Sun 17 Jan 2016
BILL S. BALLINGER – Heist Me Higher. Signet P3799, paperback original, March 1969.
Over his long writing career (24 books listed in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, and more than a few dozen TV and movie credits on IMDb), Bill Ballinger came up with only two series characters: a Chicago PI by the name of Barr Breed (two appearances) and Joaquin Hawks, who was a Native American agent for the CIA whose adventures took place in Southeast Asia.
The detective of record in Heist Me Higher is another PI, this time a fellow named Bryce Patch, who owns his own security firm. The detective aspect of the story is only so-so, but there’s no reason why Patch couldn’t have made subsequent appearances. Ballinger is especially good at describing people and places, and the conversations and dialogue that take place are as good as any other PI writer of the day. Combined with an adequate amount of action, some of it in the bedroom (very discreetly), keeps the reader flipping through the book in nothing flat. At least it did me.
Patch has two cases on his hands in this one. The first is that of an armored car heist — no surprise there — in which a guard and a good friend of his gets killed. The second is brought to him by a good-looking lady who wants her ex-husband found to have some papers signed. I will not tell you whether or not the two cases are in any other way connected.
What I will tell you is that Bryce Patch is a sex magnet of some great magnitude. As the way the story works out, he shares his bedroom with three lovely ladies on successive nights, one at a time, and at story’s end he he faced with happy prospect of four of them in his penthouse apartment at one time, two of them return visits from the previous three. This is what you may very well refer to as a male fantasy.
I wish the detective work had been presented better, however. The clues are there, sort of, and the way Patch described it at the end, he had to have been working on instinct alone; either that or a slick combination of hunches and guesswork, which is probably the same thing. Nonetheless, the book is short (125 pages), and as a low ambition crime caper, it is fun to read.
January 18th, 2016 at 7:55 am
I read this in 1977, apparently, in a heavy-duty period of reading a lot of paperback originals. I have no memory of it at all. The year before I had read his Hawks book, THE SPY AT ANGKOR WAT, which I found much more memorable indeed, probably for the setting as much as anything else.
January 18th, 2016 at 2:22 pm
Jeff
I discovered from an online index that you wrote a review of this book for Mystery FANcier way back then. I’ll see if I can’t find the actual issue itself. I’ll let you know if I do!
January 18th, 2016 at 8:11 am
Ballinger always struck me as a writer who got hold of a few intriguing thoughts (PORTRAIT IN SMOKE and THE LONGEST SECOND for example) but lacked the talent to exploit them properly.
January 18th, 2016 at 2:49 pm
Here’s Jeff’s review, as reprinted from the July 1977 issue of The MYSTERY FANcier. Thanks, Jeff, for giving me permission, and without even seeing it. Until now:
HEIST ME HIGHER starts out well enough, with Bryce Patch witnessing a payroll robbery at Neo-Electronics Corporation and setting out to find the crooks (he is the head of the American Investigation Bureau).
But the story starts to go downhill fast when Leda Claysmith arrives to persuade Bryce to find her ex-husband.Soon every woman B. P. meet is dragging him off to bed. Ballinger obviously mean this to be humorous, but it kills all interest in the mystery.
Even the dialogue deteriorates: “I’m itching for a chance to heat you up — all of you! Right in the guts!”
When a couple of other people are murdered, Patch quickly finds the answers and wraps up the case, but by then the only reaction is … who cares?
January 18th, 2016 at 6:33 pm
Ballinger could write, but he tended to lack ambition or something. He never really seemed to care to develop what he started.
January 19th, 2016 at 9:05 am
Thanks for taking the trouble, Steve. As I said yesterday, I do remember the other Ballinger book I read because of the Angkor Wat connection. I’m not alone in finding that place fascinating, and I remember decent use being made of it in the book.