Satan Takes the Helm

by Calvin Clements

Martin Lewandowski is out of work and sitting in a San Francisco bar when he hears that someone is hiring for the position of chief officer on the Trader. So with nothing to lose, he applies for the job. The person doing the hiring is a nice surprise. Joyce is the ship captain’s wife, and Martin is just the person she’s looking for. Captain Sloan is too lenient and needs a chief officer with backbone. He’s also too old, too crippled, and just too ugly for Joyce. Theirs is a marriage of convenience that has grown inconvenient for Joyce. What she needs in a chief officer is more than a man who can keep the crew in line. She needs a man who will help her replace the captain…

Genres: Crime, Noir

196 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 1952

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Noir At Sea

"Satan Takes the Helm" is the reason why you dig through the mounds of old paperbacks. Among the crap, once in a while you find a gem. Calvin Clements wrote few pulp novels, three others in fact. He's best known as a screenwriter for Gunsmoke.

It is a nautical pulp, which means that our characters are of course trapped together in a small confined space with nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide. From start to finish, you get that darkness, that bleakness, that ennui. Through no fault of his own, our main character, Martin Lewandoski, is descending into Dante's circles of hell. Cause that's what it is when the aging boat owner Ezra Sloan's wife Joyce decides that Martin's the one who she's got to have even if it's right under Sloan's nose. It's shades of James Cain right there, but it gets even worse when Martin realizes what a real ice cold hellcat Joyce really is. And, she terrifies the crap out of even an old sailor like him. Cold, ruthless, calculating, and insatiable.

[Edwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories set in boats or snowed-in cabins, etc. work well in the crime/noir genre since it forces tensions due to the confinement of the characters, and then sustains them since there is nowhere to escape. The story here is a familiar one. Luscious young woman is married to an ugly, old freighter owner. She has eyes on a juicy inheritance. She hires a tough-guy captain to helm the freighter and then uses her charms to seduce him and then imply that maybe things would be better if her husband wasn’t around. Clement's spin on this theme is terrific, bristling with thorny dialog and conflict between the main characters as she cleverly manipulates circumstances to influence the reluctant captain. Some nice twists keep the tension escalating to a satisfying conclusion. Great book and an easy four stars.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent 50’s Adventure,Noir,Pulp!

I’ve read hundreds of pulp novels from the fifties and sixties-Gold Medals and all. And I’ve read quite a few from Stark House Press, but I have to say this is one of the best. Well written, fast paced and though treading well known tropes(femme fatale, older man, younger man trapped by older man’s femme fatale wife) Clement does it so well it seems fresh. I definitely hope Stark House can reprint Clement’s other Gold Medal books!

[Tim Deforest · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent Noir novel from 1952. I love the setting--the narrator is captain of a tramp freighter and the elderly owner of the ship has a young wife who takes the role of the Femme Fatale. The wife, naturally, wouldn't mind if her husband was dead. The captain is attracted to her (in fact, has trouble turning down her physical advances even when saying "no" is clearly the wise thing to do.) He balks at the idea of murder, but the wife manages to twist the situation to get him involved in her plot otherwise.

Most of the action takes place on the ship during a journey across the Pacific. As I said, I love that setting. The author doesn't romantize the hard work involved in working on a freighter, but (at least for those of us who never actually worked on a freighter) it has a romantic appeal to it anyways. That, plus a few unusual twists the author puts into the standard Femme Fatale plot, make this a fascinating novel.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 4 out of 5]

My second Black Gat reprint after Awake and Die and another winner. This one has some doldrums a little ways in, but picks up just past the halfway point and is strong to the end. It's a femme fatale story like Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity set on a merchant ship. There's the older owner, his young hotsy-totsy wife, and a hunky new sailor just signed on as chief officer but who has ambitions for more, especially when he discovers the wife has a plan to get hubby out of the way, and she might need his help. Solid crime pulp.