The Never-Was Girl by Carter Brown

Self-styled 'troubleshooter for the stars', Rick Holman, takes on one of his toughest cases - a Hollywood murderama with a plot that calls for sinister characters, serious blackmail, sizzling seduction...and a body written right out of the script...the never-was girl.

English actor Robert Giles hires Holman to discover what happened the night of the party - when he awoke to find a tawny-blonde dead on the floor. Already drunk at one a.m., he went wild when buxom Dixie came in and performed a naked pagan love dance, vibrating like a set of bongo drums. Stealing her away to a nearby beach house, he blacked out and awoke to find her spent in a pool of blood. Everyone at the party claims there never was a Dixie - Giles just passed out, and they drove him home. Was it delirium, or is everyone is lying?

Holman tracks down Virginia Strong, a part-time actress and full-time prostitute 'employed' by film producer Marty Jennings, who owns the beach house. Bruce Milford is the clever agent who arranged for Giles to star in Jenning's next million-dollar spectacle. Artisocratic girlfriend Edwina is used to his drunken delusions and chastises him with a caustic tongue. Then there is Nick Fessler, an underworld creep with a finger in everyone's dirty business, who brought his girlfriend Betty Wong (described as a Chinese enigma and usually wearing a black cheongsam). When Holman tracks down the beach house and is whacked out cold, it's Betty who awakens him, beside a ticking time bomb before the whole place explodes. If it is a conspiracy of friends, to what end? And if Dixie was not a fantasy, alive or dead, where is she now?

This is a hard boiled thriller, where the men growl their dialogue through gritted teeth, and the women are 'honey' or 'doll', offering their naked bodies at the drop of a negligee. Rick is an established Hollywood private eye (this is number 7 in the series) and Brown fills this standard plot without laying it on too thick. By the time Rick gathers the characters together, it still remained anyone's murder. This is not too deep, but you came for the ambiance, and it's consistantly entertaining if you like your motives cold as a virgin's tomb.

Bestselling pulp fiction writer Carter Brown (a pseudonym of Alan Geoffrey Yates) wrote 34 Rick Holman mysteries, and over 300 'Carter Brown' novels between 1954 and 1984.

1964 / Paperback / 126 pages