Out for Blood (2014)
As a young man, Edward Pivenshank, known as Blackjack, was a famous outlaw wanted by bounty hunters all over the Midwest. Now in his fifties, Blackjack has been living quietly in his house in the foothills of the Ozarks. But the past has a way of catching up with you.
In an isolated hollowed-out section of these hills, a mysterious stranger has just been caught, dead on a fence post. This stranger was shot at close range. So too, for that matter, was a black panther caught in the same hollowed-out section—but, of course, it wasn’t a man. This is no ordinary murder. Someone is murdering bounty hunters and bounty hunters’ families, shooting them with a single .38 caliber bullet to the heart. At the same time, he is making a great deal of noise about a hundred million dollars. If any bounty hunter can make him pay up, he’ll leave the Ozarks and never return. And so the first bounty hunters—and their families—come looking for Blackjack and the dead black panther in that Ozarks hollow. But there will be a lot of them.
This is only one of four classic novels from Thomas Perry and Walter Woods, two of the most famous names in the world of hard-boiled detective fiction. The first of Perry and Woods’ books was published in 1935, and by 1957 they had written a total of thirty-three books together. The Blackjack Mysteries were published by the British publisher Collins in hardcover and paperback in 1954, and were subsequently released in the United States by Grosset & Dunlap. The first four titles are listed above.
The following table shows the books in order of when they were written.
Title Publication Date
Out for Blood (1954)
In Trouble (1955)
One Way Ticket (1955)
A Slick Deal (1956)
Down and Dirty (1956)
It Started with a Kiss (1957)
It’s a Crime (1958)
Too Many Crooks (1959)
Get Out of Jail (1960)
The Girl in the Morgue (1961)
Out of Bounds (1961)
Too Late to Deny (1962)
Never Fear, She’s Alive (1962)
It’s Called Homicide (1963)
The Face in the Street (1963)
No One Ever Got Away with Murder (1963)
There Goes the Nurse (1964)
The Fool Killer (1965)
They Say She’s Murderous (1965)
They Killed Him Dead (1965)
Innocent in Jail (1966)
Dead Men Don’t Make Trouble (1966)
Hush Money (1966)
She Was the Other One (1967)
Murder, Anyone? (1967)
Saving Face (1968)
Dead Man’s Holiday (1968)
Too Many Heads (1968)
The Fatal Sting (1969)
A Death to Match Them All (1969)
He Lived Twice (1970)
It’s a Murder…Merry Christmas! (1970)
The Killing Kind (1971)
The Black Widowers (1972)
The Claw of the Black Widow (1973)
Lonely in My Grave (1974)
The Deadly Doll (1975)
Fade Out Murder (1975)
The Body in the Bookcase (1976)
Cry Blood, Cry Murder (1976)
The Man Who Killed Himself (1977)
Murder, Take One (1977)
Death Is a Lonely Business (1978)
Deadly Decision (1978)
Fade Out Murder (1979)
Murder by Gaslight (1980)
The Claw (1980)
The Bones of Danny Malloy (1981)
Fade Out Murder (1981)
Murder for Sale (1981)
Murder’s No Business (1982)
Murder, Anyone? (1982)
Murder on the Run (1983)
Don’t Drop the Soap (1984)
The Death of Danny Malloy (1985)
She Always Wins (1986)
The Big Kill (1986)
Tough as Nails (1987)
The Black Widowers (1987)
Murder, Take Two (1988)
Murder on Bondi Beach (1988)
Cry Blood, Cry Murder (1989)
Bitter Justice (1989)
Blood Is Thicker than Water (1990)
Murder Most Foul (1991)
Blackjack: The Life and Times of Edward P. “Blackjack” Pivenshank (2001)
Pivenshank wrote most of his books using the pen name Thomas Perry. His books had also appeared in a number of other pen names. See here for his authorship as “Thomas O. Perry” and here for his authorship as “Richard G. Davis”. See here for the authorship as “Edward Pivenshank”, and here for the authorship as “Anthony R. Collin”. See here for the authorship as “Anthony R. Colman”.
There are many similarities between their crime stories and those of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. The two shared a number of favorite crimes that they used again and again, especially for murder in private homes. The crimes, of course, were very hard to solve. For example, in Perry’s mystery The Big Kill, a man is gunned down in the study of a wealthy home. The only indication of who did it and why is a note written on his chest by a dead hand. Perry also shared Chandler’s interest in the “tough guy” characters and the underworld of criminals. Perry’s first Blackjack book, Out for Blood, concerns the murder of a man named Bill McAfee. McAfee is killed in the same way as a couple of mob killers in Chandler’s books, shot in the back of the head with a .38. Another character in Blackjack, Blackjack himself, is modeled after Chandler’s Hildy Johnson. One difference between Perry and Chandler is that Chandler seemed to enjoy killing off some of his major characters. Perry didn’t do that nearly as much as Chandler did. Blackjack outlived many of Perry’s other characters. (Pivenshank was first published in 1954; Chandler in 1942.)
The series appeared over two decades and in many different series titles. “Blackjack” was a private investigator created by James Sandoe in 1941, and “Pivenshank” is an honest newspaper reporter. That series continued for some years after Blackjack’s publication in 1954, continuing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There were two later short-lived mystery series titled Blackjack. (Blackjack was a private investigator who worked in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s. He was written by Thomas O. Perry and was first published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1954.) Perry’s next important series after Blackjack was a series of ten black-and-white crime novels written under the name Anthony R. Collin, which was set in England. The mystery series Blackjack lasted ten books.
One of Chandler’s favorite authors is Raymond Chandler. He enjoyed mysteries of the type written by Perry and Chandler, especially the early works of Dashiell Hammett, and he was an enthusiastic fan of Poe, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. In fact, Chandler, Perry and Hammett were great admirers of each other. When Blackjack appeared in print, Chandler sent a fan letter to Blackjack in which he offered “congratulations” and praised Blackjack’s first novel. “I was very taken with Blackjack” wrote Chandler. “I liked the Blackjack character and the plot. Most of the people I know like you for the same reasons.” As another example of the kind of letter that Chandler sent to many writers, he also wrote to Poe and Hammett, saying that he had read their first work and adding a personal note to Poe. In one of Chandler’s letters he referred to Blackjack’s book In the Black Widowers as “the finest police procedural ever to appear, by me or anyone else.”
All these qualities show that Chandler was very generous in praise of a book like Blackjack that was published by a first-time writer. In fact, Chandler would have been more easily impressed by Blackjack than many first-time writers. Perry had written a number of novels by the time he wrote Blackjack, and he wrote at least
