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Max Thursday and Austin Clapp #3
Fatal Step
Dave Lee was shot dead as he rode the Joyland ferris wheel. As hard-boiled private investigator Max Thursday stalked Dave’s killer, he encountered … a high-powered sob sister, the sadistic king of a gambling syndicate, and a delicate, sphinx-like girl who packed a .38 revolver. The best Wade Miller mystery yet! A tough private eye relentlessly pursues a wily, cold-blooded gunman through an amusement park.
128 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1948
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23 people want to read
About the author
Wade Miller
136 books12 followersSee 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 11, 2021
—¿Cuánto hace que ha estado en la puerta escuchando?
—Lo suficiente como para reconocer cuándo una investigación está atascada.
Wade Miller es el seudónimo que utilizaron los escritores Robert Allison “Bob” Wade y H. Bill Miller a finales de los años 40 para escribir la serie de novelas de Max y otros títulos. Paso fatal es la segunda entrega de la serie protagonizada por el detective Max y el teniente Austin Clapp, amigo y ex colega de Max.
Este es un caso de asesinato de un empleado de origen chino en la feria Joyland de San Diego. (Es la segunda vez que tropiezo con otra feria Joyland en pocas semanas. Está visto que King no fue muy original con el nombre). En 48 horas el detective Thursday investiga el caso ininterrumpidamente, sin dormir, sin comer, con alguna que otra paliza pero sin desfallecer, absolutamente volcado en la resolución y sin descanso.
Narrada vertiginosamente al estilo de la novela policiaca norteamericana de los 50, capítulo a capítulo seguimos en todo momento al detective Thursday, diálogos escuetos y ácidos, se avanza en el caso con nuevas y sorpresivas deducciones y un alto índice de intuición, calles y parajes oscuros y sucios, sórdidos garitos de juego, matones irascibles y un tímido e incipiente romance.
Los diálogos son lo mejor, sobre todo los de Merle Osborn, (aunque muchas veces se tiene que intuir quien habla porque apenas hay aclaraciones del narrador), suceden cosas constantemente a ritmo telegráfico, no es aburrido, toma impulso mientras avanza la narración y tiene un buen final. (6/10)
March 9, 2025
A solid crime story starring Max Thursday, a private detective who has seen better days.
Disappointed that ChatGTP recommended this book as a mystery that involves corporate intrigue, but otherwise a solid and fun read.
Disappointed that ChatGTP recommended this book as a mystery that involves corporate intrigue, but otherwise a solid and fun read.
Want to read
March 22, 2019Synopsis: Dave was killed on a ferris wheel. As Thursday stalks the killer, he encounters a sob sister, a syndicate king, and a girl who packs a 38.
January 13, 2025
“Fatal Step” is the second novel in the tag-team Duo of Wade Miller (Robert Wade and Bill Miller)’s Max Thursday series. Although the novels in this series are all standalone novels, there are chronological links between them. This one takes place six months after the events in “Guilty Bystander,” where Thursday famously guns down three in a deadly shooting that leads to notoriety and to his questioning his use of a gun to the point where he no longer even carries a gun. It is also the first book where he meets crime reporter Merle Osborne, who would eventually in later novels become his long-term girlfriend until she finally calls it quits in “Shoot to Kill,” some four years later with no marriage proposal forthcoming from Thursday.
The Max Thursday we are introduced to in this novel is six feet tall with “a lean countenance that was all planes and tight-skinned angles with no gentle fat. The face was impassive and stern.” He had coarse black hair covered by a hat and “[t]he coat pockets of his brown tweed suit were baggy as if they carried his big fists much of the time.”
The setting, as with all the novels in the series is the post-war booming metropolis of San Diego, which was almost never used in crime novels of the Forties and Fifties, a kind of forgotten little brother city to the mean streets of Los Angeles. Much of the action (particularly the deadly shootings) takes place in Joyland, an amusement park and carnival midway located in the center of downtown San Diego where the Sheriff’s headquarters are now. It was popular with sailors and their girls, which is what San Diego was known for at the time. It is still a city built around a major naval harbor.
Thursday had received a call from a mysterious stranger asking for a meeting at the Loop-o-plane at a certain time. Figuring that the call had been a gag, Thursday boards the ride and, as he is somewhere hundreds of feet up, shots ring out and a young Chinese teenager (Dave Lee) is shot at the midway, a teenager whose wallet carried a clipping of a news article about Thursday’s exploits six months earlier in that notorious shooting. The only witness to the shooting reports that the possible shooter had his head all wrapped up with white cloth like bandages. The antagonism between Thursday and Merle begins with the notorious article she wrote about him and her greeting to him as, “Hello killer.”
Lee’s family engages Thursday to clear their son’s good name, knowing he had previously been involved with a gambling house. Whether he wants to be or not, Thursday is now involved and his investigation leads him to a mysterious Leon Jagger and the Tarrants who run a series of gambling dens across San Diego being reinforced with Los Angeles muscle. Larson Tarrant and his wife Ulaine are the king and queen of the empire. Larson gardens anonymously. Ulaine takes callers in her fluffy bedroom wearing “fluffy negligee binding her fat body. She was middle-aged and flabby, with recently hennaed hair Skin hung pendulously behind her elbows and powder caked in the wrinkles of her neck.” Never let it be said that Wade Miller’s stories are only populated by the beautiful people.
One item of interest to readers of this series is how tight Merle’s involvement was with the Tarrants and how much she accepted in the form of a Buick convertible and a fancy apartment not to report on the goings-on with the Tarrants. In the world of Max Thursday, it seems that other than Clapper, no one is wholly blameless and innocent.
And that is in keeping with the theme of this novel which is that the characters are not supermen, but ordinary, fallible people. Thursday takes Merle to task for painting his previous exploits as a glamorous cloak-and-dagger affair. He tells her he should never have been painted as a ruthless superman. He says he has never been more than a run-of-the-mill private cop and that, after the war, he came back to his wife and kid “with bum nerves.” He got “worse instead of better” and ended up at a downtown flophouse without a wife or kid or job. When his son was kidnapped, he says he fumbled so badly that he killed three people. When asked if they deserved to die, he opines who am I to decide. He also says he does not trust himself to carry a gun anymore. He says he does not want to reach the point where he enjoys killing.
This is an interesting complexity that Miller gives to Thursday. He is a broken, battered man, first by the war, coming back with post-traumatic stress disorder though there was no name for it then. He is then spooked by how quickly he exploded into violence and what the consequences were. Thursday recognizes how corrupting power is and does not want to fall into that corruption. Thursday knows what a dangerous business he is engaged in and what the consequences are if he guesses wrong.
The Max Thursday we are introduced to in this novel is six feet tall with “a lean countenance that was all planes and tight-skinned angles with no gentle fat. The face was impassive and stern.” He had coarse black hair covered by a hat and “[t]he coat pockets of his brown tweed suit were baggy as if they carried his big fists much of the time.”
The setting, as with all the novels in the series is the post-war booming metropolis of San Diego, which was almost never used in crime novels of the Forties and Fifties, a kind of forgotten little brother city to the mean streets of Los Angeles. Much of the action (particularly the deadly shootings) takes place in Joyland, an amusement park and carnival midway located in the center of downtown San Diego where the Sheriff’s headquarters are now. It was popular with sailors and their girls, which is what San Diego was known for at the time. It is still a city built around a major naval harbor.
Thursday had received a call from a mysterious stranger asking for a meeting at the Loop-o-plane at a certain time. Figuring that the call had been a gag, Thursday boards the ride and, as he is somewhere hundreds of feet up, shots ring out and a young Chinese teenager (Dave Lee) is shot at the midway, a teenager whose wallet carried a clipping of a news article about Thursday’s exploits six months earlier in that notorious shooting. The only witness to the shooting reports that the possible shooter had his head all wrapped up with white cloth like bandages. The antagonism between Thursday and Merle begins with the notorious article she wrote about him and her greeting to him as, “Hello killer.”
Lee’s family engages Thursday to clear their son’s good name, knowing he had previously been involved with a gambling house. Whether he wants to be or not, Thursday is now involved and his investigation leads him to a mysterious Leon Jagger and the Tarrants who run a series of gambling dens across San Diego being reinforced with Los Angeles muscle. Larson Tarrant and his wife Ulaine are the king and queen of the empire. Larson gardens anonymously. Ulaine takes callers in her fluffy bedroom wearing “fluffy negligee binding her fat body. She was middle-aged and flabby, with recently hennaed hair Skin hung pendulously behind her elbows and powder caked in the wrinkles of her neck.” Never let it be said that Wade Miller’s stories are only populated by the beautiful people.
One item of interest to readers of this series is how tight Merle’s involvement was with the Tarrants and how much she accepted in the form of a Buick convertible and a fancy apartment not to report on the goings-on with the Tarrants. In the world of Max Thursday, it seems that other than Clapper, no one is wholly blameless and innocent.
And that is in keeping with the theme of this novel which is that the characters are not supermen, but ordinary, fallible people. Thursday takes Merle to task for painting his previous exploits as a glamorous cloak-and-dagger affair. He tells her he should never have been painted as a ruthless superman. He says he has never been more than a run-of-the-mill private cop and that, after the war, he came back to his wife and kid “with bum nerves.” He got “worse instead of better” and ended up at a downtown flophouse without a wife or kid or job. When his son was kidnapped, he says he fumbled so badly that he killed three people. When asked if they deserved to die, he opines who am I to decide. He also says he does not trust himself to carry a gun anymore. He says he does not want to reach the point where he enjoys killing.
This is an interesting complexity that Miller gives to Thursday. He is a broken, battered man, first by the war, coming back with post-traumatic stress disorder though there was no name for it then. He is then spooked by how quickly he exploded into violence and what the consequences were. Thursday recognizes how corrupting power is and does not want to fall into that corruption. Thursday knows what a dangerous business he is engaged in and what the consequences are if he guesses wrong.
February 26, 2020
I am fast becoming a fan of Wade Miller and his Max Thursday detective series. The characterization is realistic and the story is fast paced.
A young Chinese-American is gunned down in broad daylight just outside the Joy Land Amusement Park in San Diego. Max Thursday had received a phone call from the young man, David Lee, just that afternoon and was to meet him at the Ferris Wheel, and in fact was on the ride when he heard the gun shot and saw David laying in the street. From this beginning the story weaves a complicated web that involves illegal gambling dens. I recommend these novels as some of the best 1950's era private eye novels.
A young Chinese-American is gunned down in broad daylight just outside the Joy Land Amusement Park in San Diego. Max Thursday had received a phone call from the young man, David Lee, just that afternoon and was to meet him at the Ferris Wheel, and in fact was on the ride when he heard the gun shot and saw David laying in the street. From this beginning the story weaves a complicated web that involves illegal gambling dens. I recommend these novels as some of the best 1950's era private eye novels.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews