Sat 23 Apr 2016
JEROME BARRY – Murder Is No Accident. Dell D369, paperback; 1st printing, May 1960. Originally published in hardcover by Doubleday Crime Club, 1957, as Extreme License. Cover art by Ted Coconis.
Jerome Barry was a prolific writer of stories, vignettes and poetry for the slicks of the 1930s and early 40s, magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and Liberty. His first hardcover mystery was Murder with Your Malted, the first of three detective novels featuring a soda jerk named Chick Varney who does the investigative chores.
I’ve not read any of those, but it’s my impression that they were lighthearted in nature, in a sophisticated Manhattan sort of way. Whether this is a correct assessment or not, this book, Murder Is No Accident, the paperback title, was a book that definitely takes itself seriously. I don’t believe there’s more than a half-hearted chuckle to be had anywhere along the way, if that much.
The story can be broken into three distinct parts. The first 75 pages are as dark in tone and noirish in style as anything written by Cornell Woolrich, while the middle portion of the book turns into an adolescent (and not nearly as interesting) coming-of-age story before its muddles its way into a conclusion that’s totally conventional in presentation and about as convincing.
What this is is the story of a 17-year-old boy who’s hired by a man who has tired of his mistress’s demands, and so he is looking around for a way to rid himself of her. Young Joey Tripp, he decides, will be the means. But Joey, as chance would have it, survives the crash Chester Baggot cooks up on his behalf, as well as the lady’s, leaving a dead hitchhiker in his place.
On the run, Joey holes up in a old-fashioned rest home in upstate New York, where he finds an unusual assortment of patients there for various reasons, one an older but still attractive woman with a glint in her eye for Joey, who is interested in return, but he’s more attracted to the young girl who is in charge of the facility.
But murder has a way of coming back to haunt you, meaning in this case both Joey and Baggot, who is briefly blackmailed, a sidebar that seems to go nowhere, but then it all wraps up with a fight to the death on the edge of a cliff.
I liked the first 75 pages. The rest of the book runs out of steam after a while, but in 1960 it was probably well worth the 35¢ cover price, especially with that eye-catching Coconis cover.
April 23rd, 2016 at 7:12 pm
They did love their suggestively salacious (younger would be JD older woman) sleaze back then. Today a book about a book that wasn’t intended as a serious novel about a teen being seduced by an older woman would be quite a different matter — likely still publishable, but it would have to be written from a different POV.
It always amazes me that the 1950’s had the lowest incidence of juvenile delinquency of the 20th Century largely do to economic good times and the highest incidence of JD fiction and films.
April 23rd, 2016 at 7:50 pm
The seduction scene is the high point of the middle and rather uninteresting section of the book, that I grant you, but overall it’s rather irrelevant to the main thrust of the book. I haven’t gone back to look, but it can’t be more than two pages long, and it’s interrupted before anything really interesting happens.
You may be right, though. For some readers, it could have been the high point of the entire book. Salaciousness is well known to be only a state of mind.
April 23rd, 2016 at 8:01 pm
Keep in mind THE MOON IS BLUE, a totally pointless comedy film hardly worth sitting through despite William Holden and David Niven was a major hit only because the word “virgin” was used on screen, and that reference to Nick Charles erection was a major selling point of THE THIN MAN with ads telling readers what chapter and page to look for it on.
Two pages of sleaze was enough for any book, even if it was sleazus interuptus.