RICHARD SALE – For the President’s Eyes Only. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1971. Bantam, paperback, 1972. British title: The Man Who Raised Hell (Cassell, hardcover, 1971).

   Sam Carson, ex U.S. Navy genius electronics expert an, part Sioux Indian, currently working at McMurdo Station helping communications studies done on Weddell seals is surprised when Air Force One shows up on the landing strip bearing Admiral John Jeremiah McCabe, acting chief of the National Security Agency and looking for him. It’s his own dead leopard on the runway and even when it is explained to him it doesn’t quite make sense.

   Intelligence has uncovered something called Keyhole, a Club that deals in extortion, blackmail, murder, and high level espionage and Carson is the only man who can help, not because he is Sam Carson, but because he is a physical match for 6’ 3” inch wealthy playboy, rakehell, and alcoholic half Crow Simon Kincade, and Kincade is the kind of target Keyhole likes. He’s also dead, but so far as the world knows is only missing.

   When he is “rescued,” he will come back as Sam Carson whose job is to get himself blackmailed by the murderous Keyhole operation.

   Keyhole has already killed, and a wealthy but shady Australian named Charlie Ravensmith is a key but too obvious suspect. A wider trail of possibly linked kills makes it imperative Keyhole be uncovered, and not surprisingly it’s invaluable blackmail information made available to Western Intelligence agencies.

   They aren’t half as interested in exposing Keyhole as managing it.

   The President of the United States himself is interested in this one.

   In short order Carson finds himself going under the knife to make him closer to Kincade (James Bond never had his appendix removed for king and country) and introduced to his wife, Melisande Kincade, who he falls in love with while he has surgery and prepares for the mission in the Fiji islands in a savage kind of paradise.

   Newly rescued and back on a rampage, Simon Kincade shows up in Nairobi with his entourage, mistreated wife Melisande, and Carson’s old friend now bodyguard full blood Shoshoni Willie Littlesky about to go on safari.

   From that point on the plot moves swiftly with more twists and turns than an Agatha Christie novel, coming to one stunning climax in Africa on safari before moving to England for an even more shocking turn as Carson/Kincade and Littlesky dig deeper into the secrets of Keyhole, the duplicitous Charlie Ravensmith, and a curious group known as the Seven Needles, a cartel with offices around the world and in a gambling club called the Montebank in London.

   Lady Darla Henley, code name Stitch is Chairman of the board, a randy and eccentric beauty; Dickerson a former New York newspaper columnist is code named Dart; Monty Wyndham a ghostly Canadian known as Scissor; Vittorio Tarantella, a former body guard for Lucky Luciano who runs the casino and is known as Seam; a phony French designer named Henri Dieu known as Hem with his killer lover Bane; Ninji Fukimora a lesbian half American half Japanese woman code named Tuck; and, Buffy Pristine, a black woman who may have murdered her wealthy Arab husband, code named Gore.

   Stitch, Dart, Scissor, Seam, Hem, Bane, Tuck, and Gore. As Carson says, “Like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

   Not satisfied to do a mean Ian Fleming, Sale also does a mean Hemingway and Robert Ruark in the African sections all the while keeping his cards firmly up his sleeve with a bit of Richard Condon and James Michener thrown in the mix while the reader never quite knows which way the plot will twist and who, if anyone, can be trusted.

   Even the writer is an unreliable narrator in this one.

   Sale, of course, was a successful pulp writer (creator of Daffy Dill and Major Deen, the Cobra) turned mystery novelist, bestselling writer, screenwriter, film director, producer, and bestselling writer again. He directed and produced movies and television, and was married to Mary Loos, niece of the legendary Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes).

   He was also an entertaining writer who penned at least three classic mystery novels, the scewball Lazarus #7 that James Sandoe called a “gay Hollywoodian gambol” (read it anyway the twist ending is a doozy), Passing Strange, and Benefit Performance. His mainstream novels include Not Too Narrow Not Too Deep, The Oscar, and White Buffalo, all made into films.

   I don’t usually quote from other reviews, but The New York Times summed this one up pretty well:

   That should tell you everything you could possibly need to know about this wild ride of a spy novel that is by turns, wry, witty, thrilling, smart, sophisticated, and tragic. Best of all it is all these globe trotting adventures are done tongue in cheek without ever laughing at itself or the reader but still keeping it clear that nothing is to be taken too seriously.

   It is not particularly politically correct, though it pales before the likes of Joe Gall pr Matt Helm in general attitudes.

RICHARD SALE – Benefit Performance. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1946. Dell #252, mapback edition, 1948.

   So, what it is, is a hardboiled Prince and the Pauper. I’m surprised I’ve never seen it before. It’s quite ingenious. Ingenuous? Maybe. But totally ingenious.

   Kerry Garth, a well-known B-actor, is pooped. Just finished the wrap on three features in a row, two of which filmed simultaneously. The man needs a break.

   But there’s the stupid premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. No freakin’ way.

   Fortunately, Kerry’s got a spot-on stand-in: Joshua Barnes.

   Pretty much an identical brother from another mother. Physically, anyway. A bit younger, but nothing a bit of Grecian Formula can’t fix.

   For a C note, Barnes agrees to stand-in for Garth at the premier. As long as no one gets too close, no one will be the wiser.

   At the premier, though, the unthinkable: Kerry Garth is assassinated! Assailant unknown!

   Of course, the reader and Kerry know that it wasn’t the REAL Kerry Garth that got assassinated. But pretty much no one else knows!

   Someone is trying to kill Kerry Garth–but Kerry has no idea who or why. He has no enemies that he knows of.

   But one thing’s for sure. Being Kerry Garth ain’t too good for your health.

   So Kerry’s only choice is to assume the identity of his stand-in: Barnes.

   Unfortunately, Barnes turns out to be quite the unsavory character. The role isn’t too fun. And it’s unpaid. Hence, a ‘benefit performance’.

   And Barnes turns out to be murder suspect #1 in the murder of Kerry Garth! So now the cops are after Kerry Garth for his own murder!!

   Can he prove he’s really the prince and not the pauper? Or will he fry for a suicide he didn’t commit?

   The book is slick, fast, fun and fabulous. The words just hum. Seamlessly. No seams.

   Richard Sale and the best of the other hardboiled writers of the 20’s to 50’s were able to take language of ordinary working class Americans and make it sing.

   Because I’m a pretentious bastard I’ll go on, though I need not, I am sure, to belabor the point I mean to belabor. And to accentuate my pretentiousness I’ll quote Wordsworth, who says of colloquial speech: “[T]he greatest Poet … must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those passions”. And Moliere: “These forty years now I’ve been speaking in prose without knowing it!”

   Hardboiled writers like Sale streamlined ordinary speech patterns in this zenith of American culture to create an architecture of thought and story with crisp lines, moral clarity, and, most of all, sheer joy.

   It’s a time machine to better times. Don’t miss it.

   Some alternate takes:

         https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=43471

         https://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/2014/01/forgotten-books-benefit-performance-by.html

         https://prettysinister.blogspot.com/2012/01/ffb-benefit-performance-richard-sale.html

● JACK HIGGINS – The Wrath of God. Originally published as by James Graham (Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1971; Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1971; Dell, US, paperback, 1974).

● THE WRATH OF GOD. (1972) Robert Mitchum, Ke.n Hurchinson, Victor Buono, Frank Langella, Rita Hayworth. Director: Ralph Nelson.

   I may shock some here who know what a fan of the British adventure/thriller genre I am, but I stopped reading Jack Higgins after The Eagle Has Landed, his breakthrough bestseller and never went back. I dipped my toes in once in a while, but honestly I just was not interested. To me he was always the least of the major names in the genre, not in the same class as MacLean, Lyall, or Bagley and certainly not Innes, Household, and Canning.

   Some of those later books I found nearly unreadable. Major bestselling writer, hugely popular, films, mini-series, but I had moved on. He just did not interest me anymore. I don’t even like Eagle, or the movie based on it.

   As a writer, Higgins simply was not a good enough to get me to pull for German commandos trying to assassinate Churchill and their traitorous charismatic IRA helper. I’m just not sophisticated enough to enjoy an entertainment when I’m pulling for the main characters to be shot as soon as possible, not unless the writer is a hell of a lot more skilled than Jack Higgins was.

   But noting his recent death I thought I would look at my favorite Higgins novel, because once upon a time I read him faithfully and had high hopes for him.

   Higgins, real name Harry Patterson, was a school teacher who decided writing was more fun and paid better and went about it with a vengeance unseen since the heyday of the pulps. He had to manufacture multiple names to keep up with his output, mostly in around sixty thousand to seventy thousand word novels that moved fast, had attractive narrators, and exotic locations.

   Those are far and away his most entertaining books, Night Judgment on Sinos, Year of the Tiger, A Game of Heroes, East of Desolation (my first), The Run to Morning, and Khufra Run are among the ones I would particularly single out from his his pre-Eagle output. They are not only good books, I’ve reread some of them recently and enjoyed them again.

   Along the way he decided that it was more effort to churn out these fast moving short thrillers than to try for something bigger, and one of the names he experimented with in that endeavor was James Graham under which he wrote the fine flying adventure The Last Place God Made and this book, The Wrath of God.

   Made has echoes of Nevil Shute, God of Graham Greene. The latter only just edges out the former in my estimation only because I like the fairly cheesy film based on it which I won’t really go into other than to say Robert Mitchum has fun as the phony priest who falls for his own con and Victor Buono gets what may be the only semi heroic role of his career.

   I will not kid you it is a good movie, only that it is, for me anyway, a fun one despite the sad figure Rita Hayworth cuts in it as her failing health and mental state were becoming obvious.

   The place is Central America and the time is the 1920’s. The narrator is young ex-IRA gunmen Emmett Keogh for whom the world has become too small and the backwaters of hell seem a good place to lie low. At least they do until he meets Mr. Janos, a fat shady businessman with an ivory headed cane and Father, Oliver Van Horne, a charming American priest. Neither is what they seem. Janos sells illegal arms and Van Horne has a Tommy gun under his cassock and alternates between con artist and bank robber.

   All three have run out of places in the world to be.

   Which is how the three of them end up under arrest and blackmailed by Colonel Bonilla of the Army into helping topple a mad land owner turned warlord in the small village of Mojada and the surrounding region which is held in the grip of terror by Tomas la Plata, revolutionary, outlaw, madman, and would be dictator.

   An army couldn’t pry him out of the region, but maybe a phony priest with a machine gun, an arms dealer, and an IRA gunman/sniper can.

   It’s a fairly simple set up that goes back away, the good bad men vs the worse bad men. Arcs of redemption are put into action, tough seasoned hard cases are softened by decent people, love, and the plight of the innocent, and before it is over bloody hell will break out.

   But it is written with brio and conviction, the narrator, Keogh, convincingly cynical, tough, and caught up in Oliver Van Horne’s greatest con and his own lingering shreds of idealism.

   Writing a book using central casting isn’t always a bad idea.

   You can guess every turn of the plot well before it happens. There are no surprises here. Our “heroes” will consider stealing the silver hidden in Mojada and double crossing Bonilla, and of course end up doing the right thing while cursing themselves for doing it. Keogh, the youngest, will find love with a local girl.

   I’ll go farther and point out that one of the delights of reading Higgins was how much he embraced the more obvious tropes of the genre. He wasn’t one for great invention of plot or character, he instead gave the reader what they wanted in the most straightforward manner possible moving so fast you couldn’t really complain that it was a good sandwich and not a filling meal.

   His downfall came when he tried to convince readers it was a multiple course meal and he just didn’t deliver.

   Frankly, when I stopped reading him was when he tried to do a bit more and I just didn’t think he really had the chops for it. This and The Last Place God Made are as far as he was really able to stretch himself in more serious terms, and truthfully he only just makes it, but credit where deserved in the end he does pull it off.

   Maybe there wasn’t greatness there, but there was something more than the too slick bestselling writer he became. I would highly recommend every book I have mentioned here but The Eagle Has Landed, granting that most of you will probably disagree and may only know Higgins from his later better known works.
   

S. J. TUDOR – The Burning Girls. Ballantine Books, hardcover, February 2021. Penguin, softcover, September 2021Setting: Sussex, England; contemporary.

First Sentence: “It’s an unfortunate situation.”

   Reverend Jack Brooks and 14-year-old daughter Flo have been transferred to Chapel Croft in Sussex. A community with a very dark past including the burning of martyrs, disappearance of two girls, and the suicide of a priest. With no one being who they seem and not knowing who to trust, can Jack and Flo survive while exposing closely-guarded secrets?

   The best books grab you from page one and don’t let go. This book does just that. One thing to know; there are a lot of bodies; new, old, spectral, and real. The story is more suspense than mystery, and never boring.

   Tudor has a compelling voice. It’s engaging and conversational in both outward dialogue and internal thoughts. Jack and daughter Flo hold one’s attention and curiosity to know more. It’s nice that Flo acts appropriately for her age. However, both occasionally suffer from going into danger alone, yet both are also smart, brave and interesting.

   Beyond the elements of voice and character, there are a plethora of memorable passages: another indication of a great author. Tudor makes one stop and think— “We all have our hiding places. Not just physical ones. Places deep inside where we put away the things we don’t want other to see.”

   Rather than having an unreliable narrator, this is the case of “trust no one” in the best possible way. No one is who they seem and everyone has secrets.

   There are an abundance of very effective plot twists and revelations from beginning to end. Some of them scare, some cause one to gasp, all of them surprise.

   It’s hard to say much about the plot without saying too much and spoiling the suspense and the fun of reading it. The only problems were a couple silly, editing issues. Ignore them.

   The Burning Girls is a great, escapist read, especially for those who like a bit of dark, eepy-creepy. There is a supernatural element, but doesn’t stop an enjoying an engrossing, page-turning book that keeps one reading way too late into the night, but one may want to leave the light on. The story holds one’s attention from first page to last and makes one happy Tudor has more books to read.

Rating: VG Plus.

HAROLD Q. MASUR – So Rich, So Lovely, and So Dead. Scott Jordan #4. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1952. Pocket #998, paperback, 1954; cover art by; Stanley Zuckerberg. Dell D383, paperback, November 1961, as by Hal Q. Masur; cover art by Robert McGinnis. Pyramid #T2391, paperback, 1971.

   The title refers to the first victim in this mystery, the fourth book appearance of defense attorney Scott Jordan. This is unfortunate, because I’d have liked to see her alive and well quite a bit longer. She is lovely, but while still young, has been married twice, and as a result of both marriages, is worth something in the order of ten million dollars. Rich, in other words.

   And which is why she’s dead, and all too soon, because she also has a bit of sass to her. Someone wants her money – and control of her recently deceased uncle’s company – also worth a huge amount of money. But there is a catch. To obtain her inheritance she has to be married to an employee of the company by a certain date. And since her fiance’s divorce is not complete, she has to find a stand-in, a man who will agree to marry her for long enough to fulfill the provisions of the will, then step gracefully aside, well compensated, of course.

   A problem arises, however, when she is murdered while still married to the stand-in. This is the legal problems begin – not quite as complicated in a Perry Mason story, but close enough.

   One difference between Perry and Scott Jordan, is that the latter tells his own story, and he’s more active in the legal end of things, instead of manipulating the evidence, as the former is so wont to do. When it comes down to it, Perry leaves all the paperwork to Della or an occasional law clerk in his office to do. Jordan is more of a hands-on kind of guy in that regard. Perry;s biggest claim to fame are his trial scenes. There’s not a hint of a courtroom in this one by Masur.

   The latter tells his story with a smooth but by no means overly slick style of prose. He even makes the usually saggy parts in the middle of the book interesting. In spite of full contingent number of suspects with motive, I’d have to say that the actual amount of detective work involved is minimal, with the date of a missing newspaper rather important in that regard.

   I enjoyed the Scott Jordan books quite a bit when they were coming out new, every year or so for a while, and I enjoyed this one too, one I seem to have missed back then.

WINSTON GRAHAM – Tremor. Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1995. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1996.

   
   One of those hotels is the Hotel Saada where on the 29th of February, the third day of Ramadan, twenty seconds of terror change everything for a disparate group of tourists: Matthew Morris fleeing a failed marriage and failing career; Nadine Deschamps, a beautiful young actress seeking solitude among people well aware of her fame; Jack Frazier, on the run from the police and the partners he betrayed and the suitcase he never lets out of his sight for long; an American lawyer, and three French prostitutes who have saved up enough money to escape their profession and have a little fun on their own terms.

   Graham is less interested in the event itself than how these individuals are changed by their brush with death, the twisted paths that brief twenty seconds of terror leads them down, a chance for some for rebirth and for others for destruction. He certainly writes of the terrors following the earthquake, but it is how they change the people involved and not the terrors themselves that interest Graham.

   While this book has no tie to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, if you are familiar with the Flitcraft Story from that novel and its thematic role there, you have a partial idea where Graham is going.

   Though Graham’s reputation was built on such suspense classics as Take My Life, Night without Stars, Fortune Is a Woman, The Walking Stick, and of course Marnie, the basis for the Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name, he was always as much novelist as suspense writer, interested in more than just crime and what leads to it. Notably each of those titles above was the basis for a major film by people like Alfred Htichcock, Sidney Gilliatt, and Ronald Neame.

   Marnie was also adapted as an opera.

   In addition to his suspense novels and thrillers in the Graham Greene mode, he achieved even greater fame and success with his historical novels, beginning with Grove of Eagles, and then the popular Cornish series following the exploits of Ross Poldark and his family. The eleven books in what became the Poldark Saga achieved even greater success than the Alfred Hitchcock movie both here (and in twenty-two countries) on Masterpiece Theater, so much so that the entire saga was remade and filmed a second time.

      Today the popularity of the Poldark Saga has surpassed his suspense novels with only Marnie available in e-book form, while all of the Poldark series is available and pretty much been in print since the first series.

   The qualities of a Graham novel well beyond the build up of suspense are the well drawn characters, the character driven plots, the often real human emotions of his characters trapped not only by events but by their own flaws (as often as not small and insignificant until a crisis), and his refusal to deal in easy and simple happy endings.

   Life in a Graham novel is messy, and neither love nor truth is quite enough to overcome the guilt and disappointments that lead people into dangerous moments. The mere resolution of the plot is seldom enough to satisfy Graham‘s people. There are loose ends, real world pain to be dealt with, guilt that must be lived with, and hard truths that are to bitter to bear.

   A man with night blindness is hunted through the dark by spies, a woman must save her husband from the gallows by proving he didn’t murder his mistress, a sheltered young woman with a lame leg is drawn into a criminal plot, a con woman and thief must confront her past to escape prison, an insurance investigator contemplates allowing a beautiful murderess get away with it, the mistress of a dangerous sports promoter plots his murder with one of his fighters … these are Graham plots.

   He isn’t as important a writer as Graham Greene, but it is to Graham Greene he is most often compared.

   Tremor came late in his career, but shows no loss of his skills. He had in fact written two of his better suspense novels, Cameo and The Green Flash, just before Tremor.

   I admit Graham isn’t to every taste. His books are more novelistic than suspense driven, his protagonists not always likable people, their dilemmas often as not self made through some flaw in their character. Survival and not victory is often the only goal the hero of a Graham novel can hope for, and even that comes at a cost, but their intelligence and humanity make them more than worth the effort to seek out and read..

HOLBY/BLUE “Episode One.” BBC, 08 May 2007. Cal Macaninch as DI John Keenan, Richard Harrington as DS Luke French, Elaine Glover as PC Lucy Slater, and large recurring ensemble cast. Created by Tony Jordan as a spin-off from the established TV medical drama Holby City; also screenwriter. Director: Martin Hutchings. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

   This BBC series might be categorized as police procedural/soap opera drama. It takes place in a small overworked police station in the fictional town of Holby, somewhere in England. This, the first episode of the first of two seasons opens with the well-worn concept of a new copper arriving (DS Luke French) and being introduced (and learning to adjust to) his new partner (DI John Keenan). At the same time, it is also the first day that a crop of new recruits are on the job, including a PC Lucy Slater, a young eager-to-go but klutzy blonde.

   It’s a day like all others, or is it, the new guy wonders. A known pedophile is about to be released for lack of evidence; a husband with a compulsive disorder is convinced that his wife is cheating on him; and Keenan – a maverick who hates playing my the rules — smashes the tail light of the car of the new male friend of his soon to be ex-wife. French bears up to all this with calmness and remarkable composure; and Lucy Slater is able to redeem herself in the eyes of her colleagues.

   It’s done well and at the same time completely by the book. Very slick, in other words. I probably won’t watch another, but then again, I might.  On the other hand, I never watched but one episode of Hill Street Blues either.
   

THE ROVER. United Artists, 1967. Released first in Italy as L’avventuriero. Anthony Quinn, Rosanna Schiaffino, Rita Hayworth, Richard Johnson, Ivo Garrani, Luciano Rossi, Anthony Dawson. Based on the novel by Joseph Conrad. Director: Terence Young.

   It was with some bemusement I watched The Rover, a film based on Joseph Conrad’s novel, a cheap-jack multinational production/tax write-off which captures nothing at all of Conrad’s ethos and even less of the brooding excitement of his writing at its best.

   What we’re left with is Anthony Quinn — that charismatic actor whose career had more bad steps than a derelict lighthouse — as a Napoleonic-era trench privateer returned to his country with all too little to show his head-hunting bosses. He falls in love with a mysterious young woman, tries to refit a derelict ship and slip past a British blockade, but by that time, everyone’s pretty much lost interest in this shabby show.

   How tacky is it? Well, aside from the perfunctory photography and poor dubbing, it’s set in a rather sparsely-populated France (well, maybe everyone was off fighting the wars) with few buildings, one or two streets, and maybe four horses. And the scene of a British ship chasing the privateer was very obviously filmed with One ship photographed from different angles, edited to try and make it look like Two — which don’t work.

   Sad to see talents that once showed some promise stuck in this movie-mire: The Rover was directed by Terence Young, who made movie history a few years earlier launching the James Bond series; aside from Quinn, it features Rita Hayworth and Richard Johnson (who at various times embodied Bulldog Drummond and Lord Nelson) and, in a teeny-tiny part, tucked off in a corner somewhere, movie-goers with long memories will spot Anthony Dawson and wonder what became of the promising actor so memorable as the unlucky Cpt. Lesgate in Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder.

CAROLYN WELLS – The Wooden Indian. Fleming Stone #41. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, US, 1935.

   While obviously a mystery novel, maybe even a work of detective fiction, The Wooden Indian is very nearly a fantasy, simply because its resemblance to reality is so razor slim.

   At least, I *think* it’s slim. It takes place in the Connecticut of the 1930s (New London County), and the country club set is very much a part of it. It’s not a world which I was ever a part of, then or now, and maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I just don’t recognize how close to reality it really is (or was).

   At any rate, David and Camilla Corbin are valued members of the Pequot Club, but they are not very happily married. He is wealthy, a stamp collector, and an amateur historian specializing in local Indian legends. She is serenely beautiful, subject to scathing comments from her husband, and every other unattached male in the neighborhood is attracted to her like moths to a flame.

   Wait. There’s more. Legend has it that a curse is upon the Corbin family, and every 100 years one of them will die at the hands of the spirit of a vengeful Indian chief, with bow and arrow. This is the year — and this the stuff of which detective stories are made. It’s no wonder that a friend of Fleming Stone, noted criminologist, calls him in, even before the first murder occurs. As stated on pp.26-27: “Bob’s wire didn’t promise a case exactly, but it held out interesting hopes …”

   In other words, what we are playing here is a game. The rules are fixed. The victim has no say in the matter, even though his identity is known 80 pages in advance. [WARNING: Major Plot Alerts in the Paragraphs ahead.] There is a ghost at hand, there is even what is described on p.191 as a “locked room”, even though the murder took place 80 pages before that and this is the first (and last) time it’s mentioned.

   The solution, by the way, describes (in some detail) the trick the killer used to get in, and yet the only thing blocking the doorway was the red cord used by the dead man to signal that he was listening to the radio and did not want to be disturbed. When Stone came upon the scene earlier, he “lifted one end of the red cord from its hook and went in,” (p.109)

   While the book is listed in Bob Adey’s book on Locked Room mysteries, I must have missed something.

   The killer is not the secretary, as Fleming Stone first surmises. (Apparently the last mystery Stone has read was The Leavenworth Case, and evidently, in that one the secretary *was* the killer.) Instead it’s a trivial variation on the “person most likely” — in other words, a person so obvious that I thought that that was the gimmick. Sorry. No such luck.

NOTE: Obviously forgetting I first read this book back in 1991, as above, I read and reviewed it again on this blog here in 2009. These comments followed Bill Pronzini’s take on it here,  a 1001 Midnights review.

STUART KAMINSKY – Murder on the Yellow Brick Road. Toby Peters #2. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1977. Penguin, paperback, 1979.

   This is the second in Stuart Kam1nsky’s historical series starring his 1940’s Hollywood private investigator, Toby Peters (a.k.a. Tobias Leo Pevsner), who made his own debut last year in Bullet for a Star.  This second entry is  far superior to the first. Once again, Hollywood stars join the fun in both major and minor roles.

   In this vehicle Toby is summoned from the Warner Brothers lot (where he helped Errol Flynn in Bullet) to M.G.M by an urgent call from Judy Garland, who has just discovered the body of a murdered Munchkin on the still-standing publicity set of Munchkin City from The Wizard of Oz, released more than a year earlier. Peters is hired by Louis B. Mayer himself to keep the investigation quiet and protect Judy, whose own safety seems at stake.  Toby’s interview with the “little” suspect arrested in connection with the murder convinces him of his innocence.

   Peters, of course, whose wife has already walked out on him and who shares office space with a dentist, is a progeny of the classic Hammett/Chandler tradition:

   
   And again:

   
   Indeed, Raymond Chandler also has a bit part as himself in the novel. He spots Toby while doing research on flophouses and decides to shadow him, but is waylaid for his efforts. Since Toby is the first real detective he has ever met, our investigator lets him tag along on the case so he can drink in some local color and dialogue first hand.

   A second fatal stabbing, a defenestration., and two attempts on Toby’s life all ensue before the climax, in which even Judy has a hand (or an elbow, to be more exact).

   Murder on the Yellow Brick Road is a well-paced and very neat yarn, indeed, even if it doesn’t require a wizard to spot the culprit. The dialogue is crisp and lively, especially between Toby and his antagonistic brother, LAPD Lieutenant Philip Pevsner, whose boiling point is nil whenever he runs up against his younger  brother.

   Add Clark Gable in a minor role as a prospective witness and several other M.G.M. stars in walk-through parts and it all adds up to quite a pleasant stroll down memory lane as well. Unfortunately, there was a very careless printing job by St. Martin’s Press on the first edition which will hopefully be corrected in subsequent printings, including that  scheduled for the Mystery Guild.

   Kaminsky’s third work is already in progress and will involve Toby Peters with the Marx Brothers.