Review: Love Me - And Die

Love Me - And Die by Day Keene
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Although published under Day Keene's byline, this was Gil Brewer's first novel. As David Rachel describes it in his introduction to Redheads Die Quickly, the collection of Gil Brewer stories he edited, Keene was awash in material and commissioned Brewer to turn his novella "Marry the Sixth for Murder!," which had been published in Detective Tales, into a novel. Which Brewer did using Keene's original story as an outline. It was published in 1951 by Phantom Books in digest format, with cover art by George Gross. After reading Rachel's review of this one I had low expectations, but was still disappointed. Basically this is just a poor Raymond Chandler imitation. The plot moves randomly and the hard-boiled dialogue is clunky. It reminded me quite a bit of what Orrie Hitt tried to do (also poorly) in Love or Kill Them All, his attempt at hard-boiled under the Nicky Weaver pseudo. This one is interesting (and collectible) only because it was Gil Brewer's first novel.

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