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.

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.

Slice of P.I.: “Shady Lady”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Shady Lady, by Cleve F. Adams (Ace, 1955). Originally published as Too Fair to Die, one of two works paired in a cheap, 1951 Two Complete Detective Books edition with Fredric Brown’s Compliments of a Fiend, Shady Lady was expanded, retitled, and repackaged as an Ace Double Novel opposite Harry Whittington’s One Got Away. It marked the sixth and final outing for Adams’ Rex McBride, a controversial Los Angeles dick described by one critic as “a racist, a fascist, and a hypocrite, but a tender ballad brings tears to his eyes. In one word, he’s an oaf, deliberately drawn by Adams so as to pull the rug out from under [Raymond] Chandler’s romantic image of the P.I. as a contemporary knight.” Cover artwork by Harry Barton.

Slice of P.I.: “Blood and Honey”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Blood and Honey, by G.G. Fickling (Pyramid, 1961). Here we find the eighth novel starring Honey West, often touted as “the nerviest, curviest P.I. in Los Angeles—or anywhere else for that matter.” The character was created in the late 1950s by the husband-and-wife writing team of Gloria and Forrest E. Fickling under their “G.G. Fickling” pseudonym. Cover art by Robert Maguire.

READ MORE: “Gloria Fickling, Who Helped Create Honey West, TV’s First Female Detective, Still a Force 60 Years Later,” by Erika I. Ritchie (Orange County Register); “You Can’t Keep a Good Gal Down: An Interview with Gloria Fickling, the Real Honey West,” by Kevin Burton Smith (The Thrilling Detective Web Site).

Slice of P.I.: “Killers Are My Meat”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Killers Are My Meat, by “Stephen Marlowe,” aka Milton Lesser (Gold Medal, 1957)—the third novel in his series about globe-trotting, Washington, D.C.-based gumshoe Chester Drum. The artwork here, by Gerald Powell, boasts one of the giant heads that often popped up on this genre’s paperback covers during the mid-20th century.

Slice of P.I.: “The Kissing Gourami”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



The Kissing Gourami, by Kin Platt (Charter 1980), with a cover illustration by David Plourde.

First published in a 1970 hardcover edition by Random House, The Kissing Gourami was the initial installment in a seven-book series built around Max Roper, who The Thrilling Detective Web Site describes as a “Los Angeles-based operative for EPT (Emergency Procedure Terminus), a nationwide private investigation/security firm ... that frequently works for big business concerns, as well as doing the dirty work for various local and national government law-enforcement agencies when they need some behind-the-scenes work that will not come back to haunt them.” Author Platt (1911-2003) was a comics artist, caricaturist, and the author of both adult and young-adult mysteries.

In his excellent blog The Paperback Palette, Denver, Colorado, librarian Jeff Christoffersen (aka Jeffersen) writes that book and magazine cover artist Plourde painted not only the front for this title in the Roper series, but also created the art for at least three others: The Pushbutton Butterfly, The Princess Stakes Murder, and The Giant Kill. All of those, too, were released by Charter Books in 1980.



Click any of these covers to open an enlargement.

Slice of P.I.: “The Lady Is Afraid”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



The Lady Is Afraid, by George Harmon Coxe (Dell, 1953), with a cover illustration by Frank Cozzarelli. First released in 1940, this is the second of only two novels starring hawkshaw Max Chauncey Hale, a blue-blooded Bostonian for whom criminal inquiries were more pastime than profession. Hale had previously headlined 1939’s Murder for the Asking. Author Coxe (1901-1984) is better remembered for creating the photographer-sleuths Jack “Flashgun” Casey and Kent Murdock.

Slice of P.I.: “Death of a Dastard”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Death of a Dastard, by Henry Kane (Signet, 1963), with a cover illustration by Jerry Allison. Here we have just one of more than 30 novels Kane produced starring “private richard” (his distinctive spin on “private dick”) Pete Chambers, a fashionable, man-about-metropolis New Yorker with a wolfish eye for women.