I hate it when my favorite authors decide to push the envelope or whatever they called it back in 1951. Maybe the publisher advised the two fellows who wrote as "Patrick Quentin" that their formula was getting stale. But for whatever reason, RUN TO DEATH was the first Peter Duluth novel to vary from the evocative, period titles of PUZZLE FOR . . . (after PUZZLE FOR FOOLS, PUZZLE FOR PLAYERS--my favorite, PUZZLE FOR PUPPETS, FOR WANTONS, FOR FIENDS and FOR PILGRIMS. He could have called this one PUZZLE FOR GENDERS and nobody would have blinked an eye. Instead it's called RUN TO DEATH and that's such a generic title that I, who have just finished the novel for the fourth time, couldn't tell you why.
The Duluth novels had gotten more and more noir as the forties wore on, and PILGRIMS in particular has got to be one of the most depressing Golden Age detective stories ever written. Peter and Iris had started out as imitations of Nick and Nora Charles--they were Nick and Nora in a theater setting--but the bubbles in the champagne had long since evaporated and in PUZZLE FOR PILGRIMS they were reduced to a bitter, loveless marriage, both of them sexually involved with other partners, in a sinister, Lawrentian Mexico City, red with blood and hot as Hades.
RUN TO DEATH picks up where PILGRIMS let off, almost literally, like the next week. Iris has left to start a new picture (she is a top Hollywood star on the order of Hedy Lamarr or Paulette Goddard) and Peter is left alone to start thinking about a new play. Mistake! Right away he meets a young girl, Deborah Brand, barely legal, uey disturbingly seductive, who makes a play for him using sunburn cream that must have been pretty shocking in its day. It's still a little raunchy.
I won't be giving many spoilers when I tell you that Deborah falls, plunges, or is pushed into an ancient Aztec ruin like the crater of an extinct volcano. The suspects, a handful of American tourists, none of them known to Peter, and a beautiful Mexican boy with skin like the petals of a flower. This boy inspires the most homo-erotic passages in all of Patrick Quentin's novels. But he's deadly and carries a .45 tucked into the crotch of his patched overall shorts. His eyes, black, impassive opals like bullets.
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