ARTHUR MALING, Editor – When Last Seen. Mystery Writers of America Anthology. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1977.
Another excellent offering in this thematic series. The theme in this case, as the title suggests, is of people or things that disappear, and the authors’ roster includes such luminaries as.Starrett, Ross Macdonald, Gores, Hoch, Slesar, Ellin, de la Torre and Pronzini.
Some of the stories — Hoch’s “Vanishing of Velma”, James Holding’s amusing “The Philippine Key Mystery” (with detective Leroy King) — are old favourites of mine, but many others introduced to me authors and stories I hadn’t met before.
Of the new authors I was extreme1y impressed by Pauline C. Smith’s “That Monday Night” and Stanley Cohen’s haunting “Nadigo” about a strange little town that isn’t to be found on any map, while amongst the old reliables, only Vincent Starrett’s “The Big Door” seems slow and dated. (And of course it was originally published well before the war.)
My favourite story in this volume? Well, the palm goes to either to “Natigo” or to Henry Slesar’s “The Girl Who Found Things,” in which a missing man is sought by a clairvoyant, and the twist is almost the last paragraph.
All in all, a first class compilation.
Contents:
1 · Gone Girl [Lew Archer] · Ross Macdonald · nv Manhunt February 1953, as “The Imaginary Blonde†by John Ross Macdonald
37 · The Crime of Ezechiele Coen · Stanley Ellin · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine November 1963
65 · That Monday Night · Pauline C. Smith · nv Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine August 1971
93 · The Three Halves [Daniel Kearny Associates] · Joseph N. Gores · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine July 1968, as “The Pedretti Caseâ€
111 · Back in Five Years [Insp. (Supt.) Hazlerigg] · Michael Gilbert · ss John Bull December 18 1948
123 · The Vanishing of Velma [Captain Leopold] · Edward D. Hoch · nv Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine August 1969
145 · The Perfectionist · Gerald Tomlinson · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine February 1974
157 · The Girl Who Found Things · Henry Slesar · nv Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July 1973
185 · Born Killer · Dorothy Salisbury Davis · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine #120, November 1953
203 · Putting the Pieces Back · Bill Pronzini · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine April 1976
211 · The Philippine Key Mystery [Martin Leroy & King Danforth] · James Holding · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine February 1968
229 · The Lost Heir [Dr. Sam: Johnson] · Lillian de la Torre · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine December 1974
249 · Nadigo · Stanley Cohen · ss Mystery Monthly September 1976
269 · The Dog Incident · Patrick O’Keeffe · ss
279 · The Blue Door · Vincent Starrett · na Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories August 1927, as by Edgar Savage
335 · All the Way Home · Dan J. Marlowe · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine September 1965, as by Jaime Sandaval
– Reprinted from The Poisoned Pen, Volume 4, Number 4 (August 1981).
JOHN L. SPIVAK – Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang. University of South Carolina Press, trade paperback, 2012. Originally published as the novel Georgia Nigger (1932).
ROBERT ELLIOTT BURNS – I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang. Vanguard Press, hardcover, 1932. University of Georgia Press, trade paperback, 1997. First serialized in True Detective Mysteriesmagazine, beginning January 1931. Filmed in 1932, starring Paul Muni.
Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang is a crappy title for a pretty amazing piece of work. The original title is more powerful but no longer publishable.
Spivak used some connections to get access to Georgia chain gangs in the 30’s for a supposed academic study. Instead, he took the stories he heard from the inmates and the terrible things he saw to create a novel. An amalgam character, David Jackson, is put through the veritable wringer and becomes the camera’s eye of the action.
The take home message is that life for Black folks in the South was worse after slavery than before. During slavery, a slave would cost the slaveholder serious coin. David’s grandfather cost $1800. This meant that, like a cow or a horse or other farm chattel, the farmer had a financial interest in keeping his slaves alive and relatively healthy.
But now slave labor was much cheaper. Here’s the recipe: If you need a slave, ask the sheriff to arrest some Black folks for vagrancy. Any Black man walking down the street is fair game.
Once arrested, you have a choice. Three months on the chain gang or a $10 fine. You don’t have $10, but a farmer comes by and says: “Hey, tell you what I’ll do. If you’ll come work for me, I’ll pay the fine out of your next months wages. I pay $20 a month.
You figure anything’s better than a chain gang, so you take the deal. What you don’t know is that you’ll never pay off the $10 to the farmer. The farmer will charge you for room and board, and charge usurious interest, and each month you work there you’ll be further and further in debt.
Plus unlike a slave that cost the farmer big money, you only set him back $5. So if you get sick, he’ll let you die. He’ll work you til you die, and if you refuse to work, he’ll whip you til your body’s welted and bloody.
And if you run away, the Sheriff will track you down and charge you with theft of the debt you owe the farmer, plus resisting arrest, disturbing the peace. That’ll get you a year on the chain gang or $25 dollars. And so on. You’ll never get free.
It’s a terrible story, striking, descriptive, horrific and well-told. But no one read it because that same year a white northern journalist named Robert Burns put out his autobiographical tale of his time on a Georgia Chain gang. He had a pretty bad time too. But his writing is not very descriptive. And aside from him telling you how bad it was, you can’t really visualize it because he doesn’t give you the gory details.
Burns’s tale was immediately optioned by Hollywood and made into a popular melodrama, insuring its vague memory in the public mind while the much better book by Spivak has been mostly forgotten.
But if you’re really interested in this tale of woe, of Georgia chain gangs and their lacerated legacy, skip Burns and go straight to Spivak.
I watched the first ten minutes of the Hollywoodified Burns tale and had to turn it off. If Burns was tepid — this was wretched.
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang can be viewed at:
LILLIAN de la TORRE – The Detections of Dr. Sam Johnson. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1960. Dolphin Books, paperback, 1962. Intl Polygonics Ltd, paperback, 1984.
At first glance, the great eighteenth-century English lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson seems an unlikely detective. On closer consideration, however, the idea of the man who, after years of sleuthing, published the first English dictionary (1755), and who had the original Boswell close at hand to chronicle his literary detections and adventures, seems just right. The combination of the grumpy sage Johnson and his Scottish biographer, James Boswell of Auchinleck, forms the model for the classic detective-story Holmes-Watson relationship.
The eight stories in this book are pastiches, written in Boswell’s style with the fancy of the author woven into the fabric of history. The detections take place around the 1770s, mostly in London ( “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” -S.J.), and in Bath and Stratford-onAvon. Johnson, or “Cham,” as he is sometimes called, investigates crime and chicanery, fraud and felony.
His unique position enables him to mix with all classes of society and get involved in various events-from the soldiers’ court-martial on the greensward of Hyde Park, to the robbery of Gothic enthusiast Horace Walpole, to the espionage exploits of the female American patriot against Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne. In “The Tontine Curse,” he hears of dying children and blesses a Roman parent. The “harmless drudge” probes the pitfalls of antiquarianism and exposes forgery in “The Missing Shakespeare Manuscript.” “The Triple-Lock’ d Room” is a case of murder and theft at Boswell’s lodgings with its weird inhabitants.
The Dr. Sam tales are scholarly and quaint and quite the best of their kind. An earlier collection is Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector (1946), and there are more to come. Most of the stories originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
Contents:
The Black Stone of Dr. Dee · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 1948
The Frantick Rebel · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Dec 1948
ANTHONY ABBOT – About the Murder of a Startled Lady. Thatcher Colt #5. Farrar, hardcover, 1935. Avon Murder Mystery Monthly #25, digest paperback, 1944.
Thatcher Colt, Police Commissioner of NYC, District Attorney Doughterty, and Colt secretary Tony Abbot (an actual character unlike Philo Vance’s Van Dine) are strolling casually back to their offices when a policeman shows up looking for the Commissioner. It seems the police have just busted a phony church and spiritualist scam, and the husband and wife mediums, the Reverend and Mrs. Lynn, made their phone call to call in a professor who insists they are the real thing, and something more.
“I know it sounds screwy, Mr. Commissioner, but Professor Gilman told me to tell you that the Lynns were positively genuine mediums and could really and truly talk with the remains of the dead.”
“Was that all?”
“That was all — except a lot of hooey about how the Lynns could tell you about a murder.”
“About a what?” barked Dougherty. Until now he had been totally indifferent, stamping large, cold feet.
“Mrs. Lynn, the female of the mediums, is supposed to have got a message from what she calls her spirit guy—”
“Spirit guide!” corrected Dougherty.
“And the spirit guy brought in a girl that had been murdered and the body buried—”
That leads to an impromptu seance with the attractive Mrs. Eve Lynn, the medium, who contacts the victim, Madeline, who tells Colt where to find her body.
And it turns out there is a body, a woman, a woman whose body has been at the bottom of the ocean off Shadow Island, in two hundred pieces, with a bullet in her skull.
“It’s as plain as plain can be. Look at them — the bones of a petite woman, quite young, I should judge — not more than twenty-five at the outside, nearer twenty in my unexpert opinion. She probably weighed a little over a hundred pounds — there was a very slight curvature of her spine which makes her height a little uncertain — she was about five feet, four inches tall. She was probably from a good station in life. The hole in her skull was caused by a bullet and she died around May first.”
“The time the medium said.”
“Just about,” assented Colt imperturbably.
A fair enough start for just about any mystery, and shortly they uncover the name of the victim, Madeline Swift, a solid motive, a connection of Tammany Hall (and the DA is up for reelection and owes his position to Tammany Hall), and a suspect who couldn’t look more guilty but Colt isn’t so sure.
Anthony Abbot was noted writer Fulton Oursler (The Greatest Story Ever Told), father of pulp and mystery writer Will Oursler, and a noted literary figure of his day who famously chose his pseudonym because of its alphabetical advantages.
His Thatcher Colt mystery novels were in the S. S. Van Dine tradition, but like Ellery Queen, and Rex Stout, he often outdid the creator of Philo Vance with Colt, based on Theodore Roosevelt, himself a former NYC Police Commissioner, being at once more believable, having a great sense of humor, and his position as Police Commissioner giving him more realistic entry into the murders he investigated.
Most of the Colt novels are interspersed with actual touches of police procedure, here the reconstruction of the victims face from her skull, and Colt able to command his army of police and contacts around the country without the need for a DA Markham or Sgt. Heath or for that matter a policeman father.
The books eventually came to the screen with Adolph Menjou surprisingly well cast as Colt and later Sidney Blackmer, who often played Theodore Roosevelt in films, ideal despite a much lower budget.
Though the books never achieved the success of Van Dine, they hold up better over all, and Abbot at least never introduces the killer in the same chapter on the same page and paragraph in every book as Van Dine was apt to do.
Though as static and talky as any mystery in the Van Dine tradition Abbot keeps things moving at a decent pace, and throws enough curves and red herrings to delight even the most hardened aficionado of the form.
Who killed Madeline Swift, the startled lady of the title (based on the expression of the reconstructed face)? Was it the boyfriend, his forceful sister who disapproved of Madeline and her brother, the fanatic mediums using Madeline’s death to prove they are real, the Tammany Hall politician who may have been too interested in a girl the same age as his daughter, someone else?
“I don’t like to look the realities of this affair in the face. They’re too horrible. I don’t like to look at them. But I’ve got to. Right now.”
The red light of the traffic lamp spilled a hellish glow over the face of Thatcher Colt. In the crimson glow his eyes gleamed demoniacally.
“Right now!” he repeated. “Here’s the horrible part, Tony — I know who killed Madeline Swift now — but I can’t prove it!”
But prove it he will in an operating theater of a major hospital with a doozy of a final gathering of the suspects.
These aren’t without many of the flaws of the Van Dine school, and colorful as Colt’s model may be he doesn’t always live up to him, his portrayal in many ways a collection of traits rather than personality (his sartorial splendor making Menjou a natural to play the part).
This is mystery fiction as a game, dated in many ways, but also surprisingly modern in others (the Van Dine school was often socially conscious racially and ethnically in ways unusual for the period). I personally tend to prefer the Brits from this era to most of the Americans in the Van Dine school (Ellery Queen outgrew the Philo Vance business and Rex Stout had Archie’s hardboiled voice to appreciably change things up) including Abbot, but Colt is perhaps the most human of the Van Dine sleuths until Ellery’s humanization.
Not that he is never high-handed, most of the great detectives on either side of the pond are high handed, but with Colt it seems to arise from the needs of the case and his position as Police Commissioner. He is the most likable of the Van Dine sleuths, as well as one of the smartest.
There are a number of good entries in the Colt series, and they are worth reading if you like the form, Oursler is a capable writer, and not above a little theatrics to spice up the mix, and unlike Vance, no kick in the pants is needed.
RICHARD DIAMOND. “The Sport.†CBS. 15 February 1959 (Season 3, Episode 1). David Janssen (Richard Diamond), Barbara Bain (Karen Wells), Mary Tyler Moore (Sam; uncredited). Guest Cast: Ross Martin, Ed Kemmer, Irene Hervey, Mort Sahl. Written by Richard Carr, based on the character created by Blake Edwards. Directed by Alvin Ganzer. Currently available on YouTube.
After two years of PI Richard Diamond being based in New York, this first episode of the third season has him relocated to L.A., in all likelihood hoping to pick up some of the glamour if not (hopefully) the success of another TV show taking place there, namely 77 Sunset Strip, as a prime example. He also has a luxurious place on the beach, and a telephone messaging service, that service provided by the seductive voice of Sam, never quite seen, but what is seen hints at something quite special. And so is the byplay on the phone.
Also introduced is a girl friend for Mr. Diamond, a lovely beauty in her own right by the name of Kitty Wells (Barbara Bain). As one of several players in the episode,, we the viewer do not know that she will turn up again, but she did, making five appearances in this third season in all. (And all to the good, I’d say.)
Adding to the special flavor of this episode are guest appearances by Ross Martin (always welcome) and Mort Sahl (even though the portion of his night club act that we are allowed to see is rather lame). And of course, David Janssen’s portrayal of a wonderfully laconic PI is, as always, spot on perfect.
As for the story itself, I have to say it isn’t much, having to do with a missing race car driver, later found dead it what is at first assumed to be a terribly unfortunate automobile accident. Oh, well. In a PI show only thirty minutes long, you can’t have everything.
ROBERT THOROGOOD – The Marlow Murder Club. First in series. HQ/HarperCollins, UK, softcover,2021. Poisoned Pen Press, US, softcover, 2022.
The club, formed only on an ad hoc basis, so to speak, consists of Becks, a vicar’s wife; Suzie, a dog-walker; and Judith Potts, a 70-year-old widow who lives in an inherited house along the Thames and who has a penchant for going swimming in it in the nude on warm summer evenings.
On one such occasion, she hears a gunshot coming from the house directly opposite hers. She calls the police, but after they leave without finding anything, she punts over and finds her neighbor – or at least his body. He has been shot to death.
She now, of course, has the police interested. A possible fourth member of the club is DS Tanika Malik, who at first resists the assistance of Mrs Potts and the two other ladies who gradually become involved. But Tanike, realizingshe is in over her head, somehow manages to find a way to get the detective-minded trio officially on the case.
Marlow, by the way, is the small English town where this first death and the two others that follow take place. Based on the title of the book, those readers tempted into reading this particular mystery novel thinking it will be a hard-boiled possibly PI novel will in all likelihood give up quickly. Written by Robert Thorogood, the creator of the Death in Paradise TV series, this is about as cosy a work of detective fiction as aficionados of that particular sub-genre of that field as they might wish.
Being a fan of both fields, I enjoyed this one, save for an unfortunate thriller of an ending in which Mrs Potts confronts the killer with the backup she assumes is waiting in the wings is not in the wings at all, but across the river in a torrential thunderstorm.
Considering the alternative, say, of a finale consisting of gathering all the suspects together in one room, at least I’d have to concede, well, it was different.
MICHAEL FESSIER – Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind. Knopf, hardcover, 1935. Lion 214, paperback, 1954 [?]. Stark House Press: Staccato Crime #5, softcover, 2022.
Johnny Price, a 30-ish bachelor of independent means, lives in San Francisco. He’s just minding his own business, out for a stroll, when a well-known publisher of a city paper is shot to death down the street. As he scurries away with the crowd, an ordinary looking little old man with startlingly satanic green eyes casually says to him: I’m the one that murdered him.
Price assumes the old man, who aside from his dangerous eyes, does not appear to be capable of harming a mosquito, or even downing a mojito, is just batty. And walks on.
The old man continues to make unwelcome appearances. At the bar, at the apartment. He just wanders in, uninvited. Drinks a bit of sherry, and leaves. Leaving discomfiture in his wake. And then dread.
Meanwhile, Price has taken to midnight meanders by the Golden Gate park, where he encounters a beautiful naked maiden who swims there each evening. He falls in love with the sea nymph, and she him, but she is unwilling to leave her park and live with him.
Then Price’s acquaintances begin to die. And the old man claims to be a witness to Price murdering one of them. And Price is imprisoned.
The book is an oddity, and a bit uncomfortable. You’re not sure who or what to believe of the goings on. It’s a bit reminiscent of the malaise I felt reading The Deadly Percheron and The Red Right Hand. Though where those two attempted to explain away all the oddness by the end, this author feels no such compunction. So you close the book with the weirdness unresolved. It continues to irk, unlike its ilk.
——
Incidentally, when I read that the same author’s other ‘famous’ novel was called Clovis (Dial Press, 1948), about a bird that could not only talk but think, becoming the leader of a cult, I had to read that too. Nothing particularly criminous about Clovis. But also strange with its strangeness unresolved. A bit more on the comic side though.
In one funny part he’s giving a lecture on evolution when a middle-aged matronly bumpkin exclaims: “You saying my grandma was a monkey!! I’ll get you!!!!” To which Clovis responds: “In your case, I’ll agree. You did not evolve from monkeys. However, if you and your offspring make very careful and deliberate breeding choices for many generations, it is possible that your lineage may evolve into monkeys.”
Like JG Ballard (though not at all like JG Ballard), Fessier only mildly tinkers with reality. He doesn’t throw it completely out of whack. Which causes you to experience a level of verisimilitude in the strangeness. It’s not so weird as to be deniable as simply fantasy. Rather it reads like it’s true. And it’s believable enough to create an absurdity that you cannot quite dismiss — howevermuch you might like to.
THE CHELSEA DETECTIVE.“The Wages of Sin.†Acorn TV original, 07 February 2022. (Series one, episode one). Adrian Scarborough (DI Max Arnold), Sonita Henry (DS Priya Shamsie). Writers: Peter Fincham, Glen Laker. Director: Richard Signy.
TV producers and other executives, if their TV detectives aren’t buddies from episodes one on, then the next best thing is that they’re mismatched in almost every way possible. It may actually be the best thing, if you stop and think about it.
DI Max Arnold is short, chunky-ish, and male. DS Priya Shamsie is tall, statuesque, and female. What they have in common, though, is a dedication to their jobs, and personal problems they’re working their way through. (TV producers and other executives like those too.)
In the first episode of a new British series, the victim is a middle-aged stone mason who dies in front of an oncoming trade in a tube station. Did he fall? Did he jump? Was he pushed? When CCTV tapes establish the latter, the two policeman have a case on their hands.
And as they gradually discover, the victim had been plagued with guilt, for what, not known, but spurred on by finding messages from the Bible written on his bathroom mirror when waking up in the morning.
The case is solved by plodding but indispensable police work – which in today’s world means not only person-to-person interrogation, but sitting at the computer, with one person standing and looking over the shoulder of the other who is typing furiously away at the keyboard.
I mentioned personal problems. Arnold is working his way through the death of his father as well as a messy divorce, and Shamsie has just returned from maternity leave, which leaves the baby at home with her father, who is not entirely happy about it. Perhaps we the viewer can hope these problems have been resolved by the time this first episode ends; it shouldn’t take a whole season!
You should not take this last comment the wrong way. If it helps to show that your two TV detectives have their human sides too, I’m all for it, and given the overall rather light touch, I think they succeeded. Recommended.
ROGER L. SIMON – Wild Turkey. Moses Wine #2. Straight Arrow, hardcover, 1974. Pocket, paperback, 1976. Warner, paperback, 1986. iBooks, softcover, 2000.
The second Moses Wine book and in my view a better and less confused book than the first, The Big Fix. From the word go the pace is hectic as Wine, initially challenged to clear best selling author Jock Hecht of the murder of a famous TV woman newscaster, finds himself chasing desperately after Hecht’s killer and searching for some mysterious tapes before he himself is bumped off.
There’s a touch of the Donald Westlake about some of it, and by and large I enjoyed it. I’m not sure that I believe in Wine’s strange domestic set up or casual sex life — but I’m not sure that it matters.
– Reprinted from The Poisoned Pen, Volume 4, Number 4 (August 1981).
The Moses Wine series —
The Big Fix. Straight Arrow, 1973.
Wild Turkey. Straight Arrow, 1974.
Peking Duck. Simon & Schuster, 1979.
California Roll. Villard, 1985.
The Straight Man. Villard, 1986.
Raising the Dead. Villard, 1988.
Director’s Cut, Atria, 2003.
