Jonathan CraigBesprekingen

First published in Manhunt Magazine in 1953, Dirge For a Nude is a fun and atmospheric little pulp noir story from Jonathan Craig, who became a writer through a very circuitous route.

According to online articles and sources, he was born in Santa Barbara in 1919. During the Great Depression, his family emigrated to Kansas City, and at a very young age he began supporting his family when his father became ill, eventually working at the Kansas City Star. He served in the Navy from 1942 — 1946, becoming head of a Pentagon research and analysis section for the Department of Defense. He even accompanied Truman to a Postdam conference in 1945. Quite a pedigree for a guy who began writing in the pulps in 1949, a decision which prompted him to leave government work to write full time by 1952.

He began by writing pulp westerns, but as the western cycle began to wane, he branched out to the detective side in 1953. Not limiting himself to genre, he even wrote some Gothic novels using Jennifer Hale as his moniker during his career. Apparently he wrote over 450 short stories for various pulp magazines. Dirge For a Nude is an early example of Jonathan Craig’s (Frank E. Smith) style, before he began writing the Peter Stelby and Stan Ryder novels, where he gained some notoriety.

Set around a piano player in a smoky new dive called the Cavern Club, one has to suspect Craig’s time in Kansas City, known for its jazz and blues music, influenced his pulp stories. It’s late at night when Dirge For a Nude begins, and Marty Bishop is itching to get off so he can show the auburn-haired hat-check girl, Julie Cole, a new bauble he’s bought for her. But then his ex-girlfriend Gloria Gayle walks in, with her blue-black hair and curves that stop traffic. Even though she dumped him for a light-heavyweight prizefighter, she is bored, and wants Marty back. She even has twelve grand to entice him to run off with her to Mexico. But Marty’s no sap, and he blows her off. Next thing you know, she’s lying across the front seat of Marty’s Caddie, as dead as she is nude.

Marty knows he’s been set up to take the fall, and drives around with Gloria’s body trying to find the killer. It seems obvious, but there’s a twist, and a terrific noir ending. At less than twenty pages, this is a fun one to read between bigger stories, and will make any fan of pulp want to read more from Jonathan Craig.

Originally titled Frenzy - no doubt the publisher reprinted the book with the new title (EXCLAMATION POINT and all) to attract the soft-core smut crowd - JUNKIE! is a straightforward whodunit that follows jazz musician Steve Harper as he tries to prove his ex-prostitute (ex-JUNKIE!) girlfriend is innocent of murdering his close friend and jazz horn mentor by tracking down the real killer. In typical pulp fashion, the bodies start piling up and the eyes of the law start focusing in on Steve as gets closer to the truth. Yes, there are junkies in the book, and there is talk of drug use and - GASP - nymphomania, but there isn't much lurid detail on either of these fronts, just a tour of the seedy underground of 1950's Washington DC. Jonathan Craig is the pen name of Frank E. Smith, who worked as a research analyst at the pentagon, which explains the atypical setting and occasional references to pentagon secretarial pools. If you can look past the misleading TITLE!, JUNKIE! is a decent pulp read.

I found this to be decent enough pulp fiction. Quality literature this is not. Even the publishers agree that it is not quality literature: it came out in 1962 and is already in the public domain. Generally, to be in the public domain, a book needs to be something like 40 years older than this. Whatever, I found it to be an interesting enough read.

It's about a policeman who pulled a nutty whilst interrogating a hot, red-headed suspect, and almost choked her to death. As a result, he gets kicked off the force. He vows to find the jewel thief, whose whereabouts the red head was shielding, so as to get back into the good graces of the force, and, thereby, be reinstated into the only job he's ever wanted. Over the course of his investigations strangles several more hot, red heads. Along the way, we have flash backs to his youth and find therein the seeds of his madness. It doesn't help his recurrent bouts of madness that he drinks a lot, an unimaginable lot, seemingly endless glasses of double whisky shots.

This is a guy's book, perhaps the male equivalent of harlequin romances. The attitudes toward women and toward sex in general would make any sensible feminist want to choke the first handy man they find. I wouldn't blame them. It's surely a reflection of our benighted past. It's also interesting how they have to dance around the sex issues implicitly, given that writing about explicit sex was still a no-no back in the day. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. It seems quaint but veils to some extent the mindless, and not really necessary, crudity people feel compelled to inject into today's literature.

Jonathan Craig is one of the great underrated writers of the great pulp era of the 1950s and early 1960's. It's unfortunate that more of his books aren't available in e-format. His books are generally easy to read and throughly pulpy.

Originally published as Alley Girl, Renegade Cool is filled with lots of pulpy goodness including the corrupt cop who plants evidence and preys on suspect's wives, the woman who is so gorgeous that no red blooded man can resist her charms, the innocent man being forced to confess, and the young drunken broad who can never seem to keep her clothes on. At the heart of the story is the juxtaposition between the good Boy Scout type cop and the corrupt bruiser type which reminds me of James Ellroy's LA Confidential which was written decades later.

This book is a solid, quick read but just misses being really good. The characters are great archetypes but could use a little more complexity. Overall, a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Jonathan Craig is one of the great underrated writers of the great pulp era of the 1950s and early 1960's. It's unfortunate that more of his books aren't available in e-format. His books are generally easy to read and throughly pulpy.

Alley Girl is filled with lots of pulpy goodness including the corrupt cop who plants evidence and preys on suspect's wives, the woman who is so gorgeous that no red blooded man can resist her charms, the innocent man being forced to confess, and the young drunken broad who can never seem to keep her clothes on. At the heart of the story is the juxtaposition between the good Boy Scout type cop and the corrupt bruiser type which reminds me of James Ellroy's LA Confidential which was written decades later.

This book is a solid, quick read but just misses being really good. The characters are great archetypes but could use a little more complexity. Overall, a thoroughly enjoyable read.

When you look up Jonathan Craig to see who he was, you see that Jonathan Craig is a pseudonym for Frank E. Smith and he is credited with having written over 100 books and perhaps 300 short stories and was one of the mainstays of the Manhunt magazine in the early to mid-1950's. His better known pulp-era books include So Young, So Wicked, The Case Of the Beautiful Body, The Dead Darling, Junkie, and Case of the Petticoat Murder. He was well-known for having written a police procedural series about the Sixth Precinct.

Junkie is a misleading title for this book and more than likely one that Craig's publisher stuck on the book to garner attention at the newsstand. The title and the original cover of the book lead one to believe that the story follows the downfall of a woman wracked by drugs and falling into oblivion. Instead, Junkie follows a more basic hardboiled pulp-era plot of a man and a woman framed for a murder that they didn't commit and racing against time to figure out who really committed the murder before the police and the bad guys catch up with them. It is a plot line that has been used in countless fifties-era pulp novels, but it is a plot that stands up well to the test of time and Craig has a different take on it than most writers of the era did.

Craig's hero in this book is not a detective or insurance agent. Rather, Craig's protagonist is Steve Harper, a jazz musician who works the various jazz clubs scattered around the Washington D.C. area. Nowadays, jazz musicians don't sound very scandalous, but in the fifties before rock'n roll really took off, jazz was very scandalous. Those clubs were where the action was, where the women were, and were the dope was. Harper has women chasing him left and right and had himself fallen into the temptation of dope. The undercurrent of this novel is the world of the jazz clubs, the world of call girls in Washington, D.C., and the world of temptation that assaults Harper. There is a driving jazz beat in the background of every page. The reader knows that it is nighttime in the city and that blondes in tight dresses are dancing to the jazz beat.

But it is a pulp novel and it is about murder and about being framed. As Craig explains in the opening line to the book, "It was bad and he knew it was going to get a lot worse before it got better." If that doesn't give you the flavor of the book, then who knows what will.

The back story is that Harper had once had a relationship with Lois, but Lois moved on to her now-husband, who not being a jazz musician, had money and a future. Nevertheless, Harper was the man who Lois still had a torch for. After Lois, Harper met Kathy Mason. At the time, Kathy was a call girl and a junkie, but he had never met anyone like her. She was one in a million to him from the minute she walked into the hotel suite. He wanted to drive the highways with her with his arm around her. He got her back on her feet, away from the life, away from the dope. But, as the story opens, they had a falling out and were separated. Harper had fallen into temptation with another woman and Kathy couldn't stand it. He still carries a torch for her and it is all he can think about.

Harper comes home and hears jazz music playing in his apartment. Thinking he left the stereo on, he opens the door and sees that she was very blonde and very beautiful and that her clothes were all in a heap on the floor. But this is Lois, not Kathy, and he throws Lois out of the apartment. Shortly thereafter, Harper gets a call from his friend who is now a police officer, Mark, telling Harper to come to his friend Haynes' apartment because something has happened. Something, something like Haynes has been choked to death and the police received a telephone call from a woman who said she was Kathy Mason, that she had killed Haynes, and that she was going to kill herself. The officer asks Harper gently where Kathy is and what he knows and warns Harper that he better produce Kathy if he knows what is good for him.

Of course, any reader of pulp literature knows that Harper is not going to simply turn Kathy over to the police and let her be framed for this killing. Harper knows that Kathy, no matter what her past, is no murderer. Harper sets out to find Kathy and protect her and, on the way, stumbles into bar fights with Lois' husband who is upset about Lois being in Harper's apartment, knowing Lois really wants Harper. Harper stumbles over more bodies as a conspiracy is uncovered and he races against time to solve the mystery before the police dragnet closes in on him and Kathy.

It is an incredibly well-written book, deserving of far more attention and acclaim than it has received. The story moves at a breakneck pace as Harper races through the jazz clubs, reefer dens, garages, and apartments of the Washington, D.C. area trying to find Kathy and unearth how she is being set up and by whom.

Written in roughly the same period as Jim Thompson's portrait of Lou Ford, the homicidal deputy, Craig's Redheaded Sinners similarly featured a deputy good and decent on the outside but beset by twisted demons and a red mist of rage on the inside. This too is a story of uncontrollable murderous rage, but it doesn't feature a clever psychopath like Lou Ford hellbent on fooling everyone with his dummy act. Craig's twist is that his homicidal deputy doesn't quite know what's bottled up inside him and only remembers his attacks as memory blackouts.

The writing is at its best when describing the deputy's murderous rage. It just misses being really good because the plotting and psychological explanations are too simplistic and really fed to the reader. Craig is a really underrated writer and this novel really shows where his writing would eventually develop.

When you look up Jonathan Craig to see who he was, you see that Jonathan Craig is a pseudonym for Frank E. Smith and he is credited with having written over 100 books and perhaps 300 short stories and was one of the mainstays of the Manhunt magazine in the early to mid-1950’s. His better known pulp-era books include So Young, So Wicked, The Case Of the Beautiful Body, The Dead Darling, Junkie, and Case of the Petticoat Murder. He was well-known for having written a police procedural series about the Sixth Precinct.

Dirge for a Nude is one of his short fiction pieces and it originally appeared in Manhunt in 1952. It begins with the narrator (Marty) playing in a jazz club and looking forward to his date with the hatcheck girl. Gloria Gayle walks in and is immediately the center of attention. She had blue-black hair that couldn't be real, but was, and skin as smooth and white as a new piano key. A couple of months earlier Gloria had made "the world go round" for Marty, but that was before she had taken up with Al Prince, a prize fighter.

Now she tells Marty that she has twelve grand in her bra and they're heading to Mexico City. When he refuses, she makes a scene and when she leaves: "Every eye in that place followed that lithe, swivel-hipped walk of hers." And the next time he sees her, it's her nude corpse laying across the front seat of car.

Great story. Quick reading.

Case of the Laughing Virgin is the eighth book in Craig's ten-book police procedural series featuring New York Police Detectives Pete Shelby and Stan Rayder. The case begins with a lot of excitement: a naked woman on the edge of a rooftop high above the city. From there, it becomes a straight ahead police procedural with the two detectives methodically investigating every possible suspect to a murder. Along the way, they stumble on the twisted lives of Broadway producers, pornography, blackmail, infidelity, and all sorts of odd characters. Overall, the book doesn't especially stand out other than the opening scenes, but it's a good solid read.

This book follows a basic hardboiled pulp-era plot of a man and a woman framed for a murder that they didn't commit and racing against time to figure out who really committed the murder before the police and the bad guys catch up with them. It is a plot line that has been used in countless fifties- era pulp novels, but it is a plot that stands up well to the test of time and Craig has a different take on it than most writers of the era did.

Craig's hero in this book is not a detective or insurance agent. Rather, Craig's protagonist is Steve Harper, a jazz musician who works the various jazz clubs scattered around the Washington D.C. area. Nowadays, jazz musicians don't sound very scandalous, but in the fifties before rock'n roll really took off, jazz was very scandalous. Those clubs were where the action was, where the women were, and were the dope was. Harper has women chasing him left and right and had himself fallen into the temptation of dope. The undercurrent of this novel is the world of the jazz clubs, the world of call girls in Washington, D.C., and the world of temptation that assaults Harper. There is a driving jazz beat in the background of every page. The reader knows that it is nighttime in the city and that blondes in tight dresses are dancing to the jazz beat.

But it is a pulp novel and it is about murder and about being framed. As Craig explains in the opening line to the book, "It was bad and he knew it was going to get a lot worse before it got better." If that doesn't give you the flavor of the book, then who knows what will.

The back story is that Harper had once had a relationship with Lois, but Lois moved on to her now-husband, who not being a jazz musician, had money and a future. Nevertheless, Harper was the man who Lois still had a torch for. After Lois, Harper met Kathy Mason. At the time, Kathy was a call girl and a junkie, but he had never met anyone like her. She was one in a million to him from the minute she walked into the hotel suite. He wanted to drive the highways with her with his arm around her. He got her back on her feet, away from the life, away from the dope. But, as the story opens, they had a falling out and were separated. Harper had fallen into temptation with another woman and Kathy couldn't stand it. He still carries a torch for her and it is all he can think about.

Harper comes home and hears jazz music playing in his apartment. Thinking he left the stereo on, he opens the door and sees that she was very blonde and very beautiful and that her clothes were all in a heap on the floor. But this is Lois, not Kathy, and he throws Lois out of the apartment. Shortly thereafter, Harper gets a call from his friend who is now a police officer, Mark, telling Harper to come to his friend Haynes' apartment because something has happened. Something, something like Haynes has been choked to death and the police received a telephone call from a woman who said she was Kathy Mason, that she had killed Haynes, and that she was going to kill herself. The officer asks Harper gently where Kathy is and what he knows and warns Harper that he better produce Kathy if he knows what is good for him.

Of course, any reader of pulp literature knows that Harper is not going to simply turn Kathy over to the police and let her be framed for this killing. Harper knows that Kathy, no matter what her past, is no murderer. Harper sets out to find Kathy and protect her and, on the way, stumbles into bar fights with Lois' husband who is upset about Lois being in Harper's apartment, knowing Lois really wants Harper. Harper stumbles over more bodies as a conspiracy is uncovered and he races against time to solve the mystery before the police dragnet closes in on him and Kathy.

It is an incredibly well-written book, deserving of far more attention and acclaim than it has received. The story moves at a breakneck pace as Harper races through the jazz clubs, reefer dens, garages, and apartments of the Washington, D.C. area trying to find Kathy and unearth how she is being set up and by whom.

Junkie concerns a jazz trumpeter trying to track down the murderer of his mentor and to un-frame his girlfriend, who woke up unconscious with the dead body, at the same time. After reading two Craig books in a row that have a lot of similarities, I will take a shot at identifying his strengths and weaknesses as a writer.

Strengths:
- He can write a good sentence. There's no fumbling around or anything that makes you cringe. In Alley Girl (Renegade Cop) he or his characters try to get profound a couple of times, but it isn't too jarring.
- There a lot of good interaction between the characters and some memorable scenes. The dialogue is good.
- There's an impressive noir atmosphere of excessive drinking, drugs, impossibly beautiful women, people getting hit on the head a lot, and questionable cops.

On the other hand, his weaknesses include:
- Plots that tie up much too nicely. If a character appears, you can bet he or she is somehow connected to the mystery at the center of the book and also related to the other characters, even if Craig never tells you how until the end of the book. This is really pretty annoying. The solutions to his mysteries aren't nearly as satisfying as taking the ride that gets us there.
- A lack of atmosphere, other than the overall noir feeling described above in strengths. Junkie takes place in Washington, DC, but there is really no feel for the place at all. It could be anywhere.

Junkie, like the first Craig book I read, has a lot of entertaining scenes and the story carries you right along. But at the end, you aren't quite satisfied.½

Craig tells a compelling tale of a very bad cop, who thinks nothing of threatening to send an innocent man to the electric chair to get his wife to sleep with him, or accepting bribes, or pretty much whatever comes his way. He also never turns down a drink. In the opening chapter, he wakes up hung over, has two beers for breakfast, takes a mid morning break for three more drinks, has a few more drinks over lunch with the DA...and then I lost count. There's a murder mystery along the way, but its resolution is straight out of the less-enlightened 1950s. The real story is the bad cop and what happens to him. The book is full of way too many coincidences to be at all believable, but Craig writes pretty well, except for the occasional foray into grand statements that seem out of place, so the end result is quite enjoyable. And this is a free download from one of the world's greatest web sites, www.munseys.com.

(This book was later retitled Renegade Cop.)