Carnival of Death

by Day Keene

At a carnival set up near a shopping center, a clown is throwing money to the crowd when he and a number of the spectators are shot by a group of thieves with an alibi so perfect, they can't be caught

Genres: Noir

269 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

Day Keene, whose real name was Gunnar Hjerstedt, was one of the leading paperback mystery writers of the 1950s. Along with writing over 50 novels, he also wrote for radio, television, movies, and pulp magazines. Often his stories were set in South Florida or swamp towns in Louisiana, and included a man wrongly accused and on the run, determined to clear his name.

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in Los Angeles, Keene’s “Carnival of Death” is the story of a headline-making armored car robbery which caught a lot of attention because it took place at a shopping center where a carnival with rides had been set up, because the robbers were dressed like carnival clowns, and because the robbers created a distraction by throwing fistfuls of money in the air, causing the crowd present to erupt into a frenzy.

The primary suspects were a pair of married carnies, Mickey and Paquito Laredo. Paquito was a suspect because one of the armored car guards collapsed and died immediately after drinking the lemonade she was passing out. Mickey was a suspect because that guard had groped his wife the previous week and an angry Mickey had threatened to take action. Mickey was a former flying trapeze artist who had lost a leg on the Bay of Pigs fiasco and it was thought perhaps that he was trying to raise money for another foray into liberating Cuba.

Rather than be a simple police procedural, Keene uses Television talk show host Tom Daly as his stand-in for an investigator. Daly had interviewed Mickey the night before the robbery as a human interest story and did not believe the Laredos were capable of pulling off this caper. Indeed, he thought the police were barking up the wrong tree in arresting the Laredos and embarked on his own investigation, chasing down a platinum blonde with large breasts and often wearing little more than a robe into the Big Bear mountains.

Daly ends up getting bludgeoned with guns and confronting the ringleader with evidence while being held at gunpoint. It is often unclear though what Daly’s stake is in this, other than perhaps to get ratings or to help the Laredos. Daly seems almost too dispassionately interested to really have a stake in it.

[Kurt Reichenbaugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually it's more Noir-Lite than fully-leaded noir. It's one of Day Keene's later paperback originals, published in 1965. There are references to the Bay of Pigs invasion and lots of politically-incorrect observations about women. Also, teenagers say things like, "Get hip, make the scene, man. Don't you dig?"

The plot involves an armored-truck heist in the middle of a kiddie-carnival running in a shopping plaza parking lot. It's a good pool-side read but that's about it. The kind of book you pick up and it smells like stale Winstons.

[Steven · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only interesting part of this mystery is that the person doing the investigating is a TV talk show host. There's an armored car heist and multiple murders. The main event is retold multiple times by different witnesses so new facts come out with each re-telling and that pushes the investigation along. It's all pretty tame, however, with no edge to the action, even during the few scenes where something happens other than Q and A. The dialogue is all pretty much on the nose and that makes it boring. Basically just speed-read this one. Has clowns, if that is your thing, and some carny lingo.