Forgotten Books: The Blonde in Lower Six - Erle Stanley Gardner

THE BLONDE IN LOWER SIX is Carroll & Graf’s second volume of Ed Jenkins stories reprinted (mostly) from the pulps, and I wish there were more of them. As far as I know, however, this is it for Ed Jenkins collections.

The Phantom Crook is back in three novelettes that originally appeared in BLACK MASK in 1927, being pursued by the underworld and the police alike, although as far as Ed is concerned, there’s not much difference between the two. If anything, most of the cops Ed encounters are more crooked and corrupt than the criminals they’re supposed to pursue. Ed’s still a hardboiled kind of guy, gleefully sending off his enemies to be caught in their own traps, running around Chinatown in various disguises, making hair’s-breadth escapes, befriending tong leaders, and fending off the attentions of two beautiful young women, because, after all, it wouldn’t be fair to them if he let them fall in love with a crook who has all hands against him. These yarns strike me as being a little more melodramatic than the ones in the previous collection, DEAD MEN’S LETTERS, but they’re still very entertaining.

Then you have the title story, “The Blonde in Lower Six”, which is a different sort of animal. Set in 1943 but published in ARGOSY in 1961 – and I’d love to know the story of how that came about – it’s a full-length novel that’s almost completely devoid of the Phantom Crook melodrama. Instead Ed acts more like an unlicensed private eye as he helps out an old friend from Chinatown in a case involving wartime espionage, embezzlement, characters pretending to be other characters, and at least three murders. The plot is so complicated I sort of lost track, but by the end I think I pretty much had everything straight. Vintage Erle Stanley Gardner plotting, in other words, and told in a very terse, tough style that reads really fast. I loved it, even though I couldn’t always keep up with what was going on.

My only quibbles aren’t with Gardner but rather with Carroll & Graf. On a book called THE BLONDE IN LOWER SIX, why would you use a cover illustration of a girl who’s definitely not a blonde? And if you read this collection, be sure to read the stories reprinted from BLACK MASK before you read the title story, which, although it comes first in the book, is actually more of a sequel to the pulp yarns. I have no idea why they were arranged that way for publication.

I highly recommend both DEAD MEN’S LETTERS and THE BLONDE IN LOWER SIX, and if any publisher wants to reprint some more Ed Jenkins stories, I’d read them without hesitation.