What is a “hilarious all-action thriller” like? That’s the question that went through our minds when we impulsively ordered Richard Powell’s 1946 novel All Over but the Shooting, though we were also drawn by the cover. The book was originally published by Popular Library, but the striking version you see above with art that’s unfortunately uncredited came from the British imprint Hodder & Stoughton in 1952.
Powell weaves a tale set in 1942 about Richard Blake and his danger-magnet wife Arabella—Arab for short—who believes she’s stumbled across a spy plot centered around a Washington, D.C. women’s boarding house. Determined to delve for answers—and to her husband’s chagrin—she pretends to be a single woman, takes a room, and starts poking around. Her suspicions are of course correct. The place is a den of Nazis.
Powell thinks outside the box about every aspect of his story: how the conspiracy is uncovered, how the investigation proceeds, what clues are found, and what leaps of intuition keep the intrepid Arabella moving toward a solution. But the entire story is preposterous. Example: when Arab seems likely to be connected to a raincoat she lost while fleeing for her life, her hubby manages to sneak into the room where it’s being kept—while its occupant is just upstairs—and have it altered in five minutes by a conveniently situated maid. That way the coat won’t fit Arab when the villain tries to say it’s hers.
That and about two dozen other moments are silly. Powell achieved, we think, exactly what he set out to do as an author, but we didn’t find the book to be exactly scintillating. It was no Thin Man, for example, Dashiell Hammett’s smashingly successful amalgam of humor and danger. But in the same way Arab erodes her husband’s disbelief and finally gets him to buy into her wacky ideas, she wore us down too. She’s a fun character, and makes the book worth a read. We won’t seek out Powell again, but one spin around wartime D.C.? Sure, okay.
