Fri 1 Feb 2019
MANNING STOKES – Murder Can’t Wait. Vincent Donnellen #1. Graphic #117, paperback original, 1955. Never reprinted.
To call Vince Donnellen a private eye is stretching it just a bit, since when Murder Can’t Wait begins, his license has recently been suspended. According to him, it was for “getting a little tough with some punk who turned out to have political connections.”
Not only that, but Yvette, his steady girl friend, has just dumped him, but he seems to regret the loss of the license more than he does her. The latter isn’t completely sore at him, though, since she hooks him up with a job offered by her new boy friend, a wealthy socialite who needs someone (Vince) to take his niece to a dry-out (alcoholic rehab) clinic in Indiana. She’s managed to elude every one else who’s ever tried.
And for $50,000 if she happens to die along the way, so much the better. (She’s due to come into her million dollar inheritance in the next month or so.)
Vince wants the money, and he’s determined to get it, but he’s not so keen on the other part of the job, even though he agrees to take it on. Question: How can he find another dead body he can pass off as Lee’s? Of course, he also has to sober her up first. He needs her help. It’s not a plan he call pull off on his alone.
While there’s nothing that’s absolutely new here, Stokes was a good story teller, and this one’s just far enough off the beaten path to keep the reader reading, or at least it was for me. The last couple of chapters are as action-packed and suspenseful as anything other thriller I’ve read recently. A good movie in the making, I think. It’s only too bad that the ending is, well, so ordinary, but then again, so were the endings of a lot of movies from the 50s that are called noir today.
PostScript: No, in case you were wondering, there wasn’t a Vincent Donnellen #2.
Also Note: For more on the author himself, who was usually billed under his full name, Manning Lee Stokes, see my review of The Dying Room, first published by Phoenix Press in hardcover in 1947. Be sure to read the comments as well.
February 1st, 2019 at 9:23 pm
Some of these one shots are well worth reading. Stokes isn’t a great writer, but often entertaining.
February 1st, 2019 at 9:36 pm
In their mystery line, Graphic Books published a mixture of reprints and paperback originals. Generally speaking, the latter are of about the same quality as those Ace put out in their double-novel format. That’s is to say, ranging from mediocre to good.
This one is at the upper end of that scale, or almost as good as some of the lesser Gold Medal’s being published at the same time.
BUt yes, entertaining, or I couldn’t have finished it, which I find myself not doing more or more often lately, as I work my way way through the shelves of old paperbacks I’ve accumulated over the past 50 years or so.