Fannin #1: Epitaph for a Tramp

Before experimental, avant-garde novelist David Markson (1927-2010) became a highly-regarded Greenwich Village literary figure, he wrote two hardboiled noir paperbacks for Dell starring private investigator Harry Fannin. The novels were “Epitaph for a Tramp” (1959) and “Epitaph for a Dead Beat” (1961). The books have been reprinted several times and even compiled together, but neither have been legally digitized for Kindle as of this writing.

“Epitaph for a Tramp” (also released as “Fannin” for a 1974 Unibook reprint) is narrated by Fannin, a former University of Michigan halfback, former newspaperman, former U.S. Army soldier and current private detective living a sweaty and lonely existence in a Manhattan fleabag apartment with his books. One sleepless night at 3:30 a.m., Fannin is greeted to his door buzzer ringing. The uninvited guest is his estranged ex-wife Cathy, whom he hasn’t seen in a year. Upon arrival, she collapses into his arms and dies moments later from a stab wound in her chest. Client or no client, Fannin now has a murder to solve.

We quickly learn that Cathy was no angel during their marriage. She was, in fact, the kind of tramp you’d mention in a paperback book title. I won’t spoil the details but the flashback chapter detailing the trajectory of the marriage between Fannin and Cathy was a helluva ride unto itself and makes the reader want to know more about this girl. The good news is that Fannin also wants the facts, and the reader is along for the ride.

Fannin is a thinking-man’s hardboiled private eye. He makes with the funny wisecracks (like Shell Scott) and genre tough guy talk (like Mike Hammer), but he’s also smart as hell and drops a lot of literary references along the way - T.S. Elliot and Dashiell Hammett among them. The good news is that none of this gets overly pedantic, nor does it get in the way of a great story.

Some of the characters Fannin encounters are drawn with some rough stereotypes that likely wouldn’t fly today. I always enjoy those moments in classic fiction because they help measure the passage of time and the changes in attitude over the past 60 years. If consumed correctly, books like this can be a valuable time capsule of social norms. However, if you require contemporary politeness to fictional characters in vintage paperbacks, “Epitaph for a Tramp” probably isn’t for you.

It’s also a violent read. A character gets tied to a chair in and burned with a lit cigarette. There are quite a few graphic beatings as Fannin stalks the New York streets in search of the bad decisions that led to Cathy’s fatal stabbing. The author clearly took the template of Mickey Spillane’s successful Mike Hammer series and turned the volume up to 11 with an extra twist at the end. It’s both a mystery and a vendetta story, and it’s one of the finest novels I’ve read this year - a highly recommended, absolute must-read.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Cash Madigan #01 - The Buried Motive

Bruce Cassiday was one of those authors who transitioned nicely from the pulp magazines to paperback original novels in the 1950s. He wrote a few Flash Gordon books in the 1970s and a host of other genre novels under an army of pseudonyms. He also wrote a biographies of Dinah Shore and Betty Ford, if that’s your bag. For awhile, he served as the fiction editor for Argosy Magazine and the brains behind many of their “book bonus” features.

Cassiday also authored two crime novels in the “Cash Madigan” series (if two books can even be called a series) - both released in 1957. One was half of an Ace Double titled “The Buried Motive” and the other was “While Murder Waits,” published by Graphic Books. The intended series order probably doesn’t matter, so I am hereby declaring “The Buried Motive” as Cash Madigan #1.

Cash is a Manhattan “bonding investigator,” a career that surprisingly doesn’t require a leather vest or a ball gag. Instead, he investigates employee embezzlements for a big company that insures employers against such losses. Cash’s job is to chase down the embezzler and recover enough stolen money to make his employer whole after the claim is paid. He’s basically a collection agent for an insurance company.

“The Buried Motive” assignment brings him to the small farming town of Gotham, Missouri to meet with an informant. The stool pigeon has info to provide Cash regarding the whereabouts of an embezzler who disappeared with $200,000 in payroll funds from a New York manufacturing company insured by Cash’s employer.

Upon Cash’s arrival in town, he reports to the trailer of his informant only to find that someone has butchered him with a carving knife. Although the logical suspect is the missing embezzler, Cash is quickly arrested for the stoolie’s murder. A baloney alibi from the town cutie springs him from police custody, but Cash remains in town to solve the murder, find the embezzler, and recover the missing dough.

Cash is a stereotypical wisecracking, tough-guy private eye in the mold of Shell Scott or Mike Hammer. The first-person narration is easy to read and follow, and Cassiday’s plotting is solid, if unremarkable. The mystery was pretty basic and nothing you haven’t read before. There’s murder and blackmail and deceit and missing money and if you haven’t read a warehouse of private eye paperbacks already, “The Buried Motive” will seem fresh and interesting. However, if you read a lot of these types of books, you’ll probably find this one to be just an average outing.

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The Crooked Window (aka Blood Lust Orgy)

In 1956, Harry Whittington wrote a manuscript called “The Crooked Window” that went unsold for a decade until March 1966 when it was adapted into a Nightstand Book called “Blood Lust Orgy.” The original 30,000 word novella was later published in Shell Scott Mystery Magazine’s November 1966 issue under the original title. I found a copy of the Shell Scott magazine containing the novella at a nice price on eBay whereas the lusty paperback tends to fetch insanely-high collector prices.

Readers expecting an actual orgy of blood and lust will probably be pretty disappointed, but “The Crooked Window” is a compelling mystery story typical of the digests of the late 1960s. It opens with Bill dropping off Marge at a local department store while he waits in the car for her. She needs to do some shopping before they return to their motel to resume daytime boning. Oddly, Marge never emerges, and Bill wonders why his girlfriend is taking so long.

Through a flashback montage, we learn that the relationship between Bill and Marge is a forbidden love. Marge is a married woman in an unhappy and abusive relationship. Her heel of a husband won’t give her a divorce, so her romance with Bill is driven underground. They meet periodically in secret to enjoy a few stolen hours together, and that’s exactly what they were doing when Marge inconveniently disappears inside the department store.

After verifying that Marge is nowhere inside the store, Bill is forced to make some tough decisions. Should he get the police involved? After all, he really as no legitimate standing in her life in his capacity as secret boyfriend. As day turns to night, Marge’s husband eventually calls the cops. Her disappearance becomes big local news, yet Bill remains paralyzed with fear - not wanting to step forward to reveal what he knows to police for fear of exposing Marge’s extra-curricular romance. The moral dilemmas and mysterious happenings unfold from there.

Again, this is a decent mystery but nothing particularly special. It’s not much better or worse than the stories you’d find in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine around that same era. Most importantly, “The Crooked Window” just isn’t up to the caliber of Harry Whittington’s greatest hits, and it’s certainly not worth the price bonehead collectors have been paying for rare copies of “Blood Lust Orgy.” If you can find a copy of the digest cheap, you should certainly buy the magazine and read the story. Just control your expectations and don’t expect a masterpiece.

Rudd #01 - Vice Cop

To the extent that crime fiction author Richard Deming is remembered today, it’s for his many TV tie-in novels (Dragnet, Mod Squad, Starsky & Hutch) or his one-legged P.I. character, Manville Moon. However, he also wrote an interesting three-book series of hardboiled police procedurals starring Matt Rudd, a vice cop in the fictional city of St. Cecilia. The three Rudd novels are “Vice Cop” (1961), “Anything but Saintly” (1963), and “Death of a Pusher” (1964) - all of which are available today as cheap eBooks. 

In a 1960 interview, Deming said that his Matt Rudd character (real name: Mateuz Rudowski) was originally designed to steal market share from Richard Prather’s Shell Scott series. Other than both detectives solving mysteries in sexually-charged environments (Rudd is, after all, a Vice Cop), they really aren’t all that similar - other than the fact that first-person narration and the fact that both heroes get laid. For my money, Deming was a far better writer than Prather.

“Vice Cop” begins with a citizen showing up at the police station to report a society dame who hosts “marijuana parties” with sex orgies at her home attended by the idle wealthy. Because the world was a very different place in 1961, the department assigns Rudd to begin dating a sexy reefer user in an undercover capacity, so he could score an invite to this recurring pot party in a private home. (Your tax dollars at work, 1961 America.)

Although the premise is stupid by today’s standards, Deming is still able to weave this into a credible crime novel. As long as you can see this as a historical artifact, “Vice Cop” is a minimally compelling police procedural story with well-written prose and a highly-likable blue-collar main character in Rudd. He’s a funny, and self-deprecating cop who makes you wish you were his drinking buddy. Narration this good makes the 175 pages fly by, but it still wasn’t much of a great novel.

Last year, I read and reviewed the second book in the Matt Rudd series, “Anything but Saintly.” It was a far superior effort than “Vice Cop” and more worth your time. You can probably just skip this one and try some of Deming’s better works. After all, life’s too short to read so-do crime fiction.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Ed Noon #14 - "Lust Is No Lady"

During his prolific career, Michael Avallone wrote around 38 novels and countless short stories featuring his private eye character, Ed Noon. Most of the early installments are straightforward mystery novels in the bawdy tradition of Shell Scott or Milo March. Later in the series, Avallone reinvented the Noon character as a spy working on special assignments handed to him directly by the U.S. President. Toward the end of the series, I’m told that Noon tangles with UFOs and aliens. He was an all-purpose, multi-genre hero for the ages.

“Lust Is No Lady” is the 14th novel in the series - although I’ve found that they can be enjoyed in any order. The paperback was originally released in 1965 by Belmont Books and later again under the title “The Brutal Kook.” Avallone’s son, David, is a successful comic book writer who has lovingly kept the Ed Noon series available as affordable Kindle editions while preserving the original cover art wherever possible.

The story opens with Noon’s car experiencing a blowout while driving through desolate Wyoming en route to a much-needed California vacation. While preparing to change the tire, a small airplane flies out of nowhere and starts dropping bricks from the sky onto his car - destroying any hope of a roadside repair.

Setting out on foot in the blistering heat, Noon finds a half-dead, naked, Native American woman staked to the ground with vultures circling above. The language barrier prevents a full explanation, but the woman leads Noon to a small settlement in the middle of nowhere called Agreeable Wells where every person that Noon encounters behaves in a guarded and suspicious manner.

While stranded with these oddball settlers, Noon is not exactly a prisoner but not quite a guest among them. A brutal murder occurs and Noon - being a hotshot NYC private detective - lends a hand toward getting to the bottom of the situation. However, the bigger mystery to the novel involves the true reason these people are in the middle of nowhere. For much of the novel, Noon is an observer bearing witness to a feuding and duplicitous small community brimming with dysfunction and greed.

At some point during this short paperback, it occurred to me that “Lust Is No Lady” was Avallone’s attempt at placing Noon into a Western novel - albeit one with periodic attacks by a killer airplane. The good news is that this works splendidly thanks to the author’s knack for compelling storytelling and vivid characters. The action sequences - particularly the one at the book’s climax - are all expertly engineered for maximum excitement.

As long as you know what you’re getting - a big-city private detective plopped into an old west adventure - “Lust Is No Lady” is an easy recommendation. You really can’t go wrong with the Ed Noon novels of Michael Avallone.

Postscript:

Thanks to the efforts of David Avallone, an unpublished Ed Noon book called “The Walking Wounded” by Michael Avallone will finally be published. The novel was written in 1973, and features cover art by contemporary comic book artist, Dave Acosta. Keep an eye on Amazon for details about this exciting release.

Buy a copy of "Lust is No Lady" HERE

Shell Scott #12 - Strip for Murder

Richard Prather built a career on his 'Shell Scott' character with around 35 novels spanning from 1950 to 1987. Countless short stories appeared in the pages of 'Manhunt' and 'Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine', and there was even a short-lived 'Shell Scott Mystery Magazine' that existed for a bit in the 1960s.

The 'Shell Scott' paperbacks have gone through multiple printings over the past half century with some beautiful cover art by Robert McGinnis as well as some weird photo covers featuring an odd-looking model in a silver wig. I’m told that the best 'Shell Scott' stories were the early ones published by Fawcett Gold Medal. Later editions either suffered from too much madcap comedy or injections of Prather’s own conservative politics into the stories. My informal polling - and an article by the late Ed Gorman - told me that 1955’s Shell Scott #9: “Strip For Murder” was among his best.

The setup in “Strip For Murder” is fairly proforma: After a young heiress impulsively marries a man she hardly knows, her wealthy mother hires Los Angeles private detective Shell Scott to investigative his background. Is this a case of true love or is the new husband a conniving gold digger? The danger of this assignment lies in the fact that Scott isn’t the first investigator on the case. His predecessor was found murdered on a rural road during the course of his investigation, so our hero also has at least one murder to solve along the way.

Scott is the stereotypical, wise-cracking, skirt-chasing private eye. He’s hard-boiled but funny.
Because this is a 'Shell Scott' novel, the action quickly moves to a nudist camp where Scott is called upon to go undercover as the naked fitness director. It should come as no surprise to the reader that every woman (or tomato, as he often calls them) at the camp is beautiful, luscious, and willing. Comedy set pieces throughout the book pad the paperback’s length without compromising the plot.

Other than some wacky situations, this is a pretty standard private eye novel. Scott follows logical leads, gets laid, and has his life repeatedly threatened as he gets closer to the truth. There are red herrings, bar brawls, and sunbathing contests adding to the fun, but the core mystery is nothing you haven’t seen before if you’ve ever read 'Milo March', 'Mike Shayne', or the works of Carter Brown. This genre is comfort food, and this execution of the craft in “Strip for Murder” was good reading - just don’t expect a masterpiece.