ROBERT SILVERMAN – The Cumberland Decision. Manor, paperback original, 1977.

   You may have noticed that from time to time I take up valuable space by delving into the publishing phenomenon in the field of mysteries that produced the flood of paperback originals from Gold Medal/Fawcett Publications all during the 1950s. I’m firmly convinced that these novels, all easy to find for the most part, and mostly in the hard-boiled genre as linear descendants o the pulp magazines, are unjustly neglected.

   You may tire of me telling you so, but for characters involved in down-to-earth situations and for sheer story-telling ability, the authors in the Gold Medal group are not easily surpassed. (Outstripped?)

   Even in their heyday, however, these novels were all too easily panned by snobbish reviewers, if not totally ignored. There were the indiscriminate pitchforks dispensed by the anonymous reviewer for The Saint Magazine, for example, but there also was Anthony Boucher, in the New York Times, as one reviewer who did not automatically subscribe to the “paperback equals junk” theory.

   It occurs to me that 20 years from now, retrospective reviewers may find that today’s Manor paperbacks are also exceptional examples of neglected writing, and in reality saying a great deal about American society and culture of [the 1970s].

   It’s possible, but I found ex-cop-turned-mystery-writer Johnny Otto crude and semi-literate, a macho chauvinist who seems utterly incapable of writing a coherent sentence, let along a best-selling novel, or having an intelligent lady friend as a girl friend. His method of ending an argument is slipping his hand inside her blouse and leading her to bad. “Yeah, baby.”

   As I say, it’s possible that Johnny Otto describes a definitive figure in American life, but he is most definitely a flop as a detective. The true villain behind the death of his former partner on the police force and the huge shipment of heroin about to be smuggled into San Francisco is obvious at first meeting, and I think I found comical overtones in the climactic rescue and capture that were not wholly intended.

   Redeeming social value? Ask me in 20 years.

Rating: D

–Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 2, No. 3, May 1978.

   

Note: Robert M. Silverman has one other entry in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, that being The Colombian Connection, also a paperback original from Manor, also in 1977.