Based on an overall favorable review in Barzun & Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime, I read Anne Hocking’s Death Disturbs Mr. Jefferson (1950). Solicitor Jefferson is found dead in bed, and it soon becomes apparent that someone had put a ringer in his bottle of sleeping pills.

   At first, Jefferson seems to be an estimable character – he had no use for people and lives only for his glass collection – but it is discovered that he has been supporting his hobby/habit by blackmail on the basis of documents entrusted to him professionally.

   At this point the reader is all on the side of the murderer. In a good touch, Ms. Hocking has overcome our misplaced running with the hare by making the culprit one of the blackmailees.

   Most of the detection is ordinary policework and elimination of suspects because they aren’t “capable” of the crime. There is little action – even the killer is collared offstage.

   Not bad, not good.

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

ANN HOCKING – Death Disturbs Mr. Jefferson. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1950. Geoffrey Bles, UK, hardcover, 1951.

CHIEF INSPECTOR WILLIAM AUSTEN. Author: Anne Hocking, pseudonym of Mona Messer Hocking, (1890-1966).

Ill Deeds Done (n.) Bles 1938 [England]
The Little Victims Play (n.) Bles 1938 [England]
Old Mrs. Fitzgerald (n.) Bles 1939 [England]  US title: Deadly Is the Evil Tongue.
So Many Doors (n.) Bles 1939 [Cyprus]
The Wicked Flee (n.) Bles 1940 [England]
Miss Milverton (n.) Bles 1941 [England]  US title: Poison Is a Bitter Brew
Night’s Candles (n.) Bles 1941 [Cyprus]
One Shall Be Taken (n.) Bles 1942 [England]
Nile Green (n.) Bles 1943 [Cairo]  US title: Death Leaves a Shining Mark.

Six Green Bottles (n.) Bles 1943 [England]
The Vultures Gather (n.) Bles 1945 [England]
Death at the Wedding (n.) Bles 1946 [England]
Prussian Blue (n.) Bles 1947 [England]  US title: The Finishing Touch.
At “The Cedars” (n.) Bles 1949 [England]
Death Disturbs Mr. Jefferson (n.) Bles 1951 [London]
Mediterranean Murder (n.) Evans 1951 [Spain; Ship]  US title: Killing Kin.
The Best Laid Plans (n.) Bles 1952 [England]

There’s Death in the Cup (n.) Evans 1952 [England]
Death Among the Tulips (n.) Allen 1953 [England]
The Evil That Men Do (n.) Allen 1953 [England]
And No One Wept (n.) Allen 1954 [England]

Poison in Paradise (n.) Allen 1955 [England]
A Reason for Murder (n.) Allen 1955 [England]
Murder at Mid-Day (n.) Allen 1956 [Spain]
Relative Murder (n.) Allen 1957 [England]
The Simple Way of Poison (n.) Allen 1957 [Oxford]

Epitaph for a Nurse (n.) Allen 1958 [England]  US title: A Victim Must Be Found.
Poisoned Chalice (n.) Long 1959 [England]
To Cease Upon the Midnight (n.) Long 1959 [England]
The Thin-Spun Life (n.) Long 1960 [England]
Candidates for Murder (n.) Long 1961 [England]
He Had to Die (n.) Long 1962 [England]
Murder Cries Out (n.) Long 1968 [England]

ELIZABETH DALY – Night Walk.

Dell, paperback reprint; Murder Ink series #55; 1st printing, December 1982. Hardcover first edition: Rinehart & Co., 1947. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, February 1948. Other paperback edition: Berkley F811, 1963.

   A scarce book, relatively speaking. On ABE at the moment there are only 24 copies of all of the various editions combined. The “Murder Ink” series is a nice set to own, by the way. Wouldst that a mass-market publisher would consider doing today a long series of classic detective novels like this one, with a parallel and equally long one presented under the auspices of the “Scene of the Crime” bookshop on the West Coast.

   Authors like Sheila Radley, V. C. Clinton-Baddeley, W. J. Burley, Douglas Clark, Colin Watson, and Patricia Moyes (Murder Ink); and Gladys Mitchell, Anthony Berkeley, Alan Hunter, and Gwendoline Butler (Scene of the Crime). Hardly any of them even in print today.

   I’ll forgo my usual bibliographic discussion of the author, Elizabeth Daly. You can read the preceding review for that. Even though I read The Book of Lion over four years ago, the same kinds of feelings were evoked this afternoon and evening in finishing up Night Walk. A strong sense of nostalgia for the past, quite definitely, but there’s also (as I suspect in all of Daly’s fiction) an unmistakable love of things literary, bookish, and yes, libraries, where a portion of the current book takes place.

   The scene is a small, isolated town in Westchester County, New York, which even though perhaps less than 50 miles from Manhattan, lives (or did in 1947) almost as though in a different, earlier era, and obviously in a far different place. A place where, if a murder occurs, it can be blamed on a tramp. A homicidal maniac, more likely.

   The first four chapters, in fact, do nothing more than to follow the trail of the killer, first to a small scale rest and rehab facility for the rich and well-to-do, then the aforementioned lilbrary, then the local inn, and then and only then, to the home of the Carringtons’, where the senior member, an invalid, is later found dead in his bed.

   Henry Gamadge is called in on the behest of a friend who finds himself caught up by accident by the police, a stranger to the area, but with an ulterior motive he’d rather not make public.

   Gamadge, having an in with the police, a friend on the force in the city having put in a good word for him, does his usual low key type of investigation. In fact, the first 100 pages he’s on the job seem to be nothing more than retracing the steps of the killer on the path connecting his (or her) various stops along his way. Nothing seems to escape Gamadge’s attention, however.

   To the reader, though, the lack of a “Watson” is a bit of a frustration, as we see what Gamadge sees, but we do not have access to his thought processes. On the other hand, however, there are none of those “You know my methods,” tossed off to his subordinates as if only to tease us.

   It’s a trade-off, of course, and if I were to read more of Elizabeth Daly, I think I might eventually catch on to the way she includes her clues — all very fair and above board, I might very well make sure you understand.

   What it also means is that it takes the last 18 pages or so for Gamadge to explain all, and ’tis nice, the explanation is, indeed. One wishes perhaps only more stage presence from Clara, otherwise known as Mrs. Gamadge. She comes to Frazer’s Mills only at the end of the book, appearing on only one or maybe two of the pages in the last 18.

   Plotwise, I might mention a small couple of glitches in the summing up or the previous telling of the tale, but they’re so minor, for what good reason, I ask myself now, should I bring them up now? So I won’t, no more than I already have.

ELIZABETH DALY – The Book of the Lion.

Bantam paperback, 1st printing, 1985. Hardcover edition: Rinehart & Co., 1948. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, September 1948. Earlier paperback editions: Bestseller Mystery #112, circa 1949; Berkley F700, circa 1963.

   For a lady who didn’t start writing mysteries until she was in her early 60s, Elizabeth Daly was one of the more prolific author in the 1940s, publishing sixteen adventures of Henry Gamadge, the leading character in each of her books, during the twelve year period beginning in 1940 and ending in 1951.

   It’s doubtful, though, if any but the most dedicated of mystery readers know of her work today. For the volume of work she did, Elizabeth Daly seems to be under-appreciated and all but forgotten. According to Amazon, only one of her books is currently in print: Unexpected Night (Otto Penzler’s Classic American Mystery Library, 1994).

   And I’ll confess that in spite of many opportunities to do so, this is the first of her novels that I’ve read, and I can’t tell you why. In case, you’ll have to take the comments that follow as being based on a sample of size one, no more (and no less).

   What Gamadge does (or did) for a living, precisely, based on this wispy, lightweight bit of mystery, escaped me for a while. He is called upon to look at a collection of letters that might have some value, even though he gently protests that he is not really qualified. He is later described as a graphologist – a handwriting expert – not to mention a noted criminologist (page 41). What he really seems to be, and he has a laboratory to back up this up, is an expert in old and rare books.

   All of which lends a strong literary flavor to the case that follows. The widow of a famed poet and playwright, but not in any financial sense, has the husband’s letters, but before Gamadge can view them, she has them sold and bundled out of her brother-in-law’s house, sight unseen.

   The end of the matter, perhaps, but Gamadge senses there was more to the sale than met the eye. He is proven right, although not in any way the police can follow up on, when the last person the dead man visited before his unsolved death also is found dead, an apparent suicide, and it takes Gamadge’s mild-mannered investigations to bring some closure and finality to the matter.

   Gamadge is the epitome of the genteel, bookish detective, the pure amateur, and he is very clever in the way he figures things out and puts the pieces of the puzzle together – and I still haven’t figured out how he knew what and when nor how.

   “The Book of the Lion,” by the way, would be a fabulous find, if it were ever found – especially in manuscript form as one of the lost books of Chaucer – and that is what piques Gamadge’s interest more than anything else, even if the chances are nearly one hundred percent that it’s a forgery.

   Even if the plot is flimsy and gossamer thin, Daly’s characters are perfectly described, even those the most minor, and she has a sense of humor that can often catch you unaware. Gamadge’s wife Clara, who does not appear often enough in this novel, is a charming young woman who seems to adore Henry.

   I particularly liked the following exchange, from page 112. Clara and Henry are talking about the beautifully naive young cousin of the widow who had the letters:

[UPDATE] 07-16-08.   Four and a half years later, and there aren’t any of Elizabeth Daly’s books in print. I’m guessing, but I imagine both she and Henry Gamadge are even less well-known now than they were then. Tastes change, I know, but it’s still a shame.

   And in the “credit where credit is due” department: The cover of the Bestseller edition came from www.bookscans.com, a website with a most worthy goal: to display the covers of every vintage paperback ever published in the US through 1970 or so. I sent Bruce Black, the proprietor, a few he’s missing earlier this week, and if you’re a collector, you might consider doing the same.

[UPDATE] 07-23-08.   Good news! I was in error when I said Daly is no longer in print. See the comment left today by Les Blatt.

SARAH STEWART TAYLOR – Judgment of the Grave. St. Martin’s Press: hardcover, June 2005; paperback, August 2006.

   Sweeney St. George, temporarily relieved of her academic teaching duties, pursues her interest in funerary art (mainly gravestones) by relocating to Concord to do primary research on the bizarre headstones carved by a Revolutionary era stonecutter. She finds herself following the trail already opened up by another scholar who’s disappeared and is presumed to be dead.

   I prefer Sweeney in her academic setting, where she seems more at home, but the novel, if somewhat over ingenious in its plotting, is still a pleasing mix of scholarship and murder, both of them natural lures for the always inquisitive protagonist.

ANN WALDRON – Unholy Death in Princeton. Berkley, paperback original, March 2005.

   A novel somewhat in the same vein as the one above. It features a protagonist (McLeod Dulaney) who’s a prizewinning journalist doing research for a biography on an abolitionist newspaperman at Princeton Seminary.

   In comparison with Taylor’s book, however, Waldron’s novel is cluttered with forgettable characters and really awful dialogue, further compromised by a meandering plot and an improbable climax.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA:

   The Sweeney St. George mysteries:

   The McLeod Dulaney mysteries:

    …We are often reminded that it is not polite for critics to discuss who did it or how. I say that, if we are going to write criticism – which I define as discussion of strengths and failings of books and authors – of detective fiction, the who and how are exactly what we should be writing about. To the extent the means and/or the murderer is memorable, the book is memorable – as detective fiction …

   In the interest of space and weight, I recently took along a paperback copy of S. S. Van Dine’s The Benson Murder Case (1926) to the laundromat rather than some hard cover book higher on my reading list. This is the public’s introduction to Vance, and Vance’s first exposure to detection which came to overshadow various connoisseurships and collecting interests among his hobbies.

   In it he gives long disquisitions on the superiority of psychological to physical evidence, which, while boring, are at least better than the parade of esoteric trivia he later became infamous for. Vance does make a good and important psychological deduction in the early going; that the vain and lecherous Alvin Benson could have been murdered only by a male intimate because he wouldn’t have granted an interview to a woman or a mere acquaintance while not wearing his toupee and false teeth.

   Having done so, Vance permits and occasionally abets his foil District Attorney Markham to harass the innocent suspects, who had conveniently grouped themselves in the neighborhood of Benson’s house on the fatal night like Christmas carolers, for the middle 3/4 of the book, merely remarking from time to time, “Markham, you’re going at it the wrong way.”

   Markham endures this amateur criticism in silence with only one outburst in the middle of the book and list of suspects, inquiring as to what the right way might be. Vance replies to this effect, “You wouldn’t understand,” and the inquisition goes on until only one person remains uncleared (i.e. heretofore unsuspected).

   Then, with the aid of a bit of illegal entry, Vance deftly breaks that gentleman’s alibi, forces his confession, and sits back to await the plaudits of the dumbfounded official investigators. Based on this book, Philo Vance doesn’t deserve “a kick in the pance,” just avoidance. (This is one author about whom Thomson’s opinion and mine are at great variance.)

   Two minor points. One of the suspects, a supercilious fop almost in Vance’s class, is presented as a caricature to be ridiculed. Van Dine was sailing very close to the wind here. New York City buffs will be interested to learn that at the time of writing, Sutton Place/York Avenue was more prosaically known as Avenue A.

FOOTNOTE: H. Douglas Thomson, referred to at one point in this review, was the author of Masters of Mystery: A Study of the Detective Story (Dover, 1978; originally Collins, UK, 1931). E. F. Bleiler called it “the first English-language work devoted to serious criticism and history of the detective story.”

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA:

  S. S. VAN DINE – The Benson Murder Case. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926. Hardcover reprints include: A. L. Burt, no date (shown); Gregg Press, 1980. Paperback reprints include: Pocket #333, 1945 (shown); Fawcett Gold Medal T2006, no date (ca.1968); Scribner’s, 1983 (shown).

[UPDATE] 07-18-08.   I’ve just posted another review of The Benson Murder Case, this one by Mary Reed, not in reply, but written independently by her and sent to me late last year. (I’ve just pulled it out of my “to do” list, which as usual, I’m way behind on.)

         — Steve

MANNING LEE STOKES – The Dying Room. Mercury Mystery #124; digest-sized paperback; no date stated. Hardcover edition: Phoenix Press, 1947.

   This is strange — really strange, as a matter of fact. There are six copies of this book available for sale on ABE as I type this, and five of them are the paperback version. Guess which one’s the least expensive? The hardcover edition from Phoenix. Even without a dust jacket on the hardcover, explain that if you can.

   Manning Lee Stokes was born in 1911 and died in 1976, and at best, he had what you might call a mixed writing career. The Dying Room was one of his earliest books — his first four were published by Phoenix, beginning in 1945, and in chronological order, this one’s the third. From Phoenix he went to paperback originals (Graphic Books) and then wrote several others for another designed-for-libraries hardcover publisher, Arcadia House. One book was published Dell in 1958, but from 1960 on, he wrote nothing that appeared under his own name.

   He wrote some of the early Nick Carter spy thrillers from Award in the 1960s, for example, a few of the John Eagle “Expeditor” men’s adventure novels from Pyramid in the 1970s as by Paul Edwards, and as Ken Stanton, all eleven of the “Aquanauts” books (with leading character Tiger Shark) that came out from Macfadden and Manor, also in the 1970s. (I have all the Expeditor books, I believe, but I have no explanation as to why I have NONE of the Aquanauts books.)

   Stokes also wrote some of the sex-oriented SF-Fantasy “Blade” novels from Pinnacle, or so I’m told, but there’s certainly no reason to go into that, or at least not here. One other series character whom he created and who is worth mentioning is Christopher Fenn, who solved a couple of the cases from Arcadia House in the late 1950s, including The Case of the Presidents’ Heads, shown smoewhere below and to the left. Fenn was a private eye or criminologist of perhaps no great renown, but he is listed on Kevin Burton Smith’s PI website, so he has not been totally forgotten.

   But there is private eye that Kevin does not know about — a rare event — a gent called Barnabas Jones who appeared in both The Wolf Howls “Murder” (Phoenix Press, 1945) and Green for a Grave (Phoenix Press, 1946). And something that Al Hubin does not know about (yet) is that Barnabas Jones also shows up for a short appearance in The Dying Room. Even though Jones is not the leading character and his part is small, his role is a relatively important one, substantially more than a walk-on or cameo, and I’ll get there very shortly.

   Before I do, however, let me say this up front. The Dying Room is a much better book — and detective novel — than I expected it to be. Phoenix Press is not noted for its gems and works of art in the world of crime and mystery fiction, but you could do much worse than finding a copy of The Dying Room to read somewhere and somehow, hopefully not paying too much for it, no more than ten to fifteen dollars or so, and maybe less if you’re lucky. (My copy cost me five dollars if you were to split the money up as part of a group lot, and when I found it among the others, my first reaction was that I paid too much.)

   Telling the tale is Tom Fain, an ex-soldier with a splinter of a German shell embedded in his brain. About to be moved into the “dying room” at the Fort Tyner station hospital after his latest unsuccessful surgery, Fain decides to make a break for it. And with the help of a sympathetic nurse’s aide named Helen, escape he does.

   On his way to see his ailing stepmother, the only mother he has ever known, he stops to visit with an old friend — the aforementioned Barnabas Jones, who offers him a job, but with other things on his mind at the time, Fain turns him down. (Mr. Jones makes another appearance and more importantly, in his professional capacity, later on.) Failing to reach his stepmother before she died, and avoiding a pickup by a pair of MP’s on his trail, Fain heads back to New York (and Helen) on an airplane — which is where the story begins, or at least the mystery part.

   Fain sits next to a good-looking girl — no, change that, make it a beautiful girl — with whom he strikes up a lively conversation. Things are going well, but there’s nothing like a small disaster to get a story really going. Both Fain and the girl survive the crash. He’s more or less OK, but she is not. Her memory is gone, and a new one — one of her former life — has replaced it. Unfortunately there is a two-year gap in what she remembers. She doesn’t remember Fain, but being convinced that he helped save her life, she invites him to her new (old?) home to recover.

   There was a question mark there, as you will have noticed. Is the girl the missing heir to a considerable fortune? Or is she a fraud? Fifty million dollars is at stake. (I did say considerable.) Several persons try to hire him — it turns out that he, before the war, was a private eye himself. And as it turns out, and not too surprisingly, someone is playing a dangerous (and deadly) game, and Fain, as he quickly discovers, was never given the rules under which it’s being played.

   But as a detective, Fain gives his clients their money’s worth, and in similar fashion does Stokes the author. A six-point summary on page 98 is as precise and to the point as any I’ve read in a work of detective fiction in quite a while. No power point presentation could have produced anything better.

   The ending gets a little too melodramatic, perhaps — well, no perhaps about it — and the prologue most certainly could have been ditched, which very nearly goes without saying, as most prologues could be (should be) ditched, but (and this is a big but) this book is as entertaining as anything I’ve watched on television this week.

   That someone never recognized that this book would make for an awfully good movie is something to be regretted. Filmed in black-and-white, with some professionally done noir-ish touches, perhaps, maybe even a great one.

[UPDATE] 07-11-08. Looks like I never told Kevin about Barnabas Jones, but I will today. (One of course wonders immediately if the gent is related to the later Barnaby Jones of TV fame. Probably not. There are a lot of Joneses in this country.)

   Barnabas Jones’s brief appearance in The Dying Room is now included in Part 5 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, along with a complete listing for each of the PI series he did, both early in his career.

   Of the five authorial bylines in this installment of the onlineAddenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, there may be only two actual authors involved. These entries come from Part 25. Besides the incidental alphabetical proximity between two of them, there’s no other connection.

ADCOCK, LARRY. It is possible that this author of one book in the Revised Crime Fiction IV is also Thomas L(arry) Adcock, q.v., author of several other crime fiction novels.
      CB Angel. Popular Library, pb, 1977. Add setting: cross-country US. Also add British edition: NEL, pb, 1981. Leading characters: “The Lone Ranger” = Steve Yancy and “Tonto” = Jay Banks. [A pair of truckers team up with a woman known to them only as “Foxy Lady” and a voice.]

ADCOCK, THOMAS L(ARRY). 1947- . Pseudonym: Buck Saunders; possible other byline: Larry Adcock, q.v.. Born in Detroit; a former journalist and newspaper editor before turning to writing full time. Under his own name, the author of seven police procedurals included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, six of them with NYPD detective Neil Hockaday. Hockaday earlier appeared in a series of short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the first of which, “Christmas Cop” (March 1986) received an MWA Edgar nomination. The second Hockaday novel, Dark Maze (Pocket, 1991), won an Edgar in 1992 for Best Original Paperback.

ADLON, ARTHUR. Pseudonym of (Harold) Keith (Oliver) Ayling, 1898-1976; other pseudonym: Kaye Ayling, qq.v. Under this pen name, among other adult fiction, the author of a marginally crime-related novel previously included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. Add the one indicated with an asterisk (*).
      (*) -Bad Girl Abroad. Chariot, US, pb, 1960, Setting: France. [Criminous and passionate adventures of an American teenager in the French Riviera.]

      -The Prince of Poisoners. Chariot, US, pb, 1960.

AYLING, KAYE. Pseudonym of (Harold) Keith (Oliver) Ayling, 1898-1976; other pseudonym: Arthur Adlon, qq.v. Under this pen name, the author of one romantic spy thriller included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV.
      Who Was Ellen Smith? Lancer, pb, 1967. “Her husband’s past was a mystery.and her own future depended on the answer. Where could she seek help?”

AYLING, (HAROLD) KEITH (OLIVER). 1898-1976. Pseudonyms: Arthur Adlon & Kaye Ayling, qq.v. Born in Hampshire, England. Wartime service with the Royal Air Force; came to the US in 1940. Writer for Liberty Magazine and the aviation pulps in the 1940s; author of many non-fiction books about aviation and auto racing between 1941 and 1970. Also under his own name, the author of one espionage novel included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. See below.
      The Last Enemy. Pyramid, pb, 1971. “International double-dealing in sex and revolution.”

   In clichesville, the equivalent of the gothic heroine is our old friend, the Private Eye — male variety. Frank Kane’s Johnny Liddell was a harmless example of the species — not vicious like Mickey Spillane but not possessing the social conscience of Mike Shayne of Lew Archer either. Recent reading of three of Kane’s books back-to-back showed that he “borrowed” liberally from himself. By the third book I had a feeling of déjà vu, and a fast rereading showed why, as the following quotes indicate. (NOTE: All page numbers are from Dell paperback editions.)

Poisons Unknown, page 63: “Gabby Benton was on her second cup of coffee, third cigarette, and fourth fingernail when Johnny Liddell stepped out of a cab. . . ”

Red Hot Ice, page 18: “Muggsy Kiely was on her third cup of coffee and her fourth fingernail when Johnny Liddlell walked into….”

Red Hot Ice, page 27: “Her legs were long, sensuously shaped. Full rounded thighs swelled into high-set hips, converged into a narrow waist. Her breasts were firm and full, their pink tips straining upward.”

Poisons Unknown, page 182: “The whiteness of her body gleamed in the reflected light from the windows. Her legs were long, sensuously shaped. Full rounded thighs swelled into high-set hips, converged into the narrow waist he had admired earlier in the evening. Her breasts were full and high, their pink tips straining upward.”

A Short Bier, page 60: “The whiteness of her body gleamed in the spotlight. Her legs were long, sensuously shaped. Full rounded thighs swelled into high-set hips, and converged into a narrow waist. A thin wisp of a brassiere made a halfhearted attempt to cover the full breasts, their pink tips straining upward.”

Poisons Unknown, pages 49-50: “The pealing of the phone at his ear was shrill, strident, insistent. Johnny Liddell groaned, cursed softly, and dug his head under the pillow. The noise refused to go away. He opened one eye experimentally, squinted at the window shade and noted that it still wasn’t light. He tried to wipe the sleep from his eyes, but it wouldn’t wipe away.”

Red Hot Ice, page 40: “The telephone on the-night table started to shrill discordantly. Johnny Liddell groaned, cursed sleepily, and dug his head further into the pillow. The noise refused to go away. He opened one eye experimentally; he could see by the half-drawn shade that it was still night…. He tried to wipe the sleep from his eyes, but it wouldn’t wipe.”

Red Hot Ice, page 90: “Muggsy Kiely … opened the door herself in response to his knock. She was wearing a robe that clung to a figure that was decidedly worth clinging to.”

A Short Bier, page 39: “Muggsy Kiely opened the door in response to his knock. She was wearing a hostess gown that clung to curves that were obviously worth clinging to.”

Poisons Unknown, page 20: “… seemingly unaware that the front of her housecoat had sagged open with breathtaking effect.”

A Short Bier, page 41: “…seemed unaware that the front of her hostess gown had sagged open with breathtaking effect.”

   With that technique, coupled with no great originality of plotting, it’s surprising Kane only wrote thirty-one books about his hero.

    Books reviewed or discussed in this installment:

FRANK KANE – Poisons Unknown. Ives Washburn, hardcover, 1953. Dell 822, paperback, 1955. Dell D334, pb, January 1960.

  —, Red Hot Ice. Ives Washburn, hardcover, 1955. Dell 991, pb, 1956. Dell 7292, pb, November 1967.

  —, A Short Bier. Dell First Edn B150, paperback original, July 1960.

HENRY KANE – Until You Are Dead.

Signet S1835; paperback reprint, August 1960 (Barye Phillips cover). Hardcover edition: Simon & Schuster, 1951. UK editions: T. V. Boardman, hc, 1952; ppbk, 1953. Earlier US paperback edition: Dell 580, 1952, mapback (Victor Kalin cover).

   In order of publication, Until You Are Dead was either the sixth or seventh of Henry Kane’s series of detective tales featuring a suave Manhattan private eye named Peter Chambers. (The reason I’m not more definitive on this is that there were two of Chambers’ adventures in 1951. With nothing else to go on, I’m going to suggest that this one is #6, since it was came out from Simon & Schuster, who published the first five, and A Corpse for Christmas appeared from Lippincott, suggesting a change in publisher. The Christmas aspect of the latter also suggests that it was published later in the year, once again making Until You Are Dead the earlier one.)

   Such is life in the fast armchair-detective lane.

   Also of note is that Kane’s first three short stores, one of which, “Kudos for the Kid” (May 1947) may have been the overall first appearance of Peter Chambers, were published in Esquire, which was a prestigious magazine to be in at the time.

   After 1951, though, all of Kane’s novel length fiction in the US, most but not all adventures of Peter Chambers, came out as paperback originals, first from Avon, then Dell and many of the others including Signet, before both Kane and Chambers ended up in a series of X-rated books from Lancer in 1970.

   Oops. I see I erred in one thing I just said. There was a series of novels about Inspector MacGregor that appeared in hardcover from Macmillan between 1965 and 1968. These all took place in New York City, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any of them. (I no longer remember all of the books I’ve seen.)

   It’s not clear how sharp an operator Chambers is, and how close to the legal edges he usually runs, but he seems to know his way around and to know a lot of people who come close to running the town. Really running the town, that is. But either way, he draws the line at aiding and abetting a jazz musician turned blackmailer — the guy had seen a killing in a night spot men’s room, a guy high in the rackets who tossed Kermit Teshle (that’s his name) a hundred dollar bill and left.

   Teshle wants more. Chambers says no. Enter Ivy Teshle, his sister, a girl who dances for a living while trying to make it to Broadway. (See either of the two covers shown.) She meets him in his office, worried about her brother, on page 15, and on page 17 she is kissing him. Chambers says yes.

   It is that kind of book, and Chambers is that kind of private eye, and Henry Kane is that kind of writer.

   Kermit ends up dead, and Chambers is in it up to his neck.

   As a writing stylist, Henry Kane is pretty good. Not in Raymond Chandler’s league, but he can rattle off the dialogue when he wants to, which is often, and he can go into philosophical matters with equal ease. Once in a while these discussions become what in the vernacular might be called full-fledged rants, or here in New England, “wig-outs.” Example, pages 85 and 86:

   Whew. He caught me there, but only twice, thank goodness. (How about you?)

   With a passage like that to recommend this book, I wish the mystery had an ending to match. It’s OK, don’t get me wrong. It just isn’t up to the one I’d been waiting for. (I don’t think it could have.)

      MARY ANNA EVANS —

   Relics. Poisoned Pen Press; trade paperback, Feb 2007 trade paperback; hardcover edition, August 2005.

   Effigies. Poisoned Pen Press, hardcover, January 2007.

   These two novels, the second and third in a series, feature Faye Longchamp, an archaeological graduate student. In Relics, she’s directing a project on an ethnically isolated Alabama group, the Sujosa, who have shown an unusual resistance to diseases that include AIDs, while in Effigies, she’s part of a team excavating a site in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where the Choctaw nation is thought to have been born. When mysterious deaths occur in each case, it’s left to Faye to investigate.

   Evans’ style is a bit heavy at times, with the scientific data weighing somewhat heavily on the narrative, but Faye is talented and possessed of a strongly independent mind that, coupled with a natural empathy for the native cultures she is investigating, make her a most sympathetic protagonist. The interaction with other members of the team and with the local population are thorny in both novels, and I found these both emotionally and intellectually satisfying.

[COMMENT] There is one earlier book in the series, as Walter mentions: Artifacts (2003); and one more recent one: Findings (2008).    — Steve