Pick Up A Pulp [79]: HELLCAT by Carter Brown

"He hardly seemed to have left the room before he was back with that axe in his hand! Oh, God! I saw him standing there, his eye gleaming like a maniac's, and then he swung the axe and I saw Tino's head roll!" 

HELLCAT starts off like an 80's mass market paperback horror; a head floating in a jar of formaldehyde, a confused cop, and a medical examiner who's lost his senses, all clustered around the ice cold bodies of the dead in a eerily quiet mortuary. From there the story evens out to the traditional lone wolf police procedural akin to Spillane's Mike Hammer (the comparison and praise is well deserved) with Lieutenant Al Wheeler tasked with solving a 5 year old cold case, reopened thanks to a deathbed confession. 

The Sumners own the Valley and everyone who lives there. Their old money influence has kept them out of the headlines and out of the hands of law - until their former cook calls time on a dark family secret. Wheeler's first port of call is the Sumner residence, his first task; get past the beautiful Jessica Sumner (wife to Crispin, who was in residence at the time of the murder accusation), and then interview Crispin and Charity, the brother and sister linked to the murder, in order to debunk the deathbed confession, or confirm it. 

HELLCAT is one of my favourite Al Wheeler books. Not only is the story gripping and dripping with that oh so cheesy pulp goodness, it manages to create a near perfect balance of humour and seriousness as Wheeler steadily paints a picture of murder. 

On the surface, HELLCAT seems pretty standard, but as the story progresses, Carter Brown cleverly adds layer upon layer of complexity to the case which only strengthens the narrative; there's a couple of mob goons (including a pro executioner) claiming to have known the person to whom the decapitated head belongs, a father who resides in the Valley with murder in his veins and a quest to avenge the wrong-doings subjected to his teenage daughter, and a side plot of pure pulp 'love' between Wheeler and Charity Sumner (of course, there had to be some sleaze!). I greedily ate this one up in a single sitting.