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: Night Never Ends - Frederick Lorenz (Lorenz Heller)

Lorenz Heller’s NIGHT NEVER ENDS uses the classic noir novel set-up: down on his luck photographer Luke Fogarty takes a job at a struggling photography studio run by George and Belle Buckner. George and Belle are not happily married. George drinks too much, is a terrible photographer, and is gradually running the business into the ground. Belle is his beautiful, long-suffering wife, and when Luke goes to work for them, sparks fly immediately between the two of them. Most of the time, you’d think you knew where this story was going, and most of the time you’d be right.

But not in this case. NIGHT NEVER ENDS, which was published originally as a paperback original by Lion Books in 1954 under the pseudonym Frederick Lorenz, takes a different tack. There are some lurid secrets in the background of these characters, and Heller reveals them pretty early on, which ratchets up the tension between them. Although several crimes take place in this book, it’s not really a crime novel. It’s more of a mainstream domestic drama, but it’s so well-written it kept me up later than usual, flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen.

Stark House has just reprinted this one as half of a double volume with Heller’s THREE MUST DIE!, which I read and reviewed a couple of weeks ago. I think I liked NIGHT NEVER ENDS even more. Heller’s characters are always well-developed and interesting, and he had a great touch with memorable lines that do a fine job of capturing the setting and the era. This latest double volume from Stark House gets a high recommendation from me. You can find it on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions.

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 Tigress (Payoff for Paula) - Jeff Bogar (Ronald Wills Thomas)

Jeff Bogar was the pseudonym British author Ronald Wills Thomas used for a couple of dozen mysteries and thrillers between 1950 and 1955, most of them published in England by Hamilton & Company. Several of them made their way to the United States for American editions, including two published by Lion Books. Thomas’s novel PAYOFF FOR PAULA was published in paperback by Lion in 1951 under the title THE TIGRESS, and I recently read my copy of that edition. That’s it in the scan. I don’t know who did the art.

The narrator/protagonist of THE TIGRESS is Hollywood talent agent Greg Farley, who represents a number of up-and-coming young starlets. Greg is a real rarity in the movie business, a nice guy who doesn’t try to take advantage of his young female clients. But one of them suddenly turns on him unexpectedly, attacking him verbally in a nightclub where they run into each other, and when she turns up dead later that same night, stabbed to death, Greg is the only real suspect. Which means, of course, that he has to dodge the cops and uncover the real killer in order to clear his name.

This murder launches several days of whirlwind action that involves mobsters, gamblers, nightclub owners, a fortune in missing gems, and several beautiful women, including the stunning redhead Paula of the original British title. Greg, a former vaudevillian, uses the skills he learned on that circuit and his Hollywood connections to navigate this dangerous investigation, which finds him getting hit on the head and knocked out more than once in classic hardboiled fashion. Eventually, he untangles everything and solves the starlet’s murder, along with another killing later on.

This is the sort of yarn I’ve read hundreds, if not thousands, of times, but I always enjoy it if it’s well-written, and THE TIGRESS mostly is. The plot gets a little muddled now and then, and there are occasional reminders that the author is British and not American. But Thomas does a good job overall. The plot, the beautiful babes, the fast-paced banter, and the breezy style all remind me very much of the Carter Brown books. Not done as well as Alan G. Yates did, mind you, but still, that’s the sort of book this is, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I have the other Jeff Bogar novel published by Lion Books and probably will get around to reading it in the relatively near future.

Whip Hand -- Rod Patterson

I read a Western pulp story not long ago by Rod Patterson and enjoyed it enough that I wanted to read more by him. His first novel is WHIP HAND, published by Lion Books in 1954 and expanded from the novella of the same title published by RANCH ROMANCES in the Second October Number, 1953. I don’t know who did the cover on the first paperback edition, but the novel was reprinted in 1957 with a cover by Mort Kunstler, and that’s the edition I read, pictured at the top of this post.

This is a save-the-ranch yarn, as Cole Brazee, forced to flee from Wyoming with a murder charge hanging over his head (the killing was actually self-defense, of course), comes home to seek justice and vengeance when his father is gunned down. This puts him in the crosshairs of his old enemy, cattle baron Doane Williams, who marries Cole’s old sweetheart just as Cole gets back in town. Many ambushes, shootouts, and brutal fistfights ensue as Cole tries to get to the bottom of the troubles in the area. Oh, and there’s a romantic triangle, too.

Patterson springs an effective plot twist late in the book, but for the most part WHIP HAND makes use of a very traditional plot, the sort of thing you’ve read many times before if you’re a long-time Western fan like me. Plenty of other writers, such as L.P. Holmes and William Heuman, do the same thing. Unfortunately, Patterson wasn’t as good a writer as Holmes and Heuman were, so this novel sort of just plods along despite the occasional nice line or bit of business, so it never really engaged my interest.

Patterson wrote a handful of other novels, all of them published as halves of Ace Double Westerns, and I own several of them. I might give one of them a try someday, or I might not. Your mileage certainly might vary, but I wasn’t very impressed by WHIP HAND. That’s a really nice cover by Mort Kunstler on the second edition, though.

Sin Pit - Paul S. Meskil

Over the years, I’ve read quite a bit about Paul S. Meskil’s only novel, SIN PIT, all of it favorable, so now that it’s being reprinted by Stark House in another triple volume of novels originally published by the legendary Lion Books, it seemed like a good time for me to finally get around to reading it. And I’m glad I did, because it really is a mostly lost gem.

The narrator is Barney Black, a detective sergeant on the East St. Louis, Illinois police force. Barney is a distinctive character, to say the least. He’s a little corrupt. He’s coarse and brutal and doesn’t mind in the least beating up a suspect while questioning him. He slaps around dames when they give him trouble. He doesn’t believe in love, and lust is just a basic animal need to be satisfied when necessary.

But for all his unlikable qualities, dump a murder in his lap and Barney Black will do anything, go to any lengths, to solve it and bring the killer to justice. In SIN PIT, he’s driven to uncover the truth about the killing of a beautiful young blonde who’s dumped in a junkyard after being whipped cruelly and shot in the head. This sets him on a quest through a series of squalid gambling dens, taverns, and whorehouses, all of them depicted with garish vividness by Meskil, whose main career was that of a journalist specializing in crime reporting.

Along the way, Barney meets a beautiful brunette (the way Meskil describes her kept making me think of Bettie Page) who makes him reconsider his belief that love isn’t real. But is she trustworthy? As always in this kind of book, you have to ask yourself that question if you’re the narrator, especially after a couple more murders take place. Will Barney sort everything out in time to deliver justice to a killer?

Meskil’s writing is top-notch in this novel, delivering the sleaziness of his characters and settings in fine fashion. SIN PIT’s strongest quality for me is its pace. The tension just never lets up. Barney has to sleep sometime, but even when he does, his slumber is haunted by violent dreams and as soon as he’s awake he plunges right back into the investigation at breakneck speed. I read this novel in one sitting, which is unheard of for me these days. Granted, it’s fairly short, but if it was much longer, the reader would be exhausted from trying to keep up with Barney. I had a great time reading it and give SIN PIT a high recommendation. It’s available in LION TRIO 3: FEMMES FATALE from Stark House, which you can pre-order now.

Coming Soon From Stark House: A Trio of Lions

(This trio of novels originally published by the legendary Lion Books will be out this summer, and it looks great. You can pre-order it from Amazon or directly from Stark House.)

HERO'S LUST Everyone in Crescent City knows that Mayor Gowan controls the town, most of all Red Norton. Red's an ace reporter, sure, but he's living in the mayor's side pocket. What the Mayor wants, he gets. And right now he wants Red to write up his new Medical Center. The Mayor needs a pitch, and finds it in tubercular Ann Porter, who is scheduled for an upcoming operation. Her story sells a lot of papers, and puts a face to the Mayor's pet project. Red didn't figure on falling in love with the kid, but now he's involved. And with the Mayor making some new demands, Red is about to find out just how rotten the town really is the hard way. 

THE MAN I KILLED When Lew Ross was young, he got into a fight and killed a man, then fled the scene. Haunted by this event throughout his life, he finds himself back in that same town again, at the same club where it all happened. Except that now the place is a nightclub. And this is where he meets Kitty, one of the hostesses, and her slick boss, Marty Evans, who has a proposition for Ross pick up a delivery from a local rival, and join his crew. Evans even loans him a gun for protection. Trouble is, the pick up is a set up, and Ross is the fall guy. Now he's in a squeeze play between a scheming D.A., an honest cop, and Evans' thugs. And then there's Kitty... 

HOUSE OF EVIL Nina Valjean needs a fix or she wouldn't have agreed to see Smith again. Smith is one of the sick ones, but sometimes a girl can't afford to be picky. Still, she's got a bad feeling about this time. The next day, Roman Laird lets himself into his out-of-town fiancée's apartment, and finds Valjean's nude, strangled body. Things haven't been good between he and Joyce for a while, but finding a body in her place is just crazy. Trying to protect her, Laird tracks the dead woman to a seedy bar called The Red Parrot, which is how he meets an exotic dancer named Cecille Merrill. But all this time, Smith is out there, watching him, ready to kill again.