JOEL TOWNSLEY ROGERS – The Red Right Hand. First published in New Detective Magazine, March 1945. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft. Shown: Pocket 385, pb, 1946; Dell D203, pb, Great Mystery Library #9, 1957.

   This classic suspense novel has the quality of a hallucination. From the opening paragraph, we are drawn into a strange world where eerie and seemingly impossible events are happening; and as we view them through the eyes of the narrator, Dr. Harry Riddle, we begin, as he does, to believe in their reality and to search desperately for some rational explanation for them.

   The story begins after most of the events have taken place, with Riddle trying desperately to puzzle them out as he sits in the study of Adam MacComereau, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Harvard.

   The late Adam MacComereau, we learn. Murder has been done more than once. Various shadowy and frightening events are described, without their chronology or connections being given. There is a woman asleep on a nearby sofa toward whom Riddle feels protective, while also holding back fear of his own insanity. And as he sits there, thinking about the events that have passed, he begins to reconstruct what they really signify.

   While driving from Vermont to New York City, Riddle had car trouble on a back road; when he finally got under way, he encountered the woman, Elinor Darrie, lost and fleeing through the underbrush. As Riddle tells us, “It was a simple enough incident.”

   Elinor and her fiance, Inis St. Erme, were driving to Vermont to be married. On the road they picked up a tramp-a little, twisted man whom Riddle comes to think of as Corkscrew — and when they stopped for a picnic, there was a fight between the tramp and St. Erme. Elinor heard a terrifying scream and fled. Riddle and Elinor investigated the spot and found a quantity of blood, but nothing else.

   As Riddle says, “It was such a damned ordinary and commonplace crime, on the face of it.” But other aspects surface — such as St. Erme’ s missing right hand; a mutilated blue hat that Riddle found on the road before he met with Elinor; the noise “like a great frog croaking in the weedy ditch” near where Riddle’s car broke down; and the ugly little man, Corkscrew — who is he and how has he gotten away after apparently doing murder?

   This is a dizzying and confusing novel, but pleasurably so. And when the action has been unraveled, its apparent solution explained, confusion is initiated again, and more action occurs. And when that has been unraveled, its solution stands alone, and the result is stunning indeed.

   In thinking over the wonderful experience of reading The Red Right Hand, the reader can only marvel at how the author constructed such a baffling and complex plot without leaving a thread untied. And — corollary to that — how he did so without driving himself as mad as his narrator fears he is becoming.

   Rogers, however, did remain sane and capable of writing other memorable novels: Lady with the Dice (1946) and The Stopped Clock (1958). In addition, he wrote reams of fiction for both the pulp and slick magazines, and a first (but less memorable) novel, Once in a Red Moon (1923).

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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 you might recall, I’d intended to post the three Ruth Rendell reviews from 1001M this weekend, but as usual, the real world interfered. I’ll get those uploaded in the next couple of days, I hope, but in the meantime, I thought this alternative choice might be appropriate.

   Geoff Bradley’s review of this book, which you can find here, has generated more comments than usual — including my own admission that I’ve yet to read it. Perhaps the book falls into a category that might called Classic Novels That Everyone’s Heard About But Relatively Few Have Read.

   If the combination of Geoff’s and Marcia Muller’s reviews don’t tempt you into reading it, if you haven’t already — and I doubt that anyone could say more about the story than Marcia without revealing everything — than nothing will!

   As for me, I know when I’ve run out of excuses. I also know where my copy of the Pocket paperback is, and I’ll start reading it this week. You can take that statement to the bank and cash it. It’s as good as gold.

RUFUS KING – Malice in Wonderland. Doubleday Crime Club, 1958. Queen’s Quorum 117.

   Rufus King had two distinct “careers” in crime fiction. The first was as a writer of traditional Golden Age whodunits, beginning in 1927 and continuing until 1951. He produced twenty-two novels during this period, most of which are entertaining despite some stilted prose; they are marked by clever plotting, interesting backgrounds, and touches of gentle humor.

   King’s best work, however, is his short fiction, particularly that written during his second “career” in the 1950s and 1960s when he abandoned novels altogether and concentrated on stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

   Malice in Wonderland, the second of King’s four collections, was so highly regarded by the Mssrs. Queen that they included it in their Supplement Number One (1951-59) to the Queen’s Quorum.

   The eight stories here expose the violence and corruption of the fictional town of Halcyon, Florida — after the fashion, if not in the style, of John D. MacDonald. Queen said that in these stories King “pungently, almost maliciously impale[s] … the Gold Coast, that fabulous neon strip between Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale, with its cross section of natives and tourists, of greedy heirs and retired gangsters (alive and dead).”

   The best story in the collection, “The Body in the Pool,” traces the strange connection between the state of Florida’s electrocution of murderer Saul (“Stripe-Pants”) McSager and the selection of Mrs. Warburton Waverly as the county’s “Most Civic-Minded Woman of the Year.”

   Also excellent are the title story, in which a girl tries to decode a message from a long-dead playmate; and the long novelette “Let Her Kill Herself,” in which an unpleasant woman makes an extremely disturbing discovery.

   Some of King’s early short stories are collected in Diagnosis: Murder (1941). Two other collections of stories about Halcyon and the Florida Gold Coast, both of which rank with Malice in Wonderland, are The Steps to Murder (1960) and The Faces of Danger (1964).

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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.

RUFUS KING – Murder by Latitude. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1930. Reprint paperback: Popular Library #246, 1950. (Cover art: Rudolph Belarski.)

    Rufus King’s sole series character was a New York police detective, Lieutenant Valcour. A proper gentleman detective, Valcour’ s only unusual characteristic is that he is a French Canadian.

    Murder by Latitude is one of Valcour’ s more exotic cases. The Eastern Bay is a cheap passenger-carrying freighter making a Bermuda-to-Halifax run. Lieutenant Valcour boards the ship with the news that one of the passengers is a murderer.

    One of the victims is dead of strangulation, the other is in a New York City hospital; police are hoping this victim will recover to give a description of the killer. The murderer sabotages radio communication so police can not send the description of the guilty party, but Valcour has clues that indicate the murderer is aboard the Eastern Bay and he starts his investigation on his own among the bizarre menage of passengers.

    As the degrees of latitude sail by, the murderer strikes again, leaving such cryptic clues as a lump of wax, a stolen thimble, and a pair of scissors. Valcour achieves some impressive feats of detection to tie the clues to the culprit in classic fashion.

    Another recommended Valcour sea mystery is the fine Murder on the Yacht (1932). Valcour made an impressive debut with Murder by the Clock (1929) and went on to detective fame in a half-dozen novels, concluding with Murder Masks Miami (1939).

    Notable among King’s nonseries novels are A Variety of Weapons (1943), The Case of the Dowager’s Etchings (1944), and Museum Piece No. 13 (1946).

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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.

  JAMES HADLEY CHASE – No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Howell Soskin, US, hardcover, 1942. UK edition: Jarrolds, hardcover, 1939. Revised edition: Panther, UK, pb, 1961; Avon, US, pb, 1961. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback. Film: Alliance, 1948. Also: Cinerama, 1971, as The Grissom Gang.

   Since the publication of No Orchids for Miss Blandish, James Hadley Chase has sold millions of copies of his more than eighty novels. A British writer who uses mostly American characters and settings in his works, Chase has a fast-paced, hard-boiled style perfectly suited to his violent, action-filled novels.

   The title character of Miss Blandish is a young socialite who is kidnapped by small-time hoods and then kidnapped from them by the members of the Grisson gang, a group based on the notorious Ma Barker and her sons.

    Ma Grisson’s favorite son, Slim, a vicious, perverted killer, takes a special interest in Miss Blandish; so instead of killing her when the ransom is paid, Ma gives her to Slim—

   She is kept in a narcotic haze by Doc, another of the gang, so that she will submit to Slim’s debased desires. Eventually, Miss Blandish’s father hires Fenner, a former crime reporter turned private eye, to find his daughter.

   There is a bloody shoot-out between the gang and the police, but Slim escapes with Miss Blandish. He is finally cornered, but this is not the sort of story in which everyone can live happily ever after.

   Chase does a fine job in Miss Blandish (even in the revised edition of 1961) of understating the sex and violence, which become more effective than if they had been spelled out.

   The pace never lags, and the ending is very well handled. Miss Blandish is no longer as shocking as its reputation might suggest, but it remains a powerful crime novel.

   Chase’s novels were well suited to the needs of the early paperback market, and many of them are highly sought after by collectors, as much for their colorful titles and gaudy covers as for their contents.

   Examples include Twelve Chinks and a Woman (Avon, 1952) and Kiss My Fist! (Eton,1952).

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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.

CELIA FREMLIN – The Hours Before Dawn. Victor Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1958. J. B. Lippincott, US hardcover, 1958. Reprint US paperbacks: Dell D422, 1961; Dell 3770, Great Mystery Library, 1966.

   Celia Fremlin has the unusual ability to take a perfectly normal, if not mundane, situation and create an atmosphere of sheer terror. The Hours Before Dawn, which won an Edgar for Best Novel of its year, introduces us to Louise Henderson, a sleep-starved young housewife with a fretful new infant that is causing complaints from both her family and neighbors.

   The only person who doesn’t complain is Miss Vera Brandon, the boarder the Hendersons have recently taken in. In fact, Miss Brandon is so self-effacing and quiet that at times the Hendersons don’t even know she is in the house.

   Soon the boarder’s actions begin to arouse Louise’s suspicions, and she finds herself doing all sorts of things she has never done before — attempting to search the woman’s room, contacting total strangers for information about her, and finally taking the baby for a nocturnal stroll in his pram, only to fall asleep and lose him in a park.

   The author skillfully weaves truly frightening events into Louise’s daily routine of meals, housecleaning, and childcare, and her superb characterization has the reader thoroughly on Louise’s side — and just as terrified as she is — by the time the story reaches its surprising conclusion.

   Other Fremlin titles of note: Uncle Paul (1960), Prisoner’s Base (1967), The Spider-Orchid (1978), With No Crying (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.

CELIA FREMLIN, R.I.P. It was Martin Edwards who first made known the news of mystery writer Celia Fremlin’s passing, announcing it on his blog three days ago.

    She died this past summer in a nursing home in Bournemouth, on June 16th, with very few in the world of mystery fandom knowing about her passing until now.

    Besides Martin’s appreciative tribute to her work, plus a long array of followup comments, a longer obituary by Rebecca Tope can be found online here. She says in part, in one poignant paragraph:

    “Her personal life was, in fact, full of tragedy. From the death of her mother when she was seventeen, she went on to lose three children and two husbands, before going blind and slowly sinking into a twilight world that lasted for several years. Her books are light and humorous at first glance, but just below the surface is an acknowledgment of the truly terrible things that can happen to a person. Her style is distinctive and the books immensely enjoyable.”

   BIBLIOGRAPHY: Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

FREMLIN, CELIA. Pseudonym of Celia Margaret Goller, 1914-2009. UK publishers only, except for one case of a US retitling:
      The Hours Before Dawn (n.) Gollancz 1958.

      Uncle Paul (n.) Gollancz 1959.
      Seven Lean Years (n.) Gollancz 1961. US title: Wait for the Wedding, Lippincott 1961.
      The Trouble Makers (n.) Gollancz 1963.
      The Jealous One (n.) Gollancz 1965.

      Prisoner’s Base (n.) Gollancz 1967.
      Possession (n.) Gollancz 1969.
      Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark (co) Gollancz 1970.
      Appointment with Yesterday (n.) Gollancz 1972. No US edition.

      By Horror Haunted (co) Gollancz 1974. No US edition.

      The Long Shadow (n.) Gollancz 1975.
      The Spider-Orchid (n.) Gollancz 1977.

      With No Crying (n.) Gollancz 1980.

      The Parasite Person (n.) Gollancz 1982.
      A Lovely Day to Die, and other stories (co) Gollancz 1984.
      Listening in the Dusk (n.) Gollancz 1990.
      Dangerous Thoughts (n.) Gollancz 1991.
       Echoing Stones (n.) Severn 1993.
      King of the World (n.) Severn 1994.

LAWRENCE BLOCK – Burglars Can’t Be Choosers. Random House, hardcover, 1977. Paperback reprints include: Jove, 1978; Pocket, 1983; Onyx, 1995; Harper Torch, 2004.

   Bernie Rhodenbarr is no ordinary burglar; he is a professional of finesse, charm, and good common sense. At least that is what he tells himself when he enters an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he has been commissioned to find a blue leather box — a box he has been advised not to open.

   Unfortunately, the box isn’t where it should be, nor is there anything else of interest, and Bernie is about to depart when the cops arrive. No novice at such problems, he successfully bribes the officers with his advance on the burglary commission, and is about to take his leave once more when one of them turns up a body in the bedroom.

   The officer has the grace to faint on the Bokhara carpet; the other is distracted; and Bernie flees.

   From here on out, Mr. Rhodenbarr is engaged in a flight to keep himself free, and a quest to find out just who attempted to frame him for the murder of entrepreneur J. Francis Flaxford-tenant of the apartment he was set up to burgle. There are a lot of amusing moments, a surprise roommate for Bernie, and a good amount of burglar lore.

   Also entertaining are The Burglar in the Closet (1978), The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (1979), The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza (1980), and The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian (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.

A. A. FAIR – Owls Don’t Blink. New York: William Morrow, hardcover, 1942. Paperback reprint: Dell 211, mapback, 1948. Many other reprint editions in both hardcover and soft.

   A. A. Fair is a pseudonym of Erle Stanley Gardner, but don’t pick up one of these novels featuring private eyes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam expecting a couple of carbon copies of Paul Drake.

   Cool and Lam are an amusing and endearing pair — perfect foils for one another. Bertha Cool, at the time of this novel, is the middle-aged proprietor of an L.A. investigative firm, pared down to a mere 165 pounds but ever on the alert for a good meal. Her partner, Donald Lam, is a twerp in comparison — young, slender, and forever on the defensive for what Bertha considers excessive squandering of agency money.

   But there’s considerable affection between the two, and with Donald doing the legwork, they crack some tough cases — and have a lot of fun while doing so.

   Owls Don’t Blink opens in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where Donald is occupying an apartment once rented by a missing woman he has been hired to find. He is due to meet Bertha at the airport at 7:20 the next morning and knows there will be hell to pay if he’s late.

   Fortunately, he arrives on time, and together they meet the New York lawyer who has hired them to find Roberta Fenn, a former model. Over a number of pecan waffles — a number for Bertha, that is, who “only eats once a day” — the lawyer is evasive about why he wishes to locate Miss Fenn. But Cool and Lam proceed with the case — and Bertha proceeds with several lavish meals, still on that same day.

   The discovery of the missing woman’s whereabouts proves all too easy, and also too easy is the discovery of a corpse in Roberta Fenn’ s new apartment. But from there on out, everything’s as convoluted as in the best of the Perry Mason novels.

   The scene moves from New Orleans to Shreveport, Louisiana, and from there to Los Angeles, where its surprising (although possibly a little out-of-leftfield) conclusion takes place.

   And there’s a nice twist in the Cool-Lam relationship that will make a reader want to read the later entries in this fine series, such as Crows Can’t Count (1946), Some Slips Don’t Show (1957), Fish or Cut Bait (1963), and All Grass Isn’t Green (1970). Especially entertaining earlier titles are The Bigger They Come (1939) and Spill the Jackpot (1941).

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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.

TED ALLBEURY – Shadow of Shadows. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1982. UK editions: Granada, hc, 1982; pb, 1982. (Shown is the cover of the paperback edition.)

   Ted Allbeury started writing espionage novels in the early 1970s. He specializes in realism and the sense of desolation evident in the best contemporary British spy fiction.

   What makes Allbeury’ s novels so authentic is his background: He served with British counterintelligence during World War II. In each of the dozen espionage novels he has written so far, Allbeury creates characters and plots so convincing that the reader can’t help but be caught in his webs of suspense.

   In Allbeury’ s best book to date, Shadow of Shadows, the game is a battle of wits between Colonel Anatoli Mikhailovich Petrov, a KGB defector, and British Intelligence’s James Lawler. Petrov has been supplying valuable information — identities of double agents, locations of “safe houses,” and more — until suddenly he stops talking.

   Lawler’s mission is to find out who or what silenced Petrov and to convince him to resume supplying the vital information to British Intelligence.

   Allbeury’s novelistic skills are apparent in the relationship between the two spies — one Russian, one British — who find they have more in common with each other than they do with the spy masters who control them. The relationship grows despite Petrov’s suspicion that Lawler’s real mission may be to discover his secrets and then to liquidate him.

   With this novel and The Other Side of Silence (1981), Ted Allbeury has written espionage classics.

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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:   My review of The Reaper, an earlier book by Ted Allbeury about tracking down ex-Nazis in Europe, along with some biographical data about the author, can be found here.

ANNE PERRY – Callander Square. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1980. Reprint paperback: Fawcett Crest, 1981. Reprinted many times since.

   Anne Perry’s books featuring London police inspector Thomas Pitt are called “Victorian mysteries.” One look at the covers of the paperback editions would lead the reader to believe they are just more of what has been called the “Gasp in the Grass” genre — the kind of stories that find the virginal heroine crawling at least once across the grassy slopes of a Victorian mansion in the moonlight.

   Not so. Perry has very cleverly portrayed British Victorian society with a sharp eye for its particular brand of social deceit. She is especially skilled at making the reader realize the almost unbelievable subjugation of women in those days, and if one ever wonders why women began to rebel against social constriction at the turn of the twentieth century, these books will clear up that mystery, too.

   Detective Thomas Pitt is a working-class hero in the extraordinary position of being called upon periodically to blow the cover of the English aristocracy. Being a policeman, he can exercise certain influence; if any blustering old gent attempts to order him out of the Morning Room, Pitt can threaten a search warrant.

   He rarely needs to resort to such tactics, however, because he gets inside help from his charming wife, Charlotte, who stepped out of her upper-class world to marry him. She is an honest and enthusiastic woman whose family despairs of her insistence on following her own inchnations (although most of the women she grew up with admire her courage).

   And she is invaluable to Pitt, since most of his cases involve his exposing the passion beneath the icy breast of the upper classes. Pitt analyzes the facts with cool logic, while Charlotte uses her family connections to pick up pertinent gossip over tea and crumpets.

   In Callander Square, gardeners have inadvertently dug up the corpses of two newbom babies in the square of one of the most affluent suburbs of London. The neighborhood residents, while forced to admit the monstrosity of the deaths, simply chalk them up to the irnrnorality of some servant girl who “let herself” be molested — probably by a footman, perhaps the master of the house; gentlemen always dally with the servant girls “just for a spot of fun.”

   It is too bad, they concede, that the girl was stupid enough to get herself into such a mess — but then, what can one expect from the working class anyway?

   Of course, those babies never belonged to a servant girl, and it is Pitt’s job to expose the enormous hypocrisy of the self-righteous elite — as well as two murderers, a blackmailer, and a gentleman drunk. This is an excellent novel that says a great deal about social pretension and the harm it can do.

   Other highly recommended books in this series are The Cater Street Hangman (1979), Paragon Walk (1981), Resurrection Row (1981), Rutland Place (1983), and Bluegate Fields (1984).

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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.

R. D. ROSEN – Strike Three, You’re Dead. Walker, 1984. Signet, pb, 1986. Walker, trade pb, 2001.

   Harvey Blissberg, the hero of Strike Three, You’re Dead, is a baseball player recently traded from the Boston Red Sox to a new American League expansion team, the Providence Jewels.

   Called “Professor” by his younger teammates for his reading habits and off-diamond attire, Blissberg is stumped for a motive to the murder of his roommate, Rudy, and begins looking for the murderer out of a combination of curiosity and guilt.

   Discouraged by management, teammates, and police, Blissberg gets support from his girlfriend, a local TV sportscaster, and his brother, a baseball fanatic, as he tries to determine why his best friend on the team wound up drowned in the team whirlpool. His quest for the murderer takes on a new urgency when he, too, becomes a target.

   Baseball statisticians will have a very slight edge in solving the murder, but such avidity is not needed. Rosen’s clever plotting, quick wit, and subtle understatement makes this book both entertaining and easy to read.

   In the second book in this series, Fadeaway (1985), Blissberg has retired to become a professional detective and is called in to solve the murder of two NBA basketball stars.

   Strike Three, You’re Dead was named one of the seven best mysteries of the year by the New York Times, and won a Best First Novel Edgar. Rosen is also the author of two nonfiction books and numerous essays, criticisms, and articles on sports and humor.

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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.