Fri 24 May 2024
ROBERT FINNEGAN – Many a Monster. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1948. Bantam #363, paperback, May 1949. Stark House Press, softcover, 2022 (three-in-one edition also including The Lying Ladies and The Bandaged Nude).
Dan Banion’s a reporter. His editor sics him on the story of an escaped lunatic from the insane asylum — a recently convicted serial killer of women.
Dan looks into the story, but the further he looks, the more it seems like the kook is innocent: The serial murders continue to mount irrespective of whether the kook’s in custody.
Dan solves the case, but not before tussling with the KKK, quitting his job, and witnessing more grisly murders.
Dan Banion’s cool, the writing’s great, but the story’s nothing to write home about. It’s one of those where a cagillion suspects are rounded up and the writer settles on one of them seemingly at random as if he was running low on paper.
May 25th, 2024 at 12:50 am
I run into that feeling that the writer decided to round up his plot before he had to buy another ream of paper quite often in the mystery fiction of the late forties and early fifties.
May 25th, 2024 at 1:11 pm
In one of Mike Nevins’ columns he wrote for this blog before he recently became ill, he did an in-depth coverage of Paul William Ryan’s life as a Communist sympathizer and the three mysteries he wrote as Robert Finnegan. Here’s the link:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=76780
Of MANY A MONSTER, the third of the three, he said, in part:
“The solution is surprising but is pulled out of a hat, as it were, and leaves a few key questions unanswered. With a total of fifteen fatalities — four before Page 1, another quartet during the course of the novel and seven neo-Nazis gunned down by Banion himself, who also disposes of their Fuhrer in a brutal fistfight — one might almost think our author was setting out to become the left-wing Mickey Spillane if one didn’t know that the first Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury (1947), came out only shortly before Finnegan’s death.”
Of the three books, Mike suggested they were ripe for picking by the movies, and if that had happened, John Garfield was his choice to play the role of Dan Banion.