Jim Bennett

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Created by Robert Martin 
Pseudonyms include Lee Roberts
(1908-1976)

Cleveland, Ohio’s own JIM BENNETT was a rarity in detective fiction in the fifties — a happily-married man. Thomas Dewey, Bart Spicer and James M. Fox are about the only other writers of this period that seemed to stray from the whole lone wolf/P.I. thing. The long-suffering Sandy Hollis served as his secretary and girlfriend through most of the series; with their constant struggle to pick an actual wedding date stretching through most of the series. She was routinely described as long-legged, with a “generous mouth” and a few freckles on her short nose.

Bennett, meanwhile, was, to borrow a phrase, everything the respectable private detective should be. He was a company man, the head of the New York-based Cleveland branch of the American-International, Inc., and far more domesticated than most of his contemporaries, at ease in his own skin, and partial to poker, hunting, trout fishing, hunting and dry martinis. He was kind and empathetic, a genuine nice guy, somewhat akin to William Campbell Gault‘s Brock Callahan. But, like Brock, he was no cream puff — there were definitely lines he would not cross. Colour him medium-boiled.

A law school dropout, he first appeared in a string of novelettes in the pulps in the forties, most notably Dime Detective, and many of the those were later cannibalized, expanded, revised, and seamlessly sewn together as novels in the fifties and sixties, starting with Dark Dream in 1951. Sleep My Love (1953) and Tears for the Bride (1954) followed the same pattern, while The Widow and the Web (also 1954) became Martin’s first all-original Bennett novel.

A good series, solid and fast-paced, and pleasingly Chandleresque, given to far more characterization than was common for its time, but not shy about the private eye action, either. Surprisngly, however, there’s little actual sex — as Bill Pronzini once lamented, “In all of Jim Bennett’s cases, he never once gets laid, not even by Sandy Hollis!”

Nonetheless, Martin’s apprenticeship in the pages of the pulps served him well when he moved to novels. Unfortunately the series is all-but-forgotten now, although I’ve always enjoyed the books.

As Lee Roberts, he wrote about private eye Lee Fiske in the pulps (who became Andy Brice when he made it into a novel), and the crime-solving Dr. Clinton Shannon (who was sometimes known as Dr. Clinton L. Colby).

Yeah, it gets confusing…

UNDER OATH

  • “And speaking of Chandler pastiches, does anybody remember a writer named Robert Martin? I thought some of his early books were about as good as the ones by Browne/Evans, though later on the books went way downhill. I thought Sleep, My Love in particular was pretty good, but some of the later books (reprinted by Curtis in paperback) were a severe drop-off.”
    — Bill Crider (June 2001, Rara-Avis)
  • “Tight with incident … breathless.”
    — New York Herald Tribune 
  • “… the Jim Bennett books are too edgy to be called cozy mysteries, yet there’s something comforting about the presence and voice of the good-natured character of the detective.”
    — Brian Greene

SHORT STORIES

  • “G.I. Doublecross” (March 1945, Dime Detective)
  • “Murder Without Music” (August 1945, Thrilling Detective)
  • “Killers Can’t Be Careless” (November 1946, Dime Detective)
  • “Nice, Like a Cobra” (February 1947, Thrilling Detective)
  • “Talk Yourself to Death” (February 1947, Mammoth Detective)
  • “Nothing But Trouble” (April 1947, Mammoth Detective)
  • “Death Under Par” (May 1947, Dime Detective)
  • “Wake of the Willful Wife” (August 1947, Dime Detective)
  • “Passport to Murder” (August 1947, Mammoth Detective)
  • “Death Gives a Permanent Wave” (October 1947, Dime Detective)
  • “Pardon My Poison” (April 1948, Dime Detective)
  • “Hanging is Too Good” (March 1948, Black Mask)
  • “Dolls of Death” (July 1948, Dime Detective)
  • “She, Me and Murder” (November 1948, Dime Detective)
  • “Remains — To Be Seen” (November 1948, New Detective Magazine)
  • “Murder the Bum!” (April 1949, Dime Detective)
  • “A Shroud in Her Trousseau” (June 1949, Dime Detective)
  • “Deadliest Dame in Town” (September 1949, Dime Detective)
  • “Slayers Go Solo” (November 1949, Dime Detective)
  • “I’ll Be Killing You” (Febrruary 1950, Dime Detective)
  • “Sheath Your Claws, Hellcat!” (April 1950, Dime Detective)
  • “Slayers Burn Slow” (November 1950, Dime Detective)
  • “Case of the Frozen Bridegroom” (June 1952, Detective Tales)

NOVELS

COLLECTIONS

MEA CULPA

  • Turns out The Echoing Shore (1955; aka “The Tough Die Hard”) is not a Jim Bennett novel, although for years I listed it as such. It’s a pretty good noir tale, though, about an insurance investigator named Nick (his job doesn’t really matter) caught up in a nasty love triangle.

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Kevin Reddy and Bill Crider for the leads.

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