CHRISTOPHER BUSH – Dead Man’s Music. Howard Baker, UK, hardcover reprint, 1970. First Edition: Wm. Heinemann, UK, hc, 1931. US hardcover: Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, 1932.

   An odd request to Durangos, Limited, sends Ludovic Travers, newly appointed director, to Steyvenning, Sussex. Claude Rook is looking for a man of “implicitly honourable confidence” who knows china and music and is quick-witted.

   When Travers more or less satisfies Rook’s requirements, Rook gives him a musical manuscript with unclear instructions what to do with it. As might have been guessed, Rook turns up dead, maybe having been tortured and maybe having committed suicide. One of the several odd things about his death is that someone shaved him shortly after he died

   Who was Rook? Why did he give the musical manuscript to Travers? What did the manuscript mean, particularly since it is not the piece Rook played for Travers?

   Not one of Travers’ better cases, more a thriller than a detective novel. A library patron — I deplore this tendency but must give the lady or gentleman credit for perceptivity– has scribbled on the cover, “Not good.”

   Not bad, either, but certainly a surprisingly weak selection to reprint, considering all the first-class novels that Bush has produced.

Bibliographic Data: If my count is correct, Dead Man’s Music is the 5th of 63 mysteries in which Ludovic Travers was the sleuth of record.

   The first appeared in 1926, the last in 1968. Christopher Bush also wrote another dozen or so detective novels as by Michael Home in which Travers did not appear.

   It isn’t clear in Bill’s review, perhaps, but Travers himself was a licensed (and therefore private) investigator, so unless I’m wrong about this, it’s strange that he’s not included in Kevin Burton Smith’s list of PIs on his Thrilling Detective website.

   Three more of Bush’s mysteries are reviewed by Mike Grost on his Classic Crime and Detection website, where he suggests that alibis and stage trickery are often significant factors in his work.

S. J. BOLTON – Blood Harvest. Bantam Press, UK, hardcover/softcover, 2010. US edition: St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 2010.

Genre:   Suspense. Leading characters:  Rev. Harry Laycock / Dr. Evi Oliver / ensemble; standalone (3rd book). Setting:   England.

First Sentence:   “She’s been watching us for a while now.”

   Reverend Harry Laycock has come to his new parish which includes Heptoncough in the Yorkshire Pennines. Here there is an old church, a very old church a village which still carries out the old traditions and where young girls have disappeared or died.

   One of the girls died in a house fire, but her mother, Gillian, never accepted her death and constantly roams the moors at night. Psychiatrist Evi Oliver is trying to help her put her life back together.

   Tom Fletcher and family have moved to the village having bought the only new house built in many years. It was built on the old Church’s land, next to the graveyard. They all learn that events of the past are still part of the present.

   Although I really liked Ms. Bolton’s first two books, this one knocked my socks off. Everything about it was so well done, it’s hard to know where to start.

   Even from the page before the prologue, I was captivated. I am not a particular fan of prologues, but this one really worked. I was introduced to a number of the significant characters who immediately jumped off the page and made me want to know more about them.

   I am also not usually a fan of ensemble casts. Again, this worked. Although Harry, the antithesis of a stuffy vicar and for whom I would have provided a different surname, and Evi, the physically impaired, intelligent and independent psychiatrist, are the pivotal characters, all characters were alive and their interactions realistic.

   Dialogue is such an important element of a story. Ms. Bolton has a skill with dialogue that echoes in cadence the speech of the characters. As well as establishing a strong sense of place, she incorporates the history and traditions of the area.

   Combined with all these ingredients, what caused me to read this 421 page book in eight straight hours was the author’s voice and the plot. The first half of the book is an amazingly skillful balance of humor… “I haven’t had this much success with a woman since I got drunk at my cousin’s wedding and threw up over the maid of honour.” … and underlying, delightfully creepy menace.

   There is a real sense of “things that go bump in the night” which made me happy I was reading the book during the day.

   The second half of the book moved to police and forensic investigation, and a race-against-time fear, while the climax was filled with an increasingly ratcheted tension and surprises right up to the very end.

   One observation is that Ms. Bolton does have a penchant for her female protagonists to be somehow physically impaired. While the overcoming of the particular impairment shows the character’s strength and resolve, it can also become formulaic or even cliché over time.

   However, as this is a general observation and not a criticism of this particular book, it does not impact my rating at all. In this case, it greatly added to the suspense. This really was an exceptional, “wow” book and one I shan’t soon forget. I cannot wait for Ms. Bolton’s next book

Rating:   Excellent.

      Novels by S(HARON) J. BOLTON —

1. Sacrifice (2008)

2. Awakening (2009)
3. Blood Harvest (2010)

E. LOUISE CUSHING – Murder Without Regret. Arcadia House, hardcover, 1954.

   During a party after the reading of a will, one of the guests presumably commits suicide. Barbara Hillier finds the corpse and aids Inspector MacKay of the Montreal police in the investigation of an undoubted murder later.

   Striving as always to say something good about any novel, I can report that this one has very large type and a great deal of space between the lines. Thus, it’s only about a 30-minute waste of time.

    Bibliographic Data:   [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

CUSHING, E. LOUISE. Pseudonym of Mabel Louise Dawson. Inspector Richard MacKay appears in all four books below.

       Murder’s No Picnic (n.) Arcadia House, 1953.
       Murder Without Regret (n.) Arcadia House, 1954.
       Blood on My Rug (n.) Arcadia House, 1956.
       The Unexpected Corpse (n.) Arcadia House, 1957.

JAMES ROSS – They Don’t Dance Much. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1940. Paperback reprint: Signet #913, abridged edition, April 1952. Hardcover reprint: Southern Illinois University Press, “Lost American Fiction” series, 1975; reprinted in ppbk by Popular Library, 1976 (scarce).

   Okay, a few weeks ago I was all set to read some Henry James when someone here mentioned Richard Hallas’ You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, and I decided I should have another look at it. Only on the way to dig out Play, I stumbled across something else I hadn’t read in 30-odd years and took up that instead.

   James Ross’s They Don’t Dance Much (1940) is about murder in a small southern town, which got to be a pretty over-worked sub-genre, but this one stands out.

   Ross creates vivid characters with a strong narrative voice, and slowly (but not too slowly) eases them into a plot about murder and double-cross, with some very brutal action and a few cunning twists.

   Over it all, there’s the stifling atmosphere of a town with nothing much there, and the casual brutality of boredom.

   There are also some memorable bad guys; Smut Milligan and Aston LeGrand are two of the most striking nasties in literature since Captain Hook and Ming the Merciless, and their presence looms over the book like a gathering thunderstorm.

   In fact, even the minor characters have that little something extra, and together with Ross’s terse-but-leisurely prose, it goes to make Dance something very memorable.

From the SIU edition:

    “Called by Raymond Chandler ‘a sleazy, corrupt but completely believable story of a North Carolina town,’ this tough, realis­tic novel exemplifies Depression literature in the United States.

    “Falling somewhere between the hard-as-nails writing of James M. Cain and the early stories of Ernest Hemingway, James Ross’s novel was for sheer brutality and frankness of language considerably ahead of his reading public’s taste for realism untinged with sentiment or profundity. In his brilliant Afterword to this new edition, George V. Higgins, author of the recent best-seller Cogan’s Trade, pays tribute to Ross for his courage in telling his story truthfully, in all its ugliness.”

   James Ross was born in North Carolina in 1911, was a newspaper man there and died in 1990. The book is his only novel.

JOSEPH L. BONNEY – Murder Without Clues. Carrick & Evans, hardcover, 1940. Digest-sized paperback: Green Dragon #16, 1940s, condensed.

   An amateur pugilist who plays the violin, dabbles in chemistry, smokes pipes when he’s pondering, deduces expertly, investigates crime, and has a roommate named Watson.

   Yes, as you surmised, I am alluding to Simon Rolfe, who regards Sherlock Holmes as an “incompetent bungler.” There are differences, of course; Rolfe reads mostly, perhaps only, of the works of Montaigne.

   While he criticizes some of Holmes’s deductions, Rolfe himself occasionally falls short in exercising that talent. For instance, Watson tells Rolfe that he does a lot of typewriting and moons about when he’s trying to straighten out a plot sequence or characterization. Rolfe responds: “You’re a writer, then?”

   In this novel, either the first or the second of two featuring Rolfe — I’d deduce the first, since he meets Watson in this one — the police are baffled by a locked room stabbing at the home of a former vaudeville memory champion.

   Not only was the room locked, with untracked snow outside the windows, but all the inhabitants of the house have alibis, including the man the stabbed woman accuses of the murder just before she dies. The weapon, which could not have been removed from the house, cannot be found.

   An interesting detective, appearing in not a lost gem of the literature necessarily, but nonetheless a good read.

    Bibliographic Data:   [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

BONNEY, JOSEPH L. (1908?-1989?)

       Murder Without Clues (n.) Carrick 1940 [Simon Rolfe]
       Death by Dynamite (n.) Carrick 1940 [Simon Rolfe]

       Look to the Lady! (n.) Lippincott 1947

PETER CHEYNEY – It Couldn’t Matter Less. William Collins & Sons, UK, hardcover, 1941. Reprinted in the UK in paperback many times since. Mystery House, US, hardcover, 1943. Also published as: The Unscrupulous Mr. Callaghan. Handi-Books #18, pb, 1943. Also published as: Set-Up for Murder. Pyramid #16, pb, 1950.

Film: (France), 1954, as Plus de Whisky pour Callaghan! (with Tony Wright as Slim Callaghan; director: Willy Rozier).

   His biographer, Michael Harrison, subtitled his book on Peter Cheyney, “The Prince of Hokum.” In many ways it isn’t far off. Cheyney was a reporter and public relations man who worked the West End club scene in London and had briefly been the secretary to Sir Oswald Mosley of the BUF (British Union of Fascists), though in fairness Cheyney got out well before Mosley and his Blackshirts turned to outright treason.

   Having dropped out of school at fourteen to become a writer in 1933 he turned to mystery fiction and in 1936 he wrote This Man is Dangerous about American G-Man Lemmy Caution, a British turn on the hard-boiled school and like nothing anyone else had tried.

   The language and the style of the Caution books is unique. Even Cheyney’s imitators never managed to ape it. Caution put Cheyney on the map. Along the way Cheyney also created Alonzo MacTavish a Saint like adventurer, and began his “Dark” series of spy novels that received high praise from the likes of Anthony Boucher and helped to inspire Ian Fleming and James Bond.

   Considering his career only lasted from 1936 to his death in 1951, he turned out 35 novels and 150 short stories.

   But most would agree his single greatest creation is Slim Callaghan, the British answer to the American hard boiled private eye who made his debut back in 1938 in Urgent Hangman. Slim belongs to the Sam Spade school of tough cynical and money obsessed eyes, less a knight in tarnished armor than a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

   It Couldn’t Matter Less is his fifth outing, and was the first I read, way back in 1970. It isn’t the best of the Callaghan novels but is still one of my favorites.

   The setting is wartime London. Inspector Gringall of the Yard, longtime friendly rival of Callaghan’s, has been clubbing and happens to call Slim to ask if he’s seen Doria Varette, a torch singer at Ferdie’s Place.

   It’s Slim’s birthday but Callaghan knows Gringall has something up his sleeve . He goes anyway. Backstage Doria asks him to take on a job, to find her boyfriend Lionel Wilbery, a poet with the wrong friends and a drug problem:

   Slim has hardly agreed to take the case before a slick Cuban accented thug, Santos, confronts him outside Varette’s flat, but such things don’t faze Slim.

   Back at the office, Slim puts his loyal, and jealous, secretary Effie and his assistant, a long winded Canadian Windemere “Windy” Nichols, on the case and contacts Wilbery’s well-to-do Mother — might as well get paid twice for the same chore. That leads to Wilberys’ beautiful sister (beautiful women pass in and out of Slim’s life at a remarkable rate) Leonore.

   Meanwhile he meets a pair of Russian refugees running the publishing house that publishes Wilbery’s poetry (one of them of course the beautiful Sabine) who tell him Varette is the poet’s drug connection. At an illegal gambling joint he runs into Santos D’Inazzi, the Cuban who tried to warn him off Varette, who slugs him, and might have finished him off if Windy Nichols hadn’t stepped in.

   And of course there are the Cheyney women, as famous in their day as the Bond Girls have been in ours:

   Things really get interesting when Callaghan breaks into Varette’s apartment and finds her dead. So he frames Santos and calls the cops. After all the guy tried to kill him. One good turn deserves another:

   From this point on the action seldom slows. Callaghan romances Lenore, slugs it out in a West End nightclub with a pair of Santos partners, burgles the Russian publishers offices, and literally stumbles across Lionel Wilbery.

   Along the way he discovers why Gringall introduced him to Doria Varette, breaks up a Nazi spy ring, and collects his considerable fees and the delicious Lenore, usually while three sheets to the wind, breaking every law in the book, and planting evidence left and right — when he isn’t concealing it from the police:

   Originality wasn’t Cheyney’s strength, but he did the hard-boiled patter, the tough guy stuff, and the atmosphere surrounding it as well as anyone working in the genre. Slim is in the mode of Sam Spade, Michael Shayne, Kurt Steel’s Hank Heyer, Cleve Adams Rex McBride, and Jonathan Latimer’s Bill Crane, narrated in the third person and a good deal tougher and less sentimental than the Chandler school.

   Slim’s style is direct and to the point, and he could give Spade pointers on saying what he thinks:

   Care for it or not, the atmosphere of a Cheyney novel is distinct, smoky night clubs, good whiskey, and a hint of Narcisse Noir in the air. You can almost hear the torch singer and just make out the swarthy type in the dinner jacket waiting in the shadows with a knife meant for your gizzard.

   But don’t worry, order another slug of rye, light another cigarette, brush off your impeccable dinner jacket, don that soft black felt hat with the dashing brim, and go into battle knowing you are sure of eye and hand — despite the amount you’ve had to drink:

   He takes Salkey’s gun away from him and kicks Wulfie in the head. Then he takes the gun and a drink and calls Effie. Cool customer, Mr. Callaghan.

   Slim consumes heroic amounts of booze throughout his adventures. If you are impressed with the half a fifth of vodka James Bond consumes, or Philip Marlowe’s bottle of bourbon in his office desk, you will be in shock that Slim can even get out of his silk pajamas and into action, much less romance beautiful women and battle nasty thugs.

   He does laze around and stretch his long legs a good deal, but really, Slim has to be the Olympic champion of the genre when it comes to drinking. John J. Malone and his pals the Justus’s couldn’t hold a candle to him — they wouldn’t dare. It’s a wonder he doesn’t blow himself to kingdom come just lighting a cigarette.

   Slim was well played on screen by Michael Rennie in Uneasy Terms and on the West End stage by Terence De Marney and on screen by Derek De Marney in Meet Mr. Callaghan.

   Eddie Constantine, who was Cheyney’s Lemmy Caution on screen, had a few outings as Slim first. Probably his best incarnation however was the principle inspiration for Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective.

   Neither Cheyney nor Slim ever found much of an American audience, but he was hugely popular in England, with sales of up to five million copies a year of his books, and also loved in Europe and especially France.

   Cheyney’s novel Dark Duet, was the first book published in France after the Nazi occupation, the book smuggled in from occupied Holland, and on the streets while German soldiers were fleeing Paris. Jean-Luc Goddard later borrowed Lemmy for his New Wave science fiction film Alphaville.

   Anthony Boucher edited an anthology of Cheyney’s “Dark” novels, The Stars Are Dark, during the war, and Raymond Chandler praised his novel Dark Duet.

   Long, lean, and angular, Slim, with a cigarette hanging from his lip and a drink or a beauty never far from his lips, is Cheyney’s best creation. There may not be a lot of surprises in his oeuvre, but his books are fun and well worth reading, and no one ever did the atmosphere of the London club scene like Cheyney.

   Reading any of his books is the equivalent of a night of West End clubbing — just watch out for the hangover. Slim’s liver must be a wonder to behold.

Note: Whatever Cheyney’s pre-war politics were, he made up a little for them with many of the 150 short stories, often featuring Slim or Lemmy, that were distributed to the troops in little chapbooks of a few short tales each. The output was huge and greatly appreciated by the troops.

JAMES HILTON – Was It Murder?   Paperback reprint: Bantam #29, 1946. Hardcover edition: Harper & Brothers, US, 1933. Other reprints include: Dover, trade paperback, 1979; Perennial Library, pb, 1980. First published as Murder at School, by Glen Trevor: Benn, UK, hardcover, 1931.

   James Hilton’s only mystery is set in a boys’ school in England. It is interesting to compare it with Nicholas Blake’s mystery A Question of Proof, which has the same sort of setting. Both Hilton and C. Day Lewis, Blake’s real name wrote other kinds of literature and gained their primary reputation that way.

   Blake, in his first detective story, gives us the picture of an entire school and its operations, while Hilton prefers to concentrate on one segment. Hilton shows us just a corner of the physical domain: the headmaster’s house, the home of one of the married masters, a dormitory, and glimpses of the chapel and the Circle, a path around the perimeter of the school.

   His amateur detective, Colin Revel, is an “old boy” of Oakington, so it is not hard to find an excuse for his presence before there is widespread suspicion of murder.

   Blake’s detective is called in by a master under suspicion after murder has very obviously been done. Yet both fit well into the schools, get along with masters and boys, and don’t seem out of place.

   Revell is called in by the headmaster, Dr. Robert Roseveare when one of the younger boys is killed, apparently by acc1dent. Roseveare seems nervous, but as the investigation goes on and the accident seems to be precisely that, he is quite anxious to have Revell leave.

   Then a second boy dies, a brother of the first, in another ‘accident.’ Revell hastens back; the police are called in by the boys guardian, and evidence is found that this time it is murder.

   Suspicion naturally falls on the master, who inherits all the boys’ wealth. But there is no evidence. And there is a deathbed confession, and the police leave. But Revell is not satisfied and stays on.

   The cast of characters is small; suspicion never goes far from the one person. There is less a hunt for evidence than a delving into the high emotions of the people: love, jealousy, greed, fear, pride.

   Sophisticated readers of the 70s may guess the surprise solution before the end, but the writer keeps up the drama and the suspense; we can’t be sure. And when the final revelations come, they draw together all the skeins, and one puts down the book with a sigh of satisfaction.

Bibliographical Note:   It is not quite true, perhaps, that this book was Hilton’s only mystery, as there are three others listed under his name in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. Two are included only marginally, however, and the third may be a crime story without being a mystery, per se. For completeness, though, here’s the complete list:

  HILTON, JAMES. 1900-1954.

       -Rage in Heaven (n.) King 1932
       Knight Without Armour (n.) Benn 1933
       Was It Murder? (n.) Harper 1933.   See: Murder at School (Benn 1931), as by Glen Trevor.
       -We Are Not Alone (n.) Macmillan 1937

   Thanks to Turner Classic Movies I recently discovered a detective film series I had never heard of before. Before Midnight (RKO, 1933) debuted on TCM in June and starred a young Ralph Bellamy as Inspector Trent of the NYPD.

   A procedural this ain’t: Trent comes out on a dark and stormy night to a Toad Hall fifty miles from New York City at the request of a millionaire who expects to be killed before the ancestral clock strikes twelve. Sure enough, the murder takes place, and Trent immediately takes over the investigation, such as it is, smoking up a storm as he interrogates the dead man’s lovely ward, the doctor who loves her, the enigmatic Japanese butler, the sleazy lawyer, etc. etc.

   Eventually, donning a white lab coat for forensic cred, he holds up two test tubes with blood samples in them and announces to his bug-eyed stooge that both came from the same person. How he managed to do that, generations before anyone ever heard of DNA, remains a mystery after the murder method (obvious to most viewers) and the murderer (obvious to all) are exposed.

   A bit of Web surfing taught me that Before Midnight was the first of four Inspector Trent films, all starring Bellamy and dating from 1933-34. The titles of the other three are One Is Guilty, The Crime of Helen Stanley and Girl in Danger.

   Columbia had released an earlier detective series with Adolphe Menjou as Anthony Abbot’s Police Commissioner Thatcher Colt but had dropped it after two films. The Trent series lasted twice as long but who today has ever heard of it? Bellamy of course went on to star in Columbia’s bottom-of-the-barrel series of Ellery Queen films (1940-41).

   Second of the four EQ films with Bellamy in the lead was Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery (1941). For most of my life I was unsure whether this picture was based on any genuine Queen material.

   In Royal Bloodline I speculated that it might have come from one of the early Queen radio plays. Recently I learned that my hunch was right. Its source was the 60-minute drama “The Three Scratches” (CBS, December 13, 1939).

   Someday I’d love to compare the Dannay-Lee script with the infantile novelization of the film by some anonymous hack that was published as a tie-in with the movie, but unfortunately that script was not included in The Adventure of the Murdered Moths (2005).

   Does the name Peter Cheyney ring any bells? He was an Englishman (1896-1951), the son of a Cockney fishmonger who specialized in whelks and jellied eels.

   He had never visited the U.S. but in 1936 began writing a long series of thrillers narrated in first person by hardboiled G-Man Lemmy Caution, beginning with This Man Is Dangerous (1936).

   For the most part these quickies were laughed off as unpublishable over here but became huge successes in England and also in France, where translation concealed Cheyney’s habit of peppering the dialogue of American characters with British slang, not to mention self-created idioms which are like nothing in any language known to humankind.

   The one that has stuck in my mind longest is “He blew the bezuzus,” which is not a musical instrument but just Cheyney’s way of saying “He spilled the beans.”

   According to Google the only known use of the word was in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt, where a character is said to have a degree from Bezuzus Mail Order University.

   Could Cheyney have read that acerbic satire on the American middle class or did he come up with the word independently? Googling “bezuzus” with Cheyney’s name produces no matches, but I suspect that situation will change as soon as this column is posted.

   With The Urgent Hangman (1938) Cheyney launched a series of utterly conventional ersatz-Hammett novels about London PI Slim Callaghan, and during World War II he wrote a series of rather bleak espionage novels, all with “Dark” in their titles and lavishly praised by Anthony Boucher and others.

   I don’t know if he’s worth rediscovering, but you can catch him as he looked in newsreel footage from 1946, dictating his then-latest thriller to a secretary, by going to www.petercheyney.co.uk and clicking first on “Links” and then on the image at the bottom of the screen.

   The mail has just brought me the proof copy of my latest assault on the forests of America. Cornucopia of Crime is a 449-page gargantua bringing together chunks of my writing over the past 40-odd years on mystery fiction and some of my favorites among its perpetrators, from Gardner and Woolrich and Queen to Cleve F. Adams and Milton Propper and William Ard, not to mention screwballs like Michael Avallone and mad geniuses like Harry Stephen Keeler.

   One small problem with this copy: on the title page the author’s name is conspicuous by its absence. This glitch will soon be corrected but I’m told that ten or twelve uncorrected copies are on the way to me by mail.

   If they arrive before I leave for the Pulpfest in Columbus, Ohio late next week, I plan to bring them with me and — assuming there are a few collectors in attendance who are in the market for perhaps the most limited edition of any book on mystery fiction ever published! — sell them off. Consider this an exclusive offer to Mystery*File habitues.

Editorial Comment. 07-22-10.   Inspired by David Vineyard’s comments on Peter Cheyney’s contributions to the world of crime fiction, I checked out the website devoted to him that Mike mentioned. It’s definitely worth a look. I especially enjoyed the covers, a portion of one I’ve added below. Who could resist a book with a lady like this on the cover? Not me.

   Artwork by John Pisani. For more, go here.

  HILDA LAWRENCE – Death of a Doll. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1947. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, April 1947. Paperback reprints include: Pocket #540, August 1948; Avon Classic Crime PN239, November 1969.

   Only temporarily is Ruth Miller, department-store clerk, happy with her move from a furnished room to Hope House, a Home for Girls. Upon entering the lobby of her new domicile, she is frightened by a face from the past. Miller makes plans to get away, but her assisted plunge from a seventh-floor window renders her schemes nugatory.

   A wealthy customer of the department store who liked Miller hires Marc East to investigate because the death is being treated as a suicide. Reluctantly, for he also thinks the death was self-inflicted, East begins checking out Hope House and its denizens.

   More and more evidence, including the bludgeoning of a young lady in one of the bathrooms, accumulates to persuade East that Miller was murdered.

   More or less aiding East are Beulah Pond and Bessy Petty, who are visiting the wealthy customer and who are acquainted with East through some of his earlier investigations. They are a delightful pair, despite Bessy’s slight problem with alcohol. On one occasion, just in case someone might be listening, Bessy spells out a word.

   Often I have problems with people who are in danger, real or fancied, and who dimwittedly attempt to avoid any risk by keeping quiet. Hilda Lawrence convinces here. Miller, the residents, and the help of Hope House conceal information, but persuasive reasons are presented. This novel should not be missed.

Bibliographic Data: Hilda Lawrence was the pen name of Hildgarde Kronmuller, 1906-1976. There are five novels or story collections by her in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. Her series character Mark East is in three of them (so indicated by ME). Note that her books often underwent title changes when republished, and that the two long novelettes in Duel for Death have been reprinted individually.

    * Blood Upon the Snow (n.) Simon 1944 [ME]

    * A Time to Die (n.) Simon 1945 [ME]
    * The Pavilion (n.) Simon 1946
    * Death of a Doll (n.) Simon 1947 [ME]
    * Duet of Death (co) Simon 1949

SAPPER [H. C. McNEILE] – Knock-Out. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1933. US title: Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back. Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, 1933. Reprints: Grosset & Dunlap, hc, 1934; Triangle, hc, 1943; House of Stratus, UK, trade paperback, 2001.

Films: United Artists, 1934, as Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (Ronald Colman, Loretta Young; director: Roy del Ruth). Also: Columbia, 1947, again as Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (Ron Randell, Gloria Henry; director: Frank McDonald).

   English thriller writer Sapper (pen name of Herman Cyril McNeile) is a much maligned figure of late decades, his famous hero Captain Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond now being seen as less a “clubland hero” than an arch-conservative, racist, public-schooled bully.

   This perception is fueled especially by offensive racial comments made by Captain Drummond in some of the 1920s novels, like The Black Gang (1922) and The Female of the Species (1928). Eric Ambler represented the views of many in dismissing Sapper’s books as essentially fascist.

   By 1933, however, Hitler was consolidating his power in Germany and shocking much of the civilized world with his bellicose, frequently anti-Semitic, rhetoric and behavior. Sapper continued publishing thrillers up until his premature death in 1937. What was the tenor of his later works?

   My conclusion from reading Knock-Out (1933) is that if you are offended by it, you are pretty easily offended.

   Knock-Out opens with Ronald Standish (familiar to Sapper readers from the Sherlock Holmes inspired pastiches he appeared in throughout the 1930s — they should have been collected under the title Knock-Off) and his friend Bill in Ronald’s flat discussing a vital matter — golf — when a phone call from Ronald’s friend Sanderson comes through asking Ronald to come over to his place immediately.

   But the line goes dead! Ronald and Bill head over to Sanderson’s place, only to discover Sanderson dead, stabbed — or shot? — through the eye.

   They then encounter Hugh Drummond and his friend Peter. The mighty Hugh is about to pound Ronald and Bill into the floor when Peter stops him with an important piece of information: “It’s Ronald Standish. I’ve played cricket with him.”

   Ronald’s bona fides as a sportsman established, the four good fellows are able to come together on a plan over what to do about Sanderson’s murder. It seems that Sanderson was on the trail of some sort of BIG criminal conspiracy.

   Of course, letting the police or intelligence service in on the “show” in any big way is unthinkable — this is a job for impetuous, sporting, public-schooled amateurs!

   Soon Hugh, Ronald and pals are on the hunt for the conspirators, who include a noted society doctor, a sadistic American film actress and, worst of all, a cross-dressing, bald-headed Greek man with lacquered fingernails.

   A number of elements from earlier tales are recycled. Hugh again indulges his odd penchant for disguise, his Wodehouseian pal Algy is made to take notes of Hugh’s deep thoughts (to what purpose is not evident), there is a loyal “old nurse” of one of the the fellahs on hand when needed and, of course, a pretty, plucky nice girl (Daphne Frensham — “an absolute fizzer”) shows up to help out the lads, as well as to engage in some light romantic banter with Peter (Hugh’s wife presumably is out shopping during this one).

   The heroes’ headstrong assault on the villains’ country house headquarters also will seem familiar, as will the fact that it is defended by a fearsome beast (here, a mastiff “the size of a donkey” — young apes were not available this season, evidently).

   Hugh also goes into one of his patented berserk rages, splitting open one filthy swine’s head and throwing another off a railway embankment, but they really were rather rotters, I will stipulate (they had committed an act of what we would call terrorism today and were in the process of attempting another one).

   Yet not all is pure action. The presence of the relatively cerebral Ronald Standish gives Sapper an excuse to indulge a little in the exercise of a bit of brain power. There is much speculation over exactly how Sanderson was killed and there is a cipher that plays a major role in the tale.

   However, during the course of the action Standish is drugged, kidnapped, kidnapped yet again and concussed by a bomb, so let us just say that his brains are not always fully operational throughout the tale.

   Perhaps most interestingly, Sapper takes time to present, in a quite sympathetic manner, a Jewish shopkeeper named Samuel Aaronstein, alone with his wife and son. If Knock-Out ever was reprinted in Nazi Germany — and we know Hitler liked Edgar Wallace thrillers — this section of the book would not have found favor.

   It should be noted as well that the sadistic American film actress who is aroused by seeing men being tortured to death is not exactly a cozy concoction. I could never quite figure out why she was necessary to the success of the conspiracy, but she certainly added a frisson of wicked decadence.

   So, while Knock-Out is not perhaps the most original of Sapper’s thrillers, it is as smoothly competent as any of the author’s books, and it is not as offensive as people will tell you Sapper works invariably are.

   Sure, the lower class characters all speak exaggerated cockney-ish dialect, the street boy with the message for our heroes is invariably referred to by them as “the urchin” (I was half expecting “ragamuffin”) and the head villain is a creepy hermaphrodite (or something like). But, honestly, you must have read more obnoxious books than this one from the period.

   I suspect part of the animus against Sapper has to do with the fact that the academics who write much of the mystery criticism today are precisely the eggheads who would have been made to eat dirt three times a day in public school by a young Bulldog (and don’t we know it). Though, admittedly, I too find some of the earlier books distasteful in parts.

   Interestingly, Sapper’s father, Captain Malcolm McNeile (1843-1901), was a naval officer and prison warden described as “a ‘rod-of-iron’ officer from the old school” and “a disciplinarian of the meanest type.” And Sapper’s paternal grandfather, Reverend Hugh McNeile (1795-1879) [FOOTNOTE], was an evangelical Anglican minister considered “unquestionably the greatest preacher and speaker in the Church of England” in the nineteenth century.

   With this background, it’s probably no wonder that the Sapper books are as conservative (and sometimes bullying) as they are. Whether they are “fascist” — with all that that ideology entails — is to my mind open to question, however.

   Conservative and fascist are not synonymous terms. Sapper’s clubland heroes may be vigilantes doing what they do “for the good of England” (which usually seems to mean people earning income off invested capital), but they often seem to find it unnecessary to inform the State what they are doing.

   Fascist dictators might have found them a little too anarchic and individualistic in that respect.

FOOTNOTE: Reverend Hugh McNeile obtained his first living in 1822 from the wealthy banker and politician Henry Drummond. Put those names together and I think that we surely have the inspiration for the name of Sapper’s greatest hero.

       Previously reviewed on this blog:

The Black Gang (by David L. Vineyard)
Bulldog Drummond (by Steve Lewis)