JAMES DARK – Hong Kong Incident. Signet D2935, paperback original; 1st US printing, August 1966. First published in Australia as Assignment: Hong Kong by Horwitz Publications Inc., Australia, paperback, 1966.

   There were in all 16 recorded adventures of undercover spy Mark Hood, of which this is one of the earliest. The author of all but one of the Hood books, ostensibly James Dark, was J. E. Macdonell, who according to his Wikipedia page, “wrote over 200 novels, in at least 7 different series under several versions of his own name and several pseudonyms.” In Australia, where Horwitz was based, the Mark Hood books were published under Macdonnell’s own name.

   The gimmick for Mark Hood was that he worked undercover as an international playboy, as as such, according to the Spy Guys and Gals website, he was an expert in “Auto racing at Le Mans, karate competitions in Tokyo, sail fishing in the Bahamas, and, most famously of all, one of the greatest living cricket players in England.”

   This was the first one I’ve read, and in Hong Kong Incident, of the skills above, he shows off only auto racing (in Chapter One), plus karate or some other Asiatic fighting ability. I’ll have to take the other website’s word for it about any of the other talents.

   The reason he’s in Hong Kong is to be there where a Chinese dissident crosses the border and get him safely to Geneva. The first he does; the mission goes wrong when it comes to the second. Otherwise, of course, there wouldn’t be a story, which when it finally gets around to it, is about keeping a Chinese submarine from blowing up part of the American fleet. Before that the story takes place in a rice paddy, an ancient Chinese cemetery and a couple of exotic bars, with ladies in them to match.

   Dark is OK with short action scenes and quick descriptions of local countrysides. He’s not so good in placing the action in a grander scale: Dark seems to know Macao, Hong Kong, and Kowloon in particular, with China looming somewhere across the border, but to me, the setting was all one big jumble. His characters? One-dimensional at best.

   On the other hand, Dark’s other books, many written under Macdonnell’s real name, are naval adventures, and here he really seems to know what he’s talking about. The last third of this book would be grand stuff, I think, for fans of naval fiction, naval personnel, naval armament and the like. I don’t happen to be one, but I got by. Overall, I’m glad this one was only 128 pages long. I don’t imagine I’ll read another.

      The Mark Hood series —

Spy from the Grave, 1964. [No US edition; written by R. Wilkes-Hunter]
The Bamboo Bomb, 1965.

Come Die with Me. 1965.
Hong Kong Incident. 1966.
Assignment Tokyo. 1966.
Spy from the Deep. 1966, No US edition.

The Throne of Satan. 1967.
Operation Scuba. 1967.
Operation Jackal. 1967. No US edition.
Spying Blind. 1968.
The Sword of Genghis Khan. 1967.

The Invisibles. 1969.

Operation Ice Cap. 1969.
Operation Octopus. 1968
The Reluctant Assassin. 1970. No US edition.
Sea Scrape. 1971.

   Except where there was no US edition, all were published by Signet as paperback originals in this country. Dates are those of the US editions. (In some cases the US edition came before the Australian one.) Books published the same year are listed alphabetically, so this list may not be completely correct chronologically.

BRANDON BIRD – Downbeat for a Dirge. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1952. Detective Book Club, hardcover reprint, 3-in-1 edition. Also published as: Dead and Gone: Dell 857, paperback, 1955.

   While the sublettor of the apartment under Hampton Hume’s is with Hume and his wife, the woman rehearsing a song is murdered in a room below. During the wait for the police, the woman’s body is removed, presumably by the murderer, and an attempt is made to clean up the room.

   The murdered singer was a chanteuse, if there can be such a thing with a band playing Music Out of Dixie. A magazine illustrator and a former musician, Hume, who had appeared in two earlier novels, joins the band at police request when the band’s saxophonist disappears.

   If I relate my problems with the plot, it will give away essential information. So I’ll just say there were no more Hamp Hume mysteries after this one, no loss to the world of fiction.

      The Hampton Hume series ––

Death in Four Colors. Dodd Mead, 1950.

Never Wake a Dead Man. Dodd Mead, 1950.
Downbeat for a Dirge. Dodd Mead, 1952.

Note:   A fourth book by Brandon Bird, Hawk Watch (Dodd Mead, 1954), not in the Hume series, was reviewed earlier on this blog by Walter Albert. You can read his comments here, along with considerable biographical information about the authors: George Bird Evans, (1906-1998) & Kay Harris Evans, (1906-2007). Some discussion of a fifth book they wrote, The Pink Carrera (Dodd Mead, 1960), as by Harris Evans, is also included in Walter’s post.

THOMAS B. DEWEY – Nude in Nevada. Dell 6508, paperback original; 1st printing, April 1965.

   I’ve read one or two of Dewey’s PI Pete Schofield novels, but I don’t remember it (or both) being as lackluster as this one is. It starts out poorly, as far as I was concerned, and never gets any better as it goes along. It does have some good moments, though, enough to keep me hoping, and I ended up finishing it. With another author, less known to me, I probably wouldn’t have.

   Pete Schofield is one of the few tough PI’s of the 50s and 60s era who happened to be married, and happily so. It did cut down on his womanizing, though that never seemed to stop him from looking. In any case, as the books begins, Pete and Jeannie are driving somewhere through the Nevadan desert when their car breaks down, miles from anywhere.

   Or so he thinks at first. Then he remembers that by pure chance an old friend, Strangler Martin, just happens to own a small garage and poor man’s resort a few miles back and off the road a way. He and Jeannie hoof it there, only to find Martin and his wife being held prisoner of a gang of foreigners whose language Pete doesn’t recognize. Perfect timing. What are the odds?

   The gang has killed the cook, so obviously they mean business. Also a prisoner is a young lady who is completely naked but covered with tattoos, and when Pete and Strangler Martin manage scare off the bad guys (this really puzzled me, how they managed to pull this off) the lady is happy to have them take a closer look.

   Then adding to the absolute weirdness of the evening, a horde of soldiers from a nearby army base stops by, and a party breaks out. A case might be made that this was meant to be a screwball mystery, but to me, it doesn’t make any more sense now when I’m telling you this than when I was reading it. As I said earlier, I was hoping Dewey could go somewhere with this wacky beginning, but other than morphing into a long and uninteresting story of international espionage, as far as I am concerned, he never did.

   Otherwise all ends well, but since this is last recorded adventure of the Schofields, I’m afraid we’ll never know where Jeannie wants to get a tattoo, or in fact if she ever did.

      The Pete Schofield series —

And Where She Stops. Popular Library, 1957.
Go to Sleep, Jeannie. Popular Library, 1959.
Too Hot for Hawaii. Popular Library 1960.

The Golden Hooligan. Dell, 1961.
Go, Honeylou. Dell, 1962.

The Girl with the Sweet Plump Knees. Dell, 1963.
The Girl in the Punchbowl. Dell, 1964.

Only on Tuesdays. Dell, 1964.
Nude in Nevada. Dell, 1965.

  A. E. MAXWELL – The King of Nothing. Fiddler & Fiora #7. Villard, hardcover, 1992. Harper, paperback, 1994.

   The “A. E.” stands for Ann and Evan, who are the husband and wife who together write the Fiddler books, and have written several others besides. Their characters are no longer husband and wife, but lovers still. Fiddler is wealthy, by somewhat shady means detailed in the first book in the series; Fiora is wealthier, by virtue of being a financial wheeler-dealer and entrepreneur. You might, without stretching things too far, look at them as a West Coast McGee and Meyer with a little sex and a lot of money thrown in.

   Which is not to say that the Maxwells together are another John D. MacDonald, because they aren’t. They do combine to write very good prose, however, and I have thought highly of the series to date.

   In the latest episode, Fiddler is fishing with an old friend at his place on the coast of Washington. One day the friend makes Fiddler aware that he is to be the executor of his estate, and the recipient of an old Samurai sword, a souvenir of war experiences. The next day the friend is found dead, apparently the victim of a break-in and robbery. The local police do not inspire Fiddler with confidence. Concurrently, Fiora has been in Seattle negotiating with a Japanese conglomerate to sell her financial firm.

   Aha, Samurai sword, Japanese firm — can there be a connection? Well, maybe. Several gory deaths later you find out.

   This wasn’t my favorite of the series, and I’m really not sure why. The plot was a tad far-fetched in places, but most books of this type suffer from that. The writing was competent as usual, and Fiddler and Fiora continue to be engaging characters. At one time I was afraid they were headed toward some of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser-Susan kind of foolishness, but the Maxwells seem to have drawn back in time.

   Oh well, some you like more than others, some less. Still recommended, as are the first six in the series.

      The Fiddler and Fiora series —

1. Just Another Day in Paradise (1985)

2. The Frog and the Scorpion (1986)

3. Gatsby’s Vinyard (1987)

4. Just Enough Light to Kill (1988)
5. The Art of Survival (1989)
6. Money Burns (1991)
7. The King of Nothing (1992)
8. Murder Hurts (1993)

BART SPICER – Blues for the Prince. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1950. Detective Book Club, hardcover reprint, 3-in-1 edition. Bantam #934, paperback, 1951.

   This is apparently the second case for private-eye Carney Wilde. When The Prince — Harold Morton Prince — jazz pianist, about sixth best in the country, and composer apparently without peer, is murdered, Wilde is called in to investigate the claim of The Prince’s accused murderer that he, not Prince, had composed most of the music Prince took credit for, particularly “Red Devil Blue,” and the folk operetta Sunset in Harlem.

   An admirer of The Prince and also a jazz enthusiast, Wilde takes a personal interest in the case since he doesn’t want The Prince’s reputation besmirched. Too much of an interest, it turns out, as he proves that the accused couldn’t have committed the murder.

   A good but not a particularly great case. Still, it has an interesting background. The Prince, his family, Wilde’s client, and other characters are black. Philadelphia in the late ’40s, as was true of most other places, was not a pleasant city if you were black. With music, though, there was no race barrier, nor apparently any race recognition.

       The Carney Wilde series —

The Dark Light. Dodd, 1949.
Blues for the Prince. Dodd, 1950.
Black Sheep, Run. Dodd, 1951.

The Golden Door. Dodd, 1951.
The Long Green. Dodd, 1952.
The Taming of Carney Wilde. Dodd, 1954.

Exit, Running. Dodd, 1959.

LIONEL BLACK – The Eve of the Wedding. Avon, paperback, 1st US printing, December 1981. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1980.

   This is the sixth of seven recorded cases solved by British newspaperwoman Kate Theobald, and the first of them that I’ve read. I’ve always thought that she and her barrister husband Henry were a Mr & Mrs detective duo, but Al Hubin lists only her as a series character, and not him in Crime Fiction IV. Inspector Bill Comfort is mentioned there as an occasional sleuthing partner, as he is for this one, but I’d say that that’s stretching it, as while the police are at hand, Comfort is offstage for most of the book.

   But Henry is a key character in this one, in a secondary role, true, but if it were me, I’d still say this is a married couple detective team. Dead is the brother of the groom during a party the night before he is to marry the daughter of the American half of a business partnership that split a generation or so ago.

   There are plenty of motives, not all of them all that savory. It seems that the dead man raped the bride-to-be during the party. He was also the one who stood in the way of the proposed re-merger of the two companies, US and UK. There is also a poltergeist at hand, making a nuisance of itself. Could it have thrown the dagger into the dead man’s neck. Henry thinks the idea is hogwash.

   There are several generations of family living in the huge mansion, and most of them do not get along, and I mean seriously. There is a completely dotty uncle and aunt, a pair of aged married servants who will do anything for their master, the patriarch of the family, but in one way or another, they were all cowed by the dead man, not a nice person at all.

   Black’s style is engagingly readable, but with a list of possible suspects like this, I’d have liked to have seen more actual detection. Having our detectives solve the case largely by overhearing and listening to secret conversations going on over the course of one long, long evening is not my idea of real detective work.

      The Kate Theobald series —

Swinging Murder. 1969.
Death Has Green Fingers. 1971.
Death by Hoax. 1974.

A Healthy Way to Die. 1976.
The Penny Murders. 1979.
The Eve of the Wedding. 1980.
The Rumanian Circle. 1981.

MICHAEL ALLEGRETTO – Blood Relative. Jacob Lomax #4. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1992. No paperback edition.

   I had read a couple of the earlier Lomax books and hadn’t been tremendously impressed, but on the other hand liked them well enough to try another. I’m a little more impressed after reading the fourth.

   Jake Lomax is a Denver PI, an ex-cop whose wife was murdered five years ago; this destroyed his career as a policeman, and remains the central fact in his life. He is just back from an extended vacation in Mexico, and wondering what he’s doing with his life. He is hired by a lawyer for a man accused of murdering his wife, and who seems to be considered guilty by everyone even his children, and Lomax.

   Lomax is to find some helpful witnesses, and see if he can track down a possible lover of the murdered woman. As the stones are turned over the worms crawl out, and Lomax prods them to see which way they move. They move, as always, towards secrets and other crimes.

   This is a well-done standard private eye novel; if the concept of genre has any meaning this is probably the kind of book it applies to. Lomax walks the mean streets like he’s supposed to, and does the things a man’s gotta do when and where he’s gotta do ’em.

   Allegretto writes well if not exceptionally, and the plot is tight and more than normally realistic. I wouldn’t put him in the top rank of PI writers yet, but based on Blood Relative, I believe he’s moved up a notch. I look forward to the next one. Recommended.

The Jacob Lomax series —

1. Death on the Rocks (1987)

2. Blood Stone (1988)

3. The Dead of Winter (1989)
4. Blood Relative (1992)
5. Grave Doubt (1995)

ANTHONY HOROWITZ – Trigger Mortis: A James Bond Thriller, with Original Material by Ian Fleming. Harper, US, hardcover, September 2015. Orion, UK, hardcover/softcover, 2015.

               The rain swept into London like an angry bride.

   That may not be the authentic voice of Ian Fleming, but it is close, and not surprising the source is polymath Anthony Horowitz, whose accomplishments include many episodes of Poirot, the highly praised Foyle’s War and Midsomer Murders series, the bestselling adventures of juvenile secret agent Alex Rider, several other juvenile series in horror, fantasy, and mystery genres, and more recently, the highly praised Sherlock Holmes pastiche, the bestselling Moriarity and House of Silk. Horowitz is the latest writer to tackle the Bond series and with more than a bit of success.

   Since Kingsley Amis’s Colonel Sun, written as Robert Markham, one writer or another has attempted to keep the Bond series going. (An earlier attempt by Geoffrey Jenkins, Per Fine Ounce, was never published and is a sort of minor grail for Bond collectors, and an original un-canonical novel, Jim Hatfield’s The Killing Joke is a mixed bag that does away with Bond decisively at the end.)

   Christopher Wood wrote two novelizations of the screenplays for The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker,which had nothing to do with Fleming’s novels, and about which nothing much needs to be said. John Gardner had great success in terms of sales, though popular as they were, his Bond was never quite Fleming’s (not surprising as he created Boysie Oakes as a reaction against Bond and was himself the anti-Fleming, a radical leftist ex commando/vicar).

   Raymond Benson was a bit more popular with Fleming fans as opposed to the movie fans, but again the authentic voice was not quite there, though certainly closer than anyone could hope from an American writer.

   All those books have and deserve their own fans, but they are none of them quite Ian Fleming’s James Bond. They kept Bond alive in print, and I personally enjoyed many of them, but they were never Ian Fleming nor did they really try too hard to be. They were instead what the publishers and the public seemed to want, a hybrid of the literary Bond and the cinematic one. In regard to that the Bond series has been lucky to be helmed by so many conscientious writers.

   The latest round of pastiche began with Sebastian Faulks’ The Devil May Care, which was interesting and certainly literate, but didn’t quite fit the bill. Jeffery Deaver’s Carte Blanche recreated 007 and updated everything, but while it was a good thriller it wasn’t Bond or Fleming — just a thriller calling its main character James Bond, 007.

   But with William Boyd’s Solo this latest series found its legs. Boyd, author of A Good Man in Africa and Brazzaville Beach, not only found an authentic voice that echoed Fleming, he actually wrote a damn good James Bond novel, more serious perhaps than any by Fleming, but an adventure that took Bond to Africa in the sixties to good effect. If anything Solo is actually better than some of Fleming’s novels while still clearly Bond.

   Trigger Mortis is the new Bond pastiche by Anthony Horowitz, and it takes a bit of original material by Fleming from an incomplete story from the For Your Eyes Only shorts he never finished that took Bond into the world of Grand Prix. From that Horowitz has extrapolated an adventure that begins just after the end of Goldfinger.

   Bond is in London living with Pussy Galore who he has successfully kept out of prison, but things are deteriorating between them and domesticity doesn’t really suit either of them very well. There is a nice observation by Horowitz when Bond recalls introducing her to a friend in London and recognizing just how puerile her name was outside of one of his exotic adventures.

   Bond’s discomfort and self-recognition are something sadly missing from many Bond pastiche, but part of the authentic Fleming Bond. Both Boyd and Horowitz recognize that the Bond books are not individual adventure or suspense novels, but a saga, part of a very personal evolving fantasy auto biography by Fleming much the same way John D. MacDonald used the Travis McGee novels or Raymond Chandler used Philip Marlowe as more than simply a series about a continuing character.

   Bond will be saved from the ‘soft arms of the good life’ by a mission that puts him on the Grand Prix circuit, pits him against SMERSH and the mad bad and dangerous Korean Sin Jai Seong, aka Jason Sin, and he finds himself in the arms of the intriguing and all too self-aware Jeopardy Lane. It seems Smersh has been enlisted to help along the Russian entry in the Grand Prix stakes, and Bond is sent to foil their plans, but not before he saves Pussy Galore from the same gold plated fate of Jill Masterson in Goldfinger. Eventually the trail takes him from the Tyrol to a bomb laden train racing beneath New York with the intent of laying waste to most of Manhattan.

   Best of all is a nice little snipe at the film Dr. No (the book properly is Doctor No) when Bond discovers plans for an American rocket in Sin’s office and is told about any Smersh plans to sabotage American rockets: “… suppose he did manage to blow up a couple of rockets. Would it really make all that much of a difference? The Americans are managing perfectly well without him. Last January they fired off a Thor rocket. It managed all of nine inches before it fell in two and blew up.”

   A well-stated reminder of our space program late in the Eisenhower administration when this takes place — in terms of the timeline of the books: Doctor No takes place in about 1958 and Goldfinger in 1959.

   What is surprising here, and in Boyd’s Solo, is that the books read like an undiscovered Fleming and not a pastiche. Boyd and Horowitz capture the feel and the authentic Fleming effect in a way none of the previous writers have, and it is the Bond of the books and not the films, a mistake made by all of the previous pastichers, who tried too hard to split the difference between the two.

   Either book could have been written at the height of Fleming’s powers the way the best Holmes pastiche sometimes rises to echo Doyle or Robert B. Parker’s authentic sounding continuations of Raymond Chandler sounded so much like Marlowe.

    Trigger Mortis is not only good Bond, it is good Fleming, not surprising since Horowitz’s Alex Rider books are canny takes on the Bond novels themselves. Solo and Trigger Mortis are not Ian Fleming, but they have the feel and at times the voice of Ian Fleming without ever simply imitating his work, and far and away mark the first time fans of the books have reason to truly celebrate Bond pastiche.

   I’m not sure if fans of the films or of the Gardner or Benson Bond’s will be entirely happy with these, but they are the closest thing to finding a pair of lost Fleming novels available and that is as high a praise as admirers of the original Bond novels and Ian Fleming can deliver. This is not the Connery, Moore, Lazenby, Dalton, Brosnan, or Craig Bond, but the Fleming Bond.

   Of all the Bond pastiche written since Fleming’s sudden death at the hands of the ‘iron crab’ on that golf course, these are the first two I would happily include as authentic Bond novels since Amis’s imperfect Colonel Sun.

   They are, as advertised, James Bond Thrillers, and for some of us that is exactly what we have been missing for far too many seasons in the past, not books about a character called James Bond, but books about James Bond. There is a subtle difference there, but fans of the authentic Ian Fleming James Bond will know exactly what I mean.

SANDRA WEST PROWELL – By Evil Means. Walker, hardcover, 1993. Bantam, paperback, April 1995.

   This is the first of three recorded adventures for perhaps the only fictional PI working out of Billings, Montana, a former FBI agent named Phoebe Siegel. The case seems simple enough, that of a woman who is afraid that there is something wrong at Whispering Pines, the psychiatric clinic on the outskirts of town where her daughter had recently sought help.

   Phoebe is about to turn her down, since (for many reasons) she always takes the month of March off. One of the reasons is that March is the month that her brother Ben, a cop in the local police force, committed suicide. She changes her mind, though, when the mother tells her there may have been an involvement between the girl and her brother Ben, even to the extent of a police complaint just before he died.

   Thus begins a long (over 350 pages) investigation into all kinds of secrets in her home town that Phoebe had never had an inkling of, many of them involving her family and friends, and she has many in both categories. The book is slow to start. It is not until page 130 or so, when Phoebe goes sneaks into Whispering Pines and convinces herself at last that Dr. Stroud is indeed up to no good, that the tale really starts to get into high gear.

   In some ways, this book reminded me of several of Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone stories, in which the friends and family seem to be a secondary but essential sidebar to the mystery. But in Phoebe Siegel’s case, the role they both take on simply grows and grows, insidiously so. The ending is as harrowing as any that I’ve read in a PI novel in quite a long time.

   I wasn’t so sure for a while, but this one’s a keeper.

      The Phoebe Siegel series —

By Evil Means (1993)
The Killing of Monday Brown (1994)

When Wallflowers Die (1996)
An Accepted Sorrow (unpublished)

   According to the Thrilling Detective website, By Evil Means was nominated for the Hammett Prize, and both that novel and The Killing of Monday Brown were nominated for a Shamus.

JUDY FITZWATER – Dying to Remember. Fawcett, paperback original, August 2000.

   I’ve been winnowing out my collection of paperbacks over the past few weeks. Some are now up for sale, others are going to the local library or in other ways new homes are being found for them. This was going to be one of the latter until I saw that Jennifer Marsh, the detective in this, the fourth of now seven books in the series, the last after a gap of 12 years and available only on Kindle — whew, sorry — is a writer of mystery stories.

   An occupation for a fictional detective that I’ve always found interesting, so I retrieved it from the Pass Along pile, thinking it deserved a trial reading before I did so. Turns out, however, that while Jennifer, a young 30-something, has written nine mysteries, none of them have ever been published. False advertising by the back cover blurb writer right there, wouldn’t you say?

   But while this firmly places this book in the “cozy” category, reinforced by the presence of a wanna-be authors support group she’s a member of, there is an edge to this light-weight murder mystery that managed to keep me reading all the way to the end.

   Most of the opening portion of the book takes place at a high school reunion, with Jennifer reluctantly agrees to attend, and sure enough an old flame is there, bringing back memories of a prom night some 12 years ago. Along with many other members of the same class, most of whom Jennifer would just as soon forget, or she already has.

   But when the old flame is found dead in the parking lot outside the event, the verdict being an unfortunate suicide, Jennifer does not agree and takes it upon herself to do a little amateur sleuthing.

   High school is tough on a lot of people, but for others, it is the highlight of their life. The difference is where the edge comes in. Unfortunately it seems to me that what happens 12 years ago should have been checked into back then, not now, and the ending is one of these in which the heroine decides to tackle the killer head on, with no police in sight.

   So what did I decide? Is this one a keeper after all? No, but Jennifer Marsh is a character that I got to know rather well. She has spunk, and if the other books she’s in come along while I’m winnowing, I may check into her life again.

       The Jennifer Marsh series —

1. Dying to Get Published (1995)

2. Dying to Get Even (1999)
3. Dying for a Clue (1999)
4. Dying to Remember (2000)
5. Dying to Be Murdered (2001)

6. Dying to Get Her Man (2002)
7. Dying Before ‘I Do’ (2014)