LIONEL BLACK – The Penny Murders. Kate and Henry Theobald #5. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1979. Avon, US, 1st US printing, February 1980.

   As if we didn’t already know, the age of electronics is upon us. When a wealthy numismatist is found shot to death in an inner sanctorum of his home, completely guarded by the most sophisticated of perimeter circuits and alarms, suicide is the only logical possibility. The dead man had the only keys, and they were found on his body.

   Kate Theobald, unstoppable lady journalist, is persuaded by the manservant of the deceased, however, that there is more to the story. Not surprisingly, there is. Some information about the impossibly rare 1933 and 1954 English pennies, which supposedly never left the mint, comes to light, and so do some decidedly noxious wart s that had blighted the dead man’s personality.

   Kate’s husband, Henry, is a barrister, the son of England’s most famous criminal lawyer, and a coin collector of sorts as well. Together, Kate and Henry make a pretty good team, although it is she who does most of the detecting, and he who (so reminiscent of the many pitfalls stumbled into by a certain Mrs. North) stupidly falls into a trap while trying to give her a hand.

   The dialogue, as seems common in a goodly amount of British crime fiction, is blunt, terse, and flat. Black has an engaging writing style, and he uses it well to conceal the lack of depth exhibited by his characters. The solution is as up to date as today’s hardware store, and (surprisingly) it is as easily explained and as obvious ex post facto (an exciting phrase from the Latin which means here that, no, I didn’t figure it out but either) as most locked-room mysteries usually are.

Rating: C plus.

         — Attributed to SF author Clifford D. Simak:

    “And when you get around to those unreadable stories, you must not lose sight of the fact that whether a story is readable or unreadable depends entirely upon the person reading it. This is an extremely nebulous area in which to make a judgment. I will mention no names or titles, for I should be ashamed to, but I must confess that for me there are certain stories that are unreadable. The horrible thing about this is that some of them have been critically acclaimed as masterpieces. No doubt they are, but I still can’t read them. And yet, I consider that it would be impudent and perhaps even a little stupid of me to go about proclaiming them as unreadable.”

   I have some bad news to report. Those of you who have been readers of this blog for a long time will recognize Michael’s name for sure. He started out by leaving comments on posts he found interesting and ended up being one of this blog’s most frequent reviewers.

   I have been informed by a close friend of his that he passed away on July 17, 2020. He suffered from a variety of serious ailments, including bad vision, extreme diabetes, and heart disease. He was 65 years old.

   I did not know him personally, outside of this blog, and I never met him in person. I would have liked to. His interests were many, but included TV shows, old time radio, comics and graphic novels, and light-hearted mystery fiction, and he wrote knowledgeably about all of them.

   Michael was a long time fixture on the Mystery*File blog, and I will miss him tremendously.

RUTH RENDELL – The Lake of Darkness. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1980. Bantam, US, paperback, 1987. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard,US, softcover, 2001. First published in the UK by Hutchinson, hardcover, 1980. TV Adaptation: Episodes 8 & 9, Season 11 of Ruth Rendell Mysteries, 03 & 10 May 1999.

   When Ruth Rendell’s books involve her series character, Inspector Wexford, she writes detective stories, and, as a guess, most of her fans like those best. She also writes crime novels with a psychological bent, none of which carries a character over from one to the next. From all indications, these are the ones the author herself prefers to write. While they are intended less to be read for the sheer pleasure of reading, perhaps, they are not, by any means, any less rewarding for it.

   Wexford is not in this one. There are instead two other major participants in this ironic melodrama as it gradually unfolds. One is a mild-mannered accountant wrestling with latent homosexual urgings, thrust suddenly into an affair with a married woman. The other is a pale, anemic handyman with (he thinks) psychic powers. He is also (we know) a psychopathic killer. That their paths are doomed to cross, of course we also know.

   That it makes for such shivery reading has nothing to do with the supernatural. These two unfortunates are so overwhelmed by life, so permanently warped in personality, that they have literally become alien to the rest of humanity, in thought and in behavior, if not in appearance. They are innocents caught up in a monstrous twist of fate. What Rendell renders so convincingly is the fact that even is we were so inclined, there’s no way in this world we could ever help them.

Rating: A minus

Why do people say “no offense” right before they’re about to offend you?

HERBERT RUHM, Editor – The Hard-Boiled Detective: Stories from Black Mask Magazine, 1920-1951. Vintage, paperback original, 1977.

   I don’t think that anyone would argue the fact that Black Mask was the best detective pulp magazine around. It died a lingering death after World War II with all the other pulp magazines, but in its pages during the 1920s and early 1930s were some of the toughest detectives in the business – and the freshest writing on the American scene.

   The private detective as a two-fisted gallant knight , loyal to his clients and deadly to the undesirable, criminal element of society was a far cry from the sedate British counterpart, and as invented by Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, and a somewhat later Raymond Chandler, became a much imitated feature of American culture, with copies and variations still alive today.

   We’re told that Carroll John Daly’s “The False Burton Combs” (December 1922) marks the first usage of American colloquial speech in Black Mask, the slangy tough vernacular that was to become its trademark. For a time Daly was Black Mask’s most popular author, though today he’s perhaps remembered only by collectors. The story, about the impersonation of a rich boy in gangster trouble, is a good one. It’s told by the soldier of fortune hired for the job; he’s neither crook nor policeman., but he’s willing to make a quick buck, and equally willing to take his knocks when it comes time.

   The tough guy narration goes down smooth and natural, but the narrator is still an innocent rube behind his image of worldly sophistication. I suspect Daly later was undone trying to out tough himself with every story he wrote later on, and forgot the schmaltz that helps pull this one off.

   From the very same issue comes “The Road Home” by Dashiell Hammett, under his Peter Collinson pseudonym. It begins as a Stanley-meet-Livingston adventure that in only four pages says more about the inner compulsion of men who spend their lives hunting down criminals than in some novels. Understated and maybe the best story in the book, it’s hard to believe that this is the first time it’s been reprinted.

   “The Gutting of Couffignal” (December 1925) has been around many times, and in fact I think it’s the first story by Hammett I’ve ever read. It gets better every time. After the wealthy island of Couffignal is systematically looted by machine-gunning terrorists, the Continental Op, gets to demonstrate both his detective ability and his unswerving loyalty to that choice of career. I was unhappy that in the book’s introduction, Ruhm chose to quote from the final few lines to illustrate the point. You really deserve to get the full impact in context.

   I have a weakness for Hollywood detectives, and “Kansas City Flash” (March 1933) by Norbert Davis takes full advantage of that weakness. When Mike Hull investigates the kidnapping of Doro Faliv, Hollywood’s latest rage in leading ladies, success only reveals yet another sad story midst the twistedly tangled plot. Intended or not, in many ways Doro Faliv is symbolic of the famous 1930s glamor capital of the world. Hiding behind its glittering facade is a brittle sadness and emptiness that all the many love affairs and busy publicity agents were never able to cover up.

   Frederick Nebel’s “Take It and Like It” (June 1934) is meant mostly for fun, but in doing so Kennedy and MacBride form the prototype for many 1ater wisecracking detective teams. Kennedy’s a screwy newspaper reporter not averse to a drink or two, while MacBride is his long suffering police captain friend. This time around, however, MacBride has orders to pick Kennedy up for murder, to the glee of the reporter’s enemies on the D.A.’s staff. Nevertheless Nebel has everything under control, and he easily keeps it way this side of flat-out comedy.

   It may be heresy to say so in print, but I’ve never really been a diehard Raymond Chandler enthusiast. “Goldfish” (June 1936) would seem to do well as illustration. The story itself is about a pair of missing pearls, stolen nineteen years before and never recovered by the insurance company. Carmady’s late start on the case doesn’t mean that the fireworks are over – in fact, the treachery and bloodshed have just begun. Chandler’s verbal imagery dazzles, I admit, but more often than not, it’s merely for show and also quite useless to the plot, which has all the connectivity of a plate of hash-browns.

   Possibly I’m missing something, as I keep getting the feeling that some key element is hanging just out of my grasp. Chandler and I are fractionally out of sync.

   Lester Dent was not really a Black Mask writer, as he wrote only a couple of stories that appeared in the magazine. He spent most of his writing career doing a couple hundred Doc Savage novels. “Angelfish” (December 1936), the story included here, is plagued by Dent’s characteristic semi-literate understatement, but it’s for sure a tough story, told with hurricane ferocity. His hero is a tall, lanky detective named Sail, who dresses all in black. The chase is after some aerial photos of a promising oil field. Uncomplicated, in a breathless way.

   At another extreme is Erle Stanley Gardner, who was so prolific in short pulp work that his bibliography fills a short book in itself, “Leg Man” (February 1938) was a late-appearing pulp story, and it exhibits both Gardner’s unmistakable ponderous dialogue and the elaborate plot machinery that may creak here and there but yet meshes with intricate mastery. Pete Wennick is the leg-man, doing a high-priced law firm’s dirtier investigative work, which may include actively defusing a blackmail scheme. Even though less complicated than usual for Gardner, it still fooled me.

   Any anthology taken from the pages of Black Mask needs a Flashgun Casey story by George Harmon Coxe. In “Once Around the Clock” (May 1941) the famed photographer for, the Express requires only a quick twenty-four hours to help an ex-piano player out on parole escape a murder rap. I wouldn’t say Coxe is a bad writer, but the best I could say is that he’s indifferently average.

   How then has he lasted so long? Take Casey. He’s a down-to-earth guy, with cares and problems of his own, as well as concerns for others. If this makes him a sentimental slob instead of just another hard-boiled character, I’d say that’s why Coxe can keep finding something that readers can keep on enjoying.

   Luther McGavock is the only detective I know of who works out of Memphis, Tennessee, and his cases always seem to take him deep into the hill country of the South. In “The Turkey Buzzard Blues” (July 1943), Merle Constiner gives us a deceased aristocratic gentleman of another age, a frowsy political hack, moonshiners, a tired sheriff suffering from the miseries, and a pet buzzard. There’s more than a tinge of comic mayhem throughout, but it’s all too durn much for me, and at 71 pages, far too long.

   I’d call William Brandon’s “It’s So Quiet in the Country” (November 1943) Runyonesque if I’d ever read enough Damon Runyon to be sure. A city type mixes it up in rural Vermont with a couple of Poe scholars who find they are in need of his burglarizing services. Kind of funny, but no more.

   We’re now in the era when straight crime stories were predominant. After a couple of decades perhaps readers and authors both were tiring of the hard-boiled detective. “Killer Come Home” (March 1948), by Curt Hamlin, combines anger with domestic tribulations. Paul W. Fairman tells about a young kid learning about the big time in “Big Time Operator” (July 1948). In “Five O’Clock Menace” (May 1949) Bruno Fischer deals with undercurrents of human nature in a small-town barbershop. All short and all inferior to the crime shocker tales that Manhunt later brought to perfection and rode to success on.

   But what results is a true cross-section of Black Mask magazine for the length of its existence. If the quality of the stories begins to slide downward from the beginning of the book to the end, so did the magazine as a whole. I do wonder why something by John D. MacDonald wasn’t used to close the book, as JDM in particular was a strong part of the upturn in quality in the crime story in the 1950s, as the pulps died, and writers turned to paperback novels, and the previously mentioned Manhunt.

   One might wish for all the stories from the 1920s, but all but a few that were used have been reprinted for the first time, and the truth is that there’s plenty of stories left for more pulp detective anthologies as good as this one. The best stories, all worthy of “A” ratings, plus or minus, are the pair of Hammett’s, and the ones by Daly, Davis and Dent.

Overall Rating: B plus.

MINETTE WALTERS – The Scold’s Bridle. Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1994. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1994.; paperback, 1995. TV movie: BBC, 1998.

   I feel sort of proprietary about Walters – I was among the earlier in this country to sound the “fine new author” alert when she debuted with The Ice House [reviewed here ]even if no one but me and a few friends heard it. Imagine my delight when one of those friends returned from London and presented me with a signed copy of this.

   Mathilda Gillispie was an old woman, crippled by arthritis, and thoroughly disliked by almost everyone; very much including her daughter, and granddaughter. When she was found dead with her wrists cut, everyone was convinced it was suicide except for an aging policeman and two of the very few people who didn’t dislike her, her doctor and the doctor’s artist husband. She was found wearing one of her favorite possessions, a scold’s bridle – an iron framework that encloses the head and has a sharp metal bit to restrict the tongue. And therein lies a tale that spans four generations, and touches many lives still extant.

   The strength of Walters’ novels is the set of characters she creates and brings to full life. She doesn’t try to establish an ambience in any sort of geographic or physical sense. Her pacing is outstanding, but that by nature is unobtrusive unless done poorly. Her prose is excellently suited to what she does, but is not memorable in the sense that passages or phrases will stick in your mind. Her characters will. For a long time.

   The Scold’s Bridle won’t win an Edgar for obvious reasons, and given the vagaries of the awards process may not even be nominated, but hear me well: if this isn’t the best crime novel of the year, someone wrote a hell of a book between now and then.

REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:

MICHAEL CONNELLY – The Black Echo. Harry Bosch #1. Little Brown, hardcover, 1992. St. Martin’s, paperback, 1993. Reprinted many times since. Winner of the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for “Best First Novel” for 1992, and was nominated for the Anthony Award in the same category and the Dilys Award for “Best Novel.” TV Adaptation: Season three of Bosch (Amazon Video) was based on both The Black Echo (Book 1) and A Darkness More Than Night (Book 7).

   Harry Bosch is working when an anonymous phone call to the police informs them that there’s a body in a drainpipe at Mulholland Dam. At first it seems to be a simple case of a heroin overdose, but Harry recognizes the corpse as a fellow “tunnel rat” named Meadows who served with him In Viet Nam. A few discrepancies lead Harry to believe that Meadows was murdered and placed in the drainpipe, and he soon discovers that Meadows was a suspect in an old safety deposit box burglary.

   Harry then learns that Meadows was apparently tortured before his death and had recently pawned a piece of jewelry that had been in one of the safe deposit boxes. The bank burglary is being handled ,by the FBI, and Harry has to threaten to go to the newspapers to force his way onto the investigating team. Meantime, Internal Affairs is suspicious of his connection with the dead man and assigns two men to try and get the goods on Harry.

   I can’t fault the writing or the story telling, which is first rate; it’s the plotting that I have to take to task. I picked this book up at the same rummage sale that I bought The Poet [a non-Bosch book from 1996], which I read before this one.

[WARNING: Plot details are going to be discussed so if you are planning to read either of those books, do not read any further.] This book was written earlier, so perhaps I should have read it first, but it doesn’t matter: both have the same basic plot. The crime is different and the protagonist is different but both feature crimes in which the FBI agent in charge turns out to be the one behind the crimes. And in both, the hero forces himself onto the FBI team and falls in love with the female FBI agent working with him. And both wind up alone, though for different reasons. [END OF WARNING]

   One other thing: the burglars break into the bank by digging a tunnel that connects to those large drive-in sewers that they have in Los Angeles. When Connelly describes these sewers, he scrupulously avoids mentioning the one pop culture reference that made everyone familiar with them: the classic giant-bug movie Them. Why?

THE JORDAN CHANCE. NBC, 2 hours. 12 December 1978. Raymond Burr (Frank Jordan), Ted Shackelford, James Canning, Jeannie Fitzsimmons. Guest Cast: John McIntire, Peter Haskell, Maria-Elena Cordero, Stella Stevens, George DiCenzo, Gerald McRaney. Teleplay by Stephen J. Cannell, based on a story by Roy Huggins (as John Thomas James) & Stephen J. Cannell. Directed by Jules Irving.

   Chronologically, as far as Raymond Burr’s career is concerned, this failed pilot for another TV series for him came after Perry Mason, after Ironside, after the short summer season of Kingston: Confidential, but before the long run of Perry Mason movies. I called this particular endeavor a “failed pilot,” and I’m sure that the people involved were ready to go with it as another series, but there was a big, big reason why they didn’t. I don’t know what the ratings were for it, but the fact is is that it’s not very good.

   I hesitate saying that it’s bad, but it’s an awfully close call.

   Here’s the premise. After serving time in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, lawyer Frank Jordan sets up a foundation, with himself as the head, whose directive is to come to the assistance of others who are have found themselves in jail while innocent but have used up all of their other options.

   Such is the case of a Mexican-American maid who has been convicted of murder for only two reasons: one, that she’s Mexican-American, and two, because she was there on the scene, working in the dead man’s house and being the one who found the body. Once he’s convinced that she’s innocent, Jordan gathers up his crew of three assistants and heads for the small California town where the murder occurred.

   And where he finds – no surprise here – that not only does the local sheriff not want him coming in and stirring things up again, but none of the local townspeople do either. I think we have all seen this before. Not personally, mind you, but in watching several dozen TV shows with much the same story line.

   One problem here is that Jordan (Raymond Burr) is the whole show. His assistants are bland beyond belief, and then some. And the story’s so slight that at least twenty minutes is spent on watching cars squealing tires turning corners in city streets or chasing each other up and down rural roads, with the more than occasional sheriff’s helicopter hovering around overhead. Jordan does get roughed up a little, but once he convinces the sheriff to switch sides (I didn’t catch how this happened), the show’s over.

   And so was any chance for a series. Not even a Jordan Chance.

REVIEWED BY JEFF MEYERSON:

JACK HIGGINS – Storm Warning. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1976. Henry Holt & Co., US, hardcover, 1976. Bantam, US, paperback, 1977.

   Jack Higgins (Henry Patterson) has written more than thirty crime novels since 1959, as Harry Patterson, Martin Fallon, Hugh Marlowe , James Graham, and Higgins. It was only with the publication of The Eagle Has Landed (1975), however, that he hit the big time. Storm Warning has several things in common with that excellent book and is, in my opinion,, even more exciting.

   Both books take place during World War II, with a considerable part of the action set in Great Britain. Each has a German as a sympathetic protagonist, each of whom spent time in England as a child (and therefore speaks the language well), and each man gains our sympathy through the opposition and antagonism of an obnoxious Englishman. Finally each is courageous, honorable, and ultimately heroic.

   That said, these are two quite different books. Eagle is a Day of the Jackal-type story about an attempt to assassinate Churchill. Storm Warning centers on the attempt of a group of German seamen to sail a nineteenth century sailing ship, The Deutschland, home to Germany from Brazil to be with friends and family as the war reaches its inevitable climax.

   Besides the excellent scenes aboard the ship, Higgins shows that he is a master craftsman by shifting points of view among several groups of people: the crew and passengers of The Deutschland (including five nuns); the people of the island of Fhada, in the Outer Hebrides, whose lifeboat crew plays an important role; and the four leading characters. These are American Admiral Carey Reeve, recuperating from wartime injuries on Fhada while longing to return to action; his niece, Dr. Janet Munro; Lieutenant Harry Jago, running a messenger service between the islands as a respite from the action; and Paul Gericke, the German war ace.

   Higgins maneuvers his large cast until the fantastic storm of the title brings them all together off Fhada in a desperate, selfless and heroic rescue mission where all sides work together to save lives. Storm Warning is a thrilling book and a sure bet as a movie. Don’t miss it.

   
Editorial Update: From Wikipedia “In January 1977 it was announced that Columbia had bought the film rights and Peter Guber would produce a movie version. However no film resulted.”