42 DAYS FOR MURDER

Originally published in 1938, 42 DAYS FOR MURDER was the only novel prolific pulp wordsmith Roger Torrey wrote during his long career. He was a regular contributor to the venerable BLACK MASK magazine, as well as other detective/crime/mystery oriented pulps. The edition pictured above, which I finished reading over the weekend, was published in 2012 by Pulpville Press.

42 DAYS is an utterly routine detective novel. The hero is Shean Connell, a generic tough talking, two-fisted private detective on a case in Reno, Nevada. His client's wife wants a divorce but refuses to see or speak to her soon to be ex husband. Connell, along with his junior G-Man partner Lester (who owns a piece of the detective agency), travel to the wicked city to investigate. There they find floozies and b-girls, crooked cops, good cops, low-level gangsters, a powerful lawyer who runs the town, white slavery, dope and murder. The plot doesn't hold up on close inspection but Torrey keeps things moving at such a fast clip that you barely have time to notice.

One thing that stands out (and in a bad way), is the way some words are spelled. I've never seen "Sean" spelled "Shean" and Torrey consistently uses "okey" for "okay". There are other typos and misspellings. I suspect the original text contained some of these errors while Pulpville Press may have contributed some new boo-boos when the company typeset what is clearly a public domain story.

If 42 DAYS had been made into a film in 1938, it would have been produced by Monogram (or another poverty row studio), a cheap programmer shot on a minuscule budget and schedule with a running time of just barely an hour, designed to be released on the lower half of a double bill. That should give you some idea of what to expect with this one.