ARCHER MAYOR – The Skeleton’s Knee. Mysterious Press, hardcover, December 1993; paperback reprint, November 1994. Joe Gunther #4.

   I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Mayor is one of the best writers to come along in the last few years.

   Lieutenant Joe Gunther’s got a 25 year old murder. A man just died who lived on a farm outside Brattleboro, Vermont, and the autopsy shows it was the result of an old, untreated bullet wound. Nobody knows anything about the man, but he had a lot of old, circa 1969 and before, cash money.

   When the police go over the grounds searching for a gun, they uncover a skeleton with an artificial knee, also circa 1969. The trail leads to Chicago where the operation was performed, and leads Joe down unforeseen paths, and into unexpected danger.

   Mayor tells a story about as well as anyone writing cop novels these days. His prose can be almost lyrical when describing the Vermont countryside, and crisp and clean when describing the to and fro of police work. Gunther is am appealing and well drawn character, as are several others who reappear in the series.

   The Chicago section of the book reads as realistically as the Vermont, which means Mayor has either been there or knows how to fake it well.

   There’s a lot of nicely handled detective work, and the only problems I had with the book were a few plot elements that I had trouble believing fully. That’s true with most of ’em, though, and it doesn’t keep me from recommending it to you.

       The Joe Gunther series —

1. Open Season (1988)

2. Borderlines (1990)
3. Scent of Evil (1992)
4. The Skeleton’s Knee (1993)

5. Fruits of the Poisonous Tree (1994)
6. The Dark Root (1995)
7. The Ragman’s Memory (1996)
8. Bellows Falls (1997)

9. The Disposable Man (1998)
10. Occam’s Razor (1999)
11. The Marble Mask (2000)

12. Tucker Peak (2001)
13. The Sniper’s Wife (2002)
14. Gatekeeper (2003)
15. The Surrogate Thief (2004)
16. St. Alban’s Fire (2005)

17. The Second Mouse (2006)
18. Chat (2007)
19. The Catch (2008)
20. The Price of Malice (2009)
21. Red Herring (2010)

THE NINTH GUEST. Columbia Pictures, 1934. Donald Cook, Genevieve Tobin, Hardie, Edward Ellis, Edwin Maxwell, Vince Barnett, Helen Flint, Samuel S. Hinds, Nella Walker. Based on the novel The Invisible Host, by Gwen Bristow & Bruce Manning; previously produced as a play, The Ninth Guest, by Owen Davis, who is also given credit as one of two co-screenwriters. Director: Roy William Neill.

   Regular readers of this blog will recall that The Invisible Host, the book by Bristow and Manning this movie was nominally based upon, has been reviewed here twice before, once by David Vineyard, the second time by Jim McCahery.

   So I needn’t go into as much detail about the film as I might have otherwise. Suffice it to say, I trust, that eight socialites of New Orleans are tricked into attending a murder party. Trapped in an apartment high above ground level, their host, a voice only on the promises them they will all be dead by morning, unless they manage to outwit him.

   And straightforwardly, he begins doing just that, preying on their weaknesses, finding the flaws in their characters and allowing them, in many cases, to bring their own doom down around them.

   It’s difficult to say how closely the movie follows the book, even with two reviews, The opening scenes in the deadly apartment are the same, that much is clear, but I think I’d rather read the book myself, as I suspect some trimming may have been done, or the details changed, in order to fit it into its 65 minutes of running time.

   In that sense, it may easily follow the play more closely than the book, but film itself, with some qualifications, is certainly worth watching. The apartment is filled with dark rooms and dark corners and dark stairs, and the director and the head cameraman certainly make the most of it.

   In all honesty, when you think about it, once the movie’s over, you have to realize how unlikely the whole scenario has been, and how almost impossible it would have been, from the murderer’s point of view, to have pulled it off as successfully as he did. Another problem, from the viewer’s point of view, this time, is that as the number of survivors begins to decrease, it becomes easier and easier to decide who the killer might be.

   Assuming, of course, that the killer is one of the eight, and just so that I don’t give everything away, that I will refrain from confirming. You might want to watch the movie yourself, and with the qualifications I previously mentioned, I most certainly recommend that you do.

JACK FREDRICKSON – Honestly Dearest, You’re Dead. St. Martin’s/Minotaur, hardcover, January 2009.

Genre:   Licensed PI. Leading character:  Vlodek “Dek” Elstrom, 2nd in series. Setting:   Florida.

First Sentence:   She wouldn’t have heard the back door glass being punched out, not in those winds.

   Investigator Dek Elstrom is unemployed, broke and living in a five-story turret with no castle. He is contacted by an attorney in Michigan and advised that he has been named executor by a woman who was murdered, but that he doesn’t know.

   When Dek visits where the woman was living, there is an object he first thinks may have been connected to someone from his past. Dek determined to learn more about this woman, even at the risk of his own life.

   I very much enjoyed Jack Fredrickson’s first book A Safe Place for Dying, which had been nominated for a Shamus Award. I like this book even more.

   The sense of place is excellent and created through vivid descriptions: “…a small red lighthouse … stood like a crimson exclamation point against the vanished horizon.” The book is mainly set in the winter and you are cold. When Dek travels to Florida, you feel the sudden heat and humidity.

   By providing background on many of the places, he brings them to life, making them characters in their own right. The characters, themselves, are ones I really liked. While they are not as fully developed as I might like for someone who has not read the first book, they certainly have enough dimension so you have a real sense of who they are.

   Dek is a particularly appealing protagonist in that he will sometimes do dumb things, but knows they are dumb when he does them. At the same time, he is smart and dedicated to putting the pieces together and following the trail. With the support of his wardrobe-challenged but brilliant, best friend Lou, one of my recently most-favorite characters, and ex-wife-but-not, Amanda, and even his nemesis Elvis Derbil, these are characters I want to continue to follow.

   Don’t be fooled by the title, this is not a cozy and the title makes very good sense, once you’ve gotten into the book. The story, and the author’s voice with just the right touch of wry humor, was great.

   Okay, there was one hole in the plot, and a bit of redundancy which should have been caught in editing, but I’ll forgive that. There were so many unexpected twists, none of which felt contrived, and some very good suspense. This was a straight-through, didn’t-put-it-down read for me. I am anxious for the next book.

Rating:   Very Good Plus.

DARK INTRUDER. Universal Pictures, 1965. Leslie Neilsen, Mark Richman, Judi Meredith, Werner Klemperer, Charles Bolender, Vaughn Taylor, Gilbert Green. Screenplay: Barré Lyndon. Director: Harvey Hart.

   It’s foggy turn of the century (1890) San Francisco and the city is being stalked by a murderer, but no ordinary killer — he’s killing in the name of Lovecraftian demons from the ancient past. Only a handful of victims stand between him and eternal life, leaving behind a mystical ivory demon with a parasite on its back that grows smaller with each murder as the time grows shorter between the date each new victim dies.

   Who is the disfigured monster stalking the foggy streets and what is his true face, and what is the demonic killer after? There’s even the mummified body of a demon in the possession of a mysterious Chinese who aides our hero.

   Leslie Neilson is amateur supernatural sleuth Brett Kingsford (“The seventh son of a seventh son has a reputation to uphold”) — replete with secret crime lab, a Latin motto “Omina Exeunt in Mysterium” (Everything is a Mystery), a library of occult tomes, and a dwarf assistant named Nikola (Charles Bolender):

   Kingsford is called in by the Police Commissioner (Gilbert Green) to help find the killer (“You seem to specialize in obscure acquaintances.”), which he does while maintaining the pose of a playboy a la Lamont Cranston or the Scarlet Pimpernel (“For me to be any value to you at all the company of a narcotics addict is preferable to a police commissioner.”), though he is less than happy when Kingsford suggests they are hunting a ritual murderer in the thrall of ancient Sumerian gods who must be locked away “… where all such unearthly things belong.”

   Nielson has some fun as the Sherlockian Kingsford, who is a master of disguise and fully as high handed as Holmes at his best. Judi Meredith is Evelyn, whose psychic trances aide Kingsford in his hunt for the demonic killer, fiancee of wealthy importer and a friend of Kingsford, Robert Vandenberg (Mark Richman).

   This was originally shot as a pilot for a series, The Black Cloak, that never developed and released theatrically by Universal as a feature as sometimes happened then.

   Night Gallery producer Jack Laird produced it and the teleplay was by Barré Lyndon (screenplays for The Lodger, Hangover Square, War of the Worlds, Night Has 1000 Eyes — with Jonathan Latimer — The Man Who Could Cheat Death, and his play The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse), so the mix of horror, mystery, and detective elements were natural. The eerie score is by Lalo Shifrin.

   Enjoying himself playing Kingsford, Leslie Nielsen gets to indulge in disguises and flights of Holmesian reasoning, and the scenes with Mark Richman as wealthy Robert Vandenberg have a nice bite to them.

   You’ll have to look closely for Werner Klemperer, Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes, in a key role with a distinctly Lovecraftian twist if you recall the plot of “The Dunwich Horror.”

   Handsome Robert Vandenberg has a demonic twin, Professor Malachi, born at the same time on an archeological dig, and brought up by a nurse who was midwife to Robert’s mother, who won’t be happy until he has traded bodies with his half brother and ushered in his demonic father.

   A set piece when Malachi confronts Vandenberg in a foggy church is nicely done with one last twist when the misshapen Malachi plunges to his supposed death…

   And he’s right as he races to save Evelyn from a fate much worse than death:

   This is an entertaining little exercise in the mix of detective and horror elements with an attractive cast and Leslie Neilsen in a lead role long before he revealed his comic flair in the Airplane! movies.

   At a mere 59 minutes it is tightly written and directed and moves along nicely never pausing long enough for any pesky doubts to cloud the viewers enjoyment of the precedings.

   This was on everyone’s wish list for years, and when it showed up a few years ago on the gray market it was a bonus to discover it was every bit as good as the memories it evoked. It’s an attractive little black and white entry in the mystery/horror genre that manages some genuine chills and solid fun.

   More than a few more expensive productions fail to deliver as much atmosphere, action, and fun as this one does. It may remind you of the similar Chamber of Horrors with Patrick O’Neal and Cesare Danova, another pilot turned feature, though this one, thankfully, does without the “Horror Horn.”

   Dark Intruder is a fine example of a period when the pilots that failed were sometimes more interesting than the ones that succeeded.

GEORGE HARMON COXE – Uninvited Guest. Popular Library, paperback reprint; no date stated (late 1960s?). Hardcover edition: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953.

   According to Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, there have been only nine mysteries (one marginal) that have taken place in Barbados, one many island countries in the Caribbean (independent since 1966) , and George Harmon Coxe has written three of them. (The most famous of the other six is probably The Green Hell Treasure, by Robert L. Fish, a Captain Jose da Silva adventure.)

   While many of Coxe’s standalone novels take place in such exotic places such as Cuba, Panama, Belize and Trinidad, I’ve always preferred those he wrote with either of his two favorite characters, Flash Casey and Kent Murdock, both newspaper photographers in the Boston area. Chalk it up to their newspaper backgrounds, which I always enjoy, and the ultimate stability of familiar faces.

   But I was attracted to this one by first of all the McGinnis cover, which may be a little too small and dark to show up well — and my apologies for that if it doesn’t — and of course the attraction of the Caribbean is exactly that, an attraction. (I’ll see if I can’t blow up the artwork a little.)

   The uninvited guest is Julia Parks, who crashes a small party planning on an short ocean cruise by schooner the next day. She knows most of them, most of them know her, and plans of several are threatened by her unexpected presence.

   One of the above is her ex-husband, who has come into a small inheritance since their divorce. Imagine his surprise when she tells him that the divorce never went through.

   The owner of the schooner, Alan Scott, does not know her, but he would like to sell the schooner to one of the couples about to make the trip with him, and the trip may be off.

   Scott also has an eye on one of the unattached women in the party, or perhaps she is not, as she seems to have been brought along by her half-sister with an ulterior motive in mind. But when she (the girl) seems to put herself in danger of being accused of the decedent’s passing — oops, I missed telling you about that, but you know who I mean, don’t you? — he (Scott) takes it upon himself to clear her, in spite of the abilities of a rather good policeman who’s put in charge of the case.

   You can therefore categorize this as a case tackled by an amateur detective, which is to say, there is a lot of messing around with evidence, clues, accusations and alibis, the whole works.

   There’s not a lot of action, only a fist fight or two, but lots of nightclubbing and the like, with the abundance of social drinking that goes along with it.

   There are clues, by the way, but without motives — would you be surprised if I told you that the dead woman was not the most popular woman on the island? — I’d have to say on a Fair Play scale ranging from one to ten, this would rank no higher than five.

   Mildly entertaining at best is my final judgment. I still favor those guys from Boston.

J. H. WALLIS – Once Off Guard. E.P. Dutton, hardcover, 1942. Also published as: The Woman in the Window. World, 1944. Paperback reprints: Mercury Mystery #81, 1944, abridged; Armed Forces Edition #723, 1945, as The Woman in the Window; Popular Library #385, 1951, abridged.

    ● Filmed as The Woman in the Window: RKO, 1944. Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, Edmund Breon, Dan Duryea. Screenwriter: Nunnally Johnson. Director: Fritz Lang.

   I like to do the book/movie thing (read a few chapters in the book each day, then watch the corresponding scenes of the film that night) and got a chance last week with The Woman in the Window, originally published back in 1942 as Once Off Guard by J.H. Wallis and filmed by Fox in ’44.

   Wallis’s book is an oddly depressing read, tense and claustrophobic, told almost entirely from the point of view of Professor Richard Wanley, who, overcome by reading erotic poetry of ancient Greece, gets involved with a tart and suddenly has to kill her sugar-daddy in self-defense.

   Terrified of scandal and genuinely reluctant to hurt his wife, Wanley and the tart cover up the crime and hide the body, leading to a world of complications.

   The book, as I say, gets a bit depressing as Wanley frets and sweats over little things that loom large in his guilty conscience, sure that everyone notices tiny clues that link him to the killing, and it gets worse yet when the tart gets a visit from a prospective blackmailer. All of which leads to more murder, more guilt and a neat, ironic ending. An involving read, but not much fun.

   So when Fox took this on for a movie, they gave it to writer Nunnally Johnson, who could be depended on to lighten things up, and director Fritz Lang, whose sense of fatalism was perfectly suited to the material.

   The result is just as involving as Wallis’s book, but much less claustrophobic. Characters who seem merely looming presences in the book get neatly fleshed out in the movie by competent players like Raymond Massey, Dan Duryea and Edmund Breon (whom some may remember as the lascivious music box collector in the Sherlock Holmes flick, Dressed to Kill).

   Also, we get to see things in the movie that in the book are only imagined by Wanley, opening things out a bit. Finally, there’s a twist ending, followed by a twist on a twist, handled beautifully by Lang in a cinematic flourish where he abruptly changes scenes without cutting.

   Think of that: he actually switches scenes without cutting! A friend of mine once asked the director (by then quite aged and revered) how he did this, and Lang merely smiled and said some mysteries were best left as mysteries.

   I suspect he just didn’t remember.

Bio-Bibliographical Data:   James Harold Wallis, 1885-1958, was the author of ten mystery and crime fiction novels for Dutton between 1931 and 1943, the first six of which were cases for Inspector Wilton Jacks. Says Al Hubin of Wallis in Crime Fiction IV: Born in Iowa, educated at Yale; newspaperman in Iowa turned full-time writer in New York.

RUTH RENDELL – Not in the Flesh. Crown, US, hardcover, June 2008. Trade paperback: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, June 2009. British edition: Hutchinson, hardcover, 2007.

   Jim Belbury likes to walk his dog through Old Grimble’s Field because the dog is good at sniffing out truffles which he can sell to fancy restaurants in London. But one summer’s day the dog digs out a skeletal hand which brings Chief Inspector Wexford and his team to investigate.

   The remains turns out to be those of a man who was killed about eleven years earlier. At that time Old Grimble’s stepson, who inherited the land, had the idea he could get the planning commission’s permission to put up houses on it.

   He and the man he hired had begun digging a trench where the sewage pipes would be laid. Permission was refused and the trench was filled in, but someone used it as a convenient place to hide a body.

   So the search begins to try and identify the body of someone who has been missing for eleven years. Then, a few days later, when two of Wexford’s men are searching the bungalow, they discover in the basement buried under a woodpile, the body of another man who, it turns out, was killed eight years earlier. Are the two dead men connected and, if so, how?

   Meanwhile, a subplot deals with female “circumcision” among the Somali community in Kingsmarkham when the Somali waitress at an Indian restaurant Wexford and his assistant, Mike Burden, like to eat lunch approaches Wexford because she fears her 5-year-old sister is about to have that procedure, which the waitress had undergone as a child.

   As usual, with Rendell, you cannot fault her writing or characterization. With this one, though, even before the identity of the body in the trench was discovered, I realized the motive for the murder and, if I didn’t know the exact name of the killer, I knew in which household the killer could be found.

   One other thing, and someone perhaps in the UK can help me out here: during the course of the novel the police are looking for a man nicknamed Dusty and, automatically, assume his last name must be Miller because all man nicknamed Dusty are invariably named Miller. Why? Over here we are likely to think his last name is Rhodes, but not invariably.

W. BOLINGBROKE JOHNSON – The Widening Stain. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1942. Hardcover reprint: Cornell University Library Associates, 1976. Trade paperback reprint: Rue Morgue Press, 2007, as by Morris Bishop.

   W. Bolingbroke Johnson is the pseudonym of Morris Gilbert Bishop (1893-1973), and this is his only mystery novel both facts courtesy of the Bibliography of Crime Fiction, by Allen Hubin. For a first and only, it is extraordinarily good and well worth looking out for.

   It is set in a University, largely in its library, and the characters are all university employees. Some are professors,one a custodian, several are young women who catalog the books, and the narrator is the Chief Cataloguer herself, Miss Gilda Gorham.

   A minor subplot keeps us wondering whether Gilda is going to be captured into matrimony by one or another of the professors, but this does not distract from the major interest, the murders.

   First one and then another profess or is murdered in the library. The first might have been an accident, for the beauteous and seductive French professor, Mademoiselle Coindreau, had climbed onto a high balcony, and thence onto a ladder in an evening dress. She might have fallen, and yet there is strong suspicion that she was pushed.

   When an elderly bachelor is found strangled in a locked press which also contains erotica, murder is certain.

   A handful of professors who all came to the library after the President’s reception are the suspects, along with the custodian, who knows a great deal more about the private affairs of the professors than would seem desirable.

   The police are singularly inept, awkward in the face of so much erudition. Gilda begins to detect, and continues in spite of warnings. By interrogating everyone involved and by psyching out the murderer, she traps him in the basement stacks. Both police and innocent male professors are there for her rescue, and Gilda is triumphant.

   The book is enlivened by a scattering, of limericks, which one of the professors makes up on the spur of the moment. Just as a sample:

         There was a young miss of Bermuda
         Who said of her fiance, who’d a
            Thought that he would look
            Like a god in a book!
         She must have been thinking of Buddha.

Bio-Bibliographic Data:   In case anyone was wondering, as I was as I was getting this review ready to post, the “W.” in the author’s pen name stood for Gladys, the author being Welsh. This and a good deal of other information about the author can be found on the Rue Morgue Press website, Tom & Enid Schantz as publishers having made life a whole lot easier for anyone wishing to locate an inexpensive copy of this book to read.

DICK FRANCIS – Rat Race. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1971. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1970. Reprinted many times.

Genre:   Amateur sleuth. Leading character:   Matt Shore, stand-alone. (Francis’s 10th novel.) Setting:   England.

First Sentence:   I picked four of them up at Whit Waltham in the new Cherokee Six 300 that never got a chance to grow old.

   Matt Shore’s life and career as a pilot have been on a downward spiral. His latest job is with a flying taxi service for racecourses and his first flight ends with the plane exploding after he lands from sensing a problem with the aircraft.

   Although all the passengers are safe, it’s another black mark on Matt’s career and he wants to know why.

   Although I’ve not read this particular book since January 1977, it reminds me why I became such of fan of Dick Francis’s writing. The protagonist, Matt Shore, is so appealing and one of a style I appreciate — the “common” man caught up in an uncommon situation.

   He is not perfect. He is intelligent without being egotistical, attractive without being overbearing, and heroic without being macho. And he gets the girl, but you know there will be painful incidences along the way.

   In spite of the opening portent, the story captivates you from the very first page and never lets you go. The pacing between suspense and respite is every effective. The writing is masterful — not a term I use lightly — and imminently readable.

   I was surprised how much of the plot I remembered after all these years, and that’s a real tribute to the author. Whether Dick or Mary Francis was the primary author of this, and the other books by Dick Francis, I frankly don’t care.

   All I know is that it was a great read when I read it the first time, and it is a great read now.

Rating:   Very Good Plus.

BEN BENSON – The Blonde in Black.   Bantam #1974, paperback reprint; 1st printing, July 1959. Hardcover: M. S. Mill; first edition, February 1958.

   When the subject of police procedurals comes up, and which authors were among the first, Lawrence Treat and his novel V for Victim (1945) is often cited as the first of those in the modern era.

   There were, of course, any number of candidates in the 1930s and even before. The idea of police solving crimes is a natural, after all; private eyes and purely amateur sleuths can’t have all the fun.

   Ben Benson, whose books in softcover I’ve owned for many years (there were 19 of them and this is, alas, only the second one I’ve read) has somehow become neglected as one of the early authors in the field.

   His first book, Alibi at Dusk, came along in 1951, for example, and there were not many other authors who might fit into the category between Treat’s books and his. As a minor quibble, if you were to look closely at The Blonde in Black, you might say that it does not really fit the category — if the category consists of a police department at work upon several unrelated crimes at the same time.

   But if a police procedural can also consist of several members of a police department working as a team, following professional guidelines and conducting a case coolly and intelligently, then The Blonde in Black does indeed qualify, and presumably so do all of Benson’s other books.

   The blonde in question is Junie Jacques, whose image as a sexy singer has been built as a gigantic case of fraud by her record company. She’s in reality a home town girl from Massachusetts who needed the money and agreed mostly against her will to go along with the image the public knows her by.

   And when she tells her record company executive that she’s quitting to get married, to the nephew of the governor, he’s fit to be tied. He’s also very quickly dead, with the D.A.’s office ready to arrest Junie for his death, which she claims to have been only a shooting accident.

   Captain Wade Paris of the Massachusetts State Police is not so sure of Junie’s guilt, and he continues his investigation anyway, regardless of what the ambitious fellow from the D.A.’s office might think.

   In one sense, this is an impossible crime, since Junie’s warning shot against what she thought was an intruder was in the air and toward the figure coming toward her, and as it turns out, the man was shot in the back. But the shot came from her gun, and only one shot was fired.

   A fact which may sound insurmountable, but it’s easily enough solved. (It didn’t take me much time to figure it out, in other words.) Most of the book is taken up, in documentary fashion, with the ins and outs of the music business as it was in the 50s, in what it took to create an image the public would go for; payola to grease the palms of important disk jockey’s; the expectation that girl singers would do whatever it took to get ahead; and so on.

   Benson’s a bit stodgy in the details here, nor does he see a lot to rock-and-roll singing beside the well-planned gyrations on stage, but his policemen, while largely faceless, do know their business. And on the other hand, while the case is a slight one, the other characters involved are real enough to have convinced me.

   Ben Benson died young, in 1959, at the age of only 44, and I don’t know any details. His 19 books were written in a span of less than ten years, the last, The Huntress Is Dead (1960), being published after his death, and was never published in softcover.

   Wade Paris was in ten of his novels; a Massachusetts state trooper named Ralph Lindsey was in another seven. There do not appear to have been any crossovers, but I’d love to be corrected about this. The other two books Ben Benson wrote consisted of one standalone novel and a collection of two novelettes. (Thanks to Roger Ljung, whose comment made an essential correction to this statement.)

[UPDATE] Later the same day.   I have discovered one source online that says this about Benson:

    “[He] was born in Boston and seriously wounded during Army service in WW2. He began writing as therapy…” A complete list of Benson’s novels can also be found on this site.

[UPDATE #2] 07-01-10.   I recently received the following email from Victor Berch, with a cc sent to Al Hubin. The updated information about Benson will appear in the next installment of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV.

Hi Steve:

I became interested in your review of Ben[jamin] Benson’s books and since he was a Boston boy, I decided to check on his vital statistics. I know Contemporary Authors and other sources assign a 1915 birth date to him. However, according to the Massachusetts Vital Records, 1911-1915, there was no Benjamin Benson born in 1915.

What little data that is presented in Contemporary Authors reveals that Benson had enlisted in the US Army in 1943. So, I decided to check out any statistics that might appear in his Army record. Sure enough, his record was available.

It stated that he had enlisted in Boston on Sept. 24, 1943 as a private for the duration of the war (his Army serial number was 31422170, should anyone care to explore his record further). His year of birth was given as 1913, had two years of college education and his civilian occupation was given as a salesman.

Armed with that 1913 birth date, I went back to the Massachusetts Vital Records, 1911-1915. And his record was available. The data revealed that Benjamin Benson II had been born in Boston June 14, 1913, the son of Hyman D., a printer, and Rivka [Rebecca] (Charmonsky) Benson, both immigrants from Russia.

Whatever the family name originally was would have to be obtained from his father’s naturalization papers. His family had only immigrated to the US in 1912.

Best,

Victor