Draw the Curtain Close - Thomas B. Dewey

Thomas B. Dewey’s series about a hardboiled Chicago private detective known as Mac was fairly popular back in the Sixties. The hardbacks showed up often on library shelves, and paperback reprints were common on the spinner racks in the drugstores and grocery stores. I read quite a few of them and enjoyed them all, but more than fifty years later it’s hard to remember which ones I’ve read and which I haven’t. Not that it really matters, because I’ve decided to read and/or reread the series in order, rather than haphazardly like I did back then.

The first Mac novel is DRAW THE CURTAIN CLOSE, published originally in hardback by Jefferson House in 1947 and reprinted in various paperback editions. Like the rest of the series, it’s now available as an e-book on Amazon from Wildside Press, which is the edition I read. I’m reasonably sure I’d never read this one before.

It opens with Mac being summoned to the mansion of a powerful gangster modeled somewhat after Al Capone. He wants to hire Mac to protect his estranged wife from some unspecified danger. At least, that’s what he tells Mac, but when he turns down the job, it quickly becomes obvious that something else is going on. He meets the gangster’s beautiful nightclub singer mistress, some hoods pay him a visit, and the first of several murders takes place. Whether he wants to be or not, Mac is involved with this case, so for the next twenty-four hours, he spends a lot of time driving around Chicago, getting grabbed and beaten up by various tough guys, helping out and possibly falling for the gangster’s wife, and trying to figure out what a valuable Gutenberg bible has to do with all these seedy but dangerous characters.

The MacGuffin, when it’s finally revealed, comes sort of out of left field. Not quite to the warning track, but almost. But I’m not sure that matters, since the reader has had a good time getting there. Mac’s first-person narration is really good, reminiscent of Hammett’s Continental Op stories with a little bit of Frederick Nebel thrown in. There’s plenty of good action. As I recall, as the series goes on it gets less hardboiled, more Ross Macdonald than Hammett or Nebel, but that’s certainly okay, too.

If you’ve never read any of this series, I marked a passage I like that will give you a good example of Dewey’s style and the character:

“Call me Mac,” I said. “I’m just a guy. I go around and get in jams and then try to figure a way out of them. I work hard. I don’t make very much money and most people insult me one way or another. I’m thirty-eight years old, a fairly good shot with small arms, slow-thinking but thorough and very dirty in a clinch.”

That’s good stuff, the kind of thing that kept me reading fifty years ago and still does. If you’re a fan of hardboiled detective novels and haven’t made Mac’s acquaintance, you really need to, and DRAW THE CURTAIN CLOSE is a fine place to start.

As for me, I’m looking forward to the next one in the series, EVERY BET’S A SURE THING, since I know I have read that one and there’s even a story that goes with it . . . but we’ll get to that.