Kill Her If You Can
KILL HER IF YOU CAN
THE CLASSIC HANK JANSON
The first original Hank Janson book appeared in 1946, and the last in 1971. However, the classic era on which we are focusing in the Telos reissue series lasted from 1946 to 1953. The following is a checklist of those books, which were subdivided into five main series and a number of ‘specials’.
PRE-SERIES BOOKS
When Dames Get Tough (1946)
Scarred Faces (1947)
SERIES ONE
1) This Woman Is Death (1948)
2) Lady, Mind That Corpse (1948)
3) Gun Moll For Hire (1948)
4) No Regrets For Clara (194)
5) Smart Girls Don’t Talk (1949)
6) Lilies For My Lovely (1949)
7) Blonde On The Spot (1949)
8) Honey, Take My Gun (1949)
9) Sweetheart, Here’s Your Grave (1949)
10) Gunsmoke In Her Eyes (1949)
11) Angel, Shoot To Kill (1949)
12) Slay-Ride For Cutie (1949)
SERIES TWO
13) Sister, Don’t Hate Me (1949)
14) Some Look Better Dead (1950)
15) Sweetie, Hold Me Tight (1950)
16) Torment For Trixie (1950)
17) Don’t Dare Me, Sugar (1950)
18) The Lady Has A Scar (1950)
19) The Jane With The Green Eyes (1950)
20) Lola Brought Her Wreath (1950)
21) Lady, Toll The Bell (1950)
22) The Bride Wore Weeds (1950)
23) Don’t Mourn Me Toots (1951)
24) This Dame Dies Soon (1951)
SERIES THREE
25) Baby, Don’t Dare Squeal (1951)
26) Death Wore A Petticoat (1951)
27) Hotsy, You’ll Be Chilled (1951)
28) It’s Always Eve That Weeps (1951)
29) Frails Can Be So Tough (1951)
30) Milady Took The Rap (1951)
31) Women Hate Till Death (1951)
32) Broads Don’t Scare Easy (1951)
33) Skirts Bring Me Sorrow (1951)
34) Sadie Don’t Cry Now (1952)
35) The Filly Wore A Rod (1952)
36) Kill Her If You Can (1952)
SERIES FOUR
37) Murder (1952)
38) Conflict (1952)
39) Tension (1952)
40) Whiplash (1952)
41) Accused (1952)
42) Killer (1952)
43) Suspense (1952)
44) Pursuit (1953)
45) Vengeance (1953)
46) Torment (1953)
47) Amok (1953)
48) Corruption (1953)
SERIES FIVE
49) Silken Menace (1953)
50) Nyloned Avenger (1953)
SPECIALS
Auctioned (1952)
Persian Pride (1952)
Desert Fury (1953)
One Man In His Time (1953)
Unseen Assassin (1953)
Deadly Mission (1953)
KILL HER IF YOU CAN
HANK JANSON
This edition first published in England in 2005 by
Telos Publishing Ltd
5A Church Road, Shortlands, Bromley, Kent, BR2 0HP,
United Kingdom
www.telos.co.uk
Telos Publishing Ltd values feedback. Please e-mail us with any comments you may have about this book to: feedback@telos.co.uk
ISBN: 978-1-84583-961-1
This Ebook edition © 2017, 2020 Telos Publishing Ltd
Introduction © 2005 Steve Holland
Novel by Stephen D Frances
Cover by Reginald Heade
With thanks to Steve Holland
www.hankjanson.co.uk
Silhouette device by Philip Mendoza
Cover design by David J Howe
The Hank Janson name, logo and silhouette device are registered trademarks of Telos Publishing Ltd
First published in England by New Fiction Press, March 1952
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The appeal of the Hank Janson books to a modern readership lies not only in the quality of the storytelling, which is as powerfully compelling today as it was when they were first published, but also in the fascinating insight they afford into the attitudes, customs and morals of the 1940s and 1950s. We have therefore endeavoured to make Kill Her If You Can, and all our other Hank Janson reissues, as faithful to the original editions as possible. Unlike some other publishers, who when reissuing vintage fiction have been known edit it to remove aspects that might offend present-day sensibilities, we have left the original narrative absolutely intact.
The original editions of these classic Hank Janson titles made quite frequent use of phonetic ‘Americanisms’ such as ‘kinda’, ‘gotta’, ‘wanna’ and so on. Again, we have left these unchanged in the Telos Publishing Ltd reissues, to give readers as genuine as possible a taste of what it was like to read these books when they first came out, even though such devices have since become sorta out of fashion.
The only way in which we have amended the original text has been to correct obvious lapses in spelling, grammar and punctuation, and to remedy clear typesetting errors.
Lastly, we should mention that we have made every effort to trace and acquire relevant copyrights in the various elements that make up this book. However, if anyone has any further information that they could provide in this regard, we would be very grateful to receive it.
INTRODUCTION
Kill Her If You Can was the thirty-sixth Janson novel and historic in a minor way. It was the twelfth and final novel in the third Janson series, published in March 1952, and marked the end of one of the most troubled periods of Janson’s history.
As the Hank Janson novels began to gain popularity, Stephen Frances, their author and publisher, had holidayed in Spain in the late 1940s and found himself in the delightful village of Rosas on the Costa Brava. Over the next couple of years, Frances visited the village again and decided to buy an apartment to escape from rationing and the grey austerity of post-war London. In 1950 he had made the acquaintance of printer’s rep Reginald Herbert Carter, and the two had become firm friends. Carter had ambitions as a publisher and offered to take over the Janson novels, freeing Frances of the day-to-day grind of chasing paper supplies, dealing with printers, and the dozens of other tasks that went into getting the Janson books onto the newsagent’s shelves.
The agreement Frances had reached with Reg Carter meant that all rights to the Janson name were taken over by Carter and his new company, New Fiction Press, an imprint of Editions Poetry (London) Ltd, which Carter had purchased in August 1951. Carter and Julius Reiter, whose Gaywood Press were the sole distributors of the Janson novels, set up a printing company, and Carter purchased a second company, Comyns Ltd., to begin publishing further gangster thrillers alongside the Jansons.
At the same time, Frances’s personal life was in upheaval; his marriage had failed and his mother was diagnosed with cancer. The latter died in November 1951, and Frances decided that there was now no reason to stay in England permanently.
Against this background, Frances still had to keep turning out novels. ‘Published by S D Frances’ disappeared from the title page to be replaced by ‘Published by New Fiction
Press’ on the novel Frails Can Be So Tough. More dramatically, the beautifully painted cover by Reginald (Heade) Webb also disappeared. A few months earlier, Archer Press had been heavily fined for publishing three ‘obscene’ novels, all of which had Heade covers; the Hank Janson novel Gunsmoke In Her Eyes had also been the cause of a fine levelled against a bookseller in Blackburn.
Three artwork covers disappeared entirely, replaced by a silhouette of Hank. Two more were sent back through the printing presses so that the ‘dame’ depicted on the cover could be obscured by silver ink. The next was slightly repainted to make it less revealing. The seventh, that for The Filly Wore a Rod, was replaced entirely. That for Kill Her If You Can, the next book in sequence, was, as far as I am aware, painted at the same time (probably during the autumn of 1951) as the published cover for The Filly Wore A Rod – the title lettering and 2/- cover price make this obvious.1
With all this activity, personal and professional, affecting Frances, it is little wonder that the Hank Janson novels published around that time were of somewhat shaky quality. Kill Her If You Can is a generic crime thriller set around the premise of an unknown assailant’s attempts to assassinate a wealthy heiress. Because of the generic nature of the Hank Janson titles, it could as easily have appeared under the title Broads Don’t Scare Easy, or Frails Can Be So Tough, or Skirts Bring Me Sorrow … Frances chose the titles for the simple reason that the covers were prepared long in advance of the story being written. This also explains why there is a blonde on the cover, while Beryl Pinder, the endangered heiress, has ‘bluey-black’ hair.
Whilst Kill Her If You Can is a relatively unremarkable Janson novel, plot-wise, it does contain quite a few interesting insights into Janson, the character, and his author.
An advertisement for the next series of Hank Janson books was printed at the back of Kill Her If You Can.
The story told to Hank by a barman early in the novel – that Russian peasants were eating babies to ward off starvation – was the kind of McCarthyist propaganda that was circulating in America at the time. Frances, a former Communist himself, had a firm idea of how the Cold War was being sustained by fear of ‘The Red Menace’. The Rosenberg atomic spy case was big news in 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg having been arrested in 1950 for persuading Ethel’s brother, who worked at Los Alamos, to reveal classified data on nuclear weapons, which were then passed to the Soviet Union. Frances’s passing mention of Albania, then in the grip of radical political upheaval as Enver Hoxha secured power by a Stalinist purge of his enemies, shows that he had not lost his interest in European politics.
Although by 1951 Frances had become less politically active, he still maintained a fierce personal philosophy, and he continued to attack injustice and name those whom he saw as the guilty parties through the voice of Hank Janson. In Kill Her If You Can, the plot stalled half way through the first chapter while Frances issued a polemic against the media.
The real hope of civilisation is that ordinary folk, the quiet, ordinary folk, won’t be herded beyond the limits of reasonableness by the ferocity of printed and broadcast propaganda when the pressure is put on and is intended to whip the peoples of the world into red-hot, suicidal war fervour.
As well as attacking government-sponsored paranoia, Frances also ground his heel into the police with a brief but bitter description of police interrogation tactics. All in the space of ten pages, after which Frances allows himself a breather to get on with the story. Our endangered heiress, Beryl Pinder, turns out to be something of a spitfire as she snaps and sneers out her answers to the police, denying any knowledge about why she would be a bomber’s target. Frances cleverly shows how Beryl tries to control the situation, The cops are outside the circle of light they use during the interrogation; Beryl is the focus of their rapt attention, drawing them in, asking for a cigarette, crossing her legs, mocking the officers… Think Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.
In places, Frances allows humour or a pressing need to inform the reader to suspend the plot, not always to the benefit of the novel. Having written sixty novels by this time, he was usually a little less obvious with his padding, but scenes between an American and a British pilot at a Flying Club visited by Hank and a brief history of women’s clothing smack of space filler material. Elsewhere, Frances can nail a scene or character in a few lines:
She smoked like a man. Without removing the cigarette from her mouth she said, ‘Can’t you fill in all this nonsense about security number and so on?’ The cigarette bobbed between her lips as she spoke.
Frances uses his descriptions to good effect. The setting was America, and slipping in a phrase like ‘The guy behind the huge oak desk who was obviously the apartment manager, was dressed like a Fifth Avenue tailor’s advertisement’ helped convince his readership that Hank was the genuine article. He occasionally slips: ‘stinks department’ (for forensics) is, I’m sure, British (meaning chemistry department); the later use of ‘four-flusher’ (a cheat or swindler) would have been more acceptable in a Western and is used wrongly (the context implies Beryl is saying Janson is useless or, perhaps, even a coward). But for the most part Frances sells Hank convincingly.
The best aspect of Kill Her If You Can is the relationship between Hank and Beryl, the plot being almost incidental. The last third of the novel is a fine example of Frances’s ability to wrench the most out of a situation. Hank and Beryl make their way to an isolated shack in the middle of nowhere, and the already tense relationship between Janson and the headstrong Beryl boils over under the merciless sun. The description of what happens when Beryl’s attacker tracks them down and the gruelling, nightmarish aftermath as the two walk to the nearest town sixty miles away is Frances at his finest.
Steve Holland
Colchester, September 2004.
KILL HER IF YOU CAN
1
It’s happened in Albania, it’s happened once or twice in Britain, and in some small countries in Europe it’s probably a common-day occurrence.
But it isn’t common in America!
And since the days of prohibition, it hasn’t been common in Chicago!
But it’s said there’s nothing new under the sun, and I guess Chicago was just as likely a place for it to happen as in Moscow or Paris.
I got the tip-off from an excited member of the public who shouted so loudly through the phone on account of his ringing ear-drums that I had to ask the address three times before I could understand it.
It took three-quarters of an hour to get there on account of the traffic held up for blocks around, and by that time the cops had everything in hand, had cordoned off the whole block and were hugely enjoying themselves like this was a police gala day.
From the outside of the apartment block it didn’t look like anything had happened except for the four crimson fire engines, the two white ambulances and the half-a-dozen black squad cars. There was a little glass scattered in the roadway but nothing to attract special attention.
There were so many officious cops around wanting me to flash my press card that I carried it in my hand, breast high, so they didn’t have to ask for it.
Yeah, it looked like a gala day for the cops, the Fire Department and the Red Cross as well. The entrance lounge to the apartment block was packed thick with them. Once inside the lobby, I could see further evidence of the explosion. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling and was trodden into the thick, luxurious carpet by cops’ large number nines, dust was floating in the air like an invisible cloud and tickling the back of my throat, while the sharp tang of cordite irritated my nostrils.
Things had been quiet in town during the past coupla weeks. Maybe that explained the zealousness of the Fire Department, who’d unrolled a coupla miles of hosepipes and run them in through the lobby and up the stairs.
There was no fire that I could see. Not even a wreath of smoke. Maybe that explained the slightly crestfallen faces of the firemen.
There was more evidence as I climbed the stairs to the first
floor. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling in thick lumps, powdered the stairway and scrunched underfoot as I shouldered my way through the mass of uniforms. I couldn’t have encountered more brass and uniforms if I’d been at Regimental Headquarters.
The explosion had taken place on the first floor. When I reached it, there wasn’t any doubting where it’d happened. Plaster had been shaken from the walls of the corridors, leaving them stripped and showing the naked brickwork beneath. Half the apartment doors were open, hanging crazily from broken hinges, splintered so that sharp tongues of white, jagged wood speared at my eyes.
The explosion had taken place in apartment Ten. There wasn’t much doubt about that either. I didn’t have to open the door to see into apartment number Ten. I didn’t have to do anything except stumble over loose brickwork in order to stare into the apartment and see it in perspective like a dolls house when roof and front have been removed.
It musta been quite an explosion. This was a new apartment block, modern and strongly made, expensive to rent.
It musta been nicely furnished too. But I couldn’t bet on it. A coupla tons of brickwork, plaster and ceiling distributed around can make a room or flat awful untidy and dusty.
Sid Walker, the Chronicle’s photographer, was down on one knee beside me, firing his flashlight as fast as he could insert new films. I carefully studied the scene, noted everything worthy of interest, and when Sid nodded at me with satisfaction, I threaded my way back along the corridor and downstairs to the entrance hall.