Louis Trimble (1917–1988)

Louis Trimble wrote crime fiction, westerns, and other novels. Surfside Caper is a terrific little pulp novel that is charged with action right from the start. Murder, car races, intrigue, sexy widows, big time hustlers, small town cops, ex-lovers, drunks, frame-ups, traveling corpses, blackmail, and some kinkiness round it out.

You wouldn't think much of it if you were told it was about a hotel investigator and a battle over the ownership of a cliffside resort hotel. But that's where Trimble's magic comes in. He takes a rather mundane situation and fills it with so much intrigue and action that it really becomes a great pulp read.
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Trimble begins this story with a reporter, Tom Hallam, on the loose after two years in a sanitarium, off to take a job with a small town newspaper. The story then gets far more complicated from there with a rude chauffeur, a headstrong hitchhiker who seems to know Hallam's business, a one-legged hotel caretaker, and an all but deserted and haunted town.

But that's only the beginning with the plot thickening as a woman shows up claiming to be Tom Hallam's wife with a marriage certificate and everything, Hallam falls for another woman, and a headless corpse is traipsed all over the county. It is a rather odd and fantastic tale that at times feels dreamlike or as if the narrator hasn't quite got all his marbles.

The haunted town in the country and all the mysterious characters turning up are puzzling and lends a rather bizarre touch to this pulp mystery. In the end, I found the plotting to be hopelessness complex and like running through an endless maze. Not Trimble's best work, but still interesting at points.… (más)