Sun 10 Sep 2023
A 1001 Midnights Review: ROBERT DIETRICH – Murder on the Rocks.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[5] Comments
by Bill Crider
ROBERT DIETRICH – Murder on the Rocks. Steve Bentley #1. Dell First Edition A141, paperback original, 1957. Cutting Edge, trade paperback, 2020.
Steve Bentley, series fiction’s toughest tax accountant, was the creation of Robert Dietrich. better known by his more famous (or infamous) real name of E. Howard Hunt. Because he was employed by the CIA, Hunt used pseudonyms for much of his paperback writing in the 1950s and 1960s; the Dietrich name was used first for Dell Books and later for Lancer.
In Murder on the Rocks, the first book in the series, Bentley is asked by the beautiful daughter of a South American ambassador to investigate the theft of an emerald worth over $ I million. Instead of the emerald, Bentley finds a corpse, and the case becomes even more complicated when the emerald is apparently returned.
Another murder takes place; Bentley is threatened by gangsters; and the ambassador’s other daughter, even more beautiful than her sister, practically proposes to him. Eventually Bentley, functioning much like any hard-boiled private eye, sorts things out and deals out a bit of his own kind of justice.
This is one of the better books in the Bentley series, and most of the tough narrative rings true. How tough? Here’s an example: “When Cadena was a tank sergeant on Luzon he had pulled the head off a dead Jap to win a ten-cent bet.” The Washington setting is described with easy familiarity and the characterization is adequate, although readers may be put off by Bentley’s frequent disparaging comments about homosexuals, which are entirely unrelated to the book’s plot.
Readers looking for more of Bentley’s adventures should also enjoy End of a Stripper (1960). Perhaps Hunt’s best book as Dietrich, however, is a non-series work, Be My Victim (1956).
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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.
The Steve Bentley series —
Murder On the Rocks (1957)
The House on Q Street (1959)
End of a Stripper (1960)
Mistress to Murder (1960)
Murder on Her Mind (1960)
Angel Eyes (1961)
Calypso Caper (1961)
Curtains for a Lover (1962)
My Body (1973)
September 10th, 2023 at 9:19 pm
“Steve Bentley, series fiction’s toughest tax accountant“. Wouldn’t be a long list—but I’m a fan of David Dodge’s Whit Whitney series. Also an accountant. And Whitney is plenty tough. Maybe the wimpy accountant trope came later in the 20th century.
September 10th, 2023 at 10:08 pm
I’ll agree with Tony and Whit Whitney, and Dodge was a much better writer, but I always liked Hunt’s writing and ignored his later political shenanigans as much as possible when reading him. He was a fairly common type among that first generation of CIA officers in the Fifties, somewhere between Bill Buckley and Mike Hammer in politics and opinion but he wrote well enough, especially the tough guy stuff. If you read anything written in that era the macho posing anti gay nonsense goes too often with the genre.
I particularly liked the Bentley books, and HOUSE DICK as Gordon Davis. Prior to Buckley his Peter Ward books as David St. John was probably the closest thing to an American Ian Fleming in all but literary quality. Like FLeming he sailed very close in those to revealing things the CIA likely didn’t want out like Company names and post office drops in Virgina furniture stores under them as well as the country club culture of the Agency at that time.
A shame he couldn’t have stuck with spying overseas and writing in the States, he might have developed into a much better writer if he had instead of a bad joke.
September 10th, 2023 at 10:27 pm
My only run-in with David Dodge and his CPA detective Whit Whitney is still SHEAR THE BLACK SHEEP:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=75291
Reading the review again just now, I can’t tell, but my memory of it has it as no more than medium-boiled. I’d say Steve Bentley is tougher, but not so much so that I’d argue the point with anyone, much less Tony.
September 11th, 2023 at 6:03 am
“fiction’s toughest tax accountant”
“When in doubt, have a man come through a door with an overdue income tax return in his hand.â€
“Don’t move! This form IR 17/93 subsection b is loaded!” – lacks a little something.
On the other hand, Jack Elam began as an accountant…
September 11th, 2023 at 8:28 am
I read several of Hunt’s David St. John books about superspy (sort of) Peter Ward and they weren’t bad.
I did get a kick out of Woody Harrelson’s portrayal of Hunt in the recent WHITE HOUSE PLUMBERS.