FFB: Case of the Cold Coquette (a rerun)

Here's another rerun for you pulled from the back files of Pretty Sinister Books. I read nearly all of the Jonathan Craig police procedurals and wrote them up over a three year period.  The only two not reviewed on this blog are the last two books in the series. Though they were popular posts (one in particular garnering over 1700 hits) I got very few comments on them when I first ran them. This may be in part because -- with the exception of one post -- none of them were featured as part of the Friday's Forgotten Book meme. Enjoy this late summer rerun!

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In the opening pages of Case of the Cold Coquette (1957) Eddie Macklin is shoved into the path of an oncoming subway car. His corpse is a mess, the police have to take him away in pieces. The medical examiner jokes, "I could practically do the autopsy right here without lifting a scalpel." Gallows humor is the only way to survive the mean streets of Lower Manhattan. Selby and Rayder examine the contents of Macklin's clothes and find nearly $500 in cash and receipts from a theater ticket agency and an after hours liquor joint that show Macklin to be a man of expensive tastes. Why then is he wearing cheap off-the-rack clothes and unpolished battered shoes?

The two cops learn that Macklin was leading a double life in two separate homes. One residence is a small room in a cheap tenement on West 24th Street where he talked to no one, never had visitors, and played his guitar and sang folk tunes that annoyed his cranky landlady. His other place is a swank midtown apartment near Columbus Circle that he shared with Marcia Kelpert, the "cold coquette" of the title.

Marcia Kelpert is a high priced call girl who specializes in long term commitments to only very rich clients. She's found her latest wealthy lover in Macklin. She provides Selby and Rayder with their first real leads and through her stories they begin to understand the dual life of Eddie Macklin. She mentions Eddie's hatred of Peggy Taylor, a popular jazz singer with whom he attempted to collaborate on a recording of some folk tunes. Eddie was an expert in the origins of American folk tunes, an amateur guitar player and a fairly good singer. But his partnership with Peggy ended after a nasty fight. This bit of info will lead the cops to Taylor and her agent, the equally shady George Sullivan.

Craig focusses the story on the life of the victim which will become the growing trend in much of crime fiction, especially the police procedural, from the late 1950s to the present. Each interview provides another layer of Macklin's complex life: his multiple addresses, his primary source of income as a bookkeeper, the basically friendless life he led, and his mistrust of nearly everyone. Selby soon realizes that Macklin's source of wealth was related to another of his non-musical interests -- blackmail.

As in The Dead Darling when the story moves to Greenwich Village (the two cops' usual beat) Craig takes advantage of that colorful neighborhood to introduce us to a variety of oddball characters. There is Ace Wimmer, a newspaper seller who fancies himself a secret journalist even to the point of wearing a hat with a fake press card tucked into the band; Mercator, who gets his quirky nickname from his hobby of selling maps of the Village with special locations for secret thrills; Teddy Sheaffer, an ex-vaudeville ventriloquist who haunts the local bars with his dummy plying drinks from tourists and doling out info on Village denizens; and Alice from the Movies, a statuesque prostitute who appeared in some News Reel footage of Times Square that garnered her a lot of attention and provided her with her odd nickname. But one of the strangest characters is Dukey Nardo.

Nardo is a snipe grabber. Provided with a report from the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Selby discovers that Nardo had been examined at Bellevue where it was revealed that Dukey Nardo derived "sexual gratification from obtaining the unsmoked portion of a cigarette - provided it was being smoked by a young and attractive girl - and finishing it himself." He started out by sitting near a smoking girl and switching cigarettes with her in a shared ashtray and moving up to the daring and extremely creepy job of plucking a cigarette right out of the woman's hand or mouth and running off with it to drag on it ecstatically. Snipe grabber. Don't tell me you can't learn something from reading old mystery novels.

Another thing you will learn is of two unusual medical conditions that affect the circulatory system. Knowledge of these medical conditions provides a huge clue to Selby in recognizing the identity of the murderer. I guess if you've gone to medical school or have an extensive knowledge of diseases you might be able to recognize the killer when first introduced, but don't count on it. The identity of the killer came as a complete surprise to me. This is one of Craig's skills in writing these books. You're wrapped up in the unravelling of Macklin's confusing and fascinating life that you lose sight of the hunt for the killer and things just slip right by. These are not just police procedurals, but cleverly constructed and subtly clued detective novels.

Case of the Laughing Virgin - Jonathan Craig

It was bound to happen. I have been disappointed by the latest Jonathan Craig novel I’ve read. This is number eight in the series and there are only two more left. With the best of the lot already behind me I figured the final three might perhaps deliver a clunker among the trio. Case of the Laughing Virgin (1960) is the first letdown in what previously had been a crisply written, offbeat series set in Greenwich Village of the 1950s. In this novel we enter a new decade and already a deeper cynicism has sunk into both the characters and the overall writing.

Craig’s police procedurals are characterized by detail in the bureaucracy of police work and characters consisting of colorful oddballs among what might be called the lowlife of Lower Manhattan. The books nearly always include some unheard of kinky sex practice or fetish as the murder investigation almost always involves sex in any number of practices and preferences. But in this story the situation is seedier than usual, most of the characters are unrelentingly loathsome, and the overall tone is bitter and caustic.

Pete Selby and his partner Stan Rayder trade sarcastic quips more often than usual but the humor is  forced and tone is flippant. The usual crackerjack dialogue is not enhanced with lines like these:

"I was beginning to wonder where everyone was. They must have come by way of Bluefield, West Virginia."  (Says Rayder when his police colleagues finally show up at the murder scene) 

"Once upon a time...there were seven little thespians, all in a row. But the brave and brilliant detective team of Selby and Rayder went to work on them -- and now there are three."

Was Craig getting tired of these guys? Was he in a bad period in his life? Or was he just fed up with sex and crime books?

The story centers around the shooting death of Larry Yeager, a no talent actor who blackmails his way into a role in a grade Z play called Grade A about the life of milkmen and the strange notes they find in milk bottles on their delivery route. I can only guess this is Craig’s attempt at humor but it bombs as badly as those lame lines above. Yeager we soon learn managed to purchase a movie featuring a group of six individuals unknowingly caught on film displaying their talent for bedroom acrobatics in a round robin of sexcapades. With the use of clever lighting, a two way mirror, and a hidden camera the evening's activities were filmed without their knowledge and the movie was then shown at a variety of underground stag shows. When Yeager saw the film he recognized several of the unwilling participants in the movie and persuaded the stag show producer and owner of the film to sell him the movie for $1000. Selby and Rayder deduce that he wanted the movie for blackmail purposes. The murder investigation focuses on the search for the missing movie and uncovering the identity of the sex addicted participants all of whom had reason to kill the blackmailing Yeager.

Normally Craig writes about these people with a kind of aloof hipness and tends to make light of the sex underground and its obsession with all things carnal. In previous books these seedy escapades were dealt with almost farcically which took the edge off the freaky. Craig made it interesting, sometimes fascinating, and often amusing to read about. However, the emphasis on pornography and hedonistic sex parties this time is not played for laughs. The writing highlights the squalor of these dens of iniquity, the slobs involved in promoting sex and profiting from it, and the crassness and vulgarity of the people who are their customers and victims. Few characters are presented in a favorable light. Ironically, the only murder suspect who appears to have any decency turns out to be the killer.

Case of the Laughing Virgin has an extremely cynical viewpoint and is unfulfilling as a mystery novel. Craig’s usual offbeat humor which often can elicit a laugh or a smile is all out nasty this time around. Selby and Rayder come off as jaded cops, utterly fed up with the losers and downtrodden types they are forced to deal with day in and day out. Each suspect they question turns out to be selfish, haughty, mean-spirited, brash or unfeeling. The blackmail plot is hackneyed, the detection is at a minimum, and there is not a single twist to enliven the proceedings. (Well, to be truthful there is an attempt at an eleventh hour surprise but it was obvious to me.) I’m moving on to the ninth and tenth books and I’m hopeful for a return to the spark and life of the earlier books.

IN BRIEF: Case of the Village Tramp - Jonathan Craig

Another Jonathan Craig book and you know what that means -- sex and crime. The victim in this sixth book about cops of the 6th precinct is found wearing nothing but a chastity belt and tiara. A genuine medieval chastity belt. Museum quality, my friends. And the key is missing. Talk about a titillating start.

I read this back in December and I made no notes so I'm relying solely on my memory of the book. Sorry to report though only one month has passed I don't remember much. Craig really has a knack for dreaming up some of the strangest people to populate these police procedurals. But this time no real standouts in the cast , but the cast of male characters is made up of a variety of the usual weirdos and oddballs. There's a Casper Milquetoast medievalist, a very strange doctor who seems to have strayed out of a Sax Rohmer book from the 1920s, a hired killer who uses an icepick as his weapon of choice, and one of those drop dead gorgeous Lotharios Craig always throws into the works. Apart from the victim who turns out to be a nasty piece of work the women characters, usually one of Craig's strengths, failed to stick in my cluttered mind.

This one was rather a low point in the series for me. Craig seems to be repeating himself and made the plot overly complicated this time by adding a mobster subplot with a hitman looming in the background. The victim turns out to be yet another in a long line of blackmailers who went too far. I'm tiring of that angle. Pete and Stan do yeoman-like police work as usual. Detection is not as good as in some of the other entries, but there's enough to elevate this book away from some of the lesser, similar Gold Medal crime novels.


Another censored Belmont Tower cover

FREAK OF THE WEEK: One character I didn't forget is the creep who gets this regularly awarded dubious honor. This time the badge goes to a cop -- a captain no less --whose passion is aural sex. He loves listening to the details of the sex crimes and goads his fellow police officers into lingering over the details of the manner and method of the crime. When he hears about the chastity belt he's in his element. The reader gets the picture when Pete Selby says the captain leaves his hands in his pockets during the interview. Not the kind of guy you want as your co-worker, let alone your superior.

As those voiceovers go on TV here's the "previously on Pretty Sinister Books" section. Titles marked with an asterisk are the best of the bunch.

The Dead Darling (1955)*
Morgue for Venus (1956)
Case of the Cold Coquette (1957)*
Case of the Beautiful Body (1957)
So Young, So Wicked (1957)* - not part of the Pete Selby/Stan Rayder series
Case of the Petticoat Murder (1958)*
Case of the Nervous Nude (1959)*

Case of the Nervous Nude - Jonathan Craig

Not true. She was wearing shoes!

Not that I was in search of the sleaziest police procedural ever written but I do believe I have found it in Case of the Nervous Nude (1959). Out of the six books in this series that I have read so far this will win hands down in a competition of the book with the most oddballs, the most alternative sex practices, the most deviant and/or amoral characters, and the book with the darkest and most depressing atmosphere of the lot. I usually bestow the title of "Freak of the Week" to at least one character in a Jonathan Craig novel but there are so many to choose form I may have to have a kind of horse race finish with win, place and show.

The deeper I delved into this police procedural series the more I discover how Craig learned to concoct plots that are more and more multi-layered with the kind of red herrings and subplots you expect to find in books written by masters of the traditional mystery. This was like Ed McBain crossed with Agatha Christie with a dollop of Jean Genet – if you can imagine such a monster hybrid of genre fiction. Sleazy sex, creepy characters and solid police investigative techniques complete with bureaucratic obstacles and dreary paperwork all combine in a compactly told tale of outcast New Yorkers with lust and greed and several other deadly sins in their hearts. The number of characters with murder in their past, for example, rivals any Christie novel. Turning the pages is like releasing a Pandora's trunk of cruel wife killers, avaricious abortionists, and sex fiends upon the world. Looking for any sign of that jewel called Hope at the bottom of the trunk is almost pointless.

The story opens with Pete Selby and Stan Rayder, our cop protagonists, on their local beat. It's a foggy night and Stan hears something odd, but he can barely make out the sight. It is a woman running in high heels and as she approaches he sees that she's wearing nothing but the shoes. The naked dame jumps into a car waiting for her and it speeds off into the night. The two cops make their way in the direction from where she was running and find a garage with a door slightly open and a Cadillac with its motor still running. Inside the Cadillac they find a dead man, his face flushed not with a sunburn but the telltale signs of carbon monoxide poisoning. Further investigation uncovers an exhaust fan that had been tampered with to prevent it from removing possibly deadly fumes. It's a scene of murder for sure.

The usual police routine follows of identifying the victim, trying to locate the naked girl, and figuring out if she was with the guy or had anything to do with his death. Selby and Rayder will uncover several people with murder and larceny in their hearts. A jewel robbery, the thieves and some missing loot will keep turning up in their investigation. Along the way we meet a parade of the strangest characters in any of these books. Here's just a sampling:

• "Drummer" Dugan – a local hood who gets his nickname from the way he pounds on doors to collect debts. He also loves to listen to marching band music. Oh! and he's a leper.
• George & Elizabeth Willis - the parents of the naked girl who have the unusual habit of arguing through their dog. George will call his wife Liz to irritate her and she'll reply "The name is Elizabeth. Not Liz. Tell him, Chappy [the dog], tell him my is Elizabeth." The wife addresses the dog when she really is talking to her husband. Utterly bizarre.
• Fred Sharma – somehow Fred manages to fool everyone into thinking he's a 35 year old Adonis. But up close and personal Pete sees he's closer to 50 and one of the poorest walking adverts for hair dye and plastic surgery out there. He also is a self-confessed sex addict with a penchant for frotting. For what? (I hear you ask in your usual puzzled voice.) Turns out it's a predilection for rubbing up against women in public places – especially crowded subway trains. A real charmer Fred is.
• Wilbur Loftus – aka "the Ghoul" is a mortician's student who nearly killed his wife by giving her an overdose of "truth serum" when he suspected her of philandering with some local Lothario. She didn't tell him much and went into a coma instead.
• Hootin' Annie – bar owner. I'll let Craig's words do the job here: "…real name, Anna Weber, born in Pell Street in New York's Chinatown – was Eurasian, an enormous neckless old harridan with a grayish-yellow skin, hooded black eyes, hair so black it had blue highlights in it, a voice her Jersey customers swore could be heard all the way to Hoboken, and a background that included being a lady bouncer in a waterfront dive in San Francisco, heading a phony Caodaist mission in Los Angeles, running a mitt camp with a succession of traveling carnivals, and teaching a refined form of judo to young ladies from Park and Fifth Avenues. She was a "character's character in an area where characters seem sometimes to outnumber the noncharacters three to one."



This nude is so nervous she left her clothes on

Any one of them is deserving of the dubious honorific of "Freak of the Week." My preference for win, place and show would be Fred, Wilbur and the Willises with that second and third place running close to neck and neck. Feel free to come up with your own freak awards in the comment section.

I almost forgot! As a bonus the reader gets a crash course in sex crime terminology, circa 1959. The book is littered with slang terms that I'd never heard of in the hundreds of books I've read from this era. A dumper whore, for instance, is a prostitute who likes to be beaten with a cloth belt. Circus shows are gatherings with girl on girl action scenes where the johns pay to watch but no joining in is allowed. A ringmaster is what you call the pimp who runs a circus show. The girls are probably called performers or acrobats, though it's not mentioned outright. You'll not learn things like that watching Law and Order: SVU. Don't you love vintage crime novels?

The following books by Jonathan Craig have been reviewed previously on this blog. Those marked with an asterisk are my favorites (so far) and come highly recommended.

The Dead Darling (1955)*
Morgue for Venus (1956)
Case of the Cold Coquette (1957)*
Case of the Beautiful Body (1957)
Case of the Petticoat Murder (1958)*
So Young, So Wicked (1957)* - not part of the Pete Selby/Stan Rayder series

FFB: Case of the Petticoat Murder - Jonathan Craig

In this fifth book in the series featuring 6th Precinct cops Pete Selby and Stan Rayder Jonathan Craig finally proves he can write not only a gritty, urban crime novel, but a twisty, red herring laden mystery. In Case of the Petticoat Murder (1958) there are the usual seedy sexual practices, colorful lowlife Greenwich Village characters, and ample amount of routine often dreary police work. This time, however, the crime turns out to be a puzzler cleverly concocted with devious misdirection worthy of a Golden Age whodunit.

Naomi Ellison is discovered hanging by her neck from a steampipe in her Greenwich Village studio apartment. She is completely nude except for a pair of stockings and high heeled shoes. Immediately we get a lesson in crime solving as Selby tutors a novice policewoman in murder disguised as suicide. In a lecture that goes into graphic detail that I will spare you he point s out the angle of the body clearly indicates it was hoisted up after death. Later, the M.E. supports his theory when it is learned that Naomi was strangled with a petticoat found tightly twisted and not so well hidden in a dresser drawer.

The victim, as usual, is a beautiful young woman with a secret life. Though she may have presented herself as a friendly neighbor Selby and Rayder soon discover that Naomi was renting out her apartment to couples who were indulging in illicit love affairs. Her home was in effect an assignation hotel room. Selby starts compiling a list of her customers and through routine interviews with them gradually pieces together a portrait of a women who not only supplemented her income as a hostess for sexual playmates but as a blackmailer. Careful readers should note that Craig's laying down of clues starts first and foremost with the manner in which Naomi's body was displayed. It will turn out to be one of the biggest clues to the identity of her killer.

I've often talked about the unusually modern aspects of Craig's books. When first published in the late 50s readers of these books might have been taken aback by not only his frankness in discussing sexual fetishes, but his frequent use of profanity. In the past, editors at Gold Medal have replaced the F bomb with tame euphemisms like "frag." Here we get the real thing. "Bullshit" and "half-assed" are only two of the terms that popped up. I think he may be the first of their authors to get a completely uncensored story in its final published form. And although there really isn't a character saddled with some odd form of sex practice or fetish there is a section which describes the practice of erotic asphyxia, both solo and in pairs, which I think was a pretty daring thing to throw into a crime plot for a book released in 1958.

I liked a lot of his minor characters. Craig is very good at capturing unique speech and slang of working class Manhattanites. And his strength in making those characters original in they way they dress and live is at its best in ...Petticoat Murder. Those who stand out are Josie Daniels, a diner waitress, who provides some vital clues to one of the suspect's hidden past; Marty Hutchins, the elusive athletically built boyfriend who appears in a photo Selby takes from Naomi's apartment, turns out to be something of a "kept boy" with a ferocious temper; Miss Hardesty, a snotty receptionist whose missing alligator handbag will provide one of the more interesting clues to the crime; and Johnny Farmer, the strangest guy of the bunch, a hayseed illiterate Lothario always on the prowl for a shapely willing woman whose home turns out to be one of the most repellent dives ever described in a paperback original.

As for police business, the 6th precinct novels always point out the drab and dreary job that is a real policeman's gig. The paperwork, the forms, the constant phone calls to BCI -- a branch of New York government bureaucracy Manhattan cops are always dealing with -- and, specifically, the Lost Property Bureau all figure prominently in this book. We even get a scene that gives us a little more insight into the irascible nature of Barney Fells, Selby and Rayder's immediate superior. Fells was a cop who loved the street and was an excellent policeman but when the lieutenant retires early he is promoted to fill the spot. Now saddled with a desk job he despises he has become a tool of police bureaucracy, forced to keep his team in line according to the book his moods become ever crankier, his temper always getting the better of him. At one point Selby's flagrant disobedience for strict police procedure so infuriates Fells he predicts Selby's lonely future: "You're hopeless, Pete. Give you another five years and you'll end up in the same damn fix I'm in. And you know something, smart ass? It'll serve you right."

The structure of the book echoes a few aspects of Golden Age detective novels. There is a slow reveal of a murder in the past that Naomi became privy to. There are ample clues and police leads that take the form of stolen items from her apartment that turn up in the hands of various suspects. There is the hunt for a missing address book with numerous secrets. There is the previously mentioned hand tooled, alligator handbag manufactured by a small company that keeps track of its creations by means of serial numbers and registration cards. One of the suspects turns out to be a wife killer on the lam very much in the manner of a frequent plot device employed by the Grand Dame herself, Agatha Christie. I doubt Christie would find much to admire in the book's emphasis on the sex-obsessed characters, but had she read the book straight through she might be forced to give a gold star or two to Craig's tightly plotted puzzle of a mystery with all its clues -- both red herrings and the real McCoys. Case of the Petticoat Murder certainly is teeming with plot twists and subplots.

Finally, I always like to bestow on one character the title of "Freak of the Week." Up until this book that character was always a sexual fetishist. This time, however, the honor goes to a more empathetic little guy. It's Louis Lozeck, an elderly gentleman who visits the precinct when his delusions get the better of him.  He finds refuge in the police offices and has as one of his few friends Pete Selby who sympathizes with the old man's mental illness. Louis, you see, is abnormally afraid of his sister-in-law with whom he lives. Every now and then he fears for his life. He is convinced she is in league with the Devil and is plotting to do him in. When life gets too fearful for him he heads on down to the 6th Precinct for a hour or two of chit chat, he buys Selby some coffee, Selby lets him keep the change. It's a scene of both weirdness and a tenderness rarely given the spotlight in Craig's work. I liked seeing that side of Pete Selby. I hope to see more of that in the remaining five books in the series.

Books by Jonathan Craig previously reviewed on this blog:

The Dead Darling
Morgue for Venus
Case of the Cold Coquette
So Young, So Wicked (not in the Selby & Rayder series)
Case of the Beautiful Body

IN BRIEF: So Young, So Wicked – Jonathan Craig

When Steve Garrity comes home one night to find a paper match bent into the front door frame of his apartment he knows it's not a good sign. Vince Licardi has been there again. And when Vince shows up Steve knows he has to give up his regular gig as a piano player in a local night club and do another favor for the syndicate. The favor always means someone has to die.

This time it's Leda , a fifteen year old girl living in a upstate New York suburb. Just why Leda has to do die is never explained to Steve. All that is stressed is her death must appear to be accidental and needs to happen fast. It's one of Steve's most difficult jobs for the gangsters he has become enslaved to. Years ago he beat a man to death and in order to escape prison and eventual execution in the electric chair he agreed to a Faustian pact of sorts. He would have to kill someone for the mob and continue to accept hit man jobs whenever called upon in exchange for his life and protection.

Craig provides the usual well drawn cast of supporting players. Small town gossips provide Steve with all the info he needs on Leda without having to probe too deeply.  Offering up all the dirt on the town and Leda's life are a slovenly misanthropic hotel owner, the ineffectual and nosey bellhop Ollie, and a friendly bartender. A former NYC cop, now chief of police of the small town, serves as the shrewd detective who begins to suspect Steve may not be what he pretends to be.

So Young, So Wicked travels down the dark noir road. There is no detection or real justice as in the books detailing the cases of cops Pete Selby and Stan Rayder of the 6th Precinct. Instead we get plenty of steamy sex and scheming. Steve gets in way over his head when he foolishly decides to use Leda's aunt, Nancy Wilson, as a way to get to know his intended victim. Posing as a man interested in opening a music store in the space that formerly housed Nancy's financially disastrous gift shop, Steve decides to pursue her romantically. The phony relationship gets out of hand, Nancy falls madly for Steve, and Leda then uses the two against each other in order to outwit Steve at his own game. Some readers may find the portrait of Leda, a nasty little Lolita with a case of the Bad Seed syndrome, a bit repellent by the end which is as bleak as most real noir should be.

Interestingly, So Young, So Wicked must've been a big seller for Gold Medal  It's one of Craig's books that received two Gold Medal printings.  The one pictured up top (#954) is the second edition with a picture of a mature and teasing teen age Leda as she is described in the book. The first printing (#669) at right makes Leda look like a magazine model in her 30s. Neither of the cover artists chose to dress Leda in her drum majorette outfit that she sports in an incriminating photo, an integral part of the plot. How much of a fetishist's dream is a teenager in a drum majorette outfit? How could Gold Medal have missed that opportunity? Maybe someday there will be a reissue with Leda shown the way Craig intended her to be depicted.

Morgue for Venus - Jonathan Craig

Had I read Morgue for Venus (1956) first in this excellent series of police procedurals I may not have continued onwards. It doesn't have the usual spark of originality or exceeding quirkiness to be found in the later books. But having read four others prior to this sophomore novel of Jonathan Craig I can see how he is beginning to develop his own original formula for a subgenre that has grown into at least two new subgenres – the forensic pathology thriller and the forensic anthropology thriller. Interestingly, as in the case of the variety of forensic thrillers where the identity and the slow reveal of the life of the victim takes over the story Craig in Morgue for Venus is most interested in Lucille Taylor, the hapless victim of the piece.

Already I am coming up with a list of typical Craig characters that will appear in his series. We have the middle-aged couple in which the husband is a weak-willed Milquetoast under the control of a mean-spirited harridan (in one book the wife is also a husband beater!); the adulterous work relationship; the jealous lovers; a cadre of police informers; and at least one male character with a bizarre sexual fetish. No lesbians or gays in this debut, but they crop up often in later books. After all, the books take place in the environs of Greenwich Village.

Lucille Taylor, strikingly beautiful in life, is found dead in the Hudson River. After matching her identity to that of a young woman who appeared in the missing persons file Pete Selby and Stan Rayder, the police detective duo, are faced with a few odd details. What happened to her expensive engagement ring? Why was she not wearing any underwear? Did she drown or was she killed by some other method and then dumped in the river? Most importantly who exactly was Lucille Taylor? Each interview with relatives, co-workers and friends adds another layer to a complex portrait ultimately revealing a young woman who was not as innocent as she presented herself. A sexual tease starved for attention Lucille was secretary by day, sexual adventuress by night. The two cops trace her after hours life to a posh apartment that serves as a shooting gallery where drugs, sex and porn provided entertainment for a hedonistic crowd.

The mystery plot was not as puzzling as some of the other books I've read and is fairly routine if you can call drugs, porn and prostitution routine in any crime book. Lucille's death proves to be linked to a burglary gone wrong in which Jess Callan, the primary thief, was killed by police. When it is learned that Jess was involved sexually with Lucille and Jess had a temperamental and jealous wife the police think they have a solution to the murder. But there will be other lovers in Lucille's dual life to complicate the case even further.

And what would a review of a Jonathan Craig book be without the FREAK OF THE WEEK? In Morgue for Venus that role goes to Johnny Noland, a creep with a bridal fixation. He is the mail room guy at the photo studio where Lucille worked and had all the dirt on an adulterous affair she was having with her boss. When the two cops from the 6th precinct visit Noland in his fetid cramped one room apartment they are first struck by one wall of the apartment that is covered floor to ceiling in a collage of photographs composed solely of models dressed in wedding gowns and bridesmaid's outfits. During the interview he confesses that he has fallen in love with Lucile, describes how he was planning their first date together, and then dishes the dirt on Lucille and their mutual boss. Hell hath no fury like a bridal fixated creep scorned. But to be fair he's only trying to bring about justice for the object of his failed desires.

For those who have missed my other reviews of this worthwhile series of police procedurals – books that predate Ed McBain's books about the 87th Precinct – I offer the list below for your perusal.

The Dead Darling (1955)
Case of the Cold Coquette (1957)
Case of the Beautiful Body (1957)

Next month we look at book number five in the series: Case of the Petticoat Murder.

Case of the Beautiful Body - Jonathan Craig

Pete Selby and Stan Rayder are on the case again. And some good news: after appearing as nothing more than a cameo in the first three books with hardly any input Stan Rayder, the apparently junior partner in the team, gets a much bigger role. We learn more about him than the constant look of surprise on his face (it's those permanently furrowed brow lines). Stan comes into his own and I suspect judging by his short temper and conservative worldview he may become something akin to the "bad cop" in a good cop/bad cop duo.

The case involves the murder and apparent rape of a Bonnie Nichols, a commercial artist who has been leading a double life. The detective work here is not as interesting as in the previous books nor is the mystery as puzzling or intriguing. The book emphasizes the duplicitous nature of the victim and the sleazier sexual escapades that gave her a thrill before someone got tired of her Machiavellian ways and gave her the brutal beating that ended her wicked life.

Among the suspects we have these colorful characters:

Mr. Connor - Bonnie's landlord and proprietor of the candy store on the first floor of the building where she lives. He may or may not have a past history of being a child molester. He arouses the ire of his easily jealous wife when he pays a bit too much attention to the pretty women who frequent the candy store.

Ralph Hagan - Bonnie's driving instructor who insists that Bonnie turned on her sex kitten charm nearly every time the two were alone in her car. Is he making it all up or was Bonnie really a predatory woman?

Lori Mason - Bonnie's ex-roommate, also an artist. A catty gossip of a young woman who has nothing good to say about Bonnie. She has plenty of dirt on Bonnie's nightlife with...

Mel Tyner - a pimp who collected money and gifts from Bonnie after her numerous "dates."

Jason Lambert - owner of the perfume company that hired Bonnie to design some labels and bottles for his company. Didn't like Bonnie because of her too close friendship with his wife....

Elaine Lambert - a tart tongued wanna-be socialite trapped in a loveless marriage with her brute of a husband. Her friendship with Bonnie was one of the decent parts of her miserable life.

Pete and Stan do a lot of leg work and interviewing of the suspects. The sexual frankness dealing with child molestation, prostitution, and even talk of one character's vasectomy are the prominent features in this case. Sex lives - or lack of one - play a big role in the crime and the murderer's motive. While the denouement is not as surprising as the previous two books I've read getting to know Stan better and seeing how he and Pete are growing as police partners was worth the reading.

FREAK OF THE WEEK: Each time I read one of these books I discover that Craig loves to throw in some wacko with an odd sexual fetish - usually one I've never heard of. This time it's Mel Tyner. We learn that in addition to being Bonnie's pimp and loves to undress his choice women, have them stand in a bathtub in their underwear and douse them with perfume from some kind of a hardware implement that amounts to a fancy squirt gun. He's a perfume fetishist. We've already had a shameless Peeping Tom caught with his pants around his ankles in public and a "snipe grabber" - a guy who gets off on smoking the cigarette butts of lipstick wearing women. Add "scentophile" to the batch.

Next month, I'll be going back to the beginning of the series with book two - Morgue of Venus - which I finally purchased at a bargain price back in November of last year. Then I'll jump ahead to book five and continue in order until the end of the series.

Other Selby/Rayder books reviewed on this blog are:

The Dead Darling (1955)
Case of the Cold Coquette (1957)

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This is my first book in Part One of Bev's 2012 Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge: Perilous Policemen: 8 books with a policeman as the primary investigator. During January and February I will be focussing on books about cops and police inspectors for this particular section of this reading challenge.

TCOT Cold Coquette - Jonathan Craig

It's been awhile since I reviewed Jonathan Craig's first detective novel The Dead Darling and I did promise that I would be reviewing all of the books featuring Pete Selby and Stan Rayder, two New York Cops who solve crimes in 1950s era lower Manhattan. So here's the second in my projected series. I'm trying to go in order, but I have yet to find the second book and so I'm skipping over to the third -- Case of the Cold Coquette (1957).

Eddie Macklin is shoved into the path of an oncoming subway car. His corpse is a mess, the police have to take him away in pieces. The medical examiner jokes, "I could practically do the autopsy right here without lifting a scalpel." Gallows humor is the only way to survive the mean streets of Lower Manhattan. Selby and Rayder examine the contents of Macklin's clothes and find nearly $500 in cash and receipts from a theater ticket agency and an after hours liquor joint that show Macklin to be a man of expensive tastes. Why then is he wearing cheap off-the-rack clothes and unpolished battered shoes?

The two cops learn that Macklin was leading a double life in two separate homes. One residence is a small room in a cheap tenement on West 24th Street where he talked to no one, never had visitors, and played his guitar and sang folk tunes that annoyed his cranky landlady. His other place is a swank midtown apartment near Columbus Circle that he shared with Marcia Kelpert, the "cold coquette" of the title.

Marcia Kelpert is a high priced call girl who specializes in long term commitments to only very rich clients. She's found her latest wealthy lover in Macklin. She provides Selby and Rayder with their first real leads and through her stories they begin to understand the dual life of Eddie Macklin. She mentions Eddie's hatred of Peggy Taylor, a popular jazz singer with whom he attempted to collaborate on a recording of some folk tunes. Eddie was an expert in the origins of American folk tunes, an amateur guitar player and a fairly good singer. But his partnership with Peggy ended after a nasty fight. This bit of info will lead the cops to Taylor and her agent, the equally shady George Sullivan.

Craig focusses the story on the life of the victim which will become the growing trend in much of crime fiction, especially the police procedural, from the late 1950s to the present. Each interview provides another layer of Macklin's complex life: his multiple addresses, his primary source of income as a bookkeeper, the basically friendless life he led, and his mistrust of nearly everyone. Selby soon realizes that Macklin's source of wealth was related to another of his non-musical interests -- blackmail.

As in The Dead Darling when the story moves to Greenwich Village (the two cops' usual beat) Craig takes advantage of that colorful neighborhood to introduce us to a variety of oddball characters. There is Ace Wimmer, a newspaper seller who fancies himself a secret journalist even to the point of wearing a hat with a fake press card tucked into the band; Mercator, who gets his quirky nickname from his hobby of selling maps of the Village with special locations for secret thrills; Teddy Sheaffer, an ex-vaudeville ventriloquist who haunts the local bars with his dummy plying drinks from tourists and doling out info on Village denizens; and Alice from the Movies, a statuesque prostitute who appeared in some News Reel footage of Times Square that garnered her a lot of attention and provided her with her odd nickname. But one of the strangest characters is Dukey Nardo.

Nardo is a snipe grabber. Provided with a report from the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Selby discovers that Nardo had been examined at Bellevue where it was revealed that Dukey Nardo derived "sexual gratification from obtaining the unsmoked portion of a cigarette - provided it was being smoked by a young and attractive girl - and finishing it himself." He started out by sitting near a smoking girl and switching cigarettes with her in a shared ashtray and moving up to the daring and extremely creepy job of plucking a cigarette right out of the woman's hand or mouth and running off with it to drag on it ecstatically. Snipe grabber. Don't tell me you can't learn something from reading old mystery novels.

Another thing you will learn is of two unusual medical conditions that affect the circulatory system. Knowledge of these medical conditions provides a huge clue to Selby in recognizing the identity of the murderer. I guess if you've gone to medical school or have an extensive knowledge of diseases you might be able to recognize the killer when first introduced, but don't count on it. The identity of the killer came as a complete surprise to me. This is one of Craig's skills in writing these books. You're wrapped up in the unravelling of Macklin's confusing and fascinating life that you lose sight of the hunt for the killer and things just slip right by. These are not just police procedurals, but cleverly constructed and subtly clued detective novels.

The Dead Darling - Jonathan Craig

I can't think of a more unlikely person to rave about a gritty detective novel set in the subcultures of Greenwich Village than P.G. Wodehouse. He was a fan of detective stories and even thrillers, this is true, but it's like seeing a blurb quote from Noel Coward praising the work of Jim Thompson. At least two copies of The Dead Darling, including the one I own, have a blurb by the creator of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves exclaiming the work of Jonathan Craig: "As terse, authentic, thrilling as Dragnet!" All that is true and more. Wodehouse knows his crime like he knows pigs and butlers.

From 1955 to the late 1960s Jonathan Craig, pseudonym for Frank R Smith, wrote a police procedural series about the 6th Precinct. The two detective leads are Pete Selby, who serves as narrator, and his partner Stan Rayder. The police methods are some of the most methodical and bureaucratic I've read in an early novel of this type. Before anyone says "Oh yeah, Ed McBain did that kind of thing and with a bigger cast of cop characters" it should be said that the first 87th Precinct novel (which uses a fictitious city based on New York) was published in 1956. Craig started his series of cop novels in 1954 and dares to use the real New York as his setting. McBain has said that he was inspired by the "Dragnet" TV series. I can't say where Craig got his inspiration but he beat McBain at this idea by a couple of years.

After looking up the actual NYPD precinct maps I learned that it's a fairly large area for police to cover. The 6th precinct serves the entirety of the West Village with the boundaries being 14th Street to the north, Broadway the west, Houston Street to the south and the Hudson River as the eastern border. Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a rich environment for a wide variety of characters. It's an excellent choice for a crime novel. Artists, musicians, poets and writers. Models, actors, jazz singers, and the coffee house scene. And of course the burgeoning gay and lesbian neighborhood that would make headlines in 1968 with the Stonewall riots. In Craig's first outing (despite what my 1970s reissue advertises on the cover shown below The Dead Darling is the first 6th precinct novel) all of these cultures will play some sort of role with the lesbian scene, surprisingly, taking center stage. Well, almost center. Maybe a little down left of center, for a few solo numbers.

1973 reissue - Belmont Tower Books

Jean Proctor is the dead darling of the title. She's found stretched across three chairs with her head in the oven of her tiny kitchen in Greenwich Village. Selby and Rayder are pretty sure it's a staged suicide even if the place reeks of gas. An autopsy shows a recent wound to the back of the neck and it's confirmed that a broken neck was the primary cause of death. Jean was a model who made a living as a handsome head of hair in a big shampoo ad campaign in several leading magazines. A former roommate, Norma Johnson, stumbled across the body. She informs the police that Jean was formerly married to a bruiser of a husband, Halston Proctor, who routinely beat her and she suggests that he is probably the one who killed her. But Selby and Rayder will soon learn that Jean had several men in her life. A handful of them married to other women.

Originally published by Gold Medal, the pioneer publisher of paperback originals in genre fiction, The Dead Darling is bound to have an element of the lurid and the seedy to appeal to their audience of the time. But the characters are never presented condescendingly or as freaks. It's a fine line that Craig walks here. I think he presents them as people well aware of their idiosyncrasies and unabashed in owning up to them.

The prize winner in this book is Paul Cressy, a peeping Tom with a salacious appetite for spying on babes undressing near unshaded windows. He happens to be caught indulging in his hobby in the neighborhood of the victim's apartment a few days after the murder of Jean Proctor. Selby and Rayder grill him hoping to get him to admit to seeing something or maybe even committing the murder. Instead, Cressy gives them an alibi. He goes into great detail describing a party which he spied on in a completely different part of the Village. As Cressy tells it (he could hear as well as see) some women had been to a burlesque show and they dare each other to come up with a better strip tease than what was on the stage. What starts out as a teasing contest results in abundant female nudity on display, then the men join in, and the whole night ends in a pansexual orgy. The two cops then decide to visit the apartment in question and have one of the participates corroborate the story. Amazingly, he does so with a little pressure from the police. Begrudgingly Selby and Rayder concede that Cressy is in the clear. Rayder ends the interview with this comment: "I've seen some characters in my time, Cressy, but you make them seem almost normal, you really do."

Another kind of intriguing lowlife is Nancy Ford, a police informer who envisions herself as a historian. Four years ago she put to use her considerable skills as a historian of Greenwich Village by collecting private life information and in the guise of literary research blackmailed several prominent and wealthy people. She made a bit of cash with the weaker more vulnerable targets. Foolishly she did this through the mail and after contacting a few smarter and braver people learned too late that she had laid a trail of evidence that sent her directly to jail.

Nancy likes her history and her wine. Selby always brings along a bottle or two in exchange for his information. Nancy hasn't even cracked the bottle open before she's offering up lots of tidbits about the lesbian clientele at Orrie's, a popular ladies only bar where Nancy used to get a lot of her history, and continues to frequent now that she's doing research for the police. Her dialog is great. She knows who she is and isn't ashamed being a stool pigeon as long as she gets paid and a couple of bottles of wine are thrown in as part of the deal. I pictured her being played by Joan Blondell or a younger Thelma Ritter. Her scenes are a highlight in the book.

As mentioned earlier Jean Proctor was a flirt with the men and led a few husbands astray. Consequently, there are a few wronged women in the cast. The Dead Darling might well be re-titled Hell Hath No Fury. Three different women get burned by their lover or husband during the investigation of Jean Proctor's death and each woman deals with her mate's infidelity in a unique way. One wife rushes to protect her husband, another tries to implicate him in the crime and punish him in a cruelly passive aggressive manner, and still another seems a bit too aloof about the affair as if she was immune to her husband's attraction to a considerably younger woman. Then there's poor Betty Calder, the artist used and abused by the thrill-seeking Norma Johnson.

When we first meet Norma we know she's bad news. She's discovered the body and she tells an elaborate story that is full of holes. Selby knows she's holding back on the truth and continues to pursue her and grill her. He even assigns a policewoman to tail Norma. When Norma is spotted putting $450 down on a fur coat Selby is sure he's got his chance to break her down. After all, where does a rookie lingerie model get that kind of money in 1955?

Much of the story is told through monologues. The dialog is lively and quirky. It's very much peppered with 50s slang and lingo which is something that appeals to me. I get a kick out of old time vocabulary. At one point late in the book an angry drunk says "Forn off!" I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be an attempt at a drunken slur or if the publisher was censoring Craig's more pungently flavored dialog. Yet even with all the talking there is a good amount of legitimate detection. That most of it comes at the end of the story and in a flurry may speak to Craig's pulp magazine roots (he had several stories in Manhunt prior to his novels), but it's no real fault. These are great police detective books - well told, fast paced, intelligently written, some compassionate treatments of marginalized characters, and often the story comes with a surprising twist at the end.

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6th Precinct Novels w/ Pete Selby & Stan Rayder
The Dead Darling (1955)
Morgue for Venus (1956)
Case of the Cold Coquette (1957)
Case of the Beautiful Body (1957)
Case of the Petticoat Murder (1958)
Case of the Nervous Nude (1959)
Case of the Village Tramp (1959)
Case of the Laughing Virgin (1960)
Case of the Silent Stranger (1964)
Case of the Brazen Beauty (1966)

Other Crime Novels
Alley Girl (1954) -- reissued as Renegade Cop (1958)
Red Headed Sinners (1953)
So Young, So Wicked (1957)
Come Night, Come Evil (1957)