Tue 3 May 2016
THOMAS B. DEWEY – Don’t Cry for Long. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1964. Pocket, paperback; 1st printing, March 1966.
I posted a review here last October of one of Dewey’s Pete Schofield books, and it was not a very positive one, I’m sorry to say. The good news is that Don’t Cry for Me, the 10th of 17 books in his Chicago-based PI “Mac” series, is as far on the plus side as Nude in Nevada was on the minus side.
There’s no long buildup to the case that Mac is by default given to handle. The murder of a young girl’s bodyguard occurs on page 9 (in reality the third page of the story) and all of the ensuing action takes place in no more than two or three day’s time.
The girl’s father is a Congressman, which means he and therefore his daughter has many enemies. but Mac suspects that the killing is more personal than that.
Along the way Mac meets a woman, the girl’s no-nonsense chaperon who does not flinch an inch in her duties along those lines, and who may become the woman in Mac’s life. One of the threads of concern to the reader is whether or not she will still be that woman by the time the book ends.
Dewey’s prose in this book is terse and hard-boiled, more like Hammett than Chandler, in my opinion, but as a person Mac cares more, and in so doing resembles some of the characters in Chandler’s books more than he does any of the leading characters in Hammett’s. The fact that I’m doing any such comparisons with either author means that really enjoyed this one. If PI fiction is a substantial portion of your usual reading fare, I think you may, too.
May 3rd, 2016 at 10:13 pm
I have enjoyed the Mac stories of his I’ve read, and thought he was a more “realistic” PI than some of the others around that time. Not as “real” as Robert Martin’s Jim Bennett series, but pretty good.
He also wrote four books very early in his writing career about a hotel detective (did they even have them?) named Singer Batts that I enjoyed.
May 3rd, 2016 at 10:45 pm
The Mac books encompassed his best books, Mac eventually even getting a last name (Robinson), and one outing on a television anthology series (either Kraft Suspense or the Bob Hope summer replacement series, anyway, on NBC) played by Hugh O’Brien (I think based on SAD SONG SINGING). He was one of the more humane tecs of the hardboiled school, plotting out of Hammett as you said, but character more along the lines of Marlowe, though as David P. said more realistic. I tended to think of Mac as being what Macdonald might have done if he had chosen to let Archer be a human being rather than a cypher.
And yes, there used to be hotel detectives, though now they would just be security.
Re Singer Batts, if I remember right he isn’t a hotel tec, but the night manager, just as Dan Marlowe’s Johnny Killain is sometimes misidentified as a hotel detective when he’s head bellhop at a big hotel. All the Batt’s books are available in a single ebook for .99 cents in the Mega Books series, which have some decent bargains in pulps and old paperback reprints for those of us who read on a Kindle.
One thing I think most paperback collectors would agree on, Dewey’s THE CHASTE AND THE UNCHASTE used to be the easiest of his titles to find. I don’t think I ever saw a listing of his work for sale that didn’t have that one back in the day.
May 3rd, 2016 at 10:56 pm
I read this novel back in 1966 and enjoyed it alot. My notes say:
“Short, fast, tough, hard to put down action novel with a hard boiled private eye. Alot in common with Hammett but not as great. Dewey is the right type of entertaining novelist to pass with night with–nothing like the Big Three(Hammett, Chandler, Ross Macdonald) but very readable.”
Concerning hotel detectives, I once came in contact with one. I was staying in the Sheraton in St Louis while in the army back in 1967 and one night I guess I had the music too loud and there was a knock on the door. I asked who was it and they said the hotel detective and would I please turn down the volume.