John Evans (1)

In the 1940s, Howard Browne (sometimes using the pen name "John Evans") wrote a short series of hardboiled detective novels about a PI named Paul Pine. Browne skirted the edges of some controversial topics in his books, never more so than in this one, in which the subject of homosexuality is clearly acknowledged. Some of the views of lesbian orientation are pretty quaint, to put it gently, from a 21st-century viewpoint, but Browne writes a compelling mystery and even his antiquated perspective rarely becomes harsh. What's great about this book is that it's a believable private eye engaged in a plausible mystery and it's written with a flair that only the great masters of the period (Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald) exceeded consistently. All three Halo books are good. I liked this one a lot.… (mais)

review of
Howard Browne's Halo in Brass
- tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 21-22, 2020

I've only read one other book by Browne, Halo for Satan (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3284043369 ), so he's still a new author for me. So far, so good. I'm always happy to find a new author whose work I want to discover more fully. Browne's writing is full of that good old deadpan detective humor & other such tropes of hard-boiled American crime fiction.

""Don't tell me a nice-looking young man like you's not married."

""No," I said. "This dent in my nose came from high-school football."

"It wasn't funny, it wasn't even that bright, but it was broad enough for almost anyone to understand. Yet it went past the Fremonts like a rifle bullet." - p 13

I feel ya, Pine. My sense of humor is similarly rc'vd.

Description is another strong point of such writing.

"We said good-by and the old man gave me a hand the color and texture of Billy the Kid's saddle and mumbled something I didn't catch. I moved the hand up and down and returned it to him and went out to the vine-covered porch where a green porch swing crouched crossways on the narrow planks. It seemed the right place to spend the long summer evenings listening to the crickets and watching the snails whizz by." - p 18

See what happens to the writing when you close in the holes on the left side of "3"?!
But what happens to it when the detective gets into dialog w/ the bell-hop?

""You don't have to give me a cent," he retorted with a quiet dignity. "All I know is what I've heard, and you're welcome to it. They say Bertha Lund runs a house—if you know what I mean. But that's only part of it. You hear all kinds of talk. I hear stories that things go on out there I wouldn't even talk about. And I been around, too."

"I started at him until patches of color began to burn in his plain and artless face. "And this seemed such a nice town," I said. "Clean air and shimmering stone and a big blue sky. Empty jails and very little garbage and no roaring traffic's boom. I ought to punch you one right on the nose."

"His mouth was open. "What's the matter with you, mister?"

""Matter? Nothing's the matter. How can you say that? Everything's right. As right as two left feet in a wall bed on a purple-tinged morning in May. What were you saying?"" - p 29

His humor's being a little rough on the young feller, doncha think?!

Pine, in the sourse of his investigations, is approached by someone offering to buy him off in the supposed best interests of a 3rd party. The truth of this, however, is unclear.

"I sighed. "Do tell. You drive a hard bargain, Mr.—— Do you have a name or do I call you X17?"

"His thin nostrils flared. "You can call me Smith."

""Oh, yes. I've seen your name on a lot of hotel registers. Keep your king's ransom, Mr. Smith. If Miss Rehak wants information from me, she'll have to get it direct—in exchange for the information I want."

""She'll never agree to see you, Pine," he said firmly. "She's terribly frightened of blackmail. Grace has put her past behind her and made a new life for herself. If the . . . the people with whom she is now associated should learn of her life three years ago . . . well, it would kill her. That's why she's beside herself with worry right now over your efforts to find her. That's why she asked me to come to you."" - pp 58-59

Likely story, right? No, no, it couldn't possibly be that simple, the reader's only 59pp in!

& lest you think that our hero is just another slug-happy dimbulb, he IS a cultured gentleman, maybe even more than the average screen-gawker of today.

"It was an evening for taking in a movie, for sitting in a bar, for shooting hooligan at the corner cigar store. It was an evening for going home and having the radio on without really hearing it while you drink highballs over a book by Roy Huggins or Kenneth Patchen or some other streamlined intellectual." - p 102

& to think I had just gotten Pine's head in the sights of my sniper rifle when I saw that he was reading Patchen. No amt of money cd get me to kill a Patchen reader.

Pine has to muddle thru a variety of fake identities in his search for a missing person. In the process, he tries to trick one of the suspects.

"["]Incidentally, Chris sends his regards."

""Who's Chris?" she said suspiciously,

""What are you trying to pull?" I said, just as suspiciously. "I'm talking about your father. Don't tell me he's dead and buried too?"

"Her laugh was a short hard burst of sound. "My God, Pine, I'm surprised at you! When it comes to being clever you're really a card. My old man's name is Stanislaus Rehak—cut down to Stanley a long time ago—and he's hated my guts ever since I was fourteen and dating the track captain at high school.["]" - p 111

The description continues to be inspired.

"The wind was still at it. Nothing moved along the walks except shadows. Shadows that swooped and crept and retreated, like ghosts afraid of shadows." - p 152

"Halfway down the block I found a parking place. While I was getting out, a couple crossed the walk from one of the entrances and got into a car big enough to hold the Jukes family. It pulled away from the curb and rolled past me toward Broadway, its motor as quiet as butterflies wrestling." - p 162

"The Jukes family was a New York "hill family" studied in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The studies are part of a series of other family studies, including the Kallikaks, the Zeros and the Nams, that were often quoted as arguments in support of eugenics, though the original Jukes study, by Richard L. Dugdale, placed considerable emphasis on the environment as a determining factor in criminality, disease and poverty (euthenics)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jukes_family

My theory is that the sound of butterflies wrestling kept them up all night & drove them to drink.

As a reader, I usually solve the mystery w/in the 1st few words. This time I was pretty sure I had it by page 196.

""That's interesting," I said. "Her and Whitney, huh?"

"She made a derisive sound that was half hiccough. "Are you serious? Ruth Abbott? She wouldn't sit in the same room with a man unless somebody else was around. Larry accidentally brushed a hand against her hip one day in the library. I thought she was going to climb the wall."" - p 196

SO, as you can see, the butler did it with a candlestick in the library. Then he licked the candlestick clean. The cops were fine w/ that b/c, to them, perverts like a candlestick licker don't matter anyway.

""Worked out all for the best, at that," he rumbled. "Nobody gets hurt except people who don't count anyway. Awhile there I figured I might have to go to bat against I don't know how many millions. I wouldn't of liked that one."

""Four people with their lives snuffed out." I said. "Five counting the kid back in Lincoln, Nebraska. But I feel better now that you've pointed out they don't count."

"He looked at me narrowly out of his sleepy yellow eyes. "Don't get noble on me, brother. A bunch of lousy perverts," He leaned out the window to spit and the subject was closed." - p 217

Hey! I take exception! I'm a pervert & not only am I more valuable than any fictional character, I've never had lice. So there.

This had all sorts of standard tropes: the detective gets sapped, the suspects gather in the library & the detective talks them thru the case until the guilty one reveals themselves.

The author was actually born in Nebraska, I'll bet you thought that possibility was a myth.

"Born in Omaha, Nebraska. My mother was a school teacher, my fether died four months before I was born. While residing in Lincoln, Nebraska, and after attending high school for three years, it seemed to me that attending school was interfering with my education. So I dropped out altogether." - p 223

THE END… (mais)

1946's Halo in Blood is the somewhat shaky debut of the Paul Pine series. Writing as "John Evans," Howard Browne would steadily improve with each book until, eleven years later, he was imitating Ross Macdonald instead of Raymond Chandler (in The Taste of Ashes, the only Pine novel that Browne published under his own name). Here, he's very hung up on Chandler's stylistic idiosyncrasies and imitates them quite conscientiously. While the story is workable and often entertaining, too much of it is taken up with strained quips and romantic encounters that verge on the cornball. Still, there's plenty of action and intrigue, and Browne even mixes in a Dashiell Hammett cliché (the peculiarly effeminate gangland henchman) with the numerous Chandlerisms (the private eye who's always getting sapped from behind, the emotionally volatile woman who can't or won't give a straight answer to a question, etc.).

Readable, and the series gets better from here on out.… (mais)

In conscious imitation of Raymond Chandler, prolific pulp magazine author and television screenwriter Howard Browne created a private eye character named Paul Pine. But Browne wasn't just a Chandler imitator: he was the best one in the business, and his books are worth reading. Halo in Brass (1949), the third of four Pine novels, finds the Chicago detective working a missing persons case; as he attempts to locate a young Nebraska woman who moved to the Windy City and then disappeared, Pine encounters increasingly dangerous resistance. The lesbian element of the story, while it will not please the PC police, is an interesting angle that Chandler himself probably would never have attempted. In the foreword to the 1988 edition, Browne notes that he was trying to "turn out mystery novels in which the least likely subject is not the killer, but somebody impossible to suspect," and he certainly fulfilled that ambition here.

Browne was such an uncannily accurate Chandler imitator that he even got the less appealing aspects of Chandler's writing down pat. For example, Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe frequently became indignant for reasons that were never made clear to the reader. In Halo in Brass, Browne makes Paul Pine inscrutably salty in the following exchange with a hotel bellhop:

"'And this seemed such a nice town,' I [Pine] said. 'Clean air and shimmering stone and a big blue sky. Empty jails and very little garbage and no roaring traffic's boom. I ought to punch you one right in the nose.'

"His [the bellhop's] mouth was open. 'What's the matter with you, mister?'

"'Matter? Nothing's the matter. How can you say that? Everything's right. As right as two left feet in a wall bed on a purple-tinged morning in May. What were you saying?'"

That's a flawless imitation of Chandler's prose, obviously, but the really funny thing about this scene is Pine's admission that his anger makes no sense: "He [the bellhop] had no idea what I was talking about. I hardly knew myself." It's as if Browne was winking at his readers and saying, Hey, we all love Chandler's books, but have you noticed that Marlowe is always biting the head off a client or an elevator operator or just some random walk-on character for no reason? And that the hapless victim is never made to understand *how* he or she has offended Marlowe's delicate sensibilities? What's that all about?

At any rate, this is quite a good detective novel and I recommend it. The Taste of Ashes--the fourth and final Pine book--is generally regarded as Howard Browne's masterpiece, but Halo in Brass will not disappoint fans of hardboiled PI fiction.… (mais)