HALO GOODBYE

Yeah, you're right, that was pretty evil of me. But I find that a swift kick in the nuts works better than plain old no.

In detective yarns the MacGuffin—the thing everyone is chasing—might be a suitcase of money, or diamonds, or bearer bonds, or a shipment of heroin. In John Evans’, aka Howard Browne’s, intriguingly titled Halo for Satan the thing being pursued is an ancient parchment allegedly written by Jesus Christ. Its discoverer wants to sell it to the Catholic church for $25 million (that would a third of a billion in today’s money), but disappears without a trace. A high ranking Chicago bishop hires private dick Paul Pine to find the missing man and document. Pretty soon others want the artifact too. One of them is a former top gangster who’s near death and believes he can make his way into the good graces of the church—and thus into heaven—by donating the parchment. That’s where the unusual title comes into play. A criminal Satan wants a halo.

Naturally, the question of authenticity is important to the story, but the central themes here are greed and ruthlessness. As Pine puts it: “You have to be a violent person to make money. I don’t necessarily mean the stab-and-shoot kind of violence. I mean the kind that will let you kick other people aside to get your hands dipped in gold.” Since the parchment is a classic MacGuffin, it doesn’t appear until the end—like the Maltese Falcon. Meanwhile betrayals abound, bodies accumulate, and Evans turns numerous hard-boiled phrases while leading readers to a bloody resolution. We found Halo for Satan reasonably fun, even though it would be pretty thin without its gimmick. It was originally published in 1948, with this Bantam edition coming in 1950. The cover art is uncredited.

Bantam Books, John Evans, Howard Browne, cover art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

April 30

1927—First Prints Are Left at Grauman's

Hollywood power couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who co-founded the movie studio United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, become the first celebrities to leave their impressions in concrete at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, located along the stretch where the historic Hollywood Walk of Fame would later be established.

April 29

1945—Hitler Marries Braun

During the last days of the Third Reich, as Russia’s Red Army closes in from the east, Adolf Hitler marries his long-time partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker during a brief civil ceremony witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. Both Hitler and Braun commit suicide the next day, and their corpses are burned in the Reich Chancellery garden.

April 29

1967—Ali Is Stripped of His Title

After refusing induction into the United States Army the day before due to religious reasons, Muhammad Ali is stripped of his heavyweight boxing title. He is found guilty of a felony in refusing to be drafted for service in Vietnam, but he does not serve prison time, and on June 28, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses his conviction. His stand against the war had made him a hated figure in mainstream America, but in the black community and the rest of the world he had become an icon.

April 28

1947—Heyerdahl Embarks on Kon-Tiki

Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and his five man crew set out from Peru on a giant balsa wood raft called the Kon-Tiki in order to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia. After a 101 day, 4,300 mile (8,000 km) journey, Kon-Tiki smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947, thus demonstrating that it is possible for a primitive craft to survive a Pacific crossing.

April 28

1989—Soviets Acknowledge Chernobyl Accident

After two days of rumors and denials the Soviet Union admits there was an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Reactor number four had suffered a meltdown, sending a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. Today the abandoned radioactive area surrounding Chernobyl is rife with local wildlife and has been converted into a wildlife sanctuary, one of the largest in Europe.

April 27

1945—Mussolini Is Arrested

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci, and fifteen supporters are arrested by Italian partisans in Dongo, Italy while attempting to escape the region in the wake of the collapse of Mussolini’s fascist government. The next day, Mussolini and his mistress are both executed, along with most of the members of their group. Their bodies are then trucked to Milan where they are hung upside down on meathooks from the roof of a gas station, then spat upon and stoned until they are unrecognizable.