Milton K. Ozaki (1913-1989) was an American writer born in Wisconsin. His father was Japanese. He wrote a couple of dozen crime novels between 1946 and 1960.
The Scented Flesh opens in classic hardboiled style. Private eye Carl Good wakes up next to a beautiful blonde. This dame has real class, and a look around her apartment indicates she has real money as well. That puzzles Carl. If she has class why would she have gone to bed with him? Dames like her don’t sleep with two-bit private eyes. There’s a used flash bulb on the floor, which worries Carl a little. Another thing that bothers Carl is that the blonde is dead. He doesn’t like the implications of that. He certainly didn’t kill her but it looks like someone is trying to make it look that way.
It would help if he could remember how he ended up in the dame’s apartment but the previous night is a complete blank. Carl is no drunk. He figures someone slipped him a mickey.
Eventually he remembers that he’d been in a dive called The Shamrock. Maybe one of the girls there remembers seeing him. Flo remembers him. She thought he was a pretty nice guy.
Another thing that Carl figures out is that he’s making somebody nervous. Nervous enough to try to blow him up with a hand grenade. There are whispers of a shake-up in the world of organised crime but Carl can’t see how that could connect with a routine missing persons case. Which is all that this started out to be. An old guy from Iowa hired him to find a girl, Sylvia Shepherd. Maybe she’s his daughter. Carl doesn’t care. He was offered two hundred bucks to find her so he took the case.
Now everyone is telling him that the smart thing to do is to drop the case. Carl thinks that would be the smart thing to do as well. He has no personal stake in this and it sounds like some very dangerous people are mixed up in it, the kinds of people a smart private eye steers well clear of. But Carl is stubborn.
The sleaze level gradually increases. It’s a crooked town. But Carl has been around long enough to take that for granted. He’s a big boy.
There are a lot of women in this case. Lots of naked women. Some dead, some alive. Some of them are strippers. Some seem respectable. Carl thinks the strippers are more trustworthy than the respectable dames. Maybe he’s right.
Maybe he should talk to the organised crime boss? A crazy idea but it might give him a clue. And it’s not like Carl has any crusading ideas about clearing up crime and corruption. He just wants to solve the case and collect his two hundred bucks and go back to his normal routine. A routine that doesn’t involve waking up in bed with dead blondes.
It’s a fairly routine plot but it’s serviceable enough. Carl gets himself deeper and deeper into something he still doesn’t understand and that offers plenty of potential for action and narrow escapes from danger.
There’s plenty of hardboiled atmosphere but this is definitely not noir fiction.
The Scented Flesh is a fairly average but very competent hardboiled PI thriller. As long as you don’t approach it with unrealistically high expectations it’s enjoyable. Recommended.
Armchair Fiction have paired this title with Owen Dudley’s rather good Run If You Can in a two-novel edition.
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