Case of the Village Tramp by Jonathan Craig

Case of the Village Tramp by Jonathan Craig
Gold Medal 930, Copyright 1959

Jonathan Craig was a damn good mystery writer. Unfortunately, he became lost in the shadows of the more popular Gold Medal authors from the 1950s. Most of his paperbacks were published by Gold Medal, with the bulk involving murder investigations by NYPD Detective Pete Selby. Selby and his partner Stan Rayder work out of the Sixth Precinct, and mix it up with the oddball inhabitants of Greenwich Village. During that time, Craig wasn’t afraid to push the envelope a bit. You’ll find characters in the stories on the kinky side, with a few perverts (1950s style) popping up in the plots. But hold on, these are exciting detective dramas. Packing .38s and kicking down doors, Selby and Rayder perform old fashion police legwork to solve each whodunit case.

I holstered my gun and walked to the window. Blondie Miller's body was impaled on the swordlike points of an ornamental iron fence that ran across the brick courtyard five floors below. It was hard to be sure from that angle and at that distance, but he seemed to have been disemboweled.

Beautiful seventeen year old Sharon Ramey is found murdered in her apartment, wearing nothing but a medieval chastity belt. Selby discovers that Sharon was famous as a child classical concert pianist, but also learns that sweet little old Sharon wasn’t so sweet after all. For the past year, a trail of men have been lead into her bedroom and the detectives suspect one is the murderer. Lurking in the story is a syndicate rat who is being hunted by a psycho hitman who performs his work using an ice pick. As leads come in, Selby struggles to find a link between these two men and the murder. There is a wonderful scene where a lesbian enters the precinct to offer up a possible suspect for the detectives. The exchange is so unorthodox, that you wonder who is running the investigation, the detectives or her. As we near the end of the story, we seem no closer than in the beginning on finding the identity of the murderer. But after a brutal torture scene and some gunplay, things start falling in place for Selby. And as the detectives head out to nab the murderer, we are treated to an excellent ending by Jonathan Craig.

You'll find no complains by me on this novel, this is solid hardnosed crime fiction. 1950s police detectives doing their jobs, tackling the challenges thrown at them. From the offbeat characters they meet during the investigation, to the perverted police captain who gets his kicks hearing Selby reporting on the naked victim and her unusual lifestyle -all make this novel (and the whole Pete Selby series) a wonderment in this definitive genre from a bygone crime writing era.

As I said, It's ashame that Jonathan Craig has faded in popularity. The man could write a mystery story, and you won't find a bad novel in his bibliography. Also, he wrote a slew of excellent short stories that appeared in all the major mystery periodicals, including Manhunt, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine. But don't overlook his non-Pete Selby novels, to me they contain his best work. And if you ever come across his paperback "Renegade Cop" (also published as "Alley Girl") you'll be introduced to the nastiest S.O.B. rogue cop ever found in any novel.

The Kremlin Plot by Don Smith

The Kremlin Plot by Don Smith
Award AQ1402, Copyright 1971

He pressed the sharpened end of the wood under the fingernail and the excruciating pain made me jerk and the rope cut into my throat. He sat back and watched the drop of blood ooze out and run down the strip of wood and fall to the stone floor.
"The offer is still open," he said calmly.

One of the better written adventure series that came out in the 60s/70s heyday era were the "Secret Mission" espionage novels by Don Smith. The stories are actually mysteries and American Phil Sherman is our agent in the field. Sherman's cover is selling business equipment and this allows him to enter any country where the Agency feels the need to deploy his "special" talent. Don't be fooled into thinking he's one of those super vigilante CIA operatives, Sherman is a shrewd detective and the world stage is his turf.

In "The Kremlin Plot," the mission literally falls in Sherman's lap. On a business trip to Moscow, an attempted hijacking occurs on his plane. The hijacker is shot by the co-pilot, but before he dies he drops design plans for a new Russian missile defense system on Sherman. He enters Moscow knowing this is too hot to have on him and quickly heads over to the American Embassy to pass them off. A snag prevents an easy hand off, and before you know it people are coming out of the woodwork to find out what Sherman knows and what he has. Beautiful young female engineers, the KGB, British Intelligence, and nasty Chinese agents that are lurking in the shadows,-all play a deadly game to get the plans from Sherman.

Photographs of the plans are stolen from his hotel and Sherman sets out find who took them and get them back. Sherman has a backbone, but he has his limits. Through torture, bedroom bribes, and KGB interrogation, -he almost breaks, but stays on the trail and carries this mission to the end.

Lately, I've found myself reading more and more of these fine Don Smith novels. I missed them when they first came out, and I'm sort of glad because they are not dated at all. They are written so well that they come off fresh and new. I actually find the stories more believable than the bulk of the stuff that was coming off the printing machines during this era. The plots are well developed, with devious international characters as adversaries. (watch out for a duo of Slavic black marketeers) Phil Sherman comes off as the real deal. He doesn't carry a weapon or have any high tech gadgets. He's just a "dick" on a cloak and dagger case, that plays like a well crafted mystery crime novel. There are around twenty paperbacks in the series and I've enjoyed every one so far.

As for Don Smith, he is becoming one of my favorite authors.

Fat City by Leonard Gardner

Fat City by Leonard Gardner
HB ed., Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright 1969

Fat City is a California noir story about the torpid lives of two despairing boxers, one old and one young. One day their bleak paths cross in a gym and from then on we are taken into a world of destitute souls, broken romance, and faded dreams. Set in the seedy part of 1950s Stockton, Gardner uses the backdrop of small-time local boxing to intensify the stark mood of this distressing tale.

"His life, he felt, had turned against him. He was convinced every day of it had been mislived. His attention dulled, his ears humming, a sense of emptiness and panic hovering about him, he feared he was losing his mind. Catastrophes seemed to whisper just beyond hearing."

Billy Tully is the older washed up boxer, who has been lagging out a living as a field picker or a short order cook; anything to get a couple of bucks to pay for his flophouse and a bottle. His best days have past, and he faces a long future of grim disconsolation. Thinking he still has some gas in the tank, he attempts a return to the ring and chase an unreachable illusion. He meets 18 year old Ernie Munger and encourages the boy towards local boxing. Ernie has some talent, but not enough to get him out of the entrapped life he will forever live in Stockton.

This novel is much more than a palooka boxing story. It's a haunting portrayal of people who seem content embracing an existence of little hope, and find comfort living in despair and lack of personal drive. Leonard Gardner delivers it through the depressed atmosphere of the harsh streets of Stockton, with all of its cast of characters eroding in a world they composed of their own failures. Fleabag hotels, crooked managers, stale smelling taverns, drunken lush women that live in turnstile bedrooms, and yet Gardner teases us into thinking that a glimmer of hope can spark, especially for young Ernie. But escape is too difficult and failure continues to be the word in everyone's destiny.

Leonard Gardner wrote numerous short shorts and screenplays, but "Fat City" is his only novel. When first published, it received wide acclaim and caught the interest of director John Huston. (who directed the 1972 film) But now this novel seems forgotten, and that is a shame. Few better than this capture the honest depiction of cheap uncaring lives -with its pains of past glory, hopelessness, and utter loneliness.

Virgin Cay by Basil Heatter

Virgin Cay by Basil Heatter
Gold Medal k1310, Copyright 1963

I read a few Basil Heatter novels before this one, some I enjoyed and others seemed bland to me. One which was a historical novel, I gave up on. (but to be fair I am no big fan of historical novels) He did author quite a few books, though I never could find a complete listing of his work. I gave "Virgin Cay" a shot not expecting much, and was I wrong. The novel convinced me not to quit on this author. It contains an exciting little scorcher of an adventure story, where the seed is planted for a crime that can not be allowed to occur.

She was speechless with rage. At that moment she could of killed him. But she managed to bring herself under control. Without Dino she would be alone, and she could not stand to be alone. When you were alone you remembered the way Harry looked with the top of his head blown off and the spatter of brains on the English carpet.

After his boat went down in a storm, self-sufficient Gus Robinson washes ashore on the island of Spanish Cay. He receives some care and interest from Clare Loomis, a socialite who has a few secrets in her conniving closet. Clare needs a relative of hers to disappear and Robinson fits the bill to make it happen. Claire offers the "job" to him for twenty thousand dollars. With the lost of his boat and with no money, Robinson also lost his independence and accepts the offer.

Old family money is behind the reason for the crime, but sparks fly when Robinson meets the intended victim, young beautiful Gwen Leacock. Both know nothing will come of their little romance, for Gwen is committed to marry another man. But Robinson has a soul and concocts a scheme to deceive Clare and keep the cash. He comes clean with Gwen, who agrees to be a part in his risky plan. And even with impending dangers, it comes off nautically smooth.

If you ever read a Basil Heatter novel, you know he had talent. In fact it was in his genes, his father was newsman Gabriel Heatter. "Virgin Cay" is a story that contains a plot that is admirably crafted. After finishing it I quickly thought of a combination of a seafaring novel by Charles Williams and an early John D. MacDonald work, with it's shady players entangled in an island soap opera. Heatter delivers on presenting genuine, realistic characters. Gus Robinson, after some doubt, turns into a decent guy that the reader can take a liking to. Gwen struggles with conflicting emotions and takes the most risk in Robinson's scheme. Then there is Claire Loomis, who Robinson even shows some sympathy for because there is a reason for her evilness. Throw in a strong cast of supporting characters and Basil Heatter delivers on creating a neat little adventurous mystery novel. It works well and recommended for a sandy hot weather read.


If you want something different from Basil Heatter, find yourself a copy of "Harry and the Bikini Bandits." An escapade of rip-roaring fun. Whenever I see the paperback cover, I wish I was Harry sitting on that case of dynamite.

Gold Medal t2372 (1971)

Thin Air by Howard Browne

Thin Air by Howard Browne
Dell 894, Copyright 1954

"Our street was as black as an account executive's tie."

In 1954, three years before Howard Browne started his career as a television script writer, he wrote "Thin Air." It involves a theme that others have covered may times - a missing wife, with the husband being the main suspect. Of course Browne being no slouch of a writer, took it a step further and put together a sharp piece of crime literature, which starts in a sterile setting and then takes us down a bleak road of violent danger.

"It was no way to die. Her face was bloated and the wrong color, her mouth wide and strained far back, her tongue enormous. Her eyes bulged out until they were no longer eyes but something out of the psychiatric ward at Bellevue."

Ames Coryell finally pulls into his Westchester County driveway after thirteen straight hours on the road from a Maine vacation. Sleeping in the back seat is his exhausted wife and three year old daughter. On arrival, his wife immediately leaves the car to open the house while Coryell gets his sleeping daughter out of the back. Once inside, Coryell can’t locate his wife. She has disappeared. After a frantic search, he combs the neighborhood streets with no luck. The police are notified and later a male neighbor that his wife knew is found unconscious, near death in the bushes. Suspicion quickly turns to Ames Coryell as a suspect in the assault on the neighbor and his wife’s disappearance. Feeling that the cops are inept, Coryell decides he must take action and get personally involved to find out what happen on that night.

What makes this missing persons story different than others is Coryell’s position as vice president of a major NYC advertising agency. The next morning he heads to work assembling all his business contacts, using their skills to construct a world-class campaign to get leads on his wife. He has some of the best marketers, commercial designers, and researchers at his disposal. He puts together his little private detective agency in one day and has his wife’s photo out in the streets, on radio and television in hours. Leads quickly come in and he personally investigates them, during which a couple of murders occur. At this point in the story, Coryell plays it like a hardboiled dick, hitting the streets with gun in hand and roughing it up with a few informants. Though an amateur, he’s no dummy – he finally pieces it together.

Howard Browne doesn’t hold anything back from the reader. The clues are there throughout the story, we just have to grab the right ones and place them accordingly. He sure had the wonderful talent of taking a storyline that has been covered before and building it into a dark, noir potboiler. The twist in using the advertising agency as a means to locate Coryell’s wife was surprisingly unique, even though I thought he got into a little too much detail on it's workings for my taste. But after Browne sails through that, he takes us on a hardboiled trail through shabby apartments, small-time hoods, a dark mysterious proprietor and finally to a hell of an ending. A first-rate mystery novel.

I’ll admit “Thin Air” is a bit far fetch and not his best novel, but Howard Browne’s writing is so good that anything he authored is well worth your time. In fact later when the author was working as a writer for television, he adapted this storyline for numerous television detective scripts. There was a high demand for his TV crime dramas, but he really excelled when writing mystery novels. His best work is undoubtedly the four detective novels, featuring Chicago P.I. Paul Pine. Definitely one of the best detective series ever written, all four novels are outstanding and they are personal favorites of mine.

Halo in Blood (1946, pseud. John Evans)
Halo for Satan (1948, pseud. John Evans)
Halo in Brass (1949, pseud. John Evans)
The Taste of Ashes (1957, Howard Browne)

And if you can find it, don’t miss the one Paul Pine short story that appeared (under his pseud. John Evans) in the Feb. 1953 issue of Manhunt Detective Story, “So Dark for April.” In could be the best short story the prominent mystery magazine ever published.

Sands Of the Kalahari by William Mulvihill

The Sands of the Kalahari by William Mulvihill
HB ed., G.P. Putnam's Sons,
Copyright 1960

Take a plane crash in the remote reaches of the Kalahari desert and pit six people (five men and one woman) against each other, and you may have the best psychological survival novel since "Lord of the Flies."

"He found himself thinking of baboons constantly. A dead baboon was better than a live one. It was one less belly to fill. If all of them were dead there would be no competition for the meager food resources of the mountain. There was nothing he could do that was as important as killing baboons. The others could look for honey and lizards and melons. He would kill."

"The Sands of the Kalahari" throw the six strangers into an environment where for them the outside world has ceased. They are stripped bare "into the primitive," having to depend on their inner abilities and suspicious faith in their fellow man. Unable to unite to better the predicament, competition forces them to struggle for leadership, the meager food supplies, and the woman. Mulvihill provides no standout main character, instead all six play an equally important part in the story. The real protagonist is the harsh desert wasteland, an entity that we can't have sympathy for.

Survival is most important, so members cautiously align themselves. The girl, Grace Monckton, quickly attaches herself to O'Brien, the hunter of the group. Being a man of strength and instinct, O'Brien can provide and protect her from the others. Three venture (or are forced) out to trek through the desert to find salvation. Fate awaits them all. Grimmelmann, an old German war survivor, has desert living knowledge, but his turbulent conflicts with O'Brien come at a cost. Guilt and pity torment the failed pilot, Sturdevant. And possibly the most dramatic of them all is a black American scholar by the name of Jefferson Smith, who's black African history is slammed into him in this 20th century world. Last is Mike Bain, another American who is unprepared to meet the challenge and overcome his weakness in bravery.

Beside the struggles between themselves, they share the desert mountain area with a group of baboons, competing for the scarce available food. Eating baboon is a form of cannibalism to the group, so using them as a food source is out of the question. Instead O'Brien sets out to eliminate the primates. This changes the balance of things, because eons of evolution to adapt and endure make the baboons stronger than any rifle.

William Mulivhill's novel contains strong characters and a powerful survival narrative. Underneath it is a psychological thriller, where we wonder if you first have to be lost to find oneself. A fantastic ending, not one that the reader would expect. A novel that I thoroughly enjoyed. "The Sands of the Kalahari" was so successful for William Mulvihill, that all of his other novels were forever overshadowed by it.

"He found a place to sleep and lay looking up at the great sky. How far was this from a city with electric lights and automobiles? How many miles, how many years, how many centuries?"

The Star Trap by Robert Colby

The Star Trap by Robert Colby
Gold Medal 1043, Copyright 1960

Robert Colby was one of those authors that never got the fame and recognition that he deserved. His 1959 novel, “The Captain Must Die” was one of the first Gold Medal books that I ever read. I picked it up because I thought it was a war story, ‘course it turned out to be one of GM’s best novels - involving three men seeking violent revenge years after the war, towards a man who they thought wronged them. Two other Gold Medal entries from 1959, “Secret of the Second Door” and “The Deadly Desire” also captured the author’s ability to build a highly suspenseful noir story in just under 130 pages. All are quick page turners that will compel the reader to continue on until the end. The same could be said of Colby’s fourth Gold Medal novel “The Star Trap,” where after aiding a voluptuous beauty, a respectable young man gets caught in a dragnet of deception and murder.

She wore the same turquoise wool-knit suit in which I seen her last. And she managed to look just as beautiful in it, though her face was staining with tension. The sight of her gave me a moment of relief, disturbing the old longings. The feeling passed in an instant and I hated the bitch.

In the middle of the night, struggling B actor Glenn Harley gets a hysterical phone call from starlet Nancy Rhymer. She needs Harley to come over to her house immediately. Harley, who always has secretly longed for Nancy Rhymer, jumps out of bed and drives quickly to her home. Once there, he discovers she has knifed a semi-famous actor to death “in self defense” and needs Harley’s help to clean things up to protect her from scandal. His affection for the actress is too strong to refuse and he ends up burying the corpse along with it's belongings. Of course as he is digging the grave, we know he is actually digging himself deeper and deeper into a world of blackmail, disloyalty, and hunted persecution.

A few days later Nancy Rhymer flees from sight and Harley learns that the dead actor had $350,000 on him. The money belongs to a crooked independent film producer, who along with a couple of dirty cops, has been blackmailing Hollywood hotshots in a sex ring setup. Harley goes back to where he buried the man and finds the corpse gone. Suspecting that the Rhymer girl took the cash and is using him, he heads back to his apartment where the two dirty cops are waiting and play rough with him. Later, the two rogue cops conveniently find the dug up body in Harley’s car trunk. Thinking that he has the loot, the dirty cops pressure Harley to turn it over and if he does they will forget about finding the corpse. But he doesn't have it and escapes. This becomes a major headline story and now he is a fugitive, on the run for murder. Harley has to go it alone to get the evidence to clear his involvement and he does it by devising a sneaky little scheme.

Colby had a masterful way to developing a suspense filled plot, and doing it he created pockets of enriching text. It could be as simple as when Glenn Harley is describing his current position as an actor in the business, “I got parts. But I always felt they were handouts.” Or deeper, like his assertion of another actress who resorted to the casting-couch route, “She was one of the lost ones on the same road to oblivion all of us are traveling. But like so many escaping in the labyrinth of sensual amorality, she had more heart than guile, more warmth than a host of virtuous pretenders I have known.” Half the enjoyment of a Robert Colby story is the descriptive discourse between the protagonist and reader. And when he throws in an atmosphere of noir and unbridled tension, you have an exciting mystery/crime novel written by an author that will have you hunting down more of his work.

If you never read a Robert Colby novel, the Gold Medal books are the place to start. But don't overlook his other novels that were printed by many of the quality paperback publishers of the day. Even in the ACE Doubles, where many of their stories are below average for this genre, the four Colby novels are some of the best that the publishing company put out. And if you’re lucking enough to stumble on one of Robert Colby’s many short stories that appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in the 60s and 70s, I guarantee you will be rewarded if you check them out.