A DAME CALLED MURDER

Kudos to Greg Luce at Armchair Fiction for another winner. Luce, who is the mastermind behind Sinister Cinema, a website specializing in obscure, public domain titles of various types of genre and exploitation films, is also responsible for the insanely ambitious Armchair Fiction line of handsome trade paperback reprints of vintage crime, science fiction, fantasy and horror fiction. Again, it's material that's fallen into the public domain but that in no way lessens the appeal of these hard boiled, two-fisted pulp classics.

Case in point A DAME CALLED MURDER by Milton Ozaki. Originally published in 1955, the Armchair Fiction edition was published in 2014. The novel stars Chicago private detective Max Keene who, while on an assignment for a client, stumbles across what appears to be a very sophisticated shoplifting ring. Max takes one of the comely female suspects back to her apartment but before he can tend to her illness, he's hit over the head and knocked out. He comes to in the apartment of another young woman and he soon discovers that the first woman is dead in her apartment, brutally murdered, her corpse savaged by bite marks. Oh yes and Max's fingerprints are all over the place. 

Max is pegged as suspect numero uno and quickly goes on the lam deep into the Chicago underworld in a quest to clear his name and find the real killer. Along the way, he learns a great deal about professional shoplifting, visits several sleazy strip clubs, encounters a stripper who uses a giant python in her act, runs across crooked cops, a sinister homosexual and other colorful characters. 

Ozaki was no great stylist but he sure as hell knew how to keep things moving.  A DAME CALLED MURDER opens with a chapter that double dog dares you to stop reading and before you know it, you've breezed through 183 pages of pure pulp magic, the kind of "quick and dirty" storytelling I like and admire. 

Check out the Armchair Fiction website (armchairfiction.com) for more info.  

And if you end up ordering a book (or two, or three..) be sure and tell Greg I sent you.