SANDRA WEST PROWELL – Where Wallflowers Die. Phoebe Siegel #3. Walker, hardcover, 1996. Bantam, paperback, 1997.

   I wasn’t as taken with Phoebe’s first two adventures as a lot of people were. I liked them and liked the character, but thought there were some definite rough edges. Prowell has a strong, individual voice, though.

   A Montana politician who’s running for Governor wants Billings PI Phoebe Siegel to investigate the murder of his wife; the catch is, it occurred 27 years ago, and is still an open case. It’s one her dead father had worked on, one that disturbed him a lot.

   Phoebe doesn’t much like politicians, but takes the case anyway. When she starts opening long-closed doors, bad things come out, past death leads to present, and she comes in harm’s way herself.

   I still think Prowell has a way to go before moving up to the Muller /Grafton/Paretsky /Barnes class, but she’s sure better than some female PI writers who are with bigger publishers for probably bigger bucks. My main problem is just that, mine — I don’t find Phoebe Siegel all that likable a protagonist. Too mindlessly antagonistic and wiseass when it’s not called for. Got a mouth on her like a stevedore, too, which may offend some.

   I do think that Prowell tells a pretty good story, and I liked the fact that the ending was at least semi-realistic and didn’t culminate in an orgy of needless violence. Really, if you take to ol’ Phoebe you’ll probably think these are pretty damned good.

      The Phoebe Siegel series —

1. By Evil Means (1993)
2. The Killing of Monday Brown (1994)
3. When Wallflowers Die (1996)

      Awards —

Dilys Awards Best Book nominee (1994) : By Evil Means
Shamus Awards Best Novel nominee (1995) : The Killing of Monday Brown
Shamus Awards Best Novel nominee (1997) : When Wallflowers Die

JOHN LUTZ – The Right to Sing the Blues. Alo Nudger #3. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1986. Tor, paperback, 1988. iBooks, softcover, 2001.

   Alo Nudger is a PI home based in St. Louis, but as a diehard jazz fan, when he gets a chance to take a case in New Orleans, and a potentially lucrative one at that, he jumps at the chance. One of his idols, former clarinetist Fat Jack McGee, now a night club owner, has a problem: his current piano player is making eyes at the young girl now singing for Fat Jack at his club. Problem is, the girl is anonymously the daughter of New Orleans most notorious crime lord.

   Trouble is brewing, and Fat Jack needs Nudger to get him out of it.

   The gimmick in the Alo Nudger stories is that the man has a nervous stomach – a very nervous stomach – and he takes antacids totally non-stop throughout the story. Personally I think as a gimmick, it’s overdone, but you have to admit that it’s also unique.

   John Lutz, who died in 2021, was a very good writer. His prose flows smooth and easily, with every so often an especially nice turn of phrase, and his characters are substantially more than two-dimensional. What bothered me, though, plotwise, is why his investigation annoys so many people, including the cops and a pair of thugs who take utter delight in beating him up every so often.

   It’s all straightened out by the end of the book though, when all of the pieces finally fall into place. All in all, not an epic piece, but an entirely enjoyable one.

   Rating on my trademarked H/B [hard-boiled] scale: 4.8. Too many Tums!
   

      The Alo Nudger series –

1. Buyer Beware (1976)
2. Night Lines (1985)
3. The Right to Sing the Blues (1986)
4. Ride the Lightning (1987)
5. Dancer’s Debt (1988)
6. Time Exposure (1989)
7. Diamond Eyes (1990)
8. Thicker Than Blood (1993)
9. Death by Jury (1995)
10. Oops! (1998)
The Nudger Dilemmas (story collection, 2001)

MAXINE O’CALLAGHAN – Set-Up Delilah Wesr #4. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1991. Worldwide, paperback, 1994.

   Delilah West’s write-up on the Thrilling Detective website begins thusly:

   
   On the basis of Set-Up, this the fourth novel in the series, it’s clear that an injustice has been done. It is as good as any of those featuring those other PI’s above, but neither the author or Delilah West herself ever caught the eye of readers in meaningful way that I know of.

   After successfully closing the case on a secretary whom she has found embezzling funds from her boss, Delilah’s next case concerns a bomb threat a environmental activist has received. In one of those coincidences that really do happen in the real world as well as fiction, the two cases ar connected, and her new client is suspect number one in the death of the woman convicted in Chapter One.

   It’s quite a complicated case, with suspects and entangled relationships all over the place, but O’Callghan’s smooth and easy prose make the whole affair go down smooth and easy. There is, I warn male readers, a hint of coziness when Delilah ruminates a notch too often about the men in her life, most of whom are carry-overs from the earlier books (and can easily be ignored, if you are so inclined), but the case itself carries on in fine old PI fashion, whether male or female. (And the bomb threat is quite real throughout the book.)
   

      The Delilah West novels —

Death Is Forever (1981)
Run From the Nightmare (1982)
Hit and Run (1989)
Set-Up (1991)
Trade-Off (1996)
Down For the Count (1997)

   â€“ plus seven scattered short stories.

DOUG HORNIG – The Dark Side. Loren Swift #3, Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1986; paperback, 1987.

   PI Loren Swift works out of Charlottesville, Virginia, and this is the third book of his adventures. He’s hired in this one to find out why carbon monoxide detector failed to operate properly. A man is dead.

   His current lady friend is in a hospital in a coma, and it gets a little sticky when he’s assigned a female assistant. It’s an intense sort of book, full of highly charged emotions and entangled relationships – including sexual ones – and, yes, murder.

      The Loren Swift series —

Foul Shot. Scribner 1984
Hardball. Scribner 1985
The Dark Side. Mysterious Press 1986
Deep Dive. Mysterious Press 1988

PATRICK KELLEY – Sleightly Invisible. Harry Calderwood #3. Avon, paperback original, 1986.

   Another mystery with magic involved (*) – Kelley’s detective (this is his third adventure) is a magician named Harry Calderwood. Harry was once a big name, on TV and all, but he is now doing street corners. I don’t know why. Maybe I should read the earlier books.

   But maybe I won’t, since I found this one rather disappointing. It involves a missing coed that Harry is forced into finding. Harry has a glib tongue, but his attempts at humor seem to miss tw7o times out of three.  The mystery he solves also needs some work.

   
      ____

(*) I was referring here to the book The Wealth Seekers, the Shadow paperback by Maxwell Grant reviewed a few days ago on this blog.

      The Harry Calderwood series —

Sleightly Murder. Avon 1985.
Sleightly Lethal. Avon 1986.
Sleightly Invisible. Avon 1986
Sleightly Deceived. Avon 1987.
Sleightly Guilty. Avon 1988.

ROBERT KYLE – Kill Now, Pay Later. Ben Gates #3. Dell First Edition B178, paperback original; 1st printing, December 1960. Reprinted as by Robert Terrall (Hard Case Crime, paperback, 2007). Cover art for each by Robert McGinnis.

   This one starts off with Ben Gates hard at work doing a job not often brought up in the world of PI fiction: namely watching over the wedding gifts at a very fancy affair in the outskirts of New York City. The affair is so upscale that Ben has hired an assistant to keep watch on the outside while he’s stuck in the house on the inside.

   It’s a good thing he did, too, as things do not go smoothly. First an inebriated bridesmaid comes into the room where he is standing guard, and the first thing she does is put on a very expensive diamond bracelet and refuse to take it off. It’s a touchy situation, and before Ben is sure he (and his assistant) have it under control, he finds himself falling asleep.

   The coffee he drank to keep himself awake was drugged.

   When he wakes up the next morning, he learns that a burglar had been at work in the house during the night. The bride’s mother, having surprised the intruder in her room, has died of a heart attack, and his assistant had shot and killed the thief.

   Everything’s fine, otherwise, except for Ben’s reputation, and to remedy that, he takes himself on as a client. What follows is a rollicking romp of a case, with lots of lovely ladies to distract Ben from following up on the clues he finds (basically how did the thief, a city fellow, know that the picking would be so good at this particular time and place?). The lovely ladies all have the way of wearing clothing (or not) as to best attract Ben’s attention, and maybe a male reader’s, too.

   Shades of Richard Prather’s Shell Scott stories – straight out of the same Author’s Handbook. No maybe about it.

   A plot line involving a case of possible arson, badger games, naughty photos, blackmail and the like builds up at length to the bursting point. At which time All Hell Breaks Loose.

   Who’d have thought a simple case of watching wedding gifts would turn out to be so complicated? And fun!
   

      The Ben Gates series —

Blackmail, Inc. Dell 1958.
Model for Murder. Dell 1959.
Kill Now, Pay Later. Dell 1960.
Some Like It Cool. Dell 1962.
Ben Gates Is Hot. Dell 1964.
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ROGER L. SIMON – Wild Turkey.  Moses Wine #2. Straight Arrow, hardcover, 1974. Pocket, paperback, 1976. Warner, paperback, 1986.  iBooks, softcover, 2000.

   The second Moses Wine book and in my view a better and less confused book than the first, The Big Fix. From the word go the pace is hectic as Wine, initially challenged to clear best selling author Jock Hecht of the murder of a famous TV woman newscaster, finds himself chasing desperately after Hecht’s killer and searching for some mysterious tapes before he himself is bumped off.

   There’s a touch of the Donald Westlake about some of it, and by and large I enjoyed it. I’m not sure that I believe in Wine’s strange domestic set up or casual sex life — but I’m not sure that it matters.

   
      The Moses Wine series —

The Big Fix. Straight Arrow, 1973.
Wild Turkey. Straight Arrow, 1974.
Peking Duck. Simon & Schuster, 1979.
California Roll. Villard, 1985.
The Straight Man. Villard, 1986.
Raising the Dead. Villard, 1988.
Director’s Cut, Atria, 2003.

IAIN PEARS – The Last Judgment. Jonathan Argyll #4. Scribner, hardcover, 1996. Berkley, paperback, 1999.

   I’ve only read one other in this series, and my vague memory of it was that it was a quite decent read, if nothing major.

   Expatriate British art dealer Jonathan Argyll, now living in Rome, is having a rough season of it. While in Paris buying some sketches for a museum, he works out a deal with a Parisian dealer — if the dealer will see that the sketches are shipped to America, Argyll will deliver one of the dealer’s paintings to a buyer in Rome.

   Nothing could be simpler, right?

   Wrong. First someone tries to steal the painting in the train station, and then a murder is connected with it. Then there’s another, and Argyll’s lover, Flavia di Stefano of Rome’s Art Squad, gets involved The Parisian police are strangely obfuscatory, so Argyll and de Stefano follow the trail back to Paris and secrets buried since World War II and into some serious danger.

   I enjoy this series. I like the art background (though in one sense there isn’t much of it in this one), I like the European setting,  and I like the  characters. These aren’t major books by any means, probably on a par with and similar to Aaron Elkins’ Chris Norgren series, but they are enjoyable. In these days of bloated books about serial killers and women in peril, I value my minor pleasures more and more.

      
      The Jonathan Argyll series —

1. The Raphael Affair (1990)
2. The Titian Committee (1991)
3. The Bernini Bust (1992)
4. The Last Judgement (1993)
5. Giotto’s Hand (1994)
6. Death and Restoration (1996)
7. The Immaculate Deception (2000)

EARL NORMAN – Kill Me on the Ginza. Burns Bannion #6. Berkley Y626, paperback original, 1962. Barye Phillips cover art. Also available in ebook format (Kindle).

   You know the old saying, “you can’t keep a good thing down?” It seems sometimes you can’t keep a bad thing down either, which explains why Earl Norman’s Burns Bannion novels are back in print.

   Burns Bannion is an expatriate American private eye in Tokyo (each book gives us a long winded explanation how the Japanese would never give an American a P. I. License so Bannion is enrolled as a college student, but never goes to class), and an expert in karate. Literally the little bits of karate you get in these slender books is about the only reason to read them though they promised at times to be so bad they are good without quite making it.

   This one opens with our hero in a club on the Ginza, the neon club district in wide open Post War Tokyo, Burns is leaving a club when a pneumatic Japanese performer heaving precariously in her low cut outfit smacks him over the head with a metal tray.

   
   So far I can’t disagree with anything she says.

   This is really poverty row private eye stuff with a little international intrigue and exotic locations thrown in. In every book Bannion meets one dimensional (character wise, physically they are three dimensional) Japanese women in various states of undress and gets drawn into pretty non-dimensional cases.

   Bannion fails to recognize this one because she has her clothes on, and he last saw her a week earlier in the buff posing at the Art Photography Studio for Photo Fans also on the Ginza (next to the Urological and Sexual Institute we are told) where Bannion had pretended to be a photographer to check her out for a client, Hedges, a correspondent. Seems the girl, G. N. Noriko was a friend of Bill Crea a missing correspondent who disappeared on a trip to Kobe.

   Before he can go to Kobe though Inspector Ezawa, another Karate man, picks up Bannion and Hedges and takes them to the train station where a dismembered body has been found, and the police have been sent his head in a bowling bag. Bill Crea’s head.

   Not a terrible opening despite Norman’s somewhat tiresome version of wise guy private eye-ese. In this one he’s battling a cult, the Oshira, based on a prototype of modern Japanese gods and predating Buddhism, the hidden god, and something called the Grand Apex which turns out to be a front for sex trafficking from Korea while Bannion gets help from G. N. (and you do not want to know what those initials stand for) and a stripper called Bay-bee.

   There’s also a philosophical criminal called House Charnel who talks like Nietzsche on LSD: “We are all born into the world as enemies.”

   I can see where these time killers were exotic enough at the time to draw some readers. The plots are serviceable, there is a lot of talk about sex and pneumatic Japanese beauties, and of course karate battle aplenty (I wanted to get my hands free so I could Karate-chop the Whore-master to his just rewards.).

   I have a feeling that many people feel more kindly about these than I do, and I have no problem with that.

   I will give Norman this, he manages to keep the action boiling down to the last page and without a single chapter break — that’s right, the edition I read had no chapter breaks, just continuous narrative, and I have a suspicion this may be his best book, though that isn’t saying a lot. He knows something about Japan and probably could have parlayed that into something interesting, but never does.
   

      The Burns Bannion series —

Kill Me in Tokyo. Berkley 1958 [Tokyo]
Kill Me in Shimbashi. Berkley 1959 [Tokyo]
Kill Me in Yokohama. Berkley 1960 [Japan]
Kill Me in Shinjuku. Berkley 1961 [Tokyo]
Kill Me in Yoshiwara. Berkley 1961 [Tokyo]
Kill Me in Atami. Berkley 1962 [Japan]
Kill Me on the Ginza. Berkley 1962 [Tokyo]
Kill Me in Yokosuka. Erle 1966 [Japan]
Kill Me in Roppongi. Erle 1967 [Japan]

POUL ANDERSON – Murder Bound. Trygve Yamamura #3. Macmillan, hardcover, 1962.

   Authors better known for other sorts of writing have occasionally produced good detective novels. Tales by A. A.Milne, C. P. Snow, Antonia Fraser, Isaac Asimov and William F. Buckley (well kind of) come immediately to mind.

   Poul Anderson, the accomplished science fiction and fantasy author, tried his hand at three detective novels between 1959 and 1962. It’s not surprising that the strongest sections of his third mystery, Murder Bound, contain some fantasy elements, especially the scenes connecting Norse sea-legends with modern mystery.

   The book opens with Conrad Lauring returning to America aboard the liner Valborg and listening to tales of Draugs, the ghosts of men drowned st sea. A sailor named Benrud then unaccountably starts a fight and disappears overboard. When Lauring reaches San Francisco, his life is threatened by apparent manifestations of a faceless Draug (Benrud’s ghost), dripping seaweed and all.

   Though Anderson gives some fine atmospheric descriptions of San Francisco, he remainder of Murder Bound is a letdown.· For one thing, it’s difficult to take seriously the investigations of someone named Trygve Yamamura. I’m not kidding; that’s really’ is the name of Anderaon’s private eye. He’s half-Norwegian,. half-Hawaiian, a judo expert who collects Samurai swords.

   Maybe if Anderson had made Yamamura’s Aryan Hawaiianism part of the story, the detective would be acceptable; but in fact; he’s just a normal P,I., and one who seems a bit slow on the uptake. Second, not only is the identity of the Draug  obvious, but the solution assumes an amazing amount of incompetence from a former Gestapo agent.

   There are enough good sections in Murder  Bound to justify spending a few hours with it, but it is not really worthy of an author who could produce such-splendid fantasy novels as A Midsummer’s Tempest and Three Hearts and Three Lions.

The Trygve Yamamura series —

   Poul Anderson: (novels)

Perish by the Sword.  Macmillan 1959.
Murder in Black Letter. Macmillan 1960.
Murder Bound. Macmillan 1962.

   Poul Anderson: (short stories)

Pythagorean Romaji. The Saint Mystery Magazine, December 1959
Stab in the Back. The Saint Mystery Magazine, March 1960
The Gentle Way.  The Saint Mystery Magazine, August 1960,

   Karen & Poul Anderson: (short story)

Dead Phone. The Saint Mystery Magazine, December 1964