How hard can it be for a PI to find a missing child? PI Jim Sader expects a quick and easy trace to find the boy. Instead he walks into a mystery of twists and turns. Evil nasty people are involved in hiding the boy. A good story full of lies and half truths from so many of the characters. I thought it was a pretty good story.

This is the second book with private eye Jim Sader after Sleep with Strangers and is even better. A compulsive read, it is not as dated as the previous one and the mystery really pulled me into the story. Sader is hired by a rich man, Gibbings to find a child after he’s received a letter telling him the child is being abused. It’s a twisty tale and Sader is a great, genuine character, very human and makes this an excellent hardboiled thriller.

Private eye Jim Sader returns in a hard-hitting thriller set in the dark corners of sunny southern California. The writing is superb and enthralling and overall, I just loved this book.

Detective Noir from the 50s--
Featuring California private eye Jim Sader: Sleep With Strangers (1955) and Sleep With Slander (1960), which are being re-published.

Unusual as written by a woman for a noir detective novel; a little dated due to the time period but still excellent examples of the style.

Lots of smoking and drinking involved but she prefers ginger ale, which I love as well. Both stories offer interesting stories involving a lot of gritty background of 1950s Southern California.

Another great classic mystery from the Library of America. I love that these are getting published, and introducing new readers to these great novels. I've been lucky enough to read four of these, and will have to pick up more. Can't believe I would have never read these if not for Library of America. This one had a great plot that was fun to read along and figure out. #SleepwithSlander #NetGalley

This is one of two private detective novels featuring California private eye Jim Sader: Sleep With Strangers (1955) and Sleep With Slander (1960), which are being re-published by the Library of America.

Lots of twists but dated and I needed lots of imagination to take myself back to Long Beach!

Thanks to Net Galley and Penguin Random House for the chance to read and review.

This is the second book featuring Private Eye Jim Sader. I found Sleep with Slander to be much more interesting than Sleep with Slander. The noir-ish element is a tad less but the mystery is too good when compared to the previous book. (Less sleaze too). One character who hardly makes an appearance here is Dan, Sader's partner. Dan was grievously injured last time and is currently enjoying a vacation with his aunt. (Recuperation vacation, perhaps)

The mystery behind the young boy and his (dead) mother is well-maintained throughout. The second half is full of twists - I never saw it coming and I certainly think it added a dash of suspense to the story.

The ending is mind-blowing. Sader might be just a private eye but he's very good at his work and the ending is just the proof of it. Overall, this was an engrossing and riveting mystery. If you are a mystery classics fan, you might want to give this book a read.

A highly recommended read from me.

The second of the author's two novels featuring PI Jim Sader, first published in 1960. This edition has good biographical information and an assessment of the author by novelist and critic Steph Cha.

I was wowed by the earlier "Sleep With Strangers" but this was even better. The writing, plotting and characterisation are all as fine as before but here the emotions and tensions are heightened as Sader searches for a a disappeared and abused child.

I was gripped throughout. Here every detail was telling, and the plot twisted from surprise to revelation.

Highly recommendable. Another must-read.

4.5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the digital review copy.

Dolores Hitchens is yet another one of those underrated crime writers who seems to be primarily forgotten in today’s literary world. The number of women crime writers of the forties and fifties is small in number, particularly those who wrote under their own names. Hitchens wrote some forty novels between 1938 and 1973. Of particular importance here is that she published two private detective novels featuring California private eye Jim Sader: Sleep With Strangers (1955) and Sleep With Slander (1960), which are being re-published by the Library of America.

Sleep With Slander is the second book in the crime-fiction duo, published five years after the first book in the series. Hitchens really should have turned this into a lengthier series. Sader is a fascinating character and Hitchens writes about him so well. Sader is an older private eye, about fifty, and is based in 1950’s/1960’s Long Beach, California. Hitchens is quite familiar with the area and writes about the jets taking off from Los Alamitos Airbase.

As often happens with these private eyes, they are engaged by the wealthy and often under mysterious circumstances where the whole truth and nothing but the truth is not readily revealed. Thus, operating with one hand tied behind their backs, they try to ferret out the truth. The hiring interview is odd, with Gibbings telling Sader he has to have “a certain kind of man. A certain touch. I need a weasel, an opportunist, somebody with the mind of a shakedown artist. A corner-cutter. Even … you might say … a kind of pimp.”

Here, a wealthy architect, Gibbings, informs Sader that his daughter, who is not to be bothered under any circumstances whatsoever, gave birth to an illegitimate child and that child was given away. Now, five years later, the adoptive parents have died and it is not clear what happened to the baby except that Gibbings has now gotten letters claiming that the child is being abused.

Of course, the first thing we would do nowadays is search the internet for information. Sader strangely enough in 1960 does not take advantage of that cascade of information and has to do it the hard way by actually talking to people and interviewing them, including the men who were with the adoptive mother (Tina Champlain) when she drowned off Catalina Island. The father long since died in an air crash.

As is typical in these things, nothing really adds up or makes sense and Sader suspects he is being played for a fool and, in fact, told that in so many words. And, Sader goes to the adoptive mother’s last house, but it has been condemned like so many others to make way for a new freeway extension in Santa Monica. This gives Sader an “ominous, lurching sense of a loss of footing.” It seems that “Everywhere he turned in this thing, he ended in a blind alley.”

As Sader treks back and forth from Orange County to Beverly Hills to Santa Monica, he offers us a parched, windswept Southern California. He has given up drinking although he has to frequent bars to meet witnesses and to entertain the kind of gadflies who know all there is to know about anybody in high society. Sader has a partner, but the partner is out of town, never to be seen. In the end, Sader is not as money-grubbing as the lone detective persona would leave you to believe, but a crusader for justice. Cynical, older, always ending up eating burgers in drive-ins with carhops, Sader’s stories take us to a world that no longer exists.

Hitchens is quite a writer and her descriptions create pictures in the reader’s minds with just few words. Wanda Nevins, who comes as close to a femme fatale as anyone in this novel, lives in a house on a hill in Laguna Beach, had “fair clear skin, the kind of skin the old-fashioned songs always compared to rose petals” and “tawny and insolent eyes that looked directly into Sader’s face.” Sader looks at her and thinks she’s been spoiled good cause “For years and years people have stared at her because she’s beautiful, and kowtowed t her and run themselves ragged trying to please her – men especially – and now she has the manners of a bitch.” In a few short phrases, Hitchens does not just describe Nevins, but gives a whole history or at least the kind of history people come up with when they first meet someone and imagine they know who that person is and what they have experienced to become the person they appear to be.

It may also be as a woman writer Hitchens could write a hardboiled novel but explain things a little differently than a man could. Instead of simply going on about the curves on the architect’s receptionist, Hitchens notes she “had lavender lips, silver fingernails, a size thirty-nine bust, nice dimples, and she was pretty.” Then, Hitchens reminds the reader that “Her blonde hair needed touching up at the roots but on her it looked intriguing.” These little touches in the descriptions give the characters quite a bit of depth.

Overall, this novel is quite an impressive foray into the world of hardboiled private eyes. It stands up well to the test of time and still feels fresh sixty years later. While I cannot say with any certainty whether the rest of Hitchen’s extensive catalog matches up to this novel, the second in the series of two novels, there is definitely enough here to make a reader want to view more.