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Mrs. Homicide/Naked Fury/Murder on the Side
MRS. HOMICIDE
Everyone in the homicide squad knows that Herman Stone’s wife Connie is cheating on him. They’d all seen her with Lyle Cary. So when she is arrested in Cary’s apartment, drunk and nude, with his murdered body on the bed they had obviously just shared, they all assume she’s guilty. Except, of course for Stone. The husband may be the last to know, but Connie claims she is innocent. She’s never even met Cary, much less killed him. It’s almost more than Stone can believe. But in trying to prove her innocence, he soon finds himself up against not only the witnesses, but the entire police force!
NAKED FURY
There’s been a fatal hit-and-run in the poor part of town. And now the only witness has been beaten to death as well. Big Dan Malloy runs this part of town and makes it his business to take care of his people. So he starts to investigate the deaths. It all points to a man in a large, dark blue car. But the official police report is now saying it was a red coupe driven by a woman—which can only mean that someone has fingered Katie, Malloy’s girl. Meanwhile, Malloy is working hard on an election that should bring some real change to his part of town. But with so much on the line, who can he really trust?
MURDER ON THE SIDE
Larry Hanson should have been a successful engineer instead of the glorified accountant he is. Now in his mid-40s, he has grown bored with his job, his wife. Then his secretary Wanda calls one evening and asks for his help. Her ex-boyfriend, just released from prison, had been trying to drunkenly rape her. She hit him with a lamp, and thinks she killed him. Hanson finds the young man unconscious and takes him away, dropping him at a nearby park. Grateful, Wanda offers herself to Hanson. The next morning, he feels like a new man. Then he reads the morning paper—Wanda’s boyfriend was found dead in the park… murdered. And Holden is the most likely suspect!
Everyone in the homicide squad knows that Herman Stone’s wife Connie is cheating on him. They’d all seen her with Lyle Cary. So when she is arrested in Cary’s apartment, drunk and nude, with his murdered body on the bed they had obviously just shared, they all assume she’s guilty. Except, of course for Stone. The husband may be the last to know, but Connie claims she is innocent. She’s never even met Cary, much less killed him. It’s almost more than Stone can believe. But in trying to prove her innocence, he soon finds himself up against not only the witnesses, but the entire police force!
NAKED FURY
There’s been a fatal hit-and-run in the poor part of town. And now the only witness has been beaten to death as well. Big Dan Malloy runs this part of town and makes it his business to take care of his people. So he starts to investigate the deaths. It all points to a man in a large, dark blue car. But the official police report is now saying it was a red coupe driven by a woman—which can only mean that someone has fingered Katie, Malloy’s girl. Meanwhile, Malloy is working hard on an election that should bring some real change to his part of town. But with so much on the line, who can he really trust?
MURDER ON THE SIDE
Larry Hanson should have been a successful engineer instead of the glorified accountant he is. Now in his mid-40s, he has grown bored with his job, his wife. Then his secretary Wanda calls one evening and asks for his help. Her ex-boyfriend, just released from prison, had been trying to drunkenly rape her. She hit him with a lamp, and thinks she killed him. Hanson finds the young man unconscious and takes him away, dropping him at a nearby park. Grateful, Wanda offers herself to Hanson. The next morning, he feels like a new man. Then he reads the morning paper—Wanda’s boyfriend was found dead in the park… murdered. And Holden is the most likely suspect!
476 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 15, 2024
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About the author
Day Keene
163 books33 followersDay Keene, whose real name was Gunnar Hjerstedt, was one of the leading paperback mystery writers of the 1950s. Along with writing over 50 novels, he also wrote for radio, television, movies, and pulp magazines. Often his stories were set in South Florida or swamp towns in Louisiana, and included a man wrongly accused and on the run, determined to clear his name.
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April 23, 2024
Stark House’s April 2024 collection of three Day Keene novels, Mrs. Homicide
(1953) /Naked Fury (1952) /Murder on the Side (1956) reprises three of Keene’s novels from three different years, different original publishers, and different plots. They are unrelated other than they are Day Keene crime novels from the Fifties and they are all damn good.
Set in New York City, Mrs. Homicide has a title that refers to Connie, accused of murder and married to a homicide detective. This starts with a twist on the classic set-up of the innocent guy who wakes up in a room covered in blood with a corpse and the cops on the way to take in the scene. Generally, with this plot device, the innocent guy, through whose eyes the story is told, takes a leap out the window and down the fire escape and spends the rest of the story on the run trying to prove his innocence with no one willing to listen to him. Keene takes this well-worn plot and twists it a little bit, telling it through the eyes of Homicide Detective Herman Stone whose wife Connie is found naked and drunk in the apartment of the newly-deceased local playboy, Lyle Carey. What’s more is that it appears half the city has seen Connie out and about with Romeo for the last five or six months. Even the phone records support the theory that they have been having a torrid affair. Detective Stone is the only one who believes in her – although he has his doubts from time to time since the evidence since the evidence is all lined up and he even spends the night in the arms of Myra the telephone operator while Connie spends her first night behind bars. What Keene does so well in this novel is he captures how tortured Stone is by what took place. That begins with the opening scene where he sees her in the precinct station and narrates that she cheated on him, but it did not show. “Her hair was just as red. Her eyes were just as blue. Both of us kept right on breathing. She was still the big beautiful doll I’d waltzed out of a dime-a-dance place when she was eighteen and I was the cop on the beat.” His next thought though is that he ought to beat her face in. He is horror-struck and humiliated with everyone in the precinct house smirking at him, at the knowledge that she’d been stepping out on him and he would never live down the humiliation of being cuckolded. He thinks: “She wasn’t my wife anymore. She was just a dame in a jam. A red-haired dame who’d slept in my arms a long, long time ago – last night.” Stone feels all alone and betrayed, but also understands how alone Connie feels among all these people in the precinct who knew her on a first-name basis and now saw her as the village joke and had seen her without her clothes, drunk, disheveled, and covered in blood. Of course, the story is Stone sticking his neck out for Connie when no one thinks he should, determined to prove her innocence although nothing seems to support that theory. He looks like s a sucker to every guy in town who thinks he is being led around by her even when the proof of her adultery was laid out for all to see. Stone can’t lay off even when ordered to and eventually he is on his own, without his badge, and with every cop in town on the prowl for him. Keene offers us a fast-paced, emotionally overwhelming, novel that is just too good to ignore.
Naked Fury (1952) is Keene’s novel about machine politics and small-town corruption with the only twist being that Big Dan Malloy, despite the graft and the favors, is a pretty decent guy who actually wants to do the right thing for his “people” living in tenements in the valley. When a crippled newspaper boy is run over and the real culprit covered up by the beating to death of the only witness, Stan Kozak, Malloy starts sticking his neck out and uncovering things he wished he had not. He would rather walk between Katie’s Bar and his other haunts in Phelpsburg putting out the good word for the machine’s candidate, Charles A. Reardon, based on Reardon’s promise to redevelop the tenements and put up parks and swimming pools even though Reardon was a “chinless jerk.” He tells Katie Bishop that he wants to retire and farm a small plantation and get away from it all, but she does not believe it will ever happen and no one else does either. Malloy has that magic quality that lets him be friends with everyone and he would only be half himself isolated on a small farm. What Katie does not like is Reardon’s” black-haired little bitch” of a wife Jane throwing herself at Malloy to seal the deal. Keene does a fine job of portraying Big Dan Malloy and all the contradictions that are wrapped up in him. His Malloy is a machine-politician whose every other sentence is the “good word” on who to vote for and his every waking hour is spent in conference with his boys fixing this and fixing that for his people. The contradiction here is that Malloy, despite his power and influence, has never lost touch with the little people and still has their back. He plays here the role of the amateur detective trying to ferret out what really happened with the hit-and-run before more bodies pile up in town and the press turns on him finally. This novel keeps a strong focus on the plot and has quite a bit of action with Malloy often not far from the action.
Murder on the Side (1956) is the third selection in Stark House’s latest reprint of Day Keene novels. Murder on the Side is the story of a corporate executive Larry Hanson trapped in a humdrum marriage to Olga who throws it all away one night when his hot secretary Wanda Gale throws herself at him. He thinks about his mortality tables and the fact that he had nineteen more working years until he got a gold watch from Atlas Engineering but he feels his arteries hardening and that he is a rut of his own making. He married Olga, who was the file clerk at the office, after one rendevous at a drunken office party and her announcement of pregnancy some weeks later. Now he was “doomed to be a John Q. Doakes, a moderately successful money-making machine living in a typical upper-class Chicago suburb with the first girl he’d ever gotten in trouble.” Now they were barely intimate. He thinks: “The Russians were wrong. It wasn’t religion, it was marriage that was the narcotic of the masses. A man became accustomed to finding Liederkranz and Braunschweiger and boiled ham where he had every reason to find it.” Into this humdrum life waltzes Wanda Gale on a week when Olga leaves to visit her sick mother, one who Hanson has never met. Wanda, though, when he shows up her apartment in the middle of the night has one problem, she thinks she has a naked corpse in her bed. She wants Hanson to take care of it because naturally that is part of his job responsibilities and as payment she tells him she has been madly in love with him since she first laid eyes on him. She claims this is her ex-boyfriend, newly out of prison, and that he wanted to ravish her again, but she clocked him with the heavy lamp and could Hanson pretty please dispose of the body because naturally the police would never believe a busy executive had not been putting to his gorgeous secretary and that Hanson had not killed the ex-con in a jealous rage. They’ve barely met. They’ve never touched and already she wants Hanson to do body disposal and clean up on aisle five for her.
Hanson naturally takes care of business when he realizes that the ex-boyfriend (Connors) is out, but not forever, and walks the guy in the drunken stupor out to his car with the help of a nearby police officer and then dumps the guy in the bushes with a bottle of booze to keep him warm and Hanson’s fingerprints all over the bottle. Thinking to protect Wanda, he put her up in a new apartment hotel and spends the best night of his life with her. He is so overwhelmed by her physical attentions that he wakes up and decides to ditch Olga and make a new life with Wanda. But since a crime story is not much without a crime, it turns out that Connors never wakes up because someone tossed three bullets in his chest out in the bushes. Naturally Hanson and Wanda decide no one will ever believe they are innocent and decide to take off the next morning with a few thousand dollars. This amorous pair are now on the run across the country and headed toward Mexico except for a few moments of distrust. None of this strikes this reader as believable, particularly when Hanson takes his own secret money out of the company safe to travel with, but leaves the entire payroll in cash sitting there. If you are going to go on the run for murder, what’s a little grand theft thrown in? Although all the plot elements are there, Keene was little bit off his game with this one in that you just never really buy in to these two characters (Hanson and Wanda), but nevertheless it is an exciting read.
(1953) /Naked Fury (1952) /Murder on the Side (1956) reprises three of Keene’s novels from three different years, different original publishers, and different plots. They are unrelated other than they are Day Keene crime novels from the Fifties and they are all damn good.
Set in New York City, Mrs. Homicide has a title that refers to Connie, accused of murder and married to a homicide detective. This starts with a twist on the classic set-up of the innocent guy who wakes up in a room covered in blood with a corpse and the cops on the way to take in the scene. Generally, with this plot device, the innocent guy, through whose eyes the story is told, takes a leap out the window and down the fire escape and spends the rest of the story on the run trying to prove his innocence with no one willing to listen to him. Keene takes this well-worn plot and twists it a little bit, telling it through the eyes of Homicide Detective Herman Stone whose wife Connie is found naked and drunk in the apartment of the newly-deceased local playboy, Lyle Carey. What’s more is that it appears half the city has seen Connie out and about with Romeo for the last five or six months. Even the phone records support the theory that they have been having a torrid affair. Detective Stone is the only one who believes in her – although he has his doubts from time to time since the evidence since the evidence is all lined up and he even spends the night in the arms of Myra the telephone operator while Connie spends her first night behind bars. What Keene does so well in this novel is he captures how tortured Stone is by what took place. That begins with the opening scene where he sees her in the precinct station and narrates that she cheated on him, but it did not show. “Her hair was just as red. Her eyes were just as blue. Both of us kept right on breathing. She was still the big beautiful doll I’d waltzed out of a dime-a-dance place when she was eighteen and I was the cop on the beat.” His next thought though is that he ought to beat her face in. He is horror-struck and humiliated with everyone in the precinct house smirking at him, at the knowledge that she’d been stepping out on him and he would never live down the humiliation of being cuckolded. He thinks: “She wasn’t my wife anymore. She was just a dame in a jam. A red-haired dame who’d slept in my arms a long, long time ago – last night.” Stone feels all alone and betrayed, but also understands how alone Connie feels among all these people in the precinct who knew her on a first-name basis and now saw her as the village joke and had seen her without her clothes, drunk, disheveled, and covered in blood. Of course, the story is Stone sticking his neck out for Connie when no one thinks he should, determined to prove her innocence although nothing seems to support that theory. He looks like s a sucker to every guy in town who thinks he is being led around by her even when the proof of her adultery was laid out for all to see. Stone can’t lay off even when ordered to and eventually he is on his own, without his badge, and with every cop in town on the prowl for him. Keene offers us a fast-paced, emotionally overwhelming, novel that is just too good to ignore.
Naked Fury (1952) is Keene’s novel about machine politics and small-town corruption with the only twist being that Big Dan Malloy, despite the graft and the favors, is a pretty decent guy who actually wants to do the right thing for his “people” living in tenements in the valley. When a crippled newspaper boy is run over and the real culprit covered up by the beating to death of the only witness, Stan Kozak, Malloy starts sticking his neck out and uncovering things he wished he had not. He would rather walk between Katie’s Bar and his other haunts in Phelpsburg putting out the good word for the machine’s candidate, Charles A. Reardon, based on Reardon’s promise to redevelop the tenements and put up parks and swimming pools even though Reardon was a “chinless jerk.” He tells Katie Bishop that he wants to retire and farm a small plantation and get away from it all, but she does not believe it will ever happen and no one else does either. Malloy has that magic quality that lets him be friends with everyone and he would only be half himself isolated on a small farm. What Katie does not like is Reardon’s” black-haired little bitch” of a wife Jane throwing herself at Malloy to seal the deal. Keene does a fine job of portraying Big Dan Malloy and all the contradictions that are wrapped up in him. His Malloy is a machine-politician whose every other sentence is the “good word” on who to vote for and his every waking hour is spent in conference with his boys fixing this and fixing that for his people. The contradiction here is that Malloy, despite his power and influence, has never lost touch with the little people and still has their back. He plays here the role of the amateur detective trying to ferret out what really happened with the hit-and-run before more bodies pile up in town and the press turns on him finally. This novel keeps a strong focus on the plot and has quite a bit of action with Malloy often not far from the action.
Murder on the Side (1956) is the third selection in Stark House’s latest reprint of Day Keene novels. Murder on the Side is the story of a corporate executive Larry Hanson trapped in a humdrum marriage to Olga who throws it all away one night when his hot secretary Wanda Gale throws herself at him. He thinks about his mortality tables and the fact that he had nineteen more working years until he got a gold watch from Atlas Engineering but he feels his arteries hardening and that he is a rut of his own making. He married Olga, who was the file clerk at the office, after one rendevous at a drunken office party and her announcement of pregnancy some weeks later. Now he was “doomed to be a John Q. Doakes, a moderately successful money-making machine living in a typical upper-class Chicago suburb with the first girl he’d ever gotten in trouble.” Now they were barely intimate. He thinks: “The Russians were wrong. It wasn’t religion, it was marriage that was the narcotic of the masses. A man became accustomed to finding Liederkranz and Braunschweiger and boiled ham where he had every reason to find it.” Into this humdrum life waltzes Wanda Gale on a week when Olga leaves to visit her sick mother, one who Hanson has never met. Wanda, though, when he shows up her apartment in the middle of the night has one problem, she thinks she has a naked corpse in her bed. She wants Hanson to take care of it because naturally that is part of his job responsibilities and as payment she tells him she has been madly in love with him since she first laid eyes on him. She claims this is her ex-boyfriend, newly out of prison, and that he wanted to ravish her again, but she clocked him with the heavy lamp and could Hanson pretty please dispose of the body because naturally the police would never believe a busy executive had not been putting to his gorgeous secretary and that Hanson had not killed the ex-con in a jealous rage. They’ve barely met. They’ve never touched and already she wants Hanson to do body disposal and clean up on aisle five for her.
Hanson naturally takes care of business when he realizes that the ex-boyfriend (Connors) is out, but not forever, and walks the guy in the drunken stupor out to his car with the help of a nearby police officer and then dumps the guy in the bushes with a bottle of booze to keep him warm and Hanson’s fingerprints all over the bottle. Thinking to protect Wanda, he put her up in a new apartment hotel and spends the best night of his life with her. He is so overwhelmed by her physical attentions that he wakes up and decides to ditch Olga and make a new life with Wanda. But since a crime story is not much without a crime, it turns out that Connors never wakes up because someone tossed three bullets in his chest out in the bushes. Naturally Hanson and Wanda decide no one will ever believe they are innocent and decide to take off the next morning with a few thousand dollars. This amorous pair are now on the run across the country and headed toward Mexico except for a few moments of distrust. None of this strikes this reader as believable, particularly when Hanson takes his own secret money out of the company safe to travel with, but leaves the entire payroll in cash sitting there. If you are going to go on the run for murder, what’s a little grand theft thrown in? Although all the plot elements are there, Keene was little bit off his game with this one in that you just never really buy in to these two characters (Hanson and Wanda), but nevertheless it is an exciting read.
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