Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Double-Action Gang Magazine, April 1938

Here's a non-Western pulp cover by A. Leslie Ross. I think he was more at home on the range, so to speak, but his non-Western covers are okay. DOUBLE-ACTION GANG MAGAZINE was part of what eventually became the Columbia pulps, so there are at least two house-names here, Mat Rand and "Undercover" Dix. Pierson Bryan, who wrote the cover story, has only this single credit in the Fictionmags Index, so I'm suspicious that might have been a pseudonym, too. Also on hand are Margie Harris, a top gang pulp author, the prolific Thomas Thursday, Robert Martin, who would go on to be a well-respected author of hardboiled private eye novels, and Bertrand L. Shurtleff. I'm still not very well-read in the gang pulps, but this looks like an okay issue.

Dark Dream - Robert Martin

When I was binging on private eye fiction in the late Seventies, one of the authors I discovered thanks to the great fanzine THE NOT SO PRIVATE EYE was Robert Martin with his series featuring Jim Bennett, an operative for the National Detective Agency who worked out of Cleveland. I read several of the later books in the series and recall enjoying them very much. Now Stark House Press is bringing back the Jim Bennett series and has just reprinted the first two novels, DARK DREAM and SLEEP, MY LOVE. Today I’m going to take a look at DARK DREAM, the novel-length debut of Jim Bennett, although he had appeared in pulp stories before this book was first published in hardcover by Dodd, Mead in 1951 and reprinted in paperback by Pocket Books in 1952.

Bennett is sent to the northern Ohio town of Wheatville to take on a case for a local lawyer who has hired the agency. It seems that somebody has been taking potshots at the lawyer as he plays on the local golf course. Bennett hasn’t been in town long, though, before he picks up another client: the owner of a beauty salon whose business is being sabotaged. Could it be that these apparently unrelated cases will wind up being connected?

That seems to be a foregone conclusion, especially if you know that DARK DREAM is based on two pulp novellas, “Death Under Par” (DIME DETECTIVE, May 1947) and “Death Gives a Permanent Wave” (DIME DETECTIVE, October 1947. I’ll give Martin full credit, though: the combining of these two stories may not be seamless, but it’s pretty darned good. If I hadn’t known about the pulp origins already, I might not have suspected it. Multiple murders crop up, a proverbial whirlwind of action takes place over the course of the few days Bennett spends in Wheatville, he kisses a number of beautiful women (some of whom are suspects), and gets hit over the head, knocked out, poisoned, and suffers a minor bullet wound. The guy stays busy!

In addition to the mystery angle, parts of this book read almost like a mainstream novel about small-town Americana, and northern Ohio towns in the early Fifties must have been a lot like Texas towns in the early Sixties because I felt some powerful nostalgia reading this book. The businesses and the people sound very similar to what I grew up with.

I, of course, had a wonderful time reading this book. It’s pure hardboiled private eye, one of my favorite subgenres in all of fiction. I’m glad Stark House is reprinting this series. It’s a really good one and well worth being back in print. It’s available on Amazon in a nice trade paperbackdouble volume.

The pulp stories featuring Jim Bennett are also being reprinted, by the way, by Steeger Books, and I intend to check those out, as well.

BONUS RAMBLING: To clarify what I said in the first paragraph of this post, I don’t mean to make it sound as if I discovered private eye fiction in the late Seventies. The first private eye novel I ever read was either THIS IS IT, MICHAEL SHAYNE or SHILLS CAN’T CASH CHIPS, one of the Donald Lam/Bertha Cool books, both of which I checked out from the bookmobile around 1964. Yeah, sixty years ago. Where does the time go? By the late Seventies, I had read all of Dashiell Hammett available at the time, all of Raymond Chandler, most of the Mike Shayne, Shell Scott, and Ed Noon novels, and assorted other private eye books. I’ve talked before about how I started reading THE NOT SO PRIVATE EYE and how it introduced me to a number of PI writers I hadn’t been aware of, as well as allowing me to make the acquaintance of Bill Crider, Joe Lansdale, and Tom Johnson. Glory days, as they say.

Forgotten Books: Little Sister - Lee Roberts (Robert Martin)

I remember reading some of Robert Martin’s novels featuring private detective Jim Bennett many years ago and liking them quite a bit, but I hadn’t read anything by him for a long time. If I was aware that Martin also wrote mysteries under the name Lee Roberts, I had forgotten it until recently when I received a review copy of his novel LITTLE SISTER, soon to be reprinted by Black Gat Books.

According to the fine introduction by Bill Pronzini, LITTLE SISTER is an expansion of the novelette “Pardon My Poison”, which appeared under Martin’s real name in the April 1948 issue of the pulp DIME DETECTIVE. The protagonist in that version is private detective Lee Fiske, but for the novel version, published by Gold Medal in 1952 under the Lee Roberts by-line, Fiske’s name changes to Andy Brice, but he’s still a private eye. And in classic private eye fashion, he’s hired by a rich, beautiful blonde to handle a mess involving her beautiful, wayward, 17-year-old little sister, who’s gotten herself into more trouble than anyone knows when the book opens. Brice quickly figures that out, though, when the girl shows up drunk—or was she drugged?—with the corpse of a murdered young man in the trunk of her car.

That grisly discovery kicks off a fast-paced couple of days in which two more murders take place, Brice is almost bumped off himself (more than once), and, again in classic private eye fashion, every gorgeous babe in sight throws herself at him. Money and passion both turn out to be motivating factors in this complicated affair, but Brice navigates through all of it in a rather low-key manner, wisecracking a little but not going overboard with it, cooperating with the cops (most of the time), and finally untangling everything to uncover a killer.

LITTLE SISTER is a really well-written book with a lot of nice lines, and Brice is a very likable protagonist/narrator. Reading this novel took me back to the days of high school and college when I was eagerly devouring every private eye yarn I could find, many of them read in my favorite spot on my parents’ front porch. I think I may have to hunt up some more of Martin’s novels. This one is right on the border between medium- and hardboiled and is well worth reading. If you’re a fan of private detective novels, you really should check it out. (Great cover on the reprint edition by Rudy Nappi, too, although it originally appeared on a different book, REEFER GIRL by Jane Manning—which also sounds pretty darned good!)