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nghia's review
2.0
I have a soft spot for pulpy noir -- probably due to reading [a:Dashiell Hammett|16927|Dashiell Hammett|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1287255332p2/16927.jpg] and [a:Raymond Chandler|1377|Raymond Chandler|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1206535318p2/1377.jpg] at an impressionable age. Death Comes Early was published in 1961 and sold for 35 cents. The cover declares "The murderer could be anybody -- but the most likely candidate was the girl he'd inherited from his best friend".
I couldn't tell why I picked this out of the slush pile of all possible out of print pulp books to read. I couldn't find a single review anywhere about it. When you read a book like this you always hold a small hope that you'll stumble on some forgotten, long-lost gem. The reality is...it is probably out of print and forgotten for a reason.
And so it is with Death Comes Early.
It does one or two things slightly different from the genre tropes -- the "detective" is a rich club owner whose life is going to so well that he's kind of bored; the antagonistic police detective ends up becoming a bit of ally and even gets a girl. But it's not really enough.
The biggest failing of the book is that the main characters don't do any mystery solving. Everything just gets handed to them on a silver platter. The police detective tells them he has a "hunch" about the lodge upstate. So they go there because he told them to. At the lodge they find a letter that literally explains everything. When they come back to the city, the rich man and his wife come to the club and -- for no apparent reason -- bare their hearts.
There's just nothing especially redeeming -- other than its 160 page length -- about Death Comes Early.
I couldn't tell why I picked this out of the slush pile of all possible out of print pulp books to read. I couldn't find a single review anywhere about it. When you read a book like this you always hold a small hope that you'll stumble on some forgotten, long-lost gem. The reality is...it is probably out of print and forgotten for a reason.
And so it is with Death Comes Early.
It does one or two things slightly different from the genre tropes -- the "detective" is a rich club owner whose life is going to so well that he's kind of bored; the antagonistic police detective ends up becoming a bit of ally and even gets a girl. But it's not really enough.
The biggest failing of the book is that the main characters don't do any mystery solving. Everything just gets handed to them on a silver platter. The police detective tells them he has a "hunch" about the lodge upstate. So they go there because he told them to. At the lodge they find a letter that literally explains everything. When they come back to the city, the rich man and his wife come to the club and -- for no apparent reason -- bare their hearts.
There's just nothing especially redeeming -- other than its 160 page length -- about Death Comes Early.
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