FFB Review: THE WENCH IS WICKED (1955) by Carter Brown Reviewed by Barry Ergang

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THE WENCH IS WICKED (1955) by Carter Brown

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Detective Lieutenant Al Wheeler has a date with a blonde singer named Goldie as soon as he’s finished his shift—which will end ten minutes after the call he receives from motorcycle patrolman Macey. Macey has discovered a body in a long-unused gravel pit a mile past the Eldorado Roadhouse, a body entertaining three fatal bullet holes. When Captain Parker insists that Wheeler investigate, he reluctantly does so and learns from a corpse’s billfold that the victim is one Robert Heinman from New York.

(Before we go further, this is definitively not a police procedural. Wheeler and crew could pollute a crime scene faster than a factory stack.)

The billfold also contains an inscribed photograph of alluring movie star Deidre Damour. It happens that a western starring Ms. Damour is being filmed in the area. When he digs further, Wheeler learns that Heinman wrote an exposé in the publication Dynamite that did little to endear many to him in Hollywood, including a number of the personalities in the local film unit.

There is something questionable about Macey’s report concerning his discovery of the body that Wheeler wants to follow up on. Doing so takes him back to the gravel pit where Macey is shot and killed, and the murderer takes off with Wheeler’s prowl car. The result is a meeting with his unhappy captain, the police commissioner, and a politically ambitious district attorney—a meeting that results in Wheeler’s suspension. This, of course, doesn’t deter him from investigating, and his probe entangles him with the Hollywood crowd and several local personalities. It also nearly costs him his life in the obligatory sock finish.

Readers familiar with the work of Carter Brown (real name Alan G. Yates) know that he was a one-man fiction factory, grinding out hundreds of short, very fast reads. The Wench is Wicked is the first in the Al Wheeler series. I’ve read only one other, The Lady is Transparent, quite a number of years ago. I’ve read titles in a few of his other series, my favorites being those starring the ditsy Mavis Seidlitz. (If I had kept all of the various Carter Brown novels my father bought and read, most of which I didn’t, I’d conceivably own a minor fortune in collectibles.)

Barring a major disruption of the space-time continuum, it is extremely unlikely that Brown will be remembered as a top-shelf literary master of crime fiction a la Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald or Jim Thompson, but he qualifies as a decent entertainer. Having said so, however, I must add with greater specificity that The Wench is Wicked struck me as middling—and that’s being generous. Its characters are not well-defined and, in most cases, are stereotypes. Wheeler—via his creator—tries much too hard to be funny and, for me at least, doesn’t succeed. Brown’s prose is relatively pedestrian, although he sometimes tries to be clever and winds up with unintentionally fatuous moments—e.g., “Goldie was there, all right. She was sitting facing the bar, her chin propped up on her elbows” is worthy of mention in Bill Pronzini’s wonderful Gun in Cheek or Son of Gun in Cheek.  

I read this title, the first, in the electronic version of Stark House’s collection of the first three Al Wheeler mysteries: The Wench is Wicked, Blonde Verdict, and Delilah Was Deadly.

© 2018 Barry Ergang

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s mystery novelette, The Play of Light and Shadow, is available at Amazon and Smashwords, along with some of his other work.