Brute Madness

Ledru Shoopman Baker Jr. (1919-1967) was born in Kansas and died in Los Angeles at age 48. He was a painter, novelist and WW2 vet who authored two successful Fawcett Gold Medal novels in 1951 and 1952 as well as an espionage novel called Brute Madness released by low-end sleaze publisher Novel Books in 1961. Fortunately, the paperback has been rescued from the dustbin of history by reprint house Cutting Edge Books.

The paperback opens with out narrator, Mark “Mitch” Mitchell, on trial for stealing a classified technical report on atomic guided missile technology from his employer at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Flashbacks from the trial tell the backstory of how the patriotic young scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project suddenly finds himself on trial for treason.

Essentially, it’s blame the dame.

Mitch has an eye for the ladies. Meanwhile, the agency keeps a close eye on him to ensure he doesn’t get loose-lipped about his nuke job while endeavoring to get laid. Mitch does a fine job of compartmentalizing such things until he meets Marie at a dance club. From the moment they meet, there is an erotic compatibility that the author describes in vivid - but never graphic - detail. Suffice it to say that Mitch is completely intoxicated by Marie’s charms.

Three weeks after meeting, Mitch and Marie are engaged to be married. The internal security people at the Atomic Energy Commission are skeptical of Marie from the beginning. Why can’t they find anything about her past? It’s like she appeared out of nowhere. The marriage moves forward over the protestations of the agency cops.

You don’t have to be a genius to draw a straight line between the opening courtroom scene with Mitch on trial for mishandling classified materials and the flashback involving his suspicious wife who materialized into his life from nowhere. Is it possible that Marie duped Mitch and made off with the secret missile plans?

The trajectory of the legal case comprising the first quarter of the book was nonsensical and made me wonder if the author ever met an attorney. However, if you’re able to suspend your disbelief, there’s a great spy thriller inside the pages of this thin paperback with delightful and unexpected twists and turns around every corner. The paperback’s main villain is a corpulent giant called The Dutchman, who is one of the finest villains I have ever encountered in a vintage paperback. Both the dialogue and action scenes are also particularly good throughout the novel.

Brute Madness is a remarkably good time. It probably won’t be your favorite book ever, but it’s way better than it had to be to satisfy both 1961 readers and those rediscovering the paperback 60 years later. Recommended.

Ledru Baker Jr. Bibliography:

And Be My Love (Fawcett Gold Medal 1951)

The Cheaters (Fawcett Gold Medal 1952)

Preying Streets (Ace Books 1955)

“The Queens Bedroom” - Novelette from Tales of the Frightened magazine (August 1957). The publication was edited by Lyle Kenyon Engel and illustrated by Rudy Nappi.

Brute Madness (Novel Books 1961)

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One for the Road

Conventional wisdom says that the best books by former CIA operative and Watergate burglar Howard Hunt were the ones he wrote under the pseudonym Robert Dietrich. One for the Road is a 1954 stand-alone crime-noir novel that has been re-released by Cutting Edge in trade paperback and ebook formats.

One for the Road begins in the Florida gulf coast town of De Soto, populated by mosquitoes, sea turtles, and rich widows. The old dames are the draw for our narrator, a con-artist and Korean War vet named Larry Roberts, who grew up a poor orphan and has decided to spend his adult life remedying that by latching onto a rich sugar mama and then disappearing with her money. He meets a 40 year-old wealthy woman named Sophie with a smoking hot body and a decent face. Even better: her husband has been dead for a year.

So Larry is a bit of a heel and a misogynist. He’s also charming, clever, funny and unrepentant. You hate yourself for liking him as much as you do - especially when he’s conning money out of an otherwise nice and loving lady. Getting rich quick and dishonestly isn’t a noble pursuit, but it definitely makes for compelling reading. As the paperback progresses, a cool gambling subplot becomes a major source of tension and anxiety for both Larry and the reader before settling into a rather typical femme fatale story.

The coolest things about this thin paperback were the innovative story arcs and vivid settings. Larry covers a lot of ground in the novel, which basically weaves three separate plots into an overarching narrative. I read a lot of these books, and I had no idea where this one was heading. The plotting was just masterful.

Of the Howard Hunt books I’ve read, One for the Road is the best of the bunch by a country mile. There’s sex, violence, duplicity and intrigue. I’m thrilled to see this paperback has made a comeback for modern audiences. This is the vintage novel you deserve. Highly recommended. 

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Designing Fiction: A Richard Himmel Paperback Primer

Did one of America’s most famous interior designers have a side-hustle writing tawdry paperbacks at the advent of the new medium? Today we take a peek behind the curtain and present you with the untold story of author Richard Himmel.

Richard was born in Chicago in 1920 and called the city home for nearly all his life. The young man loved the written word and attended University of Chicago to study writing under the tutelage of his mentor Thorton Wilder, the writer of Our Town. 

“He always intended to become an English teacher. He was a voracious reader,” Richard’s son John Himmel told Paperback Warrior. “In his library, he had first editions, including a D.H. Lawrence collection. He was always drawn toward the literary arts.”

Richard’s plans to teach writing were sidelined by World War 2. When the time came to serve, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. However, an illness prevented him from being shipped overseas into the fields of battle. “The Army realized early on that he was a pretty smart boy, and he was assigned to General Patton’s staff,” John explained. “He wrote pamphlets and brochures for all sorts of things such as identifying Japanese aircraft as well as a primer on the Japanese language.”

After the war, he returned to Chicago with the intention of becoming an English teacher. While waiting for this to occur, he took a job at his sister’s housewares store in the northern suburb of Winnetka. “He began taking on decorating jobs and his career was made,” John said.

Richard’s knack for colors and spacing eventually made him one of the most sought-after interior designers in the United States with high-profile clients including boxer Mohammed Ali and Hugh Heffner’s Playboy Club. However, as his business was growing and becoming established, he never lost his love of the written word. 

Around 1950, a new outfit called Fawcett Gold Medal had plans to revolutionize the publishing industry by releasing all-new novels directly to the paperback format with salacious painted covers. For the past decade, paperbacks had just been reprints of successful hardcover literary works. The idea of releasing original material in a 25 cent paperback filled an important hole in the book market for readers after the pulp magazines had disappeared. Paperback originals were poised to be the next big thing, and publishing houses like Fawcett Gold Medal needed talented authors who could write compelling prose quickly.

At the time, Richard – and all of America – had become infatuated with the prose of Mickey Spillane and wrote a book called I’ll Find You about a hardboiled Chicago lawyer named Johnny Maguire who functions as a private eye for his clients. Richard submitted the manuscript to Fawcett Gold Medal, who released the book in 1950 as the imprint’s fifth paperback original. The book was an instant success and saw five printings through 1955 and a second life in 1962 when it was re-released as It’s Murder, Maguire. 

“He got a literary agent in New York named Sterling Lord, and they worked together to get his books published,” John said. This put Richard in good company as Lord represented some of the biggest names in 20th Century literature including Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, and Howard Fast. 

The second installment of the Johnny Maguire series was The Chinese Keyhole from 1951. It’s an odd sequel because there is no mention of Chicago whatsoever whereas the first novel was steeped in local Windy City sites and flavors. Another major change is that The Chinese Keyhole is a spy novel, not a hardboiled crime story. There’s a hasty explanation at the beginning of the book that Attorney Johnny Maguire was also an occasional spy for a shadowy U.S. intelligence agency. The paperback is great, but it was a weird and abrupt genre shift. My theory is that Richard wrote the book as a stand-alone spy thriller and his literary agent or publisher told him to edit the book to make it Johnny Maguire #2. Mickey Spillane taught the publishing world that there’s money to be made in series characters, and Himmel was apparently happy to oblige.

Later in 1951, Fawcett Gold Medal released the third Johnny Maguire novel, I Have Gloria Kirby and things went gangbusters. Over one million copies were sold firmly establishing Richard as one of the bestselling authors in the Fawcett Gold Medal stable. It was also a big year for Richard and his wife for another reason - the arrival of their son. They chose a familiar name for the boy: John Maguire Himmel. 

Throughout the 1950s, Richard was working during the day as an interior designer and at night as a successful writer pecking away at his typewriter with two fingers and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “Growing up, I still remember that sound, and I still have his typewriter” John said.

The success of the Johnny Maguire series opened the door for Richard to get his romantic and sexy mainstream novels published as well. The best of these books (The Sharp Edge, Beyond Desire) were also published by Fawcett Gold Medal while others found homes and multiple printings elsewhere. The Johnny Maguire series continued for five total installments through 1958’s The Rich and the Damned.

This was followed by a 19-year hiatus from writing and publishing. “There was a period in his life when he wasn’t really writing because his career as a designer took off,” John said. “He really didn’t have much time to write, but it was always in his mind. Eventually, he went back at it.”

Richard returned to publishing with three longer stand-alone thrillers between 1977 and 1981, each with page counts exceeding 300 pages. The novels were successful and moved the action to international settings, including Iraq, Cuba, and China. By this time, Richard was a high-profile member of Chicago society, and each subsequent paperback was greeted with increasing fanfare. John recalls the release party for his dad’s 1979 Cuba thriller, Lions at Night. Richard used a parking lot on a busy street corner of Chicago’s famed Magnificent Mile for the extravagant outdoor gala. “He rented actual lions and guys dressed in guerilla fatigues for a big-ass party there, and he sold a lot of books,” John said. “My dad was quite a showman.”

Richard’s final manuscript, a novel with a working title of The Uncircumcised Jew, failed to find a home. The book was submitted to publishers through his agent in the 1990s and just didn’t sell. Richard’s literary winning streak had ended. “I think he got a little bit discouraged,” John said. 

Aging and dealing with health issues, Richard’s career as a novelist ended, but he never fully retired from the decorating business. According to John, his father was sick for a long time at the end of his life. “He was a heavy smoker and obviously a workaholic. He also didn’t get much exercise.” Heart problems lead to his death in 2000 in Florida.

Today, Richard is mostly remembered as a visionary in the field of interior design. John took over the business and has continues in the field keeping the Himmel name alive as the go-to brand for upscale decorating clients. 

The Johnny Maguire series, one of the most successful side-jobs of the paperback original era, was almost lost to the ages until Lee Goldberg’s Cutting Edge Books started reprinting the books in 2019 as trade paperbacks and affordable ebooks. John is thrilled that his father’s literary work has found a new audience in a new century. “There was very little that he put his mind to that didn’t excel. My dad was a generic genius.”

Richard Himmel Bibliography:

1950 I’ll Find You / It’s Murder, Maguire (Johnny Maguire #1)

1950 Soul of Passion / Strange Desires / The Shame

1951 The Chinese Keyhole (Johnny Maguire #2) 

1951 I Have Gloria Kirby / The Name’s Maguire (Johnny Maguire #3)

1952 - The Sharp Edge 

1952 - Beyond Desire 

1954 Two Deaths Must Die (Johnny Maguire #4)

1955 Cry of the Flesh

1958 The Rich and the Damned (Johnny Maguire #5)

1977 The Twenty-Third Web

1979 Lions at Night

1982 Echo Chambers

Footnote  

Thanks to Paperback Confidential: Crime Writers of the Paperback Era by Brian Ritt for providing information used in this feature. 

Ride the Gold Mare

While spending a majority of his career penning non-fiction, Ovid Demaris authored a number of crime-fiction novels. While I've had mixed reactions to Demaris' literary work, I enjoyed his 1959 novel The Long Night. Hoping for another positive reading experience, I read the author's first novel, Ride the Gold Mare, published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1957 and reprinted by Cutting Edge Books in 2020.

The book stars Phil Lambert, a tenacious Hollywood reporter whose focus is the city's deadly heroin distribution network. In the novel's opening pages, a crooked cop named Fusco violently kills a drug pusher. The murder is witnessed by two druggies who flee the scene of the crime. Lambert learns of the murder and suspects that Fusco may be tied to the Syndicate. In an effort to break the story, Lambert tries to stay ahead of Fusco in learning the whereabouts of the two witnesses.

At this early career stage, Demaris was clearly influenced by Jim Thompson's writing style. Ride the Gold Mare is saturated with characters who remain rough around the edges and undesirable. Weepy and Doris, for example, are both losers who never stray far from the gutter begging for drug money. There's a stripper longing for love, a wife begging for faithfulness, a dealer skimming off the top and an average man positioned on the brink of the vast criminal underworld.

Much of the narrative focuses on the aforementioned Sergeant Vince Fusco of the Los Angeles Narcotics Squad. In essence, he is the consummate villain, a narcissistic dirty cop who clashes with the public he’s sworn to serve. In many ways, he's the prototype for the sadistic mob killer that Demaris would later create and utilize for his 1960 novel The Enforcer.

Among the miscreants, delinquents, hookers and dealers, the cast of characters is bleak, created with a sense of depravity by the author. The narrative is littered with profanity, drug use and sexual aggression that is somewhat uncommon for a 1957 Gold Medal paperback. Like John D. MacDonald's 1960 novel The End of the Night, Ovid Demaris' Ride the Gold Mare is a brutal look at youth gone wild with no safety barriers or censorship. It's an epic, violent clash between lawbreakers that swirls into a compelling, fast-moving crime-noir read from beginning to end. The book is a fantastic first-effort from an author who simply excelled in this genre. 

Note - Ride the Gold Mare is also part of a four-book compilation entitled California Crime. The omnibus is available from Cutting Edge and features three other crime-noir novels authored by Demaris - The Enforcer, The Long Night and The Hoods Take Over.  

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Swamp Nymph

Swamp noir was a popular American sub-genre of the 1950s and 1960s born from the idea that the rural backwoods was teeming with sexy, duplicitous babes seeking to take advantage of city slickers who crossed their paths. In 1962, sleaze-fiction maven John Burton Thompson (1911-1994) got into the act with Swamp Nymph, a short novel that has recently been reprinted by Cutting Edge Books. 

Charles Carraway III is a 30 year-old wealthy scion of a chemical company who just caught his wife showering with her tennis partner in his mansion filled with servants. He responds in kind by forming a sexual relationship with his Swedish maid - a coupling that, for various reasons, can never be more than a fling. To escape all the problems of the world, he heads south to Louisiana in his private plane for a much-needed vacation. 

The Swamp Nymph in question isn’t introduced until well into the paperback. Her name is Shayne, and she’s a 19 year-old beguiling beauty living near the Amite River in rural Louisiana. She was sexually assaulted at a young age and has avoided the company of men ever since despite a desire for love and intimacy. Thompson does a nice job of making Shayne sympathetic and attractive to male readers who will want to rescue this girl from her own past. 

For nearly the whole novel, the plot toggles between the Charles story and the Shayne story. The book is really not about their romance because they don’t even meet until 85% into the novel. The entire plot is just a series of life events and romantic near-misses that eventually bring them to the same swamp community at the same time. 

It’s hard to tell from the cover of these swamp paperbacks if a particular book is a crime-noir novel in disguise (like Harry Whittington’s Backwoods Tramp) or just a standard soft-core sex story. Swamp Nymph is definitely not a crime novel, and the sex scenes are so tepid that they’d hardly raise an eyebrow today. It’s really the story of When Charles Met Shayne and it takes a pretty basic, rather lengthy and mostly unremarkable route to get there. 

Thompson was a better writer than his genre deserved, but his plotting in Swamp Nymph was a slow road to nowhere. I didn’t hate the book, but life is short. You deserve to be reading better books than this one.

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Paperback Warrior Unmasking - Philip Race

In the Cutting Edge Books reprint of the 1959 paperback Killer Take All, readers learn that author Elmer Merle Parsons (1926-1970) was as untamed as the criminals he fictionally fabricated. Born in Pittsburgh, Parsons was first convicted of burglary and grand theft auto at the age of 23. After serving three years in prison, Parsons began passing stolen checks. His freedom was short-lived, and Parsons was sentenced to San Quentin Prison for five years. While inside, Parsons discovered a dexterous ability to write, becoming the editor of the prison newspaper and crafting his first novel, Self-Made Widow (1958), which he sold to Fawcett Gold Medal for $3,500 under the pseudonym Philip Race.


While in prison, Parsons authored two novels starring a craps dealer named Johnny Berlin – 1959's Killer Take All and 1960's Johnny Come Deadly (published by Hillman Books). Both were published under the pseudonym Philip Race. Using the name E.M. Parsons, the author wrote a suspenseful romance novel called Dark of Summer (1961) as well as three western originals – The Easy Gun (1970), Fargo (1968) and Texas Heller (1959). Later, the talented writer went to work for Hollywood, writing scripts for a number of television shows like Bonanza, The Dakotas, The Virginian and Sea Hunt. I've always enjoyed the proverbial “small town drifter” story, so the synopsis of Killer Take All peaked my interest.

Review: Killer Take All

Johnny Berlin flees the bright lights of Las Vegas due to a love gone bad. When readers first meet Berlin, he's driving a fog-shrouded highway in rural Oregon in an effort to start a new life in Portland. After becoming lost on the midnight highway, Berlin is aided by a man named Donetti who directs him to spend the night in a small town called McKaneville. Surprisingly, when Berlin rolls into the tiny hamlet, he discovers it's a booming lakeside village ripe with gambling clubs.

Parsons' novel puts Berlin back behind the craps table for a struggling club owner named Dan Gurion. After meeting an old flame, Berlin agrees to assist Gurion in an effort to rekindle the business and keep his new boss from being forced to join a pushy racket called the Gambler's Protective Association. With the mob running a number of gambling halls throughout the area, Gurion is one of the last few holdouts to join the association. Partnering with Berlin, Gurion goes against the grain to defy the odds and beat the rackets. But, when Berlin is nearly murdered and the premier head of the Protective Association is killed, things aren't quite as black and white as readers might think.

The first thing to know about Parsons' writing style is that he introduces over a dozen characters in the narrative's opening half. It's a large cast to contend with, a habit that threw me off of the author's similar novel, Dark of Summer. Both paperbacks feature lakeside communities that are mired in business transactions, lover quarrels and a penchant for violence. Dark of Summer was a dense romantic fling whereas Killer Take All is more of a violent crime-noir complete with painted ladies and jaded faces.

While Berlin isn't the stout heavyweight crime-fighter that readers typically associate with these types of stories, the vulnerable protagonist enhances the overall concept – a flawed human fighting a flawed system complete with flawed justice. Where the characters are sometimes subdued and emotionally wilted, it's the author's storytelling talents that truly blossom.

Parsons wasn’t a remarkable writer as his saturation of characters can, at times, make for a burdensome read. However, he's a solid writer with a knack for great stories. With just a handful of published novels in his career, Killer Take All's affordability as a used paperback and digital reprint is well worth the price of admission. You won't be disappointed.

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Johnny Maguire #02 - The Chinese Keyhole

In the 1950s, Richard Himmel (1920-2000) wrote five books in the Johnny Maguire series about a lawyer who functions as a hardboiled detective and all-around troubleshooter. I loved the series debut, so I was excited to tackle the second installment, The Chinese Keyhole from 1951. The book was originally a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback and has been re-released by Cutting Edge Books.

The novel opens with Johnny telling the reader something he neglected to share in the first book. During World War 2, Johnny was recruited into the OSS, the wartime precursor to the CIA, and he’s periodically called upon to set aside his law practice to engage in espionage at the request of the U.S. State Department. Yes, our favorite hardboiled Chicago lawyer is evidently a spook as well. It’s almost as if the author had a cool idea for a spy novel and decided to slot Johnny Maguire into the lead role because he had an extra protagonist just lying around with no immediate plans. 

Anyway, Johnny’s handler instructs him to go to the Chinese Keyhole, a strip club in Chicago’s Chinatown, to deliver a coded message to an Asian stripper. One thing leads to another, and Johnny has a bloodbath on his hands. The only way to get close to the killers is to, well, sleep with a stripper. A part-time spy’s work is never done. 

Meanwhile, Johnny’s childhood friend Tom was recently plugged in the back six times with no leads as to the killer’s identity. Tom was a walking saint on earth, and who would want to kill a guy like that? If you’re familiar with the way 1950s plotting works, you’ve probably already guessed that Tom’s death is somehow tied into the nudie bar spy situation. A central mystery develops regarding the identity of the enemy spy ring boss, and the solution - a big reveal at the end - was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention. That said, the series of final confrontations with Johnny’s adversaries was pretty outstanding. 

Himmel was a great writer who knew how to keep a story moving, and The Chinese Keyhole is a sexy and exciting thin paperback. Readers should know that this 1951 work of disposable fiction has some retrograde things to say about Asians and gays. It didn’t bother me, but consider yourself warned that 1951 was, in fact, nearly 70 years ago. 

Richard Himmel deserves to be remembered, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that The Chinese Keyhole was the high-mark of his writing career. It’s a romantic and exciting bit of domestic spy fiction, and I’m thrilled that Cutting Edge Books has made the series available to a new generation. I’m also excited to read what Johnny Maguire is going to do next. 

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Steve Bentley #02 - End of a Stripper

E. Howard Hunt authored over 70 novels utilizing pseudonyms including David St. John, Gordon Davis, John Baxter and variations of his own name. He also used the name Robert Dietrich to write 12 novels, 10 of them featuring a fictional Washington D.C. tax accountant named Steve Bentley. The character debuted in 1957's Murder on the Rocks and continued with two to three books per year through 1962. In 1999, Hunt revisited the character with one final chapter, Guilty Knowledge. Cutting Edge Books has released several of them as affordable ebooks. I really enjoyed my experience with the series debut and was happy to obtain a digital copy of the second installment, 1959's End of a Stripper.

The story begins with Bentley entertaining an old war buddy at a swanky strip-club called Chanteclair. It's here where Bentley first sets eyes on a gorgeous Scandinavian stripper named Linda Lee. Enthralled with the woman, Bentley notices that a shady man is taking quick, discreet photos of Lee. After a few minutes, the man is assaulted by two bouncers and hauled outside. Right before his exit, the man furtively slides his camera into Bentley's pocket. After the show, Bentley has a private-eye friend analyze the photos only to determine they are just poorly lit, poorly planned shots of Lee. But, Bentley learns the man taking the photos was a bottom-shelf private-eye named Mousey found murdered in a nearby warehouse. After Bentley is visited with threats to return the camera, the narrative accelerates to furious pace under Hunt's talented writing skills.

With Bentley the target of the bouncers and whoever hired Mousey, the only solution is to discover the identity of the mysterious stripper. In doing so, Bentley finds himself mired in the inner workings of politics in the D.C. beltway. Using his trusted ally Lieutenant Kellaway, the duo investigate Chanteclair's ties to a wealthy criminal mastermind and his connection with a secretive U.S. Congressman.

Hunt's second Bentley thriller is an intriguing, pulse-pounding hardboiled crime-novel with all of the desirable genre tropes – sultry women, crooked men and the inevitable chase for wealth and power. End of a Stripper is a more superior offering when compared to the series debut, Murder on the Rocks. Both are excellent, but it's Hunt’s narrative that readers will find fascinating. His contemptuous views of 1959's amoral Washington D.C. serve as a prophetic message for readers in 2020. 

In an odd twist, it is Hunt himself who would later contribute to unlawfulness in our nation's capital with his involvement in the famed Watergate Scandal. Despite the author's political experiences, Hunt proves once again that he can write the proverbial hardboiled crime classic again and again. End of a Stripper may or may not be one of his best literary offerings. After all, he authored over 70 novels, so further investigation is warranted.

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Death Must Wait

Former NFL player Don Kingery had only four published novels during his short literary career – Death Must Wait (1956), Swamp Fire (1957), Paula (1959) and Good Time Girl (1960). The rest of his writing was dedicated to print journalism, a career that spanned over 50 years in and around Southwest Louisiana. His novels were of the Erskine Caldwell variety, centering around strong southern roots and a penchant for poverty-ridden family dynamics that make up the blue collar highways of rural America. Nothing expresses that literary sense more than Kingery's Death Must Wait.

Like Caldwell's superior Tobacco Road, Kingery explores criminal behavior, immorality and mental issues throughout the thick narrative of Death Must Wait. Arguably, the book's only protagonist is Jed, a poor working man who hunts and traps in a dense section of Louisiana Bayou called Morganzas Pass. His father is complacent in his family's rags-to-more-rags lifestyle, never rising above the lowest tier of low class. Often Jed's parents lament their decision to marry, breed or even rise to exist. Jed's sister is a prostitute and his brother a drunk. A sense of escapism feeds Jed's desire to flourish in the outdoors, a trade that provides the only honest wage for the family.

Kingery's narrative expands once Jed is provoked into a fistfight with a belligerent bar patron. Jed's social inadequacies, short-temper and neanderthal strength leads to his undoing. When the man Jed scuffles with seemingly dies on the bar’s sawdust floor, Jed runs to the swamps to avoid a demented, corrupt small-town sheriff who wants to secure his bid for reelection. Eventually Jed is captured and arrested, but it is his love for a young woman named Nila that stirs a cause for action. Jed must either escape or prove his innocence before the backwoods lawyer and sheriff condemns him.

Death Must Wait was an intriguing story that displays crime-noir tendencies despite the abstract approach. Jed is the common-man placed into extreme circumstances, but the author's description of this small-town existence – failures, poverty, corruption, greed, despair – is the focal point. While still retaining a crime-fiction element, the book works more as a cynical look at this era of American history and the social degradation that formed so many of the southeastern cities. If you need more crime in your fiction, Death Must Wait may not spin your wheels. But for a solid, intriguing testament about rural America and it's deficiencies, look no further than this.

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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.

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Vince Slader #01 - The Long Night

Ovid Demaris (1919-1998) authored a number of crime-fiction novels that were based on his research into real-life organized crime. The author’s most successful books were his non-fiction accounts of actual Mafia operations. As such, it's no surprise that his novels including Hoods Take Over, Candyleg and The Organization revolve around the Syndicate's drug, gambling and prostitution rackets on the American West Coast. While I wasn't fond of Demaris' The Enforcer, I wanted to sample another of his mob novels. I chose The Long Night, originally published in 1959 and recently reprinted as an affordable ebook by NY Times bestselling author Lee Goldberg's Cutting Edge imprint. It's the first of two books starring quasi-private investigator Vince Slader, the other being 1960's The Gold Plated Sewer.

The Long Night features protagonist Vince Slader, a hard-nosed guy who works as a debt collector. Now, Slader isn't a debt collector that sits behind the phones and dials for dollars. Instead, really bad guys call on the really tough Slader to retrieve gambling debts and derogatory installment payments. In Beverly Hills, it's a business that is booming. Armed with an address and a .45, Slader's track record in the debt collection business is very good. He runs the operation under his license of private-investigator, and that business has now become scrutinized by two California Senators who are wise to Slader's violent business practices.

Despite being the target of a committee investigation, Slader takes on a new assignment of tracking down a gambling debtor named Russell. To retrieve him, he starts with questioning Russell's voluptuous wife Cindy. The intense question and answer session eventually leads to Slader getting laid, but it doesn't get him any closer to Russell or his dough. After digging in a little further, Russell is traced to a couple of beefy hit-men who want to protect the man for their own purposes.

The narrative takes an unexpected twist when Cindy dumps Slader on a rural stretch of California highway. It is there that Slader apparently is run over by a car belonging to Russell. But here's the mystery: Slader awakens at the bottom of a ravine behind the wheel of Russell's car. He is in possession of Russell's wallet and driver's license with no idea how he got there. After hearing a radio bulletin about Russell being carjacked, Slader realizes he's been set-up for armed robbery. The book's climactic second-half is a riveting narrative that follows Slader's investigation to clear his own name and find this mysterious Russell character.

My previous experience with Demaris was the soapy, teenage delinquent novel The Enforcer (1960). It was disguised as a gritty crime-fiction novel about a Mafia stranglehold but was really a uninspired episode of Melrose Place. The Long Night is a far more compelling story, one that is legitimately a gritty crime-fiction novel. Demaris inserts loud-mouthed, gambling kingpins into the narrative and saturates the prose with gunplay, fast cars and sexy women. The criminals are edgy, but the hero is a valid, uncompromising tough guy who serves as the perfect crime combatant. While Slader's goal is to recoup the money, the author weaves in a romantic side story as well as an interesting revelation of Slader's ex-wife who became a prostitute.

The Long Night is an enjoyable 1950s crime-fiction novel that retains most of the flavor of the genre's mid-century pioneers. If you are a fan of authors like Frank Kane and Mickey Spillane, The Long Night is sure to please.

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The Enforcer

Maine native and US Army veteran Ovid Demaris (1919-1998) dedicated a majority of his literary work to non-fiction accounts of Mafia operations. Between 1957 and 1988, Demaris also authored a number of crime-fiction novels, two of which were adapted to film - Hoods Take Over as the film Gang War and Candyleg as Machine Gun McCain. Based on the author's research on organized crime, it's no surprise to find The Enforcer in his published works, a mob-themed crime-noir originally released by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1960 and now available as an affordable reprint through Cutting Edge.

Bender is a ruthless mob enforcer living in a bright and cheery apartment complex in Hollywood. When he's not breaking the legs of debtors and traitors, Bender spends his time with a stripper named Nicki while also lusting over a nearby resident named Eileen. However, the police are on to Bender and have him under investigation for a neighborhood double-homicide. To finalize their case, the police ask Detective Mark Condon to go undercover as a resident at the apartment complex. While it's never really explained what Condon is hoping to discover, readers will forget the story-line due to the narrative's abundant sleaze and sexy oscillation. The apartment complex’s pool is like the porn palace of Los Angeles. Resembling a dirty episode of “Friends”, roommates spend 127-pages attempting to get laid. There's also the sex-starved whacko who observes from afar with one hand on his...windowsill.

The Enforcer was my first experience with author Ovid Demaris and by all rights should be the last. I'm a sucker for punishment and unfortunately bought a four-pack of his vintage novels on Ebay. But just to be fair, Demaris may have intended this to be a smutty romance novel and Fawcett just dressed it up to resemble a vengeful crime-fiction offering. Even the book's title may have been something entirely different. We'll never know. But that doesn't dismiss the notion that Demaris is a good author. His fragmented, multilayered narrative has way too many shallow characters. The author spends multiple pages on poolside antics and immature jokes that hinder the pace. Nothing is remarkable, and Demaris doesn't have a story to tell. It's just a random amount of nonsense about young hotheads stripping, dancing and boning.

It goes without saying, but I'll state for the record that The Enforcer has joined the Hall of Shame. Avoid this one like a scorching case of California Clap. 

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Steve Ashe #02 - I Like It Tough

I was thrilled to see that Cutting Edge Books has chosen to reprint James A. Howard’s fantastic Steve Ashe novels as ebooks and new-edition paperbacks. The four-book series from 1954-1957 stars a rough and ready pilot-boxer-reporter unafraid to fight dirty. The series served as an early prototype for the kinds of serial vigilante adventures popularized by Pinnacle Books in the 1970s. I Like It Tough from 1955 is the second Steve Ashe adventure, and it’s probably best for the series to be read in its proper order.

The story opens with Steve regaining consciousness in a Colorado hospital room a day after using his body to stop some bullets during the climactic ending of I'll Get You Yet, the series debut installment. The opening chapter does a thorough job of bringing readers up to speed on the events of the first novel. As such, if you read this second series novel first, you’ve just spoiled the prior book. The short version is that Steve successfully dismantled the upper-echelon of the Denver syndicate. Are they gone forever? Or will The Outfit regroup?

A package bomb arrives at the hospital room killing Steve’s girl, so we know that Steve’s one-man war against the mafia definitely isn’t over. Steve’s new eye-for-an-eye target is Vito Gaesinni, a mobster filling the void left by the dead wise guys from the previous novel. The path to find Vito brings Steve to Los Angeles and into the orbit of some interesting side characters who become part of Steve’s manhunt plan. As with the first novel, the fact that Steve’s career as a journalist has zero relevance to the plot. He’s just a badass adventurer cleaning up the streets of L.A.

Early in the novel, Steve befriends (and lays) a prostitute with a heart of gold named Sylvia. Vito had paid Sylvia for sex and companionship in the recent past, so the hope is that she can provide Steve some insight into his prey. In Los Angeles, he connects with a psychologist operating a sanitarium treating a narcotics-addicted magazine illustrator with a sexy personal secretary. The scourge of drugs - particularly the terrifying and insidious “marijuana” - lurks in the background of the paperback and takes a human toll on many of the characters.

There’s a legitimate mystery to solve in the heart of I Like It Tough, and it involves a shadowy corporation paying the bills for the drunken illustrator and their possible connection to the narcotics trade. Is it a publishing industry outfit licensing illustration art? Or a mob front insuring the silence of people who know too much? The vendetta story and the mystery compliment each other nicely throughout the violent, fast-moving pages leading to a climactic conclusion.

I have no idea if Don Pendleton ever read the work of James L. Howard, but they were certainly flying in the same airspace 20 years apart. I Like It Tough is another winner in the short-lived Steve Ashe series. Thank heavens these books are back in print as this series certainly deserves to be remembered. 

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Kiss or Kill

Between 1950 and 1969, Louisiana native and WW2 veteran John Burton Thompson (1911-1994) authored and sold around 75 books. His paperbacks were considered to be so racy at the time that NYPD raided city bookstores and seized over a thousand copies of paperbacks written by him and others. Thereafter, much of his writing was done using pseudonyms to remain marketable to skittish booksellers. By today’s cultural standards, the sex in Thompson’s work wouldn’t raise an eyebrow, and Lee Goldberg’s new publishing imprint, Cutting Edge Books recently put that to the test by reintroducing Thompson’s 1962 paperback Kiss or Kill back into print.

Our narrator is Jack McKnight looking back on his adolescent years when he was raised by his evil mother and his wicked half brothers from his mom’s previous relationship. His mother and siblings are bitter that dad left half the estate to Jack, his only biological heir, before dad’s early demise. His teen years are filled with disdain from mom and savage beatings from the brothers.

Young Jack has an ally in his late father’s best friend, Mr. Palmer, who explains the birds and the bees to Jack and seems genuinely invested in the young man’s well-being. As Jack pursues a variety of romances while moving into adulthood, there’s a lot of great fatherly advice that Mr. Palmer bestows upon Jack about life and women. I can’t remember a more satisfying “young man and adult mentor” relationship in any book I’ve read in ages.

However, there’s an real air of menace lurking in the background of this paperback. Jack’s mother and half-brothers become increasingly unhinged, and Jack worries with good reason that they are plotting to murder him to take over his half of his father’s estate. The violence - real and threatened - escalates throughout the novel building to a bloodbath of a climax.

Kiss or Kill is a really odd book. There are scenes of shocking violence, but it’s not an action novel. There are hot scenes of seduction, but it never felt like a graphic sleaze novel. There are a few genuinely romantic storylines, but it’s certainly not a romance novel. And so on. It’s really a fictional autobiography of a compelling character overcoming a difficult upbringing and becoming a man. In that sense, it’s a very mainstream novel masquerading as a tawdry 50-cent paperback.

Although this is pretty far afield from the classic crime-adventure novels we normally cover here at Paperback Warrior, I can enthusiastically recommend Kiss or Kill to anyone who enjoys a good vintage coming-of-age tale. Thompson is a way better writer and storyteller than either iteration of the novel’s packaging would lead you to believe, and I look forward to exploring his body of work in greater depth. Recommended. 

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The Captive

American author Norman Daniels (real name Norman Danberg, 1905-1995) is best known for re-introducing pulp hero Black Bat in 1939. Daniels authored a number of short stories featuring the character for Black Book Detective. Arguably, Black Bat was the catalyst for DC Comics' iconic Batman. Along with Black Bat, Daniels contributed stories for dozens of pulp magazines like Shadow, Gangster Stories, Thrilling Publications and All Detective. The author's post-pulp career was immensely successful as Daniels utilized a number of pseudonyms to write crime-noir and adventure paperbacks for a variety of publishers. My introduction to Daniels is the 1959 Avon paperback The Captive, which is now available in both digital and paperback editions through Cutting Edge.

Jeff Castle is a WW2 veteran who now lives a quiet life in Africa as a big-game hunter. Upon hearing that his estranged grandfather is dying, Castle arrives on New York's East Side to pay his respects. After stopping in at a local bar for a drink, Castle is seduced by a sultry woman named Alma. After an afternoon of lovemaking at the woman's apartment, Castle steps out to buy a few drinks. Upon his return he discovers that Alma has been strangled to death. In my crime-noir experiences, The Captive was shaping up as a stereotypical “innocent man flees the corpse” novel. Thankfully, Norman Daniels had some interesting variations in store for the reader.

After fleeing the scene, Castle vows to find Alma's murderer. But Castle's quest for vengeance is sidelined when his grandfather advises him that he's the sole heir to his vast fortune. The heart of the estate is 60 small hotels and inns scattered throughout the state. As if it was a dire warning, Castle's grandfather, on his deathbed, pleads that nobody will take the fortune and asks Castle to fight for what is his. Questioning his grandfather's dying wish, Castle begins investigating the hotels he now owns. Shockingly, he discovers that all of the properties are full-staffed brothels.

Digging into the accounting ledgers, Castle discovers a complex earning schedule of rental income and the proceeds from properties' illegal affairs. After attempting to remove prostitutes from one of the larger hotels, Castle is brutally tortured and beaten in a cold dark basement. The Syndicate warns Castle that he may own the properties, but they control and operate all of the affairs. As the plot thickens, Castle learns that Alma's murder may have ties to the Syndicate's warning. In his quest to avenge Alma's murder, Castle finds that he's fighting the mob head-on.

First and foremost, Normal Daniels is an average writer. When compared to mid-20th century contemporaries like Charles Williams, Gil Brewer or John D. MacDonald, there is an obvious shortfall in the prose’s quality. Daniels' dialogue sequences are the heaviest casualty. With that being said, The Captive is still an engaging, thoroughly enjoyable literary work. The pace is brisk and both Castle and a few side characters are really engaging. I particularly enjoyed the author's connection from mobsters to the big-game hunting that Castle is familiar with. In a way it reminded me of the 1951 novel The Killer by Wade Miller (Robert Wade, Bill Miller). The narrative's twists and turns through Castle's new estate left me curious and wholly surprised. Further, I was ecstatic to find Daniels flesh out a familiar opening concept.

With The Captive, Norman Daniels pulls no punches – this is a violent crime yarn from cover to cover. You can buy your copy of the book HERE

Steve Ashe #01 - I'll Get You Yet

After serving in WW2, James Howard (1922-2000) earned a doctorate in psychology and began writing crime novels as a side hustle. He put his name on the literary map with a four-book series starring journalist Steve Ashe published between 1954 and 1957. The first book in the series was I’ll Get You Yet published by Popular Library’s Eagle Books imprint with misleading and uninspired cover art. Thankfully, Cutting Edge has new editions of this series available in physical and digital.

As the story opens, unemployed newspaperman Steve Ashe is leaving Neon City for the greener pastures of Omaha. His truck driving buddy Scotty is giving him a lift in a big rig when they narrowly evade an collision with a sedan careening out of control on the snowy highway. After both the truck and the sedan come to a stop after scraping one another, the men rush over to the car to find the female driver beaten within an inch of her life. The damage to her face far exceeds what could have been caused by the mere sideswiping of Scotty’s truck.

After the woman regains consciousness and the blood is cleaned off her face, Steve recognizes his old childhood crush, Vicki. She’s running from a Denver syndicate boss named Mario Carazzi whose goons roughed her up and forced her 17 year-old sister Gina into prostitution by getting the kid hooked on dope. Steve agrees to rescue Gina for Vicki while exacting some revenge on the mobster and his goons. With this promising set-up, we are off to a very Mack Bolan-esque start.

Today we call it “human trafficking,” but in 1954 it was “white slavery” and mobster Carazzi controls the action on the 1,100 mile stretch between Santa Fe, New Mexico and Helena, Montana. Steve begins his hunt in Omaha tracking the syndicate muscle who worked over Vicki. 

At times, this really felt more like a well-written 1970s Pinnacle book with one man on a revenge mission against the underworld than a 1954 crime paperback. But whatever the era, I’ll Get You Yet is some primo vendetta stuff - albeit without a pure vigilante edge - starring a stalwart hero with a self-deprecating sweetie worth avenging.

Steve’s way to ingratiate himself into Carazzi’s organization is to pose as an amateur heavyweight boxer seeking to rise through the pro ranks. It helps that Steve really knows how to use his fists in a scrape, so fans of pugilistic drama will enjoy the boxing segments of I’ll Get You Yet. 

When things go sideways for the hero, there are plenty of outstanding action set pieces. The fact that Ashe is a newspaper reporter is largely irrelevant to the plot until the very end and may play a bigger part later in the series. For the purposes of this debut novel, he’s just a badass. Of course, all of this leads to the climactic confrontation between Steve and Carazzi that you won’t soon forget.

I previously read and reviewed Howard’s stand-alone novel, Murder Takes a Wife. It was decent but nowhere near as awesome as this opening installment in the Steve Ashe series. Ignore the lame cover art. This one is a balls-out, hardboiled, 1950s action paperback written for guys like us. I’m confident you will love this paperback as much as I did. It’s really something special.

Addendum:

Steve Ashe series by James Howard:
1. I’ll Get You Yet (1954)
2. I Like It Tough (1955)
3. Blow out my Torch (1956)
4. Die on Easy Street (1957)

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