J. L. POTTER – …Or Murder for Free. Jeff Tyler/Loafalong #2. Chicago Paperback House A-104, paperback original, 1962. Wildside Press, trade paperback, 2018.

   I will never forgive this writer for his middle initial being an L. instead of a C., because it ruins a perfect one sentence review.

   Yes, this book is sausage.

   And yet, this second novel in the Jeff Tyler/Loafalong series almost perfectly mirrors what John D. MacDonald would do three years later with his beach bum salvage expert Travis McGee. This book only goes to prove its the delivery and not the idea, because this is not JDM or McGee. This isn’t even William Fuller’s Brad Dolan. At least Philip Wylie’s Crunch and Des caught fish once in a while.

   As boat bum heroes go Jeff Tyler is beached.

   His boat is the Loafalong if I didn’t mention it. God knows he does endlessly.

   Maybe it’s because he gives the damn boat equal credit in every other sentence. Can you imagine the Busted Flush getting credit on the cover next to McGee and over Meyer? This guy loves his 84 foot boat and he is not going to let you forget it.

   He loves that stupid pun name too. Frankly it doesn’t work very well in print. It just doesn’t pay off on the written page. It’s prime thud ear stuff.

   It’s the kind of boat name a retired insurance adjuster gives his fishing boat, not the kind of name a dashing tough semi-private eye salvage expert gives his working boat.

   Busted Flush is clever, but JDM doesn’t beat you over the head with it. They aren’t the Travis McGee/Busted Flush series.

   You know the old joke about how the Gothic genre is basically a girl gets house plot?

   This is a guy owns dreamboat genre.

   Every other paragraph…

   Potter is the kind of guy who repeats a punchline until you just want to scream.

   Did I mention there were four or five of these?

   To give the guy credit, he isn’t awful. He does well with some of the boating stuff, a nice little passage about navigating a river is oddly shown on the back cover instead of an action or sexy passage, but it is well done. He’s pretty good on diving too. His biography shows he had experience as a seaman and a Navy Frogman. A lot more of that and a lot less of tired tough guy stuff would make this better.

   An editor might have done something with J. L. Potter. Not a lot, but something.

   So Jeff and his crewman Red are cruising along when they spot a raft. Inside is a dead young man, and a barely alive nearly naked young woman suffering from sunburn and exposure. The raft is from the Volstok, a private vessel.

   Tyler administers first aid, calls the Coast Guard, gets roped in to getting the girl to help in New Orleans , and calls a good buddy to report he is going for salvage on the Volstok.

   It turns out there were valuable jewels on the Volstok. There was a robbery that went wrong, people died, and the dying young man with a bullet in him and the girl got away in the lifeboat.

   Save that isn’t the story the captain of the Volstok is telling.

   Things get rough. Everyone is lying, which is private eye writing 101.

   Here his his terribly overwritten version of the Philip Marlowe black pool:

   I’m guessing Chicago Paperback House didn’t employ editors or were really into Jackson Pollock and splashes of color on too broad a canvas. This is Readers Digest How to Develop a More Colorful Vocabulary stuff.

   Last time I was knocked in the head and passed out, I just fell forward.

   I guess I’m just not colorful. Or maybe he thought he was getting a penny a word.

   We get another colorful awakening from being knocked out, but he does spare us the rainbow vomiting.

   Small favors.

   He’s not very good at the tough guy monologues:

   
   â€œContributing to Girl Scout cookies?” What, the bad guy bakes?

   Of course he is warned off by an old friend since the mob is involved:

   How does that Hammett line go about the cheaper the punk, the gaudier the patter?

   Some sixty thousand words later of a lot of tough guy posing and half digested Mickey Spillane monologues later we find out what was really going on all the lies are sorted out, some people get shot and our hero gets the girl and the reward, neither much worth writing home about, much less writing a novel.

   At the finale after a fairly bloody ending his crew washes down the Loafalong before setting sail even though one of their own has a bullet in him saving them. Got to get your priorities straight. Swamp down the boat then sail for help.

   It’s the boat, stupid. Pardon me, the Loafalong. I think I went almost a paragraph with only mentioning its name once. In Potter’s world you could be shot at dawn for that.

   I know nothing about Chicago Paperback House. Frankly this looks and reads like vanity press stuff, poorly edited with poor production, but then what kind of masochist would publish four or five vanity press books?

   Maybe I’m being too hard on the guy. Maybe the crimson and yellow black meanies are on my back as I plunge forward into this review.

   I read this.

   I fell down.

   I may just stay down.

   I’ve been beaten into submission. I never got knocked down in the ring, but on this one I’m throwing in the towel.

   I’m just gonna loaf along to bed now and contribute to some Girl Scout cookies.
   

      The Jeff Tyler series —

Jambalaya Loverman. Newsstand Library, 1961.
Kill, Sweet Charity-Kill. Chicago Paperback House, 1962.
…Or Murder for Free. Chicago Paperback House. 1962.
Room at the Bottom. Chicago Paperback House, 1962.