LIBBIE BLOCK – Bedeviled. Detective Book Club; hardcover 3-in-1 reprint, July 1947. Hardcover first edition: Doubleday Crime Club, 1947. Paperback reprint: Dell 344 (mapback edition), 1949.

   Surprisingly, this is the only mystery novel that Libbie Block ever wrote — a one-hit wonder, and it is a doozey. Right from the first page. Right from the first sentence: “I am Elizabeth, and I want to kill a woman named Coca Himbert.”

   Elizabeth tells most of the story herself, and it’s like being inside a dis-eased mind, as she slowly becomes aware that her husband, a struggling young classical composer, is being stolen away from her by the maestro conductor’s young wife (this is a recurring pattern) and murder becomes her only solution, an obsession she cannot remove from her mind.

   And when the woman is eventually murdered, Elizabeth confesses, even though she does not actually remember committing the crime. But the police have no other suspect. Did she do it, or can she find the person who did? It’s a mystery like no other I can recall.

   The ending is both crystal clear and morally ambiguous. It’s one that makes you sit back and think — not the sort that makes you trace back the plot to see if all the pieces fit — that’s the part that’s clear — and not the question at all. Definitely a book worth searching out, though probably not easily found.

   [UPDATE] 03-04-08.   I failed to follow through bibliographically when I wrote this, and the last part of the final sentence is incorrect, or at least it is if all you?d like is a copy to read. Copies of the Dell mapback, while collectible, are quite plentiful. You can find many offered for sale online even as I speak. Nor are the hardcover editions all that difficult to come by, but to say something on my own behalf, this review was written before it had become known how common some previously “hard to find” books really were.

   I was correct in saying that this is the only mystery novel that Libbie Block wrote, but she wrote at least four other novels. One of them, Wild Calendar, was the basis for a major Hollywood production, Caught (1949) with James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes and Robert Ryan. Mostly she seems to have done short fiction, with loads of stories appearing as early as 1934 in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal. She died in 1972.

   In any case, I hope I made it clear that I liked Bedeviled, the one mystery novel she did do. I’m going to have to read it again. I made it sound noirish, which may or may not be true, and I’d like to find out. And even more than that, I don’t remember the ending, and I made that sound rather interesting too.

   (It’s funny, but I seldom remember endings, unless it?s something totally Ackroydian in nature. It’s a good thing, I guess, because it allows me to re-read a book with as much pleasure as it did the first time. When it’s not such a good thing, it shows up at times like now. I feel as though I’m typing without really knowing what I’m talking about. Awkward? Yes.)

MARY JO ADAMSON – The Blazing Tree.

Signet, paperback original; first printing, June 2000.

   Adamson, whose previous mysteries featured Lt. Balthazar Marten and were set in present day Puerto Rico, starts a new series with this book. Taking place in 19th century New England, The Blazing Tree is the first case tackled (and solved) by Boston police reporter Michael Merrick.

   Merrick, at one time a serious opium-eater, has been rehabilitated and given his previous position by an unknown benefactor. The newspaper’s owner, Jasper Quincey, will not say who that good soul is, but he gives Merrick a new assignment: to become his eyes and ears and find out who is responsible for a number of fires that have been set near and around Hancock, a Shaker village somewhere in western Massachusetts. One of these fires, not accidental, has now caused a fatality. Perhaps murder was not what was intended, but a death it is all the same.

   Masquerading as a new member, Merrick joins the community of Shakers and his investigation begins — and which is where the mystery comes to a near dead stop. Or at the least, it proceeds in only fits and starts. For history buffs, there is a goodly amount of background to be filled in, all very interesting, but that’s not the real problem.

   Which is this: there is simply too much story involved. One of the Shakers in Hancock is the same man who was the partner of Merrick’s father, and who may have cheated his mother out of his share of the business. The man’s son is tormented by a strange affliction now known as Tourette’s syndrome. Another boy is lame and unable to speak, traumatized by some earlier accident or bad treatment. And there is Sister Esther, with whom Michael soon finds himself falling in love. This causes problems, as celibacy is one of the main tenets of the Shaker religion.

   So it is no wonder that the mystery falters and stutters. Adamson has very good intentions, but in spite of a semi-uplifting ending — the mystery is solved, given some of Quincey’s eventual input, but not all of Michael’s problems — the tale doesn’t quite get out of second gear.

   As an aside to more devoted detective fiction fans, the resemblance to Nero Wolfe and his second-in-command, Archie Goodwin, is probably quite intentional.

          — May 2000. This review first appeared in The Historical Novels Review. It has been revised and expanded since then.

[UPDATE] 03-03-08.    Using Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV as a guide, here’s a complete list of all of Ms. Adamson’s mystery fiction:

       ADAMSON, M(ARY) J(O).  1935- .

   According to the calendar, Adamson’s first series ended far too early. I’ve not read any of them, but from what I’ve read, Marten was a homicide detective for the NYPD who traveled to Puerto Rico and decided to stay.

      — The Balthazar Marten books:    [Setting: Puerto Rico.]

         * Not Till a Hot January. Bantam, 1987.
         * A February Face. Bantam, 1987.
         * Remember March. Bantam, 1988.
         * April When They Woo. Bantam, 1989.
         * May’s New Fangled Mirth. Bantam, 1989 .

   Until I checked online just now, I was positive there were more in Ms. Adamson’s second series than two, but that’s all there seems to have been:

      — The Michael Merrick books:    [Setting: Massachusetts, 1870s.]

         * The Blazing Tree. Signet, 2000.
         * The Elusive Voice. Signet, 2001.

MARNE DAVIS KELLOGG – Tramp.

Bantam; paperback reprint, October 1998. Hardcover first edition: Doubleday, 1997.

   This is the third of what has turned out to be a five-book series, one in which Lilly Bennett in essence tells us some of her memoirs, the stories being told in first person, you see. Coming in at the middle may have caused me some confusion, but in her home town of Bennett’s Fort, Wyoming, Lilly is both a U.S. Marshal and a private eye.

   I think some of the confusion was due to the act that I never really had the feeling that she was doing either job very well. Entertaining, yes, but organized, she is not. Lilly is soon to be 50, rather outspoken, and a member of a very wealthy family with her own helicopter that takes her from ranch to town. She also wears designer clothes, at least when she’s forced to.

   Dead – or at least the first victim – is a millionaire letch named Cyrus Vaile, who collapses and dies at his 90th birthday party. What he’d asked Lilly to do when he’d hired her just before the party was to find the $20 million which had disappeared from the endowment he’d bestowed upon the local Roundup Repertory Company earlier that year.

   While it takes a while to sort through all of Lilly’s back story – her family, friends, employees, and friendly rivals – the members of the theatrical company are easy to identify. Most of Kellogg’s descriptions are right on target.

   And once you get to know them, the recurring players are sketched in equally well. Besides the mystery and the detective work that has to be done, a goodly portion of the story’s 320 pages are devoted to the upcoming wedding of Lilly’s goddaughter – and Lilly’s ongoing angst over her good friend Jack’s failure to pop the question himself, no matter how compatible they may happen to be.

   As I suggested earlier, Lilly’s detective work takes second place to all of the other events in her life – or it seems to. Lilly does not tell the reader all, which is annoying at least once when it is the most obvious, and awkwardly so. But it also turns out that there was a clue – or indeed two – well-hidden and cleverly done, in the fashionable clutter of the life of one of the more interesting private eyes who lives in Wyoming I have ever read about. (No, really.)

   Additional comment: Following the Lilly Bennett series was Insatiable, a stand-alone mystery coming out in 2001. Since then Ms. Kellogg has switched to relating the misadventures of Kick Kewswick, a high-class jewelry thief turned sleuth, specializing in – jewel thefts. There are now four books in this series, which I will be giving a try one of these days. Check back later and see if I don’t.

ELLERY QUEEN – The Adventures of Ellery Queen.

Pocket 99; paperback reprint; 1st printing, March 1941. Earlier editions: Frederick A. Stokes, hardcover, November 1, 1934. Grosset & Dunlap, hardcover, July 1936. Mercury Bestseller Library #1, digest paperback (abridged), February 1940. Triangle, hardcover, June 1940.

      And of course the book has appeared from many another publisher over the years. I’ll add cover images for some of them along the way.

      This will be a long review. Over the years I’ve never known exactly how to review collections or anthologies of short stories. I have the need, I guess, to cover each story in detail. I don’t have knack that other reviewers have of keeping the review crisp and concise with a quick summing up of the book’s overall qualities.

      So this will be a long post. I read these stories at a pace of one or two an evening, then wrote up each one the next day in a diary sort of format. I may do some summarizing at the other end, but perhaps not. In any event, here are the comments that came to mind as I read them, with all story titles beginning with “Adventure of …”

    “The African Traveler.”   First publication. As the opening story, it’s based on an intriguing premise. Ellery has agreed teach a course in Applied Criminology at a local (unnamed) University. From the students who’ve applied, 63 in all, he’s chosen only two, John Burrows and Walter Crane, both with high academic achievements. Wheedling her own way into the course is the fawn-eyed Miss Ickthorpe, thanks to the fact that her father, Professor Ickthorpe, is the fellow on the faculty who inveigled Ellery into giving the course in the first place.

      Their first assignment, a field trip to the scene of a crime: a murdered man alone in his bedroom, where all four see the body still lying on the carpet. Nothing like getting your feet wet upon a moment’s notice!

      After seeing all of the clues, each of the three sleuths-in-training come up with a different solution – and choice of killer – from each of the others. And equally, of course, all three are wrong. Ellery probably has the inside edge, but I’d have graded the students almost as highly.

      I have one quibble about the wristwatch, a fact that Ellery tosses off lightly but doesn’t make sense to me, but of course (once again) having a case with three partial and one full solution like this is what EQ the author was at one time known best for.

      As far as I know, this is the only assignment the three students have had that was ever recorded. Too bad; they seemed to work well together, if not entirely successfully. (It may be my imagination, but Ellery seemed a little nonplussed at having an unexpected student to deal with, and primarily because she was female.)

    “The Hanging Acrobat.”    First published in Mystery magazine, May 1934, as “The Girl on the Trapeze.” The female half of a husband-and-wife pair of circus acrobats is found hanged to death inside of the theatre where the show still manages to go on the next day, as distraught as the male half, the rather slow-minded Hugo Brinkerhof, may be.

      In rather macabre fashion, the possible suspects – most of them other performers who had made time with the dead woman at one time or another – are interviewed at the scene of the crime before the coroner has come with the rope around her neck creaking and the body swaying gently back and forth. Erggh.

      The primary clue has to do with the kind of knot that was used. There was a bit of misdirection involved right about here, but at least in my case as a reader, it didn’t succeed. My eye stayed on the pea. The slightness of the detective work makes the overall tale appear all the more inadequate. Not one of EQ’s better efforts.

    “The One-Penny Black.”    First published in Great Detective magazine, April 1933. This is the oldest story in the collection, and one that at best I found only mildly enjoyable. It begins with old Uneker’s horrible German accent, as he tells Ellery about the recent happenings in his mid-Manhattan book shop, and ends with one of the more absurd endings to a detective story I’ve ever read.

      It turns out that a thief who stole a rare stamp from a neighboring store made his getaway from a neighboring store, and now someone is buying – or stealing – every copy of Europe in Chaos that Uneker had on the shelf at the time.

      Sgt. Velie doesn’t get it, but I think every reader will. That part’s fine, but Ellery’s subsequent deductions depends on a man’s snuff habit – an abominable inclination shared by Ellery’s father – and won’t mean a lot to modern readers. After registering this one mild complaint, I’ll return to the ending, wherein Ellery triumphantly discloses where the stamp is.

      I don’t believe that either half of the EQ writing partnership understands collectors at all, and therefore I don’t believe a word of it!

    “The Bearded Lady.”   First published in Mystery magazine, August 1934. One of the greatest strengths of the early EQ repertoire was the “dying message” story that helps define their approach to their 1930s detective fiction: the pure puzzle aspect. In this one, a dying artist (also a doctor, making both professions important, paints a beard on a woman in the painting he was last working on. Question: Which of several suspects was the message referring to?

      That there are only a few suspects in the house should have made it easier, but I found that keeping track of them difficult to do, forcing me to go back and re-read several passages several times. There is a huge to-do about estates and who gets what when who dies, and maybe it was late at night, because that was hard to follow also.

      But, and a big but, if you’re a fan of “dying message” detective puzzles, as contrived as they are – and this one I cheerfully admit is contrived – this is a good one.

    “The Three Lame Men.”   First published in Mystery magazine, April 1934. A kidnapped businessman, his ex-gang girl slash showgirl mistress dead of suffocation in the closet of her apartment, and the muddy footprints of three men – all of whom limped – and no means of getting the man out of the window.

      When you look back at the story, you realize that it’s a minor one – no one’s going to remember its solution as being remarkable or outlandish in any way – but it still works as a puzzle, thanks primarily to the nifty build-up and the rather outre trappings. Or if the word bizarre works for you, then use that instead.

       “The Invisible Lover.”   First published in Mystery magazine, September 1934. Ellery makes his way out of Manhattan for this one, to a small town upstate called Corsica NY (population 745), where a young man is in jail for killing the rival to his girl friend’s hand. The bullet that killed the man, a recent newcomer to the village, turns out to have fired by the young man’s gun.

      When Ellery meets Iris Scott he understands why the bees have been buzzing. She is Circe and Vesta in one, he thinks. It takes a trip to the graveyard and digging up the dead man’s body to prove the young man’s innocence, but mildly macabre settings like this have been occurring all book long, and it fits right in.

      It does the trick, too. A good story with a solution to match.

    “The Teakwood Case.”   First published in Mystery magazine, May 1933. I’m beginning to see a pattern here, and it’s hardly a surprising one. The earlier the story was written, the more rigid the format and presentation. As time went on, the EQ partners seemed more and more adept at avoiding stereotyped characterizations and letting Ellery’s detective work appear smoother and more skillful, instead of being forced.

      This is an early one, having to do with a dead man in an apartment apparently mistaken for its owner, his brother. Inspector Queen does his usual routine with the snuff, and the rest of the case revolves around a pair of cigarette cases, each of the brothers owning one of them. The killer comes as a fairly good surprise, but the telling is dull.

    “The Two-Headed Dog.”    First published in Mystery magazine, June 1934. Another aspect of these early EQ stories that I haven’t mentioned before is the oblique way they often begin, sometimes abruptly – in the sense that the story has already begun before the reader is invited in – but sometimes more conventionally, as this one does, standing out in comparison to some of the others which didn’t.

      Either way, I’ve discovered that the openings are tough for me to handle. They’ve often overwritten or overcharged – that’s the best word I’ve come up with so far to describe the phenomenon – and it takes a while for the story to settle down and begin to pull itself together and into shape.

      This is not a complaint. I chalk it up to sheer literary exuberance – the love of words and telling a tale. Reading their early stories now, I can sense the joy the EQ cousins must have had in writing them, and the overall effect has been contagious. My complaints, as you’ve been reading them, seem minor in comparison.

      This story, with its roots based on Greek mythology (Cerberus), is a good one. It’s a ghost story about a Cape Cod roadside inn with a haunted cabin for rent, and it’s up to Ellery to deduce why and by whom. Genuinely spooky, but perhaps too much so, as some questions are left unanswered in the denouement.

    “The Glass-Domed Clock.”    First published in Mystery League Magazine, Oct 1933. This particular “dying message” mystery story was written even before the previously mentioned one, “The Bearded Lady.” It also features what had been a standard ingredient in the half dozen or so Ellery Queen novels published up this time, a Challenge to the Reader…

      …with one difference. This one comes right at the beginning, reporting as it does that Ellery had stated: “Anyone with common sense could have solved that crime. It’s as basic as five minus four leaves one.”

      Didn’t do me a bit good. I didn’t read carefully enough. A murdered curio dealer leaves a trail from a broken glass-domed clock to a jewel whose position was far back in the case he took it from, making it obvious that the jewel was a key to the message as well as the clock, as there were many other clocks he could have chosen to break.

      This is a very finely – and fairly – plotted story. And yet, it’s also a little too fussy. And more than that, the EQ stories don’t seem to have aged well, and the significance of the clock is a case in point. In contrast, the Sherlock Holmes stories seem ready to last another century, and EQ’s don’t. Maybe Ellery needed a Watson to “uncomplicate” the stories he was in. (I know. My spell-checker knows that that’s not a word also.)

    “The Seven Black Cats.”   First published in Mystery magazine, October 1934, as “The Black Cats Vanished.” There is yet another young unattached woman whom Ellery meets in this story who is fascinated by either his appearance or his reputation in solving crimes, or both.

      Nothing seems to come of these brief, cursory attachments, as the lady in question never appears again in another story. While Ellery seems to welcome the attention, he also seems uneasy about it – until, that is, he’s solving the mystery at hand takes the full focus of his abilities.

      Take Miss Curleigh, for example. She’s the pet store owner who poses Ellery the problem in this tale: why a woman who hates cats keeps buying another one week after week, each almost identical to the one before.

      The woman’s name is Euphemia Tarkle, and she is also bedridden, an invalid. I haven’t been keeping note of unusual names in the previous stories, but this one is, well, unusual. Unusual enough for Ellery to be take notice of it himself, when he hears it.

      One other aspect of a common EQ trait occurs in this one, otherwise about average for the stories in this collection. The killer’s name – and yes, of course, there is one – is revealed until the last two words in the story.

    “The Mad Tea-Party.”   First appeared in Red Book Magazine, October 1934. EQ has been saving the best for last, although I liked the first one and quite a few others too. I’ve always liked mysteries that connect themselves in wacky ways with nursery rhymes and childrens’ stories, and this is among the best of them.

      The cousins must also enjoyed theatrics among their repertoire of mystery tricks, for for when Ellery manages to reach an isolated friend’s home in the hinterlands on Long Island – on a dark and rainy night, yet – he’s confronted with the other guests acting out their roles in a scene from Alice in Wonderland.

      And when the host mysteriously disappears during the night, and mysterious packages beginning arriving – all connected with Alice once again – it makes for one of the cleverest detective stories in the entire collection. Did I mention one scene in which the entire party is drugged and falls asleep for several hours? I should have.

      I don’t think that many people will catch on to what’s going on in this one. It’s a beauty.

      Whew. This review is long enough already, so don’t expect a long summary, after all. If you’re a fan of detective stories with a capital D, then either you’ve read this book already, or you should – and posthaste. If you don’t particularly care for the contrivances that make detective puzzles work, then you’re not probably reading what I’m saying right here, either.

ERIC HEATH – Murder of a Mystery Writer.Arcadia House, hardcover 1955. A rewritten version of Death Takes a Dive, Hillman-Curl, 1938.

   Whenever you come across a book that is — how shall I phrase this? — not as good as it could have been, how overwhelming the temptation is to start quoting large portions of it just to prove the point. Only a consideration of space unwisely used keeps my resistance high.

   Murder of a Mystery Writer begins with chapter one, as so many books do. Criminologist Dr. Wade Anthony, whose pet theory it is that motion pictures will soon be the crime investigator’s number one tool, takes his secretary-assistant Penny Lake along with him, hoping to find Mystery Lodge (about which more later) a quiet place of seclusion in which to write his latest book.

   Instead, when upon arrival they find themselves snowed in, they also find themselves interlopers to a branch meeting of the Mystery Writers’ Guild that is running concurrently. The mystery writers are past experts at slugging away at each other with a continuous flow of insults, but one of the other main topics of discussion is the possibility of a perfect crime being committed. At length, one of the more obnoxious of the authors is done away with. Could this have been a trial run?

   This may in fact sound pretty good, and without quoting, I can’t say that I’m conveying very well the fact that the first few chapters are pure, unadulterated corn. Mystery Lodge is a prime example of what some misguided entrepreneurs consider a topnotch tourist attraction. Bizarre is hardly the word for it. It’s filled with phony coffins, artificial corpses in the closets, snakes hanging from the chandeliers — all the brain child of the saturnine host, the greatest mystery reader in the world, Antrim Zarzour.

   Heath has his heart in the right place, however, and I have to admit, it’s a valiant effort. The murder is committed at dinner, with a gunshot ringing out as the lights go off, whereupon the weapon immediately disappears. There are lots of suspects and mysterious servants, a dying message, a tuning pipe, and a trapdoor or two.

   All very interesting, you might agree. But beyond the fact that Heath demonstrates no great skills as a writer, the fact remains that murder is not a game that has to be solved according only to the rules. If there was no such thing as mystery fiction, this story would be impossible — in more ways than (the obvious) one. [D]

[UPDATE] 02-28-08.   In my first paragraph, I mentioned the restrictions I placed upon myself in refusing to quote or paraphrase long passages. But when Bill Pronzini provided me with the cover image that graces this review, he reminded me that:

    “I not only have a copy in jacket (scan attached), I found it so atrocious when I read it back in the early 80s that I wrote a six-page dissection of its plot absurdities and accorded it Alternative Hall of Fame status in Gun in Cheek (Coward McCann, 1982). A classic!”

   How could I resist? I didn’t quote from Eric Heath’s book back in 1979, but I am going to quote Bill today, almost 30 years later. These paragraphs describe what immediately followed the murder that was committed at dinner, as mentioned above:

   For the other five and a half pages, you’re going to have to read Gun in Cheek for yourself. (You’re going to have trouble reading Heath’s book itself, though, if you’re interested in primary sources. Nary a copy is offered by anybody online.)

   And for those of you willing to investigate further, here is the complete entry for Eric Heath in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

HEATH, ERIC (1897?-1979?)
    Death Takes a Dive (Hillman-Curl, 1938, hc) [Cornelius Clift, Jr.; Los Angeles, CA]
    Murder in the Museum (Hillman-Curl, 1939, hc) [Cornelius Clift, Jr.; California]
    Murder of a Mystery Writer (Arcadia, 1955, hc) [Wade Anthony; California] Rewritten version of Death Takes a Dive, q.v.
    The Murder Pool (Arcadia, 1954, hc) [Wade Anthony; Los Angeles, CA]

[UPDATE] 03-05-08.   Excerpted from an email sent me by Bill Pronzini:

   [When Al says that] Murder of a Mystery Writer is a “rewrite” of Death Takes a Dive, it probably gives the wrong impression that the two books are more or less identical — a case of total self-plagiarism. Not so.

   The latter uses the exact same plot devices as the former, but the setting in Dive is a Beverly Hills house party, and the characters, while similar in other ways, are Hollywood types (sans dwarf, rather than mystery writers. Also, Dive is narrated by a “glamorous hard-as-nails female detective” named Winnie Preston and the criminologist who solves the caper and earns Winnie’s undying love is called Copey.

THE GHOST AND THE GUEST. 1943, Producers Releasing Corporation. James Dunn, Florence Rice, Sam McDaniel, Robert Dudley, Mabel Todd. Story: Milt Gross; screen writer: Morey Amsterdam. Director: William Nigh.

   Morey Amsterdam you know if you’re old enough to have watched The Dick Van Dyke Show on TV. He played Buddy Sorrell, one of Rob’s fellow writers on the fictional “Alan Brady” comedy show. Milt Gross you may not know, unless you’re heavily into animation and 1930s and 40s comic strips and books.

   But put them together to write a mystery movie, and what do you get? A comedy movie, of course! Of course there is a spooky old haunted house, a coffin of an recently executed convict that proves to be empty when the local constabulary comes to examine it, secret passages, trick panels, openings in walls where sinister eyes can be seen looking through, and non-stop laughs all the way through.

   Maybe that last part is conditional. You may think of routines like these to be utter corn, which of course is true, but I’ll be willing to wager that even so, you may be tempted to smile every once in a while.

   James Dunn, a long time comedic actor, and Florence Rice, daughter of famed sportswriter Grantland Rice, play newlyweds who’ve been given the home by her father – a former hideout of the sinister gangster whose demise I’ve just attested to. Instead they meet the former hangman (dour Robert Dudley) who did the job and who claims the house is his. The couple’s black chauffeur (Sam McDaniel) completes their threesome. The rest of the cast consists of various mobsters, molls and cops, including the pulp-story writing chief of police, a nice touch.

   Dunn is his usual likable clowning self, and Florence Rice, both pretty and charming, seems to match him step for step. I would have thought she’d have had a long continuing career in movies, but not so. This was her last one, at the age of only 36. (She was in over 45 movies before this one, though.)

   Luckily the movie is just over an hour long. I’m not tempted to ever watch it again, but with one large caveat, it was fun, in a dopey sort of way, while it lasted. Not funny though, was the former hangman’s trailing after the chauffeur with a noose in his hands. I’ve seen the same bit in other movies of this type, and in no case was it one of Hollywood’s finer moments.

HELEN REILLY – The Silver Leopard

Detective Book Club; hardcover reprint, 3-in-1 edition, July 1947. Hardcover first edition: Random House, 1946. First magazine appearance: Mystery Book Magazine, January 1947. Paperback reprint: Dell 287, mapback, 1949.

   This is a post-war society mystery novel — a different life than most of ours (I would imagine), but real people are involved. In her books, Reilly’s main detective is Inspector McKee, head of the Manhattan Homicide; of the 35 to 40 mysteries she wrote, he appeared in all but two or three. New York City was her most favored locale, though excursions to suburban Connecticut were common, as so it happens in this novel.

   I’ve not read many of her books, but in the ones I have, McKee — while eventually on the scene — is not the primary protagonist. He seems to have been content to stay in observer status: looking in on the affair from without, balancing the facts he knows with the people he sees.

   In this book, to take a handy example, we follow the actions of Catherine Lister, whose uncle had died several years ago, but whose life is still very much centered about her aunt and her two cousins (not her aunt’s children). There was recently a broken romance in Catherine’s life (due primarily to Harriet, called Hat, one of the two cousins) but now there is a new fiancé (Nicky, who has just been invalided out of the war).

   But when Catherine’s aunt announces her own plans to re-marry, events begin to snowball — and somehow the silver leopard that Catherine’s uncle had sent her just before his untimely death is intricately involved.

   I don’t quite understand the last attack on Catherine’s life — I don’t think it’s quite enough to say that the killer was perhaps slightly crazed — but otherwise this tangled web of mystery and romance was a lot of fun to read, in observer status, in much the same way that McKee does.

[UPDATE] 02-26-08. For a lot more on Helen Reilly’s career, see Michael Grost’s long article about her on the main Mystery*File website, followed by a complete bibliography and lots of additional covers.

   It was interesting to note that while I assume the book was popular when it first appeared, it has not been reprinted since 1949. As I said in a followup comment to the preceding review of Last Seen Hitchhiking by Brett Halliday, some books (and authors) are very much a product of their own time and era, and I’m sure that The Silver Leopard is one of them.

   In my opening sentence, I referred to this as a “post-war society” mystery novel. I think you can often learn more history from mystery fiction — at least very small slices of it — than you can anywhere else. And that includes high school and grade school textbooks, from which — other than their parents — most people learn about the world that came before them.

BRETT HALLIDAY – Last Seen Hitchhiking

Dell 4683; paperback original. 1st printing, August 1974.

   By this date in the career of famed private investigator Mike Shayne, all of his adventures were appearing as paperback originals and (unknown to unwary buyers) were ghost-written by other writers. Brett Halliday — as I’m sure you know, but I’ll mention it anyway — was the pseudonym of Davis Dresser. After 1960 or so Dresser started to contract out the stories to authors such as Robert Terrall (mostly) and Ryerson Johnson (once or twice). What the circumstances were, I don’t know, but in any case Terrall was the man who wrote this one.

   Which makes difficult such judgments as comparisons in style between this and Halliday’s Tickets for Death, reviewed here (by me) not too long ago. Dresser’s books were written in the 40s and 50s, though, and the 60s and 70s were a different era altogether.

   Mike Shayne was still a tough private eye based in Miami, but society itself had changed, and sexual freedom had come to a large sectors of it. The F-word is used with no inhibitions in this book, for example, and that a fairly graphic description of sexual perversions (you might say) is included seems to say that this is not your grandfather’s brand of mystery tale. (Well, maybe yours, but certainly not mine.)

   Shayne is called in by a fellow (female) detective, who needs his help in tracking down a missing (female) grad student, who disappeared while (probably) hitchhiking away from the scene of a crime — the theft of an extremely valuable Central American artifact.

   We (the reader) know that she was indeed the captive of a certain kind of predator — again fairly graphically. We don’t (quite) know her final fate, but that that it’s tied rather intricately with each of the two cases Shayne is working on certainly comes as no surprise, a near no-brainer.

   There is also a rather unique way in which Shayne solves them: by doing a live broadcast from a radio talk show, trying to entice a killer out of hiding as well as the captor of his lady friend — the killer and the captor are perhaps the same person, but we suspect not — plus any witnesses who believe they have anything else of interest to share.

   All in all, this is a solid, suspenseful mystery, unraveled in part by the intelligence, believe it or not, of the detective at work. As a bonus — depending on your point of view, perhaps — hippies, LSD and free sex are elements of this country’s cultural history, and this is definitely a jolt back into time, describing a huge capsule chunk of our past only now getting into schoolbooks. (And some of this never will.)

[UPDATE] 02-25-08. Since the review was already written, and it has been for seven and a half years, I didn’t see any reason for having you wait any longer for it.

   For the best one page coverage of Mike Shayne and all of the venues he’s appeared in, along with the authors who wrote about him, you really ought to go to this portion of Kevin Burton Smith’s “Thrilling Detective” website.

   If that’s not enough, then there’s more: an entire website devoted to the red-headed Irishman. Check it out at http://www.mikeshayne.com/.

    BRETT HALLIDAY – Tickets for Death.

Dell 8885; paperback reprint. 1st printing, new Dell edition, July 1965; cover art by Robert McGinnis. Hardcover first edition: Henry Holt & Co., 1941. Several other paperback editions, including Dell 387 (mapback); cover art by Robert Stanley.

   It’s been a long time since I’ve read a Mike Shayne private eye novel, and I think I’d forgotten how hard-boiled a guy he was. Back in 1941, Shayne was a two-fisted detective in the Dashiell Hammett-Black Mask mode, a bit derivative, maybe, but by no means a fellow to mess around with.

   Take pages 24 and 25, for example — a very early event in this case centered around a sudden influx of counterfeit racetrack tickets. Shayne and his wife have just registered in a hotel, when he’s called down to another room. Something triggers his suspicions, and he goes in ready for action. Within four paragraphs the two hoodlums in the room are slumped on the floor dead. Shayne himself is injured, but “It was only a flesh wound.” Naturally.

   Nor does the wound hamper his range of action for the remainder of the night. And there is a lot of action, and during the midst of it, Shayne runs into a lot of characters that both he and the reader have to keep constant track of:

   There is a pint-sized newspaper editor who seems to delight on rousing up stories. There is the owner of a disreputable night club just outside the city limits. There is a cop who, while not perhaps crooked, is heavily beholden to the criminal elements in town. There is the manager of the race track, and there is a girl who tries to frame Shayne up in the old badger game. There is another girl who knows something and tries to entice Shayne into paying her for what she knows. There is a shyster of a lawyer who is trying (among other activities) is trying to get the inventor of a new camera gimmick to sign the rights over to him.

   And there is Phyllis, who (at the time of this story) is married to Mike Shayne. Having a wife on hand is an interesting twist added to a tale of a hard-drinking private investigator, but (apparently) there are only so many twists that an author can manufacture from the concept — and marriage vows really have to tie a guy down a lot — and Phyllis soon disappeared from Shayne’s long life in fiction.

   What’s remarkable is not so much any of the above, but that out of the tangled morass of a plot (as indicated above) the author Brett Halliday makes a coherent mystery novel out of it. Most (if not all) of the confusion that the tangled non-stop motion and literary sleight-of-hand is eventually unraveled, and neatly so. Good work all around.

[UPDATE.] 02-24-08. I’ve read a few other Mike Shayne novels since Tickets for Death. In fact, the very next book I read (back in the year 2000) was one. Look for my comments about it here sometime within the next couple of days.

   As for Phyllis, I’ve done some investigating on my own, and I have the answer. In Brett Halliday’s own words (well in the words of Davis Dresser, who ought to know), taken from The Great Detectives, by Otto Penzler (Little, Brown, 1978):

    “20th Century Fox bought The Private Practice of Michael Shayne as a movie to star Lloyd Nolan and gave me a contract for a series of movies starring Nolan as Shayne. For this they paid me a certain fee for each picture starring Shayne, promising me an additional sum for each book of mine used in the series.

    “I finally inquired as to the reason from Hollywood and was told it was because Shayne and Phyllis were married and it was against their policy to use a married detective.

    “Faced with this fact of life, I decided to kill off Phyllis to leave Shayne a free man for succeeding movies. This I did between Murder Wears a Mummer’s Mask and Blood on the Black Market (later reprinted in soft cover as Heads You Lose).

[BONUS.] From a website called www.bookscans.com I have found an image of the back cover I will add here at the end. Why have a map of the mystery available, and not use it?

JOHN RHODE – Three Cousins Die

Geoffrey Bles, UK, hardcover, 1959. Dodd Mead & Co., US, hardcover, 1960. [The cover shown is of the latter.]

   The first of the three seems to have killed himself; the second is the victim of a far too hasty knife attack; the last dies in a puzzling sort of automobile accident. Dr. Priestley asks a few pertinent questions of Superintendent Jimmy Waghorn, and although he’s never on the scene himself, he’s easily able to establish the common factor that connects all three events.

   This is surely no-nonsense investigation at its finest. Rhode was indubitably an author at least a quarter century behind his time. Little or no effort is spent on the kinds of trivial matters that commonly pass for characterization or secondary motivation. Slow-moving; and, yes, I knew who did it as soon as Dr. Priestley did.    [C minus ]

   When I wrote this review, it looks as though I was channeling mystery critic Julian Symon and his opinion of the “humdrum” school of detective fiction. From Bloody Murder (1974) he describes what he means:

    “Most of them came late to writing fiction, and few had much talent for it. They had some skill in constructing puzzles, nothing more, and ironically they fulfilled much better than S. S. Van Dine his dictum that the detective story properly belonged in the category of riddles or crossword puzzles. Most of the Humdrums were British, and among the best known of them were Major John Street …”

   The Major Street he was referring to was also John Rhode, author of the Dr. Priestley books, as well as Miles Burton, who related to the world cases solved by Inspector Arnold and Desmond Merrion.

   Three Cousins Die came toward the end of Street’s long writing career, which extended from 1925 to 1961. Only three more Rhode novels came later, and three more Burton’s.

   For whatever reasons – supply? demand? – this particular book is also hard to find. There are seven copies on ABE at the moment, ranging in suggested price (and condition) from $30 to $65.

   I couldn’t tell you whether my opinion today would match the one stated above or not. I seem to remember railing away at some private eye around the same time for having too much characterization; that is, too many details of his home life. What can I tell you? I was much younger then.