House of Evil

A lot of publishers were quick to embrace the new concept of paperback originals in the 1940s and 1950s. Houses like Pocket Book, Dell, Ace, Popular Library and our cherished Fawcett Gold Medal were all competing as the leader of this new publishing trend. They all created an identifiable marketing niche. Ace did doubles (for a dime more), Avon tried appealing art and Fawcett attracted authors with up front cash. It resulted in a massive catalog of titles. But in the midst of this publishing competition came a multitude of smaller publishers that just didn't make it. Zenith, Hillman, Quick Reader, etc. One of those publishers, Lion Books, only lasted nine years, 1949 to 1957, but released an abundance of noir fiction in their 223 offerings. In fact, some of the genre's leading pioneers contributed books to Lion. Stalwarts like Jim Thompson, Day Keene, Robert Bloch, David Goodis and Richard Matheson. Regardless of the short life span, that's an incredible offering. 

Lion Books would later fold, due in large part to it's founder, Martin Goodman, owning Timely Comics, which by 1960 would be a little 'ole comic company called Marvel. Needless to say, Goodman made bank, sold it and retired. All of this information, and detailed backstory on Lion Books' development and demise, is culled from Stark House's 2016 reprinting of three “sleeper” noir titles released by Lion - “Hero's Lust” (1953) by Kermit Jaediker, “The Man I Killed” (1952) by Shel Walker and the subject of this review, “HOUSE OF EVIL” (1954) by Clayre and Michael Lipman. Included as a bonus is an introduction and “skim” review of these books by Gary Lovisi, the author/collector behind genre zine the Paperback Parade. 

To say that “House of Evil” is bleak is an understatement. It's as dark as a mortuary drape and profoundly lives up to its name. The opening sentence ushers us into a world of depravity, grime and ultimately...death: “The girl at The Red Parrot was a slut”. And we quickly learn about her. 

Nina Valjean is a prostitute, peddling her washed up goods at the Red Parrot, where Bennie the bartender is pimping and Vernie is flashing a different kind of shot in the corner. Nina's arms prove she's a prisoner of Hell, and she's over 24-hours removed from her last fix. She doubles her asking price for “Smith”, a rough customer she's rode before. Hesitantly, she takes the cash, gets her fix and then gets in another fix a few hours later – strangled to death in an empty apartment.   

Our protagonist Roman is then introduced. He's a swell town guy, working as an engineer and climbing the ranks at a local firm. His girl, Joyce, is out of town for a reason. They have reached the crossroads and Joyce is ready to move on. Roman doesn't want her to, and it's that gloomy depression that envelopes Roman, the book and the reader. After Roman stops by Joyce's empty apartment for a suitcase, he finds the strangled stranger (which we know is Nina) and becomes paranoid that the authorities will suspect him as the killer. Refusing to report the crime, Roman heads out as a solo gumshoe, converting the book from thriller to whodunit and back to thriller when the killer strikes again. 

As the mystery thickens, the authors present a weird dreamlike delivery of the killer's thoughts. It's an abysmal, terrifying portrait of dead babies, bodies on meat-hooks and books of blood. It's Lovecraft on absinthe. We know the killer's thoughts and eventually who the next target is. While we wrestle with the killer's true identity, Roman and a stripper named Cecille team up to stop the killer before Joyce becomes the next victim. 

“House of Evil” presents everything we love about noir fiction. It's the dark suspense that Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Richard Laymon and even today's masters like Dean Koontz feed on. At about 150-pages, it's a short read that utilizes a slow reveal to the end. I read it in one fell swoop and was thoroughly invested. Oddly, these married authors never wrote another book. The two did write a 1943 play and six shorts that appeared in various zines like 'Ellery Queen'. It's a shame because the strength of the story-telling would have warranted a potentially good career. But, as they always say, everyone has at least one book in them. It's that second effort that's so allusive.

You can obtain a copy of the Stark House book here. 

Dirty Harry #01 - Duel for Cannons

I’d put off reading this for nearly a year because I had a premonition that it wouldn’t be very good. I was right.

A vacationing Texas lawman gets gunned down in California, and “Dirty Harry” Callahan of the San Francisco Police Department thinks it was an assassination. It was indeed, and as Harry investigates further, a big conspiracy emerges involving an evil Texas businessman who’s got the whole San Antonio police department on his payroll, including its crooked chief. Those who don’t go along get killed by the businessman’s favorite assassin. Harry goes after them all, and you can guess how things end up.

The story has potential, and Dirty Harry is a terrific character, but somehow this book never got in gear for me. I didn’t care for the style of author Ric Meyers (using the name Dane Hartman), who writes as if he’s reading a screenplay and adapting it shot-by-shot into a novel. The result is that action sequences go on way too long, with lengthy descriptions of the physical landscape and details of each participant’s every motion. It’s always way more information than you need. For example, the book opens with the assassin killing that vacationing lawman. That simple sequence takes fourteen pages to describe.

Most of the story takes place in San Antonio, where Harry tries to rescue its last remaining honest lawman, who’s been kidnapped by the villains. This leads to a series of drawn-out gun battles in which nothing gets resolved. It also leads to Harry sleeping with the lawman’s worried wife (huh?), which I guess gives him something to do between gunfights. 

Weirdly, Harry then teams up with the assassin to invade the businessman’s mansion and kill him. After that battle, there’s a brief layover until the book’s final shoot-out, in which Harry and the assassin try to kill each other. This occurs at the Alamo, apparently after the tourists have gone home but before anyone locks up for the night, as Harry walks right through the front door for his gunfight appointment.

What follows is a lot of shooting until the ammo runs low, and then we come to the one scene in the book that I loved. It’s a reversal of the famous scene in the original movie, in which Harry levels his Magnum at a cringing low-life and gives that little speech ending with “You have to ask yourself a question: do I feel lucky?” This time it’s Harry who’s looking up at that lethal barrel, and it’s a terrific scene. Unfortunately we have to slog through 98.5% of an uninspired book to get there, but at least there’s that.

The Evil Days

During the 1950s, Bruno Fischer was one of the mainstays of crime fiction. His bestselling novel, “House of Flesh,” sold 1.8 million copies following its 1950 release. After 21 years of writing, followed by a 14-year hiatus from new releases, Fischer’s “The Evil Days” (1974) was his last published book at the age of 62. Stark House Mystery Classics has repackaged the novel for modern audiences as a double along with Fischer’s “The Bleeding Scissors” (1948).

“The Evil Days” was marketed as a “novel of crime and suspense in the suburbs.” The plot setup is one we’ve seen before: Caleb Dawson’s wife finds a bag of jewels that she wants to keep to supplement the family’s meager income. Caleb thinks it’s a bad idea, but acquiesces to his money-hungry wife’s ill-conceived scheme. As you may have guessed, there are unsavory people who aren’t excited to just walk away from a lost fortune and want the jewels recovered. Meanwhile, there’s a violent murder in the same suburb that serves as the basis for a satisfying mystery. Could the two events be connected?

Fischer spent much of the 1960s working as an editor for two large publishing houses, and he puts his industry knowledge to good use in “The Evil Days.” Caleb works for a respected publisher that has been acquired by a large corporation. The inside baseball treatment of the publishing world is an interesting aspect to this novel for avid readers with an interest in the way a book is brought to market, and the way that editors speak about writers when they’re not around. The snappy dialogue feels authentic because Fischer has been there.

Another interesting way to read this novel is with the knowledge that Fischer was an honest-to-goodness Socialist. His early career was spent editing leftist publications, and he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1938 as the Socialist Party Candidate (spoiler: he lost). The ideas that workers are exploited by their bosses and that lust for money invites unhappiness are recurring ideas in his books and stories. “The Evil Days” has elements of both themes.

But even if you don’t read this paperback as a Marxist allegory, it remains a helluva mystery filled with moral dilemmas, poetic intrigue, sex, and murder. His politics aside, Fischer was an outstanding writer who honed his craft writing short-stories for the pulps, and that fat-free approach to storytelling carried forward for decades to this fine tale. It’s not filled with action or violence, but the Hitchcock-style mystery is plenty tense. Fischer was a pro at this game, and this final novel was a fitting close to a remarkable body of work. Highly recommended.

Bonus Tip:

The best work by Bruno Fischer that I’ve ever read was a 40-page novella called “We Are All Dead.” It’s about a fouled-up getaway after a heist. It’s only $1.49 on your Kindle, and it’s a damn masterpiece. Thank me later.

Swampmaster #03 - Unholy Alliance

If Paperback Warrior celebrated a Hall of Shame, then two of the three books in this 'Swampmaster' series would absolutely be inducted. David Alexander's hog piss 'Phoenix' would be in as well as the 'Roadblaster' atrocity committed by Paul Hofrichter (also known here as He Who Creates the Horror). I despised Jake Spencer's (real name Jerome Preisler) series debut (“Swampmaster”, Diamond 1992) and its 232-pages of utter nonsense. The author redeemed himself with a quality sequel called “Hell on Earth” the same year, moving the action from St. Augustine, Florida to the Gulf Coast. The book, while wildly ridiculous and equally nonsensical, had a good story to propel its over-the-top violence and mayhem. The third and final book in the series is “Unholy Alliance”, once again released by Diamond in 1992. 

Jerome Preisler, my God man. Why? Why did you write this?

In theory, a book showcasing a drug deal between post-apocalypse criminal factions at an abandoned Disneyworld is tantalizing. It's a fascinating concept – bad guys running around the most famous amusement park in the world while a war party featuring acrobatic twins and a Seminole (they are the good guys mind you) are attempting to stop them. Just for shits, throw in 8-pages of Black Bear vs Doomsday Cowboy, a gladiator game of motorcyclists mowing down human heads and a drooling wheelchair bound madman residing in Cinderella's Castle. 

I mean...Jerome, how do you screw this up? 

It's essentially like Peter North just showing up on the set and having no idea where to put it. This should be an easy one. Instead, it's pages and pages and pages of junk. Gun porn galore, mindless conversation about Cuban cartels, pointless backstories on meaningless characters that become decapitated in throwaway “cut” scenes. This is absolute garbage. It's worse than garbage. If garbage had a waste can that they put their own garbage in, then this book would be the filth-ridden wallpaper adorning its inner aluminum shell. 

Thankfully, this series was trash-canned, thrown onto the back walls of garage sales worldwide, finding solace in its obscurity and staying away from unknowing readers who might seek out the answer to “Who is Swampmaster”. He's John Firecloud and he'll rain on your Macy's parade every single Thanksgiving. He's the guy who hid the chocolate bunny on Easter and told you asparagus tastes great. He only left you a quarter for pulling that bloody stump of a tooth out of your pink gums and John Firecloud is the guy who crapped in the work toilet and left it there to dissolve knowing you'd see it and never unsee it. 

Jerome Preisler did all of that too. 

'Swampmaster' is the warning label for bad fiction: Contents inside may put you at risk of blindness, erectile dysfunction and lethargic bouts of coma-like fatigue. Do not operate heavy machinery if you are reading 'Swampmaster' and contact your physician or nearest urgent care if you reach page 10. In other words, don't read this, don't look at it, don't buy it...pretend it doesn't exist.

Adam Steele #04 - Valley of Blood

It was the cover art that got me intrigued enough to read this 'Adam Steele' western. For once, the cover is perfectly faithful to a scene in the story--- in fact, it’s the most eye-opening scene in the book--- so let’s take a look.

Our hero has come to a frontier town controlled by a greedy rancher and his henchmen. Four masked hardcases corner Steele one night. We know that these are the same creeps who’d gang-raped the book’s helpless young leading lady a couple of chapters back. Things go badly for Steele at first (he takes a punch to the stomach and a kick in the crotch), until he suddenly produces a three-inch “tie pin.” With it, he swiftly skewers the testicles of one bad guy, whose shrieks of agony distract the others long enough for Steele to get the drop on them. A fast gunfight leaves that trio dead, and Steele blows the head off Punctured Testicle Guy for good measure. Next, he strips all four of the thugs nude and hangs their bodies on a barbed-wire fence before castrating them.

I’ll leave it to others to speculate where the author’s fascination with groin trauma comes from, but the over-the-top violence isn’t a surprise. The book is credited to George G. Gilman, but the author is Terry Harknett, the British pulpster who wrote these 'Adam Steele' books along with the even more brutal 'Edge' westerns. Steele has a bit more humanity than Edge, but that’s not saying much considering what a stone-cold sociopath Edge is, and he shares Edge’s habit of cracking a bad pun at the end of most chapters.

Harknett’s characters exist in a stark spaghetti western landscape. That gives his stories a somewhat different flavor than what you get with conventional westerns by American authors. Tough-guy heroes are nothing new, but in these books the hero has a hard, cold core like an under-baked potato. The same traditional themes of good versus evil are here, but there’s an emotional detachment which makes it hard to really care about anyone, or about what happens to them. That’s just as well, because the author is fond of killing off virtually every named character in a given novel, and it happens here too.

Even the unfortunate leading lady gets killed off, casually and pointlessly. A beautiful young widow who’d helped him earlier in the book, Steele pauses to reflect on why he nevertheless feels nothing for her. “Sorry, ma’am,” he muses, “But I’m looking for the best and you were banged around too much.” Maybe it’s just as well that Steele doesn’t pause for reflection very often.

It all winds up in an action climax, but I found the ending pretty unsatisfying, and apart from the spasms of colorful violence this is a fairly dreary, downbeat book. The pacing is reasonably brisk and I was grateful for the brevity of its 148 pages, but reading “VALLEY OF BLOOD” just isn’t much fun.

Alley Girl (aka Renegade Cop)

The 1954 stand-alone novel “Alley Girl” by Jonathan Craig (real name: Frank Smith) was re-released in 1959 as “Renegade Cop.” I suspect that the book was written and published following the success of Jim Thompson’s 1952 masterpiece, “The Killer Inside Me”, as both novels feature sociopath cop protagonists.

The main character of “Alley Girl” is highly-regarded Detective-Lieutenant Steve Lambert, and the first time we meet him he is pounding whiskey before his morning shift while the naked 18 year-old he’s been banging is haranguing him about his bad habits.

The central mystery of the novel concerns Tommy Nolan who may or may not have killed somebody in a whiskey blackout. Detective Lambert is working the case and promised Tommy’s hot wife that he’d keep Tommy out of the electric chair if she sleeps with him. Classy guy, right? Meanwhile, someone else wants to make sure that Tommy is convicted for the crime and is willing to pay Lambert a ton of cash to make sure that happens. The detective has no ethical qualms about this conflict of interest and appears personally uninterested in the truth behind the allegations against Tommy.

Meanwhile, a good and honorable cop named Dave Kimberly wants to solve the murder for all the right reasons. His cop instincts won’t let him mind his own business and allow Lambert to work the case without the scrutiny of an honest colleague. Dave’s character is a ray of light in this novel filled with ill-will and corruption. Dave’s quest for the truth makes this crime novel a straight-up whodunnit mystery with a satisfying conclusion. 

Lambert is a reprehensible protagonist, and you need to be comfortable with that fact to make it through this short paperback. He feels like a 1950s prototype for the Vic Mackey character on the TV show, The Shield - a talented cop with no moral compass. If you can stomach spending so much time with a villainous main character who forces another man’s wife into depraved, coercive sex, you’ll find a pretty compelling police procedural here. I’m embarrassed to say that I enjoyed this book a lot. You might as well if you’re a twisted soul.

A couple postscripts:

The title “Alley Girl” makes no sense, and was likely the idea of someone at Lion Books rather than the author. There’s no obvious Alley Girl in the whole book. There’s a secondary female character of humble beginnings who could arguably be the Alley Girl, but naming the novel after her doesn’t add up. Blame the publisher. As a title, the 1959 Diamond Books re-release as “Renegade Cop” makes more sense even if it shows an utter poverty of imagination.

Jonathan Craig also wrote a bunch of police procedural novels called the '6th Precinct' series. The paperbacks spanned ten installments between 1955 and 1966. At first glance, it would seem that the series was trying to capitalize on the popularity of Ed McBain’s '87th Precinct' series, but Craig actually beat McBain to the punch by a full year. The '6th Precinct' novels follow two NYPD detectives - Pete Selby and Stan Rayder - through a series of murders that always seems to start with the discovery of a dead, nude woman. Craig’s series never saw the commercial success of McBain’s (both were inspired by “Dragnet”, it seems), but Craig was a solid talent and the books seem to be worth a shot. For what it’s worth, the late Bill Crider loved them, and the never-late Paul Bishop was lukewarm on the '6th Precinct'. I intend to break the tie and get back to you.

We have a feature on Jonathan Craig on the third episode of the Paperback Warrior Podcast.

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Felony Tank

Malcolm Braly's life ironically mirrors his 1961 prison novel “Felony Tank”. Braly was born in Portland in 1925 to the son of an automobile dealer. After that stint fell through, Braly's family hit hard times during the depression. Meaningless robberies eventually stacked up, culminating into multiple sentences in the clinger. While serving time in both Folsom Prison and San Quentin, Braly began to hone his craft – writing books about guys just like himself. Surprisingly, he wrote “Felony Tank” in 1961 behind bars. In fact, Braly went on to write two more in the pen - “Shake Him Till He Rattles” (1963) and “It's Cold Out There” (1966). All were originally released by Gold Medal due to editor Knox Burger convincing Braly to write during a visit to San Quentin. Arguably his best work was “On the Yard”, published in 1967 and adapted to film in 1979. Sadly, after Braly's parole, he only gained 15 years of freedom. He died in an auto accident at age 54.

“Felony Tank” follows a hopeless 16-year old named Doug, who in essence is simply Braly reliving his own helter-skelter youth. Doug's childhood and upbringing has led him to become a vagabond, riding the rails and hitchhiking to the next town and the next robbery. After leaving Phoenix, Doug arrives in the southwestern city of Ardilla (state never given). It's here that he commits nearly the same crime as the author – robbing a feed store for a few bucks before picked up by the police. He's taken to jail and placed in an upstairs “penthouse”, an ill-fated mid-point between county jail and prison. Most of the inmates at Ardilla are hardened lifers, they know the drill and are well-aware the next stop is a prison term. 

The book really becomes interesting with the internal politics. Without ruining it for you, deals are made, cigarettes are exchanged and Doug's cell of no-jobbers has a hacksaw blade. In a daring escape, the second half of the book begins with Doug and his older ruffian/mentor named Agnes on the run. Paralleling one of Braly's own robberies, the duo break into a laundromat to steal clothes (and a suit) and rob a nearby grocery store for what amounts to pennies. After sleeping in abandoned buildings and cars, the two find a warm hostess with stay-at-home mom Marion.

While the book possesses a turbulent blend of jail, escape and pursuit, the heart of the book is Doug's struggles with establishing some kind of existence. It's this moment when he meets Marion that really ebbs the tide. Marion is a mother of two, seemingly neglected at home by her husband, a sailor. With Marion's spouse gone for a few weeks, she invites the inexperienced Doug to her bed. He falls in love, but that's just another chapter in what amounts to be a full-circle novel that hopelessly reflects Braly's life behind bars. 

It had to be incredibly fulfilling, satisfying and all-together victorious for Braly to not only pen his own struggles, but to have a novel published by Gold Medal while in prison. “Felony Tank” is written from the heart on a gravel road of conviction and authenticity. It's a stellar first effort (nominated for an Edgar) and one that cements Braly's position in the “prison drama” niche of novels. While action and adventure fans may be swayed off course, Doug's story is so tragic that it warrants another page flip to see what's coming next. I highly recommend “Felony Tank” and it's available as both a Black Gat Books reprint (2016) or together in a Stark House collection with “Shake Him Till He Rattles/It's Cold Out There” (2016).

Buy a copy of this book HERE