STEVE HARRAGAN – Three Bad Girls. Unibooks #57, paperback, US, 1952; Stallion Books #203, US, paperback, 1953. Unidentified prior British publication.

      visceral:

1 : felt in or as if in the internal organs of the body : deep a visceral conviction
2 : not intellectual : instinctive, unreasoning visceral drives
3 : dealing with crude or elemental emotions : earthy a visceral novel
4 : of, relating to, or located on or among the viscera : splanchnic visceral organs

   It’s a word I learned in college, one that has stood by me in times of trial, and perfectly suited to this demented little trifle.

   But first a bit of background: Steve Harragan is the name of both the author and the hero of this story (à la Ellery Queen) but being naturally suspicious, I wondered at the outset about such a coincidence. A little bit of research came up with one William Maconachie, a British post-war pulpster who also wrote under the names Bart Carson, Larry Ellis and Ray Stahl. A few of Maconachie’s Bart Carson books perambulated west to the U.S. and along the way the author and hero got their names changed to Steve Harragan.

   So much for that. The only other niggling detail is that although Harragan-the-hero is depicted as wearing an eye patch, Harragan-the-author occasionally drops a two-eyed reference, like “I turned my eyes on him,” and even “I closed one eye,” making one wonder just where the eye patch came from and whether anyone took it seriously.

   Getting on to the book itself, well I have to say it’s pretty amazing: a story that never stops moving from first page to last. The writing may be pedestrian, but the drama takes the corners on two wheels as it careens from our hero waking (in the uniform of a deserter from the French Foreign Legion!) to capture, escape, recapture, prison, escape again, and a perilous journey back to the U.S. where he catches up with the guy who stole his identity and gets in the middle of a kidnapping which…..

   You get the idea. Scarcely a page goes by without a fight, chase, explosion or all three, as our hero gets his violent revenge. Good writing? It is to laugh — but Three Bad Girls will amaze the reader with its sheer unparalleled pace.

      References:

William Maconachie bibliography at Bear Alley
Steve Harragan page on Thrilling Detective