Review: Man Chase - Joseph Chadwick

Dave Macklin is a man with plenty of trouble on his hands. He’s the president of a small electronics company that needs to expand but can’t get a bank loan in order to do so. The company is also the target of a hostile takeover by a larger rival outfit eager to gobble it up and take advantage of some vital research done by Dave’s scientist partner. On a personal level, Dave’s wife is an alcoholic who has just gotten back from rehab, swearing that she’s cured, but is she really? Then there’s the beautiful redheaded receptionist at the plant who has her eye on Dave, not to mention the equally gorgeous owner of the rival company who inherited it from her late husband. Yeah, between business problems and beautiful babes, Dave’s got quite a juggling act going on.

That’s the set-up of MAN CHASE, a 1961 novel by Joseph Chadwick, who happens to be one of my favorite hardboiled Western authors. Published originally in paperback by Beacon Books, this novel has been reprinted in e-book and paperback editions by Cutting Edge Books. I guess you could call it a hardboiled corporate soap opera. Although there’s a private detective and some blackmail, it’s not really a crime novel. But it’s very fast-paced and well plotted as Chadwick manipulates the business and personal elements to pile a whole heap of trouble on Dave Macklin’s head.

This would have made a good early Sixties movie with, say, Jeff Chandler as Dave, Dorothy Malone as the rival business owner, and Ann-Margret as the sultry receptionist. For a novel published by Beacon, there’s not much sex, only a couple of scenes and they’re pretty restrained. It would have been easy enough to fade out before things got too risque.

I really enjoyed MAN CHASE. Dave is a good protagonist. He can be kind of a jerk at times but isn’t really a heel, just a decent guy at heart with a lot to deal with. The plot takes a slightly unexpected turn here and there, always a good thing, and works its way to a satisfactory conclusion. Chadwick was better as a Western writer, but he was a solid pro who could turn out a book like this, too, and do an excellent job of it. He wrote at least one other book for Beacon under his own name and several under the pseudonym Jim Layne. I may have to see if I can get my hands on some of them.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: One By One - Fan Nichols

Here are the opening paragraphs from this book:

He slouched through the squalid gaudy Mexican Quarter. He could feel the bulge of the gun butt against his flat belly, held there, beneath his coat, by his belt.

I’m going to kill her, he thought. I won’t turn yellow this time. This time I’ll do it. I’ll kill her. I mustn’t get caught. I can run fast. I’ve got good legs. I can run like hell.

If you’re like me, there’s no way you’re going to read a classic noir opening like that and not keep reading.

Not surprisingly, after the first chapter ONE BY ONE flashes back to tell the story of how the protagonist, telephone lineman Jerry Ryan, gets in such a bad predicament that he’s considering murder. It was a woman, of course. Jerry is in Los Angeles, separated from his loving wife Verna by work (it’s the fall of 1932 as the book begins, in the middle of the Depression), when he makes the mistake of helping an attractive young woman who’s being thrown out of a dime-a-dance joint. The woman, who calls herself Dolly Dawn because she’s trying to break into the movies, latches onto Jerry with the desperation of a drowning man grabbing a life preserver. She convinces him to give her a lift to Las Vegas, where he’s headed for a new job. Jerry is basically a good, decent guy, but he rationalizes himself into bed with Dolly and that turns out to be a huge mistake. Since he took her across a state line and then had sex with her, she tells him that she’ll turn him in to the cops for violating the Mann Act unless he continues to take care of her and pretends to be her husband.

After the noirish beginning, ONE BY ONE turns into less of a crime novel and more of a lurid, soap-operatic melodrama, as Jerry continues trying to get out of Dolly’s blackmailing clutches only to be thwarted by her again and again. That doesn’t keep it from being compelling reading, though. This novel was originally published in 1951 but reads like it was actually written during the Depression, as Nichols paints a vivid picture of shabby desperation among the cheap hotels, boarding houses, freight yards, and gin mills of small towns in California, Washington, and Oregon. Jerry is one of those likable, not-too-bright schnooks who populate novels like this, and you can’t help but root for him even though you know he’s going to do the wrong thing nine times out of ten. All of it leads up to a somewhat odd ending that I’m not sure if I like or not.

This is the first novel by Fan Nichols that I’ve read. I don’t know anything about her except that she wrote a lot of what would have to be considered hardboiled sleaze, even though she started in the Thirties before that genre really existed. ONE BY ONE was originally published by Arco Publishing, a hardcover house that put out books a lot like the ones that Beacon would be doing as paperback originals a few years later. Nichols continued to write through the early Sixties, including books for Beacon and Monarch. I liked this one enough that I’ll continue to keep an eye out for her books, although I probably won’t go on-line and order a big stack of them like I have with some authors. I certainly plan to read more by her, though, and if you run across a copy of ONE BY ONE for a reasonable price (I paid three bucks for mine at Half Price Books), my recommendation is to grab it.

(Despite the good intentions expressed in this post, it'll come as no surprise that I haven't read any more Fan Nichols novels since this was published on April 9, 2010. But several of them are available as e-books and I picked them up, so maybe I will. Among the e-book editions is a Beacon Books reprint of ONE BY ONE under the title DOLLY. If you'd like to check it out, you can find it here. Also, I've learned more about Nichols, whose real name was Frances Nichols Hanna. She was a concert pianist and model before becoming a writer. If I remember right, Roger Torrey was also a piano player. And of course, one of David Goodis's novels was filmed as SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, although that wasn't the book's original title. I believe that was DOWN THERE. I guess there's just something noirish about playing the piano. All I was ever able to play was "Chopsticks", so I guess I'm safe on that score.)

The Other Woman - Charles Burgess

As we all know, many of the soft-core sex novels published in the Fifties and Sixties were actually crime or mystery novels in disguise. That’s certainly true of Charles Burgess’s THE OTHER WOMAN, published originally by Beacon Books in 1960 and about to be reprinted by Black Gat Books.

The narrator/protagonist of this one is Neil Cowan, a real estate agent in a small city on the west coast of Florida. Neil gets involved in a deal to sell a large piece of land to a wealthy developer who’s going to put houses all over it. In the process of arranging this, Neil meets the developer’s wife Emmaline, a blonde who is the most beautiful woman Neil has ever seen. He’s happily married with a nice sexy wife and a small child, but he falls for Emmaline despite that and soon they’re having a torrid affair, which continues until, in true noir novel fashion, Emmaline suggests what a good life they’d have if her husband, who’s considerably older than her, was dead. And who better to hurry him along off this mortal coil than Neil?

From this point on, THE OTHER WOMAN veers off into something a bit less like a Gold Medal novel. Even though he’s obsessed with Emmaline, Neil isn’t just about to commit murder for her. Unfortunately, her husband winds up dead anyway, and Neil is the only potential suspect who doesn’t have a solid alibi. When one of the local police detectives learns of the affair between Neil and Emmaline, he’s convinced that Neil is the killer and goes after him doggedly, looking for proof—proof that the actual murderer is willing to provide to pull the frame tighter around Neil. In order to save himself, he’ll have to uncover the real killer.

I’d never heard of Charles Burgess, but the Florida setting and the excellent writing had me suspecting that Burgess was a previously unknown pseudonym for Day Keene or Harry Whittington or Talmage Powell. The book doesn’t really read like the work of any of those authors, however, and a bit of subsequent investigation turns up the fact that Burgess wrote another hardboiled novel called BACKFIRE, apparently published only in Australia. I don’t think he was Australian, though. He had at least one story in MANHUNT in the late Fifties, and he wrote a number of true crime stories for various detective magazines. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s probably his real name, and he might well have been a reporter since many of them wrote those true crime yarns as a sideline. But that’s purely guesswork on my part.

As for THE OTHER WOMAN, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Although the affair between Neil and Emmaline is what the whole plot hinges on, there’s really not much sex in the book, only a few scenes that don’t go on very long. I’m a little surprised Beacon published it. It’s more of a solid mystery novel with a reasonably clever solution. It reads very much as if Burgess wrote it intending to try to sell it to Gold Medal or Ace, and when it didn’t click at one of those houses, he sexed it up a little and sent it to Beacon. We’ll never know if that’s true, of course, but you can tell from that description what sort of book this is. I liked it, and if you’re a fan of noirish, hardboiled mysteries, I think THE OTHER WOMAN is well worth reading.

Bait - William Vance writing as George Cassidy

I’ve seen William Vance’s by-line on a number of Western novels over the years, but as far as I recall I’ve never read any of them. I had no idea that he also wrote soft-core books under the pseudonym George Cassiday until Black Gat Books reprinted one of them entitled BAIT, originally published by Beacon Books in 1962 with a fine cover by Jack Faragasso, who is still with us, by the way, and active on Facebook.

The title refers to beautiful, seventeen-year-old Melody Frane, who lives a hardscrabble existence as a migrant farm worker. The only family she has is a drunken mother, and Melody has to take care of her, as well. She’s working at a cantaloupe farm in Arizona when she meets Kenney Ward, a pilot who works for Harry Ransome, the ruthless tycoon who owns not only the farm but also radio stations, hotels, electronics plants, and other enterprises. Melody and Kenney are attracted to each other, but before a real romance can develop between them, she falls under the sway of Ransome, who beds her, takes her under his wing, and sends her to Los Angeles so she can be educated at a school for aspiring starlets and models run by a beautiful former silent movie star. Ransome claims he wants to hire Melody as his secretary, but in reality he plans to pimp her out to various important businessmen he wants to blackmail.

Although there are crimes in this book, it’s not a crime novel. BAIT is more of a domestic drama as every man Melody encounters, as well as some of the women, try to seduce her. The thread of her developing relationship with Kenney runs all the way through, and anybody who’s read very many of these soft-core books can make a pretty good guess how things are going to turn out.

That predictability in plotting and resolution doesn’t really detract from the appeal of BAIT. It’s a well-written book with some excellent scenes and a pace that never lets up for very long. The sex scenes are frequent but not very graphic, as if Vance wasn’t all that comfortable writing them and got more enjoyment out of developing the characters, the most well-rounded of which is Melody. (No pun intended, honest.) Harry Ransome is also a thoroughly despicable villain. I raced through BAIT and really enjoyed it. I’m not going to drop everything and search for the other “George Cassidy” books Vance wrote, but I am going to check my shelves and see if I have any of his Westerns. The paperback edition of BAIT can be pre-ordered on Amazon, and I’m sure there’ll be an e-book edition as well once it’s published.

Love Camp on Wheels - Tom Harland

The third novel in TRAILER TRAMPS, the great new collection from Stark House, is LOVE CAMP ON WHEELS by Tom Harland, published originally by Softcover Library (the successor to Beacon Books) in 1963. It’s the story of Stan Barton, a regular guy who manages a trailer park in an agricultural area of California. Many of the camp’s occupants are migratory workers and their families, but there are some full-time residents, too. Stan was in the lettuce business until automation forced him out, but he’s managed to land this nice job taking care of the trailer park.

Things get complicated, though, as they always do in these books, when Stan becomes romantically involved with three married women: his own ex-wife, a newcomer to the park, and a woman who works in the office there. Eventually the husbands of all three women cause trouble for Stan, as does the park’s owner, a lesbian who has fallen for one of the three women herself. Stan not only has to figure out which of the three he really wants, he also has to survive a threat on his life and trouble with the law.

I don’t know anything about Tom Harland and couldn’t find anything on-line about him except that he wrote half a dozen of these softcore novels for Beacon/Softcover Library in the early Sixties. I have a hunch the name is a pseudonym, but that’s all it is, a hunch. Whoever he was, he wasn’t as good a writer as Orrie Hitt and Doug Duperrault, the other two authors in TRAILER TRAMPS. His prose isn’t nearly as smooth. But he keeps the story moving along at a good pace, his depiction of the middle class lifestyle of the era is accurate, and his characters ring true.

Some of the book concerns the expansion of the trailer park, and I’ve been around enough construction projects to recognize that Harland knows what he’s talking about in those scenes. In fact, the writing is stronger in those parts, almost as if Harland was more interested in them than he was in the domestic drama.

That said, Stan Barton is a likable lug of a protagonist, despite his penchant for fooling around with married women, and you can’t help but root for him to figure things out and come up with a happy ending. I enjoyed LOVE CAMP ON WHEELS, and it makes a nice companion piece for the other two novels in this collection. This latest offering from Stark House is well worth reading.

Trailer Tramp - Orrie Hitt

TRAILER TRAMPS, the new triple-decker collection from Stark House, has to have an Orrie Hitt novel in it, of course, and what better one than the similarly named TRAILER TRAMP? Published originally by Beacon Books in 1957, TRAILER TRAMP is Orrie Hitt near the top of his game, although there are some differences in it from his usual books, too.

For one thing, the protagonist of this novel, Joan Baker, isn’t trapped in a hardscrabble existence like many of Hitt’s protagonists. Instead, she’s a smart, hard-working young woman who runs a successful trailer camp established by her parents, who are now taking an extended vacation and have left Joan in charge. So money isn’t a worry as it so often is in a Hitt novel.

Which doesn’t mean that Joan is carefree. She has her personal demons to deal with. She was in love with a young man but after he tried to pressure her into sex and she refused (she’s a virgin), he turned to another girl to get what he wanted. But she still has feelings for the guy, and it doesn’t help when he starts working at the trailer camp.

Then a construction crew putting in a pipeline shows up and the boss of the job, Big Mike Summers, moves his trailer into the camp and Joan is immediately drawn to him. When she gives in to her feelings, she worries that she’s becoming a tramp. (Well, it’s right there in the title, although to be honest, Joan never comes across as particularly trampish.)

Other complications crop up, and although a lot of the book is domestic drama, it becomes a crime yarn as Hitt pulls off several nice twists, leaving the reader unsure of what’s going to happen almost right up to the end of the book.

I know Hitt worked as the manager of a hunting camp, but I don’t recall if he ever had any connection to trailer camps. He must have, because he does a great job with the setting in this book. As in so much of his work, the details of middle-class and lower-class life really have the ring of authenticity. His writing is sharp and the pace moves along at a nice clip. This is fine storytelling.

TRAILER TRAMP is in the top rank of the Orrie Hitt novels I’ve read. Along with TRAILER CAMP WOMAN by Doug Duperrault, it makes this new Stark House collection a solid two-for-two so far. That leaves LOVE CAMP ON WHEELS by Tom Harland, which I’ll be getting to soon. TRAILER TRAMPS is available in both e-book and print editions.

Forgotten Books: Sex Dancer - Clayton Matthews

You can’t get much more blatant about the title of a book than SEX DANCER, a novel by Clayton Matthews published by Beacon Books in 1961. The protagonist, Jean Winters, is a beautiful young blonde who dances in the girlie show at a traveling carnival. A year earlier, she left her hometown in New Mexico to go to Hollywood and become a big star. Well, we all know how that works out, so now to survive Jean travels with the carnival from one town to another and carries on a desultory affair with the sleazy concessionaire who runs the girlie show. But then she meets Mace, a motorcycle rider who used to be the star attraction of the motordrome show (where guys race motorcycles around the inside of a cylinder, held up by centrifugal force) until he cracked up in an accident and lost his nerve. Jean and Mace fall for each other, but there are all kinds of obstacles in the way, of course. Will their love survive?

I tend to like carny novels, and this one is okay. Like Fredric Brown’s MADBALL, it’s full of carny lingo and lore and colorful characters, but it lacks any real mystery or noir plot and is more of a soap opera than anything else. But it’s a pretty fast-moving and well-written soap opera, so I enjoyed it. It’s not the sweaty, desperate, naturalistic art of Orrie Hitt, and it doesn’t have the narrative drive of Ben Haas, but it’s still worth reading because Clayton Matthews was a good storyteller.

Matthews is an interesting author. He wrote quite a few of these soft-core sleaze novels for various publishers under his real name, and later he did a number of big, family saga type novels, also under his name, as well as a lot of books under other names. Rumor has it that in the Eighties he actually wrote dozens of bestselling historical romances published under another name. I never met him, but we had some mutual friends and he was also the cousin of my good friend, pulp fan and publisher Tom Johnson. I have some of his other novels published by Beacon and will be getting around to them in due course, I suspect. 

Beacon Covers

Here are the covers for those books listed in the house ad in the previous post. Anybody know who Adam Rebel, J.T. Pritchard, and Jay de Bekker really were?