HERMAN PETERSEN – Old Bones.

Duell, Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1943. Paperback reprint: Dell 127, 1947 [mapback edition].

   Herman Petersen was a prolific contributor to the aviation, adventure, and detective pulps of the Twenties and Thirties; one of his stories appears in the famous “Ku Klux Klan Number” of Black Mask (June 1, 1923). Between 1940 and 1943, he published four crime novels advertised by the publisher of three of them, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, as “quietly sinister mysteries with a rural background.”

   All four are set in an unnamed county in an unspecified part of the country (presumably upstate New York, Petersen’s home base). Three feature a team of more or less amateur sleuths: old Doc Miller, the county coroner; Paul Burns, the D.A.; and the narrator, Ben Wayne, a gentleman farmer. Miller does most of the sleuthing, Burns most of the worrying, and Wayne most of the leg work.

   Old Bones, the last and nominally best of the Doc Miller books, begins with the discovery — by Wayne’s wife, Marian — of a jumble of old bones wedged into the bottom of a standpipe at an abandoned gristmill.

   Before the authorities can remove them, someone else gets there first and tries unsuccessfully to hide them. Doc Miller’s eventual examination and investigation reveal that the bones are those of Nathaniel Wight, a black-sheep member of the district’s leading family; that he died of a crushed skull; and that he has evidently been dead for five years — ever since the night he was banished by old Aunt She, eldest and most imperious of the Wights, who believed he had seduced his cousin Amelia.

   It soon becomes apparent that someone in the Wight family, or someone close to it — perhaps more than one person — is willing to go to any lengths to keep the truth about Nate’s death from surfacing along with his bones.

   Much of the action takes place at or near the mill, and in the swamp that separates it from the Waynes’ farm, known as Dark House. In one harrowing episode, Wayne nearly drowns inside the standpipe; in another he is attacked in the mill loft and superficially stabbed.

   A second murder, the actions of a transient who has been bothering women in the area, a nightmarish stormy-night chase through the swamp on the trail of a kidnapped girl, and a tense and fiery conclusion are some of the other highlights.

   Old Bones drips atmosphere and understated menace. Its mystery is well constructed, with some legitimate detection on Doc Miller’s part; there is a nice sense of realism in the characters; and the touches of folksy humor are adroitly handled.

   The novel does have its flaws: We are told almost nothing about the backgrounds and private lives of the protagonists, people we want to know better; the solution to the mystery comes a little too easily and quickly; and more could have been done with the final confrontation. But the pluses here far outweigh the minuses. This and Petersen’s other servings of fictional Americana are well worth tracking down.

   Doc Miller, Paul Bums, and the Waynes are also featured in Murder in the Making (1940) and Murder R.F.D. (1942). The D.A ‘s Daughter (1943) also has a rural setting and emphasizes comedy along with murder and mischief.

   Petersen’s only other mystery novel, “The House in the Wilderness,” was published serially in 1957 and did not see book publication.

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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.

THOMAS PERRY – Metzger’s Dog.

Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1983. Paperback reprint: Charter, 1984. Trade paperback: Random House, 2003.

   This is a joyous romp of a thriller featuring the funniest band of brigands since Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder gang. While pulling a routine caper — a small matter involving a million dollars’ worth of cocaine — the gang inadvertently comes into possession of a Toyota-size dog and a worthless-looking manuscript.

   Immelmann, Kepler, Chinese Gordon, and Margaret the moll keep the surly canine only because Gordon’s cat, Dr. Henry Metzger, takes a fancy to it. The manuscript is more promising — it’s about psychological warfare, and they figure the CIA will pay plenty to get it back.

   A deal is struck, but the public servants of this great nation prove untrustworthy. Double-crossed, the tiny gang of four decides to teach the mighty CIA a lesson it’ll never forget. And then the real fun begins.

   Besides having one of the smartest mouths in the West, Chinese Gordon can think of dazzling plans on a moment’s notice. His revenge plot is a dandy; even the CIA’s ruthless Ben Porterfield, (“a man who had eaten armadillo. That said it all.”) can’t keep up with him. In fact, he can seemingly be outsmarted by only one being on earth — his own cat, Dr. Henry Metzger.

   A dynamite read-the plot is ingenious, the dialogue terrific, and the comedy wild and wacky.

   Perry’s previous book, The Butcher’s Boy, is totally different from this one — a tense thriller about an assassin and the government worker who must apprehend him; it won the MWA Edgar for Best First Novel of 1982. His latest title is Big Fish (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.

ELIZABETH PETERS – Crocodile on the Sandbank. Dodd, Mead & Co., hardcover, 1975. Paperback reprint: Fawcett Crest, 1976. Many other reprint editions, both hardcover and soft.

   Crocodile on the Sandbank is a wonderfully amusing romp in Egypt in the 1880s with all the trimmings — dahabeeyahs (houseboats), royal tombs, and mummies, both dead and walking. Into the world of archaeology blunders a self-proclaimed “middle-aged spinster” (age thirty-two) who has used her newly inherited fortune to leave England and her avaricious relatives.

   Sensing herself to be plain, Miss Amelia Peabody has decided against marriage, saying, “Why should any independent, intelligent female choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband? I assure you, I have yet to meet any man as sensible as myself.” But then she meets Radcliff Emerson, a voluble and single-minded sociologist. A Tracy-Hepburn relationship immediately develops.

   Where she meets Radcliff is at an archaeological dig he and his brother share on the Nile. Amelia and her companion, a young woman she befriended in Rome, have stopped there for a brief visit, but the short stay they envisioned is lengthened by a series of threatening events, endangering the artifacts and finally the lives of the four protagonists.

   The story is told from Amelia’s viewpoint. She is exceptionally well educated, full of endurance, and never, never forgoes her principles. Peters’s skill is in keeping the friction inherent in this situation amusing, yet making the characters just realistic enough to be credible and immensely likable. And though the reader realizes the outcome of the plot before Amelia does, it doesn’t matter, it is the interchange between the characters that is the delight of the book.

   In further adventures, presented in the form of Amelia’s memoirs — The Curse of the Pharaohs (1981) and The Mummy Case (1985) — she marries Emerson and returns to the Nile with an expanded cast of characters, including her precocious son, Ramses, and an Egyptian cat, Bastet.

   Peters (whose real name is Barbara Mertz, and who also writes as Barbara Michaels) has written such other entertaining novels as The Jackal’s Head (1968), Borrower of the Night (1973), The Copenhagen Connection (1982), and Die for Love (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.

TONY HILLERMAN – Listening Woman. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1978. Paperback reprint: Avon, April 1979. Many other reprint editions, both hardcover and soft.

   Joe Leaphorn is assigned to a double homicide that has occurred on a remote plateau of the Navajo reservation. Hosteen Tso, an old man, had complained of illness and gone to Margaret Cigaret, known as Listening Woman, for a pollen-blessing ceremony. During a brief period when Listening Woman left him alone, both Hosteen Tso and her niece and assistant, Anna Atcitty, were bludgeoned to death.

   The old man, Listening Woman reports to Leaphorn, knew something about some sand paintings that had been desecrated, but refused to discuss it, saying cryptically that he had made a promise to someone long ago. Following this rather slender lead, Leaphorn travels across the barren mesas to that part of the Indian nation where the Navajo wolves and witches are said to dwell.

   As in Hillerman’s other novels, ancient tribal beliefs come into sharp conflict with the modern world – a conflict that is reflected in Leaphorn himself. And when he finally reaches the solution to the crimes, he sees how legend can be manipulated to suit the designs of evil men.

   Hillerman has put his knowledge of Navajo custom and mysticism to good use in this novel. His stark depiction of the New Mexico landscape is particularly fine, conveying a haunting sense of how insignificant one man is against the vastness of nature, and making this a compelling and often chilling book.

   Joe Leaphorn also appears in The Blessing Way (1970), Hillerman’s first novel. A nonseries novel, The Fly on the Wall (1971), is a political story set in the capital of an unnamed midwestern state. In addition, Hillerman has produced a juvenile novel and various works of nonfiction, including the hilarious The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other Affairs of Indian Country (1970).

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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.

TONY HILLERMAN – The Ghostway. San Diego: Dennis McMillan, 1984. (Limited edition.) Also published in a regular trade edition by Harper & Row, 1985. Paperback reprint: Avon, 1986. Many other reprint editions, both hardcover and soft.

   Hillerman’s second series character, Navajo tribal policeman Jim Chee, is a younger man than Joe Leaphorn and more closely tied to mainstream American society. Because of this, he is perhaps less interesting than Leaphorn, and the Chee books lack the haunting, magical quality of Hillerman’s earlier work. Chee is nonetheless a complex character and the dichotomies he must face within himself are closely intertwined with the plots.

   The Ghostway concerns a Los Angeles Navajo who has shot a hoodlum to death and in turn been seriously wounded in a parking lot on the reservation. The FBI is looking for the man — Albert Gorman — for some reason that they do not discuss in detail with the Navajo police, and he is traced to the hogan of a relative, Ashie Begay.

   But when Chee, the sheriff’s deputy, and the FBI agents arrive at the hogan, they find no signs of life; the hogan’s smoke hole has been plugged, its doorway boarded over, and a hole cut in one side. To Chee this means someone has died inside and the hogan thought to be possessed by the malicious chindi (ghost) of the dead person has been abandoned.

   There are things that bother Chee about the situation: Ashie Begay was a wise old man, accustomed to death, and he loved his home; surely when he saw that Albert Gorman, the wounded man, was close to death, he would have moved him outside, as is the custom.

   And when Chee finds Gorman’s body, it has been prepared as the dead are supposed to be, except Begay has neglected to wash the corpse’s hair with yucca suds. Did something interrupt the preparations? And where has Ashie Begay gone?

   At the time the case begins, Chee is facing a tough personal decision: Should he join the FBI and leave the reservation with his white lover, Mary Landon? Or should he stay on here where his roots are and risk losing her?

   Before he can resolve this, however, Ashie Begay’s granddaughter, Margaret Billy Sosi, disappears from her boarding school, and Chee must track her down. Eventually he finds her in Begay’s contaminated hogan — a place where even he, with his logical policeman’s mind, is loath to step — but she quickly eludes him.

   He follows her to Los Angeles, where Navajos of the Turkey Clan, to which she belongs, live in abject poverty. Chee’s investigation takes him back to the reservation again, and into its far reaches where a Ghostway (purifying ceremony) is being performed. And at the ceremony, he must confront not only a killer but also the cultural conflict within himself.

   While not as powerful as the Leaphorn novels, The Ghostway ties its thematic matter into the plot in an extremely satisfying way, and Chee is developed to greater depth than before. Any reader will be eager to see how he resolves his conflicts in future novels.

   The previous Chee books are People of Darkness (1980) and The Dark Wind (1982).

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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.

TONY HILLERMAN – Dance Hall of the Dead. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1973. Paperback: Avon, 1975. Many reprint editions, both hardcover and soft.

   Tony Hillerman is a master storyteller, the kind who can spin you a yarn that will keep you on the edge of your chair replete with ghosts, evil spirits, sinister happenings, legends, and all the other ingredients that make up the culture of a people.

   The people he writes of are the Navajo and Zuni Indians of the American Southwest. His books are full of Indian lore. (Hillerman himself went to an Indian boarding school for eight years, and knows the culture as few Anglos do.)

   Set against the vast and often desolate expanse of the great reservations near Four Corners (where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado abut one another), they re-create the loneliness of the high mesas.

   If life is hard for those who live there, it is also hard for Hillerman’s heroes – tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn and, in more recent books, Jim Chee. There are no instant backup systems on the mesas, no quick computerized information resources, indeed few methods of communication.

   Alone, the protagonists must rely on their own intelligence, good judgment, and instincts that have been passed down in a society almost as old as the ancient land where it sprang up.

   Dance Hall of the Dead (which won the MWA Edgar for Best Novel of 1973) opens, as a number of Hillerman’s books do, with a scene from the life of a resident of the reservation, in this case a Zuni.

   And immediately we are confronted with one of the numerous contrasts between modern and an ancient culture that are a trademark of Hillerman’s work: “Shulawitsi, the Little Fire God, member of the Council of the Gods and Deputy to the Sun, had taped his track shoes to his feet.”

   The Little Fire God is a young Zuni man in training not for a track meet but for a religious ceremony. As he rests, thinking of many things that disturb him (but not allowing himself to become angry because at this time in the Zuni religious calendar, anger is not permitted), a strange figure appears from behind a boulder….

   Now that we have been drawn into the Indian consciousness, the scene switches to Zuni tribal-police headquarters where Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is being briefed on a jurisdictional problem. The Little Fire God, in ordinary life Ernesto Cata, and his Navajo friend, George Bowlegs, are missing, and there are indications that one of them has been knifed. While Cata’s disappearance is in Zuni jurisdiction, Leaphorn is asked to find Bowlegs.

   Cata is presumed dead, and the police suspect Bowlegs is his killer. But there are also rumors that a kachina – a Zuni ancestor spirit – got Cata and frightened Bowlegs. When Cata’s body is found, Leaphorn’s search intensifies; and as he crosses the rugged reservation, fact becomes mixed with legend, and Leaphorn, an outsider to the Zuni culture, must sort out the reality of the situation.

   Dance Hall of the Dead is a fascinating study in the conflicts between two Indian cultures, as well as a fine mystery, the scenes and characters of which will haunt you for a long time after you reach its conclusion.

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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.

TONY HILLERMAN, R.I.P. The much loved author of the Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee mysteries died October 26 of pulmonary failure. He was 83. See the The Rap Sheet online for more details and many remembrances.

   
MERLE CONSTINER – Hearse of a Different Color. Phoenix Press, hardcover, 1952. Previously serialized in Short Stories magazine as “Death on a Party Line”: July 10, July 25, August 10, Aug 25, 1946.

   In Gun in Cheek (1982), the undersigned reviewer’s humorous study of classically bad crime fiction, an entire chapter is devoted to the lending-library publisher, Phoenix Press. During the Thirties and Forties, Phoenix foisted upon an unsuspecting public some of the most godawful mysteries ever penned — scores of them, in fact.

   Not all Phoenix mysteries were horrendous, however; every now and then, whether by accident or otherwise, a pretty good one seems to have slipped out. Hearse of a Different Color falls into that rarefied category.

   Arkansas semanticist Paul Saxby comes to the backwoods town of Falksville, Tennessee, for two reasons: to study the picturesque colloquialisms of the area (?Git down and tie up, Brother Saxby; we’uns is shore hellacious proud to have you jubilating with us”), and because of a letter written to him by a local resident, Alicia Poynter, which hints at a “great and terrible crime being planned.”

   Shortly after Saxby’s arrival, at least part of that terrible crime is revealed: He finds Alicia dead of poison that mayor may not have been meant for her. Saxby’s investigation involves him with, among other colorful characters, a tough old lady named Cora Bob Wilkerson; the founder of the Caudry Burial Brotherhood; the owner of an abandoned sawmill (in the vicinity of which are all sorts of strange goings-on); and a dog with the magnificent moniker of Moonrise Blizzard the Second. More homicide — and the local sheriff, Masters ? plagues Saxby before he finally arrives at a well-clued solution.

   You should not get the impression that this is a masterpiece, however; Hearse of Another Color has its flaws (one of them being the title), and in places the story shows its pulp origins (it was originally published as a serial in Short Stories in 1946).

   Still, the unusual background is well depicted (Constiner was a native of southern Ohio and traveled extensively in the Deep South), the plotting is competent, and the writing is above average. Come to think of it, considering the general run of Phoenix mysteries, maybe this is a masterpiece ? Phoenix’s, anyway.

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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.

[COMMENTS]   (1) A working bibliography for Merle Constiner by Peter Ruber can be found online at the Pulp Rack website.

(2) Covers for almost all of the Phoenix Press covers can be found online here, beginning with those published in 1936.

JAMES M. CAIN – Cloud Nine. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1984; paperback, 1987. Robert Hale, UK, hardcover, 1985. J. M. Dent & Sons, Canada, trade ppbk, 1987 (shown).

   In the 1930s and 1940s, James M. Cain was the most talked-about writer in America. His novels of that period, like the detective novels of Dashiell Hammett, a few years earlier, broke new ground in crime fiction.

   Until the publication of The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1934, sex was a topic handled with kid gloves and almost always peripheral to the central story line; Cain made sex the primary motivating force of his fiction, and presented it to his readers frankly, at times steamily. (Some of the scenes in Postman are downright erotic even by today’s standards.)

   But Cain, of course, was much more than a purveyor of eroticism. His lean, hard-edged prose caused critics to label him a “hard-boiled” writer, but he is much more than that, too. His best works are masterful studies of average people caught up and often destroyed by passion (adultery, incest, hatred, greed, lust). They are also sharp, clear portraits of the times and places in which they were written, especially California in the depression era Thirties.

   Cain’s success began to wane in the Fifties and Sixties, however, partly because of a desire to write novels of a different sort from those that had brought him fame, and partly because of a clear erosion of his talents (a seminal fear of all writers) brought about by advancing age.

   Cloud Nine is one of those “different” novels, written in the late 1960s when Cain was seventy-five. It was rejected by his publisher at that time and shelved. Resurrected for publication in 1984, seven years after Cain’s death, it was puffed by its publisher as “an important addition in contemporary American literature” and by an advance reviewer as “a minor masterpeice and publishing event of some note.”

   It is none of those things. It is, simply and sadly, a flawed novel of mediocre quality – a pale shadow of his early triumphs.

   The novel’s basic premise is solid. A teenage girl, Sonya Lang, comes to Maryland real-estate agent Graham Kirby with the news that his nasty half brother, Burwell, has raped her and that she is pregnant as a result. Through a complicated set of circumstances, Graham agrees to marry Sonya, initially for charitable reasons; but he soon falls in love with her.

   He then discovers that Burwell may be a murderer as well as a rapist, and that another murder may be part of Burwell’s future plans. The conflict between Burwell and Graham forms the central tension here, with Sonya as one catalyst and a million dollars in prime real estate as another.

   All the elements are present for a classic Cain novel, ones that should combine to keep the reader on tenterhooks, “anxious to find out what happens,” as Cain biographer Roy Hoopes says in an Afterword, “but always dreading the ending because of the horror [he senses] would be waiting – ‘the wish that comes true’ that Cain said most of his novels were about.”

   But the elements simply don’t mesh. The bulk of the novel is taken up with the relationship (much of it sexual) between Graham and Sonya, to the exclusion of everything else; Burwell doesn’t even appear on stage until page 108, and other major plot points are introduced sketchily and/or not developed until the final fifty to sixty pages.

   Graham is a rather dull and unappealing narrator, not at all one of “those wonderful, seedy, lousy no-goods that you have always understood,” as one of Cain’s friends described the protagonists of Postman and Double Indemnity.

   And the prose is anything but lean and hard-edged. It reads as if Cain, late in life, discovered and became enamoured of commas and clauses, as witness the novel’s opening sentence: “I first met her, this girl that I married a few days later, and that the papers have crucified under the pretense of glorification, on a Friday morning in June, on the parking lot by the Patuxent Building, that my office is in.”

   Not everything about Cloud Nine is weak; there are some crisp passages of dialogue reminiscent of vintage Cain, the character of Sonya is well developed, and there is power in the climactic scenes (although none of the existential terror and tragedy of the early books). But on balance, and like the other suspense novels Cain wrote late in life – The Magician’s Wife (1965), Rainbow’s End (1975), The Institute (1976) – it is minor and disappointing.

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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 M. CAIN – Serenade. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1937. US Paperback editions include: Penguin Books #621, 1947; Signet 1153, 1954; Bantam S-3864, 1968; Vintage, 1978.

Film: 1956, with Mario Lanza and Joan Fontaine.

   Though lesser known than his more famous The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Serenade is equally a masterpiece. Most of Cain’s best work is of novella length, but Serenade is an exception; a wider canvas is required for this more ambitious work with its subject matter that was daring even for Cain.

   The operatic undertone of Cain’s work comes to the fore here as an opera singer who loses his voice regains it by spending a night of lust and love with a Mexican whore in a deserted church during a thunderstorm.

   When John Howard Sharp returns to New York City and his singing career, the healing prostitute, Juana, is at his side; but they are soon faced with a threat from the past, the man whose homosexual liaison with Sharp had caused the singer?s traumatic loss of voice. In James M. Cain, there can only be one solution to such a situation: murder.

   But murder in Serenade isn’t born of greed and petty self-interest as it is in other Cain novels. The man and woman who share this sexual adventure are admirable and self-sacrificing. Their love is noble, and their tragedy is the deepest, most affecting in all of Cain.

   Cain wrote Serenade and his two other masterpieces in the 1930s; but his later, lesser (if interesting) works have tended to dilute his reputation. He is easily the peer of Hammett and Chandler, however, neither of whom wrote with Cain’s unabashed passion.

   Among his better later works are Past All Dishonor (1946) and The Butterfly (1947); they are, characteristically, in the first person. Mildred Pierce (1941) is the best of Cain?s third-person works. Several other completed novels are among Cain?s papers, and remain unpublished.

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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 M. CAIN – Double Indemnity.

Avon Murder Mystery Monthly #16; paperback original, 1943. First published in Liberty magazine in 1936 as the eight-part serial “Three of a Kind.” First hardcover edition: included in Three of a Kind (Knopf, 1944) with “Career in C Major” and “The Embezzler.” Many other reprint editions, both hardcover and paperback, including Avon #60, 1945 (shown).

Film: 1944, with Barbara Stanwyck & Fred MacMurray; adapted for the screen by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder.

   James M. Cain wrote of “the wish that comes true … I think my stories have some quality of the opening of a forbidden box, and that it is this rather than violence, sex or any of the things usually cited by way of explanation that gives them the drive so often noted.”

   Double Indemnity employs this same technique, already displayed in The Postman Always Rings Twice, with dazzling ease. Cain, making a quick buck writing a magazine serial in 1936, did not realize it at the time, but he was at the top of his form. Employing skillful, scalpel-like first-person narration, Cain tells his tale of love and murder from the point of view of a lover and murderer.

   Insurance man Walter Huff becomes embroiled in a plot to kill a beautiful woman’s husband. In addition to the sexual and financial incentives, Phyllis Nirdlinger manages to play upon Huff’s boredom and his pride – he knows the insurance game inside and out, and figures with his expertise he can beat it.

   The husband is murdered, according to Huff’s plan, without a hitch. But Huff is dogged by Keyes, a claims agent who also knows the insurance game inside and out. Huff begins to realize Phyllis is untrustworthy and just possibly insane, and falls in love with Lola, the daughter of the murdered man by a previous wife, who had very probably been yet another murder victim of Phyllis’s.

   Double Indemnity is a murder mystery turned inside out: We are forced inside the murderer’s skin, only to find it uncomfortably easy to identify with him, and then share his paranoia as the world crumbles piece by piece around him.

   Huff is a white-collar worker and he’s smart – smart enough to sense early on just how major a mistake he’s made. His sense of his own frailty and wrongdoing makes him a truly tragic protagonist, as does his sense of loss: “I knew I couldn’t have her and never could have her. I couldn’t kiss the girl whose father I killed.”

   Cain liked to explore the workings of businesses, and he never did it better than in Double Indemnity, through the characters of Huff and Keyes. But he also gave the pair an understated shared understanding of humanity (an aspect broadened in the widely respected Billy Wilder-directed, Raymond Chandler-scripted film version of 1944).

   In their final confrontation, Keyes says to Huff (renamed Neff in the film), “This is an awful thing you’ve done, Neff,” and Huff/Neff only says, “I know it.” And when Keyes says, “I kind of liked you, Neff,” Huff/Neff says, “I know. Same here.”

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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.