FAY GRISSOM STANLEY – Murder Leaves a Ring.

Dell 662; paperback reprint; no date stated, but circa 1953. Cover art: James Meese. Hardcover edition: Rinehart & Co., 1950. Hardcover reprint: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, 4-in-1 edition, January 1951.

   It’s difficult to make out from the image I found, but if I’m reading what’s in the small circle on the cover of the hardcover edition correctly, this book was the winner of a “Mary Roberts Rinehart Mystery Contest.”

   It was also one of only two mystery novels Fay Grissom Stanley, 1925-1990, wrote. The other was a paperback original from Popular Library in 1975, a gothic romance titled Portrait in Jigsaw, as by Fay Grissom.

   There is a short online autobiographical sketch by her daughter, Diane Stanley, an illustrator and author herself, in which she talks about her mother (follow the link), and mentions other books she wrote. Her mother was taken ill by tuberculosis for several years, which may explain the long gap between the two books, and perhaps why there were only two.

   Murder Leaves a Ring is pure detective fiction, and the cover (as you will have seen for yourself) falls into the “body in a bathtub” subgenre. It’s told by the primary protagonist, Katheryn Chapin, a would-be mystery writer herself, as we learn on page one: she’s working on the manuscript of a novel called “Murder on Monday,” just before climbing into a tub, where she first must clean the ring left behind by one of her two roommates, a showgirl named Iris McIvers.

   Later on, during a party of fellow Manhattanites, many in the world of the theater, it is Iris’s body who’s found in the very same tub, fully clothed, but with a stocking knotted tightly around her neck. It is learned soon after that Iris had been doing a brisk business of shakedown if not out-and-out blackmail – among other secrets that Katy and Bonnie, the other roommate, had not known about her.

   One of Iris’s recent meaner tricks was that of stealing Katy’s fiancé from her, a writer of plays named Mark, and it is her that Katy tries to protect when questioned by the police in the form of Captain Steele, who castigates her quite vigorously on pages 76-77 for both her lack of observation (significant, he suggests, for someone who hopes to write mysteries) and/or her lack of cooperation (for which at least the reader knows the reason).

   There is a long laundry list of suspects in Murder Leaves a Ring – all to the good! – all with varying degrees of conflicting interests, a map of the three girls’ apartment even before page one – and it’s needed! – and an elaborate trap for a suspected killer toward the end. And if I were to mention several twists in the tale along the way, I hope you will forget that I said that, as the pleasure’s in the reading, and not in the reading about it.

   The opening chapters do not flow as well as they should – it was not surprising, after the fact, to learn that this was the author’s first book – but as the story picks up some momentum, so does Miss Chapin’s narrative, which becomes noticeably smoother and easier as her encounters with the police and the killer grow more and more serious.

   Captain Steele is something of a conundrum, married to his job and seemingly hard-boiled through and through, but by the end he seems to have thawed out considerably, even to the extent of becoming perceptibly human.

   If he and Miss Chapin had ever been in a second mystery novel together – and there is a hint of something in the air at the end, and perhaps with young Dr. Harrison, too – I’d snatch it up in an instant.

STANLEY CASSON – Murder by Burial. Hamish Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1938. Paperback reprint: Penguin, UK, 1943. US hardcover edition: Harper & Brothers, 1938.

   Col. Theodore Cackett, R.E., D.S.O., has formed in Kynchester the Roman Guard for the Regeneration of Britain and is now planning [to] erect a monument to the memory of the Emperor Claudius in recognition of the civilizing influence that the Romans brought to the Isles.

   On the other hand, Canon Burbery knows that the early Britons were a great deal more civilized than commonly supposed. It is his plan to begin an archaeological dig to prove that Kynchester was the stronghold of King Cunobeline (or Cymbeline, as Shakespeare would have it). He hopes that the citizens of the city will take the claims in behalf of the Romans less seriously after they have been shown their heritage.

   A rivalry of this sort is bound to create bad feelings. Add to it the Canon’s blackballing of Cackett at the learned Augusteum Club and Cackett’s becoming involved in a plot to arm the landowners of England to defend against a possible revolution, and anything can happen.

   In this case a death occurs. Following a fortuitous investigation by a professional archaeologist, questions are raised whether the death was Indeed “an act of God.”

   Well written, quite literate, amusing in parts, informative on both archaeology and numismatics. The dialogue sometimes seems more lecture than conversation, but the lectures are interesting and thus tolerable.

   Fascinating also is Miss Boddick’s expatiation on Holmes’s view of the country as a scene of crime: “You Londoners will never realise the depths of depravity of the countryside Why, the English countryside is one congealed mass of intrigue and petty spite. That is why almost every murder story is placed in a country town or in some remote village, where all the natural passions have free play.”

       Bio-Bibliographic Data:

   This is the only mystery that the author wrote. From an online website comes the following information:

   Stanley Casson (1889-1944) was a multi-talented art scholar and army officer who read Classical Archaeology at Oxford, served as Assistant Director of the British School at Athens, Special Lecturer in Art at Bristol University, and was Director of British Academy Excavations at Constantinople in 1928-1929. His publications include numerous articles and books on the subject of Classical Antiquities.

LORNA BARRETT – Bookmarked for Death. Berkley Prime Crime, paperback original; 1st printing, February 2009.

   I ordered this sight unseen, attracted by the description of it as a bookstore mystery. What I didn’t realize was that it also included recipes, a seemingly popular device for some mystery novels that I have, up to now, avoided.

   Zoe Carter, author of a popular series of mysteries, is murdered during a signing at Haven’t Got A Clue, a mystery bookstore in Stoneham, New Hampshire. Tricia Miles, the proprietor of the bookstore, has a rocky relationship with the town’s sheriff and decides to investigate the case on her own in an attempt to speed up the identification and capture of the murderer.

   She has a sister, irritating to other people and, I suspect, to some readers as well; an ersatz boyfriend to whom she is not yet committed; and a tendency to put herself in situations that put her own life at peril.

   Tricia and I both fingered the wrong suspect, but the outcome is only slightly delayed. One of the chief suspects is a woman who has a bakery. and she keeps bringing treats to Tricia that are described in such a way as to provoke a reader with a sweet tooth into an instantaneous and severe craving for an over-caloried snack.

   I made it through the book without succumbing, but the fragrance lingers on. Now you know why I’ve avoided recipe mysteries.

   Most of the characters are quickly introduced in the first chapter, which had me retracing my steps more than once to find out who in heck the author was talking about. Distinctive characterizations are not her strong suit, but the plot has some tricky, intriguing turns, the setting is affectionately evoked (with a bookstore cat, Miss Marple, to pull in the animal lovers).

   In short, all the bases are hit for a conventional, undemanding cosy that’s dispatched with some flair.

      Bibliographic Data: Author’s Name: Lorraine Bartlett.

   Booktown Mystery Series, as by Lorna Barrett:

      1. Murder Is Binding. Berkley, pbo, April 2008.

      2. Bookmarked For Death. Berkley, pbo, Feb 2009.
      3. Bookplate Special. Berkley, pbo, Nov 2009.

   The Jeff Resnick series, as by L. L. Bartlett:

   [After insurance investigator Jeff Resnick is mugged, he discovers the resulting brain injury has left him able to sense people’s secrets.]

      1. Murder on the Mind. Five Star, hc, Dec 2005; Worldwide Mystery, pb, Oct 2007.

      2. Dead in Red. Five Star, hc, June 2008.

LYON MEARSON – Phantom Fingers. Macaulay, hardcover, 1927. Hutchinson, UK, hc, 1929.

   Damon Knight, I believe it was, once reviewed what he called an “idiot novel,” wherein the hero was an idiot and the heroine was an idiot, but fortunately the villain was a super-idiot. This novel qualifies for that description.

   The Grand Theatre in New York City is about to put on a new play. The management and the two stars receive threatening letters — signed variously “Pro Bono Publico,” “Constant Reader,” and “A Well-Wisher,” affording the only intentional humor in the novel. If the male lead attempts to make love to the female star on the stage, he Is doomed, says the threatener.

   The play takes place, and the male star does indeed die, being strangled and then having his neck broken by some invisible agency in full view of the audience and almost in full view of the detective in the case, Steve Muirhead, who would have seen it from the beginning if he had been paying attention.

   Muirhead is more alert on the second occasion when an understudy takes over the role and begins being choked on stage, again by an invisible hand. With a visible knife Muirhead stabs the invisible hand and saves the understudy’s life.

   Does Muirhead remember his brave and intelligent — his only one — act? No. He puts the knife away somewhere safe and is thus at the mercy of the villain.

   Murder and attempted murder, and Muirhead is the sole policeman involved in the investigation. The rest of the force is directing traffic, one gathers. “A fate worse than death” is mentioned often enough in regard to the heroine to make one suspect that the author was trying to titillate his readers since he couldn’t entertain them.

   The only mysteries worth thinking about here are how Muirhead’s man Briggs becomes Muirhead’s man Grigson a few pages later and how this wretched amalgamation of mystery and science fiction went into a third printing.

   How it got published originally I will let others ponder.

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

MEARSON, LYON. 1888-1966. Born in Montreal; educated at New York Law School; art critic for New York Evening Mail.
      Footsteps in the Dark. Macaulay, 1927; Hutchinson, 1928. [Murder mystery revolving around an “oriental” decorated house and a stack of gold.]

      Phantom Fingers. Macaulay, 1927; Hutchinson, 1929.
      The Whisper on the Stair. Macaulay, 1924; Hutchinson, 1924.

   More authors’ entries from Part 34 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.

Note: Thanks to Curt Evans in Comment #1 for pointing out the relationship of Thomas Cobb to Belton Cobb. (See the former’s entry below.)

CLARK, ELLERY H(ARDING). 1874-1949. Born in West Roxbury MA. Add: Educated at Harvard University; as an athlete, Clark is the only person to have won both the Olympic high jump and long jump, achieving the feat in 1896 at the first modern Olympics in Athens. Later a lawyer and a Boston city alderman; as an author, Clark has two books included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. Below is his complete entry:

      The Carleton Case. Bobbs, hc, 1910.
      Loaded Dice. Bobbs, hc, 1909. Silent film: Pathe, 1918 (scw: Gilson Willets; dir: Herbert Blache).

CLAUSEN, CARL. 1895-1954. Correction of birth date. Born in Denmark; died in Pennsylvania. Prolific story writer for the pulps and other magazines, circa 1917-1941; the author of two books included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. See below:
      The Gloyne Murder. Dodd, hc, 1930.

      Jaws of Circumstance. Dodd, hc, 1931; Lane, UK, hc, 1931.

CLEMENTS, COLIN (CAMPBELL). 1894-1948. Born 25 February 1894 in Omaha, Nebraska. Add: Educated at the University of Washington, Carnegie Institute of Technology and Harvard University. With his wife Florence Ryerson (Clements), 1894-1965, q.v., prolific co-author of over one hundred short stories, plays and screenplays. Included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV are five collaborative mystery novels and three plays of a criminous nature. Series character Jimmy Lane appeared in four of the five mysteries, including the one cited below:

      Blind Man’s Buff. Long & Smith, US, hc, 1933. [Thirteen people stormbound on lonely island are murdered one by one.]

CLEMENTS, FLORENCE RYERSON. 1894-1965. Working byline: Florence Ryerson, q.v.

COBB, THOMAS. 1853-1932. Add: Born and lived in London. Father of (Geoffrey) Belton Cobb, 1892-1971, q.v. Prolific author of some 78 novels and perhaps 300 short stories. Of these, over 60 novels are included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, many of them only marginally. Series character Inspector Bedison has a leading role in four of them.

RYERSON, FLORENCE. Maiden name and working byline of Florence Ryerson Clements, 1894-1965. Born in Glendale, California. Add: Educated at Stanford University, Radcliffe College, and Boston University. Contributor to numerous magazines; screenwriter for films in the Fu Manchu and Philo Vance series; most noted for being one of the co-writers of The Wizard of Oz. Included in her entry in the Revised Crime Fiction IV are five collaborative mystery novels and four plays of a criminous nature, most in tandem with her husband, Colin (Campbell) Clements, 1894-1948, q.v., whom she married in 1927.

   Prompted by the recent addition to the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, I’ve decided to begin annotating the entries again. I’ve been remiss in doing so since last December, in spite of strong admonitions to myself, and I’ve fallen way behind.

   All of the entries below are now online in Part 34. Posting the entries here on the blog means all the more visibility for them, however, and from past experience, the extra exposure never hurts. Comments, additions and/or corrections are not only welcome but strongly encouraged.

CHILD, HAROLD (HANNYNGTON). 1869-1945. Add: biographical information. Born in Gloucester, England; actor; literary and drama contributor to London Times from 1902; drama critic for Observer 1912-1920, with a number of writings on the history of drama. Also a novelist with many stories and articles contributed to newspapers and magazines of the day. Author of one book included marginally in the Revised Crime Fiction IV:

      -Phil of the Heath. Pearson, UK, hc, 1899. Setting: Bristol (UK), 1831. [A romantic tale of the Reform Bill period.]

CHILD, NELLISE. Add: Pseudonym of Lillian Lieberman Gerard Rosenfeld, 1901-1981, q.v. Born Lillian Lieberman, the author’s first husband was Frank Gerard, an automobile saleman; she later married Abner G. Rosenfeld, a Chicago real estate developer. A journalist and playwright, her work includes the Broadway play Weep for the Virgins. Under this pen name, the author of two detective novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. SC: Detective Lt. Jeremiah Irish, in each:

      The Diamond Ransom Murders. Knopf, hc, 1935; Collins, UK, hc, 1934.

      Murder Comes Home. Knopf, hc, 1933; Collins, UK, hc, 1933. [After writing a note to the L. A. police department, a collector of Spanish art is found dead in his library.]

CHILD, RICHARD WASHBURN. 1881-1935. Add: biographical information. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts; educated at Harvard Law School. Ambassador to Italy, 1920-1924; contributor of articles on political and social themes to magazines. The author of two novels (one marginally) and two story collections included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. Of the two collections, the one cited below includes a story which has been the basis for several film adaptations:

      The Velvet Black. Dutton, hc, 1921; Hodder, UK, 1921. Story collection. Silent film, from ss “A Whiff of Heliotrope”: Cosmopolitan, 1920, as Heliotrope. Also: Paramount, 1928, as Forgotten Faces. Also (sound film): Paramount, 1936, as Forgotten Faces. Also: United Artists, 1942, as A Gentleman After Dark. [Synopsis of the 1920 silent film: A prison inmate obtains his release in order to rescue his daughter from the clutches of a blackmailer.]

CHILDERS, JAMES SAXON. 1899-1965. Born in Birmingham, Alabama. Professor of literature, newspaper editor, and publishing executive. Add: Educated at Oberlin College and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Author of two espionage novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. See below:

      The Bookshop Mystery. Appleton, US, hc, 1930. Setting: England. “A double appeal will lure the reader of this mystery story on: in the mellow atmosphere of rare books and famous bookshops is played out a tense intrigue between the secret agents of great nations.”

      Enemy Outpost. Appleton, US, hc, 1942. Setting: Canada. “An action-packed story of adventure, intrigue, and romance which is guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your chair. A story of a desperate attempt by Nazi saboteurs to dynamite American industry.”

CHRISTIE, ROBERT (CLELAND HAMILTON). 1913-1975. Add as a new author. Lived in Montreal and Ottawa, Canada.

      Inherit the Night. Farrar, hardcover, 1949; Hale, UK, hc, 1951. Setting: South America. “An evil stranger destroys the serenity of an Andean village and eventually himself.” [The cover shown is that of the reprint Pyramid paperback, R279.]

E. BAKER QUINN – One Man’s Muddle. Heinemann, UK, hardcover, 1936. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1937.

   Two years before Raymond Chandler introduced us to Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1939), E. Baker Quinn, a British writer, anticipated both his voice and his attempt to do something more serious with the detective novel with her first novel about former Scotland Yard sleuth James Strange, an accomplishment noted by critic James Sandoe in his famous list of notable hard-boiled writers.

   When we first meet her sleuth James Strange, he has fled to a “… tu’penny ha’penny inn a hundred miles from nowhere,” to escape his past. But he knows it’s hopeless. “Do a bunk to the jungles of Africa and ten to one you’ll meet your mother-in-law’s char coming around the first bush …”

   And for Strange it is much worse than his mother-in-law’s charwoman. He’s runs smack into the former Mrs. Boynton, now Mrs. Geoffrey Wharton, a former London snowbird, an addict, who knows all about Scotland Yard’s former bright young thing who has just completed four years in the pen for possession of illegal drugs.

   And of course Mrs. Wharton is promptly murdered, and Strange finds himself forced to help her husband cover up her past while trying to cover up his own and keep the police from finding the .32 caliber automatic hidden in his luggage, the gun he used in a manslaughter case he was acquitted in — but would rather not bring up again — and coincidentally, the same caliber Mrs. Wharton was shot with …

   His attempts to keep his head above water push him deeper into the mess, and force him back to his ex-fiancee in London and to Ratchet, the partner who ratted on him and testified against him as King’s evidence.

   That’s the set up for a novel that anticipates the style and voice of Chandler’s novels:

   Before it is over Strange will solve the case, but find himself facing another two years in prison.

   In later books Strange gets out of prison and goes to work as a private eye with his despised ex-partner Ratchet. The voice continues in the Chandler vein.

   Who Quinn was, and how she came to discover a voice and subject matter so close to Chandler is a mystery in itself. But her books are worth discovering and reading, and Strange a curious compliment to Marlowe and his world.

   Here are a few samples of Quinn and Strange:

   One Man’s Muddle and its sequels are an interesting look at a Marlowe that might have been, one of those curious side roads that sometime run parallel to a more successful track. And well worth reading and discovering as first rate mysteries by a writer who deserved more recognition than she got.

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

QUINN, E(LEANOR) BAKER

       One Man’s Muddle (n.) Heinemann 1936. Macmillan, 1937. [James Strange]
       The Dead Harm No One (n.) Heinemann 1938.    (**)
       Death Is a Restless Sleeper (n.) Heinemann 1940. Mystery House, 1941. [James Strange]

(**) While it seems likely that he is, it is not known whether James Strange is in this book or not.

RICHARD ROSEN – Fadeaway. Harper & Row, 1986. Paperback reprint: Onyx, July 1989.

   Robert B. Parker may not be the best private eye writer of the eighties but surely he’s the most influential, as witness the horde of newcomers to the field who have used his pretentious, wildly overrated, consistently best-selling series about the Boston PI Spenser as their takeoff point.

   Richard Rosen, winner of the Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for the best first crime novel of 1985, deserves another prize for. using Parker most creatively.

   The main character both in Fadeaway and in Rosen’s prizewinning Strike Three You’re Dead is a sort of Jewish Spenser, at least in the sense that each man is a smart-mouthed jock from Boston with a liberated live-in lady and a snootful of angst.

   Harvey Blissberg has turned hesitantly to the PI game after the early end of his career as a major-league outfielder, but he’s not very good at his new line of work and all his cases seem to come to him from his sports world connections. In Fadeaway he’s hired simultaneously by the Boston Celtics and the Washington Bullets to find out why a basketball star from each team vanished from Logan Airport within forty-eight hours of one another.

   When both players are found shot to death, Harvey follows the trail into the seamy world of college sports recruiting, and his hunch that the murders are tied in with the seven-year-old “accidental” death of a high school basketball champ in a dark bus tunnel stirs up the usual hornet’s nest of corruption.

   If Ross Macdonald had written this book, the plot would have been so convoluted you’d need a chart to sort out who did what to whom. Rosen goes to the opposite extreme, leaving out complexity and surprise almost entirely.

   If Parker had written the book, there would have been a violent confrontation in every chapter. Rosen avoids action scenes almost entirely, too. But he’s an excellent stylist, with the ability to describe an American city (in this case Providence, Rhode Island) and the inner world of desperately lonely people as well as any PI novelist now at work.

   What sets Rosen apart from everyone else in the field, however, is his gift for shifting without effort from the film noir gear into another mode entirely. Here for example is Harvey anguishing over the case with his girlfriend, Mickey:

   Jock though he’s supposed to be, Harvey is the only PI in the literature who cries out to be played by Woody Allen.

    Fadeaway is crammed with scenes which are not only hilarious in their own right, but marvelous as parodies of the tiresome philosophic shticks in the Spenser novels. It’s light on action and complexity, but the first-rate dialogue and characterizations and the rich anti-Parker subtext make this one a joy to read.

    Bibliography — Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

ROSEN, R(ichard) D(ean), 1949- . SC: Harvey Blissberg, in all titles.

      Strike Three You’re Dead. Walker, hc, 1984. Signet, pb, 1986. Walker, trade pb, 2001.

      Fadeaway. Harper & Row, hc, 1986; Onyx, pb, 1989.

      Saturday Night Dead. Viking, hc, 1988; Onyx, pb, 1989.

      World of Hurt. Walker, hc, 1994.

      Dead Ball. Walker, hc, 2001.

BRUCE ALEXANDER – Rules of Engagement.

Berkley, paperback; 1st printing, February 2006. Hardcover edition: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, March 2005.

   This is the first of Bruce Alexander’s “Sir John Fielding” detective novels that I’ve read, and no, I didn’t realize it until after I’d picked it out to read that this is also the last one that Alexander ever wrote. And as perhaps you already knew, Bruce Alexander was the pen name of Bruce Cook, 1932-2003, who wrote eleven mysteries under that name. Under his own name, he had five earlier ones, four of them with Antonio “Chico” Cervantes as the leading character.

   Now it gets interesting. (I’ll get back to Antonio “Chico” Cervantes in a minute.) Cook also was at least in part responsible for writing William J. Coughlin’s last book after he (Coughlin) died, The Judgment (St. Martin’s, 1997). I’m quoting from Al Hubin in Crime Fiction IV now: “Apparently written by Bruce Cook from a beginning by Coughlin, then finished and polished by widow Ruth Coughlin.”

   The reason is that this is interesting, is that this is precisely how Rules of Engagement got written. From the back cover, and quoting again: “He (Bruce Cook) died in 2003, having completed most of Rules of Engagement, and left notes on how the rest of the story unfolded. John Shannon, author of the highly praised Jack Liffey series, most recently Dangerous Games, completed the novel with Bruce’s wife, Joan Alexander.”

   As coincidences go, it would be rather minor, but was it a coincidence? Probably not. The idea was there, and the Bruce Cook and his wife simply carried it out in the same way it had been done before. And as you can easily imagine, there are both pluses and minuses in doing so.

   But before getting into that, and to Sir John Fielding and what the book (and the series) is about, I promised to tell you something about Chico Cervantes. This Thrilling Detective link will tell you more, but perhaps it suffices to say that Cervantes was a Mexican-American ex-LA cop turned private eye whose stomping grounds were (as you probably already guessed) Southern California.

   His four recorded cases, published between 1988 and 1994, did not seem to turn the mystery fiction world on fire, and in fact, only one of the four, the first, Mexican Standoff, was ever published in paperback, the other three only in hardcover.

   For whatever that tells you. In any case (no pun intended) the year the last Cervantes book came out, 1994, was the same year that Blind Justice, the first Sir John Fielding novel appeared. Cook, as Alexander, at the age of 62, had hit the equivalent of pay dirt.

   I’ll append a complete list of the highly popular Fielding books at the end of this review. (I have them all. They are, unfortunately, still in the TBR (To Be Read) portion of the basement.)

   Sir John Fielding, as I hasten now to tell you (at last), was the blind English magistrate who was the real-life founder of London’s first true police force, the Bow Street Runners, in the mid-to-late 1700s.

   What’s interesting about one of Alexander’s Fielding books, An Experiment in Treason, Benjamin Franklin makes an appearance. Unlike Robert Lee Hall’s series of books of the latter’s London adventures, though, in Treason Franklin is a suspect, not the detective, while in Hall’s books, Fielding is only a (relatively) minor character.

   In the books by Bruce Alexander, Fielding’s household and close-knit circle of friends and close acquaintances takes center stage, filled to abundance with family, servants, many of which (if not most) are fictional. Especial note should be made of the narrator of the tales, one Jeremy Proctor, Fielding’s protege with him throughout the series, an orphan taken under his wing as a dogsbody, now in Rules of Engagement all of eighteen and Sir John’s clerk at the Bow Street Court.

   The title comes in part from the fact that Jeremy is engaged to be married to Clarissa Roundtree, the other orphan taken in by the Fieldings: Clarissa as Lady Fielding’s general factotum, and as the book begins, he (Jeremy) is beginning to wonder greatly about his future. (On page 241 there is another context in which “rules of engagement” come into play.)

   The mystery is extremely slight, but of course it needs to be mentioned. It concerns the strange death of Lord Lammermoor, who has recently jumped to his death from a bridge while crossing the Thames alone.

   Several chapters later (or to be precise, in Chapter Three) the case is all but solved when Fielding and his entourage are entertained at the theater by a practitioner of “animal magnetism” and/or “mesmerism.” The only question that remains (to the reader, that is) is who is responsible, and while I cannot reveal his/her name, you will know as soon as he/she enters the story. (Ventriloquy is also an important factor, but my telling you that will neither enlighten you further, or less.)

   One hopes for more, but more there is not, save 200 pages in which a great happens, but very little of any consequence. All in all, what the authors in combination have provided is nothing less than a worthy attempt to tie up some loose ends for the readers who followed the series and the characters from early on — but not all of them (the loose ends, that is). Life happens, and that is what is left for the reader to contemplate. This is one of the aforementioned pluses.

   For someone expecting a detective story with some solid, down-to-earth detective work going on, either Mr. Alexander did not have one in mind, or if he did, neither his wife nor John Shannon were able to build one out of the notes that he left them. This is one of the aforementioned minuses.

   For the record, the pluses outweigh the minuses, but personally, coming in at the end as I did, I left with a feeling of disappointment that I sincerely wished I hadn’t — come in at the end, that is.

   If you’d like to call my verdict “mixed,” you’d certainly be right. I wouldn’t deny it at all.

      The Sir John Fielding novels by Bruce Alexander:

   All were published in hardcover by Putnam and in paperback by Berkley. The dates are of the hardcover editions; the paperback generally appeared a year later.

Blind Justice. 1994.

Murder in Grub Street. 1995.

Watery Grave. 1996.

Person or Persons Unknown. 1997.

Jack, Knave and Fool. 1998.

Death of a Colonial. 1999.

The Color of Death. 2000.

Smuggler’s Moon. 2001.

An Experiment in Treason. 2002.

The Price of Murder. 2003.

Rules of Engagement. 2005.

   Some sad news was awaiting me yesterday when I returned from Columbus and PulpFest 2009. Author William Tapply, author of two dozen mysteries tackled by Boston-based lawyer Brady Coyne plus three about New England fishing guide Stoney Calhoun, died last Tuesday of leukemia at the age of 69.

   Previously reviewed on this blog are the following, all Brady Coyne books (follow the links):

      The Vulgar Boatman
      The Dutch Blue Errror
      Cutter’s Run

   Taken from Mr. Tapply’s first novel, Death at Charity’s Point, is the following blurb, provided by fellow writer Ted Wood:

    “William Tapply does for the private eye what Len Deighton did for the secret agent. His Brady Coyne is quiet and wry and vulnerable and given to asides that make you chuckle out loud… The characters are all real people, the locale is so vivid you can smell the sea.”

      Bibliography:

   Brady Coyne

1. Death at Charity’s Point (1984)
2. The Dutch Blue Error (1985)

3. Follow The Sharks (1985)
4. The Marine Corpse (1986)
5. Dead Meat (1987)
6. The Vulgar Boatman (1988)

7. A Void In Hearts (1988)
8. Dead Winter (1989)
9. Client Privilege (1989)

10. The Spotted Cats (1991)
11. Tight Lines (1992)
12. The Snake Eater (1993)
13. The Seventh Enemy (1995)
14. Close To The Bone (1996)
15. Cutter’s Run (1998)

16. Muscle Memory (1999)

17. Scar Tissue (2000)
18. Past Tense (2001)
19. A Fine Line (2002)
20. Shadow of Death (2003)
21. Nervous Water (2005)

22. Out Cold (2006)
23. One-Way Ticket (2007)
24. Hell Bent (2008)

   Brady Coyne / J.W. Jackson (with Philip R Craig)

1. First Light (2001)

2. Second Sight (2005)
3. Third Strike (2007)

   Stoney Calhoun

1. Bitch Creek (2004)
2. Gray Ghost (2007)

3. Dark Tiger (2009, forthcoming)

   With Linda Barlow:

Thicker Than Water (1995)

   Among his several works of non-fiction, most of them dealing with fly fishing and other outdoor pursuits, is the following:

The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing a Modern Whodunit. (1995)