A REVIEW BY DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


WILL MITCHELL – The Goldfish Murders. Gold Medal #188, paperback original; 1st printing, 1950. Red Seal, UK, pb, 1958.

WILL MITCHELL Goldfish Murders

   Somewhere along about chapter three of this Gold Medal original a character inquires about a sexy showgirl who has been found dead with a goldfish between her ‘lung worts.’ By then you should be well aware you are in the realm of Dan Turner Hollywood Detective more than Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer.

   The hero is NYPD Homicide sleuth Christopher Lash, the son of a legendary police officer with a penchant for quoting his old man. Chris has a tough case on his hands in a series of murders that mix Broadway and the funeral business and involves a series of corpses with that signature goldfish.

   Truth be told, Chris spends almost as much time romancing the screwball showgirl Penny as he does investigating the murder. Penny is the type who has a small dog named Cuspidor, and this is type of book where attractive young women have small dogs with names like Cuspidor who like to chew on visiting detectives’ pants cuffs.

   This one is less Mickey Spillane than Robert Leslie Bellem, but in a forgiving mood it adds up to some fun.

   A few samplings from the book will tell you more than any recitation of the plot ever could.

    “Sweetest pair of knockers I’ve seen in a dog’s age …Milky white and shapely as a pair of butter dish covers. Positively beautiful, I tell you. Ah! And the rosebuds — pure poetry, gentlemen.”
    I hated to interrupt his sermon on the mound …

    Aghast she drew her fur cape tightly across her high firm breasts, lush pouter pigeons …

    “Chris, a woman may reveal her dairy a bit, but she will go to any lengths to conceal her diary.”

    “Maybe she’s up there in the laboratory,” I said. “Come on, let’s go,”
    Regan blocked my path. “Hey, wait a minute. If Jessica is up there in the bathroom, we can’t just bust in on her.”
    “Laboratory, you sap, not lavatory …”

    “I’ve had an antipathy to policemen all my life …”

    “How I hate cutting these beefy babes open from Adam’s apple to pelvis. By the time you get all their organs out you feel like you’ve just completed a five year tour.”

    “It’s only good detectives who get a kick in the pants. The bad ones are always sitting down on the job.”

    “I can’t for the life of me remember what I remembered.”

    A small beaver hat sat jauntily on her head, and under a beaver jacket was a green velvet gown with a neckline that took a near suicidal plunge. It was all of sixty seconds before I looked her in her face.

    “It’s a wonder Benjamin Franklin didn’t tell her to go fly a kite.”

    Penny was sweetness personified in a confection that she said brought out the color of her eyes (it brought out my eyes too, but not the color) …

    “Chris, speak to me, say anything — please, if it’s hydrophobia, at least froth at the mouth …”

    “I’m the only girl in the world who was ever proposed to in a coffin.”

   If you have been wondering where the spicy pulps went to die, now you know. Still in its own way this is fun along the lines of Carter Brown, Bellem, or even some B movie mysteries. At least you get the impression Mitchell meant for it to be almost as funny as it is, and some points have to be given to any writer who gets away with comparing female anatomy to pouter pigeons.

   This seems to be Mitchell’s only book. But then one like this per career is all you really need.

   Should there be a third volume of Bill Pronzini’s paean to alternative classics Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, this one really has to be in consideration. They don’t get much more alternative than this.