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

Trimble wrote mysteries, westerns, science fiction, spy stories, and more. He churned out more than eighty novels in his heyday. Trimble was not consistently good, but he was right on the money enough that it's worth grabbing any of his books you can get your hands on. Maybe
you'll find a gem like this one.

Blondes Are Skin Deep is a tough-guy, hardboiled rackets novel taking
place in the Pacific Northwest. There's a lot of rushing around between hotels and apartments and a bevy of tough no show more nonsense hard types who don't trust each other when someone has made off with a six-figure sum and bodies start falling. There's something about Trimble's
tough writing that catches you and makes you keep reading this.

There's the blonde bombshell model, the hulking hotel majordomo, the
ex-con clerk with the blade, the rackets boss in his suite of rooms, the debonair heartbreaker who disappears with the heiress, and the tough guy whose got to get some answers before Police Detective Powers hauls him away.

Tough, hardnosed, with the guys trading blows, knives flying through the air, skulls being cracked, femme Fatales aplenty. show less

Louis Trimble wrote science fiction, westerns, mysteries, and this 1957
Cold War spy novel. It begins with action as Agent Barr meets someone hired to kill him off the Irish coast in the service of Roget. Meanwhile, Lenore Corey is
forced to spy on Leon Roget for her country and to prevent personal
embarrassment. Lenore had met Roget in San Francisco and become
his mistress. There is a lot of interplay between Lenore, Barr, Leon, and two other
characters, Tommy and Portia. However, this spy show more thriller is slow and languid in pace. This book is simply not up to Trimble's usual standards. I found his PI novel Bring
Back Her Body to be far superior reading. 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