Fri 15 May 2015
A 1001 Midnights Review: JAY FLYNN – A Body for McHugh.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Characters , Reviews[2] Comments
by Art Scott
JAY FLYNN – A Body for McHugh. Avon T-444., paperback original, 1960. MacFadden-Bartell 75-378, paperback, 1966.
This is one entry in a nifty little five book paperback series that Flynn did in the early 19608. McHugh owns a backstreet San Francisco bar, the Door, that serves as the local watering hole for assorted spy types, ours and theirs.
McHugh (no first name is supplied) is one of ours, working for one of those secret agencies tucked away in a Pentagon sub-basement; he periodically takes on assignments messing around in Mexican or Caribbean revolutions, recovering Nazi war prizes, and the like.
Oddly, the books were packaged as if they were typical private-eye novels; consequently they may have failed to find the audience that would best appreciate these neatly crafted action yarns. Matt Helm fans,in particular, will find them right up their street.
In this one, a man is knifed just outside the Door, and a scared young girl, apparently there to meet him, slips out the back way before McHugh (and the FBI and CIA agents hanging around) can get a line on her.
The killings that ensue (some engineered by adept assassin McHugh) have to do with a missing suitcase full of money, the loot from a double-cross-infested operation by a group of Cubans trying to get their wealth out before Castro grabbed it.
The action ranges up and down the California coast, from San Francisco to L.A. to Carmel, with assorted law-enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, and the Mafia mixed into the caper.
The other four books in the series are McHugh (1959), It’s Murder, McHugh (1960), Viva McHugh! (1960), and The Five Faces of Murder (1962). Flynn also wrote a number of nonseries suspense novels, among the best of which are Drink with the Dead (1959), about a bootlegging operation in northern California; and The Action Man (1961), about a heist involving a golf tournament modeled on the one at Pebble Beach.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
Editorial Note: For a long personal profile of Jay Flynn by Bill Pronzini, along with a complete bibliography of the author put together by myself, check out this page on the primary Mystery*File website.
May 16th, 2015 at 12:27 pm
Art is right about this one. If I ever read one of the McHugh books, it was a long time ago. But after reading this review, I’m now convinced that I haven’t. If you’d asked me about this series a couple of days ago, I’d have said McHugh was just another PI, but obviously he wasn’t.
May 16th, 2015 at 6:43 pm
Steve,
I’m in the same boat, I thought it was yet another generic pi.
The set up of the bar reminds me of Ross Thomas MacCorkle and Padillo books since the latter operated a bar. I saw VIVA MCHUGH advertised quite a bit, but I don’t think I ever saw one of these on a newsstand which seems odd since the newsstand I went to separated books by publisher and usually had a solid Avon section and this was the period I started reading heavily in the field.