Grave Danger, by Frank Kane

One of the profound delights of my writing this new blog is discovering pulp-era authors whose work I have somehow neglected to read over the years, but who I now want to look up. Another name to add to that growing list: Frank Kane. He was the Brooklyn-born inventor of hard-fisted New York City private eye Johnny Liddell, who starred in 29 novels and almost three dozen short stories between the end of World War II and the Summer of Love.

Liddell evidently made his initial appearance in “Morgue Star Final,” a short story published in the July 1945 edition of the magazine Crack Detective Stories. His creator, Kane, turned 32 years old that same month. He was a graduate of the City College of New York, who had gone on to attend law school. But according to the recollections of his granddaughter Maura Fox, Kane dropped out sometime before graduation in order to make money faster (he hoped) in journalism. A 1968 obituary in The New York Times says that Kane’s writing career began at the New York Journal of Commerce, “where he became editor of the wine and spirits page.” Fox explains that her grandfather also “served a couple of years as a columnist for the New York Press [and] was Editor-in-Chief for the New York Trade Newspapers Corporation.” Kane did public relations work, as well, putting in two years (1943-1945) as P.R. director of the Conference of Alcoholic Beverages Industries, working part of that time “with government officials to end the prohibition of consumption of alcohol,” states Fox.

Kane’s introduction to penning mystery and crime fiction began in the mid-1940s, when he started turning out scripts for the popular radio-drama series The Shadow. He exhausted half a decade or more working on that show, but also wrote for “a multitude of radio programs,” as Fox recalls. “In the detective-adventure genre, he spent three years writing Gang Busters. He also wrote for Counter Spy, The Fat Man, Casey, Crime Photographer, Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, The Lawless Twenties and Nick Carter, Master Detective. He also created Call the Police for Lever Brothers, and created, wrote, and produced Claims Agent for NBC, which was based on Kane’s character, Jim Rogers. And in 1947, Frank Kane was selected to write the Coast Guard documentary You Have to Go Out, starring Robert Young.” The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) adds that Frank Kane later did a stint in Hollywood, “writing for the television networks, including [the shows] Special Agent 7 (1958), The Investigators (1961),” and, most memorably, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, which showcased Darren McGavin in the title role. One of Kane’s most popular standalone novels, Key Witness (1956), was made into a 1960 film of the same name.

At one point, Fox recalls, execs from the U.S. TV network “CBS even approached Kane about adapting Johnny Liddell for a TV series. Unfortunately, CBS and Kane were unable to agree on terms of the project, and the plan fell through.”

Nonetheless, Liddell found a substantial audience. After cracking into Crack Detective, the P.I. finally made his leap to novel-length adventures in 1947’s About Face (later published as The Fatal Foursome). It was the start of what Kevin Burton Smith, editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site, has called “a solid series, nothing really exceptional, but it gets the job done, sorta like Johnny.” In many respects, Liddell was typical of his era’s type. Women found him attractive, he could handle himself in a tussle, and though he was frequently prone to having his gun stolen away by toughs and burning his tongue on hot coffee, he seemed eminently capable of separating himself--and his clients--from trouble. Readers often came to the Liddell novels after enjoying the chronicles of Mike Shayne, Philip Marlowe, Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, and others, hoping for more of the same. And there were certainly comparisons to be made, and more than a few passages in the Liddell stories worth remembering. Analyzing a Liddell yarn called “Frozen Grin,” which debuted in the January 1953 edition of Manhunt magazine, Mystery*File contributor Peter Enfantino wrote:

Frank Kane (1912-1968) had a freewheeling style of writing. It seemed to be all over the place at the same time. He could write dark:

There was a dull, crunching sound as the man’s nose broke. Liddell chopped down at the exposed back of the other man’s neck in a vicious rabbit punch. Sammy hit the floor, face first. Didn’t move.

or light:

She slid out of his arms, shrugged her shoulders free of the gown. It slid down past her knees, and she stepped out of it. Her breasts were full, pink-tipped; her waist trim and narrow. Her legs were long, tapering pillars; her stomach flat and firm.

Her eyes dropped down to her nakedness, rolled up to his face.

“I’ll do my best to make sure you’re not bored, Johnny.”

However, blogger Edward Piercy observes in his excellent review of the 1953 novel Poisons Unknown that Liddell’s creator had some writing quirks: “Kane breaks with tradition in his novels, putting his P.I. narrative in third-person. He has a habit of using Johnny Liddell’s full name throughout the book, long after the character has been introduced. It is all too frequently ‘Johnny Liddell did this’ or ‘Johnny Liddell did that.’ He should have cut some of them out. He also has a propensity to call a female character ‘the blonde’ long after she has been introduced. I chalk this down to a 50’s era obsession with blondes.” Meanwhile, crime-fiction historian Marvin Lachman has observed that Kane often “‘borrowed’ from himself” when it came to descriptive phraseology.

The Liddell series installment that immediately succeeded Poisons Unknown provides this week’s “killer cover”: Grave Danger (1954). Its back-jacket copy provides a good sense of how captivating--and corpse-filled--these stories could be:

ONE--
The redheaded secretary lay crumpled on the office floor, her blouse ripped to the waist. Blood trickled from her mouth.

TWO--
The redheaded divorcee sprawled across the bed, the black silk sheet baring her lovely body--and her gaping throat.

THREE--
The black-haired B-girl lay broken across the steering wheel of the bomb-shattered car. Her open eyes stared sightlessly at the tilted floor.

AND OUT!
Each had walked into a trap meant for private eye Johnny Liddell, set by the crime syndicate out to get him. Each was a score Johnny had to settle--if he could live long enough to see the end of three brutal bouts with murder!

If a reader wasn’t won over by that summation, he (or, less likely, she) would certainly have been seduced by the 1960 paperback cover embedded at the top of this post. Featuring an illustration by Harry Bennett, who created a number of Kane novel fronts in the mid-20th century (as well as jackets for works by Agatha Christie, Richard S. Prather and Ellery Queen), it contains all the requisite elements of hard-boiled detective fiction: a callipygous blonde (no doubt endangered), a well-heeled shamus (looking as if he’s been shot or clubbed ... or maybe he’s just planning to fondle the blonde’s behind), and alliterative cover lines that emphasize the noirish nature of the story inside: “Johnny Liddell tangles with mobsters, molls, and murder in New York.” Bennett established a distinctive style for the Liddell jackets, almost all of which found the gumshoe snuggled up near a woman of drool-inducing proportions, and were notably spare as far as background details went. Other artists--among them Victor Kalin and the renowned Robert McGinnis--tried their hands at illustrating the Liddell novels, but it’s the Bennett fronts (including Time to Prey and Bullet Proof, both of which are also featured here) that hold my eye best.

Some of Kane’s book titles were eye-catching as well, and probably caused light chuckling as readers browsed bookshelves. Grave Danger was one of the least inspired. More clever were Bare Trap (1952), Trigger Mortis (1958), The Mourning After (1961), Due or Die (1961), Dead Rite (1962), Crime of Their Life (1962), Esprit de Corpse (1965), Two to Tangle (1965), and, well, the list goes on and on. Even titles that seemed less creative, such as Green Light for Death (1949), were clear in their intent to attract readers hungry for hot lead, cool dames, and downright chilly killers. And there were plenty of such readers back when Kane was at his fiction-writing height. As The New York Times reported, the Johnny Liddell novels “sold more than 30 million copies in paperback and were translated into 17 languages.”

Unfortunately, Frank Kane’s life was cut way too short. He died on November 29, 1968, at his home on Long Island, New York, the victim of a heart attack at age 56. Granddaughter Maura Fox remembers that he perished “with many projects pending.” It’s likely that some of those unfinished undertakings were Liddell stories that we will never have a chance to read. But at least the author left behind an abundance of works that can still be found in used bookstores--not just his private-eye tales, but also standalones, TV series novelizations, and a pair of non-fiction books, The Anatomy of the Whiskey Business (1965) and Travel Is for the Birds (1966).

So, a career well spent? As alcohol-industry promoter Kane no doubt said himself on many occasions, I’ll drink to that.

READ MORE: “Richard Stark, Harry Bennett, Parker Book Covers, and The Seventh (a Westlake Score),” by Nick Jones (Existential Ennui); “Archived Review: Frank Kane -- A Real Gone Guy,” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File); “Bouchercon 2016, the Books: ‘This Is a Job for the Meat Wagon, Ed,’ a Look at Frank Kane,” by Peter Rozovsky (Detectives Beyond Borders).

The Moon Is Red, by Sax Rohmer

Arthur Henry Ward--that was apparently the mundane real name of the author best remembered by history under his pseudonym, “Sax Rohmer,” creator of the Chinese master criminal, facial-hair trendsetter, and later would-be U.S. dictator Dr. Fu-Manchu. Today would have been Ward’s 126th birthday, had he not died in 1959.

The novelist was born in Birmingham, England, in 1883 and published his first short story, “The Mysterious Mummy,” two decades later. He went on to pen music hall comedy sketches and magazine serials, before witnessing his first novel, Pause!, published (anonymously) in 1910. How Ward turned from all of that to composing thrillers about a diabolical Asian plotter and his nemesis, Sir Denis Nayland Smith, is a matter of some legend, recounted at the Books and Writers site:

In 1909 [the author] married Rose Elizabeth Knox, whose father had been a well-known comedian in his youth. When Rose Knox met Rohmer she was performing in a juggling act with her brother Bill. For almost two years they kept the marriage a secret from Rose’s family--she lived with her sister and Rohmer with his father. Rose was psychic and Rohmer himself seemed to attract metaphysical phenomena--according to a story, he consulted with his wife a Ouija board as to how he could best make a living. The answer was ‘C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N.’

Ward/Rohmer’s earliest Fu-Manchu book, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (also known in the States as The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu), came out in 1913, introducing the reading public to his nefarious fictional Chinese poisoner, master manipulator, and “Yellow Peril” archetype. The writer was periodically derided for the racist stereotype represented by his tall, satanic protagonist; however, Fu-Manchu gained renown from his appearances not only in more than a dozen novels, but in about the same number of motion pictures, including a few early ones starring Swedish actor Warner Oland (who also headlined the Charlie Chan films). Comic books and novels written after Rohmer’s demise have kept the name of his evil genius alive.

The Fu-Manchu yarns made Ward/Rohmer one of the highest-paid writers of the early 20th century. But he also earned a following with his books about Paris police detective Gaston Max (The Yellow Claw; full text here), occult detective Moris Klaw (The Dream-Detective), and “witch of the world” Sumuru (“an ice-cold, fascinating genius whose hypnotic powers impelled all men to do her bidding”), as well as a variety of one-offs such as this week’s featured title, The Moon Is Red.

Moon was originally published in 1954, but the cover shown atop this post comes from a 1964 British paperback edition. The illustration on that jacket is credited to an artist known as “Michel,” but I don’t seem able to find any additional information about him on the Web. Nonetheless, it’s a stunning front, full of apparent innocence (represented by the raven-haired young lovely with the cavernous cleavage) and dark menace (symbolized of course by the minimally defined yet powerful-looking figure who is sneaking up behind her). The Moon Is Red isn’t a book in my collection, but it’s said to be “a multiple locked-room mystery with [a] fantasy resolution.” R.E. Briney, who was once editor of a fan magazine called The Rohmer Review, dubbed Moon “one of the best of Rohmer’s last novels.”

The back-jacket copy describes this novel as “a macabre tale of mystery and imagination” and provides us with a bit of its plot:

Florida lay under a shadow--the long shadow of murder. Who or what was responsible for the deaths of two women, savage reminders of killings elsewhere? In each case the crime appeared motiveless and committed by other than human agency.

Non-human killers stalking the streets and hinterlands of Florida? No wonder that woman on The Moon Is Red looks a tad uneasy.

The Books and Writers site explains that, despite all of his work and enthusiasm for his stories, Rohmer’s financial security was short-lived: “He traveled with his wife in the Near East, Jamaica, and in Egypt, and built a country house called Little Gatton in the Surrey countryside. But the money went as fast as it had come--Rohmer’s business instincts were not good and he gambled away much of his earnings at Monte Carlo. In 1955 Rohmer was said to have sold the film, television and radio rights in his books for more than four million dollars.”

Four years later, this British novelist perished--rather ironically--during an outbreak of avian influenza, which was known better in his day as the Asian flu.

FOLLOW-UP: The wonderful blog Pulp Covers: The Best of the Worst identifies the artist responsible for this 1964 Digit Books cover of The Moon Is Red as Michel Johnson.

READ MORE: “‘Case of the Greek Room’ -- Sax Rohmer,” by Arun Kumar (The Ingenious Game of Murder).

Anything But Saintly, by Richard Deming

I don’t believe I’ve ever read any books by Richard Deming (1915-1983), but I understand that he was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and educated in Missouri. He’s also said to have once served as a U.S. Army captain, a social worker, and an employee of the American Red Cross, and was apparently a member of the Mystery Writers of America’s board of directors for the last six years of his life. According to the fine blog Vintage Paperback Reads, “Richard Deming had a long career that ran from the ’40s to the ’80s. He wrote many short stories, novels, and film/television adaptations. Highly admired, he created characters such as Manville Moon [and] Matt Rudd, and took over the Tim Corrigan series under [the house name] Ellery Queen.” He wrote under a wide variety of pseudonyms, including Max Franklin, Halsey Clark, and Nick Morino.

Deming didn’t lack for energy when he sat down in front of a typewriter. He’s credited with having published more than 70 books, including 10 under the Queen name and 11 works of non-fiction. In addition to composing stories featuring his own characters--such as Edge of the Law (1960), Hit and Run (1960, starring Buffalo, New York, private eye Barry Calhoun), Body for Sale (1962), and Death of a Pusher (1964)--Deming also penned more than 20 TV tie-in novels (often under the Max Franklin pseudonym) using the characters popular from Dragnet, Starsky & Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, and The Mod Squad. Concealed behind the house name Franklin W. Dixon, he’s even said to have written an installment of the Hardy Boys series, The Vanishing Thieves (1980). And on top of all of this, Deming reportedly composed more than 100 mystery and detective short stories, one of those being “The New Hand,” which appeared in the November 1968 edition of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.

Anything But Saintly was originally published by Permabooks, a paperback division of Doubleday, in 1963. A write-up on the Web explains the novel’s plot this way:

As a town, St. Cecelia was anything but saintly. She was rife with prostitution, dope, gambling, the works. Matt Rudd of the Vice Squad had the lurid inside story, but he was helpless as long as crooked politicos like Nick Bartkowiak and his right-hand goon, Little Artie Nowak, kept the Police Commissioner under their thumb.

The strangling of one of Little Artie’s call girls raised a few eyebrows, especially Rudd’s. When his questions brought him face-to-face with a gun, a five-gallon bucket and a sack of plaster-of-Paris, even the cowering Commissioner had to face facts. It was shoot to kill, all-out war on the underworld!

That sounds promising. Unfortunately, I don’t own a copy of Anything But Saintly. But someday maybe, because I’ve been appreciating its cover for a good long while. It’s the work of Indiana-born paperback artist Robert K. Abbett. Although he’s now 82 years old and specializing in dog, sporting, and wildlife paintings, during the 1950s and ’60s Abbett produced jacket illustrations for Permabooks, Ballantine, Pyramid, Ace, and a number of other paperback publishers. His efforts graced books by A.A. Fair (aka Erle Stanley Gardner), Graham Greene, Jack Webb, and Wade Miller. A small gallery of his paperback work can be studied here.

What’s most captivating about Abbett’s illustration for Anything But Saintly, of course, is how much it leaves to the imagination. While this artist could capture a near-naked woman with a sensualist’s enthusiasm, he chooses here to offer only the suggestion of a shapely hip and a tantalizingly exposed midriff; our previous knowledge of the human form and our natural desires must fill in the rest of the picture. The balance of Abbett’s art with the book’s title is also neatly accomplished, though our attention may be more drawn to the woman’s penetrating gaze. Indeed, even a saint would have trouble turning away from those eyes.

The Doll’s Trunk Murder, by Helen Reilly

Although she penned more than 40 novels and once served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America, Helen Reilly is not familiar to most readers these days. Yet, as Mike Grost recalled in Mystery*File, she is deservedly acclaimed as one of the first crime-fictionists to stress accurate police procedures in her novels.

The majority of her books featured Inspector Christopher McKee, a New York City detective operating out of the old Police Headquarters on Centre Street (built in 1910, but currently given over to condominiums). Although McKee first appeared in The Diamond Feather (1930), it was for his star turn in McKee of Centre Street (1933)--considered to have been Reilly’s “breakthrough novel”--that he is best recalled. Of that work, Grost writes:

McKee of Centre Street sticks to its police procedure paradigm throughout its entire length. The book is extremely pure in its approach. Nearly everything in the book consists of the police examining a crime scene, finding some physical clue, and then using it to reconstruct the actions of the suspects and the victim. The police also use the eye-witness testimony of innocent bystanders, and the facilities of a huge police operation. They also do much trailing of the suspects, and even go so far [as] to spy on them on occasion. The suspects all stonewall and lie to the police at every opportunity, so the suspects’ testimony plays only a small role in this book, as compared to, say, a typical [S.S.] Van Dine school novel.

Although the suspects’ movements and actions are endlessly traced, they are on stage for only a small fraction of the time they would be in a conventional Golden Age novel, and they do not really come alive as characters. Throughout the novel there is vivid descriptive writing, especially of the buildings in which the suspects move, and of New York City lighting and atmosphere, as if to create a portrait of the city.

This purity of approach has both strengths and weaknesses. It can be monotonous, and lack variety. But it does allow Reilly to explore her innovative techniques at length.

Reilly went on to compose 26 additional McKee novels--the last being The Day She Died--before she herself died in January 1962, at age 71. In addition to those, however, she left behind a handful of standalone works, including The Doll’s Trunk Murder (1932), which I’m highlighting on this page today. Relating the plot of that novel in his New York Times review of November 20, 1932 (published in the wake of the national election that first sent Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House), critic Isaac Anderson explained:

Three Mile House, an isolated homestead on a Pennsylvania mountainside, is the scene of most of the strange events with which this story deals. The story opens with the death of Mary Alice Greer, the elderly owner of this house. Within a few days of her death the house is rented, completely furnished, to Miss Fenwick, who makes it plan that she likes solitude and hopes to find it there. She has scarcely taken possession when the house is thronged with visitors seeking shelter from a terrific snowstorm. Among the last to arrive are Sheriff Craven and Mr. Brierly, who appear on the scene just in time to discover the body of a woman who has been murdered. In spite of the storm people continue to dash into and out of the house in a fashion that is most disconcerting to the Sheriff and his volunteer assistant. To make things worse, almost every person in the house appears to have something to hide. The story is so packed with mystery that the author has all she can do to straighten things out in the last chapter. The reader’s interest is not permitted to flag for a single instant, for there is something doing on every page, and suspicious characters are as plentiful as election promises were a few weeks ago.

The “bondage” illustration fronting the 1949 Popular Library paperback edition of The Doll’s Trunk Murder--shown at the top of this post--was done by Rudolph Belarski. During the 1930s, Belarski became famous for the buxom, bug-eyed blondes in distress and shovel-jawed detectives he portrayed on dozens of Popular Library crime novels. For this particular Helen Reilly suspenser, he gives us a noticeably disheveled brunette, threatened by a knife-wielding miscreant, her calls for help chocked off by surgical tape but her yellow dress barely able to contain her fear-heaving breasts. (No doubt, this imagery improved Belarski’s stock among post-World War II male mystery readers, though it’s likely that the cleavage and prominent nipples incited some protestations from their wives.) It’s an eye-catcher, to be sure.

A final note: Helen Reilly (née Helen Kiernan, born to a former president of New York’s Hunter College) was the mother of two other mystery novelists, Mary McMullen (Death by Request, Welcome to the Grave) and Ursula Curtiss (Catch a Killer). She was also the sister of James Kiernan (Jr.), a onetime press secretary to New York Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia and author (Come Die with Me, 1951). Sometimes, it seems, writing talent runs in families.

FOLLOW-UP: A modified version of Belarski’s artwork for The Doll’s Trunk Murder appeared on a 1943 edition of Detective Novels Magazine. You can see that here.

READ MORE: “Dying for a Refund,” by J. Kingston Pierce
(The Rap Sheet).