Ben Gates #03 - Kill Now, Pay Later

Robert Terrall (1914-2009) served in WWII and later wrote for Time and the Saturday Evening Post. After becoming a full-time writer, Terrall used the pseudonym John Gonzales to author a three-book series starring crime-fighting journalist Harry Horne. Arguably, Terrall's claim to fame came when Mike Shayne creator and author Davis Dresser departed the successful private-eye series. Terrall took over the reigns and authored another 25 installments using the series house name Brett Halliday. From 1958-1964, Terrall also authored a five-book series of mysteries starring private-eye Ben Gates using the pseudonym of Robert Kyle. My first experience with the series is the third installment, Kill Now, Pay Later, published by Dell in 1960 and later reprinted by Hard Case Crime in 2007.

In the book's beginning pages, New York City private-eye Ben Gates is working a ritzy wedding for an insurance company. The job is simple: guard the wedding presents and keep the tipsy guests from making off with the family jewels. After Gates is teased by a sultry female guest, he mistakenly drinks a handful of sleeping pills hidden in a mug of hot coffee. Gates falls into snoozeland while the groom's mother is shot and killed in a robbery attempt. The thief is also killed, but there's more to the story.

After Gates awakens, he is questioned by the groom's family and a hard-nosed cop named Lieutenant Minturn. The police think Gates was in on the grab, and the officer seems to have a personal vendetta against private-eyes in general (not uncommon in crime-fiction). A combination of events puts Gates into the driver's seat of the investigation.

First, a newspaper article is published about the murder and points out that Gates was asleep through the debacle. Gates wants to redeem himself and discover who was serving him loaded coffee. Second, Mr. Pope, the wealthy groom's father, brings Gates into the family circle. He explains to Gates that the police and family aren't aware that $75,000 was stolen from his safe during the murder. He wants the money back and hires Gates to find it.

I really love this Ben Gates character. He's the middle ground between serious Lew Archer and comedic Shell Scott. The author's witty dialogue and candor enhance the story and character, making them both instantly enjoyable. Gates doesn't necessarily chase women, but he isn't one to turn away from a hot undercover romp. In Kill Now, Pay Later, there are a number of sexy women attempting to lure Gates into bed or simply remove him from the investigation. While mostly a loner, Gates does rely on a few supporting characters throughout the procedure including a colleague named Davidson.

If you love these urban detective novels, there's plenty to enjoy here. Kill Now, Pay Later is another solid private-eye novel that stands out in the crowded field of mid-20th Century crime-fiction. Ben Gates’ charisma is leveraged by the author to really define the storytelling experience. Based on the high level of quality here, I'll be searching for the remaining series installments.

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Paperback Warrior Podcast - Episode 67

On Episode 67 of the Paperback Warrior Podcast, we delve into the history of Weird Tales pulp magazine and the mysterious true identity of a “female” horror author from that era. Also: Perry Rhodan! James Herbert! Calvin Clements! Bookstore finds! And much more! Listen on your favorite podcast app or PaperbackWarrior.com or download directly HERE: 

Listen to "Episode 67: The Weird Tales of Allison V. Harding" on Spreaker.

Satan Takes the Helm

Popular screenwriter Calvin Clements authored three nautical-themed paperbacks in the 1950s – Barge Girl, Hell Ship to Kuma and Satan Takes the Helm. After enjoying my first experience with Clements, Hell Ship to Kuma, I was on the hunt for his other two nautical titles. Thankfully, Stark House Press timed their newest release perfectly. Satan Takes the Helm, originally published in 1954 by Fawcett Gold Medal, is the newest publication of Stark House's imprint Black Gat Books. Needless to say, I was thrilled to obtain a copy.

In the opening chapters, Martin Lewandowski is a rugged freighter captain searching for work on the San Francisco docks. A timely job tip leads him to a hotel room and an interview with a woman named Joyce. Martin explains to the reader that Joyce isn't particularly pretty, but is blessed with a stunning body. Surprisingly, this is an important part of the narrative. When Joyce inquires about Martin's non-vocational skills and personal attributes, the interview takes a slight detour. Caught up in the moment, Martin kisses Joyce which apparently seals the deal. Martin is then hired as the chief officer on the Trader, an Asian freighter that is currently helmed and owned by Captain Sloan, Joyce's horribly disfigured, aging husband.

After Sloan provides a touching, personal account of his life on the old ship, Martin begins to appraise the boat's sea-readiness. After given full permission to whip the crew into shape, the narrative's first half begins to resemble the early stages of the proverbial sports underdog story. Martin condemns the lackadaisical effort by Sloan's crew to maintain the ship's peak performance, but he also questions their loyalty and work ethic. He's determined to rebuild the Trader into a worthy sea vessel in return for 10% of the profits. However, before you conjure up images of Gene Hackman transforming a looser Hoosier into a champion, Clements injects a femme fatale archetype into the novel's story. Suddenly, this venturesome nautical tale begins to resemble the classic crime-noir.

The author, or the original publisher, chose the perfect book title for this crime-driven story. Satan Takes the Helm is exactly that. As an angel, Martin appears to have rescued Sloan from the red ink that threatens to drown his operation. But once this mysterious, seductive married woman offers up her body, Martin's clear path to sterling leadership and lucrative profit becomes overgrown with evil vices. As the narrative unwinds, Martin's admirable persona has transformed into a guilt-ridden spiral of madness and regret. Is his role on the Trader divine intervention or inglorious malice? That's the slippery edge that Clements navigates.

Satan Takes the Helm is an adventurous nautical tale that surprisingly serves as a sexy and crafty crime-noir. As readers ride the choppy waves, the characters become more dynamic and mentally unbalanced. It's this sort of downward spiral from the promised land to the depths of Hell that made writers like Day Keene and Gil Brewer literary superstars. Calvin Clements uses that tried-and-true formula and places it in a unique setting. The combination makes for a compelling, thoroughly enjoyable story that completely validates the decision to reprint the vintage paperback for modern audiences. Clements rightfully sails again and you should get on board.

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Hatch #01 - Hatch's Island

Author Don Merritt (real name Donigan), born in 1945, worked as a scuba diver, fishing boat captain and sailing instructor. After obtaining a degree in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa, Merritt published his first novel, One Easy Piece, in 1981. The suspenseful thriller was the first of seven total novels the author has written. Typically his books fall into a "romantic, suspenseful tragedy" and oddly that's where his three-book series of Hatch novels lies. Hatch's Island (1986), Hatch's Conspiracy (1987 and Hatch's Mission (1987) form a short-lived series of action-adventure novels published by Bantam. After acquiring all three books recently, I decided to take the plunge to see what Hatch is all about.

The book's prologue introduces the reader to protagonist Captain Franklin Jefferson Hatcher. In it, “Hatch” is serving in the U.S. Army's Special Forces in the jungle highlands of Laos. While it's never really clear what the group is doing, Hatch and company live with a small village where some combatants bed down the young women. Hatch has fallen in love with a young woman named Mai and the two are expecting a child. While he's out on patrol, guerrilla fighters ambush the team and Hatch is shot repeatedly and left for dead. The enemy then converges on the village and kills everyone in heinous fashion. Hatch crawls back to the village to find that Mai has undergone a terrible surgery where a rat has been fatally inserted into her womb.

The book then fast-forwards 15-years where readers learn that Hatch quit the Army and went AWOL in 1965. To escape U.S. intelligence, Hatch is now living as a quiet hermit on the tiny fictitious island of Tuva in the South Pacific. Despite Bantam's action-oriented book cover, Hatch has long gray and black hair with an equally long beard. He's spent the last 10-years living in a run-down warehouse where he stores his emptied whiskey bottles, fishes and generally trades things like shovels for boat propellers. The idea that Hatch is the Rambo-type action hero from the front of this book cover is terribly misleading.

While walking through the jungle, Hatch stumbles upon a 17-year old girl named Kukana being raped by an unknown man. After threatening the man with a knife, the girl runs back home to notify her father, the island's pseudo-mayor. After walking the man through the jungle at knife-point, Hatch is ambushed by two other men and they break a bunch of bones and leave him for dead for the second time in this book. Although it's never explained, the three men are arrested and locked up. Later, Kukana's father takes the men far into the ocean in their own boat and drops them with the instructions that a three-day swim will get them to the next island.

The middle portion of the novel focuses on Hatch's healing and Kukana's overwhelming passion for her newfound hero. In total dedication to the island's warrior and savior, the whole town builds Hatch a new house and awards him the fishing ketch that his three attackers previously owned. Further, due to Hatch's courage and fighting prowess, they want to make Hatch the island's sole police force and give him the 17-year old Kukana as a wife. Hatch repeatedly says no, but eventually caves to the pressures of the new boat and house. And the girl.

I'm not spoiling anything for you. The last third of the book circles back to Hatch's attackers and connects them to a mercenary force that may know Hatch's identity from the war. Further, they may or may not be the same people that raped and killed his lover Mai years ago. They may or may not inform the Pentagon that they have found the missing Hatch who was feared dead. The book's plot lines eventually intersect which brings about the book's explosive narrative and eventual fiery finale.

If you haven't figured it out by now, I didn't like this novel. Perhaps if the book cover had depicted a old long-haired man walking along the beach with a boat propeller I would have been pleasantly surprised with the action. Instead, I bought an action novel and was unpleasantly surprised that it's mostly a crafty, suspenseful (albeit violent) love story. Hatch is rather one-dimensional and the only characters that I enjoyed reading about were the three criminals. The book's ending and connections to the Pentagon left me a little curious as to where the next book takes readers. For that reason alone I might courageously take a peek at Hatch #2’s opening chapters hopeful for a better book. In the meantime, I'm drifting as far as I can from Hatch's Island.

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A Piece of this Country

Thomas Taylor (1934-2017), a West Point graduate, was a Captain in the U.S. Army and served in the 101st Airborne Division during the Vietnam War. After an intense engagement with a Viet Cong battalion, Taylor was awarded the Silver and Bronze Stars as well as a Purple Heart. After his service, Taylor graduated from University of California, Berkley and became a writer. His work includes a number of non-fiction volumes on military history and combatants' first-hand accounts as well as fictional novels like A-18 (1967). My first experience with Taylor is his 1970 military fiction novel A Piece of this Country.

The paperback is set in 1965 during the U.S.'s early involvement in the war. Sergeant Roscoe Jackson is an African-American fighting with the ARVN (Army of Vietnam) near the Laos border. Jackson is a short-timer with just four months of active duty remaining before he returns to the U.S. As a husband and father of four, Jackson is anxious to leave the hot and steamy jungles and get back to Maryland. However, after being offered the dangerous job of overseeing the remote and isolated Fort Cougar, Jackson decides he wants to pursue an officer's rank. To obtain it, he'll need to work closely with a South Vietnamese leader to fortify the base and protect it from waves of Viet Cong.

Thomas Taylor's military combat experience is deeply ingrained into this violent and exciting narrative. Jackson tells readers that he keeps his matches inside of condoms, carries hornet spray and wears his poncho backwards. It's these little, descriptive things that make the story come alive with detail. The artillery fire, mortars and minefields are the book's soundscape, drowning Jackson in a sea of emotions as he contemplates his family's financial stress and discrimination back home in the U.S. Through mail correspondence with his wife, Jackson learns that she has a blood disorder and can't work. Further, his oldest son seems to have chosen a criminal path to overcome racial and financial struggles. Knowing that an officer's rank will pay more, Jackson's decision to re-enlist is a costly one.

Once Taylor arrives at Fort Cougar, he begins to formulate a strategy. His collaboration with Vietnamese commander Dai Uy Nguyen involves building escape tunnels while engaging the enemy on small jungle patrols. After numerous attacks on their ranks, Jackson begins to question Nguyen's allegiance. The book's fiery finale places the smaller American and South Vietnamese forces against wave after wave of enemies as they await aerial support from afar.

I really enjoyed so many aspects of A Piece of this Country. It contains so many memorable scenes. There's a powerful dialogue between Jackson where an enemy soldier tells him to leave Vietnam. He explains, “I'm trying to liberate my south. Why don't you liberate yours?” referring to Jackson's race and southern heritage. In another, Jackson explains that he has heard artillery fire so much that he isn't sure that weather-related thunder even exists in Southeast Asia. There's a humorous scene where Jackson trades two Mike Shayne novels to a fellow soldier in exchange for a nudie book. It's all of these realistic things that enhance the propulsive plot points and emotional characters.

If you love military fiction then you'll certainly enjoy A Piece of this Country. Anyone interested in Thomas Taylor's career and proud military lineage should check out both Taylor and his heroic father Maxwell Taylor's Wiki pages to learn more. I'm anxious to read more of this author's work.

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Solomon's Vineyard

The Hype

The legend of Jonathan Latimer’s 1941 novel Solomon’s Vineyard is likely more famous than the book itself. Here are the facts:

In 1940, Chicago journalist and crime fiction author Jonathan Latimer (1906-1985) wrote a hardboiled novel called Solomon’s Vineyard with lots of sex and violence. It’s about a hard-drinking private eye seeking to rescue a woman from a bizarre religious cult. Because of the era, no one cared about the boozing or considerable violence, but the sex (tame by today’s standards) made U.S. publishers nervous. As such, they declined to make the book available to American readers.

British publishers were more forward-leaning and released the novel in 1941, and it became a minor literary hit. In 1950, a censored version retitled The Fifth Grave was released for U.S. audiences with the juicy and scandalous stuff about the narrator’s sex drive (he’s drawn to female butts) removed. When cheap paperbacks became the rage, U.K.’s Great Pan books reprinted the original version - along with other Latimer books - to the further delight of British readers. Meanwhile, the uncensored version of Solomon’s Vineyard never received a U.S. printing until 1983.

In all fairness, it’s more likely that the novel merely slipped through the cracks rather than continued censorship by shadowy puppet masters. The publishing world can, at times, have short memories and resurrecting a novel that had been a hit in England four decades earlier just wasn’t anyone’s priority. It’s fun to say that Solomon’s Vineyard was “banned in the U.S. for 42 years,” but the truth is more benign. It wasn’t until 1983 before it occurred to a wise reprint house to release the unexpurgated original manuscript.

Since then, the novel has been reprinted multiple times as a paperback, ebook, and audiobook. You should have no problem finding a reading copy.

The Review

Karl Craven is Solomon’s Vineyard’s narrator, and he’s a private detective cut from the same cloth as Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or the Continental Op. Think of this generation of fictional characters as Hardboiled 1.0 before Mickey Spillane redefined the genre.

As the novel opens, Craven arrives by train into the fictional town of Paulton from his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri during the sweltering summer heat. On his way to the hotel, he notices a distant set of buildings around a temple surrounded by green fields and grapevines. He’s told that the compound belongs to a religious colony known as Solomon’s Vineyard populated by a thousand crazies awaiting the resurrection of their dead founder, an alleged prophet named Solomon.

Craven was summoned to Paulton by his business partner, Oke Johnson, who was in town working a case. When Craven arrives at Oke’s rooming house, he’s greeted by the local police advising him that his partner has been murdered. Oke was trying to recover a missing girl from the nearby religious cult, and he died without leaving behind any notes or reports. As such, Craven needs to recreate the entire investigation himself, snatch the dame, and get away safely while solving Oke’s murder in the process.

What follows is quite a journey of sex, violence, and corruption. Paulton is a town under the control of a gangster named Pug with the police serving as his toadies. There’s a possible relationship between the local mob and the cult that may provide Craven the leverage he needs to rescue the girl living at the Vineyard. The adventure finds Craven descending into a series of real binds without an obvious path to success. Also, if you like a violent fight scene, the one at the end is total aces.

I have a general bias against crime fiction of the 1940s, but Solomon’s Vineyard is the exception. This book is awesome - even if it owes quite a bit to Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Craven is such a badass main character (he even reads Black Mask Magazine in his hotel) that I wanted to spend more time with the guy. Unfortunately, the author never developed Craven into a series character, but Latimer wrote several unrelated novels throughout his career. I look forward to exploring Latimer’s body of work more fully. Solomon’s Vinyeyard is a close-to-perfect novel. Highest recommendation.

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Paperback Warrior - Episode 66

On Episode 66 of The Paperback Warrior Podcast, we return to our Men’s Adventure roots with a discussion of several rare and iconic series titles in the hard-core action genre. Tom also tells a shocking and controversial book hunting story you won’t want to miss. Listen on your favorite podcast app, PaperbackWarrior.com, or download directly HERE

Listen to "Episode 66: Men's Adventure Shootout" on Spreaker.