Mon 14 May 2012
Reviewed by Marv Lachman: HUGH PENTECOST – Remember to Kill Me.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[2] Comments
HUGH PENTECOST – Remember to Kill Me. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1984. Worldwide, paperback, 1988.
Longevity is one of the strong points of Judson Philips, who was a sports reporter while a student at Columbia University where he was a contemporary of Cornell Woolrich and Jacques Barzun in the early 1920s.
He’s been writing ever since, under his own name and the more famous pseudonym of Hugh Pentecost, with hundreds of magazine stories in the “pulps” and the “slicks” plus over a hundred novels since his first in 1936.
Never a great literary stylist, Philips-Pentecost is often not readable, especially when his plot is weak. On the other hand, considering his prolificity, he has done some very good work, and one of his best recent Pentecost novels, Remember to Kill Me, has recently been reprinted by Worldwide Library in paperback.
In a far from new plot device, terrorists take over the luxury Beaumont Hotel, holding hostages and planting bombs throughout the building. The Pentecost nuts-and-bolts prose works beautifully here as the suspense builds up while Pierre Chambrun tries to resolve matters without loss of life.
The growth in books about what the television networks call “hostage situations” has led to this new sub-genre of the mystery, which I’ll call “howdoit,” depending upon how (if at all) the authorities will end a siege without loss of life. Remember to Kill Me is one of the best and most suspenseful of this new breed.
Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1989.
[UPDATE] 05-14-12. Judson Philips died in 1989, at the age of 86, with one book published after his death. Pierre Chambrun, one of his most popular characters, appeared in 22 novels and one short story collection. For more about the author, his Wikipedia entry can be found here, and his page on the Golden Age of Detection wiki is here.
May 15th, 2012 at 7:32 am
I have always found Pentecost/Phillips very readable, with the one exception being his first novel RED WAR (written in collaboration). He easily transferred pulp sensibilities to his novels and wrote for the moment. His Julian Quist books about a “mod” PR man and those of John Jericho, the artist with a social conscience, are firmly rooted in time and may well be considered horribly dated, but the writing still flows easily and enjoyably. Pentecost and other popular mystery writers of his time (George Harmon Coxe, Baynard Kendrick, Aaron Marc Stein, etc.) deserve at least a mini-revival, IMHO.
May 15th, 2012 at 8:33 am
Jerry
I agree. All four authors (Pentecost/Philips, Coxe, Kendrick, Stein/Bagby/Stone) were extremely popular in their day and there isn’t one of them that should be as forgotten as they are. The problem, as you say, is that their work is thought of as terribly dated today. But not by me. For me, a good bonus for reading old mysteries is that they’re like small time machines that allow you to go back and see for yourself what life was like at the time the book was written.
I could go into that a lot more, and I’m sure I have on many occasions. But if the question is, will there be a revival of mysteries from the 50s through 80s any time soon? I’d like to think so. Publishers such as Rue Morgue Press have been mining the 30s and 40s era quite effectively. There’s a good chance that the time will come for mysteries for the 50s, 60s and 70s — not the major publishers, of course, but in terms of ebooks and specialty outfits, I’m hopeful.. I don’t see why not.