Sun 14 Jun 2009
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: STEWART STERLING – Where There’s Smoke.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
William F. Deeck
STEWART STERLING – Where There’s Smoke.
J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1946. Hardcover reprint: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, 4-in1 edition, April 1947. Paperback reprint: Dell 275, mapback edition, 1949.
Saying that the Dell mapback has a great cover and leaving it at that is a temptation. But our noble editor has a strange notion that his readers should get their money’s worth, so ever onward and downward.
A two-alarm fire at the Brockhurst Theater leads to the discovery of a body burned to death, although the chap would also have died shortly from drinking denatured alcohol. The fire was deliberately set. Whoever was after the poor guy, and apparently. he had nothing but enemies, wasn’t taking any chances.
Fire Marshal Ben Pedley investigates this fire and a later fire and is involved in a third one. He also —
— Is “barrelling” up “sleet greased” Broadway in New York at a “screaming” seventy miles per hour worrying about the equipment responding to the second alarm because “no driver could get up to speed” on those streets. He then bears down on the gas.
— Nearly dies in the first fire rescuing a damsel in distress.
— Is conked over the head and tied up while searching the dead man’s apartment. (A killer, who later tries to do away with Pedley, does the conking and tieing. Why he doesn’t get it over with then is only conjecture, but it’s probably because there was still four fifths of the novel yet to come.)
— Nearly dies when the floor collapses under him while he is investigating a fire in progress.
— Lets a prisoner drive his car, rather than cuff the guy. (“Better this way,” Pedley says smugly and erroneously. The prisoner wrecks the car at fifty miles per hour. He escapes unscathed, while Pedley gets a bruised thigh.)
— Is shot at in a lawyer’s office by the guy who didn’t kill him at the apartment. I’m taking the author’s word for it here. I’m still trying to figure out how and why it happened the way he says it happened.
— Is nearly drowned in the pool at a Turkish bath by the guy who didn’t. try to kill him at the apartment and failed to kill him at the lawyer’s office. .
— Is laid out by a blow from a revolver butt to the bridge of his nose.
— Rescues again, more or less, the same damsel in distress from another fire and comes close to being burned alive.
One doesn’t expect a novel to be completely realistic, but there ought to be some connection with the real world.
Fire-fighting buffs should stick to Dennis Smith.
June 15th, 2009 at 11:55 am
Knowing Sterling’s pulp origins I enjoyed this one more than this, but grant all the points made. Logic wasn’t always a strong point of the pulp masters, not when the plot needed to move along. I like the Ben Pedley books, but for what they are.
Sterling’s other series sleuths were hotel detective Gil Vine and as Spencer Dean private eye Don Cadee, both good, if minor, entries in the hardboiled stakes.
As for any connection with reality that was often pretty hard to come by in the pulp school Sterling learned in where movement meant more than plot and action more than logic. I know some of the Pedley novels ran in the pulps but I don’t think they originated there, but still that’s where Sterling got his training, and here, at least, it shows.
June 15th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
I believe I sense Bill’s quiet sense of humor at work here.
I think if you take almost any fast-paced mystery adventure and break it down as Bill did in this review, you can make it sound as far-fetched as this one — and I’ll bet he had a lot of fun writing it.
Richard Moore once did an article for me on Stewart Sterling, and in it he included a brief review of SMOKE.
https://mysteryfile.com/Sterling/Detectives.html
One brief excerpt: “The most notable aspect of the Fire Marshal Pedley novels is the pace. I love a writer who knows how to keep a novel moving, and Sterling is one of the best at this I’ve ever read.”
June 16th, 2009 at 1:49 am
I’m probably more forgiving of Sterling because he wrote the very good screenplay for the film of Craig Rice’s Having a Wonderful Crime.
He also penned at least some of the Black Bat novels that featured crusading DA Tony Quinn (at the time Anthony Quinn was a very minor B actor usually as heavies) who at night donned the garb of the Black Bat to strike fear into the bad guys who were a cowardly and … sorry, wrong Bat (actually the two are coincidental neither influencing the other).
I know at least some of the Ben Pedley novels ran in the pulps but I think they were reprinted from the hardcover editions much like Brett Halliday’s Michael Shayne and Kurt Steel’s Hank Heyer. In that way even John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie got into the pulps.
The Pedley novels were well reviewed for the most part, though as I said, I couldn’t really argue with any of the points made. They just didn’t bother me. That sort of thing was a staple of the hardboiled school and still is to some extent today.
Poor Philip Marlowe’s brain must have been nothing but mush and scar tissue as many times as he got whacked on the skull and dived into that black pool that formed at his feet, and sleuths like Marlowe, Slim Callaghan, and Craig Rice’s the Justus’s and John J. Malone would have been in the county home drying out with the screaming DT’s if they really drank that much. In their own way the hardboiled school was as much mush and nonsense as the most contrived of the Golden Age classics. But they did move — you can’t say they didn’t move.