Thu 1 Oct 2009
Reviewed by Marvin Lachman: WILLIAM P. McGIVERN – Very Cold for May.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
by Marvin Lachman
WILLIAM P. McGIVERN – Very Cold for May. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1950. Reprint paperback: Pocket 786, April 1951. Trade paperback: Penguin, March 1987.
Punny titles are among the earmarks of writers who got their start at the pulps, as did William P. McGivern, and his Very Cold for May is an example, once we learn that the name of the corpse is May Laval.
The setting is McGivern’s home town, Chicago. (He would later in his career write primarily of Philadelphia, New York, and California.) May had been planning to publish a “tell-all” diary, and public relations expert Jake Harrison is hired to protect his friend Dan Riordan.
When May’s lips and pen are permanently sealed, he turns detective to protect himself as well as his friend.
If this book isn’t McGivern at his peak (as he is in Odds Against Tomorrow and The Big Heat), it is nonetheless a lively, tightly plotted book, and Penguin deserves thanks for reprinting it in their new Classic Crime series.
October 1st, 2009 at 1:11 am
Not McGivern’s best, but even minor McGivern is good.
I always wondered if Very Cold for May wasn’t somehow a nod to the last line of Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely, the one that ends “not as far as Velma?” Probably not, but for some reason it struck me as similar.
No relation, but Nicholas Freeling did write one called Not As Far as Velma, so it isn’t entirely impossible.
October 1st, 2009 at 1:04 pm
David
You might be right about the Velma connection. I have a copy of MAY boxed away in the basement, but I’ve never read it. Nor have I read anything by McGivern himself in a good long while. He was a darned good writer.
I enjoy doing this blog the way I am now and running all of these old reviews, but it’s also getting more and more frustrating!
— Steve
October 1st, 2009 at 5:58 pm
We think of McGivern in terms of The Big Heat, Rogue Cop, and The Odds Against Tomorrow, but he also wrote a couple of good novels in the Ambler vein, a damn good war novel, and a good international caper novel The Caper of the Golden Bulls along the lines of To Catch a Thief.
Alas the movie wasn’t that great though Stephen Boyd was ideally cast as the hero.
If you can find it Caper features an intricate art heist against the background of the running of the bulls in Pamplona.