Before his popular Earl Drake series of heist adventures, Dan J. Marlowe authored a five-book series of hotel detective novels. Beginning with the 1959 debut, Doorway to Death, Marlowe introduced Johnny Killain, a brawny WW2 veteran who works nights at the Hotel Duarte in New York City. The author's consistent cast of characters includes Sally, the building's switchboard operator who also serves as Killain's main squeeze. I was thrilled with the series first two installments and I have been anxious to read the third entry, Doom Service (1960).
In the book's opening chapter, Killain receives a call from a bartender at the Rollin' Stone Tavern asking for him to pick up “his boy”. Readers quickly learn that the boy is Sally's brother Charlie, a young and successful boxer. Earlier in the night, Charlie experienced his first loss in a high-profile bout. Many think the match was fixed and that getting knocked-out in the sixth round was actually a high-priced dive. Killain finds Charlie nearly dead drunk at the bar and offers to take him home. However, two armed thugs barge into the bar and Charlie is fatally shot.
Readers follow Killain as he backtracks the events leading up to Charlie's boxing loss. In doing so, Killain stumbles upon the lucrative gambling circuit and a high-roller named Manfredi. Killain learns that Charlie was supposed to lose in the fourth round and that Manfredi had lost a fortune on the fight. Adding to the confusion is Sally's discovery that Charlie was holding over $100K in his bank deposit book. Was this a payout to lose in the fourth or sixth round? Did someone “re-fix” the fight for the sixth round to throw Manfredi? The answer is buried in a cast of boxing characters from referees to fight veterans, from ringside doctors to journalists. By attempting to solve Charlie's murder, Killain exposes the city's core of corruption.
Despite its silly name, Doom Service was an iron-fisted, hardboiled crime novel that should appeal to fans of the “no nonsense” approach of Mickey Spillane. There's crooked guys, shady ladies and a lot of tough guy, knuckle-up negotiations. Marlowe spends a few chapters revealing the intricacies of Sally's inheritance in terms of IRS regulations, estate taxes and monetary penalties. I'm guessing that Marlowe wrote this in the midst of settling his wife's estate – she died in 1957 – or this was simply an exercise to reveal what he learned from the experience. It felt a little out of place, but eventually circles back to the central story and ties in to Charlie's possession of the funds.
Doom Service is on par with the first two Johnny Killain novels although I would be remiss if I didn't criticize the author's setting of the story. I enjoyed the prior books due to Killain working inside of the hotel, not out of it. This novel puts more emphasis on Killain as a private-eye, including romps with a sexy secretary and a lounge act singer. I think I prefer Killain solving mysteries involving dead guests or murder inside the hotel. Nevertheless, Doom Service delivered high-quality goods right to my doorstep.
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Female authors are rather underrepresented at Paperback Warrior (nothing personal, ladies!), so we put our feelers out for book recommendations of hardboiled vintage crime fiction by women. One name that kept popping up was Helen Nielsen (1918-2002), a popular mystery author of the 1950s and 1960s who also wrote TV episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Perry Mason. My introduction to her work was the 1953 paperback, Detour to Death (also released as just Detour). The novel remains available today as a cheap ebook and audiobook - both free with a Kindle Unlimited subscription.
Danny Ross is an 18 year-old drifter hitchhiking south from Chicago in search of a fresh start. He gets a ride with a kindly physician named Dr. Gaynor who needs to make a quick detour in the small town of Mountain View where the doc has patients among the locals. After a brief visit at the town’s diner, the Doc heads back to his car where Danny finds him minutes later murdered from a blow to a head. All in all, it’s a pretty basic setup for a pretty standard whodunnit.
Because Danny is both a stranger in town and the one who found the bludgeoned doctor, he’s immediately the prime suspect for the murder and detained pending further police investigation (i.e. beatings). Fortunately, two attorneys - one a drunk and the other an accomplished trial lawyer - team up to investigate the matter to learn the truth. This leads to some astonishingly unrealistic scenes of investigative procedures in which the attorney drags along both the sheriff and Danny to examine the crime scene and interview witnesses in a handful of scenes that defy any understanding of basic law enforcement operations.
While Nielsen could craft a decent mystery with solid prose, she introduces way, way too many characters for a 192 page book. I get that it’s a small town and a lot of people are suspects with varying motives, but I needed a Game of Thrones-style org chart to keep track of the townsfolk, their alliances, and their grievances.
Back to the woman-thing, Nielsen made some narrative choices that I think her male contemporaries would have done way differently. For example, the sheriff beats Danny to a bloody pulp to elicit a confession, but this was done off-page. Does anyone think that author Dan J. Marlowe would have passed up the opportunity to chronicle every nose-crushing blow? There were other examples where Nielsen pulled punches - both literally and figuratively - that serve to make the novel rather soft-boiled.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Detour to Death was just a paint-by-numbers mystery whodunnit. Nielsen could clearly write well enough, but her plotting in this one was a real snooze. Seeing the shortcomings of Detour to Death through a gendered prism may not be fair to other female authors, but we also shouldn’t be grading this softball of a novel on a curve just because the writer was a lady. There were certainly plenty of crappy crime novels written by both men and women in the 1950s. I was just hoping for something better given Nielsen’s reputation for quality.
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Frederick Lorenz was the pseudonym used by Lorenz Heller (1911-????) for a handful of paperback crime novels released by Lion Books in the 1950s. The New Jersey native worked as a seaman on a freighter, so it’s only fitting that I’m introduced to his body of work through his shipwreck novel A Rage at Sea from June 1953. Best of all, the book has been reprinted by Stark House Crime Classics as a double along with Lorenz’s A Party Every Night and an informative introduction by Nicholas Litchfield.
The protagonist of A Rage at Sea is Miami drunkard Frank Dixon, a former boat captain who lost his ship in a poker game and now is in the process of drinking himself to death. Out of nowhere, an opportunity arises for Dixon to captain a rich man’s yacht on a four-month cruise through the Bahamas and into the Virgin Islands. Broke and in need of a change, Dixon accepts the gig.
The owner of the yacht is an obese and lazy millionaire playboy named Charles Allard who doesn’t know the first thing about boating. He relies on Theron Addams, his right-hand man, purser, cook, and steward. Addams is also a con-man fueled by greed and love of money ripping off Allard every day of the journey. Dixon’s only reliable ally on the boat is the young engineer named Wirt, but he’s not a man you ever want to cross.
Many authors of nautical fiction fall into the trap of getting extra-technical with their level of boating detail in the narrative. Fortunately, Lorenz avoids that literary pitfall. Nearly the entire first half of the paperback was at-sea, but the reader was able to follow the action without any trouble because the author made the narrative about the four main characters. In fact, I can’t recall a lean crime paperback from the 1950s with character development handled more adeptly than A Rage at Sea.
It’s almost halfway through the novel that an accident leaves the foursome stranded on a deserted Caribbean island - as promised in the book’s synopsis. It’s then that the slow-burn novel begins to boil a bit, but it remains a character drama with shifting alliances and resentments simmering from their time at sea together. The bad blood and bruised egos evolve into threats of real violence and acts of compromised ethics and actual heroism.
A Rage at Sea isn’t particularly action-packed, but the author’s excellent writing keep the pages flying by. To be sure, it’s an odd book - more cerebral than most paperbacks of its type. Dixon is a flawed, but logical, mostly honorable and highly-competent, hero. He’s exactly the kind of guy you’d want to be stranded with on a deserted island. I really liked A Rage at Sea, but I could see it being polarizing for readers who want a bit more swashbuckling in their maritime adventures. Recommended.
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On Paperback Warrior Podcast Episode 39, we take a deep-dive into the crime fiction work of Wade Miller, including a review of “Kitten with a Whip.” A review of Mickey Spillane’s “My Gun is Quick” inspires a discussion of 1940s vs. 1950s crime fiction with lots of vintage paperback fun starring Eric and Tom! You can stream the show at below or listen on any podcast app. Download directly HERE.
Listen to "Episode 39: Wade Miller" on Spreaker.
Before he was a mainstay on the bestseller list, Great Britain’s Ken Follett began his career as a novelist with a trilogy of books released in 1974 and 1975 starring a wealthy businessman-sleuth named Apples Carstairs. The slim paperback originals were published under the pseudonym Simon Myles and were reprinted under Follett’s own name when he became a big-money brand name. The first book in the series was titled The Big Needle, later released in the U.S. as The Big Apple before reverting to the original title for subsequent reprints.
The story opens in London with Apple in bed with his two girlfriends - one white, one black (ahhh, 1974) - when he is awakened by a visit from an unexpected guest, his ex-wife. She tells Apple that their 17 year-old daughter is in the hospital following a heroin overdose. Rather than sitting vigil by his daughter’s bedside, our hero takes to the streets with a vow to find and kill the pusher who supplied his kid with the smack.
Apples beats the tar out of a junkie and learns that the dealer is a spade (again, 1974) named Harry Hat who, you guessed it, wears flamboyant pimp hats. Harry Hat proves to be a more elusive and dangerous foe than Apples anticipated as the dealer leaves a trail of beatings, kidnappings and rapes behind.
I was hoping Follett had something clever in store for the manhunt, but instead Apples goes to great lengths to become a heroin supplier to infiltrate the London supply chain from above. From this vantage point, he learns that the heroin gang stretches deeper into the fabric of London’s elite - far beyond his original target of Harry Hat. This investigation was interspersed with graphic sex scenes every few chapters leading up to the inevitable confrontation between Apples and his shadowy enemy.
Follett said he wrote these books in his 20s to raise some car repair money, and that mostly shows. He became a way better writer coinciding with his fame and success as a bestseller. I think the best thing that could be said about Apples Carstairs #1 is that it was a quick read at 175 big-font pages. I suppose it wasn’t a miserable way to kill a couple hours, but in a world with infinite choices, why bother with mediocrity?
Addendum:
The Apples Carstairs series order is as follows:
1. The Big Needle (aka: the Big Apple), 1974
2. The Big Black, 1974
3. The Big Hit, 1975
Be warned: Books two and three are almost impossible to find. Based on book one’s middling quality, I wouldn’t bother seeking out the other two. Life, after all, is short.
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Although he authored more than 170 novels during his 40-year career, only a small fraction of Harry Whittington’s books are available today in any format. I’m hoping that one day the Whittington Estate can marry up with an enterprising publisher to keep the author’s back catalog alive through modern reprints and ebooks. Thankfully, Stark House Press are doing a great job with reprinting a lot of the authors work, including Hell Can Wait, a 1960 paperback that is now available as a twofer with Whittington's other Hellish novel, A Ticket to Hell.
Our narrator is Greg Morris and he has come to the backwoods town of Koons Mills with a score to settle. Over a year ago, Greg’s wife was killed in a car accident caused by the town’s boss, Saul Koons. At a subsequent civil trial, Koons arranged for false testimony to get himself off the hook and convince the court that the accident was Greg’s fault. After spending a year away mourning the loss of his wife, Greg is back in Koons Mills hell-bent on justice and revenge.
Upon arrival, Greg gets his ass kicked by a group of Koons’ employees while the town’s sheriff declines to interfere. It becomes clear that no one has any interest in helping Greg bring down the town’s patriarch and primary employer. If Hell Can Wait had been written by Don Pendleton, Greg would have gotten his satisfaction with a long gun and a sniper scope. But this is a Harry Whittington paperback, so what does he do? He tries to seduce Koons’ saucy young wife.
Hell Can Wait is a slow-burn of a novel but very compelling. It’s more of a mainstream revenge story than a normal crime fiction paperback. Well, the ending was pure noir, but I won’t spoil it here. Greg is a menacing and rather creepy character for a protagonist, and Koons is a very nuanced villain whose behavior is a bit odd throughout the book - until the twisty ending explains all. At no point did I really know where the plot was headed, which is saying a lot in a genre that usually abides by fairly rigid formulas.
Overall, I can recommend Hell Can Wait as a fun puzzle-box of a vintage paperback. It’s not quite top-tier Harry Whittington, but it will certainly be on your mind long after the last of the 144 pages are done.
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John Creasey (1908-1973) authored hundreds of crime novels over a literary career that deployed nearly 30 pseudonyms. One of the British author's earliest works was The Baron series (as Anthony Morton, 1937-1979) of novels starring an ex-jewel thief named John Mannering. Perhaps his most popular series is The Toff (1938-1978), an aristocratic sleuth with a literary resemblance to The Saint. I discovered a 1968 paperback titled Gideon's River on my bookshelf. The author was listed as J.J. Marric, but after brief research I learned that this was part of another series of novels authored by Creasey. The series stars Commander George Gideon of the Scotland Yard's Criminal Investigation Department. Gideon's River is the 14th installment and was published in 1968 by Popular Library.
The novel features Gideon working with various law enforcement agencies along the Thames River to solve a diamond heist. But, in what appears to be a series consistency, the author presents a number of crimes for Gideon's team to investigate. This is unlike other crime-fiction novels where one crime or mystery is the narrative's focus. In Creasey's series, Gideon must solve two to three mysteries per book. Along with the diamond heist, this installment features Gideon searching for a missing girl while also preparing his department for a planned robbery aboard a large pleasure boat called River Belle.
In the book's opening pages, the Thames Division of the Metropolitan Police locate a satchel underwater containing a number of industrial diamonds. Gideon assigns Detective Micklewright onto the case which eventually leads to a group of smugglers led by a brutal and sadistic criminal named Screw Smith. With agency resources, the diamond smuggling is traced back to Denmark but leaves Gideon and his department in a heated political exchange with the Dutch Police.
Gideon's own investigation surfaces when a 13-yr old girl goes missing after school. Creasey's narrative focuses on the procedural investigation but also allows readers the girl's perspective as prisoner of a strange man living in a rock quarry. It was this portion of the narrative that produced the best results as Gideon, a father of six surviving children, maintains a close, more emotional bond with the case.
Rounding out the trio of investigations is more of a preparation for a high-profile jewelry and fur show aboard a large riverboat. Gideon's defensive measures are in advance of a planned robbery. This theft circles around to the diamond heist in Denmark, but I won't provide any spoilers on that. Gideon's team collaborates with a number of law enforcement agencies that work the lengthy, fast-churning river.
This series began in 1955 and consisted of 21 novels through 1976. After Creasey's death, four more novels were authored by William Vivian Butler as J.J. Marric. One of the more interesting aspects of the series is that the characters age as the series continues. For example, the series debut, Gideon's Day, features Gideon as a Detective Superintendent. As the series continues, Gideon is promoted to Commander. Further, his six children age through the series and eventually become married and move out. Gideon's second-in-command, Lemaitre, serves for many years but eventually he's transferred out of the department and a character named Hobbs takes the role. In this novel, an event is mentioned from an earlier installment where Hobbs' wife dies. Gideon's River also features more emphasis on Detective Micklewright and his troubles with alcohol and a failing marriage. I could sense that this story also began in earlier novels.
Creasey's prose is like watching a good television episode of your favorite cop series. It's mostly surface level interactions, witness reports and the endless struggles between the media and the law enforcement agencies. It is similar to Ed McBain's (real name: Evan Hunter) 87th Precinct series but not as well written. Considering Creasey's massive production schedule (supposedly over 600 novels), his quality probably varies depending on series and installment. Overall, I was very pleased with Gideon's River and will certainly pursue more of the author's work.
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