WADE MILLER – Calamity Fair. Farrar Straus & Co., hardcover, 1950. Signet #843, paperback, January 1951; Signet #1270; 2nd printing 1956. Harper Perennial, trade paperback, 1993.

   I was prepared to like this one more than I did, even in spite of Chapter One which is essentially a prologue, and as such essentially unnecessary. Sometimes they work, more often they don’t, and this is one in the latter category.

   The PI in this book is Max Thursday, the fourth of six recorded adventures. The scene is San Diego, which is described in enough detail to make the reader (me) feel at home there. The crime: an organized gang of blackmailers. Thursday’s client: Irene Whitney, she says, meeting him in a house which is not hers, and what she wants him to do is get back a stack of gambling IOU’s before her husband finds out.

   And once on the case, that is Thursday’s only concern. Very little of his personal life is brought up. In fact, he may as well have none. He is on the go from page one and does not stop until page 160 of the Signet paperback edition.

   Problems, as I saw them: In the course of events Thursday meets a lot of people, some of them women and most of those are very seductive. Some more than others. Combined with the intense pace throughout the book, it is often difficult to keep them straight, as many of them, those who aren’t killed early on, pop up again later, sometimes quite unexpectedly.

   But what bothered me more is the tenuous way that the primary villain, as he (or she) turns out to be, is brought into the case. Very strange, I thought at the time, and as I finished the book, I thought, even stranger. But how else could he (or she) have been brought into it? I have no answer for that.

    Although he makes a point of not carrying a gun, at least in this book, Max Thursday is a tough guy through and through, tough and tenacious. He’s also rather smart at putting two and two together, too, though when I got four, Thursday sometimes got five. Or in other words, he was slightly ahead of me for much of the way.

   All in all, though, I’d rather a book read that way than the other way around. Not quite as good as I expected, but still good.