JOHN GARDNER – License Renewed. James Bond #16 (but the first by Gardner). Jonathan Cape, UK, hardcover, 1981. Richard Marek, US, hardcover, 1981. Berkley, US, paperback, 1982.

   After the death of Ian Fleming, the holders of the James Bpnd copyright bestowed upon John Gardner the honor and responsibility of moving the British master spy, along with his galaxy of gadgets and arch-villains, into the l 980s. This established thriller writer has responded admirably.

   Here Bond is assigned to infiltrate the castle of the Laird of Murcaldy, a renowned nuclear scientist who has had meetings with an international terrorist known as Franco. Bond manages to deftly extract an invitation to Gold Cup Day at Ascot. Very English. He is off to the castle in the highlands, where he meets people with names like Mary Jane Mashkins and Lavender Peacock and affects the courses of nations with names like England, France, and America.

   If this novel isn’t a Fleming original, it is still great fun.

   Everything Bond fans would expect is here: the eccentric, larger-than-life villain with his sexy and thoroughly evil female companion and preternaturally tough henchman; the seductive and seduced beautiful woman of questionable allegiance; the slyly sexual double entendre; the infusion of ultramodern technology; and the name-dropping of expensive quality brands of everything from perfume to hand-guns.

   So artfully has Gardner penetrated and captured Fleming’s style that one can only wonder if Bond’s old nemesis, SPECTER, might somehow be involved. No doubt Bond’s boss, the enigmatic M, could tell us; but, as usual, he is tight-lipped.

   Another recommended title in the new Bond series by Gardner is Role of Honor (1984).

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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.

JOHN GARDNER – The Garden of Weapons. Herbie Kruger #2 [See Comment #1.] Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1980 McGraw-Hill, US, hardcover, 1981.

   John Gardner is one of the most versatile British writers in the espionage genre. He gained early recognition for his Boysie Oakes series — The Liquidators (1946), Amber Nine (1966 ), and five others — which he created in the hope they would be an “amusing counter-irritant to the excesses” of James Bond; these were written in the black-humor style characteristic of the Sixties.

   In the Seventies, Gardner scored additional critical and sales triumphs with a much different type of series — one featuring Sherlock Holmes’s archenemy, Professor Moriarity, in The Return of Moriarity (1974) and The Revenge of Moriarity (1975). And in the Eighties, Gardner returned to the frantic world of Bondian spies — literally when he began a series of new 007 adventures.

   But Gardner’s best book to date is not one featuring a series character; it is the realistic espionage thriller The Garden of Weapons, which begins when a KGB defector walks into the British Consulate in West Berlin and demands to speak with Big Herbie Kruger, a legendary figure in intelligence circles.

   Kruger’s interrogation of the defector reveals that the greatest of Kruger’s intelligence coups — a group of six informants known as the Telegraph Boys — has been penetrated by a Soviet spy. Kruger decides to go undercover and eliminate the double agent himself, without the knowledge or consent of British Intelligence.

   Posing as an American tourist, Kruger enters East Berlin to carry out his deadly self-appointed mission. But the task is hardly a simple one: and Gardner’s plot is full of Byzantine twists and turns involving the East Germans, the KGB, and British Intelligence. Any reader who enjoys espionage fiction will find The Garden of Weapons a small masterpiece of its type.

   Another non-series Gardner thriller in the same vein is The Werewolf Trace (1977), which has been called “a compulsively readable thriller with delicately handled paranormal undertones and a bitter ending.”

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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 Herbie Kruger series —

1. The Nostradamus Traitor (1979)
2. The Garden of Weapons (1980)
3. The Quiet Dogs (1982)
4. Maestro (1993)
5. Confessor (1995)

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece. Perry Mason #8. Morrow, hardcover, 1936. Pocket, paperback, 1944. Reprinted many times.

   Perry Mason is approached by a “peculiar” client-Edna Hammer, who seeks help for her uncle, Peter Kent. Kent has a bad habit of sleepwalking, and when he does, he heads for the carving knives and curls up in bed with one. Edna is afraid Uncle Peter will kill someone, and she wants Mason to prevent this.

   Kent has other troubles: a wife who instituted divorce proceedings on account of the sleepwalking but now wants to reconcile; a fiancee whom he wishes to marry but can’t unless the divorce goes through; a complicated business arrangement with a “cracked-brained inventor”; a hypochondriac half brother; and a woman tailing him in a green Packard roadster.

   Mason spends a night at the Kent home, and by the next morning there is a bloodstained knife under Peter Kent’s pillow, a corpse in the guest room, and a client in very hot water.

   The writing in this early novel is taut and lean — reflective of Gardner’s hard-boiled work for such pulp magazines as Black Mask. The dialogue is terse and packs a good impact, and there arc none of the long-winded conversations and introspections that characterize the later Perry Masons. A first-rate example of Gardner’s work in the Thirties and early Forties.

   Some other notable titles in the series are The Case of the Black-Eyed Blond (1944), The Case of the Lazy Lover (1947), The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister (1953), and The Case of the Daring Decoy ( 1957). After the late Fifties, the novels seem to lose something, possibly as a result of Gardner’s work on the Perry Mason TV series. Mason is less flamboyant, and the plots are not as intricate or well tied off as in the earlier novels.

   Gardner created other series characters, writing under both his own name and the pseudonym A. A. Fair. The best of these under the Gardner name are small-town prosecutor Doug Selby (The D.A. Calls It Murder, 1937; The D.A. Cooks a Goose, 1942), whose role as a hero is a reverse of Hamilton Burger’s; and Gramps Wiggins (The Case of the Turning Tide, 1941; The Case of the Smoking Chimney, 1943), an iconoclastic old prospector whose experiences reflect Gardner’s childhood travels with his mining-engineer father.

   In addition to his novels, Gardner wrote hundreds_of mystery and western stories under various names for such magazines as Argosy, Black Mask, Sunset, West, and Outdoor Stories.

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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.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink. Perry Mason #39. William Morrow, hardcover, 1952. Pocket #1107, paperback, 1956. Reprinted several times since. TV adaptation: Perry Mason, CBS, 14 December 1957. (Season 1, episode 13; starring Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale.)

   The moth-eaten mink belongs to waitress Dixie Dayton — or at least it does until the night Perry Mason and Della Street stop in for dinner at Morris Alburg’ s restaurant. While they are there, something-or someone frightens Dixie and she runs out, without either her paycheck or the once-expensive coat.

   The restaurateur, Mason, and Street speculate about the woman’s hasty disappearance, but soon find out from the police that Dayton was struck down — not fatally — outside by a passing car while fleeing a man with a gun. Mason takes charge of the mink, and in its lining finds a ticket from a Seattle pawnshop. But before Paul Drake can investigate it, the police find a second ticket in Dayton’s possession; they inquire and find out it is for a diamond ring, and the pawnbroker remembers the other object left in his shop-a gun used in a cop killing one year before.

   The case becomes a tangle of falsehoods, assumed identities, cryptic clues, missing witnesses, missing clients. and murder. Mason and Drake work around the clock in the interests of their clients — Morris Alburg and Dixie Dayton, both now accused of homicide. And Lieutenant Tragg hands Mason a surprise in the last sentence.

   All the Mason books are talky, relying upon dialogue rather than description, action, or deep characterization, but this one is particularly so. Tragg, in fact, holds center stage with his long-winded speeches. The plot, however, is characteristically complex, and a true Perry Mason fan will relish its twists and turns.

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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.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Fan Dancer’s Horse. William Morrow, hardcover, 1947. Pocket 886, paperback, 1952. Several later reprint editions.

   In 1933, when Erle Stanley Gardner took his publisher’s advice that the hero of his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, might make a good series character, he did not know what lay in store for him-or for Perry Mason. Since then, the Los Angeles lawyer; his secretary, Della Street; and private investigator Paul Drake have become household names. And with the first airing of the immensely popular Perry Mason television series in  1957 they became household images as well, in the form of Raymond Burr. Barbara Hale, and William Hopper.

   While not particularly well written or characterized, the Mason books have convoluted plots and punchy dialogue, which in the courtroom takes on the form of verbal sparring. The books are also very much alike, and perhaps this is the basis for their wide appeal. Readers know that in each one an innocent (in the legal sense) will become involved in a murder; odious Lieutenant Tragg will investigate and arrest; snide District Attorney Hamilton Burger will prosecute; and Perry Mason will vindicate his client in a dramatic courtroom revelation of the true killer.

   It is these courtroom scenes that make the novels stand out from other mystery fiction. Gardner, a lawyer himself, was able to simplify courtroom procedure so even the least astute reader could understand it, while at the same time packing the scene with dramatic impact. Even those who are normally bored with legal matters can enjoy watching Perry Mason devil the D.A. in the interests of justice, and many a lawyer practicing today will admit he got his first taste of the profession through Mason’s legal pyrotechnics.

   The Case of the Fan Dancer’s Horse begins with a hit-and-run automobile accident in California’s Imperial Valley. Two cars glance off one another; Perry Mason and Della Street rush to aid the one that overturns in the ditch, and find an old Mexican woman whose car trunk contains the plumed wardrobe of a fan dancer. The woman is presumably taken away to the hospital by a passing motorist, but the accident is never reported. Mason, who has taken the fans and dancing shoes into custody, places an ad in the paper offering their return. The reply is not what he expected: The fan dancer docs indeed want her property returned, but it is a horse, not a wardrobe, that she is missing.

   Dancer Lois Fenton — alias Cherie Chi-Chi — is appearing in an old western town called Palomino, and Mason and Street travel there to meet with her. They return the fan-dancing paraphernalia and receive a description of the missing horse, but soon it becomes apparent that the woman they spoke with is not the real Lois Fenton. The real fan dancer — who has a complicated history — is as missing as her horse.

   Approached by a young man who is in love with Miss Fenton, Mason accepts a retainer to act in her behalf, and earns it when a wealthy rancher is found murdered in an L.A. hotel room, a bloody imprint that could have been made by an ostrich feather on the wall. Lois Fenton was seen leaving the scene and quickly becomes the chief suspect.

   In spite of obvious holes in logic — why, for instance, would Mason take on a client when he has seen no more of her than her ostrich plumes? — the story moves ahead at a breakneck pace. And when the real Lois Fenton finally turns up and the legal battle lines are drawn, Mason is in fine form.

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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.

DOROTHY GARDINER – The Seventh Mourner. Sheriff Moss Magill #2. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1958. Popular Library, paperback, 1964.

   Sheriff Moss Magill of Notlaw, Colorado, functions best in his beloved mountains and is reluctant to leave them. However, when local resident Harriet Farquhar Orchard dies, she makes it a condition of her will that he deliver her ashes to her home in Rowanmuir, Scotland. Moss is convinced to go only when he learns that Harriet also wanted him to investigate her sister, Lizzy, who has been released by a Scottish court with the verdict “not proven” on a charge of murder.

   Wearing his customary whipcord pants, boots, and black-and-yellow striped shirt with his silver badge pinned to it, Moss evokes many stares during the trip, especially on the train from Edinburgh to Rowanrnuir, which, coincidentally, all of the mourners have taken that same August morning.

   The assorted group is all staying at the hotel where Lizzy works as a maid. During a day trip to Glasgow, Moss hears bagpipes for the first time and, in an enchantment born of ethnic memory, falls in love with Scotland.

   When one of the party is pushed under a truck that same day, he puts his investigative talents to use and works with the local authorities both to discover the murderer and to fulfill Harriet’s last request.

   This is an unusual idea, for a mystery, with excellent background and an appealing main character. Other amusing Magill adventures are Lion in Wait ( 1963), in which a toothless circus lion is accused of murder; and What Crime Is This (1956), in which Moss uses a hula-dancer statue with a clock embedded in her stomach to help clear up a 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.

EMILE GABORIAU – Monsieur Lecoq. E. Dentu, France, 1868. Edited version published in the US by Dover, softcover, 1975. Many other editions published in the US.

   Monsieur Lecoq, Gaboriau’s twelfth book and his fifth novel in which the French detective of the title appears, is today often considered his best and most readable book. Changing reading habits, plus indifferent translations, have left the pioneer French mystery writer all but unread today, but he deserves a place in any survey of classic detective fiction.

   Lecoq, introduced in his first book as a secondary character, was a minor Surete detective with a shady past somewhat like that of the real-life Vidocq. But he soon takes center stage in the Gaboriau novels, and in Monsieur Lecoq he investigates a triple murder in a poor section of Paris. The killer, apprehended at the scene, appears to be a petty criminal who cans himself May, but Lecoq suspects he might really have another identity.

   The duel of wits between the two men extends through the first volume of the novel. The second volume, sometimes published separately as The Honor of the Name, is really a separate and inferior historical novel set around the year 1815, with Lecoq and the evasive villain only reappearing in the final twenty-two pages.

   Though there have been numerous British and American editions of the novel, the recent Dover edition cited above (skillfully edited and introduced by E.F. Bleiler) is the first to eliminate the extraneous historical novel and jump at once from the end of volume one to the important final pages of volume two.

   Gaboriau’s books are not without their weaknesses, and they often suffer from cardboard characterizations and inconsistencies. Their strengths lie in plotting and background. They arc not exactly the books we think of as detective novels today, but enough elements are present to argue effectively that Gaboriau deserves his title as the father of the detective novel.

   Lecoq first appears as a secondary character in The Widow Lerouge (1866), but stars in his next two cases, The Mystery of Orcival (1867) and File No.113 ( 1867). He also makes a brief appearance in The Slaves of Paris (1868), but this is more a crime novel than a detective story.

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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.

JACQUES FUTRELLE – Great Cases of the Thinking Machine. Dover, softcover, 1976.

   Editor E. F. Bleiler has selected from the almost fifty stories about the incredible brain, “The Thinking Machine,” thirteen cases for this book. Only one has appeared in book form before; the others were collected from newspapers of 1906-1908.

   These have been called “societal stories,” different from the stories in Best “Thinking Machine” Detective Stories. The journalistic, telegraphic writing style illuminates the American Edwardian period of the tales, which involve mostly the shenanigans of rich Back Bay Boston life. Once again the testy professor is able to recall his maxim, “Nothing is impossible. It might be improbable, but not impossible.”

   The stories are short — they are set up as a Problem, then the professor’s explanation. or Solution. Many involve exotic suspects, impersonations, vague stock-market machinations, jewel thefts, and menagerie solutions (animals hold the crucial clue).

   From “The Problem of the Cross Mark,” we learn to beware of drugged cigars. From “The Roswell Tiara.” we learn to keep our eye on the cockatoo. And if there’s an old house, there’s a treasure. These tales pale in comparison to the earlier volume — science hardly enters into most of the solutions. It seems that a thoroughly bizarre situation is set up, allowing the mastermind to give an explanation and then say, “Any problem may be solved by logic.”

   The longest story, “The Haunted Bell,” was put into some editions of one of  Futrelle’s novels. It contains an exotic dream sequence, but the solution is straightforwardly scientific; only the ending has a surprise, even for the Thinking Machine.

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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.

JACQUES FUTRELLE – Best “Thinking Machine” Stories. Dover, softcover, 1973.

   The career of Jacques Futrelle was heroically cut short by his choice of holiday transportation — he sailed aboard the Titanic. Before that, however, he created one of the most notable eccentric detectives in crime history, Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen (with plenty of degrees after his name), “the Thinking Machine.”

   The professor is a famous scientist with an enormous, domelike head (he wears a hat size 8); a wilderness of straw-yellow hair; and squinty, watery blue eyes. He has thick spectacles, long white hands, and a small body. His henchman and gofer is Hutchison Hatch. a newspaper reporter. Most of the Thinking Machine’s cases arc brought to him by Hatch, who knows that to get a good story, one brings it to the man who can get to the bottom of an “impossible crime.”

   The professor, in the fine tradition of armchair detectives, knows that any puzzle has a logical explanation. His sententious principle is “two and two always make four — not sometime but all the time.” Much of the legwork is done by Hatch off stage; the professor himself is a phone fanatic — he often goes into his little phone room and returns with the complete solution.

   The Best “Thinking Machine” Detective Stories are a dozen collected from The Thinking Machine (1906), which contains seven stories, and The Thinking Machine on the Case ( 1907). Two of Futrelle’s tales were shown on public television in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.

   The Thinking Machine was introduced in a story, much anthologized, called “The Problem of Cell 13.” From a simple arguing point, a challenge is proposed. The professor undertakes, on purely scientific grounds, to escape from a death cell in the penitentiary in one week. And does so.

   Other stories contain puzzles about dying messages, perfect alibis, buried treasure, and an occult legacy. Excellent “locked-room” variations are presented in “The Stolen Rubens,” “The Phantom Motor,” and “The Lost Radium.” Another, “Kidnapped Baby Blake, Millionaire,” where a person vanishes from footprints in a snow-filled yard, is not quite up to snuff.

   In “The Missing Necklace,” the crook is about to give Scotland Yard the bird except for the intervention of the Thinking Machine. He is able to sum up one case thus: “The subtler murders — that is, the ones which are most attractive as problems — are nearly always the work of a cunning woman. I know nothing about women myself.”  Shades of Sherlock Holmes.

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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 FULLER – Back Country. Dell First Edition #8, paperback, 1954. Stark House Press, 2022 (Black Gat #36).

   William Fuller, according to his publishers, was a merchant seaman, a hobo, a veteran of World War II, and a bit player in western movies. He also wrote seven novels about Brad Dolan, a big, tough drifter who travels around the south getting in and out of trouble.

   In Back Country, the first book in the series, Dolan’s car breaks down in Cartersville, a small town in central Florida. Many similar small towns turned up in the paperback originals of the 1950s, and Cartersville is filled with all the characters we love to hate — the Boss who runs the county and believes that “nigras” are all right if they slay in their place; the cruel, corrupt, pot-gutted lawmen; the redneck town bigots.

   Dolan enters this environment and makes all the wrong moves: He wins at gambling, insults the sheriff, makes time with the big Boss’s wife. Naturally, he gets beaten and thrown in jail, but that doesn’t stop him. He not only sleeps with the Boss’s wife, he sleeps with the Boss’s daughter. Then the wife is found in Dolan’s room with her throat cut, just as the town’s racial tension reaches a crisis.

   These ingredients may sound familiar, but Fuller mixes them expertly, keeping the pace fast and the characters believable. Dolan’s toughness (and his realization that he’s not quite as hard-boiled as he thinks) is convincingly handled. There’s a spectacularly vivid cockfighting sequence, and the setting is at times drawn with telling realism.

   Also recommended in the Brad Dolan series: Goat Island (1954) and The Girl in the Frame (1957).

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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.