Combine Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest with Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake, throw in some self-effacing humor and what have you got? Murder Can't Stop (1946), the second of four novels in the Bill Lennox series. A fixer for Hollywood's largest studio (the fictitious General Consolidated), Lennox was W.T. Ballard's most popular character and appeared in the pages of Black Mask for many years before Ballard began writing novels about him. The setting is a small Northern California mountain town which serves as a weekend retreat for movie types; the head of a rival studio turns up dead, and there's more murder and mayhem than Lennox can shake a stick at as he finds himself the victim of a frame-up.

Humor is vital to Ballard's work. Yes, there's the usual fast action and convoluted plotting that readers of the hard-boiled subgenre demand, but Ballard's central characters were always able to laugh at themselves and the situations they stumbled into. For that reason, his detective novels and stories have aged remarkably well, and it's a damned shame that they're all out of print. Ballard's masterpiece, if you're curious, is 1967's Murder Las Vegas Style (after which he bade farewell to crime fiction to concentrate on Westerns), but the Lennox series is extraordinarily readable as well. Murder Can't Stop is my favorite among the four. ( )