Although he never rose to the commercial success of his contemporaries, Robert Colby was a productive author of paperback original novels for Fawcett Gold Medal and Ace during the 1950s and 1960s. Meanwhile, he was also a regular contributor of short stories to ‘Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine’ and ‘Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.’ “The Star Trap” was Colby’s 1960 release for Fawcett Gold Medal. The book was also reprinted by Manor Books in 1974, and it exists as an affordable eBook today.
Our narrator is Hollywood B-list actor Glenn Harley who is awakened by a 3 a.m. hysterical phone call from starlet Nancy Rhymer - a mere acquaintance - needing help. Glenn rushes to Nancy’s home to find her in a revealing nightgown with a fellow actor lying dead on the floor with a knife wound in his chest. For reasons not fully revealed at first, Nancy wants Glenn’s help in concealing the murder.
The act of stashing a body to get in good with a beautiful girl inevitably involves complications, and it wouldn’t be a femme fatale noir story without them. I won’t give away the store in this review, but suffice to say I found myself muttering, “Oh man, this is getting good,” several times throughout the short novel. At points, there is a disappearing corpse, a missing bundle of cash, some crooked cops, and an honest-to-goodness nymphomaniac. Fun for everyone.
“The Star Trap” isn’t a masterpiece of the genre by any means, but it’s a pretty enjoyable - and very short - paperback to kill a few hours. I’ve heard that Colby’s best work was his 1959 thriller, “The Captain Must Die,” and I intend to check that one out in the near future. Stay tuned.
Buy a copy of this book HERE
Author Steve Fisher's novel “Red is for Courage” was published by Argosy in November, 1943. It was written as a testament to the Red Cross and their sacrifices during WWII. Fisher, known for his pulp runs and military fiction in the 30s, 40s and 50s, had many of his works adapted for film. Arguably the most notable is the 1943 submarine themed “Destination Tokyo” starring Cary Grant. “Red is for Courage” was purchased by 20th Century Fox with the intention of an adaptation called “Red Cross Girl”. From my understanding the film never came to fruition.
In many ways this is a classic love story, a turbulent and rocky romance using WWII battlefields as the backdrop. It's told from the first person perspective of Willie, a Red Cross volunteer who's serving in battle scarred Madrid. Willie is best friends with fellow nurse Tony, who's in love with a female nurse named Noel who in turn loves Willie. This love triangle is the basis of the book. Both Tony and Willie are introduced to a war journalist named Kadi Rogers and then the triangle becomes a rather complicated thing.
Willie declares his love for Kadi after an eventful and romantic evening. Kadi rejects his advances and soon leaves for Paris. The story then takes a fast track, covering a lot of battles and a whole lot of bandages and blood. Over the course of a few years we follow Willie's progress through the war and his eventual relocation back to New York to become a private practice physician. It's a long but memorable journey following Tony, Willie, Noel and Kadi's wartime service and their eventual post-war lives.
From a romance genre perspective, this one nails it. But, this is a Men's Action Adventure blog and I'm sure you're all scratching your heads. I will say that there's enough battlefield action here to please genre fans. In fact, the whole climax of the book is a stirring recount of the Battle of Dunkirk, reliving a harrowing quest to ship soldiers across the canal and away from the incoming German forces. This portion is worth the price of admission. Overall, I really enjoyed this story and will probably re-read it at some point.
William P. McGivern (1918-1982) started his writing career authoring science fiction and fantasy stories for the pulps. By the time he turned to paperback novels, crime fiction became his preferred genre with a high water mark being his 1954 release, “Rogue Cop.” The book was adapted that same year into a well-regarded movie starring Robert Taylor and a pre-Psycho Janet Leigh.
The book’s protagonist is Detective Sergeant Mike Carmody, a police officer in the employ of his big-city police department (feels like Philadelphia to me) and the local mobster, Dan Beaumonte. Carmody has an idealistic kid brother named Eddie who is also a cop, but one who honors his oath of office and plays by the rules. As you can imagine, their relationship is distant and chilly due to the sizable gulf between their core values.
As the novel opens, Carmody has a real dilemma on his hands. His brother Eddie is preparing to testify against a low-level mobster working for Beaumonte, and the racketeer is nervous that the defendant is going to flip if convicted. Beaumonte enlists Carmody’s help to have Eddie keep his mouth shut...or else.
When Carmody explains the risks of testifying to Eddie, the Super-Catholic younger brother doesn’t want to hear it as he can’t be bought or swayed. Carmody is forced into quite a bit of soul-searching regarding his own reputation in the department as a dirty cop while devising a plan to placate his mob boss and keep Eddie alive. Carmody enlists Eddie’s girlfriend into his scheme to keep his brother safe using his own knowledge of the girl’s checkered past.
This really is a fantastic novel. McGivern brings his A-game when it comes to creating tension and making Carmody’s redemption tale a roller-coaster ride of conflicting interests. The mobsters are menacing without being cartoonish, and the scenes of reckoning between the brothers are emotionally wrenching. McGivern had a real knack for propulsive plotting, and this story is tight as a drum.
“Rogue Cop” is more than just a kick-ass tale of cops and crooks (although plenty of asses do get kicked). It’s also a story of a man fighting for his own redemption - both professionally and spiritually. There’s a lot going on in this short novel, and it’s way smarter than most genre paperbacks of that era.
I haven’t seen the movie adaptation because they always seem to be a letdown, but I may seek this one out. But you shouldn’t cheat yourself out of a great page-turner. If you’re looking for a fast-moving hardboiled crime story without an ounce of fat, please consider “Rogue Cop” to be essential reading. Highly recommended.
Buy this book HERE
Cornell Woolrich wrote nearly 30 novels from 1926-1960. His most notable work is the 1942 short story “It Had to be Murder”, later filmed by Alfred Hitchcok as “Rear Window” in 1954. One of his shorts, “Tokyo, 1941”, was written in 1960 and later featured in two compilation books by Bill Pronzini and Martin Greenberg - “The Mammoth Book of Short Spy Novels” (1986) and “13 Short Espionage Novels” (1985).
The book begins in a Hong Kong hotel room as an American secret agent/spy named Lyons transfers some vials to a Caucasian male under the guise of selling a camera. There's a Chinese woman in the room with Lyons and we quickly learn that he's married but quite the ladies man. Adding to his rather unlikable nature is that he's a liar and a cheat, which are probably great traits for a spy to possess, but ultimately makes for a lousy human. After low-balling and cheating a shop owner out of a valuable diamond, Lyons makes his way back to suburban life in Azabu-ku.
Returning to the normal 9-5 day job at the Acme Travel Agency, Lyons argues with his wife Ruth consistently. She doesn't know about his secret agent night life and Lyons, while being a real hothead, has no need to tell her his whereabouts. She thinks he's out bedding tramps...and she's fairly accurate in her appraisal. The reader can sense that the marriage is nearing its final end.
The story then takes a right turn by introducing us to a beautiful Japanese woman named Tomiko. She arrives at the equivalent of Japan's Secret Service upon request by Colonel Setsu. He demands she sacrifice herself to the Emperor by becoming Lyons lover. She'll submit her body in an effort to grab an important radio transmitter. It's all silly espionage stuff – secret vials, radios and handshakes – but it makes for an effective story. Gaining Lyons attention is no difficult task, and soon the story reaches a climactic point in a lakeside cabin. Lyons may be working for the Russians, Ruth may be on to Lyons game and this Japanese woman...well she's really just the connecting point.
I'm not sure really what Woolrich had in mind when writing the story. It's certainly steeped in spy mythology, but comes across as social subtext on failed marriage. The Russian/US/Japan circus is prevalent, but there's the diamond portion and a slight prison angle that makes this wishy-washy at best. It's a myriad of story arcs that really doesn't lead to anything other than just an average story. Nothing more, nothing less. Paperback Warrior will continue the search for a satisfying Woolrich read.
Buy a copy of "The Mammoth Book of Short Spy Novels" HERE
Under the pseudonym of Mallory T. Knight, author Bernhardt J. Hurwood (1926-1987) wrote nine bawdy, tongue-in-cheek spy paperbacks in ‘The Man From T.O.M.C.A.T.’ series that ended in 1971. He then began writing paperback originals for the Fawcett Gold Medal imprint, including the stand-alone 1972 thriller, “Rip-Off!”
As the novel opens, former CIA spy Peter Ross is bored as hell in his current position as a federal prosecutor in New York’s U.S. Attorney’s Office targeting “second-rate losers who had run afoul of federal law.” Ross becomes obsessed with a spate of recent domestic terrorist incidents, burglaries, and bank robberies attributed to the shadowy, left-wing Revolutionary Action Party (RAP). As luck would have it, his politically-ambitious boss gives Ross a secret assignment to neutralize RAP, even if it means breaking the rules.
Leaving aside the author’s ignorance regarding the role of an Assistant U.S. Attorney and the machinations of the U.S. justice system, all of this seemed like a promising set-up - like Mack Bolan vs. The Hippies. Early in the novel, Ross catches a break when a young, female RAP member named Holly is captured alive at a bank robbery attempt. Ross takes Holly into his personal custody with the goal of flipping her to the side of Team America. Did I mention that Holly is super-sexy? Can you see where this is headed?
Hurwood’s written dialog is super-clunky, and his characters aren’t particularly likable or interesting. Ross is a charmless hero who does a lot of his speaking in sentences that end in unnecessary exclamation points (just like the title), so the reader is forced to imagine the ex-spook shouting in every conversation. It’s also clear that the author had some real animus towards left-wing hippies of the early 70s and used the verbal jousting between Ross and Holly as a way to score political points largely irrelevant to a modern reader.
The main problem with the novel is nothing really happens for the first 146 pages of this 160-page paperback. It almost feels like a romance novel where the federal prosecutor runs off with the hippie terrorist for an extended getaway with a lot of chit-chat between tepid sex scenes. Ross seems to take his sweet time actually getting anything worthwhile during his questioning of Holly. A single action sequence at the end of the book lands with a thud because of the dreadful slog it takes to get that far. Hurwood constructed the final scene to introduce the possibility of a series starring Peter Ross, but the character thankfully never appeared in any other books, to my knowledge. 160 pages of this dullard was more than anyone should have to endure.
Another issue with “Rip-Off!” is that my expectations are just higher for Fawcett Gold Medal paperbacks. Even accepting that the quality of their output diminished by the 1970s, this felt like the kind of hastily-written one-off that Manor Books was releasing around the same time. Upon finishing the paperback, I felt cheated out of a few weekend hours and had an overwhelming feeling of being, well, ripped off. Don’t make the same mistake and waste a second of your time with this one.
Buy this book HERE
The paperback shelf at your used book store is typically going to feature plenty of titles from the William W. Johnstone empire. If you are a fan of the author (s), there's a plethora of goodies to devour. If you aren't, you are stuck weeding through stacks and stacks of the stuff hoping to find other writers. It's just the nature of the paperback reseller.
'Rig Warrior' was a short-lived series that debuted in 1987. The self-title released that year, followed by two sequels in 1988 - “Wheels of Death” and “Eighteen-Wheel Avenger”. The books were repackaged with different artwork and reprinted for modern audiences. It's similar to Bob Hamm's 'Overload' series in the way it drills down to vigilantes driving freight trucks and fighting the mob. It's really as simple as that, although this series adds a slightly new dynamic to it by the second novel.
Barry Rivers is a Vietnam Vet and ex-Special Forces officer. He's won numerous medals and gained a universal knowledge for killing. After service, Rivers went into consulting work and established an extremely profitable firm. His father is an owner operator for Rivers Trucking, an employer that Barry drove for before going to Vietnam. Barry learns that the business has been targeted by the Mob and that his father was badly beaten. It sounds like we have ourselves a vigilante novel.
Barry takes a vacation from the firm and starts driving for his father's business again. Soon, he learns that the business is running government contracts and that certain parts of the FBI are shipping drugs in the freight. It's an elementary story line until we realize that there's mad scientists involved and, along with the drug traffic, it is an expansive operation involving corpses being used in freakish experiments. Rivers Trucking unknowingly supplies the labs with these cadavers and in turn they are subjected to “Frankenstein” experiments in a weird “Universal Soldier” concept.
Johnstone is in ultra-conservative mode here and takes some of the political turns that saw his 'Out of the Ashes' series go extremely red. It's very pro-gun, Republican and prepper friendly with the typical “the government and police can't be trusted” phobia. It's silly, poorly written and comes across as rather immature. However, by the end of the book there's a twist that I won't ruin for you. It's this twist that makes me rethink the book's staying power. Because of this, I think I may jump on the second novel just to see if the series improves under the new dynamic. The verdict is still out, but based on this only lasting three books I'm thinking it was a failed attempt.
Buy a copy of "Rig Warrior" HERE
I’ll never live long enough to read the approximately 170 books that Harry Whittington wrote during his prolific career. Instead, I rely on others to identify his Greatest Hits, so I can use my limited reading time wisely. His 1954 paperback, “You’ll Die Next!”, was first published as half of an Ace Double (paired with “Drag the Dark” by Frederick C. Davis), and was recommended to me as being one of Whittington’s better noir novels.
Henry and Lila are a normal, suburban couple. One morning while Henry is enjoying Lila’s famous popovers for breakfast, the doorbell rings. When Henry opens the door, an unknown thug on his front stoop pulls him outside and beats the stuffing out of him. As the muscle leaves, he delivers Henry an ominous and threatening message from “Sammy.”
But who the hell is Sammy?
Henry quickly begins to suspect that it’s Lila with the secret in her past that inspired the beating. You see, Lila used to be a lounge singer, and she married Henry six months ago in a whirlwind romance. This always puzzled Henry because his sexy wife is way out of his league looks-wise. In any case, Lila denies knowing anyone named Sammy who would arrange for a savage beating like this.
More weirdness follows Henry that day including a mysterious letter, an attempt on his life, and an unjust suspension from work. Someone is trying to turn Henry’s life upside-down but why? Henry’s only play is to become his own investigator and locate the elusive Sammy. As the hunt unfolds, Henry’s problems escalate until he finds himself a man on the run - wanted for a crime he didn’t commit with police on his tail.
Whittington sets up the story nicely as a noir mystery, and, for the most part, the novel holds the reader’s attention quite nicely. But the worthiness of a book like this can be judged by the quality of the payoff at the end. Either the solution to the novel’s central mystery is reasonable and clever or you’ve just wasted your time on a pleasant flight without a smooth landing.
Unfortunately, Whittington fails the “clever solution” test in this particular mystery, and “You’ll Die Next!” left me feeling like I got a bum steer from whomever recommended it to me. The bad guys orchestrating Henry’s torment are wooden, and their motivation is rather silly. There are some decent scenes in this short book, but the payoff lands with a thud. As such, I need to file this one in the “don’t bother” pile. Your time is better spent elsewhere.
Buy a copy of this book HERE
