GLORIA DANK – Friends Till the End. Bernard Woodruff & Snooky Randolph #1. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1989.

   This light-hearted tale of murder in suburban Connecticut reminded ma a bit at first of Richard Lockridge, with a little less sparkle but with a lot more off-the-wall humor that eventually teeters into out-and-out wackiness. Hardboiled fiction it isn’t.

   Dead (of poison) is the wealthy wife of a man who claims he was the intended victim, and to give him credit, he actually is the next target. Give this one a “2” (out of 10) for ingenuity of plot, and give Bernard and Snooky (who work out the solution together) a “6” or “7”.

        The Bernard Woodruff & Snooky Randolph series —

Friends Till the End. Bantam 1989.
Going Out in Style. Bantam 1990.
As the Sparks Fly Upward. Doubleday 1992.
The Misfortunes of Others. Doubleday 1993.

[UPDATE] 11-04-18. Since I didn’t take the space to explain who the two mismatched detectives are in this series, let me do it now: Bernard Woodruff, a curmudgeonly children’s book author, and Snooky Randolph, who has never found a vocation and lives off a trust fund, are brothers-in-law who in spite of their differences somehow manage to solve mysteries together.

   Anyone remember John Roeburt? My hunch is that few do even if they’re regular readers of this column. I believe he first swam into my ken in the late 1950s, when I was a teen and he was story editor and occasional scriptwriter for NBC-TV’s THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ELLERY QUEEN (1958-59), starring George Nader and later Lee Philips.

   Being heavily into EQ at that time, I made it a point to check out this Roeburt guy and found several of his novels at my friendly neighborhood used book store. Prices were unbelievable back then: you could buy a hardcover for a quarter, a paperback for a dime. I picked up all the Roeburt I could find but, and weirdo that I am, read few if any of his books. Recently I decided he might be a good subject for a column and pulled down a few of his early novels from my shelves. Was I right? You tell me.

   A New Yorker from square one, Roeburt was born on March 15, 1909. At least one website claims that, like myself, he graduated from NYU Law School, probably during the pit of the Depression, but neither the Law School Alumni Office nor the Registrar’s Office has been able to confirm this.

   If he was an attorney, we don’t know whether he ever practiced law. Most of his career as a writer he spent in radio and later TV but he did turn out a book every few years. Outside the crime genre he’s best known for EARTHQUAKE (1959), a mainstream novel nominally written by TV comic Milton Berle and himself.

   This book had nothing in common with the 1974 Big Disaster movie of the same name, co-scripted by Mario Puzo and starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy and Lorne Greene, with special effects out the wazoo. Titles aren’t copyrightable but theoretically Berle and Roeburt could have sued on a claim of unfair competition.

   However, to succeed on that basis you have to establish that your title has developed a secondary meaning, i.e. it’s identified with you in the public mind the way, say, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is identified with Harper Lee. In any event there was no such suit and Roeburt wasn’t around to bring it. He had died of a heart attack on May 22, 1972 at his summer home on Fire Island.

   His first novel, JIGGER MORAN (Greenberg, 1944), which I picked up for a cool quarter back in my teens, is hard to classify. On the surface it’s a Mean Streets thriller in the Raymond Chandler tradition (although without first-person narration), but every so often it tries futilely to break out of its hardboiled mold and enter the mainstream, abandoning its protagonist for a few pages now and then, even offering a flashback to the childhood of one of the other principals.

   Jigger, whom one can easily imagine being played on the big screen by Bogart, is nominally a cab driver but actually an amoral “fixer” with both a Ph.D. and a law school diploma, which Roeburt insists on calling a degree De Juris. (This is both bad Latin and dead wrong: in Roeburt’s time what you got when you graduated from a law school was called an Ll.B., for Bachelor of Laws, although by my own graduation year, 1967, the name had been changed to J.D., for Juris Doctor. In any event, the second Moran novel tells us that he’s been disbarred for years.)

   Numbers racket kingpin Little Joey, whom one can easily imagine being played by Edward G. Robinson, hires Moran to clear him of the murder of a German-American doctor who apparently won a huge amount of money from Joey’s organization not long before he was found battered almost beyond recognition in his Yorkville home office. The trail leads Jigger to the usual zoo of lowlifes — including a psychotic whose wife died after a botched abortion at the doctor’s hands and several pseudo-intellectual leftists from Greenwich Village — and ultimately to a Nazi propaganda mill.

   What makes JIGGER MORAN stand out from the usual tough-guy thriller is that it’s studded with lines of the sort Bill Pronzini in an inspired phrase has called “alternative flapdoodle.” I’ll quote just a few, complete with page references so no one will think I’m making this stuff up:

    Jigger gave the cherchez la femme faucet a quarter-inch twist….(35)

    Jigger thrust a nail-file through a crack in Wang’s double-decker subtleties as a reminder that the good doctor had two strikes on him and Jigger was pitcher and umpire both. (129)

    Jigger pummeled his way through the mob cacaphonizing at Johnny’s bar…. (133)

    “Used to be a ranking sluggerdutch from Chicago.” (139)

    The office girl squared her breasts as Jigger zipped past…. (201)

    [H]e looked like a man jumping out of his skin. (208)

   Roeburt uses a number of throwaway references to evoke the 1944 atmosphere but they don’t always work. The Euro-café filled with “Viennese refugees who took fright with the bullet that reduced Dolfuss to a footnote in history” (209) is okay if the reader remembers that Engelbert Dollfuss (with two l’s), chancellor of Austria, had been shot by the Nazis in 1934.

   But what about Jigger’s prediction that he and a certain cop “will be principals in a rewrite of the Becker-Rosenthal case” (189)? Personally I don’t feel like going online to track down that ancient case, and I suspect very few readers would have wanted to do it back in that cenozoic era before the Web.

   Roeburt does even worse when he ventures onto religious turf. The well-known Catholic apologist and 1950s TV personality Fulton Sheen morphs in his hands into “Monsignor Sheean” (209), but that’s a mere bag of shells beside the unforgettable reference to “the St. James version of the Old Testament” on the same page!

   JIGGER MORAN was reprinted twice after its hardcover appearance: as THE CASE OF THE TEARLESS WIDOW (HandiBooks pb #46, 1946) and as WINE, WOMEN AND MURDER (Avon pb #807, 1958). I don’t have either of these editions and don’t know whether Roeburt cleaned up any of the wacko lines from the original but, as we’ll see shortly, there’s reason to believe he might have.

   One notices a certain cousinly resemblance between the beginning of JIGGER MORAN and that of Roeburt’s follow-up novel, THERE ARE DEAD MEN IN MANHATTAN (Mystery House, 1946). Jigger is pulled out of a crap game in a nightclub kitchen by Dixie Travers, a gangster driven out of New York and now holed up across the Hudson in Jersey City, and offered a large fee if he’ll clear up a murder.

   This time, however, the gangster himself is not under suspicion. The guy in the shadow of the hot seat is Blaine Fowler, who’s on trial for the murder of his mistress and almost certain to be convicted. Why does Travers care? Because, he says, Fowler owes him $50,000 in gambling debts and can’t pay up if he fries.

   Soon after Jigger takes the case, one of the Fowler jurors is (non-fatally) poisoned, a mistrial is declared and Fowler is released on bail. (Yeah, right.) Next someone tries to shoot the poisoned juror in his hospital bed, and Jigger finds himself in the thick of a conspiracy involving, among other notables, the DA who put Fowler on trial. Not only is our hero beaten to a pulp, which is par for the course in vintage PI novels, but he also gets scalped, which I think makes him unique in the tough-guy genre.

   In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle (March 17, 1946) Tony Boucher called the book “a highly individual and effective variant on the hardboiled school” despite its employment of “one of the oldest cliché solutions….” No, the murderer is not a woman Jigger has had sex with. Through the pages of this caper he remains chaste. Who’d want sex with a scalped man anyway?

   Various plot components make it clear that Raymond Chandler and especially FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (1940) were very much on Roeburt’s mind at the time: witness the Moose Malloy-like hulk who administers the scalping to Jigger, and the phony sanitarium in the later chapters. The weirdo lines that marked JIGGER MORAN are fewer in number this time around but just as flapdoodlesque:

    “Christy… doormanned lugubriously, tallying all incoming customers with a clockometer.” (19) “Fowler can-canned his bottom to the edge of the bunk and his feet touched the floor.” (44) In the abridged paperback edition of DEAD MEN, which I happen to have (Graphic pb #42, 1951), the first of these howlers is cut completely and the second is toned down to the conventional “Fowler sat up in his bunk and swung around.”

   It’s revisions like these that lead me to suspect that if we had one or both of the paperback editions of JIGGER MORAN we’d find similar instances of — if I may perpetrate my own Roeburtism — second-thoughting.

   In the third and final Jigger Moran novel, CORPSE ON THE TOWN (Graphic pb #27, 1950), Roeburt dispenses with weirdo lines except for one or two like “Jigger smiled a shot of Vitamin W” (37). This time around the track we get much more dialogue — which is natural considering that so much of his writing took the form of radio drama — plus the only opening scene in any of the three that can reasonably be called noirish.

   On a rain-soaked evening, Jigger drops off a passenger in front of an apartment building on Greenwich Village’s Charlton Street and is about to turn in his cab and call it a night when a stranger he can barely see asks him to deliver a trunk to the Railway Express office near Penn Station, offering a fee of five bucks, which in 1950 was a princely sum for a short haul.

   On 31st Street he’s cut off by four cops in official cars and forced to accompany them to the police garage, where the trunk is taken off his cab and found to contain the body of a young woman, battered beyond recognition. The trail leads him to a wealthy upstate New York family, a police chief with a murderous streak, a professor of creative writing who was mentoring the dead woman, a red-bearded Greenwich Village artist with a penchant for blackmail and all sorts of other pungent characters.

   Since the book was published as a paperback original it was reviewed nowhere, not even in the New York Times, although if it had appeared a couple of years later Tony Boucher would certainly have covered it in his “Criminals at Large” column, which began in July 1951.

   What Tony would have said we’ll never know. Personally I found the book sort of confusing for a number of reasons, for instance the will that Roeburt summarizes for us in Chapter Nine:

   Wealthy grandmother disinherited her son and left most of her estate to her granddaughter provided she gets married before she turns 21. Would a court have found that provision contrary to public policy and void? One would expect that if Roeburt were a lawyer he’d at least bring up the issue but not a single word is said about it.

   The granddaughter did get married before turning 21 but her husband was also her first cousin. Is that legal? It is in New York today and presumably was back in 1950. But suppose she gets married before age 21 and then dies? We are told that “the old lady didn’t think to insure against such a contingency.”

   Well, duh! You don’t have to be a law school graduate to know that in that event the estate goes wherever the granddaughter’s will says it goes or, if she didn’t leave a will, to her nearest relatives by intestate succession.

   There are other sources of confusion too but it would be boring to harp on them.

   Several years after the novel’s first appearance, a new version was published as CASE OF THE HYPNOTIZED VIRGIN (Avon pb #730, 1956), whose front cover informs us in small print that it was “based on” CORPSE ON THE TOWN. The main difference between the two titles is that in 1956 Roeburt inserted several hundred words of new material about hypnosis and reincarnation, obviously designed to cash in on the then wildly popular book THE SEARCH FOR BRIDEY MURPHY. The additions were no improvements.

   Three Roeburts in one column is quite enough. If I decide to talk about his other books — notably TOUGH COP (1949) and THE HOLLOW MAN (1954), both featuring Johnny Devereaux, and the stand-alone crime novels THE LUNATIC TIME (1956) and THE CLIMATE OF HELL (1958), not to mention his countless scripts for radio and TV — it will have to be on another occasion. Probably not next month. If I may quote the “Send In the Clowns” song, maybe next year.

   The popularity of the canny lawyer in fiction dates at least back to stories told about Abe Lincoln and were popularized by characters like Post’s Randolph Mason, Baroness Orczy’s Skin ‘O My Tooth, and Train’s Mr. Tutt. Post and Orczy both featured lawyers very much in the Mason tradition — Randolph Mason much closer to the edge than Perry ever thought of being.

   But there is no question the Prohibition and then the Depression era saw a sharp rise in outlaw heroes and slick legal types who fought for the little guy by any means possible. The whole spirit of the New Deal era was the idea of the little guy taking on the powers that be whether it be the rich or the state with gentleman adventurers, adventuresses, masked heroes, outlaws and some gangsters, clever defense attorneys, independent minded private eyes, and wise cracking reporters dominating the popular imagination.

   What Gardner did in the Perry Mason novels that was unique was to marry the hard-boiled voice and attitude to the classic detective story and the court-room drama. It may seem formulaic today, but fictional lawyers outside of plays didn’t solve their cases with brilliant courtroom tactics in much of the pre-Mason mystery fiction. It isn’t just Perry Mason who is a brilliant creation, but the entire milieu he operates in.

   Prior to Perry you might get the rare courtroom mystery, but most would amount to perhaps Dr. Thorndyke giving evidence, or Lord Peter speaking before a trial in the House of Lords, Uncle Abner in a short story, or perhaps Mr. Tutt, but there was no one quite like Perry Mason and nothing like those dramatic courtroom solutions Gardner provided. If he didn’t invent the genre, he honed it and perfected it, and gave it a new a vital life on the printed page.

   I always liked Gardner’s Doug Selby DA books, but I have to admit Selby is pretty colorless compared to his nemesis A.B. Carr or Perry. Gardner wisely made Perry part rogue, part detective, part gun fighter, and part crusading knight to the point we never really needed to know much about Perry as a human being, just that he was there to protect the innocent and risk everything doing it.

LAURIE R. KING – To Play the Fool. Kate Martinelli & Al Hawkin #2. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1995. Bantam Crimeline, paperback, 1996.

   King won a First Novel Edgar for A Grave Talent, which I thought was very good. She followed that with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, [the first of her Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes mysteries], and now Martinelli and Hawkin are back.

   [Back] finally, after the traumatic events of the first book were followed offstage by another case almost as bad. Now they are investigating the murder of a homeless person, and smack in the middle of the case is a charismatic and enigmatic man known only as “Brother Erasmus.” He is something of a Holy Fool who speaks only in quotations, ad he is at once their strongest hope and biggest barrier to solving the case. Before all the puzzles are solved, someone else has died.

   I like King’s writing very much. She is adept at characterization and dialogue, and it has a real sense of San Francisco that she imparts without overdoing it. At the center of this book as with her first is a superbly drawn character — here it’s the fool, Erasmus. The plot, and Matrinelli, revolve around him. Hawkin is there but less present in this one. Martinelli is a sympathetic human being, and her relationship with her lesbian lover is very well handled.

   While I enjoyed the book a great deal as I read it, I think it has two problems, one of them major. The first is the large amount of material about the Fool’s involvement is worked into the book — and understanding of it is central to the plot, but if the reader doesn’t find it interesting, it will be a real stumbling block. It wasn’t for me, but I think it might be for many.

   The second, however, is an eventual solution to the crime that I found unlikely to the point of being unbelievable, which went a long way toward negating my earlier enjoyment. Granted, the mystery of the crime was less important to what King was attempting than was the mystery of Erasmus, but it was still a downer.

        The Kate Martinelli mysteries —

A Grave Talent (1993)
To Play the Fool (1995)
With Child (1996)
Night Work (2000)
The Art of Detection (2006)

DENNIS LEHANE – A Drink Before the War. Patrick Kenzie & Angie Gennaro #1. Harcourt & Brace, hardcover, 1994. HarperTorch, paperback, July 1996. Reprinted several times since.

   This is a first novel. Lehane was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and still lives in the Boston area. He has worked as a teacher of writing and a counselor of abused children, and that’s all we know about him.

   Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are private detectives who are natives of Boston’s blue-collar Dorchester section, and still live there. The case that will change their lives starts simply enough: according to a prominent local politician, a black cleaning woman has stolen some important Statehouse documents from his office. He wants her found, and he wants them back.

   Finding the woman isn’t that difficult; that’s their profession. Finding the “documents” and staying alive are two other stories entirely. The crime leads to other crimes, everybody’s a victim, and Boston’s ghettos threaten to erupt into an apocalyptic gang war — with our intrepid stalkers in the middle of it.

   Well, hell. I thought I has my choice for Best First Novel of 1994 locked in months ago, with Mallory’s Oracle. Now along comes Lehane with A Drink Before the War, and all of a sudden the short list has grown by one, and I have to at least think about re-opening the polls.

   This is a powerful story and a superbly written one. It doesn’t break any new ground in the private detective patch, and the plot is a little more cowboy than I usually like, but my goodness it’s well done.

   Lehane does everything well, but what he does best are characters and prose. Kenzie and Gennaro are beautifully crafted protagonists. They have depth, and they come alive on the page. The book’s other characters are equally well crafted, though in less depth, with not a false note struck among them.

   It’s all done with some of the best prose I’ve read this year. It’s not lyrical, but it’s witty, strong, and evocative. The dialogue rings true, and Lehane brings the meaner, seedier part of Boston into the living room of your mind. The book is about damaged people and a damaged society, and who does what to whom, and how, and why.

   It’s bloody, and it’s hard, and I think it’ll stay with you a while. What it is more than anything else is good; astonishingly so for a first novelist, and I can’t wait for the encore, If this doesn’t win a First Novel Shamus the PWA will lose what little credibility they have with me.

[UPDATE.]   A Drink Before the War was not nominated for an Edgar, but as Barry suggested it should, it did win a Shamus from the PWA as Best First Novel for the year 1994.

      The Patrick Kenzie & Angie Gennaro series —

A Drink Before the War (1994)
Darkness, Take My Hand (1996)
Sacred (1997)
Gone, Baby, Gone (1998)
Prayers For Rain (1999)
Moonlight Mile (2010)

ROBERT SHECKLEY – Live Gold. Stephen Dain #3. Bantam J2401, paperback; 1st printing, July 1962.

   I’m not sure, but Live Gold may be unique in the annals of detective fiction. We know the villain from very early on. In fact over 90 percent of the story follows along with him on his latest arduous journey across northern Africa, circa 1951-52, with a contingent of perhaps 400 very indigent Muslims on their once in a lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca.

   Or so they believe. What they do not know is that their guide, Mustapha ibn Harith, is leading them instead straight into slavery. Live gold.

   What we the reader do not know is which one the seven Europeans traveling with them is the international agent Stephen Dain. Each and every one might be the man, but neither Harith nor his sycophant assistant, a Greek named Prokopulous, can determine which one he is — and their attempts to do so form the thrust of the story.

   Robert Sheckley was, of course, far better known for his long career of writing witty and often outright comic science fiction, usually in the short story form. The wit is often present in this, Dain’s third recorded adventure. I don’t think Sheckley could have stopped himself if he had tried. It’s subtle, though, and a reader unfamiliar with his style of writing may not even notice.

   What I found amusing personally, for example, was Sheckley’s apparent fondness for place name dropping, a trend that takes place every so often throughout the book. Take this passage from page 109:

   After a while one begins to wonder if Sheckley had ever been near any of these places. The alternative, of course, is that he had a really good atlas at his disposal.

      The Stephen Dain series —

Calibre .50 (1961)
Dead Run (1961)
Live Gold (1962)
White Death (1963)
Time Limit (1967)

DAVID DANIEL – The Heaven Stone. Alex Rasmssen #1. St Martin’s, hardcover, 1994. No paperback edition.

   This is Daniel’s first novel, and it won the PWA/St. Martin’s Best first PI Novel Award for 1993. It’s blurbed by Jerry Healy and Les Roberts, and Les, at least, honestly liked it.

   Alex Rasmussen is a PI in Lowell, Massachusetts, an ex-cop who left the force under a cloud. He’s hired by a social worker to look into the murder of one of her clients, a Cambodian the police think was involved with the drug trade. She’s convinced he wasn’t, and wants Rasmussen to prove her right.

   He doubts he can help her, but as an old friend on the force sent her to him, he agrees to see what he can find out. In the end, it’s more than he wants to know.

   I can see how this won the St. Martin’s contest. It’s better than most first novels, as good as a lot of PI fiction being written these days, and better than some. Daniels writes smooth prose and has an engaging lead, a certified old-style PI — pure of heart, empty of wallet, full of wisecracks. What’s not to like?

   Well, the plot wasn’t anything special, and there was some foolishness with the police that an editor should have caught, if there was any such thing as an editor any more … but I guess the main problem was that it’s the same old recipe, and the ingredients weren’t special enough to make the end product anything really out of the ordinary.

   If Healy or Roberts had written it, I imagine I’d say “decent, but he can do better.” Maybe Daniel can, too.

      The Alex Rasmussen series —

1. The Heaven Stone. October 1994.
2. The Skelly Man. September 1995.
3. Goofy Foot. February 2004.
4. The Marble Kite. April 2005.

RALPH DENNIS – The Buy Back Blues. (Jim) Hardman #12. Popular Library, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1977.

   In this, the last of the Hardman series, he’s hired in Chapter One to find a waitress’s missing husband, Bob, a bartender by trade. The man turns up dead, but Hardman has already made a connection between him and several break-ins and thefts in homes after parties where he’d worked. The insurance company is interested, and Hardman has a new client.

   I may be wrong — it’s been a while since I’ve read any of the earlier books in the series (over forty years) — but many of the rough edges that Hardman had in his earlier adventures have long since worn away. He’s overweight (“pudgy”), white and balding. Assisting him on all of his cases is Hump Evans, who is black, over six feet six inches tall, and a former star football player.

   There is an elephant in the room whenever this series is discussed. Both this series and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books started in 1974, and even though Dennis had the first seven Hardman books published that year, I don’t think Parker read any of them. Or as Ed Gorman once wrote, mixed race detective duos have been around since at least the days of the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

   It has also been noted over the years that Hardman’s appearance (read his description above…) is at some odds with the publisher’s marketing strategy for the series, which makes the books out to be Executioner style men’s adventure paperbacks (…and compare with the cover art in the image provided). Any guy who bought one of them on the basis of the covers had to have been badly disappointed.

   But what Dennis did provide for the series is a drive that keeps the stories constantly moving, even though the stories are otherwise standard enough PI fare, and The Buy Back Blues is no exception. At the end of the book, Hardman and his off-and-on girl friend are back on again, and if the series had to end with Hardman standing at the window of a mountain cabin with Marcy still in bed while he’s watching the mist rising from the valley below, why that’s not a bad conclusion at all.

   The Jim Hardman & Hump Evans series —

Hardman 1: Atlanta Deathwatch (1974)
Hardman 2: The Charleston Knife’s Back In Town (1974)
Hardman 3: The Golden Girl & All (1974)
Hardman 4: Pimp for the Dead (1974)
Hardman 5: Down Among the Jocks (1974)
Hardman 6: Murder’s Not an Odd Job (1974)
Hardman 7: Working for the Man (1974)
Hardman 8: The Deadly Cotton Heart (1976)
Hardman 9: The One-Dollar Rip-Off (1977)
Hardman 10: Hump’s First Case (1977)
Hardman 11: The Last of the Armageddon Wars (1977)
Hardman 12: The Buy Back Blues (1977)

DANA CHAMBERS – She’ll Be Dead by Morning. Jim Steele #3. The Dial Press, hardcover, 1940. Popular Library #238, paperback, no date stated [1950]. Popular Library Eagle EB-5, paperback, 1953.

   The gimmick in this tough guy detective series is that Jim Steele is not a private eye, even though all of his cases, which he seems take on only as favors to friends of friends, are precisely the kinds of cases that PI’s take on.

   In this one he’s “hired” to help a wealthy old man to help his daughter get though the trouble she’s obviously in. He’s recently lost two of his other children to accidents, so Steele has no problem in saying yes at the same time he’s tearing up the blank check he’s offered.

   In other books in the series Steele’s day job is said to be hat of writing radio thrillers, but in this one, he calls himself only a businessman, but no ordinary businessman gets into the kind of scrape that he does in this one.

   Which starts out with a bang. Whatever trouble that Suzy is involved with, there is someone who wants him off the case, and badly. After being shot through the arm Steele is told to get out of town — to take a train to Chicago — and only if he does, will his wife be released. She has been kidnapped and in the hands of the bad guys.

   Steele gets on the train, followed closely by someone obviously assigned to keep an eye on him, but he dumps the guy off the train, follows suit and finds the man dead. He has until the train’s arrival in Chicago, which he will not be on, to find whoever has his wife and rescue her.

   An action-packed adventure story, in other words. It starts well but gets talky and sags in the middle, before ending up on a higher note, but as a full-fledged detective novel, which in my opinion was not one of the author’s stronger points. This is a case of simply going off in too many directions, in other words, but all in all it’s good enough to tell me I ought to find time to read more of the series, most of which I already own. Unaccountably I have allowed them to sit idle for far too long.

       The Jim Steele series —

Some Day I’ll Kill You (n.) Dial 1939
Too Like the Lightning (n.) Dial 1939
She’ll Be Dead by Morning (n.) Dial 1940
The Blonde Died First (n.) Dial 1941
The Frightened Man (n.) Dial 1942
The Last Secret (n.) Dial 1943
The Case of Caroline Animus (n.) Dial 1946

PARNELL HALL – Murder. Stanley Hastings #2. Donald J. Fine, hardcover, 1987. Onyx, paperback, January 1989.

   PI Stanley Hastings first appearance was in Detective, read and reviewed be me in M*F10 [but not yet online], and as I said then, Hastings is not really a PI. More of an ambulance chaser, a self-admitted coward. The scrapes he gets into are invariably amusing, compulsively readable, and not to be missed.

   In this case a housewife in his son’s kindergarten’s car pool is also a daytime hooker, unwillingly, and Hastings is asked yo help retrieve an incriminating video tape from her pimp, whom he finds dead. Is he up to the challenge? Read this. It’s the real thing.

[FOOTNOTE.]   No, I’m not going to tell you anything about the ending. It’s not quite up to the suspense-building climax of the first book, but it wil do. What I thought I’d mention instead is that when Hastings watches the tape, he tells us exactly what is on it/ He has a problem facing his client after that, which is probably the same reaction I would have.

   Pamela Berringer’s character also changes at this point, ever so subtly, from an innocent victim to someone who has something of an upper hand. Most curious.

      The Stanley Hastings series —

Detective (1987)
Murder (1987)
Favor (1988)
Strangler (1989)
Client (1990)
Juror (1990)
Shot (1991)
Actor (1993)
Blackmail (1994)
Movie (1995)
Trial (1996)
Scam (1997)
Suspense (1998)
Cozy (2001)
Manslaughter (2003)
Hitman (2007)
Caper (2010)
Stakeout (2013)
A Fool for a Client (2016)

    Short stories —

“The Petty-Cash Killing” (November 1999, EQMM)
“The Missing Heir” (2000, The Shamus Game)
“Faking It” (2002, Most Wanted)
“Oh, What a Tangled Lanyard We Weave” (2005, Murder Most Crafty)
“Death of a Vampire” (2010, Crimes By Moonlight)
“Times Square Shuffle” (2013, Crime Square)
“The Naked and the Dead” (2015, Fifty Shades of Grey Fedora)
“The Dead Client” (2015, Dark City Lights: New York Stories)