Wed 15 Oct 2014
Archived Review: Two Fizz & Buchanan Mysteries by JOYCE HOLMS.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[16] Comments
JOYCE HOLMS – Payment Deferred. Headline, UK, hardcover, 1996; paperback, 1997. Bloody Brits Press, US, softcover, 2007.
The cover bills this as “A Fizz & Buchanan Mystery,†which was intriguing right then and there, because (a) I admit that Joyce Holms was a new name to me, and (b) what’s (who’s) a Fizz? Doing some investigation on my own, it was not difficult to discover that Payment Deferred is the first of [nine] in a series, and why I’d happened to have never heard of the author is that [at the time I read this book] none of them have been published in this country.
I’ll get back to that particular point later, I think. Of the pair of sleuths working out of Ms. Holms’ books, let’s take Tam Buchanan first, as it’s much simpler that way. The town is Edinburgh, and Tam (male) is a lawyer who donates a morning a week to a free legal clinic, a more-or-less straight-and-narrow sort of fellow. As for “Fizz,†I think I’ll do some quoting from pages 7 and 8:
Tam arrives late to find “a plump girl of about seventeen†waiting for him.
She had a sweet, dimpled face and an expression of unassailable innocence. “Well,†she said with a hesitant smile, “that rather depends on who you are.â€
The discrepancy between what his eyes saw and what his ears heard was so great that Buchanan was momentarily at a loss. It was like being savaged by a day-old chick, which was clearly impossible, so that he had to assume that she had not intended the put-down but was merely trying to sound sophisticated, or some such rubbish.
“I do beg your pardon,†he said, with exaggerated politeness, and then regretted it. She was, after all, just a kid, and besides, he should have had the common decency to introduce himself before barking at her. “I’m Tam Buchanan, Legal Advice.â€
She gave him a shy nod and offered a small but surprisingly strong hand. “In that case I am waiting to see you. I’m your new assistant. The name’s Fitzpatrick.â€
And so from here the relationship begins, full of sparks and brief bursts of annoyance and vexation (on both sides, but mostly Tam’s). Here’s another long quote from much toward the end of the book (page 291):
Buchanan was equally disgusted at himself for (a) ever letting her into his life, and (b) being markedly less than enthusiastic to be rid of her.
She was a pain in the neck. Let’s face it, she was horrendous. She was an inveterate liar, a manipulator, selfish, opinionated, miserly, and didn’t give a hoot in hell about anyone but herself. Her philosophy, as propounded by herself, was: everything I have is yours and everything you have is mine. Which was fair enough till you remembered that she didn’t have anything you’d want.
On the other hand, when she was in a good mood – which, okay, was almost always – she was quite nice to be around. She was different. She made you see things in ways you hadn’t seen them before. Also, she had a strange kind of innocence about her, even though you couldn’t trust her with the gold fillings in Grandma’s teeth. But she was honest. That was the funny thing. Way down deep, where it counted, she was as honest a person as he’d ever met.
However, be that as it may, he was rid of her now, and he wasn’t about to change that, regrets or no regrets. Common sense dictated that he learn his lesson and steer clear of her from now on.
Obviously the man is hooked on her. And, no, all first impressions aside, she’s not seventeen, either. More like twenty-six. She’s starting law school in the fall, and working for Tam is to get her foot in the door, and she has no intentions of being a mere secretary. She begins assisting on Tam’s next case almost before he knows there is one.
Which consists of trying to clear the name of an old (and rather dull) friend of Tam’s, Murray Kingston, who has just been released from prison after being convicted of molesting his young daughter.
Who had anything to gain from the false conviction – who could have wanted Murray out of the way for any reason – and who could have faked all of the evidence that put him into prison for three years?
Well, yawn. This is not the most gripping of tales – there’s a heaping abundance of legwork and around page 120 the book gets really talky. Even though (of course) there’s eventually a murder to solve, the real fun is watching the free-spirited Fizz walk loops around the laid-back Buchanan. For the edgiest of relationships since Maddy and David — back before they jumped the shark and “did it†– this is the book you’ll want to read next.
JOYCE HOLMS – Foreign Body. Headline, UK, hardcover, 1997; paperback, 1997. Bloody Brits Press, US, softcover, 2008.
Authors, on occasion and for various reasons, go in their own direction, and that is not always where the reader is going, or wants to, and he or she (the reader) is left leaning the wrong way, and sometimes in the most awkward of positions.
Which is to say, strangely enough, in this the second adventure of Fizz and Buchanan, the edge is gone. Vanished. Only the slightest sense of sexual tension between the two mystery solvers remains, showing itself only now and then, and mostly then.
There’s also a sizable gap in time between the previous book and this one. Fizz, having gotten fired from Tam’s legal clinic, has somehow attached herself to his legal firm itself – and there’s got to be a story there that’s (apparently) never going to be told.
What we do get, as a rather inadequate substitute – I’m being Uncle Grumpy here – is a intimate look into Fizz’s background – the small Scottish village where she grew up, orphaned at an early age, and raised her elderly grandfather.
Persuading Tam to recuperate from an inconvenient gall bladder operation in Perthshire, around Am Bealach where Fizz’s grampa lives, Fizz also has an ulterior motive – persuading Tam to also take an interest in the strange disappearance of Old Bessie, an elderly villager Fizz was fond of. In the meantime, another mystery is encountered – that of a strangely behaving camper with a tent full of weird objects including a blonde wig and a mannequin’s hand.
Can the two cases be connected? Have you not read enough crime fiction to know the answer without asking? You realize of course that the twist might be that they are not – and I’ll never tell.
Once the reader (that’s me) rights himself (or herself, if it’s you, and the pronoun is appropriate) this pair of semi-dueling detectives does do themselves a fair amount of justice on the pair of mysteries with which they’re confronted.
Once again the book plods a little in the middle, but the pieces of the puzzle are painstakingly shaped and given time to develop – perhaps a little too painstakingly – but do stay with them. What better reading experience can there be when all sorts of mysterious occurrences are eventually explained and slide into place?
The Fizz and Buchanan series —
1. Payment Deferred (1996)
2. Foreign Body (1997)
3. Bad Vibes (1998)
4. Thin Ice (1999)
5. Mr Big (2000)
6. Bitter End (2001)
7. Hot Potato (2003)
8. Hidden Depths (2004)
9. Missing Link (2006)
October 15th, 2014 at 4:33 pm
I seldom read books by the same author back to back, but I obviously enjoyed the first one so much that I made an exception to this “rule,” only to be mildly disappointed, as you see.
At the time I wrote this pair of reviews, I knew of only six in the series, and it was before any of them were published in the US. I remember having at least one more to read, but I put it off, packed up the book, and never got back to it.
So here it is ten years later, and I’ve managed to intrigue myself into wondering what box and what storage location I put it into.
October 15th, 2014 at 5:16 pm
I’ve missed something. Why does the heading read “Patricia Holms” and the books under discussion “Joyce Holms”? Is there a connection to Simon Templar’s longtime girl friend Patricia Holm?
October 15th, 2014 at 5:35 pm
You might call that a Goof, in the vernacular. Obviously Patricia Holm got stuck in my head and I couldn’t dislodge it.
I’ll fix it. Thanks!
October 15th, 2014 at 10:21 pm
These sound interesting, but they also sound as if the writer isn’t quite aware of what you found in the book or not sure how to pursue it. Attractive sleuths can lead me along, but I think I’ll wait until I know something about the third outing to see if she recovered from the second novel curse.
October 15th, 2014 at 11:14 pm
Yes, I regret now not reading the third book when I had it handy. The reference to MOONLIGHTING may be apt. My sense is that Holms realized the edgy relationship between Fizz and Buchanan couldn’t be maintained over the course of nine books, not that she knew there were going to be nine books, but that may be the reason she decided to cool down whatever attraction each of them had for the other.
And that slip I made about Patricia Holm may also be relevant. After all, didn’t Charteris decide to essentially write her out of the series after a while, having (as I’ve always thought of it) nowhere to go with her?
October 15th, 2014 at 11:28 pm
I thought The Saint stories with Patricia Holm were well served and a personal preference.
October 16th, 2014 at 11:46 am
There’s a late story in which Simon Templar muses on his having lost Patricia Holm. It may be in the last novel, _Salvage for the Saint_.
October 16th, 2014 at 12:30 pm
You are quite right, Randy. Patricia Holm important enough as a character to have her own long entry in Wkipedia, which states:
“Ultimately a brief reference to Holm was included in the final Saint novel published under Charteris’ tenure, Salvage for the Saint, revealing that at some point in the past, Holm had left Templar.”
With much more about the lady here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Holm
I think Charteris made a mistake in diminishing her role in the series so drastically, but he obviously thought otherwise and didn’t consult me.
October 16th, 2014 at 1:53 pm
Re The Saint In New York. The reference to Patricia added depth and completion. TCM running the picture in the next eight or so weeks. And, it is ‘the’ picture.
October 16th, 2014 at 2:06 pm
Steve, I, for one, am glad you made that mistake re: Patricia Holm and Joyce Holms. Otherwise I might never have read that wikipedia entry about Patricia Holm. I’ve read all of the Saint books, although some of them not recently. I once sent Leslie Charteris a number of books to autograph. He signed one: “On a historic date – 12 May 1977” — it took me awhile to realize that was his birthday!
October 16th, 2014 at 2:34 pm
I want to second Randy Cox’s comment about your mistake, Steve. It was a great one. In life, the late Mrs. Charteris, Audrey Long, had a fair resemblance to Pat Holm.
October 16th, 2014 at 3:33 pm
Writing Pat out was a necessary evil when the Saint moved to the States — he was living with her out of wedlock which was more likely to cause comment here. And much as I liked her a romantic interest is tough to write around for a character like the Saint. Having him single opens up myriad plots.
When Ian Fleming married off Bond and widowed him in the next chapter Erle Stanley Gardner wrote that was why Perry Mason never married Della Street — if he did he would have to kill her off as he did Ed Jenkins love interest.
Pat appears in a few of the films — THE SAINT’S VACATION for one, and was played by Eliza Dushku in the 2013 pilot with Adam Raynor that has yet to air as far as I know.
Isn’t SALVAGE FOR THE SAINT based on a story Charteris wrote for the Saint comic strip by John Spanger and Doug Wildey?
Barry
I agree, THE SAINT IN NEW YORK is ‘the’ Saint film, virtually word for word with the novel, and Louis Hayward the only actor to play the part as written — despite the fact Charteris hated him as the Saint because he was too slight and his South African accent still too thick — and the only film Saint I could imagine cracking the Bishop and the Actress jokes at a constable at three in the morning. It’s a great Saint film and the ending when he deals with the criminal mastermind he’s been hunting pure Charteris and pure Saint.
All the other films feature a character called the Saint, NEW YORK is the Saint.
October 16th, 2014 at 4:27 pm
David,
For whatever reason Charteris did not like any of the actors in the Saint RKO series, Louis, Sanders and Sinclair, this is the first time I’ve ever heard of Louis having a South African accent. He was born there, but no more South African than Olivia De Havilland, born in Tokyo, was Japanese, or Nigel Bruce, born in Cuernavaca, Mexican, or Sanders, born in St. Petersburg, Russia. There parents just happened to be there at the time. In Hayward’s case, his father was a mining engineer run down in ;a hit and run accident. His uncle moved the family back to England, and Louis was educated there and in Brittany. Louis thought Charteris really weird. Wanted him to do things with his eyes to give them an oriental slant. That did not work out.
October 17th, 2014 at 5:52 pm
The accent, at least for that film, was noticeable enough that American producers who can’t tell the difference between Cockney and Oxbridge felt the need to have the character flying in from South Africa at the films opening rather than England.
I never noticed it myself, but they at least thought they did. And South African British accents aren’t always all that strong. No one ever commented on Basil Rathbone being from there.
True Charteris didn’t like any of the Saint’s on film, he even had Simon escape a a particularly tricky trap in one story and quip he’d like to see George Sanders do that. But he was particularly virulent about Hayward which I never understood.
But Hayward was certainly the best of the film Saint’s.
Charteris clearly identified with the Saint, posing as him for a famous photograph (was it in LIFE or one of its imitators?). That may explain the Asian slant to the eyes. His own choice for the part was Cary Grant though the original models were Jack Buchanan and Rex Harrison.
October 17th, 2014 at 6:34 pm
Jack Buchanan, a pass, but Harrison works for me and on another thread, Cary Grant was discussed, and I think we all agreed perfection in the part.
October 17th, 2014 at 10:13 pm
LIFE had a photoplay feature of “The Saint in Hollywood” with Charteris playing the role of Simon Templar.