No month stated, 1958 Crest Books
Hardboiled junkies with a quarter to burn would’ve been well-pleased to discover Morocco Jones, but I’m assuming the series didn’t gain much traction in its day. The Peeping Tom Murders is more hardboiled in its approach than the previous two books, with Morocco in seedy Los Angeles and trying to figure out who murdered a movie star and her husband.
I’m under the impression book producer Lyle Kenyon Engel was at least aware of this series; it seems very in-line with the paperbacks he would produce the following decade, particularly Nick Carter: Killmaster. This is mainly in how Morocco is a former globetrotting secret agent, and also how the books are written in third-person instead of the more hardboiled-esque first person. Even the narrative style of Jack Baynes (aka Bertram Fowler, apparently, but as with my previous two reviews I’ll refer to him by his much-cooler pseudonym) is similar to the house style Engel would instill in his productions.
And on that note, The Peeping Tom Murders is almost like something Manning Lee Stokes would’ve written for Engel in later years, with an unwieldy plot and an ever-growing cast of characters. The only thing it lacks that Stokes would’ve brought is a lurid quotient; the uncredited cover art is the most lurid thing about The Peeping Tom Murders. But it’s misleading, as it doesn’t depict a sequence in the novel; the beautiful young starlet is already murdered before Morocco Jones arrives on the scene, so there’s no half-nude corpse for him to look at through a window.
There’s also no pickup from previous volumes, nor an appearance of Morocco’s recurring cast of characters, the General and Llora. The former is only mentioned in passing and Llora is often thought of, but Morocco proves his macho worth by sleeping with some random lady during the course of this novel, even if he suspects Llora is the perfect woman for him! But folks that’s the biggest difference between Morocco Jones and the men’s adventure novels of later decades; the sex scene isn’t just off-page, it happens between paragraphs, leaving the sordid details to the reader’s fevered imagination because it’s 1958 and all.
The novel gets off to a fine opening in which Morocco makes his way to a secluded estate up in the winding hills around Hollywood and is jumped by a trio of armed goons. Morocco makes short work of them, taking them out in believable fashion, even if he doesn’t have a gun. Oh and that’s another misleading element from the cover art: Morocco doesn’t even use a gun in the course of the book. At one point he gets hold of one, but tosses it aside later on.
This is because Morocco is in the cross-hairs of the Los Angeles cops, just one of many factions that zero in on Morocco. I do not exaggerate when I say that the majority of The Peeping Tom Murders concerns this or that character approaching Morrocco, usually in his hotel room, and either threatening him or asking him for his help. The novel quickly becomes overly complex and muddled with too-many characters and subplots overcrowding the central storyline of the murdered starlet.
There’s also the question of why Morocco is even here; we’re told in the opening that the General “insisted” Morocco handle this job, but I never could figure out why an LA-based detective wasn’t hired instead of Morocco, who has come over from his home base of Chicago. He soon learns he’s out of his depth, with practically every character involved in the case figuring out where he’s staying in Hollywood and what his next move might be. Forward momentum is constantly halted by badgering, annoying characters who crowd the narrative.
But the opening is cool. Morocco takes out the trio waiting for him, leaving one of them dead from a broken neck, and he goes into the bungalow of the man he’s working for: Garado Parano, scion of a wealthy family who claims not only that the men outside were not his, but also that he’s been framed for murder (the starlet and her husband). The thugs, Garado says, must have belonged to Santash, the leader of a local cult.
Here The Peeping Tom Murders detours from what the reader might rightly assume would be the plot: rather than focusing on Hollywood and the movie biz, Jack Baynes gives us a story about a New Age cult that is run by a conman who works with a gossip columnist, and together the two are blackmailing Hollywood notables. There are also gangsters and whatnot involved, and all of them are constantly ten steps ahead of Morocco Jones; once again, Baynes manages to make his protagonist come off as dumb for the convenience of the busy plot.
I was also a little let down with how Baynes treats the novel’s sole female character, Sonya Langley, a purple-eyed up-and-coming starlet who is one of the first characters to make an unnanounced appearance at Morocco’s hotel shortly after he arrives in town. With her “lowcut neckline” (which is about as risque as Baynes gets; there is zero in the way of anatonimical exploitation, sad to say) and her comment that “there are many beds between a bit part and a starring role,” Sonya throws herself at Morocco…who turns her away, not trusting her. This will begin a frosty rapport between the two, with Morocco suspecting that Sonya is working with the bad guys and trying to sway him.
Indeed, she seems to be involved with Santash, formerly known as Joel Tuck, a black low-level criminal who started pretending he was a psychic to swindle superstitious gamblers. Now, in his robe and with a legion of followers, Santash commands a “psychic cult” that operates on the fringes of Hollywood society; the novel’s most memorable sequence has Morocco sneaking onto the cult grounds while a ceremony is in progress, complete with proto-psychdelic stuff like Santash praying to a “purple light” of the cosmos that shines on him. Morocco spends the time wondering what optical and stereo tricks Santash is using to fool his followers…talking aloud to himself the whole time. Yes, folks, a “tough” private eye who talks aloud to himself while sneaking around, just like Renegade Roe.
The sordid Hollywood trash one might expect isn’t much to be found in The Peeping Tom Murders. The closest we get is a part where Morocco follows one of his innumerable leads to a Demille-esque director, and goes to the guy’s house to find him not there, but a bevy of post-party women lying around in an alcoholic stupor, and one of the women tells Morocco to “knock out” a particular young lovely who is getting on her nerves or something.
What the lady is asking Morocco to do is bang the gal, you see, but it’s 1958 and all – and Morocco gamely obliges, but as mentioned above it occurs between paragraphs! Morocco takes the girl to a bedroom, she pulls him down to her, and next paragraph begins, “Five miles later, after a shower, Morocco…” I re-read the sequence just to ensure I hadn’t missed anything. Perhaps “five miles later” was a 1950s euphemism for “after banging the broad.”
But really, Morocco just spends the novel going from one lead to another, and occasionally getting jumped by various characters. And in fact there are so many characters in the book I quickly got lost keeping track of them. There’s a lot of wasted opportunity, too; Garado, aka Morocco’s ostensible client, is himself protected by a lawyer who looks out for the family, and said lawyer employs this monstrous brute called Chaco who is described like some proto-Hulk. Hardly anything is done with the character, though.
Not much is done with Santash, either. I thought it was interesting that Baynes made this character black, but it’s not much dwelt upon. One interesting angle though is that Morocco gets his information on Santash from a black crime boss in the city; Baynes again shows an admiration for inner-city blacks that was apparent in the previous two books. But otherwise Santash is sort of lost in the narratorial shuffle.
Then there’s Ham Potter, a hard-drinking newsman (man, I wish those were still around today) who becomes Morocco’s pal during the course of the novel…eating steak and drinking hard and shooting the breeze. Again, I don’t exaggerate when I say that much of The Peeping Tom Murders features Morocco Jones talking to the many and sundry characters who populate the novel.
Action is scant, and usually involves Morocco getting in a fistfight in pure hardboiled style. Lots of characters pull guns on him, but Morocco either turns the tables or manages to get saved by the sudden presence of yet another character who will distract the gun-toters. Again, Morocco gets saved quite a bit in the novel, which as with the previous books robs him of his tough-guy nature.
To be honest, The Peeping Tom Murders was one of the most deceptively-slim books I’ve ever read. Despite “only” being 144 pages, it seemed that no matter how dogged of an effort I put into reading, the book just wouldn’t end! It was strange, because I wanted to like the novel, and thought the setup was interesting. But Jack Baynes fumbled the delivery this time, turning in a muddled effort that constantly stalled itself out, and way too many scenes of characters popping out of the woodwork to either threaten Morocco Jones or to provide him with info that would lead him to yet another character.
My assumption is readers of the day felt the same, as the next volume would be the last. And as for Jack Baynes, aka Bertram Fowler, I have no idea whether he wrote anything else…if I had a copy of Hawk’s Author’s Pseudonyms, I’d see if there was an entry for him. Maybe I should order it from Interlibrary Loan again. The librarians are always super happy to lug that several-thousand-page monstrosity through the library’s pickup window for me when I pull up.
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