Mon 26 Feb 2007
M. E. KNERR – Travis
Pike Book #214; paperback original. First printing, April 1962.
I seem to be specializing in obscure books this month, and this one is about as obscure as you can get. Even though it is a private eye novel – and I’ll get back to that in a minute – it was published by one of those small sleazy paperback outfits in the early 1960s that promised more than they could possibly deliver at the time. And even so, if you happened to have purchased this one in 1962 for its sexy parts, you’d be sadly disappointed, since in that regard, it’s really rather tame. If sexy passages were what you were looking for back then, you’d have been far better off buying a copy of Peyton Place than this.
This book does not even appear in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, but it will, or at least in the Addenda. The author does appear, however, and to show you something of his track record, here’s his present entry:
* Operation: Lust (Epic, 1962, hc) as by M. E. Knerr.
* The Violent Lady (Monarch, 1963, pb)
Listed below are other titles by Knerr (under either byline) which I found listed for sale at various places on the Internet, but not included in CFIV, and probably for good reason. I do not have descriptions of the story lines for any of these first three, so your guess is as good as mine:
* Heavy Weather (Belmont/Tower, pbo, 1979) [** -See UPDATE below.]
* Port of Passion (Imperial #737, pbo, n.d.)
These I found descriptions for:
* Sasquatch: Monster of the Northwest Woods (Belmont/Tower, pbo, 1977) Quoting from the cover: “Though based upon factual research, this is a fictional tale of what could conceivably happen in the Pacific Northwest: a chain of events that could create a monster out of a normally timid and gentle giant.”
* The Sex Life of the Gods (Uptown Books #703, pbo, 1962) “Science Fiction erotica.”
[** UPDATE 02-27-07] At first I was doubtful, but now that I’ve found a cover scan of Heavy Weather, I’d say that it’s also a prime candidate for inclusion in Crime Fiction IV. If you can’t make out the small print on the bottom of the cover, it says, and I quote: “On the Mexico run the Pandora carried a cargo of drugs, danger and death!” LATER THE SAME DAY: Al Hubin agrees. In it goes. (The book pictured below is described as a Horwitz edition published in Hong Kong.)

But let’s get on with things and to the book Travis itself. There’s only one copy offered for sale on the Internet, making it not only obscure but scarce. I mention this even though I’m sure you know that the two are usually, but not always, one and the same.
Telling the story, though, in his debut and probably his only appearance in print, is Mike Travis, a “sailor of fortune, who loves life, and woman, especially women.” It is not difficult to deduce what other reasonably well-known character was the inspiration for Mike Travis. Travis in this book had previously been in the charter boat business in Florida, but when times went bad, he went to California to accept an offer made by one of his former customers, a multi-millionaire named Del Houston, to look him up if and when Travis headed out that way.
And Del does indeed have a job for him. After some quick string-pulling and the greasing of certain political hands, Del hands Travis a PI license and a gun, and a three-fold request: to find his son; get him off narcotics; and break up the gang who’s been supplying them.
It’s not a bad opening for a PI yarn, and the story maintains its way reasonably well for about half of its just under 160 pages: the usual PI stuff, the things that PI’s do, and the usual bad things happen to some of the people who just happen to get in the way, with all of the coincidences that make one or more aspects of one PI investigation dovetail nicely into another.
Even though it goes without saying, I’ll say it anyway. Travis himself is one of those guys who is irresistible to beautiful women. In this book that includes both his employer’s foster daughter, from page 20 …
… and a stripper who the first time they met, tripped him into a pool at Houston’s house. From page 68:
I think you can tell a lot of about a story by looking closely at how the author describes his characters, don’t you? With an ending that doesn’t directly address the clues that have been set up for it, though, the tale does two things simultaneously and hence the apparent impossible. The action-packed finale (a) goes all but out of control, and (b) withers away from lack of interest, as if there were a deadline set that had to be met, and it didn’t matter precisely how.

Although overall not without flashes of acceptable writing, and every once in a while better than acceptable, the overall impact of this novel is still rather like a third-rate Carter Brown or a tenth-rate John D. MacDonald, either of whom, if you’re a fan, you know what I’m talking about and whom you’re far better off pursuing.
Or let’s put it this way. One of the reasons for collecting and reading unknown and long-neglected works of mystery fiction is the hope that never dies of discovering an unknown and long-neglected classic of mystery fiction. Sometimes you have to settle for unknown and long-neglected.
UPDATE [02-26-07] If you were to google “M. E. Knerr” on the Internet, you would find, as I did, that there was a Michael E. Knerr who was a friend of SF and (occasional) mystery writer H. Beam Piper, who committed suicide in 1964 when he ran into financial troubles. I’ve not been able to confirm that the two Knerr’s are one and same, nor have the birth and death years for either one been verified. Accounts vary on the latter. Knerr may have also written under the name of “Brent Hart,” but that’s another loose end not yet tied down.
But the Knerr who was a friend of Piper apparently wrote a hitherto unpublished biography of him, and upon Piper’s death, went through his manuscripts and salvaged, among other things, the “lost” third Fuzzy novel, Fuzzies and Other People.
If and when I know more, I will as always, let you know.
[UPDATE #3] Postdated 03-29-07 on 08-16-07. Thanks to Google, I discovered that SF writer John F. Carr knew Mike Knerr, and after a small amount of effort, I was able to get in touch with him by email. As a consequence of this contact, John has posted a long article about his friendship with him here on the M*F blog. I should pointed this out more clearly before now, instead of leaving it hidden as one of the comments.
In this article about Mike Knerr, Carr has his correct date of birth, along with the year he died, plus a lot more about him on both a professional and a personal level.
March 6th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
[…] Also noted your piece on Michael Knerr. I don’t have Travis, the book you reviewed, but do have and have read the Monarch, The Violent Lady. Pretty good adventure/mystery tale set mainly on a 49-foot yawl on a long Caribbean treasure cruise. […]
August 15th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
Yes Mike E Knerr was a friend of Piper’s and yes he did write under Brent Hart. Also missing from your list of publications are two stories in Louis L’Amour Mag. As for the Fuzzy stories… somewhere there is a blue trunk with a lot of Piper’s things…(wink)
He was not born in 08 did not die in 84 as he was present at my wedding in 96. While the book Travis and several of the like were lacking was the fact he hated writing them, most before I was born in 64. But a lot of things we do for money they are not always the best product if your heart is not in it…
Daniel W Knerr
August 16th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
I’ve thanked Dan for leaving the comment above. He’s now seen the follow-up piece that John Carr did on his father, where the dates of when Mike Knerr was born and died were corrected. It was my fault for not leaving an update to Carr’s piece at the end of this one. I’ll do that right now. — Steve
December 20th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
I was Mike’s best friend since we were 12. We shared writing and joined a startup writers group that had H. Beam Piper in the group. I spent many a wee hours with mike discussing books including “Travis”. Before it was written we were working on a biography of the main charcater and how he come to own this great sailboat. I was there when Mike got the call from the publisher telling him they wanted TRAVIS. Shortly after that he ran all the way to California where he banged out a lot of cheap little books that paid him 600.00dollars for the first one and 100.00 increases for each story until he reaches 1200.00. He wrote them fast and I was disappointed because he was a much better writer then the hack I was reading. I once commented to him about the lead characters always getting woman. I told Mike ,either he was very nieve or one lucky son of a ….. I’m afraid his best writings were never published. I have in my possession a partial manuscript of his western epic he was working on. a kind of, How the West Was Won, thing. I hounded him since 1976 to write historical stuff, which was his favorite. I loved his writing on a book called, Forlorn Hope. An American revolution story from a British soliders point of view. It was good writing. He chose instead to write for the quick cash and notriety. your take on the book Travis was right on. It was not the book he and I worked on. Monty
June 9th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
[…] of the author’s mystery fiction, see a review of his private eye novel Travis posted earlier here on the Mystery*File blog. A biographical reminiscence of his life by John F. Carr can be found in […]
June 26th, 2023 at 5:05 am
I knew Mike when he and a friend lived on a sailboat on a mooring in Redondo Beach Harbor for a short while. He gave me a copy of his book “Sasquatch Monster of the Northwest Woods” and I still have it. Unfortunately, he didn’t sign it and I forgot to ask. Good people and I would say we three were friends.