LESTER DENT – Dead at the Take-Off. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1946. Bestseller Mystery, digest-sized paperback, date? Reprinted as High Stakes (Ace Double D-21, paperback, 1953).

   Lester Dent is best known as the creator of Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, who ranks with the Shadow as the most popular cull hero to come out of the pulp magazines of the 1930s. As “Kenneth Robeson,” Dent wrote close to 200 full-length Doc Savage novels for Doc’s own monthly magazine from 1933 to 1949.

   Dozens of these have been reprinted in paperback since 1964, under their original titles — Brand of the Werewolf, The Squeaking Goblins, The Living Fire Menace, etc. Despite hokey plots, stereotypical villains, and hurried writing, they contain some ingenious ideas and extrapolations. Dent was much more than a pulp hack; he had genuine talent and a convincing prose style that, when he took the time to polish it, matches up well with the best crime writers past and present.

   Dent’s best work is a pair of novelettes featuring detective Oscar Sail, which he wrote for Black Mask in the mid-Thirties, and Dead at the Take-Off, his first novel to appear under his own name. Take-Off is an evocative work, with postwar commercial aviation as its background.

   The protagonist is Chance Molloy, the owner of a small airline, AEA, who is facing financial ruin because a conspiracy headed by corrupt Senator Lord has prevented him from buying surplus military transport planes. Molloy, with the aid of two of his staff, has been trying lo obtain proof of the senator’s duplicity, and now believes he has found it.

   Lord’s nephew has agreed to turn over damning evidence against his uncle at the senator’s New Mexico ranch. Along with several other principal characters, including the senator’s daughter, Janet, Molloy boards Flight 14 for New Mexico. En route, there is considerable intrigue, capped off when the nephew turns up dead and Janet is drugged. Later, in New Mexico, an attempt is made on Molloy’s life, and the suspense continues to heighten. The violent climax takes place back on board the airliner.

   There is plenty of action, but Dead at the Take-Off has much more than that to recommend it. The characterization is sharp, with strong psychological overtones; effective use of flashback is made; and the writing is among Dent’s best. The book is jam-packed with such imagery as:

   The book has its flaws — Dent was never able to totally overcome his. pulp origins and there is a good deal of melodrama here — but it is still a very good example of the mid-Forties hard-boiled crime novel.

Dent’s other books are somewhat less successful, although Lady to Kill (1946), which also features Chance Molloy, and the paperback original Cry at Dusk (1952) have many of the same positive qualities as Dead at the Take-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.

ROBERT C. DENNIS – Conversations with a Corpse. Paul Reeder #2. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1974. Ballantine, paperback, 1976.

   Robert C. Dennis wrote dozens of short stories for the pulps in the 1940s and hundreds of teleplays for such popular TV
series as Dragnet, Cannon, and Perry Mason from the 1950s to the early 1980s. But his output of novels, regrettably, was limited to just two — both published in the early Seventies; both narrated by architect Paul Reeder, “a psychic, a man with a freak brain capable of recovering mind pictures of past events”; and both literate and expertly constructed whodunits that even ESP skeptics can enjoy.

   On a business trip to the small California wine-country town of Orofino, the “Wine Capital of the West,” Reeder rents a car at the local airport and, as soon as he touches the steering wheel, has a psychometric vision telling him the man who last drove the car is now dead. Directed by his “inner mind,” he embarks on a search that leads him into conflict with Sergeant Dryden of the Orofino police and with members of the Chicano community; into an abandoned winery filled with bloated rats and an equally bloated corpse; and finally to a confrontation with a homicidal madman at the Mission Santa Teresa Dolorosa.

   Library Journal called the novel “a suspenseful and menacing puzzle”; the Los Angeles Times praised it as “tough and furiously fast-paced … [with] bone-chilling situations.” Both assessments are on target. The scene in which Reeder is trapped in the bankrupt winery is a minor masterpiece of its kind, guaranteed to give the most jaded reader a case of the shudders.

   The first Reeder novel, The Sweat of Fear (1973), is also a fine piece of criminous storytelling and highly recommended.

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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.

RALPH DENNIS – Atlanta Deathwatch. Jim Hardman #1. Popular Library, paperback original, 1974. Brash Books, softcover, 2018.

   In 1974, Popular Library introduced a new series called “Hardman,” by Ralph Dennis, by releasing the first two books in the series simultaneously. These were followed by five more that year, and another five in 1976. The series stands at twelve, and that’s a shame, because although Hardman was marketed as just another men’s adventure series, it was much more than that. It was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale subgenre that was filled with Executioner rip-offs.

   Jim Hardman is a disgraced ex-cop working out of Atlanta as an unlicensed PI with an ex-football player sidekick, Hump Evans. They walk a tight legal line and will do just about anything for money that doesn’t offend Hardman’ s morals — which are high for the kind of life he leads.

   In this book they are hired by a black mobster called “The Man” to find out who killed a girl he was in love with, but the plots of these novels are secondary to the actions and interactions of the main characters and the crisp writing. At its worst, Dennis’s writing is well above that of the run-of-the-mill men’s adventure series; and at its best, it is a fine example of PI writing that depends little on the conventions of the genre.

   Other novels in the series particularly recommended are Working for the Man (1974), The One Dollar Rip-Off (1976), and The Buy-Back Blues (1976).

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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.

RICHARD DEMING – Anything But Saintly. Matt Rudd #2.  Permabooks M-4286, paperback original, 1963.

   Richard Deming wrote original mysteries and novelizations of numerous TV series, including two books based on Dragnet. The two Dragnet books appeared in 1958 and 1959 and perhaps led to Deming’s writing his own police procedural series in the early 1960s. Although the series was only three books, it was competently written and entertaining.

   The setting of each of the books is the riverside city of St. Cecelia, and the first-person narrator is Sergeant Matt Rudd (real name Mateusz Rudowski), a member of the city’s Vice Squad.

   In Anything but Saintly, a businessman visiting the city is rolled by a prostitute and robbed of $500. Rudd and his partner, Carl Lincoln, set out to recover the money, only to find that the girl was murdered shortly after returning to her apartment. Being a member of the Vice Squad does not keep Rudd from getting involved in the killing, because an attempt is soon made on his own life.

   What looked at first like a simple case suddenly escalates into something more, with a heavily protected procurer and a big-time politico getting dragged in. The procedural details, including the peculiar workings of the St. Cecelia Police Department, are well done, and the story is terse and fast, with a good depiction of a racket-ridden city and how it is run.

   Matt Rudd appeared previously in Vice Cop   (Belmont, 1961) and again in Death of a Pusher (Pocket, 1964 ). An equally good, but very different, paperback original by Deming is Edge of the Law (Berkley, 1960). He also created a one-armed private detective, Manville Moon, who appears in three novels published in the early 1950s, beginning with The Gallows in My Garden (Rinehart, 1952). Other of his mysteries appeared under the pseudonym Max Franklin, notably Justice Has No Sword (Rinehart, 1953).

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Updated and 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.

MICHAEL DELVING – The Devil Finds Work.  Dave Cannon #2. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1969. Belmont, paperback, 1971.

   Of the six bibliomysteries Michael Delving (Jay Williams) wrote about the adventures, in England, of the two American partners of a Connecticut-based rare-book and manuscript firm, The Devil Finds Work is the only one featuring both Dave Cannon and Bob Eddison.

   In the small town of Bartonbury, the two dealers are offered a collection of material belonging to Tristram Vail, a notorious Satanist who was once called “the wickedest man in the world.” They also find themselves caught up in the investigation of the theft of a silver cup from a desecrated church. When Vail’s secretary. Richard Foss, is found dead during another attempt to rob the church, Chief Inspector Codd — whom Delving introduced in the first Cannon/Eddison adventure, Smiling the Boy Fell Dead (1966) —  is called in from Scotland Yard to investigate.

   The odd activities of Vail’s ambiguous friend Anthony Gaunt play a role in the mystery. As does Bob (who is a full-blooded Cherokee from Oklahoma) being challenged by the local pub’s darts champion to a match in which Bob will use a bow and arrow and lined target, and the other player will use a regulation dart board with appropriate adjustments made for distance.

   Another plot thread is Bob’s romantic interest in Jill Roseblade, the niece of an eccentric woman named Miss Trout, who owns a valuable Book of Hours coveted by the two partners. It is Codd, with help from Dave and Bob, who finally sorts out the disparate elements and solves the mystery.

   Each of the characters in The Devil Finds Work is fully developed (Bob is especially well drawn), and the narrative is packed with vivid descriptions of village life, the English countryside and architecture, and various works of art. Delving was also a master at conveying the differences and similarities between the English and American ways of life. (Anthony Boucher said of him: “I can’t think of anyone since John Dickson Carr who has better handled England-from-an-American-viewpoint.”)  And his knowledge of rare books and art is that of both an expert and connoisseur.

   The other five books in the series are equally fine, in particular Die Like a Man (1970), in which Dave, traveling in Wales, is offered an ancient wooden bowl its owner claims is the Holy Grail; and A Shadow of Himself (1972), which is concerned with a seventeenth-century Dutch painting and in which Delving divulges the outcome of the romance between Bob and Jill. Because of such personal elements that carry over from book to book, a sequential reading of the series is recommended.

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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.

DAVID DELMAN – He Who Digs a Grave. Lt. Jacob Horowitz #2. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1973. No paperback edition.

   The combination of protagonists David Delman has used in this engaging novel — that of a small-town female sheriff and a male cop from New York-is an inspired one. Sheriff Helen Bly and Lieutenant Jacob Horowitz are as different on the surface as two people can be.

   She’s a country woman with strong roots in the area around Cedarstown, an elected official who’s never had to handle a murder before. He’s a tough city cop who’s seen more than enough violent death. And they hold opposing views about whether Horowitz’s old army acquaintance Ian Kirk (who has asked Horowitz to come to town and investigate in an unofficial capacity) murdered his wife and her lover. But Bly and Horowitz are both strong, fair, and sensitive people-characteristics that allow them to work together and also allow them to fall in love.

   As Bly and Horowitz piece together such facts as a missing suicide note, an unwanted pregnancy, a vanished housekeeper, and a pair of thugs who have been paid to intimidate the outsider from New York, the author skillfully depicts small-town life through his characterization of the other residents. A well-plotted novel with a realistic and satisfying conclusion.

   Delman’s other mysteries: A Week to Kill (1972), Sudden Death ( 1972), One Man’s Murder ( 1975), and The Nice Murderers ( 1977)-feature Jacob Horowitz. His most recent book, Murder in the Family, appeared in 1985.

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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.

LILLIAN de la TORRE – The Detections of Dr. Sam Johnson. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1960. Dolphin Books, paperback, 1962. Intl Polygonics Ltd, paperback, 1984.

   At first glance, the great eighteenth-century English lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson seems an unlikely detective. On closer consideration, however, the idea of the man who, after years of sleuthing, published the first English dictionary (1755), and who had the original Boswell close at hand to chronicle his literary detections and adventures, seems just right. The combination of the grumpy sage Johnson and his Scottish biographer, James Boswell of Auchinleck, forms the model for the classic detective-story Holmes-Watson relationship.

   The eight stories in this book are pastiches, written in Boswell’s style with the fancy of the author woven into the fabric of history. The detections take place around the 1770s, mostly in London ( “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” -S.J.), and in Bath and Stratford-onAvon. Johnson, or “Cham,” as he is sometimes called, investigates crime and chicanery, fraud and felony.

   His unique position enables him to mix with all classes of society and get involved in various events-from the soldiers’ court-martial on the greensward of Hyde Park, to the robbery of Gothic enthusiast Horace Walpole, to the espionage exploits of the female American patriot against Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne. In “The Tontine Curse,” he hears of dying children and blesses a Roman parent. The “harmless drudge” probes the pitfalls of antiquarianism and exposes forgery in “The Missing Shakespeare Manuscript.” “The Triple-Lock’ d Room” is a case of murder and theft at Boswell’s lodgings with its weird inhabitants.

   The Dr. Sam tales are scholarly and quaint and quite the best of their kind. An earlier collection is Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector (1946), and there are more to come. Most of the stories originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

      Contents:

• The Black Stone of Dr. Dee · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 1948
• The Frantick Rebel · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Dec 1948
• The Missing Shakespeare Manuscript · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jul 1947
• Saint-Germain the Deathless · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jan 1958
• The Stroke of Thirteen · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Oct 1953
• The Tontine Curse · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1948
• The Triple-Lock’d Room · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jan 1952
• The Viotti Stradivarius · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Aug 1950

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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.

LEN DEIGHTON – The Billion Dollar Brain. “Harry Palmer” #4. Jonathan Cape, UK, hardcover, 1966. Putnam’s, US, hardcover, 1966. Dell, US, paperback, 1967. Film: Lowndes, 1967 (with Michael Caine as Harry Palmer and Karl Malden as Leo Newbigen).

   Len Deighton’s first novel, The Ipcress File (1962; later filmed with Michael Caine), marked the debut of one of the major stars of espionage fiction. Since then this former photographer, illustrator, teacher, and occasional cookbook author has written a string of stylish and tightly plotted espionage novels that are thoughtful commentaries and reasoned examinations of society as well as first-rate thrillers.

   One of Deighton’s chief concerns is the morality of the world of espionage, but his treatment of this theme is never ponderous or heavy-handed. Instead he chooses to examine the ethics of the characters about whom he writes with an ironic wit; his prose has a lightness that further leavens this rather weighty subject. The books are also full of vivid description — of places, people, meals, natural wonders — that give the stories an air of authority; his use of documents and appendixes further convinces the reader that the espionage world is really as described. Along with John LeCarré, Deighton is one of our foremost contemporary writers of espionage novels.

   The billion-dollar brain of this novel’s title is a remarkable computer owned by a Texas mogul who has assembled his own private espionage network. This wild-card covert agency poses a grave threat to just about every government on earth, and what makes it tick is the incredibly complex computer, the quintessential technical-wonder successor to man’s own reason and self-asserted destiny.

   Deighton’s insubordinate, deceptively tough, unnamed first-person spy is given the task of neutralizing this menace, and along the way meets some fascinating characters. There is sensuous, champagne-swilling Signe Laine, a Finnish beauty who favors expensive underwear and has a knack and passion for besting males; Dawlish, the fumbling Intelligence chief who runs the show; Colonel Stok, of Red Anny Intelligence; Harvey Newbegin, the neurotic American agent who is in on the chase; and the maniacal General Midwinter. The action is on an international scale, swinging from Helsinki to London, Texas, Leningrad, and New York.

   This is a tightly constructed, imaginative, high-tech sort of thriller. Space Age espionage, in which Colonel Stok makes the disturbingly relevant observation “Two not very clever men will have to decide whether to extend a hand or pull a trigger.”

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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.

MIRIAM ALLEN deFORD – The Theme Is Murder. Abelard Shuman, hardcover, 1967.

   Miriam Allen deFord is best known for her scholarly works on a variety of historical subjects, and for her true-crime studies — the full-length books, The Overbury Affair (for which she was awarded an MWA Edgar in 1961) and Ma Barker (1970), and the collection of short pieces, Murderers Sane and Mad (1965).

   But she was also an accomplished writer of short stories, both mysteries and science fiction (and in some cases a combination of the two); beginning in 1944, she published an aggregate of more than 1O0 until her death in 1975 at the age of eighty-seven.

   The Theme ls Murder is her only criminous collection, and a first-rate gathering it is. There are seventeen stories here, most of which first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; others were originally published in such diverse publications as Shadow Mystery Magazine, the Sixties men’s periodical Dude, and Windsor Quarterly. Most are of the quiet variety, with emphasis on character and unusual backgrounds (an actual homicide case preserved on a cuneiform tablet from 1850 B.C., for instance, in “The Judgment of En-Lil”; or Ancient Rome in “De Crimine”).

   One of her favorite themes is familial strife that builds into violence, as in such stories as ”Beyond the Sea of Death,” “The Oleander’ and “A Death in the Family.”

   Each of these seventeen tales is finely crafted and thought-provoking — a single-volume legacy from a gifted spinner of mysterious webs. Recommended.

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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 L. DeANDREA – The Hog Murders. Niccolo Benedetti #1. Avon, paperback original, 1979. Intl Polygonics Ltd, paperback, 1999.

   DeAndrea’s second Edgar-winner is a wonderfully old-fashioned puzzle mystery, complete with serial killer and a master detective reminiscent of Nero Wolfe or even the great Holmes himself. The eccentric but brilliant Professor Niccolo Benedetti is assisted by his pupil, Ron Gentry, a young private eye based in snowy Sparta, New York.

   Sparta is being terrorized by a homicidal maniac who, in the tradition of serial killers, writes notes to a local journalist, in this case likable Buell Tatham. He signs himself “Hog,” and the cover of this paperback is a particularly arresting one, showing a stocky man’s upper body topped by the monstrous head of a pig. Hog’s methods are as clever as they’re diabolical; his victims are random and almost invariably innocent — even a child is killed. But Benedetti, of course, is a little too quick for him.

   The solution is truly unexpected, yet really as obvious as who killed Roger Ackroyd; in other words, the reader is fooled but could kick himself for it. Bonuses are the trademark DeAndrea wit and the withholding of the complete solution until the very last sentence.

   In addition to his mysteries, DeAndrea has published a number of non-series suspense novels, including The Lunatic Fringe (1980), which is set in New York City during the Gay Nineties; and Cronus ( 1984), a thriller about an apparent terrorist killing in the sleepy town of Draper, Pennsylvania. DeAndrea has also published one novel to date under the pseudonym Philip Degrave, Unholy Moses (1985).

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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.
   

      The Niccolo Benedetti series —

The Hog Murders. Avon 1979
The Werewolf Murders. Doubleday 1992
The Manx Murders. Penzler 1994