Tue 16 Jan 2024
A PI Mystery Review: HARRY WHITTINGTON – Married to Murder.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
HARRY WHITTINGTON – Married to Murder. Joel Palmer #1 (and done). Phantom #503, digest-sized paperback original, 1953. Berkley Diamond D2019, paperback, September 1959. Gryphon Books, softcover, 2005.
From the early 1950s and clear into 1970s, Harry Whittington was one of the most prolific paperback writers around, publishing nearly 200 novels under a host of pen names. What he’s best known for by connoisseurs of such things was a unique combination of noir/hardboiled/sleaze fiction. For all that work, I don’t believe he produced another private eye novel other than this one. (I could easily be wrong about that.)
Joel Palmer, the protagonist in this one, was once a cop but he’d been forced to resign, and when Married to Murder begins, he’s trying to eke out a living as a PI and not doing a very good job of it. Worse, the police are continually hounding him, with obvious malicious intent. So when a old woman with one leg and a crutch to help her get around comes looking for him, he takes her up on the offer she makes, as dubious and offputting as it sounds.
He’s to move in with the woman’s granddaughter, under the pretense of being her husband. His first reaction is a natural one. He laughs. But the granddaughter, who thinks her husband is dead, is in deadly danger, he is told, although exactly why, she refuses to say. At length, confronted with threats of calling his personal nemesis on the police force, he agrees.
Some plastic surgery is involved. That’s a given. But to make the change permanent, he has to agree to put his identification papers on the person currently being stored in a small freezer and dump the body in the East River. After this point in time, Joel Palmer will be dead. Assisting him on this task is the old woman’s maid, a strange enigmatic creature who dresses in tight-fitting black dresses. (Use your imagination here.)
While two of them are on this midnight disposal run, our hero (of sorts) discovers that the man, whom he has been told died of natural causes, was really a victim of cold-blooded murder. By this time, though, it is far too late for him to turn back.
Which all of the above takes up the first 64 pages of a mere 144 page novel, but between you and me, these are 64 pages I will never forget. Once he hits Florida, where the granddaughter lives, and the impersonation begins, the book settles down into a more conventional sort of tale, but conventional in the hands of a writer such as a Harry Whittington was in that regards is still heads and shoulders above almost any other PI writer I can think of.
It’s not a classic, mind you. There are way too many implausibilities built into the plot as it unfolds to say that. I didn’t believe them all myself, even while I was reading it. Safe to say, you’d be better off just fastening your seat belt and going along for the ride.
H/B rating: 8.9
January 17th, 2024 at 8:14 pm
Gil brewer inscribed a book to Whittington with the following:
“For Harry and Kathryn: / Harry, if you don’t sit yourself down and write the honest to God book of your guts very soon, I’m sure as hell going to bash you over the head with a sledge hammer. I mean it. / Gil.” https://www.royalbooks.com/pages/books/154575/gil-brewer/the-red-scarf-first-edition-association-copy-inscribed-by-the-author
I don’t know if brewer drank himself to death before he got a chance to bash Whittington with a sledge hammer—but I don’t think Whittington ever got around to writing ‘the book of his guts.’
Woody Allen in an interview said he’d rather make 100 pretty good movies than, say, a few masterpieces a la Kubrick. Whittington subscribes to the woody Allen school. A lot a pretty good novels.
January 17th, 2024 at 9:07 pm
I wonder how much respect, for lack of a better word, Whittington got for his writing back in the days when he writing, either from readers or other writers, like Brewer.
What I do know that many many of his books now go for hefty prices in the collectors’ market. Too late to do any good for him now, of course, but it’s a legacy that most of the rest of us would like to have, I’m sure, but never will.
January 20th, 2024 at 12:59 pm
Bill Crider championed Harry Whittington and his many novels for years. I’ve read a dozen of them–enjoyed them all–and have another dozen or so Whittington paperbacks waiting to be read. Stark House has reprinted some of Whittington’s works but there’s a large number of his books available only as pricey paperbacks.
January 20th, 2024 at 3:18 pm
Bill Crider sure had good taste when it came to authors he liked, didn’t he?
January 21st, 2024 at 10:18 pm
The plot reminds me a bit of the kind of minor noir films that Edmond O’Brien used to appear in. One of Whittington’s strengths was that ability to write in novel form the kind of story that defined many of the crime films of the forties, fifties, and sixties while still bringing his unique voice to it.