PAUL CAIN – Fast One. Doubleday Doran & Co., hardcover, 1933. First appeared in serialized form in non-consecutive issues of Black Mask magazine between March and September, 1932. Bond Mystery #10, digest paperback, 1945. Avon #178, pbbk, 1948; Avon #496, ppbk, 1952. Southern Illinois University Press, hardcover, 1978. Popular Library, paperback, “American Fiction” series, 1980. Black Lizard, paperback, 1987.

   The hardest of the hard-boiled writers for Black Mask in the early 1930s was unquestionably Paul Cain (Peter Ruric). His style, as pulp authority Ron Goulart has noted, at times “becomes as sparse and clipped as that of a McGuffey’s Reader.”

   In an afterword to the Southern Illinois reprint edition, critic Irvin Faust says that Cain “hasn’t the time or patience for excess baggage. He picks up his literary scalpel and scrapes away conjunctions as if they were bad merchandise… He digs into the page with a hard sentence: simple, declarative, exact.”

   Fast One is Cain’s only novel. (He was primarily a screenwriter and is responsible for such films as One for the Money, Grand Central Murders, and Mademoiselle Foi.)

   It was written on a bet and its various sections first appeared in Black Mask as five self-contained novelettes prior to book publication. It is unrelentingly grim and stark and brutal, to such an extent that it becomes uncomfortable to read; one begins to feel a kind of breathless despair well before the end.

   The “hero” is Gerry Kells, a mysterious loner, a criminal who insinuates himself into the Los Angeles underworld and wreaks havoc on its denizens and on others who happen to get in his way. The dust jacket blurb on a 1978 reissue by Southern Illinois University Press says about Kells:

   Cain knew his Los Angeles and he knew the ways of its Prohibition and post-Prohibition underworld. The portrait he paints of both, and of Gerry Kells, makes Fast One an important and compulsively readable novel, despite that feeling of breathless despair it engenders.

   The only other book by Cain is Seven Slayers (1946), a collection of seven of his other Black Mask stories, all of which are in the same tough vein and all of which are excellent samples of pulp writing at its best.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

THE LAST CROOKED MILE. Republic Pictures, 1946. Donald Barry, Ann Savage, Adele Mara, Tom Powers, Sheldon Leonard, Nestor Paiva, Harry Shannon, Ben Welden, John Miljan, Charles D. Brown, John Dehner. Based on a radio play by Robert L. Richards. Director: Philip Ford.

   Don “Red” Barry, as he usually was billed – he got the nickname from playing Red Ryder in the 1940 serial – was 5’ 4 ½” tall, making him an easy comparison with Jimmy Cagney, with same on-screen persona: brash and cocky, but as someone on IMDB has pointed out, without the same degree of menace. In the 1940s he had mostly western roles before switching to a more varied list of credits when TV came along.

   In Last Crooked Mile, though, he plays a brash and cocky private eye named Tom Dwyer, who horns in uninvited on an armed robbery investigation to get a 10 percent reward for recovering the $300,000 that was stolen. The gang who pulled the job all died trying to make their getaway, and no one knows where the money went.

   The car, though, that three of them cracked up in has been restored and is on display in a carnival. Although the car was searched many times with no success, Dwyer thinks it’s a good place to start, and do you know what? He’s right.

   While chasing down and avoiding the various thugs and hoodlums who have the same idea, Dwyer meets two attractive women, which is one more than usual in short hour-length B-films like this. One is Adele Mara, who plays an old flame who resents being stood up too many times, and the other is Ann Savage (of Detour fame), who plays a nightclub singer and an old flame of the head of the gang who pulled off the robbery but who is now going straight.

   Although the hiding place for the money is no big secret, there are a couple of twists to the tale, and one of them is actually a fairly good one. There is a decent amount of action, some humor (maybe a little too much) and some singing. That plus a storyline that makes sense, and you have a good 60 minutes of entertainment. Not noir, by any means, but still entertaining.

DEREK MARLOWE – Somebody’s Sister. Viking, hardcover, 1974. Penguin, paperback, 1977. First published in the UK: Jonathan Cape, hardcover, 1974.

   Somebody’s Sister is an attempt by a British author to write an American hard-boiled private-eye novel — and quite a successful attempt it is.

   The investigator, Walter Brackett, is a fifty-three-year-old Englishman operating in San Francisco. His wife has died, his business has nearly gone to ruin, and he has an emotionally crippled partner, Harry Kemble, in a rest home.

   Brackett visits Kemble every Saturday; otherwise he sits in his office above Fatty’s Delicatessen waiting for clients who seldom materialize. Brackett is likable and sympathetic but — in the tradition of the hard-boiled novel — he keeps his reader at a distance.

   On this particular Saturday, Brackett returns from his usual visit to find the police waiting: A young girl has been killed in an auto accident on the Golden Gate Bridge, and Brackett’s card was in the car; the police want him to make an identification.

   At the morgue, Brackett finds the girl is Mary Malewski, a prospective client who wanted him to find her father; Brackett never investigated for her, however, because she suddenly ran out of his office. Also at the morgue Brackett encounters a man named Loomis who apparently witnessed the accident.

   Later Loomis leaves a message asking Brackett to visit him at his Sausalito motel. Brackett goes, but before he can talk to the man, Loomis is fatally shot in the car wash across the street! The police tell Brackett to stay out of the investigation; Loomis was a drug informer, involved in something too big for a down-at-the-heels private eye. But Brackett can’t stay out of it; he senses Loomis’s death and that of the girl are connected.

   So he digs — in the lowly dives of North Beach where the girl lived; in an expensive home in Pacific Heights where her aging lover resides — until he finally must face a personally shattering truth.

   The book is well plotted, and just when the reader thinks he knows what is really going on, he encounters another unexpected twist. In fact, its only faults are minor: a clue that could have been better placed; geographical discrepancies that are more likely to bother San Franciscans than anyone else; the San Francisco police having jurisdiction over a crime which happens in Sausalito across the Bay. (The novel is dedicated to newspaper columnist Herb Caen, who is often referred to as “Mr. San Francisco”; perhaps if Marlowe had consulted Caen, these discrepancies wouldn’t have happened.)

   Unfortunately Marlowe — who has written a number of other suspense novels, including the well-received Dandy in Aspic (1966) — chose not to make Brackett a series character.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

DEBORAH CROMBIE – No Mark Upon Her. William Morrow, hardcover, February 2012.

Genre:   Police procedural. Leading character:  Det. Supt. Duncan Kincaid; 14th in series. Setting:   England.

First Sentence:   A glance at the sky made her swear aloud.

   Police Detective Chief Inspector Rebecca Meredith, also an Olympic rowing contender, has gone missing. When a K9 team locates her body, it is clear her rowing accident was no accident. Pressure in brought to bear on Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid to solve the case quickly and quietly, but things are not as simple as they appear.

   On a personal level, one thing I enjoyed about this particular book is the setting; it’s one of the few areas of England I’ve been fortunate enough to visit and come to know. I’ve always appreciated Ms. Crombie’s vivid descriptions, but this was especially fun for me.

   Although I am always glad to move away from the angst-driven detective to those who have families and personal lives, there can be way too much of a good thing. The case and the mystery were very nearly drowned in details of Duncan Kincaid and his wife Gemma’s life. While that adds veracity to the characters and story, I found it overwhelming and distracting to the point where I was close to not finishing the book.

   What saved it, for me, is that Ms. Crombie does write a very good police procedural. There is good tension and some very well-done plot twists. Sadly, I correctly identified the killer almost from the first appearance in the story.

   Ms. Crombie is a wonderful writer. Unfortunately, No Mark Upon Her was, for me, far from her best book. I’d prefer to see her leave the kids and the dogs more in the background and focus on her fine ability to write a really good mystery.

Rating:   Okay.

PAUL CAIN – The Complete Slayers. Edited and with a biographic essay by Max Allan Collins and Lynn F. Myers, Jr.   Centipede Press, hardcover, March 2012.

   Recently I was very impressed by a collection of hardboiled literature and we discussed it here on Mystery*File. I’m talking about Frederick Nebel’s The Complete Casebook of Cardigan. Around the same time, a second collection was published, this time by Paul Cain (no relation to James Cain). The book is titled The Complete Slayers and has created a buzz on the internet and in some discussion groups.

   Paul Cain’s career was far shorter than Frederick Nebel and except for one short story in 1949, all his fiction appeared during the period between 1932 and 1936. At least three major newspapers have reviewed the book, one did not like it and the other two loved it.

   In The Wall Street Journal, Lee Sandlin bluntly states, “Cain wasn’t any good.” However in The Washington Post, Michael Dirda, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reviews, gives the collection a very favorable review and stresses Raymond Chandler’s quote about Paul Cain’s style being “some kind of high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner.”

   He then finishes his long review by saying, “There’s absolutely nothing to criticize about the knockout stories inside the book…” The Los Angeles Review of Books also gives it a favorable long review and discusses “The grim hardness of a neglected noir master.”

   I’ve been a long time admirer of Paul Cain and first read his work in Black Mask back in the 1970’s when I was picking up back issues for only a few dollars each. Of the 20 stories in this collection, 17 of them first appeared in Black Mask. Five were combined and published as Cain’s only novel, Fast One.

   I reread the novel a couple times over the years and now with this collection, which reprints the novel in its original magazine form, I feel I can safely say that Fast One definitely deserves to be on any list of the 10 best hardboiled novels.

   On a recent panel at PulpFest in Columbus Ohio, the topic was Black Mask and the consensus was that Paul Cain was one of the very best writers for the magazine, after of course, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Exactly how editor Joseph Shaw discovered Paul Cain is still a mystery but we can recreate some of the details of what must have happened.

   In 1930 Dashiell Hammett stopped writing for Black Mask. He had been writing for the magazine for several years and had just about created the hardboiled detective. I say just about because some scholars also credit Carroll John Daly. He left not because of any disagreement but simply because the movie industry in Hollywood paid far more money.

   Shaw even sent Hammett a check for $500 as an advance on another story, but this money was now just pocket change since Hollywood was paying more than this every week.

   In an attempt to replace Hammett, Joseph Shaw got Frederick Nebel to start writing a series about another agency detective called Donahue. There were over a dozen of these novelets, which will soon see publication as Tough As Nails (Altus Press). Then in 1932 he discovered Paul Cain, and it’s obvious that Cain was encouraged to write in the Hammett, tough hardboiled style.

   The first story by Cain appeared in the March 1932 issue of Black Mask and was called “Fast One” The first novelet of a series that would eventually be published as the novel, Fast One.

   It stars Gerry Kells and relates the complicated plot of how Kells gets involved in gambling and corrupt politics. The story is very bleak, very violent, very fast.

   Kells gets his face carefully kicked, sapped on the head, shot in the leg, an ice pick in the back, and finally a car crash. If you are looking for a clean cut hero with a happy ending, then this is not the book for you.

   His girlfriend Granquist has no first name and is a drunk. Again, not your typical pretty, young heroine of most novels. In fact I consider her to be one of the most believable gangster girlfriends that I have read about.

   Then in 1933, Shaw discovered Raymond Chandler as the hunt to replace Hammett continued. In 1936 Joseph Shaw left Black Mask over a salary dispute and he had such a big influence that several writers also quit the magazine.

   When he left, so did Paul Cain, Frederick Nebel, and Raymond Chandler. Lester Dent also stopped writing for the magazine. He only wrote two hardboiled stories but he might have written more with Shaw’s encouragement. The magazine became quite different after Shaw left, certainly less hardboiled.

   The Complete Slayers is published by Centipede Press in a special 500 copy edition, signed by the editors and the artist, Ron Lesser. The cover price is $75 but I see that amazon.com still is discounting it at $47.

   This book is definitely worth the price. There are 622 pages, a biographical essay about Cain’s life, a 13 page color section of book and magazine covers, and each story has an introduction. The dust jacket cover is a knockout showing a scantily dressed blond, casually pointing a gun at some guy lying on the floor.

   There is one incorrect statement in the biography that has to be pointed out. The editors state that after Shaw left Black Mask in 1936, Daisy Bacon took over as editor. Daisy worked for Street and Smith and was responsible for the astounding success of Love Story, which was the biggest seller of all the pulp magazines. I’ve heard circulation reports of 600,000 a week.

   She eventually became editor of Detective Story in the 1940’s but at no time did she ever edit Black Mask. The lady who took over after Shaw was Fanny Ellsworth(1936-1940). Then Ken White became editor in 1940 when Popular Publications bought the title.

   If you like hardboiled fiction or the tough Black Mask style, then this collection is a must buy. It gets my highest recommendation.

JOHN STEPHEN STRANGE – The Strangler Fig. Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, 1930. Reprinted in paperback as Murder at World’s End: Mystery Novel Classic #59, no date stated, [1944].

   Had I but known what awaited me in John Stephen Strange’s The Strangler Fig, I’d have left this Crime Club mystery for Bill Deeck to review because only he can really do justice to the gems within. How about some of the following H-I-B-K beauties from this book:

   Or:

   Strange’s amateur sleuth is Baltimore attorney Bolivar Brown, who goes to World’s End Island off the Florida coast where there was a disappearance seven years ago, and now a murder. A hurricane occurs, as obligatory in Florida mysteries of the 1930s as drugs are in the 1980s.

   Superstition ascribes the ability to murder to the titular tree, but Bolivar knows better, as he says, “I shall not rest until I am able to call the strangler fig by its human name.”

   The book proceeds for too many pages (295) toward a fairly guessable denouement in which Brown gathers all the suspects together. Before he has made any disclosure, Strange (a pseudonym for Mrs. Dorothy Stockbridge Tillet) gives us more wonderful cliches:

    “Do you really mean that one of us is a murderer?” and “Do you mean to say that you know who committed these murders?”

   This is a quaintly old-fashioned mystery whose plot, characters, and atmosphere are not strong enough to warrant the time spent. However, the unconscious humor made it worthwhile.

Bibliographic Notes:   Mrs. Tillet wrote a total of 22 mystery novels in her career, the first appearing in 1928, the last, The House on 9th Street, in 1976 when she was 80 years old. All of them were published under Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint. While she used other leading characters more than once, this was the only appearance of Bolivar Brown.

JEREMIAH HEALY – Swan Dive. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1988. Pocket, paperback, 1989.

   Your name is John Francis Cuddy, Boston private eye. You’ve lost your beloved wife to cancer, and you go frequently to commune at her gravesite, to leave a flower, to talk with her about what’s happening in your life.

   What’s happening Is Nancy Meagher, an assistant D.A., whom you may come to love when your affections recover from wifely loss. What’s also happening is that a friend, a fearfully incompetent lawyer named Chris, with a wife in the latter stages of M.S., asks you to help in a divorce action he’s handling.

   Wants you as a bodyguard, actually, since he’s afraid of the husband. With good reason, it develops, for soon you’re fighting for your life in the underbelly of the city, and the cops have your name on a double murder.

   This is Swan Dive by Jeremiah Healy, a very satisfying read as Cuddy tries to find the way out of a no-win situation.

Editorial Comment:   Swan Dive was the fourth of 13 novel adventures of PI John Francis Cuddy; there have also been two short story collections. Since the most recent novel was Spiral in 1999, it is safe to assume that after nearly automatic yearly appearances over a period of fifteen years, there will be no more.

CAROLA DUNN – Anthem for Doomed Youth. St. Martin’s/Minotaur Books, hardcover, March 2011; trade paperback, February 2012.

   It is hard to believe that this is the 19th in Carola Dunn’s Daisy Dalrymple series. It has to rank high in the list of long-running series still in progress, and it’s all the more remarkable considering that the first one, Death at Wentwater Court, was published in 1994, which (at times) seems like only yesterday.

   Of course, unless you hadn’t heard, Daisy is now Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher, happily married to DCI Alex Fletcher of Scotland Yard, and the stepmother of one young lady and the mother of a pair of twins just beyond infancy. The only source of discontent between husband and wife is when Daisy manages to get involved in one of Alex’s cases, which happens, to the avowed disapproval of Alex’s superiors, more often than not.

   A long-running series means that readers have gotten fond of a character and keep coming back for more. It has to be challenge to keep the character interesting – which means change – while not annoying readers — who might not like change as much as an author does, not wishing to tell the same story over and over.

   From my perspective, the series has changed noticeably since I last read one of them, which was very early on in her list of cases to be solved. Daisy’s adventure then – I misremember which – was light-hearted and cozy all the way through. She was young at the time, while in Anthem she seems a lot more matronly, or well on her way to such status, with equally matronly friends with children the same ages as hers.

   The story in Anthem is darker, too, reflecting the time in England a lot more accurately than I recall was the case in her earlier adventures. It is 1926, between the wars, and it is the aftereffects of the first one that are at the root of the three murders Alex is confronted with: three men shot through the heart and buried in an isolated woods at staggered times over the past few months.

   This makes Alex’s half of the story the primary one, one he deals with competently but without great challenge, but it is the cause for the darker mood of the overall story. Daisy, on the other hand, finds herself with a separate unexplained death on her hands, that of a headmaster at the boarding school her stepdaughter attends. His body is found in the middle of a maze near the school grounds, an unliked (and unlikeable) man in life, one who would make any number of wishers of his demise without half trying.

   Are the two cases connected? You will have to read to find out. While the ending is worth the wait, it does take a while for Daisy to have anything to do – about 130 pages into a 290 page book. Longtime fans of the series won’t mind. Others who are not might get a little impatient.

THE LAWBREAKERS. MGM, 1961. Jack Warden, Vera Miles, Ken Lynch, Arch Johnson, Robert H. Harris, Robert Douglas, Jay Adler, Robert Bailey. Theme & background music: Duke Ellington. Screenwriters: Paul Monash & W.R. Burnett. Director: Joseph M. Newman.

   Among several other sources, IMDB says that this film was cobbled together from two episodes of The Asphalt Jungle, a tough, hardboiled crime series shown on ABC in 1961 as a summer fill-in. Combing through the list of episodes and their descriptions, however, the only matchup that fits is that of a single episode, “The Lady and the Lawyer,” the second in the series (9 April 1961).

   Some material may have come from the previous episode, to help establish the characters, but there’s only one real story line, that of a big name attorney who works for the local syndicate on the side. He also has money problems. Trying to support a wife and family as well as a mistress (Vera Miles) extends his resources too far – the lady has expensive tastes – and when desperation sets in, well, that’s where the story begins.

   Jack Warden plays the guy on the other side, a cop, and an honest one. Promoted to Commissioner when his predecessor can’t stand the heat, he proves to be formidable force against crime. He succeeds easily enough in this film, but I’ll have to come up with the rest of the series on DVD before I can tell you how he fares from here on out.

   As a femme fatale, Vera Miles is beautiful and alluring enough, but (to my mind) rather too icy cold to compare with the more sultry ladies who often appeared in the noir films of the 50s and 60s – more of a Grace Kelly type than an Audrey Totter or Marie Windsor. Not that she’s a pushover, by any means, not at all. You have to keep a close eye on women like this.

   There are several killings in the movie, served well by the black-and-white camera work, with one of the dead men being that of Bob Bailey’s character, the latter being one of the better players of Johnny Dollar on Old-Time Radio – he had one of the toughest voices to ever come from a man so slim. His part in The Lawbreakers may have been his longest roles in the movies, even though (sad to say) his character’s part ends so quickly.

   Overall, then, even though concocted somehow from a TV series, the film works well as a film, especially if you like your movies hardboiled and tough, which this movie is, except when Jack Warden breaks down a delivers a sort of sappy soliloquy to the press in a plea for some cooperation. He meant well, but I wish he hadn’t done it.

Note:   For more about The Lawbreakers, check out Mike Grost’s website, and the usual detailed analysis he does of all the movies he covers.

IRVING WEINMAN – Virgil’s Ghost. Fawcett Gold Medal, reprint paperback, January 1991. First published by Columbine, hardcover, 1990.

   Lenny Schwartz, the hero of Weinman’s two previous mystery novels, turns PI in this one. Years of guilt as a homicide policeman have taken their toll. (I haven’t read the first two, so that is all I know, but as you will see, if you read on, neither am I about to.)

   Lenny’s wife is upset by this decision for some reason, but maybe mostly because he didn’t tell her. Not, that is, until the night before he is to move into his new office. She kicks him out, saying that he is welcome home only on weekends, the next few of which they spend making love and feeling guilty afterward.

   So Lenny’s first case is important to him, more important than he knows. The parents of a mathematician whose mutilated body was recently found in the East River want him to prove that the coroner’s report was wrong, that their son did not die of AIDS. They feel guilty about this, but they are determined to pursue this course of action.

   Mixed in with all this guilt is a load of ethic humor (mostly Jewish), and fifty pages was as far as I went. Lenny’s new assistant is named Abrasha Addison (formerly Yarmolinksy), but at one time his real name was Abraham Resnick, and he can get a deal for you. When Lenny’s office/apartment is trashed by a firebomb, Abrasha is on the spot with a suitcase of clothes for Lenny. “What you think? Just your sizes, Lenny. No? Look, is first drawer quality. Bloomie’s Abe Strauss, good stuff, Huh?”

   The murder is serious, however. Pornography is hinted at. Snuff films. According to the back cover, perversion, conspiracy, and cover-ups are involved. Seamy sex clubs and drugs. Government agencies. Russkies. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency. Heaven help us. Can’t anyone write a plain old PI story any more?

   Anyway, I didn’t read most of this, but eight different newspapers and review services are liberally quoted on both covers, and they all read it and liked it, and you may, too. One of them even suggests that thus “great new literate sleuth” is “the American version of Adam Dalgleish.” I wouldn’t go that far, based on what I read, but I’d have to admit that I no longer read P. D. James either, and a lot of people do.

       The Lenny Schwartz series —

Tailor’s Dummy. Atheneum, 1986.

Hampton Heat. Atheneum, 1988.

Virgil’s Ghost. Columbine, 1990.
Easy Way Down. Columbine, 1991.

[UPDATE] 04-09-12.   One never knows for sure, but there’s a good possibility I would find something to reverse my opinion of this book, were I to read it now. Something as simple as my mood at the time may be different, or some eleven years later, certain overall ways I view things may have changed. On the other hand, I have not read P. D. James since I wrote this review, so perhaps not.