ROSS THOMAS – Chinaman’s Chance. Arthur Case Wu & Quincy Durrant #1. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1978. Avon, paperback, 1979. Mysterious Press, paperback, 1988.

   A few years ago some dude named Malcolm Jones (who I’ve never heard of) shared his top ten list of crime novels. All the ones I’d already read were great, lending the list some credibility. The ones I hadn’t have been great too. Chinaman’s Chance made the grade. So I was impelled to try it out.

   A ramshackle ramble by the seat of its pants, the story is an entertainment. A wonderful entertainment. And of perhaps all the novels I’ve ever read, it deserves that moniker. It strives to be nothing other than entertainment. And it succeeds. Wonderfully and wonderfully vacuous.

   There are so many plot threads that it will be hard to relay them in linear, straightforward fashion. God knows that Thomas didn’t try to do it. And yet it is the multiple perspectives and slowly eked out details that makes the damn thing so tantalizing, anticipated and delicious.

   I’ve read that Woody Allen only gives his actors their own lines to remember and they have no idea how the whole script fits together. That’s the feeling you get from the characters here. No one has the whole picture. Everyone has just a little piece. And the story reveals itself like a picture puzzle put together, piece by piece, before your eyes. But this picture puzzle you bought came in a blank cardboard box. So you have no idea ahead of time how the thing is supposed to look.

   In fact I’d be surprised if Thomas knew ahead of time how it all was going to fit together. If he did, and outlined it all ahead of writing it, then he’s a freaking genius. If not, then he’s really really lucky. Because all of the pieces in this 5000 piece puzzle fit. Even though it seems like he’s manufacturing the puzzle pieces right before your very eyes.

   But hey. I’ll have a try at linear summary.

   Artie Wu and Quincy Durant are soldiers of fortune. Back when the Vietnam war was petering out, there was money to be made. An associate of theirs at the US Embassy, Reginald Simms, was given orders to burn the 12 million in U.S. currency on hand. He burned 10 million of it.

   The other two mil? Simms and his college roommate, a major mafia figure, ‘buy’ the political machinery of the small broken down coastal town of Pelican Bay in Southern California.

   The dream? To build a red-light district version of Epcot Center: “[S]in without sorrow and thrills without danger…. You can go from Paris to Berlin…. to Singapore to Hong Kong to Marseilles to London’s Limehouse to San Francisco to New Orleans to New York to wherever you have ever dreamed of going. It will all be within this four block square area, and whatever you have dreamed of finding in those places you will find here — carefully sterilized for safe consumption…. People don’t want the real thing… because the real thing has bad breath, and sweaty armpits, and sometimes steals your wallet and makes you hurt when you pee. What people want is vice and sin that look the way they look in the movies — and that’s exactly what we intend to give them.”

   So what’s wrong with it? Well maybe nothing in principle. But the devil’s in the details. And whether the end justifies the means.

   Part of the means involved screwing over Artie Wu and Quincy Durant back in Vietnam. Including getting Durant’s fiancé murdered by the Viet Cong.

   And part of cleaning out the old Pelican Bay political machinery involves killing a Congressman opposed to graft. And the Congressman’s wife. And the Congressman’s mistress.

   So that’s basically the story. It’s about Artie Wu and Quincy Durant seeking vengeance and a cool $2 million coming up against the mob.

   It’s supremely entertaining. And another thing that surprised me is how Tarantinoesque the thing is. And it predates Tarantino by more than a decade. So the phrase shouldn’t be Tarantinoesque. Tarantino is being RossThomaseque. It’s all there: the combination of brutal violence and slapstick comedy.

   There are a number of great scenes so it’s hard to pick one to illustrate the point. But my favorite involves a couple of hitmen who’ve taken their target in a Winnebago, intending to throw him off a cliff near Pepperdine University. They lecture the murderee on having made bad career choices. Then they are distracted as it dawns on them that Pepperdine’s campus appears in The Six Million Dollar Man! The murderee leverages their distraction by grabbing a can of gasoline and setting them on fire while the Winnebago flies off a cliff.

   So yeah. It’s like that. And if it sounds like your bag, give it a read. It’s a great movie to watch in the theater of your mind. Grab the popcorn.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Crooked Hinge. Dr. Gideon Fell #8. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1938. Popular Library #19, paperback, 1944. Reprinted many times.

   What the Farnleighs are waiting for, though they don’t yet know it, is foul murder, a hint of the supernatural, Satanic cults, possible robot killers (in 1938), and a killer whose lack of genius almost overwhelms the brilliance and eccentricity of Dr. Gideon Fell’s efforts to unravel the mystery.

   But pause a moment to admire the literary skill in this little scene at the start of Chapter Two of The Crooked Hinge, a classic Carr mystery. It not only established Farnleigh Close, which is both the setting and the McGuffin that seemingly sets the action in motion but it sets a mood. Chimney’s are “thin and close,” the woods are called Hanging Chart and shadowed ominously, the “silver of age and grace” lays over a room. A clock ticks at the beginning of the paragraph and is brought in again at the end, establishing a tension. Something is coming. Something sinister though nothing concrete has been said to tell us that.

   Carr does this effortlessly, his use of metaphor and simile as sharp as Chandler, though applied to a different end.

   Even the title, The Crooked Hinge, suggests something sinister about a house, something not quite right about it or the people in it.

   The setting is Kent, where John Farnleigh (“The old-time Farnleighs were an unpleasant lot…”), a survivor of the Titanic lives with his wife in Farnleigh Close, but another claimant has shown up claiming to be the real John Farnleigh and an inquest is scheduled to establish the truth. Carr tries out his own solution to the famous Tichborne Claimant case.

   Then the first Farnleigh is murdered by the pool, his throat slashed in front of three witnesses, and none of them saw anyone do it and the police can’t find the weapon.

   Is it the automaton modeled on Maezel’s Chess Player that reaches out to touch a maid and nearly frightens her to death, and who stole the thumbograph, a device for taking fingerprints, not to mention the suggestion of a cult of Satanists. DCI Elliot (…”youngish, raw-boned, sandy-haired, and serious-minded. He liked argument, and he liked subtleties…”) investigates and calls on Dr. Fell to sort out the sinister goings on, as he points out:

   A ranking of the top ten impossible crime mysteries of all time placed this one number four. It is Fell and Carr at their considerable best. It is dedicated to Dorothy L. Sayers.

   Just why the wrong man was murdered becomes as important as how. Fell cannot quite lay hands on why the murderer struck and why he has not struck again: “This murder is human, my lad. I’m not, you understand, praising the murderer for this sporting restraint and good manners in refraining from killing people. But, my God, Elliot, the people who have gone in danger from the first! Betty Harbottle might have been killed. A certain lady we know of might have been killed. For a certain man’s safety I’ve had apprehensions from the start. And not one of ’em has been touched. Is it vanity? Or what?”

   In finding the solution Fell even calls on S. S. Van Dine and Philo Vance’s favorite work, Criminal Investigations: a Practical Textbook by Hans Gross (The Bishop Murder Case) to explain the esoteric but quite real murder weapon (and true to Carr he has laid the groundwork for the killer’s expertise with the weapon) and in a real twist reveal the killer twice in a single chapter.

   The Crooked Hinge is Carr and Fell at their best. The mystery sparkles with hints of something unhealthy and outside the realm of the possible, with Fell at his eccentric, high handed, and deceptive finest, and full of well-realized characters just the right side of cardboard, neither overwhelming the story nor mere cut-outs to be moved on the board.

   This is a model for the genre, especially that special corner of impossible crime and hints of something sinister and beyond that John Dickson Carr made his own.

JAMES LEE BURKE – Cadillac Jukebox. Dave Robicheaux #9. Hyperion, hardcover, 1996; paperback, 1997. Reprinted in several editions and printings since.

   Burke is one of the mainstays now, one of those writers who if you haven’t read him you’re either not a real fan of crime fiction, or you like it only on the lighter side. Every generation of crime writers has a few upon whom posterity bestows the tag of “significant,” and I think he’s one of those.

   A former Klansman and forever white trash refugee from the piney woods has finally been imprisoned for the decades-old murder of a black civil rights leader. He swears he is innocent, but no one believes him-except maybe New Iberia cop Dave Robicheaux. A politician who wrote a book about the crime is. about to be elected governor, a film company wants to make a documentary proving the man’s innocence, and a New Orleans hit man accuses Robicheaux of taking a bribe to ignore Crown’s case. Robicheaux had an affair long ago with the politician’s wife, and that just may be the final bit of heat that makes the pot boil over.

   There is no question in my mind that Burke is one of the best pure prose stylists ever to grace our field. The man can, to coin a phrase, write like an angel, and in the alcoholic and angst-ridden Robicheaux h has created one of the genre’s enduring characters. His books are dark, lyrical, and yes, occasionally overwrought, and maybe even sometimes confusing.

   I’ve never read one of his books I didn’t enjoy while reading it, and enjoy a lot; I have finished a few  with some lingering dissatisfaction, particularly those in which indulges his penchant for the supernatural.

   Jukebox possesses all Burke’s virtues, and lacks, thank goodness, any ghosts — though he couldn’t resist a little mysticism. Thus I rate it highly, as it deserves, but I’m left with a lingering uneasiness that Burke has said nothing new in his last few books, nor said it in any new ways. And however unfair it may be, sometimes sameness, however fine a sameness, may begin to pall.

THE KENNEL MURDER CASE. Warner Brothers, 1933. William Powell (as Philo Vance), Mary Astor, Eugene Pallette. Ralph Morgan. Robert McWade. Robert Barrat. Based on the novel by S. S. Van Dine. Director: Michael Curtiz. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime (and perhaps elsewhere).

   When a man who is intensely disliked by both his family and friends, it is not big surprise when soon into the movie he’s found dead in his study. What is a surprise is that an examination of his body reveals that not only was he shot, but he was also slugged and then stabbed. At first it is assumed that he committed suicide, especially when his study door has been locked from the inside and the only way to get in (or out) is by breaking the door down.

   Once suicide has been ruled out, the there two questions: who did it (and there are lots of suspects) and how? The latter is answered quickly enough. Philo Vance, who seems to have an in with the D..A. and free rein on the case, [PLOT ALERT] uses a needle and a short length of thread to demonstrate. [END OF PLOT ALERT]

   A dog is eventually used to identify the killer, but even before that, the title of the film is totally justified by it opening scenes, taking place at a championship dog show where all the players seem to have a stake in the action.

   From all accounts, this is a fairly good adaptation of the original Philo Vance novel, and just maybe, too good. It’s not easy getting all the primary plot points of a 300 page book into a movie with only 80 minutes running time, but director Michael Curtiz moves even the draggy bits along at a fast pace. It also does not hurt that all of the players are more than competent in their roles, starting at the top with William Powell who was made to play smoothly urbane roles like this.

MICHAEL ARLEN – Hell! Said the Duchess: A Bedtime Story. Heineman, UK, hardcover, 1934. Doubleday Doran & Co., US, hardcover, 1934. Valancourt Books, softcover, 2013. [NOTE: Horror writer Karl Edward Wagner included Hell! Said the Duchess on his list of “The Thirteen Best Supernatural Horror Novels” in the May 1983 issue of The Twilight Zone Magazine.]

   A slim volume, a real curiosity, and a highly enjoyable read.

   Michael Arlen is best remembered (if at all) for his best-selling The Green Hat  (1924) which is pretty much forgotten these days. And is there anything so terribly forgotten as the best-sellers of another generation?

   Not for me. I read The Green Hat  (not to be confused with The Green Hornet) and while researching it for a review, I came across mention of this later work. Well, there’s something inside me that will not pass up anything with a title like Hell! Said the Duchess, so I ran down a copy, and discovered a neglected gem.

   Plot-wise, this starts out as a rather obvious Murder Mystery: a series of gruesome crimes, dubbed the “Jill the Ripper” murders is terrorizing London in the 1880s, and evidence points unmistakably to a woman who must be innocent — the eponymous Duchess, who is known far and wide ass the very soul of sweetness and light. Police are puzzled, friends are frantic, and confusion is rife.

   All this is carried along with a light, humorous prose that reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, as in:

   
   Or:

   
   The bantering tone fooled me into thinking I had the mystery figured out, only to find that there was no mystery here. Only a terrible truth that surprised & shocked me – if you can imagine being shocked by a work of fiction.

   Arlen shifts gears in the last chapter and the ending is a shattering surprise. I can say no more except that I urge you to try it and see if you agree.

JOHN JAKES – When the Star Kings Die. Dragonard #1. Ace G-656, paperback original, 1967. Cover by Jack Gaughan. Second printing, 1978.

   When Max Dragonard, ex-Regulator, is broken out of prison by his old commander, he is assigned to investigate the revolutionary organization called Heart Flag. The Lords of the Exchange, rulers of II Galaxy and previously immortal, are dying, and no one seems to know why. Dragonard is captured by the High Commander of the Regulators and betrays his friend.

   At the command of Lord Mishubi II, he is sentenced to die. Escape to the Heart Flag movement reveals to him the secret of immortality which has been kept from the ordinary people of the galaxy.

   Quite better than expected, the story improves as it continues. One can hardly help but think of the old Planet Stories tradition, but it would seem that there is more complexity and development in this novel than the usual stereotyped space-adventure.

   Dragonard’s own mental defect, correction of which was denied him, helps persuade him of the Lords’ treachery, a nice touch. The girl he loves is killed under bitter circumstances, but there is another who is waiting for his love. And Jeremy’s dream of life for all must be destroyed, but only temporarily, to free the galaxy from one man’s control.

Rating: ***½

         The Dragonard series –

1 When the Star Kings Die (1967)
2 The Planet Wizard (1969)
3 Tonight We Steal the Stars (1969)

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Bigamous Spouse.  Perry Mason #65. Morrow, hardcover, 1961. Pocket, paperback, 1963. Many later printings and editions exist.

   Here is one of the smoothest Masons of ESG’s last years, with a beautifully mounted plot, tremendous pace and a variety of sharp comments on everything from sales technique and modern marriage to police lawlessness and the· undertaking business.

   Mason’s client is a gorgeous book saleswoman who has accidentally discovered that her best friend’s husband is a bigamist — and that he’s ready to kill her to keep his secret. When the bigamist is murdered instead, all hell breaks loose.

   There are a few tiny plot flaws, and the solution is rabbit-out-of-a-hat, but still and all it’s a gorgeous entertainment reminiscent of Gardner’s prime.

EARL EMERSON – Nervous Laughter. PI Thomas Black #3. Avon, paperback original, 1986, 1995 (shown). Fawcett, paperback, 1997.

   P.I. Thomas Black (not to be confused with PI novelist Thomas Black (read more here ) is a Seattle-based private detective working in the contemporary world.

   I like it when writers set their work contemporaneously. To me, it’s this world I’m struggling with — not the world of yesteryear. And by “I” I mean “me the reader.” So if I’m looking for answers: for how to live in this world with a modicum of self-respect; for how to make it thru the day — I want a book that is dealing with the ‘present’. Hopefully heroically. “I want you to show me the way” Peter Frampton, or whoever else happens to have a map.

   Plus I think it’s a cheat to steal a past that no living reader can possibly remember. If you’re talking 1930, say whatever you want. All I know is what I read in Hammett and see in the movies the same as you, dear author. So you copy Hammett’s setting and make a slightly new version. Big freaking deal.

   But you wanna talk 70’s to 2022? I know those times because I’ve lived thru them. So you’re going to have to be credible. You’re gonna have to be real — not Disneyfied.

   Black is hired by a gorgeous and flirty jilted wife to tag her hubbie, a dog food mogul, on a suspicion of adultery job. The target immediately kills himself and his lover in a murder suicide. Case closed.

   Or is it? Aye — and thar’s the rub.

   So how was the book? It’s just okay. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s real and it’s credible. It’s captivating and hard to put down. It makes sense and everything. But I’m struggling to remember even now, a couple days after shutting the covers. It’s disposable. (Except for getting rid of the bad guy by turning him into canned dog food — that I might remember, ironically: disposing of the disposable bad guy by literally canning him for sale on grocery store shelves).

   But the thing with these common, disposable potboilers is they give the listless reader a list. A teleology. A toward-which. An ending. A goal. A solution. A forward momentum towards which you move. Chapter to chapter. Impelled towards the final page with a trajectory of movement into the future.

   Books like this take the lost and wayward reader and plunks them down on one of those walking sidewalks at the airport. While you’re reading it, you’re no longer lost. You’ve got a specific place to go. Or at least a fear in back of you, scaring you into scurrying on ahead into the unknown but surely better than whatever fate is chasing you from behind.

   I used to work in a bookstore where the staff was roiled by a manager who insisted upon referring to the books as ‘product’. The bibliophile wants to rescue the book from the world of commodities and make of it a fetish, free from this world of objects, existing solely in the soul. In ‘the life of the mind’ (to quote Barton Fink).

   But this type of book is surely a commodity. Kind of like crack or speed or anti-depressants. It’s a salve for what ails you. But temporary. And disposable.

   And as soon as you’re done you need another just like it. Forevermore. Til death do us part.

DAY KEENE – My Flesh Is Sweet. Lion #68, paperback original, September 1951. MacFadden-Bartell, paperback, 1969. Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2005, in a two-for-one combo with Framed in Guilt, another Day Keene novel.  Armchair Fiction, softcover, 2020.

   Mystery novels for which the setting involves either pulp writers or the pulp magazine industry are few and far between, and those which do ought to be well noted and documented, even if they’re not very good. As it so happens, this is one, and it’s actually a rather good one, indeed – not surprisingly, as it’s by one of the better paperback writers of the day, Day Keene.

   It begins in Mexico City, as pulp fiction writer Ad Connors witnesses an automobile accident involving a Mexican general and a beautiful American tourist, female. Who’s at fault? The general, of course, but who in Mexico would believe her, her word against his? Connors decides to intervene, which as you know if you’ve ever read a novel by Day Keene before, is rather a hasty (and regrettable) decision on his part.

   Connors has been in Mexico trying to write the great American novel. It hasn’t worked out. All he has to his name is a few pesos and his typewriter, and the latter is stolen as he manages to get Miss Elena Hayes out of the trouble she’s in. But not completely. Later that evening Connors has to intervene again, this time in Elena’s hotel room and in shall we say, compromising terms and with the general shot and presumably dead.

   Whether he is or not, Mexico City is no place to be found at a time such as this. Flight is their only choice. And as they head for a safe haven, Ad learns more about Elena and why she’s in Mexico. A lawyer there should be able to vouch for her birth, that her parents were married. Why is this important? She is about to be married back in the States, and to a very wealthy man.

   It perhaps need not be said that she does not love this man.

   The book thus falls into two parts. I found the first, as the two fugitives manage to stay just a few days ahead of the law, only to become involved in another murder, to be the more interesting. The second half, back in the USA, is another murder mystery to be solved, one involving the disappearance of Elena’s father when she was young back in the far distant past, and yet another murder.

   This is, of course, the key to the tale Keene is keen to tell, but what happens in the first half of the book is considerably more vivid and alive, or so it read to me. The cover of the Lion edition makes the story seem to be lurid and just a little sleazy, and maybe it was, back in 1951. Today, though, it’s quite tame in that regard, if not out-and-out tepid. The overall murder mystery is well done, though, and Keene makes the page fly by.

   Getting back to the pulp writing business, though, I should like to point out that to finance his and Elena’s escape from Mexico, Connors has to hammer out two stories in a week or so and get them sold. Not only that, but the two stories are closely related to the two halves of My Flesh Is Sweet itself, with only a few modifications. Which are important, too, and neatly so.

ARCHIE ROY – Devil in the Darkness. John Long, UK, hardcover, 1978. Valancourt Books, US, trade paperback, 2016.

   It’s cold and rather gloomy outside, and I find myself in the mood for an old fashioned haunted house thriller.

   Ardvreck House stands alone in Scotland, a house deserted as much by its bad reputation as by its lonely location. Paul and Carol Wilson are newlyweds caught in a sudden April snowstorm driving across the Ardnamurchan Peninsula toward the cottage they have rented for their honeymoon when the storm forces them off the road.

   Luckily for them there is a house nearby.

   Well, some would call it luck.

   Inside Ardvreck House they are greeted by nine disparate people who don’t immediately explain what it is they are doing in this dreary house without electric power. They welcome Paul and Carol though and provide them with a room to ride out the storm, but that night Paul is suddenly awakened.

   Paul can rest assured the individuals in Ardvreck House have permission to be there, but there is nothing reassuring about their legal reason for being there. The “army types” are demolitions experts who have been hired to bring down Ardvreck House, destroy it, and the others are paranormal investigators.

   Ardvreck House is one of the most notorious haunted houses in the United Kingdom and has been for almost a century. People have died in Ardvreck House.

   Archie Roy must seem an unlikely candidate to be writing supernatural thrillers. To begin he is that Archie Roy, Professor Archie Roy of the University of Glasgow, the astronomer who calculated the orbital trajectory of objects in space for NASA in the Sixties including the 1969 moon landing. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society of Astronomers as well as the British Interplanetary Society with an asteroid named after him in 1986.

   He was also the author of three previous scientific thrillers in the Buchan vein.

   But those weren’t his qualifications here. Far more important here is the fact he was his membership in both the London and Scottish Societies for Phychical Research and as author of A Sense of Something Strange, Archives of the Mind and Eaters of the Dead, and his reputation as the “Glasgow Ghostbuster” (unlike other psychical investigators with scientific reputations Roy did not abandon the Scientific Method when looking into the uncanny, the paranormal was always his last resort) he was more than qualified to take on the paranormal.

   And that rigorous mind is part of what he brings to Devil in the Darkness as his team of innocents, psychical researchers, and hard headed demolition experts confront the horrors of Ardvreck House while the blizzard outside traps them and the madness inside the walls of the house tries to stop its secrets from being uncovered. Unlike most horror novels that rely on their chills from the credulity and often stupid behavior of their characters Roy seeks every rational explanation before turning to the paranormal and his characters behave as logically as policemen in their investigation.

   The result is the real chills are greater and more disturbing than the artificial kind when some lady in a filmy negligee and high heels armed only with a candle goes exploring in the basement after midnight because she heard strange noises.

   The stakes are higher here, the threat more real.

   â€œDon’t open the doors,” good advice in any supernatural thriller, and hope they don’t open themselves. While Devil in the Darkness isn’t in a class with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, it could sit comfortably on the shelf with it, Richard Matheson’s Hell House, Russell Kirk’s The Old Dark House of Fear, Dorothy MacCardle’s The Univited, Stephen King’s The Shining, and J. B. Priestley’s Benighted (filmed as The Old Dark House), and that’s as fine a collection of damned and doomed architecture as you can hope to find.

   Something to savor on a cold stormy night beneath a warm throw with a medicinal cat in your lap and a good dog at your feet, and the beverage of your choice, fortified or not, at your hand.

   And whatever you do when the cat suddenly arches her spine and hackles rise on the dog as he growls menacingly, don’t open the door…