Talmage Powell (1920–2000)

Talmadge Powell wrote a number of pulp novels and stories in the late
50's & early 60's. Among his work are five novels featuring PI Ed
Rivers, a tough hardhreaded bear of a man who worked out of an
office in Tampa, partcularly Tampa’s Ybor City.
The story is well written and nicely paced. There are few if any wasted
words. I picked up three of Powell's books last month and I wish I'd
picked up several more.
The story begins with Rivers glancing out of his apartment window and
spying a gorgeous scantily clad woman in another building. She was
either beckoning him over or taking ill. In any case, Rivers investigates
and ends up in a tangle with a crazed killer stalking him and the local
syndicate looking to shut him down.
Terrific book filled with nonstop action. Highly recommended.
… (mehr)

Corpus Delectable is the final volume of the five that comprise the Ed Rivers series, a fine example of a pulp -era detective series. This one, of course, takes place in Tampa, at that time the most Latin of American cities with a large Cuban and South American population. This story takes place during the Gasparilla festival, Tampa's annual pirate festival that sounds like their own version of Mardi Gras with endless parades and parties and costumes. Into this whirlwind of fiestas, walks a mysterious but beautiful client and a man with a gun. There's lots of action in this one and a clever scheme unfolds in deadly earnest before Rivers can unravel it and before he can prevent innocents from getting in the way. Also, big old Ed may have met his match with a killer as deadly as he is himself. This is a good, solid, action-packed, easy-to-read story just as we've come to expect from Talmage Powell.… (mehr)

Start Screaming Murder is the fourth of the five novels in Powell's Ed Rivers private eye series, all published in the late fifties and early sixties. Rivers is a big bear of a man with an ugly mug who is part of a national security firm, but operates on his own in Tampa, Florida. "Women either get a charge from that face or want to run from it. Men fear it or trust it to the hilt. It isn't a face that ever meets a neutral reaction." His stories typically involve a woman he once knew showing up with a tale of woe and a need for help. His stories generally feature some time in Ybor City, which apparently at that time was Tampa's Cuban quarter. This story features midgets, dwarves, circus acts, sailing vessels, nasty guys in dark alleys. Rivers fights back just as tough as anyone and, when he punches, the other guys "bounced like a crazy cue ball in a bank shot. He did a cross between a jitterbug step and Virginia reel, halfway across the alley." As for the damsel in distress, it's Tina La Flor, with "a calendar girl figure, sunny-reddish hair, green eyes with a tiny up-tilt at the corners, and a face so mistily beautiful that you had to look twice at the porcelain perfection of it to make sure it was real." But that sleek package of loveliness stood slightly over three feet high.… (mehr)

“The Killer Is Mine” is the first of five Ed Rivers PI novels by Talmage Powell, one of the pulp writers from the Tampa Bay area in the fifties. Rivers is an ugly bear of a man who can’t stand Florida’s oppressive heat. He has a low-rent apartment and office in Tampa’s Ybor City. He was originally a New Jersey police officer who fell for a girl he thought was “everything fine and decent in human form,” only to discover that she had it bad for a hood and ended up watching her and the hood lose a race with a freight train. Rivers works on his own, often at odds with the interests of the law. His specialty seems to be defending men accused of/convicted of murder when no one else believes they have one drop of innocence.

“The Killer Is Mine” is a terrific PI novel and a lightning fast read from cover to cover. On the way to righting wrongs and doing justice, Rivers encounters seven-foot tall circus freaks, blonde call girls (with “bedroom blond hair framing a face that was almost pretty as a doll’s”), blackmailing waiters, victims families who are so wrought with grief that they are claimed by insanity and/or inebriation, precocious teenagers, and a grande dame of a wealthy family. He is battered, bruised, set on fire, shot at, jailed, run over, and otherwise trampled.

And, of course, the accused’s wife (Laura Tulman) couldn’t just be ordinary, could she? “She was the kind who’d make the whole trip for a man, right to hell’s front door. Even for a guy in his spot.” The accused on the surface doesn’t seem like a crazed child molester/killer and, the narrator explains, “in a gentler world, Wally Tulman might have been an outstanding success. But the world was not the gentle place he needed. It was a place of atom bombs and wars and death and blood, and it viewed Wally Tulman with critical, bloody eyes.” And what they accused him of was putting him through hell on earth: “They had built a nightmare like a strait jacket and laced his spirit up in it. They had him so confused he half-believed he had really done it.”

The late fifties/early sixties brought a ton of PIs of every kind to the literary world, but Powell’s Ed Rivers is one of the best. Powell has created a character that is not just a caricature, but has tremendous depth. He isn’t just bamboozled by feminine wiles, but is concerned whether someone has lost their soul and now has “a chunk missing inside” and has “lost the line between right and wrong.”
… (mehr)