MILTON BASS – The Belfast Connection. New American Library, hardcover, 1988. Signet, paperback, 1989.

    Benny Freedman is not your average American cop, and The Belfast Connection is not your average American cop’s adventure. Milton Bass introduced his lieutenant in the San Diego homicide department three novels back, and by now Benny is worth $49 million through some convenient if unplanned inheriting.

    The money came with mob fingerprints all over it, but Benny sorted that out earlier. The millions don’t interest Freedman greatly, though sometimes they come in handy; he’d just as soon be investigating murder. But here a minor injury has sidelined him for the statutory twelve-week sick leave, so he decides to explore his roots.

    His Irish roots. On his mother’s side, obviously. When his Jewish father (now dead) married his mother (now also dead), her intensely Catholic family denounced her. Thirty years later, Benny figures he’d like to find out what sort of people would do that, and maybe punch a few of them in the nose.

    He comes to Belfast to find cousin Sean is freshly dead, of what is confidently assumed to be a Protestant bullet. So this Irish-Jew cop of ours is plunged into the sectarian wars of that ravaged city, a place where human answers are as unknown as dying is familiar. A fascinating tale.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:

       The Benny Freedman series —

   Dirty Money. Signet, pbo, 1986.
   The Moving Finger. Signet, pbo, 1986.
   The Bandini Affair. Signet, pbo, 1987.
   The Belfast Connection. NAL, hc, 1988.

  Bass also wrote two mystery novels in his Vinnie Altobelli series: The Half-Hearted Detective (1993) and The Broken-Hearted Detective (1994), plus one stand-alone thriller in hardcover: Force Red (1970).

  From one online website: “Milton Ralph Bass was born [1923] and raised in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He received a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts in 1947 and a Master’s in English from Smith College in 1948. During World War II, he served in the army as a medic. In 1986, he retired from The Berkshire Eagle after 35 years as entertainment editor, theater and movie critic.”

 
Milton Bass was the author of at least four western novels, all in his “Jory” series: Jory (1969), Mistr Jory (1976), Gunfighter Jory (1987), and Sherff Jory (1987). I’ve never seen any of them, but Bill Crider reviewed the first one a couple of years ago on his blog.

[UPDATE] 01-20-11.   As I’ve just discovered, Mr. Bass is not yet fully retired. He’s still doing a weekly online column for The Berkshire Eagle. Here’s a link to a piece he did last Sunday on the occasion of his 88th birthday.

CHARLES L. LEONARD – Deadline for Destruction. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942. Reprint paperback: Thriller Novel Classic #24, no date [1944].

   Despite the misgivings of military intelligence, private detective Paul Kilgerrin is removed from a hospital where he is recovering from a gunshot wound and blackmailed into tracking down an espionage and sabotage ring unconnected with any foreign power. Government agents keep getting killed in their efforts to penetrate the ring, and Kilgerrin’s life is apparently of no value to anyone but him.

   Kilgerrin has no problem with flouting the law and obstructing justice or killing when he feels called upon to do it. He also does not suffer fools or anyone else gladly. Still, he gets the job done despite many obstacles and being shot and tortured.

   While it might be a bit much to pity criminal masterminds, feeling a trifle sorry for them is a temptation. Plot they ever so cunningly, they always seem to come a cropper through the incompetence or stupidity of their minions.

   The CM’s scheme to use Kilgerrin would have been a foolproof one if a fool hadn’t tested it. Additionally, the CM should have remembered that revenge is a dish best eaten cold, but then the US might have lost World War II and Kilgerrin.

   A thriller far superior to Heberden’s Desmond Shannon novels.

Bibliographic Notes:   Between 1942 and 1951 eleven Kilgerrin adventures were published, all written by M. V. Heberden under this Charles L. Leonard byline.

   The “Desmond Shannon” books referred to by Bill appeared under her own name, but using only her initials, disguising the fact that her full name was M(ary) V(iolet), the latter nomenclature presumably deemed unsuitable for buyers of tough PI fiction. There were 17 of these, appearing as they did between 1939 and 1953.

   My review of Sinister Shelter, a later Kilgerrin novel (1949), appears here on this blog, along with a list of all eleven of his adventures. Preceding that is a post containing (believe it or not) a glamour shot of the author from Vogue Magazine.

   I recently unearthed an Ellery Queen mystery, or more precisely a mystery about EQ, which will not be solved easily if at all. The September 2002 issue of Radiogram, a magazine for fans of old-time radio, includes “In the Studio with Ellery Queen,” a brief memoir by Fred Essex, who was a producer-director for the Ruthrauff & Ryan advertising agency in the early 1940s when one of the programs the agency brought to the air every week was The Adventures of Ellery Queen.

   At this time Ellery’s creators, the cousins Fred Dannay and Manny Lee, were working out of an office in mid-Manhattan but asked the agency not to disturb them while they were in the throes of creation. “[T]he boys in the mail room who would deliver two mimeographed copies of the finished script each week were instructed not to enter the office…but to throw the fat envelope through the transom above the door.”

   At the time in question, Essex recalled, “Carleton Young played Ellery….” We know that Young took over that role in January 1942, when the series returned to the air after a 15-month hiatus, and kept it until August or September 1943 when he was replaced by Sydney Smith. Essex occasionally directed an EQ episode, and in his memoir described a segment where the murder “was committed in a radio studio that was supposedly rehearsing a crime program.”

   Essex recalled that the guest armchair detective that evening was radio comedian Fred Allen, and that he failed to solve the mystery. What’s wrong with this picture? Simply that The Sound of Detection, my book on the Queen series, lists no episode during Young’s tenure where Ellery solved a crime in a radio studio and no episode at any time where Fred Allen was the armchair sleuth!

   Either Essex misremembered radically or there’s still some information on the Ellery of the airwaves that hasn’t been unearthed. I hope to live long enough to find out which.

   Anyone in the market for another EQ mystery? As most mysteryphiles know, roughly between 1960 and 1966 Manny Lee was suffering from some sort of writer’s block and unable to collaborate with Fred Dannay as he’d been doing so successfully since 1929.

   Ellery Queen novels and shorter adventures continued to appear during those years, with other authors expanding Fred’s lengthy synopses as Manny had always done in the past. We know who took over Manny’s function on the novels of that period but not on the short stories and not on the single Queen novelet from those years.

   â€œThe Death of Don Juan” (Argosy, May 1962; collected in Queens Full, 1965) is set in Wrightsville and deals with the attempt of the town’s amateur theatrical company to stage a creaky old turn-of-the-century melodrama.

   Could this be a clue to the identity of Fred’s collaborator on the tale? In his graduate student days Anthony Boucher had worked in the Little Theater movement, and on his first date with the woman he later married the couple went to a creaky old-time melodrama.

   This is hardly conclusive evidence but, if I may borrow a Poirotism, it gives one furiously to think. Between 1945 and 1948 Boucher had taken over Fred’s function of providing plots for Manny to transform into finished scripts for the EQ radio series. Might he also have performed Manny’s function a dozen or more years later?

   The first publisher of the hardcover Ellery Queen novels and anthologies was the Frederick A. Stokes company, with whom Fred and Manny stayed from their debut in 1929 until 1941. A few months before Pearl Harbor they moved to Little, Brown and stayed there through 1955.

   After a few years with Simon & Schuster (1956-1958) they moved to Random House and the aegis of legendary editor Lee Wright (1902-1986), who among other coups had purchased Anthony Boucher’s first detective novel and the first “Black” suspense novels by Cornell Woolrich.

   What was behind their earlier moves from one publisher to another remains unknown, but when I interviewed Wright more than thirty years ago she explained why Queen left Random House. The year was 1965, a time when Manny was suffering from writer’s block and Fred called most of the shots for the two of them.

   He left Random, Wright told me, ”literally because Bennett Cerf didn’t invite him to lunch. His feelings were hurt….I said: ‘Fred, Bennett isn’t your editor. I am. You’re sort of insulting me. My attention isn’t enough for you, it has to be the head of the house, is what you’re saying.’”

   Fred tended to be hypersensitive to any hint that mystery writers were second-class literary citizens, while Manny over the years had come to hate the genre and his own role in it, to the point that he described himself to one of his daughters as a “literary prostitute.”

   That he and Fred could have disagreed about this and everything else and still have collaborated successfully for so long is nothing short of a miracle.

   When I was ten years old, for no particular reason I began squirreling away the weekly issues of TV Guide as my parents threw them on the trash pile with the week’s newspapers. The result is that today my bookshelves are weighed down by a week-by-week history of television from the early Fifties till the end of 2000, a goldmine of information unavailable elsewhere.

   One such nugget is buried in the listings for Thursday, June 14, 1956. One of the top Thursday night programs broadcast that season was the 60-minute live dramatic anthology series Climax!

   That particular evening’s offering was “To Scream at Midnight,” in which a wealthy young woman breaks down and is placed in a sanitarium after being thrown over by her lover. Her psychiatrist becomes suspicious when the man reappears and claims he wants to marry her.

   Heading the cast were Diana Lynn (Hilde Fraser), Dewey Martin (Emmett Shore), Karen Sharpe (Peggy Walsh), and Richard Jaeckel (Hordan). John Frankenheimer directed from a teleplay by John McGreevey which, according to TV Guide, was based on something by Highsmith.

   But what? I can recall no novel or story by her from 1956 or earlier (or later either) that remotely resembles this plot summary, but I am no authority on Highsmith. Joan Schenkar, author of the Edgar-nominated The Talented Miss Highsmith (2009), has read every word her subject ever wrote, including hundreds of thousands of words in her diaries.

   When I sent her a photocopy of the relevant TV Guide page, she too couldn’t connect the description with any Highsmith novel or story.

   That makes three mysteries about mysteries in one column, all of them probably unsolvable. If any readers have suggestions I’d love to see them.

   Breaking News! My chance encounter last Thanksgiving with that website devoted to William Ard has borne fruit. Ramble House, a small publisher with which every reader of this column should be acquainted, has arranged with Ard’s daughter to reprint a number of her father’s novels of the Fifties, probably in the two-to-a-volume format pioneered by Ace Books back when Ard was turning out four or more paperback originals a year. More details when I have them.

● JOE GORES – Dead Skip. Random House, hardcover, 1972. Reprint paperbacks include: Ballantine, 1974; Mysterious Press, 1992.

   While holding down a variety of jobs, one of them a stint as a San Francisco private investigator, Joe Gores published numerous (and generally hard-boiled) short stories in the 1950s and 1960s. One of these, “Sweet Vengeance” (Manhunt, July 1964) became the basis for his first novel, the violent suspense thriller A Time of Predators (1969).

   Dead Skip is the first of three novels in the DKA File series (which also includes a dozen or so short stories) — a series Ellery Queen called “authentic as a fist in your face.”

   DKA stands for Daniel Kearny Associates, a San Francisco investigative firm modeled on the real agency for which Gores once worked. (It was Anthony Boucher who first suggested Gores utilize his PI background as the basis for a fictional series.)

   DKA operates out of an old Victorian that used to be a specialty whorehouse, and specializes in the repossessing of cars whose owners have defaulted on loans from banks and automobile dealers.

   Kearny, the boss, is tough, uncompromising, but fair; his operatives, each of whom plays an important role in some if not all of the novels and stories, include Larry Ballard (the nominal lead protagonist), Bart Heslip, Patrick Michael O’Bannon, Giselle Marc, and office manager Kathy Onoda.

   Dead Skip begins quietly enough, with Bart Heslip (who happens to be black) repossessing a car in San Francisco’s Richmond district and returning it to the DKA offices, where he files his report. But when he leaves he is struck down by an unknown assailant — and the following morning the other members of DKA are confronted with the news that Bart is in a coma in a hospital intensive-care unit, the apparent victim of an accident in a repo’d Jaguar.

   Bart’s girlfriend, Corinne Jones, refuses to believe in the “accident” and convinces Ballard that Bart was the victim of violence. In spite of Kearny, who seems more concerned about the cost of the wrecked Jag than about Bart’s welfare (thus causing tension in the ranks), Ballard embarks on a search for Bart’s assailant and an explanation for the attack.

   Starting with the files on Bart’s recent repo jobs, he follows a twisting trail that takes him all over San Francisco and to the East Bay; involves him with a number of unusual characters, one of them a rock musician with a group calling itself Assault and Battery; and ends in a macabre confrontation that endangers not only Ballard’s life but that of Giselle Marc, in a house high above the former haven of the flower children, the Haight-Ashbury.

   The motivation for the attack on Bart is hardly new to crime fiction, and some of the villain’s other actions are likewise questionably motivated, but these minor flaws shouldn’t spoil anyone’s enjoyment of what is otherwise an excellent private-eye procedural. It is, in fact, strong stuff — realistic, powerful, “a traditional American crime novel, out of Black Mask, Hammett and Chandler” (New York Times).

   Even better are the other two novels in the series — Final Notice (1973) and Gone, No Forwarding (1978).

● JOE GORES – Hammett. Putnam’s, hardcover, 1975. Reprint paperbacks include: Ballantine, 1976; Perennial Library, 1982.

   Gores is a lifelong aficionado and student of the works of Dashiell Hammett, and Hammett’s influence is clearly evident in Gores’s own fiction. Hammett is his personal monument to the man he believes was the greatest of all crime writers — part thriller, part fictionalized history, part biography set in the San Francisco of 1928, “a corrupt city, owned by its politicians, its cops, its district attorney. A city where anything is for sale.”

   When an old friend from his Pinkerton days, Vic Atkinson, is murdered after Hammett refuses to help him, the former op-turned-Black Mask writer once again finds himself in the role of detective and man hunter.

   But as the dust-jacket blurb says, “During his search through the teeming alleys of Chinatown, through the cathouses and speakeasies and gambling hells of the city, Hammett discovers that the years of writing have dulled his hunter’s instincts, have made him fear death — and that failure to resharpen his long-unused skills as a private detective could end… his life.”

   The blurb goes on to say, “[Gores’] dialogue crackles and sparks with the wry, tough humor of the twenties. His characters are thinly disguised portraits of the men and women who shook and shaped this most fascinating of American cities. His plot, drawn from actual events in San Francisco’s corrupt political past, casts harsh light on a stark and bloody era.”

All of which is true enough, at least up to a point. Hammett is considered by some to be Gores’ best book, and in many ways it is. But it also has its share of flaws, among them some overly melodramatic scenes and a disinclination on Gores’ part to even mention Hammett’s left-wing politics.

   All things considered, it is certainly a good novel — one that should be read by anyone interested in Hammett, San Francisco circa 1928, and/or fast-action mysteries of the Black Mask school — but it is not the great novel it has occasionally been called.

   The 1982 film version produced by Francis Ford Coppola, on the other hand, is pure claptrap. Frederick Forrest is fine as Hammett, and the script by Ross Thomas is faithful to the novel, but the direction (Wim Wenders) is so arty and stylized that all the grittiness and power is lost. Some of the scenes, in fact, are so bad they’re almost painful to watch.

   Gores’ other non-series novels, A Time of Predators (which received an Edgar for Best First Novel of 1969) and Interface (1974), are also excellent.

   The latter is one of the toughest, most brutal novels published since the days of Black Mask — so hard boiled that some readers, women especially, find it upsetting. But its power is undeniable; and its surprise ending is both plausible and certain to come as a shock to most readers.

         ———
   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.

JOE GORES, R.I.P.   Posted earlier today on Yahoo’s Rara-Avis group was an announcement by publisher Vince Emery of Joe Gores’ death. Quoting briefly:

    “Sad news: Joe Gores, one of my favorite authors — and favorite people — passed away Monday, in a hospital in Marin County.

    “Joe was a three-time Edgar Award winner, past president of the Mystery Writers of America, and author of my favorite hard-boiled mystery series set in San Francisco, the Daniel Kearny & Associates series, which was based on Joe’s own experiences as a detective and repo man. He was working on a new DKA novel when he died.”

    Mr. Gores’ most recent novel was, of course, Spade & Archer (Knopf, 2009), a prequel to The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. Quite coincidentally (this is Steve talking) I am halfway through it now, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

    A few weeks ago on this blog I posted a review/essay by J. F. Norris of The Notting Hill Mystery (1865), a book considered by many to be the first detective novel ever written. When it was serialized in one of the magazines of the day, the author was noted as “Anonymous.” When it appeared later in hardcover, someone named Charles Felix was given credit.

    Who was Charles Felix? It’s been a mystery. “Felix” has long been known as a pen name, but who was the person behind the pseudonym? His was a name lost over the years, if it was ever known, and if so, forgotten by everyone since.

    But no longer. We now know who done it. In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section will be an essay by Paul Collins, who explains all:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/books/review/Collins-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

    I won’t go into all of the detective work that Collins has done — you’ll have to read the full article to do that — but here’s the key paragraph:

    “I’d almost given up when I stumbled upon a Literary Gossip column in The Manchester Times for May 14, 1864. The sole identification of Charles Felix had lain there for 146 years, hidden in this single sentence: ‘It is understood that Velvet Lawn, [another book known to have been written by] by Charles Felix, the new novel announced by Messrs. Saunders, Otley & Co., is by Mr. Charles Warren Adams, now the sole representative of that firm.’”

   The entry for The Notting Hill Mystery on Wikipedia has been updated to include this information. A link to John’s review on this blog appears at the bottom of the Wiki page.

MARJORIE ALAN – Dark Prophecy. M.S. Mill, hardcover, 1945. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, December 1945. Originally published in the UK as Masked Murder (Hale, hc, 1945).

   Chapter 1:   “Of course, Valerie thought, as she laid it [the letter] down, she wouldn’t go.”

   Chapter 2:   “Directly she got into the train at Paddington she knew that she ought not to go to Wayfarers. Knew in a clear, definite premonitory flash, as unmistakably as though someone had spoken the words…”

   Had I but known, I wouldn’t have begun the book. But unlike our heroine, I at least was wise enough not to undertake this perilous journey.

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

MARJORIE ALAN.   Pseudonym of Doris Marjorie Bumpus, 1905- .

    Masked Murder. Hale 1945. US edition: Dark Prophecy, Mill 1945.
    Murder in November. Hale 1946. US edition: Rue the Day, Mill 1946.
    Murder Next Door. Hale 1950.
    The Ivory Locket. Hale 1951.

    Murder at Puck’s Cottage. Hale 1951.
    Dark Legacy. Hale 1953.
    Murder Looks Back. Hale 1955.
    Murder in a Maze. Hale 1956.

Editorial Comments:   This is essentially all I have learned about the author. One online source adds a birthplace (in England), but no one seems to have even a year of death for her.

    Confession time. I have not been posting all of Bill Deeck’s fanzine reviews I come across, generally choosing not to use any that are as short and dismissive as this one is. I’ve made an exception this time. Even though it’s short and dismissive, it’s also one (in my opinion) that gives a honest description and evaluation of the book.

    If you can’t get an idea of what the novel’s about in these 150 words or so, and whether you’d like it or not, I don’t think another thousand would help. You be the judge!

   From detective fiction researcher John Herrington comes the following inquiry, which I paraphrase:

   I have been looking for Jay Shane, an author who published a couple of westerns for Robert Hale in the UK. I thought it might be a pseudonym until I found the blurb below on Amazon. According to Social Security death records, the dates are correct.

   So far I’ve only found a couple of westerns by him, as well as various works on TV repair etc. I wonder if you can post something on your blog to see if anyone can identify his crime fiction, or anything else he wrote.

   Here’s the Amazon blurb:

    “Jay Shane, the author of both Western novels and Technical literature was born in 1911 in Saskatchewan, Canada. Mr. Shane passed away just two months after having finished the writing of this novel in April of 2009 at the age of 97. Mr. Shane made his living repairing Color Televisions and owned and operated a shop for most of his career. His avocation however was writing and had successfully published many fiction including Westerns and Detective novels and wrote technical articles for the TV repair industry other non-fiction books and articles for the electronics industry. Always interested in character profiles, Mr. Shane had researched extensively the social and cultural characteristics of the time period for this novel in an effort to accurately represent the kind of world in which the Apostle Matthew would have lived.”

IRINA KARLOVA – Dreadful Hollow. Hurst & Blackett, UK, hardcover, 1942. Vanguard Press, US, hardcover, 1942. Reprint paperbacks include: Dell #125, 1946; Paperback Library 53-860, 1965; 2nd pr., 64-030, 1968.

   This gothic supernatural novel with detective novel elements wavers between genuinely creepy and outrageous self-parody. At the time I was reading it I wondered if Karlova is a pseudonym for some better known writer. The name seems influenced by Universal horror movie characters and actors. I later learned that I was correct.

   The author’s real name is Helen Mary Clamp (sometimes noted as H.M. Clamp), and she was extremely prolific throughout her lifetime. In addition to writing three supernatural novels using the Karlova pen name, she wrote over 60 novels from main stream to romance to adventure under her given name.

   Using yet another pseudonym (Olivia Leigh) she wrote a few more romances and eleven literary biographies on historical figures such as Nell Gwynn, Charles II of Spain and Louis XV. Her writing career lasted from 1925 to 1970.

   Dreadful Hollow seems to be influenced by those Universal monster movies I mentioned earlier. It certainly seems to be a bit of a coincidence that those films with all the Eastern European atmosphere and characters should share such a similarity with this book written several years after those films were popular.

   It is peopled with Hungarian gypsies, a mysterious countess of either Czech or Hungarian descent, and a stuffed werewolf, and the dread vampire legend looms large over the story.

   Although it does borrow a framework from the detective novel in that the two narrators do some digging up of clues and interview servants and neighbors, it really is nothing more than a pulpy, over-the-top horror novel with all the usual HIBK trappings of the neo-Gothic novel.

   The major difference is that whereas most of those books are pale imitations of a Gothic novel, Karlova’s book is indeed a true Gothic. She does very well with all the Radcliffian elements – emphasis on dreary landscapes and decaying households, a real femme fatale, a ninny of a heroine who suspects she is losing her mind, and genuine supernatural beings and activity.

   As I read I also noted that the structure of the novel was probably inspired by Stoker’s Dracula, with the first person narrative journal entries of young Dr. Clyde (who seems to have escaped from the pages of a pulp magazine like Speed Detective — he speaks in an entirely American wiseacre slang) interspersed with the third person limited sections focusing on Jillian Dare, the young girl hired to act as a companion to an ancient crone.

   The book is unintentionally funny and the mystery is, sadly, to a modern reader, rather obvious from the opening chapters. When young Countess Vera arrives on the scene, any reader who hasn’t instantly figured out the mystery has probably never seen a vampire movie in his or her lifetime.

   That isn’t to say the book is not without its deliciously gruesome surprises. There is a disappearance of a young boy that isn’t fully explained until the final pages, for instance. I have to confess that I was alternately raising my eyebrows, gasping and laughing in the final pages which really do get rather wild and bizarre for a book of this era.

   I am sure that even most jaded contemporary reader will find something thrilling in Dreadful Hollow. They certainly don’t write them like this anymore.

   A side note: Some additional research turned up several articles on the internet which mention the fairly recent discovery of William Faulkner’s screen adaptation of Dreadful Hollow.

   Apparently the find happened sometime in 2001 by his daughter who turned the script over to Lee Caplin, Faulkner’s literary executor. Caplin also happens to be a film producer and was toying with the idea of making the movie. Here’s a link to the news story I found from 2007.

   And there is also some mention of the discovery of the script in a article back in the March 2009 issue of The Faulkner Journal: “The Unsleeping Cabal: Faulkner’s fevered vampires and the other South.”

   But now in 2010 it seems the whole thing as been scrapped. There is no info on the movie on Lee Caplin’s website for his Picture Entertainment outfit and nothing noted on his page at IMDB — a source I find generally reliable about films in pre- and post-production.

Irina Karlova’s supernatural mysteries:

      Dreadful Hollow. Hurst & Blackett, 1942.
      The Empty House. Hurst & Blackett, 1944.
      Broomstick. Hurst & Blackett, 1946.

   Something unusual happened to me on Thanksgiving morning and I’m thankful that it did. Browsing the Web for something entirely different (and apparently nowhere to be found), I stumbled upon a truly excellent website devoted to that unjustly forgotten Fifties hardboiled author William Ard, who managed to write something like three dozen novels before dying of cancer at age 37. With permission from website proprietor Dennis Miller, I hereby offer a link.

   Decades ago, when I was writing the essays about Ard for The Armchair Detective that earlier this year I reorganized into a chapter for my book Cornucopia of Crime, I had had some correspondence and phone conversations with his widow and son.

   Mrs. Ard, nee Eileen Kovara, was tremendously helpful, even loaning me her copy of one Ard novel I had never been able to locate on my own and have never seen since.

   I learned from Dennis Miller’s website that both had died since I was last in touch with them, but he and I began emailing and I soon had the cyber-address of Ard’s daughter and got in touch with her.

   Her father died destitute, she told me, and her mother had a hard time of it for many years, trying to support herself and two children on a secretary’s salary.

   I now know a lot more about the Ard estate than I knew before Thanksgiving, and I’m hoping to persuade a publisher I know who loves hardboiled and noir novels from the Fifties to reissue a few of Ard’s, especially Hell Is a City (1955) and Club 17 (1957, as by Ben Kerr). As they say in the news biz, more details later.

   In my last column I described how Fred Dannay, reprinting Dashiell Hammett’s first Continental Op story in EQMM decades after its first publication in 1922, tried to make it seem less like a period piece by inflating all the cash amounts and substituting common or garden variety bonds for the original version’s Liberty bonds, which the U.S. had sold to finance its entry into World War I.

   This seems to have been a recurring editorial habit of Fred’s, and not even Ellery Queen stories were exempt from its reach. In EQMM for March 1959 he reprinted “Long Shot,” a Queen short story first published twenty years earlier, but changed the names of most of the movie stars who attend the big horse race.

   Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo are fused into Sophia Loren, Al Jolson is replaced by Bob Hope, Bob Burns by Rock Hudson, Joan Crawford the second time by Marilyn Monroe, and Carole Lombard by Jayne Mansfield.

   The only star who appears in both versions of the story is Clark Gable.

   If I hang onto life and health long enough, one of the books I’d love to do is a volume of The Wit and Wisdom of Anthony Boucher.

   Here’s a prime candidate for inclusion, from a letter of his to Manfred B. Lee of the Ellery Queen partnership, dated February 9, 1951.

   As the Forties segued into the Fifties and network radio fell before the juggernaut of television, Boucher tried for months and perhaps years to establish a foothold in the new medium comparable to what he’d enjoyed in the middle and late Forties when he made hundreds of dollars a week (huge money in those days) providing plot synopses for Manny to expand into Queen radio scripts.

   He got nowhere, but his frustration led to a memorable one-liner. “TV is to radio as radio is to films as films are to theater as theater is to publishing as publishing is to rational behavior.”

   Boucher once remarked that readers either love Gladys Mitchell or can’t stand her. I haven’t read enough of her dozens of novels to identify myself with either camp, but recently I tackled her second, The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1930).

   Perhaps a better title would have been one Harry Stephen Keeler used a few years later, The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (1934), since much of the plot concerns a dead man’s sconce that keeps disappearing and reappearing in different places.

   Mitchell’s sleuth, the spectacularly ugly Mrs. Lestrange Bradley, is a professional psychoanalyst who, like her forerunner Philo Vance, eschews physical clues and favors those stemming from the psychology of the murderer.

   For some unaccountable reason the excellent sketch of the crime scene isn’t printed until page 305, so that no reader could know it was there when it might have been helpful. At the center of events is an old Druid sacrificial altar surrounded by a perfect circle of tall pine trees. “There it crouched, a loathsome toad-like thing, larger than ever in the semi-darkness.”

   Add Mitchell to the toad-haters of the world! I wonder why Mrs. Bradley, who’s often described as looking like a crocodile or a pterodactyl, is never compared to that sweet-singing and useful amphibian known to biology as bufo bufo.

RONALD KNOX – Still Dead. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1934, Pan #223, UK, paperback, 1952. US edition: E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1934.

   Ronald Arbuthnott Knox typifies many British writers and readers of detective fiction in that period between the World Wars we call the Golden Age of detective fiction.

   Although in her recent short genre survey, Talking About Detective Fiction (2009), mystery doyenne P. D. James has written that it was Dorothy L. Sayers in the middle 1930s who made detective fiction intellectually respectable (with such “manners” crime novels as The Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night), in fact intellectuals were attracted, both as readers and writers, to detective tales at the very beginning of the Golden Age (roughly 1920), because of those tales’ ratiocinative appeal as puzzles.

   For these individuals, the intellectual appeal of detective novels lay in the quality of their puzzles, not in any attempts on the part of their authors to ape the mainstream “straight” novel with compelling portrayals of social manners and/or emotional conflicts. Indeed, too much emphasis on such purely literary elements initially was often seen by common readers and more lofty genre theorists alike as detrimental in detective novels, because such an emphasis distracted readers’ minds from cold analyses of clues in their attempts to solve mystery puzzles.

   One of the major literary standard-bearers for this now obsolescent view of the detective novel was an undoubtedly intellectual mystery fan and mystery writer, Ronald Knox.

   Knox, a son of the Bishop of Manchester and an Eton and Oxford educated classical scholar who converted to Catholicism in 1917 (soon becoming a priest and one of England’s most prominent and articulate Anglo-Catholics), published his first detective novel, The Viaduct Murder in 1925.

   Two more detective novels appeared in the 1920s (The Three Taps, 1927, and The Footsteps at the Lock, 1928), as well as Knox’s famous Detective Fiction Decalogue, wherein he laid down rules for the writing of detective fiction (all of which emphasized the puzzle aspect, or “fair play”).

   On the strength of these accomplishments, Father Knox was invited in 1930 to become a founding member of the Detection Club. Three more detective novels would follow — The Body in the Silo (1933), Still Dead (1934) and Double Cross Purposes (1937) — before Knox gave himself completely over to his religious scholarship.

   Less donnishly facetious than the 1920s tales, The Body in the Silo and Still Dead are commonly considered to be Father Know’s best detective novels, though oddly, they are two of the most difficult to find.

   (AbeBooks lists the following number of copies for each Knox mystery title: Viaduct Murder, 27; Three Taps, 20; Footsteps, 35; Silo, 7 — all in German or French; Still Dead, 17 — though 12 of these are Pan paperback editions ranging from thirty to fifty dollars; Double Cross Purposes, 12.)

   Both novels are worth reading for fans of the pure puzzle sort of detective novel, having rigorously fair play problems that even include numbered footnotes giving the pages where clues were earlier given. My preference goes to Still Dead, for its Scottish setting, over Silo, with its more hackneyed (but perennially popular) country house locale, though admittedly this is a purely literary consideration.

   Still Dead concerns the death of Colin Reiver, the thoroughly undesirable heir to the Dorn estate in Scotland. Colin’s dead body was glimpsed by one of the estate’s employees, but had disappeared by the time he had left for help and returned to the spot with others.

   Two days later, however, the body reappears at the same spot (still dead, hence the title). Colin is pronounced to have died from exposure, but is that really true and, either way, why were morbid shenanigans played with the corpse?

   If Colin was murdered, there is no shortage of suspects. There is another employee, a gardener, whose child was run down by a drunken Colin (the latter was exonerated in court on the strength of false testimony from an Oxford friend). There are several family members, including Colin’s own father, Donald, as well as Colin’s sister, brother-in-law and cousin (truly, nobody liked Colin). There’s a family physician and also a leader of an odd religious sect to which Donald Reiver adheres.

   The police write off the case (all to the good, since Father Knox evidently knew nothing about police procedure), but insurance investigator Miles Bredon (Knox’s series detective in five novels and a single, classic, short story, “Solved by Inspection”) is called in, because the question of when Colin actually died bears directly on a crucial insurance settlement (the dissolute Colin was heavily insured in his father’s favor and the Dorn estate is sadly diminished).

   Still Dead starkly reveals both Father Knox’s strengths and weaknesses as a detective novelist. Positively, the fair play cluing is exemplary and reading the solution is quite enjoyable. Negatively, human interest is minimal and the plot moves very slowly.

   Aside from a gentrified old lady at a hotel, Colin Reiver’s military martinet-ish cousin and a eugenics-professing doctor, none of the characters has a semblance of interest. Even these three aforementioned characters don’t come to life as they might have, given the basic material.

   To be sure, Knox provides a little lightly humorous verbal byplay, courtesy of Miles Bredon’s wife, Angela (she always seems to accompany him on his investigations, despite having a child — or children, Knox is inconsistent on this point — at home). Yet Miles and Angela are no Lord Peter and Harriet, despite having preceded them into print as a mystery genre male-female duo by three years.

   I found Still Dead rather more slow-moving than novels by Freeman Wills Crofts or John Rhode from this period, because Bredon’s investigation is peripatetic. Knox’s fictional works lack the relentless narrative investigative drive we see in mystery tales by those other, “humdrum”, authors, who focus so resolutely on the problem. Nor is Knox’s problem itself, though well-clued, as interesting as the alibi and murder means conundra presented by Crofts and Rhode, respectively.

   In the blurb for Still Dead, Father Knox’s English publisher, Hodder and Stoughton, called Knox “a master of the English language.” Indeed, Knox is a very good writer; yet his strength as a writer is that of an essayist, not a novelist. Scattered throughout Still Dead are some fine scenic descriptions, pithy observations on religion and interesting digressions on the fate of England’s aristocracy, the nature of English gardens, chess, books, caves, hotel, etc., but, while they are interesting in themselves, by themselves they do not sustain the dramatic situation desirable in a crime novel.

   Of course Knox would counter that he was merely trying to provide readers with a good puzzle, and this is a perfectly reasonable point. Admittedly, Still Dead is a good puzzle. Yet the basic material here — a dissolute gentry heir having killed a young child while driving inebriated — is interesting enough to have deserved a more serious treatment.

   Knox’s handling of the material is too much on the dry side, even in the final chapter when the philosophical implications of the problem are discussed by the characters (though this is a good discussion).

   Indeed, just a few years later Nicholas Blake (the pen name of poet Cecil Day-Lewis) took a rather similar plot and injected it with real human pain and suffering, in The Beast Must Die (1938), a tale much better-remembered today than Still Dead.

   Even Agatha Christie, one feels, would have made a more compelling tale of Still Dead. There seems to me to have been an evident reluctance on the part of Father Knox to grapple with deeper emotions in his detective novels. (One sees this quirk as well in the half-dozen mild mystery tales by a Knox contemporary, Anglican minister Victor Whitechurch.)

   Despite these reservations on my part, Still Dead is well worth reading for admirers of classical British mystery. If you can find a hardcover copy (as least this is true of the British edition by Hodder and Stoughton), you also will find a beautiful endpaper drawing of the Dorn estate and a dramatic frontispiece of stark Dorn House, both by Bip Pares, as well as that footnoted clue page guide.

   The Pan paperback editions of Still Dead from 1952 that booksellers want thirty to eighty dollars for lack these graces, so charmingly redolent of the Golden Age detective novel, when many writers in their mystery tales unashamedly emphasized puzzles.

Editorial Comment:   In my review of Knox’s The Three Taps earlier on this blog, I included his list of the “Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction,” also referred to by Curt.