Frank Kane's The Living End

Frank Kane (1912-68) was a successful American hardboiled crime writer who has now fallen somewhat into obscurity. He was successful writer for radio and wrote a lot of scripts for the excellent 1958-59 Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer TV series. He also wrote about forty crime novels most of which featured PI Johnny Liddell. The Living End (in which Johnny Liddell does not appear) was published in 1957.

Eddie Marlon is a skinny Polish-American kid who desperately wants to be a song writer. He’s written a song which he figures will be a surefire hit if only someone will get behind it. He has no talent. The song is just a pastiche of half a dozen current hits. But a lack of talent never stopped anybody from being a success in the music business. He tries to get a music publisher named Devine interested, to no avail. Devine does however offer to get a job as an assistant to popular radio DJ Marty Allen. Eddie’s job will be to pick the records that get paid. Devine warns him that Marty Allen is a straight up and down guy - he’s one of the few DJs who doesn’t accept payola.

Eddie honesty is roughly on par with his talent but he’s prepared to go along with Allen’s rules. Then he gets introduced to sultry up-and-coming singer Jo Leary. Jo and her record company’s contact man Mike Shannon are desperate to get her platter on the radio. Jo tells Eddie that there’s no question of paying money to get her record played but that if somebody could get it some air time she could find other ways to express her gratitude. Mike assures Eddie that Jo can be a remarkably grateful girl. And Jo is a sexy platinum blonde with curves in all the right places.

Getting a few air plays for Jo’s song is just minor league stuff. There is real money to be made if you're a guy with flexible ethical standards, or even better no ethics at all. It’s a certainty that Eddie is going to be tempted again.

Temptation comes in an unexpected form. It has to do with a girl (the platinum blonde mentioned above) and a whip. The whip has been used on the girl. Used a bit too enthusiastically. It was a sex game that got out of hand. It wasn’t Eddie who used the whip but it gives him the opportunity to begin his rise to being a big shot in the music industry.

This book is not at all what you might be expecting from a ’50s hardboiled crime novel. There is crime, there is racketeering, but this is strictly white-collar crime. No-one gets taken for a ride by the boys. There are no guns. It’s essentially an exposĂ© of the notorious payola racket, with DJs paid to promote songs. This novel was published in 1957 and the payola scandal broke in a big way two years later. Of course the music business promised to clean up its act, and of course they never did.

The Living End provides a fascinating insight into the almost unbelievably corrupt world of the American music business in the 1950s, and into the extraordinarily ingenious methods by which so many people in a sleazy business were making easy money by manipulating hits.

As a hardboiled crime novel, well this simply isn’t a hardboiled crime novel as such. It’s still quite intriguing, it has a memorable and extremely nasty villain and an overwhelming  atmosphere of corruption and nastiness. It has the tone of a hardboiled crime story but don’t expect any action or any violence. There’s not much sex either although sordid sexual shenanigans are hinted at obliquely (such as payola in the form of sexual favours). Apart from the matter of the girl and the whip the book doesn’t really get into overt sleaze.

This is a bit of an oddball novel but it’s not without interest. It’s an interesting journey into the moral squalor of white-collar crime. Worth a look.

The Living End has been recently reprinted by Black Gat Books.

Van Wyck Mason’s The Fort Terror Murders

The Fort Terror Murders was published in 1931. It was the third of F. Van Wyck Mason’s twenty-six spy thrillers featuring American G-2 intelligence agent Hugh North. At this stage of his career Hugh North holds the rank of Captain.

Hugh North is in the Philippines and at a dinner party at Colonel Andrews’ house there is much excitement among the officers and their ladies. The excitement concerns the deserted and half-ruined Spanish fortress, Fort Espanto (“Fort Terror”). According to local legends there is treasure hidden somewhere in the fort, treasure that once belonged to the Jesuits before they we unceremoniously expelled from the fort. A fabulous treasure. That was centuries ago. Since that time many have sought that treasure, and they have all died. For the fort is haunted by ghosts - jealous, vengeful ghosts. Now two people claim to have discovered the secret of the treasure’s location.

Hugh North isn’t concerned by ghosts but by much more prosaic evils. The treasure will belong to Senorita Inez Sarolla and her family, and to her fiancĂ© Lieutenant Bowen. Most of the young officers are by no means rich. A junior officer’s pay is not generous. Impoverished young officers and their ladies are not immune to jealousy or to greed. Such a treasure is likely to excite similar emotions even among the senior officers and their wives. It is clearly a potentially dangerous situation and those legends of mysterious deaths and disappearances do not reassure him - they could suggest temptations to weak-minded men (and women).

A party of a dozen or so officers and their women set off for the fort at dead of night to join in the fun of the uncovering of the treasure. The treasure hunt ends disastrously, with one man dead and another who simply vanished. Since Hugh North is an officer with the Intelligence and Criminal Investigation Department of the Army he takes charge of the case.

The tragic events occurred in total darkness within the vast bulk of Fort Espanto. It had originally been a monastery which was converted into a modern fortress by the Spanish in the late 18th century. Much of the original monastery remains. It could of course be riddled with secret passageways but while plans of the fort exist no plans of the original monastery survive, and any secret passageways would have been built into the monastery. There is no way of knowing if they exist or where they might be.

And since the events occurred in darkness no-one is sure where anybody else was at the time.

The clues are particularly puzzling. Two rosaries, both very unusual, and a cryptic message scrawled on a note. Hugh North believes that these clues contain a cypher, but it’s a fiendishly complex one.

But greed is not the only unhealthy passion at work here. There is also lust. Several illicit and intersecting love affairs seem to be approaching crisis point.

While the Hugh North novels are spy thrillers they also include definite murder mystery elements and this particular book is more or less a pure murder mystery. It’s made more interesting by being set in the tropics, which in the 1930s was synonymous with mystery, intrigue, madness and forbidden passions. The vast decaying fortress and the fact that the keys to the location of the treasure lie in the distant past add some gothic touches.

Of course mysteries set in ruined monasteries that include hidden passageways, and passions unleashed by life in the tropics, are deeply unfashionable today. And when you add notions of military honour it becomes even more unfashionable. To me that makes the book all the more appealing. Nobody writes books like this any longer, and that’s very sad. Van Wyck Mason was very very good at writing such books.

Hugh North is also a very old-fashioned hero. Although occasionally his methods can be ruthless (he deliberately and rather callously misleads a key witness) he is essentially a man of honour who does his duty. That’s not to say that he’s a dull square-jawed storybook hero. He’s capable of action but mostly he relies on his brains rather than on brawn. His approach is patient and intellectual.

If you love both golden age detective fiction and spy thrillers then Van Wyck Mason is the author you’ve been looking for all these years. In the pre-war Hugh North books he provides plenty for fans of both genres. The Fort Terror Murders is a bit unusual in including no actual spy thriller elements but it does have the sort of exotic setting that spy fans love. And it does have cyphers. Even cooler, it turns out that solving the cypher is not quite enough to solve the mystery - there’s an extra fiendish twist.

This one throws in assorted gothic and pulp elements as well - not just secret passageways but legends of ghosts and fiendish murder methods (such as murder by cobra). You have to remember that in 1931 Edgar Wallace was at the peak of his popularity so it made sense for Van Wyck Mason to throw in the kinds of things that Wallace fans enjoyed.

The Fort Terror Murders is gloriously entertaining. Highly recommended.

All the early Hugh North books are good. If you want more of a mixture of detective and spy elements then I’d recommend The Budapest Parade Murders or The Singapore Exile Murders. If you want a great spy story (and yes it does have murder as well) then check out the excellent The Branded Spy Murders.

John Norman’s Outlaw of Gor

Outlaw of Gor is the second of John Norman’s Gor sword-and-planet adventure novels. It was published in 1967, a year after Tarnsman of Gor.

After seven years back on Earth, following the avenues recounted in Tarnsman of Gor, Tarl Cabot returns to Earth’s strange sister planet, Gor. To find that everything has changed, and changed in ways that seem to him bewildering and demoralising. He had looked forward to being reunited with Talena, the woman he loves, but now he despairs of ever seeing her again. And the priest-kings, the mysterious hidden possibly alien rulers of Gor,  seem to have plans for him. He has danced to their tune before and did not like it but no-one can defy the will of the priest-kings.

Gorean society is a barbarian society, with odd traces of high technology. Gor should by now have developed a lot more high technology but it is the will of the priest-kings that it should remain an agrarian society, dependent on animal power and with no weaponry more sophisticated than crossbows.

Tarl Cabot is now a man without a city and on Gor that automatically makes a man an outlaw. Tarl decides that maybe it is about time that someone confronted the priest-kings but that means journeying to the Sardar Mountains and to do that he will need a tarn, one of the gigantic birds that serve as a type of winged war-horse. He reasons that the best place to head for is Tharna, the one city on Gor that welcomes strangers (and the one city ruled by women). Heading for Tharna proves to be a costly mistake but at least he finds out why the city welcomes strangers. It’s something he would have been happier not knowing.

Tarl has the usual adventures you expect in a sword-and-planet adventure. There’s no shortage of action.

As was the case with Tarnsman of Gor it is Gorean society that proves to be the most interesting feature of the book. Or more specifically, it is the hero’s ambivalent attitude towards Gor. Tarl Cabot violently disapproves of many aspects of Gorean society and contrasts it unfavourably to the Anglo-American culture in which he was bought up. He considers Gor to be a barbarian society, which of course it is. Despite this Tarl only seems to feel truly alive when he is on Gor, and he loves Gor passionately.

Tarl particularly disapproves of the Gorean treatment of women and most strongly of all he disapproves of the almost universal Gorean institution of female sex slavery. Of all the cities of Gor the one in which he should feel most comfortable is Tharna. Women are largely free in Tharna. And yet he finds Tharna not only to be dull and depressing, but in a strange way to be more barbaric than the other more overtly barbaric cities. He will soon discover just how barbaric Tharna is.

Tarl is an intelligent educated man. He is capable of understanding nuance, and he is capable of understanding just how complicated human beings are. Even an intelligent educated man can find it difficult to comprehend another culture. Tarl’s problem is that there are things he does understand about Gor, but he recoils from that understanding. For example he disapproves of the keeping of women as slaves and yet the women of Gor approve of this institution. Even the women slaves approve of it. To a Gorean woman the one thing worse than being captured and forced into slavery is not being captured and forced into slavery.

Of course many readers find it impossible to get past the slave thing. I suspect that most of those who find Norman’s treatment of the subject offensive either haven’t read the books or have had a knee-jerk reaction of disapproval the moment they encounter it. Norman, a professional philosopher, uses the barbarian society of Gor (including the slavery aspect) to comment on American society in the 1960s and human nature in general. And as in the first novel there’s nothing even remotely graphic of a sexual nature.

Outlaw of Gor is more than just a sequel to Tarnsman of Gor. Gorean society has changed profoundly in the years that Tarl has been away. So Norman has not just created a fascinatingly different alien society, he has created a dynamic changing society. It will be intriguing to see if there are further changes in the third novel in the series (a copy of which I have already ordered).

And like the first book Outlaw of Gor is a pretty decent sword-and-planet adventure tale as well. Recommended.

William Ard's You’ll Get Yours

William Ard was an ex-Marine and ex-Hollywood publicist who was a successful writer of hardboiled mysteries in the ’50s. After his death in 1960 at the age of 37 he was rapidly forgotten. Most of the many books he wrote are now hard to find and only a couple have been reprinted. You’ll Get Yours, which he wrote in 1952 under the name Thomas Wills, has been re-issued by Black Gat Books.

It opens with a murder. We know who the murderer is and we know who the victim is but we don’t know why the person was murdered. We will find out. We do know there’s a dame involved. It all started when New York private eye Barney Glines was hired by artists’ representative Archie St George to recover some very valuable jewellery, stolen from Kyle Shannon.

Kyle is an actress and she’s about to become the hottest thing in Hollywood. The studio has built her up as a poor kid lucky enough to be discovered quite by accident so they don’t want the public to know that she’s actually a rich girl whose daddy left her a fortune. Those jewels have to be recovered discreetly. The thieves have in fact offered to return the jewels for twenty grand, but what Barney doesn’t understand is why the thieves want him to be the go-between.

The first complication is that Kyle is Archie St George’s woman but as soon as Barney lays eyes on her he wants her. He wants her real bad. The fact that Kyle dislikes him on sight could present something of a challenge. And why does she dislike him?

The second complication is that it wasn’t just jewels that were stolen. There were some photos as well. And the negatives. Nudie pictures. Not quite the thing that an aspiring Hollywood star would want to have made public.

Getting the jewels back is easy but the pictures are not with them. Maybe the thieves din’t steal the photos. Maybe they did. Maybe someone else did. But did anyone else even know about those naughty pictures?

Stripper Gaye Dawn may have the answers. She’s a junkie, which can make persuading her to co-operate easier, or more difficult.

And people start to turn up dead.

Barney Glines is an honest private eye. His approach to the job is to work with the police. He’s kept his nose clean. Now he doesn’t care about anything except Kyle. Solving the case is now just a means of getting her. So now he’s prepared to cut a few corners, not always a good idea for a private eye. He still has friends on the force which comes in handy when he’s arrested for murder.

Kyle is a nice girl but she’s the worst thing that ever happened to Barney Glines. She’s not a femme fatale but she has the same effect on Barney, plunging him into a disastrously messy situation that he would have been wise to keep out of. Nice girls can lead men to destruction, if they’re the wrong nice girls. Especially nice girls who belong to other men,

This is classic hardboiled stuff with a generous helping of noir on the side.

William Ard clearly had the potential to be a major hardboiled writer. His prose is energetic and he certainly knows how to pace a story. If you’re a noir/hardboiled fan You’ll Get Yours is worth checking out. Recommended.

Orrie Hitt's Wayward Girl

Orrie Hitt (1916-75) was one of the many prolific writers of American sleaze fiction of the ’50 and ’60s. He wrote around 150 such books. Wayward Girl dates from 1960 when the genre was at the height of its popularity.

Wayward Girl tells the story of Sandy Greening, a sixteen-year-old prostitute and gang member. Sandy was raped when she was fourteen and she liked it (this is of course a very politically incorrect book). After that she couldn’t get enough of men. Especially when she discovered she could take money out of having sex, thus combining business with pleasure.

She runs with the Blue Devils and they’re about to have a rumble with their hated rivals, the Black Cats. The Black Cats gang-raped one of the Blue Devil debs. That’s bad enough, but the rape occurred on Blue Devil turf. That’s much more serious. It’s a rumble which ends with one of the Black Cats dead.

Sandy doesn’t like killings but that doesn’t stop her from sleeping with the gang member who did the killing. And sex with Tommy Forbes is real nice. He’s a violent thug but that’s why the sex is real nice.

Sandy’s luck is about to change. She usually gets five dollars a trick (just enough to sustain her heroin habit) but this time the guy is willing to give her twenty-five bucks. Life is good. Or it would be, except that he’s an undercover cop. So instead of twenty-five bucks she gets six months in reform school. But this is one of the new enlightened reform schools where they really want to help the girls. She’s assured that everybody there wants to help her. They’ll teach her a skill (apart from the one that landed her in the reform school) and how to live a decent life and she’ll be able to get married and have kids and make a better America (that’s what they actually tell her).

Up to this point the book reads disturbingly like a social work treatise but don’t worry, the cynical twists are just around the corner and the sleaze factor is about to be ramped up.

Miss Hunt is the house-mother in charge of the cottage to which Sandy is assigned. Miss Hunt really wants to help her girls. She’s pretty young herself, in her early twenties, and she’s kind and idealistic. Only she looks at Sandy sorta funny. You know, the way men look at women. She tells Sandy that Sandy has really nice breasts. They’re so nice that Miss Hunt wants to touch them. And she likes to see Sandy naked. And to kiss her. And to do other things to her. Sandy is horrified but Miss Hunt is the one who will decide if she gets parole or not.

In fact the school is a hot-bed of lesbianism. Miss Hunt assures Sandy that this is OK, girls need loving and if they don’t get the kind of loving they prefer any kind of loving is better than nothing. And lots of the girls like this strange sort of loving.

One of the school’s enlightened ideas is to send the girls to nice families for weekends. Lots of families are willing to take the girls. Middle-aged couples like the Ridgeways. Mr Ridgeway is a middle-aged man but he’s really keen to help wayward girls. I mean, having sex-crazed sixteen-year-old girls spend a weekend with nice middle-aged men whose wives don’t understand them - what could possibly go wrong?

So while at the reform school Sandy actually has sex more often than she did when was a prostitute on the outside. The only difference is that now she doesn’t get paid for it.

Sandy is in the biggest trouble she’s ever been in. She’s trapped. She can’t escape the sexual attentions of either Miss Hunt or Mr Ridgeway and then when she gets there’s going to be problem of Tommy Forbes and the Blue Devils. She can’t escape either her past or her present nightmares.

Compared to Gang Girl by Robert Silverberg (written under the pseudonym Don Elliott) the sex in Wayward Girl is less graphic, the rapes take place offstage so to speak and the violence is toned down a little. The whole tone is rather different as well. The heroine is more of a conventional victim of circumstances rather than being the depraved monster of Gang Girl. The two novels do however have a number of things in common - the casual senseless brutality of gang life, the atmosphere of sleaze and a honest acceptance of the reality of female sexual pleasure in casual sex. Which was not the sort of thing that was considered respectable at the tie, but then these novels are not concerned with respectability.

Both books also belong to the same milieu as the exploitation movies of the same era - glorying in trashiness and depravity while covering themselves by appearing to deplore such things and occasionally treating their subject matter with an honesty and directness not found in the mainstream of either cinema or literature. And like exploitation movies, they’re great fun. Not clean wholesome fun, but fun nonetheless.

Wayward Girl has been re-issued by Stark House in their series of noir reprints, in an edition that also includes other Orrie Hitt sleaze classic, The Widow.

Wayward Girl is obviously recommended to sleaze fans but noir fans may find themselves enjoying it as well.

Edgar Wallace's On the Spot

On the Spot is a 1931 Edgar Wallace crime thriller set in Chicago during the heady days of Prohibition.

Tony Perelli is a Big Shot, one of the biggest racketeers in Chicago. He’s ruthless but he’s smart. Tony don’t want no trouble. If someone is causing trouble, Tony gets a couple of his boys to take the guy for a ride. There’s nothing personal in it. It’s just business. He’s not a mere hoodlum. Tony would never have some body bumped off just for the hell of it. But sometimes it’s necessary.

Tony’s main rival is Irish gangster Mick Feeney. Feeney is tough but he’s not as smart as Tony. Feeney’s chief lieutenant, Shaun O’Donnell, is another matter. O’Donnell is clever and patient. And Feeney’s gang have been muscling in on Tony’s territory. Something will have to be done about that.

Tony had had plenty of women, but he’s never had a woman like Minn Lee. Mine Lee is half-Chinese and all beautiful. And she’s not your typical gangster’s moll. Tony doesn’t really understand her, but insofar as he is capable of loving a woman he loves her. He loves her the way he loves all his other possessions. He likes to be surrounded by beautiful things. All the beautiful things money can buy including women. He thinks maybe she loves him, but he’s not quite sure.

Everything on the home front is going just swell for Tony until he meets Maria. Maria is Con O’Hara's woman. O’Hara is an out-of-town torpedo who does a lot of jobs for Tony. He’s a killer and he’s good at his job. There’s no subtlety to the man but if some guy is causing trouble O’Hara is the boy to take care of it. He’s been killing professionally since he was a teenager. Unfortunately O’Hara is pretty attached to Maria.

Then there’s Jimmy McGrath, a nice college boy from the east. Tony thinks he can find a place for Jimmy in his organisation but he’s not sure what that place might be. Maybe Jimmy could be a fixer. A fixer has to be smart and be able to present himself as respectable. Tony already has a fixer, a really good one, Victor Vinsetti, but he’ll find something for Jimmy. Of course first Jimmy will have to kill for him. You can’t trust a guy until he’s killed for you.

Jimmy is in love with Minn Lee. Vinsetti is in love with her as well. She has that effect on men. They don’t just want her, they fall in love with her.

Of course anyone with a thorough knowledge of the Chicago underworld of the Roaring Twenties would undoubtedly spot lots of inaccuracies in this account (and some of the characters sound disturbingly cockney in their speech patterns) Wallace being an Englishman with no firsthand knowledge of the subject. It doesn’t matter. Wallace knows how to tell an engrossing tale.

And Tony Perelli and Minn Lee are intriguing characters. Tony’s great love is Italian opera. He considers himself to be a civilised man. He says he’d happily run his rackets without ever killing anybody but there are always guys who want to make trouble and they have to be dealt with. He has a genuine fondness for both Jimmy and Minn Lee, the kind of fondness a man feels for beautiful things that he owns.

Minn Lee has had many men. When one man goes out of her life she finds another, without any fuss. But while she’s with a man she is a one-man woman. She has a code of honour. A woman should be devoted to her man. Whether she loves him or not is immaterial. She has never loved a man. Although that might be about to change. Tony’s life might be about to change as well, but he doesn’t know it yet.

There’s as much murder and mayhem as you could desire in this gangster potboiler. There’s also a kind of love story and there’s the story of a fascinating woman. Being an Edgar Wallace novel it is also naturally highly entertaining. Recommended.

Henry Slesar’s The Secret of Marracott Deep

Henry Slesar’s novella The Secret of Marracott Deep was originally published in the July 1957 issue of the science fiction pulp magazine Fantastic. It’s been recently reprinted by Armchair Fiction in their series of pulp science fiction double novel paperback, paired with  Mark Clifton’s Pawn of the Black Fleet.

Henry Slesar (1927-2002) was an American writer who wrote science fiction, detective stories and thrillers as well as having a very successful career as a television writer.

As The Secret of Marracott Deep opens Burt Holrood and his new bride Jessie have just arrived in Hawaii where they are to spend their honeymoon. But Jessie is behaving oddly. Why would a new bride tell her husband that she’d like to spend some time alone? Burt takes refuge in the bar where he meets British oceanographer Dr Percival Nichols. They are having a quiet drink when they hear screams. It is Jessie! Burt rushes down to the beach to find his wife being menaced by - a gigantic lobster! Not just a particularly big lobster but one bigger than a man.

The lobster is after Jessie again on the following day. Burt figures it must be a mutation caused by atomic testing but don’t worry, the real answer is not so obvious or so boring. Dr Nichols is not convinced but he knows there are all kinds of strange things at the bottom of the ocean in places like the Marracott Deep.

A clue is provided by a Hawaiian reporter. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the lobster seems to be targeting young Mrs Holrood. But what possible connection can a nice young woman from Los Angeles have with oversized crustaceans?

Dr Nichols, being an oceanographer, is a scuba diver. He suggests Burt might like to learn scuba diving. Since he’s spending his honeymoon with a wife who wants to be alone Burt has more free time on his hands than he would have wished for so he agrees. He gets a little over-confident and dives deeper than he’d intended to and he finds something even more startling than giant lobsters. Something that may threaten Civilisation As We Know It.

Burt wants to save civilisation but he’s even more determined to save his wife and she’s certainly in great danger although I’m not going to reveal why that is.

This is a pulp story so there’s no point in getting too worried about details like scientific plausibility. If you accept the story for what it is then it’s quite a bit of fun and there’s  plenty of action. There are other sea monsters besides giant lobsters and there’s something much more threatening than mere sea monsters at the bottom of it.

Slesar’s prose is serviceable enough and he knows how to maintain the right kind of pulpy breathless excitement.

I’m not going to claim that The Secret of Marracott Deep is a great story but it does belong to an interesting sub-genre that I find rather appealing - the unknown terror from the deep science fiction story. It’s a sub-genre that includes John Wyndham’s excellent The Kraken Wakes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s often overlooked 1923 classic The Maracot Deep (which presumably inspired the title of Slesar’s story). Both these books clearly influenced Slesar’s novella but it’s not by any means a mere recycling of exactly the same ideas.

The ending is a bit rushed but I think it works and it has the right impact.

The Secret of Marracott Deep has mysteries in the deepest depths of the ocean, some intrigue involving infiltration of key scientific organisations and it has a beautiful Woman in Peril. It’s fun in its own way. Worth a look.