FFB: The Trials of O’Brien – Robert L. Fish

I was completely unfamiliar with this series. Understandable. I was fifteen at the time it aired and mostly watched and read science fiction. It only ran for one season and I read elsewhere that Peter Falk said he thought more of it than he did his signature show Columbo. It was a post by Todd Mason that alerted me to it’s existence ans since I collect tie-ins, it was a natural. 

Having never seen the show, I can only review it as a crime novel by one of the great crime writers. Fish’s second novel, MUTE WITNESS, as by Robert Pike, became the Steve McQueen film Bulliitt.

Daniel J. O’Brien is a lawyer that likes to play the horses and throw the dice, gamble in general, and is not very successful at any of them. He owes everybody, has an ex-wife that constantly carps about late alimony in the form of bounced checks, and a secretary he’s always borrowing money from and is behind on her salary. Fortunately for him, he seems to bring out the soft spot in women and stays on their good side. Just barely.

O’Brien gets unwittingly involved in a scheme by an old client of his. Benny Kalen is a three time loser. That he only got a few years on his last conviction instead of a dozen makes no impression. O’Brien should have got him off, therefore he didn’t deserve to get paid.

O’Brien gets suckered by Benny’s wife into being at a bar late one night while Benny and a confederate are pulling a stick-up job on a finance company that had just opened next door.

Thinks go wrong and there’s a dead body. Benny;s parole officer had warned O’Brien that he heard his name mentioned and believes he’s in on the job.

Our lawyer is forced to defend his former client, who swears the man was already dead and the safe broken into when he entered the office, in order to clear his name.

For more forgotten books, drop in over at PATTINASE.

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FFB: The Case of The Hardboiled Dicks – John Blumenthal

I should have realized it from the title, but it didn’t take long for me to figure out this book wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. It grabs every private eye cliche and wrings it for every thing it can get out of it. Mac Slade is our erstwhile hero and every woman wants him. He wants every woman. When he brushes a woman off several times, he literally gives her a brush(clothes, hair, lint). 

The women are all beautiful and we get lines like “gams from the hips all the way to the ground” and “a blouse so tight that if breasts could breathe, they would have to come up for air shortly.” He has a gal Friday named Tuesday, he carries a gat, a heater, a roscoe.

He’s not very bright and has been known, when following a car, to lose it and pick up the wrong one later. He once followed a car from New York to Arizona before realizing his mistake.

He’s hired by a beautiful woman who calls herself Mary Smith to find her baby brother Link, in hiding from the mob for gambling debts. Slade quips “I specialize in finding missing links. Also, when he learns her real identity, he finds that her husband committed suicide by shooting himself in the back with a bow-and-arrow. “Not that weird, I did it to myself by accident,” he thinks.  

Bodies keep turning up with a bullet from Slade’s gun in them, but they’ve been dead for hours, boiled alive in water. The first is identified as Mike Hammer, Jr., the second as Philip Marlowe, Jr., and the cops are looking for Sam Spade, Jr., one wanting to pin it all on Slade.

A shadowy figure known as the “Fat Man” seems to be behind it all and Slade runs into a mob boss looking for the brother named Don Corleone.

An amusing little book and it put me in mind of Get Smart for it’s silliness. Don Adams would have been perfect in the role of Mac Slade.

For more forgotten books, drop in on Todd Mason who’s doing the gathering this week over at http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com

FFB: The Big Kiss-Off Of 1944 – Andrew Bergman

Jacob “Jack” Levine is not your regular fictional private eye. He’s Jewish, middle aged, and bald. He has a lady friend with a “friends with benefits” arrangement. The line goes : “I even took my socks off. In my circles, that’s class.”

Still, he’s not immune to the fairer sex.

So when the leggy blonde came in one morning with a problem, Jack was more than ready to help. She had a bit role in a play on Broadway, just having moved from the chorus line, and her problem was blackmail!

It seems when she was on the west coast trying to make it in the movies and in need of money, she’d had a moment of indiscretion and had made a couple of stag films. Now someone was demanding money and promising to tell the show’s producer and she needed the job so bad!

Jack got a twenty dollar retainer from her and said he’d see what he could do.

He soon finds himself in over his head.

 A dead body turns up, the producer calls and is being blackmailed as well. He knows there’s a girl in the show who’s made stag films, but not who, and wants Jack to make the pay-off, twenty thousand.  Another dead body, his first client disappears and Jack figures out she’s more than she seemed(he knew she’d not told him everything), someone is taking shots at him and sending goons by his home, and politics enter the picture, going all the way to the highest office in the land.

I liked this P.I. novel and I have a second one I will get to shortly.

For more forgotten books, check out Patti Abbott over at her blog, PATTINASE, on Fridays.

FFB: Bloody Murdock – Robert Ray

It wasn’t a new story. Older man falls for a young woman half his age and it costs him his marriage.

Laguna P.I. Matt Murdock, not the blind lawyer from New York, doesn’t know that at first. Ellis Dean wants to hire him as a bodyguard. It wasn’t until someone in a red pickup tried to kill Dean, forcing Murdock to put two bullets into the engine to get him off that he began to get the full story.

He’d read about the horrific car accident the night before that had crashed, bursting into flames and killing the young couple, a Mexican actor and the young woman with dreams of Hollywood.

Dean had witnessed the accident, which wasn’t an accident at all, when he’d followed them after she’d ditched him at a party. He was in time, and got photographs, of two men in a red pickup and a Porsche hosing down the wreck with a fire extinguisher. 

His client ends up firing him, then gets himself murdered, and the photos are gone. Then the dead girl’s sister comes to find out what happened.

We get a story of pornography, shattered dreams, and Murdock’s obsession with finding the truth though he’s been fired by two clients before the tale ends.

Good one.

For more forgotten books, as always, drop in on Patti Abbott on Fridays.