What Price Murder

by Cleve F. Adams

"'If you're lying I'll be back,' - suddenly she was all tiger, ready to claw him - and this time with a gun."

191 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1942

About the author

The missing link between Dashiell Hammett and James Ellroy, Cleve F. Adams wrote rambunctious, violent, corrosively cynical private eye fiction from the mid-1930s until his untimely death from pneumonia in 1949 at the age of 54. He also wrote as Franklin Charles and John Spain.

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen McCloud of West Coast Indemnity is hot on a quarter million dollar diamond heist and out to recover the stolen ice. McCloud is, of course, another version of Adams’ favorite insurance detective, Rex McBride, just working for another Los Angeles insurance agency and not besotted with Kay Ford. Instead, he’d stuck on attorney Sheila Mayo, despite her still being married to a no-good husband. While McBride often went out of town to tangle with local law enforcement, McCloud never leaves LA proper and keeps circling around to a few blocks in downtown’s financial district.

This standalone hardboiled thriller is chock full of action from cover to cover with McCloud getting beaten out of payoff money more than once, showing up unfortunately at murder scenes more than once with a gun in his hand just as the police roll up, and getting caught with one woman or another. Adams offers up so much gun-toting violence in this one you might swear that Spillane wrote it.

The resolution of the theft of the diamonds sort of takes a backseat at timed to all the other murders, kidnappings, and robberies, but nevertheless it remains at the heart of everything. Pretty much everyone in the novel (other than our hero McCloud) is a crooked backstabbing varmint running some kind of badger game, but it’s going to take a whole lot of blood and sweat till McCloud finally sorts it all out.