E. BAKER QUINN – One Man’s Muddle. Heinemann, UK, hardcover, 1936. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1937.

   Two years before Raymond Chandler introduced us to Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1939), E. Baker Quinn, a British writer, anticipated both his voice and his attempt to do something more serious with the detective novel with her first novel about former Scotland Yard sleuth James Strange, an accomplishment noted by critic James Sandoe in his famous list of notable hard-boiled writers.

   When we first meet her sleuth James Strange, he has fled to a “… tu’penny ha’penny inn a hundred miles from nowhere,” to escape his past. But he knows it’s hopeless. “Do a bunk to the jungles of Africa and ten to one you’ll meet your mother-in-law’s char coming around the first bush …”

   And for Strange it is much worse than his mother-in-law’s charwoman. He’s runs smack into the former Mrs. Boynton, now Mrs. Geoffrey Wharton, a former London snowbird, an addict, who knows all about Scotland Yard’s former bright young thing who has just completed four years in the pen for possession of illegal drugs.

   And of course Mrs. Wharton is promptly murdered, and Strange finds himself forced to help her husband cover up her past while trying to cover up his own and keep the police from finding the .32 caliber automatic hidden in his luggage, the gun he used in a manslaughter case he was acquitted in — but would rather not bring up again — and coincidentally, the same caliber Mrs. Wharton was shot with …

   His attempts to keep his head above water push him deeper into the mess, and force him back to his ex-fiancee in London and to Ratchet, the partner who ratted on him and testified against him as King’s evidence.

   That’s the set up for a novel that anticipates the style and voice of Chandler’s novels:

   Before it is over Strange will solve the case, but find himself facing another two years in prison.

   In later books Strange gets out of prison and goes to work as a private eye with his despised ex-partner Ratchet. The voice continues in the Chandler vein.

   Who Quinn was, and how she came to discover a voice and subject matter so close to Chandler is a mystery in itself. But her books are worth discovering and reading, and Strange a curious compliment to Marlowe and his world.

   Here are a few samples of Quinn and Strange:

   One Man’s Muddle and its sequels are an interesting look at a Marlowe that might have been, one of those curious side roads that sometime run parallel to a more successful track. And well worth reading and discovering as first rate mysteries by a writer who deserved more recognition than she got.

         Bibliographic data: [From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin]

QUINN, E(LEANOR) BAKER

       One Man’s Muddle (n.) Heinemann 1936. Macmillan, 1937. [James Strange]
       The Dead Harm No One (n.) Heinemann 1938.    (**)
       Death Is a Restless Sleeper (n.) Heinemann 1940. Mystery House, 1941. [James Strange]

(**) While it seems likely that he is, it is not known whether James Strange is in this book or not.

RICHARD ROSEN – Fadeaway. Harper & Row, 1986. Paperback reprint: Onyx, July 1989.

   Robert B. Parker may not be the best private eye writer of the eighties but surely he’s the most influential, as witness the horde of newcomers to the field who have used his pretentious, wildly overrated, consistently best-selling series about the Boston PI Spenser as their takeoff point.

   Richard Rosen, winner of the Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for the best first crime novel of 1985, deserves another prize for. using Parker most creatively.

   The main character both in Fadeaway and in Rosen’s prizewinning Strike Three You’re Dead is a sort of Jewish Spenser, at least in the sense that each man is a smart-mouthed jock from Boston with a liberated live-in lady and a snootful of angst.

   Harvey Blissberg has turned hesitantly to the PI game after the early end of his career as a major-league outfielder, but he’s not very good at his new line of work and all his cases seem to come to him from his sports world connections. In Fadeaway he’s hired simultaneously by the Boston Celtics and the Washington Bullets to find out why a basketball star from each team vanished from Logan Airport within forty-eight hours of one another.

   When both players are found shot to death, Harvey follows the trail into the seamy world of college sports recruiting, and his hunch that the murders are tied in with the seven-year-old “accidental” death of a high school basketball champ in a dark bus tunnel stirs up the usual hornet’s nest of corruption.

   If Ross Macdonald had written this book, the plot would have been so convoluted you’d need a chart to sort out who did what to whom. Rosen goes to the opposite extreme, leaving out complexity and surprise almost entirely.

   If Parker had written the book, there would have been a violent confrontation in every chapter. Rosen avoids action scenes almost entirely, too. But he’s an excellent stylist, with the ability to describe an American city (in this case Providence, Rhode Island) and the inner world of desperately lonely people as well as any PI novelist now at work.

   What sets Rosen apart from everyone else in the field, however, is his gift for shifting without effort from the film noir gear into another mode entirely. Here for example is Harvey anguishing over the case with his girlfriend, Mickey:

   Jock though he’s supposed to be, Harvey is the only PI in the literature who cries out to be played by Woody Allen.

    Fadeaway is crammed with scenes which are not only hilarious in their own right, but marvelous as parodies of the tiresome philosophic shticks in the Spenser novels. It’s light on action and complexity, but the first-rate dialogue and characterizations and the rich anti-Parker subtext make this one a joy to read.

    Bibliography — Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

ROSEN, R(ichard) D(ean), 1949- . SC: Harvey Blissberg, in all titles.

      Strike Three You’re Dead. Walker, hc, 1984. Signet, pb, 1986. Walker, trade pb, 2001.

      Fadeaway. Harper & Row, hc, 1986; Onyx, pb, 1989.

      Saturday Night Dead. Viking, hc, 1988; Onyx, pb, 1989.

      World of Hurt. Walker, hc, 1994.

      Dead Ball. Walker, hc, 2001.

BRUCE ALEXANDER – Rules of Engagement.

Berkley, paperback; 1st printing, February 2006. Hardcover edition: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, March 2005.

   This is the first of Bruce Alexander’s “Sir John Fielding” detective novels that I’ve read, and no, I didn’t realize it until after I’d picked it out to read that this is also the last one that Alexander ever wrote. And as perhaps you already knew, Bruce Alexander was the pen name of Bruce Cook, 1932-2003, who wrote eleven mysteries under that name. Under his own name, he had five earlier ones, four of them with Antonio “Chico” Cervantes as the leading character.

   Now it gets interesting. (I’ll get back to Antonio “Chico” Cervantes in a minute.) Cook also was at least in part responsible for writing William J. Coughlin’s last book after he (Coughlin) died, The Judgment (St. Martin’s, 1997). I’m quoting from Al Hubin in Crime Fiction IV now: “Apparently written by Bruce Cook from a beginning by Coughlin, then finished and polished by widow Ruth Coughlin.”

   The reason is that this is interesting, is that this is precisely how Rules of Engagement got written. From the back cover, and quoting again: “He (Bruce Cook) died in 2003, having completed most of Rules of Engagement, and left notes on how the rest of the story unfolded. John Shannon, author of the highly praised Jack Liffey series, most recently Dangerous Games, completed the novel with Bruce’s wife, Joan Alexander.”

   As coincidences go, it would be rather minor, but was it a coincidence? Probably not. The idea was there, and the Bruce Cook and his wife simply carried it out in the same way it had been done before. And as you can easily imagine, there are both pluses and minuses in doing so.

   But before getting into that, and to Sir John Fielding and what the book (and the series) is about, I promised to tell you something about Chico Cervantes. This Thrilling Detective link will tell you more, but perhaps it suffices to say that Cervantes was a Mexican-American ex-LA cop turned private eye whose stomping grounds were (as you probably already guessed) Southern California.

   His four recorded cases, published between 1988 and 1994, did not seem to turn the mystery fiction world on fire, and in fact, only one of the four, the first, Mexican Standoff, was ever published in paperback, the other three only in hardcover.

   For whatever that tells you. In any case (no pun intended) the year the last Cervantes book came out, 1994, was the same year that Blind Justice, the first Sir John Fielding novel appeared. Cook, as Alexander, at the age of 62, had hit the equivalent of pay dirt.

   I’ll append a complete list of the highly popular Fielding books at the end of this review. (I have them all. They are, unfortunately, still in the TBR (To Be Read) portion of the basement.)

   Sir John Fielding, as I hasten now to tell you (at last), was the blind English magistrate who was the real-life founder of London’s first true police force, the Bow Street Runners, in the mid-to-late 1700s.

   What’s interesting about one of Alexander’s Fielding books, An Experiment in Treason, Benjamin Franklin makes an appearance. Unlike Robert Lee Hall’s series of books of the latter’s London adventures, though, in Treason Franklin is a suspect, not the detective, while in Hall’s books, Fielding is only a (relatively) minor character.

   In the books by Bruce Alexander, Fielding’s household and close-knit circle of friends and close acquaintances takes center stage, filled to abundance with family, servants, many of which (if not most) are fictional. Especial note should be made of the narrator of the tales, one Jeremy Proctor, Fielding’s protege with him throughout the series, an orphan taken under his wing as a dogsbody, now in Rules of Engagement all of eighteen and Sir John’s clerk at the Bow Street Court.

   The title comes in part from the fact that Jeremy is engaged to be married to Clarissa Roundtree, the other orphan taken in by the Fieldings: Clarissa as Lady Fielding’s general factotum, and as the book begins, he (Jeremy) is beginning to wonder greatly about his future. (On page 241 there is another context in which “rules of engagement” come into play.)

   The mystery is extremely slight, but of course it needs to be mentioned. It concerns the strange death of Lord Lammermoor, who has recently jumped to his death from a bridge while crossing the Thames alone.

   Several chapters later (or to be precise, in Chapter Three) the case is all but solved when Fielding and his entourage are entertained at the theater by a practitioner of “animal magnetism” and/or “mesmerism.” The only question that remains (to the reader, that is) is who is responsible, and while I cannot reveal his/her name, you will know as soon as he/she enters the story. (Ventriloquy is also an important factor, but my telling you that will neither enlighten you further, or less.)

   One hopes for more, but more there is not, save 200 pages in which a great happens, but very little of any consequence. All in all, what the authors in combination have provided is nothing less than a worthy attempt to tie up some loose ends for the readers who followed the series and the characters from early on — but not all of them (the loose ends, that is). Life happens, and that is what is left for the reader to contemplate. This is one of the aforementioned pluses.

   For someone expecting a detective story with some solid, down-to-earth detective work going on, either Mr. Alexander did not have one in mind, or if he did, neither his wife nor John Shannon were able to build one out of the notes that he left them. This is one of the aforementioned minuses.

   For the record, the pluses outweigh the minuses, but personally, coming in at the end as I did, I left with a feeling of disappointment that I sincerely wished I hadn’t — come in at the end, that is.

   If you’d like to call my verdict “mixed,” you’d certainly be right. I wouldn’t deny it at all.

      The Sir John Fielding novels by Bruce Alexander:

   All were published in hardcover by Putnam and in paperback by Berkley. The dates are of the hardcover editions; the paperback generally appeared a year later.

Blind Justice. 1994.

Murder in Grub Street. 1995.

Watery Grave. 1996.

Person or Persons Unknown. 1997.

Jack, Knave and Fool. 1998.

Death of a Colonial. 1999.

The Color of Death. 2000.

Smuggler’s Moon. 2001.

An Experiment in Treason. 2002.

The Price of Murder. 2003.

Rules of Engagement. 2005.

MARK BURNELL – Chameleon. Avon; reprint paperback, March 2003. HarperCollins hardcover, 2002.

   A spy thriller about a female assassin, the best in the business that there is. She’s Stephanie Patrick a/k/a Stephanie Schneider a/k/a Petra Reuter and quite a few others as the book goes on, and at the beginning of this 400-plus page novel, she’s burned out, in hiding from her British overseers, and (more significantly) from herself.

   This retreat may be caused in large part, by events, in an earlier novel, The Rhythm Section, but since I seem to have missed the book completely, that’s only a strong conjecture.

   But adding to a theory I’m still in the process of developing, there’s something I’ve decided to call the Heinz test. The precise numerical value is still subject to empirical study, and hence revision, but at the present time it goes something like this. If after reading 57 pages, and nothing in the book has happened that makes you really want to keep reading, why should you?

   On page 57 Stephanie is the midst of being involuntarily rehabilitated, being fitted up for service again. And even though the problem she’s being groomed to tackle, something to do with plutonium being smuggled out of somewhere into somewhere, was moderately non-interesting, the reclamation project she’s being forced to undergo was engaging and challenging enough for me to give the book a tentative and conditional go-ahead.

   There’s a re-evaluation stage that comes next, and I’ll call this one the Dalmatian test. When I got to this point, I stopped, and I stalled out again. If I may, I’ll quote for you a paragraph from page 101:

   There’s more immediately following, three or more paragaphs in a similar vein. Information dumps like these occur far too often. Every minor character seems to have his or her own long history, and in turgid detail. Also making the book unappealing is that it’s also difficult to root for an assassin, whether she’s on “our side” or not. A writer like Donald Westlake can pull it off, a lesser author can not.

   (Note to self: It’s obviously time to put Westlake on the to-be-read list, and maybe Eric Ambler too. See below.)

   Ambler’s early heroes were ordinary people, as I recall, caught up in events beyond their control, and managing somehow to still survive. Stephanie has too many contacts, too much money, and even with all the psychological baggage she carries with her, and the love affair that’s all-too-apparently going nowhere, she’s far too competent at what she does for the reader to care.

   Not this reader, at least. Not this time.

          Bibliographic Data:

      The Stephanie Patrick series:

The Rhythm Section. HarperCollins, UK, hc, 1999. HarperCollins, US, hc, 2000; Avon, pb, 2000.

Chameleon. HarperCollins, UK, hc, 2002. HarperCollins, US, hc, 2002; Avon, pb, 2003.

Gemini. HarperCollins, UK, pb, 2003.

The Third Woman. HarperCollins, UK, hc, 2005.

   Some sad news was awaiting me yesterday when I returned from Columbus and PulpFest 2009. Author William Tapply, author of two dozen mysteries tackled by Boston-based lawyer Brady Coyne plus three about New England fishing guide Stoney Calhoun, died last Tuesday of leukemia at the age of 69.

   Previously reviewed on this blog are the following, all Brady Coyne books (follow the links):

      The Vulgar Boatman
      The Dutch Blue Errror
      Cutter’s Run

   Taken from Mr. Tapply’s first novel, Death at Charity’s Point, is the following blurb, provided by fellow writer Ted Wood:

    “William Tapply does for the private eye what Len Deighton did for the secret agent. His Brady Coyne is quiet and wry and vulnerable and given to asides that make you chuckle out loud… The characters are all real people, the locale is so vivid you can smell the sea.”

      Bibliography:

   Brady Coyne

1. Death at Charity’s Point (1984)
2. The Dutch Blue Error (1985)

3. Follow The Sharks (1985)
4. The Marine Corpse (1986)
5. Dead Meat (1987)
6. The Vulgar Boatman (1988)

7. A Void In Hearts (1988)
8. Dead Winter (1989)
9. Client Privilege (1989)

10. The Spotted Cats (1991)
11. Tight Lines (1992)
12. The Snake Eater (1993)
13. The Seventh Enemy (1995)
14. Close To The Bone (1996)
15. Cutter’s Run (1998)

16. Muscle Memory (1999)

17. Scar Tissue (2000)
18. Past Tense (2001)
19. A Fine Line (2002)
20. Shadow of Death (2003)
21. Nervous Water (2005)

22. Out Cold (2006)
23. One-Way Ticket (2007)
24. Hell Bent (2008)

   Brady Coyne / J.W. Jackson (with Philip R Craig)

1. First Light (2001)

2. Second Sight (2005)
3. Third Strike (2007)

   Stoney Calhoun

1. Bitch Creek (2004)
2. Gray Ghost (2007)

3. Dark Tiger (2009, forthcoming)

   With Linda Barlow:

Thicker Than Water (1995)

   Among his several works of non-fiction, most of them dealing with fly fishing and other outdoor pursuits, is the following:

The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing a Modern Whodunit. (1995)

DICEY DEERE – The Irish Cairn Murder.

St. Martin’s; reprint paperback, March 2003; hardcover St. Martin’s edition, 2002.

   Dicey Deere is a new name to me, and likewise her mystery-solving character, Torrey Tunet, a professional translator by trade, living in Ireland, and by all accounts, a continual thorn in the side of Inspector Egan O’Hare. This is her third case, and the first I’ve had occasion to read.

   It also occurred to me that whenever you pick up a new author, one so new that there’s no word of mouth out on him or her yet, there’s always some mental evaluation going on in your mind as you read the first few pages, trying to stay flexible, but weighing one aspect of the story versus another — yes, this is good — no, that wasn’t very well done.

   And then there comes a point when suddenly you realize that, yes! this is maybe going to be OK, that the author knows what he or she is doing, and you can sit back and enjoy the rest of the read.

   In this book it comes very early on, on page four as a matter of fact, where it’s learned that to keep her linguistic skills in cutting-edge form, Torrey reads a stack of Maigret paperbacks in whatever language she’s going to need to be fluent in next. In this case, it’s Hungarian.

   (Note to self: It’s been a long time since I’ve read one of Inspector Maigret’s adventures. It’s time to remedy that.)

   As for the mystery itself, the dead man seems to have been a blackmailer, and of course it’s the victim (the blackmailee) who’s the obvious suspect. Torrey is not so sure.

   Dicey Deere’s manner of telling the story takes a little time to totally get used to. It’s told in fits and starts, with numerous hints and nuances, jumping sometimes abruptly from one scene to another. Mysterious events are followed by mysterious conversations, with mysterious trips ensuing. John Dickson Carr would have been very proud.

   The overall atmosphere is much cheerier and lighter than in any of Carr’s works, I hasten to add. It’s the idea that the reader doesn’t have to be told everything right away that’s the key in this comparison.

   (Note to self: It’s been a long time since I’ve read one of Dr. Gideon Fell’s adventures. It’s time to remedy that, too.)

   Another stylistic feature I liked is a form of emphasis new to me, though maybe not to you, if you’re been reading different books than I have. I’ll illustrate with a random quote, this one from page 180.

     Bibliography: [Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

LA BARRE, HARRIET (ca. 1916- ). Pseudonym: Dicey Deere. Travel writer living in New York City.
      Stranger in Vienna. Popular Library pbo, 1986.
      The Florentine Win. Walker, hc, 1988; Ivy, pb, 1989.

      Blackwood’s Daughter. St. Martin’s, hc, 1990; Ivy, pb, 1992.

DEERE, DICEY. Pseudonym of Harriet La Barre. Series character: Torrey Tunet, in all titles.
      The Irish Cottage Murder. St.Martin’s, hc, 1999; pb, June 2000.

      The Irish Manor House Murder. St. Martin’s, hc, 2000; pb, August 2001.
      The Irish Cairn Murder. St. Martin’s, hc, 2002; pb, March 2003.
      The Irish Village Murder. St. Martin’s, hc, 2004; pb, March 2005.

ERIC C. EVANS – Misconstrued.

Worldwide; paperback reprint, Feb 2003. Hardcover edition, 2001, Avalon Books.

   I was talking about coincidences a while back, and (such is the way of the world) here’s a book that’s built on — well, if not a story-making coincidence of title-making proportions, a killer who’s awfully serendipitous in his choice of victims.

   Without letting the plot completely out of the bag, let me show you what I mean by quoting from page 217:

   Sam McKall, whose second recorded adventure this is, is the political aide to the governor of Utah, who (as the story begins) is trying to stop a nuclear waste dump being built on a Pishute reservation in the state. Pushed into investigating a series of deaths the police believe are only accidents, Sam and a reporter friend soon find themselves in what may be a huge conspiracy of corporate-based murder.

   What puzzled me almost as much as the case they’re working on, which is smoothly told, in a totally workmanlike manner, is why the capital of Utah is referred to as Wasatch City. A minor matter. I’ve only been there once, and maybe it is.

   What disappointed me was how the mix of cerebral detection with a modicum of action suddenly — with just over 20 pages to go — became an over-the-top (but non-pyrotechnic) thriller of Bruce Willis proportions.

   And surely we didn’t need most of Chapter 23, which recaps the entire scenario, filling in details we already knew. Better than average, then, but not by much.

      Bibliographic data:

   ERIC C(HARLES) EVANS

Endangered. Avalon, hc, 1999. Worldwide, pb, Jan 2001. Sam McKall.

The Key. Avalon, hc, 2000.

Misconstrued. Avon, hc, 2001. Worldwide, pb, Feb 2003. Sam McKall.

PHILIP KERR – A German Requiem. Viking, UK/US, hardcover, 1991. Paperback edition: Penguin, 1993 (shown), with many later printings.

    I’ve already read the fourth and fifth books in Kerr’s series about German investigator Bernie Gunther. When I started to read the fourth I had thought that I had read the first three in the series but came to realise that I hadn’t read the third. I’ve now rectified this and I’m glad in did.

    It’s set in 1947 and Bernie, struggling with a rather bleak existence in Berlin, is hired by a Russian Colonel to go to Vienna to help one of his, Gunther’s, old police colleagues who is to be tried on charges of murdering an American officer.

    Bernie takes the case and finds a world of subterfuge where everyone has things to hide and where the Russians and Americans are vying for control and each are anxious to harness the abilities of ex-German military leaders, even if they are wanted for war crimes.

    The situation is bleak and the overwhelming emotion of many is despair, and the cynical, but moral, Gunther tries to work his way to a just conclusion to the case. This is an excellent series and I’m glad I took the time to fill in this gap in my reading of it.

The Bernard Gunther novels:

      1. March Violets (1989)

      2. The Pale Criminal (1990)
      3. A German Requiem (1991)
      4. The One from the Other (2006)

      5. A Quiet Flame (2008)
      6. If the Dead Rise Not (2009)

LOUISE PENNY – Still Life. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, July 2006; paperback reprint, May 2007. First published in Canada & the UK: Headline, hc & pb, 2005.

   A Canadian rural mystery, with Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec Sûreté and his team called in to investigate the suspicious death of Jane Neal, a reclusive resident of Three Pines, felled by an arrow.

   The strength of the novel is in its portrait of the town and its colorful inhabitants, but Gamache and his team are also nicely portrayed, with Gamache’s sharply observant eye seldom missing a significant detail in the convoluted relationships that make the investigation difficult to pursue. A promising debut for the series.

Bibliographic data:   The Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries.

1. Still Life.

2. Dead Cold (UK/Canada), A Fatal Grace (US).

3. The Cruelest Month.

4. The Murder Stone (UK/Canada), A Rule Against Murder (US).

5. The Brutal Telling.

JACK S. SCOTT – The Poor Old Lady’s Dead.

Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1976. Reprint paperback: Popular Library, 1980. First published in the UK: Robert Hale, hc. 1976.

   The Chief Inspector had come down with a bug and the Superintendent was not aware of it until Detective Inspector Rosher had taken over the investigation. So the tumble down the stairs by a little old lady at the Haven, an old folks’ home, remains in the ham-fisted hands of Old Blubbergut, as he is unaffectionately known to his colleagues and his underlings.

   Rosher has to deal with an alderman who is the dead lady’s nephew and quite influential in the town, and finesse and subtlety are not Rosher’s strong points, if they are points of his at all.

   A subplot involves Rosher’s unhappy and hapless assistant, who has to suffer not only from his superior’s taunts but from the demands of a pregnant mistress who, quite reasonably, wants him to leave his wife and marry her.

   Rosher can be compared with [Joyce Porter’s] Chief Inspector Wilfrid Dover in some ways, only Dover is a caricature, a grotesque, and funny. Rosher is unfunny and very close to real.

   He toadies to his superiors. As for his underlings, “Strangely, he was not unpopular with the rank and file, provided they were on a lowly rung and unlikely to rise far above it.” Like Dover, he cadges meals and drinks from the unfortunate juniors who have to work with him. His personal habits aren’t very pleasant, either.

   As some other authors before him have discovered when they made their main character unpleasant, a continuing character must receive some empathy from the reader or be a burlesque like Dover. Otherwise, the normal reader will not buy further books in the series.

   Scott made Rosher more appealing and more human, though still not particularly pleasant, as the series advanced. Read this first recorded case of Rosher for a good investigation, some rather bitter humor, and to discover what he was like in the beginning.

   Then read the rest of Scott’s novels featuring Rosher. They become even more enjoyable as Rosher mellows somewhat.

      Bibliographic Data:     [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

ROSHER, INSP. (Sgt.) ALFRED STANLEY “ALF”.   Series character created by Jack S. Scott.

      The Poor Old Lady’s Dead (n.) Hale 1976; Harper, 1976.
      The Shallow Grave (n.) Hale 1977; Harper, 1978.

      A Clutch of Vipers (n.) Collins 1979; Harper, 1979.

      The Gospel Lamb (n.) Collins 1980; Harper, 1980.

      A Distant View of Death (n.) Collins 1981; Ticknor, 1981, as The View from Deacon Hill.
      The Local Lads (n.) Collins 1982; Dutton, 1983.
      An Uprush of Mayhem (n.) Collins 1982; Ticknor, 1982.
      All the Pretty People (n.) Collins 1983; St. Martin’s, 1984.

      A Death in Irish Town (n.) Collins 1984; St. Martin’s, 1985.
      A Knife Between the Ribs (n.) Collins 1986; St. Martin’s, 1987.

Editorial Comment:

   I may be wrong, but I don’t have any strong feeling that either Inspector Rosher or his creator Jack S. Scott are remembered by more than a handful of mystery readers today, some 20 or 30 years later. Back in the 1970s and early 80s, I’m fairly sure that Joyce Porter’s Inspector Dover’s books were more popular than Rosher’s, and I’m sure that even the obnoxious Dover is now little more than a fading memory, alas.