(Not long ago, A.V. Club editor Keith Phipps purchased a large box containing over 75 vintage science fiction, crime, and adventure paperbacks. He is reading all of them. This is book number 45.)
The book's from 1957. The cover's from 1976. The style, by an uncredited artist, is late-pulp but it's the hair that really announces the years between. There's little chance that a straight-arrow cop like Vanishing Ladies' protagonist Detective Philip Colby would be wearing his hair like that in the '50s. It's a post-Serpico treatment of a pre-Camelot man. The book has its divisions, too. Written in 1957 by Evan Hunter, a.k.a. Ed McBain, a.k.a. Salvatore Albert Lombino (that's the one on his birth certificate), a.k.a. a bunch of other cool names like "Curt Cannon," it finds the writer still coming into his own. Hunter–to stick to his official adopted name–had found success with his 1954 novel The Blackboard Jungle and was already starting to write his 87th Precinct series under the Ed McBain pseudonym, a series he'd keep writing until his 2005 death. This book, released under the name "Richard Marsten," clearly tries to reach the same audience as the 87th Precinct books, already familiar to longtime readers of this column, but with some added noir sleaze and tough guy action. In fact, Vanishing Ladies has a lot in common with that series. Colby works for the 23rd Precinct in an unnamed city and travels across the river to another unnamed state, but it's easy to fill in the blanks as New York and New Jersey. But where the 87th Precinct books take a procedural approach to police work with an emphasis on the gritty details, Vanishing Ladies is hardboiled crime fiction first, a mystery second, and never quite satisfying as either. That isn't to say it's bad, just a little ungainly. Framed as a deposition given by Colby (and, briefly, a second deposition given by another cop) after the events of the novel have already taken place, Vanishing Ladies makes good on its title pretty quickly. With some time off on his hands, Colby decides to vacation with his fiancée Ann, a woman with
wide brown eyes, and a good figure even though she's tall. You meet a a lot of tall girls who look like telephone poles. Ann's not that way.
(Ann's one of a few women described, lovingly, as "big." Try getting away with that now.) It's an interesting sort of vacation, one predicated on it not being that kind of vacation. For one, Ann still lives with her widowed father, who's only grudgingly approved the trip. Apparently Colby isn't interested in it being that kind of vacation either, or at least has resigned himself to a chaste weekend. "She rested her head on my shoulder," he recalls
and pulled her legs up under her. I knew she was almost out because her skirt had pulled back over her knees during the operation and she hadn't bothered to shove it back down again.