Mon 6 Mar 2023
A 1001 Midnights Review: RICHARD DEMING – Anything But Saintly.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[3] Comments
by Bill Crider
RICHARD DEMING – Anything But Saintly. Matt Rudd #2. Permabooks M-4286, paperback original, 1963.
Richard Deming wrote original mysteries and novelizations of numerous TV series, including two books based on Dragnet. The two Dragnet books appeared in 1958 and 1959 and perhaps led to Deming’s writing his own police procedural series in the early 1960s. Although the series was only three books, it was competently written and entertaining.
The setting of each of the books is the riverside city of St. Cecelia, and the first-person narrator is Sergeant Matt Rudd (real name Mateusz Rudowski), a member of the city’s Vice Squad.
In Anything but Saintly, a businessman visiting the city is rolled by a prostitute and robbed of $500. Rudd and his partner, Carl Lincoln, set out to recover the money, only to find that the girl was murdered shortly after returning to her apartment. Being a member of the Vice Squad does not keep Rudd from getting involved in the killing, because an attempt is soon made on his own life.
What looked at first like a simple case suddenly escalates into something more, with a heavily protected procurer and a big-time politico getting dragged in. The procedural details, including the peculiar workings of the St. Cecelia Police Department, are well done, and the story is terse and fast, with a good depiction of a racket-ridden city and how it is run.
Matt Rudd appeared previously in Vice Cop (Belmont, 1961) and again in Death of a Pusher (Pocket, 1964 ). An equally good, but very different, paperback original by Deming is Edge of the Law (Berkley, 1960). He also created a one-armed private detective, Manville Moon, who appears in three novels published in the early 1950s, beginning with The Gallows in My Garden (Rinehart, 1952). Other of his mysteries appeared under the pseudonym Max Franklin, notably Justice Has No Sword (Rinehart, 1953).
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Updated and reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
March 7th, 2023 at 4:41 pm
Deming started writing for the detective pulps in 1948, and as Bill mentions, many of his early ones were adventures of PI Manny Moon. Making the transition that many pulp writers did not make, he was the author of numerous novels in paperback, both under his own name and a couple of pen names. Even so, he was still writing stories for the mystery digests until the early 1980s (mostly for Hitchcock and Mike Shayne MM, probably hundreds of them).
March 7th, 2023 at 4:50 pm
Deming has been covered earlier on this blog.
Here’s a link to an overview of the Manny Moon series by Jon L. Breen:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=18861
and my review of the first Manny Moon pulp story:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=68523
March 7th, 2023 at 9:18 pm
I have fond memories of the Manny Moon stories. Honestly, short of looking up his bibliography I have no idea how many books by Deming I may have read under various names over the years.