Howard Browne (1908–1999)

*Partial spoilers ahead*

Browne hadn't written a Paul Pine detective novel in nearly a decade when The Taste of Ashes was published in 1957. By that time he was a considerably more mature writer, and the fourth (and final) Pine book is a near-classic. He never quite emerged from the shadow of Raymond Chandler, however, and reminds the reader of that fact by sending Pine on Marlowe-esque navel-gazing jags every few pages. (During the first half of the book, Pine seems inordinately distracted show more by air conditioning, which I suppose was something of a novelty in the late '50s. This happens so often that it's almost like Browne was trying to offer some subtle commentary on affluence. Did he mean to say that air conditioning is a ridiculous first-world luxury? I don't know. Maybe there was no conscious intent.)

Here, Pine is called out of Chicago to the little town of Olympic Heights, where a blackmail case gets serious as bodies begin to pile up. One of those bodies is a colleague Pine knew only vaguely, but liked. The local cops are tough (behind a veneer of chilly politeness), other men's wives are attractive, and the hoods who carry saps aren't afraid to use them. The elements of Browne's plot are familiar, but he breathes life into them with solid and occasionally inspired writing. This book has been compared to Ross Macdonald, but it's not in that class; Macdonald found his own voice, but Browne always relied to one extent or another on Chandler's. If you haven't read Macdonald's work (or Chandler's masterpiece The Long Goodbye), you might mistake The Taste of Ashes for a great hard-boiled detective novel. It isn't, but it's a very good one that deserves to be in print again. show less

In conscious imitation of Raymond Chandler, prolific pulp magazine author and television screenwriter Howard Browne created a private eye character named Paul Pine. But Browne wasn't just a Chandler imitator: he was the best one in the business, and his books are worth reading. Halo in Brass (1949), the third of four Pine novels, finds the Chicago detective working a missing persons case; as he attempts to locate a young Nebraska woman who moved to the Windy City and then disappeared, Pine show more encounters increasingly dangerous resistance. The lesbian element of the story, while it will not please the PC police, is an interesting angle that Chandler himself probably would never have attempted. In the foreword to the 1988 edition, Browne notes that he was trying to "turn out mystery novels in which the least likely subject is not the killer, but somebody impossible to suspect," and he certainly fulfilled that ambition here.

Browne was such an uncannily accurate Chandler imitator that he even got the less appealing aspects of Chandler's writing down pat. For example, Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe frequently became indignant for reasons that were never made clear to the reader. In Halo in Brass, Browne makes Paul Pine inscrutably salty in the following exchange with a hotel bellhop:

"'And this seemed such a nice town,' I [Pine] said. 'Clean air and shimmering stone and a big blue sky. Empty jails and very little garbage and no roaring traffic's boom. I ought to punch you one right in the nose.'

"His [the bellhop's] mouth was open. 'What's the matter with you, mister?'

"'Matter? Nothing's the matter. How can you say that? Everything's right. As right as two left feet in a wall bed on a purple-tinged morning in May. What were you saying?'"

That's a flawless imitation of Chandler's prose, obviously, but the really funny thing about this scene is Pine's admission that his anger makes no sense: "He [the bellhop] had no idea what I was talking about. I hardly knew myself." It's as if Browne was winking at his readers and saying, Hey, we all love Chandler's books, but have you noticed that Marlowe is always biting the head off a client or an elevator operator or just some random walk-on character for no reason? And that the hapless victim is never made to understand *how* he or she has offended Marlowe's delicate sensibilities? What's that all about?

At any rate, this is quite a good detective novel and I recommend it. The Taste of Ashes--the fourth and final Pine book--is generally regarded as Howard Browne's masterpiece, but Halo in Brass will not disappoint fans of hardboiled PI fiction. show less

Howard Browne (sometimes writing as John Evans, among other pseudonyms) wrote three private eye novels about a Chicago shamus named Paul Pine, all with "halo" in the title. All three books were very good novels. But Browne figured he'd done all he could with the character and dropped it. A few years later he was persuaded to do one more. He considered the result, THE TASTE OF ASHES, to be his best. I agree. It's several steps above the other Pine novels, which were wonderful themselves. This show more story about Pine's investigation of the death of another private eye is superbly written with a clear yet rich style. It's also got a real sense of human beings as opposed to the mere plot devices characters sometimes end up being in lesser writers' stuff. It's not Chandler or Macdonald, but very, very good stuff. show less

review of
Howard Browne's Halo for Satan
- tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 15-16, 2020

I keep reading bks that I think are important for some reason or another but that I find collosally boring. THEN I read something like this & I thoroughly enjoy it & the temptation to ONLY read such things becomes strong but I go right back to reading things that I'm bored by but that I think are important. Someday I might even read Marx's Das Kapital & I'll be found dead, frozen stiff, my lifeless cold show more fingers wrapped around Das Kapital in a death grip. If only I had wised up & only read Howard Browne & Mack Reynolds (who IS, actually, IMPORTANT to me) I might've lived longer.

The publisher informs the reader on the back cover that they bring to the reader "those classic crime novels by the contemporaries of Chandler and Hammett that typified the 'Hardboiled' heydey of American Crime Fiction" & I have to say that Browne came astonishingly close in quality to those 2. Maybe he didn't quite make it there b/c "Hollywood finally tempted him away from novels and he has a host of TV and film screenplays to his credit" — film? OK. TV? Braindeath. Selling out does have its price. STILL, I loved this bk & will be reading more Browne as soon as I get some more 'serious' reading out of the way.

I've always loved the turns of phrase of Hammett & Chandler & Browne's right in there w/ them:

"This could go on for hours. I said, "Maybe you'd better let the Bishop know I'm here. It sounds like every minute counts."

"The words went over her head and shattered soundlessly against the wall." - p 13

"I shoved open the front door and went into a gloomy hall filled with last year's air." - p 31

"It wasn't much of a room. About large enough to play solitaire in if you held the cards close to your chest." - p 31

"She said, "Are you quite finished?" in a voice as tight as a pullman window." - p 36

""Riley," the thin one said. "Open the goddam door."

"It closed far enough to release the chain, then swing all the way back. We went into what I suspected was a hall, although it was as dark as the inside of a cannibal." - p 79

Now, of course, the inside of a cannibal wd be as dark as the inside of a non-cannibal but the threateningness of the cannibal makes it 'darker' in a different sense.

"He added a word that might have been Italian for goodby and held out a hand that was as light and fragile as four straws from a whisk broom." - p 95

"No man with a manuscript and only one man without one. Me. I felt as conspicuous as the Swedish minister to Liberia." - p 113

"The hours moved by like ten-ton trucks pulled uphill by snails." - p 142

Independent of the expressions used, the writing has that wry surprisinginess that I enjoy so much in 'hard-boiled' crime fiction:

"I went over and opened the closet door.

"There was more space in there than I had expected, most of it occupied. Two beat-up traveling bags in black leather stacked in one corner. Shirts, underwear and socks piled neatly on the single shelf. Several four-in-hand neckties in conservative patterns looped around a hanger. Four suits of clothing. But only one of the suits had a body in it." - p 38

Describing all of contents of the closet, even down to the "conservative patterns" of the neckties before finally mentioning the corpse, the obvious most important thing, is a way of both amusing the reader and showing the detective's jadedness.

""How'd he get dead? Hung hisself?"

""No. Somebody left him leaning. With a knife. Into the heart. Like dirty fingernails into an overripe watermelon."" - pp 41-42

"By eight-fifteen I had all I could take. I had gone through everything in the paper except the want ads, there was a mound of cigarette butts in the ashtray, and my tongue tasted like something rejected by a scavenger. I glowered at my wrist watch, growled, "Up the creek, brother!" for no reason at all and put on my trench coat and hat." - p 139

In case you're wondering what's happening in this bk, one paragraph does a nice job of summarizing:

"Not that the morning had been uneventful. A manuscript worth, to one customer at least, twenty-five million dollars; a girl lovely enough to make you gnaw your nails, who was the owner of a gun and a cloudy motive; a gangster from Prohib days who everybody thought was sunning himself in Florida but whose punctured body had turned up hanging by a necktie in an Erie Street flophouse—enough there for a full cauldron of trouble. So far, my part in the picture was confined to the role of bewildered spectator. I figured it was time for me to stop wading and begin to swim." - p 55

"There was a phone number or two in my address book, either of which could keep the evening from being a total loss. But there was a novel by Philip Wylie on the night table next to my bed and there were Scotch and seltzer in the kitchen. . . ." - p 61

I always love it when writers drop mention of other writers whose work they like. That stimulates my interest in the writers mentioned.

"Philip Gordon Wylie (May 12, 1902 – October 25, 1971) was an American author of works ranging from pulp science fiction, mysteries, social diatribes and satire, to ecology and the threat of nuclear holocaust." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wylie

I recognized the name, didn't remember reading anything by him, so I checked his list of works expecting something the-title-of-wch-I-can't-quite-remember — didn't find that but found this instead:

"When Worlds Collide (1933) (with Edwin Balmer) – Earth is destroyed in a collision with the rogue planet Bronson Alpha, with about a year of warning enabling a small group of survivors to build a spacecraft and escape to the rogue planet's moon, Bronson Beta. Filmed, with major changes to the story, as When Worlds Collide (1951)." - ibid

I think I was confusing him w/ Nevil Shute & expecting On the Beach. Anyway, the odd thing about When Worlds Collide for me, personally, is that back in the late 1970s I was given a small collection of super-8mm silent home movie versions of some mostly 'Grade B' SciFi commercial releases & When Worlds Collide was one of them. I re-edited this footage & turned it into a series of films called Subtitles. Only one of those has made it online:

"Subtitles (3/4" version)"
-> 3/4" vaudeo
- 32:00
- '80-'82/'84
http://youtu.be/wED-LIEbdKg

& that's not the best of them. Anyway, these few S8s have stuck in my mind all these decades not b/c they were any good but b/c I put the effort into repurposing them. As far as I can remember, I haven't seen the original 35mm sound versions of all but one of them UNTIL I saw The Phantom Planet recently. I expected to find it bad but I actually liked it. Maybe the same wd hold true if I saw When Worlds Collide. I may've read the bk, I don't remember. At any rate, thanks to Browne, if I live long enough to browse in my favorite bkstore again I'll definitely pick up whatever Wylie I can.

"I ate an early lunch for want of something better to do, and spent a few hours browsing in a department store book section. I picked up a new mystery by William P. McGivern and took it back to the office to read." - p 123

"William P. McGivern": That's an author I'm sure I've never heard of before or read.

"William Peter McGivern (December 6, 1918 - November 18, 1982) was an American novelist and television scriptwriter. He published more than 20 novels, mostly mysteries and crime thrillers, some under the pseudonym Bill Peters.

"His novels were adapted for a number of films, among them Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), a noir tale of three losers, starring Harry Belafonte; The Big Heat (1953), starring Glenn Ford as a cop who will do anything to get his man; Shield for Murder, about an honest cop going bad; and Rogue Cop (1954), a film noir directed by Roy Rowland, about a crooked cop trying to redeem himself. The Big Heat received an Edgar Award in 1954 as Best Motion Picture, which McGivern shared as author of the original novel. He also published more than one hundred science fiction stories during the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, he moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote for television and film."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_P._McGivern

I'm pretty sure I've seen The Big Heat, I don't remember the rest. Maybe Browne & McGivern were screenplay-writing buddies together. What the heck'o'goshen, I just ordered his "A Choice of Assassins" online.

"I dug out the McGivern mystery novel and finished it over half a pack of cigarettes. The women in it were beautiful and the private eye was brilliant. I would have liked to be brilliant, too. I would even have liked to be reasonably intelligent. I put the book away." - p 169

It's interesting to think about the detectives & the writers who create them. Presumably these creations are rooted in what the writers think good detecting wd consist of. An ability to put 2 & 2 together, an ability to persevere despite hard knocks. I remember this detective plodding right along, treading a tightrope, gradually having it all dawn on him. I reckon that's fairly usual in such stories.

I had a friend who worked for an actual detective. The detective would be hired to do things like wiretap someone. As I recall, he faked alotof the 'detection', not particularly caring about whether he was really doing what the client wanted. What HE wanted was to get pd.

&, yes, of course, the women are 'beautiful' & seductive & potentially deadly. That's a MUST in this stuff & I reckon it's a shortcoming from the standpoint of realism.

"She laughed softly and finished her glass, her throat muscles rippling as she swallowed. Before I could get up to take the empty glass and fill it for her, she was out of the chair and tilting the Scotch bottle. She put in a jolt to stagger a Kentucky mountaineer, waved the water pitcher in its general vicinity, and took three smooth rustling steps around the coffee table and dropped down beside me on the couch.

"Her brown eyes seemed to lick their lips. "You're awfully good-looking," she said deep down in her throat. We drank to that.

"I said, "You're as lovely as a jungle night." We drank to that.

"I wondered if the jungle night was really lovely, then decided it would be if there were panther eyes to reflect the moon. Three highballs had done that to me." - pp 127-128

Dutch Courage & Potomania. I don't need to be drunk to say that all-in-all reading this was fun. Too bad he turned to writing for TV. Oh, well. show less