Richard Gallagher - The Stewardess Strangler

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Richard Gallagher - The Stewardess Strangler (World Distributors, 1972)

Blurb:
ANGEL WITHOUT WINGS ...

Jacqueline Bernet was the fifth steward­ess to die on New York's East Side. A psychopathic pattern was emerging, but as terrifying as it was, it seemed a case for the police, not for Cannon ...

Until the heavyweight eye found some­thing special in the dead girl's apart­ment ... something that broke the pattern, set Cannon face-to-face with a hard-nosed inspector – and on his own trail of a savage murderer.

Hippie deep New York, summer of 1971 and the NYPD have failed to get any kind of lead on the Stewardess Strangler. Ralph Grinnell, the secret husband of the fifth victim, hires pleasantly plump lard-arse and permanently grumpy Private Eye Frank Cannon to track the killer before he or she can strike again. Frank's arrival in New York does not sit well with Assistant Inspector John Longo. Longo and his henchman, Lieutenant Flaherty have a pathological hatred of PI's and keep Cannon under surveillance while they think up something they can arrest him for. Frank doesn't know this at first as he's busy lolling on a bed in undershorts, studying juicy newspaper accounts of Jacqueline's murder.

Cannon adopts one of his useless disguises (flower delivery man) to get past the doorman at the dead girl's appartment, so Flaherty and his boys rough him up and drag him to the station where Longo offers him a beer then runs through the list of everything he despises about him and his fellow "liars and parasites". Being lumped in with the worst of his profession makes Cannon much grumpier than usual, especially as the police investigation to date has been shoddy. How come they failed to notice that Jacqueline's clothes were liberally dusted with heroin? As Frank digs deeper, so those few terrified parties who agree to speak to him are ruthlessly murdered, seemingly by the Mafia. Grinnell sacks him, fearing for both their lives, but the brutal slaying of his old friend and fellow PI William Kantor has sent Frank's grumpiness into overdrive and he continues to work the case illegally until he's framed for stocking strangling number six.

OK, so it's a crime/ psycho cop novel rather than a horror story, but some of the violence is surprisingly graphic. For all that he's fifty and refers to his gut as "Moby Dick", Frank proves to be as durable as The Six Million Dollar Man, surviving several savage beatings, a crash through the window of a police station, even a header down a lift-shaft.

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Paul Denver - Cannon: The Falling Blonde (Star, 1976)

Blurb
From the shattering moment when a beautiful girl named Lorraine Selby appeared to jump from the high roof of the Tri-Star Building in Laurel City and landed at Cannon's feet, the heavyweight maestro crime-buster became involved. But it was not until he received a call from Lorraine's boyfriend Larry Durham that events were set in motion.Then it became not only a question of cracking the riddle of the failing blonde but a sickening and perilous investigation into the mountainous vice and corruption which riddled the corridors of power in that fated city.

Frank's strutting his stuff in the Deep South, Laurel City, Georgia to be precise, and the best thing about the place is it has an airport, meaning you can fly the hell out of there when you realise the locals ain't partial to strangers, "heavyweight maestro crime-buster"s being especially unwelcome. Frank's due to catch his plane home when a passer by points to the top of the seventeenth storey Tri-Star block where a blonde sunbather is teetering on the roof's edge. While all around him gawp or place bets, Frank waddles forward, arms out-stretched, but he can't bulldoze a path through the crowd ...

Back in LA, he receives a call from Larry, the dead girl's student boyfriend. Police chief Grodner has just laughed him out of his office for suggesting Lorraine didn't jump, she was pushed. Lorraine was in dispute with her manager at the time of her death. He'd accused her of rifling the till, and Grodner reckons this amounts to incontrovertible evidence that she took her own life out of guilt.
To the incredulity of Herb Meyer, his trendy business manager, Frank takes the case without even setting a fee, but then he's acting very strange these days. He's deferential to his client. If anyone suggests his Ivy League suits are hopelessly out of style, he doesn't drip sweat all over the place or tear their head off. I hope he gets his act together soon because, whereas in the superlative The Stewardess Strangler, he only had a corrupt police force to contend with, this time around it's not just a few bent cops but their paymasters, the politicians and business moguls, plus every other Tom, Dick and Harriet who've been drawn into Laurel City's web of crime ....

To be continued once sufficiently recovered from the shock of it all

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Cannon returns to Laurel City to get answers. The roly-poly PI learns that Tom Voss, a reporter on the local press, fortuitously caught Lorraine on camera seconds before her fatal plunge. The incriminating photograph clearly shows two hands reaching out from behind, as if to push her over. It is now in the possession of Police Chief Ralph Grodner, who, from what we know of him so far, is another Inspector John Longo (see The Stewardess Strangler). Voss has disappeared off the face of the earth.

Frank makes a nuisance of himself at the Inquest, announcing himself as Larry's counsel, and deliberately makes an enemy of Grodner by disputing the police version of events. This, argues Frank, was no accidental death, nor did Lorraine take her own life due to a guilty conscience. Her boss has since testified that the cash went missing during a break in. On the steps outside the Coroner's Court, Grodner suggests now would be a good time for Cannon to quit town in the interest of his continued well-being.

This is definitely a new improved Frank; no losing his rag at the least provocation; no stopping off at Dunkin Donuts for a greasy sugar-coated stress-buster every ten minutes; courteous to client and adversary alike, etc. What gives?