Joe Dunne is a big-city private investigator hired to do a job he doesn’t really want: scaring a local student-preying drug dealer out of town. Nonetheless, Joe does the job well. Perhaps even too well, because then his one-time employer recommends him to a guy who comes in with an even bigger assignment: “I want you to kill five people.”

Joe’s no killer, but the price is awfully right, and could put him smack onto easy street. Such a setup is difficult to resist – for him and us – in Shepard Rifkin’s 1960 novel THE MURDERER VINE, now back in print and unabridged from Hard Case Crime.

As his benefactor explains, his beatnik college-student son has gone off with two black classmates to Mississippi to campaign for minority voter rights. Seeing as how such a thing doesn’t sit well in the deep South, the man’s not surprised that communication from his son and his friends suddenly were severed. In fact, he thinks his boy is dead. He’s sure of it; he wants Joe to find the bodies and also those responsible for said bodies, so revenge can be enacted.

To do this, Joe enlists the help of his busty secretary Kirby, who’s so Southern that she’s been taking “diction lessons” to lose her Dixie drawl. They’ll pose as husband and wife, and infiltrate the snobby country clubs and other haunts all the prejudiced people can be found, while acting like racists themselves to blend in.

It takes too long to get to that destination — nearly halfway through the novel, in fact. But what loses the reader’s attention more — or at least tries his patience — is Rifkin’s decision to spell all the Southern dialogue phonetically. It’s so Southern-fried, you might need Google Language Tools: “Ah’m a great hand to garden in de moon. Things that grow under de ground, lahk potatoes an’ carrots, they want to be planted in de dark of de moon …”

Ah’m frustrated!

THE MURDERER VINE is a little dated — any book where “Zowie!” is exclaimed without irony is these days — but still effective. (Too bad it’s not dated in the racism department, as witnessed by all those ridiculous “Obama’s a Muslim” e-mails people forward so blindly.) It is not among Hard Case’s best efforts, although the ending is. My soul sure took a hit from it. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

“She was pressing her breasts against me. She was wearing a thin nylon blouse of an apricot color, and a thin nylon bra underneath. I was wearing a thin cotton jacket on top of a thin drip-dry blue shirt, and I could feel her nipples bulging into my chest as hard as cherry candy.”