DICK LOCHTE – Sleeping Dog. Leo Bloodworth and Serendipity Dahlquist #1.Arbor House, hardcover, 1985. Warner, paperback, December 1986.

   In which a young worldly-wise girl (Serendity, 14) meets a world-weary private eye (mid-40s?) named Leo Bloodworth. Her dog is missing, and she needs him to help find him. The trail (for her mother, as well) leads them up and down the state of California today.

   I loved the first two chapters, and the wrap-up of the detective story was nearly as nice, but I have to confess I found the middle section of this long book just a little too long, And if this is the state of California today, I’m glad to be here in New England.

      The Leo Bloodworth & Serendity Dahlquist series:

Sleeping Dog (1985)
Laughing Dog (1988)
Rappin’ Dog (2014)
Diamond Dog (2014)
Devil Dog (2017)
Mad Dog (2017)

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN “State of Grace.” PI Ralph Poteet #1. . First published in An Eye for Justice: The Third Private Eye Writers of America Anthology, edited by Robert J. Randisi (Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1988). Collected in Match Me Sidney!, (No Exit Press, 1989), and in People Who Kill, (Mystery Scene Press, 1993). Reprinted in Under the Gun, edited by Ed Gorman, Robert J. Randisi & Martin H. Greenberg, (NAL, 1990_ and in Murder Most Divine ed. Ralph McInerny & Martin H. Greenberg (Cumberland House, 2000).

   Comical PI’s are not common, fictional or otherwise, but you can add Ralph Poteet to the short list that (someone else) has been busy putting together over the years. You can tell about the funny business in it first of all by the name of the detective. Now I suppose the name Ralph Poteet is common enough is some parts of the country – Detroit, for example? – but  in sturdier country, such as New England, for example, just reading the name is bound to give us folk a serious case of the giggles.

   Not that the comedy in this tale is likely to do more thay. Mr Estlemna, as its author was wise to make the humor in it quieter and more subtle than that, but I think that he had fun writing it. It begins with the hooker who lives in the apartment above him calling him to tell him that she has a dead priest in her bed. Dead. Heart attack? Maybe. What she wants is for him to get rid of him.

   Ralph is the kind of guy who thinks well of himself, but when it comes down to it, he’s a sleazy kind of fellow, and he takes the job. The first person he calls is a bishop named Stoneman, who is ready and willing to help. When he comes back, well I won’t say exactly, but it’s a close call.

   The story goes on from there, and if you haven’t been able to tell, I recommend this one to you highly. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find, if I’ve intrigued you enough.

The Ralph Poteet series —

       Short stories:

“State of Grace” (1988, An Eye For Justice)
“A Hatful of Ralph” (2003, Flesh and Blood: Guilty as Sin)

        Novels:

Peeper. (Bantam, 1989.)

ELSPETH HUXLEY – Murder on Safari. Inspector Vachell #2. Methuen, UK, hardcover, 1938. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1938. Perennial Library, US, paperback,1982. Viking, US, hardcover, 1989.

   Superintendent Vachell of the Chania Police [in Kenya] is brought in when Lady Baradale’s jewels turn up missing, then finds murder on his hands when the lady is found dead, near a pond full of hippos but shot between the eyes.

   [A replica of a] small isolated English village taken to an extreme – one hundred miles from the nearest civilization. Most satisfying. The only whodunit (outside of Carr?) with footnotes to [point out] the clues – all fairly stated and still not much more.

      The Inspector Vachell series —

Murder at Government House, 1937.
Murder on Safari, 1938.
The African Poison Murders, 1939.

GABRIELLE KRAFT – Bullshot. Jerry Zalman #1. Pocket, paperback original; 1st printing, 1987.

   Jerry Zalman is an updated version of Perry Mason, you might say, a Beverly Hills lawyer with a zest for the good life (California style). He even finds his own bodies when business is slow, but he hot-tubs the girls he meets on the job, which Perry never did.

   Anybody who goes to bed with a blue-velvet sleep mask is not likely to becomes one of my favorite detective heroes. All that kept me reading was that this case involves a monumental collection of rock & roll memorabilia. [Otherwise], insipid. As bad as a made-for-TV movie.

The Jerry Zalman series —

1. Bullshot (1987)
2. Screwdriver (1988)
3. Let’s Rob Roy (1989)
4. Bloody Mary (1990)

LIA MATERA – Where Lawyers Fear to Tread. Willa Jansson #1. Bantam, paperback original, 1987. Fawcett, paperback, 1991.

   When Susan Green, editor-in-chief of the Malhousie Law Review, is found murdered in her office, there is no shortage of suspects. Besides other various editors. There are all of the faculty, of course, and numerous spouses, lovers, distinguished alumni,and so on.

   Willa Jansson, former senior articles editor, unwillingly pressed into service as Susan’s replacement, also turns detective. Almost everyone is suspected in turn, and many of them are guilty (of something). An intense sort of story, in a cluttered sort of way.

      The Willa Jansson series —

Where Lawyers Fear to Tread, Bantam, 1987.
A Radical Departure, Bantam, 1988.
Hidden Agenda, Bantam, 1988.
Prior Convictions, Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Last Chants, Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Star Witness, Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Havana Twist, Simon & Schuster, 1998.

L. J. WASHBURN – Wild Night. Lucas Hallam #1. Tor, paperback; 1st printing, November 1987. Five Star, hardcover, 1998. Rough Edges Press, softcover, 2022.

   Lucas Hallam is a former western lawman, now a part-time movie actor as well as a 1920s private detective. In this case, he’s hired by a charismatic new Hollywood evangelist who is also apparently ripe for blackmail. (Nothing ever changes.)

   What I didn’t particularly care for was the use of a fortuitous tornado as a plot device, nor the scene where Hallam outshoots three men with tommy guns. His long bouts of reminiscing (though a bit repetitious) did give the man some character, however.

      The Lucas Hallam series —

1. Wild Night (1987)
2. Dead-Stick (1989)
3. Dog Heavies (1990)
4. Hallam (story collection, 2022)

JOHN GARDNER – The Garden of Weapons. Herbie Kruger #2 [See Comment #1.] Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1980 McGraw-Hill, US, hardcover, 1981.

   John Gardner is one of the most versatile British writers in the espionage genre. He gained early recognition for his Boysie Oakes series — The Liquidators (1946), Amber Nine (1966 ), and five others — which he created in the hope they would be an “amusing counter-irritant to the excesses” of James Bond; these were written in the black-humor style characteristic of the Sixties.

   In the Seventies, Gardner scored additional critical and sales triumphs with a much different type of series — one featuring Sherlock Holmes’s archenemy, Professor Moriarity, in The Return of Moriarity (1974) and The Revenge of Moriarity (1975). And in the Eighties, Gardner returned to the frantic world of Bondian spies — literally when he began a series of new 007 adventures.

   But Gardner’s best book to date is not one featuring a series character; it is the realistic espionage thriller The Garden of Weapons, which begins when a KGB defector walks into the British Consulate in West Berlin and demands to speak with Big Herbie Kruger, a legendary figure in intelligence circles.

   Kruger’s interrogation of the defector reveals that the greatest of Kruger’s intelligence coups — a group of six informants known as the Telegraph Boys — has been penetrated by a Soviet spy. Kruger decides to go undercover and eliminate the double agent himself, without the knowledge or consent of British Intelligence.

   Posing as an American tourist, Kruger enters East Berlin to carry out his deadly self-appointed mission. But the task is hardly a simple one: and Gardner’s plot is full of Byzantine twists and turns involving the East Germans, the KGB, and British Intelligence. Any reader who enjoys espionage fiction will find The Garden of Weapons a small masterpiece of its type.

   Another non-series Gardner thriller in the same vein is The Werewolf Trace (1977), which has been called “a compulsively readable thriller with delicately handled paranormal undertones and a bitter ending.”

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

      The Herbie Kruger series —

1. The Nostradamus Traitor (1979)
2. The Garden of Weapons (1980)
3. The Quiet Dogs (1982)
4. Maestro (1993)
5. Confessor (1995)

WILLIAM FULLER – Tight Squeeze. Brad Dolan # . Dell First Edition A189; paperback original; 1st printing, August 1959.

   Brad Dolan is an adventurer, a man with a boat scrounging for a living in the Florida keys. Not averse to making a few dollars illegally, he accepts a girl’s offer of $3000 to run a shipment of guns to Castro’s guerilla army, still in hiding in the Cuban hills.

   The plan goes wrong, of course. These were the heady days of the Cuban revolution, and Fuller’s description of it, in bold, vivid strokes, makes it seem a grand venture. Dolan has a head of rock, otherwise there’d be no story. A gripping macho fantasy.

   
      The Brad Dolan series —

Back Country.
Goat Island.
The Girl in the Frame.
Brad Dolan’s Blonde Cargo.
Brad Dolan’s Miami Manhunt.
Tight Squeeze.

   All were first published by Dell in the 1950s as paperback originals.

GERALD KERSH “The Ambiguities of Lo Yeing Pai.” Vara the Tailor #4. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1968, Not known to have been reprinted,

   I have not read much of the novels and other short fiction of Gerald Kersh, but based on what I have read, including this one, he was a magnificent writer – a man born to write. His Wikipedia page is here:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Kersh

   Even better, here’s the first page of another summary of his life and career, as posted by SF writer Harlan Ellison, champion of his writing like none other:

      https://harlanellison.com/kersh/index.htm

   Assuming you have now gone and come back, I will now be content to talk only about this one short tale. It’s a minor piece in many ways, and yet a completely fascinating one. Vara is a tailor, plying his trade somewhere in Manhattan, and as the tale begins, he is busy declining the advances of a salesman offering a fantastic deal on a neon sign for his shop.

   To further his explanation of why he is not interested in the offer, Vara tells the salesman and another man (who may be Kersh himself) a story of a murder, that of one of two Chinese partners in the ownership of their own shop, also somewhere in Manhattan – but one that was close by.

   As I say, it’s any ordinary tale, a mystery, one with a happy ending, more or less, a puzzle of words, you might say. The magic is in the telling, though, a magical way of talking about events that had already happened. What it was that made me smile every so often were the diversions that Vara takes his listeners along upon.

   I shan’t say more. If you ever happen to pick up this particular issue of EQQM, make sure you read this one. Don’t pass it by. It’s the last story in the issue; make sure you read it before setting the magazine down for good.
   

      The Vara the Tailor series —

The Incorruptible Tailor (The Ugly Face of Love and Other Stories, 1958)
The Geometry of the Skirt (EQMM, 1965)
Old Betsey (The Hospitality of Miss Tolliver and Other Stories, 1965)
The Ambiguities of Lo Yeing Pai (EQMM, 1968)

RICHARD ROSEN – Fadeaway. PI Harvey Blissberg #2. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1986. Onyx, paperback; 1st printing, September 1987.

   Former baseball center fielder Harvey Blissberg is now a Boston PI, and his first real case is a doozey: two star NBA basketball players have just been found murdered at Logan Airport, The police naturally think of cocaine, but Harvey keeps digging.

   And ends up in Providence again, where in his earlier adventure, he first solved a murder (and the town really is New England’s armpit). Rosen can write crystal clear page-turning prose, and he can write murky. In this book he does an admirable job at both.

      The Harvey Blissberg series:

Strike Three You’re Dead (1984)
Fadeaway (1986)
Saturday Night Dead (1988)
World Of Hurt (1994)
Dead Ball (2001) .