JAMES ANDERSON – The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy. Chief Inspector Wilkins #1. Constable, UK, hardcover, 1975. David McKay, US, hardcover, 1977. Avon, US, paperback, 1978. Poisoned Pen Press, US, softcover, 1998.

   In this book Mr. Anderson has attempted and pretty well succeeded, in recapturing the spirit of the pre-war era. The setting is a weekend house party in a stately home, the flavouring that of international intrigue, and the characters the full range of golden age products — the titled hosts, American millionaires, a penniless deb, a mysterious stranger, some diplomats, a foreign countess, etc. etc.

   But whereas the genuine thirties article also often contained unreal dialogue, ridiculous characters, a meandering plot with a hopelessly weak denouement, this does not. The build-up is beautifully done and leads to a storm-ridden night when all hell lets loose — jewelry is stolen (could it be the work of a master criminal, the Wraith?), guns are missing, there are constant comings and goings — and murder is done.

   The police in the form of  unconventional Inspector Wilkins carry out a detailed investigation and in a marvelous revelation scene the pieces of the jigsaw are put together and the truth emerges.

   An affectionate study, and quite a tour de force.

S. A. DUNPHY – Lost Graves. Boyle & Keneally #2. Bookouture, paperback, January 2022. Setting: Contemporary Ireland.

First Sentence: A small boy stood in the clearing amid the oak and hazel trees and stared at the macabre object his dog had just excavated from the soil of the forest floor, gripping the animal’s collar to restrain it from tearing the severed human hand apart.

   Joe Keenan and his young son Finbar are Travellers who’ve made camp for the night at the edge of the Derrada Woods when Finbar comes across a corpse. Although Joe is arrested, the members of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigations; Jesse Boyle, criminal behaviorist, DS Seamus Keneally and historian and computer genius Terri Kehoe, who are called in to investigate under the command of Irish Police Commissioner Dawn Wilson, doesn’t believe Joe is guilty.

   More bodies are found, some dating back 20 years. Locals blame the deaths on a vampire, the Abhartach. Joe Keenan is hesitant about helping the investigation as he is on the run from a group of Travellers threatening to kill him.

   What an excellent opening. One is drawn immediately into the story and the characters. Even the chapter headings are evocative.

   Jessie Boyle, Seamus Keneally and Terri Kehoe make a great team. Jessie’s observations and analysis are interesting to follow, Seamus’ ability to eat constantly without ever getting a drop on himself, and Terri’s computer expertise bring the characters to life. One has become accustomed to investigative teams being able to find whatever information they want via computer. It is a nice change to have someone acknowledge the GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out — unreliability of data.

   In this second book of the series, once again the author  falls victim once again to over plotting.   (My review of the first, Bring Her Home, can be found here .) While the folklore is interesting, it somewhat overwhelms the story, as does the serial-killer trope. There is an attempt to introduce a sense of the paranormal with the idea of the Abhartach, a vampire-like creature, one never quite buys into it, and links to the seemingly omniscient character of Uruz from the earlier book.

   Dunphy excels at suspense. He creates a true spine-chilling creepiness that makes one catch their breath. However, he is guilty of overkill, he maintains a degree of logic to the plot. What was effective was the inclusion of case notes of a former detective. This added veracity to the story, as did information on the psychology of the Travelling people. They are a group on which there is rarely a focus. The epilogue is nicely done, while a major weakness is the use of completely unnecessary portents.

   Lost Graves is a good, fast, completely engrossing diversionary read. The thing that really holds it together is the principal characters. Dunphy falls into the category of a guilty pleasure read, and that’s not a bad thing. While this second book is a step forward, a much stronger editor is to be desired. Even so, the books are ripping reads, and the next is already in the queue.

Rating: Good plus.

JILL PATON WALSH – The Wyndham Case. Imogen Quy #1. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1993; trade paperback, 2003. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1993.

   Jill Paton Walsh, who died in 2020, was first best known as the author of a long list of children’s book. She rose to fame in “our” field for being chosen to complete one of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels, left unfinished at the time of her death (Thrones, Dominations, 1998), followed by three more Wimsey novels written on her own.

   Alongside these she wrote the four books in her Imogen Quy series, of which this is the first. Imogen is a young nurse at St. Agatha’s College, Cambridge University —  an interesting way to write detective mysteries involving college professors and deans in action, up close and personal, but yet from the outside, without having a major stake in the game.

   The “Wyndham Case” is actually (as a play on words) the spectacular shelving unit in a special, separately endowed scholarly library at St. Agatha’s, complete with arcane requirements for its care and financial upkeep . Found dead there one morning is a student who, because of his meager means, is suspected by many of being there for nefarious reasons. Thievery,

   A close male friend of Imogen is a police officer, which is always a good way to get a layperson involved in a murder case. Imogen is, in fact, invited by him to do just that when the students in the dead boy’s life stonewall the police.

   Walsh has to have been a good choice to continue to Peter Wimsey series. Her prose is clear, precise, witty, and just fusty enough to qualify. (I haven’t read any of them.) Imogen Quy (rhymes with “why”) is quiet but both perky and intelligent enough to be able spend a lot of enjoyable time with – perhaps too much so, as the fully absorbed reader (me) can easily find him- or herself so caught up in her personal life as to let the clues in the case slip  on by Me again).

   Do not lose yourself in the game, therefore,  and miss sight of the goal. Read and remember all the details as the case goes on. They will all be there (mostly).

   I enjoyed this one.
   

       The Imogen Quy series —

The Wyndham Case (1993)
A Piece of Justice (1995)
Debts of Dishonour (2006)
The Bad Quarto (2007)

FREDERICK C. DAVIS – The Deadly Miss Ashley. Schyler Cole & Luke Speare #1. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1950. Pocket #804, paperback, 1951.

   I read and collect Davis’s books mostly because he was an extremely prolific writer for the detective pulp magazines, but if you were to pin me down I couldn’t tell you anything significant that he wrote for them. Maybe the Operator #5 pulp-hero stories?

   Here the detective Agency is Scyler Cole’s, but the switch os that he plays Watson to his own legman, Luke Speare, who appears to have all the brains and energy. The problem is to discover which of the many women inn the case is the accomplice awaiting an embezzler’s return from prison, the loot still hidden.

   The deductions get tedious and self-contradictory, the plot contrived and essentially unreal, but the clues are fair and the killer is deadly. The case hinges to large extent on an undecipherable method of shorthand, invented and taught by a lady in Baltimore – a touch of insanity indeed.

Rating: C

      The Schyler Cole & Luke Speare series —

The Deadly Miss Ashley. Doubleday 1950.
Lilies in Her Garden Grew. Doubleday 1951.
Tread Lightly, Angel. Doubleday 1952.
Drag the Dark. Doubleday 1953.
Another Morgue Heard From. Doubleday 1954.
Night Drop. Doubleday 1955

BASIL COPPER – The Curse of the Fleers. Harwood-Smart, UK, hardcover, 1976. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1977.  PS Publishing, UK, hardcover, 2012 (restoring the text of the author’s original manuscript).

   A well done Gothic melodrama for the season.

   Though Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca was as unblushing a gothic tale as was ever written, replete with the Rochester like Maxim de Winter and the faintest blush of the supernatural in the person of the title character and her mad housekeeper, the result of that novel and films success was that the Gothic novel took a tack into largely the women’s market, in books written almost exclusively by women and for women.

   Defined as a woman gets house genre, the model followed Du Maurier and Bronte’s Jane Eyre slavishly. A woman, always young and somewhat inexperienced, usually a governess, comes to a strange household usually finding an eccentric family haunted by the past, an attractive but distant, cold, and cruel male and a more charming, but not always trustworthy type.

   Not every book in the genre followed that model exactly, and I am not in the least condemning those that did. Mary Stewart. Norah Lofts, Phyllis Whitney, Dorothy Eden, Victoria Holt, and others working in the genre are some of the best writers of their era, but the true Gothic spirit got a bit lost in the mix.

   Oh, there were books that did fit the original definition, Dorothy MacArdle’s The Univited, Francis Beeding’s The House of Doctor Edwards, Jesse Douglas Keruish’s The Undying Monster, Russell Kirk’s The Old Dark House of Fear, William Sloane’s Edge of Running Water and To Walk Alone, Tom Tryon’s Harvest Home, and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House fit the “Gothick” tradition like a glove. And so did Basil Copper’s The Curse of the Fleers, and it might have been recognized as such if it hadn’t been butchered by its first publisher to the point the author turned his back on it.

   Now a restored edition brings the book back into its full Gothic glory replete with Copper’s extensive notes on writing the book appended to the ending.

   Captain Guy Hammond is a forty something veteran of the wars in Afghanistan facing the end of his military career as he recovers from a leg wound in London.

   
   Hammond, a bit like Dr. Watson, is a man with little family and no direction in life until he gets an urgent letter from former Lt. Cedric Fleer begging him to come to their estate Fleer in Dorset. “I cannot go into details but, for friendship’s sake. I should be grateful for your help and advice. This business becomes blacker with every passing day and I fear for my father’s sanity.”

   
   What red blooded Victorian male could resist that? But as Hammond gets closer to Fleer a sense of foreboding overtakes him. And with good reason. Beneath its battlements, Fleer is a vast uninviting place, however welcoming Sir John, Cedric’s father, and his attractive younger sister Prudence, and beautiful Claire Anstey. The countryside is cold and damp and the nearest neighbor Sir Jeffrey Darnley sullen and threatening.

   Basil Copper was a popular British writer who made his mark in the latter day Lovecraftian movement and followed August Derelith in writing the popular Solar Pons stories. His novels include the Lovecraftian The Great White Space, the Victorian Gothic detective story Necroscope, and the horror novel House of the Wolf. In addition he had some success with his L.A. based private eye series about P.I. Mike Faraday (even though he never visited Los Angeles), and wrote the Lee Falk Phantom paperback original novels for Avon. He was nominated for a Locus Award for best Fantasy novel and his story “Camera Obscura” was adapted for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

   One flaw built into the Gothic is that with all the build up too often the payoff is a disappointment. All that portent and heavy breathing, those sideways looks, the sudden breeze and cold, the faint noise that can’t be explained, shadows, and things barely perceived can add up to nothing much and disappear with a little light and a fresh breeze off the sea in lesser hands, or descend into overdone melodrama and sturm un drang. Many a perfectly good Gothic falls apart as the cobwebs get blown too conveniently away and the reader is left with a resounding, “so what?”.

   John Dickson Carr borrowed the trappings heavily in his detective novels, usually avoiding the pitfalls and often exceeding expectations, while writers like Helen McCloy (Through a Glass Darkly and Mister Splitfoot), Hake Talbot (Rim of the Pit), and William Lindsey Gresham (Nightmare Alley) teased the edges of the genre. Wilson Tucker’s Warlock even managed to work the spy novel into the mix, but the classic gothic take was usually eschewed for something else, the detective story, the horror novel, or science fiction.

   Not Copper, and not Fleers. The elements ratchet up nicely without boiling over, the tension gathering, the mystery deepening, and the ending well choreographed replete with logical explanation, a death trap worthy of Dick Tracy, and of course the inevitable treasure of the Fleers. Elements of the detective novel and horror may play at the edges, Hammond does some good detective work, but they are not the main thrust of the tale.

   That is pure Gothic. This would be silliness in a fair play detective story. In a true Gothic it is par for the course.

   Originality isn’t really what we are looking for in these kinds of entertainment. It’s the comfort of the familiar played out with intelligence and an eye to teasing our expectations while never disappointing them, here with the Creeping Man seen haunting the battlements and a giant gorilla in a private zoo as well as bodies hanging strangled in closets as Hammond investigates and begins to uncover very real motives for murder and the methods of committing them it all builds to what Copper himself called a Grand Guignol finale.

   And this time the guy gets the house and the girl and a career.

   About time too.

GLENN M. BARNS – Murder Is a Gamble. Jonathan Marks #1. Phoenix Press, hardcover, 1952. Bestseller Mystery B162, digest paperback, 1954?

   Jonny Marks of the Watson Agency is hired as a bodyguard for a slightly phoney but still likable Colonel Smallwood, who turns out to be a small-time card sharp and con-man with one last important deal in the works. Marks does save him from a beating by some mobsters om a nightclub but not from a “suicide” on a sealed-off floor of his hotel.

   A perfectly ordinary tale on which every other character is a ninny; otherwise no major offenses. The “locked room” mystery is nothing to startle, but it works neatly enough to be noted. Barns might have made something more out of this [had he given more editorial assistance than I am sure Phoenix Press was willing or able to provide].

Rating: C

Bibliographic Update: This was the first of eight mystery novels written by Glenn Barns. There was a second case recorded for PI Jonathan Marks, that being Murder Is Insane (Lippincott, 1956).

CHARLES WILLEFORD – Cockfighter. Chicago Paperback House, paperback, 1962. Crown, hardcover (slightly revised), 1972. Avon, paperback, movie tie-in, 1974. Black Lizard, paperback, 1987.

   If you’re still looking for the great American novel, this could be it.

   George Washington wrote a letter to General Lafayette saying: “It will be worth coming back to the United States, if only to be present at an election and a cocking main at which is displayed a spirit of anarchy and confusion, which no countryman of yours can understand.” One may want to remember this point, which we may be in danger of forgetting.

   Frank Mansfield is a cockfighter. He’s 32 and single. Cockfighting is his life. And his life’s goal is to win the Cockfighter of the Year award. He’s taken a vow of silence and will not speak again until and unless he wins the award.

   The story is of the single-minded purpose and commitment of a man alone in the world but for the signal pursuit that he himself has freely chosen and the cockfighting community in which he thrives.

   It’s a story of honesty, brutality and commitment. There are four things we can learn from a rooster: To fight, to get up early, to eat with your family, and to protect your spouse when she gets into trouble. Frank Mansfield has no spouse or family. But two out of four ain’t bad.

   The honesty of the sport is impeccable as a peck of pecking peckers. A cock couldn’t throw a fight even if it knew how.

   I’d last read this book in the mid-90’s and considered it a favorite. But sometimes it’s good to see if my assessments of yore hold true. And as old Heraclitius pointed out ‘you can’t step in the same river twice’ because you’ve changed and so has the river.

   Well, if I loved the book before I love it even more now. This book is as good as it gets. It’s about cockfighting, sure. But more than that it’s about life, about commitment to something, never mind what the hell it is. And fighting for it with everything you’ve got, risking everything. Like Camus said, “A reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.”

         —-

   In 1974 was made into a movie starring Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, and Charles Willeford. Directed by Monte Hellman (who also made the terrific Two-Lane Blacktop starring Dennis Wilson and James Taylor).

            https://tubitv.com/movies/466939/cockfighter

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Spurious Spinster. Perry Mason #64. William Morrow, hardcover, 1961. Pocket #4515, paperback, 1963. Reprinted many times since.

   This was one of Anthony Boucher’s favorite late Masons, but I found little to praise in it except for Gardner’s never-failing story-telling pace and drive.

   The plot has to do with corporation intrigue over a non-productive mine, a shoebox full of dubious cash, the impersonation of the company’s irascible female owner and, as if you hadn’t guessed, a murder.

   But all the story elements remain chaotic and incredible by the fadeout, and even the courtroom sequence is weak, with Mason given little chance to shine. Gardner must have dictated this adventure on an off day.

ANTHONY PRICE – Other Paths to Glory.  Dr. David Audley #5. Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1974. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1975. Mysterious Press, US, paperback, 1987

   When Anthony Price is on form he really. does write a.very good novel of espionage and intrigue – and in this one he’s quite definitely on form. The particularly intriguing puzzle he poses is why should anyone in 1974 want to kill off those few remaining people with expert knowledge about a little known first War battle waged in 1916.

   One of the intended victims is young military historian Paul Mitchell, but by sheer luck he survives,·and is at once recruited to find the reasons by Dr. David Audley, that devious agent for the Defence Ministry. The action (and the intrigue) rattle along at a good old pace, and the solution is quite feasible. A book I found myself stealing time to read.

S. A. DUNPHY – Bring Her Home. Boyle and Keneally #1. Bookouture. softcover, 2021. Setting: Contemporary Ireland.

First Sentence: I left his body where I knew it would be found, nestled gently in the tidal mud of the Thames in the shadow of the Tate Modern in Southwark.

   A man known only by the Celtic rune Uruz murders the former professional and personal partner of criminal behaviorist Jessie Boyle and is now stalking her. After retiring from London’s Metropolitan Police, Jessie returns home to Ireland. Her friend, Dawn Wilson, newly appointed Police Commissioner of Ireland, calls in an old debt.

   Penelope (Penny) O’Dwyerhe, the daughter of Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister) is gone. The kidnapper threatens to kill her unless the police find her first. They have twelve days. Serial killer Frederick Morgan, imprisoned for life, claims he has the information needed to save Penny, but Jessie is the only one with whom he will negotiate. As Boyle and her team investigate, they learn there is much more to Penny than first thought, and that she is not the only woman who has gone missing.

   There are a lot of threads and characters in this story. There is much to really like, and Dunphy’s voice galvanizes the reader to continue reading. But there are several things which, upon reflection, cause one to pause.

   The book, in some ways, feels introductory, a prologue to the upcoming series while clearly being a story in and of itself. One is introduced to every character, including the secondary ones, with each given a separate chapter detailing their background. As opposed to interfering with the story, the characters are brought to life with even the bad guys given full dimensionality and shades of gray. However, one may wonder at the necessity of this and how many of these characters will reappear in the future.

   The principal police characters: Jessie Boyle, Detective Seamus Keneally, genealogist and IT tech Terri Kehoe, and Dawn Wilson are an interesting, diverse team, each with strengths and weaknesses. They contrast and complement each other and are characters one wants to know. When at risk, the tension is palpable as one doesn’t want any harm to come to them.

   The story includes quite a bit of ancient folklore and references to Celtic artifacts. While germane to the plot, this slows the pace and can lead to confusion with the number of characters who spiral off the person who fashions himself after the folklore character of Uruz. One already knows he will be back.

   Bring Her Home is an exciting read with great characters, occasional good humor, and powerful suspense. The book would have benefited from stronger editing. Even with a satisfactory ending, once one thinks about it, it causes curiosity about the fate of several characters. Book two awaits. It will be interesting to see how things progress.

Rating: Good.