AGATHA CHRISTIE – And Then There Were None. Washington Square Press (Pocket Books), hardcover, July 1973; 173 pages. ISBN 0-671-70466-4.

   If you haunt used book stores (ever dwindling numerically) like I do, you occasionally come across something unexpected. Such was the case with this particular edition of an Agatha Christie novel:

   This is a hardcover version of the mass-market paperback (and there is no mention anywhere in this edition of the book’s original, politically incorrect title).

   What makes this version special is the 48-page “Reader’s Supplement” inserted in the middle of the text. Clearly, the supplement is aimed at students, probably in high school.

   The supplement breaks down as follows:

       1.   Portrait photo of Agatha Christie (1 page)

       2. “Biographical Background” (3 pages)

       3. “Historical Background” (2 pages)

       4. “Pictorial Background” (22 pages)

       5. “Visual Glossary” (2 pages)

       6. “Literary Allusions and Notes” (5 pages)

       7. “Critical Excerpts” (13 pages).

    “Pictorial Background” (all photos are B&W and grainy):

“A View of the Terraces at Torquay” – “Agatha Christie with Her Husband at Their Devonshire Home” – “A Third-class Coach on an English Train” (sketch) – “A Striking View of the Plymouth Shoreline” – “The Devonshire Countryside” – “An English Village Similar to Sticklehaven” – “A Flashy Sports Car of the Period” – “The Occupants of the Motor Boat to Indian Island” (scene from the 1945 movie) – “A ‘Correct’ English Butler” (sketch) – “Harley Street, London, Where Numerous Doctors Practice” – “The Guests Enjoy Their First Dinner” (1945 movie) – “A Gramophone—1905” (sketch) – “A British Courtroom Scene” – “Some of the Guests on the Terrace” (1945 movie) – “A Rocky Coast in Devonshire” – “Vera and General MacArthur at the Shore” (1945 movie) – “A Tea Tray and Service” – “Another Shocking Warning” (1945 movie) – “The Latest Victim” (1945 movie) – “The Last Two Survivors in a Showdown” (1945 movie) – “… And Then There Were None ….” (1945 movie) – “Scotland Yard, Viewed from Westminster Bridge—1940s”.

    “Visual Glossary” (artist’s sketches):

Cosh, truncheon, stiletto, torch, grandfather chair, siphon, gimlet, heliograph.

    “Literary Allusions and Notes”:

Thirty-seven entries including “cairngorm,” “trional,” “pukka sahib,” “red herring,” “chloral,” “Caesar’s wife,” and “had one over the eight.”

    “Critical Excerpts” (published comments from critics of various eras about mystery fiction, including a few about this particular book — and how many of these people have you heard of?):

R. Austin Freeman (1924) – Willard Huntington Wright (1927) – Dorothy L. Sayers (1928) – George Godwin (1929) – P. G. Wodehouse (1929) – Ronald A. Knox (1929) – H. Douglas Thomson (1931) – Stephen Leacock (1939) – Times Literary Supplement (1939) – The Spectator (1939) – Ralph Partridge (1939) – M. L. Prevost (1940) – Will Cuppy (1940) – Marian Wiggin (1940) – Saturday Review of Literature (1940) – Isaac Anderson (1940) – The New Yorker (1940) – The Pocket Book of Great Detectives (1941) – Edmund Crispin (1961) – Fredric Wertham, M. D. (1926) – Current Biography (1964) – Harry Shefter (1964) – Colin Wilson (1969).

   The characteristically arch Wodehouse excerpt comes from his article “About These Mystery Stories” in the Saturday Evening Post (1929):

   The next time you’re in a used book store, you might want to look for this edition of And Then There Were None, but you might have to search the children’s section to find it.

ROBERT J. COURTINE – Madame Maigret’s Recipes. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, hardcover, 1975; trade paperback, 1987.

   I cannot explain the long life of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Jules Maigret, who has been around for almost sixty years. He spends much of his time on “stake outs,” standing around in the cold. To warm up, he drinks more brandy than is good for him or his liver.

   And what happens when he comes home? Well, according to Madame Maigret’s Recipes, compiled by Robert J. Courtine, he is served all the wrong foods. Still, I once said the same about Nero Wolfe, and he survived many years even though he also had to contend with obesity and a sedentary life style.

   Seriously, Courtine’s book is a delight for all who love good food, presenting recipes which range from soups like vichyssoise to deserts, e.g., profiteroles, an obscenely delicious concoction of eggs, butter, cream, chocolate, and ice cream.

   In between are more than a hundred dishes of meat, seafood, and chicken. Vegetables and salads are few and tend to be prepared with such cholesterol no-nos as butter, cream, and eggs. Still, everything sounds mouth-watering, and the mystery fan will have the added pleasure of being reminded of the book and circumstances under which Maigret ate each dish.

   My favorite cook says most of these dishes are relatively difficult to prepare, despite the contention that Louise Maigret prepared only “good, honest” food, because sophisticated fare had no appeal for her husband.

   However, when the detective comes home to lunch (!) in Maigret and the Loner (1975) she prepares coq au vin and must have spent the entire morning at the stove.

   She proves she loves the detective as much as do his readers. Perhaps it is that the French have a different viewpoint regarding food and, as has been said in a different context, vive le difference.

   One of the last books I read in 2009 was Losing Mum and Pup, satirical novelist Christopher Buckley’s memoir of his parents, who died within a year of each other.

    His father of course was that titan among supercilious sesquipedalians, William F. Buckley Jr., who while appearing weekly on his Firing Line TV series for decades and writing thousands of columns for his magazine National Review (often turning out 700 words in five minutes) also penned a series of novels starring superspy Blackford Oakes, completing each book in about two weeks.

    Christopher says nothing about his Pup’s contributions to mystery fiction but his memories of his Mum, who never wrote a word, reminded me irresistibly of another crime novelist. Mum, it seems, was a compulsive teller of tall tales. “I had heard [her] utter whoppers that would make Pinocchio look button-nosed,” says Christo.

    She loved to tell visitors that when she was small the king and queen of England stayed at her parents’ house in Vancouver, or that she had recently served as alternate juror on a famous murder trial.

    I never met any of the Buckleys but about 35 years ago I was invited to join the University of California’s Mystery Library project and thereby got to spend quality time with the project’s instigator: John Ball, author of In the Heat of the Night (1965) and creator of black detective Virgil Tibbs.

    John too was a Munchausen of the first water. The instant any famous name was mentioned in his presence, from Gene Autry to the Dalai Lama, he would claim to know the person well and toss off an anecdote. Shostakovich? “Ah yes, he played the piano for us in this very room when he was last in the States.”

    And what tales he’d spin about his hair-raising adventures around the world! Traveling in Asia, he was invited by the local police to help track down some notorious terrorist. On a secret mission behind the Iron Curtain he lured a Stasi agent who was shadowing him into a public urinal in East Berlin and killed him with one karate chop.

    If you knew a bit about his life — that he’d been a licensed pilot and had traveled widely in Japan and had reviewed classical music for a Brooklyn newspaper and was a police reservist and a martial arts maven — you could almost believe these yarns, which he garnished with vivid detail.

    Perhaps his biggest whopper, and one he should never have perpetrated because so many people saw through it, was that almost everything in the movie based on In the Heat of the Night had been taken from his novel.

    Of course, what made that film so successful was the conflict between Sidney Poitier as Tibbs and the racist cop played by Rod Steiger. Go try to find a smidgen of that conflict in John’s novel.

    John worshiped every badge he saw. In his world racist cops are like dry water, categorically impossible. Even on the plot level director Norman Jewison and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant junked much of the book, including everything about the murder victim trying to make that sleepy Southern town a Mecca for classical music.

    But even when we saw through John’s tall tales it was tremendous fun to watch him spin them. He was the kind of personality that made Casper Gutman say to Sam Spade: “By Gad, sir, you’re a character, that you are!” I thank Christopher Buckley for rekindling my memories of him.

    Another of the last books I read in 2009 came out earlier but so stealthily that few people know it exists. Rick Cypert’s The Virtue of Suspense: The Life and Works of Charlotte Armstrong (Susquehanna University Press, 2008) is just what its title indicates, the first full-length study of the woman who deserves to be called the female Cornell Woolrich if anyone does.

    At their finest, both could generate suspense like nobody else in the business, often with the aid of eye-popping coincidences and improbabilities that readers were usually too rapt to register. There were, of course, huge differences between the two. Armstrong (1905-1969) led a conventional life enriched by a husband (who was murdered a few years after her own death), children and many friends, while that loner’s loner Woolrich hardly had a life at all.

    Armstrong carefully revised and reworked her novels and stories while Woolrich wrote at white heat, creating an intensity beyond Armstrong’s but also committing countless linguistic howlers and blunders.

    Mysteryphiles may safely skip most of Cypert’s introductory chapter, which explores various psychological and aesthetic theories, but they won’t want to miss anything else. Another book on Armstrong is unlikely but, thanks to the excellence of this one, hardly necessary.

    Cypert had the full co-operation of Armstrong’s children and access to her extensive correspondence — with other writers, editors like Fred Dannay, and critics like Anthony Boucher, who adored her work and had much to do with her success. He is presently editing a collection of her short stories, which will be published by Crippen & Landru in due course.

    Cypert is a professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University, the alma mater of another famous female mystery writer. I suspect it’s not a Woolrich-Armstrong coincidence that he’s also written a book on Mignon G. Eberhart and co-edited a collection of her short stories.

    I’ve read little of Eberhart and only met her once, but on that occasion I just may have saved her from serious injury. One miserable winter afternoon in the Reagan era I was in New York and found myself with Eberhart, who was in her eighties at the time and quite tiny and frail, and Gloria Amoury, MWA’s executive secretary.

    All three of us needed to get from Point A to Point B and decided to share a cab. I was immediately behind Eberhart as she entered and one of her feet went out from under her on a patch of ice.

    Somehow my instincts kicked in. I formed my hands into a sort of seat and caught her bottom in it before she could fall.

    Could I be responsible for her having lived to the ripe old age of 97?

BILL PRONZINI – Gun in Cheek: A Study of Alternative Crime Fiction. Coward McCann & Geoghegan, 1982, hardcover, 1982. Trade paperback: Mysterious Press, 1987.

   Gun in Cheek is Bill Pronzini’s backhanded salute to the “Best of the Worst,” books and stories that pushed the envelope of language to the breaking point and beyond. The blurb on the back says it all:

   But they’re not all hardboiled. Gladys Mitchell is Pronzini’s target in Chapter Five: “…Mitchell’s prose is of the eccentric variety, to put it mildly — something of a cross between Christie and P. G. Wodehouse, with a dollop or two of Saki, or maybe John Collier, thrown in — and, like garlic and rutabagas, is an acquired taste.”

   Of course, Pronzini’s criticism is supported by only one example: The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop. Nevertheless, as Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) says of Pronzini in his Introduction, “He has obviously read and digested everything ever written in the genre by anyone anywhere,” so his judgment in these matters is to be respected.

   Gothic mysteries are examined in Chapter Ten, which begins with a famous Donald Westlake quote: “A gothic is a story about a girl who gets a house”; but the variations rung in on the Gothic theme can go far afield, as Pronzini amply demonstrates.

   Ed McBain feigns injury in the Introduction, wounded by Pronzini’s ignoring some of the bad writing McBain himself was guilty of, and produces examples of his own as proof that even the best writers can nod now and then over their typewriters — and what does this say about editors?

   Pronzini discusses some works at great length, such as (in Chapter Seven) The Dragon Strikes Back by Tom Roan (1936), an extravaganza so over the top that it leaves Pronzini wishing its author had produced more of the same.

   (If Ian Fleming ever denied having cribbed from The Dragon Strikes Back when he wrote Dr. No, he must have been lying, especially with its element of a renegade group trying to initiate a world war among the superpowers — how many times have those drearily formulaic Bond films used that very notion?)

   Chapter Four affectionately deals with Phoenix Press, whose stable of “alternative” authors boggles the mind, and among whom was Harry Stephen Keeler, “the once-popular ‘wild man’ of the mystery, who seems to have been cheerfully daft and whose plots defy logic and the suspension of ANYONE’S disbelief.”

   (Sidebar: Keeler offered his plotting schemes for sale to the public. That’s a lot like you teaching your cat Tiddles to play Chopin’s ‘Piano Concerto in F Minor’ : No matter how good he gets at chording, his feet will never reach the foot pedals — and Keeler’s “feet” never did.)

   You’ll probably enjoy Gun in Cheek, but three cautions:

   ● One (for parents): There is some coarse language.

   ● Two: Spoiler Alerts, for Pronzini happily reveals the endings in a few cases.

   ● Three: Don’t try to read this book in one sitting because it just might make you dizzy — with laughter.

BRIAN ANTHONY & ANDY EDMONDS – Smile When the Raindrops Fall: The Story of Charley Chase. Scarecrow Press, 1998.

RICHARD LEWIS WARD – A History of the Hal Roach Studios. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

   Together these two books give a nice portrait of one of the most interesting smaller studios during Hollywood’s Golden Period. The Charley Chase book covers the creative sides by telling the story of one of Hal Roach’s most talented stars and directors. The Ward book covers more of the business and practical aspects of the studio and includes a great deal of specific figures on the cost and earnings of individual films and series.

   I am a bit late to the party on Charley Chase, as other than his supporting role in Laurel & Hardy’s wonderful Sons of the Desert, I was not very familiar with his film work. I had seen a few of his shorts but those few were years ago. More recently, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) ran some of his silent short subjects as well as talkies and it piqued my interest. Chase was a very talented fellow, both as a performer and director.

   Born Charles Joseph Parrott in Baltimore in 1893, he spent his first 10 years in an ethnic neighborhood near the inner harbor. After his father died, the family moved in with his mother’s sister and Charley began running errands and anything he could to bring in money.

   A talented tap dancer with a pleasing voice, he began earning money on the streets as an entertainer. Soon he teamed up with two other boys and the trio gained bookings in vaudeville theaters. Eventually, he teamed up with another comic for a routine entitled “The Boys from Nutsville” that was very successful. Charley became tired of living out of a trunk and stayed in Los Angeles when a tour ended in 1911.

   He found employment with Lon Chaney’s stage troupe as a member of the chorus. There he met his wife, but soon Chaney abandoned his stage career to enter movies. Out of a job, Charley did the same, first with the Christie Studios and then with Mack Sennett.

   With Sennett, Charley began doing bits and graduated to featured roles, and along the way, was given his first chance at directing. He also became friends with the star of the Sennett lot, Charlie Chaplin, and appeared in several of the Chaplin films circa 1914. After several years with Sennett, Charley freelanced as a director and performer at Paramount and other studios.

   His younger brother Jimmy Parrott went to work for the Hal Roach Studio in 1917 as a gag writer on Harold Lloyd comedies and eventually made his way in front of the camera. Jimmy was drafted into the Army and sent to Europe where he was wounded.

   After his return, Roach put him back before the cameras but soon James Parrott left acting to become one of Roach’s best directors.

   Meanwhile, his brother Charley joined Roach and because of his experience with some of the best producers, he was made supervisor of all productions. It was at Roach that Charley made his mark both in front and behind the camera.

   As a studio manager, Charley lured Stan Laurel into returning to the Roach Studio trom vaudeville. Charley had worked with Oliver Hardy in the Billy West comedies and in 1924, he added him to be Roach stable of actors. While others have credit for teaming L&H, Charley got them to the same studio.

   The star of the Roach Studio in the early days was Harold Lloyd. I attended a 100th birthday party for Hal Roach given by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Nearly completely deaf, Roach did answer questions posed. Asked who was his favorite comedian, Roach immediately answered “Harold Lloyd.” Why? “Because I made the most money with him.”

   I need to dig up my notes from the Roach interview to be exact but when he was asked who he thought was the funniest comic, he quickly said “Charley Chase. But he was a terrible drunk.” Alas, in a hard-drinking era, Charley was notable for his love of brandy and eventually, it killed him in 1940.

   Rail thin, slicked-back hair and a small mustache was the picture of a young man on the go in his early movies and even as he grew older, he maintained a very likable film persona. It is ironic that he is best remembered for his role as the obnoxious fraternal order convention-goer who plagues Laurel and Hardy in Sons of the Desert.

   When Roach exited the short subject field (except for the “Our Gang” series), he used Chase in a couple of features and then fired him. Chase took a full page ad in Variety to thank Roach for a wonderful 17-year run. He moved over to Columbia where he had his own series, and he directed others including several of the best by the Three Stooges including Violent Is the Word for Curley.

   The biography is an odd collaboration as Andy Edmonds had done much of the research years before but had never finished the biography. One day Anthony knocked on his door and asked him “Why?”

   Together they finished the book: The close cooperation of Chase’s daughters and children add a human element often missing from biographies. The writers also visited the homes they lived in and that added a lot of physical detail.

   Edmonds’ early interviews saved a lot of information that would have been lost with the death of Chase’s contemporaries. He even tracked down Joe Kavigan, the bartender at the theatrical oriented Masquers Club where Charley was an officer. Kavigan used to drive Chase home when he was in his cups. Chase would yell “Stop the car!! Get out!!” And outside, he said “Look at the sky! Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”

   Kavigan said his helping the patrons home could be misinterpreted. He often escorted an inebriated Spencer Tracy from the club to his home. One late evening, Mrs. Tracy came to the door to help her husband in and said sharply, “How come when he’s with you, he’s always drunk?” She probably had no idea he was the bartender.

   The Ward history of the Hal Roach studio is a much drier book but I found the level of detail fascinating. Discussed in detail are the relationships with Pathe as his distributor, fol1owed by the glory years with MGM and then finally with United Artists.

   I knew Roach had been in trouble in the early 1930s after the crash but was surprised to learn that the studio nearly went under in 1940. Although Roach produced the wonderful Of Mice and Men starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Burgess Meredith, the rave reviews did not translate into profitability due to mishandling by United Artists.

   As documented in a wealth of detail, the studio was never in great financial shape. Hal Roach, Sr. eventually turned it over to his son and Hal Roach, Jr. made the lot one of the most active in the early days of television. Shows shot at Roach included My Little Margie, Blondie, Racket Squad, and The Stu Erwin Show.

   Independent producers rented the studio to make series including Amos and Andy, Life of Riley, Beulah, You Are There, and Waterfront. Yet, the studio couldn’t make money because of the debt it was carrying, including a hefty buy-out for Hal Roach Sr. Eventually, it went bankrupt.

   Interesting tidbits: “Our Gang” weekly salaries in 1937: Spanky $200, Alfalfa $175, DarIa $150, Buckwheat $80.

   I don’t know why, but sometimes the last (and the shortest step) in a project takes the most amount of time before it finally gets done.

   Case in point. I’ve been working on the Lending Library Mystery website for quite a while, and only over the weekend have I managed to get the last publisher’s page done.

   This is the website that Bill Pronzini and I have been doing in conjunction with Bill Deeck’s reference book Murder at 3 Cents a Day, which is a complete list of all of the publishers whose mysteries were published almost solely for the lending library market in the late 30s through the 1940s, with blurbs and descriptions of all their offerings.

   The best known of these may be Phoenix Press, but there were several others, including Hillman-Curl, Dodge Publishing Co., Gateway Books and more. Over the past year or more, Bill and I have been uploading cover images to the LLM website for almost all of the mystery and detective fiction put out by each of these small publishers.

   The last two to have been completed are Mystery House, about which some information about the man who founded the company has been added, and Arcadia House, the last publisher to be included and for which cover images are now available.

   Besides Bill, whose collection has been the source of all the cover images, thanks go also to Victor Berch, a tireless researcher into WorldCat and other arcane sources of publisher information.

   Follow the links and feel free to browse around!

NOTE: The two covers shown are both Arcadia House titles.

WHIRLWIND RAIDERS. Columbia, 1948. Charles Starrett, Smiley Burnette, Fred Sears, Philip Morris, Jack Ingram, Nancy Saunders, Patrick Hurst, Don Kay Reynolds (as Little Brown Jug), Doye O’Dell and The Radio Rangers. Screenplay: Norman Hall. Director: Vernon Keays.

   Well, once again there are no raiders in this next Durango Kid movie, or if there are, by no connotation of the word, are they “whirlwind raiders.” The bad guys are more insidious than that. At a time when the Texas Rangers were officially disbanded, the “Texas State Police” were put in charge, and if the screenwriter for this film is to be believed, they were a bunch of crooks with political connections who rode sway over the populace with grafts, holdups and penny ante corruption throughout their ranks.

   (If anyone knows how true this small aberration in Texas history might be, let me know.)

   Charles Starrett is Steve Lanning in this one, a former Texas Ranger working undercover to root out the bad guys, led by saloon owner Tracey Beaumont (Fred Sears) and his head henchman, Buff Tyson (Jack Ingram, whom I am sure always played a crook in his 271 film appearances, or in at least most of them).

   But what this means is that in this movie, as opposed to the previous one, Lanning does have of a reason for having two identities. Whenever he does anything of semi-illegality, such as breaking into Beaumont’s safe late at night, he does it as the Durango Kid.

   I mentioned earlier my (adult-based) puzzlement that no one ever seems able to recognize Steve as Durango, but in this movie, a young lad named Tommy Ross (played by Little Brown Jug, as he is billed in the credits) actually does discover that the two are indeed one and the same.

    He is quickly sworn to secrecy and sworn in as an adjunct Texas Ranger to boot. His first assignment? To follow the actions of Smiley Burnette, who “is acting very suspiciously.”

   Smiley in this movie is a traveling tinkerer who’s set up shop in the same town, and with a covered wagon filled with pots and pans and objects of other obviously beneficial value, including a cage containing two chickens, it establishes a very convenient venue for Smiley to clown around in, making an enormous racket most of the time he’s on the screen.

   There’s no love interest in this one either, or just the smallest of hints that newspaper owner Bill Webster (Patrick Hurst) is interested in making moves on Claire Ross (Nancy Saunders), daughter of rancher Homer Ross (Philip Morris). There’s no time to add any mushy stuff to this story, which is chuck full of action, comedy and singing, in just about that order.

   Additional comments: This was the only movie Patrick Hurst made, and he plays his role so thinly in this one, you might not even realize he was in it. Philip Morris, although only 55, looks old and tired, and it’s scary to learn that he died the very next year. Beginning in 1949, Fred Sears began his career as a director with yet another Durango movie, Desert Vigilante. He did lots of westerns among his 51 films, including the 1958 version of Utah Blaine, based on the novel by Louis L’Amour.

[UPDATE] 02-12-09.   This is the second of three Durango Kid movies I taped and watched over four years ago now. I’ll post the third review tomorrow, if all goes well.

   After digging the reviews out of storage, it prompted me to sign up for the Encore grouping of premium cable channels yesterday — one of them being, of course, the Western Channel, the source of these Durango films.

   I canceled today without taping a single one of their offerings. I do not care to pay a premium fee for cable channels with huge logos (bugs) in the lower corner of the screens. These must have appeared between now and the last time I’d signed up for the Encore channels, since they weren’t there before, at least not as permanently and as ugly as they are now.

   Turner Classic movies uses logos, but they come on only every 30 minutes or so, and then quietly disappear. The Encore logos are four times the size and are opaque white. Maybe I’m the only one who hates these things. And don’t get me started on network TV and the bulk of the non-premium cable channels. Besides news and sports, I don’t watch any of them.

   Not only do they have logos, but they have characters from next show come wandering in on the bottom of screen and jump around until you notice them (as if) and then whoosh off, sound effects included, all the while the current show is still on. Besides this sort of nonsense, and five-minute blocks of commercials, I can’t see anyone except invalids and shut-in’s putting up with this. But I guess they do.

   On a more pleasant note, I’m going to repeat one of the comments that Walker Martin left after I posted yesterday’s Durango Kid feature:

    “Today, I just received a new book, Western Film Series of the Sound Era, by Michael R. Pitts. Published by McFarland it’s 474 pages [long and covers] 30 western film series from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s. Included is a long chapter on The Durango Kid, 45 pages discussing all the films and 11 photos and posters. Also there is a chapter on the Dr. Monroe series discussing the three films starring Charles Starrett.

    “McFarland Books website lists the 30 series covered.”

    It’s just out. It was published only last December, and I’ve ordered a copy myself. As Walker says, the various series it covers are listed on the McFarland website, but to save you the time of searching online for it yourself, here’s the Contents Page:

ROBERT KENNETH JONES – The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s.

NAL Plume, trade paperback, 1978. Hardcover edition: FAX Collector’s Editions, West Linn OR, 1975. Reprint hardcover/softcover: Wildside Press, 2007.

   In 1940, when I began reading everything I could lay my eyes on, there were countless pulps at my local newsstand. There was even, in the neighborhood in the South Bronx in which I grew up, a store that sold used pulps at three for a dime. Aware of the prices being asked for pulps now, I deeply regret not having invested-or at least kept those I had. Had I but known.

   Robert Kenneth Jones’ The Shudder Pulps is designed for those of us who, for literary and-or monetary reasons, are nostalgic for the pulpa era. It is not designed as a complete history, but rather as an informal survey of the horror-weird menace type of pulp that was so popular in the 1930’s.

   The stories of which Jones writes fell somewhere in between fantasy-science fiction on one hand and detective-mystery fiction on the other. While most of his discussion concerns magazines like Weird Tales, Horror Stories, and Terror Tales, some of the detective pulps like Dime Detective come in for attention as well. In an easy-going, anecdotal style, Jones describes the contents of some of the magazines, the publishing taboos, and gives us an idea of the economics of writing at the time.

   Though many of the pulp writers of the thirties are no longer alive, Jones interviewed several of those available, e.g., Baynard Kendrick and Wyatt Blassingame, and has captured their reminiscences for posterity.

   No book about the pulps would be complete without some discussion of the illustrations, especially the gory, funny, sexy covers. Jones has included more than seventy illustrations, mostly covers. Unfortunately, they are reduced in size and are in black and white, so that some of the original appeal of the covers is missing. Still, in words and pictures Robert Kenneth Jones has done an admirable job of recreating a time for which we rightly feel nostalgic.

C. W. SCOTT-GILES – The Wimsey Family: A Fragmentary History Compiled from Correspondence with Dorothy Sayers.

Victor Gollancz Ltd, UK, hardcover, 1977; New English Library, pb, 1979. Harper & Row, US, hc, 1978; Avon, pb, October 1979.

   As a fan of Dorothy L. Sayers I would desperately like to recommend The Wimsey Family, by C. W. Scott-Giles. I have long been on record as saying there should be more of the Baker Street Irregular type of speculative writing about other detectives than Sherlock Holmes.

   Based on correspondence with Sayers, Scott-Giles has provided a genealogical history of Lord Peter Wimsey. However, most of it concerns pre-1700 history and does not directly Concern the characters Sayers created. It may be of interest to students of arms and heraldry, but it is not especially vital to mystery fans. It certainly provides no answers to such vital questions as: what really occurred between Lord Peter and the German soprano in Vienna?

   This is also an over-priced book. Refuting the conventional laws of supply and demand, the [US hardcover] publisher has apparently assumed that since there will be a small audience, a high price is needed to maximize profit (or minimize loss). Six dollars and ninety-five cents is a bit much, even in these inflated times, for an 88 page book with a handful of drawings and not even a family tree diagram, something essential to an enterprise of this sort.

   Mr. Scott-Giles, due to his obvious love of the Wimsey canon, would appear to have been well-qualified to do the definitive “biography” of Lord Peter. It is unfortunate that he did not give himself a wider canvas.

[UPDATE] 12-24-08.   Geoff Bradley just emailed me (this is Steve) to point out that the Dorothy L. Sayers Society has recently published a new edition of this book. The price, including postage to the US, $38. (Don’t anyone tell Marv.)

   For more details, email me or Geoff (at Geoffcads @ aol.com), or even better if you’re a subscriber to CADS, the mystery zine that Geoff publishes, see page 14 of #55, the most recent issue.

   Highlights of #55 include a long article by Agatha Christie written in 1945 in which she discusses the work of her contemporary mystery writers; Josef Hoffmann on Mildred Davis; Jon L. Breen on Charlie Chan; and more. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface.

   To obtain a copy and/or to start a subscription, contact Geoff (address above). Highly recommended!

   It’s been a long time in getting it finished (the last update was sometime in January) but the Mystery House section of Bill Deeck’s Murder at 3 Cents a Day Lending Library website is ready for viewing. Thanks to the assistance of Bill Pronzini, whose collection has been of great use, cover images of almost all of the books published by Mystery House between 1940 and 1948 are now online.

   Mystery House was revived as an imprint in 1952 and continued on until 1959, but rather than doing any of these, what Bill and I will be tackling next are the covers of the lending library mysteries published by Arcadia House between 1939 and 1947. Arcadia House also began publishing mysteries in 1952, but here again we’ll concentrate on the ‘Golden Age’ titles first.

   Here are a couple of the Mystery House covers. For the others, you’ll have to follow the link above: