TODD DOWNING – The Case of the Unconquered Sisters.

Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, 1936. UK edition: Methuen, hc, 1937.

   The skeleton of a professor doing sabbatical research down in Mexico is accidentally brought to light by the derailment of a train carrying a museum’s collection of archaeological relics back across the border.

    Customs official Hugh Rennert is first upon the scene, and this connection to the case, as slight as it is, seems enough to lead the American embassy in Mexico City to request his services in conducting the ensuing murder investigation.

   This is his fifth case, by the way. Customs work apparently means that you’re naturally snoopy — or is it the other way around?

   This is a curious sort of mystery, filled with wild and crazy clues, and populated by a pair of mildly eccentric expatriate ladies and their niece (beautiful), assorted servants and embassy officials, plus the remaining team of university scholars. It’s artificial, scatter-minded, and clouded by clumsy obfuscation.

   Nobody would publish such stuff today, and in a way, it’s a shame.

[UPDATE] 01-18-09. As a matter of fact, the folks who run the Rue Morgue Press are doing well reprinting books like this, and more success to them! In spite of my critical remarks, books like these are fun to read, and that’s a statement you should not take lightly.

   I’ve been omitting the letter grades I added to my reviews back then, but this one received a “C.” Obviously it’s not one of the classics — or you would have heard of it before now — but it’s equally not a stinkeroo from the bottom of the barrel. You can never go far wrong with a Crime Club mystery.

   As for the author, he was born in Oklahoma (Indian Territory) in 1902 of Native American (Choctaw) descent. He was the state’s “first successful writer of detective novels,” according to this website, which has a considerable amount of other information about him.

   All of the books below, in a list taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, take place in either Texas or Mexico — quite often both:

DOWNING, (George) TODD. 1902-1974.

      Murder on Tour (n.) Putnam 1933 [Hugh Rennert]
      The Cat Screams (n.) Doubleday 1934 [Hugh Rennert]
      Murder on the Tropic (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Hugh Rennert]
      Vultures in the Sky (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Hugh Rennert]

      The Case of the Unconquered Sisters (n.) Doubleday 1936 [Hugh Rennert]
      The Last Trumpet (n.) Doubleday 1937 [Hugh Rennert]
      Night Over Mexico (n.) Doubleday 1937 [Hugh Rennert]
      Death Under the Moonflower (n.) Doubleday 1938 [Peter Bounty]
      The Lazy Lawrence Murders (n.) Doubleday 1941 [Peter Bounty]

   I don’t know very much about Downing’s second series character. An online review from Time Magazine of this last book describes him as a Texas sheriff, with the mystery taking place on a train en route to Mexico.

MAY MACKINTOSH – Balloon Girl.

Popular Library; paperback reprint; no date stated. US hardcover edition: St. Martin’s, 1977. Previous UK hardcover edition: Collins, 1976, as Roman Adventure.

   If you seek a book that has all but dropped out of sight, you need not look very much further than this one. There is only one copy of the paperback listed on ABE, and five copies of the hardcover, and for the completists among you who may be wondering, there is a single copy of the British hardcover.

    One might also wonder, or at least I am, why the British title Roman Adventure was changed for the US edition. The UK title is fairly bland, I grant you, but why did they think that Balloon Girl was a better one? That it would sell more books? It doesn’t seem that way to me, but I never was a marketing major. (Since I prefer the US title myself, it’s only a rhetorical question.)

   Under either title, I’m going to call this a novel of “gentle romantic suspense” and wait for all of the hard-boiled detective fans who are still reading this to step off the bus, if they haven’t already, before getting down to details.

    To wit: this is one of those books which never quite manages to get down to details — any questions that plain flat out need to be asked are never quite asked. They’re left somewhere off in the distance, clouds on the horizon, to be dealt with later. This is a book for someone with the flair of a master procrastinator for putting off unpleasant things in life until tomorrow.

   Take Kati Nickleby, for example, for indeed she is the primary and main character in the tale. Kati works for the restoration department at the European and American Museum in London, and when she awakes on the morning that dawns in Chapter One, she spots her flatmate Ann, her immediate supervisor at the museum, driving off in the street below with a strange man, taking all of her clothes and possessions with her.

   Later that morning it is discovered that a valuable Van Gogh is missing. While there is no proof, the conclusion is obvious. Or is it? On page 29 Ann returns, blissfully unaware that the police have been looking for her. End of Chapter Two.

   In Chapter Three, Kati is in Italy, ready for her pre-arranged stay with Signor Turo, for whom she is to work in his private gallery. What had happened to Ann is a question that Kati ponders but does not know the answer to, and life in sunny Italy begins to shoo away the clouds that had formed back in England.

   Until, shockingly, Ann appears again in a villa Kati is visiting in Tuscany. Ann is the niece of the owner, one Conte Pietro di Tiepolo, and not too coincidentally, of a chain of antique shops, each called “The Balloon Girl.”

   And also not too coincidentally, Kati’s one assured friend, Dr. Sam Frame, a Canadian museum director who also happens to have been on the scene in London when the Van Gogh disappeared and now also in Italy, suspects that forged paintings have surfaced through The Balloon Girl shops.

   Ah, sorry. This is getting (a) too complicated, while at the same time (b) I am oversimplifying things. I will skip further details, as I am sure you have gotten the picture by now.

   There is an abundance of atmosphere, with long passages in which little happens except sudden chills in the warm Italian sun — hinting ever so slightly that some insidious evil is at work — and then of a sudden, evil is at work.

   Shots ring out in an open square. Kati is attacked while touring the Tomb of St. Cecelia. Someone wants her dead. Someone else — or it is the same person? — intends to use her to take a fall. For whom or for what, it is not quite known, but nonetheless suspicion is steered by the spadeful in her direction.

   Please don’t get me wrong. There are flashes of brilliance in the plotting, just enough to keep the reader wondering, and just often enough to keep the previously mentioned reader from putting the book down for good. When the tale begins to falter, crumble and fall apart, my advice is to stay with it, as no, it never quite does.

      Bibliographic data:

   Here’s a complete list of the other mystery fiction that May Mackintosh wrote, expanded from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, with an able assist from abebooks.com:

Appointment in Andalusia. Collins, UK, hc, 1972. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1972.
      Dell, pb, 1973.

      Pan 23817, pb, UK, 1974.

A King and Two Queens. Collins, UK, hc, 1973. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1973, as Assignment in Andorra.

      Pan 24325, pb, UK, n.d., as Assignment in Andorra.

The Sicilian Affair. Collins, UK, hc, 1974. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1974.
      Dell, pb, 1978, as Dark Paradise.

The Double Dealers. Collins, UK, hc, 1975.
      Delacorte, hc, 1975, as Highland Fling.
      Dell, pb, 1978, as Highland Fling.

Roman Adventure. Collins, UK, hc,1976.
      St. Martin’s, hc, 1977, as Balloon Girl.
      Pop. Library 04384, pb, n.d., as Balloon Girl.

   And as by REGINA ROSS:

Falls the Shadow. Arthur Barker, hc, UK, 1974. [British Intelligence agent Charles Forsyth]
      Delacorte, hc, 1974.
      Futura/Troubadour, pb, UK, 1977.
      Dell, pb, n.d.

The Devil Dances for Gold. Macdonald & Janes, hc, UK, 1976.
      Futura / Troubadour, UK, pb, 1977.

      Ballantine, pb, 1977.

The Face of Danger. Avon, pb, 1982.

   There are no birth or death dates for May Mackintosh in Crime Fiction IV, but what Al does provide is the only biographical information I have discovered so far: She was born in Scotland and later lived in Spain. I do not know who series characters Laurie Grant and Stewart Noble are (nothing on Google), but I plan on finding out, eventually. Some day…!

[UPDATE] 01-17-09.   I don’t know why I wrote such a long review of this book, but I did. I thought just now of cutting it, but in the end I decided not to. I did do some rearranging, though, to put the bibliographic data at the end, not the beginning.

   Since writing the review, I haven’t found anything more about May Mackintosh myself, but Al Hubin has. From Part 9 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, here are the years she was born and when she died: 1922-1998.

CHARLES G. BOOTH – Murder at High Tide.

William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1930. UK edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930.

   This story of a domestic tyrant who’s found murdered in his library has a lot of what attracted me to mysteries in the first place.

   Even so, while fun to read, an honest appraisal would have to rank it only a notch or so above the Hardy Boys. And as in a vintage Charlie Chan movie, the dead man’s mansion is full of suspects at each other’s throats, with wild accusations and amazing discoveries coming at every moment.

   The hero is a young antiques dealer, in his own words, an ass with women. (No further comment.) The detective is Anatole Flique, a comically suave French policeman, although the murder does take place on an island just off the California coast. In his own words, he’s the cleverest on the Paris Surete. He’s also greatly given to twirling his mustaches and busily polishing the top of his head, all the while contemplating life’s little mysteries.

   There are tons of false evidence, most of it leading to dead ends, but I think that the killer, in spite of his or her alibi, should be spotted at once. The style is not John Dickson Carr’s, but it is his kind of story. If there’s no locked room, it’s only because then there wouldn’t have been quite so much fun with alibi-breaking, which in Murder at High Tide is the name of this particular game.

[UPDATE] 01-14-09.  One of the revisions I made was to add the name of the French detective who worked on this case. Obviously I had no idea that he appeared in more than one book, but he did. From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s his complete dossier:

FLIQUE, ANATOLE [Charles G. Booth]
       o Murder at High Tide (n.) Morrow 1930 [California]
       o The Cat and the Clock (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Los Angeles, CA]
       o Kings Die Hard (n.) Hammond 1949 [California; 1929]

   This last book never had a US edition. It came out in 1949, the same year that the author died. According to Wikipedia, Charles G. Booth was “a British-born writer who settled in America and wrote several classic Hollywood stories, including The General Died at Dawn (1936) and Sundown (1941). He won an Academy Award for Best Story for The House on 92nd Street in 1945. […] He also penned the source story for Paul Mazursky’s 1988 film Moon Over Parador.”

   I’d never realized until now that Booth was originally from England. Besides the fiction he wrote in novel form, I know his name from many stories he wrote for Black Mask, the quintessential hard-boiled American detective pulp magazine.

   In fact, he has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the three authors whose stories were deleted from the paperback edition of The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (Simon & Schuster, 1946), edited by Joseph T. Shaw. This is a great reason why you should own the hardcover edition, not just the one reprinted by Pocket (1952).

EDWINA NOONE – Dark Cypress.

Ace K-213, paperback original; 1st printing, 1965. Reprinted at least once.

   Edwina Noone was, as you might have guessed, if you didn’t already know, one of the pseudonyms of Michael Avallone, one of more prolific writers of the 60s and 70s. As the author of a long armful of detective novels, his primary private eye character — and probably his favorite — was the inimitable Ed Noon, the books in which he appeared I should really unpack and read again soon.

   Avallone as Noone stays totally within the restrictions of the gothic romance novel, however, as practiced in the 60s and 70s, and except for sheer readability, perhaps, there’s nothing in this tale’s style of writing to suggest that it was Avallone who was really at the wheel.

   We move from Cornwall (see my earlier review of The Shadow of Polperro, by Frances Cowen) to Connecticut. From the present day when the previous book took place, we shift in time to some unidentified period in the past. Rather than a desolate castle on a rocky coastline, the focus is instead a grove of cypress trees surrounding a bathing pool behind a huge manor house.

   A young girl comes to be the tutor of a young motherless boy, his aloof father and two servants the only other occupants of a house that’s full of secrets. Many another gothic novel has started in very much the same way. The boy’s older brother is dead, drowned in the pool behind the house, a magnificent lad; a prodigy, the housekeeper says. The mother had died at childbirth. The younger boy never knew her.

   Very atmospheric, and although you can read pages at a single glance, the tension builds so that you can all but feel it. Built to a formula, but in the hands of a man (in this case) born to write, formulas can also have substance.

[UPDATE] 01-12-09. Another reason you should go back to the review I posted of The Shadow of Polperro is that in the comments afterward Xavier Lechard and I had a brief exchange about the formula that most gothics were structured on, plus a display of a few of their covers in their French incarnations.

   The following list does not include all of the gothic romances written by the late Michael Avallone, only the ones for which his Edwina Noone byline was used. (He also wrote gothics as by Priscilla Dalton, Jean-Anne de Pre, Dora Highland and Dorothea Nile.) Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

NOONE, EDWINA. Pseudonym of Michael Avallone.

      Corridor of Whispers (n.) Ace 1965
      Dark Cypress (n.) Ace 1965
      Heirloom of Tragedy (n.) Lancer 1965
      Daughter of Darkness (n.) Signet 1966
      The Second Secret (n.) Belmont 1966
      The Victorian Crown (n.) Belmont 1966

      Seacliffe (n.) Signet 1968

      The Craghold Legacy (n.) Beagle 1971
      The Cloisonne Vase (n.) Curtis 1972
      The Craghold Creatures (n.) Beagle 1972
      The Craghold Curse (n.) Beagle 1972
      The Craghold Crypt (n.) Curtis 1973

   Of the two covers shown, note that the first is a stylized version containing all of the traditional ingredients, while the second features photographed models, rarely used for gothics, with a close-up shot of only their faces.

   The book itself was marketed as “a novel of high romance,” so it was an obvious attempt to move away from the typical gothic novel. Nonetheless the blurb on the front cover gives it away: “… dark tale of foreboding love between the daughter of a Yankee captain and a mysterious seafaring stranger, on the windswept coast of Maine.”

LEONARD R. GRIBBLE – The Grand Modena Murder.

Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, [1931]. Prior UK edition: George G. Harrap, hc, 1930. Paperback reprint: Cherry Tree, UK, ca.1944.

   The earliest books that were published under Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint showed decidedly English overtones. Like this one, a great many of their selections between 1929 and 1933 first appeared on the other side of the Atlantic.

   This one was written by Leonard Gribble when he was still very young, only 23, and perhaps as a result it nicely shows a grand youthful passion for melodrama and determined, awkward telling. Over a long career, Gribble wrote well over 50 other mysteries, both under his own name and others. Crime Club published only two or three of them, however, and most of his work has never appeared in this country.

   The Grand Modena that gives the book its name is a hotel, one of London’s finest. The opening scene is a confrontation that takes place in the ballroom, between a young man and the father of the girl he loves.

   Apparently the older man is something less than a completely trustworthy business associate as well. Not altogether to our surprise, he’s found the next morning murdered in his room upstairs. Detective Inspector Anthony Slade is immediately called in as the representative of Scotland Yard’s famed Criminal Investigation Department.

   Slade lives and breathes the entire investigation that follows. He eats it, he sleeps it, and over and over again he reasons his way through the treacherously tangled skein that the past has made of numerous intertwined secrets.

   If the internal workings of a detective’s mind is what you find yourself yearning for in a story, without the noisome clutter of a troubled domestic home life, this is a story built for you.

   But even so, if details like watching Slade look through a lens for fingerprints upon a dagger already cleaned by the doctor bother you, and if you believe that detectives, even policemen, are only human too, you may begin to have doubts.

[UPDATE] 01-06-09.   In spite of my rather lukewarm comments, Inspector Slade went on to have one the longer careers in the annals of Scotland Yard. I’ll add a complete listing of all his full-length novel appearances below. Gribble wrote a few other works of crime fiction in which Slade did not appear, and these are not included in this list.

   I also mentioned that Gribble used other pen names. There’s a fellow named John Creasey who used more, but Gribble is right up there as a leader in this particular category. The following information comes from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

GRIBBLE, LEONARD R(eginald). 1908-1985. Pseudonyms: Sterry Browning, James Gannett, Leo Grex, Louis Grey, Piers Marlowe, Dexter Muir & Bruce Sanders.

SLADE, SUPT. ANTHONY

o The Case of the Marsden Rubies (n.) Harrap 1929 [England]
o The Gillespie Suicide Mystery (n.) Harrap 1929 [England]
o The Grand Modena Murder (n.) Harrap 1930 [England]
o Is This Revenge? (n.) Harrap 1931 [England]
o The Stolen Home Secretary (n.) Harrap 1932 [England]
o The Secret of Tangles (n.) Harrap 1933 [England]

o The Yellow Bungalow Mystery (n.) Harrap 1933 [England]
o The Death Chime (n.) Harrap 1934 [England]
o The Riddle of the Ravens (n.) Harrap 1934 [England]

o Mystery at Tudor Arches (n.) Harrap 1935 [England]
o The Case of the Malverne Diamonds (n.) Harrap 1936 [England]
o Riley of the Special Branch (n.) Harrap 1936 [England]
o The Case-Book of Anthony Slade (co) Quality 1937 [England]
o Who Killed Oliver Cromwell? (n.) Harrap 1937 [England]
o Tragedy in E Flat (n.) Harrap 1938 [England]
o The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (n.) Harrap 1939 [England]
o Murder First Class (n.) Burke 1946 [England; Train]
o Atomic Murder (n.) Harrap 1947 [England]
o Hangman’s Moon (n.) Allen 1950 [England]
o They Kidnapped Stanley Matthews (n.) Jenkins 1950 [England]
o The Frightened Chameleon (n.) Jenkins 1951 [England]
o The Glass Alibi (n.) Jenkins 1952 [England]
o Murder Out of Season (n.) Jenkins 1952 [England]
o She Died Laughing (n.) Jenkins 1953 [France]
o The Inverted Crime (n.) Jenkins 1954 [England]

o Death Pays the Piper (n.) Jenkins 1956 [England]
o Superintendent Slade Investigates (co) Jenkins 1956 [England]
o Stand-In for Murder (n.) Jenkins 1957 [England]
o Don’t Argue with Death (n.) Jenkins 1959 [England]

o Wantons Die Hard (n.) Jenkins 1961 [England]
o Heads You Die (n.) Jenkins 1964 [England]
o The Violent Dark (n.) Jenkins 1965 [England]
o Strip-Tease Macabre (n.) Jenkins 1967 [England]
o A Diplomat Dies (n.) Jenkins 1969 [England]
o Alias the Victim (n.) Hale 1971 [England]
o Programmed for Death (n.) Hale 1973 [England]
o You Can’t Die Tomorrow (n.) Hale 1975 [England]
o Midsummer Slay Ride (n.) Hale 1976 [England]
o Crime on Her Hands (n.) Hale 1977 [England]
o Death Needs No Alibi (n.) Hale 1979 [England]
o Dead End in Mayfair (n.) Hale 1981 [England]
o The Dead Don’t Scream (n.) Hale 1983 [England]
o Violent Midnight (n.) Hale 1986 [England]

SUSANNAH SHANE – Diamonds in the Dumplings.

Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1946.

   According to Hubin’s Bibliography of Crime Fiction, Harriette Cora Ashbrook wrote seven “Spike” Tracy mysteries between 1931 and 1941, all as H. Ashbrook. Then from 1941 to her death in 1946 she wrote six more detective novels, all of these as by Susannah Shane. In at least four of these the sleuthing was done by amateur man-about-town named Christopher Saxe.

   Neither Ashbrook nor Shane seems to be mentioned in the Penzler-Steinbrunner Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, and the one reference to Susannah Shane in Catalogue of Crime (Barzun and Taylor) leads the reader only to an entry for R. C. Ashby, who, although feminine, is another writer altogether.

   Diamonds in the Dumplings was, as it happened, Saxe’s last case. It begins in a wealthy Connecticut home with the accidental discovery that a valuable jewel, the famous Burma Star, has been stolen and an almost identical replica substituted. Saxe is brought into the case by means of a badly hung-over crime reporter friend, and by an ever-curious eye for the unusual.

   As a writer, Ashbrook-Shane takes full advantage of the fact that an amateur detective is not required to follow hard-and-fast police procedure, but after a slow start she allows complications to enter in at a breakneck pace. Chance is permitted to play dirtier tricks than usual on the frailties of human nature, but as it is eventually learned, the three separate plot threads had been neatly intertwined all along.

   Some quite plausible detective work (seen and appreciated more in looking back upon it) undoes an entanglement that at one time seemed to be confused beyond all redemption. At least in the guise of Susannah Shane, the mystery authoress who wrote this particular work seems unfairly forgotten — if in fact she was ever well known.

[UPDATE] 01-04-09.   I’ll leave for another day a listing of the H. Ashbrook-Spike Tracy titles. For now, perhaps it will suffice to supply a list of the books she did as Susannah Shane.

   I don’t think I’ve read any of them since my review of Diamond in the Dumplings. Re-reading what I had to say then, that could be a serious omission on my part, as this seems to be the kind of book I’m inordinately fond of.

   Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

SHANE, SUSANNAH. Pseudonym of H. Ashbrook, 1898-1946.

      Lady in Lilac (n.) Dodd 1941 [New York City, NY]

      Lady in Danger (n.) Dodd 1942 [Christopher Saxe; Long Island, NY]
      Lady in a Million (n.) Dodd 1943 [Christopher Saxe; New York City, NY]
      Lady in a Wedding Dress (n.) Dodd 1943

      The Baby in the Ash Can (n.) Dodd 1944 [Christopher Saxe; New Jersey]

      Diamonds in the Dumplings (n.) Doubleday 1946 [Christopher Saxe; Connecticut]

GEORGE BAGBY – Guaranteed to Fade.

Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1978. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition], February 1979.

   The first time that George Bagby, himself a character in his own novels, told us about one of the mystery cases solved by his friend, Inspector Schmidt of the N.Y.P.D., was in 1935. This is his latest, the 44th in the series so far.

   As always, Schmitty complains a great deal about his aching feet, but he makes quick work of the murder of the many-times married Tommy Thomas, a prime example of how the rich find divorce so convenient a convention. To tell the truth, however, this one doesn’t take a lot of brain-power to figure out. The entertainment may be lighter than usual, but then again, I’m a confirmed addict.

[UPDATE] 12-31-08.   One thing that struck me when reading this review is that when I wrote them for the Courant, I generally had to keep them short, something I seem to have difficulty doing any more. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

   The other thing that caught my attention was the very last word I used. George Bagby, in real life Aaron Marc Stein, aka Hampton Stone was one of my favorite writers, under all three names. I cringe at having to use the word “was,” since (once again) he’s an author I haven’t read in an awfully long time. Going through these old fanzines is bringing back lots of memories.

   In Mr. Bagby’s honor, and Inspector Schmidt’s as well, why not go for a long list of all of the latter’s adventures? Thanks to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here it is:

SCHMIDT, INSPECTOR [GEORGE BAGBY]

o Murder at the Piano (n.) Covici Friede 1935 [New York City, NY]
o Ring Around a Murder (n.) Covici Friede 1936 [New York]
o Murder Half Baked (n.) Covici Friede 1937 [New York City, NY]

o Murder on the Nose (n.) Doubleday 1938 [New York City, NY]
o Bird Walking Weather (n.) Doubleday 1939 [New York City, NY]

o The Corpse with the Purple Thighs (n.) Doubleday 1939 [New Jersey; Academia]
o The Corpse Wore a Wig (n.) Doubleday 1940 [New York City, NY]
o Here Comes the Corpse (n.) Doubleday 1941 [New York City, NY]

o Red Is for Killing (n.) Doubleday 1941 [New York City, NY]
o Murder Calling �50� (n.) Doubleday 1942 [New York City, NY]
o Dead on Arrival (n.) Doubleday 1946 [New York City, NY]
o The Original Carcase (n.) Doubleday 1946 [New York City, NY]
o The Twin Killing (n.) Doubleday 1947 [New York City, NY]
o In Cold Blood (n.) Doubleday 1948 [New York City, NY]
o The Starting Gun (n.) Doubleday 1948 [New York City, NY]
o Coffin Corner (n.) Doubleday 1949 [New York City, NY]
o Drop Dead (n.) Doubleday 1949 [New York City, NY]
o Blood Will Tell (n.) Doubleday 1950 [New York City, NY]

o Death Ain�t Commercial (n.) Doubleday 1951 [New York City, NY]
o The Corpse with the Sticky Fingers (n.) Doubleday 1952 [New York City, NY]
o Scared to Death (n.) Doubleday 1952 [New York City, NY]

o Dead Drunk (n.) Doubleday 1953 [New York City, NY]
o Give the Little Corpse a Great Big Hand (n.) Doubleday 1953 [New York City, NY]
o The Body in the Basket (n.) Doubleday 1954 [Madrid]
o A Dirty Way to Die (n.) Doubleday 1955 [New York City, NY]
o Cop Killer (n.) Doubleday 1956 [New York City, NY]
o Dead Storage (n.) Doubleday 1957 [New York City, NY]

o Dead Wrong (n.) Doubleday 1957 [New York City, NY]
o The Three-Time Losers (n.) Doubleday 1958 [New York City, NY]
o The Real Gone Goose (n.) Doubleday 1959 [New York City, NY]
o Evil Genius (n.) Doubleday 1961 [New York City, NY]
o Murder�s Little Helper (n.) Doubleday 1963 [New York City, NY]
o Mysteriouser and Mysteriouser (n.) Doubleday 1965 [New York City, NY]
o Dirty Pool (n.) Doubleday 1966 [New York City, NY]
o Corpse Candle (n.) Doubleday 1967 [Maine]
o Another Day-Another Death (n.) Doubleday 1968 [New York City, NY]
o Honest Reliable Corpse (n.) Doubleday 1969 [New York City, NY]
o Killer Boy Was Here (n.) Doubleday 1970 [New York City, NY]
o My Dead Body (n.) Doubleday 1976 [New York]
o Two in the Bush (n.) Doubleday 1976 [New York City, NY]

o Innocent Bystander (n.) Doubleday 1977 [New York City, NY]
o The Tough Get Going (n.) Doubleday 1977 [New York City, NY]
o Better Dead (n.) Doubleday 1978 [New York City, NY]
o Guaranteed to Fade (n.) Doubleday 1978 [New York City, NY]
o I Could Have Died (n.) Doubleday 1979 [New York City, NY]
o Mugger�s Day (n.) Doubleday 1979 [New York City, NY]
o Country and Fatal (n.) Doubleday 1980 [New York City, NY]
o A Question of Quarry (n.) Doubleday 1981
o The Sitting Duck (n.) Doubleday 1981
o The Golden Creep (n.) Doubleday 1982 [New York City, NY]
o The Most Wanted (n.) Doubleday 1983 [New York City, NY]

PETER ISRAEL – The Stiff Upper Lip.

Thomas Y. Crowell Co., hardcover, 1978. Paperback reprint: Avon, 1980.

   The private eye seems in essence to be almost wholly a uniquely American character. Even if B. F. Cage is originally from Los Angeles, by continuing to use the side streets and back alleys of Paris and Amsterdam as his stomping grounds, he stands out like a crime against nature.

   His client this time around is a black basketball player trying a comeback in France, but certain past and present indiscretions involving mobs of two different nationalities are threatening to catch up with him. The story is slight, involving no particular urgency, and it ends with an awfully silly version of a Chicago gang war.

   Too many transplants, and they fail to take. Valerie, Cage’s newly self-appointed assistant, is the only delicious morsel to be found anywhere in this stale and condescending affair.

[UPDATE] 12-30-08. As a wild shot in the dark, I’d say that fictional PI’s are a world-wide phenomenon today, which is a Good Thing. And in the years since 1979, I think that these foreign born PI’s have adapted and changed. They display much more of their own countries’ backgrounds and flavors, instead of relying so heavily on the US model. (A point worth considering in more detail, someday.)

   Just from reading through this review, I also think I might enjoy The Stiff Upper Lip more now than I did in 1979. Not having read it again in the almost 30 years since, all I can pass along to you is my judgment as it was back then.

   Over the years Peter Israel, the author, was also a high-ranking editor at Putnam. He eventually became the president, then chairman of the board of directors, serving in these capacities between 1978 and 1987.

   Of more specific interest to us, he also wrote five mystery novels, three with B. F. Cage and two with “eccentric, brilliant New York City legal detective Charles Camelot and his assistant, Phil Revere,” as they’re described on one bookseller’s website.

   Here’s a list of all five, as taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

      ISRAEL, PETER. Pseudonym of J. Leon Israel.

   Hush Money (n.) Crowell 1974 [B. F. Cage; Los Angeles, CA]
   The French Kiss (n.) Crowell 1976 [B. F. Cage; Paris]

   The Stiff Upper Lip (n.) Crowell 1978 [B. F. Cage; Paris]
   I’ll Cry When I Kill You (n.) Mysterious Press 1988 [Charles Camelot; New York City, NY]
   If I Should Die Before I Die (n.) Mysterious Press 1989 [Charles Camelot; New York City, NY]

K. j. a. WISHNIA – Red House.

St. Martin’s; paperback reprint, December 2002. Hardcover edition: St. Martin’s, November 2001.

   This is the fourth in the series of mysteries solved by Ecuadorian ex-revolutionary and now fledgling private eye Filomena Buscarsela, single mom and philosopher slash social critic. Quoting from page 67: “And thus we see the dangers of post-Heideggerian rejection of history.”

   Since I haven’t read the previous three books, I don’t know exactly what career paths she may have been following up to now. She seems to have spent some time on the New York City police force — a police detective for only one day, as she puts it — but in this book, she’s a first year trainee at the PI firm of Davis and Brown, trying to work her way up to getting her own license.

   And rather than focusing on only one case, we get bits and pieces of a number of them — more of a private eye procedural, a la Joe Gores, street style, as Filomena tries to build up the Latino clientele for the firm.

   The mugging (murder?) of a local housing advocate is the main item on her agenda, however, with the plight of the illegal squatters in an abandoned tenement they refurbished themselves a close second.

   The pace is fast-moving, told in first person, present tense, and Filomena certainly knows her way around. The problem with the book is a subtle one, as I found it. According to the back cover, Wishnia (male) has a Ph.D. in comparative literature, and book reads as though it was written by someone having a Ph.D. in comparative literature.

   It does not read as though it was being told by a real-life Filomena Buscarsela, whose depth of knowledge seemingly knows no bounds, running the gamut from Heidegger (see above) to Marx (Groucho, waggle-waggle) to pulp novel covers (page 131) to nineteenth-century German chemist Friedrich Kekulé (page 226).

   I’m not saying that Filomena Buscarsela is not the person she says she is. What I’m saying is that K. j. a. Wishnia did not succeed in convincing me that she is. It’s his job, and so far (I’ve read only the one book) he hasn’t done it, at least not for me.

   The street scenes are fine, perhaps even more than fine. Otherwise? I’m skeptical, but I’ll leave myself open to opposing argument. (Even better, I’ll read the first three books.)

[UPDATE] 12-29-08.   That’s another promise I haven’t kept, I’m sorry to say. Not yet, I haven’t, but I will. For the record, expanded upon from her entry in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s a list of all of Filomena’s appearances in book form:

   BUSCARSELA, FILOMENA

      23 Shades of Black. The Imaginary Press, trade pb, 1997. Signet, pb, Nov 1998; Point Blank, trade pb, 2004.    [Edgar Award finalist for Best First Novel.]

      Soft Money. Dutton, hc, 1999; Signet, pb, May 2000.
      The Glass Factory. Dutton, hc, 2000; Signet, pb, Mar 2001.
      Red House. St. Martin’s, hc, Nov 2001; St. Martin’s, pb, Dec 2002.
      Blood Lake. St. Martin’s, hc, Dec 2002.

BRIAN FREEMANTLE – Here Comes Charlie M. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1978; ppbk reprint: Ballantine, 1980. Published in the U.K. as Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie; Jonathan Cape, 1978; ppbk reprint: Arrow, 1987.

   Spies can easily outlive their usefulness. The new brooms of equally new administrations have moved in on both sides of the Atlantic, and Charlie Muffin, who proved to be so embarrassing a non-willing pawn in the preceding book in this series (a book called Charlie Muffin, or simply Charlie M. in the US) is the dirt that has to be swept out. Guilt-ridden and on the defensive as he is, however, it is his nature to fight back.

   And the nature of sequels being what it is, the keen edge of cutting commentary concerning the spy business is lost, or at least it takes a while for it to be sharpened up again. This time it seems almost too easy — the top minds of two huge intelligence organizations pose very little challenge to the intrepid Charlie M.

[UPDATE] 12-27-08. I had no idea at the time, but Charlie Muffin has turned out to be one of the most durable spy characters in hardcover spy fiction. He’s appeared in 14 books, listed below. Guys like Matt Helm, Joe Gall and Nick Carter have lasted longer in paperback, to be sure, and maybe you can think of others who might rival him in hardcover, but it’s quite a record.

   And one that’s passed below my own personal radar. Until coming across this review, I hadn’t thought of Charlie M. in ages, perhaps because so few of his adventures have come out in paperback. Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s the list:

   MUFFIN, CHARLIE

o Charlie Muffin. Cape 1977. [US: Charlie M.]

o Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie. Cape 1978. [US: Here Comes Charlie M.]
o The Inscrutable Charlie Muffin. Cape 1979. [US: same]
o Charlie Muffin’s Uncle Sam. Cape 1980. [US: Charlie Muffin, U.S.A.]
o Madrigal for Charlie Muffin. Hutchinson 1981. [No US edition]

o Charlie Muffin and Russian Rose. Century 1985. [US? The Blind Run]
o Charlie Muffin San. Century 1987. [US: See Charlie Run]
o The Bearpit. Century 1988. [No US edition]
o The Runaround. Century 1988. [US: same]
o Comrade Charlie. Century 1989. [US: same]
o Charlie’s Apprentice. Century 1993. [US: same]

o Charlie’s Chance. Orion 1996. [US: Bomb Grade]
o Dead Men Living. Severn 2000. [US: same]
o Kings of Many Castles. Severn 2001. [US: same]

   As for author Brian Freemantle, he doesn’t seem to have stopped writing, unless it’s been very recently. He’s been averaging a book or two a year over the past 30 years, either under his own name or as by one of his four pseudonyms: Harry Asher, Jonathan Evans, John Maxwell or Jack Winchester. For a long list of all the books he’s written, along with a large assortment of covers, see the UK Fantastic Fiction website.