Badge of Evil is chiefly memorable as the source text for Orson Welles’s film Touch of Evil. It’s a competent mystery/thriller, written in the 1950s in a style that would be considered pretty languid today.

The film writers made a number of changes in the basic story, written by “Whit Masterson,” a pseudonym for the creative team of Wade Miller and William Daemer. In the movie, Charlton Heston played Miguel Vargas, a Mexican drug enforcement officer, married to an American woman played by Janet Leigh. This was a reversal from the book, whose hero was Michael Holt, an assistant district attorney in an unnamed California city, married to a woman of Mexican heritage.

In the book, Michael is assigned to assist in the prosecution of an heiress and her fiance, charged with the dynamite murder of her father. Michael is unsatisfied with the detectives’ case, and his own digging soon uncovers a different suspect who immediately confesses.

Michael becomes suspicious of the two detectives—heroes in the city—and begins to research other cases they’ve “closed,” to see if they’ve planted evidence before. Before long both he and his wife are under attack.

For a contemporary reader, there’s not a lot of punch here. The idea of corrupt cops who plant evidence was shocking in the 1950s, but has become a cliché in today’s fiction. Also, a district attorney with these kinds of suspicions would get a lot more support from a police department nowadays.

I was intrigued by the portrayal of Michael’s marriage. The authors make a special point of noting that Michael’s co-workers joke about his wife being jealous of his career, but in fact she’s extremely supportive. Michael’s marriage is portrayed as a genuine partnership, and his wife as a good friend as well as a lover. It strikes me that a modern writers would have given her her own career, and would have also ramped up the conflict between the spouses. What does that say about marriage, then and now?

Badge of Evil should be approached as an artifact of its time, and the reader had best not bring contemporary expectations to it. I found the prose a little flaccid, and the action a little tame, but that’s probably typical of the style of the times. Suitable for most readers, teens and up.