RICHARD FOSTER – Bier for a Chaser. Pete Draco #1. Gold Medal #899, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1959.

   The only thing I found interesting about this book is its cover. There is little else to it. PI Pete Draco, from Miami Beach, is brash and ballsy but noticeably weaker when it comes to brainpower, and somehow beautiful babe simply flock to his bedroom. I’d be hard pressed to say why.

   A syndicate kingpin has dies, and nearly a million dollars in gunrunning money has disappeared. (This was written back in the day when a guy named Castro was a folk hero.) This is boozy male fantasy fiction at either its worst or its finest — it is hard to say which.

–Reprinted and slightly revised from Mystery*File #17, November 1989.


Bibliographic Note: Richard Foster was but one of many pen names of Kendell Foster Crossen, best known perhaps under his M. E. Chaber byline for a long series of books about insurance investigator Milo March. Crossen wrote a total of seven mysteries as Foster, but only one was another Pete Draco adventure, that being Too Late for Mourning (Gold Medal, 1960).