BRETT HALLIDAY – Marked for Murder. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1945. Paperback reprints include: Dell 222, mapback; Dell 503, mapback; Dell D291, June 1959; Dell 5386, Jan 1963 (cover art: McGinnis); Dell 5386, new printing, June 1968.

   The copy I just read is the one from January 1963 with the cover art done by Robert McGinnis, seen here to the right. He may have done covers for the other printings, but if so my records do not currently show it.

   As for the book itself, it’s a good one, and I will tell you this much up front and right away. When you read this book, you won’t be able to tell the blondes apart without a scorecard. Marked for Murder takes place in Miami — private eye Mike Shayne comes in from New Orleans where he has been living and working after the death of his wife Phyllis, but once he hears that his good friend Tim Rourke, beat reporter for the Miami Courier, has been shot, almost fatally, you can’t keep him away.

   But to get back to the point I was making, Miami has to have a higher quota of blondes than any other part of the country, if this book is to be believed. Rourke was writing an expose about the blonde woman who has been seen hanging out with winners at gambling joints around town, said winners later showing up dead, their winnings not to be found.

   The wife of the current editor of the Courier is also a blonde. Rourke doesn’t get along with the editor, but he has been making time with the wife. He is also visited by a couple of blondes (one the editor’s wife) just after a pair of thugs working for the guy that owns the aforementioned casinos take Rourke for a ride.

   Even though this is a PI novel, it is also a good old-fashioned detective puzzler. Halliday’s writing (or that is to say, Davis Dresser’s) reminded me this time around of Erle Stanley Gardner’s, of all people, with enough clues and suspects to keep Shayne scratching his red-haired head all the way through the book.

   There is no final courtroom scene, à la Perry Mason, but à la the latter, Shayne does play loose and easy with the evidence and all of the possible suspects he encounters along the way. This one was fun to read, in a timeless sort of fashion, and I am embarrassed to say that I did not figure out who done it long before Shayne did, and I should have.

An Austrian band, founded in 2008 noted for playing psychobilly, pop punk and horror punk.

MAURICE SANDOZ – The Maze. Doubleday Doran, hardcover, 1945. No paperback edition.

THE MAZE. Allied Artists, 1953. Richard Carlson, Veronica Hurst, Katherine Emery, Michael Pate. Screenplay by Daniel Ullman. Directed by William Cameron Menzies.

   I love it when learning one thing leads to learning another.

   When I mentioned to Ray that I was reading /watching this, he mentioned right back that it was based on a true story. This prompted a bit of research that led me to the story of Glamis.

   Glamis Castle in Scotland is a place of legend, the setting of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, reputedly the scene of a card game between the laird of the manor and Satan himself, and the seat of an impenetrable mystery involving a secret room and an unseen denizen half-haunting the manse. This was the basic material that Maurice Sandoz took for his short novel, The Maze.

   Like a classic ghost story, Maze is set in a frame, as an unnamed narrator tells of a chance meeting with Edith Murray, the kind of spirited old lady familiar to readers of this sort of thing. It seems that some years ago, Edith’s niece Kitty was engaged to marry Gerald MacTeam, who, as we get into the story, is related to the MacTeams of Craven Castle, which has a mysterious history and odd ways with its guests, who are forbidden to enter parts of the house and grounds and are locked in their rooms at night.

   Sandoz throws in a few more teasers like this and promptly moves the plot along as an uncle dies, Gerald inherits the estate, goes to the castle to settle things, then abruptly breaks off the engagement with a letter that (fittingly for this sort of thing) foreshadows a grim tale to come and throws Kitty into tearful confusion.

   But not for long. Aunt Edith isn’t the kind of lady to see young love go unrequited, and not many pages have turned before she’s a guest in the castle and busied with the usual night-time perambulations through twisty corridors and sinister paths, to a conclusion in the mysterious maze of the title.

   I have to say though that I closed this book with a sense of mild disappointment. It’s smoothly written, suspenseful, and the illustrations (by Salvador Dali) are just dandy, but overall it lacked any real drama, and the resolution seemed just a bit too pat and convenient. Worth reading, but hardly memorable.

   The film, on the other hand, is definitely worth your time. Directed by William Cameron Menzies (Things to Come, Invaders from Mars, etc.) in his best off-kilter style, it fairly drips with menace and gives real, visceral feeling to the creepiest elements of Sandoz’s book: the sound of something unworldly moving through the castle halls, the thing half-seen in the shadows which sanity must reject, and the palpable sensation of persons keeping a secret they wish they didn’t know.

   Writer Daniel Ullman, who did his best work in B-Westerns, rings in the changes one would expect from Hollywood; here it’s young and attractive fiancée (Veronica Hurst) who instigates the investigation and heads it up when Aunt Edith (Katherine Emery) wants to back off. And when the end comes, it’s with a fine flurry of activity and jump-in-your-seat scares.

   Richard Carlson, that reliable stand-up guy of 1950s sci-fi puts in his usual earnest performance, and Michael Pate, the vampire gunslinger of Curse of the Undead (1959) adds a bit of depth to his sinister butler part, but the film really belongs to Menzies, whose striking visuals and sense of pace keep things going wonderfully.

STEPHEN GREENLEAF – State’s Evidence. Dial Press, hardcover, 1982. Ballantine, paperback, 1983. Bantam Crimeline, paperback, 1991.

   A few [posts] back, as you may recall, I had some misgivingsabout Death Bed, Stephen Greenleaf’s tale of private eye John Marshall Tanner that immediately preceded this one.

   You can forget all that. If you’re a fan of PI fiction, whatever you do, don’t let this one pass you by! Toned down, but thankfully never quite eliminated, is some of the overbearing narrative that has marked Greenleaf’s two earlier books. The dialogue now carries a greater share of the story, and the plot-line is far less reliant on the flowery but not always appropriate series of metaphors that Greenleaf seemed to put so much stake in before.

   It all begins when Tanner is hired by a deputy district attorney in the town of El Gordo to find a missing witness, a woman who claims to have seen a fatal hit-and-run accident.

   But do you remember ever watching the TV series The Outsider? El Gordo is one of those typically Californian towns that private eyes keep stumbling across, bright and sunny on the surface, but simply riddled with hostility, crime, and corruption just underneath. It doesn’t take Tanner long to start digging, nor for the foul matter to start making itself known.

   Naturally, not all is what it seems. Some of the missing woman’s friends believe that she’s been kidnapped, murdered, or worse. Others feel she has merely fled her husband, a quietly arrogant tyrant with a fetish for things Oriental.

   Surprisingly, everyone who has known the woman reveals to Tanner a completely different side to her personality. Not surprisingly, little by little, Tanner is forced to realize that D. A. Tolson has not told him all he needs to know about the case. Even the federal government, it seems, is vitally interested in its outcome.

   Rampant coincidence seems to abound, but in each instance there is a substantive reason behind each of the bombshells Tanner soon begins to uncover. And bombshells they are. An added plus, at least as far as I was concerned, was the touch of courtroom theatrics a la Perry Mason that highlights a central portion of the cases he’s in. Tanner is also an ex-lawyer, and it’s about time we saw that fact become a more essential part of one of his cases.

   It may not happen, but Greenleaf should begin to start getting the recognition he deserves with this book. It’s certainly fine enough to suggest that he’s beginning to nudge his way out from behind the shadows of Chandler and Macdonald — his predecessors down these same dark alleys of Californian hypocrisy and despair.

Rating:   A.

From jazz singer Janis Siegel’s CD I Need your Love (Telarc, 2002). Besides her solo work, she has been a member the vocal group The Manhattan Transfer since 1972.

WILLIAM GORE – There’s Death In The Churchyard. George G. Harrap, UK, hardcover,1934. No US publication.

   Pondersby Jonson becomes ill in the church at Sutton Eacham. When helped out of the church after the services by his host, Captain Stoyner, squire of the village, Jonson expires, but not before accusing his host of having murdered him.

   Stoyner and Jonson had had a fierce argument the night before; Stoyner possessed the poison used to commit the murder; Jonson, a financial ‘shark’ from the city, was trying to do down the good captain; Stoyner was the only one who could have administered the poison if what he says about the poison is true.

   It seems like an open-and-shut case. The villagers are all convinced that the squire did it, although their opinion is that the murder was certainly justifiable. Stoyner puts up no defence at the coroner’s hearing, his opinion being that if the jurors don’t want to believe a chap with his breeding, background, and record, so much the worse for them. They don’t justify his faith.

   During the trial itself, he will not allow himself to be defended by a barrister. If it costs £2000 for an obviously, or so he claims, innocent man to be found not guilty, then there really isn’t any justice.

   Luckily, this rather headstrong and proud man has a few believers and supporters. The vicar, married to Stoyner’s sister-in-law, finally spots, during one of his tedious sermons, how and why the murder was committed.

   This is a well-plotted, well-written, and amusing novel, with an unusually true-to-life private detective. It also has one of the few acceptable children in the genre, which makes it worth reading on that count alone.

          Bibliography:

WILLIAM GORE: pseudonym of Jan Gordon, 1882-1944.

   There’s Death in the Churchyard. Harrap, UK, 1934.
   Death in the Wheelbarrow. Harrap, UK, 1935; Mystery House, US, 1940 as by Jan Gordon. [Insp. Ernest Penk]
   Murder Most Artistic. Harrap, UK, 1937; published in the US by Doubleday, 1938. [Insp. Ernest Penk]

From this roots-rock guitarist’s 2011 CD, Eleven Eleven. Besides working solo and in collaboration with his brother Phil, Dave Alvin has also played in the bands X and The Knitters.

   It’s hard to imagine two writers with less in common than Graham Greene and Erle Stanley Gardner, but we know that Greene was an enthusiastic reader of the Perry Mason novels, and in one of my columns several years ago I quoted from a letter about Mason which Greene sent to fellow Gardnerian Evelyn Waugh. Recently I discovered that Mason even figures in one of Greene’s novels. The Honorary Consul (1973) is set in northern Argentina and among its principal characters are Dr. Eduardo Plarr, a physician in sympathy with the revolutionary movement in that country, and León Rivas, a former priest turned guerrilla leader. On page 36 of the novel we find the following:

   Is that really how Mason comes across in Spanish, as lawyer to the Left and friend to those who have no friend? Quien sabe?

   Maybe readers of Gardner in Spanish translation confuse Mason’s fierce loyalty to clients with something ideological. The murderee in The Case of the Screaming Woman (1957) is a doctor who ran an illegal service connecting wealthy women desperate for a child and girls about to give birth out of wedlock.

   Mason discovers that the doctor kept a secret notebook that can prove large numbers of children are illegitimate and adopted. Out of Mason’s sight, the woman who stole the book from the dead man’s office gives it to Della Street, who later asks Mason whether it’s ethical for her to have it.

   Mason: “Hell, no!… That notebook is stolen property, Della. If I take it into my possession, I become an accessory after the fact. [But] I haven’t the faintest intention of letting that property get to the police.”

   Della: “And if I should have that book, where would it leave you professionally?

   Mason: “Behind the eight ball if I knew you had it.”

   Then he says: “Ethics are rules of conduct that are made to preserve the dignity and the integrity of the profession. I’m inclined to conform to the spirit of the rules of ethics rather than the letter.”

   Della: “But what about the courts?”

   Mason: “They’ll conform to the letter rather than the spirit. If the police ever find out that [the notebook] came under my control, [Hamilton Burger the DA will] throw the Penal Code at me.”

   Della: “And then what will you do?”

   Mason: “Then I’ll truthfully say that I don’t know where the book is… I’m not going to throw heaven knows how many children to the wolves….”

   Della: “And you’re willing to risk your reputation and your liberty to keep that from happening?”

   Mason: “You’re darned right I am. I’m a lawyer….”

   Anti-establishment passages of this sort were to come to a screeching halt once Mason in the form of Raymond Burr became a star of prime time TV but they may help to explain how in Spanish he might have been mistaken for a revolutionary with a law degree.

   Screaming Woman happened to be published between two of the finest Mason novels of Gardner’s middle period, The Case of the Lucky Loser and The Case of the Foot-Loose Doll, and is certainly not in the same league with those gems.

   At least two key characters never come onstage even for a moment, the more important of the pair isn’t even mentioned until very late in the day, and the dying message clue is one of the feeblest I’ve ever encountered. But it moves like a bullet train and remains well worth reading almost 60 years ago.

   By a coincidence worthy of Harry Stephen Keeler, Gardner’s is one of two novels I’ve read recently in which crucial characters are kept offstage. The other is Georges Simenon’s Félicie est là, which was written in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of France, first published in French two years later and still under the occupation, and translated into English as Maigret and the Toy Village (1979).

   After a one-legged old man is shot to death in the bedroom of his house in a small residential development being built in the countryside, Maigret visits the scene and is driven to distraction by the dead man’s impossible housekeeper. Here, unlike in Screaming Woman, it’s the murderer himself whom we never get to see or hear, and in fact his name isn’t even mentioned until page 116 of the 139-page American version.

   Does it matter? I’m not sure. When someone as nutty as Keeler throws in characters who are no more than names, we couldn’t care less, especially when they have names like Hoot Ivanjack, Hamerson Hogg and the three Threebrothers brothers. When someone like Gardner does it, there’s a problem. Simenon seems to me to fall somewhere between these extremes.

   Having read a fair number of the novels Simenon wrote during the war, I’ve concluded that he entered into a “contract with France” to say nothing about the Nazi occupation and backdate everything to the Thirties without explicitly saying so — at least not often. We find one exception to this rule in the first paragraph of Toy Village:

   This tells us pretty clearly that the events he’s describing took place years earlier. Simenon’s relation to the two German occupations he experienced, the first in Belgium during his adolescence, the second in France at a time when he’d become one of the best-known European novelists, is explored in depth by biographers like Pierre Assouline and Patrick Marnham.

JACK O’CONNELL – Box Nine. Lenore Thomas #1. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1992; paperback, 1993.

   I started this with more anticipation than usual, and less certainty. It’s had a great deal of publicity, much more than a first novel usually gets, and though the reviews have been mostly favorable, still I really didn’t have a good sense of what to expect, other than something extremely hardboiled. And that, at least, I got.

   Lenore Thomas is a policewoman, an undercover narcotics agent. Her twin brother, Ike, is a postman. They live together in a duplex in a mythical city [Quinsigamond] somewhere (I assume) in Massachusetts. The book turns around the introduction of a new designer-drug with strange and ultimately lethal properties.

   Reviewers and would-be critics are lost without comparisons, and are prone to grab at unlikely ones when obvious and apt ones are not readily at hand. I’m going to avoid that trap, but possibly at the cost of leaving you as unsure of what Box Nine is all about as I was. There are, though, a few things I can tell you.

   The book presents a bleak, grim view of urban life, and of those urban denizens that it depicts. The story is told in the present tense and from shifting view-points; Lenore’s, Ike’s, a drug lord’s, another police woman’s, Ike’s supervisor at the Post Office, and they are all strange people. Lenore is arguably the strangest: a speed freak, heavy metal devotee, in love with her guns if she is in love with anything and overall one of the more different protagonists in recent memory. The prose serves the story well. The plot? Secondary, at best; what you have are people dancing in and out of a semi-apocalyptic vision.

   Do I recommend it? Lord, no. If you don’t like hardboiled fiction, you shouldn’t touch it with a pair of tongs. Even if you do, I have no idea whether you’d be glad you read it or not — and notice my avoidance of the terms “like” and “enjoy,” which seem inappropriate. Am I glad I did? No, I don’t believe I am. But it was different; I’ll give it that much.

       The Quinsigamond series —

1. Box Nine (1992)
2. Wireless (1993)
3. The Skin Palace (1996)
4. Word Made Flesh (1998)

Appropriate for the Halloween season. (It’s never too early.)