JEREMIAH HEALY – Rescue. John Francis Cuddy #10. Pocket, hardcover, 1995; paperback, 1996.

   Jerry Healy, besides being a hell of a nice guy (I played poker with him at the Seattle Bouchercon), is one of the group of “modern” PI writers I like the most. As with most of that group, however, I haven’t enjoyed his last few books as much as I have the earlier ones.

   It all starts with Cuddy being a good Samaritan, stopping to help a young woman change a flat. She is defiant and obviously scared, as is her companion a 10-year-old buy with a disfiguring birthmark. Finding that Cuddy is a PI, the boy asks him if he would ever find him if he were ever lost, and Cuddy assures him that he would.

   The next day he reads that the woman’s body has been found, but there is no mention of the boy. Cuddy made a promise in Viet Nam once that he was unable to keep, and that he has never been able to forget. He intends to keep this one. It leads him to the other end of the country and to a religious group, and to violence he didn’t anticipate.

   Healy is writing a different kind of PI novel than I remember his first few being, though my memory may be at fault. His tales have trended more and more toward the action-adventure, with Cuddy going mano a mano with the bad guys and not being averse to taking the law into his own hands, a la Spenser.

   Not that Healy’s plots have ever descended to the idiocy that Parker’s did for a while, mind you, but still. I think that Healy is an enormously talented writer, and I haven’t read a book of his I didn’t enjoy. His pacing is excellent, his prose smooth as silk, and his characters well drawn. Cuddy himself is one of today’s more likable and believable of the “growing” PI’s. I don’t like “cowboy” stories as well as I do the more traditional kid, but Healy does what he does very well indeed.

The John Francis Cuddy series —

1. Blunt Darts (1984)
2. The Staked Goat (1986)
3. So Like Sleep (1987)
4. Swan Dive (1988)
5. Yesterday’s News (1989)
6. Right To Die (1991)
7. Shallow Graves (1992)
8. Foursome (1993)
9. Act Of God (1994)
10. Rescue (1995)
11. Invasion Of Privacy (1996)
12. The Only Good Lawyer (1998)
13. Spiral (1999)

TIMOTHY FULLER – Three Thirds of a Ghost. Jupiter Jones #2. Little Brown, hardcover, January 1941. Popular Library #81, paperback, no date stated. [1946].

   There is a word game called Ghosts from which the title is derived, but I’m afraid I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the book to tell you how. (Mystery writer Helen McCloy wrote a book called Two-Thirds of a Ghost which as I recall explained the connection to the story a whole lot better, but it’s been 50 years or so since I read that one, and I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast that day.)

   This is the second mystery to e solved by a fellow named Jupiter Jones. (His real first name was mentioned once, but I neglected to jot it down. To me this was important only to know his parents didn’t really name him Jupiter.) In the first book, Harvard Has a Homicide, Jupiter was a grad student at Harvard. In this second one he has moved up the academic ladder to the position of Instructor in the Fine Arts Department at the same school.

   But he’s also got a nose for solving mysteries, and the basic one in this one is a good one. An author known for the mysteries he writes has also been dabbling in romans clef — his latest is said to be based on the members of a well-to-do real life family in the Boston area — and when the author is killed, shot to dead while speaking in front of a crowd of people at a long-established, not to mention prestigious, bookstore, no one is really surprised.

   What is surprising is that the shot came from the back of the room, and not one person saw who fired the gun. Not exactly a locked room mystery, but an impossible crime? Yes.

   The dead man’s Chinese secretary gets third billing as one of sleuths who tackle the case, but the focus is mostly on Jupiter Jones and his girl friend, the charming Betty Mahan. All of the of the other characters have their place in the story, but none of them distinguish themselves enough from the others for their names to stick in the readers’ minds as to who is who.

   A typical early 40s puzzle mystery, in other words. It’s told in a lighthearted way that’s fun to read, and not only that, every once in a while the characters sit down together to chat about the allure of mystery novels and why readers want to read them.

   If this sounds like your kind of detective novel, then it is. It was mine.
   

   The Jupiter Jones series —

Harvard Has a Homicide. 1936
Three Thirds of a Ghost. 1941
Reunion with Murder. 1941
This Is Murder, Mr. Jones. 1943
Keep Cool, Mr. Jones. 1950

ROB KANTNER – Concrete Hero. Ben Perkins #9. Harper, paperback original, 1994

   This is Kantner’s third Perkins book for Harper after doing six for Bantam, all paperback originals.

   Ben donates himself to a charity auction at the urging of his ex-love and the mother of his young daughter, and os “won” by an Ann Arbor lady who wants him to look into the death of her husband. The man, a copywriter for an ad agency, was found dead in his office of what appeared to be an auto-erotic asphyxiation.

   Ben pokes around halfheartedly,wanting to be done with it, but the case won’t go away. The dead man participated in a porno computer bulletin board that specialized in digitized photos, and it appears that too much good, unclean fun may have led to murder, Meanwhile, an out-of-town friend shows up in bad shape, and takes up with one of Ben’s best friends, and he’s got to worry about that, too.

   Like most series PI novels, or most crime series of any kind for that matter, the Perkins books pretty much follow their own internal pattern each time. Perkins gets a case, pokes around, spends some pages on personal relationships, gets some help from his cop friends, decides to handle things himself, and brings it all to a violent climax, usually with extreme danger and injury to himself.

   Nothing wrong with that if you like how it’s done, and I’ve liked how Kantner did it in the past. I still do, some, but not as much as before. Some of the characterizations are good and I like his storytelling, but I’m getting weary of the state cop who’s more and more willing to act like Perkins’ sidekick, and I didn’t think Kantner spent nearly enough time here setting up his villains.

   It’s decent, but he can do and has done better.

       The Ben Perkins series —

1. The Back-Door Man (1986)

2. The Harder They Hit (1987)
3. Dirty Work (1988)
4. Hell’s Only Half Full (1989)
5. Made in Detroit (1990)

6. The Thousand Yard Stare (1991)
7. The Quick and the Dead (1992)
8. The Red, White and Blues (1993)
9. Concrete Hero (1994)
10. Trouble is What I Do (story collection, 2005)
11. Final Fling (2007)

ELMORE LEONARD – The Hot Kid. Carl Webster #1. William Morrow, hardcover, May 2005. HarperTorch, paperback, 2006.

   As you very well may know without my telling you, Elmore Leonard’s writing career began with westerns of the classic, traditional variety. While he was more than slightly successful at it (with books turned into movies like Hombre and 3:10 to Yuma) his sales didn’t begin to take off until he switched to contemporary crime novels (with books turned into movies like Mr. Majestyk and Get Shorty).

   What The Hot Kid is, is a semi-combination of the two genres, permuted and shuffled around into a smooth, well-blended concoction of the two. Historical gangster fiction, that is, one that takes place in the Old West of the 1920s: the world of Pretty Boy Floyd, Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, and Bonnie and Clyde, all of whom are mentioned, as are Will Rogers and Count Basie, but while Floyd comes close, none of the aforementioned villains and world famous stars actually appear.

   It’s a meandering sort of tale, but when it comes down to it, there are only two primary players involved, and they are (as one would expect) on the opposite sides of the law: Carlos (Carl) Webster, a U.S. Marshal, and Jack Belmont, the son of a wealthy businessman, but a gent who is intent on becoming Public Enemy Number One.

   And he very nearly succeeds. Carl is better, however, and who knows, he may return in yet another adventure. Here’s a quote from page 57, as true crime reporter Tony Antonelli is trying to convince his editor to allow him to write a piece on Carl:

   The resulting story is in turn profane, mundane and jazzy. Sparked every so often with confrontations, holdups and numerous shootouts, it’s vastly entertaining. The problem is that it may be too smooth and too easy-going, not to mention the fact that everyone’s dialogue, while suitably terse and in the vernacular, sounds exactly the same as everyone else’s. That includes the descriptive passages as well, as if a grizzled old-timer back in the 1920s had wound himself up in a place of his own choosing and spieled off a yarn of his own making.

   One might have expected a little more jaggedness. Except for a few isolated moments that directly contradict this statement, and I will certainly concede there are, this one’s surprisingly straightforward and calm, in its own sentimental way.

        The Carl Webster series —

1. The Hot Kid (2005)
2. Up in Honey’s Room (2006)
3. Comfort To The Enemy (story collection; 2009)

CHRISTOPHER NICOLE – Angel Rising. Anna Fehrbach #6. Severn House, hardcover, 2008.

   A fair summation from the prologue of the sixth entry in a series of the heroine of this sexy playful historical series by Christopher Nicole, a British writer of big sexy historical thrillers in the Wilbur Smith/James Leasor vein, best known here for his popular spy novels as Andrew York about professional assassin Jonas Wilde (*) and later CID operator Tallant in the Cockpit country of Jamaica.

    When I say sexy, I should point out I mean in the James Bond sense and not the Lady from L.U.S.T. or Man from O.R.G.Y. vein. While these may not stop at the edge of the bed neither do they overly dwell on activities between the sheets, the object being tease more than fulfillment. In fact the best I can describe this series is a cross between Ilsa She Wolf of the SS, Geoffrey Bocca’s soft core Commander Amanda titles about a sort of female Candide serving in the SOE during WWII, Modesty Blaise, and Flashman with far more ties to the latter two in style and mood.

   At eighteen in 1938 Austro-Irish Anna Fehrbach and her family are arrested during the Hitler putsch in Austria. Forced by the SS, who hold her family hostage, Anna becomes the top agent of the SD, their number one assassin and mistress of Reyhard Heydrich, at one point even pursuing an attempt on Joseph Stalin, but eventually Anna is recruited by MI6 and her future husband Clive Bartley and becomes a double agent, even planning the execution of Heydrich in Czechoslovakia and plotting the failed coup against Hitler.

   In and out of bed whether with Heydrich, Stalin, or Hitler Anna is a busy girl.

   That is all back story as this one begins at the end of the war when the Soviets under Stalin’s orders and MVD (predecessor to the KGB) head Beria’s directions decide along with the Americans and Anna’s ex-American lover, Joe Andrews, formerly OSS and now the fledgling CIA, agree Anna is too dangerous to live, and join forces to find and kill her leaving her with no where to hide, pursued and betrayed by the deadliest killers in the world not to mention vengeful Nazis.

   The chase takes her from the highlands of Scotland to Brazil, Germany and Switzerland, a confrontation with her SS trained and loyal Nazi sister, Katherine, and a reckoning with former lover Joe Andrews until Anna wins a brief respite and relieves the Soviets of a considerable sum of money along the way.

   Anna is described as amoral, but instead is something of an original moralist along the lines of Frank McCauliffe’s Augustus Mandrel, Mark Gattiss’s Lucifer Box, and Kyril Bonfigioli’s Mortdecai. She is all the more fun for it eschewing the tiresomely earnest purity of too many of contemporary fiction’s cold-blooded killers.

   This history is of the playful behind-the-scenes type, both accurate and imaginative, the plot fast moving, and the pleasure in watching the beautiful and brilliant Anna (she has an IQ of 173) outwit everyone and anyone trying to use her or kill her, and often both. It is a lighter variation of the kind of thing both Ian Fleming and William F. Buckley did, offering a playful peek at the inner workings of the great and powerful with their hair down and make-up off.

   Yes, it is nonsense, but not without some actual models in the case of Anna, albeit in a less superhuman mold. I don’t want to oversell this; it is fluff, but it is good fluff of the kind not seen as often as it should be these days, not bloated or self important, and Anna’s cheerful blend of amoral survival, healthy (and not so healthy) sexuality, and crisp action and violence is exactly the kind of beach read that used to be a summer staple before the advent of the hernia-inducing beach book.

   The writing is crisp and professional, the nonsense factor the tongue-in-cheek sort of the better Bond and Modesty Blaise imitators (which Nicole was), and as I said, the history accurate if playfully tweaked as only the better thrillers manage. Think Dennis Wheatley’s Gregory Sallust without the clunky info dumps.

   Best of all it never overstays its welcome unlike too many thrillers today.

   By the time Anna has earned her rest you will likely feel she fully deserves it and be wanting to join her on other adventures, done in a high style that seems to be lost to many of today’s more heavy-handed thriller writers and their earnest Boy Scout heroes. Pink champagne and caviar with a Vodka chaser taken in proper amounts makes a nice change up from the lite-beer and potato chip boys of too many modern thriller series.

   There is something to be said for style above all else in entertainment which is the only serious intent here.

    To be, as they say, continued.

            —

   (*) Jonas Wilde debuted in The Eliminator and went on to a long and successful career, most of the books published here in paperback by Berkeley and even resulting in a solid little film, Danger Route, starring Richard Johnson as Wilde, which Quentin Tarantino champions as a model of its kind and has often said the wanted to remake.

   As Nicole the author also penned a juvenile spy series about young agent Jonathan Anders (published here by Dell). He is a popular historical novelist in England with numerous series. The Anna Fehrbach series is up to the ninth entry in that series, and I warn you Nicole is nothing if not prolific…

      The Anna Fehrbach series —

1. Angel from Hell (2006)
2. Angel in Red (2006)
3. Angel of Vengeance (2007)
4. Angel in Jeopardy (2007)
5. Angel of Doom (2008)
6. Angel Rising (2008)
7. Angel of Destruction (2009)
8. Angel of Darkness (2009)
9. Angel in Peril (2013)

FRANCINE MATHEWS – Death in the Off-Season. Merry Folger #1. William Morrow, hardcover, 1994. Avon, paperback, 1995. Soho Crime, trade paperback, 2016.

   There are two facts worthy of immediate note here, before reading a word of the text: that this is yet another first novel trumpeting on the dust wrapper that it is “An Ima New Character Book” (as though anyone gave a damn yet if ever), and Morrow has it priced at $23. Twenty-three dollars. For an unknown. I simply don’t understand. Someone help me, please.

   Merry Folger us a detective on the Nantucket Police Department, and the daughter of the Chief. She catches her first murder case when the brother of a local farmer turns up unexpectedly at the farm after a ten year absence — murdered at the gate,

   Nobody knows why he returned; not the brother, not the lawyer and family friend, not Merry’s ex-love and the brother;s current employee. Nobody. But then somebody takes a shot at the brother, and Merry has to decide whose life to dig in.

   This is all too typical of a type of “mystery” that has become ubiquitous. It’s all about Relationships. Merry with her father. Merry with her ex-love. Merry with the brother. The brother with everybody. And on and on. As a crime novel, it’s silly, and the “investigation” bears about as much relationship[ to real police work as it does to … whatever. It’s told in third person from a number of viewpoints, primarily Merry’s and the brother’s, and the prose is adequate, no more. $23, my ass. Pass this up and read a romance.

       The Merry Folger series —

1. Death in the Off Season (1994)
2. Death in Rough Water (1995)
3. Death in a Mood Indigo (1997)
4. Death in a Cold Hard Light (1998)
5. Death on Nantucket (2017)

ELIZABETH PETERS – Borrower of the Night. Vicky Bliss #1. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1972. Paperback reprints include: Dell, 1974. Tor, 1990. Avon, 2000.

   The first adventure of Vicky Bliss, and what a woman she is! Tall, intelligent — a doctorate in history — and beautiful! — she claims to have measurements straight out of Playboy magazine, although she demurely declines to be specific. (Too good to be true?)

   At stake, a treasure hidden somewhere in an old German castle, complete with ghosts in creaking armor, old tombs and secret passageways. The whole can be less than the sum of its parts, however, and on page 169 [of the Tor edition] the characters themselves admit the story is getting corny.

The Vicky Bliss series —

1. Borrower of the Night (1973)
2. Street of the Five Moons (1978)
3. Silhouette in Scarlet (1983)
4. Trojan Gold (1987)
5. Night Train to Memphis (1994)
6. Laughter of Dead Kings (2008)

MICHAEL RALEIGH – The Maxwell Street Blues. Paul Whelan #3. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1994. iUniverse, paperback, 2000.

   Paul Whelan, a PI who specializes in finding people who don’t want to be found, has his usual not much of anything going when a black lawyer comes to him with a case. The lawyer has a client, he says, who wants a missing relative, an aging black man, found.

   He can’t tell Whelan much about the man, but that’s all right — Whelan’s used to that. He takes the case but doesn’t find the man, because the police find him first. Murdered. The cops quickly arrest two young black men, but a friend of the dead man doesn’t think they did it, and talks Whelan into doing some discreet poking around.

   It has better be discreet, because it’s an open murder case and the investigating detective is an old enemy of Whelan’s. Once more into the breach we go, down Chicago’s own particular brand of mean streets.

   I don’t know why, but I seem to like Chicago books better than New York books, whether they’re cop, PI, or whatever. Raleigh does Uptown Chicago about as well as it can be done. The city is as much of a character as most of the people, too.

   I like Paul Whelan a lot. He’s a man who has come to terms with his life and who he is and what he does, and all this without a lot of breast-beating and philosophical posturing. Raleigh tells his tale in the third person through Whelan’s eyes, with a lot of easy, realistic dialogue, and with smooth, clean prose.

   It’s a low key story, about people rather than society or Big Issues, and I think it’s a good one, told by a very good writer.

The Paul Whelan series —

1. Death in Uptown (1991)
2. A Body in Belmont Harbor (1993)
3. The Maxwell Street Blues (1994)
4. Killer on Argyle Street (1995)
5. The Riverview Murders (1997)

JOHN LESCROART – Poison. Dismas Hardy #17. Atria Books, hardcover, February 2018.

First Sentence:   If opening day wasn’t the happiest landmark in Dismas Hardy’s year, he didn’t know what was.

   San Francsico attorney Dismas Hardy is recovering from two gunshot wounds and thinking about retirement. The murder of Grant Wagner, the owner of a successful family business, changes his plans. Abby Jarvis was a former client of Hardy’s and is the prime suspect. She was Wagner’s bookkeeper and was receiving substantial sums of cash off the books, but she claims she is innocent. The further Dismas digs into the family relationships, the more precarious his own life becomes.

   If you’ve not read Lescroart in a while, or ever, this is a good time to change that. He is a true storyteller. He engages the reader from the beginning with his style and humor— “Part of it, of course, was AT&T Park, which to his mind was essentially the platonic ideal of a ballpark. (Although, of course, how could Plato have known?)”

   There is a fair number of characters in the story, but Lescroart is adept at introducing them all and making them distinct enough not to become confused. Having the perspective of the victim’s family is an interesting approach.

   In addition to a good recounting of the past case which caused Hardy to be shot, there is an excellent explanation of the steps and process of the law. Rather than its being dry reading, it involves one as if they are the defendant. Early on, it is revealed that poison was the cause of Wagner’s death, and interesting information on wolfsbane is provided. The link made from the first murder to the second is nicely done as it then becomes personally dangerous to Dismas.

   The mention of food and family— “Hardy made them both an enormous omelet in his black cast-iron pan… They discussed the irony that he’d spiked the eggs with a cheese from Cowgirl Creamery named Mt. Tam, and that Frannie was going out to climb the very same Mount Tamalpais with her women’s hiking group in the next half hour or so.” —local landmarks, and all the San Francisco references, add realism to the story. Another such touch is the mention of a fellow author— “…C.J. Box novel, stopping on a high note when he laughed aloud after coming across the line ‘Nothing spells trouble like two drunk cowboys with a rocket launcher.’”

   Lescroart not only shows what happens on the defense side of a case, but also with the homicide team and, somewhat, with the prosecution team. The crisis within the Hardy household is realistically portrayed. Lescroart has a very good way of subtly increasing the suspense.

   Poison is an extremely well-done legal thriller filled with details which can seem overwhelming yet are interesting and, most of all, important. The well-done plot twists keep one involved and the end makes one think.

      The Dismas Hardy series —

1. Dead Irish (1989)
2. The Vig (1990)
3. Hard Evidence (1993)
4. The 13th Juror (1994)
5. The Mercy Rule (1998)
6. Nothing But the Truth (1999)
7. The Hearing (2000)
8. The Oath (2002)
9. The First Law (2003)
10. The Second Chair (2004)
11. The Motive (2004)
12. Betrayal (2008)
13. A Plague of Secrets (2009)
14. The Ophelia Cut (2013)
15. The Keeper (2014)
16. The Fall (2015)
17. Poison (2018)
18. The Rule of Law (2019)

STEFANIE MATTESON – Murder on High. Charlotte Graham #6. Berkley, hardcover, 1994; paperback; 1995. eBook: Mysterious Press/Open Road, June 2016.

   Though it’s the seventh [sic] Charlotte Graham book, it’s the first hardcover, and Berkley is going to do an East Coast author tour. Mattheson was a journalist at one time, winning several awards for her reporting in science and medicine.

   Charlotte Graham is a well-known seventy-ish actress, not retired but taking a break in Maine while she finishes her autobiography. Her procrastinations in that regard are interrupted when an old friend now a Lieutenant in the State Police takes her to view the home of a woman recently killed in a fall from a mountain and now suspected to have been murdered.

   The woman proves to have been the screenwriter for many of Charlotte’s most successful pictures, a woman blacklisted in the Communist witch hunts of the 50s. What has she been doing that’s gotten her killed, and who to?

   There’s a cozy convention that I can ever get past, one that causes me persistent discomfort — that of a police officer using a civilian as an “assistant.” Yes, yes, I know that all genres have their conventions, but some of them I can stomach and some I don’t. This one I can’t, at least to the degree that its use severely limits my enjoyment of the book.

   Matteson is a smooth writer, Graham is an engaging character, I liked the Maine setting, the other characters were interesting, and I would have enjoyed the book, but — the idea of a Lieutenant in the State Police dragging a 70 year old woman around with him, introducing his to everyone as his “assistant,” and giving her critical police work to do just doesn’t cut it.

   If I want fairy tales, I’ll re-read Grimm. Or maybe Robert Parker.

The Charlotte Graham series —

1. Murder at the Spa (1990)
2. Murder at Teatime (1991)
3. Murder on the Cliff (1991)
4. Murder on the Silk Road (1992)
5. Murder at the Falls (1993)
6. Murder on High (1994)
7. Murder Among the Angels (1996)
8. Murder Under the Palms (1997)