Mystery Review: Sleep with Strangers, featuring P.I. Jim Sader, is similar to some classic hard-boiled detective novels, with a plot similar to The Big Sleep and the name of the client, Miss Wanderley, oddly similar to femme fatale Miss Wonderly from The Maltese Falcon. Set in Long Beach, California (as opposed to L.A. or San Francisco), Sader is a mid-life, dry alcoholic, world-weary as Marlowe but not quite as tough as Spade. On the other hand, he falls in love more easily. His investigation into a missing socialite includes baby pigs, shady real estate transactions, oil wells, several people who lose their temper quite easily, a generous number of murders, and the requisite number of beautiful women. Engaging, compelling, with plenty of twists and turns, Sleep with Strangers has a few too many coincidences but that's par for the course and doesn't louse up the story. Hitchens also adds a psychological underlay unusual in tough guy detecting. Though P.I. Sader is actually more soft-boiled than otherwise (he loses his only fistfight), but that, his fatal flaw, and a mid-life crisis make him all the more interesting. This is a highly readable detective novel by the prolific Dolores Hitchens (1907-73) who's better known (under the pseudonym D.B. Olsen) for her "cat" series featuring little old lady sleuth Rachel Murdock, beginning with The Cat Saw Murder (1939). Sleep with Strangers is a reprint by The Library of America, as is the second and final Jim Sader mystery, Sleep with Slander (1960). Too bad there weren't more. [4★]
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