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.”