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.

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.

Honey West: Kiss for a Killer

Kiss for a Killer, published in 1960, was the sixth of the eleven Honey West private eye thrillers written by American husband and wife writing team Gloria and Forest Fickling as G.G. Fickling.

These novels were the basis for the 1965-66 Honey West TV series which starred Anne Francis. Both the novels and the TV series are seriously under-appreciated.

Honey West made her first appearance in This Girl for Hire in 1957. A girl PI was a pretty new concept for crime fiction at that time. Honey West runs a private detective agency that belonged to her dad before he was murdered.

In the TV series Honey has a side-kick but in the novels she works alone although she does co-operate with Sheriff’s Deputy Mark Storm (who has a bit of a thing for her). Honey is fairly hardboiled, she’s adept at unarmed combat and she carries a pearl-handled .22 revolver (in a garter holster under her skirt).

These were intended from the outset as sexy PI thrillers and there’s plenty of sleaze. Honey always seems to be losing her clothes.

Honey West paved the way for other action heroines in fiction, comics, TV and movies. Heroines like Cathy Gale, Emma Peel and Modesty Blaise. Honey has a quirky quality all her own (which Anne Francis captured extremely well in the TV series). She has an amazing capacity for getting herself into trouble but it doesn’t faze her at all. She just assumes that somehow she’ll extricate herself.

Honey loses her clothes a lot in Kiss for a Killer, perhaps not surprising since she’s investigating a nudist religious cult. The cult is also into a bit of sadomasochism and other kinks.

The novel starts with football player Rip Spensor crushed to death by a steamroller, and it was no accident. Honey had been dating him which is how she becomes involved. There are other fairly gruesome murders. There also seems to be a connection with an Italian movie star, Angela Scali. When she makes her first appearance in the book she’s stark naked as well.

On her way to the murder scene Honey has a narrow escape from deadly spiders and then she is chased by a naked man in a car.

Honey suspects that the cult leader, Thor Tunny, controls his flock through hypnotism but she can’t prove it.

The cult might have murdered Rip Spensor but there are plenty of other suspects, Rip’s brother for one. There’s also a crippled reporter and Angela Scali’s agent. Plus the cult leader’s crazy depraved daughter Toy. All these people seem to have been involved with one another but Honey will have to find the exact nature of the connection. She will also have to try to keep her clothes on, which will be an even bigger challenge.

The plot is pleasingly outrageous, and it’s resolved quite satisfactorily. The action is non-stop and it’s inventive. Honey gets beaten up, there are several attempts to kill her, she has a narrow escape from a crashed car and she gets captured more than once. It’s all in a day’s work for a busy lady PI.

The style is pulpy but entertaining. Honey is as quick with a wisecrack as she is with her gun. There’s plenty of violent action, but it’s only moderately graphic by the standards of the day (although a guy getting squashed flat by a steamroller could perhaps be described as graphic). There isn’t really any sex but there’s the implication that such things are going on. The titillation factor is provided by the amount of time the various characters spend naked but it’s all done in a playful good-natured way.

Like the other Honey West novels Kiss for a Killer is unashamedly violent, lurid, trashy and sleazy with hints of kinkiness. And it's extraordinarily enjoyable. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several other Honey West novels here - This Girl for Hire (1957), A Gun for Honey (1958), Girl on the Loose (1958) and Honey in the Flesh (1959). They’re all worth reading.

Honey West: Honey in the Flesh

Honey in the Flesh was published in 1959. It was the fourth of the eleven Honey West PI thrillers written by husband and wife writing team Gloria and Forest Fickling under the name G.G. Fickling.

The Honey West novels were the basis for the 1965-66 Honey West TV series starring Anne Francis. Neither the novels nor the TV series have ever received the attention they deserved.

Honey West certainly wasn’t the first female fictional detective and she wasn’t even technically the first fictional female private eye. But when she made her first appearance in print in 1956 she was something different. She was the prototype for most of the female action/adventure heroines of the 60s and 70s, not just in books but in TV and movies. Modesty Blaise, Cathy Gale, Emma Peel, The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., all followed the trail that Honey West had blazed. Honey West was a new type of heroine. She was not just an action heroine. She was smart, witty, sexy, stylish and hyper-confident. She was very feminine and totally comfortable with her sexuality and her femininity but she was hardboiled and tough as well.

The Honey West novels, apart from the innovation of featuring a female protagonist, are fairly typical of the private eye fiction of the 1950s. And that’s no bad thing. American PI fiction of that period was bursting with energy and hard-edged style. The Honey West novels are hardboiled but heavily laced with humour. And sexiness. In fact at times outright sleaze, in the style of late 50s sleaze fiction. They were written at a time when authors could get away with very little in the shape of actual sexual content but there was certainly nothing to stop them creating an atmosphere of sex and sleaze.

Honey in the Flesh opens with the body of a beauty pageant contestant fished out of the bay. The girl is Josephine Keller, the contestant from California. That’s what the police think. The coroner is non-committal. Mawson Lawrence, the businessman who is promoting the Miss Twentieth Century Pageant, is adamant that Miss Keller is alive and well. He wants to hire Honey to prove that all the contestants are alive and well, although Honey isn’t at all sure that that is really what she’s been hired for.

Then the missing contestant turns up, safe and unharmed.

But Honey is not happy. Her friend Lieutenant Mark Storm isn’t happy either. Nor is hardbitten newspaperman Fred Sims.

Mark Storm suspects a connection between the pageant and a prostitution racket. He thinks Mawson Lawrence isn’t as squeaky clean as he appears to be.

Honey gets a phone call from one of the girls in the pageant, offering information that might tie in with the prostitution angle, but Honey’s meeting with the girl doesn’t turn out at all the way Honey had hoped.

People keep trying to kill Honey. And trying to set her up so that it looks like she is a murderess. Honey heads to Mexico, accompanied by beatnik photographer Hank Kirsten who is one of the prime suspects. Then Honey gets kidnapped and given an injection that turns her into a sex maniac. Hank manages to get Honey back to the States but it’s a wild drive, with Honey continually trying to rape him.

Anyone and everyone involved with the pageant could be a suspect, including all eighty-eight contestants. Would one of the contestants actually murder a fellow contestant, just for the sake of the $50,000 prize money and the glory of becoming Miss Twentieth Century? Honey has no doubts whatever on that score. Beauty contests are ruthless. It’s kill or be killed. Honey has no illusions about women.

Most of the contestants seem to spend most of their time wandering about naked. In fact all the female characters (including Honey) seem to have trouble keeping their clothes on.

The plot is fiendishly complicated. The contest itself, the call-girl racket, a brothel in Tijuana with which most of the characters seem to be connected, crooked cops, corrupt public officials, shady business deals, bizarre marital complications - all these things could provide motives for murder.

There’s plenty of action, Honey gets into lots of dangerous escapades and as you may have gathered there’s an atmosphere of sex, sin and sleaze. It’s all great fun. Honey in the Flesh is very pulpy, in the best possible way. Highly recommended.

You might want to check out my reviews of other Honey West novels - This Girl For Hire, A Gun for Honey and Girl on the Loose.

Honey West - Girl on the Loose

Girl on the Loose was the second of G.G. Fickling’s Honey West private eye thrillers. It was published in 1958.

G.G. Fickling was actually husband-and-wife writing team Gloria Fickling (1926-?) and Forrest “Skip” Fickling (1925-1998).

The 1965-66 television series starring Anne Francis is now better remembered than the books. The TV series toned down the violence slightly and toned down the sleaze quite a lot. The Honey West character of both the books and the TV series is pretty similar. She’s a lady private detective who took over her father’s private detective agency when he was murdered. In both the books and the series she’s sublimely self-confident to the point of recklessness, she has formidable martial arts skills and she’s quite prepared to use her considerable sex appeal when she deems it necessary. She carries her revolver in a garter holster.

Girl on the Loose hits the ground running. Within the first few pages a guy has been cut in half by machine-gun fire and Honey has been stripped naked. It won’t be the last time in the book that she’s stripped naked.

There’s a Honey West look-alike running around and she’s involved in the kidnapping of a millionaire’s baby son. There’s also a female Marine Corps officer whom Honey is forced to impersonate, there’s a murder of an old friend of Honey’s in San Francisco and there’s a husband out for revenge. There’s even an encounter with UFO cultists. The Ficklings throw in just about everything you could want in a pulpy private eye thriller including a considerable helping of sleaze.

The revenge-seeking husband has a theory that the kidnappers are heading for Mexico and he persuades her to help him set an ambush. Honey thinks his theory is a bit wild but it’s the only decent lead she’s got.

The plot is rather wild and woolly with lots of convolutions but there’s a decent twist at the end. It turns out to be a crime that only a woman could solve. Which is a nice touch - if you’re going to have a female PI you might as well let her make use of her knowledge of female psychology.

There’s quite a lot of violence and some of it gets fairly graphic. There’s no graphic sex but Honey is always aware of her sexuality and all the male characters are aware of it as well (and of her very impressive body measurements). And she does take her clothes off frequently.

The Ficklings belonged to the “if in doubt throw in another murder” school of hardboiled fiction. The pacing is fast and the action is constant.

The Honey West novels are a bit on the trashy side but they’re trashy in a good fun way.

The Ficklings wrote nine Honey West novels between 1957 and 1964 and then two more in the early 70s. There were also three early 60s Honey West novels written by Erik Marsh (about which I know nothing) and there have been several attempts to revive the character.

I’ve previously reviewed the first book in the series, This Girl For Hire, and the third, A Gun For Honey. And the TV series (which is wonderful in its own way).

Honey West is very much the model for most of the female PIs, cops and secret agents (in print and in television and movies) that would appear in subsequent decades - sexy, smart and dangerous. She was in fact the prototype of the kickass action heroine.

Girl on the Loose is moderately hardboiled, pulpy and throughly enjoyable. Highly recommended.

G.G. Fickling's A Gun for Honey

Lady private detective Honey West is best remembered today as the heroine of the cult 1965-66 TV series Honey West. Long before the TV series she featured in a series of popular crime novels written by husband-and-wife team Gloria and Forest Fickling under the name G.G. Fickling.

The series began with This Girl For Hire in 1957. The Ficklings would eventually write eleven Honey West novels, the final instalment appearing in 1972.

The second Honey West novel was A Gun for Honey, published in 1958.

Honey’s father had established a successful private detective agency. After he was murdered his daughter Honey, having no other way of earning a living, had decided to keep the agency running.

Honey (who is the narrator as well as the heroine) has now been hired to find the Kissing Killer. He kills his (female) victims by smothering them with kisses. He kisses them to death. He’s been terrorising Shark Beach.

Honey has been hired by former horror movie director Rote Collier who is worried because the police think the murders sound like something out of a horror movie so they suspect him. He’s also worried about his wife and daughter he wants Honey to protect them. Rote’s daughter Fawn is twenty-three. His wife Helena is slightly younger than Fawn.

Helena has had a colourful past. She’s been a nude model and a pornographic movie star, among other things. With maybe a bit of blackmail on the side. Helena is very fond of men. She’s also very fond of women. She plays for both teams. As do several of the suspects in this case. There seems to be a lot of that sort of thing in Shark Beach. It’s apparently one of the things Shark Bech is known for. It does boast a bar called the Gay Blade.

Then the Kissing Killer strikes again. A woman is found nude and dead inside a mummy case (being a former horror movie director Rote Collier has a lot of items like mummy cases in his house). Honey figures the killer has to be one of the people at Rote Collier’s New Year’s Eve party. Rote’s parties can get a little wild. He provides little bedrooms for the use of guests who want things to get really wild. They invariably get used.

There are quite a few plausible suspects. There’s Wolf Larson, who operates a bathysphere at the pier. It’s the world’s biggest bathysphere and he lives aboard. Apart from taking tourists on dives to see the wonders of the underwater world he also takes young ladies aboard for other purposes. There’s photographer Hel Gandy, who takes nudie pictures and makes pornographic films (although he’s not the only one who films such things). There’s handsome Marine Corps fighter pilot Reed Walker, rather popular with the ladies. And there’s Rote Collier, whose personal life is a little unconventional. And there’s Fawn. They all have very strong motives.

The sleaze factor is very high in this book and it’s established right from the start. There are lots of naked women. Including bound naked women. There’s spanking. There are those movies. There are lots of sexual shenanigans going on in Shark Beach, some of them not exactly conventional.

And somehow Honey’s breasts (which she has to admit are rather impressive) seem to keep playing a prominent rôle in the story, along with her habit of never wearing a bra. Most of the male characters will at some stage discover that she’s not kidding about not wearing a bra. It’s not that Honey is the kind of girl who jumps into bed with any man who comes along but somehow her sweaters seem to keep coming off.

There’s not much graphic violence in this tale. In fact hardly any. Honey has her .32 revolver but she’s not really the kickass action heroine type (in the TV series she is transformed into very much a kickass action heroine). She’s tough and she’s not lacking in guts but she prefers to be more subtle. You’d be surprised how useful it can be to a lady private detective to be young and gorgeous and very well endowed in the bust department (especially if she doesn’t wear a bra). It tends to distract the suspects while she’s gathering evidence.

This might sound like a remarkable trashy book, and in some ways it is, but underneath all the sleaze there’s a decent enough mystery plot. It was good enough to keep me guessing. Although the solution is perhaps just a trifle far-fetched.

Honey has a knack for getting herself into trouble but she a knack for getting herself out of tight spots as well. Being young and pretty also tends to mean that suspects are not as much on their guard as they might be with a Mike Hammer-style PI and Honey uses this to her advantage. Male suspects are too busy trying to figure out how to get her out of her clothes to realise that she has brains as well as looks and that she’s closing the net on them.

A Gun for Honey is sleazy, trashy, amusing, entertaining and generally enjoyable. And by today’s standards very politically incorrect. It’s good dirty fun. Highly recommended if you like the idea of sexy lady PIs.

Honey West: This Girl For Hire

This Girl For Hire, published in 1956, was the first of eleven Honey West crime thrillers written by Gloria and Forrest E. Fickling under the name G. G. Fickling. The Honey West character is probably better known these days from the 1960s Honey West TV series starring Anne Francis in the title role.

The back cover blurb memorably describes Honey West as the nerviest curviest private eye in LA, with the sleuthmanship of Mike Hammer and the measurements of Marilyn Monroe. That gives a pretty accurate picture of the kind of book this is - it’s trashy, pulpy fun.

Honey’s father was a PI who was murdered and Honey then took over the business. She’s not quite a female Mike Hammer but she does her best. She’s not as violent but she has the attitude and she’s sufficiently adept at judo and street fighting to handle herself pretty well. She packs a .32 revolver but she uses her feminine wiles more often than she uses her gun.

When she needs to find out if a bunch of guys are heroin users she needs to get a look at their arms, so she does the obvious thing - she challenges them to a game of strip poker. OK, that’s not what Mike Hammer would do, but he’d probably approve. And since she’s a good card cheat she figures they’ll end up losing their clothes before she does. It almost works, if only she hadn’t drawn that lousy deuce in the last hand. And maybe it would have been a better idea if she’d started off wearing more than one item of clothing.

The case she’s working on involves the sleazy world of network TV. Former matinee idol turned loser Herb Nelson ekes out a living playing bit roles on TV, including the popular Bob Swanson Show. Now he’s convinced that Swanson is trying to kill him so he engages Honey West to keep him alive. She soon discovers that Herb Nelson is not the only one who thinks someone is trying to kill him, and that just about everyone working on the show would like to murder at least one other person involved with the show.

And apparently these TV people do more than just talk about murder. Corpses start to accumulate at an alarming rate. Honey has landed herself a job on the show, as an actress. She can’t act, but with a figure like hers nobody cares if she can act or not. The only trouble is that she might turn out to be the next victim.

The plot is outrageously convoluted and as the body count rises it gets more convoluted.

Honey is not your classic fictional detective. She doesn’t wait for the evidence to mount up. She plays hunches. At one stage or another she manages to suspect every single character in the book. And she’s not the type of detective to keep her hunches to herself - as soon as she suspects someone she comes right out and accuses them. While she breaks most of the rules for fictional detectives one can’t help suspecting that maybe real-life detectives actually operate more like Honey West than Sherlock Holmes. And she’s nothing if not dogged, and she does get there in the end, and gets there before her pal Mark, the homicide cop.

There’s a fair bit of implied, and even overt, sleaze. Honey is definitely attracted to the male of the species. The violence is fairly graphic for its time as well.

This is very much pulp detective fiction. Great literature it ain’t but it’s entertainingly trashy.

Honey West did represent a definite departure for detective fiction. There’d been plenty of female fictional detectives but she is certainly one of the earliest examples of the hardboiled female PI. Well, relatively hardboiled. Honey is a tough cookie but she’s a lady. Having been written in the 50s it doesn’t need to bludgeon us with political correctness but if you’re looking for crime novels featuring a tough capable woman detective and you don’t mind the very pulpy stye you could do worse than check out the Honey West books. This Girl For Hire is good trashy fun.