The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

C.W. Sughrue, hero and narrator of The Last Good Kiss (1979), should have been played by Richard Boone.

I'm guessing around the time the novel was in preparation for release, he was battling Robert Mitchum as a villain in the remake of The Big Sleep.

While the Raymond Chandler classic was being retooled for the big screen, James Crumley was probably working under the hood of the private eye genre and fine-tuning this variation.  

Not much later Boone passed away, but his rugged would have been perfect for Sughrue.

It's probably best that, despite reading high praise for it over the years maybe first in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or another publication at the time, I didn't read the first Sughrue adventure too early.

 I checked out a paperback edition from the library but didn't get far past the fabulous first line about the beer swilling bulldog, Fireball Roberts. My bad.

Still, I don't think I would have appreciated Sughrue and Crumley's perspective without more of my own.

Montana detective Sughrue is tired and cynical as the book opens, and his tale is not one of straightforward investigation. It's a tale with twists and turns that follows the hell-raising detective's involvement with renowned hell-raising author, Abraham Trahearne, and his quirky family situation.

He's first hired to find Trahearne. That's before the book's action begins. We catch up as he's getting close.

While locating the author in a California dive, he's hired--for $87--by the bar owner to find her long, long lost daughter, but things aren't quite as simple or straightforward as they look.

Trahearne winds up shot in a barroom altercation, so while he's in the hospital Sughrue begins the legwork and learns the lost daughter, Betty Sue, went from high school acting into Bay Area porn, eventually put on a lot of weight and left town.

His later findings about where she went next don't please Mom much.

After Trahearne's healed a bit, Sughrue takes him home, meets his family which includes the current wife who hired Sughrue, the ex-wife who's still in love with him and Trahearne's wealthy mom.

The odd family setup's integral to the story as it moves along, and that soon involves second rate mobsters, more secrets about Betty Sue, gunplay and eventually an ending that's surprising and brutal. It's as you might expect from an unflinchingly unromantic depiction of the private eye, though maybe Sughure's last move is romantic and appropriate and a good fit for the narrative.

To say more than that all the hype for this novel is pretty accurate if you're in the right place would be too much of a spoiler. It's a great entry in the private eye realm of the mystery genre, and happily, though Crumley's passed away, he finished several more books in the Sughrue series over the years.

Impulse buy

Phantom of the 13th Floor by Marilyn Ross

Gothic romances as mentioned in an earlier post enjoyed a long heyday in the '60s and '70s, perhaps fueled in longevity by symbiotic success of Dark Shadows, TV's Gothic soap which began in 1966 and continued until 1971.

Perhaps appropriately, a long series of Dark Shadows paperback tie-ins were released under the pen name Marylin Ross, actually William Edward Daniel or W.E.D. Ross (1912-1995).

Ross also penned a long string of stand-alone gothics under Marylin and a variety of other pseudonyms including tales from perhaps the twilight of the gothic era.

Phantom of the 13th Floor would seem to be from that later edge of the era, released four years after Dark Shadows' cancellation.

It's an engaging little tale set around Christmastime and New Year's in midtown Manhattan and stretches the boundaries of the gothic. It might be called romantic suspense these days. It eschews the usual old dark houses, though there is the ominous Midtown Hotel Brant, modeled on the Drake Hotel.

The heroine's a young Broadway actress who's a bit naive. Joan Crane is the granddaughter of actress Molly Miller who headlined "Me and Molly" in 1928 until her death in a fall during a party at the Brant. Joan's starring in a mid-'70s revival with much of the same production team and living in an apartment across the street from the historic hotel.

She's dating choreographer Rex Grayston, a generically perfect romantic lead, has a cabbie named Archie on retainer, and is surrounded by a circle that includes some familiar with her grandmother or at least the theater community.

A written invitation from Rex lures Joan to a party at the Brant on a rainy December night after a show, and there she encounters a turban-wearing mystic who soon has her in a trance that will quickly be followed by blackouts that coincide with murders. All of the victims have some tie to Joan's grandmother or others involved with the show including the gentlemanly producer of both original and revival.

As Joan becomes a murder suspect, Rex is drawn away to tweak the dances on a show in another city leaving her to fend on her own, and a possibly ghostly or possibly criminal series of events unfolds as Christmas approaches.

Ross tosses several red herrings into the mix, teases a bit of a romantic rival in the police detective investigating the murders and keeps the supernatural viable for much of the tale. Is the ghost of Molly Miller possessing Joan to kill off old rivals? Is the Vaudeville mentalist who once loved Molly really dead or pulling Joan's strings in a twisted act of revenge?

Despite the twists the tale remains a thriller and not a true mystery. The theater world feels just a tad generic. The sense that the novel was penned for a target audience is always there, as is the case with most tales of a type, I suppose. There's also a sense that this is a bit of a soap-on-paper, more in the realm of The Edge of Night if not Dark Shadows. 

None of that's to say it's not a fun, creepy and engaging page-turner with a real atmosphere of a grim and cold winter city as backdrop.

Gothics, especially those by prolific masters like Ross, shouldn't be lost to time. The serve up interesting thrills and chills.

Murder in the Wind by John D. MacDonald

Great critiques have already been written about Murder in the Wind (1956) assessing its place in John D. MacDonald's development as a writer, and Stephen King has praised it as an influence. It's another I picked up in conjunction with a re-read of It. Wind, like The End of the Night, suggests influence on King and especially the massive multi-viewpoint approach in It.

Several other factors were also involved in my purchase and reading, beyond studying King.

I love MacDonald's work, as this blog would indicate, and Murder, sometimes called Hurricane really seemed like something I ought to take a look at after enduring Hurricane Irma as it swept through Central Florida. It's almost like a 60-year-old prophecy of a storm's path.

In some ways, Murder also reminds me of The Crossroads, a slightly later fifties novel that really re-awakened my interest in MacDonald several years ago as well as kicking off a period of non-Travis McGee reading. Like Wind, it winds together various plot and character threads around an almost-peripheral crime.

Murder in the Wind is interesting immediately as a historic thumbnail perspective on hurricanes before the development of current technology and modeling.

The fictional hurricane that kicks off the book's action sweeps around Cuba, into the Gulf of Mexico and gains power before battering Florida's West coast. No one really quite knows what's coming as the story unfolds.

And MacDonald begins to introduce characters who'll be in its path. It's an episodic ride that anticipates future disaster fiction and movies.

We meet a young family who came south to find better climate for an ailing child only to find the struggle of starting a small firm to great. They're beginning the trek back north under a gloom of personal failure.

There's also a deal-making businessman and his aging underling who's failed to manage a merger properly, so both are headed north to fix the problems.

Then there are two young criminals and their despondent girlfriend, a slightly mentally challenged young woman who's found their company preferable to bad family circumstances. An FBI agent grief stricken over the loss of his wife rounds things out and ultimate helps tie threads together as the murder of the title and other tragedies unfold at the novel's core.

And a host of others join in. MacDonald even gives us a finely drawn portrait of a long-haul trucker distracted by the recent discovery of his wife's cheating while he's on the road. That leads to the disastrous accident and road blockage that throws the disparate strangers together in an abandoned house to ride out the storm.

As plans are made for the weathering, MacDonald shifts gears, providing the other side of the equations introduced in the early portion of the books. We learn the assistant's understanding of the failed merger and more as the murder transpires and nature and brutal happenstance take over.

MacDonald builds to a satisfying conclusion in the storm's aftermath and ends with a ray of hope.

I'm glad I didn't read it while riding out Irma, but I'm happy to have experienced the novel. It really captures the blend of dread and denial connected with an approaching storm and gives a realistic taste of the brief period in the eye of a storm when disaster seems imminent and possible.

He also delves into human experience in rich and meaningful ways and offers a snapshot of the times.  Murder in the Wind is a great read and a worthy work of fiction.

The Sorcerers by Dorian Winslow (Daoma Winston)

In the the latter days of the gothic paperback era, Avon books offered up a brief and now hard-to-find (or at least pricey) Satanic line. Distinguished by a goat's-head logo, each was penned by a different author. They bore titles like Lord Satan, Her Demon Lover and Red Wine of Rapture and appeared from 1973 to 1974. 

It was the time when every TV detective battled satanists, from McMillan and Wife to Ironside ("Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Murder" featuring Jodie Foster and a cameo by Rod Serling). Cults and the dark lord must have seemed like perfect adversaries for gothic heroines historic and contemporary.


I've wanted to explore some of the gothics for a while, so I've been nabbing the occasional title. I sought out an affordable Avon Satanic  and ran across a reasonable, "good condition" edition of The Sorcerers by Dorian Winslow, a pseudonym of Daoma Winston. I didn't key in on that until I opened to the copyright page, but I once owned Winston's hardcover thriller Mira, so I was pleased to return to her work after many years.

Despite what the logo might lead you to believe, The Sorcerers is not a tale of black-robed cultists and late-night rituals with chickens and blood. It's actually a well-crafted if slow-burn mystery with elements of The Fantastic. Is black magic at work at Walker Hill, the creepy mansion at the core of the story? Or is human evil and superstition?

That's indirectly what the heroine, Gilly Davis, must find out when she accepts a job as companion to Caretha Walker, a woman turned into an agoraphobic emotional invalid by the accidental death of her child.

Recently devastated herself by the decampment of her husband John with her best friend, 23-year-old Gilly accepts the job from  Mason Walker,  a man of "imposing good looks." He's wealthy and has pretty much taken in most of Gilly's family at Walker Hill in the remote town of Cumberland, surrounded by red hills and shrouded in mist.

As Gilly works to bring Caretha out of her depression and despair, she observes strange behavior and disturbing occurrences including black, inverted crosses smudged about the house. Miss Ming, a Pekingese, serves as a sinister observer, seemingly materializing at inopportune moments.

Caretha's sister Megan indulges Caretha's taste for fortune telling and dressing dolls as if they are members of the household, practices Mason strives to obliterate as detrimental.

There's a musty old attic, a mysteriously departed former employee, weird visions in a mirror, a burned out residence in town and soon mysterious accidents and a death.

There's certainly a Dark Shadows feel to it all, but everything's subtle, building to revelations in the final few pages, tying things together in a satisfying fashion almost in an Agatha Christie vein. I suppose the less patient reader might find things a little slow, but it's all to a purpose.

The romance component may really be what's lacking or at least taking a back seat to other goings on. It comes late in the slim (160-page) novel and without much real justification that we're shown. It's really like genre requirements had to be shoe-horned in around the mystery, but so it goes.

In general, I liked this volume and its quiet, moody horror. It's not for all tastes, but it's not a bad entertainment, especially for a cold, dark night's reading.

This is not an impulse buy proposition. Keep an eye peeled wherever you shop for used books. 

Darker Than Amber by John D. MacDonald

I read and loved many of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels  in my high school and college years. I read most of the titles and wrapped up with a hardcover purchase of The Lonely Silver Rain.

While it has an exciting opening sequence, Darker Than Amber (1966) somehow lost me when I started it back in the day, having secured a paperback copy from The Book Nook in Alexandria, LA, where I often scanned the shelves for detective works I'd read about. 

My dad read it through and liked it, but I guess the opening passage was a bit slow for me in my younger years.

McGee, you probably know, was a houseboat-dwelling beach bum who took his ongoing retirement in chunks. When funds grew low, he'd take on a salvage job. Recover money or property for someone in exchange for half the value to fund a little more free time of boating, fishing and otherwise enjoying life. McGee had frequent female guests aboard, often for complex though brief relationships.

When Darker Than Amber opens, he's fishing with his pal Meyer. Meyer's an economist who occupies a boat called the John Maynard Keynes a few slips away from Trav's F-18 at the Fort Lauderdale marina known as Bahia Mar marina.  

Meyer and Trav's motorboat is anchored beneath a South Florida bridge when a girl's hurled over the railing with weights on her feet. Trav dives to save her and manages to unfurl the wires holding the weights in place, ripping of his shirt to help with the tightly-wrapped metal. Fortunately her would-be killers didn't have time for concrete galoshes. 

He takes her back to his houseboat, The Busted Flush and soon learns she's named Vangie, short for Evangeline, though she has about as many aliases as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. 

The color of the title

Vangie seems to be of Hawaiian island lineage and has eyes that provide the book's color title, a conceit devised by MacDonald to help buyers differentiate the books they'd already read. 

A former prostitute, we learn Vangie gained a conscience while serving as bait in a con game she's a little vague about as she hangs out aboard the Flush, donning duds left behind by previous guests. She bonds a bit with McGee though he turns down a sexual encounter and winds up posing for a few photos for Meyer. 

Then she's off to pick up dough she siphoned off from the con games from a hiding place she's hopeful her former accomplices haven't discovered.

Mild spoilers past this point

McGee's soon at the morgue using a ruse to check the body of a hit-and-run victim, and yes it's Vangie. 

Feeling a sense of duty as well as a desire to pick up the funds she might not have accessed, McGee sets off to find out what Vangie was a part of. 

Soon, McGee's got her hidden cash and is unraveling the con game with a murderous component and devising an elaborate scheme of his own to rattle the bad guys and exact justice. That includes a dangerous character named Ans Terry, who has a touch of a conscience but a brutal side as well. He was kind of forced to throw Vangie off the bridge.

I guess originally the opening dragged a little for me. On this reading at a more patient age, it flowed well and overall it offers an interesting and different entry point into the adventure for McGee.

The scheme Vangie was part of is a bit complicated, and the pains and lengths McGee and Meyer go to in order to rattle the culprits make up the latter part of the action. This is not my favorite McGee because it all seems just a little shaky and strained, but it eventually comes together well with some satisfying action, a bit of McGee role playing and an exciting climax. 

The book features many South Florida locations and offers a look into the cruise industry of the mid-sixties as well. Any McGee is a fun and rich reading experience. I'm happy to have returned and taken this additional step toward being a McGee completist. I still have a few steps to go.

I should note I saw the movie version with Rod Taylor on TV in the early '80s with a trimmed version of the famous fight scene between Taylor as McGee and William Smith as the Terry character sans the Ans. 

I didn't care for the film either back in the day. Re-watching it today in uncut form, I think it does a good job overall with the novel, is pretty true to the McGee spirit and dishes up a pretty cool fight scene directed by Robert Clouse who was destined for Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon. 

Taylor's a pretty good McGee as well. Makes me a little sad the planned movie series didn't pan out.

Miami Mayhem by Marvin Albert

As hurricane Irma approached Florida, even though I was a good distance inland, it was a bit unsettling.

Tony Rome with Frank Sinatra turned up on the broadcast TV channel Movies!, and I recorded it and watched it Saturday afternoon Sept. 10 as the storm neared Florida.

It had been a while since I'd seen it, having first learned of it in Jon Tuska's The Detective in Hollywood when I was a kid. It came in the wake of Paul Newman's Harper as part of a mini-detective cycle in the late '60s. I caught it finally on cable years after that.

I'd forgotten much of it as I re-watched the film, which was about all I could really focus on that pre-Irma afternoon with all the hurricane prep I could manage already accomplished. 

Maybe the Miami setting played a small role. It was kind of relaxing watching Sinatra drive Jill St. John around in a convertible on happier and sunny Florida days.

The storm passed through in the wee hours of Sept. 11-12 , bringing us a lot of wind, but we survived and were lucky. We lost power 36 hours or so and had water and canned ravioli, so we fared OK.

I plucked the novel the movie was based on from my shelves. Somewhere along the way I picked up a tie-in edition of the 1960 book but had never read it.

I was pleasantly surprised. The novel's really deftly plotted and fairly character rich. I suspect Albert was a Raymond Chandler fan, but resemblances are really a tip of the fedora, I believe.

Anthony Rome, the hard-boiled narrator protagonist, is an ex-Miami cop with a gambling problem. He lives on a houseboat called the Straight Pass from the craps game that won it for him, and Travis McGee's Busted Flush is possibly a tip of the fedora to that even though McGee didn't wear one.

Anthony aka Tony's slightly less cool than Sinatra is in the movie. He gets rattled a little more, but the movie's fairly faithful to the novel's plot.

Rome is called on by an ex-partner to drive a missing heiress home from a seedy hotel where she's wound up at the end of a drinking binge. When he arrives at her dad's house, he's promptly hired by her businessman father, Rudy Kosterman,  to find out what's troubling his daughter, his only heir from a first marriage.

By the time Tony makes it back to the Straight Pass, thugs are waiting, in search of a daisy-shaped diamond pin the daughter, Diana Pines, should have been wearing.

Tony's situation gets worse from there. That ex-partner's murdered soon after Tony asks about the missing pin, and he's off to figure out what's up as his efforts lead to word of a swindler named Nimmo and his henchman named Catleg.

From ruined-mansions to secret gambling dens and redneck shanty towns, Tony dodges bullets, outmaneuvers cops, including pal Lt. Santini, and encounters drug dealers. He finally figures out what's up with the pin and the Kosterman family as the tale winds down. It really all ties together in a tight package.

I need to look up the other Rome books including Lady in Cement, which was also adapted into a film about a year after Tony Rome. Albert moved on from Rome after three titles to craft a longer series about a hero named Pete Sawyer. 

Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death by Tucker Coe aka Donald E. Westlake

I discovered Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death first on one paperback rack or another when the Charter edition appeared. I'd read Chandler and MacDonald by then, so a tale of an unlicensed private detective looked like an interesting one to peruse.

The edition was apparently issued in 1976, but I'm not sure it was that early that I ran across it. Paperbacks floated around in news service vans, finding their way to random corners of the universe in those days.

I didn't realize in that moment that Tucker Coe was a pseudonym for Donald E. Westlake, creator of Dortmunder, the hapless robber, and as Richard Stark, Parker, the much more grim and professional thief.

As I recall my dad read it around the time I did and liked it also, but recently I realized I could remember little more than the fact that Mitch Tobin, the ex-cop hero was building a wall around his back yard as he investigated a murder case.

As with many things I read when I was young, I suspect many of the subtleties of character were lost on me the first time around.

I still had the paperback amid private eye novels on my shelf, so I decided to re-read it the other day after plucking it out to share a photo with other Tsundoku types in a Facebook group, and it was great to revisit it with mature eyes.

Secrets and lies
The story seems deceptively straightforward at first. Tobin, booted off the force following his partner's death is approached to conduct a murder investigation even though he holds no investigator's license.

Tobin, we learn, was seeing a mistress while on duty and failed to provide backup for his partner on a police call that turned deadly.

Months into exile from the force though still married, Tobin's approached by a representative of "the corporation" for help. He's building the above-mentioned wall as a way of metaphorically putting his life back together and would rather keep building, but he sees the investigation as perhaps a path to some form of redemption, maybe both professionally and spiritually. His wife Kate's been supporting the family with extra shifts at a five and dime.

The mob of the Tobin world is indeed very corporate with dark-suited managers interacting with union representatives and quasi-legitimate business executives.

Corporate intrigue
Married mobster Ernie Rembek, sort of a regional manager for the corporation, has lost his girlfriend, Rita Castle. She left the apartment he provided with a suitcase full of cash. A note states she's found a "real man" to help spend it. Unfortunately for her, she got only as far as a mob-connected Allentown hotel before being murdered.

Ernie's a sentimental guy and wants Tobin to find the killer, even if he feels the need to turn the killer over to the authorities for justice to be done. While it's not ideal, Tobin agrees to the job and the payday especially after his wife gives it a blessing.

Soon he's set up in an office and interviewing others in the corporation who can't provide an alibi for the time of death.

For a while it seems Tobin's just going to be cataloging information and ferreting out the culprit, but then office explosions and other threats arise, and he begins to gain understanding and insight into Rita Castle that reveals all is not as it seems, not with Eddie or other corporation members.

With a plot that zigs and zags and many surprises, Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death turns into a character-rich mystery that proves just as 361 had before it, that Westlake was as comfortable with a circuitous murder case as he was with a heist or caper.

It stands up well to a contemporary reading. Only the dollar values and the view of the mob hint that it's from another era, and it can be had in an ebook edition.

A great entry in the private eye realm, and a solid mystery as well.