Wed 1 Oct 2025
JAMES SAVAGE – Girl in a Jam. PI Chuck Merrick. Avon T-356, paperback original, 1959. [Cover srt said to be by Ernest Chiriacka.]
This is probably PI Chuck Merrick’s only recorded case, and Al Hubin doesn’t even seem to know about this one. [This oversight has most assuredly been corrected by now.] He works for a large agency centered in Memphis, but this case takes him down to a small town in Georgia.
Where his client is the female head of an electronics firm being plagued by sabotage. She is young, beautiful, has a graduate education, and on the front cover she is wearing a brassiere, Merrick calls he “Baby,” tucks her into bed and goes out to solve the case.
— Reprinted from Mystery.File.4, March 1988.
October 1st, 2025 at 8:46 pm
The cover has attracted some attention online, but this might be the only review it’s ever gotten, as short as it is.
Nor can I tell you anything about the author, whose real name may or may not be James Savage. (There are lots of books written under that particular byline, well over a hundred, but whether or not “our” James Savage is one of them, I also cannot tell you.)