CHRISTIANNA BRAND – Green for Danger. Dodd, Mead, hardcover, 1944. UK edition: John Lane/The Bodley Head, hc, 1945. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and paperback. Film: Individual Pictures, UK, 1946, with Alastair Sim as Inspector Cockrill.

   Christianna Brand has written mainstream novels, short stories, and juveniles, but she is best known for her detective novels featuring Inspector Cockrill of the Kent, England, County Police.

   Cockrill (known affectionately as Cockie) is a somewhat eccentric, curmudgeonly fellow — less a character than a catalyst in the cases he solves. He delights in setting up situations that force the murderer’s hand, and the murderer’s identity usually seems quite obvious to the reader, until Brand introduces a twist designed to delight.

   At the beginning of Green for Danger, an unlikely group of characters assemble at a military hospital during the blitz of World War II. Each has his reasons for escaping his previous environment; each has expectations of what this assignment will bring.

   What none of them suspects is that a patient — the postman who, incidentally, delivered their letters saying they were coming to Heron’s Park Hospital — will die mysteriously on the operating table, and that all of them will come under Inspector Cockrill’s scrutinizing eye as murder suspects.

   The characters are numerous, but Brand nonetheless manages to instill unique qualities that enlist the reader’s sympathy and create dismay at the revelation of the murderer.

   The solution is plausible, the motivation well foreshadowed, and the evocation of both the terror and fortitude of those who endured the German bombing is very real indeed.

   Inspector Cockrill has also solved such cases as Heads You Lose (1941), Death of Jezebel (1948), London Particular (1952), and The Three-Cornered Halo (1957).

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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:

     Fog of Doubt (London Particular), by Steve Lewis
     The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries, by Mike Tooney
     Heads You Lose, by Mike Tooney
     Fog of Doubt (London Particular), by Kevin Killian

JONATHAN LATIMER – The Fifth Grave. Popular Library #301, paperback original; 1st US printing, 1950. Methuen, UK, hardcover, 1941, as Solomon’s Vineyard. Magazine appearance: Mystery Book Magazine, August 1946.   Reprinted several times, including: Jonathan Press #J65, digest-sized paperback, 1950s; Pan, UK, pb, 1961. International Polygonics, pb, 1988; Neville, hardcover, 1982: limited edition, 300 copies, 26 additional bound in leather; first unexpurgated US edition. (Each of the latter two editions were entitled Solomon’s Vineyard. Note that the IPL paperback is also unabridged, and the Pan may be.)

   This book has a curious history. Published first in England in 1941, it didn’t see book publication in the United States until 1950 as a paperback titled The Fifth Grave, and then only in drastically expurgated form.

   The first line of the original is “From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she’d be good in bed.” The paperback version is “From the way she looked under the black silk dress, I knew she’d be a hot dame.”

   It wasn’t until a small California publisher reprinted it in 1982 that the original text saw American publication, and then only in a limited edition of 326 copies. This is most unfortunate, as Solomon’s Vineyard is a genuine hard-boiled classic and deserves wide availability. It has everything!

   A private eye; a shoot-out at a roadhouse; necrophilia; a shoot-out in a steam bath; mobsters; a crooked police chief, a bizarre religious cult; a knife fight in a whorehouse; kidnapping; a mystery woman with a taste for kinky sex; human sacrifice; crypt-robbing — you name it, detective Karl Craven has to deal with it.

   Craven, a crude but very tough investigator (very reminiscent of Hammett’s Continental Op in style and physique), arrives in the small Missouri town of Paulton to help his partner get a young woman out of the cult’s sanctuary, Solomon’s Vineyard, which dominates the life of the town.

   He finds his partner’s been shot dead. Soon thereafter, he finds himself a target of the local mob, who control the countrywide vice operations in concert with the elders of the cult.

   The cult’s founder, Solomon the Prophet, has been dead for five years, embalmed under glass for viewing on Sunday; but he takes a bride every year, and the brides mysteriously disappear just after the ceremony.

   By “romancing” the cult’s priestess (the one with the black silk dress-and a fondness for S&M), he arranges a falling-out between the mob and the cult (a la the Op in Red Harvest), and ultimately finishes his job.

   For this book, Latimer adopted an exceptionally terse first-person narrative style (the Bill Crane novels are told in more expansive third-person prose): The average sentence length is perhaps six or seven words. The comic elements are less overt, but he indulges his taste for Grand Guignol with evident relish.

   Solomon’s Vineyard is clearly Latimer’s homage to the classic hard-boiled detective story, made obvious by Craven’s reading Black Mask during a couple of brief lulls in the action (shades of Bill Pronzini’s “Nameless”). As such it is a brilliant success, and deserves to be ranked with the best of Hammett, Whitfield, Cain, Davis, Chandler, et al.

   Other fine Latimer novels, all but the last two with Bill Crane: Murder in the Madhouse (1935), Headed for a Hearse (1935), The Dead Don’t Care (1938), Sinners and Shrouds (1955), and Black Is the Fashion for Dying (1959).

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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.

PETER O’DONNELL – Pieces of Modesty. Pan, UK, paperback, 1972. Mysterious Press, US, hc, 1987; Tor, US, pb, 1990.

   Modesty Blaise first appeared as a comic-strip character in 1962, and the first novelization of her exploits was published in 1965. She is often thought of as a female James Bond, but her wildly entertaining adventures certainly entitle her to stand alone as a fascinating fictional character.

    A good way to make Modesty’s acquaintance is to read the stories collected in Pieces of Modesty, each of which reveals something of her background and philosophy.

    At the age of eighteen, Modesty commanded the Network, the most successful crime organization outside the United States. After dismantling the Network, she occasionally found herself working for the intelligence section of the British Foreign Office, as she does in “The Gigglewrecker,” in which a very reluctant defector is transferred from East to West Berlin.

    A better story is “I Had a Date with Lady Janet,” narrated in the first person by Modesty’s formidable associate Willie Garvin, who comes to Modesty’s rescue when she is held captive by an old enemy ensconced in a Scottish castle.

    “A Better Day to Die” and “Salamander Four” might be read as companion pieces. In the former, Modesty finds herself captured by guerrillas, along with the other passengers on a bus. One of the passengers, a minister who believes strongly in nonviolence, sees the results of brutality and is changed by them.

    In “Salamander Four,” a sculptor given to non-involvement finds himself involved against his will when Modesty helps a wounded man, but the ending is is predictable. “The Soo Girl Charity” features Modesty and Willie in a robbery for charity and has an amusing twist at the end.

    For colorful writing and nonstop action, the books about Modesty Blaise are hard to beat, especially such titles as Modesty Blaise (1965), Sabre-Tooth (1966), I, Lucifer (1967), and two titles published for the first time in the United States in 1984: The Silver Mistress (1973) and The Xanadu Talisman (1981).

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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.

PETER O’DONNELL, R. I. P. (1920-2010). He was in ill health — he had had Parkinson’s disease for several years — so the reporting of Peter O’Donnell’s death on Monday, May 3rd, at the age of 90, was not surprising news, but it was still difficult to accept.

   It is remarkable (or perhaps not) that the opening paragraph of his obituary in The Times begins with a description of Modesty Blaise’s most famous tactic in distracting the enemy, the so-called “Nailer,” described here on one of the earliest posts on this blog, as well as much more (as they say) about both Modesty and her creator.

   And for even more on Peter O’Donnell and his career, including a complete bibliography, check out Steve Holland’s recent post on his Bear Alley blog.

JON L. BREEN – The Gathering Place. Walker, hardcover, 1984; paperback, September 1986.

   Well known for a number of years as a critic, short-story writer, and parodist, Jon L. Breen turned to the writing of novels in 1983 with Listen for the Click, an affectionate parody/pastiche of the classic country-house mystery.

   The Gathering Place, his second novel, is quite different — a bookshop mystery that combines the traditional fair-play whodunit with ghosts and other elements of the paranormal.

   When Oscar Vermilion dies of heart failure, his used book store on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, a fixture since 1935 and a gathering place for such literary lights as Nathaniel West and William Faulkner, is in danger of closing for good.

   But Vermilion’s niece, Rachel Hennings, inherits the property, and she has both experience of her own in running a bookshop and a desire to maintain her uncle’s legacy.

   That desire may not be easy to fulfill, however: Not long after her arrival from Arizona, Vermilion’s is broken into (although nothing is taken); ghostly manifestations begin to occur in the shop’s dusty confines (something guides her hand to write F. Scott Fitzgerald’s name in a copy of The Great Gatsby, a signature that turns out to be authentic); and she is presented with evidence that The Atlantis Courier, an early novel by leading Hollywood writer Arlen Kitchener, was actually ghostwritten by a man who was found murdered shortly after Oscar Vermilion’s death.

   Breen neatly meshes these diverse elements, and a budding romance between Rachel and newspaperman Stu Wellman, into a suspenseful tale that keeps the reader guessing on several fronts.

   Some may find the supernatural segments of the plot a strain on their credulity; this reviewer and general skeptic had no trouble with them, and in fact found that they add considerable depth and mystery to the story line. Another plus is the bookish lore and information the author weaves throughout the narrative.

   One other recommended title by Jon Breen is Hair of the Sleuthhound (1982), a collection of some of the best of his short spoofs of distinguished crime writers and their 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.

Note: This book was previously reviewed on this blog by Marv Lachman.

HERBERT BREAN – Wilders Walk Away. William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1948. Hardcover reprint: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, 4-in-1 edition, June 1948. Reprint paperbacks include: Pocket #582, 1949; Collier, 1962; International Polygonics, 1988.

   Free-lance magazine writer Reynold Frame comes to the Vermont village of Wilders Lane to do a series of articles on the colonial town and its history. The village’s founding family, the Wilders, are a decidedly curious bunch:

   It is said that no Wilder ever died of old age; they just disappeared. In 1775 patriarch Jonathan Wilder walked down into the cellar of the family house and was never seen again. Another Wilder was a mate on the Mary Celeste. Still another vanished from a sandy beach in 1917, in full view of witnesses.

   But Wilders “walking away” isn’t a phenomenon relegated to past history, as Frame soon learns. First young Ellen Wilder and then Aunt Mary also vanish from watched rooms inside the house, while he himself is on the premises.

   There is plenty of eerie mystery here, a fine sense of small-town New England life circa 1948, and some fascinating bits and pieces of colonial history woven in. Plus a Revolutionary War treasure, secret passages and hidden rooms, an array of offbeat characters, and of course a love interest for Frame (Constance, one of the few Wilders who does not walk away).

   The solutions to the “impossible” occurrences are well set up, if not particularly ingenious — the trickiest is the sandy-beach disappearance — but that doesn’t spoil the book’s appeal.

   Reynold Frame appears in three other novels — The Darker the Night (1949), Hardly a Man Is Now Alive (1950), and The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1952) — all of which likewise make good use of unusual settings, strange doings, and past crimes.

   Brean also created another journalist detective, William Deacon, for The Traces of Brillhart (1960) and The Traces of Merilee (1966).

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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:   This title is one of those compiled in John Pugmire’s profusely illustrated article “A Locked Room Library,” to be found here on the main Mystery*File website. (Follow the link.)

WARREN ADLER – Trans-Siberian Express. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977. Paperback reprint: Pocket, 1978. Stonehouse Press, hc, May 2001; trade ppbk, July 2004.

   One of crime fiction’s most popular subgenres is the tale of mystery and intrigue set on board a fast-moving train.

   For more than a century, authors from Poe to Christie to Warren Adler have perpetrated all sorts of mayhem on the world’s railways — highballing freights and crack passenger specials in this country, the fabled Orient Express, and now the Trans-Siberian Express that spans two continents on its 6000-mile route across Russia to the Sea of Japan.

   Dr. Alex Cousins, a Russian-speaking American cancer specialist, has been sent to Moscow on a secret mission by the president of the United States. The mission: to prolong for seven weeks (for unspecified reasons) the life of Viktor Dimitrov, secretary-general of the politburo, who is dying of leukemia.

   Cousins has done his duty, and now that he is ready to leave Russia, Dimitrov urges him to take the Trans-Siberian Express instead of flying — a “gift,” Dimitrov says, the train being one of legendary Victorian grandeur and the scenery being magnificent.

   Cousins agrees, but with reservations that turn out to be more than warranted. First he meets and becomes romantically involved with Russian beauty Anna Petrovna; then he finds himself enmeshed in a politically motivated conspiracy, trapped on board the train with KGB agents watching his every move.

   His only chance for escape is to seek help from his fellow passengers, but at least some of them are not who they seem to be….

   This is a rousing novel of international intrigue and adventure, populated by sharply drawn characters; the Trans-Siberian Express, in fact, is so realistically depicted that it becomes a character in its own right. Adler’s prose tends toward the undistinguished, but his evocation of the Russian scene and the scope and drama of his story more than make up for any deficiencies.

   Warren Adler is the author of a number of other contemporary thrillers, among them The Casanova Embrace (1978) and Natural Enemies (1979).

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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.

CARROLL JOHN DALY – The Snarl of the Beast. Edward J. Clode, 1927. Previously serialized in Black Mask, June-July-Aug-Sept, 1927. Hardcover reprint: Gregg Press, 1981. Trade paperback reprint: Harper Perennial, 1992.

   Carroll John Daly was one of the fathers of the modem hard-boiled private eye, a primary influence on such later writers as Mickey Spillane. His style and plots seem dated today, but the presence of his name on the cover of Black Mask in the Twenties and Thirties could be counted on to raise sales of the magazine by fifteen percent.

   Daly’s major contribution was Race Williams, the narrator of The Snarl of the Beast and the first fully realized tough-guy detective (his first appearance, in the June 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask, preceded the debut of Hammett’s Continental Op by four months).

   Williams was a thoroughly hard-boiled individual. As he says of one criminal he dispatches, “He got what was coming to him. If ever a lad needed one good killing, he was the boy.” Williams doesn’t hesitate to dole out two-gun, vigilante justice.

   The Snarl of the Beast has an uncomplicated plot: Williams is asked by the police to help track down a master criminal known as “the Beast” and reputed to be “the most feared, the cunningest and cruelest creature that stalks the city streets at night.”

   Williams is willing to take on the job and to give the police credit for ridding the city of this menace, just as long as he gets the reward. Along the way he meets a masked woman prowler, a “girl of the night,” and of course the Beast himself.

   Daly is not known for literary niceties — his style can best be described as crude but effective — yet there is a certain fascination in his novels and his vigilante/detective.

   Characterization is minimal and action is everything. “Race Williams — Private Investigator — tells the whole story. Right! Let’s go.”

   Race Williams also appears in The Hidden Hand (1929) and Murder from the East (1935), among others. Daly created two other series characters, both of them rough-and-tumble types, although not in the same class with Williams: Vee Brown, hero of Murder Won’t Wait (1933) and Emperor of Evil (1937); and Satan Hall, who stars in The Mystery of the Smoking Gun (1936) and Ready to Burn (1951), the latter title having been published only in England.

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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:   For a long expository commentary of the book as well as the author, see Mike Grost’s Classic Mystery and Detection website. Included is a breakdown of the novel into its singular parts as they appeared in Black Mask magazine.

DICK FRANCIS – Forfeit. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1969. Michael Joseph, UK, hc, 1969. Reprinted many times.

   Dick Francis not only uses his racing experience in his novels, but in many of them other facets of his life form the background. In Forfeit, his sixteen years as racing correspondent for the London Sunday Express is embodied in the hero, James Tyrone, journalist.

   Tyrone listens to a drunken tirade from an old-time colleague who then goes back to his office and nips out the seventh-floor window onto Fleet Street. With a nose for a good story, Tyrone smells a fiddle and starts some inquiries.

   He knows he’s on to a sure thing when he hears of blackmail and is met with unexplained violence. As a reporter, he is at great pains to protect his sources, but the dangerous headlines run by his “dreadful rag” of a paper focus the menace on him.

   In typical Francis style, the fast-paced writing brings out the individuality of the hero, even though it’s a typical suspense/thriller situation of a normal human being trapped in an abnormal situation. In another bit of autobiographical content, Tyrone’s wife is confined to a respirator and requires constant attendance (Francis’s wife once had polio).

   Unusual for a Francis novel, a true love story is depicted even though Tyrone feels that he lives a shadow life-full of “dust and ashes.” In his pursuit of racketeers who force owners not to start their horses in a race, he faces extortion, blackmail, and “high-powered thuggery” (more violence), along with a splash of racism.

   He confronts the villain in the Big Cats’ House in London Zoo, and comes face-to-face with an evil sociopath who’s in it for the money. In the end, Tyrone saves his wife while made drunk by the villains, and then must save himself.

   Forfeit won a well-deserved Edgar as Best Novel of 1969. Francis’s recent novels have all been large-scale best sellers. The Danger was one; others are Reflex (1981), Twice Shy (1982), Banker (1983), and Proof (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.

DICK FRANCIS – The Danger. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1984. Michael Joseph, UK, hc, 1983. Reprinted a number of times.

    For some time after he achieved bestsellerdom in the United States, it seemed that Dick Francis (according to some critics) was not keeping up the pace. But with The Danger, he is back in front, writing prose as crisp and taut and lean as a racehorse. This novel runs in the really big international thriller category, starting with “there was a Godawful cock-up in Bologna.” It’s about kidnapping with a touch of terrorism.

    Andrew Douglas works as a partner in the firm of Liberty Market Ltd., whose credo is to “resolve a kidnap in the quietest way possible, with the lowest of profiles and minimum action.” He successfully gets back the kidnap victim, Alessis Cenci, “one of the best girl jockeys in the world.”

    They go back to England, where he engages in some psychological rehabilitation. This leads to the next hurdle, another kidnap (literally, a kid this time), and he sees a thread of connection. Douglas has the opportunity to assess his opponent — “Kidnappers are better detectives than detectives, and better spies than spies.”

    Then, it’s a leap across the Atlantic, where the senior steward of the English Jockey Club is kidnapped in Washington, D.C. — a snatch related to the first two. Apparently Dick Francis likes the States, because he has his chief character say, “I feel liberated, as always in America, a feeling which I thought had something to do with the country’s own vastness, as if the wide-apartness of everything flooded into the mind.”

    Andrew Douglas finally comes face-to-face w,ith his adversary genius in an exciting climax.

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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.

DICK FRANCIS – Odds Against. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1966. Michael Joseph, UK, hc, 1965. Reprinted many times. Adapted as the first segment of The Racing Game, a six-episode TV series starring Mike Gwilym as Sid Halley.

   In most of his books, Dick Francis uses an ordinary man (usually connected with the racing world) as his protagonist, caught up in events that are so overwhelming and out of control that he must make heroic efforts to sort them out.

   But in Odds Against, Sid Halley has a job as a detective-the obvious choice for a tough man to right the world’s wrongs. He’s been doing the work for two years, and when he’s shot (on page one of the story), he realizes that a bullet in the guts is his first step to liberation from being of “no use to anyone, least of all himself.”

   He was a champion steeplechase jockey, that’s what makes him tough. A racing accident lost him the use of his hand and self-respect simultaneously.

   The action breaks from the starting gate and blasts over the hurdles of intrigue, menace, and crime. Halley is cadged by his shrewd and loving father-in-law into confronting Howard Kraye, “a full-blown, powerful, dangerous, bigtime crook.”

   On the track he encounters murder, mayhem, plastic bombs, and torture. But he endures, in some part to regain his self respect, and in some part because he believes in racing, the sport, and in putting it right.

   A fascinating chase through an empty racecourse defies the villain. In the end, despite his tragedy, Sid Halley sees himself as a detective and as a man.

   Dick Francis was so taken with the characters in this book that he went on to use them in a television series, The Racing Game (shown on Public Broadcasting). A second Sid Halley novel, Whip Hand, won the British Gold Dagger Award in 1979 and another Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.

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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.