Created by J.M. Flynn
Pseudonym of John Martin Flynn
Other pseudonyms include Jay Flynn
(1928-85)
Burl’s no prize–a former police lieutenant, he quit the police department after accusations of brutality and sadism were made, but he’s trying to stay on the straight and narrow, running his own small security agency staffed with former cops like himself.
But that all hits the fan when three armed dudes in a golf cart crash into the car, and gunfire breaks out, taking out one of his men and one of the thieves. When Burl recovers consciousness, the receipts ($400,00 worth) are gone, and there’s no sign of the dead robber.
It’s a massive screwup and a major ding to his agency’s reputation, unless he can nail the culprits and get back the loot. But there more he looks into it, the more he begins to suspect it was an inside job…
Terror Tournament was first published in hardcover in 1959, and in paperback later the same year as part of an Ace Double (D-409, for you collectors), partnered with Louis Trimble’s Cargo For The Styx. It was later reprinted as a Stark House double, this time paired with Flynn’s 1961 thriller The Action Man.
ABOUT THEAUTHOR
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. He’s probably best known for his series about McHugh, a bar owner, private eye and sometime spy-for-hire. He also wrote a standalone, Drink with the Dead (1959), about Konrad Jensen, another government agent who poses as a private eye, and a couple of westerns about Slim Jim Bannerman, a World War I-era operative for the Gallows Detective Agency in San Francisco. He also did a novelization of TV’s Surfside 6.
UNDER OATH
- “… an effective tale of the carefully planned heist of the gate receipts of a golf tournament modeled after the one at Pebble Beach.”
— Bill Pronzini on Terror Tournament
NOVELS
- Terror Tournament (1959) | Buy this book
COLLECTIONS
- The Action Man/Terror Tournament (2018) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
Paired with Flynn’s 1961 thriller The Action Man. Features an intro by Bill Pronzini.
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.
