When I stepped outside my Hammett-Chandler-Ross Macdonald comfort zone, the very first hard-boiled crime story I read by a more obscure author was "A Nose for News" by Richard Sale. Originally published in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1934, it was funny, fast-paced and engrossing; I was impressed by Sale's ability to cram enough action for a novel into just twenty-three pages. (You can find that story in Ron Goulart's first-rate collection The Hardboiled Dicks.) His skill as a writer is not in doubt.

Which makes a book like 1946's Benefit Performance all the more disappointing. It's readable, but so bland and undistinguished that you'll wonder why you even bothered. Sale's humor is intact (that's what got me through the novel), but all the rough edges--the things that made the crime stories in pulp magazines so interesting--have been ground off. This tale of an aging Hollywood star pretending that he's dead to draw his antagonist into the open is a good example of how the crime genre tended to suffer when its authors took the mainstream route. ( )