Honey in his Mouth - Lester Dent

Lester Dent - creator of Doc Savage - has a little bit of a different spin on the hard boiled pulp crime genre. The characters are indeed all greedy, grasping, violent and double-crossing, but the difference here is the nature and scale of the operation being planned. This one involving a syndicate plotting the overthrow - or at least the continued embezzlement through impersonation - of the president of a South American nation.

There is a small time crook involved. Walter Harsh is a grifter making a living taking photographs involving whatever kind of scam he can come up with, but when he cheats a photographic supplier out of a large amount of stock, his luck finally runs out. He finds himself pursued in a car chase that puts him in hospital, where his blood group is noticed and picked up by an investigator with a proposition for him. Not only is the blood group right but Harsh even looks like El Presidente. Except he doesn't have a scar, but that can be easily fixed.

Lured by the promise of large sums of money - like honey in his mouth -  and the threat of illegal activities being reported, Harsh has no choice but to go along with the scheme. He's not too smart, and is kept largely in the dark about the nature of the operation, but he knows when things aren't on the level and starts to have serious doubts about what he is getting himself into.

Honey in his Mouth appears to be a little outside of the usual US small-time crooks and murder of the traditional pulp fiction, but it remains very much rooted in the genre in terms of the characterisation and plotting. There's a lot of preparation needed to get a small-time grifter like Harsh up to speed of impersonating the President of a South American nation, and room for a lot of double-dealing. Harsh is a wonderful character, a petty thug who is violent and greedy, who is going to get what is coming to him sooner or later.