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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