Round Trip - Don Tracy

Don Tracy had an odd career as a writer. As a young man, he published four well-regarded hardboiled novels during the Thirties while he was still working as a newspaper and radio journalist. Then he became a full-time writer and turned out scores of short stories for various sports and detective pulps, as well as having his work appear frequently in the slicks. He didn’t return to novels until the late Forties with some popular historical sagas, and then he concentrated on those for the next dozen or so years before turning to detective novels with a long-running series about an army investigator named Giff Speer. Also during the Sixties he wrote a number of movie novelizations and TV tie-in novels, as well as a few more historical epics, under the name Roger Fuller. (This is how I first encountered Tracy, with his BURKE’S LAW novels.) He wrote some non-fiction, as well. So he’s really a hard author to pin down and is mostly forgotten now.

Not by the fine folks at Staccato Crime, though, an imprint of Stark House Press that specializes in reprinting what they call Jazz-Age Noir Classics. They’ve recently done a double volume of Tracy’s first two novels, ROUND TRIP and CRISS-CROSS (which was made into a popular 1949 movie that deleted the hyphen and added Burt Lancaster). I just read ROUND TRIP, and it is indeed both hardboiled and noir. Very much so in both categories.

Retitled paperback edition; I don't know the artist

The narrator/protagonist is a young man named Eddie McGruder, who works as a news photographer for a Baltimore newspaper. As the book opens, he and one of the paper’s reporters are sent to a small town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to get the story on the lynching of a black man who was accused of some crime (and Tracy never really specifies what crime, as if it doesn’t really matter, which adds to the bleakness). The trouble Eddie runs into there is only a small part of the book, however. There are some flashbacks to his checkered past. Then he falls in love. Then there’s a sensational manslaughter trial. Everybody drinks a lot. The book reminds me of some of Elmore Leonard’s novels, in that a lot of stuff happens, but there’s not really much of a linear plot. Things just meander around, kind of like real life. And like real life, there’s a lot that can go wrong . . . and does.

Tracy’s prose in this book is about as lean and tough as you’ll find anywhere, reminiscent of Paul Cain. He can nail a character or a setting in just a few terse lines. ROUND TRIP is a very impressive book, but it’s a tough one to actually like, because of the air of inevitable doom that hangs over it. But then, that’s noir, isn’t it? If you’re a fan, I give it a high recommendation, and I’m glad it’s been reprinted so I had a chance to read it. I’ll be reading CRISS-CROSS, the other novel in this volume, soon, and I’m looking forward to it. The paperback edition of this book is available here, and there's an ebook edition, as well.

And maybe I’ll read some of Tracy’s historical novels, too. I have several of them on my shelves but have never gotten around to them.