CAROLYN HAINES – Splintered Bones. Dell, paperback reprint: February 2003. Hardcover edition: Delacorte, February 2002.

   There’s a huge difference between mysteries like the recent pair of “Golden Age” novels by G. D. H. and Margaret Cole I reviewed recently, especially the latter, and this one, and that’s the amount of personal life of the detective we get to become a part of.

   Sarah Booth Delaney is trying to make a go of it as a private investigator, and as a former pampered Daddy’s Girl, southern-belle Mississippi-Delta style, she hasn’t quite succeeded in getting her own life on track — and she has a ghost in her house who keeps telling her that. (Sarah Booth is on the wrong side of thirty, not married, and she has no viable prospects in sight.)

   This, her third major case, seems to come straight from a Dixie Chicks’ country song. You may know the one. The dead man was a wife abuser, a lousy father, and has been compulsively piling up gambling debts. He’s all-around No Good. No one has a decent word to say about him. His wife Lee has confessed. Her only defense is that Kemper Fuquar deserved to die, and she hires Sarah Booth to help her prove it.

   Part of the deal is taking in Lee’s sullen 14-year-old daughter Kip, who proves to be the heart of the matter, in more ways than one. A teenager in her home? It proves to be just what Sarah Booth’s heritage and home, Dahlia House, needs.

   Kip may also be the reason for her mother’s confession, which serves to complicate matters, and she’s just one of the fine characters Carolyn Haines gives us a sharp, keen insight into. But the over 350 pages of small print are also filled with a meandering investigation, and the facts seem awfully mushy. (If the right questions were asked at the right time, and of the right people, the book could easily have been 100 pages shorter.)

   And when tragedy strikes again, Sarah Booth’s reactions are surprisingly flat, along with everyone else’s. Are they suddenly all on Prozac? For all but these few pages, the inhabitants of the small southern town of Zinnia are filled with a zingy zest for life, and the singular lack of a more emotional response to this remarkable night of misadventure just doesn’t ring true.

   The book’s well worth reading, in other words, but the recommendation comes with some small little warning flags as well. Adjust to your own tastes and preferences.

Bibliographic Data: The Sarah Booth Delaney Mysteries. For full coverage of all of Carolyn Haines’ work, both fiction and non-fiction, visit both her website and a very good external one, located here.

Them Bones. Bantam, pb, Nov 1999.

Buried Bones. Bantam, pb, Oct 2000.
Splintered Bones. Delacorte, hc, Feb 2002; Dell, pb, Feb 2003.
Crossed Bones. Delacorte, hc, April 2003; Dell, pb, Feb 2004.
Hallowed Bones. Delacorte, hc, March 2004; Dell, pb, Jan 2005.

Bones to Pick. Kensington, hc, July 2006; pb, June 2007.
Ham Bones. Kensington, hc, July 2007; pb, June 2008.
Wishbones. St. Martin’s, hc, June 2008; pb, June 2009.
Greedy Bones. St. Martin’s, hc, July 2009.

CHRISTIANNA BRAND – Heads You Lose. John Lane/The Bodley Head, UK, hc, 1941. US hardcover: Dodd Mead, 1942. Hardcover reprint: Ian Henry (UK), 1981. Paperback reprints include: Penguin (UK), several printings, 1950s; Bantam, June 1988 (shown).

    Christianna Brand’s mystery output seems paltry compared to, say, Agatha Christie.

    In the 1950s, Brand produced progressively less in the crime fiction field, focusing more on her children’s writing. According to the IMDb, a handful of her children’s stories were adapted for British TV and one was the subject of a full-length motion picture a few years ago.

    Film makers gave her mystery fiction brief attention in the mid-to-late 1940s, and then she was promptly forgotten. Only Green for Danger (1946), based on her 1944 novel, seems to have been given a proper treatment. Film critic William K. Everson and yours truly agree that this movie is THE classic detective film, with The Kennel Murder Case vying with it for first place.

    Thomas Godfrey, in his English Country House Murders (1989), characterizes our author and her writing thus: “Christianna Brand (Mary Christianna Milne Lewis), the last of the grandes dames of traditional English writing, was, like Josephine Tey, a connoisseur’s writer. Her plots are intelligently premeditated, rich in atmosphere, keenly observed, and subtly set forth.” (page 423)

    Heads You Lose memorably introduces her series sleuth, Inspector Cockrill, like this:

    Heads You Lose was, according to the bibliographies, Christianna Brand’s second book; and there are some rough places in the narrative that seem to show she isn’t quite as accomplished as she would later become. Nonetheless, compared to some other Golden Age writers of the same period, she often reads like Shakespeare.

    Chapter 6, the coroner’s inquest, is a marvelous set piece filled with low comedy and not a little misdirection.

    It isn’t revealing too much to say that Inspector Cockrill doesn’t really solve this case; he lets the other characters eliminate false trails on their own. It’s fun to watch one indolent character exerting himself trying to prove the guilt of another character — but what’s his motivation, to protect a woman or to shift suspicion from himself?

    Cockie also spends a large part of the first half of the book off-stage and gradually assumes a greater presence later; also, we are allowed into his thoughts only intermittently — in fact we spend much of the book inside various other characters’ minds, including, believe it or not, the murderer’s (but without being conscious of it).

    The story has a historical setting, a cosy English village not long after the Dunkirk evacuation, but the war is alluded to only in several places and never intrudes much into the narrative.

    It’s annoying when Brand introduces an impossible crime but doesn’t do much with it — the impossibility is later dismissed in one sentence. But all the characters, major and minor, are well imagined.

    Once she had hit her stride, Christianna Brand could play “The Grandest Game” with the best of them. Heads You Lose shows her warming up for her later, more solidly plotted novels in which she could often out-Christie Christie.

LOUIS TRACY – The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley. Edward J. Clode, US, hardcover, 1919. Serialized in the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, May 30 to July 25, 1920. Previously published in the UK as The Case of Mortimer Fenley: Cassell & Co., hardcover, 1915.

   Artist John Trenholme is staying in the Hertfordshire village of Roxton, having gone there at the request of a magazine to do paintings of the local area before the railway arrives and ruins everything.

   His request to thus immortalise a nearby Elizabethan mansion is rebuffed by its owner, Mortimer Fenley, private banker and father of two half-brothers.

   Trenholme finds out there’s a public right of way across Fenley’s parkland and on a lovely June morning he avails himself of it to paint the view — which includes a young woman in a bathing suit taking a morning dip in the lake. He is thus on the spot to hear the shot that kills Fenley on his own doorstep.

   At this point one of my favourite sleuthing teams, Superintendent James Leander Winter and Detective Inspector Charles Francois Furneaux, arrive on stage when Scotland Yard is called in by oldest son Hilton Fenley. To add to the family’s troubles, both siblings wish to marry their father’s beautiful ward Sylvia Manning — she of the bathing suit — which worsens the already bad blood between them.

   The younger son Robert is a ne’er-do-well who was in London when his father died, or was he? Could the murder be connected to a bond robbery at the Fenley Bank? How was the seemingly impossible crime committed when a prime suspect was known to be in the house when the murderous shot was fired from a wood some 400 yards away?

My verdict: Much as I have enjoyed the Winter & Furneaux stories, I must mark this one as a B. The Fenleys are curiously thin as characters, and I felt the lesser players in the drama were more rounded out, probably because Tracy provides a different angle for the traditional supporting cast.

   Thus for example we have the oft bibulous butler depicted instead as a wine connoisseur and the village bobby as intelligent and quick thinking. On the other hand, the touch of melodrama towards the end of the novel seems somewhat out of place, and prospective readers should be aware there are a few comments of an un-PC nature.

Etext: http://www.munseys.com/diskseven/mofendex.htm

Bibliographic data:  John D. Squires’ long chronological checklist for Louis Tracy (1863-1928), aka Gordon Holmes and Robert Fraser, is online here here.

   The non-writing careers of writers is always fascinating, and not just those like Dick Francis, Dashiell Hammett, Ian Fleming, John Le Carre, Joseph Waumbaugh, Joe Gores, Erle Stanley Gardner, or Graham Greene whose work is reflected in their writing (in order, jockey, private detective, journalist/spy, diplomat/spy, policeman, private detective, lawyer, and journalist/spy).

   Rex Stout was a millionaire before he was 22 for designing a system of accounting for public schools in Wisconsin, had a long career as a pulp writer, wrote a novel compared to Philip Wylie and F. Scott Fitzgerald (How Like a God), and then at 40 created Nero Wolfe. Raymond Chandler was an oil exec until the Depression hit and then turned to writing at 45. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan on the back of the letterhead stationary for his bankrupt haberdashery when he was thirty-nine after a career of differing jobs including fighting Geronimo in the cavalry.

   Agatha Christie was a nurse in WWI in charge of the poisons cabinet (which she became an expert on) and P.D. James a nursing administrator. Sax Rohmer and P. G. Wodehouse (best friends) were both clerks at the same bank in Alexandria Egypt — where later C. S. Forester (Horatio Hornblower) and Geoffrey Household briefly worked.

   Conan Doyle was an optometrist (though never a succesful one) and Margery Allingham came from a family of pulp writers who filled the pages of the countless Boys’ Own Paper type publications in England, writing everything from Robin Hood and Billy Bunter to Sexton Blake. Leslie Charteris was a failed cartoonist — ironic in that he ended up writing Secret Agent X-9 and The Saint strips.

   During WWII Eric Ambler was John Huston’s cameraman in Italy on the Oscar winning Battle of San Pietro, and Max Brand died in Italy while working as a war correspondent.

   John Buchan topped almost everyone. After a distinguished career in many important political roles he was Governor-General of Canada in the critical years before WWII — often credited with healing the rift between Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King and London and deepening the alliance between Canada and the US (and if you think that is overstating his importance, even Winston Churchill gave him credit for insuring Canada stayed in the Commonwealth and supported England in the war).

   In his real life S. S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright) was a distinguished art critic. A. E. W. Mason was a secret agent for the British Admiralty whose pre-WWI network in Spain operated as the primary Allied network in that country well into the Cold War and who once foiled an almost Bondian biological warfare plot to smuggle anthrax infected animals into the Allies stock in WWI.

   Edmund Crispin was conductor/ composer Robert Montgomery, who wrote the film scores for the Carry On films among others. Mystery writer Laurence Payne starred on stage and film (The Crawling Eye …) and played Sexton Blake on BBC television for years. Alan Cailliou, who wrote numerous suspense and adventure novels, was a familiar character actor in films and television.

   Twenties and thirties adventure, mystery writer Achmed Abdullah was not only the son of a Romanov Prince and an Indian Queen, but spent a lifetime as an officer in the British Army. Talbot Mundy was a con-man before an illness reformed him and he turned to writing, and German writer Karl May was born blind, regained his sight, became a criminal, and reformed to become a beloved storyteller loved by Einstein, Herman Hesse, and Albert Schweitzer (and alas also Hitler) — and responsible for all those Winnetou movies with Stewart Granger and Lex Barker that in turn inspired the Spagetti Western — so he may not be all that innocent or reformed.

   Zane Gray was a dentist, John Gardner an ex-SAS special forces op and leftist reverend, Van Wyck Mason an army engineer for twenty years before he created Colonel Hugh North, and Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels is really distinguished Eyptologist Barbara Mertz.

   Edgar Wallace, aside from being a journalist, was a race track tout, Peter Cheyney a secretary for Oswald Mosely’s fascist Black Shirts in England (briefly and before Mosely turned from nut to traitor), and Gerard Fairlie, aside from being the real life model for Bulldog Drummond, was a member of the Royal House Hold cavalry and favorite of the Queen.

   John Mortimer the author of the Rumpole mysteries was the barrister who won the landmark Crown vs Lady Chatterly’s Lover case in the early sixites that broke the back of censorship in British publishing. John B. West, author of the Spillane-ish Rocky Steele books, was a West African doctor in general practice.

Techno thriller writer Tom Clancy was an actuarial table expert for the insurance industry, and current bestseller James Rollins a veternarian. Michael Innes was an Oxford don (J.I.M. Stewart) and prolific John Creasey created his own political party and stood for office.

   A few are even fitting, Donald MacKenzie (Nowhere to Run) who wrote about reformed thieves and John Raven, a retired Special Branch officer who lived on a houseboat on the Thames, was himself, a reformed thief. Solicitors Michael Gilbert and John Welcome were literary agents to Raymond Chandler and Dick Francis respectively.

   The late Michael Crichton began his career writing under the pseudonyms John Lange and Jeffrey Hudson so he wouldn’t be thrown out of medical school for moonlighting. Western historical novelist Will Henry wrote cartoons for MGM with Tex Avery as Heck Allen. Douglas Preston of the bestselling team of Preston and Lincoln Childs worked for the Museum of Natural History in New York.

   Brett Halliday and Jim Thompson were both oilfield roughnecks. William Henry Porter, or O. Henry, was a convicted embezzler who began telling stories while serving in Sing Sing. W. Somerset Maugham was a medical student who began writing for the extra money. Jeffrey Archer reversed the process, beginning as a writer and now an ex politician and convicted felon.

   Pulpster Walter Gibson was a PR man for Harry Houdini and Norvell Page, author of the Spider, gave up writing to work for the government during WWII eventually becoming secretary to the postwar Hoover Commission and an official in the Atomic Energy Commission (and if the author of the Spider, who used to go out on the beach in Miami dressed in a slouch hat a black cloak, working for the A.E.C. doesn’t make you uneasy, nothing will). Nicholas Boving, who writes the Maxim Gunn thrillers, currently was a mining engineer who used to traipse around the world from Africa to Western Australia.

   The fact is writers come from a variety of backgrounds — and sometimes a name that we are only familiar with in terms of our leisure reading will have a completely different connotation to others in another field. For example Nicholas Blake often mentioned here as one of the icons of the golden age of the detective story (which he was) was also C. Day Lewis, the father of actor Daniel Day Lewis, and Poet Laureate of England. Sort of puts his detective writing career in perspective.

   While I never read any of the Mrs. Warrender stories I did read several of the Supt. Wilson ones, and eventually had to grant the chief criticism of the Coles put forward by Haycraft and others, that the Coles put together a fair puzzle but they were awfully dull. I’ll check out some of the Warrender tales and see if that still holds. Someone once said of Daniel DeFoe that he “employed dullness brilliantly” but that’s hardly a virtue in a detective story.

   The Coles were hardly alone in the category of being dull reads. I enjoy many of Freeman Wills Crofts’ books and those of John Rhode, but though both could get some action going, both could be pretty dull too. There’s a certain charm the first time you encounter one of Crofts’ timetables, but it grows thin fairly soon, and some of Rhode’s later Dr. Priestley books could be used to cure insomnia.

   One of the problems with the classical tec tale is it sometimes got so involved with the puzzle and the rules it forgot the rule about entertaining.

   The absurd length that this was taken to was in the Dennis Wheatley books, which presented you with characters, motive, even clues like cigarette butts, but you had to play the detective. Alas they pointed out the problem that murder wasn’t much fun without a good detective and things like a plot and real story. They might be fun for a party game but they weren’t much to curl up before the fire with.

   One of the reasons we still read Christie, Marsh, Sayers, and Allingham when so many others have gone the way of the dodo is that they weren’t afraid of a little melodrama, adventure, intrigue, romance, and action. Philip MacDonald was often criticized at the time for introducing too much suspense and action into his Anthony Gethryn novels, but as a result many of them are better reads today than clever puzzlers like Anthony Berkley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case where everyone talks and talks and nothing much happens.

   Towards the end of the classical era even S.S. Van Dine felt the need for Philo Vance to get involved in a car chase and running gun fight (The Kidnap Murder Case). I never understood why dullness was supposed to be a literary virtue in the detective novel.

   That said, R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke stories and novels contain few thrills, but the structure of the plot, the joys of watching Thorndyke’s careful and methodical investigation, and the reconstruction of the crime by Thorndyke at the end hold the reader as well as any shocker or thriller.

   But then Freeman was, in Chandler’s words, “the best dull writer,” and Thorndyke a character who, while largely forgotten today, deserves to sit very near the top with Holmes, Father Brown, Poirot, and Maigret. In the right hands even dullness can be a virtue, though not one to be imitated by would be writers.

G. D. H. & MARGARET COLE – Knife in the Dark.

Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover; Dec 1941. The Macmillan Co., US, hardcover, 1942 (shown below).

   G. D. H. and Margaret Cole were extremely prolific writers between the two world wars: individually and collaboratively, they published well over two hundred books of fiction, nonfiction, and verse.

   G. D. H. was a prominent social and economic historian; his five-volume A History of Social Thought is considered a landmark work. Dame Margaret is best known for her biographies of Beatrice Webb and of her husband (The Life of G.D.H. Cole, 1971).

   The Coles co-authored more than thirty “Golden Age” detective novels, beginning with The Brooklyn Murders in 1923, and six volumes of criminous short stories. Knife in the Dark is their next to last novel, and the only one to feature Mrs. Warrender as its protagonist.

   “A naturally trim and tidy old lady,” Mrs. Warrender is the mother of private detective James Warrender (who affectionately calls her, among other things, “an incurably meddling old woman”). She is also solidly in the tradition of such “little old lady” sleuths as Miss Jane Marple and Hildegarde Withers, although less colorful than either of those two indefatigable crook-catchers.

   Knife in the Dark takes place at a mythical ancient English university, Stamford, during the dark days of World War II. Kitty Lake — wife of Gordon Lake, a teacher of Inorganic Chemistry whose mother is a cousin of Mrs. Warrender’s — is stabbed to death during an undergraduate dance which she herself arranged.

   Any number of people had a motive to do away with the mercurial Kitty, who had both a mean streak and a passion for other men; the suspects include her husband, an R.A.F. officer, a young anthropologist, a strange Polish refugee named Madame Zyboski (who may or may not be a Nazi spy), and a dean’s wife whom James Warrender describes as “an awful old party with a face like a diseased horse and a mind like a sewer.”

   Like all of the Coles’ mysteries, this is very leisurely paced; Kitty Lake’s murder, the only one in the book, does not take place until page 104, and there is almost no action before or after. Coincidence plays almost as much of a role in the solution as does detection by Mrs. Warrender (who happens to be staying with the Lakes at the time of the murder); and the identity of the culprit comes as no particular surprise.

   For all of that, however, Knife in the Dark is not a bad novel. The characters are mostly interesting, the university setting is well-realized, and the narrative is spiced with some nice touches of dry wit. Undemanding fans of the Golden Age mystery should find it diverting.

   Mrs. Warrender’s talents are also showcased in four novelettes collected as Mrs. Warrender’s Profession (1939). The best of the four is “The Toys of Death,” in which Mrs. W. solves a baffling murder on the south coast of England.

The Coles also created three other series detectives, none of whom is as interesting an individual as Mrs. Warrender. The most notable of the trio is Superintendent Henry Wilson of Scotland Yard, for he is featured in sixteen novels, among them The Berkshire Mystery (1930), End of an Ancient Mariner (1933), and Murder at the Munition Works (1940); and in the collection of short stories, Superintendent Wilson’s Holiday (1928).

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

JOHN BRETT – Who’d Hire Brett?   Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition]; hardcover reprint,. Sept-Oct 1981. First edition: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Paperback reprint: Bantam, July 1989. No UK edition.

    My copy is the DBC edition, one of the so-called “Inner Circle” volumes in that set of books, and the only one that I could find a cover for — although I suspect I have the Bantam paperback, somewhere.

    There’s not much information about John Brett, the author. This was his only detective novel, and in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, he’s described only as “born in England, the son of an earl; living near Hollywood,” a statement possibly obtained from the blurb on the hardcover edition. Now since this describes the character John Brett, except for the “earl” part, awfully well, I have a feeling that “John Brett” is not the author’s real name.

    And since he’s relatively skilled as an author, it’s also possible that we might know him as a mystery writer under another name altogether. Not that I have any suggestions.

    Getting back to the “earl” part, that might be true for the character in the book, too. He’s a glib sort of fellow who tells the story himself, but in doing so, he only hints at his background. He, we soon gather, is what’s called a remittance man — an exile living on money sent from home — in this case England. Something shady and quite possibly illegal back went on back there, but as I say, hints are all he’s going to give.

    He’s not exactly hired in this book, in spite of the title, but he is asked by a female friend to steal a valuable artifact from his upstairs neighbor, the upstairs neighbor having stolen the artifact from the female friend and her husband, they having it in their possession illegally, which is why they can’t call the police in on the theft.

    With me so far? I’ll let Brett take over to tell you what happens next. He’s just turned the icon (a Mud Dancer) over to the husband, Harry:

    The police, naturally, suspect Harry’s wife, and since John Brett is close friends with the wife, they suspect him, too, for a while. To clear their names in the eyes of Sgt. Steinberg — apparently the only cop in the Beverly Hills Police Department, for he’s the only one who ever appears in person anywhere in the book — John and Edie and Edie’s enterprising and eavesdropping maid Marie decide to do a little sleuthing on their own. Make that a lot of sleuthing, although John has to be prodded by Marie, who’s another story, and being John’s age (Edie is older), sparks begin to fly, and more.

    I’ve been doing some hinting myself, but right now I’ll come out and say it. This is a comic caper in the same sense as many of Donald Westlake’s books under his own name were comic capers, not that I’m saying that Donald Westlake was the author of this book, though it’s kind of fun to imagine that he was.

    From page 60, just to give you a good idea. John and Marie are on the case together:

    “I pointed the Sunbeam in a direction that seemed likely to get us somewhere near the Beverly Hills Police Department. It didn’t. Instead, we wound up in a rather dismal place called Culver City that has a lot of strange-looking streets meeting at even stranger intersections. In Culver City, I discovered; nothing goes anywhere. Everything is coming from somewhere and seems to dissipate into nothingness. It’s what astronomers are lately calling, with a remarkable lack of cheeriness, a Black Hole. Everything collapses into it, and damned little gets out again. I began to flounder, and I’m afraid that the sight of a half-crocked Englishman floundering in a Sunbeam with a rather dazzling redhead at his side was enough to make the day for the locals. Not that they lined the streets to cheer, mind you, but I noticed a certain mocking quality in the eye of the policeman who stopped us.

    “‘Going somewhere?’ he asked.

    “It struck me as a rather stupid question, as it must have been obvious to him that we were not. After all, he had just succeeded in following us in five complete circles.

    “‘Beverly Hills Police Department?’ said I, giving him the bright smile.

    “‘Wrong town. Try again.’

    “Well, I knew it was the wrong town, for God’s sake. All I was trying to do was get it across to him that directions were needed. He was obviously dense. I tried again.

    “‘We want to go to the Beverly Hills Police Department.’ I tried to wither him with a look this time. Take my word for it: don’t ever try to wither a Culver City cop. They take it personally.”

    To get back to the case, however, this really is a detective story, although with all of the wackiness going on, you might begin to wonder. There is one line in the book which John Brett, for all of his semi-doltishness, which is obviously a front, picks up on and knows (he says later) who the killer is, right then and there. He’s right. If you read it correctly, you will, too.

    What I don’t know is whether or not his knowing then fits in with the rest of the book, as he tells it. That is to say, if he (or you or I) knew then what he says he knew — well, I’d have to read the book again.

    While in a one sense it’s completely out of character, it could very well be that John Brett is an even deeper character than he otherwise ever lets on.

    Since this was his only recorded outing as a detective, we may never know.

[UPDATE] 04-23-09.   As you see, I have found my copy of the Bantam edition.

GEORGE BAXT – The Dorothy Parker Murder Case.

International Polygonics; reprint paperback; 1st printing, April 1986. Hardcover edition: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Trade paperback reprint: IPL, November 1989.

   I’ve been struggling to remember, but I think this is the first book by George Baxt that I’ve ever read. The Dorothy Parker Murder Case is the first of three series of detective novels he wrote, along with five stand-alone works of crime fiction. His series charcaters were:

      1. Pharaoh Love: New York City homicide detective in New York, both black and gay.
      2. Sylvia Plotkin and Max van Larsen: New York City author and police detective.
      3. Jacob Singer: New York City homicide detective, later a 1940s LA private eye, or so I’ve been told.

   While I was reading it, I didn’t realize that Dorothy Parker was Singer’s first recorded case. He and the celebrated Mrs. Parker had met previously when this case begins – that of the mysterious deaths of several Manhattan-based show girls — but when, how, and on what basis it happened they met was never the subject of a mystery novel of its own.

   When Baxt, who died in 2003, was writing the Jacob Singer books, I was going through a phase in which I paid no attention to mystery fiction that had “real people” in them. I had no idea until yesterday that Baxt had written so many of them. (See the complete list at the end of this review.)

   I can’t tell you why I had that particular prejudice. If I had a bad experience with a novel with a real person in it, it’s possible, but I simply don’t remember. Sometimes otherwise normal people do silly things.

   I also have never done any reading about Dorothy Parker and the famed Algonquin Round Table, nor read any but the briefest poems among her huge accumulation of literary work. I suppose there’s enough time left in my life to make up for various deficiencies like this, and instead of writing reviews, I sometimes think maybe I really ought to be doing something about it.

   In this book, which takes place immediately following the tragic death of Rudolph Valentino in 1926, the following real people appear, and I know I’m omitting some: Dorothy Parker, of course; her sleuthing partner, Alexander Woolcott; George S. Kauffman, in whose apartment the first dead girl is found; Robert Benchley; Marc Connelly; Judge Crater; Polly Adler; Edna Ferber; George Raft; Harold Ross; Flo Ziegfeld; Neysa McMein; Horace Liveright; Marie Dressler; Elsa Maxwell; Jeanne Eagels; and more.

   Not that all of these have big parts, but if what George Baxt says about them and their whoring and drinking, it’s remarkable that any of them grew up to be famous. There are puns, zingers and witticisms in this book galore, nearly one on every page.

   Picking a page at random, here’s a long passage that begins by describing Jacob Singer as he walks into Kauffman’s apartment to see the dead girl there in the bed:

    Here’s another:

    The less said about the mystery the better, and you will have noticed that I’ve already done so. That’s not what you’re paying your money for this time around. For what it’s worth, of the real people above, George Raft fares the worst at the hands of Mr. Baxt’s typewriter. Of the people who weren’t real until Mr. Baxt came along, though, you may be sure that many of them fare much worse.

    In summary, then, in case you’re wondering, do I intend to track down and read the rest of Jacob Singer’s adventures? Yes, indeed I do, and here’s a complete list of them, based on his entry on the Thrilling Detective website. (Not all of these are listed in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. I will pass the information along to Al Hubin.)

* The Dorothy Parker Murder Case (1984)
* The Alfred Hitchcock Murder Case (1986)

* The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case (1987)

* The Talking Pictures Murder Case (1990)
* The Greta Garbo Murder Case (1992)

* The Noel Coward Murder Case (1992)
* The Marlene Dietrich Murder Case (1993)

* The Mae West Murder Case (1993)

* The Bette Davis Murder Case (1994)
* The Humphrey Bogart Murder Case (1995)
* The William Powell & Myrna Loy Murder Case (1996)
* The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Murder (1997)
* The Clark Gable & Carole Lombard Murder (1997)

   If you’re interested in Cornell Woolrich and get Turner Classic Movies on satellite, I strongly suggest that, the next time it’s scheduled, you check out Blind Date (Columbia, 1934). It’s not based on anything Woolrich wrote and isn’t even a film noir, but this obscure little gem breathes the spirit of Woolrich’s early non-crime fiction like no other movie I’ve seen.

   Ann Sothern stars as a young woman of Manhattan, supporting her parents and a kid brother and sister in the pit of the Depression. As in the country-western song she is torn between two lovers: her steady boyfriend (Paul Kelly), who is “shanty Irish” like herself, and the wealthy young playboy (Neil Hamilton) whom she met on the blind date of the title.

   Anyone who’s familiar with the early Woolrich stories, and their recurrent theme that relationships and anguish are inseparable, is sure to feel that this movie must have been based on one of them.

   (Homework assignment: read Woolrich’s 1930 tale “Cinderella Magic,” collected in my Love and Night, just before or after watching the movie.)

   Even more amazing is the number of links between this film and Woolrich’s future. There’s a short and brutal scene at a dance marathon prefiguring the suspense master’s powerful 1935 tale “Dead on Her Feet.”

   Second male lead Paul Kelly was to play the second male lead a dozen years later in the Woolrich-based “Fear in the Night” (1947).

   The director, Roy William Neill, would later, and just before his death, helm Black Angel (1946), arguably the finest movie ever based on a Woolrich novel.

   Even the title Blind Date figures in the Woolrich canon: first in his pulp story “Blind Date with Death” (1937), later as the new title for the 1935 story better known as “The Corpse and the Kid” and “Boy with Body” when, in 1949, Fred Dannay reprinted it in EQMM.

   All these links are coincidences, of course, but what an eye-popping network of them!

   Speaking of Fred Dannay, a Japanese film crew will soon be coming to America to make a documentary on Ellery Queen. Since this is the first segment of a projected series to be called The Great Mystery Writers, I assume (and hope) that the emphasis will be on Fred and his first cousin Manny Lee, not on the detective character whose name they chose as their joint byline.

   I’m going to be involved in this project but exactly to what extent and in what capacity isn’t clear yet. For updates, stay tuned to this column.

   Soon to be published by the ABA Press (that’s ABA as in American Bar Association) is an anthology entitled Lawyers in Your Living Room! which deals, as you must already have guessed, with the countless series about the legal profession that have graced or disgraced our TV screens for more than half a century.

   As you also must already have guessed, I wrote the chapter on Perry Mason. There’s also a chapter on The Defenders, but most of the series discussed in the book are much more recent than Mason. For more details you needn’t wait for my next column, just google the title.

   During much of the next week my eyes are going to be glued to the PDF of the second volume of The Dark Page, which I am checking over for author Kevin Johnson.

   The first volume was a lavish coffee-table book dealing with those films noirs of the 1940s that were based on novels or short stories and with their literary sources.

   The sequel covers the noirs of the Fifties and early Sixties and their literary sources, ranging from Dreiser and Hemingway and Graham Greene, through a slew of specialists in noir fiction — Horace McCoy, Steve Fisher, Dorothy B. Hughes, Ed McBain, John D. MacDonald, David Goodis and (need I mention?) Woolrich — to such long-forgotten pen wielders as Ferguson Findley and Willard Wiener.

   Mickey Spillane, of course, gets full coverage. The choices of what films count as noir are at times quite unusual: The Bad Seed and the first version of Death of a Salesman are in, as is Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, but Psycho is out.

   The illustrations aren’t part of my PDF but, if the first Dark Page volume is any indication, they’ll be stunning.

   If you groove on Harry Stephen Keeler, the greatest nut who ever wrote a book, you’ll be pleased to hear that Strands of the Web, a collection that brings together the vast majority of his early short stories — not all because two or three remain lost — is about to be published by Ramble House.

   Most of these tales were written between 1913 and 1916, when Keeler was in his early and middle twenties and just beginning to develop the webwork patterns of wild coincidence that were to become his trademark but the earliest story dates back to 1910 and the latest to 1962, a few years before his death.

   You’ll find a few foreshadowings of his wacky webs now and then in this collection, but the prose is much more ordinary than the labyrinth sentences he eventually came to favor. The most noticeable influence on these stories is O. Henry, perhaps the most popular American short-fiction writer of all time, who died the same year Keeler first set pen to paper.

   For more details, go to www.ramblehouse.com.

From today’s emails:

    Hi, I have a query….Hope you may be able to help me out… On which Edgar Wallace story / novel was the 1960 Vernon Sewell movie The Man in the Back Seat based? I would appreciate any responses. Thanks. Regards, Ashish Pandey.

Me again:

    No online resource seems to say. Or to clarify, Edgar Wallace is always given as the author, but the name of the specific short story or novel the 1961 film’s based on is never stated. It was part of a series of 46 films entitled The Edgar Wallace Mysteries produced by Merton Park Productions.

    From http://www.britmovie.co.uk/, here’s a list of the cast members along with the longest recap of the storyline that I’ve found anywhere, in case anyone recognizes it. The director was Vernon Sewell. And believe it or not, I’ve even found a photo from the film that I can show you, but — nothing more re Wallace.

   Derren Nesbitt – Tony
   Keith Faulkner – Frank
   Carol White – Jean
   Harry Locke – Joe Carter

Plot Synopsis

   Taut B-movie adapted from an Edgar Wallace mystery with an intriguing premise that’s ingeniously executed by director Vernon Sewell. Sewell outdoes himself with this well-plotted and haunting story of two incompetent crooks and an unwanted passenger which obviously has its roots in the Banquo’s ghost segment of Macbeth.

   Two youthful crooks, cold-hearted Tony (Darren Nesbitt) and his compliant best mate Frank (Keith Faulkner), try to rob bookie Joe Carter (Harry Locke) as he is leaving the dog track with his daily winnings. Unfortunately, the two discover that he’s chained the case to his wrist and consequently they are forced to take him along with them as they try to find a way to salvage the money. They drive through the London night looking for an opportunity to break the chain but wind up back at Frank’s house – much to the chagrin of his nagging wife Jean (Carol White). Having beaten the bookie unconscious, the pair douse him in alcohol and dump him near a hospital in the expectation of a passer-by discovering him, but the pair have to retrieve the lifeless bookie when they realise they’ve left fingerprints behind. They return to Jean’s with the body, where a neighbouring back-street doctor declares the bookie practically dead, Tony and Frank drive north to Birmingham to dispose of the body, but on the North Circular the pair encounter a eerie experience.