Very Cold for May by William P. McGivern
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This 1950 police procedural is told in a very straight-forward manner like books that ended up in noir movies. The protagonist is former newspaper reporter Jake Harrison who works for a PR firm that’s representing a man currently being investigated by the government. Add to this, the fact that former WWII-era socialite May Laval is planning to write a tell-all memoir that might include the details of her potentially sordid relationship with the man Jake represents. In fact, it might contain details about a lot of past relationships. She kept everything about her day-to-day intrigues in a diary.
Nobody can, including Jake, can talk her out of writing the memoir, much less divulging who (if anyone) might suffer the slings and arrows of earlier escapades.
When she is murdered, there are plenty of suspects. The diary seems to be missing from the bedroom murder scene. Who has it? Everyone wants it and everyone seems to have an alibi.
This slim volume is well-done until we get to the ending. The ending might have worked in 1950, but most readers have–by now–seen movies or read detective stories where all the suspects are called together in a room while the main character tells them what happened to May, what happened to the diary, and why people did what they did.
On the plus side, who killed who is a surprise. On the minus side, the ending–by 2019 standards–is a bit hackneyed. Detective story aficionados may nonetheless enjoy this old novel.
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I found this old novel on my bookshelf last week and have no idea where it came from. My wife has no recollection of it either. One of us must have been assigned to read it in a college course and–assuming we did read it–forgot all about it.
—Malcolm
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