Punk & Other Stories - Cleve F. Adams

I’ve read several of Cleve F. Adams’ novels over the years and really enjoyed them. I’m not sure why I haven’t read more by him. Just another case of too many books, not enough time, I guess. But I hadn’t read any of Adams’ pulp stories as far as I recall, so the recent publication of PUNK & OTHER STORIES, a collection of four hardboiled detective yarns by Adams, was something I grabbed immediately.

The title novelette was published originally in the March 19, 1938 issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY. “Punk” is how the narrator/protagonist Jerry Cassidy thinks of himself, and it’s an opinion shared by several other characters in the story. Jerry grew up with a couple of friends, Ed Harmon and Slats McKenna, but when they reached adulthood they went very separate ways. Harmon is now Big Ed Harmon, one of the top gangsters in Los Angeles, while Slats is now Lieutenant McKenna, a police detective. And Jerry? Jerry is a low-level criminal, a flunky who works for Big Ed even though he’d like to get into something more respectable like radio work, something he was trained for during a stint in the Navy. Jerry’s married to a floozy named Cora who hates him because he’s not successful. In his younger years he was in love with a beautiful dame named Frances, but she wound up marrying Jerry’s boss Big Ed. Jerry knows he’ll never escape from this shady life because Big Ed knows he killed a guy, a case of self-defense but a jury will never believe it from a punk like him. Then everything busts wide open for Jerry when a crooked politician is murdered and the love of his life has to go on the run and appeals to him for help.

As you can tell, Adams packs a lot of back-story in this novelette, but it’s never obtrusive and the information comes out naturally instead of interfering with the headlong pace of the action. And I do mean headlong. Breakneck, even. Man, this story moves. And with its bang-bang-bang pace, its touches of humor, and the distinctive, likable narration by its protagonist, it’s just terrific, the sort of pure, top-notch entertainment I needed right now.

“Default With Doom”, from the April 1937 issue of TEN DETECTIVE ACES, is the only appearance of hardboiled Los Angeles private eye Mike Shane, and since the first Michael Shayne novel DIVIDEND ON DEATH came out two years later, it really makes me wonder if Davis Dresser happened to read this story and the name stuck in his head. We’ll never know, of course, but I don’t think we can rule it out. For our purposes here, what’s important is whether the story is any good, and it really is. This one is in third person, and the style is as terse and tough as can be as Shane investigates the murder of a newspaper columnist. His former girlfriend is the columnist’s secretary and is one of the suspects in the killing, so of course Shane has to find the real killer in order to clear her name. Once again the action is almost non-stop, and Adams manages to work a little actual detection in along with the shootouts, fistfights, and car crashes. As with “Punk”, I just had a great time reading this one.

Adams makes use of another one-shot private detective, Nicolas Flagg, in “Frame for a Lady” from the October 1938 issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE. Flagg is a former mobster who got out of the rackets and became a PI. He gets involved in this case when the beautiful daughter of his former partner in crime says that her father wants to see him. Unfortunately, when they get to the big guy’s apartment, he’s been murdered—and the dame, who has always been in love with Flagg since she was a little girl, is one of the primary suspects. Anyway, when a man’s partner—or his former partner, in this case—is killed, he’s expected to do something about it, or something like that, so Flagg sets out to find the killer. This is another whirlwind of action and plot twists and great dialogue.

Adams’ unscrupulous private eye Connor O’Melveny appears in three stories, and “Forty Pains”, from the July 1941 issue of DIME DETECTIVE MAGAZINE, is the middle yarn in that trio. It opens at the Santa Anita racetrack, where O’Melveny and his beautiful former secretary turned partner in the agency, Desiree Dugan, are following a married couple bent on divorce. Although neither husband nor wife are aware of it, they have both hired the O’Melveny agency to follow the other and gather evidence. Desiree doesn’t know about this, either, but O’Melveny does and has no qualms about playing both sides against each other. Then a handsome lad the wife in the case rendezvouses with at the racetrack turns up dead, and off we gallop again. This one is a bit more of a screwball comedy than the other stories in this collection, although they’re humorous at times, too. And “Forty Pains” has its share of hardboiled action, as well. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Connor O’Melveny is an odd but engaging character, and his banter with his partner Desiree Dugan is excellent.

I knew I was a fan of Cleve F. Adams’ work, but this book made me even more of one. I had a great time reading it and rank it as one of the best books I’ve read this year and some of the best hardboiled private eye fiction I’ve read in quite some time. I hope there’ll be more collections of Adams’ pulp stories in the future. For now, I give this one a very high recommendation. You can get it on Amazon in paperback and e-book editions.