Friday's Forgotten Books: IN MEMORY OF RANDY JOHNSON

From his archives.
FFB: The Case of The Hardboiled Dicks – John Blumenthal
02 Thursday Jan 2014

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.

Mark Baker, MRS. POLIFAX PURSUED, Dorothy Gilman
Joe Barone, A THEORY OF LIBERATION, Gustavo Gutierrez
Elgin Bleecker, BAD COUNTRY, C.B. McKenzie
Brian Busby, PRESENT RECKONING, Hugh Garner
Bill Crider, THE PERSIAN CAT, John Flagg
Martin Edwards, BACKGROUND TO MURDER, Shelley Smith
Ed Gorman, ON THE LOOSE, Andrew Coburn
John Hegenberger, THE FRANKENSCIENE MONSTER, Forest Ackerman
Rick Horton, TEMPEST-TOST, Robertson Davies
Jerry House, MISTS OF DAWN, Chad Oliver
Nick Jones, THE MINISTRY OF FEAR, Graham Greene
George Kelley, THE POWER OF THE DOG, Don Winslow
Margot Kinberg, THE INTRUDER, Hakan Ostlundh
Rob Kitchin, EASY STREETS, Bill James; IN THE WIND, Barbara Fister
B.V. Lawson, A PRIVATE INQUIRY, Jessica Mann
Evan Lewis, TARZAN, THE TERRIBLE, Edgar Rice Burroughs 
Steve Lewis/Marv Lachman, NGAIO MARSH
Todd Mason,  WORLD'S BEST CONTEMPORARY SHORT STORIES selected by the Editors of SHORT STORY INTERNATIONAL [magazine] (Ace Books, 1966)
Nik Morton, JACK OF SWORDS, E.C. Tubbs
J.F. Norris, FLORAL TRIBUTE, C.E. Vulliamy
James Reasoner, TARZAN THE TERRIBLE, Edgar Rice Burroughs
Richard Robinson, SONG OF THE BEAST, Carol Berg 
Kerrie Smith,  DOUBLE SIN AND OTHER STORIES, Agatha Christie 
R.T. THE TRIUMPH OF CAESAR, Steven Saylor
Kevin Tipple, PANDEMONIUM, Warren Fahey
TomCat, PICTURE FROM THE PAST, Paul Halter
TracyK, A SKELETON IN THE GRASS, Robert Barnard 
Graham Wynd, CAROL, Patricia Highsmith
Zybahn, THE SUICIDE CLUB, Robert Louis Stevenson