Oh, Murderer Mine

What's really remarkable about Norbert Davis's "Oh, Murderer Mine" is how brilliantly, and giddily, it riffs off the essence pulp detective fiction of its era.

This is the jazz of American literature: the seamy underbelly of human behaviour exposed through murder and mayhem but not taking anything too seriously.

Davis published this in 1946 -- there are direct references to the then recent demise of Hitler -- yet 70 years the prose is fully alive. That's not too shabby for "pop pulp culture".

"They've got him stuck away ow in a nuthouse somewhere in a room wallpapered with mattresses. The doctors say he'll never get better."

or

"He sold medicines at carnivals and fairs -- Kickapoo Joy Juice and Colonel Ouster's Calibrated Cure-All -- and stuff like that. Heloise was his come-on. She used to dress in spangled diapers and a necklace and juggle knives to attract a crowd so Big Tub could work them over. He was good at it, from all accounts."

What's not to love, with dialog like that?

Carstairs, and Doan as sidekick and translator, raises this otherwise ordinary hard-boiled detective story to a higher plane, and a different genre.

The Carstairs/Doan stories (Carstairs insists on top billing. He does, after all, have a vastly superior pedigree.) are more humour than mystery; and at their best truly amusing humour. The mystery is just as secondary as that in Dorothy Sayers books. Davis may not reach that literary level; but his Carstairs books are well worth a read, and a fine, funny way to while away a quiet evening.

These are great! Pure fun, with a hard-boiled detective at the center of it all.