Showing posts with label Crime Magazines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crime Magazines. Show all posts

Thursday, August 24, 2017

Manhunt, February 1956 (Volume 4, Number 2)


This February 1956 issue of Manhunt is a special thing indeed, as it features the first of two stories Herbert Kastle would contribute to the magazine. I’ve wanted to read either of these stories for a long time, but it took me a while to track down one of the mags Kastle appeared in. His story is “They’re Chasing Us!,” and while it’s entertaining, it is hard to compare to Kastle’s later lurid masterpieces like Ladies Of The Valley.

Kastle was new in the writing field in ’56, still credited as “Herbert D. Kastle,” thus his name isn’t even headlined on the cover. And his story is buried toward the back, though of course I read it first. It’s only a few pages long (double-columned pages like all the other stories are, though), and it concerns a pair of brothers named Sid and Mel. In their 40s, the two share an apartment with Norma, Mel’s woman, though Sid lusts for her – a harbinger of future Kastle material is that this story features a guy who lusts after a woman who belongs to someone else and who successfully pressures her into having sex with him.

Sid and Mel are crooks, making their living knocking over stores. They want to get out of the hellhole of Brooklyn, though Norma complains that their neighbors, who have go-nowhere jobs, are actually doing better. This is proven at the start of the tale, with Sid returning to the apartment after the latest robbery and discovering they didn’t come off with as much cash as expected. Meanwhile, he bullies Norma into sex, which Kastle of course keeps off-page. When Mel comes back he instantly figures out the two have been screwing, but he’s cool with it. Another Kastle mainstay – the screwed-up “family” in which the single woman is shared, a la Cross-Country.

Then someone knocks on the door, claiming to be from the phone company, and the brothers instantly figure it’s the cops. They escape, there are gunshots, they shoot at some cops while they run. They abandon Norma back in the apartment. Mel’s shot in the ass and Sid manages to pull him into a car, taking hostage some random woman on the street as they go – they pistol-whip her and dump her. An underworld doc fixes Mel up in the back seat while Sid drives around, and the tale ends with Sid realizing their cash is low and their chances even lower, but he’s going to try to get them to safety.

This is a fast-moving tale and Kastle has the hardboiled vibe down pat; the brothers carry .38 revolvers and say all the right tough-guy dialog. But as mentioned it doesn’t feel like Kastle at all; if you were to tell me this was by say Fletcher Flora or Richard Deming or some other random contributor of the magazine I wouldn’t know otherwise. The same cannot be said of the only other early Kastle short story I’ve read, “Game,” which Ed Gorman collected in his anthology American Pulp; that one is pure Herbert Kastle, about a guy who thinks he’s saving some woman from a twisted relationship. I enjoyed that one so much I’ve been meaning to re-read it.

There are a bunch of stories in this issue of Manhunt. I didn’t read all of them. Here are my thoughts on the ones I did read:

“Block Party” by Sam Merwin, Jr – this 12-page “novelette” opens the magazine and concerns another pair of crooks: Tony and Carl, who when we meet them are slipping on “plastic rubber masks” and pulling a hotel heist – one of them’s in a Hopalong Cassidy mask and the other in a Joan Crawford mask, the latter to fool witnesses into thinking they’re “a pair of queers.” They’ve been hired by Dixon to steal the contents of a safe which contains blackmail photos, and they’re free to take their own haul.

But the way these things go, someone dies – Carl accidentally hog-ties the night manager too tightly and he strangles to death. This doesn’t sit well with Dixon, who tells the guys they need to escape to Mexico. He’ll even drive them to the bus stop. But when the car “breaks down” on the drive, Tony figures it’s a rubout; he drives over Dixon and he and Carl get on a bus; the tale ends with Tony figuring he’ll have to kill Carl as well. This one was okay, competently written, but didn’t offer much new.

Up next is an actual novelette, “Sauce For The Gander,” by Richard Deming; this one features a recurring character named Clancy Ross. A gambler who owns the Club Rotunda, Clancy is given zero introduction; about the most we learn is he has a scar on his face. His sidekick is a dude named Sam Black. This overlong-but-simple tale concerns the new Club Rotunda bookkeeper who is murdered by someone, and Ross helps the cops figure it out who did it. Along the way he has run-ins with various Syndicate hitmen and the bookkeeper’s hot widow, who throws herself on Ross for some off-page sex. This sequence leads to the unforgettable line, “I’m not a nympho, Clancy.” Probably the only time these words have ever been spoken. This one’s just overdone, a simple story blown to extreme portions.

Much better is “Fog,” by Gil Brewer, a story recently collected in the Brewer anthology Redheads Die Quickly. It’s the usual Brewer tale about simmering lust that explodes into full-bore sex. It’s about a guy visiting Florida and looking up his old friend; instead he finds the man’s sexy wife home alone, wearing a see-through robe, complaining about the heat, and coming on to him strong. He beats a retreat and goes back to his hotel, only to be called by her late that night. She claims her husband disappeared in the fog that has settled upon town, and the two walk around in it looking for him. It’s a surreal tale which of course leads up to them having hot off-page sex. The cover of the issue blows the surprise end, though – turns out there’s a good reason why we haven’t seen the nympho’s husband yet.

Robert Bloch gives us “Terror In The Night,” a first-person short-short about a woman who has escaped a mental asylum and swears to the narrator that murder and rape occurs behind the barred windows of the place, but our narrator and his wife think she’s making up the story due to her insanity, particularly the part about the bloodhounds sent after her. She runs away. Ends as expected with the narrator and his wife being woken that night by the howls of bloodhounds.

Fletcher Flora turns in “Handy Man,” an entertaining tale about Carey Regan, “handy man” (aka hit man) for Campan, a newly-powerful crime boss who sees Regan as his servant. They started off together, but now Campan’s the big man, so big that he no longer even needs his first name; he’s just “Campan.” Meanwhile Regan’s screwing Campan’s hot wife; he bridles when she bemoans that Regan will “never be more than a handy man.” Campan tasks Regan with killing the Swede, another crime boss. There’s a cool part where Regan sits alone in his apartment, not drinking or smoking or anything else, and lets the “coldness” take him over – then he drives over to the Swede’s place and guns down his prey and his henchman. Story ends just the way you expected it would, with Regan next killing off Campan himself and taking over his operation – “Just call me Regan,” he tells Campan’s widow.

“Killer” is a short first-person tale by William Logan; this one’s similar to “Handy Man” in that it’s about a professional killer. The narrator is tasked by his boss, Mr. Rose, to figure out the leak in the organization; Rose is certain it’s either our narrator or Charlie. Our narrator has a wife named Sue, who turns out to be screwing Charlie, who turns out to be the leak – instead of killing them himself, the narrator calls in Mr. Rose’s goons.

“Job With A Future” is by Richard Welles and is told in first-person present tense; it’s narrated by a 17 year-old who can’t find a job, and eventually gets paid driving the getaway car at robberies. But he’s shot during one, and the tale ends with him dying as he tries to escape.

“Shot” by Roy Carroll wraps up the issue; according to the Philsp site, Carroll was a pseudonym used by a few writers, one of them being Robert Turner. I’m betting this is his work, as the short tale is similar to those Turner collected in Shroud 9. So similar you wonder why this one wasn’t included. It concerns Renick, a regular dude who is shot while walking the crowded city streets, waiting for his wife. He stumbles around in a panic, not knowing who shot him or why; a guy comes up to help him, somehow knowing Rencik’s name. Turns out this is the man who shot him, a professional killer who complains that he actually missed with his silenced .45. Renick escapes him, but the hitman hurls a knife into his back; Renick dies on the city streets, just as a cop shows up. Turns out Renick’s wife was the one who hired the hitman. Cold!

Thursday, August 3, 2017

Shroud 9


Shroud 9, by Robert Turner
No month stated, 1970  Powell Publications

This 200 page paperback seems to be exceedingly scarce; I’m unfamiliar with Powell but they must not’ve had the best distribution. They also didn’t come up with the best covers. While the artwork by Bill Hughes for Shroud 9 is nice, it’s also very misleading. It makes the book look like a horror thing. It’s not – it’s a collection of short stories the prolific Robert Turner wrote for various crime fiction digests in the mid-‘50s, Manhunt in particular. The title also has nothing to do with anything, as there are 18 tales here, not 9!! 

Another miss is the acknowledgements; we’re not told which specific magazine each story came from. We’re only given a list of publishers and dates. I know Flying Eagle published Manhunt, so I know which ones here are from that magazine. But the other ones are unfamiliar to me. Not that it matters – those crime digests are sadly tough to find, so it likely would be easier to just hunt down this book…which itself is too damn scarce! There’s no intro from Turner; about all we get are a few words of praise from John D. MacDonald and Robert Bloch on the back cover, and a few snippets of various industry reviews of Turner’s work. It’s also mentioned that Turner has written an “original script” and that some of his stories have been optioned for the movies, but I don’t think anything came of it; the one thing I recall from Turner’s autobio Some Of My Best Friends Are Writers But I Wouldn’t Want My Daughter To Marry One (1970) is that he was always on the cusp of fame and fortune, but never quite got there.

Despite coming from various crime digests, the tales in Shroud 9 aren’t really of a criminous nature; mostly the stories are about average people getting caught up in horrific situations of their own making. Stories featuring professional criminals or contract killers or the other staples of pulp-crime are relatively few. But the main thing that I disliked about the book was that all of the stories are so short – just a few pages each. After a while I really wanted something with a bit more meat to it; I know Turner wrote scads of such stories, some of them novella length, and I wish some of those had been included here. My assumption is the theme of this anthology was to stick to short, punchy tales with “shock” finales; in that way the stories are very similar to EC Comics. Another point of reference would be the Old Time Radio drama Lights Out.

The first story, “Field of Honor,” from a 1955 issue of Manhunt, isn’t what I would’ve expected, but it definitely introduces the dark theme of the book. It’s a piece of juvenile delinquent fiction in which 14 year-old Jill ducks out on her uncaring socialite mother and hooks up with her pal Thelma. The two put on jeans and tote beer can openers; they’re going to prove their mettle in a fight with a rival girl gang. In particular Jill wants a piece of big-boned Roxanne; Thelma says hunk Johnny, “nearly twenty years old,” is going to date the winner; this excites Jill greatly. But the fight doesn’t go as planned, with Roxanne tearing Jill the hell up, even gouging out her right eyeball. The juvies dump Jill off at her house and she has to scratch at the door with that beer can opener to get her mom to let her in, as she’s too busy entertaining guests. The end!

Up next we have “What Do You Want?” from 1955, another dark one with a dark comedy payoff. Rich punk Buckman is getting freaked out how “old man” Pritchett keeps staring at him; never speaking, just staring. Pritchett’s been doing it for days. We’ll learn that Buckman “accidentally” killed Pritchett’s daughter in a car wreck. It develops though that Buckman’s thing was to take girls who refused to screw him on 100mph races in his sports car, which usually thawed ‘em out. Only Pritchett’s daughter wouldn’t give. Now Pritchett keeps following Buckman around and staring at him, to the point where Buckman tries to escape him in his car, racing along that same perilous road in which he crashed with Pritchett’s daughter. You can see this one coming a mile away, if you’ll pardon the pun. Not bad but not great.

“The Two Candles” is from 1955 and concerns an old lady just returned to her apartment after lighting two candles at the local church, one for her recently-departed husband and one for her son, who died 21 years ago. She’s shocked to discover a young man waiting for her in the apartment, a self-assured punk who swears up and down that he’s her son, returned home at last. It’s none other than Mad Dog Castle, infamous bank robber, who just killed a cop last week. The lady refuses to listen to him, calls the cops, and shoots him when he tries to stop her. Up-in-the-air finale in which the reader must decide for himself if Mad Dog really was the lady’s son, and she just made herself think he died all those years ago, instead of running away and becoming a notorious criminal.

“A Life For A Life” is from a 1954 and is a little better. This one’s also about a killer bank robber; the cops have come up with this sting where they’ve made the guy think that a lady he knocked up is about to give birth in a local hospital – in reality the lady was moved out of town long ago. They set up their dragnet, with the narrator and his junior partner concerned that the sadistic sergeant in charge of them, a top marksman, is going to kill the crook instead of arresting him. This is what happens, but as the crook is dying in the hospital he calls in the cop who shot him – and gouges out his eyes with his bare hands! That makes for two eye-gougings in one book!!

We return to the Manhunt yarns with “Fight Night,” from a 1955 issue. Our narrator tells us about the night he went to a bar to watch a boxing match with his pal Max, a dude who, despite his “sensitive face,” is actually quite manly and served in the war. But a drunk starts up a fight with Max, insinuating he’s gay and whatnot. The two get in a brutal brawl which climaxes with the drunk smashing a bottle and grinding it in Max’s face. Our narrator finally gets off his ass – he’s been in shock throughout – but the drunk escapes and Max later dies from too much blood loss. He leaves behind a wife and kid, and the narrator questions the “macho” sentiments which demand that men must defend their honor and not turn their backs to drunken challenges.

“A Living From Women” is from 1957 gets back to the third-person narration and concerns good-looking stud Danny Lund, who is notorious for marrying rich women, burning up their money, and then divorcing them. But his latest victim, a willowy girl named Levora, keeps following him around the country, getting frailer and frailer. Danny goes on with his con work, and has his biggest coup in sight, an ultra-wealthy woman who admits to him that she knows he’s only after her for her money, and that’s fine with her – she just wants to be seen around town with a pretty face and will give Max a thousand bucks a month, and he won’t even have to touch her. Levora louses all this up when she throws acid in Danny’s face one day! The rich woman leaves him and, despite extensive plastic surgery, Danny now looks like a “gargoyle.” Features an EC Comics finale in which Levora now happily cares for Danny.

“Who’s Calling?” is from a 1956 Manhunt and actually received a TV adaptation. It makes for good early television fodder, taking place in one location and featuring only two characters: Jay Breen and his wife, Beth. This one is totally in the Suspense mold as Jay keeps receiving calls from New York, the operator asking for “James Binford.” What freaks Jay out – and he gradually loses his sanity over the few pages of the story – is that this is his old name; five years ago, in New York, he embezzled a lot of money and killed a guard or something in the escape. He changed his name from Binford to Breen, but only Beth is aware of this new life. But the calls keep coming and the mystery of who knows Breen is Binford deepens, our “hero” getting closer to panic. It’s a taut, suspenseful tale, and very good, though given that only Beth knows Jay’s past makes it quite obvious who the culprit is. The ending though goes on a surreal tangent as Beth, happily with the man she used to drive Jay nuts (to the point of suicide), starts to receive mysterious calls for a Mrs. James Binford…

“Shy Guy” is from a 1954 Manhunt and is screwy in that it’s narrated by a dude who is telling us about a story he heard – it’s overly pedantic, with too much background detail and setup, something for which the narrator apologizes. Apology not accepted! The story is overly dull and is yet another tale about a guy driven to insanity – in this case an artist named, on-the-nose as can be, “Artie,” whose wife Della insists on going to big parties and is likely whoring around. A few years ago Artie and Della lost their unborn child in a car wreck, and the narrator intimates this is what has driven Della to her behavior, though he also claims she pretended not to be overly concerned about it. Ends with Della leaving her latest part and coming back with other people for Artie, who refused to go because he had a premonition bad stuff would occur if he did. But when they get him to the party they ignore Artie, and he sees his wife hanging around with some men…he finds a .45 in a deputy’s car and shoots everyone, the end. Thought this one was lame.

“Business Trip,” from a 1957 Manhunt, makes up for the previous misfire, and is probably my favorite in the book, even though it too is too short. We go back to the third-person narration and meet our protagonist, Burke, a “Specialist” for “The Organization.” He sits in a nondescript office with a few other Specialists while the Organization rep, an older VIP type I pictured as legendary character actor John Vernon (who of course would’ve pronounced his outfit “The OrganIZE-ation,” in that old-school way I love so much), goes over the latest target. We’re informed of the Organization’s weird way of assigning hits; all men are briefed, then a random drawing determines who actually gets the job. Burke of course pulls it, and he takes a train to the unnamed city – banging some broad he meets off-page, the first mention of sex yet in the entire book – and then buys an ice pick. He jams this into the ear of the target when the man gets in his car. Burke flies home to his nice house, with his lovely wife and adoring kid, reflecting over how he only needs to be a Specialist for a few more years before he too becomes a VIP. The “shock”-type finale we now expect has it that Burke suffers from recurring nightmares in which his ear is clogged and only an ice pick could unclog it, with Burke nightwalking to the kitchen to do the deed, ie kill himself. His wife stops him this time – but who knows about next. Other than the dumb finale, I liked this one, and it has that vintage pulp-crime vibe I love.

Next is “Everyman’s Woman,” also from 1957, and slightly longer than the other tales collected here. Our narrator is Brad, a cartoonist who moved to a cabin in the woods a few months ago with his new wife, a mega-babe named Nikki. One day Nikki comes home from the long hike to the town post office – Brad was too busy on a project to go with her, as he usually does – and she’s distraught because some creep followed her home. Eventually Brad rousts out the creep; it’s a dude with a limp named Carl Brand, who announces himself, “I’m free, white, and twenty-five.” He insists on his right to walk along the country road, and says he wasn’t following Nikki, but eventually Carl will flat-out tell Brad that he, Carl, has figured out that Nikki is a “nympho,” and it’s only a matter of time before he screws her. Unfortunately for Brad, this turns out to be the truth, at least so far as his wife is concerned; he met her, he tells us, when she was about to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge in suicide to escape her condition, which compels her to screw countless men. A doctor recommended moving to the countryside where there were less men(!). This one ends with Brad finally having enough of Carl’s shit and accidentally killing him in hand-to-hand combat. Turner just says “to hell with it,” with Brad going home, realizing he’ll never be free of the worry that Nikki might screw every man she meets, and so killing her to end his worries!

“Accident” is from 1955 and goes back to third-person; it’s a short about a rich drunk who crashes into a car one night, wiping out an entire family except for the father. He lies to the cops that the other driver was at fault, and gets away with it; when the father who drove the other car comes out of his coma, he basically just shrugs it off, for what will bring back his wife and kids? Features a nasty finale in which the father shows up one night and carjacks the rich dude, tearing off into the night with the rich man’s own wife and kids in the car and plowing into a tree, killing them all – poetic (if draconian) justice is served, as now the rich man must live with everything also having been taken from him.

“Don’t Go Away Mad” is from a 1956 issue of Justice and is a highlight of Shroud 9 as it was a highlight of The Hardboiled Lineup; I reviewed it in my writeup on that one.

“Repeat Performance” is from a 1957 Manhunt and concerns a nameless guy who fondles teen girls at rock concerts. He’s all jazzed up about how he went “too far” with one of them at a concert this afternoon; the intimation is that he raped the girl and got away with it due to the noise and the crowd. He’s all excited to go to this evening’s concert and do it all again, but when he gets there he sees his victim from this afternoon, with a bunch of other girls. She saunters over to him and, just when he thinks she actually enjoyed her raping and has come back for more, she and her friends stab him to death with hat pins. Ends with the cops figuring they’ll never figure out who killed the guy! 

“Vacation Nightmare” is from a 1956 Manhunt and is like a ‘50s Deliverance. Our narrator informs us how he was driving his wife and teen daughter back from vacation, and decided after a full day’s driving to sleep in the car one night, at a fishing camp just off the highway. Next morning they woke into a nightmare: a trio of rapist-hillbillies were leering in the car at the women. Our narrator gets beaten while the hillbillies take their turns with the women; Turner keeps it all off-page, with the narrator knocked unconscious. When he comes to he staggers to his car despite the pleading of his wife and daughter and finds the three men down at the lake fishing(!). He steers his car toward them, jumps out, and the car runs over them – the cops chalk it up as an accident, the end.

“Everything Has To End,” from 1956, features the most disturbing “shock” finale in the book. We’re informed that a rich bastard named Vincent has knocked up his latest mistress, Verna, and he’s taken her to a doctor who handles abortions; indeed, this isn’t Vincent’s first time handling such an issue. But this time it’s cheaper, as we’re informed that Vincent has learned that dumb, poor women like Verna are much more “enjoyable” than the rich dames he used to run with – plus they’re easier to handle. But Verna’s waited four months to tell Vincent, which makes him wonder if he should break the affair off for good once the abortion is over. The doctor gives Verna a pill and Vincent drops her off at her place and gets back to his society life with his rich wife – Vincent is only wealthy due to her inheritance. Then one afternoon a few days later Vincent is drunk at a big party at his house; so drunk he thinks it’s his imagination when he sees a taxi pull up and Verna herself get out. She looks disheveled and she’s carrying a small box. She comes up to Vincent and tells him that she didn’t know what to do, especially since “he” was Vincent’s – “he” being the aborted child, of course, which Verna proceeds to dump on Vincent’s lap, right in front of his wife and everyone!

“Movie Night,” from a 1957 Manhunt, gets back to the juvenile delinquent fiction. Our narrator tells us how he and his family would often go to the drive-in with the family that lived next door. The father of that family, Fred, was a hothead who would get worked up over nothing, as he does this particular night; the movie is about juvenile delinquents, and Fred rants and raves that the “jaydees” get away with their rule-flaunting and bad behavior because no one ever stands up to them. Fred gets his chance to do this very thing when everyone goes to the crowded snack bar between movies; a group of jaydees are horsing around and one of ‘em knocks Fred’s soda all over Fred’s shirt. This leads to a brawl in which Fred gets the better of the punks, but when a cop comes by and is eager to bust the jaydees for causing a disturbance, Fred’s wife pleads with him not to press charges and to just forget it. Fred does so, reluctantly – and that night our narrator and his wife are woken by the horrible screaming of Fred’s wife. Turns out the jaydees lured him out of his house and beat him about the knees with axe handles before smashing him in the face with glass-filled socks. He’s now crippled and half-blind, and the narrator receives notice that he’s next on the jaydee revenge list.

“The Onlooker” is from a 1954 Manhunt and concerns a dude named Blake who watches a blonde in the hotel room across from his own. This is a stalker tale, with Blake becoming increasingly worked up as the blonde talks to the young soldier she’s invited up to her room; when it’s apparent the two are having sex in the now-darkened room, Burke whips out an automatic rifle and fires. Ending has the cops discussing this nutjob Burke, who didn’t even know the blonde, and was just some psycho who thought she was “his” girl; he didn’t even know that the soldier was actually the blonde’s husband, just returned from the war.

“Room Service,” from a 1955 Manhunt, follows, and is of a similar bent; indeed it’s so similar to the previous story you wonder why it was placed right after it. This one’s also about a guy hanging out in a room with a rifle, but this guy’s watching a parade pass by beneath him. Occasionally he checks over a dossier at his side, which shows an older man and a young, pretty woman – the last photo shows them being married. Then we see the main attraction in the parade below is the man and woman in the photo; our nameless rifleman blows the woman away and escapes. Ends with the revelation that the older man was the rifleman’s father, and apparently he killed the woman out of jealousy because she was going to get in the way of all the big game hunting he’s done with his dad(!?).

And that’s that, 18 tales that mostly just go for shock and usually succeed. I really wanted to read something by Turner a bit longer, which I guess is an indication that his writing is good enough that it made me want more. I think next I’ll get around to one of his actual novels. Anyway, Shroud 9 is entertaining enough, but I’m not sure it justifies the exorbitant prices it goes for on the secondhand market.

Thursday, July 27, 2017

The Hardboiled Lineup


The Hardboiled Lineup, edited by Harry Widmer
September, 1956  Lion Books

I have never been much of a short story reader, but I’ve found when it comes to hardboiled pulp I tend to prefer the short stories to the novels. Maybe because in my mind the more streamlined and focused these noir tales are, the better, and sometimes their plots are so thin it takes a bit of padding to fill out a whole book. Anyway this slim little paperback, 128 pages of fairly small print, really hit the spot – I was in the mood for some hardboiled yarns, and the book really delivered. Edited by Harry Widmer, the tales here are collected from Justice magazine, which Widmer also edited. He doesn’t waste our time with an intro and just gets right into it.

“Las Vegas Trap” by William R. Cox starts things off; it’s from the October 1955 issue of Justice. Told in third-person, “Trap” is the longest story in the anthology, practically novella length. It has the hardboiled feel down pat – a long-simmer tale with a grizzled cast of characters. I’m no expert on hardboiled or noir or whatever you want to call it, but to me the difference between it and men’s adventure is that the former is all about the setup and the latter is all about the payoff. You could read an entire Gold Medal paperback from the ‘50s or ‘60s and it could just be building and building toward something, with the eventual action almost hastily rendered in the final pages. Meanwhile, Mack Bolan could blow away a dozen mobsters within the first chapter of any volume of The Executioner.

And Cox’s story is definitely all about the setup. It opens like a ’55 prefigure of Frank Miller’s Sin City, with gambler Nick Crater (not to be confused with Nick Carter, of course!) having run afoul of Vegas kingpin Makowsky, who more than likely will be sending over his sadistic henchman Buster to beat Nick to a pulp or kill him. Then “zero girl” hostess Meg Bond shows up in Nick’s hotel room – only gradually does he realize how smokin’ hot she is, for some reason – and tells Nick his one shot is to come out with her to her Merc, which despite looking like a “heap” can move like hell thanks to a souped-up engine no one knows about.

The two take off, Nick certain Makowsky’s goons will be closing in, and he’s also uncertain how much he can trust Meg, whom he only knows slightly. But what starts off like one story soon veers into another. Driving through Vegas and on into the periphery of California, the two stop off in nowheresville Suntown, where they grab a motel – Meg actually blushes when Nick asks about the sleeping arrangements, given they’ve checked in as a married couple. Despite Meg’s wishes, Nick goes out to check out the poker game the manager’s having out back. Big money’s at stake, and next morning the manager is dead from a dozen knife wounds.

Now “Las Vegas Trap” becomes a murder mystery; having discovered the corpse, Nick is involved in the scene whether he likes it or not; his main concern is that a photo of him will make it into the paper, and thus Makowsky and goons back in Vegas will see it. The only cop in town, Sloan, is almost casually dismissive of Nick’s shady past; Sloan is certain the murder’s going to be pinned on young Andy Perez, given that he’s Mexican-American and the locals have been historically distrustful of him. Around Suntown Nick goes, gathering clues and meeting people, the most memorable being Myra, widow of the motel owner, a big-boned beauty who, pulpishly enough, is a former lady wrestler.

The finale has the locals closing in on the sheriff’s office, ready to lynch Perez; Nick, Meg, and Sloan wade through them, wielding shotguns and pistols. At this moment Buster shows up in a Cadillac, mowing down pedestrians, and Cox delivers the firefight in that almost outline vibe typical in hardboiled pulp – chaotic shooting in the melee and people falling down. Myra again scores the most memorable moment, catching her husband’s killers – they’re trying to escape in the chaos – getting them in hiplocks, and smashing their heads together! Oh, and Buster’s taken out, his car all shot up – another cool part where Meg blasts her double-barrelled shotgun right into the open door of Buster’s Cad. Meanwhile Nick decides he’s going to marry Meg – the end!

“Justice Is Blind” by Ad Gordon is next, from the May 1955 issue. As Bill Crider notes, this story is unusual in that it’s “about 90% telling.” The story is relayed in almost a summary format, telling us of the torrid affair between stud Tony, a dayworker hired to work the field of wealthy Grasso, and Gina, Grasso’s sexy young wife. We’re informed how the affair started, the two running off into the mansion to screw while Grasso was away, etc. The one day Grasso discovered the treachery and, in one of those moves only possible in fiction, beats up whelp Tony, lashes two saplings together, and ties Tony to them, then cuts the cord, wrecking his body. Gina ends up killing Tony to relieve his suffering – this is how the title is explained, as by law, Gina is the one who killed Tony. The story ends with an unexpected, surprise flashforward in which we learn who has told us the tale.

“Hot Snow” by Vin Packer is another short one, from the January 1956 issue. Taking place solely in a dingy bar, the tale opens with an unkempt young man declaring “I only love the white snow,” much to the interest of a lovely young lady sitting nearby enjoying a few beers. The story is mostly dialog between the two, with what appears to be a budding relationship blossoming – but then this guy comes in, goes in the back, and the unkempt man is called back there: “snow” is in reference to heroin, and this guy has just cleaned up his act and was about to leave for Alaska, but his old supplier knows he will squeal and gives him a fatal “hot shot” of heroin. Then the cops rush in; it’s too late for our unkempt dude, though, and the lady, who is revealed to be a cop herself, watches him die and mutters she never thought the job would be so hard. “You’ll get tough,” one of her fellow cops tells her!

Next is “Living Bait” by Frederick Lorenz, from the May 1955 issue. Our narrator, Roy, is captain of a small fishing vessel in Florida, and he and his sole crewmember, Wiley, who has one arm, are taking out wealthy Mr. Langler and also-wealthy Ms. Starr on a fishing trip. The two are business owners and are discussing a merger. Wiley is the star here; “I got more nothing than anybody,” he boasts, declaring that he too is a CEO in his own way. But when Langler loses a day-long struggle with a big tarpon, he blames Wiley and that night calls him a “one-armed freak.” The two fight, and Wiley’s knocked overboard. Meanwhile Langler claims he was attacked by Wiley.

Despite a big search Wiley can’t be found, and Langler is arrested for murder. Then on a hunch Roy finds Wiley hiding out on a little island – Wiley wants Langler to go to prison, even if he isn’t responsible for “drowning” him. Then Ms. Starr shows up, toting a rifle; she also wants Langler in prison, so she can get his business for a pittance. This one ends with a high-speed boat chase which sees the unfortunate Ms. Starr become sharkbait – eaten up by a great white nicknamed Whitey. I liked this one a lot, the characters were memorable and the action kept moving.

“Scented Clues” by Richard Deming follows, from the January 1956 issue. This one is also in first-person, narrated by a cop named Sullivan. It features a memorable opening, of Sullivan and Sam London, his partner of the past ten years, looking down at the negligee-clad corpse of Marge, London’s wife. This lurid procedural has the two investigating her murder, with the new lieutenant willing to throw the rules out the window and let London handle the case of his own wife’s murder. 

Deming delivers taut prose and good lines, but cheats the reader unecessarily. For one we are told Marge was strangled by someone big, and Sullivan often intimates how he’s a muscular dude, and there’s also how Sullivan acts more torn up over the lady’s death than London himself does. When it develops that Marge was carrying on affairs with multiple men, even keeping a little book with all their names in it (and Sullivan even knows where she hides the book!), Sullivan’s name is in there – and the reader can’t help but think that Sullivan’s the killer.

So too does the new lieutenant, and only here in the final page does Deming reveal that…Sullivan was Marge’s brother!! It’s just a rotten cheat and comes off as stupid because you’d figure this would be common knowledge at the precinct, or even that Sullivan himself would’ve, you know, told the lieutenant straight up. But then, Lost ran for several seasons on the same lame “everything could be solved with just a single simple question” premise. As if trying to top his own lameness, Deming here has Sullivan deduce, while sitting in a chair across from the lieutenant, that it was Sam London himself who killed Marge – an angry Sullivan jumps on him, tries to strangle him, and London admits it. The end!

Up next we have the now-culty Gil Brewer with “Die, Darling, Die,” the title of which made me think of “Die Die My Darling” by the Misfits. This one is from the January 1956 issue as well. A bit longer than the previous stories, but not as long as Cox’s, Brewer’s yarn as ever occurs in Florida, and as ever concerns two characters burning up for each other. Joe Morley is our hero, a guy who just gave up on his fiance and has come here to a hotel along the Gulf to forget about things. Meanwhile he’s got the burnin’ yearnin’ for a raven-haired sexpot named Miriam, who stays in the room across from Joe’s; he spends his days gawking out at her screened porch to monitor when she sunbathes. He’s made his interest known to her, and despite seeming interested herself and kissing him once or twice, the lady is aloof and keeps telling Joe it can never be between them.

Then one afternoon Joe finds a dude sitting in his room – it’s a cop named Thompson, who reveals that Miriam is a “moll,” the wife of bank robber Frank Garrett, and she’s here at the hotel waiting for her husband. Garrett just pulled a job in which he killed his comrades and the cops hope to pin him when he sneaks here to the hotel, but meanwhile there’s also a contract killer on the premises who has been hired by the heist backers, who want Garrett dead for doublecrossing them. But the cops don’t know who the killer is. So now Joe is pushed into working for the cops, who want to exploit Miriam’s interest in him to keep her there – Brewer intimates that Joe and Miriam finally go at it, but it being 1956 and all he leaves it vague whether they do it or not.

The finale sees Garrett’s arrival, and the surprise reveal of the killer’s identity – not too surprising, really, as there are only a handful of characters in the story. While Thompson’s off looking after Garrett, Joe is left to handle the killer himself, but is unable to save Garrett or his wife – “Die, darling, die” being the words Garrett screams to Miriam as he guns her down, as it turns out that Miriam was working with the contract killer to off her own husband. After this bitter ending, Joe figures he’ll head back home and look up his fiance, after all! I enjoyed this one, too, and it is more easily found these days, having been collected in the 2012 Brewer anthology Redheads Die Quickly.

“The Trouble With Alibis” follows; it’s by John Mulhern, from the May 1955 issue, and is one of the shorter tales in the book. This one’s about the owner of a “broken-down ranch” whose shapely but shrewish wife has just crashed her car on an icy road, and our hero figures he might as well leave her there to die – problem solved! She’s been cheating on him (a common theme in this anthology!) and she deserves to die; meanwhile he’s more concerned about the calf he’s left out as bait for a cougar. This one features an EC Comics finale in which our hero finds that he might be joining his wife in the afterlife a lot sooner than expected.

“Don’t Go Away Mad” by Robert Turner follows, from the January 1956 issue. This ten-pager is a breeze of a read, and it too has an EC Comics-esque vibe, the same I’ve noted in the few other Turner crime short stories I’ve read. Our narrator, Connaught, brings us into the action after he and his short-fused partner Briggs have pulled a payroll job. During the escape on foot they’re attacked by a dog, which bites Briggs in the calf; Connaught suspects the dog might’ve been attracted by the hoses he and Briggs are still wearing over their heads. They escape to their fishing cabin in the woods, where Brigg’s sexy girlfriend Julie waits, a brunette nymph who wears “snakeskin” shorts so tight Connaught wonders they don’t split when she sits down. He lusts for her – not to mention Briggs’s portion of the cash.

Then on the radio they hear about the heist, only for the announcer to state that a witness saw one of the robbers attacked by a dog, and the dog has rabies! The announcer pleads with the bitten robber to seek medical attention immediately, otherwise suffer the drawn-out death of hydrophobia. Briggs freaks, Connaught figures it’s a scam to get them to turn themselves in…but then he uses his slim knowledge of animal husbandry to play on Briggs’s growing paranoia, lying to him that the symptoms will set in quickly – symptoms which are really just indications of anxiety. Briggs goes slowly nuts over the next few days, to the point where he beats up Julie, demanding his gun so that he can rob a nearby drug store. Julie brings him the gun, alright – a moment which is sort of captured on the back cover:


Connaught ends the tale with he and Julie in Mexico, six weeks later, and all is great…save for the itch that’s begun to develop in Connaught’s calf, right where an insane Briggs bit him. The first sign of hydrophobia. This was a very entertaining one, my favorite story in the anthology, and it made me glad I finally forked over the dough for a copy of Turner’s sadly-scarce paperback collection Shroud 9.

“The Sinkhole” by James P. Webb, also from the January 1956 issue, closes the collection. This is another short one about a farmer getting revenge on his sluttish wife. It almost has the ring of a Stephen King story, with good old country boy Eli figuring out that his sexy wife Janet is cheating with Barney, a muscular young stud who just bought the farm nearby. Eli mulls over that sinkhole he’s been needing to fill in the backyard. Webb just keeps dragging it out, even though a crayon-sniffing toddler could figure out where it’s going from page one; Eli announces to everyone that he’s going to fill that hole with rocks, but he’ll need help, and hey, that Barney is muscular, ain’t he?

But Eli doesn’t toss Barney in the sinkhole, when the tale comes to the climax, instead pulling a gun on him and telling him to scram and never come back. Meanwhile Janet’s gotten so suspicious, particularly when Barney turns up missing, that she eventually calls the cops – who come over and say they’re gonna dig out that sinkhole and want Eli to stay here while they’re doing it, in case they find something down there they shouldn’t. A cocksure Eli says he might as well go along with them…the end!

I enjoyed each of these stories, even though none of them were knockouts that had me plunging back into a hardboiled kick – the book did at least make me want to read more of Turner’s work, as mentioned, so I’ll be reviewing Shroud 9 soon.

Thursday, March 2, 2017

The Mammoth Book Of Pulp Fiction (Part One)


The Mammoth Book Of Pulp Fiction, edited by Maxim Jakubowski
August, 1996  Carroll & Graf

Back in late 2015 I was on a hardboiled kick and started in on Maxim Jakubowski’s colossal Mammoth Book Of Pulp Fiction, which is stuffed to the gills with hardboiled stories. At the time I envisioned a similarly-mammoth post reviewing each story in the anthology, but as these things go my hardboiled kick eventually faded away. I’ve had these reviews sitting around for a while, so figured I’d go ahead and post them now…then someday when I get back to the anthology I’ll do another post of reviews. Anyway, here are the stories I read:

“Too Many Have Lived” by Dashiel Hammett starts off the collection, from a 1933 issue of American Magazine. This tale, narrated by Hammett’s immortal private eye hero Sam Spade, didn’t appeal to me at all. It was something about Spade being hired to to look into a case about a missing guy or something, but I found it all so listless and padded that I gave it up posthaste.

“Flight To Nowhere” by Charles Williams is from a 1955 issue of Manhunt and was later expanded into novel form, published first as Scorpion Reef and then in paperback as Gulf Girl. Narrated by a war vet turned diver named Bill Manning, the story starts off very strong before it gets a little too bloated. In fact as I started to read the story I figured I’d find the unfortunately-scarce paperback, but gradually I decided the short story would suffice. “Flight To Nowhere” just gradually tapers off into too much exposition. It does however have an interesting opening and closing section that’s borderline metafictional.

Our narrator is approached by a hot young gal one day who says her name is Mrs. Shannon Wayne. She wants to hire him to retrieve an antique gun which she claims was accidentally dropped into the ocean. Manning suspects something’s up, and gets verification when the gun is easily found. After a few run-ins with some thugs, Manning finally learns there’s more to the woman’s story. Turns out her husband was a maritime insurance investigator who stumbled upon a cache of diamonds in a plane that crashed in the sea. His plan was to make off with it, but the local goon squad, under the command of Barclay, got wise – now he’s hiding in his home.

It all just gets bogged down as Manning and Shannon shuttle back and forth, gradually falling in love, while the mobsters track them. Occasional action scenes liven things up, like when our hero accidentally drowns a mobster who jumps him at the docks. There’s also a veritable heist as our hero springs Mr. Wayne from his house. But too much of it is relayed via dialog, and the rush of the opening section is soon diluted. Also, Williams fails to bring much to life. There’s a modicum of topical detail in the story; the finale plays out as a long section of all the characters on a yacht as it plies through the ocean, and Williams never once describes the scenery, the tang of the ocean spray, the feel of the sun on their backs.

“Black” by Paul Cain – From a 1932 issue of Black Mask, this short tale is narrated by the titular Black, who is like a go-to guy for criminals. I had a hard time getting into this one, which was like a Yojimbo riff, with Black playing competing gangs against one another, one led by a young guy and the other led by the dude’s stepfather.

“Finders Killers!” is by John D. MacDonald and comes from a 1953 issue of Detective Story Magazine. This is the first of MacDonald’s work I’ve ever read and I really enjoyed it. Narrated by an FBI agent named Russ Gandy, it features a snappy pace, good action, dialog, and plot. Our hero is just about to bust an infamous crook named Torran when his cover is blown; after which he’s asked to resign from the Bureau. Obsessed with catching the bad guy, Gandy gets his private eye license, buys a .357 (which he never even uses), and continues the case on his own.

Torran has just heisted a bunch of money but has disappeared, something he’s notorious for. Our hero, who has learned to think like his prey after hunting him so long, does his legwork and eventually traces him down Mexico way. The finale is like a Jim Thompson thing, taking place in a sunny patch of hell south of the border; the lone female character in the novel turns out to be the villain’s moll, and she’s dead like a few paragraphs after her introduction. The sole action scene has our hero blasting away with the girl’s .25 and recovering the stolen loot – which he uses to negotiate his return to the FBI. While it didn’t have a ton of action or anything lurid, “Finders Killers!” was very enjoyable and makes me want to read more of MacDonald’s books.

“Murder’s Mandate,” by WT Ballard, comes from a 1946 issue of Thrilling Detective Magazine and appears to be about a lawyer or something. I say “appears” because the story failed to draw me in (or perhaps I failed to be drawn in by the story) and I quickly abandoned it.

“Cigarette Girl” is by James M. Cain and comes from a 1952 issue of Manhunt. Cain is another famous crime author I’ve never read. Narrated by a guy named Jack Conner, it’s more of a love story. Our narrator is a composer or some such who visits a honky tonk dive in another city to check out some song one of his musicians claims was stolen from him, or something. But in the bar he meets up with the titular character, a lovely young lady who turns out to be on the run from the local mob. This is a shorty, breezy tale which doesn’t offer much in the way of fireworks but does work as a character piece. Unlike the MacDonald story it didn’t make me want to seek out more of Cain’s work, though. 

“The Getaway” is by Gil Brewer, late in his career, from a 1976 issue of Mystery. This short tale, told in third-person, is about a Mafia hitman named Vincenti who has been hired to take out one of the top dons in Florida. He pulls off the job, saving at the last moment a damsel who claims to have been an abused toy of the don. She’s also a pilot and flies them to safety on her small plane. But then she reveals she was really the don’s daughter, and the code of Mafia requires that she kill her father’s killer, even if she herself dies. They crash into a cliff, the end.

Nowhere up to the standards of Brewer’s earlier work, “The Getaway” could in fact have been written by anyone else. It was interesting though to see a writer from the hardboiled era in the mid-‘70s, with a generally sleazy feel encompassing everything. Also of note is that Brewer employs the term “soldato” a few times, as in a Mafia enforcer; Soldato was the title of a mid-’70s Lancer Books series for which Brewer wrote the third and fourth volumes, as “Al Conroy.”

“Preview Of Murder” by Robert Leslie Bellem comes courtesy a 1949 issue of Thrilling Detective Magazine. I really enjoyed this goofy novella, which is narrated by a PI named Nick Ransom, who tells his tale in what was apparently Bellem’s trademark goofy style. The tough-guy patter in this one is up there with Gannon, with the same bizarre syntax and vocabulary. Bellem was quite prolific in the pulps and it sounds like all of his stories had this same skewed vibe.

A former movie stuntman, Ransom now works as a private eye in Hollywood; this case has him called up by a crippled recluse who turns out to be Ransom’s old pal from the movie days, fifteen years before. Once a marquee name, Ronald Barclay is now confined to a wheelchair, missing both legs and one arm. He lives in a hovel of an apartment building and refuses to allow anyone to see his face; the entire world has thought him dead, but it turns out he’s been living under an assumed name.

The first half of this long story is played out via expository dialog, but it’s such bonkers dialog that you can’t complain. And Ransom is such a hardboiled bastard of a protagonist, narrating the tale with tough guy aplomb, that you wish it would just keep going on and on. But like the Charles Williams story above it kind of fizzles out after a while; Barclay ends up dead, as does the old man who runs the apartment building, and our hero is shuttling around Los Angeles trying to make sense of it all. 

Bellem has all of his pulp cliches firmly in check; the story features an almost token appearance by a sexy babe, this being a former starlet now married to Barclay’s old enemy, a studio bigwig. The lady, who moonbathes nude, comes on strong to our hero, who gives her the bum’s rush. But what starts out as a bizarre tale about a mutilated movie star seeking revenge turns into a rather standard murder mystery, with all of the interesting characters shuffled off the page and Ransom instead chasing after some punk kid. Still though, Bellem’s style is so goofy and memorable that I hope to read more of him someday.

“Forever After” is by Jim Thompson himself and comes from a 1960 issue of Shock. Short and punchy, “Forever After” apparently aims to live up to the title of the magazine. This third-person narrative is about a woman named Ardis Clinton who is stuck in a loveless marriage to a clout named Bill. As we meet her Ardis is priming her young stud, a peabrained roughneck named Tony, for the kill: Tony is to hide in the shower and hack Bill to pieces with an axe when he comes home. Bill sticks to a tedious routine and Ardis is certain the plan will work perfectly.

And it does, but problems ensue when Ardis insists that Tony hit her to make it look real – her plan is to mask it all as a robbery. With great reluctance Tony hits her…and knocks her flat. When Ardis comes to the cops are there, and they flat-out accuse her of a setup, planning to kill her husband. Why are they so glib? Turns out Tony hit Ardis so hard that she’s suffered fatal injuries and may go any second. She sends them away, goes to sleep…and wakes up in hell. In a surreal finale along the lines of his earlier novel The Getaway, Thompson finishes the tale with Ardis finding herself spending eternity in Bill as he goes along his same tedious routines.

“The Bloody Tide” is by Day Keene, another well-respected crime author I’ve never read, and comes from a 1950 issue of Black Mask. Slightly reminiscent of Charles Williams’s story above, this one’s narrated by a dude named Charlie White who just got out of prison, having done time for transporting illegal shipments on his boat. He did it all for his kind-hearted wife, but ran afoul of a femme fatale named Zo whom he apparently had an affair with. He gets out of prison determined to go straight, but instead of wife Beth he finds Zo waiting to pick him up.

Only after he’s drunk on rum, hours later in Florida, does Charlie find a note in his pocket, written by Beth and apparently sent to the prison for him. She says she’ll be waiting for him, and an excited Charlie rushes out to tell Zo he’s splitting – only to find her dead. Immediately after this our pal is knocked into dreamland. When he comes to he realizes he’s been set up for Zo’s murder. He decides to do something about it, but first he reconnects with his estranged wife over in Tampa. Beth is one of those wives that only exist in fiction, totally understanding and supportive, even if Charlie’s now wanted for the murder of his mistress.

I say this one’s similar to “Flight To Nowhere” because it starts off strong but gradually peters out. You start off the tale expecting this great revenge story, but instead Charlie goes off to stay on a remote island he owns with Beth, to hide in the attic of their abandoned cottage there – only to find it filled with a bunch of “wetbacks.” When he comes to from a sound beating, having been dumped in the harbor (the long swim to safety no problem for our hero, who we learn was a frogman in WWII), Charlie realizes who the villain has been all along, leading to a lame finale in which Charlie and Beth are under the man’s gun, only for the cops to come out of the woodwork and arrest him.

“Death Comes Gift-Wrapped” by William P. McGivern, is short tale I can’t remember about a cop in love with a nightclub singer or somesuch, who tries to go crooked to support the lifestyle she demands.

“The Girl Behind the Hedge” by Mickey Spillane, is another slight story I forgot as soon as I finished it, which is mostly a tale one character tells another about how he got vengeance on an enemy. Since this guy was a love ‘em and leave ‘em playboy, our storyteller made the dude fall in love with a mentally handicapped girl, and when the playboy discovered this he killed himself.

“We Are All Dead” is by Bruno Fischer and from a 1955 issue of Manhunt. This novella is a masterpiece of noir plotting and is my favorite story in the collection. Taking the old pulp cliché of a heist gone bad, it’s about a group of criminals turning against each other after one of their own died on the caper. Narrated by a career criminal in his 30s named Johnny Worth, the story moves at a fast clip, indicative of Fischer’s mastery of the craft. In a heist planned by professorial Oscar, the getaway driver is shot and Oscar finishes him off with a knife, saying it’s the only way to keep the heat off them.

The remaining four heisters split off with their share of the twenty-two thousand; besides Johnny and Oscar, one of them’s a family man and the other is an oldschool goon. Meanwhile our narrator stays with Oscar, trying not to lust over Oscar’s latest buxom gal, Stella. Then another good-looking lady, Allie, shows up, claiming to be the wife of the dead getaway driver. Not that she’s blackmailing them, but she thinks she’s entitled to her departed husband’s share of the loot. Meanwhile a cop is trying to bring them down; Oscar’s “fingerprints” are all over the job. 

The story becomes more of a tension-laden piece as the members of the heist team begin dying off one by one. But who is killing them? Meanwhile Johnny has become infatuated with Allie, who has become Oscar’s woman…and Stella has become Johnny’s woman. Fischer writes the tale so you have no choice but to finish it in one sitting. It all culminates with Johnny and Oscar against one another, and features a morbid, downbeat ending which bears out the title, Johnny writing his story from the death house.

Monday, September 7, 2015

Web Detective Stories, October 1960 (Volume 3, Number 3)


Very similar to (but not as enjoyable as) the issue of Two-Fisted Detective Stories I recently reviewed, this October 1960 issue of Web Detective Stories features a handful of lurid crime stories with EC Comics levels of dark humor and “twist” endings you can see coming a mile away. No surprises there, as despite not carrying the Reese Publications imprint logo, this mag was also edited by publisher Bud Ampolsk, who turns in my favorite tale in the magazine.

“The Triple Cross” by Richard Deming starts things off; this one’s narrated by Deming’s recurring character Manville Moon, a private eye who has an artificial lower right leg, something only given cursory mention in this story. Since getting on my recent hardboiled kick I’ve seen Deming’s name quite often, but I don’t as yet have any of his novels and this is the first of his work I’ve read. The story isn’t bad but seems pretty quick and underdeveloped, which is true about most every story here – this certainly isn’t Manhunt magazine.

Moon’s hired by Henry Sheffield, a mega-rich guy whose young wife Sylvia was murdered a few months ago. Local hoodlum Eddie Dallas is the prime suspect but the cops can’t pin it on him. Sheffield thinks he’s next on Dallas’s list and hires Moon to protect him. Eventually they visit Dallas in his penthouse apartment, and as they check out the mobster’s collection of vintage weapons Dallas professes his innocence. Then the hoodlum later calls Moon, blaming him for stealing his WWII trench knife. Moon didn’t do it, which leaves only one other candidate. That night Dallas turns up dead in Sheffield’s home; the story Sheffield gives is that Dallas tried to break in and kill him with the knife, but Moon knows that Sheffield had the knife and Dallas was merely coming to get it from him – in other words, Sheffield just murdered the guy.

“Model Of Murder” by Christopher Mace is more along the goofy, EC Comics-esue vibe these Ampolsk-edited digests were known for. It’s about a sculptor named George Carlton who lives off of a heavyset wealthy lady named Bernice. Meanwhile George has a nice thing going with blonde hotstuff Yvonne, secretly shacking up with her in his artist’s loft just off from the main house. Yvonne pushes him to divorce Bernice, but George can’t do it, he needs the money. So he decides to kill Bernice, coming up with the most bizarre method you’ll ever read.

Sculpting a realisitc hand, he stores it in the fridge for a while and then dips the cold marble in chocolate and ties it to the pull-chain for the light in the bedroom closet. That night when Bernice comes home George makes up a story he claims to have read in the paper, about a maniac loose on the streets who chopped up someone and made off with the bodyparts. Bernice, aghast at the tale, goes into the closet, grabbing for the light-pull – and grabs hold of that “severed hand.” She has a heart attack and dies, and George figures her two million is now his. Only he forgot to factor in Goldie, Bernice’s equally-obese maid; she says she knows what George did, and unless he marries her she’ll turn him in to the cops.

“Daughter of Darkness” by O.W. Reynolds is a short nasty about Margaret, a pretty 17-year-old who works as a waitress in a dive somewhere. With a mother who whores herself and a long-gone father, Margaret yearns to get the hell out of town. She puts down the constant proposals of various men, until one night she decides to get in the car of some random guy who pulls up alongside her as she walks home. He tells her she can be his partner on a cross-country con game. Margaret, who hates men, gets in. Their first job will be to rob a diner; the guy will go in, rob the joint, and then run back to the car, Margaret driving them off. Instead Margaret runs him over and drives off to a new life in a new town. The end!

“Dumb Bull” by Flip Lyons concerns Rosie Haver, high-class hooker for bigwig crook Tony Marchione. Teddy Landon, a junior cop, arrests Tony while he’s in the middle of doing the deed with Rosie, something his superior bashes him for – he should’ve nabbed Rosie instead and tapped into her knowledge about the Marchione crime family. Back Landon goes to Rosie’s place, figuring someone’s likely about to kill her – and of course, a few Marchione thugs are on the way to her place. Features a lackluster finale with Rosie running for safety across the rooftop of her apartment building and Landon, whom she’s called “a dumb bull,” showing up to blast the thugs and save the day.

“You Can’t Cheat Death” by Earle Smyth is like I Know What You Did Last Summer a few decades early; a guy named Smathers has just run over someone, out driving around late at night with his busty mistress Caroline. Now Smathers, who runs a fashion company in New York, is desperate to keep it all out of the papers, lest he be ruined. This long tale then goes into a flashback on how Smathers hired Caroline, who showed up one day willing to both model his lingerie and work around the office. Lots of “spicy” stuff here with details on how Caroline would waltz around in “wisps” of lingerie for department store buyers, the men oggling her curvaceous bod and buying Smather’s lingerie in bulk.

This leads somehow to an affair between Smathers and the girl; I say “somehow” but any idiot can easily figure that Caroline has something up her sleeve. This goes on for a few months and then one night the two are driving back to Caroline’s place and Smathers, as usual, has had a few too many, and he runs over some guy in the gutter. Caroline checks the body, says the man is dead, and Smathers panics. They keep it quiet but the next day Smathers receives a threatening note; the sender claims to know what Smathers did and demands payment to keep quiet. A panicking Smathers has Caroline do all the dirty work for him, answering the blackmailer’s calls, taking the demanded payment to him. Who will be surprised when the blackmailer turns out to be the man who was in the gutter – ie Caroline’s partner in a long-running con game?

“Lust Isn’t Funny” by Fletcher Flora has one of the goofiest titles ever. Flora’s like Deming, a hardboiled writer who’s name I see a lot but haven’t actually read…until now! This short tale probably isn’t the best indication of his writing talents, though. Leo Baldwin, “a publicity bloated punk comic with a sponsor,” likes to frequent the club owned by Clay Cooper. Baldwin is a notorious prick who picks up women with ease, due to his fame and wealth – all while his wife sits right there. Gilbert, the club’s headwaiter, complains that Baldwin treats his wife like shit, just openly pawing women while she sits there beside him. After Baldwin’s wife tries to commit suice that night – Gilbert having saved her – the headwaiter decides to do something about it. He spikes Baldwin’s drink with his wife’s poison and then blithely informs Cooper later that the annoying comic is dead. 

“Mistress of Evil” is by Bill Ryder, aka Bud Ampolsk himself, and it’s very much along the lines of the sort of thing he’d write for the sweat mags he also edited and published. In a way this one’s almost like a “part two” to the Nazi Horror tales he edited/wrote for those sweat mags, such as the type seen in Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood; it’s about Gustave Himmelman, a pyschiatrist in an American city who is really taken to task by his latest client, an attractive young woman named Margery Coleman. Margery’s problem is that she gets off on being hurt, especially being whipped, and it’s driving a wedge in her marriage because her husband doesn’t get it.

As Gustave sits and listens, breaking out into a sweat, Margery goes into a long backstory over the many times she’s gotten off on pain. Starting with her father, who whipped her (much to her enjoyment), to the boy who took her virginity, Margery basically demanding that he beat her up before, during, and after the act. And let’s not forget about her sorority sisters, who as part of hell week stripped her down and whipped her, something which made Margery actually pass out, due to the power of her orgasms. What she wants from Gustave is not psychoanalysis but instead for him to whip her! If not, she’ll make up a story that he raped her.

But what we learn in the last moments is that Gustave was really a medical officer at Dachau, and is a wanted Nazi, “Himmelman” just being the name he took up when he fled Germany. He also knows that this gorgeous young sadist will be “the end of him,” because, once he starts whipping her, he won’t be able to stop. Whereas the title makes you think Margery is going to be the evil one, it’s actually Himmelman, and all she has done is unleashed the evil he’s blocked in himself this past decade and a half. He begins whipping her nude body, knowing he will whip her until she is dead – just as he whipped to death so many other women at Dachau.

“As Hot As Ginger” by Art Crockett rounds out the mag. This first-person tale doesn’t feature Crockett’s recurring character Juan Kelly; it’s narrated by a 21 year-old petty thief named Petey who when we meet him is watching as his fellow burglar, 17 year-old Big Sal, is punching some woman in the gut. Crockett goes to town detailing how savagely the woman’s been uppercut, so hard that the “squishy” sound of it makes Petey figure the gal will be puking her guts out for the rest of the week. He and Sal are in the midst of robbing the woman’s apartment, only to be surprised when she shows up – and they’re even more surprised when she produces a .38 and, despite being half-dead from agony, blows a few holes into Big Sal. 

The lady passes out after that and Petey makes a run for it. The next day on the news he hears that the lady was actually a policewoman named Ginger and she’s given Petey’s full description to the force. Now all the cops in the city are out looking for him, even the ones with the day off. A frantic Petey attempts to escape, only to be caught in a traffic jam – and to find that Ginger is the policewoman directing traffic! He abandons the car and hightails it for a barbershop, where he gets a buzz cut; next he gets a pair of glasses. Getting some books so he’ll look like a student, Petey’s almost home free when some cops yell at him. He runs for it, falls, wonders how they figured he was the guy from the break-in; turns out they were just yelling at him because they assumed he was a truant, but they’re sure glad to hear they’ve just nabbed the guy who had the audacity to rob a policewoman’s apartment.

EDIT: As Walker Martin mentions below, Peter Enfantino also reviewed this issue of Web Detective (as well as all of the others) at the Barebones e-zine blog; you can read the review here.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Two-Fisted Detective Stories, October 1960 (Volume 2, Number 3)


I’ve been on a hardboiled pulp kick recently and discovered that a lot of good material was published in the ubiquitous digest-size crime magazines of the time (roughly 1953 to 1965 or thereabouts). Then I discovered that some of the more lurid crime digests were published by the same twisted folks who also turned out the various sweat mags of the time, ie the stuff that was anthologized in Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood. In particular Two-Fisted Detective, Web Detective, and Off Beat Detective, and I got a few volumes of each, luckily for acceptable prices.

This October 1960 issue of Two-Fisted Detective is the first of them I read. At 113 pages of double-columned stories, it basically amounts to a paperback-sized anthology. Some stories were okay, others just middling. While entertaining it was nothing mindblowing, with each of the stories short, snappy, and heavy on the torture/lurid vibe. I’m betting the more famous (and respectable) Manhunt magazine didn’t feature so much torture and bondage! Practically every story in here features a woman being tied up and slapped around by a thug.

“Kill Me With Kisses” by Art Crockett, the lead story, is a case in point. Narrated by recurring protagonist Juan Kelly, a private eye with a talking parrot in his office, the story sees Kelly hired by wealthy Mrs. Southwell to find her daughter Barbara, who has run off with some damn beatniks. In reality “Babs” has been abducted by Charlie Sleeper, a rough pimp who keeps the young girl tied up in a room for his clients who are into rape scenes. Our hero Kelly when we meet him is surrounded by several of Sleeper’s gorgeous hookers, each armed with a dagger. He is very much in the Mike Hammer mold, dishing out punishment with his fists.

When Kelly finds Babs he takes her back to his place, only for Sleeper to call and say he’s sent in all of his clientele – all of whom would want Babs permanently silenced. The finale is pretty good, with Kelly and Babs running across rooftops, being chased by the bloodthirsty creeps, though the finale is perfunctory with Kelly merely blowing Sleeper away and the others running for it. Of course Kelly must inform us that Babs, who has been bound and raped for the past week or so, demands they go back to his apartment so they can have sex.

“No Escape” is by Don Unatin, which according to Philsp.com was a pseudonym of Reese editor (and owner?) Bud Ampolsk, who also wrote as “Bill Ryder.” Ampolsk I’m betting wrote many of the stories that appeared in the sweat mags he edited, and according to Bob Deis at Mens Pulp Mags, Ampolsk was also the guy who devised the crazy, torture-focused covers Norm Eastman would paint for the Reese mags. So then it’s safe to say Ampolsk had a quite fevered imagination. It’s at work here in this short, breezy tale written in third-person about a girl named Ronnie who keeps getting calls from a horny sadist named Duke who claims he got her number off a payphone, where someone had written that she offered a great time.

The calls have become more and more aggressive, with Duke even figuring out her address. He says he’s coming over for a little loving, and might even rough her up a little because he likes that, too. And don’t bother calling the cops ‘cause they’d never believe you, or something like that. Finally Ronnie talks him into meeting her somewhere. They meet at a hotel where, surprisingly, Duke actually does have sex with her, though obviously it’s an off-page event. But as he’s lying there afterward Ronnie takes an icepick from her purse and jams it into his brain. Turns out Ronnie is a killer, putting up her own number on payphones so as to root out and kill off “lust crazed animals.” 

“Hell School” by Pete McCann returns to the first-person narration and concerns Craig Bradman, a gym teacher at deadbeat Southside High, which is populated by “duck-tailed punks” and promiscuous young women who are hookers in all but name. The narrator’s wife wants him to move on to a better job in a better school, but Bradman wants to stick around. On his way into the school one day he comes across one of the punks having sex out in the open with one of the gals. Bradman isn’t surprised when later he’s called into the principal’s office and there’s a cop there, having busted them. Also the cop found dope in the backseat. The principal convinces the cop that they can handle it – turns out Bradman earns his living by beating the shit out of the punks who break the rules! As a double ironic twist we also learn Bradman is the supplier for the punks, hooking them up with drugs and using them as salesmen so he can eventually get his wife out of the hovel in which they live. 

“Save Her For A Passion” by Grover Brinkman is narrated by Joel Vance, an enforcer hired to pull a hit on Diane – who turns out to be the wife of Joel’s boss, Jud. He’s about to assassinate her along a beach but the lady gets the drop on him, coming armed with her own gun. She talks Joel into teaming up with her against Jud, who doubtless will send Joel up the river for doing this job, anyway. She reminds him what a bastard Jud is, like that innocent girl Jud raped and got hooked on drugs in New Orleans. The narrator goes along with it, absorbed with Diane’s great breasts, and the finale sees a quick fight on Jud’s drug-transporting ship. But then Diane shoots Joel in the gut and leaves him: that innocent kid in New Orleans was her sister, and Joel’s the one who snatched her off the streets for Jud.

“Mistress of Mayhem” by Al James is another third-person tale with an ironic twist ending you can see coming even with blinders on. Mira is a hotstuff 19 year-old married to deadbeat Phil, 23 and unemployed, a former car mechanic. Mira is having an affair with Jim, 40, and hopes to marry him, but Phil won’t give her a divorce. Al James appears to have written sleaze paperbacks in the ‘60s and that’s quite apparent here, as the word “breasts” is used more than all the other stories in the issue combined; Mira must be quite stacked.

Mira demands Phil leave to look for a job and then when Jim comes over for their daily rendevous (cue a sex scene that isn’t as vague as the others), she tells him she wants him to kill Phil. There’s a red-gloved bandit going around the neighborhood, attacking people in their homes, and they can set Phil up so Jim shoots him, mistaking him for the bandit. Can you see the ironic twist? Yes, Phil turns out to be the red-gloved bandit, and the tale ends with Jim dead and Phil revealing his true identity to Mira, as well as his knowledge of her affair with Jim; it’s intimated he’s about to strangle her. 

“Come-On Cutie!” by Flip Lyons has a hell of an opening: a con man named Bennie beating the shit out of his female accomplice, Jodi. He bashes her in the stomach, the face, beating her to the floor. Why? Because he came into a hotel room and caught her packing her luggage with ten thousand bucks she just conned from an old millionaire named Hollingsworth. Battered and bloody, Jodi tells Bennie he’s an idiot; she packed his bag, too. Hollingsworth, whom she knocked out with a sleeping pill, is on his way with the cops and they need to leave town. Further, she and Bennie are now through; she refuses to stay with a guy who beats her. After cleaning up – during which she shows Bennie her breasts and tells him he’ll never see them again! – Jodi takes off…only to immediately be snatched by Hollingsworth and the cops.

Feeling bad about it, Bennie tries to con Hollingsworth so Jodi can be freed. But then he finds out that Jodi really stole 90 thousand from the guy. He springs Jodi from prison and tells her he’s going to beat her to a pulp this time – that is, right after she tells him where she hid that ninety thousand. Jodi talks him into a last meal at the local diner, where she of course slips a mickey in his drink. A bizarrely light-hearted finale sees Bennie, that woman-beating maniac, merely falling asleep at his table as Jodi announes her plans to go live like royalty in Europe with the 90 thousand!

“Lust Holds The Gun!” by Gil Grayson concerns Spandau, a con who came up with his latest idea in prison; he’s going to rob Marie Rodgers, a high-class madame who makes monthly payoffs to a mob boss named Rodman. Spandau became pals with one of Rodman’s men in the slammer and learned how Rodman’s men collect from the various madames. This tale definitely has the feel of a vintage men’s mag story as it’s all about the bondage and the breasts. Spandau, wielding a .38, sneaks into Marie’s office building at night, an hour before the scheduled money pick-up, and barges in. He roughs her up, which she seems to enjoy. Also she’s certain Rodman won’t believe that she’s been robbed, so she wants him to hurt her.

So Spandau ties Marie up and then, because she seems eager for it, rapes her. (She apparently enjoys that, too…) Afterwards he burns her with cigarettes, all so as to get the safe combination. Finally Marie gives it, and Spandau absconds with twenty-five thousand bucks. The story features a typical EC comics-style twist with the greasy, obese elevator operator being a pickpocket who ends up lifting Spandau’s wallet. This third-person story is written in a goofy hardboiled style, with such enjoyable lines as, “The elevator door finally opened, revealing a sallow faced man whose bald head looked like something you might step on in a graveyard at midnight.”

“Dark Hunger” by Jay Richards is the shortest story in the book and the goofiest. It’s also very much in the EC Comics vein. Marty is a serial killer who strangles women, and he’s set his sights on a lovely young lady named Erica as his latest kill. With the opening lines of “She was young… Lovely… Stacked…”, you know this one also upholds the Reese Publications standard, and thus there’s a definite lurid vibe throughout. Mostly the dark comedy comes through Marty chastisizing himself that his last kill was named Loreta, which blew the A-B-C nature of his previous kills; if only Loretta had been named “Doris!” He takes Erica home, ready to strangle her – and who will be surprised when Erica herself turns out to be a serial killer, pulling a knife from her purse and killing Marty? The lurid vibe continues with the vague detail that Erica orgasms when she kills. And now she’s on the hunt for a new man…

“Don’t Tempt Murder” by Jim Arthur is another dark comedy piece; this one’s about Alfie, a would-be “professional bleeder” who has just gotten his first job from mob boss Turk. Alfie’s been ordered to kill Turk’s old flame Sue Martin, who is about to turn state’s evidence. Alfie goes to Sue’s apartment with a .38 Special that only has one bullet in it, so as to fool the cops into thinking an amateur was behind the kill (professional bleeders we’re informed use six slugs on their hits to ensure death, an industry standard).  But Sue turns the tables on him, opening her door fully nude. The dark comedy ensues as Alfie gawks at her awesome bod and keeps telling her he has to kill her. She offers herself, he reluctantly refuses; somehow he shows her he only has one bullet, and then he spins the chamber and it’s like Russian roullette, with the girl passing out with each blank shot. Finally the cops show up and it turns out Sue is under police protection and she also took the bullet out of Alfie’s gun, so it was empty the whole time!

“A Darling For The Devil” is by Lawrence Stone and rounds out the magazine. This “novel”-length tale is narrated by Charlie, a chaffeur for a sadistic kingpin named Bugs Martin. We watch as Bugs beats some hapless diner owner nearly to death, then moves on to a local nightclub. Along the way our narrator informs us how Bugs gets his rocks off whipping women with a studded belt. This story is very heavy with the sweat mag vibe. The nightclub has a new act – a hotstuff lady named Francie who turns out to be the childhood sweetheart of our narrator. Bugs gets the immediate hots for her, and due to his span of influence the club owners turn away as he basically abducts Francie. She fights back and now he’s all hot and bothered, just ready to whip the shit out of her.

They go to a cottage outside of the city, where Bugs has his fun, and when the narrator can take no more he ends up getting bashed in the face by Bugs. It culminates in a bizarre ending where the narrator finds some spiders on a milkjug and throws it at Bug’s feet, after he’s been whipping Francie for a good long while – Bugs freaks out (turns out he’s afraid of bugs, hence his nickname!), and in the chaos Charlie picks up his .38 and blasts him. The story does not feature the expected denoument in which Charlie gets lucky with the gal; instead, he carries her home and he tells us he never heard from her again. Jeez, wonder why?