“The Killer Is Mine” is the first of five Ed Rivers PI novels by Talmage Powell, one of the pulp writers from the Tampa Bay area in the fifties. Rivers is an ugly bear of a man who can’t stand Florida’s oppressive heat. He has a low-rent apartment and office in Tampa’s Ybor City. He was originally a New Jersey police officer who fell for a girl he thought was “everything fine and decent in human form,” only to discover that she had it bad for a hood and ended up watching her and the hood lose a race with a freight train. Rivers works on his own, often at odds with the interests of the law. His specialty seems to be defending men accused of/convicted of murder when no one else believes they have one drop of innocence.

“The Killer Is Mine” is a terrific PI novel and a lightning fast read from cover to cover. On the way to righting wrongs and doing justice, Rivers encounters seven-foot tall circus freaks, blonde call girls (with “bedroom blond hair framing a face that was almost pretty as a doll’s”), blackmailing waiters, victims families who are so wrought with grief that they are claimed by insanity and/or inebriation, precocious teenagers, and a grande dame of a wealthy family. He is battered, bruised, set on fire, shot at, jailed, run over, and otherwise trampled.

And, of course, the accused’s wife (Laura Tulman) couldn’t just be ordinary, could she? “She was the kind who’d make the whole trip for a man, right to hell’s front door. Even for a guy in his spot.” The accused on the surface doesn’t seem like a crazed child molester/killer and, the narrator explains, “in a gentler world, Wally Tulman might have been an outstanding success. But the world was not the gentle place he needed. It was a place of atom bombs and wars and death and blood, and it viewed Wally Tulman with critical, bloody eyes.” And what they accused him of was putting him through hell on earth: “They had built a nightmare like a strait jacket and laced his spirit up in it. They had him so confused he half-believed he had really done it.”

The late fifties/early sixties brought a ton of PIs of every kind to the literary world, but Powell’s Ed Rivers is one of the best. Powell has created a character that is not just a caricature, but has tremendous depth. He isn’t just bamboozled by feminine wiles, but is concerned whether someone has lost their soul and now has “a chunk missing inside” and has “lost the line between right and wrong.”
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