Above you see a cover for The Avenger, written by Matthew Blood and published in 1952. It’s a detective novel that reads like a parody. It was the first of two starring hard-boiled private dick Morgan Wayne, and it’s immediately clear why the character lasted only two outings. In many hard-boiled detective books the hero is unrealistically tough and the women unbelieveably pliant, but here that’s taken to a ridiculous extreme, only with poor writing that makes clear that this is not a parody, but a serious attempt at urban crime drama in the Spillane mold. At one point the anti-hero Wayne bites the head off a crook’s prized goldfish then shoots him. This is all in pursuit of the person who killed Wayne’s new secretary Lois, who he’d been looking forward to laying:
He concentrated fiercely on visualizing her as she must be waiting for him now. That was the only drawback to this affair. There hadn’t been enough build-up. Not enough expectation. Nothing at all of the slow and delicious burning that gradually takes complete possession of a man during the period of delightful dalliance that generally precedes the consummation of a civilized love affair.
So much wrong with that paragraph. Delightful dalliance that precedes consummation? But we’ll let it pass:
She must be waiting for him in her apartment now, damn it. Soaking up the warmth of a hot bath while she waited for him and anticipated his coming. He savagely cursed the circumstances that were keeping them apart, and unconsciously trod the accelerator closer and closer to the floor boards…
That’s pretty bad too. Anyway, Wayne arrives at Lois’s apartment to find her dead and mutilated, and along the road to solving the crime he’s pursued sexually by a sixteen-year-old, her mother, and various other cock-starved characters, before climbing the ladder to the person who ordered the murder and taking care of business. It’s all written in the same graceless fashion as the above examples. The amazing part is that Matthew Blood was a pseudonym for W. Ryerson Johnson and David Dresser. There’s no excuse for two brains producing a half-witted book. We do like the cover art, though, and no wonder—it’s Barye Phillips again.
