Louis Trimble (1917–1988)

Pulp In The Northwest Mountains

Girl on a Slay Ride is a wonderful bit of fifties pulp. Trimble puts five people together and a hidden treasure trove of money and let's the tension build and build and build. Cliff is supposed to deliver $40,000 in bonds, but his ex wife Denise - they were married for a minute - is on the run from her new husband a mobbed-up gambler with an army of goons at his disposal. Throw in a half-insane escaped convict with a rap sheet of murder and rape and two show more hardened men who want the treasure hidden in the mountains.

It's the old story of pulp fiction of a fabulous prize (like the Maltese Falcon) and a bunch of clever characters each trying to outsmart the others and get the prize. The story may be old but Trimble breathes fresh life into it and sets it in the Northwest wilderness.

This is really well plotted and you can feel the desperate passion and the greed and the tension just keeps ratcheting up. This is great stuff indeed. show less

Bring Back Her Body is a 1953 novel by Louis Trimble writing under the pen name Stuart Brock. All the action in the book takes place in and around Seattle and Whidbey Island.

Abel Cain, whose name was his minister father's idea of a joke, is a hardboiled Unlicensed fisherman and investigator who promises Honor Ryerson he would look into her sister Paula's disappearance.
Cain has quite an adventure between fistfights with hoods, dead bodies springing up, dames without clothes, cat fights, show more boat rides, bombs, more dames running off without a stitch. A well written book that doesn't feel dated at all. Although the idea of a PI being hired to chase after a wild daughter isn't new, Brock (aka Trimble) makes it seem as though you've never heard the idea before.
He writes good stuff, period show less

This is a fairly short South-of-the-Border pulp novel involving a private detective down in his luck, his crooked ex-partner, a wealthy blonde widow, an exotic dancer, and a cattle rancher. It reads very well and has a pulpy late fifties feel as it takes the reader to a land of cantinas and cattle ranches and bodies that seem to turn up rather inconveniently for Tom Blaine.

Blaine can't figure out for much of the book why he was hired or what kind of mess he's gotten himself into, but half show more the fun is trying to figure out who Blaine should trust and who is about to throw him to the wolves.

Trimble wrote all kinds of different books including Westerns and Science Fiction. At his best, as here, he tells a great story. show less

Louis Trimble wrote crime fiction, westerns, and other novels. Surfside Caper is a terrific little pulp novel that is charged with action right from the start. Murder, car races, intrigue, sexy widows, big time hustlers, small town cops, ex-lovers, drunks, frame-ups, traveling corpses, blackmail, and some kinkiness round it out.

You wouldn't think much of it if you were told it was about a hotel investigator and a battle over the ownership of a cliffside resort hotel. But that's where show more Trimble's magic comes in. He takes a rather mundane situation and fills it with so much intrigue and action that it really becomes a great pulp read. show less