DORIS MILES DISNEY – Who Rides the Tiger. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1945. Ace, paperback, 1965. Zebra, paperback, 1989.

   Unlike so many other authors, Doris Miles Disney never wrote the same book twice, even though she frequently used Connecticut as a background and always included a romantic element. In this novel, flashbacks that sometimes catch the reader unaware create a tangled, two-layer story of a great-aunt’s will, an old house filled with a lifetime accumulation of furniture and memories, and fourteen diaries that intrigue (as well as confound) the modem-day heroine, Susan.

   Her search for the motive behind her impoverished father’s exclusion from Great-Aunt Harriet’s will is aided by a recently returned Army Intelligence officer, Philip, who has a stake in the past, as well as a deep interest in Susan’s future. This story could justifiably be called a Gothic, since it involves tangled family relationships. an old house, and all the other trappings; but its mounting feeling of suspense and terror transcends the form and makes Who Rides the Tiger a startling tale of malevolence.

   Disney’s skill at creating dialogue and atmosphere is also evident in her other non series books, including Testimony by Silence (1948), No Next of Kin (1959), Voice from the Grave (1968), and Cry for Help (1975). In addition, she created three series characters: insurance investigator Jeff DiMarco, who is featured in such titles as Dark Road ( 1946), Method in Madness (1957), and The Chandler Policy ( 1971 ); postal inspector David Madden, who appears in Unappointed Rounds (1956), Black Mail (1958), and Mrs. Meeker’s Money (1961); and small-town Connecticut policeman Jim O’Neill, who is the hero of such early novels as A Compound of Death (1943) and The Last Straw (1954).

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

ROBERT DIETRICH – Murder on the Rocks. Steve Bentley #1.  Dell First Edition A141, paperback original, 1957. Cutting Edge, trade paperback, 2020.

   Steve Bentley, series fiction’s toughest tax accountant, was the creation of Robert Dietrich. better known by his more famous (or infamous) real name of E. Howard Hunt. Because he was employed by the CIA, Hunt used pseudonyms for much of his paperback writing in the 1950s and 1960s; the Dietrich name was used first for Dell Books and later for Lancer.

   In Murder on the Rocks, the first book in the series, Bentley is asked by the beautiful daughter of a South American ambassador to investigate the theft of an emerald worth over $ I million. Instead of the emerald, Bentley finds a corpse, and the case becomes even more complicated when the emerald is apparently returned.

   Another murder takes place; Bentley is threatened by gangsters; and the ambassador’s other daughter, even more beautiful than her sister, practically proposes to him. Eventually Bentley, functioning much like any hard-boiled private eye, sorts things out and deals out a bit of his own kind of justice.

   This is one of the better books in the Bentley series, and most of the tough narrative rings true. How tough? Here’s an example: “When Cadena was a tank sergeant on Luzon he had pulled the head off a dead Jap to win a ten-cent bet.” The Washington setting is described with easy familiarity and the characterization is adequate, although readers may be put off by Bentley’s frequent disparaging comments about homosexuals, which are entirely unrelated to the book’s plot.

   Readers looking for more of Bentley’s adventures should also enjoy End of a Stripper (1960). Perhaps Hunt’s best book as Dietrich, however, is a non-series work, Be My Victim (1956).

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

      The Steve Bentley series —

Murder On the Rocks (1957)
The House on Q Street (1959)
End of a Stripper (1960)
Mistress to Murder (1960)
Murder on Her Mind (1960)
Angel Eyes (1961)
Calypso Caper (1961)
Curtains for a Lover (1962)
My Body (1973)

CARTER DICKSON – The Plague Court Murders. Morrow, hardcover, 1934. Reprinted several times in paperback, including: Avon, 1941. Berkley G267, 1959. Belmont-Tower, 1974. IPL, 1990. American Mystery Classics, 2021.

   The house in Plague Court had come into the hands of the Halliday family in 1833, having earlier been associated with the horrific figure of Louis Playge, a hangman’s assistant in the time of the Great Plague. For a hundred years, odd happenings, illnesses, suicides, and rumors of haunting had kept the house a white elephant that the family could neither use profitably nor get rid of.

   Now a group of people is invited to spend the night in the house. The group includes Ken Blake, the book’s narrator; Inspector Masters of Scotland Yard; the current head of the Halliday family and his fiancee; and a psychical. researcher named Darworth, who has lately gained influence over two of the Halliday women.

   The night is filled with unexplained incidents, but the climax comes when Masters breaks into the small stone house in the rear court and finds Darworth’s dead body. The door had been double-locked, from inside and from outside; there arc no other exits; and no one else is inside the house. Yet Darworth was stabbed with a dagger that once belonged to Louis Playge and was stolen the day before from a London museum.

   Blake once worked for H. M. [Sir Henry Merrivale] in Military Intelligence, and Masters is a friend of both men. This connection draws H.M. into his first recorded case. He is memorably eccentric, but not yet the full-blown comic figure of the later books in the series. The atmosphere of Plague Court, in fact, is anything but light. An air of brooding and macabre menace is set up in the early pages and expertly maintained throughout. A second grisly murder occurs before H.M. finally traps a truly surprising “least likely” murderer.

   Other H.M. cases include such ingenious locked-room murders as The Peacock Feather Murders (1937) and The Judas Window (1938), both justly regarded as classics of the form. A Graveyard to Let (1949) is set in New York and features another miraculous disappearance, in which a man dives into a swimming pool in full view of family and friends, and never reappears. The series comes to an end in a blaze of comic glory in The Cavalier’s Cup (1953), a substantial crime puzzle (although there is no murder) that reads like a combination of P. G. Wodehouse and Thorne Smith.

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

CARTER DICKSON – The Curse of the Bronze Lamp. Morrow, hardcover, 1945. Paperback editions include: Pocket 568, 1949. Berkley, 1967. Carroll & Graf, 1984.

   When it became clear that John Dickson Carr’s output of mystery novels — seven novels in less than four years — was more than his original publisher could handle, some of the books were diverted to a second publisher, to be issued under a pen name.

   The first of these pseudonymous works, The Bowstring Murders ( 1933), carried the by-line Carr Dickson. This was a publisher’s error and was quickly corrected to the scarcely less obvious Carter Dickson. Dickson’s series detective, Sir Henry Merrivale (“H. M.”), was introduced in The Plague Court Murders in 1934.

   Like Carr’s Dr. Gideon Fell, H.M. is fat, funny, and formidably intelligent. His appearance and mannerisms arc more reminiscent of Churchill than of Chesterton, who was the model for Gideon Fell. H.M. is more overtly comic: a large, bald, vulgar, and frequently childish figure, fond of practical jokes, continually outraged at the twist of fate that put him in the House of Lords, and full of insults for the government bureaucrats with whom he must deal in his somewhat mysterious capacity as “that astute and garrulous lump who sits with his feet on the desk at the War Office.”

   Almost all of the H.M. stories involve locked rooms or impossible crimes. The centerpieces in The Curse of the Bronze Lamp are a pair of vanishings as startling as any produced by stage illusionists. Helen Loring, daughter of British archaeologist Lord Severn, has been presented by the Egyptian government with a bronze lamp taken from a Twentieth Dynasty tomb.

   An Egyptian fortune-teller, Alim Bey, claims that the lamp carries a curse, and that Helen will be “blown to dust as if she had never existed” if she takes the lamp out of Egypt. Helen returns to England with the lamp, having announced her intention to disprove the curse. Arriving at Severn Hall with friends, Helen gets out of the car and runs ahead of them into the entrance hallway. A few moments later, her raincoat and the bronze lamp are found lying in the middle of the hall floor, and Helen has vanished without a trace.

   Shortly thereafter, Lord Severn arrives from Egypt and disappears from his study in the same fashion, leaving behind his outer clothing-and the bronze lamp. H.M., whom Helen had asked for advice in Egypt (where his encounter with an Arab taxi driver provided a memorable interlude of slapstick humor), is drawn into the case.

   Romantic entanglements, stolen antiquities, the activities of H.M.’s Scotland Yard nemesis, Inspector Humphrey Masters, and the continuing doom-filled prophecies of Alim Bey supply only part of the smoke screen through which H.M. must find his way, which of course he does in satisfactory fashion.

   As always in Carr/Dickson, the clues prove, in retrospect, to have been fairly planted, but it is a rare reader who can recognize them and put all the pieces together ahead of the detective.

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

PETER DICKINSON – The Last Houseparty. Pantheon, US. hardcover, 1982. Published earlier in the UK by Bodley Head, hardcover, 1982.

   Peter Dickinson is both the author of classical detective stories and a reviewer of mystery fiction for Punch, where he was an assistant editor for seventeen years. His early novels featured the very British Superintendent James Pibble of Scotland Yard; in many of his later books he moved into the area of psychological suspense and amateur detection.

   Although the structure of the majority of his stories is classic-a murder, a number of suspects. and often a closed environment such as the English country house-the settings and characters are anything but ordinary. As Dickinson himself says, “I tend to overpopulate my books with grotesques.” But if he tends to the bizarre or eccentric, Dickinson also has the ability to make us believe implicitly in the existence of these people and places, and in the plausibility of the events they participate in.

   The Last Houseparty is a historical mystery set in three time frames: 1937, when most of the action takes place; 1940 (briefly); and 1980, when the mystery is resolved. The author tends to skip among these without giving the reader much warning, and in the first few chapters this is very disorienting; after we become familiar with the characters, it is easier to recognize which time frame we are in.

   The main action of the novel takes place at Snailwood, a grand English estate whose tower contains a fabulous clock, replete with moving figures that perform on the quarterhour. In 1937 the estate is the domain of Lord Snail wood and his second wife, the Countess Zena. who is famous for her weekend “dos” and “superduperdos” to which illustrious personalities are summoned. Zena’s current house party is to be a political one, and various people — including an Arab prince, a professor with high connections, and Lord Snailwood’s two nephews, one a publisher, the other a soldier — are to debate, in bright cocktail-party chatter, the world situation.

   The weekend begins successfully, with even a budding romance between Countess Zena· s new secretary and the publisher nephew in the offing. But it soon degenerates and dark events take place that result in the traumatization of a young girt, the disappearance of the soldier nephew, an old man’s near fatal heart attack, the clock stopping permanently-and this being the last of Zena’s famous parties.

   Of course, Dickinson does not reveal all these events at once; the story builds slowly, beginning in the present, with Snailwood now a “stately home” open for public display by the financially strapped heir. He then takes us back to 1937 and the arrival of the party guests; next, forward to the African desert in World War II. We gradually realize that terrible events have destroyed the Snailwood family, and we see what they apparently were, we also realize that there is even more under the surface. This is an intriguing novel that will keep you guessing right up to the final revelations.

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

CHARLES DICKENS – The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Published posthumously in 1870. Only six of the twelve projected parts had been completed by the time of Dickens’s death. First published in the US as The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Some Uncollected Pieces (Fields, Osgood, 1870).

   Charles Dickens turned to the pure mystery near the end of his life, and left us, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, one of the most compelling of all literary puzzles.

   Edwin Drood and Rosa Bud, both orphans, were betrothed as children by their parents. Now, as they approach their majority, this arrangement has poisoned the love between them. Edwin is fond of his uncle, John Jasper, the music director of the town cathedral, and his uncle appears fond of Edwin. But Jasper has fallen in love with Rosa, who despises him, and he is consumed by jealousy of his nephew.

   Another youth, Neville Landless, admires Rosa and, goaded by Jasper, Drood and Landless quarrel. Subsequently, Edwin and Rosa agree that their marriage would not work and call off the engagement. But before they can announce their decision, Edwin disappears-apparently the victim of murder.

   Evidence points to Landless, but there is no case against him because no body has been found. Landless flees in disgrace to London. Rosa, afraid of Jasper, also goes to London. A new character on the scene, known as Mr. Datchery but apparently someone else in disguise, begins dogging Jasper’s footsteps.

   At this point, halfway through the projected novel, Dickens died. He left evidence that Jasper was Drood’s killer-but also hinted that there had been no murder. An early working title for the novel was Edwin Drood in Hiding, and some have speculated that Jasper failed in his murder attempt and that Datchery is really the vengeful Drood. There have been many other theories about the novel’s conclusion. One, championed by the late Edmund Wilson (who hated mysteries but loved Dickens), is that Jasper was a devotee of the Indian Cult of Thugs, and that he murdered Drood as a required ritual act. Dickens’s remaining notes are ambiguous, however, and he had promised that the ending would be a great surprise, even to his friends.

   Dickens was a significant figure in the development of the mystery novel long before Edwin Drood. In 1828, when Dickens was seventeen, Robert Peel launched the modern London police force. The young writer was fascinated by the new profession, and in 1850 his magazine, Household Words, published four articles on police work, spawning considerable public interest in crime fighting. In Bleak House (1853), Dickens introduced the intrepid Inspector Bucket, a sort of nineteenth-century Columbo, who was the first fictional English police detective. Dickens was deeply influenced by his friend Wilkie Collins, whose classic novel The Moonstone was published in Dickens’ periodical All the Year Round in 1868.

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

THOMAS B. DEWEY – A Sad Song Singing. Mac #10. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1963. Pocket, paperback, 1965. Carroll & Graf, paperback, 1984.

   A Sad Song Singing is Mac’s finest case and Dewey’s masterwork. This reviewer considers it one of the ten best private-eye novels ever written — not because of its plot, which is relatively simple and straightforward, but because of its emotional depth and impact and its superb depiction of what it was like to grow up in the early 1960s.

   It is the only mystery novel to employ as its background the short-lived hootenanny craze of that period (hootenannies being, for those of you who might have forgotten or are too young to remember, large gatherings at which folk singers entertained with audience participation).

   In fact, one can’t imagine any kind of novel more vividly or poignantly evoking that type of festival or the life-styles of its young performers.

   Crescentia Fanio, twenty years old and a budding singer, hires Mac to find her missing boyfriend, Richie Darden, himself an itinerant but already well-established singer of folk songs. But it isn’t just a simple case of boy losing interest in girl and leaving her behind; Cress is convinced that not only is Richie’s life in danger, but so is her own.

   If Mac has any doubts that her fears are genuine, he quickly loses them with the appearance of two toughs who are unmistakably hunting Darden — and a mysterious suitcase he had with him when he vanished. A combination of flight, chase, and personal odyssey leads Mac and Cress from Chicago into rural Illinois and Indiana, from the world of coffeehouses and hootenannies to an isolated farm near the small agricultural community of Fairmont, Indiana — and finally to tragedy and, for Cress, rebirth.

   There is plenty of action and suspense, but as in most of Dewey’s novels — and even more so here — the emphasis is on mood and characterization. The father-daughter relationship between Mac and Cress is what gives the novel its emotional power: The last page is the kind of stuff that could put a tear in the eye of Mike Hammer. In all respects, A Sad Song Singing is a virtuoso performance.

   Mac appears in a total of sixteen novels, beginning with Draw the Curtain Close (1947). The others are likewise first-rate, the most notable among them being The Mean Streets (1954), the novel in which Mac — and Dewey — realized his full potential (thus making the title, a phrase from Chandler’s essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” doubly appropriate); The Brave, Bad Girls (1956), The Case of the Chased and the Unchaste (1959), Don’t Cry for Long (1964), Portrait of a Dead Heiress (1965), and The King Killers ( 1968).

   Dewey also wrote four minor mysteries featuring a small-town hotel owner named Singer Batts, the best of which are probably As Good as Dead (1946) and Handle with Fear ( 1951 ). Of his non-series suspense novels, two arc first-rate:

   How Hard to Kill (1961), a chiller about an ex-cop’s hunt for the murderer of his wife; and the paperback original A Season for Violence (1966), which is concerned with corruption, murder, and rape in a small California town.

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

THOMAS B. DEWEY – Only on Tuesdays. Pete Schofield #8. Dell 6680, paperback original, 1964.

   In addition to the “Mac” series, Dewey also created another private eye, Los Angeles-based Pete Schofield, for a series of paperback originals in the Fifties and early Sixties. The Schofield novels are much lighter in tone, much sexier (as sexy as paperback mysteries could get in that era, anyhow), and lacking the depth and quality of the Mac novels.

   Schofield, who is married to a sultry lady named Jeannie (married private eyes never seem to work out well in fiction), is something of a bumbler and spends as much time trying to crawl into the sack with Jeannie as he does solving crimes. But things keep happening to prevent his connubial bliss — telephone calls, people showing up at highly inopportune moments, squabbles, battle wounds, and various other interventions.

   Dewey’s technical skill and sense of humor make this sort of thing work: The Schofield books are exactly what they were intended to be-pleasant light reading — and no more.

   Only on Tuesdays, perhaps the best of the series, begins when Pete comes home after a hard day and finds an unemployed actor holding a gun on Jeannie; he also finds. not irrelevantly, a new addition to the family (a dachshund, Hildy) hidden away in the bedroom closet.

   It ends with a frantic sailboat race to Catalina Island and another confrontation in the Schofield domicile, this time with a murderer. In between he encounters a missing wife, a wealthy yachtsman named Conway, some highly compromising photographs, and of course plenty of murder and mayhem. The sailing scenes are genuinely exciting and suspenseful, and the byplay between Pete and Jeannie, which in some of the other books becomes a bit tedious, is restrained and amusing.

   All the Schoficlds are worth reading; along with Only on Tuesdays, the best of them are Go to Sleep, Jeannie (1959), Too Hot for Hawaii (1960), and The Girl with the Sweet Plump Knees (1963).

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

      The Pete Schofield series —

1. And Where She Stops (1957)
2. Go to Sleep, Jeanie (1959)
3. Too Hot for Hawaii (1960)
4. The Golden Hooligan (1961)
5. Go, Honey Lou (1962)
6. The Girl with the Sweet Plump Knees (1963)
7. The Girl in the Punchbowl (1964)
8. Only On Tuesdays (1964)
9. Nude in Nevada (1965)

THOMAS B. DEWEY – Deadline. Mac #13. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1966. Pocket 55002, paperback, 1968. Carroll & Graf, paperback, 1984. Probably condensed and reprinted as the story “Deadline” appearing in Sir!, August 1968 [see Comment #6].

   Thomas B. Dewey is one of detective fiction’s severely underrated writers — a craftsman of no small talent whose work is among the most human and compassionate of any in the genre. Although Dewey was clearly influenced by Hammell and Chandler, his Chicago-based private eye, “Mac,” is not one of the wisecracking, vigilante breed of fictional ops; he is intelligent, quiet, gentle, ironic, tough when he has to be, a light drinker, and a man not incapable of being hurt either physically or emotionally. All in all, a far more likable creation than the bulk of his brethren.

   In Deadline. Mae is hired by a group of do-gooders in a last-ditch effort to save the life of a small-town youth, Peter Davidian, who has been convicted of the mutilation murder of an eighteen-year-old girl and is awaiting execution in the state prison. When Mac arrives in the rural Illinois town, Wesley, he meets considerable hostility: The crime was a particularly vicious one, and the girl’s father, Jack Parrish, is an influential citizen who is convinced of Davidian’s guilt.

   Racing against time-he has only four days before the scheduled execution, the “deadline” of the title- Mac utilizes the aid of a retarded handyman, a friend of the dead girl’s named Mary Carpenter, and a schoolteacher named Caroline Adams to find out who really murdered Esther Parrish. In the process he has to overcome a conspiracy of silence, threats, and a harrowing brush with death.

   This is a simple, straightforward story, told with irony, fine attention to detail, and mounting suspense. Satisfying and memorable.

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

AUGUST DERLETH – In Re: Sherlock Holmes: The Adventures of Solar Pons. Mycroft & Moran, hardcover, 1945. Reprinted as Regarding Sherlock Holmes #1 – The Adventures of Solar Pons (Pinnacle, paperback, 1974).

   August Derleth was a literary phenomenon. In a writing career that lasted from his teens until his death at the age of sixty-two, he worked in a wide variety of genres and styles. Among his more than 150 books are contemporary novels, historical novels (both for adults and for young readers), regional history, biographies, mystery fiction, true-crime essays, pastiches, weird and supernatural fiction, children’s books, personal journals, compilations of nature observations, and poetry.

   He edited numerous volumes of short stories and poetry, and he founded and operated Arkham House, a publishing company originally devoted to preserving the work of H. P. Lovecraft in book form; Arkham later published the first books of such writers as Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, and A. E. Van Vogt.

   By his late teens, Derleth had read and reread all of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and wrote to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to ask if there would ever be any more of them. Doyle’s noncommittal reply spurred the nineteen-year-old Derleth to fill the gap himself. The result was “The Adventure of the Black Narcissus,” the first of some seventy stories about Solar Pons of 78 Praed Street and his literary chronicler, Dr. Lyndon Parker.

   In Re: Sherlock Holmes gathers twelve of these stories in book form. In addition to “The Black Narcissus,” the book includes “The Adventures of the Norcross Riddle,” ·”The Retired Novelist” “The Three Red Dwarfs,” “The Purloined Periapt,” “The Man with the Broken Face,” and others. As Vincent Starrett wrote in his introduction to the book, Pons “is not a caricature of Sherlock Holmes. He is, rather a clever impersonator, with a twinkle in his eye, [who] hopes we will like him anyway for what he symbolizes.” Ellery Queen’s jacket blurb asked, “How many budding authors, not yet old enough to vote, could have captured the spirit and atmosphere of the Sacred Writings with so much fidelity?”

   The Pons stories eventually filled seven volumes (including one novel), with an additional volume of miscellaneous commentary. The entire series was edited and revised by Basil Copper and issued as a 1306-page, two-volume set, The Solar Pons Omnibus, in 1982. Some diehard fans of the Pontine canon have expressed a preference for the original versions over the altered texts in the omnibus, but for the average reader the differences are hardly significant.

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.