JOHN McPARTLAND – Big Red’s Daughter. Gold Medal 354, paperback original, November 1953. Macfadden, paperback, 1968. Black Curtain Press, softcover, POD, 2013. Also: Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2017, 2-in-1 edition with Tokyo Doll (added March 2018).

   She was one beautiful girl. Her body was graceful without effort. Her hair was a tiger gold, natural and lovely, her face was that of somebody’s pretty young sister grown up to be a woman. (page 9)

   Her name is Wild Kearny, and for young Jim Work, fresh out of the war in Korea and attending a small college in southern California, it is love at first sight. There are two problems, though, besides the young and hip crowd of friends she hangs out with, and the first is the man she is with, a tough guy named Buddy Brown, who is apparently a good friend, and as happenstance would have it, he makes quick work of Jim Work in a couple of very short rounds of fisticuffs.

   Not the best impression to make on a first meeting, but Wild Kearney must see something in Jim Work who tells the story, because it is not Buddy Brown she takes to the airport to meet her father flying in from the East Coast. No, it is Jim Work whom she introduces to her father as her current live-in boy friend, a guy she has met only four hours earlier.

   And her father is the second problem: Broadway Red Kearny, last of the big gamblers, a honest and tough headline-making fellow whom you know does not want just anyone making hay with his daughter. Ever meet the father of the woman you love for the first time? Double that, or quadruple it, and you’ll know how Jim Work feels.

   This all happens with the space of 22 pages, and to tell you the truth, it’s the best part, but the rest of the book is no slouch ether. There’s a murder involved, and while Buddy Brown may be the killer, it is Jim Work who is accused, locked up, and who with the help of a magician friend in the same cell, makes his escape, only to confront Buddy Brown again, and this time the tables are turned, which merely makes Jim Work’s predicament all the worse.

   Only this time he has Wild Kearny on his side.

   The story is plagued with what seems like gigantic coincidences, but somehow or another, McPartland, a writer with a smooth and easy way with words, pulls all of the threads together and more or less makes a coherent whole of them, I think.

   It would make one heck of a movie, that’s for sure. From the cover, I’d say that Robert Mitchum might have made a good choice to play Jim Work, a young Robert Mitchum, though, and I’d to qualify that to say it would work only if you could ever picture a young Robert Mitchum as a serious-minded college student.

   Take a look at that cover again. I’ll let you decide who should play Wild Kearny, if you’d care to.