JOHN BUXTON HILTON – Holiday for Murder. Diamond, reprint paperback; 1st printing, July 1991. Originally published as Passion in the Peak. US hardcover edition: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Originally published in the UK by Collins Crime Club, hc, 1985.

   This is another in the author’s Inspector Kenworthy series, the fifth in the series published by Diamond. There have been seventeen in all, and they have all been published in the US, surprisingly enough. (For most British mystery writers, there’s always at least one book that doesn’t make the cut with publishers over here — or so it seems.)

   Of the ones they’re doing, Diamond is not publishing them in order. One that I read not too long ago was Hangman’s Tide, which originally came out in 1975. In Holiday for Murder, which was written ten years later, Inspector Kenworthy has already retired, but his ability as a detective has spread throughout England so greatly that he’s regarded as very nearly omniscient.

   In this book he investigates a strange sort of murder, a hillside automobile accident in the driver disappears, only to show up later, very much dead, some distance away. The dead man is a notorious womanizing rock musician (all of which are (to some degree) very much synonymous) who has the leading role (that of Christ) in a non-denominational/ecumenical Passion play now in the stages of rehearsal in the small village of Peak Low.

   Practical jokes at the expense of two different Mary Magdalene’s have preceded the accident, but the murder was apparently committed for other reasons. The villagers, various policemen, and the many actors, singers, electricians and so on involved in putting on the extravaganza are all precisely and individually depicted — Hilton’ s primary strength as a writer.

   The solution to the murder is presented in very anti-climactic fashion, strangely enough, as if Hilton felt that the mystery itself wasn’t strong enough to stand on its own.

   There is also a red herring — the matter of the match from Doncaster — that is poorly done. Kenworthy seems to know all about before he’s informed, and its significance in the story is none at all. It’s never mentioned again.

   But if you enjoy mysteries with small English village settings, read this one anyway. You’ll like it.

[UPDATE] 01-25-09. Strangely enough, while I don’t remember any of the details of this book’s plot, much less whatever flaws I may have found in it, I do remember enjoying reading it, which makes that last sentence pretty much of a guarantee.

   One thing that I didn’t change in the review is Kenworthy’s rank. I called him an Inspector, but in Al Hubin refers to him as a Superintendent. (See below.) The easiest explanation is, of course, that he was promoted sometime during his career.

   When Hilton wasn’t writing about Kenworthy, he used Inspector Thomas Brunt as his detective on the case. What really distinguished them from the Kenworthy mysteries, though, is that the six Brunt books took place in England in the late 1800s through the year 1911 or so.

   And, for the sake of completeness, Hilton also wrote another six mysteries as by John Greenwood. Inspector Jack Mosley was in all of these. I remember the Mosley books as being somewhat lighter in tone, though I may be in error about that.

   Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s a list of all the Kenworthy books —

         KENWORTHY, SUPT. SIMON     [John Buxton Hilton, 1921-1986.]

       Death of an Alderman (n.) Cassell, UK, 1968. Walker, US, 1968. Also published as: Dead Man’s Path, Diamond, pb, 1992.
       Death in Midwinter (n.) Cassell, UK, 1969. Walker, US, 1969. (Diamond, pb, 1994.)
       Hangman’s Tide (n.) Macmillan, UK, 1975. St. Martin’s, US, 1975. (Diamond/Charter, pb, 1990.)
       No Birds Sang (n.) Macmillan, UK, 1975. St. Martin’s, US, 1978. Also published as: Target of Suspicion, Diamond, pb, 1994.
       Some Run Crooked (n.) Macmillan, UK, 1978. St. Martin’s, US, 1978.
       The Anathema Stone (n.) Collins, UK, 1980. St. Martin’s, US, 1980. Also published as: Fatal Curtain, Diamond, pb, 1990.

       Playground of Death (n.) Collins, UK, 1981. St. Martin’s, US, 1981. (Diamond/Charter, pb, 1991.)
       Surrender Value (n.) Collins, UK, 1981. St. Martin’s, US, 1981. Also published as: Twice Dead, Diamond, pb, 1992.

       The Green Frontier (n.) Collins, UK. 1982. St. Martin’s, US, 1982. Also published as: Focus on Crime , Diamond, pb, 1993.
       The Sunset Law (n.) Collins, UK, 1982. St. Martin’s, US, 1982.

       The Asking Price (n.) Collins, UK, 1983. St. Martin’s, US, 1983. Also published as: Ransom Game, Diamond, pb, 1992.
       Corridors of Guilt (n.) Collins, UK, 1984. St. Martin’s, US, 1984. (Diamond, pb, 1993.)

       The Hobbema Prospect (n.) Collins, UK, 1984. St. Martin’s, US, 1984. Also published as: Cradle of Crime, Diamond, 1991.
       Passion in the Peak (n.) Collins, UK, 1985. St. Martin’s, US, 1985. Also published as: Holiday for Murder, Diamond, 1991.
       The Innocents at Home (n.) Collins, UK, 1986. St. Martin’s, US, 1987. Also published as: Lesson in Murder, Diamond, 1991.
       Moondrop to Murder (n.) Collins, UK, 1986. St. Martin’s, US, 1986.
       Displaced Person (n.) Collins, UK, 1987. St. Martin’s, US, 1988.

MABEL SEELEY – The Listening House.

Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, 1938; reprinted, 1953 [25th Anniversary of the Crime Club]. Paperback reprints include: Popular Library #69, 1944; Mercury Mystery 45, digest-sized, n.d.; Pyramid R-1009, 1964, plus several later printings.

   It’s hard to believe that The Listening House, one of the cornerstones in the Haycraft-Queen collection, has been out of print for so long and that it isn’t a book everyone knows.

   Perhaps the problem is that Seeley wrote only a handful of books (nine, not all of them mysteries) and stopped writing when she was still fairly young — she lived until 1991 but her last mystery book appeared in 1954. It might be a regional thing too, for she was resolutely set in her native Minnesota.

   And then again it might be that, for all her other charms, Seeley never again wrote a book as fine as her first, though she copied the title again and again so that she had during her lifetime the sort of brand name loyalty Travis McGee novels had, or in our own day Sue Grafton. Seeley’s other books include The Chuckling Fingers, The Beckoning Door, The Crying Sisters, and The Whistling Shadow.

   In The Listening House a young woman, fired from her job and down at her luck, rents a cheap room from a huge old creepy rooming house that is set on the very edge of a steep overlook, and tenants throw their garbage off the back side of the building.

   Gwynne Dacres is not your ordinary ingenue heroine. She has been married, she’s capable of taking care of herself, for the most part, she has managed to surmount the Depression. The Great Depression is a tactile, living thing in this novel, a character as important as any of the crime victims or killers.

   Gwynne’s new landlady, old Mrs. Garr, is a terrible old tarantula of a woman, out of a Balzac novel, sitting on her cellar steps half the day and night, waiting, waiting, waiting, but for what? In the meantime a man’s body is found (by Gwynne) dumped, like an old load of dry goods, into the trash area at the bottom of that long cliff-like drop.

   Mrs. Garr’s terror is unfeigned, and we are not surprised, but horrified, and maybe even moved to pity, when the ghastly old lady is the second corpse whose body Gwynne discovers.

   There is plenty of horror or terror or what have you in this book, but it is also a fairly clued mystery with roots in a socio-sexual crime that occurred some twenty years back, during the days when police corruption in “Gilling City” allowed vice to run rampant.

   Seeley’s no-nonsense honesty about the harsh realities of what today we call “sex work” distinguishes her book from any other that I know of published in the late 1930s. It has a harsh, biting, Faulknerian edge to it.

   (I was thinking one of the reasons Seeley has faded from view is that none of her books was ever made for the movies — Irving Wallace made The Chuckling Fingers into a 1958 episode of the TV anthology series Climax! — and I can see that The Listening House is far too sexually frank for Hollywood of the late 1930s.)

   In addition to the sex-crime horror, which remains pretty disgusting even in today’s considerably degenerated world of “torture-porn” writing, Gwynne herself is torn, though in an amusing and sophisticated way, between the love of two very different men, a newspaper publisher, and the cop investigating the murders.

   (She accidentally meets the first one while he’s wearing only his boxer shorts, doing chin-ups in his apartment, so she gets a long view of his bare torso and hairy forearms and legs — sort of the “meet cute while naked” introduction Ellery Queen used to give his cute male characters.)

   Some have called Seeley’s plot marred by “coincidence,” but I don’t read it that way. Certainly many of the tenants had reason to kill their evil landlady — but it’s because they followed her there, to track her down, it’s not as if it were all some accident that so many of the characters had some ties to the 1921 disappearance and suicide of the unfortunate Rose Liberry.

   I think Seeley is painting a picture pf a complex society in which crimes against women are endemic because they’re built into the system, they’re the mortar which holds the bricks together in an edifice larger than a listening house.

   Too bad her other books aren’t as good, but she did make up for a disappointing run by a sharp and exciting finale: The Whistling Shadow, which is like the William Irish/George Hopley book that Woolrich never wrote.

      ___

         Bibliographic data:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin; various paperback editions are shown.]

SEELEY, MABEL (Hodnesfield). 1903-1991.

      The Listening House (n.) Doubleday 1938.
      The Crying Sisters (n.) Doubleday 1939.

      The Whispering Cup (n.) Doubleday 1940.

      The Chuckling Fingers (n.) Doubleday 1941.
      Eleven Came Back (n.) Doubleday 1943.

      The Beckoning Door (n.) Doubleday 1950.

      The Whistling Shadow (n.) Doubleday 1954.

   The opening of Isabel Ostrander’s The Clue in the Air (1917) is a full intuitionist detective novel. There is a Dying Message. There is a description of a whole apartment building, and the suspects living on various floors and corners — a description that could have served as a blueprint for the many Golden Age novels which have elaborate floor plans in their stories.

   The detectives also investigate alibis and time tables. Unfortunately, this does not lead to a classic puzzle plot. Ostrander unravels all the threads of her story, but does not show any great ingenuity in the Christie tradition.

   Still, the whole tone of the novel anticipates the storytelling of Christie, Queen and other intuitionists of the Golden Age. Ostrander, like other American women writers such as Lee Thayer and Carolyn Wells, was writing intuitionist detective novels at an early date: in the 1910’s, and long before the famous British writers like Christie and Crofts, who allegedly started the Golden Age in 1920.

   Thayer and Wells dealt with the domestic realm in their tales: a house full of suspects, whose motives sprung from their personal relationships with each other and the deceased. This was in marked contrast to the public realm writers of the American Scientific school, where motives spring from business relationships, theft, politics and civic corruption.

   Ostrander has plenty of domestic motives. But she also has a young inventor and his plane. A typical scientific school, business type issue. Similarly, in At One-Thirty (1915) we have domestic motives for some characters (a tangle of jealousy and adulterous relationships) and business issues motivatingothers (a detailed look at a Wall Street swindle).

   Business issues in Christie et al tend to be somewhat perfunctory. Someone will threaten to kill someone because they are double crossing them in a business deal. The motive is not developed into a major story, the way the American Scientific School would do it.

   For example, everything about the missing cashier and the embezzlement in The Circular Staircase is elaborately plotted. Ostrander straddles both traditions in her books.

   Another difference between the two schools. The intuitionists play attention to the crime scene, and the movements of the suspects around it during the crime. This is not generally true of the American Scientific School. A possible exception: Cohen’s Six Seconds of Darkness.

   This motion around the crime scene probably is a consequence of impossible crimes: one cannot have a Zangwill-Chesterton rearrangement in space and time, without tracking the characters’ movements.

   But it spreads to writers that are not always impossible crime oriented, such as SS Van Dine, Anthony Abbot, and Ellery Queen. It was also found in Doyle, in stories like “The Naval Treaty.” This was before the main impossible crime movement.

   The central mystery plot of Ostrander’s At One-Thirty (1915) is a straightforward imitation of Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913). This shows that Ostrander was reading British mystery novels.

   Ostrander’s book is very similar to Golden Age mystery fiction to come, with murder among a closed circle of suspects in a wealthy home. Here as elsewhere, Ostrander introduces a whole slew of suspects, each with a different subplot.

   Servants tend to be prominent characters in Ostrander, just as they are in Bentley. They do not tend to be the anonymous functionaries of Christie, who fade into the background. Instead they play major roles in the stories.

   Ostrander’s The Tattooed Arm (1921) has her police detective hero Sergeant Miles go undercover into a wealthy Long Island home as a servant, and much of the story is narrated from the servants’ hall and point of view.

   Scientific School writers sometimes paid close attention to issues of spousal abuse. These stories are fully feminist, and remind one of the attention that the women’s movement focused on this issue in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Ostrander also continues this tradition. At One-Thirty has a very detailed look at the problems of an abused wife.

   At One-Thirty centers on blind detective Damon Gaunt. Ostrander does a vivid job of evoking his world of sound, touch and smell. Gaunt makes many brilliant deductions from these senses, in a way that evokes Sherlock Holmes’ numerous deductions about his clients.

   Gaunt’s main detective work centers around flashes of insight into the situations in front of him. Ostrander makes it clear that he solves mysteries by pure thinking. This is definitely in the intuitionist tradition, and recalls both Sherlock Holmes before him, and such Golden Age intuitionist writers to come as Christie, Milne and Queen.

   Bibliographic data:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

OSTRANDER, ISABEL (Egenton). 1883-1924. Pseudonyms: Robert Orr Chipperfield, David Fox & Douglas Grant. (Books published under the latter three pen names are not included here.)

      At One-Thirty (n.) Watt 1915
      The Crevice [with William J. Burns] (n.) Watt 1915
      The Heritage of Cain (n.) Watt 1916

      The Clue in the Air (n.) Watt 1917 [Timothy McCarty]
      Island of Intrigue (n.) McBride 1918
      Suspense (n.) McBride 1918
      Ashes to Ashes (n.) McBride 1919
      The Twenty-Six Clues (n.) Watt 1919 [Timothy McCarty]

      How Many Cards? (n.) McBride 1920 [Timothy McCarty]

      The Crimson Blotter (n.) McBride 1921
      McCarty, Incog (n.) McBride 1922 [Timothy McCarty]
      The Tattooed Arm (n.) McBride 1922
      Annihilation (n.) McBride 1924 [Timothy McCarty]
      Dust to Dust (n.) McBride 1924

      Liberation (n.) McBride 1924
      The Black Joker (n.) McBride 1925
      The Neglected Clue (n.) McBride 1925
      The Mathematics of Guilt (n.) McBride 1926

      The Sleeping Cat (n.) McBride 1926
      The Sleeping Cop [with Christopher B. Booth] (n.) Chelsea House 1927

[Editorial Comments.]

   Please see Mike Grost’s website A GUIDE TO CLASSIC MYSTERY AND DETECTION for more essays such as this on the history of Detective Fiction. If it’s your first visit, you’re bound to stay quite a while — and to come back often.

   For further discussion of Carolyn Wells and Mary Roberts Rinehart, among other contemporaneous authors, see the comments that follow Bill Pronzini’s review of Carolyn Wells’ novel, The Wooden Indian.

TODD DOWNING – The Case of the Unconquered Sisters.

Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, 1936. UK edition: Methuen, hc, 1937.

   The skeleton of a professor doing sabbatical research down in Mexico is accidentally brought to light by the derailment of a train carrying a museum’s collection of archaeological relics back across the border.

    Customs official Hugh Rennert is first upon the scene, and this connection to the case, as slight as it is, seems enough to lead the American embassy in Mexico City to request his services in conducting the ensuing murder investigation.

   This is his fifth case, by the way. Customs work apparently means that you’re naturally snoopy — or is it the other way around?

   This is a curious sort of mystery, filled with wild and crazy clues, and populated by a pair of mildly eccentric expatriate ladies and their niece (beautiful), assorted servants and embassy officials, plus the remaining team of university scholars. It’s artificial, scatter-minded, and clouded by clumsy obfuscation.

   Nobody would publish such stuff today, and in a way, it’s a shame.

[UPDATE] 01-18-09. As a matter of fact, the folks who run the Rue Morgue Press are doing well reprinting books like this, and more success to them! In spite of my critical remarks, books like these are fun to read, and that’s a statement you should not take lightly.

   I’ve been omitting the letter grades I added to my reviews back then, but this one received a “C.” Obviously it’s not one of the classics — or you would have heard of it before now — but it’s equally not a stinkeroo from the bottom of the barrel. You can never go far wrong with a Crime Club mystery.

   As for the author, he was born in Oklahoma (Indian Territory) in 1902 of Native American (Choctaw) descent. He was the state’s “first successful writer of detective novels,” according to this website, which has a considerable amount of other information about him.

   All of the books below, in a list taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, take place in either Texas or Mexico — quite often both:

DOWNING, (George) TODD. 1902-1974.

      Murder on Tour (n.) Putnam 1933 [Hugh Rennert]
      The Cat Screams (n.) Doubleday 1934 [Hugh Rennert]
      Murder on the Tropic (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Hugh Rennert]
      Vultures in the Sky (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Hugh Rennert]

      The Case of the Unconquered Sisters (n.) Doubleday 1936 [Hugh Rennert]
      The Last Trumpet (n.) Doubleday 1937 [Hugh Rennert]
      Night Over Mexico (n.) Doubleday 1937 [Hugh Rennert]
      Death Under the Moonflower (n.) Doubleday 1938 [Peter Bounty]
      The Lazy Lawrence Murders (n.) Doubleday 1941 [Peter Bounty]

   I don’t know very much about Downing’s second series character. An online review from Time Magazine of this last book describes him as a Texas sheriff, with the mystery taking place on a train en route to Mexico.

MAY MACKINTOSH – Balloon Girl.

Popular Library; paperback reprint; no date stated. US hardcover edition: St. Martin’s, 1977. Previous UK hardcover edition: Collins, 1976, as Roman Adventure.

   If you seek a book that has all but dropped out of sight, you need not look very much further than this one. There is only one copy of the paperback listed on ABE, and five copies of the hardcover, and for the completists among you who may be wondering, there is a single copy of the British hardcover.

    One might also wonder, or at least I am, why the British title Roman Adventure was changed for the US edition. The UK title is fairly bland, I grant you, but why did they think that Balloon Girl was a better one? That it would sell more books? It doesn’t seem that way to me, but I never was a marketing major. (Since I prefer the US title myself, it’s only a rhetorical question.)

   Under either title, I’m going to call this a novel of “gentle romantic suspense” and wait for all of the hard-boiled detective fans who are still reading this to step off the bus, if they haven’t already, before getting down to details.

    To wit: this is one of those books which never quite manages to get down to details — any questions that plain flat out need to be asked are never quite asked. They’re left somewhere off in the distance, clouds on the horizon, to be dealt with later. This is a book for someone with the flair of a master procrastinator for putting off unpleasant things in life until tomorrow.

   Take Kati Nickleby, for example, for indeed she is the primary and main character in the tale. Kati works for the restoration department at the European and American Museum in London, and when she awakes on the morning that dawns in Chapter One, she spots her flatmate Ann, her immediate supervisor at the museum, driving off in the street below with a strange man, taking all of her clothes and possessions with her.

   Later that morning it is discovered that a valuable Van Gogh is missing. While there is no proof, the conclusion is obvious. Or is it? On page 29 Ann returns, blissfully unaware that the police have been looking for her. End of Chapter Two.

   In Chapter Three, Kati is in Italy, ready for her pre-arranged stay with Signor Turo, for whom she is to work in his private gallery. What had happened to Ann is a question that Kati ponders but does not know the answer to, and life in sunny Italy begins to shoo away the clouds that had formed back in England.

   Until, shockingly, Ann appears again in a villa Kati is visiting in Tuscany. Ann is the niece of the owner, one Conte Pietro di Tiepolo, and not too coincidentally, of a chain of antique shops, each called “The Balloon Girl.”

   And also not too coincidentally, Kati’s one assured friend, Dr. Sam Frame, a Canadian museum director who also happens to have been on the scene in London when the Van Gogh disappeared and now also in Italy, suspects that forged paintings have surfaced through The Balloon Girl shops.

   Ah, sorry. This is getting (a) too complicated, while at the same time (b) I am oversimplifying things. I will skip further details, as I am sure you have gotten the picture by now.

   There is an abundance of atmosphere, with long passages in which little happens except sudden chills in the warm Italian sun — hinting ever so slightly that some insidious evil is at work — and then of a sudden, evil is at work.

   Shots ring out in an open square. Kati is attacked while touring the Tomb of St. Cecelia. Someone wants her dead. Someone else — or it is the same person? — intends to use her to take a fall. For whom or for what, it is not quite known, but nonetheless suspicion is steered by the spadeful in her direction.

   Please don’t get me wrong. There are flashes of brilliance in the plotting, just enough to keep the reader wondering, and just often enough to keep the previously mentioned reader from putting the book down for good. When the tale begins to falter, crumble and fall apart, my advice is to stay with it, as no, it never quite does.

      Bibliographic data:

   Here’s a complete list of the other mystery fiction that May Mackintosh wrote, expanded from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, with an able assist from abebooks.com:

Appointment in Andalusia. Collins, UK, hc, 1972. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1972.
      Dell, pb, 1973.

      Pan 23817, pb, UK, 1974.

A King and Two Queens. Collins, UK, hc, 1973. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1973, as Assignment in Andorra.

      Pan 24325, pb, UK, n.d., as Assignment in Andorra.

The Sicilian Affair. Collins, UK, hc, 1974. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1974.
      Dell, pb, 1978, as Dark Paradise.

The Double Dealers. Collins, UK, hc, 1975.
      Delacorte, hc, 1975, as Highland Fling.
      Dell, pb, 1978, as Highland Fling.

Roman Adventure. Collins, UK, hc,1976.
      St. Martin’s, hc, 1977, as Balloon Girl.
      Pop. Library 04384, pb, n.d., as Balloon Girl.

   And as by REGINA ROSS:

Falls the Shadow. Arthur Barker, hc, UK, 1974. [British Intelligence agent Charles Forsyth]
      Delacorte, hc, 1974.
      Futura/Troubadour, pb, UK, 1977.
      Dell, pb, n.d.

The Devil Dances for Gold. Macdonald & Janes, hc, UK, 1976.
      Futura / Troubadour, UK, pb, 1977.

      Ballantine, pb, 1977.

The Face of Danger. Avon, pb, 1982.

   There are no birth or death dates for May Mackintosh in Crime Fiction IV, but what Al does provide is the only biographical information I have discovered so far: She was born in Scotland and later lived in Spain. I do not know who series characters Laurie Grant and Stewart Noble are (nothing on Google), but I plan on finding out, eventually. Some day…!

[UPDATE] 01-17-09.   I don’t know why I wrote such a long review of this book, but I did. I thought just now of cutting it, but in the end I decided not to. I did do some rearranging, though, to put the bibliographic data at the end, not the beginning.

   Since writing the review, I haven’t found anything more about May Mackintosh myself, but Al Hubin has. From Part 9 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, here are the years she was born and when she died: 1922-1998.

CHARLES G. BOOTH – Murder at High Tide.

William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1930. UK edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930.

   This story of a domestic tyrant who’s found murdered in his library has a lot of what attracted me to mysteries in the first place.

   Even so, while fun to read, an honest appraisal would have to rank it only a notch or so above the Hardy Boys. And as in a vintage Charlie Chan movie, the dead man’s mansion is full of suspects at each other’s throats, with wild accusations and amazing discoveries coming at every moment.

   The hero is a young antiques dealer, in his own words, an ass with women. (No further comment.) The detective is Anatole Flique, a comically suave French policeman, although the murder does take place on an island just off the California coast. In his own words, he’s the cleverest on the Paris Surete. He’s also greatly given to twirling his mustaches and busily polishing the top of his head, all the while contemplating life’s little mysteries.

   There are tons of false evidence, most of it leading to dead ends, but I think that the killer, in spite of his or her alibi, should be spotted at once. The style is not John Dickson Carr’s, but it is his kind of story. If there’s no locked room, it’s only because then there wouldn’t have been quite so much fun with alibi-breaking, which in Murder at High Tide is the name of this particular game.

[UPDATE] 01-14-09.  One of the revisions I made was to add the name of the French detective who worked on this case. Obviously I had no idea that he appeared in more than one book, but he did. From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s his complete dossier:

FLIQUE, ANATOLE [Charles G. Booth]
       o Murder at High Tide (n.) Morrow 1930 [California]
       o The Cat and the Clock (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Los Angeles, CA]
       o Kings Die Hard (n.) Hammond 1949 [California; 1929]

   This last book never had a US edition. It came out in 1949, the same year that the author died. According to Wikipedia, Charles G. Booth was “a British-born writer who settled in America and wrote several classic Hollywood stories, including The General Died at Dawn (1936) and Sundown (1941). He won an Academy Award for Best Story for The House on 92nd Street in 1945. […] He also penned the source story for Paul Mazursky’s 1988 film Moon Over Parador.”

   I’d never realized until now that Booth was originally from England. Besides the fiction he wrote in novel form, I know his name from many stories he wrote for Black Mask, the quintessential hard-boiled American detective pulp magazine.

   In fact, he has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the three authors whose stories were deleted from the paperback edition of The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (Simon & Schuster, 1946), edited by Joseph T. Shaw. This is a great reason why you should own the hardcover edition, not just the one reprinted by Pocket (1952).

EDWINA NOONE – Dark Cypress.

Ace K-213, paperback original; 1st printing, 1965. Reprinted at least once.

   Edwina Noone was, as you might have guessed, if you didn’t already know, one of the pseudonyms of Michael Avallone, one of more prolific writers of the 60s and 70s. As the author of a long armful of detective novels, his primary private eye character — and probably his favorite — was the inimitable Ed Noon, the books in which he appeared I should really unpack and read again soon.

   Avallone as Noone stays totally within the restrictions of the gothic romance novel, however, as practiced in the 60s and 70s, and except for sheer readability, perhaps, there’s nothing in this tale’s style of writing to suggest that it was Avallone who was really at the wheel.

   We move from Cornwall (see my earlier review of The Shadow of Polperro, by Frances Cowen) to Connecticut. From the present day when the previous book took place, we shift in time to some unidentified period in the past. Rather than a desolate castle on a rocky coastline, the focus is instead a grove of cypress trees surrounding a bathing pool behind a huge manor house.

   A young girl comes to be the tutor of a young motherless boy, his aloof father and two servants the only other occupants of a house that’s full of secrets. Many another gothic novel has started in very much the same way. The boy’s older brother is dead, drowned in the pool behind the house, a magnificent lad; a prodigy, the housekeeper says. The mother had died at childbirth. The younger boy never knew her.

   Very atmospheric, and although you can read pages at a single glance, the tension builds so that you can all but feel it. Built to a formula, but in the hands of a man (in this case) born to write, formulas can also have substance.

[UPDATE] 01-12-09. Another reason you should go back to the review I posted of The Shadow of Polperro is that in the comments afterward Xavier Lechard and I had a brief exchange about the formula that most gothics were structured on, plus a display of a few of their covers in their French incarnations.

   The following list does not include all of the gothic romances written by the late Michael Avallone, only the ones for which his Edwina Noone byline was used. (He also wrote gothics as by Priscilla Dalton, Jean-Anne de Pre, Dora Highland and Dorothea Nile.) Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

NOONE, EDWINA. Pseudonym of Michael Avallone.

      Corridor of Whispers (n.) Ace 1965
      Dark Cypress (n.) Ace 1965
      Heirloom of Tragedy (n.) Lancer 1965
      Daughter of Darkness (n.) Signet 1966
      The Second Secret (n.) Belmont 1966
      The Victorian Crown (n.) Belmont 1966

      Seacliffe (n.) Signet 1968

      The Craghold Legacy (n.) Beagle 1971
      The Cloisonne Vase (n.) Curtis 1972
      The Craghold Creatures (n.) Beagle 1972
      The Craghold Curse (n.) Beagle 1972
      The Craghold Crypt (n.) Curtis 1973

   Of the two covers shown, note that the first is a stylized version containing all of the traditional ingredients, while the second features photographed models, rarely used for gothics, with a close-up shot of only their faces.

   The book itself was marketed as “a novel of high romance,” so it was an obvious attempt to move away from the typical gothic novel. Nonetheless the blurb on the front cover gives it away: “… dark tale of foreboding love between the daughter of a Yankee captain and a mysterious seafaring stranger, on the windswept coast of Maine.”

ARTHUR MORRISON – Chronicles of Martin Hewitt.

D. Appleton & Co., US, hardcover, 1896; Ward Lock & Co., UK, hardcover, 1895 (shown).

   Arthur Morrison’s Martiin Hewitt was for the decade 1895-1905 probably the foremost rival of Sherlock Holmes. Not much of one, though, for he completely lacked the distinguishing personality of the Master and his creator the skill to make his deductions seem other than lucky guesses.

    Some of his adventures, however have plots as delightfully flamboyant as Holmes’. Notable of the six short stories — each the length of a Nero Wolfe novella — included in Chronicles are “The Case of Laker, Absconded,” in which the crooks carefully arrange their robbery of a bank messenger to make it seem that he has defaulted; and “The Case of the Missing Hand,” in which a gypsy almost frames, unintentionally, two brothers for killing their suicide step-father by stealing the corpse’s hand to make a Hand of Glory — a thief’s talisman.

   The telling of these tales is, however, almost as pedestrian as Hewitt’s personality.

      Additional bibliographic data:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

ARTHUR MORRISON – Chronicles of Martin Hewitt

      The Case of Laker, Absconded · nv The Windsor Magazine May, 1895
      The Case of the Lost Foreigner · nv The Windsor Magazine Jun, 1895
      The Case of the Missing Hand · ss The Windsor Magazine Apr, 1895
      The Holford Will Case · ss The Windsor Magazine Mar, 1895
      The Ivy Cottage Mystery · nv The Windsor Magazine Jan, 1895 (shown)
      The Nicobar Bullion Case · nv The Windsor Magazine Feb, 1895

LEONARD R. GRIBBLE – The Grand Modena Murder.

Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, [1931]. Prior UK edition: George G. Harrap, hc, 1930. Paperback reprint: Cherry Tree, UK, ca.1944.

   The earliest books that were published under Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint showed decidedly English overtones. Like this one, a great many of their selections between 1929 and 1933 first appeared on the other side of the Atlantic.

   This one was written by Leonard Gribble when he was still very young, only 23, and perhaps as a result it nicely shows a grand youthful passion for melodrama and determined, awkward telling. Over a long career, Gribble wrote well over 50 other mysteries, both under his own name and others. Crime Club published only two or three of them, however, and most of his work has never appeared in this country.

   The Grand Modena that gives the book its name is a hotel, one of London’s finest. The opening scene is a confrontation that takes place in the ballroom, between a young man and the father of the girl he loves.

   Apparently the older man is something less than a completely trustworthy business associate as well. Not altogether to our surprise, he’s found the next morning murdered in his room upstairs. Detective Inspector Anthony Slade is immediately called in as the representative of Scotland Yard’s famed Criminal Investigation Department.

   Slade lives and breathes the entire investigation that follows. He eats it, he sleeps it, and over and over again he reasons his way through the treacherously tangled skein that the past has made of numerous intertwined secrets.

   If the internal workings of a detective’s mind is what you find yourself yearning for in a story, without the noisome clutter of a troubled domestic home life, this is a story built for you.

   But even so, if details like watching Slade look through a lens for fingerprints upon a dagger already cleaned by the doctor bother you, and if you believe that detectives, even policemen, are only human too, you may begin to have doubts.

[UPDATE] 01-06-09.   In spite of my rather lukewarm comments, Inspector Slade went on to have one the longer careers in the annals of Scotland Yard. I’ll add a complete listing of all his full-length novel appearances below. Gribble wrote a few other works of crime fiction in which Slade did not appear, and these are not included in this list.

   I also mentioned that Gribble used other pen names. There’s a fellow named John Creasey who used more, but Gribble is right up there as a leader in this particular category. The following information comes from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

GRIBBLE, LEONARD R(eginald). 1908-1985. Pseudonyms: Sterry Browning, James Gannett, Leo Grex, Louis Grey, Piers Marlowe, Dexter Muir & Bruce Sanders.

SLADE, SUPT. ANTHONY

o The Case of the Marsden Rubies (n.) Harrap 1929 [England]
o The Gillespie Suicide Mystery (n.) Harrap 1929 [England]
o The Grand Modena Murder (n.) Harrap 1930 [England]
o Is This Revenge? (n.) Harrap 1931 [England]
o The Stolen Home Secretary (n.) Harrap 1932 [England]
o The Secret of Tangles (n.) Harrap 1933 [England]

o The Yellow Bungalow Mystery (n.) Harrap 1933 [England]
o The Death Chime (n.) Harrap 1934 [England]
o The Riddle of the Ravens (n.) Harrap 1934 [England]

o Mystery at Tudor Arches (n.) Harrap 1935 [England]
o The Case of the Malverne Diamonds (n.) Harrap 1936 [England]
o Riley of the Special Branch (n.) Harrap 1936 [England]
o The Case-Book of Anthony Slade (co) Quality 1937 [England]
o Who Killed Oliver Cromwell? (n.) Harrap 1937 [England]
o Tragedy in E Flat (n.) Harrap 1938 [England]
o The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (n.) Harrap 1939 [England]
o Murder First Class (n.) Burke 1946 [England; Train]
o Atomic Murder (n.) Harrap 1947 [England]
o Hangman’s Moon (n.) Allen 1950 [England]
o They Kidnapped Stanley Matthews (n.) Jenkins 1950 [England]
o The Frightened Chameleon (n.) Jenkins 1951 [England]
o The Glass Alibi (n.) Jenkins 1952 [England]
o Murder Out of Season (n.) Jenkins 1952 [England]
o She Died Laughing (n.) Jenkins 1953 [France]
o The Inverted Crime (n.) Jenkins 1954 [England]

o Death Pays the Piper (n.) Jenkins 1956 [England]
o Superintendent Slade Investigates (co) Jenkins 1956 [England]
o Stand-In for Murder (n.) Jenkins 1957 [England]
o Don’t Argue with Death (n.) Jenkins 1959 [England]

o Wantons Die Hard (n.) Jenkins 1961 [England]
o Heads You Die (n.) Jenkins 1964 [England]
o The Violent Dark (n.) Jenkins 1965 [England]
o Strip-Tease Macabre (n.) Jenkins 1967 [England]
o A Diplomat Dies (n.) Jenkins 1969 [England]
o Alias the Victim (n.) Hale 1971 [England]
o Programmed for Death (n.) Hale 1973 [England]
o You Can’t Die Tomorrow (n.) Hale 1975 [England]
o Midsummer Slay Ride (n.) Hale 1976 [England]
o Crime on Her Hands (n.) Hale 1977 [England]
o Death Needs No Alibi (n.) Hale 1979 [England]
o Dead End in Mayfair (n.) Hale 1981 [England]
o The Dead Don’t Scream (n.) Hale 1983 [England]
o Violent Midnight (n.) Hale 1986 [England]

GEORGE BAGBY – Guaranteed to Fade.

Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1978. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition], February 1979.

   The first time that George Bagby, himself a character in his own novels, told us about one of the mystery cases solved by his friend, Inspector Schmidt of the N.Y.P.D., was in 1935. This is his latest, the 44th in the series so far.

   As always, Schmitty complains a great deal about his aching feet, but he makes quick work of the murder of the many-times married Tommy Thomas, a prime example of how the rich find divorce so convenient a convention. To tell the truth, however, this one doesn’t take a lot of brain-power to figure out. The entertainment may be lighter than usual, but then again, I’m a confirmed addict.

[UPDATE] 12-31-08.   One thing that struck me when reading this review is that when I wrote them for the Courant, I generally had to keep them short, something I seem to have difficulty doing any more. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

   The other thing that caught my attention was the very last word I used. George Bagby, in real life Aaron Marc Stein, aka Hampton Stone was one of my favorite writers, under all three names. I cringe at having to use the word “was,” since (once again) he’s an author I haven’t read in an awfully long time. Going through these old fanzines is bringing back lots of memories.

   In Mr. Bagby’s honor, and Inspector Schmidt’s as well, why not go for a long list of all of the latter’s adventures? Thanks to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here it is:

SCHMIDT, INSPECTOR [GEORGE BAGBY]

o Murder at the Piano (n.) Covici Friede 1935 [New York City, NY]
o Ring Around a Murder (n.) Covici Friede 1936 [New York]
o Murder Half Baked (n.) Covici Friede 1937 [New York City, NY]

o Murder on the Nose (n.) Doubleday 1938 [New York City, NY]
o Bird Walking Weather (n.) Doubleday 1939 [New York City, NY]

o The Corpse with the Purple Thighs (n.) Doubleday 1939 [New Jersey; Academia]
o The Corpse Wore a Wig (n.) Doubleday 1940 [New York City, NY]
o Here Comes the Corpse (n.) Doubleday 1941 [New York City, NY]

o Red Is for Killing (n.) Doubleday 1941 [New York City, NY]
o Murder Calling �50� (n.) Doubleday 1942 [New York City, NY]
o Dead on Arrival (n.) Doubleday 1946 [New York City, NY]
o The Original Carcase (n.) Doubleday 1946 [New York City, NY]
o The Twin Killing (n.) Doubleday 1947 [New York City, NY]
o In Cold Blood (n.) Doubleday 1948 [New York City, NY]
o The Starting Gun (n.) Doubleday 1948 [New York City, NY]
o Coffin Corner (n.) Doubleday 1949 [New York City, NY]
o Drop Dead (n.) Doubleday 1949 [New York City, NY]
o Blood Will Tell (n.) Doubleday 1950 [New York City, NY]

o Death Ain�t Commercial (n.) Doubleday 1951 [New York City, NY]
o The Corpse with the Sticky Fingers (n.) Doubleday 1952 [New York City, NY]
o Scared to Death (n.) Doubleday 1952 [New York City, NY]

o Dead Drunk (n.) Doubleday 1953 [New York City, NY]
o Give the Little Corpse a Great Big Hand (n.) Doubleday 1953 [New York City, NY]
o The Body in the Basket (n.) Doubleday 1954 [Madrid]
o A Dirty Way to Die (n.) Doubleday 1955 [New York City, NY]
o Cop Killer (n.) Doubleday 1956 [New York City, NY]
o Dead Storage (n.) Doubleday 1957 [New York City, NY]

o Dead Wrong (n.) Doubleday 1957 [New York City, NY]
o The Three-Time Losers (n.) Doubleday 1958 [New York City, NY]
o The Real Gone Goose (n.) Doubleday 1959 [New York City, NY]
o Evil Genius (n.) Doubleday 1961 [New York City, NY]
o Murder�s Little Helper (n.) Doubleday 1963 [New York City, NY]
o Mysteriouser and Mysteriouser (n.) Doubleday 1965 [New York City, NY]
o Dirty Pool (n.) Doubleday 1966 [New York City, NY]
o Corpse Candle (n.) Doubleday 1967 [Maine]
o Another Day-Another Death (n.) Doubleday 1968 [New York City, NY]
o Honest Reliable Corpse (n.) Doubleday 1969 [New York City, NY]
o Killer Boy Was Here (n.) Doubleday 1970 [New York City, NY]
o My Dead Body (n.) Doubleday 1976 [New York]
o Two in the Bush (n.) Doubleday 1976 [New York City, NY]

o Innocent Bystander (n.) Doubleday 1977 [New York City, NY]
o The Tough Get Going (n.) Doubleday 1977 [New York City, NY]
o Better Dead (n.) Doubleday 1978 [New York City, NY]
o Guaranteed to Fade (n.) Doubleday 1978 [New York City, NY]
o I Could Have Died (n.) Doubleday 1979 [New York City, NY]
o Mugger�s Day (n.) Doubleday 1979 [New York City, NY]
o Country and Fatal (n.) Doubleday 1980 [New York City, NY]
o A Question of Quarry (n.) Doubleday 1981
o The Sitting Duck (n.) Doubleday 1981
o The Golden Creep (n.) Doubleday 1982 [New York City, NY]
o The Most Wanted (n.) Doubleday 1983 [New York City, NY]