Wed 30 Dec 2020
JACK LYNN – Nympho Lodge. Tokey Wedge #1. Grizzly Pulp, paperback, 2020. New cover art by Jim Silke. Originally published by Novel Books, paperback, 1959; 2nd printing, 1962.
Well, here’s some good news. Tokey Wedge is back, and a new publishing company is planning on publishing at least the first six of his original novels. As I understand it, though, you won’t be able to find them on Amazon or any other of your usual book buying sources, only directly from the publisher. I’ll add the link to the Grizzly Pulp website at the end of this review.
Now take a look at the cover, over there to the right, and the title. You should be abundantly clear from either one that you shouldn’t expect to be reading the likes of Leo Tolstoy or Charles Dickens when you read a Tokey Wedge book. And even if you’re a fond reader of Richard Prather, say, or Carter Brown, you’re thinking in the right direction, but when “Jack Lynn†wrote the Tokey books, he was, too, thinking in the right direction, that is.
While he wasn’t quite as good as either one, he was a contender, though, no doubt about it, in a slightly scuzzier vein, and even so what he produced, in Nympho Lodge, at least was a detective story that was a fair play detective story. To particulars, though. Tokey was a private eye, somewhat handicapped by being only 5 foot 5 or so, but even so, women are uniformly attracted to him. Beautiful sexy women, and does Tokey mind? No sir, and he shows how much he doesn’t mind, over and over in this tale.
He’s hired in this case by a woman (beautiful and sexy, of course) in the midst of an upcoming divorce case, and afraid of what her soon-to-be ex-husband might do, she needs a bodyguard. I won’t go into more details than that, but besides many other women finding Tokey extremely manly (no details provided in the story itself), in spite his height, a lot of deaths occur, and I mean a lot. So many so, that Tokey nearly runs out of suspects.
Jack Lynn has come up before on this blog, almost entirely in the comments to another post, which you will find here. His real name was Max van derVeer, and there were about 20 in the series.
As to where you can buy a copy of this one, here’s the link:
https://www.grizzlypulp.com/#/
December 30th, 2020 at 4:54 pm
Of interest perhaps is that Michael J Monson of Grizzly Pulp adds that
“It’s correct that “Jack Lynn” was Van Derveer, but the origin for his pen name was a play on his first wife’s name Jaqueline, hence Jack Lynn.”
December 30th, 2020 at 8:13 pm
Of interest to collectors of vintage p.b.’s and pulps, this book is printed on pulp like paper AND comes in a basic black D.j.!! Cost of book is $10.00 plus another $5.00 to ship. I purchased my copy earlier in the month. I feel like I got my money’s worth. Haven’t read it yet, though.
December 30th, 2020 at 8:21 pm
Hmm. My review copy didn’t come with a black jacket. Maybe I should ask for my money back.
December 30th, 2020 at 8:31 pm
The screwball school of hard-boiled writing, to which Prather and Lynn in this series most certainly belonged, was always a bit more violent and generally more sexy than the more staid standard private eye tale. Throughout the fifties and well into the sixties quite a few series combined a Spillane outlook with a clearly Bellemesque point of view making them perfect for the “adult” market such as it was before 1967.
Nice to see them coming back into print though I hope they are eventually available in ebook form. It looks like fun, but for what this is it’s a bit steep for me
December 30th, 2020 at 9:01 pm
Steve, you get what you pay for! As to the series, you must have read at least one of these in your past. I can remember you buying one or more of these originals at a long lost convention. Can you recall if you liked them or not?
December 30th, 2020 at 9:51 pm
I had those copies for maybe 30 years before I finally sold them on eBay this past spring. It was either that or stand in a bread line.
December 30th, 2020 at 10:08 pm
Audie Murphy was only 5’5″
December 30th, 2020 at 11:21 pm
And on a good day, Alan Ladd was 5’6″.
December 31st, 2020 at 8:14 pm
Whoever filmed Alan Ladd to make him the bruiser that he so often appeared, was better than Harry Harryhausen and George Pal.
Remember him pounding 6’2″ George Peppard into a pile of cheap plywood shavings in, “The CarpetBaggers”?
Remember him flaying 5’11” Oklahoma-raised Van Heflin into just so much sawdust in “Shane”?
What a he-man. If only someone could bottle what he had.
I still can’t figure out how Robert Blake, Frank Sinatra, and Mickey Rooney got all the dames they did. I’m taller than all of them and don’t do half as well.
January 2nd, 2021 at 2:03 am
I can’t speak for Blake, but Sinatra and Rooney were superstars, and both involved with Ava Gardner.
As for Ladd, whether he was tough or not in real life I don’t know, but he had a great physique, and the bigger guy doesn’t win every fight. We bought into Jimmy Cagney decking the likes of Ward Bond for years.
One of the tricks used to make Ladd look taller was to have leading ladies like Sophia Loren stand in a trench, but they also teamed him with Veronica Lake and Gail Russell because they were small.
Hollywood has always been more about illusion than fact anyway. Errol Flynn couldn’t have lasted five minutes in a sword fight with Basil Rathbone.