NGAIO MARSH – Spinsters in Jeopardy

St. Martin’s, paperback reprint; 1st printing, November 1998. First edition (UK): Collins Crime Club, 1954. First edition (US): Little, Brown & Co., 1953. Digest paperback: Mercury Press, 1955, as The Bride of Death (abridged). Other paperback reprints: Berkley, 1961, and Jove, 1980, each with several followup printings.

   Among the list of mystery authors who are considered as being among the best at what they did or currently do, Ngaio Marsh is the one I’ve perhaps most neglected. Before reading Spinsters in Jeopardy over these past few evenings, I have to confess that I’d read no more than two of her mystery novels, totaling 32 in all, not a very high percentage. In all 32 of her mysteries was Inspector (later Superintendent) Roderick Alleyn, whose career at Scotland Yard lasted from 1934 (A Man Lay Dead) to 1982 (Light Thickens), quite a long time in anyone’s book.

   This particular edition, the one recently published by St. Martin’s, was part of quite a publishing feat, and they should be commended for it. Back in the late 90s, St. Martin’s put out all 32 novels with uniform covers and in chronological order. (If only someone would do they same for other authors I (or you) could think of, but as far as I’m concerned, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books come to mind first, now that Bantam seems to have let them drop.)

   But to return to Ngaio Marsh and me, I don’t know why it is that I’ve not read her work any more often than I have. I’ve read a lot of Agatha Christie, for example, and Marsh seems to have been Christie with personality, someone may have said, or if they didn’t, maybe they should have. For me, Marsh has been one of those authors whose work has always been available, so perhaps there hasn’t been any urgency in picking one of her books up to read.

   Unfortunately, Spinsters in Jeopardy wasn’t the first one I should have picked up to read in quite a while, since I don’t believe that it’s in any way typical of Marsh’s other mysteries. It’s a thriller, first of all, and not a detective story, even though Inspector Alleyn is in it, and so’s his wife, the former Agatha Troy, the famous artist he’d met and wooed in previous adventures, along with their precocious six-year-old son Ricky.

   All three are in France, in part on a vacation trip to meet Troy’s cousin, whom she’s never met; and in part business, as Alleyn has been assigned an undercover liaison job with the French authorities trying to crack down on a narcotics gang operating in the very same area.

   A bad idea — using his family as cover on a criminal assignment, that is. Alleyn is required to assist on an emrgency appendectomy operation for a woman who had been on the same train they were on, in the heart of the enemy’s strong stronghold, the Château de la Chévre d’Argent. Ricky is kidnapped and luckily found, but a book in which not only drugs but a vicious religio-erotic racket is the central focus is probably not a book for a young lad to be in anyway.

   Ngaio Marsh does manage to make the scenes in which Ricky appears as light-hearted as possible, mitigating against that particular discomfort, but the rest of the occult-based plot, with its mystical (and apparently) deadly rituals, is not one that’s designed to lead to any sense of ease on the reader’s part. Not that there’s anything wrong with mystical rituals, of course, but there didn’t seem to be any need to witness them as far as Alleyn does, which is to nearly their conclusion. Not in a detective mystery, which once again I remind you, this one was not, except at the very end, when it was all but too late.

   As a thriller, there are simply too many coincidences to contemplate, and the villains, as successful as they are, are simply too dumb to survive, especially once Alleyn’s ire is fully aroused and he’s well on their trail. All in all, although not without some interest, this is not one of Marsh’s best books, I’m sure.

VICTORIA LAURIE – Crime Seen.

Obsidian; paperback original. First printing, September 2007.

   This is the 5th in this series of “Psychic Eye” mysteries, all featuring Abby Cooper, a professional psychic who dabbles in solving mysteries. For the record, here’s the list:

      Psychic Eye Mysteries:

1. Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye (Signet, December 2004)
2. Better Read Than Dead (Signet, June 2005)
3. A Vision of Murder (Signet, December 2005)
4. Killer Insight (Signet, September 2006)
5. Crime Seen (Obsidian, September 2007)
6. Death Perception (Obsidian, September 2008)

   … a list of mysteries written by Victoria Laurie which has recently been expanded by a new series of …

      Ghost Hunter Mysteries:

1. What’s a Ghoul to Do? (Signet, April 2007)
2. Demons Are a Ghoul’s Best Friend (Signet, March 2008)

   … in which M. J. Holliday and her partner Gilley are, as advertised, ghostbusters who also come across mysteries to solve in the course of their daily routine.

   I suppose I sound slightly dismissive there, and if I did, I probably meant it, just a little. Psychic detectives have been around a long time — since the days of Weird Tales and Seabury Quinn’s detective Jules de Grandin, and probably even before that.

   The fact is, in spite of what you may have seen or heard about on TV, according to Wikipedia, “no psychic detective has ever been praised or given official recognition by the F.B.I. or US national news for solving a crime, preventing a crime, or finding a kidnap victim or corpse.”

   And another fact is — or is this just my opinion? — solving crimes by psychic means takes all of the fun out of solving mystery puzzlers. Well, OK. It’s just my opinion.

   What Abby Cooper has the ability to do is to wave her hand over her FBI boy friend’s “closed case” files, get pictures from them in her mind and give him hints as to who the culprit is or how he got away with it. Or she can accompany her PI girl friend to interview suspects and give her a kick under the table when she know the suspect is lying.

   In Crime Seen she helps Dutch — that’s her boy friend — catch Dutch’s new partner’s former partner’s killer. Or rather, what she’s asked to do is to help prevent the confessed killer from getting parole. In doing so, she risks her life at least once, when a enemy Hummer runs her and her PI friend Candice off the road into a deep ravine.

   And she doesn’t tell Dutch. There are some issues involved. Go figure. The characters are otherwise pleasant enough, and the psychic abilities just unreliable enough, that the book is easy and — in spite of my statement above — fun to read. Just don’t take it too seriously, and my own personal pre-judgments aside, you’ll see why this is a popular series that’s doing well.

CATCH ME A SPY – George Marton and Tibor Méray.

Popular Library; paperback reprint, no date stated, but stated elsewhere to be 1971. Hardcover edition: W. H. Allen, UK, hc, 1971; Harper & Row, US, hc,1969.

   I reviewed the movie based on this book way back in May of last year, then followed it up soon afterward with a short profile of the first of its two authors, George Marton.

   I mentioned then that it took me by surprise that the story was played for fun, so I wasn’t sure if the book was going to be a comedy as well. I played it cautiously as I read, waiting to see what would happen, and – I’ll tell you in a minute.

   Here’s a short recap of the story itself. A young and rather naive English girl named Jennifer, the niece of a famous chemist, is wooed and romanced by a chap named Fenton who sweeps her off her feet and takes her off to a honeymoon in – Bulgaria. Where on their wedding night, before their marriage is consummated, he is whisked off to a Moscow prison.

   Returning eventually – and disconsolately – to London, Jennifer decides on a plan: to find a spy on the other side operating in England whom she can capture and use in a swap to gain her husband back.

   So here is where the humor comes in. I did say that Jennifer is naive, didn’t I? So unsophisticated in the world that she does not even know that Hungary does not have a navy, much less a naval attache. Is there a chance in the world that such a charming young woman – played by Marlène Jobert in the movie – would have a chance in the world at completing such a mission? It is but to laugh, although gently.

   Whereas in the movie the comedy is much more physical, although again (if this makes sense) in a gentle way. The spy that Jennifer does meet – played by Kirk Douglas in the movie – also appears much earlier on in the film, a good choice that, as it gets the major players face to face quite a bit earlier.

   The endings are also not quite the same, but at least they were built on the same basic premise, which of course is one that I cannot reveal. At only 174 pages of medium-sized type, the book is too slender to have even been a major player in the world of fictional spy fiction, mildly complex and no more. A pleasant diversion, that’s all, and no less.

   Plus – and I’m sure it’s a huge bonus in some collectors’ minds – a really spiffy cover by Robert McGinnis, which I imagine you’ve guessed – and admired – already.

WADE MILLER – Killer’s Choice.

Signet 771; paperback reprint. First printing, February 1950. Second printing, Signet 1235, 1955. Fourth printing, 1961. Originally published as Devil on Two Sticks by Farrar, Straus & Co., Inc. Appeared earlier in Famous Detective magazine, November 1949. Trade paperback: Stark House, June 2008 (paired with The Killer, Gold Medal, 1951).

   In case you were wondering, I have no information about the third Signet printing. It may have been a Canadian printing. But between 1961, when the fourth printing appeared, and the forthcoming edition from Stark House, that’s over 45 years that the book was out of print. (At least it’s coming back. There are many, many books that are over 45 years old and will never see print again, and I don’t mean only hardboiled novels like Killer’s Choice.)

   If you’d like to read more about the writing pair of Robert Wade and Bill Miller, then I can send you to no better place than the original Mystery*File website, where you can find an overview of their career, many reviews of their work, a partial bibliography, and an interview with Mr. Wade conducted by Ed Lynskey back in 2004.

   Killer’s Choice (or Devil on Two Sticks, if you prefer) is not one of Wade Miller’s stories of private eye Max Thursday, which I can highly recommend to you, if you are a private eye fan, and even if you’re not. It’s instead a tough, hard-as-nails story of a mobster named Steve Beck, or rather a head mobster’s right hand man, or enforcer, if you will.

   The setting is San Diego, and when word gets to Beck’s boss, a fellow by the name of Pat Garland, that the state Attorney General’s office in Sacramento has a direct line into his operations, it’s Beck’s job to find the insider and plug the leak, and fast. It’s like a detective story in reverse, with a list of suspects from which to pick the Good Guy, not the other way around.

   Complicating matters is that Beck is falling in love with the daughter of one of his possible choices, a lawyer by the name of Everett. Marcy is slim, young and not as sophisticated as she thinks she is, and a far cry from Beck’s usual taste in women. One more problem: Marcy seems to favor one of Beck’s other suspects more than she does him. Jealousy is an ugly monster.

   There is at least one additional surprise in store for the reader, which I won’t even begin to hint at, other than what I’ve just said. Surprisingly, though, and not the surprise I just alluded to, is that there is not a lot of action in this novel of the rackets. A lot of talk – a lot of threats, some subtle, some not – most of it very intelligent, and you have to read every word behind what everyone says, if you know what I mean.

   I was reminded more of Dashiell Hammett more than I was Raymond Chandler while reading Killer’s Choice. Robert Wade mentions both as influences in the Lynskey interview, along with Alfred Hitchcock, and I can see the latter as well. The book would have made a terrific movie back around 1950, and in the right hands, it still would today.

   But I mention Hammett in the following sense. We follow the story’s progress through Steve Beck, although he does not tell the story himself. We know what he says and what we sees, but we do not always know what he’s thinking, and for a hoodlum, he thinks a lot. And it also turns out that he’s not quite as capable as he has always led himself to believe, and it comes as quite a shock when he discovers this – especially to him.

   It’s also, believe it or not, a fair play story of detective novel also, or very nearly so. The clues are there when you look back, but even so, they’re still rather subtle, and it’s no wonder I missed them the first time around. (I kick myself like this rather often, you understand.)

   As I hope I’ve made clear, this is not your usual Mike Hammer kind of yarn, to pick a rather obvious author to use in comparison, but at the time the books of both of them came out, I think Wade Miller’s books did respectably well in the competition, and deservedly so. It’s good to see this one coming out again, there’s no doubt about that.

KATHERINE HALL PAGE – The Body in the Fjord.

Avon, paperback reprint; 1st printing, November 1998. Hardcover first edition: William Morrow, November 1997.

   False advertising. Although her name is not on the front cover, it’s on the back cover and all over the first couple of blurb pages. This is supposedly a “Faith Fairchild” mystery, and it isn’t.

   Faith Fairchild, for those of you who may not know, is a minister’s wife who lives in Aleford MA (a small fictional village somewhere outside Boston), and she’s solved many a case in her day, but not this one. She appears in a few pages at the beginning, a couple in the middle at the other end of a telephone call, and a few more at the end. That’s all.

   Besides being a sleuth, a wife and a mother, and not necessarily in that order, Faith also has a catering business on the side. Working for her part-time is Pix Miller. What Pix knows about murder cases, she’s learned from Faith, but it hardly seems enough for her to tackle a book’s worth of adventure on her own – and it isn’t, I’m reluctantly sorry to say.

   Pix and her mother Ursula head for Norway in this book – which should hardly come as a surprise, given the title of the book – where they try to track down Kari, the granddaughter of Ursula’s best friend Marit. Kari and Eric, her boy friend, had been working as stewards on a guided tour through the land of the fjords for a group largely consisting of Americans.

   But Eric has been found dead, and Kari is missing. You might think it would be the utmost in audaciousness for two American women to come to a foreign country to do the job of the local police, and for the most part, you would be right. Mitigating this rather shaky basis of the story line is the picturesque quality of the tour they join, asking all kinds of questions as they go. Most of the central part of the book is as much a travelogue as it is a mystery, which is what we primarily signed up for, or at least I did, complete with recipes in the back.

   Possible reasons for Kari’s disappearance: she and Eric may have stumbled upon a stronghold of Nazi survivors or sympathisizers; or a gang of smugglers of Norwegian artifacts; or a cabal of industrial spies in the oil business; or the romance between the two young people may have ended in a lovers’ spat and that is that.

   Or any combination of the above. The police don’t make an appearance until page 167, leaving Pix and her mother the only ones on the scene asking questions and getting into serious trouble, especially Pix. It’s all a case of too much, which is quite a paradox, since it’s also a case of far too little.

   Here’s a list of all the Faith Fairchild books, expanding upon the entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. I’d recommend that you read one or another of this list instead, at least for the first one. If you’ve already read one, you’re probably way ahead of me on this.

LES ROBERTS – The Cleveland Local.

St. Martin’s; paperback reprint, December 1998. Hardcover first edition: St. Martin’s, November 1997. Trade paperback: Gray & Company Publishers, June 2005.

   I’ll begin, not at the beginning, or not really, with a list of all the mystery fiction that Les Roberts has written. This I put together from what I found in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, plus the bibliography that Mr. Roberts provides on his own website:

         The Saxon Series:     [A Los Angeles actor turned private eye.]

• An Infinite Number of Monkeys (St. Martin’s Press, 1987)
• Not Enough Horses (St. Martin’s Press, 1988)
• A Carrot for the Donkey (St. Martin’s Press, 1989)
• Snake Oil (St. Martin’s Press, 1990)
• Seeing the Elephant (St. Martin’s Press, 1992)
• The Lemon Chicken Jones (St. Martin’s Press, 1994)

         The Milan Jacovich Series:      [A private eye of Slovenian heritage based in Cleveland OH.]

• Pepper Pike (St. Martin’s Press, 1988)
• Full Cleveland (St. Martin’s Press, 1989)
• Deep Shaker (St. Martin’s Press, 1991)
• The Cleveland Connection (St. Martin’s Press, 1993)
• The Lake Effect (St. Martin’s Press, 1994)
• The Duke of Cleveland (St. Martin’s Press, 1995)
• Collision Bend (St. Martin’s Press, 1996)
• The Cleveland Local (St. Martin’s Press, 1997)
• A Shoot in Cleveland (St. Martin’s Press, 1998)
• The Best-Kept Secret (St. Martin’s Press, 1999)
• The Indian Sign (St. Martin’s Press, 2000)
• The Dutch (St. Martin’s Press, 2001)
• The Irish Sports Pages (St. Martin’s Press, 2002)

         Stand Alones:

• The Chinese Fire Drill (Five Star, 2001)
• The Scent of Spiced Oranges (Five Star, 2002)

   Here’s the real beginning, the first sentence of The Cleveland Local: “It was a black-and-white-movie morning when I opened my office, looked out the window down the Cuyahoga River, and saw the angry thunderheads hunkered over Lake Erie.”

   And here’s how the man pronounces his name: MY-lan YOCK-o-vitch, which he proudly makes sure the reader knows by page 3. Milan is an ex-football player and pretty much of a blue-collar kind of PI. He knows his way around every section of Cleveland, though, from the ethnic neighborhoods where he grew up to the ritzier parts of downtown and areas where the richer people live.

   In The Cleveland Local he’s hired to tackle a rather cold case, that of the shotgun murder of a young professional lawyer on the Caribbean island of San Carlos ten weeks earlier. Obviously there’s no way the Cleveland cops can get involved, so the case is steered Milan’s way. The dead man’s sister, also an attorney, is picking up the tab.

   What Milan can’t understand is why the dead man’s father, a noted well-to-do labor attorney, wants nothing to do with the investigation, making him wonder if the sister might be right, and that there’s a local connection, not just another botched robbery attempt in a foreign country and international resort area.

   And of course there is. That’s almost not the point. What Roberts is equally interested in, besides the mystery, is to illustrate why and how he loves the city of Cleveland, the ins and outs, the people who run it, mostly behind the scenes, in a fictional paean to the town, with a hint of melancholy for the older days. There’s also some introspective father-son stuff involved as well, without being overly blatant about it, plus a generous hint of a budding romance. (Milan is divorced from his two boys’ mother.)

   Milan’s technique consists of asking good common sense questions, persistence, a tough guy attitude (which at over 40 he can still back up) and persistence. An excellent combination, marred by the fact – and I dislike having to bring it up – by the relative weakness of the mystery. The motive for the murder seems too slight, the method too complicated, and people in retrospect don’t seem to have behaved in appropriate fashion to it.

   Can I say that and still say that I enjoyed the book? I can, and if you didn’t notice, I just did. I should also point out, as many of the reviewers on Amazon also do, that the ending is one that will have readers immediately reaching for the next book in the series, which – thanks to the bibliography above – would have been A Shoot in Cleveland. It looks like a must read to me.

JEAN HAGER – Sew Deadly.

Avon, paperback original. First printing, December 1998.

   At one time Jean Hager had three different mystery series going, but while I’m not 100% sure, there doesn’t seem to have been any books to appear from her in a while. She was born in 1932, so if she happens to be retired from writing, as seems likely, she’s had a very decent career to show for it.

   Ms. Hager wrote romances in the beginning, under both her own name and under several pseudonyms, before edging her way into mystery fiction by writing Gothics (as Amanda McAllister and Sara North) in the late 1970s. Her first true detective novel may have been The Grandfather Medicine in 1989 — but let’s do it the easier way. Here’s a complete list of all the books in each the three series that I mentioned just a minute ago, thanks primarily to Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

   Chief Mitchell Bushyhead: [half-Cherokee and head of the four-man police force in Bushkin, Oklahoma]

      The Grandfather Medicine. St. Martin’s, 1989.
      Nightwalker. St. Martin’s, 1990.
      Ghostland. St. Martin’s, 1992.
      The Fire Carrier. Mysterious Press, 1996.

      Masked Dancers. Mysterious Press, 1998.

   Molly Bearpaw: [a major crimes investigator and advocate for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma]

      Ravenmocker. Mysterious Press, 1992.
      The Redbird’s Cry. Mysterious Press, 1994.
      Seven Black Stones. Mysterious Press, 1995.

      The Spirit Caller. Mysterious Press, 1997.

   Tess Darcy: [owner of the Iris House, a bed-and-breakfast in Victoria Springs, Missouri]

      Blooming Murder. Avon, pb, 1994.
      Dead and Buried. Avon, pb, 1995.
      Death on the Drunkard’s Path. Avon, pb, 1996.
      The Last Noel. Avon, pb, 1997.
      Sew Deadly. Avon, pb, 1998.
      Weigh Dead. Avon, pb, 1999.
      Bride and Doom. Avon, pb, 2000.

   Relative to the Tess Darcy books, there’s a long online interview with Jean Hager about the series at http://bandb.about.com/library/weekly/aa060898.htm.

   Any mystery novel with an amateur female detective, especially one who operates a bed-and-breakfast establishment, is going to be called a “cozy,” no matter that two people are murdered in it, and more or less on stage rather than off, one of them in fairly gruesome fashion. (While sometimes I wonder exactly how cozy “cozies” really are, I’m not going to argue, or least not here.)

   Probably because a B&B can’t have too many murders take place in it and stay in business, the primary setting of Sew Deadly has shifted by this time, the 5th book in the series, to the local seniors’ center, where Tess volunteers during the winter months, with no reservations in sight until March.

   The first victim comes as no surprise. It is a meddlesome little old lady who lives in near poverty and seems to delight in finding various ways of annoying her fellow seniors, even to the extent of a little minor blackmail, just for fun. (The second to die is more of a shocker, as I mentioned above, both as to who the victim is and the manner of death.)

   It does mean that there are plenty of good suspects, including the dead woman’s nephew and his supposed wife, who just happen to be visiting to make sure he’s remembered in her will, for whatever small amount it might be. And because Jean Hager as an author is quite good as describing what might have been totally stereotypical regulars to the senior center, the detective work is for the most part very well done — and in fact the emphasis is on the detective work, and not Tess’s love life, which seems to be moving well enough along so as not to cause anybody any concern.

   Perhaps you noticed that I used the phrase “for the most part.” The killer is fairly obvious to spot, but while there are lots of clues planted along the way, some of them leading to dead ends, of course, the clincher is not discovered until page 202 (of a 210 page book), meaning that Tess knows for sure only a fraction of a moment before the reader does.

   If the reader has been paying attention, that is. The end result is an “almost but not quite” fair play detective story, but in some cases, like this one, the “almost” is almost good enough.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Fan-Dancer’s Horse.

Detective Book Club; hardcover 3-in-1 reprint, July 1947. Hardcover first edition: William Morrow & Co., 1947. Paperback reprints: Pocket 886, 1952 (with many additional printings); Ballantine, October 1992.

   Start out with a serious automobile incident that leaves one car on its side in a ditch. When Perry Mason and his secretary Della Street observe the accident, they (a) get the occupant of the car to safety and (b) check out the trunk to find two very fine ostrich-plume feathers and a pair of white dancing slippers. Ever think of writing a mystery yourself? What sort of story could you come up with from here?

   Probably not one as complicated and far-fetched as this one. Don’t even think of trying to compete with a master in his prime. More than one fan-dancer is involved. There are two, and one is using the name of the other. One has a horse — hence the title — and it seems to have disappeared. It may have been wounded, or it may have a bullet in its saddle, and in any case it’s missing.

   When the husband of the one with the horse, the real Lois Felton, is murdered, a timetable of the people visiting his room that night takes up nearly half a page. Plus of course the fact that one fan-dancer looks a lot like the other, and which one is telling the truth about her story? It also makes for some great courtroom theatrics, and of course isn’t that what you read a Perry Mason novel for? (If you were to tell me that you read a Perry Mason novel for the characters, I would be more than amazed. I would be dumbfounded.)

   It think it all fits together. I was puzzled, though, as to how Perry knew on page 27 that the fan-dancer he saw in the previous chapter was a ringer, and I still am. An explanation never turned up, and I kept waiting for one. And that’s what kept me entirely off-balance the rest of the story, and that’s why I never would have figured out who did it on my own. That’s my excuse, anyhow, and I’m sticking to it!

[UPDATE] 03-08-08. If you’ve been paying attention, you should have been expecting this review, right? Well, here it is. But to maintain a semblance of the unexpected, what you won’t see here is the cover of that Detective Book Club volume for the third time, and you’re welcome.

   If I may, however, let me introduce a plug for those old 3-in-1 one books. If you like to read vintage detective fiction but you’re on a limited budget, then you can still pick them up cheaply on eBay, especially in bulk. They do seem to be disappearing from bookshops. Once up a time you could find at least a shelf full of them in every used book store you went into. No more. Maybe the store owners have gotten tired of clearing the dust off of them, or they’ve gotten confused with multi-book Readers Digest editions, and into the landfill they went.

   As for Erle Stanley Gardner, I’ve probably mentioned this before, but the Perry Mason novels were the first mysteries I cam across, once I was allowed into the grown-up section behind the librarians’ desk, along with a Tommy Hambledon tale or two. Once found, I was hooked. I think I read three Mason’s in the first day, but I’m probably exaggerating there.

   Some 50 years later, I’m afraid I’m seeing the flaws in the Gardner oeuvre. Not in the lack of personal lives for the primary players, but in the logic behind their thinking. I didn’t notice the gaps in the plots then, but I’m beginning to now, more and more, as I attempt to revisit my past.

MARTHA GRIMES – The Case Has Altered.

Onyx; paperback reprint, November 1998. Hardcover first edition: Henry Holt & Co., October 1997.

   Yes, in case you were wondering, and I realize that you probably weren’t, there are authors whose mystery fiction just doesn’t — how shall I say this? — work for me. Take Martha Grimes, for example. For all of her popularity — she has to be, since this is the 14th of 20 cases of Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury that she’s written about, along with four adventures of 12-year-old Emma Graham (about whom I otherwise know nothing at all) and a small assortment of stand-alone’s — I’ve never been able to finish one before, and believe me, I’ve tried. In fact, if you really must know, I nearly quit on this one after exactly 73 pages in.

   I know the number of pages because that’s when I stopped and wrote a first version of this review — and by the time the next morning had rolled around, I’d thought better of it. At least I got it out of my system.

   I almost never quit on a book. I figure that when the going gets tough, it’s just me, and in all fairness, I can’t write a review of a book I hadn’t finished, now could I? So with The Case Has Altered (the name of an English pub, as usual) firmly back in hand, I continued on to the end, and all in all, I’m glad I did.

   But here’s the crux of the problem. There is a knack that the writer of a series of detective stories, all with the same leading characters, has to have, or so it seems to me. And that’s to introduce these people clearly and eloquently to the reader who’s starting with the book he or she has in her hand so that at least they have an idea of which way is up and where that part of the story is going.

   This is especially true, as it is in The Case Has Altered, when a good part of the story has to do with the relationships between two and maybe three of the characters, and it’s crucial to know exactly what they are. At the same time, of course, you’ve got to do it without boring to tears the ones who’ve been along for the ride since book one. (A cover image of that very same book one is shown below, left.)

   Ms. Grimes, deliberately, one supposes — how else can one explain it? — goes for the non-boring approach, and the first-time reader is caught flat-footed and totally lost, caught up as it were in the middle of the second act when they’ve only just opened the book. Superintendent Jury seems to be in love with Lady Jennifer Kennington, and so’s his good friend Melrose Plant. Is there a competition there? Or was there? It is not clear, though it does become clearer — and even so, is this a relatively new love, or a long-abiding one?

   And when Jennifer appears to be the number one suspect in a double killing in the Fens of Lincolnshire county, it is not all clear why Jury does not simply stop by and ask her. What’s up with this double killing, he might ask her, but perhaps less directly. No, he does not. There are telephones in this otherwise nearly timeless world in which Jury and his friends live, but are they used in the way that they’re intended to be used? No.

   But perhaps he does not want to know the answer, or perhaps she is not so much in love with him as he is with her, or maybe neither loves each other very much at all, only an attraction perhaps? We the reader have no clue, at least the first time reader, for apparently the relationship has come up before, or maybe it hasn’t, because I don’t know, not having read any of the earlier ones.

   Nor was I wrong in thinking that a couple of chapters are missing, because a reviewer on the Amazon website said the very same thing: when did Melrose Plant’s search for Jenny take place, since it came up later and had never been mentioned before?

   There are, I hasten to add, some absolutely wonderful characters in this book. Absolutely wonderful, and the scenery of the Fens is described so beautifully (for what is essentially swamp land, that is) as to take you right there. Not that it’s likely I’ll ever go, and for now, I don’t need to. I’ve already been given a guided tour, and every part of the story that takes place there is exquisitely fascinating.

   Melrose Plant also does a smashing (and utterly amusing) job impersonating an antiques appraiser while snooping around on Jury’s behalf. It is not entirely clear how Jury has so much free time to do the investigating he does on his own, and he does, but talk to Jenny? No. Not until page 192, after she’s been arrested, do we have any idea of what her side of the story might be, nor is she telling him everything then.

   And my goodness. 427 pages. No wonder some of the twists and turns the plot takes don’t make any sense, or how some of the more minor characters are so poorly remembered (or not at all) when they are called upon to take their turn on the stage again.

   One more thing, if I may. If I could advise Ms. Grimes about her characters, I’d tell her leave Melrose’s outrageous Aunt Agatha, her lawsuits and her other antics out completely, or at the very least, trim her role way back. This portion of the tale, included for comedy relief perhaps, goes absolutely nowhere, and do I mean nowhere? Yes.

   Will I attempt another mystery written by Martha Grimes? Previous comments aside, I might surprise you and say yes, now that I know the characters, but in all likelihood, the honest answer is probably not, not right away. There are too many other books to read before undertaking another one that’ll require a whole week of evenings at bedtime to read, only to leave you with as many mixed feelings as this one does — the primary one being that of frustration.

   Nor am I the only one. Read the other reviews on Amazon. They’re all over the board, just as my reactions are. I have no doubt that they’re honest, from out-and-out praise to “dump this one in the garbage pail.” Me, I’m somewhere in between, as I’m sure you can tell.

A. B. CUNNINGHAM – Murder Without Weapons.

E. P. Dutton & Co.; hardcover first edition, 1949. No US paperback edition.

   The backwoods region of the Deer Lick country is pretty nearly an alien world to me, a city feller for most of my life. (The exact state doesn’t seem to have been mentioned, but presumably it’s somewhere in Appalachia.) Even the title is one that makes more sense to an outdoorsman, seeing as the murder occurs with the death of a young girl going over the edge of a logging chute, a drop of all of fifty feet, frightened by the snuffling sounds of an approaching bear. A nonexistent bear, as it turns out, since dogs are not so easily fooled.

   Sheriff Jess Roden is the reluctant detective — reluctant, that is, to claim there’d been murder done if in fact there hadn’t. To the trained, inquisitive mind of the inveterate mystery reader, there’s a surprising lack of questions asked, both by those who find the body and by her family, but in many ways the roles of country folks are as fixed, as categorized, as those of us city people, and things do work out a little more slowly and in their own way.

   Roden does do a fine, though irrelevant, piece of detective work to impress an inquiring reporter, but I was disappointed with the ending. All the traipsing around at the top of the cliff where the dirty work was done seems highly unlikely, and at best, it needs a bit more explanation. The killer was fairly obvious, but even now I’m not convinced I know why he did it.   [C]

[UPDATE] 03-05-08. This book is one that was published as part of Dutton’s Guilt Edged series of mysteries, and as such it’s included in the online article that Victor Berch, Bill Pronzini and I did on them.

   It’s still the only book by Cunningham that I’ve read, but I hope my comments didn’t suggest that such would always be the case. In fact, now that I’m (much) older, I have the feeling that I might enjoy one of Sheriff Jess Roden’s adventures even more than I did back then, in my youthful 30s.

   Most of his cases I’m more likely to have in paperback. Many of them were published as Dell mapbacks, others as digest-sized softcovers from Detective Novel Classics and so on. None are particularly collectable — after all Jess Roden is not a detective that anybody brings up in conversation very often today — so unless you want them in Fine or better condition, they should be relatively easy to find.

   And oh, one last thing. I didn’t know then, and apparently in the book it was never stated or made clear, but Deer Lick is in Kentucky. Not only that, but it’s a real town, just up the road from Lewisburg. The population today is about 1400.

   Which leads me to a question. Is there a smaller town in the US with as many mysteries taking place in the immediately surrounding area as Deer Lick? According to Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, there were 20 of them, plus one Roden adventure set in Texas, all published by Dutton: