STARK HOUSE’S new release of Raoul Whitfield’s Green Ice brings the return of an early classic hardboiled detective novel. Private Eye Mal Ourney takes a fall for a crime he didn’t commit. After serving a two-year sentence at Sing Sing prison, Ourney meets Dot Ellis, the woman he protected with his voluntary admission of fault (she killed someone while drunk driving), on the day of his release–and Dot is murdered within minutes.
Dot Ellis’s death triggers a series of murders while Ourney tries to figure out why. Whitfield provides a complicated plot as the dead bodies mount up. But those deaths are just to build up to the fistfights and the epic tommy-gun massacre.
“The plot does not matter,” Dashiell Hammett wrote in a review of Green Ice in the New York Evening Post “… What matters is that here are 280 pages of naked action pounded into tough compactness by staccato, hammerlike writing.”
Slick plotting, relentless action, and hardboiled dialogue make Green Ice one of the great detective novels of that Black Mask era. GRADE: B+
The story first saw print as a 6-part serial in Black Mask, beginning in December 1929 (along with part 4 of the serialized Maltese Falcon). Though green ice provided the motive for most of the killings, it failed to get the title role. Instead, the serial was called “The Crime Breeders.” Green Ice was published in hardcover by Knopf in 1930. It was reprinted in paperback by Avon Murder Mystery Monthly in 1946.
Notable that Avon didn’t trust cf readers to think GREEN ICE was a crime fiction title, so they “augmented” the title as THE GREEN ICE MURDERS. Good work as usual from Stark House.
Todd, the AVON cover says it all! I first read GREEN ICE when AVON brought out a paperback version in 1971.
I read this in the ’70s when it was reprinted in the Avon Classic Crime Collection. Good book.
But my favorite Whitfields are the Jo Gar stories originally published as by Ramon Dacolta. Great, atmospheric stuff.
Jeff, you’re right about the Jo Gar stories. And, the Giants and the Jets had a good First Round in the NFL Draft last night. The Bills, meanwhile, traded back THREE TIMES!
Found it in 1970 or ’71 at a junk store, as part of an old 3-in-1 volume of mystery stories. I should read it again.
Fred, GREEN ICE is cool! For a book almost a 100 years old, it still resonates!
Have never read him. Never went for the action plots-always the mystery ones. Also the library would have to buy it for me to run across it. Not a bookstore within miles of me either. Possible it was on a spinner rack at the local drugstore.
Patti, I actually picked up GREEN ICE back in 1971 off a spinner rack! GREEN ICE is part of the BLACK MASK style of writing.
I never read it but love those covers. I fondly remember the spinner racks, but sadly wasn’t aware of the books with the great covers being collectibles ( I think that would have been a bit early)
Maggie, Art Scott and Bruce Taylor were very much into paperback cover artwork in the 1970s.