Review: The Corrupters - William Francis

One of my favorite types of hardboiled novel is the one where the protagonist takes on the organization of a crooked boss who runs the whole town. That’s the basic set-up of THE CORRUPTERS by William Francis, published originally by Lion Books and coming soon in a new reprint edition from the fine folks at Black Gat Books.

The narrator/protagonist of THE CORRUPTERS is Mike Moyden, a former cop in an unnamed city four hours up the coast from Los Angeles. Framed with a bribery charge because he made enemies, he was kicked off the force five years earlier and moved to Texas, where good luck made him a fortune in the oil business. Now he’s come back to his hometown because his ex-wife has been charged with murder. She’s a nightclub singer and has been arrested for killing the owner of the club where she worked, who happens to have been the younger brother of the town boss. She was also the guy’s mistress, rumor has it. Mike’s feelings about her are conflicted, but he believes she’s no killer and doesn’t want to see her railroaded for a crime she didn’t commit.

We’ve all read enough of these books to have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen. Mike charges around poking his nose in where it’s not wanted, he meets some good-looking dames including a newspaper reporter who’s sort of an old flame, and he clashes repeatedly with gangsters, goons, and brutal cops. Oh, and he stumbles over dead bodies. Lots and lots of dead bodies. I kind of lost count of how many murders there are in this book, over and above the one that kicks off the action, but the corpses definitely pile up before Mike sorts out the whole complicated plot.

Familiar it may be in some respects, but man, THE CORRUPTERS is fun to read. I’d never heard of William Francis, let alone sampled any of his books, but he spins this yarn in a fast-moving, tough yet breezy style that’s a pure pleasure to read. This is the kind of book I grew up reading, and I enjoyed it a lot and give it a high recommendation for hardboiled fans. You can pre-order the Black Gat edition on Amazon.

Review: A Rage of Desire - Clayton Matthews

We’ve all encountered guys like Mitch Sutton in noir novels before, but there are some important differences in Mitch’s character, too. He doesn’t have a great job—he’s a used car salesman in Los Angeles—but he’s good at it and enjoys the work. He’s not exactly trapped in a loveless marriage—he genuinely cares for his wife and their twins—but there’s definitely a spark that’s missing, too. One day, when Mitch drops into a neighborhood bar for his usual beer on the way home from work, that lack prompts him to take a drink of hard liquor instead—and Mitch can’t handle the hard stuff. He knows that, but he gets drunk anyway and picks up a woman at the bar who turns out to be a high-class prostitute. Things don’t work out between them, though, because Mitch is too drunk.

He would have been luckier if things had stayed that way.

But no, the woman winds up marrying Mitch’s boss, but Mitch falls hard for her anyway, leading to a torrid affair that, sure enough, winds up with somebody dead and a murder charge hanging over Mitch’s head.

A RAGE OF DESIRE is the latest reprint from Black Gat Books. Originally published as a paperback original by Monarch Books in 1960, with a cover by Harry Barton, it’s the first novel by Clayton Matthews, who went on to a career as a prolific paperbacker over the next three decades. I’ve read a couple of other novels by Matthews, and this one is very similar, utilizing the sort of crime and noir elements we’ve seen in scores of novels but changing things up enough that the books also work as domestic dramas. Matthews was a very good writer and had that paperbacker’s knack of keeping the reader turning the pages.

Over the years, Matthews wrote Westerns, family sagas, romantic suspense, and traditional mysteries. In the early Seventies, he married author Patty Brisco, and together they produced a bunch of bestselling historical romance novels under the name Patricia Matthews. This is hearsay, or gossip, if you will, but I was told by a mutual writer friend that Clayton Matthews did nearly all the writing on those romance novels published under his wife’s name, in addition to the ones that were credited collaborations. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the person who told me that was in a position to know.

And speaking of mutual friends, Clayton Matthews was also the cousin of my long-time friend Tom Johnson, who was one of the leading figures in pulp fandom for many years. He always referred to Matthews as “Matt” and told me that some of Matthews’ family sagas set in Texas were based on actual people and incidents. Again, I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s certainly plausible enough.

A RAGE OF DESIRE may have been Matthews’ first novel, but it’s a polished debut, no doubt about that. It’s not as hardboiled as some, but it has a gritty edge and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This novel is available on Amazon in paperback and e-book editions, and I think it’s well worth reading.

Review: Run, Killer, Run - Lionel White

Before there was Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) and his famous protagonist Parker, there was Lionel White, the first real master of the heist novel. White didn’t write about a series character, but many of the protagonists of his novels bear a resemblance to Parker, including Rand Coleman, the lead character in White’s first novel, RUN, KILLER, RUN. The original version of this novel was published as a digest novel by Rainbow Books in 1952 under the title SEVEN HUNGRY MEN. White revised it and Avon published it as a paperback original in 1959 under its current title. Then Black Gat Books reprinted that version in a very nice paperback edition that comes out today. (You can see the covers of the two previous editions below. I don't know who did the art on the Avon edition of RUN, KILLER, RUN, but the cover on the Rainbow Books edition of SEVEN HUNGRY MEN is by the great George Gross.)

Rand Coleman is a professional criminal serving time for robbery when a corrupt lawyer manages to secure his release and recruits him to pull off a big job: an armored car robbery that will net a cool two million dollars. In telling his story, White employs the classic structure of the heist novel. Coleman assembles his team and we get to know them: a couple of veteran mobsters, a hotheaded young punk, a washed-up boat skipper, a sullen first mate. A couple of beautiful girls wind up involved in the proceedings. The plan for the robbery is laid out, and then we get the execution of it.

Do things go wrong? Of course, they do! But Coleman and his team get their hands on the loot, and now all they have to do is make their getaway to Florida, and from there, who knows? Cuba? South America? Unfortunately, treachery, greed, lust, and violence are along for the ride, too.

RUN, KILLER, RUN may not have much in it that we haven’t seen before, but this is a very early example of this sort of noir crime novel. And White spins the yarn with such skill that I was totally caught up in it, eagerly turning the pages to find out what was going to happen. The twists and turns that White introduces in his plot never disappointed me, either. RUN, KILLER, RUN is a terrific novel, fast-paced and well-written and very entertaining. If you enjoy heist novels, I give it a very high recommendation.

Review: The Red Tassel - David Dodge

THE RED TASSEL is the third and final novel by David Dodge to feature Al Colby, a private detective/troubleshooter who works primarily for U.S. business interests in South America. It was published in hardcover by Random House in 1950 and reprinted in paperback by Dell in 1952 with a cover by Robert Stanley. The same Stanley cover art graces the recent reprint from the fine folks at Black Gat Books, which is available in paperback from Amazon and also includes an excellent introduction by Randal S. Brandt.

In this novel, Al Colby, who is a very likable narrator/protagonist, is hired by beautiful redhead Pancha Porter, who inherited a lead and silver mine in the mountains of Bolivia from her father. The mine’s production has dropped dramatically, and Pancha wants Al to find out why and put a stop to it. The situation is complicated, as far as Al is concerned, by Pancha’s insistence on traveling to the mine with him. And since she’s footing the bill, he can’t really say no.

They run into trouble before they even arrive and meet all the colorful characters at the mine and the nearby village of Indian workers. Those colorful characters include a witch doctor who holds a grudge against Pancha’s late father, a neurotic young man and his overprotective mother, assorted surly servants and employees, and an old woman who wanders around acting like a lunatic . It’ll come as no surprise to most readers that a murder takes place sooner rather than later, and Al find himself in deadly danger more than once.

Dodge and his family lived in South America and the setting for this novel is based on a real place. You can tell that from the excellent descriptive writing. THE RED TASSEL is well-plotted, too, not extraordinarily complex but always solid and intriguing. I figured out the killer’s identity and most of what was going on, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of this book even a little bit. That’s how good the characters and the writing are.

Dodge is best remembered for his novel TO CATCH A THIEF, which served as the basis for the famous Alfred Hitchcock movie with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. I haven’t read that one, but I have read the second Al Colby novel, PLUNDER OF THE SUN (also a movie) and the posthumously published THE LAST MATCH. I really liked both of those books, too. I need to read more by David Dodge. I thoroughly enjoyed THE RED TASSEL and give it a high recommendation. It’s a smoothly told, very entertaining tale.

Review: The Joy Wheel - Paul W. Fairman

Eddie Kiley is just a normal 16-year-old guy growing up in Chicago in 1926. His dad is a salesman, his mom is a housewife, and he has an older sister he squabbles with. One of his uncles is a cop, and another is a drunk. He spends his time going to school, hanging around with his friends (some of whom are his cousins), and thinking about girls, especially the beautiful but unattainable Mimi Taylor.

Eddie is the narrator/protagonist of THE JOY WHEEL, a 1954 novel by Paul W. Fairman published originally by Lion Books and just reprinted by Black Gat Books. The story follows Eddie for a year or so as he learns about life, falls in with shady company, wrestles with his conscience, uncovers family secrets and tragedies, and generally just grows up. There’s plenty of crime in this book, as Eddie gets a job working around bookies and gangsters and even inadvertently witnesses a murder, but it’s not really a crime novel. Likewise, although Eddie’s relationships with several different young women are very important, it’s neither a romance novel or a softcore novel.

Instead, THE JOY WHEEL is a coming-of-age novel that’s a little on the gritty side, and I think it’s a great one. Paul W. Fairman is best remembered for his work as an author and editor in the science fiction field—and his reputation there is a little mediocre, to be honest—but he was also a journeyman writer who turned out mysteries, Westerns, movie novelizations, and TV tie-in novels. I haven’t read a great deal by him, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read and consider his SF to be pretty good.

But THE JOY WHEEL is so good it took me very much by surprise. The characters are great, Eddie’s narrative voice is fun to read, and Fairman really had me turning the pages to find out what was going to happen. I wish he had written more novels like this.

Maybe he did. I have a couple of his mysteries and one Western but haven’t gotten around to reading them yet. Very late in his career, Fairman also wrote two historical romance novels under the name Paula Fairman (although you won’t find any mention of that on-line, for some reason), then died while writing a third one which a friend of mine finished and then continued ghosting as Paula Fairman for twenty or so more books. I have the two that Paul Fairman wrote and hope I get around to reading them, and more by him, one of these days. Meanwhile, I give THE JOY WHEEL a high recommendation. You can get it on Amazon in paperback and e-book editions.

Review: The Face of Evil - John McPartland

John McPartland died young and wasn’t very prolific, only a dozen novels during the Fifties, a couple of them published posthumously. But his work was well-regarded and movies were made from several of his books. The fine folks at Black Gat Books have just reprinted his novel THE FACE OF EVIL, originally published by Gold Medal in 1954 with a cover by Ray Johnson, a great cover artist but not one I particularly associate with Gold Medal. I’d read and enjoyed several of McPartland’s novels, so I was eager to give this one a try.

The narrator/protagonist is Bill Oxford, a former newspaperman who works for a public relations agency in Los Angeles. However, Bill’s real job is as a fixer, a guy you can call on to get you out of a jam—or get one of your enemies into one. His specialty is framing political or business figures for some sort of crime and then blackmailing them into doing what his employers want. As this novel opens, he’s been sent to Newport Beach to stop a crusading lawyer from revealing damaging information about a candidate for public office. McPartland never delves deeply into the specifics of any of this, and he doesn’t need to. It’s enough for us to know that Bill is a pretty shady guy who’ll stoop to just about any dirty trick to accomplish his ends.

Unfortunately for Bill, he still has a tiny shred of decency in him, and it’s about to be tested when he falls in love with the widow of his target’s ex-law partner and also has to deal with the reappearance in his life of a young woman he did dirty several years earlier.

The action in this book takes place in about twenty-four hours, and it’s roughly divided between Bill wrestling with his conscience, dealing with various hitches in his plan, trying to figure out the romantic triangle in which he finds himself, getting mixed up in brutal fistfights, and going on the run from the law. It’s all very well-written, and McPartland spins his yarn at a breakneck pace that really had me flipping the pages. And I honestly didn’t know how he was going to resolve Bill’s various dilemmas, which is always nice.

Speaking of resolutions, I have to admit there are a couple of late plot developments that strike me as deus ex machina, which slightly lessens the impact of this novel. But it’s still very, very good despite that, with great characters, a vividly realized setting (Newport Beach during what’s now known as Spring Break, although McPartland never uses that term), and plenty of action and drama. I had a great time reading THE FACE OF EVIL, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled fiction from the Fifties, I give it a high recommendation. It's available from Amazon in print and e-book editions. There’s a lot in this one I feel like I’m going to remember for a while.

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.

Review: Cornered - Louis King

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.

Review: Backfire - Charles L. Burgess

A while back, I read and enjoyed Charles Burgess’s novel THE OTHER WOMAN, which was published originally by Beacon Books in 1960 and reprinted last year by Stark House as part of their great Black Gat Books line. Burgess, a Florida author who specialized in writing articles for the true crime magazines, wrote only two novels, and his other one, BACKFIRE, was very rare, having been published only in Australia. Now the good folks at Stark House have tracked it down and reprinted it as well, along with Burgess’s only short story and a selection of his true crime yarns. I’ve just read BACKFIRE.

The novel’s protagonist is Martin Powers, about as normal and run-of-the-mill a guy as you could find. He’s a salesman for a cosmetics company and is recently married to a beautiful brunette named Angela. He has a pretty good life, he thinks—until somebody starts trying to kill him.

After several failed attempts on his life, Martin’s wife brings in the cops, in the person of a hulking detective named Sam Bannerman. Unfortunately, Bannerman doesn’t seem to be able to make any progress in finding out who wants Martin dead. So Martin figures if he wants to stay alive, he’d better do some investigating himself. He was adopted as a young child and knows very little about his background, so he decides that would be a good place to start. He proves to be a clever, dogged detective, too, and starts uncovering things. But will he arrive at the ultimate answer before his mysterious enemy knocks him off?

BACKFIRE is a well-constructed mystery/suspense novel that generates considerably urgency and kept me flipping the pages. I think Burgess revealed some key elements of the plot maybe a tad too early, but that didn’t take away from my overall enjoyment of the book. He keeps the central questions unanswered until late in the book and keeps tightening the screws on Martin until a satisfying climax.

Maybe due to Burgess’s background as a true crime author, there’s a strong sense of realism to this book, as well, a sense that the investigation really could have gone this way. There’s nothing flashy about the style, just straight-ahead storytelling, but in a story like this, that’s a very effective approach. I'm sorry Burgess didn't write more novels. I had a fine time reading BACKFIRE and give it a high recommendation. It’s available in e-book and trade paperback editions. I haven’t yet read the true crime articles that round out the book, but I intend to.

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.

Review: Chartered Love - Conrad Dawn

I love it when I find a little gem of a book in an unexpected place. At first glance, CHARTERED LOVE looks like it might fall into that category. Originally published in 1960 by Novel Books, one of the bottom-of-the-barrel paperback publlshers that specialized in what was then considered fiction for adults only, it’s the debut novel of Conrad Dawn, an author I’d never heard of, let alone read. Dawn published only six books, all of them from Novel Books in 1960-62. The cover promises some adventure to go along with the risque elements, and the book was reprinted recently by Black Gat Books, a consistently top-notch imprint, with an introduction by Gary Lovisi, an author whose opinions I respect, so yeah, this book might actually be pretty good.

CHARTERED LOVE starts out in very promising fashion. It’s a South Seas adventure yarn with a two-fisted boat skipper being hired by a beautiful young woman to help her recover a fortune in gold bars that went down with a refugee ship sunk by the Japanese during the early days of World War II. This is a very standard adventure plot going back to the pulp days. H. Bedford-Jones wrote probably dozens of stories that used some variation of this concept. So did plenty of other pulpsters, and the sunken treasure plot was used again and again by paperbackers and also hardcover authors such as Wilbur Smith, Clive Cussler, Jack Higgins, and Alistair Maclean. It’s a plot that I happen to like a lot, and I’ve even used it myself. Whether it succeeds or not is all a matter of execution. In a familiar tale such as this, a writer has to create strong characters, keep up a fast pace, provide vivid settings, and maybe, in the best of them, come up with a few twists in the standard plot.

A good protagonist is a must for this kind of novel. John Darrow, the skipper of the Malacca Maid, is a very good one. Reasonably smart, plenty tough, with morals just questionable enough to be interesting but still with a code of honor that he follows. The beautiful girl, Elizabeth McClain, is also smart and tough, not the least bit whiny, and a fine match for Darrow. The ship’s crusty old first mate is a great sidekick, the villains who are also after the gold bars are properly oily and evil, and all of them do good work as the story races along. There are some excellent action scenes during a typhoon, and the underwater diving scenes are suitably creepy. You’d barely know this book was from a so-called sleaze publisher. Except for a few mild, not-at-all graphic sex scenes, this reads very much like a Higgins or Maclean novel from the same era.

So, having read it, I’m happy to report that CHARTERED LOVE is indeed one of those lost gems. I thoroughly enjoyed it and give it a high recommendation for fans of sea-going adventure yarns. It's available in paperback and e-book editions. I don’t know if Conrad Dawn’s other books are as good, but I’d love to find out. 

Review: Hunter at Large - Thomas B. Dewey

I’ve been reading Thomas B. Dewey’s books off and on for close to 60 years since discovering his series about the private eye known only as Mac while I was in high school. He’s never failed to entertain me. He’s one of those writers who never achieved huge success but published steadily for 25 years and was always well-regarded by readers and critics. Black Gat Books has just reprinted one of his stand-alones, HUNTER AT LARGE, published originally in hardcover by Simon & Shuster in 1961 and reprinted in paperback by Pocket Books in 1963—an edition I owned for many years but never got around to reading.

The protagonist of this one is Mickey Phillips, a police detective in an unnamed Midwestern city, who is home one night with his wife Kathy when two men show up at the house, take Mickey by surprise, make him a prisoner, and torture and kill his wife in front of him. They leave thinking that they’ve killed Mickey, too, but he survives, which is a bad mistake for them to make.

After months of recuperation, Mickey is well enough to set out on the trail of the killers. He has to resign from the police force to do it, but he doesn’t care. He just wants revenge for Kathy’s murder. The trail leads him across the country with stops in Kansas City, Denver, and a small town in Nevada. Mickey puts his training to good use in conducting a dogged, methodical investigation which ultimately leads him to his goal with a few surprises along the way.

This is a fine suspense novel written in Dewey’s usual smooth prose with well-developed characters, especially Mickey Phillips. He never comes across as hysterical or overwrought, just very, very determined. The mystery angle is well-constructed. It’s a very bleak, humorless book, but given the plot, I don’t see how it could have been anything else. If you’ve never read Dewey’s work before, HUNTER AT LARGE isn’t really representative of his private eye novels featuring Mac or his other series protagonist Pete Schofield, but it’s well worth reading and it gets a solid recommendation from me. It’s available in paperback and e-book editions.

Review: Wild - Gil Brewer

WILD is actually the first Gil Brewer novel I ever read, approximately 40 years ago. I had heard of Brewer but didn’t know anything about him or his books except that my buddies Bill Crider and Ed Gorman said they were good. That was enough of a recommendation for me. When a copy of the original Fawcett Crest edition from 1958 came in at the used bookstore I managed, I grabbed it for myself and read it. All these years later, with Black Gat Books reprinting this novel recently, it seemed like a perfect time for one of my rare rereads.

Lee Baron is one of the few private eye protagonists in Gil Brewer’s fiction. Lee, who has been working as a private detective in California, returns to his hometown of Tampa, Florida, to take over the agency of his late father, who has just passed away. For his first case, he’s hired by an old flame to talk to her husband, from whom she’s estranged, and try to set up a reconciliation. This seems like an odd assignment for a private detective, but Lee takes the case and, wouldn’t you know it, discovers a dead body almost right away. The corpse has been mutilated, so it’s hard to tell who the dead man is. Is it the old flame’s husband? Is it one of the guys who was involved in a recent bank robbery that netted the thieves almost half a million bucks? Loot which is still missing, by the way. Or maybe the dead man was tied in with whoever hired the hulking, out-of-town thug to hand Lee a beating and scare him off the case, or kill him if he won’t scare. Let’s not forget the second murder, or the old flame’s beautiful but slutty sister, who Lee was also involved with in the old days.

And all of this is just in the first twelve hours after Lee takes the case.

WILD is a real whirlwind of a novel. Gil Brewer is known for the propulsive nature of his plots and writing, and that quality is in full force in this one. I had no clue what was going to happen next, and Lee Baron sure as hell doesn’t. But something is going to happen, you can be sure of that, and it’ll probably be bad.

I have a confession to make. When I first read WILD back in the Eighties, I didn’t care much for it. It didn’t make me a Gil Brewer fan, and I didn’t read anything else by him for quite a while. But then I read the Hard Case Crime reprint of his novel THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN (which just happens to be the next novel Brewer published after WILD) and thought it was terrific, one of the best hardboiled/noir novels I’d read in a long time. I’ve gone on to read many more of his novels and have enjoyed every one of them.

So what did I think of WILD when I reread it? I’m happy to report that I liked it much better this time around. The plot is suitably twisty, the characterization is vivid, and Brewer’s writing is quite poignant, almost poetic in places. At the same time, it still manages to capture the white-hot desperation of the people involved in this swamp of lust and greed. If you’re already a Gil Brewer fan and haven’t read WILD, you’ll definitely want to check it out. If you haven’t read Brewer, as I hadn’t all those years ago, you might want to start with one of his classics like 13 FRENCH STREET, SATAN IS A WOMAN, or THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN, as mentioned above. But WILD is well worth reading, make no mistake about that. It’s available in paperback and e-book editions. 

 

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.

Drink With the Dead - Jay Flynn

DRINK WITH THE DEAD opens with our protagonist, Konrad Jensen, being questioned by the cops about a murder he’s suspected of committing. He gets beaten up and thrown into the felony tank. Being a long-time reader of hardboiled crime and noir novels from the Fifties, I immediately expected Jensen to break out of jail and spend the rest of the novel trying to find the real killer and clear his name.

As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what we eventually get, but instead of occupying the rest of the book, after that brutal opening author Jay Flynn takes us on an extended flashback in which Konrad Jensen—who’s a federal agent—investigates a moonshine ring in the northern California mountains. This isn’t a spoiler, by the way; Flynn clues the reader in on Jensen’s real identity almost right away. It’s Jensen’s partner who gets killed, giving him a personal stake in the case, and then his own life is on the line as the bad guys close in around him. Oh, and there are two beautiful women mixed up in the investigation, too, of course.

DRINK WITH THE DEAD was published originally in 1959 under the name J.M. Flynn as half of an Ace Double Mystery with a cover by Paul Rader. That cover has been preserved on the recent Black Gat reprint of the novel. Jay Flynn was as much of an intriguing character as any of those in his books, a writer of considerable talent eroded by booze and hard living and a generally screwball approach to life. He’s the subject of a great essay by Bill Pronzini, originally published in MYSTERY SCENE, that can still be read on-line. I’ve read Flynn’s novels off and on for years, and while he was inconsistent to say the least, I don’t think I’ve ever read one that failed to entertain me.

DRINK WITH THE DEAD is certainly one of his better efforts. Setting a moonshining yarn in California instead of Kentucky or Tennessee is a nice offbeat touch. A lot of the book is more G-Man Procedural than hardboiled action, but it’s well-done, and when the action does kick into gear, it really yanks the reader along full-throttle. The ending of this novel is great, with an effective final twist of the tail. If you’ve never read Flynn’s work before, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start. If you’re already a fan, you’ll want to give this one a try. Recommended.

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.

The Steel Noose - Arnold Drake

I’ve been aware of Arnold Drake’s work as a comic book writer for a long, long time, having been a fan of one of his best-known creations, the Doom Patrol, ever since those stories began appearing in DC’s MY GREATEST ADVENTURE comic more than half a century ago. In the Seventies, I was also a regular reader of his GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY series for Marvel. But I had no idea he was also a novelist until Black Gat Books reprinted THE STEEL NOOSE, originally published by Ace Books in 1954. It’s an Ace that I just never came across over the years.

THE STEEL NOOSE is narrated by fast-talking, wise-cracking New York gossip columnist Boyd McGee, who moves in a world of cabbies, tycoons, gamblers, chorus girls, gangsters, and cops. An item he includes in his column inadvertently gets him mixed up in multiple murders and the hunt for half a million dollars in blackmail loot. Boyd gets beaten up more than once but dishes out some punishment, too. And of course, there are also several beautiful women involved in the convoluted plot.

Drake could have played this pretty straight, and in some stretches he does, but for a lot of the novel, the genuinely funny banter dished out by Boyd as he navigates this labyrinth of crime puts me in mind of something else. It’s like reading the novelization of a Bob Hope movie that was never made. Boyd McGree isn’t exactly cowardly like the characters Hope usually played, but every quip he made, I heard it in Hope’s voice. To a Bob Hope fan like me, reading THE STEEL NOOSE was a hugely entertaining experience. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Drake had Hope in mind while he was writing this. And it’s fitting, at least to me, that a decade later, Drake was writing DC’s THE ADVENTURES OF BOB HOPE comic book, which I read occasionally in those days, although not as much as I should have because I tended not to pick up anything except superhero, Western, and war comics. I’m sure I missed some good stuff.

As far as I know, THE STEEL NOOSE is Arnold Drake’s only novel. That’s kind of a shame because it’s really good and he might have given us more like it. On the other hand, if he’d been a successful novelist, we might never have had the Doom Patrol and the Guardians of the Galaxy. I’m not sure I’d make that trade, but I’m very glad Black Gat Books decided to reprint this one. You can pre-order it on Amazon, and I give it a high recommendation.

The Floods of Fear - John and Ward Hawkins

As this novel opens, disastrous flooding from spring rains and snowmelt has spread over a large region, and a group of convict laborers under the command of one guard are stacking sandbags along a dike, trying to keep it from collapsing. But they’re doomed to fail, and when the dike gives way it’s a catastrophe that leaves only three men alive: Donavan, a murderer; Peebles, an armed robber; and Tom Sharkey, the guard who was in charge of the work detail. It’s no surprise that the three of them wind up together, trying to survive. Then, a short time later, they come across Elizabeth Matthews, a pretty young college girl who’s also been stranded by the terrible flood. Peebles wants the girl for himself, Sharkey wants to get the two convicts back behind bars, and Donavan, well, Donavan has his own agenda, and it includes murder and revenge.

Once that set-up is in place—and it really doesn’t take long—THE FLOODS OF FEAR becomes a pure, white-knuckled, man vs. nature/man vs. man suspense novel, with a little bit of a Gold Medal hardboiled crime angle as well. This wasn’t a Gold Medal book, but it certainly could have been. Instead, THE FLOODS OF FEAR by the writing team of brothers John and Ward Hawkins was serialized in THE SATURDAY EVENING POST in 1956, published in hardback by Dodd, Mead that same year, reprinted in 1957 by Popular Library under the title A GIRL, A MAN, AND A RIVER, and finally reprinted recently by Black Gat Books, the edition I read.

This is an excellent novel, well written and very much character-driven but also with plenty of action. Donavan, especially, is an intriguing and compelling character. Not everything turns out the way you’d expect at first, although along the way it becomes apparent what the authors are building toward. And the big finale doesn’t disappoint, either. I really enjoyed THE FLOODS OF FEAR and give it a high recommendation for readers who want an intelligent, fast-moving novel of suspense. It’s available in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon and from the publisher.

Freakshow Fallout

Last week I reviewed FREAKSHOW, the novel by Jacquin Sanders recently reprinted by Black Gat Books. As I sometimes do when I remember, I copied the review over onto Amazon and submitted it. It didn’t show up on FREAKSHOW’s page, which came as no surprise. About half the time when I submit a review to Amazon, it never appears, as if I had sent it into a black hole.

However, this time I actually got a response from Amazon, saying that they couldn’t publish my review because it didn’t meet their guidelines for one or more of these reasons:

Profanity

Harassment

Hate speech

Sexual content

Illegal activity

Private information

Of course, they didn’t tell me which of those things they found in the review. Personally, I don’t think the review contains any of those things, but you can read it for yourself, if you haven’t already, and see what you think.

Amazon also invited me to edit my review and resubmit it. I don’t think I’ll be doing that. If you’d like to pick up a copy of FREAKSHOW (it’s a very good novel), you can buy it directly from the good folks at Stark House Press/Black Gat Books.

Freakshow - Jacquin Sanders

I like carny books, so I was predisposed to enjoy FREAKSHOW, a novel by Jacquin Sanders that was published in hardback in 1954 by Little, Brown, reprinted in paperback by Popular Library in 1956 under the title STRIP THE HEART, and has just been reprinted again by Black Gat Books with an introduction by Jeff Vorzimmer, the edition that I read.

Bat Fidler is a young drifter who can’t seem to fit in anywhere, but when he goes to work as a wrestler for a carnival, it looks like he may have finally found a place where he can feel like he belongs. He begins an on-again, off-again romance with a slutty young dancer, but the one he’s really drawn to is the Fish Girl, a beautiful young woman born with underdeveloped arms who’s married to the carnival’s owner, a man with a similar condition who’s billed as the Fish Boy. Naturally, drama develops, and as it does, Sanders gives the reader plenty of colorful scenes and inside dope featuring the carnival’s eccentric inhabitants.

It becomes obvious pretty quickly that the performers in the freakshow aren’t the only freaks in this novel. In fact, even though Bat isn’t the most likable protagonist, the reader can’t help but root for him because he’s surrounded by an even more unsympathetic cast of characters. The only one in this book who isn’t a pretty sorry specimen of humanity is the Fish Girl.

There’s a murder and a trial, but FREAKSHOW isn’t really a crime novel or a legal thriller, although it does manage to generate quite a bit of suspense in its later stages. It’s more of a mainstream novel with a noirish tone and reminds me a little of Orrie Hitt’s work, full of characters who get a variety of raw deals but still try desperately to grab on to some sliver of happiness. Sanders makes things so rough on his characters that I wasn’t sure he would be able to pull it all together in any sort of satisfying ending, but that’s what he does. With its small town Texas and midwestern settings, it also reminds me of William Inge and Larry McMurtry.

Overall, FREAKSHOW is compelling reading from beginning to end. It’s deliberately paced, but I read it quickly anyway because of the fine writing and the intriguing characters. As usual, the folks at Black Gat Books deserve our thanks for bringing back an excellent novel that deserves to be read. It's available in paperback and e-book editions. Highly recommended.