Review: The Wicked Streets - Wenzell Brown

I first encountered the work of Wenzell Brown in THE SAINT MAGAZINE in the Sixties, where he published a few espionage novellas about a secret agent named Mike Stranger. I don’t remember a thing about them except that I thought the sex scenes in them were pretty graphic for a digest mystery magazine in that era—which I, as a teenage boy at the time, certainly appreciated. I had no idea back then that Brown had had a successful career as a paperbacker, specializing in true crime volumes and juvenile delinquent novels.

But even though I’ve been aware of Brown and his books for many, many years, I don’t believe I actually read any of them until now. THE WICKED STREETS was published originally by Gold Medal in 1958 with a cover by Barye Phillips and has been reprinted recently by the fine folks at Black Gat Books with a cover by Howell Dodd.

The protagonist of this novel, if you can call him that, is Buzz Baxter, a young man from a good family who is definitely not a good guy. He’s left his home for the seedier parts of New York City, where he works occasionally as a jazz musician. His main line of work, though, is pushing heroin, a gig he got by turning in another pusher to the cops. That pusher, psychopathic knife artist Frank Nucci, is out of jail a lot sooner than Buzz anticipated, and now Nucci has a grudge to settle. This grudge endangers Diane Griscom, a beautiful teenage society girl who is in love with Buzz. He leads her along, but he’s really planning to use her in some sort of scheme aimed at her wealthy father.

Then another girl winds up naked and dead in Buzz’s bed, as they have a habit of doing in novels like this, and all his plans start collapsing. Nucci committed the murder, of course, but unless Buzz can cover it up, the cops will pin the killing on him. Danger closes in on all sides, not only for Buzz but also for the innocent Diane.

Brown does a good job in structuring the plot of this novel in a clever manner that continually ratchets up the tension on these characters. The writing is excellent and does an especially good job of creating a nightmarish world spinning further and further out of control. New York City has never been sleazier or more garish and threatening.

THE WICKED STREETS is another top-notch reprint from Black Gat Books and has made me realize that I’m going to have to hunt up more books by Wenzell Brown. In the meantime, this one is available on Amazon in both e-book and paperback editions.