2nd Paperback; Art by Ron Lesser
I’ve been reading Frank Kane’s Johnny Liddell novels since I
was in high school, when the Dell editions with excellent covers by Victor
Kalin and Ron Lesser kept catching my eye at the used bookstores I frequented.
(I didn’t know anything about Victor Kalin or Ron Lesser then, but no matter.)
I loved hardboiled private eye yarns and still do, and Johnny Liddell, while no
Mike Shayne or Shell Scott, always had interesting, fast-moving adventures. I
still read one now and then, which brings us to RED HOT ICE, a 1955 entry in
the series first published in hardback by Ives Washburn and then reprinted in
paperback by Dell in 1956 and 1967.
1st Paperback; Art by Victor Kalin
This one actually starts with Muggsy Kiely, beautiful redheaded reporter with
whom Liddell has an on-again, off-again romance. Muggsy is probably my favorite
private eye’s girlfriend/sidekick/assistant in the genre. She’s smart and tough
and Kane gives her some fine dialogue. She gets involved with a couple of
high-stakes gamblers who are running a flying crap game (literally in an
airplane that takes off and flies around while the gambling is going on), and
that leads to Liddell’s involvement with a drunken, washed-up stage star who
owes the gamblers a big chunk of money. The blonde figures on paying off the
debt with some illicitly gotten diamonds, and she hires Liddell’s agency to
protect her during the transfer of the stones.
Ives Washburn Hardback; Artist Unknown
Well, things go wrong, of course. Two people wind up dead, and that’s just the
start. I actually lost count of how many murders there are in this book. I know
there were four by the halfway point, as witnesses and potential witnesses keep
getting rubbed out. Liddell roams around from swanky supper clubs to flophouses
to drug dens. He gets threatened by gangsters and even taken for a ride by a couple
of trigger men at one point. (Spoiler: He survives.) Beautiful women try to
seduce him. Everybody lies to him. I don’t recall him getting knocked out, but
he does get beaten up at least once.
Sure, we all know how this stuff goes, but Kane does such a fine job of putting
Liddell through his paces that any familiarity doesn’t matter. The plot is a
decent mystery, too, with clues and everything, and while I had the killer
pegged pretty early on, I didn’t figure out all the twists. Liddell was definitely
ahead of me on some of it.
RED HOT ICE is a good solid private eye novel, not a classic of the genre by
any means, but a highly entertaining couple of hours of reading. For me, it was
like being back in high school and college, when I was consuming books like
this as if they were salted peanuts. I really enjoyed it. If you want to give it a try, an ebook edition is available here.
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