Michael Avallone’s The Alarming Clock

The Alarming Clock, published in 1956, is one of Michael Avallone’s many Ed Noon pulp private eye thrillers (he wrote at least thirty Ed Noon books).

Michael Avallone (1924-1999) was an amazingly prolific American author in various pulp genres.

The Ed Noon books are long out of print and used copies can be pricey. They may for all I know be available as ebooks - I have zero knowledge of and interest in ebooks.

The Alarming Clock starts promisingly. PI Ed Noon has a package delivered to him, with a very cryptic note attached. The package contains an alarm clock. What’s weird and disturbing about the clock is that there’s nothing weird and disturbing about it. It’s just a very ordinary cheap alarm clock. There has to be some secret attached to it but Ed can’t even guess what it could be.

In the early stages I thought the story had a slight Maltese Falcon vibe. The key to The Maltese Falcon is the falcon but nobody is sure if it really exists, if it does exist it might be a fake, it’s reputed to conceal immense riches but it might turn out to be worthless and if it’s a fake there may be more than one falcon. Despite all this uncertainty a motley collection of shady characters are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths and double-cross each other to get hold of it.

Which is also the case with this clock. It might contain hidden diamonds, or the key to finding some hidden treasure, it might conceal vital military secrets, or a stolen top-secret device, or it might contain evidence of a crime (or it might be the evidence). Or it might be just a very ordinary cheap alarm clock.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, Avallone reveals too many clues as to its true nature too early on so we know what kind of story it’s going to be.

On the other hand, like The Maltese Falcon, the story still has a motley collection of very suspicious characters prepared to take drastic steps to get hold of it. They could be rival criminal gangs or rival spies or even undercover Feds.

Ed Noon did not come down in the last shower. As soon as he got the clock he played the old switcheroo. And someone else then plays the same trick. So now nobody knows how many clocks there are or which is the real one.

Any good PI thriller requires at least one dangerous dame. This one has two. One blonde and one brunette, both glamorous and they hate each other (in the way that only women can hate other women) which adds to the fun. Ed loves Alma but that doesn’t necessarily mean he can trust her. He is sure that he can’t trust Myra but he might of course be wrong about that. Nobody in this tale is what he seems to be. The good guys might really be bad guys and the bad guys might really be good guys.

The book is not short on action. The violence is not graphic. There’s no sex.

Avallone keeps the true nature of the clock concealed quite skilfully. We can make guesses. The important thing is that the characters in the story are even more in the dark.

Ed Noon is a typical likeable wisecracking private eye, basically honest but he has occasional misunderstandings with the cops. He’s a PI of the down-at-heel type. He has pokey office and cannot afford a glamorous secretary, or even an unglamorous one.

Perhaps it needed a more colourful master villain but then it’s the nature of this story that we don’t know the identity of the master villain.

The Alarming Clock is perfectly decent moderately hardboiled entertainment and it’s recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the two Girl from U.N.C.L.E. TV tie-in novels written by Michael Avallone, The Blazing Affair and The Birds of a Feather Affair. They’re both worth reading.

Richard Deming’s Kiss and Kill

Richard Deming’s Kiss and Kill was published in 1960. It can be described as moderately hardboiled and very noir.

Richard Deming (1915-1983) wrote an enormous number of novels under his own name and a bunch of pseudonyms and his output included a lot of TV tie-in novels.

The protagonist in Kiss and Kill is a con artist and I have to say up front that I seriously love stories about con artists. In this book we get detailed accounts of several fairly clever cons. But this novel is in fact the story of how two bunco artists get into the murder business.

Sam is working on a long con when he meets a dark-haired girl in a bar. Her name is Mavis. There’s something odd about her. Sam figures she’s a meek little receptionist on vacation trying desperately to appear rich and sophisticated and badly overdoing it.

By the hotel swimming pool he runs into her again and he is vastly amused when he realises she’s a fellow bunco artist and she’s selected him as her mark. She’s rather devastated that he sees through her at so easily. This is obviously her first time and she’s a bungling amateur but it just so happens that Sam needs the services of a young woman for the con he’s working at the moment. He persuades her to be his assistant.

She’s a very quick learner and she has a natural flair for the con game.

Mavis wants to be Sam’s regular partner. He’s agreeable to that but suggests that they might as well make it a personal partnership as well by getting married. She’s happy with that suggestion.

They’re quite successful but Sam feels that the bunco game is too risky. The mark might call in the police. And might give evidence if there’s a trial. Sam comes up with a variation which he considers to be superior. If the mark is no longer alive there’s no danger. And murder is risk-free if you know what you’re doing. This at least is Sam’s view.

Mavis is hesitant at first but she trusts Sam and she can see the logic in his arguments. Her moral qualms about murder are easily overcome.

These are still cons of a sort it’s just that the payoffs are achieved in a different way.

This definitely qualifies as noir fiction. It also belongs to a sub-genre I’d describe as anti-hero crime fiction which is certainly closely related to noir fiction. The outstanding anti-hero protagonist is of course Donald E. Westlake’s Parker who made his first appearance in 1962 in The Hunter. Westlake had already experimented with an anti-hero protagonist in his underrated The Cutie, published the same year as Kiss and Kill. These anti-heroes are not quite like the violent psychos and serial killers which were also becoming popular in crime fiction. An anti-hero is oddly attractive and we can admire him for his cleverness and, as is the case with Parker, we find ourselves hoping he’ll get away with his crimes and appalled at ourselves for hoping such a thing.

Mavis is not quite a femme fatale. Sam has her figured out from the start. She is not corrupting him or tempting him into crime or wickedness. It’s more that he tempts her into getting more deeply into moral corruption. We also find her oddly admirable - she is a very shrewd operator.

We can’t help liking Sam and Mavis, apart from the minor detail that they’re cold-blooded murderers.

This is a clever crime tale with satisfying twists and a nicely cynical atmosphere. Highly recommended.

And it’s in print, from Wildside Press.

Anthony Rome's Miami Mayhem

Miami Mayhem, published in 1960, was the first of the Tony Rome PI thrillers written by Marvin H. Albert under the pseudonym Anthony Rome.

Marvin H. Albert wrote huge numbers of crime and spy novels using his own name and several pseudonyms including Anthony Rome and Nick Quarry.

Tony Rome is a PI in Miami. He lives aboard his boat, the Straight Pass. He won it playing craps. He gambles a lot. Mostly he loses. The Straight Pass is the only thing he has to show for all the years he has devoted to gambling.

Tony gets a call from a PI named Turpin. He and Tony used to be partners. Turpin is now house dick at a Miami hotel. He wants Tony to return a girl to her father. Just to drive her home. There’s no real drama. The girl (her name is Diana) is fine, just drunk and passed out. Her father, a seriously rich guy named Klosterman, has reported her missing. It’s an easy two hundred bucks for Tony.

So why has someone torn Tony’s boat, car and office apart looking for something? It has to be something very valuable.

Diana has lost an item of jewellery. It’s a pin in the shape of a daisy. It’s moderately valuable, but not worth enough for someone to go to so much trouble to get hold of. And it doesn’t explain why Turpin has had his brains blown out (we know about this right at the start so this is not a spoiler).

The Klosterman family setup provides endless potential for dramas. Klosterman has an ex-wife. He hates her. Diana’s husband is chasing other women. There’s a sleazy doctor who’s lost his medical licence and he’s mixed up with the family. And there are some secrets.

That missing pin leads Tony to all kinds of discoveries. Valuable jewels do tend to be associated with all manner of shady dealings.

Klosterman is determined above all to avoid scandal. What he wants from Tony is help in covering up any possible scandal. And Klosterman has major political connections. There is a background of corruption involving politicians, cops and powerful men like Klosterman. Justice means nothing. Power is everything. Tony Rome is basically honest but he’s a realist. In a crooked town in a crooked state in a crooked world there’s no point in even daydreaming about justice. The first thing for a PI to worry about is to survive. Then if you’re lucky you worry about collecting your fee. If you’re real lucky maybe you can keep the innocent out of trouble.

Tony Rome is hardbitten and cynical. He just wants to spend his time gambling and fishing. He’s tired of dealing with cops and crooks and junkies and hookers and other assorted lowlifes.

Tony is hard but he’s no thug.

The plot is complex. At times you wonder if there’s any way the author will be able to tie everything together but he does so quite successfully.

It would be a stretch to call this noir fiction but it does have a few noir tinges. It’s a fine hardboiled crime thriller with the right balance of action, mystery and suspense. Highly recommended.

Miami Mayhem was filmed in 1967 with Frank Sinatra as Tony Rome. It’s a movie worth seeing.

Everything Marvin H. Albert wrote is worth reading, including The Gargoyle Conspiracy, the two superb adventure thrillers he wrote as Ian MacAlister, Driscoll’s Diamonds and Valley of the Assassins, and his Nick Quarry crime thrillers The Girl With No Place To Hide and No Chance in Hell.

James Hadley Chase’s Lay Her Among the Lilies

Lay Her Among the Lilies, published in 1950, was the third of James Hadley Chase’s thrillers featuring private detective Vic Malloy.

James Hadley Chase (1906-1985) was an immensely successful English writer of crime thrillers. He wrote around 90 novels. Most were set in the United States although Chase only ever made two brief visits to that country. He relied on maps and dictionaries of American slang to achieve the desired flavour.

The setting is Orchid City, a fictional city in southern California.

Vic Malloy (along with his partners Paula Bensinger and Jack Kerman) runs an agency called Universal Services. It’s basically a private detective agency but they will take all kinds of other assorted jobs.

Vic’s latest client is dead. She’s been dead for quite a while. In the pocket of a trench coat he hasn’t worn for a long time he finds a letter that he had received but had forgotten to open, and in fact he had forgotten that the letter existed. The letter is from a rich young woman named Janet Crosby. She wants Malloy to find out if someone is blackmailing her sister Maureen. She has enclosed five hundred dollars as a retainer. The letter was sent fourteen months ago. The difficulty is that Janet Crosby died on the very day the letter was sent.

Vic could simply return the money to her estate. He has a better idea. He will earn the money. He will take the case. His motivation is not greed. His business is thriving. He feels guilty about mislaying the letter and now he feels that the least he can do for Janet Crosby is to carry out her instructions.

Right from the start Vic senses that there’s something fishy going on. Janet’s death certificate was signed by a doddery old doctor who should have given up practising medicine twenty hears earlier and he wasn’t even her treating physician. Her treating physician was Dr Salzer and he isn’t a qualified medical practitioner. Janet died of a heart disease that would have produced debilitating symptoms long before her death, but two days before she died she was playing tennis.

Her sister Maureen is now ill and confined to bed, but the nurse caring for her tells Vic some very strange things that don’t add up at all. And then there’s the strange will left by the girls’ father, and the father’s death seems like it might be worth looking into as well. In fact there’s a whole bunch of stuff that Vic would like to look into. He has no idea what he is dealing with or looking for but he’s a sufficiently experienced investigator to know that there are almost certainly some serious cries involved. Possibly murder. Possibly more than one murder.

Vic gradually puts the pieces of the puzzle together and it makes a plausible picture but he is sure that there is something really big that he has overlooked. And he’s right about that.

It’s an outrageously complicated but entertaining plot with as many twists as any reader’s heart could desire. There’s murder, kidnapping, arson, gambling, medical malpractice, fraud - pretty much a full house of serious crimes.

And there’s a goodly amount of action, and some decent suspense. Our hero finds himself in plenty of danger, as do no less than three young women. Or maybe four.

Vic Malley is an honest private eye and in this instance he has that guilt about the forgotten letter to drive him on to uncover the truth. He’s a pretty tough guy and he’s pretty smart.

I have no doubt that an American reader at the time would have spotted plenty of minor local details that Chase got wrong but as a non-American reader seventy years later I wasn’t too bothered about stuff like that. It feels nicely hardboiled and that’s enough for me.

Lay Her Among the Lilies is a thoroughly enjoyable crime yarn and it’s highly recommended.

I also enjoyed, and reviewed, Chase’s 1941 novel The Doll’s Bad News.

Honey West - Girl on the Prowl

Girl on the Prowl, published in 1959, was the fifth of G.G. Fickling’s Honey West private eye thrillers. G.G. Fickling was in fact a husband-and-wife writing team.

Honey West inherited a private detective agency from her murdered father. Honey handles all the cases herself. She’s cute and sexy but she’s a hard-nosed professional PI.

You know this is a real Honey West book because by the end of the second paragraph Honey is naked. It’s not her fault. She just has really bad luck with her clothes. They just keep falling off. In this case she is, or was, wearing a bikini but with her 38-inch bust Honey was just too much woman for her bathing suit. Poor Honey will lose her clothes on several further occasions. It’s just one of those things that a lady PI has to deal with.

Luckily a hunky guy, Kirk Tempest, comes to her rescue but when he takes her back to his house to find some clothes for her he starts to get fresh. They have a bit of an altercation, they both end up falling into the swimming pool and Kirk is now very dead. But that wasn’t Honey’s doing. He’s dead because he’s impaled on a spear from a spear-fishing gun. It’s a bizarre accident. It was an accident because there was no-one around. Except that maybe it wasn’t an accident.

There were two Tempest brothers and a sister. The sister Jewel, is a famous strip-tease artiste. Her gimmick is that she always a gold mask over her face. There may be a reason for this. She may have been disfigured in a fire. But everything about the Tempest siblings is mysterious. The relationship between them is very mysterious. Love, hate, jealousy and other assorted passions were involved.

Jewel’s other trademark is her gold G-string. And a gold G-string is now a vital piece of evidence;. This particular G-string may have been concealing something other than the thing that G-strings are designed to conceal. It might conceal valuable information.

There will be lots of women wearing gold masks in this story. How many women? Who can tell? They are after all wearing masks.

There’s more than one gold G-string as well. And somebody wants to get their hands on one or more of those G-strings.

Jewel Tempest is to be interviewed on a TV talk show. At this point the authors begin their campaign of deception. Whenever Jewel makes an appearance we can never be sure it is really her, and none of the other characters can ever be sure either. There’s doubt about the identities of all three siblings. And there’s a woman who may be masquerading as Jewel, and possibly there’s a woman masquerading as a woman masquerading as Jewel.

The Tempests are mixed up with various showbiz people. All of them are sleazy, dishonest, greedy and ambitious and they’re all entwined in a web of mostly perverse sexual betrayals and jealousies.

The Honey West novels are all fast-moving and fairly hardboiled and they’re all sleazy but mostly they’re sleazy in a fun good-natured way. Girl on the Prowl amps up the perversity factor quite a bit.

Honey is not quite a stereotypical modern kickass action heroine. The Honey West novels are not non-stop fistfights and gunplay and martial arts action. Honey can handle herself but mostly she relies on her wits. She’s a private eye, not a super-heroine. She’s very good at nosing around in things that are none of her business, and persuading people (through charm, sexual allure and cunning) to tell her things they’d rather not tell her. She just keeps plugging away a a case until she gets results and she doesn’t mind exposing herself to danger.

Girl on the Prowl boasts an outrageous plot but it’s a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed other Honey West novels - This Girl For Hire, Girl on the Loose, A Gun for Honey, Honey in the Flesh and Kiss for a Killer.

I’ve also reviewed the excellent 1965-66 Honey West TV series that starred Anne Francis.

James Hadley Chase's The Doll’s Bad News

The Doll’s Bad News (AKA Twelve Chinks and a Woman AKA Twelve Chinamen and a Woman) is a 1941 James Hadley Chase crime thriller. It was his third published novel.

James Hadley Chase (1906-1985) is an interesting figure in pulp fiction history. There was a time when paperback editions of his books were absolutely everywhere. Anywhere that paperbacks were sold his books would be there. He wrote ninety-odd novels which sold by the truckload. He is now almost entirely forgotten.

Chase was English but at the end of the 1930s he figured out that the formula for success was to write American-style hardboiled gangster stories with American settings. He had never been to America but he gave himself a crash course in American slang and the geography of American cities. He got some details wrong but his books were fast-moving, exciting and entertaining. They were also violent and had an appealingly lurid style.

The Doll’s Bad News starts with New York private eye Fenner getting a new client. She wants him to find her sister. Then some unknown guy phones and tries to convince Fenner that the girl is an escaped lunatic. Fenner isn’t buying that. He tells his secretary to stash the frail away in a hotel somewhere but the girl does a vanishing act.

Then things turn nasty and the case becomes personal for Fenner.

Fenner has a lead that takes him to Florida, to Key West. He poses as a gangster. There are two major gang bosses, Carlos and Noolen. Either one might perhaps lead him to that missing sister and to the solution to a murder. Carlos is mixed up in an illegal immigration racket. There are lots of unsavoury characters. There’s a rich guy named Thayler who owns a yacht. The nature of Thayler’s involvement isn’t clear. There are a couple of dangerous dames. Glorie is Thayler’s woman although it’s probably more complicated than that. There’s also Nightingale, who runs the funeral parlour. He has connection with both gangs.

Fenner’s idea is to play the chief gangsters off against each other. It’s a dangerous game but at least it will make things happen.

Things do indeed happen. A full-scale gang war erupts. It doesn’t erupt spontaneously - Fenner makes it erupt. There are epic gun battles on land and sea and lots of explosions. Chase figures his readers want plenty of mayhem and that’s what he’s going to give them.

Although there is some lurid subject matter there is curiously a total lack of actual sleaze content. Glorie makes it clear she’s up for some bedroom hijinks but Fenner isn’t buying. The reason for this may be Paula. Paula is Fenner’s secretary and there are hints that they’re in love with each other.

Fenner is also smart enough to know that when a case involves dangerous females a private eye who starts hopping into bed with said females can find himself in a whole world of hurt. He already has quite enough on his plate.

Fenner is a fairly typical private eye hero although perhaps more inclined to co-operate with the cops than most. He doesn’t want to bring the cops into this case because he has personal grudges to settle but he is careful not to alienate the cops. There is a definite streak of ruthlessness to Fenner. He’s one of the good guys but he’s not averse to exacting some private justice.

Chase keeps things moving along at a very brisk pace. There’s plenty of hardboiled dialogue and atmosphere. There’s a complicated but effective plot. It’s all nicely pulpy.

There’s plenty to enjoy in The Doll’s Bad News. I’ll definitely be checking out more of James Hadley Case’s work. Highly recommended.

A.S. Fleischman’s Venetian Blonde

A.S. Fleischman’s thriller Venetian Blonde was published in 1963. You couldn’t really come up with a cooler title for a thriller.

A.S. Fleischman (1920-2010) had been a professional magician. He wrote some excellent spy thrillers in the early 50s. Venetian Blonde came later and it’s a crime thriller rather than a spy thriller. Fleischman later had a hugely successful career as a writer of children’s books.

Venetian Blonde is moderately hardboiled with perhaps some hints of noir.

Skelly has just arrived in Venice California. He is a professional cardsharp. He is very good at it. Or at least he was. Now he’s lost his nerve. The skill is still there but to be successful as a cardsharp you need nerve as well. His big problem is that he owes 125 grand to a guy who can get quite unpleasant about such things. If Skelly is really lucky he’ll just have both his legs broken but it’s more likely he’ll be found floating face down in a canal. He can avoid all this unpleasantness by paying back the 125 grand. The trouble is that his personal fortune at this amount amounts to $31.45.

He meets two women. One is the psychic and mystic Evangeline Darrow. Her real name is Maggie. She’s married to a con artist buddy of Skelly’s. Maggie is working on a long con and the payoff could be huge. She needs Skelly. Skelly isn’t interested but then he thinks about the prospect of being found floating face down in that canal and figures maybe he will join Maggie in the con.

The other woman is Viola. She’s a cute blonde and she’s a crazy beatnik chick and she keeps following Skelly around like a puppy. This annoys Skelly, until he realises he’s fallen in love with her.

The con Maggie is working on involves a very very rich old lady, Mrs Marenbach. Maggie figures that if she can put the old dame in touch with her deceased nephew Jamie it could be good for a cool million. Mrs Marenbach is no fool and she’s very suspicious but Maggie has an angle that she’s confident will work.

Skelly gradually starts to suspect that something doesn’t add up. There’s something Maggie hasn’t told him. He isn’t even sure who else is on this deal. Maggie claims her husband is in Mexico, but maybe he’s much closer to hand. He’s also a bit concerned by Porter, the sleazy private eye.

The con itself is clever enough and Fleischman throws in some neat plot twists.

Fleischman’s background in stage magic and vaudeville and his obvious familiarity with the mindset of carnies gives the book an authentic flavour. Fleischman clearly understood the tricks used by phoney mediums.

And there’s nothing better than noir fiction that involves phoney spiritualists, illusionism and con artists.

Skelly isn’t a bad guy. He’s dishonest but there are limits to his dishonesty. He’s a crook with ethics, of a sort. He’s not as cynical as he thinks he is.

Maggie is every bit as cynical as she thinks she is. She’s beautiful and sexy and that makes her dangerous. Skelly’s problem is that he’s not sure just how cynical and dangerous she might be.

There’s some nice hardboiled dialogue liberally sprinkled with carnival and criminal argot.

There’s not much violence but the threat of murder hovers in the background.

And there’s a quirky love story as well.

Venetian Blonde is a very enjoyable read. Highly recommended. It’s been reissued by Stark House in a double-header edition paired with Fleischman’s Look Behind You, Lady.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of Fleischman’s spy thrillers. They’re all set in exotic locations and they’re all excellent - Malay Woman, Danger in Paradise, Counterspy Express and Shanghai Flame.

Charles Williams' The Sailcloth Shroud

The Sailcloth Shroud is a 1959 crime novel by Charles Williams.

Charles Williams (1909-1975) was an American crime writer whose work could be described as hardboiled or noir or suspense fiction, in varying degrees in different books.

The Sailcloth Shroud is a nautical thriller and I am personally very fond of nautical thrillers.

Stuart Rogers (the narrator of the tale) has just arrived back in the U.S. on the Topaz, a ketch he bought cheap in Panama on the assumption that he could sell it at a substantial profit in the States. It was not the happiest of cruises. He had taken on two men, both experienced seamen, as crew. One of them, Baxter, died of a heart attack on the voyage and as a result of unfavourable winds there was no way of getting the body back to an American port in time. Baxter had to be buried at sea.

Then the other crewman, Keefer, turns up dead. Murdered. Brutally beaten to death. There’s some mystery about the money Keefer was carrying. He was supposed to be broke but several thousand dollars were found on the body. For some reason the F.B.I. is interested and curiously enough they’re more interested in Baxter’s fate.

There’s no evidence against Rogers but the Feds think that he knows more than he’s saying. Some other people, very unpleasant people (in fact they’re the guys who killed Keefer), also think Rogers knows something. Which is distressing because Rogers really has told the complete truth and he really doesn’t know anything else.

His problem is that although his story is true, although Baxter really did die of a heart attack, Rogers can’t prove it. Baxter’s body is at the bottom of the Caribbean. Rogers really is telling the truth when he says that there was no alternative to a burial at sea, but he can’t actually prove that either.

Rogers figures that it might be a good idea to do a bit of investigating himself. If he can turn up anything that will clear up the mystery he’ll be able to get the Feds off his back, and, those goons as well.

He knows there are two women involved. Both women were connected in some way with Baxter. And there’s clearly a mystery attached to Baxter.

Stuart Rogers is a regular guy who is not equipped to deal with murderous hoodlums. He briefly considers buying a gun but dismisses the idea. He’s an amateur. These heavies are pros. A gun would just get him into more trouble. Rogers is not a tough guy but he’s not totally soft either. He might not be an experienced brawler but it’s amazing what you can do when you’re scared enough and desperate enough and you’re fighting for your life.

He’s also very much an amateur investigator but he does stumble across a couple of leads.

This is a tale of a pretty ordinary guy suddenly caught up in a nightmare that he doesn’t really understand.

It’s somewhat hardboiled but it's not really noir fiction even if it does have its darker moments. It doesn’t contain the key ingredients that distinguish noir fiction.

It is however a gripping and extremely well-written thriller with plenty of atmosphere and the nautical aspects of the tale add plenty of interest. Top-notch stuff. Highly recommended.

Stark House have paired this with another Charles Williams thriller, All the Way, in a double-header paperback edition with is pretty much a must-buy.

Peter Rabe's Journey Into Terror

Journey Into Terror is a 1957 crime novel by Peter Rabe.

It opens with a killing. A senseless killing. Two criminal outfits shooting it out in Truesdell Square and a girl named Ann just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up with a bullet hole in her forehead.

Ann was John Bunting’s girl. They were to be married the following day. Now that his girl is dead Bunting is just an empty shell. He gets drunk. He gets drunk again. He keeps getting drunk. Then he hears another drunk, a guy known as Mooch, talking about all the people who have done him wrong over the years and how one day he will have his revenge.

And suddenly Bunting knows what he has to do. He has to kill the guy who killed Ann.

He doesn’t know where to start. All he has a name. Saltenberg. Saltenberg may have some connection with the events in Truesdell Square. Bunting has also heard that a whore named Joyce might know something. Joyce doesn’t know anything her sister Linda does. Linda isn’t a whore. She’s a widow. Since her husband died she’s been dead inside. Just the way Bunting has been dead inside.

Linda has some vague connection with Saltenberg. Saltenberg is a businessman but he’s not exactly an honest businessman.

The answer may lie in Florida, in a town named Manitoba. Bunting heads for Florida. Maybe Bunting is finally doing something positive, but maybe he’s being manoeuvred into it. He doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Linda tags along with him. She doesn’t care about Bunting or Florida and she doesn’t care about herself but Joyce has kicked her out and she has to go somewhere.

Bunting and Linda don’t get along. There is no whirlwind romance. There’s nothing between them. They don’t exactly hate each other. They don’t care enough to hate each other. But maybe in their own broken ways they have made some some kind of connection. At least Bunting is now vaguely aware of the existence of another human being even if he doesn’t like her. And for Linda it’s much the same.

Bunting finds out that Ann’s killer had to be one of four men. The four men are Tarpin and his associates. They’re decidedly shady businessmen. In fact they’re small-time gangsters. Bunting has found a way to infiltrate Tarpin’s gang. It’s not clear how he intends to find out which one of them was the killer. He just assumes that he’ll find a way. His objective is clear but he hasn’t given much thought to the methods necessary to achieve it. He’s an obsessive but not a very clear-headed one.

So this is a murder mystery as well as a revenge story. Neither Bunting nor the reader has any idea of the identity of the killer.

The real focus is on the two central characters, Bunting and Linda. They’re both severely broken people and they have a lot in common. They’re both dead inside. The question is whether there is any hope for them, whether they can find a way to put themselves back together. Maybe they’ll just destroy themselves, or destroy each other. Maybe they can give each other a reason not to destroy themselves.

They’re not exactly sympathetic characters. They have entirely shut down their emotions and they have also shut down their entire personalities. They’re zombies.

The four men who might have killed Ann have a bit more depth than you might expect. They’re not very nice men but they have their own vulnerabilities and fears.

This is a psychological crime novel with perhaps a slight noir feel, if you’re prepared to define noir very loosely.

Like the other Peter Rabe books I’ve read this is an odd but strangely fascinating tale. Highly recommended.

By the same author I have also reviewed Stop This Man! and The Box and they’re both odd books as well.

Charles Williams' All the Way (The Concrete Flamingo)

All the Way is a noir novel by Charles Williams, published as a paperback original by Dell in 1958. It was reprinted in Britain in 1960 as The Concrete Flamingo. It was filmed in 1960, as The 3rd Voice.

American writer Charles Williams (1909-1975) is one of the greats of hardboiled/noir fiction.

The narrator, a man named Hamilton, is sitting on a beach. There’s an attractive blonde nearby reading a book. But then he realises she isn’t reading the book at all. She is listening to him. Listening very intently. He tries to pick her up but gets the brush-off. Later she agrees to meet him. Her name is Marian.

She knows a lot about him. His name is really Jerry Forbes. He had to change his name and leave Vegas in a hurry after an unfortunate incident. He is not a murderer on the run or anything like that. He is not a criminal. He did however slug a guy, hard enough to break his jaw, in a disagreement over a woman. Leaving Vegas seemed like a good idea.

He finds out why she was listening to him. It’s his voice. His voice is uncannily similar to someone else’s. There’s a reason that that interests her. She has a plan. It’s not exactly legal but she assures him that he won’t be running any risk. And there’s $75,000 in it for him. OK, the plan does involve a murder, but it’s foolproof. And 75 grand is 75 grand.

Jerry is not a criminal but 75 grand (an immense fortune in the 1950s) would tempt anybody. He would like that $75,000 but the real reason he agrees to Marian’s scheme is Marian. He is becoming obsessed by her.

Marian is a bit strange. She is bitter and she has good reason to be bitter. A woman who has been dumped by her man for another woman (a woman more than ten years younger) can get very bitter. That’s what her plan is all about - revenge.

Her plan involves perfect alibis. Alibis that cannot be broken. That’s where Jerry’s voice comes in.

Marian is quite willing to sleep with Jerry. She’s very good in bed but she seems a bit disconnected from it all. This is a girl with a lot of red flags showing but Jerry doesn’t care. He wants her.

Jerry isn’t seeing things very clearly. Marian tells him that she’s using him but it makes no difference. He is in love with her and he knows she will learn to love him.

You can see some obvious plot twists on the way but the actual plot twists are not the ones you expect. The ending is brilliant and powerful.

You expect a Charles Williams story to have a nautical flavour and while this is not really one of his full-blown nautical thrillers boats do play a fairly significant part in the story.

There’s a love story here but it’s kept nicely ambiguous. Marian’s feelings towards Jerry are kept deliberately unclear. In a story such as this the reader will always expect one of the lovers to betray the other. This story has a few surprises in store in that department.

The plotting is excellent. Marian’s scheme is risky but fiendishly clever and elaborate. It’s a plan that deserves to work.

Jerry isn’t the smartest guy in the world and he’s not the most honest but he means well. He really does love Marian. He will do anything for her.

Marian is obviously playing a femme fatale role but she is not a straightforward femme fatale. I always like complicated ambiguous femmes fatales and Marian qualifies on both counts.

This is genuine noir fiction. It ticks most of the noir boxes. It’s beautifully written and the noir sense of doom builds very slowly. Jerry is not really committed to anything until late in the story. He can still back out. Except that he can’t back out. He has to have Marian.

This is top-tier noir fiction from a top-tier writer. Highly recommended.

Stark House Noir have paired this with another excellent Charles Williams novel, The Sailcloth Shroud. This two-novel volume is pretty much a must-buy for noir fans. I’ve also reviewed Williams’ superb 1954 novel A Touch of Death.

Glenn Canary’s Trailer Park Girls

Glenn Canary’s Trailer Park Girls was published by Monarch Books 1962. It has more recently been reprinted by Black Gat Books. It appears that it may also been published as Trailer Park Trash.

I know very little about Glenn Canary (1934-2008) other than the fact that he started as a newspaperman and he wrote a handful of novels and short stories.

The title obviously suggests that this is going to be sleaze fiction but that needs to be qualified. In the 50s and early 60s there was a lot of crossover between sleaze fiction and hardboiled/noir crime fiction, both of which were popular pulp genres. There were a lot of sleaze novels that had crime fiction plots and there were crime novels that were quite sleazy. Many authors wrote in both genres.

There was in the late 50s and early 60s a curious craze for trailer park sleaze. For a lot of people the American Dream wasn’t quite the world of TV series like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet. Home ownership was hopelessly out of the reach of many people, either permanently or temporarily. The best they could aspire to was life in a trailer park. There was much clucking of tongues over the immorality that supposedly flourished in trailer parks. This was mostly media hysteria but there was some truth to it. They did attract transients and drifters and undoubtedly there was a fair amount of illicit sex.

Not surprisingly this made trailer parks a splendid setting for sleaze novels.

Trailer Park Girls fall into the category of hardboiled crime/noir spiced up with sex. This is the tale of three guys who live in a trailer camp, and three girls who live in the same camp.

Three young guys who met in the army share a trailer. Burt Stone is the one who comes up with the idea for the robbery. He was all set to be a doctor. He’s finished his undergraduate studies and now he’s ready for medical school. That won’t be a problem. He has ten thousand dollars set aside, enough to support him until he qualifies as a doctor. Only he doesn’t have that money after all. His brother stole it. But has a plan to rob a department store with his two buddies. That should net him the ten grand he needs.

Al Needs is a tough guy with a nasty streak. Jack Cannon is a huge good-natured bear of a man. They could both use some money. These three guys are not really hopeless losers, they’re just not as smart or as hard as they think they are and they’ve convinced themselves the robbery will be child’s play and they haven’t considered the possibility that it could all go wrong.

They get mixed up with the three girls. Sally pairs off with Al. Fran pairs off with Jack. Burt doesn’t want any emotional entanglements but he just drifts into an affair with Marianne and before he knows what’s happening they’re in love.

Of course one of the girls finds out about the robbery and she wants in. The other two girls don’t want to be mixed up in it but they are whether they like it or not.

The robbery does not take place until very late in the story but this is not a classic heist story in which the focus is on the preparations for the robbery and the detailed mechanics of pulling it off. This is a character-driven story rather than a plot-driven story. Canary is much more concerned with the character motivations and interactions, especially the growing tension between Burt and Al and the complicated relationship between Burt and Marianne.

Right from the start Burt wanted the trio of robbers to have nothing to do with women until after the robbery. He was sure that any involvement with women would sow dissension and and pose dangers. He was right. But he couldn’t stop it from happening and he couldn’t stop himself from getting deeply involved with Marianne. She presents him with a choice - back out of the robbery or lose her. But he doesn’t see any way that he can back out.

The main focus is on Burt and Marianne. Especially Burt. He’s a typical noir protagonist. He’s basically a very decent guy. In the normal course of events he’d have become a doctor and led a blameless life. But having that money stolen by his brother has distorted his thinking and embittered him. And now events are moving out of his control. This is all classic noir fiction stuff.

There is a femme fatale of sorts but it’s not Burt’s girlfriend, it’s Sally. She’s the most reckless of the three girls.

There are no real villains here, just people who make mistakes. Maybe some will lean from their mistakes and maybe some of them won’t.

There’s some violence and a lot of sex. The sex isn’t very graphic but it does have an edge of noir desperation to it. People who need love but don’t realise it and sometimes don’t recognise it when it’s there.

As to how noir this novel is, that depends on how you read the ending but it does have a noirish atmosphere.

I enjoyed this one. Highly recommended.

Robert Silverberg's The Hot Beat

The Hot Beat is a 1960 noir-inflected sleazy hardboiled crime thriller by Robert Silverberg.

Robert Silverberg (born 1935) is best-known as one of the grandmasters of science fiction. He had just started to establish himself in the genre when the science fiction market to which he was selling temporarily collapsed. He turned to other genres such as men’s adventure fiction, sleaze fiction and crime fiction and became a very prolific and very successful writer of pulp paperback originals. The Hot Beat was written (using the pseudonym Stan Vincent) for a short-lived paperback original publisher, Magnet Books.

Bob McKay is a band leader. He’s young and he has the world at his feet. He’s the toast of the town. And then he hits the skids. He’s been pushing himself too hard and when you make a living in nightclubs it’s all too easy to reach for the bottle when you need to relax. McKay reaches for that bottle way too often. He loses everything, including his girl Terry. Terry is a starlet whose career has so far gone nowhere but she’s a swell kid. She just can’t put up with McKay’s drunken unpredictability any longer.

McKay has reached rock bottom. And then things get worse. He’s arrested for the murder of B-girl Doris Blair. He knew Doris but he didn’t kill her. The cops, who in this novel behave like moronic thugs, don’t care. He’s a convenient suspect. They’re happy to railroad him all the way to the gas chamber. They intimidate witnesses into identifying McKay.

Newspaper columnist Ned Lowry covers the seamy side of life but he can’t stand thuggish cops and he can’t ignore such an obvious miscarriage of justice. He gets a hotshot lawyer interested in the case.

And along with Terry, the aforementioned starlet, he starts playing amateur private detective. They really are amateurs but they’re motivated and gradually they start to see a picture emerging that is sharply at variance with the cops’ version.

Silverberg’s knack for pulp fiction is much in evidence - an understanding of the necessity for breakneck pacing, the ability to sketch characters quickly and economically, the ability to capture the right atmosphere of seedy corrupted glamour. He also makes sure to have all the right ingredients - some action, some romance, some suspense, some sleaze.

McKay is a typical noir fiction loser. He’s not such a terrible guy but he has a genius for self-destruction. In most novels of this type he would have to set out to prove his own innocence. In this story McKay does practically nothing. The focus is entirely on the two amateur sleuths.

Terry is the most interesting character here. She’s no Girl Scout, she knows that making it in Hollywood will mean doing a certain amount of wallowing in the gutter, but she has limits. She has tried very hard not to be corrupted. She’s not sure how well she has succeeded. She hasn’t learned to hate herself but she’s also aware that at times she has behaved badly. She’s not a femme fatale, but also not quite a stock-standard Good Girl. To achieve stardom she is prepared to sleep her way to the top but at least she feels bad about it. She’s not a villainess in need of redemption, but she does need to take stock of her life.

There’s a solid enough mystery plot here and I always enjoy mysteries or thrillers with a seedy-glamorous showbiz background.

Hard Case Crime rescued this novel from obscurity in 2022. One thing I have to say about Hard Case Crime - they’re one of the very very few modern publishers who understand the importance of great stylish sexy book covers. The original painting by Claudia Caranfa for the cover of this one gets the tone just right.

To make this paperback edition even more enticing it also includes three late 50s crime short stories by Silverberg.

Drunken Sailor is rather a nothing story about a naïve young sailor on shore leave. It appeared in Trapped Detective Story Magazine in October 1958.

Naked in the Lake was published in Trapped Detective Story Magazine in February 1958. A married man decides it’s time to get rid of his inconvenient mistress but there are some nasty surprises in store for him. It’s an OK story.

Jailbait Girl appeared in Guilty Detective Story Magazine in September 1959. Now this is a terrific little story about a con artist and it has a delicious sting in the tail.

Having now read a couple of Silverberg’s noir novels I’m inclined to think that this genre was not quite his forte. He was better suited to sleaze fiction since he was good at dealing with human relationships and human motivations. He was one of the very best sleaze fiction writers. He doesn’t quite have the gift of a making a more straightforward crime novel come to life. The Hot Beat is still worth a look.

The inclusion of the three short stories, and especially Jailbait Girl, is enough to bump this Hard Case Crime paperback up into the recommended category.

John D. MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Good-By

The Deep Blue Good-By was the first of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels. It was published in 1964.

John D. MacDonald (1916-1986) had already written several dozen novels but it was the Travis McGee novels that really put him on the map.

Travis McGee is not a private eye. Not exactly. He’s such a maverick and loner and general outsider that even getting a private investigator’s licence and working as a regular PI would threaten his fierce sense of independence. He is a kind of freelance investigator-troubleshooter of a very special sort. If someone has stolen something from you and it’s the kind of case the police either won’t or can’t take on, or if you have a good reason not to want cops involved, and if the case is so risky and so speculative and the chances of failure are so high that no regular PI would take it on then you go to Travis McGee. He will recover your property, and take a fifty percent cut.

That makes McGee sound greedy but he isn’t. If he doesn’t recover the property he gets nothing, not even his expenses. And if you thought you had no chance of ever getting any of your property back then you’re going to be happy to accept his terms. Half is a whole lot better than nothing.

McGee’s lady friend Chookie (yes, Chookie) has advised her friend Cathy to talk to McGee. Cathy’s father came back from the war with a great deal of money. He died in prison, with the money still hidden somewhere. A smooth-talking sleazeball known as Junior Allen seduced Cathy and he now has that money. Losing the money was bad enough but Cathy had her heart dragged through the dirt as well.

Doing a bit of digging on the subject of Junior Allen leads McGee to a woman named Lois. She was another of Allen’s victims. A picture is starting to emerge. Allen is not just a thief. He enjoys psychologically and emotionally (and sometimes physically) brutalising women.

Lois is a mess. So much of a mess that if McGee hadn’t found her she might have succeeded in starving and drinking herself to death. McGee becomes a full-time nurse to her.

Which brings us to Travis McGee’s fascinating attitude towards women. He likes women, but not just as bed partners. He’s no Boy Scout. He likes sex. But he really likes women as people. He doesn’t owe Lois anything but she needs him so he’ll be there for her. He’s just the kind of guy who could never walk away from a woman in need of help.

Slowly McGee puts the pieces of the puzzle together - where that money came from originally, why it was hidden, how Allen got his hands on it. And he finds out that Allen has further plans. Nasty plans. It’s none of McGee’s business but he intends to wreck those plans.

There’s plenty of action, and some moderately graphic violence. Much of the action happens at sea. Allen is a tough guy and he’s plenty mean. But Travis McGee is a tough guy as well and he’s willing to play dirty when necessary.

The plotting is clever. McDonald’s writes very entertaining prose with some cynicism and quite a bit of passion - Travis McGee is a man of very strong views. McGee does not really approve of the modern world. He doesn’t approve of rules and regulations. He also doesn’t approve of progress. He loves south Florida. He likes it just the way it is. He doesn’t think it needs more resort hotels and shopping malls and condos and highways.

There’s some sex but there’s also an atmosphere of twisted cruel perverted sexuality. Junior Allen has some major issues with women.

McGee is far from being a perfect hero. He can be extraordinarily ruthless and he has only a limited respect for the law. He doesn’t have too much in the way of ethical standards. What he does have is a certain basic decency. And an old-fashioned attitude towards women. Old-fashioned in a good way.

This book is huge amounts of fun, with a hardboiled feel and some noir fiction touches. It’s just different enough from standard PI stories, and Travis McGee is just different enough from standard PI heroes, to give it a flavour of its own. Highly recommended.

Carter Brown’s The Dame

Carter Brown’s The Dame, published in 1959, is one of his many Lieutenant Al Wheeler hardboiled mysteries. In fact it was the fourteenth of the 52 Al Wheeler novels (Carter Brown wrote 215 novels and 75 novellas which sold a total of around 120 million copies).

Lieutenant Al Wheeler from the sheriff’s office has to investigate the murder of glamorous movie star Judy Manners, only he gets to her luxury beach house to find her very much alive. There is a corpse, a naked woman, but it’s not the movie star.

The dead blonde was Judy’s secretary Barbara.

Judy thinks that she was the killer’s real target and that Barbara was killed by mistake. Al thinks it’s an interesting theory but he’s not convinced one way or the other.

Judy is married to fellow movie star Rudi Ravell. Rudi is as dumb as a rock but he’s handsome (and he knows it) and he has an eye for the ladies. He also has a very jealous wife.

Judy and Rudi were about to star in a new movie. The business deals behind the movie, involving a producer named Harkness and a financier named Luther, are perhaps not entirely honest and above-board. But then very little in Hollywood is honest and above-board.

There’s another dame involved, Camille Clovis. She lives expensively and has no job. She is almost certainly a kept woman, but kept by whom?

Any of the men could be sleeping with any of the women. That’s the way it goes with movie people.

Which means shady business dealings or sexual jealousy could be equally plausible motives. And everyone mixed up in the case has a motive for murdering someone.

Al is keen to get to grips with some hard evidence. He’s also keen to get to grips with the lovely Camille. He wouldn’t mind getting to grips with Judy Manners as well - that legendary 40-inch bust of hers certainly got his attention. The truth is that Al Wheeler has a very keen interest in the female of the species, and when when he’s on a case he finds plenty of opportunities to pursue that interest.

Maybe the crazy old guy who maintains the cemetery in the dusty little one-horse town of Oakridge can provide a clue. The old guy has some bitter memories and they involve some of the people mixed up in this murder case.

There could be a question of mistaken identity, or possibly several questions of mistaken identity. Al seems to be dealing with people who shoot first and ask questions later.

Carter Brown wrote pulp fiction with the emphasis on pulp. But he wrote very enjoyable pulp fiction. And he wrote well. There’s plenty of hardboiled dialogue and atmosphere, and plenty of sleazy atmosphere as well.

Al Wheeler is a likeable wise-cracking rogue. He might seem to be focused mainly on skirt but he has good cop instincts. He has a reputation for getting results and treading on toes in the process. As long as he keeps getting results he can get away with treading on toes and chasing dames.

The Dame is trashy fast-paced light entertainment and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed a number of the Al Wheeler books - No Harp for My Angel, Eve it's Extortion and Booty for a Babe as well as his Danny Boyd PI novel The Savage Salome and his Hollywood trouble-shooter Rick Holman thriller Where Did Charity Go? and they’re all fun.

Blood and Honey - Honey West

Blood and Honey was the eighth of the Honey West mystery novels. The husband and wife writing team of Gloria and Forest Fickling, writing as G.G. Fickling, wrote eleven Honey West novels between 1957 and 1971. They more or less invented the sexy girl private eye genre and Honey West also has claims to being fiction’s first kickass action heroine.

Honey West’s father was a private eye, until he got murdered on a case. Honey now runs the West Detective Agency. In fact she is the Honey West Detective Agency. She handles all the cases herself. Her father taught her the job. She has a PI’s licence. She has a gun and she knows how to use it (for emergencies she carries a .22 in a garter holster). She can handle herself in unarmed combat. Honey is tough, resourceful and very stubborn. She’s a good PI. Honey’s measurements are 38-22-36. In other words she has everything a woman should have, in all the right places. She is young, blonde, cute and very female.

Blood and Honey starts with Honey running down a dark alley in New York wearing a negligee and high heels. She’s running from a man with a gun. When she made her exit through her bedroom window she was only wearing the high heels. She grabbed the negligee on the way out. So we knows she sleeps nude. We also know immediately that this is a real Honey West novel. Poor Honey is a nice girl but she has an amazing knack for being caught without her clothes on.

Honey is in New York at the request of an old friend, Broadway producer Vic Kendall. His latest production has run into troubles. Several attempted murders certainly counts as trouble. Honey has just arrived in the Big Apple and already somebody has tried to kill her. It seems that somebody doesn’t like Vic’s new show. New York critics can be tough but they don’t usually try to literally kill you.

There are all sorts of emotional, romantic and sexual dramas associated with this show. There are other dramas as well, such as questionable business dealings. There are people with scores to settle.

I love showbiz mysteries and thrillers. There’s always a touch of decadence and sin. There’s plenty of both here. And sexual jealousies get even more overheated than usual in this world.

There are some dangerous women. Vic’s ex-showgirl wife Tina. Tina wants love. Lots of it. There’s the star of the show, Pepper Parker. She’s blonde and she’s built and she and Tina hate each other. There’s Pepper’s friend Evy. There are rumours that Evy and Pepper like to play games together, games that involve dressing in cowboy boots and paper doilies and nothing else. Yes, I know, paper doilies are a kink I’d never heard of either.

The movie world is involved as well. Movie producer Anthony Troy has bought an ocean liner. He intends to sink it. For his new movie. He’s mixed up with some of the people in Vic’s new show. There are gangsters as well. And Pepper has a story about being tied to a bed, a special bed with leather straps. She doesn’t like to think about what happened to her next.

Yes, there’s plenty of sleaze here. What I love about the Honey West books is that they’re sleazy but in a kind of playful way. Honey isn’t shocked by any of this. All her cases seem to involve such things. When a girl is a PI she sees all sorts of things. She’s used to it.

This is moderately hardboiled fiction, but again with a playful touch. The authors are aiming for slightly naughty entertainment rather than wallowing in misery. This is hardboiled but it’s not noir fiction.

There’s plenty of action as well.

Honey is a wonderful heroine, with or without her clothes. Once she’s on a case she doesn’t give up.

Blood and Honey is a typical Honey West novel which means it’s loads of fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed other Honey West books - This Girl For Hire, Girl on the Loose, A Gun for Honey, Honey in the Flesh and Kiss for a Killer. And I’ve also reviewed the excellent 1965-66 Honey West TV series that starred Anne Francis in the title role.

John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8

BUtterfield 8 was John O’Hara’s second novel, appearing in 1935. It was an immediate bestseller.

John O’Hara (1905-1970) is now almost entirely forgotten but he was quite a big deal on the American literary scene at one time. Even during his heyday he had his detractors as well as his admirers.

BUtterfield 8 was based on the notorious real-life case of a flapper named Starr Faithfull.

This is a Depression novel in the sense that the Great Depression is mentioned constantly but while the characters complain about how hard the Depression has hit them these are people for whom extreme poverty means having to cope with fewer servants. These are very rich people having to deal with the trauma of suddenly finding themselves only moderately rich.

The novel concerns an affair between a young woman named Gloria and a married man named Weston Liggett.

After spending the night having sex with Liggett in his apartment (in the marital bed) Gloria leaves, taking with her Liggett’s wife’s mink coat. That mink coat becomes an obsession with Liggett. Or rather, he becomes obsessed by the difficulty of explaining its absence to his wife.

Gloria is eighteen but she has had a lot of men. She feels plenty of guilt and existential despair. Liggett is torn between guilt, his cowardice about coming clean to his wife and his feelings for Gloria. Eventually the illicit relationship between Gloria and Liggett reaches a crisis.

There are also numerous sub-plots involving other couples but they go nowhere and serve no apparent purpose. Perhaps O’Hara saw this novel as a kind of social document on American middle-class life in the 1930s but the result is a novel that feels badly unfocussed. Or perhaps social documents are just not to my taste.

The book’s success at the time is understandable. It was based on a widely publicised real-life scandal and the plot revolves entirely around sex. In 1935 this novel would have been considered racy.

What’s curious is the total lack of any sense of erotic or emotional heat. When characters in this novel have sex they do so with as much enthusiasm, passion, desperation and madness as they would experience when deciding whether or not to have a second cup of coffee at breakfast. When one of the male characters tells one of the female characters that he has to have her, or when one of the female characters tells one of the male characters that she loves him, we just don’t buy it. We’re just not convinced that these people feel anything.

The characters are totally lifeless and uninteresting. It’s easy to get the various characters confused because they don’t have any real individuality.

The climax comes as more of an anti-climax.

Maybe O’Hara was trying to say something profound about the emptiness of modern life. Or maybe he just couldn’t write interesting prose or create living characters. Maybe he thought he was writing an honest hard-hitting realist novel but the fact that the characters are not believable is still a problem.

The novel gives us exhaustive backstories on even minor characters. It gives us a detailed explanation of how Gloria came to be such a wicked girl. This aspect of the story was handled much more economically, much more effectively and much more convincingly in the 1960 movie.

This is one of the cases of a movie adaptation being vastly superior to the source novel. The screenwriters of the 1960 movie, Charles Schnee and John Michael Hayes, wisely dumped most of O’Hara’s story and replaced it with a much more interesting story. They also retooled the story as melodrama, but very superior and very entertaining melodrama. The movie also has the advantage that Elizabeth Taylor brings Gloria to life on the screen in a way that O’Hara totally failed to do on the printed page.

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that BUtterfield 8 is a bad book but it’s most definitely not to my taste and I can’t recommend it.

I can however very strongly recommend the movie which I reviewed here - BUtterfield 8 (1960).

Donald E. Westlake’s The Outfit

The Outfit, published in 1963, is the third of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker novels written under the pseudonym Richard Stark.

I’m not going to give away spoilers for the first two novels (although in fact Westlake does so in this novel) but this third book continues Parker’s feud with the organised crime syndicate known as the Outfit.

Parker is not a member of the Outfit (although he did a job for them once). He’s an independent professional thief. That doesn’t mean he’s small-time. His jobs are always major robberies. He’s very successful. He pulls very few jobs because the ones he pulls are very lucrative. In between jobs he lives a life of leisure in Florida.

Now he has a problem. The Outfit seems to have taken out a contract on him. He thought he had resolved his issues with them. Parker is annoyed but far from disconsolate. He has already established his ability to hurt the syndicate badly. Now he will have to hurt them again, to make them see reason.

The Outfit has a weakness. Their security at their various illegal operations is lax. It has never occurred to them that anybody would be crazy enough to try to rob them. That was before they encountered Parker. Parker is crazy enough to do it. Except he isn’t crazy, just stubborn. If Parker has to hurt the Outfit his campaign against them will be meticulously planned and well thought out. He’s a cold calculating professional.

I love the opening of this novel. Parker is in bed with his current woman, Bett. She is not a criminal. He isn’t the slightest bit in love with her but she suits him and she’s good in bed. A gunman breaks into the hotel room and starts shooting. Any normal woman would be terrified. Bett is excited. Parker realises he will have to torture the gunman for information. He finds such things distasteful but he thinks Bett might enjoy it. When he asks her if she would enjoy torturing the gunman she gets very excited. Parker knew there was something about this girl that he liked. We are definitely in Parker’s world.

There’s another early scene, involving two brothers and a woman, which is just so incredibly Parker-ish.

This is not a straightforward heist story. Rather it is a whole series of heists. Parker’s campaign against the Outfit is based on persuading other independent professional criminals to start raiding Outfit operations. Each of these robberies is a perfect heist story in miniature.

Parker comes up against some old foes in the Outfit, foes who might be thinking they have a score to settle with him. They still haven’t quite realised that they’re up against a very smart guy who thinks out his moves well in advance. Parker has survived a long time as a professional criminal. He knows that if you rely solely on being fast with a gun or your fists you won’t last long. You have to play it smart, and not react emotionally. Parker approaches his conflict with the Outfit more like a game of poker than a bar-room brawl. He’s a tough guy but that’s not what makes him such a fascinating character.

Parker is a full-blown anti-hero. He is ruthless and amoral and apparently emotionless. He has been misunderstood as having no redeeming qualities. That’s not quite true. If necessary he will kill without hesitation and without remorse. On the other hand he never kills without a reason and he never kills for pleasure. He is very careful not to kill innocent bystanders.

In this story he has a woman. He knows that eventually he will have to get rid of her, but getting rid of her does not mean killing her. It just means giving her the brush-off as cleanly and painlessly as possible. He has no intention of killing her. That would be cruel. Parker, despite his serious character flaws, is not a cruel man.

And despite those flaws the reader is going to be on Parker’s side. He’s just so super-cool.

It’s a tough cynical book. Very entertaining. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the excellent first Parker novel, The Hunter (AKA Point Blank) and the second, The Man with the Getaway Face. You do have to read this series in order. You also need to see the 1967 movie Point Blank, based on the first novel.