Wade Miller (aka the writing team of Bob Wade and Bill Miller) wrote numerous pulp novels from the late forties through the sixties. Among their earliest works were six Max Thursday novels, published between 1947 and 1951, including Guilty Bystander, Fatal Step, Uneasy Street, Calamity Fair, Muder Charge, and Shoot to Kill. Wade Miller grew up in San Diego and, naturally, wrote about San Diego, then a small city with a naval port and easy access to the border. Max Thursday was Miller’s hardboiled detective and placed in San Diego. Like most hardboiled detectives, Thursday has an uneasy relationship with officialdom, distrusted by the DA, and often one step above being handcuffed and thrown into the clink. Calamity Fair does not have the pulpiest title, but it is a good, solid private eye novel, involving as so many of the early private eye novels did blackmail and photographs and gambling debts. This one also has Thursday stuck with nonexistent clients and a web of deceit culminating in murder. Without much of a good reason, he plunges ahead with a case, even when he thinks the client is selling him a bill of goods. What’s really great about this novel is how fast-paced and full of action it is with Thursday racing all over the San Diego area from fortune tellers to penthouse babes to going barhopping in what is now the gaslamp district and, of course, why not throw in an alligator farm. ( )