Read Online Gun in Cheek by Bill Pronzini - Free Book Online

emphasis is on death and destruction as it pertains to Steele and the other white characters.
    This is even more curious in light of West's background. According to a blurb on the back cover of An Eye for an Eye (1959), he "was born in Washington, D.C., and educated at Howard University and Harvard University. He holds five academic degrees. Dr. West is a specialist in the prevention and treatment of tropical diseases, and he has a general practice in Liberia, Africa. He also owns and operates the Liberian Broadcasting Company, is President of the National Manufacturing Company and President of the Liberian Hotel and Restaurant Corporation."
    It is true that black writers were not exactly popular in the fifties, and black detectives were few and far between. There were only three of note in those pre-Virgil Tibbs days: Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, a pair of Harlem cops invented by expatriate black writer Chester Himes; and Touissant Moore, hero of the Edgar-winning Room to Swing (1957) by Ed Lacy, who was white but who had been married to a black woman for a number of years. Yet West made no real attempt to hide the fact of his race. His publishers surely knew he was not a Caucasian. Why such an educated and successful black doctor would want to write slavish, lily-white imitations of Spillane instead of more serious work remains one of mystery fiction's unsolved mysteries.
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    T he second private eye phenomenon born in the late forties was Shell Scott, a 6-foot-2 inch 200-pound Los Angeles detective with bristly white hair that sticks straight up on his scalp. The new wrinkle that Scott's creator, native Californian Richard S. Prather, added to the mystique is in one sense the antithesis of that wrought by Spillane. Which is not to say that a certain amount of lusty sex and violence, replete with corpses in bunches, cannot be found in each and every Scott caper; the hard-boiled school's influence on Prather is not minute. But whereas Mike Hammer is a cold, hard, humorless individual—a walking time bomb looking for a place to explode—Shell Scott is a happy-go-lucky sort, full of cheer, virility, and what folks used to call piss and vinegar. Prather's gift to the literature of the private investigator is that of "comic vitality," as Larry N. Landrum puts it in his essay on Prather for Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers —meaning broad, farcical humor and plenty of it. With emphasis on sex, and plenty of that, too.
    A Scott caper abounds in wisecracks, double entendres, and quite a bit of what is known as bathroom comedy; but there are also occasionally hilarious plot devices, plus enough reductio ad absurdum scenes to delight the satirical minded. Testimony to the fact that. Prather's brand of humor tickled funny bones in the fifties and sixties (and into the seventies) is an aggregate of some forty million books sold. Of course, not everyone thinks Prather is funny—intentionally or otherwise. One person's guffaw is another's yawn. You can reach your own verdict by considering, first of all, the openings to several Scott escapades:
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She yanked the door open with a crash and said, "Gran—" but then she stopped and stared at me. She was nude as a noodle.
I stared right back at her.
"Oh!" she squealed. "You're not Grandma!"
"No," I said, "I'm Shell Scott, and you're not Grandma, either."
She slammed the door in my face.
Yep, I thought, this is the right house. ( The Wailing Frail )
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She had a seventy-eight-inch bust, forty-six-inch waist, and seventy-two-inch hips—measurements that were exactly right, I thought, for her height of eleven feet, four inches.
The scarlet bikini which had covered a minimum of those eye-popping curves lay crumpled on the floor at her feet, and my eyes focused on her ass glassily as did the dead man's. He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled.
Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had