JAMES ANDERSON – The Affair of the Mutilated Mink Coat.Inspector Wilkins #2. Avon, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1981. Poisoned Pen Press, softcover, 1999

   A house party at Alderly, and all of the guests are either uninvited or there under false pretenses, or so it seems, and murder is inevitable. A classical 1930s British mystery with more dovetailed plot than anyone could hope for, all tied up with a witty twist.

   The humor is not forced, but understated, and is all the more obvious for it, Maybe the English do this best, The job done by a top detective called in from Scotland Yard, a great mind and s smug condescending man, is one not easily forgotten. A pure delight.

THE MEANEST MAN IN THE WORLD. 20th Century Fox, 1943. Jack Benny, Priscilla Lane, Eddie ‘Rochester’ Anderson, Edmund Gwenn. Director: Sidney Lanfield.

   A small town lawyer is persuaded by his girl friend’s father to go to New York City and make his reputation, but unless he sheds his nice guy image he finds he won’t make a nickel. Once he starts evicting little old ladies into the street, business comes flooding in.

   And of course he loses his girl. There is not much else to say about this film (less than an hour running time), except to say that Jack Benny plays himself very well, and although not called Rochester in the movie, Eddie Anderson may be even better in his part.

DICK LOCHTE – Sleeping Dog. Leo Bloodworth and Serendipity Dahlquist #1.Arbor House, hardcover, 1985. Warner, paperback, December 1986.

   In which a young worldly-wise girl (Serendity, 14) meets a world-weary private eye (mid-40s?) named Leo Bloodworth. Her dog is missing, and she needs him to help find him. The trail (for her mother, as well) leads them up and down the state of California today.

   I loved the first two chapters, and the wrap-up of the detective story was nearly as nice, but I have to confess I found the middle section of this long book just a little too long, And if this is the state of California today, I’m glad to be here in New England.

      The Leo Bloodworth & Serendity Dahlquist series:

Sleeping Dog (1985)
Laughing Dog (1988)
Rappin’ Dog (2014)
Diamond Dog (2014)
Devil Dog (2017)
Mad Dog (2017)

DAVID GOODIS – Down There. Gold Medal #623, paperback original; 1st printing, 1956. Caver art by Mitchell Hooks. Grove Press, softcover, 1962, as Shoot the Piano Player.

   David Goodis is probably best known for the film versions of two of his books: the Bogart/Bacall Dark Passage and the French version of Down There (Shoot the Piano Player, directed by Francois Truffaut). Both movies are better than their sources. Goodis was a writer without real verve or flair, and he did far too much telling and too little showing in his books. He remains popular in France, however, perhaps because of the “existential” nature of his stories.

   In Down There, Eddie Lynn is a piano player in a cheap joint called Harriett’s Hut. He had once been a prominent musician, but he discovered that he owed his big break to his wife’s sleeping with an impresario. She eventually confessed to Eddie and then killed herself. Eddie began his long slide to the bottom.

   One night Eddie’s brother shows up at the Hut, being pursued by gangsters. Eddie helps him out and gets in trouble himself. Lena. a kindhearted waitress at the Hut, tries to help Eddie out, but his relationship with her leads to his killing a man. He runs to the old family home, where his brother is holed up. Lena follows him to warn him that the hoods are on his trail, and there is a final shoot-out.

   The ending, like most endings in Goodis novels, is bleak and without hope, showing men at the mercy of outside forces, yet still responsible for their acts. This theme runs throughout Goodis’s works and is never more evident than in Down There.

———
   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.

GLORIA WHITE – Murder on the Run. PI Ronnie Ventura #1. Dell, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1991.

   According to page one,Ronnie Ventura is the half-Mexican daughter of a pair of jewel thieves, Somehow she is now a PI, According to the short bio at the end of the book, this is Gloria White’s first novel. Of these two statements, the first one is more than a little unusual, but it’s actually the second one that’s hard to believe. This is a good book, and if I had any say in the matter (which I don’t), I think it could easily be nominated for Best First Novel in anybody’s league.

   It begins like this. Ronnie is out running near Golden Gate Bridge one morning, when she spots two men struggling, One pushes the other into he water, and  once she has been seen, she is pursued by the one who did the pushing, Luckily she gets away,

   Two problems arise immediately: (1) the body is not discovered right away, and (2) she has recognized the person who did the dumping as Pete August, a PI who once worked for the D.A.’s office, and who also has worked for the police department – in other words, he’s a fair-headed, high profile boy with all his former connections still in intact.

   Snubbed by the police, Ronnie keeps working. More deaths follow, but she soon manages to get a homicide detective names Philly Post interested. This is a lady who doesn’t give up, and the story has both ginger and snap.

   There is even an unexpected twist ahead. The only problem is the ending, It’s too predictable. A little too obvious. I saw it coming, One good twist deserves another as the saying goes, and I didn’t get one.

   Don’t get me wrong. This book is as good as any of the other female PI novels I’ve read in recent months, and some of them were as good as those by men, (A number of them have been even better.)

AMELIA REYNOLDS LONG – Murder to Type. Phoenix Press, hardcover, 1943.

   Blood type, that is. A blackmailer is given the wrong type of blood during an emergency transfusion in a doctor’s office. (The doctor is among those being blackmailed, and so is his female ward.)

   Lawyer Stephen Carter. brother of the D.A., does the detective work. While he has a light-hearted view of the world, Long takes the whole affair very seriously. Midst the flutter and clutter, though, who really cares?

ROBERT MARTIN – She, Me and Murder. Jim Bennett #12. Curtis, paperback original, 1962. Expanded version of the story that appeared in Dime Detective Magazine, November 1948.

   Jim Bennett, who may have been Cleveland’s first fictional private eye, is hired by an elderly man who has befriended a young stage actress, When her current boy friend is killed, there are only three possible suspects.

   As opposed to the prose of an Ed McBain, for example, which scorches and sings, Martin’ is – at first – plain, dowdy, and chaste. The pace picks up, however, when Bennett’s secretary/fiancee is kidnapped, and the triple-switch at the ending is a doozy.

WILLIAM GOLDMAN – Marathon Man. Delacorte, hardcover, 1974. Dell, paperback, 1975. Other reprint editions include: Random House, softcover, 2001.

   William Goldman, the well-known novelist and screenwriter (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), achieved his first major commercial fiction success with Marathon Man. The first half of the novel is some of the finest suspense writing committed to paper during the past three decades. Goldman weaves a complex plot involving a young budding intellectual/historian/student/marathon runner named Babe Levy, a superspy named Scylla, and Nazi war criminals on the loose in New York City. The characterization is excellent, the story line taut and fast-moving, and there are a couple of unexpected twists.

   The last half of the book, however, might have been written by someone else, because the plot and everything else falls apart. The characters suddenly begin to think and act implausibly, there are several bizarre and unbelievable progressions, and the climax on the Jewish-controlled Diamond Exchange along Forty-seventh Street is unsatisfactory and filled with gratuitous and glorified violence.

   Goldman never seems able to make up his mind whether he wants to be funny or deadly serious; the fluctuation works surprisingly well in the first half and not at all in the second. (There is one nicely handled scene in the last half. a chilling interrogation by torture, simple and bloodless, that involves the use of a dental drill. This scene was likewise one of the highlights of the 1975 film of the same title, starring Dustin Hoffman.)

   All in all, a potentially classic novel in the suspense field, weakened and made distasteful through mishandling of its material.

   Goldman’s other suspense novels include No Way to Treat a Lady (1964; originally published as a paperback original under the pseudonym Harry Longbaugh) and Magic (1976).

———
   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.

DOCKS OF NEW ORLEANS. Monogram Pictures, 1948. Roland Winters (Charlie Chan), Virginia Dale, Mantan Moreland, John Gallaudet, Victor Sen Yung. Based on charcaters created by Earl Derr Biggers. Director: Derwin Abrahams.

   A chemical manufacturer hires Charlie Chan to help investigate the trouble he’s gotten into after agreeing to handle a mysterious overseas assignment, then dies under strange circumstances before their appointment the next morning.

   The is some semblance of a locked room mystery here, but I don’t think it occurred to anybody involved. Happy to say, I figured out who the killer was and how he did it, even before Charlie’s number two son starts up rousing rendition of “Chop Chop Boogie.”

ED McBAIN – Cinderella. Matthew Hope #6. Henry Holt & Co., hardcover, 1986. Mysterious Press, paperback, August 1987.

   Matthew Hope’s sixth adventure, another perverse take-off of a children’s fairy tale. Here Cinderella is a prostitute who meets a crime kingpin at a ball and then vanishes, along with four keys of nearly pure cocaine.

   McBain is master of dialogue – people really do talk this way – and he tells a compelling story. But along the way, I found that I was learning more about the narcotics and prostitution trade than I really wanted to know.