During World War II John Creasey wrote dozens of thrillers set in London that were never published outside the UK — until decades later when, as a superstar of the genre, he revised them for US publication, cutting out all the vivid wartime atmosphere that made them special.

   Recently I picked up The Toff Is Back — first published in 1942 and, according to the copyright page, revised in 1971, two years before Creasey’s death — and found to my surprise that all the ambiance of a largely bombed-out London survived the revision intact.

   The Hon. Richard Rollison, a.k.a. The Toff, returns from military service in North Africa to find that a well-organized gang has been looting bombed jewelry shops on a grand scale and framing innocent residents of his beloved East End for their crimes.

   Over the years I’ve read, or rather tried to read, several revised Creaseys alongside the 1940s versions, and every time found the originals infinitely better. I’ve never seen the wartime version of this one but it reads as if it hasn’t been revised at all, for which I shout Hallelujah.

   In fact, even the occasional gaffes which are inevitable when a book is written at the rate of 10,000 words a day seem to have been preserved. The racket boss is named Barte Lee while other characters live in Bartley Square, and on page 54 we read “Very slowly and deliberately Lee leaned forward,” which reminded me of the hilarious “Everywhere a Lee Lee” song from 1776.

   Gaffes and all, I highly recommend this one to any reader who wants to be taken back, like viewers of the early seasons of the Foyle’s War series, to a London being nightly pulverized by Hitler’s Luftwaffe.

   Anyone who would like to sample Creasey’s unretouched WWII thrillers without hitting used book shops has a golden opportunity in store. His first five Roger West novels, originally published between 1942 and 1946, will be reprinted a few months from now by Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, the Canada-based publishing operation owned by George Vanderburgh, as the omnibus volume Inspector West Goes to War.

   I’ve written an introduction for the book and have just finished proofreading the computer-scanned texts of those novels. It was a tedious task with two capital T’s but there’s no other way I could have learned so much about the stylistic oddities of these chronicles of London during and immediately after the war.

   Quirks and all, the early West novels are still amazingly readable today. Unlike any other Scotland Yard series I can recall, these books are packed with vivid action scenes. One might almost be reading a series of old-time Westerns except for the fact that guns are sparingly used, both by the bad guys and the bobbies.

Pounding out those ten thousand words a day, Creasey couldn’t avoid perpetrating some Avalloneisms, but far fewer than in the works of the grand master of malapropisms, Mike Avallone himself.

   One I found while proofreading is worth preserving. In Chapter 11 of Holiday for Inspector West (1946) Roger questions a female suspect and then her father, of whom Creasey says: “Like his daughter he had become a changed man.”

   As editor of this five-volume omnibus I’ve decided to substitute “person” for the last word of that sentence.

   Blatant mistakes of this sort, grammar-wise, usage-wise or otherwise, are being corrected, but I am not Americanizing any British terms: those four rubber doughnuts that are found on motor vehicles are called tyres, and when a car has engine trouble, the driver pulls into the kerb and looks under the bonnet.

   What you will read in Inspector West Goes to War is (except for those blatant slips) precisely what Creasey wrote at white heat as that war was raging and immediately afterward.

Between late June and late August 1939, during the first ten weeks that the 60-minute Adventures of Ellery Queen radio series was broadcast on CBS, each episode featured original background music composed and conducted by the soon to be famous Bernard Herrmann.

   None of those episodes survive, and the last time anyone heard what Herrmann wrote for the EQ series was 71 years ago. But today, thanks to the wonderworld of the Web, you can see some of the pages of Herrmann’s score on your computer screen:

   

   First, go to the Bernard Herrmann Society website. Click on “Talking Herrmann.” Enter the box at the bottom of the first page and, among the options given, click on “Topics for the Last Year.” Near the bottom of the fourth page is a thread entitled “Adventures of Ellery Queen 1939.” [This link, if it holds up over time, should take you there directly.]

   There lies the treasure, allowing those who can read a score and have an appropriate instrument to play some of Herrmann’s EQ music in their own homes.

   I wish I were one of that number. When I was a child my mother tried to make a pianist out of me but I resisted and today, sixty years later, I can’t read a note. Damn!

   The second and final Herrmann-Queen interface took place almost a quarter century later. Among the episodes of the second season of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour on NBC-TV was “Terror in Northfield” (October 11, 1963), based on Queen’s 1956 non-series novelette about a string of violent deaths on the exact same spot. [Hulu link.]

   Harvey Hart directed from an adaptation by Leigh Brackett that dropped most of the detection in the Queen tale and stressed suspense. The puzzled deputy sheriff, the menaced local librarian and the mad farmer were played respectively by Dick York, Jacqueline Scott and R.G. Armstrong.

   Herrmann composed the score for this and several other Hitchcock Hour segments as well. May I still be alive and the owner of a decent pair of ears on the day when his scores for that series and others of the same period, like The Richard Boone Show and The Virginian, become available on CD.

   Thanks to Turner Classic Movies I recently discovered a detective film series I had never heard of before. Before Midnight (RKO, 1933) debuted on TCM in June and starred a young Ralph Bellamy as Inspector Trent of the NYPD.

   A procedural this ain’t: Trent comes out on a dark and stormy night to a Toad Hall fifty miles from New York City at the request of a millionaire who expects to be killed before the ancestral clock strikes twelve. Sure enough, the murder takes place, and Trent immediately takes over the investigation, such as it is, smoking up a storm as he interrogates the dead man’s lovely ward, the doctor who loves her, the enigmatic Japanese butler, the sleazy lawyer, etc. etc.

   Eventually, donning a white lab coat for forensic cred, he holds up two test tubes with blood samples in them and announces to his bug-eyed stooge that both came from the same person. How he managed to do that, generations before anyone ever heard of DNA, remains a mystery after the murder method (obvious to most viewers) and the murderer (obvious to all) are exposed.

   A bit of Web surfing taught me that Before Midnight was the first of four Inspector Trent films, all starring Bellamy and dating from 1933-34. The titles of the other three are One Is Guilty, The Crime of Helen Stanley and Girl in Danger.

   Columbia had released an earlier detective series with Adolphe Menjou as Anthony Abbot’s Police Commissioner Thatcher Colt but had dropped it after two films. The Trent series lasted twice as long but who today has ever heard of it? Bellamy of course went on to star in Columbia’s bottom-of-the-barrel series of Ellery Queen films (1940-41).

   Second of the four EQ films with Bellamy in the lead was Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery (1941). For most of my life I was unsure whether this picture was based on any genuine Queen material.

   In Royal Bloodline I speculated that it might have come from one of the early Queen radio plays. Recently I learned that my hunch was right. Its source was the 60-minute drama “The Three Scratches” (CBS, December 13, 1939).

   Someday I’d love to compare the Dannay-Lee script with the infantile novelization of the film by some anonymous hack that was published as a tie-in with the movie, but unfortunately that script was not included in The Adventure of the Murdered Moths (2005).

   Does the name Peter Cheyney ring any bells? He was an Englishman (1896-1951), the son of a Cockney fishmonger who specialized in whelks and jellied eels.

   He had never visited the U.S. but in 1936 began writing a long series of thrillers narrated in first person by hardboiled G-Man Lemmy Caution, beginning with This Man Is Dangerous (1936).

   For the most part these quickies were laughed off as unpublishable over here but became huge successes in England and also in France, where translation concealed Cheyney’s habit of peppering the dialogue of American characters with British slang, not to mention self-created idioms which are like nothing in any language known to humankind.

   The one that has stuck in my mind longest is “He blew the bezuzus,” which is not a musical instrument but just Cheyney’s way of saying “He spilled the beans.”

   According to Google the only known use of the word was in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt, where a character is said to have a degree from Bezuzus Mail Order University.

   Could Cheyney have read that acerbic satire on the American middle class or did he come up with the word independently? Googling “bezuzus” with Cheyney’s name produces no matches, but I suspect that situation will change as soon as this column is posted.

   With The Urgent Hangman (1938) Cheyney launched a series of utterly conventional ersatz-Hammett novels about London PI Slim Callaghan, and during World War II he wrote a series of rather bleak espionage novels, all with “Dark” in their titles and lavishly praised by Anthony Boucher and others.

   I don’t know if he’s worth rediscovering, but you can catch him as he looked in newsreel footage from 1946, dictating his then-latest thriller to a secretary, by going to www.petercheyney.co.uk and clicking first on “Links” and then on the image at the bottom of the screen.

   The mail has just brought me the proof copy of my latest assault on the forests of America. Cornucopia of Crime is a 449-page gargantua bringing together chunks of my writing over the past 40-odd years on mystery fiction and some of my favorites among its perpetrators, from Gardner and Woolrich and Queen to Cleve F. Adams and Milton Propper and William Ard, not to mention screwballs like Michael Avallone and mad geniuses like Harry Stephen Keeler.

   One small problem with this copy: on the title page the author’s name is conspicuous by its absence. This glitch will soon be corrected but I’m told that ten or twelve uncorrected copies are on the way to me by mail.

   If they arrive before I leave for the Pulpfest in Columbus, Ohio late next week, I plan to bring them with me and — assuming there are a few collectors in attendance who are in the market for perhaps the most limited edition of any book on mystery fiction ever published! — sell them off. Consider this an exclusive offer to Mystery*File habitues.

Editorial Comment. 07-22-10.   Inspired by David Vineyard’s comments on Peter Cheyney’s contributions to the world of crime fiction, I checked out the website devoted to him that Mike mentioned. It’s definitely worth a look. I especially enjoyed the covers, a portion of one I’ve added below. Who could resist a book with a lady like this on the cover? Not me.

   Artwork by John Pisani. For more, go here.

   Of all the authors who in the years after World War II moved mystery fiction “from the detective story to the crime novel,” perhaps the most influential American woman was Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995).

   Certainly she’s the only one to have received so much critical attention after her death: first Andrew Wilson’s biography in 2003, more recently Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith, which isn’t a conventional biography but more an exploration of Highsmith’s obsession-torn mind and emotions and how they spilled over into novels like Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

   If you think Cornell Woolrich was something of a psychopath and a creep, you don’t know the meaning of those words till you’ve encountered Highsmith.

   Both, of course, were homosexual. I gather from Schenkar’s book that Highsmith, who was born in Texas and came of age in the feverish New York of the World War II years and went through lovers with the fury of a Texas twister, was never terribly comfortable with being a lesbian.

   Woolrich was perhaps the most deeply closeted, self-hating homosexual male author that ever lived. Both wound up worth several million but often acted as if they were penniless. Both lived mainly on booze, cigarettes and coffee, with peanut butter added to the diet in Highsmith’s case.

   Both bequeathed their copyrights and other property to institutions, not human beings. Woolrich left an autobiographical manuscript (Blues of a Lifetime) which is full of obvious fiction; Highsmith left 8000 pages of notebooks which, as Shenkar demonstrates, are also pockmarked with falsifications.

   But there were notable differences too. Just to mention one, Highsmith was fixated on possessions, keeping everything (except any paper trail leading back to the seven years she had spent in her twenties writing scripts for comic books like Spy Smasher and Jap Buster Johnson), while Woolrich kept nothing, not even copies of his novels and stories.

   It’s most unlikely that the two ever met. Woolrich read very little crime fiction but appeared regularly in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties and may have read Highsmith’s EQMM stories.

   We know she read the magazine steadily and, in her book Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, devoted almost a full page to Woolrich’s “Murder After Death” (EQMM, December 1964).

   Why did she single out this rarely reprinted and never collected tale? Perhaps she saw something akin to her own evil protagonists in Georg Mohler, a loser at the game of love who turns to crime for emotional revenge.

   When the wealthy and lovely Delphine rejects him for law student Reed Holcomb and then dies a sudden but natural death, Mohler concocts a laughably dumb plot to sneak into the funeral parlor, inject poison into her body and frame Holcomb for murder.

   Woolrich’s detail work is sloppy and implausible and his climactic twist, like those in several of his earlier stories, comes straight out of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. But the scene where Mohler hides in the funeral home and posthumously poisons his lover’s corpse is a gem of poetic horror.

   If any single element in the tale deserved Highsmith’s attention it was this one. In fact she spent most of the page summarizing the plot, calling it a “quite well-done gimmick story” with “an elaborate but quite entertaining and believable scaffolding….” Go figure.

   It was a gimmick—the two men in Strangers on a Train (1950) agreeing (or did they?) to exchange murders — that first made crime fiction readers (not to mention Alfred Hitchcock) take notice of the not yet 30-year-old Highsmith.

   Later authors including Nicholas Blake and Fredric Brown worked their own variations on the theme. But who remembers its first appearance in the genre?

   Mum’s the Word for Murder (1938) uses very much the same gimmick, although here it involves three murders, not two, and is saved till the solution rather than employed as a springboard.

   The byline on this long-forgotten book was Asa Baker but the author’s real name was Davis Dresser and his best-known pseudonym was Brett Halliday, which he used for the all but endless adventures of Miami PI Michael Shayne, beginning in 1939, a year after Mum’s the Word came out.

   As chance would have it, much of both novels is set in Texas, where both Dresser and Highsmith spent several of their formative years.

   My apologies for the delay between columns. I was on the road for two and a half weeks, when I wasn’t traveling, proofreading my next book took up all my writing time.

   Cornucopia of Crime, which Ramble House will be doing, will probably run about 450 closely printed pages when the index is finished. It will bring together a ton of long and short pieces I’ve written about mystery writers over the past 40-odd years, including some bits from this column.

   The cover is by New Zealander Gavin O’Keefe, and as anyone can see from the attached image, it’s a knockout.

   Part of my recent week in New York I spent at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where Fred Dannay’s papers are archived, looking into whether Fred had saved anything written to him by Cornell Woolrich that I wasn’t already aware of.

   My most interesting find was a brief undated note that accompanied Woolrich’s last story.”Just consider it on its merits, like you always have all stories,” he wrote. “Don’t feel sorry; I’ve had it better than most guys. I’d like one last publication, before I kiss it off. I’m a writer to the end. And glad I was one.”

   Clearly the story accompanying this note was “New York Blues,” which Fred purchased in May or June of 1967 but didn’t publish in EQMM until the December 1970 issue, more than two years after Woolrich’s death.

   There’s a penciled note on Woolrich’s covering letter which looks to me like Fred’s handwriting and suggests an alternate title for the story, one I actually like more than Woolrich’s: “The Last Hours.”

   In the end, of course, Fred went with Woolrich’s title.

   Stopping off in Cincinnati on the way home from my little odyssey, I happened upon a nice copy of Thieves Fall Out (Gold Medal pb #311, 1953), an obscure paperback original bearing the byline of Cameron Kay, which has never been seen on any other book before or since.

   The true author? Gore Vidal. It’s an ordinary little number, set in Egypt in the days of King Farouk, with minimal action or suspense and not a bit of the satiric wit that enlivened the three whodunits Vidal wrote as Edgar Box during the same time period.

   Among all the TV private eye series of the Fifties and Sixties that never caught on and were quickly cancelled, perhaps the finest was Johnny Staccato (NBC, 1959-60), starring John Cassavetes as a jazz pianist who makes ends meet by working as an apparently unlicensed PI.

   Even in my late teens the music of my life was classical music, but I was still very fond of this series in first run and watched it from the first episode to the 27th and last.

   Half a century later I’ve found the complete series on DVD and it’s still first-rate: evocative streets-of-New-York photography, fine performances (guests included Michael Landon, Martin Landau, Gena Rowlands, Elizabeth Montgomery, Elisha Cook and Mary Tyler Moore), excellent direction (with five episodes helmed by Cassavetes himself), offbeat scripts (including some by Fifties PI novelist Henry Kane), and of course tons of jazz, with a young hepcat then known as Johnny and later as John Williams—like yeah, man, that John Williams— doing the honors on piano.

   The series must have been planned as a sort of Peter Gunn clone but turned out quite different, mainly, I think, because the cool-jazz sound of Gunn was replaced by a hotter, more passionate music style.

   Something I read recently (I won’t say where) suggested to me that there ought to be an annual award for most eye-popping boner in or about mystery fiction. My first candidate for this honor, who shall remain nameless, wrote of Nero Wolfe that he “tended a rose garden on his roof….”

   Ouch! That’s a thorn from one of those roses.

    This column isn�t my usual hodgepodge but sticks to one subject and therefore deserves a title. How about �Call for Campion Complete�?

    A few months ago and for no particular reason I decided to read the first series of Margery Allingham�s short stories about Albert Campion in the order of their original publication as far as that could be determined.

    After some research on my own shelves and in The FictionMags Index, which is by far the leading Web source when it comes to identifying where almost any work of short fiction in English first appeared, I identified 18 tales that clearly belonged on my reading list: two dating from 1936 or earlier, fifteen that appeared in The Strand Magazine between late 1936 and 1940, and a singleton first published in a London newspaper shortly before the outbreak of World War II.

    There are also two short-shorts that present bibliographic as well as criminous puzzles but let�s save them for a while, shall we?

    Revisiting the Easy Eighteen between 70 and 80 years later, I found them by and large to be as clever, charming and delightful as I remembered them from decades ago. Most of the crimes in these stories are jewel thefts or con games, with hardly a murder anywhere but plenty of indications in the later tales that England is moving ever closer to that form of mass murder we call war.

    �The Man with the Sack� (The Strand, December 1936) is a light-hearted Christmas story in which Campion frustrates a jewel scam while attending a holiday party at one of those stately homes of England that abound in Golden Age crime fiction.

    Two years later, during the last peacetime Christmas season, came �The Case Is Altered� (The Strand, December 1938), where the setting is yet another holiday party at yet another stately home, but this time the McGuffin is a secret document revealing the country�s plans to purchase huge numbers of war planes.

    The next Campion tale in The Strand and for my money one of the weakest is �The Meaning of the Act,� an international espionage trifle which came out in the issue of September 1939, the month Hitler invaded Poland.

    The eighteenth and last story in the batch is �A Matter of Form� (The Strand, May 1940). This one centers around a magnificent con game which could only have been devised during the so-called phony war, a time of �children in uniform and bankers in mourning� but with minimal disruption of ordinary life, so that Campion can still enjoy an oyster appetizer in the heart of a London soon to be blitzed.

    The two stories that predate the fifteen in The Strand and a third from near the end of the cycle need to be treated separately.

    �The Border-Line Case� is shorter than any Strand tale and, unlike any other Campion exploit, has a first-person narrator, namely Allingham herself. A careless reading of the story might suggest that she was cohabiting with her character, but then one notices a few subtle hints that besides the narrator and Campion and Detective Inspector Stanislaus Oates, there is a fourth and silent person in the room, presumably P. Youngman Carter, to whom Allingham had been married since 1927.

    My guess is that this neat little impossible-crime story dates from between 1933 and 1935, making it Campion�s first short exploit.

    �The Pro and the Con� is the same length as the Campion stories in The Strand but doesn�t seem to have appeared there. In this tale we find Campion bound, gagged and beaten up by an Edgar Wallace-style gangster, and that fact alone suggests a date slightly earlier than the Strand fifteen.

    �The Dog Day� first appeared in the London Daily Mail sometime in June 1939, probably having been rejected by The Strand because of its complete crimelessness.

    So much for the eighteen Campion tales that definitely belong on my reading list. Now we come to those two pesky short-shorts, each limited to a single scene and just one or two characters if you don�t count Campion and Scotland Yard�s Stanislaus Oates and the corpse.

    The earlier of the pair to appear in the U.S. was �The Unseen Door� (Mystery Book Magazine, August 1946), which takes place in the billiards room of a London club. No concrete detail hints that the story might have been published in England ten or more years earlier and therefore belongs in the first series.

    My hunch that it does stems from the other short-short, �Mr. Campion�s Lucky Day� (Ellery Queen�s Mystery Magazine, April 1947). Judging from his introduction, founding editor Fred Dannay thought Allingham had just written the tale. In the EQMM version Oates is given the rank of Superintendent, which he first sported in �The Old Man in the Window� (The Strand, October 1936). But when this tale finally appeared in a collection (The Allingham Minibus, 1973), Oates� title is Detective Chief Inspector!

    This strikes me as highly persuasive evidence that the story first appeared in England before October 1936. And is it plausible that two Campion short-shorts with as much in common as this one and �The Unseen Door� could have been written more than ten years apart? My tentative conclusion is that both are early entries in the Campion saga. Perhaps someday we�ll know for sure.

    While immersed in my Allingham project I came upon a curious connection between one of these tales and perhaps the most powerful of all English noir novels, Graham Greene�s Brighton Rock (1938).

    The sociopaths from the lower depths whose leader is the sexually terrified young racetrack racketeer Pinkie refer to women in several terms like �buers� which I�ve never seen elsewhere. But the Greene character who calls a young woman a �polony� has his counterpart in Allingham�s �The Meaning of the Act,� where a lower-class pickpocket uses the same word, although she (or perhaps her Strand editor) spells it �palone.�

    To anyone eager for more about this obscure contribution to English slang: Google the word in either spelling and you will be enlightened.

    Even reading the fifteen Campion stories from The Strand requires more work than one might think. Besides needing to be at home in FictionMags Index, and assuming you don�t own copies of the magazine from the second half of the 1930s, you must have access to most of the Allingham collections published over the past 70-odd years.

    The second edition of Mr. Campion and Others (Penguin, 1950) contains twelve of the fifteen, although chaotically out of order. But the 1936 Christmas story �The Man with the Sack� was collected only in Mr. Campion: Criminologist (1937) and The Allingham Minibus (1973), and its analogue from two Christmases later, �The Case Is Altered,� remained uncollected until The Return of Mr. Campion (1989).

    That volume is also the sole hardcover source for the crimeless but charming �The Dog Day.� �The Border-Line Case� and �The Pro and the Con� were collected in both Mr. Campion: Criminologist (1937) and The Allingham Case-Book (1969), with �Border-Line� also appearing in the first edition of Mr. Campion and Others (1939) but not the second (1950).

    Those pesky short-shorts �The Unseen Door� and �Mr. Campion�s Lucky Day� remained uncollected until the Minibus started to roll.

    Then there�s one final problem. If you set out to read the Campion stories in order of first publication, as I did, you wind up having to save one of the earliest for last.

    How can this be? Because of �The Black Tent,� which Allingham clearly wrote around 1936 but then put aside and rewrote as �The Definite Article� (The Strand, October 1937). The first version remained unpublished until almost a quarter century after her death, when it was included in a British anthology (Ladykillers: Crime Stories by Women, 1987) and then in the most recent Allingham collection to date, The Return of Mr. Campion (1989).

    What a mess! Wouldn�t it be loverly if someday all the Campion shorts were brought together in their proper order in a single book?

NOTE:   Previously on this blog: A Review by Mike Tooney: MARGERY ALLINGHAM – Mr Campion and Others.

[UPDATE] 02-25-10.   I [Steve] posted this last question asked by Mike on the Yahoo Golden Age of Detection group. That it was a good idea, everyone agreed at once. Others wondered if other authors might also be honored with Complete Short Story collections, including (and especially) Edward D. Hoch. Here’s a reply from Doug Greene, head man at Crippen & Landru, which he’s graciously allowed me to reproduce here:

   I fear that a complete collection of the Campion shot stories would make a hefty volume, but I’d love to see it done. C&L, however, specializes in books of uncollected short stories — though we made an exception of C. Daly King’s The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant, which added 4 or 5 previously uncollected stories to the original 1935 volume.

   The agent for Lillian de la Torre would like us to collect all of her Dr. Sam: Johnson stories into a single book — including 5 or so uncollected tales, but again the volume would be very long, and pricey to publish.

   On the Hoch suggestion, Ed wrote almost 1000 short stories, which would fill about 66 volumes of the usual C&L size. We’ve already published 6 Hoch collections and have plans for at least 3 more… depending on energy and cash flow.

   Our latest, Michael Innes’ Appleby Talks About Crime, is now in print, and we’re sending out copies to our subscribers as quickly as possible — especially since I leave for England in about a week (and will stay 10 days). After I return, we’ll take orders from the general public. And to answer an unspoken query, all the stories are previously uncollected.

                  Doug G

   Then this response, also first appearing as a post on the Yahoo GAD group:

   Barry Pike, chairman of the Margery Allingham Society, has been trying for a while to persuade Vintage, the UK publishers, to do this, but he doesn’t seem to be getting very far.

      Lesley
       —
         Lesley Simpson
          http://www.margeryallingham.org.uk

    In spite of some less than entirely optimistic answers, thank you both, gentlemen!

          Steve

   There are plenty of undiscovered treasures waiting out there in those old Gold Medal Books, some of them by authors you may never have heard of. Clifton Adams is a case in point.

   His name is probably much more familiar to readers of western novels than to readers of crime fiction because he was much more successful as a western writer. But he wrote a couple of crime novels for Gold Medal that are well worth seeking out, Whom Gods Destroy and Death’s Sweet Song.

   These books are of the James M. Cain school, and while they don’t quite come up to the best of Cain, they belong on the same shelf.

   Both books are set in small Oklahoma towns. Whom Gods Destroy is the story of Roy Foley, who returns to his hometown of Big Prairie on the death of his father only to discover that his life is still ruled by his feelings of love and hate for a woman named Lola.

   In fact, his feelings for her have pretty much driven him crazy, though he doesn’t know it. He finds another woman named Vida (I’ll leave all discussions of symbolism to the English majors among you), but even his attraction to Vida isn’t enough to save him.

   To hear him tell it, Foley is one of those hardluck guys, plenty smart, but he’s just never gotten the break he deserves. He thinks he’s found the chance in Big Prairie, however. He’s going to take over the thriving bootlegging trade in the town, and he’s going to do it fast.

   He gets off to a bad start, as his first plan goes wrong. So does his second. And his third. Each time something goes wrong, he pays a price, and just when his plans finally seem to be working out, things fall apart.

   Roy winds up in a cheap hotel and in despair: “Out of the emptiness, I kept thinking: What are you going to do, Foley? What are you going to do? There had to be an answer — if I could only find it. Lost somewhere in the violence and rage there was an answer.”

   The guy in Death’s Sweet Song is Joe Hooper. He owns a little filling station with a couple of tourist cabins out back in Creston, Oklahoma. Like Roy Foley, he’s waiting for his big break, and one day it shows up in the persons of a safecracker named Sheldon and his wife, Paula.

   Paula is one of those women who often turns up in stories like this: bad clear through, and as beautiful as she is bad.

   Before long, Joe finds himself involved in robbery and murder, and at the end of his downward spiral, he’s thinking a lot like Foley: “I looked at them and they were waiting for the answer. They wanted a simple, clear-cut answer, and there wasn’t one. It was a long story, almost a month ago, I thought; that was when I saw her for the first time . . . Less than a month ago it had been. It seemed like a thousand lifetimes.”

   The simple plot summaries don’t do much to convey the quality of writing in these books. It’s the real thing. Uncluttered prose, smooth, and assured, with just the right amount of description to make things real and immediate.

GOLD MEDAL BONUS: If you’re curious about Adams’s westerns, I highly recommend two of his earliest, The Desperado and A Noose for the Desperado.

   These are dandy noir westerns with a protagonist worthy of Jim Thompson. They’re hard to find, though. They hardly ever turn up even on eBay. Copies of Death’s Sweet Song and Whom Gods Destroy show up now and then, and no one even bids on them. Maybe people don’t know what they’re missing, but if you’ve read this far, you don’t have that excuse.

NON-GOLD MEDAL BONUS: Adams also wrote a paperback original for the Ace Double line. He used the name Jonathan Gant, and the book is one half of D-157, Never Say No to a Killer.

   It seems to have been influenced by Horace McCoy’s Kiss Tomorrow Good-Bye, as it’s narrated by an intellectual killer and begins with an escape from a prison work gang. Roy Surratt deludes himself in much the same way that Joe Hooper and Roy Foley do, though he’s well aware that he’s far from the innocent they think themselves to be before they begin their crime sprees.

   This book has a nice twist in that it doesn’t appear to be a mystery novel until the very end, when it’s revealed that one character was indeed doing some detecting and putting the clues together. Maybe this one’s not quite in the league with the two Gold Medals, but it’s worth a read.

   In a way it’s too bad that Clifton Adams found his biggest success writing westerns and didn’t write more crime novels. He was very good at it.

Selected Bibliography:

       ● Death’s Sweet Song. Gold Medal #483, pbo, May 1955.
       ● Whom Gods Destroy. Gold Medal #291, pbo, March 1953.

       ● The Desperado. Gold Medal #121, pbo, 1950.
       ● A Noose for the Desperado. Gold Medal #168, pbo, 1951.

       ● Never Say No to a Killer, as by Jonathan Gant. Ace Double D-157; pbo, 1956.

Editorial Comments:   This column first appeared in Mystery*File #42, February 2004. Covered in previous installments appearing online are authors Day Keene, Dan Marlowe, Charles Williams, Marvin Albert, and Bill Pronzini & Ed Gorman.

   A checklist of the western novels Adams wrote as Clay Randall can be found here earlier on this blog.   [LATER:]   In comment #5, I’ve listed all of Adams’ westerns that I own which were written under his own name.

   And look for additional commentary by Bill on the Jonathan Gant book over on his blog, where it was a “Forgotten Friday Book” a week or so ago.

   One of the last books I read in 2009 was Losing Mum and Pup, satirical novelist Christopher Buckley�s memoir of his parents, who died within a year of each other.

    His father of course was that titan among supercilious sesquipedalians, William F. Buckley Jr., who while appearing weekly on his Firing Line TV series for decades and writing thousands of columns for his magazine National Review (often turning out 700 words in five minutes) also penned a series of novels starring superspy Blackford Oakes, completing each book in about two weeks.

    Christopher says nothing about his Pup�s contributions to mystery fiction but his memories of his Mum, who never wrote a word, reminded me irresistibly of another crime novelist. Mum, it seems, was a compulsive teller of tall tales. �I had heard [her] utter whoppers that would make Pinocchio look button-nosed,� says Christo.

    She loved to tell visitors that when she was small the king and queen of England stayed at her parents� house in Vancouver, or that she had recently served as alternate juror on a famous murder trial.

    I never met any of the Buckleys but about 35 years ago I was invited to join the University of California�s Mystery Library project and thereby got to spend quality time with the project�s instigator: John Ball, author of In the Heat of the Night (1965) and creator of black detective Virgil Tibbs.

    John too was a Munchausen of the first water. The instant any famous name was mentioned in his presence, from Gene Autry to the Dalai Lama, he would claim to know the person well and toss off an anecdote. Shostakovich? �Ah yes, he played the piano for us in this very room when he was last in the States.�

    And what tales he�d spin about his hair-raising adventures around the world! Traveling in Asia, he was invited by the local police to help track down some notorious terrorist. On a secret mission behind the Iron Curtain he lured a Stasi agent who was shadowing him into a public urinal in East Berlin and killed him with one karate chop.

    If you knew a bit about his life — that he�d been a licensed pilot and had traveled widely in Japan and had reviewed classical music for a Brooklyn newspaper and was a police reservist and a martial arts maven — you could almost believe these yarns, which he garnished with vivid detail.

    Perhaps his biggest whopper, and one he should never have perpetrated because so many people saw through it, was that almost everything in the movie based on In the Heat of the Night had been taken from his novel.

    Of course, what made that film so successful was the conflict between Sidney Poitier as Tibbs and the racist cop played by Rod Steiger. Go try to find a smidgen of that conflict in John�s novel.

    John worshiped every badge he saw. In his world racist cops are like dry water, categorically impossible. Even on the plot level director Norman Jewison and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant junked much of the book, including everything about the murder victim trying to make that sleepy Southern town a Mecca for classical music.

    But even when we saw through John�s tall tales it was tremendous fun to watch him spin them. He was the kind of personality that made Casper Gutman say to Sam Spade: �By Gad, sir, you�re a character, that you are!� I thank Christopher Buckley for rekindling my memories of him.

    Another of the last books I read in 2009 came out earlier but so stealthily that few people know it exists. Rick Cypert�s The Virtue of Suspense: The Life and Works of Charlotte Armstrong (Susquehanna University Press, 2008) is just what its title indicates, the first full-length study of the woman who deserves to be called the female Cornell Woolrich if anyone does.

    At their finest, both could generate suspense like nobody else in the business, often with the aid of eye-popping coincidences and improbabilities that readers were usually too rapt to register. There were, of course, huge differences between the two. Armstrong (1905-1969) led a conventional life enriched by a husband (who was murdered a few years after her own death), children and many friends, while that loner�s loner Woolrich hardly had a life at all.

    Armstrong carefully revised and reworked her novels and stories while Woolrich wrote at white heat, creating an intensity beyond Armstrong�s but also committing countless linguistic howlers and blunders.

    Mysteryphiles may safely skip most of Cypert�s introductory chapter, which explores various psychological and aesthetic theories, but they won�t want to miss anything else. Another book on Armstrong is unlikely but, thanks to the excellence of this one, hardly necessary.

    Cypert had the full co-operation of Armstrong�s children and access to her extensive correspondence — with other writers, editors like Fred Dannay, and critics like Anthony Boucher, who adored her work and had much to do with her success. He is presently editing a collection of her short stories, which will be published by Crippen & Landru in due course.

    Cypert is a professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University, the alma mater of another famous female mystery writer. I suspect it�s not a Woolrich-Armstrong coincidence that he�s also written a book on Mignon G. Eberhart and co-edited a collection of her short stories.

    I�ve read little of Eberhart and only met her once, but on that occasion I just may have saved her from serious injury. One miserable winter afternoon in the Reagan era I was in New York and found myself with Eberhart, who was in her eighties at the time and quite tiny and frail, and Gloria Amoury, MWA�s executive secretary.

    All three of us needed to get from Point A to Point B and decided to share a cab. I was immediately behind Eberhart as she entered and one of her feet went out from under her on a patch of ice.

    Somehow my instincts kicked in. I formed my hands into a sort of seat and caught her bottom in it before she could fall.

    Could I be responsible for her having lived to the ripe old age of 97?