JAMES McKIMMEY – Blue Mascara Tears. Ballantine, paperback original, 1965.

   In Sam Spade, as everyone knows, we had the detective as conniving con-man; in Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, the detective as Sir Galahad. In Mike Hammer, of course, we had the detective as one-man jury. Today we have Spenser in the role of detective as social worker, and Bill Pronzini’s nameless private eye as the winner of detective fiction’s hard-luck award of the year.

   As the hero of this rather obscure paperback original, Jack Cummings is a cop, not a private eye, but a cop of the lone-wolf variety. As such, not only is he definitely part of the multi-faceted PI tradition above, but he also extends it into directions never quite followed by any of the others in the field.

   In Jack Cummings, meet the detective as Christ figure.

   The similarity is in more than the initials, and no, it is not entirely coincidental, On page 42, for example, Cummings ponders what it is that he believes in, swimming as he does “through the sea, always working never to become a part of it, because the contamination would be fatal…. Was he only fooling himself, “being Christ-like within his own mind and heart, but deceiving himself…?”

   Or take this conversation on page 138: “The fix is cancer. Somebody’s got to cure it. Who else will, if I don’t?” “They’ll crucify you.” “It’s happened to others,”

   It’s a tough story. the terseness of the opening chapters is reminiscent of none other than Dashiell Hammett himself, and if the dialogue and the rest of the story tails off a bit in comparison – to the level of Erle Stanley Gardner, say (which is no great disparagement, to my mind, but it had to be said) – why, that’s no great surprise either. In spite of all the writers who’ve tried it, Hammett has seldom been equaled, and certainly not for longer stretches.

   Otherwise, here’s a book filled with good, viscerally involving scenes, and plotting that’s far more than merely adequate. It also features the most beautiful hooker in the world (briefly), and yet another victim (the girl with the tears) who did absolutely nothing to deserve her death.

   If you’re a lover of hard-boiled fiction. try to find this one if you can.

Rating: A

–Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 7, No. 5, Sept/Oct 1983.