Slim Jim Bannerman

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

SLIM JIM BANNERMAN is a Denver-based operative for the Gallows Detective Agency in San Francisco, supposedly founded by a former Pinkerton agent named Vernon Gallowes back in 1916. The two novels in this series, written for sleaze merchants Belmot-Tower under their B-T and Leisure imprints, are set during the waning years of the Wild West (very waning–World War I is raging) and do a pretty good job of avoiding Western clichés (although a few slip through), while “sexing them up,” as Ed Gorman put it. The tag line was the suitably ominous: “His real name is a secret revealed only to men he is about to kill.”

Uh-huh.

Judging from the covers, it’s a little hard to figure out what the publishers were aiming for. A 1980s reprint (pictured) of Bannerman‘s cover makes it look like your basic six-gun saga, with presumably Bannerman in typical cowpoke gear, checking out a fallen fellow cowboy, while the follow-up, Border Incident, looks like an attempt to cash in on the Men’s Adventures craze of the time—it features a derby-sporting gent in a suit coat chomping on a cigar and blazing away with a Gatling gun, like a scene out of TV’s Bearcats!

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 once 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, 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. Other P.I.s he wrote about include security specialist Burl Standard, and government agent/private eye Konrad Jensen. He also did a  novelization of TV’s  Surfside 6.

NOVELS

• Bannerman (1975) | Buy this book 
• Border Incident (1976) | Buy this book 

FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS

• My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys
  Cowboy Eyes of the Old West
• Forgotten Writers #1 : Jay / J.M. Flynn
  A great essay by Bill Pronzini, originally published in Mystery Scene.

Respectfully submitted by Dale Stoyer.