Here are a couple of quotes from THE PRIVATE EYE (1942) by
Cleve F. Adams:
| "Hello, Shannon." The tightly drawn bodice of her pale gold
frock gave
| her body the perfection of a Vargas creation. Her eyes were
the color
| of sea at great depths. In them was the restless urgency of
the sea,
| and a cynical awareness of life, and intelligence and the
veiled
| suggestion of an emerald flame which lit an answering flame
in Shannon.
| Her voice was even richer than he had remembered it. "Been
playing with
| matches again?"
| Shannon kissed her. He could not have done anything else.
If she had
| had a knife in each hand, and intended to bury them both in
his back,
| he could not have done anything else. After a while he
pushed her
| away. "Christ!"
It's set in Los Cruces, Arizona (not New Mexico). John J.
Shannon, cop turned PI, heads there (on a bus with a bunch of
"sweating hunkies") to investigate the death of the husband
of a beautiful woman he once knew. Los Cruces is a mining
town up in the mountains, but don't read this for
descriptions of landscapes, or, for that matter, good
writing.
Shannon starts meeting people on the bus, and after a night
in town the book is jammed with so many folks they can't be
kept straight. It quickly turns into a RED HARVEST
arrangement where the two men fighting to be town boss each
try to hire him. Shannon gets in some fights, has a bomb
thrown at him, meets some gorgeous women, runs into trouble
with the chief of police, and all the usual stuff. I gave up
after about fifty pages.
Here's the back cover blurb, from Signet #1405, a 1957
reprint:
| The town of Los Cruces was enjoying booming business in
vice when J.J.
| Shannon, a hardboiled private cop, moved in to check a
fishy suicide.
| But when he kidnapped the mayor, caught the police chief in
a bribe
| trap, and managed to get control of the local paper in a
fight for
| justice, he blew the lid off this lawless mining town.
Shannon had to
| dodge lead from a dozen racketeers while he used three
beautiful,
| dangerous dames to trap a cunning syndicate killer!
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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