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

MARGARET SCHERF – The Elk and the Evidence. Rev. Martin Buell #4. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1952.

   Reverend Martin Buell is an Episcopal rector in Farrington, Montana, but some how or another, he always seems to find himself caught up in yet another murder case, The Elk and the Evidence appearing right in the middle of his crime-solving career. Margaret Scherf, the teller of his adventures, as well as those of her other series characters, Grace Severance (4 books), Emily & Henry Bryce (4 books), Lt. Ryan (2 books), as well as a sizable number of standalones, is known for her light humorous approach to writing detective fiction, and the example at hand is no exception.

   The case is threefold. (1) A package of elk meat given to Buell as a gift unaccountably contains a man’s toe. (2) A hunter who was a member of a large hunting party has gone missing. And (3) a girl coming to Montana to vet out a wealthy man as possible marriage material encounters two men in hunting clothes leaving a third man overnight in a lower train berth while on her way home.

   Are the three incidents connected? You bet they are.

   The humor comes quietly in almost every page of the first half of the book – only a smile perhaps, but most detective novels have none. The smiles don’t come from wacky behavior, but largely from Buell’s observation of people and the natural order of things in a small town in which everybody knows everybody else. The girl, a natural redhead, has to be put up in a widower’s spare bedroom, for example, which causes a lot of curiosity.

   This is a lot of fun to read, as you can imagine, but unfortunately the detective end of things is, to coin a word,  disappointing. Reverend Buell tries, but as as a man of the cloth, nothing more, he has no way to conduct any kind of proper investigation. The conclusion tries to tie all the preceding events together, but where all of the facts relevant to a motive came from, it is hard to say. And why the man’s toe was removed is even harder to explain. I didn’t even try to follow.
   

      The Rev. Martin Buell series –

Always Murder a Friend. Doubleday 1948.
Gilbert’s Last Toothache. Doubleday 1949.
The Curious Custard Pie. Doubleday 1950.
The Elk and the Evidence. Doubleday 1952.
The Cautious Overshoes. Doubleday 1956.
Never Turn Your Back. Doubleday 1959.
The Corpse in the Flannel Nightgown. Doubleday 1965.

NANCY BELL – Biggie and the Poisoned Politician. Biggie Weatherford #1, hardcover, St. Martin’s, 1996; paperback, 1997.

   And here we have a first novel by an Austin, Texas lady who is a sorority house-mother at the University of Texas, and who is at work on the next Biggie Weatherford novel.

   Biggie Weatherford is the wealthiest woman in the small East Texas town of Job’s Crossing, and somewhat more than semi-eccentric. When the city fathers decide to put a landfill next to her farm and ancestral graveyard she rises up in righteous wrath, which is further fueled by a strip-mining operation sniffing around the area. But before she can accomplish anything a boarder has his car blown up, a city official is killed, and a mysterious stranger shows up in town.

   Well, they don’t come any cozier than this-pure fluff and a yard wide, but fortunately not very long (200 pages). It’s even got a recipe at the end, for God’s sake. And I actually sort of (*blush*) enjoyed it. It’s narrated by the lead’s 12 year old grandson in a fairly authentic rural Texas voice, which along with the characters was most of its appeal for me. They were painted with a very broad brush, but anyone who’s lived in a small town won’t have trouble recognizing a few of them.

   Bell stumbles once or twice with the voice (a regional first person voice is hard to write for 200 pages, even if you’re raised to speak it) and has a cat doing something a cat wouldn’t do, and the plot is the usual cozy silliness, but if you’re not expecting too much going in, you  might be pleasantly surprised.

   An aside — I’ll be interested to see if she catches any heat from the P.C. crowd for not only portraying a black woman as a maid, but having her have a shiftless husband and be a voodoo woman as well.

      The Biggie Weatherford series —

1. Biggie and the Poisoned Politician (1996)
2. Biggie and the Mangled Mortician (1997)
3. Biggie and the Fricasseed Fat Man (1998)
4. Biggie and the Meddlesome Mailman (1999)
5. Biggie and the Quincy Ghost (2001)
6. Biggie and the Devil Diet (2002)

CAROLYN WESTON – Rouse the Demon. Casey Kellog & Al Krug #3. Random House, hardcover, 1976. Brash Books, softcover, 2015.

   A psychologist trying hypnotism as therapy for juvenile drug addicts is murdered. Cops Casey Kellog and Al Krug investigate and find Dr. Myrick more apprentice than sorcerer. No miracle cures for this encounter group.

   This is the third of the series of novels that inspired the TV show The Streets of San Francisco. It’s plagued by both spotty and shoddy police work, as far as I’m concerned, detracting greatly from a decent plot conception. It’s also very tempting to add that the television actors bring a great deal to their roles, and I would, if I watched it more than once a year.

Rating: C.

   
      The Casey Kellog & Al Krug series —

Poor, Poor Ophelia. Random House, 1972.
Susannah Screaming. Random House, 1975.
Rouse the Demon.  Random House, 1976.

FREDERICK C. DAVIS – The Deadly Miss Ashley. Schyler Cole & Luke Speare #1. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1950. Pocket #804, paperback, 1951.

   I read and collect Davis’s books mostly because he was an extremely prolific writer for the detective pulp magazines, but if you were to pin me down I couldn’t tell you anything significant that he wrote for them. Maybe the Operator #5 pulp-hero stories?

   Here the detective Agency is Scyler Cole’s, but the switch os that he plays Watson to his own legman, Luke Speare, who appears to have all the brains and energy. The problem is to discover which of the many women inn the case is the accomplice awaiting an embezzler’s return from prison, the loot still hidden.

   The deductions get tedious and self-contradictory, the plot contrived and essentially unreal, but the clues are fair and the killer is deadly. The case hinges to large extent on an undecipherable method of shorthand, invented and taught by a lady in Baltimore – a touch of insanity indeed.

Rating: C

      The Schyler Cole & Luke Speare series —

The Deadly Miss Ashley. Doubleday 1950.
Lilies in Her Garden Grew. Doubleday 1951.
Tread Lightly, Angel. Doubleday 1952.
Drag the Dark. Doubleday 1953.
Another Morgue Heard From. Doubleday 1954.
Night Drop. Doubleday 1955

NEVADA BARR – Firestorm. Anna Pigeon #4. Putnam, hardcover, 1996. Avon, paperback, 1997.

   Barr is one of those authors who seems to have taken the field more or less by storm, and whose first novel commands a ridiculous price from dealers. I’ve only read one of her previous three books, the second, and thought it was well written prose-wise but had an excruciatingly unlikely plot denouement. I felt sort of sad when I started this, because it was a a book that a god friend had harangued me about reading.

   Forest ranger and EMT Anna Pigeon is attached to a firefighting crew that’s battling a monster blaze in the National Forest and Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California when disaster strikes. Just as the fire appears to be winding down, a change in the weather causes a firestorm and Anna and the crew are caught by it.

   Most survive, but most are burned to one degree or another, and they are isolated from rescue by terrain and weather. When they check for survivors, one of the casualties is not only burned, but stabbed. Those that remain must worry not only about surviving injury and the elements, but the presence of a murderer in their midst.

   I liked this. Anna Pigeon is a very engaging character (at least in this book; I don’t remember liking her as well in the other), and here Barr writes a very lean, straightforward style of prose and tells a hell of a good story. The nearest I’ve come to to fighting forest fires is brush and grassland, but I’ve seen firestorms, and if Barr hasn’t been there and done that, she’s listened well to someone who has. The realism of the fire scenes is astounding.

   Barr did a good job with the supporting cast and the mystery was adequate, but this was as much about coping and survival as anything else, to me. Good book.

   
      The Anna Pigeon series —

1. Track of the Cat (1993)
2. A Superior Death (1994)
3. Ill Wind (1995)
4. Firestorm (1996)
5. Endangered Species (1997)
6. Blind Descent (1998)
7. Liberty Falling (1999)
8. Deep South (2000)
9. Blood Lure (2001)
10. Hunting Season (2002)
11. Flashback (2003)
12. High Country (2004)
13. Hard Truth (2005)
14. Winter Study (2008)
15. Borderline (2009)
16. Burn (2010)
17. The Rope (2012)
18. Destroyer Angel (2014)
19. Boar Island (2016)

BART SPICER – Black Sheep, Run. Carney Wilde #4. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1951. Bantam #1049, paperback, 1952.

   Carney Wilde is one of the top private eyes in Philadelphia. He just opened his brand new office that he can’t afford and a cop he knows busts in on the office-warming party and urgently needs to talk to him.

   The police superintendent committed suicide a week back, but he left a note confessing to graft and naming names. New Jersey gamblers had been paying off cops to look the other way when shuttle services shipped Philadelphians to and fro from Jersey to enjoy an evening of debauchery. The list included the name of a mutual friend, the most honorable homicide detective on the force. The cop hires Carney Wilde to clear his name.

   Wilde heads to Jersey to try to figure out the payoff structure. He ends up getting tailed by another P.I. hired by a reform group of mugwumps aiming to clean up corruption in the City of Brotherly Love. But before Wilde knows it, he’s been framed for the murder of the mugwumps’ P.I., and now the law is after him too. Now Wilde not only has to vindicate the cop, but vindicate himself whilst uncovering the deep dark twisted conspiracy behind the framing of the innocent by the grifters themselves. Who’s behind the conspiracy? And why are the mugwumps so embedded in the swamp?

   Hopefully I’m not giving too much away by saying that the story’s a bit reminiscent of One Lonely Night and The Manchurian Candidate.

   Carney Wilde is a believable, likeable, very human detective, with all the frailties and passions of an everyday guy. He’s no hero. He’s just trying his best. Which is generally good enough.

   I enjoyed the book, as I did the only other in the series I’ve tried (The Long Green). I think he deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Ross Macdonald and Thomas Dewey and William Campbell Gault. Which is to say that, to apply Somerset Maugham’s self-denigrating quote: “in the very top rank of the second rate.”
   

      The Carney Wilde series —

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