A Virginal Young Woman Finds Herself in Jeopardy in This Early Novel from Charles Willeford

Originally published in 1957, this book has all the hallmarks of a potboiler that Charles Willeford churned out relatively quickly, perhaps because the rent was coming due or some such thing. Willeford would later become known for a series of excellent crime novels, most notably, Miami Blues and others featuring a protagonist named Hoke Mosley. This book isn't nearly up to the standards of his later work and, for that matter, it isn't really a crime novel in the traditional sense. Rather it's a titillating piece of soft-core porn, constrained of course, by the literary standards of 1957.

Back in the Fifties, a number of writers, including people like Lawrence Block, were turning out lurid novels like this one, sometimes under their own names and sometimes using pseudonyms, for the spinning paperback book racks that were so common at the time. They most often featured very suggestive covers, hinting that all sorts of interesting and often twisted sexual activity was to be found within the pages, and a common theme of these books involved a beautiful, but innocent young woman--usually a virgin--who accidentally winds up traveling in the wrong company and who is unfortunately led down the path to a life of degeneracy.

Such is the case here. Maria Duigan is a young secretary from New York who has saved her money for almost a full year so that she and a girlfriend can afford a vacation to Miami Beach. Maria is looking for excitement and attracts the attention of Ralph Tone, an art student who is working for the summer as an elevator operator in the hotel where Maria and her friend are staying.

One of the hotel's owners is a Mr. McKay, and he has taken a shine to Ralph for some reason or other. He invites Ralph to spend an afternoon cruising on his yacht, and in an attempt to impress Maria, Ralph impulsively invites her to come along as his date. Much to poor Ralph's dismay, McKay will turn out to be a pimp and a pornographer and once he sets his eyes on the beautiful Maria, her innocence and virginity will be in serious jeopardy.

Over sixty years down the road, this book is perhaps best read as an historical artifact--a reminder of a time when things were more innocent and unsullied, or at least a time when a lot of people wished that they were. The story is a bit overwrought and the conclusion is practically foregone. This is not Charles Willeford at his best, but it's still a fun read.

Another Excellent Novel frm Larry Watson, Author of MONTANA, 1948

Jack Nevelsen is the sheriff of a small county that is tucked into northeastern Montana--isolated from the larger world and very sparsely populated. Jack lives in the tiny town of Bentrock and is always very nervous on the night of the town's high school graduation. The new graduates are often tempted to drink and drive, which is always a dangerous combination, but especially so on a night like this in a county where the roads are not all that great to begin with. 

Up to now, Jack's always been pretty lucky, but it's graduation night, 1957, and his luck has just run out. Jack is called to the scene of a fatal accident and is shocked to find that the victims are June Moss, a young woman who just graduated from high school that night, and Leo Bauer, the high school principal. Bauer is a married man, a pillar of the community, and his son, Rick, just graduated in the same class as June.

There are three suitcases in the trunk and it's clear that Bauer and the young woman were running away together--a scandal that would devastate the small town. Jack believes that his principal duty as sheriff is to protect the town and the citizens who elected him. Accordingly, he begins to devise an alternative explanation for why Moss and Bauer might have been killed together.

Oh, the tangled webs we weave (to coin a phrase). Once Jack starts down this path, there will be no turning back. Inevitably, the situation will get increasingly complicated as time goes on, and Jack's story will quickly get away from him and turn in directions he never anticipated, with very serious consequences for the county, for the people that Jack was trying to protect and, most of all, for Jack himself.

This is a very engaging book that offers deep insights into the human condition and which also illustrates how actions taken with the best of intentions can sometimes go dramatically wrong. Larry Watson expertly describes the time and place in which this story takes place and has created solid, believable characters to populate it. One might strongly disagree with some of the decisions that Jack Nevelsen makes through the course of the story, but the book poses some very interesting questions and will leave readers thinking for a long time after the story has ended.

A Great Debut Novel from Jordan Harper

Simply put, She Rides Shotgun is a fabulous debut novel. At its center is eleven-year-old Polly McClusky, a character that no reader is ever likely to ever forget. Polly has only dim memories of her father, Nate, who has been in prison for much of her life. But when he unexpectedly pops up in her schoolyard, demanding that Polly accompany him in a car that he's obviously stolen, Polly does as she's told, bringing along the small stuffed bear that is her best and perhaps only friend. 

At eleven, Polly is obviously too old to be having a stuffed bear as her constant companion, but it's not been an easy eleven years, and things are about to get exponentially worse. While in prison, Polly's father killed the brother of the head of a prison gang called Aryan Steel. Nate was due to be released, and the gang was attempting to coerce him into working for them on the outside. Nate resisted; the brother came at him with a shank; shit happens. 

Now the Aryan Steel has put a death sentence on Nate and, for good measure, on his ex-wife and daughter as well. Nate arrives back in his home town only to find that his ex and her new man have already been brutally murdered. He knows that Polly is next on the list and his only option is grab up his daughter and go on the run.

What follows is a story unlike any other in this history of father/daughter road trips. Nate and Polly McClusky are a combination unlike any other you've ever met, on the page, in the movies, or anywhere else, for that matter. Nate knows little or nothing about being a traditional father, which is a very good thing, because with a death threat from a vicious gang like the Aryan Steel hanging over her head, the last thing Polly needs is to be riding shotgun with Ward Cleaver. And, fortunately, Polly is not your run-of-the-mill eleven-year-old girl either. If she's going to survive, she's going to have to grow up quick and learn the kind of lessons that no one ever taught at the school she so recently left behind.

This is a beautifully-written book--dark, bloody and violent, with characters that will leave an indelible imprint on the mind of anyone who reads it. It rushes along, twisting and turning like a raging river, and once it grabs hold of you, all you can do is hang on for dear life and hope to somehow come out safely at the other end. A fantastic read.

Detective Harry McCoy Returns in this Riveting New Novel from Alan Parks

Glasgow police detective Harry McCoy, the protagonist of Alan Parks's debut novel, Bloody January, returns in February's Son. The story takes place during a freezing winter in the 1970s, and McCoy is still recovering from the events that occurred in the first book when he is assigned a new case involving the brutal murder of a promising young footballer. The victim has been hacked to death and a message has been carved into his chest.

It turns out that the murdered man was engaged to marry Elaine Scobie, the daughter of a major Glasgow drug dealer, and that adds an entirely new perspective to the case. The principal suspect is a man named Connolly, a vicious thug who works for Elaine's father and who apparently had a thing for Elaine himself. Connelly has disappeared, and as more corpses keep turning up, the pressure on Harry McCoy ratchets up as well.

McCoy has his own connection to the underworld in the form of his best friend, Stevie Cooper. The two have a history that dates back to the time when they were both young boys, and in spite of the pressure from his bosses, McCoy is not about to turn his back on Cooper who will play an instrumental role in this case.

This is a very dark, hard-boiled novel, with a cast of creepy and interesting characters. Harry McCoy is one of the most tortured protagonists in modern crime fiction, and watching him work this case is riveting. The plot is compelling; the settings are vividly rendered, and this book suggests that Alan Parks has a very bright future in crime fiction.

Introducing Gabriel Du Pre, Fiddler, Brand Inspector and Part-Time Deputy Sheriff

Published in 1994, this is the novel that introduced Gabriel Du Pre, a fiddle player, brand inspector and part-time deputy sheriff who lives in the fictional town of Toussaint on the eastern plains of Montana. Du Pre is somewhere in his middle forties when we first meet him, a widower with two daughters and a rapidly growing number of grandchildren. Every once in a while, he goes to church and confesses that he's still living in sin with his girlfriend, Madeline, whose husband abandoned her three years earlier. "Good," says the local parish priest before giving Du Pre absolution. Say a "couple Hail Marys. The words are pretty, you'll like them."

Du Pres is a Metis, descended from the French fur trappers who married Native American women in Canada in the nineteenth century. Some Metis later moved south into Montana and when another character asks him early on what sort of an Indian he is, Du Pre says that, fortunately, he's one with just enough French in him that the anthropologists leave him alone.

As the book opens, a ranch hand calls the sheriff's office to report that he's come across a plane wreck high in the Wolf mountains. The sheriff asks Du Pre to check it out and, reluctantly, Du Pre agrees. It turns out that the wreck is over thirty years old. There are a couple of skeletons lying near the wreck, but there's also a spare skull and a few other bones that don't seem to belong with the wreckage.

The discovery sets off an investigation with significant ramifications for a lot of people, and it's up to Du Pre to get it all sorted out, if and when he can, in and around looking at cows' asses, as he puts it, ensuring that their brands are in order before they are shipped off to market. Du Pre is surrounded by a great cast of characters who will endure through most of the long-running series, and Bowen expertly puts them all in a beautifully-rendered setting. 

Gabriel Du Pre is one of the most unique characters in all of crime fiction, and the novels in this series are uniformly very good. If you're a fan of crime fiction and haven't tripped to them yet, do yourself a favor and find them. If you can, it's best to read this series in order to follow the development of the characters, all of whom have rich, full lives that continue to evolve as the series progresses.

Cassidy's Girl Turns Out to Be Big Trouble in This Pulp Novel by David Goodis

Cassidy's Girl was first published in 1951, and was written by David Goodis, a prolific author of pulp paperback originals. Goodis is perhaps best known for his novel, Dark Passage, which was later turned into a film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Near the end of his life (Goodis died when he was only forty-nine), he would insist that the concept for the television series, "The Fugitive," had been stolen from Dark Passage.

Goodis specialized in writing about characters that were down on their luck and had basically been kicked to the curb by polite, mainstream society, and Cassidy's Girl is filled with such people. At the center of the novel is Cassidy, who was once a respected, high-flying airline captain, living the good life. But then a passenger plane he was piloting crashed on takeoff and a number of people were killed. 

Although Cassidy was not at fault, he was blamed for the crash. As a consequence, he lost his job and his life began the downward spiral that ultimately finds him working as a bus driver in Philadelphia. He lives in a rundown apartment on the waterfront in the seediest part of town with his wife, Mildred. Theirs is a very rough, dysfunctional relationship with lots of drunken physical abuse on both sides. Their fights most often end in bouts of very rough, wild sex to which both Cassidy and Mildred seem addicted, but no wonder, given that "Mildred was a wild animal, a living chunk of dynamite that exploded periodically and caused Cassidy to explode, and these rooms were more of a battleground than a home."

Cassidy and Mildred have a small circle of friends, all of whom are serious alcoholics. These people spend virtually all of their waking hours at a dive bar called Lundy's where they drink themselves into oblivion, and as the book opens the reader can only wonder where Goodis is going to take these characters.

Not very far, it turns out, which is really too bad. I loved the first half of this book, which I thought had a great set up for the kind of really dark, nasty, sexy plot that leads people to read pulp novels in the first place. But sadly, there's no payoff of any consequence. These characters drink and smoke and fight and have sex and then drink some more. Cassidy will become disenchanted with Mildred and infatuated with another woman. Bad luck will continued to be his constant companion, and his life will continue to disintegrate even further. Meanwhile, the other minor characters around him will continue to drink themselves blind and offer very bad advice.

This really isn't a crime novel, since no crime of any consequence actually occurs. Rather it turns out to be something of a sociological study of a group of people that you'd never want to hang out with. The plot, such as it is, becomes increasingly unbelievable as the book progresses, until it reaches a climax which will simply leave a lot of readers shaking their heads in frustration.

I think there was a lot of unrealized potential in this story and, as I said, there were parts of it that I really enjoyed. But in the end, the book failed to live up to the promise of the opening pages and by the time it was over, I'm sorry to say that I no longer wanted to spend any additional time with either Cassidy or his girl.

P.I. Philip Marlowe Searches for a Missing Wife in Another Very Good Novel from Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler's fourth novel to feature Los Angeles P.I. Philip Marlowe involves two missing wives. One is the independently wealthy spouse of Derace Kingsley, an executive in a large firm. His wife, Crystal, who disappeared a month ago after sending him a telegram from Texas announcing that she was divorcing him and marrying her boyfriend, Chris Lavery, who has a reputation as a Don Juan.

Kingsley isn't particularly concerned about that. He doesn't really love his wife; he knows that she plays around, and he also knows that Lavery is one of her conquests. But then he happens to run into Lavery who tells him that he hasn't seen Crystal in a month and certainly didn't run off to Texas or anywhere else with her. Now worried, Kingsley hires Marlowe to find her.

Inevitably, of course, this will lead Marlowe into a complex series of events that's hugely convoluted, even for a Raymond Chandler novel. Several people will be murdered; some will be blackmailed. Almost everybody will lie to Marlowe, making his job even more difficult, and corrupt cops will keep beating him up and threatening to frame him for all sorts of crimes. But, as always, Marlowe will soldier on, irrespective of the odds, determined to root out the truth, even though he really doesn't like his client or virtually anyone else with whom he will come into contact on this case. It's his job, damnit, and he's going to do it the best he can.

As with practically any novel by Raymond Chandler, the plot is almost impossible to follow, but then nobody reads Chandler for his plots. Like the best of his books, this one is beautifully written in the spare, lean tone that set the early standard for hard boiled crime novels. This is not my favorite of Chandler's novels by any means, but it's still a very good read.