McHugh

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Created by Jay Flynn
Pseudonym of John Martin Flynn
Other pseudonyms include J.M. Flynn
(1928-85)

In his late thirties, a burly Irish-American bruiser standing just over six feet and weighing in at a muscular 200 pounds or so,  with a face that’s taken a few punches over the years and a nose that’s been busted at least once, none of the patrons at the San Francisco bar he runs are likely to start anything up with McHUGH.

Not that The Door is a dive–nope, it’s a nice, respectable joint, tucked away on a quiet side street, a favorite among assorted operatives from various intelligence agencies, who view it as safe, neutral territory. McHugh runs it with his lover Loris, who tends bar and occasionally sings there. She also takes over the place when McHugh (we never do find out his first name) isn’t around.

Which is often. Seems McHugh has a couple of side gigs.

Ostensibly, he’s an unlicensed private eye who occasionally helps out a customer–generally considered a pain in the ass by local law enforcement, up to and including the FBI.

But McHugh is also an occasional agent for the Pentagon, and he fights and shoots his way through a string of pulpy, fast-paced paperback originals by Avon in the late fifties and early sixties, drinking drinks, cracking wise with his fellow agent, Bud Chapman, and his handler, General Burton Harts, wooing babes (not all of them trustworthy, and apparently Loris doesn’t mind) and duking it out with Nazis, mobsters, enemy agents, evil dictators everywhere from San Francisco to Mexico, the Caribbean, and Switzerland.

Good thing, then, that he always travels with briefcase containing a fifth of Scotch and a .45. Would be even better if  McHugh knew what he was doing–it’s not always clear to him or readers. But stuff sure happens.

In a later reprint of the pre-Bond series launch McHugh (1959), a cover blurb boasts that McHugh was “sexier than James Bond,” but if you’re not really into spies, 1960’s A Body for McHugh has our man ditching the spy game to help out Loris’ sister, who’s found a dead mobster in her apartment.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Martin Flynn wasn’t all that different than many of his protagonists: 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, later 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, published by Avon, Belmont-Tower, Ace and Leisure–all publishers of varying degrees of quality.  While he’s probably best known for his series about McHugh, he also wrote a standalone starring Konrad Jensen, another government agent who poses as a private eye, 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 Stannard. He also did a  novelization of TV’s  Surfside 6.

UNDER OATH

  • “None of his adventures make much sense, really, but there is a good deal of energy in each, plus plenty of sly humor, breakneck pacing, and some lean, evocative writing.”
    — Bill Pronzini on the McHugh series

NOVELS

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

Published

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