Forgotten Books: Tall, Dark and Dead - Kermit Jaediker

Tina Van Lube is being blackmailed by a disreputable ex-lover, so she hires detective Lou Lait to get her incriminating love letters back. All in a day's work for Lait. Except for one small detail--the disreputable ex-lover, columnist Erskine Spalding, is found dead with a knife in his back. Suspects abound: Tina's husband Jan, disfigured war hero; Tina's hot-headed brother, Stanislaus; Coates, the recently-fired butler; plain-but-dedicated secretary, Prescott; the gun-running Colonel; the social-climbing Durkins...even Lolita, the dancer. They all had their reasons for quieting the nasty gossip columnist. Lait's making it his job to find out who did the deed.

This novel was published originally in hardback in 1947, then reprinted in paperback in 1951 by Lion Books. It's included in the latest Trio of Lions volume from Stark House, coming out later this month. It's a really entertaining private eye novel that's considerably different from Kermit Jaediker's other novel HERO'S LUST, also reprinted by Stark House. The style in this one is more breezy and lighthearted, with a wise-cracking protagonist and a cast of eccentric characters. And yet there are also some pretty violent scenes and one particularly harrowing one where the private eye has to escape when some of the villains have captured him and intend to torture him. All in all, this hits the marks very nicely and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Both of Jaediker's novels are excellent, and it's a shame he didn't write more.

Forgotten Books: Hero's Lust - Kermit Jaediker

This summer Stark House is going to be reprinting three noir novels originally published in the early Fifties by Lion Books. HERO’S LUST is the first book in that volume, and it’s well worth being in print again after more than sixty years.

The protagonist is reporter Red Norton, who works the City Hall beat for the Courier in Crescent City. As Gary Lovisi points out in his introduction, the book’s title is something of a misnomer, because Red’s really a far cry from a hero. He’s actually on the Mayor’s payroll and is as crooked as the Mayor and everybody else in the city administration. Red knows this, but he goes along with what’s expected of him anyway. Because of that, he agrees to write a series of stories for the newspaper about a patient in the city’s new hospital, which is the Mayor’s pet project. The patient they pick to feature in the stories is Ann Porter, a young woman who has tuberculosis. What nobody is planning on is that Red will fall in love with her, and that leads to dangerous complications for everyone involved.

HERO’S LUST is actually a pretty simple book at its heart, which is the struggle between Red’s greed and the few decent impulses he has left, which grow stronger as his relationship with Ann develops. What really carries it along is the powerful writing of its author, Kermit Jaediker, who wrote only one other novel. Jaediker was a newspaperman himself, and you can really tell it in this book. The feeling of authenticity is undeniable, as is the passion for reform that runs through the book. It’s a little hard to believe that Jaediker didn’t write more fiction, because he was very good at it. I can give this one a high recommendation, and I think most of you will understand why when I say HERO’S LUST is really a punch in the gut! I’m looking forward to reading the other two novels in the Stark House volume.