The last Milton K. Ozaki book we read left us cold, but because 1952’s Deadly Pick-Up has beautiful cover art we decided to give it a shot. Graphic Books during the early 1950s routinely had brilliant covers. About a paragraph into reading this we realized it was the same Ozaki as before, but we forged ahead into the tale of a man wrongfully suspected of a woman’s strangulation, who must solve the crime before he’s snared by the cops. The dead woman’s sister, a private detective, helps him out, and they discover the reason for the killing was $60,000 in counterfeit bills, which turn out not to be fake after all.
In terms of specific problems with the book, we’ll highlight a couple. First, the sister detective is immediately pushed by Ozaki into a background role, protected and sidelined by the main character. We’d be okay with it if the hero were a qualified tough guy. But he’s a damned insurance salesman. It seems as if Ozaki was imaginative enough to create a female detective, but not imaginative enough to conceive of her refusing to let some rando tell her how to do her job. In an era where other writers had already created tough and competent women detectives it was simply a whiff. A second issue, more serious in our view, is the tortured similes Ozaki uses. Some choice examples:
With his bat in hand he hurdled the bar as gracefully as a ballet dancer sailing over a papier mâché bush.
He kept watching me as though my nose were an independent organism likely to do tricks.
Thinking was like trying to bounce a rubber ball in a puddle of wet, sticky mud.
Crime writing and hard boiled similes go hand-in-hand, but you have to do better than that. Ozaki does manage to create a few unusual moments, including steering the investigation into a gay bar—where the hero is physically attacked twenty-against-one when he’s assumed to be a morals spy. The gay characters in the book do not—obviously—fare well descriptively. That’s never fun to read, but it’s what you have to expect considering the time period. Ozaki would not have earned our future trust regardless. He just doesn’t write well. But we’re glad to have the book because the cover—uncredited, sadly—is aces.
