Review: Twenty Plus Two - Frank Gruber

I’m a long-time fan of Frank Gruber’s work, but I’d only read some of his Western novels, a couple of his early mystery novels, some of his pulp mystery stories—most notably, the Oliver Quade stories collected in BRASS KNUCKLES—and his memoir THE PULP JUNGLE, which grew out of his introduction to the Quade collection. I hadn’t read any of his later mystery novels. This seemed like a good time to remedy that since Black Gat Books is about to reprint his 1961 novel TWENTY PLUS TWO, published originally in hardcover by E.P. Dutton and then reprinted in paperback that same year by Bantam. It was even made into a movie that year, starring David Janssen and with a screenplay by Gruber, which I haven't seen.

The protagonist of TWENTY PLUS TWO is Tom Alder, who’s not a private detective, although he functions pretty much like one and has contacts with detective agencies all over the country. Instead, he tracks down missing heirs and takes a cut of whatever they inherit. But as this book opens, he’s not looking for an heir. He’s taking an interest (for reasons that will be explained later in the book) in the murder of a woman who works for various movie stars answering their fan mail, running their fan clubs, etc.

That murder investigation isn’t all Alder has on his plate. A swindler and ex-con wants to hire Alder to find his younger brother. A beautiful woman who’s a friend of one of Alder’s old flames goes missing. In some odd way, all these cases seem to connect to the disappearance of a teenage girl and the murder of a young mobster more than twenty years earlier.

As experienced readers of these kind of novels, we’re all going to expect those plot elements to tie together eventually, so I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that they do. However, Gruber piles on enough complications and coincidences that eventually the reader has to do some pretty serious willing suspending of disbelief. “Sure, why not?”, if you will. Despite that, is the plot of TWENTY PLUS TWO too far-fetched? Well, no, I don’t think so. The resolution is logical and holds together, and who’s to say it couldn’t have happened that way? I don’t think Gruber cheats and conceals things from the reader, either. It’s all there to be figured out, as Tom Alder does.

The book races along, too. I was flipping the pages pretty quickly in the second half, eager to see what was going to happen. Gruber’s prose isn’t fancy, but it’s very effective when it comes to telling a story.

Gruber moved in pulp writing circles in New York and movie and TV circles in Hollywood (he created several Western series I watched as a kid), and I’ve read that he wasn’t very well-liked by some of his contemporaries, although he remained good friends with a few such as fellow pulpster Steve Fisher. He was a really good yarn-spinner and turned out top-notch stories and novels for a long time. I think I need to read more of them. In the meantime, the Black Gat paperback of TWENTY PLUS TWO will be out in early October. It’s one of the best mystery novels I’ve read this year.