The Sunburned Corpse

by Adam Knight

"Steve Conacher, hard-fisted private eye, tangles with . . . tricky characters in the tropical lushness of Puerto Rico, when an assignment to find a missing heiress turns into a hunt for a killer." Signet Book #1103.

144 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published March 1, 1954

About the author

Before I got into anything else in my rather hectic life, I knew I was a writer. From a young age trying to write stories about Star Wars, expanding on comic book theories - basically creating "FanFics" before there ever was such a term, I knew that writing was my true passion in life.

Now that I am adult (shudder) and have fallen off the written path a touch, I find myself with a new hope, a new vigor.

But more on that later.

Check out the links provided. I am excited about writing again and making a real go of this. So many stories in my head.

I hope you love them as much as I do.

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lawrence Lariar is best known as a cartoonist, but he also wrote numerous mystery stories, including his Steve Conacher private eye mystery series, which were originally published by Signet in the 1950’s, but have now been republished and are available through Mysterious Press. “The Sunburned Corpse” is the fourth book out of eight in the series which consists of (1) “Stone Cold Blonde” (1952), (2) “Murder for Madame” (1951), (3) “Knife at my Back” (1952), (4) “The Sunburned Corpse” (1954), (5) “Kiss and Kill” (1954), (6) “I’ll Kill You Next” (1954), (7) “Girl Running” (1956), and (8)”Triple Slay” (1959). The books in this series were originally published under the psuedonym Adam Knight.

Other crime fiction novels by Lariar include the two-book Johnny Amsterdam series (“Naked and Alone” (1953) and “I Like it Cool” (1960)), the four-book Homer Bull and Hank MacAndrews series (“Death Paints a Picture” (1943), “He Died Laughing” (1943), “Man With the Lumpy Nose” (1944), and “The Girl With Frightened Eyes” (`1945). Standalone crime fiction includes “You Can’t Catch Me” (1952), “The Day I Died” (1952), “Bed and Bored” (1945), “The Crops in the Cabana” (1959), “Friday for Death” (1950), “Kill Box” (1946) (also published as “Run For Your Life” under the name Michael Stark), “Win, Place, and Die!” (1953), “Miami Murder-go-round” (1952) (as by Marston la France), “Death is Confidential” (1959), “Lady Chatterly’s Daughter” (1960), and “Sugar Shannon” (1960).

All of the action in “The Sunburned Corpse” takes place either on the cruise ship SS Rico or in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Conacher has been asked by a client to find his missing daughter, Nancy, who went to Puerto Rico and never returned. Conacher is by trade a New York private eye, mainly skip tracing deadbeats and phonies. “I was called in on all sorts of stuff,” he explains, “but in every job, it was the broas who loused me up.”

As luck would have it, the one clue Conacher has is that Nancy’s gal pal, Jane Yorke, is taking the cruise to San Juan. Conacher is told she has a reputation as a nympo and a pushover and, as the story opens, he is in the dining room of the ship, making his moves with his hand inching its way from her knees up her thighs. He tells us: “She had the manner of a dignified whore when she looked at a man. She did flips with her eyes, warming him up by just a long straight glance, aided and abetted by the quick smile that spelled everything and maybe nothing to the marauding male.” Jane Yorke “was something out of a book of sin, an impossible piece.” He had neen “warned that Jane was a psycho. A sexual siren, a round-heel, a nympho.”

It should be a simple matter to seduce Jane Yorke and pry from her Nancy’s whereabouts Conacher figures. Nevertheless, it gets complicated quickly with Ira Garel being a the bar, one of the upper echelon gang bosses. Jane confides in Conacher that she had been in touch with Nancy for the year she had been missing and that she had left town with Rafael Miquello, not another artist, but a louse who was “the beginning and the end of the story.” But before she can reveal more, things happen. And they happen to Jane as quickly as all that and it was too late for Jane because someone had throttled her. “Her hair framed the horror in her eyes, the wild look of wide-open madness.”

Your first thought as a reader when Conacher is knocked out is that he will be blamed for Jane’s death, particularly when found with her corpse after seen seducing her all evening. But Lariar takes a different tact here and has her corpse vanish (perhaps overboard) and no one official willing to believe that she was murdered rather than having thrown herself overboard in despair. The only one onboard willing to take the death seriously is Garel the mobster who is willing to pay Conacher a tidy sum to ferret out the murderer.

Once in San Juan, Conacher now has two missions, finding one woman and finding the murderer of the other and he is thinking that there may be some conflict between the two goals. He has little to go on but to follow some of the other passengers from the cruise like Nina Dunn and hope something connects. Eventually, of course, all the clues come together and he puts together what is going on.

Lariar offers up a smoothly written and absorbing mystery tale set in the Caribbean.

[Me · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, it felt odd to read from the printing of the book, dated in 1952. I was afraid to bend the pages a bit.

Second, the old gumshoe language. Loved it.

Third, the plot. There was a plot. Right? I mean, besides reading how our plucky private dick followed people around, ogled chests struggling to release themselves from bodices, and him getting clonked on the head.

Still, a fun read.