Gun in Cheek An Affectionate Guide to the Worst in Mystery Fiction by Bill Pronzini

Author:Bill Pronzini [Pronzini, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery & Crime
Published: 2011-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

Whatever else you can say about James Bond, he knew what to do when he had a woman on a bed with her skirt off. And it wasn’t to bend her double so blood would flood her brain.

The involvement of the United States in World War II spawned a surfeit of American spy novels, some of which were the equal of anything Horler, Newman, and others were turning out in England. Nearly all of these dealt with home-front espionage—the threat of Nazi spies and saboteurs in the large cities, in and around defense plants and military installations. Outstanding among them is Frank Diamond’s Murder Rides a Rocket (1946), featuring the breezy escapades of Vicky Gaines (a.k.a. “the Dish”) and counterespionage agent Ransome V. Dragoon (a.k.a. “Drag,” not inappropriately).

The scene is Manhattan, where Drag and the Dish mix it up with German spies, French spies, Russian Army Intelligence, the FBI, assorted vamps, a couple of horny but good-hearted naval officers, a couple of murders, and the model of a “new form of compact one-man hand rocket weapon,” similar to a bazooka, which contains three “sausages” (i.e., rockets) and has an interchangeable barrel and magazine of “the ordinary tommygun type.” The Dish is fun to watch in action because she’s cute and cuddly and kissable and wily and is always doing something unpredictable, like Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy. Drag is fun to watch because he has an amazing repertoire of clever expressions, including (but not limited to): “Great murderous mastodons!”, “Dangle my remains from a tree,” “Well, rack and-thumbscrew me,” “Burn me for an infidel!”, and, best of all, “Great whistling wheels of the Pit!”

But the real charm of Murder Rides a Rocket lies in its breezy style. William Le Queux may have been a master of padding, but Frank Diamond was no slouch in his own right; where Le Queux’s method was to use description and repetitive dialogue, Diamond’s favorite tool was an endless stream of devastatingly simpleminded humor. This novel (and its forerunner, Murder in Five Columns, also starring Drag and the Dish) fairly bulges with wisecracks, atrocious puns, snappy one-liners, B-movie patter, and Bowery Boys routines—sort of like the joke book for a stand-up comic on the forties burlesque circuit.

Just a few samples:

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