On Sunday, September 12, at age 80, Claude Chabrol died. He was one of the most creative French film directors, and one of the most deeply committed to the crime-suspense genre, and the only one I ever met.

   It was in the summer of 1986, at an international festival on Italy’s Adriatic coast where he and I and countless others were guests. We were introduced by another mystery writer, the late Stuart Kaminsky, and over the next several days we were on some tours together — including one to the castle of Cagliostro — and had a number of conversations.

   I can’t claim to have seen all or even most of the dozens of films Chabrol directed in his career of more than half a century behind the cameras, not even all the crime-suspense-noir pictures with which his filmography is studded.

   But among those I knew well were 1969’s Que la bête meure (The Beast Must Die) and, from 1971, La décade prodigieuse (Ten Days’ Wonder), the former very freely based on a classic Nicholas Blake novel and the latter on a classic by Ellery Queen.

   His then most recent film, which was premiered at the festival, was Inspecteur Lavardin. After seeing Lavardin, and connecting what I took to be dots between it and the other two, I saw all three as sharing a common theme: the meaning of being a father.

   Remembering that Ten Days’ Wonder in both novel and film form climaxed with a death-of-God sequence, I ventured to suggest to him that all three films tell us: “There is no God the father, therefore we must be good fathers.” His reply: “Yes, yes, yes!”

   We talked about Cornell Woolrich, a few of whose stories he had adapted and directed for French TV, and after returning to the States I sent him, at his request, a few Woolrich tales that might be adapted into Chabrol features.

   Nothing came of this, but among the many films he made in the quarter century after our meeting was Merci pour le chocolat (2000), based on Charlotte Armstrong’s The Chocolate Cobweb, which is also centrally about fatherhood. Among the other world-class crime novelists whose work he translated to film are Stanley Ellin, Patricia Highsmith and Georges Simenon. Adieu, cher maître.

   In my student years I read just about every one of Frances and Richard Lockridge’s Mr. & Mrs. North mysteries, but I hadn’t revisited any of them in decades. Recently I reread The Norths Meet Murder (1940), first in the long-running series, and found it as charming and enjoyable as I had long ago.

   It’s also a lovely piece of evidence in support of Anthony Boucher’s contention that one of the valuable functions of mysteries is that they show later generations what life was like “back then.”

   The Norths Meet Murder takes place in late October and early November 1939. On September 1 Hitler had launched World War II, and in New York there’s an organized boycott against buying “Nazi goods,” which impacts at least one of the murder suspects.

   The latest consumer novelty is the electric razor. Walking New York’s night streets, you see men working on the new subway line under floodlights. Those who read this novel back in 1940 probably took these verbal snapshots for granted, just as those of us who as kids watched the early TV private-eye series Man Against Crime took for granted the chases all over the New York landmarks of the early 1950s.

   Now in the 21st century they strike me as treasures, and perhaps help explain why, given the choice between a vintage whodunit or a new one, or an episode of a vintage TV series or a new one, I tend to go for the gold in the old.

   I recently attended a convention in suburban Baltimore but arrived before my hotel room was ready. Luckily there was a bookstore with comfortable chairs in the mall across the street, and I killed some time in the mystery section with “Arson Plus,” the first of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories, originally published in Black Mask for October 1, 1923 and recently reprinted in Otto Penzler’s mammoth Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories.

   For decades this was one of the rarest of Hammett tales, revived only by Fred Dannay (in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1951, and in the Queen-edited paperback collection Woman in the Dark, 1951).

   Today it’s in the Penzler anthology and a major hardcover Hammett collection (Crime Stories and Other Writings, Library of America 2001) and can also be downloaded from the Web in a few seconds.

   The other day I felt an urge to compare the e-text with the EQMM and Library of America versions, and made a discovery that startled but didn’t really surprise me. The Web version I downloaded is identical with Fred’s except for a few changes in punctuation and italicization, but both are quite different from the Library of America text, which uses the version originally published in Black Mask.

   Fred believed that every story ever written was too long and therefore tended to trim the tales he reprinted, even those by masters like Hammett. Some of the bits and pieces he cut were perhaps redundant, but he also axed part of the Continental Op’s explanation at the end of the story.

   Reprinting “Arson Plus” in 1951, he must have felt a need to update some of the price references to reflect post-World War II inflation. At the very beginning of the original version, the Op offers a cigar to the Sacramento County sheriff, who estimates that it cost “fifteen cents straight.” The Op corrects him, giving the price as two for a quarter. Fred raised these figures to “three for a buck” and ”two bits each” respectively.

   He also added a cool ten thousand dollars to the purchase price of a house that in the 1923 version sold for $4,500. Where a Hammett character disposes of $4,000 in Liberty bonds (sold by the government to finance World War I), Fred has him sell $15,000 worth of common or garden variety bonds.

   Whenever Hammett refers to an automobile as a “machine,” Fred changes it to “car.” Where three men in a general store are “talking Hiram Johnson,” Fred has them merely “talking.” (Hiram Johnson, as we learn from a note in the Library of America volume, was governor of California between 1911 and 1917 and later served four terms as senator.)

   He also unaccountably changes the name of a major character from Handerson to Henderson. A quick check of Fred’s versions of a few other Continental Op stories with the original texts yielded similar results and a clear conclusion: to read Hammett’s tales as they were meant to be read, you have to read them in the Library of America collection. This doesn’t help, of course, with the eight Op stories not collected in that volume, but it’s a start.

   In every version of “Arson Plus” the plot is of course the same: a man insures his life for big bucks, assumes another identity, sets fire to the house he bought, and the woman named as beneficiary demands payment.

   Did these people really think any insurance company would be fooled for a minute when there were no human remains in the ashes of the destroyed house? Didn’t Hammett with his experience as a PI realize that this plot was ridiculous? Was Fred ever bothered by its silliness?

   My nonfiction collection Cornucopia of Crime, which I subtly plugged a few columns ago, is now officially available (Ramble House, 2010).

   So too is Night Forms (Perfect Crime Books), a collection of 28 of the short stories I’ve written over the last four decades including my earliest (“Open Letter to Survivors”), my latest (“The Skull of the Stuttering Gunfighter”), and a huge pile of tales that fall between that unmatched pair.

   I’ve completely forgotten where the picture of me on the back cover came from, but whoever took it deserves some kind of award for improving on reality more than any other photographer in history.

   Every now and then collectors of detective pulps mention The Big Three, which refers to the best three detective/crime magazines: Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly, in that order.

   Detective Fiction Weekly lasted over 900 issues during 1924-1951, mostly on a weekly basis. The first few years it was known as Flynn’s and Flynn’s Weekly and had the subtitle of “Detective Fiction with the Thrill of Truth.” William J. Flynn was credited as being the editor and blurbed as having been “25 years in the Secret Service of the U.S.”

   The early issues had some photo covers and printed many so-called factual or “true” articles. However they read like fiction to me and now strike me as sort of dated and not very readable. In fact, I cannot recall ever meeting a collector who really liked the early issues in the mid-twenties.

   Flynn’s was published by Munsey and was a companion magazine to Argosy. The best fiction was written by a sort of Golden Age group of writers: Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, J.S. Fletcher, Caroline Wells, Freeman Wills Crofts, H.C. Bailey, R. Austin Freeman, and Mary Roberts Rinehart.

   For example Agatha Christie in addition to several short stories, also had as a serial, Who Killed Ackroyd? Edgar Wallace published the J. G. Reeder stories as well as several serials. Arthur Reeve was present with his Craig Kennedy series. But these writers were outnumbered by quite a few mediocre and forgotten authors.

   However all this was to change starting with the June 2, 1928 issue when Flynn’s Weekly became Detective Fiction Weekly. Howard Bloomfield took over as editor somewhere around this period, and during his six years as editor he changed the magazine for the better.

   Gone were the bland covers, and by 1929 they had a bright yellow eye-catching background, showing a lot more action and violence. The contents page was redesigned and the magazine now looked more attractive and impressive. He started to publish such writers as Erle Stanley Gardner, H. Bedford-Jones, Fred MacIsaac, Fred Nebel, George Harmon Coxe, Frederick C. Davis, MacKinlay Kantor, all with their first stories for DFW.

   Instead of the more sedate and quiet crimes of the Flynn’s era, Bloomfield wanted a tougher story with more action and humor. He also started using the work of Carroll John Daly on a more frequent basis.

   Bloomfield was so successful at sprucing up DFW, that Popular Publications hired him to revive and reinvigorate Adventure magazine during 1934-1940.

   As an example of his success with DFW, the Jan 11, 1930 issue has an interesting letter column, known as “Flashes From Readers”, in which an announcement is made that DFW had 69 stories mentioned as notable in the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1929. All 69 of the stories are listed with the comment that the total from all other detective magazines combined is 79. The nearest competitor had only 21 stories. This shows quite an improvement in the quality of fiction.

   Of course the competition published far fewer issues since they were on a mostly monthly schedule. Black Mask had a total of 340 issues and Dime Detective had 273. For DFW to fill over 900 issues on a weekly basis is the sort of statistic that is hard to grasp.

   Most pulps published 12 issues a year, which must of been hard to fill with quality fiction. But DFW’s 52 issues a year would drive an editor to a nervous breakdown. If enough good fiction was not available one week you just could not publish blank pages. That explains the variable quality of some of the contents.

   But there were plenty of good writers and many series characters to keep readers amused. It’s true that Dashiell Hammett appeared only once under the name of Samuel Dashiell (Oct 19, 1929) and Raymond Chandler also once in May 30, 1936.

   However readers also loved Erle Stanley Gardner who appeared dozens of times with such series characters as Lester Leith, Sidney Zoom, Patent Leather Kid, Senor Lobo, and The Man in the Silver Mask. Richard Sale was very popular and also had many witty stories starring newpaper reporter, Daffy Dill and photographer, Candid Jones.

   Norbert Davis and John K. Butler were popular as was Fred MacIsaac. Unfortunately MacIsaac either fell out of favor with the editors in the late 1930’s or developed an enormous writer’s block because he committed suicide in 1940. Judson Phillips was very popular and had a long running series about the Park Avenue Hunt Club.

   Another popular writer was Carroll John Daly with such series characters as Satan Hall, Mr Strang, and Twist Sullivan. Daly is a very controversial figure among readers and collectors. He is often credited as being the first writer to deal with the hardboiled private detective and his name on the cover often meant a 15% percent increase in circulation.

   However many readers find that his novels have not held up well and that he is almost unreadable. Stephen Mertz wrote a defense of Daly in The MYSTERY FANcier dated May 1978. In the article he states that Daly is as good or better as Hammett, a very strong opinion not shared by many.

   Over the years I have leaned more toward the view that Daly was not a good writer simply because I found his stories to be dated and not too believable. Race Williams often annoyed me by stopping the story dead, and speaking directly to the reader.

   However, I do have to admit that on occasion I have liked Race Williams. Since Daly is not a big favorite of mine, it has been a long time since I tried one of the stories. Because I was writing this column about DFW, I recently read “Parole” in the April 6, 1935 issue.

   This is the first of three novelettes introducing Mr. Strang, a vigilante and bitter foe of the corrupt parole system. I actually enjoyed the story and found it to be more subdued and not as unbelievable as much of Daly’s work. The theme of a corrupt parole system is not dated and is still a problem today.

   In fact the editors followed Daly’s novelette with an article titled, “The Ghastly Folly of Parole”, which goes into the abuses of the parole system. One abuse that still occurs is when a murderer is sentenced to life and gets out on parole after seven years.

   Since Daly was popular in all three of The Big Three, there must be some validity to those that find his work to be enjoyable as action crime fiction.

   Another writer who did not write about series characters but was one of the top authors was Cornell Woolrich. Starting in 1934 he wrote dozens of suspenseful mysteries for DFW.

   To give you an idea of the tremendous number of series running in the magazine, here is a listing of the series I noticed in the span of a half year or 26 issues. Most of these are not by well known writers but will show the emphasis on series:

   Serials were a regular feature with at least one and sometimes two per issue.

   While thinking about this article, I looked through all 900 issues and noticed that I had obtained almost all the issues in the early 1970’s at only $1 or $2 each. I know this beyond a doubt because I penciled in the price paid on the corner of the contents page.

   I know it’s hard to believe, but I even paid as low as 15 or 25 cents per issue. Which brings up the question of why, even 40 years later, DFW is still one of the most inexpensive pulps to collect. You can still find copies for sale at the $20 or less price, even while issues of Black Mask and Dime Detective often are priced at over $100 for copies in the 1930’s.

   Because DFW was a weekly, it must have had a high circulation and therefore issues appear to be more numerous than the monthly pulps. Also the magazine did not have a lot of Hammett and Chandler, so we don’t see issues for sale at hundreds of dollars each.

   Since they were filling 52 issues a year, the quality of the magazine appears to be lower than Black Mask and Dime Detective, who only had to find good fiction for 12 issues. At any rate, DFW is a bargain nowadays and issues are a lot more numerous than some other titles.

   I’ve talked before about the influence of Ron Goulart’s book The Hardboiled Dicks. I started to hunt down copies of DFW and found my first large amount at a fellow collector’s home.

   He had stacks of most of the issues when it was known as Flynn’s Weekly. He was willing to accept less than $1 each because of condition. It seems a coal miner had read the magazines in a coal mine and stored them there, perhaps because his wife would not let him keep them in the house, a common problem with non-collecting spouses.

   The issues were covered with coal dust and no matter how you scrubbed or wiped the copies the dust would remain. After reading one these magazines, your hands would be black and your lungs clogged with the dust. I still have these copies and 40 years later the dust is still there.

   There also must have been rats in the mine because some of the issues have big chunks chewed out of the corners. Since the type is ok, the stories can still be read even though the pulp chips are falling heavily and the coal dust leaves a black mark.

   Some collectors have asked me why I accepted less than good copies like the magazines described above or reading copies lacking the front cover, etc. I was simply buying so many different titles, not to mention books and vintage paperbacks, that I could not afford to hold out for only the best.

   I was not rich and had the usual responsibilities such as wife, children, home mortgage, car payments, etc. If I was going to build up complete sets before the prices rose up above what I could afford, then I could not be too fussy about condition.

   I’ve noticed most condition collectors who look for so called “fine” condition, do not really read the books and magazines. Or if they do read them, then except for SF, it is just about impossible to put together a complete set of the different titles.

   There are a few exceptions but I’m always surprised at collectors who do not read the books or magazines that they collect. I like nice condition just like everybody else but I’m basically interested in reading, not just looking at the book in a shrink wrap.

   As usual with these memoirs, there always is a woman involved. With the exception of a half dozen or so women collectors, most ladies do not care about old magazines and see them as so much clutter and a waste of time and money. Women and pulps do not mix.

   Here is another tale of woe in the battle between pulps and females. The first DFW I ever found was in an enormous second hand bookstore in Trenton, NJ called Acres of Books. In 1970 I had a job in an office building near the store and just about every lunch hour I would walk over and spend the hour, not eating and talking about nothing like my non-collecting co-workers, but happily digging through boxes of old books.

   Since the job required that I wear a suit and a tie, I often arrived back from lunch in less than presentable shape. It took me a long time to gain the confidence of the old lady who managed Acres of Books but after seeing me at lunch for several months, she finally let me into the “Pulp Section.” This was a roped off forbidden section containing the valuable “collector’s items.”

   She let me pick out one DFW from 1930 and as we arrived at the cash register, I had visions of the price being more than I could pay. She said “that will be 25 cents.” To her, asking a quarter for a dime magazine, was a big mark up. She still remembered the 1930’s and the depression as being not that long ago.

   Needless to say, I soon talked her into letting me buy a lot more than one pulp at a time. At the time I was dating a receptionist and as I passed her desk she noticed my dusty condition and wondered what on earth happened to me during lunch.

   I used this as an opportunity to introduce her to the world of pulp magazine collecting and I took the DFW out of the dirty bag to show her. I gave my usual speech about what a pulp was and handed her the magazine. She held it as far as possible from her and with a puzzled expression said only, “It smells.”

   As my friends know, I love the smell of the different pulps; each title has its own special scent and aroma. So this reaction from a girl I was interested in was not a promising sign at all.

   DFW eventually came to a bad end, as did all the pulps, slowly fading away. In the early 1940’s they must have been having circulation problems and the magazine went from weekly, to every other week, to monthly.

   They tried covers with just the story titles and no illustrations and they tried the larger size of 8 1/2 by 11. They even tried covers showing Nazis whipping girls in their underwear. Nothing worked and they finally sold the title to Popular Publications.

   They put out 20 monthly issues in 1943 and 1944 before the paper shortage killed off the title. It was revived for 6 issues in 1951 but by then the pulps were dying and on their way out. Coming around the corner were the digest mystery magazines like Manhunt, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Saint, Mike Shayne, and so on, but that’s another story.

   The days of the great pulp titles were over and by 1955 nothing much remained except SF Quarterly and Ranch Romances.

   Because pulp reprints are so popular, I’m sure there will soon be collections of the series characters. Battered Silicon Dispatch Box Press already has published a collection of the Bedford-Jones Riley Dillon stories and there is an enormous two volume Park Avenue Hunt Club collection by Judson Phillips.

   But the original pulp magazines are so inexpensive, you can easily find affordable copies of DFW on eBay or at the two pulp conventions: Windy City Pulp Convention in Chicago and Pulpfest in Columbus, Ohio. One thing is for sure. There is a lot of good mystery and detective reading in 900 issues!

Previously on Mystery*File:   Part Two — Collecting Dime Detective.
Coming next:   Part Four — Collecting Detective Story Magazine.
Editorial Comment:   A fine companion piece to this chapter of Walker’s memoirs is “Those Detective Fiction Weekly Mugs,” by Terry Sanford, in which he discusses some the series characters which populated the pages of the magazine. You can find it here on the main Mystery*File website.

DOOMWATCH. Tigon British Film Productions, UK, 1972. Released in the US as Island of the Ghouls. Ian Bannen, Judy Geeson, John Paul, Simon Oates, George Sanders, Geoffrey Keen, Percy Herbert, Shelagh Fraser. Screenplay by Clive Exton, based on the BBC series created by by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis. Director: Peter Sasdy.

   This cautionary thriller was based on the BBC television series of the same name starring John Paul, Simon Oates, Vivien Sherrard, and Robert Powell (1970-72) and adapted to this taut film about an environmental disaster on a small Cornish island dependent on fishing and the sea.

   Ian Bannen is Dr. Shaw ( a new character created for the film) with Doomwatch, an organization that investigates the environmental impact of ecological disasters. After an oil spill he is dispatched to the small island of Balfe (a fictional creation) to ask a few questions and take some samples to see if local wildlife has been harmed.

   Balfe (filming was done around Polperro and Mevagissey in Cornwall ) is a quiet place, insular and inbred. Shaw gets little cooperation and meets open resentment as he begins to nose around. The opening scenes build up a nice atmosphere as he encounters deeper mysteries; an unusually violent dog, someone following him everywhere, a child buried in the forest whose body disappears, and finally an attack by a strangely disfigured man that locals try to write off as an accidental fall on slippery rocks on the shore.

   With the help of local teacher, Judy Geeson, Bannen begins to delve into the mystery it is now clear cannot be caused by the oil spill, and uncovers Castle Rock, an abandoned Naval dumping ground, but when he approaches Admiral George Sanders he learns the low level radioactive material dumped by the Royal Navy could not have caused the problem on the island.

   A dive at the dumping site uncovers industrial experimental growth hormones dumped there illegally. The radiation caused the hormone filled canisters to burst and contaminated the fish eaten by the islanders.

   But even when they know the cause of the disease the insular and increasingly violent islanders don’t want their life disturbed, and may kill to protect their way of life. They believe the disease is caused by inbreeding and is a judgment of God. They are too ashamed to seek help, and frightened of being forced to leave their ancestral home: in its last stages the disease can produce violence and madness — and in several cases has led to murder and suicide.

   The film produces a powerful statement about the impact of such a disaster, and while it was science fiction at the time it hardly seems so today. If anything, the scenes of the clean up of the oil spill at the beginning of the film are more chilling now than they were then. But it works as an intelligent and thoughtful mystery thriller despite and sometimes thanks to its minuscule budget.

   Filming was done effectively in and around the rugged Cornish coast, and the unique architecture of the island towns gives it an curiously threatening and yet quaint look. Bannen is effective as the passionate scientist and Geeson the outsider only partially accepted by the islanders. Sanders, seems mostly tired as the Admiral and Keen (probably best known to American viewers as the Foreign Minister in the James Bond films) has little to do as the industrialist who farmed out the clean up to the lowest bidder.

   Character actor Percy Herbert has one or two brief scenes as one of the islanders effected by the disease but hanging on to his humanity and common sense. Shelagh Fraser is good as Bannen’s landlady, trying to maintain her secrets and contain her grief over her desperately ill and grotesquely deformed husband.

   The ending, as Doomwatch and the Navy try to clean up the mess, is effectively downbeat, and if it’s a letdown from the monsters and horrors suggested earlier in the film it offers instead a sober, intelligent, and moving picture of the devastation left behind by greed and carelessness and the difficulty of dealing with such a small secretive and inbred community.

   Running only 88 minutes (I’ve seen it listed as everything from 70 to 92 minutes, but the DVD I viewed was 88), this is an almost gentle film, handsomely shot, and done with real intelligence and a determination to avoid sensationalism and replace it with real drama and suspense, and in those things it succeeds.

   As in real life there are no real villains and no easy answers. The corporate types tried to save money and chose the low bidder to dispose of the waste and the company who disposed of the waste was stupid not criminal.

   The writers eschew sensational sub-plots and stick to the human story, and it is more powerful for it with no corporate intrigue, chases, and hired hit men tacked on for filler; just real people in a real crisis. Just how much tension and threatened violence they ring out of that may surprise you.

    Doomwatch is sometimes unfairly compared to The Wicker Man, but only the setting and the idea of the insular island society and an outsider’s reaction to it and uncovering its mysteries are the same. It is primarily a mystery and suspense film, but often promoted as horror or science fiction.

   Writers Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis also wrote a Crichtonesque novel, Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters adapted from an episode of Doomwatch TV series, as well as the novels Brainrack and The Dynostar Menace.

   Kit Pedler (aka Dr. Christopher Magnus Pedler) was the unofficial scientific adviser on Doctor Who and wrote several scripts, among them “Tomb of the Cybermen,” in which he created one of the Doctor’s most enduring foes, the Cybermen.

   Screenwriter Clive Exton’s credits include adapting Edgar Wallace’s On the Spot and Francis Durbridge’s The World of Tim Fraser for television, the screenplays for Night Must Fall and 10 Rillington Place, and would be best known here for the Jeeves and Wooster series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, and the Poirot series with David Suchet.

   Director Peter Sasdy directed several Hammer films including Countess Dracula, Taste the Blood of Dracula and Hands of the Ripper. He also directed the film of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tapes, and somewhat less successfully Harold Robbins The Lonely Lady with Pia Zadora. His other work includes Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady with Christopher Lee and the television series Callan, with Edward Woodward.

   The disease the islanders suffer from is acromegaly, a disease of the pituitary gland, probably the best known sufferer of the disease being actor Rondo Hatton, the Creeper of Hollywood fame, whose distinctive features were exploited in several Hollywood horror films (The Pearl of Death from the Sherlock Holmes series, The Return of the Spider Woman, The Brute Man) before his early death from the disease in 1946.

   This list follows (or precedes) my list of “50 Favorite Golden Age Generation British Detective Novels,” which you may find here. This list consists of more worthy British works of detection, both novels and short story collections, but with the additional restriction that the books that follow all came from the 1920s. One may notice that, once again, men predominate, in this case accounting for 75% of the books.

   The top authors, accounting for 70% of the books, are: Freeman Wills Crofts (5), R. Austin Freeman (4), John Rhode (4), Agatha Christie (3), Dorothy L. Sayers (2), G.D.H and Margaret Cole (2), Gladys Mitchell (2), J.J. Connington (2) and Henry Wade (2).

   Looking overall at the Twenties, 43% of the books come from just two years, 1928 and 1929, suggesting that the genre was improving as the decade wore on and was heading into its most golden years yet, those of the 1930s.

         NOVELS (36)

   Omissions include Herbert Adams, Lynn Brock, A. Fielding, Ronald Knox and Philip Macdonald; but I am not crazy about Brock, I have not read enough Adams, and I believe the other three did much better work in the next decade.

1. Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
   A fine country house mystery that gave the world Hercule Poirot. A bit old-fashioned, but all in all one of the strongest debuts in the literature.

2. Freeman Wills Crofts, The Cask (1920)
   Another significant debut, for its apotheosis of alibi-busting and astonishing devotion to material detail. Over- long, as the author himself admitted, but one that should be read.

3. Eden Phillpotts, The Grey Room (1921)
   Unfairly dismissed by Julian Symons, this tale is an appealing take on the haunted room theme. Though it exhibits the venerable author’s penchant for philosophical digressions (which became even more pronounced as he aged), it is shorter than many of his works — and is none the worse for that.

4. A.A. Milne, The Red House Mystery (1922)
   Infamously dismantled by Raymond Chandler, this charming tale is still enjoyable even if one concedes logical faults in the plot structure.

5. Edgar Wallace, The Crimson Circle (1922)
   A deservedly once-celebrated tale by the British Golden Age King of the Thriller. This one allows scope for deduction by the reader and clearly influenced the genre.

6. R. Austin Freeman, The Cat’s Eye (1923)
   Another thrillerish tale, but still one with plenty of ratiocination by the author’s Great Detective, Dr. Thorndyke.

7. Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body? (1923)
   Another fine debut. Some may find Great Detective Lord Peter Wimsey too facetious, but the tale is very clever, with a memorable culprit.

8. Freeman Wills Crofts, Inspector French’s Greatest Case (1924)
   The debut of Inspector French sees the author moving away from dependence on alibis, but still prolific with clever devices of deception. Too much travelogue and dialect speech, but still a good case.

9. A. E. W. Mason, The House of the Arrow (1924)
   A major work by an author who contributed only sparingly to mystery. Beautifully written.

10. G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, The Death of a Millionaire (1925)
   While flawed in some ways, this tale demonstrates that British Golden Age mystery could be used as a vehicle for leftist-tinged satire.

11. R. Austin Freeman, The Shadow of the Wolf (1925)
   Freeman’s most famous inverted mysteries are the tales collected in The Singing Bone and the 1930s novel Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight, but this inverted tale, an expansion of an earlier version, is very good indeed.

12. Anthony Wynne, The Mystery of the Evil Eye (1925)
   The debut of Great Detective Dr. Hailey, who later revealed a marked penchant for locked room problems. No such problem here, but another noteworthy debut.

13. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
   Brilliant; one of the landmarks of the genre, probably the archetypal twenties detective novel, wrongly or rightly.

14. G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, The Blatchington Tangle (1926)
   A humorous country house tale, but with more detection than we get in, say, Agatha Christie’s similar (and better- known) The Secret of Chimneys (which was published the previous year).

15. John Rhode, Dr. Priestley’s Quest (1926)
   The author’s second Dr. Priestly tale, but more striking than the first in its impressively rigorous application of the principles of logical deduction.

16. J. J. Connington, Murder in the Maze (1927)
   In some ways repellent in attitude, yet inspired in its central notion (multiple slayings in one of those country house garden hedge mazes) and told with verve.

17. Freeman Wills Crofts, Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy (1927)
   One of the great original uses of burned bodies, even if laborious at times in the telling.

18. Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death (1927)
   Offers a notably celebrated how? problem and an interesting why? one, plus some amusing writing and a very well-observed spinster.

19. Victor L. Whitechurch, The Crime at Diana’s Pool (1927)
   Archetypal country house, village tale. Drawn mildly, but pleasantly (thanks David!).

20. Freeman Wills Crofts, The Sea Mystery (1928)
   One of the author’s shorter works and none the worse for that. Some very clever devices, and characters less stodgy than usual. It should have been called The Crate, however.

21. Anthony Gilbert, The Murder of Mrs. Davenport (1928)
   One of the early detective novels by a prolific author who was more comfortable, in my opinion, with mystery than true detection. But this is one of her best efforts at true detection.

22. Robert Gore-Browne, Murder of an M. P.! (1928)
   One of two mysteries by a forgotten playwright and mainstream novelist. The second, a thriller, is much inferior in my view. The first, praised in A Catalogue of Crime, is a clever tale with a memorable amateur detective.

23. R. Austin Freeman, As a Thief in the Night (1928)
   An impressive achievment. Though somewhat old-fashioned in tone, the novel boasts good characterization, suspense and fascinating science.

24. John Rhode, The Murders in Praed Street (1928)
   Notable use of a particular plot gambit involving multiple murders (the first?). Good opening setting, some good characters and fiendish murders, though Dr. Priestley, Rhode’s Great Detective, is a bit imperceptive on one matter!

25. Henry Wade, This Missing Partners (1928)
   Second genre effort by one of the major figures of the period. More “Croftsian” than later works, but with interesting and original characterization.

26. Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)
   The Crime Queen’s take on an Edgar Wallace thriller, but with all the detection of her straight detective novels. Some good humor as well.

27. Freeman Wills Crofts, The Box Office Murders (1929)
   Another thriller with detection. We know who the criminals are, but just what they are up to is an interesting question.

28. J. J. Connington, The Case with Nine Solutions (1929)
   The Case with Nine Possibilities might have been a more accurate title, but this is a strong work, with an interesting situation and even detective case notes at the end!

29. C. H .B. Kitchin, Death of My Aunt (1929)
   Once celebrated (and still fairly well-remembered) detective novel by a mainstream novelist successfully aiming here at a more realistic treatment of character in a genre novel.

30. & 31. Gladys Mitchell, Speedy Death (1929), The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1929)
   An impressive one-two debut punch by a truly unique mystery writer. The first, a country house tale, is original in myriad ways. So is the second, though for many it may be too farcical and bizarre. Both have Mrs. Bradley, one of the great women detectives.

32. E. R. Punshon, The Unexpected Legacy (1928)
   First of five Inspector Carter and Sergeant Bell mysteries by a longtime mainstream novelist who had written mystery before but not really detection. There is detection here, though the author would produce better examples of it later. What appeals most are his two police detectives, who are very original for the period.

33. & 34. John Rhode, The Davidson Case (1929), The House on Tollard Ridge (1929)
   The first novel boasts one of the most complex plots of the decade, the second pleasingly adult characters, a spooky house and some neat gadgets. Both have the acerbic Dr. Priestley.

35. P[eter] R[edcliffe] Shore, The Bolt (1929)
   A strong village take by an author about whom I know absolutely nothing beyond the name and that he was born in 1892, ostensibly. He published a second mystery, The Death Film, in 1932. Of this later book a review states: “It consists of detection, and more detection, and then some, and it was all needed. Straight investigation of crooked involution can hardly be better done.” Apparently it involves murder at the cinema, but I have never seen a copy of it.

36. Henry Wade, The Duke of York’s Steps (1929)
   Another notable work of detection by this author, with better-than-average characterization and writing.

         SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS (4)

   Omissions here include collections by Christie, the Coles, and Sayers, as well as one by the Grand Old Man himself, Arthur Conan Doyle. I believe the four collections below are superior, coming from supreme masters of the short form who were still at the top of their games.

37. Ernest Bramah, The Eyes of Max Carrados (1923)

38. H. C. Bailey, Mr. Fortune’s Trials (1925)

39. G. K. Chesterton, The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926)

40. R. Austin Freeman, The Magic Casket (1927)

I LOVE TROUBLE. Columbia Pictures, 1948. Franchot Tone, Janet Blair, Janis Carter, Adele Jergens, Glenda Farrell, Steven Geray, Tom Powers, Lynn Merrick, John Ireland, Donald Curtis, Eduardo Ciannelli, Robert Barrat, Raymond Burr, Eddie Marr, Sid Tomack. Screenplay by Roy Huggins, based on his book The Double Take. Director: S. Sylvan Simon.

   I have any number of things I need to tell you about this film, and I do not know where to begin. But perhaps the most essential thing you need to know is that this is a private eye movie, and that the PI who stars in it, impersonated by Franchot Tone, is Stu Bailey, who later became much more famous as the star of the television series, 77 Sunset Strip, in which he was played by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.

   I could understand the latter as being a gent who could turn the heads of any number of women as he walks by, if not actually being the object of the whistle of the wolf, but Franchot Tone, somewhat less so. As you can see from the list of cast members, there are any number of women in this film, including the former Torchy Blane, aka Glenda Farrell, now relegated to the role of Helen “Bix” Bixby,” faithful secretary. It’s an important role, but to my mind, it’s still a relegation.

   Bailey is hired in this movie to follow the wife of an important man in his neck of the woods, which is Los Angeles, or if not, one of the important suburbs.

   Either way, the wife of this important man is accused anonymously of having secrets in her past, which includes Portland, where she was a nightclub dancer, and Los Angeles, where she was a bubble bath entertainer.

   From which point many leads open up, and many clichés of the gumshoe business ensue as well, and quite excellently so, including witty repartee (of course); being run down by an automobile in a dark alley; being followed by car in a high speed chase before the tables are turned; finding his room and office ransacked; being slugged on the head from behind; being kidnapped by the ransackers and then being drugged by a nurse with a needle with nefarious intent and more. And as suggested above, all kinds of women (other than the nurse) become involved, some essential to the plot, some not.

   And speaking of plot, I do not believe that anyone can watch this movie and follow the plot all of the way through. It is complicated.

   Perhaps as complicated as the 250 page novel the movie is based on, which I thought I had read when I started this movie, but which I quickly decided I had not.

   In any case, I have watched this movie twice, so far, and I think everything makes sense to me. Luckily I was watching on DVD and I could back up whenever I needed to, which was on the second time through, since I didn’t realize I needed to – the first time, that is.

   Unhappily, Raymond Burr has only two lines of dialogue. Distinctive lines of dialogue, true, but only two.

[UPDATE] 10-13-10. Turns out that Jeff Pierce did a long review of The Double Take a while ago, the Huggins book that this movie is based on. He apparently read a later paperback edition that updated the story a little bit, to make it a better fit for the TV series, but it didn’t seem to affect the details of the plot any. Jeff also includes huge chunks of the story itself, making his comments doubly worth reading. You can find it here.

HENRY KANE – A Corpse for Christmas. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1951. Hardcover reprint: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, November 1951. Paperback reprints: Dell 735, 1953; Zenith ZB-19, 1959, as The Deadly Doll; Signet D2877, 1966, as Homicide at Yuletide; Lancer 75261, 1970s? Previously a two-part serial in Esquire, December 1949 & January 1951.

    As all of you — or at least the three people who read these reviews out of a misguided urge to get your money’s worth from this magazine — know, I strive for balance here. That is to say, I endeavor to work in at least one tough P.I. novel every other column.

    This one almost didn’t make it, since fantasy is what the author starts with. I mean, of the six females encountered by the detective, four of them are hot for his body immediately. His client would be, but she is aware he lusts after her so she needn’t bother. Only a landlady shows no desire, perhaps because she’s unprepossessing and it would embarrass the detective.

    Acting in behalf of his client, another private eye in jail on several traffic charges, Peter Chambers discovers a man, with wine-red hair and beard of the same color, shot to death. Holding the murder weapon is a young lady, who of course didn’t do it.

    A gangster looking for some jewels possessed by the dead man is the client of Chambers’s client, and there are various former wives of the dead man whose income he was going to cut off but who didn’t mind that, or so they say.

    Chambers investigates on Christmas Eve and Christmas and identifies the murderer, who was fairly obvious at least to this reader.

    What kept me reading was Kane’s obvious love of the language and Chambers’s sense of humor. Kane has a delightful style, although I still haven’t figured out what a “saltatory mattress” might be. Maybe he’ll explain it in his other books, which I’ll be looking for.

FOG ISLAND. PRC, 1945. George Zucco, Lionel Atwill, Jerome Cowan, Sharon Douglas, Veda Ann Borg, John Whitney, Jacqueline DeWit, Ian Keith. Screenplay by Pierre Gendron, based on the play Angel Island, by Bernadine Angus. Director: Terry O. Morse.

   Fog Island cost about a buck-ninety-five to chum out and looks it, but here is a film to sink your teeth into; a stylish, creaky Old-Dark-House thriller directed at penurious pace by someone named Terry Morse and offering a hand-picked cast of cinematic low-lifes including George Zucco, Lionel Atwill, Ian Keith, Veda Ann Borg and Jerome Cowan (best remembered as the short-lived half of the Spade-Archer partnership in The Maltese Falcon) at his slimiest.

   Before going on to rave about this thing I should add perhaps that by nomic standards, Fog Island don’t amount to much. The script makes very little sense at all, the sets — when there are any seem about to topple any moment, and the whole affair is served up with a rushed look that seems cheap-jack even by PRC’s bottom-of-the-trash-can standards.

   Watching it is like seeing a derelict car chug its clanking way down a superhighway – you can’t believe it’s actually moving right there in front of you, much less understand what keeps it going.

   For the record, Fog Island concerns itself with the efforts of recently paroled embezzler Zucco to revenge himself on his unindicted co-conspirators, and their efforts to prise out of him the money they’re sure he squirreled away.

   As the plot unspools, hints are dropped here and there that Zucco and/or some of his cronies may or may not be guilty — but these are mostly left unresolved in the haste to get this thing in the can.

   What’s left is brilliantly atmospheric and astonishingly grim as Zucco, Atwill et. al. struggle, grasp and claw at each other to see who will emerge Wealthy… or Alive, anyway. Oh. there’s a romantic sub-plot stuck in there somewhere, but Director Morse and writer Pierre Gendron (who worked on Ulmer’s masterful Bluebeard) clearly save most of their interest for the Baddies — who are all played by much more interesting actors anyway.

   The big Confrontation scene where Zucco and Atwill pull out all the dramatic stops and hammer away at each other (accent on Ham) with histrionic abandon has — no kidding — Real Chemistry — made all the more compelling by being shot practically in the dark to hide the cheap-o sets.

   With nothing to distract us, the eyes are drawn irresistibly to the spectacle of two full-blooded (to put it mildly) performers face-to-face and toe-to-toe in the thespic equivalent of a knockdown drag-out prize fight.

   After this emotional high point, Fog Island drags, lurches and stumbles a bit to a conclusion that, as I say, is surprisingly grim and well-realized for a B-Horror/Mystery Movie. The glimpse of impressive artistry someone heaped on this obscure thing while no one was looking makes me despair of facile, expensive things like The Firm and Line of Fire.

   Which is not to say that Fog Island is as entertaining as either of them; it isn’t. The only thing it has going for it is the gratuitous energy and enthusiasm of its creators. Which is enough for me.

THE SORROWS OF SATAN. A Famous Players-Lasky Corporation production, distributed by Paramount, 1926. Adolphe Menjou, Ricardo Cortez, Lya De Putti, Carol Dempster, Ivan Lebedeff, Marcia Harris.

Screenplay by Forrest Halsey, based on the novel by Marie Corelli (1895). Directors of photography, Harry Fischbeck & Arthur De Titta; art director, Charles Kirk. Director: D. W. Griffith. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

   In this modern morality play, urbane Prince Lucio de Rimanez (Menjou) promises Geoffrey Tempest (Cortez), a struggling writer, great riches if he will surrender his soul. Tempest abandons his pregnant fiancee Mavis Claire (Dempster) and falls under the spell of the debauched Princess Olga Godovsky (Lya De Putti), whom he subsequently marries.

   The Prince is, course, the Devil, and Tempest is the Faust who sells his soul not for youth or knowledge, but for worldly success. Menjou is impressive, both charming and sinister, and Dempster is touching as the abandoned Marguerite.

   Lya de Putti, a Beardsley-like siren in a performance that seems molded on one of DeMille’s seductive vamps, captures the coldness of the often deceived searcher of forbidden pleasures and the almost desperate yearning for a pleasure that will prove more than fleeting.

   The weak link in the casting is Cortez, who seems too much the self-absorbed matinee idol to convincingly portray the adoration for the guileless Dempster and the lustful pursuit and conquest of the worldly De Putti.

   The film is greatly enhanced by the artful cinematography that is particularly effective in portraying the opulence of the world to which the Prince introduces Tempest. It may not have the power of Griffith’s use of the traditional materials of Victorian melodrama that he demonstrates in Way Down East, but it renews the time-worn themes of the Faustian tale with sensitivity and pictorial beauty.

   These are from the gray dawn of the origins of the genre up to 1913. Short story collections are included and a few novels that are only related (but closely) to the genre. They appear here in approximate chronological order, but not strictly so. Some books by an author are listed together even though they were published later.

   My rule on these was simple. They had to fit within the dates and I had to have read them. The end date of 1913 marks the publication of Trent’s Last Case by E. C. Bentley, recognized as the beginning of the Golden Age. A few toward the end were not published in book form until after Bentley, but had been serialized before and so fit in the pre-Golden Age category.

   Historians of the genre will note that Dickens was not writing detective stories and I agree, but many of these early books are direct progenitors of the detective novel as we know it and in their handling of crime and criminals important to the genre.

●   Captain Singleton by Daniel Defoe (the memoirs of a privateer, mostly the imagination of Defoe)

●   The Newgate Calendar by Anonymous (romanticized accounts of the likes of Dick Turpin, George Barrington, and Jonathan Wild)

●   Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding (while the novel is satirical it could almost be a playbook for the career of Vidoq)

●   Caleb Williams by William Godwin (the first crime novel — and still a rousing tale of chase and pursuit as well as an early social reform novel)

●   The Romance of the Forest by Mrs. Radcliffe (many of the Gothic trappings used by the genre later on and all the supernatural is rationally — if not always logically — explained)

●   The Tales of Hoffman by E. T. A. Hoffman (he may actually predate Poe with the first detective story)

●   Rookwood by Hugh Ainsworth (most notable for the long section of the novel known as Dick Turpin’s Ride, a forerunner of Raffles, the Saint, and the gentlemen crooks)

●   The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott (a fictional account of an actual murder with some Gothic trappings, one of Scott’s Tales of the Landlord series)

●   Wieland by Charles Brockden-Brown

●   Confessions of an Unjustified Sinner by James Hogg (both this and Wieland are examples of the foundations of the psychological crime novel)

●   The Spy by James Fenimore Cooper (the story of one of Washington’s agents during the American Revolution)

●   The Memoirs of Vidoq by Eugene Francois Vidoq (non-fiction, more-or-less about the thief turned detective who gave us Dupin, Vautrin, Jean Valjean, Lecoq, and Sherlock Holmes as well as the modern police force as we know it — and the origin of ‘cherchez la femme’)

●   Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe (no comment needed)

●   The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

●   Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner by Richardson (again non-fiction, more-or-less)

●   Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (Fagin an early model for the criminal mastermind)

●   A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (international intrigue)

●   Bleak House by Charles Dickens (Inspector Bucket)

●   The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

●   The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (the first and still one of the best detective novels)

●   The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (Collins’ best book and with the wonderful villainy of Count Fosco)

●   Armadale by Wilkie Collins

●   No Hero by Wilkie Collins

●   John Devil by Paul Feval pere (the first Scotland Yard detective in Gregory Temple and an early prototype for Moriarity)

●   The Black Coats by Paul Feval pere (an early novel of organized crime)

●   The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas pere (all the mystery men in literature owe a debt to Edmund Dantes)

●   The Horror at Fontenay by Alexandre Dumas pere

●   The Mysteries of Paris by Eugene Sue (a huge crime novel by the Dickens of Paris)

●   The Wandering Jew by Eugene Sue (the use of a Tontine as a plot device and an early use of the reading of the will for dramatic purpose)

●   Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (politics, crime, injustice, Jean Valjean — yet another Vidoq figure — and the implacable Javert)

●   The History of the Thirteen by Honore de Balzac (Vidoq yet again, here as Vautrin)

●   Monsieur Lecoq by Emile Gabiorou (Gabiorou was Feval’s secretary and took the name of his hero from one of Feval’s villains — Lecoq is the most important figure between Dupin and Holmes)

●   Uncle Silas by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (still one of the seminal books in the genre)

●   Wylder’s Hand by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

●   The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katherine Greene (one of the classics and likely her best)

●   The Trail of the Serpent by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (splendid nonsense recently republished in a trade paperback edition with extensive notes and introduction)

●   Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume (helped to make the cab of the title the symbol of Victorian London — even though Hume is a colonial and a terrible writer)

●   The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (most editions also include “Pavilion on the Links” and “The Sire De Maltroit’s Door,” both seminal to the genre)

●   The New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson (virtually at the birth of the genre Stevenson is already poking fun at it)

●   The Wrong Box by Robert Louis Stevenson & Lloyd Osborne (humorous use of the Tontine plot beloved by the Victorians)

●   The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (again, no comment needed)

●   The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

●   The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

●   The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill (an early and great locked room)

●   The Chronicles of Martin Hewitt by Arthur Morrison (the first reaction against the colorful detective as represented by Holmes, and good in their own right)

●   The Hole in the Wall by Arthur Morrison (a fine crime novel worthy of Dickens or Stevenson)

●   As a Thief in the Night by E.W. Hornung (the first Raffles collection)

●   The Experiences of Loveday Brooke: Lady Detective by C. L. Pirkis (early female sleuth — if not the first — written by a woman)

●   The Shooting Party by Anton Chekov (Chekov’s only novel and it’s a murder mystery)

●   Hilda Wade by Grant Allen (completed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an exceptional mystery of the chase and pursuit kind)

●   Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain (if not a detective story, good use of detectival skills)

●   The Old Man in the Corner by Baroness Orczy (still the best of the armchair sleuths and the final story still has a kick)

●   The Man in Gray by Baroness Orczy (an early example of the historical mystery)

●   Secrets of the Foreign Office by William Le Queux (spy stories featuring Duckworth Drew — fun in the right mood)

●   The Count’s Chauffeur by William LeQueux (an early and influential use of the automobile in crime fiction)

●   The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton (first and best of the paradoxical priest)

●   The Secrets of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton (ironically these were written almost twenty years before Chesterton became a Catholic in 1922)

●   The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton (the detective novel as parable and allegory)

●   My Adventure on the Flying Scotsman by Eden Phillipotts ( a novella really — Phillipotts is important both on his own — The Red Redmaynes — and because he encouraged young Agatha Christie to keep writing)

●   The Passenger From Scotland Yard by Henry Wood (murder, smuggling, and trains)

●   The Great Tontine by Hawley Smart (one of the best of uses of the Tontine plot)     [1]

●   The Rome Express by Major Arthur Griffith (this helped to popularize the idea of intrigue on a train)     [1]

●   Mr. Meeson’s Will by H. Rider Haggard (a mix of adventure story and trial novel with a somewhat racy finale)

●   The Red Thumb Mark by R. Austin Freeman (no sooner had fingerprints been accepted as evidence in court than Freeman proved they could be forged — not unlike the detective work that would break the real Sir Harry Oakes case in 1943 in the Bahamas)

●   The Singing Bone by R. Austin Freeman (the invention of the inverted detective story, the most important innovation since Holmes)

●   John Silence by Algernon Blackwood (the finest of the psychic detectives, everyone a classic — you may never look at cats or French villages the same again)

●   November Joe by Hesketh Prichard (fine tec tales of a Canadian half-breed trapper)

●   The Eyes of Max Carrados by Ernest Bramah (Carrados is a bit of a superman, but these are still great reading)

●   The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope (prototype for a thousand books of international intrigue to come)

●   The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings by L.T. Meade & Robert Eustace (an international criminal conspiracy not unlike those so popular today)

●   The Exploits of Valmont by Robert Barr (highly entertaining stories and an early forerunner of Poirot)

●   The Gentle Grafter by O. Henry (clever stories about charming con man Jeff Peters)

●   The Beetle by Richard Marsh (a mix of horror and detective story, in many ways second only to Dracula for genuine chills)     [1]

●   Dr. Nikola by Guy Boothby (the Italian Peril and great fun, Nikola one of the great villains in the literature)

●   The London Adventures of Mr. Collin by Frank Heller (Philip ‘Flip’ Collin is the Danish Raffles)

●   Carnaki, Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson (supernatural sleuth and some real chills)

●   The Thinking Machine by Jacques Futrelle (Futrelle of course perished on the Titanic, but luckily there are two good collections of this series)

●   Cleek, the Man With Forty Faces by Thomas Hanshew ( a great favorite of John Dickson Carr with an penchant for impossible crimes almost as impossible as the hero, but fun in the right mood and who can resist a Scotland Yard man named Maverick Narcom?)

●   The Man in Lower 10 by Mary Roberts Rinehart (this was serialized before The Circular Staircase was published — my own choice as her best)

●   Kim by Rudyard Kipling (granddaddy of the Great Game)

●   In the Fog by Richard Harding Davis (too little read today, a splendid little book, and be sure to get the edition with the color plates by Frederic Dorr Steele)     [1]

●   At the Villa Rose by A. E. W. Mason (without Hanaud there is no Poirot)

●   The Exploits of Arsene Lupin by Maurice Leblanc (the French Raffles and in much of the world a rival to Holmes himself)

●   813 by Maurice Leblanc (Lupin’s greatest case in which is client is the Kaiser)

●   The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux (one of the great locked room tales of all time)

●   The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

●   Stories of the Railroad by Victor L. Whitechurch (these tales of Thorpe Hazel are some of the best short detective stories of their era)

●   Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries by Melville Davidson Post (the finest collection of American detective stories since Poe)

●   The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason by Melville Davidson Post (Perry’s last name is no coincidence)

●   Ashton Kirk Investigator by John McIntyre (McIntyre went on to become a serious novelist about gangsters; A-K also features in Ashton Kirk Secret Agent and others)

●   Prince Zaleski by M. P. Shiel (the last gasp of the Decadent era — unique is plot and execution)

●   The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (the first serious novel about terrorism)

●   The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace (the birth of the modern thriller)

●   The Romance of Terence O’Rourke, Gentleman Adventurer by Louis Joseph Vance

●   The Lone Wolf by Louis Joseph Vance (Vance’s Michael Lanyard would become the standard for most the gentleman crooks to come, and his adventures are still worth reading)

●   The Achievements of Luther Trant by Edwin Balmer & William McHarg (perhaps the first psychological sleuth)

●   The Power House by John Buchan (Graham Greene calls it the first modern spy novel)

●   The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer (say what you will — I love it — one of the most influential books in the genre — Racist? Yes, the Anglo-Saxons are all idiots as S. J. Perlman pointed out)

●   The Silent Bullet by Arthur B. Reeve (the introduction of Craig Kennedy the Scientific Detective, dated, but these stories show some energy)

●   The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim (the last of the great Edwardian spy novels, within the next year both The Thirty Nine Steps and Riddle of the Sands would leave if forever behind)

●   The Lodger by Mrs. Belloc Lowdnes (the classic novel of Jack the Ripper)

●   Fantomas by Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre (the newspaper serialization barely squeezes in — the surreal criminal Fantomas is unique in the genre)

[1]   The Great Tontine by Hawley Smart, The Rome Express by Major Arthur Griffith, In the Fog by Richard Harding Davis, and The Beetle by Richard Marsh, are all collected in one volume as Victorian Villainies edited by Graham and Hugh Greene

   These are all real detective stories: tales in which a mystery is solved by a detective. Real detective fiction tends to go invisible in modern society, in which many people prefer crime fiction without mystery.

   The list is in chronological order but unfortunately omits many major short story writers: G. K. Chesterton, Jacques Futrelle, H. C. Bailey, Edward D. Hoch, and other greats.

Émile Gaboriau, Le Crime d’Orcival (1866)
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868)
Israel Zangwill, The Big Bow Mystery (1891)
Anna Katherine Green, The Circular Study (1900)
Edgar Wallace, The Four Just Men (1905)
Cleveland Moffett, Through the Wall (1909)
John T. McIntyre, Ashton-Kirk, Investigator (1910)
R. Austin Freeman, The Eye of Osiris (1911)
E. C. Bentley, Trent’s Last Case (1913)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear (1914)
Clinton H. Stagg, Silver Sandals (1914)
Johnston McCulley, Who Killed William Drew? (1917)
Octavus Roy Cohen, Six Seconds of Darkness (1918)
Mary Roberts Rinehart & Avery Hopwood, The Bat (1920)
Donald McGibeny, 32 Caliber (1920)
Carolyn Wells, Raspberry Jam (1920)
Freeman Wills Crofts, The Cask (1920)
A. A. Milne, The Red House Mystery (1922)
G. D. H. Cole, The Brooklyn Murders (1923)
Carroll John Daly, The Snarl of the Beast (1927)
Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1927)
Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk, Into Thin Air (1929)
Samuel Spewack, Murder in the Gilded Cage (1929)
Thomas Kindon, Murder in the Moor (1929)
Mignon G. Eberhart, While the Patient Slept (1930)
Victor L. Whitechurch, Murder at the College / Murder at Exbridge (1932)
Ellery Queen, The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932)
Anthony Abbot, About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932)
S. S. Van Dine, The Dragon Murder Case (1933)
Helen Reilly, McKee of Centre Street (1933)
Dermot Morrah, The Mummy Case (1933)
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors (1934)
Milton M. Propper, The Divorce Court Murder (1934)
John Dickson Carr, The Three Coffins / The Hollow Man (1935)
Georgette Heyer, Merely Murder / Death in the Stocks (1935)
David Frome, Mr. Pinkerton Has the Clue (1936)
Nigel Morland, The Case of the Rusted Room (1937)
Cyril Hare, Tenant for Death (1937)
Baynard Kendrick, The Whistling Hangman (1937)
Ngaio Marsh, Death in a White Tie (1938)
R. A. J. Walling, The Corpse With the Blue Cravat / The Coroner Doubts
(1938)
Dorothy Cameron Disney, Strawstacks / The Strawstack Murders (1938-1939)
Rex Stout, Some Buried Caesar (1938-1939)
Rufus King, Murder Masks Miami (1939)
Theodora Du Bois, Death Dines Out (1939)
Erle Stanley Gardner, The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939)
Agatha Christie, One Two, Buckle My Shoe / An Overdose of Death (1940)
J. J. Connington, The Four Defences (1940)
Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
Frank Gruber, The Laughing Fox (1940)
Anthony Boucher, The Case of the Solid Key (1941)
Stuart Palmer, The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941)
Kelley Roos, The Frightened Stiff (1942)
Cornell Woolrich, Phantom Lady (1942)
Frances K. Judd, The Mansion of Secrets (1942)
Helen McCloy, The Goblin Market (1943)
Anne Nash, Said With Flowers (1943)
Mabel Seeley, Eleven Came Back (1943)
Norbert Davis, The Mouse in the Mountain (1943)
Robert Reeves, Cellini Smith: Detective (1943)
Hake Talbot, The Rim of the Pit (1944)
John Rhode, The Shadow on the Cliff / The Four-Ply Yarn (1944)
Allan Vaughan Elston & Maurice Beam, Murder by Mandate (1945)
Walter Gibson, Crime Over Casco (1946)
George Harmon Coxe, The Hollow Needle (1948)
Wade Miller, Fatal Step (1948)
Alan Green, What a Body! (1949)
Hal Clement, Needle (1949)
Bruno Fischer, The Angels Fell (1950)
Jack Iams, What Rhymes With Murder? (1950)
Richard Starnes, The Other Body in Grant’s Tomb (1951)
Richard Ellington, Exit for a Dame (1951)
Lawrence G. Blochman, Recipe For Homicide (1952)
Day Keene, Wake Up to Murder (1952)
Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel (1953)
Henry Winterfeld, Caius ist ein Dummkopf / Detectives in Togas (1953)
Craig Rice, My Kingdom For a Hearse (1956)
Frances and Richard Lockridge, Voyage into Violence (1956)
Harold Q. Masur, Tall, Dark and Deadly (1956)
James Warren, The Disappearing Corpse (1957)
Seicho Matsumoto, Ten to sen (Point and Lines) (1957)
Michael Avallone, The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse (1957)
Ed Lacy, Shakedown for Murder (1958)
Lenore Glen Offord, Walking Shadow (1959)
Allen Richards, To Market, To Market (1961)
Christopher Bush, The Case of the Good Employer (1966)
Randall Garrett, Too Many Magicians (1967)
Michael Collins, A Dark Power (1968)
Merle Constiner, The Four from Gila Bend (1968)
Bill Pronzini, Undercurrent (1973)
Nicholas Meyer, The West End Horror (1976)
Thomas Chastain, Vital Statistics (1977)
William L. DeAndrea, Killed in the Ratings (1978)
Clifford B. Hicks, Alvin Fernald, TV Anchorman (1980)
Donald J. Sobol, Angie’s First Case (1981)
Kyotaro Nishimura, Misuteri ressha ga kieta (The Mystery Train
Disappears) (1982)
K. K. Beck, Murder in a Mummy Case (1986)
Jon L. Breen, Touch of the Past (1988)
Stephen Paul Cohen, Island of Steel (1988)
Earl W. Emerson, Black Hearts and Slow Dancing (1988)

Editorial Comment: This will do it for today, but I do have one more list to post. David Vineyard sent it to me this morning. It’s a followup to his previous list, consisting of what he calls “100 Important Books From Before the Golden Age.” The cutoff date for these is 1913, which is where his earlier list began. While not all of the books on this new list may be crime fiction, they’re all important to the field. Look for it soon!