The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.74 - 1939?
As with so many of these Crime-Book Society inter-war writers, I had never heard of Leo Grex before reading this novel. He was an incredibly prolific wordsmith, writing scores of crime and western fiction and crime non-fiction. Born Leonard Reginald Gribble in February 1908, he also wrote under the pseudonyms of Bruce Sanders, Dexter Muir, Piers Marlow, Louis Grey and Sterry Browning. He used the name Landon Grant for his Westerns. His family came from Barnstaple, Devon and he had his first novel, The Case of the Marsden Rubies, published in 1929. Some of his crime fiction was football based. He married Nancy Mason in 1932 and served in the Press and Censorship Division of the Ministry of Information between 1940 and 1945. After the War, he was a founding member of the Crime Writers Association in 1953. Gribble died in September 1985. His final work, Violent Midnight, was published posthumously in the following year.
I have to admit straightaway that I did not enjoy Transatlantic Trouble. Over half the book was set in a seedy New York, involving minor crime bosses, their unpleasant and thuggish henchmen and some rather unlikeable businessmen. James (Jimmy) Keith is the English half of a two-man Anglo-American Detective Agency. He is the son of a respected Scotland Yard officer, now deceased. The American partner is Carl Hoffman, a man used to dealing with shady crooks in the American capital and not above using shady methods himself. Jimmy is over in New York to drum up business; at the Agency's office he first bumps into Virginia Kelsey, Carl's secretary: who flashed her dark eyes at me as I walked in. She always gave me the impression of being excited at meeting me. The Agency are to meet a Mr. Mitchell Bainbridge, broad-shouldered, full-faced, with heavy brows and thick pink hands, he embodied power. I had met his like in clubs and at parties: men who bludgeoned their way up over the heads of their fellows. However, Bainbridge has a problem - his wayward daughter Marilyn has disappeared. This is but one string, albeit a major one, in the story. Apparently, she has absconded to marry Tony Rossi, a crooner at the Cloven Hoof. Her father had already rescued Marilyn from unwise attachments to two saxophone-players, a Greenwich village airedale, a Pan-American pilot, one pug and a couple of floozies. A real-goer, then.
If the author had just kept to that main story, perhaps I would have enjoyed the tale more. However, we get involved with a small-time, but puffed-up Italian crook called Luigi Spinelli, his side kicks Herman (his body had the willowy line of a dancer's, his neck was as thick as a bull's) and Sweeny Burke (who has a wizened pig's face), and a rather rambling tale about racehorse skulduggery (betting is, of course, involved). On top of this, is another story about a rivalry over oil exploration. Bainbridge's great competitor is Stanley Dorrance, a Britisher who lives in Mexico and who controls Allied Mexican Oil - he is a pain the neck and sundry other places to Bainbridge. I soon rather lost track of who was doing what to who; this didn't really get much clearer once the settings changed to a transatlantic voyage and then London and the Newmarket area. I found I couldn't engage positively with any of the characters, not even the narrator, Jimmy Keith. The dialogue was usually staccato. I suppose a good thing was that the bad people all died or were imprisoned - in England as well as the USA - the two fairly ruthless businessmen made up and Jimmy and Virginia looked likely to become a permanent item. But, frankly, by the end of the novel, I just didn't care!
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