Unredeemed male chauvinists will tell you that woman’s place is in a castle — preferably one depicted with a single light shining. Yet, the Gothic form lends itself to considerably more variety than that. There is the domestic variety in which the setting is an ordinary house, and the heroine’s tribulations have nothing to do with mysterious strangers wandering the moors.

   Ursula Curtiss is one of the best writers in this category, and The Menace Within may be the archetypal Curtiss mystery. Heroine Amanda Morley has to contend with:

      1. An aunt who has just suffered a stroke.
      2. A missing dog.
      3. A runaway horse.
      4. A jealous boy friend.
      5. The care of a neighbor’s two year old baby, a child with a serious vitamin deficiency.
      6. A house to care for.
      7. Escaped convicts in the area.

   Does she also need a psychopathic killer in her bomb shelter? Not really, but without him, we’d only have a soap opera. Instead, we have a slightly unbelievable, fairly exciting book with good descriptions of New Mexico in December.

   The domestic setting of Theodora Du Bois’ The Listener (1953) is unusual, a convent on New York’s Staten Island. Her heroine, Sister Genevieve, joined the religious order when here fiancé was killed in Greece. Now, still depressed at his loss, she also has a problem of spiritual doubt and, more important for the plot, involvement in a series of crimes related to the tunes played on a woodwind instrument during the night.

   Though she wrote more than twenty books, Du Bois is relatively unknown – undeservedly so. She develops The Listener effectively, and her resolution is generally satisfying, though somewhat dependent on coincidence. I’m grateful to her for a well-written book. I’m also grateful to the type-setter for the Ace paperback edition who included this amusing “typo” in a book about the Sisters in a religious order (one of whom is very ugly): “I can see there are some very unattractive angels to this.”

   In a promising first novel, The Rembrandt Decisions (1979) by Anne V. Badgley, the author presents a realistic Gothic heroine. Dr. Catherine Gordon, recently widowed at 35 (“recycled by fate”), returns to the labor market to pursue her skill as an art expert. She takes on the cataloging of a valuable print collection and becomes involved with a mysterious Scottish widower whose hobby is said to be installing burglar alarms.

   The book begins subtly, and the dialogue between the two protagonists crackles. Unfortunately, the second half is disappointing, depending more on breakneck action than on logic and character development.

    Books reviewed or discussed in this installment:

URSULA CURTISS – The Menace Within. Dodd Mead, 1979. Ballantine, pb, 1979.

THEODORE DU BOIS – The Listener. Doubleday Crime Club, 1953. Ace G-550, pb, 1964.

ANNE V. BADGLEY – The Rembrandt Decisions. Dodd Mead, 1979. [This was her only crime novel.]

RICHARD ELLINGTON – It’s a Crime. Pocket 756; 1st printing, Dec 1950. Hardcover: William Morrow, 1948.

   Richard Ellington (1914-1980) wrote only five mysteries, and all five featured a Manhattan-based private eye named Steve Drake. This is the second of them, and for the record, using Al Hubin’s Revised Crime Fiction IV as a basis, here’s a list of all five, along with (eventually) paperback covers for all of them:

      Shoot the Works. Morrow, 1948; Pocket #624, 1949.

      It’s a Crime. Morrow, 1948; Pocket #756, 1950.

      Stone Cold Dead. Morrow, 1950; Pocket #813, 1951.

      Exit for a Dame. Morrow, 1951; Pocket #941, 1953.

      Just Killing Time. Morrow, 1953; Bantam #1286 as Shakedown, 1955.

   Thanks to the Cook-Miller index to digest mystery magazines, we learn that Ellington also published three short stories in Manhunt and one in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine:

       “Fan Club” Manhunt, April 1953.
       “The Ripper” Manhunt, August 1953 .
       “Shadow Boxer” Manhunt, February 1954.

       “‘Good-By, Cora'” Mike Shayne, February 1968

   At least the first of these is a Steve Drake yarn as well. I’m not sure about any of the others. According to the brief biography of Ellington inside the front cover of this paperback edition, he was heavily involved with radio both before and after the war: acting, announcing and writing. What he ended up doing after the career in writing mysteries ended I don’t yet know; perhaps writing for television? (A later search on www.imdb.com turned up nothing.)

   The cover of the paperback edition of It’s a Crime will give you an idea of the kind of mystery it is, or if not, at least it’s a portrayal of the one scene that the people at Pocket thought might sell the book. Paul Kresse is the artist, and in the center foreground is the butt end of a gun being grasped by the barrel (only part of the fingers showing) and being used to clout a man in the head. Side view, tie askew, he’s obviously in excruciating pain.

   Quoted from the text: “My gun-butt smashed his skull.”

   Granted that the scene is in the book, and so is another in close proximity of the same guy with a tommy gun, firing away at Drake before he gets away, only to turn the tables, as shown on the cover, but …

   Steve Drake is really only medium-boiled, about 6 or 7 on a standard HB (hard-boiled) scale ranging from 1 to 10. I’ll quote Mr. Drake, who tells his own story, from pages 60-61:

   Drake actually has two cases in this adventure. The first is a wandering husband caper. The second is a case of blackmail, the victim being the male half of a famous Broadway husband-and-wife duo. That the two cases are connected comes as no surprise to anyone who has read as many mysteries as you and I, but Drake himself takes it in with a slightly perplexed stride.

   What is surprising, and it really shouldn’t have been, is that this prime example of lower-echelon tough-guy fiction turns out to have a complex and finely tuned detective story plot to go with it. There are many, many people with access to the dead girl’s apartment, and before her death there were enough of them going in and out that it would take a minute-by-minute timetable to keep it all clear.

   After the non-essentials have been eliminated, all of the suspects that remain have iron-clad alibis, and takes a huge effort in deduction on Steve Drake’s art to crack one of them. It’s a plot worthy of Ellery Queen, say, without quite the same finesse — relying on what seems like sheer chance on the part of the killer, and of course the aforementioned coincidence that involves Drake in both cases to begin with.

   It’s a neat double combo, in other words, and very much worth seeking out. I’d especially like to locate my copy of the next book in the series. The love affair that Drake seems to find himself in as this one goes along seems to bloom very quickly, and if I read the last couple of pages correctly, Drake proposes marriage and the same time he says he going to be spending the money he made on this case on a trip to St. Thomas. Does she go too, or will she wait for him patiently at home?

   These are things an inquiring minds like to know.

[UPDATE] 06-28-08.    Prompting my posting this review from the past was an email this morning from SF writer Robert Silverberg:

   Then from a follow-up email:

MARY McMULLEN – Welcome to the Grave.

Detective Book Club, hardcover reprint (3-in-1 edition); May 1979. Hardcover first edition: Doubleday Crime Club, 1979. US paperback: Jove, 1989. UK hardcover: Collins Crime Club, 1980. UK paperback: Keyhole Crime, 1981.

   It was the second paragraph that hooked me in, line and sinker as well:   “Chapter Five was going well. The typewriter seemed to be doing the inventing for him and he was hard put to keep up with it, long square-tipped fingers flying. He was in the middle of what he considered a hilarious sex scene and hardly knowing it he laughed out loud, his shoulders shaking.”

   There is a knock on the door. Harley’s wife, who had run off with a gallery owner, has returned. He’d never divorced her, and now he can’t get rid of her. There is a secret, an accident, a dead child, and she is the only one who knows about it.

   If ever there was an author proficient in domestic (suburban Connecticut) malice, it was Mary McMullen, who wrote nearly a score of similar mysteries, mostly in the 70s and 80s. There is murder about to happen, and the only questions are: when is he going to do it, is he going to get away with it, and how?

   McMullen is also very witty, and she jabs the socio-economic pretensions of the lower corner of the state quite nicely. But she also seems to lose her way after a third of the way through, and she allows Harley’s grandiose plans to fizzle away in a largely mystifying manner. It leads to an unsatisfactory and (upon some reflection) rather unpleasant conclusion.

[UPDATE] 06-22-08.    It’s over six years later, and for the life of me, I do not remember either the ending of this book or what I found in it to be displeased about. Either way, I don’t believe there are many authors today who write with the same kind of domestic malice in their books as Mary McMullen did, along with a number of female authors of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, such as Ursula Curtiss, Genevieve Holden, Margaret Millar and others. They didn’t necessarily write noir fiction, but there was a lot of bite to their books.

   (Using Ursula Curtiss as an example is a small in-joke, perhaps, since she was Mary McMullen’s sister. See this earlier post for more about their family and the mystery fiction they wrote.)

ANNA GILBERT – A Morning in Eden.

St. Martin’s; hardcover; First US Edition, Dec 2001. UK edition: Robert Hale, 2001. No paperback editions.

   A couple of quick reactions first. (a) No diehard private eye fan will ever read this slow-moving tale of adolescent romance in a remote village in England, just after the close of World War I. (b) Time and place are both important aspects of the story, and yet very little of the outside world intrudes — soldiers are coming home from the war, trying to fit into society again — but it’s all very incidental, hardly a major theme.

   After the death of one aunt, young Lorna Kent goes to live with another. In isolated Canterlow, she realizes that her infatuation with the local headmaster must be kept secret.

   She also discovers she is surrounded by swirls of other mysteries around her. Even more sinister secrets abound — most centering around the death (suicide or murder?) of another young girl not too long before.

   Ominous writing prevails, filled with constant portent, imbued with the sadness of nostalgia and the regrets of life that could have been. Decisions made that could not be undone.

   More than the mystery to be solved, the reader begins rather to wonder when Lorna will make her own right decision — glaringly obvious, if she were only to see.

[UPDATE] 06-21-08.    Anna Gilbert was the pen name of Marguerite Lazarus (1916-  ), making her 85 years old when this book appeared. (I have used “was” in the past tense only because I am fairly sure she is no longer writing; I have found no information to say that she has passed away.)

   [Unfortunately I was wrong when I wrote this last statement. Marguerite Lazarus died in 2004. See the first comment below for a link to a well-written and heartfelt tribute to her.]

   Here, using the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, as the primary source, is a complete list of her crime-related fiction (the dash (-) indicating only minor relevance to our field.)

   These are the British editions; most if not all have been published in the US, all but one by St. Martin’s. (This list does not include a few novels with no criminous component.)

# Images of Rose (n.) Hodder 1974 [England; 1883]
# The Look of Innocence (n.) Hodder 1975 [England; 1800s]
# A Family Likeness (n.) Hodder 1977 [England; 1800s]
# -Remembering Louise (n.) Hodder 1978
# The Leavetaking (n.) Hodder 1979 [England; 1880s]
# Flowers for Lilian (n.) Hodder 1980 [England; 1800s]
# Miss Bede Is Staying (n.) Piatkus 1982 [England; 1800s]
# The Long Shadow (n.) Piatkus 1983 [England; 1800s]
# A Walk in the Wood (n.) Piatkus 1989 [England; WWII]
# The Wedding Guest (n.) Piatkus 1994 [England; 1920 ca.]

# -A Hint of Witchcraft (n.) Hale 2000 [England]
# A Morning in Eden (n.) Hale 2001 [England; post-WWI.]

   Quoting very briefly from Contemporary Authors:

MAX BRAND – The Outlaw Redeemer.

Leisure; paperback reprint, March 2004. Hardcover edition: Five Star, 2000.

   In one way or another, most traditional westerns have elements of crime fiction inherently built into their plot structure, and naturally I wouldn’t have brought it up if both of the short novels in the case at hand, The Outlaw Redeemer, did not abundantly qualify, but in different ways.

   In “The Last Irving,” which takes place in the more recent Old West – there is electricity in Irvington, and the characters drive proudly around in flivvers – the heir to the non-existent Irving fortune, a city yokel by the name of Archibald, returns from the East to revenge himself on the two crooks who conned his Uncle Ned out of his life’s savings. This a standard tall tale of a (perceived) dumb sap who (it is anticipated) comes out on top by the simple expedient of setting his two opponents one against the other.

   While there is more anticipation than there is follow-through, I can’t imagine anyone not finding the ending at least mildly satisfying.

   The title story, “The Outlaw Redeemer,” comes with some unexpected surprises, however, making it by far the more enjoyable one of the two.

   The opening is nothing more than Biblical in nature, with lots of “begat”s that trace the lineage of the tale’s two antagonists, the pure in heart John Tipton, who becomes a Texas Ranger whose constant quarry is the brutish and devilish criminally-minded Hubert Dunleven, nicknamed either Shorty or Bunch, “both of which were derived from his physical peculiarities.”

   Their efforts directed against each other are the stuff that legends are made of – can a western ever be called utterly charming? Dunleven is that rarest of beings, an outlaw with a silver tongue. Take for example, this speech he makes to the beautiful Nell – oh, yes, there is a girl, and of course she comes between them. But first, from page 118, after he has requested that she make breakfast for him, a request she cannot refuse:

   Nell is not, however, emphasis not, your usual western heroine. As the two male protagonists of the tale, she also is flawed, and I confess – I admit it – I did not know, with several chapters remaining to go, which way the story was going to come out.

   That is it a happy ending, you may rest assured. You may be assured that you will not know in which way it will end happily, but it will.

PostScript:    Both of the these stories first appeared in the pulp magazine, Western Story. “The Last Irving” appeared as “Not the Fastest Horse,” as by John Frederick in the November 7, 1925, issue; and “The Outlaw Redeemer” appeared as “The Man He Couldn’t Get,” as by George Owen Baxter in the February 27, 1926, issue.

   In some substantial way, I like the original titles better.

DONALD HAMILTON – The Ambushers

Gold Medal k1333, paperback original. First printing: 1963. Reprinted several times.

   When readers and critics talk about hard-boiled writers, Donald Hamilton’s name never seems to come up, and it should. There may be two reasons for this. First, he didn’t write about private eyes. His primary hero, who appeared in 27 spy fiction novels for Gold Medal between 1960 and 1993, was Matt Helm, a hard-as-nails agent for an unnamed branch of the US government, but still not a private detective. Secondly, Dean Martin, and those godawful movies. I enjoyed them at the time, but I was only in my 20s. What can I tell you?

   In the order of appearance, this is the 6th in the series. Starting in a Latin American country falsely called Costa Verde, where Helm takes out the leader of a gang of cutthroat revolutionaries, back to Washington, then out west to Tucson and into northern Mexico, where a leftover Nazi overling has been spotted, Hamilton doesn’t let the story die of the doldrums, to say the least.

   There is a girl. Reminiscent of many John D. MacDonald stories, this one needs a rescue, and then some therapeutic rehabilitation. But in this case, Sheila, the agent who ran into problems in Costa Verde, is an essential part of the story, and its ending as well.

   As for Helm, he improvises quickly, making (for example) being caught in a trap all part of the plan, and he has no false compunctions or misgivings about what his job entails. He’s in a rough line of work, no doubt about it, with little or no tolerance for error. James Bond is more famous than he, with more of a Continental flair (and better movies) but by a good margin, Matt Helm is the tougher of the two.

[UPDATE] 06-19-08.    My comment at the beginning of this review may have been true when I wrote it, but in the six years between then and now, I think Donald Hamilton has been given his due, at least on blogs and the Internet, if not in terms of new editions of his books at Borders and Barnes & Noble. (Hard Case Crime has reprinted Night Walker, a non- Matt Helm book, and I hope it has done well.)

   So it may be that neither Helm nor Hamilton are truly forgotten, but the Matt Helm books have been so long out of print that anyone in their 20s now is very likely never to have heard of him in the first place. Unless they read blogs like this one, and Bruce Grossman’s reviews over at bookgasm and Bill Crider on his blog and John Fraser on his website …

[UPDATE #2] Just after posting this, I went to check my email and by some uncanny coincidence, I discovered that Ed Crocker had posted a long reminiscence about Donald Hamilton on an earlier post here on the Mystery*File blog, back when Hamilton’s death was first reported. I’ve kept what he had to say there, but I’ve moved it here as well. It’s the first comment you’ll see below. Thanks, Ed!

CHARLAINE HARRIS – Shakespeare’s Champion.

Dell; paperback reprint, November 1998. Hardcover first edition: St. Martin’s, December 1997. Later paperback edition: Berkley, December 2006.

   You could have fooled me, and I was. I didn’t see it coming. I thought this book was one of those “cozy” mysteries that have been flooding the paperbacks shelves at Borders and other outlets over the past ten years or more. What with ice-skating detectives, teddy-bear-collecting detectives, quilting detective, herbal-shop-owner detectives, fudge-making detectives — which is not to put any of them down, as long-time readers of this blog know that most certainly do I not make a habit of — I was caught leaning the wrong way this time, and Ouch.

   Lily Bard is the detective in this one, her second appearance of five so far, and she cleans houses for a living in a small town named Shakespeare, somewhere in Arkansas. What would you think, if that were all you knew about the series?

   My guess is that you’d be wrong, too. There are more dead bodies in this than any Robert B. Parker books you’ve read, and if you stacked two or three of them together, the count might then just start to be close.

   There are some things I was unhappy about in this book, the criminous part focusing on racial hatred and violence, but neither that fact nor Lily Bard herself is one of them. She’s quite a lady, having come to Shakespeare to run away from her past, but she works out nearly every morning in the local gym (body building and karate), and does not take any sass from anybody. Hard-boiled, flinty — but in a totally feminine sense — independent. Name it, she’s it.

   I may as well start enumerating some of the problems I had with the book, even though I still haven’t told you much about the story line. First, the prologue, which is not told by Lily, while the rest of the book is. I hate prologues, especially when they are as useless as this one.

   Secondly, while I can understand Lily’s reticence in talking about her past — and she doesn’t for the longest time in this one — she already has in the first one. Revealed her secrets, that is, to at least some of the people in her new life.

   This means that someone who’s already read the first book, as I haven’t, would be reading a totally different book than I was, as he or she would already know the players and the tensions (many sexual) between them, and I didn’t. Lily’s conversation with Claude Friedrich, the local chief of police, as she spurns his amorous advances — soon after the discovery of the first body (although it really isn’t– the first body, that is) — makes a lot more sense later on, then it does in Chapter One. The reader of book one knows, but the reader of book two hasn’t a clue.

   I’m making this complicated, but going back and re-reading what I just wrote, it’s correct, and I think I will stay with it the way it is. There has been a series of deaths in Shakespeare, and only gradually are they revealed, and of course they’re important. The blurb on the back cover puts things in the right order, chronologically, but I have to admit that this is only a minor quibble, although a frustrating one, as the characters’ actions reflect what they know, and we (the reader) do not.

   But here’s the greatest problem I found with this book. With a scene of violence as horrific as the one that occurs in this book — if it were to have happened in the real world — it would have made national headlines, news crews from every channel on the cable dial would have been in town, snooping around 24/7, and a real investigation would have gone on, the ending not relying on three people sneaking around at night to uncover the culprits and their plot on their own. And in spite of all of the bloodshed, this strictly amateurish way of nabbing the killers is perhaps what makes this dark and sobering tale story a “cozy” mystery after all.

   Would I read another Lily Bard tale, though? You bet I would. She’s quite a lady.

POSTSCRIPT.    I know they’re too small for the details to be all that helpful, but each of the cover images that I’ve found to add to this post illustrate three different but still vitally important aspects of the book, and in three different styles. I like all three of them.

LESLIE CHARTERIS – The Saint in Trouble.

Detective Book Club; hardcover reprint (3-in-1 edition), May 1979. Coronet, UK, paperback, 1978. First UK hardcover edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1978. No US paperback edition.

   Although this reprint volume doesn’t mention it, Charteris apparently had very little to do with this book. According to Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, the book was adapted by Graham Weaver from original teleplays by Terence Feely and John Kruse.

   Which certainly explains a lot. Charteris may have had something to do with final revisions, but there’s not much substance to either of the two short novels in this book. I was reminded more of the James Bond movies (not the books) than anything else, without all of the spectacular visuals. (And without that, what’s left?)

   In “The Imprudent Professor”, the Saint (Simon Templar, aka Sebastian Tombs) helps prevent a scientist from defecting to the Soviet Union. It seems he has a solar energy alternative to fossil fuel, and the Free World cartels insist on keeping the discovery covered up.

   The sunny Cannes background is nice, and Simon meets at least two very good-looking young ladies, but (as far as I can tell) one of the pieces of evidence the Saint proceeds on never occurred.

   To verify that certain things never change, in “The Red Sabbath” Simon returns to London to help a (good-looking) female Israeli agent track down a Arab terrorist trying to defect from his comrades to South America. Again we get a intimate inside look at the London underworld, but beyond that, it’s a matter only of luck and fortunate timing that helps the dashing modern-day privateer prevail.

   Except for the lapse of a kind mentioned above, the writing is polished enough, but the stories themselves are rather superficial and perfunctory. A disappointment.

[UPDATE] 06-19-08.    Now that I have resources (the Internet) that I did not have when I wrote this review — or I was too new at it then to use them — I can now tell you that I’ve identified “The Imprudent Professor” has having been televised on 19 November 1978 as part of the series The Return of the Saint, starring Ian Ogilvy. (“The Red Sabbath” remains unidentified.)

   The series played in the US as The Friday Late Night Movie on CBS, or so I understand, but I don’t remember seeing it, or even knowing about it — and in spite of my generally negative reaction to the book, I’d have liked to have.

   Maybe copies still exist? I’ll check into it.

EDGAR WALLACE – The Daffodil Mystery. Ward Lock & Co., UK, hardcover, 1920. U.S. title: The Daffodil Murder. Small Maynard & Co., 1921. Many reprints, both hardcover and paperback. Film: Omnia-Rialto, 1962, as The Devil’s Daffodil (Das Geheimnis der Gleben Narzissen) (scw: Basil Dawson, Donald Taylor; dir: Akos Rathony).

   Odette Rider loses her cashier job after she indignantly rejects a suggestion from Thornton Lyne, owner of the large store where she works, that they cohabit without benefit of clergy.

   As a result Lyne, a thoroughly mean-spirited man, plots to frame her for embezzlement of company funds even though he knows the real culprit is a departmental manager, Mr Milburgh.

   Lyne’s cousin Jack Tarling, late of the Shanghai Detective Service, has just opened an investigative agency in London’s Bond Street and visits Lyne to discuss the Milburgh matter. When Tarling learns Lyne wants to pin Milburgh’s defalcations on Miss Rider – Milburgh of course being more than happy to go along with the idea – he refuses to have anything to do with it.

   As part of his general posing as a charitable fellow, Lyne has become acquainted with Sam Stay, burglar and jail bird, who is due to be released from prison next day. As usual, Lyne meets him, gives him breakfast and twenty pounds, and tells such outrageous lies about Miss Rider that he succeeds in getting Stay interested in helping his benefactor “get even” with her.

   The day after Tarling warns Miss Rider of the possibility of Lyne taking revenge Lyne is found murdered, his body laid out in Hyde Park with a pad formed from one of Miss Rider’s nightgowns and some of her hankies used in an attempt to staunch his gunshot wound – and a bunch of daffodils laid upon his chest.

   He is wearing slippers, and a small piece of red paper with Chinese characters on it is in his waistcoat pocket, although that garment, his coat, and his boots are in his car a hundred yards away from his body. Tarling interprets the writing as saying Lyne brought trouble upon himself.

   Tarling goes to visit Miss Rider at her mother’s house in Hertford. Things look bad for her, not only because of the nighty and hankies but also because a shot was heard in her flat the night before. But Miss Rider has disappeared. A warrant is issued for her arrest and Tarling, who has fallen for her, embarks on a quest to find her, establish her innocence, and discover who was responsible for the murder of the odious Lyne – and the motive behind the crime.

   My verdict: Readers’ notions of likely suspects are cleverly led along until a plot twist turns them on their heads, while the machinations of Mr Milburgh will make some almost admire his cleverness – until they learn the nasty depths of his nature. The murderer is the person most readers will least suspect. And will any of them be able to look a daffodil in the trumpet again without recalling their mental picture of the corpse in Hyde Park?

      Etext: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20912

H. BEDFORD-JONES – Fang Tung, Magician. Detroit, MI: Beb Books, 2007.

   This oriental thriller by a prolific and popular pulp writer was originally published in the All-Story Weekly issue for 2 August 1919. Brian Earl Brown, the entrepreneurial chap behind Beb Books, specializes in cheap reprints (the text, in stapled wraps) that he was selling at the table opposite mine at Pulpcon last year.

   This entertaining novelette, about a Chinese messianic magician who wants to chase all foreigners out of the country, in its often careless style betrays the pressure under which pulp writers worked, but the writer’s imagination carried this reader over the rough spots.

   Bedford-Jones was no Sax Rohmer, but he’s working somewhat in the same vein, and the combination of a charismatic villain, a pure and feisty heroine, and an adventuresome journalist is a winning one here. And the $5 price was just right for this minor adventure thriller.