“The Last Good Kiss,” by James Crumley

The Last Good Kiss, by James Crumley (Vintage Contemporaries, 1988), with cover artwork by Rick Lovell.

Now that I’ve finally finished compiling and have posted The Rap Sheet’s extensive selection (more than 400 titles!) of what look to be the most interesting crime, mystery, and thriller works being released this season—on both sides of the Atlantic—I can return to my usual duties. Among those is adding to Killer Covers’ contents.

Given that I enjoyed both James Crumley’s early private-eye novels, especially The Last Good Kiss (originally published by Random House in 1978), and the Vintage Contemporaries paperback series, it may surprise you that I don’t own a copy of this particular edition. My only excuse is that the Vintage Contemporaries line wasn’t launched by U.S. publisher Vintage Books until 1984, and its version of The Last Good Kiss did not appear until 1988. By that time, I already owned and had read a 1983 printing from Pocket Books. I wasn’t inclined to replace it.

Foolish of me, I know.

Crumley saw The Last Good Kiss reach print at the end of his fourth decade on Earth. It was neither his debut novel (that had been a 1969 Vietnam War tale called One to Count Cadence), nor his first work of detective fiction—a distinction that belongs, instead, to 1975’s The Wrong Case. But it boasts one of this genre’s best openings:

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

The Wrong Case is built around Milo Milodragovitch, described by Kevin Burton Smith of The Thrilling Detective Web Site as “an alcoholic, redneck good ol’ boy sometime-private eye who hails from Meriweather, Montana, with a taste for mind-altering substances, high-powered weaponry and a definitely non-linear approach to detective work.” The Last Good Kiss follows the lazy twists and turns of a wandering-husband case led, instead, by C.W. Sughrue, another Treasure State gumshoe cut very much from the same cloth as Milo. “They’re both veterans,” Smith explains, “but Milo did his time in Korea, while the slightly younger Sughrue served in Vietnam, where he was court-martialed for ‘unintentionally’ killing an entire Vietnamese family. And while Milo is a basically a kind, generous guy, a bit smarter, a bit gentler, a bit less inclined to violence, Sughrue is a mean son of a bitch, a loaded weapon with a natural-born mean streak; the Tasmanian devil off his meds.” Crumley used to say, “Milo is my good side, Sughrue’s the bad.”

Over his roughly 36-year career, before he died in 2008 at age 68, Crumley penned seven P.I. yarns, alternating their protagonists between Milo and Sughrue (or pairing them as he did in 1996’s Bordersnakes). His final book was The Right Madness (2005), a Sughrue outing. However, none of the others rivaled The Last Good Kiss for lasting impact. As Wikipedia recalls, “In 2007, the magazine Men’s Journal named The Last Good Kiss as number 12 on its list of ‘Top 15 Thrillers of All Time,’ and in Newsweek, George Pelecanos, crime author and co-producer of the HBO series The Wire, rated Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss as number 3 in his list of the ‘Five Most Important Crime Novels.’”

Yet The Last Good Kiss was not the first of Crumley’s oft-poetic novels to earn a spot in the Vintage Contemporaries lineup.

(Above) Two more Vintage Contemporaries reprints of Crumley novels: Dancing Bear (with cover art by Marc Tauss), and The Wrong Case (again, with an illustration by Rick Lovell).

Those of us who passed for adults in the 1980s often have fond memories of Vintage Contemporaries. That string of high-quality trade paperback editions premiered in September 1984, the brainchild of Random House editor Gary Fisketjon. The imprint offered seven initial titles, but by the close of the decade that number had risen to 90. Its roster—made up primarily of literary novels, but with a few collections of short stories and poems thrown into the mix—were immediately recognizable on shelves because of their uniform appearance, comprising color-banded spines, “often surreal illustrations,” the author’s name always in a colored box on the cover’s upper-right corner, and dot matrix accents. This represented the vision of Lorraine Louie, a San Francisco-reared graphic designer who relocated to New York City in 1982 and signed on with Random House the following year. As Paula Scher, a partner with the international design firm Pentagram, told The New Yorker several years back, Louie’s “look” for Vintage Contemporaries gave each edition a best-seller air, something “designed to be kept, designed to be collected, not merely designed to sell.”

It was through Vintage Contemporaries that I made my earliest acquaintance with such wordsmiths as Richard Russo (Mohawk), Anita Brookner (The Debut), Denis Johnson (The Stars at Noon), Gloria Naylor (Mama Day), Richard Ford (The Sportswriter), Mona Simpson (Anywhere But Here), Thomas Sanchez (Rabbit Boss), Susanna Kaysen (Asa, as I Knew Him), Steve Erickson (Rubicon Beach), Jill Eisenstadt (Far Rockaway), and Valerie Martin (A Recent Martyr). Plus, of course, Jay McInerney, whose distinctive second-person narrative, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), became “a sensation,” observes The New Yorker, “selling a reported half-million copies by the end of the decade” and helping give the imprint “both literary cachet and the air of the cutting edge.” A shelfful of Vintage Contemporaries opposite my desk still greets me each morning when I sit down with a cup of coffee to write.

Although Dancing Bear (1983), the second Milo story, was composed after The Last Good Kiss, a reissue of that book marked Crumley’s premiere in the Vintage Contemporaries catalogue, reaching the market back in 1984. The Wrong Case followed in 1986, with One to Count Cadence receiving the Louie treatment in 1987. As I mentioned before, The Last Good Kiss joined this winner’s circle a year later.

Slice of P.I.: “Dreaming of Babylon”

(This is the 22nd and final entry in Killer Covers’ late-summer celebration of fictional private eyes.)



Dreaming of Babylon, by Richard Brautigan (Delta, 1978).

Yes, that Richard Brautigan, he of Trout Fishing in America and The Hawkline Monster fame—and one of many “literary authors” who have taken a shot at penning crime and detective novels during their careers. Said lineup also includes Thomas Berger, who followed his acclaimed western parody, Little Big Man, with a screwball twist on private investigator fiction titled Who Is Teddy Villanova? Brautigan’s Dreaming of Babylon was released originally in hardcover in early 1977 (by Delacorte Press), around the same time as Berger’s book. I procured and read paperback editions of both in 1978. They now sit together on my office shelves. The fact that I’ve never since considered revisiting either may indicate my level of satisfaction with their stories.

Similar to Russell Wren, the protagonist in Berger’s yarn, Brautigan’s C. Card is an impecunious dick, a Spanish Civil War veteran who has escaped service in World War II only because he was “shot in the ass” during that earlier conflict. The year is 1942, and Card has no car and has been forced to relinquish his office in downtown San Francisco, working instead (when he can find work at all) from “the pay phone in the front hall of the cheap apartment building I was living in on Nob Hill where I was two months behind in my rent.” He also let go of his secretary, whom he’d tried to seduce, without success.

Card is so down on his luck, he can’t even afford bullets for his gun. Which could be a problem, because he’s set to meet the first client he has had in three months, and they want him to bring his firearm. Preferably loaded. So Card goes searching among his friends for spare bullets, all the while trying not to get sidetracked by fantasies of living a wonderful life in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon.

Yes, this is an odd story. Bear with me here.

It seems that years ago Card experienced a head injury, which has caused him to periodically—and not always on convenient occasions—drift off into delusions of spending his days in Babylon. There he is the best private detective around, enjoying a gorgeous woman named Nana-dirat as his secretary and lover. “His life in Babylon,” explains the anonymous blogger at Biisbooks, “is the polar opposite of his life in the real world; no wonder he can’t stop dreaming about it.” But those hallucinations may make it difficult for Card to complete the mission given him by his new client, a beautiful, beer-drinking blonde who wants him to steal a body from the local morgue.

Reviews of Brautigan’s tale have been mixed. Scott Alderberg describes it in Do Some Damage as “a pleasurable and amusing read, just the playful thing I was looking for, an escape from the usual P.I. tropes that can become at times, let’s face it, a little wearying.” However, in their 1985 study, Private Eyes: One Hundred and One Knights, Robert A. Baker and Michael T. Nietzel called Dreaming of Babylon “as weak an effort from a major writer as one is likely to encounter. As parody, as humor, as any statement, the book fails.”

I don’t know. While paging through this book in order to write about it here, I finally found myself wanting to re-read the thing!

As for the novel’s cover illustration, credit belongs to California artist Craig Nelson, who—according to his Web site—is better known for painting record jackets as well as posters for films such as John Wayne’s The Cowboys (1972) and Paul Newman’s Slapshot (1977).

Peepers on Parade

I launched Killer Covers’ “Slice of P.I.” series on July 24, which (by no coincidence) was National and International Private Investigator Day. I’m ending it this morning, 22 days and 22 covers later.

Putting this series together has been an altogether delightful experience. It led me to explore some of the deeper recesses of my computer files, looking for book fronts that demonstrate the wide range of private eye fiction—both in time period and type—as well as an assortment of artists. (I always prefer hand-illustrated covers to photo fronts.) A few of the covers I’d wanted to include had to be eliminated, because I could not identify their painters, even with help from tech writer-turned-book art authority Tim Hewitt, who provided me with the scans of Lawrence Block’s The Sins of the Fathers and John D. MacDonald’s Darker Than Amber. But there were always others waiting to substitute. The issue, finally, was how long I wanted this series to run. My original promise was that it would last “seven days or more.” Within the first week, however, I had already gathered enough interesting covers (not previously showcased on this page) for three weeks worth of posts. I could probably keep going still, but I do have responsibilities elsewhere, including to The Rap Sheet, which has not seen much attention from me since I began this project.

So, as Marlene Dietrich sang, “let’s call it a day,” with the assurance that I shall return to the subject of elegantly illustrated private detective works. Probably sooner than later.

Slice of P.I.: “The Autumn Dead”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



The Autumn Dead, by Ed Gorman (St. Martin’s Press, 1987). Dust jacket illustration by Joanne Pendola.

Not long before he died in 2016, at age 74, Iowa author Gorman sent me a copy of this novel with an inscription declaring it “the best of the Jack Dwyers.” Dwyer, you will recall, was Gorman’s long-running cop turned private eye (and aspiring actor), a guy who worked the streets of a barely disguised Cedar Rapids, beginning in the 1986 novel Rough Cut. Over just six more years, he produced a total of eight Dwyer investigations, The Autumn Dead being the fourth of those, “a thoughtful, melancholy journey that is heavy on working-class angst,” to quote critic and short-story writer Ben Boulden.

Of the book’s general plot, Publishers Weekly explained:

The sequel to Murder Straight Up and New, Improved Murder will add to Gorman’s laurels and the popularity of his Midwestern hero-narrator, Jack Dwyer. Private detective Dwyer agrees to help Karen Lane, his high school crush, to recover a lost suitcase. Still lovely after 25 years, Karen is also greedy for money and status, but the disillusioned Dwyer takes the assignment, which puts his life in danger. When Karen dies suddenly, the detective goes after evidence that she has been murdered, and perhaps others with knowledge of the facts behind the death of their schoolmate, Sonny Howard, whose drowning has been officially declared a suicide. The tensions multiply, with Dwyer baiting a trap for criminals willing to buy the suitcase holding the source of blackmailer Karen’s wealth. The author’s salty humor and fast, tuned-in dialogue quicken the pace of a dandy mystery with no contrivances, even in the startling finale.

“There’s a solid mystery here, full of murder, rape, blackmail and old secrets,” Kevin Burton Smith observed in a review for Mystery Scene magazine, “but the real mysteries lie within the complicated relationships between men and women, between past and present, between what we want and what we have. Through it all, Jack displays considerable empathy and a gentle humor as he plies his trade, and brings things to an emotionally satisfying ending.”

The intimidatingly prolific Gorman fielded at least three different fictional gumshoes over the decades, with Dwyer and Sam McCain, the latter of whom starred in 10 Iowa-based mysteries set during the 1950s (The Day the Music Died, Riders on the Storm, etc.), gaining the greatest renown. However, he also gave us sexagenarian Jack Walsh in 1991’s The Night Remembers, which Smith calls “his masterpiece, a quietly powerful gem of a novel.” If you haven’t tried any of these books yet, it’s time to add them to your reading list.

Slice of P.I.: “Asking for Trouble”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Asking for Trouble, by “Joe Rayter,” aka Mary Fuller McChesney (Pocket, 1956). Cover illustration by James Meese.

Among the most rewarding results of exploring vintage crime and mystery fiction is that I discover authors about whom I've never heard or at least never known much. “Joe Rayter” certainly qualifies in said category. As it turns out, that byline was a pseudonym for a California sculptor and art historian of no small renown, a onetime National Endowment of the Arts fellow named Mary Fuller McChesney.

Born Mary Ellen Fuller in Wichita, Kansas, back in 1922, she moved with her family to Stockton, California, just two years later. The Fullers were not well off, but Mary eventually won a full scholarship to study philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her obituary in The New York Times says she left college after only three years, taking a job “at the sprawling Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, Calif., in the Bay Area,” and then “apprenticed herself to a ceramics company, where she proved so adept that she quickly had her own line of tableware, for sale at high-end San Francisco department stores.” Her interest in the art world led her to meet and marry Robert McChesney, an abstract expressionist painter and printmaker who had created murals for the 1939-1940 Golden Gate International Exposition, on Treasure Island in San Francisco. In 1951, “the height of the Red Scare,” Mary McChesney was teaching art classes in Point Richmond, northeast of San Francisco, when the state “ordered all public employees to sign an oath disavowing radical beliefs, in particular communism. She refused, and was fired.”

Along with other left-leaning Bay Area intellectuals, the McChesneys soon fled the United States, landing in their case in Guadalajara, Mexico, where they stayed for a year or so. It was there that Mary became fascinated with pre-Columbian art, as well as Aztec and Mayan mythology—all of which would influence her subsequent sculpting efforts. Following their Mexican sojourn, the McChesneys returned to Northern California and refocused on their art. Money was short at first, though, so Mary tried her hand at writing mystery novels. The Victim Was Important saw print in 1954, and a year later Asking for Trouble rolled out in hardcover from publisher M.S. Mill (a subsidiary imprint of William Morrow). Both starred Johnny Powers, who’s touted on the paperback edition of Victim as “the best new private detective since Philip Marlowe.”

(Right) Asking for Trouble’s back cover.

That was more than a modicum of overselling, but the San Francisco-based Powers was a hit with someone whose opinions on this matter count: Bill Pronzini, creator of the Nameless Detective series. He recalls, in an old Mystery*File piece, how Asking for Trouble was “one of the first adult mysteries I read in my formative years,” growing up in the Sonoma County town of Petaluma. Pronzini enjoyed the novel partly because it boasted “more than enough s*e*x to stir the hormones of a curious and incipiently horny teenager,” but also for its “convincing medium-boiled male detective” protagonist and compelling plot. “This one,” he explains, “starts with the apparent shotgun slaying of a ‘mildly crazy philosopher’ who owns a Tomales Bay oyster farm that doubles as a retreat for a strange assortment of homeless alcoholics. A messy divorce case involving money and ‘revolting practices,’ and such characters as an unscrupulous private eye, an ex-prizefighter turned Dada painter, a female ex-con, a ‘wild gypsy’ nympho with exotic sexual tastes, and a besotted former college professor, figure prominently in a complex plot that takes Powers all over the Bay Area and into Nevada.”

Mary McChesney would go on to produce only one additional mystery, Stab in the Dark (1995), a non-series work “about murder, infidelity, and dope-peddling among a group of oddball expatriate artists in Guadalajara,” according to Pronzini. Beyond that, however, she penned erotic novels under the nom de plume Melissa Franklin (including 1969’s titillatingly titled Murder in Her Thighs). She passed away at age 99, in 2022. While McChesney “never achieved widespread celebrity as an artist,” to quote the Times again, “her sculptures can be found across California today, in parks, private gardens and public plazas as well as outside San Francisco General Hospital and at the city’s zoo.” Her novels are somewhat harder to locate.

READ MORE: “Remembering Mary McChesney, Sculptor, Welder, Art Historian, Murder Mystery Writer,” by Jonah Raskin (Berkeleyside); “True Bohemians,” by Gretchen Giles (Metroactive).

Slice of P.I.: “Darker Than Amber”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Darker Than Amber, by John D. MacDonald (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1982). Cover illustration by the great Robert McGinnis.

Originally published in 1966, this was MacDonald’s seventh outing for Travis McGee, a handsome Florida houseboat resident, former footballer, and sometimes gumshoe, who calls himself a “salvage consultant”—meaning he recovers valuable lost property for a fee equal to 50 percent of its value. He also helps people get out of trouble with the police. The blog Cannonball Read provides this plot summary:

Travis McGee and his trusted friend Meyer are fishing in a secluded location late one night when a car stops on the bridge overhead. Next thing they know a woman wearing cement shoes is thrown into the water and sinks to the bottom. Acting quickly, McGee is just barely able to get her out alive. Once she’s recovered from the shock, she tells them the shocking story. A beautiful young woman, Evangeline (“Vangie” to her friends) has been a prostitute since she was a teenager, and found herself wrapped up with a gang of criminals who target lonely, foolish men with money to spend and no one to miss them. She’s vague on the details, but Vangie eventually grew a conscience and was nearly killed for it.

Once she learns about McGee’s line of work …, Vangie wants his help getting her nest egg back. She’s been squirreling away money in case she ever needed an escape. She’s willing to split it with McGee if he can help. McGee could use the money, since his “retirement fund” is running low, but he’s also drawn to something more. Feeling a duty to Vangie since he saved her life, and unable to shake the image of all those men the gang has disposed of, McGee wants to take down the whole operation.

It’s been a long while since I last read this book, but my memory is that—befitting its title—it is somewhat darker than many McGee yarns, with renowned economist Meyer playing a most substantive sidekick role. Those ingredients might have contributed to film director Robert Clouse’s decision to bring this story to the screen, as he did in 1970, with Australian actor Rod Taylor playing McGee. (That was a year before Taylor co-starred with Dennis Cole in the TV crime/adventure historical series Bearcats!) At least for now, you can watch the entirety of Clouse’s Darker Than Amber on YouTube.

Slice of P.I.: “Grave Error”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Grave Error, by Stephen Greenleaf (Dial Press, 1979).

At the time of this book’s publication, Greenleaf was 37 years old, a child of the American Midwest who’d graduated from Minnesota’s Carlton College, earned a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and was enrolled at the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He’d already determined that storytelling as a career was far and away better for him to lawyering. And indeed, despite his workshop instructors frowning upon detective novels as “commercial fiction,” Greenleaf would go on to pen 13 more of them beyond Grave Error, all starring a San Francisco gumshoe named John Marshall Tanner.

The Thrilling Detective Web Site’s Kevin Burton Smith describes Tanner as “a loner, almost a recluse. He’s middle-aged and single, and painfully aware of both facts. He seems to be working his way to achieving full-curmudgeon status, albeit in the political left division. And his gloom ’n’ doom isn’t helped by a profession he feels ‘traffics in misery.’ When he’s not out doing his job, he prefers to stay at home, reading, listening to music or watching sports on television, a stiff drink and a bag of Oreos by his side. He occasionally heads out to his favorite watering hole, but he maintains he’s a drinking man, not a drunk.” Like his creator, Tanner was formerly a lawyer. He has an office over an antique store and, in the beginning, an adoring secretary named Peggy Nettleton. Most of his income is made from “small businesses and law firms that can afford me on a daily rate …” Other clients, the more interesting ones with more dangerous problems, don’t come as frequently or request such straightforward results.

In Grave Error, writes Aubrey Hamilton in Happiness Is a Book,

Tanner is retained to find out what the leader of a private consumer advocate institute is up to. Roland Nelson, a Ralph Nader-like individual, is revered by thousands as an incorruptible rooting out venal corporations everywhere. His wife reports that he’s been siphoning off money from the institute and he disappears evenings, declining to account for his time. She wants to know if he’s being blackmailed and if so, why. If he’s having an affair, she wants to know with whom. She is well aware that any adverse publicity will destroy her husband and the work he’s done. Tanner’s investigation crosses the path of his fellow P.I. and good friend Harry Spring, whose current case seems to intersect with Tanner’s but how isn’t clear. Harry turns up dead, and Tanner’s focus changes to supporting the widow and finding the killer, which may not be altogether separate from whatever is occupying Roland Nelson.

Years ago, Greenleaf told Mystery*File’s Ed Lynskey that “I made Grave Error as much like a Ross Macdonald book as I could make it. I’m surprised he didn’t sue me. I liked his style, less operatic than Chandler and less apocalyptic than Hammett, a startling and penetrating vision of [private eye] Lew Archer’s time and place. I also liked his focus on the psychological genesis of the murderous impulse …” This and subsequent Tanner tales were cogent, smoothly composed, daring with their character development (at one point, Tanner—like his creator—was forced to deal with depression), and often creative in their plotting. Smith opines that, by seeking “alternatives to murder as the engine for his novels, [Greenleaf] has added considerable depth to them, and they often pack an emotional and moral wallop. Death Bed, in particular, has always struck me as one of the most powerful P.I. novels I’ve read, and the murderer’s M.O. is one of the nastiest imaginable.”

Greenleaf has explained before that he knew Tanner’s time was up when his 13th book in the series, the Edgar Award-nominated Strawberry Sunday (1999), failed to find a paperback publisher. Sadly, only one additional entry made it into print: 2000’s Ellipsis.

William Schmidt is credited with painting the front of Grave Error displayed atop this post. I don’t see much information about him online, other than mentions of his art having decorated works by John D. MacDonald (Contrary Pleasure) and Brian Daley (Han Solo and the Lost Legacy), as well as assorted monthly issues of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine during the 1970s.

Slice of P.I.: “A Key to the Morgue”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



A Key to the Morgue, by Robert Martin (Ace, 1960).

This is the ninth of 13 novels Martin (1908-1976) produced starring Cleveland, Ohio, private investigator James “Jim” Tobias Bennett. The protagonist had initially been introduced as a law-school dropout in short stories for Dime Detective magazine in 1945; he made the big leap to book-length yarns six years later in Dark Dream. Unlike most fictional shamuses of his era, the black-haired, blue-eyed Bennett wasn’t a lone wolf, but instead a company man, heading the Cleveland branch of a New York-based national sleuthing agency. He also had a steady girlfriend, his long-legged secretary Sandy Hollis, whom he hopes to marry (though they never quite set a date to exchange vows).

A Key to the Morgue saw its original, hardcover publication in 1959 by Dodd, Mead. A reviewer for Goodreads sums up the plot this way:

Alvin Bayne is a man who started small in the produce business, but is now a rich man with contracts to supply major canning companies. Jim Bennett works for a private eye firm out of New York. Both men belong to a country club in Cleveland, or somewhere thereabouts.

When Alvin Bayne propositions Jim Bennett personally to gather evidence of his wife’s infidelity, Jim refuses on the grounds that it would violate his company’s policy. But then Alvin Bayne is so persistent and pathetic that Jim eventually agrees to meet up with him to discuss his situation, but of course when Jim arrives he finds Alvin Bayne lying with a bullet hole in his face, thus bringing all golfing activities to a grinding halt.

So Jim Bennett takes on the task of avenging his friend’s death, which straight away sees him dodging bullets and breaking detection protocol in the pursuit of suspects. The most likely suspects include Mrs. Bayne and her gangster lover John Damon, who have discovered through eavesdropping that Mr. Bayne is about to cut his cheating wife out of his will. But soon Jim Bennett is dealt a wild card in the form of Marsha King, the woman who Bennett learns was having an affair with Alvin Bayne while his wife was having an affair with John Damon. ... Marsha insists on accompanying Bennett on his mission to snap some pictures of John Damon and Mrs. Bayne in the act.

Add to all this the fact that Marsha King also has a romantic past with the criminal John Damon and you have a plot that would normally confuse the shit out of anyone, but Robert Martin makes it coherent by laying it out with trenchant style and the sure touch of a professional.

“This is by far the darkest, most violent of all the cases so far [in the series],” opined Gary Warren Niebuhr in Mystery*File. “Risking his license and his reputation, Jim rolls from one killing to the next trying to clear his friend’s name and eventually his own. Hard-boiled to the maximum, this cold and bleak tale is highly recommended.”

The paperback edition of A Key to the Morgue shown above features cover art by Lou Marchetti. Ace Books’ “Double Novel” packaging paired it with Odd Against Linda, by Steve Ward.

Slice of P.I.: “Steel Guitar”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Steel Guitar, by Linda Barnes (Delacorte, 1991). This is the fourth entry in Barnes’ series starring Boston shamus Carlotta Carlyle. Single, red-headed, six feet tall, and with a habitually grumpy cat, Thomas C. Carlyle, under whose name much of her mail is received, Carlyle also happens to be a former Beantown cop, a current part-time cab driver, and the guardian of a young Hispanic “little sister” named Paolina Fuentes. In short, she’s no pushover. I really enjoyed these books, the first of which was the Edgar Award-winning A Trouble of Fools (1987). So I was sorry when their run ended with 2009’s Lie Down with the Devil.

Cover illustration by Robert Santora, who in more recent years has become active in efforts to protect artists’ work from being improperly manipuled by artificial intelligence.

Slice of P.I.: “Deadly Weapon”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Deadly Weapon, by “Wade Miller,” aka Robert Wade and Bill Miller (Signet, 1960). With cover art by Robert K. Abbett.

Robert Allison Wade (1920-2012) and H. William Miller (1920-1961), co-authors and lifelong friends who met when they were 12-year-olds taking violin lessons together, are fondly recalled nowadays for creating what The Thrilling Detective Web Site calls “one of the best private eye series to crawl out of the fifties,” starring San Diego, California, peeper Max Thursday. There were six installments in that series.

Deadly Weapon was not among them.

Instead, this was the authors’ first novel to see print, originally published by Farrar, Straus & Company in 1946, when they were both 26-year-old veterans of World War II. It was also their only book to star Atlanta, Georgia, gumshoe Walter James. But among its cast is someone who later became a staple of the Thursday yarns: Lieutenant Austin Clapp, in charge of the San Diego Police Department’s Homicide Squad. Clapp observes at one point that “Man is the only deadly weapon,” giving this book its title and establishing its dark tone.

Critics over the years have noted how Deadly Weapon shows the distinct influences of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, with James patterned after Sam Spade. The old blog Battered, Tattered, Yellowed & Creased provides this summation of Deadly Weapon’s plot:

Private eye Walter James is on the trail of the drug cartel who killed his partner, led to a San Diego burlesque house by an anonymous tip from one Doctor Boone. But before he can make the meet, the contact is murdered. James decides to team up with police detective Austin Clapp to bust the drug ring once and for all. There are plenty of suspects for him to choose between. There’s the beautiful Shasta Lynn, the striptease artist headlining at the burlesque. There’s Laura Gilbert, whose romance with James blossoms over the course of the novel, and her father, who’s providing a lot of secret money to Shasta Lynn. There’s a retired Major, a quack psychiatrist, and a trio of Mexican drug lords. Untangling this web of shady dealers and dangerous characters might lead James to the mysterious Doctor Boone, who is the key to busting this case wide open.

Anthony Boucher, who was then a book reviewer with the San Francisco Chronicle, called Deadly Weapon a “highly satisfactory debut” and praised its ending (which The Thrilling Detective’s Kevin Burton Smith describes as “genuinely surprising”). Others have characterized it as a striped-down and fairly generic shamus tale, but one that provides hints of the superior things Wade and Miller would eventually accomplish in this genre. In Mystery*File, Richard Moore cites the book’s dated perspectives. “It was apparent,” he remarks, “that modern readers would need to overcome instinctive reactions to racial and other slurs. This is a novel written in 1946 featuring people with the attitudes and language of the times. In addition to the racial slurs, the cast of characters includes a lesbian couple and writing today, the descriptions would be quite different. Notwithstanding the fact that Walter James punches out one of them, the two lesbians do come through as very human characters.” Moore lamented that such anachronisms might distract from this book’s strengths.

And those strengths are not to be overlooked, says Battered, Tattered, Yellowed & Creased: “Deadly Weapon is a winner, but not for the reasons I expected; it’s not the greatest Wade Miller novel, but it is a great read. And that’s the important thing.”

Hall & the Gang

Let me take just a moment’s break from our evolving “Slice of P.I.” series to mention that The Stiletto Gumshoe’s C.J. Thomas has showcased the beautiful covers artist H. Tom Hall created for Signet’s 1976-1977 editions of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series.

Slice of P.I.: “Portrait in Smoke”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Portrait in Smoke, by Bill S. Ballinger (Signet, 1951).

William Sanborn “Bill” Ballinger (1912-1980) was an Iowa-born author, college professor, radio scriptwriter, and screenwriter. He penned standalone novels with titles such as The Tooth and the Nail (1955), The Wife of the Red-Haired Man (1956), Beacon in the Night (1960), and Not I, Said the Vixen (1965), along with episodes of TV shows including M Squad, Mike Hammer, Ironside, Cannon, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. In the 1960s, Ballinger also concocted five thrillers starring Joaquin Hawks, a U.S. secret agent of Native American heritage.

Not satisfied with those abundant credits, Ballinger also penned a couple of novels featuring Chicago private eye Barr Breed (1948’s The Body in the Bed and 1949’s The Body Beautiful), plus a single book about New York City gumshoe Bryce Patch, (Heist Me Higher, 1969), and Portrait in Smoke, a one-and-done outing for Danny April, who operates a bargain-basement Chicago collections agency.

Although I haven’t read Portrait, someone who has is prolific novelist and blogger James Reasoner. He offers this synopsis:

To start with, Ballinger uses a technique that I hardly ever like, alternating between first and third person, but makes it work really well. The first-person sections are narrated by Danny April (great name) ... In an old file from long before he bought the agency, he finds a photograph of a beautiful young girl named Krassy Almauniski. And to put it simply, he becomes infatuated with her, all because she reminds him of a girl he saw once when he was a young man but never talked to. Love at first sight? Maybe, but certainly obsession at first sight. Danny starts trying to find her, or at least find out what happened to her, and these parts of the novel form a top-notch procedural yarn as Danny traces out the details of Krassy’s life, step by step.

At the same time, in the third-person sections, Ballinger
gives the truth about Krassy’s life, as opposed to Danny’s somewhat skewed view. This part of the book reads more like a naturalistic novel about a young woman’s determined climb out of the poverty and squalor of Chicago’s stockyards district all the way to the heights of wealth and power, no matter what it takes. It’s inevitable that these two storylines will intersect eventually, and when they do, that’s when Portrait in Smoke becomes a noirish crime novel with a very nice twist ending.

Reviewer NancyO sounds no less delighted with Ballinger’s 160-page yarn. “I believe I’ve discovered the ultimate in femmes fatales,” she writes in The Crime Segments. “I read this story this past Saturday, and I did not move from my spot on the sofa until the last page had been turned—that’s how good it is. I actually found myself gasping when I got to the ending … [Q]uite honestly, it blew me away. Trust me: you may think you’ve seen all that these old books have to offer in the way of femmes fatales, but there is no one, absolutely no one in my reading experience quite like this woman [Krassy Almauniski].”

(Left) Portrait in Smoke’s back cover.

Hmm. This sounds like a book I should find for myself. Fortunately, Stark House Press reprinted it six years ago in a two-fer paperback edition together with another Ballinger standalone, 1957’s The Longest Second.

Stanley Meltzoff (1917-2006), the New York City-born painter responsible for the Portrait cover atop this post, started his career working for advertising agencies, book publishers, and magazines in the 1950s. His artistry graced National Geographic, Scientific American, and The Atlantic, and he produced for The Saturday Evening Post “a still life featuring a bust of Benjamin Franklin” that, beginning in 1956, appeared on that popular weekly five Januarys in a row to celebrate Franklin’s birthday. Meltzoff’s creations were displayed over the decades on crime novels by Dashiell Hammett, Ellery Queen, Georges Simenon, and Day Keene, as well as on science-fiction releases by the likes of Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and A.E. van Vogt.

A selection of his covers can be enjoyed here.

WATCH THIS: “Reckless Lives! Ballinger’s Crazy Crime Novels!” by Thomas McNulty (McNulty’s Book Corral).

Slice of P.I.: “A Red Death”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



A Red Death, by Walter Mosley (W.W. Norton, 1991).

Set in Los Angeles’ working-class Watts neighborhood in 1953, this second novel starring Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins (following 1990’s Devil in a Blue Dress) finds the Black factory worker turned snoop getting into trouble with the Internal Revenue Service over his recent property acquisitions. However, a Red-baiting FBI agent, Darryl T. Craxton, agrees to let him off the hook for back taxes, so long as Easy looks into suspected espionage at a major aircraft manufacturing plant. Craxton also wants our hero to find proof that a local labor union organizer is a closet communist spy. Murders soon follows, of course.

Efforts online to find background online about John Jinks, who’s credited with painting the dust-jacket art for this hardcover edition of A Red Death (which was later reused on paperback versions) have had negligible results. I can tell you that during the late 20th century, he created fronts for fantasy novels by Michael Bishop and interior illustrations for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, as well as producing covers for some of Harper Perennial’s line of Miss Silver mysteries by Patricia Wentworth. Oh, and I tracked down this collection of Jinks’ distinctive angular artistry. But beyond that, well, he remains a mystery. At least for the time being.

Slice of P.I.: “Hickory Dickory Death”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Hickory Dickory Death, by Agatha Christie (Pocket, 1975).

Published originally in Great Britain at the end of October 1955 as Hickory Dickory Dock, this novel’s title was changed when it reached print in the United States a month later. Wikipedia’s description of the story’s plot will serve our needs quite well here:

It features her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. The novel is notable for featuring Poirot's efficient secretary, Miss Felicity Lemon, who had previously appeared only in the Poirot short stories. This novel is set at a student hostel on Hickory Road, where Miss Lemon’s sister Mrs. Hubbard is the warden. Poirot attempts to discover the reason for a sudden spate of petty thefts and vandalism, as he suspects there is a darker aspect to the happenings at Hickory Road; these suspicions are confirmed when three people are murdered.

We are all familiar here, or should be, with the career of Christie’s mustachioed gentleman sleuth, who took up his first case in 1920’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Less familiar is the artist behind this novel’s 1975 cover. As Curtis Evans explains in his blog, The Passing Tramp, “Mara McAfee, who was born in 1929 and died much too young in 1984, got her start as a film and television actress and dancer in the 1950s. Often she was uncredited in her films, as in the landmark brutal Fifties noir Kiss Me Deadly, where she plays the beatific, silent nurse looking down upon the stricken Mike Hammer. She also had parts in the genre films Women’s Prison—starring Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Audrey Totter and Phyllis Thaxter (Wow!)—and Las Vegas Shakedown (she actually gets credited in that one), both also from ’55.”

While she was certainly attractive, McAfee didn’t trust that her fame would grow or endure in Hollywood, so she took her money earned from acting and dancing, and spent it on an art education. In 1962 she began exhibiting work in New York City, her paintings featuring familiar U.S. heroes, burlesque performers, comic-book characters, and more. However, she made a far bigger name for herself when she moved into magazines and books. McAfee started illustrating for the humor mag National Lampoon in the 1970s (her efforts later collected in book form), and was tasked at the same time by Pocket Books with creating new fronts for its line of Christie titles. I’m uncertain how many she created, but I hope to collect them all for Killer Covers.

Slice of P.I.: “Murder on the Yellow Brick Road”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Murder on the Yellow Brick Road, by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Penguin, 1979), with cover artwork by Joel Iskowitz.

Stuart Kaminsky (1934-2009) taught film studies at the college level and authored a variety of non-fiction works about movies and movie makers, so it was no surprise that when he turned to penning mystery novels, they should feature personalities from Tinseltown. Not just any personalities, but classic stars of the silver screen. His protagonist was Toby Peters, who I once described in an interview with the author as “a disheveled, divorced and taco-loving former security officer with Warner Brothers Studio, who’d been fired in 1936 (after ‘breaking the arm of a Western star who had made the mistake of thinking he was as tough in person as he was on the screen’), and subsequently hung out his shingle as the most low-rent of private eyes. This job change, however, didn’t greatly alter his clientele. He’s continued to work for early 1940s celebrities, both Hollywood habitués and others.”

For instance, in Toby’s first adventure, Bullet for a Star (1977), he’s hired by swashbuckler Errol Flynn to retrieve a compromising photograph of him with a very naked young beauty. But when Toby goes to swap $5,000 for the incriminating image, he is knocked out … only to wake up later beside the now deceased extortionist, who has been slain by the gumshoe’s own gun. The second series entry, Murder on the Yellow Brick Road, imagines our unintimidating hero trying to solve the murder of a Munckin on the Wizard of Oz sound stage, while also protecting the life of headliner Judy Garland. Subsequent entries in the series had him working for such famous historical figures as the Marx Brothers, billionaire Howard Hughes, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, General Douglas MacArthur, comedian W.C. Fields, suave leading man Cary Grant, and magician Harry Blackstone.

Private-eye fiction authority Kevin Burton Smith calls the two-dozen Toby Peters tales “good old-fashioned, B-movie entertainment. Not too heavy, with straightforward plots and full of wonderfully colorful characters who pop in and out of the series with wild abandon. You can just picture character actors playing these roles.”

He’s not wrong about that.

Slice of P.I.: “Killing Orders”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Killing Orders, by Sara Paretsky (Morrow, 1985).

This was the third novel to be published starring Chicago P.I. V.I. Warshawski, following Indemnity Only (1982) and Deadlock (1984). By this point, Paretsky had impressed critics as one of several female crime-fictionists (including also Sue Grafton and Liza Cody) who were making inroads into a previously male-dominated field. As The Thrilling Detective Web Site puts it, Warshawski, “specializing in corporate skullduggery,” was “very proud of her Italian-Polish roots and her working-class background, and seems to take particular delight in going after fat cats. She’s got an office in the Loop, complete with the El rattling past every few minutes. And while she may be a slender 5’8”, V.I. can certainly take care of herself, thanks. No waiting to be rescued here—she packs a gun in her purse, and she’ll use it if she has to. She’ll duke it up if necessary, and she doesn’t take any bullshit—especially from men. She’s fiercely and defiantly feminist, and if many of her cases revolve around ‘women’s issues,’ well, so be it.”

Killing Orders finds Warshawski accepting a case to help her great-aunt Rosa, even though the two of them enjoy something far less than a warm relationship. The local Dominican priory has discovered counterfeit securities stored in its safe, and Rosa, who has long acted as that monastery’s treasurer, becomes a suspect in the crime and is quickly suspended. She needs her great-niece to prove her innocence. But what begins as a seemingly simple and safe assignment, soon results in lives being threatened and V.I. facing an unknown opponent willing to throw acid in her face and torch her apartment if that’s what is necessary to stop her from digging further.

Cover artwork for the eye-catching hardcover edition of Killing Orders shown above is credited to Judith Kazdym Leeds, whose bio brief says she has created more than 3,000 book jackets, among them the 1982 front of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, “chosen by Literary Hub as one of “The 25 Most Iconic Book Covers in History.”

Slice of P.I.: “The Sins of the Fathers”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



The Sins of the Fathers, by Lawrence Block (Dell, 1976).

Block is now 88 years old and well-established as an author of top-notch crime fiction, but in the mid-1970s, he was pretty much an unknown. Yeah, he’d produced a great many novels, but a lot of those had been of the soft-core porn variety (published pseudonymously), and the two series he’d launched up to that point—one about a sleep-deprived, peripatetic spy named Evan Tanner, the other a non-mystery series built around lust-driven teenager Chip Harrison—had not achieved best-seller status. Matthew Scudder was going to change all that.

When we first meet Scudder, in The Sins of the Father, he’s “a 15-year veteran of NYPD who retired after an accidental shooting of a seven-year-old girl,” explains Carol Siwert in her blog Book Reviews Forevermore. “That incident became a breaking point, an emotional trauma that is shared with the reader in bits and pieces. Now living in an emotion-free zone powered by booze and coffee, he works for ‘favors,’ where he investigates for people and they express appreciation in cash. The police force, alas, exists on a favor system as well, and undoubtedly set the stage for Scudder’s mentality now.”

This 276-page story (slim by today’s standards) finds Scudder laboring as an unlicensed gumshoe, taking on clients sent his way by friends on the force. “Desperate people they don’t really want to deal with,” as Benoît Lelièvre characterizes them in Dead End Follies. “Cale Hanniford is one of those people. His estranged daughter Wendy has been murdered in brutal fashion, seemingly by Richard Vanderpoel, her roommate. The case is closed since Vanderpoel has been arrested and hung himself in his jail cell. Cale Hanniford doesn’t really debate the investigation. He just wants some closure. He wants to know how he ended up with a murdered daughter. Scudder accepts the case and sets foot in the strange world of Wendy Hanniford’s ghost, waking up his own at the same time.” A good deal of time is spent in the protagonist’s first-person company, as he questions people in hopes of solving this book’s whodunit plot.

(Right) Lawrence Block

Block is fairly sparing in his descriptions of Scudder, leaving us with the vague understanding that he’s heavy-set and tough enough to handle himself in dangerous situations. He’s also wandered over the line that separates a problem drinker from an improbably functioning alcoholic, a transition that becomes clearer as the series continues. These are definitively hard-boiled yarns, well introduced by The Sins of the Fathers but, as Kevin Burton Smith opines at The Thrilling Detective Web Site, reaching their creative apex with 1982’s Eight Million Ways to Die, “simply one of the best P.I. novels of all time, and Everybody Dies (1998) ain’t too shabby either.”

Thanks to tech writer-turned-book art authority Tim Hewitt, I know that the paperback cover topping this post was painted by John Melo, who started his career in commercial art around 1970. He worked in motion-picture advertising as well as providing illustrations for books, magazines, films, the theater, and television. Many of his creations fronted science-fiction novels, as well as works of horror fiction, TV tie-in releases (including several linked to the Lee Major series The Six Million Dollar Man), and the occasional tale of crime and mystery—not just Block’s Scudder debut, but also this entry in Dell Books’ Murder Ink/Scene of the Crime series of the 1980s.