September 2009


A Review by MIKE TOONEY:


ELLERY QUEEN, Editor – Masterpieces of Mystery: The Supersleuths. Davis Publications, hardcover, 1976.

   Back in the early 1970s, the country of Nicaragua asked Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM) “to set up a poll to establish the dozen greatest detectives of all time” in anticipation of that nation’s issuing a commemorative set of twelve postage stamps to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Interpol. This book is a result — or, perhaps, a by-product of that request.

   EQMM conducted three polls of mystery critics and editors, professional mystery writers, and mystery readers. It was from the last group that an unexpected (to Ellery Queen) result came:

    “Only one fictional detective was voted for unanimously by mystery critics, mystery editors, and mystery writers — not surprisingly, Sherlock Holmes. But, surprisingly, the vote for Sherlock Holmes by mystery readers was not unanimous: no less than 64 readers out of 1,090 failed to rank Holmes as one of the 12 best and greatest. Surprising, indeed. (Surprising? Incredible!)”

   Here are the poll results, in order of popularity:

1-Sherlock Holmes 2-Hercule Poirot 3-Ellery Queen 4-Nero Wolfe 5-Perry Mason 6-Charlie Chan 7-Inspector Maigret 8-C. Auguste Dupin 9-Sam Spade 10-Father Brown 11-Lord Peter Wimsey 12-Philip Marlowe 13-Dr. Gideon Fell 14-Lew Archer 15-Albert Campion 16-George Gideon 17-Miss Jane Marple 18-Philo Vance 19-The Saint (Simon Templar) 20-Roderick Alleyn 21-Luis Mendoza 22-Sir Henry Merrivale 23-Mike Hammer 24-James Bond 25-Sergeant Cuff 26-Inspector Roger West

ELLERY QUEEN Supersleuths

    “This anthology … contains stories by 14 of the 15 top vote-getters in the three combined polls — 14 of the 15 most famous and most popular detective heroes of fiction.”

   Ellery Queen includes a note: “Why Charlie Chan Does Not Appear in the Volume.” Can you guess why?

   Each story in this volume is introduced by a short biographical paragraph and a cameo photograph of the author(s).

      CONTENTS:

ELLERY QUEEN Supersleuths

1. “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” (1904) by A. Conan Doyle (1859-1930). Supersleuth: Sherlock Holmes.

    … our thoughts were entirely absorbed by the terrible object which lay upon the tiger-skin hearthrug in front of the fire. It was the body of a tall, well-made man, about forty years of age. He lay upon his back, his face upturned, with his white teeth grinning through his short, black beard.

Comment: When a rich but sadistic man is apparently murdered by a gang of burglars, Holmes and Watson are summoned; but the case quickly grows more complex. The solution lies in the presence of three wine glasses and a frayed bell-rope. Holmes remarks to Watson at one point: “Once or twice in my career I feel that I have done more real harm by my discovery of the criminal than ever he had done by his crime. I have learned caution now, and I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience.” Filmed for TV in 1986 with Jeremy Brett.

ELLERY QUEEN Supersleuths

2. “The Dream” (1937) by Agatha Christie (1890-1976). Supersleuth: Hercule Poirot.

    “My laundress,” said Poirot, “was very important. That miserable woman who ruins my collars was, for the first time in her life, useful to somebody.”

Comment: When a man who dreams that he commits suicide is found dead in a watched room, only Poirot suspects murder. “Motive and opportunity are not enough …. There must also be the criminal temperament.” Filmed for TV in 1989 with David Suchet.

ELLERY QUEEN Supersleuths

3. “The Case Against Carroll” (1958) by Ellery Queen (1905-1971; 1905-1982). Supersleuth: Ellery Queen.

    “The Fancy Dan who weaves an elaborate shroud for somebody else more often than not winds up occupying it himself. The clever boys trip over their own cleverness. There’s a complex pattern here, and it’s getting more tangled by the hour.”

Comment: The case against Carroll — accused of murdering a law firm partner — seems airtight; the noose tightens when someone who can support his alibi is also murdered. This story is a clever variation on alibi-breaking and is perhaps the penultimate example of that theme. Notice how the narrative’s focus shifts from Carroll at the start to Ellery at the end.

ELLERY QUEEN Supersleuths

4. “The Zero Clue” (1953) by Rex Stout (1886-1975). Supersleuth: Nero Wolfe (with an able — but unwelcome — assist from Archie Goodwin).

    That was a funny thing. I’m strong on hunches, and I’ve had some beauts during the years I’ve been with Wolfe; but that day there wasn’t the slightest glimmer of something impending.

Comment: A mathematical genius is murdered and Archie unwittingly visits the crime scene, causing Inspector Cramer and a horde of policemen to invade Wolfe’s inner sanctum ( “The biggest assortment of homicide employees I had ever gazed on extended from wall to wall in the rear ….”) The dying clue involves eight pencils and a broken eraser, and the solution is found in Hindu mathematics — go figure!

ELLERY QUEEN Supersleuths

5. “The Case of the Crimson Kiss” (1948) by Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970). Supersleuth: Perry Mason (with Della Street and Paul Drake).

    “Ordinarily I’d spar for time, but in this case I’m afraid time is our enemy, Della. We’re going to have to walk into court with all the assurance in the world and pull a very large rabbit out of a very small hat.”

Comment: “… Carver L. Clements, wealthy playboy, yachtsman, broker, gambler for high stakes, was dead.” And good riddance, too. But why is Fay Allison, who never even met the deceased, on trial for his murder — especially when there are better suspects around like, say, Perry Mason and Della Street? Talk about your kiss of death! Filmed for TV in 1957 with Raymond Burr.

ELLERY QUEEN Supersleuths

6. “Inspector Maigret Pursues” (1961) by Georges Simenon (1903-1989). Supersleuth: Inspector Maigret.

    Had the police one single clue? Nothing. Not one piece of evidence. A man killed during the night in the Bois de Boulogne. No weapon is found. No prints.

Comment: Slogging police work for Maigret and his detectives through the freezing streets and stuffy bars of wintertime Paris. “He didn’t know yet that this dreadful trail was to become a classic, and that for years the older generation of detectives would recount the details to new colleagues.” Yet Maigret came to view it differently: “As things turned out, this case was to be referred to at Headquarters as the one perhaps most characteristically Maigret; but when they spoke of it in his hearing, he had a curious way of turning his head away with a groan.”

ELLERY QUEEN Supersleuths

7. “The Purloined Letter” (1844) by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). Supersleuth: C. Auguste Dupin.

    “… I have received personal information, from a very high quarter, that a certain document of the last importance has been purloined from the royal apartments. The individual who purloined it is known — this beyond a doubt; he was seen to take it. It is known, also, that it still remains in his possession.”

Comment: The world’s first armchair detective chain smokes his way to a logical solution to a non-violent crime.

ELLERY QUEEN Supersleuths

8. “Too Many Have Lived” (1932) by Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961). Supersleuth: Sam Spade.

    “Who is this Eli Haven?” “He’s a bad egg. He doesn’t do anything. Writes poetry or something.”

Comment: The world’s first popular gumshoe chain-smokes his way to a logical solution to a very violent crime.

ELLERY QUEEN Supersleuths

9. “The Man in the Passage” (1913) by Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936). Supersleuth: Father Brown.

    The three men looked down, and in one of them at least the life died in that late light of afternoon. It ran along the passage like a path of gold, and in the midst of it Aurora Rome lay lustrous in her robes of green and gold, with her dead face turned upwards.

Comment: Actress Aurora Rome is murdered in her theatre dressing room amidst a group of admirers — and one nondescript Catholic priest. Considering that everyone but the clergyman had experienced amorous impulses exceeding adoration towards her, why would anybody want to kill her? In a courtroom finale, Father Brown clarifies it all, you could say, by holding up a mirror to human nature. (Defense counsel is named Patrick Butler — just a coincidence?)

ELLERY QUEEN Supersleuths

10. “The Footsteps That Ran” (1928) by Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957). Supersleuth: Lord Peter Wimsey (with Bunter).

    “No use playing your bally-fool-with-an-eyeglass tricks on me, Wimsey. I’m up to them.”

Comment: Lord Peter Wimsey-cally solves it when a woman is murdered right over his head, one floor up. The assailant has apparently taken flight with the weapon, but the killer’s goose is cooked when Wimsey gets the bird.

ELLERY QUEEN Supersleuths

11. “The Pencil” (1959; published posthumously) by Raymond Chandler (1888-1959). Supersleuth: Philip Marlowe.

    I had my pipe lit and going well. I frowned down at the one-grand note. I could use it very nicely. My checking account could kiss the sidewalk without stooping.

Comment: Marlowe is hired by “an ex-hood, used to be a troubleshooter for the Outfit, the Syndicate, the big mob, or whatever name you want to use for it.” As he wisecracks his way through the case, he receives — by Special Delivery, no less — the … pencil!

12. “The Proverbial Murder” (1943) by John Dickson Carr (1906-1977). Supersleuth: Dr. Gideon Fell .

    “You see,” [Dr. Fell] said, “this crime is very much more ingenious than it looks. A certain person who is listening to me now has created something of an artistic masterpiece.”

Comment: A simple case for Gideon Fell — simple, that is, if, like him, you can correctly connect up the disturbed window curtain, the disappearing stuffed wildcat, dried moss that’s gone missing, and a gun that couldn’t possibly have fired the fatal bullet but did. Archons of Athens!

13. “Midnight Blue” (1960) by Ross Macdonald (1915-1983). Supersleuth: Lew Archer.

    Her hair was in curlers. She looked like a blonde Gorgon. I smiled up at her, the way the Greek whose name I don’t remember must have smiled.

Comment: Archer goes target shooting and stumbles across the body of a high school senior, her neck in a noose. Did the crack-brained hobo do it, or the highway patrol dispatcher; or was it the grieving father, or maybe the restaurant cook (a proven killer), or the philandering teacher or his estranged wife? The motive is just about the oldest one in the book, as Sam Hawthorne has been known to say.

14. “One Morning They’ll Hang Him” (1950) by Margery Allingham (1904-1966). Supersleuth: Albert Campion.

    “It’s not a great matter — just one of those stupid little snags which has some perfectly obvious explanation. Once it’s settled the whole case is open-and-shut … It’s just one of those ordinary, rather depressing little stories which most murder cases are. There’s practically no mystery, no chase — nothing but a wretched liittle tragedy.”

Comment: On the contrary, Inspector Kenny, the “perfectly obvious explanation” you hope for is an illusion, as Mr. Campion goes on to prove. A shell-shocked war veteran is the prime suspect in the murder of his hot-tempered aunt, but the weapon is missing (it is, in fact, anything but sedentary). Once the killer and the gun are reunited, only then can you say “the whole case is open-and-shut.

A REVIEW BY DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


KINGSLEY AMIS & ROBERT CONQUEST – The Egyptologists. Jonathan Cape, UK, hardcover, 1965. Random House, US, hardcover, 1966. UK paperback reprints: Penguin 2769, 1968; Panther, 1975.

ROBERT AMIS

    For coded messages the discrete use of Egyptological terms is recommended.

   Who are the Egyptologists?

   Just what goes on behind the sedate doors of the Metropolitan Society for Egyptology of London?

   Women would like to know — no woman is allowed to join — especially wives.

   The BBC would like to know — their expose of the Society ended up in a virtual on air brawl.

   Egyptologists would like to know — no one with the least academic credentials is allowed to join.

   MI6 would like to know — you know how nosy spies are.

   Scotland Yard would like to know — the Vice Squad just raided the place, and now a society member has gone missing. Could it be foul play?

   Well, actually yes, but not the kind readers of this blog might expect.

   Funny too, the wives think, that all of their husbands suddenly developed an interest in Egyptology at the same time. Especially when they had never shown the least interest in the subject before. Or anything else remotely academic.

ROBERT AMIS

   Readers familiar with Kingsley Amis will no doubt have already developed a theory about just what the Society is up to, or what exactly their mysterious Project Nefertiti is. And just how did they break one of breasts off the bust of Nefertiti by attempting to put a bra on her? And why?

   Kingsley Amis was a literary gadfly who burst on the literary scene with Lucky Jim, a comedy of manners and sex at Oxford. The books that followed took him from dirty young man (That Uncertain Feeling — the basis for the Peter Sellers film Only Two Can Play) to dirty old man (One Fat Englishman), laughing, jibing, and harpooning the comfortable all the way.

   He also championed science fiction, writing one of the key works of criticism in the field (The New Maps of Hell) with the co-author of The Egyptologists, Robert Conquest.

   He championed Ian Fleming and James Bond in The James Bond Dossier and Every Man His Own 007 (as William Tanner), and penned the first and one of the best Bond pastiche in Colonel Sun, published as by Robert Markham.

ROBERT AMIS

   And he refused to sit still. The Alteration is a startling tale of an alternate world where a group tries to save a young boy from being made a castrati by the all powerful Catholic Church — it was chosen one of the 100 best modern science fiction novels.

   He wrote a coming of age novel in the form of a murder mystery, The Riverside Villa Murders, and a spy novel that was a meditation on morality, The Anti-Death League.

   His horror novel The Green Man was chosen one of the 100 best modern horror novels — it is also drop dead funny. It was made into a mini series and shown on A&E with Albert Finney in the leading role.

   I won’t give away the secret of the Metropolitan Egyptological Society, but nothing good lasts forever.

   Science fiction fans will also enjoy the many references to the genre from theories of alien invasion, to Professor Asimov, of Krakow who almost never publishes anything …

ROBERT AMIS

   If you aren’t familiar with Amis work, this is a perfect place to start. It reads much like one of the great British film comedies of the fifties and sixties (a few of which were based on Amis novels), you won’t be alone if you find yourself casting the novel as you read it with those great British character actors.

   You won’t forget the secret of The Egyptologists, alas for them, neither will their wives.

   Sadly membership is closed, but then your wife would never approve of your spending your Thursday evenings there.

   You know what those ancient Egyptians were like — well, actually, if you do, you couldn’t be a member anyway. You wouldn’t want an actual Egyptologist in the Metropolitan Egyptological Society — that would hardly be fair to the members.

   You wouldn’t want them to waste their Thursdays discussing ancient Egypt would you?

   That would be a complete waste of valuable time.

   And believe me, the Egyptologists have better things to do.

Editorial Comment:  For what it’s worth — and in case you were wondering — this book is NOT included in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV.

    Or should that be NOT YET?

REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:         


ELLY GRIFFITHS – The Crossing Places. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, January 2010. UK edition: Quercus, hardcover, February 2009.

ELLY GRIFFITHS

    The Crossing Places introduces Ruth Galloway, a forensic archeologist who teaches at the University of New Norfolk, and lives on the Saltmarsh in a cottage in the midst of a vast wasteland, with the sea only a line of dark gray against the milky horizon and dimly glimpsed in the distance.

    Two other houses huddle nearby, with scarcely a hint of current human habitation, a bleak expanse that serves as an apt setting for Griffiths’ first crime novel.

   Galloway is happiest when she’s working among her bones, until she is asked by Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson to help with the excavation of remains he believes to be those of Lucy Downey, who disappeared ten years earlier. The bones are, in fact, two thousand years old, but when another girl goes missing, Galloway finds herself drawn deeper into Nelson’s investigation — which also brings back into her life her former lover and her mentor, whose ties to Nelson’s case may be more than purely circumstantial.

ELLY GRIFFITHS

    Griffiths’ husband is an archaeologist, and she gives him and other sources full credit for their police and archaeological expertise. The attention to detail grounds the novel in solid realism, while the use of the present tense for the narration gives it a highly compelling immediacy.

    Like most female amateur sleuths in contemporary crime fiction Ruth prefers to follow her own investigative paths, paths that lead her into dangerous situations, with more than a hint of the traditional Had-I-But-Known technique in evidence.

    But that hint of conventional vulnerability only made the character more attractive for me, as I found myself both engaged by her determination and irritated by her lapses in judgment.

    The developing professional relationship between Galloway and Nelson, even if they are sometimes at odds, is a major factor in the novel’s appeal. The archaeologist and the professional investigator make an excellent team, and I suspect that the series, if it materializes, will take good advantage of this very fortunate pairing.

Editorial Comment:   Walter’s right. The second book in the series, The Janus Stone, is scheduled for publication in the UK in 2010:

ELLY GRIFFITHS

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Bill Pronzini:


DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Thin Man. Alfred A. Knopf, 1934. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback, including Pocket #196, 1942; Vintage, trade pb, 1989.

DASHIELL HAMMETT The Thin Man

   The Thin Man is Hammett’s last and weakest novel. By the time it was written, he had begun his affair with Lillian Hellman, been embraced and financially enriched by Hollywood, and adopted a freewheeling, alcoholic, pseudo-sophisticated life style not dissimilar to the one depicted in these pages.

   He had, in short, lost touch with everything that had made his earlier work so innovative and powerful — his background as a Pinkerton detective, his contacts in the underworld, the lean years spent in a San Francisco flat painstakingly writing stories for Black Mask.

   Hammett could not go home again, and he knew it. Unable to write about the Op or Sam Spade, he could only write about the likes of Nick and Nora Charles. They were phonies in comparison, and he knew that, too — if not during the composition of The Thin Man, then not long afterward.

DASHIELL HAMMETT The Thin Man

   Nick Charles is no longer a detective, a reflection of the fact that Hammett was no longer a writer; he is an ex-sleuth, formerly with the Trans-American Detective Agency of San Francisco, having one last fling at his old profession. Nor is he tough any longer; he is a charming, fun-loving, nouveau riche alcoholic with a veneer of gentility.

   (His wife is just like him, the flighty type who forces him into his one last fling as a means of exorcising her own boredom — the kind of woman the Op or Sam Spade would have sneered at in the old days.)

   The plot has its moments, but on the whole it is merely a standard whodunit of the period. Inventor Clyde Wynant disappears and his secretary is found murdered; Nick investigates at Nora’s urging and encounters such characters as Mimi Jorgensen (his former girlfriend), Dorothy Wynant (Mimi’s daughter), a crooked lawyer named Herbert Macaulay, a gangster named Shep Morelli, a nightclub owner named Studsy Burke.

DASHIELL HAMMETT The Thin Man

   There is more mayhem, considerable duplicity, and enough booze consumed to float the proverbial battleship; Nick solves the case; and at the end Nora says, “Let’s stick around San Francisco a while. This excitement has put us behind in our drinking.”

   Those two lines are typical of the book’s tone: light, witty, urbane. If anyone other than Hammett had written it, it would stand as an amusing piece of fluff. But compared to The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key, it is shallow and gutless.

   Ironically, Nick and Nora Charles, thanks to the six films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, join Sam Spade as Hammett’s most famous detective characters. The films, like the novel, are witty and sophisticated; unlike the novel, they work well because Hammett didn’t write them and because of the delightful interplay between Powell and Loy.

DASHIELL HAMMETT The Thin Man

   The best are the first, The Thin Man (1934), based on the novel; After the Thin Man (1936); and Shadow of the Thin Man (1941). Peter Lawford starred in a popular TV series in the Fifties.

   It should also be noted that Hollywood is responsible for the widespread misconception that “the thin man” refers to Nick Charles. Not true. It refers to the disappearing inventor, Clyde Wynant.

         ———
   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.

Note: This completes this cycle of Hammett reviews on the Mystery*File blog, which began with Dan Stumpf’s earlier comments on The Thin Man, which you can find here.

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Bill Pronzini:


DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Maltese Falcon. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1929. Serialized in Black Mask magazine, September 1929 through January 1930. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft, including Pocket #268, July 1944; 8th printing, October 1945, with dust jacket (both shown). Film: Warner Bros., 1931; also released as Dangerous Female. Also: Warner Bros., 1936, as Satan Met a Lady. Also: Warner Bros., 1941.

DASHIELL HAMMETT The Maltese Falcon

   The Maltese Falcon is the prototype hard-boiled private-eye novel, the finest ever written. It is also the most famous of all American detective stories, thanks in no small part to John Huston’s definitive 1941 screen version.

   Huston remained remarkably faithful to the novel, using most of Hammett’s original dialogue; and his casting was superb: Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade; Mary Astor as Brigid 0’Shaughnessy; Sydney Greenstreet as Caspar Gutman; Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo; and Elisha Cook, Jr., as the little gunsel, Wilmer.

   (An interesting footnote is that Wamer Brothers originally wanted either Edward G. Robinson or George Raft for the lead role; it was only after both of those actors turned it down that Bogart — Huston’s choice from the first — was selected. The thought of either Robinson or Raft, fine actors though they were, portraying Spade is mind-boggling.)

   Sam Spade is likewise the quintessential tough detective. Other writers have altered his image, refined it; but the fact remains that without Spade, there would have been no Philip Marlowe, no Lew Archer, no uniquely American subgenre of detective fiction that has so captured the imaginations of millions that it has been elevated to the status of myth.

DASHIELL HAMMETT The Maltese Falcon

   Spade himself is a mythical figure, of course, owing in part to the fact that he is both enigmatic and misunderstood. Otherwise a Hammett admirer, Somerset Maugham called Spade “a nasty bit of goods … an unscrupulous rogue and heartless crook,” and said that “there is little to choose between him and the criminals he is dealing with.”

   Maugham missed the point completely. Spade is indeed a nasty bit of goods, an unscrupulous rogue and heartless crook — on the surface. That is his public persona, one he wears like a suit of old clothes or the gun he sometimes needs to carry.

   As he says to Brigid at the end of both novel and film, words identical in both: “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be. That kind of reputation might be good business — bringing in high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy.”

DASHIELL HAMMETT The Maltese Falcon

   Spade is hardly a saint; but in his own way, and despite his affair with his partner’s wife, about which much has been made, he is an exceedingly moral man.

   Similarly, don’t be too sure The Maltese Falcon is everything it seems to be on the surface. It is hard-boiled, yes. Uncompromising, yes. Grim and brutal and even nasty in places, yes. But in its own way, it, too, is exceedingly moral.

   The plot of Falcon is familiar to nearly every detective story fan and film buff. Briefly, Spade is visited by a woman calling herself Miss Wonderly; she tells him her sister ran away from New York with a man named Floyd Thursby, that the three have a date that night, and that she wants Spade to rescue the sister.

   Enter Miles Archer, Spade’s partner, who says he’ll attend to the job himself. Which he does, but not very well: He gets himself shot to death in a back alley. Also shot that foggy San Francisco night is Floyd Thursby, in front of his hotel.

   Spade tracks down Miss Wonderly (in reality Brigid O’Shaughnessy); she tells him a different story and begs for his help, and he agrees.

DASHIELL HAMMETT The Maltese Falcon

   Enter Joel Cairo, who puts a gun on Spade in Spade’s office and first mentions “the black figure of a bird.”

   Enter Caspar Gutman, who eventually explains that the figure is “a glorious golden falcon encrusted from head to foot with the finest jewels,” a gift to Emperor Charles V from the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, crusaders who persuaded the emperor to give them the islands of Malta, Gozo, and Tripoli in 1530.

   While en route to Spain, the falcon was stolen by the pirate Barbarossa, and over the centuries it passed through various private hands, two of those hands being Gutman’ s — almost.

   He has spent seventeen years tracking down the black bird, almost got it in Paris, almost got it in Constantinople: wants it desperately. So do Joel Cairo and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, both of whom were confederates of Gutman’s at one time and both of whom have tried to double-cross him to get it for themselves.

DASHIELL HAMMETT The Maltese Falcon

   Another murder and more double-dealing lead to a grand finale in Spade’s flat with all the principals present — including the falcon, which has just arrived via the ship La Paloma from Hong Kong. Or has it? The confrontation between Spade and the murderer of Miles Archer remains one of the most powerful in all of crime fiction.

   The Maltese Falcon is hardly a perfect novel; such is a rara avis indeed, almost as rare as the Maltese falcon itself. Spade’s affair with Iva Archer is never satisfactorily resolved. The character of Rhea Gutman, Gutman’s daughter, seems superfluous. (John Houston thought so, too: He excised her completely from his screen version.)

   Bits and pieces don’t quite hang together or are fused by melodrama. But this is nitpicking, really. In all ways that matter, it is truly a classic work, summed up brilliantly by Houston in the last line of the film, when he had Bogart/Spade say that the Maltese falcon is “the stuff that dreams are made of.”

         ———
   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.

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Francis M. Nevins:


DASHIELL HAMMETT The Glass Key

DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Glass Key. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1931. Serialized in Black Mask magazine: “The Glass Key” (March 1930). “The Cyclone Shot” (April 1930), “Dagger Point” (May 1930), “The Shattered Key” (June 1930). Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback, including Pocket #211, pb, 1943 ; Dell 2915, pb, 1966. Film: Paramount, 1935, with George Raft. Also: Paramount, 1942, with Alan Ladd, Brian Donlevy, Veronica Lake.

   Hammett’s fourth novel is set in a nameless city modeled on Baltimore, where he grew up. Like Personville in Red Harvest, the city is controlled by crooked politicians in league with various mobster factions; but in The Glass Key Hammett gives us an insider’s view of the corruption and in fact creates a corrupt political henchman as his protagonist.

DASHIELL HAMMETT The Glass Key

   Ned Beaumont — tall, thin, a dandy and a compulsive gambler and tuberculosis victim like Hammett himself — is the best friend and most trusted adviser of Paul Madvig, the lower-class ethnic who controls the city.

   Against Beaumont’s advice, Madvig has made a deal for mutual political support with upper-crust Senator Henry, hoping that the payoff for him will include Henry’s lovely daughter, Janet, with whom he’s infatuated.

   Then Senator Henry’s son is murdered in circumstances that implicate Madvig. As Madvig’s enemies plot to speed the politically wounded leader’s fall from power, Beaumont sets out to clear his friend and patron, limit the damage to his machine, and keep the other side’s crooked candidates from defeating Madvig’s crooked candidates in the upcoming election.

   In the process he endures perhaps the most savage beating in crime fiction, and the equally painful experience of becoming involved himself with Janet Henry, his best friend’s woman.

DASHIELL HAMMETT The Glass Key

   The Glass Key is one of Hammett’ s most powerful novels but also one of crime literature’s most frustrating classics. Its third-person narrative voice, like that of The Maltese Falcon, is so objectively realistic and passionlessly impersonal that it seems to draw an impenetrable shield between characters and reader.

   As a result, generations of critics have debated all sorts of factual questions that writers less bold than Hammett would have answered unequivocally.

   Did Ned really intend to sell Madvig out to his rival Shad O’Rory, or is he playing double agent?

   For what earthly reasons did he permit Jeff, O’Rory’ s unforgettable moronic bone-crusher, to beat him almost to death? Is he really in love with Janet Henry or does he have a suppressed homosexual desire for Madvig?

   Reading the novel again and again only fuels these controversies, for Hammett refuses on principle to enter into any of his characters’ thoughts and feelings, and forces us to judge from what they say and do — from inherently misleading and uncertain data. No wonder there’s no consensus about The Glass Key!

DASHIELL HAMMETT The Glass Key

   Hammett himself, and such experts as Julian Symons and Frederic Dannay (Ellery Queen), thought it was his best novel; a number of academic literary critics rank it as his worst.

   Hammett’s vision was one of the darkest in the history of crime fiction. He saw the world as an incomprehensible place in which no one can ever really know another, and created the world of The Glass Key to match.

   Whatever the ultimate verdict on its literary status, it’s a compulsively readable, coolly sardonic portrait of an unredeemable nightworld and ambiguous relationships, and stands beside The Maltese Falcon as one of the earliest classics of noir crime fiction.

         ———
   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.

JOHN CREASEY – A Rocket for the Toff. Pyramid R-1085, paperback original; 1st US printing, October 1964. UK editions: Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 1960; Hodder 563, paperback, 1963.

JOHN CREASEY A Rocket for the Toff

   John Creasey simply wrote too many books for me to claim to be an expert on all of them, including the reprints, both in England and the US. So when the cover of the Pyramid edition of A Rocket for the Toff claims that it”s the first of Creasey’s Toff adventures to be published over here in this country, I haven’t checked it out positively, but I’ve done enough so far that I’m inclined to believe it.

   And to that end, there is a two page introduction by John Creasey in which he explains who The Toff is (Richard Rollinson) and what a toff is (“a man who is stylishly dressed, or who has a smart appearance […] a gent, in fact”).

   I don’t remember where I bought my copy of this book, except that I had just started grad school, so it would have been Ann Arbor, but which of several sales outlets, including drug stores — all of which I remember rather vividly — I cannot say for sure, but what I am sure of is that I appreciated the introduction, as otherwise how would I have known what a toff was?

   But buy the book I did, and now I can say that I have read it. (Whether or not I read this one at the time, I cannot say, but Pyramid published several of these Toff adventures within a period of a few months, and read some of them, I did.)

   This one starts out in fine fashion, full of action, furor and mystery from page one onward, as a young girl hoping to meet her fiance at the London airport, after two years’ absence in the US, is sadly disappointed when he does not arrive. Even more, she’s involved in a serious accident involving a man, his sister, and their dog that results in her being knocked to the ground and knocked out.

JOHN CREASEY A Rocket for the Toff

   To her rescue comes Dr. Mike Kennedy, who believes her story when the police are polite but somewhat skeptical. He (the doctor) is also somewhat taken by her and personally takes her home. He is also a good friend of the Toff, whom the next day he calls in on the matter.

   And it is a good thing, too, as Kate Lowson — that’s her name — and her apartment, is the subject of several break-in’s and attacks, but for what reason she does not know.

   And as long as the spotlight is on Kate and Dr. Kennedy, the action is focused and direct. But once the basis of the affair is revealed — the “rocket” of the title is nothing more than a new secret brand of automobile with amazing (almost science-fictional) abilities — it seems as though all of the mystery is gone, and the reader-s interest with it. (Speaking for myself, that is.)

   It remains to the Toff and his friend Superintendent Grice of Scotland Yard to clean up from here, but also from this point on, the story no longer seems personal, having lost (in my opinion) all of its immediacy. Lots of derring-do, which as always keeps the pages turning, but all in all, it’s all fairly lackluster, I’m sorry to say.

A REVIEW BY DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


BORIS AKUNIN – Murder on the Leviathan. Random House, hardcover, April 2004; trade paperback, February 2005. Translated by Andrew Bromfield.

BORIS AKUNIN

    One of the unexpected benefits of the fall of the former Soviet Union was the career of Russian mystery writer Boris Akunin, with his novels about Erast Fandorin now available in the west.

    Akunin is Grigori Chkhartichvili, a philologist, critic, essayist, and Japanese translator, who took advantage of the new freedom in Russia to create a popular series about 19th Century sleuth Erast Fandorin, a special agent of the Russian Police whose adventures take him from his youth to middle age and from Moscow to exotic adventures around the globe.

    Attractive, smart, and devastating to women, Fandorin is a human and likable hero who combines elements of James Bond, the original Nick Carter, The Wild West, and Ellery Queen in his bright clever adventures.

    The books veer from wild adventure to more or less straight detection, from con men to serial killers, and find Fandorin at various stages in his illustrious career, often caught between clever villains, dangerous beautiful women, and his own devious superiors.

BORIS AKUNIN

    It’s no surprise Ruth Rendell has called Akunin the Russian Ian Fleming.

    In Murder of the Leviathan Akunin takes a note from Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming. When Lord Littleby and his family are found murdered in their mansion on the Rue de Grenelle in Paris in 1878, the legendary French sleuth “Papa” Gauche finds his only clue to the crime is a key in the shape of a golden whale, a ticket on the luxury steamship the Leviathan leaving Southampton on its maiden voyage to Calcutta.

    Arriving at Southampton and boarding the Leviathan, Papa Gauche finds himself joined by Erast Fandorin, a handsome callow Russian sleuth with a shock of white hair. It’s a reluctant teaming on Gauche’s part, though he admits Fandorin might be useful. He might be even more reluctant if he knew Fandorn was a walking arsenal of hidden weapons, and something of a genius at crime solving.

    I see that I did not finish writing about Mr. Fandorin. I do believe I like him, despite his nationality. Good manners, reticent, knows how to listen. He must be a member of that estate referred to in Russia by the word intelligenzia …

    Fandorin is a contrast to Papa Gauche, who lives up to his name:

    Gray haired, bloated, and decidedly not good-looking …

    But the two form a working relationship, and Gauche soon comes to respect Fandorin’s wisdom and intelligence.

BORIS AKUNIN

    There are ten un-ticketed passengers on the Leviathan, and one of them is the killer: the Japanese doctor, the professor who deals in rare Indian artifacts, a pregnant Swiss woman, a wealthy Englishman who collects Asian antiquities, being among them. And then in true Christie style the passengers on the Leviathan begin to die at the hand of the desperate killer.

    These books feature grand villains, femme fatales, desperate espionage, and action enough for a dozen books. The Fandorin tales are great fun, playful and intelligent, as Alan Furst said, as if Tolstoy had set out to write a murder mystery. Fandorin is a cross between Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, d’Artagnan, and a Dostoevsky hero, brilliant, swashbuckling, and romantically melancholy.

    I’m not sure anyone in the west is writing anything like Akunin’s Fandorin novels, but thankfully we have them, and so far of the eleven books in the series, at least eight have been translated, with five published so far in the US. Akunin has also written a trilogy about Sister Pelagia, all of which are now available in English.

    Get acquainted with him. His books are literate, playful, and page turning reads. You will find nothing quite like him and no one quite like Erast Fandorin in Western literature — more’s the pity.

    It’s not often you find a writer or a hero who can honestly be said to mix elements of dime novels, Ian Fleming, Dostoyevsky, Dumas, and Ellery Queen, but Akunin and Fandorin manage the feat. There is nothing else quite like them on the shelves.

       The Erast Fandorin series. [Note that so far only the first five have been published in the US.]

1. The Winter Queen (2003)
2. The Turkish Gambit (2004)

BORIS AKUNIN

3. Murder on the Leviathan (2004)
4. The Death of Achilles (2005)
5. Special Assignments (2007)

BORIS AKUNIN

6. The State Counsellor (2008)
7. The Coronation (2009)
8. The Lover of Death (2009)

       The Sister Pelagia series

1. Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog (2006)

2. Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk (2007)
3. Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (2008)

COUNT THREE AND PRAY. Columbia, 1955. Van Heflin, Joanne Woodward, Phil Carey, Raymond Burr, Allison Hayes, Myron Healey, Nancy Kulp, Jean Willes. Screenwriter: Herb Meadows. Director: George Sherman.

COUNT THREE AND PRAY

   In all likelihood, this is Joanne Woodward’s least known motion picture. I may be wrong about that, but it is for a fact her first.

   Before doing Count Three and Pray, she’d been on Broadway and she’d been on television, doing episodes of highly regarded series such as The United States Steel Hour, Alcoa Playhouse and Studio One.

   It was on Broadway that she first met a fellow actor named Paul Newman; both were understudies for a run of “Picnic,” where they got along well, or so I’ve read.

   I’ve categorized this movie as a western, but I’m not sure that it is, exactly, even though director George Sherman had directed tons of westerns, starting as far back as 1937. It does take place in the post-War South, that’s definite, but how far west Van Heflin’s rural home town is, the one he returns to, I’m not sure.

   Van Heflin plays Luke Fargo, a veteran of the war and a man with a new goal in life. It seems that he fought for the North, a choice his former neighbors do not take kindly to when he returns. Before he left, he was also something of a hell-raiser. Now his only desire is to become the town’s preacher.

   But the church has been destroyed, and the parsonage next door in bad shape and has been taken over and is lived in by a young orphan girl named Lissy (Miss Woodward), a true tomboy who wants nothing to do with Luke Fargo. As if she has any choice.

COUNT THREE AND PRAY

   Running the town is a storekeeper named Yancey Huggins (Raymond Burr, in fine villainous form). Allison Hayes (later to become the “50 Foot Woman”) plays the daughter of one of the town’s former aristocrats, and you know how old Southern aristocrats fared after the War. Many of them had to make their lives over, in any way they could.

   (It should be noted that the female star with Van Heflin in the still from the movie is Allison Hayes. It’s been difficult to find any contemporaneous publicity material which includes Joanne Woodward, which illustrates, I believe, how totally unknown she was to moviegoers at the time.)

   As for Van Heflin, he plays weary and perhaps sorely misguided but determined very well, but Joanne Woodward is even better, as she brings an entirely unexpected light to his life – and to this movie as well.

   Even this early in her career her Broadway training is very noticeable. She moves around the set with polished ease, makes it clear what she’s thinking without saying a word, and when she does speak she does so clearly and projects to the last seat in the balcony – and in the meantime, she is a ray of sunshine whenever she is on the screen. It is extremely clear that she would not be doing many more westerns in her movie-making career.

   Two years later, she won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for The Three Faces of Eve (1957).

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Bill Pronzini:


DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Dain Curse. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1928. Originally published as the following stories from Black Mask magazine: “Black Lives” (November 1928), “The Hollow Temple” (December 1928), “Black Honeymoon” (January 1929), “Black Riddle” (February 1929).   Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and paperback, including Permabook M-4198, 1961 (shown). TV movie [4-episode mini-series]: 1978; with James Coburn as “Hamilton Nash”.

DASHIELL HAMMETT The Dain Curse

   The Dain Curse is one of two novel-length works featuring the Continental Op. It was originally written for Black Mask as four separate novelettes; taken together, the four interconnected “cases” comprise a kind of criminous family saga in which Hammett all but decimates the “Black Dains” of San Francisco.

   The novel begins with the Op, who has been hired by an insurance company to look into a diamond robbery at the home of Edgar Leggett (real name Dain), finding one of the missing stones:

    “It was a diamond all right, shining in the grass half a dozen feet from the blue brick wall.”

   Just a few of the more than thirty characters he subsequently encounters: Leggett/Dain, a scientist working at home on a process for coloring diamonds; his daughter, Gabrielle, who feels she has bad blood and is cursed and whose drug addiction is a focal point of the story line; the family’s mulatto maid, Minnie Hershey; Gabrielle’s doctor, Riese; her fiance, Eric Collinson (a puckish Hammett tribute to the pseudonym under which his first Black Mask stories were published); Joseph Haldorn and his wife, Aaronia, who run a religious cult called the Temple of the Holy Grail; writer Owen Fitzstephan; and a couple of other private detectives investigating Leggett/Dain’s shady past.

HAMMETT The Dain Curse

   The plot has numerous twists and turns, multiple climaxes, and plenty of atmospheric elements (the scenes enacted at the Temple of the Holy Grail, for instance).

   On the whole, however, it is overlong and decidedly melodramatic. As critic John Bartlow Martin wrote in Harper’s Magazine:

    “In this single Hammett novel the detective shot and stabbed one man to death, helped shoot another dead, was himself attacked with dagger, gun, chloroform and bomb, fought off a ghostly manifestation barehanded, wrestled with five women, cured a girl of narcotic addiction — and … was obliged to deal with one seduction, eight murders, a jewel burglary, and a family curse.”

   The Dain Curse is more cleanly plotted and credible than the first Op novel, Red Harvest (1927), in which more than thirty people die, including no fewer than a dozen of the main characters. But its flaws prove that it is the novelette, not the novel, to which the Continental Op was best suited and in which his finest cases are chronicled.

         ———
   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.

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