Halo in Blood

Thank goodness for the Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction. I bought it to read the Robert Leslie Bellem story, but without it I might never have given the novels of Frederic Brown and W.T. Ballard and William Campbell Gault a chance. Nor a writer named Howard Browne, whose contribution, So Dark For April, told of a PI named Paul Pine. It was a short, obviously derivative story, but was well-written in the weary, cynical, wise-acre way I look for, so I began to seek out more of Browne's books.There aren't many, and even fewer are affordable. Halo in Blood is his first, followed by Halo for Satan and Halo in Brass. I can't say whether this is his best, because I haven't read the others yet. (Although A Taste of Ashes seems his most critically successful, I hear it is of a different, more late-50s style.) But this is a good one.When he first met Chandler, I read, Browne told him that he had been making a living off of him for years. So Browne did not even bother to hide the fact that his creation is a Marlowe wannabe, moved to Chicago. There are a few other small differences, but Pine is basically Marlowe. Chandler treated Browne with some scorn, as was his custom with competitors, but probably moreso because he did not appreciate the attempted cloning. Chandler needn't have worried; his writings were strictly better. Browne's characters are not as well-defined, at least in this initial offering, his descriptions of place aren't as atmospheric, and occasionally things seem forced. But it is readers like me who win in their perhaps-rivalry, because Chandler did not write very many novels, and four nicely-turned knockoffs sound like a good (if not quite *as* good) thing to me.About Halo in Blood: It begins with Pine being late for a meeting with a rich client because he breaks up a funeral procession and gets caught at a burial in which a John Doe is buried with twelve priests officiating. His rich client has a beautiful, wild stepdaughter (don't they all?), who is seeing a gambler. The client wants Pine to break up the little affair. Then the gambler gets bumped. A mobster, cops, assorted thugs, family scandals, a 25-year old crime in San Diego, false identities, lots of lying and sapping and several more murders ensue before Pine unravels all the threads and ties them all back together again, including the opening scene of the funeral. I won't really comment further on the plot. It is good enough; but plots are the *least* interesting things to me in hard-boiled mysteries.I suppose it plays fair with the clues. I suppose a better mystery solver could have guessed the culprit(s) if they paid rapt attention to every word in the book's twisty pages. There were rather too many characters and identity switches and even too many deaths for me to keep logical track of, but that's not why I read these kinds of things anyway: I read them for the arch simile-and-wisecrack-laden dialogue, and Browne handles that aspect quite well.Case closed.See also: the authors a