Dave’s Reviews > Hero's Lust / The Man I Killed / House of Evil > Status Update

Shel Walker is not a well known name today and his tough guy novel had that Hardboiled atmosphere typical of tales of towns controlled by mobsters where everyone seemed to be on the take. It was a dirty, filthy town but for some unknown reason it was pulling Lew Ross back to the scene of his crime where he left a man dead in the dirt following a bar fight, fleeing the town.

Kermit Jaedeker’s Hero’s Lust is a 1953 paperback original from Lions Books, one of the more well known paperback original publishers, best known perhaps for its Jim Thompson novels. Hero’s Lust is a tale of big city corruption set in a fictional city, Crescent City, seen from the eyes of a news reporter Red Norton who earns more from graft than by reporting and is the corrupt Mayor’s cheerleader.