PI Scott Shell: Hardboiled Made Fun

Shell Scott. I remember the PI character well. His rakish portrait with those infamous bone white eyebrows and short hair was stamped top center on front covers to the paperback series.

It was like an icon, a name brand, or a logo you couldn’t easily forget. Perhaps that was the publisher’s genius behind the marketing ploy. Those Shell Scott paperbacks by Richard S. Prather were on my grandfather’s bed table, drugstore racks, and with the 40-million (!) copies sold, just about everywhere you went it seemed.

This past summer while out on a book-buying junket, I snapped up his title DEAD MAN’S WALK (Pocket Books, 1965) for $1.95. Its original cost was a whopping 60 cents. A short while later, I started reading it and was hooked, as they say, by a fast-paced, somewhat intricate, and always outlandish yarn.

Shell Scott in this entry was dispatched to Verde Island in the Caribbean Sea to match wits against voodoo and murder and betrayal. Much has been made about Mr. Prather’s puckish humor for very good reason. In the novel’s opening scene, Scott ambling down the cruise ship’s gangplank is accosted by a local witch doctor who screams a curse on him. In turn, our hero simply retorts: “I’m going to pop you.” After some confusion, Scott’s balled up fist in the witch doctor’s face bridges any communication gap between the two. This is shades of Indiana Jones gun in hand confronting the fierce swordsman that also drew a laugh from me when I saw it.

One of the hallmarks of a Shell Scott title is the use of high-tech James Bondian trickery. In this plot, liquid nitrogen was to be spilled on Scott’s bare chest to freeze his heart’s pulse resulting in sudden death. The villain goes through a lengthy explanation of the grisly process climaxing with the pointed question: “What do you think happens?”

To which Shell Scott quips: “Nothing good?”

Cuteness aside, that’s a fiendishly clever scheme for a murder that I could’ve never dreamt up. The fight scenes and action sequences in a Shell Scott caper are every bit as gritty and lurid as those, say, in a Mike Hammer fisticuffs. Somehow, though, Scott manages to preserve his sense of humor even when a gang of thugs is bashing out his brains. The left hooks slammed to his ribcage pack as much pain but Scott’s readers are spared from experiencing all the visceral details in overwrought language. 

Not every groan is registered. Not every knocked out tooth is recorded. Not every death is notched. Rather than risk having the fight scenes reduced to hardboiled parody or mere rough-and-tumble slapstick, Scott recounts what transpires in a deadpan, tongue-in-cheek style. Humor, even if very dark humor, amid the violence serves as a genuine comic relief. Read Shell Scott and find yourself laughing aloud. Read Mike Hammer and find yourself scowling a bit.

In trying to pair Shell Scott with a hardboiled contemporary, Donald Hamilton’s long-running Matt
Helms series comes to mind. Both are narrated in a similar voice though Helms’ brand of comedy is much drier and understated. Helms is also responsible for justifying his actions to whatever government agency he works for while Scott answers only to himself. Certainly, Helms like Scott never seems to take himself too seriously while busting the bad guys but stays resolved to finish the job he has undertaken. 

That down-on-his-luck PI stereotype plied over and over in the genre doesn’t seem to fit the irrepressible Shell Scott series, either. In DEAD MAN WALKING, after things cool down and the dust settles, Scott still ensconced on his tropical island decides to stick around and enjoy himself. He doesn’t ride off into the sunset because it’s too gorgeous. He narrates: “It hurt to breath -- but breathing this clear air was restorative all by itself. Here there were millions more stars than are seen from smoggy L.A. Millions of millions.”

The first person point of view, I suspect, was popular in the 1950s and 1960s because its familiar hardboiled tone was tempered by Scott’s injections of wisecracks and often not-so-subtle ironic observations. Other pulp writers of the period applied the same formula but with Scott it was a matter of timing. He sensed the right place to throw a zinger into his telling of the tale.

Of course, there were the voluptuous “babes.” This was, after all, the misogynistic 1950s. Any such male condescension to females isn’t painted here with too wide of a brush. At one point, Shell spoofs his ideal of a lady in a surrealistic but sobering dream induced by hallucinogenic drugs: “Huge, roseate-tipped breasts hung over my face with the sound of hissing breath. They brushed my cheeks, burned, became lips that kissed my mouth. Then they melted and were gone. A dying doll, larger than life, walked mechanically in a weird gray wasteland.”

Scott’s investigative methods are unorthodox as are the tools of his trade. He brings to a stakeout “a pair of binoculars; without my .38 but with a monster bar magnet strapped to my right wrist.” Of course, the magnet would interfere with the .38’s functionality. This plain goofiness of pulling slick tricks out of his bag like Felix the Cat is also designed to grab a good laugh. The silly situations Scott gets himself into are remindful of the high jinks played out by Joe R. Lansdale’s unlikely good guy duo, Leonard Pine and Hap Collins.

Bumbling along in his murder investigations, Shell spliced together the disparate clues by applying his own convoluted logic. This is typical PI fare for certain, but I doubt if any detective took as much fun doing it as Scott Shell did. Or as much fun in telling us about it.

NOTE: This piece appeared somewhere online that has long since disappeared. So, I decided to dig it out and run again in my blog. Enjoy.