The sizzling brunette collected shrunken head, but she offered Al Wheeler five thousand dollars to bring her the live heart of her ex-husband.
The torrid redhead collected men and offered Al Wheeler her pretty self.
The girls were twin sisters. Each, in her own seductive way, was trying to take the tenacious cop's mind off their matched set of corpses. Bu Al wasn't buying their brand of pleasure. Not while he still suspected that their trademark was . . . murder.
Carter Brown was the pseudonym of Alan Geoffrey Yates (1923-1985), who was born in London and educated in Essex.
He married Denise Mackellar and worked as a sound engineer for Gaumont-British films before moving to Australia and taking up work in public relations.
In 1953 he became a full-time writer and produced nearly 200 novels between then and his retirement in 1981.
He also wrote as Tex Conrad and Caroline Farr.
His series heroes were Larry Baker, Danny Boyd, Paul Donavan, Rick Holman, Andy Kane, Randy Roberts, Mavis Siedlitz and Al Wheeler.
“The Passionate” has some odd black comedy moments such as the opening when Lieutenant Al Wheeler goes to the morgue at midnight to investigate a missing corpse. Mortician Charlie Katz is really upset because he has a responsibility even if Wheeler does not appreciate it and found one of the stiffs, a dame, blonde and she was some looker, gone.
But, the plot thickens, as they say, when Wheeler picks up the morgue phone and hears a male voice telling Wheeler that he knows where the missing corpse could be found – at television studio KVNW. At the studio, Wheeler finds that they are about to run a horror movie, the Stepchild of Frankenstein. And the assistant host of the late night horror show is none other than Penelope Calthorpe, one of the Calthorpe sisters, famous for their street theater. There is a coffin in the studio and Wheeler is assured that it is just a prop. Famous last words. The coffin is not empty, though, and its occupant is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Meanwhile, an employee found the missing blonde in the prop room. “It looked like Charlie Katz wasn’t going to be lonely any more.” Wheeler receives a second anonymous call, identifying the corpse in the coffin as Howard Davis, a pro tennis player who happens to be Penelope’s ex-husband. Wheeler soon finds that, between the Calthorpe sisters, Penelope and Prudence, their ex-husbands, and their ex-husband’s ex-wives, there were plenty of suspects and plenty of animosity.
Detective Al Wheeler encounters hot and horney twins, a dead body in a horror TV show host’s coffin, and some brutes to get beat up by. Carter Brown novels can always be counted on for plenty of wisecracks and silly sexist humor. Admittedly his plots can sometimes fall flat - the guy wrote one novel per month. Fortunately here we have a cracking good plot, a whodunit that had me as puzzled as Wheeler as the suspects and red herrings pile up. Top notch Cater Brown for sure and good one to introduce readers confused about the hundreds of CB novels of various quality. This was recently republished by Stark House Press with a couple of other titles at http://starkhousepress.com/brown.php