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BRIAN AUGUSTYN - Gotham by Gaslight: An Alternative History of the Batman.

DC Comics; graphic novel; 1st printing, 1989.  Script: Brian Augustyn; pencils: Michael Mignola; inks: P. Craig Russell.  Introduction by Robert Bloch.

    What it is that makes (and establishes)  a cultural icon is difficult if completely impossible to predict, but with plenty of hindsight at our command, it is absolutely certain that both the Batman and Jack the Ripper each and individually most definitely are.
    Did they ever meet?  Of course not, but on the other hand, why not?  This particular graphic novel (or sophisticated comic book, if you prefer, with sturdy cardstock covers, glossy pages and no ads) was not designated with the “Elseworlds” label, but according the various comic sites on the Internet, it was the first, and it was so successful that an entire series of such novels followed.
    So what is (or are) Elseworlds?  Allow me to quote from the equivalent of the DC handbook: “In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places – some that have existed, and others that can’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t exist.  The result is stories that make characters who are as familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow.”
    After Robert Bloch’s introduction, supplied just in case an unwary comic book reader does happen to be unfamiliar with Jack the Ripper – and a nice touch, at that – comes a retelling of the origin of the Batman: the holdup man who guns down Bruce Wayne’s parents before his very eyes; the young lad then devoting his life to take up the cause of justice against criminals and the underworld behind a mask, a costume and a long, free-flowing cape.  Except this time it is the late 1880s, and this is not the current Batman at all. 
    At the same time as Bruce Wayne is taking up his new career, a horrible slayer of prostitutes in London seems to have made his way to Gotham, a city well-known to comic book readers as the home stomping grounds of the Batman, Inspector Gordon and all of the other characters of current legend (and so it appears) no matter what universe they may happen to be in.
    The coincidence in timing is far too obvious for some, and Bruce Wayne, unable to account for his whereabouts and not being home at night, is first confronted, then arrested and convicted of being the Ripper.  In his jail cell, going over the piles of documents, photos and other evidence against him, provided by Gordon, not convinced of his guilt, it is Bruce Wayne the detective that spots the clue that will nail the killer, if only he were not scheduled to be executed for the crimes himself in the morning.
    Truthfully, however, while this certainly qualifies Gotham by Gaslight as an entry in Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV  – it is not there now, but other Batman graphic novels are – the detection, if not minor, is hardly of the fair play variety.  In terms of the reader playing detective him- or herself, this is also mere child’s play, as it were, there being only one other suspect and that being one who only appears in one previous panel.
    The attraction here is the small delights provided by viewing the Batman legend from another perspective in an unexpected context – as if with new eyes – and the delightful art from Mignola and Russell.  Grays and blues and browns dominate, as well as exquisite details in Victorian-era architecture, wearing apparel and facial foliage.
    You have to be a Batman fan, perhaps – and if you’re not, it’s sure as shouting that I’m not going to make you one – but if you are, this is a sure-fire classic must-read.

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HUGH CLEVELY - The Case of the Criminal’s Daughter

Sexton Blake Library #323; The Amalgamated Press.  Paperback.  No date given.

    As it says, this slim (if not flimsy) 64-page digest-sized paperback comes with no bibliographic information, but luckily for those with Internet access, help is just a few keystrokes away.  There is a website devoted to all things Sexton Blakian, and where the link will take you, you will discover that this is #323 of the Third Series of the Sexton Blake Library.  The stories appeared monthly; this is the one that came out in November, 1954.  And the illustrator responsible for the cover art was none other than Reginald (Heade) Webb. 
    This being only the first Sexton Blake novel I’ve read in some 20 years, and the second overall, there’s no way I will talk in any general way about the character, nor should I, except to say that he, Sexton Blake, appeared as a character in over 3000 stories written by some 200 authors over a period of well over a century. 
    As for Hugh Clevely, well, first of all, he was one of the 200 authors who wrote stories about Sexton Blake, but of course you knew that, or you should have.  According to Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, however, he only wrote 10 other Sexton Blakes, at least in novel form.  His overall writing career spanned the years from 1928 to 1955 and includes a list of 35 novels under his own name, one co-written with Edgar Jepson.  Only four of these novels have been published in the US.  As Tod Claymore, he wrote another eight mysteries, all with a series character named Tod Claymore.  According to W. O. G. Lofts and Derek Adley’s website The Crime Fighters, “He [Claymore] had been a Wimbledon tennis player and a wing commander during the war, then switched to writing, with detection as a hobby.”  Some of these books were imported or published in this country as Penguin paperbacks, the green ones.
    Returning to the books Clevely wrote under his own name, the series characters that appeared in them were Chief Inspector Williams, Maxwell Archer, J. D. Peters, and John Martinson.  According to a New York Times review of a film based on one of the Maxwell Archer books the latter was a “famed fictional private detective whose greatest pleasure in life is to second guess Scotland Yard..”  The occupations of the other series characters remain either unknown or quite guessable.
    So Clevely was an experienced mystery writer when he started doing the Sexton Blake books, which were all written toward the end of his career.  All eleven of them appeared in the four-year period from1952 to 1955.  Does the experience show?  It does and as the saying goes, it doesn’t.
    The plot of the case in point, that is to say the book in hand, is a complicated one, and the pace is a lively one, but there’s a considerable amount of what is generically called sloppiness in the details, making you wonder if it were written too fast for a market that didn’t offer very much in compensation.
    The criminal in the title is a circus performer (billed as The Great Costello) who once spent some time in jail, but who now is worth a considerable amount of legitimate money.  His brother is a ne’er-do-well who is currently in a jam with some British style hoodlums.  Add in the fact that Pat Costello, the acrobat, does not know he has an American daughter, but after his death by misadventure – deliberate – the fact of her existence – and that she is on a schoolgirls’ trip in Europe – means a lot to everyone who’s involved.  There is also a not-so-small matter of some missing diamonds, and there (without going into further details) you have the basis for a decent if not overly rousing mystery for private enquiry agent Sexton Blake, his assistant Tinker, and Inspector Fosdyke to solve.
    The details that the author works into the story, a rather pulp-like yarn, help to make the story more of a something than it is, along with a few twists in the tale that I frankly didn’t see coming.  It was more than enough for me to start searching out more of the entries in Sexton Blake’s long history, but –
    – some of the details don’t fit, or they clash with other ones.  The conversation that Blake has with newspaper journalist Peter Grayson on page 26, for example, makes it seem that he had never heard of  the girl Josie Benson before, whereas on page 23 the same two gentleman had a long conversation about the very same girl, and what Grayson should do to contrive to meet her.  On page 53 Grayson and the girl are being held captive in a Martello Tower, he in a handcuff that severely restricts his range of motion – yes, that’s the kind of thriller this is – but the handcuff is never mentioned again, nor is there any restriction on his range of motion, when it comes time to attempt an escape.
    And yes, of course, such a point in time does come, and not too soon, at that.

GILBERT CHESTER - The Man Who Wouldn’t Quit.

Sexton Blake Library #74; Amalgamated Press.  Paperback.  No date stated.

    Once again the Sexton Blake website comes galloping to the rescue.  This is #74 of the Third Series, published in June, 1944.  The date being in the midst of World War II, and by some reckoning among the darkest days of the war, I wondered how scarce this book (thin, digest-sized, but 100 pages long) might be.  I was right.  There are no other copies to be found anywhere on the Internet, and while I do apologize, mine’s not for sale.
    Gilbert was the pseudonym of one H. H. Clifford Gibbons (1888-1958), whose total criminous output totaled approximately 100 novels, all but a handful of them Sexton Blake’s, either anonymously or under his pen name, beginning in 1923 and continuing on through 1949.
    And if I knew more, I’d tell you, but I don’t, so I’ll get right to the story this time.  And what a great first chapter this story has!  It’s one that’s designed to grab the reader right in from the start, or maybe I’m just a sucker for stories taking place on trains, beginning with a frightened girl who enters Fenton’s compartment just as the train is leaving the station.  She hurriedly tells him that she’s going to bale out before the next stop and furthermore requests that if he’s ever asked, he should say that never saw her.
    From page 4:


    She jumps, and so (without much hesitation) does he.  And of course he has no idea where they are or into what kind of trouble he’s leapt into.
    Chapter Two can hardly compete with this, but it nearly does.  Dropped off  by the mysterious girl at Professor Barton’s home (where he had been heading) after a short hike and a longish drive in the dark, Fenton (a research scientist) is surprised to find himself in the morning a prisoner, with another young girl holding the key to his cell-like room.
    Chapter Three.  We have nearly forgotten about Sexton Blake by this time, speaking collectively for myself alone, but the author hadn’t.  Another young lady calls on Blake to solve a problem for her – her bungalow is being tampered with.  Someone has been entering and prowling about while she is away.  By an invisible man, she claims.  No one has seen anyone enter or leave.
    It seems like a minor problem, but Blake takes the case, thinking her recitation too theatrical and wondering what could be behind such a fanciful tale.  And of course, there is a surprise in store, and not only to Sexton Blake.  On page 22 they discover a body in her locked and sealed home, riddled with lead – the body, that is.
    If some care had been taken, this could have been quite a mystery to unravel, but Blake makes it look easy.  With only a cursory examination, Blake suggests a solution – and a rather ingenious one – to Inspector Briggan after he shows up, and of course Blake’s right and I have no idea how he did it.  But it certainly is ingenious.
    In any case, no more details from me.  You will have a find a copy of this book for yourself, if you’d like to know more.  Suffice it to say that the opening three chapters are the best, but Chester certainly makes a more than competent story out of the rest of it. 
    Some additional comments: Chapter Six is a long, ten-page conversation between two of the characters (already alluded to) which manages to both be informative and entertaining and moves the plot along while at the same time not being a mere recitation of topics and events that each of the two participants already know.  It’s a neat trick, if you (as an author) can do it.  Try it sometime and see.
    The weakest links in the chain of the narrative are (I sadly acknowledge) Sexton Blake’s own deductions, which consist almost entirely of whole cloth and gauze and mirrors, which is (I also admit) one heck of a way to run a railroad, um, detective novel.  The gaps could have been fixed, but it is entirely to Mr. Chester’s credit that the story is still is as enjoyable as it is, even if they weren’t, and they never will be.

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SHERYL J. ANDERSON - Killer Cocktail

St. Martin’s; paperback reprint, May 2006.  Hardcover: St. Martin’s Press, August 2005.

    This is the second in a series of what are now three cases solved by Mollie Forrester, a New York City based advice columnist (and wishful crusading reporter) for fashionable Zeitgeist magazine.  In order, here they are:


    According to Booklist, the authors are a pseudonymous husband-and-wife writing team, and if that is the case, the copyright notice in Cocktail gives it all away: copyright © by Sheryl J. Anderson & Mark Edward Parrott.  On the other hand, the author’s website does not admit to any other author than the female half of the husband-and-wife team, so I will leave the question open to more diligent detectives than I.
    I suppose I should also admit upfront that a case of murder that are tackled and cracked by a team of female friends in the city is a phenomenon that I am somewhat unaccustomed to and/or unfamiliar with. Whether or not it is a rare phenomenon I do not know, not having read any of Stephanie Plum’s adventures, for example, nor ever (in regards to non-mystery fiction) having seen Sex in the City.  Not that there is any sex in Killer Cocktail, but these are suggestions put forth by reviewers who have posted their various comments on Amazon in their attempts, probably successful, to inform readers just what kind of book this one by Sheryl Anderson happens to be. 
    (If truth be said, I do not believe such mystery novels are rare.  I am perfectly content to work to assume that I have not (yet) happened upon them, and if I simply keep reading, I will come across another one soon.)
    Mollie’s female friends are, to enumerate: event planner Tricia Vincent, whose brother’s prospective bride falls to the titular poisoned cocktail in the Hamptons only hours before the wedding; and Cassady Lynch, successful lawyer.  Mollie’s male friend and as such, an item of significant interest to her, is NYPD homicide detective Kyle Edwards, who is therefore out of his jurisdiction in the Hamptons.  How close a male friend Kyle is to Mollie, even at the risk of repeating myself, is a matter of some reflection and concern throughout the book, including some strong attacks of jealousy perhaps whenever Detective Darcy Cook of Suffolk County Homicide is on the scene, which is often, as the Hamptons do happen to be in her jurisdiction.
    The book is funny, light, breezy and so tightly told that it made my jaws ache.  There is also (as hinted above) a good deal of internal pondering – I have neglected to mention that Mollie herself tells the story – and there are both a sizable number of suspects – it was a large party at which the victim died after all – and there are a good number of pages (over 300) to read before the end is in sight.  I have been debating whether or not to tell you this, but I guess I am, for whatever it’s worth.  I stalled out round the 250 page mark and didn’t pick the book up again for a week.
    But I’m glad I did.  Pick it up again, that is, even above and beyond the consideration of the time already invested.  Perhaps you have to be in the right mood to begin with, as the author doesn’t concede a thing to the reader, nor will she diverge from her way of telling her story for anyone or anything.  I like an author with a goal and a sense of purpose in mind, and one who sticks to it.
    And anyone who can write a passage like the one following, taken from page 256, is worth reading, no matter what.  Mollie is in the City at the time.

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WILL CREED - Death Wears a Green Hat

Five Star Mystery #42; digest-sized paperback original; 1st printing, 1946.

    Not too much is known about Will Creed, except that his real name was William Long (1922- ) and besides the two paperback originals he wrote for Five Star in 1946, he also wrote four more as by Peter Yates for Vulcan Mysteries in 1945.  Vulcan was a publisher similar to Five Star Mysteries, so similar in fact, that I’ve compiled provisional checklists for both outfits and made them available online here.
    I do like the both the title and the cover of this one, and yes, a green hat figures prominently in the mystery, and I’ll get to it in a minute.  Telling the story is a Manhattan-based advertising agency executive named Hal Boyd.  Dead is his apartment mate and his best friend, Adrian Clay, a gossip columnist well-known around town.
    Where things get interesting is that Boyd’s hat, a midnight-blue homburg is evidently a clue, because it is missing and nowhere to be found until it turns up mysteriously later in his bedroom, but green instead of blue!
    Forgive the exclamation point, but that’s purely reflective of Will Creed’s style of writing.  Pulp authors often wrote in the same vein, supplying artificial suspense or amazement when they couldn’t take the time (or weren’t able) to manufacture it on their own.  I’ll have more to say about this later, and what it meant to me while I was reading the story, but at the moment, let’s reflect a little bit about hats, and what they mean in today’s world, as opposed to the mid-1940s...  Who knows today the difference, say, between a fedora and a homburg?  Derbies, OK, and panama hats, sure, but mention the names of any other styles, and you may as well be speaking Martian.
    Inspector Day, whom Hal Boyd becomes friendly with (at least to a certain degree) and who allows Boyd to confer with him about large segments of his investigations – thinks hats are important too.  Allow me to quote the inspector from his conversation with Boyd on page 34:


    Boyd thinks of the inspector as rather an intelligent fuddy-duddy, but the inveterate mystery reader knows better.  The hat is important, essential, crucial and/or all of the above.  The mistake I made, reference above, is underestimating Will Creed as a mystery writer.  He may have had a pulpish, somewhat clumsy, gee-whiz style that lacks the push, the elan and/or the drive it needs to survive on its own, but he also had exactly the right instincts, Agatha Christie-like, to make the plot swivel and turn on a nickel and four pennies – or in other words, wow, I didn’t see that coming! – but without the knack of pulling it off with the confidence and ease that I really, really wish that Creed had had at his command.
    Or maybe he did and I’m just yapping because he fooled the socks off me, no lie.  I’m going to have to go back and read it again – and if that isn’t a sure sign of a magician at work, no matter what level of expertise, I sure as shinola don’t know what is.

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PAUL MALMONT - The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

Simon & Schuster; hardcover.  First Edition: May 2006.

    In 1937, the United States was in the midst of the Great Depression.  For entertainment there was no television, only radio, the movies and – the pulps.  The newsstands were filled with magazines made of cheap paper with lurid covers.  Two of the best of these were The Shadow and Doc Savage, written by Walter Gibson and Lester Dent, respectively, although the general public knew them only by their pseudonyms, Maxwell Grant and Kenneth Robeson.
    What Paul Malmont proposes in this almost hoot of a novel is that Gibson, Dent, and a gent named L. Ron Hubbard combined forces to solve the murder of a fellow writer, one H. P. Lovecraft, and to track down at the same time a fellow from China trying to give his country a step up on Japan in those desperate days before World War II.
    Other real names which can be spotted in the narrative are Robert Heinlein, Chester Himes, Louis L’Amour and more than a few others.  There is only one problem.  No pulp novel ever took more than 150 pages to get started, as this book does. 
    The author seems to feel that many readers will need a long expository history of the pulp magazines before he can begin, along with the life stories of each of the primary protagonists.  Those who do not require this information will be bored, I fear – unless they enjoy quibbling about the details – expecting a faster pace by far. As for the uninitiated for whom the background would be useful, I wonder how many of them will ever get past the background. 
    But when the book finally does take off, it’s hang-on-to-your-seatbelt time, there’s no doubt about it!

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ADAM BLISS - The Camden Ruby Murder

Grosset & Dunlap; hardcover reprint, no date stated.  First edition: Barse & Co., 1931.

    According to the increasingly indispensable Crime Fiction IV, Adam Bliss was the pseudonym of Robert F. Burkhardt & Eve Burkhardt, husband and wife, as we shall see in a moment.  They wrote three books under this pen name, to whit:

    The Camden Ruby Murder, Barse, 1931.  Grosset hc reprint.
    Murder Upstairs, Macrae-Smith, 1934.  Grosset hc reprint.
    Four Times a Widower, Macrae-Smith, 1936.

    The leading character in each of the last two is someone named Alice Penny, about whom I know nothing at the moment, but since I own one of the two books, present whereabouts unknown, I will tell you more about her, eventually, as soon as I locate the box I know that it is in.  And read it.  The book, that is, not the box.
    The Burkhardts also wrote books as Rob Eden; there are five entries for them in CFIV under this name.  And ordinarily, this is about all you might expect to learn about an obscure pair or writers like these, but no, the Internet does say more.  With a judicious use of Google, I discovered a website devoted to events in 1947.  What particular connection the Burkhardts have with 1947, I have not yet discerned, but I quote:


    The works of Rob Eden, as taken from the website above, are the following.  No claim is made (by me) as to completeness.     [those marked with a * are entries in CF IV; one marked with a ** perhaps should be]


    One other website indicates that the authors also wrote as Rex Jardin.  If so, this may be a case of a missing entry in CFIV, as the one title found under this byline certainly sounds as though it may be crime-related:  The Devil’s Mansion, Fiction League, 1931; Jacobsen, 1931?; Paperback Library, pb, 1966, as a gothic romance with the following blurb on the cover: “Janet was forced to escape the eerie old house or become the bride of the Devil himself!”
   
    As for The Camden Ruby Murder itself, the good news is, to some of us – should I make that “most of us?” – is that this is a locked-room mystery.  I’ll get to the (relatively) bad news in a minute.  To set the scene first of all, the narrator, Gary Maughan; his host, Van Every, owner of the newly acquired (and priceless) Camden Ruby;and Maughan’s long-time acquaintance (and once his lover) stage star Margalo Younger, are in Van Every’s home, listening to him expound on  the curse that has been placed upon the gem.  When the story is completed, with its gory details, Margalo, who has apparently fainted, is discovered by the two men instead to be dead.  Murdered by means of a poisoned needle found at the base of her brain.
    Mitigating circumstances: The door to the room was open, and a number of household members (and close friends) are eventually learned to have passed by, which seems to make matters less complicated, until (as time goes on) it is also learned that none of them could have committed the crime, more or less.  Which is too bad, because none of them really did do it.  In the hands of an author like John Dickson Carr, the flummery would have kept pace with the investigation, if not kept tantalizingly out in front instead of lagging behind, as it does here, which to my mind, at least, was a large disappointment, as the flummery itself is top-notch and worthy of, as I suggested above, better hands.
    This book was written back in the day where the mystery, the murder, the crime, the investigation and the questioning were the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story.  Not much time is spent on personal matters, unless and until they had a bearing on the case at hand.  Maughan quickly gains the confidence of the investigating officer, one Captain Keyes, which (fortunately for the reader) gives Maughan, as the narrator, total and complete access to the entire investigation.  He is therefore able to view it from every side and angle and than back inside out again.
    Not that this amounts to more than a hill of peapods later on, at a key juncture of the story when Maughan, tired from slogging across town one time too many in the rain, turns down an opportunity for someone to tell him something important, something so important it would have solved the case then and there – halfway through the book – only for that person offering him the aforesaid opportunity, but denied, to become the second of the killer’s victims.  (I am not telling you anything you should not know, for as Maughan himself says, immediately after turning said person away, “I would have given anything if only I ... had listened...”)
    Any weaknesses or problematic passages aside, I enjoyed reading this book, and if you are still with me in reading my comments thus far, I am somewhat of the opinion that you would too.


[UPDATE] 07-21-07.  Al Hubin has agreed with me about the book by Rob Eden which I suggested be included in CFIV.  You will find it under that author's name in the ongoing online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV. 
    As for the book by Rex Jardin mentioned above, Al has informed me that it was included in Crime Fiction II.  He removed it from later editions on the advice it was not criminous in nature.  Any confirmation or factual information to the contrary would be welcome.

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RHYS BOWEN - In Like Flynn

St. Martin’s; paperback reprint, December 2005.  Hardcover edition: St. Martin’s Press, March 2005.

    I’ll defer to Ms. Bowen’s website for most of the data about her, including the fact that her books have been nominated for “every major mystery award – Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, Barry, Macavity – and has won seven of them.”  Thanks to Crime Fiction IV, however, it can be learned that her real name is  Janet Quin-Harkin.  Ms. Bowen started writing mysteries later than usual in life; her first one was Evans Above, part of the Evan Evans series, and was published in 1997 when the author was 56.   FOOTNOTE.
    From her website, here’s a list of all of the books in each of her two series:

Evans Above, 1997
Evan Help Us, 1998
Evanly Choirs, 1999
Evan and Elle, 2000
Evan Can Wait, 2001
Evans to Betsy, 2002
Evan Only Knows, 2003
Evan’s Gate, 2004
Evan Blessed, 2005

Murphy’s Law, 2001
Death of Riley, 2002
For the Love of Mike, 2003
In Like Flynn, March 2005
Oh Danny Boy, March 2006

    The Constable Evans series take place in Llanfair, Wales, and are contemporary in nature.  The Molly Murphy books, on the other hand, are historical mysteries, Manhattan-based, and take place just after the turn of the last century.  Naturally it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: I’ve just read the fourth book, and none of the first three. 
    What that means, in other words, is that there is a lot of backstory that has developed through the course of the three before this one, and there are a number of characters to be introduced to, all in a hurry.  If you take all in stride, however, it doesn’t take too long to fill in most of the salient details.  Suffice it to say, perhaps, that Molly Murphy is a recent immigrant who has improved her status in her new world to become one of the few female private investigators in that particular time and place.  On page 12 she also admits to having been an artist’s model, comfortable in posing in the nude before strange men, which of course is an eye-opener, and equally of course I can only believe her.
    In any case, Miss Molly Malone is about as progressive as you could possibly get, in that particular time and place, and her love life and home life are equally eyebrow-raising, figuratively speaking.  She is all-but-spoken-for with one man, she shares her home with another, and the man she really loves (it seems) is her ex-beau, Captain Daniel Sullivan of the New York Police.
    Much of this background, once the new reader has found some solid ground upon which to stand, turns out to be unnecessary in a way, since the case that Molly undertakes this time around takes her to a mansion up along the Hudson, where her task is twofold: (1) to investigate the authenticity of two females mediums who have been preying upon wealthy people who have lost loved ones, and (2) and Daniel Sullivan does not know this, to investigate the kidnapping and subsequent disappearance (and assumed death) of a young child born to Senator Barney Flynn and his wife.
    And what this means is working undercover as an unknown cousin of the senator’s, visiting from Ireland – and hence the title.  What Molly does not know that this also means meeting someone from her recent past, someone whom she expected never to see again, as well as keeping her wits about her in solving the case without blowing her cover.  Taking advantage of some rather limited opportunities, she does a capable enough job of investigating – enough so that the truth, in long-winded fashion (the book is over 320 pages long), does come out.  Investigating, that is, in the sense of Nancy Drew, reacting rather than acting, and with little sense of doing any real deducting.
    It is a fine piece of writing, though, you should certainly not get me wrong, with quite a few serious insights into who people are and why they are that way.  Once again, I should not lead you astray by saying what the book is not, as opposed to what it is, and what it is, is fine indeed. The ending also contains a considerable enticement to read the next one, to see what comes next for Molly Malone and her somewhat embattled (and bewildered) policeman friend.


FOOTNOTE. Ms. Bowen addresses this point in a short autobiographical section that she’s included on her website: “Children’s books, young adult books, adult historical romances and sagas followed [working for the BBC and Australian broadcasting] until I decided it was finally time for me to write what I enjoyed reading most ... and that was mysteries.”

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JAMES M. FOX - The Wheel Is Fixed

Dell 573; paperback reprint; no date stated, but circa 1951; mapback edition.  Hardcover edition: Little, Brown; 1951.  Also: Raven House #33, pb, 1980; 2nd printing (#22), pb, 1982.

    I may have the Raven House numbering scheme all wrong.  The first printings you got only by subscribing to their overall line of books, which is what I did at the time.  I never paid their mass market distribution (the later printings) much attention -- who cared? -- and they WERE different.  There was a noticeable discrepancy in which books were published in one versus the other, for example, and a different numbering on those that were.  To get information on the later printings now, all I’m able to do is look online to see how sellers describe their books for sale, which I have to admit, even between you and me, is a pretty pitiful way to conduct honest-to-goodness research.
 
    UPDATE: It belatedly has occurred to me that Michael L. Cook included a complete checklist of the subscription Raven’s (through #72) in his book on book clubs, Murder by Mail (Bowling Green University Popular Press, revised edition, 1983).  I can therefore confirm that The Wheel Is Fixed was indeed #33.   What the numbers were in the list of later printings, however, Mr. Cook does not say.

    The other books by Fox that were reprinted in the Raven House line are:

    #45.  A Shroud for Mr. Bundy.  [A John and Suzy Marshall mystery published in hardcover by Little Brown in 1952 and reprinted by Jonathan Press as a digest-sized paperback.]

    #61.  The Coven.  [A paperback original; 1981.]

    Fox, whose real name was Johannes Matthijs Willem Knipscheer (1908-1989), had a mystery-writing career that began in 1943 with the first John and Suzy Marshall book, and ended in 1989 with a mystery western from PaperJacks entitled Crunch.
    Not that I know very much about the Marshalls, but since Fox’s career began with one of their adventures – in fact The Wheel Is Fixed is the first one which is not – and it’s their books that Fox may be remembered most for, if at all, I’ll go ahead and provide you with a complete checklist of them, taken from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

    Don’t Try Anything Funny.  Davies, UK, 1943.
    Hell on the Way.  Davies, UK, 1943.
    Journey Into Danger.  Cherry Tree UK, pb, 1943.
    Cheese from a Mousetrap.  Davies, UK, 1944.
    The Lady Regrets.  Coward-McCann, 1947.  Dell 338, pb, 1949.
    Death Commits Bigamy.  Coward-McCann, 1948.  Graphic 14, pb, 1949.  Dell 845, pb, 1955.
    The Inconvenient Bride.  Coward-McCann, 1948.  Dell 463, pb, 1950.
    The Gentle Hangman.  Little Brown, 1950.  Dell 526, pb, 1951.
    The Aleutian Blue Mink.  Little Brown, 1951. Dell 623, pb, 1952, as Fatal in Furs.
    The Iron Virgin.  Little Brown, 1951.  Dell 719, pb, 1953.
    The Scarlet Slippers.  Little Brown, 1952.  Dell 685, pb, 1953.
    A Shroud for Mr. Bundy.  Little Brown, 1952.  Jonathan Press J92, digest-sized pb, March 1957.
    Bright Serpent.  Little Brown, 1953.  Jonathan Press J96, digest-sized pb, probably early 1958, as Rites for a Killer.

Plus one short story:

    “Start from Scratch.”  Four-and-Twenty Bloodhounds, Anthony Boucher, editor, Simon & Schuster, 1950.

    Most of the stories took place in Los Angeles, CA.  Why the first ones were published in the UK, I do not know, nor why they were never published here.  (I do have a copy of Cheese from a Mousetrap.  Perhaps I need to read it.)
    On his Thrilling Detective website, Kevin Burton Smith refers to the Marshalls as "Nick and Nora wanna-be’s.”  Since once again I’ve not read one that I remember reading, I’m going to have fall back on quoting Kevin and leave it at that, for now: “Where Nick and Nora were rather urbane and urban sophisticates, constantly traveling from one trouble spot to another, martinis in hand, Johnny and Suzy were suburban all the way, beer-drinkers and homebodies, who didn’t have to go far, it seemed, to find trouble.  It always seemed to find them, thanks to Johnny’s job as a private detective.”

By 1953, the market demand for the Marshalls seems to have disappeared.  All of the books written by Fox after then seem to be action- and adventure-oriented, although I am allowing myself to say that only on the basis of seeing the names of the titles, in which stock you should know how much to put.    [FOOTNOTE]     The Wheel Is Fixed appeared before at least the last three Marshalls, and it starts out as if it’s going to be one of the best unknown noirs ever written.  A former orchestra leader named Rick Bailey and a girl named Lorna, described in a newspaper as a motion picture actress, are holed up in El Paso as fugitives from justice.  Hunt Couple in Palm Springs Swim Pool Massacre, reads the headline of that very same newspaper.  “They found the car in Phoenix yesterday,” Rick tells us, the reader, “which proves that we crossed a State line and makes us eligible for five years in the Federal penitentiary right there.”     Lorna’s hands are bandaged, making it difficult for the couple to escape notice, and they see strange men on their trail everywhere they go.  Checking into the Cortex Hotel, they hope against hope they will be able to cross the Rio Grande on the following day.

    At which point [end of Chapter One] Rick decides to put down the entire story down on paper, so that “at least the truth will be known, and the deal will have to from the top of the deck.”
    It’s flashback time, in other words, and unfortunately the next part of the story is not nearly as gripping as either the beginning.  As for the ending, that comes later, which of course you knew before I told you, and I’ll get to it shortly.  But what happens next, or first, if you are still with me, is that Bailey, down on his luck, is hired by a well-heeled gangster (and a heel to boot) to get a woman out of his son’s hair.  A semi-interesting sojourn to Palm Springs develops from there, and several false starts later – or so they seem at the time – we finally, 150 pages later, get to the crux of the matter, and hence the headline.
    Thirty more pages from there, the past has caught up with the present, and Rick Bailey has run out of things to put down on paper.  The last remaining twelve pages are worthy of the opening chapter, let me tell you, in case I’d left you wondering, complete with at least one sock-removing twist I didn’t see coming, maybe even both sox, lulled perhaps to unawareness by the soporific middle stanza, or at least that’s the way I’m telling it.
    It is uneven, the story is, but in 1951 they built mystery and detective fiction of every subgenre and variety on puzzles and twists, and as I say, so it is here in the end.  This particular effort on the part of Mr. Fox has not fared well over time, in terms of general recognition then and hardly now.  All in all, this is mostly a forgotten book by an all but forgotten writer, but I’ll remember it for its good (if not great) parts at either end, and noticeably less for its lack of pace and cohesiveness in the middle.

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BOB GARLAND - Derfflinger

Manor Books 17181; paperback original.  First printing, 1978.  Trade paperback reprint: Writer’s Showcase Press, 2000.

    The Manor edition of this title is a very scarce book.  As I type this, there is only one copy online on ABE.  Manor books never did get distributed very widely, and when (or where) they did, the authors generally never had any “name appeal,” or not at least on the ones that were paperback originals.  Usually an author wrote one or maybe two books for them and nobody else, and nobody ever heard from them (the authors) again.
    Which is why it surprised the something out of me to learn that Bob Garland, now a retired business executive, has written a total of four other book-length adventures of  Humboldt Prior, computer manufacturing executive for Intercontinental Data Processing, of New York, NY.  The order in which the adventures occur and in which the books were published is a little confusing, and I will try to elucidate as best I can.
    The only one published at the time they were written, I think, is the one at hand.  As stated above, the book was reprinted as a trade paperback by Writer’s Showcase Press, in October 2000, and as such it is denoted as a Second Edition.  (I do not know if the book has been revised for this edition, but there is the possibility, as Manor probably did a quick “make it fit” procedure on it, even before WordPerfect came along and made it easy.)  It is, however, described as the “Second Humboldt Prior Mystery.”
    The other books in the series are the following, in order as published.  All are trade paperbacks:

R.I.P. 37E: The Third Humboldt Prior Mystery.  Writer’s Showcase Press, October 2000.

Slaying the Red Slayer: The First Humboldt Prior Adventure.  Writers Club Press; 2nd edition, April 2001.  [If there was ever a First Edition, I do not know about it.]

The Elephant Mask: The Fourth Humboldt Prior Mystery.  iUniverse, January 2004.

Tradedown: The Fifth Humboldt Prior Mystery.  iUniverse, December 2005.

    The only one of these last four which I have a copy of is R.I.P. 37E, which I have not read, but from a quick peek inside, the story appears to have taken place in 1979.  This seems about right.  On Amazon.com, there is a short description of the last two books that provides us with the information that Prior is “now ... aging” (Elephant Mask) and is “now 60 years old” (Tradedown).  Which certainly makes me feel old.  In any case, perhaps I was wrong in saying that Derfflinger was the only one published when it was written.
    In any case, Derfflinger certainly reads like the first in a series, as an amateurish but enthusiastic Humboldt Prior agrees to help the widow of a friend in England who had been doing some investigation on his own into a ship salvaging operation conducted at the end of World War II.  He was killed in an auto accident, but as Humboldt takes over the investigation, he too becomes the target of some very narrow scrapes.  The reason the book reads like the first of series is that Humboldt seems to be awfully new and/or naive about matters he seems almost in over his head about.  Almost, I hasten to add, because he is quite competent at what he normally does, in a global business sense, and he doesn’t mind admitting it.
    With a billion dollar operation behind him (Intercontinental Data), Humboldt gets around fairly easily and comfortably – to Scotland and then to Germany before heading back to England – on the company’s private Jet Star, with various nefarious villains on his tail most of the way.
    Not only  is Humboldt amateurish but enthusiastic, but so is the story.  It’s enjoyable enough, but until the end, which contains a surprise or two, there’s no meat to the tale at all, nor does it quite connect on many levels.  On the other hand, enthusiasm is sometimes all it takes, and even though this may surprise you, given my comments so far, I discovered when I was finished that I really wouldn’t mind reading any of the four follow-up adventures at all. 
    And so perhaps I will.
   
POSTSCRIPT.  If you would like to know something more about the primary focus of the travail that Humboldt encounters, you could do no worse than to look the word Derfflinger up on Google, say.  It’s just a suggestion.

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AGATHA CHRISTIE - N or M?

Dell 187, reprint paperback: mapback edition; no date stated, but generally accepted as 1947.  Hardcover editions: Collins Crime Club (UK), 1941; Dodd, Mead (US), 1941.

    I will not be so foolhardy as to list all of the editions that this book has been published in, nor will I supply more than the front and back cover of this particular mapback edition, especially since the jackets of the respective hardcover editions are so rather plain and unexciting.
    But speaking of mapbacks, what I just realized now, strangely enough, is that not once while reading N or M? did I refer to the back cover.  Not until getting an image ready for uploading did I even think of it.  And so, looking it just now, I find it utterly remarkable that while I all of the geographical details of the small seaside resort town of Leahampton essentially wrong in my mind, the overall picture in my head was exactly right.  (And of course who is there to say that the artist who drew the map had the details right?)
    This is a Tuppence and Tommy (Beresford) book, and if you were to check the date that the book was published (1941), you might immediately gather that this wartime book had something to do with the war, and indeed it does.  (It is my impression that relatively few murder mysteries published during the war ever mentioned the war, but this one does, and directly so.  Other handedly, my impression could be totally false.  It is a subject worthy of further investigation.)
    I have not read the earlier books in the Tuppence and Tommy series in quite some time, so I do not recall in which one of them the twosome were secret agents in World War I, but when this book begins, they are beginning to feel their age, not to mention the pain of their rejection, as sitting on the sidelines is not their idea of how to spend the time they find free on their hands, nor in any way how to make the best use of their abilities.
    A small pause here while I investigate and come back with a short list of the books in which the pair of intrepid adventurers appeared:

    The Secret Adversary, 1922.    [This must be the World War I adventure .]

    Partners in Crime, 1929.    [A story collection disguised as a novel.]

    N or M?, 1941.

    By the Pricking of My Thumbs, 1968.

    Postern of Fate, 1973.

    That’s quite a range of dates, and the gap between the 3rd and 4th is a huge one, 27 years, but I don’t imagine that it is anywhere near a record –  the longest break between appearance of series characters.  (A question like this is something else I wish I had more time to look into.)
    But back to the story.  Luckily enough Tommy is offered a job by the British equivalent of Homeland Security, so hush-hush, he is advised, that he should not even tell Tuppence.  Who, of course, has other ideas, and thus indeed there is a story.
    It seems that a pair of spies for the Germans, N (a man) and M (a woman) are located in the aforementioned seaside resort town of Leahampton, and in particular they may even be living there in a private hotel called Sans Souci.  An amateur is precisely what is required, Tommy is told, as a professional would be spotted right away.
    During wartime towns like Leahampton would be populated by (as related on page 14): “old ladies, old colonels, unimpeachable spinsters, dubious customers, fishy customers, a foreigner or two.  In fact, a mixed bag.”  And the two spies, Tommy again is advised, are among them.
    Now if there are people Agatha Christie could write about more capably than “old ladies, old colonels, unimpeachable spinsters, dubious customers, fishy customers, a foreigner or two,” I don’t know who they would be, nor do I know of any other mystery writer could outdo her in this regard, either.
    What with the number of people staying on at Sans Souci to describe and make distinguishable, it might have been a Herculean task to succeed in doing so, but what Agatha Christie had was a knack of instant characterization for the inhabitants of her stories, and so it is here.  And there is more.  Christie is often put down for mysteries that focus more on the plots than they do on the writing of them, but such critics are generally wrong, as this book amply demonstrates.  It is so smoothly written that 50 pages flash by in what seems to be an instant – gently humorous at times, sometimes (later on) deadly serious, and with a sense that something suspicious is always going on.
    There are a good many suspects at hand, in other words, in an oddly arranged version of the closed manor house type of mystery, but with little of substance to back up this statement, I do not believe that spies and espionage were Ms. Christie’s strongest points.  Or in other words, where the book fails, if indeed it does, is in the plotting, which seems forced and unconvincing, concluding with some derring-do and remarkable rescuing that seems entirely fortuitous. 
    And that the bring-down-the-curtain revelation at the end was one that I was suspicious about myself several pages earlier – “What’s going on here?” I wondered to myself (you’ll have to take my word for it) – which only goes to reinforce the statement I made in the preceding paragraph.  Entirely enjoyable then, is my conclusion, but weakest precisely (and curiously) where you’d expect an Agatha Christie novel not to be.
                   

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ERIC WRIGHT - The Night the Gods Smiled

Signet 13409; paperback reprint, February 1985.  Hardcover edition: Charles Scribner’s Sons, September 1983.  Canadian hardcover: Collins, 1983.  Canadian paperbacks: Totem (two editions), 1984, 1988.

    Sub-titled “Introducing Inspector Charlie Salter,” this is the first of ten mysteries solved by Eric Wright’s most well-known series character between 1983 and 1993.  An eleventh (and presumably  last) case for Salter, a Toronto police detective, appeared in 2002.  After appearinf first in hardcover, all eleven of them were later published in paperback.  When the series was dropped by Signet, the rest were picked up by Canada’s own Worldwide Mysteries (also known as Harlequin).
    Wright eventually added a second series character in Mel Pickett, a cop who first played a second fiddle to Salter in A Sensitive Case (1990) and then who tackled one on his own in Buried in Stone (Scribner, 1996), followed by Death of a Hired Man in 2001.
    The first of two adventures of Lucy Trimble Brenner also appeared in 1996.  Ms. Brenner is a librarian who inherits a Toronto private detective agency and decides to make the big career move.  (I have never seen either of the two books, and I think I had better do something about it.)
    In the year 2000 a fourth series character came along, a part-time community college English teacher named Joe Barley, who also works part-time as a private eye.  He has two books under his belt so far, the second coming out in 2003.  The latter may end up being Eric Wright’s final mystery, as he was born in 1929, making him now 77 years old, and perhaps he is no longer writing.  Or he may yet surprise us.  Perhaps there is yet another in the works.
    Eric Wright himself was (and more than likely, in this order) professor, chair of the English department, then Dean of Arts at Ryerson Institute of Technology in Toronto, from where he is now retired.  And if his first book (and also more than likely) several of his others deal with academia, one should hardly be surprised.  I know I am not, and in fact after reading The Night the Gods Smiled, I highly approve.
    The victim, in fact, was a professor of English at a small college in Toronto, but he was found dead in his hotel room while attending an academic conference in Montreal.  The dead man’s occupation, however, gives Charlie the opportunity to interview many of his colleagues, none of whom seem to have liked the man very much, some less than others, and in the process, Charlie learns a lot about academic squabbles indeed.
    There was a glass with lipstick on it in the dead man’s room.  Had he picked up a streetwalker?  He had also bragged of good fortune earlier in the day (hence the title).  I should back up.  Charlie is on the outs with the current administration of the Toronto police force.  He works under the category of General Duties, and homicide is by no means his regular assignment.  But the investigating officer in Montreal is French, and the roots of the crime may lie in English-speaking Toronto, hence Charlie is assigned liaison duty.
    In the background is Charlie’s home life.  While they are happily married, there is a class and/or cultural divide between Charlie and his wife (and children) and especially his wife’s family, who are considerably wealthier than Charlie, who gets by on a policeman’s pay, but usually no better than that.  That Charlie is (platonically) attracted to the free-spirited Molly, one of the dead man’s students (and so was the professor) is part of who he is and who he is learning himself to be.  She is a charmer.
    Here’s a short quote taken from a conversation Charlie has with one of the dead man’s colleagues at the Faculty Club, taken from page 59:


    The paragraph is longer, but I’ve changed my mind and decided to cut it off here, deleting the rest of it. The part that I cut has Usher explaining how courses are set up and who gets to teach what course and the like, all of which is necessary for Charlie to feel himself in the dead man’s shoes, and I hope you get the idea well enough from this greatly truncated version.
     The following quote shows Wright’s ability to describe something entirely ordinary and everyday, but when you look at it more closely, is not.  From page 113:


    I have a number of other quotes jotted down to provide to you, but I will resist and behave myself.  I also see that I wrote myself a note about the mystery and its solution: “somewhat frazzled at the end but OK.”  It’s been a while since I’ve read the book – I’ve had to put off writing this review for several weeks, I’m sorry to say – but I skimmed through the ending again, and I was right.  It’s the characters that I remember the most about this book – characters who are described as individuals and (even better) who are allowed to think and behave like human beings that we either know or see around us every day.
     The book won a couple of major awards (see below) and if my opinion matters at all, at this late date, I think the author deserved them.


    BIBLIOGRAPHY  [With a couple of exceptions, these are the US editions only.  Some books may have appeared earlier in a Canadian or British edition.]

    Charlie Salter:

The Night the Gods Smiled.  Scribner, hc, September 1983.     (John Creasey Memorial Award, Arthur Ellis Award)
    Signet 13409, pb, February 1985.

Smoke Detector.  Scribner, hc, December1984.
    Signet 14123, pb, February 1986.

Death in the Old Country.  Scribner, hc, August 1985.  (Arthur Ellis Award)
    Signet 14450, pb, 1986.
    Signet 14450, 2nd pr., July 1991.

The Man Who Changed His Name.  Scribner, hc, August 1986.
    Signet 14930, pb, August 1987.

A Body Surrounded by Water.  Scribner, hc, December 1987.
    Signet 16385, pb, September 1989.

A Question of Murder.  Scribner, hc, October 1988.
    Worldwide 26039, pb, 1989/90?

A Sensitive Case.  Scribner, hc, 1990.    [Note: Mel Pickett also appears.]
    Worldwide 26083, pb, Oct 1991.

Final Cut.  Scribner, hc, May 1991.
    Worldwide 26107, pb, Oct 1992.

A Fine Italian Hand.  Scribner, hc, 1992.
    Worldwide 26143, pb, 1994.   

Death by Degrees.  Scribner, hc, 1993.
    Worldwide 26169, pb, 1995.

The Last Hand.  St. Martin’s, hc, February  2002   [in which Salter, having reaching the mandatory retirement age of 60, does exactly that]
    Worldwide 26569, pb, 2006.


    Mel Pickett:

 A Sensitive Case.  Scribner, hc, 1990.    [Note: A Charlie Salter case in which Pickett also appears.]
    Worldwide 26083, pb, Oct 1991.

Buried in Stone.  Scribner, hc, March 1996.
    Scribner, trade pb, January 2001.

Death of a Hired Man.  St. Martin’s, hc, March 2001.
    Worldwide 26521, pb, 2005.


    Lucy Trimble Brenner:

Death of a Sunday Writer.  Foul Play Press, hc, 1996.

Death on the Rocks.  St. Martin’s, hc, June 1999.
    St. Martin’s, trade pb, June 1999.


    Joe Barley:

The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn. Perseverance Press, hc, 2000.    (Barry Award)
    Perseverance Press, trade pb, October 2000.

The Hemingway Caper.  Castle Street Mysteries (Canada), trade pb, April 2003.  No US publication.


    Collection:

Killing Climate: The Collected Mystery Stories Eric Wright.  Crippen & Landru, trade pb, August 2003.  Collection of 16 stories, one original. A limited hc edition also appeared.
    “Licensed Guide.”  Criminal Shorts, ed. Eric Wright & Howard Engel, Macmillan Canada, 1992
    “The Boatman.” [“Start with a Tree”].  Paper Guitar, ed. Karen Muhallen, 1995
    “One of a Kind.”  Secret Tales of the Arctic Trails, ed. David Skene-Melvin, Simon & Pierre, 1997
    “Twins.”  A Suit of Diamonds, ed. Anon., Collins, 1990
    “Two in the Bush.”  Christmas Stalkings, ed. Charlotte MacLeod, Mysterious Press, 1991
    “The Duke.”  2nd Culprit, ed. Liza Cody & Michael Z. Lewin, Chatto & Windus, 1993
    “Kaput.”  Mistletoe Mysteries, ed. Charlotte MacLeod, Mysterious Press, 1989
    “Caves of Ice.”  EQMM, March 2002
    “Hephaestus.”  Cold Blood II, ed. Peter Sellers, Mosaic, 1989
    “Bedbugs.”  Das Magazin, April 26 1996
    “Duty Free.”  Cold Blood V, ed. Peter Sellers, Mosaic, 1994
    “Jackpot.” [“Looking for an Honest Man”].  Cold Blood, ed. Peter Sellers, Mosaic, 1987
    “The Cure.”  Fingerprints, ed. Beverley Beetham-Endersby, Toronto: Irwin, 1984
    “The Lady from Prague.”  Cold Blood IV, ed. Peter Sellers, Mosaic, 1992
    “An Irish Jig.”  The Globe and Mail, December 22, 2001
    “The Lady of Shalott” [Insp. Charlie Salter].  Original

Lodgings for the Night.  Crippen & Landru, August 2003.  Separate pamphlet accompanying the limited edition of A Killing Climate: The Collected Mystery Stories by Eric Wright, Crippen & Landru, 2003.

EDITOR:  Criminal Shorts: Mysteries by Canadian Crime Writers, ed. Eric Wright & Howard Engel, Macmillan Canada, hc, 1992.


SOURCES:

    Allen J. Hubin, Crime Fiction IV.
    William J. Contento, Mystery Short Fiction: 1990-2004.
    www.abebooks.com
    www.amazon.com

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ERIC WRIGHT - The Man Who Changed His Name.

Signet 14930; reprint paperback, August 1987.  Hardcover: Charles Scribner’s Sons, August 1986.  Canadian editions, both published as A Single Death: Hardcover: Collins, 1987; paperback: Totem, 1987.

    If I’d been able to locate copies of the intervening two Charlie Salter mysteries, neither of which I may not actually have, I’d have read one or the other first before tackling this one, the fourth of the series in chronological order.  Not that there seems to have been any need to, but I certainly am annoyed at myself for not having access to the two missing books, as I really don’t believe I purchased them when they first came out.  I have no record of them, in any case and for what it’s worth, as my collection is completely catalogued only through 1982 or ’83.  Both of the two I now I have at present I picked up used, and not so very long ago.  Alas, the folly of one’s younger days.
    For as much as I enjoyed The Night the Gods Smiled, I enjoyed this one even more, starting immediately from page one onward, beginning with Salter’s first wife calling on him for assistance – in his professional capacity – but after 25 years not seeing each other, it also causes something of a shaking-up to Salter’s semi-insecurity in his current marriage.
    Not that the marriage isn’t solid, but Salter is always aware of the differences between his family and Annie’s, especially with Christmas time coming, and both sets of parents coming to visit the Salters at the same time for the first time.
    Gerry, Salter’s ex-wife was a free spirit whose life style was 180 degrees incompatible with that of a newly minted young policeman’s.  As an author, Eric Wright is excellent (unsurpassed, in fact) in comparing and contrasting differences the way two people act and (try to) live together.  It also comes as no surprise to read on and to discover that this is what the case of murder in The Man Who Changed His Name is about, the one that Gerry calls on Charlie for assistance with: that of a lonely woman whose death Gerry, as a middle-aged feminist, feels the police are not taking seriously enough.  Separated from her husband many miles away, Nancy Cowell, a social worker, was new to the dating scene, and the police, with no other leads to go one, feel that one of the men she have met while bar-hopping is responsible.
     After his wife left him, however, her husband, whose family once changed their name to Cowell, is now known again as Kowalczyk, of Ukrainian lineage, and of course, it has to do something with the story, and so does adultery and jealousy and ethnic relations.  (See specifically page 158 for a short but pertinent quote concerning the latter.)
    By this far into the series, Salter seems to have found more confidence in himself as an police investigator, and the murder and the trail he follows to solve it is both irresistible and fascinating.  Hard-boiled fans may not find too much to get their teeth into, but on the opposite side of the coin, those of you who prefer cozies will find there is far more meat here than you may be accustomed to in your usual diet.  What everyone will find, if I’m able to persuade you to pick up a copy, is an abundance of intelligent police work, fashioned and shaped together with a more than an occasional insight into human nature – insight that is  brilliant, quietly unerring, and (dare I say) often jarring.
    This is an excellent piece of work, from beginning to end.  Highly recommended, as if you hadn’t already gathered that yourself.
           
                       

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JOHN J. LAMB - The Mournful Teddy

Berkley 21112; paperback original. First printing: August 2006.

    Speaking of cozies, as I was just a paragraph or so ago, take one look at the cover and the title of this book and what would you think?  I’ll get back to that in a minute.
    This is the second mystery written by John J. Lamb, a retired homicide detective from San Diego County who’s pulled up stakes and moved back east to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where he now lives and attends teddy bear shows with his wife, among other activities.  His first book, Echoes of the Lost Order (Five Star, hardcover, 2005) sounds as though it might be the first of a totally different series, one that takes place in Talmine, a small Virginia Tidewater town, where a murder is solved by  the town’s chief of police, Steve MacKinnon, and his wife, Victoria, a former police crime analyst.
    Looking back at that paragraph, I see that I’ve gotten ahead of myself.  The Mournful Teddy is already the first in a series, even though it’s the only one that’s been published so far.  Coming up in May 2007 is The False-Hearted Teddy, and according to his website, the author is now hard at work on The Crafty Teddy.  
    And I’m still ahead of myself, or I’ve swung off sideways, and I really have to get back on track.  The protagonists in all three of these “Bear Collector’s Mysteries” are retired San Francisco P. D. homicide inspector Brad Lyon and his wife, Ashleigh, a teddy bear collector (and creator), now living along the Shenandoah River in rural Virginia.  One senses a pattern at work here.
    Which is hardly bad news, and the even better news is that The Mournful Teddy became Number One on the Independent Mystery Bookseller Association’s best-seller list for August 2006.  Who among mystery readers can resist a work of detective fiction that involves teddy bears?  (When beanie babies were hot hobby items, was there a mystery that involved beanie babies?  If not, someone missed a good opportunity, as beanie babies hardly have the mass appeal they had at one time, do they?)
     But teddy bears?  They never go out of fashion, and I think this series of mysteries that Mr. Lamb has concocted and devised could go on for quite a while.  It begins with Lyon finding a body in the Shenandoah outside his home, a male body that the local sheriff and ambulance crew seem to recognize without even turning him over.  They also quickly invite Lyon to mind his own business, which of course rankles the retired homicide detective.
    Also worked into the tale, as of course you were wondering, is a valuable teddy bear with connections to the Titanic.  Make that extremely valuable.
    After a slow opening, the story gradually picks up speed, and the antagonistic behavior of the local law enforcement officers gives it an even bigger boost.  As an investigator, which of course he has been for a long time, Lyon is a good interviewer, and he is especially good with hostile witnesses.  But even with so many facets to the mystery, it is one that is surprisingly easy to solve, with at least one of the bad guys caving in all too easily and not really (as it turns out) perhaps not that bad at all.  Some of them certainly are, however – do not get me wrong – and they are not necessarily all guys, either, in case you were trying to read something into my words that I didn’t mean for you to pick up on.
    Overall?  Everyone reading this will either (a) read the book or (b) not, no matter what my recommendation might be, so I won’t say anything further, nor do I think I need to.
    But here’s a quote from page 88 that I thought was amusing, and since it’s about mysteries, I thought perhaps you might also:


    Ouch.  Nothing like that in this one, but still.  Ouch.

   

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ELLERY QUEEN - Tragedy of X

Avon T-141; paperback reprint, no date stated, but generally accepted as 1956.  Second Avon printing.  Hardcover first edition as The Tragedy of X by BARNABY ROSS: The Viking Press, June 1932.  Hardcover reprint: Grosset & Dunlap, mid-1930s.  First hardcover edition as by ELLERY QUEEN: Stokes, 1940.  (All editions that follow are all as by E.Q.)  Hardcover reprints: Grosset & Dunlap, circa 1940 [or 1943]; University of California Extension, 1978 [Mystery Library, Volume 7; introduction & checklist by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.]; Bookthrift Co., 1986.  Paperback reprints: Pocket 125, 1942; Avon 425, 1952; Avon S206, 1966; IPL, 1986.

    Whew.  And who knows, I may have missed an edition or two.  In order to tell you more about the history and other insights about the book, I wish I had the Mystery Library edition, with the introduction by Mike Nevins.  But I don’t, and I won’t try to fake it, but I will insert one short note I found on wikipedia.com:  “For a while in the 1930s ‘Ellery Queen’ and ‘Barnaby Ross’ even staged a series of public debates in which one cousin impersonated Queen and the other impersonated Ross.” 
    What I’d be interested in knowing is how, when and who started to put two and two together and deduced the fact that Queen and Ross where one and the same.  The four Barnaby Ross books came out in rapid succession during only a two-year period between 1932 and 1933, then there were no more.  That the fourth one was titled Drury Lane’s Last Case made it as final and conclusive as possible there were only going to be four, even given the earlier resurrection of one Sherlock Holmes.
    I believe I have read all four, but if I did, it was something like 50 years ago.  When I came to read this one, now in my maturing years, I quickly discovered that it really didn’t matter if I really had read the book once before: I didn’t remember any of it, including (and especially) the ending, which tended (this time around) to knock my socks off.  Whether it did or not before is a matter of only conjecture, but why else would I so vividly recall having read it, even without any accompanying details?
    Drury Lane is the detective in all four mysteries, a retired (and deaf) Shakespearean actor with a penchant for helping the police in a purely amateur (but not amateurish) fashion, in particular and to whit, District Attorney Bruno and Inspector Thumm.  On page 56 there is a reference to Lane’s giving them a hand on the “Cramer mess,” but since that case seems to have never been recorded, this would have been the reading audience’s initial introduction to the man.  (I picture John Carradine in the role, myself.)
    Murder number one is that of a man poisoned to death on a trolley car.  Means: a cork with needles dropped in the victim’s pocket.  Circumstances: only one of the people on the trolley could have placed it there.  More deaths follow, each one connected and each one as hopelessly complicated in commission as the first.  Don’t expect anything like proper police procedure.  The emphasis was on fooling the reader, in as extravagant a fashion as possible.  For my money, the two men who were Queen succeed, and on all counts. 
    Well, let me quibble on that last statement perhaps a bit.  That there are some awkward moments, designed not for realism, but caused by the authors’ reluctance to not reveal all too soon, as goes almost without saying.  Drury Lane says more than once, in true classic sleuthing style, for example, that he knows who the killer is, but he can’t say who it is.  Statements like this are always annoying, no matter which classic sleuth it is who says it.  That it takes 36 pages for the solution to be revealed, step by step, will tell you something about what kind of book this is, as if you didn’t already know.  In the explanation, though, Lane also reveals how he knew, and even more – and this is the clincher – why he couldn’t say who when he did.
    This is also one of those kinds of mysteries which I do not believe are written any more, nor have they for a long time, in which the key to killer’s identity is not revealed until the last page.
    Make that the last paragraph.  The last sentence.  And, keeping in mind the title: The. Very. Last. Letter.  X.
    No, they don’t write books like this any more.  Even given the quibbles I mentioned, wow, what a pleasure this was to read.  (I did mention up above what happened to my socks, didn’t I?)

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INIGO JONES - The Albatross Murders

The Mystery Novel of the Month #33; digest-sized paperback reprint, 1941.  Hardcover First Edition: Mystery House, 1941.

    Beginning with what’s known so far about the author, here’s a quote from Bill Deeck’s long-awaited reference book on lending library mystery publishers, Murder at 3 Cents a Day (Battered Silicon Dispatch Box; forthcoming):

   
    Some detective work is therefore in order.  The actual title of the book appears to be 50 Best American Short Stories 1915-1939, and one can find a complete list of the contents on the Internet, including all fifty authors.
    This narrows it down, but not enough, unless authors like Erskine Caldwell, J. P. Marquand, and Dorothy Parker can be eliminated, and they probably can.  But there are enough unfamiliar names there (Robert Whitehand, I. V. Morris, Lovell Thompson and a host of similar others) that at the moment, I cannot tell you that I have proceeded any further than this.
    While I am presuming that the first name Inigo denotes someone of the masculine gender (about which see below), it cannot obviously be presumed that the person behind the pseudonym is equally masculine.
    If by chance it is a clue to you (but not to me) that there are two Inigo Jones’s listed online at the wikipedia website, let me know.  The first is considered the first significant English architect (1573-1652), while the second is a descendant of the first, one Inigo Owen Jones (1872-1954), who is noted as having been a well-known meteorologist and long-range weather forecaster.
    More clues may arise from the settings of Inigo Jones, the detective story author.  The Albatross Murders takes place in Shrewsbury, a small New England town, the mystery centering around the troupe of actors plying their trade in a two-months-long summer theatre.  (No state is named; only New England.  While no actual state name is mentioned, it had the distinct feel of Connecticut or western Massachusetts to me.)  Doing the investigatory honors is Inspector Sebastian Booth.
    Jones’s earlier book, The Clue of the Hungry Corpse (Arcadia House, hc, 1939; Mystery Novel of the Month #11, digest pb, 1940), takes place in New York City, and the detectives of record in that book were Lieutenant Blanding and Headquarters Detective Barry Linden, thanks again to Bill Deeck’s book.  Which I admit doesn’t give us a lot more to go on, except to suggest that the author was familiar with both small town and big city American life, New England and New York City style.  (I’d have eliminated Erskine Caldwell on this basis, if I hadn’t already.)
    So who Inigo Jones was is a mystery as yet unsolved.  There is also, I go on to say, at last, an equally interesting case to be solved in The Albatross Murders as well – that of an actor being shot to death on stage with a gun loaded only with blanks, and in full sight of 500 people.  More?  It is later discovered that the bullet is not in the body, nor is there an exit wound.
    There is a lot of back stage rivalry between the players – hardly unexpected, as such rivalries always seem to exist in such affairs – and in terms of both quantity and quality, there is certainly more than enough, and they are substantial enough, to keep the story going purely on the behind-the-scenes business alone.  But adding some additional momentum to the tale, the local townspeople have their own secrets as well, and the events that occur after uncovering them turn especially nasty very quickly.  The double combo gives Inspector Booth about as much as he can handle, or wants to. 
    There was a certain amount of crudity, I thought, in the detective’s initial approach.  Chapter IV is twelve pages long and consists of nothing more (or less) than a re-creation of the murder, with all of the players in their places, and the body of the victim still lying uncovered on the floor.
    But (and again, if this is a clue to the person behind the pen name, let me know) the author knows his way around backstage, and his detective character is no mean slouch at reasoning things through.  Let me quote one paragraph from page 43, to allow you to see, I believe, for yourself:


    Yes, yes, I know.  Some of you are yawning already, and so was I for a while, but by page 108 the dialogue between the characters had become almost lyrical, the repartee flowing both easily and wittily, with Booth always firmly centered at the focal point.  The method of the murder is clever enough, although highly unlikely, and with no perhaps about it.  But one could say that of the Queen effort commented on just before this one, couldn’t one? 
    Other than that, there’s really no comparison.  In the final analysis, Jones’s effort comes up lacking when compared with that totally superb,  multi-faceted Queenian extravaganza.  But even though The Albatross Murders is a minor league effort, it definitely has its pluses as well as minuses, making totally valid the final note I wrote myself – I always write comments to myself while reading – for this is what I said, somewhat in surprise, I have to admit, after the book and I got off to such a rough start together: “Not bad after all.”
    And please take that statement for all that it’s worth.  You can take it to the bank, deposit it, and count on it.

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CRISTINA SUMNERS - Familiar Friend

Bantam; paperback original. First printing: August 2006.

    Familiar Friend is the third in a series of mystery adventures in which the two leading characters have an exceeding complicated relationship, which I will get to in a moment.  First of all, however, here are the books:

    Crooked Heart.  Bantam, hc, October 2002; reprint pb, September 2003.
   
    Thieves Break In.  Bantam, pbo, October 2004.

    Familiar Friend.  Bantam, pbo, August 2006.

    There is a long story behind the writing of these books and why it took so long for them to find a publisher.  The author hints at it in the Acknowledgments to this one, but then she goes on to say that the story would bore us.  As if.  But – if I have read this introduction correctly – this, the third book, was the first one written, or at least plotted, and that was back in the 1970s when she was taking courses at Princeton, which is the town upon which her fictitious town of Harton, New Jersey, is modeled.
    Harton being the home of the Reverend Kathryn Koerney and police chief Tom Holder, who are tacitly in love with each other, but neither of whom dares to admit it, even to themselves.  Tom Holder is married, but to a wife he does not love, nor does she love him.  Kathryn Koerney is all but committed to another man, a rich Englishman named Kit Mallowan.  (From what I’ve gathered, Kathryn is equally wealthy, if not wealthier, but I can’t tell you any of the details, this being the only book of the three that I’ve read.  I also gather that she met Kit in England, where Book Two took place.)
    The setting in Book Three is purely academic, at least in the beginning, given that the body of the chairman of the local university’s Spanish department being found on the driveway leading into St. Margaret’s, a parish church.  The man was universally disliked by his colleagues, it is soon revealed, making sure that there are many, many suspects for Holder to interview in the initial stages of the investigation that quickly ensues.
    Curiously enough, however, even though all of these professors, wives, students and the staff, crew and a group of the usual university hangers-on are strongly depicted, with considerable time and energy put into making them distinct individuals, all with motives, and with all of this elaborate background already built and ready to wear, the author seems to forget about (most of) them and concentrates instead on the not-so-minor issue of mysterious disappearance of Holder’s wife, causing the local D.A. to..., and Father Mark to..., and then Kit to...
    I can say no more, but it is a lot of fun.  You will have to read it for yourself.  Sometimes the leading characters behave like teenagers in their rather complicated dance they perform in establishing their relationships to each other, but it’s all done in such a nicely charming fashion, that I am sure that all but the most surly curmudgeon would not be pleased and object to it.
    The puzzle of the mystery is classically done as well, what with time tables and the shrewdest of plans concocts by the villain(s) involved.  The last line has nothing to do with the mystery (as opposed to the Ellery Queen novel I covered not so long ago), but if you care anything at all about the characters, it will make absolutely certain that you will not miss where the next episodic installment of their amusing romance (but not to them) will take them next.


[UPDATE] 05-30-07.  Unfortunately, given the pattern of appearances of books in this series, it looks as though there will still be over a year’s wait.

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A. WHATOFF ALLEN - Exit an Admiral

Sampson Low; hardcover. No date stated, but given as 1938 in Hubin, Crime Fiction IV.

    And this seems to be the sum total knowledge of Mr. Allen and his single work of detective fiction, unless you include an Internet obituary of one David Whatoff Allen, BA, 22 May 1997; commoner 1936–9. Aged 79.  Perhaps a relative? 
    In this country (US) there was (presumably) a family of Whatoffs in Oklahoma, five members of which died between 1987 and 1993.  [From Social Security records.]  In the UK there is a Whatoff Lodge Farm in (I belive) Leicestershire where camping sites are available.
    Using Google, even though it’s an uncommon name, there are other references to Whatoff to be found, so perhaps if one wanted, the author could be traced, given a little more persistence, ingenuity and luck.
    And you may need the same (persistence, ingenuity and luck) if you were to try to find a copy of this book.  I obtained mine on eBay, a winning bid taken purely as a shot in the dark, as I had no idea what kind of crime fiction the book might turn out to be.  There are no copies available on the Internet, for example, at the present time.  (Right now my book searching website of choice is addall.com.  The results on bookfinder.com are organized better, but since ABE took them over, they seem to miss a lot of books that addall finds.)
    But I digress.  As a detective novel, Exit an Admiral leaves a certain amount to be desired, but it is also crammed full of clues, derring-do, more clues (a house full of them), mistaken identities, false trails, even more evidence and other clues, and I tell you up front, this was an extreme pleasure to read.  (Not to mention the sinister satisfaction that one sometimes feels when one knows one is reading a book that no one else has in over 50 years perhaps – or am I deluding myself with this? – nor perhaps no one else will in another 50 years.)
    I do tell you this.  If you do see a copy for sale anywhere, make sure you grab it up immediately.  If I can’t persuade you to read it, and I am about to do my best, you can consider this: that I will have persuaded someone else that they desperately want to read it, and they will pay almost anything for the opportunity.
    In Chapter I we meet Ivor Duke, young barrister and a well-known amateur sleuth of the type that England was filled with in 1938.  His assistant (major domo), a former boxer named Pug Jordan, is with him in a car, and the story of how they met is told.
    In Chapter II Duke stops along the highway, rather deserted, to come to the aid of young woman standing next to a car with a decidedly flat tyre.  She resists his assistance, he allows her to resist, but persists long enough to see a man in the back seat who looks decidedly dead.  She holds a revolver on him, and that is when the lights go out, as someone has snuck up on him from behind.  (Pug remains asleep in Duke’s car throughout the incident.)
    Next day.  In Chapter III Duke is visited by Inspector Jenner at home and is told about the mysterious murder of a retired admiral in his home, the same night and in the (totally coincidentally) same area as Duke’s own strange encounter.  Not the same dead man, however, much to Duke’s surprise.
    But two bodies in the same evening and in the same vicinity?  Are the cases connected?  Apparently not, but we (the reader) know better, and in spite of some doubts along the way, so does Duke.
    Here’s a quote from the beginning of Chapter III, however, describing Duke on the morning after, and before the visit from Inspector Jenner:


    Here’s where you and I may go our separate ways, if I were to tell you that this is my kind of writing and it happens not to be yours.  And at least in the early going, the author is making it abundantly clear what sort of approach he plans to take with the story.
    What the paragraph above also makes clear is that this is not Duke’s first brush with strange events occurring at two o’clock in the morning, which is reinforced with some suitably appropriate banter soon thereafter with Jenner about how, when Scotland Yard is baffled, they come along to see Ivor Duke.
    Now this was in 1938, and in 1938, whether true in real life or not, amateur assistants to Scotland Yard in detective fiction were allowed to examine the premises where the dead man’s body was found, picking up clues and other evidence, sometimes revealing what they find to the reader, and sometimes not, carelessly forgetting to do so until such time when a careful exposition is more likely to impress the reader with their various reasonings and conclusions.
    One can easily forgive Mr. Allen for merely going along with the trend.  Here’s a quote from page 101 which will describe what Ivor Duke soon finds himself up to his waist in, immediately after interviewing an elderly gent named Huggett, whose horse and buggy were nearly run off the road on the same night as the murder, but by another car altogether:


    There is also a host of strange and mysterious coincidences that are, I confess, exceeding frustrating, coincidences being the primary means of support for many a weaker detective fiction writer, but do not despair, all is explained, as well as the even stranger behavior of the dead man’s daughter on page 112. 
    While this is a thoroughly solid detective story, once one gets over some of the shakier parts, it ends in a sudden burst of activity found in only the best thrillers of the day, followed by the revelations suggested above in which all is marvelously and beautifully explained. 
    One is also left with the hope of another detective thriller from the pen or typewriter of A. Whatoff Allen, but for whatever reason, alas, such a one was not to be.
               
   

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A. S. FLEISCHMAN - Look Behind You Lady

Gold Medal 223; paperback original. First printing, February 1952; 2nd printing, Gold Medal 572, 1956.  Hardcover reprint: Herbert Jenkins, UK, 1962, as Chinese Crimson.  To be published by Stark House Press in late 2006 as  a trade paperback combined with The Venetian Blonde.

    Albert Sidney Fleischman, known to his friends and colleagues as Sid, was born in 1920, and at 86, thankfully he’s still around to see publisher Greg Shepard bring a couple of his old Gold Medal paperbacks back into print.
    His career in the adult mystery field was relatively short, beginning with a couple of Phoenix Press mysteries in 1948 and 1949, then shifting to Gold Medal for five paperback originals between 1951 and 1963, with one from Ace making an appearance in 1954.
    After that he became an author of children’s books, winning the Newberry Medal for The Whipping Boy (1987), and the creator of Bullwhip Griffin – the movie about his adventures was based on the book By The Great Horn Spoon (1963).
    Greg always does a great job in adding material to his books about the authors he publishes, so I won’t try to come up with any more background like this on my own.  Nor will I say anything about The Venetian Blonde, one of my favorite mystery titles of all time, and I love the cover as well – they go hand-in-hand together as one truly great match-up.
    To introduce you to Look Behind You Lady (no comma, and I’m not sure why), you might pretend that you’re at the newsstand in 1952, or the drug-store spinner rack, and you’d see the cover, designed to catch anyone’s eye, 100% guaranteed.  (Truth be told, I was 10 at the time, so it had to have been the 1956 reprint that snagged my attention.)
    Then once in the would-be purchaser’s hand, he would have looked inside the front cover to read the following blurb:


    Not a word wasted, and if you could pass this up, you’re a better person than I, or your tastes are so different from mine that you should be reading another review anyway.
    But just in case a quarter was all that you had in your pocket, back in 1952, and you needed just that one extra nudge to tip the balance toward paying the storekeeper and on your way with the book, all you would have had to do was to turn two more pages and start reading from the top of Chapter One:


    Ka-ching!  Sold, am I right, or am I right?  If you can’t read this story and hear the voices of Humphrey Bogart as rather world-weary stage magician Bruce Flemish and Lauren Bacall as Donna Van Deerlin, the lady above who has both a room number and a proposition for him, you haven’t been watching as many of the movies of the 1940s and early 1950s as is good for you.  Something’s been missing from your video diet that you ought to remedy as soon as possible.
    More.  The owner of the Hotel China Seas is Senhor Gonsalves, a gentleman who is missing both his thumbs, and he also has a small task for Flemish to perform as part of his act, a task involving the not-so-small sum of $10,000 Hong Kong dollars.  Sydney Greenstreet.
    One of Senhor Gonsalves’ many assistants is a mousy sort of fellow named Josef Nakov, who is handy with a gun.  Peter Lorre. 
    From page 144:


    Nakov says something about the intelligence of Donna, who had walked back into Gonsalves’ hands after a brief escape.


    You can cast Gilberto, young punk working for Gonsalves, and Phebe, a somewhat shopworn stripper whose act follows that of Flemish on stage, yourself.
    The plot has something to do with the Communist Reds and/or the opium trade, and it matters not very much in the long run.  But there are twists to be had, and thrills of the nature above, and what more could you want of a book of exotic Oriental danger and intrigue like this?

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MORTON WOLSON - The Nightmare Blonde

Pocket, paperback original; 1st printing, April 1988.

     This book escaped a lot of notice when it came out, or at least that’s what I strongly suspect.  Reading just the cover and the blurb at the top –  “It was murder.  A Hatchet Job.” – I think the average reader would have thought that this was just another horror novel of the blood and gore variety, both of which were very popular at the time.  Nor would the name of the author have meant anything to anybody.
     But what if I told you that Morton Wolson was the real name of 1940s pulp writer Peter Paige, creator of the private detective Cash Wale?  Or at least I think that Wale was a PI, but I may be wrong and someone will have to tell me.
    In any case, Peter Paige wrote a slew of detective stories for magazines like Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly and Dime Detective – mostly the latter, I believe – until disappearing from sight about the same time as most of the pulps died, in the early 1950s.  Most of them were, by all accounts, fairly ordinary.  Paige is a not a name which comes to many people’s mind when it comes to pulp detective fiction.  Myself, I know the name, and I know Cash Wale, his primary series character, but as far as any single story is concerned, I can’t think of a single plot line, I have to say, and reluctantly so as I do.
    When I asked veteran researcher Victor Berch to see what he could come up with as far as either Paige or Wolson was concerned, he did his usual amazing sleight-of-hand and came up with a couple of interesting items.  In the Los Angeles Times of January 7, 1946, there was a short item with the following headline: Writer, Held for Beating Wife, Says She Beat Him:


    Accompanying the article, not much longer than the excerpt above, are separate photos of both Wolson and his wife, who is shown feeding their baby with a bottle.  (The headline of the item that follows on the same page is: Jeanne Crain and Mother Reconciled.)
    Besides the work he did for the pulps as Peter Paige, Wolson had two stories published under his own name.  The first one appeared in the January 1954 issue of EQMM, a tale entitled “The Attacker,” and a little bit later, “The Glass Room,” was published in the September 1957 issue.
    Wolson’s output may have been small under his own name, but “The Attacker” was good enough to be selected in David C. Cooke’s annual Best Detective Stories of the Year anthology for 1954, and more than that, to be picked up again by Allen J. Hubin’s Best of the Best Detective Stories: 25th Anniversary Collection in 1971.  (Al did not remember this fact while he and I were corresponding a short while ago about Wolson, until I pointed it out to him.)
    There is one entry for Wolson on www.imdb.com.  A story he wrote was the basis for “Prime Suspect,” an episode of Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theater, telecast on 27 February 1958.  A gent named Steve Fisher did the adaptation, and an actress named Nita Talbot appeared in it, whom I thought was tremendously good-looking at the time; the leading role was played by William Bendix, whom hardly anybody thought was good-looking at any time.  Where the story may have been published earlier remains unknown.
    The next time Victor came across Wolson’s name in a newspaper was in the New York Times for March 29, 1970, in an advertisement for a special “Manager’s” sale being held by Furniture-in-the-Raw, an outfit with five stores in the New York City area.  I’ll quote the relevant detail:


    Nothing more seems to have put Wolson in the news or in any sort of spotlight until the publication of The Nightmare Blonde in 1988, and then, as I alluded to earlier, the book seems to have come and gone without much notice.  At the moment there seems to be two copies available on the Internet, one from Alibris in the $3.00 range, and one from England in the $30 range.  It is dedicated to his wife Gaye, so it is clear that the earlier one did not last.
    But before getting to the main event, perhaps you’ve started to wonder.  Wolson was born in 1913 (making his age as reported in the LA Times correct), and he died in 2003.  You also may be beginning to wonder about this book he wrote in 1988, when he was 75, and whether it is any good or not.
    My answer, in a word, is “yes,” but if I may, I’d also have to say that it’s a qualified response, and I’ll get to that soon.  Remember now that it was marketed as a horror novel, which in a strong but not overpowering sense it is, as the murder to be solved is that of a family of four, killed by someone with a very sharp axe. 
    But what it really, really is, when you really get down to it, is a detective novel in a very traditional sense.  It’s also a tough, middle-class sort of novel, and hard-boiled at about the same level as, for example, a Ross Macdonald novel, not to forget to mention that it’s quite definitely noirish in a way as well.
    Let me explain that last sentence right away.  Dan Warden, the leading character, is the former chief of police in Oregon City, a town somewhere along the Pacific Ocean where the story takes place, who had recently been fired for beating up a newspaper columnist’s nephew and being chewed out in print by that very same newspaper columnist.  After coming out of a 24-hour drinking binge, about which he remembers nothing, he discovers that it is (no surprise here) the newspaper columnist who has been murdered, along with the three remaining members of his family.
    Which makes Dan Warden the number one suspect, no matter how close his friendship with the police commissioner is.  At the same time as Warden is discovering how badly his life has been suddenly turned upside down and inside out, he makes a friend – saving her life, to be precise, as she (a blonde) tries jumping off the end of Fisherman’s Wharf, but miscalculating badly as she does so.  Allow me to insert a long quote right about here, taken from pages 17 and 18:


    Kay Mullins (that’s her name) has had psychological problems dealing with children in the past, and now two of them are dead, and the reason for emphasizing that she is a blonde, as I did a just a moment ago, is that several blonde hairs have been found at the scene of the murders.
    It takes Dan most of the rest of the book to investigate the crimes while trying to stay ahead of the new police chief, who still considers him to be his primary suspect, while keeping Kay stable and discovering just how many blondes just happened to be in and around the area of the victims’ home, including Kay herself.
    Part of the investigation includes visiting a camp of the local branch of the White Knights of America and at least three brothels of increasing degrees of sophistication, and some low spots as well.  It’s a tough, rough story at times, and while it tends to start rambling a little, it still provides about four hours of pure entertainment, or at least it did for me, flawed only – here comes a qualifier – by the inescapable unlikelihood of one too many fairly uncommon events, all happening at the same time and in the same place. 
    But while the laws of probabilities, still enforced in every state in the union, say that the juxtaposition of so many blondes in one focal point of chaos, could not and should not have happened, what Wolson does is not easy.  He makes the book flow well enough, and smoothly enough, that you (the reader) don’t (and can’t) stop to think about it while you’re in the process of reading, and read it you will.
    As the identity of the killer becomes increasingly clear, and Wolson does a more than creditable job in disguising the solution to the murders for as long as he can – and even longer than he had a right to, truth be said – the chills begin as well, intellectually as well as (without trying to give anything away) deep down inside the reader’s bones somewhere.
    Nor is the book over even then.  For noir fans everywhere, lift a glass to a pulp writer past.  This one’s for you.

UPDATE: Victor Berch has come up with some more information on Wolson’s life.  Why don’t I simply let him have the floor:

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HUNTER STINSON - Fingerprints

Henry Holt & Co.; First Edition, March 1925.

     After a short investigation on my part, I believe that I can safely say that this is the only edition that was published of this book, nor were there any other books that appear under this author’s name.  (The asking price for the only copy found on the Internet at the time I am writing this is $50, but that is certainly explainable by the fact that that particular copy is inscribed by the author; otherwise it is in about the same condition as mine.)    FOOTNOTE.
    Long time readers of the pulp magazines may, however, suspect that they know the author by a slightly different name, and they would be correct, if they happen to be thinking of H. H. Stinson.  An incomplete list of his short fiction at Bill Contento’s Fiction Mag website begins with a western story published in Top Notch in 1928 and ends with a mystery yarn in Black Mask in 1948.  In the latter magazine he had a series character by the name of Kenny O’Hara.
    To discover more, I put out a call for help, first from Victor Berch, whose name has been mentioned on these pages before, then from the various members of the Pulp Mags yahoo list:






    Me again. I’m back, and I’m assuming that after all of this talking, as interesting as I hope you found it, you’d like to hear about the book itself.  Truth be told, it’s not very good, but for most of an evening or two, the entertainment value is still high enough that I did.  Read it in an evening or two, that is.
    As the story begins, the primary protagonist has discovered that as of that very same morning, he is a pauper.  The estate he believed that had been left to him by his overly generous father, he learned, had been badly (and sadly) overtaken by various notes, mortgages, liens and debts.  Which therefore means, as of that very same evening, his marriage to Maryse Douglas is off.
    Not by any wishes of the young lady herself, far from it, but by Owen Kenrick, her guardian until she comes of age.  Here is how the author describes the young lady, on page 5:


    The next morning Christopher is consoled by a gent by the name of Bosworth, who lives in the apartment upstairs from him.  From page 13:


    This is not the sort of dialogue that would make any kind of headway in the pages of either Black Mask or Dime Detective, nor would the mystery itself.  When Kenrick is found dead, young Christopher is, of course, the obvious suspect.  The only others in the running are the butler or Miss Douglas herself, and when Christopher’s fingerprints are found on the murder weapon, that just about clinches the case right then and here.
    Except for one undeniable fact, and that is that Christopher did not do it, and in the remaining 200 pages, it is up to him, Maryse, and Bosworth (who has secrets of his own) to prove it.
    Also on Blake’s trail are a gang of jewel thieves (jewelry being a primary item of trade for the dead man) who kidnap Maryse as part of their nefarious doings, but she escapes and makes her way back to the city just as Blake and Bosworth discover the hideout where she had been kept a captive, and mystery upon mystery ensues.  By page 209 Maryse has been captured again, by yet a third party to the drama, and rest of the book is devoted to her rescue, nothing more, and quite a lot less. 
    A lot happens in this book, as you can tell, but when it comes down to it, as I’ve already implied, nothing really happens, if you know what I mean.  And what about the phony fingerprints?  You might ask, and rightly so.  In 1925, they were still a novelty to mystery readers, and so in 1925 they must have been amazed as to what could be done with them, by both the investigators and (in this case) the villains.  I checked online with Google, and guess what, what the chaps on the wrong side of the law did back then could really be done.  Of course Mr. Stinson makes it sound easy, but in terms of the technology of 1925, I’m still not quite convinced it would have been as easy as he made it sound.


    FOOTNOTE: I seem to have spoken somewhat ahead of myself.  After some further investigation I have discovered that the novel was previously published as a three-part serial in the mystery fiction magazine Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories, concluding in the February 1925 issue.  Mostly, I think but am not sure, the stories that appeared in RDT&MS were either of the mansion house variety or out-and-out thrillers, and thusly not hard-boiled fare at all. 
    Or am I making a judgment on a sample of size only one?  Other authors who appeared in the magazine in 1925 include Seabury Quinn, Arthur J. Burks, Raoul Whitfield, Otis Adelbert Kline and Vincent Starrett.  You tell me.

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SARAH ANDREWS - Dead Dry

St. Martin’s, paperback reprint; 1st printing, September 2006.  Hardcover: St. Martin’s Press, November 2005.

    Em Hansen, the detective of record in Dead Dry, is the new forensic geologist for the state of Utah, and while she’s had nine previous adventures on record, this is the first case of murder that’s come her way since taking the new position.  I’d tell you more about some of her earlier cases, but as it happens, as I so often have to admit, this is the first one of the ten that I’ve happened to read.
    For the record, expanded from her entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here are the previous nine (plus this one, her tenth, along with the one that’s in the works) in chronological order, beginning with her earliest:

    Tensleep.  Otto Penzler Books, hc, June 1994  [Wyoming]
        Signet, pb, December 1995
    A Fall in Denver.  Scribner, hc, December 1995.  [Colorado]
        Signet, pb, December 1996
    Mother Nature.  St. Martin’s, hc, June 1997  [California]
        St. Martin’s; pb, July 1998
    Only Flesh and Bones.  St. Martin’s, hc, May 1998  [Wyoming]
        St. Martin’s; ; pb, August 1999
    Bone Hunter.  St. Martin’s, hc, September 1999  [Utah]
        St. Martin’s; pb, September 2000
    An Eye for Gold.  St. Martin’s, hc, September 2000  [Nevada]
        St. Martin’s; pb, Decmber 2001
    Fault Line.  St. Martin’s, hc, January 2002  [Utah]
        St. Martin’s; pb, January 2003 
    Killer Dust.  St. Martin’s, hc, February 2003  [Florida]
         St. Martin’s; pb, March 2004
    Earth Colors.  St. Martin’s, hc, March 2004  [Pennsylvania]
        St. Martin’s; pb, December 2004
    Dead Dry.  St. Martin’s, hc, November 2005  [Utah]
        St. Martin’s; pb, September 2006  
    In Cold Pursuit.  St. Martin’s, hc, Spring 2007  [Antarctica]

    For a photo of the author is the controls of her plane while researching her latest book, go to her website.  You’ll also find a biography of the author there.  Short version: “A geologist who writes mystery novels about a geologist.”  For the long version, I’ll suggest you simply check out her website.   It’s definitely worth a visit.
    While researching the publication dates of the books above, mostly on Amazon, I happened to glimpse some of the reviews, and unfortunately, some of them matched my opinion almost completely.  Long discourses on matters geological, many of them, too little plot. 
    In Dead Dry, for example, we (the reader) are given mini-lectures (some not so mini-) on the lack of water in Colorado, along with water resources (and ecology) in general.  Not that I’m complaining, mind you, because it’s important, but when it becomes noticeable, as it does here, then maybe (just maybe) it’s overdone, at least in a (mere?) mystery novel.
    Which, in the case at hand, involves the death of an old colleague of Em’s, an eccentric geological consultant named Afton McWain, buried in a suspicious quarry wall collapse.  Was he the victim of a horrific accident, or is this a case of murder?  It is the latter, and the connection with the above-mentioned water resources in Colorado (or lack thereof) has a great deal to do with it.
    Besides working allover the western part of the US (see the settings as listed above), Em also seems to have a romantic interest in every book.  Whether new ones or not, I do not know, but Fritz (in this one) seems to be rather new, while Ray seems to have been part of her past for some time longer, and it appears that he will stay there.
    Now you may have noticed that I have left the detective work involved until after discussing the romantic aspects of the book, mostly because, well, I found the detective work of a rather, um, perfunctory nature.  Something invariably seemed lacking.  On more than one occasion, I found myself commenting to myself – I almost always write notes to myself while I’m reading –  that Em simply wasn’t asking the right questions, if she was asking questions at all.   
    But she’s a character whose lively, animated outlook on life is definitely worth following – a series wouldn’t last as long as this has if that weren’t true – and  it all turns out well in the end.  In fact, there is no doubt in my mind that the book is considerably better than the one that I see (looking back) that I have described so far.  But (still looking back) I don’t see anything I’ve said that I would change, so I won’t.

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KATHLEEN HILLS - Hunter’s Dance

Poisoned Pen Press:  Hardcover First Edition: January 2004.  Trade Paperback: April 2006

    For fans of detective mysteries, there is a lot to enjoy in this, the second appearance of township constable John McIntire, his first being Past Imperfect, which came out from the same publisher two years earlier, in 2002.  And for the very same readers – fans of detective mysteries, that is – there is also a huge disappointment in the ending, and I think that, if I may, I’ll put off talking about that for a while. 
    Let me talk about the good news first, before getting to the not-so-good.  In Hunter’s Dance, set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in late1950, the death of Bambi Morlen is one that would present a challenge for any detective who’d be worthy of the title.  The boy is found tied up, poisoned, scalped, stabbed and worse: someone has attempted to drill a hole in his skull.
    Not all of these were done by the same individual, as it turns out, and thereby lie the pieces of the puzzle that McIntire and Pete Koski, sheriff of fictional Flambeau County, must juggle around and put back together.  There are a good many local residents of rural St. Adele, also fictional, and the semi-wilderness surrounding it, and in time the reader is introduced to a good assortment of them, not all of whom get along well with one another: the Finns; the Chippewa Indians; the hardy, long-time resident woodsmen; the rich folks in their own enclave along Lake Superior.  Bambi is the son of one of the latter, and yes, I know what you’ve been thinking, what kind of name is that?
    As a quick sidebar, I lived in the area for four years, and calling it a “semi-wilderness” is putting it mildly.  There are small spots of civilization scattered here and there, but there are also long stretches of highway where the road is flat, never curves or bends, and goes on for fifty miles or more with absolutely no one in sight, and (unlike the Far West) surrounded on either side by trees and/or swampland on the entire way.
    Back to the text.  During the long patient investigation that ensues, all of which is never less than interesting, the pieces slowly start snapping into place, but (here comes the not-so-good part) the ending, which comes as quite a surprise – to put that mildly as well – brings forth as many new questions as it answers.  That’s in the next-to-the-last chapter.  Well, OK, one thinks, there’s still plenty of time for some explanation.  It wouldn’t take all that much, maybe, but – the final chapter is no help either. 
    The events that occur in the final six pages are even more eye-opening – and I am not even attempting to put it mildly.  There’s nothing in the final scene that’s related to Bambi’s death.  All that this final turn of events does, as well-intended as it may have been, is to produce is even more head-scratching wonder (and dismay?) on the part of the reader, or at least those of us who prefer some sort of closure as far as the mystery in their mystery fiction is concerned.
    Does the good outweigh the bad?  Not quite, to my way of thinking, but to be truthful, it does come close, and who knows?  Your reaction to the ending may be totally different from mine.  As far a being a historical mystery is concerned, there is little here to identify the year as being precisely 1950.  The UP is isolated enough that the story could have happened in a period of time extending, say, ten years either way.  But the countryside is perfectly described (not enough to make me truly homesick, mind you, but perhaps there’s not an author living who could do that) and the inhabitants are a joy to meet and (even as archetypes) to remember.

    Note: A shorter version of this review appeared in Historical Novels Review.

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KATHLEEN HILLS - Witch Cradle

Poisoned Pen Press.  Hardcover First Edition: March 2006

    What I said about Hunter’s Dance, Kathleen Hills’ previous book in her John McIntire series, in that it could have taken place at any time between 1940 and 1960, was absolutely true.  I haven’t been back in a while, but I suspect there are locales in the UP that have not changed at all in the over 40 years since I lived there.
    Not similarly so with Witch Cradle, which takes place in early 1951, only a few months later than the conclusion of the events related in Hunter’s Dance.  When a huge winter’s storm brings down trees across the countryside – and believe me when I tell you that reading about the snow and the wind and the cold in this book did definitely NOT make me homesick, not even a little, except in the purest form of the abstract – what’s found in the roots of one of the giant fallen pines, and hence the title, suggests that a married couple who had planned to make a pilgrimage to Russia sixteen years before, and to live in a commune there, never managed to take the trip.
    Tying in with the Communistic dreams that some innocent individuals in the UP had in the 1930s is the abrupt reality of the repugnant McCarthyism of the 1950s: that infamous era of national paranoia about seeing Reds around every corner, and in every schoolhouse and in every film and every radio program and in every government agency in the country.  Worse.  McIntire’s investigation seems to lead to tragedy and heartbreak at every turn of the tale: losses of jobs, jailing, threats of deportations, and what looks very suspiciously like a suicide.  Because of his past, about which little but hints now and then have been known until this third book, McIntire finds an FBI agent breathing not so lightly down his own neck.
    Based on true events, Hills’ story certainly has a lot of resonance to it, and as a result it produces a lot of strong feelings in the reader, which is all to the good.  Unfortunately it also reads as though too much has been crammed into it.  Nor does the fact that one player’s characterization is completely reversed from the previous book help very much, either.
    The ending is rushed, and the nearly simultaneous revelation of secrets from McIntire’s hidden past also seems forced and not worked in as smoothly as it should (could) have been.  A case of too much of what’s good for us, perhaps.  The intention is admirable, but the execution is lacking.

    Note: A shorter version of this review appeared in Historical Novels Review.

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DOUG  J. SWANSON - Dreamboat

Harper, paperback reprint; first printing, January 1996.  Hardcover: HarperCollins, February, 1995.

    The mystery shelves of used bookstores are filled with any number of series of detective fiction that appeared out of nowhere, flamed brightly for a short while, then just as suddenly disappeared.  If there were still used bookstores, that is.  They are, alas, an endangered species, are they not?
    I’m not going to digress off in that direction, though.  Not this time.  I’m going to stay focused and on track, even if I have to force myself.  Private eye novels, which this one is, or cozies, which this one isn’t, it makes no difference.  If they don’t catch on, in spite of critical acclaim, they gone, they’re history, and how many of the Jack Flippo PI novels can you name?  Do you know what major city he worked out of?  Had you heard of Jack Flippo before you began reading this review?
    One of the reasons I began this review the way that I did is that on the front cover Doug J. Swanson is described as an “Edgar Award Nominee.”  Given all of the questions I just asked you, this is a fact I did not know myself – but it’s why my mind went poetic on me, re the fire “that flamed briefly brightly” and all, and I hope you’ll forgive me. 
    Here’s the list of all of Swanson’s mystery fiction.  The detective in each of them is Jack Flippo.

    Big Town.  Harpercollins, hc, February 1994.
        Harper, pb, February 1995
    Dreamboat.  Harpercollins, hc, February 1995
        Harper, pb, January 1996.
    96 Tears.  Harpercollins, November 1996.
        No paperback edition.
    Umbrella Man.  Putnam, hc, July 1999.
        Berkley, pb, May 2000.
    House of Corrections.  Putnam, hc, August 2000.
        Berkley, pb, May 2001.

    That’s it.  That’s all there were, and viewing it from the outside, it looks very much as though Flippo’s career was all but over after the first three.  The Edgar nomination came in 1995 for Big Town in the category of Best First Novel of the Year.  (It did not win.  The award went to The Caveman’s Valentine by George Dawes Green, as I am sure you will recall.)
    Swanson himself was a long-time reporter for the Dallas Morning News, or so I’ve discovered, and at the age of only 53, there’s a good chance he still is.  Luckily he’s had a day job to fall back upon.  But what this also means is that he knows the Dallas area, and the people that live there, all kinds of them: the small-town hicks, the semi-slimy big-city entrepreneurs, the ladies of the evening, high and low, good folk and bad.   He also has a sense of humor about his approach to mystery fiction (and probably life as well) that tickles my funny bone, and who knows, maybe yours as well.
    Jack Flippo used to be an Assistant D.A. in Dallas.  At the beginning of this book, he’s a non-practicing lawyer, a newly licensed investigator, and he’s in jail for simple assault.  The victim: his ex-wife’s boyfriend.  (This turns out to be important.)
    The case he’s asked to work on, by the insurance exec who bails him out, is to look into the death by drowning of a gent with a half-million dollar policy on him  Off he goes, therefore, to a small town called Baggett, somewhere in East Texas, where he meets a small town justice of the peace and an even smaller (five foot six) hick sheriff by the name of Loyce Slapp.  You can bet that Flippo doesn’t get anywhere, and fast, even if he suspects foul play, and you would win.
    He also meets a girl named Sally, good-looking, of course, and who works for the dead man’s partner in an exotic-type night club in Dallas.  This is important, too, since a friend of hers named Bobby has gone missing, and she’s starting to get worried.  Apparently he is (or was) in on whatever business went on in Baggett, and is in hiding (or worse).  Thieves do fall out, and in Texas everything does grow taller, including tales like this one.
    While Jack is quick with the quip and talks with a basket full of confidence, I have to say (reluctantly) that it would be nice if he had a small modicum of competence to go with the confidence.  Things do not always go smoothly for Mr. Flippo, in other words.  Spenser he is not, not to mention that he does not have a Hawk for a back-up.  Nor even back-up plans for every contingency, for that matter either.  On the other hand, not all of his various problems and ill-times mini-disasters are entirely his fault, exactly.
    So a somewhat warped sense of humor (like mine) is what you need as a reader, and if that is what you have, you will  have a rattling good time.  On the other hand, and you may be certain that there is one, the story also goes off into some dark and dangerous directions now and then as well.  It isn’t all funny-named characters who are in over their head in matters criminous.  Some of the bad guys are rather competent, as a matter of fact.  The ending – if I may now at this juncture skip over some of the story lines which you are better off reading yourself anyway – is better than average, even in comparison with PI novels which take themselves a lot more seriously.
    I would imagine that the five Jack Flippo novels are all there are going to be.  If you were ever to spot one in a used bookshop shelf someday, may I suggest that you don’t pass it by.  If the description of this one hasn’t sent you running in the other direction already, which of course I realize that it very well may, do yourself a favor and give it a new home.  You’ll thank me, I’m sure, and maybe as early as the very same evening.

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MAGGIE ESTEP - Flamethrower

Three Rivers Press; trade paperback.  First Edition, September 2006.

    This is the third in Maggie Estep’s Ruby Murphy mystery series, and as usual, I came in late.  The first two were Hex (Three Rivers, March 2003) and Gargantuan (Three Rivers, July 2004), and while I’ve been meaning to – and I haven’t yet – my intentions are to get my hands on the first two as soon as possible.
    If I thought that the book by Swanson was somewhat over-the-top and humorous, and I did, I certainly didn’t see this one coming.  Ruby Murphy, who lives as low-key and laid-back a life in Brooklyn and environs (post-Giuliani Manhattan, Queens, Coney Island) as anyone possibly could, begins this episode with a visit to her psychiatrist, Dr. Jody Ray.  Ruby has been seeing Jody since the death of someone she cared about – well, Attila, her lover – in a previous book.  Unfortunately, not having read the previous book, this did not mean a lot to me, personally, but having a sociopath murder someone close to you right before your eyes, I grant you, maybe a psychiatrist could help.
    And Ruby’s new boyfriend is obsessed by a new object of his affection, his new horse, making this her primary complaint to Jody during this particular visit.  Which is summarily interrupted when Ruby discovers, you will not believe this, one of Jody’s husband’s legs in the fish tank outside her office.


    That’s when you know that you have a story that has gone completely off the tracks, and in fact there are no tracks in sight.  Where, oh where, you could most reasonably ask, could a story possibly go from here?  The quote above came from only page 11 and continues thusly:


    Eventually, a few twists and turns of the plot later, Ruby is hired (after being mysteriously (and falsely) fired from her job at the Coney Island Sideshow Museum) to find the missing doc, who seems to have a past history that Ruby knew nothing absolutely about, including (page 211) the aspect of the previously mentioned past from which the title of the story arises.
    That the last 12 pages have nothing to do with the mystery end of things tells you something about where the priorities lie in the Ruby Murphy mysteries: not all that so very high.  And truth be told, mystery-wise you will have had to have read the other two books to reap all you should from this one.  The last chapter is about Ed, the new boyfriend, who became somewhat estranged from Ruby partway through this one, and Ed’s new horse, and Ruby’s new dog Spike.
    That you might not care (that the last 12 pages have nothing to do with the mystery end of things) – and I didn’t – shows you what kind of writer that Maggie Estep is, and how finely etched her characters are.  Or, on the other hand, you being you and not me, it might do absolutely nothing of the kind.   
              

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EDWARD S. AARONS - Assignment–Stella Marni

Gold Medal 666; paperback original.  First printing, April 1957.  Reprinted several times: as 906 (2nd pr., 1959), k1515 (4th pr., 1965), d1729 (5th pr., 1966), T2308 (6th pr., 1970), and M2949 (1973).

    Search as I may, I cannot determine what the number and date of the third printing might be.  Although, of course, I fully realize that I may be the only person reading this who may care.  The data as given above may also be suspect, it is true, determined as it was largely from listings on ABE and elsewhere, which is hardly the most reliable way of doing bibliographic research.
    But one thing that is clear is that the book, published as the fourth in the Sam Durell “Assignment” series, came out early enough to be reprinted again and again as later ones came along.  (In the same way the the oldest child in the family gets the vast majority of the appearances in the family’s photo album.)  What is not so obvious from the bibliographic data is that the book is not among the better ones in the series.
    At first I thought that this may have been due to the fact that the action takes place solely in the five boroughs of New York City.  It’s been a while since I read one of the books in the series, but what I remember always enjoying is Aarons’ detailed descriptions of the exotic places of the world where he would place Durell next.  But that’s not really the problem Even this early in the series Aarons shows how he could make even the most mundane places suddenly come to focus, and with a fresh perspective.  Here, for example, is Sam on page 87 as he is tracking down a frightened girl’s father – well, all right: Stella Marni’s father – who has been kidnapped and may be hidden away on a freighter docked along Manhattan’s west side:


    Stella Marni is a crucial element in a campaign by several communist countries to “call home” refugees who’ve come to the United States seeking political asylum.  Convinced that all is well back in their native land, several such people have gone back, only to never to be seen again.  As a famous successful photographic model, Stella Marni has gone before a Senate committee stating her willingness to return to her native Hungary.  Sam wonders why, and if there is any way to change her mind.  The final key to her mysterious change of heart: her missing father.
    Stella is also one of those women who draw men to her like the proverbial moths to a flame, and even Sam may not be immune.  On pages 72-73 he has a long and increasingly bitter confrontation with his close lady friend Deirdre, who, although she herself asked Sam to help Stella in the beginning, is also beginning to have second thoughts.  As it has transpired, Sam has spent the previous night with Stella, causing Deirdre to become suspicious and increasingly jealous.  And even though the night spent together by Sam and Stella was innocent enough, the fact remains that Deirdre has every right to be.
    The primary focus of this tale is therefore Stella: as an enchantress, as a unwitting Jezebel, and yet as an innocent victim.  And if you are beginning to wonder if this makes the book a “cozy” in any sense of the term, the answer is no.  There are some extremely tough fight scenes in this book also, one example of which is on page 127.  (Severely tempted to add quotes both here and up above a paragraph, I decided to reconsider when I looked and saw just how long each of the insertions would have to be, in order to convey the full effect.)
    And this is strange.  As I am typing up my comments on the book just now, based on the notes that I took (over a month ago) I am suddenly discovering that I may have liked the book more than I thought I did.  But no, it is not so.  The last comment I see that I made is that it is “lightweight at the core.”
    Which meant at the time, and still so now, that there are no twists or surprising turns of the plot.  Paths I anticipated did not occur, even the less imaginative ones.  The story has but one direction to go, and that it does so with skill – and a modicum of finesse – still does not mean that it is not going in any more than in one direction.

Postscript:  I wonder somewhat about Deirdre.  Being the girl friend of an ruthless CIA agent whose jobs continue to take him to exotic places around the world, places in which equally exotic women are always available and/or near at hand, would hardly seem ideal for a long-lasting relationship.  The future for her appears rather blaak and dismal.  All seems well again at the end of this book, but just how long, I wonder (that is to say, for how many more books) does Deirdre manage to stick it out?  Anyone know?

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RICHARD BURKE - The Frightened Pigeon

Unicorn Mystery Book Club.  Hardcover reprint, June 1946.  First Edition: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1944.  Paperback reprint: Dell 204, mapback edition, 1947.

    When Victor Berch, Bill Pronzini and I did our annotated bibliography of the Ziff Davis line of Fingerprint Mysteries , we included a short profile of Richard Burke, which of course you should go read.  Many of his books, we said, involved a Broadway private detective named Quinny Hite, but as it happens, this is not one of them.  In fact The Frightened Pigeon takes the reader to another part of the world and (one imagines) another kind of mystery altogether.
    But first a word on the cover that’s shown, though, before getting down to details.  This is, of course, the Dell mapback edition that’s  mentioned above, and in case you can’t make out the details, the map on the back is that of the city of Marseilles, which is where the last eighty percent of the story takes place.
    The setting of the first fifty pages is Paris, 1942, with the Germans solidly in control of the city.  An American dancer named Valerie Bright is still there, however – the pigeon of the title – and very determined to stay non-political.  From page 8, of the Unicorn edition:


    Her close male friend, Charles John Dillon, nicknamed “Ching,” is working closely with the French underground, however, and events, beginning with a stolen German diary, bound to be embarrassing if it falls into the wrong hands – as, for example, into Ching’s hands – soon make the light-hearted Val realize how dirty – and dangerous – war really is, not knowing what will happen next nor whom your friends really are.  By page 40, she is one frightened pigeon indeed, as off to Marseilles they and a small group of displaced others go, hoping to find a way out of France and its closed borders.
    The diary appears and disappears with amazing regularity.  It is, in fact, amazing, how much mileage an author (Burke) can make of one small important object.  Otherwise here is a novel one can learn a large amount from – supposing, that is, that one has never been in a place controlled by Nazi-like enemies one is trying his or her best to avoid – both in term of locale (well-described) and people, especially those like Valerie, whose mind is soon brought down to earth in satisfying (but not very surprising) fashion, but also the large number of others who find themselves caught up in events far beyond their say.
    Don’t get me wrong.  This is by no means a major work.  It’s no more than ordinary at best, in the overall scheme of things, but what it does have is atmosphere, and plenty of it.
   

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EVELYN PAYNE - Held Open for Death

Arcadia House; hardcover; c. 1958.

    The author’s only mystery, nor is it particularly easy to find.  There are two copies online that are both in the $30 range, and one other in Norway for $80 or so.  I paid less than either asking price for mine, and – as long as you’re asking me my opinion – neither should you.
    It starts out promising enough, with a heroine sleuth with an unusual occupation for, um, a heroine sleuth: that of real estate agent.  There certainly must have been others, before and since, but at the moment, none seem come to mind.
    Tillie Latimer is her name, the locale is El Paso, and truth be told, when the book begins, Tillie’s been a real estate agent for only a couple of weeks.  Her first big assignment on her own: holding an open house for the home next door to her mother’s, where Tillie still lives.
    It proves to be a big success, so big that keeping track of incoming visitors proves impossible.  This turns out to be a big problem when Granpa Tellfair, aged 89, and father of Miss Sadie, who owns the house, is later found dead in the basement, stabbed to death with a knife still in his back.  Strangely enough, he also still has $1000 in his pocket.  This is doubly strange.  Since time he was once robbed, he never carried more than five dollars with him at a time.
    Tillie had met Granpa during the open house, and as it so happens, while he managed to maintain his well-deserved status as a curmudgeon in his short conversation with her, he was also one of the more likable people who happened to stop by.  The question is, who’d kill an old man like this, and why?
    To go along with the mystery, there is also a strong romantic interest for Tillie in the person of Miss Sadie’s son Rick, the “town’s star juvenile delinquent for a few years,” now out of the Army and perhaps on his way to becoming a solid citizen.  Nor is Rick the only one who is showing an interest in Tillie.  Trying to place the book into its proper category, I am not sure whether the two or three more murders that occur qualify this detective yarn as a cozy or not, but if Agatha Christie’s books are cozies, then so is this one.  And after thinking about it some more, I shall happily concede that it is, no matter what.
    I mentioned Agatha Christie.  That was a rather unfortunate reference, now that I think about it.  While the author is obviously very familiar with the ins and outs of the real estate business, she’s also in over her head in making sure that the story keeps on going in the direction she wants it to.  The characters are fun at first, but their lack of depth soon begins to tell.  Soon after the halfway point, the many loose strands of the plot get tangled, cluttered and confused, and seemingly beyond repair.  In wrapping things up, the author makes it clear she had a goal worthy of the telling in mind.   It is the getting there that is the problem.
    Everything that a good mystery should have is in this book.  It’s just that the ingredients have been assembled – well, not badly, exactly, and I have not come up with a more positive way of saying this – but by an amateur, in a truest sense of the word.  Without a stronger pro at the helm, to come to the point a little more quickly, this is little more than a “nice try” and/or a “might have been.”

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MARY ROBERTS RINEHART - The Yellow Room

Dell 9790; paperback reprint, later printing, April 1971.  Hardcover, first edition: Farrar & Rinehart, 1945.  Previously (?) published as an eight-part serial in The Saturday Evening Post, September 28 through October 27, 1945.  Cassell & Co., UK hardcover, 1949; Thriller Book Club, UK hardcover, 1950. 
    Bestseller B95, digest pb, 1947.  Bantam 314, pb, April 1949.  Other Dell paperback editions include: Dell D179, 1956; Dell 9790, October 1962; Dell 9790, 1967.  Also: Zebra (Kensington), pb, 1973, 1988, 1990 (3rd pr.), 1991, 1996 (5th pr.).  Included in Mary Roberts Rinehart: Three Complete Novels by America’s Mistress of Mystery : The Bat / The Haunted Lady / The Yellow Room, Zebra, pb, 1995.

    It is quite possible that I’ve missed a few editions of this book.  In particular, there are at least nine listings on ABE of a hardcover edition from 1955 (Farrar & Rinehart), but whether that’s a misprint or no, I do not presently know.  There may also have been a US hardcover book club edition, but with no definitive information to back this statement up, I have not included it.  Suffice it to say, however, if you’d like to locate a copy of this book to read, even a hardcover edition, you shouldn’t have any trouble.
    Rinehart’s writing career, as least as far as her novels and collections are concerned, began with The Man in Lower Ten from Bobbs-Merrill in 1909, but the story’s even earlier appearance was in serialized form, in All-Story Magazine for January through April, 1906.
     According to various online sources which I haven’t attempted to verify, Rinehart suffered a severe heart attack in 1938 while living in Maine, and apparently was a semi-invalid for much of her later life.  In any case, from that time on there were only four more novels to come from her pen – she never used a typewriter, according to one source – and of those, The Yellow Room is next to last.  Only The Swimming Pool (1952) came later.  (This statement excludes several collections of novelettes and short stories.)  Still perhaps one of the most famous mystery writers of all time, Mary Roberts Rinehart died in 1958.
    Appearing after a three-year gap, following Haunted Lady in 1942, The Yellow Room was written when the author was 67, which may go a long way in explaining some apparent slippage in the her writing ability, or perhaps the flaws I saw were always present.  I will have to rely on someone more familiar with her earlier work than I am to be able to say more.
    The book itself takes place in 1944, and the opening chapters go far in describing the general difficulties of life at home in wartime, what with rationing, limited travel opportunities, the absence of men except for the oldest and/or the feeblest, and the hardest of all – waiting for news of loved ones fighting (or reported missing) on the front lines.  When Carol Spencer’s invalid mother wishes to move from New York City to the family’s summer home in Maine, it is up to Carol, with only three female servants to assist, to tackle the work involved in doing so.
    Little did she suspect or know – and yes, that’s the kind of book that Mrs. Rinehart is famous for writing – that she would find the house still shut up and not opened.  Lucy, a local woman who is the housekeeper, she learns the next day, is in the hospital with a broken leg.  Lights have been seen in the house, Carol is told, shining from the room where Lucy says she never was before her accident.
    Another discovery occurs on page 27: Another woman is found dead in a linen closet, partially burned as if someone had been hoping to dispose of her body.  When asked, Lucy’s story does not ring true; there is something she is not telling.  And it is precisely here that the reader’s frustration begins, or at least they did with at least one reader: me.  There are many, many questions that if asked are not answered, and there other questions that seem never to be asked, and if they were answered, at the right time and the right place, the mystery – one has the uncomfortable feeling – would, at that time and that place, simply cease to exist.
    Coming to Carol’s aid is her next-door neighbor, the worldly but still young Major Dane, who has been injured from work for US Intelligence, or so it seems.  He has been recuperating in the area until deemed fit to go back to duty.  The police, generally speaking, are of little or no help.  Truth be said, they seem far more antagonistic toward Carol than any evidence seems to say they should be.
    By page 126 – I jotted a note to myself to this effect at this exact spot, so I am indeed able to be this precise –  the facts, what there are of them, are so far muddled that the average reader, it seems to me, will either (A) have given up or (B) have shrugged their shoulders and allowed themselves to follow along, no more and no less, just to see where the author may be headed.  There are 256 pages of small print, so at page 126, it is an important decision that must be made whether or not to stop or plunge on, keep going, and rely on the author’s name and reputation that the story may yet be salvaged.
    I often exaggerate, and the previous paragraph is one of those times, but not by much.  Considering Major Dame, who by proximity feels himself becoming closer and closer to Carol, to be the primary detective, there are too many times when we (the reader) are not given total access to his thoughts, and too many other times when the point of view has shifted, and we (the still faithful reader) are shown scenes that Dane knows nothing about.
    Frustration, yes, but please (if you are ever the reader) keep the faith.  The ending, with all of its revelations, is worth waiting for.  Mrs. Rinehart has some nifty tricks up her sleeve for you.  Even though the buildup to the final couple of chapters might have been more capably accomplished, and whether the end result is realistic or not, I think that even at this late stage in her career, in terms of pulling off the (almost) totally unexpected, she still had the right stuff.  I feel quite justified in myself in sticking with Plan B.

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JOHN GALLIGAN - The Nail Knot

Worldwide; paperback reprint, October 2006.  Trade paperback: Bleak House, May 2005.

    A “nail knot” is one of those clever devices that are used most often by fly fishermen, and as such it is something I knew nothing about before reading this book.  (The last time I went fishing was with my grandfather when I was ten or so, when all we did was  to drop our lines into water off a long pier jutting out into Lake Michigan.  No casting abilities of any kind required.  Nor did we catch anything, but why do I still remember the day, now well over fifty years ago?)  The primary protagonist of The Nail Knot, a laid back sort of fellow who calls himself the Dog, is a fly fisherman, however, and I’ll get back to him in a minute.
    In the meantime, here is a short list of other mystery novels or series which I’ve just come up with in which fly fishing is a substantial component, in no particular order.

    Firehole River Murder, by Raymond Kieft, first book in the “Yellowstone Fly-Fishing Mystery Series.”  Series character: name not known.
    Blood Atonement: A Dahlgren Wallace Mystery, by Jim Tenuto.  Series character [SC]: fly-fishing guide Dahlgren Wallace.
    Bitch Creek, by William Tapply.  SC: Stoney Calhoun, amnesiac worker in a bait and tackle shop in rural Maine. 
    Pale Morning Done, by Jeff Hull.  SC: Montana fly-fishing guide Marshall Tate.
    Dead Boogie: A Loon Lake Fishing Mystery, by Victoria Houston.  SC: Chief Ferris, Doc Osborne and Ray Pradt.  [There are several in this series.]

    There are probably others that I am not thinking of now.  Please add others, if you can.  This is the first of at least three books in John Galligan’s “Dog” series, but some research shows that he wais the author of one earlier mystery novel, Red Sky, Red Dragonfly, also published by Bleak House (in 2001), in which a hockey player from Wisconsin travels to Japan to teach English for a year and ends up being implicated in his predecessor’s disappearance.
    Subsequent and/or reportedly forthcoming follow-ups in John Galligan’s fly fishing series are:

    The Blood Knot.  Bleak House, hardcover, October 2005.
    The Clinch Knot.  Bleak House. Spring, 2007.
    The Surgeon’s Knot.
    The Wind Knot.
    The Hex.
    This is a long-range projection, and I suspect that some of these titles may turn out to be totally hypothetical.  But assuming that you’re still with me, let’s take a look at the book in hand.  As mentioned above, “the Dog” is how the leading character refers to himself – he tells the story, and on a strictly personal basis, it’s quite a story that has to tell.
    The Dog’s real name is Ned Oglivie, and he is what you might call a dropout from the human race, wandering across the country and checking out fishing spots as he goes.  A nomadic fly fisherman without parallel, you might say.  Until he reaches Black Earth, Wisconsin, that is, where it is that he finds a body along the edge of the creek that leading into (or out of) local Lake Bud.  (You can see that even though it may be an important plot point, it didn’t make much of an impression on me.)
    He also finds The Woman, but not until she removes from the crime scene all of the evidence that (Dog later learns) points to her semi-senile father.  But let the Dog describe the lady, from page 13:
   

    You can tell at once that the Dog is hooked.  Her name is Melvina Racheletta O’Malley, or Junior for short, and the Dog discovers to his dismap that he cannot walk away when she asks him to help her in what she insists is a frame-up of her father, Mel.
    The dead man has only lately been a local, which first of all is not a good thing in rural Wisconsin, and secondly he had been an activist in trying to revive and save the fish in Lake Bud, which is also definitely not a good thing – activism, that is.
    The solution to the mystery depends greatly on who was able to tie a nail knot, and at what time.  It wouldn’t have been a terribly difficult case to solve, if one had a protagonist who was a little more, shall we say, pro-active on the case – you soon get the feeling that if the Dog were any more low key than he is, he wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning – but then again meeting all of the local folk, some more local and inbred than others, and some not, would have been not nearly so much fun as this.
   

UPDATE.  Quite coincidentally there has been a discussion of fly-fishing mysteries on DorothyL this past week (early November), in relation to a slightly different topic of “male cozies.”  Here are a couple more mystery series that have been pointed out as belonging to the category, still small but obviously growing:

    Fly Fishing Can Be Fatal, by David Leitz.  SC: Max Addams, owner of a northern Vermont fishing lodge.   [There are several other books in this series.]
    Catch and Keep, by Ronald Weber.   SC: Northern Michigan conservation officer Mercy Virdon and her boyfriend, newspaperman Donald Fitzgerald.    [There is at least one other book in this series.]
    Death on a Cold, Wild River, by Bartholomew Gill.  SC: Dublin police Chief Superintendent Peter McGarr, who is the detective in several other books by Gill.  In Cold, Wild River, though, it’s the victim who is the fly fisherman, along with at least one of the suspects.

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MARGUERITE SILVERMAN - The Vet It Was That Died

Nicholson & Watson; UK hardcover. First edition: 1945.  No US edition.

    Of the three mystery novels written by this author, this one is the most common among those fopund offered for sale online: there are six copies available at the time I am writing this.  Of Silverman’s second (Who Should Have Died?, Nicholson, 1948) there are none, and of her third (9 Had No Alibi, Nicholson, 1951) there is but one.
    According to Al Hubin’s CFIV, the primary detective in each is Chief Inspector Christopher Adrian.  Coming to his assistance in this one, at least, a relatively minor affair, is a newly graduated veterinarian surgeon by the name of Helena Goodwin.
    Helena’s involvement with the mystery is due only to this, her first job, however, and in fact she’s one of those immediately on the scene when her body of her veterinarian employer is found.  (Hence the title.)  And yet, even though both the inspector and his wife are old friends of her family, it doesn’t seem as though there’s enough of a connection there to warrant her presence in any of Adrian’s other cases.  I could be wrong.  It will also be difficult to find out, but if and when I do, I will be sure to tell you.
    It comes as no surprise that “the vet it was that died,” as both Mr. Thorpe and his wife are two of the most terrifically unlikeable people that one can imagine.  They are hated by their niece Carol, who lives with them; Dora, the other girl who works for them; their neighbors, and even their clientele, believe it or not.  That the couple were not especially fond of each other is also an understatement, to put it mildly.  When Mr. Thorpe is found poisoned to death, what Adrian and Helena quickly realize is that they have a lengthy list of suspects to work with.  There is no need at all to start looking under rocks or for tramps passing by.
    By page 92, however, the list has been narrowed down to five: the only ones who had access to the brandy to which the strychnine was added, but with 100 pages yet to go, it takes quite a bit of time (and false leads) to whittle the list down any further.
    I called this mystery a “minor affair” a short while back, and truthfully that is all it is.  The dialogue on occasion is rather juvenile in tone, and on other occasions one gets the unsettling feeling that the author is making up facts as she is going along.  Neither of these are necessarily fatal flaws, mind you, but neither of them allows for much in the way of recommendation, either.


UPDATE [02-01-07]  A representative of Poisoned Pen Press promised to pass on to Ms. Ulmer an email of inquiry I’d sent them, suggesting that perhaps she would respond to me directly.  That was several weeks ago, and she has not.  More, the information I quoted from the PP website is no longer there, or at least I am unable to find it again.  I wish I had better news than this.

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ROMILLY & KATHERINE JOHN - Death by Request.

Hogarth Crime; trade paperback. 1984.  Also published as a Hogarth hardcover.  Offset from the original [hardcover] Faber & Faber edition, 1933. 

    I haven’t gotten the bibliography details tracked completely down yet.  From looking at copies offered for sale on ABE, there appears to have been a US edition that Al Hubin doesn’t yet know about, published by Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group) in both hardcover and paperback in 1984.  This might only be the Hogarth edition imported here, but after a quick, superficial investigation, it appears that there actually was a separate publication here.  Also in question is the date of the Faber edition, for which Al in CFIV says 1935, but the information above [1933] comes from the reverse of the Hogarth title page.  FOOTNOTE.  No copies of the Faber edition are currently available on the Internet.  It’s undoubtedly a scarce book.
    It’s also the only mystery that the married couple of Romilly and Katherine John wrote.  Who were they, is one question, and how did it happen that Hogarth reprinted it some 50 years later?  For at least partial answers, one must read the new introduction to this edition, written by Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan, as part a series of Hogarth Crime reprints of classic detective fiction.  Romilly, born in 1906, was in the RAF, was briefly a civil servant, then a poet and an amateur physicist before dying in 1986.  Katherine was a reviewer as well as a translator of Scandinavian books.  She died two years before her husband, in 1984.
    Other authors in the Hogarth series seem to have been Fergus Hume(*), Nicholas Blake, E. F. Benson(*), Cyril Hare, R. Austin Freeman, Freeman Wills Crofts, Margery Allingham, C. B. H. Kitchin, and S. S. van Dine.  Those marked with a (*) are denoted as part of a Gaslight Crime series.
    Now these are all names that most fans of the Golden Age of Detection are familiar with.  Not so the Johns, and the gap between 1933 and 1984 between editions may be one of the longest on record for any mystery novel.  As far as discussion or another review of the book is concerned, I found a mention of it in:




     This is not a lot of coverage for a book which Hogarth Press considered significant enough to reprint in a series of classic crime fiction; a locked-room mystery; and in its own inimitable way, a minor tour de force of one form or another, the details of which I most sincerely will do my best to avoid telling or revealing to you.
    The dead man is found in his bedroom at one of those old English manor residences so commonly found in works of mystery fiction, especially the English ones.  He is found gassed to death in a heap on the floor, still dressed as he was the evening before, the window shut tightly, and (of course) the door was locked.  It had to be broken down in order to enter in the morning.  Could it have been suicide?  No, Lord Malvern seems to have been well enough off, and he was off to visit his fiancée in London on the very same day as his death.
    Telling the story is the local vicar, an elderly man by the name of John Colchester, a long-time friend of Matthew Barry, the master of the house.  Also staying over are various friends and relatives, including a comic-relief colonel who harrumphs all over the place; a weepy young girl; a recent widow only slightly older; the slightly deaf sister of Matthew; assorted staff, mostly female, save for a slightly villainous butler named Frampton.
    And to tell the truth Frampton is more than only slightly villainous.  He’s a socialist, a seducer of young maids in the area, and – as the truth comes out – a blackmailer.  Many letters which threaten to reveal secrets which others might wish kept unrevealed are found, some sent by Frampton, others perhaps not.  Obviously, as these have a great deal to do with the plot, the letters – their contents, who received them, who sent them, and who may have intercepted them – must be given, as the book goes on, a exhaustive and thorough going over.
    And to tell you another truth, the going-over of the letters is probably too thorough and exhaustive.  One is tempted, I must admit, to throw up one’s hands whenever another letter appears and must be discussed and put into the context of the previous ones.
    I see that I have neglected to mention the detective on the case.  Nominally that would be Inspector Lockitt, but that particular gentleman seems content to do his work off-camera, as it were.  Almost all of his activity is related to the vicar second-hand, and then of course the vicar must relay his impressions of the good Inspector Lockitt on to us, the reader.  It seems a strange way to tell a mystery, but one must always get accustomed, eventually, to things we expect to occur in the usual way, but which do not, do we not?
    The bulk of the detective work is rather more accomplished, in fact, by an unusual twosome: (a) Mr. Nicholas Hatton, a friend of the dead man’s fiancée, one of those amateur detectives who are as common in British mystery fiction in the 1930s as damp old manor houses with murders committed within them, and (b) the aforementioned widow, Mrs. Fairfax, who proves to be a most tenacious (and efficacious) individual when it comes to solving mysteries.
    There are secrets galore that must come out before the solving is done, including at least two that should correctly be considered “bombshells” when they are revealed.  There is, of course another secret at the end, which I promised not to tell or reveal to you, and looking back at what I have written, I do not believe that I have.
    So, is the book a classic?  You may well ask, and you should.  No, I say, but with a small hedge in the back of my mind.  For today’s audiences, large portions of this exercise in murder-solving will be dreary and dull to the extreme.  For those of you who like puzzles, well, the puzzle is there, and without a doubt, a double delight it is.  The problem is that it’s, well, unskillfully told, when measured by more modern standards, say of five or so years later. 
    That the door was locked on the inside, for example, is not revealed until page 50, whereas the body itself was found on page 24.  Nor, surprisingly enough, is the locked room aspect very much – if at all – the focus of the tale.  This may in part be due to the telling (see above) or the fact that (as is often the case) the solution (to the locked room aspect) is rather simple when explained, and therefore not very worthy of much dwelling upon.
    If you were to read this book – and if you are still with me, I would at least suggest that you should, for this must be the kind of mystery you prefer to read, not so? – you will also need to know what a geyser is, at least a geyser that one would find in the bathroom of a country house in England in the early 1930s.  Readers of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Unnatural Death, for example, will have already come across one, if they were to think back upon it.


FOOTNOTE: A reply on matters bibliographic from Al Hubin:
    “You’re right on both counts.  The Revised CFIV will show the Faber edition as 1933 and that a U.S. edition appeared in paperback by Trafalgar in 1984.”
    Even though we agreed, I wasn't so sure about the publisher of the US edition, Trafalgar being, as I understand it, a distributor who imports books from England, and not a publisher per se.  
    Continuing to discuss this with Al, in a later email he says, “Those import editions are a challenge/frustration ... lots of ’em in CFIV, I’m afraid.  In some cases, I noted the appearance of a ‘real’ edition and replaced the import with the real.  In this case, you’ve convinced me and Addenda #10 will include the correction to Vintage.”

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F. G. PARKE - First Night Murder

A. L. Burt & Company; hardcover reprint; no date.  First Edition: Dial Press, hc, 1931.

    The bad news first, perhaps, if you happen to read this review and if I happen to convince you that you might want to read the book for yourself.  There are three copies on ABE at the present time, one the Dial Press edition for $35, one in French for under $20, and one the British hardcover (Stanley Paul, 1932) for over $40.  (The one from Dial Press has a jacket, and I think it’s worth the money.)
    But what the heck, keep reading.  I may not convince you anyway.  And who’s F. G. Parke, you ask, and well you may.  No one seems to know, and it’s not even his (or as it has suddenly occurred to me) her name.  It’s a pseudonym.  I think the author is male, however, thinking about it even as I sit at the keyboard.  It’s not a woman’s tale, what with the many-faceted male point of view which so generally obvious if not blatant – and maybe so obvious that I could very well be wrong.
    But as I was reading this – and enjoying it, for the most part – and don’t worry, I will be sure to let you know at which point I stopped enjoying it – I pretended in my mind (and where else) that this was an unknown work of the cousins known as Ellery Queen, who needed some money at this point of their career, which would have been, roughly, between The French Powder Mystery (Stokes, 1930) and The Dutch Shoe Mystery (Stokes, 1931), perhaps.
    Or perhaps not, but it was fun to pretend – and who knows, I could very well be wrong, and they actually did write it.  What got me thinking this way, though, was the locale where the first murder was committed: in a theater during the actual performance of a play, the New York City Police Commissioner in attendance, among many other notables, it being first night, of course.  A mystery drama is about to reach its denouement, the lights go out, a woman’s wild scream rings out, the lights come back on, the villain (of the play) is in handcuffs – and a noted Broadway producer is found stabbed to death in his seat near the front of the theater, the space next to him unused.
    Fifteen seconds of darkness – hardly time enough for the killer to make a getaway – but no knife is found (everyone is searched) and no one heard anything, no one saw anything.  There is no lack of potential murderers, for as if by pre-arrangement, motives for everyone seated in seats within a small vicinity are soon revealed.  But once again, no one heard, saw or felt anyone move or pass by them, and – this is the key – there is no murder weapon anywhere in the theater.
    Doing the honors as the detective at hand is Martin Ellis, the author of the play, the first  step of what he had hoped to be a long career as a playwright.  The inner flap of the dust jacket (the only piece of the jacket I happen to have) compares him favorably with Philo Vance, but on the other hand, you know how the people who write story descriptions on the flaps of dust jackets often seem to exaggerate.
    No, it was Ellery Queen I kept thinking of (Ellis = Ellery?).  The Roman Hat Mystery?  And yes, I know that it was death by poison in that first novel the Queens wrote, but still, it was a during a play that the victim in that book, an unliked/unlikable lawyer, was killed.
    But Martin Ellis on his own, and as a writer of mystery fiction himself, seems to be amiable enough and competent enough to solve this case, even though he is in love with the girl, the actress on stage, whom the dead man married earlier the same day, which in most books would make him the number one suspect.  (I did suggest that there are motives galore – what’s lacking are means and opportunity.)  Both Lt. John B. Gradey of Homicide and District Attorney Moore eliminate him quickly as a suspect, however, as he was seen by two witnesses just before and after the lights went out, and nowhere near the scene of the crime.
    To help demonstrate Ellis’s prowess as a detective, along either Queenian lines, or Vancian, you choose, here’s a quote from page 98:

   
    As I say, you choose.  More deaths occur, with plenty of influence on the thinking processes of Martin Ellis, but as it occurred to me, with very little emotional impact.  As for the solution, as I skip over in this short essay anything more about all of the suspects and the all of the suspicious activity that goes on in this book, it is the solution that tells the tale, and to tell you the truth, while I was ready for it, already having made a note to myself about the paragraph I quoted to you above, I really wasn’t ready for it.  Don’t know as I still am, as a matter of fact, but I guess that means that I should take my hat off to Mr. Parke, whoever he was.
    The gentlemen behind Ellery Queen could never have been quite this melodramatic – could they?



UPDATE [02-10-07]   I emailed the seller of the Dial first edition of this book a couple of days ago, asking if there was anything helpful that was said about the author on either the back panel of the dust jacket or its flaps. Perhaps asking for too much, I also inquired if a scan of the cover might be possible. I’m still hoping, but to this date, I have not heard back.

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M. E. KNERR - Travis

Pike Book #214; paperback original.  First printing, April 1962.

    I seem to be specializing in obscure books this month, and this one is about as obscure as you can get.  Even though it is a private eye novel – and I’ll get back to that in a minute – it was published by one of those small sleazy paperback outfits in the early 1960s that promised more than they could possibly deliver at the time.  And even so, if you happened to have purchased this one in 1962 for its sexy parts, you’d be sadly disappointed, since in that regard, it’s really rather tame.  If sexy passages were what you were looking for back then, you’d have been far better off buying a copy of Peyton Place than this.
    This book does not even appear in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, but it will, or at least in the Addenda.  The author does appear, however, and to show you something of his track record, here’s his present entry:

  KNERR, MICHAEL E. (1908?-1984?)
    *  Operation: Lust (Epic, 1962, hc) as by M. E. Knerr.
    *  The Violent Lady (Monarch, 1963, pb)

    Listed below are other titles by Knerr (under either byline) which I found listed for sale at various places on the Internet, but not included in CFIV, and probably for good reason.  I do not have descriptions of the story lines for any of these first three, so your guess is as good as mine:

    *  Brazen Broad (Pike #206, pbo, 1961)
    *  Heavy Weather (Belmont/Tower, pbo, 1979)   [** -See UPDATE below.]
    *  Port of Passion (Imperial #737, pbo, n.d.)
   
    These I found descriptions for

    *  Night in Guyana (Belmont/Tower, pbo, 1978) A non-fiction account of the of the mass suicide of the Jim Jones cult.
    *  Sasquatch: Monster of the Northwest Woods (Belmont/Tower, pbo, 1977) Quoting from the cover: “Though based upon factual research, this is a fictional tale of what could conceivably happen in the Pacific Northwest: a chain of events that could create a monster out of a normally timid and gentle giant.”
    *  The Sex Life of the Gods (Uptown Books #703, pbo, 1962)  “Science Fiction erotica.”

    [** UPDATE 02-27-07] At first I was doubtful, but now that I’ve found a cover scan of Heavy Weather, I’d say that it’s also a prime candidate for inclusion in Crime Fiction IV. If you can’t make out the small print on the bottom of the cover, it says, and I quote: “On the Mexico run the Pandora carried a cargo of drugs, danger and death!”  LATER THE SAME DAY: Al Hubin agrees. In it goes. (The book pictured below is described as a Horwitz edition published in Hong Kong.)

    But let’s get on with things and the book Travis itself.  There’s only one copy offered for sale on the Internet, making it not only obscure but scarce.  I mention this even though I’m sure you know that the two are usually, but not always, one and the same. 
    Telling the story, though, in his debut and probably his only appearance in print, is Mike Travis, a “sailor of fortune, who loves life, and woman, especially women.”  It is not difficult to deduce what other reasonably well-known character was the inspiration for Mike Travis.  Travis in this book had previously been in the charter boat business in Florida, but when times went bad,  he went to California to accept an offer made by one of his former customers, a multi-millionaire named Del Houston, to look him up if and when Travis headed out that way.
    And Del does indeed have a job for him.  After some quick string-pulling and the greasing of certain political hands, Del hands Travis a PI license and a gun, and a three-fold request: to find his son; get him off narcotics; and break up the gang who’s been supplying them.
    It’s not a bad opening for a PI yarn, and the story maintains its way reasonably well for about half of its just under 160 pages: the usual PI stuff, the things that PI’s do, and the usual bad things happen to some of the people who just happen to get in the way, with all of the coincidences that make one or more aspects of one PI investigation dovetail nicely into another.
    Even though it goes without saying, I’ll say it anyway.  Travis himself is one of those guys who is irresistible to beautiful women.  In this book that includes both his employer’s foster daughter, from page 20 ...


    ... and a stripper who the first time they met, tripped him into a pool at Houston’s house.  From page 68:


    I think you can tell a lot of about a story by looking closely at how the author describes his characters, don’t you? With an ending that doesn’t directly address the clues that have been set up for it, though, the tale does two things simultaneously and hence the apparent impossible.  The action-packed finale (a) goes all but out of control, and (b) withers away from lack of interest, as if there were a deadline set that had to be met, and it didn’t matter precisely how.
    Although overall not without flashes of acceptable writing, and every once in a while better than acceptable, the overall impact of this novel is still rather like a third-rate Carter Brown or a tenth-rate John D. MacDonald, either of whom, if you’re a fan, you know what I’m talking about and whom you’re far better off pursuing.
    Or let’s put it this way.  One of the reasons for collecting and reading unknown and long-neglected works of mystery fiction is the hope that never dies of discovering an unknown and long-neglected classic of mystery fiction.  Sometimes you have to settle for unknown and long-neglected.


UPDATE.  If you were to google “M. E. Knerr” on the Internet, you would find, as I did, that there was a Michael E. Knerr who was a friend of SF (and occasional) mystery writer H. Beam Piper, who committed suicide in 1964 when he ran into financial troubles.  I’ve not been able to confirm that the two Knerr’s are one and same, nor have the birth and death years for either one been verified.  Accounts vary on the latter.  Knerr may have also written under the name of “Brent Hart,” but that’s another loose end not yet tied down.
    But the Knerr who was a friend of Piper apparently wrote a hitherto unpublished biography of him, and upon Piper’s death, went through his manuscripts and salvaged, among other things, the “lost” third Fuzzy novel, Fuzzies and Other People.
    If and when I know more, I will as always, let you know.

---

VALERY SHORE - Final Payment

Major Books 3236, paperback original; copyright 1978; no other date stated.

    Next on the agenda, and the final book I read in 2006,  is the only mystery written by the pseudonymous Valery Shore.  Al Hubin in Crime Fiction IV says that Shore was the pen name of Lon Viser, born in 1932.  All I’ve been able to come up with regarding Mr. Viser is that he had something to do with the American Art Agency, a publisher based in North Hollywood in 1965.
    From the small print inside Atualidades Globo Controle Da Natalidade, written in Portuguese and illustrated throughout, aka The Complete Book of Birth Control:


    It’s not a common name.  Maybe it’s the same man.  All that comes up for Valery Shore, in case you were wondering, are a few dealers offering this book for sale on eBay, or maybe it’s the same book offered at different times.  I didn’t check.
    The dedication reads as follows: “To Yvonne, Rhoda, and Lon, without whose help this book could not have been written,” so I assume that Al is correct – not that there’s any reason to doubt him.
    The primary detective in Final Payment is a former Scotland Yard inspector by the name of Christopher Camel, still young, who’d recently been left a fortune by an aunt, in her day a sex symbol of the silver screen.  Staying with Camel in his aunt’s Tudor-style Hollywood mansion is “his beautiful Eurasian companion, Kim Lee Chance.”  I’m quoting from the back cover.
    In attendance upon them both is Potter Goodleigh, his aunt’s former lover and a long ago movie director who’d been exiled to the guest cottage, but who is now cook, butler and father figure to the two young people who are now “livening up the old museum,” as he puts it.
    It is Potter’s daughter Felicia who’s murdered, her body found in the piano in her living room.  Unfortunately Felicia was also a blackmailer, and there are thirteen suspects that Camel, Kim Lee, and the local lieutenant of police named Davidson have to deal with.  In spite of his new-found money and all of his resultant leisure time, there is no way Camel can be kept off the case, as you can well imagine if it had happened to you and sunny fortune had smiled your way in such a fashion.
    The story, as I’ve relayed to you so far, may also sound to you as the basis for a made-for-TV mystery movie.  If so, you share my feelings exactly, and I have the advantage of having actually read the book.  If you also were to suspect that on page 177 there would be a gathering of the suspects in the dead woman’s living room, in an attempt to recreate the crime, I would certainly begin to wonder about you.  How could you possibly know that it was on page 177?
    As entertaining as made-for-TV mystery movies may be, and some more than others, in general I’ve always had a relatively low opinion of them.  This one, I’ll conclude by saying, is better than most of them.  If there had ever been a second book in the series, I’d make sure that I had it in my collection too.


UPDATE:  Victor Berch has done some preliminary spadework on Lon Viser, and so far he’s come up with the following:  His full name as Lorenzo Ludwick Viser, born February 28, 1932 in FL, died August 9, 1994 in LA.   There was a Lorenzo M. Viser living with him in the 90s, probably a son.  More later, if and when!