Created by George Harmon Coxe
(1901-84)
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of eyes?
LEON MORLEY is yet another private eye from the prolific Coxe, who started out in the pulps back in the 1930s and kept on writing novels into the seventies.
But Leon wasn’t one of the good guys. In his lone appearance (in the 1943 novel Alias the Dead) he’s “one of PIdom’s rotten apples, with a commanding manner and keen mind but a larcenous heart” (John Conquest in Trouble in My Business). Leon’s a bottom feeder if ever there was one; a man who makes his living doing “divorce work” and “labour cases” (presumably strikebreaking and the like).
He’s not even the “hero” of the book. That would be blond-haired, blue-eyed Tony Kenyon, an ambitious young reporter from Indiana, who’s in Los Angeles, after being recently discharged from the military (a week before the US declared war), struggling to get back into the newspaper biz. He’s having little success, though. So he’s easy prey for a Help Wanted newspaper ad that promises “an unusual and profitable assignment.”
The ad was placed by Morley, who ropes the young man into a dodgy scheme that involves Tony impersonating a dead man — a scheme that will eventually see him as the main suspect in a couple of murders.
Ooops.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Coxe created other detectives, including Sam Crombie, Max Hale, Paul Baron, and Jack Fenner, but he’s best known for his two crime photographers/amateur sleuths, Flashgun Casey and Kent Murdock, who are basically private eyes with cameras.
UNDER OATH
- “The general pattern of this book is a familiar one. It runs like this: Young man, down and out, answers blind ad, gets a job that promises good pay for very little work, and runs into a lot of trouble. It is a pattern that admits of endless variations, and Mr. Coxe has provided some that make one forget that the pattern is a little shopworn… Mr. Coxe’s swiftly paced narrative style leaves nothing to be desired in a story that is replete with excitement and surprise.”
— Isaac Anderson (January 31, 1943, The New York Times)
NOVELS
- Alias the Dead (1943) | Buy this book
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- These Eyes Keep Themselves in Trouble
Bad, Bad Eyes
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
