ELIZABETH FERRARS – Give a Corpse a Bad Name. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1940. Collins Crime Club, UK, hc, 1981. Chivers, UK, large print edn, 2000. No US edition.

    Like Christianna Brand, the prolific, long-lived mystery doyenne Elizabeth Ferrars (1907-1995) slipped into print at the tail end of the Golden Age of British mystery (roughly 1920 to 1940); and, like Brand, upon her appearance in the detection field, she was raved as part of the “literary” school of British women mystery writers following Crime Queen’s Dorothy L. Sayers’ injunction to transmute detective novels into novels of manners with a crime interest.

    Ferrars went so far as to use a Lord Peterish, Campionite series detective in her first five books, one Toby Dyke, who comes complete with a Bunterish, Luggite assistant, one George (no last name — George is wary about giving out personal details). Though Toby is no aristocrat, he is an winning gent; and George seems to have picked up quite a bit of knowledge of crime and criminals at some point in his life.

    I have read three of the later four titles in the series and thought the last, Neck in a Noose, the best, with the other two getting bogged down in messy plots. Give a Corpse a Bad Name, however, struck me as very good, with a particularly ingenious, twisting finish.

    In the English village of Chovey, the charming, youngish widow Anna Milne (formerly of South Africa but now residing at one of Chovey’s most desirable residences, “The Laurels”), reports to the police that she has run down and killed a man. Oddly, the dead man also comes from South Africa and has Anna Milne’s address in his pocket, yet Anna Milne claims not to recognize him.

    Since the man had been drinking heavily before the fatal accident and she herself had not, no legal culpability is attached to Mrs. Milne. But then anonymous letters begin appearing, suggesting that this “accident” was no accident….

    Soon former crime reporter Toby Dyke and his mysterious yet amiable friend George are investigating, with surprising results. And George proves no slouch himself as an “amateur” detective in the end.

    Give a Corpse a Bad Name is an enjoyable book, with sufficient, sometimes strong, characterization, good writing and an interesting puzzle with some coherent cluing. Toby and George remain more nebulous than Peter and Bunter and Campion and Lugg, yet they do have some nice moments, such as George’s lecture to Tony on the merits of barley sugar.

    Definitely worth reading, though the original edition, printed only in Britain by Hodder and Stoughton, is very rare and very expensive. Fortunately it was reprinted in hardcover by Collins in 1981 and also a new press, Langtail, appears to have reprinted it in paperback just this year.

   Some Brief Bio-Bibliographic Bits:

The Toby Dyke mysteries:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

       Give a Corpse a Bad Name (n.) Hodder 1940.
       Remove the Bodies (n.) Hodder 1940. Doubleday, 1941, as Rehearsals for Murder.
       Death in Botanist’s Bay (n.) Hodder 1941. Doubleday, 1941, as Murder of a Suicide.
       Don’t Monkey with Murder (n.) Hodder 1942. Doubleday, 1942, as The Shape of a Stain.

       Your Neck in a Noose (n.) Hodder 1942. Doubleday, 1943, as Neck in a Noose.

Note: Both Elizabeth Ferrars and E. X. Ferrars, her byline in the US, were pen names of Morna Doris Brown, 1907-1995. A long obituary for her by Jack Adrian can be found online.

Editorial Comment: I have found no website for Langtail Press, but there is a list of their forthcoming mysteries, all softcover reprints, on Amazon UK, with almost 50 titles scheduled for release on December 1st. The books are uniformly priced at 12 pounds; other authors include Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts, Fredric Brown, Gavin Black and John Dickson Carr.

“Sleight of Hand.” An episode of The Rockford Files (Season 1, Episode 15). First air date: 17 January 1975. James Garner, Noah Beery, Joe Santos, Tom Atkins, Lara Parker, Pat Delany, Allan Miller. Teleplay by Stephen J. Cannell & Jo Swerling Jr., based on the novel Thin Air by Howard Browne.

   Stop me if you’ve heard (or seen) this one before.

   Private eye Jim Rockford is coming back to LA after a vacation trip with Karen Mills, his current girl friend, a vivacious young divorcee with a three year old daughter. He stops at her house, she leaves to open the front door, he carries the girl up to her bedroom and tucks her in, and goes downstairs to find Karen’s open purse on a counter — and no Karen. He was only a few feet behind her when he went in — and she has disappeared.

   When the police are called (Joe Santos as Sgt. Becker), they find the body of Karen’s next door neighbor lying on the ground next to her house. Do the police (Tom Atkins as Lt. Diel) believe Rockford’s story? Well, what do you think? (Would you believe such a story?)

   Or in other words, Rockford’s on his own in solving this one, except for his dad, Rocky, who catches the one clue Rockford misses.

   The novel has been reviewed earlier on this blog, and from Gloria Maxwell’s description, the story line of the TV show is almost exactly the same, at least the beginning. While I’ve read the book, I couldn’t tell you now if the ending is the same, nor how closely they followed the plot when the story was used again as the basis for an episode of Simon & Simon in 1982.

   I have to tell you, though, as entertaining as the story is on this mid-season episode of The Rockford Files, if you allow yourself the time to think it about carefully, and maybe only casually and not even that carefully, the whole thing is adroitly administered hogwash, a heap of impossibilities disguised as a stack of highly unlikelies.

   It may be that 50 minutes or so just isn’t enough running time to make the parts fit together so they make sense, but in all honesty, they don’t.

   But did I say that this was one of the most entertaining episodes so far this first season? I did and I didn’t, but it was. It also comes the closest to true noir, albeit in a slightly ham-fisted way. As private eye Jim Rockford, James Garner lets his feelings show more than usual on this one.

H. C. BAILEY – Mr. Fortune Objects. Victor Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1935. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1935.

   One of the most popular of British Golden Age sleuths is H. C. Bailey’s Reginald Fortune. Reggie is a doctor whose deductive abilities and refusal to take the facts at face value make him an invaluable asset to Scotland Yard’s CID, and he is often called in as scientific adviser on particularly difficult cases.

   Fortune, whose plump appearance and fondness for gourmet foods belie his dogged devotion to the pursuit of justice, appears in ten novels and fourteen short story collections.

    Mr. Fortune Objects contains six stories (aptly termed “objections” because Reggie persists in taking exception to the obvious solution to each of the cases presented to him).

    In “The Broken Toad,” he investigates the mysterious poisoning of suburban Police Constable Mills, the circumstances of which are “rare and bafflin’ ” and the solution to which is sure to surprise the reader.

    “The Three Bears” takes us into the art world, exposing its hypocrisies and affectations, as well as its murderous passions. And in “The Yellow Slugs,” Fortune probes into the reasons a young boy attempted to drown his sister, reasons that he thinks are not as simple as the boy claims.

    “The Little Finger” deals with arson, jewel theft, bloodstains, and a missing digit. “The Angel’s Eye” is an entertaining house-party mystery. And “The Long Dinner” concerns a missing painter and a menu that makes gourmand Reggie’s mouth water.

   Fortune, his boss Lomas, Superintendent Bell, and Inspector Underwood have delighted readers for years. The Reggie Fortune stories are soundly plotted and their logic is impeccable. One might complain of the weak development of secondary characters and somewhat pretentious dialogue, but all in all these remain good light reading.

   The better of the Reggie Fortune novels are Shadow on the Wall (1934), The Bishop’s Crime (1941), and The Life Sentence (1946). Particularly good among the short-story collections are Mr. Fortune Explains (1931) and The Best of Mr. Fortune (1943).

   Bailey’s other series character, lawyer Joshua Clunk, “a champion of the weak and oppressed,” is considerably less interesting-perhaps because he appears only in novels and Bailey was a much better writer of short stories than a novelist.

   The ten Clunk books — among them The Red Castle Mystery (1932), Nobody’s Vineyard (aka Dead Man’s Shoes, 1942), The Wrong Man (1945) — are well plotted but are written in a much more turgid style than the Reggie Fortune series.

   Anyone who can wade through an entire novel bulging with such passages as the following from Nobody’ s Vineyard is a truly dedicated mystery reader:

         ———
   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.

Previously on this blog:   Combined earlier into one post, Curt Evans reviewed both Mr. Fortune Objects and Clue for Mr. Fortune.

ALYS CLARE – Whiter Than the Lily. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, November 2004; paperback, August 2005.

Genre:   Historical mystery. Leading characters: Josse d’Acquin/Abbess Helewise; 7th in series. Setting:   England, 1190s.

First Sentence:   The walled garden lay as if stunned under the hot May sunshine.

    Sir Josse d’Acquin. a knight in the era of King Richard I, is taken to the Isle of Oxney where he meets an older man and his young wife who despair of having a child. When asked, Josse supports their idea of the wife traveling to The Abbey of Hawkenlye where Josse’s friend, Abbess Helewise, and her nuns might help the young wife.

   Once there, the woman keep refuses examination and keeps herself sequestered. The husband arrives later, much addled and unwell. But for Josse, who comes to the Abbey, something doesn’t add up, particularly when the woman dies and is found to have been pregnant.

   Vivid descriptions are a hallmark of Ms. Clare’s writing whether it is of the area in spring, thunderstorms, or of dreams. That, along with a lovely, gentle humor to the author’s voice and a touch of the paranormal to the story, although much less than in some of the previous books, are some of the reasons why I so enjoyed this book.

   English history is an interest of mine. Ms. Clare goes beyond providing interesting information and facts. She views those facts in terms of their impact on the lives of the people such as the strain on people to raise money for King Richard’s ransom…

    “Although Helewise understood why such an expensive campaign had been necessary, a port of her could not help wondering whether knights, lords and kings with the passion and the thrill of holy war filling their heads ought to pause just for a moment to wonder if it was all worth it.”

    As always, I read for interesting, realistic characters. I love that, in spite of being Abbess, Helewise had a full life prior to becoming Abbess. I appreciate Josse’s uncertainties and frustration at the realization of how little he knows and how few facts he has in trying to learn what happened.

   However, it’s the relationship between Helewise and Josse; one of friendship, respect and support but with the affection always contained, that is the central focus of the stories.

   I thoroughly enjoyed this book and am pleased I’ve many more books ahead of me. I do recommend the series and suggest reading it in order.

Rating:   Good Plus.

Editorial Comment:   There are 12 books in this “Hawkenlye” series, with the most recent appearing in 2008. LJ reviewed Girl in a Red Tunic, the eighth in the series, here, earlier on this blog. The titles of the books come from Carmina Burana, the lyrics of which were written by a 12th century monk.

“Night of the Gun.” An episode of Tightrope! (Season 1, Episode 17). First air date: 29 December 1959. Mike Connors as Nick Stone. Guests: Mike Kellin, Whit Bissell, Barbara English, Paul Langdon. Teleplay by Frederic Brady. Directed by Paul Wendkos.

   Policeman Paul Langdon explaining why a detective roughed up undercover cop Nick Stone (Michael Connors):

   Tightrope! ran for a single season in the 1959-1960 television season for 37 episodes and featured the adventures of undercover cop Nick Stone, as played by Michael Connors. Stone was a cross between Peter Gunn and James Bond, plying the mean streets in first person-narrated tales of crime, murder, betrayal, about a man on the tightrope as a undercover policeman.

   Created by Clarence Greene and Russell Rouse, Tightrope was a fast paced half hour show that moved like the bullets that frequently flew from Connors’ gun. A typical episode featured beautiful sexy women, bizarre villains, twisty plots, and enough violence for three other series.

   Opening each week with Connor’s patented fast draw, the series had only one continuing character, Stone, and found him each week in a new city with a new assignment.

    “Night of the Gun” is perhaps the best of the series, a tough and dark little tale that finds Nick helping the local police to find a witness on the run (Whit Bissell). Also hunting for Bissell is Larry Maddox (Mike Kellin), a club owner who sidelines as a killer for hire.

   It’s Kellin and his performance as Maddox that raises this above the rest. Maddox is an effeminate sadist, one part hipster, one part Liberace, who lives for trouble and pain: “Beautiful, beautiful.”

   Nick knows the best way to find Bissell is to follow Maddox to him, so he attracts his attention, then befriends the bizarre hood who sees a kindred spirit in Connors. For a show from 1959 the homo-erotic content of these scenes is pretty obvious, and though a couple of pretty girls are thrown into the mix, it’s clear that Kellin’s bizarre hit man isn’t interested in them all that much.

   I was reminded a bit of Lee Marvin and Earl Holliman’s homo-erotic hoods from Joseph L. Lewis The Big Combo and George Sanders as the strange forger and thief from John Larkin’s Quiet Please, Murder!, but Kellin’s character is even more outlandish.

   The opening scene where he kills a frightened and desperate witness is as sadistic a display as you ever saw on the small screen.

   This kind of show lived or died on the shoulders of the hero, and here Connors, in his first series, shines. Nick Stone is tough and smart, but he is also haunted by his job. He’s not always sure that there is a purpose to what he does, and longs for the comradeship of his fellow officers, a good woman, and a nine-to-five life, even as he wears expensive clothes and hangs out in the fanciest nightclubs. Each show features at least one scene of Nick alone in a crowd on a busy neon-lit street in a large city, alone even among the throng.

   As Connors gets closer to Kellin we begin to see just how crazy his Larry Maddox is, and it is a great bizarre performance, a mix of beatnik and hood, flamboyant and equal parts sadist and masochist.

   Finally when they go to meet Whit Bissell — who thinks Maddox is helping him to get out of town — Maddox figures out Connors as Nick is a cop and gets the drop on him, but didn’t figure on that patented fast draw.

   Connors went on to fame and fortune as Mannix, and Kellin had a long career as a character actor, including right after this a turn as the Chief Mate on The Wackiest Ship in the Army.

   Whit Bissell was in a little bit of everything from his role as the General in The Time Tunnel to his essay as the mad doctor in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein ( “I know you have a civil tongue in your head, I put it there!”).

   An attempt to revive the character of Nick Stone and series with Christopher George was a failure, but Stephen Cannell’s legendary Wiseguy with Ken Wahl owed a lot to this.

   Tightrope! isn’t available on DVD, but a few episodes are around, and well worth catching even if they are in less than pristine condition. It was a smart well written and directed series mindful of Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond’s early Secret Agent X-9 with its lone hero living a lonely and dangerous life without friends or allies.

   Tightrope! was a solid entertaining cop series with a bit more meat on the bone than usual. If you have never seen any of these you are in for a treat, and if you recall them but haven’t seen them for a long time you will be surprised just how good they were.

ROADHOUSE NIGHTS. Paramount, 1930. Helen Morgan, Charles Ruggles, Fred Kohler, Jimmy Durante, Fuller Mellish Jr., Leo Donnelly, Tammany Young, Joe King, Lou Clayton, Eddie Jackson. Story by Ben Hecht; screenplay by Garrett Fort based on the novel Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. Director: Hobart Henley. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

   The casting of the vaudeville team of Durante, Clayton and Moore in this version of Hammett’s classic crime novel will surely make the heart of any film noir fan sink.

   (The introduction of a bumpkin sheriff into the Crime Club film The Black Doll, reviewed here, was surely already one example too many of how to ruin a crime novel on screen.)

   And the casting of Charles Ruggles, known principally for his skillful handling of comic roles, as an investigative reporter (substituting for Hammett’s Continental Op) is not a choice to arouse much interest in the classic crime film aficionado. So you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that this film was the one I felt the most responsibility to see and the one whose screening I most dreaded.

   It starts off well as Hogan (Fuller Mellish Jr.), a reporter on an investigative assignment for his Chicago paper, lights a match to check the address of a house on a dark street.

   He knocks, is admitted, and is almost immediately shot by a dark figure. A fellow reporter, Willie Bindbugel (Ruggles), is sent by his editor to check the disappearance of Hagan, who was working on a story on bootlegging in a small town on Lake Michigan.

   (In Hammett’s novel, it’s a newspaper publisher who’s murdered just as the Continental Op arrives in the crime-infested city of Personville, known by some of its local inhabitants as Poisonville.)

   Much of the action of the film takes place in a roadhouse operated by local crime boss Sam Horner (Fred Kohler), and it’s here that Willie encounters singer Lola Fagan (Morgan), whom he knew years ago and who is now the girl friend of Horner.

   The Durante trio is also performing in the roadhouse (and regretting it), but it’s the relationship of Willie and Lola that fuels the real drama of the film, as she struggles to find a way out of the explosive situation created by Willie’s arrival.

   As Willie catches on to the viper’s nest he’s fallen into, the events move rapidly toward a climactic scene in which Willie, apparently drunk, calls his editor and as he appears to insult him on line taps out a coded message that alerts the editor to the big shipment of bootleg liquor that’s to be picked up that night.

   It’s not a stretch to see the roadhouse standing in for Poisonville, with Willie as a somewhat unlikely but still effective substitution for the Op. But it’s not the traces of Hammett’s novel that keep the film afloat but the adroit performances by Ruggles, Morgan and Kohler make it work.

   And, if you’re wondering how the film was received on its release, I can report that excerpts from the New York Times and Variety reviews are, if not glowing, certainly positive.

MICHAEL AVALLONE – The Case of the Violent Virgin. Bound back-to-back with The Case of the Bouncing Betty. Ace Double Ace D-259, paperback originals, 1957.

   Michael Avallone, who has dubbed himself “The Fastest Typewriter in the East” and “King of the Paperbacks,” has published more than 200 novels over the past four decades, some thirty of which feature private eye Ed Noon.

   On the one hand, Noon is your standard hard-boiled, wisecracking snoop with a taste for copious bloodletting and a Spillane-type hatred of Communists, dissidents, counterculture types, pacifists, militant blacks, militant women, and anyone or anything else of a liberal or civilized cant.

   On the other hand, he is a distinctly if eccentrically drawn character whose passions include baseball, old movies, and dumb
jokes, and who gets himself mixed up with some of the most improbable individuals ever committed to paper.

   The gold-toothed, beret-wearing villain in The Case of the Violent Virgin, for instance-a guy named Dean, who, like Ed Noon, is on the trail of a six-foot marble statue called the Violent Virgin, “The Number One Nude,” not to mention one of the world’s most precious stones, the “Blue Green.”

   Dean is a very well-spoken fellow; at one point in the narrative, he says to Noon, “Your precipitous exodus from serene sanctuary propels me toward Brobdingnagian measures. Spider and I mourn for your misdemeanors but your palpitating perignations [sic] induce no termination of our grief.”

   Spider, who is Dean’s accomplice in crime, is not nearly so well spoken; he says things like “Okay, Dad. Make the parley with them. But fast. This choo-choo could get too hot for us.”

   The “choo-choo” he is referring to is the Mainliner, which travels from New York’s Grand Central Station to Chicago. Noon is on it because he has been hired to bodyguard a woman named Opal Trace (who doesn’t speak her words, she “carols” and “musicales” them).

   And what a train ride it is, chockablock full of a mixed-up mish-mash of double-dealing, multiple murder, vicious dogs, shootouts, a bomb explosion, and, to cap things off, a rousing derailment. None of it makes much sense — but then, one doesn’t read Avallone looking for sense.

   What one does read Avallone for, primarily, is his lurid, bizarre, and often hilarious prose style. Noonisms — as his better similes, metaphors, and descriptive passages have come to be called — abound in The Case of the Violent Virgin; there are more to the chapter, in fact, than in just about any other Ed Noon adventure.

   A sample: “Her hips were beautifully arched and her breasts were like proud flags waving triumphantly. She carried them high and mighty.” And: “I flung a quick glance through the soot-stained windows. A mountain range and a dark night sky peppered with salty-looking stars winked at me.”

   Similar “palpitating perignations” can be found in such other Avallone spectaculars as The Tall Dolores (1953); The Voodoo Murders (1957); The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse (1957); Meanwhile Back at the Morgue (1960), in which you will find the immortal line “The next day dawned bright and clear on my empty stomach”; and Shoot It Again, Sam! (1972).

         ———
   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.

NOSTROMO. BBC-TV mini-series, 1996. Claudio Amendola, Paul Brooke, Lothaire Bluteau, Claudia Cardinale, Joaquim de Almeida, Brian Dennehy, Albert Finney, Serena Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, Roberto Escobar. Based on the novel by Joseph Conrad. Director: Alastair Reid.

   Somewhere over the last couple months I found time to watch Undersea Kingdom (Republic, 1936) in which Ray Corrigan battles the tyrant of Atlantis while dressed as a Mardi Gras Queen. It’s done with the usual care Republic lavished on their serials: splendidly tacky sets, ambitious special effects and action action action, but it lacks the energetic stuntwork that usually graced their films of this period, and I only mention it because shortly after seeing this I watched another lengthy tale of internecine warfare in an exotic locale, a 5-hour BBC miniseries from 1996 of Joseph Conrad’s 1904 Nostromo.

   While I was watching it, I re-read the book, which proved to be a rewarding experience as the film adds some clarity to the characters and narrative while the book … well Nostromo is Conrad at his best, which is very good indeed: fights, shooting, hair-breadth escapes and house-to-house street battles, all laid on with surprising thoughtfulness and skill as Conrad makes it happen to people we believe in.

   The mini-series carries this complex plot without dropping it, though they expand on the narrative where Conrad didn’t and rearrange it for clarity, which was probably necessary in the miniseries format. Characters who come on late in the book are introduced earlier in the film to provide for continuity, and sometimes they say baldly what Conrad only hinted at.

   Colin Firth and Serena Scott Thomas as the English couple who form the nucleus of the story acquit themselves quite well, Albert Finney throws in a fine character part as a disreputable doctor (one of Conrad’s finest characters) while Joaquim de Almeida and Roberto Escobar make a daunting pair of villains.

   Only Claudio Amendola, in the title role, disappointed me, and that was probably a personal thing. Conrad wrote the character as a stylish swashbuckler, the kind who would have been played by Doug Fairbanks Sr. in the old days, or perhaps Errol Flynn or Gilbert Roland in Hollywood’s golden age: a man who can leap onto a speeding train, gallop across the plain, and cut buttons off a coat with one sweep of a knife.

   Amendola seems formidable enough, but entirely too serious, as if the producers saw the character’s end and wanted to telegraph it to us early on. As I say though, that’s entirely a personal thing and I didn’t let it spoil my enjoyment of a fine effort that should be more widely available.

Editorial Comment:   The mini-series, for which I have not yet unearthed the exact dates of its first (and only?) run, is available commercially on VHS but not on DVD. For the former, think the $40 range.

PAT McGERR – The Seven Deadly Sisters. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1947. Paperback reprints: Dell 412, mapback edition, 1950; Macfadden 60-364, 1968.

   It begins as a gimmick story, as you may already know, if only by reputation. Sally Bowen and her new husband have just moved to England, and there she receives a letter from a friend back home, expressing her sorrow over the fact that the husband of one of Sally’s aunts died of poison, and that when she was discovered as the murderer, the aunt committed suicide.

   Unfortunately for Sally, she has seven aunts, and between them they have at least that many husbands, and what the friend neglected to mention is what she most desperately needs to know — who was it that was murdered?

   Granted, the situation is contrived. As Sally begins to tell her husband the tangled story of her aunts’ various love affairs, however, with all of them eventually pressured into marriage by the oldest who raised them, often largely for the sake of family honor and “what people would think,” the reader (me!) becomes more and more wrapped up in affairs properly none of his or her business, and more and more fascinated by the kinds of messes people of supposedly good sense and breeding can get themselves caught up in.

   Considering the year that this book was written, I thought that Pat McGerr titillates the reader’s imagination with an amazing amount of scandalous behavior going on. Doris, deeply in love with Tessie’s husband, for example, is the chief culprit — and Bert is not the only husband in her life.

   The solution to the mystery is a knockout, but I think I’d have to admit that the sheer process of sorting through people’s dirty laundry like this could easily become habit-forming.

Previously on this blog:

      Pick Your Victim, reviewed by Marvin Lachman.
      Death in a Million Living Rooms, reviewed by William F. Deeck.

Editorial Comment:   It surprises me more than you, I’m sure, to find this review here, the last of three in a row by Patricia McGerr. After uploading the first two earlier this evening, I went to the garage to continue my every November task of cleaning the garage of its summer accumulation so that Judy can get her car into her side this winter.

   When done repacking and rearranging some boxes of books, I idly picked up one of the copies of old mystery fanzines I’ve been using as sources of material to post here on the blog, when lo and behold, here I found this one.

   Coincidences do happen, happily so, even if this one of the more boring ones I could tell you about, and for that I apologize. Walker Martin asked me earlier if I could include the letter grades with these old reviews. I’m even happier to say that I gave this one an “A plus.”

PATRICIA McGERR – Pick Your Victim. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1946. Paperback reprints: Dell #307, mapback edition, 1949; Macfadden 75-306, 1970.

   While literally thousands of mysteries have been based on the attempt to discover a murderer, Patricia McGerr’s is unique in disclosing the killer at the beginning and challenging detectives (and readers) to select the victim.

   Not content to rely upon an original idea, she followed through, though this was only her first book, to create a mystery that was worthy of its conception. It is small wonder that Barzun and Taylor, who labeled this book a “whodunin,” also called it a masterpiece.

   Pick Your Victim starts in the Aleutians in 1944, where a group of U.S. marines are fighting the “Great Battle of Boredom.” Reading matter is in short supply, and the never-broken rule is that “if there was printing on it, you read it.”

   Thus, a torn piece of newspaper discloses to Pete Robbins, former publicity agent, that his previous boss in Washington, D.C., has been arrested for murder. The name of the victim is missing, although the item states that it was an officer at SUDS (Society for the Uplift of Domestic Service), where Robbins was employed.

   Pete and his fellow marines agree on a sweepstakes with the prize going to the first to guess who was murdered before the news arrives from back home. Playing the role of a GI Scheherazade, Robbins tells his barracks mates about SUDS and his colleagues during his four years at that philanthropic organization.

   McGerr knows Washington, D.C., and the political, economic, and social life of the nation’s capital come alive in her novel. This is an unusually good blend of realism and satire, with the leading characters limned in a manner that makes them believable.

   The story is well plotted, with clues adroitly inserted. Unlike many books that start with splendid gimmicks, Pick Your Victim has an ending that is not a letdown.

   Much of the authenticity in this book undoubtedly came from McGerr’ s employment, from 1937 to 1943, as director of public relations for the American Road Builders Association in Washington. Though never quite matching the success of Pick Your Victim, she has built a writing career in which originality has been the keynote.

   Thus, in her next book, The Seven Deadly Sisters (1947), she leaves the identities of both victim and culprit to be determined when she has her heroine learn, through a letter, that one of her seven aunts has murdered her husband.

   McGerr’s one series character is Selena Mead, a Washington, D.C., society woman who doubles as a counterespionage agent. In addition to appearances in two novels Is There a Traitor in the House? (1964) and Legacy of Danger (1970). Mead is featured in numerous short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

   Some of her other non-series mysteries are Catch Me If You Can (1948), Murder Is Absurd (1967), and Dangerous Landing (1975).

         ———
   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.