Goodnight & Good-bye and Kyd for Hire, by Timothy Harris

I love it when publishers issue multiple books from an author in similarly designed editions. We’ve seen a number of such releases lately, celebrating the works of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, James Bond, Earl Derr Biggers, Richard Stark, and others. However, the best example I’ve seen yet of series artwork comes from a pair of British paperback editions of Timothy Harris’ Goodnight & Good-bye (1979) and Kyd for Hire (1977), both memorable novels featuring Vietnam War vet turned Los Angeles private eye Thomas Kyd.

The books shown above, while certainly attractive individually, can only really be appreciated side by side. They were apparently put out in 1981 by Pan Books. The image divided between their covers comes from an oil painting by Paul Roberts, an England-born but Wales-reared artist, who was once a member of the rock band Sniff ’n’ the Tears. It’s apparently the second of two canvases titled “Bodyguard,” done by Roberts in the late 1970s. (The first of those canvases can be studied here.) While I don’t recall the particular circumstances suggested by this work being played out in either of Harris’ first two Kyd stories, the hard-boiled tone, the man at the window with a holstered gun, and the suggestion of women wielding beauty as power all fit perfectly.

It’s easy to see why Roberts’ work would appeal to a publisher of crime novels. Many of his pieces are ominously shadowed, explicitly sensual, and tread an often fuzzy line between being criminal and being erotic. He has an appreciative eye for the female form and a taste for scenes that combine exhibitionism with banality. His works would seem to be so ideal for paperback crime and mystery novels, especially those bearing a noirish edge, that I’m surprised they haven’t been featured on more genre jackets in the past. But if spotted too frequently, his work might wear out its welcome.

Sadly, these Pan editions of Harris’ first two novels have gone out of print (though they’re still found easily through online used books sites). Of course, since their publication, the author has turned out another entry in the Kyd series, 2004’s Unfaithful Servant, and it wouldn’t do at all to split artist Roberts’ “Bodyguard 2” in three.

(Hat tips to Art Scott and Bill Crider.)

When She Was Bad, by William Ard

I’ve resisted writing about covers by the great 20th-century paperback illustrator Robert McGinnis, primarily because there are just so damn many goods ones. Heck, you could construct a whole Web site around McGinnis’ elegant efforts (and there used to be just such a resource, until the artist himself forced its closure). But I can’t resist showcasing his jacket art for the 1960 Dell paperback edition of William Ard’s When She Was Bad.

This offers pretty much everything you could want in the way of pulpish crime-fiction imagery: a tough-guy private eye (you can tell he’s tough, because there’s that gun in his mitt) and a brunette and leggy lovely, who smokes, drinks, and isn’t above flirting a little to get what she desires. That last characteristic is one I can only assume to be true, based on the fact that these two are together in what looks like an apartment--and because of the suggestive phraseology of a teaser that appeared on the last page of another Dell book (Cain’s Woman, by O.G. Benson), published around the same time as When She Was Bad. After describing Ard’s protagonist, Danny Fontaine, as “First in the Hearts of Ladies ... and The Last Word in Private Eyes,” that teaser explained:

He’s a private eye par excellence. He never means to get involved--he has a beautiful red-headed bride. But, somehow, he always seems to be in trouble. Woman trouble.

So what can you expect from a guy who’s the image of Rock Hudson? The ladies just can’t keep their eyes--or their petal-soft hands--away.

Take his first case, for instance, involving a supposedly reserved English type. She was his client in a case of blackmail and murder. She was scared and she had every right to be.

But the lady had some definitely unladylike ideas--especially about the intimate ways in which she wanted Danny to “guard her body ...”

When She Was Bad was the second of two connected novels, following Ard’s As Bad As I Am (1959; later retitled Wanted: Danny Fontaine). Both featured Fontaine, although in the first, his given name is “Mike.” For some reason, whether due to a legal disagreement or because Ard simply thought “Danny” more fitting, the name was changed for When She Was Bad. In an extensive piece about William Ard, published in the late, great Armchair Detective magazine in 1982, Francis M. Nevins Jr. described Mike Fontaine as

thirty years old, big and dark and handsome, half French, half Irish, and such a compulsive romantic that he must help any and every troubled woman who crosses his path. Although he aspires to Broadway stardom, and once appeared in the male chorus of South Pacific, [Fontaine’s] penchant for rescuing ladies has caused most of his adult life to be spent behind bars.

In As Bad As I Am, Fontaine was finally paroled after five years spent in prison for killing a man who’d beaten a woman. One of the requirements of his return to society: that he refrain from social contact with females for the next 18 months. That was almost impossible, Nevins noted, because “Fontaine ... is one of those sexually magnetic men at first sight of whom women tear off their clothes and offer themselves.” (Lucky bastard!) Shortly after returning to New York City, Fontaine hits the streets in search of acting jobs and manages to send a red-headed starlet named Gloria Allen into a serious swoon. He also discovers that some of the upper rooms in his old family home on East 97th Street, now occupied by his younger sister and her cop husband, Harry Taggart, are being rented out to Puerto Rican prostitutes--an arrangement that’s filling his brother-in-law’s pockets with kickback dough. When Fontaine tries to clear those whores out, he riles Taggart, who wants to shoot him, only to be killed himself. The aftermath finds Taggart’s equally crooked superiors branding Fontaine as “a mad-dog killer,” and it falls largely to pretty Gloria Allen and a resourceful Broadway private eye named Barney Glines to save our hero’s sorry ass. Reviewing As Bad As I Am for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Anthony Boucher called it “a happy, exciting romance-melodrama of rogue cops, the theatre, and young love ...”

The action in When She Was Bad takes place two weeks after the previous story concludes. He’s recently wed the curvaceous Ms. Allen and has been hired as Barney Glines’ new detective partner. Things seem to be looking up. But Nevins found the story line in this novel disappointing. Here’s his description:

A titled, recently widowed and astonishingly sexy young Englishwoman comes to Manhattan and hires the Glines agency to find her stepdaughter, who is threatening to sell some of the lady’s passionate love letters to a London scandal sheet. Glines assigns the case to Danny, whose bride has just flown to Hollywood to appear in a Frank Sinatra-Dean Martin-Tony Curtis sex comedy. The real sex comedy, however, unfolds in Manhattan and Bermuda as the stepdaughter’s trail brings the hapless Fontaine into the eager clutches of uncountable nubile lovelies, every one of them lusting for his manly body. Sex titillation consumes most of the pages in this adventure, and what crime plot there is turns out to be as skimpy and flimsy as the bikini panties discarded by every female in the cast at first sight of Fontaine. Ard’s last novel to be published by a major house is so long, slow, clumsily paced, lackadaisically told and non-urgent that one could easily enough believe it was ghosted from an Ard outline or rough draft by somebody
infinitely less talented.

That’s an important final point, because while When She Was Bad may have been pretty bad on its own (despite Boucher’s description of it in The New York Times as “very breezy and amusing”), Ard was not a hack writer. Born in Brooklyn in 1922, he graduated from Dartmouth College, worked briefly for a detective agency in Manhattan (a credential that would prove useful in subsequent years), went into advertising copywriting, and later signed on as head of the publicity department at the New York offices of Warner Bros. Pictures, before quitting to become a full-time author. During the 1950s, recalls Dennis Miller, the public relations director at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania and the creator of a wonderful Web site dedicated to this author’s memory, William Ard “was one of the most popular hard-boiled writers of the 1950s. He was praised by critics from the St. Louis Dispatch to The New York Times.” Influenced jointly by John O’Hara and Raymond Chandler, Ard, like Ross Macdonald, resisted the powerful trend after World War II to pen a harder, more sadistic brand of detective story, and instead constructed his yarns around generally decent protagonists and others who didn’t employ violence for the sake of violence, and who engaged in sex as a means of restoring their humanity rather than satisfying any needs for perverse dominance.

Ard’s best-known character has to be soft-boiled New York shamus Timothy Dane, introduced in his first novel, The Perfect Frame (1951), and the star of eight subsequent novels. As The Thrilling Detective Web Site explains, Dane is “a pretty normal guy. Not too flashy, not particularly eager for action, and far from some super stud that all women find irresistible. ... [He’s just] trying to do his job the best way he can and keep his integrity, if possible. Sure, he carries a .45, and he’s not afraid to use it, and he walks the walk and talks the talk, but he’s surprisingly compassionate for the time, very similar at times to the later Lew Archer and Michael Collins’ Dan Fortune.” Dane’s opening adventures are told in first-person, but author Ard soon gave that up in favor of the third-person viewpoint, as he sent Dane into danger in Private Party (1953), Mr. Trouble (1954), and the book Nevins contended is “by far the most powerful and exciting of Ard’s private eye novels,” Hell Is a City (1955). The final Dane outing, published in 1957, was The Root of His Evil, which has also appeared as Deadly Beloved (not to be confused with Max Allan Collins’ 2007 novel of that same name).

Ard went on to create several other private investigators, including not only the aforementioned Danny Fontaine, but also Johnny Stevens (about whom he wrote under the nom de plume “Ben Kerr”), Luke MacLane, Lou Largo (whose career was continued after Ard’s death by writers John Jakes and Lawrence Block), and Barney Glines (though, as Nevins stipulated, this was not the same Glines who appeared in When She Was Bad--“Ard seems to have been almost pathologically careless about recycling that name”). In addition, he wrote a series of Westerns under the pseudonym “Jonas Ward.”

In his Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994), William L. DeAndrea defined Ard as a “fast and sloppy” writer, but added that he “had the ability to grab readers and make them care about the characters.” Nevins, though clearly a fan of several Ard works, expressed similar sympathies in his Armchair Detective article:

[Ard] wrote rapidly and didn’t always revise as much as he should. Although his style is readable and efficient, his work lacks the haunting memorable, marvelously quotable lines that are common in Chandler and Macdonald. Despite his gifts of pace and economy and his usual story premises, his plots have a tendency to fall apart, especially when he plays with the motifs of classical detective fiction. He seemed to have a mental block that made him forget the character names he used in one book and recycle them unwittingly a few books later; sometimes he changed a person’s name halfway through the same book.

Still, Nevins insisted that even William Ard’s worst stories “are infused with raw readability, and his best are among the finest hard-boiled novels of the ’50s.”

Unfortunately, this author’s promise was abruptly terminated on March 12, 1960, when he died of cancer at the young age of 37. In the years since, Nevins lamented, Ard “has been all but forgotten, his books unreprinted, his career unmentioned even in the most comprehensive works on mystery fiction.”

But, I’m pleased to say today, it’s not unmentioned everywhere ...

READ MORE: “Down I Go, by Ben Kerr,” by August West (Vintage Hard-boiled Reads); “True Confessions: The Diary (1952), by William Ard,” by Curtis Evans (The Passing Tramp).

A Hearse of Another Color, by M.E. Chaber

Certainly the most common element of illustrations fronting crime-fiction paperbacks during the mid-20th-century was sexy women. Usually sexy women in distress and undressed to the extent that publishers and retailers would bear. Men were hardly banished from those classic book covers; however, they usually appeared in tandem with lightly clad lovelies. After all, the principal audience for such inexpensive novels was males, and they were more likely to be attracted by skin and sin than by depictions of masculine heroics.

Today’s showcased cover, from the 1959 Pocket Books edition of M.E. Chaber’s A Hearse of Another Color (originally published in 1958), finds an artist trying to do something a little different, yet not abandoning tried and true formulas. The illustrator in question is the prolific James Meese, who during the 1950s and ’60s created the fronts for novels by Gil Brewer (77 Rue Paradis), Sax Rohmer (Return of Sumuru), Richard S. Prather (Dagger of Flesh), Ellery Queen (The Glass Village), Erle Stanley Gardner (The Case of the One-Eyed Witness), Gordon Davis (I Came to Kill), Raymond Chandler (The High Window), Ian Fleming (Live and Let Die), and so many others.

While his excellent jacket for Hearse focuses on the story’s private-eye protagonist, the fedora-wearing and cigarette-smoking Milo March, Meese also set out to please the Pocket Books sales team and male shoppers everywhere by including the image of a shapely legged, high-heeled woman slinking down what looks like a building’s emergency escape ladder in a skirt that’s entirely too tight for such escapades. The cover’s teaser line heightens one’s expectations of salacious high jinks even further: “MILO MARCH, looking for a corpse, turns up a body that’s blonde dynamite!” That exclamation point seems superfluous. How can that line be read without ending on a high note?

To my mind, Meese’s front for this edition of Chaber’s novel is far more intriguing than the better-recognized 1970 Paperback Library Inc. edition. Yes, the latter (shown above, left) features an illustration by Robert McGinnis. However, its depiction of the martini-quaffing and poetry-spouting March makes him look too much like the 1960s action film star Derek Flint (James Coburn) from Our Man Flint and In Like Flint--a similarity even more pronounced in McGinnis’ 1970 jacket for another March outing, A Lonely Walk (also displayed here).

A Hearse of Another Color was the eighth installment in the successful Milo March series, which eventually ran to more than 20 titles, from Hangman’s Harvest (1952) to Born to Be Hanged (1973). “M.E. Chaber”--a moniker that evidently derived from the Hebrew word for author, mechaber--was one of several noms de plume employed by New Yorker Kendell Foster Crossen, an ex-insurance investigator, guide book contributor, and editor of the magazine Detective Fiction Weekly, who later wrote for such TV programs as 77 Sunset Strip and Perry Mason, and in 1940 created the superhuman Buddhist crime-fighter Green Lama, a character immortalized by others in a series of comic-book adventures. As if all that weren’t enough, Crossen also penned science-fiction novels, one of those being the dystopian yarn Year of Consent (1954). According to The Thrilling Detective Web Site’s Kevin Burton Smith, Crossen “wrote over 400 radio and television dramas, some 300 short stories, 250 non-fiction articles and around forty-five novels.”

During his career, Crossen created several series sleuths, including Brian Brett and Pete Draco. But he’s best remembered now for Milo March, a spy turned “globetrotting investigator for Intercontinental Insurance.” As Smith puts it, “The general consensus about the series is that it’s fun, if not exactly Chandler.” Writing in the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, mystery history expert Mike Gross remarks specifically on A Hearse of Another Color, which takes place at least partly in New Orleans:

It’s a genuine mystery story, with fair play clues pointing toward the final solution, and other subplots along the way. The tale focuses relentlessly on detection throughout, with March constantly attempting to learn more about the crimes. The story never degenerates into a thriller or suspense tale. I found the puzzle plot of the book very easy to solve, but it is still there, unlike some private eye writers.

The tale suggests that nothing is as much fun as the lifestyle of 1950s corporate America, with its endless flow of money, expense accounts, and the opportunities to pursue such activities as travel, nice clothes, cars, fine dining and romance. Both Milo March and some of the characters live in such a world, which is designed to be a pleasant fantasy experience for the readers. There is a relatively realistic tone to Crossen’s work, at least when compared to such contemporaries as Richard S. Prather. Both men like the high life of the day, but while Prather spins fantasies about a private eye’s life, Crossen sticks to a fairly realistic account of the opportunities open to a well-to-do business exec of the time. Of course, most Americans of the era could not afford to live on this scale. Still, Crossen’s desires are relatively modest, and his delight in travel and good food would increasingly become affordable to the majority of Americans.

Milo March stories differ radically in tone from those of Raymond Chandler. Chandler’s stories are dark, and they depict a world full of evil characters. Crossen despises mobsters and crooks, but basically he likes 1950s America and the world in general. Neither he nor March seem alienated, which is the word I’d use to describe Philip Marlowe and his successors. Instead, Crossen and March preserve a sunny, good-natured attitude towards most of life. Indeed, Crossen’s tone is generally comic throughout. Even his mob villains have a slightly tongue-in-cheek quality. Parts of the story even approach the comedy of manners, something one associates more with Golden Age sleuths than 1950s private eyes. Milo March also has a different attitude towards the men he meets, than most private eyes. Usually he winds up making friends with them, and the book is full of scenes of male bonding. March is especially fond of government agents, such as police and FBI men, Madison Avenue-type executives, and artists. All of these types are described glowingly in Crossen’s work. All of these men represent success, in different forms and professions. They tend to be highly competent and glamorous.

A Hearse of [Another] Color strongly endorses integration and the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, its best parts deal with black “diviner” Willie Morell. Willie is the most colorful of the New Orleans locals March meets, and he is a character whose verbal facility and unique way of talking mark [him] out as an original. Crossen’s sympathy with black Americans reminds one of Ed Lacy.

It is symbolic of investigator Milo March’s onetime popularity, that he managed--if only briefly--to cross over from the literary to the cinematic world. In 1958, a British film adaptation of Crossen/Chaber’s 1954 novel, The Man Inside, was released with tough guy actor Jack Palance playing the smooth Mr. March, and Anita Ekberg and Donald Pleasence helping to fill out the cast. Adventure thrillers were very popular in movie theaters during that time, and would become even more watched as the James Bond films were introduced, beginning with Dr. No in 1962. Yet even with Palance in the lead role, and with Albert R. Broccoli working as a producer, March’s big-screen career didn’t take off.

Author Kendell Crossen died in November 1981, age 71. Reports are that he left behind an unpublished Milo March novel called Death to the Brides, which he had composed in 1974. Kevin Burton Smith says that Crossen’s publisher, Henry Holt & Company, “had refused to publish [it] back in the seventies because it contained an unflattering portrait of then-president [Richard] Nixon, and a spy mission to Vietnam.” Wikipedia explains that the manuscript “is preserved along with the rest of Crossen’s papers in the 20th-century collection of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.” Whether that missing last entry in the March series will ever surface is anybody’s guess at this point, but perhaps it could serve as the beginning of a Milo revival. Isn’t it about time?

The Deadly Sex, by Jack Webb

In memory of California novelist John Alfred “Jack” Webb, who evidently died in February 2008 (though his passing was only recently announced), this week’s book jacket comes from the 1961 paperback edition of The Deadly Sex, a novel Webb had seen published in hardcover just two years before. It was the seventh installment of a then-popular mystery series starring priest-cum-amateur sleuth Father Joseph Shanley and his friend, police homicide detective Sammy “Elijah” Golden.

As Philip Grosset recalls on his Web site, Clerical Detectives, Father Shanley worked out of “St. Anne’s Church in the parish of Royal Heights” in an unidentified Southern California city that was assumed to be Los Angeles. Grosset notes that Shanley was a conscientious tender of both roses and souls, and that the character was described in his first outing (The Big Sin, 1952) as

“a young man in his early 30s, broad of shoulder and erect. The lines graven at the corners of his lips and fine blue eyes were saved from severity only by the touch of humor that turned the toes of the crow’s feet up and gave his face a slightly quizzical expression when it was in repose.” He is Irish, although with no trace of an accent, and five-ten or eleven in height.

He is a pipe-smoking “handsome priest,” well able to look after himself and quite prepared to get into a fight and knock out a murderer if the occasion demands. “He was a fighter by instinct, a man of cloth by devotion and inspiration.”

Like the Reverend Clare Fergusson in Julia Spencer-Fleming’s fine novels, Leonard Holton’s Father Joseph Bredder, and Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi David Small, Catholic Shanley had a tight and beneficial association with one of the local cops, Detective Sergeant Golden, a non-practicing Jew in his mid-30s, a “medium-sized, stocky figure” who served in World War II and “still seems to happily turn to violence.” Over the course of nine books, Shanley and Golden worked out problems of personal, criminal, and religious natures, all the while strengthening their friendship and mutual understanding.

The Signet paperback cover that tops this post was illustrated by Robert K. Abbett, who I praised earlier this month for his work on Richard Deming’s Anything But Saintly. Seductive without being too revealing, and strikingly dependent on shades of red and its artistically gathered arrangement of type, Abbett’s Deadly Sex jacket was undoubtedly a stunner on bookshelves when it appeared in the same year that John F. Kennedy took his oath of office as the 35th president of the United States. Unfortunately, Grosset opines, The Deadly Sex “is not one of the better [Shanley-Golden] books.” He explains the story’s plot this way:

The Deadly Sex has detective Sammy Golden being told to acquire a hangover and then report for duty. This is all part of a police plan to catch the murderer of an ex-policeman, one of Sammy’s friends. So he turns up at a roadhouse called the Seven Club, ready for both beer and trouble. It is there that he meets a strange blonde, called Laura, and saves her from a fight that breaks out. This leads him into a whole series of particularly violent (and rather confusing) adventures, at the end of which he is about to flee the country with his latest lover, a crook called Rita Campbell, and her smuggled diamonds when he get shot.

Father Shanley plays only a small part in this story, which is a pity as Sammy Golden becomes less and less of an attractive character. At the end he tells Father Shanley, “I broke the faith. I am not fit to carry a badge. You should understand that.” But, as he lies almost dead in hospital, Father Shanley continues to stand by him, fornication and all. “There is a pagan myth,” he tells [Golden], “that’s been around for a long time. It says before Eve existed there was a woman called Lilith. She was not fecund. She existed for bodily pleasure. But, mark you this, Sammy, she was not worth losing paradise for. It took Eve to do that. A real woman, not a Rita Campbell.” And he persuades Sammy that life is still worth living. But the whole situation lacks credibility.

Oh, well, there are eight other Shanley novels to sample and enjoy, including at least two--The Damned Lovely (1954) and The Brass Halo (1957), both featured above--that were illustrated by another 20th-century paperback artist of renown, Robert Maguire.

In addition to those works, Webb (who shouldn’t be confused with the Jack Webb responsible for bringing us Dragnet and Hec Ramsey, any more than his priest protagonist ought to be confused with the defrocked Father Shanley who was convicted of child rape) penned a couple of standalones: One for My Dame (1961) and Make My Bed Soon (1963). He also wrote five more crime novels under the pseudonym “John Farr,” and at least one Western as “Tex Grady.”

Author Jack Webb was 92 years old when he died in Coronado, California, last year. Since all of his novels appear to have been published in the mid-1900s, it makes you wonder what happened to him during the last four decades of his life. If anybody has information along that line, please don’t hesitate to drop it into the Comments section below.

READ MORE: “Author Jack Webb,” by Tom Rizzo.