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) .

ANTONIA FRASER – Quiet As a Nun. Jemima Shore #1. Weidenfeld ^ Nicolson, UK, hardcover, 1977. Viking, US, hardcover, 1977. Ace, paperback, 1978. Bantam, paperback, 1991. Norton, paperback, 1986. TV : A six-part version of the book appeared on ITV’s anthology series Armchair Thriller in the UK, 1978. Maria Aitken played Jemima Shore.

   The heroine of this first novel by noted historian Antonia Fraser is Jemima Shore, Investigator — not a detective in the proper sense, but an investigative television reporter in London. Her show carries great influence, and it is on the strength of this that Jemima is summoned back to Blessed Eleanor’s Convent in Sussex, where she attended school.

   Jemima was a Protestant, thrust into the convent world because of the “vagaries of her father’s career,” but her best friend, Rosabelle Powerstock, was a Catholic and later became a nun at the same convent.

   Now Sister Miriam, as Rosabelle was called, is dead under strange circumstances, having starved to death in the black tower built by the founder of the order-a structure commonly referred to by the schoolgirls as “Nelly’s Nest.” People give the nuns strange looks on the streets of town; a cloud hangs over the convent; the air is full of suspicion and distrust; and the Reverend Mother Ancilla turns to Jemima to find out what is amiss.

   Jemima is loath to revisit the scene of her childhood, but an aborted trip to Yugoslavia with her member of Parliament — and very married — lover makes her welcome a change of scene. She settles in at Blessed Eleanor’s in considerably more comfort than she enjoyed as a schoolgirl, but its charms fade when she hears strange footsteps at night, has a terrifying midnight encounter in the chapel, and discovers that politics, while very worldly, are not alien to these hallowed walls.

   Jemima is an interesting character — a complex combination of a hard-driving career woman and a person who repeatedly binds herself into no-win situations with married men; she also has more than her fair share of skepticism about nuns and Catholicism.

   The nuns, in their diversity, are also absorbing, and it is upon their hidden motives, passions, and beliefs that the plot turns. The unusual combination of the trendy contemporary world and the Gothic old convent gives a nice look at how such a place functions in the modern world.

   Subsequent Jemima Shore novels are The Wild Island (1978), A Splash of Red (1981), and Cool Repentance (1982).

     ———
   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 complete Jemima Shore series —

1. Quiet As a Nun (1977)
2. The Wild Island (1978)
3. A Splash of Red (1981)
4. Cool Repentance (1982)
5. Oxford Blood (1985)
Jemima Shore’s First Case (1986)
6. Your Royal Hostage (1987)
7. The Cavalier Case (1990)
Jemima Shore At the Sunny Grave (1991)
8. Political Death (1994)

DICK FRANCIS – Odds Against. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1965. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1965. Berkley X-1370, US, paperback, 1967. Reprinted many times since.

   In most of his books, Dick Francis uses an ordinary man (usually connected with the racing world) as his protagonist, caught up in events that are so overwhelming and out of control that he must make heroic efforts to sort them out. But in Odds Against, Sid Halley has a job as a detective — the obvious choice for a tough man to right the world’s wrongs.

   He’s been doing the work for two years, and when he’s shot (on page one of the story), he realizes that a bullet in the guts is his first step to liberation from being of “no use to anyone, least of all himself.” He was a champion steeplechase jockey, that’s what makes him tough. A racing accident lost him the use of his hand and self-respect simultaneously.

   The action breaks from the starting gate and blasts over the hurdles of intrigue, menace, and crime. Halley is cadged by his shrewd and loving father-in-law into confronting Howard Kraye, “a full-blown, powerful, dangerous, big time crook.”

   On the track he encounters murder, mayhem, plastic bombs, and torture. But he endures, in some part to regain his self respect, and in some part because he believes in racing, the sport, and in putting it right. A fascinating chase through an empty racecourse defies the villain. In the end, despite his tragedy, Sid Halley sees himself as a detective and as a man.

   Dick Francis was so taken with the characters in this book that he went on to use them in a television series, The Racing Game (shown on Public Broadcasting). A second Sid Halley novel, Whip Hand, won the British Gold Dagger A ward in 1979 and another Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.

———
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 Sid Halley series —

   by Dick Francis …

Odds Against (1965)
Whip Hand (1979)
Come to Grief (1995)
Under Orders (2006)

   by Felix Francis …

Refusal (2013)
Hands Down (2022)

RICHARD FORREST – A Child’s Garden of Death. Lyon & Bea Wentworth #1. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1975. Pocket, paperback, 1977. Dell, paperback, 1982.

   Take one children’s-book writer who is also a hot-airballooning enthusiast; add his fictional creations, the Wobblies, and his politician wife, plus his best friend from Korean War days, now police chief in their small Connecticut town. These staple ingredients of Richard Forrest’s series about Lyon Wentworth add up to an intriguing mix-even before the element of murder enters.

   In this first entry in the series — whose titles are variations on well-known children’s books — Lyon is called in by buddy Rocco Herbert to help solve an unusual type of killing: a thirty-year-old murder of a man, woman, and child whose bodies are uncovered by a bulldozer at a construction site. Rocco often relies on his friend’s “unusual kind of mind,” but this case is particularly painful to the writer. His own daughter was killed by a hit-and-run driver some years ago, and he and his wife have yet to come to terms with their loss.

   Lyon’s investigation — which he frequently discusses with his imaginary friends, the Wobblies — takes him back to World War II and into a reconstruction of the life of a Jewish family who fled Hitler’s Germany only to find horrors in the new world. And the resolution of the case brings a measure of peace to the Wentworths. An excellent and sensitive novel whose serious theme is leavened by a wry good humor.

   Other titles featuring Lyon Wentworth: The Wizard of Death (1977), Death Through the Looking Glass (1978), The Death in the Willows (1979), The Death at Yew Corner (1980), and Death Under the Lilacs (1985).

     ———
   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.
   

NOTE: The series has continued on to include the following titles:

7. Death On the Mississippi (1989)
8. The Pied Piper of Death (1997)
9. Death in the Secret Garden (2004)
10. Death At King Arthur’s Court (2005)

JANICE LAW “The Best Thing for the Liver.” Madame Selina #2 (?). First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2012.

   According to the evidence found in this, perhaps the second of the Madame Selina stories. they all take place in either New York City, or as in this particular case, fairly close by, in upstate New York in the spa area around Saratoga.

   Due to some notoriety caused in an earlier adventure in which the folks at Tammany Hall were sorely annoyed, Madame Selina and her young assistant, an orphan by the name of Nip Tompkins, decide to take a sudden “vacation” from the big city.

   This also places the time of the take as being (well, I’m guessing) perhaps the mid-1800’s. As a medium with quite a following, Madame Selina is doing quite well, and the seances she conducts are quite the rage. There are times, however, when discretion is quite the right route to take.

   The story is told by young Nip, and he is rather an observant lad. He notices a young girl, the heir to a large fortune, who appears paler and paler each times he sees her. He wonders, of course, if she is ill. Since this is a mystery story, we the reader are in sync with the rest of the story as it plays out. The even greater pleasure obtained from the tale. however, is in the telling, elaborately fashioned after the times, but without flowing into the excesses of an era now so long ago.

         ____

Note: The online Crime Fiction Index includes the Madame Selina tales, but at this point of time, it is unaware that this story is part of the series. Here’s the list of her adventures, as known so far, with this one inserted in bold as (for now) number two:

      The Madame Selina series —

Madame Selina, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine June 2010
The Best Thing for the Liver (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July/August 2012
A Political Issue, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine September 2013
The Psychic Investigator, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine December 2013
The Irish Boy, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine January/February 2015
The Ghostly Fireman, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine April 2015
The Spiritualist, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine March 2016
The Organ Grinder’s Daughter, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July/August 2016
A Fine Nest of Rascals, (nv) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July/August 2019

   As for the author herself, Janice Law is one of very few mystery writers still producing fiction who are older than I am. Her most recently published work is listed as “Up and Gone,” Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2024.

SARA GRAN – Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. Claire DeWitt #1. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, June 2011. Mariner Books, trade paperback, May 2012.

   So once in a long while I read something written recently. Just to make sure I’m not missing anything. Just to make sure that no one’s figured it out.

   And by ‘figured it out’ I mean figured out how to write a hardboiled detective novel like they did in the good old days. I mean contemporaneously — not as a historical novel or as pastiche. In other words: I want hardboiled detectives doing their hardboiled detection right now. In this world we live in today. Not in some synthetic imagined yesteryear. Because if I wanna read yesteryear, I’ll go straight to the Hammett’s mouth. I don’t need a ventriloquist.

   Anywho. So this one is written contemporaneously. So there’s that.

   It takes place in New Orleans, in the aftermath of Katrina. A DA went missing in the flood. Presumed dead. Left all his considerable coin to his nephew. Who feels he owes it to his uncle to find out what happened to him. Until it begins to seem like maybe he had it coming.

   What is unique and disconcerting about Claire DeWitt is that she does not depend upon traditional investigation or procedure. Rather, she depends on vibes and seeming coincidence. She does not run down the list of suspects and evaluate alibis and hard evidence. Instead, she uses a lot of hallucinatory drugs and relies on leads received in dreams. She takes her cue from a (fictional) obscure French handbook called ‘Détection’ by Jacques Silette, from which she constantly quotes.

   And it’s the quotes that make this a compelling read. Not the detection. Which is hair-brained and unconvincing.

   Here are some of my favorite quotes:

         Be grateful for every scar life inflicts on you. Where we’re unhurt is where we are false.

         There are no coincidences. Just opportunities you’re too dumb to see, doors you’ve been too blind to step through.

         The truth lies — at the intersection of the forgotten and the ignored, in the neighborhood of all we have tried to forget.

         He’d been counting on a happy ending. But there is no such thing. Nothing ever really ends. The fat lady never really sings her last song. She only changes costumes and goes on to the next show.

         Consider the possibility that what we perceive as the future has already happened, and intuition is only a very good memory.

         There will always be people who need to be rescued. And there will never, ever be enough people to save them all.

         NO ONE IS INNOCENT. The only question is, how will you bear your portion of guilt?
   
   

SPOILER ALERT: The entire case is solved by a single ‘clue’. A discarded calling card randomly found near the table at the restaurant where Claire Dewitt initially meets with her client. Nearly the first thing Claire does in the book is find and pocket the random calling card.

   Nearly the last thing she does is call the number. And that’s it. That’s how the mystery is solved. Calling the number on a random calling card you found during your initial client meeting at a random restaurant. If she’d called the number at the beginning of the novel, the novel would be about three pages long.

   Everything that takes place between finding the card and calling the number is just one big mcguffin. Which is to say, the mcguffin is the mystery itself. END OF SPOILER ALERT.
   
   

VERDICT: Sara Gran is a really good writer. Claire Dewitt is a terrific character. Line by line, they are fresh and new. And I went out and bought a couple more Sara Gran (non-series) novels based on how good her writing is, if that tells you anything.

   But the mystery itself? The detection? Strictly for the birds.

   Previously reviewed here on this blog: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=22628
   

      The Claire DeWitt series —

1. Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (2011)
2. The Bohemian Highway (2013)
3. The Infinite Blacktop (2018)

BART SPICER – The Golden Door. Carney Wilde #3. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1951. Bantam #975, paperback, 1952.

   “The Golden Door” are the last three words on the Statue of Liberty:

         “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
         I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

   Carney Wilde has been able to sustain his private eye business through a retainer as security detail for the fancy Jonas Department Store in downtown Philadelphia. It’s been a pretty cushy gig — but lately it seems like there’s some insider theft going on. So Wilde has to earn his keep.

   While working on the case, the son of the Jonas Department Store mogul asks for help with an ‘unrelated issue’. The so-called unrelated issue has to do with stolen files from his non-profit agency “Future Americans”. “Future Americans” helps displaced eastern European Jewish survivors of WWII immigrate to the U.S., frequently by promising jobs with the Jonas Department Store. The missing files contain sensitive personal information of prospective immigrants.

   Of course, if you’ve read any detective stories before you know there’s no such thing as an unrelated case.

   The store thief ends up dead, and he’s not the only one. Turns out some of the “Future Americans” think the ‘golden door’ ought to be melted down and cashed in. And that’s pretty much just what they try to do.

   Carney Wilde is a terrific hardboiled detective and Bart Spicer exercises great narrative control. Despite seeming coincidences tying everything together, I never doubted the credibility of the story. No plodder, he’s a skillful plotter. Everything fits; you get a satisfying denouement.

   So I’ll say it again. I have no idea why the Carney Wilde books are out of print. They’re exciting vintage hardboiled detective novels. Some of the best I’ve read by anyone not named Chandler or Hammett.
   

      The Carney Wilde series —

The Dark Light (1949)
Blues For the Prince (1950)
The Golden Door (1951)
Black Sheep, Run (1951)
The Long Green (1952)
The Taming of Carney Wilde (1954)
Exit, Running (1959)