Wed 25 Mar 2020
A PI Mystery Review by Dan Stumpf: JASON MANOR – The Girl in the Red Jaguar.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[4] Comments
REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:
JASON MANOR – The Girl in the Red Jaguar. Steve Summers #1. Popular Library Eagle #EB42, paperback; 1st printing, June 1955. Originally published as The Red Jaguar (Viking, hardcover, 1954.
A gift from a friend who found it in a thrift store somewhere in the Jersey Wildlands, and an excellent all-around hard-boiled mystery.
“Jason Manor†turns out to be a pen name of Oakley Hall, author of Warlock and a literary lion of the 1950s, whose circle included Michael Chabon, Thomas Pynchon, and Amy Tan. With a name like that behind the name on the book, one expects something better than average. And one — this one, anyway — is not disappointed.
The story opens with ex-cop, ex-PI Steve Summers looking for his ex-wife Verna’s ex-husband Ted in Westhaven, a town so crooked the criminals have to catch each other. It seems Ted left Verna without bothering to get a divorce. Verna didn’t let it bother her either, but now Ted’s come into money and she wants her share.
Problem is, Ted’s affluence comes from his new employment as business manager for Westhaven’s local gang boss, and he can make trouble for anyone who tries to shake him down. Serious trouble. The kind where six of your friends carry you out by the handles.
Manor spices the mix with the gang boss’s pretty and restless daughter, a couple of bent cops trying to straighten out, a fainthearted DA and his ambitious underling, a couple of mob-style enforcers….
In lesser typing fingers these would all have been stock characters, but Manor/Hall breathes life into the smallest of them. Even the local gang boss becomes a figure of sympathy, and Steve Summers (remember him?) the hero of the piece, has a self-destructive relationship with his ex-wife that rings true and adds a few wrinkles to a plot that constantly surprises.
For all that Jaguar is still a thing of par-boiled pulp, it’s far enough above the average Red Harvest rip-off to merit seeking out.
Editorial Note: A second and final adventure of Steve Summers was recorded in The Pawns of Fear (Viking, 1955; no paperback edition).
March 25th, 2020 at 4:09 pm
Hall is one of those rare writers who seemed capable of writing anything well, so this comes as no surprise. It’s only a shame he never did for the mystery what he did for the Western in his trilogy.
March 25th, 2020 at 4:19 pm
Other books he wrote as Jason Manor:
Too Dead to Run. Viking 1953
The Tramplers. Viking 1956
One series he wrote under is own name I bought when they came out in paperback (I’m not sure if all did) but I’ve never read, are these:
Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades (1998)
Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings (2001)
Ambrose Bierce and the One-Eyed Jacks (2003)
Ambrose Bierce and the Trey of Pearls (2004)
Ambrose Bierce and the Ace of Shoots (2005)
Has anyone read any?
March 28th, 2020 at 12:11 pm
I read AMBROSE BIERCE AND THE DEATH OF KINGS. I was disappointed, because the protagonist is a young reporter – a wet-behind-the-ears type involved in romance as much as in mystery. I felt Hall was pulling his punches with Bierce who comes off merely as the curmudgeon with a heart of gold type and anyone who knows anything about Bierce knows he was deeper and more complex than that. So, marketing hook by using Bierce’s name and period near-cozy romance for the rest of it.
March 28th, 2020 at 6:32 pm
That’s what I feared, Bill. I have for all practical purposes given up on mysteries in which real people appear. Without being a full-fledged biographer, authors who write books like this almost never get them right, and Ambrose Bierce was a fellow who, as you suggest, was a lot more complicated and interesting than a solver of mere detective stories.