Sugar Shannon

by Lawrence Lariar, Adam Knight (Psued.)

A hep female reporter combs the back-alley Bohemian bistros of Greenwich Village looking for a beatnik killer-- Can you dig it?

When popular cartoonist Lawrence Lariar decided to moonlight as a mystery writer, creating comic book artist turned amateur sleuth Homer Bull was a natural. From the 1940s through the 1960s, Lariar continued to switch from sketching caricatures to sketchy characters, writing hardboiled crime fiction under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Michael Stark, Adam Knight, Michael Lawrence, and Marston La France, and creating a series of memorable gumshoes. Now his classic whodunits are available as ebooks.

Newspaper gal Sugar Shannon is New York City's top tabloid dream girl. But her latest scoop has a personal edge. Sugar's friend, George DeBeers, an avant-garde abstract painter so young and so talented is now so dead--knifed in the short ribs. So who among his coffeehouse crowd wanted the hot new artist to cool it?

There's an Amazonian hooker as eager to give a client a bounce as she is to roll him; a boy-crazy Zen poet and easy target for the vice squad; a former stripper gone legit, pouring joe at a village dive; and a moody sculptress carving out her own niche in the art world. One of these cats may have had their claws out for George, but now that Sugar's on the case they have to cover their tracks.

That means an offbeat killer is in Sugar's shadow, and her deadline may be closer than she feared.

142 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1960

About the author

Larence Lariar was best known as a cartoonist. He also wrote mysteries, creating comic book artist turned amateur sleuth Homer Bull. He published both under his own name and under the pseudonyms "Michael Stark," "Adam Knight," "Michael Lawrence," and "Marston La France."

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lawrence Lariar was a well-know cartoonist and editor of the Cartoon of the Year series of books. In the late 1940s-1960s he also wrote crime and mystery novels under the pseudonyms Adam Knight, Michael Stark, and Marston La France. Similar to Carter Brown, Lariar had a few different series characters, most notably the Homer Bull and Steve Conagher P-I novels. Although this novel is billed as "an exciting new series," as best I can tell this was the only appearance of Sugar Shannon, who, along with her friend Gwen Moody, are not P-Is, but reporters for a lower-tier New York newspaper. This was an ok mystery but not too exciting. Greenwich Village setting. Lots of quirky artist-types for the reporters to interview as they try to track down the killer. No action sequences. No sex scenes. Just a lot of room searching and interviewing of potential suspects. Sugar is tough-talking and fond of repartee. Stylistically, a Carter Brown comparison seems a close fit. This is the only Lawrence Lariar mystery that I've read and although I'm not rushing right out to find one, I wouldn't mind checking out another. In 2019 Mysterious Press/Open Road re-published all of his novels as eBooks so they are readily available.