Thu 25 Jun 2020
A PI Mystery Review: ROBERT MARTIN writing as LEE ROBERTS – Little Sister.
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Reviews[4] Comments
ROBERT MARTIN writing as LEE ROBERTS – Little Sister. Andrew Brice #1. Stark House Press / Black Gat Book #27, trade paperback, August 2020. Based on the story “Pardon My Poison,†as by Robert Martin, Dime Detective Magazine, April 1948, in which the leading character was Jim Bennett. Introduction by Bill Pronzini. First published as a paperback original by Gold Medal, #229, March 1952, as by Lee Roberts.
Between 1951 and 1964 and under his own name, Robert Martin wrote fourteen novels in which PI Jim Bennett was the leading character, but back in the 1940s Bennett was the detective of record in several dozen pulp stories, largely but not exclusively for Dime Detective Magazine. Bennett was a down to earth sort of guy, based in Ohio with a steady girl friend whom he later married. He wasn’t flashy, and in quiet contrast to all of the other PI’s of the same era, as Bill Pronzini points out in his introduction to the upcoming Stark House reprint, “he never once gets laid.â€
This may be the reason why the Jim Bennett of the earlier pulp version of this story gets replaced by Andy Brice in this one. The setting is still Ohio, PI Andy Brice is still a nice guy, but yes, one big difference is, he does get laid. He’s hired by the older sister of a younger girl, who if the word “sexpot†hadn’t been invented yet, they’d have had to come up the word, just to describe her. She is the kind of girl who cannot seem to keep her clothes on properly, at least whenever she’s in the same room as Brice. Her bigger problem, though, when she comes home on night in a doped-up daze, what they also find in the trunk of her car is the body of a dead man.
It isn’t the younger girl whom Brice spends the night with, however, and wishes for more, but his client, the older sister. And while on the case for her, Brice is also poisoned and shot at, while other characters fare much worse. There are a lot of characters to keep track of, many of them men with eyes for Linda, the little sister, but Martin’s prose is smooth and easy and keeps things running like a well-tuned engine.
June 25th, 2020 at 9:39 pm
I;ve read and enjoyed several of the Bennett stories. I will have to see if this one is availably in the Internet Archive DIME DETECTIVE titles.
June 25th, 2020 at 11:26 pm
I’ll see if I have the magazine version myself. Many of my pulps have gone the eBay route, but I still have a long comic box filled with later issues of DIME DETECTIVE. I’d like to see what the “short” version reads like, and what Martin added to it to make a full length novel out of it.
June 26th, 2020 at 8:48 am
His books, especially the ones featuring Jim Bennett were some of the best PI stories written in the 50’s. He was the first that had a realistic character that was actually a decent human being. I thought that Bennett was the forerunner to Nameless, Harry Stoner, Jacob Asch, etc.
June 26th, 2020 at 10:16 am
I don’t think Martin’s books were appreciated as much as they should have been, even back when he was writing them, and that’s a shame. I also think he had a lot of fun writing this one. The mystery itself is fairly easy to solve, but I enjoyed how well he played with the conventions of the traditional PI story, not subversively, but tweaking the usual standards of the genre ever so gently here and there.