Wed 18 May 2016
FRANK KANE – Poisons Unknown. Ives Washburn, hardcover, 1953. Dell 822, paperback, 1955; Dell D334, paperback, January 1960.
This is the seventh of 29 Johnny Liddell PI novels plus two short story collections. Liddell’s career started way in 1944 with the story “Murder at Face Value” appearing in the January 1944 issue of Crack Detective Stories, not the highest level of pulp magazines but it was a start. His first appearance in hardcover was About Face, published by Mystery House in 1947.
In Poisons Unknown, Liddell heads for New Orleans to find a Holy Roller preacher in flowing white robes who’s gone missing. Liddell is working for a mob boss whose crime and corruption Brother Alfred has been sermonizing heavily against. If Alfred is dead, Marty Kirk fears he will be blamed.
Or is Kirk just using Liddell to set up and eliminate Alfred? That’s what has Liddell puzzled. There is a twist or two, maybe three, in the story that follows, but only one may come as a surprise to anyone who’s spent their lifetime reading old PI novels such as this one.
All in all, this one’s no more than average but far from mediocre and not nearly as formulaic as Kane was later, only mildly sex-obsessed but interrupted every so often by highly choreographed violence, and easily forgotten by the next morning.
May 19th, 2016 at 4:03 pm
I am going to have to rebut my own final statement. Here it is two mornings later, and that one twist I referred to is still with me.
I’ll check back in again in a week or so.
May 19th, 2016 at 5:18 pm
Early on Liddell is an agency tec more in line with the Op than his later sexy eye image. The early books are likely his best, and I still recall how shocked I was to find a few Kane’s in hardcover editions.
A friend of mine liked JURASSIC PARK because, as he said, he wanted to see dinosaurs and he saw dinosaurs. That is how I feel about Kane and Johnny Liddell to some extent. I wanted a hard boiled private eye yarn with a certain amount of plot, sex, and action, and I got that.
Back then I read very fast. On a Saturday I could read three Liddell novels and still have time for other things. I never did, but the thing was I could have. Instead I read them like sorbet, to cleanse the mental palate. If that morning you I read something fairly heavy like a Graham Greene novel, and that afternoon or night I was going to tackle a Hornblower or SF novel or something a bit more challenging, I might take thirty to forty five minutes and read a Liddell just to wind down from the heavier book before.
I grant that isn’t much of a commendation, but it worked for me, and as a result I have pleasant memories of the Liddell books and can still pick one up and read it the same way, though not quite as quickly. The Liddell books were the literary equivalent of series like 77 SUNSET STRIP and HAWAIIAN EYE. Quick, competent, entertaining, pleasant company for most of an hour, and mostly forgotten when it was over.
I actually think it a shame that books and writers like that aren’t as common as they once were.