JACK FOXX – Freebooty. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1976.

   Jack Foxx is a pseudonym used by Bill Pronzini for four Foxx novels written in the 1970s. Two are action/ adventure stories featuring Singapore bush pilot Dan Connell — The Jade Figurine (1972) and Dead Run (1975); a third, Wildfire ( 1978), is a thriller about a small California logging community menaced by both a trio of dangerous criminals and a forest fire.

   Freebooty, a historical mystery, is very different in tone from the other tautly written, action-oriented Foxx novels. This is not to say that there isn’t plenty of action and suspense, but Freebooty‘s style is gentler, evoking an earlier age, and it is spiced with frequent, delightful humor.

   Fergus O’Hara and his wife, Hattie, arrive in San Francisco in 1863 en route to the port city of Stockton, where they suspect the members of a bandit gang who have been terrorizing coaches of the Adams Express Company are hiding out. As O’Hara explains, his wife is not an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, as he is, but frequently assists him in his inquiries, “women being able to obtain information in places men cannot.”

   Before the O’Haras board the steamer Freebooty for the inland Journey, Fergus makes the acquaintance of Horace T. Goatleg, an obese man with patently suspicious motives; encounters an articulate and ribald parrot (one of the most memorable characters in a cast of outstanding ones); witnesses a near-riot on the Barbary Coast; finds a murdered man in an alley; and sustains minor injuries himself, including being half drowned by a shower of beer.

   Needless to say, all of the above events tie in to further goings–on aboard the steamer. And as the O’Haras — an effective team –investigate them, their initial purposes take a series of twists and turns, leading to a final revelation that is sure to leave the reader both surprised and amused.

   Pronzini has a firm grasp of historical fact, and he blends it skillfully into his narrative, capturing the tenor of the times without allowing detail to slow the pace of his story. This is an entertaining novel, well plotted and full of engaging characters.

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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.

FREDERICK FORSYTH – The Odessa File. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1972. Viking, US, hardcover, 1972. Bantam, US, paperback, 1974. Reprinted many times since.

   In The Odessa File, crime reporter Peter Miller finds the diary of a survivor of the Riga Concentration Camp. Miller, an extremely able journalist and a German of the postwar generation, is stunned to discover the horrors of the camp, and he sets out to track down the camp’s commandant, Eduard Roschmann (a real figure, whose story is accurately reported by Forsyth).

   Roschmarm is reported to be living comfortably under a new identity somewhere in Germany.

   In his search for the Butcher of Riga, Miller uncovers Odessa. a secret organization of former SS members. which is supported by the gold and jewels they took from the Jews in the concentration camps. Its aims are to aid former Nazis in returning to positions of influence in Germany and to further neo-Nazi propaganda. The anti-Nazi underground is powerful in the Germany of 1963, when this story takes place, and Miller is up against the biggest challenge of his career.

   German officials who are charged with prosecuting war criminals now only want to forget; Miller gets no help from them. The Israelis want to make use of him to thwart the production of an Odessa-designed guidance system that will supposedly enable Egyptian missiles to carry bubonic plague into Israel; to them, Miller is expendable.

   This tense and fascinating story reads like fact, and it is with the factual that Forsyth is at his best; he can make the assembling of a bomb in a hotel room as riveting as the best chase scene. His totally fictional characters are less sure than those based on real individuals, but Miller is a sympathetic hero.

   Forsyth’s other thrillers are The Dogs of War ( 1974) and The Devil’s Alternative (1979). He has also written mainstream novel, The Shepherd (1974), and a nonfiction book, The Biafra Story (1977).

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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.

FREDERICK FORSYTH – No Comebacks. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1982 Viking, US, hardcover, 1982. Bantam, US, paperback, 1983. Reprinted many times since.

   The ten stories gathered here carry out the same theme as Forsyth’s novels, detailing the work of competent professional men who are single-mindedly committed to achieving their goals. Forsyth details their preparations for their missions with loving thoroughness, and follows their plans through to their logical conclusions.

   Some of his heroes succeed; some don’t. But if they don’t, it is because of some strange quirk that the hero could not have foreseen. More often than not, human frailty is what produces the splendid final twists in a number of the stories.

   “No Comebacks” is the cleverest example of this: The _signs of what is to happen to city of London “golden-boy tycoon” Mark Sanderson are obvious all along, yet the ironic climax is still surprising and leaves us with a satisfied smile. In “There Are No Snakes in Ireland” (which won the MW A Edgar for Best Short Story of 1983), it is the bigotry of certain Irish (in this case against an Indian student named Harkishan Ram Lal) that proves to be the true villain. As in this award-winning story, Forsyth also used his experiences while living in Ireland in “Sharp Practice,” a tale of a highly unusual poker game on a train. And in “A Careful Man,” an individual whose meticulousness affected his family in life does so even from the grave.

   These stories arc more human than Forsyth’s novels, the characters more memorable as people, rather than technicians, and the tension runs just as high as in the author’s longer 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.

FREDERICK FORSYTH – The Day of the Jackal. Viking, hardcover, 1971. Bantam, paperback, 1972. Reprinted many times. Film: UK, 1973. TV series: Peacock, 2024- .

   As a Reuters correspondent, Frederick Forsyth reported from London, Paris, and East Berlin in the Sixties, and he brings to his fictional works the expected objectivity and thoroughness of a talented reporter. Against a background of real events and real people, he places both his fictional heroes and antiheroes: professionals in their fields who arc impeccable in carrying out their jobs and arc governed by unshakable commitments to their own internal standards.

   The heroes frequently combat established but morally corrupt government agencies, and their victories over them come about through preparation and planning. There is a great deal of motion in Forsyth’s work, and the scene shifts frequently between the heroes and the antiheroes, creating a tension that is sustained until the last page.

   The Day of the Jackal is Forsyth’s best-known and most meticulously drawn suspense tale. Seeking the best of professional killers to take over from their own bunglers, French dissidents intent on assassinating Charles de Gaulle hire the Jackal. Working alone, the Jackal makes painstaking preparations to obtain each essential piece of equipment from the appropriate craftsmen, whom he either gives a nodding respect, views with silent contempt, or occasionally, disposes of.

   In counterpoint to the Jackal’ activities are scenes in which the authorities work to uncover the plot, and when Commissaire Claude Lebel, “the best detective in France,” is brought in on the case, the contest becomes an even match.

   Forsyth’s skill is such that, despite the Jackal’s morally unacceptable line of work, we feel sympathy for the character. His integrity and total commitment to his internal standards are commendable — regardless of what those standards are.

   And the chess game between these ultimate professionals — which takes them back and forth across Europe and the English Channel — is a joy to behold. The game grows tenser and tenser, until its climax — and then Forsyth gives us one more superb twist.

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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 FORREST – A Child’s Garden of Death. Lyon & Bea Wentworth #1. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1975. Pocket, paperback, 1977. Dell, paperback, 1982.

   Take one children’s-book writer who is also a hot-airballooning enthusiast; add his fictional creations, the Wobblies, and his politician wife, plus his best friend from Korean War days, now police chief in their small Connecticut town. These staple ingredients of Richard Forrest’s series about Lyon Wentworth add up to an intriguing mix-even before the element of murder enters.

   In this first entry in the series — whose titles are variations on well-known children’s books — Lyon is called in by buddy Rocco Herbert to help solve an unusual type of killing: a thirty-year-old murder of a man, woman, and child whose bodies are uncovered by a bulldozer at a construction site. Rocco often relies on his friend’s “unusual kind of mind,” but this case is particularly painful to the writer. His own daughter was killed by a hit-and-run driver some years ago, and he and his wife have yet to come to terms with their loss.

   Lyon’s investigation — which he frequently discusses with his imaginary friends, the Wobblies — takes him back to World War II and into a reconstruction of the life of a Jewish family who fled Hitler’s Germany only to find horrors in the new world. And the resolution of the case brings a measure of peace to the Wentworths. An excellent and sensitive novel whose serious theme is leavened by a wry good humor.

   Other titles featuring Lyon Wentworth: The Wizard of Death (1977), Death Through the Looking Glass (1978), The Death in the Willows (1979), The Death at Yew Corner (1980), and Death Under the Lilacs (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.
   

NOTE: The series has continued on to include the following titles:

7. Death On the Mississippi (1989)
8. The Pied Piper of Death (1997)
9. Death in the Secret Garden (2004)
10. Death At King Arthur’s Court (2005)

C. S. FORESTER – Payment Deferred. Little Brown, hardcover, 1942. Reprinted many times, including Bantam #816, paperback, 1951.

   Payment Deferred is not a mystery. It is, rather, a stunning tour de force detailing “the perfect crime,” and its devastating aftermath on a working-class British family. Everything is in the telling.

   Will Marble and his family exist rather drearily on his income as a clerk at a bank. When a long-lost relative arrives from the colonies (Africa) with a fortune in cash and a sad story about having no other living relatives, Mr. Marble seizes the moment. He murders the boy, buries him in the backyard, and doubles the fortune through a series of crooked financial manipulations. He becomes a man of wealth and station. He has committed the perfect murder and has gone unpunished. All seems right with the world.

   What follows is a tale of retribution visited on Mr. Marble, his wife, and ultimately his children. The family, never close, begins to fall apart. The daughter, embarrassed by her parents’ common background, turns her back on the family (if not their newfound wealth) and leaves home. The son, bought off with expensive gifts and enrollment in the public school system, is both unloved and unloving. Mrs. Marble, discovering her husband’s terrible secret, is forced to share his nightmare world of fear and suspicion. Mr. Marble, forever brooding, sits by an open window refusing to leave home and maintains a constant vigil on the unmarked grave. His drinking, always a problem, gets worse. A blackmailing neighbor bleeds him financially. The family seems farthest apart at those times spent together.

   Forester’s prose is first-rate and his characterizations haunting. And the ending is guaranteed to surprise, with just the right fanciful touch to make it a perfect ironic counterpoint to the somber tone of the rest of the novel.

   C. S. Forester’s fame rests on his later, non-criminous writings, in particular his series of sea adventures featuring Captain Horatio Hornblower, which remain in print to the present. Several films have been made from his novels, among them the 1942 MGM production of Payment Deferred (starring Charles Laughton) and the 1951 Humphrey Bogart/Katharine Hepburn film The African Queen.

   His only other crime novel, Plain Murder, was published as a paperback original by Dell in 1954.

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

LESLIE FORD – Ill Met by Moonlight. Colonel Primrose & Grace Latham #2. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1938. Dell #6, paperback, mapback edition, 1943.  Popular Library, paperback, 1964.

   Leslie Ford (a pseudonym of Zenith Brown. who also wrote as David Frame,  has often been accused of being one of the leading practitioners of the “had-I-but-known” school. and it is true that a great many of these leading and tension-spoiling statements appear in her novels. However, shortsighted critics have overlooked her carefully delineated exploration of life among people who are not too different from the average reader except in the fact that, through familial associations, political affinity, or geographic accident, they invite more than their fair share of murder and well-bred mayhem.

   This is the second adventure of Colonel John T. Primrose and Sergeant Phineas Buck, one in which the unlikely but highly successful combination of retired officer and retired enlisted man is teared with a thirty-eight-year-old widow, Grace Latham.

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

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

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

STANTON FORBES – If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1970.

   During Mime Day at Shenley College, a small eastern school, students from the Classical Cinema Department all decide to dress up as Laurel and Hardy for their annual high jinks. One pair of actors takes the opportunity to murder the president of a nearby electronics corporation, Sacheville, Inc., and newly hired PR director Larry Evans is implicated in the crime. In order to save his bacon, Evans undertakes an investigation of his own, pokes around among a bunch of rather quirky (to say the least) suspects, and eventually unmasks the culprits.

   This is a fine idea for a mystery, but the execution is poor. Forbes’s style is a cross between eccentric and sophomoric; so is her humor. Some might find this sort of thing clever and amusing, but this reviewer isn’t one of them. (The best thing about the book, in fact, is its wraparound dust jacket depicting thirteen sad-faced Laurels against an orange background — one of the niftiest jackets on any contemporary crime novel.)

   Forbes is the author of numerous other novels, among them the likewise fancifully titled Go to Thy Death Bed (1968), The Name’s Death, Remember Me? (1969), and The Sad, Sudden Death of My Fair Lady (1971). She has also written numerous mysteries under the pseudonyms Tobias Wells  and Forbes Rydell (collaborations with Helen B. Rydell).

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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.

KEN FOLLETT – Eye of the Needle.  Arbor House, US, hardcover, 1978. Signet, US, paperback, 1979. First published in the UK as Macdonald and James, London, 1978, as Storm Island. Reprinted many times since. Film: United Artists, 1981, with Donald Sutherland and Kate Nelligan.

   Eye of the Needle is one of the best of the recent spate of World War II espionage novels. Ken Follett combines a very believable plot based on astounding. historical fact with excellent pacing and-a real boon in this type of thriller-well-rounded. sympathetic characters.

   The historical fact is that in 1944 the Allies created a fake army in southeastern England. To Nazi reconnaissance planes. it looked like a huge encampment set to invade France at Calais. But seen from the ground, the “barracks” had only one side and a roof; the “airplanes” were mere carcasses sunk into the ground. with no engines or wheels. It was a hoax of gigantic proportions that convinced the Nazis to concentrate their defenses at Calais instead of Normandy, and it affected the outcome of the war.

   But this outcome would have been very different had there been one German spy who saw the phony encampment al ground level and reported it to Berlin. Suppose there had been such a spy. a master spy, an upper-class German, somewhat of a rebel, who refused to join the Nazi party but still had the ear of Hitler. Suppose such a spy had lived in London long enough to pass as an Englishman ….

   This is the central premise of Eye of the Needle. Here Follett gives us Die Nadel — the Needle — who uses a stiletto to kill anyone who threatens his mission or his cover. He kills as a soldier; he doesn’t enjoy it. In a moment of self-inquiry. he wonders if his personality — the ever-present wariness that keeps him at a distance from everyone else — has really not been foisted upon him by his occupation, as he likes to suppose; perhaps, he thinks, he has instead chosen his profession because it is the only type of work that can make him appear normal, even to himself.

   Such self-doubt (although it is a luxury the Needle rarely permits himself) has us at least nominally on his side for much (but not all) of the novel, even as the British agents — a typically tweedy ex-professor named Godliman and a former Scotland Yard man named Bloggs — match him in intelligence and quickly realize he has discovered their great hoax.

   With this discovery, the chase becomes faster and more desperate. Circumstances lead Die Nadel to a storm-battered island in the North Sea, where a frustrated young woman, Lucy Rose, and her wheelchair-bound husband (he lost both of his legs in a traffic accident) live in bitter isolation and where much of the novel’s action takes place.

   Lucy’s attraction to the Needle, her fear and revulsion when she finds out what he is, and finally her desperate struggle to keep from becoming his latest victim make for some the best edge-of-the-chair suspense writing of the past decade. (The 1981 film version starring Donald Sutherland and Kate Nelligan has its moments but unfortunately falls far short of the novel.)

   Follett’s success with Eye of the Needle led to a number of other best sellers, none of which has the same raw powe1 and tension. Those other thrillers include Triple (1979), The Key to Rebecca (1980), The Man from St. Petersburg (1982), and On the Wings of Eagles (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.
   

J. S. FLETCHER – The Middle Temple Murder. Knopf, hardcover, 1919. Reprinted many times.

   Julian Symons, English author and critic, coined a good name for the multitude of middle-rank mystery writers who lacked literary skill and ingenuity — the Humdrums. J. S. Fletcher stood in the front rank of the prolific English phalanx of Humdrums. He wrote over a hundred books on a variety of subjects, and the majority were detective stories. These melodramas are extremely conventional, with the not-too-brilliant central puzzle dominating the story.

   They are a comfortable confirmation of decency and lawfulness for the moneyed middle class. Snobbery descends to racial prejudice (with several Chinese villains), and despicable, evil foreigners have dark complexions and comical accents. Not much scientific detection is involved, and the tenets of the Golden Age arc not closely followed. There is too much reliance on coincidence, detectives missing details, failure to follow up clues, and mysterious figures who appear to wrap up the plot at the end.

   It is a trifling triumph to select one of Fletcher’s detective stories as his best. From The Amaranth Club (1926) to The Yorkshire Moorland Murder (1930), there is not much to choose from, except for The Middle Temple Murder. While the plot is fairly pedestrian, many of Fletcher’s defects are absent. It is one of his earliest works, and attracted the first real notice for Fletcher in the United States when it was championed by Woodrow Wilson.

   The story concerns Frank Spargo, subeditor of the Watchman, who happens to be present when a bludgeoned body is found in the Middle Temple. The hotshot reporter (he’s as bright as any latterday Flash Casey) teams up with Ronald Breton, barrister, to follow the clues in this devious mystery.

   The victim is John Marbury, from Australia, who was struck down on his first night back in London after an absence of many years. This photo=procedural novel is a case of complicated theft, legacy, parentage, and includes a suspected empty coffin. A major motif (as in many Fletcher tales) is railway travel checking timetables; confirming alibis; zipping around to discover clues; getaways and pursuits.

   Fletcher has been praised for his novels set in the English countryside, but the atmosphere in most of these is overwrought and the descriptions dull. Novels such as The Middle Temple Murder and The Charing Cross Mystery (1923) are vivid because most of the action takes place in the streets, byways, squares, stations, and buildings of London, and is reported in factual detail.

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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.