CARTER BROWN – The Strawberry-Blonde Jungle. Belmont Tower, paperback original, 1979.

   Carter Brown’s back, and he’s got Danny Boyd with him. Brown was a mainstay at Signet for years — sales of over 50,000,000, so says the cover, and not a bad track record at all — before being dropped several years ago.

   His kind of story being hard to sink, he’s resurfaced in recent months at Belmont Tower, but with some of the sleazier aspects of his later days at Signet still very much in evidence — if not more.

   As for Danny Boyd, he’s moved from Manhattan to Santo Bahia, California, but he’s still a private eye. In his own words, he’s about the ripest bastard he knows, with a penchant for a leer and saying his mind.

   This latest case involves a widow’s hunt for some leftover syndicate money, and a reasonable number of complications develop, but it’s your meat only depending on how deeply your craving for bosomy babes and bawdy broads runs in your daily dose of detective fiction.

   This is a family magazine, as I’ve remarked before, so I don’t believe I’d better explain the title.

Bibliographic Note:   The final Carter Brown novel from Signet may have been The Dream Merchant, which came out in June 1976. When Belmont Tower picked up the franchise in 1979, they published six or so that year, with Donovan’s Delight and The Spanking Girls appearing first, followed by The Strawberry-Blonde Jungle.