Todhunter Ballard (1903–1980)

The first of three novels about Las Vegas cop Max Hunter, Pretty Miss Murder follows Hunter's attempts to track down the killer of a casino cigarette girl he met only briefly but with whom he was infatuated. Finding himself obliged to team up with a prominent mobster to get the job done, Hunter bounces from Vegas to Los Angeles, from a sleepy, corrupt Ohio town to sweltering Miami and then back to L.A. before uncovering the truth. The book is only 180 pages long, but veteran crime writer W.T. Ballard managed to fill it with intrigue and excitement.

I've really enjoyed my deep dive into Ballard's work. Not content with generic, soundalike crimefighters, he created a number of distinct characters: Bill Lennox, the film studio fixer and unofficial detective, was the most overtly tongue-in-cheek; Mark Foran (the PI hero of Ballard's standalone masterwork Murder Las Vegas Style) was darker, but still capable of ruefully humorous self-deprecation. Max Hunter falls somewhere in between. As a cop he's stiffer than Lennox or Foran, which is a nice touch of realism on Ballard's part, but Hunter gets to sound off in a way that Ballard's other characters never did. At one point he expresses disgust for the Ohio town bigwigs "who think their shit doesn't stink"; it's a refreshingly direct sentiment, unusual for popular literature of the time (1961) and for Ballard's work in particular. To me this book has a noticeable John D. McDonald-esque flavor, more so than Ballard's other novels.

I always say this when reviewing a W.T. Ballard book, but the guy richly deserves to be back in print. He was a very good writer, and if you're new to his work, Pretty Miss Murder is an entertaining place to start.… (meer)

Combine Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest with Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake, throw in some self-effacing humor and what have you got? Murder Can't Stop (1946), the second of four novels in the Bill Lennox series. A fixer for Hollywood's largest studio (the fictitious General Consolidated), Lennox was W.T. Ballard's most popular character and appeared in the pages of Black Mask for many years before Ballard began writing novels about him. The setting is a small Northern California mountain town which serves as a weekend retreat for movie types; the head of a rival studio turns up dead, and there's more murder and mayhem than Lennox can shake a stick at as he finds himself the victim of a frame-up.

Humor is vital to Ballard's work. Yes, there's the usual fast action and convoluted plotting that readers of the hard-boiled subgenre demand, but Ballard's central characters were always able to laugh at themselves and the situations they stumbled into. For that reason, his detective novels and stories have aged remarkably well, and it's a damned shame that they're all out of print. Ballard's masterpiece, if you're curious, is 1967's Murder Las Vegas Style (after which he bade farewell to crime fiction to concentrate on Westerns), but the Lennox series is extraordinarily readable as well. Murder Can't Stop is my favorite among the four.… (meer)

Once you've read everything by the masters (Hammett, Chandler, Ross Macdonald) and have resigned yourself to slogging through the work of second- and third-raters like Raoul Whitfield (see my last review, Death in a Bowl) when you need a hard-boiled fix, it's a real pleasure to stumble across a book like Murder Las Vegas Style. The unjustly forgotten W.T. Ballard (a first-generation Black Mask author whose most famous character was film studio troubleshooter Bill Lennox) wrote this novel when he was in his sixties, and has rightly been lauded for his ability to change with the times. Vegas Style reads like the work of a significantly younger man and will have you on the edge of your seat; one critic called it a book that Chandler would have enjoyed, but I think a more accurate comparison is to Macdonald circa The Chill or The Far Side of the Dollar.

There are differences, of course, the most refreshing of which is that Ballard's private eye Mark Foran is self-effacing: not a dour mope as Macdonald's Archer too often was. Foran's sense of humor serves him--and the reader--well, taking the oppressive edge off the grim events he's investigating. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that this book was a source of inspiration for Stephen J. Cannell when he created The Rockford Files. The narrative flows smoothly; you don't feel the obligation to drag it along yourself, like a heavy stone, because the author neglected to give it a sense of movement (as in Whitfield's novels). This little tale of divorce, organized crime and foul play should be considered a classic, and I can't praise it enough. My only quibble, apart from the fact that it ends after just 156 pages, is that Foran never appeared in another novel or story. I'll definitely be seeking out more books by W.T. Ballard.… (meer)