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:

/

None but the Lethal Heart (Carter Brown, 1959)

With such a badass cover, this post was scheduled to be published on International Women's Day. I'm not writing this on March 8th, so you can probably guess where this review is heading.

Mavis Seidlitz is just not a heroine appropriate for celebrating strong and independent women. She's supposed to be an equal partner in the Rio Investigations detective agency, but this "partnership" is a bit odd. You see, It is entirely normal for her partner, Johnny Rio to throw an appointment book at her for being late, orders her around to bring him drinks (needless to say without "please" and/or "thank you"), and - worse of all - solves the case for her because she is too incompetent and dumb enough to drown in the rain.

Annoying and sometimes pretty nasty. Towards the end, there's a scene in which Johnny shoots (pretty much in cold blood) a suspect, and this is the exchange that follows between our duo of partners:

"Tell me something, Johnny" I said. "When you shot at Marian Stern, did you mean to kill her?

He thought about it for a moment. "I don't think so, Mavis," he said finally. "I wanted to make sure I stopped her shooting Rafael - I think there's a difference somewhere. Why?"

"Just for future reference," I said. "Otherwise I wouldn't feel safe when you got mad at me."

Partnership? Looks more like some kind of abusive and dysfunctional relationship to me.

I wanted to like this and had hoped that Mr Brown would have toned down his male chauvinistic crap, at least when his hero is a female. But instead of satirizing the stereotypes, he uses them for his leading character (non) development. Too bad. I couldn't really say I was shocked; I was more disappointed.

Other than that, the novel is surprisingly O.K. It does take several chapters to get into its goofy sense of humour, but then it is genuinely funny. Especially the first half, in which Mavis and Rafael run around like Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, trying to dispose of the corpse with every attempt more silly than the previous one. 

This gag becomes too repetitive and eventually loses its effect. However, there are still other things to enjoy. The supporting cast is pretty colourful, and I liked the dictator's spoiled son Arturo a.k.a. "The Fabulous" and beatnik Terry with his incomprehensible ramblings. Dig this jive:

"It was a kick", he said simply. "What else is there, doll? Don't you want me to have any fun? You a square or something - don't you dig this jazz?"

So yeah, it's more or less a standard Carter Brown quick read. It is a product of its time that publishers these days wouldn't give a second thought. I have two more Mavis Seidlitz books, but I don't think I'll bother chasing the others in the series. And for the next 8th of March, I'd instead do a post with Dark Angel or Baroness. Until then, happy International Women's Day to all you ladies out there. You rule the world!

3/5

Facts:

Hero:

But then I remembered I was Mavis Seidlitz, a full partner in Rio Investigations and I could handle a situation on my own. Anyway was I a girl or a gopher? Did I have red blood in my veins or perfume? So I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders determinedly and wouldn't you know I'd bust a bra strap at the same time!

Dames: 

Mavis Seidlitz, the torrid blonde private eye.

Location:

L.A.

Body count:

4

Blackouts:

Mavis faints when she discovers corpse #2. Of course, she does since she's a woman, right?

References:

He pressed the doorbell and inside the house chimes played something that sounded like it was from My Fair Lady. I figured it wasn't really, because they have something called copyright, don't they, which means it's only right to copy if you pay for it, and I figured Milroyd wasn't the guy to pay for anything if he could avoid it.

Title:

Have no idea what the expression "None but the Lethal Heart" means. I googled it and got back several links related to heart diseases. 

Edition:

Signet #1694, First printing, August 1959

Cover:

Outrageously funny and definitely in my top 10. She didn't even bother to take off the high-heeled shoes!?! Plus, check out the defiant look she's giving us - I don't think this gal has any guilty conscience, and I'd bet she'll sleep like a baby tonight!

And it's actually pretty accurate as our heroine indeed does dig a hole:

I had a shallow hole ready in no time, being a healthy girl.

There's a tiny signature in the bottom right corner that looks like Barye. So, probably by Barye Phillips?

Cool lines:

It takes some time (and effort) to get into "Carter Brown humour" mode. Stuff like this I do understand and find funny:

He believes the shortest distance between two points is a bullet.

Stuff like this I get, and I find amusing:

I flung open the front door and stepped out onto the porch, and that was as far as I got. A small blue sea broke over me, carrying me back into the entrance hall again. Then the sea sorted itself out into four beefy, uniformed cops, and a gray-suited character with a face that would have made him top man on the totem pole on any reservation.

"O.K.!" The gray-suited guy snarled at me. "Where's the body?"

I took a deep breath and looked down - the scarlet shirt was stretched as tight as it could be. "If you can't see the body, you need glasses," I said coldly.

And then there are the weird ones like this:

This radio gadget is a cute deal - when it gets around to eight o'clock, it switches on the radio all by itself. Then five minutes later it squawks like a Democrat who's just been goosed by an elephant.

Democrat goosed by an elephant?

Danger Is My Line (Stephen Marlowe, 1960)

I read Drum Beat - Madrid recently and quite liked it. Nice mix of a private eye mystery and spy thriller with a decent story (there are actually two of them) and a bit of a globetrotting plus some sex thrown in. This one follows such a template but is far inferior.

The opening part, let's call it the "P.I." section, which takes place in Washington, is okay, and, although it's pretty short, it sets things up nicely. A guy found not guilty of murder confesses the crime and sells his story to some newspaper publisher. There's also a beautiful blonde, and we don't need to wait long for the first corpse to appear. It didn't exactly grab me by the throat, but it wasn't bad.

But then it just goes from pretty good to somewhat decent to kind of okay-ish to... a bit boring, and towards the end, it's just a struggle to get over the line.

The story is too fragmented, and numerous action scenes are too static. The damn thing hardly moves anywhere, and it is usually in the wrong direction when it does. And you know that the writer wasn't very confident (dare I say skilful?) when, in the middle of the novel, you come across a two-page recap that reminds the readers what the hell they've been reading so far.

In short - disappointment. Stephen Marlowe and his Chester Drum post were long overdue on this blog, but I wish it would be for some other book. This one is memorable only for one of the most idiotic takes on the Cold War (see 'Object of Desire' section of the facts below) and maybe also for some pretty ridiculous LSD trip descriptions.

2.5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
His eyes examined my card for the first time.  It said I was Chester Drum. I did confidential investigations, I had an office in the Farrell Building on F Street in downtown Washington and could be seen with or without appointment or any way at all.

Bad guy(s):
"He runs the show. You want a name for it, I'll give you one. He's the chief hatchetman for the Reds. He can make men dance on five continents."

Location: 
Washington, Reykjavik, Akureyri (400 km from Reykjavik), Stockholm

Body count:  
9 + Wally's dog Benards. Interestingly, the main villain survives in this one and only gets away with a broken arm.

The object of desire: 
Preventing a fishing war between Iceland and the UK that the Commies would like to exploit.

Huh? Let's see how this gets explained to our hero: 

"And Chet, if the key to world mastery, thanks to intercontinental missiles whose shortest route lies over the Pole, is the Arctic Ocean, then the key to the Arctic is Iceland, Now do you see where we stand?"

Makes sense now, doesn't it?

Dames: 
Maja Kolding, a small blonde with ice-blue eyes only a little colder than the Rhone glacier. Unfortunately, after the opening, she's mostly out of the picture.

Baroness Margaretha:
She was not quite  twice the size of Anita Ekberg, and all of it in splendid proportion... She was that kind of woman. Her eyes were green, her large breasts fought against the white wisp of the Bikini top, her hips, bare for a couple of devastating inches above the Bikini bottom, were broad and firm-fleshed, her long legs were as tanned as a beach-boy's and as shapely as a Grecian statue's. She was an insolent-eyed, thick-lipped sex-bomb of a woman, to end all insolent-eyed, thick-lipped sex-bombs. she was probably a Swede.

Stewardess Freya, a fine-boned, almost delicate. brunette:
It was as if there were two Freyas - the one pleasantly and lightly seductive who did all the talking, the other silent and deeper with an almost astonishing understated desire and need. Alone either one of them would have been a memorable occasion for a man who likes such memorable occasions. Together they could have stirred even an octogenarian.

And when both Freyas finally have sex with Drum, the whole thing is described pretty - oh well - octogenarian-ish:

It was swift and explosive and then it built - a slow mounting fusion of lips, arms, legs, bodies - to magic.

And to conclude this section - there's a cool blurb on the cover saying: "She was a daydream turned into a nightmare - the most lethal beauty Chester Drum had ever met"

Nice one indeed, although I'm not 100% sure whether it refers to the Baroness or to Freya.

Blackout: 
She held it [the rifle] by the metal barrel and was swinging it like a baseball bat. I dove for the ground and got halfway down before the heavy walnut stock took the top of my head off.

The peculiar thing about this one is that afterwards, Drum still manages to walk for three hours before collapsing. But let us not question this too much since even "Dr. Ericksson says it sometimes happens like that, even with severe concussion." 

Anyway, he loses his consciousnesses twice more, but neither one is especially memorable:
Dark sky split and spun sickeningly a hundred and eighty degrees until it was beneath my feet, and I plunged in,

The blow drove me to my knees and a dark closed on my brain, squeezing out consciousness.

Title: 
One of the early Drum titles in the form of:

Murder/Trouble/Terror/Violence/Homicide/Danger/Death/...
is my 
Meat/Dish/Name/Trade/Business/Comrade/Pay/Job/...

It's fair to say that it is one of the coolest. Except for, of course, "Killers Are My Meat"!

Edition:  
Gold Medal #947, First Printing, January 1960

Cover: 
An iconic and super cool illustration by Barye Phillips.

Cool lines: 

With her left hand she shut the door and leaned on it. That made her right-handed, because in her right hand, and pointing it where such things will be pointed, she held a small, snub-barreled revolver, a belly-gun.
The phone went on ringing. the shower went on hissing and drumming. I went on living - for a while.