ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Fan Dancer’s Horse. William Morrow, hardcover, 1947. Pocket 886, paperback, 1952. Several later reprint editions.

   In 1933, when Erle Stanley Gardner took his publisher’s advice that the hero of his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, might make a good series character, he did not know what lay in store for him-or for Perry Mason. Since then, the Los Angeles lawyer; his secretary, Della Street; and private investigator Paul Drake have become household names. And with the first airing of the immensely popular Perry Mason television series in  1957 they became household images as well, in the form of Raymond Burr. Barbara Hale, and William Hopper.

   While not particularly well written or characterized, the Mason books have convoluted plots and punchy dialogue, which in the courtroom takes on the form of verbal sparring. The books are also very much alike, and perhaps this is the basis for their wide appeal. Readers know that in each one an innocent (in the legal sense) will become involved in a murder; odious Lieutenant Tragg will investigate and arrest; snide District Attorney Hamilton Burger will prosecute; and Perry Mason will vindicate his client in a dramatic courtroom revelation of the true killer.

   It is these courtroom scenes that make the novels stand out from other mystery fiction. Gardner, a lawyer himself, was able to simplify courtroom procedure so even the least astute reader could understand it, while at the same time packing the scene with dramatic impact. Even those who are normally bored with legal matters can enjoy watching Perry Mason devil the D.A. in the interests of justice, and many a lawyer practicing today will admit he got his first taste of the profession through Mason’s legal pyrotechnics.

   The Case of the Fan Dancer’s Horse begins with a hit-and-run automobile accident in California’s Imperial Valley. Two cars glance off one another; Perry Mason and Della Street rush to aid the one that overturns in the ditch, and find an old Mexican woman whose car trunk contains the plumed wardrobe of a fan dancer. The woman is presumably taken away to the hospital by a passing motorist, but the accident is never reported. Mason, who has taken the fans and dancing shoes into custody, places an ad in the paper offering their return. The reply is not what he expected: The fan dancer docs indeed want her property returned, but it is a horse, not a wardrobe, that she is missing.

   Dancer Lois Fenton — alias Cherie Chi-Chi — is appearing in an old western town called Palomino, and Mason and Street travel there to meet with her. They return the fan-dancing paraphernalia and receive a description of the missing horse, but soon it becomes apparent that the woman they spoke with is not the real Lois Fenton. The real fan dancer — who has a complicated history — is as missing as her horse.

   Approached by a young man who is in love with Miss Fenton, Mason accepts a retainer to act in her behalf, and earns it when a wealthy rancher is found murdered in an L.A. hotel room, a bloody imprint that could have been made by an ostrich feather on the wall. Lois Fenton was seen leaving the scene and quickly becomes the chief suspect.

   In spite of obvious holes in logic — why, for instance, would Mason take on a client when he has seen no more of her than her ostrich plumes? — the story moves ahead at a breakneck pace. And when the real Lois Fenton finally turns up and the legal battle lines are drawn, Mason is in fine form.

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

WALTER TEVIS – The Man Who Fell to Earth. Gold Medal k1276, paperback original, February 1963. Cover art by Diane Dillon and Leo Dillon. Reprinted several times, including: Avon, paperback, 1976 (slightly updated); Bantam, paperback, 1981. Film: British Lion Film Corporation, UK, 1976; Cinema 5, US, 1976 (starring David Bowie). TV Movie: ABC, 1987. Plus two TV Mini-series.

   An alien, an Anthean, comes to Earth. They’ve run out of resources on Anthea.

   The Antheans had just enough fuel to send one of them to Earth.

   He’s long, tall and gangly, with bird like bones, but with prosthetics looks human enough to pass. He’s learned English from intercepted television broadcasts.

   He has a bagful of diamonds which he pawns til he raises a decent stake.

   He buys a suit of clothes, passage to nyc, rooms at a luxury hotel, and visits the best patent lawyer money can buy. He shows the lawyer formulas for more efficient oil processing, digital photography, digital recording technology, and offers 10% of the profits if the lawyer will take care of the patents and hire the infrastructure to start World Enterprises Corporation. The lawyer salivates.

   Before you know it, the Anthean is a multimillionaire. An Elon Musk-like titan of technology.

   His next project is a huge spacecraft whose secret purpose is to travel to Anthea to bring the rest of his race to Earth. To take over. To rule the earth in a wise dictatorship. To save Earth from the destructiveness of man.

   But the CIA discovers him and his plans. He’s arrested. Officially, the change is being a suspected non-us citizen without proper immigration papers. But he’s forged perfect proof of citizenship and has all the right papers. He’s too famous to kill, and the administration doesn’t dare tell the public he’s an actual alien. It’s an election year, and they’d be laughed out of office. Other big business moguls and the press are hounding the government on this warrantless arrest of a titan of industry. So he’s released.

   But his plans are ruined. There is no way the US government will allow the incomplete spaceship to be finished. And if the Antheans arrived they’d be arrested or killed.

   The Anthean realizes he’ll never see his people again, his wife and family. They’ll be unable to forestall man’s foretold fate of self destruction.

   He discovers the pleasures of gin. He soaks his loneliness. And decides, what the hell is all this for? Who cares? Better to drink my way to oblivion.

   An affecting and strangely believable meditation on loneliness.

BANK ALARM. Grand National Pictures, 1937. Conrad Nagel, Eleanor Hunt, Vince Barnett, Wheeler Oakman, Nat Carr. Directed by Louis J. Gasnier.

   Bank Alarm is a perfectly average crime film. Although considerably dated, it nevertheless tells a somewhat compelling story about a federal agent’s quest to uproot a bank robbing outfit in 1930s Los Angeles. G-Man Alan O’Connor (Conrad Nagel), with his girlfriend/assistant Bobbie Reynolds (Eleanor Hunt), begins his investigation when a lower ranking member of the criminal outfit is killed in prison.

   Little does O’Connor know that his sleuthing will eventually lead to his sister’s new boyfriend, screenwriter Jerry Turner (Frank Milan). Turner has been working in cahoots with local crime boss, nightclub owner Joe Karlotti (Wheeler Oakman).

   There’s nothing particularly special about this film. With a running time of around an hour, it doesn’t waste the viewer’s time with extraneous material. That said, there’s not much here to overly recommend. If you watch it, you probably won’t love it and you probably won’t hate it. It is what it is. Just a largely forgotten B-movie that most people, I suspect, have never heard of, let along seen.

LOOK WHO’S LAUGHING. RKO Radio Pictures, 1941. Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, Fibber McGee & Molly, Lucille Ball, Harold Peary. Director: Allan Dwan.

   Edgar and Charlie make an unscheduled landing in Wistful Vista, the home of Fibber McGee and Molly. Lucille Ball is Edgar’s secretary, and to make things complicated, she is secretly in love with him.

   The rest of the story has to do with land for a proposed airplane factory in Wistful Vista, but the main attraction of the story is seeing so many famous radio characters in the flesh – including Fibber’s long-time nemesis, Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve.

JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper. Travis McGee #10. Gold Medal T2023; paperback original, 1st printing, 1968. Cover artist: Ron Lesser. Reprinted many times.

   It takes about 60 pages of slow going, through a very familiar story of a woman dying of the Big C, before the story begins. But before it’s done, the dirty inside secrets of another pretty-on-the-outside Florida town are exposed by the actions of the ever adventuresome Travis McGee.

   The lady’s request that McGee stop her daughter’s suicide attempts brings him to Fort Courtney, and he stays when the nurse who picks him up in a bar is murdered. It isn’t suicide he still has to stop, but a carefully planned murder, by a man who can’t believe anything will stand in his way.

   McGee is a bit too late, and the daughter becomes the first girl in a plain brown wrapper. The second is more obvious, and yet more subtle.

   Emphasis, or detail, is added to McGee’s sexual appetite. What indeed does make man an man, and a woman a woman? And any resplendence to an abortive scene from The Graduate is purely intentional.

Rating: ****½

DOROTHY GARDINER – The Seventh Mourner. Sheriff Moss Magill #2. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1958. Popular Library, paperback, 1964.

   Sheriff Moss Magill of Notlaw, Colorado, functions best in his beloved mountains and is reluctant to leave them. However, when local resident Harriet Farquhar Orchard dies, she makes it a condition of her will that he deliver her ashes to her home in Rowanmuir, Scotland. Moss is convinced to go only when he learns that Harriet also wanted him to investigate her sister, Lizzy, who has been released by a Scottish court with the verdict “not proven” on a charge of murder.

   Wearing his customary whipcord pants, boots, and black-and-yellow striped shirt with his silver badge pinned to it, Moss evokes many stares during the trip, especially on the train from Edinburgh to Rowanrnuir, which, coincidentally, all of the mourners have taken that same August morning.

   The assorted group is all staying at the hotel where Lizzy works as a maid. During a day trip to Glasgow, Moss hears bagpipes for the first time and, in an enchantment born of ethnic memory, falls in love with Scotland.

   When one of the party is pushed under a truck that same day, he puts his investigative talents to use and works with the local authorities both to discover the murderer and to fulfill Harriet’s last request.

   This is an unusual idea, for a mystery, with excellent background and an appealing main character. Other amusing Magill adventures are Lion in Wait ( 1963), in which a toothless circus lion is accused of murder; and What Crime Is This (1956), in which Moss uses a hula-dancer statue with a clock embedded in her stomach to help clear up a murder.

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

   Live from The Howard Stern Show in 2023:

   A correspondent known to me as Gunnar asks the following question. Perhaps those of you who have read more early detection fiction than I can tell us more:

    “Tony Baer’s recent review of A. A. Milne’s Red House Mystery (1922) got me thinking of the origins and early history of the country house mystery. I suppose you can trace its early prototypes back to Wilkie Collins, but later Sherlock is mainly metropolitan – and while Baskervilles, Valley of Fear and some of the short stories do feature country houses or castles, they’re not really country house mysteries in the true sense (with a closed circle of suspects and all that).

    “The first proper instance I can think of is The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) followed perhaps by Trent’s Last Case (1913) and then of course Styles (1920). Are there other early examples that predate Christie’s debut?”

MARJORIE BONIFACE – Murder As an Ornament. Mabel Wickley/Sheriff Odom #1. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1940.

   A Christmas story, taking place on a Texas dude ranch facing the Rio Grande, When a body is found hanging from a tree on Christmas Eve, everyone thinks it is suicide, until the doctor discovers that the woman was actually poisoned first.

   While Sheriff Hiram Odom is the detective in this case, the calm, seemingly slow-witted man does not do too much to produce the killer. This is a “little did I know” kind of story, but catching me by surprise, hidden in the nooks and crannies, are a few clever clues.

NOTE: Two later books in the series appear to be Venom in Eden (1942), and Wings of Death (1946)

(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Summer 2025. Issue #69. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 34 pages (including covers).

   THE LATEST ISSUE of OLD-TIME DETECTION focuses on one of detective fiction’s all-time greats, PETER LOVESEY (1936-2025), who passed away in April. OTD editor ARTHUR VIDRO has gathered comments, a 1980 EQMM interview with Lovesey, even a letter that the author wrote to Arthur about OTD, and personal recollections, among them DOUGLAS G. GREENE (“THE LOSS OF PETER LOVESEY, A GREAT WRITER”), JEFFREY MARKS, and MARTIN EDWARDS (“PETER LOVESEY, R.I.P.”).

   JON L. BREEN offers a JURY BOX appraisal of print publications that were spawned by Warren Beatty’s 1990 movie interpretation of DICK TRACY, some of which might surprise you, boasting really big names in detective and science fiction.

   NEXT UP, TOM MEAD manfully tackles what has been a vexatious topic for years, the “10 MOST PUZZLING IMPOSSIBLE CRIME MYSTERIES.” Long-time detective fiction readers might be familiar with most, if not all, of them, but Mead’s appraisals offer new insights: Carr’s THE THREE COFFINS (a.k.a. THE HOLLOW MAN), Dickson’s THE RED WIDOW MURDERS, Hoch’s “The Long Way Down,” McCloy’s THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, Dunsany’s “The Two Bottles of Relish,” EQ’s THE CHINESE ORANGE MYSTERY, Rogers’s THE RED RIGHT HAND, Shimada’s THE TOKYO ZODIAC MURDERS, Halter’s THE SEVEN WONDERS OF CRIME, and Crispin’s THE MOVING TOY SHOP. “When done right,” says Mead, “the puzzle and the atmosphere are perfectly intertwined; all the clues are there but they are so ingeniously disguised as to make it nigh-on impossible for the reader to suss out what is going on.”

   PERCEPTIVE REVIEWS of a diverse collection of books come next: ARTHUR VIDRO discusses King’s CARELESS CORPSE; LES BLATT talks about Crispin’s THE CASE OF THE GILDED FLY; HARV TUDORRI takes on Berkeley’s THE WYCHFORD POISONING CASE; RUTH ORDIVAR reviews Gardner’s THE CASE OF THE BAITED HOOK; TRUDI HARROV appraises Christie’s POSTERN OF FATE; and RUTH ORDIVAR returns with her take on Guigli’s UNDER THE BLACK FLAG – PIRACY IS NOT A VICTIMLESS CRIME, a 2024 novel which “shares many of the old-time qualities we love.”

   THE FICTION SELECTION is excellent, as usual. This time it’s William Brittain’s ingenious “FALLING OBJECT,” which first appeared in EQMM in 1971.

   CHARLES SHIBUK continues to chronicle THE PAPERBACK REVOLUTION, that wonderful time when publishers discovered there was gold in them there classic reprints, this time from the mid-seventies: Allingham, Carr, Christie, Ellen, Francis, Hammett, James, Levin, Liebman, Post, Queen, Roueche, Stribling, and Symons.

   BACK IN 2016, MARTIN EDWARDS wrote an introduction to MURDER AT THE MANOR: COUNTRY HOUSE MYSTERIES, and it’s reproduced in full here. “Today,” writes Edwards, “enthusiasm for the country house crime story remains as strong as ever.” The same could be said for 2025.

   ARTHUR VIDRO continues his series about collecting, “THE VAGARIES OF THE MARKET,” with his and others’ experiences thrown in.

   NEXT IS “CHRISTIE CORNER” by DR. JOHN CURRAN, probably the world’s foremost expert on all things Agatha Christie, and, as usual, the ways the good lady’s properties are being handled (and mishandled) come under his close scrutiny. His wise advice for the ages: “LEAVE HER PLOTS ALONE!”

   THIS ISSUE of OTD ends with readers’ letters and a baffling puzzle. Overall, the Summer 2025 issue of OLD-TIME DETECTION is worth a look, and maybe even a subscription.

Subscription information:

– Published three times a year: Spring, summer, and autumn. – Sample copy: $6.00 in U.S.; $10.00 anywhere else. – One-year U.S.: $18.00. – One-year overseas: $40.00 (or 30 pounds sterling or 40 euros). – Payment: Checks payable to Arthur Vidro, or cash from any nation, or U.S. postage stamps or PayPal. Mailing address:

Arthur Vidro, editor
Old-Time Detection
2 Ellery Street
Claremont, New Hampshire 03743

Web address: vidro@myfairpoint.net