Review: Some Day I'll Kill You - Dana Chambers

Until recently, I’d never heard of hardboiled mystery author Dana Chambers, whose real name was Albert Fear Leffingwell. Looking at his books, though, they seem to be right in my wheelhouse, and since Stark House Press is making it easy by reprinting them, I recently read the first in the Jim Steele series, SOME DAY I’LL KILL YOU, published originally in hardback by Dial Press in 1939 and reprinted twice in paperback by Popular Library in 1949 and 1953, prior to the recent Stark House double volume that also includes the second novel in the series, TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING, and an informative introduction by Curtis Evans.

With a name like Jim Steele, you’d figure the narrator/protagonist of this book is a private detective, but no, he’s actually a writer of radio thrillers, although he’s one of the toughest, most two-fisted radio scripters you’re liable to run across. Hey, he even fought in the Spanish Civil War as a pilot for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. But as this novel opens, he’s back in the States and concerned with the trouble in which an old flame finds herself. Beautiful Lisa Ridgman, married to psychiatrist Mike Ridgman, is being blackmailed over accusations that she murdered her first husband. She’s gotten three anonymous letters so far, not only demanding money but being threatening, as if her own life is in danger.

Well, Jim knows the girl he’s in love with isn’t a killer, of course, and when she asks him to come along to her husband’s country estate in Connecticut for a weekend get-together with some of their wealthy friends, Jim agrees right away. Of course, he doesn’t know that he’ll barely be on the scene before murder strikes—and it won’t be the only killing before the weekend is over, either.

SOME DAY I’LL KILL YOU is a really offbeat blend of an English country house mystery and a rock’em, sock’em hardboiled crime yarn. Sure, you’ve got brittle banter among rich folks, much discussion of wills and inheritances, and some genteel flirtations. But then you’ve also got gangsters and shootings and slugfests (Jim gets hit on the head and knocked out twice in 24 hours), lots of hard drinking, beautiful babes, and surprisingly risque dialogue for the era. Chambers mixes and stirs all these elements in amusing, fast-paced prose that’s also suitably brutal when it needs to be. Jim Steele may spend his days typing scripts, but you don’t want to make an enemy of him.

I really enjoyed this book. It’s a Front Porch yarn for sure, the kind of book I grew up loving and still do. Highly recommended. You can find ebook and paperback editions of the double volume on Amazon.

Review: The Blonde and Johnny Malloy - William Ard writing as Ben Kerr

A couple of weeks ago, I read and enjoyed William Ard’s SHAKEDOWN, a breezy, fast-moving private eye yarn recently reprinted by Stark House in a double volume with THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY. I’ve read that one now, too, and as a grim, gritty hardboiled crime novel, it’s quite a contrast to SHAKEDOWN. But it’s every bit as good, if not better.

Johnny Malloy is a young convict working on a prison road gang in Florida, serving a ten-year sentence for driving drunk and causing an accident in which two people were killed. He’s five years into that sentence when a couple of unexpected things happen. A beautiful blonde in a red car starts driving by the place where the prisoners are working every day, giving them an eyeful. And then, without any warning, Johnny is paroled, an arrangement set up by his brother-in-law, a gambler and nightclub owner who has considerable political influence.

Johnny is grateful for being released, of course, but he soon discovers that his brother-in-law didn’t act out of the goodness of his heart. Far from it, in fact, since the guy has a plan that involves Johnny winding up dead. Oh, and that beautiful blonde? She works for the brother-in-law, of course, and before you know it, Johnny realizes he might be safer back on the road gang.

Ard makes the wise decision to spin this tough yarn in a relatively compressed time frame of five days, Monday through Friday, and he packs a lot of action and plot twists into those days, too. There’s a heavyweight prize fight with a fortune bet on it, a coalition of gangsters, cops, beautiful women, kidnapping, and a whole pile of trouble for Johnny Malloy. He handles it well. He’s not incredibly tough, or smart, for that matter, but he gets by. He’s a good protagonist, the villains are suitably despicable,  and the blonde is a better developed character than most beautiful babes in books like these.

I really enjoyed THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY. Ard was a fine storyteller, no doubt about that. This one was published originally as a paperback by Popular Library in 1958 and is one of Ard’s later novels. He died much too young in 1960 at the age of 37 and no doubt would have given us many more fine novels if he had lived longer. You can read this one in that top-notch double volume from Stark House, available in paperback and e-book editions. If  you’re a fan of hardboiled novels, I give it a high recommendation.

Review: Longhorn Stampede - Philip Ketchum

A couple of weeks ago, I read the issue of RANCH ROMANCES that contained the first installment of Philip Ketchum’s serialized novel “Longhorn Stampede”. I didn’t read that installment in the pulp because I thought I had the novel version and would probably read it one of these days. Well, it turns out that I didn’t have a copy, but then I discovered that it was published by Popular Library with an A. Leslie Ross cover, and temptation got the better of me. I found an affordable copy, ordered it, and read it as soon as it arrived. That turned out to be a good choice all around!

Llano Smith is a Texas cowboy helping drive a trail herd to the railhead in Kansas. When the owner of the herd falls sick, Llano heads for a nearby town to see if he can find a doctor. This turns out to be a mistake, because the settlement is actually run by an owlhoot who is in league with a rustling kingpin. Llano winds up in all sorts of trouble, including being framed for murder and thrown in jail to await trial and hanging.

Ah, but Llano has a secret, you see. He’s actually a reformed outlaw from Texas named Sam Todd who hit the vengeance trail when a gang of carpetbaggers wiped out his family after the war. He’s settled the score with all of them except one, and he’s lost the thirst for revenge on that one, figuring it’s better to take a new name and start a new life. (None of this is a spoiler. Ketchum lays out all the background pretty early in the book.)

Anybody who’s read many traditional Western novels and/or watched many Western movies will be able to foresee most of what happens in this novel. Coincidence plays a rather large part in Ketchum’s plot, but that doesn’t really bother me. What’s important is that he was a writer with an excellent hardboiled style who really knew how to keep a story moving along. And there are a few minor surprises as everything doesn’t work out exactly like you might expect it to.

Llano Smith is a fine protagonist, plenty tough and not always likable but still sympathetic enough for the reader to root for him. Ketchum does a very good job with the inevitable romantic triangle involving Llano, a rancher’s beautiful daughter, and a beautiful saloonkeeper in the outlaw town. At times these scenes are actually pretty racy for the time period. The action scenes are gritty and effective and build up to a smashing climax.

My copy of LONGHORN STAMPEDE has some damage to the front cover, which is probably why it was fairly affordable, but that’s it in the scan anyway. The cover isn’t really a wraparound illustration, but the back cover has more Ross art, so I’m including it as well. I love those Popular Library editions from the Fifties. Consistently good books with good covers. I’m glad I was prompted to pick this one up and read it.

Review: Shakedown - William Ard writing as Ben Kerr

Johnny Stevens is a private detective working for an agency in New York. His boss sends him to Miami Beach on what seems like a simple assignment: Johnny is supposed to keep tabs on a doctor who may be blackmailing a young wastrel/playboy who happens to be the son-in-law of a canned food tycoon. The client is actually the public relations firm that represents the father-in-law. Johnny doesn’t know what the outcome is supposed to be and doesn’t really care. His assignment is just to keep track of where the doctor goes at night and who he sees. Just a simple shadowing job, right?

Well, you know it’s not going to stay simple, and sure enough, there’s a murder attempt the first night Johnny is on the job. On the second night, the killer succeeds, and even though the murder takes place in front of 300 witnesses, Johnny finds himself on the spot for it and has to figure out who the real killer is in order to clear his name. That’s not the only murder before this case is wrapped up, either. Throw in several beautiful young women for Johnny to juggle, some gangsters, gambling dens, and nightclubs, and you have all the elements for a highly entertaining private eye novel of the sort that I grew up reading.

SHAKEDOWN was published originally in hardcover by Henry Holt in 1952 and reprinted in paperback by Popular Library in 1954. The by-line on the book is Ben Kerr, but the actual author was William Ard, the popular Fifties writer who passed away in 1960 at the much too young age of 37. In addition to the stand-alone mystery and suspense novels and a two-book series featuring PI Barney Glines that he authored as Ben Kerr, he wrote a well-regarded series under his own name featuring PI Timothy Dane and a couple of books starring ex-con Danny Fontaine. He started a series starring private eye Lou Largo but wrote only part of the first book before dying. Lawrence Block completed that book, and John Jakes wrote several more under Ard’s name featuring Lou Largo. Ard’s most successful work during his lifetime may well have been the Western series he wrote in the late Fifties starring adventurer Tom Buchanan, published under the pseudonym Jonas Ward. Ard wrote five of those and started the sixth one, which was completed by Robert Silverberg. Used copies of the Buchanan novels were easily found in used bookstores when I was a kid, and I eagerly bought and read all of them, without having any idea who actually wrote them, of course. Nor did I care, at that point.

The fine folks at Stark House Press are about to reprint SHAKEDOWN and another of Ard’s Ben Kerr novels, THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY, in a double volume with an excellent introduction by Nicholas Litchfield. I’ll be getting to THE BLONDE AND JOHNNY MALLOY soon, but for now I can give this book a high recommendation based on SHAKEDOWN. It’s very fast-paced, written in a breezy, entertaining style, and Johnny Stevens is a likable protagonist, tough but not overly so, smart but not brilliant, quick with a quip and charming with the ladies. I’m a little surprised that this is his only appearance, but hey, Ard was busy with other things. I love this kind of book and always will. I had a really good time reading SHAKEDOWN.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: One By One - Fan Nichols

Here are the opening paragraphs from this book:

He slouched through the squalid gaudy Mexican Quarter. He could feel the bulge of the gun butt against his flat belly, held there, beneath his coat, by his belt.

I’m going to kill her, he thought. I won’t turn yellow this time. This time I’ll do it. I’ll kill her. I mustn’t get caught. I can run fast. I’ve got good legs. I can run like hell.

If you’re like me, there’s no way you’re going to read a classic noir opening like that and not keep reading.

Not surprisingly, after the first chapter ONE BY ONE flashes back to tell the story of how the protagonist, telephone lineman Jerry Ryan, gets in such a bad predicament that he’s considering murder. It was a woman, of course. Jerry is in Los Angeles, separated from his loving wife Verna by work (it’s the fall of 1932 as the book begins, in the middle of the Depression), when he makes the mistake of helping an attractive young woman who’s being thrown out of a dime-a-dance joint. The woman, who calls herself Dolly Dawn because she’s trying to break into the movies, latches onto Jerry with the desperation of a drowning man grabbing a life preserver. She convinces him to give her a lift to Las Vegas, where he’s headed for a new job. Jerry is basically a good, decent guy, but he rationalizes himself into bed with Dolly and that turns out to be a huge mistake. Since he took her across a state line and then had sex with her, she tells him that she’ll turn him in to the cops for violating the Mann Act unless he continues to take care of her and pretends to be her husband.

After the noirish beginning, ONE BY ONE turns into less of a crime novel and more of a lurid, soap-operatic melodrama, as Jerry continues trying to get out of Dolly’s blackmailing clutches only to be thwarted by her again and again. That doesn’t keep it from being compelling reading, though. This novel was originally published in 1951 but reads like it was actually written during the Depression, as Nichols paints a vivid picture of shabby desperation among the cheap hotels, boarding houses, freight yards, and gin mills of small towns in California, Washington, and Oregon. Jerry is one of those likable, not-too-bright schnooks who populate novels like this, and you can’t help but root for him even though you know he’s going to do the wrong thing nine times out of ten. All of it leads up to a somewhat odd ending that I’m not sure if I like or not.

This is the first novel by Fan Nichols that I’ve read. I don’t know anything about her except that she wrote a lot of what would have to be considered hardboiled sleaze, even though she started in the Thirties before that genre really existed. ONE BY ONE was originally published by Arco Publishing, a hardcover house that put out books a lot like the ones that Beacon would be doing as paperback originals a few years later. Nichols continued to write through the early Sixties, including books for Beacon and Monarch. I liked this one enough that I’ll continue to keep an eye out for her books, although I probably won’t go on-line and order a big stack of them like I have with some authors. I certainly plan to read more by her, though, and if you run across a copy of ONE BY ONE for a reasonable price (I paid three bucks for mine at Half Price Books), my recommendation is to grab it.

(Despite the good intentions expressed in this post, it'll come as no surprise that I haven't read any more Fan Nichols novels since this was published on April 9, 2010. But several of them are available as e-books and I picked them up, so maybe I will. Among the e-book editions is a Beacon Books reprint of ONE BY ONE under the title DOLLY. If you'd like to check it out, you can find it here. Also, I've learned more about Nichols, whose real name was Frances Nichols Hanna. She was a concert pianist and model before becoming a writer. If I remember right, Roger Torrey was also a piano player. And of course, one of David Goodis's novels was filmed as SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, although that wasn't the book's original title. I believe that was DOWN THERE. I guess there's just something noirish about playing the piano. All I was ever able to play was "Chopsticks", so I guess I'm safe on that score.)