The fiction of Cleve Adams (1895-1949) first appeared in pulp magazines like Double Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly. Beginning in 1940, Adams launched a seven-book series of private-eye novels starring Rex McBride. He also authored two novels starring private-eye John Shannon as well as a two-book series of mysteries starring Bill Rye (published under the pseudonym John Spain). The author also wrote a handful of stand-alone, hardboiled crime novels and a number of short stories. One of those, "The Key", was featured in the July 1940 issue of Black Mask and collected in the 2010 collection The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories.
"The Key" stars Canavan, a tough-as-nails police lieutenant working the beat in Los Angeles. After bringing a thug into Night Court, Canavan spots an attractive young woman named Hope who seemingly doesn't belong with the night's typical lot of thieves, prostitutes and miscreants. After paying her $8 fine for skipping out of a restaurant tab, Canavan offers to drive Hope back to the hotel where she resides. It's on this drive that Hope confesses to Canavan that she was to meet a man at the diner but he didn't show. Her belongings were apparently stolen from her room, including her meal money. Canavan, feeling pity for the young woman, escorts her to her hotel room only to awaken a few hours later with a knot on his head, his wallet missing and Hope nowhere to be found. Literally.
Canavan believes Hope is attached to something other than just petty theft. After chasing her trail, the police lieutenant runs into a Syndicate goon named Kolinski who may be behind the murder of Hope's brother. After learning that Hope may be on the run from her brother's killer, Canavan defies the law and finds himself as a wanted fugitive. In attempting to find Hope, Canavan hopes to prove his innocence as the corpses pile up.
This was a rather odd whodunit with a number of nonsensical scenes involving Canavan searching for clues. There's Kolinksi's racket of running a protection association for morticians begging them question: were mortuaries frequently robbed and vandalized in the 1940s? The idea of a “key to solve the murder” is an old genre trope that even feels over utilized for the time period. At six chapters, the novella moves briskly and Canavan is a believable hero. Everything else wasn't. Overall, "The Key" was an enjoyable albeit average mystery that left me curious to read more of Cleve Adams' literary work.
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Robert B. Parker authored a whopping 40 installments of his Spenser series of private-eye novels. The series was adapted for television in 1985 and consisted of 66 total episodes starring Robert Ulrich as the satirical Boston detective. In 1999, Joe Mantegna played the character in three made-for-television films. In 2020, Netflix released a film version entitled Spenser Confidential. It was based loosely on the 2010 novel written by Ace Atkins, an author that Parker's estate hired to continue the Spenser series. The character was portrayed by Mark Wahlberg, a baffling choice largely panned by critics. After enjoying the series debut, The Godwulf Manuscript (1973), and its follow-up God Save the Child (1974), I just knew that the series third installment, Mortal Stakes (1975), would be another fantastic entry.
In Mortal Stakes, the general manager of a fictional Boston Red Sox team, Erskine, hires Spenser to investigate their star pitcher Marty Rabb. Erskine feels that Rabb has been on the take to purposefully lose games. Erskine requests that Spenser go undercover as a sportswriter to investigate Rabb's possible gambling scheme. Once Spenser accepts and spends a few days spectating in the dugout and press box, a ruthless shylock named Doerr warns Spenser to back out of the job. Thankfully, the threat just encourages Spenser to dig deeper.
The investigation leads Spenser into rural Illinois where he discovers Rabb's wife isn't who she claims to be. The two may not even be married. Further, all evidence suggests that Rabb's wife was a former prostitute and performed in an adult movie. After digging up the dirt in Illinois, Spenser dives headfirst into the prostitution racket in New York City while contending with an unlikely enemy – a Red Sox radio announcer named Maynard. How Rabb, his wife, Maynard and Doerr are connected is that paperback’s central story. Like the previous installments, the author counters the suspense and tension with Spenser's condescending, satirical quips. In a lot of ways, Spenser is a far superior improvement to Richard Prather's iconic Shell Scott. Spenser is a smooth, real cool jock whereas Shel Scott is a chuckle-headed, unbelievable farce. Both are enjoyable.
In many ways, Mortal Stakes turns a corner in the series. By the end of this novel, Spenser has become a changed man. More violent, less calm. His patience is replaced with anger. While always fueled to fight, the book's fiery finale thumbs the Zippo and throws it into the fumes. Spenser's violent actions are matched only by his own weighty guilt, a balance that's emotionally sparked during a counseling session with love interest Susan Silverman.
I think the more abrasive evolution is effectively captured in one of the book's scenes. Spenser routinely packs his .38 Special revolver in a shoulder rig. By the book's end, Spenser reaches for a shotgun and rams five shells in. It's this scene that's just as important as the novel's climactic firefight because it illustrates the evolution of the character. In reading these books in order, I'm curious to see if that same stony intensity prevails in future installments. I'm hopeful. Mortal Stakes was a riveting, explosive chapter in this long-running series. Highly recommended.
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Amber Dean (real name Amber Dean Getzin, 1902-1985) was a New York native that authored 17 mystery novels between 1944 and 1973. One of the author's most consistent characters was that of Abbie Harris, a nosy amateur detective that debuted in 1944's Dead Man's Float. The seven-book series features Harris solving mysteries and assisting police in and around Rochester, New York. My first experience with Amber Dean is a stand-alone novel entitled Bullet Proof, published in 1959 by Popular Library.
In the novel's opening chapter, Jac Constable and his wife Betty are talking with New York State Police regarding a possible male voyeur that was spotted in their vineyard. When the police depart after failing to locate the perpetrator, Jac spots the man in a nearby bush. After a confusing sequence of events, Betty calls the police to return to the house. But too little too late. Betty is shot and killed by the lunatic hiding in the bushes.
Next, this opening sequence is replayed again from the perspective of the lunatic in the bushes, a 16-year old named Henry Muslim. Muslim has escaped from a nearby juvenile delinquent facility called Diligence and spent the last two nights sleeping in the basement of an abandoned house. After stealing a .22 rifle, Muslim is driven by the need for attention. He isn't fueled by adolescent rage, sex or money. He simply wants to be chased. In alternating chapters, the book changes perspective from Muslim to various law enforcement officers. But, the book's main character is Jac Constable's sexy secretary Hallie Brown.
The author forces readers to spend a great deal of time in the headspace of Hallie. These sequences are saturated with Hallie's lust for Jac, her flirtation with a local cop and daydream segments where Hallie is embraced by a husky cop and taken to an Alaskan cabin. As a fan of hardboiled, vintage crime-fiction that features tough cops and ruthless killers, the author's lovey-dovey approach to storytelling wasn't exactly the narrative promised by the book's inspiring cover. Eventually (I mean page 80 of 124-pages), Hallie is kidnapped by Muslim but the two never actually engage in dialogue. In fact, Muslim ties her up and leaves. The end.
I'm sure Amber Dean is a fine mystery author and has her share of cozy mystery fans. Based on my experience with Bullet Proof, I'm not one of them. Her method of saddling the storytelling on a number of characters was confusing and took me out of the story. After a shocking opening chapter, the rest of the book just waddles in mediocrity as Muslim peeps on residents, sits at a drive-in movie and tinkers with a car. Hallie is wasted as an overbearing sex goddess that remains tied in a chair for most of the book's hectic finish. The cops are clueless while the author pitches a surprise swerve at the end.
Bullet Proof was a dreadful reading experience and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. If you have to own this book due to its vivid cover, please entertain purchasing a copy of it HERE.
Before his untimely death at the age of 38 in 1960, William Ard was on a roll writing popular mystery fiction under his own name as well as the Buchanan westerns under the pseudonym Jonas Ward. Ard’s demise interrupted his Lou Largo series of hardboiled private eye novels, but the character lived on through later installments written by ghost writers Lawrence Block and John Jakes before they became famous. Ard’s first two Lou Largo novels are expensive collector’s items, but they have been reprinted in a single volume by Ramble House Books providing an affordable opportunity to enjoy the 1959 opening installment, All I Can Get.
Largo is a charming and wisecracking Manhattan private investigator with a difficult client: a wealthy media mogul named Milton Weston. Largo is hired to perform a background check on Mr. Weston’s new infatuation - a gold-digging chippy that he intends to make his eighth wife. The tycoon is thoroughly uninterested in hearing the truth about the party girl and refuses to pay Largo’s fee at a time when Largo’s reserve funds are running thin.
Ard begins the Lou Largo debut in a fun, lighthearted style that recalls the Carter Brown mysteries featuring over-the-top, wealthy eccentrics who Largo is forced to endure for business and economic reasons. And then things take a very clever turn. Nothing is as it seems in the opening act of this deceptively simple novel. Through a non-linear storyline with early-novel flashbacks and flash-forwards reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, the reader is treated to the story behind the story, and we learn that Largo has a little deception in his heart as well regarding the girl. This early-plot twist catapults All I Can Get from a simple, lighthearted crime novel into something bordering on brilliant. And sexy.
While never veering into pornography or graphic descriptions of lovemaking, All I Can Get was surprising explicit for a 1959 novel. I couldn’t imagine sex scenes like this in 1952 as the world apparently just wasn’t ready at that point. Seven years later, here we are. The sex scenes work because they have real context and help to explain the decisions the characters make throughout this well-crafted paperback.
As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the doomed romance between the millionaire and the sexpot is actually the subplot, not the main dish. The real story involves the Cuban syndicate based out of Tampa’s Ybor City neighborhood and a newspaper rivalry in a nearby beach town. Lou Largo isn’t even present for a large part of the book’s second act. But sure enough, Ard weaves these threads into the early-novel story of Largo, Mr. Weston and his new fiancé. All of this leads to a genuinely exciting and violent conclusion.
This is a tough book to review because I don’t want to spoil anything for you. If you enjoy crime fiction and can appreciate truly exceptional writing in the genre, you’re bound to be pleased with All I Can Get. It’s as if Ard took a close look at the dumb-but-fun private-eye sub-genre (think Richard Prather’s Shell Scott books) and asked himself “How can I turn this formula on its ear, and make it something that transcends the genre?”
Ard writes in a style popularized by Ed McBain in his 87th Precinct series. Basically, it’s a third-person narration with doses of personality and commentary sprinkled into the action with the omniscient point of view. It makes for a fun read, and Ard’s humorous narrative quips are a delight. It gives the reader the sense that you’re in good hands with Ard as your tour guide on this twisty paperback ride.
The downside is that Ard is considered to be a “collectible” author by the types of people who buy vintage paperbacks, encase them in plastic, and never read a word. Thank heavens Ramble House has compiled the first two books in the series into a single trade paperback volume titled Calling Lou Largo, which you can purchase HERE. However you get your hands on a reading copy of All I Can Get, please do so. It’s something special.
Addendum
Lou Largo Series Order and True Authors:
1. All I Can Get (1959) by William Ard
2. Like Ice She Was (1960) by William Ard
3. Babe in the Woods (1960) by Lawrence Block
4. Make Mine Mavis (1961) by John Jakes
5. And So to Bed (1962) by John Jakes
6. Give Me This Woman (1962) by John Jakes
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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