You actually get two books in this volume, short novel 'Cut Me In' and novella 'Now Die In It'. Both are of their time, hard boiled and lots of fun. 'Cut Me In' has an interesting backdrop (publishing), a likeable somewhat hapless hero, lots of murders and almost as many dames. 'Now Die In It' has hard drinking down on his luck PI and a suitably depressing denouement. Two winners from the master, McBain and an enjoyable alternative to the 87th Precinct books. ( )

“I didn’t really give a damn, you understand, because the buzz saw inside my skull and the decaying caterpillar in my mouth told me there’d be plenty I wouldn’t remember about last night.”

Josh Blake’s business partner is shot to death. And their big contract, the Cam Stewart agreement is missing. Who done it, and why? Josh follows a trail of bodies to find out that answer! A good, quick read that was fun too!

This book also includes “Now Die In It” a novellette featuring the former detective Matt Cordell, “the screwed shamus”. Short, but good! ( )

The publisher’s blurb for Cut Me In talks about having to find a killer because that’s what you do when your partner, Del Gilbert, is murdered. For many of us, that brings back memories of Spade and
Archer, particularly when you find out that the partners didn’t particularly like each other and the surviving one had scandalous thoughts about the dead one’s wife. And, to top it off, the police detective is suspicious. But, McBain did not give us a remake of any Maltese Falcon novel. Indeed, Josh Blake and Del Gilbert are not detectives at all, but literary agents. Kind of a different twist for a hardboiled pulpy crime novel. This novel works really well, starting with Robert McGinnis’s excellent understated cover art. What really makes it though more than anything else is the top-notch pulpy writing. I never realized how good McBain really was.

There is something about the way he writes in this novel that makes you see, feel, and hear the descriptions, beginning with the girl sitting at the kitchen table with the steam rising from the coffee cup, her legs crossed, the ankle straps, the nylon stockings stretched taut against the curve of her leg, the pale orange lipstick that accentuated her blondness and added just a touch of color to her full lips. Then there’s the description of how Blake feels with the buzz saw inside his skull and the decaying caterpillar in his mouth. Then, Blake talks about the top of his skull blowing off when he sees the safe open in his office. And, all throughout the novel McBain throws in these terrific pulpy phrases so, as the reader, we can feel the tension in the room, the distraction, the eyes roaming, the sounds coming through the windows. You can feel the shock when someone hears news and it is almost as if she were hit in the stomach and she holds onto her glass as if she were holding a life preserver. There’s other sounds too – like the shrill clamor of the telephone slicing into the air, shredding the silence, leaving nothing but the heat. What’s amazing though is that the novel written and first published over sixty years ago feels fresh and new today. It’s not stuck in a time warp as so many old-time novels feel. There’s nothing necessarily that places this in the fifties except when you realize no one has cell phones. It is an easy book to read and the pages just fly off your hands as you thumb through it. This is precisely the kind of book I look to find in Hard Case Crime’s catalog. There might at times be a bit more dialogue and a bit less action than one would want, but not enough to detract from the read. Plot-wise, it gives you some themes that you will find in other crime novels from that era, the partner murdered, the widow, the mistress, the cynical homicide detective, the innocent man who unfortunately finds the body and has a motive for murder, but the writing and the feel are what puts this novel on the top shelf for me.

As an added bonus, at the end of the novel, Hard Case Crime also gives us a short novella) featuring Matt Cordell (The Gutter and The Grave). This is a classic 1950s hardboiled detective story with teenagers hanging out at the ice cream parlor. It's definitely worth reading. ( )