"Framed in Guilt" takes place in 1940's post-war Hollywood. It begins with the pulpiness of Grace Turner, a British woman who had fallen for an American GI stationed there. She tracked him down to Hollywood, Arthur had claimed to be in love with her. He was going to marry her and all, but he disappeared and now that she had found him he wanted nothing to do with her. Down to her last dollar, what is she to do she wonders when she sees a news article about movie script writer, Robert Stanton, about to marry Joy Parnell, the princess of the silver screen. Of course, what else could she do but call him up and blackmail him, knowing as she did about her friend Eve, abandoned during the war, blinded by bomb blasts, and raising a young son all on her on, believing all along that Robert Stanton had died, having been shot down over enemy territory. Blackmail is never pretty and here the results were not what Grace aimed for. She recognized him when he pulled up and talked to him as he drove her up to a quiet place in the hills.

The next morning, Stanton stumbled into his ranch, half out of his mind drunk and with a huge blackout as to what had happened the night before. The sheriff's deputies are right on his heels and he doesn't know what to make of it, where he had been, or even who Grace was. But the one thing he and his handlers know is that he was best served keeping the scandal out of the papers and away from Joy Parnell, fickle as the bombshell was.

Keene does a great job of portraying 1940's Hollywood from the rundown hotels beneath the neon lights of Hollywood and Vine to the parties on the fabulous ranches out in the valley. Keene creates great characters like Stanton, whose really one claim to fame was a true life story of survival in a German POW camp after he had been shot down. The mystery keeps the reader engaged from beginning to end and it is terrificly filled with great stuff. ( )

The Framed in Guilt cover is one of my absolute favorites. It really captures the sweaty desperation of a character in a tight spot. A pity that the artist is uncredited. I love the sheen on the clothes, especially the detail on the girl’s suit, and the way the hyper-realistic flash-of-lightning style has all the hallmarks of a nightmare, one of those where you’re being chased and can’t get away. The guy’s stepping though the barbed wire adds such a nice bit of extra intensity to the scene. And what’s with the shadowy, grayish blob in the cover's upper left-hand corner? Rocks on a mountainside? Or perhaps it represents a sinister individual who oversees everything with omniscient malevolence? In any case, this is one of the best covers from Graphic Books, one of the more under-appreciated paperback publishers that flourished in the early fifties. To me, their pulpy, quasi-trashy covers were closest in spirit to those terrific Avon covers of the forties and fifties in all their over-the-top sordidness. [By the way, is it just me or is the guy on the cover a dead ringer for Victor Mature?]

Note: my copy had the title slightly cut off at the top – a nice touch or just a slight defect in the printing of the book? The latter, I suspect, as I note that some of the pages in the text are cropped pretty close to the top.

The prolific Day Keene is a major figure in roman noir circles, though he’s never caught on with the general public in the same manner as a Chandler, Hammett or MacDonald. - BCS