Clifton Adams (1919-1971) was primarily known as a western writer in the 1950s and 1960s, but he also authored a handful of solid noir crime paperbacks that were largely forgotten until they were resurrected by reprint publisher Stark House. “Whom Gods Destroy” from 1953 was a Fawcett Gold Medal original that has been re-released as a double along with “Death’s Sweet Song.”
Our narrator, Roy Foley, is a fry cook at a diner who receives word that his father has just died. Roy reluctantly takes a Greyhound bus back to Oklahoma to make the burial arrangements for the town’s drunken cobbler. This brings back a flood of good and bad memories from Roy’s youth that drive the plot in this thin paperback.
A flashback chapter fills the reader in on Roy’s background. He grew up barefoot and dirt poor in the hard-scrabble part of town. Despite these humble origins, Roy was the town’s star quarterback and smarter than most of the rich kids in his school. He had a crush on the wealthy Lola and dreamed of going to college on a scholarship and making something of himself.
All this came crashing down when Lola laughed in his face at the prospect of them ever being together. Disgraced, Roy left town and never returned until it became time to bury his father 14 years later. Upon his return to his hometown, he learns that Lola is married to a highly-regarded pillar in the community.
After the Volstead Act ended prohibition in the U.S., Oklahoma was one of two states that continued to outlaw alcohol - a practice that continued for over twenty years thereafter. This kept booze bootleggers in business in Oklahoma and presents a money-making opportunity for Roy when he meets up with an old high school buddy in the smuggling business. Roy wants to get in the illegal liquor racket figuring it will make more than fry-cooking and might just show Lola that he isn’t actually white trash.
The bootlegging business is intertwined with local public corruption, and that brings Roy and Lola back into the same orbit. The hurt and hard feelings from a high school snub never fully go away and motivate Roy to climb his way up the bootlegging ladder as a form of comeuppance. His obsession with Lola never dissipates and fuels many bad decisions over the course of the novel.
Like his other noir books, “Whom Gods Destroy” is compelling as hell. The only problem is that Roy is more than a bit of a jackass, and it’s hard to root for him knowing that everything he does is motivated by avenging hurt feelings from his adolescence. You really have to be comfortable with a seriously-flawed main character to enjoy this paperback. Even so, the plot twists and turns in delightful ways that keep the pages turning long after bedtime. Highly recommended.
Postscript:
I wish Clifton Adams wrote more crime novels in his career. I’m only aware of five:
Death’s Sweet Song
Whom Gods Destroy
Never Say No To A Killer (as Jonathan Gant)
The Very Wicked (as Nick Hudson)
The Long Vendetta (as Jonathan Gant)
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Author Lewis B. Patten (1915-1981), born in Denver, Colorado, served in the U.S. Navy from 1933-1937. Later, he was educated at the University of Denver and became an auditor for the Colorado Department of Revenue. It was in this 1940s period that he began his writing endeavors. His first novel, “Massacre at White River”, was published in 1952. It was the first of more than 90 western novels, three of which won Golden Spur Awards. My first Patten review is a 1978 coming of age tale entitled “Death Rides a Black Horse”.
We're introduced to 15-year old Frank Halliday and his father Walter. The two live on a sweeping 200,000+ acre ranch in Wyoming. The ranch foreman is Rafe and his second command is Standing Bear. This is important in the ranch hierarchy due to Walter's fatal fall from a horse. Frank attends the reading of the will and finds that his father has left a house and plenty of farm land to a neighboring girlfriend. The ranch and lucrative funds are trusted to Frank for distribution on his 21st birthday. Rafe, dedicating the majority of his life to the Halliday Ranch, is left with 5K and a lifetime job. The kicker – the entire spread goes to Rafe in the event of Frank's death prior to age 21. This opens the door for Patten's jealousy ridden murder narrative to fully develop.
Frank, understanding Rafe's disappointment, senses that his life may be in danger. Soon, he's asked to ride out and check one of the springs. He's ambushed by two rustlers and forced to kill them in the attack. In his confusion, Frank runs away fearing that Rafe and Standing Bear will kill him upon his return to the ranch. The book drifts into Frank hopping trains, stealing horses, befriending Cherokees and eventually meeting the love interest Susan. This middle portion reads like a brisk adventure tale.
The book's final quarter has Frank shooting it out with more hired killers, realizing that his father's own money (remember the 5K to Rafe?) is being utilized to murder him. While the reader suspects the finale will be a whirlwind firefight in the mountains, it actually equates to a jail scene with an angry mob hungry for a lynching. How we get there is an interesting twist, proving that Patten had a few cards up his sleeve to avoid the generic western formula.
Again, this is my first foray into the bibliography of Patten. Like my recent Frank Gruber read, I just find it amazing that so many great westerns and western writers are out there even when you look beyond genre cornerstones like Zane Grey, L'Amour and Johnstone. For me, I've already purchased six more Pattens and have read that some of his finest works are “A Killing at Kiowa” (1972) and “Ride a Crooked Trail” (1976). I'm on it!
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Between 1949 and 1956, thirteen original crime novels were released under the name Robert O. Saber by a variety of paperback publishing houses. Most of these were private eye books starring an assortment of hardboiled heroes including Phil Keene, Hal Cooper, Max Keene, and Carl Good.
Consistent with the era, the covers of Saber’s paperbacks featured lushly-painted illustrations depicting scantily-clad women, square-jawed heroes, and often a murder weapon nearby. When compared to the lousy cover art we see today, the packaging of these vintage novels demand that the books be purchased and read. Quite deservedly, the author was also a member of the Mystery Writers of America.
All of this begs the question: Who the hell was Robert O. Saber?
Milton Ozaki was a Wisconsin-born, Japanese-American crime fiction author who wrote mass-market paperbacks under his own name as well as the pseudonym Robert O. Saber in the 1950s while living in Chicago and also operating two beauty shops. The economic realities of the publishing world of the 1950s forced many writers to employ pseudonyms to make a living. Handi-Books, for example, probably didn’t want to flood the market with books by Ozaki, so about half of his novels were published under the Saber pen-name. No harm. No foul. Everybody wins.
However, it appears that his double-identity and 27 published novels - plus women’s hair styling - failed to bring Ozaki the lifetime of financial security he desired. As such, he decided to channel his creative energies elsewhere. Life began imitating art as the man who was author of many heist and con-man stories began to turn his fiction into a dark reality.
In the 1970s, Ozaki began operating a “diploma mill” mail-order scam involving the issuance of phony college degrees from non-existent universities including “Colorado State Christian College” and “Hamilton State University” in exchange for a $100 donation to the fake schools. Campus life at these universities must have been rather mundane since they were nothing but post office boxes in Colorado (As an aside, if your urologist received his degree from either university, you may want to get your vasectomy elsewhere). After realizing $70,000 from the scam, the courts ordered him to knock it off in 1974, according to an article by Mike Royko in the Chicago Daily News.
It seems that 1974 was a doubly-bad year for Ozaki who was also sued by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office for another con-game he operated. Ozaki was director of “Ko-Zee Products Corporation” where he sold a phony “mini-turbo charger” guaranteed to give your car 37% better gas mileage. The device didn’t work, but the government’s action did. The former crime writer turned scammer was put out of business, again.
Additionally, Ozaki ran a mail-order school teaching paying students how to develop their powers of E.S.P. and hypnosis. Given this skill set, you’d think Ozaki would have seen the government investigations coming.
Regarding his multitude of failures as a professional grifter, Ozaki said, “We are trying to do good work, and we just ran afoul of these archaic-minded bureaucrats.” This quote sounds like a re-working of the famous lament of criminals from the Scooby-Doo universe, “And it would have worked if it weren’t for you meddling kids.”
Ozaki died in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 1989 at the age of 76, and many of his mystery books are still available as eBooks and paperback reprints.
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Irish born Peter McCurtin moved to America in the early 1950s. After co-owning a bookstore, he launched his writing career with “Mafioso” in 1970. While his novels were typically westerns and mob-inspired action, he wrote the WW2 prison novel “Escape from Devil's Island” in 1971 for Belmont. It was republished with alternate artwork in 1974 to capture “Papillon” movie fans from the prior year. Ironically, that book cover not only mentions “...in the savage tradition of Papillon!” but features artwork of two men bearing the likeness of Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. The novel and movie are both based on the real life Henri Charriere's time in the French Guyana penal system.
The novel introduces us to the notorious Devil's Island in the late 1930s French Guyana. Both Captain Boudreau and Colonel Gamillard run the prison, both sadistic foremen that seemingly enjoy their time lopping off heads at the guillotine. As one prisoner meets his demise, American inmate Gendron is introduced to the reader. He was a former Marine Lieutenant working at the Paris Embassy when he was approached by a wealthy businessman to become his personal bodyguard. Gendron ends up in the sack with the man's young wife, a fight ensues and Gendron shoots and kills the man. But, there's early hints that maybe Gendron was just covering for the vengeful lover and took the time. He's now the only American in the prison colony, and an easy target for Colonel Gamillard and the inmates.
Make no bones about it, “Escape from Devil's Island” is emphatically brutal. It's surely not written for sensitive readers, and this author utilizes homosexuals as villains – unfortunately. It's a product of the time, and like a lot of jailbreak books, it features gay rape in some extremely violent scenes. When choosing factions, there's a gay rapist union backed by sadomasochist officer Ducharme. The group, backed by Boudreu and a Belgian ex-boxer named Radisson, target Gendron. This culminates in one of the best fisticuffs I've read in a while (13 pages worth!), leading to a brutal “tiger cage” month for our protagonist.
Inevitably, we know this is a jailbreak novel. As the pacing picks up, Gendron makes the decision to escape. Staying on the island is certain death, and there are rumors of the Nazis occupying the prison in the coming days. Alliances are made, plans are constructed and soon there's an exciting gun fight in the works.
The bottom line - McCurtin delivers one of the better escape novels I've read. Adventure, survival, gun fights and brawls are the chief ingredients that make this sort of book rise above the norm. At an easy 150-pages and manageable font size, there's no reason not to work this one into your “need to read” list.
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Kermit Jaediker was a newspaper reporter and Golden Age comic book writer during who shifted genres to write a paperback original crime novel called “Hero’s Lust” that was released in 1953 by upstart publisher Lion Books. Jaediker’s noir novel has recently been given new life through a reprint by Stark House who co-packaged the short book with two other Lion releases from the 1950s.
Red is a newspaperman covering city hall in corrupt Crescent City. Since he was a young reporter, Red has been taking bribes to write stories in the paper favorable to the local political machine and the all-powerful Mayor - fake news before it was a thing. As a result of his boosted income and status, Red is a real man about town driving a convertible and bedding lots of fine dames.
Red’s comfortable life as a hack for the current administration is placed in jeopardy by an anti-corruption mayoral candidate who appears to be gaining traction with the voters. The Mayor has a plan that will ensure his victory and needs Red’s help to hype it. The plan is to campaign on his administration’s crowning achievement - a state-of-the-art hospital complex for the poor in the city’s second ward.
(As an aside, everything about this novel makes me think it’s really about Chicago’s powerful political machines, and the hospital in question is really Cook County Hospital. However, the author was an east coast guy, so it’s also entirely possible that I’m just full of beans.)
The Mayor wants Red to do a series of articles trumpeting the hospital’s positive impact on the community. Red’s counter-proposal is to make the articles a series of human interest stories following a single patient through the hospital’s treatments. Red thinks the articles will have more impact if the sympathetic patient is “A dame. Pretty. Stacked.”
Enter Ann Porter. Pretty. Stacked. And suffering from tuberculosis so bad that she needs to have part of her lung removed. Red is to be her shadow through the procedure while documenting it all for his newspaper readers to illustrate the societal worth of the new hospital and delivering the Mayor an easy re-election. In the process of documenting Ann’s medical procedures, an intimacy between Red and Ann develops that helps illustrate Red’s humanity but opens the door to all sorts of derivative problems for the compromised reporter.
Meanwhile, Red is being courted by a rival newspaper with a reform agenda interested in leveraging Red’s political knowledge to expose the Mayor’s corruption. Is Red willing to risk his comfortable life of status to be a real investigative reporter? What are the risks of being a snitch against the political machine who gave him everything? This is one of those stories where a morally-compromised man finds himself at a fork in the road and needs to make a tough choice between right and wrong with life-or-death consequences.
“Hero’s Lust” is filled with inside info on the operations of the 1950s newspaper business and the blood-on-the-knuckles operation of a corrupt urban political machine. It’s a fascinating read and Jaediker’s writing is top notch. Anyone who considers himself a fan of 1950s hardboiled crime, should consider this one required reading. Highly recommended.
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Author Ralph Hayes has penned an incredible amount of action novels. He launched his vigilante inspired series 'The Hunter' in 1975. Adding to the surplus of genre paperbacks, Leisure released five books of the series that same year. With book number three, “A Taste for Blood”, the formula is altered. Instead of series heroes John Yard and Moses Ngala tracking criminals, the two are thrust into a harrowing survival yarn that doesn't involve firearms.
The book's opening introduces us to the various characters that will eventually be partnered with Yard and Moses in the African swamps:
-Liu Chi-Han, a hatchet man for budding terrorist groups
-Wealthy married couple Demetrios and Lisa Tzanni
-Vacationer Kanak Rawal and 10-yr old son Nahki
-Israeli policeman Yigael Bialik and his Islamic terrorist prisoner Osman
-Brush pilot Colin Bourke
This cabaret of characters, including Yard and Moses, boards a Cesna plane in Narobi departing for the city of Khartoum in Sudan. Yard, suspecting the plane requires much needed repairs, hesitantly agrees to board while questioning Bourke's flying skills. About 200 miles north of Juba the plane crashes into a desolate stretch of swampland. Very little water and food forces the group on a trek to civilization. That's Hayes backdrop, and he does a splendid job fashioning an action-adventure story out of a plane crash survival recipe.
There's immediate discord in the ranks as the arrogant Bourke refuses to leave the plane. Factions are formed and eventually they all agree to designate Yard the leader. Soon, Chi-Han begins to calculate rations and bodies, positioning himself to conveniently kill a few of the group in the night. Osman's background as a terrorist makes for an easy alliance, and the book eventually moves into Yard/Moses vs Chi-Han while supplies run out.
Hayes is terrific here, making 'The Hunter' series 3 for 3. The intrigue, deception and fortitude are all variables in this human experiment. Sure, the jungle adventure has been done to death (Hayes may have taken liberties with Robert Westerby's 1969 novel “The Jungle”) but the last 25-pages places the action on urban streets and plays on the general vigilante theme of the first two novels. The end result is another stellar effort from an under-rated author.
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The three-book Pepperoni Hero series debuted in 1975 and was probably the oddest named series in the men’s adventure genre. It’s hard to learn much about the author, Bill Kelly (Copyright: William Kelly), because there have been dozens of novelists with the same name over the past 50 years. The hard-to-acquire series is a running joke among collectors and fans of the genre, but I’ve never met anyone who has actually read one. I decided to take the plunge.
First, Pepperoni Hero is his real name. The first name is from a drunken father and the last name was historically truncated from Heropoulus by a Greek immigrant ancestor, yet his friends call him Pep or Pepper. The novel is a low-rent tribute (okay, rip-off) to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. For example, McGee’ houseboat, “The Busted Flush,” is named after the poker hand that won him the boat. Pepper’s houseboat is called “Crap” because he won his boat in a dice game. On the book’s first page, Pep is in bed reading “John D. MacDonald’s latest Travis McGee satire,” and Pep drinks Plymouth Gin on the rocks, just like McGee. At times, its difficult to tell if this book is outright parody, fan fiction or just an earnest - but inferior- cover band.
Like McGee, Pep is a boat bum with the unusual twist that he’s doing it in Chicago while moored at Navy Pier Marina. He works as an adventurer for hire helping people who can’t enlist the help of the law for one reason or another. This 188-page paperback is one long flashback with Pep recounting his life story to the reader. Some of the stories he tells about his checkered past are very compelling, but I kept wondering when the novel was going to start. Then, all of a sudden, I realized that one of those old war stories was, in fact, the plot of the novel.
The plot deals with Pep helping an old Vietnam War buddy who wants Pep to use his superior poker skills to clean out his wealthy brother-in-law. The reason this is important involves a convoluted and rather stupid sibling rivalry and a dead man’s will with millions at stake. This turns into a murder plot with an impotent bad guy involved in sexual torture, homemade porno movies, and blackmail. Meanwhile, Pep gets laid a lot.
Kelly is actually a pretty good writer but his plotting is an abomination. He does seem to know his way around the neighborhoods and norms of Chicago. The action scenes are well-described, and Pep is a credible badass. The sex scenes, and there are many, are plenty graphic. Finally, the author gives Pep an eight-inch dong - consistent with the league minimum for numbered 1970s paperbacks.
Despite these mitigating factors, the bottom line is that no one in his right mind would ever recommend this mess of a novel to you for anything other than the novelty of the cover. By all means, buy it and display it proudly. But for heaven’s sake, please don’t read it. Only one of us should have to endure this mess of a paperback.
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