HENRY KANE – Death Is the Last Lover. Peter Chambers #10. Avon T-291; paperback original; 1st printing, 1959. Signet D2851, paperback, 1966.

   Until the end of his career, PI Peter Chambers was very much a traditional sort of one. In this case he helps a wealthy playboy out of a spot he has created for himself, keeping a secret hideaway under an assumed name and frequenting a dance club named Nirvana.

   Chambers also meets a lovely vision called Sophia Sierra, but even while going ga-ga over her, his mind stays on the case. The rhythm of Kane’s writing often hammers and sings like poetry, and I think his reputation should be higher than it is.

ELLERY QUEEN – The House of Brass. Ellery Queen #32. [Said to have been plotted by Frederick Dannay and written by Avram Davidson. (See Comments #2 and #4.)] New American Library, hardcover, 1968. Signet, paperback, 1971. Several reprint editions followed.

   Ellery returns from an overseas vacation at the beginning of the last chapter, in which the case’s solution finally comes out, thanks to Ellery’s deductions. I might say that Ellery makes it too easy, without substantial indications pointing to the identity of the missing heir, but the mystery, artificiality and all, makes up for it.

   Before that, in the beginning, Inspector Queen and Jessie, his recent bride, receive a strange note inviting them to the ancestral home of the Brass family, The old man, the lone survivor, has brought prospective heirs-to-be together in one spot, before completing his will, with what he says is a legacy of $6,000,000. Once the will is made, you know he hasn’t long to live. Who is the murderer, and where is the money?

   Ellery’s father asks the assistance of several old cronies, like the Inspector, all required to retire from the force because of age, But the Inspector doesn’t fare very well.  He does discover the dream of gold is actually one of mere brass, but an alibi keeps the case from being closed.

   Now maybe Ellery, having read many mysteries, realizes that the missing heir has to be a clue, as should any devotee of the genre. But is this any way to solve a mystery?

Rating: ****

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece. Perry Mason #8. Morrow, hardcover, 1936. Pocket, paperback, 1944. Reprinted many times.

   Perry Mason is approached by a “peculiar” client-Edna Hammer, who seeks help for her uncle, Peter Kent. Kent has a bad habit of sleepwalking, and when he does, he heads for the carving knives and curls up in bed with one. Edna is afraid Uncle Peter will kill someone, and she wants Mason to prevent this.

   Kent has other troubles: a wife who instituted divorce proceedings on account of the sleepwalking but now wants to reconcile; a fiancee whom he wishes to marry but can’t unless the divorce goes through; a complicated business arrangement with a “cracked-brained inventor”; a hypochondriac half brother; and a woman tailing him in a green Packard roadster.

   Mason spends a night at the Kent home, and by the next morning there is a bloodstained knife under Peter Kent’s pillow, a corpse in the guest room, and a client in very hot water.

   The writing in this early novel is taut and lean — reflective of Gardner’s hard-boiled work for such pulp magazines as Black Mask. The dialogue is terse and packs a good impact, and there arc none of the long-winded conversations and introspections that characterize the later Perry Masons. A first-rate example of Gardner’s work in the Thirties and early Forties.

   Some other notable titles in the series are The Case of the Black-Eyed Blond (1944), The Case of the Lazy Lover (1947), The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister (1953), and The Case of the Daring Decoy ( 1957). After the late Fifties, the novels seem to lose something, possibly as a result of Gardner’s work on the Perry Mason TV series. Mason is less flamboyant, and the plots are not as intricate or well tied off as in the earlier novels.

   Gardner created other series characters, writing under both his own name and the pseudonym A. A. Fair. The best of these under the Gardner name are small-town prosecutor Doug Selby (The D.A. Calls It Murder, 1937; The D.A. Cooks a Goose, 1942), whose role as a hero is a reverse of Hamilton Burger’s; and Gramps Wiggins (The Case of the Turning Tide, 1941; The Case of the Smoking Chimney, 1943), an iconoclastic old prospector whose experiences reflect Gardner’s childhood travels with his mining-engineer father.

   In addition to his novels, Gardner wrote hundreds_of mystery and western stories under various names for such magazines as Argosy, Black Mask, Sunset, West, and Outdoor Stories.

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   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.

BLOOD WORK. Warner Bros., 2002. Clint Eastwood, Jeff Daniels, Anjelica Huston, Wanda De Jesus. Based on the novel by Michael Connelly. Directed by Clint Eastwood.

   Clint Eastwood directs, and stars in, Blood Work, a rather captivating police procedural from the aughts. Based on the book by Michael Connelly, the film features Eastwood as a retired FBI agent who returns to work under highly unusual conditions. After suffering a heart attack a couple years ago while chasing the Code Killer, Terry McCaleb (Eastwood) is recovering from a heart transplant and living a slow-paced life on his boat in the Long Beach harbor.

   All that changes when Graciella Rivers (Wanda De Jesus) comes to him with a request: find the person who murdered her sister, Gloria. McCaleb is perplexed. Why him? He’s retired. Only when he’s told that he is the recipient of Rivers’ heart does he decide to take the case.

   He’s retired, of course. So all of this police work on his part is unofficial and puts him at loggerheads with the LAPD and with his physician (Anjelica Huston), who thinks he’s putting his life at risk. Still, McCaleb is determined to see this through to the very end. It’s only when he begins to dig deeper that he realizes that the Code Killer, his long time nemesis, may be back and playing a deadly game with him.

   Because McCaleb doesn’t drive, he has to rely upon his neighbor, Jasper “Buddy” Noone (Jeff Daniels) to ferry him around town while he conducts his unofficial investigation. The chemistry between these two leads is solid, with Daniels really leaning into the role of a boat bum with too much time on his hands.

   Aside from being a police procedural, Blood Work is very much a character study of a man at the end of his career who realizes that he has a lot of unfinished business to tend to. There’s a whole subplot about McCaleb’s guilt and belief that he is undeserving of the heart he has been gifted and his sorrow that there is a kid on a heart transplant waiting list, but it never adds up to very much.

   As it turns out, however, the heart transplant itself becomes the key to unlocking not only Gloria’s murder, but the dark machinations of the Code Killer. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this one, even if it was slow in the beginning. The direction is lean and to the point, something for which Eastwood is known.

ROBERT J. BOWMAN – The House of Blue Lights. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1987. No paperback edition.

   It took me a while to decide what Cassandra Thorpe’s occupation is at the beginning of this book. She is not a private investigator, but rather an investigator for the public defender’s office. (A public investigator?) City: San Francisco.

   More specifically: the unappetizing skid row district south of Market. Her clients: winos, derelicts, and a crazy man who writes notebooks full of code in colors and ends up dead. It’s a busy kind of story, and not a very comfortable one. Maybe it was just me.

BILLIE HOLIDAY – Lady Sings the Blues [with William Dufty]. Doubleday, hardcover, 1956. Reprint editions include: Popular Library, paperback, 1958. Lancer, paperback, 1969. Avon, paperback, 1976. Harlem Moon, softcover, as Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition, 2006.

   An ‘as told to’ autobiography. Legitimacy in question, but if you ask me, based on nothing but instinct, it’s pretty legit.

   Why? Because it makes her look bad. And it’s not very well written. And it makes you depressed just reading it. It’s not ups and downs. It’s mostly just downs.

   And certain tidbits, no one is making this shit up. For example: one of her earliest memories is of her great grandmother, who she loved. Who would regale her with stories from the days of slavery. Where she had 16 kids by the Irish master, and was set up in a little shack behind his home. Great grandma was never supposed to lie down, so she slept in a chair. She’d die if she ever lay down. And little Eleanora (she picked up the name ‘Billie’ later, for her screen girl crush, silent starlet Billie Dove), would wash her great grandma down with washcloths, and was the only one who paid any attention to her.

   So the little four year old bathes grandma one time and grandma begs: oh dear child, please lay down some blankets, I’m so tired, and snuggle up with me and I’ll tell you a story. So she does and wakes a few hours later, middle of the night, and great grandma is ice cold, rigor mortis has set in, and she’s holding the child with a death grip. The child screams and they have to call the fire department to break great grandmas arm to set her free. And she’s beaten for having let great grandma lie down, and was told she killed her.

   Yeah. And it doesn’t get much brighter. Hounded for addiction to opioids, imprisoned, raped aged 10; sent up for seducing the 40 year old man who raped her. Her life sucked.

   There were some good times, sure. And she has nice stories of Orson Welles and Bob Hope and Clark Gable and Artie Shaw standing up for her, standing up against racism.

   But overall it’s just a depressing pit of despair. And she’s frankly not that likable as she sinks. She takes no responsibility for her addiction, the black hole of her constant poverty, no matter how much she makes, her relationships with one abusive scoundrel after the next. And you can see she’s drowning. And it’s too late. But she still can’t see it in this book completed three years before her death. She still has a bit of hope that you know is doomed. And that voice, that fading beauty, the tremor in her reaching vibrato. She sings straight from her breaking heart. And you can feel it. But to no avail. You’d like to help but it’s just too late.

   It’s easy to remember. But so hard to forget.

   Forget it. It’ll just make you sad.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink. Perry Mason #39. William Morrow, hardcover, 1952. Pocket #1107, paperback, 1956. Reprinted several times since. TV adaptation: Perry Mason, CBS, 14 December 1957. (Season 1, episode 13; starring Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale.)

   The moth-eaten mink belongs to waitress Dixie Dayton — or at least it does until the night Perry Mason and Della Street stop in for dinner at Morris Alburg’ s restaurant. While they are there, something-or someone frightens Dixie and she runs out, without either her paycheck or the once-expensive coat.

   The restaurateur, Mason, and Street speculate about the woman’s hasty disappearance, but soon find out from the police that Dayton was struck down — not fatally — outside by a passing car while fleeing a man with a gun. Mason takes charge of the mink, and in its lining finds a ticket from a Seattle pawnshop. But before Paul Drake can investigate it, the police find a second ticket in Dayton’s possession; they inquire and find out it is for a diamond ring, and the pawnbroker remembers the other object left in his shop-a gun used in a cop killing one year before.

   The case becomes a tangle of falsehoods, assumed identities, cryptic clues, missing witnesses, missing clients. and murder. Mason and Drake work around the clock in the interests of their clients — Morris Alburg and Dixie Dayton, both now accused of homicide. And Lieutenant Tragg hands Mason a surprise in the last sentence.

   All the Mason books are talky, relying upon dialogue rather than description, action, or deep characterization, but this one is particularly so. Tragg, in fact, holds center stage with his long-winded speeches. The plot, however, is characteristically complex, and a true Perry Mason fan will relish its twists and turns.

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   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.

JULIAN MacLAREN-ROSS – Of Love and Hunger. Allan Wingate, UK. 1947. Reprinted a number of times.

   Fanshawe’s about 30, jaded, in 30’s London between the wars. And broke. Trying to sell vacuum cleaners door to door. Unsuccessfully.

   “The new bloke’s name was Roper. Soon as I set eyes on him I knew he’d never make a salesman. He was about twenty-four and not very tall, and he’d a pink face with a long pointed nose and blond hair slicked straight back with the pink puckered skin of a scar running up into the roots of it. The scar looked odd on him somehow: he didn’t seem the kind of chap who’d have a scar like that. You’d never think he’d been to sea. That’s how he got the scar: a lascar with a bottle in Marseille.

         …

   “Sukie was his wife. She’d a job in the cash-desk at Morecombe’s, dress shop down by the Arcade. Sultry-looking piece. Spanish type. Black hair, dark eyes, lot of lipstick on. Hell of a temper, you could see. We’d never actually met, but I didn’t like the look of her at all.”

   Roper decides to quit and go back to sea. Look after my wife for me while I’m away, he says. See that she doesn’t get lonely.

   Fanshawe does. And so it begins. A torrid affair, but not for long. And Roper returns.

   And without further ado, Hitler invades Poland, and Fanshawe goes to war.

   The end.

   A tightly written, slangy slice of hardscrabble life in 30’s London. I dug it.

WILLIAM L. SHIRER – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 17 October 1960. TV adaptation: ABC, 1968, consisting of a one-hour episode aired each night over three nights.

   I’m anticipating here.

   See August is the end of Summer, and that got me to thinking of September. Which is the month before October. (Check your calendars.) Which is the month I spend reading scary books and watching old monster movies.

   And that got me thinking about an Autumn a few years back, when I led into it….

         (Cue harp.)

   …by reading William L. Shirer’s classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich ,  a real mega-book when it first came out – I remember it was serialized in Life, there were TV shows, bubble-gum cards, tie-in comics, etc. – and it’s easy to see why: More’n fifteen hundred pages and scarcely a clunker in the bunch. Well, I admit to skimming over some of the background on Hitler’s grandparents, but by and mostly this is a compulsive page-turner, even if the title gives away the ending.

   What’s Halloween-scariest, though, is the first third, describing Hitler’s rise to power: how he subtly smeared his rivals with racist tactics, arranged to have opposing parties disenfranchised, convinced Parliament to give up its oversight powers, and the people to abridge their civil liberties in the name of National Security; filled the media with scare stories about threats from Poland and Czechoslovakia… one either sees the parallels or never will, but what impressed me is that you and I read about these antics and say, “I don’t wanna do that stuff if Hitler did it,” but apparently some people read this and say, “Hot dang! That’s slicker’n a toad in a out-house! I gotta try that….

   I guess Real Life gets scary too.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Fan Dancer’s Horse. William Morrow, hardcover, 1947. Pocket 886, paperback, 1952. Several later reprint editions.

   In 1933, when Erle Stanley Gardner took his publisher’s advice that the hero of his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, might make a good series character, he did not know what lay in store for him-or for Perry Mason. Since then, the Los Angeles lawyer; his secretary, Della Street; and private investigator Paul Drake have become household names. And with the first airing of the immensely popular Perry Mason television series in  1957 they became household images as well, in the form of Raymond Burr. Barbara Hale, and William Hopper.

   While not particularly well written or characterized, the Mason books have convoluted plots and punchy dialogue, which in the courtroom takes on the form of verbal sparring. The books are also very much alike, and perhaps this is the basis for their wide appeal. Readers know that in each one an innocent (in the legal sense) will become involved in a murder; odious Lieutenant Tragg will investigate and arrest; snide District Attorney Hamilton Burger will prosecute; and Perry Mason will vindicate his client in a dramatic courtroom revelation of the true killer.

   It is these courtroom scenes that make the novels stand out from other mystery fiction. Gardner, a lawyer himself, was able to simplify courtroom procedure so even the least astute reader could understand it, while at the same time packing the scene with dramatic impact. Even those who are normally bored with legal matters can enjoy watching Perry Mason devil the D.A. in the interests of justice, and many a lawyer practicing today will admit he got his first taste of the profession through Mason’s legal pyrotechnics.

   The Case of the Fan Dancer’s Horse begins with a hit-and-run automobile accident in California’s Imperial Valley. Two cars glance off one another; Perry Mason and Della Street rush to aid the one that overturns in the ditch, and find an old Mexican woman whose car trunk contains the plumed wardrobe of a fan dancer. The woman is presumably taken away to the hospital by a passing motorist, but the accident is never reported. Mason, who has taken the fans and dancing shoes into custody, places an ad in the paper offering their return. The reply is not what he expected: The fan dancer docs indeed want her property returned, but it is a horse, not a wardrobe, that she is missing.

   Dancer Lois Fenton — alias Cherie Chi-Chi — is appearing in an old western town called Palomino, and Mason and Street travel there to meet with her. They return the fan-dancing paraphernalia and receive a description of the missing horse, but soon it becomes apparent that the woman they spoke with is not the real Lois Fenton. The real fan dancer — who has a complicated history — is as missing as her horse.

   Approached by a young man who is in love with Miss Fenton, Mason accepts a retainer to act in her behalf, and earns it when a wealthy rancher is found murdered in an L.A. hotel room, a bloody imprint that could have been made by an ostrich feather on the wall. Lois Fenton was seen leaving the scene and quickly becomes the chief suspect.

   In spite of obvious holes in logic — why, for instance, would Mason take on a client when he has seen no more of her than her ostrich plumes? — the story moves ahead at a breakneck pace. And when the real Lois Fenton finally turns up and the legal battle lines are drawn, Mason is in fine form.

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   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.