ROBERT BLOCH – The King of Terrors. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1977. No paperback edition.

   Robert Bloch has long been recognized as the patriarch macabre fiction writers, having made his first professional sale half a century ago (to Weird Tales in 1934, at tender age of seventeen). But he has also written extensively in the criminous field, with several novels, hundreds of short stories. and five major collections.

   The King of Terrors, subtitled “Tales of Madness and Death,” collects the best of his many short works on the theme of psychopathology. “Throughout man’s history,” Bloch says in his introduction, “I suppose death was the King of Terrors. The ultimate threat to our egos is the thought of their extinction. Now we have recently come to learn that mental illness can also destroy the ego, rob s of our self-awareness and, thus, identity. In a word — living death, the King of Terrors’ tortured twin.”

   That tortured twin makes for some truly fearful and fear-filled tales. “The Real Bad Friend,” for instance, which covers some of the same psychopathological ground as Bloch’s classic novel Psycho and predates the book by two years; “Water’s Edge,” a deceptively simple story about an excon and a woman’s horrifying retribution against him; and a pair of beautifully understated shockers- “Home Away from Home,” about a young woman’s ill-advised visit to her psychiatrist uncle in a remote section England, and “Terror in the Night,” about a young man’s escape from an insane asylum. Not all the stories here are first-rate-Bloch — but all are enjoyable and the best ones are truly shuddersome.

   Bloch’s other criminous collections are also recommended. (It should be noted, however, that there is considerable duplication of stories among them.) They are Terror in the Night and Other Stories (1958), Blood Runs Cold (1961), Cold Chills (1977), and Out of the Mouths of Graves (1978).

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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.

  OLIVER BLEECK – The Brass Go-Between. William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1969. Pocket, paperback, 1971. Perennial Library, paperback, 1983. Warner, paperback, 1993.

   Ross Thomas uses the pseudonym Oliver Bleeck for his entertaining Philip St. Ives books. These are fast-paced stories with first-person narration, reminiscent of many private-detective novels. But St. Ives is not a detective, he is a professional go-between — that is, he acts as an intermediary between such parties as kidnappers and the kidnap victim’s family, insurance companies and thieves, etc. He has built a reputation in this strange profession and people on both sides of the law seem to trust him.

   In The Brass Go-Between, the first book of the series, he is dealing with the Conker Museum in Washington, D.C., attempting to recover a huge brass shield that has been stolen from the museum’s Pan-African collection. But there is more to the shield than meets the eye. Not only is it historically priceless, it is also a magnificent work of art. Add to this the fact that at least two opposing African nations claim rightful ownership, and it becomes obvious many people would like to discover the whereabouts of the shield.

   Naturally, all this complicates St. Ives’s job as he encounters many of the interested parties along the way: Winfield Spencer, a rich and reclusive art collector; and Conception Mbwato, a giant emissary from the African nation of Komporeen, to name but two.

   This and the other Oliver Bleeck titles — Protocol for a Kidnapping (1971), The Procane Chronicle (1972), The Highbinders (1974), and No Questions Asked (1976) — are distinguished for their crisp dialogue, unusual background and understated sense of irony. Qualities, of course, that Thomas also infuses into his novels published under his own name.

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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.

CHARITY BLACKSTOCK – Dewey Death. William Heinemann, UK, hardcover, 1956. London House & Maxwell, US, hardcover, 1958. Ballantine U2125, paperback, 1964.

   Charity (a.k.a. Lee) Blackstock’s first mystery remains one of the best library mysteries ever published. For London’s Inter-Libraries Despatch Association, the biggest scandal had always been the frequent and imaginative typos (e.g., “Law of Tarts”) by the typing pool on request forms. That is, until the evil-minded office busybody, Mrs. Warren, is found with her neck broken, spilling out of a book sack.

   Despite the investigation led by a Scotland Yard detective, and a second murder, Dewey Death cannot be classified as a classic detective story. It isn’t even a puzzling mystery. Readers, along with various characters, become increasingly aware of the murderer’s identity. This does not, however, lessen the suspense or interest of Blackstock’s novel, which is a masterful mixture of romantic fantasy and harsh realism.

   With a good deal of humor, the author weaves her suspense plot well through the interplay of day-to-day office life. The heroine (like Blackstock under another pseudonym) is an author of historical romances. When she becomes smitten with a dashing co-worker, she soon learns just how dangerous and disruptive a swashbuckling antihero can be in real life.

   Like traditional whodunit writers, Blackstock studies the effects of murder on a small, insular community. But her library locale and her unusual characters are portrayed with a depth unequaled by most of her contemporaries.

   Charity Blackstock created several other excellent suspense novels — The Woman in the Woods (1958) and The Foggy, Foggy Dew (1959) are good examples — before turning to romance fiction more than a decade ago.

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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.

NICHOLAS BLAKE – The Beast Must Die. Harper, hardcover, 1938. US paperback editions include: Crestwood / Black Cat Detective Series #7, digest-sized, 1943; Dell D227, Great Mystery Library #15, 1958; Berkley F971, 1964; Perennial Library, 1978. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1938.

   British Poet Laureate (1968-72) and novelist Cecil Day Lewis, writing as Nicholas Blake, published a score of popular detective and suspense novels from 1935 to 1968, all but four of which feature an urbane amateur sleuth named Nigel Strangeways. For the most part, the Blake novels are fair-play deductive mysteries in the classic mold and are chock-full of literary references and involved digressions, which makes for rather slow pacing. But they are also full of well-drawn characters and unusual incidents, and offer a wide variety of settings and information on such diverse topics as sailing, academia, the British publishing industry, and the cold war.

   The Beast Must Die is considered by some to be Blake’s finest work and a crime-fiction classic. When the young son of mystery novelist Felix Cairnes (a.k.a. Felix Lane) is killed by a hit-and-run driver, Lane, who doted on the boy, vows to track down and kill the man responsible. A trail of clues leads him to a film star named Lena Lawson, who was a passenger in the death car, and finally to its driver, George Rafferty, the obnoxious part owner of a Gloucestershire garage.

   Lane insinuates himself into Rafferty’s household as Lena’s new lover, and makes preparations to exact his revenge via a sailing “accident.” But things don’t quite go as he (or the reader) anticipates. And when murder finally does strike, it does so in a wholly unexpected fashion.

   The plot is tricky and ingeniously constructed: the first third is told first-person in the form of Felix Lane’s diary; there is a brief middle section, called “Set Piece on a River,” which is done third-person from Lane’s point of view; and the last half is a straightforward, third-person narrative that introduces Nigel Strangeways (and his wife, Georgia, and Inspector Blount of Scotland Yard) and follows Strangeways as he unravels a tangled web of hatreds and unpleasantries. Blake builds the suspense nicely in the first half, makes good use of a subplot involving Lane’s affection for Rafferty’s own son, Phil, and even spices his narrative with a little sex — an unusual ingredient for mystery novels during the Golden Age.

   But The Beast Must Die also has its share of flaws. The manner in which Lane tracks down Rafferty — and the ease with which he is able to meet and seduce a popular actress seem both convenient and contrived; once Strangeways (who is something of a colorless and priggish sort, at least in this novel) arrives on the scene, the narrative becomes talky and slow, diluting suspense; a physical attack on Strangeways is poorly motivated; and the final revelations, intended as a stunning surprise, are neither stunning nor particularly surprising.

   This is a good novel, certainly, one worth reading — but it’s not a mystery classic.

   A film version of The Beast Must Die was produced in France in 1969 under the title This Man Must Die. Directed by Claude Chabrol, it is faithful to the novel except in one major (and curious) point: It excludes Nigel Strangeways completely and tells the tale as a straightforward thriller.

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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.

GAVIN BLACK – A Time for Pirates. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1971. No US paperback edition. First published in the UK by Collins Crime Club, hardcover, 1971.

   There is a riot in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — young Malays demonstrating against the Chinese merchants — and Paul Harris is caught in the middle of it. His car is destroyed and he makes his escape on foot, in the process rescuing another stranded European, the young blond wife of a geologist. This geologist, as it turns out, works for an unscrupulous Chinese corporation that Harris suspects of secret oil exploration.

   Harris loves Malaysia, is concerned about the environment and all that, but figures someone is going to develop the oil, so he might as well have a hand in it. With backing from a Japanese firm, he sets about forming a company to beat out the Chinese.

   So begins a very readable and rather involved story of conflicting business and political interests, with money, power, and terrorism used to back the various interests. (Harris himself is subjected to a couple of physical attacks and attempted kidnappings, plus an attempt on his life.) The blonde? Well, she becomes an enigmatic figure, usually appearing whenever a kidnapping is in the offing. This is also a story of races — Malays, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and Europeans — coming together, seldom in harmony.

   Gavin Black (a pseudonym of Oswald Wynd) was born in the Orient and most of his novels take place in the Far East — Malaysia and Singapore in particular. Other books featuring Paul Harris include Suddenly, at Singapore (1961), A Wind of Death (1967), and The Golden Cockatrice (1975).

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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.

NORMAN BERROW – The Footprints of Satan. Ward Lock, UK, hardcover, 1950. Ramble House, US, softcover, April 2005.

   One morning the inhabitants of the English village of Winchingham awaken to find a single line of hoofprints that begin in the middle of the road, in a carpeting of virgin snow, and then lead through gardens, over walls and hedges, through a locked summerhouse and pavilion, across a steep roof inaccessible to humans, to finally end by an old tree from which a man is hanging by the neck.

   Superstitious terror grips the village: Many believe the devil is responsible. (There is actual historical precedent for such a belief: On the night of February 8, 1855, a similar trail of cloven hoofprints appeared in and around a number of towns in the south of Devon, and no earthly explanation for them was ever discovered.)

   The trail and the dead man are not the work of Satan, of course, but that of a very clever murderer. Berrow’s development and unraveling of the apparently inexplicable is likewise ingenious, and he builds considerable suspense before his series sleuth, Detective Inspector Lancelot Carolus Smith, finally solves the mystery.

   Only one of Berrow’s twenty novels — a revised and updated version of the 1940 book The Ghost House (1979) — was published in the United States, perhaps because of their numerous flaws: talkiness and overwriting, colorless characters, and some dubious use of English slang (Berrow was a New Zealander). The Footprints of Satan, however, his best and most baffling novel, deserves to have been reprinted here — and still should be for the amusement of contemporary readers.

   Other of his books worth reading include The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) and The Bishop’s Sword (1948), each of which contains no fewer than three neatly worked out “impossible crimes”; and It Howls at Night (1937), a non-series book set in Spain, which has a werewolf theme.

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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:   Here is some good news, at least for fans of “impossible crime” mysteries. All twenty of Berrow’s mysteries have been reprinted by Ramble House, including this one.

EARL DERR BIGGERS – The Black Camel. Bobbs Merrill, hardcover, 1929. Grosset & Dunlap, hardcover reprint; Photoplay edition. Paperback reprints include: Pocket #133, 1941; Paperback Library 52-312, 1964; Pyramid T-1947, 1969; Bantam N6315, 1975; Mysterious Press, 1987; Academy Chicago Publishers, 2009. Film: 20th Century Fox, 1931 (Warner Oland); remade as Charlie Chan in Rio, 1941 (Sidney Toler).

   “Death is the black camel that kneels unbid at every gate.” Charlie Chan quotes this Eastern saying when Shelah Fane, silent-movie star, is stabbed to death in Honolulu. A famous but fading actress, Fane is in Hawaii to finish off the final shots of a South Sea film started in Tahiti. Apparently she also had witnessed a murder of another movie star in Hollywood some three years earlier and was planning at last to reveal the murderer’s identity.

   Chan has his work cut out for him in this investigation, particularly when the most likely suspect, a fortune teller, has an unbreakable alibi. Not a fair-play mystery, but Chan is always entertaining and interesting.

   Although Inspector Charlie Chan of the Honolulu Police Department is a household name throughout the world, he appears in only six novels. The great number of films, radio plays, and comic strips inspired by Chan are proof of the compelling quality of Earl Derr Biggers’s creation. However, these offshoots do not do credit to Chan’s character. In them, he becomes a stereotypical Chinese, mouthing ridiculous platitudes and doing more than his fair share of bowing and scraping.

   To anyone familiar with Chan only from the Thirties’ and Forties’ B-movies, Biggers’ novels will come as a refreshing surprise. In them, Chan is portrayed as an amiable, wise man, given to philosophic contemplation. He is an individual in whom the characteristics of the East and the West are delicately blended, and often Biggers uses this cultural mix in his plotting, allowing his detective to discern clues that either an Occidental or Oriental investigator would not.

   Chan’s character is one of considerable depth — a welcome period departure from sinister Orientals such as Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu. Unfortunately, Biggers’ secondary characters tend to be less interesting, especially his melodramatic and overly romantic young men and women.

   A sense of place is another aspect of fiction at which Biggers excelled. The Black Camel is set in the Honolulu of the Twenties — a city much different from the one we know today. Waikiki is a quiet beach community where trade winds “mumble at the curtains,” a place where flowers bloom unmolested, and the trip into the city itself is a long journey by streetcar.

   When movie queen Shelah Fane rents a house on the beach, she expects a restful sojourn, but complications in the form of an ardent shipboard suitor, a disturbing session with her trusted fortune-teller, and fear of a secret in her past arise to disrupt it. When Shelah is found murdered, Chan is called in.

   The star has left a letter for the fortune-teller, which could perhaps provide the vital key, but before Chan can read it, the lights in the house go out and it is snatched from him. Without this clue, the detective must sort through the conflicting stories of the murdered woman’s suitor, secretary, co-star, fortune-teller, tourist guide, butler, and a beachcomber — all of whom seem to have had ulterior motives where the film star was concerned.

   An entertaining novel, with suspects galore, and a surprise 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.

ANTHONY BERKELEY – The Poisoned Chocolates Case. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1929. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1929. Paperback reprints include Pocket #814, US, 1951; Dell/Scene of the Crime #8, US, 1983.

   Anthony Berkeley (a pseudonym for A.B. Cox, who also wrote as Francis Iles) had an excellent ability to characterize, as is demonstrated in this novel in which the members of London’s Crime Club — a carefully chosen group of armchair detectives — match wits to solve the murder of Mrs. Graham Bendix. Mrs. Bendix died after eating poisoned chocolates that were apparently intended for Sir Eustace Pennefather, dissolute member of the aristocracy whom many had reason to kill.

   The police have found no solution to the problem of who sent the chocolates to Sir Eustace (who seems to have innocently passed them on to Mrs. Bendix), and Roger Sheringham, somewhat pompous founder of the Crime Club, has volunteered the assistance of his learned members. Although Detective Inspector Farrar of Scotland Yard appears to think this an idle amusement, nonetheless he agrees to brief the club on the case.

   The members — each characterized in all his or her eccentricities — agree to present their solutions on different nights. And it is no surprise when suspicion falls on one of their number. As theories and evidence pile up, the facts of the case unfold, and the cumulative work of the members — each of whom has his own particular sphere of knowledge, each of whom is certain of the correctness of his solution — leads to the logical but surprising conclusion.

   This is a talky novel, with little action or movement. But it should appeal to those who like the combination of good characterization and armchair detection.

   Other novels featuring the learned Roger Sheringham include The Layton Court Mystery (1929), The Second Shot (1931), Jumping Jenny (1933), and Panic Party (1934).

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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.

JOSEPHINE BELL – Curtain Call for a Corpse. Macmillan, US, 1965. Perennial, US, paperback, 1988. First published in the UK by Longmans, hardcover, 1939, as Death at Half-Term.

   Josephine Bell (whose real name is Doris Bell Ball) has practiced two professions. She began her career as a physician in the 1920s, when it was an unusual field for a woman. Since 1937 she has practiced a trade more expected of British gentlewomen — the writing of mystery and suspense stories.

   In recent years, Bell has specialized in non-series suspense stories, but she started her writing career with a series of classic mysteries starring David Wintringham. Her amateur sleuth is, appropriately enough, a doctor. His police counterpart is Inspector Mitchell, who does not always appreciate Dr. Wintringham’s interference.

   Wintringham’s fifth case takes him to the Denbury (boys’ prep) School, where he is conveniently related to the headmaster and one of the students. Half-term weekend traditionally features both a father-son cricket match and a theatrical performance. This year’s performance of Twelfth Night by a third-rate touring company becomes highly memorable when an ill-tempered actor collapses with a bashed skull as the curtain falls.

   Wintringham, who attends the dying actor, becomes even more interested in the case when it is discovered that members of the school’s staff may also have had reasons for wanting the victim dead. There is plenty of detecting to go around. Mitchell, Wintringham, and an enthusiastic band of young students all have a share of collecting clues and interviewing suspects. The result is a nicely complex investigation, punctuated by a cricket match and climaxing in a classic gathering of the suspects and confrontation with the murderer.

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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 Dr. David Wintringham series —

* Death on the Borough Council. Longmans, 1937.
* Murder in Hospital. Longmans, 1937.
* Fall Over Cliff. Longmans, 1938.
* Death at Half-Term. Longmans, 1939.
From Natural Causes. Longmans, 1939.
All Is Vanity. Longmans, 1940.
Death at the Medical Board. Longmans, 1944.
* Death in Clairvoyance. Longmans, 1949.
* The Summer School Mystery. Methuen 1950.
* Bones in the Barrow. Methuen 1953.
* The China Roundabout. Hodder 1956.
* The Seeing Eye. Hodder 1958.

(*) Inspector Steven Mitchell also appears. The latter had one case to solve on his own, and three with barrister Claude Warrington-Reeve, who had no solo appearances.

STEPHEN BECKER – The Chinese Bandit. Random House, hardcover, 1975. Berkley, paperback, 1977.

   Stephen Becker is one of the few Americans who can write the novel of suspense and high adventure as well as, if not better than, his counterparts in Great Britain. The Chinese Bandit is the first of an outstanding trilogy about the postwar years in the Far East (the other two titles are The Last Mandarin, 1979, and The Blue-Eyed Shan, 1982, and is so good that it earned Becker accolades as “a modern Dumas.”

   The bandit of the title is Jake Dodds, a brawling, wenching, semi-alcoholic marine sergeant, wartime hero, and peacetime bum who finds himself in Peking in 1947 and becomes involved with a wily Chinese black-marketeer named Kao. After Jake nearly kills an American brigadier general in a whorehouse fight, it is Kao who saves him from imprisonment by arranging to smuggle him out of Peking with a camel caravan. Working as a guard and camel-puller, Jake soon finds himself dealing with progression of traders, nomads, guerrillas, warlords, Japanese deserters, Chinese Communists, Chinese Nationalists, and women good and bad. Not to mention the Gobi Desert, the great snow-capped mountains of Central Asia, and even the legendary yeti or Abominable Snowman.

   Byzantine plot twists, well-drawn characters, and one of the most graphically detailed of all fictional portraits of postwar China, Mongolia, and Turkestan make this escapist entertainment of the finest sort. But it is even more than that, for Becker writes beautifully and incisively from firsthand knowledge of time and place, giving us keen social and political observations and a work of genuine literary distinction. This is a novel to be read slowly, to be savored, and then to be read again — as are the other two tities in his trilogy.

   Becker has also written two contemporary tales suspense and adventure: A Covenant with Death (1964) and Season of the Stranger (1966). Under the pseudonym of Steve Dodge, he produced a paperback original with a China setting, Shanghai Incident (1955), which was later reissued under his own name. All of these are good, but none is as rich or as memorable as the three later works.

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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.