Ed LacyReseñas

A beautiful woman on the run meets a sailboat captain and they go through being chased for the secret she doesn't know she has.

How a white guy wrote this multi-dimensional FANTASTIC black character is so far beyond me that it blows my mind. And he wrote it in 1957. This book is shockingly good and deserved the Edgar Award that it won in 1958. Fantastic characters. Great plot. Fast paced. Simply one of the best of the genre I've read in a long, long time!

The Big Fix is a great little pulp crime thriller about a washed up “pug” – or boxer – whose stumbles into what appears to be a lucky break, spearheaded by a couple of con artists looking to make a literal killing on Irish Tommy Cork’s waning career (no spoilers here, this is all set up in chapter one). While watching a long con slowly unfold doesn’t make for a quick action novel, Lacy engages the reader from multiple character POVs, and weaves some backstories and subplots that are just as engaging, if not more so, than the main event. The human drama drives the novel far more than the insurance scam setup, and even readers not into boxing will find themselves waiting for that final bell!

What should Mickey Whalen do after he drops anchor on a desolate key off the Florida coast and meets Rose, a platinum –blonde bombshell, calmly sitting on a suitcase filled with money, and peeling off her stockings and a ritzy summer dress. She was a little too hardboiled for the coy routine and wants to know if he can make Cuba in his boat. Should he find her presence there all too disconcerting? Should he realize that a babe like this on the run from the law or the mob is going to tie him up in knots and screw up his life? Should he run for the hills cause this dame is plain crazy and she’s going to make him crazy as well? Or should he welcome her aboard and make a life with her for nine months on a tiny inlet on one of the Cayman Islands and accede to her wishes never to be brought into a city again, never to go anywhere she could be spotted? Should Mickey ever get comfortable or should he always be surprised to find her there when he returned? After all, “how many men come home to see a half-naked movie queen smiling at them from their bed?”

In “Blonde Bait,” Ed Lacy offers the reader a Caribbean adventure of boats and blondes and booze and of a man who can’t just lie back under the sun and wait for the money to run out, but has to poke around and get some answers. The first half of the book is a quiet, gentle sunset and flows at a relaxed pace, that is, until Mickey starts getting some answers to the questions that are bugging him about Rose, answers he may not have really wanted to get.

The second half of the book is a wild chase through the streets of New York and New Jersey with all kinds of post-WWII international intrigue thrown in. Lacy did a good job of keeping the solution to the mystery under wraps until the very end of the book. While not perfect, somehow the whole thing falls together and works well. An enjoyable thriller, not a detective story.

Ed Lacy (aka Leonard Zinberg) wrote 28 novels and was quite popular in the fifties, allegedly having sold over 28 million books. “Go For The Body” was first published in 1954 and was his eighth novel. It tells the story of an ex-GI, down-on-his-luck, returning to post-war Europe where Americans were no longer the heroes and the walls are plastered with graffiti telling Americans to go home. The story centers around boxing and graft and touches on race relations and mafia involvement. Ken, a former boxer, returns to Europe, he thinks to promote boxing matches, but he is being used and made a chump for other reasons.

Eventually, he hooks up with a former boxer who pretty much ended Ken’s fighting career and Ken spends time promoting his friend’s fights and hoping to get enough cash to eventually go home. There are flashbacks where Ken thinks of Gina, a young woman he met during the war in Italy when he fought with the partisans against the Nazis. There is also a romance that Ken has with a nutty woman, Marian, an American who is there as a fashion reporter.

Ken is a bit naïve at the beginning, getting taken for a fool by his mob friends and getting taken by street hustlers, leaving him without even enough cash to book a boat home. As the story goes on, Ken matures and comes to realize what is important to him. It is a compelling read, particularly the boxing sequences, and Lacy is known for his knowledge of the sport.

My primary criticism of the book, however, is that it feels as if it is meandering and it is not clear through most of the book what is at stake or how the disparate events in Ken’s life fit together. Although often lumped with 1950’s pulp detective novels, it is a bit different from that genre.

"The Woman Aroused" was Ed Lacy's first published novel. Many of his early novels revolved around post-World War II life, including soldiers returning from war, soldiers with loot pilfered from Europe, continental attitudes toward American GIs. This book is no exception and is firmly rooted in post WWII life. The title and the cover are lewd and lascivious. The story is a unique one, particularly for a first novel. It is not quite a crime novel.

George has a couple of hobbies, including ballroom dancing, playing the ponies, and an on-again, off-again relationship with his ex-wife Flo, who he had divorced six years earlier, but they still carried on and then broke up, over and over again. A friend, returning from the war in Europe, leaves $7,000 with George, obstensibly to hide it from his wife, Lee. The friend dies suddenly, falling off a ladder at home. George, who isn't necessarily a great guy, plots to keep the money since no one knows about it, but decides to visit Lee to see who she was and whether she had any inkling. If you stop to think about what George does in this book, you realize he is a heel, but Lacy's writing allows the reader to see the world through George's point-of-view and to think of him as not quite the heel that he is.

George, in his wildest dreams, couldn't have imagined Lee, a six-foot tall blonde Amazon sex machine, who drops her clothes at the drop of a hat and, pretty soon, George has his friend's money and his friend's widow and, while feeling slightly guilty, can't let go of anything. But, Lee is a most unusual person, though filled with sex appeal like a giant Wonder Woman type of creature, who lives in a filthy, roach-infested apartment, she is nothing like Lee could have imagined and she turns his life upside down in the strangest ways.

This is a unique story that is hard to categorize and hard to describe without giving it away. Lacy really took a chance with publishing this as his first novel. Don't read this with any pre-conceived notions about what it is about or how it will end.

In the late fifties and early sixties, there was nothing more romantic or exciting in fiction or the movies than the French Riviera. In this novel, Lacy takes us to a time when every single guy without much of a job or a family found himself in the Riviera, hustling this or running away from that. It is a time when every Teenage French girl wanted to be Brigit Bardot and they were all riding motor scooters and attracting long glances from these American expats on the run or hustling photographs or trying to sell their next script.

This is the story of four young American expats on the French beaches and their local flings and the trouble they find trying to scrape by and stay in this little slice of Paradise.

It is a fine read and does involve a bit of criminal mischief, but those looking for a hardboiled crime novel will probably be disappointed. It is more a glimpse of a time and a place and these expats and whether or not they are in the end all looking out for each other.

First published in 1958, Ed Lacy's "Shakedown for Murder" features an unlikely hero in the shape of Matt Lund. Matt isn't a handsome, charismatic twenty-something, but a grumpy man of 58 with a big nose.

Matt unintentionally gets involved with a murder case whilst off duty and on holiday. The book cover picture does not represent any scenes in the book and the cover text - "a chilling tale of 11 dead men and one hell of a live woman" - is misleading.

I can't say too much without giving the game away, but at no point did I find myself "chilled" and it's not a story where 11 people get bumped off one at a time.

I found most of the text to be family interaction, such as Matt going fishing with his grandson, or holding general conversation with his daughter-in-law. There are a lot of light-hearted moments and also some good humour throughout.

This was the hardest to obtain of the Edgar winners so far. The protagonist is a struggling African-American private eye whose girlfriend wants him to give up and get a job in the Post Office. He's almost ready to do that when he gets a job that lands him in big trouble. He must leave familiar New York City for a Jim Crow town in southern Ohio to solve the mystery and keep himself from being framed for the murder. Let's just say he learns a lot about himself and other things. It's well worth reading.

un Ed Lacy inquietante: mutilato eroe di guerra, editore di giornale antiguerra, coinvolto controvoglia in segreti militari. Conclusione un po' tirata via ma guerra fredda, rapporti tra razze, femminismo. Al solito, poco convenzionale.

Ed Lacy è sempre un po' diverso: questa volta il suo detective è nero e siamo negli anni 50: razzismo a livelli diversi tra NYCity e il Kentucky.

Engrossing noir about a part time auto mechanic who does private detective work being drawn by his police detective brother-in-law into the mystery of a double murder rather than his usual skip tracing jobs. Lacy weaves the story of the investigation together with chapters about the villains, who started out by making extra money illegally while in the Army in WW II Europe. It is almost as if there are two books here, the parts are so different. It also kills the suspense--who done it becomes why done it becomes how will they catch them? Still, the book succeeds because of its characters: the widowed mechanic/detective and his loving relationship with his six year old daughter; the blind wrestler; the beautiful young wife of the murdered cop; a prostitute and her pimp; the police detective in charge of the case. Lacy brings all of these characters and their environment to life so well that they just about jump off the page. You care about what happens because of how it affects the characters, and when the book is over you feel you are leaving behind a bunch of pretty good acquaintances. As far as I can tell from a quick search through his other books on my Kindle, Lacy never wrote another book featuring Barney, his mechanic/detective. That is a real shame.½

Brutal, effective story by a talented writer.½