WILLARD E. HAWKINS – The Cowled Menace. Sears Publishing Co., hardcover, 1930. Wildside Press, softcover, 2008.

   If I were to guess, I’d say you’re thinking “Ku Klux Klan” right about now, but, no, instead of novel involving the white sheets of racial intolerance, the cowled menace of this early detective story is that of monkshood, the wild flower whose poisonous brew has become a traditional part of the legend of Theseus and Medea.

   Yes, a detective story, told in that glorious but supremely artificial style of the Golden Age of detective stories. Doing the sleuth-work is the famous Balmore O’Day. criminologist, investigator extraordinary, complete with a less brilliant assistant named Gillespie, who tells the story of how, in spite of three eye-witnesses, a man is cleared of murdering the husband of the woman he loves.

   The naive simplicity of this book is about as far from today’s ultra-gritty police procedurals as you can possibly imagine, taking place in a timeless world of never-was that yet could be yesterday. or 50 years ago. At times tinged with the purplish prose of Gothic terror, and utterly hopeless as a document of social significance, nevertheless this only mystery novel of Willard Hawkins still provides an evening’s worth of entertainment.

   It never promised more than that.

Rating: C minus.

Bio-Bibliographic Note: Reprinted from the Tellers of Weird Tales website:

    “Willard E. Hawkins was born on September 27, 1887, in Fairplay, Colorado, and seems to have lived in Colorado all his life. He was a writer, editor, publisher, public speaker, and proprietor of World Press, Inc., all without benefit of a college degree. According to the [online] The FictionMags Index his first magazine credit was “The Human Factor” in The Blue Book Magazine, September 1912. Hawkins also contributed to Breezy Stories, The Cavalier, Chicago Ledger, The Green Book Magazine, The Red Book Magazine, Western Outlaws, Western Rangers, and Western Trails, among others.”

KENN DAVIS – Acts of Homicide. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1989.

   Here’s an example of another series of private eye novels that I managed to accumulate most — if not all of — back when they were being published, but until now this is the first I’ve read. Or maybe the second, as the first in the series came out in 1976, and sometimes it’s difficult to think back that far and be sure.

   In any case, the PI in question is Carver Bascombe, who is black and who works in the Berkeley, California, area. Unfortunately, in this, the seventh of his eight appearances, there’s not much else that’s said about him. He tends to be taciturn, shrugs a bit when confronted, and that’s about I can tell you at the moment.

   The case he’s on in Acts of Homicide finds him working undercover as an accountant for a acting company that’s preparing to put on an updated version of Medea. Unfortunately someone seems intent on stopping the production, and his or her attempts to do so are finally sufficient to bring on the police. The book begins with the murder of a young girl who would have liked to have been a member of the cast, but who was only allowed to work behind the scenes instead.

   More murders occur, and besides helping the police, Carver Bascombe finds himself becoming more and more attracted to the officer in charge, a capable enough woman but one whose career depends on her hiding the hide the fact that she is severely disturbed by the sight of dead bodies.

   With lots of suspects to be combed through, this is a detective puzzle through and through, undermined (in my mind) by the fact that the first victim was found nude with all of the blood drained from her — a sensationalistic killing there was no real need for in terms of the plot. Kenn Davis is a very smooth writer, though, especially when it comes to dialogue. On the other hand, an occasional propensity for using exclamation marks in his own narrative was (I thought) a negative.

   All in all, however, this was a decent enough venture that I’d read another, when I come across another in my collection, entertained as well by an author who seems to have known something about putting on plays and the history of the stage.

   In support of that last statement, let me point out that some of the characters’ names in Acts of Homicide are also those of actors in the past, sometimes the far distant past:

         Edmund Kean
         Charlotte Cushman
         Colley Cibber
         Frank Craven
         Barton Booth
         Charles Macklin
         August Iffland

   … and more than likely, a few others I missed.

       The Carver Bascombe series —

The Dark Side. Avon, 1976 [with John Stanley]
The Forza Trap. Avon, 1979.
Words Can Kill. Gold Medal, 1984.
Melting Point.Gold Medal, 1986.
As October Dies. Gold Medal, 1987.
Nijinsky Is Dead. Gold Medal, 1987.
Acts of Homicide. Gold Medal, 1989.
Blood of Poets. Gold Medal, 1990.

TOURIST TRAP. Compass International Pictures, 1979. Chuck Connors, Jocelyn Jones, Jon Van Ness, Robin Sherwood, Tanya Roberts, Dawn Jeffory, Keith McDermott. Director: David Schmoeller.

   There are slasher films and there are supernatural horror movies. And there are those films that are a bit of both subgenres, movies in which the deranged maniac killer has borderline supernatural abilities. Think John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), in which Michael Myers is both figuratively and literally the Boogeyman.

   Then there’s Tourist Trap, a creepily quixotic slasher film with supernatural elements that are so very over the top as to preclude the movie from making a whole lot of narrative sense. Add in in a beautifully weird main theme by Italian composer Pino Donaggio (heard above) and a crazed leading man performance by Chuck Connors – the Rifleman himself – and you’ve got yourself one totally off kilter, but inescapably fun late seventies horror film.

   Tourist Trap begins as so many other low-budget horror films do; namely, with a group of young attractive girls and a couple of their male friends stranded in the middle of nowhere with car trouble. Then, wouldn’t you know it? A Good Samaritan (Connors) comes along and offers to help the kids with their troubles. The guy’s a little weird and lives alone in a house filled with stuff that belongs in a circus tent, but hey, there’s no one else around, so why not accept the old geezer’s offer.

   So from what I’ve told you, you probably have a fairly soon sense of where the movie is going from here?

   Thing is: you’d be wrong. All because I didn’t mention the mannequins that come to life and kill one of the youngsters during the first five minutes of the film. You see, one of the two guys in our coterie of stranded travelers makes the initial foray into a house up the road while seeking help. Within minutes, mannequins – the type you’d see in a store – come to life and murder him. It’s from then on that you know you’re not watching just another slasher film.

   But still, it’s difficult, without spoilers, to tell you how very weird the movie is going to get. Borrowing elements from Gothic horror, the best atmospheric Hammer films, all American road trip films, and mad scientist films, Tourist Trap ends up being a wild nonsensical ride that is simultaneously darkly comical and genuinely horrifying. The closest horror movie I could use as a point of comparison is The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), which I reviewed here, which is similarly not easy to describe, but hard to forget.

WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – Square in the Middle. Random House, hardcover, December 1955. Bantam #1602, paperback, May 1957.

   Although a very prolific author in his day, I imagine that Gault is remembered now mostly by fans of private eye novels and for his two primary series characters, both members of the profession, Joe Puma and Brock (The Rock) Callahan. Only a small handful of Gault’s crime fiction novels were standalones, of which Square in the Middle is a prime example.

   It’s also a prime example of noir fiction, and if it had even been made into a movie (it never was), it could have been a good one. Picture James Garner, say, as a happily married man, but who, when his wife and two children take a vacation away from home together, meets a very entrancing waif of a woman sitting along in bar (Audrey Hepburn, if we could afford to pay her salary), and all of a sudden, Jim Gulliver becoming exactly as the title says, the square in the middle.

   Lynn Bedloe, as it turns out, is a member in good standing of a gang of friends, some married to each other, some not, although some would like to be, and when Gulliver hesitantly and ever so cautiously tries to learn about Lynn, he finds himself a member of the gang as well, and well over his head.

   And when one of the members of the gang ends up dead, and Gulliver is the first on the murder scene, none of of the connections he has as a well-known member of the community seems to mean anything to a publicity hungry detective who’s assigned to the case.

   Square in the Middle is as much a character study as it is a detective mystery, which takes going back and re-reading certain earlier parts of the book to be sure it all hangs together properly (it does), but if characters who are trying to find their way in the wilderness of suburban 1950s sunny California appeal to you at all, then so will this book.

JONATHAN KELLERMAN – Private Eyes. Alex Delaware #6. Bantam, hardcover, 1992; paperback, October 1992.

   Child psychologist Alex Delaware’s latest case involves people from 20 years in his past. An actress had been assaulted with acid, and become a neurosis-crippled recluse; her 7-year old daughter had called a hospital for help, and Delaware had become involved. The girl, now grown, is calling for his help again. The acid-thrower is out of prison, and the daughter is terrified for her mother again. Then the mother disappears.

   I like the Delaware books, and have from the first. I think he’s a strong, believable character, as is his homosexual policeman friend, and his love interests have been well-handled. I enjoy the psychological background, and for the most part have found it believable. This is not the best in the series, but it’s good, and I recommend it.

Bibliographic Note:   Including Breakdown, published this year (2016), there are now 31 books in Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware series, with at least one more scheduled for next year

OCTAVUS ROY COHEN – Star of Earth. D. Appleton & Co., hardcover, 1932.

   While in Hollywood investigating possible irregularities in the financial department of New Art Pictures Corporation, Jim Hanvey is called upon to deal with the star of New Art’s current movie. Tanse Wilson, a young man recently from the Kentucky backwoods who was big hit in silent film and now has graduated to talkies, is on the set, apparently terrified and carrying a props revolver loaded with live ammunition.

   (Some years ago I would have scoffed at the live-ammunition claim, but I have heard James Cagney say — and if you can’t believe James Cagney, who can you believe? — that in his early movie, real bullets were used in scenes requiring gunfire. It apparently did not take him long to stop this practice, at least for his movies.)

   The gun is no defense for Wilson, for he is also shot dead with it between scenes. Since there are a fair number of people at the studio who might have wanted Wilson out of the way, Hanvey has a difficult task in spotting the murderer.

   Not a particularly well-written novel, with uninteresting characters and an implausible plot. Still, the early talkie atmosphere should appeal to some.

THE LAST MAN ON EARTH. American International Pictures, 1964. Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Umberto Rau, Christi Courtland. Screenplay: William F. Leicester & Logan Swanson (Richard Matheson), based on the latter’s novel I Am Legend. Directors: Ubaldo Ragona & Sidney Salkow.

   Since it’s been over a decade since I read Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), I’m afraid I won’t be of much use in comparing The Last Man on Earth with the original text from which it was adapted. But suffice it to say, this low budget horror film is one of the bleakest movies I’ve recently viewed. Both in plot and mood, The Last Man on Earth resonates with hopelessness.

   And not just any type of despair, but an almost borderline nihilism that, when it’s all over, makes it almost difficult to wish it had turned out all that differently. In a very real sense, it’s the script’s fatalism that makes it both a far more compelling story than other vampire tales, but which ultimately ensnares it into a narrative trap in which things simply cannot work out for the protagonist no matter how hard he tries to make it so. Simply put, being the last man on the planet is not an inevitable position.

   Vincent Price, in a role largely bereft of his trademark wit and ironic detachment, portrays Dr. Robert Morgan. He’s a scientist by trade and a family man by nature. When we first encounter him, we see that he’s living alone in a house in a world marked by abandonment and decay. There are vampires on the prowl every night and as far as we know, he’s the sole survivor of a plague that has devoured humanity and left death and vampirism in its wake. So Morgan, year after solitary year, hunts vampires by day and locks himself inside his house at night.

   All that changes when he encounters a mysterious woman who, like him, travels freely in daylight. But who is she and what clues does she possibly hold to help Morgan solve the puzzle of what happened to the world? The answer, such as it is, isn’t so much predictable as it is a depressingly commentary on humanity.

   Perhaps that was the whole point of the screenplay: to be an acerbic political observation. Fair enough, but then again one need not be beaten over the head with wooden stakes for ninety minutes to make a point.

ELLERY QUEEN – What’s in the Dark? Popular Library, paperback original; 1st printing, 1968. Dale Books, paperback, 1978. Zebra, paperback, 1985. Published in the UK as When Fell the Night (Gollancz, hardcover, 1970).

   Here’s a detective novel based on the Northeast blackout of 1965, one that lasted for 13 hours and affected over 30 million people. I’d tell you about it personally, but Judy and I didn’t move to Connecticut until 1969. But it made headlines at the time, and not only does one-eyed NYPD homicide captain Tim Corrigan solve a murder mystery in the midst of the city’s shutdown, the solution depends entirely on the circumstances.

   Except for one mistake, the killer could have gotten away with the death of an accountant, 21 floors up, being called a suicide. Give that he or she did, however, Corrigan has a whole floor of suspects to deal with, included a bright-eyed colleen named Sybil Graves, to whom he takes an immediate fancy.

   The author behind the Ellery Queen pen name this time is Richard Deming, who wrote four of the six Tim Corrigan novels, and while What’s in the Dark? is not up to the usual Ellery Queenian standard, he proves to be an adequate creator of a detective puzzle mystery. The cousins Ellery Queen probably never used the word mammae in one of their own novels, however, nor never wrote a scene in which one character is walked in on while fumbling with the brassiere of another.

EMILY RAYMOND – Little Black Dress. BookShots, paperback, July 2016.

ANDREW HOLMES – Hunted. BookShots, paperback, September 2016.

   To begin with, before anything else is said, the idea behind this series of books under the James Patterson byline is a good one; to provide a series of short novels that can be read quickly, running from forty to sixty thousand words, filling the gap left when paperbacks blew to disproportionate lengths because of high prices. In that it isn’t unfair to think of these in terms of most books published in the fifties and sixties in paperback, paperback originals especially, like the Carter Brown books at Signet, Michael Shayne and Johnny Liddell at Dell, and many suspense and Western volumes at Gold Medal.

   James Patterson Bookshots are long novellas and short novels published in uniform trade paperback editions running in the $5.99 range, and written under the Patterson byline by mostly young unknown writers. Most feature original characters, although there has been at least one Alec Cross book (Cross Kill), a sequel to Zoo, and one featuring the Women’s Murder Club (The Trial). So far the books fall into the categories of Thrillers, Romance, and James Patterson Bookshots Flame series which are racier romance novels.

   Emily Raymond’s Little Black Dress is published and sold with the thrillers, but for no reason I can see. Coming in at a slender 108 pages it’s the story, told in the first person for most of the book, of Jane Avery, a book editor in New York who spends her nights alone until she buys the little black dress of the title.

   That dress soon changes her life as she becomes more adventurous and flirtatious embarking on a series of increasingly risky sexual adventures until she comes up missing and her panicked sister comes looking for her.

   Now I admit that sounds like it might have potential to be anything from a solid Mignon G. Eberhart mystery suspense novel to a dark Woolrichian glimpse of desperate women trapped by fate.

   It’s not.

   The telling is achingly flat. According to her biography, Emily Raymond has penned two books with Patterson and ghosted numerous young adult novels. If so, I am not very enthusiastic about looking any of them up. Little Black Dress takes most of its length detailing a number of dull and obvious sexual escapades that are too boring to be porn and too graphic and uninvolving to be romance.

   It picks up briefly when Jane fails to come into work one morning and her increasingly worried sister panics, only to find Jane in the most outright stupid predicament you can imagine, having learned her lesson and in a final even more pointless chapter returning the little black dress of the title to the store (and no one would want it after Jane was through with it) as she meets the handsome and wholesome new doorman at her apartment building.

   Not only isn’t it a novel, it’s barely a story– just a series of uninteresting sexual escapades that wouldn’t titillate a convent school teen, an anti-climactic climax, and a rushed finale that seems to suggest it’s fun to be a bad girl but you wouldn’t want to make a thing of it after a guy into B&D handcuffs you to a radiator and forgets to let you free.

   I can only say if this is the quality of Ms. Raymond’s young adult fiction I feel sorry for young adults. A Thriller it is not. It’s barely a vignette.

   Hunted by Andrew Holmes is a different matter. It seems to be the author’s first published work, and while it is in no way original, it is well enough written, and proceeds at a pleasantly suspenseful pace reminiscent of an episode of a sixties or seventies episode of the Saint, the Persuaders, or the Baron.

   David Shelly is a special forces type sent undercover by Clairidge of MI5 to investigate a mysterious high stakes game being played in the countryside where toughs from the city streets are being lured to play for their lives in yet another variation of Richard Connell’s oft copied tale “The Most Dangerous Game.”

   It’s Geoffrey Household, P.M. Hubbard, Allan MacKinnon, and Victor Canning country, hardly as assured or as deep as those writers, but still fun. The length is ideal (140 pages) and it is written with an eye toward keeping the plot moving.

   Shelly is ex-SAS with a wife and a need for money and soon finds himself dealing with the duplicitous Tremain and the beautiful bloodthirsty Claire. The plot moves smoothly, and the only real complaint I have might be that it is all a bit timid, in need of a more assured hand willing to go where this sort of thing needs to go to be fully satisfying instead of resembling a novelization of a television episode. The plot would have fit Bulldog Drummond or Jonah Mansel well enough, but I can’t help thinking even they would have been less timid in the telling of it. John Creasey likely did write it, but much better.

   The idea of the series is good, my only caveat being that the writing lacks the kind of energy the best of its fore bearers had. You find yourself missing that sleazy, slightly tacky, but assured voice that the best paperback originals used to have, and while $5.99 is a cheap enough price these days it certainly seems back when the same books cost 35 to 60 cents you got a lot more bang for your buck.

   To be honest I found these marked down to $3.98, or I wouldn’t have bought them then, but I’m glad, at least, I read the Holmes. Whatever its flaws it was nice just once to read a thriller that hadn’t been puffed out to four hundred pages of extraneous prose.

A. A. MARCUS – Post-Mark Homicide. Graphic #67, 2nd printing, 1953. Previously published as The Widow Gay by David McKay, hardcover, 1948; and Graphic #21, paperback, 1950.

   The covers and the interiors for the two Graphic paperback editions of this book are the same. Only the titles are different. I can easily imagine that it was decided that the word “gay” was no longer usable in the meantime.

   Not that the widow Gay is gay. That’s her last name, and the way she carries on with PI Pete Hunter, that’s also proof enough that she isn’t. This was Hunter’s first recorded case, in which he’s hired by a political mover and shaker to find some letters his pet District Attorney unwisely wrote someone — to whom he will not say. Dead is the widow’s husband, the opposition’s power behind the scenes.

   As for Hunter as a leading character, before the war he was an accountant of some renown, but what happened to him while fighting during the fighting changed his outlook on life considerably. This may explain why he decides to work for one of two unsavory political elements in town, but unfortunately that’s an aspect of his behavior that’s not gotten into in any depth.

   Also unfortunately this is one of those mystery yarns that starts well, but begins to run out of steam about halfway through. There are flashes of good writing now and then, but nothing worth making a note of, nor is the ending anything to write home about. Overall: adequate but no more.

Bibliographic Notes: This was the first of three Pete Hunter novels; the other two were published as paperback originals by Graphic: Walk the Bloody Boulevard (1951) and Make Way for Murder (1955).

   As for the author, unlike A. A. Fair, A(rthur) A(aron?) Marcus (1904?-1996?) was apparently his real name.