A Rough Edges Rerun: Strictly For Cash - James Hadley Chase (Rene Raymond)

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 20, 2009.)

If James Hadley Chase (who was actually an Englishman named Rene Raymond) is remembered for anything these days, it’s probably either his notorious, highly successful first novel, NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH, or the charges of plagiarism leveled at one of his early novels, BLONDE’S REQUIEM, which some people thought borrowed a little too generously from Raymond Chandler’s FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. One of the people who thought so was Chandler himself, which led to an apology from Chase. (I didn't know at the time of the original post that Chase also ran into plagiarism accusations regarding NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH and William Faulkner's SANCTUARY. Much has been written about this online if you'd care to look it up.) Despite that embarrassment, Chase went on to a long, prolific career as an author of mysteries, thrillers, and noirish crime yarns.

I read a few books by Chase nearly thirty years ago and don’t remember much about them. A recent conversation with one of the readers of this blog prompted me to try another one, and since I’d recently picked up a copy of STRICTLY FOR CASH at Half Price Books, that’s the one I read. Originally published in England by Robert Hale in 1951, it’s one of numerous Chase titles reprinted in the U.S. by Pocket Books during the Seventies. It’s the story of down-on-his-luck boxer Johnny Farrar (is there any other kind of boxer in books like this?), who’s hitchhiking through Florida when he gets mixed up with a crooked fight promoter (is there any other kind?) and a beautiful but quite possibly dangerous dame (is there any other . . . never mind, you get the idea). So far there’s nothing here you haven’t seen a thousand times before, even though it’s reasonably well-written and enjoyable.

But then Chase pulls a switch and starts playing with time in a way you don’t often see in yarns like this. Ultimately, you may know where he’s going with his story, but you can’t be sure how he’s going to get there, and some of the actual twists are fairly unexpected, too. Like every noir protagonist, Johnny thinks he’s doing the right thing, or at least the only thing he can, but the mess he’s in keeps getting worse and worse until everything comes together in an operatic, almost surreal climax. Along the way, the action scenes are very well-done, and there are some nice lines that made me laugh out loud, like “She had a figure that would make a mountain goat lose its foothold.”

Another charge leveled against Chase is that his books, although set in America, don’t sound American. Well, that’s true in this case, sometimes distractingly so. I’m as much of a supporter of pure texts as the next person, but really, in a book set in America, and published by an American publisher (as these Pocket Books reprints were), a character shouldn’t be pumping petrol and putting something in the boot of the car. It wouldn’t have been too hard for an editor to change those references, and it would have improved the book because sometimes they were so jarring that they knocked me right out of the story.

That said, I enjoyed STRICTLY FOR CASH quite a bit. Chase’s style really keeps the reader turning the pages most of the time. I have several more of his books on hand, and I have no doubt that I’ll read them. And it won’t take me another thirty years, either. (I've actually read several more Chase novels since the time of the original post, and I think there's a very good chance I'll read more in the future.)

I'll Bury My Dead - James Hadley Chase (Rene Raymond)

James Hadley Chase was actually Rene Raymond, an English author who wrote mysteries and thrillers under several different names, but Chase is certainly the best-known and most successful of those pseudonyms. His novel I’LL BURY MY DEAD was published originally in hardcover in 1953 in England by Robert Hale and reprinted in paperback by Harlequin in 1954. It was published in the United States in hardcover by Dutton in 1954 and then reprinted in paperback by Signet in 1955. Finally, the Signet paperback had a second edition with a different cover published in 1963, and that’s the edition I read. That’s my copy above. On-line images of the other editions are at the bottom of this post.

The protagonist of I’LL BURY MY DEAD is Nick English, a promoter who backs theater and nightclub shows, boxers, and assorted other enterprises. He’s something of a shady character who’s mixed up in some political corruption as well. But he’s not a bad guy, and in a nice twist, he’s also an inventor who got his start by coming up with a gyroscopic compass he was able to patent. He’s also a philanthropist who financed a new hospital in New York City, which goes by a pseudonym itself in this novel, as Chase/Raymond refers to it as Essex City, but it’s obviously New York.

Nick has a mistress who’s a nightclub singer, a beautiful secretary who’s in love with him (although he doesn’t realize that, the reader does), a tough chauffeur/bodyguard, and a ne’er-do-well brother who’s a private eye. It’s the brother’s suicide that kicks off the action in this book . . . but did he really kill himself? Nick doesn’t think so, and when the brother’s secretary also winds up dead, another apparent suicide, the same night, Nick is convinced something sinister is going on. He doesn’t trust the cops to find out who’s responsible for these deaths, so he sets out to do it himself. This investigation sets off a chain of even more murders.

Then halfway through the book, Chase springs a twist that I didn’t see coming at all, and the second half of the novel is less mystery than thriller as Nick battles against a brilliant but deranged killer who seems to always be a step ahead of him.

I’ve read maybe a dozen James Hadley Chase novels over the years, and I’LL BURY MY DEAD is one of the best of them. Nick English is a good protagonist and the other characters are handled well, especially the killer, who’s really creepy and despicable. There are some very brutal scenes in this novel, and not everyone survives who you might expect to. The pace never slows down for long and I had to keep flipping the pages all the way to the end. Since Chase was English and this book, like most of his others, is set in America, there are a few bits of dialogue that don’t sound quite right, but overall he does an excellent job of making things ring true.

I really enjoyed I’LL BURY MY DEAD and give it a high recommendation. One word of warning, though: Harlequin reprinted this and several other hardboiled novels back in 2009 as part of what they called their Vintage Collection, but the editors there took it upon themselves to delete what they considered objectionable material from those editions. I don’t know the extent of the cuts they made to this novel, but I suspect they toned down some of the violence and possibly the sex. Just on general principles, though, I’d avoid that 2009 edition and look for the original Harlequin edition or one of the Signet editions if you decide to read it.

Bonus points: Which is the best cover?

UPDATE: The much better scan of the cover from the original Robert Hale edition comes to us courtesy of Keith Chapman. Thanks!

Forgotten Books: No Business of Mine - James Hadley Chase

The main weakness in the American-set thrillers by British author James Hadley Chase is that occasionally the settings and especially the dialogue don’t quite ring true. The very popular Chase, whose real name was Rene Raymond, comes up with a smart way to avoid this minor pitfall in NO BUSINESS OF MINE, a novel originally published in 1947 under the pseudonym Raymond Marshall. Even though the novel features an American narrator/protagonist, two-fisted reporter Steve Harmas, it’s set in post-war England and so Chase can write more about people and places he knows. And for that matter, Steve Harmas is a pretty believable American, too.

Harmas spent most of the war in London as a war correspondent, and he’s back now, a couple of years later, to write a series of articles for a New York newspaper about conditions in post-war England. While he’s there, he intends to look up an old girlfriend of his named Netta Scott. When he does, though, he discovers to his shock that she committed suicide just the day before by gassing herself in her flat. Harmas doesn’t believe she would do such a thing, so he starts poking into her life since he saw her last. Naturally, things do not go well.

The first few pages of this novel are kind of slow as Chase sets things up, but once Harmas discovers Netta’s death and starts his investigation, boy, things really rocket along after that! Almost right away, Netta’s sister winds up dead, too. Hearses are hijacked and bodies disappear! The morgue goes up in flames! Gangsters beat the crap out of Harmas! The cops warn him to stay out of their investigations or go to jail! A fortune in jewels is missing! Throats are cut, skulls are bashed in with fireplace pokers, and everywhere Harmas turns, somebody’s either lying to him or trying to kill him! Thank goodness there are a few beautiful blondes and redheads to comfort him along the way.

It seems that Chase went into this book with the goal of springing a major surprise on the reader every thirty or forty pages. He succeeds in doing that, too. I certainly wasn’t expecting some of the twists. That makes for an incredibly complicated plot, but as far as I can tell, it all holds together pretty well, although Harmas has to take the last fifteen pages of the book to explain everything. He’s a hard-nosed but likable protagonist, quick with his fists and with witty banter, too, and the book has a lot of other vividly depicted characters (mostly villainous) as well.

NO BUSINESS OF MINE is one of the most entertaining James Hadley Chase books I’ve read so far. It’s just been reprinted by Stark House in a double volume with another early Chase novel, MISS SHUMWAY WAVES A WAND, and if you’re looking for a tough, fast-paced, hardboiled action novel, I give it a high recommendation. I really enjoyed it.

Forgotten Books: Just the Way It Is - James Hadley Chase

JUST THE WAY IT IS was published originally in 1944 under the pseudonym Raymond Marshall, although it's been reprinted several times as by James Hadley Chase, the much more famous pen-name of its author, Rene Raymond. It appears again under the Chase name in a recent double volume from Stark House, along with BLONDE'S REQUIEM, another novel first published as by Raymond Marshall.

Chase (we might as well call him that) was an English author who specialized in crime and mystery novels set in the United States. In JUST THE WAY IT IS, the story revolves around two neighboring small cities, Bentonville and Fairview, as well as a slum area outside Fairview known as Pinder's End. Bentonville's criminal underworld is controlled by a mysterious mastermind named Vardis Spade, but nobody knows who Spade really is or what he looks like. Clare Russell, a newspaper reporter, stumbles across the fact that a low-level criminal has bought Pinder's End. Clare's boyfriend's best friend is a gambler named Harry Duke, who is widely reputed to be a dangerous, shady character. Harry Duke rents an office from poolroom owner Paul Schultz, who has a beautiful mistress called Lorelli and a driver/gunman named Joe. All of these people, and assorted others, are vying to find out what suddenly makes Pinder's End so valuable and get their hands on whatever it is, no matter what it takes, including double-crossing, kidnapping, and murder.

The plot of this novel is actually pretty simple once you get to the core of it, but with all the conniving characters running around drinking, smoking, and killing each other, Chase makes it seem complicated. It's all as hardboiled as can be, with lots of snappy banter and terse action. I've read quite a few James Hadley Chase books, and they're always fast-moving and entertaining. JUST THE WAY IT IS fits that description very well. I had a fine time reading it. In my opinion, Chase never really succeeds in sounding like an American—he still sounds like an Englishman trying to sound like an American—but hey, if I was trying to write crime novels set in 1940s England, I probably wouldn't get it completely right, either. What he succeeds at is spinning good yarns, and if that's what you're looking for, Stark House has published quite a few of his novels. I recommend any or all of them.

Forgotten Books: Strictly for Cash - James Hadley Chase

If James Hadley Chase (who was actually an Englishman named Rene Raymond) is remembered for anything these days, it’s probably either his notorious, highly successful first novel, NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH, or the charges of plagiarism leveled at one of his early novels, BLONDE’S REQUIEM, which some people thought borrowed a little too generously from Raymond Chandler’s FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. One of the people who thought so was Chandler himself, which led to an apology from Chase. Despite that embarrassment, Chase went on to a long, prolific career as an author of mysteries, thrillers, and noir-ish crime yarns.

I read a few books by Chase nearly thirty years ago and don’t remember much about them. A recent conversation with one of the readers of this blog prompted me to try another one, and since I’d recently picked up a copy of STRICTLY FOR CASH at Half Price Books, that’s the one I read. Originally published in England by Robert Hale in 1951, it’s one of numerous Chase titles reprinted in the U.S. by Pocket Books during the Seventies. It’s the story of down-on-his-luck boxer Johnny Farrar (is there any other kind of boxer in books like this?), who’s hitchhiking through Florida when he gets mixed up with a crooked fight promoter (is there any other kind?) and a beautiful but quite possibly dangerous dame (is there any other . . . never mind, you get the idea). So far there’s nothing here you haven’t seen a thousand times before, even though it’s reasonably well-written and enjoyable.

But then Chase pulls a switch and starts playing with time in a way you don’t often see in yarns like this. Ultimately, you may know where he’s going with his story, but you can’t be sure how he’s going to get there, and some of the actual twists are fairly unexpected, too. Like every noir protagonist, Johnny thinks he’s doing the right thing, or at least the only thing he can, but the mess he’s in keeps getting worse and worse until everything comes together in an operatic, almost surreal climax. Along the way, the action scenes are very well-done, and there are some nice lines that made me laugh out loud, like “She had a figure that would make a mountain goat lose its foothold.”

Another charge leveled against Chase is that his books, although set in America, don’t sound American. Well, that’s true in this case, sometimes distractingly so. I’m as much of a supporter of pure texts as the next person, but really, in a book set in America, and published by an American publisher (as these Pocket Books reprints were), a character shouldn’t be pumping petrol and putting something in the boot of the car. It wouldn’t have been too hard for an editor to change those references, and it would have improved the book because sometimes they were so jarring that they knocked me right out of the story.

That said, I enjoyed STRICTLY FOR CASH quite a bit. Chase’s style really keeps the reader turning the pages most of the time. I have several more of his books on hand, and I have no doubt that I’ll read them. And it won’t take me another thirty years, either.