THE DEADLY PICK-UP & KILLER TAKE ALL!

For many years, Greg Luce and his Sinister Cinema video label have provided film fans with hard-to-find, obscure, low budget genre films, first on VHS cassettes and now on DVDs. Many of the films in the Sinister Cinema catalog were and are still available as double features, with vintage drive-in movie commercials and trailers in-between the features. My buddy Kelly Greene and I sought out many a Sinister Cinema title in days gone by and I have a much longer story to tell about our relationship with Greg Luce and his company. Maybe some day soon I'll recount here the amazing and true saga of the first (and only) Drive-In Double  Feature Film Festival.

A few years back, Luce launched the Armchair Fiction publishing label as a subsidiary of Sinister Cinema. Taking the same approach to the Sinister Cinema double-bill titles, Armchair Fiction offers vintage pulp science fiction, horror and crime novels and short stories, re-packaged to resemble the legendary Ace Doubles of the '50s, '60s and '70s. There are a slew of titles available and I've been  anxious to try one of these babies for quite some time. I took the plunge the other day and ordered the volume pictured above. It's AF B-1 (2015) for those keeping score at home but what it really is, is a dynamite package of two-fisted 1950s crime fiction.

First up is THE DEADLY PICK-UP (1953) by Milton K. Ozaki. I've never read anything by Ozaki prior to this one but I'm definitely going to keep an eye out for his stuff in the future. Gordon Banner, a sales rep for a flour company (I kid you not!), is new in Chicago. He spots Lila Livingston, a delicious dish, trying to hail a ride on a busy street. He offers her a ride and she accepts but tears her dress getting into Banner's car. He takes her to her apartment so she can change but after waiting for her for over thirty minutes, he decides to check on her. Banner enters Lila's apartment, finds her strangled to death and receives a knock-out blow to the head. And that's just the first chapter,

When he comes to, Banner is down the rabbit hole along with Lila's sister Sarah, (a private detective, no less), Lila's missing body, a bundle of cash (is it real or fake?), a heroin ring, vicious "pretty boys", desperate junkies, lounge singers, undercover narcotics agents, sadistic gangsters, bent cops and other assorted denizens of the underworld. All of the action plays out over one long night and for a flour salesman, Banner makes a pretty good detective. He's also able to sustain multiple beatings and blows to the head in the course of his adventure. Ozaki keeps things moving at a good clip and while the plot might have a hole or two in it, the narrative never flags and certainly never lacks for salaciousness and debauchery. THE DEADLY PICK-UP is the perfect little "down and dirty" crime novel, the kind I love.

I liked KILLER TAKE ALL! (1957) by James O. Causey even better. Causey is another author I''ve never read but he's on my radar now. Tony Pearson is a down-on-his-luck golf pro who is recruited to work for Max Baird, a west coast gangster who owns a swank hotel and country club. Trouble is, Stephen Locke, the man who recruits Pearson, is married to Pearson's previous lover, Fern Davis. Sparks fly between Pearson and Fern and before you know it, Locke has faked his own death and framed Pearson for the murder. Pearson goes on the run from both the cops and the crooks in order to clear his name and reveal Locke's scheme (which also involves a fake Rembrandt painting and a takeover of Baird's hotel by a rival gangster). The action is fast and furious and again, for a golf pro, Pearson makes a durable detective. I found KILLER TAKE ALL! to be slightly better written and plotted than DEADLY PICK-UP  but I enjoyed them both immensely.

This may have been my first volume of Armchair Fiction but it certainly won't be my last. Kudos to Greg Luce for another great line of vintage material. If you love vintage pulp fiction like I do, Armchair Fiction delivers the goods.

 Here's the link:

http://armchairfiction.com/pages/shortstories.htm

Check it out and tell Greg Luce I sent you.

Highly recommended.