Rusty Forbes

Created by Milton K. Ozaki
Other pseudonyms include Robert O. Saber & Mark Shane
(1913-89)

“The car was hot and so was the blonde who drove it. A smart shamus like Rusty Forbes should have known better than to hole up with her in a tourist cabin. By the time that the little picnic was over, he found himself custodian of a corpse-and on the trail of enough loot to stock a department store.”
— the blurb

RUSTY FORBES was yet another of Milton Ozaki‘s hard-boiled (some might say over-boiled, given the cheese quotient) Chicago eyes, up to his neck in half-naked babes, booze and blood.

And usually a plot that didn’t quite make sense. In his one appearance, 1954’s Dressed to Kill, Rusty starts off taking a job repossessing cars, and gets tangled up with a couple of blondes (of course) a corpse in his trunk, a truckload of stolen televisions, and both the law and the local mob on his tail.

You know. The usual.

Others eyes from the House of Ozaki include Max Keene, Carl Good and Carl Guard, the latter two bearing a particularly striking resemblance to each other, and Sarah Livingston, a lady dick.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Milton Ozaki was born in Racine, Wisconsin, from a Japanese father (Jingaro Ozaki, who later changed his name to Frank) and an American mother, Augusta Rathbun.  He was a  beauty parlor operator, a tax attorney and a reporter before turning to writing crime fiction after World War II, delivering a couple of dozen hard-boiled romps, all but two of them paperback originals, many of them for the infamous Graphic Mystery line, and all of them full of enough sex, violence and ham-fisted, jaw-dropping prose and head-scratching similes to fulfill all your daily cheese requirements. Pronzini even cites him in Son of Gun in Cheek a few times, for such classics as this one from Dressed to Kill:

“The blonde strolled to the cabin and unlocked the door. She went in, leaving the door invitingly open. I looked it it and my red corpuscles began to get redder.”

Now that’s writing!!!

NOVELS

• Dressed To Kill (1954) | Buy this book 

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

• Milton K. Ozaki: A Collage and Homage
  Written and compiled by Bill Crider, originally for EyeCon, 1995.
• Their Kind of Town
  Chicago Eyes

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. For those of you keeping score, the cover is by Walter Popp.