STEPHEN GREENLEAF – Death Bed. Dial Press, hardcover, October 1980. Paperback reprints: Ballantine, May 1982; Bantam, December 1991.

   Stephen Greenleaf has received a great deal of critical acclaim for his novels featuring John Marshall Tanner, former lawyer turned private eye.

   Tanner’s territory is the San Francisco Bay Area, where his cases take him into the homes of the rich and powerful, as well as into the lowest dives in the city; the author draws heavily on his knowledge of politics, business, and local events to flesh out Tanner’s investigations.

   Greenleaf has been hailed as the successor to the Raymond Chandler/Ross Macdonald tradition, and it is easy to see why. Like Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, Tanner is less a fully developed character than an observer. Hints are thrown out about his past and private life, but they are not elaborated upon, and frankly the reader doesn’t care.

   Greenleaf makes extensive use of simile, as Macdonald did, but with far less success; often he seems to be stretching a point, reaching for a likeness that simply doesn’t come off. He is a successor to the tradition of the hard-boiled private eye developed by these writers in the sense that he is an imitator, and his work makes one wonder why we need further imitations.

   Death Bed begins with a scene reminiscent of Philip Marlowe’s meeting with Colonel Stem wood in The Big Sleep. Maximilian Kottle, dying millionaire, wishes to hire Tanner to find his estranged son, Karl.

   Kottle waxes philosophical about life and death — perhaps too much so for a man in such pain and close to death — and Tanner agrees to find his son for him. Karl’s mother, flamboyant romance novelist Shelley Withers, can give few clues to her son’s whereabouts, but through solid detective work — one of the strong points of this series — Tanner traces Karl, and is getting close when Belinda Kottle, beautiful young wife of Maximilian, calls to say Karl has contacted his father and is coming to see him.

   Shortly afterward, Maximilian dies, and Tanner considers the case closed. He is then free to undertake a search for missing investigative reporter Mark Covington, but soon discovers the Kottle case is not only still open, but also linked to the journalist’s disappearance.

   There are a few surprising twists here, but the case builds to a rather predictable conclusion, and the primary villain (there are many, of various sorts) is introduced so late in the narrative that the solution comes a little out of left field. Chandler and Macdonald simply did it better.

   Other novels featuring John Marshall Tanner are Grave Error (1979), State’s Evidence (1982), and Fatal Obsession (1983).

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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.

HENRY KANE – Trinity in Violence. Avon 618, paperback original, 1955; reprinted as Avon T-264. Signet G2551, pb, October 1964.

   Here we have three novelettes featuring Henry Kane’s long-running New York detective Peter Chambers. The Chambers stories tend to be pretty routine private-eye capers, but Kane’s handling of this stock material is quite unusual. The characters deliver their lines in a peculiarly arch fashion, which veteran PI fans are equally likely to find either refreshingly novel or plain silly.

   Also, in the midst of typical guns-and-gangsters melees, Chambers is wont to toss off sly asides to the readers, saying, in effect, “How about this for a typical private-eye cliche?” The Chambers books can provide enjoyable light entertainment if the reader finds Kane’s quirky, playful approach palatable.

   Best of these tales is “Skip a Beat,” with one of those once-popular story ideas you don’t see anymore: A famous newspaper columnist is about to announce that a leading citizen is actually a closet Commie, but he gets knocked off before he can spill it; Chambers cleans it up.

   Slapdash plotting comes to the fore in “Slaughter on Sunday,” in which a prominent hood hires Chambers to extricate him from a murder frame; it involves a sort of locked-room problem (a transparent one, at best), a gimmick for faking paraffin-test results, and several gaping plot holes.

   “Far Cry” finds Kane’s durable “private richard” romancing a hood’s mistress and breaking up a hot-car exporting racket.

   Some of the better Chambers novels include A Halo for Nobody (1947); Until You Are Dead (1951); Too French and Too Deadly (1955; another locked room opus, better than the one above, but no challenge to John Dickson Carr) and Death of a Flack (1961).

   Chambers’ female counterpart, Marla Trent, appears in Private Eyeful (1960),and the two collaborate in Kisses of Death (1962). Avoid at all costs the dreadful X-rated Peter Chambers novels published by Lancer in the early 1970s!

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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 reviewed on this blog:

The Midnight Man (by Bill Pronzini, 1001 Midnights)
A Corpse for Christmas (by Steve Lewis)
Laughter in the Alehouse (by Al Hubin)
Until You Are Dead (by Steve Lewis)

HENRY KANE – The Midnight Man. The Macmillan Co. (A Cock Robin Mystery), hardcover, 1965. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, September 1966. Paperback reprint: Raven House #9, 1981.

   Henry Kane is best known as the creator of Peter Chambers, a tough but urbane New York “private richard” whose adventures were quite popular in the late Forties and throughout the Fifties.

   (Some of the early Chambers short stories appeared in the sophisticated men’s magazine Esquire, which once devoted an editorial to Kane, calling him an “author, bon vivant, stoic, student, tramp, lawyer, philosopher … the lad who works off a hangover conceived in a Hoboken dive by swooshing down large orders of Eggs Benedict at the Waldorf on the morning after … the man who can use polysyllables on Third Avenue and certain ancient monosyllables on Park Avenue.”)

   Kane wrote dozens of novels and scores of stories featuring the exploits of Peter Chambers; and yet, ironically enough, his most memorable private eye is not Chambers but a 250-pound ex-cop named McGregor. In fact, his three best mystery novels are those in which McGregor is featured — The Midnight Man, Conceal and Disguise (1966), and Laughter in the Alehouse (1968).

   Like Chambers, McGregor is urbane, literate, and a connoisseur of beautiful women, gourmet food, and vintage booze. Unlike Chambers, he is prone to pithy literary quotes instead of suave wisecracks, and prefers to use wits and guile in place of guns and fists to solve his cases.

   He is not a career PI with an office and a secretary; he is a newly retired New York City police inspector, “pushing fifty, ramrod-straight and robustly handsome,” known around headquarters as “the Old Man,” who dabbles at private investigation (he has a license, of course) just to keep a hand in.

   He is more likable than Chambers, has more depth and sensitivity, and his three cases are less frivolous and more tightly plotted than any of the Chambers stories.

   In The Midnight Man, McGregor has undertaken the job of closing down an illegal after-hours enterprise at a fashionable Upper East Side nightclub. The case begins as a simple one — the club’s neighbors don’t like the idea of drunks carousing in the wee hours — but it soon turns complicated: The after-hours operation is being run by a major New York mob figure named Frank Dinelli, whom McGregor would love to put in the slammer.

   When the late-night doorman, whom McGregor has bribed and who was instrumental in a successful raid on the club, is shot to death practically in McGregor’s presence (he arrives just in time to grapple with the killer), the case becomes personal.

   Working with his pal, Detective Lieutenant Kevin Cohen, he follows leads that take him to the studio of millionaire photographer George Preston, to the offices of Park Avenue dermatologist Robert Jackson, and to a fancy loan-sharking operation that Dinelli is sponsoring.

   They also take him to a second murder, this one featuring an ingenious method of execution, which McGregor solves through the same combination of deduction and guile with which he wraps up the rest of the case.

   Kane has a fine ear for dialogue; there is some witty repartee here, especially between McGregor and a variety of New York cabdrivers. Of course, cops don’t really talk the way McGregor and Cohen do, but that’s a minor flaw.

   As the jacket blurb says, “If high crime in high society is your cup of tea, you’ll especially relish this fast, crisp, upper-echelon saga of mayhem in Manhattan.” And from Anthony Boucher: “Kane has, as usual, a pretty sense of story-shape and a nice way with clues. There is a cleverly gimmicked murder, a lot of colorful night life, and much fun (and good food) for all.”

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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.

RICHARD MATHESON – Someone Is Bleeding. Lion #137, paperback original, 1953. Reprinted in Noir – Three Novels of Suspense: Someone Is Bleeding; Fury on Sunday; Ride the Nightmare: Forge, hardcover & trade ppbk, 2005. (Previous limited edition: G & G Books, hc, 1997.)   Film: Fox-Lira, France, 1974, as Les Seins de Glace (Icy Breasts).

   While Richard Matheson would go on to become a major figure in the fields of fantasy and science fiction with such distinguished works as I Am Legend and his Shock! series of short-story collections, his first novel was solidly criminous — a book whose influences ran heavily to James M. Cain and Hemingway.

   Someone Is Bleeding is the somewhat overwrought tale of writer David Newton who meets a lovely but deeply disturbed young woman named Peggy Lister and falls into tormented love with her.

   Peggy, icon that she is, is surrounded by men whose overwhelming desire in life is to possess her. Because of her psychological problems, possession means keeping her physically around them — since it is unlikely that anyone will ever have her heart or mind, given her pathological distrust of men, which seems to stem from having been raped by her father.

   For its era, Bleeding was a surprisingly complex psychosexual tale. Peggy, a dark goddess who literally rules the fives of her men, is all the more chilling a woman for the sympathetic way in which David sees her for most of the book. She is the helpless, beautiful woman-child that many men fantasize about and long to protect as proof of their own masculinity.

   As the novel rushes to its truly terrifying climax (it is an ending that must rank, for pure horror, with the best of Fredric Brown and Cornell Woolrich), we see how much Peggy comes to represent the pawn in a quest. Her men are willing to scheme, lie, and die to have her.

   Despite its foreshortened structure, which gives it the singular tone of a short story, and despite the fact that the prose occasionally becomes overheated — one wishes for a flash of humor once in a while — Someone Is Bleeding is a satisfyingly complex, evocative study of loneliness, dream and pathology.

   Matheson also gives us an exceptionally good look at the Fifties and its snake-pit moral code, its demeaning view of women, its defeated view of men. He packs an icy poetry, a bittersweet love song, and moments of real terror into this debut.

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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.

Note:   This novel by Richard Matheson was previously reviewed on this blog by Dan Stumpf.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL – The Big Bow Mystery. Rand McNally, US, hardcover, 1895. Previously published by Henry, UK, hardcover, 1892. Reprinted in many anthologies of vintage detective fiction, both hardcover and soft.

   Film (with partial sound): FBO, 1928, as The Perfect Crime (with Clive Brook & Irene Rich; director: Bert Glennon). Also: RKO, 1934, as The Crime Doctor (with Otto Kruger & Karen Morley; director: John Robertson). Also: Warner Bros., 1946, as The Verdict (with Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre & Joan Lorring; director: Don Siegel).

   British novelist and playwright Israel Zangwill made only one excursion into the mystery field, at the age of twenty-seven, when he was invited by the London Star to write a “more original piece of fiction” for them. The result, which ran serially in the newspaper during 1891, was certainly original — the first locked-room mystery novella.

   There had been locked-room mysteries before, in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, but both had involved elementary trickery with windows and the reader had no real opportunity to solve the puzzle. The Big Bow Mystery, written partly as a parody of detective stories, is a classic whodunit that still reads quite well today.

   Whether or not retired police inspector Grodman can really qualify as a Classic Sleuth may be open to question, but from the moment he is summoned by Mrs. Drabdumb to break down the locked door of Arthur Constant’s bedroom, it is clear we are witnessing the birth of a classic mystery situation.

   John Dickson Carr once observed that Israel Zangwill invented a fictional device that has since been used in many forms, “on a ship, in a ruined house, in a conservatory, in an attic, and even in the open air.” But Zangwill’s first version still remains one of the best, and rightly established him as the father of the locked-room mystery.

   Scores of later mystery writers were intrigued by the plot possibilities suggested by Zangwill’s work, and went on to create endless variations on the locked room and the impossible crime.

   Running just over 30,000 words in length, about half as long as the average mystery novel today, The Big Bow Mystery has rarely been published as a separate volume in this century. It appears in Zangwill’s 1903 collection The Grey Wig. More recently it was included in Hans Stefan Santesson’s 1968 anthology The Locked Room Reader (Random House) and David Willis McCullough’s 1984 anthology Great Detectives (Pantheon).

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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.

Note:   The Big Bow Mystery was previously reviewed on this blog by Mary Reed. In his comments following my review of The Big Clock, David Vineyard pointed out that “The idea of the hero hunting himself […] all dates back to Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery […] a pioneering locked room classic that touches on the theme.”

EVE ZAREMBA – A Reason to Kill. PaperJacks, Canada, paperback original, 1978. Second Story Press, Canada, trade paperback, 1989.

   Even Zaremba’s first mystery surely represents one of the more unusual experiments with the female hard-boiled private eye. First of all, her heroine, Helen Keremos, is a Canadian. Second, she is a lesbian.

   But if the locale of Zaremba’s mystery is obvious, the sexual identification of her sleuth is not. Since Zaremba refrains from chronicling the amorous adventures of her detective, it is only her empathy with male gay characters and occasional name-calling by disgruntled straight men that give her sexual identity away.

   Keremos, who operates out of a second-floor walk-up in Vancouver’s Chinatown, is called in by an academic to trace his missing son, last seen in Toronto. With the help of a researcher friend named Alex, Keremos checks out the young man’s past as well as his friends and family — all suspects.

   These include his sculptor mother and her drunken lover; a boyhood friend and his masculinity-obsessed father; and an appealing bisexual hood on the edge of Toronto’s entertainment biz. Keremos concludes that Martin Milwell’s disappearance is somehow linked to his recent acknowledgment of his homosexuality, but she must still discover the how and why of his disappearance.

   The plot, which seems to be building to an obvious solution, has several twists to deliver before its unusual conclusion — one that turns the classic reenactment of the crime into an exercise in collective decision-making.

   Keremos’s cross-Canada trek tells us much about the country and its people as well.

   Tough, a navy veteran with plenty of street smarts, Keremos is nonetheless a sympathetic figure. When she takes on two thugs (after a few too many drinks), we may question the realism in the portrayal, but Keremos’ s macho antics are mild compared to most of her male fictional counterparts.

   The politics of Zaremba’ s novel, sexual and otherwise, is clearly recognizable as part of the Seventies. For her portrayal of a believable PI, hardboiled and female, Zaremba should be recognized as an early entry in a mystery trend of the Eighties — and very probably beyond.

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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:   As suggested in my comments following the preceding post, Helen Keremos may be the very first lesbian PI, at least as published by a major publisher (although semi-obscure one). It has been reprinted once, but apparently there’s never been a US edition. (PaperJacks books were generally distributed in this country, however.)

The Helen Keremos series —

     1. A Reason to Kill (1972)
     2. Work for a Million (1988)

     3. Beyond Hope (1988)
     4. Uneasy Lies (1990)
     5. The Butterfly Effect (1994)

     6. White Noise (1997)

MIKE BARRY – The Lone Wolf #14: Philadelphia Blowup. Berkley, paperback original, 1975.

   The success of Don Pendleton’s Executioner series in the early 1970s naturally spawned a host of imitators. Like Mack Bolan, the Executioner, these other rough, tough, and lethal heroes are one-man armies embarked on a personal crusade to destroy the Mafia, the “Communist conspiracy,” or similar organizations/ideologies in the name of justice and/or democracy, and by whatever means necessary.

   The Lone Wolf series is one such imitation, and on the surface is solidly in the conventional action/slaughter mold. The lone wolf of the title, ex-New York narcotics cop Burt Wulff, embarks on his one-man vendetta against organized drug traffic in the United States when his girlfriend, Marie Calvante, is found dead of an overdose in a Manhattan brownstone.

   His savage quest carries him through fourteen novels — each one set in a different U.S. city, each one dealing with a different arm of the vast drug network — and culminates in a bloodbath in the City of Brotherly Love.

   But there is much more to this series than meets the casual eye. “Mike Barry” is a pseudonym of Barry N. Malzberg, a writer of no small talent who specializes in stream-of-consciousness science fiction. Indeed, the Lone Wolf books are essentially plotless, make extensive use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, and are jam-packed with idiosyncratic prose much more suited to a mainstream literary novel than to a paperback paean to violence:

   And Burt Wulff is anything but your standard macho hero; he is, in fact, a raving lunatic who, by the last three books in the series — Philadelphia Blowup, in particular — is knocking off people for the sheer soaring pleasure of it: a serial killer as psychotic as Gilles de Rais or Son of Sam. In this respect, then, his saga is both a mockery and a condemnation of the whole Executioner subgenre.

   The Lone Wolf novels are not without their flaws, certainly. They were written rapidly and show it; there are any number of factual and geographical errors, and the lack of cohesive plotting makes for a great deal of repetition. Nevertheless, as amazing hybrids of the literary novel and the potboiler, as a saga of one man’s breakdown into psychosis, as an implacable send-up of the Executioner and his ilk, these fourteen books are quite remarkable.

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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.

JOSEPH ROSENBERGER – Death Merchant #20: Hell in Hindu Land. Pinnacle, paperback original, 1976.

   The remarkable success of Don Pendleton’s Executioner series (several million copies sold) naturally spawned the usual bunch of imitators, some of whom enjoyed no small success of their own. The most literate of these is Mike Barry’s Lone Wolf saga; the least literate (and funniest) is Joseph Rosenberger’s ongoing adventures of Richard Camellion (a.k.a. the Death Merchant).

   Camellion is a sort of lunatic James Bond in that he is primarily occupied in eradicating threats to the free world arranged by Communist forces or members of a SMERSH-like organization called Spider. He, too, travels all over the world; the main difference between him and Bond is that 007 accomplishes his missions with wit and intelligence as well as violence, while the Death Merchant displays as much wit and intelligence as a “Goju-Ryu karate ball-of-the-foot koga geri groin kick,” which he uses whenever he is engaged in hand-to-hand (or hand-to-foot) combat.

   Rosenberger takes the same jovial pleasure in describing breaking bones and teeth (spurting blood, too) as Camellion does in knocking off foreign “boobs.”

   There are plenty of broken bones and teeth, and oceans of blood, in Hell in Hindu Land, number twenty in the series. It seems the CIA has been receiving reports that a mysterious secret room in a Buddhist monastery in India contains “secrets from the stars e.g., plans for a “bio-plasm” force that can defy gravity and a “psychotronic generator” that can harness the energy of the human mind — which were allegedly brought to earth by ancient astronauts from another planet.

   Camellion is dispatched to India to check out this bizarre report and, if there is any truth in it, to gain control of the plans before his old KGB nemesis, Major Kondrashev, can claim them for Mother Russia. All of which is pure nonsense, of course — but no more so than Camellion’s antics on Indian soil, which are principally comprised of feverish battles with the Russians and/or the deadly tribesmen of Rajmahal.

   What makes such as this worth reading (marginally so and in small doses) is Rosenberger’s inimitable style. (It has been said that he possesses unappreciated comic talents and that the Death Merchant series is not pastiche but parody; there is no evidence, however, to support such a claim.) The following representative snippet should serve as an indicator of whether or not you would like to become better acquainted with Rosenberger and Camellion:

   Other titles in the series include The Albanian Connection (1973), The Mato Grosso Horror (1975), Armageddon, USA! (1976), and Blueprint Invisibility (1980).

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

DON PENDLETON – The Executioner: War Against the Mafia!.   Pinnacle, paperback original, 1969.

   Sergeant Mack Bolan, the ideal sniper in Vietnam, is called home on compassionate leave when his father shoots the other members of the family and then takes his own life. Bolan learns that his father was in debt to a Mafia-controlled loan company and was unable to payoff the debt; as a result, in an attempt to save her father from the loan sharks’ reprisals, Bolan’s young sister, Cindy, had been forced into prostitution.

   After burying his family, Bolan decides to get revenge, having been perfectly trained to do so and being psychologically suited for the job. He begins simply, with a .444 Marlin lever-action rifle, but by the end of the book he is using flares and rockets, leveling houses as well as killing men. (The book’s apt subtitle, on the cover though not the title page, is “War Against the Mafia!”)

   Before his battle is well begun, Bolan realizes that he does not hate his enemy, that vengeance is not the issue, that there is nothing personal involved. It is simply the good guys against the bad guys, and he is the good guy. He isn’t interested in philosophical discussions of good and evil. The Mafia is the enemy, and he will destroy them or die in the attempt.

   When Don Pendleton created the Executioner, he probably didn’t know that he had altered the direction of paperback series fiction. His hero caught the imagination of so many readers that imitations soon flooded the stands (the Butcher, the Marksman, the Sharpshooter, the Assassin, etc.).

   But Mack Bolan was the first, and his simple, hard-boiled philosophy was carefully worked out as the books progressed. To read this series is to watch the development of a real American phenomenon.

   There have been some fifty books in the series to date, all bearing such titles as Miami Massacre (1970), New Orleans Knockout (1974), and Colorado Kill-Zone (1976).

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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.

H. C. BRANSON – The Pricking Thumb. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1942. Paperback reprint: Bestseller Mystery B76, digest-sized, 1946.

   During his Ann Arbor days, Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) was a close friend of H. C. Branson and an admirer of his work. It is easy to see why. Branson wrote literate, meticulously plotted (but flawed) novels in which the emphasis is on deep-seated conflicts that have their roots in the dark past.

Branson’s detective, John Bent, like Macdonald’s Lew Archer, is less a human being than a vehicle around which to build a narrative, a catalyst to mesh all the elements so that each novel’s final statement becomes clear.

   In The Pricking Thumb, Bent is hired by an acquaintance, Marina Holland, to investigate the disappearance of her stepson, Bob, and the odd behavior of her husband, Gouvion. But when Bent arrives in the small town of New Paget (in an unnamed state, probably Michigan; a sense of place is almost nonexistent), he finds Gouvion dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.

   Also found dead this same night are Marina and Gouvion’s doctor, Brian Calvert, under circumstances that suggest the two might have been lovers. It appears to be a case of double homicide perpetrated by Gouvion, who then committed suicide.

   But there are too many inconsistencies, leading Bent to believe that it is instead a case of triple homicide. His search for the truth takes him along a tangled trail of relationships, old and new hatreds and jealousies, and not a little double-dealing.

   There is a good deal of passion among the characters; unfortunately, there is very little in John Bent or in the writing. Bent is a virtual cipher, about whom we know only that he once practiced medicine. “Someone was feeding [one of my patients] arsenic,” he says to Marina Holland in the first chapter. “The only way I could cure him was to find out who it was and make them stop, which was a little more difficult than it sounds. At any rate, I ended up with a new profession.”

   The writing, while well crafted, is so detached and emotionless that the reader tends to lose interest. Had Branson possessed more of Ross Macdonald’s talent, had he been able to make Bent more human and sympathetic, had he injected some passion and vividness into his work, he might have become an important figure in the mystery field. As it is, he is chiefly notable not for his work but for his relationship with Kenneth Millar.

   Among his other novels, all featuring John Bent, are I’ll Eat You Last (1941), Case of the Giant Killer (1944), and The Leaden Bubble (1949).

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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.