By 1974, Australia’s sexy and violent Larry Kent series was reaching the end of its 800 installment run. In fairness, the first 500 or so were magazine novellas before the series switched to independent short paperbacks in 1965 while continuing with the same sequential numbering. The character of Larry Kent was an American hardboiled private eye similar to Mike Hammer, but he occasionally drifted into espionage work in the tradition of Chet Drum. Today we join Kent in a more traditional P.I. mystery called “Hello Dolly...Goodbye,” the 794th entry in the series. This one was written by an American named Don Haring who emigrated to Australia after WW2 to write a slew of the Larry Kent adventures before his 1981 death in Honolulu at age 58.
The short novel really starts out on the wrong foot as I had to read the first chapter three times to understand the setup. The writing was stylistically fine but extremely unclear. Here’s what I could figure:
Kent is engaged by an NYPD detective on behalf of the department to solve the mystery of two police officers who recently disappeared. One of the missing cops is the kid brother of the detective who hires Kent. That much is clear. The missing officers were investigating a list of names, but the relevance of the list is unclear. The client cop mentions that the list has something to do with a mob from Chicago “interested in aliens.” I assume they meant foreigners and not E.T. Kent also mentions the Secret Service, but there was no indication of why, and the agency is never mentioned again in the novel.
Another thing unclear to me was the era. This paperback was published in Australia in 1974 and takes place in New York City. However, on page one of the novel a character says, “This cop is a client...Write down in your clients’ book. Twentieth of May, eighty...” Does this book take place in 1980? The future? Everyone in the book used a 1940s vernacular and wears fedoras. There’s also a reference to Sonny Liston, an American boxer who competed from 1953 to 1970. I don’t know what to make of any of this, and I guess it really doesn’t matter. The paperback just felt very unstuck in time in addition to the opaque plot.
Anyway, Kent begins working his way down the list of names just like missing cops did. The first name is a famous television personality named Grant Kelso. Unfortunately, Kelso gives Kent the slip before anyone could explain the plot to me. Eventually, he learns that the list of names are all millionaires who belong to a fraternal organization called The Nations Club. Some members are tied into a group that is, in fact, moving people in and out of the U.S. in a scheme that was never entirely clear.
In the author’s defense, there are lots of great scenes in “Hello Dolly...Goodbye” in which Kent is either kicking ass or getting his ass kicked. The hardboiled P.I. patter is amusing and borders on parody at times. Moreover, the collaboration scenes between Kent and the police were also fun to read. Kent shoots and fights his way closer to the truth regarding the two missing cops, but the eventual solutions were rather unsatisfying.
I recently read Larry Kent #642: “Curves Can Kill,” from 1965, and it was awesome - one of the most satisfying private eye-espionage mashups ever. It was also written by Haring when he was clearly at the top of his game. The only thing I can figure is that the Larry Kent series was winding down by 1974, and Haring began just phoning it in to fulfill his contractual obligation because “Hello Dolly...Goodbye” is a total mess. However, I’m not giving up on Larry Kent because I’ve seen how good the series can be. Going forward, I’m going to avoid 1970s installments unless I get a solid tip on a particularly good one from that era.
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Between 1954 and 1974, there were hundreds of novellas and paperback original novels produced in Australia starring hardboiled New York Private Eye Larry Kent. The series was published by the same company that brought the world the Carter Brown mysteries and packaged with salacious cover illustrations similar to the Hank Janson books. The primary authors were Don Haring and Des Dunn, but all the books were released under the house name Larry Kent. Piccadilly Publishing has been reprinting Larry Kent’s adventures as affordable eBooks while maintaining the original cheesecake cover illustrations. I’m starting the series with #642: Curves Can Kill, a 1965 installment written by Don Haring.
The character of Larry Kent started as a newspaper reporter in 1950 on a popular Australian radio drama called, I Hate Crime. The popularity of the radio show launched the novellas and eventually the novels. Kent’s character became a private investigator in the mold of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. As time went on, the writers borrowed a page from Stephen Marlowe’s Chester Drum and Michael Avallone’s Ed Noon when the hero began accepting espionage assignments from the CIA in selected novels. A variation on this “private eye as spy” gambit is the storyline at work in Curves Can Kill.
The action opens with Kent tied to a chair being worked over by a Romanian goon wanting to know what Kent knows about “Z Detail.” Unfortunately for the wisecracking Kent, he doesn’t know much, so he must continue to suffer the abuse - from both fists and a switchblade - with no reprieve. It’s a brutal and violent opening scene that will play well for readers who like their pulp fiction more extreme than Carter Brown could ever offer.
Fortunately, we don’t need to sit through 120 pages of Kent being carved up with a switchblade. He is rescued and finds himself in the hands of Z Detail, an America-friendly private intelligence outfit with close ties to the CIA. The Z-boys want to hire Kent as a contract operative for the vast sum of $300 per week.
His first mission as a contract operative for Z Detail involves befriending a woman in New York. Kent’s version of befriending looks a lot more like a Carter Brown novel, and the swinging sixties attitude toward women is on full display. None of this would fly today, but that’s part of the fun of vintage fiction. Anyway, the woman has access to a secret that Kent needs to learn, and giving any more info away would spoil the fun for you. Suffice to say that all this eventually ties back to the Romanian goons who tried to filet Kent in the opening chapter.
This is one of those great books that kept surprising me with the quality of the prose and story. I had been misled to believe that the Larry Kent series was disposable fiction with a production schedule too aggressive to be among the outstanding works of pulp fiction. Instead, as I read Curves Can Kill, I found myself repeatedly muttering, “Wow, this is really good.” Fans of violent spy-mysteries with major twists and turns will love this book as much as I did.
There are some slow sections but no boring ones in this Larry Kent mystery-adventure. It all leads up to a shockingly violent bloodbath of a climax - one of the finest I’ve read in ages. Overall, I was very impressed by this paperback, and I’m excited to read some more. With over 800 installments, we are unlikely to run out of Larry Kent content in this lifetime. It’s great to discover a new series with an endless amount of content to enjoy. Highly recommended.
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California author Michael Kurland is one of those guys who has published novels in several different genres. He wrote a successful series of mystery novels in the Sherlock Holmes universe starring Professor Moriarty. He also has a sizable back catalog of science fiction and alternative history titles spanning 1964 to 1990. Of greater interest to Paperback Warrior is his “The Man from W.A.R. Inc.” action series that lasted three installments from 1967 to 1969.
W.A.R. Inc. is Weapons, Analysis, and Research Incorporated, a for-profit American company that provides training and logistical support around the world to clients (mostly small nations) desiring greater stability. The hero of the series is W.A.R. Inc. employee Peter Carthage, who uses the skills he honed in U.S. Army Intelligence to fight evil for profit. “Mission: Third Force” from 1967 is the first Carthage novel in the trilogy.
The campus of W.A.R. Inc. contains a giant underground fortress beneath New Jersey farmland for drills and experimentation. The corporate lair is unimaginably high-tech...for 1967. The unintentionally hilarious descriptions of the equipment includes space age technology including “digital tape recorders” storing mountains of data. The “modem mercenaries” of W.A.R. Inc. are primarily research and development types as
well as consultants - not unlike the cadre of “Beltway Bandit” defense contractors we have today. The weapons developed in the company’s “dirty tricks” department are cool as hell and seem to be borrowing a page from the James Bond films.
Peter Carthage is one of three people in the firm with the title of “Expediter.” In this first adventure, he is sent to the fictional Southeast Asian kingdom of “Bonterre,” formerly a French colony in Indochina. The author basically took the colonial history of Vietnam and superimposed it over a Thai-style constitutional monarchy to conjure up Bonterre. Anyway, the country is experiencing instability caused by guerrilla insurgents from the kingdom’s northern province as well as the shadowy influence of a right-wing “Third Force” also seeking to topple the current government from within.
The Bonterre ambassador wants Carthage to train his armed forces in combat and intelligence to be used against the guerrillas while establishing a link between the insurgents and the traitorous Third Force. Carthage puts together a multi-disciplinary team of colorful fellow employees for the training engagement and spearheads the investigation into the Third Force himself.
The result is a ton of fun to read. Carthage is basically Sherlock Holmes in a third-world guerrilla warfare environment. He uses clues and deduction to unearth Third Force operatives among Bonterre’s military and government class. And when the time comes to kick-ass, he and his crew justify their hourly billing rate. It’s also a hilarious book, but not in the cartoonish way of the fake spy novels of the late 1960s. Instead, the author peppers the dialogue with clever wisecracks and sarcastic remarks from Carthage and his crew causing me to laugh out loud more than once. The novel also has a good sex scene but nothing particularly graphic.
Kurland’s writing and plotting is exceptionally well-done - although the climactic ending felt a little rushed. The story moves forward with vivid characters and no dull moments. I’m frankly surprised this series wasn’t a greater commercial success justifying more than three installments. In any case, I’m overjoyed to have acquired all three books in the series. Snapping up these paperbacks should be a no-brainer for any vintage adventure fiction fan. Highly recommended.
This book was discussed on the fourth episode of the Paperback Warrior Podcast: Link
