Barye Phillips art adorns the cover of Carter Brown’s The Bombshell, first published in 1957, with this Signet edition appearing in 1960. The book features his franchise police detective Al Wheeler, who’s assigned a murder case where there’s no body. He protests because it’s really a missing persons investigation, but his boss is convinced young Lily Teal’s corpse is somewhere to be found. Even so, a previous investigation came up empty and Wheeler is assigned the case with the expectation he won’t get anywhere. But failure is for lesser detectives. Our favorite exchange in this one:
Femme fatale: “Maybe it’s something to do with me being born in the South—a girl matures early in a hot climate.”
Al Wheeler: “And you’ve been carrying that climate around with you ever since.
We shared this cover as part of a collection several years ago, but hadn’t read the book. The scan above is from our own copy. This is the third Al Wheeler book in the long running series, but it already feels a bit perfunctory. The narrative doesn’t really take off until Wheeler is framed for attempted sexual assault. At that point, based on how far his still unknown enemies are willing to go, he realizes there’s more to the case than just a possible murder. Overall, not a bad outing, but nothing special. We have more Al Wheeler mysteries we acquired recently, so we’ll see how those go.
