FRANCES CRANE – Death-Wish Green. Random House, hardcover, 1960. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition. No paperback edition.

   Pat and Jean Abbott, a private investigator and his wife, are returning to foggy San Francisco from a weekend in the sun. As they reach the toll plaza of the Golden Gate Bridge, they spot a familiar car being inspected by highway patrolmen and the local police. The car, which was abandoned on the bridge, belongs to Katie Spinner, daughter of friends of the Abbotts; and it appears she has jumped off the bridge.

   Jean Abbott, however, is not convinced the girl committed suicide; and when Pat is hired by Katie’s aunt to investigate the disappearance, it becomes apparent Katie is still alive.

   The Abbotts, who often work as an investigative team, focus on bohemian North Beach, one of the last places Katie was seen before she started across the bridge. There they encounter an art-gallery dealer with a taste for Zen Buddhism and opium; a model who calls her favorite color “death-wish green,” and dies wearing it; a mysterious stranger with a large auburn beard who was seen with the missing girl in a coffeehouse; and errant sons and daughters of some of the city’s wealthiest and most respected families.

   For all Pat Abbott’s investigative skills, in the end it is Jean who sees most of the action and carries the day.

   Frances Crane’s descriptive powers are considerable, and the sense of place — particularly of the fog and its effect on San Francisco — is powerful. Her secondary characters are well drawn and indeed far more vividly drawn that either Pat or Jean. Jean, the narrator/observer, remains just that, and we come away without really having gotten to know her. Pat, the detective, is merely a figure going through investigative motions.

   Frances Crane has written many other novels, all of them with colors in their titles, featuring the Abbotts. Among them are The Amethyst Spectacles (1944), The Buttercup Case (1958), and The Amber Eyes (1962).

   In addition to San Francisco, they are set in such locales as Tangier (The Coral Princess Murders, 1954); New Mexico (Horror on the Ruby X, 1956); and New Orleans (The Indigo Necklace, 1955).

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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.

      Previously on this blog:

The Cinnamon Murder (reviewed by Steve Lewis)

R. A. J. WALLING – Marooned with Murder. Morrow, hardcover, 1937. UK edition published as Bury Him Deeper, Hodder & Stoughton, hc, 1937.

   R. A. J. Walling, a British journalist and newspaper editor who began writing mysteries as a hobby in his late fifties, received a good deal of acclaim during his time. (His first book was published in 1927, his last posthumously in 1949.)

   The New York Times stated in 1936 that Walling had considerable skill in weaving mystery plots; the Saturday Review of Literature decided that he wrote suavely baffling stories; the eminent critic Will Cuppy said of one of his early novels that it was “absolutely required reading.”

   This reviewer couldn’t agree less.

   In the first place, Walling wrote some of the dullest mysteries ever committed to paper; it may even be said that he elevated dullness to a fine art. And in the second place, his series sleuth, private inquiry agent Philip Tolefree, is a twit.

   He says things like, “You’re a vandal, Pierce. You’ve feloniously broken into my ivory tower. Never mind. I’d have been bored in another half hour. How’d you find me out? Sit down, my dear fellow. Cigarette? Pipe? Well, carry on. What’s the trouble now? Or did you come for the sake of my beautiful eyes?”

   He is also fond of quoting obscure Latin phrases, treating his sometime Watson, Farrar, as if he were an idiot, and withholding information from everyone including the reader.

   Although Tolefree operates out of a London apartment, most of his cases seem to take him into the countryside. He solves them in the accepted Sherlockian manner of detection and deduction, using an inexhaustible fund of knowledge both esoteric and ephemeral.

   Another reason he is so successful at unmasking murderers is his familiarity with such matters and motives as skeletons in closets, hidden relationships, peculiar wills, strange disappearances, and Nazi infiltrators, since nearly all his investigations seem to uncover one or any combination of these.

   Marooned with Murder is no exception; its central plot points are hidden relationships and a strange disappearance. It begins well enough, with a dandy premise: Tolefree and Farrar, on a holiday in the Scottish Highlands, decide to rent a boat and sail her out of one of the fjordlike lochs into the Atlantic.

   A sudden storm shipwrecks them on the tiny island of Eilean Rona, where they are rescued by the lord of the isle, Martin Gregg; artist Bill Parracombe; and two odd and fiercely loyal Scotsmen, Fergus and Jamie. Also staying at the island’s ancient castle for the summer are Gregg’s wife and small son, and the boy’s governess.

   The storm continues to batter Rona, preventing any of them from leaving. A chance remark by Farrar, about a retired sea captain he knows named Strachan who lives over on the mainland, for some reason seems to frighten everyone; so does the remark that Tolefree is a detective.

   It soon becomes clear that Strachan had been hunting lost treasure on the island and disappeared one foggy Sunday three months before, along with his boat and a mysterious companion; and that the inhabitants of Rona know something about that disappearance and are desperate to protect their guilty knowledge.

   So far, so good. But Walling spoils the stew by interminable passages of cat-and-mouse dialogue, annoying cryptic remarks from Tolefree, and a lot of rather silly running around. He also lets the reader know early on that Tolefree and Farrar do not fear for their lives; they think their hosts are all swell people, even though one of them may be a murderer.

   The result is plenty of mystery but no menace and therefore no tension. And the mystery isn’t satisfying, either, when its rather predictable solution is revealed.

   Walling has been called (by his publishers) “the foremost exponent of the seemingly ‘quiet’ mystery, the civilized story with … excitement and drama seething below the surface.”

   Readers who don’t find that a euphemism for dull, and would like to examine Walling’s work for themselves, should try The Corpse in the Coppice (1935), The Corpse with the Floating Foot (1936), The Corpse with the Eerie Eye (1942), and A Corpse by Any Other Name (1943). The last-named title has some effective descriptions of Londoners coping with the wartime blackout and blitz.

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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.

LESLIE FORD – Siren in the Night. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1943. Paperback reprints include: Bantam #303, 1948; Popular Library K68, 1964.

   Grace Latham, Colonel Primrose, and Sergeant Buck reappear in yet another locale in this wartime story. Grace is spending the spring in San Francisco because her son, a naval air cadet, is stationed there; Primrose and Buck have traveled west because of the colonel’s involvement in the war effort.

   The city is at its charming best, except for placards indicating where the air-raid shelters are and “the sudden rising wail of the alert siren, and the lights of that Golden City fading like a million synchronized fireflies dying in the night.”

   A blackout, in fact, plays a key role in the discovery of the murder of Loring Kimball, popular resident of San Joaquin Terrace, where Grace has taken a house.

   If all the lights in the city hadn’t gone out except for the one in Kimball’s study, no one would have stopped in to investigate, and his body might not have been discovered for some time — thus allowing the killer to escape the scrutinizing eyes of Colonel Primrose.

   But the lights do go out; the body is found by neighbor Nat Donahue (who is immediately suspected of the crime); and when all residents of,the small street are accounted for, it turns out that a number weren’t where they should have been at the time of Kimball’s death.

   As Primrose probes into the lives of these residents, hidden passions and secrets come to the surface. The suspects are varied and well characterized, and the portrait Ford paints of wartime San Francisco is memorable.

   While as mannered as Ford’s other mysteries, there is a dark side to this novel, as exemplified by the blackout and the implied threat of annihilation by the enemy.

   The Primrose/Latham series is best read in order of publication, since its chief charm lies in the complexity of the relationships among the main characters. Other notable titles include The Simple Way of Poison (1937), Old Lover’s Ghost (1940), and The Woman in Black (1947).

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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.

LESLIE FORD – Ill Met by Moonlight. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1938. Reprint paperbacks include: Dell #6, mapback edition, no date [1943]; Popular Library 60-2440, 1964.

   Leslie Ford (a pseudonym of Zenith Brown, who also wrote as David Frome) has often been accused of being one of the leading practitioners of the “had-I-but-known” school, and it is true that a great many of these leading and tension-spoiling statements appear in her novels.

   However, shortsighted critics have overlooked her carefully delineated exploration of life among people who are not too different from the average reader except in the fact that, through familial associations, political affinity, or geographic accident, they invite more than their fair share of murder and well-bred mayhem.

   This is the second adventure of Colonel John T. Primrose and Sergeant Phineas Buck, one in which the unlikely but highly successful combination of retired officer and retired enlisted man is teamed with a thirty-eight-year-old widow, Grace Latham. Grace is of a distinguished Georgetown family, and her elegant home forms the backdrop for many of the books in this series.

   Ill Met by Moonlight takes place in another setting — April Harbor, Maryland, a summer playground for an inbred group of upper-crust families, where Grace and her relatives have been vacationing for years. Primrose and Buck are guests at Grace’s cottage when she finds a neighbor dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning in the garage next door.

   An old romance, a troubled marriage, a new love affair, and relationships with the folks in the neighboring town are all woven together in this engrossing and charming tale of love and murder.

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

SIMON BRETT – A Comedian Dies. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1979. Reprint paperbacks include: Berkley, 1980; Dell, 1986; Warner, 1990. UK edition: Victor Gollancz, hardcover, 1979.

   Making good use of his background in radio and television, and of his interest in the theater, Simon Brett has created one of the most likable characters among recent series sleuths: Charles Paris, a middle-aged and not very successful radio actor whose vices include drink, women, and stumbling into murder cases that he is forced to solve.

   The Paris novels are distinguished by solid plotting, well-drawn entertainment business backgrounds, and a nice interweaving of humor that often borders on spoof.

   One of the first things the reader of A Comedian Dies, which has a modem British vaudeville background, will notice is that there is a gag at the beginning of each chapter. A gag such as:

   Having discovered this, most readers will no doubt be tempted to flip through the book and read all of the gags immediately, like gulping popcorn. You should refrain from doing this, however. Taken one at a time, every dozen pages or so, each will provoke an amused and tolerant groan; taken all at once, they are sort of like listening to a Bob Hope monologue and may therefore cause severe trauma, if not a sudden desire to take up golf or vote Republican.

   On the other hand, the novel itself is worth reading all at once. Paris and his estranged wife, Frances, trying once again to mend their marriage, are attending a vaudeville show at the Winter Gardens in Hunstanton, a small English seacoast town. But the show the star performer, comedian Bill Peaky, puts on is not at all what Paris anticipated: Peaky is electrocuted on stage while clutching his electric guitar and microphone.

   At the inquest, the coroner decides the death was accidental, due to faulty wiring, but Paris has his doubts and starts an investigation of his own. Suspects abound, owing to the fact that Peaky was not a very popular fellow. Paris is something of a bumbler, which only enhances his appeal; and he does get to the bottom of things eventually, in spite of the eighteen gags Brett throws at him along the way.

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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.

GEOFFREY HOMES – Build My Gallows High. William Morrow, hardcover, 1946. Paperback reprints include: Jonathan Press J35,digest, no date [1948]; Ace D-185, 1956, published dos-à-dos with The Humming Box, by Harry Whittington; Zebra “Movie Mystery Greats,” 1988.

   From 1936 to 1946, Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring) published a dozen very good mysteries set primarily in the valleys and foothills of north-central California. Build My Gallows High is the last and best of the twelve, and so firmly established Mainwaring in Hollywood (he had been writing B movies since 1942) that he produced no more fiction during the last thirty-two years of his life.

   This novel was filmed, from Mainwaring’s screenplay, as Out of the Past (1947), starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas — one of the half-dozen best noir crime films ever made.

   Both novel and film are powerful studies of one man’s struggle to maintain the hope of his future when his jaded past catches up with him. Red Bailey is a former New York private detective, the kind “who first looked at a client’s supply of thousand-dollar bills, then at his social-and legal-status” before taking on a job; an angle player who made his big mistake when he went to work for a gambler named Whit Sterling.

   The job (told through flashback) was to find Sterling’s ex-mistress, Mumsie McGonigle, who shot and wounded Sterling and then ran off with $56,000 of his money. Red tracked Mumsie to Mexico, met and fell in love with her; and when she claimed she’d only shot Sterling in self-defense, Red stupidly double-crossed the gambler and helped Mumsie cover her tracks from Mexico to California.

   But their relationship wasn’t what Red expected. When his former partner showed up at their country hideaway, murder drove the final wedge between them — and Red realized how badly he’d screwed up his life.

   Determined to put Mumsie and the rest of it behind him, he made his way to a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, opened a gas station, and spent most of his free time fishing. He even met a new woman, one he learned to love more than Mumsie, one he planned to marry. Now, for the first time in his life, he is content.

   But then one day his past shows up in the person of a flashily dressed Greek gunman employed by Guy Parker, a crooked cop Red knew in the old days who now operates a gambling club in Reno. Red accompanies the Greek to see Parker, and finds that Mumsie is now Parker’s live-in girlfriend.

   Parker wants Red to do a detective job for him; if he doesn’t agree, then Parker will tell Whit Sterling where to find him. Red smells a setup of some kind, with himself square in the middle, but what choice does he have except to do as Parker asks? Up to a point, that is …

   This is a taut, hard-edged thriller, powerfully told in a clipped style reminiscent of Hemingway’s, with superb characterization and a hammer-blow climax. Anyone who has seen and admired Out of the Past will find Build My Gallows High every bit as memorable.

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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.

 

LEE THAYER – Out, Brief Candle! Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1948. No paperback edition.

   The life of Emma Redington Lee Thayer is more fascinating than any of her novels. Born in 1874, she quickly established herself as a painter of murals on the walls of private homes, and some of her work in this field was displayed in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair. Later she specialized in doing the designs for stamped bookbindings, and countless early-twentieth-century titles were made visually more appealing thanks to her skill.

   It was only after World War I that she started writing books herself, turning out a total of sixty mystery novels, for all but the last three of which she also designed the dust jackets. Apparently she holds the record for both professional and personal longevity in the mystery field, for her last book, Dusty Death (1966), came out when she was ninety-two, and she lived to be ninety-nine.

   She seems to have been a nice, refined, well-to-do old lady. Unfortunately she wrote her novels for an audience she thought of as exactly like herself, with no attempt to widen her appeal.

   Fifty-nine of Thayer’s sixty books deal with redheaded gentleman detective Peter Clancy, a dinosaur among sleuths if ever there was one. Imagine a stick figure from Edwardian times adrift in the decades of depression, war, angst, and civil rights, and trying desperately to pretend that nothing has happened, and you have something of the flavor of a Peter Clancy exploit.

   Thayer’s novels move with the speed of an arthritic snail trying to cross a piece of flypaper. Her plotting is abysmal, her style unbearable, her characters impossible. In most of his adventures, Clancy is attended by an ever-deferential valet named Wiggar, a Jeeves clone without a drop of humor, who is constantly getting off bons mots like “Oh, Mr. Peter, sir!”

   Her favorite device for bringing a book to climax was to have God Almighty himself strike down the killer from on high, while Mother Nature whipped up a furious storm and the rhetoric swirled and squalled. Those who might think this description is exaggerated are referred to Accessory after the Fact (1943) and Still No Answer (1958), as well as to our main entry.

   Out, Brief Candle! takes its title from Macbeth and its kickoff situation from Agatha Christie: Like Poirot in Death in the Air (1935), Clancy investigates a murder aboard an airliner on which he was a passenger.

   Like all Thayer novels, this one is twice as long as necessary; but a slightly ingenious solution, combined with a truly grisly encounter between a little girl and a body in a coffin, lifts it to the ranks of Thayer’s best, whatever that means.

   Lee Thayer is a highly specialized taste, but if for no other reasons than her industry and longevity, she deserves better than to be totally forgotten.

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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 Comment:   Complementing this review, or to be more precise, the impetus for my posting it here, is one covering Lee Thayer’s first book, The Mystery of the 13th Floor (1919), by J. F. Norris on his blog. You should go read it.

● JOE GORES – Dead Skip. Random House, hardcover, 1972. Reprint paperbacks include: Ballantine, 1974; Mysterious Press, 1992.

   While holding down a variety of jobs, one of them a stint as a San Francisco private investigator, Joe Gores published numerous (and generally hard-boiled) short stories in the 1950s and 1960s. One of these, “Sweet Vengeance” (Manhunt, July 1964) became the basis for his first novel, the violent suspense thriller A Time of Predators (1969).

   Dead Skip is the first of three novels in the DKA File series (which also includes a dozen or so short stories) — a series Ellery Queen called “authentic as a fist in your face.”

   DKA stands for Daniel Kearny Associates, a San Francisco investigative firm modeled on the real agency for which Gores once worked. (It was Anthony Boucher who first suggested Gores utilize his PI background as the basis for a fictional series.)

   DKA operates out of an old Victorian that used to be a specialty whorehouse, and specializes in the repossessing of cars whose owners have defaulted on loans from banks and automobile dealers.

   Kearny, the boss, is tough, uncompromising, but fair; his operatives, each of whom plays an important role in some if not all of the novels and stories, include Larry Ballard (the nominal lead protagonist), Bart Heslip, Patrick Michael O’Bannon, Giselle Marc, and office manager Kathy Onoda.

   Dead Skip begins quietly enough, with Bart Heslip (who happens to be black) repossessing a car in San Francisco’s Richmond district and returning it to the DKA offices, where he files his report. But when he leaves he is struck down by an unknown assailant — and the following morning the other members of DKA are confronted with the news that Bart is in a coma in a hospital intensive-care unit, the apparent victim of an accident in a repo’d Jaguar.

   Bart’s girlfriend, Corinne Jones, refuses to believe in the “accident” and convinces Ballard that Bart was the victim of violence. In spite of Kearny, who seems more concerned about the cost of the wrecked Jag than about Bart’s welfare (thus causing tension in the ranks), Ballard embarks on a search for Bart’s assailant and an explanation for the attack.

   Starting with the files on Bart’s recent repo jobs, he follows a twisting trail that takes him all over San Francisco and to the East Bay; involves him with a number of unusual characters, one of them a rock musician with a group calling itself Assault and Battery; and ends in a macabre confrontation that endangers not only Ballard’s life but that of Giselle Marc, in a house high above the former haven of the flower children, the Haight-Ashbury.

   The motivation for the attack on Bart is hardly new to crime fiction, and some of the villain’s other actions are likewise questionably motivated, but these minor flaws shouldn’t spoil anyone’s enjoyment of what is otherwise an excellent private-eye procedural. It is, in fact, strong stuff — realistic, powerful, “a traditional American crime novel, out of Black Mask, Hammett and Chandler” (New York Times).

   Even better are the other two novels in the series — Final Notice (1973) and Gone, No Forwarding (1978).

● JOE GORES – Hammett. Putnam’s, hardcover, 1975. Reprint paperbacks include: Ballantine, 1976; Perennial Library, 1982.

   Gores is a lifelong aficionado and student of the works of Dashiell Hammett, and Hammett’s influence is clearly evident in Gores’s own fiction. Hammett is his personal monument to the man he believes was the greatest of all crime writers — part thriller, part fictionalized history, part biography set in the San Francisco of 1928, “a corrupt city, owned by its politicians, its cops, its district attorney. A city where anything is for sale.”

   When an old friend from his Pinkerton days, Vic Atkinson, is murdered after Hammett refuses to help him, the former op-turned-Black Mask writer once again finds himself in the role of detective and man hunter.

   But as the dust-jacket blurb says, “During his search through the teeming alleys of Chinatown, through the cathouses and speakeasies and gambling hells of the city, Hammett discovers that the years of writing have dulled his hunter’s instincts, have made him fear death — and that failure to resharpen his long-unused skills as a private detective could end… his life.”

   The blurb goes on to say, “[Gores’] dialogue crackles and sparks with the wry, tough humor of the twenties. His characters are thinly disguised portraits of the men and women who shook and shaped this most fascinating of American cities. His plot, drawn from actual events in San Francisco’s corrupt political past, casts harsh light on a stark and bloody era.”

All of which is true enough, at least up to a point. Hammett is considered by some to be Gores’ best book, and in many ways it is. But it also has its share of flaws, among them some overly melodramatic scenes and a disinclination on Gores’ part to even mention Hammett’s left-wing politics.

   All things considered, it is certainly a good novel — one that should be read by anyone interested in Hammett, San Francisco circa 1928, and/or fast-action mysteries of the Black Mask school — but it is not the great novel it has occasionally been called.

   The 1982 film version produced by Francis Ford Coppola, on the other hand, is pure claptrap. Frederick Forrest is fine as Hammett, and the script by Ross Thomas is faithful to the novel, but the direction (Wim Wenders) is so arty and stylized that all the grittiness and power is lost. Some of the scenes, in fact, are so bad they’re almost painful to watch.

   Gores’ other non-series novels, A Time of Predators (which received an Edgar for Best First Novel of 1969) and Interface (1974), are also excellent.

   The latter is one of the toughest, most brutal novels published since the days of Black Mask — so hard boiled that some readers, women especially, find it upsetting. But its power is undeniable; and its surprise ending is both plausible and certain to come as a shock to most readers.

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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.

JOE GORES, R.I.P.   Posted earlier today on Yahoo’s Rara-Avis group was an announcement by publisher Vince Emery of Joe Gores’ death. Quoting briefly:

    “Sad news: Joe Gores, one of my favorite authors — and favorite people — passed away Monday, in a hospital in Marin County.

    “Joe was a three-time Edgar Award winner, past president of the Mystery Writers of America, and author of my favorite hard-boiled mystery series set in San Francisco, the Daniel Kearny & Associates series, which was based on Joe’s own experiences as a detective and repo man. He was working on a new DKA novel when he died.”

    Mr. Gores’ most recent novel was, of course, Spade & Archer (Knopf, 2009), a prequel to The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. Quite coincidentally (this is Steve talking) I am halfway through it now, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

C. W. GRAFTON – The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1943. [Mary Roberts Rinehart Mystery Contest winner.] Reprint paperbacks: Dell #180, 1947, mapback edition; Perennial Library, P639, 1983. Poisoned Pen Press, trade paperback, 2020.

   Lawyer Gil Henry’s client describes him as a young man who has “got more curiosity than an old maid and his mind is so sharp it’s about to cut his ears off.” Henry is this and much more — tenacious, eager, with a humorous, self-deprecating wit.

   Sometimes he’s a bit of a bumbler, but he has the good grace to acknowledge it. And in this, his first case, his determination serves him in good stead.

   Henry is hired by Ruth McClure to look into the matter of some stock she has inherited: Her father, who was recently killed in an auto accident, has left her a hundred shares in Harper Products Company, the firm where he was employed. The owner of the company, William Jasper Harper, is offering to buy the shares for much more than they are worth, and Ruth wants to know why.

   Henry takes her on as a client — with reservations because the senior partner in his firm is dating Harper’s daughter. And when he receives an urgent summons to come to Harpersville earlier than he planned (because someone has ransacked Ruth’s house), he still is hesitant.

   But he goes, in a car borrowed from his partner, and is involved in a near-fatal accident on the way. When the accident turns out to be due to a shot-out tire, he checks the car Ruth’s father died in. There is no evidence, because there is no tire — someone has taken it from the wrecking yard.

   From there on, suspicious circumstances mount up: There seems to be little love lost between Ruth McClure and her adopted brother, Tim; Ruth’s father lived well beyond his means; there is a disfigured egg lady who is also living beyond her means — and indeed buys the eggs she sells to selected persons (including Mr. Harper) at the grocery store.

   When Henry confronts Harper personally, he is run out of town, and he must go to Louisville, Kentucky, where the company’s accountants are, in search of further evidence. Before he finally gets to the bottom of this strange state of affairs, murder has been done twice — and Gil Henry is considering committing a third.

   Grafton’s style is easy and humorous, the plotting is good, and the characters are sure to intrigue you. Gil Henry is an extremely likable young man, and it’s regrettable that he appears in only one other book, The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher (1944).

   Grafton — the father of contemporary private-eye novelist Sue Grafton — wrote only one other suspense novel, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1950).

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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.

SUE GRAFTON – “A” Is for Alibi. Holt Rinehart & Winston, hardcover, April 1982. Bantam, paperback, 1982. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft.

   In this first of a series featuring female private investigator Kinsey Millhone, screenwriter Sue Grafton introduces us to a captivating character. Millhone is thirty-two, twice divorced, with no kids (after all, she can’t very well ramble around California in her beat-up Volkswagen with two babes and a lonely husband waiting at home).

    “A” Is for Alibi begins with Kinsey telling us she has killed someone for the first time. The event “weighs heavily” on her mind, and in a tightly packed 274 pages we find out just how it happened.

    Millhone takes us back to the beginning of the case, when she meets with the widow of a prominent attorney in Santa Teresa, a small, upperclass beach community in southern California (and Grafton’s admitted tribute to Ross Macdonald).

    The woman was convicted eight years ago of poisoning her philandering, abusive, and very rich husband with a capsule of oleander-a common California shrub-which she allegedly slipped into his bottle of tranquilizers so he would take it at will, when she wasn’t around: “A” is for alibi.

    The woman has proclaimed her innocence from the beginning. After eight years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit, she wants Millhone to find her husband’s real murderer.

    What follows is a beautifully written story of spoiled love, American-style. Ex-wives, children of divorce, ambitious girlfriends, loyal secretaries, and longtime business partners — Millhone grills all of these with the tenacity of the best hard-boiled detectives, and her female sympathies draw out the emotional reality of the characters with refreshing clarity.

    In the end, she has no choice but to kill someone, and we are as surprised as she is when it happens. Don’t miss this one, or its sequel, “B” Is for Burglar, which appeared in 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.