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.