MAY MACKINTOSH – Balloon Girl.

Popular Library; paperback reprint; no date stated. US hardcover edition: St. Martin’s, 1977. Previous UK hardcover edition: Collins, 1976, as Roman Adventure.

   If you seek a book that has all but dropped out of sight, you need not look very much further than this one. There is only one copy of the paperback listed on ABE, and five copies of the hardcover, and for the completists among you who may be wondering, there is a single copy of the British hardcover.

    One might also wonder, or at least I am, why the British title Roman Adventure was changed for the US edition. The UK title is fairly bland, I grant you, but why did they think that Balloon Girl was a better one? That it would sell more books? It doesn’t seem that way to me, but I never was a marketing major. (Since I prefer the US title myself, it’s only a rhetorical question.)

   Under either title, I’m going to call this a novel of “gentle romantic suspense” and wait for all of the hard-boiled detective fans who are still reading this to step off the bus, if they haven’t already, before getting down to details.

    To wit: this is one of those books which never quite manages to get down to details — any questions that plain flat out need to be asked are never quite asked. They’re left somewhere off in the distance, clouds on the horizon, to be dealt with later. This is a book for someone with the flair of a master procrastinator for putting off unpleasant things in life until tomorrow.

   Take Kati Nickleby, for example, for indeed she is the primary and main character in the tale. Kati works for the restoration department at the European and American Museum in London, and when she awakes on the morning that dawns in Chapter One, she spots her flatmate Ann, her immediate supervisor at the museum, driving off in the street below with a strange man, taking all of her clothes and possessions with her.

   Later that morning it is discovered that a valuable Van Gogh is missing. While there is no proof, the conclusion is obvious. Or is it? On page 29 Ann returns, blissfully unaware that the police have been looking for her. End of Chapter Two.

   In Chapter Three, Kati is in Italy, ready for her pre-arranged stay with Signor Turo, for whom she is to work in his private gallery. What had happened to Ann is a question that Kati ponders but does not know the answer to, and life in sunny Italy begins to shoo away the clouds that had formed back in England.

   Until, shockingly, Ann appears again in a villa Kati is visiting in Tuscany. Ann is the niece of the owner, one Conte Pietro di Tiepolo, and not too coincidentally, of a chain of antique shops, each called “The Balloon Girl.”

   And also not too coincidentally, Kati’s one assured friend, Dr. Sam Frame, a Canadian museum director who also happens to have been on the scene in London when the Van Gogh disappeared and now also in Italy, suspects that forged paintings have surfaced through The Balloon Girl shops.

   Ah, sorry. This is getting (a) too complicated, while at the same time (b) I am oversimplifying things. I will skip further details, as I am sure you have gotten the picture by now.

   There is an abundance of atmosphere, with long passages in which little happens except sudden chills in the warm Italian sun — hinting ever so slightly that some insidious evil is at work — and then of a sudden, evil is at work.

   Shots ring out in an open square. Kati is attacked while touring the Tomb of St. Cecelia. Someone wants her dead. Someone else — or it is the same person? — intends to use her to take a fall. For whom or for what, it is not quite known, but nonetheless suspicion is steered by the spadeful in her direction.

   Please don’t get me wrong. There are flashes of brilliance in the plotting, just enough to keep the reader wondering, and just often enough to keep the previously mentioned reader from putting the book down for good. When the tale begins to falter, crumble and fall apart, my advice is to stay with it, as no, it never quite does.

      Bibliographic data:

   Here’s a complete list of the other mystery fiction that May Mackintosh wrote, expanded from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, with an able assist from abebooks.com:

Appointment in Andalusia. Collins, UK, hc, 1972. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1972.
      Dell, pb, 1973.

      Pan 23817, pb, UK, 1974.

A King and Two Queens. Collins, UK, hc, 1973. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1973, as Assignment in Andorra.

      Pan 24325, pb, UK, n.d., as Assignment in Andorra.

The Sicilian Affair. Collins, UK, hc, 1974. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1974.
      Dell, pb, 1978, as Dark Paradise.

The Double Dealers. Collins, UK, hc, 1975.
      Delacorte, hc, 1975, as Highland Fling.
      Dell, pb, 1978, as Highland Fling.

Roman Adventure. Collins, UK, hc,1976.
      St. Martin’s, hc, 1977, as Balloon Girl.
      Pop. Library 04384, pb, n.d., as Balloon Girl.

   And as by REGINA ROSS:

Falls the Shadow. Arthur Barker, hc, UK, 1974. [British Intelligence agent Charles Forsyth]
      Delacorte, hc, 1974.
      Futura/Troubadour, pb, UK, 1977.
      Dell, pb, n.d.

The Devil Dances for Gold. Macdonald & Janes, hc, UK, 1976.
      Futura / Troubadour, UK, pb, 1977.

      Ballantine, pb, 1977.

The Face of Danger. Avon, pb, 1982.

   There are no birth or death dates for May Mackintosh in Crime Fiction IV, but what Al does provide is the only biographical information I have discovered so far: She was born in Scotland and later lived in Spain. I do not know who series characters Laurie Grant and Stewart Noble are (nothing on Google), but I plan on finding out, eventually. Some day…!

[UPDATE] 01-17-09.   I don’t know why I wrote such a long review of this book, but I did. I thought just now of cutting it, but in the end I decided not to. I did do some rearranging, though, to put the bibliographic data at the end, not the beginning.

   Since writing the review, I haven’t found anything more about May Mackintosh myself, but Al Hubin has. From Part 9 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, here are the years she was born and when she died: 1922-1998.

NORMAN KELLEY – Black Heat.

Avon, paperback reprint; 1st printing, 2002. First Edition: Cool Grove, trade ppbk, 1997. Reprint hardcover: Amistad Press (HarperCollins), 2001.

   I need some help here. If you can think of another series detective novel as focused on black power politics as this one is, let me know. Black Heat is the first appearance of former Brooklyn-based prosecutor turned private eye Nina Halligan, who is both female and black.

   (The second is The Big Mango (Akashic Books, 2000), and I’m glad to know that there is a second one, because after over 300 pages of small print and letting it all out in the first one, I thought perhaps Kelley had left himself with nothing more to say.)

   Nina is hired to find the daughter of the widow of an assassinated black leader of the 1970s, Sister Ronnie, a former movie star, who has been in a mental institution for the last two decades, unable to withstand the pressures on her as a grief-stricken black Madonna.

   In the meantime the legacy of Dr. Malik Martin, her husband, has been fractured and split between two opposing groups of black power activists, one ultra-conservative, anti-rap and anti-feminism, the other more progressive, but each with guns, firepower and the motivation for wiping the other from the face of the nation.

   The pace of the first three-quarters of the book is slowed by the huge amount of expository dumps needed to fill in the background, and a list of characters is badly needed to keep them all straight.

    Even worse, the continuity is severely marred — if you’re trying to read this a detective mystery — by ever-changing statements of who admitted to what, and when.

   Nina Halligan, who tells her own story, is a tough person to identify with, with a mercurial temperament and obsessed with finding the killers of her murdered husband and two children.

   Not that she has much time to spare for the latter, as all her energy is diverted to the ever-growing case at hand. Streetwise and violent, and nearly out of control by the end, this is not a story to which you can cuddle up and relax with.

   Perhaps unique in the world of detective fiction, with lots of jagged edges, this won’t be a book for everyone, but the strong images it invokes are designed to stay with you for a while — and ignoring any of its flaws — I guarantee you that they will.

[UPDATE] 01-17-09. Taken from an online biography: “Norman Kelley is an independent journalist [and] author [who] has written for L A Weekly, The Village Voice, The Nation, [and] Newsday [among others].

    “He is also the author of the ‘noir soul’/ mystery series that features ‘Nina Halligan’ in Black Heat (Amistad), The Big Mango (Akashic Books), and A Phat Death (2003).

    “Norman Kelley was also a contributing writer to Brooklyn Noir (Akashic Books, 2004) and DC Noir (Akashic Books, 2006). […] He edited and contributed to R&B (Rhythm and Business): The Political Economy of Black Music (Akashic Books, 2005).”

   Harold R. Daniels was nominated for an Edgar in 1955 for his first novel, In His Blood. His other five novels feature the excellence of his first: interesting plots and situations, solid characterizations, and a sense of realism few crime novels achieve.

   In His Blood (Dell, 1955) is the story of Milton Raskob, a worker at Hammersmith Chemical, a loner. Then something happens to change his dull, meaningless life:

   Raskob is seized by the urge to kill, and he does. After following a school girl after a movie, he uses his knife to butcher her. The buildup to the scene is powerful and realistic.

   Lieutenant Ed Tanager of Homicide is given the case. Tanager has personal problems: his daughter is hospitalized with suspected polio; Tanager’s wife is an emotional zombie as a result.

   Raskob endures various humiliations, and after each he feels the urge to use his knife. He almost murders a little black girl, but she gets away. Later, he butchers a small boy in the park. Finally, the fever takes over and he slits the throat of a newborn baby in its crib.

   The investigation is believable, realistic, and professional as Tanager and his men hunt for the killer. The reader feels the frustration of the lack of clues; but he also feels for Raskob as a man driven beyond his limits.

   In His Blood isn’t a perfect book. Daniel’s writing style has its weaknesses, and the dialogue wanders into cliches too frequently. But In His Blood is a superb study of a modern day Ripper.

   Daniels’ second book, The Girl in 304 (Dell, 1956), begins with the body of a young woman found in the woods: stripped and stabbed to death. For a moment I thought Daniels was going to tell the same story as In His Blood, only this time from the perspective of a Georgia sheriff, Ed Masters.

   But this time we aren’t dealing with a psychopath: there’s motive and deception involved here. The plotting is tight and the characters are more fully developed than those of In His Blood.

   I liked The Girl in 304 because Masters must first learn the secrets of the dead woman before he can find the killer, and in that process we discover truths about Masters and ourselves.

   With The Accused (Dell, 1958), Daniels attempts something new. The format is radically different: sections of testimony introduce the narrative. The evidence presented in the trial is expanded and amplified by the chapter that follows it.

   Alvin Morlock is a simple man teaching at a small college. He is unexceptional. He lives a lonely, studious life. But he meets Louise Palaggi, a tramp, and in a moment of supreme foolishness marries her. From that moment he is doomed.

   But Daniels is subtle enough to make Morelock’s fate a tragic event by increments. Although two people are destroyed in this book, the crime is one of being punished for stupidity and pride rather than the usual premeditation. The Accused displays Daniels’ growth in writing skill and characterizations.

   With his next book, Daniels gets even better. John D. MacDonald said, “Harold Daniels’ The Snatch belongs among the modern classics of crime and punishment.” The Snatch (Dell, 1958) involves three men desperate enough to kidnap the grandchild of a Mafia godfather, but men who lack the toughness and professionalism to get away with it.

   Mollison is a grifter who’s come to the end of his road. He’s working for a used car company and is caught trying to work a con on the company. Mollison needs money to avoid a prison sentence.

   Mollison knows Morgan, a bank teller who wants to live as well as the wealthy side of the Morgan family lives. Morgan needs money.

   Mollison also knows Patsy, a handyman of low intelligence who admires Mollison’s phony style. Mollison tricks him into a part in the scheme.

   The snatch comes off fine, but it’s the aftermath with murder and the psychological disintegration which produces the book’s finely crafted conclusion. The characters create their own doom in their own special ways.

   The Snatch is Daniels’ best balanced book, reflecting narrative control and tight plotting.

   For the Asking (Fawcett, 1962) features a character very much like Milton Raskob, the psychopath from In His Blood. Lawrence Merrick is a high school English teacher. He’s pushing forty. He has no close friends. He’s an indifferent teacher whose students consider him boring and stupid. The administration correctly labels him as a time-server.

   But when Merrick assists at a school dance, he’s presented an opportunity to exercise the power and control he craves. While searching the school grounds for necking couples. Merrick stumbles on two students about to make love: Don Scott is the teen-aged son of the town’s doctor, while the girl, Jean Cole, is from the poor side of town.

   Merrick uses his discovery of their activity to blackmail Scott for money and Jean Cole for sex. Slowly, Merrick’s power over these two young people begins the chain of events that’ll destroy them all. When Jean Cole becomes pregnant, Merrick’s mind bursts into a frenzy of hatred and murder.

   For the Asking is a solid book. Its theme of dominance and submission painfully illustrates the ironies of youth and age.

   With House on Greenapple Road (Random House, 1966; Dell, 1969) Daniels brings all of his experience and craftsmanship together. It is simply a stunning book, excellent in all respects.

   A neighbor calls the police. Detective Dan Nalon comes out to the house on Greenapple Road. Here’s how Daniels describes the community it’s a part of, Fruit Hill Farms:

   That is good writing, capturing the tedium and futility of suburban developments with cute names.

   When Nalon reaches his destination he finds a kitchen covered with blood: seven pints of it. The press converge like barracuda, calling it ‘The Red Kitchen Murder.’ However, police can’t find the body. Marian Ord, the missing woman, becomes the object of a multi-state search.

   But Nalon does a search of his own, and, like a time machine, uncovers Marian Ord’s strange, torrid past. Daniels exposes it carefully, skillfully, in a series of flashbacks. The ski instructor, the preacher, the lifeguard, the motorcycle fan, the salesman, the bookie. The path of Marian Ord’s life is like a minefield.

   Nalon follows the case to the surprising conclusion and the result is perhaps Daniels’ best book. I highly recommend House on Greenapple Road and the rest of Daniels’ novels. He’s a fine writer and his books will give you hours of suspense and enjoyment.

VINCENT STARRETT – The Case Book of Jimmie Lavender. Gold Label, hardcover, 1944. Hardcover reprint: Bookfinger, 1973.

   Comprising about a fourth of the published cases of Jimmie Lavender, the only sleuth in mystery fiction named for a major-league baseball player, these twelve tales from the Twenties and Thirties are representative examples of the now mostly forgotten detective short stories of Vincent Starrett, better known today as the biographer of Lavender’ s inspiration, Sherlock Holmes.

   By modern standards, none is of the first rank, but most are well-plotted puzzles cast in the classic mold, with a nice blend of cerebral deduction and physical action, and even fifty years and more later they have their attractions.

   Several of the victims in the ten episodes concerned with murder are dispatched in picturesque ways and in a variety of interesting settings. Among the latter: a nightclub, a cruise ship, a golf course, a hospital, a university campus not far from the grounds of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and even an airplane cockpit.

   In one of the tales, a house “vanishes”; in another, the scene of the crime itself disappears; in a third — a locked-room homicide — the case is solved twenty years before it occurs. And every so often the proceedings are enlivened with some typical Chicago-style gunplay.

   Though not as fully realized or memorably limned as some of his more celebrated Golden Age contemporaries, Lavender himself is an engaging protagonist, warm and whimsical throughout, though perhaps a bit too omniscient at times. He is aided in his investigations by his equally likable companion and chronicler, “Gilly” Gilruth, a refreshingly able Watson.

   Taken in small doses, their adventures are still fun to read, both for their own sake and as pleasantly nostalgic reminders of a more innocent era in the history of the crime-fiction genre.

   Starrett also published a number of mystery novels, none of which is particularly distinguished. Three of these feature a detective with the unlikely name of Walter Ghost: Murder on “B” Deck (1929), Dead Man Inside (1931), and The End of Mr. Garment (1932).

   Starrett’s best novel, however, is probably Murder in Peking (1946), which has a nicely evoked Chinese background. Other of Starrett’s criminous short stories can be found in Coffins for Two (1924) and The Blue Door (1930); two of the stories in the later volume feature Jimmie Lavender.

         ———
   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.

CHARLES G. BOOTH – Murder at High Tide.

William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1930. UK edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930.

   This story of a domestic tyrant who’s found murdered in his library has a lot of what attracted me to mysteries in the first place.

   Even so, while fun to read, an honest appraisal would have to rank it only a notch or so above the Hardy Boys. And as in a vintage Charlie Chan movie, the dead man’s mansion is full of suspects at each other’s throats, with wild accusations and amazing discoveries coming at every moment.

   The hero is a young antiques dealer, in his own words, an ass with women. (No further comment.) The detective is Anatole Flique, a comically suave French policeman, although the murder does take place on an island just off the California coast. In his own words, he’s the cleverest on the Paris Surete. He’s also greatly given to twirling his mustaches and busily polishing the top of his head, all the while contemplating life’s little mysteries.

   There are tons of false evidence, most of it leading to dead ends, but I think that the killer, in spite of his or her alibi, should be spotted at once. The style is not John Dickson Carr’s, but it is his kind of story. If there’s no locked room, it’s only because then there wouldn’t have been quite so much fun with alibi-breaking, which in Murder at High Tide is the name of this particular game.

[UPDATE] 01-14-09.  One of the revisions I made was to add the name of the French detective who worked on this case. Obviously I had no idea that he appeared in more than one book, but he did. From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s his complete dossier:

FLIQUE, ANATOLE [Charles G. Booth]
       o Murder at High Tide (n.) Morrow 1930 [California]
       o The Cat and the Clock (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Los Angeles, CA]
       o Kings Die Hard (n.) Hammond 1949 [California; 1929]

   This last book never had a US edition. It came out in 1949, the same year that the author died. According to Wikipedia, Charles G. Booth was “a British-born writer who settled in America and wrote several classic Hollywood stories, including The General Died at Dawn (1936) and Sundown (1941). He won an Academy Award for Best Story for The House on 92nd Street in 1945. […] He also penned the source story for Paul Mazursky’s 1988 film Moon Over Parador.”

   I’d never realized until now that Booth was originally from England. Besides the fiction he wrote in novel form, I know his name from many stories he wrote for Black Mask, the quintessential hard-boiled American detective pulp magazine.

   In fact, he has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the three authors whose stories were deleted from the paperback edition of The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (Simon & Schuster, 1946), edited by Joseph T. Shaw. This is a great reason why you should own the hardcover edition, not just the one reprinted by Pocket (1952).

MARY DAHEIM – Just Desserts.

Avon, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1991. Reprinted many times; a later cover is shown.

   Another first novel, so far as I know [it was], and like Gloria White’s Murder on the Run (reviewed here earlier), one that takes place in contemporary California. Other than that, the difference between this book and the other is nearly without measure.

   So that you should not get me wrong, each book has a heroine rather than a hero, but where PI Ronnie Ventura is almost as tough as the guys she hangs out with, Judith Grover McGonigle is a widow trying to make ends meet with a newly established Bed-and-Breakfast in her home, and she and her cousin Renie are both as suburbanly house-wifey as they come.

   And when a family of wacky eccentrics descends on her house (while their own is being fumigated), and when the murder of a charlatan fortune-teller occurs the same evening the contents of a will are going to be disclosed, and when the investigating officer turns out to be Joe Flynn, an old beau who mysteriously disappeared on Judith 25 years ago, why then, you might get the idea you’ve read all this before.

   The clutter and clamor do not die down for an instant. Everybody seems to have known or have been related to the dead woman some time or another, and everyone appears to have a motive. None of it seems to matter, though. Nobody seems to care very much, though they say they do, or maybe it was just me.

   I also found it difficult enough to keep all the names straight, much less worry about small things like why the police let everyone roam all around the house, inside and out, and how the neighbors manage to pop in and out with important evidence without anyone being aware of it.

   There is a small mystery about Joe Flynn’s marriage and impending annulment, and somewhere between pages 101 and 102 something seems to have gotten terribly garbled, as though somebody left out several pages of text. In all the confusion that is supposed to pass for mysterious happenings, I guess not even whoever was supposed to have edited this book happened to notice.

   Let me leave you with this small quote from the end of the book (page 203). It will tell you as best as I could otherwise where a sizable part of Judith McGonigle’s mind is really at:

[UPDATE] 01-13-09. From 1983 through 1992, Mary Daheim wrote historical romances, seven in all, but her career as a writer didn’t really begin until she switched to writing mysteries in 1991 with Just Desserts.

In spite of my reservations about the book, it has struck a chord with a sizable segment of the mystery reading population. There are now 25 books in the series, either published or forthcoming

   That’s more than a book a year, on the average — work out the math — but in the same time period, Mary Daheim has written 21 books in yet another series, this one the Emma Lord mysteries, beginning with The Alpine Advocate in 1992. (The title refers to the newspaper that Emma Lord publishes and edits in a small town in Washington state.)

   But getting back to Judith McGonigle, rather than put the inevitable off any longer, by Dune to Death, the fourth book in the series, she’d married Joe Flynn, and all of their subsequent adventures were as husband and wife. (Seeing that she had a good thing going, she didn’t give up the Bed-and-Breakfast, though.)

ANGELA AMATO & JOE SHARKEY – Lady Gold. St. Martin’s, reprint paperback; 1st printing, October 1999. Hardcover edition: August 1998.

   From reading the biographical information about Angela Amato inside the back cover, one could easily get the impression (I did) that the story in Lady Gold could in large part be autobiographical. Her life story, in the guise of that of NYPD police detective Gerry Conte, could easily be “as told to” Joe Sharkey, a columnist for the New York Times, at least at the time this paperback edition came out.

   Angelo Amato, we are told, was an officer and a detective for the NYPD for over a decade. See above. Now a criminal defense attorney, she is in private practice in New York and Florida. In Lady Gold, Gerry Conte is in her last semester of law school. And the book reads like one of the most authentic police procedurals I’ve had in my hands in quite a while.

   Gerry’s primary function is babysitting a CI — a Confidential Informant — who’s the nephew of one Anthony Rossi, an underboss in the New York City Mafia. Trapped on some minor charges, Eugene Rossi has agreed to help get the goods on Tony, who in turn may help nab the real target, the top guy himself, Sal Messina.

   Working undercover like this is slow and often unproductive work, and the book often reads that way too. Flurries of action, once quite deadly, then long lulls of relative calm. Leads spring up, then fizzle out. Gerry’s problem, though, is of her own making. She gets too close to Eugene, whom she recognizes as illiterate and weak in the ways of the real world – so much so that the oral agreement he’s made with the D.A.’s office is not worth (as they say) the paper it’s not written on.

   Is Gerry too close to closing the line? Once Eugene Rossi has testified, if the case ever gets that far, he’ll be hung out to dry. No witness protection program for him, no matter what he’s been lead to believe. Is she a woman or is she a cop? In the male-dominated world of cops and lawyers, it’s not a good question.

   This is inside stuff that is going on in Lady Gold. All the details ring true. If the going is slow at first, stay with it. The pages of the last third of the book will flicker by in a blur.

PostScript. After Lady Gold was written, and with no other books to her credit, Angela Amato became a consultant for the NBC series Third Watch (1999-2005), and as Angela Amato Velez, wrote four of the episodes.

   From Wikipedia: The series was “set in New York City… It followed the exploits of a group of police officers, firefighters, and paramedics in the fictional 55th Precinct and Fire Station 55 whose shifts fell between 3 p.m. and 11 p.m, the ‘third watch.’”

EDWINA NOONE – Dark Cypress.

Ace K-213, paperback original; 1st printing, 1965. Reprinted at least once.

   Edwina Noone was, as you might have guessed, if you didn’t already know, one of the pseudonyms of Michael Avallone, one of more prolific writers of the 60s and 70s. As the author of a long armful of detective novels, his primary private eye character — and probably his favorite — was the inimitable Ed Noon, the books in which he appeared I should really unpack and read again soon.

   Avallone as Noone stays totally within the restrictions of the gothic romance novel, however, as practiced in the 60s and 70s, and except for sheer readability, perhaps, there’s nothing in this tale’s style of writing to suggest that it was Avallone who was really at the wheel.

   We move from Cornwall (see my earlier review of The Shadow of Polperro, by Frances Cowen) to Connecticut. From the present day when the previous book took place, we shift in time to some unidentified period in the past. Rather than a desolate castle on a rocky coastline, the focus is instead a grove of cypress trees surrounding a bathing pool behind a huge manor house.

   A young girl comes to be the tutor of a young motherless boy, his aloof father and two servants the only other occupants of a house that’s full of secrets. Many another gothic novel has started in very much the same way. The boy’s older brother is dead, drowned in the pool behind the house, a magnificent lad; a prodigy, the housekeeper says. The mother had died at childbirth. The younger boy never knew her.

   Very atmospheric, and although you can read pages at a single glance, the tension builds so that you can all but feel it. Built to a formula, but in the hands of a man (in this case) born to write, formulas can also have substance.

[UPDATE] 01-12-09. Another reason you should go back to the review I posted of The Shadow of Polperro is that in the comments afterward Xavier Lechard and I had a brief exchange about the formula that most gothics were structured on, plus a display of a few of their covers in their French incarnations.

   The following list does not include all of the gothic romances written by the late Michael Avallone, only the ones for which his Edwina Noone byline was used. (He also wrote gothics as by Priscilla Dalton, Jean-Anne de Pre, Dora Highland and Dorothea Nile.) Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

NOONE, EDWINA. Pseudonym of Michael Avallone.

      Corridor of Whispers (n.) Ace 1965
      Dark Cypress (n.) Ace 1965
      Heirloom of Tragedy (n.) Lancer 1965
      Daughter of Darkness (n.) Signet 1966
      The Second Secret (n.) Belmont 1966
      The Victorian Crown (n.) Belmont 1966

      Seacliffe (n.) Signet 1968

      The Craghold Legacy (n.) Beagle 1971
      The Cloisonne Vase (n.) Curtis 1972
      The Craghold Creatures (n.) Beagle 1972
      The Craghold Curse (n.) Beagle 1972
      The Craghold Crypt (n.) Curtis 1973

   Of the two covers shown, note that the first is a stylized version containing all of the traditional ingredients, while the second features photographed models, rarely used for gothics, with a close-up shot of only their faces.

   The book itself was marketed as “a novel of high romance,” so it was an obvious attempt to move away from the typical gothic novel. Nonetheless the blurb on the front cover gives it away: “… dark tale of foreboding love between the daughter of a Yankee captain and a mysterious seafaring stranger, on the windswept coast of Maine.”

FRANCES COWEN – The Shadow of Polperro.

Ace, paperback; 1st US publication, 1973. First UK publication: Robert Hale, hardcover, 1969.

   Here’s a prime example of an authentic gothic romance novel. When this particular example of the genre recently surfaced in a box of books I was rummaging through, I just couldn’t resist.

   It has all of the right ingredients, starting, of course, with the cover: A close-up of a young wide-eyed girl standing behind a iron gate next to a tall piece of statuary; in the gloomy background, a hulk of a mansion or castle, with the full moon partially hidden behind the bare branches of a convenient tree.

   The castle is Polperro, located on the southern coast of Cornwall. Supposedly it dates back to the days of King Arthur, Camelot and the traitor Mordred. It was built by the latter as a fortress. In near decay now, and known by the nearby townsfolk to be haunted, it is the single item in Esther Roden’s inheritance from her father.

   Not knowing how to dispose of it, she deems herself lucky to find a film director who wishes to rent it as a location site for his latest effort, a remaking of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.

   Lots of hints follow of dire things to come, a few unexplainable accidents occur, and there’s an abundance of spooky atmosphere, but except for one dead body found strictly offstage … nothing really happens.

   There are some close calls, but just when you think the story is at last leading you somewhere, it doesn’t, and then it boldfacedly ignores even the possibility that it was leading you somewhere.

   You’ll also think I’m crazy, but the book is as compulsively readable as a bag full of popcorn. It’s not the detective work, which is as flimsy and as transparent as a wisp of mist, the killers’ identities obvious within pages.

   The author’s strong points are her characters, surprisingly enough, both major and minor. You may not notice it while she’s doing it, but she sketches and fills them in with ease, making what’s difficult for some writers seem almost effortless instead.

PostScript:   One character who befriends the heroine in this tale is an older lady named Agnes Macintosh, whose psychic powers warn Esther of the castle’s malevolence. She doesn’t have a big role, but later on it’s revealed that she also has connections with Scotland Yard. Interesting, but not worth mentioning until I discovered that she also appears in Frances Cowen’s Village of Fear, another gothic published by Ace. Al Hubin doesn’t list her as a series character in Crime Fiction III, so I just passed the Big News on to him

[UPDATE] 01-09-09.   I suspect that Agnes Macintosh may appear in some other of Frances Cowen’s books, but these are the only two identified so far.

   Cowen is the author of 30 novels in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, all perhaps in much the same vein as The Shadow of Polperro. Four other novels by her are marginally included in CFIV. These were written as by Eleanor Hyde and are historical novels taking place in the 1500s with some criminous elements. She also seems to have written many books for children, mostly for girls.

   All of her books for adults came out first in the UK in hardcover. Seven were published in US by Ace as paperback originals. Some of the other titles are The Curse of the Clodaghs (1973), The Gentle Obsession (1968), The Haunting of Helen Farley (1976), and The Hounds of Carvello (1970).

RICHARD STARK – The Hunter.

Pocket Books, paperback original, 1962. British title: Point Blank. Coronet, ppbk, 1967. Reprint editions include: Gold Medal, pb, ca.1967; and Berkley, pb, 1973, both as Point Blank; Avon, pb, 1984; Univ. of Chicago Press, trade pb, 2008. Film: MGM, 1967, as Point Blank (scw: Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse, Rafe Newhouse; dir: John Boorman). Film: Paramount, 1999, as Payback (scw: Brian Helgeland, Terry Hayes; dir: Helgeland).

   Although one of the most influential series of the Sixties and Seventies, the Parker novels have never really been a huge popular success in the United States. They have shuttled from one publisher to another, while gaining critical acclaim and cult status, selling handsomely in foreign editions, and generating six motion pictures — the income from which no doubt justified the effort put into the books by an author who is finally coming to be viewed as one of the major figures of the twentieth-century mystery.

   The impact Parker has had on the tough crime novel can be gauged by a sub-genre Stark has virtually invented: the so-called crook book. Prior to Stark, only Robin Hood thieves like Raffles or the Saint had taken center stage in series fiction; and W. R. Burnett — in whose path Stark most clearly treads — did not write series fiction about his amoral antiheroes.

   Parker’s recorded adventures begin in The Hunter (sometimes republished as Point Blank, the title of the stylish 1967 John Boorman-directed movie version with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson).

   Betrayed and left for dead on a heist by his wife, Lynn, and his friend Mal Resnick, Parker returns with a single-minded mission: to get the $45,000 due him. He first contacts his remorseful wife (who describes herself as a “Judas ewe”) and, without really intending to, intimidates her into suicide. When he finally corners Resnick, now employed by the mob, he finds Resnick has turned the money over to his “Outfit” bosses.

   With a sense of logic unique to him, Parker forces Mal to tell him the names and whereabouts of the various mob bosses, then strangles him and sets about getting his money back from the mob. What begins as a personal vendetta — which Parker cloaks in the practical consideration of getting his money back (it is characteristic of him to bury his emotions, his humanity turns into a darkly humorous tale of one man battling an organization.

   Parker is a self-sufficient, single-minded loner out of an earlier, wilder America; the soft, big-business boys don’t stand a chance against him.

   Richard Stark’s prose is as straightforward and matter-of-fact effective as Parker himself. His narrative structure, here and in the other Parker novels, is not so straightforward: Working in the third person, it is Stark’s method to follow the initial Parker-point-of-view section of the book with a section that shifts to Parker’s antagonist’s point of view (or, in later novels, the points of view of various characters, including antagonists), and then, finally, shift back to Parker’s viewpoint.

   Events are often seen more than once, from varying perspectives, moving back and forth in time, creating a sense of inevitability where Parker’s Frankenstein-monster forward momentum is concerned.

   The Parker series is one of the most evenly written in crime fiction; the sixteen novels are consistently well done and readable. If forced, one might point out Plunder Squad (1972) as a somewhat perfunctory Parker, and Deadly Edge (1971) as a particularly fine example.

   Offbeat entries include The Jugger (1965), in which Parker plays detective: and Slayground (1971), a set piece in which Parker hides from and does battle with mob interlopers in an amusement park.

   Parker has inspired two spin-offs: Grofield by Stark, and Dortmunder by Westlake. Actor Alan Grofield, whose first appearance was in the Parker novel The Score (1964), has appeared in four novels of his own: The Damsel (1967), The Dame (1969), The Blackbird (1969), and Lemons Never Lie (1971).

   The first three resemble slightly straighter versions of Westlake’s famed comic crime novels and, in their foreign locales, prefigure his massive Kahawa (1982). Grofield seems a slightly different character in his solo novels, struggling to perform the role of protagonist and not sidekick; but the two personas converge in the Parker-like Lemons Never Lie.

    Butcher’s Moon is a sequel to both the Parker entry, Slayground, and the Grofield entry, The Blackbird, which share nearly the same first chapters (detailing a botched armored-car job). The Dortmunder books are deadpan comedy versions of Parker capers: The first, The Hot Rock (1970), is a specific reworking of The Black Ice Score, and Grofield has a leading role.

   Later, in Jimmy the Kid (1974), Dortmunder’s gang read and follow as a blueprint a nonexistent Parker novel entitled Child Heist; this nicely counterpoints the differences between the cute absurd world of Westlake/Dortmunder and the grim absurd one of Stark/Parker.

         ———
   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.