MANHUNT - October 1961

She sprawled beside him in the cockpit, letting herself lurch against him with the movement of the boat. A challenge as primitive as the sea came from the girl. - From "Sea Widow" by William P. Brothers

MANHUNT October 1961

I have only two issues of MANHUNT in my possession. This issue from October 1961, and another from June 1958. I have no idea where I picked up the 1961 issue. All I can tell you is I've had it for many years and, until now, hadn't read a single story in it.

MANHUNT is one of those digests that I wish were easier to find. Any given used bookstore will have scads of ANALOG, or EQMM, but never old issues of MANHUNT. I'll keep looking, but I'm not expecting to have much luck finding any other issues unless I resort to going online.

I'm familiar with only 5 of the writers in this issue, and each one of them delivered the goods. Talmage Powell provides an epistolary story call "Dear Sir" in an exchange of letters between a jaded defense attorney and a young woman on death row. It shifts in mood nicely from a sense of despair to almost giddiness as our beautiful young defendant sets up another fall guy while she sits on death row.

Ed Lacy provides a novelette entitled "The Death of El Indio" in which a private detective is hired by a wealthy young widow living in Mexico City to prove that her husband was murdered by a famous bullfighter known as El Indio. I liked this story a lot and was hooked as we follow P.I. Sam Eggers from Mexico City to Acapulco and back getting the goods on his suspect while dodging attempts on his life. My only complaint is that the story wraps up in a collapsed summary that seemed like Lacy was running up hard against a word count. Still, a cool story.

My favorite story in the bunch was "Sea Widow" by William P. Brothers. This one had a nice Gil Brewer style to it, as we watch a middle-aged big shot executive bastard named George Matthews start up an affair with a common, somewhat dull girl from the docks named Lola Barnes. George is pushing 40, with an ostentatious yacht he likes to take out on weekends. Lola is a 21 year old scamp who easily gets her hooks into George. Soon she's blackmailing him for money, claiming she's pregnant. George isn't about to let his reputation fall to ruins on a common slut, and plots a murder. But nothing is ever as easy as planned. I love stories like this. I'm not at all familiar with William P. Brothers, but I see there is a Gold Medal novel called Portrait of Lisa by him.

"The Deadly Affair" by Charles Carpentier is a nasty little treat about what happens when a small-time lothario gets a bit too pushy with his girlfriend, who happens to value her marriage slightly more than her boyfriend.

Other writers here include Charles Boeckman, Robert Edmond Alter, Joe Gores, with an excellent and disturbing story called "Night Out" about a sweet girl with a nasty agenda, and Bernard Epps to name a few of the contributors.

I can't say if this is a typical issue for MANHUNT. I liked every story in it, which is rare for me. Usually there is a dud in any given bunch, but not with this collection. Too bad these old issues are not easier to find.

Home is the Sailor - Day Keene

The police could pound on me until both of us were pulp without getting anywhere. I could take it. I knew. I'd been through a lot of fish-bowl sessions. It was different with Corliss. A few hours under the light with smart cops shooting questions at her in relays and she would get hysterical and tell her whole life story. But a wife couldn't be forced to testify against her husband. And Corliss was the only person in the would who knew I'd killed Wolkowysk.

Hard Case Crime - March 2005, Cover art R.B. Farrell and Gregory Manchess

I was buying Hard Case Crime paperbacks from the beginning, and when I heard they were going to publish an old Day Keene novel I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. I bought this one as soon as it hit the stands at a long gone Borders Books. This was 14 years ago. Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana, as Groucho Marx said. I read this one immediately when I got it, and must have been less than impressed with it, based on my Goodreads review, which is "Fall guy drinks a ton of rum."

Yeah, I was really lazy that day. What a crappy review of a pretty excellent book! I'm making amends now, rereading it these 14 years later.

I say it's an excellent novel given what it was when first published back in 1953 by Gold Medal. A nasty, violent, booze-filled thriller about a decent guy meeting the wrong woman. Who doesn't love that kind of story? And when I say booze-filled, I'm not kidding you. Our hero, Swede Nelson drinks rum like a little league team drinks Gatorade. There is barely a page in the novel that Swede isn't knocking back a slug of rum down his throat. And when he's not guzzling rum he's either busting someone's head or knocking boots with his new gal Corliss Mason.

We first meet Swede when he wakes up in a puddle of blood or sweat (he's not sure which) in a motel cabin just off the coast of California. He has practically no memory of the past 24 hours. He's spent the past 15 years at sea, and decided to retire that life with the notion of returning to Minnesota to buy a farm, get married and raise a family. The last thing he remembers is guzzling a boatload of rum and a game of dice behind a bar, then a dance with a couple of hoods with knives and blackjacks. So, in a rum-induced blackout Swede kicks the crap out of a couple of guys who tried rolling him. In the process he's "rescued" by a chick named Corliss Mason, who fortuitously arrives on the scene to take Swede back to her motor court named The Purple Parrot.

Of course Swede remembers none of this. He finds his uniform pressed and hanging in a closet, and wonders about his life savings, figuring the thugs took it. He's racking his brains trying to remember, wishing he had a bottle of rum for inspiration, when a girl named Mamie Meek enters his cabin. Mamie informs Swede that his money is in the motel safe, and that as soon as he's well enough, he needs to take his money and get the hell out of town. Mamie insists that Swede is in danger while staying at the Purple Parrot. But she doesn't tell him why. Swede also learns from Mamie that the Purple Parrot's owner, Corliss Mason, is the one who rescued him from getting robbed.

Swede barely has time to get dressed and make it to Purple Parrot's bar to knock back a few more glasses of rum before the sheriff shows up to arrest him on attempted murder charges. One of the thugs Swede beat up the night before is in critical condition. Swede insists that it was in self defense. The sheriff is inclined to believe him, but without any witnesses corroborating Swede's sketchy memory, he's hauled off to jail. By morning, Corliss Mason comes to bail Swede out of jail, confirming Swede's version of events.

Corliss is one of those noir babes that reek of trouble and sex. She convinces Swede that she's in love with him, and that he should marry her and stay on at the motor court. Whatever niggling doubts Swede has about Corliss is drowned under buckets of rum. She twists and teases Swede mercilessly and convinces him to stay on, despite Mamie's warnings to him. Corliss wants Swede bad, but tells him she cannot give it up for him until they're married. Wracked with sexual frustration for Corliss, Swede drinks himself into another stupor. Then in the middle of the night a hysterical Corliss comes to his room, her dress torn, her face bruised, crying that she's just been raped by a guy seen drinking at the bar earlier that night. Swede roars into action and finds the rapist sleeping in Corliss's bed. At the urging of Corliss, he proceeds to beat the guy to death.

What then follows is a harrowing account of the two of them trying to hide the body. Swede recognizes the dead guy from that night he was almost rolled. He wonders how the guy has ended up raping Corliss. Corliss tells Swede that the dead guy, whose name is Wolkowysk, has been trying to make it with her, and has been going up and down the coastline talking trash about her. She's glad he's dead. As long as they can hide the body, no one will ever know about her getting raped and Swede killing him for it. They can get married and live happily ever after, having crazy hot sex with each other.

It's all one big hell of a mess for our hero, Swede. He keeps telling us that he should have gone on as planned to Minnesota to buy that farm, but he's in too deep with Corliss now to ever escape. And worse, he admits that he's in love with her.

Yes...it's a crazy noir plot, and completely far-fetched. Swede is one of our great dumb hapless dupes who marches headlong into the trap set for him by a femme fatale. He even knows he's being played for a sucker, yet somehow, he can't seem to stop himself. Things go from bad to worse for him. And there isn't enough rum in the world to swim his way to freedom.

This is an easy book to find, thanks to Hard Case Crime republishing it. I think noir fans would dig it. Cheers, mate!

The Kidnapper - Robert Bloch

"There is no security for the average man today. It is no longer enough to be a good husband, a good father, a good craftsman. If you do not have a Cadillac in the garage, you are a failure. That is the message of modern advertising, that is the standard of the new values we accept." 

TOR Books, March 1988

For a moment there it sounded to me like the message of modern evangelicalism. But that very "standard of the new values" spoken of is the very thing that drives our narrator, Steve Collins, to embark on his scheme to kidnap his way into the good life.

Published in 1954, The Kidnapper, is a nasty little thriller that's my favorite kind of mid-century noir novel. It's not one I see out there in the wild very often. I bought my copy about 15 years ago from a long gone used bookstore in central Phoenix, and only now have gotten around to reading it. If you're going to look for anything by Robert Bloch you're going to have to do it in the horror sections of the bookstores still out there. Like Harlan Ellison getting pegged as a Science Fiction writer, Bloch is forever known as a horror writer, thanks to his 1959 novel Psycho.

Bloch dives headlong into Jim Thompsonville in The Kidnapper, as we get the story straight from our hero Steve Collins. He's been around, knows how life works, knows the angles, and isn't afraid to go after what he wants when opportunity knocks. We meet him after riding the rails into a nameless town, somewhere in Illinois, pulling down the night shift as a tool and die maker. He's not exactly on the run, but he'd prefer to live his life without any inconvenient strings attached. He gets friendly with another guy on the job, Leo Schumann, a little guy everyone just calls Specs, because of his thick glasses. Specs has no luck with the ladies, but has hopes of eventually winning over a working girl named Terry, a "blonde with dyed hair and a figure like your grandmother's broomstick." Specs would like to find a nice girl and get married, save up for a house, follow that American Dream he's been promised. But he can't seem to make it past first base with the nice girls from church. So he pines for Terry. Steve ain't interested in any of that love crap. Catch him telling a dame he loves her? Forget that! It took him long enough to shuck this last lush down in Florida. Anytime he wants a chick he can go pick one up, but saddle down with one, no way, Dad!

Then he meets Mary. Mary Adams is a strange chick. Kind of crazy-like, with her barely contained lust and her innocent way of twisting Steve all up into knots wanting her. Soon enough, she's spending her free time rocking his world each day before work. By day Mary works as a nanny to the daughter of  a well-heeled family that runs one of the banks in town. Shirley Mae Warren is the kid's name. She's 4 years old. Mary's job is to see to it she gets to and from pre-school each day. Her folks have all kinds of money, Mary tells Steve, and maybe one day they'll take Mary, with the kid, on out to California. Wouldn't that be swell?  And there you have it all laid out, sweet as a peach ripe for the picking. Snatch the kid, get a nice fat ransom for her return, and live on Easy Street afterward. Steve's just got to convince Mary that it'll work.

"A criminal? Don't be afraid to say it, Mary, it's only a word. A fancy word that guys like Warren dream up to pin on the little fellow who tries to get ahead. Anytime a little fellow takes dough from a big shot, he's a criminal. But when a big shot takes dough, he's a smart business man. He's got the law on his side because he makes the law to begin with."

Hmm...where have we heard this before? Has a ring of familiarity to it, kind of. Maybe Steve's on to something after all. Anyway, back to the kidnapping. Steve and Mary get the whole caper planned, except one thing. Steve doesn't have wheels. He's gonna need a car. If only he knew a chump he could talk into providing their wheels for a split of the ransom...A guy like Specs for instance. Just think of the dames Specs could have eating out of his hand if he had a little cash to spend on them!

And we're off and running. Of course, you know things never really go as planned in these stories. Something always slips and throws a wrench into things. In this case, the girl they kidnap has to go and die on them. 

Like I said, this novel is a lot of unwholesome fun reading, mostly because of the strong narrative voice that Bloch delivers through Steve's point of view. Steve is one of those characters who has an undeniable dark charm to them, and a way of seeing things that you can damn near relate to yourself, especially when you find yourself working a job for nuts while seeing those other big shots get all the rewards out of life. Bloch plays on our skewed sense of entitlement that has saturated our society for decades now. We're promised that hard work brings us nice stuff. You can almost empathize with the desire to take that shortcut, pull that trigger, get what's yours. And that's the stuff that the best noir novels come from. Bad people making worse decisions.

Highly recommended. 

Mountain Girls and Swamp Rats

I had to pause in my reviews of the Matt Helm series when I discovered I didn’t have the next book in line. Luckily, finding the books out there isn’t as hard as it used to be. Not sure if anyone cares or not, but I’m having fun going through them from the beginning. Anyway, it’s not like I haven’t been keeping up with other things in the meanwhile.

For example, a couple of old Gold Medal nuggets featuring primitive lusts, passion, greed, gators and girls you don’t take home to mother.

Gold Medal Books and Black Lizard Books

And the swamp continued to rot and to wait for the end, and everything was as it had been in the beginning. - Robert Edmond Alter - Swamp Sister

Swamp Sister, by Robert Edmond Alter, was published in 1966. It’s the kind of novel that’s like sour candy for me. Even the name is irresistible. I don’t know much about its author, but I remember reading Carny Kill some years ago. How is that for another great title? A pair of titles like Carny Kill and Swamp Sister and, brother, you’ve got yourself a fine double feature ahead of you. Both books were republished by Black Lizard Press in the 80’s and shouldn’t be too hard to find now. Swamp Sister sets up a classic plot of missing loot lost in a Florida swamp, a pair of swamp rats with larceny in their hearts, a lusty young man looking for a better life, a sexy babe in cut-offs and not much else, and a crooked insurance investigator, all mixed into a sweaty brew somewhere in the wilds of Florida. The place isn’t specifically named, but I’m calling Florida purely because gators turn up all over the plot as our hero, Shad Hark, navigates his way to the missing payroll loot through a pair of hot sisters named Margy and Dorry, and a couple of murderous swamp rats named Sam and Jort. Seems our pal Shad can’t get a break after he foolishly spends some of the missing loot in the local general store. In no time flat he’s got the whole town all up his ass trying to get their sweaty mitts on that money. It’s a pretty good yarn all in all. My only complaint is the cornpone dialog gets a little weary after a while. A little goes a long way when it comes to people speaking like cottonmouth snakes. But that aside, it is well worth checking out if you have a hankering for a sweaty chick with loose morals sitting on a pile of ill-gotten swag.

“Ben, they’ll kill you for sure. Ain’t nobody around here ever stands up to them. If a man’s too big, they come at him from two sides. They have guns—they’ll use them and they don’t care none if they kill. Please, Ben, let’s get out of here now. I know some of the way—we can guess at the rest.” - Norman Daniels - Something Burning

Promotional flyer found in my copy of Something Burning

Something Burning, by Norman Daniels from 1963, has never seen a reprint as far as I know. I found it in a used bookstore with a small promotional flyer by Barbara Hendra, publicity director with Gold Medal at the time, asking for a review. It’s a neat little artifact folded into the pages of the book. I don’t know anything about writer Norman Daniels, but see that he’d written some westerns back in the day. Something Burning could easily have been a western as well. Ben Medford, our lead protagonist, is deep in an alcoholic state of mourning for his recently deceased wife, Sandy, and winds up wrecking his car off a mountain road one night. He’s found by a mountain girl named Ora and is nursed back to health. In the process of recovering, he and Ora are confronted by a pair of mountain hillbillies named Roy and Joel Gallison. Roy and Joel are right out of a casting call for Deliverance, as they take pleasure in killing and raping whomever they please. Ben uses his anger and screw-it-all attitude to his advantage and beats the hell out of Roy and Joel. Unfortunately he lets his civilized upbringing get the better of him and doesn’t kill the brothers. Bad mistake! The brothers return and kill Ora as she and Ben attempt to leave their mountain hideaway. Now Ben is on the run, blamed for Ora’s death and for setting a string of recent forest fires as well. He’s an outsider stripped of civilized mores, dealing with psychotic hillbillies and firebugs as he attempts to make it out of the mountains alive. Halfway through the novel, it changes course and becomes a stranded survivor plot as Ben and others are held hostage by the real firebug in a lookout tower as the flames surround them. It’s not a perfect novel, nor a lost classic. There are some lapses in logic happening, and Ben’s sudden attraction for another mountain girl so soon after the death of his wife doesn’t make a lot of sense, but all in all, Something Burning was an entertaining way to pass a few hours. That said, I wouldn’t necessarily go out of your way to find this book. But if you see it out there, it’s probably worth a couple bucks of your hard-earned dough.

So that’s about it for missing a couple weeks. I’ll probably be back in Helm’s world. Who knows?

Megan Abbott and Gil Brewer Double-Shot

Really, if they're going to wear those darted sweaters tucked tight in those long fitted skirts cradling heart-shaped asses, skirts so tight they swiveled when they walked in them, clack-clack-clacking away down the hall, full aware - with full intention - that he was watching, even as his face betrayed nothing, not a rough twitch or a faint hint of saliva on his decidedly not-trembling lip. It wasn't he who was unusual, so lust-filled or insatiable. It was they who packaged themselves up so pertly for utmost oomph, for him alone, really, even if they hadn't met him yet when they slid on their treacherous gossamer stockings that morning, even if they hadn't known why they straightened the seams on their blouses so they'd hang in perfectly sharp arrows down their waiting, waiting breasts. - Megan Abbott, from The Song is You

Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, cover design by Ellen R Sasahara

Man, if that doesn't pull you in, you need to check your pulse to see if you're still alive! Passages like this one from The Song is You are why Megan Abbott is one of my favorite writers. She can nail the menace and sex that noir is built on, and transcend it to another level. It's not a surprise that her popularity has increased with each new novel. For every half-baked bestseller touted by critics, there are novels by writers like Megan Abbott who've already done it and done it better.

The Song is You is her 2nd published novel, from 2007, and it uses a real-life Hollywood mystery for its inspiration. In 1949, starlet Jean Spangler left her home to do a "night shoot" for a film she was supposedly working in. She never came home, and was never seen again. A few days later her purse was found in Griffith Park, with an unfinished handwritten note inside it. The note was addressed to a Kirk and referred to a Dr Scott. That was the last clue to a mystery that has never been solved. Megan Abbott uses this setup to recreate a dark novel of secrets about what might have happened to Jean Spangler. It's similar to James Ellroy's novel The Black Dahlia, in that it blends real life people with fiction and recreates a time and place built on dreams and fantasy. I mean who can resist a Hollywood mystery? Abbott's attention to detail and character drives this novel. If you're a fan of noir and unsolved mysteries, this novel will be right up your dark alley. Abbott returned to another true-crime case a few years later with Bury Me Deep about the Winnie Ruth Judd murders in 1930's Phoenix. The noir genre is so heavily weighed down with scads of male writers and tropes that have become so standard as to be expected. Diving into the dark heart of noir from the woman's perspective is a blast.

Gold Medal Books, 1951

Picture in your mind all the wizened, jittery, pasty-faced, hollow-eyed dope fiends you can conjure up, and add ashes. There you have the little guy. Maybe that doesn't do him justice. He was no dope. It was something else. You might think of leprosy when you saw the way his skin glistened, but you'd know you were wrong. He was drumhead tight, in a wasp-waisted gray gabardine that was neater than any pin, with a maroon tie and a maroon handkerchief cocking a bloody eye out of his breast pocket. He wore an expensive Panama hat that must have been set on his square little head with a carpenter's level. It was the broad-brimmed kind. He gave you the impression that when his suit went to the cleaners, he stayed in it, with through the process, pressing and all, and was carefully hung in antiseptic shade. - Gil Brewer, from So Rich, So Dead

The only thing missing from that description are the pink shoelaces! Gil Brewer is one of my all-time favorite noir writers from the 50's and 60's. He's not as polished as writers like John D MacDonald, but his prose has a fever and a drive that make his books irresistible to me. Unfortunately, So Rich, So Dead, from 1951, isn't one of the better examples of why I like his work so much. This was his 2nd novel with Gold Medal, after Satan is a Woman and before his highly successful 13 French Street. All three of these novels were published in 1951, which gives you an indication of his writing method. That was, churn them out and cash the checks. So Rich, So Dead has elements of the best of his novels, found in books like The Vengeful Virgin and The Red Scarf, but falls short, with it's Chinese Buffet of a plot that's almost zany instead of suspenseful.

Briefly, Bill Maddern returns from Charleston, SC to St. Petersburg, FL upon receiving a desperate telegram from his brother Danny Maddern. The brothers had set up a detective agency in St. Pete, and had seen a moderate level of success before, for reasons never really clear, Bill took off for Charleston. In his absence, Danny is hired to investigate a missing person believed to have been involved in a payroll robbery that netted the criminals $500,000. Bill returns to FL to discover his brother's murdered body, along with a note (hidden in a spittoon!) informing Bill that Danny had found the stolen loot and the body of one of the criminals involved. This kicks off a plot that is all over the map in the span of 24 hours, filled with 3 femme fatales, razor wielding goons, shotguns, car chases, angry cops, sex and a wild chase through a lady's department store sale, of all things. It's a fun novel, but not one that I would introduce to first-time readers of Gil Brewer. I'm glad to see that Brewer's novels and stories have seen a renewed interest though.

Holiday Stuffing

With the Thanksgiving holidays on us, and a few long weekends between my last post, I had a chance to get some reading done, in addition to the full-time day job I’m chained to.

For non-fiction, I finished The Long Gray Line by Rick Atkinson. This book details the lives of various graduates of the West Point class of 1966, from their first year at West Point, through their experiences in Vietnam and after. It’s a long book and painful in many parts. America was an ugly place then. Still is in many ways. I’m not sure we’ve learned any lessons from the past and often wonder if we’re cursed to run in place on a hamster-wheel of folly. 

So, on to the more fun stuff. In addition to the West Point book, I read a cool little sleaze paperback from Monarch Books, Tropic of Cleo by Rick Holmes. I spent a Saturday afternoon manning a market stall reading an old Avenger paperback, River of Ice by Paul Ernst, under the house name of Kenneth Robeson. And lastly, a pretty cool crime novel from the early fifties by Wade Miller called The Big Guy.

The Big Guy is a morality tale of sorts about the rise and fall of a small time hood, Joe Drum, into the top ranks of the Los Angeles underworld. If you’ve seen the movie Scarface (either version) you have a pretty good idea what’s in store for our anti-hero Drum. He’s a single minded beast, (even his name is symbolic for the loud storm from a hollow instrument) whose drive takes him to the top of the game. Unfortunately, when you’re at the top there is only one direction you can go. And man, does he go, thanks to the help of a woman named Patience. There are a lot of nightclub scenes, party scenes, gun-play and betrayal going on throughout, and you read along waiting for the fall of Joe Drum. There is a neat psycho-sexual warfare going on that plays a huge part of Joe’s demise. This is the 2^nd novel by Wade Miller (in reality, two pals named Robert Wade and Bill Miller) that I've read after Kitten with a Whip. The style is on this side of over-written, at least in this novel, but once the story hits its stride it moved at a good clip. If you're interested in trying any Wade Miller novels, Stark House Press has reprinted a few of their novels, and used copies of their paperbacks are fairly easy to find. 

Tropic of Cleo is one of those “treasure hunt” capers that could have been written by Gil Brewer. Harry Gregory and his wife Cleo arrive in the Bahamas to meet “an old college friend” of Harry’s. Right off the bat we learn that Cleo has a raging case of the hot pants and you know that wherever she goes trouble will follow. Cleo comes across as bitchy, bored and alcoholic, and enjoys needling Harry at every opportunity. Harry’s pal, Gene Freeman, arrives, along with Max Heinrich and the three of them begin making their plans. Heinrich is a former WWII P.O.W. who holds the secret location to a treasure trove of stolen loot worth about 2 million dollars in his brandy-addled head. The problem is that he doesn’t know exactly which island the loot is buried on. Cleo thinks the whole thing is hooey and isn’t shy about letting the guys know her opinion. She’s also got Gene Freeman all in a lather for her. Freeman makes no bones about putting the moves on Cleo every chance he gets. Enter the picture a seaman for hire named Casey Stribling and Marla Keever. Casey and Marla had a thing going, until Casey got tired of Marla. Casey is one of those golden sun-god types that gets Cleo’s temperature up, and next thing you know, you have a boatload of bottled-up passions and lusts ready to explode. This is the kind of plot where the idea of stocking up supplies means having plenty of hooch on hand to guzzle. There are a couple hot-sex scenes going on and one wild catfight. This is not the kind of stuff that would not find a reputable publisher today. I enjoyed Tropic of Cleo for what it was, a politically incorrect, sexy (for its time) caper with plenty of booze and duplicity and assorted shenanigans going on. I’ve never read a thing by Rick Holmes before, but it was right there in the Gil Brewer style of writing to keep things from ever slowing down, forcing you to think too much about the preposterous situation the gang’s all in. 

Finally, a quick look at The Avenger: River of Ice. This was the 11^th Avenger adventure, first appearing in July 1940. These pulp novels were reprinted in the 1970’s by Warner Paperbacks. I remember seeing them all the time in the Waldenbooks at the mall when I was a kid. They were right there alongside the Doc Savage novels that usually got my 75 cents at the time. I’ve read a lot of Doc Savage novels over the years, and only a few Avenger novels. I’m going to have to say it. The couple of Avenger novels I’ve read were better than many of the Doc Savage novels I can think of off the top of my head. That's probably fightin' words among pulp nerds! I understand that The Avenger was a response to the success of both Doc Savage and The Shadow. Paul Ernst was hired to write the early Avenger adventures after consulting with Walter Gibson and Lester Dent, authors of most of The Shadow and Doc Savage novels, respectively. The Avenger is an adventurer named Richard Benson who turns to fighting crime after his wife and daughter are murdered. The shock of their deaths turns Benson’s face and hair a ghostly white. His features are also paralyzed. This allows his face to become malleable, thereby providing ample opportunity for disguise. He’s kind of like Doc Savage, The Shadow and Batman, in that he has an arsenal of gadgets and chemicals at his disposal. He also, like Doc Savage, does not kill criminals; instead he allows them to kill themselves by their own actions. This adventure has a lost civilization theme to it, wherein a gruesome surgical method for creating obedient slaves by sticking a steel needle into the brains of people is used as a plot device. There are chases, fights and perils aplenty in this romp, including a not particularly difficult mystery about who the evil genius is causing all the turmoil. It’s nicely paced, keeping up a lot of suspense right up to the ending. I would imagine that Avenger paperbacks are relatively easy to find out there in the wild. I mostly see Doc Savage paperbacks but every so often an Avenger book shows up.

So that’s about all for now. Happy hunting. 

The Price of Murder - John D MacDonald

It did not take him very long. Nerve centers and pressure points are much the same for a woman as for a man. With the flood of genuine agonizing pain came a fear that oiled her face and turned it gray. He had her in a corner and he made the words tumble out of her, a gasping torrent. Then, holding her arm, he walked her gently to the big bed. She walked with the feeble fragility of a very old woman. When the pain had faded, he made her tell him again, and asked her questions until he was certain he knew all she knew. The harsh discipline had shocked her. It made her very meek and highly affectionate. It restored him to the place of dominance. 

Fawcett Gold Medal

That's an interesting passage from The Price of Murder by John D. MacDonald in that it illustrates one of several times that women in this 1957 novel expect and get off on male domination, whether emotional or physical. In fact, none of the women represent well in this novel. I think it's more due to the genre and the times than any misogynistic attitudes by MacDonald. I've read almost all of his novels and there aren't many where you'll find an independent, strong female character that isn't a femme fatale or an insane nympho. Otherwise, women are good good girls who are expected to make good wives and mothers. Perhaps it's something that male readers expected. But I get why female readers wouldn't appreciate the books now. Even the Travis McGee novels have dated badly when it comes to attitudes towards women. I'm not knocking the book for it, it's just something that is pretty jarring reading today. Not that we don't still have a long way to go in 2017, but that's another lecture for another time. Still, it's fun to climb into the heads of the girls gone wrong in these books.

The Price of Murder is an excellent example of character studies wrapped in a crime novel, something MacDonald was very good at. Most of the first half of the book is a series of backstories for our starring roles. We have Lee Bronson, a college English instructor and war veteran. His brother Danny Bronson, a three time loser and small-time hood with a history of bad luck. And making their lives hell is one of those terrific JDM villains named Johnny Keefler, a sadistic parole officer with a prosthetic hand and a maniacal hatred for anyone who has broken the law. Lucille Bronson is Lee Bronson's wife. She's described as a "silky and membranous and pneumatic little trap." In addition to Lucille, there is Drusilla Catton, a "dark, reckless, full-bodied, hot-blooded" woman who has no issue flirting with danger and trouble when it comes to men.

A couple of people get brutally murdered in this novel, and you'll have no trouble guessing who two of them are out of this small cast I've given you. The main plot concerns a recovered stash of ransom money that Danny Bronson has a chance to get his hands on. Unfortunately, the ransom money is tied to a foiled kidnapping and murder case of a pair of wealthy twin boys that happened years earlier. Danny Bronson only learns about it from his time screwing Drusilla Catton, who happens to be married to a failing (and ailing) businessman named Burt Catton. Burt Catton's pal and lawyer, Paul Verney, is offered a chance to purchase the several hundred thousand dollars of ransom money at a deep discount, with the intent to launder it and save both him and Catton from financial ruin. Danny Bronson intends to extort the whole boodle from them and head south of the border. Hot on Danny Bronson's trail is the psychotic Johnny Keefler. Making things worse is that Danny makes the fatal mistake of trusting his sister-in-law, the bored and restless Lucille Bronson, with his plans.

This novel rips along nicely and the early backstories only intensify the motives and drives of the characters involved. I read it in two days while prepping for a medical procedure and it was a nice diversion. My only complaint, and it's a common issue I have with some of MacDonald's books, is that in the final thirty pages or so you can see him trying to wrap everything up into a complete and final resolution. Some of the later McGee novels don't aim as hard for this as the early non-McGee novels do. But that's a minor quibble in what are some really terrific crime novels by one of my favorite writers. This one can be found easily used or for your Kindle.

Fadeout - Joseph Hansen

The wire mesh fence slumped as if the signs were too heavy for it. At one point it lay like a rusty circus net. It sprang like a circus net when he stepped across it. In the shadow of the Chute he found the place where Fox Olsen had died. Crude chalk outline on the planks....In the stinking dark forest of splintery posts under the pier lay pizza tins, beer cans, cigarette wrappers, condoms--the joyless detritus of American joy. 

Owl Book Edition 1980

I've heard good things about the Dave Brandstetter series for years and I own a couple of the early ones thanks to used book sales around the town. Some years ago I lent the whole set I had to a friend who was moving to Mexico. Since then I've got them all back and none the worse for wear. It's good to have friends who take care of books. Anyway, I finally read the first novel in the series by Joseph Hansen and am happy to tell you the good things I've heard were justified.

This isn't your standard California detective mystery, as the blurbs on my edition would have you believe. One even refers to Hansen as "a worthy successor" to Hammett. Well, Hansen and Hammett have names that begin with H, but that's about it for comparing the two as far as I'm concerned. This is a moodier, measured novel than Hammett's novels are. Dave Brandstetter is an insurance investigator, not a private eye, and is mourning the loss of a loved one as the novel begins. You don't get the feeling that Brandstetter is a "shoot first and ask questions later" type of guy.

The mystery concerns a missing person named Fox Olsen. It appears, to Brandstetter anyway, to be a staged car accident off a bridge in the rain instead of accidental death. Something just like the cover shows above. No body is found and before any life insurance is going to be doled out to the beneficiaries, Brandstetter has to verify that our missing and supposedly dead Fox Olsen isn't trying to pull a scam for the insurance money. Still, Olsen seemed happy enough, and successful enough in town with his popular radio show. So why take the fade-out?

The more Brandstetter probes the life of Fox Olsen the deeper things get. For one thing, Fox Olsen was a frustrated artist and writer. Add to that a marriage that harbored infidelity. To further complicate matters, an old friend of Olsen's returns after 20 years to rekindle a relationship the two had before Olsen joined the Air Force.

The novel was published in 1969, and I would imagine the gay themes, in addition to a gay detective protagonist were pretty controversial at the time. The mystery of the relationship doesn't take long for Brandstetter or the reader to figure out, especially to a modern reader.

I liked the novel and would recommend it to readers who enjoy the Lew Archer mysteries. Also for readers who don't mind a more poetic depiction of a time in California that you don't see in 60's news-reels. I have the next four novels in the series and am looking forward to reading them. I understand that the as the series progresses so does Brandstetter in age and maturity. I believe they're still in print and available in e-format. I also see that there is a single edition of all twelve Brandstetter novels available through third-party sellers, but the price is a bit steep for that one.

Seven Slayers - Paul Cain

There was a sudden roar from a black, curtained roadster on the other side of the street; the sudden ragged roar of four or five shots close together, a white pulsing finger of flame in the dusk, and Coleman sank to his knees. He swayed backwards once, fell forward onto his face hard; his gray hat rolled slowly across the sidewalk. The roadster was moving, had disappeared before Coleman was entirely still. It became very quiet in the street.

Black Lizard Books - 1987

This collection has been sitting on my shelf for many years. I picked up this Black Lizard edition of Paul Cain's Seven Slayers many years ago from a used bookstore in Tempe Arizona that is now closed. A newer, updated version of that bookstore opened in Phoenix a few years ago but, man it's just not the same. I could go on about my favorite old bookstores closing down in the past couple decades (which seems only like a few years to me) but why bother.

So...what can I say about this book that hasn't been said better by other aficionados of the hard-boiled school? I don't know why it took me so long to listen to them and read this book. In a word, these stories rocked! They are chock full o bad guys who are really, really bad, bad-ass dames who can't be trusted and heroes that aren't wholly good. One of the coolest things I noticed in reading the stories is how Cain likes to keep the reader off balance. He does this in subtle ways, as seen in the above paragraph from the story "Murder in Blue" in how many shots were fired. Was it four or five? The omniscient narrator (the author) should know. Or this simple line from the same story; "She was ageless; perhaps twenty-six, perhaps thirty-six."

Or take the high-rise apartment setting from the story "Pigeon Blood" where the hero lives in a flat that has no wall, "At the far side, where the light from the living room faded into darkness, the floor came to an abrupt end - there was no railing or parapet - the nearest building of the same height was several blocks away."

All of the stories wind through the tropes of hard-boiled environments: gambling dens, dingy bars, nightclubs, apartments, rain-swept streets, and sketchy hotels. Fans of this genre will feel completely at home in these stories. Violence is sudden, bodies unexpectedly (for the characters, anyway) turn up in the shadows, bullets fly from across the block, gats are pulled from bathrobes...well you get the idea. No one can be trusted and greed is the common denominator. You'll have a blast reading them.

These stories were originally published in Black Mask way back in the 30's, back when Hammett and Chandler were producing the same kind of hard-boiled tales for the same publications. If you like those guys, you'll like Paul Cain's stories also. Cain's fictional output was limited to only one novel, Fast One, and 17 short stories. I have a copy of Fast One and am looking forward to reading it soon. He was a screenwriter under the name George Sims. His fictional output has been collected under the title The Complete Slayers for anyone interesting in shelling out a whopping chunk of change.

Savage Night - Jim Thompson

That was the week that Jake tried to frame me.
It was the week he tried to kill me.
It was the week Fay and I began brawling.
It was the week Ruthie...
Jesus! Jesus God, that week! Even now--and what do I have to worry about now?--it rips the guts out of me to think about it.

Black Lizard Books, 1985

It sounds like Hell Week, sort of.

I thought it appropriate to blow out 2016's posts with a psycho-noir masterpiece, Savage Night by Jim Thompson. I picked up my Black Lizard edition of this novel about 30 years ago from a store long since closed. Like most of us, I discovered these noir classics through Black Lizard reprints. Same thing with Harry Whittington and Dan J. Marlowe. Several years later Black Lizard was picked up by Random House and the novels were re-issued in trade paperback at a price of $10 instead of $3.95, which kind of sucked for readers at the time. But that's how the publishing world goes.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun(?) dipping back into the paranoid psycho-sexual nightmare of crime and madness that Jim Thompson was so good at bringing to the page. This one, from 1953 follows a hitman named Charlie Bigger on assignment to rub out a potential mob witness, Jake Winroy, before Winroy can testify and bring a whole heap of trouble down on men of influential standing.

Bigger comes to the town of Peardale in disguise as a student attending a teacher's college. He's been hired to kill Winroy before his trial date. His orders are to make the hit look like an accident. Bigger's boss is a shadowy kingpin referred to only as The Man. Charlie Bigger cuts a strange figure as a hitman. At barely 5 feet tall, bad teeth and poor eyesight, he hardly presents an imposing figure of menace. Lifts in his shoes, contact lenses and dentures help somewhat. Years of being called Sonny, and treated like a boy by women have hardened Bigger into something of a time bomb. Our only background on Bigger's violent life is given to us through an article in a True Detective magazine, much like the kind Thompson himself used to write.

Bigger is no sooner in town and taking residence in Winroy's home as a student boarder when he's in deep with a couple of unsettling dames in Fay (Winroy's wife) and Ruthie, Ruthie is another student, hired by the Winroys to come in and clean up house a few hours each day. Ruthie has an unsettling deformity which Bigger finds both horrifying and appealing. He relates to Ruthie as a misfit. Fay is a hardened dame with a past as a nightclub singer, hooking up with Jake during his Cadillac days and now living a frustrated existence with a washed out drunk. Jake is a clown, given to fits of drunken panic. He believes, rightly, that Bigger's arrival in town means his number is finally up.

Also thrown into the cast is fellow boarder, Kendall, a kindly older gentleman who seems to take more than a passing interest in Bigger's success as a student. Then there is Sheriff Summers, who has his own suspicions about our hero.

All of this makes for a pressure cooker of mounting paranoia for Charlie Bigger as he tries to navigate his way between lust for Ruthie and overtures from Fay and the fawning attentions from Kendall. Alone that makes for a nice setup, but Thompson isn't interested in pure plot to drive a story. His books are all about voice and where that voice is coming from. His protagonists are seething with hangups that often betray them.

For example, at one point midway through the novel, Bigger interrupts his story to tell us about a bizarre encounter with a writer he once met while he was hitchhiking through Vermont. This writer had a load of manuscripts in his car that he equated with manure. The writer also lived on a farm where he kept goats that fertilized a field of vaginas. He tells Bigger that he used to grow breasts and asses and legs, but finally settled for vaginas because there was no demand for the other stuff.

Throughout the novel the characters speak in broken patterns, as though having to constantly interrupt themselves before spilling their true intentions. It's something that becomes more and more apparent as the novel progresses, with Bigger often telling the reader that he feels as though he's disappearing. Disintegrating seems more like it. Ruthie stutters as she speaks, Bigger and Fay halt their words before they're half spoken, and by the end of the novel we have Bigger and Ruthie communicating only through grunts and gestures.

A whole lotta of weird for what's supposed to be a dime caper.

I'm sure a lot of study has gone into Thompson's novels, but one has to remember that Thompson wrote these with the necessity of making a living, not provoking college professors. There wasn't time to polish and rewrite. These are first draft fits of anger and humor, never forget the savage humor,  that make reading these novels so compelling. Thompson had enough bitter experience at life and work to dish it back plenty at the casual reader who happened upon one of his books at the drugstore rack. I like to picture him laughing to himself as he typed out scenes featuring a field of vaginas, or a guy hiding out in a barrel of mincemeat, or a protagonist laying it to a woman with a deformed leg. That's the fun I get out of these books.

Most noir fans have already read this novel. Many more have read his more famous The Killer Inside Me. There is nothing out there like them, and it's too bad that their popularity didn't come at a time when Thompson could have personally got the benefit of it.

Redheads Die Quickly - Gil Brewer

He looked up and she had just stepped out from behind the bushes. She had her shorts on and the torn yellow jersey. She moved slowly and she looked pale and sheened with sweat, and as if she might have been crying. Her hair was damp and snarled, and brown pine needles clung in its dark richness. Lipstick was smeared all around her mouth.  - On a Sunday Afternoon - Gil Brewer

Gil Brewer

My favorite anthologies of the past few years is David Rachels's collection of Gil Brewer's short stories Redheads Die Quickly. It's a collection of 25 crime stories originally published in Manhunt and other Detective magazines of the 50s. Not a dud in the bunch, all of them featuring the classic Gil Brewer themes of sexual lust, booze and dangerous women.

Every fan of mid-century noir knows who Gil Brewer is by now, thanks to a number of his novels getting republished for new readers. I've been lucky finding a handful of his Gold Medal and Monarch paperbacks over the years and have liked them all. I grew up in Tampa Florida, near where Brewer lived for much of his life, and the setting of most of his fiction. Noir stories in the Florida heat, whether in a motel on the beach or a corrupt southern town, are my comfort food. My first exposure to Gil Brewer was reading The Red Scarf  in a single afternoon and from then on I was hooked. I haven't come across a novel of his yet that I didn't like. Sure, some of them are better than others, and some could have used a tighter hand at editing, but they're perfect examples of booze and sex filled nightmares of mid-century crime fiction. He's the flip-side of the far more famous and successful John D. MacDonald, They're scruffier, less polished novels than MacDonald's books, Sort of like the debutant's slutty cousins, and I love them just as much.

Redheads Die Quickly show Brewer's skill at putting together tight, psychotic and nightmarish tales of obsession and murder within just a few pages. They're "get-in-get-out and skip the fancy guitar solo" kind of cuts that you find on the best punk albums that your friends never listened to. Stories like "On a Sunday Afternoon" about a picnic gone horribly, horribly bad, or "The Black Suitcase" about a man's decent into madness during a yacht party, to name a few. Or the brutal story "Moonshine" with its gut-punching ending. Adultery, drinking binges, blackouts, robbery, sex, murder, oh man just wrap that stuff up in a bunch of short stories and how can you not like it?

This collection also includes an informative introduction on Gil Brewer's life and work written by David Rachels. Also included is a bibliography of Gil Brewer's short stories. If there ever ends up being another collection produced, I'll be one of the first to buy it.

Everybody's Watching Me - Mickey Spillane

Her face seemed to laugh at me. A curious laugh. A bewildering laugh. There was a sparkling dance to her eyes she kept half veiled and her mouth parted just a little bit. He tongue touched the tip of her teeth, withdrew and she said, "Now is the time for something else, Joe. Now is for a woman going back a long time who sees somebody she could have loved then."

I looked at her and held my breath. She was so completely beautiful and I didn't want to make a fool of myself. Not yet.

"Now is the time for you to kiss me, Joe," she said.

I tasted her.

MANHUNT, April 1953

I don't have the original issued of MANHUNT that this short novel by Mickey Spillane first appeared in. I wish I did though. Just about every story I've read that was originally printed in MANHUNT I've enjoyed. Sadly, I was born too late. I wish that someone would maybe anthologize stories from MANHUNT in single collections, the way they do WEIRD TALES, or ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. Maybe one day. Or even better, make the original issues available on Kindle.

I got the opportunity to read this story in PULP MASTERS, edited by Ed Gorman and Marting H. Greenberg. If you find this collection I recommend picking it up. It's got short novels by John D. MacDonald, James M. Cain, Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake and Harry Whittington that originally appeared in Men's magazines or digests. All very good and entertaining stories.

I wouldn't rank "Everybody's Watching Me" by Mickey Spillane as one of my favorites. There is plenty of action and bad guys and a hot dame named Helen Troy in it, but there were long passages of dialog that through me a bit, and some pages of filler. Also, I think Spillane was hemmed in a bit by trying to tell the story of a gang war strictly from Joe Boyle's perspective. Often to the point of having the plot progress via awkward scenes of Joe eavesdropping on talky bad guys.

As a simple tale of revenge it's a good one, though. Joe Boyle delivers a note to chief badguy Mike Renzo, telling him that he's gonna find his guts all over the floor for killing a gambler named Cooley. The note is signed by someone named Vetter. Vetter is a shadowy assassin for hire who's been icing various mobsters in different cities. No one knows who Vetter is or what he looks like. Renzo decides to have our hero Joe Boyle followed so that he could finger the mysterious Vetter. Along the way Joy Boyle hooks up with Helen Troy, a chanteuse of sorts for Renzo's nightclub. He also gets tangled up with the cops who would also like to get their mitts on Vetter, preferably after he puts Renzo on ice. Two birds with one stone, kind of thing.

Lots of beatings and shootings ensue, which make it vintage Spillane. Boyle and Helen also get torqued up for each other at various times in the story, until the finale when the shit all hits the fan and the bad guys scream like dames. The surprise ending isn't really a surprise if you've read enough Mickey Spillane, but it's still fun getting there. This would have made a pretty cool late night noir movie from the 50's.

Hell's Our Destination - Gil Brewer

Cora was poised in a half crouch not five feet away from Bliss's agonized, pleading face. She was wearing only a jaggedly torn remnant of yellow jacket over her shoulders. She stood there with her hands out, her head thrust forward, absolutely silent, frighteningly beautiful, her long finely sculptured legs pale against the dark green. 

Gold Medal, October 1953

Hell’s Our Destination is an earlier novel from Gil Brewer, and falls into that ever popular “swamp-noir” genre in which characters drink a lot, sweat a lot and feed upon their lusts toward no good endings. Who doesn’t like a good swamp noir romp? This one has all the right ingredients: buried loot, an eccentric loner, ex-cons out of their element, and sweaty babes who smoke cigarettes and disrobe a lot. We have two such dames in this novel. Vern, a raven-haired good girl from town, and Cora, the sultry blond from the city whose sideways glances give the menfolk pause.

There isn’t much surprise that’s ahead for someone who has made a steady diet of reading noir paperbacks from this period. You know a couple chapters in that Cora is no good and is going to screw at least one of the guys over before the end. In this case she’s got three suckers to pick from. The most obvious being our hapless “hero” of the novel, Simon.

Simon hasn’t had it so well these past years. He’s been obsessing over a wad of stolen loot that he knows is hidden out there somewhere in the swamp. Six years before he took two hundred dollars to help a traveler named Fred hide the loot. Problem is that he doesn’t know exactly where Fred hid the loot, just that it’s a couple hours up the river from his cabin, by two crossed “trees.” Simon figures that he’s going to get the money eventually, but waiting for the opportunity has eaten into his soul. It’s also but a halt to his relationship with Vern. With the money he figures he can make a life for the two of them, leave the swamp behind them forever. But until then…well…there’s booze and the bible to carry him along. But Vern can’t wait forever.

Simon reads about a payroll heist, and that Fred is sent up for it. The money is missing of course because Fred has hidden it in the swamp. Simon figures that he’d have to wait for Fred’s release from prison in order to get the money. But Fred is killed days after getting paroled, and Simon has no choice but to wait for Fred’s killer to show up looking for a tour guide into the swamp.

In the meantime Simon has to deal with a couple of smartass insurance detectives sniffing around. They figure that Fred disposed of the stolen loot in Simon’s swamp. They needle Simon. They dose him with a Mutt and Jeff routine. They wear him down with insinuations. One of them in particular, Steggins, seems to have plenty of time to just hang around the swamp in his skiff, fishing and whatnot, just waiting for Simon to make a move. If that isn’t bad enough, Fred’s old partner Bliss shows up. Bliss seems to figure Simon isn’t as simple as he tries to be. He tells Simon that it’s best for him that he shacks up in Simon’s cabin for a while, just to keep the heat off. Oh, yeah, and what about that missing loot his old buddy Fred made off with?

Then there is Cora. Ah...Cora, that icy blond who parades around Simon’s cabin flashing her legs and blowing smoke at him. Her method of attack is to play at a city gal looking for a local guide to take her out on a photography safari. She’s hot and bored and maybe willing to share a hot afternoon in Simon’s cot, but first, the guided tour into the swamp. As if she doesn’t know what’s buried there.

These characters come and go in Simon’s cabin to the point that you begin to wonder if they’re not manifestations of Simon’s torment.  He’s been putting life on hold for a false promise that his mind is getting as tattered as his old bible. Personally, I’d avoid a guy like Simon. Yeah, maybe Cora might be able to trip me up a couple of time, but I’ll know not to follow her anywhere near any quicksand. 

Secret Strangers - Thomas Tessier

He had been kind of a secret stranger in their lives, someone who could accept love and apparently give it in return, a person they knew mainly in terms of their own expectations, and didn't really know at all. 

Dark Harvest 1st Edition 1992

 Secret Strangers by Thomas Tessier would likely be found in the horror shelves of the bookstore, only because Tessier is primarily known for his horror novels. But I'm telling you, this is straight up noir, and I mean depraved nasty twisted noir. I found a copy of this book some years back and knew it was coming home with me.

Tessier's best known novel is probably The Nightwalker, about a Vietnam veteran in London who may or may not be a werewolf. Then there is his ultra-disturbing Finishing Touches about a plastic surgeon's descent into a world of S&M and death. Both novels are horror books for adults and better than anything you'll likely read by the "bigger" names on the horror shelves.

Then there is Secret Strangers, from 1990. I may be in small company by really liking this one. It's one of those novels that gets its painted fingernails into you and squeezes you out to the finish. There are literally pages that make you want to turn away. And it's a classic study of an idea that seems good at the outset yet ends up spinning wildly out of control and spilling havoc on its participants.

Heidi Luckner is a 17 year old high school student, living in an upper class community named Clearville, a town of ten thousand people outside of New York City. Heidi's life is in upheaval after her father, John Luckner, goes missing. Her father's disappearance is the first of many cracks that inexorably crumbles her world. Still, she's got her job at an upscale deli, her best friend Bella who's always there for her, and her boyfriend Gary who drives a black Camaro IROC, But without her father's income and support, her mom will have no alternative but to sell their home and move from Clearville. Something Heidi will not accept.

One night, Heidi is babysitting for her neighbors, Jane and Richard Seaton. The Seatons are those yuppie types who seemingly have it all, a beautiful home, exciting careers, beauty, health and vitality. After putting their young daughter Carrie to bed, Heidi does what probably most teenage girls might do if given the opportunity and goes snooping through their home. Fueled by mix of envy and curiosity, Heidi becomes almost a voyeur into Richard and Jane's privacy, and discovers something horrible. A set of Polaroids depicting sex acts between Richard and Jane Seaton, and what looks like teenaged children. Heidi is stunned and immediately places the pictures back into their hiding place. But the images of Jane Seaton in the pictures are too deeply etched into her psyche. Days go by and Heidi smokes Lucky Strikes, hangs out with her boyfriend Gary, fights with her mother...and thinks of the Seatons and their secrets. She reaches out to Jane as though building a relationship with a confidant, an older woman who can giver her advice and friendship. She's strangely attracted to Jane's confidant facade that masks a dark perversion, And then, when asked to house-sit for the Seatons over a holiday weekend. Heidi steals the photos, and with them, papers of coded symbols.

Heidi figures she'll start small, maybe twenty five thousand dollars. After that, she'll ask for more, tightening the screws and bleeding the Seatons out of their wealth. They can afford it. The Seatons are rich. Only Heidi is going to need some help. She can't blackmail them alone. So she turns to Gary as an accomplice. At first things seem like they're going to go as planned. Heidi can get money from the Seatons, find an apartment and stay in Clearville and keep her friends. Only plans never go down as imagined over cigarettes and sex in the back of a Camaro.

This is one of those "river of blood" kind of plots, where intentions, both good and bad, result in the worst outcomes. One has gone so far into the depravity and horror that to turn back is as far a journey as it is to see it through to the end. The players behind the suburban lawns are far more dangerous and powerful than Heidi, our teenage girl "hero" could have foreseen.

It's too bad this book isn't more well-known, or easier to find. It's a terrific nasty ride into darkness that leaves scars. If you run across a copy of it, read it. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

A Ticket to Hell - Harry Whittington

The door swung open, spilling light around him when he released the knob. The smell of gas was strong. He thrust the door wide open and entered the cottage. It was furnished precisely as his was, but in greater disarray. The man and the woman had been here for some time or were extraordinarily messy. Makeup and lotions littered the dresser top, both men's and women's clothing were strewn all over the chairs. The green bathing suit was wadded on the rug. Near it, in a wide open expensive housecoat, the girl was sprawled. 

1987 Black Lizard Books, cover art by Jim Kirwan

And with that scene our hero Ric Durazo shifts into third gear on his ride into hell in Harry Whittington's 1959 novel, A Ticket to Hell.

I chose to show the Black Lizard Books issue of this novel, since it's the version that I read. Back in the late 80's Black Lizard Books re-issued a number of classics, notably Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Harry Whittington. The Whittington novels came with an essay entitled "I Remember it Well" that Whittington wrote in 1987. In it, Harry Whittington looks back on his long career as a paperback novelist. I grab these Black Lizard Books whenever I see them. Thanks to them, writers like Thompson and Whittington found new audiences in the 80's and 90's.

A Ticket to Hell is a lean and nasty little novel about a guy with nothing left to lose finding either oblivion or redemption in the ass-end of a desert town deep in New Mexico. It begins as Ric Durazo has just picked up a hitch-hiker in a forlorn desert wasteland. The hitcher is one of those hopped up beatnik types, "jazzing" to their own tune. It's only a few minutes into the ride that he makes the mistake of pulling a gun on Ric, and finding out what road-rash feels like firsthand as Ric boots him back out onto the desert asphalt. It's one of those scenes that foreshadow the kind of journey Ric is going to experience as he reaches his final destination on Highway 58 in Los Solanos, New Mexico.

The motel is named La Pueblo. It's one of those respites from the road that dotted desert highways before the interstates took the adventure out of driving across the country. Cabins among the cactus and sage, corralled around a blue-lit pool where weary travelers smoke and drink whiskey as they plot their various paths in life. The kind of roadside motel with an office manned by a distracted middle-aged Joe and his younger, horny wife. The sort of wife that takes an immediate notice of Ric as he checks in. It's not long before she's offering Ric some personal R 'n R. Only Ric isn't interested. Across from his cabin is a young couple driving a new Cadillac. The girl appears cool, bored and rich and wears a revealing green bathing suit as she lounges by the pool. Her husband is too slick and good-looking for his own good, and spends his time knocking back highballs and shoving the babe in the green bikini around.

Ric has enough problems of his own to pay them all much attention. He's got a broken heart, a tired head, and a suitcase full of money. He's got a history of losing, and a life without a future. And he's in Los Solanos because he's got an appointment to keep. And it's while he's waiting for the phone to ring when he see's the too-handsome young husband from the cabin across the way attempt to kill his beautiful young wife.

A Ticket to Hell is the kind of noir tale that breezes by in a few hours of reading. It's got the kind of plot that moves so fast you don't spend any time looking for the lapses in logic. It's not rational and no one does anything that a "normal" person would do. But that's the fun of it all. Otherwise the motel would be a Red Roof Inn, infested by families from Florida and Kansas with their noisy fat kids yelling in the hallways and splashing in the pool. And that's a nightmare of a whole different order. One that nobody would ever write books about.

Play It Hard - Gil Brewer

He watched as she unbuttoned the flaring throat of the dress with nimble fingers, worked the zipper over her hip, then yanked the dress up over her legs. In a moment she stood before him in a black bra, black panties that were skin tight, a white garter belt, and the pink-hued nylons high on her smooth, firm, swollen thighs. "Like?" she asked softly.

Um...yeah. Me like! And there is plenty scenes like this in the pages of this neat little thriller from Gil Brewer!

Play It Hard is a perfect example of why Gil Brewer is one of my top favorite writers of mid-century noir. Books like this one move at a such a fevered pace that there is no time to slow down and realize just how far-fetched the plot is. That doesn't matter. The only thing that counts is getting to the last page and finding out who's going to end up living, dead, or trapped in some kind of existential-psycho-noir nightmare from which there is no escape.

Steve Nolan, our hero, wakes up from the depths of an alcoholic fugue to discover that the woman he just married is an impostor. She's now someone else, someone who says she's Jan Nolan, his new bride of one week, the same girl he met only two weeks before on an isolated beach on the west coast of Florida. But Steve knows she's not the same Janice Ellen Mary Lunsford that he married. She's a liar, an impostor. Problem is, no one believes him. No one claims to have seen the real Jan Nolan. It seems that Steve is suffering from a bout of amnesia brought on by a nervous breakdown of some kind. His doctor, Earl Paige, doesn't believe him. His Aunt Eda doesn't believe him, and neither does his pal, Detective Bill Rhodes. They tell him to get some rest, lay off the booze and go home to his new bride Jan Nolan. Is Steve crazy? Is he the victim of some kind of plot? And what happened to the real Janice Nolan?

Steve spends a large portion of the novel trying to retrace his steps that led up to the blackout resulting in having a stranger replacing his new bride. There are snatches of memory: a hideaway motel on the beach, a man with thick eyebrows sharing a booze-filled night, a motel manager who claims not to have seen the real Jan Nolan. There is also Steve's best gal, Claire Borroughs, the sweet girl next door who Steve dropped for a two-week engagement and marriage to a woman with no history.

And then, a body turns up. The body of a young woman tortured, raped and beaten to death. A young woman who exactly matches the description of the real Jan Nolan. Just what happened in this breakdown induced fugue-state of Steve's? Now Bill Rhodes and the other homicide detectives want to know. And who is this devil-eyed vixen in Steve's bedroom?

Giving away anymore of the plot would take the fun out of reading it for yourself. This is exactly the kind of book that polluted my young impressionable mind when I was a teenager. The sort of book that convinced you there were only two kinds of dames out there, Good ones and Bad ones. The sort of novel that writers like Brewer excelled at.

Dopefiend - Donald Goines

The white powder looked innocent lying there in the open, but this was the drug of the damned, the curse of mankind: heroin, what some call "smack," others "junk," "snow," "stuff," "poison," "horse." It had different names but the same effect. To all of its users-to all of the dopefiends in the Detroit ghetto-it was slow death. 

Holloway House Books, Reprinted in 2007, cover by Jeffrey

I've read some brutal books but not many come as close as this novel from 1971 does in taking the reader into the hell of addiction. It's basically a simple plot that follows a young couple, Terry and Teddy, as they fall into heroin addiction. Terry is a beautiful young woman from a middle-class family with a promising future. She works for a high end department store downtown, has high school behind her, her own set of wheels, and is preparing for college. Her boyfriend Teddy isn't a bad kid exactly, but has allowed himself to take the easier routes in life. It's through Teddy that they're first introduced to Porky, the local dealer. Porky lives in an apartment that is a second home to his customers, addicts, or as they're constantly referred to in the novel, dopefiends. Porky knows just what it takes to lure wide-eyed innocents like Teddy and Terry into his control. A free taste here, a hit on credit there, and soon enough, he's got them hooked. Especially Terry. Teddy is merely the means to get Terry under Porky's control. In the mix are various petty criminals, con artists, prostitutes and killers. Porky also likes to get his kicks watching his girls get freaky with his two dogs. And that's just for starters.

The novel focuses mostly on Terry as she first tries heroin to keep up with Teddy. She's not going to become an addict like the other wretches she's seen in Porky's pad. She's smarter than that. She's convinced that she can stop when she'll have to. But in the meantime, there is her paycheck to get the kicks, then merchandise from the department store she works at, then money from her parents, then a trick or two in the back of a car. And the junk-need is soon an all-consuming drive that she can no longer fight.

Teddy takes a more direct route into addiction. When Terry is no longer willing to steal for him, or give him money from her paycheck, there is shoplifting to carry him along. Then stealing appliances when that isn't enough. It's cool for a little while, until his two cutting buddies are gunned down after a botched robbery. From there it's a short stint at pimping, which fails when his girls are jacked by the cops. Life gets only more desperate and violent as his life spins out of control.

Donald Goines wrote his novels from direct experience. He lived the life of a junkie that started for him in the military after a middle-class upbringing. Influenced by Iceberg Slim (Pimp, Trick Baby, Mama Black Widow to name a few of his novels) Goines wrote Dopefiend in 1971, and went on to write over a dozen more novels after that. His novels focused on life in the ghetto, the life he reported on firsthand. His writing was his escape from a life of crime and addiction. A way of life that tragically ended for him when he was murdered in 1974 at the age of thirty-seven.

The Murderers - Fredric Brown

Yesterday's post about The Beat Generation brought to mind this cool novel, The Murderers by Fredric Brown.

Fredric Brown was one of those writers who could spin a compelling story in just about any genre he chose. One of his most famous stories is "Arena" which appeared in Astounding Magazine back in 1944. I'm betting that anyone who has ever read "Arena" has never forgotten it. It was also the basis for a Star Trek episode. His science fiction novels include What Mad Universe and Martians, Go Home.  Brown is also well known for a series of mystery novels featuring carnival showmen Ed and Ambrose Hunter, beginning with The Fabulous Clipjoint.

I found The Murderers in a used bookstore and was instantly intrigued. Here was a novel by Brown I've never heard of, and needless to say, I snapped it up "toot sweet!" And boy, was it a good find!

Bantam, September 1963

The novel is told first person by a down-on-his-luck, or what I should just say, an unemployed "beat" actor making the rounds of kicks and highs in 1950's Hollywood.

"Honey, you got a stick or two?" she asked. "I can't look any more wine in the face, but I could sure use a blast." She came over and put her arms around me, wriggled against me. "I'm worth it when I'm on weed."

Okay, before anyone has a chuckle at the dialog, remember that this novel was first published in 1961 and Fredric Brown was not above using a tongue-in-cheek approach to building up his characters before wrecking their worlds.

Anyway, it's a little potheaded kitten like this one that tips our narrator, 27-year-old Wally Griff, down his little trip into trouble. But that's really just an excuse. Wally doesn't really need a reason for anything he does. He's one of those characters built for 50's noir. And there is a moment in the novel where Wally recalls the Kenneth Patchen poem, "The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon-Colored Gloves" just before he makes that left turn down the twisted path to Endsville. The poem makes a neat analogy for this ride of kicks and kills among the lowest rung of Hollywood's players, actors, musicians and beatniks. It's that cool, baby.

And if you're curious to hear the poem referred to above, here's a video I found of it on YouTube, for your pleasure.