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. ( )