MARCIA BIEDERMAN – Post No Bonds. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1988. Penguin, paperback, 1989.

   Marcia Biederman makes her second excursion into our precincts with Post No Bonds. Phil Stark is a bail bondsman in Massachusetts. His wife Grace wants to redo the house, but Phil’s business is not flourishing. Grace’s attempts to improve Phil’s competitive position bring the law down around his neck, so he transfers the business and assets to Grace and tries selling insurance.

   Grace is a no-nonsense, middle-aged type, fully capable of larceny and pulling triggers in a good cause. The good cause shortly presents itself: she bails a drug dealer, who skips, leaving Grace holding a $30,000 bag. Attaching herself to Darcy, the dealer’s market analyst cum bedmate, Grace sets out to get her investment back. An amusing and inventive tale.

Bibliographic Data:   For some reason I thought Grace Stark was a recurring character, but not so.   [Footnote.]   Marcia Biederman wrote only three novels before leaving the field of crime fiction:

       The Makeover. Academy Chicago, 1984.
       Post No Bonds. Scribner, 1988.
       Sismo. Walker, 1993.

   One other online review of Post No Bonds is very positive, saying in part: “Pledging her condominium as collateral for Heywood’s bond is his girlfriend Darcy, who also teams with Grace to bring in Heywood. They make an effective, unorthodox pair of amateur sleuths. […] The incongruity of finding a housewife such as Grace Stark in such places gives the book much of its humor. Armed with a pistol and a bulletproof raincoat, Grace proves to be surprisingly resourceful and tough enough to hold her own. Added fun comes from the interplay between the incompatible Grace and Darcy.”

   Makes one wish that there was another book telling of their adventures.

[Footnote.]   Now I remember. The cover of the hardcover edition states:   “A Mystery Introducing Grace Stark.”

   When the present loses its savor, turn to the past. I recently reread a suspense novel first published in my childhood and first encountered something like 45 years ago. I remembered very little about it except that it hadn’t impressed me much back in the Sixties. It still doesn’t, but some aspects of it merit space here.

   The byline on the first edition of Fallen Angel (Little Brown, 1952) was Walter Ericson but the author was Howard Fast (1914-2003), who is best known for mainstream novels like Spartacus and for his Communist affiliation, which sent him to prison for three months during the McCarthy-HUAC era.

   According to his memoir Being Red (1990), he decided to present his first crime novel under a pseudonym because in those years of Red Menace paranoia he was afraid publishers would soon be boycotting all books by openly Marxist writers like himself.

   Then some patriotic munchkin at Little Brown tipped off the FBI, and J. Edgar Hoover himself called the CEO with the message that it was okay for the book to appear under Fast’s own name but that the house would be in trouble if it came out under a pseudonym. With the book already printed and bound, the dust jacket copy was hastily revised to announce that Ericson was Fast’s newly minted byline for mystery fiction.

   Critical reaction ran the gamut. Anthony Boucher in the New York Times Book Review called the book “something short of sensational… [It] has a few adroitly contrived pursuit scenes in the Hitchcock manner, but a limp, tired plot, an equally tired set of stock characters, rather heavy prose and unlikely dialogue, and a general air of never quite making sense.”

   At the other end of the spectrum, the reviewer for the Boston Herald found the novel “surprisingly absorbing and masterfully created…,” evoking a “mood that is often savage with a skein of madness.”

   The Michigan City News-Dispatch described it as “full of chills and thrills, ripe with suspense and psychological undertones.” The Cincinnati Enquirer praised the “good creepy atmosphere and excellent fast writing.” (Pun intended?)

   These and other raves were reprinted in two pages of front matter when Fallen Angel appeared in paperback, retitled The Darkness Within. This early Ace Double (#D-17, 1953) was bound together with the softcover original Shakedown by Roney Scott, who turned out to be PI novelist William Campbell Gault.

   Apparently no one tipped off J. Edgar this time: the byline on the Ace edition is Walter Ericson and there’s no hint anywhere that Fast was the author.

   The springboard situation here is as purely noir as in any Woolrich novel. The narrator, David Stillman, is in a Lower Manhattan skyscraper late one March afternoon when the lights suddenly go out and the building loses all power.

   Descending 22 stories by the fire stairs, he encounters a lovely woman who seems to know him well but whom he doesn’t know at all. He follows her into the bowels of the building but loses her. Out on the night street he finds that a renowned public figure who kept an office in the building has fallen 22 stories to his death.

   Arriving home, he discovers a gunman in his apartment who presents him with a forged passport and orders him to leave for Europe at once. All this in the first four chapters!

   Stillman soon becomes convinced that he’s been suffering from amnesia for the last three years, but in Chapter Five he visits an obese and grotesque psychiatrist who calls him a liar to his face:

   Whether Fast is right or not I have no idea but this passage seems to be a clear reference to Woolrich’s The Black Curtain (1941; filmed the following year as Street of Chance), which begins with the restoration of the protagonist’s identity after an amnesia lasting precisely three years.

   Fast devised a storyline squarely in the Woolrich vein, and left as much unexplained at the end as Woolrich ever did, but he simply didn’t have Woolrich’s awesome skill at making us live inside the skins of the hunted and the doomed, feeling their terror as they run headlong through the night and the city.

   David Stillman’s first-person narration constantly seeks to evoke a sort of existential dread — perhaps the threat of World War III and the fear of nuclear holocaust — but the style is absurdly pretentious and didactic:

   That last quartet of nouns illustrates another problem with the style: endless repetition. I’ll limit myself to two exchanges of dialogue, both from the climactic scene:

   And then:

   Multiply by hundreds and you’ll get it. The picture that is.

   Speaking of pictures, The Black Curtain was filmed the year after its publication but Fast’s novel didn’t make it to the big screen until after his post-imprisonment break with the Party.

   Mirage (1965) was directed by Edward Dmytryk, another member of the creative Left (although he avoided prison and salvaged his career by “naming names” before HUAC), and starred Gregory Peck and Diane Baker, with the performance of a lifetime by Walter Matthau as the hapless PI Peck consults.

   Dispensing with first-person narration, Dmytryk and screenwriter Peter Stone eliminate the novel’s stylistic faults, but the film never generates the powerful mood of the finest noirs of the Sixties, like Cape Fear and Point Blank.

   As a tie-in with the movie there came a paperback edition of the novel (Crest #d808, 1965), for obvious reasons retitled Mirage but now credited to Fast.

   The back cover is graced by an amusing six-word condensation of Tony Boucher’s Times review: “Pursuit scenes in the Hitchcock manner.”

   Just a few years later Mirage was loosely remade as Jigsaw (1968), directed by James Goldstone in a hallucinogenic visual style, with Bradford Dillman and Harry Guardino replacing Peck and Matthau.

   When Fast was in his early eighties I had a brief exchange of letters with him about his World War II court-martial novel The Winston Affair (1959) and the very different film version Man in the Middle (1964), which starred Robert Mitchum as a sort of Philip Marlowe in khaki. (Google my name and the movie title and you’ll find my University of San Francisco Law Review essay on that subject.)

   If only I had reread Fallen Angel back then and asked him about that book too!

GEORGE BELLAIRS – Corpse at the Carnival. Gifford, UK, hardcover, 1958. Penguin, paperback, 1964. No US edition.

   Superintendent Littlejohn of Scotland Yard is flying to the Isle of Man for a vacation with his friend, the Rev. Caesar Kinrade, Archdeacon of Man. Littlejohn had just attended an international police conference in Dublin where he had been asked to lecture on his methods. The other attendees had been shocked to discover he had none.

   Nonetheless, the local C.I.D. hasten to get him involved in the strange murder of a man known as Uncle Fred, whose last names were, depending on where he was, Snook, Snowball, and Boycott. Somebody stabbed Uncle Fred, and he died on the Douglas promenade.

   This is another boarding-house mystery, with all the oddball characters generated by that locale. Interesting also is the Information about the Isle of Man, which Littlejohn doesn’t get to see enough of.

   Despite his lack of method, though, he does discover who killed the multi-named Uncle Fred in a leisurely but fascinating investigation.

Bio-Bibliographic Data:   Quoting from the Fantastic Fiction website:

   You’ll also find a list of titles there, along with loads of cover images.

  FREDERIC F. VAN DE WATER – Hidden Ways. Bobbs Merrill, hardcover, 1935. Dell #67, mapback edition, no date stated [1944].

   A rich spinster of uncertain age, Miss Agatha Paget has hired Everett Ferriter, genealogist, to work on an. unexpurgated history of her family. When an apartment in the building in which she lives becomes vacant, she recommends that Ferriter move in.

   One afternoon a man who has been stabbed to death is found in Ferriter’s apartment, a man who had not been seen entering the building. If it was not someone on the premises, the murderer had also not been seen entering the building or leaving it.

   In addition to the police investigation, David Mallory, hall man at the apartment house and former reporter looking for a job on a newspaper, takes it upon himself, and does a poor job, to solve the murder. He has fallen in love at first sight with Miss Agatha’s niece, and anyone who can fall in love at first sight is non compos for the duration, as far as I’m concerned.

   While Miss Agatha knows whodunit immediately, she has no particular interest in seeing the murderer unmasked. Or she doesn’t until the police begin suspecting her feckless nephew.

   What raises this book beyond the average mystery novel is the presence of Miss Agatha. She had had “infantile paralysis” — for young readers, this is what poliomyelitis, if indeed that is a word still recognized, used to be called — at age twelve and has been confined to a wheelchair since then.

   Fortunately, her intelligence and her sense of humor have not been affected by the paralysis of her legs. For example, her views on opera, pace Marv Lachman: “I grew tired long ago of hearing nonsense sung in one language by folks who speak another, to people who don’t understand either.”

Editorial Comments:   The reference to long-time mystery fan Marv Lachman refers to the latter’s equally long love of the opera. The two fields of interests have overlapped several times, resulting in a number of articles about (and checklists of) fictional murders with operatic settings.

   Frederic F. Van de Water (1890-1968) has eight entries in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, including one story collection. He had one series character, John Tarleton, who appeared in two of them, neither of which was Hidden Ways.

   Finally, Michael Gilbert is getting the recognition he deserves. In 1987 he received a Grand Master Award from MWA, in 1988 publishers seem to be falling all over themselves to reprint him, and that is good news for American mystery readers.

   Incidentally, Gilbert, who only recently retired as an attorney, did virtually all his writing while commuting by train to London. Yet he had a very active practice and even was Raymond Chandler’s solicitor, writing his will. I am in awe of Gilbert since my own railroad-commuting days were much less productive, limited to reading the newspaper in the morning and napping, despite my best efforts to stay awake, in the evening.

   Penguin has reprinted Smallbone Deceased for $3.95, and there is no better possible introduction to Gilbert than this very early (1950) work. It contains many of the elements of the classic puzzle: the bizarre crime (a body is found in a large deed box at a law office), a diagram of the office, and clever chapter headings which fit in with the legal background of this mystery.

   Gilbert’s sophisticated writing and expert character development make this book very “modern” for its time, since it was written when most puzzle writers used large chunks of cardboard with which they created the people in their books.

   Gilbert is one of the finest short-story writers around, and Carroll and Graf has reprinted his wonderful collection of Calder and Behrens spy stories, Game Without Rules (1967), $3.95. This edition contains the original British titles, though many stories appeared in EQMM under different titles.

   By whatever name, most of the stories In this collection are a perfect antidote for readers who are tired of the cynicism and lack of action in John Le Carre. Gilbert’s adept plotting and wit make each story a joy to read and convince me the short story is the proper length for espionage fiction. Especially recommended are “The Cat Cracker,” “Trembling’s Tours,” and “Hellige Nacht,” three of the very best spy short stories ever.

   Carroll and Graf has also reprinted, for $3.95, Overdrive (1967), a novel which received considerable critical acclaim, though I found the protagonist, Oliver Nugent, too ruthless to permit me to identify with him.

   Allen J. Hubin’s highly favorable review of this book in a Minneapolis newspaper was brought to the attention of the editor of the New York Times Book Review and led to, from 1968 to 1971, his being the first (and far and away the best) replacement for Anthony Boucher.

   From Perennial Library comes The Country-House Burglar (1955), $4.95, and The Crack in the Teacup (1966), $3.95, two village mysteries which stress the charm of the British countryside but crackle with surprise and clever plotting. A bonus is the subtle way Gilbert works choral singing and cricket, respectively, into the stories.

● Smallbone Deceased. Hodder & Stoughton, UK. hardcover. 1950. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1950.

● Game Without Rules. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1968. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1967.

● Overdrive. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1968. First published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton as The Dust and the Heat, hardcover, 1967.

● The Country-House Burglar. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1955. First published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton as Sky High, hardcover, 1955.

● The Crack in the Teacup. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1966. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1966.

ROSEMARY KUTAK – I Am the Cat. Farrar Straus & Co., hardcover, 1948. Unicorn Mystery Book Club. hardcover, 4-in-1 edition, May 1948. Mercury Mysteries #130, digest-sized paperback, no date [1949]. Collier Books, paperback, 1964, 1966, with an introduction by Anthony Boucher.

   The Collier Books reprint is one in its series of Mystery Classics presumably chosen by Anthony Boucher. Momentarily stifling my bias against know-it-all psychiatrists, I concur with Boucher’s selection.

   Taking a break from treating veterans with war-induced traumas, psychiatrist Marc Castleman is spending his leave with his “Aunt” Emily and her houseguests, a fairly motley crew. One of the male guests apparently gets into Castleman’s medical bag and takes an overdose of morphia. When that falls to kill him, he brushes his teeth with a tooth powder made mostly of cyanide, which does the trick.

   Was he really trying to kill himself? His sister, as neurotic as he seems to have been, has doubts. The day of the inquest she is found at the foot of the stairs, with a broken neck.

   Was her death an accident, or is someone, involved with those two and other houseguests in a tontine, trying to increase his or her income? Will it get down to two, or maybe to one, if the murderer is cunning enough?

   Keen readers will spot the murderer the moment Castleman does, although all it is not what it seems.

BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL DATA:   Dr. Marc Castleman appeared in one earlier mystery novel, Darkness of Slumber (Lippincott, 1944). For more on that book plus some biographical data about the author, whose only two crime novels these are, check out this earlier post on the blog.

THOMAS BLACK – Four Dead Mice. Rinehart & Company, hardcover, 1954. Bantam #1448, paperback, 1956, as Million Dollar Murder.

   I’m going to change things around from the way they usually occur here, not just a little, but from top to bottom. Instead of a complete list of Thomas [B.] Black’s private eye Al Delany character at the end of this review, here they are at the beginning:

      The 3-13 Murders. Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946.

      The Whitebird Murders. Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946.

      The Pinball Murders. Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.

      Four Dead Mice. Rinehart & Co., 1954.

   There are are only the four of them, and why the gap, and why the abrupt end to the series, I do not know. I’d welcome any information that you might have. According to Al Hubin, Thomas Black was born in Kansas in 1910, with a possible death date of 1993, not confirmed. (Information on hand as of the current Revised Crime Fiction IV.)

   I’m sure I’ve read at least one of the first three, but it was so long ago, I’ll not rely on memory, and I’ll report on only this one. It takes place in Chancellor City, an small metropolis with more than its share of alleys, back streets, rundown housing and a wide-open red light district. I had the feeling that it might be St. Louis, in disguise, or Kansas City, perhaps, but that’s only a guess, and it’s probably not relevant anyway.

   Delany is asked by a bakery to find out who might have dropped some dead mice into a vat of bread dough, and the case escalates from there to include the death of a job applicant who flunked an employment check, and more.

   The dialogue is bright and chipper and slangy, and maybe some of the slang makes the book unreprintable today. For example, S.Q.Q. stands for? San Quentin Quail, if that helps any, and that’s what Delaney knows what Honey Ward is, a precocious young girl (in ways also probably unreprintable today) who grabs his attention early on and doesn’t let go.

   Here’s an early scene that doesn’t have anything to do with the plot, and Cora Collins doesn’t appear again, but I liked the flavor it provided:

   From a little later on, from page 37, this excerpt is getting closer to the plot:

   With other characters involved named Delight (a big nut-brown colored hairpin, handsome as sin and better proportioned), “Baggy Pants” Vance, Bam Carson, George Washington Hite, Little Phil Murio, and a hophead named Sleepy-Sleep, this reads like a cross between Damon Runyon and Harry Stephen Keeler, with triple the coherency of the latter, thanks to numerous recaps and timetables and lists of questions that haven’t have been answered yet.

   I’m not so sure about the ending. I wish Black had pumped up the descriptions of some of the characters earlier on, to give them the presence they needed to fit the roles they were designed to play — and I’m not (necessarily) referring to the killer(s). As it is, it’s solid detection on the run, winging it as it goes, and cramming it all in to fit (for the most part) until the number of pages runs out.

[UPDATE] 02-10-12.   I’m sorry to say that this is all I remember of this book. If I hadn’t written the review, I wouldn’t even be able to tell you where the four dead mice came in. I think this is a positive review, however. I’ve convinced myself I ought to read the book again, next time I get the chance.

T. J. MacGREGOR – The Seventh Sense. Kensington, hardcover, 1999. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 1999 [?]. Pinnacle, paperback, March 2000.

    When author Trish MacGregor is not writing mysteries, she’s busy doing books on astrology, the interpretation of dreams, love spells and charms, and the tarot. Which goes a long way in explaining why many of her recent books of crime fiction have more than a hint of the supernatural or paranormal in them as well.

    (She seems to have abandoned her novels in the Quin St. James/Mike McCleary series, of which there were ten, and since I haven’t read any of them, I can’t tell you how much they depended on psychic phenomena in terms of plot material, nor what the books she’s written as Alison Drake are like. Follow the link above for a list of all her books.)

    But picking this one up to read, I have to tell you, is like picking up a downed electrical wire and not being able to let go. In the opening scene an up-and-coming attorney, infuriated at not being able to land a client, succumbs to the worst case of road rage that you’ll ever read, and if you can put the book down right then and there and not continue, you’re a stronger person than I, by far.

    The fatal victims of this deliberate attack are the husband and unborn child of (guess what) an FBI agent on maternity leave, Charlie Calloway, who can’t let the killer just walk away, and she doesn’t. Is it justice she’s looking for, or simply revenge?

    This a tough story, enhanced to near incandescent level by Charlie’s newly developed seventh sense. She’d always worked well on hunches; when she died for a few minutes after the accident, her powers became even more. On page 87, her friend Rain is explaining it all to her:

    I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, so I can go along with this, but if truth be told, this would be one heck of a suspense thriller, even without the inclusion of the “new consciousness.”

    Occasionally over the top, as if you haven’t been able to tell by now, this is a wild, careening trip into the deep utter blackness that emotions (and their aftermath) can produce. Not for everyone’s taste, I don’t imagine, but while it lasts, it’s quite a ride.

[UPDATE] 02-01-12.   From the author’s website, some more information about her various series and characters: Quin St. James and Mike McCleary are two private detectives (male and female) who “plied their trade in the dark underbelly of Miami in the late 1980s.”

    Of the Alison Drake books (four of them), she says “the most significant aspect in those books was the creation of Tango Key, an island 12 miles west of Key West, where the anomalous geography is as mysterious as the island’s legends and lore of mermaids, UFOs, converging ley lines, ghosts and hauntings.”

    Tango Key was also used as a setting in the author’s five book Mira Morales series.

   It’s only January but I find it hard to believe that the remaining months of this year will produce a bio-critical book in our genre more fascinating than Blood Relations.

   Published by Perfect Crime Books, edited by Joseph Goodrich and with a foreword by master TV mystery series creator William Link, this labor of literary love brings together much of the correspondence between Frederic Dannay and his cousin Manfred B. Lee, the creators of Ellery Queen, between 1947 and 1950 when they lived on opposite coasts.

   What a treasure! It’s long been known that Fred and Manny had endless bitter disputes about their work, and Jon L. Breen presented a cross-section of this material in “The Queen Letters” (EQMM, February 2005). Now we have thousands of words more, letters that offer literally a blow-by-blow account of the creation of three of the strongest Queen novels — Ten Days’ Wonder (1948), Cat of Many Tails (1949) and The Origin of Evil (1951).

   Even the most knowledgeable Queen fans will be surprised by some of the revelations. With regard to EQMM, Fred (on page 61) boasts to Manny that he’s “done one hell of a lot of rewriting” on the stories he’s published, “including the best of them,” and claims to “have improved many a story, as the original authors have … conceded.”

   Any reader of the magazine who’s wondered about the number of motifs from the EQ novels and stories that are also found in many a story by EQMM contributors now knows the answer: Fred put them there. Manny in turn tells Fred (on page 64) that he has a “tremendous resistance” to the magazine, which he says has been “a vast sore spot with me for years.”

   Among the recurring subjects of their correspondence is their view of the vast differences between them. “I have a drive toward ‘realism,’” Manny writes on January 23, 1950 (page 112), defining the word as “conformity to the facts and color of life and the world as we live in it….”

   He accuses Fred of creating plots “in which vastness and boldness of conception is nearly everything — the colossal idea, planned to stagger if not bowl over the reader. Since such ideas rarely if ever exist in life, they necessarily lead you, in working out the details of the story, into fantasy… [T]he bigger the conception, the more fantastic becomes the story. I then face this plot, with my compulsion toward reality, and the trouble begins.”

   This is 100% consistent with what Manny’s son Rand Lee once heard his father say after a heated phone conversation with Fred: “He gives me the most ridiculous characters to work with and expects me to make them realistic!”

   Personally, I see Fred as spiritual kin to the great Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, who was a Queen fan (almost certainly of Fred’s side of the equation rather than Manny’s) and whose stories like “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Death and the Compass” are set in the same kind of self-contained Cloud Cuckoo Lands as so many of Fred’s plot synopses were.

   Manny’s soul brother on the other hand was the character Joel McCrea played in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), a Hollywood director who hates the hit comedies he’s helmed and burns to create a Steinbeck-like “social consciousness” epic called O Brother, Where Art Thou?

   If ever there were a real-life Odd Couple, Fred and Manny were it, with the difference that their lacerations of each other aren’t funny. “Why am I writing to you?” Manny asks Fred on November 3, 1948 (page 81). “Why are you writing to me? We are two howling maniacs in a single cell, trying to tear each other to pieces… We ought never to write a word to each other. We ought never to speak. I ought to take what you give me in silence, and you ought to take what I give you in silence, and spit our galls out in the privacy of our cans until someday, mercifully, we both drop dead and end the agony.”

   The miracle is that they managed to stay together, and produce such excellent novels and stories, for so many years.

   Or was it a miracle? One of the most surprising aspects of these letters is that side by side with the mutual lacerations are moments when each of these highly sensitive men empathizes with the other in times of personal trouble.

   Of all the crosses that Fred was forced to bear, the heaviest was the birth of his son Stephen with brain damage. (He died in 1954, at age six.) “He has been getting insulin injections for about a month…[but] there is hardly any flesh on Steve into which the needle can be plunged,” Fred writes on February 20, 1950, adding that he and his wife “live from day to day, not daring to look ahead to the day after.” (Page 127)

   Manny’s reply is dated February 24. “I can only imagine — and that inadequately — what all this is doing to you, this unremitting worry, nervous drain, shock, etc. Keep up your strength. Don’t give up hope. Grit your teeth… This siege on top of what you went through a few years ago would be too much for even the most stable individual. From somewhere you must find the strength to fight it.” (Page 130)

   It’s passages like these that illustrate what Fred said after Manny’s death. “We were cousins, but we were closer than brothers.”

   I was privileged to know and work with Fred during the last thirteen years of his life. I would have given much to have known Manny better but he died in 1970 after we had exchanged a handful of letters and met once. What an amazing pair they were!

RUTH SAWTELL WALLIS – Too Many Bones. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1943. Dell #123, mapback, no date stated [1946].

       — No Bones About It. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1944. Bantam #72, paperback, 1946.

   The first mystery in Too Many Bones is why the William Henry Proutman Museum, named after the aforesaid gentleman who started the institution to house some Indian relics and his corset exhibit — Proutman manufactured those undergarments at one time — would buy the 600 skeletons in the Holtzman Collection.

   Undoubtedly the skeletons were useful for studying a group that had indulged in extensive inbreeding, but why did this obscure museum, in a nearly dead town of 1,200 people, pay $50,000 for them? That is a question Kay Ellis, recently graduated anthropologist, is asked by her instructor before she goes to the museum to assist in cataloging the material. She never provides him with an answer.

   Ellis arrives to find that the museum is owned by the relict of Proutman, a still lovely woman between 40 and 50 and for whom the word bitch was invented. She makes life hell for everyone but John Gordon, Ph.D. — him she just makes miserable — the anthropologist in charge of studying the skeletons.

   When a death occurs that may be murder with a suicide following it, the sheriff is satisfied that things happened the way they seem. However, some unexplained details rouse Ellis’s curiosity, particularly since she has fallen in love with Gordon. Though she comes to learn too much, she luckily had joined the D.A.R.

   This is a competently written non-fair-play mystery with an unusual setting and one of the few hands-on anthropology novels before Aaron J. Elkins’s Gideon Oliver came on the scene.

   For reasons best known to herself, Wallis set No Bones About It in 1932. My theory is she did it because the coincidences and a major unlikelihood might have been even less acceptable at a later date.

   The Carters, Wests, and Peckhams are, one gathers, a very proud group of families in Weston, Mass., who live in some rather odd houses. The Peckham house, for example, “smelled of owls in the attic and suicides in the cellar. It was not a house you would want to meet on a lonely road at midnight.”

   When some of the younger generation return to Weston along with a mysterious movie star, Mattie Peckham, a grasping and unpleasant old lady, begins scattering hints of evil from the past involving the families. As is to be expected, Mattie isn’t around long to continue her nasty ways, she having inhaled a bit too much of the vapors of a cleaning fluid.

   What Mattie’s death has to do with a suicide 12 years earlier is cleared up at the end of the book, which some readers may reach. Wallis writes well, but the plot is preposterous.

Bio-Bibliographic Data:   Ruth Sawtell Wallis, when not writing mysteries was (not surprisingly) a well-known archaeologist, with a number of noteworthy accomplishments, which you can read about here, along with a small photo of her.

   And of course she did write mysteries. Five in fact:

  RUTH SAWTELL WALLIS, 1895-1978.   Series character: Eric Lund, in those marked (*).

   Too Many Bones. Dodd Mead, 1943.
   No Bones About It. Dodd Mead, 1944.   (*)
   Blood from a Stone. Dodd Mead, 1945.

   Cold Bed in the Clay. Dodd Mead, 1947.   (*)
   Forget My Fate. Dodd Mead, 1950.   (*)