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.

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.

Review: Men's Adventure Quarterly #12: The Private Eyes Issue - Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham, eds.

I’ve been a fan of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY since it began, and it’s a real pleasure and honor to have an article in the latest issue, #12, The Private Eyes Issue. My contribution is about detectives in Western fiction, and I hope it’s both entertaining and informative, but I’m here today to talk about the rest of the contents. Which, of course, are absolutely top-notch, as I’ve come to expect from editors Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham.

For starters, there are stories from two of my favorite authors featuring two of my favorite fictional private eyes: Michael Avallone and his iconic character Ed Noon, and Frank Kane and his equally legendary private eye Johnny Liddell. The Avallone story is “Make Out Mob Girl”, a Book Bonus condensation of the first Ed Noon novel THE TALL DOLORES, from the October 1962 issue of MAN'S WORLD. David Spencer, author of THE NOVELIZERS, provides a fine introduction to Avallone and his career, and Mike's son David Avallone contributes a touching essay about his dad. As a long time fan of Mike Avallone and his work, I'm really glad I got be his friend-by-correspondence for many years. 

Frank Kane’s “Party Girl” (KEN FOR MEN, May 1957) is a retitled reprint of the story “Frame” from the August 1954 issue of MANHUNT, the great crime fiction digest. This story was also reprinted in the paperback collection JOHNNY LIDDELL’S MORGUE from Dell. Both are really strong stories, and if you’ve never read any Ed Noon or Johnny Liddell stories or novels, this would be a fine place to start.

But of course there’s more. Honey West is probably the most famous fictional female private eye, and this issue includes the only Honey West short story, “The Red Hairing” by G.G. Fickling, actually the husband and wife writing team Forrest (“Skip”) and Gloria Fickling. This one appeared originally in the June 1965 issue of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. In addition, there’s an article about the TV series HONEY WEST featuring numerous photos of its beautiful star, Anne Francis. I was a fan of the show when it aired originally in the Sixties and am always happy to revisit it.

Walter Kaylin, one of the best authors who wrote for the men’s adventure magazine, contributes “I Had to Amputate My Leg to Save My Life!”, the tale of a private detective trapped by a mad killer, and it’s every bit as harrowing and gruesome as the title makes it sound. It’s also lightning-fast, compelling reading. Kaylin was a master, and this story is a good example of his work.

A story from a short-lived men’s adventure magazine actually called PRIVATE EYE features detective Adam Baxter in “Sing a Song of Sex-Mail”. It’s an entertaining yarn written in a fast-moving, breezy style. The story was published anonymously and I have no idea who wrote it, but I had fun reading it.

There’s also a non-fiction reprint from Alan Hynd called “The Case of the Murdering Detective” (CAVALIER, September 1956) about a real-life murder case from 1910 and the clever detective who solves it. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not much of a fan of true crime stories, but Hynd does a fine job with this one and kept me flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen.

New articles in this issue include the one by me on Western detectives that I mentioned above, a look at some of the latest Sherlock Holmes pastiches, both literary and TV, from Holmes scholar and fan Paul Bishop, and film critic John Harrison on detectives in science fiction films. Plus a feature on early Sixties TV series 77 SUNSET STRIP and HAWAIAN EYE, both of which were favorites of mine, especially 77 SUNSET STRIP. I never missed an episode back in those days. If you're the right age, you can hear the show's theme song in your head right now, can't you? I miss the Sixties just thinking about all this stuff!

I know I’ve said it before, but this is the best issue yet of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY. You can find it on Amazon, and I give it my highest recommendation.

Review: Naked Curse: A Larry Kent Mystery - Don Haring

Larry Kent was the protagonist of an Australian radio crime drama in the early Fifties called I HATE CRIME. The character was an American reporter who moved to Australia and became a private eye. The show was successful enough that enterprising paperback publisher Cleveland decided to put out a line of Larry Kent novels. In those books, Larry was an American private detective operating out of New York City. “Larry Kent” was both the main character and the by-line. Nearly all of the 400 novels that followed were written either by Des R. Dunn or Don Haring, an American who had moved to Australia, just like the character. Several years ago, the fine folks at Piccadilly Publishing began doing e-book reprints of some of the Larry Kent novels by Don Haring, teaming up with Bold Venture Press for the paperback editions. I’d been intrigued by the series, so I tried one of the e-books, and to my surprise, I didn’t like it and stopped reading after a couple of chapters.

However, I had a strong hunch that the fault lay with me as much as it did with the book. I just wasn’t in the right mood for it. That happens sometimes. When it does, especially when it’s a series that I expected to like, I give it some time and then try another of the books. Which is how I came to read NAKED CURSE.

In this one, Larry gets three cases, one right after the other, in short order. He’s hired because a beautiful young female artist is being stalked by an ugly brute. Then another beautiful woman hires him because she’s being blackmailed. And finally, he’s hired by an invalid millionaire stockbroker to find the man’s missing son. Sure enough (and you don’t get any bonus points for seeing this coming), those three cases turn out to be connected.

And this is one of those books where very little is what it seems to be at first. As he carries out his investigation, Larry runs afoul of a gangster and his hulking henchman, meets another beautiful young woman who may or may not be trustworthy, stumbles across several corpses, and gets knocked out more than once. In other words, classic private eye novel stuff. There’s a late twist that raises the stakes even more before Larry straightens everything out and winds up romancing one of the gorgeous babes he’s run into in the course of the story.

I enjoyed NAKED CURSE and plan to read more of the Larry Kent books. The story is interesting and moves right along, and Larry is a pretty good protagonist, smart and tough enough to deal with the trouble he encounters but far from superhuman. Haring’s writing strikes me as a little flat and I wish he’d had a bit more of a distinctive voice, but the prose certainly isn’t bad. And I don’t want to sound like I’m damning with faint praise. If you’re a fan of private eye novels, NAKED CURSE is well worth reading. It’s available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions.

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: The Golden Widow - Floyd Mahannah

I don’t know about you, but when I pick up a paperback from 1957 and it’s got a beautiful blonde on the cover and the hero’s name is Dex Nolan . . . well, I think, “This is my kind of book.” That reaction isn’t always right, of course. Just because a hardboiled crime novel was published in the Fifties doesn’t make it good. But the odds are that I’ll enjoy it, and in this case, my instincts were right on the money.

You really have to be a longtime fan of this stuff to recognize the name Floyd Mahannah. He wrote only a half-dozen or so novels, but he was a prolific author of hardboiled short stories and novelettes, many of them published in the iconic digest magazine MANHUNT.

THE GOLDEN WIDOW finds former cop Dex Nolan in a tough spot as the story opens. Having left the police force to operate a gold mine in Arizona, he’s just lost the property in a lawsuit over unpaid taxes. So he’s broke and at loose ends, and when a former girlfriend shows up asking him to help her because she’s being blackmailed, you know Dex is going to say yes. You also know that his decision is going to wind up landing him in a lot of trouble, and of course you’d be right. It seems that the former girlfriend’s husband has been murdered, and while she has an alibi for that killing, she’s up to her neck in other assorted troubles. Dex, acting like a private eye even though he’s not one officially, locates the blackmailer, and sure enough, that guy winds up dead in short order, too. That’s just the start of it, though. You get gangsters, drug smuggling, a suitcase full of loot, the cops chasing Dex for murders he didn’t commit, shootouts in the desert, and more double- and triple-crosses than you can keep up with. Dex takes a lot of punishment in this book, both physical and emotional, before the final twist comes barreling down on him and the reader.

Ultimately, you may spot the killer in this one – I did – but the fun in reading it is in Mahannah’s tough-minded prose and the classic Fifties setting. THE GOLDEN WIDOW is kind of a generic novel, but I mean that in a good way, in that it’s a prime example of the sort of book that I grew up reading and enjoying. I’ll probably get around to reading the rest of Mahannah’s novels. I have another one on hand and hope to get to it soon.

(Morgan Freeman voice-over: "As you might suspect, James did not get around to reading another of Floyd Mahannah's novels soon, and in fact, he has not read any of Mahannah's work since this post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on September 11, 2009. Although he would still like to, one of these days.")

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.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Love Me--and Die! - Day Keene and Gil Brewer

The origins of Day Keene’s 1951 novel LOVE ME--AND DIE! are a little murky. According to Gil Brewer’s stepdaughter, Brewer ghosted this novel for Keene, expanding one of Keene’s pulp stories to book length. One website identifies the source novella as “Marry the Sixth for Murder”, from the May 1948 issue of DETECTIVE TALES. This seems pretty feasible to me. Keene and Brewer were friends, and since Keene was already an established writer as the Fifties began, with more than ten years as a popular pulp author under his belt, I can easily see him farming out this expansion to Brewer. Whether LOVE ME--AND DIE! was written before or after the first two novels Brewer sold to Gold Medal, SATAN IS A WOMAN and SO RICH, SO DEAD (both of which also came out in 1951), I have no idea. But since Brewer probably used quite a bit of Keene’s original novella, I think the book-length version can be regarded as a true collaboration between two of the top suspense novelists of the Fifties. But the question remains, is it any good?

Well, yeah. What did you expect?

The narrator/protagonist of LOVE ME--AND DIE! is Johnny Slagle (not a great name for the hero of a book like this). Like W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox and Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner before him and Carter Brown’s Rick Holman after him, Slagle is a Hollywood troubleshooter, a private eye who’s on retainer to the movie studios to keep their big stars out of trouble. As such, he gets a call in the middle of the night from an aging, many-times-married screen idol who thinks he has just run over a woman while driving drunk in the middle of a rainstorm. He’s not sure, though, because he didn’t stop to check. That job falls to Slagle, who has to find out if his client is really a hit-and-run killer, and if so, figure out a way to cover it up.

Of course, things don’t stay that simple. Gamblers and starlets and thugs are involved, as well as a gun-toting cowboy from Oklahoma, and wouldn’t you know it, not only does Johnny get hit on the head and knocked out a couple of times, but there’s another murder and he’s framed for it, which means he has to dodge the cops while trying to find the real killer. Yes, it’s a standard plot, but Keene and Brewer throw in some nice twists on it, holding back two of them until very late in the book.

The key to a book like this is the writing, and the pace never slows down for very long in this one, which is all to the good. For the most part, it lacks the intensity of some of Brewer’s other books, but there are a few scenes that vividly capture the sweaty desperation that threatens to overwhelm most of his protagonists. I got the feeling that maybe Brewer was holding back a little on his natural voice as he expanded Keene’s novella, perhaps in an effort to make the book sound more like Keene’s work. I don’t know the details of their arrangement, so I can only speculate. As it is, the blend is a good one. LOVE ME--AND DIE! is no lost classic or anything – it’s just a shade too generic for that – but if you’re like me and grew up reading and loving books like this, I think you’ll thoroughly enjoy it.

Originally published as a digest-sized novel by Phantom Books, it was reprinted by Harlequin in the Fifties, Paperback Library in the Sixties, and Manor Books in the Seventies (the edition I stumbled across and read). A few copies of the earlier editions are available on-line, but they’re pricey. The Manor edition doesn’t show up at all. (A few years ago it was reprinted by Armchair Fiction in a double volume with YOU'LL GET YOURS by Thomas Wills (actually William Ard). I've seen claims that some of the Armchair Fiction books are abridged, but I don't know one way or the other. Just sayin'.) If you happen to have a copy of any of these editions on your shelves but have never read it, I think LOVE ME--AND DIE! is well worth the time.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on July 31, 2009.)

The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 1 - Frederick Nebel

In 1931, after a very successful run in BLACK MASK with several series, Frederick Nebel began selling to DIME DETECTIVE, BLACK MASK’s main rival over at Popular Publications. Having chronicled the adventures of a private detective named Donahue for BLACK MASK, Nebel created a new one (or revived an old one from one of his Northerns, some say) in Jack Cardigan, an operative for the Cosmos Detective Agency. The adventures of Cardigan proved to be Nebel’s longest-running series. Having read and really enjoyed the Donahue stories, I was eager to move on to the Cardigan yarns, since they’re very similar.

THE COMPLETE CASEBOOK OF CARDIGAN, VOLUME 1 includes the stories published in DIME DETECTIVE in 1931 and ’32. The first story, “Death Alley” (DIME DETECTIVE, November 1931) involves Cardigan in a murder that at first seems tied up with a labor dispute but may have its origins in something else. It’s a good introduction to the tough, smart Cardigan.

In “Hell’s Paycheck” (December 1931), Cardigan arrives in an unnamed city (Kansas City, maybe, but that’s just a guess) on a job, and as soon as he gets off the train he’s picked up and taken for a ride. The guys planning to rub him out don’t succeed, of course, so he winds up tackling a case of political corruption, a reformer, and a blackmail racket.

“Six Diamonds and a Dick” (January 1932) finds Cardigan on the trail of some stolen diamonds, obviously. This story is important because it introduces Patricia Seaward, a female Cosmos operative who appears frequently in the series. I like her. She’s petite, according to Nebel, but plenty tough and smart.

“And Then There Was Murder” (February 1932) is a sequel to “Six Diamonds and a Dick”, as some of the repercussions from that case put Cardigan’s life in danger. The attempt to kill him goes awry, however, and results in an innocent’s death, which means Cardigan is going to go all-out to deliver justice.

In “Phantom Fingers” (March 1932), Cardigan is summoned to a meeting with a potential client, but when he gets there he finds the man dead in bed, strangled. That’s not the only strangulation murder in this fast-paced tale of jewel robberies and missing emeralds.

After several years in St. Louis, Cardigan moves back to New York City in “Murder on the Loose” (April 1932). He’s still working for the Cosmos Detective Agency, but not for long. After a clash with his boss, George Hammerhorn, he resigns. The case involves a dead man Cardigan finds in his room one evening when he returns to the hotel where he’s living. Cardigan straightens everything out, of course, and mends fences with Hammerhorn so that he’s still a Cosmos op by the time the story ends.

“Rogues’ Ransom” (August 1932) is the first time the Cardigan series is mentioned on a DIME DETECTIVE cover, although not by title in this case. Cardigan, Pat Seaward, and a couple of other Cosmos operatives are sent to Ohio to retrieve the kidnapped three-year-old daughter of a rich man. Naturally, things get violent and complicated. Although Nebel’s writing is as terse and hardboiled as ever in this one, the plot is driven by some unlikely coincidences which make this the weakest entry in the series so far, although still entertaining to read.

In “Lead Pearls” (September 1932), the job is to recover a valuable necklace stolen daringly in the street right from the neck of the rich woman wearing it. But then her butler is killed, a Cosmos Agency dick is bumped off, and the case becomes a lot more complicated and personal for Cardigan, culminating in a great rooftop shootout.

“The Dead Don’t Die” (October 1932), the title of this story says, but an acerbic drama critic known for his vicious reviews certainly does, his throat slashed from ear to ear. But since he’d hired the Cosmos Detective Agency the day before the murder, Cardigan is determined to find the killer and doesn’t back down, even when Pat Seaward is kidnapped.

As “The Candy Killer” (November 1932) opens, Cardigan is being given a new assignment: bodyguard a beautiful Polish movie star who is taking the fortune she made in Hollywood and going back to her European home. But before the boat can sail, the movie star is kidnapped and Cardigan is off another wild, violent case.

“A Truck-Load of Diamonds” (December 1932) wraps up this first volume. Cardigan is hot on the trail of a valuable diamond bracelet that’s stolen from a jewelry store messenger in broad daylight. This story is cleverly plotted but also winds up being the bleakest in the book.

One thing that really struck me in reading these stories is that although Cardigan does do some detecting and crimes get solved, these aren’t really mysteries in the way we usually think of that term. They’re action/adventure yarns in which the protagonist happens to be a private detective. The mystery is just the impetus for all the action in which Cardigan gets involved. I’m not complaining about this at all, mind you. These are wonderful stories, and if you’re a fan of hardboiled fiction, THE COMPLETE CASEBOOK OF CARDIGAN, VOLUME 1 gets my highest recommendation. It's available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions. I’m glad there are three more volumes to go in this series. Lots of good reading ahead!

Review: Double or Quits - A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

Once again I found myself in need of a book that would read quickly and provide sure-fire entertainment. Well, fry me for an oyster, what better choice than Donald Lam, Bertha Cool, and Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair?

DOUBLE OR QUITS is the fifth book in the series, published in hardback by William Morrow in December 1941 and reprinted more times than I want to count in paperback since then, as well as currently being available in an e-book edition. As with most of Gardner’s novels, the plot is so complicated that it’s difficult to follow and almost impossible to summarize. Bertha Cool is on a bit of a health kick as this one opens, and she and Donald are out fishing on a barge. I immediately figured they were actually there working on a case, but no, they’re doing it for the exercise. However, a casual conversation with another angler nets them a new client and a challenging case. Their new fishing buddy is a doctor, and some of his wife’s valuable jewels have been stolen from a safe in their house. The wife is an invalid, and her secretary/companion has disappeared, so naturally the girl is the most logical suspect. The doctor hires Donald and Bertha to find the girl and recover the jewelry.

Of course, it’s nowhere near as simple as that. Before you know it, someone is dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. Was it an accident, a suicide . . . or murder? As with many of Gardner’s novels, the plot hinges on his knowledge of some obscure point of law, in this case exactly what an insurance company considers a death by accidental means. Double indemnity is riding on the answer.

Along the way, there’s another murder, some false identities, several nice bits of trickery by Donald where he fools not only some of the other characters but also the reader, and finally a solution that, by and large, makes sense once Donald explains everything, which doesn’t happen until he’s almost become a murder victim himself. A month from now I’ll remember very little of the plot.

I will, however, remember that I had a lot of fun reading DOUBLE OR QUITS. I’ve long since given up trying to out-think Erle Stanley Gardner. I did pick out the murderer in this one, but it was mostly a guess. Instead of trying to figure it out, as I would, say, with an Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie novel, I just go along for the ride. In this series, it’s Donald’s brisk, funny narrative voice; in the Perry Mason books, it’s Mason’s hard-charging character, the give-and-take between Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake, and those great courtroom scenes. Gardner’s just a thoroughly entertaining writer, as far as I’m concerned, and that’s really the reason I read. If you’re a Cool and Lam fan, you’ll enjoy this one, and if you’re not, you really should give the series a try.

Manville Moon #7: Pay Up or Die - Richard Deming

“Pay Up or Die” is the seventh and last of the Manville Moon novellas to be reprinted in e-book format. It originally appeared in the May 1951 issue of BLACK MASK DETECTIVE. There are about a dozen more Moon short stories and novelettes that appeared in various pulps and digests, mostly MANHUNT, throughout the Fifties. Maybe a publisher will collect them one of these days.

This yarn finds our one-legged private eye protagonist being hired to protect an actress who’s been getting death threats. Before Moon can even get started, though, a murder takes place. His client is the intended victim, and there are several suspects for the killer, including a dangerous mobster who used to be married to her. Sure enough, Moon gets taken for a ride again (this seems to happen a lot) and barely escapes with his life before he untangles the case and discovers the murderer’s identity.

The plot in this one is a little more complicated than in the previous two stories, but I still figured it out well before the end. No matter. Manville Moon is as likable as ever and Richard Deming’s polished prose is a pleasure to read. There are three full-length novels featuring Moon. I have all of them and am looking forward to reading them.

A Rough Edges Rerun: Armed . . . Dangerous . . . Brett Halliday (Robert Terrall)

A while back I had an email conversation with an author friend of mine [probably Steve Mertz] about the relative merits of Robert Terrall’s Mike Shayne novels. When I was first reading the Shayne novels back in the Sixties and early Seventies, I didn’t know that Davis Dresser, the original Brett Halliday, had had so many ghost-writers contributing to the series. But I did know that as the Sixties went on, I began to like the novels less, and by the Seventies, I didn’t care for them at all. Later, of course, I found out that Robert Terrall was the author of the books I didn’t like.

However, a number of people whose opinions I respect do like Terrall’s Shayne novels, and since I hadn’t read one in close to forty years, I thought I ought to do so and see if my opinion of them has changed since then.

Well . . . it has and it hasn’t.

ARMED . . . DANGEROUS . . . , from 1966, is one of the books I never got around to reading back then. It’s got a nice McGinnis cover, at least on the first edition, and although Mike Shayne is nowhere to be seen, the opening section certainly has plenty of action and intrigue to recommend it. Early on, there’s a beautiful French blonde, a jewel heist, the brutal shooting of an off-duty cop, and a kidnapping. But there’s a twist coming, and I’ll admit, Terrall slipped it right past me for a good while, although I caught it before it was revealed. From that point on, there are a lot more twists, as the story takes on a much larger scale and becomes part caper novel/part thriller with international implications. It’s very well written, a little dated in some respects today but not all that much, and the pace is spectacular, leaving the reader whipping through the pages to see what’s going to happen. There’s even a bit of humor as Terrall name-checks another of his pseudonyms. This is a very entertaining novel. The problem is, it’s barely a Mike Shayne novel.

Oh, a character named Shayne plays a huge part in it, make no mistake about that, but he’s so lacking in personality that the protagonist could be almost anybody. There’s no sense that this is the same character who inhabits all the books in the series actually written by Davis Dresser. Terrall may have been a better wordsmith than Dresser was, I won’t argue that point, but Dresser’s Shayne is a fascinating character, no more honest than he has to be but with a decent core, and maybe one of the most intelligent characters in mystery fiction, who is always two steps ahead of the other people in the books and three steps ahead of the reader. I think most of the other authors who ghosted full-length Shayne novels were able to capture this to a certain extent, and Terrall did, too, at first, but as his stint on the series went on, I believe he lost his handle on the character. However, I could be wrong about this, and I plan to read more of his books to see what I think.

In the meantime, should you read ARMED . . . DANGEROUS . . .? Absolutely. It’s well-written and a lot of fun. If it had featured anybody but Mike Shayne, I’d give it an unqualified recommendation. But if you’ve never read a Shayne novel before, this is definitely not the place to start.

(This post originally appeared on July 10, 2009. And despite what I said in it, I haven't read any more of Terrall's Shayne novels since then. I'm sure this comes as no surprise to most of you, who know by now that I have the attention span of a six-week-old puppy.)

Manville Moon #6: Five O'Clock Shroud - Richard Deming

“Five O’Clock Shroud” is the sixth novella about Richard Deming’s one-legged private detective Manville Moon. It appeared originally in the November 1950 issue of BLACK MASK DETECTIVE and was featured on the usual fine cover by Norman Saunders.

This one has a bit more complicated plot than the previous story in the series. Moon is hired by a wealthy supporter of a politician who is running for mayor as a reform candidate. Unfortunately, it appears that the so-called reformer is actually the big boss of the ring controlling the city’s gambling. Moon even turns up proof of that. And then the murders start, and Moon finds himself targeted for death, as well as being the target of some advances from a beautiful married woman.

Deming does a good job with the political intrigue even though it’s not that difficult to figure out what’s really going on. I’ve become quite fond of Manville Moon as a character. There’s a superb scene in which he’s taken for a ride by three killers, and even though the reader knows he’s going to survive, Deming’s writing generates some genuine suspense. Moon’s escape is pretty clever, too.

If you’re a fan of hardboiled private eye tales, this is a very entertaining series. “Five O’Clock Shroud” is available on Amazon as an inexpensive e-book. I had a fine time reading it and it gets a solid recommendation from me.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Something For Cat - Henry Mancini

I came across this video a few months ago and must have played it a hundred times since then. The animation is cute and appeals to my fondness for the Sixties, but I usually just listen to the music, which really resonates with me. It's from the soundtrack of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, and I've seen that movie so I must have heard the song in it, but I don't recall it from that at all. Instead, to me it sounds like it should have been the theme song from an early Sixties private eye TV series, and I can almost see the opening montage in my head as I listen to the music. I was a huge fan of PETER GUNN and 77 SUNSET STRIP and all the others from that era, and this would have fit right in. One of these days I might just write something like that. It would be a pretty limited market, but it sure would be fun.

Big Shots Die Young (Manville Moon #5) - Richard Deming

“Big Shots Die Young” is the fifth novella featuring Richard Deming’s one-legged private eye Manville Moon. It was published originally in the July 1949 issue of BLACK MASK and featured on the cover by Norman Saunders, although that cover has nothing to do with Deming’s story.

This novella is a direct sequel to the previous entry in the series, “No Pockets in a Shroud” (BLACK MASK, January 1949). And fair warning, it spoils the mystery of that earlier story, too. But since I’d read that one, I had no problem going right along with this yarn, which finds Moon the target of an old enemy who comes back into the unidentified city where these stories take place intending to take over the local gambling setup. Before you know it, Moon has been framed for murder, arrested by the cops, and has to escape and uncover the real killer to clear his name. All while romancing a beautiful woman at the same time, of course.

Manville Moon is a flat-out great protagonist. He’s tough, funny, just vulnerable enough not to be superhuman, and has become one of my favorite first-person narrators over the course of the five stories about him I’ve read so far. Deming’s prose, as always, is so smooth and polished that it glitters.

Where “Big Shots Die Young” doesn’t quite reach the level of the earlier stories is in the plot, which is rather thin and predictable. Anybody who’s read many private eye yarns will know what’s going on right away. The other stories so far in the series had pretty complex plots, but that’s not the case here.

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it. I had a really good time reading “Big Shots Die Young”, and I think anybody who has enjoyed the previous stories will like this one, too. Like the others, it’s available as an inexpensive e-book if you don’t happen to own that particular issue of BLACK MASK. And if you haven’t made the acquaintance of Manville Moon yet, I highly recommend that you do.

A Rough Edges Rerun: Dead Game - Michael Avallone

In the spirit of full disclosure, Mike Avallone was my friend. When I was a kid, he was one of my favorite writers as soon as I read my first novel by him, which was also the first novel in Ace's MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. series. As I may have mentioned before, that was the book that made me realize a writer could have a distinctive voice, that the work he produced could sound so unique that it couldn't possibly have been written by anybody else. And to this day, I love a book like that, like the ones Avallone so often produced such as his MANNIX tie-in novel and his entries in the Nick Carter series.

Years later, a mutual friend put me in touch with Mike, and we corresponded for years after that, off and on all the way up to his death. He was a guy who loved pulps and movies and baseball, and a lot of his books, especially the early novels about his most famous character, private eye Ed Noon, are pretty darned good.

Which brings us to DEAD GAME.

I thought I had read all of the Ed Noon novels except for a few late ones that were published only in England, but when a friend of mine sent me a copy of this one, the third in the series, I realized I hadn't read it. Sitting down to read an Ed Noon novel that was new to me is a treat I figured I'd never have again. DEAD GAME didn't disappoint me, either.

It starts simply enough, with Ed being hired to tail a cheating husband. That's what the guy's wife tells Ed, anyway. But instead of visiting a girlfriend, the man heads for the Polo Grounds instead, to take in an exhibition baseball game between the New York Giants and a visiting minor-league team. Then in the ninth inning, in the middle of the action, the minor-league team's third baseman is somehow stabbed to death, and the guy Ed's been following rushes onto the field to search the dead man's uniform before getting away. Ed is left with the questions of who murdered the third baseman, and what was the man he was tailing was looking for.

Well, things get even more complicated than that, of course. A cop gets killed along the way, putting Ed on the bad side of his old friend, Captain Michael Monks. Ed runs into a beautiful redhead and an equally beautiful brunette, the latter named Mimi Tango, one of the great, oddball character names Avallone could come up with. There's a lot of banter, a few fistfights, and Ed gets hit on the head and knocked out a couple of times, a private eye cliché but one that I happen to enjoy. Finally, there's even a gathering of all the suspects where Ed explains what happened and why, leading up to one last burst of action. The "impossible crime" nature of the murder in the middle of the baseball game sort of gets lost in the shuffle along the way, and when the explanation does come, it's hardly what you'd consider a "fair play" solution. But I don't think that's what Avallone was going for. A book like DEAD GAME is supposed to be fast, flippant, and fun . . . and it is.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 24, 2009. There's now an e-book edition of DEAD GAME available on Amazon, a prospect that never entered my head back in 2009.)

Now Available: Kingfisher #3: Tourist Trap - James Reasoner and Livia J. Washburn

The search for one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, a swindler who is rumored to have stashed away close to a billion dollars in ill-gotten gains, leads brother and sister private investigators Callista and Joseph Kingfisher to a fabulous, luxurious resort in Mexico. But deep in the jungles of the Yucatan, they discover another secret hidden away, a secret that may mean death for both Kingfishers!

TOURIST TRAP is another lightning-paced, colorful adventure from bestselling authors James Reasoner and Livia J. Washburn featuring plenty of thrills, humor, and excitement, with suspense and plot twists that will leave readers breathless.

Working on these books with Livia has been great fun, and I think this is my favorite so far. It's available on Amazon in e-book and print editions and as an e-book on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, and Smashwords.