Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Detective, November 1937

I don't know who did the cover on this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE, but it's intriguing. And they definitely want you to that there's a Charlie Chan story in this issue, since it's mentioned twice. However (and that's a big however), it's not a lost tale by Chan creator Earl Derr Biggers, who died four years earlier in 1933. No, this story featuring Charlie Chan was written by journeyman pulpster Edward Churchill. Now, I usually enjoy Churchill's work and this may well be a good story, but I have to wonder if publisher Ned Pines cut a deal with Biggers' estate to publish a new Chan story, or if he just did it anyway. We'll probably never know. At any rate, it's the only non-Biggers entry in the series until the 1970s, when several different authors wrote Chan stories for CHARLIE CHAN MYSTERY MAGAZINE. Which, come to think of it, was owned and published by Leo Margulies, who worked as editorial director for Ned Pines. Hmmm. Anyway, elsewhere in this issue are stories by T.T. Flynn, one of my favorite Western writers who also did mysteries and detective yarns, Robert Sidney Bowen, and Ray Cummings. That's a talented bunch.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy Detective Stories, November 1936

I don’t own this pulp, but I recently read a PDF of it downloaded from the Internet Archive. The cover is by Delos Palmer.

Evidently Alan Anderson was a real guy. There’s no indication in the Fictionmags Index that it’s a house-name. He’s the author of the first story in this issue, “The Woman in Yellow”, which is about an American spy trying to retrieve an envelope full of vital military plans from a beautiful brunette while they travel on the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. Our protagonist has a partner in this assignment, a beautiful blonde who’s a nightclub dancer in addition to being a spy. Naturally, seeing as this is a Spicy Pulp, both gals manage to lose some of their clothes during the course of the story. The plot is pretty interesting, with a semi-clever twist at the end, but the writing isn’t very good. It’s choppy and hard to follow in places. Not a bad effort, but not a particularly good one, either.

“Killer’s Price” is the first of three stories in this issue by my old buddy Edwin Truett Long. I refer to him as my buddy because I’m starting to feel a real kinship with the guy despite the fact that he died eight years before I was born. But he lived in the North Texas area for a good part of his life, including some time in Fort Worth. He wrote fast, in a variety of genres, and I can see myself having the same sort of career if I’d been born earlier. “Killer’s Price” is bylined Mort Lansing, one of Long’s regular pseudonyms, and it’s part of his series about private detective Mike Cockrell. As the story opens, Mike is on vacation in a coastal city pretty clearly modeled after Corpus Christi when he gets involved in the kidnapping of a millionaire’s daughter. There are a couple of other beautiful blondes mixed up in the deal, along with a villainous bartender and a gang boss. Mike is kept hopping as he tries to straighten out this mess. The story is plotted pretty loosely, but the action races along at breakneck speed and the banter is good. This one is a considerable step up from Anderson’s story.

Next up is a story by that stalwart of the Spicy Pulps, Robert Leslie Bellem, and it features his iconic private detective character Dan Turner. In “Murder for Metrovox”, a beautiful movie star takes a high dive from a high rise and winds up not so beautiful. Was her death suicide—or murder? At the same time, Dan is already mixed up in the case of a missing starlet, and there’s a beautiful stag movie actress involved as well. Naturally, Dan sorts everything out, but not before coming up with good excuses for the still-living babes to take their clothes off, and he manages to guzzle down a bottle of Vat 69 while he’s at it, too. Dan was one of the original multi-taskers. As usual with Bellem’s work, this is a well-plotted, if slightly predictable, yarn. The wackiness seems toned down a little, but it’s great fun to read anyway. I’ve never read a bad Dan Turner story.

“Traitor’s Gold” is by Hamlin Daly, which was a pseudonym for E. Hoffmann Price. Price wrote a lot for the Spicy Pulps under his own name, but Hamlin Daly shows up quite a bit, too. “Traitor’s Gold” is a nighttime romp through a spooky old mansion in the Hudson Valley that’s supposed to be haunted by the ghost of the murdered millionaire who owned it. He had a beautiful daughter, too, and our detective protagonist is in love with her and determined to trap the ghost who’s causing trouble. This isn’t top of the line work from Price, but it moves right along and has a decent plot. I liked it without being overly impressed by it.

The next story in this issue is another of Edwin Truett Long’s contributions, this time writing under the name Cary Moran. “Murder in Music” features sheriff’s department investigator Jarnegan, who only investigates murders. I read this one several years ago in a Black Dog Books chapbook that reprinted several of the Jarnegan stories, and here’s what I said about it then: “Murder in Music” finds Jarnegan investigating the death of a drummer from a jazz band visiting the city. It appears that the man was frightened to death by voodoo. But all is not as it appears, of course, and another band member soon turns up dead, giving Jarnegan two murders to solve.

Harley Tate and Diana Ware are partners in a private detective agency, and in “The Taveta Necklace”, they’re hired to keep a fabulously valuable necklace from being stolen during a high society party. Naturally, trouble ensues, including several murders, in this fast-paced, entertaining yarn that’s credited to George Sanders. In fact, it’s the only piece of fiction credited to Sanders in the Fictionmags Index, and there was one other Harley Tate/Diana Ware yarn published under the name Alan Anderson, so I think it’s pretty safe to say that this George Sanders was a pseudonym. Did Alan Anderson write this one, too? Now that I don’t know. I liked it considerably better and thought it was better written than Anderson’s “The Woman in Yellow”, elsewhere in this issue. This will probably have to go down as another unsolved mystery of the Spicy Pulps, though.

“Death on the Half Shell” is the third Edwin Truett Long story in this issue. It’s part of the Johnny Harding series, which, haphazardly enough, was published under three different pseudonyms during its run: Cary Moran, Mort Lansing, and Carl Moore, the byline on this particular story. Johnny Harding is a feisty little gossip columnist who frequently stumbles over dead bodies. He’s the protagonist of Long’s novel KILLER’S CARESS, which was published under the Cary Moran name. In this story, he's digging for information about a lottery that appears to be a swindle, when a beautiful informant winds up dead after consuming a poisoned lobster. More murders take place as the story gallops through a night of action. I enjoyed KILLER’S CARESS, and I like this story a lot, too. They could have made a good B-movie series about Johnny Harding starring, say, Jimmy Cagney, although Cagney was too big a star by then. But he’d fit the character perfectly.

Robert A. Garron was really Howard Wandrei, so it’s not surprising that his story “The 15th Pocket” is one of the best-written stories in this issue. A police detective investigates the murder of a wealthy lingerie manufacturer whose body is found in the back seat of an empty cab stalled in traffic. The Spicy Pulps are probably the only place you’d find a character who’s a lingerie tycoon! This isn’t a particularly complicated yarn, but the plot holds together all right and it moves right along with smooth prose. Wandrei’s stories are always good.

With stories by Bellem, Price, Long, and Wandrei, you’d expect this issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES to be a good one, and so it is. I really enjoyed it. Sure, the stories are a little formulaic, but so is most fiction, not just pulp. Space them out a little and they read just fine. If you’ve never read a Spicy Pulp, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Ringmaster of Doom - Brant House (G.T. Fleming-Roberts) (Secret Agent X, November 1935)

When you saw the title RINGMASTER OF DOOM and the by-line Brant House, you probably thought, “Hey, a Secret Agent X novel about the circus!” I know that’s the first thing that went through my mind. Well, as it turns out, this is a Secret Agent X novel, all right, from the November 1935 issue of the pulp magazine of the same name, but there’s no sign of a circus. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good pulp yarn.

This one finds New York City being terrorized by a series of robberies and kidnappings being carried out by brutal, misshapen fiends who look like Neanderthal men. (And speaking of Neanderthals terrorizing modern-day America, I believe there’s a Spider novel by Norvell Page that features the same sort of menace.) Naturally, Secret Agent X has to investigate, and he starts at a fabulous society party being hosted by one of the rich men targeted for kidnapping. While he’s there he has his first violent encounter with one of the beast-men and also runs into a beautiful, redheaded, evil female spy he first crossed swords with during the Great War. From there it’s one breathless adventure after another as the Agent battles the schemes of the mysterious mastermind who calls himself Thoth, after the Egyptian god of the dead, and even wears an ibis-headed mask to make himself look like Thoth.

You know by now whether or not you love this stuff or think it’s just about the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard of. And you know which camp I fall into. You’ve got your Neanderthals serving as henchmen for a criminal genius. You’ve got said criminal genius lashing his prisoners with an electric whip. You’ve got Secret Agent X escaping death-trap after death-trap by the skin of his teeth. And finally you’ve got a battle royal in a network of abandoned sewers along the East River that’s being flooded. There’s not much time to take a breath in this one, and that’s good, of course, because it is wildly, unabashedly, and wonderfully goofy.

But no circus. That setting was a staple of pulp yarns. I don’t know if any of the Secret Agent X novels takes place in a circus, but it would have been a good setting for the Agent to have an adventure. As it is, RINGMASTER OF DOOM is a lot of fun.

(This post originally appeared on August 6, 2010. Since then, this novel has been reprinted in Volume 5 of SECRET AGENT "X": THE COMPLETE SERIES, published by Altus Press. It's still available in a handsome trade paperback edition from Amazon.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, January 1945

I don't know who did the cover on this issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE, but how can you go wrong with a good-looking, redheaded female cabbie with a skeleton in the back seat? The best-known authors in this issue (which I don't own) are Edward S. Aarons writing under his pseudonym Edward Ronns, C.S. Montanye, and Allan K. Echols, best remembered for his Westerns. Also on hand are Benton Braden (twice, once under his own name and once as Walter Wilson) and Armstrong Livingston, plus house-name John L. Benton.

Review: Crime Nest - Edwin Truett Long (Detective Dime Novels, April 1940)

I’d read a number of pulp stories over the years by Edwin Truett Long, writing under various pseudonyms and house-names, and I always enjoyed them. But I’ve become more interested in him and his work since discovering that he lived for a while on the west side of Fort Worth and is buried on the east side. One of these days, I’m going to drive over to the cemetery and find his grave. But for now, I’m trying to read more of his stories. This time, it’s “Crime Nest”, from the April 1940 issue of DETECTIVE DIME NOVELS, which was published under the transparent pseudonym Edwin Truett. This is the first of three novels featuring Dr. Thaddeus C. Harker, one of the more offbeat characters from the pulp era.

Doc Harker, as he’s often known, is a traveling medicine show huckster, tooling around the country in a bright red coupe and pulling an equally red trailer in which he concocts his cure-all, the world-famous Chickasha Remedy. However, that’s just a cover for his true activities. Doc Harker is actually a brilliant scientific criminologist, and his passion is solving murders and other crimes with the help of two assistants, former wrestler Hercules Jones, who handles the strongarm stuff, and the beautiful Brenda Sloan, whose specialty is infiltrating gangs and gathering intelligence. In “Crime Nest”, our intrepid trio of detectives heads for Abbottsville, a resort town in Texas (although Long never specifies the state) famous for its hot springs. Abbottsville is loosely based on the real town of Mineral Wells.

They’re there in answer to a plea for help from one of Doc’s old friends, who sends Doc a letter explaining that a cabal of criminals from New York and New Jersey have moved in and taken over the town. Doc intends to break their hold on the place and bring them to justice, but the situation gets more complicated when there’s a grisly murder the first night after they arrive.

From there it’s mostly breakneck action with a little detective work thrown in as Long packs in a lot of plot in the span of not much more than 24 hours. More murders, a missing fortune, beautiful women, shootouts, clouts over the head, and lights that go out just as Doc is about to spring a major revelation—we get all that good stuff and more. Long wasn’t a meticulous plotter, but he usually wrestles all those colorful characters and fast-paced action into scenarios that make sense, mostly.

I really enjoyed this yarn and had a grand time reading it. It’s the kind of stuff I grew up on and I still get a kick out of it. One interesting note: the character who sends for Doc Harker is named Arthur Wallace, which just happens to be the name of a pulpster who contributed scores of stories to the Spicy pulps, as did Long. There’s been some mystery as to whether Wallace was a real name or a house-name. Based on Long using the name in this novel, I suspect he was a real guy and that he and Long were friends. That’s only a hunch, though. Maybe somebody will uncover the facts someday.

My friend Tom Johnson was a fan of the Doc Harker series and reprinted all three novels as small-press chapbooks many years ago. I owned all of them but never got around to reading any of them. More recently, Altus Press has reprinted the series in a handsome volume called DR. THADDEUS C. HARKER: THE COMPLETE TALES, with an introduction by none other than Tom Johnson, who provides more biographical information about Long than I’ve found anywhere else. This is where I read “Crime Nest”. The collection is available in paperback and e-book editions, and if you enjoy offbeat pulp detective yarns, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, February 17, 1934

This is the first appearance of the Park Avenue Hunt Club on the cover of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, with only the second story in the long-running series. And to be honest, in this cover by Lejaren Hiller, an artist I hadn't heard of, the guys look more like villains than the heroes they actually were. Judson Philips, the author of that series and many others, and Edward Parrish Ware are the only authors I recognize in this issue. The others who contributed stories are Herbert O. Yardley, Augustus Muir, and Milo Ray Phelps. The Park Avenue Hunt Club stories have been reprinted in a couple of expensive hardcovers that are no longer available. I'm hoping we'll get some affordable trade paperback and/or e-book editions at some point. The ones I've read are really good.

Review: The Murder on the Links - Agatha Christie

I mentioned a while back that Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books are, for me, a surefire cure for an impending reading funk. Well, so are Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, and feeling dissatisfaction with a couple of books I attempted to read, I turned instead to THE MURDER ON THE LINKS, originally published in 1923 as the second book in the Poirot series. It's been reprinted many times, and there are several different e-book and print editions available on Amazon since it's now in public domain.

In this one, Poirot and his friend Captain Hastings are summoned to France by an urgent message from a wealthy English businessman who has a villa near Calais. It seems that the man made his fortune in South America, and now some mysterious threat from his past has cropped up. He mentions Santiago, Chile, but doesn’t go into any details, just asks Poirot to come to France and help him, promising to pay any fee Poirot requests. Poirot and Hastings answer this plea for help, but they’re too late. When they arrive, they find that the man has been murdered, stabbed in the back and left next to an open grave on a golf course that’s under construction next door—hence the title.

Well, not surprisingly, not everything is as it seems. Even though his would-be client is dead, Poirot investigates and along the way clashes with an arrogant French detective. Several beautiful women have to be questioned, including the dead man’s wife, his possible mistress, the possible mistress’s daughter, and a lovely but mysterious theatrical performer Hastings encounters several times. A number of pieces of possible evidence have to be examined, among them a broken watch. We get a disappearing murder weapon that reappears lodged in the chest of a second victim. We get discussions of train schedules. (Cozy mysteries love them some train schedules.) We get our intrepid pair of detectives shuttling back and forth from England to France as the trail leads hither and yon. And then we get the solution to the mystery . . . no, wait, that’s not it, this is the solution . . . no, wait, that’s not right, either. This is the real solution . . . I think.

Some of this might get a little bit tiresome if not for the fact that Christie was such a good writer. The pace crackles right along even when people are just standing around talking. Poirot is a fascinating character, as always, and the dialogue is excellent. Hastings is dense but likable in his role as Watson. I sometimes think Poirot is a little too mean to him, but there’s not much of that in this book.

In the end, I really enjoyed THE MURDER ON THE LINKS. I don’t know how it’s regarded by Christie fans. I wouldn’t put it in the top rank of Poirot novels because the plot seems a little more far-fetched and melodramatic than usual, not surprising since it’s only the second book in the series and Christie was probably still figuring out what she was doing. But it’s still a solid yarn and very entertaining. I even figured out a pretty good chunk of the plot as I went along, although I didn’t have the murderer’s identity pinned down. I’ll probably read another one before too much longer.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ten Detective Aces, May 1941

Of course it's a clown causing trouble on the cover of this issue of TEN DETECTIVE ACES. You can't trust those guys! Or maybe he's actually the hero, although I wouldn't bet on that. But you can bet that any cover by Norman Saunders will be dramatic and/or action-packed, and this one certainly is. You've got knives, bullets, and blackjacks! (Hmm, "Knives, Bullets, and Blackjacks!" That wouldn't be a bad title.) Anyway, I don't own this issue, but I'm sure that inside its pages, a reader could find plenty of action. Authors include Emile C. Tepperman (twice, with a Marty Quade story under his own name and a story as by Anthony Clemens), Harold Q. Masur (also twice, once as himself and once as Hal Quincy), G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Cyril Plunkett, Joe Archibald, and several authors unfamiliar to me, James A. Kirch, Arthur T. Harris, Clark Frost, and H.F. Sorensen. I really should have read more from TEN DETECTIVE ACES over the years. It looks like a really good detective pulp.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Twice Murdered - Laurence Donovan

TWICE MURDERED is another in the outstanding series of pulp reprint collections coming out from Black Dog Books. Laurence Donovan is probably best known for the house-name novels he wrote starring Doc Savage, The Phantom Detective, The Skipper, and The Whisperer, but he also had a long and prolific career producing detective and Western yarns for a variety of pulps. This volume collects a dozen stories published in the Thirties and Forties in the pulps PRIVATE DETECTIVE, SPICY DETECTIVE, HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE, BLACK BOOK DETECTIVE, and SUPER DETECTIVE, under Donovan’s name and his pseudonym Larry Dunn.

Donovan had three main strengths as a writer: he was able to come up with complex plots, he used interesting settings, and he wrote fast-moving, effective action scenes. Most of the protagonists in these stories are private eyes, and like Roger Torrey’s private eye characters, they share a lot of similarities despite having different names. I think Donovan’s shamuses come across a little more as individuals, though.

All of the stories included here are good solid pulp tales, consistently entertaining. Some of them are stand-outs, though. “Death Dances on Dimes” is set in a dime-a-dance joint, and it’s unusual in that it has a female narrator. There’s something else about her that’s unusual for the pulps, too, but you’ll have to read the story to find out what it is. “The Man Who Came to Die” is about an insurance racket and manages to be pretty creepy while at the same time packing enough plot and action for a full-length novel into a novelette. “The Greyhound Murders” is another complicated murder mystery with an interesting setting (a dog racing track) and a high body count. “Footprint of Destiny” is about the movie business and features the sort of plot that Dan Turner is usually untangling. I guess Dan was out of town that week.

In addition to the stories, editor/publisher Tom Roberts provides a fine introduction that includes more biographical information about Donovan than I’ve seen anywhere else, as well as an extensive bibliography of Donovan’s work. TWICE MURDERED is an excellent addition to the Black Dog Books line, and if you’re a pulp fan, I highly recommend it.

(This post originally appeared on June 14, 2010. And even though more than 15 years have passed since then, TWICE MURDERED is still available in both e-book and paperback editions, and my high recommendation of it stands.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Famous Detective Stories, June 1954

The cover on this issue of FAMOUS DETECTIVE STORIES is by Norman Saunders, and he's by far the best known name involved with this issue. The lead novella is by Wilbur S. Peacock, a fairly prolific pulp author and editor, but the other stories are by writers I'm not familiar with: Norman Ober, Marc Millen, Gene Rodgers, and Wallace McKinley. None of these are known to be pseudonyms or house-names, but they don't ring any bells for me, either. The cover is okay, but I'm not sure if I would have gambled a quarter on this one if I'd seen it on the stands back in 1954. (I was alive when this issue was on the stands, but since I was only a year old, I doubt if I'd have been reading it anyway.)

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Kingdom of Blue Corpses - Brant House (?)

“Kingdom of Blue Corpses”, from the December 1935 issue of the pulp SECRET AGENT X, is one of the more oddball entries in the series. It’s very comic-booky (if that’s a word), with a master villain who calls himself the Blue Streak and wears a blue rubber suit, somewhat like a frogman’s outfit, emblazoned with a lightning bolt. His minions – every self-respecting master villain has to have minions, of course – wear black rubber suits that look even more like frogmen and drive around in a sinister black hearse. The Blue Streak’s weapon in his campaign of terror is an electrical cannon that fires lightning bolts, and as a side effect, the corpses of the people struck by it turn bright blue. No explanation is forthcoming for this side effect, but that’s all right. This yarn isn’t very rigorously plotted, even by pulp standards.

Which doesn’t mean it’s not a lot of fun, as Secret Agent X tries to bring the Blue Streak to justice in a series of extremely fast-moving, action-packed confrontations. As usual, “X” employs several different disguises, and his girlfriend/assistant, beautiful blond reporter Betty Dale, even gets in on the act this time, as “X” disguises her so she can take the place of a young woman he suspects of being involved with the Blue Streak.

The actual identity of the author behind the “Brant House” house-name on this one hasn’t been established, as far as I know. The first part of the story reads like it could be by Paul Chadwick, the creator of the Secret Agent X character and the principal author in the series in its early years. The style changes somewhat during the course of the story, becoming more terse and action-oriented, which has led some readers to speculate that maybe Chadwick started the novel and from some unknown reason, another author finished it. This seems possible to me as well, but at this point, we just don’t know. Whoever wrote “Kingdom of Blue Corpses” did a good job of keeping things moving, even if they don’t always make complete sense.

(Since this post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on May 28, 2010, "Kingdom of Blue Corpses" has been reprinted twice, once by Adventure House and once by Altus Press. The Altus Press edition includes several other Secret Agent X novels. In the comments on the original post, there was some discussion about who actually wrote this one. Some pulp scholars lean toward G.T. Fleming-Roberts, while others think it might be the work of Paul Chadwick. Based on my reading of the story at the time, I even suggested that Chadwick may have started it and Fleming-Roberts completed it. I honestly don't know the answer, but you pays your money and you takes your choice!)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Detective Magazine, July 1937

There's a lot going on in this great cover by Malvin Singer, all of it dramatic. And as usual with DIME DETECTIVE MAGAZINE, there are some great authors inside: Norbert Davis, Leslie T. White, John K. Butler, O.B. Myers, William E. Barrett, Maxwell Hawkins, and B.B. Fowler. The last couple of those I'm not familiar with, but I'm sure that if they were in DIME DETECTIVE, they had to be pretty good. I don't own this issue and it doesn't appear to be on-line anywhere, but there are a lot of issues on the Internet Archive and I need to get around to reading some of them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 10-Story Detective Magazine, March 1942

Nobody could pack more into a pulp cover than Norman Saunders, as this issue of 10-STORY DETECTIVE MAGAZINE illustrates. Another Norman, Norman A. Daniels, has two stories in this issue, one under his own name and one as David A. Norman. Bruno Fischer is on hand under his Russell Gray pseudonym. Harold Q. Masur, later very successful as a mystery novelist, has a story in this issue, as does an author I'm not familiar with, Richard L. Hobart. The other stories all have house-names on them: Guy Fleming, Leon Dupont, Clint Douglas, Ralph Powers, and Harris Clivesey. It wouldn't surprise me if some of those guys were actually Norman A. Daniels, too.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Mum's the Word for Murder - Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser)

Davis Dresser wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire as a writer when this book was published under the pseudonym Asa Baker in 1938. He was making a living writing romances and Westerns for lending library publishers, but it was a precarious one. Better things were on the horizon for him, though. The next year, 1939, Henry Holt would publish Dresser’s novel DIVIDEND ON DEATH under the pseudonym Brett Halliday, which introduced redheaded Miami private detective Michael Shayne, a character who would make Dresser a rich man (and put a few shekels in the pockets of numerous other authors, as well, present company included).

But what about MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER? It’s an important book because it’s a dry run for the introduction of Michael Shayne a year later. The detective, Jerry Burke, is a big, tough, smart Irishman like Shayne, and although he’s a cop in this book, he has a background as a private detective and shares the same sort of checkered history that Dresser was to give Shayne. The novel is narrated by Asa Baker (which was also the original byline), a struggling author of Western novels obviously patterned after Dresser himself. A number of years later, Dresser wrote himself (as Halliday) into one of the Shayne novels, SHE WOKE TO DARKNESS, in much the same way. The book is set in El Paso, Dresser’s hometown and the scene of one of the best Shayne novels, MURDER IS MY BUSINESS. Burke even has a nemesis, the local chief of detectives Jelcoe, who serves the same function as Miami Beach Chief of Detective Peter Painter in the Shayne novels.

As MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER opens, Asa Baker is struggling to find inspiration for a new novel, and he finds it in the person of his old friend Jerry Burke, who has been hired by the city as a special detective to clean up crime and corruption in El Paso. Burke tells Baker about a strange advertisement that appeared in that afternoon’s paper, warning that a murder will take place at exactly 11:41 that night and challenging Burke to do something about it. The ad is signed “Mum”.

Sure enough, a wealthy businessman is murdered at exactly 11:41, and Burke invites Baker along to observe the investigation and gather material for a novel based on the case. This is just the beginning of a clever cat-and-mouse game between Burke and the mysterious serial killer who calls himself Mum. There are several more murders, and each time it appears that the case is just about solved, Dresser throws in yet another twist. Burke has the same talent that Shayne possesses: he’s always one step ahead of everybody else in the book – and two steps ahead of the reader, finally coming up with an ingenious solution that predates another author’s more famous usage of the same gimmick.

The early Shayne novels are entertaining blends of hardboiled action, screwball comedy, and fair-play detection, many of them with plots that rival Erle Stanley Gardner for complexity. Dresser doesn’t quite have the mix down yet in this book – there’s not much comedy, for instance, and Dresser doesn’t strictly play fair, withholding a fairly important clue from the reader until late in the book – but MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER is still one of the most enjoyable novels I’ve read in a while. Dresser’s style is very smooth and keeps the pages turning easily. I had a hard time putting this one down.

By the Fifties, the Shayne novels were doing so well in paperback for Dell that Dresser pulled out this old novel, along with one he wrote under the pseudonym Hal Debrett, BEFORE I WAKE, and Dell reissued them under the Brett Halliday byline. MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER proved popular enough that it was reissued again in the Sixties, this time with a McGinnis cover that’s not a particularly good one, in my opinion. Unless that’s not actually McGinnis’s work. I don’t have that edition, so maybe somebody who does can check and correct me if I’m wrong.

There’s one more Jerry Burke novel under the Asa Baker name, THE KISSED CORPSE, which came out in 1939, the same year as DIVIDEND ON DEATH. After that, Dresser was either too busy to return to that Shayne-prototype (he was writing Westerns as Peter Field and Don Davis, in addition to carrying on the Shayne series), or maybe he just thought that Jerry Burke had served his purpose. Based on my reading of this book, I plan on trying to get hold of a copy of THE KISSED CORPSE. MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER is long out of print, of course, like most of Dresser’s work, but copies are fairly easy to come by on-line. I liked this one a lot and give it a high recommendation.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 2, 2010. In the comments on the original post, someone asked about the "ingenious solution" in this novel and the other author who used it later. I have absolutely no idea about any of that anymore. But another commenter confirmed that the second cover is indeed by Robert McGinnis. I have a copy of the other Jerry Burke novel, THE KISSED CORPSE. A friend sent it to me not long after this post first appeared. I'm ashamed to say that I still haven't read it. But I know where it is. Maybe time to get it out and finally read it. Also since 2010, MUM'S THE WORD FOR MURDER has been reprinted as a very inexpensive e-book, which you can get here if you want to check it out.)

Review: A Gambling Man - David Baldacci

Let me start with the obligatory complaint about the length of this book: David Baldacci’s A GAMBLING MAN, like most mysteries and thrillers from the tradional publishers these days, is just too blasted long. I’ll have more to say about that later on.

For now, let’s establish that this is the second novel featuring Aloysius Archer, World War II vet, ex-con (he was sent to prison for a crime he only kinda, sorta committed, and then only for good reasons), currently on his way to Bay Town, California, to become an apprentice private detective. I read the first book, ONE GOOD DEED, last year, and although it was, yes, too long, I found enough in it to like that I wanted to give this second novel in the series a try.

As I said, Archer is on his way to California, but he stops first in Reno, Nevada, where, through some perilous circumstances, he acquires a fancy foreign car and a friend in beautiful singer/dancer/would-be movie starlet Liberty Callahan. Except for these two bits of set-up, the first fourth of the book is filler. Entertaining, well-written filler, mind you, but still . . .

Liberty accompanies Archer to California, where he goes to work for a private detective named Willie Dash, an old friend of the cop Archer helped out in the previous book. They’re hired to find out who’s blackmailing a candidate for mayor of Bay Town. The politician is rich and has a beautiful wife, whose father is the local tycoon and far richer than anybody else in the area. The guy has fingers in all sorts of pies, too, including some that may or may not be quite on the up and up.

Well, of course, somebody involved in the investigation gets murdered, although it takes Baldacci almost to the halfway point of the book to get there. Archer gets beaten up by thugs. Somebody else gets murdered. Archer meets a few beautiful dames. Turns out there were more murders nobody even knew about until Archer and Willie Dash start uncovering connections. The plot gets pretty complicated but makes sense in the end, which is relatively satisfying. There’s enough story here for a nice, tight, 160-page paperback.

A GAMBLING MAN, in its original edition, is a 438-page hardback.

But don’t take that to mean I’m giving it a bad review. There’s actually quite a bit I liked about it. The book is set in 1949, and by and large, it reads like it. There’s only one bothersome anachronism I spotted: a woman is referred to by the title Ms. Technically, the word came into existence in the early 20^th Century, but I don’t believe it was in common usage until the Seventies. Seeing somebody use it in a book set in 1949 was jarring, at least to me. But the rest of the dialogue and the attitudes of the characters ring true to me. So I guess one misstep in 438 pages isn’t too bad. (Yeah, I’m harping on the number of pages.)

The main plot is solid, too. Nothing we haven’t seen before, but well put together. I don’t know how well-read Baldacci is when it comes to classic private eye fiction, but I got the feeling that CHINATOWN must be one of his favorite movies. Nothing wrong with that. It’s one of my favorite movies, too. And I think I picked up some Raymond Chandler influence, even though the book is written in third person. Archer’s banter is reminiscent of Philip Marlowe’s, and I have to wonder if Bay Town is a nod to Chandler’s Bay City.

As for the characters, Archer is a tough, smart, likable protagonist, while still being fallible and human. I think I liked him even more in this book than I did in the previous one. Willie Dash and Liberty Callahan are both excellent supporting characters. The villains are suitably despicable.

Now, to get back to the length of this book (you knew I would), the way Baldacci turns what could have been a reasonably short paperback into a fat hardback, other than the filler in the first part of the book, is by describing everything. Archer can’t enter a room without Baldacci giving us a rundown on everything that’s in it. Everybody he meets gets a thorough description. You might think this would bother me, but even I was surprised by the fact that it didn’t, much. I think that’s because even though he describes lots of things, he doesn’t dwell on any one of them for too long. He gives the reader a few details and moves on. In a way, this book reminds me of the work of Leslie Scott: it’s vividly descriptive, but yet it moves at a fairly brisk pace. (Baldacci isn’t as brisk as Scott, but then, who is?)

Also, reading this book made me realize something: I’d rather read stuff like this than a lot of modern thrillers whose authors like to talk about how they never describe anything, never use an adverb, and never, ever use a speech tag other than “said”. That’s fine if that’s how you like to write, and a lot of successful writers do, but all too often, to me that approach produces prose that’s flat and bland and boring. I was never bored reading A GAMBLING MAN, even though it took me longer than most books do.

So overall, I liked this book, and I enjoyed it enough I plan to read the third and apparently final book in the series. Not right away, but I expect I’ll get to it fairly soon. I might even move on from there and try some of Baldacci’s other books. The guy can tell a story, even if it is in sort of a long-winded way sometimes. In the meantime, this one is available in the usual e-book, hardback, paperback, and audio editions.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Bodyguard - Roger Torrey

Roger Torrey was one of the leading authors of hardboiled detective fiction for the pulps during the Thirties and Forties, starting out in BLACK MASK and writing for a number of other pulps as well, including SPICY DETECTIVE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE, and Street & Smith’s DETECTIVE STORY. 

Torrey’s work has two major strengths. One is the easygoing, conversational style in which the stories are told. According to Black Dog Books’ editor and publisher, Tom Roberts, reading a story by Roger Torrey is like sitting in a bar somewhere and listening to a guy spin an exciting yarn about something that happened to him. The fact that the guy is usually a private eye, and the story concerns some bizarre case mixed up with murder and beautiful babes, is a real plus.

The colorful characterization of the narrators in most of Torrey’s stories is their other strong point. Despite the fact that they all have different names, those narrators are basically the same person: a private detective, often an ex-cop and a lone operative, smart but not infallible, tough but no superman, basically a decent sort but not above a little chicanery and lechery. He’ll get beaten up when the odds are against him, he’ll be fooled by an attractive woman from time to time, and he’ll muddle his way through cases with dogged determination as much as anything else. But in the end, he comes up with the killer every time, of course.

Torrey’s background included stints as a piano player in nightclubs and an organist in movie theaters, and his stories often have some sort of show business background. He was a heavy drinker, and so are many of his characters. Despite their sometimes oddball plot elements, the stories have an air of authenticity about them, including a fatalism that foreshadows Torrey’s early death. (He wasn’t even 40 yet when he passed away, probably from alcoholism.)

BODYGUARD reprints eleven stories, several of them long novellas. While not all of them are what you’d call rigorously plotted, they’re all very entertaining and enjoyable. The book also includes an informative introduction by long-time author and editor Ron Goulart, as well as the first-ever bibliography of Torrey’s work. I had a great time reading BODYGUARD, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled pulp fiction, I highly recommend it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 17, 2010. BODYGUARD is still available in e-book and trade paperback editions, and my recommendation of it stands. It's well worth reading.) 

Review: Switcheroo - Emmett McDowell

I’d read and enjoyed quite a few of Emmett McDowell’s pulp stories. He was a prolific contributor to the Western, science fiction, and detective pulps during the Forties and Fifties. He also wrote several novels, most of them hardboiled mysteries, and I’d never read any of them until SWITCHEROO, his first novel published in 1954 by Ace Books as half of an Ace Double (D-51) with OVER THE EDGE by Lawrence Treat. The cover on McDowell’s half is by Victor Olson. The novel is an expansion of a pulp novella called “The Tattooed Nude” published in the Winter 1954 issue of the pulp TRIPLE DETECTIVE. He must have revised the story quite a bit, because while there are several nudes in the novel, none of them are tattooed. Black Gat Books has just published a very nice reprint of this novel.

The protagonist of SWITCHEROO is Jaimie MacRae, a burly former athlete who works as an operative for a large private detective agency with an office in Louisville, Kentucky, an unusual but effective setting for a private eye novel. MacRae gets the assignment to track down the missing widow of a gambling kingpin who was murdered recently. She disappeared after her husband’s death, and the lawyer representing one of the other heirs hires the agency to find her so that an inheritance matter can be cleared up.

Or at least, that’s the story, but you know as well as I do that nothing is ever what it appears to be at first in books like this. MacRae takes the job, and just like that, we’re galloping off on a twisted trail involving gamblers, the Syndicate, a riverfront resort and casino, corrupt politicians, blackmail, and several beautiful babes who wind up in various states of undress.

As I’ve said many times before, this is the sort of book I grew up reading, so I’ve read hundreds of similar novels. And I don’t care. As long as they’re well-written, I love them, and SWITCHEROO is very well-written. It’s in third person, which gives it a nice hardboiled tone. Some of it is really funny, and some of it is really bleak and brutal. MacRae takes a lot of punishment but can still come up with a quip when he needs to. He’s as likable a private eye protagonist as I’ve encountered in a while. The plot is very convoluted but in the end makes just enough sense to work.

The reviews of this novel I found on-line seem to be mostly negative, but I had a wonderful time reading SWITCHEROO. I own all of McDowell’s other mystery novels and now have no excuse not to read them. The Black Gat Books reprint is available on Amazon in a handsome paperback edition, and if you’re a fan of traditional private eye yarns, I give it a strong recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Strange Detective Mysteries, January 1941

I've never read an issue of STRANGE DETECTIVE MYSTERIES and don't own any, but I should probably try to remedy that because it looks like my kind of pulp! The covers make it look like a cross between a regular detective pulp and a Weird Menace pulp. I don't know who did the art on this one, but it's certainly eye-catching. And the authors inside are equally intriguing: Norvell Page, Henry Kuttner, Russell Gray (who was really Bruno Fischer), Stewart Sterling, and R.S. Lerch. That's a fine group.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Variety Detective Magazine, August 1938

VARIETY DETECTIVE MAGAZINE was a short-lived detective pulp from Ace that changed its name to LONE WOLF DETECTIVE MAGAZINE and ran for several more years. This is the first issue under the VARIETY DETECTIVE name and sports a Norman Saunders cover, always a good selling point. Inside were assorted house-name reprints from TEN DETECTIVE ACES, DETECTIVE-DRAGNET MAGAZINE, and SECRET AGENT X, along with stories by Lester Dent and Paul Chadwick, certainly the only authors in this issue you've ever heard of, at least that we know about. There's no telling who was hiding behind those house-names. This is probably more of an interesting oddity than anything else, but Dent and Chadwick are always worth reading. In fact, if you want to check it out, the entire issue can be found here.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Super-Detective, January 1943

I don’t own this issue, or, for that matter, any issues of SUPER-DETECTIVE. They’re not that easy to find, and they’re usually pretty expensive when you do come across one. But when Radio Archives recently published an e-book edition of this issue, I picked it up because I wanted to read the Jim Anthony novel in it. The by-line on that novel is John Grange, but that was a house-name, and in this case, I knew that two excellent authors collaborated on the story: Robert Leslie Bellem and W.T. Ballard.

For those of you unfamiliar with Jim Anthony, here’s a little background. His father was an Irish adventurer, his mother a Comanche princess. He’s a millionaire industrialist with business interests all over the world, an amateur criminologist, a brilliant scientist, and a world-class athlete. He’s Doc Savage, Bruce Wayne, and Jim Thorpe rolled into one. Veteran pulpster Victor Rousseau wrote the first dozen Jim Anthony novels in SUPER-DETECTIVE, Edwin Truett Long did the next three, and then friends and sometime writing partners Bellem and Ballard wrote ten more novels to finish off the series. “Murder Between Shifts” in this issue is the fourth entry by Bellem and Ballard. In Rousseau’s stories, he portrayed Jim Anthony as more of a globe-trotting adventurer, the Doc Savage part of the character. I’d read that Bellem and Ballard’s novels had more of a mystery angle, concentrating on Jim Anthony’s efforts as a criminologist. I was eager to read one and find out.

“Murder Between Shifts” finds Jim visiting Los Angeles with his pilot and sidekick Tom Gentry. Jim owns an aircraft plant there that’s doing vital work for the war effort, but there are rumors of trouble he’s checking out, and sure enough, when he tracks down the plant manager to a nightclub that caters to the swing shift workers, the man is murdered right in front of Jim’s eyes by one of the other plant executives. The thing is, the guy who pulled the trigger claims he’s innocent! Jim investigates, of course, which leads to attempts on his own life along with sensuous encounters with several beautiful babes. (SUPER-DETECTIVE was published by the same company that put out the Spicy pulps, so it’s a little more risque than some, although mild by our current standards.) Even though Jim is still the same tycoon/scientist/criminologist he is in the earlier novels by Victor Rousseau, “Murder Between Shifts” does read much more like a typical hardboiled detective yarn than Rousseau’s novels do. It’s well-written, clever enough, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It also features a cameo appearance by police lieutenant Dave Donaldson, from Bellem’s Dan Turner series, which put a grin on my face.

William B. Rainey, author of the short story “Don’t Get Killed Tonight”, was really Wyatt Blassingame, best remembered probably for his Weird Menace stories although he was a prolific pulpster who wrote a little bit of everything and wrote it well. “Don’t Get Killed Tonight” is part of his series about private detective Eddie Harveth, who works as a troubleshooter for nightclub and restaurant owners in New Orleans. It’s a good story in which Eddie gets framed for the murder of a beautiful dancer and has to go on the run from the cops as he tracks down the real killer. There’s nothing unusual or special about this story, but it’s competently written and moves right along. A tad on the forgettable side, though.

Randolph Barr was a house-name, and the real author of “The Shape of Death” is unknown, which is a shame because it really is a top-notch story featuring some fine hardboiled writing. A beautiful blonde living in a Florida trailer camp finds a dead man on her doorstep. Unfortunately, he’d made a pass at her a short time earlier in a nearby tavern, and she was heard to threaten him. The cops believe he followed her back to her trailer and she killed him, possibly in self-defense. The only one who believes she’s innocent is a young reporter who falls for her. The plot of this one is pretty traditional and even predictable, but it races along with plenty of good dialogue and excellent descriptions. I liked it a lot and wish I knew who wrote it.

The other stories in this issue are all unacknowledged reprints, a practice for which the publisher was notorious, beginning with “Carte Blanche for Murder” by Travis Lee Stokes, which was published originally as “Blonde Madness” in the September 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES under the name Arthur Humbolt, which was also a pseudonym. The real author was Robert C. Blackmon, who wrote a bunch of detective yarns for various pulps, under numerous different names. It opens with its newspaper reporter protagonist discovering the murdered body of a beautiful blonde with her arms chopped off. Naturally, this ties in with the case of another blonde who was killed and had her legs chopped off. And our hero’s girlfriend is a beautiful blonde and has a connection with one of the suspects! As you can tell, this story is lurid and over the top and you know exactly what’s going on almost right from the start, but Blackmon delivers it in such breathless, enthusiastic prose that it’s enjoyable despite that.

Norman A. Daniels is the actual author of “Murder Stays at Home”, published in this issue under the name Max Neilson. It was published originally as “Murder at Lake Iroquois” by Charles Maxwell in the September 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES. This one finds a bunch of theater folks and artists partying at the island mansion of a wealthy producer, and of course one of them winds up dead, seemingly an open-and-shut case of a beautiful actress murdering a rival beautiful actress. That’s not how it turns out, and the murder method is actually pretty clever. Daniels was dependable and this story is good entertainment without being outstanding.

“Post Mortem” by Walton Grey was published originally in the August 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES as “Where is the Body?”, under the author’s real name, C. Samuel Campbell. It’s even more lurid and over-the-top than “Carte Blanche for Murder” as we have two police detectives running around a stereotypical old dark house complete with secret passages and a hulking monster who’s breaking people’s necks. This one is almost too silly for me to accept it, but it has its effective moments and I wound up reading the whole thing.

Looking back on the issue as a whole, it’s certainly entertaining. The Jim Anthony story and “The Shape of Death” by “Randolph Barr” are the highlights. I definitely want to read more of Bellem and Ballard’s Jim Anthony stories. Several of them, including “Murder Between Shifts”, are reprinted in SUPER-DETECTIVE JIM ANTHONY, THE COMPLETE SERIES: VOLUME 5 from Steeger Books. Not surprisingly, I’ve already ordered a copy. But if you want to sample the series, this e-book from Radio Archives isn’t a bad place to start.