Thomas B. Dewey (1915–1981)

The Girl With The Sweet Plump Knees is a terrific old-style paperback private eye novel. You might think this one was a soft, cozy take at first with all the light banter and hanky panky between Pete Schofield and his sexy redheaded wife Jeannie. However, there's much more to this novel including a full-on boxing tale, an active riding ranch, a pair of hoods, a blonde babe in a fast car, gambling, strip clubs, and murder. This is a fast-moving and well-written tale and just an all around top notch read. Dewey knows how to tell a story and how to tell it well. Even the lighthearted portions of the story are good. Recommended read.… (mere)

The seventh book in this series is a great example of early sixties paperback originals. It is set in a very loosely disguised Laguna Beach, complete with Pageant of the Masters, artist's studios, cliffs leading down to fabulous beaches, and parties featuring mermaids who appear to be swimming in the punchbowl. It's a fast-moving, quick read that features a woman who wades into the surf as if by compulsion, a bunch of hoods, a sculptor with a tire iron, a gambling wife, a murder, and more.
Dewey gives the reader a well-crafted story that is a lot of fun to read. It has a lot of the classic PI story elements including the merciless hoods, the femme fatale throwing herself at the PI, and all kinds of racing back and forth before the pieces all fall into place. Dewey doesn't try to make this tale anything that it isn't and it works real well. Despite the hoods and the beatings, it still feels like a lighter PI tale - perhaps it's the beach town partying atmosphere with the endless martinis.… (mere)

Run Brother Run could use a snazzier pulpier title, but that's really the only complaint with it. It is a terrific fifties-era pulp story that is easy to read and hard to put down. The pacing is terrific and the action relentless.

Dewey gives us a tale about a prison break, a group of ex-cons holed
up together with no one trusting each other and for good reason,
nightclubs, strippers, knife-wielding hoods, and a fortune in jewels.

It's much much more than your average prison break story and it's filled with terrific characters that really come alive visually. Reminded me a little of westlake's Parker novels.

Nothing -absolutely nothing not to like here… (mere)

If you like classic hardboiled detective fiction with mobsters, beautiful dames, nightclubs, murder, and Fistfights, you will find no better detective series than Dewey's Mac series. Between 1947 and 1970, Dewey published sixteen books in this series and every single one of them is top-notch. Draw the Curtain Close is the first book in the series and it took Dewey six years to return to the series and give us a second one.

Draw The Curtain is tough and hardboiled. It features a world where there's little sunlight and there's all kinds of nefarious double crossing characters and crooked entanglements. Like mid classic Private eyes, Mac works by himself and has one pal on the police force, Donovan. The story is a typical tangle of double crossing crooks and, in typical classic PI fashion, leaves the reader in the dark as to what everyone's after till nearly the end.

What really works about this book is the nonstop pace that never lets up. If you've read lots of PI fiction, you've read other stories with the mobster asking the PI to work for him, the mobster's dazzling dame who has to be hidden from both the mob and the law, the frame up, and the chases through the town, but few can tell this story better than Dewey. This is simply the good stuff.… (mere)