ANTHONY GILBERT – Mr. Crook Lifts the Mask. Arthur Crook #38. Random House, US, hardcover, 1970. Beagle, US, paperback, date?. Published earlier in the UK as Death Wears a Mask (Collins, UK, hardcover, 1970).

   Lucy Beatrice Malleson’s mystery-writing career spanned almost fifty years and well over fifty novels. While she started her career as Anthony Gilbert with a polished and gentlemanly sleuth, Scott Egerton, Liberal M.P. and man about town, she is best known and loved for a very different kind of detective. In 1936 she introduced Arthur Crook. cockney lawyer, detective, and “The Criminal’s Hope.”

   Of course, Crook’s clients are always innocent. And like Perry Mason, with whom he otherwise has very little in common, Crook always proves his client’s innocence by bringing the real murderer to justice.

   In this late Gilbert title, Arthur Crook plays advocate and protector for a spunky spinster named May Forbes. On her nightly sojourn to “Broomstick Common” to feed the wild cats, she stumbles upon a man (in balaclava helmet and mask) about to bury a suspiciously large bundle. While fleeing this fearsome figure, May retreats into a noisy pub, and so into the life of Mr. Crook.

   The bundle turns out to be the body of a young woman of loose morals and avaricious ambition. There are plenty of men who might have wanted the victim dead. One young fellow (not surprisingly, an out-of-towner) is arrested for the crime, but since May is sure of his innocence, Crook investigates.

   The puzzle of Mr. Crook Lifts the Mask is perhaps a little too easy to guess. but the characters, especially May (or “Sugar,” as Crook calls her) and her man-hating. sharp-tongued friend, Mrs. Politi, are a delight. Arthur Crook. with his irrepressible optimism, his colorful slang. and his ancient yellow Rolls, “The Superb,” is a memorable sleuth. And Gilbert is skilled at creating tidy puzzles and eccentric characters.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

WALTER GIBSON – Norgil the Magician. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1977.

   One of this century’s most prolific writers, Walter Gibson was the author of 282 pulp novels featuring the most famous of all superhero crime fighters, Lamont Cranston, a.k.a. the Shadow. All 282 of those book-length works were produced between 1931 and 1949 and first appeared in The Shadow Magazine under such titles as “The Shadow Laughs,” “The Mobsmen on the Spot,” “The Creeping Death,” “The Voodoo Master,” and “The Shadow, The Hawk, and The Skull.”

   Some forty of these have been reprinted over the years, most in paperback; a few of the shorter ones have appeared in pairs in such Doubleday hardcover titles as The Shadow: The Mask of Mephisto and Murder by Magic (1975) and in the recent Mysterious Press book The Shadow and the Golden Master (1984).

   Gibson also created another series character for the pulps — Norgil the Magician, whose adventures appeared in the magazine Crime Busters in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Norgil is a stage magician: “Like Blackstone or Calvert, both headliners at the time,” Gibson writes in his introduction to Norgil the Magician, the first of two Norgil collections, “he could switch from fifty-minute shows at movie houses to a full evening extravaganza, with an enlarged company.”

   Norgil is an anagram of the conjurer’s real name. Loring; he also can (and does) change it into Ling Ro, a name he uses “when called upon to perform wizardry in Chinese costume.”

   Each of the Norgil stories features a well-known stage illusion as its central plot device — a version of Houdini’s Hindu Needle Trick in “Norgil — Magician”; burial alive in a sealed casket in “The Glass Box”; the rising-card illusion in “Battle of Magic.”

   These eight stories are pulpy, to be sure (the prose almost embarrassingly bad in places), but that shouldn’t spoil most readers· enjoyment of them. The magic in each is authentic and presented with the requisite amount mystery — Gibson was himself a practicing magician — and Norgil’ s melodramatic methods and illusions make for good fun.

   Anyone who has read and enjoyed any of the Shadow novels will certainly want to read this collection, as well its successor, Norgil: More Tales of Prestidigitation ( 1978).

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

DAVE J. GARRITY – Dragon Hunt. PI Peter Braid. Signet, paperback original, 1967.

   Dave Garrity seems unfairly destined to be a footnote in the career of Mickey Spillane. With the phenomenal popularity of Spillane in the 1950s, a group of satellite writers sprang into orbit around him: “buddies” of the Mick’s who solicited cover blurbs and contacts in the writing business to launch their own careers as hard-boiled mystery writers.

   Earle Baskinsky flamed out after two vivid, idiosyncratic novella-length books (The Big Steal and Death Is a Cold, Keen Edge, both 1956), as did Charlie Wells, after two readable, Spillane-imitative books (Let the Night Cry, 1954, and The Last Kill, 1955).

   Only Garrity — who sometimes published under the single-name by line Garrity — carved out a career of his own. His only published private-eye novel to dale (several novels completed shortly before his death in 1984 may see posthumous publication) is Dragon Hunt, in which he unashamedly tapped into the success of Mike Hammer.

   Although Dragon Hunt is one of Garrity’s lesser works, it has been singled out for discussion because it features Mike Hammer as a character, making it of interest to students of Spillane, whose importance is, after all, undeniable.

   With Spillane’s blessing (right down to cover blurb and a photo of the Mick and Garrity on the back cover), the novel that “introduces private eye Peter Braid” ties directly into the world of Mike Hammer in many ways. The title is a reference to “the dragon,” the villain of Spillane’s novel The Girl Hunters> (1961), to which Dragon Hunt is vaguely a hack-door sequel.

   Throughout the novel Braid calls Hammer on the phone for advice and help, perhaps mirroring the Garrity/Spillane relationship. (Spillane claims not to have provided Hammer’s dialogue, but one assumes he at least checked it over.)

   The basic plot — a dying millionaire named Adam hires the PI to protect his granddaughter from a prodigal, psychotic son named Cain — is lifted from the syndicated “Mike Hammer” comic strip in 1954, right down to the names of the characters. Spillane wrote the Sunday pages of the strip and collaborated with artist Ed Robbins on the daily scripts.

   In his entry in Contemporary Authors circa ’63, Garrity mentions as a work in progress a book that is obviously Dragon Hunt — then titled Find the Man Called Cain — to be done in collaboration with Ed Robbins. This would explain the Hammer strip as source material for the novel, but not the lack of Robbins’ name on the by-line. In any case, Dragon Hunt is a minor, slightly tongue-in-cheek, but likable affair, and a must for Spillane enthusiasts.

   Those who wish to see Garrity at his best, however, should seek out his Cordolini series for New American Library. In these four novels (an unpublished fifth one is known to exist), Garrity reveals himself to be an ambitious writer, experimenting with characterization via quirky effective dialogue; using third-person shifting viewpoints boldly; and generally avoiding the schlocky mock”Executioner” approach of similar series of the same period.

   His finest hour is The Plastic Man (1976), which features a narrative trick so deft, so surprising, that the most seasoned mystery reader will have to give Garrity his due.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – The Hundred-Dollar Girl. PI Joe Puma #6. Dutton, hardcover, 1961. Signet S2205, paperback, 1962.

   Sports — in particular football, boxing, and golf — play strong roles in many of Gault’s mysteries. Ex-jock Brock Callahan solves pro-football-related crimes in Day of the Ram and Dead Hero (1963). One non-series book, Fair Prey (1956), published under the pseudonym Will Duke, has a golfing background; another, The Canvas Coffin (1953), deals with the fight game and has a boxer protagonist. The Hundred-Dollar Girl likewise deals with the seedy world of professional prizefighting.

   This novel is also the seventh and last to feature Gault’s other series character — and second private eye -Joe Puma. Puma is tougher than Callahan, more of a loner, but imbued with the same human qualities; Anthony Boucher wrote of him, “He is big and muscular and can give and take punishment; he drinks and wenches and has his own ideas about professional ethics. But Gault has created him so firmly and skillfully that he is a man and not a pornographic puppet … an understandable and not too happy man, sometimes likable, sometimes exasperating and always real.”

   Puma made his first appearance in a pseudonymous book — Shakedown (1953), as by Roney Scott — but it wasn’t until 1958 that he emerged in full style; his first two major cases, End of a Call Girl and Night Lady, were published that year by Fawcett Crest, and three others followed in 1959-60. The Hundred-Dollar Girl is Puma’s only hardcover appearance.

   Hired by Terry Lopez to keep her young boxer husband from being forced by his unscrupulous manager, Gus Galbini, to throw a fight, Puma is almost immediately plunged into a murder investigation when Galbini turns up dead. Galbini’s wife also hires him: She has special reasons for wanting to find out who killed her meal ticket.

   A variety of hoodlums and beautiful women complicate matters and lead Puma on a perilous course to the (surprising) identity of Galbini’s killer. The Dutton edition’s dust jacket blurb calls this “a story of violence and death at ringside, replete with action and color and full of the authentic atmosphere of life in the ring and life in the underworld.” For once, dust jacket blurb is not only accurate but justified in its praise.

   Gault also brought Joe Puma back in The Cana Diversion,but he brought him back dead: The central premise of that novel is Brock Callahan’s search for Puma’s murderer. Those of us who liked Big Joe as well as we like Callahan, if not more so, may never quite forgive Bill Gault for so cold-bloodedly knocking him off.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – Don’t Cry for Me. Dutton, hardcover, 1952. Edgar Award winner for Best First Novel. Dell #672, paperback; cover art by James Meese.

   Don’t Cry for Me is Gault’s first novel, and one of several non-series mysteries he wrote in the 1950s. His fellow crime novelist Fredric Brown  had this to say about it: “(lt] is not only a beautiful chunk of story but, refreshingly, it’s about people instead of characters, people so real and vivid that you’ll think you know them personally. Even more important, this boy Gault can write, never badly and sometimes like an angel.” Gault’s other peers, the members of the Mystery Writers of America, felt the same: They voted Don’t Cry for Me a Best First Novel Edgar.

   This novel (and many of Gault’s subsequent books) beautifully evokes the southern California underworld of drug dealers, addicts, hoodlums, racetrack touts, second-rate boxers, and tough-minded women with larcenous and/or homicidal proclivities. Its narrator, Pete Worden, is anything but a hero; he lives a disorganized and unconventional life, walking a thin line between respectability and corruption, searching for purpose and identity.

   His girlfriend, Ellen, wants him to be one thing; his brother John — who controls the family purse strings — wants him to be another; and some of his “friends” want him to be a third. What finally puts an end to Worden’s aimless lifestyle is the discovery of a murdered man in his apartment, a hood named Al Calvano whom Pete slugged at a party the night before. Hounded by police and by underworld types, Worden is not only forced into his own hunt for the killer but forced to resolve his personal ambivalence along the way.

   Don’t Cry for Me is first-rate — tough, uncompromising, insightful, opinionated, occasionally annoying, and altogether satisfying. An added bonus is a fascinating glimpse of the death of the pulp magazines (the primary market for Gault’s fiction for the previous sixteen years), as seen through the eyes of Worden’s neighbor and friend, pulp writer Tommy Lister.

   Of Gault’ s other non-series books, the best is probably The Bloody Bokhara ( 1952), which is set in Milwaukee and has as its background the unique world of Oriental rugs and carpets. Also noteworthy are Blood on the Boards ( 1953), which has a little-theater setting; and Death Out of Focus ( 1959), about Hollywood film-making and script-writing.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – Death in Donegal Bay. PI Brock (the Rock) Callahan #10. Walker & Co., hardcover, 1984. Charter, paperback, 1987.

   William Campbell Gault sold his first short story to a pulp magazine in 1936; nearly half a century later, he is still writing fiction of the same high quality that has marked his long and prolific career. He has published more than 300 short stories and novelettes — mystery, fantasy, science fiction, sports — and some sixty novels, half of which are mystery/suspense and half of which are juvenile sports books.

   Gault’s most enduring fictional creation is ex-L.A. Rams football player turned private eye Brock Callahan, hero of eleven novels thus far. The first in the series, Ring Around Rosa, was published in 1955; six others followed it over the next eight years. Gault abandoned detective fiction in 1963 to concentrate on the more lucrative juvenile market, and did not return to a life of fictional crime until the early 1980s, when the juvenile vein had been played out. Callahan was given a new life as well, in a pair of paperback originals published by the short-lived Raven House; one of these, The Cana Diversion, was the recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award for the Best Paperback Original of 1982.

   Death in Donegal Bay is Gault’s first hardcover mystery in more than twenty years, an even better novel than Cana Diversion and as good as the best of the early Callahans, Day of the Ram (1956), The Convertible Hearse (1957), and County Kill (1962). Callahan, thanks to a substantial inheritance, is now married to his longtime girlfriend, Jan, an interior decorator, and semi-retired in the beach community of San Valdesto (Santa Barbara, where Gault himself lives).

   But he’s bored and has kept a hand in the detective business by grooming a protege, young Corey Raleigh. When Corey is hired for a surveillance job by con man named Alan Arthur Baker, Callahan worries that the kid has gotten in over his head and therefore sets out to do some snooping on his own. Among the people he encounters in the swanky former artists· colony of Donegal Bay are a conniving real-estate salesman, a couple of kids who run a bait shop, an ex-pug bar owner, a secretive former maid, a beautiful woman with a shady past, and an eccentric millionaire who lives in a medieval castle complete with moat and drawbridge.

   The murder of a vagrant opens up a Pandora’s box of blackmail, narcotics, infidelity, and more homicide before Callahan, with Corey’s help, untangles it all and arrives at the solution.

   Rich in incident, written with wry humor and sharp observation, peopled with believable characters, this is William Campbell Gault at his best.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

JONATHAN GASH – Firefly Gadroon. Lovejoy #6. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1984. Penguin, US, paperback, 1985. Published previously by Collins, UK, 1982.

   Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy series is one you will either adore or viscerally dislike.

   Lovejoy is immersed in the world he loves — that of antiques, legitimate or fake. (His own run heavily to the latter.) For Lovejoy, antiques are everything — well, nearly everything. His secondary passion is women. Readers who share Lovejoy’s first fascination will be rewarded with descriptions of, for example, hammering a reverse silver gadroon (oval fluting) or identifying Shibayama knife handles.

   In auction scenes, Gash takes his fans into the English village world of off-the-wall bids, “miffs,” “nerks,” “groats,” those who “pong” or “do a beano,” and the “cackhanded,” “narked,” or “sussed.”

   Lovejoy is charming and not above bending the law or the truth in the pursuit of a true antique. The romantic escapades and amours of this sprightly rogue are a delight. But for readers with no interest in or prior knowledge of antiques, the unexplained trade slang and the unabating discussion of old treasures can be overwhelming and tedious.

    Firefly Gadroon is the sixth in the series. Lovejoy’s trouble begins — as it often does — when he spots a luscious woman with beautiful legs at an auction. The object of his admiration “frogs” (gets) a small Japanese box he’s had his eye on, and not only will she not sell it to him, she doesn’t even appear to know its value.

   Why, then, does she insist on keeping it? That question leads Lovejoy into encounters with killers, police, international smugglers, and, of course, still more beautiful women. Lovejoy is at his roguish best in this adventure, and the background is as colorful as ever.

   The first Lovejoy novel, The Judas Pair (1977), involves a hunt for a lost pair of sinister dueling pistols. In The Vatican Rip (1982), the dealer undertakes the tricky task of stealing a Chippendale table from the Vatican. And in Pear\hanger (1985), Lovejoy tries his hand at locating a missing person — and ends up suspected of murder.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

ANDREW GARVE – The Lester Affair. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1974. Published previously by Collins,UK, hardcover, 1974.

   Among Garve’s other interests is a keen one in boating and the sea, and this is one of his best novels dealing with that theme. James Lester, Britain’s Progressive party candidate, seems well on his way to becoming prime minister when a strange thing happens: A young woman, Shirley Holt, claims that she and Jim Lester met during a holiday; that they bathed nude together on a deserted beach; that she went aboard his boat to spend the night; and that during the night they had a sexual relationship.

   Well, all right, such things happen. And apparently no harm has been done. After all, at the time, and presently, Lester was single-a widower actually. But (and here comes the intriguing Garve puzzle) Lester himself not only denies that such a thing ever happened, he denies even knowing the woman.

   Needless to say, claims and counterclaims take over the election headlines. Why. Lester supporters wonder, would Jim tum his back on this woman? She is able to supply a very convincing account of that night, including details she seemingly would not have known otherwise, and the topaz ring she claims she lost on the boat is recovered from one of its drains. Still, Lester sticks to his story, and begins to lose his lead in the election polls.

   This complex mystery is told from a number of points of view of people investigating the incident. And, as is often the case with Garve’s stories, interest is sustained throughout without a single death or even the threat of death. The resolution is sure to surprise and satisfy the reader.

   Garve also displays his knowledge of the sea to good effect in The Megstone Plot (1957) and A Hero for Leanda (1959). Other equally fine adventures are The Cuckoo Line Affair (1953), which concerns a son’s fight to clear his father of a shameful accusation; Boomerang (1970), which is set in Australia; and The Case of Robert Quarry ( 1972), an excellent depiction of the eternal triangle.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

ANDREW GARVE – The Ashes of Loda. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1965. Publisher earlier by Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1965. Popular Library, US, paperback, 1966. Perennial Library, US, paperback, 1978

   Andrew Garve (a pseudonym of Paul Winterton) has produced some forty well-crafted novels of suspense. In addition to their consistent high quality, what is notable about them is their diversity, both of setting and type. Garve writes adventure, espionage, detection, and even romance with equal facility.

   His stories are set in such far-flung locales as the English countryside, Australia, Africa, France, and Ireland. His heroes are often policemen or quite ordinary men who rise to meet unusual circumstances with unusual fortitude, and often his villainous characters are so finely developed as lo win the sympathy of his readers. Garve’s readers can count on a good adventure with a tantalizing central puzzle that will keep them reading until all is resolved.

   The puzzle in The Ashes of Loda involves the past — specifically the war record — of a Polish chemist, Dr. Stefan Raczinski. Was he, as he claims, merely a survivor of the German concentration camp at Loda, or was he guilty of war crimes in that camp? The question threatens to tear apart the relationship of the two people who care most about him: his daughter, Marya, and her fiance, Lord Timothy Quainton.

   Tim, a newspaperman normally stationed in Moscow, meets Marya while on leave in London. During their courtship he discovers an old newspaper article condemning Dr. Raczinski in absentia for war crimes. Marya adamantly ref uses to believe this, but there is enough doubt in Tim’s mind to make him launch an investigation when he returns to Russia. It is an investigation that will leave him cut off from all official help-and eventually marked for death in the middle of a Russian winter.

   Garve is well acquainted with Russia and her people, since he was a foreign correspondent for the London News Chronicle in Moscow from 1942 to 1945. He puts this. knowledge to good use in this exciting story, particularly in the sequence in which Tim finds himself stranded in the countryside, trying to escape the police, foraging for the essentials, and trying to survive the deadly winter weather.

   Garve’s other novels that make use of his knowledge of Russia include Murder Through the Looking Glass (1952), The Ascent of D-13, and the The Late Bill Smith (1971).

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

RANDALL GARRETT – Too Many Magicians. Lord Darcy #1. Doubleday, hardcover, 1967. Previously serialized in Analog SF, Aug-Nov 1966. Curtis, paperback, 1969. Ace, paperback, September 1979.

   Any number of writers have been successful at blending crime and science fiction, but no one has done it better than Randall Garrett in his Lord Darcy series. On the one hand, the Lord Darcy stories are meticulous science-fictional extrapolations — tales of an alternate-universe Earth in the 1960s in which the Plantagenets have maintained their sway, a king sits on the throne of the Western World, and not physics but thaurnaturgic science (magic, that is) is the guiding field of knowledge. On the other hand, they are pure formal mysteries of the locked-room and impossiblecrime variety, ingeniously constructed and playing completely fair with the reader.

   Too Many Magicians is the only Lord Darcy novel, and so delightful and baffling that a 1981 panel of experts voted it one of the fifteen all-time best locked-room mysteries. When Master Sir James Zwinge, chief forensic sorcerer for the city of London, is found stabbed to death in a hermetically sealed room at the Triennial Convention of Healers and Sorcerers, it seems no one could have committed the crime; indeed, there is no apparent way in which the crime could have been committed.

   Enter Lord Darcy, chief investigator for His Royal Highness, the duke of Normandy, and Darcy’s own forensic sorcerer, Master Sean O’Lochlainn. Using a combination of clue gathering, observation, ratiocination, and magic, Darcy and Master Sean sift through a labyrinth of hidden motives and intrigues and solve the case in grand fashion.

   This truly unique detective team also appears in eight novelettes, which can be found in two collections — Murder and Magic (1979) and Lord Darcy Investigates (1981). The former volume contains one of Anthony Boucher’s favorite stories, the wonderfully titled “Muddle of the Woad.”

   These, too, are clever crime puzzles; these, too, are rich in extrapolative history and the lore of magic; and these, too, are vivid and plausible portraits of a modem world that could exist if Richard the Lion-Hearted had died from his arrow wound in the year 1199- — a world that resonates to the clip-clop of horse-drawn hansoms and carriages (for of course automobiles were never invented) and through which the shade of Sherlock Holmes happily prowls.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.