Created by Jay Flynn
Pseudonym of John Martin Flynn
Other pseudonyms include J.M. Flynn
(1928-85)
When is a private eye novel not a private eye novel?
Maybe when the hero, a tough-as-nails bruiser named KONRAD JENSEN is only pretending to be a private eye.
Seems he’s really a Treasury agent for the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Unit for Northern California, working undercover, posing as a private eye who’s been hired by the family to investigate the suspicious death of newspaperman John Levangie.
But Levangie was also posing–in reality, he was also a Treasury agent, looking into a massive bootlegging operation in Northern California when he was killed.
The local cops have written the death off as an “accident,” but the Treasury Department and Jensen aren’t so sure.
Jensen’s a shark, brutal and relentless, and soon enough he’s in it up to his neck in assorted thugs, dangerous dames, corrupt cops, and all the usual brouhaha, eventually finding himself tossed in jail on a murder rap in the action-packed 1959 paperback original Drink With the Dead by pulpster Jay Flynn, originally published as an Ace Double.
Interestingly enough, Flynn wrote several novels about another character, McHugh, who occasionally worked as a private eye, but also often worked for the government.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Martin Flynn wasn’t all that different than many of his characters: A hard-drinking, hard-living fuck-up with a generally up-yours approach to life. A Boston Irishman, he worked variously as a soldier, a reporter, a bartender, an editor, a sex novelist, a bootlegger, a security guard, a caretaker, a prisoner in a Mexican jail and a “writer-in-residence” at a Nevada whorehouse. Then again, as Bill Pronzini who interviewed him wrote, “With Flynn, you just never knew what was fact and what was bullshit.” He apparently spent some time on skid row in Richmond, Virginia, and eventually ended up in a V.A. hospital in Branford, where he died of cancer at age 57. His books, except for one hardcover, were all paperback originals, of varying degrees of quality, were published by Avon, Belmont-Tower, Ace and Leisure–all publishers of varying degrees of quality. He’s probably best known for his series about McHugh, a bar owner, private eye and sometime spy-for-hire. He also wrote a couple of westerns about Slim Jim Bannerman, a World War I-era operative for the Gallows Detective Agency in San Francisco, and a caper novel, Terror Tournament, about security specialist Burl Standard. He also did a novelization of TV’s Surfside 6.
UNDER OATH
- “I read most of his novels, either when they were first published or at some point in the sixties. One of my favorites was Drink with the Dead, which has a modern-day bootlegging theme.”
— Bill Pronzini - “Fast, bloody and noir to the core.”
— Paul Burke - “A lot of the book is more G-Man Procedural than hardboiled action, but it’s well-done, and when the action does kick into gear, it really yanks the reader along full-throttle. The ending of this novel is great, with an effective final twist of the tail. If you’ve never read Flynn’s work before, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start. If you’re already a fan, you’ll want to give this one a try. Recommended.”
— James Reasoner
NOVELS
- Drink with the Dead (1959) | Buy this book
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- Forgotten Writers #1 : Jay / J.M. Flynn
A great essay by Bill Pronzini, originally published in Mystery Scene.
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
