John Herrington, who recently has been researching the careers of the many authors who wrote for the British publisher Robert Hale over the years, recently sent Al Hubin and myself word of the passing last month (on October 18th) of one of the more prolific of them, James Pattinson, 1915-2009.

   A list of the some one hundred or more books he wrote is included below. (This list has been expanded from that in the Revised Crime Fiction IV to include a few that have been published later than the year 2000 and therefore beyond the coverage of CFIV.)

   Only a handful of these books have been published in the US, making him all but unknown in this country.

   Says John about Pattinson’s novels: “I have read a lot of them. Not great or classics, but good readable thrillers, sea and war stories. Apparently, apart from time he served in the war, he lived in the same house in a Norfolk village all his life.”

   The death of a crime fiction writer with as many books as James Pattinson produced should not go unnoted. A list of his life’s output, fictionwise, may be a small tribute in some way, but it is a long list. (Note: The first three are war novels not included in CFIV. Thanks to Jamie Sturgeon for providing these, as well as three of the covers you will see below.)

* Soldier, Sail North (n.) Harrap, 1954 [non-criminous]
* The Wheel of Fortune (n.) Harrap, 1955 [non-criminous]
* Last in Convoy (n.) Harrap, 1957 [non-criminous]

* The Mystery of the Gregory Kotovsky (n.) Harrap 1958 [Ship]
* Contact Mr. Delgado (n.) Harrap 1959 [Harvey Landon; Ship]
* -Across the Narrow Seas (n.) Harrap 1960 [1944]
* Wild Justice (n.) Harrap 1960 [Ship]
* The Liberators (n.) Harrap 1961 [Harvey Landon]
* On Desperate Seas (n.) Harrap 1961 [Ship; WWII]
* The Angry Island (n.) Hale 1968 [West Indies]
* The Last Stronghold (n.) Hale 1968 [Harvey Landon; South America]
* Find the Diamonds (n.) Hale 1969
* The Golden Reef (n.) Hale 1969
* The Plague Makers (n.) Hale 1969
* Whispering Death (n.) Hale 1969
* The Deadly Shore (n.) Hale 1970

* The Rodriguez Affair (n.) Hale 1970

* Three Hundred Grand (n.) Hale 1970 [Caribbean]
* The Murmansk Assignment (n.) Hale 1971 [Russia]
* Sea Fury (n.) Hale 1971
* The Sinister Stars (n.) Hale 1971 [Harvey Landon]
* Watching Brief (n.) Hale 1971
* Away with Murder (n.) Hale 1972 [Amsterdam, Netherlands]
* Ocean Prize (n.) Hale 1972
* Weed (n.) Hale 1972
* A Fortune in the Sky (n.) Hale 1973
* The Marakano Formula (n.) Hale 1973
* Search Warrant (n.) Hale 1973 [Sam Grant; U.S.]
* Cordley’s Castle (n.) Hale 1974
* The Haunted Sea (n.) Hale 1974 [Ship]

* The Petronov Plan (n.) Hale 1974 [Brazil]

* Crusader’s Cross (n.) Hale 1975 [Greece]
* Feast of the Scorpion (n.) Hale 1975
* Freedman (n.) Hale 1975
* The Honeymoon Caper (n.) Hale 1976 [Finland]
* A Real Killing (n.) Hale 1976 [Sam Grant]

* Special Delivery (n.) Hale 1976 [England; France]
* A Walking Shadow (n.) Hale 1976

* Final Run (n.) Hale 1977
* The No-Risk Operation (n.) Hale 1977
* The Spanish Hawk (n.) Hale 1977 [Caribbean]
* Blind Date (n.) Hale 1978

* Something of Value (n.) Hale 1978 [Sam Grant]
* Ten Million Dollar Cinch (n.) Hale 1978 [Caribbean]
* The Courier Job (n.) Hale 1979
* The Rashevski Ikon (n.) Hale 1979
* Red Exit (n.) Hale 1979
* Busman’s Holiday (n.) Hale 1980
* The Levantine Trade (n.) Hale 1980
* The Spayde Conspiracy (n.) Hale 1980
* The Antwerp Appointment (n.) Hale 1981 [Antwerp, Belgium]
* The Seven Sleepers (n.) Hale 1981
* Stride (n.) Hale 1981
* A Fatal Errand (n.) Hale 1982
* Lethal Orders (n.) Hale 1982
* The Stalking Horse (n.) Hale 1982
* A Car for Mr. Bradley (n.) Hale 1983
* Flight to the Sea (n.) Hale 1983
* The Kavulu Lion (n.) Hale 1983
* Dead of Winter (n.) Hale 1984
* Precious Cargo (n.) Hale 1984 [Ship]
* The Saigon Merchant (n.) Hale 1984 [London]
* -Come Home, Toby Brown (n.) Hale 1985
* Homecoming (n.) Hale 1985 [England]
* Life-Preserver (n.) Hale 1985 [England]
* The Syrian Client (n.) Hale 1986 [Sam Grant]
* Where the Money Is (n.) Hale 1986
* Dangerous Enchantment (n.) Hale 1987 [Sam Grant]
* A Dream of Madness (n.) Hale 1987
* Paradise in the Sun (n.) Hale 1987
* The Junk Run (n.) Hale 1988
* Legatee (n.) Hale 1988 [Sam Grant]
* Dishonour Among Thieves (n.) Hale 1989
* Killer (n.) Hale 1989
* Operation Zenith (n.) Hale 1989
* Dead Men Rise Up Never (n.) Hale 1990 [England; 1938]

* Poisoned Chalice (n.) Hale 1990
* The Spoilers (n.) Hale 1990 [Central America]
* Devil Under the Skin (n.) Hale 1991 [England]

* With Menaces (n.) Hale 1991

* The Animal Gang (n.) Hale 1992 [England]

* Steel (n.) Hale 1992
* Bavarian Sunset (n.) Hale 1993 [Germany]
* The Emperor Stone (n.) Hale 1993
* Fat Man from Colombia (n.) Hale 1993
* Lady from Argentina (n.) Hale 1994
* The Telephone Murders (n.) Hale 1994
* The Poison Traders (n.) Hale 1995
* Squeaky Clean (n.) Hale 1995
* Avenger of Blood (n.) Hale 1996
* A Wind on the Heath (n.) Hale 1996 [England; 1930s]
* One-Way Ticket (n.) Hale 1997
* The Time of Your Life (n.) Hale 1997
* Death of a Go-Between (n.) Hale 1998 [Sam Grant; Amsterdam, Netherlands; London]
* Some Job (n.) Hale 1998 [West Indies]
* Skeleton Island (n.) Hale 1999 [Florida]
* The Wild One (n.) Hale 1999 [England]
* A Passage of Arms (n.) Hale 2000 [Far East]
* Old Pal’s Act (n.) Hale 2001
* Crane (n.) Hale 2001
* Obituary for Howard Gray (n.) Hale 2003
* Bullion (n.) Hale 2004
* The Unknown (n.) Hale 2008

[UPDATE] 11-11-09. The photo of Mr Pattinson came from the back cover or dust jacket flap of one of his books and was sent to me by Jamie Sturgeon. Jamie also sent along a host of updated information about settings and additional series character appearances. I haven’t added them here, but Al Hubin has them now, and they appear in the next installment of the online Addenda to the Revised CFIV.

   The news was no surprise. His wife had prepared me several days earlier: “His heart and kidneys are failing. We have brought him home from the hospital… I think he won’t live much longer.”

   He was 87 when on Thursday, October 22, he died. You may never have heard of Ray Browne, but I had known him for forty years and he wonderfully shaped my life and that of every other mystery writer of the last four decades who sported academic credentials.

   To begin explaining what he accomplished for us I must go back 75 years. A brilliant young man named William Anthony Parker White had completed his academic work and was more than eminently qualified to become a professor at any university in the country, but he chose not to.

   Why? One main reason, as his widow explained long after his all too early death, was “that he was surrounded by people who took no interest in contemporary popular literature, but at the same time were trying to research the popular literature of a few centuries back.”

   Instead he decided to become a professional writer. And, because there were already 75 authors named William White, he chose to adopt a pen name: Anthony Boucher.

   Academic contempt for anything contemporary and popular was still alive and well thirty years later. In my college years, which roughly corresponded with JFK’s presidency, there wasn’t a single “popular culture” course in the entire curriculum.

   I vividly recall one of my professors bewailing the fact that William Faulkner was forced by a Philistine reading public to support himself by writing for (**yucch!**) the movies. Carolyn Heilbrun, a young professor of English at Columbia University, had begun writing mystery novels but had to do it under a pseudonym (Amanda Cross) because, as she explained years later, she would never have gotten tenure if her colleagues had known of her sideline.

   This was the academic environment when Ray Browne came into the picture. With a Ph.D. in English and Folklore and twenty years of university teaching under his belt, he moved from Purdue to Ohio’s Bowling Green State University and, with the support of the administration, launched the movement that made it academically respectable to teach and study popular culture (a term it’s said he invented).

   If aging memory serves me, I met him in 1969. We hit it off immediately. He invited me to write for the Journal of Popular Culture, which he had launched at Bowling Green two years earlier, and after he founded the Popular Culture Association, he encouraged me to attend annual meetings. (Both my first presentation for the PCA and much of my writing for the JPC dealt with a writer I was entranced by then and still am today: that great mad genius of 20th century American fiction, Harry Stephen Keeler.)

   Knowing that countless colleges around the country were beginning to offer courses on mystery fiction, and that I knew a bit about the subject, he asked me to put together a book of readings for publication by Bowling Green University Popular Press. The result was The Mystery Writer’s Art (1970), which remained in print for well over 20 years, long after I thought it had outlived its usefulness.

A few years later the same press published Royal Bloodline: Ellery Queen, Author and Detective (1974), for which I received an Edgar. By that time I was a professor myself, having accepted a position at St. Louis University School of Law which I kept until retiring 34 years later.

   I had also begun writing mysteries of my own but, thanks to the influence of Ray Browne and a handful of like-minded colleagues of his who had made popular culture respectable, I didn’t have to use a pen name.

   It was also thanks to Ray and his cohorts that universities began hiring professors to teach courses on movies, science fiction, mysteries and countless other “popular culture” subjects. One of those young academics was Stuart Kaminsky, who was born in 1934 and grew up in Chicago.

   Drafted into the Army, he served as a medic in France and developed Hepatitis C, which plagued him for the rest of his life. After completing graduate work he began teaching film and film history at Chicago’s Northwestern University.

   His early books dealt with directors like John Huston and Don Siegel. In 1977 he published Bullet for a Star, the first of two dozen novels set in Hollywood’s golden years and starring PI Toby Peters.

   Need I mention that, thanks to Ray Browne and company, he too never needed a pseudonym?

   I can’t remember where I first met Stu, but we did a lot of Bouchercons and Midwest MWA programs together. My most vivid memories of him come from the summer of 1986 when we were both among the guests at an international festival on Italy’s Adriatic coast.

   It was in Stu’s hotel room that I met the great French director Claude Chabrol, and the three of us were among the festival guests who, a day or two later when none of us were on duty, piled into a couple of vans and were taken to San Remo for a tour of the castle of Cagliostro.

   On the way back we stopped at a country inn whose kitchen staff, with no prior notice (this was before the cellphone era), put together perhaps the finest lunch I’ve ever eaten. One course after another without end, as if we’d all died and gone to culinary heaven — Mamma Mia!

   A few years after our Italian junket, Mystery Writers of America awarded the Edgar for best mystery novel of 1988 to A Cold Red Sunrise, Stu’s fifth Rostnikov book. Soon afterwards he left Northwestern and took a position at Florida State University, where on top of teaching and administrative duties he began a third series, this one about sixtyish Chicago PI Abe Lieberman.

   In 1994 he left academia to write full-time, as if he hadn’t been doing more than that while still holding his day job. A few years later, while serving a term as president of MWA, he created Florida process server Lew Fonesca and started his fourth and final series. MWA named him a Grand Master in 2006.

   Early in 2009 he moved from Sarasota to University City, Missouri, where I hang my own hats, to await the liver transplant which his half-century-old hepatitis had made necessary, but 36 hours after arriving he suffered a stroke which disqualified him for the transplant. He died in a St. Louis hospital on October 9, at age 75.

   Thanks to the success of Ray Browne and his colleagues at bringing contemporary popular culture into higher education, any number of us — Stu and I and Jeremiah Healy and Bill Crider, just to name four off the top of my head — have been able openly to lead double lives as professors and mystery writers. Who could have dreamed of that back in the presidency of JFK?

   They gave so much while they were with us. Now let them rest.

STUART KAMINSKY – Murder on the Yellow Brick Road. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1977. Paperback reprints include: Penguin, 1979; Ibooks, 2000.

   Stuart Kaminsky is a film writer and critic as well as a mystery novelist, and he has put his expertise to good use in his series about 1940s Hollywood private eye Toby Peters.

   The novels are a blend of fact and fiction — that is, of real Hollywood personalities (now deceased) and fictional characters.

   Peters, investigator for the stars, is wise to the ways of Hollywood; he shares an office with a dentist, Shelley Minck, who provides much of the comic relief in these books; he eats abominably — burgers, Pepsis, milk shakes; he lives in “one of a series of two-room, one story wooden structures L.A. management people called bungalows”; and he has a running feud with his brother, Homicide Lieutenant Phil Pevsner (the real family name).

   Murder on the Yellow Brick Road concerns the stabbing of a munchkin — one of L.A.’s many “little people” (they prefer that label to that of midget) — on the set on which The Wizard of Oz was filmed.

   Judy Garland finds the body and calls Peters in a panic. Peters goes to MGM, where he meets Miss Garland, PR man Warren Hoff, Garland’s costume designer friend Cassie James, and Louis B. Mayer himself. Mayer hires Peters to conduct an investigation and divert any adverse publicity.

   What follows is an entertaining story of Hollywood in its heyday, the inner workings of the film community, and the brotherhood of the “little people.” Peters meets such luminaries as Raymond Chandler, and pays a visit to Clark Gable at William Randolph Hearst’s fabled San Simeon.

   Kaminsky does a good job of evoking both Hollywood of the Forties and the personalities of the various stars; his portrayal of the child/woman Garland is especially good.

   Other Toby Peters novels include Never Cross a Vampire (1980), which features Bela Lugosi and William Faulkner in his screen-writing days; and He Done Her Wrong (1983), in which Mae West calls on Peters to find her missing, sizzling autobiography; and Down For the Count (1985), which features fighter Joe Louis.

         ———
   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.

STUART KAMINSKY, R.I.P. According to his obituary in the Chicago Tribune, Stuart Kaminsky “died of complications from hepatitis and a recent stroke Friday, Oct. 9, in Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis […] He was an Army medic in the 1950s, when his family believes he got hepatitis C.” He was 75 at the time of his death.

   Unusual for most mystery writers, Kaminsky was the creator of four distinctive series characters. Besides 1940s Hollywood PI Toby Peters, who appeared in 24 novels [see below] in which he rubbed shoulders with many movie stars of the day, Kaminsky also chronicled the adventures of (quoting again from the Tribune) “… Porfiry Rostnikov, a police inspector in Moscow [16 novels]; Abe Lieberman, a crusty but wise Chicago cop who works the streets with his younger partner, Bill Hanrahan [10 novels]; and Lew Fonesca, a former Cook County state’s attorney investigator now operating as a cut-rate private eye in Sarasota [6 novels].”

   Kaminsky also wrote two novelizations of the TV series The Rockford Files, three novelizations of CSI: New York, two stand-alone suspense novels, three story collections, and was the editor of two recent crime fiction anthologies.

   Without much fanfare, Stuart Kaminksy was without a doubt one of the more prolific mystery authors of recent years. He was a quiet giant in our field.

      The Toby Peters series —

1. Bullet for A Star (1977)

2. Murder on the Yellow Brick Road (1977)
3. You Bet Your Life (1978)
4. The Howard Hughes Affair (1979)
5. Never Cross a Vampire (1980)
6. High Midnight (1981)
7. Catch A Falling Clown (1981)

8. He Done Her Wrong (1983)
9. The Fala Factor (1984)

10. Down for the Count (1985)
11. The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance (1986)
12. Smart Moves (1986)
13. Think Fast, Mr. Peters (1987)
14. Buried Caesars (1989)

15. Poor Butterfly (1990)
16. The Melting Clock (1991)

17. The Devil Met A Lady (1993)
18. Tomorrow is Another Day (1995)
19. Dancing in the Dark (1996)
20. A Fatal Glass of Beer (1997)

21. A Few Minutes Past Midnight (2001)
22. To Catch a Spy (2002)
23. Mildred Pierced (2003)
24. Now You See It (2004)

   Mystery writer Lyn Hamilton died of cancer earlier this week (September 10th) at the age of 65. At a pace of a book a year over the past 11 years, she was the author of an equal number of mystery adventures featuring her series character Lara McClintoch.

   From Lyn Hamilton’s website: “The series features Toronto antique dealer Lara McClintoch, who travels the world in search of the rare and beautiful for her shop, finding more than a little murder and mayhem along the way. Each book in the series is set in a different and exotic location and calls upon the past in an unusual way.

    “The first book in the series, The Xibalba Murders, was nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award for best first crime novel in Canada, and the eighth, The Magyar Venus was nominated for an Ellis award for best crime novel. The Celtic Riddle formed the basis for the 2003 Murder She Wrote TV Movie starring Angela Lansbury.”

   The Chinese Alchemist (2007) had already been announced as Lara McClintoch’s final appearance.

   Also from the author’s website: “Courses in both cultural and physical anthropology in her student days at the University of Toronto inspired a life-long interest in ancient cultures. Lyn was for six years the Director of the Ontario Cultural Programs Branch, the branch responsible for the licensing of all archaeology in the province as well as for museum and heritage conservation support programs.

    “Lyn visits each of the locales she writes about, and has led tours to come of the sites in her books. Her books have been translated in Chinese, German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and Turkish and will soon be available in Croatian, Greek, Hungarian and Thai.

    “She was writer-in-residence at the North York Central Library in 2003, and held the same position at the Kitchener Public Library in 2004. She lives in Toronto, and like her sleuth Lara is something of an antiques addict.”

    More details about the author can be found in online obituriaries on the Toronto Star and CBC websites.

   The Lara McClintoch Archaeological Mysteries. The entire series was published by Berkley. The first two were paperback originals; all of the others were published first in hardcover, then in paperback.

      The Xibalba Murders (1997)
      The Maltese Goddess (1998)
      The Moche Warrior (1999)

      The Celtic Riddle (2000)
      The African Quest (2001)
      The Etruscan Chimera (2002)
      The Thai Amulet (2003)

      The Magyar Venus (2004)
      The Moai Murders (2005)

      The Orkney Scroll (2006)
      The Chinese Alchemist (2007)

Short story:

       “Stark Terror at Tea-Time.” Original story with Lara McClintoch. Included in Death Dines In, edited by Claudia Bishop and Dean James; Berkley, 2004.

CELIA FREMLIN – The Hours Before Dawn. Victor Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1958. J. B. Lippincott, US hardcover, 1958. Reprint US paperbacks: Dell D422, 1961; Dell 3770, Great Mystery Library, 1966.

   Celia Fremlin has the unusual ability to take a perfectly normal, if not mundane, situation and create an atmosphere of sheer terror. The Hours Before Dawn, which won an Edgar for Best Novel of its year, introduces us to Louise Henderson, a sleep-starved young housewife with a fretful new infant that is causing complaints from both her family and neighbors.

   The only person who doesn’t complain is Miss Vera Brandon, the boarder the Hendersons have recently taken in. In fact, Miss Brandon is so self-effacing and quiet that at times the Hendersons don’t even know she is in the house.

   Soon the boarder’s actions begin to arouse Louise’s suspicions, and she finds herself doing all sorts of things she has never done before — attempting to search the woman’s room, contacting total strangers for information about her, and finally taking the baby for a nocturnal stroll in his pram, only to fall asleep and lose him in a park.

   The author skillfully weaves truly frightening events into Louise’s daily routine of meals, housecleaning, and childcare, and her superb characterization has the reader thoroughly on Louise’s side — and just as terrified as she is — by the time the story reaches its surprising conclusion.

   Other Fremlin titles of note: Uncle Paul (1960), Prisoner’s Base (1967), The Spider-Orchid (1978), With No Crying (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.

CELIA FREMLIN, R.I.P. It was Martin Edwards who first made known the news of mystery writer Celia Fremlin’s passing, announcing it on his blog three days ago.

    She died this past summer in a nursing home in Bournemouth, on June 16th, with very few in the world of mystery fandom knowing about her passing until now.

    Besides Martin’s appreciative tribute to her work, plus a long array of followup comments, a longer obituary by Rebecca Tope can be found online here. She says in part, in one poignant paragraph:

    “Her personal life was, in fact, full of tragedy. From the death of her mother when she was seventeen, she went on to lose three children and two husbands, before going blind and slowly sinking into a twilight world that lasted for several years. Her books are light and humorous at first glance, but just below the surface is an acknowledgment of the truly terrible things that can happen to a person. Her style is distinctive and the books immensely enjoyable.”

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

FREMLIN, CELIA. Pseudonym of Celia Margaret Goller, 1914-2009. UK publishers only, except for one case of a US retitling:
      The Hours Before Dawn (n.) Gollancz 1958.

      Uncle Paul (n.) Gollancz 1959.
      Seven Lean Years (n.) Gollancz 1961. US title: Wait for the Wedding, Lippincott 1961.
      The Trouble Makers (n.) Gollancz 1963.
      The Jealous One (n.) Gollancz 1965.

      Prisoner’s Base (n.) Gollancz 1967.
      Possession (n.) Gollancz 1969.
      Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark (co) Gollancz 1970.
      Appointment with Yesterday (n.) Gollancz 1972. No US edition.

      By Horror Haunted (co) Gollancz 1974. No US edition.

      The Long Shadow (n.) Gollancz 1975.
      The Spider-Orchid (n.) Gollancz 1977.

      With No Crying (n.) Gollancz 1980.

      The Parasite Person (n.) Gollancz 1982.
      A Lovely Day to Die, and other stories (co) Gollancz 1984.
      Listening in the Dusk (n.) Gollancz 1990.
      Dangerous Thoughts (n.) Gollancz 1991.
       Echoing Stones (n.) Severn 1993.
      King of the World (n.) Severn 1994.

   Some sad news was awaiting me yesterday when I returned from Columbus and PulpFest 2009. Author William Tapply, author of two dozen mysteries tackled by Boston-based lawyer Brady Coyne plus three about New England fishing guide Stoney Calhoun, died last Tuesday of leukemia at the age of 69.

   Previously reviewed on this blog are the following, all Brady Coyne books (follow the links):

      The Vulgar Boatman
      The Dutch Blue Errror
      Cutter’s Run

   Taken from Mr. Tapply’s first novel, Death at Charity’s Point, is the following blurb, provided by fellow writer Ted Wood:

    “William Tapply does for the private eye what Len Deighton did for the secret agent. His Brady Coyne is quiet and wry and vulnerable and given to asides that make you chuckle out loud… The characters are all real people, the locale is so vivid you can smell the sea.”

      Bibliography:

   Brady Coyne

1. Death at Charity’s Point (1984)
2. The Dutch Blue Error (1985)

3. Follow The Sharks (1985)
4. The Marine Corpse (1986)
5. Dead Meat (1987)
6. The Vulgar Boatman (1988)

7. A Void In Hearts (1988)
8. Dead Winter (1989)
9. Client Privilege (1989)

10. The Spotted Cats (1991)
11. Tight Lines (1992)
12. The Snake Eater (1993)
13. The Seventh Enemy (1995)
14. Close To The Bone (1996)
15. Cutter’s Run (1998)

16. Muscle Memory (1999)

17. Scar Tissue (2000)
18. Past Tense (2001)
19. A Fine Line (2002)
20. Shadow of Death (2003)
21. Nervous Water (2005)

22. Out Cold (2006)
23. One-Way Ticket (2007)
24. Hell Bent (2008)

   Brady Coyne / J.W. Jackson (with Philip R Craig)

1. First Light (2001)

2. Second Sight (2005)
3. Third Strike (2007)

   Stoney Calhoun

1. Bitch Creek (2004)
2. Gray Ghost (2007)

3. Dark Tiger (2009, forthcoming)

   With Linda Barlow:

Thicker Than Water (1995)

   Among his several works of non-fiction, most of them dealing with fly fishing and other outdoor pursuits, is the following:

The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing a Modern Whodunit. (1995)

   The passing of author Tedd Thomey was not known to the crime fiction community until quite recently, when Al Hubin came across the news as he was recently putting data together for the online Addenda to his Revised Crime Fiction IV.

   (Note that Part 33 has just been uploaded. This installment is much shorter and earlier than usual, but in time, Al hopes, for the information to be included in the 2009 edition of the Revised CFIV on CD-Rom.)

   Mr. Thomey died on December 1st of last year. A tribute to him by Tom Hennessy, a longtime friend, can be found online here, along with several photographs.

      Some excerpts:

    “Harold John Thomey was born July 19, 1920, in Butte, Mont. His father, who admired Theodore Roosevelt, called him Teddy. The second ‘d’ in Tedd was an affectation, added by a young man hoping to be noticed.”

    Storming Iwo Jima: “Tedd landed with the Fifth Marine Division in the Third Wave . He hunkered down in a shell crater. That’s where he was when a bullet pierced his heel and his boot filled with blood. Removed to a hospital ship, he was eating ice cream that night while his buddies tried to establish a foothold on the beach.

    “He cried the first time he told me of eating ice cream while his buddies fought for a toehold on the beach. He cried the second time, too.”

    After the war: “Tedd became a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, whose photo staff included [Iwo Jima photographer Joe] Rosenthal. They remained friends until Rosenthal’s death two years ago.

    “Tedd also began writing pulp fiction articles, then turned to books, 18 in all, including The Big Love. It was about actor Erroll Flynn’s love affair with 15-year-old Beverly Aadland. Told to Tedd by her mother, Florence, it became a Broadway play starring Tracey Ullman.

    “He also did profiles of celebrities, most assigned to him by his New York agent, Scott Meredith. Among his subjects: Humphrey Bogart, Peter Sellers, Judy Garland and Peter O’Toole.”

      Bibliographic data.   [Crime fiction only, expanded from the Revised CFIV, by Allen J. Hubin] —

THOMEY, TEDD. Full name: Harold John Thomey, 1920-2008.

      And Dream of Evil (n.) Abelard-Schuman, hc, 1954; Avon 614, pb, 1956. [Los Angeles, CA]

      Killer in White (n.) Gold Medal 546, pbo, 1956 [Los Angeles, CA]

      I Want Out (n.) Ace Double D-401, pbo, 1959

      The Sadist (n.) Berkley G-568, pbo, 1960 [Oregon]
       -When the Lusting Began (n.) Monarch 178, pbo, 1960

      Flight to Takla-Ma (n.) Monarch 216, pbo, 1962 [China]

      The Prodigy Plot (n.) Warner, pbo, 1987

[UPDATE] Later the same day. Thanks to Juri Nummelin who points out on his Pulpetti blog another website dedicated to Tedd Thomey’s books, including his non-criminous ones.

ROBERT TERRALL – Sand Dollars.

St. Martin’s Press; hardcover; 1st printing, 1978. Paperback reprint: Dell, 1979.

   There’s a lot of money floating around this world that most of us never get the slightest glimpse of. Tax shelters for the rich being in high demand, a great deal of this money accumulates in out-of-the-way places like regulation-free Grand Cayman Island. When the mild-mannered accountant who first discovered this Caribbean financial paradise turns down the Mafia as a silent partner in his operations, he’s forced to turn to bank robbery in retaliation and as a means for sheer survival.

   What results is a lusty tale of greed and marital infidelity, spiced with numerous feats of sexual superheroism. Unfortunately none of the hapless, amoral creatures involved arouse much sympathy when things don’t work out quite as planned, and the story crumbles into what’s left of sand castles when the tide comes in, as it inevitably does.

[UPDATE] 05-27-09. This is a scarce book. Only 12 copies come for sale on ABE, for example, but unless you’re fussy about condition, you aren’t likely to have to pay very much for it, either.

   When I wrote the review, I may or may not have known that Robert Terrall was much more famous under several of his pen names: Robert Kyle, John Gonzales, and Brett Halliday (ghost-writing for Davis Dresser).

   The list of mystery fiction that was published under his own name is small, and at least one is be a reprint of another title as by someone else. Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s his entry there, excluding his work under other aliases:

TERRALL, ROBERT. 1914-2009.

      They Deal in Death. Simon & Schuster, hc, 1943.

      Madam Is Dead. Duell, Sloane & Pearce, hc, 1947.
      A Killer Is Loose Among Us. Duell, Sloane & Pearce, hc, 1948.

      Shroud for a City. Australia: Original Novels, pb, 1956. [US title?]
      Sand Dollars. St. Martin’s, hc, 1978.
      Kill Now, Pay Later. Hard Case Crime, pb, 2007. Previously published as by Robert Kyle (Dell, pbo, 1960).

   Robert Terrall was 94 years old when died on March 27th earlier this year. An excellent overview of his career can be found here on The Rap Sheet blog, along with an interview editor J. Kingston Pierce did with Ben Terrall, the author’s son and a free-lancer writer himself.

   If you missed it before, please don’t hesitate in jumping over and reading it now. If you’re a fan of vintage Gold Medal style literature, you’ll be glad you did.

   Jim Goodrich, a good friend of mine died this morning. He died peacefully in a Albuquerque hospice around 1 a.m. His daughter Jill and her husband Kevin were at his bedside. He was 81 years old.

   Jim was an avid mystery reader and an equally avid movie buff, and he had been all his life. I’ve known him for something like 35 years, and while he never wrote any long articles or reviews for Mystery*File, he was always a strong supporter of my efforts from the first issue on. He invariably had something to say about the previous issue in the letter column of the next one.

   I met him in person the first time at the 1977 New York City Bouchercon, and we became even closer friends as time went on. We drove together to a PulpCon in Cherry Hill NJ in 1981 — he still lived in New Paltz NY at the time, where he was an academic librarian — and we attended several Friends of Old Time Radio conventions in Bridgeport CT and Newark NJ together, always having many many things to talk about and to catch up on. After he retired and moved to New Mexico, we only saw each other at PulpCons, either in Bowling Green or Dayton OH once a year, but we kept in constant touch, first by letters and postcards, then by email.

   Our interests overlapped in mystery fiction and pulp magazines, although his centered primarily on the hardboiled kind; old-time radio, movies, traditional jazz, religion, politics, and you name it, pop culture and nostalgia of every kind and variety.

   Jim had been undergoing radiation and chemotherapy treatments for the past several years, but he was a cheerful survivor. He was, in fact, planning to attend PulpCon again last year, but he was hospitalized the weekend before, a sore blow to him. He wouldn’t have missed it otherwise.

   He never went home again. He was transferred to a hospice within a week, but he rallied and was moved to a place where he could receive physical therapy, and he spent the last six months of 2008 there. From December on, his condition deteriorated again rapidly.

   Jim, I’ll miss you.

       ____

   From the online edition of the Albuquerque Journal:

GOODRICH — James R. “Jim” Goodrich, 81, of Albuquerque, died February 7, 2009 after a three-year battle with cancer. A retired librarian, Jim was an aficionado of Jazz, Cinema, Art, Pulp Fiction, Mysteries, and Comics; and an active supporter of numerous progressive causes and candidates. His intelligence, dry sense of humor, and patronage of numerous local restaurants, bookstores, and other establishments earned him many friends and admirers in the area. Jim was born in Toledo, Ohio, on September 12, 1927, the son of the late J.R. and Florence Goodrich. He earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Toledo and a Master’s of Library Science from Rutgers University. In 1990 he retired after more than 20 years as a librarian at the State University of New York at New Paltz and moved to Albuquerque. Jim is survived by his daughter, Jill Goodrich, and her husband, Kevin O’Connell, of Silver Spring, Maryland; his son Victor Goodrich of Philadelphia; his sister and brother-in-law, Lois and Edward Betts, of Northridge, California; his nephews, Tom Betts and Terry Betts, of California; and his niece, Ellen Betts, of Arizona. He was predeceased by his son Scott in 1974. Burial will take place at a date to be determined in New Paltz, New York. Donations in Jim’s name may be made to Presbyterian Healthcare Services (Albuquerque) Hospice division, the American Cancer Society, Planned Parenthood, or any environmental or wildlife charity.

   Thanks to Terry Betts for allowing me the use of the photo above.

   I owe my discovery of Donald Westlake to three separate coincidences that happened within a few weeks years ago – another reason why I don’t believe in coincidences. First, I found a beaten-up copy of Slayground, a relentless Parker novel, a hardboiled novel unlike any other I had read before.

   Second, I found a copy of The Hot Rock, which informed me that there was a P.G. Wodehouse in crime fiction and that his name was Donald Westlake. The third one was a used volume by one Tucker Coe, the novel A Jade in Aries, which I found both magnetic and devoid of Chandler-Hammett-Macdonald schtick.

   It didn’t take me long to find out that all three authors were one and the same, which surprised me and made me wonder for a moment if this were not an industrial operation. If so, it was the highest quality operation the literary-industrial complex had ever produced.

   Later, as I started catching up with the Dortmunder and Parker series, the latter not always easy to find, and with the new books that Westlake kept publishing with amazing consistency and regularity, I started connecting the styles and to see the literary carpentry that made Westlake’s books both absorbing and enduring.

   Pick up any Westlake book and you can be assured it’s re-readable, just like Wodehouse, Chandler and Ring Lardner are re-readable. I started to realize that this genre writer (I should say “multi-genre” writer) was on a par with the greatest authors in crime fiction. I then tried to fill all the gaps in my Westlake collection, which is close to complete –- and not a single book has failed to be reread!

   Who can forget Westlake? From Parker’s long-running series, likely the best hardboiled series ever published, to his late realist noir masterpieces The Ax and The Hook, from Levine (too little remembered) to Mitch Tobin, to his excursions into science fiction and various hybrid experiments?

   Who can forget the adventures of The Busy Body, a masterpiece that combines real adventure with dry humor running through it but never breaking the spell?

   Taken as a whole, the work of Donald Westlake is second to none in the annals of crime fiction. His breadth is unmatched, his style rings true regardless of setting, and his sense of humor and demonstrated intimate knowledge of human nature is a gift that future generations of readers will rediscover once and again.

   We have lost a contemporary classic of American literature.