Louis King got his start in show business as an actor in silent films and then became a director, going on to direct almost a hundred movies and TV episodes. He specialized in Westerns and adventure pictures. I’m bound to have seen some of the TV Westerns he directed in the Fifties. He wrote one novel, the crime/suspense yarn CORNERED, which was published originally as half of an Ace Double in 1958 and has just been reprinted by Black Gat Books in paperback and e-book editions.
Steve Grogan is a cop, a detective who kept on working even after he married an
heiress who died giving birth to their daughter and left him a wealthy man.
Money doesn’t mean much to Grogan, though. He only cares about the law—and
about that daughter, a three-year-old named Betsy.
So when Grogan is the only one who can testify against a shadowy mob boss and
put the guy away for murder, he takes off with Betsy and goes into hiding when
it becomes obvious that the mobster will try to strike at him through the
little girl. He has a couple of friends helping him, another former cop and a
woman who was a carnival sharpshooter. They lie low at a motel in some unnamed
desert city—Las Vegas? Reno?—but the mobster has allies, too, and he’ll stop at
nothing to track down Grogan and keep from testifying any way possible,
including murder.
CORNERED is a good story with some clever twists along the way. Not jaw-dropping twists, maybe, but the sort that make you smile and nod your head in appreciation. Grogan is a well-developed protagonist with some actual depth, and his mobster nemesis is really creepy. The prose is pretty straight-ahead stuff, the sort of writing you’d expect from a no-nonsense movie director who would bring in his pictures on time and under budget, but it’s very effective storytelling.
I got caught up in this book and was really flipping the pages toward the end. CORNERED is a top-notch suspense novel and well worth reading.
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