Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Smashing Detective Stories, June 1953

Another of the Columbia pulps edited by Robert W. Lowndes, and as usual, he's managed to get some good authors to mix in with others you've never heard of, and neither have I. In this issue of SMASHING DETECTIVE STORIES, you've got Carroll John Daly with a Race William yarn, the prolific Western pulpster who also wrote mysteries Donald Bayne Hobart, and Hunt Collins, author of the cover story, who was really Evan Hunter. Maybe not great stuff, but I'll bet it was fun. The cover scan is from the Fictionmags Index.

Forgotten Books: The Pusher - Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) (A Winter Holiday FFB)

I almost reread this one for Ed McBain Week a while back but finally decided to go with a book I'd never read instead. Still, I had very good memories of THE PUSHER from the last time I read it, more than 40 years ago when I was in high school, and I recalled that it takes place around Christmas, so when it came time to do a Forgotten Books post featuring a winter holiday, it jumped to the top of my list.

This was not the first 87^th Precinct novel I read, but it was among the first half-dozen or so. It's also the third novel in the series, so while some of the characters are very familiar—Steve Carella, Bert Kling, Meyer Meyer, Lt. Byrnes, Hal Willis—many of the characters who would become prominent in later entries haven't come along yet. That's all right. I have a real fondness for the early books where the 87^th Precinct "mythology" wasn't quite so sprawling.

This one opens with the discovery of a young man's body in what appears to be a suicide by hanging. The cops discover pretty quickly that he was already dead when the rope was put around his neck. But there's an empty syringe beside him, and when it's confirmed that he died from an overdose of heroin, the focus shifts to either suicide by overdose or an accidental death. Nope. It's murder, and there'll be several more before the detectives from the 87^th figure out what's going on and close in on the killer.

As usual with this series, THE PUSHER is a very readable blend of terse, no-nonsense police procedure reminiscent of DRAGNET with more introspective, even literary passages of characterization and setting. I'm not sure anybody's ever done this better than Evan Hunter. Not many have come close. He does a fine job of capturing the feeling of Christmas time in a big city. The actual plot, the revelation of the killer and the motive, is functional but nothing more, but what sets this novel apart is the way that plot involves two of the main characters on a very personal level. There are probably a few of you who haven't read the book (the ones who have likely know what I'm talking about), so I won't go any deeper into that for fear of spoilers. But there's some gut-wrenching stuff here, and I remember sitting in study hall barely able to breathe as I read the last five or six pages, they were so suspenseful. And that was having already read later books in the series, so I already knew how this one was going to end! Hunter/McBain was just that good.

However, for the record, his agent and editor were right when they talked him into changing the original ending of the manuscript, at least as far as I'm concerned.

I've long said that THE PUSHER is my favorite of the 87^th Precinct series, and after rereading it I think it still is, although all of the first eight or ten books are at a very high level. If you haven't read it, it gets a big recommendation from me. If you have, it's worth rereading, like visiting an old friend. (That's the original Pocket Books edition above, the later Dell edition--the one I read in high school--below.)

Forgotten Books: Goldilocks - Ed McBain

I wanted to read something I hadn't read before for Ed McBain Day, and since I never got around to reading the Matthew Hope series, I figured the first one would be a good place to start. The results were...well, mixed.

Matthew Hope is a lawyer in Florida--not a criminal lawyer, as he's quick to point out in several occasions--but he finds himself mixed up in a murder case anyway when a doctor friend of his walks into his house one night to find his wife and young daughters savagely stabbed to death. This is the doctor's second family--he has an ex-wife and two grown children, plus some other entanglements, as Matt quickly discovers. The grown son from the first marriage confesses to the killings, but something about his story doesn't seem right to Matt, who continues digging.

McBain (who we all know was really Evan Hunter, right?) does a fine job with the Florida setting. Not as good as John D. McDonald, but then who was? The writing is smooth and the pages go by quickly, as I'd expect from McBain. The dialogue is good and there are several of those fast-paced question-and-answer scenes that he employed to such good effect in the 87th Precinct series.

There are a couple of problems in GOLDILOCKS, and they're sort of connected. The mystery is fairly weak, and Matthew Hope isn't a very good detective. In fact, he's not really a very likable protagonist, and most of the other characters are unpleasant, too. There are plenty of people in this novel to feel sorry for but not many to root for. There's also a moment that seems so wrong and unnecessary that I felt the uncommon urge to throw the book against the wall. But I was reading it on my Kindle, so I restrained the impulse.

All that said, there was enough I did like about GOLDILOCKS that I'm tempted to try at least one more book in the series. I don't expect that to happen any time soon, though.

Monday Morning Digest Magazine: Manhunt, January 1953

This is the first issue of the iconic crime fiction magazine, and it's also an issue I used to own. I read it about twenty years ago. And what an issue it is, with part one of a serial by Mickey Spillane and stories by William Irish (Cornell Woolrich), Kenneth Millar (better known as Ross Macdonald), a Shell Scott story by Richard S. Prather, Evan Hunter, and Frank Kane. Oddly enough, considering that all-star line-up, the story I remember liking the best was a novelette by the now largely forgotten Floyd Mahannah. But here's what really interests me about this issue now: there's another story, and it's by none other than Charles Beckman Jr., also known as Charles Boeckman, still alive, still writing, and a pulp legend I'm proud to call my friend, something that never would have entered my mind when I read this issue all those years ago.