GEORGE HARMON COXE – Murder with Pictures. Kent Murdock #1.  Knopf, hardcover, 1935. Dell #101, paperback, mapback edition, 1945; Dell #441, paperback, 1950. Perennial Library, paperback, 1981. Film: Paramount, 1936, with Lew Ayres as Kent Murdock.

   This is Coxe’s first novel and introduces news photographer Kent Murdock, who works for the Boston Courier-Herald and moves with seeming ease through the various strata of that city’s society — stumbling over corpses with predictable regularity. As this first adventure opens, the jury has just delivered an acquittal in the Nate Girard murder trial.

   Murdock is on the job, snapping pictures; but later his concern with Girard turns personal, when he encounters his estranged wife, Hestor, with the former liquor racketeer at a celebratory party. Hestor won’t give Murdock a divorce, in spite of a year’s separation; Murdock wants out of the marriage, and he calls on Jack Fenner to help him.

   But before that situation even begins to be resolved, Girard’s attorney, Mark Redfield (who is to receive a $50,000 fee for his client’s acquittal), is murdered, and Murdock finds himself sheltering a girl he has noticed at the victory party — a stranger who bursts into his apartment while he is taking a shower and jumps in with him.

   Quickly Murdock is back on the job at the scene of the lawyer’s murder. And he soon uncovers a tangle of lies, infidelity, and intrigue that involves the dead man’s wife; a “man-about-town” named Howard Archer; Archer’s sister Joyce; gangster Sam Cuslik (whose brother Girard was accused of murdering); a “cheap punk” named Spike Tripp; Girard; and Hestor herself. By the time he has untangled this mess, Murdock has found the solution to more than one killing — and a unique way to resolve his marital problems.

   This is a typical Coxe novel, with multiple threads that all tic together in a satisfactory manner at the end, and a love interest spiced with sex that seems oddly innocent by current standards.

   Kent Murdock is also featured in, among others, The Camera Clue (1937), Mrs. Murdock Takes a Case (1941), The Fifth Key (1947), Focus on Murder (1954), and The Reluctant Heiress (1965).

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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 HARMON COXE – Fenner. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1971. Manor Books, paperback, 1974.

   George Harmon Coxe was an extremely prolific writer whose early work appeared in such pulp magazines as Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly. His news-photographer hero, Flash Casey, first appeared in Black Mask in the early  1930s, and later Coxe used him in a number of novels, among them Silent Are the Dead (1942) and Error in Judgment (1961).

   His other news-photographer sleuth, Kent Murdock, appears in many more novels than Casey, and is a more fully realized character than the creation of Coxe’s pulp-writing days. Coxe also created series characters Paul Standish (a medical examiner), Sam Crombie (a plodding detective), Max Hale (a reluctant detective), and Jack Fenner (Kent Murdock’s private-eye sidekick who starred in several novels of his own).

   Many consider Fenner the most entertaining of Coxc’s later novels. Although published in 1971, it has the feel of the Forties. (Indeed, the hippie reference seems an anachronism.) Coxe has a simple formal style; he describes his characters but seldom invites the reader to identify with them. Action-oriented readers may find Coxe’s work dull; there is virtually no violence, but rather a charming concern for decorum (another hint of bygone days).

   In Fenner, Coxe begins with heiress Carol Browning’s escape from a state mental institution. (Her husband committed her.) The scene shifts to Fenner’s office, where the husband, George Browning, hires the detective to find his wife. Why, with all her money, did he send her to a state hospital rather than a more tolerable private one? Fenner asks. Browning’s answer is unconvincing. Before Fenner can get to the bottom of this, Browning is murdered-in his wife’s apartment. There’s the hook; expect some good twists and a plausible conclusion. No more, no less.

   Jack Fenner reappears in The Silent Witness (1973) and No Place for Murder ( 1975), as well as playing a role in many of the Kent Murdock novels.

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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.

DESMOND CORY – Deadfall. Frederick Muller, UK. hardcover, 1965. Walker, US, hardcover, 1965; paperback, 1984. Also: Fawcett Crest, US, paperback, 1967.  Film:  1968, starring Michael Caine.

   Desmond Cory (a pseudonym of Shaun Lloyd McCarthy) has published a wide variety of suspense fiction, including espionage novels, detective novels, and thrillers. He has a firm grasp of psychological principles, and his characters show considerable depth. The details of his settings – frequently Spain – are richly evocative and suggest careful research and firsthand knowledge.

   He is best known for his books featuring British agent Johnny Fedora; in five of these, Fedora matches wits with Soviet spy Feramontov. There is a powerful tension in these novels – Undertow (1963), Hammerhead (1964), Feramontov (1966), Timelock (1967), and Sunburst (1971) – and their plots are complex and action-packed.

   One of Cory’s best books, however, is a nifty caper novel, Deadfall. Set in his favorite locale, Spain, it features an unlikely trio of characters: Michael Jeye, an acrobatic burglar; Moreau, a genius who plans jewel heists; and Moreau’s wife, a beautiful and mysterious woman named Fe. As the three work together to steal a fortune in jewels, Jeye finds himself falling in love with Fe. This loss of emotional control is dangerous, both to their plans and to Jeye personally – especially since the relationship between Fe and Moreau is soon revealed to be not exactly as it seems.

   Against a background of professional crime, Cory weaves a thrilling plot with deep psychological undertones. The three complex personalities are caught up in deadly motion, and themes including incest and homosexuality emerge. The pacing of Deadfall is more deliberate than the nonstop action of the Fedora series, and the overall effect is haunting.

   Deadfall was disappointingly filmed in 1968, with Michael Caine and Giovanna Ralli. Other Cory novels notable for their psychological depth are A Bit of a Shunt Up the River (1974), in which a sociopath escapes from prison; and The Circe Complex ( 1975), which deals with a former prison psychologist who finds himself imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit.

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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.

K. C. CONSTANTINE – The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself. Mario Balzac #2. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1973. David R. Godine, paperback, 1987.

   Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, police chief Mario Balzic, despite misgivings, is persuaded by the new commander of the state troopers, Lieutenant Minyon, to accompany Minyon on the first day of hunting season. Balzic isn’t crazy about Minyon, and hunting (animals, that is) isn’t Balzic’s favorite pastime.

   Things go wrong. Minyon’s prize Weimaraner bites him in the hand while they are in the car on the way to the hunt. Then the dog causes even more problems for Balzic by rooting around in the woods and finding a human bone. Balzic is given the task of discovering who is missing, and finding the rest of the body.

   The someone missing turns out to be Frank Gallic, the partner in a discount meat business with Balzic’s friend Micky Samrnara. Sammara and his sister Tina have been operating the business for almost a year while waiting for Gallic to return. Minyon decides that Mickey had something to do with Gallic’s disappearance and arrests him, prompting Balzic to hire feisty Mo Vukanas, a local lawyer with a burning dislike for state troopers, to defend Sammara.

   This is offbeat crime fiction, written in a readable, literate style, tightly plotted and with believable, very human characters in familiar settings. Constantine knows how to maintain suspense. He lets it unfold to a logical and satisfying conclusion.

   Equally offbeat and worth reading are the other Mario Balzic novels, which include The Rocksburg Railroad Murders (1972), A Fix Like This (1975), the acclaimed Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes (1982), Always a Body to Trade (1983), and Upon Some Midnight Clear (1985).

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

UPDATE: There have now been 17 books in Constantine’s “Rockburg” series, through 2002. I do not believe that Mario Balzac has been in all of them, or if so, only tagentially. #12 in the series, Good Sons (1996) is described thusly: “Detective Rugs Carlucci is the likely successor to Police Chief Mario Balzic…,” but in #13, Family Values (1997), Balzic is called back into service.

RICHARD CONDON – Mile High. Dial Press, hardcover, 1969. Dell, paperback, 1970.

   In his strongest work — The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Winter Kills (1974) — Richard Condon has shown an unerring ability to find the hub throughout which the threads of American corruption, desire, insanity, politics, dread, and dreams pass, and to find that precise point of convergence which indicates that the history (and future) of the culture is as coherent and malevolent as death; in his weakest work, Condon has been a Boy Scout leader mumbling increasingly repellent horror stories around a fire to the wide-eyed troops, trying to give them a thrill at whatever cost.

   Mile High is somewhere in the middle. It is as paranoid as The Manchurian Candidate but lacks its purity; it runs out of plot two-thirds of the way through and has to make do with an imposed and inauthentic suspense melodrama. Condon believes his generalities here but cannot pay attention to the particulars.

   The premise is audacious, wholly workable, and possibly even correct (as correct as the brainwashed-and-programmed-human-time-bomb premise of The Manchurian Candidate, or the presidential-assassination premise of Winter Kills): American Prohibition was virtually the single-handed creation of one rich and brilliant businessman who knew that it would be great for the illegal liquor business and used his. modest inherited assets to build a network that, in its complexity, virtually overtook the country. When Prohibition finally collapses, Edward Courance West is worth many hundreds of billions of dollars (and it is his consolidation of widely held assets into hard cash that causes the depression).

   West, however, is an unstable personality; abandoned by his mother, a. dark Italian, in his childhood, he must replicate the abandonment by wreaking terrible vengeance upon his black mistresses. His psychosis leads to murder and to his. removal from American society to a mile-high palace in the central Adirondacks. Here, aging, monumentally rich, safe and mad, West raves to his lifelong manservant, Willie Tobin, of the Communist peril and the rise of “the terrible black hordes” that are his alone to combat. (There is not a cause of the lunatic right to which he will not subscribe millions of dollars.)

   Good enough to this point (or bad enough), and a serviceable, often terrifying roman à clef of several figures in mid-century American life; but there is an imposed and highly coincidental subplot dealing with the black artist wife of West’s second son (the point of view character of the unnecessary middle section of the novel) who reminds West of his mother and of the black women in whose image murder was committed.

   Having run out its exposition and its implication, Mile High turns into a somewhat clumsy (and clumsily transparent) novel of menace and oversimplifies ultimately; West’s “insanity” is the hole through which the book’s true implication and terror drain. West becomes merely a symbol, and unfortunately, the novel “symbolic” rather than the horrifying near-documentary that Winter Kills is.

   Still, Condon’s pacing, portentousness, and Clemens-like contempt for the human condition come  through and sustain the narrative. At half its 160,000-word length, Mile High might have been a tormented, glacial vision: a century of history compressed to nightmare.

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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.

MICHAEL COLLINS – Blue Death. Dan Fortune #7. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1975. Playboy Press, paperback, 1979.

   Blue Death finds Dan Fortune a little less introspective than in his earlier cases, but with no less of a passion for the truth. Once more he is brought into a case for a simple $50 fee, and once more he finds himself with more than he bargained for. What appears a simple matter – locating the member of a giant corporation who has the power to sign a lease agreement for a parking lot – turns out to involve quadruple murder.

   Along the way Fortune is beaten, drugged, and nearly starved, but he cannot be scared off the case. He suspects that a member of the corporation is blackmailing another member for murder, and his chain of reasoning is correct. All the facts fit. Unfortunately, he finds that he has been on the wrong track entirely, and before he is able to bring things to a close, the fourth murder occurs.

   The amoral world of the large corporations comes under savage attack in Blue Death; its members appear virtually unassailable in their complacency and power, and even in the end one cannot be sure that justice will be served.

   But justice is not always the point, or at least not justice under the law. Fortune is still looking for the perfect world where we are all free to run ourselves, and sometimes he gives others that chance. As in Act of Fear (reviewed here) the ending may not be entirely satisfactory, but it is appropriate. Anyone looking for the best in private-eye writing in the Chandler/Macdonald vein will appreciate any title by Michael Collins.

   Other notable books in the Dan Fortune series include The Brass Rainbow (1969), Walk a Black Wind (1971), The Nightrunners (1978), and Freak (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.

WILKIE COLLINS – The Moonstone. Tinsley, US, hardcover, 1868. Harper, US, hardcover 1868. Serialised in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round and in the US in Harper’s Weekly, circa 1868. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft. (The book has probably never been out of print.) Adapted many times for the stage, movies, radio, TV, comic books and (!) a podcast.

   (William) Wilkie Collins was one of the most popular and accomplished writers of the nineteenth century, and The Moonstone is an early classic of the suspense genre. Like Collins’ other criminous works, it contains elements that later became staples of mystery writing: a purloined gemstone, carefully secreted clues, obtrusive red herrings, sinister Indians who lurk threateningly in the background, a blighted love affair, several shakily constructed alibis, numerous cliff-hanging scenes, and a mysterious suicide. Although complicated, the plot is well constructed and the reader’s interest seldom flags.

   The yellow diamond known as the “moonstone” was stolen from an Indian religious idol by John Herncastle, a man who chose to ignore the story of bad luck following the diamond should it be removed from the possession of the worshipers of the moon god. Upon Herncastle’s death, the gem was willed to his niece, Rachel Verinder, and the young lady is about to receive it when the story opens (after a prologue and two tiresome chapters filled with background material).

   The diamond disappears, of course, on the night Rachel is presented it by solicitor Franklin Blake. And when Inspector Cuff of Scotland Yard appears on the scene, some clues point to Blake, while others indicate Rachel has secreted away her own diamond for some unknown and possibly unbalanced reason.

   The story proceeds, divided into two periods, respectively titled “The Loss of the Diamond” and “The Discovery of the Truth” (which in itself is divided into eight narratives), plus an epilogue. In spite of these numerous sections, each broken into various chapters narrated by different characters, the reader finds himself as determined as Cuff to learn the truth. Who are the Indians? Was this caused by the curse of the moonstone? Will Rachel find happiness? Such questions are ever in the forefront. And when the end is finally reached, all clues are tied up, all questions are answered, and — yes — Rachel does find happiness.

   Collins’ other works are not nearly as well known as The Moonstone, but a number are just as engrossing and stand the test of time equally well. These include The Woman in White (1860), which seems to have been Collins’ personal favorite; and The Queen of Hearts (1859), a collection that contains the cornerstone humorous detective story “The Biter Bit.”

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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.

MICHAEL COLLINS – Act of Fear. PI Dan Fortune #1. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1967. Bantam H4369, paperback, 1969. Playboy Press, paperback, 1980.

   Dennis Lynds, using the name Michael Collins, is writing one of the very best of the contemporary private-eye series. All the novels under the Collins name feature Dan Fortune, a one-armed detective who operates out of the Chelsea district of New York City. Fortune’s handicap sets him apart and makes him vulnerable; he is also introspective and compassionate, a believer in absolute truth, a man who is driven to find the answers. Act of Fear, Fortune’s first novel-length case, won an Edgar for Best First Mystery of the year.

   Act of Fear begins, like many mystery novels, with a missing person. Fortune is hired by a young man to find a missing friend. Apparently the friend has good reason to be missing, and Fortune soon discovers that he is not the only one looking. The elements of the case include the mugging of a cop, two murders, and the savage beating of Fortune’s client. The plotting, as in all the Collins books, is intricate, with Fortune following an the threads to their sometimes frayed ends. His fee for the entire case is $50; he spends much more than that in solving it, but once he is involved, he has to find out the truth.

   As usual in Collins’ work, the book has a serious theme, in this case the difficulty of being true to oneself no matter what the consequences. It would be difficult to say that the ending is satisfying, but it is “right” in the sense that it is the only ending appropriate for the story that Collins tells.

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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.

MAX ALLAN COLLINS – True Detective. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1983 Tor, paperback, 1986; ibooks, paperback, 2003. Thomas & Mercer, softcover, 2011.

   In True Detective, Collins has created a brilliantly evocative period novel set in depression year 1933, Chicago, His hero, Nate Heller, is a cop who refuses to succumb to prevailing corruption on the police force. (This is a tightly woven blend of fact and fiction.) When Nate becomes involved in the shooting of gangster Frank Nitti, the corruption closes in on him. His testimony as to what happened in Nitti’s office during the shoot-out is vital to several parties; and given the climate of time and place, they all assume that Nate is for sale.

   Nate isn’t, as he explains to his pal, boxer Barney Ross. With no alternative to dishonesty other than to quit the police department, Nate goes private, working out of an office, complete with a Murphy bed, above Ross’s saloon.

   Nate has trouble and he has enemies, among them Chicago’s corrupt Mayor Cermak, the mover and shaker of the 1933 World’s Fair, and former vice president General Charles Gates Dawes, not to mention the unnamed but sufficiently dangerous Al Capone. It’s a good thing that Nate also has allies like Eliot Ness, Franklin Roosevelt, and even young sportscaster Dutch Reagan.

   The writing style here is hard-boiled and literate, and the novel is illustrated with black-and-white photographs of the book’s true-life characters and of depression-era Chicago. So artfully are photographs matched with text that they add wonderfully to the painstakingly created atmosphere of that almost-lost time.

   This novel won the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award as 1983’s best private-eye novel, and deservedly so. A lovingly and often elegantly written novel, this is marvelous entertainment and a must read for every fan of private eye fiction.

   A second Nate Heller adventure, True Crime (1984), involves the detective with J. Edgar Hoover and an FBI plot against the infamous John Dillinger, and is every bit as evocative and entertaining as True Detective. More Heller novels are planned for the future.

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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.

Editorial Update: There are now 20 books in the series, the most recent being Do No Harm (2020), in which Heller finds himself involved in the Sam Shepard case, which in real life occurred in 1954. (I believe that all of Heller’s cases have appeared in chronological order, both his time and our time.)

MAX ALLAN COLLINS – Kill Your Darlings. PI Gat Garson. Walker, hardcover, 1984. Tor, paperback, 1988. Thomas & Mercer, softcover, 2012.

   Max Allan Collins is not merely a writer of mystery novels (and of the Dick Tracy comic strip); he is also a mystery scholar, collector, and fan. This book, third in a series featuring his detective alter ego, Mallory (like Collins, a mystery collector, fan, and writer from a small town in Iowa), is an “inside” story about mystery fans and fandom. It takes place at the Bouchercon, the annual convention for mystery fans and writers. (By a remarkable coincidence, Collins sets the story al the same Chicago hotel where the 1984 convention was actually held.)

   The murder victim is Roscoe Kane, a veteran paperback mystery writer, His once-popular detective, Gat Garson, is out of fashion, and Kane is on the skids. He’s at the con to receive an award from the Private Eye Writers Association, but drowns in the bathtub – an apparent accident – before the presentation. Mallory, Kane’s friend and fan, isn’t satisfied by the medical examiner’s hasty verdict and noses around, suspecting that Kane’s death might be linked to the upcoming publication of a “lost” Hammett Continental Op story.

   In an introduction, Collins makes the disclaimer that his fictional Bouchercon attendees, writers and fans, are mostly composites of real characters. However, initiates will have little trouble identifying many of them, including a self-absorbed guest of honor named Keats – the creator of a sensitive-macho private-eye character. Other inside jokes and fan tributes are scattered throughout; e.g., Collins’s borrowing of a gaudy metaphor from Spillane’s Vengeance Is Mine in the climactic shooting scene.

   This fast-moving and inventive novel is the newest addition to the very small subgenre of fandom mystery novels. Two others are Bill Pronzini’s Hoodwink (murder at a pulp collector’s convention) and Edward D. Roch’s Shattered Raven (murder at the MWA Awards Banquet).

   Mallory is also featured in The Baby Blue Rip-Off (1983), No Cure for Death (1984), and A Shroud for Aquarius (1985).

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

Bibliographic Update: Add to the books in the Mallory series: Nice Weekend for a Murder (1986).