Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Detective, October 1943

I feel like I should know who painted the dramatic cover on this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE, but I don't. As always, artist IDs are more than welcome and will be greatly appreciated. It's a striking scene, whoever painted it, with that life or death struggle going on in the foreground. The lead novel in this issue is by my old editor, friend, and mentor, Sam Merwin Jr. Also on hand are prolific pulpsters Laurence Donovan and Joe Archibald, house name John S. Endicott (in this case, Donovan would be my guess, but who knows?), a couple of authors I've never heard of, Nita Nolan and H. Wolff Salz, and finally one of the more intriguing names on the Table of Contents, Len Zinberg, who had already begun using the pseudonym under which he would write some very well-regarded crime and mystery novels in the Fifties and Sixties, Ed Lacy. I hadn't realized he was selling to the pulps as early as this.

Forgotten Books: Lead With Your Left - Ed Lacy (Leonard Zinberg)

Ed Lacy, whose real name was Leonard Zinberg, was one of the top hardboiled writers of the Fifties and Sixties. His novel LEAD WITH YOUR LEFT was published first in hardback in 1957 by Harper and reprinted in paperback by Pocket Books. It’s being reprinted, along with another Lacy novel called THE BEST THAT EVER DID IT, in a new double volume from the always excellent Stark House.

The protagonist/narrator of LEAD WITH YOUR LEFT is Dave Wintino, former boxer and army vet and, as the book opens, the youngest detective in the NYPD. He looks even younger than he really is, which leads people to underestimate him, but despite his relative lack of experience, Dave is a dogged investigator. He has problems at home, though, with an ambitious wife who doesn’t like him being a cop and wants him to take a job with her uncle, who runs a freight business.

Dave is part of the team investigating the murder of a retired cop who worked as a messenger for a brokerage house. The case goes nowhere, and Dave gets somewhat distracted working on a complaint from an attractive young female writer who’s being harassed. Then the former partner of the retired cop who was killed winds up being murdered, too, and Dave is sure that the case is even bigger than it appears to be. So sure that he starts working on it despite being ordered to drop it, risking his career, his marriage, and ultimately his life.

Lacy really keeps things zipping along in this one, which, with its Italian protagonist (Italian/Jewish, actually) and abundance of police procedure, reminded me at times of Steve Carella and the 87^th Precinct. Dave Wintino has more domestic drama to deal with, though, than usually crops up in the 87^th Precinct novels. Lacy does a good job of tying all the strands of the plot together and the solution to the murders is a satisfying one.

LEAD WITH YOUR LEFT is a very good hardboiled novel from an era that specialized in them. I enjoyed it a great deal and if you’re a fan of the genre, this new Stark House edition is well worth picking up.

Forgotten Books: The Men From the Boys - Ed Lacy (Leonard Zinberg)

Over the years I’ve found Ed Lacy (real name Leonard Zinberg) to be a pretty dependable hardboiled/noir author. Some of his books I like less than others because he lets too much of his politics seep into them, but most of them are good, tough, fast-paced yarns about characters who aren’t necessarily sympathetic, but by golly, the reader winds up rooting for them anyway.

That’s certainly the case in THE MEN FROM THE BOYS, a novel published in hardcover by Dutton in 1956, reprinted by Pocket Books in 1957, and soon to be available again from Stark House in their fine Black Gat Books line. The narrator/protagonist is Marty Bond, a disgraced former cop who’s been reduced to working as the house detective in a sleazy hot-sheet hotel in New York City. He’s battling health problems, too, and discovers that he may have cancer. You’d think we would feel a little sorry for a sad sack like that, but Lacy makes it difficult to like Marty: he’s a drunk, a racist, was corrupt when he was a cop and is still on the shady side, and he treats everybody like crap.

But then his stepson, who’s an auxiliary cop and wants to work his way up to being the real thing, comes to see Marty and tells him about a big case he’s stumbled on. Marty thinks the kid is nuts for wanting to poke his nose into something that’s none of his business and tells him so. But then the kid gets beaten up and nearly killed, and Marty is mad enough about that he decides to look into the case himself, maybe get vengeance for what happened to his stepson and crack one last big case before the cancer in his gut kills him.

As you probably can tell, this novel borders on nasty at times (but in a good way), and unlikable though he is, you really want Marty Bond to get to the bottom of things and deliver justice to the bad guys. Now, if you’ve read more than a dozen mystery novels in your life, you’ll see all the big twists in the plot coming from far, far away, but that doesn’t really matter all that much. Lacy kept me flipping the pages through the sheer raw power of the prose and the great character of Marty Bond. I thoroughly enjoyed THE MEN FROM THE BOYS. Lacy takes us on a walk down some ugly streets and does a fine job of it.

Forgotten Books: Sin in Their Blood - Ed Lacy (Leonard Zinberg)

(Sorry about another rerun. I'll have some new posts eventually. This one originally appeared in slightly different form on April 2, 2007. Another difference since then is that an e-book reprint of this novel is now available.)

This early (1952) novel by Ed Lacy was published by Eton Books, an imprint of Avon.
It starts out as pretty standard stuff. Tough private eye Matt Ranzino returns to his home town (an unnamed city on the west coast) after serving in the army during the Korean War. He discovers that his former partner, who was sort of a shady character to start with, has turned downright crooked and is involved in an elaborate blackmail scheme. The ex-partner has also taken up with Matt’s ex-girlfriend. Matt is unsure whether or not he wants to be a PI again, but before you know it, he’s mixed up in a complicated murder-suicide case. But then Lacy takes what could have been a generic Fifties private eye novel and turns most of the conventions of such tales upside-down. Matt Ranzino turns out not to be the usual tough guy PI after all. I can’t say much more than that without ruining the book, but those of you who have read some of Lacy’s other novels or even read much about him can probably guess some of what I’m talking about.

I have to give Lacy, whose real name was Leonard Zinberg, credit for trying to do something different, but as far as I’m concerned SIN IN THEIR BLOOD is a book that’s more interesting than good. Everything is so heavy-handed that it just didn’t work that well for me, a problem I've run into in other novels by Lacy. However, the prose is very slick and fast-paced, and the ending is so over-the-top that it almost saves the whole book. I enjoyed this novel despite its flaws.

Forgotten Books: Blonde Bait - Ed Lacy (Leonard Zinberg)

Ed Lacy's 1959 Zenith Books novel BLONDE BAIT has a great opening: our narrator, charter boat skipper Mickey Whalen, finds a beautiful blonde on a deserted island in the Florida Keys, alone except for a gun and a suitcase full of cash. If you can resist the temptation to find out what happens from there, you're made of stronger stuff than I am.

For a while it looks like Mickey has had a real stroke of luck, but if you've read many of these novels you know it's not going to last. Sure enough, trouble from the past crops up to plague our hero and the beautiful and mysterious Rose, and Mickey has to turn detective to sort everything out and try to come up with a happy ending for the two of them.

Wherever you think this book is going, though, there's a really good chance that where it winds up is a whole other place. And that's why, even though I'm doing this as a Forgotten Books post, I can give BLONDE BAIT only a qualified recommendation. The whole explanation for what's behind the plot just doesn't ring true to me, and Lacy's thinly-disguised political rants don't help matters. A good ending might excuse all of this, but we don't get that, either.

What makes BLONDE BAIT worth reading is the first half, where Lacy fills in the narrator's back-story with a freewheeling mix of flashbacks that work very well and are a nice change of pace from the usual straight-ahead narrative drive of hardboiled crime novels. Mickey Whalen is a likable protagonist, too, and you can't help but root for him. Like some of Orrie Hitt's protagonists, even when he thinks he's being a heel, he's a pretty decent guy at heart and wants to do the right thing if he can just figure out what it is. And even though the book falls apart in the second half, you still have to sort of admire Lacy for the chances he takes, whether they work or not.

So there's my mixed opinion of BLONDE BAIT. Don't rush out to look for a copy, but if you come across one for a reasonable price, it's probably worth picking up. If nothing else, it's a Zenith Book, and you don't see very many of those these days.