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.

Carter Brown's The Bump and Grind Murders

The Bump and Grind Murders is a 1964 Carter Brown crime thriller.

The phenomenally popular and prolific English-born Australian pulp writer Carter Brown created a dozen or so series characters, one of the lesser-known being female private eye Mavis Seidlitz who featured in a dozen books between 1955 and 1974.

Brown could be described as a Hardboiled Lite writer with a slightly tongue-in-cheek approach. On the basis of The Bump and Grind Murders I’d say that the Mavis Seidlitz novels were among his most lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek. And also among the sleaziest.

While all fictional lady PIs owe a debt to Honey West I’d have to say that Mavis Seidlitz bears very very little resemblance to Honey West. Honey is tough, resourceful, brave and competent and she’s a smart cookie. Mavis isn’t very tough, she’s accident-prone, she’s ditzy and she’s staggeringly incompetent. The Honey West novels combine solid PI action with touches of humour and a huge dash of sexiness. The Bump and Grind Murders has a reasonably solid plot but it’s played mostly for laughs.

Mavis makes every mistake a PI could make and invents some brand new mistakes that nobody else had ever thought of.

The only thing Mavis and Honey West have in common is an extraordinary tendency to end up without any clothes on.

Mavis is a partner in a detective agency with Johnny Rio. The agency is hired by a nerdy guy named Hatchik to protect his girlfriend. The girlfriend, Irma, is a stripper at the Club Berlin. Hatchik has tried to persuade Irma to give up her stripping job but Irma takes her art very seriously. The Club Berlin’s gimmick is that everything is German-themed and the strippers use German-sounding stage names. Irma is Irma Der Bosen, which apparently means Irma the Bosom. Once Mavis gets a look at Irma’s superstructure she decides that the name is extraordinarily appropriate.

Mavis will of course go undercover at the club, as a stripper. Her act involves having her clothes fall off accidentally. She has a partner, a guy called Casey, who helps to ensure that her clothes fall off.

There is tension between the girls at the club. The manager is slightly sinister and there’s a really sinister guy with a scar hanging around. Then of course there’s a murder, but Irma is not the victim.

The plot gets a bit crazy and that’s partly due to Mavis’s amazing ability to misunderstand everything that is going on. She discovers that the club is being used as a front by a spy ring and that there’s an undercover CIA agent working there.

The strip club setting works well, adding some seedy glamour.

Brown perhaps makes Mavis (who is the first-person narrator) just a bit too ditzy but this does the advantage that we’re dealing with a kind of unreliable narrator -if it’s possible to misunderstand something and leap to the wrong conclusions Mavis will do just that. That makes the plot a bit more fun. And Mavis can be amusing at times.

Towards the end Brown throws in a bunch of plot twists and the fact that the narrator doesn’t have a clue what’s going on around her does increase the surprise factor a little.

Classical strip-tease was of course all about the tease and the sleaze factor in this book is a bit like that - it isn’t anywhere near as sleazy as we expect to to be, even when Mavis gets naked.

Carter Brown had zero literary pretensions. His books were pure entertainment, a bit trashy, but always fun. The Bump and Grind Murders is recommended.

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.

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.

Milton K. Ozaki’s The Scented Flesh

Milton K. Ozaki’s The Scented Flesh was published in 1951.

Milton K. Ozaki (1913-1989) was an American writer born in Wisconsin. His father was Japanese. He wrote a couple of dozen crime novels between 1946 and 1960.

The Scented Flesh opens in classic hardboiled style. Private eye Carl Good wakes up next to a beautiful blonde. This dame has real class, and a look around her apartment indicates she has real money as well. That puzzles Carl. If she has class why would she have gone to bed with him? Dames like her don’t sleep with two-bit private eyes. There’s a used flash bulb on the floor, which worries Carl a little. Another thing that bothers Carl is that the blonde is dead. He doesn’t like the implications of that. He certainly didn’t kill her but it looks like someone is trying to make it look that way.

It would help if he could remember how he ended up in the dame’s apartment but the previous night is a complete blank. Carl is no drunk. He figures someone slipped him a mickey.

Eventually he remembers that he’d been in a dive called The Shamrock. Maybe one of the girls there remembers seeing him. Flo remembers him. She thought he was a pretty nice guy.

Another thing that Carl figures out is that he’s making somebody nervous. Nervous enough to try to blow him up with a hand grenade. There are whispers of a shake-up in the world of organised crime but Carl can’t see how that could connect with a routine missing persons case. Which is all that this started out to be. An old guy from Iowa hired him to find a girl, Sylvia Shepherd. Maybe she’s his daughter. Carl doesn’t care. He was offered two hundred bucks to find her so he took the case.

Now everyone is telling him that the smart thing to do is to drop the case. Carl thinks that would be the smart thing to do as well. He has no personal stake in this and it sounds like some very dangerous people are mixed up in it, the kinds of people a smart private eye steers well clear of. But Carl is stubborn.

The sleaze level gradually increases. It’s a crooked town. But Carl has been around long enough to take that for granted. He’s a big boy.

There are a lot of women in this case. Lots of naked women. Some dead, some alive. Some of them are strippers. Some seem respectable. Carl thinks the strippers are more trustworthy than the respectable dames. Maybe he’s right.

Maybe he should talk to the organised crime boss? A crazy idea but it might give him a clue. And it’s not like Carl has any crusading ideas about clearing up crime and corruption. He just wants to solve the case and collect his two hundred bucks and go back to his normal routine. A routine that doesn’t involve waking up in bed with dead blondes.

It’s a fairly routine plot but it’s serviceable enough. Carl gets himself deeper and deeper into something he still doesn’t understand and that offers plenty of potential for action and narrow escapes from danger.

There’s plenty of hardboiled atmosphere but this is definitely not noir fiction.

The Scented Flesh is a fairly average but very competent hardboiled PI thriller. As long as you don’t approach it with unrealistically high expectations it’s enjoyable. Recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this title with Owen Dudley’s rather good Run If You Can in a two-novel edition.

G.G. Fickling's Dig a Dead Doll

Before Cathy Gale, before Emma Peel, before Modesty Blaise, there was Honey West. Honey West was the original tough cookie action heroine. She made her debut in 1957 and featured in eleven novels by the husband and wife writing team Gloria and Forest Fickling, writing under the name G.G. Fickling. Dig a Dead Doll, published in 1960, is the seventh of the Honey West private eye thrillers.

Honey West’s father was a private eye, until a case went wrong and he was murdered. Honey took over the running of the West Detective Agency. That doesn’t mean she took over the business side. She is the Honey West Detective Agency. She handles the cases herself. Her father taught her the ropes. She has a private investigator’s licence. She has a gun and she knows how to use it. She has been taught how to handle herself in unarmed combat. Honey is tough, resourceful and very stubborn. She’s a good PI.

Honey is also all woman. She is young, blonde, very pretty and very feminine.

The Honey West private eye thrillers are hardboiled, with touches of humour, they’re fairly violent and quite sleazy. In other words they’re everything that PI thrillers should be.

The book begins with a very large very mean guy trying to kill Honey. He has something else in mind for her before he kills her. Honey is half-naked and fighting for her life and her virtue. Things are looking grim, until she remembers the bull. Thank goodness for the bull. The guy attacking her is big and mean but he’s not as big and mean as that bull.

Honey is in a bullfighting arena in Mexico. It all started with a telephone call from Pete. Honey and Pete had been childhood sweethearts. Then Pete moved away. He moved to Mexico, to pursue his dream of becoming a matador. Now he wants Honey’s help. When the first boy who kissed you asks for help you don’t hesitate. Honey heads for Tijuana.

It looks like that dream might have cost Pete his life. Honey saw him gored by the bull. No-one could survive that. But there are things that don’t add up.

The bull-fighting business in Tijuana involves more than just bull-fighting. Drugs, for instance. And then there’s Vicaro, the impresario. He has a reputation for taking quite an interest in handsome young matadors. An interest that is not strictly professional.

Honey also discovers some of the more colourful night spots, where pretty girls dance. The dancing involves a lot of high kicks. The girls don’t bother with panties. It’s a night spot that caters for those with exotic sexual tastes.

As I said earlier the Honey West books are very sleazy. Honey is a nice girl but she has a lot of bad luck with clothing. Her clothes just seem to come off at the most opportune moments. She is also not a great believer in brassieres, which is rather daring for a girl with a 38-inch bust. In this adventure her clothes come off a lot. A girl does feel undignified hanging naked upside-down from a tree, but it’s all in a day’s work for a lady PI.

Honey has reason to believe that a man known as Zingo is the leader of some kind of criminal conspiracy but while everyone knows of Zingo no-one knows his identity. The conspiracy may concern drugs but it may also involve corrupt practices in the bull-fighting arena. Mexico’s leading matador, Rafael, may know something. Pete’s young protégé Carlos may know something. Quite a few people may know certain things but Honey has no idea which of them she can trust. And she has people in aeroplanes firing machine-guns at her. In fact she has machine-guns fired at her from all directions.

There’s plenty of action, not always involving guns. Action at sea and in seedy night-clubs and in the bull ring. Honey loses her clothing on several further occasions.

The plot is solid with some decent twists although it does at one point make use of a certain plot device that I have always found unconvincing. That’s a minor nit-pick. On the whole the plot works just fine.

The style is lively (Honey acts as first-person narrator) and there’s lots of fairly hardboiled dialogue. The pacing is pleasingly frenetic.

Honey is a delightful heroine. She’s not an unrealistic wish-fulfilment super-woman. She’s just quick-thinking and very determined and she keeps her head in a crisis and people like to help her because she’s cute and bubbly.

The Honey West books are enormous amounts of stylish sleazy action-packed fun. They’re essential reading for anyone who loves sexy lady private eyes, and what right-thinking doesn’t? Dig a Dead Doll is 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.

Carter Brown's Where Did Charity Go?

Australian author Alan Geoffrey Yates (1923-1985) wrote more than two hundred novels as well as around seventy-five novellas under the name Carter Brown. His books sold well over a hundred million copies. He created several series characters, including Hollywood troubleshooter/private eye Rick Holman who features in thirty-five books. Where Did Charity Go? is a 1970 entry in the Rick Holman series.

It begins with Rick being told he’s about to be offered a job and if he knows what’s good for him he won’t take it. He gets a beating to make sure the message gets through.

He takes the job anyway. Big-time Hollywood star Earl Raymond has mislaid his daughter Charity. He wants her found. The story told to Rick by Raymond isn’t consistent with the story told to him by Raymond’s personal assistant Sarah Manning. And the stories keep changing. Maybe Charity just ran away from home. Maybe she was kidnapped. Maybe it’s a fake kidnapping. Maybe it’s a real kidnapping. Rick doesn’t like the sound of any of it but five grand with the promise of another five grand if he’s successful is enough to persuade him to take the case anyway.

It’s a complicated family situation. Earl Raymond divorced his wife Mary to marry glamorous movie star Claudia Deane. Rick has four women to to deal with - the first Mrs Raymond, Claudia Deane, Sarah Manning and Charity. And then Daniela enters the picture. That makes five women. And there are all sorts of jealousies and romantic and sexual complications.

Rick can’t trust any of these women. He can’t trust Earl Raymond either. Perhaps Rick would have been wise to avoid sleeping with any of these women, but he sleeps with at least three of them. Rick is that kind of guy.

Every time Rick starts to figure things out he discovers something that doesn’t add up. Like the dead body at the cabin. In fact nothing really adds up.

The problem is that no-one seems to have a motive that would explain anything that has happened. It’s only when motives start to emerge that Rick finally starts to see some chance of solving the case. And the motives could be motives for murder, or just as easily be motives for double-crosses.

The plot is solid enough with reasonable twists.

Rick isn’t really a typical hardboiled protagonist. He’s not a two-fisted hero type. He carries a gun but he prefers to use his brains to get himself out of trouble, rather than his gun or his fists. He doesn’t care too much about justice or any of that kind of thing and he hopes to keep the police in the dark for as long as possible. He’s not crooked but he does like money. And he does like the ladies. Seducing Rick is not exactly hard work for a woman.

Rick is not a tortured hero or an anti-hero. He’s an easy-going guy and he enjoys his work, especially if attractive women are involved. He’s no alcoholic but he likes a drink. He’s not what you’d call a model member of a society so he’s no sleazebag and he’s definitely not a loser.

This is typical Carter Brown stuff. It ain’t literature. It’s very pulpy and it belongs towards the trashy end of the pulp spectrum. Brown however understands this type of writing perfectly. He includes all the right ingredients and he keeps things moving.

Where Did Charity Go? was never going to win critical plaudits but it delivers the pulp goods. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed a number of Carter Brown’s Lieutenant Al Wheeler crime thrillers - The Stripper, No Harp for My Angel, Booty for a Babe and Eve it's Extortion. They’re all trashy but highly entertaining.

Carter Brown’s The Savage Salome

Carter Brown’s hardboiled PI thriller The Savage Salome was published in 1961.

Carter Brown was a hugely successful English-born Australian pulp crime writer. He wrote 215 novels and 75 novellas and sold around 120 million books. He’s probably best-known for the Lieutenant Al Wheeler hardboiled cop thrillers but he created a number of other series characters including private eye Danny Boyd. The Savage Salome was the tenth of his 33 Danny Boyd novels.

Danny Boyd is hired by opera singer Donna Alberta to find the man who murdered her beloved Niki. Niki was her dog. Danny thinks this sounds nuts but he gets more interested when he finds out that money is no object to this crazy soprano lady. He gets even more interested when he finds out that if he takes the case he’ll get tickets to see her in a new production of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Danny knows nothing of opera but apparently in this production Salome will do the Dance of the Seven Veils and she’ll remove all seven veils. The first thing Danny noticed about Donna Alberta is that she has everything a woman should have and it’s all in the right places and in the right quantities. Danny figures that he’ll find watching her shed that final veil very artistically satisfying.

Then a man rather than a dog gets murdered. The murderer has to be one of a small group of people connected with this opera. Soprano Donna Alberta, mezzo-soprano Margot Lynn, tenor Rex Tybolt and impresario Earl Harvey are all possible suspects. Donna Alberta’s manager Kasplin and her private secretary Helen Mills are equally plausible suspects. Not to mention Harvey’s weird sister Marge and his trigger-happy goon Benny.

There’s a whole complicated web of sexual jealousies. There are jilted lovers, and there are thwarted lovers. Helen Mills for example is hopelessly in love with Donna Alberta.

There’s also a blackmail angle.

Danny is fired from the case and then rehired by a different client. Danny is pretty sure he knows the identity of the murderer. Maybe he’s too sure. And he can’t find any solid evidence. The second murder is more puzzling.

Danny is a pretty cocky guy. He expects women to fall at his feet, and often they do. He’s tough enough wen he needs to be but he’s a guy who would prefer to talk his way out of trouble rather than use his fists. Danny’s one great passion in life is women. Especially if they’re well-developed in the bust department. It’s possible that Danny would be well advised to spend more time thinking about the case and less time thinking about dames.

Danny is also pretty hip. He’s the first person narrator and his slightly beat-influenced way of expressing himself is a bit jarring at first but after a while it starts to work.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly noir about this tale but it is hardboiled and there are plenty of wisecracks. The operatic setting is fun. Personally I’m inordinately fond of mysteries with show business, movie business or theatrical settings.

The plot is serviceable enough.

You can always rely on a Carter Brown story to be entertaining. It has to be admitted that his novels are rather trashy. He was an author with zero literary ambitions. He aimed to write books that people would buy, and they did buy them in huge quantities.

Personally I like trashy slightly sleazy PI thrillers and I enjoyed this one. The Savage Salome is highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several of the Al Wheeler novels (all of which are fun) - Eve it's Extortion, Booty for a Babe, No Harp for My Angel and The Stripper.

Fletcher Flora's Leave Her To Hell

Leave Her To Hell is a private eye thriller by Fletcher Flora, published in 1958 by Avon. It’s an expanded version of a short story, Loose Ends, published that year in Manhunt magazine.

Fletcher Flora (1914-1968) is an often overlooked American pulp writer of the 50s and 60s. He wrote crime fiction, sleaze fiction and historical fiction. His output of short stories for various magazines was prodigious.

Percy Hand is a private detective with a reputation for being, by private detective standards, ethical. Faith Salem wants to hire him. Faith is the mistress of a rich man, Graham Markley, and she’s about to become his wife. Before she marries him she’d like to know what happened to his third wife, Constance. Faith and Constance had once shared an apartment but that’s not the reason for her interest. She knows the story of what happened to Constance and she’s not entirely satisfied with it.

Constance had been having an affair with a man named Regis Lawler. One evening Constance and Regis disappeared and neither has been heard from since. Of course it is assumed that they ran away together. Faith feels that the story leaves a few loose ends dangling and Percy Hand has to agree with her.

Regis Lawler’s brother Silas has a shady past and now he’s at best marginally respectable. He runs a gambling club and the games are reputed to be honest. He offers Percy five grand to drop the case, Percy refuses and gets beaten up. But he won’t drop the case.

Graham Markley also offers him money to drop the case, although this time the offer is not followed by a beating.

Percy gets some slightly interesting information from Silas’s mistress Robin. He gets a lot more from her than that. They spend a pleasant night together in bed.

He has picked up something that is not quite a lead but at least it’s the hint of a lead. There was a hit-run case shortly before Constance and Regis disappeared and someone was interested in that case and Percy wonders why. Most of all Percy wonders why a very disreputable private eye named Colly Alder is tailing him. Percy is even more puzzled when Colly asks him for a favour. It all seems quite innocent but it is very curious.

Percy decides to pay a visit to the nearby town of Amity. He has no idea whether he’ll find anything there but the name of that town just keeps popping up. He certainly finds something there.

Percy Hand is a likeable hero. He’s not a tough guy. He’s not lacking in guts but fistfights and gunfights are not his style at all. He’s more at home sitting and thinking things through than he is in a brawl.

This is only very very marginally noir fiction. It is moderately hardboiled. Essentially it’s just a murder mystery. You will probably find yourself being fairly convinced that a murder has taken place and you might have your suspicions as to the killer’s identity but while there has certainly been a crime it’s not quite the crime you expected it to be. And the interest here lies not in the crime itself or the identity of the criminal but in the reasons the crime was committed.

I would not call this a fair-play mystery but there are a few psychological clues.

My view is that when the solution to a murder mystery is revealed the most important thing is that that solution should be psychologically plausible. The reader should feel that the various players in the drama behaved in ways that were consistent with what we have been told about their personalities. That’s certainly the case with Leave Her To Hell. Despite one slightly far-fetched element the solution is entirely satisfying.

Flora’s prose is pleasing and witty and he has a good ear for dialogue.

Leave Her To Hell is a fine slightly hardboiled private eye murder mystery. Highly recommended.

Leave Her To Hell has been reprinted by Stark House in a Fletcher Flora triple-header paperback edition.

I’ve reviewed another Fetcher Flora novel, the lighthearted witty Killing Cousins.

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.

Mickey Spillane’s The Snake

The Snake, published in 1964, is the eighth of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels. It is a kind of sequel to The Girl Hunters and you absolutely have to read The Girl Hunters before reading The Snake.

Some further explanation is however required. Between 1947 and 1952 Spillane wrote six Mike Hammer novels which were huge bestsellers. For the next ten years he wrote very little, and he wrote no Hammer stories during that period. In 1962 he revived the Hammer series with The Girl Hunters.

At the beginning of The Girl Hunters Mike is a drunken bum living on the streets. After a case went very badly wrong he crawled inside a bottle and stayed there for seven years. Mike is convinced that he made a terrible mistake that got Velda killed. Velda was more than just his secretary. She was more like a partner. She had a private investigator’s licence herself. And she was the great love of Mike’s life. With Velda dead he had nothing to live for.

Until the day he discovered an extremely interesting fact. Velda may be alive. If she is then Mike has to find her, which means he has to pick himself up out of the gutter. Which he does.

At the beginning of The Snake Mike is reunited with Velda. But she’s not alone. She’s taken in a girl. A young woman actually, named Sue, but she seems more like a girl. A very frightened girl. She thinks her adoptive father killed her mother and is trying to kill her. Sue has run away.

Her adoptive father is Sim Torrance and he’s running for governor.

Within minutes of being reunited with Velda there’s a shoot-out which leaves two men dead and one badly hurt. It’s clear that it was an attempted gang hit, but the identity of the target is the first puzzle Mike will have to unravel. Was he the target, or was it Velda, or was it Sue?

And there are more murder attempts.

Mike figures he needs to know a bit more about the Torrance family. Sim Torrance seems squeaky-clean but Sue’s mother, now long since deceased, had an interesting history.

There’s also the possibility that someone wants revenge on Torrance, possibly as a result of his activities as D.A. years ago. There are a few possible suspects. Mike is also interested in the history of the guys he shot.

Mike is particularly interested in a robbery that took place many years earlier. The robbery went badly wrong, but Mike is curious about the circumstances. He suspects that that bungled robbery may have started a series of events that are now bearing fatal fruit.

It’s a pretty decent plot. What’s interesting is that Hammer is far from infallible, and has several narrow escapes which are due more to luck than anything else. Hammer isn’t quite as quick as he used to be. But he hasn’t lost any of his steely determination.

The Mike Hammer of The Girl Hunters and The Snake differs slightly from the Hammer of the early novels. He is now a man out of his time. The world changed during his seven years of alcoholic oblivion and to some extent it’s passed him by. He’s out of touch with the way the rackets operate in this new world. A lot of the people he used to know are no longer around. He now finds himself in the 1960s and he’s not entirely comfortable. He’s also a bit more interested in the idea of finding emotional stability. It’s a realistic change and it makes this new variant of Hammer rather interesting.

The Girl Hunters is a kind of redemption story, and in The Snake Mike is still trying to put the pieces of his life back together. He is also very concerned not to make mistakes, since he still believes that it was a mistake on his part that led to seven years of nightmare for both Velda and himself. Hammer is now a man more aware of consequences.

It cannot be emphasised too strongly that if you’re new to Spillane you must read the first six Mike Hammer books before attempting to read the later books. You have to understand the man he was in order to understand the slightly different man he becomes.

The Snake is a fine hardboiled mystery and is highly recommended with the above caveats in mind.

Nick Quarry's The Girl With No Place To Hide

Marvin H. Albert (1924-1996) was an American writer of pulp crime and adventure novels, some written under his own name and others under a host of pseudonyms. The Girl With No Place To Hide, published in 1959, was the second of his six Jake Barrow private eye thrillers written under the name Nick Quarry.

Hardbitten PI Jake Barrow sees a girl being beaten up and rescues her. She wants somewhere to hide out and thinks that Jake’s apartment would be a good place. The girl is Angela and she tells Jake that a couple of guys are trying to kill her and that they’ve already killed some guy named Ernie. Jake gets a call and he has to go out to attend to a case. He tells Angela to stay put.

Jake discovers he’s been decoyed out of the apartment. By the time he gets back Angela has gone. Maybe she just took a powder and maybe somebody snatched her.

Jake has no idea who this Ernie character is but the next day he finds out that a guy named Ernie really did turn up dead in an alleyway. Jake figures the matter is worth looking into. He did after all promise to protect Angela.

The trail leads Jake into the worlds of high fashion and photography and the murky world of high-stakes gambling. He also uncovers some juicy domestic dramas that might be motives for murder. And there might be a connection to another much earlier murder.

There are quite a few dames mixed up in this case. One of the dames, Lavinia, is a knife-thrower. That’s her profession. She worked a knife-throwing act in a carny. Another woman who seems to be mixed up in the case is Nel. She had been Ernie’s secretary and now someone is trying to kill her but she claims to know nothing that would cause someone to want to bump her off.

Of more immediate concern to Jake is the fact that someone is trying to bump him off.

There’s a decent well worked-out plot here with plenty of suspects and plenty of possible motives.

There’s also plenty of action with some moderately graphic (by 1959 standards) violence. And there’s as much sleazy paranoid noir atmosphere as anyone could reasonably demand. And you get quite a bit of hardboiled dialogue.

In this type of fiction the key was to get a good balance between plot and atmosphere and the author manages that very effectively in this instance.

Jake is definitely a tough guy PI. He most definitely does not like to be pushed around. He’s a pretty good guy overall and he doesn’t have much liking for people who go around terrorising, and murdering, women. In fact he doesn’t have much time for murderers. He’s not a Boy Scout. He’s not an outrageous womaniser but if a woman is willing then he won’t say no.

He likes money, he likes it a lot, but he likes to earn it honestly. He’s not self-righteous about it but he does have ethics. He does the right thing but he doesn’t make a song and dance about it.

Jake is a likeable enough and reasonably colourful hero.

Most of the women have the potential to turn out to be either innocent victims, innocent bystanders or scheming femmes fatales and Quarry keeps us guessing about every one of them.

It’s not exactly ground-breaking but overall this is a well-crafted noirish private eye thriller which provides very solid entertainment. Highly recommended. It's been reprinted by Black Gat Books.

I’ve reviewed another of the Jake Barrow PI novels, No Chance in Hell (which is also very good), and also one of the thrillers he wrote as Ian McAlister, Driscoll’s Diamonds (a terrific book).

Frank Kane’s Time To Prey

Time To Prey is a 1960 entry in Frank Kane’s long-running series of Johnny Liddell private eye thrillers. Frank Kane (1912-1968) has never been considered as one of the greats of American hardboiled fiction but he gained respect as a consistently solid and entertaining pulpster.

Time To Prey starts with a girl named Blossom Lee passing an envelope to private eye Johnny Liddell. Then Liddell gets into a fist fight. He’s always getting into fist fights. He’s that kind of guy.

He has no idea why the girl passed him the envelope and he has no idea what was in it since a couple of hoods took it away from him. But when the girl turns up dead Johnny decides to interest himself in the case. She was a client. Well, not actually a client, but almost a client. And Johnny doesn’t like it when pretty girls get murdered.

He’s even more keen to get involved when he discovers that the Treasury Department is interested in the case. Apparently it’s connected with a nefarious commie plot to infiltrate Red Chinese agents intro America. Johnny doesn’t like commies.

The case seems to be running into a brick wall until Johnny comes up with a clever plan to get things moving. What this case needs is another corpse and he thinks he knows a way to arrange it.

He certainly manages to get things moving, in a big way.

Johnny Liddell comes across as very much a Mike Hammer clone, but more cold-blooded and less ethical. Yes, he’s a guy who makes Mike Hammer look like a Boy Scout and a liberal bleeding heart. Being responsible for cold-blooded murder doesn’t bother Johnny, as long as it’s cold-blooded murder of commies. And Johnny is in a way working for the US Government. Cold-blooded murder is definitely A-OK if it’s a commie and you’re working for the US Government.

Johnny is a guy who knows he’s one of the good guys and if bad guys need killing then the best thing to do is to kill them, or arrange things so they get killed.

Trying to emulate Mickey Spillane certainly made solid commercial sense in 1960 but Kane is just not quite in the Spillane league. His writing doesn’t have Spillane’s manic energy. And while not everybody approves of Spillane or Mike Hammer the fact is that Hammer was more than just a thug. He had slightly more complex motivations and he had an actual emotional life. You might not like Hammer but the character had a certain reality. Spillane was a first-rate writer. Kane was a second-tier writer. Emulating a successful formula is not as easy as it looks.

That’s not to suggest that Kane was a poor writer. He was very competent and entertaining but he lacked that extra something that writers such as Spillane had.

Apart from his total lack of ethics there’s not much in Johnny Liddell’s personality to make him stand out. He’s basically a stock-standard tough guy hero.

And you could say the same about the novel itself - there’s very little to distinguish it from any other hardboiled PI novel. It is however competently plotted, it’s well-written, fast-paced and action-packed. I wouldn’t call it sleazy but Kane does add a few sexy moments.

As long as your expectations haven’t been set too high Time To Prey is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Frank Kane’s 1957 interesting hardboiled novel about corruption in the music business, The Living End.

Robert Martin's Little Sister

Robert Martin had a moderately successful career as a pulp writer in the 40s and writing paperback originals in the 50. His career unfortunately hit the skids in the early 60s. He wrote crime novels under his own name and using the pseudonym Lee Roberts. Little Sister was published in 1952, under the Lee Roberts name.

It opens in classic private eye novel style. A PI named Brice (who narrates the tale) arrives at Vivian Prosper’s house. She wants to hire him. Two things are immediately obvious. Firstly, these people are seriously rich. Secondly, Vivian Prosper is the most gorgeous hunk of woman Brice has ever laid eyes on. Vivian is worried about her seventeen-year-old sister Linda. Vivian wants to stop Linda from marrying. Or rather, she wants to hire Brice to find a way to prevent the marriage. It’s a dirty job but Brice is happy to do it.

There are however complications. Such as the dead guy in the trunk of Linda’s car. He’s not just dead, he’s been murdered. Linda arrived home very drunk, which was not unusual, but Brice could see that she wasn’t just drunk. She had been drugged.

Vivian had hoped to get rid of the body to avoid any unpleasantness with the police but the police become involved when a doctor has to be called. The doctor has to be called because Linda’s drug overdose almost proves fatal. Vivian still wants to hire Brice, but now she wants to hire him to prove that Linda had no connection with the murder.

And then somebody drugs Brice.

Brice has a few leads, but one of them leads to another corpse.

There are a number of possible motives. The Prospers’ financial situation is complex and there’s a lot of money involved and murder would be a convenient way for some family members to get their hands on that money. Non-family members might also benefit financially from a well-timed murder.

Then there’s jealousy. Vivian is jealous of Linda, and Linda is jealous of Vivian but for different reasons. And men are a major problem for both Prosper women.

Brice isn’t quite a conventional fictional PI. He’s not that much of a tough guy but you wouldn’t want to underestimate him. He takes being a private detective slightly more seriously than he’s prepared to admit. He’s no genius detective but he knows his job. He gets on very well with the police and he never withholds information from them. The PI with an uneasy or hostile relationship with the cops is such a cliché that it’s quite refreshing to come across one who goes out of his way to help them.

There’s a moderately hardboiled ambience to the story. There’s also some humour. There is a very funny scene in which a woman from whom Brice is trying to get information gets very very excited by the fact that she’s talking to a real private eye, just like in the movies. She practically begs him to seduce her.

There’s also some startling and unexpected cynicism. Brice is a fictional PI who is basically a decent regular guy and basically law-abiding, he’s no thug, but he’s also rather lacking in a sensitive side. He’s not quite your stereotypical tough guy with a warm sensitive caring side.

As for sex, he’s not an outrageous womaniser but if sex is on offer he’ll take it.

The plot is pretty sound, with lots of suspects all of whom seem quite capable of being the killer. The climax, with the killer giving a long confession which fills in all the blank spots in the plot, is maybe a bit contrived but this was a technique that was quite common in traditional puzzle-plot mysteries and this book is structurally closer to the puzzle-plot mystery genre than to the typical American private eye thriller.

There’s certainly plenty of tension in the closing pages. It really does seem like the killer holds all the cards and must triumph. And of course in the noir private eye genre you can never be sure if you’re going to get a downbeat ending or a happy ending. This is a story which could end either way.

It might be a bit of a stretch to describe this book as noir fiction but it does have two femmes fatales. They’re both very sexy and very dangerous and either might well be capable of killing. And they’re both ambiguous enough that they could equally plausibly turn out to be guilty or innocent.

There’s nothing especially to mark this out as a great private eye thriller but it’s very competently executed and it’s a very entertaining read. Recommended.

Little Sister has been reprinted by Stark House under their Black Gat Books imprint.

Dolores Hitchens' Strip for Murder

Julia Clara Catherine Maria Dolores Robins Birk Olsen Hitchens (1907-1973) wrote mysteries initially under the name D.B. Olsen. With her second husband Bert Hitchens, who was a railway detective, she wrote five railway mystery thrillers including the excellent End of the Line (1957). She also wrote mysteries under the name Dolores Hitchens, including her 1958 novella (really more a short novel than a novella) Strip for Murder.

Stark House have reprinted Strip for Murder and since it’s only a novella they’ve thrown in a couple of short stories as a bonus.

Strip for Murder begins with a guy named Bellew getting poison-pen letters. He runs a theatrical agency but in fact the entertainers he represents are strippers. Sometimes they get sent on jobs to private parties. Bellew is a quiet little guy who has no carnal interest in the girls he represents. Such things no longer interest him.

He thinks the threatening letters may be linked to an incident that occurred twenty years earlier. He’d sent a girl named Janie Gordon to a lodge party and she’d been raped. Afterwards she committed suicide. Bellew has always felt vaguely guilty although it was an incident that could not have been predicted.

Bellew asks Warne for help. Warne is an insurance investigator with an office across the hall from Bellew’s. Warne does a bit of private detective work. Warne does some checking up on Janie Gordon’s parents. Her father is still alive, he’s very very old and he’s extremely rich. Which is strange because he used to be extremely poor. Warne is convinced that it would be worth finding out where the old boy got all his money.

The old man has a bodyguard, which is also odd. The bodyguard is young, fit, tough and mean. He’s itching for a chance to beat up people like Warne who start nosing around. Warne isn’t too worried. He’s handled punks before. Old dogs tend to know some rather nasty tricks.

What worries Bellew about the letters is that they contain a prediction that what happened to Janie Gordon is about to happen again.

Warne becomes steadily more interested in the case. He also becomes steadily more interested in Bellew’s secretary. He’d never taken much notice of her previously. He hadn’t noticed how attractive she was.

Bellew is worried because he’s about to send another girl to a private party. The party is organised by a club that claims to be a group of patriots but Bellew thinks they’re more interested in naked girls than in saving the country. Bellew isn’t bothered by their hypocrisy. He takes such things for granted in his business. And Candy Carroll knows how to look after herself. Candy has just flown in from Vegas and she’s staying with another stripper, Chickie Anderson.

What happened twenty years earlier doesn’t happen again, not exactly, but something does happen. Now the police are interested. Hard-nosed reporter Fred Robinson is interested as well. He smells a story.

This is not really a hardboiled or a noir story. It’s a straightforward mystery. Warne isn’t your typical tough guy private detective but he’s tough enough. Private detective work is not really his field but he’s a good insurance investigator with an instinct that tells Im when someone is telling him lies. And he figures he’s definitely being lied to.

The plot struck me as being just a little contrived. Hitchens uses a certain method to throw us off the scent and it’s a method about which I have mixed feelings. Is the plot fair-play? I guess it is. The solution works, even with the plot contrivances.

The first of the short stories is If You See This Woman. Junie was brought up in a home for intellectually disabled girls. The girl were taught how to care for babies and were then placed with married couples as cheap live-in nannies. Junie looks after Mr and Mrs Arnold’s year-old baby Petey. One day Junie overhears something which she takes literally, and she then decides that Petey is in danger and that she must save him. If you can accept the slightly far-fetched premise (it’s hard to believe that anyone could take things as literally as Junie does) then it’s an interesting emotionally affecting story which pays off quite nicely.

The second story is Blueprint for Murder. Old Mr Harvod tells his nephew about a murder he committed and the nephew realises he now has a plan for the perfect murder. Quite a clever story.

Strip for Murder isn’t quite a neglected classic of the mystery genre but it’s enjoyable enough, Hitchens writes pretty well and the sleazy background adds interest (although the sleaze quotient is at best moderate). The two short stories are a little offbeat. So this book is worth a look.

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.

Peter Cheyney's The Urgent Hangman

Peter Cheyney (1896-1951) was an Englishman who had a very successful career writing American-style pulp thrillers, beginning in 1936. Cheyney hadn’t been to America but that didn’t matter. He was familiar with the America of the movies and the pulps and he assumed (correctly) that that was the flavour that readers wanted. He is best remembered for his crime/spy thrillers (such as Dames Don’t Care and Never a Dull Moment) involving FBI agent Lemmy Caution. He also wrote a series of novels dealing with a home-grown pulp creation, private eye Slim Callaghan, set in the seedier sleazier underside of London. The Urgent Hangman, published in 1938, was the first of the Slim Callaghan thrillers.

Slim Callaghan is a private detective and his business is not going well. He has seven-and-sixpence in his pocket and that represents his entire worldly wealth. He owns one pair of shoes and they’re falling apart. He hasn’t eaten all day. And, much more seriously, he has run out of cigarettes.

So his new client arrives just in time (and she arrives very late at night). As a bonus she’s young and gorgeous. Her name is Cynthis Meraulton. She spins him a very unlikely tale. Her very rich stepfather cannot live much longer. His fortune will be divided between Cynthis and the old boy’s five nephews. One of the nephews, Willie, is her husband-to-be. Willie is honest and reliable. His four brothers are penniless losers and probably crooks. Cynthis has been warned that she is in danger and has been advised to consult Slim Callaghan.

On that very night Cynthis’s stepfather is murdered. Cynthis is likely to be a suspect. She did not get on with her stepfather. In fact Slim is sure that she is the murderess. Nonetheless he sets out to prove her with a fake alibi. He later comes to feel that this was a mistake. Not that Slim has any qualms about providing fake alibis - his ethical standards are very very flexible. His reasons for doing so in this case are quite simple. Cynthis is a gorgeous woman.

Of course Cynthis might not be guilty. The four ne’er-do-well Meraulton brothers all had motives for killing the old man as well.

Slim concocts an incredibly elaborate plan to mislead the police. He also blackmails all of the Meraulton brothers and amasses a very tidy sum of money. But what exactly are his intentions? Detective Inspector Gringall isn’t sure. He disapproves of Slim but has a grudging respect for him. Whatever Slim is up to it’s bound to be clever. Not necessarily honest, but clever.

Old man Meraulton had made a new will, leaving everything to Cynthis. That will appears to be the key to the puzzle, and it is, but not in the obvious way.

Slim weaves an intricate web in which not only the various members of the Meraulton family are entangled but also their various mistresses and associates. Detective Inspector Gringall also seems to be caught in the web. Slim has an objective in mind but he is the only one with any idea what that objective might be.

Cheyney’s style is a kind of English hardboiled. It’s very very pulpy but it’s lively and energetic and fun.

Slim is a great character. He’s incredibly devious, he’s ruthless, he has no respect for the law and he may well be no better than a criminal but we can’t help liking him. His total disrespect for all the things that we are supposed to respect is endearing. And he’s a pretty tough guy. He can take a beating and come up smiling.

There’s no shortage of red herrings. Is it fairly clued? Since it’s not a traditional puzzle-plot mystery there’s no reason why the author should play fair but in a way he does. There’s a vital clue that we should spot but Cheyney makes sure that there’s so much going on and that we’re so involved with Slim’s scheming that we probably won’t stop long enough to notice its significance. I don’t think the author can be accused of pulling a solution out of a hat like a conjuror with a rabbit.

The Urgent Hangman has an air of seediness, sleaze, trashiness and cheapness. These are features, not bugs. It’s fine pulpy fun. Highly recommended.