Hillary Waugh wrote the procedural crime thriller Road Block in 1960. This Popular Library edition came in 1965 with great cover work by an unattributed artist, and a cool rear logo for the Crime Club collection. Doubleday & Company launched Crime Club in 1928 and it ran until 1991, at least part of the time in collaboration with Popular Library it seems, and more than 2,400 books ended up in the grouping. Along the way there were some spectacular covers, particularly during the ’60s, such as today’s. We’ll be seeing more from Crime Club in a bit.
In Road Block robbers steal the payroll of the Grafton Tool and Die Company in fictional Stockford, Connecticut, but the job doesn’t go perfectly, leading to the deaths of one robber and two security guards. Later the job’s inside man, also a security guard, is disposed of by the gang, leaving three men being hunted by police chief Fred Fellows (star of a series of novels). The search is centered around real Connecticut towns such as Danbury, Newtown, and Sandy Hook, the latter of which was the site of a 2012 shooting massacre of twenty children and six adults at an elementary school.
Waugh is a good writer and conceptualist. After a couple of chapters setting the scene his story flows frictionlessly from the robbery, to the police response, to a climax in which a femme fatale named Lela Trojan plays a pivotal role. We’ve read three Waughs now, and it seems safe to presume that anything he wrote will be good. Popular Library thought so too—the company offered a money back guarantee to anyone dissatisfied by the book. We doubt many readers took them up on the offer. Road Block is a necessary vintage crime novel.
