Review: Hunter at Large - Thomas B. Dewey

I’ve been reading Thomas B. Dewey’s books off and on for close to 60 years since discovering his series about the private eye known only as Mac while I was in high school. He’s never failed to entertain me. He’s one of those writers who never achieved huge success but published steadily for 25 years and was always well-regarded by readers and critics. Black Gat Books has just reprinted one of his stand-alones, HUNTER AT LARGE, published originally in hardcover by Simon & Shuster in 1961 and reprinted in paperback by Pocket Books in 1963—an edition I owned for many years but never got around to reading.

The protagonist of this one is Mickey Phillips, a police detective in an unnamed Midwestern city, who is home one night with his wife Kathy when two men show up at the house, take Mickey by surprise, make him a prisoner, and torture and kill his wife in front of him. They leave thinking that they’ve killed Mickey, too, but he survives, which is a bad mistake for them to make.

After months of recuperation, Mickey is well enough to set out on the trail of the killers. He has to resign from the police force to do it, but he doesn’t care. He just wants revenge for Kathy’s murder. The trail leads him across the country with stops in Kansas City, Denver, and a small town in Nevada. Mickey puts his training to good use in conducting a dogged, methodical investigation which ultimately leads him to his goal with a few surprises along the way.

This is a fine suspense novel written in Dewey’s usual smooth prose with well-developed characters, especially Mickey Phillips. He never comes across as hysterical or overwrought, just very, very determined. The mystery angle is well-constructed. It’s a very bleak, humorless book, but given the plot, I don’t see how it could have been anything else. If you’ve never read Dewey’s work before, HUNTER AT LARGE isn’t really representative of his private eye novels featuring Mac or his other series protagonist Pete Schofield, but it’s well worth reading and it gets a solid recommendation from me. It’s available in paperback and e-book editions.

Draw the Curtain Close - Thomas B. Dewey

Thomas B. Dewey’s series about a hardboiled Chicago private detective known as Mac was fairly popular back in the Sixties. The hardbacks showed up often on library shelves, and paperback reprints were common on the spinner racks in the drugstores and grocery stores. I read quite a few of them and enjoyed them all, but more than fifty years later it’s hard to remember which ones I’ve read and which I haven’t. Not that it really matters, because I’ve decided to read and/or reread the series in order, rather than haphazardly like I did back then.

The first Mac novel is DRAW THE CURTAIN CLOSE, published originally in hardback by Jefferson House in 1947 and reprinted in various paperback editions. Like the rest of the series, it’s now available as an e-book on Amazon from Wildside Press, which is the edition I read. I’m reasonably sure I’d never read this one before.

It opens with Mac being summoned to the mansion of a powerful gangster modeled somewhat after Al Capone. He wants to hire Mac to protect his estranged wife from some unspecified danger. At least, that’s what he tells Mac, but when he turns down the job, it quickly becomes obvious that something else is going on. He meets the gangster’s beautiful nightclub singer mistress, some hoods pay him a visit, and the first of several murders takes place. Whether he wants to be or not, Mac is involved with this case, so for the next twenty-four hours, he spends a lot of time driving around Chicago, getting grabbed and beaten up by various tough guys, helping out and possibly falling for the gangster’s wife, and trying to figure out what a valuable Gutenberg bible has to do with all these seedy but dangerous characters.

The MacGuffin, when it’s finally revealed, comes sort of out of left field. Not quite to the warning track, but almost. But I’m not sure that matters, since the reader has had a good time getting there. Mac’s first-person narration is really good, reminiscent of Hammett’s Continental Op stories with a little bit of Frederick Nebel thrown in. There’s plenty of good action. As I recall, as the series goes on it gets less hardboiled, more Ross Macdonald than Hammett or Nebel, but that’s certainly okay, too.

If you’ve never read any of this series, I marked a passage I like that will give you a good example of Dewey’s style and the character:

“Call me Mac,” I said. “I’m just a guy. I go around and get in jams and then try to figure a way out of them. I work hard. I don’t make very much money and most people insult me one way or another. I’m thirty-eight years old, a fairly good shot with small arms, slow-thinking but thorough and very dirty in a clinch.”

That’s good stuff, the kind of thing that kept me reading fifty years ago and still does. If you’re a fan of hardboiled detective novels and haven’t made Mac’s acquaintance, you really need to, and DRAW THE CURTAIN CLOSE is a fine place to start.

As for me, I’m looking forward to the next one in the series, EVERY BET’S A SURE THING, since I know I have read that one and there’s even a story that goes with it . . . but we’ll get to that. 

Forgotten Books: The Golden Hooligan - Thomas B. Dewey

(This post appeared in somewhat different form on March 2, 2006.)

Thomas B. Dewey was one of my favorites when I first started reading PI fiction back in the Sixties, but I doubt if very many people today are familiar with his work.

Dewey was best known for a long series of novels about a private eye called Mac. The reader never learned the character's full name. But he also wrote another series about PI Pete Schofield, who was different from most fictional private eyes in the fact that he was married, to a gorgeous redhead named Jeannie who usually managed to get involved in helping Schofield solve his cases. (Shades of Mike Shayne and Phyllis! Those are wonderful books. But that's a different post . . .)

The fact that Schofield was married doesn't seem to have had much effect on how many beautiful women throw themselves at him in each book. It still happens with considerable regularity. He just turns them down and remains faithful to Jeannie, even when he winds up in bed with some nude lovely, as he does in this book. The plot involves a dead bullfighter and a drug-smuggling ring operating across the California/Mexico border, not that it matters a whole lot. The fun in this book -- and it's a lot of fun -- comes from Dewey's breezy style and the headlong pace of the story.

To a lot of modern readers of PI fiction, a book like this (from 1961) must seem almost as much of a relic as an Old Sleuth dime novel. THE GOLDEN HOOLIGAN certainly has its faults: the plot is maybe a little too simple, Schofield probably gets hit on the head and knocked out one too many times, and the frequency with which the female characters get naked seems pretty contrived at times. But I don't care. I grew up on this stuff, and I still love it.

One last note on Dewey: I've been told that he spent the last years of his life in Mason, Texas, and continued to write books even though the market had changed and he could no longer sell them. Maybe they just weren't any good. But the thought of unpublished Dewey novels that are probably lost forever . . . well, it makes me shake my head in regret, that's for sure. But at least there are several of his published novels that I haven't gotten around to reading yet.