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.
Cameron was an interesting but as you say, hit and miss writer. His 1960s Gold Medal war novels are pretty dependable - Green Fields of Hell, The Black Camp, Dirty War of Sgt Slade - there were four or five of them. He also wrote a handful of generally worthwhile standalone westerns like Doc Travis, North to Cheyenne, and The Spirit Horses which I think won a Spur award. If you stoop to reading "adult" westerns, he was the creator of Longarm and wrote some good ones, though he wasn't necessarily the best writer on the series and definitely wrote too many of them. Stringer and Renegade are other western series he wrote, again hit or miss depending on taste. I have yet to sample a single crime novel of his that I liked though - his 70s output was all over the place.
ReplyDeleteAn obscure one that I remember thinking was pretty good cheap thrills is The Girl with the Dynamite Bangs, "#1" in a putative new "hard-hitting hardhat series" - presumably this was an attempt at creating a new subgenre, "hardhat fiction" where the hero is a blue collar tough guy. It's breezy and sleazy and might be worth a look.
A really deep dive into his output would include tracking down some of the men's adventure magazine stories he wrote in the later 50s and sampling his work as a comic book artist in the late 40s and early 50s. Some of those titles can be downloaded free at Digital Comic Museum, once you figure out which issues to look for.