Sounds like a 'must read'!
Jim~>
>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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