Review: Switcheroo - Emmett McDowell

I’d read and enjoyed quite a few of Emmett McDowell’s pulp stories. He was a prolific contributor to the Western, science fiction, and detective pulps during the Forties and Fifties. He also wrote several novels, most of them hardboiled mysteries, and I’d never read any of them until SWITCHEROO, his first novel published in 1954 by Ace Books as half of an Ace Double (D-51) with OVER THE EDGE by Lawrence Treat. The cover on McDowell’s half is by Victor Olson. The novel is an expansion of a pulp novella called “The Tattooed Nude” published in the Winter 1954 issue of the pulp TRIPLE DETECTIVE. He must have revised the story quite a bit, because while there are several nudes in the novel, none of them are tattooed. Black Gat Books has just published a very nice reprint of this novel.

The protagonist of SWITCHEROO is Jaimie MacRae, a burly former athlete who works as an operative for a large private detective agency with an office in Louisville, Kentucky, an unusual but effective setting for a private eye novel. MacRae gets the assignment to track down the missing widow of a gambling kingpin who was murdered recently. She disappeared after her husband’s death, and the lawyer representing one of the other heirs hires the agency to find her so that an inheritance matter can be cleared up.

Or at least, that’s the story, but you know as well as I do that nothing is ever what it appears to be at first in books like this. MacRae takes the job, and just like that, we’re galloping off on a twisted trail involving gamblers, the Syndicate, a riverfront resort and casino, corrupt politicians, blackmail, and several beautiful babes who wind up in various states of undress.

As I’ve said many times before, this is the sort of book I grew up reading, so I’ve read hundreds of similar novels. And I don’t care. As long as they’re well-written, I love them, and SWITCHEROO is very well-written. It’s in third person, which gives it a nice hardboiled tone. Some of it is really funny, and some of it is really bleak and brutal. MacRae takes a lot of punishment but can still come up with a quip when he needs to. He’s as likable a private eye protagonist as I’ve encountered in a while. The plot is very convoluted but in the end makes just enough sense to work.

The reviews of this novel I found on-line seem to be mostly negative, but I had a wonderful time reading SWITCHEROO. I own all of McDowell’s other mystery novels and now have no excuse not to read them. The Black Gat Books reprint is available on Amazon in a handsome paperback edition, and if you’re a fan of traditional private eye yarns, I give it a strong recommendation.