DANA STABENOW – A Cold Day for Murder. Berkley, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1992.

   The first Kate Shugak mystery, she being a former investigator for the DA’s office in Anchorage, here persuaded to check out the disappearance of a Park Ranger six weeks before.

   This is as much about real life in Alaska as it is a mystery, which is OK, but I prefer my detective stories to have more meat to them, and not to be quite so obvious as this.

COMMENT: Stabenow’s book, I have later discovered, won an Edgar as best paperback mystery of the year. Obviously the MWA is looking for social relevance, and they could care less about what I personally read detective fiction for: a solidly plotted story.

[UPDATE] 06-18-10. My views on the objection I put forth in that last paragraph above have changed since I wrote it, back in 1993, but then again, not necessarily all that much. I still look for a detective story first, but if I enjoy the characters and the interaction between them, then a tightly knit puzzle is neither crucial nor first and foremost on my mind.

   I do remember the general story of A Cold Day for Murder, but I don’t recall enough to know if I’d object as much now to the “social relevance” that I found as displeasing as I did back then.

   But I certainly missed the boat on this one, all around. Not only I did have to admit I did not recognize the Edgar-winning quality of her first book, Dana Stabenow has gone on to well-regarded and solidly established writing career.

   There are now 17 books in the Kate Shugak series, another four books with Liam Campbell, and two stand-alones. Liam Campbell is an Alaska State Trooper who, when live backs up on him, takes a post out in an isolated native town far from anywhere. I’ve read one of these also, and while I don’t have handy the review I wrote, I remember feeling the same way about it as I did this first one with Kate Shugak.

   Which is to say, a weak story line, plotwise, and characters I didn’t find myself getting close to. If you were to say I’m all wet about this, I’d just have to grin and bear it.

MEANS DAVIS – Murder Without Weapon. Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, hardcover, 1934.

   Memorial Hospital may be a fine place to visit. It is not a good idea to be one of its patients. One doctor thinks hot coffee and bromos induce sobriety. Another doctor also believes black coffee will straighten out a drunk, but he in addition employs a stomach pump that he just happens to have in his pocket while attending a funeral.

   (The stomach pump is an odd instrument, consisting of a long tube with an oval bulb at one end. The patient, or victim, swallows the end with the bulb. Shortly thereafter, by gravity or faith or something, the stomach contents gush forth through the tube.)

   The hospital’s physician-in-chief describes an aunt’s obsessive interest in her nephew as an Oedipus complex. Another doctor, an expatriate German, says, gutturally of course:

   He is preaching to the converted while holding on to the converted’s thighs, but it’s a good example of how a mystery author craftily contrives to subtly. convey information amid a somewhat mixed metaphor. The converted, by the way, is a nurse; when “she whispered, her nose, which was too long, and her lips, which were too full, contorted sensuously.”

   The author may mean “sensually”; then again, he may not. He may also know what he’s talking about; I don’t. Noses contorting sensuously or sensually are beyond my comprehension.

   This same doctor, something of a ladies’ or at least a nurses’ man, observes the heroine and, wouldn’t you know, mutters:

   Not satisfied with these M.D.’s, the author introduces, should any reader have unwisely reached this point, Timberlake Pitts, a lawyer so oleaginous that Uriah Heep would be forced to view him askance.

   And there is the heroine’s brother, a seldom-do-well whose “charm lay in the rapidity with which the pockets under his eyes could relax into silver-gray shadows.”

   Remember, I just report; don’t expect me to explain.

   Max Higgins, whom many of you will recall from The Hospital Murders (1934), a book I really want to read after I recover from this one, is in Memorial Hospital with a kidney problem. The hospital authorities ask him to investigate. Since he cannot leave the hospital, he calls in his assistant.

   The reason I bought Murder Without Weapon was the chapter titled “Snod Smooty Starts Snooping.” Snod is something of a Saul Panzer, only more talented:

   Actually, it is only when Snod is around that the novel becomes semi-interesting. When asked what he’s been doing recently, he replies that he has been involved in prison work. Asked what he discovered, he says: “Usual thing. Perversion and pellagra. Result: Riots.'”

   When I once read a mystery that had a shark as the murder weapon — no, nothing so mundane as the shark eating the victim — I thought I could no longer be surprised by any murderous device. Means Davis did astonish me here with a unique, I would hazard, method of inducing death, or possibly insanity, though it would seem to work only with elderly ladies who have weak hearts and with young ladies who are neurasthenic.

   Luckily it’s a weapon bloody difficult to find and employ.

   Plot? With all of the above, you want a plot, too? There’s just no satisfying some readers. Well, an elderly lady dies in the hospital after screaming three times and saying, “Vi’s eyes.” And then the heroine sees eyes and screams for 15 minutes and is put away in the same hospital. And then another elderly lady dies in the hospital with a look of awful horror on her face, a look that any sensible reader had long before she got the idea.

Bibliographic Notes:   As Bill pointed out in his review, Max Higgins appeared in one other detective novel by Means Davis, that being The Hospital Murders, 1934, also published by Smith & Haas. He did not mention a third mystery by the author, that being The Chess Murders (Random House, 1937).

   A fact that Bill did not know, or he would have used a different pronoun in referring to the author, is that Means Davis was the pen name of Augusta Tucker Townsend, 1904-1999.

   An online obituary notice for Mrs. Townsend tells us more about her:

[UPDATE] 06-16-10.   I’ve found copies of all three books for sale online, and the first has already arrived. I’ve just added the cover image of The Hospital Murders; the others will be included as soon as they get here.

[UPDATE #2] 06-25-10.   As you see, I now have cover images for all three books. All three that I ordered arrived in due course, and all three had jackets, even though I did not pay more than $20 for any one of them, including shipping. That the jackets are somewhat the worse for wear is not worth mentioning.

LORI ARMSTRONG – No Mercy. Pocket, hardcover, January 2010. Paperback reprint: November 2010.

Genre:   Suspense. Leading characters:   Mercy Gunderson, 1st in series. Setting:   South Dakota.

First Sentence: In the arid summer heat on prairie rangeland, a dead body doesn’t so much rot as it becomes petrified.

   Recovering from her wounds received in Iraq, Army sharpshooter Mercy Gunderson returns to the South Dakota ranch, left to her by her father. Her homecoming isn’t a restful one.

   Mercy’s sister and nephew have problems of their own, and she is being pressured to sell the ranch. The body of a young Indian boy is found on her property and his mother wants Mercy to find who killed him. Another death occurs and Mercy, feeling there is no one she can trust, sets out against escalating violence to find a killer.

   Reading a new-to-you author is a bit of a crapshoot; sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Sadly, this was one of the latter.

   First, there is a portent on page 22: “…I doubted my life could get more complicated or out of my control. Famous last words.” It’s a mystery! Of course things will get out of control. The foreshadowing is completely unnecessary. I might not have even minded so much had the author left off the last three words “Famous last words.”

   Next we have the characters. There is very little character development in the true sense. We receive pieces of background information on some of the characters, but none of them ever feel real to me.

   Mercy is supposed to be a highly trained sniper who was good at her job because she can disassociate her emotions from the task. We never see that. She, and many of the characters, vacillate between being tough to being completely pliant.

   She is the daughter of a former sheriff and spent over 20 years in the military, but I never had a feeling of a code of honor with her, particularly when she did something completely illegal.

   The plot was a case study in “fabula interruptus.” Whether with the scenes of suspense or sex, Armstrong takes you to the point where the circumstances become intense and then backs away. It feels as though she doesn’t know how to follow through and complete those scenes so she doesn’t; she fades to black and picks the story back up later. This isn’t a regency romance, after all.

   I will give credit where it is due. Armstrong does establish a very good sense of place and, while elements of the climax were rather trite and predictable, the story still had some good suspense to it. While I did identify one villain very early in the story, there was a twist and second villain I didn’t see coming at all.

   In all, the problem comes down to the author’s overall writing style and voice. To say the author’s voice was erratic would be an understatement. Armstong employs humorous sarcasm, which I enjoyed to a point, but much of the dialogue is overly strident, and her writing, overall, lacks nuance; there are no shades of gray.

   I doubt I shall read more by Ms. Armstrong.

Rating:   Poor.

      Lori Armstrong’s PI Julie Collins series —

1. Blood Ties (2005)

2. Hallowed Ground (2006)    [profiled here ]
3. Shallow Grave (2007)
4. Snow Blind (2008)

      The Mercy Gunderson series —

1. No Mercy (2010)
2. Mercy Kill (2011)

JOSEPH NATHENSON – The Library of Alex Brandt. Manor, paperback original, 1978.

   In spite of this cover blurb, angled above a devilish bloke in a stage magician’s outfit, gesturing at an open book and some skimpy laboratory paraphernalia, the novel owes almost nothing to Lovecraft and is another of those endless tales of a loony-bin psycho who has a hangup about the “woman-whore” and does something violent and bloody about it periodically.

   What gives this Manor cheapie some interest is that the psycho is also a book collector and there are splendid thrift shop book hunting sequences. The first-person narrator also has a sense of humor and introduces a brutish chap to mumble an unforgettable line when he is asked by the narrator if he is looking for an S. S. Van Dine thriller:

   I rather suspect Mr. Nathenson of throwing in the gore to ensure the publication of a highly subversive book that may lure some of the incipient psychos who drool over it to experience the even more sexually exciting pleasures of the Book Hunt.

Editorial & Bibliographic Comments:   I have no cover image to go with this book, alas. When Walter sent me this review, earlier today, he said he wrote it in 1979, and “I didn’t keep a copy of the book, but if I had I would be inclined to reread it.”

   I suspect that this is the only review that Joseph Nathenson received for any of the four books credited to him in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

   He also wrote one New Age or sci-fi novel Deep, Very Deep Space: A Journey to the Infinite (Manor, 1978). He’s also generally considered to have been the author of Land of Dreams, a historical romance for Harlequin in 1995 under the byline of Cheryl St. John. (Other books by Cheryl St. John do not appear to have been by him.)

   A brief obituary notice can be found here: http://www.jewishjournal.com/obituaries/article/obituaries_20061020/

[UPDATE] 06-17-10.   A comment left by Cheryl St. John states that the book Land of Dreams is definitely one she wrote, not Mr. Nathenson.

ELIZABETH CADELL – The Corner Shop. Morrow, US, hardcover, 1967. Reprint paperback, Bantam, 1970. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, 1966.

   If I had been asked, which I wasn’t, I doubt that The Corner Shop would be on my list of “crime fiction.” My opinion would be the same about the works of P. G. Wodehouse that are in Hubin’s bibliography.

   But since Hubin led me to discover Cadell and others may discover the Master through the bibliography, I shall not complain.

   When Mrs. Lucille Abbey, who owns a secretarial agency with an excellent reputation, has had three of her top employees precipitately abandon a position. When she goes, at great and amusing physical effort, to discover why there was dissatisfaction, she meets Professor Hallam, whose specialty is lungs and who thinks she is applying for the secretarial position.

   He tells her that she wouldn’t suit him. “For one thing, you’re decorative, and while that wouldn’t distract me, it probably distracts you.”

   Professor Hallam is trying to transcribe his father’s notes but is being badgered by a Frenchman who wants to purchase Hallam’s mother’s paintings, which are worthless, in the Professor’s opinion.

   The paintings turn out to have disappeared, Mrs. Abbey goes to Paris to babysit her aunt’s shop and encounters the woman who may have stolen the paintings, Mrs. Abbey puts in an appeal for the Professor’s presence, and the Professor usually an unworldly man, gets everything straightened out, with a happy ending for some and a not disappointing ending for others.

   The Corner Shop is similar to Wodehouse’s works. It is, as all of his are, a farce romance or a romantic farce, with a plot simple yet complex. While they haven’t a great deal of depth, Cadell’s characters are nonetheless interesting and believable.

   She doesn’t write as well as Wodehouse. Who does? She’s a couple of rungs down the ladder, but still very near the top for this sort of book.

   Consider it crime fiction and enjoy it. Or don’t consider it crime fiction and enjoy it.

Editorial Comment: There are some 15 books by Elizabeth Cadell (1903-1989) under her own name in Al Hubin’s Revised Crime Fiction IV, and another three she wrote under the name of Harriet Ainsworth.

   You may have gathered (I did) that her books were included by Al with an asterisk, indicating only marginal crime content. Not so. Only one is, and that one is not this one. (On the other hand, she was the author of 52 novels in all, so it’s clear that crime and/or mystery fiction was hardly her primary playing field.)

   There is a website dedicated to her and her work, which is where I obtained the information just above. This page consists of covers of titles A through D only, but you can easily find the others.

   Another review of The Corner Shop can be found online here; two long paragraphs are quoted.

JOHN CURRAN – Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks. HarperCollins, hardcover, September 2009.

   Since John Curran is the literary adviser to the Agatha Christie estate he was allowed to enter the two locked rooms of her house after it was donated to the National Trust and opened to tourists.

   The two rooms mostly contained copies and first editions of her various novels, story collections and plays but in the smaller room, on the bottom shelf of a bookcase, he found a cardboard box containing notebooks in which Christie jotted down various story ideas and preliminary plotting for most of her novels, stories and plays.

   These notebooks were in no manner orderly; when Christie had an idea she grabbed a notebook at random and jotted it down on the first blank page available. So notes for various of her works are scattered, most of them in more than one notebook and the numbers on them mean nothing as to when she made her entries.

   Also, despite what is printed on the dust jacket, none of the notebooks contains any of the plot ideas for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd nor Murder on the Orient Express and a few others of her works. (He never discusses Witness for the Prosecution, play or story, so I’m presuming that might be another.) The notes for those works presumably are lost. What is here is an abundance of ideas used and rejected for most of the things Christie wrote.

   One thing Curran discovered was that the last Miss Marple novel, Sleeping Murder, was written in the late 40’s and not during World War II as previously believed. (Curtain is another book not covered here.)

   Sleeping Murder‘s original title was going to be Cover Her Face, but it was changed after P. D. James used that title. The two major finds, however, are unpublished short stories featuring Hercule Poirot, which are printed at the end of his commentary.

   The first story was “The Capture Of Cerberus” the 12th Labor Of Hercules. From November, 1939 through most of 1940 the first 11 Labors had been published by the Strand Magazine. It wasn’t until 1947 that she wrote the 12th story which completed the Labors and made possible the collection of that title.

   This original story was unsuitable for pretty obvious reasons: It features a character clearly based on Adolf Hitler and portrays him in a favorable light since, in this story, he has a change of heart and becomes a proponent of World Peace, which would have been pretty hard to swallow with bombs falling on London.

   And though Curran doesn’t say so it in his notes, a plot device turns up that was used in Hitchcock’s 1940 film Foreign Correspondent: the kidnapping of a political figure and his replacement by a double who is then assassinated.

   The other story is called “The Incident Of The Dog’s Ball.” This is much better, but was never offered for publication because it is a 20 page version of what was to become the novel Dumb Witness (Poirot Loses a Client). Christie must have realized she could easily turn it into a novel so never sent it to her agent.

   Finally, if you haven’t read a lot of Agatha Christie’s output and are planning to, be warned: before every chapter Curran states which novels and stories will have their solutions revealed in his discussion.

   I finished Christie’s detective novels and stories and some of her plays (she wrote 20) a long time ago so that didn’t bother me. For those who haven’t, you might put off reading this until after you have. Also, Curran uses the politically incorrect (racist) original title for And Then There Were None when talking about that book.

GYPSY ROSE LEE – The G-String Murder. Hardcover edition: Simon & Schuster, 1941. Also published as: Lady of Burlesque, Tower, hardcover, 1942. Ppaperback reprints include: Pocket #425, 1947; Pop. Library Eagle A3635, 1954; Avon T258, 1958. Penguin, 1984; The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2005. Possibly ghost-written by Craig Rice. Film: United Artists, 1943, as Lady of Burlesque, with Barbara Stanwyck as Dixie Daisy & Michael O’Shea as Biff Brannigan.

   Burlesque impresario H. I. Moss brings Gypsy Rose Lee to the Old Opera Theater — “GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! Laffs! Laffs! Laffs! Boxing Thursday Nights” — and Lee brings her old friend and fellow stripper Gee Gee Graham with her. Soon after their arrival, one of the strippers is strangled with her own G-string, and later another stripper is strangled with yet another G-string.

   Biff Brannigan, the first comic and Lee’s boyfriend, is the unofficial detective in the novel. With his help the police unmask at least one murderer — or maybe a would-like-to-have-been murderer — meanwhile putting Lee’s life at risk.

   Most of the novel deals with the rather unpleasant backstage life of the performers, who aren’t a very mixed crew. Except for the one with a lisp, the strippers are hard to tell apart; they all sound alike in their dialogue, which is mostly puerile and self-centered.

   They aren’t even, if we can believe the rather cattish comments of their peers, attractive physically. Also, more should have been done with what occurred on the stage, certainly the most interesting aspect of burlesque from the customers’ viewpoint.

   Of interest, I would say, only to readers who enjoy show-business-type mysteries, who must be abundant or else there are still many doddering Lee-as-stripper fans around. As evidence, the recent Penguin Books reprint went into a second printing. The earlier Simon and Schuster edition went into printings of double figures, but Lee was still stripping strongly at the time and was in the movies.

   (It appears to be accepted in mystery circles that Craig Rice wrote The G-String Murders. J.R. Christopher’s article in The MYSTERY FANcier 8:3, “Who Really Wrote the G-String Murders?” raises a question about this acceptance.

   In a postscript to the Simon and Schuster edition, Lee is given full credit for the novel. It is said that she did all three drafts by herself, although for the final draft she had the aid of a thesaurus.

   In Erik Lee Preminger’s Gypsy & Me, he mentions The G-String Murders several times, with no indication that anyone other than his mother wrote the book. Responding to a letter I wrote him, he said:

    “The question of Craig Rice’s contribution to The G-String Murders was settled shortly after the book was published. Success has many fathers… Mother’s friend George Davis also claimed credit for G-String.

    “I wasn’t around when Mother wrote the book. Georgia Sothern swore Mother wrote every word, as did Mother. And I saw her write every word of Gypsy.”

   I don’t know what Mr. Preminger meant by Rice’s contribution having been settled, but he is obviously convinced that his mother did indeed write The G-String Murders. My conclusion, for what it’s worth, is that the novel does not have the Rice flair and reads as if Lee were the author — that is, that it is an amateurish effort.)

Editorial Comment:   My own review of this book immediately precedes this one; or in other words, right here.

VICTOR CANNING –

   These two novels from Victor Canning span the course of his long career. The first, Panthers’ Moon (1948), was his second thriller after returning to writing following WW II, while The Fingers of Saturn (1973) came from his most diverse, prolific, and successful era.

   Canning was the third man in the top three thriller writers of his period. If you grant that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene stand alone, then the top three of the period were Hammond Innes, Geoffrey Household, and Victor Canning. They had spectacular sales, uniformly rave reviews, and Hollywood came calling frequently. Canning is unjustly neglected today.

   Canning began writing largely humorous novels in the late thirties, took some time off after the war and came back with The Chasm, a thriller. His second thriller is Panthers’ Moon, which is a classic of its kind, a perfect mix of essential elements.

   The typical Canning hero is a professional, a country man, and a sportsman, but within that type he manages quite a bit of variation from innocents abroad to professional assassins.

   Roger Quain is an engineer asked to help an old friend who owns a circus transport a pair of leopards, a male and a female, who were kept as pets by a wealthy Italian nobleman.

   Quain respects the animal and recognizes the hatred in the beast’s eyes. Back at his hotel Quain is approached by Catherine Talbot, a British Agent, who tells him she has important information she must get out and cannot because she is being watched. The information is in the form of microfilm. Quain agrees to get it out and hides the microfilm in the collar of the male leopard.

   Then the Simplon-Orient Express, on which Quain is transporting the two cats, is wrecked in the Alps and the cats are on the loose. Quain has to recover the animals and the microfilm, and just who he can or can’t trust is a question. Denson, the American journalist who interviewed him before he left Italy, the seductive Carlotta, Valecchi the fat man, Copelnancer the professional hunter, and what of Parradou the policeman?

   And as you might expect Quain himself will become the hunted and the hunter beneath the Alpine Panthers’ moon:

   This one was filmed as Spy Hunt, with Howard Duff and Marta Toren, Walter Slezak as Valecchi, and Robert Douglas as Copelnancer. It’s a solid little film, a minor A production, a little set bound, but making the most of the elements of the cinematic novel.

   The Finger of Saturn from two decades later is a darker book. Canning had become disenchanted with the games played by the Security Services and portrayed them as ruthless and vicious. He himself had divorced his wife and become involved with another woman, prompting the most productive period of his career. It was in this period he wrote what may be his masterpiece, The Rainbird Pattern, filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as The Family Plot.

   The Finger of Saturn is the middle finger, and when it is shorter than the other two fingers surrounding it old wives’ tales imply something sinister. And as we all know not all old wives tales are wrong …

   Robert Rolt used to be something in the Foreign Office, as his father an ambassador had been. Now he takes care of the family estates, Rolthead, a gentleman farmer and land owner. Up to two years earlier he was ecstatically happy with his wife Sarah, but then she went missing.

   Now someone from the Foreign Office shows up with film that shows a woman who looks suspiciously like Sarah. When Rolt goes to visit her he discovers she is Sarah, and has no memories of her past, he convinces her to come home.

   But when they go to visit her mother in Italy they are nearly killed. An accident — or something more sinister. And now a man named Garwood, Deputy Director Statistical Projects of the Ministry of Defense has approached Rolt. Sarah’s family is tied closely to a mysterious group, International Industrial Systems Limited, I.I.S.L. and they would like to know just how closely. All he really knows about his mother in law is that she has made some eccentric donations …

   Soon enough it becomes obvious what Garwood and company want from Rolt. They want him to destroy I.I.S.L.’s secret headquarters at Caradon Abbey in Cornwall, where only he, with Sarah’s contacts, can penetrate their sinister secrets and those of the woman he loves more than anything in the world.

   I won’t give away what Rolt finds, but suffice it to say it is unique among Canning’s novels and he brings it off beautifully as only a true master could.

   To have produced one of these books in a career would be accomplishment enough. To produce two of them a bit over twenty years apart is remarkable.

   That this same career included such books as Castle Minerva, The House of Seven Flies, The Golden Salamander, Birdcage, Queen’s Pawn, The Great Affair, The Limbo Line, Firebird, and Bird of Prey, as well as his best selling Arthurian novels and his works the basis for films such as The Golden Salamander, The House of the Seven Hawks, The Venetian Bird, Masquerade, Shark, and The Family Plot is a sign of his qualities as a writer (his film and television credits are too numerous to produce here).

   Hopefully his work will be rediscovered and reprinted. He’s too good to be forgotten, and writers with his ability too rare to remain unread by future generations. These two are fine examples of his best, but there are many more equal or superior to them.

   Almost any of his thrillers are worth reading for lovers of international intrigue, suspense, action, and adventure. He even ventured into humor in The Great Affair, and to some extent his popular private eye series about Rex Carver, a Brit eye with a six foot tall secretary and a penchant for international intrigue.

   Canning was a Silver Dagger winner and named a Grand Master by the British Crime Writers Association. Grand Master was never a more deserved title. Lovers of the British thriller would be wise to learn his name and read as many of his books as they can find. No one did it better.

       Previously on this blog —

SCORPIO ROOMS: VICTOR CANNING ON TV, by Tise Vahimagi.

VICTOR CANNING – A Fall from Grace (A 1001 Midnights Review by John Lutz).

VICTOR CANNING – The Limbo Line. (Reviewed by David Vineyard).

MASQUERADE (1965). Based on the novel Castle Minerva by Victor Canning. (A movie review by David Vineyard.)

   My apologies for the delay between columns. I was on the road for two and a half weeks, when I wasn’t traveling, proofreading my next book took up all my writing time.

   Cornucopia of Crime, which Ramble House will be doing, will probably run about 450 closely printed pages when the index is finished. It will bring together a ton of long and short pieces I’ve written about mystery writers over the past 40-odd years, including some bits from this column.

   The cover is by New Zealander Gavin O’Keefe, and as anyone can see from the attached image, it’s a knockout.

   Part of my recent week in New York I spent at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where Fred Dannay’s papers are archived, looking into whether Fred had saved anything written to him by Cornell Woolrich that I wasn’t already aware of.

   My most interesting find was a brief undated note that accompanied Woolrich’s last story.”Just consider it on its merits, like you always have all stories,” he wrote. “Don’t feel sorry; I’ve had it better than most guys. I’d like one last publication, before I kiss it off. I’m a writer to the end. And glad I was one.”

   Clearly the story accompanying this note was “New York Blues,” which Fred purchased in May or June of 1967 but didn’t publish in EQMM until the December 1970 issue, more than two years after Woolrich’s death.

   There’s a penciled note on Woolrich’s covering letter which looks to me like Fred’s handwriting and suggests an alternate title for the story, one I actually like more than Woolrich’s: “The Last Hours.”

   In the end, of course, Fred went with Woolrich’s title.

   Stopping off in Cincinnati on the way home from my little odyssey, I happened upon a nice copy of Thieves Fall Out (Gold Medal pb #311, 1953), an obscure paperback original bearing the byline of Cameron Kay, which has never been seen on any other book before or since.

   The true author? Gore Vidal. It’s an ordinary little number, set in Egypt in the days of King Farouk, with minimal action or suspense and not a bit of the satiric wit that enlivened the three whodunits Vidal wrote as Edgar Box during the same time period.

   Among all the TV private eye series of the Fifties and Sixties that never caught on and were quickly cancelled, perhaps the finest was Johnny Staccato (NBC, 1959-60), starring John Cassavetes as a jazz pianist who makes ends meet by working as an apparently unlicensed PI.

   Even in my late teens the music of my life was classical music, but I was still very fond of this series in first run and watched it from the first episode to the 27th and last.

   Half a century later I’ve found the complete series on DVD and it’s still first-rate: evocative streets-of-New-York photography, fine performances (guests included Michael Landon, Martin Landau, Gena Rowlands, Elizabeth Montgomery, Elisha Cook and Mary Tyler Moore), excellent direction (with five episodes helmed by Cassavetes himself), offbeat scripts (including some by Fifties PI novelist Henry Kane), and of course tons of jazz, with a young hepcat then known as Johnny and later as John Williams—like yeah, man, that John Williams— doing the honors on piano.

   The series must have been planned as a sort of Peter Gunn clone but turned out quite different, mainly, I think, because the cool-jazz sound of Gunn was replaced by a hotter, more passionate music style.

   Something I read recently (I won’t say where) suggested to me that there ought to be an annual award for most eye-popping boner in or about mystery fiction. My first candidate for this honor, who shall remain nameless, wrote of Nero Wolfe that he “tended a rose garden on his roof….”

   Ouch! That’s a thorn from one of those roses.

RAYBURN CROWLEY – The Valley of Creeping Men. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1930. Hardcover reprint: Grosset & Dunlap, no date.

   This is a book that any lover of high adventure, goofy science, and lost-race novels won’t be able to put down.

   Somewhere in Africa, protected from the outside world by a forbidding mountain lies a valley in which — legend has it — dwells a race of golden gorillas, somewhere on the evolutionary scale between ape and man:

   The murder in London of the brilliant but loony scientist Marakoff — the discoverer of the gorilla — sets off an international pursuit that includes more murders, treachery and relentless peril.

There’s some colorful writing here, the kind that always sets my pulse to pounding:

   And away we go. The women are seductively beautiful, the men strong and intense, and the landscapes are painted with a skill that’s a cut above some of the plotting:

   Edgar Rice Burroughs, eat your heart out!

   In an appendix at the end of Chattering Gods, the sequel to Valley, published by Harper in 1931, the publisher poses the question “Who IS Rayburn Crawley?”

   In an accompanying letter, Crawley defends his anonymity by claiming that: “Any author worth reading can be known, and very fully known, by his books.”

   The publisher calls this a challenge and, listing several questions that might be asked about the reclusive author, offers autographed copies of the two books to “the persons who answer these questions correctly.”

   Laura Spencer Portor Hope and Dorothy Giles are identified in the current version of Hubin as the authors hiding behind the Crawley pseudonym, and Victor Berch has added that their identity was known as early as July 7, 1958, when the copyright on the book was renewed.

   Now if only somebody could find out the names of the winners of the Harper contest. It’s intriguing, to say the least, that autographed copies, in dust jacket, of the two books may be in some collector’s private library.

Editorial Comments:   Walter sent me this review after he spotted this book in Victor Berch’s “Checklist of Harper’s Sealed Mysteries,” announced on this blog not too long ago. This is a revised version of a review he wrote some 20 odd years ago, and he admits that he’s been wondering about the author’s identity ever since.

   As good as Walter says this book is, why it should have been published as a Sealed Mystery, along with the John Dickson Carr’s, Hulbert Footner’s and others is another mystery that’s lost in the mists of time.