Sun 29 Jan 2023
RICHARD SALE – Lazarus #7. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1942. Harlequin #79, paperback, 1950.
Dr. Steve Mason has dedicated his life to fighting leprosy across the globe. He’s spent the past few years abroad. He’s back stateside for a new gig with the Rockefeller Institute in NYC. He schedules a stopover in LA to hang out with an old college buddy, Joss Henry.
Joss is an A-list Hollywood screenwriter and hell with the ladies. By comparison, Dr. Steve’s a bit of a buttoned-up nerd. But he humors Joss, and they get drunk and party with the aspiring actresses, eager to please, hoping for their chance. And producers. And all the other Hollywood tripe.
One particularly odd duck is the studio medico, Dr. Max Lekro, who lives in something like an abandoned castle in the middle of nowhere. Dr. Max is the kind of guy who likes to tear the wings off flies and then surgically reattach them. He’s really into killing dogs and trying to resuscitate them. He’s obsessed with the biblical story of Lazarus, who Christ raised from the dead. Lekro has made six attempts at raising dead dogs, naming each of his experiments in succession: Lazarus #1, Lazarus #2, etc…. One of his most successful experiments involves a beheaded dog who remains ‘alive’ via attachment to some blood circulation machine.
Dr. Max has also been treating a Hollywood persona for leprosy. On the down low. Because being a leper doesn’t play so well in the fan zines.
And a wannabe starlet has found out about the leper, and has been bleeding them for dough, blackmailing them that they’ll disclose the leper if they don’t keep paying thru the nose. And now the wannabe starlet is dead. But she had a poison pill letter sent to Joss Henry upon her death, disclosing the identity of the leper. And now Joss Henry, rather than telling the cops, decides to get greedy and use the info for his own aggrandizement. And then Joss is murdered. And so on.
And now the perp thinks Dr. Steve, being a leprosy expert, might notice the tell tale signs. So he’s got to go too! But Dr. Steve is our hero, so he’s lucky and safe. But not so for Dr. Max.
So Dr. Max gets stabbed to death. But Dr. Steve brings him back to life, for just a moment: Lazarus #7. Whispering the name of the murderer. Loud enough for Steve to hear. Loud enough for the truth. For justice. To be served.
—-
The book is okay. It kept my attention. It kept me turning the pages. And it’s short. But it ain’t great. It’s just okay. I wouldn’t expect this forgotten book to be raised from the dead anytime soon. If it were, count it Lazarus #8.
January 29th, 2023 at 6:12 pm
Weird! That’s all I can say. Weird!
January 29th, 2023 at 7:23 pm
This one is one of the classics of the screwball school, and taken as anything resembling a normal hardboiled novel I can see why anyone might be taken aback by it.
James Sandoe recommended it in his famous list of the best hardboiled novels despite a review that called it a “gay Hollywoodian gambol.”
It is definitely in line with some of Sale’s wilder pulp work, the more screwball of the Daffy Dill stories and some of his early shorts and for the spicy and weird menace titles.
This one is something of an outlier for Sale, it seems to have been his reaction to his first exposure to Hollywood with the success of NOT TOO NARROW NOT TOO DEEP. Eventually marrying Hollywood royalty (Mary Loos) Sale would become a screenwriter (SUDDENLY), director (TICKET TO TOMAHAWK, ABANDON SHIP!) and producer (YANCY DERRINGER) and write one of the best Hollywood mysteries (BENEFIT PERFORMANCE).
I agree with Sandoe, but I don’t discount Tony’s reaction to it. One man’s classic is another man’s “Huh?”, and this wild ride is more “huh” than usual.
This one, like Latimer’s SOLOMON’s VINEYARD features franker sexual content and violence than was common for its day and was considered more than a bit racy showing the trends that would come to fruition with Spillane and Mike Hammer five years later.
January 29th, 2023 at 10:49 pm
David,
It was Raymond chandler who called it a ‘gay hollowoodian gambol’ in ‘simple art of murder’. Don’t see it in sandoe list: https://thrillingdetective.com/2021/06/22/the-hard-boiled-dick/
The pdf of Lazarus #7 is available at:
http://www.luminist.org/archives/
I found it a fair bit less funny than daffy dill mainly because Dr. Steve is a really preachy, moralistic, religious guy with nary a sense of humor about him. I’d much rather hang out with daffy dill instead of the pontificous, holier than thou Dr. Steve.
January 30th, 2023 at 12:40 am
Not Too Narrow Not Too Deep worked brilliantly as a film. Strange Cargo became the title, and Clark Gable put it across brilliantly with help from Peter Lorre, Joan Crawford, and Ian Hunter. Many felt it made little or no sense, not me. I bought it. Frank Borzage made many of us believe the star came directly from Mount Olympus to MGM.
January 30th, 2023 at 12:48 am
Strange Cargo: https://archive.org/details/strange-cargo-1940_202108
January 30th, 2023 at 3:53 am
“the perp thinks Dr. Steve, being a leprosy expert, might notice the tell tale signs.”
Mightn’t a more sensible perp – before he becomes a perp – have thought Dr. Steve could cure him – though that might have ruined the novel.
January 30th, 2023 at 9:49 am
After reading NOT TOO NARROW, NOT TOO DEEP, I spent a lot of time looking for anything by Sale nearly as good. The closest I came was the classic cover of PASSING STRANGE (Ace D-23)
http://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/2013/03/forgotten-books-passing-strange-by.html
January 30th, 2023 at 9:03 pm
Roger,
There was no cure for leprosy then though it could be controlled after the initial period where it was highly contagious. Lepers in that era were often condemned to live with each other in colonies, the most famous in Hawaii, though there were places in the Continental US.
Leprosy attacks the body’s ability to heal and even feel meaning sufferers have to do full body checks daily looking for wounds they are unaware of that could become infected and rot tissue. For centuries it had been one of the most feared and misunderstood diseases.
Jan de Hartog’s novel THE SPIRAL ROAD set in the 20’d is a fairly accurate depiction of the kind of fear and social isolation imposed by leprosy in that general pre war era.
The last lepersorium in the US was in Louisiana, and was run by SF, Fantasy, and Mystery writer Stephen Donaldson’s physician father. I think it closed in the 1980’s though it may have been a little earlier.
Since antiquity it had been considered as “unclean” and would have destroyed the career of any star in Hollywood (particularly the one in the novel) in that period, well worth murdering over to keep the secret.