VALERY SHORE – Final Payment

Major Books 3236, paperback original; copyright 1978; no other date stated.

   Next on the agenda, and the final book I read in 2006, is the only mystery written by the pseudonymous Valery Shore. Al Hubin in Crime Fiction IV says that Shore was the pen name of Lon Viser, born in 1932. All I’ve been able to come up with regarding Mr. Viser is that he had something to do with the American Art Agency, a publisher based in North Hollywood in 1965.

   From the small print inside Atualidades Globo Controle Da Natalidade, written in Portuguese and illustrated throughout, aka The Complete Book of Birth Control:

   It’s not a common name. Maybe it’s the same man. All that comes up for Valery Shore, in case you were wondering, are a few dealers offering this book for sale on eBay, or maybe it’s the same book offered at different times. I didn’t check.

   The dedication reads as follows: “To Yvonne, Rhoda, and Lon, without whose help this book could not have been written,” so I assume that Al is correct – not that there’s any reason to doubt him.

   The primary detective in Final Payment is a former Scotland Yard inspector by the name of Christopher Camel, still young, who’d recently been left a fortune by an aunt, in her day a sex symbol of the silver screen. Staying with Camel in his aunt’s Tudor-style Hollywood mansion is “his beautiful Eurasian companion, Kim Lee Chance.” I’m quoting from the back cover.

   In attendance upon them both is Potter Goodleigh, his aunt’s former lover and a long ago movie director who’d been exiled to the guest cottage, but who is now cook, butler and father figure to the two young people who are now “livening up the old museum,” as he puts it.

    It is Potter’s daughter Felicia who’s murdered, her body found in the piano in her living room. Unfortunately Felicia was also a blackmailer, and there are thirteen suspects that Camel, Kim Lee, and the local lieutenant of police named Davidson have to deal with. In spite of his new-found money and all of his resultant leisure time, there is no way Camel can be kept off the case, as you can well imagine if it had happened to you and sunny fortune had smiled your way in such a fashion.

    The story, as I’ve relayed to you so far, may also sound to you as the basis for a made-for-TV mystery movie. If so, you share my feelings exactly, and I have the advantage of having actually read the book. If you also were to suspect that on page 177 there would be a gathering of the suspects in the dead woman’s living room, in an attempt to recreate the crime, I would certainly begin to wonder about you. How could you possibly know that it was on page 177?

   As entertaining as made-for-TV mystery movies may be, and some more than others, in general I’ve always had a relatively low opinion of them. This one, I’ll conclude by saying, is better than most of them. If there had ever been a second book in the series, I’d make sure that I had it in my collection too.

UPDATE [03-01-07] Victor Berch has done some preliminary spadework on Lon Viser, and so far he’s come up with the following: His full name as Lorenzo Ludwick Viser, born February 26, 1932 in FL, died August 9, 1994 in LA. There was a Lorenzo M. Viser living with him in the 90s, probably a son. More later, if and when!

M. E. KNERR – Travis

Pike Book #214; paperback original. First printing, April 1962.

   I seem to be specializing in obscure books this month, and this one is about as obscure as you can get. Even though it is a private eye novel – and I’ll get back to that in a minute – it was published by one of those small sleazy paperback outfits in the early 1960s that promised more than they could possibly deliver at the time. And even so, if you happened to have purchased this one in 1962 for its sexy parts, you’d be sadly disappointed, since in that regard, it’s really rather tame. If sexy passages were what you were looking for back then, you’d have been far better off buying a copy of Peyton Place than this.

    This book does not even appear in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, but it will, or at least in the Addenda. The author does appear, however, and to show you something of his track record, here’s his present entry:

   Listed below are other titles by Knerr (under either byline) which I found listed for sale at various places on the Internet, but not included in CFIV, and probably for good reason. I do not have descriptions of the story lines for any of these first three, so your guess is as good as mine:

These I found descriptions for:

   [** UPDATE 02-27-07] At first I was doubtful, but now that I’ve found a cover scan of Heavy Weather, I’d say that it’s also a prime candidate for inclusion in Crime Fiction IV. If you can’t make out the small print on the bottom of the cover, it says, and I quote: “On the Mexico run the Pandora carried a cargo of drugs, danger and death!” LATER THE SAME DAY: Al Hubin agrees. In it goes. (The book pictured below is described as a Horwitz edition published in Hong Kong.)

   But let’s get on with things and to the book Travis itself. There’s only one copy offered for sale on the Internet, making it not only obscure but scarce. I mention this even though I’m sure you know that the two are usually, but not always, one and the same.

   Telling the story, though, in his debut and probably his only appearance in print, is Mike Travis, a “sailor of fortune, who loves life, and woman, especially women.” It is not difficult to deduce what other reasonably well-known character was the inspiration for Mike Travis. Travis in this book had previously been in the charter boat business in Florida, but when times went bad, he went to California to accept an offer made by one of his former customers, a multi-millionaire named Del Houston, to look him up if and when Travis headed out that way.

    And Del does indeed have a job for him. After some quick string-pulling and the greasing of certain political hands, Del hands Travis a PI license and a gun, and a three-fold request: to find his son; get him off narcotics; and break up the gang who’s been supplying them.

    It’s not a bad opening for a PI yarn, and the story maintains its way reasonably well for about half of its just under 160 pages: the usual PI stuff, the things that PI’s do, and the usual bad things happen to some of the people who just happen to get in the way, with all of the coincidences that make one or more aspects of one PI investigation dovetail nicely into another.

    Even though it goes without saying, I’ll say it anyway. Travis himself is one of those guys who is irresistible to beautiful women. In this book that includes both his employer’s foster daughter, from page 20 …

   … and a stripper who the first time they met, tripped him into a pool at Houston’s house. From page 68:

    I think you can tell a lot of about a story by looking closely at how the author describes his characters, don’t you? With an ending that doesn’t directly address the clues that have been set up for it, though, the tale does two things simultaneously and hence the apparent impossible. The action-packed finale (a) goes all but out of control, and (b) withers away from lack of interest, as if there were a deadline set that had to be met, and it didn’t matter precisely how.

    Although overall not without flashes of acceptable writing, and every once in a while better than acceptable, the overall impact of this novel is still rather like a third-rate Carter Brown or a tenth-rate John D. MacDonald, either of whom, if you’re a fan, you know what I’m talking about and whom you’re far better off pursuing.

    Or let’s put it this way. One of the reasons for collecting and reading unknown and long-neglected works of mystery fiction is the hope that never dies of discovering an unknown and long-neglected classic of mystery fiction. Sometimes you have to settle for unknown and long-neglected.

UPDATE [02-26-07] If you were to google “M. E. Knerr” on the Internet, you would find, as I did, that there was a Michael E. Knerr who was a friend of SF and (occasional) mystery writer H. Beam Piper, who committed suicide in 1964 when he ran into financial troubles. I’ve not been able to confirm that the two Knerr’s are one and same, nor have the birth and death years for either one been verified. Accounts vary on the latter. Knerr may have also written under the name of “Brent Hart,” but that’s another loose end not yet tied down.

    But the Knerr who was a friend of Piper apparently wrote a hitherto unpublished biography of him, and upon Piper’s death, went through his manuscripts and salvaged, among other things, the “lost” third Fuzzy novel, Fuzzies and Other People.

    If and when I know more, I will as always, let you know.

[UPDATE #3] Postdated 03-29-07 on 08-16-07. Thanks to Google, I discovered that SF writer John F. Carr knew Mike Knerr, and after a small amount of effort, I was able to get in touch with him by email. As a consequence of this contact, John has posted a long article about his friendship with him here on the M*F blog. I should pointed this out more clearly before now, instead of leaving it hidden as one of the comments.

   In this article about Mike Knerr, Carr has his correct date of birth, along with the year he died, plus a lot more about him on both a professional and a personal level.

   That there’s not enough time in the world to read everything you want to is something I am sure that every non-casual reader of this blog knows full well, even if you restrict yourself to mystery, crime and detective fiction –- or even only a small nook and cranny of the genre, which maybe you do but I try not do. I like to keep my horizons are wide open as possible, although there are some topics and/or themes at which I draw the line (and about which I will tell you some other time).

   And when you discover a blog dedicated to one of those small nooks and crannies of the genre, chock full of books you never knew about before, much less you’ve ever read any of them, why, it’s enough to make a grown man (or woman) cry. Figuratively speaking, of course.

   This is what happened to me this evening. The particular nook is International Noir Fiction, and the link will take you there immediately, if you’re so inclined.

   I’m not sure if Glenn Harper does all of the reviews and commentary, but at a first go-through on my part, it appears that he does. He does one or two posts a week, and going down through the current page, here are the recent objects of his attention:

   All worthy, I’m convinced, of hunting down and reading, if only my bank account didn’t have this huge and near-permanent dent in it. I won’t comment on the books themselves, as Glenn’s read them and I haven’t, and he’s already done a super job of it. This list essentially covers the month of February, and the month’s not yet over. Oh, as the man said, my.

   A big thanks to the post on The Rap Sheet that J. Kingston Pierce just did along these same lines and which pointed me in Glenn’s direction. At least I think I should thank him. Maybe he’s not forgiven me for confusing his name with that of western fiction writer Frank Richardson Pierce in a recent blog entry of mine, since corrected, and he’s getting even. (He also points out Wade Wright, the subject of the preceding entry here on M*F, as an author whose books he’s newly found as worthy of the chase. You and me both, Jeff.)

MORTON WOLSON – The Nightmare Blonde

Pocket, paperback original; 1st printing, April 1988.

   This book escaped a lot of notice when it came out, or at least that’s what I strongly suspect. Reading just the cover and the blurb at the top – “It was murder. A Hatchet Job.” – I think the average reader would have thought that this was just another horror novel of the blood and gore variety, both of which were very popular at the time. Nor would the name of the author have meant anything to anybody.

   But what if I told you that Morton Wolson was the real name of 1940s pulp writer Peter Paige, creator of the private detective Cash Wale? Or at least I think that Wale was a PI, but I may be wrong and someone will have to tell me.

   In any case, Peter Paige wrote a slew of detective stories for magazines like Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly and Dime Detective – mostly the latter, I believe – until disappearing from sight about the same time as most of the pulps died, in the early 1950s. Most of them were, by all accounts, fairly ordinary. Paige is a not a name which comes to many people’s mind when it comes to pulp detective fiction. Myself, I know the name, and I know Cash Wale, his primary series character, but as far as any single story is concerned, I can’t think of a single plot line, I have to say, and reluctantly so as I do.

   When I asked veteran researcher Victor Berch to see what he could come up with as far as either Paige or Wolson was concerned, he did his usual amazing sleight-of-hand and came up with a couple of interesting items. In the Los Angeles Times of January 7, 1946, there was a short item with the following headline: Writer, Held for Beating Wife, Says She Beat Him:

   Accompanying the article, not much longer than the excerpt above, are separate photos of both Wolson and his wife, who is shown feeding their baby with a bottle. (The headline of the item that follows on the same page is: Jeanne Crain and Mother Reconciled.)

   Besides the work he did for the pulps as Peter Paige, Wolson had two stories published under his own name. The first one appeared in the January 1954 issue of EQMM, a tale entitled “The Attacker,” and a little bit later, “The Glass Room,” was published in the September 1957 issue.

   Wolson’s output may have been small under his own name, but “The Attacker” was good enough to be selected in David C. Cooke’s annual Best Detective Stories of the Year anthology for 1954, and more than that, to be picked up again by Allen J. Hubin’s Best of the Best Detective Stories: 25th Anniversary Collection in 1971. (Al did not remember this fact while he and I were corresponding a short while ago about Wolson, until I pointed it out to him.)

   There is one entry for Wolson on www.imdb.com. A story he wrote was the basis for “Prime Suspect,” an episode of Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theater, telecast on 27 February 1958. A gent named Steve Fisher did the adaptation, and an actress named Nita Talbot appeared in it, whom I thought was tremendously good-looking at the time; the leading role was played by William Bendix, whom hardly anybody thought was good-looking at any time. Where the story may have been published earlier remains unknown.

   The next time Victor came across Wolson’s name in a newspaper was in the New York Times for March 29, 1970, in an advertisement for a special “Manager’s” sale being held by Furniture-in-the-Raw, an outfit with five stores in the New York City area. I’ll quote the relevant detail:

   Nothing more seems to have put Wolson in the news or in any sort of spotlight until the publication of The Nightmare Blonde in 1988, and then, as I alluded to earlier, the book seems to have come and gone without much notice. At the moment there seems to be two copies available on the Internet, one from Alibris in the $3.00 range, and one from England in the $30 range. It is dedicated to his wife Gaye, so it is clear that the earlier one did not last.

   But before getting to the main event, perhaps you’ve started to wonder. Wolson was born in 1913 (making his age as reported in the LA Times correct), and he died in 2003. You also may be beginning to wonder about this book he wrote in 1988, when he was 75, and whether it is any good or not.

   My answer, in a word, is “yes,” but if I may, I’d also have to say that it’s a qualified response, and I’ll get to that soon. Remember now that it was marketed as a horror novel, which in a strong but not overpowering sense it is, as the murder to be solved is that of a family of four, killed by someone with a very sharp axe.

   But what it really, really is, when you really get down to it, is a detective novel in a very traditional sense. It’s also a tough, middle-class sort of novel, and hard-boiled at about the same level as, for example, a Ross Macdonald novel, not to forget to mention that it’s quite definitely noirish in a way as well.

   Let me explain that last sentence right away. Dan Warden, the leading character, is the former chief of police in Oregon City, a town somewhere along the Pacific Ocean where the story takes place, who had recently been fired for beating up a newspaper columnist’s nephew and being chewed out in print by that very same newspaper columnist. After coming out of a 24-hour drinking binge, about which he remembers nothing, he discovers that it is (no surprise here) the newspaper columnist who has been murdered, along with the three remaining members of his family.

   Which makes Dan Warden the number one suspect, no matter how close his friendship with the police commissioner is. At the same time as Warden is discovering how badly his life has been suddenly turned upside down and inside out, he makes a friend – saving her life, to be precise, as she (a blonde) tries jumping off the end of Fisherman’s Wharf, but miscalculating badly as she does so. Allow me to insert a long quote right about here, taken from pages 17 and 18:

   Kay Mullins (that’s her name) has had psychological problems dealing with children in the past, and now two of them are dead, and the reason for emphasizing that she is a blonde, as I did a just a moment ago, is that several blonde hairs have been found at the scene of the murders.

   It takes Dan most of the rest of the book to investigate the crimes while trying to stay ahead of the new police chief, who still considers him to be his primary suspect, while keeping Kay stable and discovering just how many blondes just happened to be in and around the area of the victims’ home, including Kay herself.

   Part of the investigation includes visiting a camp of the local branch of the White Knights of America and at least three brothels of increasing degrees of sophistication, and some low spots as well. It’s a tough, rough story at times, and while it tends to start rambling a little, it still provides about four hours of pure entertainment, or at least it did for me, flawed only – here comes a qualifier – by the inescapable unlikelihood of one too many fairly uncommon events, all happening at the same time and in the same place.

   But while the laws of probabilities, still enforced in every state in the union, say that the juxtaposition of so many blondes in one focal point of chaos, could not and should not have happened, what Wolson does is not easy. He makes the book flow well enough, and smoothly enough, that you (the reader) don’t (and can’t) stop to think about it while you’re in the process of reading, and read it you will.

   As the identity of the killer becomes increasingly clear, and Wolson does a more than creditable job in disguising the solution to the murders for as long as he can – and even longer than he had a right to, truth be said – the chills begin as well, intellectually as well as (without trying to give anything away) deep down inside the reader’s bones somewhere.

   Nor is the book over even then. For noir fans everywhere, lift a glass to a pulp writer past. This one’s for you.

UPDATE: Victor Berch has come up with some more information on Wolson’s life. Why don’t I simply let him have the floor:

A. S. FLEISCHMAN – Look Behind You Lady

Gold Medal 223; paperback original. First printing, February 1952; 2nd printing, Gold Medal 572, 1956. Hardcover reprint: Herbert Jenkins, UK, 1962, as Chinese Crimson. To be published by Stark House Press in late 2006 as a trade paperback combined with The Venetian Blonde.

   Albert Sidney Fleischman, known to his friends and colleagues as Sid, was born in 1920, and at 86, thankfully he’s still around to see publisher Greg Shepard bring a couple of his old Gold Medal paperbacks back into print.

   His career in the adult mystery field was relatively short, beginning with a couple of Phoenix Press mysteries in 1948 and 1949, then shifting to Gold Medal for five paperback originals between 1951 and 1963, with one from Ace making an appearance in 1954.

   After that he became an author of children’s books, winning the Newberry Medal for The Whipping Boy (1987), and the creator of Bullwhip Griffin – the movie about his adventures was based on the book By The Great Horn Spoon (1963).

   Greg always does a great job in adding material to his books about the authors he publishes, so I won’t try to come up with any more background like this on my own. Nor will I say anything about The Venetian Blonde, one of my favorite mystery titles of all time, and I love the cover as well – they go hand-in-hand together as one truly great match-up.

   To introduce you to Look Behind You Lady (no comma, and I’m not sure why), you might pretend that you’re at the newsstand in 1952, or the drug-store spinner rack, and you’d see the cover, designed to catch anyone’s eye, 100% guaranteed. (Truth be told, I was 10 at the time, so it had to have been the 1956 reprint that snagged my attention.)

   Then once in the would-be purchaser’s hand, he would have looked inside the front cover to read the following blurb:

   Not a word wasted, and if you could pass this up, you’re a better person than I, or your tastes are so different from mine that you should be reading another review anyway.

   But just in case a quarter was all that you had in your pocket, back in 1952, and you needed just that one extra nudge to tip the balance toward paying the storekeeper and on your way with the book, all you would have had to do was to turn two more pages and start reading from the top of Chapter One:

   Ka-ching! Sold, am I right, or am I right? If you can’t read this story and hear the voices of Humphrey Bogart as rather world-weary stage magician Bruce Flemish and Lauren Bacall as Donna Van Deerlin, the lady above who has both a room number and a proposition for him, you haven’t been watching as many of the movies of the 1940s and early 1950s as is good for you. Something’s been missing from your video diet that you ought to remedy as soon as possible.

   More. The owner of the Hotel China Seas is Senhor Gonsalves, a gentleman who is missing both his thumbs, and he also has a small task for Flemish to perform as part of his act, a task involving the not-so-small sum of $10,000 Hong Kong dollars. Sydney Greenstreet.

   One of Senhor Gonsalves’ many assistants is a mousy sort of fellow named Josef Nakov, who is handy with a gun. Peter Lorre.

   From page 144:

   Nakov says something about the intelligence of Donna, who had walked back into Gonsalves’ hands after a brief escape.

   You can cast Gilberto, young punk working for Gonsalves, and Phebe, a somewhat shopworn stripper whose act follows that of Flemish on stage, yourself.

   The plot has something to do with the Communist Reds and/or the opium trade, and it matters not very much in the long run. But there are twists to be had, and thrills of the nature above, and what more could you want of a book of exotic Oriental danger and intrigue like this?

F. G. PARKE – First Night Murder A. L. Burt & Co.; hardcover reprint; no date. First Edition: Dial Press, hc, 1931.

   The bad news first, perhaps, if you happen to read this review and if I happen to convince you that you might want to read the book for yourself. There are three copies on ABE at the present time, one the Dial Press edition for $35, one in French for under $20, and one the British hardcover (Stanley Paul, 1932) for over $40. (The one from Dial Press has a jacket, and I think it’s worth the money.)

   But what the heck, keep reading. I may not convince you anyway. And who is F. G. Parke, you ask, and well you may. No one seems to know, and it’s not even his (or as it has suddenly occurred to me) her name. It’s a pseudonym. I think the author is male, however, thinking about it even as I sit at the keyboard. It’s not a woman’s tale, what with the many-faceted male point of view which so generally obvious if not blatant — and maybe so obvious that I could very well be wrong.

   But as I was reading this — and enjoying it, for the most part — and don’t worry, I will be sure to let you know at which point I stopped enjoying it — I pretended in my mind (and where else) that this was an unknown work of the cousins known as Ellery Queen, who needed some money at this point of their career, which would have been, roughly, between The French Powder Mystery (Stokes, 1930) and The Dutch Shoe Mystery (Stokes, 1931), perhaps.

   Or perhaps not, but it was fun to pretend — and who knows, I could very well be wrong, and they actually did write it. What got me thinking this way, though, was the locale where the first murder was committed: in a theater during the actual performance of a play, the New York City Police Commissioner in attendance, among many other notables, it being first night, of course. A mystery drama is about to reach its denouement, the lights go out, a woman’s wild scream rings out, the lights come back on, the villain (of the play) is in handcuffs — and a noted Broadway producer is found stabbed to death in his seat near the front of the theater, the space next to him unused.

   Fifteen seconds of darkness — hardly time enough for the killer to make a getaway — but no knife is found (everyone is searched) and no one heard anything, no one saw anything. There is no lack of potential murderers, for as if by pre-arrangement, motives for everyone seated in seats within a small vicinity are soon revealed. But once again, no one heard, saw or felt anyone move or pass by them, and — this is the key — there is no murder weapon anywhere in the theater.

   Doing the honors as the detective at hand is Martin Ellis, the author of the play, the first step of what he had hoped to be a long career as a playwright. The inner flap of the dust jacket (the only piece of the jacket I happen to have) compares him favorably with Philo Vance, but on the other hand, you know how the people who write story descriptions on the flaps of dust jackets often seem to exaggerate.

   No, it was Ellery Queen I kept thinking of (Ellis = Ellery?). The Roman Hat Mystery? And yes, I know that it was death by poison in that first novel the Queens wrote, but still, it was a during a play that the victim in that book, an unliked/unlikable lawyer, was killed.

   But Martin Ellis on his own, and as a writer of mystery fiction himself, seems to be amiable enough and competent enough to solve this case, even though he is in love with the girl, the actress on stage, whom the dead man married earlier the same day, which in most books would make him the number one suspect. (I did suggest that there are motives galore — what’s lacking are means and opportunity.) Both Lt. John B. Gradey of Homicide and District Attorney Moore eliminate him quickly as a suspect, however, as he was seen by two witnesses just before and after the lights went out, and nowhere near the scene of the crime.

   To help demonstrate Ellis’s prowess as a detective, along either Queenian lines, or Vancian, you choose, here’s a quote from page 98:

   As I say, you choose. More deaths occur, with plenty of influence on the thinking processes of Martin Ellis, but as it occurred to me, with very little emotional impact. As for the solution, as I skip over in this short essay anything more about all of the suspects and the all of the suspicious activity that goes on in this book, it is the solution that tells the tale, and to tell you the truth, while I was ready for it, already having made a note to myself about the paragraph I quoted to you above, I really wasn’t ready for it. Don’t know as I still am, as a matter of fact, but I guess that means that I should take my hat off to Mr. Parke, whoever he was.

   The gentlemen behind Ellery Queen could never have been quite this melodramatic — could they?

UPDATE [02-10-07]   I emailed the seller of the Dial first edition of this book a couple of days ago, asking if there was anything helpful that was said about the author on either the back panel of the dust jacket or its flaps. Perhaps asking for too much, I also inquired if a scan of the cover might be possible. I’m still hoping, but to this date, I have not heard back.

UPDATE [02-24-09]    Over two years later — have I been doing this that long? — and I finally have a cover image to show you. A big thank you goes to Luca Conti, who emailed me with it as an attachment a couple of days ago:

    I’m not sure how well this additional scan of the blurb from inside the dust jacket will show up, but I since I mentioned it in my review, Luca sent it along. I think it’s worth the try:

ROMILLY & KATHERINE JOHN – Death by Request. Hogarth Crime; trade paperback. 1984. Also published as a Hogarth hardcover. Offset from the original [hardcover] Faber & Faber edition, 1933. Vintage/Ebury, US, hardcover and paperback, 1984.

   Quite surprisingly, given the fact that it’s been reprinted several times, this is the only mystery that the married couple of Romilly and Katherine John wrote. Who were they, is one question, and how did it happen that Hogarth reprinted it some 50 years later?

   For at least a partial answer, one must read the new introduction to the Hogarth edition, written by Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan, as part a series of Hogarth Crime reprints of classic detective fiction. Romilly, born in 1906, was in the RAF, was briefly a civil servant, then a poet and an amateur physicist before dying in 1986. Katherine was a reviewer as well as a translator of Scandinavian books. She died two years before her husband, in 1984.

   The gap between 1933 and 1984 between editions may be one of the longest on record for any mystery novel. The fact remains that Hogarth Press considered it significant enough to reprint in a series of classic crime fiction. In that regard, the book is a locked-room mystery; and in its own inimitable way, a minor tour de force of one form or another, the details of which I most sincerely will do my best to avoid telling or revealing to you.

   The dead man is found in his bedroom at one of those old English manor residences so commonly found in works of mystery fiction, especially the English ones. He is found gassed to death in a heap on the floor, still dressed as he was the evening before, the window shut tightly, and (of course) the door was locked. It had to be broken down in order to enter in the morning. Could it have been suicide? No, Lord Malvern seems to have been well enough off, and he was off to visit his fiancée in London on the very same day as his death.

   Telling the story is the local vicar, an elderly man by the name of John Colchester, a long-time friend of Matthew Barry, the master of the house. Also staying over are various friends and relatives, including a comic-relief colonel who harrumphs all over the place; a weepy young girl; a recent widow only slightly older; the slightly deaf sister of Matthew; assorted staff, mostly female, save for a slightly villainous butler named Frampton.

   And to tell the truth Frampton is more than only slightly villainous. He’s a socialist, a seducer of young maids in the area, and — as the truth comes out — a blackmailer. Many letters which threaten to reveal secrets which others might wish kept unrevealed are found, some sent by Frampton, others perhaps not. Obviously, as these have a great deal to do with the plot, the letters — their contents, who received them, who sent them, and who may have intercepted them — must be given, as the book goes on, a exhaustive and thorough going over.

   And to tell you another truth, the going-over of the letters is probably too thorough and exhaustive. One is tempted, I must admit, to throw up one’s hands whenever another letter appears and must be discussed and put into the context of the previous ones.

   I see that I have neglected to mention the detective on the case. Nominally that would be Inspector Lockitt, but that particular gentleman seems content to do his work off-camera, as it were. Almost all of his activity is related to the vicar second-hand, and then of course the vicar must relay his impressions of the good Inspector Lockitt on to us, the reader. It seems a strange way to tell a mystery, but one must always get accustomed, eventually, to things we expect to occur in the usual way, but which do not, do we not?

   The bulk of the detective work is rather more accomplished, in fact, by an unusual twosome: (a) Mr. Nicholas Hatton, a friend of the dead man’s fiancée, one of those amateur detectives who are as common in British mystery fiction in the 1930s as damp old manor houses with murders committed within them, and (b) the aforementioned widow, Mrs. Fairfax, who proves to be a most tenacious (and efficacious) individual when it comes to solving mysteries.

   There are secrets galore that must come out before the solving is done, including at least two that should correctly be considered “bombshells” when they are revealed. There is, of course another secret at the end, which I promised not to tell or reveal to you, and looking back at what I have written, I do not believe that I have.

   So, is the book a classic? You may well ask, and you should. No, I say, but with a small hedge in the back of my mind. For today’s audiences, large portions of this exercise in murder-solving will be dreary and dull to the extreme. For those of you who like puzzles, well, the puzzle is there, and without a doubt, a double delight it is. The problem is that it’s, well, unskillfully told, when measured by more modern standards, say of five or so years later.

   That the door was locked on the inside, for example, is not revealed until page 50, whereas the body itself was found on page 24. Nor, surprisingly enough, is the locked room aspect very much — if at all — the focus of the tale. This may in part be due to the telling (see above) or the fact that (as is often the case) the solution (to the locked room aspect) is rather simple when explained, and therefore not very worthy of much dwelling upon.

   If you were to read this book — and if you are still with me, I would at least suggest that you should, for this must be the kind of mystery you prefer to read, not so? — you will also need to know what a geyser is, at least a geyser that one would find in the bathroom of a country house in England in the early 1930s. Readers of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Unnatural Death, for example, will have already come across one, I believe, if they were to think back upon it.

MARI ULMER – Cart of Death

Worldwide; paperback reprint, September 2006. Hardcover edition, as Carreta de la Muerte (Cart of Death): Poisoned Pen Press, April 2001.

    Subtitled “A Taos Festival Mystery,” this second adventure in which Christina Garcia y Grant finds herself involved takes place shortly before and during the celebration of the local Las Fiestas holiday. The first book in which Christy appeared was Midnight at the Camposanto (April 2000), which took place on a previous Good Friday through the following Easter Sunday.

    According to the Poisoned Pen website, the latter was to have been “the first novel in a series planned to follow the sacred and secular calendar through its annual cycle,” but thus far, only the two books have been published. (Also on the PP website is an announcement that “Mari is now working on More than Mischief at San Geronimo,” but since on that same page is a link to her 2002 author’s tour, along with the fact Ms. Ulmer is now 74 years old, I have a feeling that the chances that it will appear are diminishing quickly.)

    Which is shame, for I rather enjoyed this book, in spite of some rather uncomplimentary comments some readers have left on Amazon. Christy is a former lawyer who now runs a bed-and-breakfast in a small town south of Taos while she attempts to begin a writing career. This means that there are numerous tenants whose humorous antics keep her hopping while she is trying to keep them happy. Her mother lives by, and when the festival begins, the guests are displaced by all of her relatives who come swarming in.

    One particular tenant is a permanent resident, a retired surgeon from Florida named McCloud, or Mac for short, and an attraction between Mac and Christy seems to be growing. At least enough so that when other men look at Christy longer than he thinks they should, Mac feels the pangs of jealousy.

    Especially gnawing at Mac is that the suave Evelyn Bottoms (male) would make such an ideal candidate for the murder of a young worker at a local art gallery. Missing is Bobby’s female assistant, Cindy, a close friend of Christy’s mournful friend Iggy (short for Ignacio), a young lawyer she has been mentoring.

    The mystery is strangely gruesome, with at point (page 140-141) three more deaths occurring within the span of two pages. The detective work? Well, it’s as satisfying as it is in most present-day cozies. The star attraction for this book, though, overshadowing everything else, is the locale, its history, its inhabitants, and the overall spirit of enthusiasm and joy that’s on continuous display for all of the above.

    Not quite so satisfying, given the lack of another tale to continue the series, is that the semi-romance between Christy and Mac, which is left badly hanging. All readers are would-be authors, though, are we not? Anyone who reads this rather charming look at contemporary New Mexico culture (plus mystery) will know exactly how that will come out, or already has.

UPDATE: This review was written in November of 2006. A representative of Poisoned Pen Press promised to pass on to Ms. Ulmer an email of inquiry I’d sent them, suggesting that perhaps she would respond to me directly. That was several weeks ago, and she has not. More, the information I quoted from the PP website is no longer there, or at least I am unable to find it again. I wish I had better news than this.