James McKimmey's The Perfect Victim and Cornered! by Bill Crider

Once upon a time in America, even in small Texas towns like the one I grew up in, you could go to the corner drugstore and find a spinning wire rack that held paperback books that sold for a quarter. That’s right, a mere twenty-five cents, one-fourth of a dollar.

And what did you get for your quarter? Well, if you were lucky, the drugstore rack was stocked with, among other things, Gold Medal Books and Dell First Editions. The novels these lines published weren’t long. In fact, the books are sometimes nearly as thin as the quarter you paid for them, generally around 144-160 pages, but they were always worth the money. Sometimes the covers alone were worth the money. Gold Medal Originals were the top of the line, but the Dell First Editions weren’t far behind. The Dell books featured some of the same authors as Gold Medal (Charles Williams, John D. MacDonald) and others, like James McKimmey, whose work was always satisfying and entertaining. McKimmey, like a lot of the paperback writers of those days, could tell a tight, exciting, well-plotted story with characters you cared about and do it in a hundred and sixty pages.

A case in point is The Perfect Victim (Dell 1958), in which McKimmey demonstrates his ability to handle a large cast of characters while moving the story right along. The novel is set in a small Midwestern town that traveling salesman Al Jackson things is likely to be "about as lively as a Baptist church on a Monday morning." What Al doesn’t know, of course, is that the town is going to be really jumping before long, and Al’s going to wind up accused of the murder of Grace Amons, a popular waitress in a local café. It’s not giving away any secrets to say that Al’s not guilty. This book isn’t a whodunit, as the reader knows the killer’s identity. The question is one of whether the killer will get away with what he’s done. And for a good while, it looks as if he will.

The villain of the piece is Buggie Alstair, who’s visiting Willow Creek with his friend Roger Cook. Roger, who’s just finished his freshman year, and he’s impressed with the fact that Buggie, a BMOC (he even has a convertible), has condescended to spend some time with him. Buggie at first seems a bit like Eddie Haskell of Leave It To Beaver fame, but it turns out that he’s much more dangerous. In fact, he’s, well, buggie. Grace has her own plans for Roger, but things go wrong, and she winds up dead, the perfect victim. The town goes a little crazy for a while. Human decency wins out, but not before McKimmey has shaken up and changed a big percentage of the population. There aren’t any heroes in this book, just a group of people like the ones you know or the ones you grew up with. Most of them are trying to do the right thing, but not all of them. Some of them get what’s coming to them, and some of them don’t. Just like real life. And if everything’s tied up neatly in the end, that doesn’t mean that all the characters are going to live happily ever after, especially Roger, who at least manages to grow up a little even as he’s being led away to a jail cell.

Another little gem by McKimmey is Cornered! (Dell 1960). There’s a terrific opening scene set in a service station (this was back in the days when the word "service" actually applied). It’s both darkly comic and suspenseful, and it ends with a big bang. The setting is another small, close-knit community, Arrow Junction, and the bang referred to in the previous sentence is caused by two hired killers who’ve come there to put the quietus on Ann Burley, a potential witness against their boss. The story is complicated by a snowstorm and by people like Bob Saywell, a local bigshot who’s figured out who Ann Burley is and thinks he might be able to use the information to his sexual advantage; Ann’s husband, Ted, who’s not worthy of her; Hugh Stewart, who’s in love with her; and various other townspeople and visitors who are eventually held hostage by the hit men in a small restaurant owned by Saywell. McKimmey manipulates the plot and orchestrates the cast (which also includes the local law) with a sure hand. As in The Perfect Victim, the story is moved right along by McKimmey’s economical prose. There are any number of small surprises and pay-offs along the way as we discover which characters are going to act in the ways we expect and which are not.

In both novels, McKimmey’s interest is as much in character as in action. It’s not that there’s a shortage of the latter; it’s just that the interplay of the characters is what raises the books above the ordinary and makes them engrossing reading even today. Books that were supposedly disposable entertainment, to be bought for a quarter and then tossed away, have proved to be a better value than anyone at the time of their original sale ever imagined.

Copyright© 1971 Bill Crider

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Read an extract from The Perfect Victim

Read an extract from Cornered!

BILL CRIDER lives in Alvin, Texas.  He won the Anthony award for his first mystery novel, Too Late To Die, featuring Sheriff Dan Rhodes.  The most recent book in that series is A Romantic Way to Die.  Crider and his wife, Judy, won the Anthony for "best short story" in 2002 for Chocolate Moose, a Dan Rhodes story.  Crider also writes several other series, one about Truman Smith, a private eye who lives in Galveston, another about a university English teacher named Carl Burns, and one about Sally Good, a community college teacher.  The first Truman Smith book, Dead on the Island, was nominated for a Shamus award. Stand-alone novels include The Texas Capitol Murders, and Blood Marks.  Crider has also written four children's books, the most recent of which are Mike Gonzo and the Sewer Monster, Mike Gonzo and the Almost Invisible Man, and Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror, the last of which won the Golden Duck Award for best juvenile science fiction novel of 1998.
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