Does the name T.S. Stribling ring any bells? He lived from 1881 until 1965, and in the early FDR years he was considered one of the foremost authors of the American South. Before that he’d written extensively for pulp magazines like Adventure, which in the mid-1920s ran five stories of his about Professor Henry Poggioli, an American academic solving (well, trying to solve) various exotic crimes while traveling in the Caribbean area on sabbatical.

   In “A Passage to Benares,” the last and best-known of the quintet, Poggioli was hanged as a murderer. But that wasn’t the end of the saga. About three years after his demise, and without a hint as to how he came back from the dead, he returned in a new series of tales, published in Adventure and other magazines from 1929 through the years of Stribling’s literary reputation.

   A few years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Store (1933), he was eclipsed forever as America’s Southern novelist by William Faulkner and the publishing world dropped him like a hot rock.

   I was a teen when I first discovered Poggioli in the supersized Ellery Queen anthologies like 101 Years’ Entertainment and To the Queen’s Taste and in a number of the annual Queen’s Awards anthology volumes of the late Forties.

   Later, when I began collecting back issues of EQMM, I found that Fred Dannay had reprinted a Poggioli story in Volume 1 Number 1 (Fall 1941) and had bought fifteen new stories about the character that appeared in the magazine between 1945 and 1955.

   Then I discovered that in his last years Stribling had corresponded regularly with that certified mad genius of 20th-century literature, Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967).

   Recently I’ve been reading Kenneth W. Vickers’ T. S. Stribling: A Life of the Tennessee Novelist (University of Tennessee Press, 2004), which amply covers Stribling’s correspondence with Fred Dannay (whom Vickers insists on calling a “young” editor even though Fred was about 40 when he began running Poggioli originals in EQMM) but says little about the correspondence between Stribling and Keeler.

   The biography nudged me to re-read the first five Poggioli tales, collected as Clues of the Caribbees (1929), and to sample the later tales from EQMM, many of them collected in Best Dr. Poggioli Detective Stories (1978).

   My reaction was similar to what it had been more than half a century ago when I was first exposed to the saga. In my teens I couldn’t make up my mind whether I liked these stories, and as I slipslide into senescence I still can’t. There seems to be something off-the-wall about every Poggioli story I tackle. Could his affinity for Keeler be a case of kindred spirits?

   Stribling often called himself a satirist, and it seems clear that his intent was to poke fun at mystery fiction’s virtuosos of deduction like Holmes and Poirot. Since the first several Poggioli stories predate the debut of Ellery Queen as author and detective in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), it’s clear that the polysyllabic literatus created by Fred and his cousin Manny Lee was not Stribling’s target.

   But his is such a deadpan satire, so far removed from, say, Robert L. Fish’s send-up of Holmes and Watson in his Schlock Homes parodies, that many readers don’t get the point and remain in a state of head-scratching puzzlement.

   As chance would have it, the closest to Stribling’s brand of satire that I’ve ever comes across is a brief passage from his buddy Harry Stephen Keeler. In The Steeltown Strangler (1950), an industrial plant beset by posters defaming its CEO is visited by author deKoven Blystone, creator of that brilliant Oriental sleuth Sharley Shang.

   Blystone claims that he can provide a thumbnail description of each of the twenty linemen suspects if given their nicknames. In Chapter VII of the novel he proceeds to do just that. Offered the monicker of Strumberries, Blystone describes him as “A Greek with an unpronounceable name, but blue-eyed instead of brown.”

   â€œHow — how do you know that Smyro Smyroyannis has got blue eyes?” “If he had brown ones,” Blystone replies, “He’d have gotten called Zupp.”

   Chapter VII of The Steeltown Strangler is chock-a-block with off-the-wall reasoning like this — which strikes me as close cousin to the off-the-wall stuff in the Poggioli stories.

   The affinity between Stribling and Keeler — each man highly regarded for a short while and then so completely forgotten neither could find a U.S. publisher for anything they wrote — runs deep.

   This column wasn’t intended to end here. I had planned to say more about some of the oddball events one finds in Stribling — for example, a man being put on trial for murder the same day he’s arrested.

   I also wanted to discuss “The Mystery of the Paper Wad” (EQMM, July 1946), where Poggioli reveals at the denouement that two men, languishing in adjoining jail cells because they couldn’t afford to pay their estranged wives’ alimony judgments, had made a deal whereby each would kill the other’s spouse.

   This may well have been Patricia Highsmith’s inspiration for the murder-swapping scheme in Strangers on a Train (1950).

   What kept me from finishing this column as I had planned was that late in the evening of Sunday, March 6, my own Patricia died, very suddenly and unexpectedly. The death certificate gives the cause as sepsis, with pneumonia and stress-induced cardiomyopathy as contributing causes.

   She never even knew she had pneumonia. A few weeks earlier she’d been suffering from what she took to be flu but she was, or at least seemed to be, completely over it, so much so that on Thursday the 3rd she’d put in nine hours of hard labor at the cat shelter where she volunteered one day a week.

   She was fine on Friday the 4th also but started to feel ill that evening. From then on it was horrible: all night Friday, all day Saturday, all Saturday night. She refused to let me take her to the emergency room, saying hospitals never do anything on weekends but charge people.

   Patty had been terrified of hospitals ever since her mother died in one after going in for something minor. At dawn on Sunday morning, the 6th, I made her go with me. She must have felt as if I were driving her in a tumbril to the guillotine.

   A few hours later her internist told me that I had done the right thing and probably saved her life. In the emergency room I was told that she was having a heart attack right then and there but the medical people later changed their minds. She was taken to the cardiac catheterization lab where all sorts of tubes were stuck into her and all sorts of shots given to her but her blood pressure was so low that they were afraid to give her anything to relieve her pain.

   Late that afternoon they told me to go home and come back in the morning, saying that she’d need to stay in the hospital for a week to ten days. That night, around 11:00 P.M., they called and told me to get out there at once: she had taken a turn for the worse. I had her health directive and showed it to them and there the story ends. She died about half an hour before midnight.

   Our coming together, late in the 1970s, was almost a mathematical progression. First she had read my stories in EQMM, then she’d discovered from an article about me in the Post-Dispatch that I was a St. Louisan too, then we were introduced.

   At that time she was living in suburban Webster Groves with three cats, a dog and a black spider monkey named Tar Baby. I had never heard of a domesticated monkey before and began reading literature from the Simian Society of America, of which Patty was an officer.

   The result was “Black Spider,” which first appeared in EQMM (August 1979) and was later translated into several languages.

   I named my fictional monkey after the real one, and whenever I received a copy of the story in another language the first thing I looked for was what the translator had done with the monk’s name, which is meaningless outside the U.S.

   In Spanish she became Azabache, which means black as coal. The Japanese simply transliterated the syllables, turning the name into gibberish. That story would never have been written if I hadn’t met Patty and Tar Baby. It may be the foremost monkey mystery in the genre — mainly because there are no others.

   I’ve often said that TB wasn’t a monkey but Patty’s daughter by an earlier marriage. They were as close as a mother and daughter, and she was devastated when her child died.

   Afterward all her pets were cats, and I’ve dedicated several books to her and whatever animals were our housemates at a given time. The last cats in her life and the last four-legged dedicatees of a book of mine were Rico and Squeako. If cats had saints, she would be St. Patty.

   Anyone reading this column has probably heard the story of Mr. Flitcraft and the falling beam as Hammett told it in The Maltese Falcon. A beam fell on Patty that Sunday night, and on me, and on everyone who knew and loved her.

I don’t know what caused it but I had a massive muscle spasm in my right hip Sunday morning, bad enough for us to call an ambulance to take me to the emergency room around 3 pm. They assumed it was a fracture but all of the tests, Xray, MRI and Catscan, were negative.

They finally found a medication that killed the pain, and I came home around 5 pm Monday. The pain is still mostly gone and for the most part I can get around, but I’m still too light-headed to do more than post this message to the blog. I’m using my wife’s downstairs computer. I can’t maneuver my way to my upstairs study where mine is. (We live in a split level house.)

I see that a lot of discussion is still going on following last week’s posts, especially the one about the Mannix TV show that Michael Shonk wrote up, but I don’t imagine I’ll be able to post anything new for the next few days. The visiting nurse made her first visit about 30 minutes ago, and I’ll be making a trip to our chiropractor this afternoon, I hope.

I’ll have to see if there’s as easy way from me to read my email from here. My wife uses gmail or hotmail, and I don’t. I’ll probably have to add updates to this post to stay in touch.

[UPDATE] 03-30-11. Here’s the culprit, clinically speaking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piriformis_muscle

Located in men right where your billfold sits in your back packet. I don’t know if a possible cause is having too many bills in your wallet, but since that’s hardly ever true in my case, chances are slim that’s what happened to me. I have pills to take, and they seem to work, but the basic cure seems to be rest. And if something I do causes pain, then stop doing it.

Moving laterally is my biggest problem, which makes getting to my computer upstairs still too tough to do. Right now there’s only a narrow passageway up the stairs and into the room. I’ll be careful and not try to overdo anything I shouldn’t.

Thanks for all the good wishes. This was my first overnight stay in a hospital, though it was only in the Emergency Room. My problem seems awfully minor after seeing the incoming patients and listening to them talk to the the doctors and nurses in the cubicle next door. Everything seemed crowded and chaotic at first, but after a while it was still crowded and chaotic — but under control. The staff seemed to know exactly what they were doing.

David, I think it was you who asked about the MRI exam. It was full body one in a narrow closed tube, though open at both ends. They handed me a bulb to press if I experienced any kind of problem. It took me less than five seconds to press the bulb. It took a small sedative to get me through that. If that hadn’t worked, I think they were ready to use one of the conks on the head that knocked Mannix out every so often.

The blog will be back in business by this weekend, I’m sure, if not before. Thanks again for all the cheer and goodwill!

[UPDATE #2] 03-31-11. R.I.P. H.R.F.KEATING (1926-2011). See Comment #20 and David Vineyard’s tribute to one of the Giants of the world of mystery and crime fiction, followed briefly by one of my own.

    ● Reported first by Jiro Kimura on his Gumshoe website, mystery and SF writer Edward Wellen died on January 15, 2011. Noted primarily for his short fiction, Mr. Wellen wrote two crime novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, and one collection of criminous short stories:

EDWARD (Paul) WELLEN 1919-2011.
      Hijack. Beagle, pb, 1971.

      An Hour to Kill. St. Martin’s, hc, 1993.
      Perps. Five Star, ss collection, hc, 2001.

   Hijack was a science fiction novel with a considerable crime component; the blurb on the front cover says “The Mafia takes to space!” A shorter version was published earlier in Venture SF (May 1970).

   A list of Wellen’s short SF can be found here on ISFDB, while some of his short work in the mystery (and western) field can be found here in The FictionMags Index.

   The earliest story there is “Enough Rope,” 2-Gun Western, August 1953, which is enough to qualify him as a pulp fiction writer, a category whose number is sadly decreasing every month.

    ● The death of author Barbara Whitehead was reported first by UK mystery writer Martin Edwards on his blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name?

   Martin says in part: “Barbara came to crime fiction late after writing historical romances and non-fiction. Her first crime novel, Playing God, had an interesting background of the York mystery plays. It became the opening entry in her “York cycle of mysteries”, which eventually ran to eight titles spanning a decade of publication. Her main character was Detective Superintendent Bob Southwell and she was especially good at evoking the atmosphere of York Minster and the wonderful old city around it.”

BARBARA (Maude) WHITEHEAD. 1930-2011. Series character Inspector Robert Southwell in all titles:

       Playing God (n.) Quartet 1988; St. Martin’s, 1989.
       The Girl with Red Suspenders (n.) Constable 1990; St. Martin’s, 1990.
       The Dean It Was That Died (n.) Constable 1991; St. Martin’s, 1991.
       Sweet Death, Come Softly (n.) Constable 1992; St. Martin’s, 1993.

       The Killings at Barley Hall (n.) Constable 1995.
       Secrets of the Dead (n.) Constable 1996.
       Death at the Dutch House (n.) Constable 1997.
       Dolls Don’t Choose (n.) Constable 1998.

   The last four books have never been published in the US. For more information about her life and career, her webpage http://www.barbarawhitehead.com/ is still online.

(1) WILLIAM JOHNSTON, 1924-2010.

    Al Hubin sent me earlier today news of the death of William Johnston, author of many movie and TV tie-in novels, including nine in the Get Smart series. He was born in 1924 and is reported to have passed away last October 15th.

    There’s a long article about Johnston on Lee Goldberg’s blog

http://leegoldberg.typepad.com/a_writers_life/2010/01/william-johnson-named-tiein-grandmaster-for-2010.html

on the occasion of Johnston’s being awarded last year’s Faust, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers’ Grand Master Award.

    Said Lee Goldberg: “He wrote books based on Captain Nice, Room 222, Happy Days, Welcome Back Kotter, The Flying Nun, The Brady Bunch, Nanny and the Professor, The Munsters, Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, The Monkees and F-Troop, among others.

    “But his TV tie-in work extended far beyond sitcom adaptations. He wrote books based on Ironside, Dick Tracy, The Young Rebels, The Iron Horse, Then Came Bronson, and Rod Serling’s The New People, to name a few. He even adapted the cartoon characters Magilla Gorilla and Snagglepuss into books for children.

    “Johnston also penned many novelizations, including the pilots for the 1930s-era private eye series Banyon and the high school drama Sons and Daughters. His feature film novelizations include Klute, The Swinger, Echoes of a Summer, The New Interns, The Priest’s Wife, Lt. Robin Crusoe USN and his final tie-in project, Gore Vidal’s Caligula (under the pseudonym William Howard).”

(2) ARIANA FRANKLIN, 1935-2010.

    From my daughter Sarah’s historical fiction blog, Reading the Past:

    “Diana Norman, who also wrote historical thrillers as Ariana Franklin, passed away on Thursday after a lengthy illness. […] Her ‘Mistress of the Art of Death’ series brought her back to the early Plantagenet era in the company of Adelia Aguilar, a Salerno-trained physician and forensic specialist (for the 12th c).”

    L. J. Roberts recently reviewed A Murderous Procession, the fourth in the series, on this blog. I added a bibliography and some cover photos.

(3) ROBERT E. W. JANSSON. 1936-2011.

    Born in England, died in Missouri January 13, 2011. A long online obituary can be found at

http://obit.schrader.com/obitdisplay.html?task=Print&id=884065

    A teacher and chemist by trade, Jansson was also the author of two crime thrillers in the 1970s, both in Hubin: Meet You in Munich (Barker, 1975) and News Caper (London: Macmillan, 1978).

    These were followed by Feet First in 2009, a detective novel, preceded in 2008 by a novel taking place in Iceland during the Viking era, Kari’s Saga.

[UPDATE] 02-04-11.   Jiro Kimura, on his Gumshoe Site, adds the fact that Prof. Stuart Warlock appeared in both of Jansson’s 1970s novels, a series character previously unknown to Hubin.

● JOE GORES – Dead Skip. Random House, hardcover, 1972. Reprint paperbacks include: Ballantine, 1974; Mysterious Press, 1992.

   While holding down a variety of jobs, one of them a stint as a San Francisco private investigator, Joe Gores published numerous (and generally hard-boiled) short stories in the 1950s and 1960s. One of these, “Sweet Vengeance” (Manhunt, July 1964) became the basis for his first novel, the violent suspense thriller A Time of Predators (1969).

   Dead Skip is the first of three novels in the DKA File series (which also includes a dozen or so short stories) — a series Ellery Queen called “authentic as a fist in your face.”

   DKA stands for Daniel Kearny Associates, a San Francisco investigative firm modeled on the real agency for which Gores once worked. (It was Anthony Boucher who first suggested Gores utilize his PI background as the basis for a fictional series.)

   DKA operates out of an old Victorian that used to be a specialty whorehouse, and specializes in the repossessing of cars whose owners have defaulted on loans from banks and automobile dealers.

   Kearny, the boss, is tough, uncompromising, but fair; his operatives, each of whom plays an important role in some if not all of the novels and stories, include Larry Ballard (the nominal lead protagonist), Bart Heslip, Patrick Michael O’Bannon, Giselle Marc, and office manager Kathy Onoda.

   Dead Skip begins quietly enough, with Bart Heslip (who happens to be black) repossessing a car in San Francisco’s Richmond district and returning it to the DKA offices, where he files his report. But when he leaves he is struck down by an unknown assailant — and the following morning the other members of DKA are confronted with the news that Bart is in a coma in a hospital intensive-care unit, the apparent victim of an accident in a repo’d Jaguar.

   Bart’s girlfriend, Corinne Jones, refuses to believe in the “accident” and convinces Ballard that Bart was the victim of violence. In spite of Kearny, who seems more concerned about the cost of the wrecked Jag than about Bart’s welfare (thus causing tension in the ranks), Ballard embarks on a search for Bart’s assailant and an explanation for the attack.

   Starting with the files on Bart’s recent repo jobs, he follows a twisting trail that takes him all over San Francisco and to the East Bay; involves him with a number of unusual characters, one of them a rock musician with a group calling itself Assault and Battery; and ends in a macabre confrontation that endangers not only Ballard’s life but that of Giselle Marc, in a house high above the former haven of the flower children, the Haight-Ashbury.

   The motivation for the attack on Bart is hardly new to crime fiction, and some of the villain’s other actions are likewise questionably motivated, but these minor flaws shouldn’t spoil anyone’s enjoyment of what is otherwise an excellent private-eye procedural. It is, in fact, strong stuff — realistic, powerful, “a traditional American crime novel, out of Black Mask, Hammett and Chandler” (New York Times).

   Even better are the other two novels in the series — Final Notice (1973) and Gone, No Forwarding (1978).

● JOE GORES – Hammett. Putnam’s, hardcover, 1975. Reprint paperbacks include: Ballantine, 1976; Perennial Library, 1982.

   Gores is a lifelong aficionado and student of the works of Dashiell Hammett, and Hammett’s influence is clearly evident in Gores’s own fiction. Hammett is his personal monument to the man he believes was the greatest of all crime writers — part thriller, part fictionalized history, part biography set in the San Francisco of 1928, “a corrupt city, owned by its politicians, its cops, its district attorney. A city where anything is for sale.”

   When an old friend from his Pinkerton days, Vic Atkinson, is murdered after Hammett refuses to help him, the former op-turned-Black Mask writer once again finds himself in the role of detective and man hunter.

   But as the dust-jacket blurb says, “During his search through the teeming alleys of Chinatown, through the cathouses and speakeasies and gambling hells of the city, Hammett discovers that the years of writing have dulled his hunter’s instincts, have made him fear death — and that failure to resharpen his long-unused skills as a private detective could end… his life.”

   The blurb goes on to say, “[Gores’] dialogue crackles and sparks with the wry, tough humor of the twenties. His characters are thinly disguised portraits of the men and women who shook and shaped this most fascinating of American cities. His plot, drawn from actual events in San Francisco’s corrupt political past, casts harsh light on a stark and bloody era.”

All of which is true enough, at least up to a point. Hammett is considered by some to be Gores’ best book, and in many ways it is. But it also has its share of flaws, among them some overly melodramatic scenes and a disinclination on Gores’ part to even mention Hammett’s left-wing politics.

   All things considered, it is certainly a good novel — one that should be read by anyone interested in Hammett, San Francisco circa 1928, and/or fast-action mysteries of the Black Mask school — but it is not the great novel it has occasionally been called.

   The 1982 film version produced by Francis Ford Coppola, on the other hand, is pure claptrap. Frederick Forrest is fine as Hammett, and the script by Ross Thomas is faithful to the novel, but the direction (Wim Wenders) is so arty and stylized that all the grittiness and power is lost. Some of the scenes, in fact, are so bad they’re almost painful to watch.

   Gores’ other non-series novels, A Time of Predators (which received an Edgar for Best First Novel of 1969) and Interface (1974), are also excellent.

   The latter is one of the toughest, most brutal novels published since the days of Black Mask — so hard boiled that some readers, women especially, find it upsetting. But its power is undeniable; and its surprise ending is both plausible and certain to come as a shock to most readers.

         ———
   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.

JOE GORES, R.I.P.   Posted earlier today on Yahoo’s Rara-Avis group was an announcement by publisher Vince Emery of Joe Gores’ death. Quoting briefly:

    “Sad news: Joe Gores, one of my favorite authors — and favorite people — passed away Monday, in a hospital in Marin County.

    “Joe was a three-time Edgar Award winner, past president of the Mystery Writers of America, and author of my favorite hard-boiled mystery series set in San Francisco, the Daniel Kearny & Associates series, which was based on Joe’s own experiences as a detective and repo man. He was working on a new DKA novel when he died.”

    Mr. Gores’ most recent novel was, of course, Spade & Archer (Knopf, 2009), a prequel to The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. Quite coincidentally (this is Steve talking) I am halfway through it now, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

PETER O’DONNELL – Pieces of Modesty. Pan, UK, paperback, 1972. Mysterious Press, US, hc, 1987; Tor, US, pb, 1990.

   Modesty Blaise first appeared as a comic-strip character in 1962, and the first novelization of her exploits was published in 1965. She is often thought of as a female James Bond, but her wildly entertaining adventures certainly entitle her to stand alone as a fascinating fictional character.

    A good way to make Modesty’s acquaintance is to read the stories collected in Pieces of Modesty, each of which reveals something of her background and philosophy.

    At the age of eighteen, Modesty commanded the Network, the most successful crime organization outside the United States. After dismantling the Network, she occasionally found herself working for the intelligence section of the British Foreign Office, as she does in “The Gigglewrecker,” in which a very reluctant defector is transferred from East to West Berlin.

    A better story is “I Had a Date with Lady Janet,” narrated in the first person by Modesty’s formidable associate Willie Garvin, who comes to Modesty’s rescue when she is held captive by an old enemy ensconced in a Scottish castle.

    “A Better Day to Die” and “Salamander Four” might be read as companion pieces. In the former, Modesty finds herself captured by guerrillas, along with the other passengers on a bus. One of the passengers, a minister who believes strongly in nonviolence, sees the results of brutality and is changed by them.

    In “Salamander Four,” a sculptor given to non-involvement finds himself involved against his will when Modesty helps a wounded man, but the ending is is predictable. “The Soo Girl Charity” features Modesty and Willie in a robbery for charity and has an amusing twist at the end.

    For colorful writing and nonstop action, the books about Modesty Blaise are hard to beat, especially such titles as Modesty Blaise (1965), Sabre-Tooth (1966), I, Lucifer (1967), and two titles published for the first time in the United States in 1984: The Silver Mistress (1973) and The Xanadu Talisman (1981).

         ———
   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.

PETER O’DONNELL, R. I. P. (1920-2010). He was in ill health — he had had Parkinson’s disease for several years — so the reporting of Peter O’Donnell’s death on Monday, May 3rd, at the age of 90, was not surprising news, but it was still difficult to accept.

   It is remarkable (or perhaps not) that the opening paragraph of his obituary in The Times begins with a description of Modesty Blaise’s most famous tactic in distracting the enemy, the so-called “Nailer,” described here on one of the earliest posts on this blog, as well as much more (as they say) about both Modesty and her creator.

   And for even more on Peter O’Donnell and his career, including a complete bibliography, check out Steve Holland’s recent post on his Bear Alley blog.

DICK FRANCIS – Blood Sport. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1968. Michael Joseph, UK, hc, 1967. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft.

   From the winning world of British steeplechasing (where he was Champion Jockey in 1954), Dick Francis moved effortlessly into crime fiction with his first novel, Dead Cert, in 1962, and continues to be a front-runner.

   He has written twenty-some excellent thrillers full of old-fashioned moral polarity with strains of humor. These “adventure stories” (as Francis calls them) have amazing plots of clever evilness and feature nonrecurring heroes familiar with the racing game.

   Flawed, uninvolved, and soulless, each central character finds the value of vulnerability and returns to the land of the living through courage and love. As a central theme, it can be compared to that of the works of Ross Macdonald. As critic John Leonard said, “Not to read Dick Francis because you don’t like horses is like not reading Dostoevski because you don’t like God.”

   In Blood Sport, death lurks on a simple Sunday sail on the Thames. An American visitor is almost drowned, and his rescuer is convinced that it wasn’t simply an accident.

   Gene Hawkins, the rescuer and hero, is an English civil servant, a “screener” who checks employees in secret-sensitive government jobs. His training permits him to spot details that make “accidents” phony, and his knowledge of guns and listening devices comes in handy. The rescued man asks for help in locating a stolen horse that has just been bought for a huge price.

   Hawkins is relieved to use his vacation time to hunt for missing horses, because he is despondent, filled with a “fat black slug of depression.” This is the only part of his character that doesn’t ring true-after all, it’s only a failed love affair.

   The pace picks up, and the scene changes to the U.S.A. From the farms of Kentucky, the trail is followed to Jackson, Wyoming. Along the way, Hawkins gets people together for some psychological reconditioning and exposes a bloodline scam as the scene shifts to Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, and Kingman, Arizona.

   The U.S. tour is fast-moving, and Francis does not dwell on local-color background, especially not to make any points. He just gives the graphic, journalistic details of a place that push the story along

         ———
   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.

DICK FRANCIS, R. I. P. (1920-2010).   Another giant has left us. Dick Francis died on Sunday at the age of 89. A long obituary appears online here at the Daily Mail website, but it is just one of many, not including dozens and dozens of tributes to be found on mystery-oriented blogs.

   Francis was the author of 42 thriller novels, all of them having horse racing as a major part of the story. In 2000 Queen Elizabeth II honored Francis by making him a Commander of the British Empire. During his long career he won three Edgar Allen Poe awards given by the Mystery Writers of America for his novels Forfeit (1968), Whip Hand (1979) and Come to Grief (1995).

   He also was awarded a Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association for his contributions to the field, and they made him a Grand Master in 1996 for a lifetime’s achievement.

   After a lengthy hiatus following the death of his wife, Francis recently began writing again, working with his son Felix to produce Dead Heat (2007), Silks (2008) and Even Money (2009). A new novel entitled Crossfire will be published this year.

Editorial Comment:   As I continue this tribute to Dick Francis, over the next couple of days I will be posting several more reviews of his work, all also by Thomas Baird and taken from 1001 Midnights. Their titles: Odds Against, The Danger, and Forfeit.

Excerpted from an online obituary at Zenit.org:

       Ralph McInerny Dies at Age 80

SOUTH BEND, Indiana, JAN. 29, 2010 – Prominent Catholic author, professor and cultural commentator Ralph McInerny died today at the age of 80.

Ralph McInerny was a professor of philosophy and the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame

He was an acknowledged expert on the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, and a prolific author. He penned over two dozen scholarly books, many more scholarly essays, and over 80 novels.

He wrote the popular book series Father Dowling Mysteries, which became a successful television program starring Tom Bosley and Tracy Nelson.

          …

   Here’s a list of his Father Dowling books. There isn’t much doubt that in our world of mystery fiction, these are the ones he’ll be remembered for the longest:

     The Father Dowling series —

1. Her Death of Cold (1977)

2. Bishop as Pawn (1978)

3. The Seventh Station (1977)
4. Lying Three (1979)
5. The Second Vespers (1980)
6. Thicker Than Water (1981)
7. A Loss of Patients (1982)
8. The Grass Widow (1983)
9. Getting a Way with Murder (1984)

10. Rest in Pieces (1985)
11. The Basket Case (1987)
12. Abracadaver(1989)
13. Four on the Floor (1989)
14. Judas Priest (1991)
15. Desert Sinner (1992)
16. Seed of Doubt (1993)

17. A Cardinal Offense (1994)
18. The Tears of Things (1996)
19. Grave Undertakings (2000)
20. Triple Pursuit (2001)
21. Prodigal Father (2002)
22. Last Things (2003)
23. Requiem for a Realtor (2004)
24. Blood Ties (2005)

25. The Prudence of Flesh (2006)
26. The Widow’s Mate (2007)
27. Ash Wednesday (2008)
28. The Wisdom of Father Dowling (2009)
29. Stained Glass (2009)

   As Monica Quill, he wrote 10 books in a series of equally light mysteries solved by Sister Mary Teresa, and under his own name: six books about lawyer Andrew Broom, 13 mysteries with the University of Notre Dame as the background if not an active participant itself, two books with Egidio Manfredi as the leading player, and most recently (2009) two books in his Rosary Chronicle series. Not to mention another long list of standalone novels and story collections, and three anthologies edited, including Murder Most Catholic (2002) with Martin H Greenberg.

   The television series Father Dowling Mysteries of the TV series (and add Mary Wicke to Tom Bosley and Tracy Nelson as one of the continuing stars) was first aired as an NBC made-for-TV movie in 1987 and its weekly run did not begin until 1989. After one season the show moved from NBC to ABC, where it lasted another two season.

   Tom Bosley played Father Dowling, while Tracy Nelson played his assistant in solving crimes, Sister Stephanie ‘Steve’ Oskowski. Also appearing in all 44 episodes was Mary Wicke as Father Dowling’s always fussing housekeeper, Marie.

   The series has not yet been released on commercial DVDs — and why not?

   News of Robert B. Parker’s death on Monday quickly made the rounds of the mystery-oriented blogs yesterday. Three that I’d be especially pleased to send you to, since they largely reflect my own feelings, are Bill Crider’s blog, The Rap Sheet and Dwight Brown’s blog.

   There are two books that I consider the gems of my collection, and given the size of my collection, that’s saying a good deal. If there were a fire or other disaster here, these are the books I’d save first, after saving the really important things, that is.

   One is A Is for Alibi (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1982), by Sue Grafton, and the other is The Godwulf Manuscript (Houghton Mifflin, 1973), by Robert B. Parker.

   Both are hardcover first editions in jacket, and both are in Very Fine condition. The reason that I consider them gems is not because they’re valuable, which I imagine they are, but that they’re both Key Books in the development of the Private Eye novel. (I’m not alone in believing this, which in turn is what makes them valuable.)

   Of the two, Godwulf came first, of course, and it was like a breath of fresh air in the PI sub-genre, which by the early 1970s was all but dead. It’s also the least typical of the Spenser books. Parker was channeling Chandler at the time (not a bad thing to do) and hadn’t developed his own voice yet. Susan Silverman didn’t come along until God Save the Child (1975), Book #2, and Hawk made his first appearance in Promised Land (1976), the fourth in the series.

   In the beginning, the opening lines of The Godwulf Manuscript:

   The photo of Mr. Parker you see above comes from the back cover of the same book. If you think that he looks a lot like Spenser did then, I do too, and maybe even more than you. I doubt that Spenser has aged much in the 37 years (and 39 books) since, maybe 10 years, no more.

   Look for his 39th adventure, Painted Ladies, later this year. I know I will.

[UPDATE] 01-22-10. Since posting this brief tribute to Robert B. Parker, I’ve been going through my files, trying to locate the reviews I wrote of his earlier books. I haven’t been entirely successful, but come to find out, I’d posted one on this blog last year, and I’d forgotten I had. This one’s a review of The Judas Goat. Check it out here.

H. PAUL JEFFERS – Murder on Mike. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1984. Ballantine, reprint paperback, 1988. Júcar, Colección Etiqueta Negra nº21, 1987, Barcelona, as Muerte al micrófono.

   A small but persistent trend in recent years is the retrospective private-eye novel — the nostalgic adventures of PI’s operating in the Thirties and Forties, contemporary recreations of a bygone era.

   Andrew Bergman, Stuart Kaminsky, and Max Allan Collins have each done quite well with Chandleresque heroes of this sort; judging from the two Harry McNeil novels published to date — Rubout at the Onyx Club (1982) and Murder on Mike — H. Paul Jeffers will, too.

   McNeil is a very likable character, “an ex-cop who’s now a private investigator who’d prefer nothing better than to play clarinet with a top jazz band and leave the detective work to better guys,” a shamus who uses his head and his legs and his heart in lieu of violence. Harry McNeil, “the help of the hopeless.”

   It is a few days before Christmas, 1939. Harry is in his office above the Onyx Club on Fifty-Second Street, New York City. Enter Maggie Skeffington, a radio actress on “Detective Fitzroy’s Casebook” on the Blue Network (NBC).

   A few days earlier, Derek Worthington, the star of the show and a man heartily disliked by his co-workers, was shot to death in Studio 6B at Radio City; and Maggie’s boyfriend, announcer David Reed, has been arrested for the crime. Maggie is convinced that David is innocent, even though he is the only member of the cast and crew who does not have an airtight alibi for the time of the shooting.

   Harry takes the case, of course. And meets the various suspects: J. William Richards, owner of the Mellow-Gold Coffee Company and the show’s sponsor; Miles Flanagan, the producer; Veronica Blake, the head writer (with whom Harry later has an affair); Jason Patrick, Worthington’s costar; Rita DeLong, an aging musician; Guff Taylor, the engineer; and Jerry Nolan, the expert sound-effects man.

   Any of the lot might have killed Worthington — except for those alibis. The key to cracking the case lies with young Robby Miller, a Radio City tour guide, who heard the fatal shot fired through a studio mike someone inadvertently left open and who has turned up missing….

   The mystery here is lightweight but entertaining — until its resolution. The final unmasking, which Harry brings about in Studio 6B on Christmas day with the aid of a self-written radio script, is far-fetched and highly derivative of a famous novel by a certain popular Golden Age writer.

   That part of Murder on Mike is disappointing. Still, there is Harry. There is New York at Yuletide 1939, “a city for dreamers because it was a city that could make dreams come true,” a city full of fascinating real-life characters — Winchell, Woolcott, Ed Sullivan, and comedian Fred Allen (both of whom have speaking parts), dozens more.

   There is an equally fine evocation of the world of dramatic radio (a subject Jeffers knows intimately: He works for a Manhattan radio station). And there is a nice, old-fashioned flavor to the narrative, a feeling that you are reading a combination of whodunit and bittersweet private-eye romance written in 1939.

         ———
   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.

H. PAUL JEFFERS, R. I. P. (1934-2009). According to a short online obituary in the Pottstown (PA) Mercury, H. Paul Jeffers died on Friday, December 4th, in Manhattan.

   Besides his fictional work (see below), in the 60s he was a Fulbright Scholar in the 1960s and reported from Vietnam with Peter Jennings. He later wrote news for WINS, WABC, WNBC, and WCBS, all in New York City. His non-fiction work included books on history, Westerns and biographies, including books on Theodore Roosevelt and Sherlock Holmes.

   The covers and titles of the books below may give you an idea of the wide range of his interests. If his non-fiction were to be included, the range would be even wider.

   The Harry MacNeil series:

      1. Rubout At the Onyx (1981)
      2. Murder On Mike (1984)
      3. The Rag Doll Murder (1987)

   The Morgan western series:

      1. Morgan (1989)
      2. Blood On the Nueces (1989)
      3. Texas Bounty (1989)

   The Sergeant John Bogdanovic series:

      1. A Grand Night For Murder (1995)
      2. Reader’s Guide to Murder (1996)

      3. Corpus Corpus (1998)

   The Arlene Flynn series:

      1. What Mommy Said (1997)

   The Nick Chase series, as by Harry Paul Lonsdale

      1. Where There’s Smoke, There’s Murder (1999)
      2. Smoking Out a Killer (2000)

      3. Up in Smoke (2001)

   The Kate Fallon series, as by M. T. Jefferson

      1. In the Mood for Murder (2000)

      2. The Victory Dance Murder (2000)
      3. Decorated for Murder (2002)

    Other Novels:

      Adventures of the Stalwart Companions (1981)

      Murder Most Irregular (1983)

      Portrait in Murder and Gay Colours (1985)
      Gods and Lovers (1989)
      Secret Orders (1989)
      Owlhoot Trail (1990)
      Tombstone Revenge (1991)
      The Forgotten Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (2005)
      The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Stalwart Companions (2010)