REVIEW: I’ll Bury My Dead by James Hadley Chase

Harle­quin has decided to re-release their Vin­tage col­lec­tion of crime nov­els with the orig­i­nal cover art. I had no idea that Har­le­quin, which is syn­ony­mous with romance, pub­lished hard boiled mysteries.

Any­way, the cov­ers are all quite arrest­ing to look at and made me sali­vate to read one. I didn’t know who to start with first so I just picked the title that sounded inter­est­ing to me and dug in.

I enjoy my fair share of hard­boiled mys­ter­ies and was look­ing for­ward to tack­ling this one. The story fol­lows self-made busi­ness­man and inven­tor, Nick Eng­lish. A man who dab­bles in a lit­tle of every­thing and thus has that “magic touch” that seems to turn a major invest­ment into a pot of gold for him­self and oth­ers. His sec­re­tary, Lois Mar­shall, has been right there beside him, from the start.

The story opens with the cel­e­bra­tion of win­ning the Light Heavy­weight Cham­pi­onship for one of Nick’s fight­ers. It is dur­ing this party that he receives some bad news. His brother, Roy, has been found dead in his office. The two broth­ers had been estranged. Nick got him started with doing pri­vate detec­tive work before cut­ting him off financially.

The police sus­pect sui­cide since Roy was about to lose his license among other things. Nick is shocked and some­what dis­grun­tled by these turns of events. You see, the hos­pi­tal he’s been financ­ing will take a vote on whether to name the hos­pi­tal after him and he doesn’t need the stink of a scan­dal right now.

Nick is not a pop­u­lar guy with a lot of impor­tant peo­ple like the police com­mis­sioner and the DA for starters. Even the peo­ple on the com­mis­sion at the hos­pi­tal don’t care for him even though they need his money. Nick has a “unde­feat­able spirit” and is ruth­less; and more sig­nif­i­cantly, he has money to invest. He even sup­ports a Sen­a­tor who is help­ing him with get­ting him what he wants: his legacy. It’s impor­tant to Nick to show the world at large that he’s become suc­cess­ful. Espe­cially in a world where rep­u­ta­tion has more weight than money.

His brother’s death kind of throws a wrench into those plans. As the police dig deeper, more details emerge that makes Nick shell out the bucks to keep a cer­tain police lieu­tenant quiet. Turns out Nick’s brother, who is described as being a loser who was always beg­ging Nick for money, was also black­mail­ing his clients. So where there’s motive, there’s mur­der, right? Seems that way since Roy’s sec­re­tary turns up dead as well. Another appar­ent sui­cide, that is until a cer­tain police lieu­tenant leaves out cru­cial evi­dence to the con­trary in order to save Mr. Eng­lish any more stink. As the plot moves for­ward, so does the body count.

So how did I like this novel? I didn’t. This story was a chore to read. I tried in vain to engage myself but it just wasn’t hap­pen­ing. Why wasn’t I hooked into the story? Can’t answer that. Weren’t the char­ac­ters engag­ing? Not really. I read hard­boiled mys­ter­ies all the time and this one bored me to tears. I’ve even read some of Ed McBain’s stuff from the same era and his books hold up much bet­ter than this.

While the cover was arrest­ing, the story was not. So I will have to grade this one a D. It’s not a flat out F because I did fin­ish it at least. It’s not a flat out F because it was writ­ten 56 years ago. Too bad there was noth­ing hook wor­thy to keep me read­ing with some inter­est. Mainly, I pushed myself to fin­ish it.

The prose took some get­ting used to with odd, dated phrases used to describe women as “frilly” or “dames.” And the main pro­tag­o­nist? While I admired his hard work and his single-minded deter­mi­na­tion to make some­thing of him­self, he was curt and cold. He mostly barked out orders and threw around cash while he was chauf­feured around town. As I kept read­ing, I started to care less and less about who killed his brother. I was more anx­ious for closure.

As for the romance — there was a hint of one with Nick being com­pletely obliv­i­ous to Lois’s feel­ings for him for the past five years. It takes her get­ting kid­napped for him to real­ize that he’d loved her all along. As for the end­ing, it reminded me a bit of the movie, “Cape Fear” where the hero and the vil­lain bat­tle it out on a yacht except in this one the yacht goes down in flames.

Over­all, this story was a D read for me. I don’t think I want to try another one. This will be it for me from the HQN Vin­tage col­lec­tion. I’m start­ing to real­ize that maybe some books shouldn’t be reprinted again. This would be one of them.