Time to Kill

Ted Stratton was a pulp author who wrote a 1953 Popular Library paperback called Time to Kill published under the pseudonym of Terry Spain. It’s basically an entertaining Mike Hammer ripoff, and it was recently reprinted by Cutting Edge Books.

Mack Berry is a hardboiled private eye assigned to collect intel on a local mobster named Dominic Parente. The racketeer’s organization sold marijuana to a teen girl who (of course) progressed immediately to heroin, overdosed and died. The dead girl’s dad hired Mack to do the gumshoe work to dismantle Parente’s dope operations in this rural New Jersey county.

Among the way, Mack encounters an array of hoodlums, crooked cops and two-timing dames who are itching to bang the PI. Mack also knows how to crack some skulls, and the fight scenes are vividly executed in his one man war against the mafia. Time to Kill is fast-moving, bruising, sincere, and unapologetically thrilling.

1953 was a year when Mickey Spillane could drop a Mike Hammer novel and outsell the Bible, and every aspiring pulp writer was trying to bottle the same mix of bruised masculinity and righteous mayhem. Taken in that context, Stratton’s pastiche is right on the money.

If you like novels where the hero saves the day but pays for it physically and emotionally, this is your kind of book. Just don’t expect a masterpiece. Get it HERE.