Doin’ Crimes with Robert Colby and The Star Trap

“She was one of the lost ones on the same road to oblivion all of us are traveling. But like so many escaping in the labyrinth of sensual amorality, she had more heart than guile, more warmth than a host of virtuous pretenders I have known.”

Like many mid-century paperback writers, Robert Colby’s biography is primarily the list of books he wrote, but then there’s probably no better way to remember an author than by what they wrote (a pretty definitive looking list has been compiled by Peter Enfantino for Mystery File). Like many pulp authors of the day, Colby’s bread and butter were crime, detective, and sex novels, usually all rolled into one package contained behind a beautifully lurid cover. He did a lot of writing for the publishing house Gold Medal Books, wrote a couple of non-fiction true crime books, and contributed many short stories to Alfred Hitchcock and Mike Shayne mystery magazines. He even slipped a few children’s books into the mix. He wrote a Hawaiian Eye novel that was adapted into an episode of the series, and he like many was involved with the long-running and voluminous Nick Carter, aka Killmaster, series, co-authoring The Death’s Head Conspiracy (1973) with Gary Brandner. Although he never achieved the fame and respect of a writer like Donald Hamilton, Colby proved time and again he was a capable wordsmith who could deliver action-packed pulp.

Colby scored a reasonable amount of acclaim for his novel, The Captain Must Die (1959), a hardboiled story about three bitter WWII soldiers looking for revenge against the captain who had them court-martialed for desertion twelve years earlier. Despite the acclaim, however, he never had the sort of breakout hit that made him a name in the same way as contemporaries such as Donald Hamilton (the Matt Helm series). Still, he wrote some damn good books.

The Star Trap (1960) is the sort of lean, no-nonsense hardboiled detective formula that, by the 1960s, the pulp paperback industry could produce in its sleep. That’s not a criticism. Well-executed formula can be highly entertaining, and Robert Colby knew how to deliver. It’s a tale of murder, blackmail, and betrayal playing out among the could-have-beens and has-beens shacking up in shabby Hollywood apartment buildings and posh Hollywood Hills homes. Glenn Harley has his moment in the sun. It didn’t lead to a life of celebrity and fame, but he manages to eke out a life as an actor in B-movies, though even those roles are starting to dry up for him. When he receives a panicked call at 3am from starlet Nancy Rhymer, a woman he barely knows, asking him for help. Glenn may not actually know Nancy, but he’s always lusted after her from afar. So lust gets the better of reason and he heads over to a home in the Hollywood Hills and finds Nancy, scantily clad, in the company of a dead man—and she wants Glenn’s help getting rid of the body.

Glenn knows better than to get his hands bloody with this mess, but Nancy’s story about accidentally killing the man, a chump actor looking to make the move into production, after he attacked her combined with the implied promise of sex to come clouds Glenn’s judgment. He spends the rest of the book paying for it, and scrambling to stay alive and out of jail as Nancy’s story quickly unravels and reveals a labyrinthine plot involving corrupt cops, blackmail, embezzlement, robbery, pornography, prostitution, Mob infiltration of the movie business, and a sympathetic nymphomaniac. It plays out against the dependable, surreal backdrop of seedy Los Angeles and Hollywood, where urban sprawl suddenly gives way to twisting mountain roads, dusty canyons, and the Pacific ocean depending on which direction you’re heading. 

And Glenn gets tugged in a lot of directions indeed as he tries to figure out what’s happening to him, what Nancy is up to, and ultimately, how he might be able to spin the series of events to his favor and maybe come out a richer man. It’s a difficult task, especially when Nancy vanishes, the body vanishes, and Glenn finds himself on the hook for the murder and a briefcase containing $350,000 that the victim was carrying. Throughout the many twists and turns, Colby keeps the suspense level high. There’s not really a point at which the speed flags, making for a pretty breathless (and quick) read.

I love a good, sleazy movie business pulp, and The Star Trap delivers exactly that. I also enjoy a story where a single bad decision snowballs into bigger and bigger bad decisions until all of a sudden one finds oneself holed up in a dodgy motel, trying to figure out how you can escape with your life, plus maybe a case full of money and a twisted but beautiful woman. Colby packs a lot of sex, violence, and thrills into a slim volume, the pace of his writing matching the mounting desperation of poor dumb Glenn as he stumbles into and then tries to wiggle his way out of a nightmare.