Sat 3 Aug 2019
PETER DUNCAN – Sweet Cheat. Dell First Edition A182, paperback original; 1st printing, 1959. Cover art by Darcy (Ernest Chiriacka).
The cover artist was worth mentioning, I thought, since it was his work that caught my eye and had me pick this off the shelf to read way ahead of several hundred other books. (What do you think? Wouldn’t you?) It turned out to be a good choice, too. I enjoyed the book as much as I did the fetching young lady on the cover.
Buck Peters, who tells the story, is both the Chief of Police in his home town and a deacon in the local church, so he has something of a reputation to maintain with his Mama and the other elderly local ladies, which makes solving the town’s latest (and maybe the first in the long time) a task something like juggling three balls in the air blindfolded.
Dead is a woman known as the town’s tramp, although that’s by reputation only. As much as she teased the menfolk’s healthy libidos, Buck knows that none of them had ever even made it to first base with her. What was the motive, then? Buck has a feeling that it was only frustration.
What complicates everything — and thus takes up most of the story — is that the chief suspect is Kip Belton, the police commissioner himself, a man whose wife Buck has been diddling with (his word) since high school. Belton’s alibi is that he was with his wife at the time, but he was not. She was with Buck, doing what long-time lovers do whenever they can, and in the Beltons’ own back yard.
What a predicament! Luckily Buck has similar goods on all the other men in town, and when it’s necessary, he’s not at all leery about making what he knows be known — much to the delight of Delbert, his deputy , who is a little sharper than Barney Fife, but not by a whole lot.
It all works out in the end, and I was sorry the end came so soon. Highly recommended, if you happen to come across a copy — and if you go looking, it’s not a book that’s very hard to find.
As for Peter Duncan, whose real name was Butler Markham Atkinson Jr., he has one other mystery novel in Hubin, a Gold Medal original entitled The Telltale Tart (1961). That one I’m going have to go looking for myself.
August 3rd, 2019 at 8:46 pm
It was a good era for a certain kind of story that seemed to bring out the best in quite a few writers who only dipped a toe in once in a while.
August 3rd, 2019 at 9:09 pm
True enough, David, but this one has enough light-hearted charm to it that it stands out from many of the others of the era. It tickled my funny bone, at least!
August 4th, 2019 at 3:23 pm
Ernest Chiriacka was a recent find among pulp fans. I mean his work had always been out there. He did a lot of covers from the pulps but not so distinctive that one would say “That’s a Chiriacka” the way one might say “That’s a Norm Saunders cover.” He showed up a few pulp conventions, a very old and frail man, but very happy to be among people who remembered his work and honored him for it. He also had delightful tales of his career. I suppose he has passed by now, but it was nice seeing him. And it’s nice seeing the cover for this paperback.
August 4th, 2019 at 4:41 pm
My cover tribute to ‘Darcy’ was here
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=453
before I knew that he was really Ernest Chiriacka.
I’m glad he was able to get to a few Pulpcons before he died. The one time I was there the same year he was, he seemed to be having the time of his life.