Wed 9 Mar 2016
CARTER BROWN – The Coffin Bird. Signet P4394, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1970. Cover by Robert McGinnis.
Private eye Danny Boyd is in Hawaii when this 27th of some 39 recorded case files begins. In the hotel room next door is a drop dead red-haired would-be Australian heiress (see the front cover) who hires him to pose as her third fiancé. The problem she needs to have solved? The first two ended up dead before they made it to the altar.
Were their deaths accidents, or is something else going on? The two of them, Danny Boyd and Marcia Burgess, head off to Australia to find out.
Boyd manages to get beat up once quite severely after he begins to poke his inquisitive nose around, but he’s the kind of guy who gives as well as he gets. He also has his usual way with women in this one, not that the women have any dimension to them beyond that of a Playboy centerfold. They are described largely by the clothing they wear, and then in even more detail by the parts of their anatomy that are not covered by their clothing.
Not that Brown doesn’t try to do more in terms of making at least one of his female characters interesting. It seems that the delectable Marcia needs to be spanked with a leather belt before they go to bed, and there never was any doubt that they would, but this seems rather more unwholesome than I’d prefer to read about.
It’s not much of a case, when it comes down to it, and I suspect that it may be a long while before I tackle another of Danny Boyd’s capers. It ends with a bit of dime store pop-psychology that may impress others more than it did me, or perhaps even myself if the rest of the book before this wasn’t so immodestly uninteresting.
March 9th, 2016 at 10:32 pm
One I haven’t read, and Boyd was my least favorite of Brown’s tecs so that’s likely why.
Boyd was Brown’s Spillanish New York eye and it was never a really good fit. At least the settings are close to Brown’s home though. I’m sorry he didn’t make better use of it.
March 10th, 2016 at 12:35 am
I don’t know if I should be proud of the phrase “immodestly uninteresting” or not, but a check for it on Google brings up this review and nothing else.
I think I’ll keep it.
March 11th, 2016 at 9:44 am
I bought the “carter brown” books for the wonderful Robert McGinnis covers. As David pointed out, the Danny Boyd series was supposed to be “hardboiled.” I liked the Al Wheeler books better.
March 11th, 2016 at 12:30 pm
I like Danny Boyd okay (he of the breath-taking profile), and the series does relocate the CA after awhile. I recall reading and liking this one enough to save it for re-reading. The puzzle aspect of Brown’s books is rarely clever (more often that not ALL of the suspects had something to do with it except for whichever babe ends up in the hero’s arms/bed), but this one stood out because of the Australian setting. The Andy Kane stories are similarly distinguished by their Hong Kong settings (as is The Temple Dogs Guard My Fate), where Brown also lived for awhile.
March 11th, 2016 at 1:15 pm
Like George in Comment #3, I brought this back in 1970 for the McGinnis cover — that and the fact that I was buying almost all of the mystery and detective paperback that were coming out.
I don’t believe I was still reading the Carter Brown’s, though. This one, at least, didn’t seem familiar when I read it last week. As I said in my review, I didn’t particularly enjoy it now, some 45 years later. I don’t know if the flaws I saw in it now would have bothered me as much back then.
March 12th, 2016 at 3:02 pm
I don’t dislike Boyd, but for some reason I was always disappointed when it turned out to be a Boyd and not a Siedlitz, Holman, Wheeler, or someone else. It may be because Brown’s New York seemed second hand and then when Boyd went to California it felt as if it might as well be Holman or Wheeler.
I never took a count but it seemed to me as if after Wheeler Brown wrote more about Boyd than any other sleuth. I know there are only seven Mavis Seidlitz titles and I think only two Andy Kane. Holman comes in third I would suspect in number of titles and I have no idea how many he did with Randy Brooks.
Ironically Anthony Boucher praised Brown’s plots, but I think it was because at the time quite a few writers didn’t really bother much at all with actual suspects and mystery plot and good or bad Brown almost always did. A good many books of the period you knew the bad guy going in and the rest were lifted from either Hammett or Chandler or someone imitating them so if you had read their book you knew how this one would go.
Some were good and some weren’t, but Brown seemed to be doing his own thing which even with a borrowed milieu.
Steve,
You recently reviewed Richard N. Smith’s DEATH B NIMBLE and John B. West’s DEATH ON THE ROCKS, and I think that is the kind of thing you have to compare Brown with to be fair, he isn’t in a class with Ard or Dewey, Brett Halliday, or even Frank and Henry Kane, though he is closer to Johnny Liddell, at least the later one.
March 14th, 2016 at 2:52 pm
I remember the McGinnis covers and the name Carter Brown from my early paperback days, but if I read any Carter Brown it hasn’t stuck. Those days my McGinnis covers were mostly on Donald Hamilton and Don Pendleton novels, and I wish I had hung onto them.