Take A Step To Murder

by Day Keene

If he proved the girl was innocent, then Renner himself would be arrested as the killer!

TAKE A STEP TO MURDER



Only a short time ago Renner had told the harsh truth to Tamara.



"Look," he had said, "I'm forty thousand dollars short on this deal and you can help me. I know this Kelcey Anders who isn't quite normal, understand? With him girls are a disease. Here's what I want you to let him rough you up a little, let him try to rape you and then scream for help. I'll break in and threaten him with arrest. But that’ll never happen because his old man will pay off to keep his son out of prison. Pay off forty thousand dollars to keep you quiet."



Renner never forgot the look of disgust onTamara's face, and as he stared down at the body of Kelcey Anders, he thought he knew who had mutilated and killed the town satyr.

142 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

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 3 out of 5]

Eva Gabor Was a Lounge Singer

Day Keene put out a steady stream of paperbacks through the fifties, around fifty novels to be precise. "Take a Step to Murder" sets up a conniving motel owner, an Eva Gabor lookalike complete with a Hungarian accent, a rich man's son who takes advantage of any woman he can get alone whether she's agreeable to the arrangement or not, a corpse, and a bundle of missing dough.

Despite the use of these tried and true tropes, this isn't one of his more absorbing novels. The whole setup never feels authentic and the players aren't all that genuine. It's at first like watching a "B" movie play out with a desperate motel owner in hock up to his eyeballs setting up his virginal girlfriend for a rape or attempted rape by the horny rich kid so a blackmail scheme can play out. It doesn't all quite jive. And, even then, it's not enough dough to warrant thoughts of running away to South America.

Oddly, the setting is the city of Mission Bay, California, a bus ride from Los Angeles, but it's not Mission Bay, San Diego, and it's a small insular town with a new freeway starting there but otherwise a bit isolated.

All in all, not quite up to par with Keene's better pulp work, but a typical paperback from that era.

[Carla Remy · Rating 4 out of 5]

03/2019

From 1959.
Lively scenes of action, a detailed and good mystery too.
I liked the setting, a "court" (motel, gas station, restaurant and nightclub) constructed brilliantly on the side of a to-be-built highway (a thing in the 50s, when many connecting highways were put in, and many Holiday Inns). But the highway is being delayed and the owner of the court, Kurt, won't have enough money. This leads him to crime, though he's not really bad so doesn't go through with it. Still there is a murder and he is accused and must escape.

[Still · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing.
I can’t recall reading any other titles by Day Keene but I’ve steadily collected every vintage paperback I’ve come across. I was really looking forward to reading this.
As short as it is, for me it was like wading through something by one of the dead Russians.
Very soap opera-ish with gads of sex delivered in a kind of prudish fashion.
Interesting start... slow moving mid-section... ridiculous, 50’s movie type ending.

Not giving up on Keene yet but this one just didn’t work for me.
Three stars for a very promising start.

[Edwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kurt Renner needs money to keep his motor court in business while the expressway interchange gets built. He devises a truly repugnant plan to blackmail a rapist’s rich father, but things don’t go as planned. A rollercoaster of events keeps the book rolling at breakneck pace, and although I liked the plotting, I found that the lack of any sympathetic characters took the heart out of the book. I didn’t really care if Renner succeeded in saving his motor court. Not one of Keene’s best.

[Micheal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Again, Keene's noirs are so well written and plotted, the characters and settings richly detailed. All the noir tropes are here and the story bolts out of the gate; the pacing is frantic. But... Despite all the classic Day Keene elements being in place, the story is convoluted, totally unrealistic and feels like old ground. I mean, the protagonist wants his lover, whom he wants to marry, to get raped by the town lech so he can blackmail him and save his motel? Not only is that super dark and distasteful but it just wouldn't happen.
There's really only one set piece and it comes early on. The ending is super lame. Overall, this one's a bit forgettable. Oh yeah, and the ebook is FULL of typos.

[Ryan Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent crime/pulp paperback of murder, intrigue, and a guessing game about what's really afoot beneath it all.

CW: sexual assault
But it lands in the middle star for the way it deals with the multiple sexual assaults in the book, where the women have little agency, and often very poorly written reactions to their experiences - though thankfully the events are always mostly left completely off the page.
You can take into account something having been a product of its time, but that doesn't mean it needs to be carried into the future.

[Gordie LaChance · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fast paced-murder mystery about a former bellhop and 'son of a celery farmer' who , after saving up to purchase a 'motor court' (a hotel, bar and service station), gets framed for the murder of the son of the county's most powerful man.

This is one of those books where none of the characters seem all that wonderful, at least at first. Several are redeemed by the end.

A fun, gritty read with a lot packed into under 150 pages.

[B.G. Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Surely once around the moon with Tamara was worth as much as a dead fat mexican." I didn't make that up. It's on page 44...... Cormac McCarthy once wrote "You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from" For hotel owner Kurt Renner one might say "You can never tell how bad your luck can get until you set out to illegally change your luck for the better." Even so, it's people doing illegal things to improve their situation that make books like this worth reading. The scheme Mr. Renner is hoping to pull in order to lay his hands on enough cash to save his investment is cursed from the start.

So you have Renner, and Tamara, the woman he's brought in on his scheme to lure a rich bankers predatory son into the rape they know he will commit. The set up doesn't even come close to going smoothly.

Rather than anyone waking up next to a corpse, which is a favorite set up of Day Keene's, the corpse makes a late appearance. But then the excitement level stays pretty high, with aggro cops, friends of questionable loyalty, and other parties who might have just sensed that Mr. Renner was out to 'clip' someone, and in turn, decide they deserve the money more than him.

I saw another review of this were someone thought it started out good but didn't stay good. I kind of get were they were coming from. Sometimes writers can seem pretty schizophrenic, with arrows of intrigue shooting in different directions.I can always excuse this as long as it's wrapped up fairly neat, as I thought this particular book was. Also, Day keene's characters tend to have that special bleak quality. You may also recognize it in Harry Whittington's and Gil Brewer's characters. It makes Keenes work hard to beat; even when things start to seem a bit improbable