Reviewed by TONY BAER:

   

WILLIAM L. STUART – Night Cry. Dial Press, hardcover, 1948. Avon, paperback, 1949. Avon #597, paperback, 1954. Basis for the film noir Where the Sidewalk Ends, directed by Otto Preminger from a script by Ben Hecht and starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney. Adapted for TV: Kraft [Mystery] Theatre, NBC, 13 August 1958. starring Peter Falk and Jack Klugman.

   Ken Paine just came back from WWII, a war hero, and now he’s adrift. He’s drinking and gambling and generally making an ass of himself. He gets in a fistfight with some jerk at the gambling joint, knocks him out, and leaves. Later that night, the jerk winds up dead. Paine is suspect #1.

   Lieutenant Mark Deglin is on the case. A tough cop who doesn’t take shit from anybody. Deglin tracks down Paine. Paine pretends he knows nothing about the murder—and he gets surly when the cop tries to push him around:

   Paine stared at him, his one eye wide, his face mottling with anger. He stepped forward, his arms out. Deglin feinted at the eye, and when the arms came up, he hit Paine in the belly. Paine shuddered and Deglin hit him, as hard as he could hit, in the face on the blind side, then chopped at Paine’s neck. Paine started to buckle forward. Deglin hit him again, savagely, and again chopped at his neck. The blows turned Paine and carried him back onto the bed. He lay for a moment, breathing rapidly in choking gasps, then he floundered awkwardly and slid to the floor. The rapid breathing stopped.

   
   Okay. Well big deal. A murderer gets killed resisting arrest. It’ll be okay.

   Deglin calls in to report to the captain, who says: Oh you can forget about Ken Paine. We got a full confession from the murderer! Ken Paine is no longer a suspect.

   So at this point Deglin has a choice to make. Admit that he killed an innocent man. Or hide the body.

   Paine’s dead anyway. Whatever Deglin does, it ain’t gonna bring him back. So why should Deglin suffer, derailing his promising career? He decides to dump the body and make it look like Paine split, dumping the weighted body in the Hudson.

   Of course it’s all well and good long as the body stays sunk. But bodies rarely stay sunk in a crime novel. And this body no exception.

   So the body is found. And guess who is assigned to the case?

   Yep. Deglin is chasing after a murderer who is himself. But now, instead of an arguably victimless crime, this time Deglin’s gonna have to frame somebody.

   The question is, just how bad a Bad Lieutenant is Lieutenant Deglin?

   It turns out not nearly bad enough. And his ambivalence alternatively haunts him, and tempts him, while he struggles to decide how far he’s willing to go. And how much he’s willing to risk and suffer for a choice long past chosen.

         —

   It’s a good, tough novel. Not sure I buy the ending, which is a bit too cute. But other than that, a solid hardboiled read. On the other hand, when an author blows an ending, asking me how I like it is a bit like asking Mrs. Lincoln, other than that, how was the play?