Jack Tallon #01 - Police Chief

Over the course of four decades, crime-fiction author John Ball (1911-1988) wrote nearly 20 novels. His most critically acclaimed work was 1965's racially-charged In the Heat of the Night. The book introduced a California African-American detective named Virgil Tibbs, a character that Ball would utilize for six more novels through 1986. The novel was adapted to cinema in 1967 (winning an Oscar for Best Picture) and television in 1988. While Ball is mostly known for the Virgil Tibbs character, the author did create another police series as well.

In 1977, Ball's novel Police Chief was published. It introduced a highly-skilled police Sergeant named Jack Tallon who relocates from Pasadena, California to the small town of Whitewater, Washington. Motivating the move is that Tallon accepts a position as the town's Police Chief. The successful book prompted two sequels – 1981's Trouble for Tallon and 1984's Chief Tallon and the S.O.R. My introduction to the author is the first installment of the Jack Tallon trilogy, Police Chief.

The novel's opening chapter is set in South Pasadena as Tallon responds to a gun-store robbery. In just six-pages, the author introduces Tallon as a highly competent, authoritative figure who orchestrates a number of law-enforcement operatives into strategic formations and duties. When the S.W.A.T. Team arrives, Tallon accepts his role as back-up as the second chapter unfolds with a grizzly highway accident that forces Tallon to rescue students from a heavily-damaged bus. As the first on the scene, and with many of the city's police maintaining assistance with the gun-store holdup, Tallon accepts the uncomfortable position of declaring six of the students as deceased. As the night ends, Tallon's wife Jennifer sees her husband exhausted and covered in blood. This imagery leads Tallon and Jennifer to discuss a potential career change.

Over the next couple of chapters, Tallon is invited to the small Pacific-Southwest town of Whitewater, Washington. Despite being a neighbor to the much larger city of Spokane, Whitewater has very little crime. The former Police Chief has retired and Tallon is offered the role. His duties include managing four patrol cars, one detective, a Sergeant and five uniformed officers. At first, the lack of daily action and danger plagues Tallon and prompts him to rethink his one-year contract. But, in just a few weeks Whitewater is rocked by a serial rapist and a pipeline of heroin.

There's no doubt that author John Ball had a real gift of storytelling. I was really invested in the opening chapter and couldn't wait to learn how Tallon was going to assist in the store hold-up. After that entire scene is left dangling and unfinished, I was furious that Tallon had to leave the gun-action to assist with a highway collision. Most authors can't make that quick of a transition, and even fewer can maintain the reader's interest and attention after the fast scene change. But, I quickly realized that the author was plotting with a purpose. This was a calculated move that shifts all of the attention to the main character. Readers had to experience the turbulent night-life of Tallon, the daring “quick to respond” nature of the police business that puts law-enforcement in various precarious situations – sometimes within the same half-hour time-frame.

After building his character's cop credibility, Tallon trains his staff on modern tactics despite their belief that any of it is needed. When the serial rapist begins attacking the town's most beautiful women, Tallon orchestrates a sting operation that places a beautiful young nurse as bait for the rapist. Further, the staff must contend with high-speed chases and fights as a heroin operation comes to fruition on Whitewater's small-town streets and local college campus. The story is that many of the town's citizens feel that crime has increased only because the new Police Chief is involved. They suspect their new Chief is actually the rapist, placing a point of contention between Tallon and the people he has sworn to protect.

I absolutely loved this book and instantly liked the character of Jack Tallon. Once the book settles into the procedural investigation of rape and drug trafficking, I felt that Ball's storytelling was similar to that of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series. With just a handful of officers, the entire investigation was a more intimate experience told through the activities of these men. While the book isn't terribly violent, the two furious car-chase scenes were some of the best I've read. Also, the rapes themselves aren't in the narrative (thankfully), but the grizzly details are presented through the eye-witness accounts. In that regard, Ball used the expertise of Cheney, Washington's law-enforcement agencies to better understand these investigations. I think that realism propelled the story-line in a positive way.

Police Chief is still in print today and my copy was the affordable 1985 paperback version published by Canada's Paperjacks imprint. I'm already shopping for the two sequels so I can immerse myself back into Whitewater's small-town atmosphere. If you love the police procedural sub-genre of crime-fiction, I highly recommend this author and this lesser-known short series.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Nightmare

Author Edward S. Aarons wrote 20 books between 1936 and 1954, including a number of short-stories for pulp magazines including Popular Detective and Thrilling Detective. I've covered a number of the author's early crime-noir novels and was happy to find a 1971 McFadden-Bartell paperback reprint of his 1948 novel Nightmare. It was originally published under the pseudonym Edward Ronns.

WWII veteran Nolly is living the American dream in New York City. He's been married to his beautiful wife Susan for five years. He has a great job working at Globe Finance where he manages payroll, mortgage loans and the vault. He enjoys working for his boss, Mr. Wright, and each evening he happily walks his dog around the block. It's the quintessential “white picket fence” lifestyle. But, like any great crime-noir, Nolly's life is turned upside down when he is placed in an extreme situation.

After a rare night out with his three co-workers, Nolly returns to his home in an early-morning drunken stupor. After discovering his wife isn't home, Nolly receives a phone call from a mysterious voice telling him to get over to Globe Finance. When he arrives there and unlocks the door, he's hit in the head and blacks out. He wakes up to discover his boss, Mr. Wright, has been murdered and $40,000 is missing from the bank vaults. Complicating matters is that Nolly finds a gun in his pocket that apparently was used as the murder weapon.

We’ve all read this sort of story before. It's the familiar “man wakes up beside a corpse” plot where the innocent party must scour the town for clues in search of the killer. Unlike Aarons' seaside, rural novels like Terror in the Town and The Net, it was interesting to read Nightmare's story unravel in an urban setting. In some ways, Aarons' writes this in a way that would later become the dominant approach by writers like Ed Lacy and Henry Kane. He still manages to insert his seaside, darker aura to the story near the end (the characters end up in marshy New Jersey), but this one has a unique voice that isn't the standard Edward S. Aarons crime-noir.

As I read more and more of Aarons' crime literature, I move him just a few more rungs up the ladder. I don't think he's a Harry Whittington or John D. MacDonald caliber storyteller, but he does sit somewhere firmly in the middle of the pack. He's never boring, never dull, but he's never created anything particularly innovative or remarkable. Nightmare proves that Aarons was just another good, dependable mid-20th Century writer. Sometimes, that's all we are really dreaming for anyway.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

The Dean #01 - Stranger's Kill

Ohio native Merle Constiner (1901-1979) was a successful author of westerns and crime fiction who began his career in the pulp magazines and transitioned successfully to paperback novels in the 1950s. One of his most enduring characters was con-man/private eye Wardlow “The Dean” Rock who appeared in a series of novellas in Dime Detective Magazine between 1940 and 1945. Altus Press has compiled several of these stories into one volume as The Complete Cases of The Dean, including his first adventure, “Stranger’s Kill”, originally from August 1940.

The Dean stories are narrated by his sidekick, Ben Matthews in the same manner that Watson narrates the Sherlock Holmes stories or Archie Goodwin tells the Nero Wolfe tales. For his part, everyone’s first impression of The Dean is that he’s a screwball and a crank living with Ben in a slum while pretending to be a fortune teller who can divine your future from the bottoms of your feet. He’s also an amateur detective maintaining a good working relationship with the police chief.

As we join The Dean and Ben in “Stranger’s Kill,” an arsonist has been plaguing the city for six months targeting grocers, delis, and other retail stores. The Dean offers his services to the fire insurance company to catch the arsonist within six days for a $20,000 fee. The body of the insurance company’s CEO was found strangled in one of the fires, so this is more than a normal firebug.

The Dean’s detecting methods are mostly the same kind of deduction utilized by Sherlock Holmes, but he’s willing to run down leads in the street with Ben and get his hands dirty. He’s also a funny guy with A+ wisecracks along the way. By 1940, Constiner was a solid writer and his prose is smooth, never choppy, with logical, well-paced plotting. Unlike Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams stories of violence and vengeance, The Dean is a more gentlemanly mystery solver who puts together intricate puzzles over the course of 60 pages per story.

Like many pre-1950s mysteries, “Stranger’s Kill” has far too many characters and far too little action. It’s a well-crafted mystery, but it was a bit dull and ultimately failed to grab me. I’ll probably read another novella sometime in the future because I enjoyed both the character and Constiner’s writing style, but the story mostly left me cold.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

The Lover

Using the pseudonym Carter Brown, Alan Geoffrey Yates (1923-1985) authored 215 novels and 75 novellas and counted U.S. President John F. Kennedy among his fans. His most enduring character was California-based police detective Al Wheeler, and Stark House Press has just released another three-pack of Wheeler mysteries anchored by The Lover from 1958.

In this case, Detective Wheeler is dispatched by the Sheriff to investigate a loony cult in the mountains run by a dude calling himself The Prophet. His followers allegedly engage in sun worship, group sex, drugs and fertility ceremonies. The Sheriff is concerned that this screwball religion may break bad in some unforeseen manner and orders Wheeler to investigate and provide his assessment.

Wheeler heads to the mountain to watch The Prophet in action. The cult leader is tanned and muscular wearing only a loin cloth and appears to worship the sun without metaphor or irony. The Prophet’s spiel is pretty pro-forma until he starts preaching that the Sun God demands a sacrifice.

This wouldn’t be much of a murder mystery if no one got killed. As such, after meeting a cadre of the Prophet’s devotees, we finally get a murder for Wheeler to solve. The author introduces a lot of characters (probably too many) who are all regarded as suspects. For his part, Wheeler is more full of wisecracks than I recall from other installments I’ve read. I’m betting that the upswing in Shell Scott’s popularity around 1958 influenced Yates to ratchet up an the pithy quips for Detective Wheeler to deliver.

Beyond that, this is a pretty standard whodunnit mystery with colorful characters and a logical, satisfying conclusion. Carter Brown mysteries have always served as pulp mystery comfort food - a palette cleanser between more substantial novels. You always know what you’re getting, and the thin paperbacks always deliver the goods. The Lover was no exception - you know exactly what you’re getting, and it’s always a good time. Recommended.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Paperback Warrior Podcast - Episode 79

Paperback Warrior Podcast Episode 79 delved into the life and work of Edward S. Aarons. Also discussed: Richard Neely, Harry Whittington, Reprints, Men of Violence, Men’s Adventure Quarterly, and more! Listen on any podcast app or download directly HERE 

Donate to the show HERE

Listen to "Episode 79: Edward S. Aarons" on Spreaker.

Killer Tank (aka Strike Force)

Norman Daniels found enormous success authoring various pulp characters like The Masked Detective, The Black Bat, Phantom Detective and even Doc Savage. After the pulps gave way to paperback originals, Daniels transitioned into a prolific author of crime-noir, romance, television novelizations and military-fiction. In 1965, Daniels wrote the WWII novel Strike Force for low-end publisher Lancer. In 1969, the equally low-brow publisher Magnum reprinted the novel as Killer Tank with the sales tag of “In the blazing tradition of Guns of Navarone.” Loving most of Daniels' literary work, as well as military-fiction, was enough motivation to spend a few bucks on this old paperback.

The book is set in Germany during WWII. The U.S. military formulates an idea that they can create a huge, powerhouse diversion on the German border. Using a number of planes, tanks and troops, they will fake an impending invasion and engage the enemy just long enough for a team of 30 tanks to slip in over the border and become a mobile task force. This task force, led by Colonel Hagen and Sergeant Dixon, will orchestrate hit-and-run attacks on German forces, towns, bases and airstrips. By disguising the tanks as German, and using old, overgrown roads, the force plans on creating as much undetected destruction as possible. The problem with that strategy? Hagen and Dixon despise each other.

The adventures of a WWII tank battalion operating in Germany can be an entertaining read with enough attention to the action. What makes Killer Tank different is that Daniels creates this really interesting back story between Hagen and Dixon. Through the first 100-pages the readers can easily determine that the two have history with each other. But, when Hagen begins to romance a beautiful French woman, Dixon becomes Hell-bent on destroying any hopes for Hagen's happiness. What is the history between these two American commanders? How could anything warrant this much hatred and animosity? I won't ruin the story for you, but the tension and suspense eventually percolates to a hot, boiling inferno. Just when I thought I had it figured out, the last few pages came out of left field with a right hook. I was dumbfounded.

With the focus on character development and a thick tension between Dixon and Hagen, Killer Tank serves as a hybrid of WWII and crime-noir storytelling. While I wasn't necessarily bored with the plotting and pace, I will say that Daniels never fully commits to either genre. When I wanted a more serious action novel the story slowed to a conversational tone. When I needed the characters to come to blows, the military action consumed the story. I couldn't quite walk the high beam that Norman Daniels built for me. The balancing act didn't work as well as I had hoped for. But, nevertheless Killer Tank is an entertaining read that probably could have been improved with a few precise touch-ups to the storytelling. You won't hate it, but I'm not sure how necessary this paperback really is. There are far better crime-noir and WW2 books out there.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Later

Since 2004, Hard Case Crime has been the nation’s most successful publisher of new and reprint crime fiction. In 2005, the upstart paperback house struck literary gold with the publication rights to Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid. It happened again in 2013 with Joyland, and now again in 2021 with his new book Later.

Our narrator is a 22 year-old young man named Jamie Conklin telling the reader the story of things that happened when he was a kid. Jamie is the only son of a single, literary agent mother in Manhattan. Jamie also sees dead people - pretty much just like the kid in The Sixth Sense. He warns the reader in his intro, “I think this is a horror story.” It’s the truth, but the story takes awhile to heat up before things get truly scary.

Jamie explains that dead people always tell the truth when they talk to him. Sometimes they say something funny and blunt like telling the boy that his school art project sucks. Other times it’s a useful tip like where the old lady hid her jewels before she passed away. His access to the dead is limited to the few days after passing before the deceased fade away into the great beyond. Jamie is candid with his mom about his ability, and she warns him to never tell anybody that he sees dead people.

Later jumps around quite a bit while focusing on Jamie’s upbringing and a variety of incidences where his ability to see and illicit information from dead people proves useful. Mom’s best friend is an NYPD detective named Liz. She’s the stacked brunette on the book’s cover. Over time, Liz comes to believe and accept Jamie’s sixth-sense and figures out some uses for it in the realm of her police work. As such, Jamie gets pressed into service by Liz using his unusual ability.

King writes Later in a breezy first-person style with super-short chapters that are easy to follow despite the often non-linear timeline. It takes forever for an actual plot to develop, but you don’t really mind because Jamie is a likable kid who makes the reader invested in his well-being. As advertised, the paperback eventually becomes a horror story with some honest-to-goodness creepy and unsettling set-pieces reminding the reader that Stephen King still has chops.

Beyond that, there’s not much to tell that won’t spoil the fun for you. Later is a quick and fulfilling read - arguably the strongest and most on-brand of his Hard Case Crime offerings. King excels at this kind of of coming-of-age horror story with vivid characters and chilling situations with a good hero confronting supernatural evil. King has a large back catalogue of epic works, so Later is unlikely to be your favorite among them. However, I can’t imagine any of his fans walking away dissatisfied from this superb little novel. 

Buy a copy of this book HERE