The Pace That Kills

William Fuller was a merchant seaman, an infantryman and a drifter before becoming a full-time novelist in the 1950s. His claim to fame is the six-book series of crime-noir novels starring a Miami playboy named Brad Dolan who drifts along the Florida coast in a houseboat. Shell Scott author Richard Prather describes Fuller as “literate, hard-paced violence, remindful of James. M. Cain.” Aside from the Dolan series, Fuller wrote one stand-alone novel, The Pace That Kills (1956). 

The novel is set northwest of the Florida Everglades, just shy of a rural, dense area known as 10,000 Islands. It's this swampy area where Danny Rivers escapes two cops in route to prison. His fugitive trail leads back to his small hometown. Ducking police surveillance, hounds and road blocks, Fuller's narrative incorporates Rivers' attempts to commandeer vehicles, rob people and murder on his way back home. While this is the most exciting portion of the novel, the author spends a great deal of time creating characters and small town life for the reader.

Through various subplots, readers are introduced to a motel and restaurant owner named Harry and his alcoholic wife Marge. There's also Harry's brand new waitress, a beautiful drifter named June, who quickly becomes the talk of the town. There's also the town's most wealthy citizen, his mistresses and cheating wife. There's a host of other supporting characters that are vividly collected in current and past time lines. All of the town's citizens have a common thread – they have all been touched in one way or another by Danny Rivers. As the news broadcasts about Rivers' escape increases, the town begins to brace for Rivers' imminent return home.

William Fuller's The Pace That Kills is a southern Gothic that mixes Paul Cain and Erskine Caldwell into a warped version of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. I didn't find much of it particularly interesting, but I appreciated Fuller's southern-fried style. It works as a small town scandal story or as a "heated, adulterous bedroom community with secrets" novel. If that's your sort of thing, then this is a recommended title. I was hoping Fuller would further develop Rivers' actual crime and the heist money that was tucked away in a secret place unbeknownst to the town. While that plot thread eventually comes to fruition, it's too late in the book to have a sizable impact. The end result is just another crime-noir novel that's written well, but is devoid of any real substance. Readers may want to just stick with Fuller's Brad Dolan series.

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Brad Dolan #05 - Miami Manhunt

Between 1954 and 1959, Florida author William Fuller wrote six Brad Dolan mystery paperbacks for Dell about an American playboy who finds mystery and adventure while bumming around the Caribbean in his rickety houseboat. “Brad Dolan’s Miami Manhunt” is the fifth book in the series from 1958, but there’s no particular reason why they need to be read in order.

As a hero, Dolan is a can-do guy in a laid-back shell. His only ambitions are “blue water, sunshine - and freedom.” In practice, Dolan funds his freedom by doing some low-level smuggling throughout the Caribbean - mostly guns, booze, smokes, and people. As required, he’s got an eye for the ladies and very specific feelings about the appropriate breast size. And while he’s unlikely to ever get booked on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” he’s quick with a funny wisecrack at just the right times.

In this Miami-based adventure, Dolan finds himself on vacation while his boat is being repaired. Upon arrival at his hotel, he meets a stripper with all the correct proportions who asks him to help recover money that her dead husband squirreled away before his demise. Faster than you can say “Travis McGee,” Dolan is on the case. The stripper - Marta is her name - thinks she knows where the money is stashed, but bad guys are after her to get that information. She offers to split the dough - a cool quarter million - with Dolan, which will help fund his roustabout lifestyle for years into the future.

Almost right away, things go sideways. Dolan is tailed by an unknown shadow and he is questioned by police for a crime he didn’t commit. The hidden cash is somehow tied into an airline pilot who recently went missing in a Caribbean banana republic, and Dolan turns gumshoe to get the straight dope on the pilot’s disappearance in hopes that it will open the door to the hidden fortune. 

I don’t know much about the author, William Fuller, but he was likely very different than most of the genre paperback scribes of the 1950s. The back of “Brad Dolan’s Miami Manhunt” has a photo of the impossibly handsome, shirtless, muscular writer with the bio, “Like his fictional creation, Fuller’s been around himself - merchant seaman, hobo, movie bit player, infantryman on Guam, Leyte, and Okinawa. He now lives in Winter Haven, Florida.” It sounds like Fuller lived a remarkable life and channeled his experiences into his fiction.

At 160 stubby Dell pages, this Brad Dolan adventure wasn’t a huge time-commitment, but it was a lot of fun to read. Given Fuller’s looks, charisma, and talent, the real mystery may be why he remains largely unknown today. At the very least, it was good enough to motivate me to seek out the other five books in the series. Recommended.

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Brad Dolan #01 - Back Country

William Fuller worked on freighters and farms, served as a newspaper reporter, and was an infantryman during WWII. It was during the early 1940s through the 1950s that Fuller's short stories were purchased by the likes of Sky Aces, Adventure, and Argosy. Like Steve Fisher, Fuller found success in the slick magazines like Collier's, McCall's and even Esquire. With the onset of paperback publishing, Fuller began writing full-length novels in the 1950s, beginning with 1954's Back Country. It was an enormous success for Dell and Fuller. 

The novel, the first of six to star a vagabond hero named Brad Dolan, sold a half-million copies. Long out of print, Stark House Press has resurrected Back Country as part of their Black Gat Book imprint. The reprint features a comprehensive and insightful look at the series by esteemed scholar and author Bill Pronzini. As a fan of Fuller's Brad Dolan character and his only stand-alone novel, The Pace That Kills, I was excited to learn that Back Country was being reintroduced to modern readers.

Brad Dolan served in both WW2 and Korea, an experience that led to harsh imprisonment in a German camp as a prisoner-of-war. Banged up after the wars, Dolan is driving across inland Florida en route to the southern beaches of Miami. Along the way, his car gives out and he becomes stranded in a small, fictional Florida town called Cartersville. It is one of those map dots that features a war monument, a dusty park or two, the obligatory noisy railroad, and old men playing shuffleboard until they die. Dolan reminds readers and himself, “This is the Florida the tourists never see. This is small town anywhere.”

In a sweltering bar, Dolan downs a cold brew and offers to buy a woman a drink. After a minor scuffle, Dolan is hit with a sap. He then finds himself crawling through a Japanese jungle and raking fire across huts. He then wakes up and realizes he's still in the one-horse town, only he now sees it on the wrong side of iron bars. The Cartersville police then beat him up and he spends days in a daze. Eventually, the one horse that owns the town shows up – Mr. Rand Ringo. 

Ringo reviews Dolan's past and realizes his operation could benefit from his talents. He pays Dolan a wad of cash, provides lodging, and tells him to just hang around until he needs him. The hanging around part just so happens to involve Ringo's wife in Dolan's new bed. If that isn't enough grief, Dolan befriends Ringo's sexy twenty-something daughter. But, eventually the rubber hits the road and Dolan is asked to bounce on an African-American named Sam Foster. Ringo lets Foster run some illegal gambling in the black section of town, but all the games are rigged. Sam has been tinkering with the scam and trying to earn an honest living. After Dolan talks with Sam, he realizes Ringo is a toxic influence on Cartersville. It's a criminal infestation that has to stop.

Fuller's novel is a product of the times and is filled with a lot of racist comments and attitudes. But, as Pronzini points out in the introduction, Dolan and the author aren't endorsing racism or that attitude.  Dolan's nemesis...Cartersville's nemesis...is the racist law-enforcement controlled and created by Ringo. In the book's furious finale, Dolan and Sam are forced into the street to face a mob of angry white people Hellbent on a hanging. Dolan's wits, determination, and cool factor win the day, but it's a memorable fight. 

Back Country's first half is cloudy with a lot of dialogue about God, the purpose of life and social philosophy. These conversations place Dolan on an intellectual plane that ran counter to what my beliefs and expectations were of the book. But, the price of admission is well worth it. The novel's second half is a whirlwind of emotion and violence, saturated in Fuller's scrappy storytelling. It isn't pretty, but it doesn't have to be. Back Country isn't a main street crime-noir. It lives up to its name. Back Country is a crossroads of dastardly villains, despicable authority, and a lot of lyin' and cheatin' no good son of a guns. Thankfully, Brad Dolan is back in the house.

The Girl in 304

Harold R. Daniels (1919-1987) enjoyed a successful career as a technical writer and specialist in the metal industry. For 14 years he was the editor of the magazine Metalworking, but he also authored short stories for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and wrote six full-length novels. His first, In His Blood (1955), was nominated for an Edgar and hailed by the NY Times as the “best detective story of 1955”. The House on Greenapple Road (1966) was adapted into a film which spawned the short-lived Lt. Dan August television show starring Burt Reynolds. Thankfully, Stark House Press subsidiary Black Gat Books has published a new edition of his second novel, The Girl in 304. It was originally published by Dell in 1956 and now exists as an affordable paperback and ebook. 

The Girl in 304 reads like a really good John Ball novel, emphasizing small-town politics while creating an engaging, thought-provoking narrative. These ideas were nearly perfected by Ball in his novels In the Heat of the Night and Police Chief. But, many authors like Harold R. Daniels (and William Fuller for example) were using this formula at least a decade earlier. 

Edward Masters, the Sheriff of Clay County, Georgia (real place) and his deputies are called when a young boy discovers the corpse of a partially nude young woman in a heavily forested area. The woman received multiple stab wounds that led to her violent death. Rocked by this homicide, Masters immediately shifts into high-gear and notifies the state police for a lab technician and places the city's police department (his rival, county versus city) on alert. By page 25, readers are thrust into this engaging, irresistible murder investigation. 

Daniels absolutely nails the procedural investigation, pulling his reader into interviews with suspects and the victim's co-workers, family members, and acquaintances. There's a deep dive into the girl's past, leading into some really dark places. The motive and killer was easy to identify early in the novel, but I think that was the point. It was Daniels' purpose to present an imperfect hero, a noble sheriff that is determined to find answers, but continually misses the clues to break the case. It's not a criticism of law-enforcement or of Masters, who is ultimately triumphant, but a look at just how difficult the cases are when faced with a number of suspects with sketchy alibis. There is also the resistance from the city's force to assist the county, a theme touched on most recently by Lee Goldberg in his fantastic crime-fiction novel Lost Hills (2020). 

If you love crime-fiction with police procedural elements, then The Girl in 304 is definitely a must read. It has a tight story, swift pace, and doesn't lose itself completely in the details. With Daniels remarkable storytelling skills, this novel is a smooth, extremely enjoyable reading experience. Highly recommended. 

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A Bullet for the Bride

We've covered a great deal of Jon Messmann's literary work, like vigilante novels in The Revenger series, The Trailsman westerns, his Claudette Nicole gothics and Jefferson Boone: Handyman international thrillers. While Messmann's series titles are the most widely recognized, he did write a small number of stand-alone novels for a variety of publishers. Brash Books (and subsidiary Cutting Edge) have performed a wonderful public service by releasing most of Messmann's out of print novels in brand new editions. So, I was excited to acquire Messmann's stand-alone novel A Bullet for the Bride. It was originally published by Pyramid  in 1972 and now remains available through Brash Books with a brand new afterword from Bloody, Spicy, Books writer Roy Nugen.

Despite the book's original cover, A Bullet for the Bride is not a moody private-eye murder mystery. Pyramid clearly wasn't aware of John D. MacDonald's sensational houseboat hero Travis McGee. Or, any houseboat heroes for that matter – William Fuller's Brad Dolan, J.L. Potter's Jeff Tyler or, Messmann's own boating hero Logan, star of Logan (1970, 2022 Cutting Edge) and Killers at Sea (1970, 2022 Cutting Edge). As Nugen suggests in his afterword, this book was clearly designed to be the debut of a series, but it never came to fruition.

The book stars Captain Ed Steele, a retired CIA operative that now lives a fairly peaceful life on The Squid, a houseboat docked in the Gulf of Mexico. Steele still performs part-time jobs for his former CIA boss Byron. These are normally surveillance jobs or tasks that require Steele's efficiency with a boat. But, Steele is surprised when a woman named Cam Parnell calls him on the phone saying that she got his name from Byron. 

Parnell, as hot as a July firecracker, wants Steele to do a private-eye job. She wants to know why her super wealthy father's new girlfriend, whom she absolutely despises, is running what appears to be a fake company. Hesitantly, Steele learns that the woman's name is Grace White, a wealthy, sexy older woman that is apparently running a successful exporting business. After Parnell seduces Steele into the job, he discovers that White's business may be a front for an arms-dealer. 

I love Messmann's quick-pace and his flawless formula of placing a lone hero against the odds. The chemistry between Parnell and Steele was like lightning in a bottle, a sexy combination of youth, experience, and wealth within the backdrop of Florida's posh beachfront mansions. I also found it interesting that Steele's backstory has him chasing a mysterious man. That story probably would have played itself out in future installments, but they never happened. Instead, Messmann used a variation of this for his successful Trailsman series, where the lone hero Skye Fargo is chasing three murderous men. 

Jon Messmann's stirring narrative - laced with boat chases, gun-play and fisticuffs - pairs perfectly with the rich, sexual ambiance of the 1970s. A Bullet for the Bride is truly a marriage made in Heaven. 

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Paperback Warrior Podcast - Episode 62

On Episode 62 of the Paperback Warrior Podcast, Eric and Tom discuss the life and work of Charles Willeford. Also: Tom’s Dallas Book Tour, Richard Stark, Ron Goulart, Warrant for a Wanton, Nick Quarry, Hoke Moseley, William Fuller and more! Listen on your favorite podcast app, stream below or download directly HERE.

Listen to "Episode 62: Charles Willeford" on Spreaker.