I agree wholeheartedly with the review Steve Lewis recently did of Goldsmith’s Detour. It’s every bit as fine as the much-lauded film version (which follows the novel’s progression fairly closely), and unputdownable once begun.

   It so happens I have a copy of Double Jeopardy, which I’ve read and which is excellent if not quite as good as Detour. I thought everyone might like to see a scan of the jacket of the earlier book; it’s included here, as is one of the first edition of Detour. Both books were published by Macaulay.

   Here’s the dust jacket blurb for Double Jeopardy, in its entirety:

   Amen to that last line.

   Goldsmith’s third and final novel, Shadows at Noon (Ziff-Davis, 1943), is a dark wartime fantasy that examines what might have happened to a disparate group of ordinary citizens if Nazi bombers had actually penetrated U.S. air space and dumped their payloads on a large American city. Interesting, but not nearly as good as his two crime novels.

   Goldsmith spent some twenty years in Hollywood, beginning in the mid 40s, where one of his first film scripts was for the film version of Detour. He later scripted several other B films and wrote for episodic TV. Another of his films was The Narrow Margin, the well-regarded 1952 version; he also wrote an episode of The Twilight Zone. His other claim to fame is that he was married to Anthony Quinn’s sister.

   I don’t know why, but sometimes the last (and the shortest step) in a project takes the most amount of time before it finally gets done.

   Case in point. I’ve been working on the Lending Library Mystery website for quite a while, and only over the weekend have I managed to get the last publisher’s page done.

   This is the website that Bill Pronzini and I have been doing in conjunction with Bill Deeck’s reference book Murder at 3 Cents a Day, which is a complete list of all of the publishers whose mysteries were published almost solely for the lending library market in the late 30s through the 1940s, with blurbs and descriptions of all their offerings.

   The best known of these may be Phoenix Press, but there were several others, including Hillman-Curl, Dodge Publishing Co., Gateway Books and more. Over the past year or more, Bill and I have been uploading cover images to the LLM website for almost all of the mystery and detective fiction put out by each of these small publishers.

   The last two to have been completed are Mystery House, about which some information about the man who founded the company has been added, and Arcadia House, the last publisher to be included and for which cover images are now available.

   Besides Bill, whose collection has been the source of all the cover images, thanks go also to Victor Berch, a tireless researcher into WorldCat and other arcane sources of publisher information.

   Follow the links and feel free to browse around!

NOTE: The two covers shown are both Arcadia House titles.

ROSS MACDONALD – The Zebra-Striped Hearse. A. A. Knopf, hardcover, 1962. Bantam F2715, paperback reprint; 1st printing, January 1964. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft, including those seen below.

   If you somehow missed Ross Macdonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse in its hardcover edition or in one of the previous twelve (!) Bantam printings, you get another chance, for that publisher has reprinted it again, after a four-year hiatus.

   Because this is one of the best in an outstanding series of private-eye novels, it is a book you shouldn’t miss. You’ll find many elements taken from the author’s own life and placed into the investigation of his detective, Lew Archer, including the runaway father, the canyon forest fire, and California’s unique culture, accurately presented in a book that ranges the state from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

   We see the compassion for which Archer is justifiably known, but there is also ample evidence of his intelligence as his creator has him quote Dante in a conversation so well written that it fits in seamlessly.

      Covers:

    Shown above is the cover of the 12th printing that Marv was referring to. Others covers that have graced this book are shown below, but to my mind, none of them surpasses the Knopf hardcover First Edition:

   Here’s the hardcover UK first edition, from Collins Crime Club, 1963:

   And I believe this to be the first UK paperback edition, published by Fontana in 1965:

   To finish up this short display, a paperback edition from France, Éditions J’ai Lu #1662, 1984.

[UPDATE] 06-22-09.    Submitted by Juri Nummelin, a hardcover edition published in Finland:

   See the comments for a link to a short write-up about Juri about Macdonald, including this book.

ELLERY QUEEN – The Siamese Twin Mystery.

Frederick A. Stokes, hardcover, October 1933. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft, including: Pocket Books #109, 1st printing, June 1941; Pocket #109, 10th printing, 1950; Pocket 6135, 12th printing, 1962; Signet T4086, 1970. (All shown.)

   I don’t know how long I’ll last on this particular resolution, it not being New Year’s and all, but I’ve promised myself that if I can, I’ll go back and start re-reading some (not all) of the books I devoured while I was growing up.

   This is the first one, and you can mark me as I go, although I probably won’t always be mapping and pointing the trail out along the way.

   I don’t know when I read this one the first time — I didn’t even realize that you were allowed to have opinions about books and movies until I was in junior high — and I really thought about keeping records of what I read until 1970 or so.

   And all I remember from the first reading of The Siamese Twin Mystery is the fire that drives Ellery and his dad, Inspector Queen, farther and farther up a mountain, flames licking at their tires most of the way.

   Ellery was driving his Duesenberg, a model of car the name of which thrilled me in itself, and one so old that my spell-checker doesn’t even recognize it. The rest of the story was a blank, though. I didn’t remember a thing.

   J. J. McC.’s foreword states the locale as Arrow Mountain, a peak in the Tepee range, which Google says is in Wyoming, perhaps extending as far south as Utah, but most definitely “in the heart of the ancient Indian country.”

   There at the top of the mountain, with no route to safety open to them, they take refuge in (guess what) an isolated pile of a mansion in which (you guessed) a murder is about to take place, and in fact, eventually, two.

   And not only is this an “isolated county manor” sort of story, but there are two dying messages involved — both in the form of torn playing cards found in the hands of each of the victims.

   Bizarre circumstances, gruesome murders, eerie surroundings, this is a detective story that has it all, settingwise, even a pair of conjoined (Siamese) twins. (No surprise there.)

   The actual detection, though, I thought was a trifle labored in comparison. The edition (a 3rd printing Pocket paperback from 1941) that I just finished did not even have a “Challenge to the Reader.”

   Not that I have ever been up to the challenge of one of those, but for an Ellery Queen yarn, the explanation at the end made me think I might have gotten this one.

   Well, the solution was clever enough, but I would have been close. Or I might have, I’m sure, if I’d thought about it. Ellery Queen’s solution are always obvious. Afterward.

   There is a good legal question that arose at one point — and don’t take my bringing this up as my in any way letting slip the identity of the killer(s) — but if one of the Siamese twins had done it, how could he have been punished, without punishing the (possibly innocent) other?

   This is a question I remember reading about somewhere before. Was there another tale, short story or novel, by another author perhaps, where the question also arose, or is one of the other things I remember from this mystery — besides the Duesenberg working its way up the mountain, that is?

PostScript. Got a favorite cover among this choice of five? Is there one that stands out for you and would make you want to buy the book as soon as you saw it? At cover price? There’s one for me, that’s for sure.

    Aarons is another underappreciated writer who wrote clean uncluttered prose and knew his way around plot and character. The best of the Durell books are superior examples of their field and still hold up today even if the politics have left them behind.

    I do have a question, though likely no one can answer it. The familiar portrait of Durell featured originally on the front covers and later on the back looked nothing at all like the lean black haired black eyed character known as the “Cajun” who I always pictured as a cross between Dale Robertson and Zachary Scott.

    Gold Medal’s other series icons all looked a good deal like the characters within — Matt Helm, Joe Gall, Shell Scott, Travis McGee, Chester Drum, even Earl Drake’s “Man with No Face” — but Aaron’s “Cajun” was this blonde pale eyed guy in a fedora, and as late as 1962’s Assignment Karachi Durell is portrayed on the cover as a blonde.

    I think the original portrait is by Barye Phillips who did most of the early Aarons covers and Karachi looks like it might be the work of Harry Bennett.

    You would think in all the years the series ran and considering it always had steady sales that someone would have noticed the cover portrait was nothing like the character described in the book. Anyone know what was going on?

          >>>>

    Steve again. David and I have been batting this question around for a while, each providing the other with cover images. My problem with his question is that when I think of blond (or blonde), I think of Marilyn Monroe.

    Obviously there are different shades of blond, including very light browns, but I think that there always has to be some yellow in it before hair can be considered blond. I just didn’t remember ever seeing Sam Durell with hair that fit what David was saying.

    What’s more, when I came across one of the covers that David specifically referred to, Durell’s hair looked dark brown if not black, and nothing like blond to me. See above.

    But David then supplied me with a closer look at the cover of Gold Medal GM k1505, which is not the 1962 printing above, but one that would have come out in 1964 or ’65 . See below:

    It’s out of focus and lighter than the image I’d found, but yes, this time I saw what David was talking about. He’s not as blond as the lady standing next to him, but there are blond highlights in his light brown hair I hadn’t seen before. In any case, if the question was phrased as “Does Durell look like a dark-haired Cajun in this picture?” I’d have to agree that he does not.

    I challenged David’s suggestion that the painting was done by Harry Bennett. I disagreed, seeing nothing of the latter’s stylized art in the cover, and suggested Ron Lesser instead. David agreed, saying “You are likely right about Lesser. As you said, Bennett usually signed his work. I thought of him because he did a lot of work for Fawcett and the background looked like his work.”

    Here is the second cover that David sent me, one of the ones he believed was done by Barye Phillips:

    I agree that Phillips is likely the artist. With the hat on the fellow whose face is at the top, though, it is difficult to determine what color is hair is, except that it is not black, more likely brown, and to me he looks more like an Irish pug than a dark-haired Cajun.

    The one in the cover scene itself David calls “a fair-haired pale-eyed ‘Cajun’,” and he continues: “I’m curious if this was an editorial decision, an attempt to make him look more like Shell Scott, or just an artist’s interpretation that the editors and Aarons never bothered to correct. The novels describe Durrell as dark with black hair and eyes, a bit over six feet tall and lean, and resembling a Mississippi river boat gambler.”

    To end the discussion between David and me, but to open it up to others to jump in if they wish, here’s a cover, probably published in the late 1970s or even the 80s, in which Durell, to me, finally looks something like the author, Edward S. Aarons, might actually had in mind:

    The cover was obviously done by Robert McGinnis, but whether he did the small insert close-up of Sam Durell, I’m not sure. I’d need a closer look to be positive. Whoever it was, I think he finally got it right.

   Here’s David again. It’s his question, and he deserves the last word:

    “No doubt you are right about the question not getting answered, I just thought I would put it out there and hope one of the Gold Medal experts might have an idea. I can’t think of another series where the covers consistently went out of their way to portray the character as looking almost completely different than the one described in the book.”

   My father, Desmond Flower, was the Literary Director of Cassell at the time I joined the firm in the 1950s. He visited New York every year to buy books for UK publication from NY publishers and agents. On one of his visits he was given a copy of Scorpion Reef for consideration.

   This, the Macmillan (NY) edition, must have been the first hardcover edition of a thriller by CW. My father liked it, bought the rights and we published it in 1956.

   It was critically well received and this led to the idea of reissuing his Gold Medal paperbacks as hardcovers in the Cassell crime list.

   As is clear from the order of their publication, there was no correspondence between the order of original Dell or Gold Medal publication and the order in which we republished them. Some of them were republished under their paperback titles, such as The Big Bite, but it was felt that some of the titles, particularly the “Girl” titles, were not right for the hardcover market.

   It was at this point, before I took over editorial control of the Crime list in 1960, that I got involved with CW, because the pleasant task of thinking up new titles was left to me. Each time we were resetting a book for which we felt a new title was needed, I would write to CW with a suggestion and he accepted every one.

   Those I remember putting to him include:

      Operator  [Cassell, 1958; previously Girl Out Back, Dell 1958]

      The Concrete Flamingo  [Cassell, 1960; previously All the Way, Dell 1958].

      The Catfish Tangle  [Cassell, 1963; previously River Girl, Gold Medal 1951].

      Mix Yourself a Redhead  [Cassell, 1965; previously A Touch of Death, Gold Medal 1954]

      The Hot Spot  [Cassell, 1965; previously Hell Hath No Fury, Gold Medal 1953].

   Because the decision to reissue earlier titles in hardcover, and to retitle some of them, had been taken by Cassell, the US hardcover editions of Gold Medal reissues followed within the same year. New titles, written by CW after 1958, such as Aground and Dead Calm, went straight into hardcover, the US edition preceding the Cassell edition.

   The reissuing of the Gold Medal books in hardcover, many with new titles, played a crucial role in the continuation of CW’s success. It led to the creation of a new audience, not least through library sales. It brought him to the attention of critics in the mainstream and publishing trade press where, on both sides of the Atlantic, he was consistently well reviewed.

   This rebirth of his books led in turn to their reissue, under the new titles, in two further paperback phases: first, following on directly from the hardcover editions, by Pan in the UK, and Pocket Books and Harper and Row in the US; then later, through another phase of reissues, in the 80s and 90s, by publishers such as Penguin and No Exit Press.

    The photo attached is one I took of Charles Williams on the top floor of the Cassell building in Red Lion Square, London, in the early 60s.

   On the literary side, I have always divided his thrillers, not into sea vs land, but into water vs land. In all the books which contain boats, fishing, water and swamp, there is a deeply nostalgic and pervasive atmosphere of mystery – smooth water providing both a feeling of calm and of hidden menace.

   There is no better example of a water novel than what I retitled The Catfish Tangle, the title referring to the catfish which Shevlin catches for the restaurant at the head of the lake.

   In the 60s, Cassell and Collins were the pre-eminent UK publishers of blockbuster novels. Our authors included Alec Waugh, Nicholas Monsarrat, Irving Stone and Irving Wallace. The last time CW visited our office, I put to him the idea that he could write a wonderful full-length novel using a liner as the setting.

   And the Deep Blue Sea ((Signet, pb, 1971; Cassell, 1972) is, in my opinion, not really a sea novel; the liner in the book is merely a platform for psychological interplay and misdeeds. I do not think it is successful as a thriller, but it clearly shows what he could have achieved through his powers of characterisation had he been prepared to work on a bigger canvas.

   Might it have revitalised his career? Sadly we shall never know. He said no; he was happy doing what he knew best and felt he was too stuck in his ways.

       ___

NOTE: For an essay by Bill Crider on Charles Williams, along with a complete bibliography, follow this link to the primary Mystery*File website.

       ___

[UPDATE] 02-01-09.   After making a couple of minor edits in the piece above, Nicholas and I have been discussing some of the other books by CW that Cassell published. One of them was The Sailcloth Shroud, which was published first in the US in hardcover (Viking, 1960; Cassell, 1960).

    No change in title was made for this one:

    There are two others for which the titles were changed, but for these Nicholas says: “I did not think up the the titles [for these two books]. I have a feeling (no more than that) that CW may have retitled them himself.”

       Stain of Suspicion [Cassell, 1959; previously Talk of the Town, Dell First Edition, 1958]

       Man in Motion [Cassell, 1959; previously Man on the Run, Gold Medal, 1958]

   Two additional books were published first as paperback originals in the US, then by Cassell in the UK. There were no changes in title for either of these:

       The Big Bite [Cassell, 1957; Dell, 1956]

       The Long Saturday Night [Cassell, 1964; Gold Medal, 1962]

  [LATER.] 03-17-09.   In his most recent email, Nicholas adds the following:

    “I left Cassell in 1970 following the take-over of the company by Crowell Collier Macmillan of New York. By then all but one of CW’s novels, Man on a Leash, had been published.

    “In 1965 the name of the crime list was changed to CASSELL CRIME and the decision was taken to reduce production costs by introducing a standard in-house series cover. The three band covers, which I designed, each featured a studio photograph incorporating elements of the story. The Hot Spot was the only CW thriller to appear with a CC series cover.”

[UPDATE #2] 09-11-10. Twelve covers are reproduced above, but Cassell actually published fifteen of Charles Williams’s thrillers, not including his comic crime stories, such as The Wrong Venus and The Diamond Bikini.

   Thanks to the assistance of some online booksellers who graciously supplied us with the three previously missing, we can now display the covers of all fifteen:

       Aground. [Cassell, 1961; Viking, US, hardcover, 1960; Crest s471, US, pb, 1961; Pan, UK, pb, 1969]

       Dead Calm. [Cassell, 1964; Viking, US, hardcover, 1963; Avon G1255, US, pb, 1965; Pan, UK, pb, 1966]

       Man on a Leash. [Cassell, 1974; G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1973; no paperback editions]

   For these last three covers, thanks to Nigel Williams Rare Books, London, for the cover image to Aground; to Instant Rare Books of Auckland, New Zealand, for Dead Calm; and to The Antique Map & Bookshop, Puddletown, Dorset, for Man on a Leash.

   Finally, a special note of thanks to Mark Terry of www.facsimiledustjackets.com, who earlier supplied the cover of Scorpion Reef, and to Bill Pronzini, who sent me all the others.

MILES BURTON – Beware Your Neighbour. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1951. No US publication.

   Hallows Green is a quiet street of detached houses with highly respectable inhabitants, a microcosm of middle-class England. There’s Walter Glandford, retired science professor; general practitioner Dr. Jeremy Teesdale; solicitor Peter Raynham; brothers Lawrence and Barry Flamstead, who live at opposite ends of the street and unfortunately do not get along too well; retired admiral Sir Hector Sapperton,; philanthropist Miss Florence Wayland; former civil servant Charles Vawtrey; and bank manager Claude Dodworthy. An exotic note is struck in this residential backwater by Hopton and Rachel Egremont, the couple holding regular religious services with a vaguely Eastern flavour in their corner house.

   Generally speaking the neighbours are friendly but alas, this soon changes following a series of anonymous communications, causing each resident of Hallows Green to look with suspicion on the others.

   It all begins when Glandford’s morning post brings a note informing him murder stalks Hallows Green. Miss Wayland receives a New Year card signed as from Death, while Peter Raynham is the recipient of an antique dagger blade inscribed “Honourable Death Is Best.” Lawrence Flamstead gets a drawing of a tiger with the message “Media vita morte sumus” or “In the midst of life we are in death.” Dr Teesdale’s note, a torn-out advertisement inscribed “H.C.N.,” is left under the windscreen wiper of his car. Sir Hector receives an envelope containing one of his own calling cards amended to show “Death comes for” written above his name.

   Banker Dodworthy’s communication arrives in the form of a parcel left in his bank’s night safe. It contains a wooden box which by the agency of an explosive strip from a Christmas cracker goes bang when he (rather foolishly in my opinion!) opens it. Further, the box lid is embellished “Next time…Death” in poker work. Vawtrey is the recipient of a photograph of a skeleton marked, in reversed letters, “Yours.” Only Barry Flamstead, one of the warring brothers, and the religious Egremonts are left out.

   It becomes apparent whoever is keeping the postman busy is a resident of the street. And since the inhabitants naturally want to keep the situation quiet to avoid the scarlet taint of scandal, enter the admiral’s former colleague and now friend Desmond Merrion to investigate.

   Hardly has Merrion arrived when Vawtrey’s garden goes up in flames, gigantic footprints are discovered here and there, matters escalate, and ultimately murder is done. But who is responsible and what could be the motive for the crimes disturbing this quiet pocket of suburbia?

My verdict: I felt Beware Your Neighbour leaned towards metamorphing into a literary curate’s egg, yet I cannot say any part of it was actually bad.

   All through the novel I was racking my brains as to what messages the anonymous communications could possibly mean. There’s much innocent fun to be had speculating on the matter. For example, did the honourable death dagger blade sent to solicitor Raynham point to a disgruntled former client or a shady incident in the legal eagle’s past? Then too why were one brother and the religious couple left out of the general correspondence?

   The reader is drawn along through a string of strange incidents until Merrion begins to unravel what is going on. When the solution is revealed, readers may accept the motive behind the odd communications as fitting with the ultimate crime, though if like me they begin thinking about it later they may begin to wonder if the whole odd arrangement was over-egging the pudding somewhat — not to mention pointing the finger into a very small circle, surely something the culprit would wish to avoid.

   So there was a little disappointment at the end of a novel with an otherwise excellent set-up. I for one would have loved to see what sort of plot Agatha Christie would have constructed using those letters as its kicking off point!

 Etext: http://www.munseys.com/diskfour/bwaredex.htm

[EDITORIAL UPDATE] 11-20-08.  I’ve deleted my previous comment, which dealt with my inability to find a cover image to go along with Mary’s review, the first failure I’ve had along those lines in quite a while.

   The good news, though, is that I’ve had the good fortune to have one sent to me, and you will have already seen it above. Sometimes all you need to do is ask. And to offer special thanks in return to Ian of SA Book Connection, who said and I quote:

   Me again. Thanks again, Ian. If anyone’s interested, please follow the link above. And when doing the required search for the book, don’t forget to spell Neighbour correctly!

   If you check back, it was a year ago yesterday that I announced here on the blog that I’d uploaded an article by John Pugmire about one of his favorite subgenres of mystery fiction, Locked Room Mysteries. (Mine, too, of course.)

   It’s largely a list of such stories considered to be the best by a couple of noted panels of experts — I’ll leave the details to the article itself — along (and here is where I came in) with cover images of as many of them as John and I could come up with — or nearly 100 or so.

   Some time ago — and longer ago than I’d rather admit — John sent me images of five more covers, one an improvement over one that we’d used to fill a gap, plus four that are brand new. I’ve finally gotten around to doing what I do, and that’s get them online at last.

   The page is on the primary M*F website, and even if you’ve seen it before, I think it’s worth a look. Here’s the URL: https://mysteryfile.com/Locked_Rooms/Library.html, and here are a couple of the newly added covers:

   It’s been a long time in getting it finished (the last update was sometime in January) but the Mystery House section of Bill Deeck’s Murder at 3 Cents a Day Lending Library website is ready for viewing. Thanks to the assistance of Bill Pronzini, whose collection has been of great use, cover images of almost all of the books published by Mystery House between 1940 and 1948 are now online.

   Mystery House was revived as an imprint in 1952 and continued on until 1959, but rather than doing any of these, what Bill and I will be tackling next are the covers of the lending library mysteries published by Arcadia House between 1939 and 1947. Arcadia House also began publishing mysteries in 1952, but here again we’ll concentrate on the ‘Golden Age’ titles first.

   Here are a couple of the Mystery House covers. For the others, you’ll have to follow the link above:

M. K. LORENS – Ropedancer’s Fall. Bantam; paperback original; 1st printing, August 1990.

   I’ll begin with a confession of sorts. Back when M. K. Lorens’ first book, Sweet Narcissus, came out, it looked particularly appetizing and I gave it a try, but I didn’t get very far.

   Whether I wrote a review of the book, based on what I had managed to read, I have no idea. I suspect not, but I might have. Isn’t giving up on a book worth pointing out, as long as you say so very clearly and carefully?

   And point out just why it was that you came to a dead end with it, without loudly and vociferously saying how greatly the author’s fault it was? (Even though in large part it may have been?)

   In any case I haven’t come across it recently, “it” referring to the review which I may or may not have written, so the point is moot.

   But the second book in the series recently surfaced, and remembering my earlier experience, I said to myself, here’s my opportunity to give the author another chance.

   Lorens’ detective is the key attraction, a gent by the name of Winston Marlowe Sheridan who writes a “Gilded Age” series of mystery fiction himself, but under the well-disguised pseudonym of Henrietta Slocum. Slocum’s character in turn is named G. Winchester Hyde. How can one resist?

   A portly fellow, Sheridan himself is a professor of literature at a New England college, and on occasion he finds himself involved in cases of murder, for which he places his sense of deduction on the line to solve.

   In this case the dead man in Ropedancer’s Fall is John Falkner, whose one novel won a Pulitzer, but who was never able to write another one and who had been recently been reduced to being to PBS talk-show host, albeit a very good one. And as he was a long-time on-and-off friend of Sheridan’s, as well as a hopeless reclamation project, Sheridan takes his death very personally.

   All well and good, but — and you knew this was coming, perhaps? — the telling is dense and nearly impenetrable — over 260 pages of small print — filled with Sheridan’s enormous entourage of friends and acquaintances, some closer than others, and their multitude of spouses and ex-spouses and intermingled offspring and foster children. And as the book goes on, the list of the above gets longer and longer — a snowballing effect figuratively if not literally.

   But given some time to get to know them, the list of characters does becomes manageable, and the writing, while dense, is also delightfully incisive and witty. Eventually, though, it begins to dawn on the reader (or at least this one) that the investigation is going absolutely nowhere. Wheels within wheels, but all of them are spinning and spinning, and spurting up little but slush.

   Skipping to the end, after about 160 pages, and sure enough, nothing happened in Chapter Twenty that couldn’t have been predicted after reading Chapter Two.

   Recommended if you’re a fan of clever, witty repartee between clever, witty people. (Do NOT read any sense of sarcasm into this statement.) Not recommended if you like a hands-on mystery to solve in your detective fiction.

      BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA. [Expanded from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

LORENS, M(ARGARET) K(EILSTRUP). 1945- . Pseudonym: Margaret Lawrence. Series Character: Winston Marlowe Sherman, in all. [The distinctive artwork for the covers you see is by Merritt Dekle.]

      Sweet Narcissus. Bantam, pbo, August 1989. [corrected year !]
      Ropedancer’s Fall. Bantam, pbo, August 1990.
      Deception Island. Bantam, pbo, November 1990.

      Dreamland. Doubleday, hardcover, April 1992; Bantam, pb, March 1993.
      Sorrowheart. Doubleday, hc, April 1993; Bantam, pb, April 1994.

LAWRENCE, MARGARET. Pseudonym of Margaret Keilstrup Lorens. SC: Midwife Hannah Trevor, in the first three; her daughter Jennet, who is deaf, appears in the fourth. Setting: Maine, 1780s.

      Hearts and Bones, Avon, pbo, October 1997. [Nominated for Edgar, Agatha, and Anthony awards]

      Blood Red Roses, Avon, pbo, October 1998.
      The Burning Bride, Avon, pbo, September 1999.
      The Iceweaver, Morrow, hc, July 2000. Trade paperback: Harper, July 2001.