DOUBLE SHOT: Death Pulls a Doublecross and Markham by Lawrence Block

It's probably came up here before, but Lawrence Block is one of my absolute favorite writers. I found him in high school and for a while just sorta went back and forth between him and Donald E. Westlake who I found about the same time. I'd read a Dortmunder then a Burglar book and then a Parker and a Scudder (or a Chip Harrison or an Evan Tanner) and was pretty much guaranteed a good time. 

And lucky for me Block is prolific, so I got lots to treat myself too for years to come. Take Death Pulls a Doublecross, I've had a copy of this for years (the later Coward's Kiss version) and surprisingly never read despite the aforementioned love of Block and my general love of private eye books. So, I stumbled into a copy of the original Gold Medal paperback (another thing I love) and decided to take it for a spin. Then there was something gnawing in the back of my head, wasn't this book supposed to be different book?

See, I also like to read author's talk about their work, and I like to read about the pretty screwy publishing world (especially in the 50s through the 80s) which means I've read a lot of blogs, introductions, interviews, etc. etc. Block has a colorful bibliography with tons of early pseudonym work for, um, the "adult" market under several different names. A lot of these have been republished these days. But all of that used to be a big book-lovers mystery. A lot of still is a mystery when it comes to the adult books of the day. Back to Block, eventually I remembered a book called Markham by Lawrence Block that I'd also had for a long time without reading. Ah, yes. It all came back to me, so here you go:

See, Death Pulls a Doublecross or Coward's Kiss as it was originally (and eventually) titled was supposed to be a book called Markham. Or more to the point it was supposed to be a tie-in book for a TV show called Markham starring Ray Milland who at one time had X-Ray vision, I believe. Block had been hired to write a Markham book and a book on the equally forgotten TV show Johnny Midnight (that became Strange Embrace) but once he finished Death/Coward, he rather liked it and thought it might be too good to be a tie-in book to a show. He showed it to people and they agreed. So, with some changes it ceased being a book about a guy named Markham and became about a guy named Ed London. Oh, then he still had to write the Markham book, more on that later...

Death Pulls a Doublecross is a fine Gold Medal paperback. I honestly have never really been let down by a Gold Medal, sure some are better than others, but I haven't found a real stinker in the bunch, yet. I'll see how it goes. Ed London is out hero here. He's a New York private eye and when we meet him (in a great opening) he's disposing of a nude, female body. Soon, he's on a rollercoaster with stolen Nazi gems, gangsters, perky actresses, complete with gunfire, stolen Beretta's, sex, plenty of pipe smoking and drinking. It's all told in Block's hard-boiled, breezy style. The mystery might be a little easy to figure out if you've knocked about the mystery world, but I bet there's still a few surprises in store for you.

Ed's an interesting private eye, a little more urbane than the usual type (that's probably the Ray Milland touch he was a fancy-dan) who drinks cognac, smokes the pipe, likes classic music and expensive rare books. But don't let that fool you he's still a wonderful paperback hero to follow with a solid punch and a willingness to plant a bullet in a baddie. You can easily see a world where Block wrote a slew of books starring Ed. He didn't. Much like his other Gold Medal book The Specialists, he tried to write other tales of Ed, but they never came out to full length. Luckily, he wrote some short stories which are included in book partially put together by our buddy Bob Deis and his cohorts as The Naked and the Deadly which I now need to pick up, even though I own a copy of One Night Stands and Lost Weekends which collects them too.  

The best way I can describe Death Pulls a Doublecross is that it's an exceptionally well written Mike Shayne or Johnny Liddell or Pete Chambers novel. Which may sound like a knock, it's not. The book treads a familiar ground, doesn't try and reinvent the wheel and just goes about its business of entertaining you in a highly polished, professional way. Which is pretty hard to do if you think about it. So, I whole-heartily recommend this one. The Gold Medal edition is a little pricier, but it's been reprinted a few times (as Coward's Kiss) and is pretty easy to track down. And do track it down.

But it got me thinking about Markham. Which I already had on my shelf, and I began to wonder how different the two books were considering Death Pulls a Doublecross's origin. My inquisitive mind had to know, so I pulled Markham off the shelf. Markham, the show was well before my time, but I have seen a fair amount of 50s/60s detective shows so I understand the format. The show was obviously a "star vehicle" for Milland, the kind of stuff that honestly still gets made. Plug a star into a weekly detective show and rake in the money. It works. Sometimes. This one lasted 60 episodes, a lot today but not that many back then. It was crowded market for detective stuff. It was also promoted by Schlitz beer, which seems to clash with the "upscale, jet-setting nature" of the character. *shrugs*

Markham is a lawyer and private eye (gotta diversify right?) who's cases send him all over the world, but he's based in New York. He's urbane (like Ed London) but seems a bit stuffier. A little less Lawrence Block-humor has been injected into him. It's almost like it was dashed off to meet a contract after a talented writer wrote too good of a book the first time. Hmm. 

That's not to say it's a bad book, far from it. Here the subtitle is The Case of the Pornographic Photos which is just charming and quaint at this point. It's a wandering daughter job for Markham. A wealthy friend's slightly wild daughter has taken off during college and Markham is tasked with tracking her down. You can probably extrapolate from there: private eye shenanigans. Markham (at least Block's Markham) is pretty solid lead, though it's hard to imagine Ray Milland as a private eye. There's some nice Block-lines in there, but it's far from his best work. Either way it's a fun little mystery-lover's easter egg that it exists as a companion piece to Death Pulls a Doublecross. Markham was later released as You Could Call It Murder and it's a pretty cheap pick-up if you want to see what a pro can produce on the quick. 

Like I said, Block is really top-shelf talent. You really can't go wrong with a book with his name on the cover. 

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