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.