FORGOTTEN BOOKS: No Love Lost by Robert Reeves

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After last week's Dead and Done For, the first book in the Cellini Smith series, I couldn't resist moving right on to book 2. So here it is.

No Love Lost began life as the three-part serial "Dog Eat Dog", starting in the September, 1940 Black Mask. The cover says "Introducing Cellini Smith" because that was his first appearance in the magazine (or any magazine) despite the fact Dead and Done For had been published in hardcover a year earlier. Ain't this a great cover? The title spreads for Parts 1 and 2 of the serial are shown below.

The copyright page of No Love Lost, published in 1941, says "a condensed and different version" appeared in Black Mask. Was that really so, or was No Love Lost actually an expanded and different version of the serial? We'll likely never know. We can be pretty sure, though, that the book's third and final incarnation, the Mercury digest Come Out Killing, was a slightly abridged version of the hardcover.

Why three titles? Beats me. Any one of them would have served. None of the three is particularly germane to the plot, while all three are general enough to be slapped onto to any number of mysteries.

After the split with his New York gangster friend/boss, Cellini is managing a detective agency in Los Angeles, and has yet to land a case. Lucky for him, his office is across the street from a bar run by a retired boxing champ, and that champ gets himself murdered in Chapter 1. The champ's pals are convinced the killer is his arch-rival, retired wrestler The Terrible Turk (seen below eating oysters) and hire Cellini to prove it. Of course the case is not that simple, and Cellini needs all his wits and wiles to solve the puzzle.

Reeves kicked the humor up a notch for this one. While Cellini is still plenty tough, the book delivers more laughs. I got the feeling the author was feeling his oats and daring to be put more of himself into this book. There's even a bar scene where we meet a drink-mooching bald man who may be Reeves. The guy is feeling sorry for himself because he doesn't know short hand. If he did, he moans, he could have been a writer.

One sample of the humor. While a master of ceremonies is welcoming the crowd to a nightclub, a customer gets up and goes into the can.  "Tell that guy in the can to come out," the emcee says, "because the floor show's starting." Comes the answer: "The guy in the can left because he couldn't stand the smell from the kitchen."

Cellini displays a bit less of his education in this one, focusing more on the three Ds: drinking, dames and detecting. His sidekick Duck-Eye Ryan, a loyal but dumb punchdrunk bruiser, provides additional comic relief and plenty muscle.

Another book that badly needs reprinting.

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Click on over to pattinase for Patti Abbott's weekly list of Forgotten Books.

FORGOTTEN BOOKS: Dead and Done For by Robert Reeves

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Not only is Dead and Done For a forgotten book, Robert Reeves is a forgotten author - and one who very much deserves to be back in print.

Reeves compares very favorably to several other hardboiled writers who have been reprinted over the past twenty-odd years. Among them are Paul Cain, Norbert Davis and Jonathan Latimer. Heck, even Robert Leslie Bellem's crappiest work (and there was lots of it) is now available, and Reeves was way better than Bellem.

Anthony Boucher considered Reeves a forgotten, or at least neglected, writer as far back as 1953, and as far as I know, absolutely nothing has been reprinted since then. Boucher called him "one of the best" of the writers developed by Black Mask, but also "one of the least known of the major tough writers". "But," Boucher goes on, "he can hold his own with the best, giving you as sharp and action-packed a story-line as any of them, brightened by vivid dialog and enlivened by the presence of Cellini Smith, who is unique among hard-boiled private eyes in being admittedly an intellectual - and tough enough to get away with it."

While Reeves was clearly influenced by the Black Mask school, he was not actually developed by the magazine. Most others learned their trade writing short stories and progressed to serials that eventually appeared as novels, but Reeves seems to have skipped those steps and went straight to hardcover. As far as anyone knows, Dead and Done For (1939) was his first published work. Only afterward did he begin selling stories to the pulps, and produced fewer than a dozen. The bio here is from the dust jacket of No Love Lost (1941).

Dead and Done For finds Cellini keeping the books for Tony Moro, a big man in the slot machine racket in New York. The two grew up in the same neighborhood, and Tony paid for Cellini's education. Now Cellini just wants to be an anthropologist, but he's still indebted to Tony, and (despite his protests) seems to enjoy the tough life.

When Tony is suspected of murder, Cellini plays detective to clear him. In the process, he finds he's pretty good at it. In the second book, No Love Lost, Cellini is operating a detective agency in Los Angeles.

Reeves' style can be as tough as Paul Cain's, but laced with humor worthy of Jonathan Latimer and Lester Dent. As the series progresses to the third book, he almost strays into Norbert Davis territory. I like this guy a lot.

Here's the bad news: Dead and Done For has only been reissued once - a Grosset & Dunlap edition in 1941. Your best bet may be to get one from InterLibrary Loan or plead with your friendly neighborhood hardboiled reprinter to add it to their list.

Find more of this week's Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott's pattinase.