Before It's Too Late

Thus far our experiences with Lou Cameron have been hit or miss. His 1968 police procedural File on a Missing Redhead seems to be the high-water mark of his bibliography, but his 1960 jazzy crime-noir Angel's Flight and the 1976 WW2 combat adventure Drop Into Hell are worthy contenders to the “best of” Cameron claim. However, there have been a number of real clunkers including his 1977 messy cop novel Code Seven and his 1968 abysmal political thriller The Good Guy. For good reasons I cautiously approached his paperback Before It's Too Late. It was published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1970 and promised “hard-hitting suspense”. 

A former MP named Warren earned a Purple Heart for his service in the Vietnam War. He has returned to his quirky hometown because he's flat broke and needs to earn a living. He takes a job at a collection agency and is quickly assigned the job of retrieving a car from a young college student that defaulted on the loan. Warren successfully swipes the car back but finds himself embroiled in a murder investigation when the kid winds up black and blue and very dead. Like most paperback crime-noir cops the local yokels prove to be inefficient at corralling suspects. But, Warren is eventually released and ordered to get out of town. 

Warren sticks around long enough to get wrapped up in another murder, this one being the swanky hot date he just left. But, just as soon as that investigation gets underway he's paired up with an Israeli hottie that may in fact be a spy. Who's she working for? What intelligence does she need in this little college town? Soon more bodies pile up and the town is pointing fingers at Warren. What is happening in Cameron's goofy plot?

Around page 160 of this 176 pager a minor character asks everyone in the room, “What is any of this all about because I don't understand any of it!” That character echoed my thoughts perfectly – I have no idea what this book was about. It is pages and pages of kooky stuff as Warren hunts down leads like an Abominable Snowman (yep!), a Scooby-Doo type of gimmick with grave robbers, the spy-versus-spy cliché, and a group of biker hippies that can't decide if they want to ball or bang him. For the record, while Cameron's writing is a disjointed mess of ideas, this could be one of the dirtiest Fawcett Gold Medal crime-fiction novels I've read - loads of graphic sex and dialogue. Unfortunately, the book sucks. Stay away.