Police Your Planet

This is the blurb from the 1975 edition of the book;

"Bruce Gordon was an ex-fighter, ex-gambler, ex-cop, ex-reporter and now he was an ex-patriot of Earth. Security shipped him to Mars with a knife, 100 credits, and a yellow card that meant no return. He was also, he told himself, an ex-do-gooder. From then on he would take care of Number One! But in Marsport, nothing was that simple. Here the vices of Earth seemed tame and insipid. When he bought a commission in the Marsport police force, he found that graft was not only a fine art, but the official Martian way of life. So he joined the system. And then he met Sheila, who was out for blood -- his!"

Wow this is the hardest of hardboiled.The ramshackle,dirty violent and corrupt Marsport depicted in this violent novel could be any western transplanted to space.One of Clint Eastwood's characters who comes to town,sets the corrupt factions against each other,and almost destroys the town before leaving it a better place would fit in perfectly here.Del Rey's bitter indictment of the police corruption chimes in well with Raymond Chandler's similar.though less crude,indictment when his character Marlowe was beaten up by crooked cops,over a decade prior to this book..But whereas Marlowe was a shining knight walking down the mean streets though not himself mean,Bruce Gordon is as corrupt as anyone else.Though the ending is nominally the triumphing of right,it is also downbeat,as a character comments that the improvement will only be temporary as long as the public meekly allow corruption,violence and greed to become rife.

All in a fast exciting read,though I was openmouthed at the amount and degree of violence.A very interesting and unusual science fiction read