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.

MAX COLLINS – The Broker. Berkley, paperback original, 1976. Paperback reprint: Foul Play Press, 1985, as Quarry.

   In the mid-1970s, the multi-talented Max Collins (who also writes as Max Allan Collins) produced a series of four paperback originals about a Vietnam vet turned hired killer, known only as Quarry. The Quarry series has so often been referred to as a Richard Stark pastiche that its own tone and morality are often overlooked.

   In The Broker, the first in the series, we meet Quarry shooting a man in an airport men’s room. Quarry’s assignment is to bring what the man is holding (heroin) back to his employer, an icy sort called the Broker. Quarry complies.

   After complaining that he does not like to deal in drug killings, he reluctantly takes another Broker assignment, this one working with a homosexual killer named Boyd. In the rest of the novel, Collins shows us an abundantly unpleasant world peopled with all sorts of characters, from cuckolded husbands to porno-crazed geezers who look like Gabby Hayes.

   What gives the Quarry books their style is the detached voice of the narrator: Quarry has no compunctions about killing people, because he feels most of them are rather foolish beings anyway. Unlike Stark’s Parker, who is human only when it serves his ends, Quarry is subject to feelings other than anger-melancholy, amusement, contempt-feelings he notes, nonetheless, with the kind of removed observation one would expect from a man in his profession.

   The Broker and the other three novels in the series — The Broker’s Wife (1976), The Dealer (1976), and The Slasher (1977) — are successful for another reason: They depict the waning hippie/flower-power days with a great deal of historical accuracy. The Quarry books are therefore an important part of the crime fiction of the Seventies — a quirky, idiosyncratic look at the Midwest during the Gerald Ford regime.

         ———
   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: The Quarry series [Updated].

   The Broker. Berkley, pbo, 1976; aka Quarry, Foul Play, 1985.

   The Broker’s Wife. Berkley, pbo, 1976; aka Quarry’s List, Foul Play, 1985.

   The Dealer, Berkley, pbo, 1976; aka Quarry’s Deal, Foul Play, 1986.

   The Slasher, Berkley, , pbo, 1977; aka Quarry’s Cut, Foul Play, 1986.

   Primary Target. Foul Play, hardcover, 1987.

   Quarry’s Greatest Hits. Five Star, hc, 2003. Contents:
       ● Primary Target (novel)
       ● “A Matter of Principle” (short story, reprinted from Stalkers, Roc/Penguin, 1992, Ed Gorman, ed., and the basis for a short film included in the DVD boxed set Max Allan Collins Black Box Collection: Shades of Neo-Noir, 2006.)
       ● “Quarry’s Luck” (short story reprinted from Narrow Houses: Blue Motel, Volume 3, Little Brown, UK, 1994, Peter Crowther, ed.)
       ● “Guest Services” (short story reprinted from Murder Is My Business, Signet, 1994, Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins, eds.)

   The Last Quarry. Hard Case Crime, pbo, 2006. Expansion of “A Matter of Principle,” and the basis for the feature length film, The Last Lullaby (2008).

   The First Quarry. Hard Case Crime, pbo, 2008.

   Quarry In The Middle. Hard Case Crime, pbo, 2009. (Forthcoming, November.)

WENDI LEE – Habeas Campus. Worldwide; paperback reprint, February 2003. Hardcover edition: St.Martin’s Press, 2002.

   This one was a disappointment, to put it as mildly as I can. Wendi Lee, also a writer of westerns, is the author of four other mysteries about her Boston-based private eye Angela Matelli, so this drab and unbelievable outing came as quite a surprise, if not an out-and-out shocker.

   It might be the subject matter. Here’s the first line: “If my family had known that I was going up to Vermont to fight zombies, they would have slapped me in an institution so fast it would have made my head spin.”

   There’s a lot of scientific talk in the book about Haitian poisons and antidotes to back up the premise that zombies (the walking undead) indeed do exist, but if you were to check it out on Google, you’d soon discover that the evidence is largely anecdotal and (to say the least) extremely controversial.

   In any case, Lee’s job was to convince me that people can be transformed into zombies, and that they could be put to work in sweatshops or behind the counters at McDonalds. (You’re kidding me, right?) She also wanted me to believe that a body could somehow go missing from a college town’s morgue without a huge outcry being made. Just a prank by some fraternity kids? I don’t think so.

   I also thought that the plan for Angela Matelli, an ex-Marine and nearly 30, to go undercover as a student at Hartmore College, living in an undergraduate dorm, registering just before midterm, was, well, rather uninspired (if not highly unlikely).

   The writing is hardly better. Two paragraphs on page 16 say exactly the same thing. The dialogue is bad. From page 31: “This is why I didn’t tell you everything over the phone. I knew you would jump to the conclusion that this is some sort of weird situation.” On page 40, another two paragraphs (concerning Matelli’s phoney registration as a student) repeat themselves.

   Back in her own stomping grounds, surrounded by family and friends, Angie Matelli’s basic perkiness and good nature might come off to greater advantage. They don’t here, I’m sorry to say.

[UPDATE] 03-30-09.   For more on Angela Matelli and some more on the other books by her creator, Wendi Lee, you might check out the former’s data page on the Thrilling Detective website. Habeas Corpus was her last appearance in print.

   Based on both the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, and her dossier on Kevin Burton Smith’s website (above), here’s her complete bibliography:

ANGELA MATELLI. [Wendi Lee]

    Novels:

      The Good Daughter. St. Martin’s 1995.

      Missing Eden. St. Martin’s 1996.
      Deadbeat. St. Martin’s 1999.
      He Who Dies. St. Martin’s 2000.

      Habeas Campus. St. Martin’s 2002.

   Short stories:

       “Salad Days” (Noir, Winter 1994)
       “The Disappearance of Edna Guberman” (Murder For Mother, 1994)
       “Check Up” (Lethal Ladies, 1996)
       “The Other Woman” (Vengeance Is Hers, 1997)

SUSANNAH STACEY – Body of Opinion.

Pocket Books; paperback reprint. First printing, March 1991. Previously published in the US by Summit Books, hardcover, February 1990. Prior UK hardcover edition: Bodley Head, 1988, as by Jill Staynes & Margaret Storey.

   There is a mystery here – and one for which I do not know the answer – and that is why the books written by this pair of British authors appeared under their own names in the UK, but as by a pen name in the US. I haven’t any idea why.

   But since both authors are now in their late 70s or early 80s, and no books by them under any byline have appeared in over ten years, I think it’s safe to assume that their entry in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, is now complete:

    STACEY, SUSANNAH. Pseudonym of Jill Staynes & Margaret Storey; other pseudonym Elizabeth Eyre.
       Goodbye, Nanny Gray (n.) Summit 1988; UK: Bodley Head, 1987 as by Jill Staynes & Margaret Storey.

       A Knife at the Opera (n.) Summit 1989; UK: Bodley Head, 1988 as by Jill Staynes & Margaret Storey.
       Body of Opinion (n.) Summit 1990; UK: Bodley Head, 1988 as by Jill Staynes & Margaret Storey.
       Grave Responsibility (n.) Summit 1991; UK: Bodley Head, 1990 as by Jill Staynes & Margaret Storey.
       The Late Lady (n.) Pocket Books 1993; UK: Barrie, 1992 as by Jill Staynes & Margaret Storey.

       Bone Idle (n.) Pocket Books 1995; UK: Century, 1993 as by Jill Staynes & Margaret Storey.
       Dead Serious (n.) Pocket Books 1997; UK: Headline, 1995 as by Jill Staynes & Margaret Storey.
       Hunter’s Quarry (n.) Pocket Books 1998; UK: Quarry (Hale 1999), as by Jill Staynes & Margaret Storey.

   As long as Elizabeth Eyre has been mentioned, though, here’s a list of the books the two authors wrote under that name:

EYRE, ELIZABETH. Pseudonym of Jill Staynes & Margaret Storey
       Death of a Duchess (n.) Headline 1991; Harcourt, US, 1992.
       Curtains for the Cardinal (n.) Headline 1992; Harcourt, US, 1993.

       Poison for the Prince (n.) Headline 1993; Harcourt, US, 1994.
       Bravo for the Bride (n.) Headline 1994; St. Martin’s, US, 1995.
       Axe for the Abbot (n.) Headline 1995; St. Martin’s, US, 1996.
       Dirge for a Doge (n.) Headline 1996; St. Martin’s, US, 1997.

   The Eyre books all take place during the Italian Renaissance; the leading character in each is a fellow named Sigismondo, who quoting from Publishers Weekly is a “brilliant deductionist [who] is bald like a monk but who fights like a soldier, and his slack-jawed manservant, Benno, who has an air of ‘amiable idiocy.’”

   That’s a description that makes me want to read these book right away, and if you think I’m joking around when I say that, then you don’t know me very well.

   To the book at hand, though, the third in the series. It’s not clear to me that Superintendent Bone works for Scotland Yard or if he’s only a member of the local police force, but when a murder occurs at a party at a famous rock singer’s mansion, he’s the first to be called in. (One passing reference, on page 29, suggests that this is not the first time he’s met Ken Cryer and his son Jemmy, so that makes me believe he’s local.)

   Dead is a woman with a deeply held secret, and since this time the writer who wrote the blurb for the back cover doesn’t mention it, I won’t either, except to say two things — the first being that part of this sentence is not exactly true, and the second that the secret just mentioned is NOT the list of blackmail targets that’s found later in the victim’s home.

   What that does do is increase the number of possible suspects by a factor of at least ten — theoretically. Since it’s more than likely that the killer was seen at the party, invited or not, it’s still a matter of only dogged police work before his or her identity is uncovered.

   One does hope for more, however, what with all of the clues, false leads, red herrings, misleading directions and crimes on the side that Bone and his crew must sort through. But alas, no, the ending is as straight (and flat) as a string.

   Much more interesting is Bone’s home life, recently widowed with a young precocious young daughter to bring up on his own – but with the possibility of a new love in his life, a woman who is beginning at last to break down the emotional shields he’d set up after the auto accident took his wife away.

   I think the two authors had the Golden Age of Detection in mind when they wrote this book, updated by all kinds of sexual activity that went unreported in mystery fiction of the 1930s. That’s the overall model they’re following at least, but if so, I can’t tell you that they succeeded — although it’s busy, the plot simply isn’t complicated enough.

   On the other hand, the writing is excellent more often than not, with many a nice turn of phrase to complement the events taking place. The superintendent’s incipient love affair — deliberately chaste in comparison to the mystery itself, perhaps — may have been the even greater enticement for readers to be look for the next installment when it appeared.

   Anthony George Armstrong Willis (1897-1972) was a Canadian novelist and playwright best remembered today for his play Ten Minute Alibi and the novels The Room at the Hotel Ambre (also a play) and The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham (adapted for Alfred Hitchcock on television, and as the 1970 film The Man Who Haunted Himself, directed by Basil Deardon).

   From 1927 to 1932, however, he penned five of the best thrillers from the heyday of the form about gentleman crook Jimmie Rezaire and his ‘secret service’ adventures in The Trail of Fear (1927), The Secret Trail (1929), The Trail of the Lotto (1930), The Trail of the Black King (1931), and The Poison Trail (1932).

   In their A Catalogue of Crime Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertzig Taylor said of The Trail of Fear, the first Jimmie Rezaire novel:

    What sets the Rezaire novels apart from the adventures of Bulldog Drummond, Sydney Horler’s Tiger Standish, Wyndham Martin’s Anthony Trent, and the other colorful adventurers of the era was both Armstrong’s sense of drama and literacy and Jimmie’s character.

   The slight, attractive Rezaire was no steel-thewed six-footer laying the enemy about him with a single blow, no brighter buccaneer or durable desperado, but a clever criminal who enjoyed the game of pitting his brains against the police until he allowed himself to be caught and served a term in the pen.

   In The Trail of Fear he’s still a criminal and drawn into a bit of secret service work which suits his nature. In The Secret Trail, just out of prison, he teams up with his one time girl friend Vivienne and Harry Hyslop (aka H.H.), down from Oxford after a forgery scandal, who have been running a shop lifting scam. Jimmie opens a Private Inquiry agency and almost immediately gets drawn into yet another bit of secret service trying to rout a spy ring that has stolen the Murchison bomb sight and plans to smuggle it out of the country to Russia.

   The books are primarily chase and pursuit, aided by Armstrong’s understanding of plot construction and the line of suspense. Unlike many writers of the period Armstrong doesn’t indulge in tiresome blathering and the silly ass dialogue that mars the Drummond books and others from this time frame.

   The Rezaire books are a modern read, with Jimmie a more complex hero than most. Though he loves the game and plays to win he is also attractively human and given to doubts and concerns. He’s also apt to rely on his wits too much, which is where H.H. comes in as a good man with his fists and a gun. H.H. would be the hero of any other series of the era, but Armstrong is careful to show us the limit of the brawn-over-brains type when pitted against the kind of super criminals Jimmie and company cross swords with on a regular basis.

   That said, the books are very much of the period they were written, with the usual foreign spies and drug smugglers (cocaine rings feature in many books of the era, from thrillers to classical detection like Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise), but all done with Armstrong’s superior writing and Rezaire’s more intelligent hero:

   That’s more reasoning and deductive work than in the entire Bulldog Drummond oeuvre. In fact, the fun is watching Jimmie as he thinks and fights his way out the various deadly traps set by the opposition and the chases in fast low slung cars, motor boats, airplanes, and on trains, across rooftops, down foggy roads, through busy London streets, and across the Channel in France.

   Armstrong’s understanding of drama keep the books moving swiftly, while the plot unfolds in snappy dialogue and exposition. Here Jimmie’s ex-partner Long Sam is back from America and out to get Jimmie:

    It should be pointed out that Jimmie is hardly a coward, but having the wit and common sense to know when he’s in danger and the imagination to see what the consequences of his actions might be he’s no steely nerved ice man either. He’s cool and leveled headed in action, but has the good grace to at least sweat the details when he’s bound up in a rug being carried to meet his maker in the trunk of the villain’s speeding salon car.

    For anyone interested in the thrillers of the era, the Armstrong books about Jimmie Rezaire offer a better than usual entry point forgoing the blather of the Drummond books, the bullying of Horler’s various heroes, and the gloating Berkeley Gray’s Norman Conquest was prone to.

   While they don’t have the sheer spirit and joy of the early Saint adventures by Leslie Charteris, they are clever and fast-paced, and cinematic in the best sense. The jingoism, snobbery, casual racism, and other drawbacks of books of the time are played down, and the writing is crisp and literate without the endless false bon homme of so many of Armstrong’s contemporaries.

   Jimmie Rezaire is a complex and interesting protagonist, and one who deserves to be better remembered. Among the armies of Blackshirts, Picaraoons, Gray Phantoms and the like, Jimmie was a breath of fresh air with well-conceived action and a fast pace that modern readers will appreciate, along with a more human and interesting set of heroes than the usual breed of supermen.

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

REZAIRE, JIMMIE    [Anthony Armstrong]
      Jimmie Rezaire (n.) Paul, 1927. US title: The Trail of Fear. Macrae-Smith, 1927.
      The Secret Trail (n.) Methuen, 1928. Macrae-Smith, 1929.
      The Trail of the Lotto (n.) Methuen, 1929. Macrae-Smith, 1930.
      The Trail of the Black King (n.) Methuen, 1931. Macrae-Smith, 1931.
      The Poison Trail (n.) Benn, 1932. No US edition.