RICHARD SHELDON – Poor Prisoner’s Defense. Simon and Schuster, US, hardcover, 1949. Hardcover reprint: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, 4-in-1 edition, December 1950. First published in the UK: Hutchinson, hardcover, 1949.

   Offered the junior brief in a [pro bono] “poor prisoner’s defense,” Dick Rayne can’t afford to turn it down, even though he has no experience in murder trials. Rayne has come late to the law and needs any brief he can get to keep going as a barrister. Even working with an incompetent solicitor is better than nothing.

   About a quarter of the novel is taken up by the trial of Rayne’s client for slitting the throat of his alleged paramour. Rayne himself isn’t sure whether he is guilty or not guilty. There is, however, no doubt in the jurors’ minds. A guilty verdict is arrived at, followed by a sentence of death.

   Still uncertain about his client’s guilt, Rayne, with the aid of his wife, begins his own investigation, with limited time and even more limited funds. Since apparently no one on trial in a mystery novel is ever guilty of the crime charged — although Jon Breen, the expert in this area, may be aware of exceptions — the reader knows the defendant didn’t do it.

   Who, then, did do it? That, too, is no surprise, but getting to the solution with Rayne and his wife is an enjoyable process.

Bibliographic Note:   Richard Sheldon was the author of one other crime novel, that being Harsh Evidence (Hutchinson, 1950). This later book takes place in England in 1874, according to Hubin, which means that Dick Rayne and his wife never had a second chance to show off their investigative abilities.

[UPDATE] 07-07-11.   After some discussion of the author in the comments, centering about the fact that nothing was known about him, Jamie Sturgeon purchased a copy of Sheldon’s second book and was rewarded with not only a photo and but a short biography as well. I’ve created a followup post here to include this and perhaps any additional information that may be found.

   If you own a copy of the Library of America’s Dashiell Hammett volume Crime Stories & Other Writings (2001) and also a copy of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for July 1945, then, whether you know it or not, you have two different versions of Hammett’s Continental Op story “The Tenth Clew” (Black Mask, January 1, 1924).

   The first difference between the two leaps out: the last word of the title is spelled “Clew” in both Black Mask and the Library of America collection but Fred Dannay changed it to the more common “Clue” when he reprinted the tale in EQMM.

   To appreciate the final difference between the two requires a little knowledge about the story’s plot. Leopold Gantvoort, a 57-year-old widower whose net worth is around $1,500,000, is planning to marry a much younger woman, but he’s murdered before the marriage takes place and also before he’s signed a new will leaving half his fortune to her.

   The Op exposes her as a confidence woman and the murderer as her scam partner, who’s been posing as her brother. Here are the last few sentences as Hammett wrote them.

   What’s wrong here? Since Gantvoort was killed before either changing his will or marrying the woman, there’s no way on earth she could have inherited half his estate! Fred Dannay obviously caught this flub, and spared Hammett some potential embarrassment by taking it upon himself to rewrite those lines.

   Very shortly after this story appeared in EQMM, Fred included it in the digest-sized paperback original collection The Return of the Continental Op (Jonathan Press pb #J 17), which was published in the first week of July 1945, a month or two before Hammett came back to the U.S. from Army service in the Aleutian Islands during World War II.

   If any reader of this column has a copy of that edition, which I don’t, I’d love to know whether the text of this story is Hammett’s original or Fred’s revision. (My hunch is the latter.)

   Settled back into civilian life, Hammett started teaching an evening course on mystery writing at the Jefferson School of Social Science, a Communist-affiliated institution on New York’s Sixth Avenue, and Fred joined him regularly as unofficial co-instructor.

   When Return was reprinted in ordinary paperback format (Dell pb #154, 1947), the last paragraph of the story was unaccountably back in its original form. Had Hammett objected to Fred’s bold attempt to spare him a few blushes?

   Erle Stanley Gardner’s pulp stories of the early 1930s, and his early novels as well, were hugely influenced by Hammett although in later years he resented having the fact pointed out.

   In Chapter 20 of one of those early novels, the non-series whodunit This Is Murder (1935, as by Charles J. Kenny), a suspect has just been exposed as an ex-con. “Where was your first conviction?” he’s asked. “In Wisconsin.” “You served a term there?” “Yes, sir, at Waupum.”

   In fact the name of the town is Waupun, which locals unaccountably pronounce Wau-PAN. According to Wikipedia the place was supposed to have been named Waubun, which is a Native American word meaning dawn of day, but some state bureaucrat misspelled it and the mistake has never been corrected.

   The town’s chief industry is prisons — three of them! — but it’s also known for having more outdoor sculpture per capita than any other city in North America. The most famous such piece in Waupun is the “End of the Trail” sculpture: a young warrior on his horse contemplates the end of life as his people had known it.

   I saw it when I passed through the town years ago. The Library Bar on Waupun’s Main Street served the finest fries I’ve ever eaten. My buddy Joe Google tells me it’s no longer there. Drat!

   I am finishing this column on June 27, two days short of what would have been the 100th birthday of my favorite American composer. The centenary of Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975), who’s best known for having scored films like Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Psycho, is being celebrated throughout the music world, and Varese Sarabande Records has just made a huge contribution to the festivities by releasing The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Volume One.

   Herrmann wrote original scores for 17 Hitchcock Hour episodes during the program’s second and third seasons (1962-64), and this handsome two-CD set contains eight of them, more than two and a half hours of primo Herrmann never before available in audio form. Volume Two, let’s hope, will bring together the other nine — and soon. As I wrote in an earlier column, no one does ominous like Herrmann does ominous.

T. G. GILPIN – Death of a Fantasy Life. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1993. First published in the UK: Quartet, hardcover, 1988.

   I reviewed what I thought was Gilpin’s first novel, Is Anybody There?, for Mystery News, and thought it was a very good and off-beat story. But it turns out that this was his first, published in England in 1988 and only now appearing here.

   Speaking of unlikely teams, how about a professor of theoretical linguistics and a Soho stripper? The professor comes to town seeking an erratic and unlovable nephew of whom he is the guardian, and while having a pint in a pub meets a stripper when she mistakes him for someone else.

   One of her friends has been murdered a short time before, and it turns out that the erratic nephew knew her; as is true of the next stripper who is murdered, very quickly.

   The prof and the stripper get their heads together, he out of concern for the nephew, she for the sorority of strippers, but they come to no conclusions, and the alliance dies aborning when the somewhat sexless prof rebuffs her friendly (no more, surely) advances.

   He is unable to settle back into his routine, however, and when certain events occur he is drawn back in to the world well lost.

   This is one of those books of a peculiarly British type; not farcical, but with a cast of characters just slightly askew. It’s not humorous in a thigh-slapping sense, but somehow the overall tone is one of gentle humor.

   Gilpin is a literate and enjoyable stylist who seems to like the people about whom he writes, and I think you will, too. This doesn’t have the depth of Is Anyone There?, but it’s defintely worth reading. I particularly liked the ending.

  Bibliography: Adapted from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin —

GILPIN, T(imothy) G., 1946- .

      Death of a Fantasy Life (n.) Quartet 1988; St. Martin’s, 1993.
      Is Anybody There? (n.) Constable 1991; St. Martin’s, 1992.

      Missing Daisy (n.) Constable 1995; St. Martin’s, 1995

ESTELLE THOMPSON – Hunter in the Dark. Walker, hardcover, first US edition, 1979; paperback, 1984. Robert Hale, UK, hardcover, 1978.

   Philip Blair is blind, and his ego is deeply wounded when a young girl picked up from the bus stop where they both had been waiting is later found murdered.

   With the assistance of his former fiancee, he takes it upon himself to investigate a link to the death of another small girl a short time earlier; he has a theory that he feels the police are too slow in following up on.

   There seems to be a special attraction that mystery readers have toward blind detectives, and Hunter in the Dark is no exception. The story is quiet, low-key, and gently sentimental, laced with a whopping dose of coincidence, but now that Blair’s life is back on the right track, might it not be that amateur private eye work is in his blood?

Rating:   B.

  [UPDATE] 06-14-11.   I wish I could say that I remember this one, but I don’t — only the title is familiar. I believe I was right, though, to say that mystery readers are fond of blind detectives, since (speaking personally) if I had this beside me right now, I’d pick it up to read again without a moment’s hesitation.

   There were, alas, no other tales in which Philip Blair appeared as the detective. Of Estelle Thompson’s output of 16 crime novels between 1961 and 2000 (two of them designated by Hubin as having only marginal crime content), there isn’t a recurring series character to be found. Most were never published in the US, making her work essentially unknown in this country.

[UPDATE #2] 06-15-11.   Thanks to Jamie Sturgeon for providing the cover of the British edition of Hunter in the Dark — the one you see immediately here above and to the right.

[UPDATE #3] 06-16-11.   More from Jamie:

   Here’s a photo of Estelle Thompson, on the back of the UK edition of The Substitute (Hale 1991). The biog on the DW states:

   Of course she had written more than eight novels when The Substitute was published and The Edge of Nowhere was in fact her third novel. I found on the internet a more recent Hale book (Come Home to Danger) which states on the DW more briefly that:

VAN SILLER – The Mood for Murder. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1966. Paperback reprint: Curtis, no date [1967?].

   If a mystery writer — in this case, Allan Stewart, author of Death at Dawn, among other books — can’t accept that a young lady with whom he was almost in love has discovered a body, now missing, and has been shot at, who will believe it?

   As a practitioner in this field, surely Stewart knows that all such tales, particularly the most implausible, have a basis in fact and that failure to accept them inevitably leads. to unpleasantness.

   Since Stewart rejects the young lady’s story, a murder by shooting occurs, with the murdered woman possibly being mistaken for the young lady who earlier claimed to be shot at, followed by a murder by threat.

   All of this takes place at an exclusive Florida resort among the well-to-do and beautiful, and the mostly unpleasant. Unlikely coincidences constitute the explanation at the end.

   I may try another of Hilda — if the author’s sex is of interest to anyone — Van Siller’s novels with Allan Stewart to find out if he has learned anything from his profession of mystery writer. I won’t expect to enjoy it.

Bibliographic Notes:   (Hilda) Van Siller, 1911-1982, was the author of 21 crime fiction novels published between 1943 and 1974, most of them for Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint, but a small handful appeared only in British editions. In spite of her sizable output, among authors recently covered on this blog, I believe she qualifies as being among the Top Ten “Most Forgotten.”

      The Alan Stewart series —

A Complete Stranger (n.) Doubleday, US, 1965
The Mood for Murder (n.) Doubleday, US, 1966
The Biltmore Call (n.) Ward, UK, 1967 [no US edition]

   In a recent exchange of e-mails with my colleague, Allen J. Hubin, he queried me about the death date of the author known simply as Arthur Mallory.

   Mallory’s entry in Allen’s Crime Fiction IV appears as follows:

MALLORY, ARTHUR.   1881- ?

      The House of Carson (n.) Chelsea 1927
      Doctor Krook (n.) Chelsea 1929
      The Fiery Serpent (n.) Chelsea 1929
      Apperson’s Folly (n.) Chelsea 1930 [Dr. Kirke Montgomery; New York]
      The Black Valley Murders (n.) Chelsea 1930 [Dr. Kirke Montgomery; New York]
      Mysteries of Black Valley (n.) Chelsea 1930 [Dr. Kirke Montgomery; New York]

   The FictionMags Index adds a little more biographical information about Mallory, specifically that he was born on a ship in the Indian Ocean, along with a list of stories he wrote for Breezy Stories and Detective Story Magazine. No more than a dozen of these are listed, but the connection of Chelsea House and Detective Story is not surprising, since the former was the hardcover imprint of Street & Smith, which also published many pulp magazines, including DSM.

   However, I had no idea how much truth there was in that piece of biographical information from FictionMags, so I set out to discover what might be in the Ancestry.com genealogical database.

   There were some Arthur Mallorys, but none that fit the date of birth nor the description of the author. Searching further however, the name Arthur Mallory popped up in an obituary in the New York Times as the pseudonym of Ernest M. Poate, a mystery writer of some note.

   The obituary, which was dated Feb. 3, 1935, also provided the following information: Dr. Poate was born in Yokohama Japan and died in Southern Pines, North Carolina, Feb. 1, 1935, at the relatively young age of 50. He was a physician and an attorney as well as an author.

   Checking out entry for Poate in CFIV, I found the following:

POATE, ERNEST M.   1884-1935.

      The Trouble at Pinelands (n.) Chelsea 1922 [North Carolina]

      Behind Locked Doors (n.) Chelsea 1923 [Dr. Thaddeus Bentiron; New York City, NY]
      Pledged to the Dead (n.) Chelsea 1925
      Doctor Bentiron: Detective (co) Chelsea 1930 [New York City, NY]

      Murder on the Brain (n.) Chelsea 1930 [New York City, NY]

   The first thing one notices is that Mallory and Poate had the same publisher, and digging a little further it can be discovered that the stories in the Dr. Bentiron collection were reprinted from Detective Story Magazine.

   The other major match between Mallory and Poate is that both used doctors as main characters in many of their books. This had to be more than coincidence. Just as the Times obituary had stated, and in spite of the discrepancy between the two dates of birth (and the location), the two men were one and the same.

   Poking around a bit more, I learned that his parents were Thomas Pratt Poate and Belle (Marsh) Poate, missionaries in Japan until the family immigrated to the US in 1892. His birth mother had died in 1896 and by 1900, his father had remarried. His World War I draft registration revealed that he was born October 10, 1884 and his full name was Ernest Marsh Poate.

   Anyone wishing to dig further into the family can examine the Poate family papers housed at Cornell University Library. The basic information on Dr. Poate will appear in the next Addendum to Crime Fiction IV.

   When I began collecting pulp magazines over thirty years ago, I quickly zeroed in on Detective Fiction Weekly in all its various incarnations. I bought a lot of nice copies for fifteen dollars or less and I found a good number of stories that I enjoyed.

   I soon realized that I was a fan of Victor Maxwell’s Sgt. Riordan and Det. Halloran stories, a police procedural series that began in 1925. I found these stories were amazingly modern. There were no rubber hoses, beatings or hours spent in a darkened room with a bright light in the suspect’s face.

   Instead there were, just as there are today, instances where the interrogator lied to the suspect trying to extract a confession. The police were very concerned about their cases holding up in court and whether a smart defense attorney would shred them. (Riordan and Halloran are the two gents pictured here to the right and below, stalwart fellows both.)

   As I began to collect all the stories, I began to see that there was little information about the author. The stories appeared almost exclusively in Detective Fiction Weekly, hereinafter DFW, and that magazine did often run an “About the author” feature, but Victor Maxwell was never included. Sometime, somewhere I read that the Maxwell name was thought to be a pseudonym.

   About four years ago, I wrote an article for the Mystery*File website titled “Those Detective Fiction Weekly Mugs.” It was so titled because we added artist’s renderings of the various characters featured.

   I wrote this to share my enthusiasm for the hobby and one of my favorite pulps. There was no thought of a reward. A year later, Steve Lewis, our editor and chief was contacted by Don Wilde, who is the step-grandson of the man who wrote as Victor Maxwell. Mr Wilde had googled the pen name and discovered the article.

   Although he never met his grandfather he had some items that might be of interest. Steve kindly put the two of us together and we had a fine time sharing information. Within a few weeks, he sent me pictures, correspondence, three unpublished stories and two unpublished novel manuscripts and more. A treasure trove for a Victor Maxwell fan!

   The identity of the author was never a secret. It was mentioned in almost all of his obituaries. It was simply lost over time. Victor Maxwell was a newspaper reporter named Maxwell Vietor.

   Mr. Vietor was born on July 7, 1880 in New York City to Edward W. and Agnes C. (McCahey) Vietor. Edward Vietor was a medical doctor and within a few years, so was his wife. Edward was the founder of the Brooklyn Bird(watcher’s) Club, which exists today.

   In January of 1882, Dr. Edward Vietor was summoned to a local residence where 10 year-old Bessie Thayer had become gravely ill after eating some candy she bought at the neighborhood candy store. Although Dr. Vietor was the third physician to see the girl that day, his was the correct diagnosis: arsenic poisoning! The girl died in his presence.

   Dr. Vietor subsequently testified at a Coroner’s Inquest where it was resolved to turn the matter over to the police. There is no conclusion of the case that I’ve been able to find. Is it likely that this became a story that was mentioned from time to time in the Vietor household and fueled the imagination of young Maxwell? Perhaps.

   At some point prior to 1910, the Vietors divorced. Dr. Agnes Vietor and Maxwell moved to the Boston area.

   Maxwell graduated form Phillips Exeter Academy in 1898. He then attended MIT where the records show, “Maxwell Vietor ex.’02 has been granted a leave of absence for one year by the faculty, in order to take up practical railroad work with the Boston and Maine R.R.” Like many a college kid before him, Max soon realized that manual labor was not an ethnic gentleman.

   According to several of his obituaries, he then returned to New York and began his newspaper career, first with the Sun and then with New York City News, a news distribution service.

   Just prior to 1910, Max married Helena Haworth. The couple soon moved to Boston where Max continued as a reporter for The Boston Globe. By 1911, Max and Helena moved to the Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon area.

   That year Max made a haphazard attempt to keep a diary. Some of the entries deal with personal matters, but many of the pages just bore the letters, “P.P.” Finally months into the diary, those initials are spelled out: “Purple Pulp.” This was a humorous reference to his newspaper writing as he hadn’t yet begun to write for the real pulps.

   Their only child, Alice was born on August 15, 1911. In 1915, tragedy struck the Vietor family. Helena’s car was discovered parked by a bridge spanning the Columbia river, but Helena was gone. The river flows into the Pacific ocean from that spot, which was used by many suicidal people over the years.

   There was no trace of her after that day. Max would never remarry.

   The January 20, 1916 issue of The Popular Magazine published the first Victor Maxwell short story, “The Little Girl Who Got Lost.” A second story appeared in August in that same pulp.

   The family knew that Max occasionally wrote for the pulps full-time and one of those times may have been in 1917 when eight stories appeared in The Popular in an eight-month period.

   Another minor mystery in Max’s life is evidenced by a letter found in his correspondence. The letter was from Ben W. Olcutt, Oregon’s governor and was dated April 5, 1920. The one-paragraph body reads:

    “I am in receipt of your report of April 3rd, which I have read with much interest. In this connection and in passing I wish to say a good word for the work you have accomplished for the state in the capacity of special agent and for your highly intelligent and understandable report made in that connection.” There is no further explanation of his duties or service to Oregon.

   Reporting must have lured him back as the pulp stories ended until his first appearance in DFW in 1925. That story would be the first of exactly one hundred appearances in the detective pulps, thanks, in part, to a novelette that was serialized over three successive issues of DFW.

   Max had found a home there. All but seven of his detective stories were published by DFW. What prompted the inquiry is lost to the ages, but in March of 1931, Max apparently wrote the editor of DFW asking if he thought the readers might be tiring of Riordan.

   At this point Max had sold them over fifty stories in a five-and-a-half years. Editor Howard V. Bloomfield wrote Max saying that he did not think anyone was tired of Riordan and strongly encouraging to either continue with the series or send in even more!

   In addition to the detective stories, Max wrote three non-fiction articles for DFW. There were a smattering of other stories published in The Popular, Railroad (&) Railroad Man’s Magazine, Short Stories and Street & Smith’s Complete Magazine.

   And that and reporting was his life, along with raising his daughter. About 1938, Max moved back to the Boston area where his mother resided. He would finish his newspaper career at the Worcester Telegram–The Evening Gazette.

   His hearing was going and he would be completely deaf before his death. He switched from reporting to editing copy and would communicate with his fellow employees via handwritten notes. His last pulp story was in the January, 1944 issue of New Detective Magazine.

   In 1950, increasingly worse back pain was plaguing Max. He went to the Mayo Clinic finally for help. Their diagnosis was inoperable cancer. From the clinic, he returned to the Pacific coast to be with his daughter. Just two weeks prior to his death, there was a heart-breaking exchange of letters between Max and his employer where he was told he was not eligible for a pension from them.

   He died at a Portland hospital of a heart attack on October 4, 1950, survived by his mother and daughter.

   The stories and the novels I have in manuscript form are not publishable as they are. But it is one hell of a collection and I want to thank Don Wilde for his generosity of time and spirit. And thanks to Steve Lewis for starting the ball rolling.

Note:   The uppermost photo of Maxwell Vietor with his daughter Alice may have been taken in 1918. The date of the lower photograph is unknown.

VIOLA BROTHERS SHORE – The Beauty-Mask Murder. Richard R. Smith, US, hardcover, 1930, 384 pages. UK: John Hamilton, hc, 1932, as The Beauty-Mask Mystery.

   Luckily for the innocent suspects in this case, Gwynn Leith is in Hanaford visiting her brother, His Honor the Mayor. If it had been left to the mayor and the police, a whole series of suspicious characters would have been arrested for the multiple murder — by an overdose of morphine; poison, and throat slitting — of an extremely unpleasant woman who was also most unattractive at the time of her death.

   A widow of uncertain age, Leith is a most intelligent woman with a low opinion of the male mentality. She is, as it were, an early feminist. Her involvement in the case keeps the innocent from being prosecuted by official stupidity. As she says:

   Where Hanaford is located, I don’t know. A little research should find it, for it’s in a state in which the Grand Jury determines guilt or innocence. There can’t be many of those.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   Included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, is one other book by Viola Brothers Shore: Murder on the Glass Floor (Long & Smith, 1932). The most interesting Gwynn Leith is a character in it also, but so is someone called Colin Keats, a fellow whose appearance in The Beauty-Mask Murder Bill Deeck did not happen to mention.

   An online website devoted to Jewish authors has a page with a long biography of the author, Viola Brothers Shore (1890-1970), from which I excerpt the following:

   I was fourteen when I wrote to Leslie Charteris asking him to allow me to adapt The Saint for the theater. The theater in question being the auditorium of Burbank Junior High School in Berkeley, California.

   Although the Saint I’d seen on the screen in the RKO B-Movies of a few years earlier was portrayed by the suave George Sanders, who was well over six feet tall, I had no doubt that I, who’d recently shot up to the impressive height of five foot four, could do a nifty job of portraying Simon Templar. I was equally certain that I could summon up sufficient suaveness.

   I’d discovered the Saint, that Robin Hood of Modern Crime, by way of the movies, but the advent of Pocket Books allowed me, for just two bits each, to get hold of most of novels and short story collections that had appeared since Charteris had created the character back in 1928.

   I liked not only the thriller aspects, and the mystery and crime elements but the humor in the books (which seems to have partially leaked out the last time I attempted to reread one). Charteris has said in the introduction to one of his books that one of his major influences was P. G. Wodehouse, another of my literary idols back in the days when I was starting to shave.

   In that bygone era my contact with the entertainment world — books, radio, movies, comic books, etc. — was strictly as a consumer. I therefore assumed that it would be relatively simple when I was a few years older to become a novelist, a short story writer, a movie star, a radio actor, a playwright and a matinee idol, a cartoonist who drew gag cartoons, a syndicated comic strip and a comic book of his own.

   In junior high I was a sort of economy-size Orson Welles. I wrote play adaptations of Robin Hood, A Connecticut Yankee and A Christmas Carol and starred in each one. Seeing me, in green tights, cross swords with the Sheriff of Nottingham is probably one of the memories most of my fellow students have had a difficult time forgetting.

   I exchanged a few more letters with Charteris. I believe the first one was written when he was affiliated with his own paperback publishing company in Los Angeles. They were reissuing quite a few Saint books, plus new anthologies with stories about Hollywood, etc.

   There was also one collecting radio scripts from various shows, including one from a Saint broadcast. I suggested to him that a whole book of Saint scripts would be a good idea. He responded that since the scripts were mostly adaptations of printed stories that probably wouldn’t attract a large enough audience.

   Quite a few years later, when I was editing The British Detective anthology for Signet, I thought it would be a good idea to include a Saint novelet, “The Million Pound Day.”

   Charteris replied that since his story was twice as long as most of the others, he should receive twice the offered fee of $500. So I missed a chance to be Leslie Charteris’s editor.

   When I was working on a Nostalgia Book Club book about radio detectives, I queried him as to who he thought the best actor to play his character on radio. He was residing on the Riviera at the time, possibly in a yacht. His fourth wife was the movie actress Audrey Long, frequently seen in the RKO B- Movies of the 1940s.

   He sent a helpful reply and mentioned that if I wrote him again I include return postage. The nostalgia line went out of business before I ever wrote the book.

   Several men assayed the role of Simon Templar on the air. The show ran, off and on, from about 1945 to 1950. They included Edgar Barrier, Brian Aherne, Vincent Price (when I listened to him back then I didn’t notice what a smarmy Saint he made) and Tom Conway. The Saint’s creator told me the best man was the first one, Edgar Barrier.

   I noticed on Google that Charteris said the movie actors he thought should have been Templar were Ronald Colman, Cary Grant or Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. As for the actual chaps who played the part, he said “Louis Hayward and George Sanders were hopelessly miscast.”

   Raymond Chandler, by the way, said he thought the ideal actor to play Philip Marlowe was Cary Grant. You can’t beat suaveness.

       Previously on this blog:

LESLIE CHARTERIS – The Brighter Buccaneer (reviewed by Art Scott)

LESLIE CHARTERIS – The Saint in New York (reviewed by Art Scott)

LESLIE CHARTERIS – The Saint and the Templar Treasure (reviewed by Steve Lewis)

LESLIE ALLEN [HORACE BROWN] – Murder in the Rough. Five Star Mystery #45, paperback original, digest-sized, 1946.

   In Napoleon B. (which may stand for “Buttercup,” but probably doesn’t) Smith’s only case, he apparently kills a slightly dotty old lady during a golf game when one of his drives, as is the fate of most of them, hooks into what is known as Hell’s Half Acre. Only sometime later does Smith conclude that he was not really responsible and that a murderer was on the course that day.

   A sort of active and crass Nero Wolfe, Smith is a former policeman who uses his weight and bad manners as aids in his investigations. However, he also employs brains, which are not puny, and a literary background that is unexpected. Leslie Allen, Smith’s Watson [or Archie], reluctantly takes care of the dogsbody work.

   It is to be hoped that Leslie Allen the character and alleged writer is a better stylist than Leslie Allen the author. Still, the creation of Smith is something of an accomplishment.

Bibliographic Data:   Under his own name Horace Brown was the author of two other crime novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

BROWN, HORACE.   1908-??

       Whispering City. Streamline, 1947.
       The Penthouse Killings. Newsstand Library #17A, 1950; reprinted as The Corpse Was a Blonde, Boardman, UK, 1950.

   Whispering City was a novelization of the Canadian film of the same name starring Paul Lukas, Mary Anderson and Helmut Dantine. It was released in the US as Crime City (1947).