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Wings For An Angel – Three Johnny Castle Novelettes
Wings For An Angel – Johnny Castle was a New York sports reporter. Castle was tougher than most sports writers and it’s a good thing he was – he always seemed to wind up in the middle of a murder.
Book Details
Book Details
Wings For An Angel – Johnny Castle was a New York sports reporter. Castle was tougher than most sports writers and it’s a good thing he was – he always seemed to wind up in the middle of a murder.
Death With Music (1944) – Johnny Castle steps into a puzzling maze of criminal intrigue when he sets out to probe a grim hot spot murder mystery!
Chapter I – Swell Night For Murder
Chapter II – For The Law
Chapter III – Night Ride
Chapter IV – From Headquarters
Chapter V – The Coat
Crepe For Suzette (1948) – When the gorgeous water carnival star is slain, racketeers warn Johnny Castle to lay off the case-but there’s a mystery to be solved!
Chapter I – Two Down
Chapter II – Warned
Chapter III – Gold Suite
Chapter IV – Information
Chapter V – Fancy Shooting
Wings For An Angel (1948) – The sports writer and dilettante detective battles with fists, wits and guns when the backer of a Broadway show is killed—and a lovely chorine may be handed the rap!
Chapter I – Like A Snake Bite
Chapter II – Empty Pocket
Chapter III – Callers
Chapter IV – Blue Steel
Chapter V – Glass For Ashes
Johnny Castle was the creation of C.S. Montanye (1892-1948), one of the most prolific writers of Pulp Crime Fiction.
Files:
- Montanye-Wings-For-An-Angel.epub
Read Excerpt
Excerpt: Death With Music
Chapter I
Swell Night For Murder
BROADWAY had all the flash, sparkle and brilliance of a backwoods town buried deep in the sticks. Under the dimout regulations Dream Street looked like the main thoroughfare in Podunk. And to make it worse the sky was conspiring with the War Department.
There wasn’t a moon or the glimmer of a star anywhere. The whole set-up was dark as the Cotton Club’s beauty chorus.
I cut from the main boulevard, east through Fifty-first Street, heading for that resort of pleasure known to all and sundry as the Tallyho. This was a popular night-spot. One of the better columnists often referred to it as a “concentration camp with a floor show.”
The Tallyho was owned and operated by Alf Linkhart, a smart hustler who knew all the angles and most of the answers.
As first string sports writer on the Orbit, I had been tipped off that afternoon that Silk McCall, a fight manager of some prominence, was about to make a deal with Andy Best to purchase Patsy Keegan, a promising young welterweight. As Keegan was right in line for a crack at the title— and figured to have a better than even chance to wrap it up—the thing was news.
I knew McCall usually hung out at the Tallyho. In fact, a phone call to the Orient Athletic Club, where Silk’s sockers trained, brought the information that McCall was at his favorite dive.
The Tallyho graced the center of the street. It was on the north side. Its big Neon sign had been turned off.
HEAVY draperies muffled all the windows. Only “Seven,” the colored doorman on duty, was the same. Seven, in his gold-braided uniform, with teeth that lighted up the gloom like hundred-watt Mazdas, flashed them at me as I cantered up.
“It’s Mistuh Castle, sho’ enuf,” he greeted me. “Yo’ ain’t been around fo’ quite a while.”
“Sho’ enuf,” I said. “How’s the ivory stock market?”
“Fair to middlin’, suh.”
“Silk McCall inside?” I asked.
“Yes, suh.”
Seven opened the door and I exchanged darkness for light.
Sunburst Alley might have changed on the exterior but inwardly the Tallyho was just the same. The same rococo and cheap gilt decorations. The same tables, stamp-size dance floor, hot band and smoke haze.
Also, noise.
I had just finished trading my ten-dollar felt for a brass check when Alf Linkhart, owner of the Tallyho and ex-pug, came down a flight of stairs that emptied into the right side of the foyer. He was a worried-looking fat guy, with a broken nose and twisted ears. His complexion, strictly Ossining, N. Y., was a hangover from a six-year vacation he had once taken there at the Government’s expense.
Linkhart saw me and headed over.
“Well, if it ain’t Johnny Castle. You haven’t been around in a long time. How’s tricks, kid?”
I got to the point. “I understand Silk McCall’s here.”
Linkhart’s small, slatted eyes retreated under their creepy lids.
“Could be. I ain’t noticed him. You sure he’s around, Johnny?”
“I was told that,” I said. “By your own doorman.”
“Stick around and I’ll ask Ben.”
Ben was Benny Grant, a small, dapper little man with false teeth and a smile to match. He managed the Tallyho for Alf Linkhart and also doubled in the role of headwaiter. Linkhart went between the heavy draperies and into the main part of the place. He had hardly left before the door of a phone booth, on the south side of the foyer, opened and a red-headed girl stepped out.
She was in a costume that marked her as being part of the floor show’s dancing line, consisting of some glittering green-blue spangles and net. A little here, a little there. The gal was a looker. Her profile was swell—all the way down.
Yet I could see there was something on her mind, something that made her delicately arched brows draw together and stay that way. She stood there, looking at nothing, while she nervously chewed her lower lip. Just then Linkhart came back.
“Hello, Putzi. What are you doing around front?”
“I had to make a phone call.”
“Better watch the time,” Linkhart said. “You go on in a couple of minutes.” He shifted his cigar. “By the way, meet Johnny Castle. He writes pieces for the paper. Johnny, this is Putzi Russell.”
“Hello.” I nodded to the girl. “Glad to know you.”
She looked at me without much interest and nodded back.”
Excerpt From: C. S. Montanye. “Wings For An Angel: Three Johnny Castle Novelettes.”
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