RICHARD HIMMEL – The Rich and the Damned. Gold Medal s735, paperback original; 1st printing, January 1958.

   Of the eight novels Richard Himmel wrote for Gold Medal, five of them recounted the adventures of Johnny Maguire, a hard-nosed Chicago-based lawyer who grew up in a working class, blue collar neighborhood. If we can take The Rich and the Damned as being representative of the earlier books, none of which I’ve read at any time less than 40 years ago, he’s still touchy about his background if anyone brings it up.

   I’m not sure how representative this book is, though. It’s the last of the five, and even though the blurb on the front cover says, “Johnny Maguire is back, and once again mixed up with molls, and murder,” there are no molls in this, not a one, and no murder, either. In fact, there not even a crime in this book, even though (from the titles) all of the earlier books had him tackling crime of all kinds and all corners.

   The closest that anything that resembles a crime in The Rich and the Dammed takes place is when a hoodlum from Maguire’s youth has him beaten up in a futile attempt to make him reveal the terms of a industrial mogul’s will after he dies.

   In therein lies the story. Maguire has been a sometimes bedmate with the dead man’s daughter, but she’s not the only person set to inherit. One son (or stepson) is of the prodigal variety, and has been disowned. The other is a scholarly wimp (my word) who suddenly finds some legs to stand on, thanks to a new lady friend, whose eyes are probably more on the father’s fortune. The other daughter has been sheltered from the world, particularly men and it takes all of Maguire’s will power to resist when she begs him to show her what she has been missing.

   The mobster is working on behalf of a competitor trying to take over the company, and the conditions of the will are important. Surprisingly to everyone, the will leaves equal portions of the stock to each of the four, even though it is Rourke, Maguire’s red-headed girl friend, who has ever shown any interest in the company, and in fact it is she who has been running the firm in recent years, having learned the ropes by starting at the bottom.

   And Maguire, respected by all four of the beneficiaries of the will, is the one caught in the middle, and it is his working class background that formulates his philosophies toward the problems of the wealthy and well-heeled. Does he take advantage of the situation and make himself one of them, one of the rich and powerful? Or does he stick to his basic roots and let them go on squabbling and their not-so-merry way?

   Believe it or not, Richard Himmel was a writer good enough to make all of this interesting, very much so. Johnny Maguire makes a decision, and the book ends. What happens from there, we’ll never know. This is the last anyone has heard anything about Johnny Maguire.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:

    The Johnny Maguire series —

I’ll Find You. Gold Medal, 1950.
The Chinese Keyhole. Gold Medal, 1951.
I Have Gloria Kirby. Gold Medal, 1951.
Two Deaths Must Die. Gold Medal, 1954,
The Rich and the Damned. Gold Medal, 1958.

   There is little to be learned about Johnny Maguire on the Internet. I found a review of I’ll Find You on Bill Crider’s blog, and not much else. I don’t think Bill will mind if I quote from his comments, one line only: “Gangsters are involved, and there’s a murder, but this isn’t really a crime novel. In its own twisted way, it’s a love story in the Gold Medal vein, with the emphasis on speed, with lots of raw emotion, with plenty of melodrama.” Given that statement, maybe I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was at the lack of criminal activity in this book also.

   As for the author himself, I found an online obituary for Richard Himmel to be very interesting. Besides being a writer, Himmel was for most of his life one of the country’s best known interior designers. Truth, believe it or not, is often stranger than fiction.