CELIA FREMLIN – The Hours Before Dawn. Lippincott, hardcover, 1958. Dell D-422, paperback, 1966. Academy Chicago Publishers, softcover, 2005. Dover Publications, paperback, 2017.

   Celia Fremlin has the unusual ability to take a perfectly normal, if not mundane, situation and create an atmosphere of sheer terror. The Hours Before Dawn, which won an Edgar for Best Novel of its year, introduces us to Louise Henderson, a sleep-starved young housewife with a fretful new infant that is causing complaints from both her family and neighbors.

   The only person who doesn’t complain is Miss Vera Brandon, the boarder the Hendersons have recently taken in. In fact, Miss Brandon is so self-effacing and quiet that at times the Hendersons don’t even know she is in the house.

   Soon the boarder’s actions begin to arouse Louise’s suspicions, and she finds herself doing all sorts of things she has never done before — attempting to search the woman’s room, contacting total strangers for information about her, and finally taking the baby for a nocturnal stroll in his pram, only to fall asleep and lose him in a park.

   The author skillfully weaves truly frightening events into Louise’s daily routine of meals, housecleaning, and childcare, and her superb characterization has the reader thoroughly on Louise’s side — and just as terrified as she is — by the time the story reaches its surprising conclusion.

   Other Fremlin titles of note: Uncle Paul (1960), Prisoner’s Base (1967), The Spider-Orchid (1978), With No Crying (1981).

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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.

R. AUSTIN FREEMAN – The Singing Bone. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1912. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1923. Popular Library, US, paperback, as The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. Reprinted many other times.

   The Singing Bone consists of five novelettes, averaging a bit over fifty pages each: “The Case of Oscar Brodski,” “A Case of Premeditation,” “The Echo of a Mutiny,” “A Wastrel’s Romance,” and “The Old Lag.” Though the final story is fairly routine, Freeman broke new ground with the first four and invented the “inverted” detective story.

   Each of the tales is told in two parts of about equal length. In part one, “The Mechanism of Crime,” as it is subtitled in the first story, we actually see the crime committed and are furnished with all the facts that could be used in solving it. In part two, “The Mechanism of Detection,” we follow Dr. Thorndyke as he investigates the crime, finds the clues, and finally solves it.

   Although the classic question ‘Whodunit?” is necessarily absent for the reader, there is a challenge of a sort to match wits with the detective and spot the clues in advance.

   The inverted form has never been popular in fiction, although Freeman used it in three more stories and two novels, and the popular television series “Columbo” did very well by it for several seasons. Perhaps the secret was that Peter Falk’s Sergeant Columbo was a far more interesting character than Dr. John Thorndyke. whose microscopic examinations lack the flair and showmanship of Sherlock Holmes. Still, the stories in The Singing Bone deserve rediscovery, especially “The Echo of a Mutiny,” which is probably the best of them, with its atmospheric setting in a lighthouse.

   Dr. Thorndyke was first introduced in the novel The Red Thumb Mark (1907), notable for its first use of fingerprint forgery in detective fiction. The collection John Thorndyke’s Cases (1909) features eight conventional detective stories and is especially noteworthy for “The Blue Sequin” and “The Aluminum Dagger.”

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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.

R. AUSTIN FREEMAN – Mr. Pottermark’s Oversight. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1930. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1930. Reprinted a number of times, including Dover, US, softcover, 1985.

   R. Austin Freeman was one of crime fiction’s true innovators. He developed the “inverted” mystery story to an art; and in Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, he created a series detective of significant capabilities one who has been called “the only convincing scientific investigator” in the genre.

   Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke novels and short stories can be said to rival Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon in quality and cleverness of plot. Where Holmes uses deductive methods, Dr. Thorndyke draws on a wealth of scientific knowledge — everything from anatomy to zoology-to solve his cases. And although many of his plots involve technical explanations, Freeman was a master at making science and its jargon explicable to the lay reader.

   Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight is Dr. Thorndyke’s most celebrated case. Anthony Boucher called it “a leisurely, a gentle novel, yet an acute one …. No other detective in fiction has ever equaled Thorndyke in the final section of explication, often so tedious in lesser hands. The scene is especially effective in this novel; and the lucid unfolding of the reasoning of John Thorndyke carries that intellectual excitement and stimulus so often attributed to the detective story so rarely found.”

   Marcus Pottermack is a gentleman of leisure who spends most of his time studying British mollusca (snails) in his garden. As the novel opens, he has realized his dream of purchasing a sundial for the garden, and in preparing the site where he intends to place it, he uncovers an old well. The discovery proves fortuitous; Mr. Pottermack receives a visit from a gambler named Lewson, who has been blackmailing him.

   It seems Pottermack is in reality Jeffrey Brandon, a runaway convict who is supposed dead. Lewson has had financial reverses, and once again he puts the bite on “Jeff.” Pottermack lures Lewson into the garden, has a fight with him, and Lcwson falls, hitting his head on the edge of the well before tumbling in. Mr. Pottermack then sets about covering up his crime.

   The main problem is footsteps leading to his house in the soft earth. He can’t obliterate them, and so he decides to continue them on, past his home. There is a problem, though: Lewson’s shoes are on him in the well.

   The resourceful Mr. Pottermack decides to manufacture shoes, taking a plaster cast of the footprints and reproducing their soles. He then walks some distance in them, creating the impression that the person passed on by. Of course, there are other details to be dealt with, and Mr. Pottermack takes further steps (no pun intended) to assure his crime will never come to light. But he hasn’t counted on John Thorndyke’s scientific methods —  methods that eventually reveal Mr. Pottermack’s oversight.

   Readers who enjoy the inverted detective story and/or a good intellectual puzzle will find this an absorbing novel.

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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.

NICOLAS FREELING – The Back of the North Wind. Viking, hardcover, 1983. Penguin, paperback, 1984.

   The crime novels of Nicolas Freeling follow the giant footsteps of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret. But the more you read of Freeling, the more you realize that they follow not in but alongside those footsteps, sometimes wandering to explore at greater depth character and social relevance.

   Freeling writes of ordinary, unexciting policemen — Dutch police inspector Piet Van der Valk, and Inspector Henri Castang of the French National Police — who have a private eye’s conscience. He presents sympathetic character studies of all the players in each of his dramas, and his detectives examine all aspects of the various crimes they are investigating, whether broad or narrow in scope.

   Freeling, who was born in London and presently lives in France, began writing romans policiers in 1962 with Love in Amsterdam and followed it with nine more books featuring Van der Valk; then, in Aupres de ma Blonde ( 1972), he committed the rather shocking act of doing away with his series detective because he had grown tired of him and wanted to experiment with other types of stories and protagonists.

   Van der Valk’s widow, Arlette, finds his murderer and concludes that particular case, among much social commentary and existential thought. She appears in two other books of her own (The Widow, 1979; Arlette, 1981) — perhaps not so successfully: at least one critic felt that widows should “wear black and smoke cigars … instead of solving crimes.”

   In 1974 Frceling published the first of his novels about Henri Castang, Dressing of Diamond. In contrast to Van der Valk, the veteran Castang (thirty years with the French police) possesses a sense of humor and a more dynamic wife, Vera, who is fond of quoting Conrad. Castang’s relationship with his wife is a nice counterpoint to the grim realities of the murder cases he is confronted with especially the central case in The Back of the North Wind.

   Returning from vacation, Castang investigates the particularly heinous murder of a young woman. In a boggy part of a nature reserve in the French countryside, a forester discovers a plastic carrier bag containing a rotting mass of human flesh. A search is organized and six other plastic carrier bags are found, each containing a part of a human body.

   Lab analysis reveals the murder victim to have been a female of North European origin, approximately twenty years old. The dismembered parts also show human bite marks: Castang is evidently faced with a murderer who is also a cannibal.

   His investigation is complicated by other pressing matters: a series of killings of ordinary citizens beaten over the head with a heavy weapon; a very strange and sinister prostitute; and political corruption within Castang’s own department. Each of the interwoven plot lines is untangled neatly through procedural and psychological methods, and the result is a grim but absorbing novel packed with Gallic atmosphere.

   The Henri Castang series ranks with Freeling’s Van der Valk novels and with the Martin Beck series written by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo  as the best of the European police procedurals. Other recommended titles are The Bugles Blowing (1976) and Castang’s City (1980).

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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.
   

STEVE FRAZEE – The Sky Block. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1953. Lion, paperback, 1954. Pyramid, paperback, 1958.

   While fishing his old vacation stream high in the Colorado Rockies, Platt Vencel is pressed into urgent service by both the U.S. Army (in the person of Colonel Julius Catron) and the FBI (agent Clement Raven).

   Something has gone wrong with the weather throughout the country: an unprecedented state of drought that has gone on for some months. The authorities are convinced that the cause is a hidden meteorological “doomsday device” built by an unspecified foreign power. Vencel, because of his intimate knowledge of the wilderness area, soon finds himself at the forefront of a desperate and deadly hunt for the location of the “Weather-Wrecker” and the identity of the men behind it.

   Despite the novel’s fantastic premise and its overtones of the anti-Communist extremism of the McCarthy era, Frazee’s handling of the theme minimizes the melodramatic aspects and makes this an exciting and suspenseful chase/adventure story in the mode of Geoffrey Household and John Buchan.

   Its strong points are several: deft characterization, nicely choreographed action scenes, and superb evocation of the rugged mountain terrain. Frazee’s prose style is also a plus; always terse and smoothly crafted, it takes on at times a kind of dark, rough-edged lyricism that gives the story a sense of stark reality.

   Frazee was primarily a writer of first-rate western fiction. His only other criminous novels are Running Target, expanded from the distinguished short story “My Brother Down There,” which won first prize in Ellery Queen’s annual contest for 1953, and Flight 409 (1969), a tale of survival and adventure about the search for the survivors of a plane crash in which three members of the president’s cabinet were killed.

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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.

ANTONIA FRASER – Quiet As a Nun. Jemima Shore #1. Weidenfeld ^ Nicolson, UK, hardcover, 1977. Viking, US, hardcover, 1977. Ace, paperback, 1978. Bantam, paperback, 1991. Norton, paperback, 1986. TV : A six-part version of the book appeared on ITV’s anthology series Armchair Thriller in the UK, 1978. Maria Aitken played Jemima Shore.

   The heroine of this first novel by noted historian Antonia Fraser is Jemima Shore, Investigator — not a detective in the proper sense, but an investigative television reporter in London. Her show carries great influence, and it is on the strength of this that Jemima is summoned back to Blessed Eleanor’s Convent in Sussex, where she attended school.

   Jemima was a Protestant, thrust into the convent world because of the “vagaries of her father’s career,” but her best friend, Rosabelle Powerstock, was a Catholic and later became a nun at the same convent.

   Now Sister Miriam, as Rosabelle was called, is dead under strange circumstances, having starved to death in the black tower built by the founder of the order-a structure commonly referred to by the schoolgirls as “Nelly’s Nest.” People give the nuns strange looks on the streets of town; a cloud hangs over the convent; the air is full of suspicion and distrust; and the Reverend Mother Ancilla turns to Jemima to find out what is amiss.

   Jemima is loath to revisit the scene of her childhood, but an aborted trip to Yugoslavia with her member of Parliament — and very married — lover makes her welcome a change of scene. She settles in at Blessed Eleanor’s in considerably more comfort than she enjoyed as a schoolgirl, but its charms fade when she hears strange footsteps at night, has a terrifying midnight encounter in the chapel, and discovers that politics, while very worldly, are not alien to these hallowed walls.

   Jemima is an interesting character — a complex combination of a hard-driving career woman and a person who repeatedly binds herself into no-win situations with married men; she also has more than her fair share of skepticism about nuns and Catholicism.

   The nuns, in their diversity, are also absorbing, and it is upon their hidden motives, passions, and beliefs that the plot turns. The unusual combination of the trendy contemporary world and the Gothic old convent gives a nice look at how such a place functions in the modern world.

   Subsequent Jemima Shore novels are The Wild Island (1978), A Splash of Red (1981), and Cool Repentance (1982).

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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 complete Jemima Shore series —

1. Quiet As a Nun (1977)
2. The Wild Island (1978)
3. A Splash of Red (1981)
4. Cool Repentance (1982)
5. Oxford Blood (1985)
Jemima Shore’s First Case (1986)
6. Your Royal Hostage (1987)
7. The Cavalier Case (1990)
Jemima Shore At the Sunny Grave (1991)
8. Political Death (1994)

DICK FRANCIS – Odds Against. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1965. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1965. Berkley X-1370, US, paperback, 1967. Reprinted many times since.

   In most of his books, Dick Francis uses an ordinary man (usually connected with the racing world) as his protagonist, caught up in events that are so overwhelming and out of control that he must make heroic efforts to sort them out. But in Odds Against, Sid Halley has a job as a detective — the obvious choice for a tough man to right the world’s wrongs.

   He’s been doing the work for two years, and when he’s shot (on page one of the story), he realizes that a bullet in the guts is his first step to liberation from being of “no use to anyone, least of all himself.” He was a champion steeplechase jockey, that’s what makes him tough. A racing accident lost him the use of his hand and self-respect simultaneously.

   The action breaks from the starting gate and blasts over the hurdles of intrigue, menace, and crime. Halley is cadged by his shrewd and loving father-in-law into confronting Howard Kraye, “a full-blown, powerful, dangerous, big time crook.”

   On the track he encounters murder, mayhem, plastic bombs, and torture. But he endures, in some part to regain his self respect, and in some part because he believes in racing, the sport, and in putting it right. A fascinating chase through an empty racecourse defies the villain. In the end, despite his tragedy, Sid Halley sees himself as a detective and as a man.

   Dick Francis was so taken with the characters in this book that he went on to use them in a television series, The Racing Game (shown on Public Broadcasting). A second Sid Halley novel, Whip Hand, won the British Gold Dagger A ward in 1979 and another Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.

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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 Sid Halley series —

   by Dick Francis …

Odds Against (1965)
Whip Hand (1979)
Come to Grief (1995)
Under Orders (2006)

   by Felix Francis …

Refusal (2013)
Hands Down (2022)

DICK FRANCIS – Blood Sport. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1967. Harper & Row, US, hardcover. 1968. Berkley, US, paperback, 1969. Reprinted many times since.

   From the winning world of British steeplechasing (where he was Champion Jockey in 1954), Dick Francis moved effortlessly into crime fiction with his first novel, Dead Cert, in 1962, and continues to be a front-runner. He has written twenty-some excellent thrillers full of old-fashioned moral polarity with strains of humor. These “adventure stories” (as Francis calls them) have amazing plots of clever evilness and feature nonrecurring heroes familiar with the racing game.

   Flawed, uninvolved, and soulless, each central character finds the value of vulnerability and returns to the land of the living through courage and love. As a central theme, it can be compared to that of the works of Ross Macdonald. As critic John Leonard said, “Not to read Dick Francis because you don’t like horses is like not reading Dostoevsky because you don’t like God.”

   In Blood Sport, death lurks on a simple Sunday sail on the Thames. An American visitor is almost drowned, and his rescuer is convinced that it wasn’t simply an accident. Gene Hawkins, the rescuer and hero, is an English civil servant, a “screener” who checks employees in secret-sensitive government jobs, His training permits him to spot details that make “accidents” phony, and his knowledge of guns and listening devices comes in handy.

   The rescued man asks for help in locating a stolen horse that has just been bought for a huge price. Hawkins is relieved to use his vacation time to hunt for missing horses, because he is despondent, filled with a “fat black slug of depression.” This is the only part of his character that doesn’t ring true-after all, it’s only a failed love affair.

   The pace picks up, and the scene changes to the U.S.A. From the farms of Kentucky, the trail is followed to Jackson, Wyoming. Along the way. Hawkins gets people together for some psychological reconditioning and exposes a bloodline scam as the scene shifts to Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, and Kingman, Arizona. The U.S. tour is fast moving, and Francis docs not dwell on local-color background, especially not to make any points. He just gives the graphic, journalistic details of a place that push the story along.

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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.

GEORGE FOY – Asia Rip. Viking, hardcover, 1964. Pocket, paperback, 1985.

   The highly evocative title of this novel comes from one of the shoal areas off the coast of Cape Cod, an area worked by the rugged men of the North Atlantic fishing industry. George Foy sets his impressive debut mystery among these men and the corrupt individuals on land who control the industry.

   Lars Larsen joins the search for his friend Joe Sciacca when the latter fails to return from a fishing run. Later he is asked to continue to investigate by Sciacca’s widow, Marie. When the pregnant Marie is also murdered, Larsen finds himself with a murder rap on his head, and a need for vengeance in his heart.

   Foy’s well-wrought plot features a lot of bloody action as Larsen traces the link between organized crime and the fishing industry. Much of the action includes feats of unbelievable derring-do by Foy’s hero. Not your average fisherman, he is a former Harvard man and drug-runner. He is also the kind of central character who keeps the reader involved and believing even as he scales the beams and girders of a massive railroad bridge with an injured and infected shoulder.

   George Foy has worked as a journalist covering the fishing industry. This background lends great authenticity to his first mystery/adventure novel. He is also a-fine storyteller.

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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.

JACK FOXX – Freebooty. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1976.

   Jack Foxx is a pseudonym used by Bill Pronzini for four Foxx novels written in the 1970s. Two are action/ adventure stories featuring Singapore bush pilot Dan Connell — The Jade Figurine (1972) and Dead Run (1975); a third, Wildfire ( 1978), is a thriller about a small California logging community menaced by both a trio of dangerous criminals and a forest fire.

   Freebooty, a historical mystery, is very different in tone from the other tautly written, action-oriented Foxx novels. This is not to say that there isn’t plenty of action and suspense, but Freebooty‘s style is gentler, evoking an earlier age, and it is spiced with frequent, delightful humor.

   Fergus O’Hara and his wife, Hattie, arrive in San Francisco in 1863 en route to the port city of Stockton, where they suspect the members of a bandit gang who have been terrorizing coaches of the Adams Express Company are hiding out. As O’Hara explains, his wife is not an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, as he is, but frequently assists him in his inquiries, “women being able to obtain information in places men cannot.”

   Before the O’Haras board the steamer Freebooty for the inland Journey, Fergus makes the acquaintance of Horace T. Goatleg, an obese man with patently suspicious motives; encounters an articulate and ribald parrot (one of the most memorable characters in a cast of outstanding ones); witnesses a near-riot on the Barbary Coast; finds a murdered man in an alley; and sustains minor injuries himself, including being half drowned by a shower of beer.

   Needless to say, all of the above events tie in to further goings–on aboard the steamer. And as the O’Haras — an effective team –investigate them, their initial purposes take a series of twists and turns, leading to a final revelation that is sure to leave the reader both surprised and amused.

   Pronzini has a firm grasp of historical fact, and he blends it skillfully into his narrative, capturing the tenor of the times without allowing detail to slow the pace of his story. This is an entertaining novel, well plotted and full of engaging 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.