The Voodoo Murders, by Mike Avallone

It’s the rare author, indeed, whose demise can inspire an obituary opening such as this one, from the March 20, 1999, edition of Britain’s Independent newspaper: “Few writers this century have committed more gross acts of grievous bodily harm upon the language of Milton, Shakespeare and the Authorised Version than Michael Angelo Avallone Jnr., a.k.a. Dora Highland, Max Walker, Stuart Jason, Priscilla Dalton, Edwina Noone, Troy Conway (specifically when turning out such epics of literary tackiness as The Blow-Your-Mind Job, The Cunning Linguist and A Stiff Proposition), and a host of other more or less absurd aliases.”

But of course Mike Avallone was no common wordsmith. At the height of his novel-composing career in the 1950s and ’60s, he was known as “The Fastest Typewriter in the East” and “King of the Paperbacks.” “Those sobriquets are self-given but are nonetheless reasonably accurate,” explained Bill Pronzini in his entertaining 1982 book, Gun in Cheek: A Study of “Alternative” Crime Fiction. (It’s said that Avallone once wrote a novel in a day and a half and a 1,500-word short story in 20 minutes!) Pronzini goes on to observe:

Avallone has published some 190 novels in the past four decades, nearly all of them paperback originals: P.I. tales, Gothics, TV and film novelizations, juveniles, soft-core porn, espionage thrillers. He is also the holder of unconventional opinions on any number of topics, a zealous old-movie buff, a tireless self-promoter and letter writer, and his own greatest fan. Francis M. Nevins, in his profile of Avallone in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, calls him “a true auteur, with a unique personality discernible throughout his work,” and goes on to state, “Whatever else might be said about Avallone, one must say what Casper Gutman said to [Sam] Spade in The Maltese Falcon: ‘By Gad, sir, you’re a character, that you are!’”

Born in New York City in 1924, Avallone served with the U.S. Army during and after World War II, and was a stationary salesman and the editor of men’s magazines before making a career of fiction-writing. He saw his first novel published in 1953: The Tall Dolores, which not only starred “the Shapeliest Amazon in the World,” “a regular Empire State Building of female feminine dame,” but introduced the protagonist for which Avallone is best remembered, Manhattan gumshoe (and, eventually, investigator for the president of the United States) Ed Noon. “On the one hand,” says Pronzini, “Noon is a standard tough, wisecracking op with a taste for copious bloodletting and a Spillane-type hatred of Communists, dissidents, hippies, pacifists, militant blacks, liberated women, and anyone or anything else of a liberal cant. On the other hand, he is a distinctly if eccentrically drawn character who loves baseball, old movies, and dumb jokes, and who gets himself mixed up with some of the most improbable individuals ever committed to paper.” Such as the aforementioned Tall Dolores, or the 440-pound female mattress tester who escorted him into trouble in The Case of the Bouncing Betty (1956).

Noon’s adventures are often dismissed as examples of mid-20th-century detective fiction at its cheesiest, with Avallone being dubbed a “hack.” (Curt Purcell, who writes the Groovy Age of Horror blog and has produced a number of posts about Avallone’s pseudonymous genre work, insists, “I’ve hated everything I’ve read by him.”) Yet in his assessment of The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse (1957), film and crime-fiction enthusiast Mike Grost applauds this novelist’s efforts to at least accomplish something different from his contemporaries--beginning with his protagonist’s persona:

Ed Noon is the least sexually arrogant private eye in mystery history. When the heroine tells him she finds him attractive, he is almost pathetically grateful. He goes on to share with the reader his almost unbearable loneliness. He conveys a sense of being blest by the heroine’s attentions. This human quality is extremely refreshing. It is part of the way Avallone’s characters talk about fundamental human needs.

Avallone breaks from mystery history in a number of ways. While [fictional] private eyes tend to be poor, their work regularly brings them into contact with the rich and upper crust ... Not in Crazy. Ed Noon spends the entire book among characters of working-class origin. Even though the cowboy [character] is now a well-to-do gangster, his poor Texas origins are conspicuous. Much of the book is set within a few blocks of Noon’s office, in a series of near-slum locations occupied by the working poor, Noon among them. Oddly, this helps the emotional sincerity of the book. The book is about people who represent [the] emotional needs of Noon. It is not about social snobbery, or attempts to join the rich. The people in it seem even more accurate as emotional figures, because they are not carrying the burden of fantasies of wealth.

And then there’s that criticism made by The Independent, about Avallone causing “grievous bodily harm” to the English language. Indeed, examples of his ungrammatical, frequently illogical prose stylings and his fondness for mangled or downright weird metaphors--his “Noonisms,” as they’re known nowadays--have been rich sources of humor over the years. From Assassins Don’t Die in Bed (1968): “His thin mustache was neatly placed between a peaked nose and two eyes like black marbles.” From The Horrible Man (1968): “She ... unearthed one of her fantastic breasts from the folds of her sheath skirt.” In its own obituary of Avallone, The New York Times cited this gem: “The footsteps didn’t walk right in. They stopped outside the door and knocked.” And it’s hard not to groan at a line such as “The whites of his eyes came up in their sockets like moons over an oasis lined with palm trees.”

That last Noonism, by the way, was delivered in The Voodoo Murders, a 1957 Gold Medal paperback original that provides this week’s “killer cover.” I don’t own the novel; however, I gather from reading elsewhere that it leads P.I. Noon into the lethal vicinity of New York’s Caribbean contingent. Another oft-quoted passage from the book: “The hand was quicker than the private eye. Steel gleamed in his fingers magically and a lightning bolt left his brown hands. It flashed across twenty feet and pinned my sleeve to the wall, knocking the gun out of my hand. ‘Man,’ he breathed in that Jamaican-English voice you hear on a Calypso record, ‘maybe I make you stone-cold dead.’ I said nothing. With death that close, what was there to say?”

OK, so that’s not the sort of stuff that might have impressed Raymond Chandler. But Mike Avallone apparently didn’t harbor great literary pretensions. He was a journeyman author, who, as The Independent notes, was recognized by publishers for his ability to deliver a book on time, at the right length. (“In a medium notorious for its goofballs, drunks, liars and conmen, he was reliable.”) David Avallone, one of the author’s two sons and now a filmmaker in Hollywood, recalls in his blog that

My father got up every morning around seven a.m. He would walk to the local coffee shop and have a cup or two with the hoi polloi. He would return home before 9:30 a.m. and sit at “the machine.” The late industrial revolution sound effect of a manual typewriter would then start up. It would go, with very few pauses longer than a minute, until someone brought him a sandwich, or reminded him to eat. When I would come home from school, he would finish whatever sentence he was in the middle of and we’d play catch for an hour. Then back to the machine. Until dinner. If he was enjoying himself a lot, or had a deadline, he would go back to the machine and write until nine, ten at night. If he didn’t have a book or story to write, he’d knock out essays or spend the day writing letters. Hundreds of thousands of letters.

He did this five or six days a week for something like fifty years. The result was not always literature, but sometimes it was. Whatever the case it was always readable and never, ever dull. In this way he wrote around 200 novels, of which at least 170 of them saw print in his lifetime (I counted the ones on the shelf this afternoon).

The Voodoo Murders--number nine among Avallone’s almost four dozen Noon novels--probably isn’t the best or the worst of the bunch. But it certainly boasts a most eye-catching cover. A crazily dancing young woman in a bikini and beads. A voodoo doll bristling with pins. A spooky carved head and a native drum. What about that jacket doesn’t say “you’ve got to read this story to believe it”?

Credit for the art goes to the justly renowned Mitchell Hooks, a Detroit-born commercial artist who in the 1950s turned to doing paperback cover illustrations. After creating advertisements for mattress companies and clothing manufacturers, Hooks (whose style of drawing was heavily influenced by the work of Flash Gordon illustrator Alex Raymond) found a great deal of freedom in developing paperback covers. During a 2008 interview with Leif Peng, a commercial artist himself and author of the blog Today’s Inspiration, Hooks explained that Eisenhower- and Kennedy-era publishers were finally turning away from more lurid, “come on” covers that drew readers in (but didn’t necessarily reflect a book’s contents) to jacket illustrations that offered a more honest interpretation of whatever yarn was to be found inside. He welcomed the change. “The ... problem, aside from the constant aim of trying to make a good picture, is to find an original picture device that is inspired by the subject,” Hooks told Peng. “This could be an unusual bit of action taken from the story, unrealistic use of color to emphasize a mood, or interesting props or background used as a strong part of the design.” It seems he used all of those tricks for the Voodoo Murders front.

Hooks’ illustrative style made him popular with publishers. His efforts were soon decorating novels by William Campbell Gault, Michael Collins (né Dennis Lynds), Erle Stanley Gardner, William Herber, Peter Rabe, and many others. One of the most recognizable Hooks illustrations comes from the 1955 Bantam edition of The Name Is Archer, by Ross Macdonald (shown on the right). It was that cover to which freelance illustrator Jeff Wong referred when creating the jacket for The Archer Files, an excellent collection of Macdonald’s private eye Lew Archer short stories and story fragments, edited by Tom Nolan and published by Crippen & Landru in 2007.

Eventually, Hooks would move into doing magazine illustrations and movie posters, and alter his rough signature style to something more realistic, as the market demanded it. Now 86 years old, he ranks with Robert Maguire, Robert McGinnis, and Rudolph Belarski as one of the most familiar artists from America’s mid-20th-century paperback heyday.

For his own part, Mike Avallone kept beating away on his typewriter well into his 60s. “He wrote so many books, under so many pseudonyms, that even apparent misspellings like Mike Avalione and Michael Avalone soon became pen names,” explains The Thrilling Detective Web Site. “He wrote at least sixty-two novels and novelizations under his own name, many with series characters, such as April Dancer, Ed Noon and Satan Sleuth, at least three novels as Nick Carter (with Valerie Moolman), two novels as Sidney Stuart, three gothics as Priscilla Dalton, twelve gothic novels as Edwina Noone, five gothic novels as Dorothea Nile, five gothic novels as Jean-Anne de Pre, four novels as Vance Stanton, at least twenty erotic novels as Troy Conway, featuring a horny super spy named Rod Damon, a.k.a. ‘Capitalism’s favorite tool,’ nine ‘men’s adventure’ novels as Stuart Jason (all with series character ‘The Butcher’), at least three collections of short stories, and at least thirty novels and novelizations unrelated to the above series. He also wrote original novels based on television shows, including The Partridge Family (8 titles), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (the first book), The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (2 books), Hawaii 5-0 (2 books), and Mannix. The guy just loved to write.”

As The Independent recalled, “Michael Avallone wrote anything and everything, ‘to prove that a writer can write anything’. He also ghosted: ‘Liner notes, music biographies, personality articles, poetry, cover copy, all of these ... because of a long-standing love affair with the English language’. This was all perfectly true--although whether the English language reciprocated is quite another matter.”

But he couldn’t keep up such a pace forever. On February 26, 1999, this much-acclaimed “pulpmeister” was stricken down by heart failure. He was 74 years old. The Thrilling Detective Web Site recalls that he died “in his sleep at his Los Angeles home. In a better world, or at least one in which he was allowed to write the rules, it would have been while sitting at his beloved typewriter.”

I couldn’t agree more.

READ MORE: “Forgotten Books: Dead Game, by Michael Avallone,” by James Reasoner (Rough Edges); “Professional Touch” (Pulp International).

Bury Me Deep, by Harold Q. Masur

It was while writing last week about the short-story collection The Name Is Jordan (1962) that I was reminded of its author, Harold Q. “Hal” Masur. That in turn led me to recall Masur’s first book, Bury Me Deep (1947), and sent me to my office shelves in search of my copy of that work, which happens to be a 1984 Quill Mysterious Classics edition introduced by what I rank as one of the finest paperback crime novel covers produced since Lyndon B. Johnson was president.

But then maybe I’m just partial to book fronts decorated with underdressed lovelies bearing brandy snifters.

Could be.

Not only was Bury Me Deep the first published novel from lawyer-turned-wordsmith Masur, but it introduced Scott Jordan, the Manhattan investigating attorney who would star in all but a pair of Masur’s 13 novels over the next 34 years. And it has one of the greatest openings of all time, which inspired the 1948 Pocket Books reprint of this novel as well as the cover art on the 1984 Quill edition:

It was a cold Thursday evening when I first saw the blonde. I had just come home from Penn Station and I opened the door to my apartment and I found her there. She was curled upon on my sofa, listening to my radio, and sipping her own brandy. At least I assumed it was her own because I dislike brandy and never buy it.

I stood there, rooted. Her costume had me floored. She was wearing black panties and a black bra and that was all. She sat with one leg folded comfortably under her and she smiled at me. I had never seen her before in my life, and I stood just inside the foyer, gaping at her in slack-jawed astonishment and still hanging onto my Gladstone bag, completely unaware at the moment of its fifty-pound load.

She was a leggy, bosomy number, flamboyantly constructed, with bright jonquil-yellow hair and pearly skin that contrasted startlingly against the black underthings. She looked up at me, and the alcoholic glassiness in her eyes didn’t keep her from making them warm and cordial. Women have looked at me like that before, but never in church.

“Jordan?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

I nodded, still dazed.

“You’re a little late,” she said.

Had Jordan not just flown back to New York, exhausted, from Palm Beach, Florida, where he’d handled the sale of some property on behalf of friend, there’s no telling whether things might have gone differently. As it is, though, he bundles the blonde--who has collapsed onto his carpet in what appears to be a drunken stupor--into a taxicab and sends her home, then looks forward to a soothing bath. But he’s soon interrupted, first by a trio of strangers demanding to enter his apartment, and then by a battleship-size bruiser, the alleged boyfriend of that intoxicated beauty, whose name turns out to be Verna Ford. Finally, after chasing all those people away, Jordan enjoys only a few hours of sleep before he’s rousted by cops wanting to know what his involvement is in Verna’s death. It seems her drink was poisoned, and she died during the cab ride home.

From that point onward, our determined hero makes it his business to figure out why Verna was waiting for him, who slipped her a lethal Mickey, and what part those interlopers who disturbed his peaceful homecoming had in her untimely demise. Bury Me Deep offers a fast-moving story, with lots of twists, fisticuffs, and clever turns of phrase. Definitely a cut above many of the American detective novels churned out at the end of the Second World War.

According to an article by Gary Lovisi that appeared in Paperback Parade in 1992, author Masur “received $500 for [Bury Me Deep] from his hardcover publisher and $2,500 from Pocket Books in 1948 for the paperback edition. The book proved a bestseller and sold over a million copies in various Pocket Book printings. The royalties from this book enabled him to continue his writing career.” In 1963, the same work served as the basis for a Japanese feature film. And both it and a subsequent Jordan novel, So Rich, So Lovely, and So Dead (1958), were adapted as episodes of television’s The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen--the third boob-tube series to be based on the exploits of Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay’s
novelist-sleuth, Ellery Queen.

Not bad for a book that most people don’t remember anymore.

Born in New York City in 1909, Masur was educated at New Jersey’s old Bordentown Military Institute and New York University, and graduated from the New York University School of Law in 1934. He went on to practice law until the early 1940s, when he was drafted into the U.S. military and sent to China during World War II. Beginning in the late ’30s, though, Masur began to publish short fiction in >pulp periodicals such as Argosy, Popular Detective, and Detective Story Magazine. A biographical note in my copy of Bury Me Deep says that in 1952, after he’d produced just four novels, Masur “won the Storyteller’s Award from the Mutual Broadcasting System for achievement in the field of popular fiction ... At Bennett Cerf’s suggestion, the Pentagon brought him to Washington [D.C.] to participate in war games with the general staff.” Lovisi explains that Pentagon planners “wanted to create a roundtable to discuss Soviet aggression. They had assembled political, business, and military leaders from all over the country and asked Hal to help them out. Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Curtis LeMay wanted a writer for the group, someone with imagination, and they couldn’t have picked a better person than Hal.”

Masur had imagination, that’s for sure. He wrote Bury Me Deep after being discharged from the military, and went on to compose numerous short stories for Mammoth Detective, Ten Detective Aces, and other pulp publications of that era. His yarns often appeared under assumed names such as “Edward James” and “Guy Fleming,” and they introduced a variety of short-term characters such as attorney Harvey St. John and private eye Albert Catraz (often abbreviated as Al Catraz--get it?). In 1951, Masur served as the ghostwriter of American opera singer Helen Traubel’s novel, The Metropolitan Opera Murders, about a soprano heroine who is instrumental in solving a mystery.

However, Scott Jordan proved to be his top-selling creation. In his interview with Lovisi, Masur said he wanted his lawyer hero to be “a guy who was as ingenious in law as Perry Mason, but who was as bright and as insouciant as Nero Wolfe’s Archie Goodwin. I wanted to get a combination between those two.” Lovisi dug further:

[Gary Lovisi]: Where did Scott Jordan come from? How much of Hal Masur is in Scott Jordan?

[Harold Masur]: Well, he’s a lot smarter than I am. A lot braver. I think that he is an idealized version of what I would have like to have been. He was an idealized version of the kind of lawyer I would have liked to have been, but I could not achieve. I’m not as smart as Scott Jordan. ...

GL: Scott Jordan is a hard-boiled lawyer and private eye, he’s an intelligent man who uses his brain, a thinking man’s hard-boiled detective. What do you think about hard-boiled fiction?

HM: If you were writing for the pulps in those days you had to be hard-boiled. I suspect that as time went on, Scott Jordan became more soft-boiled, a little more civilized. It takes time to develop a human being and the cases he’s in.

Let me tell you something about what I decided to do about Scott Jordan once he was underway. Most of the stuff then being written involved gangsters and the underworld, the Mafia and everything, and I decided that I wanted to write stories that were different from Erle Stanley Gardner. I didn’t want a client coming into the office with a case. I wanted Scott Jordan personally involved. In every case he was a friend of the client or something was happening to him that was unusual, and in each book I wanted to pick out a business [such as art forgery, high finance, etc.] that would be the background of the book that I knew nothing about so I’d have to research it.

In that way I felt that I could expand my own horizons, and at the same time try to synthesize information to give the reader something.

Masur’s efforts tended to be well received. Critic Anthony Boucher began his January 1960 New York Times review of Send Another Hearse with the sentence, “The sole serious fault in the novels of Harold Q. Masur is their infrequency: we’ve been vouchsafed only eight book-length cases for Scott Jordan since the lawyer-detective made his debut in 1947.” Even 48 years later, when author Jennifer Egan (The Keep) was asked by The Village Voice to identify her favorite obscure novel, she picked Masur’s 1951 Jordan outing, You Can’t Live Forever. “In his savvy, stylish novels of the ’40s and ’50s,” Egan explained, “Masur manages to wink continuously at the detective genre even as he revels in it.”

Writing at the collaborative Web site Golden Age of Detection, Michigan film and crime-fiction enthusiast Mike Grost explains the characteristics of the Scott Jordan yarns:

Masur is not an absurdist, unlike [Raymond] Chandler. His plots make sense, and often center around some puzzle plot situation, just as in the Dime Detective tradition. There is a cheery atmosphere of escapism to the tales, also pulp like, and distinct from the weary weltschmerz of Chandler and Ross Macdonald. He also has some of the older pulp tradition’s forward narrative drive. Masur is unfortunately more subdued than some of the wildly surreal pulp stories of a previous era, however: Chandleresque traditions of a realistic depiction of “mean streets” have unfortunately descended over the postwar mystery story like a shroud.

Masur also has a certain middle-class orientation, which is antithetical to the social alienation of the Chandler school of P.I.s. He is obviously proud of his lawyer hero’s education and professional status--Masur was a lawyer himself. Masur’s attitude is in fact very close to the 1950s American pride in the nation’s growing prosperity and increasingly middle-class status. Masur also flaunts his education in the many cultural references which dot his tales. There are surprising references to tropical biology and customs in the stories, and a knowledgeability about literature. ...

Masur focuses on rich, corrupt people. He dislikes people who are getting easy money: bankers, union bosses, corrupt politicians, and people living on inherited wealth. His stories are full of gold diggers, both male and female, who marry rich people for their money, and greedy heirs. Extramarital affairs are also common, often motivated by money. A common type in his stories is the arrogant rich man, haughty and condescending, snide to his inferiors, and sure to get involved with a fist fight with the hero. Another standard group of Masur characters are the underworld types. These are often obvious crooks. Their criminal schemes often play a role in the plot, but they are rarely the mystery suspects or the actual killers themselves. Their role is simply to add corruption to the plot, and motives to the central characters in the tale. They stand off to one side of the story. Their function is close to what Alfred Hitchcock called the MacGuffin, a motivating force in a story whose actual content is not that important.

Masur had high regard for the police: his series officer Lieutenant John Nola is smart and incorruptible. Federal agents often show up as well; they are implacable, efficient, buzz-cutted and Brooks Brothers-suited forces of nature, honest, but not too directly involved in the detection, more characters who keep the pot boiling.

Harold Masur served as president of the Mystery Writers of America in 1973 and later worked as the organization’s general counsel for many years--tasks that, in 1991, won him the MWA’s Raven Award, given “to honor outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing.” Masur edited half a dozen or more anthologies, for the MWA as well as for Alfred Hitchcock. And he continued composing his own fiction at least into his 80s. His final Jordan novel, The Mourning After, was published in 1981. That followed a couple of standalone “big books,” neither of which featured his famous series shyster: The Attorney (1973) and The Broker (1981). When Gary Lovisi spoke with him in the spring of 1991, Masur claimed he had written an “entire rough draft” of “a Scott Jordan novel about the publishing business, a funny sort of thing, but it’s a murder book.” That work seems never to have reached print, though, and one has to wonder whatever became of it.

Unfortunately, Masur isn’t around to provide the information. He died in Boca Raton, Florida, in September 2005 at age 96. A good long life for an imaginative man.

By the way, the author was evidently fond of the cover on that 1984 Quill edition of Bury Me Deep featured at the top of this post. Its design is credited to both Irving Freeman and Steve Macanga. Searching the Web, I find that Macanga took on some other assignments for the Quill Mysterious Classics series, creating, as an example, the jacket for its 1984 reissue of Jim Thompson’s 1952 classic, The Killer Inside Me. Freeman, meanwhile, is credited with a number of cover designs, including those of Holt, Rinehart & Winston’s 1981 edition of James M. Cain’s The Baby in the Icebox and Doubleday and Company’s Black Coconuts, Brown Magic, by Joseph Theroux (1983). Together, Freeman and Macanga also created the fronts for a few, if not most, editions of the short-lived 1980s magazine The New Black Mask. They even paid tribute to their own cover of Bury Me Deep with the front of New Black Mask’s seventh issue, released in 1986. Studying that mag’s cover, which is featured on the right, it’s hard not to recognize the resemblance.

ADDENDUM: In his excellent 1994 reference work, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa: A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television, author William L. DeAndrea wrote that there’s “one central mystery” about Harold Q. Masur that can’t be solved: “what the heck is the Q. for? ‘I’ve always had it,’ the New York-based Masur says. ‘The story in the family is that my father looked at me in the cradle and said we finally had some quality in the family. But I don’t believe it.’”

READ MORE: “FFB: Bury Me Deep -- Harold Q. Masur,” by John “J.F.” Norris (Pretty Sinister Books).

Cain’s Woman, by O.G. Benson

I think the first time I came across mention of Cain’s Woman, the 1960 private-eye novel by O.G. Benson, was in a retrospective review in Vintage Hardboiled Reads. Blogger August West called it “one of the most creative P.I. novels ever written” and “an excellent P.I. novel in every way, with many surprises and a terrific ending.” But what caught my eye right off the bat, of course, was the cover illustration on that Dell paperback. It’s a captivating blend of sensuality and suspense, with its image of a seated young woman’s naked and shapely back and the teaser, “Her body was a portrait of beauty--but she used it as a weapon of death.”

Had I been old enough in 1960 to be handling money, much less mature enough to appreciate the promise of that artwork and blurb, I’d surely have plunked down my 25 cents for a copy of Cain’s Woman. No question about it.

It turns out that the cover was produced by an artist who, so far as I can tell, is still around, though he’s now in his mid-90s: Ernest Chiriacka, a gent who often worked under the pseudonym “Darcy” (as he’s credited on Cain’s Woman). According to a 2003 profile from Illustration magazine, “Ernest Chiriacka was born Anastassios Kyriakakos in New York City on May 11, 1913, and lived at 42 Madison Street on the Lower East Side.” The author of that piece, David Saunders, explains elsewhere that the future paperback illustrator changed his name to Ernest, because “many people presumed he was a girl” (Anastassios sounding too much like Anastasia, I suppose), and altered his surname because “Kyriakakos, was too hard for New Yorkers to pronounce.” A feature in The New York Times, published in 2003 in association with a pulp-art exhibition then being mounted at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, tells more about him:

Growing up on the Lower East Side in the early 20th century, Ernest Chiriacka was simply possessed by the need to draw, using whatever was available--a leftover lump of charcoal, a spent match or a piece of chalk at school.

As a teenager he became known as the Rembrandt of Third Avenue. As a young man, he had a thriving career doing illustrations for Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post. And later he made a handsome living from his studio here, painting landscapes and classic scenes of the American West.

But it is for his work illustrating the lurid tales of murder and intrigue that captivated Depression readers that he is about to be honored.

Over the years, Chiriacka was much in demand by paperback publishers, his work appearing on numerous cheap novels from such companies as Dell and Gold Medal. Two of his other crime-novel jackets--from the 1959 Pyramid release Cut Me In, by Jack Karney, and the 1958 Dell book Talk of the Town, by Charlie Williams--are featured on the left. As The New York Times explained, Chiriacka often used models when painting for the pulps--women who, to avoid scandal, might be accompanied by chaperones. The fact that he had lovely ladies posing in his studio, to help guide his mind and his paintbrush, helps explain why a femme fatale such as the one arranging her abundant dark tresses on Benson’s 1960 novel appears so curvaceously but credibly formed. It’s only too bad, that as Chiriacka told the Times, he pretty much gave up painting in his late 80s, after his wife passed away.

What of the story in Cain’s Woman, though? Well, I can’t say that I was as impressed as August West was, but at 160 pages long, with several pepperings of sex and violence, it’s a sufficiently engrossing read. The plot finds Chicago private dick Max Raven being employed by a woman named Naomi Cain, who claims that she’s being blackmailed by somebody in possession of sexually explicit photographs taken by a former lover. It’s all Raven can do to listen to these facts, though, so mesmerized is he by Naomi’s pulchritude. Here, the P.I. recalls first glimpse of her:

She was sitting in the office just out of my line of vision, cut off by the door frame. All I could see of her were her legs. Two of the longest, loveliest and most exciting legs since Marlene Dietrich drove the schoolmaster nuts in “Blue Angel.” The ones in my office were crossed, the hem of her skirt draping the tops of two softly rounded nylon knees. One of them moving idly back and forth like a metronome slowly marking time. ...

I went on in and everything that was there waiting to see me lived up to those legs. She hit you like a scented silken whip and it all breathed money. From the straw picture hat in her lap with the tiny white flowers around its wide brim to the gleaming Italian leather of her pointed toes, she exuded its distinctive aura. She was wearing a crisp, linen summer print with a snug, beautifully fitted bodice and wrist-length, spotless white gloves and a fine strand of pearls that had never heard of the word imitation or knew it existed. If she was annoyed at having had to wait, it didn’t show.

I would have guessed her as twenty-four or -five. She wore her hair long. It was dark, almost black, and hung halfway down her back in thick lustrous waves. Her eyes were as cool as the delicate astringency of her perfume and dark as her hair, set wide apart and slightly tilted in the flawless ivory of her face and fringed with soot dark lashes. They cruised over me slowly, but if there was any reaction to what they saw I wasn’t ever going to know.

One suspects that author Benson had a particular female in mind, himself, when he penned those appreciative sentences.

Anyway, Raven’s not-so-concealed drooling over Naomi Cain is stopped at least temporarily by the news that she’s Mrs. Cain, married to Jeremiah Cain, a big wheel in the pharmaceuticals industry who’s more than four decades her senior. She doesn’t want busy hubby to know about her current troubles; she just wants Raven to put an end to them. Quietly, and at whatever price is necessary. That leads our hero to dig into his client’s past, where he finds some rather unsavory details, precipitates his own beating, and forces open the still-bloody wound of his recent Reno divorce from the better-educated Joanie, a woman he’d known for only a couple of weeks before shipping out to fight in World War II. Joanie eventually left Raven for a widower who lived across the hall from their apartment, and after pursuing and trying to murder that new guy in her life (wow, that was some kind of rage!), the gumshoe retreated into a drunken stupor that did plenty of nothing to alleviate the sorrow he felt for himself. The whole experience left him vulnerable to being manipulated, and the seductive Naomi Cain seems to recognize that. She draws Raven into her supple embrace, and watches to see how that influences his commitment to her case. As the back jacket copy of this novel says, “Her trouble was blackmail. Raven’s trouble was her.”

I’m not going to give away the ending, but the plot doesn’t conclude as predictably as one might expect. As Anthony Boucher wrote in The New York Times back when this novel debuted, “Emphasis is less on the sexy and violent elements of the story than on the interesting people along the way and particularly on Raven’s efforts to understand, as he unravels [Naomi Cain’s] past, the complex woman who has come to dominate his life.” It’s the sort of endeavor that many crime novelists have taken on, but that few have accomplished quite so successfully as Benson does here.

Cain’s Woman evidently marked Max Raven’s solitary appearance in crime fiction, which is too bad. But even worse, this novel seems to have been the only one author O.G. (short for “Orwin Gaylord”) Benson ever saw published. Steve Lewis, who writes the Mystery*File blog, tells me that the first edition of Paperback Forum magazine from 1983-1984 included an article that mentioned Benson, his introduction to the editors at Dell by none other than John D. MacDonald, and how Benson had planned a Raven sequel, but was disappointed by editorial changes in Cain’s Woman and therefore abandoned work on the second book.

A painter during most of his life, O.G. “Ben” Benson* apparently died of cancer in November 2002. He was 74 years old. It would’ve been interesting to see what else he could have pulled out of his crime-writing hat, had he been more encouraged to create crime fiction. But that support appears to have been lacking. Fortunately, he was able to leave behind Cain’s Woman (republished in 1985 by Perennial Library under the more politically correct title, Cain’s Wife), a novel that, as one reader noted, was “little noticed upon its original release,” but is today “a minor classic and cult favorite.”

With one hell of a memorable 1960 cover, I must add.

* This is not the same Ben Benson, by the way, who penned Target in Taffeta (1953) and other books in the Wade Paris and Ralph Lindsay crime series.

READ MORE: “Good-bye, Darcy,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers).