RUTH FENISONG – The Butler Died in Brooklyn.Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover 1943. Mystery Novel Classic #97, digest-sized paperback, 1946/47. Stark House Press, 2-in-1 edition with Murder Runs a Fever, softcover, 2024.

   Fenisong wrote thirteen books about New York Police Sergeant (later Inspector) Gridley Nelson from 1942 to 1960. They enjoyed considerable popularity and many were reprinted in paperback. In an era of uneducated but street wise fictional cops, Nelson has just about everything going for him. He is a Princeton graduate with a substantial private income that allows him to hire a full-time housekeeper who lives in Harlem and serves as an information pipeline through her friendships with other servants. This is of enormous value to Nelson since he is frequently assigned to investigate upper-class murders.

   In The Butler Died in Brooklyn, tangled upper-class family relationships arc involved when Beulah Fitch Casey Danille Roberts’s longtime butler, Shepard (who had just been fired without cause), is found murdered. “Booming Beulah” has just moved her entire household — including giddy granddaughter Marianne and her twin brothers — from Gramercy Park to a recently converted apartment house to be near her current husband’s antique shop/warehouse.

   After another family murder, Nelson’s housekeeper, Sammy, takes it upon herself to answer an ad for a maid in the household. Proper police procedure is followed, with long interrogation of suspects and extensive background checks, while Marianne complicates matters by trying to protect her brothers and getting herself kidnapped. It is the dogged, step-by-step investigation by Nelson, and Sammy behind the scenes, that finally solves the case just in time to prevent another murder.

   Fenisong’s books, even the non-series ones like Jenny Kissed Me ( l944), are a mixture of romance and suspense, and provide glimpses of how the other half lives. Her formula of the wealthy young police officer who “speaks the language” has been used by others, but never more successfully. Among Gridley Nelson’s other successful cases are Murder Needs a Face (1942), Deadlock (1952), and Dead Weight (1962).

     ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

CHARLES PERRY – Portrait of a Young Man Drowning. Simon and Schuster, hardcover, 1962. Signet, paperback, February 1963. W. W. Norton & Company, softcover, 1996. Film adaptation: 1997 as Six Ways to Sunday, starring Norman Reedus and Deborah Harry

   A bildungsroman of Harry Odum, from a child with an Oedipus complex, to mob hitman. And everything in between.

   I guess it’s really two different story arcs, one literal, one figurative: the rise and fall of a mother-fucker.

   So it all starts relatively innocent enough. Mama loves her baby. And she doesn’t want him to love anybody else more than her. And she doesn’t ever want him to leave her. And he must always care for her. As she did for him.

   And as a kid it doesn’t look that weird. But as mama starts driving off all eligible bachelorettes, chastising her full grown son for his divided attentions—things start to get weird.

   And at the same time, we see Harry growing from small-time hoodlum to big time enforcer. And with the money he’s bringing in, he can bring Ma to the top o’ the world Ma, top o’ the world.

   And he does.

   Of course when you get to the top, you got much further to fall.

         —

   Beautifully orchestrated Oedipal mob story, where a child’s development into a psycho-killer is inextricably intertwined with his twisted sexuality, to the point that he can only be aroused by murdering someone. And only then and immediately must he find a mate, a mate denied by his mother, til she’s the only one left.

   Pretty hard core stuff. But well done.-

WILLIAM LINDSAY GRESHAM – Limbo Tower. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1949. Paperback reprints listed below.

   Crime fiction fans know Gresham for his 1946 classic noir novel Nightmare Alley and nonfiction classics on carnival/magician culture (Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls and Monster Midway: An Uninhibited Look at the Glittering World of the Carny). In 2010, Bret Wood released Grindshow: The Selected Writings of William Lindsay Gresham (see Walker Martin’s Mystery*File review here for more details).

   Few people today know about Gresham’s second novel, Limbo Tower, although it had some commercial success. My copy (William Heinemann, 1950) is the second hardcover edition, and Signet/New American Library published at least three paperback editions (Signet 839 in 1951, Signet D2046 in 1962, then a reprint of D2046 in 1973).

   It’s a curious mix of crime thriller and melodrama. The limbo tower in question is an urban tuberculosis clinic—TB is a harsh disease, so the quarantined patients are in limbo between life and death. For the main character, Jewish atheist Communist poet Benjamin Rosenbaum, the rest-and-nothing-else routine is torture. He’s got words to write and systems to smash.

   Catholic nurse Anne Gallagher struggles to care for him well because she can’t admit she’s in love with an atheist. Other patients—most notably Muslim cab driver Abdullah, con man Jasper Stone, and fundamentalist preacher Joe Kincaid—orbit around Rosenbaum, amusing or irritating each other. Meanwhile, Dr. Rathbone struggles with being a skilled surgeon in a job where his options to cure patients are limited. His colleague, Dr. Crane, strives to hide an affair with a woman whose boss is on the hospital board.

   Many interesting things could be said about how the novel connects with Gresham’s real life. Gresham spent about six months in tuberculosis wards (leaving against doctors’ advice) in 1939-1940. He dedicates the book to Alexander F. Bergman, a poet who died of tuberculosis and was “a genius, a revolutionary, and an expert at handling small boats. God rest him, he’s dead now.”

   Readers familiar with Gresham’s wife, Joy Davidman (she later married C.S. Lewis, a romance depicted in the movie Shadowlands) will know she edited They Look Like Men, a collection of Bergman’s poetry. All interesting things that biographers and researchers are still unpacking today.

   The more interesting topic for crime fans is how much Limbo Tower feels like it wants, and doesn’t want, to be a crime novel. Wood (and Alan Prendergast in a Writer’s Chronicle piece) observe that the tuberculosis setting and ensemble cast make Limbo Tower resemble Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. I found it felt more like a mix between Jim Thompson’s The Alcoholics and Elmore Leonard’s Touch.

   Like The Alcoholics, it’s an ensemble clinic story with noir elements, yet its subject matter announces that it’s meant to be “serious literature.” In Gresham’s case, the crime comes via hints that preacher Kincaid has sinful secrets and Dr. Crane’s affair with a femme fatale who talks like the brunette in Detour.

   In Thompson’s case, the crime comes via his usual tropes (women with odd sexual interests, heroes with unmentionable dark pasts), just in a clinic instead of his usual small Texas town. Yet Thompson makes his goal fairly clear: he highlights the fact the clinic is a “California gothic” style building, his ensemble cast resembles a gothic novel’s quirky mansion residents, and the essential dilemma is over accepting much-needed money from a crooked source (“how will we maintain the mansion?”).

   This is noir returning to its gothic roots. Gresham’s much longer, rambling story doesn’t have such clarity: there’s a lot of talk about religion, allusions to people’s criminal pasts, and some vague hints of supernatural phenomena, but it never coheres into a clear vision. In both cases, attempting to write a self-consciously serious novel feels like overreaching. Thompson and Gresham seemed at their best when they took a pulp novel setup (con jobs, bank heists, etc.), then quietly made it more radical.

   Like Leonard in Touch, Gresham offers a curious mix of piety and grit. Leonard isn’t strictly a noir writer, although his trademark messy urban characters and snarky humor seem to build on noir’s legacy of fast-talking crooks—hence why Tarantino liked Leonard so much.

   In Touch, a novel about hucksters exploiting a Franciscan priest whose stigmata can heal people, Leonard wants to be simultaneously snarky and reverent. The religious elements aren’t scorned, as we’d expect from someone who wrote Rum Punch. Similarly, Gresham (writing during the tail end of his 1946-1950 churchgoing Christian phase, contributing testimonies to Presbyterian Life about how much C.S. Lewis’ apologetics informed his faith journey) takes faith seriously here. Readers familiar with Nightmare Alley, where the con artist hero poses as a spiritualist minister, keep waiting for a reveal where the faithful turn out to be fools. Instead, even Rosenbaum’s angry Communist tirades against religion are treated as misguided faith. Leonard and Gresham both try to combine writing styles known for irony and cynicism with pious treatments of religion. Neither quite pulls it off.

   So, Limbo Tower is a messy book. That being said, Gresham provides some memorable scenes—including a wicked twist in Dr. Crane’s love life. The descriptions of the hospital—particularly the biblical allusions to Babel/Babylon as its furnace burns contaminated sheets—are also fun. The characters could use a stronger plot to orbit around, but they are all intriguing. As readers saw in Nightmare Alley, Gresham had a knack for making a community of characters feel like the universe in microcosm.

   Maybe now that Guillermo del Toro has made Nightmare Alley into a movie and some lesser-known Gresham works have crept back into print (Dunce Books re-released Monster Midway in 2021), we’ll see new interest in Limbo Tower. I’m unsure how well a reissue would sell, but I can see a smart adaptor playing with the structure to make a compelling audiobook or graphic novel.

         ____

About the Reviewer: G. Connor Salter is a writer and editor living in Colorado. He has contributed over 1,400 articles to various publications, including Mythlore, The Tolkienist, and Fellowship & Fairydust. His interview with mystery author Clayton Rawson’s son was published here earlier in Mystery*File.

STRANGERS KISS. Orion, 1983. Peter Coyote, Victoria Tennant, Blaine Novak, Dan Shor, Richard Romanus, and Linda Kerridge. Written by Blaine Novak & Matthew Chapman. Directed by Matthew Chapman.

   A niche film, but accessible, engaging, intelligent — and Funny!

   About 30 years before Strangers Kiss was made, an eager young would-be filmmaker borrowed money, assembled a cast of non-actors, investors and their relatives, scarfed up one professional actor and somehow cobbled a movie together.

   No, not Ed Wood and Plan 9 from Outer Space. The laying of that egg was immortalized in a movie of its own, a decade later. This film is about the somewhat more talented Stanley Kubrick, and the movie was Killer’s Kiss, reviewed here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=18638

   So if you’re still with me, Strangers Kill is loosely based on the making of Killer’s Kiss. For purposes of the plot, and to give the thing a sense of movement and suspense, they provide the leading lady/heroine with a loan shark/movie-investor for a near-husband, and Richard Romanus gives the character a hairy machismo that contrasts very well with Blaine Novak’s laid-back virility as her co-star /would-be lover.

   But these three, good as they are, compete for our attention with a vivid array of sub-Hollywood types, hangers-on or drop-outs from the fringes of the tinseltown dream, limping Kharis-like from ruin to ruin…

   Lyrical, ain’t I?

   Seriously, folks, the minor characters are well-drawn, and the bigger roles are played with commitment and deft comic timing. Dan Shor does an amazing — and very funny — job as a beleaguered producer in an abusive relationship with the director, played by Peter Coyote as a mercurial megalomaniac. The scenes of Coyote plowing through the film like a mulching mower, while Shor bags up the remains are a delight to watch, funny and deeply-felt at the same time.

   Finally, for a movie about movie-making, this is surprisingly intelligent. Director Matthew Chapman evokes the seedy back-lot milieu, and lovingly recreates scenes and set-ups from the earlier film. And best of all, ((WARNING!)) after teetering at the edge of melodrama for most of its running time, Strangers wraps with everyone acting like grown-ups, resolving their conflicts (or not) with a low-key maturity that surprised me more than many an action-film!

KENNETH FEARING – The Big Clock. Harcourt Brace, hardcover, 1946. Reprint editions include: Bantam #738, paperback, 1949. Ballantine, paperback, 1962. Perennial Library, paperback, 1980. Films: Paramount Pictures, 1948; Orion Pictures, 1987. Added later: Police Python 357, French, 1976. (See comments.)

   A poet of considerable stature and ability in the Twenties and Thirties, Kenneth Fearing turned to the writing of novels in 1939 and to the psychological] thril1er in 1941 with Dagger of the Mind. (This novel, set in a summer artists colony, caused something of a stir when it was first published: Raymond Chandler, for instance, in his famous essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” called it “a savage piece of intellectual double-talk.”) In all, Fearing wrote five novels that can be considered criminous — by far the best of which is The Big Clock. This quintessential tale of psychological suspense is so good, in fact, that labeling it a small masterpiece would not be unjustified.

   It is told in that most difficult of narrative techniques, multiple first-person viewpoints. Most of the story, however, is related by its chief protagonist, George Stroud, a reporter for Crimeways, one of a chain of magazines put out by Janoth Enterprises. Stroud is a sensitive man, a man who hates the pressures and conformity of his job, his slavery to what he cal1s “the big clock”; he yearns to be more like his boss, Earl Janoth. Janoth, with his “big, pink, disorderly face, permanently fixed in a faint smile he had forgotten about long ago,” doesn’t have to live by the dictates of the big clock. He doesn’t even know there is a big clock, Stroud reflects.

   But that is before the night Stroud happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the night Earl Janoth murders his mistress, Pauline Delos: Stroud is the only person who knows his employer is guilty. This is only the beginning of his troubles, however — for Janoth knows that somebody saw him that night. Under the guise of performing a public service, he mobilizes his staff in an all-out campaign to find out who it is. And the man he assigns to head the task force is George Stroud himself.

   The suspense that Fearing builds from this situation through skillful intercutting of scenes told from Janoth’s viewpoint and that of other members of his staff, such as Steve Hagen, Edward Orlin, and Emory Mafferson — is the kind that keeps you up into the wee hours turning pages. But The Big Clock is more than just a fine thriller; it is a novel of character and metaphysical insight in which the symbol of the big clock takes on more and more significance and ultimately becomes the focal point of the story.

   Almost as good is the 1948 film version directed by John Farrow and featuring brilliant performances by Ray Milland as Stroud and Charles Laughton as Earl Janoth. It has been hailed, and rightly so, as one of the best noir films of the Forties.

   Fearing’s other suspense novels are worth investigating, although anyone who has read The Big Clock first will find them something of a letdown. The best is Dagger of the Mind; the others are The Loneliest Girl in the World (1951), The Generous Heart (1954), and The Crozart Story (1960).

     ———
   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.

WILLIAM L. STUART – Night Cry. Dial Press, hardcover, 1948. Avon, paperback, 1949. Avon #597, paperback, 1954. Basis for the film noir Where the Sidewalk Ends, directed by Otto Preminger from a script by Ben Hecht and starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney. Adapted for TV: Kraft [Mystery] Theatre, NBC, 13 August 1958. starring Peter Falk and Jack Klugman.

   Ken Paine just came back from WWII, a war hero, and now he’s adrift. He’s drinking and gambling and generally making an ass of himself. He gets in a fistfight with some jerk at the gambling joint, knocks him out, and leaves. Later that night, the jerk winds up dead. Paine is suspect #1.

   Lieutenant Mark Deglin is on the case. A tough cop who doesn’t take shit from anybody. Deglin tracks down Paine. Paine pretends he knows nothing about the murder—and he gets surly when the cop tries to push him around:

   
   Okay. Well big deal. A murderer gets killed resisting arrest. It’ll be okay.

   Deglin calls in to report to the captain, who says: Oh you can forget about Ken Paine. We got a full confession from the murderer! Ken Paine is no longer a suspect.

   So at this point Deglin has a choice to make. Admit that he killed an innocent man. Or hide the body.

   Paine’s dead anyway. Whatever Deglin does, it ain’t gonna bring him back. So why should Deglin suffer, derailing his promising career? He decides to dump the body and make it look like Paine split, dumping the weighted body in the Hudson.

   Of course it’s all well and good long as the body stays sunk. But bodies rarely stay sunk in a crime novel. And this body no exception.

   So the body is found. And guess who is assigned to the case?

   Yep. Deglin is chasing after a murderer who is himself. But now, instead of an arguably victimless crime, this time Deglin’s gonna have to frame somebody.

   The question is, just how bad a Bad Lieutenant is Lieutenant Deglin?

   It turns out not nearly bad enough. And his ambivalence alternatively haunts him, and tempts him, while he struggles to decide how far he’s willing to go. And how much he’s willing to risk and suffer for a choice long past chosen.

         —

   It’s a good, tough novel. Not sure I buy the ending, which is a bit too cute. But other than that, a solid hardboiled read. On the other hand, when an author blows an ending, asking me how I like it is a bit like asking Mrs. Lincoln, other than that, how was the play?

JACK EHRLICH – Revenge. Dell #A168, paperback original, 1958. Cover artist: Robert McGinnis.

   A mention  in Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Blog led me back to Revenge, and I thought I’d dig it off the shelf and have another look at it.

   I still remember buying this in 1970 at a used-paperback joint in Cleveland, back when a dime (or three-for-a quarter) would buy gaudy-covered tomes by Woolrich, Hammett, Jim Thompson or any number of then-forgotten authors whose works are now fashionable and high-priced. In fact, Bill compared Revenge to Jim Thompson’s work, and there are some similarities here for sure.

   Jack Ehrlich, though, ain’t no Jim Thompson. He ain’t even Dan J. Marlowe. Revenge is a workmanlike effort, fast when it needs to be fast and suitably tense in the suspenseful passages, but it’s the in-between stuff — the filler, motivation and set-up — that let me down here.

   Ehrlich’s protagonist is an outwardly normal guy who pushes himself from robbery to rape to murder, partly to settle old scores but mostly for the thrill of the thing. And he never rang true for me. Where Jim Thompson’s killers seem genuinely twisted, and Dan J. Marlowe’s are propelled by their own sick circumstances, Ehrlich’s sociopath seemed just too normal; the first-person narrative of Revenge doesn’t give us the compelling characterization a story like this really needs, and as a result it fell flat for me.

   Still, it’s a good enough book that I’ve hung onto it for almost forty years. And I’m glad I did.

H. P. LOVECRAFT – 3 Tales of Horror. Arkham House, hardcover, 1967.

   So I’ve had this really cool edition of Lovecraft from August Derleth’s Arkham House, with ominous illustrations by Lee Brown Coye. Take a look here, using the link below, and you’ll get the general idea: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_dark_art_of_h.p._lovecraft_illustrator_lee_brown_coye.

   But for whatever reason I’d never read it. Nor any Lovecraft. Now back in my D&D’ing days of yore (Dungeons and Dragons, for the uninitiated), I became somewhat familiar with and frightened by Cthulhu. But that’s where my acquaintance stopped.

Whether because of my general disdain for the horror genre, or due to Lovecraft’s reputation for racism and lack of stylistic panache — or even prosaic competence — I had hitherto avoided reading any. But upon crackling open the spine of this here volume, hither and thither hast my avoidance been vanquished.

   In other words, Lovecraft is freaking awesome! I loved these three stories. They’re great and I devoured them as quick as I could before they could devour me.

      The three stories were:

1. “The Colour Out of Space.” Amazing Stories, September 1927.

   In this one, some weird meteor hits near a farm house, west of Arkham, New England way, near Miskatonic University.

   The material of the ‘meteor’ is of some hitherto unknown quality that appears on no periodic table of this realm.

   The scientists are all excited to test a piece of it. But as they test it, it starts to shrink, then disappear.

   Finally they chip into the thing itself, deeply, releasing some amorphous blue globule. Nothing to see here. All is well. It continues to shrink, then disappear, til near forgotten.

   Then the farmer and his family start to grow gorgeous but inedible crops , and they begin to act crazier and crazier, and finally disappear one by one.

   There is something corrupt in the soil, in their wellspring. And it’s spreading.

2. “The Dunwich Horror.” Weird Tales, April 1929.

   Young Wilbur Whately is born in Dunwich, child of weak-minded albino mother, and fathered by some monstrosity. Gramps is some sort of sorcerer called Old Whately.

   Wilbur grows at an inhuman rate, able to walk around and read in multiple languages by the time he was a toddler, big as a 4 year old by 2, big as an 8 year old by 4. And so on.

   Wilbur and gramps are working to conjure an ancient spirit to retake the earth and vanquish humanity. Will they get away with it? Tune in next time…..same bat time…..same bat channel.

3. “The Thing on the Doorstep.” Weird Tales, January 1937.

   “It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman — madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium.”

   And so it begins….

   Our narrator has murdered a person who appears to be Edward Derby, his lifelong friend.   

   But the story tells the tale of Ephraim Waite — a mysterious man of whispered wizardry. And his Winona Ryder looking daughter Asenath who steals the heart of our beloved Mr. Derby, and they wed.

   Mr. Derby’s soul seems increasingly to be wrenched from his body, and transported into the body of his strange bride, and vice versa. And there is a struggle for control of the body between each soul. A battle for the corpus of the man, Edward.

   If Edward is killed whilst his body is possessed by Asenatha Waite—who then is the victim?

         ____

   Anyway, I really dug these stories. Yeah, the prose is antiquated. But the style fits the mysterious boggy settings. And adds to them, really.

   Another thing I liked about the stories is they are narrated in each case by a sceptic — a non-believer in magical spirits and alien powers. It is only by the ‘objective’ appearance of inexplicable happenings that the inherent skepticism is overcome. And you find yourself being slowly edged into belief, an objective observer of ineffable horrors.

RON FAUST – Tombs of Blue Ice. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1974. No paperback edition.

   During a mountain-climbing expedition in the French Alps, a sudden storm breaks and one of the two companions of American Robert Holmes is killed by a bolt of lightning; the other climber, a German named Dieter Streicher, is seriously injured. Unable to move Streicher, Holmes returns to the village of Chamonix to report the incident and request immediate help for the wounded man.

   A search party is sent out to the high mountain ledge where the accident occurred, but surprisingly finds no sign of Streicher, alive or dead. What could have happened to the man? Could he have managed to leave the ledge under his own power, for some unknown reason? Or has he been a victim of foul play?

   Streicher is the son of a vicious Nazi Occupation leader, and there are many in the little French valley who have good reason to want him dead: among them a woman named Christiane Renaud, whom Holmes desires; and her stepfather, the bitter old mountain guide Martigny.

   Holmes sets out on his own to find Streicher and the truth about the man’s disappearance. Most of the novel involves his determined quest, and most of it is harrowing, especially Holmes’s descent into a huge crevasse, literally a tomb of blue ice. This is high-tech adventure writing, with a simple plot, strong characters, and evocative prose that includes memorable descriptive passages about mountain climbing and the glacial Alpine wilderness.

   Ron Faust excels at outdoor crime/adventure fiction of all types, as his other novels prove: The Wolf in the Clouds (1977) which is about a pair of U.S. forest rangers and a madman on the loose in the Colorado Rockies; The Burning Sky (1978), which deals with a deadly big-game hunt in a mountain valley in New Mexico (and which John D. MacDonald called “strong, tough … with that flavor of inevitability that seasons the good ones”); and three paperback originals with Mexican settings: The Long Count (1979), Death Fires (1980), and Nowhere to Run (1981).

     ———
   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.

BASIL HEATTER – The Dim View. Farrar Straus & Co., hardcover, 1946. Signet #668, paperback, 1948. Popular Library #602, paperback, 1954.

   Jim Masters (like Basil Heatter), is skipper of a PT boat in New Guinea in WWII. He gets blown up, ass over tit, and wakes up recuperating in Australia.

   A young, pretty barmaid falls in love with him, and he with her, as much as he can after what he’s been thru. He’s been thru enough and served long enough, he can get discharged if he wants.

   He talks it over with an Navy psychiatrist, German Jewish defector, Dr. Schwartz. “’It is a bad thing to run away,’ Schwartz said. ‘It may not seem important at the time but later there is always a little soft spot, a spot of fear. It is like cutting open a fine, healthy-looking fruit and finding inside a little spot of rottenness. Unless the rotten spot can be cut out quickly, it grows bigger and finally the whole thing must be thrown away.’”

   Masters replies “That spot is in me. I guess it was always in me way down. But today it started to spread. It’s rotten, al right, I can taste the rottenness in my mouth.”

   How do you cut out the rotten spot of fear once it begins to metastasize? Dr. Schwartz says the most effective way “is simply to go back to whatever produced the fear and to face it and try to master it. I say this is more dangerous because it is a gamble. If you win, the fear will be gone but if you fail then the fear will master you completely and you will be broken and done for.”

   So to the dismay of Masters’s cohorts and his lady friend, he decides to return to the New Guinea front rather than be discharged safely to California, to once again captain a PT boat against constant bombardment from above and torpedoing from below.

   At 155 pages told in wonderfully clipped language, the story clips along at quite a clip. This is a first novel, and it feels like Heatter put a lot of himself in it. Achingly authentic, the contrast between the languid pace of the Australian recuperation and the Autobahn-esque speed of war quickens one’s pulse as the story unfolds.

   It’s a good one.