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...