Pick Up A Pulp [86]: SWEETHEART THIS IS HOMICIDE by Carter Brown

"That's one hell of a thing for a guy to do!" Bruno said disgustedly. "He comes in here dying all over the place and making trouble for us with the cops!"

    "That's one thing we can't have..."

A racketeer from New York plays detective in a move away from the formulaic approach to Cater Brown's 'lovely' mysteries in Sweetheart this is Homicide (published 1956). 

Former syndicate man, Hugo Dorland, is living the easy life; surrounded by sand, bikini babes, and crystal clear water thanks to the clean get away he successfully orchestrated from the rotten core of the criminally charged big apple. He is sanguine about his prospects for prosperity until his joy turns to melancholy as the smell of cordite and the thin shrills of a scream promise violence from the beach front cabin next door.

A strange series of events unfolds which leads to Dorland landing himself in hot water as the key suspect in a murder case - without any real page time given to said murder case, becoming a bookie and playing a hand in fixing a boxing match (one of the boxer's managers happens to be a syndicate man from New York who was wronged by Dorland earlier leading him to evacuate NY - go figure), and assuming the role of detective to clear his name from the crime he didn't commit. Dolan manages to do all this in his down time when not indisposed by the varied women all too freely throwing themselves at him. 

Sweetheart this is Homicide is on the high end scale of strange for Carter Brown pulps. There are some interesting elements (namely the syndicate man on the lam angle), but the overall direction of the story felt wayward and haphazard. 

Pick Up A Pulp [85]: THE BLONDE AVALANCHE by Carter Brown

 

"I asked around," Tyler said. "People said in showbiz you have to go to Rick Holman. He's real discrete and he gets results."

Rick Holman, Hollywood fixer to the stars is back at it in The Blonde Avalanche, this time investigating the death of Marlene Hurst at the request of her stage partner and one half of the formerly popular stage duet headlined by Matt Tyler. Tyler's motives seem genuine, however his manager, the stunningly beautiful Angie Strong isn't keen on employing Holman's services for reasons unbeknownst to anyone but her. Naturally, suspicion lands firmly on Strong, but not before Holman tries to land his hands on her firm curvaceous wares first. 

"You're stupid, Holman, you know that," she said coldly. "You could've had my vibrant body and maybe I would've shown you a couple of tricks that even you hadn't seen before." 

Holman, as surprising as it is to mention, is at his most viral in The Blonde Avalanche; bedding near any female with a pulse on his way to solving the murder and uncovering a blackmail scheme for good measure. Whilst these encounters of the r-rated kind do progress the story, you get a sense that Carter Brown was trying to see how much smut he could cram into 122 pages and still tell a story. 

Spoiler alert - a lot!

The overly completed plot devices and simpleton characters, hallmarks of many Carter Brown mystery stories are prevalent in The Blonde Avalanche; these are the sort of books that don't take themselves too seriously and read more like a teen wet dream rather than literary crime fiction. Know what to expect going in and you'll have loads of cheesy fun.

I enjoyed The Blonde Avalanche and recommend it for readers with an interest in what I call 'popcorn pulp'. Check it out if you come across a copy hiding in the adult section of a used bookstore.