Wed 26 Sep 2018
A GOLD MEDAL Mystery Review: FRANK CASTLE – Murder in Red.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[9] Comments
FRANK CASTLE – Murder in Red. Gold Medal #709, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1957.
“Red” in the sense of Communist infiltration and intrigue, and unexpectedly so, since the blurb on the front cover doesn’t even hint at it — “They gave him only one choice: his girl’s life in exchange for his” — unless you can read something into that that I don’t see.
It opens with an agent from behind the Iron Curtain — East Berlin, to be precise — making arrangements to cross the border from Mexico into New Mexico. What his mission is, he does not know. That he will learn only when the time comes. What he also was not told before hand is that a female companion will be assigned to him, an American, we learn right along with him, with a grudge against her country.
Their journey is filled with the inevitable snags and interruptions that occur in books such as this. The stakes are high — something to do with a new project the Americans are working on, possibly involving ICBMs and/or other gadgetry. It’s still not a very exciting story, and truth be told, it’s a very minor one.
The only thing that will keep most readers going, I think, is that every so often, Curt Weber’s memory starts to play tricks on him — there are things he should remember, he realizes, but can’t. I knew what that meant right away, and you probably already know as well.
Bibliographic Notes: Frank Castle wrote five other mysteries for Gold Medal between 1954 and 1957. He also wrote a novelization of the Hawaiian Eye TV series for Dell in 1962. He also did a number of westerns for Gold Medal. How many I do not know, but it’s quite possible he wrote more of those than he did mysteries.
September 26th, 2018 at 10:28 pm
I don’t know exactly how many Westerns Frank Castle wrote, but I suspect he did more of them than mysteries. In addition to the ones he wrote for Gold Medal, he did several under the name Steve Thurman and also wrote a few of the Lassiter books under the house-name Jack Slade. His career in the pulps, which lasted from 1949 to 1955, produced nearly 100 stories, all of them in various Western pulps. I’ve found him to be a pretty entertaining author with a sometimes very eccentric style.
September 27th, 2018 at 2:27 am
Thanks, James. I should have known about his pulp stories, and as you say, he wrote a ton of them, all westerns. But I had no idea he was one of the Lassiter writers. Good for him!
September 27th, 2018 at 12:48 pm
Here’s a review I wrote recently of one of Castle’s Lassiter novels:
https://jamesreasoner.blogspot.com/2018/07/forgotten-books-sidewinder-lassiter-7.html
September 27th, 2018 at 3:27 pm
A great review, James. Thanks for the link. I was especially interested in your short but very informative introduction covering the evolution of the Adult Western paperback.
As for Frank Castle, in regard to the Lassiter book you reviewed, you say:
“Castle has an odd, choppy, comma-heavy, and sentence-fragmented style that takes some getting used to. Once you do, however, it works pretty well and produces some vivid scenes.”
This is not true with MURDER IN RED. The editors at Gold Medal may not have wanted the choppy style you found in the Lassiter book, or Castle’s writing technique may not yet have evolved in that direction.
In RED, though, his settings are vividly described (I’m using your word) and all of the characters are significantly more than two-dimensional. It’s the story itself that’s the weakest part of the book, with nothing memorable about it, or so that’s what I found.
September 27th, 2018 at 5:25 pm
Steve, there’s a pattern in your typos. In the bibliographical note you say “fir Dell” when you meant “for Dell.”
September 27th, 2018 at 6:01 pm
The only Castle I read was the HAWAIIAN EYE novelization, and it too featured a fairly eccentric but not uninteresting prose style as James Reasoner’s review suggests. As novelizations go it was middling, but I might be up to try one of his Westerns.
September 27th, 2018 at 6:02 pm
By an odd coincidence, I just finished this book last night.
September 27th, 2018 at 9:11 pm
Odd coincidence maybe, Rick, but I’m not at all surprised.
September 28th, 2018 at 8:55 am
I have some Frank Castle westerns around here. I might give them a try. And, I have some Lassiter westerns, too.
What are the chances you and Rick would be reading the same book? A million to one!