Syndicate Girl (1958) is a novel by Frank Kane that did not feature his meal-ticket private eye Johnny Liddell, protagonist of some two dozen books. Instead, the hero here is a naive sap who happens to be a district attorney without knowing until well into his official career that his domain is dominated by the mob. This goof got his job mainly because the mayor's daughter is his girlfriend but it seems very impolitic of the local political boss not to wise the guy up. Once he has his rude awakening he turns crusader with the feeble aid of the second-largest local newspaper, the largest being tight with crime. In Murder is My Dish Stephen Marlowe's Chester Drum remarks that the near-totalitarian control the mob exerts over an American community is possible only in "private dick" novels like the one Kane had yet to write. It's almost dystopian in Kane's version, but stories like this always keep a solution available.
By now, however, you're wondering what a syndicate girl has to do with all this. The answer is: very little for the most part. The title character is more a framing device than anything else, appearing at the beginning and end of the book. She's what you might call a finger woman, her job being to set people up to be killed. We see her do her job effectively early, and we learn that she keeps herself safe from fingering by keeping an awesomely incriminating file on her colleagues that will be released to the press should she die at mob hands. For the climax she's brought back to do her thing with the erstwhile prosecutor, who has grown too annoying to tolerate any longer. Meanwhile, his investigation of the earlier murder has led our hero to deduce the existence of both a sinister syndicate girl and her doomsday file. This now-hardened man's Machiavellian endgame is to take her bait and to be bait himself, to set her up and kill her in cold blood with a stolen gun that will trigger the file's release. However implausible, it's an impressively dark denouement that goes some way toward redeeming this chronicle of comparably implausible naivete and oppression. At nearly 190 pages it"s on the long side for a Fifties paperback original but like many of his peers Kane reads easy. Think of it as hardboiled comfort food -- but don't think about it too much.
