Calamity Fair

Max Thursday and Austin Clapp #5

by Wade Miller

When private investigator Max Thursday is asked to recover some gambling IOUs for a mysterious woman, he stumbles into a vicious blackmail ring. The Frame-up involves compromising photographs used as weapons against prominent men and women who are willing to pay high prices. The business is so lucrative that one of the local gangsters sets out to cut himself into the racket and ends up dead. Before he wraps up the case, Max has to outwit a pompous district attorney who wants to put him in jail and a seductive and dangerous lady boss of a crime syndicate who can’t decide if she wants him as a suitor or a corpse.

Genres: Mystery

196 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

See also Bob Wade

Wade Miller is a pen name of two authors, Robert Allison “Bob” Wade (1920-present) and H. Bill Miller (1920-61). The two also wrote under several other pseudonyms, including Whit Masterson and Will Daemer.

Received the Shamus Award, "The Eye" (Lifetime achievment award) in 1988.

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wade Miller (aka the writing team of Bob Wade and Bill Miller) wrote numerous pulp novels from the late forties through the sixties. Among their earliest works were six Max Thursday novels, published between 1947 and 1951, including Guilty Bystander, Fatal Step, Uneasy Street, Calamity Fair, Muder Charge, and Shoot to Kill. Wade Miller grew up in San Diego and, naturally, wrote about San Diego, then a small city with a naval port and easy access to the border. Max Thursday was Miller’s hardboiled detective and placed in San Diego. Like most hardboiled detectives, Thursday has an uneasy relationship with officialdom, distrusted by the DA, and often one step above being handcuffed and thrown into the clink.

Calamity Fair does not have the pulpiest title, but it is a good, solid private eye novel, involving as so many of the early private eye novels did blackmail and photographs and gambling debts. This one also has Thursday stuck with nonexistent clients and a web of deceit culminating in murder. Without much of a good reason, he plunges ahead with a case, even when he thinks the client is selling him a bill of goods. What’s really great about this novel is how fast-paced and full of action it is with Thursday racing all over the San Diego area from fortune tellers to penthouse babes to going barhopping in what is now the gaslamp district and, of course, why not throw in an alligator farm.

[Tom Britz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Calamity Fair is another winner in the Max Thursday series of 1950's era detective fiction. Wade Miller was a pseudonym for two childhood friends, Bob Wade (1920-2012) and Bill Miller (1920-1961), and I think they deserve to not be forgotten. If you like mysteries that are involved and ever evolving throughout the story with the final denouement usually coming in the last few pages. They have also used the names, Will Daemer, Dale Wilmer and Whit Masterson. So far I've only read the Max Thursday novels and they are definitely worth a read.

[Andy Oerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wade Miller (actually two men writing together) was one of the shining lights of the paperback original. Their creation, the San Diego detective Max Thursday, was a somewhat standard yet memorable addition to the cycle of PIs filling up millions of pages in the 1950s.

Thursday didn't carry a gun, due to some incidents told in his first book, but was a hard-boiled kind of guy struggling to do a job and make a buck and see right win out somehow, whether or not the law would see it his way. His personal demons never seemed like whining, and his sensitive romanticism successfully toed the line, leavened as it was with a healthy cynicism as well.

This book sees him take on an organized blackmail ring. In addition, the DA, a recurring character who is not happy Thursday has previously gotten away with four killings on self-defense rulings, thinks he may be involved. The blackmail involves everything from illicit photos of a society gal to gambling debts racked up by the DA's own wife (who Thursday agrees to help in order to protect the career of the man who is trying to ruin him). Thursday has to sort through various suspects to find out who is behind it all, including a thug who winds up dead in an alligator farm, a woman in charge of the office Thursday knows fronts for the blackmail ring, a former actor, a funny little weasel who runs a fortune telling service out of a building shaped like an upside-down ice cream cone, and several others.

A series of unlucky events seem to implicate Thursday in three more murders as he chases down clues; he has a serious knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet with all these intricately plotted coincidences and divergent elements, the book never seems like a series of gimmicks arrived at first with a mystery filled in around them later (though that may have been exactly how it was done). The well-written climax comes in a meat locker, after the head criminal makes a mistake allowing Thursday to deduce where the blackmail evidence is kept.

I am always skeptical of PI novels that do not utilize first-person narration. But Miller managed to write this tale in an entertaining voice. There is some nice dialogue, and some plot ideas that I had not read before. One of the best things is the recurring set of characters, including a spunky lady reporter with whom Thursday enjoys an on again/off again tease of a romance. The reporter would seem to be his bantering soul mate, and helps him out unofficially on his cases, adding an air of humor and sophistication to the works, a la Nick and Nora.

One small thing that didn't gel was Miller's idea of beginning the story near the end, where Thursday is a fugitive, then flashing back to the start. It was a move designed to grab the reader with a bolt of suspense from the get-go, but it was just disorienting to me. The first couple of chapters did not improve much. But then things settled into a rhythm, the book soon gathered momentum and had me flipping pages.

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

PI Thursday tangles with murder and a blackmail ring, but he is boxed in when he protects his client. Return characters Clapp and DA Benedict add to the plot. Interesting characters and a fast-paced plot. Highly recommended.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cheeseball, hardboiled detective fiction. I happen to like the genre though, so it gets some points for that. The plot is not particularly clever, something about blackmail, no real surprises.