Henry Kane's Peter Chambers novels debuted in hardback in the
late 1940s, perhaps a year or two later than Frank Kane's
Johnny Liddell. Since I am in Brussels far away from my
collection, I can't be precise on dates or publishers. Both
writers settled into paperback originals by the mid-1950s. I
recall that both writers were contributors to that great
digest Manhunt.
I read and enjoyed both as a teenager but gradually favored
Henry Kane. The Peter Chambers novels were sexy (for the
time) and funny. Great snappy dialog. Frank Kane's prose was
very plodding and was given to repeating pieces of business
again and again. For example, Johnny Liddell walks into a
nightclub and the bouncer offers him a cigarette. Liddell
sniffs it and says, "No thanks, I prefer tobacco in mine."
The first time I read this it was mildly cute; the fourth
time I was ready to scream. Despite the wonderful McGinnis
redheads on those Dell paperbacks, I stopped buying Frank
Kane.
Henry Kane's Peter Chambers was in a way a forerunner of
Peter Gunn. And it was Henry Kane who did the novelization of
Peter Gunn for Dell, in which Pete Chambers made a cameo
appearance.
Richard Moore
-- # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 23 Apr 2000 EDT