Fri 26 Mar 2021
DONNELL CAREY – Kisses Can Kill! Chase Coburn #1. Phantom #501, digest-sized paperback original; 1st printing, 1951.
Donnell Carey, an author you probably never heard of, was actually the pen name of Joe Barry Lake, who never wrote any mysteries under that name, but who did write several as by Joe Barry, five of which were hardcovers featuring PI Rush Henry as the detective of record. I have not read any of these but on the basis of Kisses Can Kill!, at the moment I see no reason to rush right onto the Internet to find any of them.
This was Barry’s only book as Donnell Carey, and hence, almost automatically, the only appearance of PI Chase Coburn. Coburn is as generic a moderately tough PI as there could be. His only claim to fame may be that he’s part of a small group of PI’s who belong to the club of “my partner’s been killed and it’s up to me to do something about it.†His partner was a guy who played fast and loose with the ladies, while Chase has always been somewhat soft on the dead man’s wife.
The case that Dave, Chase’s partner, was working on was mostly financial. He’d been in Cincinnati trying to find out why a branch of a Manhattan-based clothes designer firm is not doing as well as it should. Chase spends a big chunk of the middle portion of the book out in Ohio and across the river into Kentucky doing not much of anything before returning to Manhattan to close up the case.
Which turns out to be one of blackmail on Dave’s part. Who did him in is meant to be a surprise, but with plenty of time to think things over on the part of the reader, while the less interesting part of the story is going on, it is lot easier than it should have been to see the twist coming.
Overall then, Kisses Can Kill! is no more than an average PI story, told with some competence, but not one you’ll remember for more than a day or so.
Rating: C Minus
March 26th, 2021 at 2:49 pm
Correction, Steve: The author’s real name was Joe Barry Lake.
March 26th, 2021 at 2:54 pm
Ah, yes. You’re right. There’s many a slip between mind and fingertip!
But in this case, easily fixed. Thanks!
March 26th, 2021 at 8:16 pm
Mind/fingertip: that is a quip not in my current arsenal and I may well make use from now on.
The above review alluding to Hammett bears out a private opinion of mine (not an especially original opinion, I admit –just a private one) that ‘Maltese Falcon’ can be endlessly plundered whereas, ‘Red Harvest’ is so raw and so visceral that it defeats most copycats. If you want to write something similar to ‘Red Harvest’ you must possess real muscle of your own. Real chops. Whereas, if you just want to earn some dosh writing ‘a detective yarn’ you can wantonly pilfer from ‘Falcon’, with widely varying results according to your capacity. It’s full of archetypes which can be re-used by anyone of any caliber. But matching the astounding mayhem of ‘Red Harvest’ is not something ‘just anyone’ can do. ‘Red Harvest’ is my favorite Hammett novel and this is partly why I admire it just a tad more than the fabulously enjoyable ‘Falcon’. I don’t know why I submit this comment, I don’t intend to simply add ‘clutter’. It’s nothing very remarkable but it’s something I believe.
March 26th, 2021 at 8:37 pm
Lazy Georgenby,
I don’t disagree with your premise, but RED HARVEST is one of the most copied books in the genre, virtually everyone in the genre has written their own version at some point from Spillane to Ross Macdonald, and some like Cleve Adams more than once.
“… an average P.I. story, told with some competence …” is damning with faint praise but fits far too many stories in the genre, in any genre to be fair, but there does seem to be a plethora of just competent eyes and eye writers out there. Sometimes you would rather deal with a bad one than another “just competent” one.
March 26th, 2021 at 9:01 pm
No, KISSES is not a bad book, but it’s far from a good one. Like a lot of mysteries I’ve read (or tried to read) recently, it sags noticeably in the middle. Those I can’t make it through to the end, I don’t write about here, so there is that.
I had thought that Chase Coburn was obscure enough to have escaped the notice of Kevin Burton Smith, grand poobah of the Thrilling Detective website, but no, here he is:
https://www.thrillingdetective.com/more_eyes/chase_colburn.html
Of note, I think, and I quote:
“[The author] was probably best known for the five rough tough novels he wrote about hard-boiled Chicago P. I. Rush Henry as “Joe Barry,” but he also wrote two books featuring Donn O’Mara, apparently a New York P.I.; and another featuring a gumshoe named Bill August. Sometime in the fifties Lake apparently abandoned mystery writing, and started writing for television, working on Danger for CBS and a couple of soap operas, The Road of Life and The Inner Flame, of all things.”
March 26th, 2021 at 9:03 pm
Lazy
If you Google the phrase “There’s many a slip between mind and fingertip!” in quotes, you will find it on only one website. This one.
March 26th, 2021 at 9:07 pm
And one more thing. If anyone is interested in purchasing my copy of this book, it’s up for auction on eBay even as I speak. If you mention this blog after you win, take 20% off.
It’s time to find new homes for books I will never read again.
March 26th, 2021 at 10:10 pm
re: #4. My opinion, (leaping to repeat) is a humble one and a tentative one; I’m not a scholar. Its purely from my own stump as an amateur reader of the genre; a casual moviegoer, etc. But the topic of ‘what is an imitation’ is fascinating and should be accessible for anyone to discuss (it obsessed the Greeks for instance) and in that spirit I’d like to reply. Not contradicting but merely tacking on. I agree there are attempts by authors subsequent to Hammett, which try to capture the magic of ‘Harvest’. I’d previously considered the ways in which ‘Red Harvest’ has been imitated down through the years but: it’s this point which still seems to make it different than the way ‘Falcon’ is imitated. If someone wants to do their own version of ‘Harvest’ they needs must do an entire story of their own in that style. I’ve only read a few noted examples, but this seems to be the trend. (ps. I recall this was brought up on Mfile a few weeks ago; when various ‘knock offs’ of ‘Harvest’ were cited. Ross Thomas was said to have ‘his version’, and someone else was said to have another version, etc.) Not denying that! But to me this still seems different than what goes on with ‘Falcon’. ‘Falcon’ coined (or ‘gave more fame; to) certain tropes that any detective story in any style can pluck from. The “detective’s office” for example; the “partner’s wife”, the “dead partner”, “the detective’s code” and such like. Dozens of nuances which Hammett brought to the fore. I’m not equipped with far-reaching knowledge of the genre but it still seems to me as I suggest above: when an author wants to imitate ‘Harvest’ he has to go all-out with it and craft a similar yarn from soup-to-nuts. The type of story it is, makes it “tropeless”. A writer can certainly lift things from it like the brutality, the grimness of it, the cynicism …but …to me, this seems to pay homage to Hammett rather than steal from it. When writers crib things from ‘Falcon’ (such as, ‘gunsel’ or ‘Fat Man’ or ‘the boodle’ –something everyone’s chasing after–) it strikes me as less worthy.
‘ppreciate being allowed to kick this around with you all. Ty!
March 27th, 2021 at 1:17 am
The RED HARVEST plot is pretty much the old Western plot of cleaning up the town dressed up with modern setting and in Hammett’s case the hero going “blood simple” in doing so. Most of the writers using the basic plotline clean it up a bit by their hero not being quite as ruthless as the Op though Cleve Adams and William Ard both followed Hammett fairly closely while many writers add a Homeric touch by having their hero returning from exile to clean the town up.
FALCON is certainly seminal in the genre, Spade not only the detective real eyes wanted to be, but the model for many who followed — Peter Cheyney’s Slim Callaghan and Michael Shayne are just two eyes modeled closely on Spade right down to the secretary.
Certainly the form and language of FALCON are highly influential and the dead partner a familiar motif, and the McGuffin and colorful crooks from it frequently borrowed. You can almost split the genre between those modeled on the voices of Hammett, Chandler, and Daly/Bellem/Spillane with sub categories for Ross Macdonald and JDM.
Brigid is probably the single most common element of the book borrowed over the years. She isn’t the first femme fatale, but she appears again and again in many variations throughout the genre. She is so powerful a trope she carried over into the spy novel and once in a while into the mainstream detective story. That final scene when Spade turns her over has been copied in so many ways and in so many books in the genre it would be a Herculean task to even try to catalogue it even when the other elements of FALCON are only given a nod.
I agree completely it is impossible to underestimate the impact of FALCON to the point I’m not sure the genre as we know it would even exist without that book in something of the way the VIRGINIAN impacted the Western or Scott and Dumas the historical novel. It is the one work in the genre that is essential.
March 29th, 2021 at 9:57 am
Here’s a note about Lake, passed along to me from Bill Pronzini:
“Joe Barry Lake seems to have been an interesting fellow. In addition to writing mysteries and later for early TV programs, according to the bio on the jacket of THE PAY-OFF (1943), he had a B.A. in interpretive speech, spent two seasons with a repertory company, and worked ten years as announcer, producer, and writer for half a dozen major radio networks in the Chicago area, during which time he gave Sunday evening inspirational poetry readings and announced college football games.”