JOHN SHERWOOD – Creeping Jenny. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1993. Celia Grant #9. No US paperback edition. Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1993.

   Celia Grant is a horticulturist, and owner of Archerscroft Nurseries, which specializes in the rarer and more rarely seen varieties. She also finds time to become embroiled in various forms of shady doings.

   Celia hires for the summer a painfully shy girl whom she doesn’t really take to, the Jenny of the title. She’s even less fond of her after she seduces Celia’s head gardener, and then is apparently kidnapped.

   The investigation leads to a radical environmental group who are threatening dire consequences to a local garden show, among other more serious things, and all this at a time when Celia is in the middle of a squabble between a local landowner and an industrialist new to the area.

   I like this series. Celia is an enjoyable character, and I think one of the better realized crop of British amateur sleuths. Sherwood writes well, and generally tells a good story, occasionally with a little edge.

   Though not really hardboiled, Celia isn’t Miss Marple. Some in the series have more depth than others, but they are usually peopled with interesting characters, and the plots are usually adequate.

   I don’t think this is one of the stronger entries, but it was certainly readable, and stopped short of being disappointing.

       The Celia Grant series —

1. Green Trigger Fingers (1984)
2. A Botanist at Bay (1985)
3. The Mantrap Garden (1986)

4. Flowers of Evil (1987)
5. Menacing Groves (1988)
6. A Bouquet of Thorns (1989)

7. The Sunflower Plot (1990)
8. The Hanging Garden (1992)
9. Creeping Jenny (1993)
10. Bones Gather No Moss (1994)
11. Shady Borders (1996)

   John Sherwood had a crime-writing career than spanned six decades. He was not uniformly prolific throughout that time, but he had two periods in which he was very active. Starting out in 1949 with a longish series of adventure and espionage novels, including several with a series character named Charles Blessington, he wrote only four in the 1960s and 70s. He might be best known for a book called Death at the BBC (as it was titled in the US) in 1982, then came the long run of Celia Grant books.

DEBORAH ADAMS – All the Crazy Winters. Ballantine, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1992.

   This is the second in the recent series of mysteries taking place in Jesus Creek, Tennessee. Since the population of Jesus Creek is only 430 at the beginning of the book, and somewhat less than that at the end, you can only wonder (1) how long the series can last, and (2) how the number of murders per capita might compare to other metropolitan areas, such as (for example) the far more notorious New York City, a haven for killers and muggers if ever there was one.

   But before going on any further, I should tell you right away that if you’re a reader fonder of hard-boiled mysteries than not, you should avoid this one with all the gusto you can gather. This one’s about libraries and librarians, and genealogy, and cute characters so lovably eccentric that Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade fans will run screaming from the room and not looking back.

   It’s fairly clear that Deborah Adams has fallen in love with her characters, which is seldom a good thing to do. But no matter how you look at it, the plot really needs some help. It is so frail that Nancy Drew would have solved it in a minute, even on a bad day. With the wind blowing against her.

   Or in other words, if you like whimsical people and even lighter-weight plots, you may find this series a good investment. Do read page 75 again, however, and tell me how two grown people (male and female) groping and tussling with each other at the victim’s funeral could in any way brighten your day.

[UPDATE] 07-06-10. Obviously I did not find much to recommend in this one, and I have not read another in Deborah Adams’ series of “Jesus Creek” mysteries. As I recall, however, while there is a recurring ensemble cast, the leading protagonist changes from book to book. Positive blurbs by Sharyn McCrumb and Joan Hess on the covers show that my opinion was not universal.

      The Jesus Creek series —

1. All the Great Pretenders (1991)

2. All the Crazy Winters (1992)
3. All the Dark Disguises (1993)
4. All the Hungry Mothers (1994)
5. All the Deadly Beloved (1995)
6. All the Blood Relations (1996)

7. All the Dirty Cowards (2000)

HARRIETTE R. CAMPBELL – Crime in Crystal. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1946. No UK edition.

   As Simon Brade sits in the study of the Rev. Christopher Tyrell Dawes preparing to ask him about his new client, Lady Vanessa Lorrister, a seemingly crazed man rushes in and confesses to having strangled Lady Vanessa.

   The vicar doesn’t believe him, but it turns out that Lady Vanessa was definitely strangled. That didn’t kill her, however. Someone had come along a bit later and beaten her to death with a poker.

   The vicar contends that Lady Vanessa was loved by all — in more ways than one, it turns out. But her husband, a possible future prime minister, didn’t care for her, nor did his secretary who had ambitions for him. It is also possible that Lady Vanessa was the head of a black market in clothing during the war and was prepared to tell all, thus jeopardizing others.

   If it weren’t for his income from detecting allowing him to purchase precious jade and porcelain, Brade wouldn’t detect at all. Furthermore, he is at a loss without his fellow sleuth, Inspector Ivy of Scotland Yard.

   Ivy determines the facts. Brade then “sees” connections, working with his “bricks.” As Ivy explains it:

   Brade, at least in this novel, isn’t all that interesting. The other characters, however, particularly the Reverend Dawes, who accompanies Brade in his sleuthing, make up for his blandness.

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

CAMPBELL, HARRIETTE R(ussell). 1883-1950.   Born in New York, the daughter of the state’s attorney-general; married a Scotsman and settled in London. SB = Simon Brade.

    The String Glove Mystery (n.) Knopf 1936 [SB]
    The Porcelain Fish Mystery (n.) Knopf 1937 [SB]

    The Moor Fires Mystery (n.) Harper 1939 [SB]
    Three Names for Murder (n.) Harper 1940 [SB]
    Murder Set to Music (n.) Harper 1941 [SB]
    Magic Makes Murder (n.) Harper 1943 [SB]

    Crime in Crystal (n.) Harper 1946 [SB]
    Three Lost Ladies (n.) Heinemann-UK 1949

W. F. MORRIS – The Strange Case of Gunner Rawley. Dodd Mead & Co., hardcover, 1930. British edition: Geoffrey Bles, hardcover, 1929, as Behind the Lines.

    Tankard, the narrator of the opening chapter of this novel, is a soldier in the British army in the First World War.

    He recounts a strange encounter, when, while captured by the Germans, he saw his friend Peter Rawley in civilian clothes about to be executed by the Germans in a chalk quarry near Bapaume:

    The novel then picks up a year earlier with Peter Rawley before the events at Arras and recounts his own strange story that began with a fellow officer, Rumbald, a charming but reckless fellow of dubious virtue:

    Rawley has to give Rumbald his point, but when Rumbald later assaults Rawley during a confrontation at a forward post Rawley accidentally kills him, and panicked, deserts, which saves his life when the forward observation post is blown up by a German shell — convincing everyone that Peter Rawley is dead and Rumbald killed by the shell.

    The rest of the novel recounts Rawley’s adventures dressed as a civilian behind enemy lines and his encounter with another deserter, Alf Higgins. Morris proves to be a master at depicting the loneliness of the battle zone and its eerie otherworldly quality.

    Rawley’s adventures, and his and Alf’s eventual redemption when the German’s break through the British front, form the rest of the novel ending with Alf and Rawley before a firing squad about to be executed:

    The Strange Case of Gunner Rawley is an entertaining tale with a satisfying resolution, and Morris seemingly had experience in the war which he used to good effect. Though there is no detective interest per se in the book it is clearly marketed as a mystery.

    I don’t know anything about W. F. Morris save that in To Catch a Spy, Eric Ambler said of his novel Bretherton that it was one of the best portraits of a spy working behind the lines in wartime. The dust jacket from this one describes a previous novel, G.B. a Story of the Great War, as realistically weird and this one as “… a mystery story from an entirely new angle.”

    Morris writes well and underplays the obvious melodrama of his story. with the theme of the loss of identity in the confusion of war dating back to The Odyssey, and well handled here. Rawley is portrayed as a human and likable man who finds himself in circumstances beyond his control and how he extricates himself from his dilemma is a well told story of the confusion of war and a “quaint” tale of wartime adventures.

Note: Though this is a novel of wartime adventure, the Dodd Mead edition is marketed as a mystery, as pointed out above, with ads for books by G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, R. Austin Freeman, John Rhode, and Anthony Gilbert on the back cover; and the book is referred to as a mystery novel in the inside dust wrapper copy. Al Hubin also includes it in Crime Fiction IV.

Editorial Comment:   Hubin says this about W. F. Morris, 1893-?   Born in Norwich; educated at Cambridge; battalion commander during WWI; was Assistant Master, Priory School. Listed are seven novels published between 1929 and 1939, one marginally. From the titles, several of them also seem to have wartime settings.

[UPDATE] 07-03-10. [1] Earlier today Jamie Sturgeon sent me a link to an article about Morris. Check it out here.

   The essay//review is incomplete online, but it’s still very informative, including as it does the year that Morris died, 1969, a small piece of data that I’ll quickly send to Al Hubin for the next installment of his online Addenda to CFIV. Mostly, though, the piece is about Morris’s book Bretherton, and it goes into considerable detail about it.

[2] Thanks to the website that David has steered me to in the Comment he left, I’ve been able to add two covers images to this review he wrote.

DAVID FULMER – The Fall. Five Stones Press, trade paperback, March 2010.

Genre:   Mystery/amateur detective. Leading character:  Richard Zale; standalone. Setting:   New York City/Pennsylvania.

First Sentence:   Later, after it was all over, I spent some time thinking about how it was for him at the end.

   Actor and voice-over artist Richard Zale makes the trip back to his hometown after learning about the death of a childhood friend. While feeling guilty for having been out of touch for so long may have drawn him back, questions about his friend’s death keep him there. Why would someone terrified of heights commit suicide by jumping from an outcrop of rock?

   The common man in an uncommon situation is a theme I appreciate, when done well, and Fulmer does it very well. At the same time, he wisely gives his protagonist, Richard Zale, skills to survive, having been a Vietnam veteran and a former boxer.

   It’s this type of detail I appreciate as it makes the character’s actions logical and reasonable. Yet he balances the survival attributes off with a man who is questions his career and can look at his current life in relationship to his past.

   This makes the character interesting and compelling to read. Zale is not, however, the only well-developed character. The supporting characters not only come to life under Fulmer’s deft hand, but ultimately provide the adage that people are not always what they seem.

   This leads to the plot; one which starts with memories triggered by an old song. It is not a story of high action, but one earmarked by subtlety and answers which lead to more questions and with just the right bitter sweetness in the relationships. Perceived motives change and tension increases nicely with the story to a suspenseful and unexpected conclusion.

   As in all his books, Fulmer takes us to the location of his characters and allows us to hear their voices. His dialogue is natural and easy. Fulmer makes a very successful transition from historical mysteries to the contemporary in this very good character-driven story.

   I highly recommend this book, and every book this man writes.

Rating:   Very Good.

           Novels:     # = Early last century (1907-1913) Creole PI Valentine St. Cyr.

    * Chasing the Devil’s Tail. Poisoned Pen Press, hardcover, November 2001. Shamus award winner. [#]

    * Jass. Harcourt Books, hardcover, January 2005. [#]
    * Rampart Street. Harcourt Books, hardcover, January 2006. [#]
    * The Dying Crapshooter’s Blues. Harcourt Books, hardcover, January 2007
    * The Blue Door. Harcourt Books, hardcover, January 2008. Shamus award nomination.

    * Lost River. Harcourt Books, hardcover, November 2008. [#]
    * The Last Time. Stay Thirsty Press, digital Kindle book, June 2009.
    * The Fall. Five Stones Press, trade paperback, March 2010.

GUY ENDORE – Detour at Night. Simon & Schuster, US, hardcover, 1959. Paperback reprint: Award, 1965. British edition: Victor Gollancz, UK, 1959, as Detour Through Devon.

   A former professor of linguistics and now one of the hopeless and homeless, Frank Willis wants to go nowhere and is in no hurry to get there. Nonetheless, by mistake he ends up in Devon, Indiana, where he had been reared in an orphanage, attended and later taught at the college, married the richest woman in town, and been found not guilty of having murdered one of his students.

   On this cold, wet night in Devon, Willis relives some of his experiences and makes the reader aware of his fascination with language, the ways and the whys of speech, a fascination that I would hope any reader would be caught up in.

   When Willis is not examining and, indeed, savoring the language, he conveys considerable tension over the crime that he is suspected of having committed, a crime the details of which are not learned until halfway through the book.

   Not a great mystery, by any means, in the sense of whodunit. Yet Willis is a gripping character, caught in a web he knows he can’t escape. Despite my being unable to give him much sympathy, as he seems to be looking for, I would deem this novel as most enjoyable.

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

ENDORE, (Samuel) GUY. 1900-1970.
   The Man from Limbo (n.) Farrar 1930
   The Werewolf of Paris (n.) Farrar 1933 [Paris; 1871]

   Methinks the Lady (n.) Duell 1945
   Detour at Night (n.) Simon 1959

Editorial Comment:   While for most of his career Guy Endore was also a well-known screenwriter, it’s the second of these novels that he’s most famous for. The Werewolf of Paris is without a doubt an absolute classic.

   I wish I could thank Bill for his review of this book. It shows a side to Endore as a writer that I knew nothing about before.

W. BOLINGBROKE JOHNSON – The Widening Stain. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1942. Hardcover reprint: Cornell University Library Associates, 1976. Trade paperback reprint: Rue Morgue Press, 2007, as by Morris Bishop.

   W. Bolingbroke Johnson is the pseudonym of Morris Gilbert Bishop (1893-1973), and this is his only mystery novel both facts courtesy of the Bibliography of Crime Fiction, by Allen Hubin. For a first and only, it is extraordinarily good and well worth looking out for.

   It is set in a University, largely in its library, and the characters are all university employees. Some are professors,one a custodian, several are young women who catalog the books, and the narrator is the Chief Cataloguer herself, Miss Gilda Gorham.

   A minor subplot keeps us wondering whether Gilda is going to be captured into matrimony by one or another of the professors, but this does not distract from the major interest, the murders.

   First one and then another profess or is murdered in the library. The first might have been an accident, for the beauteous and seductive French professor, Mademoiselle Coindreau, had climbed onto a high balcony, and thence onto a ladder in an evening dress. She might have fallen, and yet there is strong suspicion that she was pushed.

   When an elderly bachelor is found strangled in a locked press which also contains erotica, murder is certain.

   A handful of professors who all came to the library after the President’s reception are the suspects, along with the custodian, who knows a great deal more about the private affairs of the professors than would seem desirable.

   The police are singularly inept, awkward in the face of so much erudition. Gilda begins to detect, and continues in spite of warnings. By interrogating everyone involved and by psyching out the murderer, she traps him in the basement stacks. Both police and innocent male professors are there for her rescue, and Gilda is triumphant.

   The book is enlivened by a scattering, of limericks, which one of the professors makes up on the spur of the moment. Just as a sample:

         There was a young miss of Bermuda
         Who said of her fiance, who’d a
            Thought that he would look
            Like a god in a book!
         She must have been thinking of Buddha.

Bio-Bibliographic Data:   In case anyone was wondering, as I was as I was getting this review ready to post, the “W.” in the author’s pen name stood for Gladys, the author being Welsh. This and a good deal of other information about the author can be found on the Rue Morgue Press website, Tom & Enid Schantz as publishers having made life a whole lot easier for anyone wishing to locate an inexpensive copy of this book to read.

BEN BENSON – The Blonde in Black.   Bantam #1974, paperback reprint; 1st printing, July 1959. Hardcover: M. S. Mill; first edition, February 1958.

   When the subject of police procedurals comes up, and which authors were among the first, Lawrence Treat and his novel V for Victim (1945) is often cited as the first of those in the modern era.

   There were, of course, any number of candidates in the 1930s and even before. The idea of police solving crimes is a natural, after all; private eyes and purely amateur sleuths can’t have all the fun.

   Ben Benson, whose books in softcover I’ve owned for many years (there were 19 of them and this is, alas, only the second one I’ve read) has somehow become neglected as one of the early authors in the field.

   His first book, Alibi at Dusk, came along in 1951, for example, and there were not many other authors who might fit into the category between Treat’s books and his. As a minor quibble, if you were to look closely at The Blonde in Black, you might say that it does not really fit the category — if the category consists of a police department at work upon several unrelated crimes at the same time.

   But if a police procedural can also consist of several members of a police department working as a team, following professional guidelines and conducting a case coolly and intelligently, then The Blonde in Black does indeed qualify, and presumably so do all of Benson’s other books.

   The blonde in question is Junie Jacques, whose image as a sexy singer has been built as a gigantic case of fraud by her record company. She’s in reality a home town girl from Massachusetts who needed the money and agreed mostly against her will to go along with the image the public knows her by.

   And when she tells her record company executive that she’s quitting to get married, to the nephew of the governor, he’s fit to be tied. He’s also very quickly dead, with the D.A.’s office ready to arrest Junie for his death, which she claims to have been only a shooting accident.

   Captain Wade Paris of the Massachusetts State Police is not so sure of Junie’s guilt, and he continues his investigation anyway, regardless of what the ambitious fellow from the D.A.’s office might think.

   In one sense, this is an impossible crime, since Junie’s warning shot against what she thought was an intruder was in the air and toward the figure coming toward her, and as it turns out, the man was shot in the back. But the shot came from her gun, and only one shot was fired.

   A fact which may sound insurmountable, but it’s easily enough solved. (It didn’t take me much time to figure it out, in other words.) Most of the book is taken up, in documentary fashion, with the ins and outs of the music business as it was in the 50s, in what it took to create an image the public would go for; payola to grease the palms of important disk jockey’s; the expectation that girl singers would do whatever it took to get ahead; and so on.

   Benson’s a bit stodgy in the details here, nor does he see a lot to rock-and-roll singing beside the well-planned gyrations on stage, but his policemen, while largely faceless, do know their business. And on the other hand, while the case is a slight one, the other characters involved are real enough to have convinced me.

   Ben Benson died young, in 1959, at the age of only 44, and I don’t know any details. His 19 books were written in a span of less than ten years, the last, The Huntress Is Dead (1960), being published after his death, and was never published in softcover.

   Wade Paris was in ten of his novels; a Massachusetts state trooper named Ralph Lindsey was in another seven. There do not appear to have been any crossovers, but I’d love to be corrected about this. The other two books Ben Benson wrote consisted of one standalone novel and a collection of two novelettes. (Thanks to Roger Ljung, whose comment made an essential correction to this statement.)

[UPDATE] Later the same day.   I have discovered one source online that says this about Benson:

    “[He] was born in Boston and seriously wounded during Army service in WW2. He began writing as therapy…” A complete list of Benson’s novels can also be found on this site.

[UPDATE #2] 07-01-10.   I recently received the following email from Victor Berch, with a cc sent to Al Hubin. The updated information about Benson will appear in the next installment of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV.

Hi Steve:

I became interested in your review of Ben[jamin] Benson’s books and since he was a Boston boy, I decided to check on his vital statistics. I know Contemporary Authors and other sources assign a 1915 birth date to him. However, according to the Massachusetts Vital Records, 1911-1915, there was no Benjamin Benson born in 1915.

What little data that is presented in Contemporary Authors reveals that Benson had enlisted in the US Army in 1943. So, I decided to check out any statistics that might appear in his Army record. Sure enough, his record was available.

It stated that he had enlisted in Boston on Sept. 24, 1943 as a private for the duration of the war (his Army serial number was 31422170, should anyone care to explore his record further). His year of birth was given as 1913, had two years of college education and his civilian occupation was given as a salesman.

Armed with that 1913 birth date, I went back to the Massachusetts Vital Records, 1911-1915. And his record was available. The data revealed that Benjamin Benson II had been born in Boston June 14, 1913, the son of Hyman D., a printer, and Rivka [Rebecca] (Charmonsky) Benson, both immigrants from Russia.

Whatever the family name originally was would have to be obtained from his father’s naturalization papers. His family had only immigrated to the US in 1912.

Best,

Victor

BURTON E. STEVENSON – The House Next Door. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1932. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1932.

   Reviewers, certainly those like me who assay the gold of the past, ought to get hazardous-duty compensation for the dross. Reading this novel could have produced brain rot if the author’s leaden prose had not set up the defense mechanism of allowing me to immediately forget what had just been read.

   Something like eight years passed between Stevenson’s previous mystery effort and this one. I can assure you that he was not perfecting The House Next Door all that time.

   According to the publisher: “In order to aid the reader in choosing a mystery of whose merit he may be certain in advance, the ‘hard-faced editors’ are placing a red badge on those detective stories which they are willing to recommend unreservedly to the most discriminating reader.”

   The red badge on this one is indubitably a fraud, for God knows I am not all that discriminating.

   The only thing that can be said in favor of this novel is the apparent absence of typographical errors. Otherwise, the plot is silly, the characters totally unbelievable, and the characters’ acts and conversation tedious.

   Turning the pages was an ordeal, but I continued to read in the hope that there might be something — anything, even one felicitous phrase — to justify publication. That hope was dashed when page 313 was reached.

   The narrator, a lawyer, judges everyone by physiognomy, even including the first corpse, whose “high, narrow forehead bespoke intelligence, but also a limited and narrow character. There were little peevish lines about the eyes It was a selfish and egotistical face, utterly without attraction.”

   One of the detectives — Godfrey, of the Record, as he is described — says: “‘Of course I suspected [Blank] from the first. For one thing, I didn’t like the way his eyes were spaced.”’

   Anyone unprepossessing or suffering from some slight physical impairment had better not be around these chaps when a crime is committed.

   As for what there is of a plot, Professor Verity wants to change his will, but somebody breaks his neck before he can accomplish that aim. The neighbors are a heathen Hindu and an oily Italian. Look no farther for suspects.

   Oh, there’s another chap that might have done it, but the Professor’s daughter is in love with him and he’s Anglo-Saxon and not obviously disfigured, so he has to be innocent.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   According to Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, Burton E. Stevenson, 1872-1962, wrote thirteen mysteries, one marginally criminous, between 1903 and 1939. The book Bill referred to as preceding this one was The Storm-Center (1924). Jim Godfrey, the sleuth of record in The House Next Door, was in five others, including Stevenson’s first one, The Holladay Case (1903).

   Mike Grost takes a critical look at The Mystery of the Boule Cabinet (1911), one of Stevenson’s earlier books, on his Classic Mystery and Detection website, comparing his work in some ways to that of Mary Roberts Rinehart.

   Many of Stevenson’s books, including the latter, are available online. A complete listing can be found here.

   When he wasn’t writing mystery fiction, Burton Stevenson was quite well-known in other fields, at least locally, in his home town in Ohio. Quoting from this online site:

    “Born in Chillicothe in 1872, Burton Stevenson’s life was devoted to the written word as a prolific author and anthologist, and as a librarian. Following stints as a journalist while a student at Princeton University and then at newspapers in Chillicothe, Stevenson became the librarian of the city’s public library in 1899. He held the post for 58 years.

    “Stevenson then went to Paris as the European director of the Library War Service. After the Armistice in 1918, he established the American Library in Paris and directed it until 1920 and again from 1925-1930. In addition to accomplishments as a librarian, he wrote or compiled more than 50 books….”

   Of all the authors who in the years after World War II moved mystery fiction “from the detective story to the crime novel,” perhaps the most influential American woman was Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995).

   Certainly she’s the only one to have received so much critical attention after her death: first Andrew Wilson’s biography in 2003, more recently Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith, which isn’t a conventional biography but more an exploration of Highsmith’s obsession-torn mind and emotions and how they spilled over into novels like Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

   If you think Cornell Woolrich was something of a psychopath and a creep, you don’t know the meaning of those words till you’ve encountered Highsmith.

   Both, of course, were homosexual. I gather from Schenkar’s book that Highsmith, who was born in Texas and came of age in the feverish New York of the World War II years and went through lovers with the fury of a Texas twister, was never terribly comfortable with being a lesbian.

   Woolrich was perhaps the most deeply closeted, self-hating homosexual male author that ever lived. Both wound up worth several million but often acted as if they were penniless. Both lived mainly on booze, cigarettes and coffee, with peanut butter added to the diet in Highsmith’s case.

   Both bequeathed their copyrights and other property to institutions, not human beings. Woolrich left an autobiographical manuscript (Blues of a Lifetime) which is full of obvious fiction; Highsmith left 8000 pages of notebooks which, as Shenkar demonstrates, are also pockmarked with falsifications.

   But there were notable differences too. Just to mention one, Highsmith was fixated on possessions, keeping everything (except any paper trail leading back to the seven years she had spent in her twenties writing scripts for comic books like Spy Smasher and Jap Buster Johnson), while Woolrich kept nothing, not even copies of his novels and stories.

   It’s most unlikely that the two ever met. Woolrich read very little crime fiction but appeared regularly in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties and may have read Highsmith’s EQMM stories.

   We know she read the magazine steadily and, in her book Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, devoted almost a full page to Woolrich’s “Murder After Death” (EQMM, December 1964).

   Why did she single out this rarely reprinted and never collected tale? Perhaps she saw something akin to her own evil protagonists in Georg Mohler, a loser at the game of love who turns to crime for emotional revenge.

   When the wealthy and lovely Delphine rejects him for law student Reed Holcomb and then dies a sudden but natural death, Mohler concocts a laughably dumb plot to sneak into the funeral parlor, inject poison into her body and frame Holcomb for murder.

   Woolrich’s detail work is sloppy and implausible and his climactic twist, like those in several of his earlier stories, comes straight out of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. But the scene where Mohler hides in the funeral home and posthumously poisons his lover’s corpse is a gem of poetic horror.

   If any single element in the tale deserved Highsmith’s attention it was this one. In fact she spent most of the page summarizing the plot, calling it a “quite well-done gimmick story” with “an elaborate but quite entertaining and believable scaffolding….” Go figure.

   It was a gimmick—the two men in Strangers on a Train (1950) agreeing (or did they?) to exchange murders — that first made crime fiction readers (not to mention Alfred Hitchcock) take notice of the not yet 30-year-old Highsmith.

   Later authors including Nicholas Blake and Fredric Brown worked their own variations on the theme. But who remembers its first appearance in the genre?

   Mum’s the Word for Murder (1938) uses very much the same gimmick, although here it involves three murders, not two, and is saved till the solution rather than employed as a springboard.

   The byline on this long-forgotten book was Asa Baker but the author’s real name was Davis Dresser and his best-known pseudonym was Brett Halliday, which he used for the all but endless adventures of Miami PI Michael Shayne, beginning in 1939, a year after Mum’s the Word came out.

   As chance would have it, much of both novels is set in Texas, where both Dresser and Highsmith spent several of their formative years.