FFB: Hark!: A Novel of the 87th Precinct – Ed McBain

Tags

87th Precinct, Ed McBain, Forgotten Books

I found the 87Th Precinct books early on and started reading them as I come across, making use of the local library system for a great many of them. I’m down to a half dozen to finish the fifty odd titles. HUSH! was one I found there and it featured the final appearance of The Deaf Man, a criminal that bedeviled the detectives in six novels. He never had a name other than The Deaf Man and planned meticulous crimes that Steve Carella and company had to decipher.

Here he sends a series of anagrams taunting the detectives. He may be behind a revenge shooting. Hints are dropped that he may not even be deaf. Using Shakespeare’s works to taunt them with riddles indicating his next crime, they test their literary skills as they interpret them.

By the end, The Deaf Man is still on the loose. He may or may not have planned to reurn to the character somewhere down the road.

FFB: Blind Justice At Wedlock – Ross Morton

Tags

Forgotten Books, Nik Morton

BLIND JUSTICE AT WEDLOCK is not an old book, a Black Horse Western from 2011. Ross Morton is of course author Nik Morton.

Clint Brennan was shot and left for dead, along with his dog Mutt, the last thing he saw were the two men dragging his wife Belle from their home. It was a third person that shot him.

Clint was blind when he came to, one shot having hit him in the head.

A little thing like blindness wasn’t going to stop him from saving Belle though. Mutt wasn’t badly wounded either and after a bit of bandaging, feeling around for supplies and one of Belle’s nightgowns, the pair leaves with Mutt trailing the scent.

Meanwhile, Belle gets rescued by a gentleman and taken to his home in a nearby town, he promising to help her get back to Bethesda Falls to see to her husband’s body. But there was always a reason why it couldn’t be done immediately.

A believably done story of a determined blind man to find and rescue his wife. And find out what was going on.

Really enjoyed this one.

FFB: The Bedroom Bolero – Michael Avallone

Tags

Ed Noon, Forgotten Books, Michael Avallone

The world was changing for P.I. Ed Noon. The Mouse Auditorium was a thing of the past, Noon having moved to more uptown digs. His secretary had run off, gotten married, an Noon had hired a young black woman, Melissa Mercer, to replace her. Now he just needed a case to keep the new prosperity going.

Then Captain Mike Monks, the sole cop he could call friend, shows up at his door. He wanted to know what Noon knew about a piece of music called “Bolero.” A stiff had been found in a bedroom with four red painted walls, no furniture other than a record player with that record playing over and over. The rest of the day was a bust, only one woman who wanted her estranged husband beat up and then insulted his new secretary, and Monks called at the end of the day.

Two more corpses, all three with the same things in common: all with a heart condition(and treated at the same hospital), naked and strangled in a furniture less room but for a record player with the same recording of Ravel’s Bolero. posed amid walls of red paint(Bolero Red as it turns out), all three with double initial names(D E & A).

Then the performance artist with the name Evelyn Eleven wants to hire him to beat up a man who threatened to kill her. Her act was accompanied by the Bolero song and her supposed future killer was named Thaddeus Orelob.

It all leads to a strange case for our favorite private eye.

The Ed Noon series is being released to ebook. If you want some great reads, pick up a few.

FFB: Danger: Dinosaurs! – Evan Hunter

Tags

Evan Hunter, Forgotten Books

Winston Science Fiction was a series, thirty-five, of juveniles published between 1952 and 1961. There was one collection and one non-fiction among them. SF writers mostly, but some more known for other genres. As here(this one and another couple were originally published as by Richard Marsden). All were especially written for the series and distinguished by that rocket on the spine. I frequently looked for that rocket when I was very young. Don’t know that I read all of them back then. Likely not.

Owen and Chuck Spencer should have been suspicious of Dirk Masterson from the start. Owen was the guide for the Time Slip back to the Jurassic era and Chuck was being allowed to go along. Masterson was unco-operative from go, not wanting to prove his identity.

Things only got worse when they went back. Masterson jumps into a jeep and takes off at high speed, crashing into and shoring out the force field that kept the dinosaurs away from them. And the recall wasn’t for a week.

When Masterson and his partner pulled hunting rifles from their truck, The Spencer brothers knew trouble was here. You see, this was a photography only mission. Killing was illegal.

And finally, Chuck discovers mining equipment and dynamite stored in Masterson’s truck.

A nice little juvenile science fiction novel. I did have problems with one plot line, but won’t give that away. Try it and see what you think. They are available as ebooks.

FFB: The Avengers Battle The Earth-Wrecker – Otto Binder

Tags

Forgotten Books, Otto Binder, Science Fiction

The Binder brothers, Earl and Otto, were SF writers in the early days of the sf pulp era. They wrote together under the pen name Eando Binder. Their most famous work is probably I, ROBOT, the story of Adam Link, an intelligent robot accused of murdering it’s creator. It was filmed twice on two versions of the series Outer Limits. The sixities version starred Leonard Nimoy as a journalist covering the trial and the nineties version again starred Nimoy, this time as Adam Link’s lawyer. I covered the collected stories, Adam Link, Robot a few years back.

By 1939, Earl had retired from writing and was his brother’s literary agent.

THE AVENGERS BATTLE THE EARTH-WRECKER can only be described as pure pulp, the last book Otto had published. It was in 1967.

it concerned the Avengers Battle with Karzz The Conqueror, an alien from 5000 years in the future who was out to destroy Earth. Humans in his future had thwarted the alien’s armada and he wanted to destroy the planet before they achieved their future supremacy.

Despite the cover, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch are described in a TV program at the beginning as former Avengers. It was actually Goliath and the Wasp in the narrative.

FFB: Blood Kin – Hank J. Kirby

Tags

Forgotten Books, Hank J. Kirby

Josh Ryder spent ten years in Yuma for something he didn’t do. Accused of murdering Sheriff Matt Malloy, Josh was one of his deputies, he’d been set up by men in the town who wanted both out of the way. The sheriff couldn’t be bribed and Josh backed him. so he was framed, his own gun used to kill Malloy. A quick trial, though manslaughter was all the jury would convict him(still had friends in town).

To top things off, the warden was Cash Malloy, the less than honest brother of the murdered Sheriff and, while believing the story, he was paid to break Josh, kill him.

Nothing worked.

After ten years, Josh got out and exacted a little revenge on the brutal guard doing the warden’s billing, then disappeared.

The ten years had changed the naive young man. At thirty-one, with the beatings, the several times broken nose, Josh was hardly recognizable. He would use that to get the people that put him falsely in prison.

Originally published as a Black Horse Western in 1997, the book I have is a large print by Linford Western Library for a 1998 edition.

FFB: Copp On Fire – Don Pendleton

Tags

Don Pendleton, Forgotten Books

Don Pendleton is best known of course for creating The Executioner Mack Bolan and later turning it into an empire. But he wrote other things as well and very good in their own right. Former policeman P.I. Joe Copp was one. COPP ON FIRE was the second of six published in 1988.

Joe Copp, though like most P.I.s close to broke all the time, didn’t really want the job, eve when $1300.00 in cash was laid in his hands. A handicapped man in a big white limousine wanted him for ten hours to take photos of people entering and leaving a business. He was looking for a rat. The man remained unidentified and after spending the day taking photos Joe met and turned the film, undeveloped, over to the chauffeur.

That’s when things went downhill fast. The business blew up. a bomb took out the limousine and it’s occupants, and the people Joe had photographed started getting knocked off one by one. He’d turned over his copies to the police and one wanted to hang the whole mess on Joe.

Figuring he’d been set up to the the fall, Joe got mad and went hunting, even as more bodies were showing up.

Nicely plotted and paced novel that I couldn’t stop reading.

New editions of the books are available as ebooks and well worth a look.

FFB: Death of A Gunfighter – Lewis B. Patten

Tags

Forgotten Books, Lewis B. Patten, western

Things came to a head in the town of Cottonwood springs when Marshal Frank Patch killed Luke Mills. Mills was a drunk, but when that challenging voice yelled out of the dark alley and a couple of shots followed, instinct took over and a man was dead.

The town had been trying to get Patch to quit for a few years now. They thought it was time for a uniformed police force. He was an anachronism these days. But Patch always refused. When he’d taken the job, it was a wild town and his type was needed.

But that was twenty years ago. The shots from Mills were the first fired Patch’s way in four years.

The town was afraid of Patch. He had a manner about him. Take his girl friend. In the last five yers, he’d never hit her, threatened her, looked crosswise at her, or raised his voice to her. Yet she was afraid of him.

Patch got away with refusing to quit because, after twenty years, he knew stuff about the important people in town, things they wouldn’t want advertised. Threats to not pay didn’t work either. His answer was he had money put away and it didn’t cost him much to live.

But something had to be done. Businesses had passed on locating in town when they saw the big gunfighter type riding through town.. They thought it was still rough. Growth had stagnated.

Patch had his own insecurities as well. The big, gruff man that frightened everybody was afraid himself. What would he do if he wasn’t Marshal. He knew nothing else.

So the town decided what they were going to do.

The novel was made into a film starring Richard Widmark as Patch and Lena Horne as his girl friend.

Final note. Heath Lowrance had this in a post and attracted my attention. He says he got it from Cullen Gallagher.

FFB: Hollywood and LeVine – Andrew Bergman

Tags

Andrew Bergman, Forgotten Books

I’ve written about P.I. Jack LeVine before.

It’s 1947 and Jack LeVine runs into an old college friend he hasn’t seen since before the war. Walter Adrian had made a career in Hollywood writing screenplays. One LeVine had loved, another not so much.

Adrian looked terrible, worried about something. Laying one false story on LeVine, he finally admitted he was having contract problems and wanted His friend to come to Hollywood and find out why. A new contract was in negotiation and Warner Brothers not only wasn’t offering him a raise, they wanted to cut his pay.

LeVine heads for Hollywood and goes to Warner Brothers where Adrian was working late on a script, only to find him on the back lot on a western set hanging from a scaffold.

The police call it suicide, but LeVine was suspicious. The trapdoor he’d been standing on that killed him when he fell through didn’t allow Adrian to hit the lever that opened it. Bot to mention the lump on the back of his head.

LeVine decides to look into it.

But no one wants him doing that. Shots are taken at him, the police are warning him off, and the meeting with freshman Senator Richard Nixon reinforces what they consider the problem.

Remember this is 1947 and Nixon is heading up the west coast version of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

LeVine keeps plugging along. The highlight of the story is the inale, a long car chase and shootout with LeVine aided by none other than Humphrey Bogart doing the driving. Lauren Bacall was left behind at the party where it started.

A fun read.

FFB: The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse – Michael Avallone

Tags

Forgotten Books, Michael Avallone

Ed Noon wouldn’t normally object when a woman asked him to take off his clothes. Especially a good-looking blonde. But when she’s pointing a .45 at him with an ugly esxpression on her face.

It started on the day Ed Noon was to get his P.I. license and back after a year of suspension. Noon’s friend, Captain Mike Monks had called him and said he had something he needed help with.

As he stepped onto the street of his office building. someone opened up with a Tommy gun. Noon goes down as does a blind man and the two little China dolls, daaughters of the laundry man next door and favorites of Noon, who constantly slipped them lollipops.

Noon took two in the chest and two glancing blows. The blind man was dead, as one was of the little Chinese girls. The other wound up with a permanently crippled arm.

Three weeks later when Noon gets out of the hospital, he’s mugged by that gorgeous blond who thinks he has something she wants. Noon can’t convince her or get her to say what it is. She just believes he’s stalling.

It’s all tied in with what Monks wanted help with: a murdered, unidentified body, a man horribly mutilated and left naked in a car.

We soon get a bomb in a laundry, more dead bodies, and Noon no closer to any sort of solution.

Another fine P.I. tale from Michael Avallone.