Say It With Bullets by Richard Powell

"This ought to be a bad dream. 
It was only in bad dreams that you did the right and logical thing and found it was horribly wrong and stupid. Maybe in a moment somebody would wake him and tell him to stop screaming. You didn't remember bad dreams very long. 
A few hours after waking there wouldn't be much left except a vague memory of a haunted top-of-the-world landscape where one had almost been caught by 
faceless things."

"Bill Wayne told his beautiful tour guide that he took the bus trip through the West to relax. But who can relax with dead bodies turning up at every stop?

From Cheyenne to Salt Lake City, from Reno to Yosemite, Bill's secretly on a mission to discover which of his former army buddies shot him four years ago and left him for dead. But with all the lead that's flying around, Bill will be lucky to make it to the end of the tour in one piece..."

So says the back cover of my copy of HCC-018, the reprint of Richard Powell's Say It With Bullets originally published in 1953. 

Like 361, it's another one I had trouble reading and staying engaged but enjoyed "watching" in my head. Reading it - particularly the banter between Bill and the beautiful tour guide (aka Holly, who just happens to know Bill from their hometown, where she used to chase after him when he was a local football star) - was a bumpy ride. 

It's a great set-up. Not mentioned above: Bill used to fly planes for Nationalist China, along with the friends who double-crossed him, and was left for dead when he objected to their plan to lift a plane full of "medical supplies" in the dying days of the Chinese Civil War. So there's a bit of real-world background animating things. The bus trip through the West is an interesting angle. I wonder if (had the novel not had a few twists upsetting Bill's plans) a homicide detective would put anything together? In a TV show they would, but it'd be a lot of intuitive leaps to make, unless someone (Young Sherlock Holmes-style) pieced together the common element in each of the dead man's backgrounds.

Dan Stumpf called Say It With Bullets a "bimbo book: not much for brains but easy to get along with." A fair description, I suppose, although the banter is a bit dated. Still, no one reads pulp from the 50s for modern-sounding banter. Even when they're not saying "Yeah, see!" they're saying "Yeah, see!" if you know what I mean.

Many reviews focus on the book's humor. I confess: not much of that that landed with me. Looking up the author's wiki I see a few items of interest regarding some of his other works. I can't say Say It With Bullets would automatically make a great film but in the right hands it certainly could. You could say that about most any book, of course. What this would make is a great mid-5os B-reeler. I could see it being a forgotten gem, directed by Ed Dmytryk or something. Shades of Hitchcock, too. Okay, final answer: I wish Hitchcock had directed a version of this somewhere, forgotten by time, and it could be rediscovered in 2020. 

The main twist was rather easy to see. But it unfolds organically enough.

Would I recommend it? For a rainy afternoon, sure. Or in my case, for Hard Case Crime reading while doing laundry. 

~

The Hard Case Crime Chronicles will continue with...

The Last Match by David Dodge.

Appearing sooner or later. See you then.