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.

TIMOTHY FULLER – Three Thirds of a Ghost. Jupiter Jones #2. Little, Brown, hardcover, 1941. Popular Library #81, paperback, 1946.

   When his first novel, Harvard Has a Homicide, was published in 1936, Timothy Fuller — just twenty-two and a Harvard undergraduate — was hailed as an important mystery-story prodigy. He never quite lived up to the promise of that first book, however, either in his productivity or in the quality of his later work.

   It was five years before he published his second and third mysteries, another two years until his fourth, and seven more until his fifth and final book. And only Reunion with Murder (1941) and This Is Murder, Mr. Jones (1943) can be said to equal or surpass Harvard Has a Homicide in plotting and technique.

   Despite its inherent flaws, however, Three Thirds of a Ghost may well be Fuller’s most appealing work. One of the reasons-perhaps the main reason-is that it is set primarily in a Boston bookshop, Bromfield’s, where writer Charles Newbury (who specializes in roman a clef novels about important Boston families, not to mention mysteries featuring an Oriental detective known as the Parrot) is shot to death while addressing 200 guests at Bromfield’s 150th birthday celebration.

   In Catalogue of Crime, Barzun and Taylor call Three Thirds of a Ghost “disappointing.” And so it is, in terms of its rather thin plot and dubious gimmick to explain how Newbury could be killed without any of the 200 witnesses seeing who fired the shot.

   But Harvard Fine Arts instructor Jupiter Jones, the amateur sleuth who also stars in Fuller’s other four novels, is an engaging bumbler; the cast of characters — especially Jupiter’s girlfriend (later wife), Helen, Newbury’s non-stereotypical. Chinese secretary, Lin, and some refreshingly intelligent cops — is diverse and well drawn; and there are amusing bits of business interspersed with plenty of barbed commentary on the writing and selling of books and on pre-World War II Boston society.

   If your taste runs to the humorous, sophisticated, slightly screwball type of storytelling popular in the 1930s, this bibliomystery (and any of the other Jupiter Jones romps) is definitely your sort of Boston tea party.

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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.

SAMUEL FULLER – The Dark Page. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1944.Mercury, digest-sized paperback, 1951, as Murder Makes a Deadline. Avon, paperback, 1982. Film: Columbia Pictures, 1952, as Scandal Sheet.

   Film director Sam Fuller is a stylish, iconoclastic auteur whose movies transform tabloid trash into cinematic art. The characters in his films are larger than life, their dialogue often sounding like the copy off the back of a paperback; yet the broad strokes of his scripts are turned to poetry by fluid camera work and startling visual imagery, redeeming graces his novels tend to lack.

   His career as a novelist is, then, considerably less significant, although perhaps no other film-maker of his stature has written so many novels. Prior to his film-making career, Fuller wrote lurid topical tales (Burn Baby Burn, 1935; Test Tube Baby, 1936), foreshadowing such “out of the headlines” Fuller films as Pickup on South Street (1953) and Underworld USA (1960).

   His later books are novelizations either of films he made (The Naked Kiss, 1963) or of films he failed to make (144 Picadilly, 1971). His claim to fame as a novelist, however, rests upon The Dark Page, a fast-moving, effective crime novel that reflects Fuller’s love for Hearst-school yellow journalism, that lurid National Enquirer style of reporting that Fuller’s movies hinge upon and transcend.

   City editor Carl Chapman throws a Lonely Hearts Ball at Madison Square Garden, a cynical media event designed to boost the circulation of his paper, the Comet. At the party, which is attended by his wife, Rose (to whom he’s happily married), he encounters Charlotte, a former wife from his former, secret life. Returning with Charlotte (whom he had never divorced) to her shabby apartment, an argument ensues and Charlotte is killed, more or less accidentally.

   Chapman’s star reporter, Lance McCleary, latching on to the fact that the murdered woman had attended the Lonely Hearts Ball, pursues the story vigorously, not realizing he is closing in on his mentor, editor Chapman. Chapman, too, cannot resist the headline-making story, and feels just as proud as he does threatened, as Lance’s muckraking tactics lead Chapman into further deceit and murder.

   Fuller’s style in The Dark Page is lively, the melodrama made palatable by the short, choppy sentences and paragraphs that are right out of his newspaper background. Well worth reading for its own merits, The Dark Page is a fascinating footnote in the story of a major, if offbeat, American film director.

   A tidy little B movie was fashioned from The Dark Page, but, ironically, Fuller didn’t make it: The adaptation, Scandal Sheet (1953), with Broderick Crawford as the city editor and John Derek as his metaphorical son, was directed by fellow B-movie magician Phil Karlson.

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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 FROME – Mr. Pinkerton Has the Clue.   Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1936. Popular Library #26, paperback, 1944; Popular Library 60-2234,  paperback, date?

   David Frome is a pseudonym of Zenith Brown, who also wrote under the name Leslie Ford. As with her Ford novels, the Frome books deal with polite middle-class people to whom bloodless murder is an unwelcome but speedily dealt-with intrusion. Unlike the Ford novels, which are distinctly American, the Frome stories are distinctly British; many readers have no inkling that the author was not English but an American living in Great Britain who had great ability at adopting the English idiom.

   Mr. Evan Pinkerton would be a pathetic character were it not for his deductive abilities. He is described mainly as “little” and “grey” — “little grey forehead,” “little grey man,” even “grey little spine.” His life has been “mostly drab and often miserable,” and now that he has inherited a substantial sum from his wife, he has trouble believing he really has money and continues to live parsimoniously.

   As this novel opens, Mr. Pinkerton is going on a holiday to Bath, England. Before very long he has violated his parsimony by engaging a room in an expensive hotel, led there by his curiosity about Dame Ellen Crosby, a famed actress.

   Mr. Pinkerton observes quarrels and tensions developing among Dame Crosby’s crippled brother, Major Peyton; the major’s beautiful daughter, Cecily; Cecily’s plain and envious sister, Gillian; Cecily’s fianc6, the arrogant Vardon Crosby; Mrs. Fullaway, landlady at the hotel; and the mysterious Miss Rosa Margolious, a guest who seems always to materialize at the wrong moment.

   When Dame Ellen is found murdered in her bed. it is no surprise — largely due to the author’s unfortunate “had-I-but-known” approach. Pinkerton, who has often assisted Scotland Yard, is called in on the case by Chief Constable Thicknesse (who investigates along with his spaniel, the macabrely named Dr. Crippen). And detect Pinkerton does, in his mild-mannered and affable way, with the usual satisfactory results.

   This novel and the others in the Pinkerton series — The Hammersmith Murders (1930), Mr. Pinkerton Goes to Scotland Yard ( 1934), and Mr. Pinkerton at the Old Angel (1939), among others — will probably not suit the reader who likes his heroes larger than life. It is possible, however, to identify with Evan Pinkerton’s frequent embarrassment and bumbling ways; and the plots and settings are vintage British mystery.

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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.

MICKEY FRIEDMAN – Hurricane Season. Dutton, hardcover, 1983. Ballantine, paperback, 1984.

   Set in the Fifties in the small northwest Florida town of Palmetto, Hurricane Season is a period piece. From the very beginning — the night the Men’s Lodge puts on its Womanless Wedding (a wedding play in which an the characters are played by men) — we are reminded of when the story is taking place by little touches, such as the Communist Threat, Nugrape soda, and off-the-shoulder peasant blouses.

   These touches are used sparingly — not once do we have the sense that the author is being heavy-handed with her research. But what really makes Hurricane Season work is the characters, who become embroiled in murder during the sultry days of August 1952.

   Events begin with the night of The Womanless Wedding when the swamp catches fire. Seen mainly through the eyes of Lily Trulock, a middle-aged woman who, with her husband, runs the grocery and marine supply, other unusual happenings follow: A mysterious stranger, Joshua Bums, comes to town; the daughter of the town’s leading politician seduces a young religious fanatic and shortly afterward is / found murdered; a book of poetry that the dead woman wrote comes into Lily’s hands. And finally Lily, convinced that her son-in-law, the sheriff, is mishandling the , investigation, sets out to get to the bottom of things — with  surprising results.

   A promising first novel that shows great sensitivity to the way small towns and the interrelationships of their residents work — be it in the Fifties or today. Friedman’s second novel, The Grail Tree, which is set in India and California, was published in 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.

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.