Wade Miller's Max Thursday Novels

The six Max Thursday novels were written from 1947 to 1951 and are set in San Diego, California. Written by Robert Wade and Bill Miller under the name "Wade Miller", they are excellent detective novels of the hard-boiled variety, though with less sex and violence than most. The star of the show is the tall, wiry Max Thursday. Max is a fundamentally decent man with an aversion to violence so strong that he doesn't own a gun.

Also making frequent appearances are his policeman friend and sometimes adversary Lieutenant Austin Clapp, and his newspaperwoman-girlfriend, Merle Osborn.

The novels are now out of print, but four of them were in-print as recently as the early 1990s. Copies are available at used book stores or at sites like abebooks.com. Wade Miller wrote many other detective and crime novels, including Badge of Evil which was made into the Orson Welles film Touch of Evil. Recently Wade Miller's 1952 crime novel Branded Woman (not a Max Thursday novel) was reprinted by Hard Case Crime.

Bill Miller died in 1961. Robert Wade is still living and now writes mystery reviews for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Max Thursday Novels

• 1947   Guilty Bystander
  An alcoholic Max Thursday pulls himself out of the gutter to track down and rescue his kidnapped son. One of my favorites, though I figured out the identity of the criminal mastermind before Max did.
  
  
• 1948   Fatal Step
  A youth is murdered at a carnival by a man with his head wrapped in bandages. Max is hired by the boy's father to find the killer.
  
  
• 1948   Uneasy Street
  Max gets tangled up with an international gang of crooks and the hunt for a music box. The presence of a femme fatale named April Ames spices things up. My favorite of the lot.
  
  
• 1950   Calamity Fair
  A simple collection case spirals out of control and soon Max is chasing murderous blackmailers and the beautiful Quincy Day. Another good one.
  
  
• 1950   Murder Charge
  Max takes over a mobster's identity in an attempt to infiltrate the underworld. More a straight crime novel than a mystery. In my opinion this is the weakest of the Max Thursday novels.
  
  
• 1951   Shoot to Kill
  Max loses girlfriend Merle to another man. Soon the other man is a suspect in a murder case. Merle asks Max for help, not knowing that he's planted evidence at the crime scene in the hopes of getting his rival convicted.

With a mind-numbing regularity, most American mystery novels are set in New York or Los Angeles. So it was a joy to discover a series set in San Diego, my hometown. I've put together a modest website documenting Max Thursday's old haunts. I tried to keep the photos down to a reasonable size.

This website is a work-in-progress which I intend to update as I have time. I would like to expand it to cover more mystery and detective fiction. I'm most partial to older novels and writers such as Craig Rice, Norbert Davis, Helen McCloy, Ross MacDonald, Rex Stout, Frederic Brown, Raymond Chandler, John Dickson Carr, and others. I do occasionally read more contemporary writers such as Bill Pronzini and Michael Connelly.

Photographs of locations in the Max Thursday Novels

Other Links of Interest

You can email your comments and suggestions to markm@mistymansion.com.

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