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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———
   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.

BRIAN GARFIELD – Hopscotch. M. Evans, hardcover, 1975. Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1976. Forge, hardcover/paperback, 2004. Film: AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1980 (with Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson).

   After the debacle with the film version of Death Wish, Garfield produced a number of works in which there is considerable menace and threat of violence, but in which no one actually dies — perhaps to prove to his critics that they were distorting the intent of his work and that he certainly didn’t need to shed copious fictional blood in order to tell a cracking good story. Hopscotch is one of those bloodless works; and testimony to the fact that it is a cracking good story is the Edgar it received for best novel of its year.

   The protagonist is Miles Kendig, an ex-CIA agent forcibly retired at the age of fifty-three, who yearns to be back “in the game.” Bored, traveling in Europe since his retirement, “he’d done everything to provoke his jaded sensibilities. High risks: the motor racing. skiing, flying lessons, the gambling which had been satisfying until his own capacities had defeated its purpose: he’d always been professional at whatever he did and his skins were the sort that took the risk out of it after a while.” He even toys with the idea of becoming a double agent for the Russians, but decides it wouldn’t be worth it: Whatever he is, he is not a traitor.

   Then a mad but irresistible idea overtakes him, triggered by the thought that The Resurrection of Miles Kendig would be a good title for an autobiography. Why not write his autobiography? Why not put into it everything he knows, everything he learned during his long tenure as one of the best spies in the business? Why not, by doing this, set himself up as the object of an international manhunt — Miles Kendig alone against both his former employers and the Soviets? The ultimate exciting game played for the ultimate stakes: his own life.

   Carefully, meticulously, using all the tricks he has learned over the years, he puts his mad idea into operation — a plan that includes getting himself a New York literary agent (one John Ives, a name Garfield later adopted as a pseudonym) and holing up in a place in rural Georgia to write the book. The action literally hopscotches all over the world — Paris, Marseilles, Casablanca, Stockholm, Helsinki, London — and all over the eastern and southern United States as well. Chasing Kendig along the way (and mostly being made to look foolish) are his former CIA compatriots Myerson, Cutler, and Ross, and his former Russian adversary, Mikhail Yaskov.

   Hopscotch bulges with plot and counterplot, with narrow escapes, humor, sex, suspense — all of which add up to a rousing good time for any reader, including those who don’t usually care for CIA-type shenanigans. Also highly recommended is the 1981 film version (which Garfield co-wrote and co-produced), starring Walter Matthau as a somewhat more lighthearted and amusing incarnation of Miles Kendig.

   Garfield has also published several other novels with varying degrees of political content, among them Line of Succession (1972), The Romanov Succession (1974), and The Paladin (1982), the latter a thriller about Winston Churchill. Checkpoint Charlie, a 1981 collection of nonviolent short stories featuring a fat, old, conceited, but nonetheless engaging CIA agent named Charlie Dark, makes use of several characters from Hopscotch — Myerson, Cutter, Ross, and the Russian superspy Yaskov — in subordinate roles.

———
   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 – 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).

———
   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.”

———
   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.

———
   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.

———
   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.