Collar for the Killer - Herbert Brean ****

This was one of those books where I saw the cover and thought it looked interesting, put it in my bookshelf, forgot about it for a couple of years, picked it up and wished I had read it earlier. The author wasn’t someone I had ever heard of, and trying to buy any of the eight novels he wrote is a fairly difficult task, it just seems I was lucky to come across this in a second hand book store. Published in 1956 (under the name ‘A Matter of Fact’ in the US) it was written when the world was still enjoying the Noir type thriller so brilliantly made popular by James M Cain, so it is no surprise that Brean has followed in the same footsteps. Collar for a killer may not be as sparse in its language or as hard boiled but you can definitely see where the author’s inspiration lay.

The plot is fairly straight forward; Jablonski is nearing retirement and with a fairly undistinguished career is placed with a rooky partner called Ryan when a murder is committed on their patch. Sighting a well-known petty criminal called Derby in the area they both come to the conclusion that he is responsible and put a plan in place to nab him. The arrest is made and both officers receive great acclaim in both the force and the press, but then something happens that makes the rooky question both the morality of their actions and the guilt of the prisoner, so he decides to investigate further under his own steam. Jablonski has other plans and is happy for Derby to face the chair regardless and wants to retire on a high and is furious at having a seemingly resolved case looked into again. This is made this more than apparent to Ryan and he continually trys to undermine him with his replies becoming more and more threatening. Will Ryan risk his career before it has even barely began? Will he risk tarnishing his partner’s lengthy service? And even more importantly, will he allow a man that may be innocent get fried in the chair?

This book really has it all, gritty action scenes, beautiful women and a fairly intricate plot. Brean really creates the atmosphere of the time and you can imagine yourself sat in those smoky bars amongst the night time drinkers in the city’s murky underbelly. The plot moves quickly enough, but not so quickly that you glance over the clues Brean scatters throughout the novel, although more than once I thought I had the ending sown up only to find how wrong I was.

I will definitely be looking out for his other novels, and surprisingly he also wrote a few self-help books on quitting drinking and smoking, but they do seem to be a scarcity these days. Hopefully someday a publisher will reissue his entire catalogue because they really do deserve to be read again with a new audience. ( )