The Ice-cold Nude by Carter Brown

I’ve always had a thing for hardboiled stories. I loved Raymond Chandler. I’d tried Dashiell Hammet and enjoyed how the story flowed but missed Chandler’s social and societal commentary. I tried James M. Cain, reading his posthumously completed The Cocktail Waitress and didn’t like it. I thought maybe it was due to it being finished and finessed by someone else. I’d read Japanese hardboiled novels and liked them.

So, now I turned to Carter Brown, aka Alan Geoffrey Yates. He wrote hundreds of books in various genres, including hardboiled. I’d seen a few of his books, including this title, at the Southbank Book Market in London but I didn’t pick any up. My loss. Back home, I decided to give his stories a go, and started with this one.

I have to say I enjoyed it. The plot was kind of weak and the characters were developed only as archetypes of the genre. But it read fast and fun. The dialogue and narrative never held the story down but it also never left you feeling like you were watching a rerun of an old TV show. I think that the hardboiled genre is excellent research material for writers of all types of fiction. Pacing, word choice, and voice are almost always executed perfectly. No matter if the plot is weak, the sexism strong or the bad guys cardboard cutout thugs, it’s a good yarn.