ALAN AMOS – Borderline Murder. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1947. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, March 1948.

   Not too long ago I was surprised to still able to pick this up for 53 cents at the Salvation Army store on Myrtle Avenue near Jamaica. The dust-jacket symbol is the Dagger — for Chase and Adventure.

   Larry Winter, embittered by a two-year stretch for a robbery he didn’t do, gets off the Bus in Laredo, Texas on Christmas Eve.

   A private eye buddy of his has been keeping track of the man whose perjured testimony sent Winter up, and it seems the suspect, one Brantz Hallem, aka Burke Hall, is in Mexico about to smuggle some stolen jewelry stateside.

   Almost immediately, things get complicated. Winter is forced to share a room with a talkative fellow-passenger from the Bus, and the two of them get glad-handed by one Larry Higby & Wife, who are organizing a party of Motel Guests to spend Christmas across the Border.

   Then Winter hears from his PI buddy that Higby has been traveling in Mexico with Hallem/Hall and will probably be doing the smuggling.

   Oh yes; also on the trip are two elderly spinsters, an over-the-hill Opera Star, a female ventriloquist with a life-sized male dummy, an elderly doctor waiting on a burro (I’m not making this up.) and a fellow who claims to be writing a history of Texas.

   Sometime during the course of the evening, Winter gets knocked unconscious and the elderly Doctor turns unexpectedly dead. With his prison record, that makes Winter a pretty good suspect, and he realizes he now must find the real killer or face dire consequences.

   Got kind of long-winded in my rundown. This one turned out to be a pretty good read, not great by any means, nor even very memorable, but a solid piece of entertainment.

   My one quibble was with the character of Winter’s PI buddy, who, we are supposed to believe, has been tracking Hallem/Hall for two years and living on God-knows-what, then just sends Winter a letter and bows out, with no desire to be in on the kill or anything. Seems more convenient than realistic, if you ask me.

Bibliographic Bits:   Alan Amos was the pseudonym of Kathleen Moore Knight, ca. 1890-1984, a prolific mystery and detective story writer from the mid-1930s on through the 1950s, mostly for the Doubleday Crime Club — and all but forgotten today.

   She wrote four thrillers as Amos, and under her own name, more than 30 more novels, many of them cases solved by Elisha Macomber, a Penberthy Island selectman up around Martha’s Vineyard way.

   One of these books, The Trouble at Turkey Hill, was reviewed earlier by me (Steve) here on this blog. Included is a list of all sixteen of Elisha’s appearances.

   At the name of Lee Thayer, most mystery fans draw a blank, but in other quarters it’s still well remembered. Emma Redington Lee was born in Troy, Pa. on April 5, 1874, studied at New York City’s Cooper Union and Pratt Institute, and got a job as an interior decorator (which in those days meant a painter of murals for the homes of the wealthy) at New York’s Associated Artists in 1890.

   Some of her work was displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 when she was still in her teens. Two years later she and Brooklyn architect Henry W. Thayer co-founded Decorative Designers, a firm which in the days before dust jackets produced binding designs, interior illustrations and the like for various New York book publishers. [An example of her work can be found at the end of this post.]

   Lee and Thayer were married in 1909. The female partner is credited with having invented a method of using a split ink roller for printing color gradations on book bindings. Decorative Designs was first based in New York but migrated to Chatham, N.J. in 1921 and was dissolved, along with the partners’ marriage, eleven years later. Henry Thayer’s ex-wife called herself Lee Thayer for the rest of her life, probably because it was the byline on her detective novels.

   Her first whodunit, The Mystery of the Thirteenth Floor, was published in 1919, when she was 45, and she continued turning out one or two books a year for well over four decades, a total of 61 titles.

   All but one of them featured debonair red-thatched private sleuth Peter Clancy, who in Dead Man’s Shoes (1929) was joined by the intolerable imperturbable Wiggar, a Jeeves clone with an endless supply of scintillating bons mots like “Oh, Mr. Peter, sir!”.

   The union between master and valet lasted much longer than many marriages including Thayer’s own. She always thought of writing as a sort of sideline and kept her hand in as an artist by designing the dust jackets for all but the last three of her novels, several examples of which can be seen illustrating this column.

   That she never became a household name is demonstrated by her only TV appearance. What’s My Line? was a popular CBS game show whose regular panelists (Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen and Bennett Cerf) were challenged to guess the occupations of various guests.

   At the time of her appearance, May 11, 1958, she was 84 years old. Subsequently the program used her photograph in promotional ads: “This sweet little elderly lady writes blood-curdling murder mysteries!” Her last novel, Dusty Death, came out in 1966 when she was 92.

   I know nothing about book design, but Thayer still seems to be highly regarded in that field. More than two dozen boxes of her Decorative Designs work are archived at UCLA, along with interviews taped very late in her life in which she reminisced about the firm’s work.

   As a mystery writer she’s almost completely forgotten, and perhaps that’s the way it should be, because by ordinary standards there’s very little to recommend her. Feeble plots, clumsy writing, laughable characterizations, elephantine pace, zero fairness to the reader: you name the fault and Thayer’s books have it in spades.

   Maybe it’s for this reason that I find in her what novelist and playwright Ira Levin told me he found in John Rhode: the perfect writer to take to bed. (Get that filthy thought out of your minds this instant!) But there are certain recurring elements in her novels that come close to qualifying her as an auteur.

   One of these is the apocalyptic denouement. Whenever Peter Clancy has solved a murder to his own satisfaction but has no evidence that will stand up in court, God himself steps into the breach, striking the killer down from on high, while Thayer’s rhetoric swirls and squalls around and kicks up a furious storm.

   In Accessory After the Fact (1943) it’s the founder of a quack religious cult who gets the treatment. The same furious deity strikes down totally secular villains in Out, Brief Candle! (1948) and Still No Answer (1958) and in who knows (I almost wrote God knows) how many Thayer novels I’ve never read.

   Another Thayer hallmark is the off-the-wall crime method. Ransom Racket (1938) climaxes with Clancy’s reconstruction of a child-kidnapping: the gangsters drove a steam shovel up to the house, aligned the scoop with the baby’s upstairs bedroom window, stuffed the kid in the scoop and drove off undetected. (This is the book where Thayer writes “It was as dark as the inside of a cow” with a perfectly straight face.)

   In Accident, Manslaughter or Murder? (1945) the victim is skating across a frozen lake on a moonless night, followed by the murderer in an iceboat which apparently makes no noise. Murderer maneuvers boat behind victim, swats him across the butt with an oar and propels him into a thin patch where the poor schmuck breaks through and drowns.

   The novel I chose to concentrate on in my Thayer entry for 1001 Midnights was Out, Brief Candle!, which like Christie’s Death in the Air (1935) is about a murder on an airliner in flight.

   It’s twice as long as it need have been, but the solution is passably clever, and I considered this the best Thayer I had read up to the time I wrote the entry. Later I discovered a copy of Evil Root (1949), which brings Clancy to a luxurious retirement home with stiff and unrefundable entrance fees and a suspiciously high death rate among recent residents. This was mystery writer/critic Jon L. Breen’s favorite Thayer, and after I’d read it I found I had to agree with him.

   The Second Bullet (1934) has always had a special cachet for me because it’s set in the mountains of northern New Jersey, the state where I grew up. Thayer sets the scene as only she can: “[T]he strong autumn sun warmed the hollows with mists of purple and gold. The color of the woods sang like a great organ. The sky was that thrilling cobalt that seems as if it must be fragrant. Great clouds piled into the zenith. The air was warm and full-flavored like … claret properly unchilled.”

   An auto mishap brings Clancy and Wiggar to the remote mansion of a famous “psychic-analyst” where they discover that he seems to have shot himself to death shortly before their arrival. Concluding that the local cops are idiots who know nothing about detective work and speak in Texas cracker accents to boot (“Meet Captain Tom Joyce, inspector for this here county”), Clancy decides to conceal crucial evidence, invite himself and Wiggar as house guests and stay on to investigate what he has quickly concluded is murder.

   In due course he exposes yet another off-the-wall crime method. The murderer and an accomplice drove up to the victim’s isolated house in a utility truck with a long ladder. When the ladder was aligned with the victim’s second-story window, the killer climbed it and, like a demented Paladin, challenged the guy inside to a gun duel!

   After twenty years as a northern Californian and resident of Berkeley, Thayer moved to the southern tip of the state and was living with relatives in Coronado in the fall of 1970 when she was interviewed by Jon Breen. At 96, Jon reported, she was still in relatively decent health and able to read with the aid of a combination lamp and magnifying glass.

   She was extremely modest about her many mystery novels, saying only that “some are worse than others.” A year or so later there was an exhibition of some of her artwork at the UCLA library. She died on November 18, 1973, just a few months short of her 100th birthday.

        The First Violin, by Jessie Fothergill, 1896. Cover design attributed to Lee Thayer.

MICHAEL ALLEN DYMMOCH – The Man Who Understood Cats. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1993. Avon, paperback, 1995.

   This is a first novel, an entry in St. Martin’s 1991 Best First Malice Domestic Novel contest. Dymmoch is a pseudonym (and a rather odd one) for “a woman who is a municipal bus driver in one of Chicago’s upscale neighborhoods.” Okay. Seems kind of strange to me, but whatever.

   Dr. Jack Caleb is a Chicago psychiatrist with two cats, Freud and Skinner, and John Thinnes is a Chicago police detective. They meet when one of Caleb’s patients, an accountant, is discovered dead of apparent suicide. Neither Thinnes nor Caleb believe that the man killed himself, and the story deals with their efforts to find out what really happened, and their own somewhat troubled lives.

   The novel opens with a dream sequence done in purple, flowery prose, which really isn’t all that well crafted; after that, the prose style is completely straightforward, and quite adequate for a first novel. Both Thinnes and Caleb emerge as reasonably sympathetic characters, but everyone else ranges from stick to not believable.

   The plot, unfortunately, didn’t hang together too well, and was particularly lacking in verisimilitude when it came to police work. Other than the author’s obvious familiarity with parts of Chicago, there was little about the story that rang true.

   The book was more about the lives and troubles of the two leads than it was a mystery or a detective story. Like so very many first novels in “our” field, it was reasonably good prose-wise, but engendered the feeling in me that it was a mystery only because the author thought it would be easier to sell as such. I can’t recommend it.

Editorial Comments:   For an interview with the author in 2007 (but one that does not reveal why she chose the pen name she did), go here on the Internet.

   A complete list of books by the author can be found here on her website. She also posts occasionally on The Outfit, a blog shared with a group of other writers based in Chicago.

ANN CARDWELL – Crazy to Kill. Mystery House, hardcover, 1941. Black Cat Detective #10, digest paperback, 1944. Harlequin #22, Canada, pb, 1949. Macfadden 35-119, paperback, 1962. Nightwood Editions, softcover, Canada, 1990. The book was also converted to an opera with this title by James Reaney, Sr., and John Beckwith; it was performed in Canada in 1989.

   After spending ten years in Resthome, a private hospital for “nervous” cases, Agatha Lawson, a spinster in her early sixties, is due to be released. Unfortunately, just at this time a grisly series of attacks and murders involving the staff starts taking place at the hospital.

   Since Lawson is around at the time of each episode, she feels that she is more than capable to solve the case, particularly in view of the incompetence of Lieutenant Hogan of the local police.

   Also aware that Hogan is beyond his depth, the authorities bring in another detective, this one willing to consult with Lawson. Between them, the murderer is apprehended.

   One of the rare mysteries with a mental institution setting and one of the rare… But that mustn’t be revealed.

   Forget that this novel was published by Mystery House, a publisher of third- and fourth-rate novels. While not in the first rank, this is nonetheless quite readable.

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

    ANN CARDWELL. Pseudonym of Jean Makins Powley, 1902-1966. Daughter of a judge in Stratford, Ontario.

   Crazy to Kill. Mystery House, 1941.

   Murder at Calamity House. Arcadia House, 1947.

   Journalist, television and radio personality and “iconic lesbian” Nancy Spain (1917-1964) was a well-known individual in fifties and early sixties Britain. (On the other hand, she was little known in the United States and remains so today.)

   Although she had many accomplishments, one of her most significant undertakings was a series of ten mystery novels published between 1945 and 1955, a period when the classical British detective story was being increasingly marginalized by the crime novel, which placed less emphasis (sometimes no emphasis) on fair play puzzle construction.

   While Nancy Spain’s mysteries maintain a formal commitment to the puzzle structure, nevertheless she is typical of the time in which she wrote in placing greater emphasis on other elements, namely humor and character. Especially notable in her books is her sly subversion of sexual mores of the post-WW2 era.

   As her 1997 biographer, Rose Collis, notes, Spain was a “trouser-wearing character” — a sort of “not in though not exactly explicitly out” homosexual (rather like America’s Liberace) who humorously winked at her straight audience (not all of whom got the joke) and inspired her gay one. One sees this quality as well in her mysteries.

   Nancy Spain’s best-known mystery is Poison for Teacher (Hutchinson, 1949), which was reprinted by Virago Press’ Lesbian Landmarks series in 1994. At the amusingly named girls school Radcliff Hall (obviously a play on the name of author Radclyffe Hall, author of the milestone 1928 lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness), murder strikes a blackmailing, scheming teacher during the performance of a school play. Another murder of a teacher, this time a shooting, follows.

   On hand, rather improbably, are Spain’s amateur (very amateur) detectives. The first of these is Natasha DuViven, former Russian ballet star and estranged wife of Johnny DuVivien, an Australian former wrestler and current English nightclub owner who was Spain’s amateur detective in her first four detective novels (Poison in Play, Death Before Wicket, Murder Bless It! and Death Goes on Skis).

   The second is Miriam Birdseye, an actress Spain based on the real-life English actress Hermione Gingold (who, incidentally, was married at one time to Eric Maschwitz, who under the name Holt Marvell co-wrote crime novels with Val Gielgud, Sir John Gielgud’s brother).

   Natasha is, like her soon-to-be ex-husband Johnny, a well-conveyed character — Spain has a good ear for native dialect — and, though indolent by nature, she does most of what actual detecting is done in the novel. Miriam, though by this novel (she debuted in Death Goes on Skis) has surprisingly set up a detective agency (so I suppose is actually technically a professional), is in the tale solely for humor, such as we see in this exchange:

   There’s also a local policeman, one Sergent Tomkins, who is an enjoyable character (in grand tradition he immediately, though unbelievingly, works in tandem with Natasha and Miriam). Also assorted “queer” lady teachers (some lesbian, some not), some objectionable students, a recurring gay male character, Roger Partick-Thistle (we learn here that he is hiding a scandal from his past that took place when he was a scout leader, something played for laughs) a male detective novelist (much inferior to the Crime Queens, we learn) and a Jewish doctor (Spain emphasizes his Jewishness, just as she emphasizes the “queerness” of the obviously gay characters).

   There’s humorous satire directed against girls’ schools (Spain herself went to Rodean) and sexual foibles, as well some interesting asides on detective fiction. The mystery is rather a mess, however. While there is fitful investigation, intricate clueing is absent; and the solution is handed to the investigators.

   You may be left with questions at the end, assuming you care about the mystery. Most of Spain’s readers probably did not.

   Though Poison for Teacher is Spain’s best-known detective novel, I actually preferred the earlier Death Before Wicket (Hutchinson, 1946). Johnny DuVivien, Spains’ first series detective, is a good character and an energetic investigator; and though the mystery plot in no classic, it is better managed than the one in Teacher and its resolution is more plausible.

   The setting is again at a girls school, this one in Yorkshire (Johnny’s daughter from his first marriage, Pamela, is a student there); and in addition to the school satire there is convincing and amusing portraiture of the local gentry (Spain herself came from northern England, of “good stock”).

   The murder victim in this tale is a fetching games mistress who slept with an impressive number of men, including an odd ex-army gent with a really quite pronounced fetish for masculine women. More alternative sexuality turns up in a brief visit to a club with a gay clientele, of your standard “mystery queen” variety (here portrayed more harshly than in the case of Roger Partick-Thistle).

   On the evidence of these two books, it seems clear to me that Nancy Spain had a gift for humor and character portrayal that makes her mystery novels worth reading even today, over half-a-century after the last of them was originally published. Just don’t expect Crime Queen level plotting, and you should not be disappointed.

   Today Nancy Spain is best known in the mystery world for having had, despite her lesbianism, a brief fling with Margery Allingham’s husband (an affair that produced a child). But her enjoyable mysteries should be get some attention as well.

Editorial Comments:   Another review of Poison for the Teacher by Emily Dewsnap can be found online here. A short biography of Nancy Spain may be found at the Golden Age of Detection wiki. None of her mystery novels have been published in the US.

LEE THAYER – Out, Brief Candle! Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1948. No paperback edition.

   The life of Emma Redington Lee Thayer is more fascinating than any of her novels. Born in 1874, she quickly established herself as a painter of murals on the walls of private homes, and some of her work in this field was displayed in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair. Later she specialized in doing the designs for stamped bookbindings, and countless early-twentieth-century titles were made visually more appealing thanks to her skill.

   It was only after World War I that she started writing books herself, turning out a total of sixty mystery novels, for all but the last three of which she also designed the dust jackets. Apparently she holds the record for both professional and personal longevity in the mystery field, for her last book, Dusty Death (1966), came out when she was ninety-two, and she lived to be ninety-nine.

   She seems to have been a nice, refined, well-to-do old lady. Unfortunately she wrote her novels for an audience she thought of as exactly like herself, with no attempt to widen her appeal.

   Fifty-nine of Thayer’s sixty books deal with redheaded gentleman detective Peter Clancy, a dinosaur among sleuths if ever there was one. Imagine a stick figure from Edwardian times adrift in the decades of depression, war, angst, and civil rights, and trying desperately to pretend that nothing has happened, and you have something of the flavor of a Peter Clancy exploit.

   Thayer’s novels move with the speed of an arthritic snail trying to cross a piece of flypaper. Her plotting is abysmal, her style unbearable, her characters impossible. In most of his adventures, Clancy is attended by an ever-deferential valet named Wiggar, a Jeeves clone without a drop of humor, who is constantly getting off bons mots like “Oh, Mr. Peter, sir!”

   Her favorite device for bringing a book to climax was to have God Almighty himself strike down the killer from on high, while Mother Nature whipped up a furious storm and the rhetoric swirled and squalled. Those who might think this description is exaggerated are referred to Accessory after the Fact (1943) and Still No Answer (1958), as well as to our main entry.

   Out, Brief Candle! takes its title from Macbeth and its kickoff situation from Agatha Christie: Like Poirot in Death in the Air (1935), Clancy investigates a murder aboard an airliner on which he was a passenger.

   Like all Thayer novels, this one is twice as long as necessary; but a slightly ingenious solution, combined with a truly grisly encounter between a little girl and a body in a coffin, lifts it to the ranks of Thayer’s best, whatever that means.

   Lee Thayer is a highly specialized taste, but if for no other reasons than her industry and longevity, she deserves better than to be totally forgotten.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Editorial Comment:   Complementing this review, or to be more precise, the impetus for my posting it here, is one covering Lee Thayer’s first book, The Mystery of the 13th Floor (1919), by J. F. Norris on his blog. You should go read it.

(1) WILLIAM JOHNSTON, 1924-2010.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(2) ARIANA FRANKLIN, 1935-2010.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHONA MacLEAN – A Game of Sorrow. Quercus, UK, trade paperback, 2010.

Genre:   Historical mystery. Leading character:   Alexander Seaton; 2nd in series. Setting:   Scotland/Ireland-1628.

First Sentence:   The bride’s grandmother smiled: she could feel the discomfort of the groom’s family and it pleased her well.

    It is disconcerting enough to be accused of less-then reputable actions you know you did not commit, but even more so when confronted by a man who could be your twin.

    Alexander Seaton, a reputable teacher at Marischal College in Aberdeen, has never known any family beyond his now-dead parents until now. Near-twin cousin Sean O’Neill is about to change all that with an entreaty for Alexander to come with him to Ireland. It seems his grandfather is dying and the entire O’Neill family is under a curse which only the proven existence of Alexander can break.

    It is always frustrating when you absolutely love an author’s first book and are then disappointed in their second. Unfortunately, that was the case here. In The Redemption of Alexander Seaton, I felt great empathy for the character and came to care about him.

    In this book, other than as the “voice” of the story, and the one to whom everything happens — how many times can one get hit on the head without major concussion or brain damage — we learn little about his internal makeup. Yes, it is interesting that he is such a fish-out-of-water character being an academic caught up in conflict, but he never really came to life.

    I’ve never been to Ireland, but I did love MacLean’s descriptions. She made me feel as though I were standing next to the characters, and wished I could be. I also felt she well conveyed the sense of Ireland as a land where faith and superstition walked hand-in-hand.

    While I found the history fascinating and gained a better understanding of the conflict between the Catholics and Protestants, English and Irish, I felt MacLean became so caught up in the history, I somewhat forgot about the story.

    I was also interested to learn that a troupe of traveling players may have performed Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” in Ireland during this time.

    The story was interesting but I found it difficult to keep track of all the characters and, because most of them were simply that, there were few about whom I really cared. I am, by no means, ready to give up on MacLean. I do hope, however, her next book focuses more on telling us a whopping good story.

Rating:   OK.

Editorial Comment:   An interview with Shona MacLean can be found online here. And in case you may have been wondering, the answer is yes, sort of. Her uncle was “best-selling author Alistair MacLean who wrote The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare and a host of other action thrillers.”

GEORGE WORTHING YATES – The Body That Wasn’t Uncle. William Morrow, hardcover, 1939. Reprint paperbacks: Dell #52, mapback edition, 1944; Dell #645, 1952.

   When a man off the train at Princeton Junction [New Jersey] heads straight across the snow for the Villars farm, the number one question asked later is, did he ever get there before he collapsed and died of atropine poisoning? And why did Sidney Villars claim the dead man to be his long-lost brother, Stephen Small?

   Ex-Scotland Yard Inspector Hazlitt Woar, now a private eye at loose ends in Bermuda, is called in by Katheren Meynard, a friend of the family who suspects fraud, but not murder. Woar, who speaks in riddles and short, clipped sentences, does a capable job of detection and fulfills while doing so a romance evidently begun in an earlier entry in the series, the courtship finally ending in a most curious fashion indeed.

   There is a class of detective novel, however, and this is one of them, in which you keep getting the distinct impression that the author is deliberately withholding information solely to keep the reader from solving the puzzle. The merely mysterious is emphasized, and not the mystery.

   Or in other words, characters are murkier than they need to be, and with murkier motives. To no avail, this time: there’s only one person the killer could be. Strangely enough, New Jersey trooper Lt. Gurney could have come straight from the pages of Black Mask, and equally so the ambitious, high-minded D.A. named Hellenberger.

   As for Woar himself, though, he has a tweedy and entirely British charm all his own.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:   [Adapted from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

GEORGE WORTHING YATES. 1900-1975. see pseudonym Peter Hunt (books)

      There Was a Crooked Man (n.) Morrow 1936.
      The Body That Came by Post (n.) Morrow 1937.   [Hazlitt Woar]
      The Body That Wasn’t Uncle (n.) Morrow 1939.   [Hazlitt Woar.]
      If a Body (n.) Morrow 1941.   [Hazlitt Woar]

   In collaboration with Charles Hunt Marshall under the joint pen name of Peter Hunt, Yates also wrote three earlier works of detective or mystery fiction. Alan Miller, about whom I know nothing more, was the leading character in these, including the provocatively titled Murder Among the Nudists (1934).

[UPDATE] 01-25-11.   I can’t say this with any degree of certainty, but I believe it was the earlier Dell paperback that I read. What’s strange is that I’m almost sure that I remember the bookstore where I found the book, but all I remember of the story is what you’ve just read yourself in the review above.

[UPDATE #2] 01-29-11.   Murder Among the Nudists, I am pleased — and quite surprised — to be able to tell you, has recently been reprinted by Ramble House.   (Thanks for the tip go to Jamie Sturgeon.)

PETER HILL – The Hunters. Scribner’s, US, hardcover, 1976. UK edition: Peter Davies, 1976.

   A rapist killer strikes in Suffolk, and Scotland Yard sends out its crack team of Chief Superintendent Robert Stauton and Detective Inspector Leo Wyndsor. Mark their names as they will return.

   In brief, Stauton is supposedly infallible, uncompromising, and suffers from hemorrhoids, while Wyndsor is a man for the ladies, who literally tear their clothes off for him. Yet as a team they make an efficient pair, gradually learning each other’s personalities and vices, each determined to succeed.

   The initial stages of the investigation are as routine as usual, but the story suddenly comes alive when Wyndsor takes on the local priest in an argument about the Church and the human condition — I say he wins. At the same time overtones of the occult begin to work their way in, and a local coven’s meeting the night of the murder makes mince of coherent alibi taking.

   It is a problem, but one overcome by a nifty piece of police work, in a tale filled with characters one grows to appreciate. A fine debut.

[UPDATE] 01-20-11.   I don’t remember this one at all. I probably wouldn’t have reprinted it if I hadn’t felt the need to remind myself that you can’t be right all the time. There were several more books in the series, but Staughton and Wyndsor obviously didn’t catch on and/or couldn’t maintain the momentum I thought I saw in their first outing. From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s a list of all of Hill’s crime fiction under this name:

PETER HILL. Pseudonym of Peter Eyers-Hill, 1939- .

    The Hunters (n.) Davies 1976 [Chief Insp. Robert Staunton]
    The Fanatics (n.) Davies 1977 [Commander Allan Dice]
    The Liars (n.) Davies 1977 [Chief Insp. Robert Staunton]
    The Enthusiast (n.) Davies 1978 [Chief Insp. Robert Staunton]
    The Washermen (n.) Davies 1979 [Commander Allan Dice]
    The Savages (n.) Heinemann 1980 [Chief Insp. Robert Staunton]

Note: The last two titles had no US publication.