THE GUNFIGHTER. 19SO. Gregory Peck, Helen Westcott, Millard Mitchell, Jean Parker, Karl Malden, Skip Homeier, Richard Jaeckel. Director: Henry King. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   Jaeckel’s part is small but a key one. He’s a young squirt who taunts the famous Jimmy Ringo into a gunfight. When the boy gets killed, it’s obviously self-defense, but the kid has three brothers who won’t believe it. Ringo’s past just won’t let him be.

   A classic, if you ask me. The plot’s an old one, but here it’s done well. The town where Ringo tries to find his former wife looks real, and feels real. Peck has a mustache in this movie, and it gives him a different look, weather-beaten, and weary. Just right.

CARTER DICKSON – The Curse of the Bronze Lamp. Morrow, hardcover, 1945. Paperback editions include: Pocket 568, 1949. Berkley, 1967. Carroll & Graf, 1984.

   When it became clear that John Dickson Carr’s output of mystery novels — seven novels in less than four years — was more than his original publisher could handle, some of the books were diverted to a second publisher, to be issued under a pen name.

   The first of these pseudonymous works, The Bowstring Murders ( 1933), carried the by-line Carr Dickson. This was a publisher’s error and was quickly corrected to the scarcely less obvious Carter Dickson. Dickson’s series detective, Sir Henry Merrivale (“H. M.”), was introduced in The Plague Court Murders in 1934.

   Like Carr’s Dr. Gideon Fell, H.M. is fat, funny, and formidably intelligent. His appearance and mannerisms arc more reminiscent of Churchill than of Chesterton, who was the model for Gideon Fell. H.M. is more overtly comic: a large, bald, vulgar, and frequently childish figure, fond of practical jokes, continually outraged at the twist of fate that put him in the House of Lords, and full of insults for the government bureaucrats with whom he must deal in his somewhat mysterious capacity as “that astute and garrulous lump who sits with his feet on the desk at the War Office.”

   Almost all of the H.M. stories involve locked rooms or impossible crimes. The centerpieces in The Curse of the Bronze Lamp are a pair of vanishings as startling as any produced by stage illusionists. Helen Loring, daughter of British archaeologist Lord Severn, has been presented by the Egyptian government with a bronze lamp taken from a Twentieth Dynasty tomb.

   An Egyptian fortune-teller, Alim Bey, claims that the lamp carries a curse, and that Helen will be “blown to dust as if she had never existed” if she takes the lamp out of Egypt. Helen returns to England with the lamp, having announced her intention to disprove the curse. Arriving at Severn Hall with friends, Helen gets out of the car and runs ahead of them into the entrance hallway. A few moments later, her raincoat and the bronze lamp are found lying in the middle of the hall floor, and Helen has vanished without a trace.

   Shortly thereafter, Lord Severn arrives from Egypt and disappears from his study in the same fashion, leaving behind his outer clothing-and the bronze lamp. H.M., whom Helen had asked for advice in Egypt (where his encounter with an Arab taxi driver provided a memorable interlude of slapstick humor), is drawn into the case.

   Romantic entanglements, stolen antiquities, the activities of H.M.’s Scotland Yard nemesis, Inspector Humphrey Masters, and the continuing doom-filled prophecies of Alim Bey supply only part of the smoke screen through which H.M. must find his way, which of course he does in satisfactory fashion.

   As always in Carr/Dickson, the clues prove, in retrospect, to have been fairly planted, but it is a rare reader who can recognize them and put all the pieces together ahead of the detective.

         ———
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.

DAVID DANIEL – The Skelly Man. Alex Rasmussen #2. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1995. No paperback edition.

   I thought Daniel’s The Heaven Stone, winner of St. Martin’s 1993 Best First Pl Novel contest, wasn’t really of award quality, though it wasn’t actually bad. I got a copy of this when it came out, but just now got around to it.

   A famous homeboy, the king of late night TV, is returning to Lowell, Massachusetts, and may be bringing trouble with him.. He’s coming to town to kick off a proposed new show, but not everyone’s thrilled. He’s been receiving cryptic threatening messages, and he wants PI Alex Rasmussen to find out who and why, and stop them. The answer is somewhere in the man’s past, but where? And can it be found in time?

   I closed the review of Daniel’s first book with this:  “… but I guess the main problem was that it’s the same old recipe, and the ingredients weren’t special enough to make the end product anything really out of the ordinary.”

   The same could literally be said of this one, but while the earlier review was mostly damning with faint praise, I liked this book somewhat better. It still isn’t anything really exceptional, but it is solid genre fiction. with a decent lead, good first-person prose and narrative, nice sense of place and an adequate plot.

   Bigger names among PI writers haven’t always done that well these last few years.

   
      The Alex Rasmussen series —

1. The Heaven Stone (1994)
2. The Skelly Man (1995)
3. Goofy Foot (2004)
4. The Marble Kite (2005)

LAURA LIPPMAN – Sunburn. William Morrow, hardcover, February 2018; trade paperback, July 2018; mass market paperback, June 2019.

   Adam Bosk, a Baltimore PI, has been hired to track down Polly Costello. She’s a pretty redhead, mid-30’s.

   He finds her in the High Ho Tavern in Belleville, Delaware. He sits at the bar and tries to connect. She’s got a sunburn.

   Polly’s first husband, Ditmars, was a wife-beating arson detective. Ditmars made an unholy alliance with an insurance broker to underwrite a bunch of insurance policies and burn stuff down, splitting the proceeds.

   Polly wasn’t given much of an allowance from Ditmars, so she entertained herself going to the library film series. One day, the library put on a James M. Cain series, showing Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. But it was Double Indemnity that got her attention. She loved it. And read the book, becoming a Cain acolyte.

   Polly then took out a big policy on her husband, made their daughter the beneficiary, and made her husband a big turkey dinner, stuffing and mashed potatoes filled with crushed up sleeping pills, and homemade apple pie with whipped cream whipped by hand.

   That night the same hand that did the whipping grabbed a huge kitchen knife and plunged it deep into her husband’s heart.

   She was later pardoned by the governor among a slew of other murderers suffering from battered woman’s syndrome. The governor’s office did a crappy job of vetting her case (the premeditation, the insurance), and later regretted her pardon — but too late. She was free.

   The insurance broker never got his kickback. And hired PI Adam Bosk to spy on her and find out where she was keeping the money.

   But Bosk ends up falling for Polly, just like every other man she’s ever wanted, or needed, or used. And Bosk throws in with Polly, casting both his client and his caution to the wind.

   Polly is even more complicated than she appears to be. And darkness descends. Enveloping Adam Bosk and all else in Polly’s orbit.

      ======

   It’s a very well-done modern take on the classic noir tale. If anyone is wondering if noir is still a viable thing, check it out. It’s also interesting to see the femme fatale from a modern female writer’s perspective. She’s ambiguous, lusty and sexy as hell. But she’s also three dimensional and at the end of the day, you can empathize with her in a way that James M. Cain and many of the old timey noir practitioners were incapable.

   It’s a legit noir. And it’s from 2018. So there. It can still be done. And with a fresh take, too. Thanks to Juri Nummelin for the recommendation: https://pulpetti.blogspot.com/2018/07/laura-lippman-sunburn.html

JAMES R. LANGHAM – Sing a Song of Homicide. Simon and Schuster, hardcover, 1940. Popular Library #63, paperback, no date [1945]. Film: Paramount, 1942, as A Night in New Orleans (with Preston Foster & Patricia Morison; screenwriter: Jonathan Latimer; director: William Clemens).

   Sammy Abbott is a detective working out of the DA’s Office.

   Sammy’s wife went to high school with handsome scoundrel Harvey Wallace.

   She wrote him some pretty juicy love notes back in the day. Juicy enough for public embarrassment. And embarrassing enough that Harvey Wallace tries to blackmail her.

   Turns out that Harvey’s been blackmailing all sorts of people all over town. And people don’t seem to like it too much.

   So when Sammy burglarizes Harvey’s home to retrieve the love letters, he encounters Harvey’s fresh, bloody corpse. It makes him happy and he sings a song of homicide.

   Sammy ain’t the most reliable narrator in the world, and makes a habit of lying to everyone constantly: his wife; his boss; his friends. He’s obviously in it for himself. And it’s never clear to the reader, up til the very end, whether in fact Sammy himself is the murderer.

   Sammy spends half his time half-heartedly investigating the murder and the other half concocting false alibis, planting concocted evidence, and rubbing red herrings across the trail of the police lieutenant in charge of the homicide investigation (a ‘red herring’ is literally a stinky fish that hunters would draw across a fox trail to put an end to their hound’s hunt).

   It’s an amusing shaggy dog tale that kept my attention til the end. But while it makes Ken Bruen’s Top 10 all-time noir list [see Comment #1], I don’t see it. In fact, I don’t even think it’s noir. It’s so light you’re afraid the wind might carry it away. But not too afraid as it would not be that great a loss.

   And I’d be shocked if Langham plotted it out ahead of time. It seems like Langham is just making the thing up as his fingers hit the typewriter keys. Up until the very last second you really wouldn’t be surprised to find out that any one of the innumerable characters ‘did it’ — or even to find that the victim wasn’t really dead. All strings are tied up at the end in a haphazard way by way of Sammy making a wild accusation with a crazy story pulled out of the left field bleachers and the accused simply confessing a la a standard episode of Perry Mason. But it really could’ve been anything or anyone.

   So, yeah. It’s okay. It’s entertaining. But disposable. Infinitely disposable. Lemon jello for the mind.

   A more positive review of the book can be found earlier on this blog here.

   I got my copy from Thriftbooks for $8.00. It was a hardcover in its shirtsleeves (i.e. without the jacket) signed by the author with a note to a local record store owner, wishing that they enjoy the book as much as he likes their records.

   “The Market Basing Mystery” (The Sketch, October 17, 1923; The Blue Book Magazine, May 1925) was collected in the U.S. in The Under Dog and Other Stories (1951), and in the U.K. first in Thirteen for Luck! (1966), a catch-all volume for young readers, and then in Poirot’s Early Cases (1974). It was expanded into the title novella (aka “Mystery of the Dressing Case”) of Murder in the Mews and Other Stories (truncated as Dead Man’s Mirror; 1937), which debuted in Redbook Magazine (September & October 1936). With his formidable “little gray cells,” Agatha Christie’s Belgian super-sleuth, Hercule Poirot, perhaps found the mystery itself less baffling than that barrage of appearances and titles!

   First mentioned here, and thought to be based upon Basingstoke and/or Christie’s future home of Wallingford, Market Basing would be the setting for stories and novels featuring Jane Marple, Superintendent Battle, and Tommy and Tuppence Beresford; Poirot himself returned there in Dumb Witness (aka Poirot Loses a Client; 1937). Inspector Japp, while off duty “an ardent botanist,” suggests a weekend with Poirot and Hastings in that “little country town,” where he craves anonymity: “Nobody knows us, and we know nobody.” But Constable Pollard, transferred from a nearby village where he’d met Japp through “a case of arsenical poisoning,” interrupts them over an English breakfast at the local inn.

   He summons them to “rambling, dilapidated” Leigh House, rented eight years ago by the virtual recluse Walter Protheroe, shot through the head; the locked door, bolted windows, and pistol in his hand suggest suicide, but per Dr. Giles, the bullet entered behind his left ear — yet the gun was in his right hand, the fingers not closed over it. There is no obvious motive, with the only apparent suspects his devoted housekeeper of 14 years, Miss Clegg, and his recently arrived guests from London, Mr. and Mrs. Parker. Examining the scene, Poirot focuses on two aspects: the smell — or lack thereof, inconsistent with Protheroe’s being a heavy smoker — and the handkerchief he had carried in his right-hand coat sleeve.

   The former suggests that the window had been open all night, and the latter indicates that he was left-handed; a broken cuff-link found by the body is identified as Parker’s by Miss Clegg, who says they were neither expected nor welcome. A tramp who often slept in an unlocked shed reports overhearing Parker attempting to blackmail Protheroe, revealed as an alias for Wendover, a Naval lieutenant who “had been concerned in the blowing up of the first-class cruiser Merrythought, in 1910.” Put on trial, Parker is cleared by Poirot, who gets Miss Clegg to admit that having found Protheroe a suicide, she blamed Parker, implicating him by repositioning the gun, bolting the window, and planting the cuff-link.

   Almost six times as long as the original, “Murder in the Mews” was adapted in 1989 with David Suchet on Britain’s ITV in Agatha Christie’s Poirot, which unsurprisingly omitted “Market Basing.” The third-person novella features Japp (now a Chief Inspector) but not Hastings, while Pollard and Giles have been supplanted by Divisional Inspector Jameson and Dr. Brett, respectively. This marks Jameson’s only literary appearance; played, as he was in “Mews,” by John Cording, he was interpolated into their 1990 adaptation of “The Lost Mine” (The Sketch, November 21, 1923; The Blue Book Magazine, April 1925) from the collections Poirot Investigates (1925) — here in the States — and Poirot’s Early Cases.

   Taking a shortcut through Bardsley Gardens Mews to Poirot’s flat on Guy Fawkes Night, he and Japp remark that it would be perfect for a murder, since the fireworks marking the plot to blow up Parliament would hide the sound of a shot. The next morning, Japp asks Poirot to accompany him back there when summoned by Jameson to the scene of what at first seemed a suicide; he and Brett, who forced open the door, show them the body.

   The set-up, with the misaligned wound and gun, is the same, but Christie rings her changes on the victim — young widow Barbara Allen, who lives with her friend Jane Plenderleith and is engaged to Charles Laverton-West, “M.P. for someplace in Hampshire” — and suspects.

   Charles, with no apparent motive yet a flimsy alibi, resents being questioned, due less to guilt than to being, says Japp, a “[b]it of a stuffed fish. And a boiled owl!”; housekeeper Mrs. Pierce merely provides a torrent of chatter. Blackmailer Major Eustace met Barbara years ago in India and knew that “having borne an illegitimate child who died at three” she invented a fictitious late husband, a revelation she feared would damage Charles’s career.

   Carried over are the clues of the smokeless room (Poirot invokes Conan Doyle’s “curious incident of the dog in the nighttime,” which did nothing) and cuff link, with a wristwatch replacing the handkerchief, supported by a writing table that has the pen tray on the left.

   Eustace admits visiting Barbara, ostensibly to offer investment advice, but the neighbors report his saying goodbye to her at 10:20; his subsequent movements are accounted for, yet when it is realized that nobody actually saw or heard her half of the conversation from inside the doorway, he is arrested. Confronted with the truth, Jane reluctantly agrees that she cannot let Eustace — already facing a long prison sentence for an unrelated swindle — take the blame for Barbara’s death. Jane admits finding her body and suicide note, which she burned, and restaging the scene to frame Eustace, so despite its title, the case remains, as Japp puts it, “Not murder disguised as suicide, but suicide made to look like murder!”

   Among her clever recombining and expanding of elements, Christie adds one that nicely shows the ingenuity of Jane, who professes first perplexity at the possibility and method of Barbara’s suicide, and then outrage at the notion of murder. Visibly discomfited when asked to unlock a cupboard full of umbrellas, golf clubs, and tennis racquets, she displays anxiety over an attache case containing old magazines and other trivia. She is later seen throwing it into the lake by the golf course, whence it is retrieved, now empty, but this is a superb piece of misdirection: she had diverted their attention to the case when her real concern was Barbara’s left-handed clubs, tossed into the undergrowth along the course.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Dead Man’s Mirror.”

Edition cited —

      “The Market Basing Mystery” and “Murder in the Mews” in Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories: William Morrow (2013)

CHINA SMITH “Devil-in-the-Godown.” Syndicated, 16 September 1952 (Season 1, Episode 6). Dan Duryea as China Smith, Douglass Dumbrille as Inspector Hobson, Myrna Dell as “Empress” Shira, Guest star: Marjorie Lord. Written by Robert C. Dennis. Director: Edward Mann. Currently streaming online here

   According to Wikipedia, the episode itself being of minimal use in this regard, China Smith was a “a soldier of fortune, an opportunistic con artist and sometimes private eye who sought adventure.” His base of action is Singapore, and this particular episode opens scene a man (later identified as a newspaper reporter) is unceremoniously dumped off a dock into the water below.

   Smith is hired to investigate, by whom is not clear, and after using a league of assassins to help finds himself tackling a gang of warehouse arsonists. Marjorie Lord plays a reporter, perhaps for the same newspaper as the dead man.

   This is all I know. The whole story is a horrible mess. You get the gist of it, and maybe that’s all you need. Perhaps if you were to watch it, you could fill me in on some of the details I missed.

   The players are more or less fine. I watched this mostly for the star, Dan Duryea, one of my all time favorite bad guys. I can tell you that he can also play a shifty kind of good guy too, and of course, either way he is his usual insouciant self. That might be all you need to know to give this one a try yourself, but keep in mind I warned you.
   

FOUR STAR PLAYHOUSE. “Search in the Night.”. CBS, 05 Nov 1953 (Season 2, Episode 7). Frank Lovejoy (Randy Stone), Frances Rafferty, James Millican, Rhys Williams, Vic Perrin, Colleen Miller. Directed by Christian Nyby. Current streaming on YouTube (see below).

   â€œSearch in the Night” features a reporter for the Chicago Star whose nightly beat takes him through the streets of that city after the sun goes down, looking for human interest stories to tell his reading audience in his next morning’s daily column. On this particular night, he comes a across a small crowd of people watching a man in a deep sea diver’s suit and helmet look for something off a short pier.

   What is he looking for? Who us the woman who hired him? At the rate of $50 per dive, it must be something important. But … a woman’s purse? Randy Stone is puzzled, until the purse is opened. In it is $5000 in a small wad of bills. Also in the purse … a gun. Then the diver reveals something else. The body of man is also down there, caught in the pilings of the pier. Now Randy Stone has his story. But how does it develop from there? And more to the point, how does it end?

   Old time radio fans will have recognized what is going on, almost immediately, I’m sure. This was an effort to transfer a highly successful radio show to TV. Night Beat was an NBC radio drama that was on the air  from February 6, 1950 to September 25, 1952

   Quoting from its Wikipedi page, “Frank Lovejoy starred as Randy Stone, a reporter who covered the night beat for the Chicago Star, encountering criminals, eccentrics, and troubled souls. Listeners were invited to join Stone as he ‘searches through the city for the strange stories waiting for him in the darkness.’”

   This “backdoor pilot” is a good one, filled with just the right amount of mystery and characters who are terrified about what comes next (some of them), while others feel safe as they go about go about their day-by-job, while revealing to Stone what led up to the events he wandered into in the middle of.

   As a pilot, this really ought to have been picked up. On radio, Frank Lovejoy’ gruff but yet kindly voice was perfect for the role. On TV, his square-jawed visual persona fit the role to a tee, and his interactions with the people he encounters and talks to are also finely tuned. (And not all of them are essential to the plot. His encounter with Colleen Miller’s character as a floozie in a bar, for example, lasts no more than a minute or so, but the conversation they have is solid gold.)

BARRY NORMAN – The Butterfly Tattoo. Bobby Lennox #2, St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1996. Published in the UK under the title The Mickey Mouse Affair (Orion, 1995).

   If I read the first in this series, The Birddog Tape, I’ve forgotten it. The author hosts a popular film review program for the BBC, and has written a number of other books both fiction and non-.

   Bobby Lennox is an ex-boxer of not quite first rank who was fortunate enough to get out of the game with his face and wits intact He’s used those wits to become a successful businessman and investor, but still has ties to the rougher world he used to inhabit.

   An old friend from that world, a top underworld figure who has almost become legitimatized, calls him and asks a favor: a London politician who may be in line for a Ministership and who is “helpful” to him is being blackmailed, and the crime figure wants Lennox to help make it go away. He does, and it does, but not before a lot of blood and tears are spilled.

   This was a pleasant surprise. It’s not a major book —  and not intended to be- — but one with more than competent first-person narration, well-drawn characters, and an interesting plot.

   In essence it’s a hardboiled private eye tale, though Lennox doesn’t have a license. In general I don’t think British authors have fared particularly well with this type of novel, but Norman seems to have the moves down pretty well.

Bio-Biographical Update (the first paragraph coming from the author’s Fantastic Fiction webpage) —

    “Barry Norman, 1933 – 2017, CBE, was a British film critic, journalist and television presenter. He presented Film… on BBC One from 1972 to 1998 and was the programme’s longest-running host. He also wrote many novels and non-fiction books, including books on film and cricket.”

   This and the one earlier one that Barry G. mentioned in this review constitute the entirety of Barry N.’s Bobby Lennox series.

DOUGLAS FAIRBAIRN – Street 8. Delacorte, hardcover 1977. Reprint paperback: Dell, 1978.

   Street 8 is Calle Ocho in Miami. Anti-Castro Cubans are everywhere. The white dudes are a dying breed. To keep his used car lot going, former Marine Bobby Mead hires a Cuban salesman to sell cars to the locals.

   One of the all time great first lines sets the scenario: “Afterwards, Bobby Mead kept thinking that he had known all along that Oscar Perez was going to get his head blown off.” Try to stop reading after that. I dare you.

   So, anyway, Bobby owns a used car lot. Has owned it for years. But now he’s barely making it, making the hire of Oscar Perez all the more necessary.

   Oscar starts out really well, very motivated, selling a ton. But then Oscar’s buddy gets rubbed out by the local Cuban “Death Squad”. The Death Squad gets rid of anybody who opposes Ramon Pache — a local politician who hopes to unite the Cuban vote behind him and take over Miami politics.

   Pache was a major right-wing political opponent of Castro in Cuba, and has used this past to leverage his political future in Miami. Pache has no interest in returning to Cuba and challenging Castro. But he uses anti-Castro sentiment as a tool to unify his political power. And anyone Pache’s Death Squad liquidates is automatically deemed to be a Castro-spy who deserved to die.

   When Oscar’s buddy gets killed, Oscar just can’t get over it. So Oscar starts shouting at all the customers, at all the passers by: “Pache! I hate you! I hate you!… I shit on your image! I will destroy you!”

   So, yeah. Hence the first line of the story.

   But if you think you know where it’s going from there, you’ve got another think coming (it’s never been ‘another thing coming’ — you just think it’s ‘another thing coming’ because of a Judas Priest song).

   Bobby Mead is a mess. He hasn’t given a shit about life ever since he screwed his 14 year old daughter. You read that right. Yup. Incest.

   Oh but don’t worry. His daughter’s 17 now, stars in amateur pornos, is a runaway, a prostitute, and a flower girl. And she tells him it’s fine. She wanted him to. It was the best sex she ever had. And for him too. He’s in love with her and doesn’t want anyone else.

   Yeah. Disgusting and disturbing. But Bobby Mead agrees with you. He hates himself. He agrees that he’s disgusting and disturbing.

   Bobby tries his hardest to drink himself to death. But it doesn’t seem to be happening quick enough.

   So when Pache makes an offer Bobby can’t refuse, converting Bobby’s garage into a bomb factory, Bobby agrees. But he doesn’t just say yes. He makes friends with the Death Squad guys (lead by another former Marine): True believers in the overthrow of Castro.

   But when the Death Squad discovers that Pache has no intention of overthrowing Castro — that he’s just leveraging anti-Castro sentiment for his own gains in money and power, they decide to go after Pache themselves. With Bobby leading the charge.

   The book is trey bizarro. Not in prose — the prose is straight and tight and hard and clear. But the story itself is literally incredible, as in not credible. But incredibly not credible, if that makes any sense. It’s not simply unbelievable. It pushes believability beyond a limit that somehow moves beyond its own unbelievability into a world where its lack of credibility hardly matters.

   To have incest in your novel is bad enough. But to have unrepentant incest, where the victim assures you that it’s okay, where the protagonist’s psychiatrist girlfriend, nonplussed, says ‘oh — no worries — it happens all the time’: that is simply astounding. Astoundingly tone deaf. But like a set of ginsu knives: Wait! There’s more! The incest isn’t even part of the story! It’s a side issue that’s never resolved. It’s just acknowledged that he fucked his daughter, years later they both look fondly upon the incident, and let’s move on to the story about the Cuban Death Squads.

   But I guess I can forgive it — because the incest thing I guess serves as a barely subconscious sublimation into alcohol fueled self-destruction as white American ex-Marine Bobby Mead leads an Anti-Castro Death Squad hunting hypocrites to the cause.

   Golly Jeepers, man. Whew.

   So I can’t recommend the thing. I can’t recommend anything that puts the incest taboo into question. Sorry. But I will say this. Douglas Fairbairn could really write.

   One example I’ll leave you with — and another side-track completely irrelevant to the story. But illustrative of just how talented this writer was. He can encapsulate a life in a sentence. A life sentence, you might say:

   
   So, yeah. Anybody that can write sentences like that ain’t all bad. He’s damn good, even. But the incest just killed me. I couldn’t handle it. Maybe you can handle it better than I. If you can, it’s a memorable book. Kind of Charles Willeford meets James Crumley. With some incest thrown in just for the fun of it.

   Another review here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1762