KATHERINE HALL PAGE – The Body in the Fjord.

Avon, paperback reprint; 1st printing, November 1998. Hardcover first edition: William Morrow, November 1997.

   False advertising. Although her name is not on the front cover, it’s on the back cover and all over the first couple of blurb pages. This is supposedly a “Faith Fairchild” mystery, and it isn’t.

   Faith Fairchild, for those of you who may not know, is a minister’s wife who lives in Aleford MA (a small fictional village somewhere outside Boston), and she’s solved many a case in her day, but not this one. She appears in a few pages at the beginning, a couple in the middle at the other end of a telephone call, and a few more at the end. That’s all.

   Besides being a sleuth, a wife and a mother, and not necessarily in that order, Faith also has a catering business on the side. Working for her part-time is Pix Miller. What Pix knows about murder cases, she’s learned from Faith, but it hardly seems enough for her to tackle a book’s worth of adventure on her own – and it isn’t, I’m reluctantly sorry to say.

   Pix and her mother Ursula head for Norway in this book – which should hardly come as a surprise, given the title of the book – where they try to track down Kari, the granddaughter of Ursula’s best friend Marit. Kari and Eric, her boy friend, had been working as stewards on a guided tour through the land of the fjords for a group largely consisting of Americans.

   But Eric has been found dead, and Kari is missing. You might think it would be the utmost in audaciousness for two American women to come to a foreign country to do the job of the local police, and for the most part, you would be right. Mitigating this rather shaky basis of the story line is the picturesque quality of the tour they join, asking all kinds of questions as they go. Most of the central part of the book is as much a travelogue as it is a mystery, which is what we primarily signed up for, or at least I did, complete with recipes in the back.

   Possible reasons for Kari’s disappearance: she and Eric may have stumbled upon a stronghold of Nazi survivors or sympathisizers; or a gang of smugglers of Norwegian artifacts; or a cabal of industrial spies in the oil business; or the romance between the two young people may have ended in a lovers’ spat and that is that.

   Or any combination of the above. The police don’t make an appearance until page 167, leaving Pix and her mother the only ones on the scene asking questions and getting into serious trouble, especially Pix. It’s all a case of too much, which is quite a paradox, since it’s also a case of far too little.

   Here’s a list of all the Faith Fairchild books, expanding upon the entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. I’d recommend that you read one or another of this list instead, at least for the first one. If you’ve already read one, you’re probably way ahead of me on this.

LES ROBERTS – The Cleveland Local.

St. Martin’s; paperback reprint, December 1998. Hardcover first edition: St. Martin’s, November 1997. Trade paperback: Gray & Company Publishers, June 2005.

   I’ll begin, not at the beginning, or not really, with a list of all the mystery fiction that Les Roberts has written. This I put together from what I found in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, plus the bibliography that Mr. Roberts provides on his own website:

         The Saxon Series:     [A Los Angeles actor turned private eye.]

• An Infinite Number of Monkeys (St. Martin’s Press, 1987)
• Not Enough Horses (St. Martin’s Press, 1988)
• A Carrot for the Donkey (St. Martin’s Press, 1989)
• Snake Oil (St. Martin’s Press, 1990)
• Seeing the Elephant (St. Martin’s Press, 1992)
• The Lemon Chicken Jones (St. Martin’s Press, 1994)

         The Milan Jacovich Series:      [A private eye of Slovenian heritage based in Cleveland OH.]

• Pepper Pike (St. Martin’s Press, 1988)
• Full Cleveland (St. Martin’s Press, 1989)
• Deep Shaker (St. Martin’s Press, 1991)
• The Cleveland Connection (St. Martin’s Press, 1993)
• The Lake Effect (St. Martin’s Press, 1994)
• The Duke of Cleveland (St. Martin’s Press, 1995)
• Collision Bend (St. Martin’s Press, 1996)
• The Cleveland Local (St. Martin’s Press, 1997)
• A Shoot in Cleveland (St. Martin’s Press, 1998)
• The Best-Kept Secret (St. Martin’s Press, 1999)
• The Indian Sign (St. Martin’s Press, 2000)
• The Dutch (St. Martin’s Press, 2001)
• The Irish Sports Pages (St. Martin’s Press, 2002)

         Stand Alones:

• The Chinese Fire Drill (Five Star, 2001)
• The Scent of Spiced Oranges (Five Star, 2002)

   Here’s the real beginning, the first sentence of The Cleveland Local: “It was a black-and-white-movie morning when I opened my office, looked out the window down the Cuyahoga River, and saw the angry thunderheads hunkered over Lake Erie.”

   And here’s how the man pronounces his name: MY-lan YOCK-o-vitch, which he proudly makes sure the reader knows by page 3. Milan is an ex-football player and pretty much of a blue-collar kind of PI. He knows his way around every section of Cleveland, though, from the ethnic neighborhoods where he grew up to the ritzier parts of downtown and areas where the richer people live.

   In The Cleveland Local he’s hired to tackle a rather cold case, that of the shotgun murder of a young professional lawyer on the Caribbean island of San Carlos ten weeks earlier. Obviously there’s no way the Cleveland cops can get involved, so the case is steered Milan’s way. The dead man’s sister, also an attorney, is picking up the tab.

   What Milan can’t understand is why the dead man’s father, a noted well-to-do labor attorney, wants nothing to do with the investigation, making him wonder if the sister might be right, and that there’s a local connection, not just another botched robbery attempt in a foreign country and international resort area.

   And of course there is. That’s almost not the point. What Roberts is equally interested in, besides the mystery, is to illustrate why and how he loves the city of Cleveland, the ins and outs, the people who run it, mostly behind the scenes, in a fictional paean to the town, with a hint of melancholy for the older days. There’s also some introspective father-son stuff involved as well, without being overly blatant about it, plus a generous hint of a budding romance. (Milan is divorced from his two boys’ mother.)

   Milan’s technique consists of asking good common sense questions, persistence, a tough guy attitude (which at over 40 he can still back up) and persistence. An excellent combination, marred by the fact – and I dislike having to bring it up – by the relative weakness of the mystery. The motive for the murder seems too slight, the method too complicated, and people in retrospect don’t seem to have behaved in appropriate fashion to it.

   Can I say that and still say that I enjoyed the book? I can, and if you didn’t notice, I just did. I should also point out, as many of the reviewers on Amazon also do, that the ending is one that will have readers immediately reaching for the next book in the series, which – thanks to the bibliography above – would have been A Shoot in Cleveland. It looks like a must read to me.

JEAN HAGER – Sew Deadly.

Avon, paperback original. First printing, December 1998.

   At one time Jean Hager had three different mystery series going, but while I’m not 100% sure, there doesn’t seem to have been any books to appear from her in a while. She was born in 1932, so if she happens to be retired from writing, as seems likely, she’s had a very decent career to show for it.

   Ms. Hager wrote romances in the beginning, under both her own name and under several pseudonyms, before edging her way into mystery fiction by writing Gothics (as Amanda McAllister and Sara North) in the late 1970s. Her first true detective novel may have been The Grandfather Medicine in 1989 — but let’s do it the easier way. Here’s a complete list of all the books in each the three series that I mentioned just a minute ago, thanks primarily to Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

   Chief Mitchell Bushyhead: [half-Cherokee and head of the four-man police force in Bushkin, Oklahoma]

      The Grandfather Medicine. St. Martin’s, 1989.
      Nightwalker. St. Martin’s, 1990.
      Ghostland. St. Martin’s, 1992.
      The Fire Carrier. Mysterious Press, 1996.

      Masked Dancers. Mysterious Press, 1998.

   Molly Bearpaw: [a major crimes investigator and advocate for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma]

      Ravenmocker. Mysterious Press, 1992.
      The Redbird’s Cry. Mysterious Press, 1994.
      Seven Black Stones. Mysterious Press, 1995.

      The Spirit Caller. Mysterious Press, 1997.

   Tess Darcy: [owner of the Iris House, a bed-and-breakfast in Victoria Springs, Missouri]

      Blooming Murder. Avon, pb, 1994.
      Dead and Buried. Avon, pb, 1995.
      Death on the Drunkard’s Path. Avon, pb, 1996.
      The Last Noel. Avon, pb, 1997.
      Sew Deadly. Avon, pb, 1998.
      Weigh Dead. Avon, pb, 1999.
      Bride and Doom. Avon, pb, 2000.

   Relative to the Tess Darcy books, there’s a long online interview with Jean Hager about the series at http://bandb.about.com/library/weekly/aa060898.htm.

   Any mystery novel with an amateur female detective, especially one who operates a bed-and-breakfast establishment, is going to be called a “cozy,” no matter that two people are murdered in it, and more or less on stage rather than off, one of them in fairly gruesome fashion. (While sometimes I wonder exactly how cozy “cozies” really are, I’m not going to argue, or least not here.)

   Probably because a B&B can’t have too many murders take place in it and stay in business, the primary setting of Sew Deadly has shifted by this time, the 5th book in the series, to the local seniors’ center, where Tess volunteers during the winter months, with no reservations in sight until March.

   The first victim comes as no surprise. It is a meddlesome little old lady who lives in near poverty and seems to delight in finding various ways of annoying her fellow seniors, even to the extent of a little minor blackmail, just for fun. (The second to die is more of a shocker, as I mentioned above, both as to who the victim is and the manner of death.)

   It does mean that there are plenty of good suspects, including the dead woman’s nephew and his supposed wife, who just happen to be visiting to make sure he’s remembered in her will, for whatever small amount it might be. And because Jean Hager as an author is quite good as describing what might have been totally stereotypical regulars to the senior center, the detective work is for the most part very well done — and in fact the emphasis is on the detective work, and not Tess’s love life, which seems to be moving well enough along so as not to cause anybody any concern.

   Perhaps you noticed that I used the phrase “for the most part.” The killer is fairly obvious to spot, but while there are lots of clues planted along the way, some of them leading to dead ends, of course, the clincher is not discovered until page 202 (of a 210 page book), meaning that Tess knows for sure only a fraction of a moment before the reader does.

   If the reader has been paying attention, that is. The end result is an “almost but not quite” fair play detective story, but in some cases, like this one, the “almost” is almost good enough.

LUCIEN AGNIEL – Code Name: “Icy”

Paperback Library 63-310; paperback original, May 1970.

   Of the three books I have by Mr. Agniel, none are copyright in his name, only by either Coronet Publications, who owned Paperback Library, or Warner Brothers. (More about the latter in a minute.) That’s usually a fairly broad hint that the author didn’t exist, that it was a pen name or, more likely, a house name.

   Not so in this case. First of all, and I just noticed this, my copy of Code Name: “Icy” has a handwritten inscription on the first inside blurb page, dedicating the book to Elizabeth. I’ll refrain from repeating the entire inscription. It’s not embarrassing, but I think it should remain private.

   Then, looking in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, we find not only dates for Mr. Lucien (1919-1988), but a note that he’s included in Contemporary Authors. Pulling up the CA web page, I found that Elizabeth was his first wife, who died in 1973.

   Over the years Lucien Agniel served in World War II and was awarded a Bronze Star, among other honors; worked for the Charlotte News, the US Information Agency, Radio Free Europe, and US News and World Report, among other jobs and occupations.

   There are two books listed in CFIV for Mr. Agniel, this one in hand, plus Pressure Point, also from Paperback Library (November, 1970). Arguably there should be another, and I will send the suggestion on to Al in my next email to him: a book entitled Zeppelin (Paperback Library; May 1971), an adaptation of the Warner Brothers movie of the same title.

   I don’t know if you’ve seen the film, starring Michael York and Elke Sommer, but since I haven’t, I looked up the story line on IMBD, which reads as follows: [An allied spy who has pretended to defect to Germany in World War I] “finds himself aboard the maiden voyage of a powerful new prototype Zeppelin, headed for Scotland on a secret mission that could decide the outcome of the war.”

   Most of Code Name: “Icy” takes place in Paris, where the paths of the following characters converge: Eric Eis, an East German assassin who is working with the Russians but who apparently is a former American soldier presumably dead but whose body was never recovered. Fred Sherman of the CIA, who has received an anonymous letter reporting that Eric Hendricks, an American deserter, is still alive; Dr. Richard Hendricks of St. Louis, the brother of the man presumed dead; “Gloria,” who sent the anonymous letter to Fred Sherman; and Nicole, of Birmingham, England, working as a gold-digging stripper in a Parisian night spot, and whom Fred Sherman appears to becoming excessively fond of.

   There is one other incidental participant in the tale, one unnamed, but suitably snooty President of France. It will come as no surprise that he survives. None of the others’ plan work out exactly as they had planned, however, except perhaps Nicole’s.

   All in all, a rather modest affair, one that can be read in a couple of nights before turning off the light. Fred Sherman seems a fairly sappy guy for a CIA agent at first, but he redeems himself reasonably well toward the end. A quick skim through Pressure Point doesn’t turn up his name as an active participant, so it looks like this was his one and only outing – the only one worth recording in book form, that is.

Dear Steve

   There were originally seven Señorita Scorpion stories. The first three were first collected in THE LEGEND OF SEÑORITA SCORPION (Circle V Westerns, 1996). The fourth story was collected in THE RETURN OF SEÑORITA SCORPION (Circle V Westerns, 1997). The sixth story was collected in THE LASH OF SEÑORITA SCORPION (Circle V Westerns, 1998). These were large print editions.

   Only the first collection of three stories appeared in a standard print hardcover: THE LEGEND OF SEÑORITA SCORPION (Gunsmoke, 2003) published in the Gunsmoke series distributed worldwide by BBC Audiobooks Ltd. The reason we stopped the stories from appearing in this Circle V Western series is that they began to appear in Les Savage, Jr., trios published in the Five Star Westerns. They now have all appeared in such Five Star trios.

   Here are the seven stories in terms of first restored appearances in the Five Star Westerns:

    “Brand of the Gallows-Ghost” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Winter, 45) was originally titled by the author “The Brand of Penasco” and was collected under this title in THE SHADOW IN RENEGADE BASIN (Five Star Westerns, 2000).

    “The Sting of Señorita Scorpion” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Winter, 49) was originally titled by the author “Scorpion’s Return” but was collected under its magazine title in THE STING OF SEÑORITA SCORPION (Five Star Westerns, 2000).

    “Señorita Scorpion” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Spring, 44) was originally titled by the author “Death ’Rods the Big Thicket Bunch” but was collected under its magazine title in THE DEVIL’S CORRAL (Five Star Westerns, 2003).

    “The Brand of Señorita Scopion” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Summer, 44) was originally titled by the author “Señorita Six-Gun” but was collected under its magazine title in THE BEAST IN CAÑADA DIABLO (Five Star Westerns, 2004).

    “Secret of Santiago” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Winter, 44) was originally titled by the author “Secret of the Santiago” and was collected under this title in TRAIL OF THE SILVER SADDLE (Five Star Westerns, 2005).

    “The Curse of Montezuma” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Spring, 45) was originally titled by the author “Six-Gun Serpent God” but was collected under its magazine title in THE CURSE OF MONTEZUMA (Five Star Westerns, 2006).

    “Lash of the Six-Gun Queen” by Les Savage, Jr. in Action Stories (Winter, 47) was originally titled by the author “The Return of Señorita Scorpion” but was collected under the title “The Lash of Señorita Scorpion” in WOLVES OF THE SUNDOWN TRAIL (Five Star Westerns, 2007).

   There is a lot of background on each story in the head notes in these various collections. Savage was not as fond of these stories as was Malcolm Reiss at Fiction House, and hence his writing of them was somewhat sporadic. Although he expanded several of his short novels for magazines into book-length novels, he never went back to do so with any of these stories, nor did he try to weld them together into collections the way we have done.

NOTE: These cover images came from Phil Stephensen-Payne’s mammoth Galactic Central website, a source that every Fiction Magazine collector should absolutely know about.

[UPDATE] 02-08-07. Turns out that someone has done a list, as I suspected, even though I still haven’t seen it. And not only that, but there’s a story missing in Jon’s list above, but that’s because Les Savage didn’t write it.

   After posting a link to this blog entry on the Yahoo PulpMags group, Will Murray vaguely remembered that maybe Emmett McDowell did a Señorita Scorpion story. This rang a bell with me, too. Then Brian Earl Brown came up with the title. It’s in John DeWalt’s book Keys to Other Doors:

       “Gun-Witch of Hoodoo Range,” Action Stories, Winter 1948/1949, by Emmett McDowell.

   Thanks, gents!

[UPDATE #2.] 02-08-07. From long-time pulp fan Jerry Page, reprinted from the PulpMags group with his permission:

   For years I read only sf and fantasy pulps — I owned some non-sf pulps and had read some hero novels, Spider, Shadow, Doc, etc., but I wasn’t all that interested in pulps outside the sf field.

   Then, wondering through the dealers’ room at a convention I saw a stack of Action Stories on a table and the Winter 1947 issue caught my eye. I knew I had seen it before.

   Where? On the Winter 1947 issue of Planet Stories.

   Both covers were by Allen Anderson. The Planet cover illustrated Erik Finnel’s “Black Priestess of Varda.” The Action cover was the same figure of a woman holding a whip and being attacked by either an outlaw or Indian (I haven’t tried digging it out of the box its in so forgive me, but this is from memory).

   Obviously done from the same reference photo of the same model in the same pose. Composition and so on the same. But one was SF and the other was Western. I bought the Action Stories, took it home and compared it with the Planet Stories and confirmed what I thought I had seen. I think I bought three Actions and in each of them there was a Senorita Scorpion story by Les Savage. I read one of them and it was pretty good. I concluded Savage might be a better than average writer. So I read the others. They weren’t quite as good as the first one, but they were good.

   And that’s how I started reading pulps outside the SF field. I still think Savage is one of the better western writers. Reading him led to reading more Westerns, and I also started reading other kinds of pulps, discovering the great wealth of fiction to be found in Adventure, Black Mask and the better Air War pulps such as Wings. (Joel Townsley Rogers is one of the great pulp writers, and his best World War I stories, especially the aviation stories are close to being masterpieces.) I examined my Argosy issues I’d picked up because they contained fantastic stories, and started reading other types of fiction.

   Additional installments of the online Addenda to Allen J. Hubin’s Revised Crime Fiction IV don’t usually occur as quickly as this, but I uploaded Part 24 to the website this afternoon.

   A primary source of much of the new data this time came from Kenneth R. Johnson’s new online index of digest paperbacks of the 1940s.

   As Ken says in the first two lines of his introduction, “The digest-sized paperbacks are very much the forgotten step-children of the American paperback revolution. The earliest series predate the advent of Pocket Books by two years. They were published in parallel with the smaller mass-market paperbacks, flourishing even amid the paper rationing of World War II.”

   Later on he states: “The largest genre published was detective fiction (almost 1100 books); western fiction was much less prolific (circa 325 books), and science fiction was marginally on the radar. Almost as prolific as the mysteries was a long-defunct genre called ‘love novels,’ with circa 925 books.”

   If Ken’s bibliography is not complete, it certainly comes close. At present it includes, he says, 2688 books, but he’s very anxious to add any that he’s missed, if you have information about them.

   But as I said up toward the top, from Ken’s index so far, Al Hubin has already discovered pages of information now incorporated into Part 24 of the Revised CFIV Addenda. This consists largely of dates and settings, but many alternate titles as well and a stray pen name or two, previously unknown to Al.

   This profile appears also in Part 21 of the Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. Some of the dates of the Australian editions of Afford’s book were revised and reported on in Part 5, then Fender Tucker (of Ramble House fame) came along and added the first US editions of most of the titles.

   So much new data to include, in other words, that it necessitated a complete revamp of his entry, and here it is.

AFFORD, MAX. Working name of Malcom R. Afford, 1906-1954. Born in Adelaide, noted playwright and radio producer with a biennial award given in his name to young Australian dramatists. Author of more than sixty radio and stage plays, with six crime novels and two books of plays included in the (Revised) Crime Fiction IV; see below. This now constitutes the author’s complete entry. Series character: Jeffery Blackburn (JB). Blackburn is a freelance sleuth who continually offers his services to Chief Inspector William Read on some very interesting cases.

      Blood on His Hands! John Long, UK, hc, 1936. (JB) Setting: Melbourne, Australia. Add US edition: Ramble House, pb, 2006. Also published as: An Ear for Murder, Johnson (Sydney, Australia), ca. 1947. Correction of tentative publication date of Australian edition. “A thriller with ‘impossible’ overtones, including a locked room murder.”

      The Dead Are Blind. John Long, UK, hc, 1937. (JB) Add US edition: Ramble House, pb, 2007. [A locked room murder takes place in a radio studo while a mystery play is being broadcast.]

      Death’s Mannikins. John Long, UK, hc, 1937. (JB) Also published as: The Dolls of Death, Johnson, Australia, 1947. Correction of publication date of Australian edition. Add US edition: Ramble House, pb, 2006. “ … about a country manor where every member of the family has a mannikin that looks like him. When one turns up, the person dies, horribly.”

       _The Dolls of Death. Sydney, Australia: Johnson, pb, 1947. Correction of publication date. Previously published as Death’s Mannikins (Long, 1937).

      _An Ear to Murder. Sydney, Australia: Johnson, pb, ca.1947. Correction of publication date. Previously published as Blood on His Hands! (Long, 1936).

      Fly by Night. John Long, UK, hc, 1942. (JB) Also published as: Owl of Darkness (Angus, 1942; Ramble House, 2006). Add the latter as the first US edition.

      Lady in Danger. Sydney, Australia: Mulga, pb, 1944. [This edition with Afford alone.] Later edition in collaboration with Alexander Kirkland and some variations in text: French, 1946. [3-act play]

      _Lady in Danger [with Alexander Kirkland]. French, pb, 1946. Revised from 1944 Mulga edition written by Afford alone.

      Mischief in the Air. Australia: University of Queensland Press, pb, 1974. Collection of plays. Add complete listing, below. Those criminous are indicated with an asterisk (*).
         Consulting Room
         *Lady in Danger
         Lazy in the Sun
         *Mischief in the Air
         William Light–The Founder

      _Owl of Darkness. Angus, Australia, hc, 1942. Previously published as Fly by Night (Long, 1942). Add US edition: Ramble House, pb, 2006. “A classic impossible crime novel about a villain dressed as an owl terrorizing a quaint village.” Shown is the cover of a Collins paperback reprint with a photograph of the author on the front.

      The Sheep and the Wolves. Sydney, Australia: Johnson, pb, 1947. (JB) Setting: Australia. Correction of publication date.

      Sinners in Paradise. Sydney, Australia: Johnson, pb, 1946. Setting: Australia. Correction of publication date.

   First — this is Steve — some background information and a bit of an introduction. If you were to look Thorne Lee up in either print or CD version of Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, his entry would look like this:

LEE, THORNE; pseudonym of Thornton Shiveley; Born in Nebraska; in 1950s living in California and instructing in English and speech at a junior college; actor; writer under another name.
       The Monster of Lazy Hook (Duell, 1949, hc) [California]
       Summer Shock (Abelard-Schuman, 1956, hc) [Oregon]

or at least that’s how it appeared until Al sent me an update for him in Part 9 of the Revised CFIV. Not much, but at least an approximate year of birth for him:

LEE, THORNE. Thornton P. Shiveley, ca.1874- .

   Following this, several months later, Al sent me an update correcting the spelling of the author’s last name, saying “There’s a Thornton P. Shively in the Mormon site with the right birth date, so I assume it’s he.”

   If he was born in 1874 would have made him a little old to be teaching in the 1950s, but that’s hardly impossible.

   But while doing a search for Lee on the Internet, I found an eBay seller who was offering a signed copy of The Monster of Lazy Hook. As part of the description she said, “Inscribed and signed on copyright page by author both as ‘Thorne Lee’ and Thornton T Shiveley.”

   So we’re back to Shiveley, but where did the middle initial “T” come from?

   We asked Victor Berch, who replied with the definitive answer. Al, this time, had the wrong fellow. Said Victor, “From what I can determine, Thornton T. Shively was the son of Thornton P. Shively. In the 1930 Census, he was listed as 17 years old, born in Nebraska.. His father Thornton Pickenpaugh Shively was an accountant, born in Virginia. Thornton T. was born Feb. 26 1913 in Nebraska and died June 21, 1980 in Santa Cruz, CA.

   And as an immediate consequence, the basic online entry for Lee/Shively now looks like this:

LEE, THORNE. Pseudonym of Thornton T. Shively, 1913-1980.

   In the meantime I’d discovered that Lee had written extensively for the pulp magazines, so I sent this information on to Bill Pronzini. At the same time I asked if had copies of both of Lee’s books, and whether he’d read either of them. Indeed he had, and I’ll let him take over from here:

   
   He began writing during WW II. His first novel, The Fox and the Hound, about an amnesiac trying to find out who he is and whether or not he committed murder, was published complete and unabridged in the August 1944 issue of Mammoth Detective (from whence came the author’s bio below). Unlike some of other full-length novels which first appeared in the Mammoth mags, it was never published in book form. From 1944 to 1949 he contributed more than 30 tales to Black Mask, Dime Detective, New Detective, Doc Savage, The Shadow, S&S Detective Story, Ten Detective Aces, and other pulps. He also wrote a few stories for the sf mags of the period.

      In Thorne Lee’s own words:

   Peering into the remote and shady past of a mystery writer, you might expect to find a witches’ brew of dangerous living and dark adventure, but my own life story reads more like an afternoon recital at a ladies’ garden party. Any resemblance to excitement in my tales is purely accidental — or I should say, purely imaginary. I have yet to look down the wrong end of a gun barrel — which is probably true of a lot of fire-breathing yarn-spinners. Well, we can’t all be Jack Londons.

    “Born in Nebraska, married in Montana, and a daddy in Southern California” covers the high spots for me. I think my first interest in words began with a story called the The Enchanted Isle of Yew. That was all I read — just the one book, over and over. So far I haven’t been accused of writing the same story over and over, but I suppose that will come in time.

   I first looked on writing with professional intent while editing a college weekly. About that time I wrote a musical comedy (book and lyrics) and was ruined for life. The show was one of those “local boy” affairs with a fat part for myself. On the road it ran four solid nights. I think the lyrics are funny, but for a different reason.

   That brief fling as a Main Street Noel Coward plus an after-dinner speaking contest gave me the quaint idea that I should be a magazine humorist. Ha! ha!

   … I topped off college graduation with a year in university theatre, where I almost flunked in playwriting. For a brief time I wavered between acting and free-lance writing. The choice was easy; chances were that either career I chose would be the wrong one.

   Since then I’ve worked as everything from chauffeur to night clerk, to florist, to meter reader. So far I’ve managed to leave all jobs under my own power. A brief career as a school teacher was soon abandoned. The last straw was the day a tenth grader mistook me for a fellow pupil.

   I write mystery stories for three reasons: (1) I like to read them; (2) a good share of the better writing being done (setting my own stuff tenderly aside) can be credited to mystery writers; (3) my first stories sold were mysteries.

   My own reading tastes vary widely from Hilton to Hammett. I like my share of realism, but I don’t favor the theory that the supernatural and abnormal are out-of-date in mystery writing, or ever have been since Poe.

   The Fox and the Hound is my first novel. I use a pseudonym for the reason that my own name is invariably misspelled or mispronounced, or both. Thorne Lee is an abbreviation based on the first and last syllables of my name.

   I like to work in old, ragged clothes. As a writer I have found that desire easy to satisfy. My wife, Betty, says I am probably the only scarecrow to write a novel.

   I’ve been falsely accused of favoring red-headed heroines because my four-year-old daughter, Susan Leigh, has golden red hair.

   Our home is that place they write songs about, the San Fernando valley. I am working in an essential industry until the end of the war gives me “time to retire,” or until Uncle Sam looks with favor upon my bony physique. Even now I think I hear the old gentleman mumbling my name. Perhaps I’ll have that real-life adventure after all. If so, I know there will be a lot of good fellows with good intentions sharing that adventure.

   The series of stories featuring the detective duo of crippled Julian Renard and his Watson, Roger Bannister, appeared solely in Doc Savage, 1945-47. Here’s the complete list, with issue dates

       “The Shock Punch” — June 1945
       “The Britannica Sock” — January 1946
       “Who Rides a Tiger…” — April 1946
       “The Man Who Got Away With It” — August 1946
       “The Monster of Lazy Hook” — December 1946
       “There Was an Old Shoe” — May-June 1947
       “The Woman in the Attic” — July-August 1947
       “The Ghost Hangs High” — September-October 1947

    Thorne Lee also wrote a couple of pretty good hardcover mysteries:

THE MONSTER OF LAZY HOOK (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc.: A Bloodhound Mystery; 1949) is a much altered expansion of the short story of the same title and features Renard and Bannister.

      From the blurb on the inside jacket flap:

   In swift succession, three men — all leading citizens of the little California coastal town of Lazy Hook — vanished without a trace. All three had been connected with the late Spencer Van Dyke, eccentric millionaire, who though he died of natural causes had managed to surround his death with many-sided mystery. What had Spencer Van Dyke done with the huge sum of cash withdrawn from his bank shortly before his death? What was the meaning of the fantastic poem he caused to be engraved on his marble gravestone? Why had he bequeathed the vast and dilapidated Van Dyke mansion to his hermit butler? Had he come from beyond the grave to spirit away Lyman Hobbs, his undertaker, Henri Picard, his lawyer, and Peter Ramsey, the local editor?

   These were the questions that were thrust at the strange pair of detectives who set out to solve the apparently insoluble. The two, crippled Julian Renard, mostly brains, and Robert Bannister, mostly brawn, found themselves in a peculiar and dangerous setup, and only their assorted but well-balanced gifts, together with a certain bit of luck, brought them through alive and entitled to the rewards they had been promised.

   Thorne Lee’s is a fast-paced puzzler, with enough easy humor and unexpected romance to balance the grim and inevitable drama that envelops Lazy Hook and its citizens.

      SUMMER SHOCK (Abelard-Schuman Ltd., 1956) is a good, unusual suspense novel that takes place at the Ashland, Oregon Shakespeare Festival (which is still being held annually and draws huge crowds). According to the author’s bio on the jacket, Shively acted in numerous plays put on at the festival, among them Richard II and King Lear. At the time the book was published he was living in Visalia, CA. and teaching at College of the Sequoias.

      Once again, from the blurb from the inside jacket flap:

   The very first reader of this book, when it was in manuscript form, started his report with this sentence: “This is a book that I don’t think you should get away from you.” We feel that the readers of the finished book will feel the same way about it.

   The Pacific Northwest is the setting, and the author’s description of the natural scenery and his use of it in the story, add much to the special flavor of the novel. The characters are all member of a semi-professional group of actors engaged in putting on a Summer Shakespearean festival. The theatrical background is completely authentic and the details of casting for the various plays are cleverly woven into the plot. (The theatrical material is completely fascinating in itself, but never gets in the way of the swiftly moving story which is full of suspense.)

   It is impossible to summarize the plot without detracting considerably from the reader’s enjoyment — except to say that it is a psychological-suspense story. There are several murders, but this is not a murder-mystery. The reader can be fairly sure, from the very beginning, as to the identity of the murderer. It is the development of the murderer’s mental processes, and the effect this has on all the people around him, that holds our interest.

      ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY: PULP FICTION —

   From the Cook-Miller index to Detective Pulps, along with Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Weird Fiction Magazine Index (1890-2006) by Stephen T. Miller and William G. Contento for the SF, plus a big assist from Victor Berch:

Bereave It or Not, Ten Detective Aces, Nov 1945

The Blood Runs Cold, Doc Savage, Sep 1948
The Britannica Sock [Bannister & Renard], Doc Savage, Jan 1946
A Corpse Slept Here, Dime Detective, Dec 1947
The Crooked House, Weird Tales, Nov 1942    [not by Thorne Lee; see the comments]
Dance Macabre, Ten Detective Aces, Mar 1948
Dead to the World, Ten Detective Aces, Nov 1947
Deadbeat, Doc Savage, Nov 1946
Death in the Groove, Dime Detective, Mar 1946
Dragnet for a Spy, FBI Detective Stories, Oct 1950
Dying to Kill, New Detective Magazine, Sept 1946
The Face of Fear, New Detective Magazine, July 1947

The Flesh Is Willing, Doc Savage, July 1946
The Fox and the Hound, Mammoth Detective, Aug 1944
The Ghost Hangs High [Bannister & Renard], Doc Savage, Sep-Oct 1947
Ghost Planet, Startling Stories, June 1943     [probably not by Thorne Lee; see the comments]
The Hanging Sisters, Chief Detective, Winter 1946
Headless Horseman, The Shadow, Aug 1945
I Thought I’d Die, New Detective Magazine, Mar 1946
If Anything Happens to Julia, Shadow Magazine, Feb-Mar 1948
It’s Been a Long, Long Crime, New Detective Magazine, July 1946
It’s in the Bag!, Dime Mystery, Mar 1947
Laughing on the Outside, Detective Story Magazine, Aug 1947
The Mad Dog of Lame Creek, Black Mask, Mar 1946
The Man Who Got Away with It [Bannister & Renard], Doc Savage, Aug 1946
The Man Who Lost His Shadow, Fantastic Adventures, June 1944
Married to Murder, Dime Detective, May 1947
The Merry Men of Mayhem, Detective Tales, Dec 1946
The Merry Widow Murder, Detective Book Magazine, Fall 1949
The Monster of Lazy Hook [Bannister & Renard], Doc Savage, Dec 1946
Murder on My Shoulders, New Detective Magazine, Mar 1947
The Mutilator, Detective Book Magazine, Sum 1949
No Body But Me!, New Detective Magazine, Jan 1947
Possession, Shadow Mystery, Fall 1948
The Reluctant Leopard, Doc Savage, May 1945
The Shock Punch [Bannister & Renard], Doc Savage, June 1945
Some Call It Murder, Detective Story Magazine, Aug 1946
Stairway Going Down, Dime Detective, Sept 1945
There Was an Old Shoe [Bannister & Renard], Doc Savage, May-June 1947
The Whisperer, Dime Detective, Mar 1945
The Whispering Wine, Weird Tales, Mar 1943     [not by Thorne Lee; see the comments]
The Will to Die!, Dime Detective, Apr 1951

Who Rides a Tiger… [Bannister & Renard], Doc Savage, Apr 1946
The Woman in the Attic [Bannister & Renard], Doc Savage, July-Aug 1947

   You’ll have to go to the main Mystery*File website to find the checklist, I’m sorry to say, but on the other hand, it’s only a link away. Just click on the one provided.

   Here’s Victor’s introduction, along with a cover image or two —

   Last week on his blog, Pulpetti, Juri Nummelin discussed the career of Gold Medal paperback writer Frank Castle, prompted by his (Juri’s) discovery of one of Castle’s books that was published in Finland but never in this country.

   This turns out, as Juri explains, not to have been an uncommon event. Several other American authors apparently had some of their books published in Finnish but never in English, including Dean Owen, Bruce Cassiday and Robert Sidney Bowen. Here’s the cover of the Castle book, the title of which, roughly translated, means “The Sowers of the Doom.”

   If you’re interested, Juri does the obliging thing and translates the first few paragraphs back into English.

   The post prompted several comments about Castle’s career, and just a few minutes ago, I chipped in with the following:

   Not much seems to be known about Frank Castle. You and the other commenters seem to have covered almost everything he did, unless you count his role as The Punisher for Marvel Comics beginning sometime around 1974. But maybe that was a different Frank Castle. And like the comic book guy, maybe our Frank Castle wasn’t his real name either.

   For his mystery fiction, here’s what appears in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV:

   FRANK CASTLE. Born in New Mexico; graduate of University of Oklahoma; magazine and book writer. Pseudonym: Steve Thurman.
      Move Along, Stranger (n.) Gold Medal 1954
      Dead–and Kicking (n.) Gold Medal 1956 [California]

      The Violent Hours (n.) Gold Medal 1956 [Los Angeles, CA]

      Lovely and Lethal (n.) Gold Medal 1957 [California]

      Murder in Red (n.) Gold Medal 1957 [New Mexico]

      Vengeance Under Law (n.) Gold Medal 1957 [New Mexico; Past]
      Hawaiian Eye (n.) Dell 1962 [Hawaii]

   STEVE THURMAN
      Night After Night (n.) Monarch 1959 [Ship]

      “Mad Dog” Coll (n.) Monarch 1961 [New York City, NY; 1932] Novelization of film: Columbia, 1961.

      I haven’t put together a list of the westerns Castle wrote under both names, but at a quick glance, he may have written more of those than he did crime novels. (And I’ve only realized this just now, but there’s at least one book overlap between his western novels and the crime fiction that’s already been listed.)

      I’ve read some of his Gold Medals, but since that was when they first came out, I couldn’t tell you anything about them. I do remember a few of the covers, though. (See above.)