Fri 21 Jun 2019
A PI Mystery Review: THOMAS B. DEWEY – The Brave, Bad Girls.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[4] Comments
THOMAS B. DEWEY – The Brave, Bad Girls. Mac #5. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1956. Permabooks M-3089, paperback, 1957. Carroll & Graf, paperback, 1985.
If you like detective work along with your hard-boiled PI fiction, this may be the book for you. But as a all-out recommendation, this statement comes with a bit of a caveat. The plot is extremely complicated, and the fact that Mac, the only name that he goes by, doesn’t tell the reader everything he notices or is thinking, doesn’t help any.
The women in the case: (1) his client, Sherry, a young girl who is going out with a married musician against her father’s wishes; (2) Miss Colby, the principal of the school where one of her staff, Lorraine, is a teacher and whose past life is being looked into and she, Miss Colby, doesn’t like it; (3) Lorraine herself, who is married to but separated from the musician that Sherry is seeing; (4) Trudy, her young precocious daughter; (5) Esther, Lorraine’s sister, who has generally been in charge of bringing up Trudy; and (6) Georgiana, also a PI, who agrees to give Sherry shelter after Mac finds her with a dead man on her hands.
As I say, complicated. The best part of the book, though, is the extreme interrogation that Mac undergoes at the hands of the police which extends from page 150 to 190. That Mac stays faithful to his clients and his principles is an understatement.
There were 16 “Mac” novels in all, published between 1947 and 1970. I’ve enjoyed all of them that I’ve read, including this one. After reading this one, though, I realize that I haven’t read nearly enough of them.
June 21st, 2019 at 10:21 pm
Since Mac tells the story himself and doesn’t go into any details of what he looks like, I don’t really have a picture of him in mind. But I do know this. To me, he doesn’t look anything like the gent in Carroll & Graf cover, the one in the upper left corner of the review.
June 22nd, 2019 at 10:41 pm
Hugh O’Brian played Mac in an hour long television adaptation, but he isn’t how I imagine Mac either, certainly not in a turtleneck 70’s look like O’Brian wore.
For my money Dewey and Mac belong in the same company as Lew Archer and Ross Macdonald in often trying to do something more literate if ot literary with the genre in much the way Chandler did. But yes, some of the plots were convoluted enough you half expected Philip Marlowe instead of Mac*.
*He did eventually get a last name, Robinson, I believe from the television adaptation, though it seems to have stuck.
June 22nd, 2019 at 11:55 pm
Mac was on TV? I didn’t know that before, but you are right. It was on the BOB HOPE CHRYSLER SHOW for 10 January 1964, an episode entitle “Runaway.”
It was hard to find since Hugh O’Brian’s character was not called Mac, but instead Mig Semple, and you just have to wonder where that name came from. It was based on Dewey’s book A SAD SONG SINGING.
If the show exists, I’d sure like to know about it. As for Hugh O’Brian as Mac, my first reaction is no, but I’ll have to think about it some more, but in a turtleneck???
I’d place Dewey’s novels as being somewhere between Chandler and Hammett in terms of style and intent, but without the achievement or success of either. But then again, except for Ross Macdonald, what hardboiled PI writer ever did?
June 23rd, 2019 at 9:01 pm
I was wrong about the origin of the Robinson last name, but I recall clearly that was Mac’s last name late in the series about like Pronzini’s Nameless Detective eventually being called Bill in one of the books.
The episode was available on YouTube at one time. I seem to recall O’Brian in a turtleneck and one of those long sleeveless sweaters with a chain around his neck at one point. Not how I envisioned Mac. Dewey, with John Evans (Howard Browne), Bart Spicer, and of course Macdonald was certainly one of the best and most literate voices in the Post War era through the fifties and early sixties.