Stark House have reprinted Strip for Murder and since it’s only a novella they’ve thrown in a couple of short stories as a bonus.
Strip for Murder begins with a guy named Bellew getting poison-pen letters. He runs a theatrical agency but in fact the entertainers he represents are strippers. Sometimes they get sent on jobs to private parties. Bellew is a quiet little guy who has no carnal interest in the girls he represents. Such things no longer interest him.
He thinks the threatening letters may be linked to an incident that occurred twenty years earlier. He’d sent a girl named Janie Gordon to a lodge party and she’d been raped. Afterwards she committed suicide. Bellew has always felt vaguely guilty although it was an incident that could not have been predicted.
Bellew asks Warne for help. Warne is an insurance investigator with an office across the hall from Bellew’s. Warne does a bit of private detective work. Warne does some checking up on Janie Gordon’s parents. Her father is still alive, he’s very very old and he’s extremely rich. Which is strange because he used to be extremely poor. Warne is convinced that it would be worth finding out where the old boy got all his money.
The old man has a bodyguard, which is also odd. The bodyguard is young, fit, tough and mean. He’s itching for a chance to beat up people like Warne who start nosing around. Warne isn’t too worried. He’s handled punks before. Old dogs tend to know some rather nasty tricks.
What worries Bellew about the letters is that they contain a prediction that what happened to Janie Gordon is about to happen again.
Warne becomes steadily more interested in the case. He also becomes steadily more interested in Bellew’s secretary. He’d never taken much notice of her previously. He hadn’t noticed how attractive she was.
Bellew is worried because he’s about to send another girl to a private party. The party is organised by a club that claims to be a group of patriots but Bellew thinks they’re more interested in naked girls than in saving the country. Bellew isn’t bothered by their hypocrisy. He takes such things for granted in his business. And Candy Carroll knows how to look after herself. Candy has just flown in from Vegas and she’s staying with another stripper, Chickie Anderson.
What happened twenty years earlier doesn’t happen again, not exactly, but something does happen. Now the police are interested. Hard-nosed reporter Fred Robinson is interested as well. He smells a story.
This is not really a hardboiled or a noir story. It’s a straightforward mystery. Warne isn’t your typical tough guy private detective but he’s tough enough. Private detective work is not really his field but he’s a good insurance investigator with an instinct that tells Im when someone is telling him lies. And he figures he’s definitely being lied to.
The plot struck me as being just a little contrived. Hitchens uses a certain method to throw us off the scent and it’s a method about which I have mixed feelings. Is the plot fair-play? I guess it is. The solution works, even with the plot contrivances.
The first of the short stories is If You See This Woman. Junie was brought up in a home for intellectually disabled girls. The girl were taught how to care for babies and were then placed with married couples as cheap live-in nannies. Junie looks after Mr and Mrs Arnold’s year-old baby Petey. One day Junie overhears something which she takes literally, and she then decides that Petey is in danger and that she must save him. If you can accept the slightly far-fetched premise (it’s hard to believe that anyone could take things as literally as Junie does) then it’s an interesting emotionally affecting story which pays off quite nicely.
The second story is Blueprint for Murder. Old Mr Harvod tells his nephew about a murder he committed and the nephew realises he now has a plan for the perfect murder. Quite a clever story.
Strip for Murder isn’t quite a neglected classic of the mystery genre but it’s enjoyable enough, Hitchens writes pretty well and the sleazy background adds interest (although the sleaze quotient is at best moderate). The two short stories are a little offbeat. So this book is worth a look.
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