Created by Floyd Mahannah
(1911-76)
In The Yellow Hearse (1950; aka “No Luck for a Lady”), redhead CASSIE GIBSON is just trying to keep her father’s detective agency from falling apart when she stops to pick up a hitchhiker named Nap Lincoln.
Later she realizes that there is a dead woman in the trunk of her yellow Caddy, hence the title.
But just in case you weren’t sure, Signet added a little tease in the tagline: “HOT DOPE…LOOSE WOMEN…and MURDER–in RENO.”
Who could resist?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Floyd Mahannah isn’t exactly a household name, even among fans of the genre. He only cranked out a half dozen or so books and a handful of short stories in the digests back in the fifties, but they include a couple of other above-average standalone private eye (or private eye-adjacent novels, The Golden Goose and The Golden Widow, while his short story, “Prognosis Negative,” is a quick mean blast of nastiness.
UNDER OATH
- “Nap Lincoln, en route to a job in California, gambles himself broke in Reno and in trying to hitchhike, gets a lift and finds a dead body in the trunk of Cassie Gibson’s car — and a fortune in narcotics. Cassie hires him to help her operative, Joe, and Nap, strictly on the amateur side, winds up another murder, together with the breaking up of a drug ring. The smackeroo treatment.”
— Kirkus Reviews
NOVELS
- The Yellow Hearse (1950; aka “No Luck for a Lady”) | Buy this book
Respectfully submitted by Dale Stoyer. The cover illustration featured is by Robert A. Maguire.
