E. X. FERRARS – Frog in the Throat. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1980. US paperback edition: Bantam, 1981. British edition: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1980.

   Virginia Freer, heroine of Frog in the Throat, is staying with craftsmen friends Helen and Andrew Boscott (he’s a furniture restorer, she’s a weaver and tapestry worker) for a much-needed holiday.

On a quiet afternoon, in walks the big mistake of Virginia’s life — Felix Freer, her estranged husband. Felix is one of those charming people who have few scruples and an overwhelming capacity for lying — even when he thinks he’s telling the truth. He is now lying about his reasons for dropping in at the Boscott house, and Virginia wonders why.

   The events of the evening only complicate matters. At a neighbor’s cocktail party, novelist Carleen Fyffe (half of a famous sister team of historical-romance writers) announces her engagement to poet Basil Deering (whom Felix has expressed an interest in meeting).

   Shortly after the Freers and Boscotts return home, Olivia Fyffe arrives, saying she has found her sister on the floor of their den, murdered.

   When they all go to the Fyffe cottage, however, there is no body. Almost everyone thinks Olivia is being dramatic for some reason of her own, or perhaps hysterical. It takes a second body and the discovery of her sister’s corpse to prove otherwise, and a certain amount of detection on Virginia’s part to determine Felix’s connection with the murders.

   The pace of this novel is slow, with good characterization of all participants except the heroine. The plot unfolds in the best tradition of the British country-house mystery, with plenty of suspicion and all ends tied up nicely at the conclusion.

   One wishes, however, that Virginia Freer were as well characterized as her enigmatic and complex husband and hosts. It is a little hard to care what happens to any of them when the viewpoint character is so lacking in substance.

   Ferrars has been writing mysteries for over forty years; many of her tales are set in such locales as Greece, Africa, Mexico, and Australia, as well as in England. Other notable titles include Give the Corpse a Bad Name (1940), Hunt the Tortoise (1950), The Busy Body (1962), The Seven Sleepers (1970), The Cup and the Lip (1976), and Crime and the Crystal (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.

E. X. FERRARS – Alive and Dead. New York: Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1975. Paperback reprint: Bantam, 1982. British edition: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1974. Hardcover reprint: Constable, UK, 1989 (shown). (Note that the author’s usual byline in the UK was Elizabeth Ferrars.)

   The novels of E. X. Ferrars (a pseudonym of Morna Brown, who also writes under the name of Elizabeth Ferrars) are best described as quiet and polite.

   The characters are usually normal middle-class British people — which is not to say they are dull; many are writers or artists or engaged in otherwise unusual professions; the women are independent and strong. But they are people to whom violence seldom happens; and when it does, they are shocked, but willingly take charge and get to the bottom of these unexpected happenings.

   Martha Crayle is a typical Ferrars heroine. Middle-aged and twice divorced, she has struggled to raise two sons while caring for an invalid aunt and running a rooming house. When the aunt dies and leaves her an unexpected legacy, she moves out all her boarders except the reserved and stem Mr. Syme (who has become her confidant and, when crime strikes, a sort of Watson) and takes up volunteer work for the National Guild for the Welfare of Unmarried Mothers.

   It is at their offices that she meets Amanda Hassall, a young pregnant woman who claims she has been deserted by her husband and impregnated by the man she is living with. Amanda does not wish to marry the baby’s father, nor does she want to put the child up for adoption as her parents have suggested. Martha takes the girl home, and a day later takes in another pregnant woman, Sandra Aspinall.

   As Mr. Syme has darkly hinted, Martha should not have given refuge to these total strangers. Before Amanda has spent two nights in the house, a murdered man turns up in a local hotel, and she is reported to have been on the scene.

   Amanda insists the victim is her estranged husband, but her parents — who appeared shortly before the body was discovered — claim the husband died in an airplane crash the year before. In addition to the parents, the boyfriends of both young women arrive, and by the time murder is done twice, Martha thoroughly regrets her involvement and wishes she had listened to Mr. Syme.

   The plot twists and turns (with plenty of surprises) all the way to the very end. Ferrars writes well and creates characters that are sure to enlist her readers’ sympathies. This novel is one of her best.

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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.

   
CLEVE F. ADAMS – Shady Lady. Ace Double D-115, paperback original, 1955. [Paired back-to-back with One Got Away, by Harry Whittington.]

   Adams is one of mystery fiction’s shadow figures. Born in 1895, he began selling to pulp mystery magazines in the mid-1930s, broke into hardcover novels at the end of the decade, and wrote most of his novels in a burst of creativity (and of recycling earlier pulp tales) during World War II. In these respects, his career paralleled that of Raymond Chandler.

   But unlike Chandler, Adams is today largely forgotten, even though he forged his own distinctive image of the private detective.

    The Adams eye is a sort of prose incarnation of Humphrey Bogart that predates Bogey’s movie detectives, but with more stress on the brutality and cynicism and less on the sentimental heart. He has a capacity for long, brooding silences, sudden ribald laughter, mad fury, and aloof arrogance. His features are wolfish and satanic and he often slaps women around during his maniacal fits of rage.

   He’s a racist, a fascist, and a hypocrite, but a tender ballad brings tears to his eyes. In one word, he’s an oaf, deliberately drawn by Adams so as to pull the rug out from under Chandler’s romantic image of the PI as a contemporary knight.

   Most of Adams’s novels depend on a stock company of recurring characters, mannerisms, scenes, plot elements, even tag lines of description and dialogue. He was an expert at borrowing story lines from Dashiell Hammett, rewriting Red Harvest three times and The Glass Key twice.

   But even when he coasted on the most familiar gambits in hard-boiled literature, he showed a genius for juggling diverse groups of shady characters, each with his or her own greedy objective.

   Right after Christmas 1949, Adams died of a heart attack. His pulp writer buddies Robert Leslie Bellem and W.T. Ballard helped out his widow by finishing his last novel. One version, entitled “Too Fair to Die,” appeared in the March 1951 issue of Two Complete Detective Books magazine, and four years later Ace Books published a more polished draft as the paperback original Shady Lady.

   It turned out to be the finest work of Adams’s career.

   Like many of his earlier novels, among the best of which are Sabotage (1940), Decoy (1941), and Up Jumped the Devil (1943), Shady Lady stars a shamus named Rex McBride.

   In this adventure he trails a missing embezzler’s girlfriend from Los Angeles to the mining metropolis of Copper Hill, Montana, arriving just in time to become involved in a vicious gubernatorial primary, a love affair with two sisters, and a string of murders.

   The plot is plagued with loose ends like many Adams efforts, but the book is so overflowingly rich in character sketches and powerful understated scenes that one is compelled to believe either that Bellem and Ballard contributed huge amounts to the manuscript or that, had he lived longer, Adams might have developed into a talent of near-Chandleresque dimensions. The electoral contest provides a marvelous setting for Adams’s ghoulish cynicism about American politics.

   In his seminal essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler argued that the PI novel requires a knightly hero to redeem the corrupt milieu. Adams disagreed violently, and in his world the protagonist is not a hero and no less corrupt than anyone else, just tougher and luckier. Repulsive the Adams eye may be, but he’s frighteningly hard to forget.

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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.

EDWARD S. AARONS – Assignment-Angelina.

Gold Medal #749, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1958.

   Like many writers from the period 1920-50, Edward S. Aarons began his career in the pulp magazines. He also wrote three mystery novels in the late Thirties, and several more in the late Forties. But it wasn’t until the paperback original boom of the early 1950s that he achieved major success and recognition, with his “Assignment” series of espionage novels featuring the action-packed adventures of CIA agent Sam Durrell.

   Along with exotic locales across the globe, violence is the main ingredient of the Durrell series; a great deal of blood is spilled in a great many different ways, both by Durrell and the various villains he encounters. Assignment-Angelina is typical.

   It begins (rather irresistibly) with the coldblooded murders of four men in four different sections of the country: a filling-station owner in, Arizona, a building contractor in Indiana, an advertising copywriter in New York, and a fisherman in Louisiana.

   We know from the first who is responsible — a trio named Mark, Corbin, and Slago — but we don’t know why. Durrell’s search for the answer leads him to a beautiful woman named Angelina, who may or may not be an ally, and into the usual muddle of James Bondian political intrigue.

   It also leads him from Washington to the bayous of Louisiana (where Durrell is right at home; he is part Cajun) to New York City and ultimately to a mountaintop in the rugged Poconos where the slam-bang finale takes place.

   Despite all the violence and melodrama, this and other Durrell novels are compulsive reading. Aarons, was an accomplished writer, with excellent descriptive abilities (particularly in depicting the various locales of his stories) and an expert sense of narrative pacing.

   A total of forty Sam Durrell books were produced by Aarons from 1955 to 1975, among the more noteworthy of which are Assignment to Disaster (1955), Assignment Stella Marni (1957), Assignment-School for Spies (1966), and Assignment-Sumatra (1974).

   After his death in 1975, a number of additional Durrell novels appeared by Will B. Aarons, said to be his son. Two of Aarons’s non-series books, Escape to Love (1952) and Girl on the Run (1954), are good examples of the paperback-original suspense novels of the early 1950s. A 1948 hardcover, Nightmare, is notable for its high level of tension and drama.

   Aarons also published numerous novels under the pseudonym of Edward Ronns, among them Terror in the Town (1947) Gift of Death (1948), and Catspaw Ordeal (1950); most these were later reprinted in paperback 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.

Editorial Comment: On the primary Mystery*File website there is a long comprehensive overview of the “Assignment” series by Doug Bassett. Following the article is a long list of all the books in the series, plus a full description of the investigation that took place several years ago which finally discovered the true identity of Will B. Aarons. (Follow the link provided.)

   Two other books in the Sam Durrell series previously been reviewed on this blog are:

       Assignment Stella Marni.

       Assignment Zoraya

ANTHONY ABBOT – About the Murder of the Clergyman’s Mistress. Covici Friede, US, hardcover, 1931. UK title: The Crime of the Century, Collins, hc, 1931. Also published as: Murder of the Clergyman’s Mistress. Popular Library #286, 1950.

   Fulton Oursler is best remembered as a magazine editor, for Liberty in the 1930s and Reader’s Digest in the late Forties and as the author of the religioso blockbuster The Greatest Story Ever Told (1949). But in younger days he also contributed to the mystery genre, using the by-line Anthony Abbot for eight detective novels starring New York City police commissioner Thatcher Colt.

   The format of the first six is clearly borrowed from S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance series. Each title falls into rigid About the Murder of pattern; Colt is portrayed as wealthy mandarin intellectual; his cases are narrated and signed by his faithful male secretary; his familiars include a stupid district attorney, a crusty medical examiner, and dignified butler; the novels tend to begin with a body found under bizarre circumstances, with strange clues pointing to a host of suspects; the investigation is punctuated by conferences at which, in the spirit of Socratic debate, the detectives offer alternative reconstructions of the crime; and a second murder usually takes place about two-thirds of the way through the book.

   Like those of the young Ellery Queen, Abbot’s variations on the Van Dine framework are better written and characterized and somewhat livelier than the Philo Vance books themselves, although Abbot unfortunately followed Van Dine in declining to play fair with the reader.

   The second and perhaps best in the Thatcher Colt series was About the Murder of the Clergyman’s Mistress, which like many Van Dine novels was based on a famous true crime. In this version of the Hall-Mills case of the 1920s the bodies of a respected Episcopal minister and of a beautiful singer in his choir are found floating down the East River in a rowboat.

   Colt quickly takes over personal command of the investigation, with a huge assortment of peculiar clues — nine dumbbells, a bloody-pawed cat, Chinese sumach leaf, a bag of dulse — implicating various members of the minister’s and the singer’s households.

   Staying in full control of a stupendously complex plot, Abbot also treats us to vivid glimpses of early-1930s New York and to a sardonic portrait of the WASP clergy.

   Most of the Thatcher Colt novels are cut from the same pattern, including About the Murder of Geraldine Foster (1930), which launched the series; About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932), with its background of a circus playing Madison Square Garden; and About the Murder of a Startled Lady (1935), with its intimations of the occult.

   The last two Anthony Abbot titles, The Creeps (1939) and The Shudders (1943), lack Van Dine elements and are believed to have been ghosted by another writer.

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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: The other writer has been tentatively identified as Oscar Schisgall. See the comment following the previous review.

MARGARET ERSKINE – Give Up the Ghost.

Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1949. Hammond, UK, hc, 1949. Hardcover reprint: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, 4-in-1 edition, March 1949. Paperback reprints: Mercury 163, US, digest-sized, 1952, abridged; Pocket B26, UK, 1952.

   Margaret Erskine wrote the same book about Scotland Yard inspector Septimus Finch twenty-one times. In each one Finch is described as having a nondescript face and a proclivity for dressing all in gray. This repetition doesn’t enhance the inspector’s limited charms, although it could be argued that his stolidity and matter-of-factness are positive character traits.

   In Give Up the Ghost, crude and rather nasty drawings have been sent to the Camborough constabulary, but have been more or less ignored until the elderly housekeeper of the pompous Pleydon family is found murdered with another drawing pinned to her body.

   None of the Pleydons can suggest any reason for their household’s being singled out, yet several days later another woman connected with them is killed, another drawing near her body. A band of vigilantes is formed to prowl the streets.

   Meanwhile Finch, in spite of the Pleydons’ interference, investigates the family’s history and discovers their convoluted, almost forgotten web of financial skulduggery — just in time to prevent further murders.

   There are moments of humor amid the gore, such as when Finch installs young Constable Roark in the Pleydon household as a butler.

   Erskine — who has stated that writing thrillers was a revolt against her highbrow family — specializes in eccentric British families with long-held secrets, social pretensions, and heads of household who possess streaks of cunning.

   As a Scotland Yard officer, Finch solves crimes in Sussex, several seaside towns, and provincial villages. He remains as colorless through his last case, The House on Hook Street (1977), as he was in his first adventure, The Limping Man (1939). Erskine’s novels are definitely an acquired taste.

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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.

STUART KAMINSKY – Murder on the Yellow Brick Road. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1977. Paperback reprints include: Penguin, 1979; Ibooks, 2000.

   Stuart Kaminsky is a film writer and critic as well as a mystery novelist, and he has put his expertise to good use in his series about 1940s Hollywood private eye Toby Peters.

   The novels are a blend of fact and fiction — that is, of real Hollywood personalities (now deceased) and fictional characters.

   Peters, investigator for the stars, is wise to the ways of Hollywood; he shares an office with a dentist, Shelley Minck, who provides much of the comic relief in these books; he eats abominably — burgers, Pepsis, milk shakes; he lives in “one of a series of two-room, one story wooden structures L.A. management people called bungalows”; and he has a running feud with his brother, Homicide Lieutenant Phil Pevsner (the real family name).

   Murder on the Yellow Brick Road concerns the stabbing of a munchkin — one of L.A.’s many “little people” (they prefer that label to that of midget) — on the set on which The Wizard of Oz was filmed.

   Judy Garland finds the body and calls Peters in a panic. Peters goes to MGM, where he meets Miss Garland, PR man Warren Hoff, Garland’s costume designer friend Cassie James, and Louis B. Mayer himself. Mayer hires Peters to conduct an investigation and divert any adverse publicity.

   What follows is an entertaining story of Hollywood in its heyday, the inner workings of the film community, and the brotherhood of the “little people.” Peters meets such luminaries as Raymond Chandler, and pays a visit to Clark Gable at William Randolph Hearst’s fabled San Simeon.

   Kaminsky does a good job of evoking both Hollywood of the Forties and the personalities of the various stars; his portrayal of the child/woman Garland is especially good.

   Other Toby Peters novels include Never Cross a Vampire (1980), which features Bela Lugosi and William Faulkner in his screen-writing days; and He Done Her Wrong (1983), in which Mae West calls on Peters to find her missing, sizzling autobiography; and Down For the Count (1985), which features fighter Joe Louis.

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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.

STUART KAMINSKY, R.I.P. According to his obituary in the Chicago Tribune, Stuart Kaminsky “died of complications from hepatitis and a recent stroke Friday, Oct. 9, in Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis […] He was an Army medic in the 1950s, when his family believes he got hepatitis C.” He was 75 at the time of his death.

   Unusual for most mystery writers, Kaminsky was the creator of four distinctive series characters. Besides 1940s Hollywood PI Toby Peters, who appeared in 24 novels [see below] in which he rubbed shoulders with many movie stars of the day, Kaminsky also chronicled the adventures of (quoting again from the Tribune) “… Porfiry Rostnikov, a police inspector in Moscow [16 novels]; Abe Lieberman, a crusty but wise Chicago cop who works the streets with his younger partner, Bill Hanrahan [10 novels]; and Lew Fonesca, a former Cook County state’s attorney investigator now operating as a cut-rate private eye in Sarasota [6 novels].”

   Kaminsky also wrote two novelizations of the TV series The Rockford Files, three novelizations of CSI: New York, two stand-alone suspense novels, three story collections, and was the editor of two recent crime fiction anthologies.

   Without much fanfare, Stuart Kaminksy was without a doubt one of the more prolific mystery authors of recent years. He was a quiet giant in our field.

      The Toby Peters series —

1. Bullet for A Star (1977)

2. Murder on the Yellow Brick Road (1977)
3. You Bet Your Life (1978)
4. The Howard Hughes Affair (1979)
5. Never Cross a Vampire (1980)
6. High Midnight (1981)
7. Catch A Falling Clown (1981)

8. He Done Her Wrong (1983)
9. The Fala Factor (1984)

10. Down for the Count (1985)
11. The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance (1986)
12. Smart Moves (1986)
13. Think Fast, Mr. Peters (1987)
14. Buried Caesars (1989)

15. Poor Butterfly (1990)
16. The Melting Clock (1991)

17. The Devil Met A Lady (1993)
18. Tomorrow is Another Day (1995)
19. Dancing in the Dark (1996)
20. A Fatal Glass of Beer (1997)

21. A Few Minutes Past Midnight (2001)
22. To Catch a Spy (2002)
23. Mildred Pierced (2003)
24. Now You See It (2004)

GEOFFREY HOMES – Forty Whacks.   William Morrow, hardcover, 1941. Paperback reprint: Bantam #117, 1947, as Stiffs Don’t Vote. Filmed as Crime by Night, Warner Brothers, 1944 (with Jerome Cowan, Jane Wyman, Faye Emerson, Eleanor Parker).

   Homes/Mainwaring created three completely different series detectives for his other eleven novels, each of them with unorthodox abilities.

   The first was newspaperman, Robin Bishop, who is featured in Homes’s first five titles, among them The Man Who Didn’t Exist (1937), which deals with the baffling suicide of a famous writer named Zenophen Zwick who seems never to have existed in the. first place.

   The second sleuth was Humphrey Campbell; an unconventional private investigator who, with his fat, lazy, and corrupt partner, Oscar Morgan, appears in one of the Bishop novels (Then There Were Three, 1938) and in four of his own.

   The third series detective was Mexican cop Jose Manuel Madero, “knitter extraordinary — not only of socks but of mysterious loose ends,” who stars in a pair of titles: The Street of the Crying Woman (1942) and The Hill of the Terrified Monk (1943).

   Chubby Humphrey Campbell is probably the best realized of the three; certainly his cases are Homes’s most intricate and satisfying detective puzzles. Forty Whacks involves Humphrey and Oscar in an ax-murder in the California town of Joaquin — “the second Borden case,” as Campbell refers to it.

   Humphrey, with grumpy Oscar watching out for any illegal dollar that might be made, sets out to prove that Joe Borden wasn’t responsible for the grisly remains found under the seat of an overturned rowboat floating down the San Joaquin River.

   Along the way he gets mixed up with a female artist’s representative; a successful concert pianist who gave up his career to hunt for gold; a tough lady newspaper publisher; a couple of mayoralty candidates; and a lot more bloody murder.

   The action in Forty Whacks is fast and furious, but there is a good deal more than that to recommend it: clever plotting, witty and remarkably good dialogue, and a lean style made lyrical in places by some of the most vivid descriptive writing to be found in all of mystery fiction.

   The other three Campbell-Morgan adventures — No Hands on the Clock (1939), Finders Keepers (1940), and Six Silver Handles (1944) — share the same qualities.

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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.

CARTER BROWN – Lament for a Lousy Lover. Signet S1856, paperback original; 1st printing, 1960 [Baryé cover art]. Third printing: Signet D3162 [Robert McGinnis cover]. Also published in Carter Brown Long Story Magazine #19, Australia, Horwitz, 1961.

   The Australian writer Alan G. Yates, a veritable one-man paperback factory, has turned out hundreds of lightweight private-eye and police novels under the Carter Brown pseudonym. The books borrow liberally from the old Spicy Detective pulp formula: action, wisecracks, coarse humor, plenty of voluptuous un- and underdressed sexpots.

   This one is a bit unusual in that it features two of Brown’s regular series characters in one book: Al Wheeler, the skirt-chasing Pine City sheriff’s detective; and Mavis Seidlitz, an astonishingly endowed and astoundingly dizzy blonde who somehow manages to fmd work as a private eye.

   Their historic meeting was prompted by a suggestion from Anthony Boucher, the only mystery critic of consequence to regularly review Brown’s paperbacks.

   As is the case with many of Brown’s books, the background is Hollywood. Mavis is on location for the filming of a hit TV western series, hired to keep a couple of feuding starlets apart. The star is murdered (via the ancient wheeze of substituting live bullets for blanks), and Wheeler is assigned to the case.

   Everybody has a likely motive; another murder ensues; Mavis blunders around like an idiot; Wheeler lusts after the starlets and winds up with Mavis. The first-person narrative alternates between Wheeler and Mavis (Yates/Brown deserves extra credit for successfully managing to provide this burlesque caricature with a semi-plausible character voice).

   Among the dozens of other Al Wheeler novels are The Brazen (1960), Burden of Guilt (1970), and Wheeler Fortune (1974). Mavis Seidlitz also stars in None but the Lethal Heart (1959) and Tomorrow Is Murder (1960).

   Brown’s other series characters include L.A. private eye Rick Holman; Randy Roberts, a randy San Francisco lawyer; and Hollywood scriptwriter Larry Baker and his drunken partner, Boris Slivka.

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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: Other Carter Brown novels reviewed on this blog —

      Meet Murder, My Angel, by Geoff Bradley.

      The Deadly Kitten, by Stephen Mertz.

      Plus Toni Johnson-Woods on the CARTER BROWN MYSTERY THEATRE.

OLIVER BLEECK – The Brass Go-Between. William Morrow, hardcover, 1969. Paperback reprints include: Pocket, 1971; Perennial Library 1983,1987.

   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 Coulter 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 backgrounds, 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.