The Ever-Loving Blues aka Death of a Doll (Carter Brown, 1961)

I assume this one was initially meant to be Carter's H'wood novel. Because for some unexplained reason, the big shot producer Guggenheimer (!) hires our man Danny Boyd and flies his gumshoes all the way from New York to California. The usual type of assignment - it's gonna be yet another case of finding the missing starlet.

Her name is Gloria Van Raven (!!), and Danny's job turns out to be trivial. Studio execs send him to interview Gloria's secretary, April Showers (!!!), and he gets the lucky break immediately. During his visit, Gloria phones April, informs her that she's enjoying herself on some yacht in Florida and asks April to bring her some clothes. Danny promptly recruits April as his assistant (or something like that), helps her pack, and they are off to the East Coast.

All this happens by page #10, and around this time, I started to raise my eyebrows a bit. True, Mr Brown was Australian who, according to Wikipedia, had not visited the States very frequently, but surely he must have known about the private detective jurisdiction? You know - the thing that cops and/or district attorneys always bitch about and threaten our private detective heroes with. And when you think about it, this whole thing doesn't make much sense from the pure logistical point of view, either. I mean, wouldn't it be simpler to send Danny directly from New York to Florida? And surely it would be much more economical for Gloria to simply buy a couple of bikinis and not bother her girl Friday to fly a suitcase of clothes all across America? Especially because she (1) intended to stay on that yacht for only five days at most, (2) was broke, and (3) didn't wear many clothes anyway...

But what the hell. Brown was contracted to write two novels and an additional short story each month (!?!!), so, understandably, he couldn't pay attention to every single minor detail. Let's move on.

Upon Danny and April's arrival, the rest of the cast is introduced quickly. They are the most stereotypical bunch possible: nightclub singer Ellen, bankrupted Wall Street trader, junkie trumpet player Muscat Mullins, Las Vegas big-shot gambler Baron accompanied by goons Meatball Murphy and Fingers Malloy (long story), fake insurance detective and, of course, mandatory local police detective.

The plot thickens... but unfortunately, not much. It seems that Brown ran out of steam by inventing all those ridiculous names and neglected the story a bit. Because it literally doesn't move anywhere, our cast is confined in cabins of some small town called Bahia Mar for the rest of the novel. There is not much action worth mentioning, except for a pathetic (probably meant to be humorous) attempt to reconstruct the murder.

So it's a bit like Agatha Christie's setup once again. With an inevitable round-up of suspects and a spectacular and surprising final whodunit revealing act. And spectacular indeed is! Danny manages to fuck it up even more than he did in The Sometime Wife. Again, he forgets to disarm the culprit, and this time, his ignorance results in a couple of fresh kills, one by a decapitation! Crazy stuff.

Nice, quick read, although a bit too goofy for me.

3/5 (Adding an extra point for the hilarious characters names)

Facts:

Hero:
"So you're Danny Boyd," he growled. "The real smart operator from the East Coast who can fix anything - for money."

And let us not forget about his profile:

"I'm Danny Boyd," I told her slowly, giving her plenty of time to catch the profile's full impact. "From the studio."
"It figures," she said pleasantly. "Only an actor talks to you sideways to be sure you don't miss it. How's the left view? Just as stunning, I bet."

Location: 
Starts briefly in Hollywood, but then the action moves to Florida to a fictional (?) resort/yacht harbour called Bahia Mar:

Bahia Mar looked like every guy's dream of how to live after the Bureau of Internal Revenue has made that glorious mistake and added five zeros to your ten-dollar refund check.

Body count:  

4

The object of desire: 
Guggenheimer sighted heavily. "I wouldn't worry about Gloria, only every time she makes a new picture, it never makes less than a three million gross at the box office. It's not the dame I care about, you understand, Boyd? It's the money."

Dames:
Gloria Van Raven - "redhead built with the exuberant generosity of a Renoir painting..." with "twin peaks of her Junoesque breasts..." who "reminded me of a still from the French movie that gave one of the South Dakota censors a coronary occlusion last year."

Gloria's secretary blue-eyed blonde April Showers who could "match the Van Raven figure any time - curve for breathtaking curve".

And finally, Ellen Fitzroy, the nightclub singer - "A tall brunette... the full curves... her strong white teeth making a brilliant contrast with the dark tan of her body."

Strong white teeth!? 

Blackouts: 
I got struck by lightning. It hit in back of my right ear and the whole world exploded, hurling me way out into a black, bottomless void.

Title: 
"It's his own composition of course," Valdez said slowly. "He calls it 'The Ever-Loving Blues'."
"They figure a jazzman's no-good unless he's unhappy," I said, "and the real top men suffered all their lives. If the quality of that composition's any standard, Mullins must be the unhappiest guy on the whole earth!"

Edition:  
Signet #1919, First printing, March 1961

Cover: 
Jazz and babe - the winning combination. But it's only half accurate. There's a trumpet player in this one, but there's no scene with April (remember - she's the only blonde one) holding a gun. 
Beautiful illustration. The artist is not credited, but I'm pretty sure it's the work of McGinnis. 

Cool lines: 

"Where was she last seen?" I asked
"Check with her girl Friday," he said curtly. "She's a nice girl."
"Here - in Hollywood?" I stared at him. "You're kidding."
Guggenheimer suddenly looked tired. "I got gag writers I pay for that kind of corn, Boyd."

"You must be April Showers," I said between my teeth. "What was if before? May Schmaltz?"
"If it was to trade insults, why didn't the studio send a writer?" she asked curiously.

The Sometime Wife (Carter Brown, 1965)

This one opens with a pretty silly bit of wisdom:

The next best thing to having a rich, good-looking dame for a client is having a rich client.

It then proceeds to the most narcissistic main protagonist introduction I can remember. Along with a witty response which Oscar Wilde himself would be proud of:

"My name's Boyd," I told her. Then I gave her a look at my left profile, which is sheer perfection in itself, to bring a little glamour into her drab life. "Mr. Vanossa is expecting me."
"He's waiting in the library." She gave me a cold beady-eyed look. "And with a name like Boyd, you should be able to look people straight in the eye without twitching your head like that the whole time!"

So, the tone is set, and we now know better than to expect some ultra-hard-boiled stuff. Our sleuth in this one is Danny Boyd, and he is hired by some extravagant (sort of) upper-middle-class (kind of) asshole to find his missing wife. And his motive for bringing her back is pretty cool: since she has access to the household money, he wants to bring her home in time to pay the bills at the end of the month.

Which is cool. I like plots driven by simple vehicles. Of course, no simple missing person case remains just that for long in any crime novel. They sooner or later all turn into murders, and in this one, it is pretty soon - the body count meter starts rolling in the second chapter. From then on, the whole thing loses some of its intensity. You see, Danny's MO is a bit strange: he keeps changing his clients, and every new one points him to a fresh suspect. He wanders around, and instead of conducting some proper interviews, he keeps explaining what he knows to anyone willing to listen to him.

But since the man is a private detective, I still had a feeling that he knew what he was doing. I wasn't so sure once I came to this:
 
"Why are you taking me back there?"
"Because that's where it happened," I said. "Because whoever murdered Randolph wanted him dead, and you and Charlie didn't."
"What's that supposed to mean?" she snarled.
"I'm not too sure myself," I admitted. "That's why we're going back to the beach house to find out."

Whoever murdered Randolph wanted him dead!? I don't know how Bill Pronzini missed this one when he put together his two Gun in Cheek masterpieces.

Anyway, they reach the beach house where the whole cast is assembled, so the stage is ready for the final revelation. Don't like that Agatha Christie type shit at all, and just when I started to yawn, it happened! The best part of the book by far! The whole whodunit revelation drama thing goes spectacularly wrong. Danny is so incompetent that he fails to notice that not just one, but two of the bad guys are carrying guns. So they disarm him and then even start to plot some shit to make our hero a fall guy. Not sure how intentionally funny this is supposed to be, but I loved it. This is what I call an original twist! And don't worry - Danny will shoot his way out (although it's not explained how he managed to obtain a gun) and save the day.

It's an easy read, and with only 120 pages, this is a perfect book to take on a plane. Lots of charming craziness in it, and I would almost call it cute, but there are a few nasty (not needed at all) fags remarks, and our hero is kind of obnoxious every now and then. For fuck's sake - you don't get a girl drunk to fuck her!

3.5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Danny Boyd, PI
 

"Oh no! This is hysterical, it really is! Don't tell me you're some kind of professional snooper, Boyd?"

"Private detective," I grunted. 

And he has this weird thing about his profile. Seems he tries this "tick" to impress every woman he runs into, and (hardly surprising) it never actually works:

"My name's Boyd - Danny Boyd." I gave her the profile, right then left, and kind of slow so she'd have plenty of time to appreciate it.

"You have a stiff neck?" The caution in her voice warmed into sickening sympathy. "It's the humidity."

Location:
New York City + several trips to Northport on Long Island.

Body count:  

3

Dames:
Mrs Karen Vanossa: She had a kind of tempestuous beauty, with smouldering dark eyes colored to match her hair, a straight nose, and a firm but strongly sensual mouth.

Nina North: She was in her early twenties, I figured; a blue-eyed blonde with the kind of hungover lower lip which said she knew what she wanted, while the upper lip had a slightly hesitant look like it agreed about that okay but was still surprised.

Mrs Randolph: She also had that indefinable something that a good maitre d' can spot at fifty paces, that combination of breeding, social position, and - best of all - money.

And I should probably also mention Danny's red-headed, green-eyed secretary Fran Jordan. They have some sort of Velda/Hammer relationship with lots of sexual innuendo around them, but it's all pretty silly, and she doesn't contribute much to the story. 

Blackouts: 
Not sure. There's a cool scene when the blonde volcano (=Nina) storms into Danny's apartment screaming "Snake-in-the-Village!" at him:

"I'll kill you!" she announced passionately. "I'll beat your brains out and feed them to the ducks on Central Park Lane!" [Fatale]

She cracks him across the nose with her purse, and then he trips over the rug (because rather than paying attention to the blonde volcano, he instead chooses to admire its sexy body) and nosedives across the floor:

I had a vague impression of a million little white balls flying over my head, then her knee stuck me in the shoulder. The rest was a combined blur of sound and sight, something like Cape Kennedy in miniature.

I'm not sure if this counts as a proper blackout, but I think it's worth mentioning. Snakes in the Village, ducks in Central Park!
 

Title: 
Don't really get it.

Edition:  
New English Library, Four Square Books, 1966. I couldn't find a scan of this edition's cover online, and I'm too lazy to create one, so I've used the Signet edition cover, which is practically identical.

Cover: 
It has to be Nina, since neither of the other two is blonde. And besides that, they both have small breasts (Karen's are high-peaked, and Mrs Randolph's are pointed with desire!). 

The illustration is not credited, but it's pretty obvious that its author is McGinnis. If nothing else, check out her unproportionally long left leg.

Cool lines:  
Maybe it wasn't his fault, I thought generously; maybe he came from a long line of kissing cousins who just kept right on marrying each other and Charlie was the end product.

"Didn't I tell you Karen is a nympho?"
"Not in so many words," I muttered. "It doesn't faze you any?"
"I find it somewhat of a relief," he said casually. "I hate any form of physical exercise."

"You've found Frederic!" Jane's face was suddenly animated again. "That's wonderful! Where's he?"
"Down at the beach," I told her. "To be strictly accurate, he's down in the beach."[The Coolest!]