 "Lament
For Julie"
by Robert Colby
Monarch Books, 1961
The back cover reads:
"Playing With Dynamite
Tormented by a satin-skinned package of dynamite
who offered him ecstasy unfettered by convention...Bedeviled by another
woman who wanted a master...Given 12 hours to get out of town--And then
framed for murder...
This was the grim situation faced by Todd Corwin
shortly after he came to Longport seeking Julie Steadman's killer.
If he cleared out of
town he was sure of safety. If he stayed, nothing was certain except more
trouble with the police and a deepening involvement with the Vollmer clan--
Austin, who owns everything in town including
the cops...Joy, Austin's wife, who took men where she found them...and
Gail, the step-daughter, who would risk anything to take Todd away from
Joy."
The back cover pretty
much tell it all. This is your classic hard-boiled murder/mystery when
the hero comes to town to avenge the death of his old navy pal and the
pal's wife (who our hero had been secretly in love with), but finding their
killers is no easy matter since the man who owns the town is somehow involved.
This is the type of story where all the men are either with or against
our hero and all the women can keep their hands off him. This story lives
up to the hard-boiled code where it's one man, living within his own code
of right and wrong, is at war against a corrupt world. There are villains,
allies, femme fatales, and the usual cast of characters, but where this
book betrays its hardboild-ness is in its happy ending--which in the world
of noir is the most egregious of all sins.
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