Wed 13 Apr 2016
PAUL KRUGER – A Bullet for a Blonde. Vince Latimer #1. Dell First Edition A160; paperback original; 1st printing, June 1958.
Although author Paul Kruger has ten entries in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, this is the only one of them in which PI Vince Latimer is the detective of record. The setting is unknown. Al lists it as the “US West,” and that’s my best guess, too.
There’s no particular reason why Latimer couldn’t have made a second appearance. Sometimes the nature of a case makes it all but certain it’s one and done, but that’s not at all true here. It’s just an ordinary PI novel, with most if not all of the standard ingredients, well written but for the most part easily forgotten once you’re done.
As the title suggests, the victim is a blonde, one who shows up drunk on Latimer’s office doorstep one night, telling him someone is going to kill her. It sounds like a vodka dream to him, so he bundles her into his car and drops her off at her home. Next day he gets a call from her sister. She wants to hire Latimer. She thinks her sister is having an affair with her husband. Latimer goes to check out the trysting place, and there he finds the girl dead.
The only aspect of the mystery that raises it above standard fare is the ending, which is a doozie. Latimer builds a solid case against two people before settling on a third, which is the correct one. It isn’t easy writing a detective novel in which this happens. The drawback being that it takes lots and lots of last chapter explanation to untangle all of the threads of the plot. I didn’t mind, but your standard PI novel reader might.
One other thing. “Paul Kruger” was in reality Roberta Elizabeth Sebenthall, 1917-1979, and if it means anything to you, you could have fooled me. The writing is told in first person, with all of the conventional leering at women and all of their curves in the right places, and while the one bedroom scene stays outside the bedroom, it does happen, as does one other that’s even more offstage, but when you think about it later, you have to realize that… well, I’ll have to be content in saying that men do not have a monopoly on PI novels in which hardboiledness (if that’s a word) comes into play in one fashion or another.
April 13th, 2016 at 5:06 pm
I read this one and several other Paul Kruger books about 40 years ago. I knew that Kruger was a woman, but I can’t remember how I found out. I believe that Cap’n Bob Napier said he could tell it after reading two pages, but I’m not that sharp. I must have found out some other way. Kruger wrote at least one book, Bedroom Alibi, for a sleaze publisher, Newsstand Library, and it turns up on eBay frequently. I’ve been tempted to buy it, but the price is never right.
April 13th, 2016 at 8:11 pm
“Paul Kruger” was a pseudonym employed by Roberta Elizabeth Sebenthal, who also wrote a series of novels featuring Colorado attorney-cum-private eye Phil Kramer.
https://www.thrillingdetective.com/eyes/kramer.html
Cheers,
Jeff
April 13th, 2016 at 8:22 pm
I haven’t read any of the Phil Kramer books, though if they came out in paperback, which I know at least some of them did, then I have them. I don’t know why I’ve passed them by all these years.
Sebenthal wasn’t the only woman who ever wrote hardboiled PI fiction under aliases or men’s names. I’m thinking first of M(ary) V(iolet) Heberden, who besides using her initials, also wrote as Charles L. Leonard. There must be more.
I knew that “Kruger” was really female, but even though I was trying to tell if I could tell, I couldn’t tell. Maybe because I *did* know, and that threw me off, but I don’t think so.
April 14th, 2016 at 2:54 pm
Steve,
Well, don’t forget Leigh Brackett, whose NO GOOD FROM A CORPSE is one of the best Chandleresque novels or Craig Rice though I think she only did one PI novel, and that under a pseudonym. Dorothy Hughes is certainly hardboiled; though no private eyes.
Margaret Millar’s Tom Aragon stories don’t feature a private eye, but at least are borderline and of course Gloria Fickling was half of the Honey West team, though I don’t know how that team divided up the writing.
April 14th, 2016 at 3:20 pm
The Brackett is one of my favorites also. Too bad she didn’t do more in the same vein if not the same PI.
April 14th, 2016 at 6:56 pm
Dolores Hitchens. Her SLEEP WITH SLANDER may not be as Chandleresque hardboiled as NO GOOD FROM A CORPSE, but as I still maintain that it’s the best traditional male PI novel written by a woman. And that opinion is in no way meant to demean the Brackett, which I also greatly admire.
April 14th, 2016 at 8:27 pm
Yes, you’ve mentioned the Hitchens book before, Bill, and ever since, I’ve been looking forward to reading it. I have the book, maybe even in hardcover, but where it is, I don’t know. I may have to buy another, just to have a copy to read. (My shelves filled up maybe 30 years ago. Everything coming in since has been stored in boxes.)
April 14th, 2016 at 9:04 pm
Bill,
Thanks, Hitchens is the name I was banging my head with my palm trying to think of.