MYSTERIES Byline: Richard Lipez Richard Lipez writes
private-eye novels under the name Richard Stevenson. Sunday,
November 26, 2000 The Washington Post
[ . . . ]
Top of the Pulps
Hard-boiled PI fans interested in the subgenre's origins in
the pulp-fiction magazines put out between the two world wars
might want to look at Bottled in Blonde (Fedogan &
Bremer, $29), which contains nine stories written by Hugh B.
Cave for Dime Detective magazine between 1934 and 1942. Now
90 years old, Cave made his name during and after World War
II as a nonfiction writer and still later as a horror
novelist. But his earliest stories, featuring raw, crude,
alcoholic Peter Kane, Boston ex-cop and anti-social private
eye, were popular in the '30s, and it's easy to see
why.
They're written with vulgar energy and non-Beacon-Hill-Boston
savvy, and with traces of the mean-streets poetry that a few
writers like Raymond Chandler mastered and turned into
American literature. In his introduction, Don Hutchison
doubts that Kane's lurching around Boston perpetually drunk
would pass muster in "today's politically correct climate."
Nope, it wouldn't. Kane drives while "soused" and spends
every spare minute in a Stuart Street dive called Limpy's.
But there are razor-sharp sketches here, like the one of Lou
Finch, "a big, sober, hard-working cop with no flair for
showmanship," and the mean flatfoot Moroni, who says things
like "Put that between your toes and use Absorbine Junior on
it!" A "girl" named Mabel Jilson won't take any crap from
Moroni. She snaps, "I used to be on the stage and I done a
knife-throwing act. Make something of that, Glue-face!"
Glue-face! Where have all the Mabels gone?
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