This column isn’t my usual hodgepodge but sticks to one subject and therefore deserves a title. How about “Call for Campion Complete”?

    A few months ago and for no particular reason I decided to read the first series of Margery Allingham’s short stories about Albert Campion in the order of their original publication as far as that could be determined.

    After some research on my own shelves and in The FictionMags Index, which is by far the leading Web source when it comes to identifying where almost any work of short fiction in English first appeared, I identified 18 tales that clearly belonged on my reading list: two dating from 1936 or earlier, fifteen that appeared in The Strand Magazine between late 1936 and 1940, and a singleton first published in a London newspaper shortly before the outbreak of World War II.

    There are also two short-shorts that present bibliographic as well as criminous puzzles but let’s save them for a while, shall we?

    Revisiting the Easy Eighteen between 70 and 80 years later, I found them by and large to be as clever, charming and delightful as I remembered them from decades ago. Most of the crimes in these stories are jewel thefts or con games, with hardly a murder anywhere but plenty of indications in the later tales that England is moving ever closer to that form of mass murder we call war.

    “The Man with the Sack” (The Strand, December 1936) is a light-hearted Christmas story in which Campion frustrates a jewel scam while attending a holiday party at one of those stately homes of England that abound in Golden Age crime fiction.

    Two years later, during the last peacetime Christmas season, came “The Case Is Altered” (The Strand, December 1938), where the setting is yet another holiday party at yet another stately home, but this time the McGuffin is a secret document revealing the country’s plans to purchase huge numbers of war planes.

    The next Campion tale in The Strand and for my money one of the weakest is “The Meaning of the Act,” an international espionage trifle which came out in the issue of September 1939, the month Hitler invaded Poland.

    The eighteenth and last story in the batch is “A Matter of Form” (The Strand, May 1940). This one centers around a magnificent con game which could only have been devised during the so-called phony war, a time of “children in uniform and bankers in mourning” but with minimal disruption of ordinary life, so that Campion can still enjoy an oyster appetizer in the heart of a London soon to be blitzed.

    The two stories that predate the fifteen in The Strand and a third from near the end of the cycle need to be treated separately.

    “The Border-Line Case” is shorter than any Strand tale and, unlike any other Campion exploit, has a first-person narrator, namely Allingham herself. A careless reading of the story might suggest that she was cohabiting with her character, but then one notices a few subtle hints that besides the narrator and Campion and Detective Inspector Stanislaus Oates, there is a fourth and silent person in the room, presumably P. Youngman Carter, to whom Allingham had been married since 1927.

    My guess is that this neat little impossible-crime story dates from between 1933 and 1935, making it Campion’s first short exploit.

    “The Pro and the Con” is the same length as the Campion stories in The Strand but doesn’t seem to have appeared there. In this tale we find Campion bound, gagged and beaten up by an Edgar Wallace-style gangster, and that fact alone suggests a date slightly earlier than the Strand fifteen.

    “The Dog Day” first appeared in the London Daily Mail sometime in June 1939, probably having been rejected by The Strand because of its complete crimelessness.

    So much for the eighteen Campion tales that definitely belong on my reading list. Now we come to those two pesky short-shorts, each limited to a single scene and just one or two characters if you don’t count Campion and Scotland Yard’s Stanislaus Oates and the corpse.

    The earlier of the pair to appear in the U.S. was “The Unseen Door” (Mystery Book Magazine, August 1946), which takes place in the billiards room of a London club. No concrete detail hints that the story might have been published in England ten or more years earlier and therefore belongs in the first series.

    My hunch that it does stems from the other short-short, “Mr. Campion’s Lucky Day” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1947). Judging from his introduction, founding editor Fred Dannay thought Allingham had just written the tale. In the EQMM version Oates is given the rank of Superintendent, which he first sported in “The Old Man in the Window” (The Strand, October 1936). But when this tale finally appeared in a collection (The Allingham Minibus, 1973), Oates’ title is Detective Chief Inspector!

    This strikes me as highly persuasive evidence that the story first appeared in England before October 1936. And is it plausible that two Campion short-shorts with as much in common as this one and “The Unseen Door” could have been written more than ten years apart? My tentative conclusion is that both are early entries in the Campion saga. Perhaps someday we’ll know for sure.

    While immersed in my Allingham project I came upon a curious connection between one of these tales and perhaps the most powerful of all English noir novels, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938).

    The sociopaths from the lower depths whose leader is the sexually terrified young racetrack racketeer Pinkie refer to women in several terms like “buers” which I’ve never seen elsewhere. But the Greene character who calls a young woman a “polony” has his counterpart in Allingham’s “The Meaning of the Act,” where a lower-class pickpocket uses the same word, although she (or perhaps her Strand editor) spells it “palone.”

    To anyone eager for more about this obscure contribution to English slang: Google the word in either spelling and you will be enlightened.

    Even reading the fifteen Campion stories from The Strand requires more work than one might think. Besides needing to be at home in FictionMags Index, and assuming you don’t own copies of the magazine from the second half of the 1930s, you must have access to most of the Allingham collections published over the past 70-odd years.

    The second edition of Mr. Campion and Others (Penguin, 1950) contains twelve of the fifteen, although chaotically out of order. But the 1936 Christmas story “The Man with the Sack” was collected only in Mr. Campion: Criminologist (1937) and The Allingham Minibus (1973), and its analogue from two Christmases later, “The Case Is Altered,” remained uncollected until The Return of Mr. Campion (1989).

    That volume is also the sole hardcover source for the crimeless but charming “The Dog Day.” “The Border-Line Case” and “The Pro and the Con” were collected in both Mr. Campion: Criminologist (1937) and The Allingham Case-Book (1969), with “Border-Line” also appearing in the first edition of Mr. Campion and Others (1939) but not the second (1950).

    Those pesky short-shorts “The Unseen Door” and “Mr. Campion’s Lucky Day” remained uncollected until the Minibus started to roll.

    Then there’s one final problem. If you set out to read the Campion stories in order of first publication, as I did, you wind up having to save one of the earliest for last.

    How can this be? Because of “The Black Tent,” which Allingham clearly wrote around 1936 but then put aside and rewrote as “The Definite Article” (The Strand, October 1937). The first version remained unpublished until almost a quarter century after her death, when it was included in a British anthology (Ladykillers: Crime Stories by Women, 1987) and then in the most recent Allingham collection to date, The Return of Mr. Campion (1989).

    What a mess! Wouldn’t it be loverly if someday all the Campion shorts were brought together in their proper order in a single book?

NOTE:   Previously on this blog: A Review by Mike Tooney: MARGERY ALLINGHAM – Mr Campion and Others.

[UPDATE] 02-25-10.   I [Steve] posted this last question asked by Mike on the Yahoo Golden Age of Detection group. That it was a good idea, everyone agreed at once. Others wondered if other authors might also be honored with Complete Short Story collections, including (and especially) Edward D. Hoch. Here’s a reply from Doug Greene, head man at Crippen & Landru, which he’s graciously allowed me to reproduce here:

   I fear that a complete collection of the Campion shot stories would make a hefty volume, but I’d love to see it done. C&L, however, specializes in books of uncollected short stories — though we made an exception of C. Daly King’s The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant, which added 4 or 5 previously uncollected stories to the original 1935 volume.

   The agent for Lillian de la Torre would like us to collect all of her Dr. Sam: Johnson stories into a single book — including 5 or so uncollected tales, but again the volume would be very long, and pricey to publish.

   On the Hoch suggestion, Ed wrote almost 1000 short stories, which would fill about 66 volumes of the usual C&L size. We’ve already published 6 Hoch collections and have plans for at least 3 more… depending on energy and cash flow.

   Our latest, Michael Innes’ Appleby Talks About Crime, is now in print, and we’re sending out copies to our subscribers as quickly as possible — especially since I leave for England in about a week (and will stay 10 days). After I return, we’ll take orders from the general public. And to answer an unspoken query, all the stories are previously uncollected.

                  Doug G

   Then this response, also first appearing as a post on the Yahoo GAD group:

   Barry Pike, chairman of the Margery Allingham Society, has been trying for a while to persuade Vintage, the UK publishers, to do this, but he doesn’t seem to be getting very far.

      Lesley
       —
         Lesley Simpson
          http://www.margeryallingham.org.uk

    In spite of some less than entirely optimistic answers, thank you both, gentlemen!

          Steve

EILÍS DILLON – Death at Crane’s Court. Walker, US, hardcover, 1963. Paperback reprint: Perennial, 1988. Trade paperback: Rue Morgue Press, 2009 (shown). First UK edition: Faber & Faber, 1953.

   To his dismay, George Arrow, of no particular occupation but with a comfortable income, is told by a doctor he consults after he passes out one day that he has a bad heart condition and must avoid most activities and any excitement. A good place to go that meets those exigencies is Crane’s Court, a posh hotel in Galway, Ireland.

   Unfortunately, Arrow discovers that Crane’s Court is actually a hotbed of intrigue. A new owner has inherited the hotel and intends to put the old residents — old in both age and tenure — in their place or cast them out.

   Of course, the old people are up in arms, or at least those who can lift them are. Is it possible they en masse, or one of them a little more agile than the others, plunged a chef’s knife into the new owner? Or maybe it was the dotty old lady who has numerous cats that tend to die before their time and who gets visited by the haunt who built the original Crane’s Court.

   Referring to the elderly inhabitants, Professor Daly says:

   Heresy is about to he committed by this reviewer, and no doubt there shall be moves to have me expunged from the ranks of true mystery fans. Nonetheless, I have to state that this is a fine novel until the murder. When Inspector Mike Kenny arrives to investigate the killing, Arrow and Daly begin to take a back seat and the book then becomes only very good.

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

DILLON, EILÍS.   1920-1994.

       Death at Crane’s Court (n.) Faber 1953.    [Insp. Mike Kenny]
       Sent to His Account (n.) Faber 1954.

       Death in the Quadrangle (n.) Faber 1956.    [Insp. Mike Kenny]

   Why only the three detective novels, in a long career of writing? (She “…was the author of fifty books, ranging from children’s stories to historical novels. She wrote and translated poetry, and had two plays produced by the Abbey Theatre company.”)

   There’s a long account of her life by her son, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, at the Rue Morgue Press website, from which the previous excerpt was taken, along with the answer. As a short biography of her, it’s well worth reading.

   The other good news is that all three mysteries have been reprinted by Rue Morgue Press.

   Regarding this latest discussion on Shiel, there is something to be said for both sides. Jess is clearly right that Asian villains appeared in lots of fiction before 1898 when Shiel got involved.

   But, David is also correct in suggesting that The Yellow Danger was something of a breakthrough novel in the genre. It was probably the first yellow peril novel to approach best seller status in England.

   I did a lot of research on the yellow peril topic 30 or so years ago for my essay in M. P. Shiel in Diverse Hands (1983), “Some Contemporary Themes in Shiel’s Early Novels: Part I, The Dragon’s Tale: M. P. Shiel on the Emergence of Modern China.”

   I read as much as I could find of the pre-1898 YP [Yellow Peril] fiction looking for influences on Shiel and a little of the later stuff looking for examples of Shiel’s possible influences on others.

   I concluded that he probably hadn’t read much if any of the prior YP stuff. I can’t speak to the Dime Novels which Jess knows, but the early US stuff originated on the West coast, was largely propaganda against Chinese immigration and may never have been distributed widely in America, let alone England. (For instance, the Woltor title Jess cites was an 82 page pamphlet issued by a California publisher.)

   The primary influences on Shiel were contemporary events. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 proved that a “colored” country could master modern weapons and raised the specter of Japan taking over or otherwise leading the untapped masses and resources of China into the modern world.

   At the end of the war Russia, Germany and France intervened to force Japan to accept a higher indemnity from China instead of Manchuria and other territories won with blood.

   In November 1897 two German missionaries were murdered in China, which provided Germany the pretext to demand control over the port of Kiao-Chau and the neighboring province. France and Russia responded with territorial demands of their own, leading to concerns about the pending break up of China. (Russia actually seized the very territory she had helped to force Japan to give up in 1895.)

   England feared the loss of its paramount position in the China trade, as well as the possibility that the concerted actions of Germany, France and Russia might indicate an active alliance among the three against England. There were debates in parliament about the crisis and speculation in the press that war might break out.

   Then Peter Keary hired Shiel to write a new serial capitalizing on public interest in the crisis. When the first installment of “The Empress of the Earth” was published in Pearson’s Short Stories on 5 February 1898, his original readers knew the background and recognized the cross-references to recent history and contemporary events.

   The first third of the serial literally was incorporating the previous week’s headline events as they occurred, including well-known politicians and other public figures as characters. The public loved it.

   And when the Boxer Rebellion broke out in 1899 it seemed to confirm Shiel’s vision of a hostile China declaring war on the West, and triggered a re-serialization of the serial and reissues of the book versions both in England and America.

    [There are three major versions of the text. Since it was so popular Pearson instructed Shiel to string the serial out to 150K words, about twice the original contract length. Shiel cut it back by a third for the Grant Richards edition, but had to rewrite the final chapter and make some further revisions to the order of the US publisher. From comments to Richards, Shiel seems to have preferred the Richards text.

    [Morse photo-offset the serial with lots of art in Volume I of his series, which is still available. Both the UK & US book versions have been reprinted in expensive series, but are available on Google as pdf downloads.]

   And Dr. Yen How, the Sino-Japanese mastermind, was not based on some prior figure from YP literature, or a shadowy criminal from Limehouse (as Rohmer would later claim about Fu Manchu.)

   He was almost certainly inspired by the Chinese revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (1866-1925,) as I demonstrated in my old essay. (Follow the link.)

   Sun had first gained notoriety in 1896 when he was kidnapped and briefly held in the Chinese Embassy in London until screaming headlines roused public pressure on the British government to demand his release. Sun commented: “The reporters drew me into the hotel more forcibly than Tung drew me into the legation building, and they coveted news from me more anxiously than the Manchu government wanted my head.”

   Most modern readers who stumble across the book have no idea about any of this, assume Shiel was writing on a clean slate and simply made all that stuff up. Shiel himself considered the novel hackwork and seemed embarrassed about its success. It was the only work published in his lifetime which approached best seller status.

   The relative success of Danger as compared to his better work must have galled him. Faced with a steady decline of his income from writing from 1900-1911, he tried to recapture the success of Danger when Sun Yat-Sen came back into the headlines during the Chinese Revolution, culminating in Sun becoming the first president of the new Chinese Republic.

   Though it was a better book in most respects, The Dragon (1913, serialized in The Red as “To Arms!”) failed to interest the public and was a complete commercial disaster. Shiel fell into a pit of personal problems and didn’t write another novel for a decade.

   Shiel inscribed a copy of The Dragon:

   Finally, though Jess didn’t mention it, David’s review/essay also has some odd errors about the text of the book itself and other points. John Hardy did not die of consumption. He was killed in a duel. I speculate why in my essay, but I assume few of you are still reading at this point. I could go on, but enough is enough. I’ll stop for now, but there are depths to the book, and Shiel, beyond those suggested in the review.

ANTHONY OLIVER – The Pew Group. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1981. Paperback reprint: Fawcett Crest, 1985. UK edition: William Heinemann, hc, 1980.

   Here’s a first novel that kept me laughing all the way to the last page!

   It’s set in an English village, but after that any resemblance to the good old conventional English murder mystery ceases. No one, least of all Doreen, is going to call her tripping her dull, antique dealer husband at the top of the stairs murder.

   But his death sets off a marvelous train of events: Doreen’s mother arrives from Cardiff, funeral unbaked meat under her arm. Joseph O’Shea, itinerant picker, tries to sell an undistinguished piece of pottery to a gay antique dealer; unsuccessful there, he goes on to Doreen’s, where he’s more successful in more than one way. The pottery turns out to be “The Pew Group,” a fantastically valuable piece, but as the assembled party partakes of baked meats after Rupert’s funeral, “The Pew Group” disappears.

   Inspector Webber, born in Flaxfield, returned there after a failed marriage and a lackluster career, finds new life in his old home town, as almost everyone involved does. Most of the characters are slightly bent, most of them are enjoying sex lives that aren’t exactly conventional and sometimes not even legal.

   All of them want “The Pew Group.” Who gets it and how we find out at the end, after a thoroughly delightful roam in the British country gloamin’.

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

OLIVER, ANTHONY.    SC: Lizzie Thomas & Insp. John Webber, in all titles.

       The Pew Group (n.) Heinemann 1980.
       The Property of a Lady (n.) Heinemann 1983.
       The Elberg Collection (n.) Heinemann 1985.

       Cover-Up (n.) Heinemann 1987.

Note: Coming soon to this blog will be Maryell’s review of The Property of a Lady.

BARBARA FROST – The Corpse Died Twice. Coward McCann, hardcover, 1951. No paperback edition.

   Though suffering from a severe hangover, Jerome Carrigan doesn’t feel he deserves the obituary published in a New York City newspaper. He calls upon Marka de Lancey, attorney at law, to investigate it and also asks her to check on an insurance policy he is considering purchasing. She doesn’t have time for the latter since Carrigan is found dead in a Turkish bath at Coney Island under suspicious circumstances.

   This is de Lancey’s second murder investigation with Lieut. Jeff McCrae of Manhattan Homicide. It is a moderately amiable non-fair-play novel.

Bio-Bibliographic Data: According to Al Hubin in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, Barbara Frost (married name Barbara Frost Shively) was a publicity manager for J. B. Lippincott Co., an obvious rival to Coward McCann, who was the publisher of her four mystery novels.

   Bill is correct in saying that this is Marka de Lancey’s second appearance. He did not mention that there was a third, however, nor that Ms. Frost’s first crime novel was not a series entry. One source on the Internet suggests that the police lieutenant’s name was spelled “Macrae.” It is not presently known if he appeared with Marka de Lancey’s in all three of her cases.

FROST, BARBARA.   1903-1985.   Note: Marka de Lancey appeared in books two through four:

        The Unwelcome Corpse (n.) Coward 1947.
        The Corpse Said No (n.) Coward 1949.
        The Corpse Died Twice (n.) Coward 1951.
        Innocent Bystander (n.) Coward 1955.

Editorial Inquiry: Marka de Lancey’s first appearance was in 1949, making her perhaps one of the earliest female attorneys to appear in crime fiction. Who may have preceded her in this category?

[UPDATE] 02-08-10.   See comment #3. It isn’t a definitive answer, but if Jon Breen doesn’t know of any other female attorney who was a lead character in a mystery novel and who came before Marka de Lancey, then my money’s on the fact that there weren’t any.

   I agree wholeheartedly with the review Steve Lewis recently did of Goldsmith’s Detour. It’s every bit as fine as the much-lauded film version (which follows the novel’s progression fairly closely), and unputdownable once begun.

   It so happens I have a copy of Double Jeopardy, which I’ve read and which is excellent if not quite as good as Detour. I thought everyone might like to see a scan of the jacket of the earlier book; it’s included here, as is one of the first edition of Detour. Both books were published by Macaulay.

   Here’s the dust jacket blurb for Double Jeopardy, in its entirety:

   Amen to that last line.

   Goldsmith’s third and final novel, Shadows at Noon (Ziff-Davis, 1943), is a dark wartime fantasy that examines what might have happened to a disparate group of ordinary citizens if Nazi bombers had actually penetrated U.S. air space and dumped their payloads on a large American city. Interesting, but not nearly as good as his two crime novels.

   Goldsmith spent some twenty years in Hollywood, beginning in the mid 40s, where one of his first film scripts was for the film version of Detour. He later scripted several other B films and wrote for episodic TV. Another of his films was The Narrow Margin, the well-regarded 1952 version; he also wrote an episode of The Twilight Zone. His other claim to fame is that he was married to Anthony Quinn’s sister.

   Although Martin M. Goldsmith was a successful novelist, screenwriter and playwright, the details of his private life are not well known. By all accounts Goldsmith preferred it that way. When his publisher asked him what they should tell their readers about his life, the author replied that it was enough to say that he was there yesterday, here today and “… God knows where I’ll be tomorrow.”

   What is known is that Martin Goldsmith was born in New York City in 1913. Over the course of his life he rarely lived in one place for long and in 1928, while still in his mid-teens, he left New York “via the thumb route” to see the rest of America. His writing career began a few years later with the publication of several short stories. By the late 1930’s Goldsmith was in Mexico, where he wrote his first book, Double Jeopardy, a crime novel published by the Macaulay Company of New York.

   In 1938, the author moved to Hollywood, hoping to write for films. To break into the film industry he took a job as a stage hand and used the opportunity to see how films were made. During his first year in Hollywood, Goldsmith completed work on the manuscript that would become Detour. Unlike the film version of Detour, the novel features two characters who live on the fringes of the Hollywood dream – Sue Harvey, a would-be actress working as a waitress at a local drive-in and Raoul Kildare, a bit-player who plans to leave Hollywood to try his luck on Broadway.

   In its final form the book has a tough and hard-boiled writing style, one often identified with the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. When Detour was published by Macaulay in January of 1939, the New York Times called it “… a red hot, fast-stepping little number…” and favorably compared it to the works of James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

   In 1944 Goldsmith sold the film rights to Detour to the Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), with the understanding that he would be hired to write the screenplay. The author finished writing the screenplay before the hiring of director Edgar G. Ulmer, the person most often credited with the film’s success. Operating under a tight budget and with little known actors, Ulmer shot the fIlm in less than a week, relying heavily on Goldsmith’s detailed script. Released in 1945, the film version of Detour is recognized as a masterpiece of film noir. In 1992 the film was selected by the Library of Congress for entry into the National Film Registry.

   In all, Goldsmith received screen credit for work on twelve films including Dangerous Intruder, Blind Spot, Shakedown, and Hell’s Island. He wrote two other novels, Shadows at Noon, a fictional account of an enemy attack on Manhattan, published in 1943, and a comic novel, The Miraculous Fish of Domingo Gonzalez, published in 1950.

   In 1952 he received an Academy Award nomination for contributing the story for the crime film, The Narrow Margin. During these years he also wrote for television, turning out episodes of The Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke and Playhouse 90.

   Despite his success as a screenwriter, Goldsmith eventually tired of writing for films and television and in the mid 1960’s he gave it up to spend more time traveling with his wife and writing books. His last works included an unpublished autobiography and a play entitled Night Shift, which ran for 24 performances at the Labor Theater in New York in the fall of 1977. After a long period of declining health, Martin M. Goldsmith died on May 24, 1994.

NOTE: This short biography of Mr. Goldsmith is also the foreword to the current reissue of Detour by O’Bryan House, Publishers LLC, the first American paperback edition of this classic crime novel. It is reprinted here with the permission of Mr. Doody.

MEDORA FIELD – Blood on Her Shoe. The Macmillan Co., hardcover, 1942. Paperback reprint: Popular Library #201, no date stated [1949].

   Despite the fact that her cousin, assumedly a levelheaded chap, calls to tell her not to come to St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, though with no explanation, Ann Carroll goes anyhow.

   Despite the fact she would rather not be there, she attends a ghost-seeking session at a graveyard, where murder occurs.

   Despite the murderer being still at large and she possessing, or so it is presumed, information that might identify the murderer, she visits a lonely farm house alone at dead of night.

   Despite nearly dying from that dunderheadedness, she goes later to the graveyard by herself to gather evidence.

   At the end of the novel, the young man she is in love with has been arrested for being AWOL and has assaulted the M.P.’s. This novel isn’t a matter of had-I-but-known. She does know, and she deserves all she gets, including her future husband.

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

FIELD, MEDORA. Working byline of Medora Field Perkerson, 1892-1960. Born in Georgia; newspaper columnist in Atlanta as “Marie Rose.”

    Who Killed Aunt Maggie? Macmillan, hc, 1939. Film: Republic, 1940.
    Blood on Her Shoe. Macmillan, hc, 1942. Film: Republic, 1944, as The Girl Who Dared (with Lorna Gray, Peter Cookson).

BARBARA LEONARD REYNOLDS – Alias for Death. Coward-McCann, hardcover, 1950.

   On her way by bus from Chicago to Dayton, Ohio, in 1945, Abigail Potter, prolific mystery writer under her own name and various pseudonyms, hears the plot for a perfect murder as planned by an Army corporal.

   By quick thinking, she discovers his real name and destination — Glen Falls, Ohio — and subscribes to the local paper awaiting news of an unexpected sudden death. Three years go by before one is reported, and then it is not the death of the person she believed was to be the corporal’s target.

   Knowing how the crime was committed and by whom, but not having any idea of why the victim was not whom she expected, Potter decides to go to Glen Falls, discover more about the crime, and unmask the murderer. However, all — indeed, very little — is not what she supposed, and she herself may have been the target of a poisoner.

   While not a first-class novel of a little-old-lady detective and not quite living up to its fine beginning, this is nonetheless good reading. Moreover, the author presented a situation that I considered nonsensical, explained it feebly, and thus caused me to overlook the essential pointer to the murderer. Excellent misdirection I thought, though it probably won’t fool anyone else.

   This was Reynolds’ only mystery. Why didn’t she write more?

Bio-Bibliographic Data:   As Bill says, this is the author’s only mystery. It’s a scarce book in nice condition; only good and/or ex-library copies can be more easily found — which I’ve done.

   There’s no information about Barbara Leonard Reynolds on the jacket, only the photo which you see to the left. Says Al Hubin of her in the Revised Crime Fiction IV: Born in Milwaukee (1915); lived in Ohio and then Hawaii. Year of death: 1990.

   News of Robert B. Parker’s death on Monday quickly made the rounds of the mystery-oriented blogs yesterday. Three that I’d be especially pleased to send you to, since they largely reflect my own feelings, are Bill Crider’s blog, The Rap Sheet and Dwight Brown’s blog.

   There are two books that I consider the gems of my collection, and given the size of my collection, that’s saying a good deal. If there were a fire or other disaster here, these are the books I’d save first, after saving the really important things, that is.

   One is A Is for Alibi (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1982), by Sue Grafton, and the other is The Godwulf Manuscript (Houghton Mifflin, 1973), by Robert B. Parker.

   Both are hardcover first editions in jacket, and both are in Very Fine condition. The reason that I consider them gems is not because they’re valuable, which I imagine they are, but that they’re both Key Books in the development of the Private Eye novel. (I’m not alone in believing this, which in turn is what makes them valuable.)

   Of the two, Godwulf came first, of course, and it was like a breath of fresh air in the PI sub-genre, which by the early 1970s was all but dead. It’s also the least typical of the Spenser books. Parker was channeling Chandler at the time (not a bad thing to do) and hadn’t developed his own voice yet. Susan Silverman didn’t come along until God Save the Child (1975), Book #2, and Hawk made his first appearance in Promised Land (1976), the fourth in the series.

   In the beginning, the opening lines of The Godwulf Manuscript:

   The photo of Mr. Parker you see above comes from the back cover of the same book. If you think that he looks a lot like Spenser did then, I do too, and maybe even more than you. I doubt that Spenser has aged much in the 37 years (and 39 books) since, maybe 10 years, no more.

   Look for his 39th adventure, Painted Ladies, later this year. I know I will.

[UPDATE] 01-22-10. Since posting this brief tribute to Robert B. Parker, I’ve been going through my files, trying to locate the reviews I wrote of his earlier books. I haven’t been entirely successful, but come to find out, I’d posted one on this blog last year, and I’d forgotten I had. This one’s a review of The Judas Goat. Check it out here.