Paperback Warrior Podcast - Episode 41

Paperback Warrior Podcast Episode 41 features an in-depth discussion of Ross Macdonald, including a review of the first Lew Archer novel.  We also talk about Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, Lawrence Block, Frederick Lorenz, Harry Whittington, and much, much more! Stream the show on any podcast app, paperbackwarrior.com, or download directly HERE.

Listen to "Episode 41: Ross Macdonald" on Spreaker.

Tough Cop

John Roeburt (1909-1972) graduated with a law degree from New York University and worked as a crime reporter for The Brooklyn Eagle newspaper before becoming a successful novelist in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1949, he published the first of two crime novels starring retiring NYPD detective Johnny Devereaux - the first of which was titled Tough Cop and remains in-print today thanks to Wildside Press.

Johnny Devereaux is a top-flight detective with the NYPD who, as the novel opens, is preparing to retire at the ripe old age of 41. He explains to his barber that he’s “tired of being a tough cop in a world of shills, con men, killers, and plain crooks.” Devereaux wants to spend his twilight years reading good books and seeing the world on permanent vacation. Devereaux is no dummy. Before retiring, he wrote a book called “Twenty Years a Cop” that he signs for his admirers when asked. The department even bought him a brand-new Buick convertible to thank Devereaux for his two decades of service to the city. I wasn’t aware that municipalities did that type of thing for civil servants, but that’s why this is a fiction book.

On his way home from his retirement party, a beautiful young woman unexpectedly jumps into his car and asks Devereaux to drive away fast. She claims she’s being pursued by someone and recounts the story of her vaguely-recalled upbringing in which daddy lavished her with unwanted - and inappropriate attention. Because of this and other factors, the girl - her name is Jennifer - doesn’t believe that her father is actually her father. Against his better judgement, Devereaux agrees to help her get to the truth of her own paternity.

Jennifer’s alleged father is a member of New York’s high society and rumored to be a homosexual. Remember this was 1949 before gay people had sitcoms and reality shows depicting their fabulous lives. While running down an initial lead, Devereaux stumbles upon a dead body catapulting this family tree inquiry into a murder investigation.

Devereaux’s authority in Tough Cop exists in a grey area. He’s no longer working as a police officer, but his separation paperwork from the department hasn’t been processed. Basically, he’s serving as an unpaid private eye for Jennifer with the authority - but minimal support - of the NYPD. He enlists the help of an actual private eye, and that character has all the book’s best lines. It’s never entirely clear why Devereaux is going to all this trouble for a girl he hardly knows. Once it became a murder mystery of sorts, wouldn’t it make sense to turn it over to a cop whose not in the process of transitioning off the job?

Overall, Tough Cop is a mostly competent, but very linear, 1940s-style mystery novel. As far as the title goes, Devereaux is not particularly tough compared to his crime fiction cohorts. It’s a pretty forgettable book, and I can think of no reason to seek out the 1955 sequel, The Hollow Man. 

Buy a copy of this book HERE.

The Camp

The Camp is a 1977 men's action-adventure paperback that was published by Belmont Tower under the name of Jonathan Trask. It came to fruition as a story idea from author and Belmont Tower editor Peter McCurtin. According to a Glorious Trash article, McCurtin wrote the first 30ish pages and handed the project to author Len Levinson to finish. In that same article, Levinson stated he couldn't remember why the transition happened and that he recalled that McCurtin left the publisher around that time. Sadly, the book has never been reprinted and remains as an expensive used paperback on internet bookshelves.

The novel begins with muckraking reporter Phil Gordon arriving at a small cabin in a rural stretch of northwestern Maine. On a much needed vacation from ousting politicians, Gordon re-connects with an old Native American friend named Jimmy Jacks. Jacks explains to Gordon that his three adult sons have gone missing around a strange military installation known as Camp Butler. Jacks elaborates that piercing screams resonate from the facility, and the whole area is saturated in barbed wire, killer dogs and pain. Intense pain.

Gordon, always chasing a good story, partners with Jacks to break into the secluded installation. Once inside, they find that imprisoned hippies (you read it correctly) are being victimized by torturers. This point is explicitly rammed home when readers and Gordon discover hippies tied to stakes and used as bayonet practice. Far out. Eventually, Gordon and Jacks tangle with some troops and a pack of killer canines before escaping into a cave. After a few days, Jacks goes home, and Gordon returns to Washington.

Levinson's narrative propels readers into Washington D.C.'s political circus as Gordon discreetly blows the whistle on the U.S. Army’s hippie torture camp to Congress. After receiving the backing of a U.S. Senator, a unique proposition is arranged that allows Gordon, a former Green Beret Captain, to re-enlist in the Army with a colorful fruit salad and specific orders to report to Camp Butler. Once inside the camp, Gordon gains a first-hand, personal account of the military's strong-arm tactics, bizarre regiments and murderous atrocities. He also discovers that much of the U.S. Government is under the control by a secret cabal of ultra right-wingers.

It's clear that Levinson really enjoyed writing The Camp. It's wild, wacky and bizarre...but for all of the right reasons. It's an enjoyable book that incorporates the era's pop-culture movement of investigative reporters as the proverbial hero. Possibly Levinson - or McCurtin - were inspired by the 1976 film All the Presidents Men and the idea that a determined journalist can expose governmental corruption. Regardless, I perceive The Camp as being a pulpy nod to the men's adventure magazines (MAMs) that recreated vile, sadistic military bases for the heroes to liberate. It's that over-the-top thrill-ride that makes The Camp so much campy fun.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Steve Bentley #01 - Murder on the Rocks

Everette Howard Hunt (1918-2007, better known as E. Howard Hunt) worked for the CIA as a covert officer specializing in political influence and action. Before devising his best-known plot, the infamous Watergate burglary that saw President Nixon impeached and himself imprisoned, Hunt authored nearly 40 crime-fiction and espionage novels using pseudonyms including David St. John, P.S. Donoghue, Gordon Davis, John Baxter and variations of his own name. As Robert Dietrich, Hunt wrote ten novels starring Steve Bentley, a Washington D.C. accountant who solves murders in private-eye style. The series debut, Murder on the Rocks, was originally published in 1957 and has now been reprinted as an affordable ebook by Cutting Edge.

The first thing to know about Bentley is that he isn't just a paper-pushing CPA. He's a Korean War veteran who was employed at one time by the U.S. Treasury Department. His expertise led to breaking up a number of black market rings globally. It's this reason that a client named Iris Seawall approaches Bentley in a bar. She wants Bentley to assist in locating a valuable emerald that was entrusted to her father.

Bentley's skepticism is fueled by a number of factors. For starters, Iris is married to a rough character linked to a gambling kingpin, and her father is an Ambassador in South Africa. Our hero's questions are valid – why not just use a private-eye? Iris responds that her father doesn't want anyone to know the failure he's brought to his position and feels that a private-eye may attract unwanted attention. Whether that's true or not isn't important, but it's a great way to propel an accountant into a lost treasure adventure.

Hunt uses Iris and her sister Sara as sexy bait for Bentley. Both are soon-to-be divorcees with bodies that were made for sin. However, Bentley mostly passes up the flesh buffet to seek out the treasure. When Iris's neighbor and her father's courier are both found murdered, Bentley's case becomes more complex.

Murder on the Rocks actually begins twice. First, Bentley declines Iris's proposal and the $500 that comes with finding the emerald. Second, Bentley also declines a $10,000 offer from Iris's sister Sara to find who murdered the courier. Third, Bentley declines an offer from a gambling kingpin named Vance Bodine. At one point, I was questioning whether Hunt was declining his own publisher's offer to craft a story. Eventually, the narrative is kick-started with a murder and the investigation is instigated. Murder on the Rocks features two sexy, desperate women, a stolen emerald and a determined hero. If you love vintage crime-fiction you should enjoy this tale.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Swamp Sister

Robert Edmond Alter (1925-1966) sold dozens of short stories to crime-fiction digests including Manhunt and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in addition to authoring several children’s books. However, his long-form fiction for Fawcett Gold Medal consisted of only two novels, Swamp Sister and Carny Kill, both of which were published in the year of his death, 1966. America’s fascination with noir fiction involving sexy and unsophisticated women from the backwoods continues to fascinate me, so I decided to try my luck with Swamp Sister.

The paperback opens with a two-person plane - a Piper Cub - destined for Jacksonville, Florida crashing in the remote swampland due to an engine failure. The crash kills two men including a passenger carrying a briefcase filled with a $80,000 in cash.

Four-years later, “The Money Plane, ” as the locals call it, is a thing of legends among swamp people. 20 year-old Shad Hark has been searching the swamp for years looking for any sign of the downed aircraft with no luck. A New York insurance investigator tickled the town’s imagination after the crash with the news that there is wreckage somewhere out there containing $80,000 among the alligators and Spanish moss. Most locals have long since given up the hunt and some have died trying to find it on their own.

Persistence pays off for Shad one day when he finds the Money Plane deep in the watery woods protected by aggressive gators and cottonmouth snakes. He crawls into the tiny cabin, and recovers the briefcase. Because he’s a moron, he uses his Bowie knife to slice the briefcase to ribbons to get at the money. Because of this bad idea, Shad has $80,000 but no way to carry the cash back home. He decides to stash the majority of the cash in the jungle with the plane and fills his pockets with what he could carry.

The author makes the unfortunate literary choice to write the dialogue in the patois of dipshits from swamp county. This makes for a condescending and cumbersome read filled with sentences like, “Shaddy, you ain’t forgit you’n me is going gator-grabbing?” This crappy writing bogs down the plot considerably. To be honest, it’s a fairly lousy plot to begin with, but Alter’s tin ear for dialogue certainly doesn’t help.

Shad’s in love with a swamp girl named Margy with a heart of gold, and he takes her into his confidence about his plan to recover the stashed funds. Meanwhile, Shad’s spending of $10 bills recovered from the wreckage attracts the attention of a different group of shotgun-toting dipshits from town - as well as a trap set by the man from the insurance company who alerted the locals to the existence of the money plane four years earlier.

This book mostly sucks. Some of the jungle scenes with the characters dodging gators and cottonmouth snakes were somewhat exciting, but overall Swamp Sister should have been left to rot among the fetid, torpid waters of history. It’s been reprinted a couple times over the years, but new cover art failed to put a glossy sheen on this turd of a book. It’s still early, but this is the worst book I’ve read in 2020 thus far. To the Hall of Shame with thee!

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Super Secret Agent Philis #01 - The Fall Guy

Between 1972 and 1985, Ritchie Perry (born 1942) wrote a 13-book series starring a British Intelligence agent named Philis (a dude) battling international criminals who pose a national security threat to Great Britain. In the U.S., the paperbacks were published by Ballantine, but many of them have been released as ebooks which should save you some time hunting them down. Start with the 1972 opening installment, The Fall Guy.

The British Intelligence arm in the series is SR(2) with the initials standing for “Special Responsibilities.” The group is designed to do things the police are not able to - namely assassinate threats without the blessing of a judge or jury. In this series debut, Scotland Yard wants SR(2)’s help in neutralizing the South American end of a cocaine trafficking operation, while the cops handle the domestic arm in the U.K. After an SR(2) sleeper agent in Brazil goes missing during the investigation of a drug exporter, a new operative is needed in the region. Enter Philis.

The Fall Guy serves as an origin story for Agent Philis - the hero of the 13 book series. When we meet him, he is a small-time British smuggler of booze and cigarettes working a beach town in Brazil. After a lengthy prologue giving the readers a third-person view of the intel agency’s mission and its challenges, the narrative abruptly switches to first person with charming and humorous Philis telling the story.

Philis is a wisecracking playboy who is kidnapped by SR(2) operatives who convince him to search for the missing SR(2) agent in a Brazilian beach town. Nearly the entire paperback takes place on the Brazilian coastline, and the author, who has also written a non-fiction book about Brazil, makes the culture and topography come alive. It’s a great setting for a thrilling adventure. As Philis gets closer to the truth about the missing spy, the author ratchets up the intensity and extreme violence. Consider yourself warned.

Where does the Super Secret Agent Philis series fall among its spy-fiction cohorts? It’s not as dense as a Robert Ludlum novel, but it’s way smarter and better-written than a Nick Carter: Killmaster volume. The cheeky first-person narration reminds me of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm series, and the well-written Britishness of the whole affair recalls Adam Hall’s Quiller books. In any case, it’s a way smarter book than the illustration on the paperback cover would have you believe.

In short, I haven’t been this excited to start a new espionage series in a long time. Hopefully, the later installments keep up the same level of high quality on display in The Fall Guy.

Series Order:

As is often the case, the American publisher renumbered the series differently for the domestic reprints. However, with the exception of the first installment, I’m told that adhering to strict series order is not required. The series order below is the best that the Spy Guys and Gals website could discern given the available data:

1. The Fall Guy (1972)
2. A Hard Man to Kill / Nowhere Man (1973)
3. Ticket to Ride (1973)
4. Holiday with a Vengeance (1974)
5. Your Money and Your Wife (1975)
6. One Good Death Deserves Another (1976)
7. Dead End (1977)
8. Dutch Courage (1978)
9. Bishop’s Pawn (1979)
10. Grand Slam (1980)
11. Fool’s Mate (1981)
12. Foul Up (1982)
13. Kolwezi (1985)

The author also published a 1991 novel called Comeback that many sources list as the 14th book in the Super Secret Agent Philis series. My research shows that the book stars an entirely different lead character who may or may not exist in the same universe. 

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Ex-Con (aka Free are the Dead)

Stuart Friedman (1913-1993) was a multi-genre author of the mid-20th century whose books often promised wild and abandoned sexuality but were, in reality, rather tame affairs. Many of his titles have found new life as modern reprints including his 1954 crime fiction novel, Ex-Con (original title: Free are the Dead), now available as a $3 ebook or $10 paperback from Wildside Press.

As the paperback opens, Charles Garrell is bummed that his devoted wife isn’t there to meet his train upon his arrival home. Charles has spent over three years in prison for a liquor store robbery motivated by extreme poverty, and Nora promised that she’d be there for him upon his release. He walks to their low-rent apartment to find Nora missing, but the table set for a welcome home meal. A thorough search of the place reveals no sign or Nora, but an inconveniently-placed corpse of a man in the bedroom closet. So much for a romantic homecoming.

The cops who locked up Charles for the robbery are hyper-aggressive and don’t take kindly to parolees in their town. As such, turning to the police for help on the missing wife problem or the dead guy in the closet problem is out of the question. Instead, he turns to underworld contacts he met during his stay in prison.

At a crooked casino run by a con-man, Charles runs into his wife’s Neitzsche-loving cousin-in-law, Sylvia. Because this is a Stuart Friedman novel, she’s also an S&M nymphomaniac with an eye on Charles, but he feels nothing but revulsion for her. She claims to know something about Nora’s disappearance, and the price for her help is sex. Meanwhile, Charles feels the need to pursue logical leads to find his missing bride and resolve the small issue of the dead corpse decomposing in his closet at home. The trajectory of the relationship between Charles and Sylvia was bizarre and not completely credible.

Charles also meets a hot little cocktail waitress named Cleo with an eye on Charles. Having been locked up for three years, Charles is understandably starved for a woman, and sweet Cleo is hot to trot. She’s presented as a kindhearted seductress without an agenda - completely the opposite of Sylvia. The quandary of Sexy Cleo vs. Missing Wife was set-up to be the central moral dilemma Charles must navigate while also solving the novel’s vexing mysteries. However, not much came of it. 

The search for Nora and the truth about the murdered man in the closet was pretty satisfying, but the ultimate solution left me cold. Can you enjoy a sexy mystery and dislike the punch line? If so, then you might enjoy Con-Man. It was a nice ride, but the destination just wasn’t to my taste.