No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase (Epub)

Description

Although originally published in 1939 No Orchids for Miss Blandish is still considered one of the most brutal thrillers ever written.

User’s Reviews

Review “Brilliantly narrated…pure fun for fans of both classic mysteries and narrators who reflect old-time charm.” –“Booklist ” –This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Inside Flap NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH When Riley gets word that Miss Blandish is going out on the town with her new pearl necklace, he decides to stage a jewelry snatch. Things get a little out of hand, and the gang ends up snatching Miss Blandish, too. Now they’ve got a kidnapping on their hands. But that’s when the Grisson Gang steps in and takes over. Ma Grisson wants the pearls, but her sadistic son Slim wants Miss Blandish. And whatever Slim wants, Slim gets—one way or the other. So the ransom is paid, but Mr. Blandish doesn’t get his daughter back. That’s when Fenner is hired, a detective as ruthless as the gang he’s after. They’ve broken Miss Blandish, but will Fenner be able to break them? TWELVE CHINAMEN AND A WOMAN Hot off the Blandish case, Dave Fenner is contacted by a frightened young lady who is looking for her sister. Laying down six grand as a retainer, she tells him that all she knows is that her sister is mixed up with twelve Chinamen. Intrigued, Fenner agrees to take the case, only to find that someone has planted a dead Chinaman in his office. No sooner has he removed that problem, Fenner is than visited by two Cubans who search his office, pistol whip him—and lead him to an apartment where he finds his murdered client. Now it’s personal and Fenner will stop at nothing to find the gang behind this strange operation. Which leads him to Pio Carlos, trafficker in human cargo and Glorie Leadler, a beauty who is not at all who she seems. –This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ You know the different writing, art and photography styles, right? For example, the romantic photographing a street at night would give us an ethereal, dreamlike vision of quiet neighborhood, shrouded in gentle mist or fog, rendered in beautiful black-and-white, showing dark, rich blacks, some beautiful gray tones and stunning white highlights. The realist would give us photo of the street as it really is, regardless of whether it’s black-and-white or color; no more, no less. Finally, the naturalist would show a filthy, depressed, run-down, neighborhood from the view of the gutter, looking over the body of a passed-out wino or mugged sailor, garbage, graffiti roving street people in the background.This book is stark naturalism. It was meant to shock, which is does even 80-years after it was written. It’s tragedy writ large. Imagine O. Henry on meth.

⭐ After reading the fierce first chapter, I was totally surprised to discover that this book was written in 1938! The novel is just as dark, violent, and explicit as anything written today, and I enjoyed every page of it! I can see why the book was such a hit and such a controversy at the same time when it was released. It wasn’t until after I finished the first chapter of the kindle edition, that I realized that I was reading a revised version of the novel, “updated” by the author for more modern audiences in the mid-60’s. After skimming through passages from the original text, I was shocked to find out that the language and some of the content was softened tremendously! When I read hard-boiled noir, I don’t want it soft, I want it as hard as can be! So I paused my reading to track down the only edition that I could find with the original text, and that was this paperback edition, the one published by Bruins Crimeworks.Described as a “shocking tale of vile, ruthless, gangsterism,” it tells the story of the kidnapping and ransoming of the beautiful, innocent, unnamed daughter of millionaire John Blandish. The girl ends up in the hands of the infamous old lady Ma Grissom, and her gang of thieves and killers, including her psychotic son and knife-man Slim Grissom. Months later, the girl has still not been found and her father hires private dick Dave Fenner to find out what happened to her. Her father partly hopes she is dead, because if she isn’t, one can only imagine what the Grissom gang has been doing to poor Miss Blandish.The novel is well-plotted, fast-paced and never boring, with raw and lurid details and vivid characters in the villainous gangsters. My jaw definitely dropped a few times at the horror of the story and the situation that Miss Blandish was in, being a rich girl that has always been protected by the terrors of the world, being suddenly thrust into something that might ruin her innocence completely. And that ending? Jeez…stuck in my head for days…

⭐ “No Orchids for Miss Blandish” is a powerful and vivid crime noir novel written in 1939 by James Hadley Chase. It is remarkable for its time in its frank and unsentimental treatment of sexuality, violence and the gangster culture that had been allowed to take root and flourish in America. It’s also remarkable because it’s a great American crime novel…written by an Englishman who had learned of gang culture and its popularity in American fiction through newspaper accounts, which gave him stories of Ma Barker and John Dillinger, and his experience in the book industry, which let him know what was popular with the reading public; indeed, except for a few lapses in vocabulary, one would not guess Chase was an Englishman. And, finally, “No Orchids for Miss Blandish” is remarkable because it was Chase’s first novel, written over a three-month period.Briefly, a petty crook learns that Miss Blandish (daughter of a multimillionaire, back when a million was worth something) and her fiance are going to visit a particular roadhouse and sees it as the perfect opportunity to relieve her of her $50,000 diamond necklace. Things go wrong, the fiance is killed, and the crook and his two cohorts take her with them. Things go from bad to worse for Miss Blandish when they have a chance encounter with the Grissom Gang, her captors are murdered, and she becomes their prisoner, a million-dollar kidnap victim. Just when Miss Blandish thinks things can’t get any worse, Slim Grissom, Ma Grissom’s simple-minded sociopathic knife-wielding son, discovers that girls are different than boys, and takes a shine to their captive, psycho puppy love. The remainder of the book not only details the efforts to recover the kidnapped girl, but her spiral into a drug-induced submissive state, and the activities and machinations of all the peripheral characters.The story is somewhat derivative of other fiction of the time, but his lack of sentimentality and romanticism sets “No Orchids for Miss Blandish” apart from other efforts. The book was shocking to English readers, and no less so to Americans when it was published here, though to modern readers, accustomed to soft-porn romance novels from the magazine aisle of the local supermarket, it will seem that Chase turns his narrative eye aside whenever the action becomes too carnal. And, also, the situation will not be so alien to modern readers as it was to readers of the late Thirties, not with our pop-psychology knowledge of Stockholm Syndrome and the frequent news reports of the Nice Guy Next Door who, it has been discovered, has kept sex slaves hidden in his house for years. Still, despite our callousness and jaded sensibilities, the story yet retains a visceral power to surprise, shock and engage the modern reader. It is well worth finding.

⭐ First, I must warn that this is only four (or five) stars for a reader in the market for, as my headline has it, ugly, sordid, noir pulp. I, a fan of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, found parts of it hard to take. It may not be right to call it noir, since it does not have the noir formula of the evil femme fatale leading the tarnished protagonist to hell. The atmosphere is pitch black, however. Almost everyone is at least corrupt; most of them seem to be certified psychopaths.The novel has an unusual structure. It shifts protagonists at least three times. I will try carefully to avoid spoilers, but the author’s focus shifts from the starting group to a different group and then, halfway through the novel, introduces an archetypal private eye. He’s a relatively early example, since this novel was published in 1939, the same year as Chandler’s The Big Sleep. (I’ll bet Mickey Spillane read this one. Mike Hammer and his sexy, marriage-happy secretary Velda are very reminiscent of No Orchids for Miss Blandish.)Now, only one caveat about the Kindle edition. This is a book written in 1939 featuring a Dust Bowl style gang highly reminiscent of Ma Barker’s. The whole atmosphere suggests that outlaw period. These guys fit right in with John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, et al. There will always be criminals, but this group is as distinctive in time as Jesse James and Billy the Kid belong to the post-Civil War West and Al Capone and company belong to Prohibition. It is therefore jarring when there are references to, say, big-screen television sets. This is because the Kindle edition is the update and rewrite that Chase did in 1962. Apparently the rewrite is quite extensive and may indeed have improved the novel in many ways. In my opinion, it feels startlingly accomplished for a debut novel. Perhaps that is because what I read is actually extensively revised by a veteran writer. In any event, be warned. You’ll be reading a 30’s style gangster story when a weirdly anachronistic detail will jump out.It is also fun to realize that Chase is British. He certainly absorbed the American hard-boiled style. No hint of the Christie-Sayers British “Golden Age” here. This is not a glass of sherry. It is straight-up American cheap bourbon.

⭐ James Hadley Chase fell in love with American crime novels while a young man in England, during the 1930s, so he started writing them himself, in imitation of Hammet and James M. Cain. He read books on American slang, consulted street maps of Chicago or wherever, and just did it. American critics and readers never quite took to him and I’ve never understood why. He’s an excellent writer, who went on to write more than eighty books in a very long and successful career, many of them set in countries other than the US. George Orwell admired his work, to name just one influential critic. This is the only one of his American books I’ve read and I defy anyone to find a sentence in it that could prove the author was foreign. It is, quite simply, an excellent example of American noir fiction. The fact that the author was not American is a trivial detail. I read his “A Lotus for Miss Quon,” set in Vietnam in 1960 and it is a very good thriller–concise, fast paced, vivid characters. His birth name was Rene Raymond, and he was one tough Brit. During the second world war he joined the Royal Air Force and rose to the rank of squadron commander. I’ll be reading more of his work.

⭐ A gangster thriller written in 1939, revised (language updated) in 1961. In many ways this is a remarkable work because of the psychological depth given the characters. Chase began his career as a bookseller and this was his first novel. It was written in England in 1938 over the course of six weekends. Chase had not been to the United States and his description of Kansas will be a surprise to people living in the Sunflower state. On the other hand, his use of a dictionary of American slang and works on the underworld of 1930s in the Midwest make the characters and their dialog convincing for the period.

⭐ My wife got a copy of No Orchids for Miss Blandish on her Kindle. She seemed a little dazed when she recommended it to me.I got a copy; whoo-eee! Earthy. Hard-boiled. Manly men, and they don’t make dames like that any more. Written in 1939, it’s rather dated, but good reading if you want to soak up some of the era’s popular culture.I’ve never read any Mickey Spillane, but I imagine he had a well-worn copy of No Orchids for Miss Blandish.Caveat: there are two versions in the Kindle store the last time I checked. You’ll want to read the longer version.

⭐ This is a superb crime thriller about a jewelry heist that becomes a murder and kidnapping.I’m not going to give away any more of the plot other than to say it is action-packed and completely involving. I made the mistake of reading this while having lunch, and looked down in horror to see that I had indeed eaten an entire sleeve of Townhouse crackers while caught up in the story.If you like a raw, gritty, no-frills, down and dirty thrill ride…I’m out of cliches – just read the damned thing.

⭐ I had never heard of the story until the movie based on the book ran on TCM in the early hours of the morning. I didn’t watch it, but decided I had to have the book.Very film noir feel to the story. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Cagney’s White Heat character was based on Chase’s “Slim”. The same “Top of the World, Ma”, coupled with amoral sadistic behavior.At first it was a little hard to change gears in the writer’s POV, from the hoods to the detective, but once you figure it out, it is a very nice read.

⭐ have an original paperback copy in my book collection. i like the story. i started reading james hadley chase in the 60’s. liked what i read. wanted a better copy so i bought this double.

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