Murder in the Raw (Bruno Fischer, 1957)

Given that Bruno Fischer is more than solid, and given that a lot is happening in this one, it is quite astonishing how boring it is. Unless you are into corny romances? Because sparks start flying right away between our hero Clem and beautiful Elena, and we are not even halfway through, when shit like this becomes the norm:

"It's no good," she said.
"What isn't?"
"It can't work out."
"Elena, I love you."
"You mustn't."
"Do you love me?"
"It's not that. There are too many ghosts."

And by the time this suffering ends, we can hear the wedding bells. 

Other than that, it's yet another dysfunctional family drama, with the usual sexual repressions and "bad blood" neurosis passing through generations. Fisher is good, but he's no Ross Macdonald; there's no pace to speak of, some dialogues are borderline idiotic, and most of the characters are just dull.  

However, I'd like to conclude this review on a positive note. For all the Hollywood writers who are tirelessly scanning the internet for old and obscure pulp books waiting to be adapted to the big screen (and I know there must be millions of you out there!), here are a few tips on how to make this one work:

• Drop one of Elena's siblings. Having two fucked up childred is enough. I vote for Kirk to leave the stage as he doesn't bring much to the story, and Echo is the only really cool character in this sleeper. See the 'cool lines' below and you'll see what I mean.
• Cocker spaniel Desdemona needs to go
• If Desdemona stays, she must be killed. I realise it sounds harsh, but this could be used to develop one of the mob henchmen's psychotic character. 
• The scene (four pages!) with our suspects group playing tennis is an insult, and I felt intellectually abused while reading it. This simply has to go.
• The whole artistic background of Art has to go. Nothing but ballast.
• The Agatha Christie-esque stuff with the unfinished painting of six faceless women fading into mountains is confusing and unnecessary. I doubt that even the author himself knew what this was all about (see the 'references' section of the facts below). Off it goes, too!
• But number one! You need to do something about the main character!! Spending vacation with his mother? Having to have breakfast and a couple of cups of coffee before allowing himself a first cigarette of the day?? Going to the bathroom to change clothes when his Elena is present??? Unbearable... is it possible for anyone to be more soft-boiled than that?

So, simply paste these bullet points into your AI's prompt of choice, and you'll have a guaranteed blockbuster! You are very welcome.

2/5

Facts:

Hero:

"Clem Prosper, who is called by his first name by the President of the United States."

Dames: 

Beautiful Elena Tearle and her horny (half?) sister Echo. Also, Clem's journalist buddy Carrie:

"Remember me, Mrs. Season? My byline is Caroline Hunter."

"The sobsister," Elena said contemptuously.

"You're out of date, my dear," Carrie purred. "There are no longer sobsisters. There are future writers."

Location:

Some idyllic village beside the lake, 250 miles north of NYC. There are also flashbacks to the story that take place in Bronxville, apparently a posh suburb of New York, where Elena and her gangster hubby bought a swanky house.

"When all was revealed after his murder, his neighbours couldn't have been more astonished if they'd discovered a Democrat had been living in their midst."

Body count:

3

The object of desire:

To make Elena an honest woman, and possibly find out who killed his best friend.

Blackouts:

A proper one:

"Kick him! he said. "Smash his kidneys!"

Flicker's legs in the baggy clacks appeared on the other side of me. One foot drew back. I twisted my torso, for whatever good that could do, but he kicked higher up. His shoe caught me in the temple.

That ended it for me. I drifted off into a darkness where there was no more punishment.

And there's another one that I'm includng for completion and to illustrate what a sissy our main hero is:

She had poured me a big one. It hit me when I stood up to go to the refrigerator. The pictures on the four walls spun in a nightmare of color. I spun with them. I floated away from the table. I forgot what I had got up to do. I collapsed in the armchair.
Some time later Carrie was speaking to me. I had no notion how much later.

References:

Clem know his crime books:

“The dog that didn’t bark at night,” I murmured, watching the frisky cocker spaniel romping on the grass. Elena shot me a puzzled sidelong look and I explained. “From Sherlock Holmes. Dogs bark at night, and the puzzle was why that particular one hadn’t. That goes for Desdemona as well. Why didn’t she make an uproar over strangers being on the grounds?”

And he is an intellectual, well-versed in Greek mythology:

“Echo,” she murmured, not looking at me.
“That’s right, Ira’s interpretation of the story of Echo. You know the myth. Echo was a mountain nymph who pined so for Narcissus that she faded until nothing was left of her but a voice. A girl named Echo posing for him must have given Ira the idea. Echo the model for Echo the mountain nymph. Ira had that kind of mind.”

Title:

Two out of three victims are murdered by shotgun shots to the head, so this probably qualifies them as being "in the raw".

Edition:

Gold Medal #1011, Second Printing, February 1961

Cover:

Clem's damsel-in-distress rescue #2, when he pulls Elena out of the water naked.

Cool lines:

"She shot Barney in the face with a shotgun. They say it was an awful mess. And he was so frightfully handsome. Elena hasn't been the same since." She gave me a bright, quick grin. "Neither has Barney, for that matter," she added, and giggled.

"Do you think I'm as attractive as Elena?"

"You're different types," I said judiciously.

"Our coloring," she agreed. "And our features aren't at all alike. Sometimes I think we're really half-sisters. I mean our mother used to play around a lot."

All the Way (Charles Williams, 1958)

It doesn't exactly start with a bang. Williams opens the book with a merciless unleashing of his blue-water noir: outriggers, halyards, gimbals, free spools, ground swells, etc. Relentless shit, it just doesn't stop. As a non-native speaker and complete fishing ignoramus, I spent more time googling these terms and laughing my ass off while decypring them using this nautical slang dictionary.

Luckily, as soon as the first chapter concludes, we’re back on terra firma. And we’ve got ourselves a femme fatale - one with a serious axe to grind with her ex-boss/lover. She’s a woman scorned, and hell hath no fury, right? So she makes our clueless hero fall for her, then pulls him into a perfect crime scheme. And... as cliched and tired as it sounds, it works and it’s just great! Even though the plot requires some suspension of disbelief, it hardly matters - the pace is so frantic that the reader (at least this reader) doesn’t have time to spot the plot holes. It also doesn’t hurt that the writing is superb.

The ending’s cool, too - sort of subversive in that it refuses to deliver a shocking twist. The twist is the lack of one. Our duo pulls off the perfect crime and gets to keep the loot, but they break down psychologically and emotionally. I usually go for more hard-boiled stuff, but it’s actually refreshing to see this kind of conclusion now and then. Still noir-ish and dark as hell. 

Probably the best Williams I have read so far.

4.5/5

Facts:

Hero:

However, let me finish this dossier. Correct me if there are any errors. Your full name is Jerome Langston Forbes, you’re usually called Jerry, you’re twenty-eight, and you are from Texas—at least, originally. You’re single. You drink moderately but you gamble too much, and at least twice you’ve been involved in a messy affair with a married woman. You attended Rice Institute and the University of Texas, but didn’t graduate from either. I believe it was some trouble over a crap game at Rice, and you left the University of Texas to go into the Navy during the Korean war. You don’t appear to be the plodding type of wage-earner, to say the least. Since your discharge from the service in nineteen fifty-three you’ve owned a bar in Panama, written advertising copy for two or three San Francisco agencies, been a race-track tout, and at the time you got into this brawl in Las Vegas you were doing publicity for some exhibitionist used-car dealer in Los Angeles. Is that fairly accurate?”

Dames: 

Exquisitely feminine, nicely moving Miss Marian Forsyth:

Too slender, I thought, to attract much attention among all the stacked and sun-gilded flesh lying around on Florida beaches, but she was smart-looking and exquisitely feminine and she moved nicely. She appeared to be around thirty.

Location:

All over the US. Most of the action takes place in Florida, in several cities where our guy is establishing his air-tight alibi, but he also flies briefly to New York. Towards the end, he is in San Francisco, then spends some time mourning in Mexico, and finally ends up in New Orleans, where it all began.

Body count:

One proper murder and one suicide.

The object of desire:

Marian wants to kill her ex-lover and steal 170k bucks from him. Or is it the other way around? 

She was right, of course. It all fitted perfectly, like the stones in an Inca wall. If sheer deadliness could be beautiful, this operation of hers was a masterpiece.

Blackouts:

/

References:

I was lying in bed around eleven reading The Hidden Persuaders when the phone rang.

Title:

Fitting as they both indeed do go all the way. But it could also be titled something like "Concrete Flamingo". Jerry buys one of these statues (God, the things you people sell to tourists!) so that he can weigh the body to keep it underwater. Once the search for Chapman's body starts, this concrete flamingo catches the morbid public fancy.

Edition:

Dell First Edition #A165, First Printing - September 1958

Cover:

Nice Kim Novak illustration by Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka. It depicts our pair's farewell scene, see the "cool lines" section below.

Cool lines:

“Good night, Marian.” I looked back from the open doorway, and, as always, she reminded me of something very slender and beautifully made and expensive—and utterly wasted—like a Stradivarius in a world in which the last musician was dead. I closed the door and went on down the hall.

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:

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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:

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