But this is Lois, not Kathy, and he throws Lois out of the apartment. Thinking he left the stereo on, he opens the door and sees that she was very blonde and very beautiful and that her clothes were all in a heap on the floor. Harper comes home and hears jazz music playing in his apartment. He still carries a torch for her and it is all he can think about. Harper had fallen into temptation with another woman and Kathy couldn't stand it. But, as the story opens, they had a falling out and were separated. He got her back on her feet, away from the life, away from the dope. He wanted to drive the highways with her with his arm around her. She was one in a million to him from the minute she walked into the hotel suite. At the time, Kathy was a call girl and a junkie, but he had never met anyone like her. Nevertheless, Harper was the man who Lois still had a torch for. The back story is that Harper had once had a relationship with Lois, but Lois moved on to her now-husband, who not being a jazz musician, had money and a future. As Craig explains in the opening line to the book, "It was bad and he knew it was going to get a lot worse before it got better." If that doesn't give you the flavor of the book, then who knows what will. The reader knows that it is nighttime in the city and that blondes in tight dresses are dancing to the jazz beat.īut it is a pulp novel and it is about murder and about being framed. There is a driving jazz beat in the background of every page. The undercurrent of this novel is the world of the jazz clubs, the world of call girls in Washington, D.C., and the world of temptation that assaults Harper.
Harper has women chasing him left and right and had himself fallen into the temptation of dope. Those clubs were where the action was, where the women were, and were the dope was. Nowadays, jazz musicians don't sound very scandalous, but in the fifties before rock'n roll really took off, jazz was very scandalous. Rather, Craig's protagonist is Steve Harper, a jazz musician who works the various jazz clubs scattered around the Washington D.C.
It is a plot line that has been used in countless fifties- era pulp novels, but it is a plot that stands up well to the test of time and Craig has a different take on it than most writers of the era did.Ĭraig's hero in this book is not a detective or insurance agent. This book follows a basic hardboiled pulp-era plot of a man and a woman framed for a murder that they didn't commit and racing against time to figure out who really committed the murder before the police and the bad guys catch up with them.
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