PHILIP MacDONALD – The Rasp

British hardcover: Collins, 1924 (see photo). US hardcover: Dial Press, 1925. Hardcover reprints (US): Scribner’s (S.S.Van Dine Detective Library), 1929; Mason Publishing Co., 1936 (see photo). Contained in Three for Midnight (with Murder Gone Mad and The Rynox Murder), Nelson Doubleday, 1962. Paperback reprints (US): Penguin #586, 1946; Avon G1257, 1965; Avon (Classic Crime Collection) PN268, 1970; Dover, 1979; Vintage, June 1984 (see photo); Carroll & Graf, 1984.

   There was a British film based on the novel that came out in 1932, and Philip MacDonald also wrote the screenplay. According to IMDB, the featured players that appeared in the movie were Claude Horton (as Anthony Gethryn), Phyllis Loring (Lucia Masterson), C.M. Hallard (Sir Arthur Coates), James Raglan (Alan Deacon), Thomas Weguelin (Inspector Boyd), Carol Coombe (Dora Masterson) and Leonard Brett (Jimmy Masterson). If you think you’d like to see this on DVD sometime soon, so would I, and so would a lot of other people. This is a “lost” film, with no known copies in existence.

   I hadn’t realized it before this, but MacDonald was involved in a good number of other movies, all as author of the original story, as screenwriter, or — as also with Rynox, also made in 1932 — both. I’ll go into some of the other fare at some other time, but the good news for Rynox is that after also having been lost for 40 years, it turned out to only have been misplaced. A print was discovered in 1990 after 50 years in the Pinewood Studios vaults, acquired by the National Film Archive and transferred onto safety film. Is it on DVD yet? Probably not, but maybe?

   As for the book itself, now that my usual opening digression is over, a nice copy of the British first in jacket will set you back, I am sure, a figure in the low four-digit range. If all you care to do is to find a copy to read, you shouldn’t have to pay more than three or four dollars. Although I have several other editions, the one I just read was the 1984 edition from Vintage Books, and as far as the story’s concerned, there was still plenty of value left.

   As a Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone title, there may be more value from historical perspective than there is from a pure story point of view, although I was certainly entertained all of the way through. On the other hand, most readers of contemporary detective fiction will probably not get all that far into it, if they even pick it up in the first place.

    This was MacDonald’s first book. It was therefore also obviously the debut of his long-time detective character, Colonel Anthony Gethryn. Gethryn’s career started fast, with ten recorded cases between 1924 and 1933, then one in 1938, followed by a long gap until The List of Adrian Messenger came out in 1960. (There may have been some shorter fiction that appeared in the interim, but during the war years, there was very little if anything that MacDonald produced in the way of mystery fiction.)

    To most mystery readers day — to return to the thought I was having a paragraph or so before — a book that was written in 1924 is going to appear as a period piece, stodgy, if not out-and-out primitive. The “rules” of detective fiction were still being formalized — what constituted “fair play” and all that goes with it. This comment does not apply to thrillers, for which authors had other objectives.

   Working largely without a “Watson” to bounce his ideas off of, Gethryn notices a lot of things but often keeps them to himself, or at least the significance of them, which helps to explain the necessity of the entirely remarkable 46 page letter that Gethryn writes to the police afterward, laying out in immaculate detail all of his thought processes as he worked his way through the case.

    Let me repeat that. Forty-six pages. Is there a denouement longer than this to be found in any other work of detective fiction?

    Dead, you may (at last) be interested in knowing, is a noted member of the government. A cabinet minister, in fact, a fellow named John Hoode. The murder weapon is the titular woodworking tool. The place, the study in Hoode’s country residence. The suspects are primarily the few friends, relatives, staff and servants who were also in attendance that fateful evening, as Gethryn soon eliminates The Woman in the case, to his relief, for he has become madly infatuated with her. She is Mrs. Lucia Lemesurier, a widow — her previous husband apparently being eliminated in the movie version — as soon as he meets her it is with an all-but adolescent passion that renders him near speechless in her presence.

    Accused by the C.I.D. is Hoode’s secretary, Alan Deacon, to whom all of the evidence seems to point. This includes the most damning: his and only his fingerprints were found on the woodmaking murder weapon. There is a good summation of the facts against Deacon on page 121. Gethryn demurs, however, and reassures the gentleman’s lady friend that all shall be well.

    Another detective writer’s creation is mentioned on page 43, where Gethryn declaims somewhat unhappily:

   For the most part, however, Gethryn putters about most happily, this game of investigation invigorating him no end, ending days of malaise after his return from the war (the first one). Most of Chapter Two is a mini-biography of Anthony Ruthven Gethryn, for those who would like to know more, but in essence he is the well-to-do bored genius, who needs the incentive of a murder to be solved to be at ease with himself.

   At least that’s his persona in this, his first appearance. Whether, like Ellery Queen, he changed over the years, at the moment I cannot tell you. Perhaps you can tell me.

PostScript: I found another quote that I intended to include, and I didn’t. I can’t find an appropriate place to put it now, without interrupting whatever train of thought I was riding at a particular juncture, so I’ll put it here. What this seems to do is reinforce several of the ideas I was working on, especially toward the end of what I was saying. From pages 111-112, with Gethryn visiting Lucia in her drawing room:

PostScript #2. I really do not know what to make of the cover of the paperback edition that I read.

UPDATE [06-02-07]  I’ve belatedly decided to include a list of all of the Gethryn novels. UK editions only, but the US titles are given if they were changed. Taken from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

JOHN SPAIN – The Evil Star

Popular Library 239, paperback reprint; no date stated [1950]. First Edition: E. P. Dutton, hardcover; April 1944. Digest paperback reprint: Detective Novel Classic #44 [date?]. Magazine appearance: Thrilling Mystery Novel Magazine, Spring 1945.

   The detective in charge of the case that develops in The Evil Star is Lt. Steve McCord, a member of the Los Angeles Police Department, Homicide Detail. Cleve F. Adams, noted pulp fiction writer who wrote a tidy sum of hardcover novels as well, wrote three novels as by John Spain. The other two featured a private eye named Bill Rye.

   The link will take you to Kevin Burton Smith’s Thrilling Detective website, where you will, if you wish, learn more about a couple of other PI’s, one named Rex McBride (five novels), the other John J. Shannon (two books). From Adam’s pulp days but no stories in book-length form, Kevin also has an entry for Violet McDade & Nevada Alvarado, two very early fictional private eyes in the overall scheme of things (seven novelettes in Clues Detective Magazine between 1935 and 1937).

    Since these detectives are fairly well-documented, there’s no need for me to do so, which means all the more space to discuss the book at hand. (The rundown in the paragraph above does not include all of Adams’s novels, however. Perhaps I’ll get back to some of the rest of his fiction sometime soon.)

    This is a complicated case, and I won’t even begin to try to spell anything out for you. What’s sort of unique, though, is that there are not twins involved, but triplets. Three young women named Faith, Hope and Charity, and while they live far apart and separate lives, they for some reason all turn up in LA at the same time.

   Charity is a school teacher, in town for a national convention of school supervisors.

    Faith is a secretary and traveling companion of an elderly woman named Gretchen Van Dorn, who is also wealthy and the owner of the Ayvil Star, said to have a curse on it. (We’ve heard that story before.)

   Hope is another story altogether. She’s a bubble dancer from San Francisco who disappears from police headquarters after being brought in bruised and without her memory. She may be involved, it turns out, with the killing of a crooked LA public works commissioner named Welles up in San Francisco.

   If you were to put some of the pieces of the puzzle from here, as meager as I’ve left the details, some of them, I’m sure, would fall right into place.

    I might mention two other matters, though. First, there seems to be a leak in the LAPD, and McCord might be the person responsible, so most of the time he’s working on the case unofficially and on leave from the department. Secondly, and the reason he stays working on the case, is that he quickly falls for one of the sisters, and Charity in particular. Solidly and with a loud thud. So solidly that he cannot believe his good fortune, thinking that she might vanish like a piece of fog or mist in his hand. It colors his thinking, but so do various konks on the head and the killing of at least one good friend on the force.

    The end result is a hard-boiled case combined with a semi-screwy caper that has aspirations of being a detective story, with an ending definitely not from Agatha Christie. From page 157 (of 159):

   This never happened in a Christie novel, or did it? I haven’t read all of hers, and some of the endings in her books may have been equally tough, in a purely figurative sense, mind you. You tell me.

   But to get back to John Spain’s book, it all turns out well in the end. Just in case you were wondering.

CRISTINA SUMNERS – Familiar Friend

Bantam; paperback original. First printing: August 2006.

   Familiar Friend is the third in a series of mystery adventures in which the two leading characters have an exceeding complicated relationship, which I will get to in a moment. First of all, however, here are the books:

      Crooked Heart. Bantam, hc, October 2002; reprint pb, September 2003.

      Thieves Break In. Bantam, pbo, October 2004.

      Familiar Friend. Bantam, pbo, August 2006.

   There is a long story behind the writing of these books and why it took so long for them to find a publisher. The author hints at it in the Acknowledgments to this one, but then she goes on to say that the story would bore us. As if. But – if I have read this introduction correctly – this, the third book, was the first one written, or at least plotted, and that was back in the 1970s when she was taking courses at Princeton, which is the town upon which her fictitious town of Harton, New Jersey, is modeled.

   Harton being the home of the Reverend Kathryn Koerney and police chief Tom Holder, who are tacitly in love with each other, but neither of whom dares to admit it, even to themselves. Tom Holder is married, but to a wife he does not love, nor does she love him. Kathryn Koerney is all but committed to another man, a rich Englishman named Kit Mallowan. (From what I’ve gathered, Kathryn is equally wealthy, if not wealthier, but I can’t tell you any of the details, this being the only book of the three that I’ve read. I also gather that she met Kit in England, where Book Two took place.)

   The setting in Book Three is purely academic, at least in the beginning, given that the body of the chairman of the local university’s Spanish department being found on the driveway leading into St. Margaret’s, a parish church. The man was universally disliked by his colleagues, it is soon revealed, making sure that there are many, many suspects for Holder to interview in the initial stages of the investigation that quickly ensues.

   Curiously enough, however, even though all of these professors, wives, students and the staff, crew and a group of the usual university hangers-on are strongly depicted, with considerable time and energy put into making them distinct individuals (all with motives), and with all of this elaborate background already built and ready to wear, the author seems to forget about (most of) them and concentrates instead on the not-so-minor issue of mysterious disappearance of Holder’s wife, causing the local D.A. to…, and Father Mark to…, and then Kit to…

   I can say no more, but it is a lot of fun. You will have to read it for yourself. Sometimes the leading characters behave like teenagers in their rather complicated dance they perform in establishing their relationships to each other, but it’s all done in such a nicely charming fashion, that I am sure that all but the most surly curmudgeon would not be pleased and object to it.

   The puzzle of the mystery is classically done as well, what with time tables and the shrewdest of plans concocts by the villain(s) involved. The last line has nothing to do with the mystery (as opposed to the Ellery Queen novel I covered not so long ago), but if you care anything at all about the characters, it will make absolutely certain that you will not miss where the next episodic installment of their amusing romance (but not to them) will take them next.

[UPDATE] 05-30-07.  Unfortunately, given the pattern of appearances of books in this series, it looks as though there will still be over a year’s wait.

CATCH ME A SPY. [a/k/a TO CATCH A SPY] Capitole Films, 1971. Kirk Douglas, Marlène Jobert, Trevor Howard, Tom Courtenay, Patrick Mower. Based on the novel Catch Me a Spy by George Marton & Tibor Méray. Co-screenwriter & director: Dick Clement.

   The particulars on the novel, as per Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, are as follows:

      Catch Me a Spy (with Tibor Méray). Allen, UK, hc, 1971; Harper, US, hc,1969.

   The author twosome wrote one other book together:

      The Raven Never More (with Tibor Méray). London: Spearman, hc,1966.

      This is the extent of Tibor Méray’s entries in CFIV. George Marton has a small number of other books listed for him. All are hardcover editions unless indicated otherwise:

   MARTON, GEORGE (1900- )

      * Three-Cornered Cover [with Christopher Felix] (n.) Allen, UK, 1973; Holt, US, 1972.
      * The Obelisk Conspiracy [with Michael Burren] (n.) Allen, UK, 1975; Stuart, US, 1976. [France]
      * Alarum (n.) Allen, UK, 1977.
      * The Janus Pope (n.) Allen, UK, 1980. Dell, US, pb, 1979.

   I imagine George Marton has passed away by this time, but at the moment I have to confess that this is all I know about him.

   And after all, this is a review of the film that was based on one of his books, and one I enjoyed but have rather mixed feelings about. The plot, however, should come first, and so I shall. Fabienne (Marlène Jobert), the rather naive young niece of a British intelligence official (Trevor Howard) is romanced and quickly married to John Fenton (Patrick Mower), but their honeymoon in Bucharest is rudely (if not crudely) interrupted by Fenton’s arrest and whisking off to Russia, where an exchange for a spy in Britain’s hands is demanded.

   When the swap falls through (and this is meant literally), the spy the Russians wanted not being available, in order to obtain her husband back, Fabienne must find another spy to offer them instead. This is where a chap named Andrej (Kirk Douglas) comes in.

   As there are in all good spy movies, there are several secrets behind some of these statements, none of which will I reveal, but after some quarreling and other small rows between the (now) two primary participants, a mutual kidnapping and several other humorous interludes, the day is saved — in a frenzy of final revelations and speedboat chases.

   And I confess that I did not realize for a while that there WERE humorous interludes in this movie, and it took me several double-takes before I fully caught on. British humor is rather dry, often with a “did they really mean that?” sort of approach to comedy, at least on the viewer’s part, or so it was for me.

   I should have mentioned before now that this is a British film, in spite of Kirk Douglas being a well-known American star, and Marlène Jobert being equally well-known in France, but not in the US until recently, when it was revealed that she is the mother of Eva Green, female star of the most recent James Bond movie.

   But to get back to the point I was making, the movie we are talking about (and not Casino Royale) is amusing but not hilarious. It was also done in, at least for me, by accents. Both the British accents in this film, sometimes near impenetrable, and Mlle. Jobert’s French accent, often in a whispery voice, have convinced me that I might enjoy the movie even more if I were to watch it again and give them (the accents) a second try, which indeed I may.

   Or not. I didn’t see the attraction between the two leads. Kirk Douglas is tall and scruffy looking, while Mlle. Jobert appears short and pixie-ish if not waif-ish. She seems to all but disappear whenever they are on the screen together, standing one next to the other. Perhaps another viewing of this film would convince me otherwise, but right now, after seeing the movie only once, I can’t imagine opposites ever attracting each other as strongly as they are supposed to have done in To Catch a Spy.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE – Pity Him Afterwards

Carroll & Graf; paperback reprint, 1996. Hardcover edition: Random House, 1964. British hardcover: T. V. Boardman, 1965 (American Bloodhound #499). Paperback, UK: Penguin, 1970.

   It seems odd that there was no prior paperback edition before this one from Carroll & Graf — I’m assuming that the one from Penguin I found on ABE is a British edition. It was written at the beginning of Westlake’s career, however, and it was written just before it went in a different direction, and a terrifically successful one at that, so perhaps it got lost somehow in the transition.

   Let me show you what I mean. Here are Westlake’s first five books — I’m ignoring the non-mysteries and the ones he wrote under different names. (A topic that needs some attention, perhaps, and one that if not done already by someone else may indeed be discussed at further length here someday.)

      The Mercenaries, Random House, 1960.
      Killing Time, Random House, 1961.
      361, Random House, 1962.
      Killy, Random House, 1963.
      Pity Him Afterwards, Random House, 1964.

   All tough guy thrillers, more or less, in one way or another.

   Then came:

      The Fugitive Pigeon, Random House, 1965.
      The Busy Body, Random House, 1966.

      The Spy in the Ointment, Random House, 1966.
      God Save the Mark, Random House, 1967.

   Comic capers all of them, in one form or another. And all were picked up by the Mystery Guild, as was Killy in the first grouping, but that was the only one of the five that was, and it is one that has never had a paperback edition in the US at all. (Can that be? That doesn’t seem right. But no, all I’ve found is a British PB from Penguin.)

   What I am trying to say is that until he started writing the funny stuff, no one knew who Donald E. Westlake was. And then all of a sudden they did, and there wasn’t a publisher around who wanted to confuse the reader by saying, hey, here’s Westlake, and he wrote this other stuff, too.

   Or I’m making this up out of nothing. It’s pure conjecture, nothing more.

   It isn’t as though Pity Him Afterwards is a bad book. Far from it, and it’s about time I started the review, isn’t it?

   If you remember OTR (Old Time Radio) and as a kid you listened to shows like Inner Sanctum, Suspense and The Whistler soon before bedtime, you will remember quite a few of them that began with an mad lunatic escaping from a mental institution, an asylum, a building which in my imagination had festooned with turrets and outside walls covered with barbed wire and unimaginable things taking place inside.

   And a motorist comes along and gives the madman, a hitchhiker, a lift, to his everlasting regret, a regret which sometimes did not that long at all. You can pick up the story from there. As often as it happened in real life, it happened 10 to 100 times more frequently on the airwaves of the 1940s and early 50s.

   I’m not sure how often it occurred in the world of mystery fiction. I do remember Margaret Millar’s The Iron Gates (Random House, 1945) as falling into the category, but no others come to mind, at the moment.

   Other than Pity Him Afterwards, that is. Just like I remembered it. Perfectly. Back then it was pull-up-the-covers time, but since I’m a few years older now, no, it didn’t bother me as nearly as much as madmen on the prowl did back then, when I was a kid, lying on the floor next to the radio, my heart pounding.

   Robert Ellington is one such escapee, although Westlake refers to him almost exclusively as the madman. Taking the identity of the fellow who picked him up, a young actor, the madman finds his way to Cartier Isle, and the summer playhouse where he becomes one of the troupe of players. The madman has a gift of mimicry and role-playing, and with a few well-chosen lies, he manages to fit right in. But which one of three newcomers to this season’s program is he?

    He kills his first victim the second day he is on the job. Cartier Isle, a wealthy, upscale summer community, no state mentioned, has only a four-man police force, headed by Dr. Eric Sondgard, who is a mere college professor the rest of the year. It is this other half of his professional life that allows him to judge people quickly. He’s a quick profiler, in other words, but while reluctant to call in the state troopers, he soon begins to feel in over his head a whole lot sooner than he expected.

    The reader may become confused right about here. Not about the story itself, which is perfectly clear, but rather the category the story falls into. A detective story, perhaps? On page 58 a detailed timetable is created, eliminating all of the people staying in the boarding house next door to the theatre except for the aforementioned three newcomers. (The idea of a wandering tramp being responsible is discarded as soon as messages from the killer are found written with soap in the bathroom and with jam on the kitchen table.)

    Sondgard tries a bluff based on a fingerprint that he does not actually have, but it is a clever idea. On pages 127-128, however, he is beginning to worry that he is using the wrong approach:

   And so, no, in spite of first impressions, that’s not the kind of story it is. A thriller, then, as it started out to be? Pressured by the bluff, the killer … but no, that would be telling.

    Let me go back and show you some more what kind of writer Westlake was when he was in his early 30s. Lyrical and clear, pungent and confident, a glorious let-it-all-out sort of prose, written almost with the sheer joy of writing. It may not work for everyone, but there are passages in this book that made me only sit back and quietly admire them.

   For descriptive writing, from page 91, for example, and of an ordinary bar, no less, down the street from the theatre:

   With a setting such as a summer playhouse, a story works only if the author knows his way around summer playhouses, and the people who inhabit them. Westlake does, or he does well enough to convince me.

   Besides having the ability to describe bars, he also knows people, including the awkward boy-girl situation in which neither quite knows what the other party is thinking. From page 167:

   A problem indeed, and a universal one. A problem, you will pleased to know, is finally resolved a page or so later, ignoring the madman, the two of them in fact ignoring the world around them and working out the problem on their own.

   The problem of the madman is another matter, and in a short book, only 185 pages long, the matter seems to end too quickly and abruptly. Not that I’m displeased. It’s a ending worthy of being called an ending, with only a doctor, the head of the asylum from which the madman escaped, regretting the loss of the madman’s intelligence and potential, if only he could have been cured.

    The title, not so incidentally, comes from Dr. Samuel Johnson (Boswell: Life of Johnson. Entry for April 3, 1776.):

   MURRAY. “It seems to me that we are not angry at a man for controverting an opinion which we believe and value; we rather pity him.”

   JOHNSON. “Why, Sir; to be sure when you wish a man to have that belief which you think is of infinite advantage, you wish well to him; but your primary consideration is your own quiet. If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.”

[UPDATE] 05-28-07.   You may be wondering why I happened to pick this review out the archives where it’s been mothballed for well over a year. On his blog a couple of days ago, Ed Gorman reviewed this same book by Donald Westlake, and if you were to stop over there to read it, it’s pretty clear that we were reading the same book. A slightly different perspective, it goes without saying, but it’s the same book, and it’s one we both think you should read (speaking for Ed without a prior consultation on doing so, but I don’t think he’s going to disagree).

ACEITUNA & JOY GRIFFIN – Motive for Murder

Sampson Low, Marston & Co; UK, hardcover. No date stated (but 1935, according to CFIV).

   Neither lady was an author I’d heard of before I happened to read this book, and if you were tell me that you have a complete set of their combined works, I’m not sure I’d believe you. Joy Griffin has only the one co-authorship to her credit in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. Aceituna Griffin, on the other hand, has a few others, the first few of them of only marginal crime content, as indicated:

      GRIFFIN, (Editha) ACEITUNA (1876-1949)

   By the judicious use of Google, I’ve found a few other non-crime books by her, romance and/or historical fiction by the looks of the titles. I won’t list them here, but the link is there to follow if you wish.

   I did discover that Aceituna’s maiden name was Thurlow, which is something that Al Hubin hasn’t happened to have mentioned. Her husband’s name was Robert Chaloner Griffin, which throws my initial supposition that Joy and Aceituna were sisters right out the proverbial window.

   Except for the book at hand, that’s as far as I’ve been able to go in digging up information about either of the authors. In regards to the book itself, I have to confess that I was hoping for more when I picked it up to read. Which of course is a comment you should immediately ignore, since a general rule of thumb for reviewers is to review the book you have, and not the book you thought you had.

   Which is the story of Clarissa Lovell, a naive young girl nearing the age of 21 who was brought up by foster parents in a quiet, isolated section of England. When the two elderly folks who raised her decide to try their hand in Africa and become missionaries, Clarissa’s only option is to go live in London with her guardian and his wife, who are nearly strangers to her, and a change of scenery so abrupt from her previously sheltered life that her head spins at the thought of it.

   What’s many times worse is that the new people who are now in charge of her life have Plans for her. The most immediate of these is that she marry their son, Gilbert, who seems only moderately interested in the idea himself. You may have noticed a phrase that I mentioned in the paragraph above — nearing the age of 21 — and I imagine that may give you an idea of what the Plans are all about.

    Entangled in a web of deceit like this, as she slowly but surely finds out, she succeeds in making her escape, and only in the nick of time — matters having gotten rather tense right about then — and she heads off for Sicily on her own, where…

    I’m sorry to say that I can’t say more, but please rest assured that things do not fare for her well there either, with Mrs. Maxton, her guardian’s wife, picking up her trail more quickly than sin.

   You may also rely on my saying so that the unscrupulous plotters are really, really up to no good. Before Clarissa realizes it, she is once again in a rather bad spot. You may be surprised to learn that this rather naive approach to story-telling nevertheless makes for moderately enjoyable reading — if, and it’s a big if, you have the patience to give the book its head and allow it to find its own way, which it does very well indeed, thank you very much.

   There is no detection in this book, though, a fact which is still greatly to my own personal regret, no matter what rule of thumb happens to be in force, just a good old-fashioned dose of gothic suspense taking place in another time and another place rather far from our own. Young girls could still be terribly unsophisticated in 1935, and maybe they were in the mid-1960s and 1970s when the gothic romance craze hit both England and the US again for reasons not yet totally clear, but other than that, not in recent times that I can think of, no.

ELLERY QUEEN – Tragedy of X

Avon T-141; paperback reprint, no date stated, but generally accepted as 1956. Second Avon printing. Hardcover first edition as The Tragedy of X by BARNABY ROSS: The Viking Press, June 1932. Hardcover reprint: Grosset & Dunlap, mid-1930s. First hardcover edition as by ELLERY QUEEN: Stokes, 1940. (All editions that follow are all as by E.Q.) Hardcover reprints: Grosset & Dunlap, circa 1940 [or 1943]; University of California Extension, 1978 [Mystery Library, Volume 7; introduction & checklist by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.]; Bookthrift Co., 1986. Paperback reprints: Pocket 125, 1942; Avon 425, 1952; Avon S206, 1966; IPL, 1986.

   Whew. And who knows, I may have missed an edition or two. In order to tell you more about the history and other insights about the book, I wish I had the Mystery Library edition, with the introduction by Mike Nevins. But I don’t, and I won’t try to fake it, but I will insert one short note I found on wikipedia.com: “For a while in the 1930s ‘Ellery Queen’ and ‘Barnaby Ross’ even staged a series of public debates in which one cousin impersonated Queen and the other impersonated Ross.”

    What I’d be interested in knowing is how, when and who started to put two and two together and deduced the fact that Queen and Ross where one and the same. The four Barnaby Ross books came out in rapid succession during only a two-year period between 1932 and 1933, then there were no more. That the fourth one was titled Drury Lane’s Last Case made it as final and conclusive as possible there were only going to be four, even given the earlier resurrection of one Sherlock Holmes.

    I believe I have read all four, but if I did, it was something like 50 years ago. When I came to read this one, now in my maturing years, I quickly discovered that it really didn’t matter if I really had read the book once before: I didn’t remember any of it, including (and especially) the ending, which tended (this time around) to knock my socks off. Whether it did or not before is a matter of only conjecture, but why else would I so vividly recall having read it, even without any accompanying details?

    Drury Lane is the detective in all four mysteries, a retired (and deaf) Shakespearean actor with a penchant for helping the police in a purely amateur (but not amateurish) fashion, in particular and to whit, District Attorney Bruno and Inspector Thumm. On page 56 there is a reference to Lane’s giving them a hand on the “Cramer mess,” but since that case seems to have never been recorded, this would have been the reading audience’s first introduction to the man. (I picture John Carradine in the role, myself.)

    Murder number one is that of a man poisoned to death on a trolley car. Means: a cork with needles dropped in the victim’s pocket. Circumstances: only one of the people on the trolley could have placed it there. More deaths follow, each one connected and each one as hopelessly complicated in commission as the first. Don’t expect anything like proper police procedure. The emphasis was on fooling the reader, in as extravagant a fashion as possible. For my money, the two men who were Queen succeed, and on all counts.

   Well, let me quibble on that last statement perhaps a bit. That there are some awkward moments, designed not for realism, but caused by the authors’ reluctance to not reveal all too soon, as goes almost without saying. Drury Lane says more than once, for example, in true classic sleuthing style, that he knows who the killer is, but he can’t say who it is. Statements like this are always annoying, no matter which classic sleuth it is who says it. That it takes 36 pages for the solution to be revealed, step by step, will tell you something about what kind of book this is, as if you didn’t already know. In the explanation, though, Lane also reveals how he knew, and even more — and this is the clincher — why he couldn’t say who when he did.

   This is also one of those kinds of mysteries which I do not believe are written any more, nor have they for a long time, in which the key to killer’s identity is not revealed until the last page.

   Make that the last paragraph. The last sentence. And, keeping in mind the title: The. Very. Last. Letter.

   X.

   No, they don’t write books like this any more. Even given the quibbles I mentioned, wow, what a pleasure this was to read. (I did mention up above what happened to my socks, didn’t I?)

   Going on right now at the The Rap Sheet is an ongoing celebration of the blog’s first year online. The party consists not of frivolities, but the serious matter of books forgotten that should not be. At least a hundred contributors are offering their selection of ONE book each that they’d like to recommend to save from oblivion.

   As you can imagine, the selections run the gamut from old to new, cozies, hard-boiled, spy novels, the works. If you can’t find something to catch your eye among the list of books selected, you’re reading the wrong blog, that’s all I can say. It’s a spectacular display of mystery wisdom and knowledge, there’s no doubt about it, delivered with grace and panache.

   Here’s my contribution. A longer review will show up here also, eventually. (I’m running behind, as usual.)

   ONE crime/mystery/thriller novel that I think has been most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years?

    I started to think about this and my brain froze. Overload. But how about this one? Well, any of WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT’s early books will do, those he wrote between 1952 and 1963. His second career began again in 1980, and I confess that I haven’t gotten to any of those yet, but I will.

    Pick one. How about his first one then? DON’T CRY FOR ME is the title, and it’s one of his non-series, non-PI books. The leading character is Pete Worden, ex-football star and the scourge of his family, cut off by his brother from his inheritance for his low-life, lack-luster attitude and approach to living.

    Invited to a crime boss’s party, he wins a bundle of cash at a dice game and ends up knocking out one of the losers. He later finds the guy waiting for him in his apartment, dead, with a knife in his throat.

    Gault’s usual complaints about the differences between the moneyed class and the rest of California society are in full force in this book, in his usual light but curmudgeonly way. But it’s not only the clash between classes that concern him. It’s also the fracture that exists between the educated and not, literature vs. pulp fiction, and wedges that occur even in families and pitting brother against brother — prime examples being Pete and his straight-and-narrow brother John, paired off and contrasted with the crime boss’s two youthful sons, with the surgical precision of a natural-born writer highlighting the differences between them.

   Cynical and sour in general motif, maybe, but it’s also one heck of a detective story. It won the Edgar for the Best First Mystery Novel in 1953.

CODE NAME: DANCER. [a/k/a HER SECRET LIFE]   Made-for-TV; Phoenix Entertainment, 1987. Kate Capshaw, Jeroen Krabbé, Gregory Sierra, Cliff De Young, Valerie Mahaffey. Directed by Buzz Kulik.

   You’ll have to be careful when you start hunting down a copy of this one. If it’s part of a double feature DVD, as the first one I happened to have watched was, there’s about four minutes missing just before the end. It sort of made sense, but not enough, and I had to find another DVD on eBay with just the one movie on it in order to have a sense of completion. If you know what I mean.

   Of course, you can live happily ever after if you never see this movie at all, and perhaps I should tell you something about it. Annie Goodwin (that’s Kate Capshaw), happily married – with pains taken to show her blissful suburban California life – gets a call from her former employer, the CIA, or someone who knows she worked for the CIA – that calls in a favor for a former colleague/superior who’s in trouble back in their old stomping grounds, Cuba.

   That’s the Dancer (Gregory Sierra). Faking an injury to her sister to explain her absence at home, Annie is back in business again, which involves a former lover, Malarin (Jeroen Krabbé), a man close to Castro – and man, I’m telling you the whole story. You can probably make one up as good as this one without trying too hard, or perhaps you might want to add something to this one, which is truthfully a little thin for its 94 minutes running time.

   Lots of flashbacks transpire, however – I think I can tell you that – and things don’t end all that well for everyone. It’s all very serious and dramatic with only a small amount of humor involved, and what there is centers around the plight of the hapless husband Paul (Cliff De Young) who’s left behind. The ending, in fact, is left open for a possible series to result from this, but it never happened.

   For Kate Capshaw, by the way, this movie was post- Indiana Jones and pre- Mrs. Steven Speilberg and was, all things considered, I’m sure, only a minor milestone in her career.

   And in case you were wondering, the first DVD cost me maybe a dime (bag day at the local library sale) and the second one only a dollar. For a dollar, it’s a keeper.

JAMES M. FOX – The Wheel Is Fixed

Dell 573; paperback reprint; no date stated, but circa 1951; mapback edition. Hardcover edition: Little, Brown; 1951. Also: Raven House #33, pb, 1980; 2nd printing (#22), pb, 1982.

   I may have the Raven House numbering scheme all wrong. The first printings you got only by subscribing to their overall line of books, which is what I did at the time. I never paid their mass market distribution (the later printings) much attention — who cared? — and they WERE different. There was a noticeable discrepancy in which books were published in one versus the other, for example, and a different numbering on those that were. To get information on the later printings now, all I’m able to do is look online to see how sellers describe their books for sale, which I have to admit, even between you and me, is a pretty pitiful way to conduct honest-to-goodness research.

   [UPDATE: It belatedly has occurred to me that Michael L. Cook included a complete checklist of the subscription Raven’s (through #72) in his book on book clubs, Murder by Mail (Bowling Green University Popular Press, revised edition, 1983). I can therefore confirm that The Wheel Is Fixed was indeed #33. What the numbers were in the list of later printings, however, Mr. Cook does not say.]

   The other books by Fox that were reprinted in the Raven House line are:

      #45. A Shroud for Mr. Bundy. [A John and Suzy Marshall mystery published in hardcover by Little Brown in 1952 and reprinted by Jonathan Press as a digest-sized paperback.]

      #61. The Coven. [A paperback original; 1981.]

   Fox, whose real name was Johannes Matthijs Willem Knipscheer (1908-1989), had a mystery-writing career that began in 1943 with the first John and Suzy Marshall book, and ended in 1989 with a mystery western from PaperJacks entitled Crunch.

   Not that I know very much about the Marshalls, but since Fox’s career began with one of their adventures – and in fact The Wheel Is Fixed is the first one which is not – and it’s their books that Fox may be remembered most for, if at all, I’ll go ahead and provide you with a complete checklist of them, taken from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

      Don’t Try Anything Funny. Davies, UK, 1943.
      Hell on the Way. Davies, UK, 1943.
      Journey Into Danger. Cherry Tree UK, pb, 1943.
      Cheese from a Mousetrap. Davies, UK, 1944.
      The Lady Regrets. Coward-McCann, 1947. Dell 338, pb, 1949.
      Death Commits Bigamy. Coward-McCann, 1948. Graphic 14, pb, 1949. Dell 845, pb, 1955.

      The Inconvenient Bride. Coward-McCann, 1948. Dell 463, pb, 1950.
      The Gentle Hangman. Little Brown, 1950. Dell 526, pb, 1951.
      The Aleutian Blue Mink. Little Brown, 1951. Dell 623, pb, 1952, as Fatal in Furs.
      The Iron Virgin. Little Brown, 1951. Dell 719, pb, 1953.
      The Scarlet Slippers. Little Brown, 1952. Dell 685, pb, 1953.
      A Shroud for Mr. Bundy. Little Brown, 1952. Jonathan Press J92, digest-sized pb, March 1957.
      Bright Serpent. Little Brown, 1953. Jonathan Press J96, digest-sized pb, probably early 1958, as Rites for a Killer.

   Plus one short story:

      “Start from Scratch.” Four-and-Twenty Bloodhounds, Anthony Boucher, editor, Simon & Schuster, 1950.

   Most of the stories took place in Los Angeles, CA. Why the first ones were published in the UK, I do not know, nor why they were never published here. (I do have a copy of Cheese from a Mousetrap. Perhaps I need to read it.)

   On his Thrilling Detective website, Kevin Burton Smith refers to the Marshalls as “Nick and Nora wanna-be’s.” Since once again I’ve not read one that I remember reading, I’m going have to fall back on quoting Kevin and leave it at that, for now: “Where Nick and Nora were rather urbane and urban sophisticates, constantly traveling from one trouble spot to another, martinis in hand, Johnny and Suzy were suburban all the way, beer-drinkers and homebodies, who didn’t have to go far, it seemed, to find trouble. It always seemed to find them, thanks to Johnny’s job as a private detective.”

   By 1953, the market demand for the Marshalls seems to have disappeared. All of the books written by Fox wrote after then seem to be action- and adventure-oriented, although I am allowing myself to say that only on the basis of seeing the names of the titles, in which stock you should know how much to put.       [FOOTNOTE]

   The Wheel Is Fixed appeared before at least the last three Marshalls, and it starts out as if it’s going to be one of the best unknown noirs ever written. A former orchestra leader named Rick Bailey and a girl named Lorna, described in a newspaper as a motion picture actress, are holed up in El Paso as fugitives from justice. Hunt Couple in Palm Springs Swim Pool Massacre, reads the headline of that very same newspaper. “They found the car in Phoenix yesterday,” Rick tells us, the reader, “which proves that we crossed a State line and makes us eligible for five years in the Federal penitentiary right there.”

    Lorna’s hands are bandaged, making it difficult for the couple to escape notice, and they see strange men on their trail everywhere they go. Checking into the Cortex Hotel, they hope against hope they will be able to cross the Rio Grande on the following day.

   At which point [end of Chapter One] Rick decides to put down the entire story down on paper, so that “at least the truth will be known, and the deal will have to from the top of the deck.”

   It’s flashback time, in other words, and unfortunately the next part of the story is not nearly as gripping as either the beginning. As for the ending, that comes later, which of course you knew before I told you, and I’ll get to it shortly. But what happens next, or first, if you are still with me, is that Bailey, down on his luck, is hired by a well-heeled gangster (and a heel to boot) to get a woman out of his son’s hair. A semi-interesting sojourn to Palm Springs develops from there, and several false starts later – or so they seem at the time – we finally, 150 pages later, get to the crux of the matter, and hence the headline.

   Thirty more pages from there, we have caught up with the present, and Rick Bailey has run out of things to put down on paper. The last remaining twelve pages are worthy of the opening chapter, let me tell you, in case I’d left you wondering, complete with at least one sock-removing twist I didn’t see coming, maybe even both sox, lulled perhaps to unawareness by the soporific middle stanza, or at least that’s the way I’m telling it.

    It is uneven, the story is, but in 1951 they built mystery and detective fiction of every subgenre and variety on puzzles and twists, and as I say,so it is here in the end. This particular effort on the part of Mr. Fox has not fared well over time, in terms of general recognition then and hardly now. All in all, this is mostly a forgotten book by an all but forgotten writer, but I’ll remember it for its good (if not great) parts at either end, and noticeably less for its lack of pace and cohesiveness in the middle.

[FOOTNOTE]  When I first wrote the review, which as you can see was nearly a year ago, I was somewhat less inclined toward completeness in providing checklists than I am now. Here is it the next day on the blog, and here are the rest of Fox’s mystery titles. I said they were action- and adventure-oriented. Feel free to judge for yourself.  [US first editions only, unless indicated; settings and series characters, if any, are included.]