PaperBack: “The Hoods Come Calling”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



The Hoods Come Calling, by “Nick Quarry,” aka Marvin H. Albert (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1958).

Albert has been much on my mind lately, thanks to a longish piece I posted in my other blog, Killer Covers, about his 1970s Alistair MacLeanesque thrillers. The Hoods Came Calling is unrelated to those. It was the first of six books he wrote about “a tough, no-nonsense private eye from New York City,” Jake Barrow. As Kevin Burton Smith explains in The Thrilling Detective Web Site, “many regard the half-dozen Barrow novels [as] Albert’s very best work. In many ways, they’re not much different from other B-listers’ pulp fiction of the era, but they’re delivered fast and hard, with a lot of energy, some well-crafted action scenes and, predictably, plenty of garment-disadvantaged babes. There’s still a fair amount of cheese in all of Albert’s work (he occasionally wrote like he must have been wearing boxing gloves), but at least it’s good cheese.”

Cover art by Barye Phillips.

BONUS: On Flickr, men’s magazine expert Robert Deis has posted the spread below, captioned: “A nice action scene by artist Samson Pollen, with a scantily clad babe included (as usual), for a story by mystery writer Nick Quarry in For Men Only, October 1962. The story is an adaptation of Quarry’s 1958 novel The Hoods Come Calling … The little box at bottom left says its a SPECIAL SUSPENSE BOOK BONUS. I think part of the suspense is whether the babe's bra will fall off or not.”



Click on the image for an enlargement. You know you want to.