At the thought of Graham Greene reading Perry Mason novels the mind boggles, but we now have documentary evidence that he did — and apparently so did his friend and fellow titan of 20th-century English literature, Evelyn Waugh.

    “Maybe we’ve been wrong about Perry Mason,” Greene wrote to Waugh on September 29, 1951. I’ve just been reading an early one — perhaps the first. The Case of the Velvet Claws. He kisses Della [Street] right on the lips & when his client notices the lipstick, he says ‘Let it stay.’ His client’s a girl & at one time he pushes her roughly onto a bed. He also makes her faint by third degree & slaps her with a wet towel to bring her round… [I]n the next case he drinks some red wine with a little French bread.”

    The letter can be found on pp. 191-192 of Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, ed. Richard Greene (Norton, 2007) but it’s never mentioned in the Index.

    The three men and the lovely Asian woman arrived a few minutes early that Saturday morning. I was reminded of the invasion of Ellery and Richard Queen’s apartment in the first pages of The King Is Dead (1952) but these invaders — Japanese director Naoto Tanaka and two camera operators and a female interpreter — were on a more prosaic mission: to shoot some footage with me for a documentary on Ellery Queen, one of a series of four that are being made for Japanese TV. (The subjects of the other three are Poe, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler.)

    They stayed for half a day and as far as I can tell the filming went well. At one point I was asked to name my two favorite Queen novels. This was almost impossible for me even when the director made it clear that I could exclude the four originally published as by Barnaby Ross.

    Since the early EQ novels (1929-35) were so radically different from those of the third period (1942-58), I argued that I should be allowed to pick two from each and chose The Greek Coffin Mystery and The Egyptian Cross Mystery from Period One and Ten Days’ Wonder and Cat of Many Tails from Period Three.

    Tanaka then insisted that I opt for one from each of those periods. When I went for the Coffin and the Cat, he beamed, and said that those were his favorites too. Whatever footage from our interview winds up on the cutting-room floor, I suspect that bit will survive into the finished film. Of which I’ve been promised a DVD.

    Just about everyone knows about the sign on Harry Truman’s desk, but how many know of its possible connection with mystery fiction? The story is briefly told on page 481 of David McCullough’s 1992 biography Truman.

    “In the fall [of 1945, soon after FDR’s death and Truman’s unexpected rise to the presidency], Fred Canfil had given him a small sign for the desk. ‘The Buck Stops Here,’ it said. Canfil had seen one like it in the head office of a federal reformatory in El Reno, Oklahoma, and asked the warden if a copy might be made for his friend the President, and though Truman kept it on his desk only a short time, the message would stay with him permanently.”

    The obvious follow-up questions are: Where did that warden get the sign? Was he or the person who had it made for him aware that a sign with an almost identical message figures in a mystery novel published just a few years before FDR’s death?

    Five Alarm Funeral (1942) was the first novel in what became a long series about New York fire marshal Ben Pedley, written by super-prolific pulp writer Prentice Winchell (1895-1976) under his most frequently used pseudonym, Stewart Sterling.

    At the beginning of Chapter Three, Pedley tells his assistant Barney that on the arson murder he’s presently investigating the Police Commissioner “has to pass the buck to somebody.” Barney: “You’d ought to have a new sign up on the door there….” Pedley: “What kind of a sign?” Barney: “‘The Buck’ — it oughta read — ‘Stops Right Here.'”

    Perhaps Truman’s next biographer will look into the connection, if any, between this passage and the most famous sign in recent presidential history.

   When I still had my book collection (sold in 1982) I read and reviewed a number of Golden Age British mysteries, and stuck the reviews in a file. Some of the reviews were published somewhere, but here is a bunch that weren’t.

   Elaine Hamilton’s Murder Before Tuesday (Ward Lock, 1937) is better than average Golden Age material, presenting a number of intriguing characters with mysterious and intertwined relationship and satisfying plotting.

   Inspector Reynolds of the Yard does the detecting, what little there is, and fair play is not emphasized. Vanda Quayne well qualifies as a murderee. She’s a dancer who preys on people, sowing discord and hatred liberally in her path. She comes to London to perform despite threatening letters, hires a secretary, inflames passions, and, in due course, provides us with our corpse.

   The landscape is littered with suspects, a nosy reporter turns up who treads on all available toes, and Reynolds whisks a least likely suspect out of his hat at the end.

    W. W. Masters and his only work Murder in the Mirror (Longmans, 1931) are about as obscure as they come, but the story is not without merit.

   The theme is psychic or supernatural menace, with which battle must be waged; I was reminded of the later books by Jack Mann. And quite a nice surprise climaxes the story.

   We begin with a man playing cricket — but playing while in mental turmoil for he can remember nothing of who he is or where he came from or how he happens to be in the game. We later meet his friends — pals from Oxford — and learn with whom, or with what, they are now locked in deadly, unavoidable combat. Babylon, magic, mind control and murder are all effectively worked into the story.

   Nat Gould was, I gather, regarded as England’s (and maybe Australia’s, too) premier horse racing writer during his active years. At least some of his work was criminous, but of particularly thematic interest here is the rare volume of short stories, The Exploits of a Race-Course Detective (John Long, 1927).

   Those exploits comprise the first 6 (out of 15) tales in the collection. Crime stories they are (the other 9 are not), but of real detection they contain practically nothing. The sleuth is Valentine Martyn, the titular detective. He has a daughter, and we know that for her true love will out.

   The villain of the linked stories is a “sharper,” Luke Darton. Martyn foils his schemes each time, and we know that in the end Val will put him away. Each story has to do with racing; there is much of the jargon and milieu of the day, but no suspense and not much interest for present-day readers.

   If you’re interested in Cornell Woolrich and get Turner Classic Movies on satellite, I strongly suggest that, the next time it’s scheduled, you check out Blind Date (Columbia, 1934). It’s not based on anything Woolrich wrote and isn’t even a film noir, but this obscure little gem breathes the spirit of Woolrich’s early non-crime fiction like no other movie I’ve seen.

   Ann Sothern stars as a young woman of Manhattan, supporting her parents and a kid brother and sister in the pit of the Depression. As in the country-western song she is torn between two lovers: her steady boyfriend (Paul Kelly), who is “shanty Irish” like herself, and the wealthy young playboy (Neil Hamilton) whom she met on the blind date of the title.

   Anyone who’s familiar with the early Woolrich stories, and their recurrent theme that relationships and anguish are inseparable, is sure to feel that this movie must have been based on one of them.

   (Homework assignment: read Woolrich’s 1930 tale “Cinderella Magic,” collected in my Love and Night, just before or after watching the movie.)

   Even more amazing is the number of links between this film and Woolrich’s future. There’s a short and brutal scene at a dance marathon prefiguring the suspense master’s powerful 1935 tale “Dead on Her Feet.”

   Second male lead Paul Kelly was to play the second male lead a dozen years later in the Woolrich-based “Fear in the Night” (1947).

   The director, Roy William Neill, would later, and just before his death, helm Black Angel (1946), arguably the finest movie ever based on a Woolrich novel.

   Even the title Blind Date figures in the Woolrich canon: first in his pulp story “Blind Date with Death” (1937), later as the new title for the 1935 story better known as “The Corpse and the Kid” and “Boy with Body” when, in 1949, Fred Dannay reprinted it in EQMM.

   All these links are coincidences, of course, but what an eye-popping network of them!

   Speaking of Fred Dannay, a Japanese film crew will soon be coming to America to make a documentary on Ellery Queen. Since this is the first segment of a projected series to be called The Great Mystery Writers, I assume (and hope) that the emphasis will be on Fred and his first cousin Manny Lee, not on the detective character whose name they chose as their joint byline.

   I’m going to be involved in this project but exactly to what extent and in what capacity isn’t clear yet. For updates, stay tuned to this column.

   Soon to be published by the ABA Press (that’s ABA as in American Bar Association) is an anthology entitled Lawyers in Your Living Room! which deals, as you must already have guessed, with the countless series about the legal profession that have graced or disgraced our TV screens for more than half a century.

   As you also must already have guessed, I wrote the chapter on Perry Mason. There’s also a chapter on The Defenders, but most of the series discussed in the book are much more recent than Mason. For more details you needn’t wait for my next column, just google the title.

   During much of the next week my eyes are going to be glued to the PDF of the second volume of The Dark Page, which I am checking over for author Kevin Johnson.

   The first volume was a lavish coffee-table book dealing with those films noirs of the 1940s that were based on novels or short stories and with their literary sources.

   The sequel covers the noirs of the Fifties and early Sixties and their literary sources, ranging from Dreiser and Hemingway and Graham Greene, through a slew of specialists in noir fiction — Horace McCoy, Steve Fisher, Dorothy B. Hughes, Ed McBain, John D. MacDonald, David Goodis and (need I mention?) Woolrich — to such long-forgotten pen wielders as Ferguson Findley and Willard Wiener.

   Mickey Spillane, of course, gets full coverage. The choices of what films count as noir are at times quite unusual: The Bad Seed and the first version of Death of a Salesman are in, as is Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, but Psycho is out.

   The illustrations aren’t part of my PDF but, if the first Dark Page volume is any indication, they’ll be stunning.

   If you groove on Harry Stephen Keeler, the greatest nut who ever wrote a book, you’ll be pleased to hear that Strands of the Web, a collection that brings together the vast majority of his early short stories — not all because two or three remain lost — is about to be published by Ramble House.

   Most of these tales were written between 1913 and 1916, when Keeler was in his early and middle twenties and just beginning to develop the webwork patterns of wild coincidence that were to become his trademark but the earliest story dates back to 1910 and the latest to 1962, a few years before his death.

   You’ll find a few foreshadowings of his wacky webs now and then in this collection, but the prose is much more ordinary than the labyrinth sentences he eventually came to favor. The most noticeable influence on these stories is O. Henry, perhaps the most popular American short-fiction writer of all time, who died the same year Keeler first set pen to paper.

   For more details, go to www.ramblehouse.com.

   If there’s ever a biography of Ellery Queen—not of the detective character but of the cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee who created Ellery and also used his name as their joint byline—the following incident from Fred’s life deserves to be included.

   The first part comes mainly from one of the long introductions that he wrote for each story published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine during its early years; the follow-up was unearthed by radio historian Martin Grams, Jr. and will appear in one of his forthcoming books.

   In the spring of 1946, soon after being discharged from the Army at the end of World War II, Dashiell Hammett arranged with “a certain school of social science in New York City” to offer a Thursday evening course on mystery fiction aimed at writers and writer wannabees.

   At this time Fred’s main tasks in life were keeping EQMM afloat and, after his wife’s death from cancer, raising two young sons. He read the announcement of Hammett’s course and was impelled by curiosity to attend the first session, on May 2.

   Hammett invited him on the spot to co-teach the course and Fred agreed, each two-hour stint followed by “all-night bull-and-brandy sessions” between those giants of crime fiction. At the end of the May 16 class a young woman named Hazel Hills Berrien approached Fred and offered him the manuscript of a story she had begun writing after the first session.

   Fred, as always, suggested certain changes — “in the character of the detective, in the plot construction, and in the title,” he said later—but when they were made to his satisfaction, he bought the tale, which appeared in EQMM for September 1946 as “The Unlocked Room” by Hazel Hills.

   Then as now, magazines appeared on the stands some time before the publication month listed on their front covers, and the September EQMM had been available at least for a few weeks before August 31, 1946. That evening’s episode of the popular ABC radio series The Green Hornet was called “Death in the Dar” and dealt with a civil servant accused of embezzlement who is found shot to death in a room with the door locked and the window bolted. Newspaper publisher Britt Reid, a.k.a. the Green Hornet, rejects the obvious theory of suicide and eventually proves that the man was murdered.

   Hazel Hills Berrien wrote ABC four days after the broadcast, admitting that she hadn’t heard the episode but claiming she’d been told by a friend that it “bore a peculiar resemblance to a recently published short story of mine.”

   In this and several subsequent letters, each more threatening than the last, she demanded a copy of Dan Beattie’s script but refused to send ABC’s lawyers a copy of her story.

   Eventually Fred heard of the dispute and, on October 11, wrote to Green Hornet creator George W. Trendle, promising a copy of September’s EQMM and asking in return for a copy of Beattie’s script.

   Four days later and after reading “The Unlocked Room,” Trendle replied to Fred, rejecting any allegation of plagiarism but saying: “[H]ad Miss Hills handled the matter as diplomatically as you have, I think a copy of our script would have been in her hands long ago.”

   A later letter to Fred from Green Hornet attorney Raymond Meurer made the same point: “[W]e regret that the matter was handled so clumsily by Miss Hills…. [H]ad we received the request originally from you, we would not have hesitated a moment in supplying the script.” The tempest in a teapot quickly blew away since the only similarity between Hills’ story and the Hornet script was that both involved a murder in a locked room with a gimmicked window.

   As far as I know Hills never wrote another story, certainly none published in EQMM.

   Among the reprints in the EQMM issue that contained Hills’ story was one by Agatha Christie (“Strange Jest,” a Miss Marple tale originally published in 1941), again with an introduction by Fred Dannay, this one quoting a stanza from one of Christie’s poems.

   It comes from “In the Dispensary,” which was included in her collection The Road of Dreams (Bles, 1925):

         From the Borgias’ time to the present day, their power
            has been proved and tried:
         Monkshood blue, called aconite, and the deadly cyanide.
         Here is sleep and solace and soothing of pain—
            courage and vigour new;
         Here is menace and murder and sudden death—in these
            phials of green and blue.

   Okay, so it’s doggerel. Thanks anyway, Fred, for giving me this item for my column’s Poetry Corner more than sixty years ago!

   John Michael Hayes (1919-2007) never wrote a mystery novel or short story but, thanks mainly to his screenplays for several Alfred Hitchcock films, most notably Rear Window (1954) and the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), his memory remains green for us.

   I recently had occasion to read a deposition Hayes gave in August 1991 in connection with some litigation over Rear Window and was delighted to find some information about Hitchcock’s connection with Cornell Woolrich that I believe has never appeared in print.

   Among the six tales brought together in the second collection of Woolrich’s short fiction (After-Dinner Story, as by William Irish, 1944) were “Rear Window” (first published under Woolrich’s own name in Dime Detective, February 1942, as “It Had To Be Murder””) and “The Night Reveals” (first published in Story Magazine for April 1936).

   Hitchcock was interested in both. Shortly after Hayes began working on the Rear Window screenplay, “Hitch asked me…if I would read [“The Night Reveals”] and comment on it because he had [had] a choice between the two stories and wanted to know if he’d made the right choice. And I said he certainly had because “Rear Window” lent itself to intense suspense material and intense personal relationships which the other story didn’t.”

   Still and all, “The Night Reveals” is also marked by powerful suspense scenes and an intense relationship—between insurance investigator Harry Jordan and his wife, who he comes to suspect is a compulsive pyromaniac—and it’s a shame Hitchcock didn’t at least use it as source for an episode of his TV series. Preferably one directed by himself.

   As all mysteryphiles know, “Ellery Queen” was both the joint byline of first cousins Frederic Dannay (1905-1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905-1970) and the brilliant sleuth who starred in most of their mysteries.

   It’s also well known that, for all but the first years of their long joint career, Fred’s function was to devise lengthy plot synopses which Manny would flesh out to novel or story length.

   This was their division of labor when the Ellery Queen radio series debuted on CBS in the summer of 1939. What was not known outside the inner circle was that, after his first wife died of cancer in 1945, Fred was so overwhelmed with raising their two small children and keeping Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine afloat that he simply couldn’t continue coming up with new plots.

   After a few false starts, the writer chosen to take over much of Fred’s function on the series was Anthony Boucher (1911-1968). Since Tony lived in Berkeley, California and Manny on the East Coast, the arrangement required correspondence between them on almost a daily basis. That correspondence, which rivals Gone with the Wind in word count, is preserved at Indiana University’s Lilly Library.

   I’ve made several trips to Bloomington to immerse myself in those letters, which are fabulously interesting for any number of reasons. Some of them are close to indecipherable since they deal with the plot minutiae of radio dramas that have apparently ceased to exist in audio form.

   But the rest! Working at opposite ends of the country and under wartime and immediate post-war traveling conditions, Tony and Manny almost never met in person. But from their correspondence alone the devout Catholic and the agnostic Jew grew to be closer than brothers, and their letters range all over the map, from the health problems of their children to Hiroshima and the Cold War and anti-Semitism.

   Manny’s letters tend to be much longer and more irascible and clearly he was using them to vent. His rants about the confederacy of dunces he had to deal with in the broadcasting world offer some remarkable insights into the medium – as long as one keeps in mind that, being a classic type A personality and a past master at getting hot under the collar, he may not have been the most objective witness in the world.

   During much of his time collaborating with Manny, Boucher was also writing scripts for the Sherlock Holmes radio series, which between 1939 and 1946 starred Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, the Holmes and Watson of Universal’s movie series.

    “Compared to EQ, Holmes scripts practically write themselves,” he told Manny in one letter (13 September 1945), “and the EQ occupies by far the major portion of my working week…. You have no idea of the number of ideas that I worked on for days only to reject because I discovered an ineradicable flaw that would exasperate you….”

   As if to reassure Manny that he wasn’t the only man in radio who was surrounded by jerks, Boucher in his letters often recounted his travails with the Holmes program.

    “On Holmes, either my collaborator [Denis Green] or I am – is – I hate that kind of sentence – one of us is present at every rehearsal-and-broadcast. And a good thing, we find: not only directors but star actors can get the damndest ideas they have to be gently talked out of.” (28 January 1945)

    “We do at least have a first-rate man at the control board; but our sound technicians are two of the clumsiest louts that ever held a union card and all the things about time for commercials and cutting dialog to the bone… God does all that happen regularly to us. Especially since the sponsor switched announcers on us because the new one reads slower!” (5 July 1945)

   But these problems were as nothing compared with what happened at the beginning of the 1946-47 season, when Rathbone left the series for the Broadway stage and was replaced by Tom Conway. “The new producer on the show … is a pretentious and arrogant boor with a great deal of very real talent for production and writing – in some ways the ablest (and also the most offensive) man I have known in radio. He is convinced that only he knows anything about Holmes…

    “He is bent on reducing Holmes to the simple formula of heavy melodrama and heavier low comedy that has driven Holmes enthusiasts screaming from their radios and theaters. And he assumes automatically that his duties as producer include replotting and rewriting of all scripts….” (14 October 1946)

    “My favorite enemy … with his constant miscasting, his incredibly inept music, and his campaign of forcing me [and Denis Green] off and replacing us by astonishing scripts from his ex-wife and a protégé, has succeeded finally in driving Holmes off the air…. I don’t know what this will mean. The director will try to argue that this is all simply due to Rathbone’s absence. But if [he] is kept on the show … I’m pretty certain to be entirely off Holmes in the fall.” (30 June 1947)

    “Did you read in the trades what’s happened to Holmes? It’s been sold to a cheap NY outfit, to be an extreme low-budget show – cheap production, no actors over scale (including Holmes & Watson), scripts for pennies – and $1,000 a week to Denis PS Conan Doyle [who was Sir Arthur’s son and one of his literary executors].”(25 July 1947)

   Taking over the parts of Holmes and Watson were the long-forgotten John Stanley and Alfred Shirley. “I’m definitely out on Holmes – not even a hope of some income from repeats… I think this may be the most severe fatality Holmes has suffered since the Reichenbach Falls – but then he survived even that…” (12 August 1947)

   As far as I know, no Sherlockian has ever delved into Boucher’s running commentary on the Holmes radio series, but it’s a job eminently worth doing. And so is the assembling of a full-length book of the Boucher-Lee correspondence, which chronicles one of the strongest, deepest, most fascinating literary friendships of the 20th century and, in the world of mystery fiction, perhaps the strongest and most fascinating of all.

   In clichesville, the equivalent of the gothic heroine is our old friend, the Private Eye — male variety. Frank Kane’s Johnny Liddell was a harmless example of the species — not vicious like Mickey Spillane but not possessing the social conscience of Mike Shayne of Lew Archer either. Recent reading of three of Kane’s books back-to-back showed that he “borrowed” liberally from himself. By the third book I had a feeling of déjà vu, and a fast rereading showed why, as the following quotes indicate. (NOTE: All page numbers are from Dell paperback editions.)

Poisons Unknown, page 63: “Gabby Benton was on her second cup of coffee, third cigarette, and fourth fingernail when Johnny Liddell stepped out of a cab. . . ”

Red Hot Ice, page 18: “Muggsy Kiely was on her third cup of coffee and her fourth fingernail when Johnny Liddlell walked into….”

Red Hot Ice, page 27: “Her legs were long, sensuously shaped. Full rounded thighs swelled into high-set hips, converged into a narrow waist. Her breasts were firm and full, their pink tips straining upward.”

Poisons Unknown, page 182: “The whiteness of her body gleamed in the reflected light from the windows. Her legs were long, sensuously shaped. Full rounded thighs swelled into high-set hips, converged into the narrow waist he had admired earlier in the evening. Her breasts were full and high, their pink tips straining upward.”

A Short Bier, page 60: “The whiteness of her body gleamed in the spotlight. Her legs were long, sensuously shaped. Full rounded thighs swelled into high-set hips, and converged into a narrow waist. A thin wisp of a brassiere made a halfhearted attempt to cover the full breasts, their pink tips straining upward.”

Poisons Unknown, pages 49-50: “The pealing of the phone at his ear was shrill, strident, insistent. Johnny Liddell groaned, cursed softly, and dug his head under the pillow. The noise refused to go away. He opened one eye experimentally, squinted at the window shade and noted that it still wasn’t light. He tried to wipe the sleep from his eyes, but it wouldn’t wipe away.”

Red Hot Ice, page 40: “The telephone on the-night table started to shrill discordantly. Johnny Liddell groaned, cursed sleepily, and dug his head further into the pillow. The noise refused to go away. He opened one eye experimentally; he could see by the half-drawn shade that it was still night…. He tried to wipe the sleep from his eyes, but it wouldn’t wipe.”

Red Hot Ice, page 90: “Muggsy Kiely … opened the door herself in response to his knock. She was wearing a robe that clung to a figure that was decidedly worth clinging to.”

A Short Bier, page 39: “Muggsy Kiely opened the door in response to his knock. She was wearing a hostess gown that clung to curves that were obviously worth clinging to.”

Poisons Unknown, page 20: “… seemingly unaware that the front of her housecoat had sagged open with breathtaking effect.”

A Short Bier, page 41: “…seemed unaware that the front of her hostess gown had sagged open with breathtaking effect.”

   With that technique, coupled with no great originality of plotting, it’s surprising Kane only wrote thirty-one books about his hero.

    Books reviewed or discussed in this installment:

FRANK KANE – Poisons Unknown. Ives Washburn, hardcover, 1953. Dell 822, paperback, 1955. Dell D334, pb, January 1960.

  —, Red Hot Ice. Ives Washburn, hardcover, 1955. Dell 991, pb, 1956. Dell 7292, pb, November 1967.

  —, A Short Bier. Dell First Edn B150, paperback original, July 1960.

   Unredeemed male chauvinists will tell you that woman’s place is in a castle — preferably one depicted with a single light shining. Yet, the Gothic form lends itself to considerably more variety than that. There is the domestic variety in which the setting is an ordinary house, and the heroine’s tribulations have nothing to do with mysterious strangers wandering the moors.

   Ursula Curtiss is one of the best writers in this category, and The Menace Within may be the archetypal Curtiss mystery. Heroine Amanda Morley has to contend with:

      1. An aunt who has just suffered a stroke.
      2. A missing dog.
      3. A runaway horse.
      4. A jealous boy friend.
      5. The care of a neighbor’s two year old baby, a child with a serious vitamin deficiency.
      6. A house to care for.
      7. Escaped convicts in the area.

   Does she also need a psychopathic killer in her bomb shelter? Not really, but without him, we’d only have a soap opera. Instead, we have a slightly unbelievable, fairly exciting book with good descriptions of New Mexico in December.

   The domestic setting of Theodora Du Bois’ The Listener (1953) is unusual, a convent on New York’s Staten Island. Her heroine, Sister Genevieve, joined the religious order when here fiancé was killed in Greece. Now, still depressed at his loss, she also has a problem of spiritual doubt and, more important for the plot, involvement in a series of crimes related to the tunes played on a woodwind instrument during the night.

   Though she wrote more than twenty books, Du Bois is relatively unknown – undeservedly so. She develops The Listener effectively, and her resolution is generally satisfying, though somewhat dependent on coincidence. I’m grateful to her for a well-written book. I’m also grateful to the type-setter for the Ace paperback edition who included this amusing “typo” in a book about the Sisters in a religious order (one of whom is very ugly): “I can see there are some very unattractive angels to this.”

   In a promising first novel, The Rembrandt Decisions (1979) by Anne V. Badgley, the author presents a realistic Gothic heroine. Dr. Catherine Gordon, recently widowed at 35 (“recycled by fate”), returns to the labor market to pursue her skill as an art expert. She takes on the cataloging of a valuable print collection and becomes involved with a mysterious Scottish widower whose hobby is said to be installing burglar alarms.

   The book begins subtly, and the dialogue between the two protagonists crackles. Unfortunately, the second half is disappointing, depending more on breakneck action than on logic and character development.

    Books reviewed or discussed in this installment:

URSULA CURTISS – The Menace Within. Dodd Mead, 1979. Ballantine, pb, 1979.

THEODORE DU BOIS – The Listener. Doubleday Crime Club, 1953. Ace G-550, pb, 1964.

ANNE V. BADGLEY – The Rembrandt Decisions. Dodd Mead, 1979. [This was her only crime novel.]

   The Private Eye novel, I’m thankful, is still with us though recent events show that type of detective might eventually become our latest folk heroine. First, we had the female op who stole the show from Inspector Dalgleish in P.D. James’ An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), relegating him to a bit part. I still believe Mrs. James is missing a good bet for another series character.

   Charity Bay, Arthur Kaplan’s detective in A Killing for Charity (1976) started as secretary to a San Francisco detective and, after learning the job, moved to New York where she charges an inflationary $300 a day, plus expenses, for her services. Kaplan has his titular detective display her very good figure to advantage. Charity begins the book by having intercourse with a man to set him up for an arrest. Later, Kaplan gets her into one of those clothes-torn, figure-exposed situations that pulp illustrators thrived on.

   In Marcia B. Muller’s Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977), female private detective Sharon McCone remains in San Francisco where she does investigative work for a store-front legal cooperative. McCone develops a relationship with art-loving Lt. Greg Marcus, S.F.P.D. Except for the possibility of romance, they get along together as the Marlowes et al have traditionally gotten along with the official police.

   The book, except for one good scene authentically describing the Seal Rock area, ends in a blaze of … coincidence. Kaplan and Muller have proven that the only limitations on the success of female private detectives in the future will be the artistic limits of their creators.

    Books reviewed or discussed in this installment:

P. D. JAMES – An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Faber, UK, hardcover, 1972. Scribner, US, hc, 1973. Many paperback reprints in both countries. Film: Boyd, 1981 (scw: Elizabeth MacKay, Brian Scobie, Christopher Petit; dir: Petit). Four episode TV-series (ITV-PBS), 1997-1999, one installment of which was based on this book.    NOTE: Besides the TV series, Cordelia Gray made one additional appearance in book form, a solo case recorded in The Skull Beneath the Skin (Faber, UK, 1982).

ARTHUR KAPLAN – A Killing for Charity. Coward-McCann, hardcover, 1976; Berkley, pb, 1977.    NOTE: This was the only appearance of Charity Bay.

MARCIA MULLER – Edwin of the Iron Shoes. David McKay, hardcover, 1977. Penguin, US, pb, 1978. Several other US paperback editions. Women’s Press, UK, pb, 1993.    NOTE: This was Sharon McCone’s debut entry. She has since appeared in 25 novels and nearly as many short stories.

   I suspect that the spy-adventure thriller will always be with us. That’s fine when books of this type are as good as Gavin Lyall’s Shooting Script (1966). Using a commercial flier as protagonist, Lyall makes a Caribbean setting and a “banana boat” revolution seem new. He provides the kind of crisp, funny first person narration many authors attempt but at which they seldom succeed.

   On the other hand, I found Dark Blood, Dark Terror (1965) and Vice Isn’t Private (1966) in Brian Cleeve’s spy series re Sean Ryan to be over-rated. However, the former does provide some insights into the dilemma of modern-day South Africa. It also gives us one hilarious “Typo” when in one of the many violent scenes we read: “Sean … finished the swing of his body with his right fist hooking hard and very low into his groan.”

   I enjoyed William H. Hallahan’s Catch Me: Kill Me (1977), a thriller which won the Edgar as best novel. Still, if this is the best book of any year, we’re in trouble. Though this story of the kidnapping of a defecting Soviet poet “grabs” the reader, it contains gratuitous violence, a lot of padding which reduces the suspense, and a weak, albeit action-filled ending.

   However, Hallahan is one writer who, while using many metaphors, uses them well. Thus, one character says: “Life plays a game – like tennis… And until you die, it just keeps playing to your backhand.”

    Books reviewed or discussed in this installment:

GAVIN LYALL – Shooting Script. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hc, 1966. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hc, 1966. Paperback reprints: Pan, UK, 1968, plus several later printings; Avon V2309, US, 1969.

BRIAN CLEEVE – Dark Blood, Dark Terror. Series character: Sean Ryan. Hammond, UK, hc, 1966. Random House, US, hc, 1965. Paperback reprints: Mayflower, UK, 1968. Lancer 73-543, US, 1967.

—, Vice Isn’t Private. Series character: Sean Ryan. Hammond, UK, hc, 1966; Corgi, UK, pb, 1969, as The Judas Goat. Random House, US, hc, 1966; Lancer 73-621, US, pb, 1967.

WILLIAM H. HALLAHAN – Catch Me: Kill Me. Bobbs-Merrill, US, hc, 1977. Victor Gollancz, UK, hc, 1978. Paperback reprints: Avon, US, 1978; Sphere, UK, 1980.

   Octavus Roy Cohen’s 1951 paperback original, The Corpse That Walked, is based on his 1942 novelet in Collier’s “Masquerade in Miami.” It contains many surprises, but perhaps this is to be expected since it comes from an era when story-telling, without unnecessary descriptions or metaphors, was important. I found very quaint (yet imaginative) the devices Cohen used to avoid mentioning sex.

   Hesitancy about sex (or violence) is seldom found in current mystery fiction. Witness Bill Pronzini’s Games (1976). U.S. Senator David Jackman is trapped, with his mistress, on an island off the Maine coast. A killer, acting “in the name of Lucifer,” begins slaughtering animals and threatening the couple. Because the protagonists are so unsympathetic and uninteresting, I never really came to care about them. That’s a pity, because Pronzini can write so well – especially in his “Nameless” Private Eye series.

   I was about to ask for a moratorium on books about political figures in high places when I read two thrillers proving that Washington, D.C., can be an effective setting. Though a best seller, Robert J. Serling’s The President’s Plane Is Missing (1967) contains many elements of the detective story. Suspense and surprise are real in this much-imitated book, though the cast of characters is too large to keep effective track of, and the proceedings are a bit dragged out.

   In Lawrence Meyer’s equally readable A Capitol Crime (1977), the detective is that modern folk hero, the investigative reporter. Incidentally, when someone writes a history of that sub-genre, precedence should be given to Tony Hillerman’s The Fly on the Wall (1971) which pre-dated Watergate and Bernstein-Woodward.

   Meyer’s hero looks into the murder of a Drew Pearson-Jack Anderson type in the Capitol building itself. Like Serling, Meyer introduces too many characters, but he, too, is a fine story teller who provides a literally breath-taking end. Furthermore, his book is as current as today’s headlines, and he seamlessly weaves foreign ownership of U.S. corporations, limits on campaign contributions, and the right of police to a reporter’s notes into his plot.

Books reviewed or discussed in this installment:

OCTAVUS ROY COHEN – The Corpse That Walked. Gold Medal 138, paperback original, 1951. Second printing: Gold Medal 650, 1957.

BILL PRONZINI – Games. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1976. Fawcett Crest 23484, paperback, date not stated. Combined with Snowbound: Stark House, trade ppbk, 2007.

ROBERT J. SERLING – The President’s Plane Is Missing. Doubleday, hardcover, 1967. Dell, paperback, many printings. TV movie: ABC, 1973 (scw: Ernest Kinoy, Mark Carliner; dir: Daryl Duke)

LAWRENCE MEYER – A Capitol Crime. Viking, hardcover, 1977. Avon, paperback, 1978; several printings.

TONY HILLERMAN – The Fly on the Wall. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1971. Many paperback reprintings.