RICHARD ELLINGTON – It’s a Crime. Pocket 756; 1st printing, Dec 1950. Hardcover: William Morrow, 1948.

   Richard Ellington (1914-1980) wrote only five mysteries, and all five featured a Manhattan-based private eye named Steve Drake. This is the second of them, and for the record, using Al Hubin’s Revised Crime Fiction IV as a basis, here’s a list of all five, along with (eventually) paperback covers for all of them:

      Shoot the Works. Morrow, 1948; Pocket #624, 1949.

      It’s a Crime. Morrow, 1948; Pocket #756, 1950.

      Stone Cold Dead. Morrow, 1950; Pocket #813, 1951.

      Exit for a Dame. Morrow, 1951; Pocket #941, 1953.

      Just Killing Time. Morrow, 1953; Bantam #1286 as Shakedown, 1955.

   Thanks to the Cook-Miller index to digest mystery magazines, we learn that Ellington also published three short stories in Manhunt and one in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine:

       “Fan Club” Manhunt, April 1953.
       “The Ripper” Manhunt, August 1953 .
       “Shadow Boxer” Manhunt, February 1954.

       “‘Good-By, Cora'” Mike Shayne, February 1968

   At least the first of these is a Steve Drake yarn as well. I’m not sure about any of the others. According to the brief biography of Ellington inside the front cover of this paperback edition, he was heavily involved with radio both before and after the war: acting, announcing and writing. What he ended up doing after the career in writing mysteries ended I don’t yet know; perhaps writing for television? (A later search on www.imdb.com turned up nothing.)

   The cover of the paperback edition of It’s a Crime will give you an idea of the kind of mystery it is, or if not, at least it’s a portrayal of the one scene that the people at Pocket thought might sell the book. Paul Kresse is the artist, and in the center foreground is the butt end of a gun being grasped by the barrel (only part of the fingers showing) and being used to clout a man in the head. Side view, tie askew, he’s obviously in excruciating pain.

   Quoted from the text: “My gun-butt smashed his skull.”

   Granted that the scene is in the book, and so is another in close proximity of the same guy with a tommy gun, firing away at Drake before he gets away, only to turn the tables, as shown on the cover, but …

   Steve Drake is really only medium-boiled, about 6 or 7 on a standard HB (hard-boiled) scale ranging from 1 to 10. I’ll quote Mr. Drake, who tells his own story, from pages 60-61:

   Drake actually has two cases in this adventure. The first is a wandering husband caper. The second is a case of blackmail, the victim being the male half of a famous Broadway husband-and-wife duo. That the two cases are connected comes as no surprise to anyone who has read as many mysteries as you and I, but Drake himself takes it in with a slightly perplexed stride.

   What is surprising, and it really shouldn’t have been, is that this prime example of lower-echelon tough-guy fiction turns out to have a complex and finely tuned detective story plot to go with it. There are many, many people with access to the dead girl’s apartment, and before her death there were enough of them going in and out that it would take a minute-by-minute timetable to keep it all clear.

   After the non-essentials have been eliminated, all of the suspects that remain have iron-clad alibis, and takes a huge effort in deduction on Steve Drake’s art to crack one of them. It’s a plot worthy of Ellery Queen, say, without quite the same finesse — relying on what seems like sheer chance on the part of the killer, and of course the aforementioned coincidence that involves Drake in both cases to begin with.

   It’s a neat double combo, in other words, and very much worth seeking out. I’d especially like to locate my copy of the next book in the series. The love affair that Drake seems to find himself in as this one goes along seems to bloom very quickly, and if I read the last couple of pages correctly, Drake proposes marriage and the same time he says he going to be spending the money he made on this case on a trip to St. Thomas. Does she go too, or will she wait for him patiently at home?

   These are things an inquiring minds like to know.

[UPDATE] 06-28-08.    Prompting my posting this review from the past was an email this morning from SF writer Robert Silverberg:

   Then from a follow-up email:

VICTOR APPLETON – Don Sturdy on the Desert of Mystery, or Autoing in the Land of the Caravans

Grosset & Dunlap; c.1925.

   Here’s the first paragraph. Read this and see how you could possibly resist reading on:

   On the next page:

   And of course off they go, and besides having a fine adventure, there are also a few more tangible goals: to locate the famed Cemetery of the Elephants, to view the fabulous City of Brass, and to find the fantastic Cave of Emeralds.

   Not to mention finding missing father of Don’s new friend Brick, who has been kidnapped by natives and is being held for ransom. Their means of transportation out across the desert, as I pictured them, are three early SUV prototypes, equipped with tank treads (and side curtains).

   Along the way they encounter numerous dangers: landslides, tarantulas, sandstorms, a band of thieving Arabs and more. It certainly made me feel fourteen again. I read a lot of the early Hardy Boys mysteries when I was a kid, the older thicker ones that belonged to my great-uncle, but never one of the Don Sturdy books, until now. What fun!

   But the adult that’s also inside my head found a bit of wonderment at the pacing. On page 209 they are trapped in a cave surrounded by the combined forces of the native kidnappers and the band of Arab thieves. Things indeed look black, as black as they could be.

   Not to worry. By page 211 they have escaped, and not only that, they’ve made their way back clear across the desert, and they’re busily making plans for their next adventure. Whoosh! And whoo-wee!

[UPDATE] 06-27-08.    Copies in dust jacket are a bit scarce, although certainly not overly expensive ($20 and up on ABE). At any rate, I’ve not been able to come up with a decent one to show you. I think as a young boy I automatically threw the jackets of my books away. So did every other kid, except the smart ones.

M. Y. HALIDOM – The Woman in Black. Ash-Tree Press, 2007. Introduction by Richard Dalby.

   This vampire novel was first published in 1906, and is another in this Canadian publisher’s series of vintage supernatural fiction. “The Woman in Black” is a glamorous seductress, leaving more than broken hearts in her chilling wake. The novel borders, at times, on the edge of parody, but was certainly worth resurrecting, although its audience is undoubtedly a limited one.

   The series is often chiefly distinguished by its scholarly introductions. That is certainly the case here, as Richard Dalby traces the life and career of a forgotten writer with his characteristic grace. He does go a bit far, however, in claiming this to be a forgotten “gem.” A gem it may be, but hardly one of great price or quality.

RON WEIGHELL – The Irregular Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. Calabash Press, 2000.

   This collection of five Holmes pastiches carries the celebrated detective and his companion and historian Dr. Watson into the realm of the weird and the fantastic, a subject for which Holmes had little patience.

   The stories are pleasantly atmospheric but it must be admitted that none of the them produces the authentic chill that Doyle, even as he’s putting to rest the aroma of the supernatural in a story like The Hound of the Baskerville, produces.

A. F. KIDD & RICK KENNETT – No. 472 Cheyne Walk: Carnacki — The Untold Stories. Ash-Tree Press, 2002.

   One of the classics of the Victorian & Edwardian fantastic story is William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. The modern writers, A. F. (“Chico”) Kidd and Rick Kennett have revived Hodgson’s scholarly researcher into the outre in a dozen stories that bring together a group of friends with a common interest in the supernatural who, after dinner, settle themselves in comfortable armchairs to listen to their host’s tale of another of the cases in which he has once again laid to rest a supernatural entity or entities.

   Such undertakings (the revival of a classic ghost-hunter) are generally doomed to a failure of some proportion but, as such efforts go, this displays some imagination. I would imagine that a solitary reader, regaling himself with a good cigar and a fine brandy, by a winter fire, might have quite a capital time with the stories. I read them under less appropriate circumstances (a hot summer afternoon, the room chilled by air conditioning) and still derived pleasure from their leisurely, willfully archaic style.

DONALD HAMILTON – The Ambushers

Gold Medal k1333, paperback original. First printing: 1963. Reprinted several times.

   When readers and critics talk about hard-boiled writers, Donald Hamilton’s name never seems to come up, and it should. There may be two reasons for this. First, he didn’t write about private eyes. His primary hero, who appeared in 27 spy fiction novels for Gold Medal between 1960 and 1993, was Matt Helm, a hard-as-nails agent for an unnamed branch of the US government, but still not a private detective. Secondly, Dean Martin, and those godawful movies. I enjoyed them at the time, but I was only in my 20s. What can I tell you?

   In the order of appearance, this is the 6th in the series. Starting in a Latin American country falsely called Costa Verde, where Helm takes out the leader of a gang of cutthroat revolutionaries, back to Washington, then out west to Tucson and into northern Mexico, where a leftover Nazi overling has been spotted, Hamilton doesn’t let the story die of the doldrums, to say the least.

   There is a girl. Reminiscent of many John D. MacDonald stories, this one needs a rescue, and then some therapeutic rehabilitation. But in this case, Sheila, the agent who ran into problems in Costa Verde, is an essential part of the story, and its ending as well.

   As for Helm, he improvises quickly, making (for example) being caught in a trap all part of the plan, and he has no false compunctions or misgivings about what his job entails. He’s in a rough line of work, no doubt about it, with little or no tolerance for error. James Bond is more famous than he, with more of a Continental flair (and better movies) but by a good margin, Matt Helm is the tougher of the two.

[UPDATE] 06-19-08.    My comment at the beginning of this review may have been true when I wrote it, but in the six years between then and now, I think Donald Hamilton has been given his due, at least on blogs and the Internet, if not in terms of new editions of his books at Borders and Barnes & Noble. (Hard Case Crime has reprinted Night Walker, a non- Matt Helm book, and I hope it has done well.)

   So it may be that neither Helm nor Hamilton are truly forgotten, but the Matt Helm books have been so long out of print that anyone in their 20s now is very likely never to have heard of him in the first place. Unless they read blogs like this one, and Bruce Grossman’s reviews over at bookgasm and Bill Crider on his blog and John Fraser on his website …

[UPDATE #2] Just after posting this, I went to check my email and by some uncanny coincidence, I discovered that Ed Crocker had posted a long reminiscence about Donald Hamilton on an earlier post here on the Mystery*File blog, back when Hamilton’s death was first reported. I’ve kept what he had to say there, but I’ve moved it here as well. It’s the first comment you’ll see below. Thanks, Ed!

CHARLAINE HARRIS – Shakespeare’s Champion.

Dell; paperback reprint, November 1998. Hardcover first edition: St. Martin’s, December 1997. Later paperback edition: Berkley, December 2006.

   You could have fooled me, and I was. I didn’t see it coming. I thought this book was one of those “cozy” mysteries that have been flooding the paperbacks shelves at Borders and other outlets over the past ten years or more. What with ice-skating detectives, teddy-bear-collecting detectives, quilting detective, herbal-shop-owner detectives, fudge-making detectives — which is not to put any of them down, as long-time readers of this blog know that most certainly do I not make a habit of — I was caught leaning the wrong way this time, and Ouch.

   Lily Bard is the detective in this one, her second appearance of five so far, and she cleans houses for a living in a small town named Shakespeare, somewhere in Arkansas. What would you think, if that were all you knew about the series?

   My guess is that you’d be wrong, too. There are more dead bodies in this than any Robert B. Parker books you’ve read, and if you stacked two or three of them together, the count might then just start to be close.

   There are some things I was unhappy about in this book, the criminous part focusing on racial hatred and violence, but neither that fact nor Lily Bard herself is one of them. She’s quite a lady, having come to Shakespeare to run away from her past, but she works out nearly every morning in the local gym (body building and karate), and does not take any sass from anybody. Hard-boiled, flinty — but in a totally feminine sense — independent. Name it, she’s it.

   I may as well start enumerating some of the problems I had with the book, even though I still haven’t told you much about the story line. First, the prologue, which is not told by Lily, while the rest of the book is. I hate prologues, especially when they are as useless as this one.

   Secondly, while I can understand Lily’s reticence in talking about her past — and she doesn’t for the longest time in this one — she already has in the first one. Revealed her secrets, that is, to at least some of the people in her new life.

   This means that someone who’s already read the first book, as I haven’t, would be reading a totally different book than I was, as he or she would already know the players and the tensions (many sexual) between them, and I didn’t. Lily’s conversation with Claude Friedrich, the local chief of police, as she spurns his amorous advances — soon after the discovery of the first body (although it really isn’t– the first body, that is) — makes a lot more sense later on, then it does in Chapter One. The reader of book one knows, but the reader of book two hasn’t a clue.

   I’m making this complicated, but going back and re-reading what I just wrote, it’s correct, and I think I will stay with it the way it is. There has been a series of deaths in Shakespeare, and only gradually are they revealed, and of course they’re important. The blurb on the back cover puts things in the right order, chronologically, but I have to admit that this is only a minor quibble, although a frustrating one, as the characters’ actions reflect what they know, and we (the reader) do not.

   But here’s the greatest problem I found with this book. With a scene of violence as horrific as the one that occurs in this book — if it were to have happened in the real world — it would have made national headlines, news crews from every channel on the cable dial would have been in town, snooping around 24/7, and a real investigation would have gone on, the ending not relying on three people sneaking around at night to uncover the culprits and their plot on their own. And in spite of all of the bloodshed, this strictly amateurish way of nabbing the killers is perhaps what makes this dark and sobering tale story a “cozy” mystery after all.

   Would I read another Lily Bard tale, though? You bet I would. She’s quite a lady.

POSTSCRIPT.    I know they’re too small for the details to be all that helpful, but each of the cover images that I’ve found to add to this post illustrate three different but still vitally important aspects of the book, and in three different styles. I like all three of them.

LESLIE CHARTERIS – The Saint in Trouble.

Detective Book Club; hardcover reprint (3-in-1 edition), May 1979. Coronet, UK, paperback, 1978. First UK hardcover edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1978. No US paperback edition.

   Although this reprint volume doesn’t mention it, Charteris apparently had very little to do with this book. According to Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, the book was adapted by Graham Weaver from original teleplays by Terence Feely and John Kruse.

   Which certainly explains a lot. Charteris may have had something to do with final revisions, but there’s not much substance to either of the two short novels in this book. I was reminded more of the James Bond movies (not the books) than anything else, without all of the spectacular visuals. (And without that, what’s left?)

   In “The Imprudent Professor”, the Saint (Simon Templar, aka Sebastian Tombs) helps prevent a scientist from defecting to the Soviet Union. It seems he has a solar energy alternative to fossil fuel, and the Free World cartels insist on keeping the discovery covered up.

   The sunny Cannes background is nice, and Simon meets at least two very good-looking young ladies, but (as far as I can tell) one of the pieces of evidence the Saint proceeds on never occurred.

   To verify that certain things never change, in “The Red Sabbath” Simon returns to London to help a (good-looking) female Israeli agent track down a Arab terrorist trying to defect from his comrades to South America. Again we get a intimate inside look at the London underworld, but beyond that, it’s a matter only of luck and fortunate timing that helps the dashing modern-day privateer prevail.

   Except for the lapse of a kind mentioned above, the writing is polished enough, but the stories themselves are rather superficial and perfunctory. A disappointment.

[UPDATE] 06-19-08.    Now that I have resources (the Internet) that I did not have when I wrote this review — or I was too new at it then to use them — I can now tell you that I’ve identified “The Imprudent Professor” has having been televised on 19 November 1978 as part of the series The Return of the Saint, starring Ian Ogilvy. (“The Red Sabbath” remains unidentified.)

   The series played in the US as The Friday Late Night Movie on CBS, or so I understand, but I don’t remember seeing it, or even knowing about it — and in spite of my generally negative reaction to the book, I’d have liked to have.

   Maybe copies still exist? I’ll check into it.