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.

Minnesota thriller and mystery writers, as you’ve probably noticed, almost always get at least one shot with me. Douglas Dorow is a Minneapolis writer (I’ve never met him, but then I’ve never met almost everybody), and I have a suspicion (based on hints in this book) that he’s a Christian. He’s written a promising, if not stellar, thriller in The Ninth District, and I think it will go over well with most of this blog’s audience.

The title refers to the Ninth District of the Federal Reserve Bank, which is located in Minneapolis. The story begins with the murder of a bank teller in suburban Wayzata. FBI agent Jack Miller, along with his junior partner Ross Fruen, are investigating it as one of a string of bank robberies in the Twin Cities area, committed by a gunman they call the Governor (because he wears a mask that looks like one of our former governors—Jesse Ventura, one assumes). The stakes are raised as they gradually come to realize that they’re facing a very clever, entirely ruthless criminal who has a much bigger score in mind than a few bank jobs.

I think Douglas Dorow has the makings of a first-class thriller writer, but he hasn’t yet mastered plotting. Although he ramps up the danger at regular intervals, as the genre demands, he makes the common mistake (I understand it well and am probably guilty of it myself) of not going full out for the climax. A master writer would have put Jack’s family (the portrayal of the family and his strained but loving marriage is one of the book’s strengths) in peril at the end, but Dorow chooses to take them out of the action and concentrate on the showdown between Jack and the Governor. That’s understandable, but it lowers the tension.

Still, not a bad summer read. The values are good, and it’s suitable for teens and up. Well worth four bucks for the Kindle version.

Train travel I was used to; plane travel was something new, and a little frightening. Truth be told, I slept through a lot of it. Twenty-five other hearty souls and I sat within the DC-3 “Flagship,” a noisy, rattling projectile that churned through the night sky like a big kitchen mixer.

I’ve praised Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller novels here before, especially the early volumes. The first three in the series, True Detective, True Crime, and this book, The Million Dollar Wound, comprise what’s called the Frank Nitti Trilogy—three books that don’t necessarily focus on gangster Frank Nitti (whom, if you only know him from the movie The Untouchables, you don’t know anything about at all), but are set in the Nitti era of Chicago crime, and end—in this volume—with his death.

The Million Dollar Wound (military slang for a non-debilitating wound serious enough to send a guy home, see also, “Hollywood Wound”) begins with Nate Heller waking up in a military mental hospital, unable to remember his name or how he got there. A sympathetic doctor tries hypnotism on him, which allows us to flash back and learn how he—in spite of being old enough to avoid the draft—had enlisted in the Marines with his friend Barney Ross, the prizefighter, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. We learn of the hell they endured on Guadalcanal, but most of the book concentrates on a post-war adventure, when Nate is hired by newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler to investigate mob influence in motion picture unions, and then—dangerously—hired by those very labor racketeers to tell them if anybody is nosing around in their business. Famous people encountered include actor Robert Montgomery, fan dancer Sally Rand (Nate’s current girlfriend), Eliot Ness, and—of course—Frank Nitti.

Author Collins’s realistic—though sometimes far-fetched (the two things aren’t necessarily contradictory)–take on Frank Nitti and his era is fascinating. Nate Heller would deny being a friend of Nitti’s, or admiring him, but he sees him as far smarter—and less toxic to society—than his predecessor, Al Capone, or the lesser mobsters who followed him. This is Chicago, after all, Nate would say. There’s an element of tragedy in Nitti’s ugly end.

Recommended, with the usual cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.