Who Dies There? (James Duff, 1956)

Graphic Books has become one of my favourite pulp publishers in recent years. I love their dark covers, and it happened more than once that I would buy their books blindly when chasing the stuff online. You know how it goes when you find some good deal on eBay: you just have to check out the seller's other items... 

But we don't buy these paperbacks just for their covers (or do we?). We actually try to read some of them, and the great thing about the Graphics is that I'm yet to find one that would really suck. I have been pleasantly surprised by some completely unknown authors, and I'm happy to report that this happened again with Mr James Duff, of whom I had never heard before picking up this one.

It's pretty much a Ross Macdonald clone with the familiar theme of messed-up families where sins and neurosis are passed from one generation to the next with devastating effects that finally culminate in a tragic and sad ending. You can only keep your shit swept under the rug for so long... 

It's not flawless. The dialogue could use a bit of rewriting, and plot development is occasionally silly and not very believable. For example, our sleuthing hero spooks some guy by nothing more than simply calling him three times and hanging up the phone. Really?

But the plot is decent, easy to follow (unlike Macdonald, with all due respect...), and delivers a good twist at the end. True, there are some cliches (like best friend cop), but it manages to avoid the most annoying ones like sex bombs throwing themselves at the hero and similar juvenile nonsense. Plenty hard-boiled also, which is always a plus.

The biggest reason why the book works is the hero, John J. Phelan. He comes in the grand tradition of Marlowe and Archer as the disillusioned loner, full of self-doubts, a bit sentimental, and with his own moral compass. We don't get to know anything about his past except that he was in WW2, and we can speculate that, somehow, that experience damaged him. I liked the way he gets introduced: upon receiving the fee, he immediately calls his bookie and places a bet with the entire amount. Nice touch. We now know everything we need to know about him without going into the usual stuff about the unpaid bills pilling...

I also loved the way it ends. There will be no sense of justice being served or any redemption for the family involved (The hell with them, I thought; the hell with them all). Johnny gets the second instalment of his fee (another 100 bucks), promptly calls the bookie and places another bet. The horse's name? Missie Gloom. And the bookie's response? "Ah, Johnny-boy, you're nuts. She won't even get outa the gate".

How much more noir-ish can one get?

4/5

Facts:

Hero:

What in hell, Phelan, what in hell? Why weren't you an accountant or a ditch digger or a truckdriver or a bank clerk or any goddamned thing but a private eye?

A good question. The only trouble with it was that it was unanswerable to the guy who had asked it. Me.

The bad guy(s):

"I'm Egan. Richie Egan. This is my place."

I said: "I'll now turn four handsprings and look to the heavens for guidance."

Dames: 

Pendleton sisters:

Honor wasn't a bad-looking dish, if you liked them thin. I didn't.

Landrith "was as beautiful as anything I'd ever seen, and she knew it".

Finally, our hero's love interest is the beautiful redhead Jean Gibbon - Miss SeaVue of Astoria, Oregon, 1953.

Location:

L.A.

Body count:

4 + a nasty dog called Turk

Blackouts:

The guy kept hitting me, and hitting me some more. He used his fist on my face and midsection, and his knee on my groin. He would grunt each time he hit me, and the other guy in the chair would laugh.

The last thing I remember was him hitting me.

They sure as hell enjoyed themselves.

References:

It's not exactly a reference that I usually write about, but it was depressing to read that the radios in 1956 were already reporting "about the latest skirmish on the Gaza border".

Title:

It sounds cool, but it's pretty silly when one thinks about it. There's never any doubt about who died in some particular location in this one.

Edition:

Graphic #134, no printing date or edition specified

Cover:

By Walter Popp. It depicts a scene in which drunk Honor tries to kill Johnny.

Cool lines:

/

Blonde on the Rocks (Carter Brown, 1963)

Let's stay on the rocks for another review, moving from the murder to a blonde. And yes, it's Carter Brown, so we can expect a new dosage of infantile and cryptic humour. Luckily, this one is from his Rick Holman series and not from the farcical and, in my opinion, much inferior Al Wheeler or Danny Boyd series.

The setup was quite original, and I liked it a lot. It opens with a famous actress hiring our troubleshooter to find out who had killed her! Obviously, not literally (even Carter Brown is now whacky enough for something like that), but killing in Hollywood can also mean blacklisting, which is precisely what happened to unfortunate Della. She hires Holman to discover who and why "put her on the ice".

Rick Holman discovers all that by the end of the next chapter. We are still only at page 30.

Holman keeps digging because there are some shady circumstances surrounding the incidental (yeah, right!) demise of Della's lover in a car accident. But he's pretty inefficient and will only be able to muster a grand total of three suspects by the time the book finishes. One of them turns out to be insane and gets incarcerated in an asylum, so the prospect of some big final roundup looks less and less likely. You don't need to take my word for it; such an idea sounds "childish and stupid" even to our main guy...

Fortunately for him, there will be no mandatory suspects roundup in this one as the murderer storms into Rick's house and tries to settle everything with a bit of a gunfight. Cool! And there's even a nice twist with body-swapping that I didn't see coming. Even cooler!

That covers the beginning and the end, but what happens in the middle? In one word: women! There are pages and pages of superlatives about the number of beauties that Holman encounters. The whole thing is so idiotic and over the top that it actually becomes funny to read. Check out the "dames" section below, and you'll see what I mean. 

Peasant-rich curves? Delicate ankles? With all due respect, Mr Brown,... but come on!?!!

3/5

Facts:

Hero:

You've gotten to be a real big man in your own line, right? These days anybody in the whole goddamned business has got troubles, what do they do? Right away they send for Rick Holman!

The bad guy(s):

Erik Stanger strode into the office, looking like something Wagner composed on an off day.

Dames: 

I liked them all! Witty and delightfully amoral.

Let's start with Della August, the titular blonde and one of the three top actresses in Hollywood. In the opening scene, our hero is struck by "the impact of the swelling curve of her jutting breasts and the long line of her lovely legs."

Not to mention that "her negligee is merely a silken sheath that hides her peasant-rich curves from his always vulgar gaze."

Then there's the bad guy's wife, Mrs Monica King:

It was like nature had made a big joke when it made her - by giving her about the most sexually appealing body of any woman I had ever seen in my whole life.

The brief black bikini only emphasised the magnetic nudity of that glorious abundance of flowing curves and spheres. Her breasts flowed outward with the majesty of a tidal river, until they culminated in a deeep fulfilment that made your whole body ache with desire at first glance. Her waist was a fragile, incredibly small bridge that merged into the swelling curves of her hips, which looked like they had been machine-turned, with a tolerance close to a ten-thousandth of an inch, into erotic perfection. Her legs were equal parts perfect, with rounded thighs, slender calves, and delicate ankles.

My favourite one would definitely be Eugenie St. Clair:

A tall, lithe brunette. Large, luminous dark eyes. High, exquisitely molded cheekbones. Both lips full and invitingly soft. A beautiful face, an intelligent face.

I figured that predatory was the word I wanted, maybe.

It has to be said that she has absolutely no role in this book, but I didn't really mind. How could I, as long as she came up with crazy stuff like this:

"Tell me more, Mr. Holman?" she whispered huskily. "Do you find my face beautiful? Is that why your vocal cords were paralyzed all that time? Or perhaps the deep sorrow that overshadows my life shows in my face - to a kindly man of the world gifted with acute perception, such as yourself?"

Location:

Tinseltown

Body count:

2

The object of desire:

"Why would they do this to you?" I asked.

She shrugged helplessly. "I don't know why, that's what I want you to find out, Rick. They started out to kill me, and in six months they've almost done it. I feel like a ghost already, with no work, no offers even, no nothing!

Blackouts:

We have one, and it's a bit unconventional. Holman is in a regular fistfight, but when he receives a punch in the solar plexus, he plunges into "a soaring whirlpool of blinding colors, alternating with Stygian darkness".

Luckily, we don't need to wait long for the explanation:

"Ah! You are back with us now? It hurt, but it was even worse in your mind, yes? That is because I was very scientific when I hit you. No permanent damage, but a temporary and partial paralysis of the diaphragm."

Title:

Della is blonde and has been "put on ice (rocks?) with all the studios". 

Edition:

Signet G2328, First Printing, July 1963

Cover:

Beautiful and sexy, by McGinnis. I'm adding the second edition's cover as it is equally great. Looks like they both came from the same photoshoot.

Cool lines:

"Oh, of course!" She giggled again. "I am stupid, aren't I?"
"Yes," I said simply.

I'd rather drop into the nearest cemetery and read the headstones than talk over old times with you.

I'll bet the only shotgun she's ever seen in her life was at her first wedding!

Murder On The Rocks (Robert Dietrich, 1957)

It's bad enough that our hero is a pipe-smoking accountant, but what really kills this one is that he is a self-absorbed, narcissistic snob who has an opinion on everything and everybody. He keeps making idiotic, corny jokes and comments that sometimes border on bizarre.

I'll give you an example: when he notices two teenage girls (heavy-chested!) staring at lurid covers of horror books displayed on the magazine rack, he just can't help himself but bark at them:

"Back to your algebra. When you're a little older it'll be a big help to your husband in figuring a system to beat the ponies."
The girl's eyes popped open. "Huh?"
"Well," I said, "it was a thought for the day." 

I don't know... Am I too literal-minded? Is someone out there who finds this kind of shit even remotely funny? You're welcome to leave the comment below.

Since he's an accountant, it would be unfair to hold his lack of detective skills against him. Like every efficient bureaucrat, he hires a proper private detective and takes over the investigation once he gets a short list of suspects. And I wonder why he takes over because he never misses a chance to explicitly explain to everyone around him that he is not a proper PI and has no intention of getting involved in the case.

The case? The standard story of some missing, insanely expensive diamond, a couple of murders, one junkie, a beautiful night-club singer, two horny sisters throwing themselves at our hero, a sinister mafia guy, incompetent police that is nowhere to be seen, etc. To be honest, it starts all right, but after the first fifty pages or so, it gets stale. Most definitely nothing that we haven't read before. 

So, yes, it's bad, and you may wonder why I even bother writing this review. The reason is simple: it contains the most ludicrous plot device I have ever encountered. And I'm a big Mike Avallone fan! Now check this: Steve narrows down his suspects to just a couple of them because he realises that the culprit is most likely a drug addict. So far, so good. The good old elimination method, right? But the crazy part is that one of his remaining suspects got hooked up on morphine when he was imprisoned in the fucking concentration camp!!!

No need to make tasteless jokes about nazi experiments in death camps, so let's stop right here. 

It's difficult to admit, but I'm beginning to realise that my relationship with our favourite Watergate spy is beyond salvageable. As love affairs often do, ours started a good ten years ago with a bang when I was devouring Hard Case Crime books and read his brilliant House Dick (which, btw, still has my favourite HCC cover!). Since those days, everything just kept going downhill, and I've been through a series of forgettable novels.

This one is at least memorable but for the wrong reasons. Skip it.

2/5

Facts:

Hero:

Steve Bentley, a tax consultant.

You're alert, quick, and highly intelligent. You've proved yourself in the world of business and you have your clients' respect. By any standards you're quite sufficiently cultured to mingle with any social group. You're honest, solid, and you have integrity. And beneath it all you're little bit of a snob. Do I make myself clear?

The bad guy(s):

When Cadena was a tank sergeant on Luzon he had pulled the head off a dead Jap to win a ten-cent bet.

Dames: 

Two daughters of some Banana Republic ambassador: Iris Sewall (with eyelashes bigger than butterflies) and Sara Cutler (The little sister. She looked like a mantrap).

Plus Janice Western, the night club singer: She had the look of a female with plenty in the bank and a private way to get more.

And let's not forget Mrs Bross, his ageing secretary who enjoys shopping during her lunch breaks.

Location:

As for Washington, it has, per capita, more rape, more crimes of violence, more perversion, more politicians, more liquor, more good food, more bad food, more tax collections, more hotels and apartments and more gold toothpicks than any city in the world. A fine place if you have enterprise, durability, money and powerful friends.

Body count:

3

The object of desire:

The Madagascar Green. La Verde de Madagascar. Cleopatra's Emerald. It was too romantic for me, the terms were too large, the menace too heavy.

Blackouts:

/

References:

In his typical condescending style, Steve treats us with a short review of The Teahouse of the August Moon:

The movie was Marlon Brando with gauze tapes slanting his eyelids and a straw coolie hat shaped like a hollow gong, the kind J. Arthur Rank's blacksmith beats in those British films. In the picture Brando spoke a lot of Japanese and some English. The pronunciation of both was bad, but I assume there was artistry behind it all.

Title:

We have some murders, and there's the precious rock of Madagascar Green diamond, so it's close enough. But even the title of this one could be improved; how about something like "Deadly Harvest of Cleopatra's Emerald"?

Edition:

Dell #A141, First edition, first printing - June 1957

Cover:

It's horrible, and unfortunately, it's similar to what we see in bookstores today. Would it be possible that Dell's art director was as unimpressed with the book as I was, so he just threw a sketch of some damsel in distress at the bottom and splashed the title in big letters all over the page? Sloppy and so very un-pulpy.

Cool lines:

/

The Girl With No Place to Hide (Nick Quarry, 1959)

I decided to give Mr Quarry and his man Jake Barrow another chance. One never knows, and because my expectations were low, I might appreciate this one differently - like I did recently with Roky Steel. 

It paid off. But this time, it was not because I was prepared for it, but because this one was not bad at all. True, Jake is still not a very good detective. He relies on hunches and friends doing the sleuthing for him and has zero problems with fucking his suspects while wasting time on investigating. A gigantic cast is assembled in this one, too, with new characters getting introduced until 20 pages before the end. But the plot is solid, the pace faster, and there is a sense that the whole thing is leading somewhere.

It is also pretty hard-boiled. Jake gets kicked around all the time, and the final shootout adds four corpses to the grand total body count, making it almost reach double digits. So, it's all good on that front. I can't complain.

This is my third one of the series, meaning I'm halfway through. I think I'm going to finish it because the remaining three don't seem to be scarce and are quite affordable on eBay. I'll probably be disappointed, but I'm a sucker for P.I. yarns. 

3.5/5 - I'm adding half a point for that scene with Dorian, the Amazon woman!

Facts:

Hero:

"I'm a private detective."

"Oh?" It interested her. She thought about it. "What's your name?"

"Jake Barrow."

"I never heard of you."

"You've got a lot of company."

The bad guy(s):

"Who's Gus?"

"Gus Banta. The guy I owed the dough to."

The name rang a bell for me. "Banta's a big underworld loanshark, right? With syndicate backing?"

Massey nodded. "That's him."

Dames: 

Angela Hart, a tramp, a nympho - the girl with no place to hide:

Her features weren't regular enough for her to be called beautiful. Her mouth was a bit too wide, her nose a bit too thick. But she had a pair of saucy, snapping dark eyes, and a mass of black hair soft and smooth as down. She had a downright arrogant figure, too.

Nel Tarey, the secretary:

She was a tiny girl, about five-one. Her face, framed by curly, honey-brown hair, was cute in a snub-nosed, clear-skinned, innocent-wide-blue-eyes way. The desk hid her legs, but the rest of her figure was unusually good for a short girl.

Clear-skinned? Anyway, once she stands up, we - of course - get the rest:

Her legs were fine; long for her height, and strongly curved.

And Jake really seems to be fixated on the girl's height:

In her bare feet she was even shorter than I'd remembered, the top of her head coming up no higher than the middle of my chest. She looked like a cute miniature of Bridgette Bardot.

Lavinia, a former knife thrower. The tall one:

She was a dish.

Tall and slinky. With hair like dark copper.

She had a perfectly chiseled face, knowing gray eyes, a patrician nose with a suggestion of passionate flair to the nostrils, and a wicked, to-hell-with it red mouth. She was one of those lean girls that pack voltage like a hight tension cable with all the juice turned on.

A patrician nose with a suggestion of passionate flair to the nostrils?? Come on!

Location:

"There's just too much work for the size force we got. We need more cops."

"There's already twenty-four thousand cops in New York. Any more and everybody else'd have to move out to make room for them."

Body count:

9

Benny's departure is the best:

His face died first. For a moment he stayed the way he was, as though the bullet had pinned him to the wall. Then he began sliding down it.

The object of desire:

I told him to hang on, got out my bank book, and looked at the balance in it. There was enough. I told the insurance adjuster that I was too busy at the moment to handle the job for him.

After I'd hung up, I thought about why I'd said that. No good reason. Except that I felt all wrapped up in a problem that was none of my making, and there was a restless, thrusting need in me to dig into it and make sense of it.

Blackouts:

Jake eventually does find a proper, paying client, and he will definitely earn those two grand for all the beatings he takes. First, he gets a truly savage one from some hick cop:

My head bloated. Darkness closed around my bulging eyes, darkness ripped by blood-red comets. Dammed-up blood pounded in my ears. 

That same day, he has one hell of a nightcap at home because his whiskey got poisoned while the cop was giving him the full treatment. He barely reaches the hospital, where he passes out. The chapter simply finishes with "I went down and out".

By the way, this turns out to be not so bad for the investigation. The next morning, when convalescing in the hospital, Jake will mentally review the case and have an Eureka moment that will break the case! 

Next, he gets slugged on his head by Dorian, the Amazon woman:

Maybe she had something in her fist. Because the floor swung up at me and I dove down to meet it. But I was out before the floor and I made contact.

Check out the "cover" section below to see how he awakes.

Finally, there's a shootout at the end in which a bullet scratches his head. Somehow, he still manages to finish the fight and calls for the cavalry using all his remaining strength. And then it's curtains one last time:

The red mist rising from the floor rose higher, engulfing me, and I sank into its bottomless depths.

References:

I went into the kitchenette and gazed at the two bottles of Chartreuse - the 86 proof yellow bottle, and the 110 proof green bottle. A bunch of monks in a French monastery make Chartreuse from a secret recipe that makes Georgia corn liquor seem as mild as Coca-Cola in comparison. It's too strong to drink more than a few drops at a swallow, and once inside you it heats like a furnace and hits like a piledriver. But it also has the effect of sharpening my thinking.

Title:

See the "dames" section, paragraph one

Edition:

Gold Medal #938, First Printing, November 1959

Cover:

According to pulpcovers.com, by Barye Phillips.

It has to be said that there's no exotic dancer in this book. Even if it had one, this cover would still be pretty lame. Partly due to the long title that takes half of the page.

However, there is a great scene that would make this book a total bestseller if used for a cover:

I was stretched out spread-eagle on my back. My wrists were tied to the top of the bed, and my ankles to opposite corners of the foot of the bed. I'd been stripped naked. My clothes lay scattered on the floor.

Dorian, the Amazon who' knocked me out, sat on the edge of the mattress beside me, smoking a cigarette, still wearing her red halter and shorts.

When she saw my eyes focus on her, she took a deep drag at her cigarette, removed it from her lips, flicked off the ash, and bent sideways to touch its burning end against the bare sole of my left foot.

Auch!!! 

Cool lines:

/

Trail of a Tramp (Nick Quarry, 1958)

Mystery fiction is no rocket science, and that goes double for the private detective genre. Our hero goes from point A to B, maybe missing C, but eventually returns to it after uncovering some new facts when reaching point D. Once there, he or she may be slightly delayed by (for example) getting drunk and/or laid, but more likely than not, the solution and culprit(s) will be found back in A or B.

A simple concept. It has worked for almost a century, and we all know and love it. But there are always exceptions, and Mr Quarry seems to be one of them. He sends his sleuth, Jake Barrow, gumshoeing through the entire alphabet. Pretty soon, this becomes a series of interviews, each leading to another, with almost no action or story development between them. It's not exactly boring, as some members of this huge cast are interesting, but still, I gradually started to lose interest as they all get dropped almost as soon as Jake finishes interviewing them.

I guess this is how private detectives work in real life, but are we really interested in such mundane stuff?

Jake, however, does make one exception to this M.O.:  he is more than willing to take a step back when it comes to women. He starts hitting on his very first female interviewee, but she is murdered before they can even go on the first date. He doesn't mourn her for long and will soon manage to score with long-limbed, deep-breasted Midge.

The case was all crooked angles and I couldn't get anywhere with it; it was too late and my brain was too tired. Midge Resko, on the other hand, was all bewitching curves, and I just might manage to get somewhere with those; it wasn't too late and I wasn't too tired for that.

And it actually helps his case! Because after he's finished whining to her:

A lot of this detective work is like that. You just go around picking up rocks and looking under them. Half the time you don't even know what you expect to find. But you pick up enough rocks, and sooner or later there's usually something under one of them.

...Midge gets an epiphany and remembers the name of the small town where elusive Julia, the tramp, grew up. Jake promptly packs his shit and departs for Smithsport. He starts with interviewing (what else?) the high school principal,... and she will point him to Julia's sweetheart Charlie,... who is not very helpful, but he points our hero to Julia's best friend... and so on and fucking on. Relentless.

The whole thing is beyond repetitive and is bordering idiotic. Luckily, in the end, the deus ex machine strikes in the form of the interviewee (let's say) M and Jake will fall over the finishing line. Together with the exhausted reader.

2/5

Facts:

Hero:

Tank got my wallet and the Magnum from my coat pocket. He looked in my wallet. "Barrow's the right name, Frisk," he told the stocky guy with the gun in my back. "Jacob Barrow. Says here he's a private dick."

I was surprised he could read that good. "That's right," I said.

Dames: 

Julia Hiller, aka Fran Ford, the tramp from the title:

Angry eyes, curved hips, her bust high on her slim chest, her hair a natural honey blonde. something downright inflammable about her looks. And her eyes dared you.

Martha DeFalco, the photographer:

Short, fabulously-curved build and round, pleasant face. 

Midge Resko, the nightclub singer:

Strong, healthy, luscious package of a girl, sly-humoured good looks, full-bodied voice and full-bodied figure, clean-cut, strong-boned face, undulating curves, deep-breasted, small-waisted, long-limbed figure, high-cheekbones and bold features

Location:

Mostly New York City. The trail also leads him briefly to Surf City in New Jersey, some small town in Connecticut called Smithsport, and to Hoboken.

I liked a lot that, unlike 99% of authors from New York, Quarry is not exactly fascinated and romantically obsessed by the city. If anything, it's the opposite:

I know some people who claim they like to walk in the rain. They must mean in the country. In New York City, every raindrop carries a cargo of soot, and the dirty puddles lie around, just waiting to splash up around your ankles.

Body count:

6

The object of desire:

The usual missing person case.

Blackouts:

The first one is touch and go for a minute. He doesn't go out all the way after getting whacked on the head with the blackjack:

I tried to duck. The lead-weighted leather cracked against the side of my skull. A gong tolled deafeningly inside my head. The room tilted, slammed against my shoulders. Pain reached down my spine from my exploding brain and cut my knees out from under me. I went down like a dropped sack of cement.

But the next time he does. The way it happens is slightly bizarre. It's 4am, and Jake and Midge are in his flat, about to get down to the hanky panky business, when they get interrupted by the bad guy. A fight ensues, Jake is almost down, and Midge screams in panic. The bad guy gets scared (?) and runs away, but now Jake is so exhausted that he only manages to: 

"Don't pass out on me," I rasped. "For Pete's sake don't pass out now."

"I - I won't... pass out," she whispered tightly.

So I let go of the door knob, and I passed out.

Title:

The way it read to me, I'd finally followed Fran Ford - or Julia Hiller, as she called herself here - all the way down. From singer to carny stripper to hotel floozy to murdereres.

Edition:

Gold Medal #413, UK edition, 1960

Cover:

Illustration uncredited. Not great, but not bad either. I like the abstract background, besides, of course, the central part...

Cool lines:

/

The Yellow Overcoat (Frank Gruber, 1942)

This was my first Gruber's non-Johnny Fletcher book and I was curious if it would be more serious and not so tongue-in-cheek as the stuff in the Fletcher series (which, for the record, I absolutely love!). I didn't need to wait long for an answer.

Our hero Joe Devlin, an ex-hobo who just inherited a detective correspondence school (the institute!) from his eccentric uncle, is hired by some hillbilly to find his stolen overcoat. Offering him a fee ten times higher than he had paid for the old, stolen one. But since our man isn't a licensed detective, he hires one... who turns out to be an alcoholic... so Joe promptly hires another private eye to keep an eye on the first one. And guess what? This last one will be killed by yet another guy who shadowed all of them!

Welcome to Frank Gruber's wacky world! Cool stuff, a real page-turner. I loved it and couldn't stop smiling while reading it. But then, in the last third, it just falls apart.

After drinking with his new drinking detective buddy and (inevitably) stirring trouble and a fight in the bar, Joe abruptly departs Chicago on some wild goose chase that turns out to not be just an episode but instead takes a good chunk of the book. Unfortunately, it gradually becomes a snooze fest, with new characters needlessly thrown into the plot and some story developments that do little to develop the story. In short, and very bluntly - it turns into a mess. Even worse, most of the spark and playfulness of the first half fades away. It felt like chapter after chapter was used for padding and to reach the word count...

There are a few exceptions, the highlight being the hotel with night and day shift rooms, so our hero must share his room with another guest! Crazy and hilarious shit, I loved that one.

By the time it came to the final part - the mandatory big revelation act - I was pretty battle-fatigued and just wanted it to end. It didn't help much that it took Joe twenty pages to explain the plot and point out the culprit. Since this is a classic mystery, Gruber does his best to overcomplicate everything, and there are probably dozens of possible solutions to whodunnit in this one. So, the one used probably holds water, but it is just not very convincing. To put it mildly.

I'll give you just one example. Our guy didn't go on that goose chase for no reason. He went to that godforsaken place (see the location section of the facts below) with a very specific goal: to make sure there was a certain painting hanging on the wall of some pub, which would corroborate the statement of one of his suspects. You may be asking yourself why the fuck didn't he just pick up the phone, call the pub, and ask the bartender about it? And you would be asking the same question as I did myself...

Had it been trimmed for 50 or so pages, it could have been great. But this way, it's just all right. With due respect to Gruber, it's actually quite forgettable, to be honest...

 3/5

Facts:

Hero:

Joe Devlin is our main guy, but I liked his sidekick, P.I. Harry Bloss, more. The best detective in Chicago!

Dames: 

Martha Drexler, Joe's secretary at "the institute", also mysterious Susan Gard when her face is not bandaged. 

Location:

Chicago... and then off on the night train to Keewatauk. Huh, say that again - to where?

"Keewatauk," said the ticket seller. "That's Pengilly. Leaves in eight minutes. Change at Alborn for Pengilly."

"Keewatauk is a suburb of Pengilly?"

"Su-burb?" Naw; Keewatauk ain't on the railroad. You get off at Pengilly and change to a bus, which runs to Keewatauk. First, you change to another train to Alborn."

"Two changes - to go how far?"

"Eight-ninety miles. Don't know. I've never been there."

Keewatauk cannot be found on Google Maps, but Pengilly is there. And there's no train connection anymore to Chicago! 

Body count:

3

The object of desire:

"I see," said Devlin. "And you want to pay four hundred dollars to get the man who stole your coat?"

"Nah, not the guy. The hell with him! It's the coat I want; that's all."

"You don't want the thief arrested?"

"Nah, what the hell? Maybe he was cold and needed the coat. I'd a bought him one maybe, if he'd asked proper for it. That ain't the idea."

Blackouts:

A missile struck his arm with crushing force, bounced off and collided with his forehead. Fire exploded in Devlin's head and he fell forward on his face, unconscious.

References:

In one scene Devlin humms this tune:

Oh, massa had an obercoat,

He hung it on the wall.

And dat niggah came and stole

And wore it to a ball!

ChatGPT identified it as "Oh, Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground", but this is just another hallucination as the words don't match at all. And it is most definitely not about the slaves "weeping at the grave of their deceased master". But, anyway, cool and funny lyrics.

Title:

See the 'object of desire' section above

Edition:

Popular Library #188

Cover:

Good old "woman-in-peril" theme. Love it. By Rudolph Belarski.

Cool lines:

"How is your uncle?"

"That depends on where he went; he checked out. That's why I'm here. I'm his heir."

"They sure dye these rabbits swell these days."

"Rabbits, you're calling it?" cried the storekeeper. "A genuine mink-dyed fur coat and you're calling it rabbits? Mister, should a mink coming in this store he'd crying, 'mama, papa!'"

"I have here a fine engraving of Abraham Lincoln. It could become yours by showing me the register from the last month and answering a question."

"Add a dollar to it," said the man behind the grill, "and I'll drink a bottle of milk with my mouth full of chewing tobacco and that's a real trick."

"A man after my own heart," said Devlin, pushing the bill under the wicket. ""Let's see the register."

And here's one, probably the least hard-boiled one-liner on this blog. But somehow, I still find it charming:

"Take a nice little walk for yourself, to the east. Walk until your hat floats!"

Never Kill a Cop (John B. West, 1961)

What a difference does it make when I know in advance that the book I'm about to read is going to suck! I remember reading one of the Rocky Steele series long ago and being astonished at how horrible it was. Rocky is Mike, Vicky is Velda, Lieutenant Pat Chambers is Captain Johnny Richards, etc. 

Yep, it's a shameless Spillane rip-off. With our gumshoeing tough guy (nicknamed by some cops the morgue-magnet!!) roaming the savage streets of New York, with the .45 magnum called Betsy in his mitt, grinning all the time, enforcing his particular brand of justice:

"I don't work like the law. In my court, you're guilty until proven otherwise, and from where I stand, you got a snowball's chance in hell!"

The less said about the plot, the better. It starts with the bad guys hiding a corpse in Rocky's Caddy. Huh? Yes, of all the cars in NYC, they randomly picked his. The plot then quickly thickens. No thanks to Rocky's detective skills, but more to his premonition, female hormones (??) in his belly, eerie feelings and hunches he gradually makes progress and finally comes to the realization:

"This thing gets bigger every hour. Murder first. Then prostitution, and now hot lettuce. Ain't there any end?"

If you're confused, let me explain that the hot lettuce means counterfeit money. And the way the scheme works (I think) is that prostitutes are handing back counterfeit bank notes to their customers. Since the horny shmucks are embarrassed about the whole hanky panky thing, they want to leave as soon as possible once they get their pants back on. Hence, they don't pay much attention so it's easy to distribute the lettuce. Makes more sense now?

But since this time I knew what to expect, I was ready... and I must admit this was one huge FUN to read. The whole thing is hilariously over the top and completely out of control, with Rocky always and firmly in the centre of madness. He's constantly pissed off and on the move all the time. One just cannot but not like the guy. Let me share this unforgettable episode instead of giving you some heavy character study:

There's a scene where some bad guy ambushes our man in his car. The usual stuff, threatening him under the gun and "advising" him to back off. We've been through this a zillion times before. But here, once the villain leaves the car, Rocky promptly slams his heap into reverse (one time I was thankful for the automatic transmission!) and runs the poor bastard over! I couldn't believe what I was reading, and I still cannot decide what to think about it. Is Rocky a despicably sneaky asshole or is he the ultimate badass? You're welcome to leave your opinion in the comments.

My new guilty pleasure. The next Rocky Steele is on its way while I'm typing this. 

3.5/5

Facts:

Hero:

"Come on, Mister Aloysius Algernon Steele. What else?"

That crack was a red flag. Nobody - but nobody - not even a copper - calls me by my given names unless he wants his mug splattered over the five boroughs - or unless he's got the goods on me.

The bad guy(s):

"You can't scare me, copper," he almost whispered. "Nobody's gunning for Studs Hackett. Nobody. Not unless he's got rocks in his head and wants to exchange 'em for lead."

Dames: 

First, his .45 gun, Betsy:

Funny how a guy feels safe with a rod in his mitt.

Then, his secretary, Vicky Boston:

She was not only the best secretary a guy could want, she was also a P.I. on her own... Vicky also is real stacked. For whistles. She's got just the right amounts of just the right things in just the right places, and a face so pretty there oughta be a law against it.

Then there's gun moll Miss Angelica Carson Martin, alias Angie Carson, alias Carrie Martin. Rocky goes crazy for her before even meeting her in person:

Then I heard her voice. Brother! What a dame! Her voice drew me a picture of her and my ears stood up straight. "Hello," was all she said, but it was earful.

When they meet, the whole page is filled with superlatives, but let's just summarize it into:

I'd have bet her measurements were 36-24-36, and the two peaches that stood out of her chest pointed straight at the sky like a pair of ack-ack guns.

Ack-ack guns?! The meeting, however, doesn't go too well because she drinks too much (!) and tries to fuck him (!!!), so Rocky comes to the shocking realisation:

Little devils were dancing in her eyes, and it struck me then. The chick was a nympho!

Btw, he seems to have other problems with sex and his masculinity:

I figure little Benny's my friend, too, and he's a fairy. That don't make me a freak, does it?

But let's leave that for another book review...

Location:

Dawn was breaking, and pale red and gold fingers of light made the skyline glow like it was on fire. New York. My New York.

Body count:

A bit of a bloodbath with 8 corpses altogether. The last killing is pretty cool: 

Betsy spoke to him once. One short word, and there was a period behind it - a blue-black period that jumped up smack between his insane, bloodshot eyes.

The object of desire:

I didn't know a thing except that someone had tried to make a sucker out of me, and for that he was gonna get the shaft. Everything else was secondary to that.

Blackouts:

The Empire State Building dropped out of the sky and smacked me on the side of the head.

I love the way he comes out of it:

I got the strength to open my eyes. The place was full of coppers. Johnny Richards was three of 'em, and Morris was the other three.

References:

It opens with a reference to "Death on the Rocks", one of the previous books of the series:

It all began on April 4. I'd spent the last coupla months in Africa hunting big game, and had even run into murder case.

Title:

"God help any son of a bitch stupid enough to knock off one of my boys. He'll fry - or my name ain't John S. Richards. You know the saying, Rocky - nobody kills a copy and gets away with it."

"That listens good, but it don't work," I argued.

This is the third book titled "Never Kill a Cop" on this blog! If you are curious about the other two, you can find them here and here.

Edition:

Signet #1929, First Printing, April 1961

Cover:

Incredible, we have a cover without a blonde and without a gun! And cool one too, I quite like it. The illustrator is not credited, but the style and colour palette are very similar to the one from my previous post.

Cool lines:

Rocky has a weird fascination with the animal kingdom, fish in particular. The phone, for example, is "dead mackerel", and I needed ChatGPT to explain it to me. Happy now to share it with you:

Yes, the term "dead mackerel" is a metaphorical expression used to refer to a phone that is not ringing or receiving any calls. Essentially, it implies that the phone is as inactive as a dead fish. This expression is often used humorously or informally to describe a period of quiet or lack of communication on the phone.

But there are many, many, many more hard-to-decipher metaphors that I didn't bother the poor AI robot with. Have fun:

• It was raining so hard that day a good healthy salmon could have swum straight up to heaven and spawned angelfish.
• My spirits were lower than whale dung, and that's on the bottom of the sea.
• The chick was as hot as little sister on her wedding night in one way and as cold as a well-digger's ass in the Klondike in another.
• She was as rigid as a rifle barrel.
• I was hungry as a bitch with ten pups.
• This deal was as mixed up as a Western omelet.
• The windows were as dark as Suzie Wong's past. 
• The night was as black as the inside of a wolf's mouth at midnight.
• The cabby got gabby. I needed his talk like I needed leprosy.
• He figured like a second-class Mongolian idiot.

And finally, let's wrap it up with some words of Steele wisdom:

Experience had taught me that when they fall on their back or on the seat of their pants, watch for 'em to get up again, but when they fall on their kisser, the fight's over. Forget it.