Centuries hence, fans and academics may still be sorting through the cultural remnants of the Twentieth Century looking for something worthwhile. When they speak of Mysteries, I hope they will be kind.

   I hope that whoever they are, the literary historians of the future will pass lightly over those exaggerated grotesques that passed for Eccentric Detectives from the pens of authors who wrote as if they’d never in their lives met a Real Person. I hope they wil skip over the showy blowhards who tried to pass off Violence as Realism and Platitudes as Philosophy.

   And perhaps they won’t even mention those puzzle-writers who mistook Contrivance for Cleverness.

   There now; Have I covered all the bases without actually offending anyone? What’s that? A word or two about the pretensions of Wordy Critics? Well, I think that may be going too far, so I’ll skip to the punch line.

   I hope, in short, that our Future Forefathers (?) will ignore all that overrated dreck and spend most of their time talking about Fredric Brown.

   No, not everything that Brown wrote was dipped in gold, and a lot of his stuff is awfully routine,  but when Brown was at his peak, no one could touch him tor speed and agility.  In the Science Fiction genre, Philip K. Dick sometimes came close to emulating  Brown’s    counter-logic (so neatly displayed in his short story collections Honeymoon in Hell and Nightmares and Geezenstacks), but in the realm  of the Clever Mystery — light, fast-paced  and ingenious — no one (not even that   ponderous puzzler Agatha Christie) ever came close.

   A lot of trees have died in the last several years, sacrificed to weighty articles  demonstrating that Brown’s Content is a lot deeper than his Style would indicate, and I will admit that there’s quite a bit beneath the surface of books like Here Comes a Candle, The Wench Is Dead and Martians, Go Home.

   I particularly like the fearful symmetry of The Screaming Mimi, which opens and closes with the hero talking to God and demonstrates along the way that God is not a particularly nice person. You could even string Brown’s short short stories together into a chapbook of commentary on the futility of Human Endeavor and I think be reminded irresistibly of the disciplined poetry of Omar Khayyam’s effort in that direction.

   But what impresses me most favorably about Fredric Brown is his sheer love of writing for its own sake, and his ability to communicate this love to the reader. Following the twists and turns of a Fredric Brown story recalls the thrill one gets from seeing Astaire dancing or Olivier doing Shakespeare or Gershwin playing Gershwin: The sheer felicity of a gifted artist doing what he loves best has an appeal all its own.

   This felicity comes across very appealingly indeed in Homicide Sanitarium  (Dennis McMillan, 1984), with an introduction by Bill Pronzini) a very welcome collection of previously unreprinted Brown stories that was followed by another half-dozen or so volumes in the same vein.

   Reading these tales, one gets some idea of what the Mystery Story can be at its best as well as a fascinating glimpse into the workings of Brown’s uniquely inventive mind.

   “Red-Hot and Hunted” for instance starts off as a moody chase story, then veers subtly into whodunit, as the Brown starts dropping subtle hints that All is not What It Seems, then wraps up with a fast, surprising but logical solution — it also shows Brown’s gift for creating plausible red herrings, characters who seem to have lives of their own outside the confines of the pages but who fit quite comfortably into the restrictions of even a short story plot.

   My other favorite in this collection, the title story, offers the engaging Brown-logic of an escaped Homicidal Maniac who hides out in a Sanitarium. There’s a lot more to this story  than merely the cute logic of what would have been a facile punch-line in the hands of a lesser writer.

   For Fredric Brown, the idea is a starting point, a place to begin his story and characters from. He is thus able to do a great deal with a very simple premise Not for  Brown the lugubrious machinations of a Mystery where Everybody Dun It or the character-flouting of a puzzle that makes a mockery of Motivation.

   He keeps one hand on his premise but the other one very firmly on plausible characterization and the result is writing in which even the most outrageous of crimes (and another story in this collection, “The Spherical Ghoul” features the most ludicrous puzzle I have come across in years) still does not insult the reader’s intelligence.

   Fredric Brown’s talent was probably a little too diffuse to earn him a very high place with most critics. Like Michael Curtiz, he seems to have crafted gems in almost every genre but never settled down to that predictable consistency that makes the works of Woolrich or Hitchcock so much easier (and therefore critically popular) to analyze.

   I hope, though, that in some golden future time, when some of the more grotesque “giants” of the Mystery have gone to a well-deserved obscurity that fans or academics or both will still be reading Brown.

NOTE: For more, much more from the pen (?) of Dan Stumpf, check out his own blog, filled with great fun and merriment at https://danielboydauthor.com/blog

GARLAND LORD – Murder with Love. William Morrow, hardcover, 1943. Detective Book Club, hardcover reprint, 3-in-1 edition. Green #4, digest-sized paperback, circa 1945.

   What I’m going to do first, rather than do the research once again as to who the author of this rather good mystery novel is, or was, is to repeat the first paragraph of my review of their novel, Murder Plain and Fancy, published the same year. The two books were, not my review. Go here to read the complete review, and be sure to follow up by reading the comments as well.

   “Garland Lord was the joint pen name of husband and wife Isabel Garland (1903-1988) and Mindret Lord (1903-1955). They wrote four books together under this name, none with series characters, the first three for Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint. Isabel also wrote one book under her own name, apparently before they decided to team up together.”

   It is difficult to say where this book takes place, geographically, but except for a few pages at a neighbor’s home, all of the action takes place in an old mansion with lots of rooms and servants, with an elderly patriarch in charge. Add wealthy to that brief description, and that sums him up more than adequately, I think.

   And what he has done is call together a conclave of family and friends (including would-be lovers), with an impending announcement involving a new will that he has in mind. This is not a good idea, especially in mystery novels. And so it happens here, although it is not the old man who dies, although the attempt is made.

   Among the guests, the man at the top (not a miserably stingy fellow, by the way) has an estranged daughter who has come, and two adopted daughters, one of whom, named Roncevald, or Roncie for short. It is she who tells the story that follows, which does include two deaths, as well as several strange events, with Roncie the target of an apparent frame-up for the deeds.

   The mystery is a good one, and the true killer may come as a surprise, unless you reading and studying the tale more closely than I was, as the clues are there, sort of. When you think about the title, you also should also not be terribly surprised if I tell you there is almost as much romance in the story as there is detection, of which there is less than you might think.

   Unusual events happen, and while the participants are certainly aware of them, life does go on, as best it can. Garland Lord seems to have had the knack of making that happen, and make it seem natural. I enjoyed this one.

WALTER GIBSON – Norgil the Magician. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1977.

   One of this century’s most prolific writers, Walter Gibson was the author of 282 pulp novels featuring the most famous of all superhero crime fighters, Lamont Cranston, a.k.a. the Shadow. All 282 of those book-length works were produced between 1931 and 1949 and first appeared in The Shadow Magazine under such titles as “The Shadow Laughs,” “The Mobsmen on the Spot,” “The Creeping Death,” “The Voodoo Master,” and “The Shadow, The Hawk, and The Skull.”

   Some forty of these have been reprinted over the years, most in paperback; a few of the shorter ones have appeared in pairs in such Doubleday hardcover titles as The Shadow: The Mask of Mephisto and Murder by Magic (1975) and in the recent Mysterious Press book The Shadow and the Golden Master (1984).

   Gibson also created another series character for the pulps — Norgil the Magician, whose adventures appeared in the magazine Crime Busters in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Norgil is a stage magician: “Like Blackstone or Calvert, both headliners at the time,” Gibson writes in his introduction to Norgil the Magician, the first of two Norgil collections, “he could switch from fifty-minute shows at movie houses to a full evening extravaganza, with an enlarged company.”

   Norgil is an anagram of the conjurer’s real name. Loring; he also can (and does) change it into Ling Ro, a name he uses “when called upon to perform wizardry in Chinese costume.”

   Each of the Norgil stories features a well-known stage illusion as its central plot device — a version of Houdini’s Hindu Needle Trick in “Norgil — Magician”; burial alive in a sealed casket in “The Glass Box”; the rising-card illusion in “Battle of Magic.”

   These eight stories are pulpy, to be sure (the prose almost embarrassingly bad in places), but that shouldn’t spoil most readers· enjoyment of them. The magic in each is authentic and presented with the requisite amount mystery — Gibson was himself a practicing magician — and Norgil’ s melodramatic methods and illusions make for good fun.

   Anyone who has read and enjoyed any of the Shadow novels will certainly want to read this collection, as well its successor, Norgil: More Tales of Prestidigitation ( 1978).

         ———
   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.

(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Autumn 2025. Issue #70. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 34 pages (including covers).

   AS usual, Old-Time Detection (OTD) succeeds in keeping classic detective fiction alive and interesting. In this issue diversity is the theme, with coverage of detecfic authors from Conan Doyle to some of the latest practitioners of the genre being highlighted.

   First up is an EQMM interview with Robert Twohy, whose approach to writing is basically character-centric: “I’ve tried to write something to approach it [‘Red-Headed League’], and haven’t yet — but the fun is in the quest.” (See the Fiction selection below for more by this author.)

   J. Randolph Cox talks about Arthur Train, now almost forgotten but once very popular in the first decades of the 20th century.

   Next we have a reprint of Martin Edwards’s introduction to Peter Shaffer’s THE WOMAN IN THE WARDROBE, which Robert Adey later characterized as “the best post-war locked-room mystery . . . [with] a brilliant new solution.”

   Everybody has to start somewhere. Francis M. Nevins exhibits his usual high-quality scholarship in “The Pulp Origins of John D. MacDonald,” highlighting that soon-to-be-popular author’s early days: “MacDonald was the last great American mystery writer to hone his storytelling skills in the action-detective pulps as Hammett and Chandler and Gardner and Woolrich had done before him.”

   Jon L. Breen’s reviews of books (ten of them from the Walker Reprints Series) in “40-Plus Years Ago” take us from familiar mystery fiction old reliables like Pierre Chambrun, to obscure eccentrics like Inspector James and Sergeant Honeybody.

   In Part II of Michael Dirda’s “Mystery Novels So Clever You’ll Read Them Twice,” he points us to modern-day examples of stories that manage to surprise the reader. After all, he says, “A mystery that doesn’t surprise is hardly a mystery at all.”

   Arthur’s Fiction selection is Robert Twohy’s ingenious “A Masterpiece of Crime,” in which a police detective and a detecfic enthusiast solve a murder, with a certain very well-known detective making a cameo appearance.

   In world-class Agatha Christie expert Dr. John Curran’s latest “Christie Corner,” he informs us of the activities pertaining to the latest International Agatha Christie Festival, including a nostalgic look back at the Joan Hickson-Miss Marple TV series from forty years ago and a look forward to an upcoming print adaptation of Miss Marple; another upcoming TV “re-imagining” of Mrs. Christie’s popular married sleuthing duo, Tommy and Tuppence (“Sadly, Christie fans are all too aware of what ‘re-imagining’ means”); and yet another upcoming event next year, characterized as “the biggest exhibition held in the last twenty years to celebrate Christie’s writing,” timed to coincide with the centenary of THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD.

   In “Collecting,” Arthur Vidro recounts the varied experiences of mystery and detecfic book collectors, one of whom undoubtedly speaks for a multitude: “It’s hard to say goodbye to favorites.”

   Next, in “Sherlock Holmes in Comics” Arthur deals on a personal level with the sporadic career of the Sage of Baker Street in that worthy’s four-color mass market exposures.

   Fifty years ago there was a mini-boom in Sherlock Holmes-related fiction and non-fiction paperbacks, and Charles Shibuk summarizes it in “The Sherlockian Revolution.”

   Next Arthur Vidro offers a mini-review of his first John Rhode novel and finds it most satisfactory.

   The readers have their say, especially about how the latest issue of OTD did not neglect the contributors to detective fiction from Fair Albion.

   And finally, Arthur confronts us with a mystery puzzle that anyone who’s been watching prime time crime TV programs for the last fifty years should find a cinch. (Yeah, right.)

   Be honest now. Considering everything you’ve just read, don’t you think that the Autumn ’25 OTD might be worth a look?

Subscription information:

– Published three times a year: Spring, summer, and autumn. – Sample copy: $6.00 in U.S.; $10.00 anywhere else. – One-year U.S, subscription rate increase starting with the next issue: $20.00. – One-year overseas: $45.00. – Payment: Checks payable to Arthur Vidro, or cash from any nation, or U.S. postage stamps or PayPal. Mailing address:

Arthur Vidro, editor
Old-Time Detection
2 Ellery Street
Claremont, New Hampshire 03743

Web address: vidro@myfairpoint.net

GABRIELLE KRAFT – Bullshot. Jerry Zalman #1. Pocket, paperback original; 1st printing, 1987.

   Jerry Zalman is an updated version of Perry Mason, you might say, a Beverly Hills lawyer with a zest for the good life (California style). He even finds his own bodies when business is slow, but he hot-tubs the girls he meets on the job, which Perry never did.

   Anybody who goes to bed with a blue-velvet sleep mask is not likely to becomes one of my favorite detective heroes. All that kept me reading was that this case involves a monumental collection of rock & roll memorabilia. [Otherwise], insipid. As bad as a made-for-TV movie.

The Jerry Zalman series —

1. Bullshot (1987)
2. Screwdriver (1988)
3. Let’s Rob Roy (1989)
4. Bloody Mary (1990)

BOB McKNIGHT – The Bikini Bombshell. Ace Double D-387. Paperback original; 1st printing, 1959. Published back-to-back with Fare Prey, by Laine Fisher (reviewed here).

   Another story taking place in the days before the fall of Batista in Cuba. Sam Petrie, American owner of a small airline based there, has managed to escape, but only after liberating $25,000 of his own money from Madhouse Manny’s casino.

   Now Manny is looking for him and two beautiful girls are helping him, one of whom, clad in only ski mask and bikini, shot a cop. Petrie’s problem: which one? McKnight’s knack is telling a story that starts on page one and doesn’t let up until it’s over.

DAVE J. GARRITY – Dragon Hunt. PI Peter Braid. Signet, paperback original, 1967.

   Dave Garrity seems unfairly destined to be a footnote in the career of Mickey Spillane. With the phenomenal popularity of Spillane in the 1950s, a group of satellite writers sprang into orbit around him: “buddies” of the Mick’s who solicited cover blurbs and contacts in the writing business to launch their own careers as hard-boiled mystery writers.

   Earle Baskinsky flamed out after two vivid, idiosyncratic novella-length books (The Big Steal and Death Is a Cold, Keen Edge, both 1956), as did Charlie Wells, after two readable, Spillane-imitative books (Let the Night Cry, 1954, and The Last Kill, 1955).

   Only Garrity — who sometimes published under the single-name by line Garrity — carved out a career of his own. His only published private-eye novel to dale (several novels completed shortly before his death in 1984 may see posthumous publication) is Dragon Hunt, in which he unashamedly tapped into the success of Mike Hammer.

   Although Dragon Hunt is one of Garrity’s lesser works, it has been singled out for discussion because it features Mike Hammer as a character, making it of interest to students of Spillane, whose importance is, after all, undeniable.

   With Spillane’s blessing (right down to cover blurb and a photo of the Mick and Garrity on the back cover), the novel that “introduces private eye Peter Braid” ties directly into the world of Mike Hammer in many ways. The title is a reference to “the dragon,” the villain of Spillane’s novel The Girl Hunters> (1961), to which Dragon Hunt is vaguely a hack-door sequel.

   Throughout the novel Braid calls Hammer on the phone for advice and help, perhaps mirroring the Garrity/Spillane relationship. (Spillane claims not to have provided Hammer’s dialogue, but one assumes he at least checked it over.)

   The basic plot — a dying millionaire named Adam hires the PI to protect his granddaughter from a prodigal, psychotic son named Cain — is lifted from the syndicated “Mike Hammer” comic strip in 1954, right down to the names of the characters. Spillane wrote the Sunday pages of the strip and collaborated with artist Ed Robbins on the daily scripts.

   In his entry in Contemporary Authors circa ’63, Garrity mentions as a work in progress a book that is obviously Dragon Hunt — then titled Find the Man Called Cain — to be done in collaboration with Ed Robbins. This would explain the Hammer strip as source material for the novel, but not the lack of Robbins’ name on the by-line. In any case, Dragon Hunt is a minor, slightly tongue-in-cheek, but likable affair, and a must for Spillane enthusiasts.

   Those who wish to see Garrity at his best, however, should seek out his Cordolini series for New American Library. In these four novels (an unpublished fifth one is known to exist), Garrity reveals himself to be an ambitious writer, experimenting with characterization via quirky effective dialogue; using third-person shifting viewpoints boldly; and generally avoiding the schlocky mock”Executioner” approach of similar series of the same period.

   His finest hour is The Plastic Man (1976), which features a narrative trick so deft, so surprising, that the most seasoned mystery reader will have to give Garrity his due.

         ———
   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.

BILL KNOX – Seafire. Webb Carrick #6. Long, UK, hardcover, 1970. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1971.

   
   Webb Carrick is normally the first officer on the cruiser Marlin under “stubby bearded Captain James Shannon,” but Carrick has temporarily been assigned to duty as Commander of the research vessel Clavella which he is to meet in the fishing village of Quinnbeg.

   The Clavella is on a fairly standard mission studying plankton to to insure the waters off Scotland’s coast stay healthy and productive, but Carrick is no sooner ashore in Quinnbegg when he meets a hostile and suspicious populace convinced the research vessel is responsible for recent disastrous catches and the scientists aboard are doing more than studying plankton.

   They aren’t far off either. Something is going on that Carrick hasn’t been made privy to, and before he lays this problem to rest, the fishing industry will be threatened, the British economy will face ruin, countless lives will be endangered, and nuclear brinkmanship, Russian sleeper agents, and murder will all raise their ugly head.

   Those unfamiliar with this series might be surprised to discover Bill Knox managed to get some eighteen titles out of the fish police and Webb Carrick, and most of them fast paced intelligent thrillers mixing mystery, seafaring, the lore of the Scottish coast and its rich history and mysterious geography, along with solid detection, suspense, and adventure. You might expect tales of smuggling, illegal fishing, and industrial pollution from such a series, but Knox throws in spies, and even a bit of SF (*) and old fashioned terror of the Deeps into the mix, all as neat as a good Scotch.

   Bill Knox is best known for his long running Scottish procedural series about cops Thane and Moss, but that is only a small part of his prodigious output. In addition to Thane and Moss and Carrick and the Fishery Protective service Knox also wrote the Talos Cord thrillers about a tough UN agent as Robert McLeod, the Jonathan Gaunt “Remembrancer’ series, several books about Andrew Laird marine insurance investigator, and a handful of stand alone books and non-fiction. A journalist from Glasgow Knox learned earned his crime writing skills as a crime reporter, and it shows in a clear concise and well researched style that combines with a vivid imagination.

   His particular gift was mastering the ideal mix of mysterious events, compounding suspense, likable characters, adventure, and an enviable gift for the relentless rousing climax.

   Seafire (a type of plankton causing all the problem here) produces  a typically masterful Knox outing in which little is what it seems and Carrick has his hands full bringing the bad guys to bear and solving a threat that reaches far beyond the small fishing villages where it began.

   If you aren’t familiar with the Webb Carrick series, I highly recommend them. I’ve read at least half of them and never been disappointed. Witchrock, Devilweed, Blacklight, and Stormtide are particular favorites in the long running series.
               ___

    (*) From Conan Doyle on, British thriller writers have never shied from a touch of Science Fiction to color their plots, from William LeQueux and E. Phillips Oppenheim and mysterious electronic eyes that sink battleships. to Edgar Wallace and King Kong, Margery Allingham and Mr. Campion, to John Creasey’s Dr. Palfrey and Ian Fleming and his imitators, SF has often injected itself into the genre, and in recent years become more common with the American breed.

JOHN CREASEY – The Scene of the Crime. Inspector Roger West. Berkley F1245, paperback; 1st printing thus, June 1966. Published earlier by Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1961, and by Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1961.

   It is not particularly pleasant to watch a man plan and carry out two murders that, with his logic, seem almost straightforward and natural. A warped mind is revealed with all of its rationalities, and more chilling because of that. What can you say about a man who loves his family so much that he will kill them so they will never learn the truth about him?

   Inspector West’s family becomes involved when they go house-hunting, only to find the one the murderer’s wife has her heart set on it.  And his sons do a bit of Hardy boys adventuring, though much more dangerous, as part of first love, with the murderer’s daughters.

   A case is built against the wrong man, doubt sets in, and that case so carefully constructed must somehow be torn down, Since knowledge of the real murderer is the reader’s from the beginning, a sense of urgency floods over everything.

   Human interest deduction, with the emphasis on “human.”

Rating: *****

MOSS ROSE. 20th Century Fox, 1947. Peggy Cummins, Victor Mature, Ethel Barrymore, Vincent Price, Margo Woode, George Zucco, Patricia Medina, Rhys Williams. Based on the novel by Joseph Shearing (correction made in Comment #6). Director: Gregory Ratoff.

   A Victorian era murder mystery, in which a chorus girl first plays detective and then attempts a surprising sort of blackmail. The main clue in the death of her friend is a rose, found in a Bible at the scene of the crime.

   Peggy Cummins’ character is naive, audacious and charming, all at the same time. I found myself rooting for her, and I didn’t know why. As a mystery the story could have used some extra finesse, however. The finger of suspicion jumps a bit too quickly here.