RICHARD & FRANCES LOCKRIDGE – Murder Within Murder.

Pocket Books, reprint paperback; 1st printing, July 1982. Hardcover edition: J. B. Lippincott, 1946. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition], February 1946. Other paperback reprints: Dell 229 [mapback], 1948; Pyramid, October 1965. Trade paperback: Perennial, July 1994.

   Based on information obtained from Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction III, this is the 10th of the multi-entertaining series of Mr. & Mrs. North detective novels. There were 26 in all, appearing between 1940 and 1963. When his wife Frances died, Richard Lockridge continued writing for quite a while, but that’s when the curtain fell for the Norths, whose last appearance was Murder by the Book in 1963.

   I’m only guessing, but it always seemed to me that the character of Pamela North, the lady with the charmingly and disconcertingly chaotic thought processes, died when Frances did. She was either Pam’s creator or inspiration, or more than likely both, and when she left us, Mr. and Mrs. North went with her.

   And while I’m digressing, one thing more. Here’s something’s that always puzzled me. The North books were immensely popular, or so it’s my impression, but they never seemed to be very successful in paperback. Compared with the way the Perry Mason books sold, for example, the adventures of the Norths were left in the dust.

   Even though there was a long-running radio series chronicling their adventures, and later a TV series, many of the books were never published in softcover. If it weren’t for the Dollar Mystery Guild, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to read each and every one when they came out, and I doubt that I was the only one.

   Pressed to describe Pamela North to someone who’s never read one of her excursion in murder and detection, I’d have to say Gracie Allen without the brashness. Assuming that that someone knows who Gracie Allen is. The books themselves are light-hearted without being out-and-out funny. Here’s a quote, from page 143. Lt. Bill Weigand is speaking to Sgt. Mullins, who always thinks the cases in which the Norths get involved become screwy:

   The first victim is a middle-aged lady, very righteous in manner, who is doing research on a book of several notorious true crimes for North Books, Inc., and the list of suspects is a long one. She controls the purse strings of her late brother’s estate, and she does not approve of either the behavior of her niece and nephew or their habitual need for money.

   While a member of the faculty of a small college in Indiana, she disapproved of a fellow teacher’s conduct with a female student, and she said so, loudly. And as she was doing the research on the book on unsolved murders, it’s also possible that she uncovered some facts from the past that greatly displeased someone she perhaps shouldn’t have confronted. Hence the title.

   This is my kind of detective novel. All kinds of theories, possibilities, and configurations of other possibilities. The good stuff.

   Delicious coincidences also abound, which may turn some people off, but I didn’t mind them at all. Wiegand is a very good policeman, even if he lets the Norths hang around a little too much, and his interview with several suspects in Chapter 8 is a small masterpiece.

   Money — or safety — is the root of all murder. I’m paraphrasing from page 68, but it’s true. In retrospect, the solution to the murders is rather obvious. What the Lockridges were able to do more often than not, and they did it again here, is a magician’s trick, to keep what the eyes of the readers are seeing from actually reaching their brains. It’s either that, or I’m awfully thick-headed.

[COMMENT] 01-07-09. When I suggested Gracie Allen as being the ideal person to play Pam North, I think I had completely forgotten the movie in which she actually did
play Pam North. Either that, or I thought my comment “without the brashness” would cover whatever deficiencies in that regard that she might have.

   I might have to watch the movie again, but right now, unh-unh, no I don’t think so. After recently watching some of the early 50s TV shows with Barbara Britton, I’m now not so high on Gracie in the part now when I first wrote this review.

   Regarding the Norths in paperback, I was struck by the fact that this particular book came out quite a few times in paperback, and maybe you caught that, too. I’ll stick to my assertion that overall the North books did comparatively poorly in paperback, and one of these days I’ll do the research I need to back my statement up.

LEONARD R. GRIBBLE – The Grand Modena Murder.

Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, [1931]. Prior UK edition: George G. Harrap, hc, 1930. Paperback reprint: Cherry Tree, UK, ca.1944.

   The earliest books that were published under Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint showed decidedly English overtones. Like this one, a great many of their selections between 1929 and 1933 first appeared on the other side of the Atlantic.

   This one was written by Leonard Gribble when he was still very young, only 23, and perhaps as a result it nicely shows a grand youthful passion for melodrama and determined, awkward telling. Over a long career, Gribble wrote well over 50 other mysteries, both under his own name and others. Crime Club published only two or three of them, however, and most of his work has never appeared in this country.

   The Grand Modena that gives the book its name is a hotel, one of London’s finest. The opening scene is a confrontation that takes place in the ballroom, between a young man and the father of the girl he loves.

   Apparently the older man is something less than a completely trustworthy business associate as well. Not altogether to our surprise, he’s found the next morning murdered in his room upstairs. Detective Inspector Anthony Slade is immediately called in as the representative of Scotland Yard’s famed Criminal Investigation Department.

   Slade lives and breathes the entire investigation that follows. He eats it, he sleeps it, and over and over again he reasons his way through the treacherously tangled skein that the past has made of numerous intertwined secrets.

   If the internal workings of a detective’s mind is what you find yourself yearning for in a story, without the noisome clutter of a troubled domestic home life, this is a story built for you.

   But even so, if details like watching Slade look through a lens for fingerprints upon a dagger already cleaned by the doctor bother you, and if you believe that detectives, even policemen, are only human too, you may begin to have doubts.

[UPDATE] 01-06-09.   In spite of my rather lukewarm comments, Inspector Slade went on to have one the longer careers in the annals of Scotland Yard. I’ll add a complete listing of all his full-length novel appearances below. Gribble wrote a few other works of crime fiction in which Slade did not appear, and these are not included in this list.

   I also mentioned that Gribble used other pen names. There’s a fellow named John Creasey who used more, but Gribble is right up there as a leader in this particular category. The following information comes from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

GRIBBLE, LEONARD R(eginald). 1908-1985. Pseudonyms: Sterry Browning, James Gannett, Leo Grex, Louis Grey, Piers Marlowe, Dexter Muir & Bruce Sanders.

SLADE, SUPT. ANTHONY

o The Case of the Marsden Rubies (n.) Harrap 1929 [England]
o The Gillespie Suicide Mystery (n.) Harrap 1929 [England]
o The Grand Modena Murder (n.) Harrap 1930 [England]
o Is This Revenge? (n.) Harrap 1931 [England]
o The Stolen Home Secretary (n.) Harrap 1932 [England]
o The Secret of Tangles (n.) Harrap 1933 [England]

o The Yellow Bungalow Mystery (n.) Harrap 1933 [England]
o The Death Chime (n.) Harrap 1934 [England]
o The Riddle of the Ravens (n.) Harrap 1934 [England]

o Mystery at Tudor Arches (n.) Harrap 1935 [England]
o The Case of the Malverne Diamonds (n.) Harrap 1936 [England]
o Riley of the Special Branch (n.) Harrap 1936 [England]
o The Case-Book of Anthony Slade (co) Quality 1937 [England]
o Who Killed Oliver Cromwell? (n.) Harrap 1937 [England]
o Tragedy in E Flat (n.) Harrap 1938 [England]
o The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (n.) Harrap 1939 [England]
o Murder First Class (n.) Burke 1946 [England; Train]
o Atomic Murder (n.) Harrap 1947 [England]
o Hangman’s Moon (n.) Allen 1950 [England]
o They Kidnapped Stanley Matthews (n.) Jenkins 1950 [England]
o The Frightened Chameleon (n.) Jenkins 1951 [England]
o The Glass Alibi (n.) Jenkins 1952 [England]
o Murder Out of Season (n.) Jenkins 1952 [England]
o She Died Laughing (n.) Jenkins 1953 [France]
o The Inverted Crime (n.) Jenkins 1954 [England]

o Death Pays the Piper (n.) Jenkins 1956 [England]
o Superintendent Slade Investigates (co) Jenkins 1956 [England]
o Stand-In for Murder (n.) Jenkins 1957 [England]
o Don’t Argue with Death (n.) Jenkins 1959 [England]

o Wantons Die Hard (n.) Jenkins 1961 [England]
o Heads You Die (n.) Jenkins 1964 [England]
o The Violent Dark (n.) Jenkins 1965 [England]
o Strip-Tease Macabre (n.) Jenkins 1967 [England]
o A Diplomat Dies (n.) Jenkins 1969 [England]
o Alias the Victim (n.) Hale 1971 [England]
o Programmed for Death (n.) Hale 1973 [England]
o You Can’t Die Tomorrow (n.) Hale 1975 [England]
o Midsummer Slay Ride (n.) Hale 1976 [England]
o Crime on Her Hands (n.) Hale 1977 [England]
o Death Needs No Alibi (n.) Hale 1979 [England]
o Dead End in Mayfair (n.) Hale 1981 [England]
o The Dead Don’t Scream (n.) Hale 1983 [England]
o Violent Midnight (n.) Hale 1986 [England]

SUSANNAH SHANE – Diamonds in the Dumplings.

Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1946.

   According to Hubin’s Bibliography of Crime Fiction, Harriette Cora Ashbrook wrote seven “Spike” Tracy mysteries between 1931 and 1941, all as H. Ashbrook. Then from 1941 to her death in 1946 she wrote six more detective novels, all of these as by Susannah Shane. In at least four of these the sleuthing was done by amateur man-about-town named Christopher Saxe.

   Neither Ashbrook nor Shane seems to be mentioned in the Penzler-Steinbrunner Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, and the one reference to Susannah Shane in Catalogue of Crime (Barzun and Taylor) leads the reader only to an entry for R. C. Ashby, who, although feminine, is another writer altogether.

   Diamonds in the Dumplings was, as it happened, Saxe’s last case. It begins in a wealthy Connecticut home with the accidental discovery that a valuable jewel, the famous Burma Star, has been stolen and an almost identical replica substituted. Saxe is brought into the case by means of a badly hung-over crime reporter friend, and by an ever-curious eye for the unusual.

   As a writer, Ashbrook-Shane takes full advantage of the fact that an amateur detective is not required to follow hard-and-fast police procedure, but after a slow start she allows complications to enter in at a breakneck pace. Chance is permitted to play dirtier tricks than usual on the frailties of human nature, but as it is eventually learned, the three separate plot threads had been neatly intertwined all along.

   Some quite plausible detective work (seen and appreciated more in looking back upon it) undoes an entanglement that at one time seemed to be confused beyond all redemption. At least in the guise of Susannah Shane, the mystery authoress who wrote this particular work seems unfairly forgotten — if in fact she was ever well known.

[UPDATE] 01-04-09.   I’ll leave for another day a listing of the H. Ashbrook-Spike Tracy titles. For now, perhaps it will suffice to supply a list of the books she did as Susannah Shane.

   I don’t think I’ve read any of them since my review of Diamond in the Dumplings. Re-reading what I had to say then, that could be a serious omission on my part, as this seems to be the kind of book I’m inordinately fond of.

   Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

SHANE, SUSANNAH. Pseudonym of H. Ashbrook, 1898-1946.

      Lady in Lilac (n.) Dodd 1941 [New York City, NY]

      Lady in Danger (n.) Dodd 1942 [Christopher Saxe; Long Island, NY]
      Lady in a Million (n.) Dodd 1943 [Christopher Saxe; New York City, NY]
      Lady in a Wedding Dress (n.) Dodd 1943

      The Baby in the Ash Can (n.) Dodd 1944 [Christopher Saxe; New Jersey]

      Diamonds in the Dumplings (n.) Doubleday 1946 [Christopher Saxe; Connecticut]

ELIZABETH PETERS – Guardian of the Horizon.

William Morrow, hardcover, March 2004. Reprint paperback: HarperCollins, March 2005.

   In this sequel to The Last Camel Died at Noon, the Emersons, with son Ramses and adopted daughter Nephret, return to the Camel’s lost city, now under the rule of a despot, with the rightful ruler in exile.

   The resourceful Amelia, hotheaded Emerson, courageous but immature Ramses, and the beautiful Nephret are the catalysts in this somewhat stately but entertaining archaeological mystery.

   The characters may be fabricated out of synthetic materials, but their essential decency and resolute genius at improvisation (especially on the part of Amelia) keep the leaky narrative afloat in the midst of the familiar, manufactured perils.

ELIZABETH PETERS – Tomb of the Golden Bird.

William Morrow, hardcover, March 2006. Reprint paperback: Harper, March 2007.

   Amelia’s Egyptologist husband Emerson is stewing over being shut out of the excavation of King Tut’s tomb by Howard Carter and his party.

   He and his family and friends are somewhat diverted by the unexpected (and not welcome) arrival of Emerson’s brother Sethos, involved in some secret government work that puts the family at peril for most of the novel.

   This is a lackluster effort, mainly for diehard Peters’ fans, with all the really interesting stuff (the work on inventorying the fabulous objects in the royal tomb) largely taking place offstage.

   I owe my discovery of Donald Westlake to three separate coincidences that happened within a few weeks years ago – another reason why I don’t believe in coincidences. First, I found a beaten-up copy of Slayground, a relentless Parker novel, a hardboiled novel unlike any other I had read before.

   Second, I found a copy of The Hot Rock, which informed me that there was a P.G. Wodehouse in crime fiction and that his name was Donald Westlake. The third one was a used volume by one Tucker Coe, the novel A Jade in Aries, which I found both magnetic and devoid of Chandler-Hammett-Macdonald schtick.

   It didn’t take me long to find out that all three authors were one and the same, which surprised me and made me wonder for a moment if this were not an industrial operation. If so, it was the highest quality operation the literary-industrial complex had ever produced.

   Later, as I started catching up with the Dortmunder and Parker series, the latter not always easy to find, and with the new books that Westlake kept publishing with amazing consistency and regularity, I started connecting the styles and to see the literary carpentry that made Westlake’s books both absorbing and enduring.

   Pick up any Westlake book and you can be assured it’s re-readable, just like Wodehouse, Chandler and Ring Lardner are re-readable. I started to realize that this genre writer (I should say “multi-genre” writer) was on a par with the greatest authors in crime fiction. I then tried to fill all the gaps in my Westlake collection, which is close to complete –- and not a single book has failed to be reread!

   Who can forget Westlake? From Parker’s long-running series, likely the best hardboiled series ever published, to his late realist noir masterpieces The Ax and The Hook, from Levine (too little remembered) to Mitch Tobin, to his excursions into science fiction and various hybrid experiments?

   Who can forget the adventures of The Busy Body, a masterpiece that combines real adventure with dry humor running through it but never breaking the spell?

   Taken as a whole, the work of Donald Westlake is second to none in the annals of crime fiction. His breadth is unmatched, his style rings true regardless of setting, and his sense of humor and demonstrated intimate knowledge of human nature is a gift that future generations of readers will rediscover once and again.

   We have lost a contemporary classic of American literature.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE – God Save the Mark.

Random House, hardcover, 1967. Paperback reprint: Signet, 1968, several printings; Charter, 1979; Mysterious Press, 1987. Hardcover reprint: Forge, 2004.

   God Save the Mark, for which Westlake received a much deserved MWA Best Novel Edgar in 1968, is a comedy whodunit with barely restrained elements of slapstick — a type of book no one in the world has done better than Westlake.

   Its narrator and bumbling hero is Fred Fitch, a mark among marks; i.e., an easy victim, a ready subject for the practices of confidence men; i.e., the perfect sucker. Fred Fitch has more fake receipts, phony bills of sale, and counterfeit sweepstakes tickets than any man alive. He has even purchased a “money machine,” which is on a par with shelling out good hard cash for a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge.

   As the jacket blurb says, “Every itinerant grifter, hypster, bunk artist, short-conner, amuser, shearer, shortchanger, green-goods worker, penny-weighter, ring-dropper and yentzer to hit New York considers his trip incomplete until he’s also hit Fred Fitch. He’s sort of the con-man’s version of Go; pass Fred Fitch, collect two hundred dollars, and move on.”

   But Fred’s earlier problems seem minor compared to those he encounters after a relative he didn’t know he had, the mysterious Uncle Matt, is killed (murdered, in fact) and he is willed $300,000.

   First of all, every grifter, hypster, bunk artist, etc., seems bent on relieving Fred of some or all of that hefty bequest; second and by no means least of all, the person or persons unknown who bumped off Uncle Matt is or are now trying to bump off Fred.

   The characters he meets as he tries to find out what is going on include a stripper named Gertie Divine, the Body Secular; a lawyer named Goodkind; an elusive crook named Gus Ricovic; a couple of cops called Steve and Ralph; a needle-happy doctor named Osbertson; and a former partner of Uncle Matt’s named Professor Kilroy.

   Add to them the wackiest chase sequences this side of a Mel Brooks movie, and you have — or will have — any number of chuckles, laughs, and guffaws. Anybody who doesn’t find this novel at least semi-hilarious probably wouldn’t crack a smile at a politician’s wake.

   Two of Westlake’s other novels in this same vein are likewise fast, funny, and fun: The Busy Body (1966) and The Spy in the Ointment (1966). Two more — Who Stole Sassi Manoon? (1969) and Somebody Owes Me Money (1969) — are less successful (Sassi Manoon, in fact, may be Westlake’s worst novel), which is no doubt the reason he turned to other types of comic suspense.

         ———
   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.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE – Dancing Aztecs.

M. Evans & Co., hardcover, 1976. UK title: A New York Dance. Hodder & Stougton, 1979. Paperback reprints: Fawcett Crest, n.d.; Mysterious Press, 1994.

   The marvel of Donald E. Westlake is his amazing versatility. With equal facility he has written light comedy, pure farce, private-eye stories, police procedurals, straight suspense, caper novels, mainstream fiction, science fiction, and nonfiction under his own name and pseudonyms; mysteries of penetrating psychological insight under the name Tucker Coe; and as by Richard Stark, a series of antihero stories harder than any of the hard-boiled stories published in Black Mask.

   Which just about covers the entire literary spectrum, except for westerns, romantic historicals, and haiku poetry — and don’t be surprised if Westlake decides to write one or all of those someday, just for the hell of it.

   He began his novelistic career with five good but derivative hard-edged novels, among them The Mercenaries (1960), a private-eye adventure; and Killy (1963), a story of detection and psychological suspense in a small town

   No, make that four good but derivative hard-edged novels; Pity Him Afterwards (1964), the tale of a madman on the loose, isn’t really very good at all. Which perhaps helped Westlake decide to try his hand at something different: The Fugitive Pigeon (1965), the first of his marvelously comic mysteries.

   It was with that book, his sixth, that he found his true metier, and ever since he has moved this type of novel onward and upward to new heights of hilarity.

   Dancing Aztecs is the best of Westlake’s crime farces from his middle period (1970s). It tells the tale of Jerry Manelli, a New York City hustler with a hot tip on a priest — a thousand-year-old, two-foot-tall, ugly, misshapen dancing Aztec priest made out of solid gold, with emeralds for eyes, worth approximately $1 million.

   It seems this priest was stolen from a museum in the South America nation of Descalzo and subsequently smuggled through American Customs in a shipment of imitation priests made out out of plaster; but somebody fouled up along the way.

   One of the copies got delivered instead to the million priest’s New York destination, while the authentic was mixed up with fifteen other copies, all of which were delivered to various people in the city and its environs. Jerry’s task: Find the real priest, and fast, before whoever has it realizes what it is and/or the original band of thieves get to it first.

   Jerry’s odyssey (and a dizzying one it turns out to be) leads him all over Manhattan, and to Connecticut, Long Island, and Jersey. It involves him with hoodlums, con men, “a yam-fed Descalzan beauty,” union thugs, street thugs, a Harlem mortician, a Wall Street financier, a drunken activist, a college professor, “a visitor from another planet” and dozens more.

   Will Jerry pull off the greatest scan career, find the golden Dancing Aztec (not to mention True Love), and live happily ever after? Read the book and find out.

   The dust-jacket blurb calls Dancing Aztecs “a silly symphony of raucous laughter and sudden realities, running to the ragged rhythm of New York now,” which is not good writing but nonetheless apt. It isn’t Westlake’s funniest novel, but some of its bits of business rank right up there with his most hilarious — his interpretation of black street dialect, for instance. A silly city symphony, indeed.

         ———
   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.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE, R.I.P.  I have sad news to pass along. Donald Westlake died late yesterday while heading out for a New Year’s Eve dinner, most likely from a heart attack. He was 75. For more information, follow this link to an online obituary from the New York Times.

   This is not the way a year should end, or a new one begin. Donald Westlake was one of the best known and most respected mystery writers in the US today. At the time of his death, in terms of his writing career, his had to have been one of the longest. The Mercenaries came out in 1960, but Mr. Westlake began writing short stories for the digest magazines a year or two even before then. Fifty years of creating and crafting top-notch mystery fiction — a tremendous achievement.

   Over the next few days on the Mystery*File blog, I will be posting reviews of several more books he wrote, all taken from 1001 Midnights. My own review of Brothers Keepers can be found here, and apparently I liked Pity Him Afterwards more than Bill did. You can find my review of that book here.

   Mystery fans have every reason to mourn. A giant has left us.

GEORGE BAGBY – Guaranteed to Fade.

Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1978. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition], February 1979.

   The first time that George Bagby, himself a character in his own novels, told us about one of the mystery cases solved by his friend, Inspector Schmidt of the N.Y.P.D., was in 1935. This is his latest, the 44th in the series so far.

   As always, Schmitty complains a great deal about his aching feet, but he makes quick work of the murder of the many-times married Tommy Thomas, a prime example of how the rich find divorce so convenient a convention. To tell the truth, however, this one doesn’t take a lot of brain-power to figure out. The entertainment may be lighter than usual, but then again, I’m a confirmed addict.

[UPDATE] 12-31-08.   One thing that struck me when reading this review is that when I wrote them for the Courant, I generally had to keep them short, something I seem to have difficulty doing any more. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

   The other thing that caught my attention was the very last word I used. George Bagby, in real life Aaron Marc Stein, aka Hampton Stone was one of my favorite writers, under all three names. I cringe at having to use the word “was,” since (once again) he’s an author I haven’t read in an awfully long time. Going through these old fanzines is bringing back lots of memories.

   In Mr. Bagby’s honor, and Inspector Schmidt’s as well, why not go for a long list of all of the latter’s adventures? Thanks to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here it is:

SCHMIDT, INSPECTOR [GEORGE BAGBY]

o Murder at the Piano (n.) Covici Friede 1935 [New York City, NY]
o Ring Around a Murder (n.) Covici Friede 1936 [New York]
o Murder Half Baked (n.) Covici Friede 1937 [New York City, NY]

o Murder on the Nose (n.) Doubleday 1938 [New York City, NY]
o Bird Walking Weather (n.) Doubleday 1939 [New York City, NY]

o The Corpse with the Purple Thighs (n.) Doubleday 1939 [New Jersey; Academia]
o The Corpse Wore a Wig (n.) Doubleday 1940 [New York City, NY]
o Here Comes the Corpse (n.) Doubleday 1941 [New York City, NY]

o Red Is for Killing (n.) Doubleday 1941 [New York City, NY]
o Murder Calling �50� (n.) Doubleday 1942 [New York City, NY]
o Dead on Arrival (n.) Doubleday 1946 [New York City, NY]
o The Original Carcase (n.) Doubleday 1946 [New York City, NY]
o The Twin Killing (n.) Doubleday 1947 [New York City, NY]
o In Cold Blood (n.) Doubleday 1948 [New York City, NY]
o The Starting Gun (n.) Doubleday 1948 [New York City, NY]
o Coffin Corner (n.) Doubleday 1949 [New York City, NY]
o Drop Dead (n.) Doubleday 1949 [New York City, NY]
o Blood Will Tell (n.) Doubleday 1950 [New York City, NY]

o Death Ain�t Commercial (n.) Doubleday 1951 [New York City, NY]
o The Corpse with the Sticky Fingers (n.) Doubleday 1952 [New York City, NY]
o Scared to Death (n.) Doubleday 1952 [New York City, NY]

o Dead Drunk (n.) Doubleday 1953 [New York City, NY]
o Give the Little Corpse a Great Big Hand (n.) Doubleday 1953 [New York City, NY]
o The Body in the Basket (n.) Doubleday 1954 [Madrid]
o A Dirty Way to Die (n.) Doubleday 1955 [New York City, NY]
o Cop Killer (n.) Doubleday 1956 [New York City, NY]
o Dead Storage (n.) Doubleday 1957 [New York City, NY]

o Dead Wrong (n.) Doubleday 1957 [New York City, NY]
o The Three-Time Losers (n.) Doubleday 1958 [New York City, NY]
o The Real Gone Goose (n.) Doubleday 1959 [New York City, NY]
o Evil Genius (n.) Doubleday 1961 [New York City, NY]
o Murder�s Little Helper (n.) Doubleday 1963 [New York City, NY]
o Mysteriouser and Mysteriouser (n.) Doubleday 1965 [New York City, NY]
o Dirty Pool (n.) Doubleday 1966 [New York City, NY]
o Corpse Candle (n.) Doubleday 1967 [Maine]
o Another Day-Another Death (n.) Doubleday 1968 [New York City, NY]
o Honest Reliable Corpse (n.) Doubleday 1969 [New York City, NY]
o Killer Boy Was Here (n.) Doubleday 1970 [New York City, NY]
o My Dead Body (n.) Doubleday 1976 [New York]
o Two in the Bush (n.) Doubleday 1976 [New York City, NY]

o Innocent Bystander (n.) Doubleday 1977 [New York City, NY]
o The Tough Get Going (n.) Doubleday 1977 [New York City, NY]
o Better Dead (n.) Doubleday 1978 [New York City, NY]
o Guaranteed to Fade (n.) Doubleday 1978 [New York City, NY]
o I Could Have Died (n.) Doubleday 1979 [New York City, NY]
o Mugger�s Day (n.) Doubleday 1979 [New York City, NY]
o Country and Fatal (n.) Doubleday 1980 [New York City, NY]
o A Question of Quarry (n.) Doubleday 1981
o The Sitting Duck (n.) Doubleday 1981
o The Golden Creep (n.) Doubleday 1982 [New York City, NY]
o The Most Wanted (n.) Doubleday 1983 [New York City, NY]

HILLARY WAUGH – The Con Game.

Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1968. Paperback reprint: Popular Library, n.d. UK edition: Victor Gollancz, hc, 1986.

   The novels of Hillary Waugh are characterized by tight plot lines that contain no superfluous action or complications. Each of his stories is lean, tense, and to the point, and it was this streamlined approach and good sense of structure that made Julian Symons select the 1952 novel Last Seen Wearing… for his list of the 100 greatest crime stories written up to 1959.

   Over the past thirty-some years, Waugh — who is married to fellow suspense writer Shannon OCork — has created several series characters: private eyes Sheridan Wesley and Philip Macadam, who are both highly derivative of the Chandler/Hammett tradition; Lieutenant Frank Sessions of Manhattan’s Homicide North; and Police Chief Fred Fellows of Stockford, Connecticut.

   Fellows, a down-to-earth, overweight cop and severe taskmaster, is probably the most appealing of these; and the small-town milieu is one Waugh knows well, since Stockford is very much like the Connecticut setting where Waugh grew up (although life there is definitely more fraught with peril than in New Haven).

   The Con Game, Fellows’s eleventh case, is sharply evocative of the suburbs of the Sixties. Four couples have conspired to bribe elected officials in a land deal; now the $60,000 they have amassed to do so is missing, as are two of the conspirators, George and Dierdre Demarest.

   Fellows’s job is to find them — and the money. His investigation reveals affairs, hopes of affairs, suspicions of affairs, revenge after affairs, and divorce because of affairs — in short, almost every kind of sexual misconduct in Stockford. And those citizens who are not motivated sexually are sure to be moved by greed.

   Fellows treads carefully through this social minefield, trying to determine what each devious-minded person is hiding, but of course he cannot tread carefully enough. And before the case is over, he must use a creative method to determine the whereabouts of his quarry.

   Fellows is an able police officer and a sympathetic character who employs not only good procedural methods but also the logical processes of classical detectives to get his woman or his man. Some of Waugh’s other books in this series are Sleep Long, My Love (1959), Born Victim (1962), and End of a Party (1965).

   Among the Manhattan North novels are “30” Manhattan East (1968) and Finish Me Off (1970).

         ———
   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.

HILLARY WAUGH, R.I.P.   Although his obituary did not appear in the New York Times until last Friday, Mr. Waugh passed away earlier this month on December 8th. The obituary called him a “pioneer of the police procedural novel,” as indeed he was.

   It ends by quoting him on the cardinal rule of mystery writing:  “‘Authenticity is the key to good mystery writing,’ he told an interviewer. ‘Not only must you be able to write well, but you must also possess the instincts of a good reporter who has witnessed firsthand the darker side of human nature.'”

PETER ISRAEL – The Stiff Upper Lip.

Thomas Y. Crowell Co., hardcover, 1978. Paperback reprint: Avon, 1980.

   The private eye seems in essence to be almost wholly a uniquely American character. Even if B. F. Cage is originally from Los Angeles, by continuing to use the side streets and back alleys of Paris and Amsterdam as his stomping grounds, he stands out like a crime against nature.

   His client this time around is a black basketball player trying a comeback in France, but certain past and present indiscretions involving mobs of two different nationalities are threatening to catch up with him. The story is slight, involving no particular urgency, and it ends with an awfully silly version of a Chicago gang war.

   Too many transplants, and they fail to take. Valerie, Cage’s newly self-appointed assistant, is the only delicious morsel to be found anywhere in this stale and condescending affair.

[UPDATE] 12-30-08. As a wild shot in the dark, I’d say that fictional PI’s are a world-wide phenomenon today, which is a Good Thing. And in the years since 1979, I think that these foreign born PI’s have adapted and changed. They display much more of their own countries’ backgrounds and flavors, instead of relying so heavily on the US model. (A point worth considering in more detail, someday.)

   Just from reading through this review, I also think I might enjoy The Stiff Upper Lip more now than I did in 1979. Not having read it again in the almost 30 years since, all I can pass along to you is my judgment as it was back then.

   Over the years Peter Israel, the author, was also a high-ranking editor at Putnam. He eventually became the president, then chairman of the board of directors, serving in these capacities between 1978 and 1987.

   Of more specific interest to us, he also wrote five mystery novels, three with B. F. Cage and two with “eccentric, brilliant New York City legal detective Charles Camelot and his assistant, Phil Revere,” as they’re described on one bookseller’s website.

   Here’s a list of all five, as taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

      ISRAEL, PETER. Pseudonym of J. Leon Israel.

   Hush Money (n.) Crowell 1974 [B. F. Cage; Los Angeles, CA]
   The French Kiss (n.) Crowell 1976 [B. F. Cage; Paris]

   The Stiff Upper Lip (n.) Crowell 1978 [B. F. Cage; Paris]
   I’ll Cry When I Kill You (n.) Mysterious Press 1988 [Charles Camelot; New York City, NY]
   If I Should Die Before I Die (n.) Mysterious Press 1989 [Charles Camelot; New York City, NY]