Charles Willeford (1919-1988) was a heroic and decorated U.S. Army veteran who served in World War 2, and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He continued with his military career after the war, and began writing in his free time while still enlisted. “Wild Wives” was released in 1956 and was his third published novel - originally packaged by Beacon Books as a double along with his 1953 debut, “High Priest of California.” Over the past 63 years, “Wild Wives” has been reprinted several times and is available today as a one-dollar eBook.
The short novel is a narrated by a low-rent San Francisco private eye named Jake Blake. His new client is Florence Weintraub, the voluptuous and promiscuous daughter of a prominent local architect. Daddy has hired a couple of goons to tail Florence and ensure she stays out of trouble. She hires Jake to help her shake the surveillance for a couple hours of unsupervised living. The prospect of a $25 daily fee is a payday too tasty for Jake to decline, so he accepts the gig.
While working the assignment, things abruptly shift gears from a remarkably-good private eye novel to a simply-amazing femme fatale noir story. If you read enough of these books, you learn the basic formula, but I never knew where this sexually-graphic story of action and violence was headed. In fact, I’m trying to remember the last crime novel I’ve read that was this awesome.
I recall reading “High Priest of California” years ago, and I’m comfortable saying that “Wild Wives” is a superior novel in every way. Willeford’s writing is excellent and it’s clear he was having a lot of fun with the tropes of the hardboiled detective genre (“She clung to me like jello in a molding tin.”). It’s difficult for me to recommend this short paperback with more enthusiasm than I already have. I wish I had enough dollars to buy the eBook for all Paperback Warrior readers and assign this to you as mandatory reading. For the love of all things holy, drop what you’re doing and read this novel. Highest recommendation.
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British author Peter Leslie (1922-2007) was a talented writer who penned a number of various literary works in his lifespan. Writing five novels in the popular television tie-in series Man from U.N.C.L.E., Leslie also penned a three book trilogy, Father Hayes, about a Catholic priest battling demonic forces. Along with a trilogy of Chicago gangster novels, Bruno Farrell (as Ed Mazzaro), action fans might remember Leslie best as a heavy contributor to the The Executioner series. Beginning with Ice Cold Kill (1984), Leslie went on to write seven The Executioner titles as well as five giant size Mack Bolan entries.
Ice Cold Kill offers an interesting assignment for Bolan. The Grand Duchess Rytova, an exile from Czarist Russia, asks Bolan to penetrate the Soviet Union and rescue an esteemed scientist. The scientist, Korsun, has created a complex computer that makes deductions that mirror the human brain. In effect, it can make inspired guesses bases on a infinite number of unrelated data. In reality, none of this really matters. We want to see Bolan kill bad guys.
The interesting aspect to the assignment is that Korsun's identity hasn't been fully established. All Rytova and Bolan know is that Korsun wants to defect from the Soviet Union to China, expecting to serve the cause of communism better. Bolan must escort her out of the country but also persuade her to defect to the west. Bolan's persuasion isn't typically in verbal debate. This mission adds a deeper depth to the typical run 'n gun.
Leslie provides a ton of fireworks through this 180-page advenute. From breaking into the Soviet Union, meeting Korsun (which turns out to be a surprise for the reader) and escaping, there is plenty of action sequences to please genre fans. Aside from the normal episodic delivery, Ice Cold Kill is much better than average and a firm entry in this long-running endeavor.
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By the time the 1970s rolled around, the quality of output from the Fawcett Gold Medal paperback imprint had decreased noticeably. The publisher that practically invented the paperback original was getting its clock cleaned by upstart violent adventure houses like Pinnacle Books anchored by series titles including ‘The Executioner’ by Don Pendleton. Fawcett Gold Medal needed to change with the times or disappear into obscurity.
Enter Basil Heatter.
During this life, Heater wrote 20 suspense and adventure novels - many with maritime themes, including the successful “Virgin Cay” for Fawcett Gold Medal in 1963. However, a decade later when the demands of the market called for bloody paperback vengeance, Heatter delivered his publisher “The Scarred Man.” It’s a violent and shocking revenge story about a mild-mannered attorney forced to hunt and kill the motorcycle punks who raped his wife, and it’s a successful entry in the vengeance genre.
William Shaw is a Manhattan corporate lawyer who is given some vacation time after a client prevails in a $40 million dispute. William and his wife head down to Florida, purchase an old wooden boat, and begin the repairs needed to sail to the Bahamas together. Through William’s first-person narration, Heatter does a great job conveying to the reader just how much William loves Stacey. She is everything to him.
One day they take a break from sanding, patching, and painting their boat and rent a Honda motorcycle to cruise through the Everglades of South Florida. William is in heaven riding with Stacey behind him, her arms wrapped around his torso. Out of nowhere, they are forced off the road by three motorcycle punks looking for kicks as they beat William’s body and face with a chain. As he’s fading into unconsciousness, William sees the naked ass of a leather-clad ruffian lowering himself onto Stacey while she is being restrained by the other thugs.
William awakens in the hospital (this is still the very beginning of the paperback) to find his face has been mutilated from the attack. He’ll be left with a nasty scar that will also provide the basis for the novel’s title. Stacey has also survived the attack - sedated and severely traumatized from the sexual assault. Unfortunately, neither William nor Stacey recall enough descriptive details to be useful to the police in identifying the attackers. It’s just another unsolved violent crime for the books.
Because this is a 1973 men’s adventure paperback written in the wake of “Death Wish”’ and “The Executioner,” it comes as no surprise to the reader that William decides to hunt and kill the barbarians on bikes who scarred his face and shattered his bride. William’s plan for infiltrating the biker gang subculture is pretty clever, and I won’t spoil it here. The bulk of the novel consists of the investigative steps undertaken by William to locate and get close to his wife’s assailants. As you might expect, neither motorcycle nor hippie youth culture get a particularly fair shake in the story, but this is a vendetta paperback, not a sociology textbook. You get what you pay for, and there’s no shortage of scenes featuring explosive violence.
I have no idea if “The Scarred Man” was a commercial success for Fawcett Gold Medal. I suspect that if it sold well, we would have seen “Scarred Man 2: Mississippi Mayhem”, but no such sequel exists. The stand-alone novel is better written than most entries in the 1970s vigilante genre and, at moments, packs a real adrenaline punch for the reader. Some of the dialogue with bikers and hippies was a bit cartoonish and stereotypical, but that’s par for the course in this genre. Because the novel is out-of-print, you’ll need to find yourself a copy on the used paperback market where it remains available at fairly reasonable prices. If violent revenge fantasies are your thing, “The Scarred Man” is certainly satisfying reading. Recommended.
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The king of the paperbacks, Harry Whittington, released “A Trap for Sam Dodge” as part of an ACE double in 1961. It was packaged with Lee Floren's “High Thunder”, but the book was later reprinted by ACE with Whittington's “Valley of Savage Men”. It's another rock-solid western entry from a master of the genre.
The book begins as Sam Dodge returns to the small town of Bent River. Dodge had originally ran for sheriff in the town, opposing his friend Miles Ringo. Ringo eventually won the election and Dodge left town. Now, Dodge has returned for Ringo's funeral, and to find some answers to his mysterious murder.
Dodge learns that Ringo was shot in the chest by an unknown assailant behind the horse corral. Dodge feels that Ringo was smart and deadly fast with a gun. No one could have shot Ringo face to face. There has to be more to the murder than what Marshall Sid Kane explains. Heaping even more intrigue onto the crime is the fact that Kane is now dating Ringo's widow Mae. So soon? Dodge feels that Kane, Judge Wilkes and land baron Kurt Duvall all had a hand in Ringo's murder.
Whittington spins this western entry into the proverbial “whodunit” and why. While there's a great deal of crime mystery in the presentation, the author still injects a surprising amount of action into the narrative. While Dodge discovers the truth, he's forced to outgun Duvall's hired hands while also protecting two Mexican farmer's from Duvall's aggressive land grab.
While firmly entrenched in the “land baron bullies the town” formula, Whittington adds enough surprising elements to make this a delight to read. It's short, fast-paced, engaging and ultimately a one-sit read.
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Between 1955 and 1992, William Campbell Gault authored 14 novels starring Hollywood private investigator - and former L.A. Rams guard - Brock Callahan. I’m told the books stand-alone well enough, so I’m starting the series with the 1956 second installment, “Day of the Ram,” a hardboiled mystery that brings Callahan back into the world of NFL football.
It’s pre-season for the L.A. Rams who just beat George Hallas’ Chicago Bears in an exhibition game thanks to the leadership of rookie quarterback, Johnny Quirk. Brock knows a thing or two about pro-football and believes that it’s entirely possible that Quirk could be one of the immortals of the game. As such, he’s surprised when Quirk shows up at his office seeking to engage Brock’s investigative services. Quirk has received a vague but threatening letter that may have been from an underworld sports gambler seeking to manipulate his performance on the field, and he wants Brock to get to the bottom of the situation.
Brock loops the police into his investigation and is relegated to nighttime protection detail of the football prodigy. When the stakes increase with a murder, Brock begins investigating in tandem with the police causing the working relationship to become strained, and the story becomes a rather commonplace private eye mystery with clues, suspects, red herrings, and tough-guy stuff.
I can’t imagine anyone enjoying this book if they don’t have an interest in NFL football. If that’s your bag, the inside information presented to the reader about nuances of the game and players’ lives will be a fascinating window dressing for a pretty straightforward, by-the-numbers mystery story. Of particular interest is the league’s determined efforts to keep the sport free of underworld gambling influence, so it doesn’t wind up like boxing.
Brock is a likable character - tough but self-deprecating and fiercely loyal to his new girlfriend, Jan, who plays a recurring and evolving role in Brock’s life over the entire series of paperbacks. Overall, there’s nothing really to dislike about “Day of the Ram” - particularly for fans of private eye mysteries and the NFL. Recommended.
Addendum
Here is the series order for the Brock Callahan books:
1. Ring Around the Rosa (1955, also titled: Murder in the Raw)
2. Day of the Ram (1956)
3. The Convertible Hearse (1957)
4. Come Die With Me (1959)
5. Vein of Violence (1961)
6. County Kill (1962)
7. Dead Hero (1963)
8. The Bad Samaritan (1982)
9. The Cana Diversion (1982; crossover with the author’s other series character, Joe Puma)
10. Death in Donegal Bay (1984)
11. The Dead Seed (1985)
12. The Chicano War (1986)
13. Cat and Mouse (1988)
14. Dead Pigeon (1992)
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Dead Low Tide was John D. MacDonald’s sixth published novel. The 1953 Fawcett Gold Medal release is a tasty bit of Florida noir that predates his iconic Travis McGee series by over a decade and remains a fresh and exciting crime thriller 66 years later. The book is still in print currently with a loving introduction by Dean R. Koontz.
The narrator of Dead Low Tide is the extremely likable Andy McClintock, an over-qualified clerk with a business degree from Syracuse working for a Florida gulf-coast home-builder named John Long. One night, Andy is visited by his boss’ wife at home. Mrs. Long is concerned that her husband has recently been behaving strangely and asks Andy to snoop around and determine what’s happening. Andy is taken aback by both the visit but reluctantly gets roped into helping her.
The paperback’s back-cover synopsis reveals that Mr. Long is murdered with Andy as the primary suspect. Of course, it falls upon Andy to solve the crime and save his own hide. It’s a setup you’ve read before, and the author’s execution of the basic murder mystery format is predictably solid. The appeal of this vintage paperback is that MacDonald’s writing is top-notch, and the reader really gets to know and love Andy through the first-person narration. MacDonald touches on many of the themes he explores decades later in the Travis McGee books - most notably the ins-and-outs of real estate development on Florida’s coasts. Moreover, he makes it interesting, and you walk away knowing a thing or two you didn’t know before.
MacDonald creates a vivid supporting cast particularly in the form of Andy’s buxom neighbor with whom he used to sleep before they decided to just be friends and confidantes. The hapless police chief, the intrepid local reporter, and the clever town attorney are also examples of superior characterization in this thin, fast-moving novel.
I’ve been working my way through MacDonald’s stand-alone novels and the quality varies wildly. Dead Low Tide is a definite winner in the bunch - perhaps the best I’ve read thus far. The central mystery is compelling but not groundbreaking. However, the writing is so good that you won’t want it to end. Highly recommended. Get it HERE.
Iconic American author Louis L'Amour is prominently associated with his western legacy. His short-stories and novels delighted western fans for decades. While known for his sweeping frontier sagas, L'Amour also wrote a number of novellas and short-stories for the pulps, including “Hills of Homicide”, which originally appeared in Detective Tales in May, 1949. A pulp themed short-story collection was released in 1983, entitled “Hills of Homicide”, which featured this story along with L'Amour's “I Hate to Tell his Widow”, “Collect from a Corpse”, “Stay Out of my Nightmare!” and “Street of Lost Corpses”.
The story begins with a private investigator arriving in the desert town of Ranagat. Written in the first-person, the premise unfolds in a verbal exchange with a cab driver. A man named Bitner has been murdered in his cliff-side cabin. The main suspects are Johnny Holben, a feuding neighbor from the bottom of the ridge, Bitner's girlfriend Karen and a rowdy gambler named Blacky Caronna, who had been fighting with Bitner recently.
The two interesting aspects to the case: 1) Bitner's house sits on it's cliff-side retreat completely free of any paths or roads aside from the one that passes directly by the Holben place. 2) Our main character, the investigator, has been hired by Blacky Caronna to find evidence that proves he is innocent. But, as the story evolves, all signs point to Caronna as being the prime suspect. Surely the killer wouldn't hire a private investigator for a murder he committed, right?
L'Amour's whodunit is 53 pages of standard 80s paperback. While novella length, it feels like a full-length novel. It's procedural, featuring an alliance with the town sheriff, and of course includes the obligatory fist-fight, well-scripted in the L'Amour boxing style. In some ways it's the locked room mystery with a handful of possible killers. The surprise is unveiled three-fourths in, delivering a quality payout for what is ultimately an entertaining read.
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