Wed 19 May 2021
An Archived PI Mystery Review: SCOTT MITCHELL – Double Bluff.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[9] Comments
SCOTT MITCHELL – Double Bluff. Brock Devlin #5. Herbert Jenkins, UK, hardcover, 1968. No US edition.
My nominee for obscure title of the month, unless you live in England, since I don’t believe any of Mitchell’s sizable collection of mystery and detective novels have ever been published in the United States. This despite the fact that the hero in most of his books was Brock Devlin, a medium-boiled PI whose main stomping grounds is Los Angeles. (A very strange LA, by the way, one that has kerbs instead of curbs.)
He is also singularly slow on the uptake. In Chapter One, after having a falling out with his girl friend, Devlin goes bar-hopping and during his travels he comes across a strange girl whose name (she says) is Zoe Gordon. In Chapter Two (the disagreement with his girl friend still not settled) he is hired by a conservative Jew-hating industrialist to find the man’s daughter-in-law, a woman by the name of Zelda Ganzer.
Bingo! But not until he sees a photograph of the woman does Devlin make the connection. (They are the same person. I don’t believe that Devlin’s been in as many detective novels as I’ve read. (*)) But even he recognizes this as a gigantic coincidence at best, or (which is infinitely more likely) there is something far more sinister behind it.
And there is. This book is nothing anyone in the US should write their friends in the UK to be on the lookout for, but except for the constant use of the words “baby†and “sweetie,†dating the story more than the author could possibly have recognized when he wrote it, this is a moderately good time-passer.
(*) [WARNING: Subtle Plot Alert ahead.] Well, actually, in violation of Someone’s Laws of
detective story writing – S. S. Van Dine’s? – the sentence before this one isn’t really true, either. It’s probably where the title came from, and believe it or not, I didn’t realize it until right now.
Bibliographic Update: Scott Mitchell was the pen name of Lionel Robert Holcombe Godfrey, (1932- ). He wrote 16 mysteries under this name, all but one of which are known to be cases for Brock Devlin. Under the pseudonym of Elliot Kennedy, Godfrey wrote six more mysteries; in at least five of these a fellow by the name of Griff Dexter was the leading character. Other than the fact that his adventures also took place in the US, primarily in Los Angeles, I know nothing about him.
May 19th, 2021 at 1:50 pm
Another author I discovered in Britain (never read, of course), and bought whenever I saw them to sell here, since they were not published in the U.S.
May 19th, 2021 at 2:08 pm
Which means, of course, you had buyers for them here in the US. I wonder if I purchased this one from you.
May 19th, 2021 at 5:58 pm
I was wondering that myself. Distinct possibility.
May 19th, 2021 at 8:04 pm
Quite a few writers from the UK are not known that well here, some like Francis Durbridge, Ernest Dudley, and John Newton Chance worth reading, if not of the first order. Berkeley Gray (E. S. Brooks) who was also Victor Gunn only got over here from the rare Canadian paperback even though his Norman Conquest was a major competitor to the Toff and the Saint in the UK, and I’m not sure Val Gielgud, Nigel Morland, Gerard Fairlie, or Francis Gerard were reprinted here in their lifetimes (one Gerard horror novel was issued here in paperback in the early paperback era). Sydney Horler was virtually unknown too.
For that matter John Creasey was only sparsely published in this country until the sixties (a few Baron books as Blue Mask pre war) though while he lived in Arizona he cracked the American paperback market as Ralph Caine Fraser and Abel Mann.
Some fairly big names like Roy Vickers were never that big here either despite his presence in EQMM.
May 19th, 2021 at 9:31 pm
I’ve always had the idea in the back of my mind to write an article about what British writers made it over here, and which not, then delve into the question of why. I think Mitchell’s case is clear. We had plenty of funky LA-based PIs of our own. We didn’t need more, while (apparently) British readers couldn’t get enough of them.
May 20th, 2021 at 8:39 pm
Steve,
In the case of John Creasey he said his problem cracking the American market until he spent some time living here had to do with his approach to his characters and the influence of Edgar Wallace (who was never as big here as in the rest of the world) on how he handled them.
One of the results of his greater understanding of the American style was the Gideon series.
Despite the domestic business in the Roger West series Creasey claimed that to really start selling in the American market he had to give his characters more of an interior life. If my memory is right he was told that by an American publisher when he complained about having trouble cracking the American market.
I never have understood how Berkeley Gray’s Norman Conquest 1066 wasn’t picked up by the pulps. Gray/Brooks had spent most of his career as a pulp writer and Conquest is a cross between James Bond and the Saint replete with gadgets and fast paced sexy adventures full of dastardly villains, and Conquest is probably the least clearly British of the Gentlemen Adventurers.
But I do think for Creasey, Gray, and other British pulp writers that difference of their characters interior lives may be one reason they just didn’t fare well over here, accepting those writers who were just too British to really translate.
On the other hand I am sometimes surprised to find writers I hadn’t known got much American exposure like Dornford Yates. Barry Perowne, or H. C. McNeile’s Bulldog Drummond in American pulps.
May 20th, 2021 at 9:33 pm
Yes, with all of the examples you give above, some made it, others didn’t. At times it seems haphazard, with others, such as Creasey, you can pinpoint with more accuracy when his books finally began to sell here. There is a doctoral dissertation just waiting to be written. I wish it could be me, but alas, it won’t.
May 29th, 2021 at 4:36 pm
As I relate in the entry (https://thrillingdetective.com/2020/02/20/brock-devlin/) I did a million years ago, the books made it at least as far as Canada–although I think mostly to libraries. I rarely saw any of them in bookstores, new or used.
So “kerbs” wasn’t wrong if it was intended for readers in the Commonwealth. Although, Canadian English, of course, is a sloppy drunk mish-mash of English, American and sometimes French. So color is colour, and theater is theatre. But tire is tire–tyre is just weird. Kerb struck me as weird, too.
But I liked the books. As I recall they had a nice Thomas Dewey/William Campbell Gault vibe. And anyway, what did I know? I was a kid!
May 29th, 2021 at 8:02 pm
Your write-up on the series — and thanks for the link!– has me trying to find my copy of the book again, or failing that, going online to find another of Devlin’s adventures. Anything in the Gault/Dewey vein is OK with me. And well worth following up on. Even if some words are spelled wrong.