So some 27 or 28 years after Block finished his Evan Tanner espionage-spoof series in 1970 with Me Tanner, You Jane, Block delves into the series again with a 320-page final book to the series. But, as he explains in an afterword, does he have a senior citizen Tanner collecting social security and going about the world or does he do something else to account for all the lost years. And, here’s where Block goes all science-fictiony on us and comes up with time travel – sort of, in the Rip Van Winkle way. Tanner, for unknown reasons, was literally put on ice – thus, the title – in 1970 and left frozen in a package like a package of frozen fish filets for nearly three decades only to be discovered in the sub-basement accessible only by a hidden trap door under the floor for no good reason. Block has a bit of fun with this concept as Tanner awakens only to wonder whether Nixon or McGovern won the election and to be mystified when told Nixon resigned and Agnew to and the president is now some guy named Clinton. There’s just a lot of history he has missed, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. He is also introduced to a Mac and the internet and spends six months getting up to speed on the world. Although he does remind the reader it has been nearly three decades since he has had sex, but now there’s a whole new world of AIDs and blood tests and the like.
The Chief locates him and asks where he has been and Tanner tells the Chief he has been frozen, which the Chief thinks means he was held incommunicado in a Swedish cell. Burma is now Myanamar, a brutal dictatorship who put national leader Aung San’s daughter under house arrest. The Agency does not like how things are going in Myanamar with the Chinese making in-roads and Tanner’s mission is to go there and shake things up and destabilize things by making contact with extreme prejudice with the daughter under house arrest.
What follows is a comedy of errors as Tanner makes his way across Southeast Asia with every entrepreneur he meets thinking he is there on some child sex tour deal, being followed by the necessary liasons, and fleeing from the secret and not-so-secret police as his life comes under extreme danger.
For my money, the best parts of the story are all to do with the time travel or sleep for three decades stuff. There was no end to the odd scenes that could be made of that stuff. The espionage exploits in Myanamar harken back to the earlier Tanner novels, but seem a little redundant here.
Book four in Block’s Evan Tanner espionage series was originally published as Two for Tanner in 1967 and then re-titled The Scoreless Thai on republication. Tanner is sort of a spoof on the James Bond franchise. Tanner, who took some shrapnel in Korea, has lost his sleep center in his brain, doesn’t sleep, earns a living ghost-writing thesis papers for college students in New York, and is sort of a secret agent – sort of, in the sense that, he has never really been vetted and hired, but no one really knows that. More often than not, he sets off on his own adventures for his own reasons, stumbling sort of over official policy.
In New York, he has been dating jazz-singing, London-educated, Kenyan-born Tuppence, who he met at a Back to Africa meeting in New York. Tanner attends every meeting and receives every subversive newsletter he can correspond to. It is interesting reading for an insomniac and it offers him a wide variety of connections around the world. Anyway, back to Tuppence, who, with her jazz band, goes to Bangkok to play a royal concert for the King of Thailand (sort of like Anna in the King and I, but a bit different), and vanishes along with the crown jewels (literally) of Thailand. Tanner receives a cryptic telegram from Tuppence and decides he must play knight-errant and rescue her.
Nevertheless, as luck would have it, Tanner is promptly captured by guerillas – this is Southeast Asia in 1968 – and placed in a cage hoisted above the jungle floor awaiting his execution. He, though, has apparently one friend there- a local – who confides in Tanner that he has never had a woman and only joined up for the promise of meeting foxy guerilla chicks in the southeast Asian jungle. Tanner promptly promises this young man – Dhang- that he will make all the proper introductions to women and that Dhang will have his golden opportunity to make love to a woman and that promise gets Tanner help.
What follows, of course, is a slapstick comedy with Dhang ever hoping to have a chance with a woman, but always, just always falling short of success in that endeavor. So this odd couple marches through the humid jungle in search of Tuppence to rescue her before the Queen orders her head chopped off.
Comedy also rears its head in the form of one Barclay Houghton Hewlitt, who decides when Tanner arrives in Bangkok, that he will be Tanner’s local contact and promptly and most assuredly stays in Tanner’s way.
It would not do to fail to note that this novel was published in 1968 during the heart of the Vietnam War and there are episodes with Tanner blundering into the middle of the battle in a North Vietnamese Tank trying to avoid being shot by American planes and to avoid shooting back. So you get a bit of a taste of the war-strewn chaos he had blundered into.
Rona Jaffe was well-known as a columnist for Cosmopolitan in the 1960’s and published sixteen books, beginning with her most well-known novel, The Best of Everything (1958), which was an instant hit, and became a movie with Joan Crawford. Away From Home, which follows three expatriate couples working in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, was her second novel. It is not a crime novel, but is included in this blog because it so well offers a glimpse of the late Fifties, early Sixties.
The novel opens with a Christmas Eve party. It is a character-driven novel and the first couple introduced is Helen and Bert Sinclair. “They were a good-looking couple, he very dark, she fair, both young, with the look of settled Americans in a foreign country: healthy, sleek, privileged, proud, and vulnerable. Helen wonders if everything in life has to be so ordered, eating on schedule, sleeping on schedule, making love on schedule. In Rio, they attend parties, talk to the maids, make menus, lists, and social schedules. “Is that all life has turned into for us,” she wonders.
Margie and Neil Davidow are the second couple introduced in the novel. “She was a smallish, dark girl, with an excellent figure, and an even more spectacular clothes sense, and an incredible neatness and feminity of person that passed for beauty.” They had been married for five years. Neil was 31. Margie was 25 and was Helen’s best friend. Outwardly, Margie has it all, but after a few drinks at the party, confesses: :Sometimes, like this evening before we got here, I wish I were dead.” On the surface, they were the perfect charming couple, but in the bedroom, Margie wanted to scream when Neil touched her. He is frustrated and wonders if she is really interested in women or if she would be happier with someone else. He had been the perfect pick for an upper East Side girl “except for a wildly romantic passionate love.”
Mildred and Phil Burns were giving the party and were known as Mil and Phil. Mil, who had once before the husband and three kids, had been Iowa Corn Queen, but she had arrived in Rio, “protestingly, hating the apartment, hating the climate, hating the cockroaches, hating the telephone system, hating the tan bath water.” Brazil isn’t as pretty as it looks, Mil confides.
The three couples soon find that Brazil is a whole different world from the temptations of Carnival to the fact that all married men seem to have a mistress on the side and an apartment to meet her in. They have different ways of navigating these treacherous waters with some falling to temptation, perhaps for the better, and some running away from the open sex buffets and finding their way back to their partners. It is a character-driven novel with very little in the way of crime or capers other than the various infidelities and a threat to kill. Nevertheless, it is a novel which captures an era.
Conjure Wife (1943) by Fritz Leiber is a horror novel that may indeed be the first appearance of Samantha Stevens of Bewitched. Norman and Tansy Saylor are a middle-class couple. Norman is an up and coming psychology professor at a small liberal arts college in a small town. Tansy is, as Norman suddenly finds out one day when he combs through Sansy’s dressing room and finds spells and bags of cemetery earth, a witch who conjures up spells. Norman, like Darren in Bewitched, is furious with Tansy and orders her to burn or destroy all the spell-making machinery in her dressing room and act like a normal wife. This directive nearly proves his undoing because his status and position were dependent on Tansy’s good magic protecting him and, once her spells are vanquished, Tansy herself is vanquished and turned into a walking corpse who does the bidding of evil witches, who turn out to be the jealous wives of other professors. Most of all though, they steal Tansy’s soul and she wants it back.
Although the novel starts a bit slowly, the reader is soon caught up in a maelstrom of events as Norman races against time to find Tansy’s body wandering across the greater New York area and there are odd scenes as he tries to get her attention and, spellbound, she ignores him and the crowd at the bus station turns on him as someone harassing a woman. Leiber does an excellent job of capturing the horror that Norman experiences to find that Tansy is under someone’s control and whether or not he can save her by the bare hints she leaves him. He then has to do battle with the other witches to save Tansy’s soul, something bumbling Darren Stevens of Bewitched, never attempted.
There is almost a Twilight Zone type curtain-pull-back of reality here where Norman finds that not is all as it seems and that there are hidden forces at work that he never would have contemplated.
Lew Archer, Ross MacDonald’s private eye creation has appeared in 18 novels over a number of decades from 1949 to 1976. MacDonald’s real name is Kenneth Millar and he was married to crime fiction writer, Margaret Miller, making a power couple in fiction writing. The Drowning Pool (1950) was book two in the series, which was made into a 1975 movie starring Paul Newman.
We don’t learn a great deal about who Archer is except that he is world-weary, that he is divorced, and that ultimately he investigates because he believes in truth and wants the truth to come out even if it causes a ruckus. Although his office in his Los Angeles, the case is set for the most part (although there are scenes in Los Angeles and Las Vegas) in Quinto and Nopal Valley, two made-up places that do not necessarily correspond to much on the map except we learn that they are north of Santa Monica, that Quinto has a port, and that Nopal Valley has oil, much perhaps on several large estates.
The story opens with Archer in his office and a nervous client approaching him. We get an understanding of who this client is well before we get her name (Maude Slocum): “If you didn’t look at her face she was less than thirty, quick-bodied and slim as a girl. Her clothing drew attention to the fact: a tailored sharkskin suit and high heels that tensed her nylon-shadowed calves.” We learn that she stands in the doorway nibbling her teeth and clutching her black suede purse. “Her stance was awkward with urgency.”
The case involves – at least initially- a letter threatening to expose Maude’s extramarital affair to her husband, the one with an unmanned voice, like a hysterical boy who Maude refers to as a “whining jellyfish.” Her husband’s mother controls “the money” in the family and would just as well be rid of Maude. It is imperative that it be kept from everyone, including Maude’s teenage daughter, Cathy, who is caught fooling around with Pat Reavis, the sometime shofar. Reavis, we are told, “had quantities of raw charm. But underneath it there was something lacking. I could talk to him all night and never find his core, because he never found it.”
Ultimately, Lew Archer novels are not so much about the spats among wealthy family members or the crooked developers who nose their way in so much as they are about characters and who they are at their core. Archer, at his core, isn’t just a gun for hire. He ultimately wants to do the right thing though he is tempted at times to waltz down to Acapulco with the latest ash-blonde temptress in need of a knight in shining armor. This blonde was Mrs. Mavis Kilbourne and “[h]er atmosphere was like pure oxygen; if you breathed it deep it could make you dizzy and gay, or poison you.”
Were he to succumb to such temptation though would he still be the Archer we know or will he have lost something along the way. Or is he just as he wonders at one point simply a shadow-figure in the mirror “without a life of his own who peered with one large eye and one small eye through dirty glasses at the dirty lives of people in a very dirty world.”
Even back in 1950, MacDonald, through his cipher, Archer, muses on how built up Southern California had become with jerrybuilt beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate and superhighways bulldozed through the mountains, cutting down a thousand years of redwood growth. In this vein, he sounds like his namesake John D. MacDonald with Travis McGee talking about how Florida was overbuilt. “There is nothing wrong with Southern California,” we are told, “that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure.” When he says this, though, you wonder if he is talking about the excess development or about the empty petty people and their twisted rotten lives.
Valin, of Cincinnati, is a magazine editor, best known for his critically-acclaimed Harry Stoner 11-volume private eye series set in Cincinnati and published between 1980 and 1995, consisting of The Lime Pit (1980), Final Notice (1980), Dead Letter (1981), Day of Wrath (1982), Natural Causes (1983), Life’s Work (1986), Fire Lake (1987), Extenuating Circumstances (1989), Second Chance (1991), The Music Lovers (1993), and Missing (1995).
Harry Stoner is a lone gunman type private eye who feels in some ways like he came out of another era. Stoner is tired, sardonic, and the world around him seems tired and dirty. The client here is an older man, Hugo Cratz, who whimpered in a weak feminine voice that something happened to his little girl Cindy Ann. Cratz appears to be not all there and probably unable to pay the bill, but Stoner takes the case, thinking he made a bundle on his last case and he could afford to be charitable. Stoner figures Cindy Ann was not Kratz’ daughter, granddaughter or any relation at all, probably a poor-white teenager from lower Vine who saw old Kratz as a stepping stone out of the tarboard shacks and who had gone on her merry way after bilking the old man out of a few Social Security checks. He figures Kratz was “just a very sentimental, very lonely, and very dirty old man.” Indeed, Stoner tells the reader that “Hugo Cratzs happen, although we don’t usually see them unless they’re selling newspapers in front of a rusted tarbarrel on a windy street corner.”
Nevertheless, Stoner, having perhaps nothing better to do, walked across the street as Cratz pointed him to the nearby couple’s house, where Kratz thought Cindy Ann had disappeared and walks into a world of darkness and greed and nastiness hiding in plain sight behind suburban walls. The couple is Laurie Jellicoe, who dressed tastefully out of Cardin, with a bland Farrah-Fawcett face and great mane of ash-blonde hair and her husband, Lance, a monster in blue jeans and cowboy boots, a square-jawed big chinned Texas boy whose first thought was to menace Stoner. Kratz claimed they were using Cindy Ann for their sex orgies and had found Polaroids to prove it after she disappeared.
Stoner traipses back and forth across the dirty underbelly of Cincinnati and the tawdry Newport, Kentucky across the river, running into odd men with the upturned mouths of rats. Stoner seems to realize that the world is darker than it first appear and that the girls on Elm Street in their bright summer dresses with the dreamy, vacant look in their eyes are often to those viewing them “like an erotic daydream out there on the blazing street, a predator’s dream of ripe and easy pickings, a world of Cindy Anns.”
Stoner represents that genre of jaded private eyes who walk those troubled streets for little monetary gain but knowing that someone has to do it. He has one glimpse of happiness though, the waitress Jo Riley at the Busy Bee who enchants him and holds his hand. The novel, the first one of nearly, but not quite, a dozen succeeds quite well in just about everything it sets out to do.
Originally published as Rafferty (1953), it was later reissued as a Signet Book #1134 as The Beautiful Trap (1954) is one of those great books that no one has ever heard of. Ballinger uses the Beautiful Trap to delve into standard noir themes of lust and obsession and the fall from grace of a a pillar of society. Ballinger though slowly and carefully walks the reader into this story, first offering up a narrative voice of one reporter who has recently returned stateside and has decided to reacquaint himself with an old buddy, but is flummoxed when the attitude of the people he encounters toward Emmet Rafferty is quite twisted. We are not as readers told what Rafferty has done or why this decorated policeman is suddenly persona non grata, but the intrepid reporter reaches out and tires to finagle an answer from Rose Pauli, the vixen who bewitched Rafferty or someone who knew her.
The conceit here is that suddenly we switch from the reporter’s narrative and perspective to that of good ol Rafferty himself and the story places itself out before us as we first lean that Rafferty is the best of the best, the cop on the beat who falls for the cute waitress on the night shift, that they marry, and move to New York where Rafferty is on the sprint up the ladder to success. But, as luck would have it, he is assigned to investigate one Rose Pauli, a voluptuous nightclub dancer who used to be the big thing for a robber. The thing is no one knows where the loot was stashed and maybe Rose knows and maybe Rafferty can shake it loose from her, but like the prize chump he goes and falls for her and thinking she wants money he can’t provide on a government salary, finds himself twisted so that he is no longer the boy scout he thought he was. He has to have the missing loot and will do whatever it takes to get it including springing Eddie Stack from prison and tracking his every move.
Rafferty slowly but surely in his desperate quest to make Rose happy turns from being the boy scout detective on the rise to something dirty and underhanded only to find that what she really wanted was not just the loot, but something akin to respectability. Rafferty slowly but inexorably descends into the depths of hell, tragically focused only on his obsession with Rose and throwing everything away in the process of trying to gain her heart.
Ballinger might raise familiar themes, but he does so with a lot of verve and builds up these themes till they are the overriding theme of the story. This is truly an unexpected gem, which became a 1954 movie starring Fred MacMurray and introducing the young star Kim Novak.
Originally published by Dell in 1962 and now republished by Stark House’s Gat Books in May 2018, Kane’s Frenzy of Evil pokes around under the surface of the well-to-do who live in resplendent mansions, people such as Jonathan Joseph Carson (62) and his young bride Dolores Zamora Carson (22). Jonathan Joseph (as he is referred throughout the book) could throw a brilliant party because “his close friends and neighbors were bright, wise, witty, clever, and quick; the older ones shamefully rich and riotously successful; the younger poised upon the glimmering brink of similar riches and similar successes.” And, “what stranger – nay, what intimate could possibly divine that beneath the stylish formal evening attire, beneath all and with only nine people present, there ran a vile and turgid undercurrent of hate, love, guilt, rape, adultery, madness, and murder.”
Jonathan Joseph and George Ross were the Carson and Ross of Carson, Ross, & Ross, a law firm ensconced at 1 Wall Street. They were college mates at Princeton. Ross was the quarterback, plotting the plays and calling the signals, while Jonathan Joseph carried the ball. Ross was the law man, the student, the digger but Carson was “a blazing, ruthless, shrewd and eloquent trial inquisitor.” He was a courtroom star. Carson was a super-luminary in a town of luminaries, “an eccentric, a fiery oddball, an ultra-character in a town of characters.” Outside of business, they were different. Ross married once and produced two children and lived happily ever after. Jonathan Joseph married thrice before he even met Dolores. First to a young, red-lipped, slim-hipped actress. Second, to a large, blonde, curvy specialty dancer. Then, a cold, haughty, society woman who died of cancer. The first two divorced him on grounds of cruelty. Sally the second wife suffered from a total concussion due to a blow to the head and a coma for two days. Once her face was smashed, including five teeth extracted twelve stitches inside the mouth, and a need for plastic restoration to the nose.
Indeed, as his friend Dr. Bernstein noted, Jonathan Joseph “functions in life as a sadist, an extreme sadist.” He is a great lawyer because he crushes the opposition. “He pulverizes the opposition and he revels in it.” Jonathan Joseph was not constantly cruel, but was generally charming, with flare-ups and a particular kind of frenzy during heavy drinking bouts.
And, dear reader, given these circumstances, what would be the situation do you think if word got out that the dazzling Dolores Zamora had taken a lover. What would Jonathan Joseph do and what would the consequences be?
Ron Goulart, who has an extensive bibliography including both science fiction (or do we now call that speculative fiction), action heroes, and mysteries for a total of 180 books (!), put out four books in his John Easy private eye series, including “If Dying Was All” (1971), “Too Sweet to Die” (1972), “The Same Lie Twice” (1973), and “One Grave Too Many” (1974). The original Ace editions contain cover art by Elaine Duillo is terrific, truly capturing the style of the early 70’s era, and the newer cover art of later editions can’t hold a candle to her artwork.
Set in Hollywood, Malibu, and nearby environs in 1970, “If Dying Was All” casts John Easy as a sort of happy-go-lucky detective who out of nowhere gets a call from a wealthy retired movie producer with an estate in Beverly Hills, although he meets his client in a room that “was dark and sour.” Frederic McCleary was “a puffy, pale man in his middle sixties, with thinning white hair and a prickly moustache.” The backdrop to everything is the raging fires that are an annual part of Southern California life.
McCleary has been a retired recluse for five years since his twenty-year-old daughter, Jackie, who he had a difficult relationship with, seemingly committed suicide by jumping off a yacht out in Santa Monica Bay. She was on the yacht with her hippie-type partying friends. McCleary never wanted to believe Jackie died, particularly since her body was never recovered, although a suicide note was. McClearly has now – five years later – received two letters from his long-dead daughter. The first inviting him to meet her at a hotel in Manzana where she is registered under the name Hollis. The second apologizing for skedaddling before McCleary showed up. McCleary swears the handwriting and the style is none other than Jackie’s and that the hotel staff said Jackie had checked in and checked out. Easy doesn’t exactly believe the letters are authentic and tells the old man so, but gets hired anyway on the basis that he will find out who wrote the letter and if it turns out to be McCleary’s daughter than fine.
Easy does not wear a trenchcoat and a porkpie hat, but he is a laid-back 1970-style guy who cavorts with Marina Harley, who loves to stroll around her apartment sans clothing. We are told that Easy was “a tall wide-shouldered man, two years over thirty, dark and knocked-about looking. His hair was a mahogany brown, short cropped and yet shaggy.” His secretary in his sparse Hollywood office is Nan Alonzo, a “short, broad-shouldered, thirty-six-year old, blonde secretary.” His Hollywood though is not glamour-ville, but filled with silver-haired prostitutes in lavender bellbottoms and spike heel shoes, dwarves, female impersonators, and motorcycle riders.
As the name of the private eye, Easy, suggests this novel is a light and easy read, but captivating. It captures the essence of 1970 California and lets us know that, under all the lightness and sun worshippers on the beaches, there is a bit of darkness and tragedy. It is after all post-Manson Los Angeles only a year after the Tate and LaBianca murders. Although in substance Easy’s investigation appears no different than that of many other private eyes decades earlier, it has a different feel and a different sensibility to it.
Naked Fury (1952) is Keene’s novel about machine politics and small-town corruption with the only twist being that Big Dan Malloy, despite the graft and the favors, is a pretty decent guy who actually wants to do the right thing for his “people” living in tenements in the valley. When a crippled newspaper boy is run over and the real culprit covered up by the beating to death of the only witness, Stan Kozak, Malloy starts sticking his neck out and uncovering things he wished he had not. He would rather walk between Katie’s Bar and his other haunts in Phelpsburg putting out the good word for the machine’s candidate, Charles A. Reardon, based on Reardon’s promise to redevelop the tenements and put up parks and swimming pools even though Reardon was a “chinless jerk.” He tells Katie Bishop that he wants to retire and farm a small plantation and get away from it all, but she does not believe it will ever happen and no one else does either. Malloy has that magic quality that lets him be friends with everyone and he would only be half himself isolated on a small farm. What Katie does not like is Reardon’s” black-haired little bitch” of a wife Jane throwing herself at Malloy to seal the deal.
Keene does a fine job of portraying Big Dan Malloy and all the contradictions that are wrapped up in him. His Malloy is a machine-politician whose every other sentence is the “good word” on who to vote for and his every waking hour is spent in conference with his boys fixing this and fixing that for his people. The contradiction here is that Malloy, despite his power and influence, has never lost touch with the little people and still has their back. He plays here the role of the amateur detective trying to ferret out what really happened with the hit-and-run before more bodies pile up in town and the press turns on him finally.
This novel keeps a strong focus on the plot and has quite a bit of action with Malloy often not far from the action.
Set in 1973 with the advent of the designated hitter in baseball and, more importantly for this novel’s purposes, the explosion of the underground movie Deep Throat starring Linda Lovelace across movie screens, generally by means of bootleg copies funneled by the mafia to showing locations. As told in the introduction, Deep Throat was a movie idea pitched by a Queens hairdresser to a couple of New York wiseguys who fronted $25,000 to make it and would go on to earn more than $600 million, much of it a windfall to the mafia. Apparently, Lovelace only got $1,500 to $2,500 and lifelong notoriety for her part. It provides the backdrop for this ferocious crime novel set in Queens and Long Island of all places where the title-figure of John Albano, a two-time loser, who lost his five-hundred-dollar a week construction gig when he punched out the foreman and now earns some bucks counting heads at underground showings of the movie so as to match the take. When his predecessor nicknamed “Tommy Porno” disappears (and is later found in a dumpster), John is promoted to film distributor and money collector from head counter. Of course, to his everlasting regret, John is now nicknamed Johnny Porno, which he hates. And now John has a job bringing the money to the wiseguys after the filmings, armed though with the knowledge that the last guy who was caught skimming from the wiseguys ended up drinking the rest of his meals through a straw and there is of course the disappearance of Tommy Deluca (“Tommy Porno”) who was eventually found with his hands cut off.
The way he got this job though was when he walked into a bar bemoaning his inability to make his child support payments to Nancy (who is now about to end her third marriage to Nathan and still banging his first husband Louis, a compulsive gambler always on the hook to some shark or another). Thing was undercover officer Billy and his wife Kathleen would get their kicks when she came on to other guys and then left them hanging and John did not know she was married when he started hitting her up. When Billy came out of the backroom of the wiseguys’ bar and interfered, John let Billy have it. John’s payment for causing the ruckus was to work it off counting heads at the porno showings. Billy got busted from the force and now has it bad for John, so bad in fact he is ready to take John off the board forever. John, though, has apparently got a temper problem and also gets into it with another Italian in the same bar, one who won’t forget getting knocked down in front of his bosses, particularly Eddie Vento.
There are a lot of names at work in this novel and they all cross paths at one point or another with the focal point being the movie Deep Throat, John and the money he is collecting for the tough guys, John’s ex-wife and the trouble she causes, Nancy’s first ex, her current husband, crooked cops on the take, Vento’s girlfriend who unbeknownst to him is working off a bust and recording him….. The point is that for John you know if you have read any of these kind of crime novels no matter how hard he works it is all going to go wrong and he is always going to be owing big money to the wiseguys and always on the run and always being betrayed.
Stella captures so clearly and decisively the spirit of the early Seventies and the manic world John is swept up in.
Robert Silverberg, writing under the psuedonym Don Elliott and several other psuedonyms (Loren Beauchamp, David Challon, John Dexter, Dan Eliot, Marlene Longman, Ray McKnenzie, Gordon Mitchell, Mark Ryan, and Stan Vincent penned over 150 “softcore” novels during the late 1950’s early 1960’s when the market for science fiction magazine stories suddenly dried up. Silverberg penned the introduction to the Stark House double novel that reprises Gang Girl and Sex Bum and expresses no embaressment about his now-well known part in the softcore literary world. Indeed, he offers in his introduction an example of how he would write sex scenes now without editorial limits, using specific words for body parts rather than the quaint way he had to write these novels in 1959 and 1963. For five years, he wrote two novels a month on a manual typewriter, resulting in a bibliography that extends for page after page and the satisfaction that he earned a good living, paid a mortgage on a large house, and supported his family.
Back in the olden days before the internet, folks who wanted a taste of titillating, sexy, fiction combed the drugstore racks for titles like Gang Girl (1959, Nightstand Books). And, at that ancient time (in the fifties), people who would one day become world-renowned authors like Robert Silverberg wrote this stuff under pseudonyms. Many authors wrote this softcore, exploitative fiction because it paid and, strangely enough, they had to pay the rent and put food on the table until some publisher with a small bit of brains recognized their genius. Make no bones about it. Gang Girl is a cheap thrill. It is a tawdry, exploitative piece of juvenile delinquent fiction that was popular in some circles in the fifties. It was never intended to be discussed in ninth grade literature between Dickens and Melville.
So why read this? Well, it is a trip back into the time machine to see what was on the racks back then. But, it is also a very well written piece of tawdry dime store pulp. As the cover page shouts at the would-be reader, it is about “sex, drugs, and crime.” It begins: “Lora Menotti was five feet five of concentrated sex, one hundred twenty-five pounds of undiluted viciousness. She was eighteen. She was deadly. Her parents knew it and they were afraid of her.” Lora was a “deb” in the gang “The Scarlet Sinners,” but when her parents move the family to a new neighborhood, she has to make a new start. She finds the local gang at the local soda shop and wants in. Lora pushes her way into the gang and, when she wants one of the guys, she pushes another girl out, way out. Lora’s ambitious and she is going to be with the gang leader no matter who she has to step on in the way.
But don’t think these gangs are John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John singing ballads in “Grease.” These are vicious, criminal gangs and the infighting is deadly and has consequences and the rumbles are not just fights, but with knives, antennas, and anything else they can get their hands on. Not everyone comes out of a rumble singing and dancing. Some never walk again and some wish they were dead because they are so wounded and torn apart. Lora is like a femme fatale of detective stories, using her looks and voluptousness as a weapon to control the gang, wearing her tightest sweater when she is ready to make a move. She got her “greatest kick of all” by manipulation. She is tough and mean and pretty much as heartless as can be, particularly to the other girls in the gang who are in her way, one time organizing a gang rape of a deb who stood in her way. The other women are dealt with viciouslessly and Lora is not too popular among them.
The author does not glamorize gang life as other writers of juvenile delinquent literature have done. Instead, he shows the cold, hard world that these kids lived in, making the world of the Cougars gang realistic.
Sex Bum (1963; Midnight Readers) is more of a coming-of age story of a young punk (Johnny Price) in a small town who sees an in with the mob and believes someone with his skills is traveling in the fast lane to the top of the mob. Price uses his initiative to quickly get in with some local characters in a poolhall and, before he can blink, is in with them in their ranch house, collecting and threatening. Price is not satisfied being a gopher for very long and wants to climb over his local bosses (Mike Lurton and Ed Kloss) all the way to the top in a hurry and makes plans to do so with all deliberate speed. We are told: “Johnny Price had big plans for Johnny Price. They involved a lot of money being his, and girls with boobs like swollen melons, all the good things life had to offer.”
What perhaps separates this story from most coming-of-age mafioso stories is that, although the fight scenes are well executed, much of the story is filled with detailed descriptions of Price’s conquests of local girls (Beth) and the mob’s call girls, including the head honcho’s girl. He did not want the local farm girls like Beth except for a few hours and wanted “real women” like the ones he had seen walking on Fifth Avenue with high cheekbones and beautiful dresses and lovely legs.
So much of the book is involved with Price hopping in and out of bed with whoever he could get his hands on that the tough-guy mafia stuff often seems like a side-plot, but perhaps in the end Price should have concentrated all his attention on climbing his way to the top before enjoying the spoils of war.
Asa Bordages wrote four novels, two under the Mike Teagle name. Stark House’s Black Gat Books has republished Murders in Silk (Black Gat # 45; April 2023), which had been a Lion paperback # 60 (1951; Lion) and apparently a hardcover book before that (1938; Hillman-Curl, Inc.).
Tiberius Bixby (known as Tie), whose father Zebediah Bixby (Zeb), had a thing about Romans and named his other two kids, Caligula and Messalina. They live on a big plot of land in “Scrafton” on Long Island. The story is told initially from Tie’s point of view and then about 75 percent of the way through Zeb picks up the narrative in first-person, which is a little confusing. Tie talks about his “pa” as if they were backwoods country folk although they live on Long Island (somewhere near Mineola we are told) and Tie works news in the city. Pa, we are told, didn’t leave his rambling old house a dozen times a year, spending his days with a bottle and his books in the library on the second floor, dreaming that he would re-edit Gibbons’ the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. At first, we readers are led to believe that Pa or Zeb is a bumbling old coot, but he later appears to be Sherlock to Tie’s Watson and the two joke a bit about playing such roles. The story is set in 1948, odd because it was first published in 1938.
This one begins with a murder on the train to Scraffton.Tie is merely on the train heading to his father’s home when he notices the girl in the red calot (“a brimless little hat that looks like half of around bombshell with the fuse sticking up on top”) and first notices that she “was an independent wench. She wore sheer black stockings and ignored the mirrors along the passageway to the Long Island Railroad level of the Pennsylvania Station.”
When there is a mysterious murder on board the train (Murder on the Orient Express, anyone?), everyone onboard is an instant suspect, but Tie knows the woman with the incredible legs and the hat is involved and, smitten as he is, he covers up for her. He doesn’t even know why he lied, but he keeps covering for her even when it starts to make it look as if he himself were the murderer who is nearly the first at the scene of two homicides, one committed with a souvenir knife from Tie’s family home and the other at the neighbor’s home.
You get inklings early on that she (Gretchen Jones) is a femme fatale with a black widow’s touch and he is a sucker who she can spin around like a top, particularly when she admits to the police detective that she dances in the chorus in a Greenwich Village nightclub, but their relationship is far more complicated.
Tie may play the full-on innocent amateur detective, thinking he can figure out this murder and the next quickly without the aid of the official law, but when the chips are down and he has to spring into action, he can brawl with the best of them. There are several great scenes with Tie going all out against hoodlums. Maybe he is not that innocent.
Tie’s other sort-of-romance is with Paula Wannerman, the daughter of a neighbor who is blown up in a laboratory fire. When Tie wanders around the house trying to ferret out clues like a good amateur, she drunkenly tries to seduce him and even hides him in her closet. She has a husky voice and drinks highballs while her father’s laboratory burns. Paula refers to Tie as her “Boy Scout” and sets out to seduce him at every opportunity except when she tries to claw his eyes out or threatens to shoot him. “Maybe I’m just plastered enough to like you,” she tells him. Tie refers to her in his narration as a “drunken hussy” with “half-closed lids.” She tells him that he is way over his head and he should get back into the shallow water before he drowns.
Ultimately, this turns out to be quite a good read, but it sometimes feels like the plot is overly complicated and the action is often a bit unevenly paced. Zeb is the one who solves this mystery and does the big reveal at the end.
Originally published by Dell (#92) in 1956, Jessup’s Night Boat to Paris was republished as Gat Books # 56 in March 2024. Jessup wrote extensively in the 1950’s and 1960’s under both his own name and under the Richard Telfair psuedonym, often westerns. Best Known for The Cincinnati Kid, which later became a movie with Steve McQueen and Ann-Margaret.
Night Boat to Paris is not about a boat. It is a post-WWII espionage story set in England and France. Duncan Reece now runs a pub in London and in the ten years since the great war has tried to forget the ugly things that happened. But now he is called to do “dirty work” for Queen and Country. In fact, he is told to head for Paris the next day and put together a team. Reece has been a number of things since the war, including a blackmailer, a procurer, a petty thief, and a gambler, and it is many of those underworld skills which are required for what lies ahead. For Reece is not a high-tech well-dressed spy like Bond. Rather, he is the kind called upon to do the work in the shadows that no one wants to talk about and no one wants to admit complicity to.
The Reds (who became the new enemy once the Nazis were defeated) are working on a nuclear-supported space station (in the years before Sputnik was launched). The engineer’s blueprints have been microfilmed, but the microfilm was stolen and the thief had been willing to sell them to the British for a small fortune, but got killed while attempting the exchange in a Paris bordello. Mow am ex-Gestapo Colonel may have it and is ready to auction it off during a charity bazaar at a French estate. Reece’s mission, and he really has no choice but to accept it, is to put together a team of underworld characters and brazenly hold up the charity ball and make off with the microfilm and all the jewels the rich and famous would be parading around in. It is an odd job for a spy, but Reece is more of an underworld character than a spy really.
There are several catches including that the Reds want the microfilm themselves and are out to get it at any costs with a stable of endless agents to call upon. Moreover, Reece’s associates are to think of it merely as a criminal enterprise without being let in on the scheme. Thus, Reece has to look over his shoulder to see who is behind him and wonder constantly who he can trust among the handful of unsavory characters he enlists and trains for the big robbery.
The preparations and training take time, but the action is never slow as Reece is constantly being called upon to do wet work. And, the actual robbery, when it comes about, is quite action-packed as is the wild aftermath as the great escape is on.
Jessup’s writing is rock-solid and he captures quite realistically the characters and the action throughout. Considering everything that takes place, you often wonder if Reece is quite the good guy he says he is. He often wonders about what he is doing and how far patriotism should take him.
Jessup’s work includes The Cunning and the Haunted, A Rage to Die, Cry Passion, The Man in Charge, Cheyenne Saturday, Comanche Vengeance, Long Ride West, Lowdown, Texas Outlaw, The Deadly Duo, Sabadilla, Port Angelique, Wolf Cop, The Cincinnati Kid, The Recreation Hall, Sailor, Quiet Voyqge Home, The Hot Blue Sea, Threat, Wyoming Jones, Day of the Gun, Wyoming Jones for Hire, Secret of Apache Canyon, The Bloody Medallion, The Corpse that Talked, Sundance, Scream Bloody Murder, Good Luck Sucker, The Slavers, and Target for Tonight.
Colby’s “The Captain Must Die” is a top-notch crime paperback. What he does so absolutely well is he has you as the reader pitching for the three soldiers who were released from Leavenworth against the captain who put them there, Gregory Driscoll. But, slowly, Colby turns things around and make you wonder if you are pitching for the good guys or not.
He sets this one up as a caper novel with three hard-edged men getting in position to pull out the ultimate revenge against the man who set them up and left them to die in prison. That man (the captain) has become quite successful financially and has a beautiful wife to boot: Madge. He is also rumoured to have a fortune in cash hidden in a secret room in the house. The three men are going to break him, humiliate him, and then kill him for kicks.
Colby does an excellent job of setting this up. The three conspirators are Cal Morgan, Brick, and Barney. Brick is the bitterest of the three and the most humorless. But the way they play this out is brilliant starting with the practical jokes on Driscoll like pulling his oil plug out and adjusting his brakes and dropping tarantulas into his car. Like when Cal gets back together with Driscoll’s wife Madge and awakens the fires in her before having her drop off to sleep and Cal puttering about the house with Driscoll about to return any second.
The full palette of revenge makes perfect sense once the reader gets the full background of what went on and how unfair it seemed and how long the bitterness had to take hold of these men.
But no adventure novel would be complete without a whole full-born bang-bang shoot-em-up take-no-prisoners all-out-battle and Colby gives this to the readers perfectly.
What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) is a novel about the dirty underside of Hollywood and also about the dog-eat-dog world of climbing the ladder to success that some people find themselves doing? As a psychological study, it is fascinating. Sammy Glick starts out as a poor teenager from the lower east side of Manhattan, but from the very first time that Al Manheim meets Sammy, he realizes he met someone different, someone who in the battle for survival of the fittest is the fittest and will climb over whoever he needs to just to get where he is going. This includes stealing articles and ideas, taking credit for someone else’s work, talking to the boss behind his supervisor’s back. At every stage, seemingly without a conscience, Sammy has the world by the balls with utter confidence that he will rise to the top and the fools he passes by in the slow lane of life are not to be pitied. The action eventually moves to Hollywood where (and this was published in 1941 at the height of Hollywood glamour) the dog eat dog world becomes even more evident and how, in the end, no one has anyone else’s back.
The Dain Curse (1929) was Hammett’s second Continental Op novel following Red Harvest (also 1929). The Dain Curse was originally published in serial format in the Black Mask Magazine in 1928 and 1929 actually in four parts, although the novel form is divided into three parts, the Dains, the Temple, and Quesada. Many years later, it became a television production with James Coburn (1978), where unfortunately the Continental Op is finally given an actual name some fifty years after the Dain Curse was published.
The Continental Op is a private detective whose name is never mentioned of the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco where he answers to “the Old Man.” Hammett himself was formerly a detective with the Pinkerton Agency out of the Continental Building. He wrote most of his stories while living in San Francisco, the setting for the Dain Curse (at least until the action moves to Quesada, a fictional location eighty miles along the coast from San Francisco).
Reading the Dain Curse in novel form, it is easy to see how it was originally published as a serial. It consists of the three interlinked parts which form one overall story, but each of which contains its own mystery story complete in itself. Recurring characters include the Continental Op (of course), Gabrielle Leggett (of the cursed Dain family by way of her mother), Eric Collinson (Gabrielle’s fiance), and Owen Fitzstephen (a writer and family friend of the Leggets).
Part One introduces the reader to the Dain curse itself as the Continental Op, working for an insurance company, seeks to ferret out the disappearance of some diamonds that Edgar Leggett (a scientist) was lent to see if he could color them the way he had colored glass. They live in an opulent San Francisco mansion, but as we get to know them, we will realize that they have an odd family history that makes the Addams Family look tame by comparison with murder, prison, and the like being par for the course. The blame for the theft seems to fall initially on the maid (Minnie Hershey) who actually plays a part in both parts one and two of the novel. She is often referred to as a “mulatto” who lives in “Darktown” with a boyfriend who is little more than a poolhall hustler. But the Continental Op keeps at it as the Leggetts, by turn, seem to fall upon themselves in utter despair and turn against each other. Part one ends in a manner which would lead the reader initially to believe that it has fully concluded and that the rest of the book is unrelated.
Part two focuses on Gabrielle, who is a dope addict and a cult member and believes she suffers from a horrible family curses that wreaks havoc on anyone close to her. All the action here takes place inside the Temple, a sort of cult mansion where the operators prey on the rich and lonely, keeping them doped up and pranking them with ghosts and fog and the like. The Continental Op’s job is merely to watch over Gabrielle who is in quite a fragile state. He is barely competent at this as the bloody corpses pile up around her. Again, part two (the Temple) ends as if the entire mystery were solved and completed which makes sense as it was originally published separately as were all the parts.
Part three continues the twisted saga of Gabrielle and the Continental Op. Gabrielle is now married to the big dope who keeps getting in the Continental Op’s way in parts one and two, Eric Collinson. Here, all the action pretty much takes place in Quesada, a coastal hamlet eighty miles from San Francisco and having no relation to any location currently on the map. It is a small town along the cliffs and the Continental Op receives a telegram or a call from Collinson to come immediately to the small town where the newlyweds have secluded themselves to escape the media. But the small rural town is no safer for Gabrielle and Eric than the big city as the Continental Op keeps stumbling on corpses and kidnappers are leaving ransom demands and small-town jealousies and infidelities impede the investigation. It all comes to a startling conclusion as the Continental Op finally puts together the entire mystery, linking together the three parts and putting an end to the curse.
All in all, the Dain Curse is an outstanding mystery story even though the parts seem oddly disconnected because they were originally shorter stories.
The Glass Key (1931) (although originally published in Black Mask Magazine in 1930) is an incredible story about political corruption and graft. It became a film in 1935 with George Raft and then in 1942 with Veronica Lake.
Although the story starts off telling the tale of a small-type operator named Ned Beaumont who has little luck with the ponies or the dice and, when he finally has some luck, the bookie absconds town without paying Beaumont, who then chases the bookie down and demands his payment. But, starting out like this is misleading, because it is a much bigger story about corruption and operators like Beaumont, a commentary on how dirty machine politics are in small cities and how even the newspapers are owned and controlled and put out stories at the behest of the operators. In such a world, it is often difficult to discern fact from fiction. Impressively, Hammett foreshadowed the world of fake news and how reporting even today is hopelessly compromised by political loyalties and expediency.
Hammett makes no bones about who Beaumont is and he is a dirty underhanded clever manipulative political operator out to serve the interests of his boss, Paul Madvig, no matter what it takes, even to the point of pinning a murder on someone it would be useful to pin it on and to publicly make a break with his boss in an attempt to get in bed with the opposition, Shad O’Rory.
Complications in Beaumont’s complex world come when his boss, Madvig, wants to throw in with Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry in an attempt to woo his stunning daughter, Janet Henry. Beaumont advises against the involvement. But things get twisted when Beaumont stumbles on the Senator’s son Taylor Henry’s corpse lying in the street and heads over to Madvig’s club to consult him before phoning it in to the police. The whole city is in an uproar in the midst of election season with the news editorials claiming Madvig murdered the Senator’s son and claiming the investigation is being slow-walked on orders from the operators. The problems also hit close to home as Taylor Henry’s sometime lover was Madvig’s daughter, Opal, who takes a path of accusation and chumming with the opposition. Meanwhile, Beaumont is receiving a series of anonymous letters about the killing, asking questions.
Beaumont carefully walks a tightrope, trying to protect his boss’s political interests as the world crumbles around him. For his troubles, he gets hospitalized, chewed on by a dog, and beaten till he loses consciousness. It is a world of dirty double-dealing, backstabbing, corruption, suicide, murder, and infidelities. And, Beaumont handles it all, coolly, cautiously, and with aplomb. Beaumont was never innocent to begin with, but he observes that no one is truly innocent, truth is often shaded, and you can’t trust what you hear, what you read, and even what someone pretends is in their heart.
In “The Grifters,” Thompson offers a tight story that isn’t filled with unnecessary excesses. It is a story about the angles and “There was one thing about playing the angles. If you played them long enough, you knew the other guy’s as well as you knew your own.” It sets three life-long grifters in a tight triangle facing off against each other, last survivor wins. Along the way in with all the card games, that dice, the punchboards, the twenties, the horse races, and more, Thompson throws in Carol Roberg, who survived Dachau sterilized by what they did to her at age eight and an Oedipal complex with Lilly Dillon offering herself to now-grown up Roy Dillon, anything cause she just had to have that cash.
There are three players in this game and none of the other clowns in this story matter one iota. They are just filler, stand-ins, extras as it were. First, there is Lilly Dillon, from a family of backwoods white trash who married at thirteen and widowed at fourteen, dumping little Roy off with her family until her father showed up with Roy under one arm and a horse whip in the other. Sticking Roy in boarding school, Lilly became increasingly useful as an employee until eventually she became someone who would make layoff bets on longshots around the country, protecting the syndicate’s money.
She wanted to be something other than mom, to Roy, and he resented her until he turned seventeen when he left. Indeed, as he got into his teens, she softened her voice when she spoke to him and there was a suppressed hunger in her eyes. Roy eventually worked the short con across the country, settling in Los Angeles, where he could use his cover as a traveling salesman while he worked the fools he found everywhere.
Roy’s one distraction was Moira Langtry, with her own background in grifting. She could match him phrase for phrase as they sparred. Strangely, though, she resembled none other than his mother in stature and type. ”You couldn’t say that they actually looked like each other; they were both brunettes about the same size, but there was absolutely no facial resemblance. It was more a type similarity than a personal one. They were both members of the same flock; women who knew just what it took to preserve and enhance their natural attractiveness. Women who were either endowed with what it took, or spared no effort in getting it.”
Thompson pits these three at odds with each other, each pretending they were more on the level that they were, and each afraid of being called out. What makes this novel work so good is how tight Thompson’s writing is and how focused he is on the angles between these three characters, knowing that if you put them together and left them to their own devices, there would be fireworks.
Previous novels: The Chalk Man (2017); The Hiding Place (2019); The Other People (2020); The Burning Girls (2021); A Sliver of Darkness (2022); The Drift (2023).
Setting: Deadhart, Rural Alaska.
Characters: Beau Grainger (old codger at 79 in his final lap of life who has hunting trophies on his walls); Detective Barbara Atkins (lead character; a forensic detective from the vampyr anthropology department); Mayor Rita; Chief Pete Nicholls; Marcus Anderson (teenage corpse); Jacob Bell (friend of the deceased); Nathan Bell (had been one of Todd Dane’s friends, left town, and now returned decades later); Reverend Grey (preacher); Tucker (former sheriff, now a recluse and a weirdo, blamed for what happened to Dane); Athelinda (Queen of the Vampyres).
Instead of a murder mystery with supernatural elements, Tudor’s latest book is a deep dive straight into Vampire horror with a sprinkling of detective thrown in. The entire novel is set in a small rural isolated Alaskan town (Deadhart), where a colony of vampyrs (note the spelling) has existed before the settlers came to mine ore. In fact, there are apparently colonies of Vampyres here and there in the world, coexisting on reservations and there are explicit laws on how to deal with Vampyrs. Yet, often people finding themselves alone without the security of armed society sometimes take it upon themselves to do a culling, that is, a progrom to end the nearby vampyr colony, particularly when unexplained deaths appear to be the result of vampyre feeding.
As the story opens, we are told that a storm is coming and something foul is on the air. ”They were back. It was about to begin again.” We are also told that nature has an appetite for the unwary and “You gotta make sure you’re the hunter, not the prey.”
The story is told mostly through the point of view of Detective Barbara Atkins from the Forensic Vampyr Anthropology Department, who was called in from New York, to investigate a suspicious death, one the likes of which had not been seen in twenty-five years. Atkins is like a fish out of water in a small town where everyone knows each other and everyone is suspicious of strangers. The townfolk (even without their pitchforks) want Atkins to finish her investigation quickly and recommend a culling so that the town can get rid of the vampyr menace once and for all. You almost get a sense that the vampyr colony is unfairly discriminated against and that the local townsfolk are just bigoted monsters themselves who want to hunt and hang trophies of creatures they do not consider human. Some even sport Helsing tattos, a hate symbol supporting the genocide of vampyrs.
It is an easy-to-read, engrossing tale that (once you accept the vampyr premise and the laws regarding how vampyrs are dealt with) captures the imagination. It is not Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but a far more modern version.
Pulp, Crime, & Mystery Books 