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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