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).

     ———
   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)

JANICE LAW “The Best Thing for the Liver.” Madame Selina #2 (?). First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2012.

   According to the evidence found in this, perhaps the second of the Madame Selina stories. they all take place in either New York City, or as in this particular case, fairly close by, in upstate New York in the spa area around Saratoga.

   Due to some notoriety caused in an earlier adventure in which the folks at Tammany Hall were sorely annoyed, Madame Selina and her young assistant, an orphan by the name of Nip Tompkins, decide to take a sudden “vacation” from the big city.

   This also places the time of the take as being (well, I’m guessing) perhaps the mid-1800’s. As a medium with quite a following, Madame Selina is doing quite well, and the seances she conducts are quite the rage. There are times, however, when discretion is quite the right route to take.

   The story is told by young Nip, and he is rather an observant lad. He notices a young girl, the heir to a large fortune, who appears paler and paler each times he sees her. He wonders, of course, if she is ill. Since this is a mystery story, we the reader are in sync with the rest of the story as it plays out. The even greater pleasure obtained from the tale. however, is in the telling, elaborately fashioned after the times, but without flowing into the excesses of an era now so long ago.

         ____

Note: The online Crime Fiction Index includes the Madame Selina tales, but at this point of time, it is unaware that this story is part of the series. Here’s the list of her adventures, as known so far, with this one inserted in bold as (for now) number two:

      The Madame Selina series —

Madame Selina, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine June 2010
The Best Thing for the Liver (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July/August 2012
A Political Issue, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine September 2013
The Psychic Investigator, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine December 2013
The Irish Boy, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine January/February 2015
The Ghostly Fireman, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine April 2015
The Spiritualist, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine March 2016
The Organ Grinder’s Daughter, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July/August 2016
A Fine Nest of Rascals, (nv) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July/August 2019

   As for the author herself, Janice Law is one of very few mystery writers still producing fiction who are older than I am. Her most recently published work is listed as “Up and Gone,” Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2024.

SARA GRAN – Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. Claire DeWitt #1. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, June 2011. Mariner Books, trade paperback, May 2012.

   So once in a long while I read something written recently. Just to make sure I’m not missing anything. Just to make sure that no one’s figured it out.

   And by ‘figured it out’ I mean figured out how to write a hardboiled detective novel like they did in the good old days. I mean contemporaneously — not as a historical novel or as pastiche. In other words: I want hardboiled detectives doing their hardboiled detection right now. In this world we live in today. Not in some synthetic imagined yesteryear. Because if I wanna read yesteryear, I’ll go straight to the Hammett’s mouth. I don’t need a ventriloquist.

   Anywho. So this one is written contemporaneously. So there’s that.

   It takes place in New Orleans, in the aftermath of Katrina. A DA went missing in the flood. Presumed dead. Left all his considerable coin to his nephew. Who feels he owes it to his uncle to find out what happened to him. Until it begins to seem like maybe he had it coming.

   What is unique and disconcerting about Claire DeWitt is that she does not depend upon traditional investigation or procedure. Rather, she depends on vibes and seeming coincidence. She does not run down the list of suspects and evaluate alibis and hard evidence. Instead, she uses a lot of hallucinatory drugs and relies on leads received in dreams. She takes her cue from a (fictional) obscure French handbook called ‘Détection’ by Jacques Silette, from which she constantly quotes.

   And it’s the quotes that make this a compelling read. Not the detection. Which is hair-brained and unconvincing.

   Here are some of my favorite quotes:

         Be grateful for every scar life inflicts on you. Where we’re unhurt is where we are false.

         There are no coincidences. Just opportunities you’re too dumb to see, doors you’ve been too blind to step through.

         The truth lies — at the intersection of the forgotten and the ignored, in the neighborhood of all we have tried to forget.

         He’d been counting on a happy ending. But there is no such thing. Nothing ever really ends. The fat lady never really sings her last song. She only changes costumes and goes on to the next show.

         Consider the possibility that what we perceive as the future has already happened, and intuition is only a very good memory.

         There will always be people who need to be rescued. And there will never, ever be enough people to save them all.

         NO ONE IS INNOCENT. The only question is, how will you bear your portion of guilt?
   
   

SPOILER ALERT: The entire case is solved by a single ‘clue’. A discarded calling card randomly found near the table at the restaurant where Claire Dewitt initially meets with her client. Nearly the first thing Claire does in the book is find and pocket the random calling card.

   Nearly the last thing she does is call the number. And that’s it. That’s how the mystery is solved. Calling the number on a random calling card you found during your initial client meeting at a random restaurant. If she’d called the number at the beginning of the novel, the novel would be about three pages long.

   Everything that takes place between finding the card and calling the number is just one big mcguffin. Which is to say, the mcguffin is the mystery itself. END OF SPOILER ALERT.
   
   

VERDICT: Sara Gran is a really good writer. Claire Dewitt is a terrific character. Line by line, they are fresh and new. And I went out and bought a couple more Sara Gran (non-series) novels based on how good her writing is, if that tells you anything.

   But the mystery itself? The detection? Strictly for the birds.

   Previously reviewed here on this blog: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=22628
   

      The Claire DeWitt series —

1. Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (2011)
2. The Bohemian Highway (2013)
3. The Infinite Blacktop (2018)

   Speaking of The Old Days (wasn’t I?), back when I first got interested in Movies there were maybe a dozen books on the subject, mostly very shallow or abstrusely academic. A recent visit to the Library, though, reminded me how much times have changed. On fifty full shelves filled with books on movies I found detailed reference books, books devoted to single films, and a variety of carefully researched works on highly-specialized topics like science fiction serials, the “Road to” movies, Abbott Costello’s horror spoofs, and The Films of the Bowery Boys (Citadel, 1984) by David Hayes & Brent Walker.

   Now I don’t recommend the Bowery Boys to anyone; the humor is crude and forced at the best of times, and at their worst, the films are so shoddy as to defy their own existence. But I find them possessed of a raw energy and persistent vision that cannot be denied, and I confess I watch them every chance I get.

   The Boys started out in the New York production of Sidney Kingsley’s classic play Dead End, and when the property went to Hollywood in 1937 they went with it, where they were billed as the “Dead End Kids” in films like Angels with Dirty Faces until Warners lost interest, whereupon they took a step down to Universal as “the Little Tough Guys” for a series of “B”s and hung around for a couple of serials. In 1940 they osmosed into “the East Side Kids” at Monogram, and coalesced into the Bowery Boys in 1946, the form they remained in until the series demise ten years later.

   By this time, there were only two real members of the group: Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall, plus a changing roster of hangers-on, frequently abetted by Leo’s dad Bernard, as Louie Dumbrowski, owner of the minimalist soda shop where the boys hung out. In this universe the “Boys” – now quite middle-aged and looking every misspent minute of it – went through a series of situations frankly quite beyond their B-movie budgets, but impressive nonetheless, with romps through London, Paris, the Orient, Olde Englande, Africa ….

   They were also visited by every character actor with a few free days and some bills to pay. The roster will mean little to non-addicts, but those of us who once worshipped the grainy black-and-white images think fondly of Noah Beery, Erle Blore, Hillary Brooke, Iron Eyes Cody, Lloyd Corrigan, John Dehner, Douglas Dumbrille, Douglas Fowley, Steven Geray, Billy Gilbert, Mary Gordon (from the Sherlock Holmes movies) Raymond Hatton, Percy Helton, Warren Hymer, Ian Keith (once considered for Dracula) Bela Lugosi (who got the part and ended up here anyway), Fuzzy Knight, Martin Kosleck, Sheldon Leonard, Keye Luke from the Chan films, J. Farrell McDonald, Mike (Murder My Sweet) Mazurki, Alan Napier, Sig Rumann, Dan Seymour, Lionel Stander Craig Stevens, Glen Strange, Woody Strode, Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, Minerva Urecal, Lee Van Cleef and Clint Walker True, we remember them from much better films, but here they are nonetheless, plugging along in cinematic obscurity.

   The authors somehow manage to document all this, watch the films and do research on a series to which respectable critics wouldn’t give the time of day. And, as with the Boys themselves, one must admire their perseverance.

   Incidentally, one of the Bowery Boys movies actually received an Academy Award nomination, which it turns out is not exactly the same as being nominated for an Oscar, which is the basis of an amusing story which unfortunately cannot be related here.

BART SPICER – The Golden Door. Carney Wilde #3. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1951. Bantam #975, paperback, 1952.

   “The Golden Door” are the last three words on the Statue of Liberty:

         “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
         I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

   Carney Wilde has been able to sustain his private eye business through a retainer as security detail for the fancy Jonas Department Store in downtown Philadelphia. It’s been a pretty cushy gig — but lately it seems like there’s some insider theft going on. So Wilde has to earn his keep.

   While working on the case, the son of the Jonas Department Store mogul asks for help with an ‘unrelated issue’. The so-called unrelated issue has to do with stolen files from his non-profit agency “Future Americans”. “Future Americans” helps displaced eastern European Jewish survivors of WWII immigrate to the U.S., frequently by promising jobs with the Jonas Department Store. The missing files contain sensitive personal information of prospective immigrants.

   Of course, if you’ve read any detective stories before you know there’s no such thing as an unrelated case.

   The store thief ends up dead, and he’s not the only one. Turns out some of the “Future Americans” think the ‘golden door’ ought to be melted down and cashed in. And that’s pretty much just what they try to do.

   Carney Wilde is a terrific hardboiled detective and Bart Spicer exercises great narrative control. Despite seeming coincidences tying everything together, I never doubted the credibility of the story. No plodder, he’s a skillful plotter. Everything fits; you get a satisfying denouement.

   So I’ll say it again. I have no idea why the Carney Wilde books are out of print. They’re exciting vintage hardboiled detective novels. Some of the best I’ve read by anyone not named Chandler or Hammett.
   

      The Carney Wilde series —

The Dark Light (1949)
Blues For the Prince (1950)
The Golden Door (1951)
Black Sheep, Run (1951)
The Long Green (1952)
The Taming of Carney Wilde (1954)
Exit, Running (1959)

LOREN ESTLEMAN – Kill Zone. Peter Macklin #1. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1984. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback, 1986.

   In Kill Zone, Loren Estleman, who is best known for his rough-and-tumble. Chandlcrcsque private-eye novels, introduces Peter Macklin, “efficiency expert” — a euphemism for hit man. Macklin is the toughest character-hero or antihero-to arrive in crime fiction since Richard Stark’s Parker; and Estleman’s prose the hardest-boiled since the days of Paul Cain  and Cap Shaw’s Black Mask. Macklin and Estleman, in fact, would probably have been too grimly realistic even for the pioneering Shaw and his magazine.

   A terrorist group takes control of a Lake Erie excursion boat with 800 passengers, rigging it as a floating bomb. They demand the release of three prisoners within ten days. Michael Boniface, the head of the Detroit mob. offers his assistance from his prison cell in return for parole, but it is not until the FBI discovers that one of the passengers on the boat is a cabinet member’s daughter that they take him up on it. Boniface’s assistance is in the form of his top “efficiency expert,” Peter Macklin.

   Macklin tries to concentrate on the business at hand while dealing with an alcoholic wife. the knowledge that someone close to him has betrayed him, and the fact that he is being stalked by a killer working for Charles Maggiore, acting head of the mob, who does not want Boniface to get out of prison.

   Estleman takes an expertise previously displayed in PI and western novels (one of his westerns, Aces and Eights, won the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award for Best Novel of 1982), and in applying it to a different type of novel has once again scored high marks. Fans of hard-boiled fiction won’t want to miss it — or subsequent Peter Macklin titles: Kill Zone is the first of at least three.

     ———
   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.
   

      The complete Peter Macklin series —

1. Kill Zone (1984)
2. Roses Are Dead (1985)
3. Any Man’s Death (1986)
4. Something Borrowed, Something Black (2002)
5. Little Black Dress (2005)

KURT STEEL – Murder for What? Hank Hyer #2. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1936. Select Publications, digest-sized paperback, 1943. Also published, perhaps in abridged form, in Detective Mystery Novel, Fall 1948.

   
   McRae is a gambler who is in a poker game with Hank Hyer when the subject of Kip Shannon comes up. Hyer, a NY based Private Eye in the Sam Spade/Michael Shayne tradition hasn’t got much use for Shannon, who married Broadway star and Hyer friend Lilith. It seems Shannon is back in New York and wanted for questioning in the murder of a policeman in his cabin upstate, though another man has been arrested for the crime. Nonetheless McRae seems unusually interested.

   Shannon is pretty much a washout, playing around on Lilith and blowing a career as a screenwriter in Hollywood before getting involved in some shady business with some shady people while wandering around the Pacific and Taos, New Mexico (already a well known artists retreat in 1936).

   
   But Hank barely makes it out the doorway with his winnings (hanging on to the money in his wallet is a running theme here) when reporter Corey Hilton shows up, the third wheel in the Shannon/Lilith relationship, dragging Hank to his apartment where Shannon is hiding out.

   Hank can avoid anything but trouble and for Lilith’s sake agrees to help Shannon against his better judgment, and barely gets out of Hilton’s door before he his sapped and kidnapped by two hoods mistaking him for Shannon.

   His “ride” is interrupted when the weather causes the car to wreck, and an annoyed Hank with a broken wrist finds himself near where Shannon is wanted by the police just south of Woodstock and does some investigating when Lilith shows up and on the train back both of them find themselves ducking the hoods that kidnapped Hank and followed Lilith looking for Kip.

   And what does sexy blonde siren Mrs. Venice Malinkell, one of the great femme fatale’s in the genre, friend of the gambler McRae, have to do with it all and what does she want when she shows up with a gun at Hank’s apartment where Shannon has been hiding out?

   Then too, why did Shannon’s father hire Hank to investigate Kip anonymously through a shady cousin

   Then Kip Shannon shows up in Hank’s apartment murdered…

   Kurt Steel, Rudolph Hornaday Kagey, wrote nine fast moving Hank Hyer novels about the tough, tight with a dollar, New York PI much in the style of Brett Halliday and Cleve Adams (though Hyer is more likable than any Adams protagonist). The books did well and were often reprinted in the pulps (as this one was in Detective Novels). They are fast paced and well written with Hyer one of the more believable private eyes with a nice balance of action, plot, and colorful characters.

   Hyer debuted in 1936, this was his second entry, and had a good decade long run before Kagey died in 1946 at forty-two bringing the Hyer saga to an end just as the paperback era was starting.

   As in any of the Hyer novels Hank finds things getting complicated as the case develops with multiple murders (Shannon’s father), gangsters, the Feds, and a fortune in counterfeit money and plates involved before Hank and a state patrolman storm Shannon’s snowbound cabin filled with heavily armed hoods and shoot it out with blazing tommy-guns and Hank wraps it all up neatly back in his apartment in New York nailing the murderer behind it all.

   Steel writes well and has the rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, tight plotting, and colorful characters of the genre down to a science. Along with Richard Reeves’ Cellini Smith, he is probably one of the last great eyes of the era deserving to be resurrected and rediscovered and less well known because he didn’t have a presence in the major detective pulps.. My favorite of the Hyer novels is Judas Incorporated from 1939, perhaps the only one to appear from a major paperback publisher (Dell).

   Murder for What? is a surprisingly good second effort that reads as if it were written by a veteran of the genre. I give it the highest recommendation for any lover of the classic hard-boiled novel of the period.
   

         The Hank Hyer series —

Murder of a Dead Man (n.) Bobbs 1935
Murder for What? (n.) Bobbs 1936
Murder Goes to College (n.) Bobbs 1936 [
Murder in G-Sharp (n.) Bobbs 1937
Crooked Shadow (n.) Little 1939
Judas, Incorporated (n.) Little 1939
Dead of Night (n.) Little 1940
Madman’s Buff (n.) Little 1941
Ambush House (n.) Harcourt 1943

AARON ELKINS – Fellowship of Fear. Gideon Oliver #1. Walker, hardcover, 1982. Popular Library, paperback, 1986. TV series: Quoting from Wikipedia “Gideon Oliver is a prime time television series that ran on the ABC television network between February 1989 and May 1989 as part of the ABC Mystery Movie rotation, along with B.L. Stryker, Kojak and Columbo. On the air for only five episodes, the series starred Louis Gossett Jr., and was created by Dick Wolf.”

   The early 1980s spawned a great many new mystery writers, and Aaron Elkins is one of the best of them. This first novel introduces us to Gideon Oliver, a young anthropology professor (Elkins himself teaches anthropology in northern California) who signed up for a summer teaching stint in Europe with the U.S. Overseas College. He’s recovering from the death of his beloved wife the year before and needs a break from that reality. And he’s never been to Europe.

   Oliver gets a change of pace, all right. Far from the confines of academic life, he’s cast as the main character in an international spy ring — but not until he’s been robbed, attacked, and followed all over Europe does he take it seriously. He then teams up with John Lau, a U.S. security officer, who’s not quite so naive about these matters. After being suitably impressed by Oliver’s fine investigative mind — he is a physical anthropologist, after all, and used to solving mysteries with little more than a sliver of bone and some ash for evidence — Lau teams with him and they attack the spy operation with fresh enthusiasm.

   Elkins has a good sense of contemporary character, dialogue, and plot. Gideon Oliver is a good man, and Elkins is good, too. He writes sparsely, to the point, and is cagey enough to keep us wondering until the very end.

   Elkins’s second novel, The Dark Place ( 1983), also features Oliver and is set in the Olympic National Park in Washington State. It also has the distinction of being the first mystery to involve the ongoing hunt for Sasquatch, otherwise known as Bigfoot.

         ———
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.
   

      The Gideon Oliver series —

1 Fellowship of Fear (1982)
2 The Dark Place (1983)
3 Murder in the Queen’s Armes (1985)
4 Old Bones (1987)
5 Curses! (1989)
6 Icy Clutches (1990)
7 Make No Bones (1991)
8 Dead Men’s Hearts (1994)
9 Twenty Blue Devils (1997)
10 Skeleton Dance (2000)
11 Good Blood (2004)
12 Where There’s a Will (2005)
13 Unnatural Selection (2006)
14 Little Tiny Teeth (2007)
15 Uneasy Relations (2008)
16 Skull Duggery (2009)
17 Dying on the Vine (2012)
18 Switcheroo (2016)

KAREN KIJEWSKI – Honky Tonk Kat. Kat Colorado #7. Putnam,  hardcover, 1996. Berkley, paperback, 1997.

   I think Kijewski is in the  group (along with Barnes, Grant, and Rozan) of female PI writers just below Muller and Grafton, and ahead of Paretsky and everybody else. My only quarrel with her lies in her seemingly gender-linked trait of endowing her heroine with obnoxious friends and/ or relatives.

   A childhood friend of Kat’s is a country and western star now, and she’s got troubles. Someone is sending her notes that are disquieting and vaguely threatening, and she wants Kat’s help. She’s not being very forthcoming about her past, though, and Kat is having a hard time getting a handle on it all. There’s an abusive ex-husband, a father that vanished when she was two, and a cousin who’s popped up from out of nowhere who wants to be a star, too, and who knows what else. Then someone is killed.

   Interesting that Kijewski and Muller both chose a country and western star background for their latest, though there aren’t many other plot similarities. This is a good, solid PI novel, of a piece with Kijewski’s earlier work except for a welcome lessening of Kat’s personal problems and the presence of her aforementioned obnoxious friends and relatives. See, Karen? You can do it.

   Good first-person narration, interesting background, good book.

      The Kat Colorado series —

1. Katwalk (1989)
2. Katapult (1990)
3. Kat’s Cradle (1992)
4. Copy Kat (1992)
5. Wild Kat (1994)
6. Alley Kat Blues (1995)
7. Honky Tonk Kat (1996)
8. Kat Scratch Fever (1997)
9. Stray Kat Waltz (1998)

LINDA GRANT – Lethal Genes. Cat Saylor #5. Scribner, hardcover, 1996. Ivy, paperback, 1997.

   With her four previous books Grant has become one of my favorite female authors. She isn’t a glib as Grafton, or as intense and angst-ful as Paretsky, or as focused on relationships as Muller, but her stories have substance and well-developed characters, and are very well written. Her business-world settings are a refreshing change, too.

   San Francisco Pl Catherine Saylor steps into a new world when she takes a case involving a biotech lab at the University of California. Someone is sabotaging experiments in cutting-edge dot com gene research, and no one there can figure out why, much less who.

   Cat finds a fair amount of academic jealousy, and some pretty lax security procedures, but the culprit and a motive prove more elusive. Then someone dies, and someone else is killed, and the com patch becomes a deadly place.

   My only cavil first off: the villain as eventually revealed wasn’t totally convincing to me, because I didn’t think the character and motivation were nearly well-enough established. That out of the way, I thought  this was Grant’s usual excellent job. She focuses more on the crime and less on the personal life of the protagonist than do most of the female, authors, which is at all to say that Saylor is not a well-drawn and engaging character — she is. Grant’s first-person narration is smooth and paced nicely, and her prose straightforward. She remains one of my favorites.

      The Catherine Sayler series —

1. Random Access Murder (1988)
2. Blind Trust (1990)
3. Love Nor Money (1991)
4. A Woman’s Place (1994)
5. Lethal Genes (1996)
6. Vampire Bytes (1998)