If the weather doesn’t interfere — a final blast of winter weather seems to be headed straight for CT — I’ll be on my way to NJ and PA tomorrow, doing some bookhunting with Paul Herman and aiming for the Bordentown NJ Pulp & Paperback show on Saturday. I imagine I will see some of you there.

   I’ll need a couple of days after that for R&R and for doing my taxes, which somehow haven’t found a way of doing themselves this month. So the not-so-good news is, if all goes as planned, this will be my last post until I surface again sometime next week. I hope you all have something to read while I’m gone!

          — Steve

ELLERY QUEEN – The Roman Hat Mystery.

Signet P3229; paperback reprint; 1st printing, August 1967. [Hardcover first edition: Frederick A. Stokes, 1929. Shown below, left.]

   First published in 1929, this early Ellery Queen effort really shows its age, unfortunately — it’s difficult to be any more polite than that. It was their first novel, and as an intellectual puzzle, it still has some fizz, but the characters are weak, and the strings they’re manipulated by stand out strongly.

   The death — by poisoning — of a unliked, unlikable lawyer takes place in the middle of the Roman Theatre while a play is going on. The key clue is the dead man’s missing top hat. In the 1920s, all men wore hats — if not top hats, then derbies and fedoras and more — all strange almost unidentifiable objects today. Ellery, aiding his father, Inspector Richard Queen, takes this premise, seemingly small, to its most logical extremes and solves the mystery.

   The Inspector, by the way, dotes on snuff, to another extreme — at least every other page, or so it seems. In terms of populating their story, the writers Queen deliberately modeled their early work on S. S. Van Dine and Philo Vance, or so I’ve been led to believe, and there’s nothing to contradict it here. Fortunately their idea of what makes a good mystery changed and coalesced into something much more solid over the years, along with their audience’s.

   With about two or three chapters to go, there’s a Challenge to the Reader, a favorite Ellery Queenian device, at which time — based on the facts so far — the reader is asked to pinpoint the killer’s identity. I hope I don’t hurt myself, patting myself on the back, but I’ll give myself about 80% on this one.

[UPDATE] 02-21-08. I don’t how often I’ll keep running these old reviews, but on the other hand, if you haven’t read them, they’re new to you.

   At the time, this happened to be the first review I’d written in about eight years. I’d drifted away from reading mysteries for a lot of that time, and even more so I’d lost touch with mystery fandom. This was prior to blogging, but not DorothyL, to put a time perspective on things. I’d been busy with teaching and other matters, but not with collecting, by any means. That has never stopped, not since I was 12 or 13. Some of the books I bought then I still have, but unfortunately not all of them.

   In any case, when I started Mystery*File up as a print zine again, this was the first review of mine that I included. Some readers thought I was fairly rough on Mr. Queen, but others agreed with me. I haven’t made any attempt to rewrite it. While the rust shows, it still reads like my writing. I know what my writing reads like, and I can’t do anything about it.

   For an Ellery Queen novel I liked more, read a more recent review of The Tragedy of X here.

   I’ve been absent from the blog for several days now, as you may have noticed. The explanation has nothing to do with mysteries or crime fiction or paperback covers, but I’d like to offer one anyway.

   It was a week ago that Evelyn Ahlberg died. She and my wife Judy taught math together at the University of Connecticut’s Hartford branch for over 30 years, and over that time she and her husband Don had become our very close friends.

   In her early 70s, Evelyn had retired but had come back to teach one course a semester.

   She died very suddenly, struck down by previously undiscovered heart problem while swimming. Judy and I received the news last Monday while eating dinner out. Since then we’ve been helping Don contact her friends and people she knew, which is redundant, because everyone she knew became a friend quickly.

   We’ll miss her tremendously. We already do.

   Cover art by F. Accanero. A quick search on Google brings up a handful of other paperbacks he did the cover art for, mostly as Franco Accanero, but once again, no website.

WARNER paperback original; 1st printing, September 1975.

      From the back cover:

But there was far more to the story than was ever told. Two of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous characters, Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger, played pivotal roles in the historic happenings. Here are the facts, never before revealed, of the confrontation: two of the most remarkable intellects the Earth ever produced pitted against beings intelligent enough to conquer space. Read now —

[A PERSONAL NOTE] The cover’s really only OK. Leaving off the Holmesian pipe and cap, it’s a fairly generic sci-fi cover and to my mind, not particularly eye-catching.

   There is a reason why I’m posting it here, and you can believe the story or not, as you wish, but it is true.

   I don’t always remember where or when I bought a particular book I have in my collection, but sometimes I do, and I’m sure it’s the same way with you. And I certainly do in this case, and here’s why.

   My daughter Sarah and her husband Mark had been living in Illinois for only a year, no more than two, as I recall — Charleston, in fact, if you’d like to look them up — and to entice me to visit, besides of course the obvious, Sarah mentioned that there was going to be a library sale somewhere in St. Louis where, it was said, they were going to be offering a million books. (I may have the number wrong. Maybe it was only half a million.)

   So of course I went. I saw the sights in Charleston (other than Sarah’s school, it didn’t take long) and in Champaign-Urbana, where Mark works (that took a little longer), and we checked out all of the bookstores anywhere in between.

   Came Saturday, we all got up early and drove the couple of hours over to St. Louis. There were lots of books, but the sale was rather disappointing. Maybe if I didn’t have to mail back anything I found, I would have bought more, but I don’t think I spent over $60 or $70. This is for paperbacks at 50 cents each, so it was a sizable amount, but I didn’t buy nearly as many books as I’d expected. (I’ve spent as much as $200 at some sales.)

   Anyway, this book by the Wellmans (father and son — in fact, Wade Wellman is actually Manly Wade Wellman, Jr.) was one of the books. So I know exactly where I bought this book and how much I paid for it.

   Well, here now comes the part that you’re not going to believe, and I wouldn’t either, except I was there. I opened the book up to glance through it, to see if it was worth keeping — the condition’s not entirely the best, as you can see — and inside was a bookplate.

   My head spun for a moment, I collected my thoughts and looked again. If I could carry a tune, I suppose I could have heard the theme for the Twilight Zone. The book was not mine — I hadn’t paid for it — and it never had been. I’d never seen it before in my life.

   I solemnly swear that the above story and final statement is true.

            Signed on this date, December 6th, 2007.

                      Steve Lewis

   The first winter storm of the season, here in the Northeast, and our first power outage, from 7:15 this morning to about 1:30 this afternoon. I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come. Wisely planning ahead, I made the big push this weekend, and Judy’s car was in her half of the garage when the ice and freezing rain hit. (Of course some of the boxes of books that came from there are now in the living room, but you have to remember: one step at a time!)

   But the reminder of how much we depend on electricity is a sobering one, not to mention access to one’s computer. I’m still working on Saturday’s New York Times crossword puzzle, for example, and without Google the Southwest corner is proving to be impenetrable.

   Al Hubin also sent me Part 21 of his online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV early this morning, and here it is, almost 4:30 in the afternoon, and I’ve only now gotten it uploaded.

   This new data is strong on newly discovered birth and death dates for authors, along with added info on series characters and settings. But also in this installment are lengthy entries for romantic suspense writers Kylie Brant and Glenna Finley, among others; historical fiction author Nigel Tranter, whose books often contained elements of crime-related activities; western writer Tim Champlin, for whose books the same can be said; Ian Rankin, whose books have been the basis for a number of recent TV films; and science fiction writer Walter Jon Williams, whose stories of galactic gentleman burglar-thief Drake Majistral are now included.

   It’s too early for me to have start adding cover images and so on, along with whatever additional commentary I will begin to add as soon as I can get to it, but I will, as soon as I can get to it!

   I’m really rather reluctant to do this, but in the last day or so, I’ve had to decide that I have to. I’ve simply run out of time to do this blog the way I want to.

   I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve in effect been coasting for most of past month — what with my brief vacation trip to Michigan, a video card malfunction when I came back, then the break-in into my storage areas.

   This most recent problem has forced me to start moving massive amount of books around, which is what I’ve been doing all of this past week. But more than ever, it’s also made me realize that I actually do have massive amounts of books to move around. By massive, I mean in the high five figures. And most of them are books I didn’t even know I had.

   Along with moving books out of the garage, it’s time to do something about it. Some I will save, others will go up for sale on Amazon, and others will get donated to the local library. (I was going to say that others will get dumped, but the folks at the library sale can do that as easily as I.)

   I’m also always in the process of adjusting my thyroid medication. If it’s right one week, the next week’s it’s not. Doing the blog has been great fun, but on another level, it’s also stressful, which doesn’t help, and I’m constantly frustrated that I can’t do more.

   Tomorrow will mark the ten-month anniversary of the Mystery*File blog, and as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been really pleased with some of the posts, and happy with all of them. (Well, I’ve deleted one or two, and you can’t see them, so those don’t count.)

   Hibernation means (for animals) being dormant for the winter months. It’s a little early for winter, and the dormancy here may or may not last longer than that, but even the most grumpy of growly bears arouses himself every once in a while during his siesta, and gets up and prowls around for a while before heading back to his cave again.

   I’ll do the same. In the sidebar on the right are a couple of projects I will be continuing to work on, and when there’s a major page added, I’ll be sure to announce it here. I’m referring first to Al Hubin’s Addenda to his Revised Crime Fiction IV, which I’m always in the process of annotating and embellishing; and secondly, I’m working with Bill Pronzini in adding more cover images to the Murder at 3 Cents a Day website.

   The latter’s been neglected in recent weeks, but I’ll start working on the books from Mystery House soon.

   Victor Berch and I have one or two other projects in progress. It’s extremely easy for us to keep coming up with others, and there’s no doubt that we will.

   Bruce Grossman just sent me another map to be included in the preceding post, and Jamie Sturgeon has said that he’s already come up with others. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t keep posting them here.

   In fact, figuratively speaking, I have drawer here in my desk that’s simply overflowing with reviews, checklists, paperback covers and other material to share with you, but alas, for now, for the reasons above and more, I’m simply not able.

   I wish it were otherwise, but not so.

A couple of my self-storage units were broken into this past weekend, as I discovered yesterday afternoon. The thieves got into about 160 units in all, I was told. They saw the boxes of books in mine, rummaged around for a while, then left. They smashed the door latch on one of the units, though, so it couldn’t be used. I had to move everything out of that one into the other, filling up the “aisle” I’d left, and leaving no room to move around at all. It wasn’t much fun.

Luckily it was a beautiful day.

The problem, as I expected, was a video card, and a new one is on its way to me now. At the moment I have a limited, rather primitive window to the Internet, but at least I’m back online again.

It took me two calls to Dell before they decided I might be right. I say “might” because the proof is in the doing — when the new card is finally installed, and it works.

It was actually three calls to Dell, if you count the second fellow. I disagreed with his suggested remedy of disconnecting all of the connections to the back of the tower, and I asked to speak to someone else. Sure, he said, no problem.

Dial tone.

Is it permissible to say that I hate computers?

Just a little bit?

— Steve

but I’m having severe computer problems. I think it’s the monitor, but I’m no expert. Everything’s backed up, but I’m limited to only a few minutes at the computer at a time. I’ll be calling Dell tonight.

Steve

   I’m off to Michigan tomorrow, and the town of Cadillac in particular, about 100 miles north of Grand Rapids, and 50 miles south of Traverse City. That’s the town where I grew up. My sister lives there now, and my brother and his family come over from London, Ontario. Monday’s the Canadian Thanksgiving, so we celebrate that as well as Columbus Day. We always have a great time.

   I’ll be heading home late on Monday. I’m sorry to miss Gary Lovisi’s paperback show in New York City this weekend, but he just happened to pick the wrong date. (Just kidding, Gary!)