Sun 31 Jul 2022
MICHAEL AVALLONE – Dead Game. Ed Noon #3. Henry Holt & Co., hardcover, 1954. Permabook M-3012, paperback, August 1955; James Meese cover art.
This one starts quietly enough. Manhattan-based PI Ed Noon is hired by a woman to follow her husband, an antiques dealer by profession, whom she suspects is cheating on her. But where does he go? To a baseball game. The Polo Grounds, as a matter of fact, the home of the New York Giants before they absconded off to San Francisco. They’re playing a pre-season exhibition game with a makeshift (semi-pro?) team called the Providence Ravens.
Where Mr. Arongio (Noon’s prey) has eyes only on that other team’s third baseman. If ever one guy could wish another guy dead just staring at him, that first guy would be Mr. Arongio. And guess what? Before the game is over, while it’s still being played, the other guy, the third baseman, is in fact dead, face down on the ground. And the first guy to reach him? No guesses. Mr. Arongio.
The baseball setting may or may not be unique in the annals of PI fiction, but the action simply does not let up from this point on. Suspects include Mrs. Arongio (who is a looker), Mr. Arongio and his girl friend (Mrs. Arongio was right, and she’s another looker), and several other members of the Ravens. (The dead man was no pal of the rest of the team.) And somewhere along the way a diary supposedly having belonged to Edgar Allan Poe comes into play, along with a missing $20,000 that Mr. Arongio paid for it.
It is easy to picture Ed Noon, who tells his own story, to have been played the movies by none other than Mike Avallone himself, just as Mickey Spillane once took the leading role in one the Mike Hammer movies. And in a way Dead Game reads somewhat like a Hammer novel, but without the higher intensity and crudeness, and the prose a tad more polished. A more family-friendly sort of PI, you might say. Noon is simply a nice guy who’s playing a slightly dirty – but definitely dangerous – game.
Those of us who knew Mike Avallone in real life will find a lot to like in this one. Even though Ed Noon is just another member of a long list of now-forgotten PI’s who began their careers in the the 1950s, I’d like to think others might too.
July 31st, 2022 at 8:57 pm
Didn’t James Grady have an ex baseball playing P.I.? I know someone in that era did. And, of course, Mike Conners who played Mannix had played ball.
Avallone wrote a lot of sports stories for the pulps, I think mostly baseball stories, he was a natural for this one.
From the review this sounds as if the famous Avallone (Avalloni) language might be a bit more in control than usual*. Avallone is always professional as a writer but being professional might have been aiming for a different audience in hardcover than paperback original, pulp, or digest.
July 31st, 2022 at 9:07 pm
I’ll have to check on James Grady, but it didn’t take me long to find a few more PI novels with baseball backgrounds:
Five O’Clock Lightning
By William L. DeAndrea
Five O’Clock Lightning brings one of America’s greatest political witch hunts—McCarthyism—to the field. Congressman Rex Harwood Simmons, one of the foremost Communist hunters in the nation, is watching his favorite team, the New York Yankees, when he is gunned down in broad daylight. Ballplayer Russ Garrett and homicide detective “Vicious Aloysius†Murphy team up to figure out who hated Simmons enough to kill him in a crowded stadium—but the list is long. Time is ticking as the two also uncover a plot to kill one of the most beloved players in America: Mickey Mantle.
Only the Wicked
By Gary Phillips
One of the most widely known events of the civil rights movement was the integration of baseball—most notably, Jackie Robinson’s induction to a Major League team. Only the Wicked is set fifty years later, just after two former Negro League teammates die under suspicious circumstances. Private eye Ivan Monk is on the case, and his investigation leads him down to Mississippi, where he realizes that America’s shameful history is not something of the past.
Strike Three You’re Dead
By R. D. Rosen
In the first book of The Harvey Blissberg mysteries, corruption strikes the very heart of the sport: the team. When the pitcher of the Providence Jewels is found beaten to death, it’s up to veteran player Harvey Blissberg to figure out who committed the crime. As he travels throughout Rhode Island’s capital, he uncovers a web of lies that involves everything from mob involvement to lovesick fans. Over the course of his investigation, Blissberg will be reminded that he’s not in the Little Leagues anymore…
And there are more.
And no, in this early Noon novel, not many Avalloneisms.
August 2nd, 2022 at 9:13 pm
This sounds interesting.
Thank you!
I really liked “The Crazy Mixed Up Corpse”.
November 29th, 2022 at 9:23 pm
Belatedly:
Chuck Connors (The Rifleman) was the former Major Leaguer you were thinking of.
Mike Connors (aka Touch Ohanian) played college basketball.
Just so you know …