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).

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.

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).