Harry WhittingtonReviews

This is a novelization of a film intended to be a blockbuster. The film failed, and the book is not much of an effort to be better. The story concentrates on the transfer of pwer after the death of Marcus Aurelius to the incompetent hands of commodus. The intent was to outline the overwhelming failure of the empire to remain undamaged in the face of incompetence at the top. It really skates over that weakness in favoour of a very pallid love affair.½

Very good to fine

You'll Die Next! offers what is best about noir fiction. A fast paced plot, ordinary people in extraordinary situations, beautiful (and often dangerous) dames, lots of thugs, and a tons of gunplay. This thin volume is full of the overblown prose and tough guy parlance that littered the literary landscape of the 1950s.


Pinky sifted his coat up on his heavy shoulders. Henry saw him as a dangerous man gone to lard. Pinky wasn’t much taller than his blind enemy. He was somewhere between forty and fifty. He had black greasy hair. His puffy face would smile at you while he knifed you in the back.

Henry stirred and Pinky’s gun jerked nervously. Pinky said, “Stand still, chump. I got other troubles right now. I’ll get around to you.”



Whittington is no Chandler but his writing is easy and knowledgeable all at the same time. At no point does the prose detract from the plot. And plot is what this is all about. Whittington keeps the reader on the edge of their seat as the action unfolds and twists in ways that most of us haven’t thought of

Often called the king of the paperbacks, Harry Whittington wrote literally hundreds of books in the fifties and sixties under a variety of pseudonyms. His books are always great to read, pulpy, filled with great characters. A Haven For the Damned follows the tried and true idea of placing a bunch of mismatched characters in an isolated location and see what happens. It's sort of like a mystery weekend in the Poconos without the mysterious murder and without the inspector lining up all the suspects in the drawing room to hear him reveal who-done-it. In this story, Whittington combines a cranky old uranium prospector, the meanest dog north of the Rio Grande, a pair of bank robbers with bags of loot, a local couple with one of them suffering from a nasty bullet wound, a man red-eyed from driving nonstop across state lines, and a speed racing millionaire and his skanky young bride. With thousands of dollars in loot, a town called lust, and half the state's troopers searching, what you get from Whittington is one helluva story.

Harry Whittington was one of the top tier of pulp writers in his heyday and One Deadly Dawn proves just how good a writer he is. Whittington sets this tawdry pulp tale in the Hollywood studios and features a fading star up for murder and a studio PR man in the place of the classic hardboiled detective.

You have the usual hoods and slinkydames here, but what sets this terrific story apart from other Hollywood tales is Whittington's descriptions and the mood he sets. He gives us Julie designed by
someone with a yen for long pleasure cruises and they'd included lots of curves and hilly country. Lorna was the Luscious kind of lovely who had to watch her diet, but in her early thirties, she would have made some farmer a healthy stout wife. Marie got her kicks from watching
violence unfold around her. And Leo Ross had a face that showed all the evil in the world. Toni's scent was half something she bought, half something she was born with.

There are no palm trees, no ocean waves, no adoring crowds. It's a journey into a dark, deceitful, backstabbing world where everyone is after something and the main character, Sam Howell, is suspicious of
every slinky dame and what they are really after.

I enjoyed every page of this novel and it was just a ton of fun to read.

Harry Whittington, King of the paperback writers, could write pulp like no one's business. And, in Brass Monkey, he offers his readers a novel that is absolutely overflowing with pulpy goodness. When I look for pulpy novels from the fifties, this is precisely what I look for.

What makes this novel so great? Although it all takes place on Oahu in the years before Hawaii's statehood, it is a novel that is dark and despairing. It is a novel that is filled with people who have the blues, people in loveless marriages, people who've pretty much given up on anything.

You have two small town guys who somehow end up on the island. One had his heart ripped to shreds and decided to get even by marrying a millionaire heiress whose love he can never return. Though
he has a detective office, it's closed six days a week and he doesn't give a damn and his rich wife supports him - failure that he is. And, his buddy has three failed marriages and no prospects - not really. They are not really buddies but something snaps when James can't accept
suicide as an explanation for his friend's death.

The story is filled with the usual pulp tropes of murder, marijuana, blackmail, dancing girls, femme Fatales and the like. But what makes it so terrific is Whittington's mastery of the language which allows him to describe things so vividly you can feel the sweat and taste and smell.

The theme of this novel is an ordinary guy who suddenly finds himself running away from a brutal murder and quickly has the police on his heels. He's not sure what he did or why and the mystery about him
and his motives deepens. Whittington is such a terrific writer that he really makes this story come alive and makes it one of those hard to put down books.

Seeing things from Sam's point of view worked well and served to keep the mystery alive till the end. The introduction of Manton the take-no-prisoners overbearing detective who specialized in police brutality was a little bit overdone and that part of the story could have
used some toning down.

The few minor typos did not detract from the story at all. This one may not be Whittington's pulpiest best but it's definitely worth reading.

Whittington's country pulp.

What would it be like to everything you ever wanted? A hacienda on Maui with servants. To run your own company and have no one to report to and really never even have to show up? To be married to the most stunning woman imaginable? Would it be like heaven on earth or would it turn into a living hell? Harry Whittington, writing as Whit Harrison, brought us this story, told in the most vivid descriptions, a story of a woman no man could say no to on a magnificent island paradise.

Coles Cameron goes to visit his war-time buddy, Victor, who has a company on an plantation in Maui and running out of the rain into their house sees a naked goddess standing there before a full-length mirror. He is bewitched and knew he should have run back, "Back into the rain. Back to the launch. Back to Oahu. Back to the States." Whittington takes the reader into the hypnotic state that Coles finds himself in even when he suspects where this will all lead. Nothing could have prepared him for meeting Lani or for what she would do to him or what she had done to other's souls. His "head is whirling and mad dervishes were wheeling around behind [his] eyes. Her voice and laughter were music." He explains: "The liquor has done it, but it was more than that. It was the warm rain, the strange land, and Lani, standing, a nude goddess, before her mirror."

Whittington does a masterful job of taking the reader into the hypnotic jungle of Maui, the island paradise and the hot sizzling nightmare that Coles finds himself in. "No man could resist those damp, dark lips, those black eyes where he could read nothing but invitation, invitation swimming up from the depths of them."

This is a terrific noir tale set in the South Pacific and although it has, on its surface, some connection with Postman Always Rings Twice with the newcomer and the wife of his best friend who he can't resist and where that all leads, this story is Whittington's own and is imbued with his enormous writing talent.

Whittington was one of the great pulp writers of the fifties and sixties. He published over 170 novels, many of them pulp crime fiction as well as westerns and country blues. "Any Woman He Wanted" reprises the character of Mike Ballard from "Brute in Brass," the violent, mean, take-no-prisoners Homicide Detective who, despite being on the take, singlehandedly threw over Luxtro's mob. Four years later, it's still the same corrupt, dirty town but maybe there's a limit to how much of a man's soul can be bought. This is a violent, powerful novel that hits you over the top with the corruption and dirty practices. It's got the young punks, the teenage dolls who cover for the hoods, the rich estates, the kids who are hopped up and doing it for kicks, the honest crusaders, and the dirty officials. But what makes this novel really work is the absolutely relentless pacing as the story builds up to the penultimate confrontation.

Harry Whittington was nicknamed the King of the Paperbacks, having penned over 170 of them in his lifetime. He was also one of the greatest of the pulp writers of the fifties and captured the essence of the pulpy feel almost effortlessly. “A Night For Screaming” is without question a five-star read.
It is filled with the sense of desperation, the sense of nowhere to turn to, down on your luck with the whole world turned against you. The backdrop is a hot, dusty, world where the protagonist drifts penniless and with the law after him for a murder he didn’t do, but how the hell is going to prove it. He is just running “like a conditioned mouse in a maze.” He can’t even bum a quarter from a lady on the main street without having her act like he’s crazy – even when “she looked like the busty, leggy brand of chick that got spoken to by any man with energy enough to open his mouth, which was just about what [he] had left.” “She had the arrogant look of the spoiled babe who has learned to take everything that isn’t freely rendered to her; laughter didn’t come easy to her unless there was a knife in it.” Ouch. This is without doubt a vicious little femme fatale. And that’s before he knows that Eve Cassell is the feudal lord’s wife, waving a whiskey bottle around and dressed in a blue nightgown and that “she’s a dame no ten men could ever satisfy.” And the men in this book. “Nothing organically wrong with them,” but what they “suffered was a virus of the soul.” This book is a gem. The plot may not be that complex, but Whittington fills it with descriptions of desperation, of meanness, of people struggling to get through each and every day. And, everyone is trapped inside a prison, some with bars, some without bars.

Harry Whittington was known as the "King of the Paperbacks." He published over 170 of them. He is best known for his fifties and sixties pulp novels. "Brute in Brass" is so good you'd think it would be more well known than it is. Every single page in this book is good. The writing is just fantastic.

What is the book about except the distance between Heaven and Hell? There's a man on death row and a crooked cop on the take. There's his mistress who has set up in an apartment and whose kid he's put through private school. There's the wife of the man on death row pleading with him to find evidence of actual innocence. There's the hoodlum who runs the town and everyone in it. And there's the commission looking for someone to take the fall.

Through every page you feel Mike Ballard struggle with a glimpse of heaven that seems just out of reach in the form of a woman who melts not just his heart but his soul. But it doesn't matter because the truth is he is just walking through hell.

Whittington wrote a powerful noir novel that isn't dark and gloomy. It's not filled with endless unnecessary descriptions. It's very easy to read and flows quickly. And when you finish, you just gotta find out what else the King has written.

On the cover of the Naked Jungle, it says “Three people – bound by fear yet torn by hate.” The plot is not entirely complex as it involves three survivors of a South Pacific airline crash who make it to a flimsy raft and, from there, to a tiny island. The story is about these three characters and how they interact rather than about some complex doings. But, what amazing characters Whittington has invented!

Webb had left the Navy and bounced around from job to job, “but whatever he was he needed that dream to sustain him” – that dream about escaping to an island in the South Pacific with “coconut palms rustling with the slightest breeze.” After a bunch of meaningless jobs and a failed marriage, he was heading out to find his escape.

The narrator, Webb, explains that the first time he saw Fran, “he’d been high, but something about her had reached through the fuzziness in his brain. And he’d thought , God, how beautiful; a man could go through hell for that. And then he’d thought with alcoholic clarity: probably, she’d see that I did that.” WoW! And, when Webb next notices Fran, he knows something is wrong with the plane. He hears the woman tell her husband that she is leaving him when they get to Sydney. “Webb looked at her, thinking it was a dead heat as to which would fly apart first, she or the plane. It was hell to think about her and plane crash in the same breath. Such a waste. She had a tender kind of beauty that made you ache looking at it.”

But, Fran came with baggage and, boy did she. Webb thought it was a miracle that put them in the raft together, “even if the same ironic joker had tossed in her husband.” Alfred Krayer was probably the meanest, most self-confident, controlling sonofabitch that you could find. Indeed, Krayer didn’t even want to let Webb in their raft because then the supplies would have to be split and, when they got to the island, Krayer was determined to teach Webb once and for all that Fran belonged to him and Webb wasn’t going to have any say in how that went.

The book is simply an amazing piece of artwork as Whittington weaves the relationships between these three individuals stuck together on the deserted island. This is not just another pulp novel tossed off for a fast buck.

This is precisely the kind of pulp noir tale that I can't get enough of. Whittington was a master at his craft and could take pulp cliches and turn them into a story so compelling you can't put it down. He's got the ordinary guy with a deadend job who somehow managed to romance and marry the headliner at the KitKat Club and can't figure out what she sees in him. There's some kind of mixup and someone thinks he is some ex-con out of California and there's some toughs out to do him trouble. Before long, the hoods and the cops are all after him and it's a pulse-pounding man-on-the-run story. Whittington piles it on this poor guy till he doesn't know which end is up and has him practically crawling through a garbage dump at one point. But Whittington gets the mood right. It's pure pulp that he's giving you here and there's not a bad note in this entire symphony.

Harry Whittington was crowned the "King of the Paperbacks" and published as many as 200 mysteries, westerns, and pulps. "A Ticket To Hell" is a terrific fast moving story that's basically a pulpy man on the run tale set in the parched hills of New Mexico.

Whittington filled this one with all kinds of pulp cliches. Ric Durazo has driven cross country to make some kind of deal or exchange, but he just can't seem to keep a low profile. He's an Ex-con who had done three years hard time. His woman who he yearned for every day went and married the judge who sentenced him. The motel owner's wife doesn't want Ric to feel lonely. The couple in the cottage across the street are in a marital dispute and, against his better judgement, Ric butts in. And, the state police and the FBI are on his trail. And, oh yeah, on the way into town, Ric threw a hitchhiker out of a speeding car.

The writing is crisp, the plot flows smoothly And this is another pulp gem by Whittington.

Whittington was known as the “king of the paperbacks” and published in excess of 170 paperback novels in his lifetime. “Fires that Destroy” is a pulp crime novel, but it is not your classic action-packed crime
story. And, don’t read it expecting to be kept in suspense. There’s little
question from the first pages who is the killer or why or what the various characters will end up being. The novel is not about the action so much as the psychological motivations of the main character, Bernice Harper. In Joe Lansdale’s introduction to the novel, “Fires that Destroy” is compared to the great Cain novels, which pick apart
characters and show their descent into worlds of guilt and compromise.

Even though this novel is a character study rather than an wham-bam action story, it is somehow compelling and, once I started reading, it became very difficult to put down. The questions you are left with after
reading this are whether Bernice is to sympathized with or not. Is she simply a horrible person motivated by greed and lust or is she thrust into this situation by how society has treated her. She suffers from “ugly duckling syndrome” and thinks other women have always gotten
their way because of their looks and their figure and that she has suffered in comparison because she is somewhat lacking in the looks and appeal. Is this a justification for murder? Is it a justification for buying her way to happiness?
Is she somewhat out of her mind? Even when she is put in a good situation- being a companion to a rich, handsome blind man – she can’t trust that he would have picked her if he had sight and she
“hated herself because it was a joke to pawn her off as a looker on a man who couldn’t see her.”

In the end, is she just a sad case of someone to be pitied or has the
narrator fooled you into thinking this person who is motivated by uncontrollable lust and greed is someone decent if but for the way people look at her or if but for the men she picked or bought. “She grew up determined to have all the things she’d been denied,” Whittington explains. “To want was one thing – that was hell. To be
wanted – that was all that mattered. Her eyes filled with tears. Without that, you had nothing.”

It is, at base, a novel of obsession: “When finally you admit that you are going to kill a man, your obsession take over. You begin to plan how you can do it – and get away with it.” But, does the obsession go
away or are you forever haunted by guilt and shame for what you did.

Do you always think everyone suspects you or everyone is after you? How far can you run? How far can you hide from those nightmare eyes that keep haunting you?
This is a terrific novel and it makes you wonder why Whittington was not more widely recognized as one of the great American writers of the
mid-twentieth century.

Loved everything connected to the TV series!

A corrupt cop decides to help prove the innocence of a condemned killer--but only so he can sleep with his wife. Whittington's protagonist is a thorough ne'er do well, but so is just about everyone else in the book. The cop at least is trying to be honest with himself. His unpredictable actions drive the story to a heart-stopping climax and a memorable conclusion.½

After an encouraging start that promises a battle of wits between a clever detective and a murderer, this book detours into a story of a woman's sad quest for love and fulfillment. There is nothing to admire in the female protagonist, however, and as the book proceeds her actions become more and more ridiculous. The man she falls in love with and obsesses over is no better. In fact, after the book's opening nearly all of the characters we encounter are corrupt. This is a noir novel of course, but despite the author's generally good writing style, the story simply doesn't engage the reader and provide the type of pleasure it should. It is simply too cold and mean-spirited. Better stories of this type provide at least one or two sympathetic characteristics for their main characters. This book doesn't, and it largely fails as a result.

I recently read a comment somewhere -- and I can't remember where -- to the effect that anyone who hadn't read any Harrington was really a hardboiled/noir ignoramus, so I decided I'd better fill this egregious gap in my knowledge. That led me to this double volume . . . and to the urge to say a very loud thank you in absentia to whoever it was who made that comment. Really I'd prefer to give this 4.5 stars rather than just 4.

The first novel, A Night for Screaming (1960), sees younger cop Mitch Walker on the run from a false murder charge but more importantly from his own ex-partner Fred Palmer, a brutally sadistic cop whose torturous methods Mitch would rather die than experience first hand. Mitch finds refuge on the vast plantation/livestock farm run, using largely prison labour, by another brutal man, Barton M. Cassel. Cassel knows Mitch is on the run, and uses that fact to blackmail him into participating into an insurance scam, a plot that will also enable Cassel to frame Mitch for murdering the reluctant lover of Cassel's hot young wife Eve. Complicating matters is that Eve has now set her lustful sights on Mitch . . . After a relatively slow start in classic noir territory -- a small town diner, a pretty but faded waitress with a heart of gold, a pair of corrupt, bullying cops -- but then starts accelerating, until eventually the pages (of which there aren't all that many) are sort of sizzling past. I reached the tale's end gasping and much sooner than I'd anticipated.

Golly. Follow that!

The long, absorbing and erudite introduction to this volume by David Laurence Wilson gives the impression that the second novel, Any Woman He Wanted (1961, as by Whit Harrison), is a pretty insignificant piece by comparison, a novel in which Whittington's normally deft touch slipped a little. By contrast, I think I enjoyed even more than I did A Night for Screaming. Disillusioned, embittered, too-often brutal homicide cop Mike Ballard has little reason to like DA Tom Flynn, even though Flynn is a rare honest man trying to clean up a dirty town. Four years ago, Mike infiltrated the town's largest mob and brought it down; all Flynn could see was that Mike was in cahoots with mobsters, and he pursued him for it -- which is why Mike is currently on the lowest detective rung rather than in a senior position within the PD. Just to make matters worse, seven years ago Flynn married the love of Mike's life, Carolyn. But then Flynn is murdered and suddenly everyone's overeager to insist he committed suicide; and soon other honest cops who were involved in the investigation are being killed too, their cause of death likewise being covered up. When Mike's drinking friend The Greek is threatened and no one in the PD seems overly interested in giving him police protection, Mike at last decides to strike back against the crime overlords and their high-placed puppets. He finds the trail -- which soon becomes a trail of corpses -- leads far closer to the Flynn family and his own life than he could have imagined . . .

Mike isn't a character you're intended to like, with his tendency to default to violence at the drop of a hat, but he has the same kind of ethical integrity (and sexual moral code) as, say, Travis McGee in the John D. MacDonald novels. But he's a hero nevertheless . . . just not a hero you would yourself want to be.

Both novels have some great noirish lines ("They're all here. Not only his family, but everybody who ever hated Tom Flynn has shown up today [for the funeral]. I never saw so many black suits, and black ties -- and black dirty hearts" [p185]) as well as some lapses ("She still didn't see the hot eyes melting and running all over her" [p191]}, and Whittington has an irritating faux-characterization tic of describing people who're suffering spiritual malaise in terms of physical sickness ("The illness inside Ernie had turned his face a nice ash-gray" [p187]); further, the text has more typos than even a labour of love should have.

But these are minor carps. Go read.

The Doomsday Affair pits Napoleon and Illya against an enemy known only as Tixe Ylno, a mastermind who is preparing to destroy the world, and only the top team from U.N.C.L.E. has any chance of stopping the madman. The plot takes them from Hawaii to Mexico and to California as they follow the trail to catch a man no one can identify and stop a catastrophe, though they don't know what exactly that might be.

The second Man from U.N.C.L.E book had a couple really good bad guy characters -- and spots in the plot which were so annoying I found it difficult to keep reading. The chase scene through the streets of Honolulu could have been shortened to a couple paragraphs with a much better feel. Illya's incredibly stupid move to walk right into the room with the bad guy just drove me over the top.

But still, the character of Sam Su Yan had some interesting touches in an egotistical, crazy way. Violet managed her part well, too. Illya and Napoleon were closer to the television characters in this book, but still lacked in the overall story feel.

The plot depended too much on the two main characters doing stupid things and more than a little coincidence, as well as UNCLE not bothering to check out a place obviously connected with Thrush.

So the second book wasn't as well done as the first, and I think part of the reason may still be based on how early this book was written (like the first book in the series). Solo wasn't very suave in some of the story and Kuryakin was stupid a couple times for no apparent reason I think there could have been a better story here with less coincidence and a bit more logic.

Whittington is a legendary pulp author, but his books aren't that easy to find by chance in used book stores. I'm happy I came across this one. It starts with a long, interesting introduction where Whittington talks about his rise, fall, and re-discovery as an author. He quotes a lot of favorable reviews to show how good he was and tells us how he plotted his books. Despite this bragging, he still comes across as a nice guy.

The book itself is marvelous, for the most part. There are some very well-written passages as an ex-baseball pitcher, Jake, whose brief stardom ended with an arm injury, tries to hunt down the robber who implicated him in the theft of $100,000. Of course, there is a girl involved, Lily, a backwoods type such as you might find in one of Charles Williams' books. To say that she causes Jake a few problems would be an understatement. Their trip down the river together and the book's climax have some pretty extreme scenes, with violence and sex inextricably mixed. In the end, despite being only 120 pages long, it drags on just a little bit too long. But Whittington has definitely succeeded in grabbing my attention - and I will probably have to resort to Amazon or abebooks to pick up a few more of his works.