WILLIAM MURRAY – I’m Getting Killed Right Here.

Bantam; reprint paperback, July 1992. Hardcover edition: Doubleday, November 1991.

   You may already know this, but William Murray, author of the Shifty Lou Anderson books, of which this is one, died in 2005 at the age of 78. He wrote nine in the series,and even though this is the first one I’ve read, it will not be the last.

   Shifty, who tells the stories himself, is what you might call a “close up magician” by vocation and a steady habitue or patron of the racetracks by avocation. Here, first of all, is a list of the nine Shifty Lou Anderson novels:

   Tip on a Dead Crab. Viking Press, hc, April 1984.
      Penguin, pb, 1985.

   The Hard Knocker’s Luck. Viking Press, hc, October 1985.
      Penguin, pb, July 1986.

   When the Fat Man Sings. Bantam, hc, September 1987.
      Bantam, pb, June 1988.
      Bantam, pb, June 1990.

   The King of the Nightcap. Bantam, hc, July 1989.
      Bantam, pb, July 1990.

   The Getaway Blues. Bantam, hc, August 1990.
      Bantam, pb, May 1991.

   I’m Getting Killed Right Here. Doubleday, hc, November 1991.
      Bantam, pb, July 1992.

   We’re Off to See the Killer. Doubleday, hc, September 1993.
      No paperback edition.

   Now You See Her, Now You Don’t. Henry Holt & Co., hc, October 1994.
      No paperback edition.

   A Fine Italian Hand. M. Evans & Co., hc, May 1996.
      No paperback edition.

   This list does not constitute all of his mystery fiction. Here’s the rest, all but the last appearing before the first Shifty Lou book:

   Passport to Terror. Avon T-423, pbo, 1960, as by Max Daniels.
       “Love me tonight,” she whispered. “Tomorrow you’ll spit on my grave.”

   The Sweet Ride. New American Library, 1967. Signet, pb, 1967.
      A novel of the restless generation, the young people who are rebels against authority and accepted conventions – a new breed of youth, the rootless, purposeless ones who want nothing more than a “sweet ride” on drinks, drugs, and sex – but mostly on the ever pounding beckoning surf. [Stated as being only marginally crime fiction in Crime Fiction IV.]

   The Killing Touch. Dutton, hc, 1974.     [No paperback edition.]
      This taut, fast paced novel is not just about an isolated killing, but, more important, about some of the many ways man and women kill each other – through illusion, deceit, even simple neglect.

   The Mouth of the Wolf. Little Brown, hc,1977.     [No paperback edition.]
      A millionaire’s grandson brutally snatched from the streets of Rome.

   The Myrmidon Project. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, hc, 1981, with Chuck Scarborough. Ace, pb, 1982.
       A highly rated TV newsman about to retire is hit by a series of personal tragedies, perhaps at the instigation of the chairman of his network.

   Dead Heat. Eclipse Press, hc, Sept 2005.     [Published posthumously.]
      A female jockey searches out a crusty old trainer to help take her to the top.

   This does not include any non-crime-related fiction, if any, nor have I attempted to list his non-fiction. Among the latter, however, and not surprisingly, is one entitled The Right Horse: Winning More, Losing Less, and Having a Great Time at the Racetrack. (Never having been to a racetrack, I assume that I am correct in assuming that this is non-fiction.)

   From an online tribute to Murray by Robert Cancel comes the following information:

   What’s at the center of I’m Getting Killed Right Here – which is also the punch line of a joke told on page 166, sort of – is that for the first time, Shifty is an insider at the racetrack.

   He owns a horse, one that is possibly going to be a very good race horse, but as Charlie Pickard, Mad Margaret’s trainer, reminds him of very early on, don’t count on anything. There are ten thousand ways to lose a race.

   Unable to feed and maintain a horse on his own on a magician’s less-than-reliable salary, Shifty needs to take on a partner, and in this case it’s a guy who turns out to have made millions in the construction business, and who also (not so incidentally) has a wife who is a looker (the general consensus) and who is also much younger than he is.

   It may not take more than a nudge from me for you to know where this is going right now. It certainly didn’t take very long for me. One brief motel scene later – well, OK, I guess that was more than a nudge, wasn’t it? – Shifty’s new partner knows what has transpires, and he, Shifty, not to mention Linda, is in a good deal of trouble.

   Here’s a quickie description of the sort of business problems Shifty’s new partner is having, quoting from page 55:

   Shifty is in over his head, and he damned well knows it. And yet, while this particular escapade on Shifty’s part starts out in rip-roaring old-fashioned Gold Medal fashion, Murray allowed this mammoth sense of impending disaster to be brushed off far too easily, and a the story heads off instead in a modified, somewhat more dignified, and — unfortunately — far more predictable fashion.

   Which is not to say that the Gold Medal type of story was not predictable. You know: the one in which the guy gets caught making love to another’s guy younger and good-looking wife, when the second guy belongs to the mob and has connections.

   Mr. Cameron, that’s the partner, is a villain through and through, of that there’s no doubt, so don’t get me wrong, but there is another villain behind him and while attempts are made along these lines to keep his role secret, there simply are no doubts at any time about who he is. (This is one of those books in which as soon as the Bad Guy makes his appearance, you know, somehow deep inside, that he is the Bad Guy.)

    A detective story this is not, in other words, which to some minds (mine) may leave the ending in something of an anti-climactic nature, but on occasion I am of a forgiving nature, and this is one of them. Shifty’s buddies (Damon Runyonesque, the lot of them) will be around in his next adventure, as will (I imagine) Mad Margaret.

   On the other hand, whether his new lady friend appears again is another question altogether. It is to wonder, but my cap is off to Shifty Lou Anderson – there are simply no two ways about it.

DEBORAH MORGAN – Four on the Floor. Berkley, paperback original; 1st printing, October 2004.

   Jeff Talbot, former FBI agent and now an antiques “picker,” continues to be one of the more personable protagonists in the flourishing antiques mystery sub-genre, although my lack of interest in antique cars (or, indeed, of cars of any kind except as a way of getting from one bookstore to another) kept me from enjoying this as much as earlier entries.

   Well, I didn’t really care about the subjects in a couple of the other entries either, but I figure that Morgan will hit one of my very limited interests one of these years.

   When Jeff goes to pick up his restored vintage automobile, he finds four dead bodies that at first appear to be the result of an industrial accident. Of course, you won’t be surprised to hear that murder is the explanation and Jeff becomes a somewhat unwilling participant in the investigation.

   A second, apparently unrelated case, is a mystery involving his parents, who were killed in an automobile accident when he was quite young, an enigma that suggests they were involved in a crime.

   I must say that the conclusion Jeff leapt to initially here seemed off-the-wall to me, as indeed he is to learn that it was. The truth is more mundane, but a bit more interesting and changes the way he views his family and himself.

   Smooth and entertaining. If you’re into antique cars, you may think this is the cat’s meow.

      The JEFF TALBOT Antique-Lover’s Mystery Series —

1. Death Is a Cabaret. Berkley, pbo, November 2001.

2. The Weedless Widow. Berkley, pbo, October 2002.

3. The Marriage Casket. Berkley, pbo, October 2003.

4. Four on the Floor. Berkley, pbo, October 2004.

5. The Majolica Murders. Berkley, pbo, April 2006.

ELIZABETH LOWELL – Blue Smoke and Murder.

Avon, paperback reprint; 1st printing, April 2009. Hardcover edition: William Morrow, June 2008.

   This is one of those long (over 400 pages) novels of romantic suspense that I often buy because they look interesting and end up never reading because they simply look too long and maybe not so interesting after all when I get them home and out of the Barnes & Noble bag.

   This one’s an exception – by which I do not mean exceptional, but it’s in many ways quite acceptable – because I did start reading it late one evening and didn’t put it down until I’d read about a quarter of the way through. Quite acceptable, that is, until … and I’ll get to that soon.

   The background is what intrigued me at first – that being an inside look at the puffery and other hi-jinks (mostly illegal) that go on in the art business, or at least the auction end of it — which is maybe the most of it, at least as far as the where the money is.

   Hence the “blue smoke” of the title, and there is quite a bit of it, since over 400 pages is quite a large number of pages to fill – but not in an uninteresting fashion, mind you.

   The story: when Jill Breck, who is one of those highly efficient and independent young women who may appear more often in fiction than they do in the real world – she has a degree in art but spends her days as a rapid-river travel guide on the Colorado River – but when she finds herself in a jam, she calls on the highly expensive St. Kilda Consulting agency, whose operatives have figured in several other of Ms Lowell’s earlier books.

   Jill’s great-aunt has died, under semi-suspicious circumstances, as it happens, although the authorities do not think so, but when Jill tries to investigate the value of a painting her great-aunt had had for a long time, she is both poopoohed badly and threatened, also badly.

   It is the latter, the threat, this is, that has her concerned. St. Kilda sends Zach Balfour to act as her bodyguard and to otherwise give her all-around assistance. Bodyguards in novels like these often end up getting closer to the bodies they are guarding than would be professionally correct, and this novel is no exception — but without the abundance of graphic details that may inhabit other books of this same genre.

   From a masculine perspective, I thought Jill would be a good person to learn to known, but that the two leading males were far too shallow: too much macho, not enough finesse. (Truth in Lending: I have neither.)

   Nonetheless, the story is OK, if not more than adequate, until the action begins, which is when it goes off the track entirely. Why let the leading lady go off by herself into such an obvious trap? And what really happened anyway, other than the villain simply going nutso?

   I’d have thought that a much more subtle ending was in order — there should have been a way to get some actual auction action involved. That’s what I was waiting for — not the usual TV stuff with cars, planes, police cars, guns and a dumpy sex ranch with a convenient ravine behind it. I can watch that sort of stuff on the boob tube almost every night in the week.

   When I read a book I want something a tad more clever than this. More than a tad, in fact.

      St. Kilda Consulting

1. Always Time to Die. Morrow, 2005; Avon, 2006.
2. The Wrong Hostage. Morrow, 2006; Avon, 2007.
3. Innocent as Sin. Morrow, 2007; Avon, 2008.

4. Blue Smoke and Murder. Morrow, 2008; Avon, 2009.

   This will take a bit of an explanation, so bear with me.

   Around the turn of last century, a relatively well-known mystery writer named Lawrence L. Lynch had quite a few books published. Some of them were reprinted later as by Emma Murdoch Van Deventer, and as John Herrington says, “At some time someone was able to match Lynch to Van Deventer [as to being the real name of the author], the connection being lost in the mists of time.”

   The only problem is, no one has been able to find a real person having Van Deventer’s name, including John, and he’s been looking. He says, in part, “There are a few Emma Van Deventers on Ancestry.com, but Murdoch does not feature as part of any of these names.”

   I’ll reprint all of Lynch’s entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, just for completeness, but the actual request is, if you know or can come up with any information about either Lawrence L. Lynch or Emma Murdoch Vandeventer, please leave a comment or drop me a line.

LYNCH, LAWRENCE L.  Pseudonym of Emma Murdoch Van Deventer.   [Note: There seem to be no books that appeared under the latter’s name only.]   Except for two which apparently were never published in the US, these are the US titles only. All but one were reprinted in the UK by Ward Lock, including those as by Van Deventer, indicated by EMVD.

      Shadowed by Three (n.) Donnelly 1879 [Neil Bathurst; Frank Ferrars]
      The Diamond Coterie (n.) Connelley 1884 [Neil Bathurst]
      Madeline Payne, the Detective’s Daughter (n.) Loyd 1884 [Madeline Payne]    EMVD
      Dangerous Ground; or, The Rival Detectives (n.) Loyd 1885 [Van Vernet]
      Out of a Labyrinth (n.) Loyd 1885 [Neil Bathurst]
      A Mountain Mystery; or, The Outlaws of the Rockies (n.) Loyd 1886 [Van Vernet; U.S. West]
      The Lost Witness; or, The Mystery of Leah Paget (n.) Laird 1890 [New York City, NY]
      Moina; or, Against the Mighty (n.) Laird 1891 [Madeline Payne]

      A Slender Clue; or, The Mystery of Mardi Gras (n.) Laird 1891    EMVD

      A Dead Man’s Step (n.) Rand McNally 1893    EMVD
      Against Odds (n.) Rand McNally 1894 [Carl Masters; Chicago, IL]    EMVD

      No Proof (n.) Rand McNally 1895 [Chicago, IL]    EMVD

      The Last Stroke (n.) Laird 1896 [Frank Ferrars; Illinois]
      The Unseen Hand (n.) Laird 1898    EMVD
      High Stakes (n.) Laird 1899
      Under Fate’s Wheel (n.) Laird 1901    EMVD
      The Woman Who Dared (n.) Laird 1902
      The Danger Line (n.) Ward 1903 [New York City, NY]
      A Woman’s Tragedy; or, The Detective’s Task (n.) Ward 1904 [Carl Masters; Wyoming]
      The Doverfields’ Diamonds (n.) Laird 1906    EMVD
      Man and Master (n.) Laird 1908 [Carl Masters]
      A Sealed Verdict (n.) Long 1910 [Chicago, IL] No UK edition.
      A Blind Lead (n.) Laird 1912    EMVD

   Notes: Titles with links can be found as etexts online. [See the comments for a list of five more.]

MARK DENNING – Beyond the Prize. Jove V4473, paperback original; 1st printing, 1978.

   This is the third book of a series featuring John Marshall, the one-armed secret agent (not to be confused with Dan Fortune, the one-armed private eye).

   This time Marshall is after an AWOL colleague in Ireland, where he tangles with the IRA, the KGB, and just about everyone else.

   There’s plenty of action, plus a plot twist or two that you don’t really expect in such an action-oriented story, and Marshall has an enjoyable toughness. There aren’t too many books of just this kind being written today, and if you liked James Bond, give it a try.

   Bibliographic data:     [Taken from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

DENNING, MARK. Pseudonym of John Stevenson, ?-1994.     JM = John Marshall.
      Shades of Gray. Pyramid, pbo, 1976.    JM

      Die Fast, Die Happy. Pyramid, pbo, 1976.    JM

      Beyond the Prize. Jove, pbo, 1978.    JM
      The Swiss Abduction. Leisure, pbo, 1981.    JM

      The Golden Lure. Tower, pbo, 1981.    JM

      Din of Inequity. St. Martin’s, hc, 1984.
      Ransom. Pocket Books, pbo, 1990.

KATHLEEN WADE – Crime at Gargoyles. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover. No date stated [1947].

   The current, updated entry for Kathleen Wade in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, looks like this:

   WADE, KATHLEEN (Nesta Knight). 1903 -1986. SC: Detective Inspector (Hamilton) Drake, in at least those marked HD.

      Death at Aranshore (Gifford, 1942, hc)
      Death on ?Calamity” (Gifford, 1945, hc) [England; Ship]
      Crime at Gargoyles (Hutchinson, 1947, hc) [England] HD
      A Cloak for Malice (Hutchinson, 1949, hc) [England]
      The Dark Moment (Hutchinson, 1951, hc) [England] HD

      Act of Violence (Hutchinson, 1954, hc)

   Note that some of this information appears only in the online Addenda, which adds some facts uncovered by British mystery bookseller and researcher Jamie Sturgeon. He also notes that “she lived with the [noted] sculptor and writer Eric Benfield (if you do a Google search you will find a little bit about both of them).”

   The link will lead you to one such page; more than likely there are several others. It was also Jamie who discovered that Inspector Drake appeared in at least two of the books, Crime at Gargoyles being one of them.

   Drake doesn’t enter in until well after halfway through, however. Until then the story focuses solely on John Shirley, home from the Far East as a war correspondent on sick leave — a “recent breakdown.”

   Which helps explain, perhaps, why he does what he does when he moves a body he finds in his guest lodgings at Max Tarn’s manor house, a former monastery called Gargoyles. He was shattered at first by meeting his ex-fiancee at the dinner party the night before, but matters are made worse when the dead man turns out to be the fellow she chose as a husband instead, Tarn?s stepson.

   Strangely enough, when he dumps the body in a small nearby stream — although he realizes how neat a frame it is — he’s thinking as much of the old man who’s been taking care of the guest lodge, a fellow named Beal, who also had good reason to hate the dead man. But good intentions often lead to bad consequences, and of course that is what they do here.

   It isn’t until another victim is found, one presumed to be suicide, but Shirley thinks not, that he decides to call on his good friend Inspector Drake, eventually confessing all. By that time, the case has evolved into as much a thriller novel as a detective story.

   One possible definition of a thriller novel: one that you pick up at midnight to read and at 2:30 you discover you haven?t put it down yet.

   Of course when you do finish it, perhaps not the same evening, you may often look back and see how inconsequential it all was, as is the case here, but not while you are reading it, not at all.

JAMES CRUMLEY – The Last Good Kiss.  Random House, hardcover, 1978.  Reprint paperback: Pocket, 1981.  Vintage Books, trade ppbk, 1988.

   Since the death of Ross Macdonald and on the basis of just three novels, James Crumley has become the foremost living writer of private-eye fiction. Carrying on the Macdonald tradition in which the PI is no longer macho but a man sensitive to human needs, torn by inner pain, and slow to use force, Crumley has moved the genre into the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era.

   His principal setting is not the big city as in Hammett and Chandler nor the affluent suburbs as in Macdonald, but the wilderness and bleak magnificence of western Montana. His prevailing mood is a wacked out empathy with dopers, dropouts, losers, and loonies, the human wreckage of the institutionalized butchery we call the “real world.” Nobility resides in the land, in wild animals, and in a handful of outcasts — psychotic Viet vets; Indians, hippies; rumdums; and love-seekers — who can’t cope with life.

   Crumley’s detective characters have one foot in either camp. Milodragovitch, the protagonist of The Wrong Case (1975) and Dancing Bear (1983), is a cocaine addict and boozer, the child of two suicides, a compulsive womanizer like his wealthy Hemingwayesque father; a man literally marking time until he will turn fifty-two and inherit the family fortune, which his pioneer ancestors legally stole from the Indians.

   Sughrue from The Last Good Kiss has a background as a Nam war criminal and an army spy on domestic dissidents and he’s drinking himself to death by inches. Yet these are two of the purest figures in the history of detective fiction, and the most reverent toward the earth and its creatures.

   Crumley has minimal interest in plot and even less in explanations, but he’s so uncannily skillful with character, language, relationship, and incident that he can afford to throw structure overboard. His books are an accumulation of small, crazy encounters, full of confusion and muddle, disorder and despair, graphic violence and sweetly casual sex, coke snorting and alcohol guzzling, mountain snowscapes and roadside bars.

   When he does have to plot, he tends to borrow from Raymond Chandler. In The Wrong Case, Milodragovitch becomes obsessed by a young woman from Iowa who hires him to find her missing brother, a situation clearly taken from Chandler’s Little Sister (1949).

   The Last Good Kiss, perhaps the best of Crumley’s novels, traps Sughrue among the tormented members of the family of a hugely successful writer, somewhat as Philip Marlowe was trapped in Chandler’s masterpiece, The Long Goodbye (1954).

   In Dancing Bear, which pits Milodragovitch against a multinational corporation dumping toxic waste into the groundwater, the detective interviews a rich old client in a plant-filled solarium just like Marlowe in the first chapter of Chandler’s Big Sleep (1939).

   None of these borrowings matter in the least, for Chandler’s tribute to Dashiell Hammett is no less true of Crumley: He writes scenes so that they seem never to have been written before. What one remembers from The Last Good Kiss is the alcoholic bulldog and the emotionally flayed women and the loneliness and guilt.

   What is most lasting in Dancing Bear is the moment when Milodragovitch finds a time bomb in his car on a wilderness road and tosses it out at the last second into a stream and weeps for the exploded fish that died for him, and dozens of other moments just as powerful.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

   Bibliographic data [updated]:

MILO MILODRAGOVITCH   [James Crumley]

      The Wrong Case. Random House, 1975.
      Dancing Bear. Random House, 1983.
      Border Snakes. Dennis McMillan, 1996. Note: Crumley’s other PI character, C. W. Sughrue, also appears in this book.

      The Final Country. Mysterious Press, 2002.

JAMES CRUMLEY – The Last Good Kiss. Random House, hardcover, 1978. Reprint paperback: Pocket, 1981. Vintage Books, trade ppbk, 1988.

   Most private eyes work out of huge metropolitan cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Through the years a handful of others have based their somewhat seedier operations in midwestern population centers such as Chicago, Cleveland and Indianapolis.

   On television this season there is an example of how a Las Vegas detective goes about his business, but you’d have to admit that the glamor and glitter of that particular show is far from typical of mainstream America, and so it remains far more reminiscent of that old stand-by of the pulp magazines, the Hollywood private eye story.

   C. W. Sughrue’s home is Montana, however, and his outlook on life and happiness, or the pursuit thereof, is correspondingly closer to a segment of American demographics long ignored by other authors, obsessed with the bizarre vagaries of life in southern California, for example.

   Rocky Mountain jade. Sughrue is often dirty and unshaven, and a good deal of the time he’s drunk, or close to it, but never obnoxiously so. He’s as much a combination of hippie and redneck as either variety of humanity could ever recognize as possible. He mixes affably with both, and yet he has the same moral obligation to himself that all the great private detectives of literature have had to have hidden inside.

   The story, as it strips his character carefully away in layers, is so intensely revealing that for him to become yet another series creation would be close to pointless.

   As muddled — or even more so — as any in real life, the story begins with a hunt for a famous bar-hopping poet and novelist who takes him on a binge through several states before he’s found, but before he can return home Sughrue is sidetracked into chasing down a runaway girl, lost and not found in the pornographic environs of San Francisco ten years earlier.

   Lives are muddled as well, and revelations are painfully hard to come by. The tale that Crumley has to tell builds slowly and easily into a climax that explodes with all the emotional thrill of a gut-satisfying revenge about to be released.

   Crumley is not the new Hammett. He’s closer to Chandler, if names must be dropped, but in several ways he’s the equal of both, their peer. In fact, he’s that rarity, an authentic rough-hewn original, and they don’t happen along very often.

[UPDATE] 04-14-09.   Some comments from me, thirty years later. I have not re-read the book at any time between then and now.

(1) Here’s the first line of the book, still one of the more memorable ones of hard-boiled crime fiction, in my opinion:

    “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

(2) I do not know what TV show I was referring to in the second paragraph. I could look it up, but if you know without resorting to a reference book, leave a comment. I have no prizes to offer to the first one to come up with the correct answer, I’m sorry to say.

(3) It is difficult, sometimes, for a reviewer to say exactly why he or she likes a book. It is far more easy to say why you don’t. Reading this review for the first time in the same 30 years, I’m disappointed (but not surprised) that I wasn’t more clear as to what I read that produced this rave review. (In the MYSTERY FANcier version, but not the one in the Courant, you might like to know that I included a rating: A Plus.)

(4) Somewhere in the middle I suggested that it would be difficult for Crumley to continue using C. W. Sughrue as a series character. As we know now, there were other books, but as I recall none of them knocked my socks off as much as this one. I’ll add a complete list below. (It did take 15 years for Crumley to write about Sughrue again.)

(5) At the end of the review, I compared Crumley to both Hammett and Chandler, saying he was their equal. In the long run, while the author and his books are both cult favorites, I don’t think his career was anywhere near as successful (or known today) as I thought it might. Am I wrong about this?

C. W. SUGHRUE.   [James Crumley]

       * The Last Good Kiss. Random House, 1978.
       * The Mexican Tree Duck. Mysterious Press, 1993.

       * Border Snakes. Mysterious Press, 1996. Note: Crumley’s other PI character, Milo Milodragovitch, also appears in this book.
       * The Right Madness. Viking, 2005.

   Between 1933 and 1959 John W(omak) Vandercook (1903-1963) penned four mysteries featuring his remarkably unremarkable sleuth Bertram Lynch and his Watson, Yale history professor Robert Deane.

   The books, Murder in Trinidad (1933), Murder in Fiji (1936), Murder in Haiti (1956), and Murder in New Guinea (1959) were all well-written detective tales possessing a sense of adventure sometimes missing in more formal works of mystery fiction.

   And little wonder, as they reflected Vandercook’s life and career as a novelist, biographer (including Black Majesty: The Life of Henri Christophe, King of Haiti, illustrated by noted Edgar Rice Burrough’s illustrator Mahon Blaine), anchorman, and war correspondent.

   You can go to the The Authentic History Center website, and listen to Vandercook’s full December 8, 1941 broadcast on the NBC Red Network of the Pearl Harbor attack. In all, Vandercook wrote more than fourteen volumes of history, biography, and travel including Tom-Tom, Dark Islands, and Caribee Cruise.

   Bertram Lynch, the hero of the series, is a special agent variously of the British and the League of Nations, who is invariably sent in alone on the most dangerous of assignments. In Murder in Trinidad, for example, Lynch has been sent to Trinidad to break the back of the opium smuggling trade. While traveling to his mission on a tramp steamer he draws the attention of Robert Deane, a Yale History professor who is first attracted to Lynch’s ordinariness, but spots something unique about the quiet middle class Englishman:

   Shortly after they land, Deane interrupts an attempt on Lynch’s life by a knife-throwing assassin and witnesses Lynch coolly retrieve the knife and throw it back wounding his assailant — again without ruffling a feather. Now Deane is drawn into the hunt, and when Lynch’s contact is murdered, the mystery deepens.

   Before the game is over, Deane will have indulged in a bit of romance, a murder from the past will have been uncovered, and the two will penetrate a dangerous swamp to uncover the mastermind behind the crimes — the man Lynch has suspected all along, as he shows with a series of deductions worthy of Sherlock Holmes. So ends the first mystery featuring Lynch and Deane.

   Anthony Boucher said: “It’s at once a rousing novel of tropic adventure .. and an unusually tight and satisfying deductive puzzle …”

   In Murder in Fiji, Deane is summoned by his friend Lynch who is now an agent of the Permanent Central Board of the League of Nations. A wave of murders has stuck the Fiji islands. After finding dead flies under the eyes of a corpse, witnessing the bizarre murder of a native chief and discovering the connection between the crimes and the sections of the map marked in lavender, Lynch cracks the case, despite a less than cooperative local Chief Constable who asks:

   Again Deane romances an attractive and lively lady and Lynch plays a sort of unwanted cupid. The dialogue is sprightly, the action intense, and the mystery more than fair. Overall, another excellent entry in the series with local color, geography, and culture playing major roles in the mystery rather than merely acting as a colorful background. The murder of the native chief is a well handled scene done with a nice understated feeling for the macabre.

   Boucher said of this one: “As before, the local color is well handled, and the relationship of detective Bertram Lynch and his narrator, Robert Deane continues to be a sheer delight.”

   Deane and Lynch don’t return again for almost twenty years, but in 1956’s Murder in Haiti, they are back in action. By now Lynch is a sort of private detective, and Deane joins him on the deluxe yacht Vittoria, owned by a financial czar determined to recover millions in stolen pirate booty.

   But when they reach Haiti, it becomes clear the gold isn’t pirate loot, but more recent in origin: stolen Nazi gold. Lynch as usual plays his cards close to his vest, risks Deane’s neck, and encourages the professor to romance an attractive blonde — all in the name of duty.

   The locations are well-drawn and the action well-conceived. Vandercook knew Haiti particularly well, and it shows in his use of the islands unique history and culture as a background.

   Murder in New Guinea is the last of the Lynch and Deane mysteries. This time Lynch and Deane have been summoned by the Governor of New Guinea to find four explorers who have gone missing among the gold rich Murray Range and it’s dangerous Stone Age tribes.

   Of course things are never that simple, and natives and gold prove the least of the duo’s problems, as they uncover something more valuable than gold and worth killing for in the mountains of New Guinea. They thwart an international plot, and we last see the duo as Lynch takes a much deserved nap after their exertions. Whether Vandercook intended that to be the duo’s last teaming we’ll never know. He died in 1963 before any further entries could be written.

   Barzun and Taylor didn’t care much for the series and were hard on this one in Catalogue of Crime, and to be fair, Vandercook makes one major blunder about a key factor in the novel, but it hardly spoils the pleasure over all.

   Likely the average reader isn’t going to be a geologist so it probably doesn’t matter all that much. Conan Doyle once had Watson identify rabbit bones as human, makes major geographical mistakes about Dartmoor, and has the trains running out of Victoria Station in the wrong direction, but no one seem to care.

   For that matter, Dumas has a street in The Three Musketeers named for one of Napoleon’s marshals. In these matters nits should be picked carefully. If minor matters bother you then this one likely will, but if you can overlook them it’s an enjoyable finale to a good series of books.

   There is nothing revolutionary about the Lynch and Deane novels, but they are all well written, fast paced, and interesting. Vandercook is no threat to Agatha Christie in the spinning of cunning plots, but he writes well, and the books are surprisingly readable, with Lynch an unassuming yet satisfying great detective, and Deane is one of the more intelligent, useful, and likable Watsons in the genre.

   Lynch is a believable figure, cool in action despite his ordinary facade and ruthless when need be. He is well-balanced by the sane and intelligent Deane, who for once proves an able assistant, despite Lynch’s Holmes like insistence on keeping him in the dark.

   Murder in Trinidad, the first entry in the series has a colorful history. It was first filmed in 1934 under the same title; it was directed by Louis King with a script by Seton I. Miller. Nigel Bruce (for once neither blathering nor blundering) played Lynch, and Heather Angel and Victor Jory were featured.

   Deane didn’t appear, at least not as Deane. You can read the review from The New York Times here online. William K. Everson also has much to say in praise of the film in The Detective in Film. Bruce’s slovenly ordinary detective is somewhat mindful of the later Columbo with Peter Falk in both his appearance and appeal.

   In 1939 the book was the basis of Mr. Moto on Danger Island, with Peter Lorre subbing for Lynch, Jean Hersholt, and Warren Hymer co-starring, and directed by Herbert Leeds with a script by Peter Milne and story by John Reinhardt and George Brickner. In 1945 the book was again filmed as The Caribbean Mystery, with James Dunn and Sheila Ryan, again minus Lynch and Deane by name.

   The first two Lynch and Deane books were reprinted in hardcover form in the mid-1950s, and two appeared in the US in paperback, and they sold well enough that they aren’t all that rare. They are well worth reading, and if you sometimes would like to get away from the more cozy British country house or village crime without sacrificing the fun of a formal mystery, the books offer thrills, and solid detection.

   Vandercook knew the places he wrote of and his style is clean and painless, all the virtues of a good travel guide to exotic ports, and Lynch and Deane are good company for a little armchair adventuring.

   These aren’t great novels, they won’t change your life or the way you think about the genre, but they deserve to be read and remembered. Among all the mediocre and worse books that fill the genre that’s reason enough to appreciate Lynch and Deane and their creator for their accomplishments.

         Bibliographic data:

Murder in Trinidad. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1933. William Heinemann, UK, hc, 1934. Hardcover reprint: Macmillan Reissue “Murder Revisited” series, 1955. US paperback reprints: Penguin 552, 1944; Collier, 1961. Also appeared as Star Weekly Complete Novel, Toronto, 1 October 1955.

Murder in Fiji. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1936. William Heinemann, UK, hc, 1936. Hardcover reprint: Macmillan “Murder Revisited” series, 1955. Also appeared as Star Weekly Complete Novel, Toronto, 26 May 1956.

Murder in Haiti. Macmillan, A Cock Robin Mystery, hardcover, 1956. Eyre & Spottiswoode, UK, hc, 1956. Paperback reprint: Avon T-278, 1958, as Out for a Killing. Also appeared in Bestseller Mystery Magazine, February 1961.

Murder in New Guinea. Macmillan, A Cock Robin Mystery, hardcover, 1959. W. H. Allen, UK, hc, 1960.

BEVERLY CONNOR – Scattered Graves.

Penguin/Obsidian, paperback original; 1st printing, February 2009.

   I’m not much interested in stories about medical examiners (not even Quincy) or forensic specialists (I’ve never read a book by Patricia Cornwell), nor do I watch Bones or any of the CSI shows on TV. It must be a failure in me, as they seem to be very popular with everyone else.

   In any case, this is the reason that this is the first book by Beverly Connor that I’ve read, it being the sixth book in her “Diana Fallon Forensic Invesigator” series, which followed five books about Linsday Chamberlain, described online as an “anthropologist who specializes in archaeology [and] an expert in forensic analysis of bones.”

   A description of A Rumor of Bones, the first book in the Chamberlain series begins this way: “It’s the bones of missing children that disturb her…” and that tells me all I want to know. I don’t read books that have bones of missing children in them. I’m sure that this is what wiped me out of reading any others in the series, as none of the titles sound remotely familiar:

      Lindsay Chamberlain series:

   1. A Rumor of Bones. Cumberland House, hc, Oct 1996; pb, Mar 2001.

   2. Questionable Remains. Cumberland House, hc, Sept 1997; Worldwide, pb, May 2001.
   3. Dressed to Die. Cumberland House, hc, Sept 1998; pb, Oct 2001.
   4. Skeleton Crew. Cumberland House, hc, Oct 1999; pb, Jan 2002.

   5. Airtight Case. Cumberland House, hc, Oct 2000; pb, Oct 2002.

   But now that I’ve done the research, I take that back. Cumberland House books don’t get much circulation up here in New England, and the reason that the titles don’t look familiar, all but the one from Worldwide (Harlequin), is that I never saw them.

   Luckily enough, when her contract with Cumberland seems to have run out, Beverly Connor was able to adapt and start another series, apparently in much the same subgenre, and maybe even the same same mode. Here’s a list of her Diane Fallon books, both so far and forthcoming:

       Diane Fallon series:

   1. One Grave Too Many. Onyx, pbo, Dec 2003.

   2. Dead Guilty. Onyx, pbo, Sept 2004.
   3. Dead Secret. Onyx, pbo, Dec 2005.
   4. Dead Past. Onyx, pbo, Feb 2007.

   5. Dead Hunt. Obsidian, pbo, Feb 2008.
   6. Scattered Graves. Obsidian, pbo, Feb 2009.
   7. Dust to Dust. Obsidian, pbo, Aug 2009.

   Six books into a series these days, when detectives have personal lives as well as solve crimes, means that there’s a lot of backstory to catch up on, but to Connor’s credit, she made it easy for me, a first time reader. What struck me the most, though, was not the small group of friends, enemies and co-workers around her – some of whom are one and the same – but how “over the top” the story line is.

   After a rather standard opening for a book about a DNA lab, with the local sheriff bringing in a young boy’s find – a stash of bone chips in a newly plowed field – I suddenly sat straight up in my chair in the middle of Chapter Four, as a local policeman with a grudge against Diane tries to push her personally off a cliff.

   She, being an experienced rock climber, manages to escape, while Harve Delamore falls to his death. Perhaps I should mention that Rosewood, where Diane works, in in Georgia, not too far from Atlanta, and you may have to accept that grudges last longer and are worked out differently in the South.

   Including, strangely enough, Diane’s nearly being charged with Delamore’s death. But wait, that’s not all. I won’t reveal anything that you wouldn’t like to know about ahead of time, but Rosewood is one of the most corrupt towns you will ever be in, and that goes all the way to the top. Until someone with a gun tries to do something about it – and that someone may or may not be one of the Good Guys.

   I’d like to say more, but let me release my breath and say Whew, just thinking about it. It’s like one bombshell going off after the other. There is one heck of a complex ending, too, one that all but stalls out in a moral morass of malicious behavior, some intended, some not, as extravagantly excessive as anything that has gone before.

   And please don’t take that as a bad thing. Is the book readable? Once you pick it up, I don’t think you’ll put it down very quickly. It took me two evenings to read its slightly over 350 pages, the best eyeball rate I’ve managed to accomplish in a good long while.