Never Bet Your Life

by George Harmon Coxe

The man who was responsible for John Gannon's two suicide attempts arrived at the Seabeach Motel late on a hot Florida afternoon. That night Gannon was killed—after Dave Barnum had strangely passed out at the Club 80. There were motives all over the place, mostly involving money. But then Gannon had been a pretty hard a gambler, a promoter, and more recently in handbooks, and had never lacked enemies. In the beginning Captain Vaughn had considered Dave one of his best suspects. Later, when Betty Nelson narrowly missed being the second victim, Dave knew he would have to find out why—before it was too late!

191 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

George Harmon Coxe was an American writer of crime fiction.His series characters are Jack "Flashgun" Casey, Kent Murdock, Leon Morley, Sam Crombie, Max Hale and Jack Fenner. Casey and Murdock are both detectives and photographers. He started writing officially from around 1922, his work being for nickel and dime pulp fiction of the time. To earn money, he originally wrote in many genres, including romance and adventure stories, but was especially fond of crime fiction, his character "Jack (Flashgun) Casey" becoming a popular radio show through to the 1940s. He wrote a total of 63 novels, the last being published in 1975. He was associated with MGM as a writer.

Married to Elizabeth Fowler in 1929, Coxe had 2 children.

He was named a Grand Master in 1964 by The Mystery Writers of America.

Reviews

[Isidore]

A rather pedestrian whodunnit from 1955. Mind you, Coxe takes time to develop a sense of place, and there's a pleasant kick of nostalgia to be had from the background glimpses of resort motels, roadside clubs, and seaside tourism. And if the plot is excessively contrived, the pace never falters, and Coxe's prose is clean and direct.

[Dave]

Coxe sets his crime thriller on the Florida coast at the Sea View Motel where Boston attorney Dave Barnum has been tasked with overseeing and caretaking John Gannon. Gannon, another blackmailed old cantankerous gambler, had felt his life come undone when his daughter died in a tragic car accident, the car driven by her boyfriend Tyler, an unemployed actor, who now wants the quarter interest in the motel the daughter signed over to him.

Gannon has twice tried to end his life and Barnum’s instructions are to never leave Gannon alone, not for a second. Barnum passes out in the local nightclub to his surprise and runs back the Mike to the motel, knowing something was wrong and finding his father’s old buddy with a bullet hole in his back.

Barnum is an attorney, not a detective, but he has to play at amateur detective to figure out who did it. At the same time though, Barnum becomes a suspect himself, mainly because Gannon left his estate to Barnum, who suddenly had a motive for murder.

This forgotten piece of the Florida coast lends an atmospheric twist to the story even as it is peopled by gamblers, mobsters, and fortune hunters, all of whom could have done it.

In the end, Barnum solved the mystery in a parlor trick denouement with everyone who matters present.

Coxe is nothing if not a professional writer and he offers us a tight well-told thriller.

[Eric O. Schultz]

Standard detective novel with a noir cast: gamblers, private detectives, real detectives, lounge singers, good girls who work in coffee shop named Betty, lost heiresses etc. It made for fun reading, but I'm not sure it was worth anthologizing in Noir Novel Megapack. Surely, there was something more interesting that could have taken its place. I think I enjoyed Carnal Psycho more, even though it lacked an actual plot.

Easy to guess who did it (sort of).

[David Macpherson]

A decent mystery novel that has a lot to do with real estate and the business of hotel management. The characters were pretty thin but the sense of place, Florida in the 50s, was evocative. This was no masterpiece, but a decent little crime book,