A Killer is Loose (Gil Brewer, 1954)

This Brewer's pulp has no virgins or femme fatales. Instead, we have Ralph Angers - an eye surgeon specialist who only wants to build a hospital. He even has the exact blueprints of this hospital, and he carries them manically with him all the time. I say manically because he, in fact, is a maniac. The poor guy is a Korean war veteran who has suffered a nervous breakdown and now wanders around a small Florida town where he stumbles upon our hero, Steve. To be precise, it's the other way around since it is Steve who saves Doc's life and, by doing this (unknowingly), forms a bond between the two men. Which, in practical terms, means he becomes (a kind of) hostage who must follow the crazy doc on his killing spree.

It's fast-moving, told in real-time and totally unpredictable. Cool stuff, but unfortunately, it doesn't work all the time. Especially parts where the action takes place outside are not always totally believable. I mean - surely someone would have noticed a couple of guys walking around in the evening covered in mud with one of them carrying a gun in plain sight? But parts that take place indoors are excellent! Home invasion on Mrs Graham's house is a masterclass in tension escalation (reminded me to see Desperate Hours again), and the scene with that little girl alone in the big house repeatedly having to play "Dancing in the Dark" on the piano is the creepiest stuff I've read in a long time.

It's not exactly an in-depth study of mental illness, but it's not just another serial killer story either. I think it suggests that sometimes we need a bit of shock therapy to appreciate the things we have. Steve is an invalid, he's jobless and has his house under two mortgages, but once he embarks on this insane journey into the darkness with Angers, all he can think of is his wife delivering their baby. Nice.

4/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Technically, Steve is the hero. However, he continues to whine and complain, doing little to address the situation, instead repeating how hopeless it is. And sometimes even praying. Fucking praying! So I'll choose Dr Angers as the hero in this one.

Location: 
Some unnamed small town in Pinellas County, Florida

Body count: 
5, not counting the old man who was shot (but never confirmed as dead) after the accident and not counting a cop towards the end (who simply dropped after being shot). Btw, and for the record, I didn't feel too bad about that real-estate asshole.

Object of desire: 
To build a hospital where Dr Angers could perform eye transplantation surgeries.

Dames: 
Lillian, a former dancer from Seattle and now (involuntary) girlfriend of Dr Angers. There's also large-breasted and round-hipped Mrs Graham.

There are also a couple of appearances of Harvey Aldercook's woman. She is totally irrelevant to the story (I don't remember if we even get to know her name), so it is even more surprising how viciously she is presented:

She was an insult to the female gender, a short circuit in the voluptuous, tender woman flesh man dreams upon. She was one of these ash-blonde, bony, saucer-eyed, skull-grinning, jut-jawed, false-breasted, fake-fannied, angle-posing, empty-thighed in-betweens they stamp out like tin slats for Venetian blinds in some bloodless, airless underground factory to supply that increasingly bewildering demand for sexless models such as she for certain women’s fashion magazines, where they loll backward gaping and pinch-nostriled in tight red and silver sashes, over an old freshly varnished beer barrel, holding long skinny umbrellas, point down in a sand dune. Sometimes you see them swooning pipe-lidded, paper-pale over a swirling Martini in a triple-sized cocktail glass with their long fleshless golden-tipped claws clamped buzzard-like around the stem.

Blackouts: 

/

Title: 
Dr Ralph Angers is loose, and he is killing people.

Edition: 
eBook

Cover: 
Pretty cool, but it could be better. Angers' facial expression doesn't look particularly psychopathic. And he doesn't have a briefcase for his roll of blueprints.

Cool lines:  

The drunk down the bar lifted his head. "I'm alcoholic. Will somebody buy me a beer?"

The Luger was like a melting chocolate cake in my hip pocket. [The Coolest!]

Johnny Staccato (Frank Kane writing as Frank Boyd, 1960)

Damsel in distress saved by the knight in shining armour - pretty typical and formulaic P.I. pulp story. Slightly below average, to be honest.

The first thing that didn't seem right was a pretty lame motive for the initial killing. Doubtless, Les was an ultra-mega asshole and probably did deserve what he got... but is it possible that a radio DJ in the early 60s would be such an influential figure in show business that he could (and this guy actually did) make or break the careers of singers? I doubt it, even though he was the nation's number-one disc jockey.

The story is a bit flat. Although there is some action and Johnny tries hard to make something happen, everything is centred around a handful of suspects who, by some weird coincidence, had all visited our unfortunate DJ an hour or so before he was killed. Busy guy he was indeed.

The last little problem I had was the protagonist. Not that the author isn't trying, but Johnny simply doesn't come across as a likeable guy. He's full of himself, a macho guy (he gets laid twice) with a near-zero sense of humour (still he keeps grinning to everyone after delivering his "witty" one-liners) and some kind of a wanna-be artist (he plays the piano in a night club) with a sensitive soul.

But more importantly, he's not much of a detective either (he has hunches, and stuff is bugging him all the time), so it is pretty surprising when the NYPD and DA decide to hand him the case for 48 hours. Johnny's plan? Believe it or not, here it is: 

“So now I take the forty-eight hours you've given me and I try to retrace my steps to see if I can pick up what it is that's bugging me.”

But it's still okay. I quite liked it. There's a nostalgic feel of the 30s and 40s, and in that sense, it works great. Straight-forward plotting with clues leading our hero from point A to B and finishing in a staged round-up of all the suspects and (not very) surprising revealing twist. Dialogues are weak, but slang is cool, and some archaic expressions left me laughing out loud.

2.5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Johnny Staccato P.I. - A smooth man on the ivories, hot on the trigger, and cool in a jam—he's the toughest private eye to hit America in a decade.

It took me some time to decipher that "ivories" bit (remember - he's a pianist). But finally managed to do it with a bit of help from the dictionary.

Location: 
New York:

As he walked past, little groups on the sidewalk in front of some of the places parted for him silently, from the doorways of others came a word of greeting. Some he returned, some he shrugged off. There was a lot to be desired, but in the last analysis, it was the Village. And to Staccato, the Village was home.

Body count:  

3

Object of desire: 
Sex for Johnny and Les, fame and money for Shelley and Delia, Johnny for Gabby, money for Mr Seymour

Dames: 
Shelley Carroll aka Snow Top:

She was tall, voluptuously built. Her blue-white hair complemented the deep tan of her face and bare shoulders. She wore a daringly decollete white satin gown that clung to the generous curves and seemed to be having difficulty restraining full, thrusting breasts. A small waist hinted at full hips and long legs concealed by the fullness of her skirt. Her mouth was a vivid, moist crimson slash in the cocoa color of her face.

Gabby:

Gabby swivel-hipped across the floor, the abbreviated skirt giving full play to her long shapely legs; the sheer blouse giving ample evidence that the magnificence of her facade needed no artificial support. 

Delia Moore:

She was short, but the sloppily tied kimono couldn't conceal the fact that her breasts were full, her hips well rounded.

Blackouts: 
Two of them. The first one is pretty plain with an evergreen black pool and exploding lights motives:

He never saw the blow that felled him. There was a whooshing sound, and lights exploded in the back of his head. He went to his knees, shook his head groggily in a desperate effort to dispel the black pool that was threatening to engulf him. A puddle of yellow light spilled onto the bedroom floor from the living room beyond. In it, he had a momentary impression of a man's black loafers with ornamental tassels. Before he could see more, the second blow slammed his face into the floor.

But the second one is a bit better. I liked that insect thing:

There was another roar from across the street. An insect stung Staccato on the side of the head. He heard the roar of thunder and his head started to spin. He was dimly aware of the sound of footsteps, a familiar voice that seemed miles away. He tried to focus his eyes on the doorway from which the shots had come, found his gun too heavy to lift. It seemed to drag him down. He was unaware that his face had hit the pavement.
 

Title: 
See 'hero'

Edition:  
eBook

Cover: 
see 'hero' and 'dames'

Notable cover blurbs: 
see 'hero'

Cool lines:  
[after having sex with Gabby]
"How do you feel, Johnny?" the redhead wanted to know.
"Like I wrestled an octopus. And lost."

“I heard what he said,” Waldo wagged his head. “I also heard they're saying they're going to shoot a man to the moon. That don't mean they know what they're talking about.”

Perchance to Dream (Robert B. Parker, 1991)

The style is okay, and there are a few moments of brilliance (see the hero and cool lines sections). However, sometimes I thought that Parker tried too hard to emulate Chandler and came up with some genuinely corny dialogue.

The problem is the story. Or lack of it... Marlowe basically breaks the case and finds the bad guys after the first ten chapters (and btw, they are pretty short in this one). And then, for some reason, he keeps calling Vivian, and she keeps whining, and the damn thing doesn't move anywhere. So Parker throws in some Chinatown-like water rights conspiracy nonsense that just doesn't make much sense either.

It's not good, but at least it's bearable. Unlike that abomination of Black-Eyed Blonde published last year.

2/5

Facts:

Hero: 
"You're a private detective," he said. He had one of those Hollywood elocution voices which has no real accent but sounds nearly British, especially if you haven't heard a real one. He sounded like a guy that recited bad poems on the radio.
"When I'm not polishing my yacht," I said.

Location: 
L.A. and fictitious (I think) Neville Valley, 200 miles north of L.A.

Body count:  
4, not counting the unfortunate kitten thrown out the open porthole into the sea by that asshole Simpson.

Dames:

Vivian, still beautiful with eyes nearly coal black and full of heat and a full lower lip that seemed specifically meant to be nibbled on. And still tough:

"I'm not as tough as I look, Marlowe," she said
"If you were as tough as you look", I said, "you'd probably have to be licensed." [Fatale]

And of course, horny and a bit kinky Carmen, still cute as a ladybug but far dumber, with the moral sense of an hyena.

Blackouts: 
Yes, no less than three of them:

...something erupted against the side of my head and the lights coalesced into a brilliant starburst and then blackness into which I slid as peacefully as a drunken seal.

Huh, drunken seal? The second one lacks this kind of imagination and is more or less limited to the use of a comparative (or is it superlative?) of the adjective red:

I couldn't breathe. The reddish haze got darker and redder and finally enveloped me and I plunged into it and disappeared.

The last one lacks any imagination at all. Pretty standard stuff:

Something hit the side of my head and I went back once again to a place I'd been spending too much time in.
 

Title: 
According to Wikipedia, it's another euphemism for dead.

Edition: 
Futura, 1991

Cover: 
She is definitely young Bacall, but the guy looks more like the dude who played Eddie Mars in The Big Sleep. Is it possible that the illustrator was given the wrong film still?

Cool lines: 

"This your car?" the fat cop said.
"Nice huh?" I said. "You want to sit in it?"
"What the hell's that supposed to mean?" the fat cop said.
"Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to talk so fast."
"You'll be talking fast in the back cell under the big lights in a little while," the fat cop said.
"The smaller the town, the tougher the buttons talk," I said.[The Coolest!]

Pearls are a Nuisance (Raymond Chandler, 1950)

Checked this one out while reading Chandler's letters and watching again the brilliant HBO series with Powers Booth. It's a collection of three short stories and a seminal essay The Simple Art of Murder.

Pearls are a Nuisance (1939)

Not bad, but quite forgettable cosy buddy-buddy nonsense. Probably of interest to Chandler's scholars only.

Finger Man (original story 1934, rewritten with Marlowe in 1950)

Opens with Marlowe testifying against some badass mobster. Besides the killing he's accused of, this guy Manny also seems to have a history of shady dealings with "a big politico, a fixer". Some influential people would prefer Marlowe to stay away from the Grand Jury, and the DA advises him to watch his step. Our main man responds simply by saying "sure" and returns to his office, where he's met by a friend who hires him as a bodyguard for the forthcoming night.

So by the end of the first chapter, the setup is complete. And the two plots merge pretty soon, which is good - I don't like those predictable endings with "surprising" revealings of "unrelated" sub-plots. What follows is a standard classical PI story, featuring gamblers, corrupt politicians, tough guys, and amoral dames.

Good stuff. Also memorable for the first appearance of Bernie Ohls in the Marlowe story.

The King in Yellow (1938)

Royalty from the title is King Leopardi (what a great name!), a jazz bandleader whose wild party is broken up by our hero Steve Grayce, a hotel detective. King has an attitude that matches his "blue" blood and gives plenty of it to Steve:

"Leopardi does what he likes, where he likes, when he likes. Nobody's stopped him yet, gumshoe. Take the air." 
... 
"I never did like house peepers," he sneered. "They smell like public toilets."

He doesn't stop at verbal abuse. The asshole even takes a shot at our hero! So, no wonder Steve throws him out of the hotel. But instead of management's gratitude, he gets canned for mistreating VIP guests. Jobless now, he decides to join the ranks of private investigators, and his first assignment is offered to him practically by itself - when cleaning the room after his fight with Leopardi, he finds a blackmail note in King's wastebasket.

It does take its time to get things going, but I really liked this intro. The story then progresses nicely, introducing some colourful characters (with even crazier names, such as Dolores Chiozza and Jumbo Walters), and everything concludes with an excellent, very surprising ending centred around a family tragedy. I could sense it coming with the old, broken couple and the blind man crying. The sad world indeed is the world of Raymond Chandler, but you enjoy every moment of it.

5/5 [anything written by the Master will always get five stars on this blog]

Facts:

Hero: 
We all know everything about Marlowe, but who is Steve Grayce, the (ex) hotel detective?

Steve frowned at the gun and didn't move. The big man looked him over. "You're tough," he said. "I been in the ring long enough to size up a guy's meat. You're plenty hard, boy. But you ain't as hard as lead. Talk it up fast."

Location: 
L.A.

Body count: 
None in Perils, 8 in Finger Man (half of them are related to the Manny Tinnen affair) and 7 in King

Blackouts: 

There's a pretty funny one in Perils:

I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor. This made me lose my balance temporarily and while I was thinking about how to regain it a wet towel began to slap at my face and I opened my eyes.

And a more proper one in Finger Man when Marlowe gets "coshed" from behind:

Then he dropped the cigarette and stopped on it and a quick, light step made faint noise behind me. I was far too late turning.
Something swished and I went out like a light.
 

Edition:  
Pan, 1980

Cover: 
Frank Dorr from Finger Man scratching his black Persian cat Toby.

Notable cover blurbs: 
This one, coming from the Daily Telegraph, is a bit old-fashioned but still pretty cool:
"...As tense as a tiger springing into action."
 

Cool lines:  
Obviously, since Chandler and Hammett invented the hard-boiled language, there's no shortage of cool lines, and below are just a few:

He had beautiful teeth, but they hadn't grown in his mouth.[The Coolest!] 

He took out a leather keyholder and studied the lock of the door. It looked as if it would listen to reason.

She had a mud-coloured face, stringy hair, grey cotton stockings - everything a Bunker Hill landlady should have. She looked at Steve with the interested eye of a dead goldfish.

But super cool stuff comes from The Simple Art of Murder essay. The whole thing is available online here. I just pasted a small example of its brilliance:

There is plenty of that kind of social and emotional hypocrisy around today. Add to it a liberal dose of intellectual pretentiousness and you get the tone of the book page in your daily paper and the earnest and fatuous atmosphere breathed by discussion groups in little clubs. These are the people who make bestsellers, which are promotional jobs based on a sort of indirect snob-appeal, carefully escorted by the trained seals of the critical fraternity, and lovingly tended and watered by certain much too powerful pressure groups whose business is selling books, although they would like you to think they are fostering culture. Just get a little behind in your payments and you will find out how idealistic they are.

Brainquake (Samuel Fuller, written in early 90s, published 2014)

Paul Page is a bagman in New York who falls for the wrong woman. Together they steal money from his employers, go on the run and end up tragically in Paris. A bagman? A highly trained professional who transports dirty money for organised crime.

It starts super cool: "Sixty seconds before the baby shot its father, leaves fell lazily in Central Park"

And with such a killer opening line and Fuller and mobsters and an anti-hero with his babe on the run... it simply got to be good, right? Well, not exactly. The first part - the boy-meets-girl & money stuff in New York - is okay, and it might even function if it wasn't so insanely blown out of proportion. Cartoonish characters (like that priest hit-man dude) I can digest, but carrying not just millions but (literally) billions of dollars in cash while being chased by (again, literally) pirates is just a bit too much.

And it should end in New York because the whole Paris thing (another 100+ pages) quickly turns into an incomprehensible mess. The plot falls apart, and there are so many incredible coincidences (like protagonists keep bumping into each other all the time) that they cannot simply be coincidences. I kept thinking for some time that they were some kind of metaphors (that I just wasn't getting) or shit like that. But the further and the crazier it got, the more convinced I was that Fuller simply wanted to finish the book and had run out of ideas.

But interestingly enough, the megalomania and surreal world from the first part gives us one of the craziest and most memorable villains in the long history of villains. Chapter 16 describes a typical day in the office of Cornelius Hampshire - the most powerful man throughout the civilized and uncivilized world of crime. In just five pages, Cornelius and his four lieutenants manage to coordinate crime all around the globe, encompassing everything from narcotics and banana republic revolutions to money laundering and high-level investment banking. They, of course, also briefly touch on the piracy situation in which our Paul is involved. And we get to know the humane side of Cornelius because he seems to be a big baseball fan:

"Good. Michael, what's going on with Citra?"
"She's being executed Friday."
"Get our liaison to buy her freedom. Give him a million."
"He's being executed with her."
"Goddam it! She's the best distributor in Malaya."
"She was."
"What about Russia?"
"The ban on farms growing poppies shot opium prices sky high."
"Addicts'll pay the difference. Take advantage of the revolt of the ruble. And, oh yes, on the baseball scandal? Kill any bastard selling drugs to ballplayers. I love that game. Don't fuck around with baseball. Ever."

Unforgettable. Super cool and funny. The whole chapter demands repeated readings!

I know this is Fuller's last book, and it's great that Hard Case Crime published it, but it has to be said that the whole thing is a bit weird. 

2.5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Paul Page, a bagman

Location: 
New York and Paris

Body count:  
20 - including two cops in the final shoot-out (although there could be more), but excluding Eddie and Michelle. And I wouldn't give this duo many survival chances because in the very last chapter, they are spotted (another unbelievable coincidence btw) in Avoriaz by the hitman Father Flanagan.

Title: 
Paul suffers from some undefined brain disorder that he calls "Brainquake". It's not a tumour or anything else that modern medicine can deal with, so I assume it must be another metaphor I have missed.

Edition: 
Hard Case Crime #116

Cover: 
Another cool one by Glen Orbik with Max Phillips designing the cover. And after visiting Phillips' website, I finally realised that the man is not an illustrator :) I need to review some of my old posts and update the artists' credits on them.

Notable cover blurbs: 
None really notable. Maybe because all of them are written by filmmakers?

Cool lines:

Entire chapter #16

So Nude, So Dead aka The Evil Sleep! (Ed McBain, 1952)

Wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time mystery. Of the amnesiac-awakened-by-the-corpse sub-genre. With a touch of a particular flavour because our hero is a junkie in this one. Which is cool - I prefer that the leading character in this average-guy-turns-amateur-detective type be some sort of societal reject rather than the usual doctor, schoolteacher, priest, etc.

It works well for a while. But then it slowly drifts into unreal or even surreal. Stuff like our poor Ray being totally strung out on heroin, disguising himself by painting his hair with shoe polish (!?) and then impersonating a police inspector (he is only 26 btw) to interrogate the husband of a woman he's wanted for the murder of. Sure enough, his pathetic "cover" gets blown, but that doesn't discourage him. He goes straight to the club where he picked up the victim the night before and starts interviewing the barman. In the middle of this charade, a beautiful woman approaches him and takes him to her luxurious home, where she tries to seduce him. Eventually (pretty soon, in fact), she will fuck him, but you could see the final 'surprise' twist miles away, couldn't you?

There's more of such stuff, and it's pointless to go through the entire list. Let's just say it culminates on the third day of his cold turkey. Instead of banging his head against the wall of some cheap Harlem hotel and slicing himself with razors, Rey is still vital enough to escape from cops by running eleven floors up the staircase (beating and disarming one cop in the process) and then jumping to several rooftops to complete his escape.

During all this time, his investigation doesn't progress much, and he resignedly concludes towards the end that:

"It's one hell of a rat race, " he went on. "There are so many loose ends, so many blind alleys. I keep asking people questions, but I'm not sure I'm asking the right ones - and I'm not sure the answers mean anything. All I know is that I've got to find the real answer before it's too late."

So the whole thing is a bit amateurish. However, it also has some nice touches. I liked the idea of running against the clock, which is simply trying to stay sane without a fix in Ray's case. And his character is superbly developed. At first, I found flashbacks to his past distracting, but they don't really slow down the pace. And they do help us understand our hero and make him human, so we don't judge him too hard and simply feel sorry for him. For fuck's sake, in a city as huge as New York, he doesn't have a single friend (not even among junkies), and he calls his father when he gets into this mess.

The plot is okay, and its development becomes quite enjoyable once you stop paying too much attention to the story holes (like where are the cops?!?), loose ends and coincidences. The final whodunit is decent, although far from shocking. All in all, it's good, honest and unpretentious writing without moralising or preaching on the complex subject of drug addiction. I imagine it was pretty ground-breaking 60 years ago.

3.5/5 (adding an extra half point for the included excellent short story Die Hard)

Facts:

Hero: 
Ray Stone - ex-pianist, these days a heroin addict

Location: 
New York

Body count:  

2

The second one is pretty funny:

There was a neat little hole right between his eyes, and it dribbled blood down along the side of his nose and over his mouth.
Ray stared at the drummer.
"Massine? Mass-"
He was dead.

Well, people with little holes between their eyes tend to be dead. Elementary, Watson...

Object of desire: 
The answer seemed logical and simple to him: find that bastard. Find him, and the pressure would be off. The cops would have a new sucker to toy with. And then Ray Stone could contact Louie or any other damned pusher in the city.
 

Dames: 
Besides Eileen (lady on the cover), there is Barbara 'Barbs' Cole - "The warmest pair of brown eyes he'd ever seen" and (unfortunately, too) briefly Chinese/Irish cutie Rusty O'Donnell ("They bill her as an artistic dancer. That means strip artist in English.")

Blackouts: 
Yes, he blacks out during the beatings that bad guys give him:

His eyes opened as he saw the gun butt reaching out for him. There was an explosion alongside his left ear, a fiery display of screaming stars. He struggled to keep his head up, felt the next solid blow crush into the base of his skull. He stopped struggling then.
 

Title: 
Pretty cool sounding, but not very profound - Eileen was simply nude when he found her dead. But I think it's still better than the original The Evil Sleep.

Edition:  
Hard Case Crime #120, July 2015

Cover: 
Love it! I think it's so good it qualifies for a painting and not "just" an illustration. Great perspective from above, and the light bulb (although it could be placed a bit over to the left) casts cool shadows and creates nice shades of red and scarlet. Very noir-ish, very stylish.  But not 100% accurate - the murdered girl is blonde, her arm is supposed to have lots of needle marks, and there should be two bullet holes in her belly.

By Gregory Manchess. Who, btw, ought to do some work on his website.

Notable cover blurbs: 
New York Times Book Review blabs the usual nonsense but finishes really cool: "Ed McBain owns this turf."
  

Cool lines:  
Can't think of any really memorable in So Nude, So Dead, but I found this one from Die Hard pretty funny:

"Give me the police."
"Do you wish to report a crime?"
"No, a strawberry festival."
"What?"
"For Pete's sake, get me the police." [The Coolest!]

Death of a Flack (Henry Kane, 1961)

There are three beautiful women in this one, three cases of blackmail, and even three (!) private detectives somehow involved... but still, the plot is very simple and straightforward. Our hero doesn't really investigate in the traditional sense, such as conducting interviews, chasing leads, or piecing together evidence. Various clients simply hire him to perform relatively trivial tasks (such as delivering blackmail money), so he goes from point A to B and C, and along the way, collects a substantial amount of cash and a few large checks. There is no action, not much of a mystery or drama, not much of anything.

Towards the end, this became clear to Mr Kane himself because he included this somehow apologetic (funny?) paragraph:

- a sizable sum in total aggregate of $7300, but if any of you, inspired by this reading, are overcome with the desire to rush into the business of private-eyeing, I must hasten to promulgate the harsh facts of the interminable succession of rank; blank days between bonanzas which flatten the average to exactly that - average. You want to make money? Invent a toilet paper with a new scent for each day of the week and sit back and wipe up the profits.

Hasten to promulgate the harsh facts of the interminable succession?

Anyway, this book'sn't bad at all, and some parts are actually hilarious (see the cool lines), but it lacks any kind of hard-boiled edge. Maybe because all the beautiful and wealthy people throw money (and sometimes themselves) at our PI, making his job trivial. And partly because he is not very likeable and/or interesting fella. He is a bit narcissistic too, and definitely a sexist asshole. There is a hard-to-digest scene in which he slaps Sherry twice simply because she wouldn't fuck him. True, he doesn't feel exactly good about it afterwards, but his rationalising is really fucking weird. He somehow concludes that she's a lesbian ("I now knew she was evil") and asks himself a rhetorical question: "Did that lessen my desire for her?". This brings us to some really misogynistic shit:

I knew why I had hit her. A courting male knows, almost instinctively, the manner of approach to the female of his desire. Some need flowers, some need poems, some need music, some need attentions, some need surliness, some need silence, some need dominance - Sherry Greco needed a good belt in the jaw. I had struck her as part of my wooing act. I had enhanced her respect for me. I had begun to earn her.

Crazy stuff. I wish Kane had dedicated some of this negative energy to improving the plot. It just leaves a dark spot on what is otherwise an entertaining little pulp.

3/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Pete Chambers, Fast-moving PI

"Now don't pretend to be a hipster with me, Mr. Chambers. I happen to know you for what you are - an incurable romantic, a Don Quixote in a custom-tailored suit, and essentially and forever, and admirably, a softie."

"Good-bye, Mr. Chambers. You're an awfully frigging clever bastard, aren't you?"

Location: 
New York

Body count: 

4

Object of desire: 
800,000 dollars worth tiara fashioned in 1550 by Benvenuto Cellini, especially for Eleonora, Princess of the House of Medici.
 

Dames: 
Three of them, introduced straight away, on the third page:

- the poetess, Miss Lori Gilmore (the jeweler's daughter), the inamorata, Miss Sophia Patri (the jeweler's latest sweetheart), the belly dancer, Miss Sherry Greco (my date) - were homogenous in aspects of beauty: they were all ravishingly attractive women, although each was of an entirely different mien... blonde, slender, sinuous, smoky-eyed, intense, reserved, and sullen... tall, red-haired, green-eyed, glistening-mouthed, and shaped with extravagant, bewitching, and always-exposed curves... a full ripe figure, tawny skin, and black smoldering eyes

Blackouts: 

/

Title: 
Flack part:

A flack is a press agent before he becomes a public relations counselor. A public relations counselor is a press agent with a fancy office, important clients, and a rapturous con.

Death part:

He appeared to be regarding us with three eyes, two of which were glazed. The third was a round red hole just above the bridge of his nose. Parker went to him, went from him, reported: "Very dead."

Edition:  
Signet, first printing, May 1961
 
Cover: 
Excellent and pretty hot illustration of Sophia Patri that (probably) depicts a scene in which our hero comes to Patri's apartment and gets ultra horny by simply seeing her armpit! (The smooth hollow of her armpit was more prod to libido than total nudity). According to this cool photo album, it was made by Robert Abbett. 

Cool lines:

Pretty weak on dialogues, but Henry Kane is THE master of metaphors. Although I'm not sure I actually get half of these (and there are many more in the book), they are still unforgettable:

The drizzle had sundered as the hymen of a star-struck virgin upon the first suggestion of a skinny crooner. 

A New Yorker has about as much use for an automobile in this city of car-crowded curbs and congested traffic as he might have for a chrome-adorned toboggan.

I had found him as reliable as rock, as solid as steel, as resourceful as a tiger on the prowl.

I was shuttling in and out of my apartment as though it were a bathroom and I was in the unfortunate piss press of chronic prostatitis. 

The lady's  motives were as grossly apparent as the bulge in the tights of the male star of ballet.

That sat her back on her pretty ass for a moment but she came up swinging like a marijuana group at a progressive-jazz session.

Studded throughout the place, like sparse cloves in an insufficiently spiced ham, were other wan business executives morosely mending last night's sins.

My gastric juices jumped like a sensitive gal insensitively goosed.

His eyes bulged like an overstuffed brassiere. 

The damned thing had more glow than an Irishman full of Scotch whiskey. 

Her firm, young, pointed, pear-shaped breasts had nipples that stuck out like the spiteful tongues of spiteful children.