QUICK SHOTS: The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes by Michael Kurland

I'm quite the fan of Micheal Kurland's work and I'm still on a mystery-bent, so the second (and final) Alexander Brass mystery called to me from the bottom shelf where I keep my hardbacks. It's pretty clear by now from this blog that I'm a paperback guy, so I have to REAL interested in a book to even consider reading a hardback. The only hardbacks I've ever really liked where the slightly squatter ones the Mysterious Press used to do. I read a bunch of Stuart Kaminsky's Toby Peters that way from the library. But I digress.

Michael Kurland is mostly known for writing about Sherlock Holmes's nemesis Moriarty in a long running series and for the Greenwich Village Trilogy of hippie-sci-fi. He wrote the middle book The Unicorn Girl and appears as a character throughout the trilogy. Men's Adventure fans might know him from his excellent War Incorporated series of 60s spy novels, some of the best of the era. Kurland's a very good writer, clever, suspenseful, and very witty. He wrote a lot of sci-fi and I'm not much of a reader of that genre, so his gems in the mystery/adventure field are extra special to me. 

The Alexander Brass books started in 1997 and finished in 1998. Brass is a syndicated columnist for a major New York paper in the 30s. He's a man of the people, knows cops, crooks, politicians, actors, actress and busboys and everyone in-between. Naturally being a mystery novel, he gets involved with various murders and blackmail plots and the like, sending out his aid-de-camp Manny DeWitt out to uncover the clues while Brass writes his column. 

It's a set-up that is vaguely reminiscent of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books. Though Brass is, um, more "active" than Wolfe. It's a series that also treads on the same field as the aforementioned Stuart Kaminsky series, where fictional characters interact with real folks (Dorthy Parker and Robert Benchley from the Algonquin Round Table here) though there's less emphasis on it here. Kurland knows the period, the whole thing feels pretty authentic with some mystery in-jokes like Manny hanging out with Black Mask writers and the like. 

The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes is a complicated story about the disappearance of "Two-Headed Mary" a beggar who hangs out in front of theaters and makes friends with all the chorus girls. But is that all she is? There are gangsters, show business types, con-artists, cops, and newspapermen. If you enjoy the old pulp tales of Daffy Dill, "Flashgun" Casey or the Kennedy and McBride stories this is for you. It's got a lot of the same vibe as those reporters-playing-detective-stories. Plus, it twists and turns and lands somewhere pretty satisfactory. 

Kurland's an old pro and this is the work of an old pro. Is it going to change your life? Probably not. Are you going to consistently entertained? Yes, undoubtably. Unfortunately, the series must not have done well. Kurland might have been too late on the 30s/40s nostalgia mystery book for the era, it was kinda a crowded space at the time. So, he only got two books out of Brass and one short story in The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits. What a shame, but luckily, he returned to the time period recently with a WWII spy series called Welker and Saboy. I guess I have to go buy those right now. 

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!