DAY KEENE – If the Coffin Fits. Tom Doyle #1. Graphic #43, paperback original, 1952. Never reprinted.

   The first appearance of Tom Doyle, a PI with his own agency based in Chicago, and as far as I or anyone knows,, his only appearance in print. Day Keene was an extremely prolific paperback writer in the medium to hard-boiled vein, but he never went in for continuing characters. The only one I’m aware of is a fellow named Johnny Aloha, based in – can you guess? – and who showed up in a couple of book-length adventures back in 1959-60.

   Not that Chicago plays any part in this one. An long-time war buddy hires him to come out west to Central City, a town in a never mentioned state where, as it turns out, a certain but quite unknown Mr. Big has taken over, and with the lid off, almost anything goes. Anything crooked, that is. Gambling, prostitution, the works. Doyle’s specific job is, however, to find evidence to free a young lad sentenced to die in four days for a murder he didn’t commit.

   No, this is not the freshest plot in world of private eye fiction, but Keene was good enough writer to take the premise and run with it, with Doyle taking the brunt of it. Keene is best in this one in small scenes only, though, which are crisp and to the point. When needed on stage, individual characters come alive with a vengeance. Afterward they tend to fade away into the background again. The story is told in bits and pieces, some verging on brilliant, but somehow it never manages to come together into a satisfying whole.

   Which means, speaking specifically, while discovering the identity of the mysterious Mr. Big is the point of all the pain and miscellaneous agony Tom Doyle goes through, when the ending finally comes, it does so as a small unexpectedly minor climax. It needs more, and it’s not there.

   Overall, a prime example of Almost but Not Quite.

SAN QUENTIN. RKO Radio Pictures, 1946. Lawrence Tierney, Barton MacLane, Marian Carr, Harry Shannon, Carol Forman, Tony Barrett, Raymond Burr. Directed by Gordon Douglas.

   An out-and-out plea for prison reform, done in pseudo-documentary style, turns out to be a pretty good gangster movie. Lawrence Tierney plays an ex-con, former head of the Inmates Welfare League, who takes it personally when Barton MacLane makes a daring escape.

   And MacLane is a killer, no doubt about it. In his gang are Tony Barrett, one of my all0time favorite radio actors, and Raymond Burr, another voice from radio. (He also made it big on TV.) The acting is a little stiff at times, but the action is fast and furious.

ROBERT KYLE – Kill Now, Pay Later. Ben Gates #3. Dell First Edition B178, paperback original; 1st printing, December 1960. Reprinted as by Robert Terrall (Hard Case Crime, paperback, 2007). Cover art for each by Robert McGinnis.

   This one starts off with Ben Gates hard at work doing a job not often brought up in the world of PI fiction: namely watching over the wedding gifts at a very fancy affair in the outskirts of New York City. The affair is so upscale that Ben has hired an assistant to keep watch on the outside while he’s stuck in the house on the inside.

   It’s a good thing he did, too, as things do not go smoothly. First an inebriated bridesmaid comes into the room where he is standing guard, and the first thing she does is put on a very expensive diamond bracelet and refuse to take it off. It’s a touchy situation, and before Ben is sure he (and his assistant) have it under control, he finds himself falling asleep.

   The coffee he drank to keep himself awake was drugged.

   When he wakes up the next morning, he learns that a burglar had been at work in the house during the night. The bride’s mother, having surprised the intruder in her room, has died of a heart attack, and his assistant had shot and killed the thief.

   Everything’s fine, otherwise, except for Ben’s reputation, and to remedy that, he takes himself on as a client. What follows is a rollicking romp of a case, with lots of lovely ladies to distract Ben from following up on the clues he finds (basically how did the thief, a city fellow, know that the picking would be so good at this particular time and place?). The lovely ladies all have the way of wearing clothing (or not) as to best attract Ben’s attention, and maybe a male reader’s, too.

   Shades of Richard Prather’s Shell Scott stories – straight out of the same Author’s Handbook. No maybe about it.

   A plot line involving a case of possible arson, badger games, naughty photos, blackmail and the like builds up at length to the bursting point. At which time All Hell Breaks Loose.

   Who’d have thought a simple case of watching wedding gifts would turn out to be so complicated? And fun!
   

      The Ben Gates series —

Blackmail, Inc. Dell 1958.
Model for Murder. Dell 1959.
Kill Now, Pay Later. Dell 1960.
Some Like It Cool. Dell 1962.
Ben Gates Is Hot. Dell 1964.
:

JOHN D. MacDONALD – Pale Gray for Guilt. Travis McGee #9, Gold Medal d1893, paperback original, 1968. Lippincott, hardcover, 1971. Reprinted many times.

   A friend of Travis McGee has a small business that was blocking a big land deal, and the squeeze was put on. Things went a little too far, and the friend was dead. McGee suspected murder and sought revenge for himself and for the widow and kids.

   Hit them where it hurts – in this case, the wallet.

   After staging a form of the pigeon drop and some crafty manipulations on Wall Street, McGee and friends are a little richer, the shrewd businessman perhaps wiser, and the murderer, XXXXXX with a feeling for power, is disposed of XXXXXX.

   Future historians need not look further than books like this for the true story of civilization in 1968. MacDonald’s views on the automobile, funeral directors and hippies are pointed but accurately reflect the tolerance and frustration of all but the indifferent.

   MacDonald is not a mathematician, however, nor his editors – the division of the spoils on page 160 [of the Gold Medal paperback] is short by $100,000 – hardly insignificant. He also has the problem that too many characters talk alike, with elusive meaning, justifiable in that the story is told in first person; maybe McGee really talks that way. Tremendous depth.

Rating: ****½

COUNTERSPY. “The Case of the Blackmailed Hijacker.” ABC, 09 August 1949. Don McLoughlin (David Harding), Mandel Kramer (Peters).  Available on many sites online, including this one.

   Counterspy was a totally fictitious anti-espionage agency whose case files began on the radio in 1942, telling tales about the Nazis and how their efforts in setting up spy operations here in the US were always thwarted. After the war ended, the series continued, up through 1957, but the enemies of this country became more general.

   In this episode from 1949, for example, truckers driving through the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania with payloads of dynamite and other explosives are being held up and robbed. The bounty is then shipped off and sold to rebels in post-war hotspots around the world, threatening world security.

   As it turns out, the title of this episode is incorrect. When one driver escapes being kill in one such hijacking, he is at first willing to testify against one of the thugs he could identify, but when the rest of gang threaten to reveal his past life as a convict, and worse, threaten his wife, he finds that his memory of the incident is not as sharp as he thought it was.

   It’s a fairly straightforward thriller of a mystery, in other words, but it’s also one with a very effective final scene taking place in the quiet of the night when the men of Counterspy move carefully in on the truck that has been blown to bits.. Who was caught in the explosion – the good guy, or the bad ones? Pictures in the mind can be a lot more effective than those seen acted out on the screen of a black and white TV set.

   Each of the two stars, Don McLoughlin and Mandel Kramer, went on to have long careers in TV soap operas. Both had very effective voices for radio, though, and I suspect the many listeners thought Counterspy was a real honest-to-goodness organization acting on the behalf of Americans everywhere.

DON DeLILLO – White Noise. Wiking Press, hardcover, 1985. Penguin, softcover, 1986. Film: Netflix Studios, et al,,2022, starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, and May Nivola; written and directed by Noah Baumbach.

   The white noise is death. We try to ignore it.

   Our vacuous, repetitive, ambiguous and confused suburban lives.

   At least the poor can concentrate on food, shelter, the business of staying alive. Not enough time or energy left for ennui.

   What if we did have time to contemplate? What would we think about?

   It’s like Woody Allen’s complaint about life being a restaurant with terrible food. And such small portions!

   The interminable absurdity of everyday suburban life: “The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of the older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they’d seen the Cream of Wheat….There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge.”

   At least the computers seem to know something. Coming to the checkout, the “terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks.”

   The tabloids. Our escape from the white noise, the confusion, the fear. The nothingness. The tabloids with the “tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.”

   What the tabloids offer us is something to have faith in. Something bigger than us. At least somebody knows something. And if we have faith in them, we can glom onto their confidence and escape our wretched fear.

         ——

   Professor Jack Gladney is head of his own department that he created at a small Midwest liberal arts college: Hitler Studies. Jack is quite well known and well regarded. With a certain gravitas and all knowing aura. He has it all. The wife, the kids, the house. Living the suburban dream.

   But it all turns to shit when a train carrying noxious chemicals derails near Jack’s town. The whole town has to be evacuated. And due to Jack’s know-it-all ironic, laconic confidence, he’s exposed to the amorphous chemical cloud.

   The nebulous cloud creates a nebulous tumor within. Or so the medical scanner technicians inform him. And he will die. No longer an abstract concept. He will die within the calculable future. A future of which he can no longer partake.

   And he starts to freak out. To break down. To quiver with fear.

   His wife has been taking an experimental drug to treat the fear of death. The fear of which is paralyzing her. She got access to the drug by giving her body to the pharma rep. But the drug has stopped working and the side effect erode her memory. The pills are thrown in the garbage.

   Jack scavenges for the pills which he craves inconsolably. Riffling thru the garbage, seeking clues: “I found crayon drawings of a figure with full breasts and male genitals. There was a long piece of twine that contained a series of knots and loops. It seemed at first a random construction. Looking more closely I thought I detected a complex relationship between the size of the loops, the degree of the knots (single or double) and the intervals between knots with loops and freestanding knots. Some kind of occult geometry or symbolic festoon of obsessions. I found a banana skin with a tampon inside. Was this the dark underside of consumer consciousness? I came across a horrible clotted mass of hair, soap, ear swabs, crushed roaches, flip top rings, sterile pads smeared with pus and bacon fat, strands of frayed dental floss, fragments of ballpoint refills, toothpicks still displaying bits of impaled food. There was a pair of shredded undershorts with lipstick markings, perhaps a memento of [a tryst].” This latent fear, now stark and omnipresent, had been subsumed, suppressed and sublimated in Jack’s Hitler Studies:

   â€œHelpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom….You wanted to be helped and sheltered. The overwhelming horror would leave no room for your own death. ‘Submerge me’ you said. ‘Absorb my fear.’…. The vast and terrible depth…The inexhaustibility….The whole huge nameless thing….The massive darkness…The whole terrible endless hugeness.”

   The only escape of fear of death? If you can’t repress it, become a killer.

   â€œI believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don’t have the disposition, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We let death happen. We lie down and die. But think what it’s like to be a killer. Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. Th more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions…..[T]o cure themselves of death by killing others…To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space.”

   What Jack must do to cure death (for what is death but its fear?) is become a killer. But how?

   Get back to your primordial roots. “The male animal. Isn’t there a fund, a pool, a reservoir of potential violence in the male psyche?….Isn’t there a sludgy region you’d rather not know about? A remnant of some prehistoric period when dinosaurs roamed the earth and men fought with flint tools? When to kill was to live?….homicidal rage…buried in the most prudent and unassuming soul.”

   So Jack tries to summon a homicidal level of rage for the pharma rep who screwed his wife. He gets a gun. Makes a plan. Finds the guy. And tries to make himself a killer.

         —–

   So that’s it, then. Ambiguity, industrial white noise and ennui. The existential crisis of the agnostic suburbanite. The suburbanite lacking faith in the tabloids, in something big and huge and strong to put your faith in. To subsume your fear.

   But it’s a fear that has no primal root. If you can make of yourself a more hardboiled character. A hunter not the hunted. Who kills instead of dies. You’ll live.

         ——

   The book is good enough. It does what it’s supposed to do. It conveys its message. But its message kinda sucks. And it’s a privileged kind of message. Not that it’s not true. I’m sure there’s a kind of truth here.

   But it kind of reminds me of an interview with the director Sarah Polley recently talking about how she turned down the part of Penny Lane in the movie Almost Famous. Penny Lane was an early 70’s groupie. Polley said she simply could not, for the life of her, understand how a young woman in the early 70’s, at the height of the war protest movement, throw her life away as a groupie. So she turned it down.

   My point is that I can’t understand the abstract fear of death, existential angst and ennui. I could when I was younger, in the suburbs, whatever. But now I can’t.

   Brecht says: “Bread before morality.” And I guess that’s where I stand. It’s why Jean Valjean shouldn’t be prosecuted for stealing a loaf for his starving family.

   How can anyone have the leisure to have poolside panic attacks about their own personal abstract mortality when people are starving, getting murdered, dying every day.

   Like Hemingway quotes Donne:

   The hardboiled fare I favor doesn’t see death as an isolated, random, unlikely, angst worthy or even newsworthy thing. It’s present. All of the freaking time. So get used to it, fight it where you can, and know that in the end, life is a tragedy that ends in death. Stop complaining. Get on with it. Everything else is only so much white noise.

THE VELVET TOUCH. RKO Radio Pictures, 1948. Rosalind Russell, Leo Genn, Claire , Trevor, Sydney Greenstreet, Leon Ames, Frank McHugh, Lex Barker. Screenplay: Leo Rosten. Director: Jack Gage.

   A Broadway star murders her producer and former lover in a fit of rage, then finds out all the evidence points to another actress. Has she committed the perfect murder, or will her conscience not allow her to get away with it?

   A big-name cast, bu there is more drama than mystery here. You could fall asleep in the first half. The second half features some unorthodox police questioning, by an outlandish captain of police, played by Sydney Greenstreet, as only Sydney Greenstreet could.

   Rex Stout’s seventh Nero Wolfe novel, Over My Dead Body (1940), was one of several to be serialized or, as in this case, abridged in The American Magazine (September 1939). Since The League of Frightened Men (1935), Stout had produced the spin-offs The Hand in the Glove (1937), introducing early female P.I. and occasional employee Theodolinda “Dol” Bonner, and Red Threads (1939), which featured Inspector Cramer. In The Rubber Band (1936), he mentioned the painting of Sherlock Holmes hanging over Archie’s desk; brought Purley Stebbins onstage at last; and introduced Police Commissioner Hombert, D.A. Skinner, the hated Lt. George Rowcliff, and London “snoop” Ethelbert Hitchcock.

   The Red Box (1937) offers a murder actually committed, via poisoned aspirin, in Wolfe’s office, and an early example of the climactic gathering of suspects there. Also introduced in, respectively, Too Many Cooks (1938) and Some Buried Caesar (1939) are his lifelong friend, Marko Vukčić, the owner of Rusterman’s Restaurant, with whom Wolfe “hunted dragonflies…in the mountains” and is on a rare first-name basis, and Archie’s sometime romantic interest, heiress and socialite Lily Rowan, who dubs him Escamillo — the torero in Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) — after a run-in with a bull. All four were adapted in a 1969-71 Italian TV series, featuring Tino Buazzelli as Wolfe and Paolo Ferrari as Archie.

   Well, now that we’re all caught up, Over My Dead Body opens with a visit from Carla Lovchen, who — as Archie tells Wolfe— “seems to be named after a mountain. The Black Mountain. Mount Lovchen. Tsernagora. Montenegro, which is the Venetian variant of Monte Nero…”

   Her friend Neya Tormic, also a pseudonymous immigrant from Zagreb employed at the dancing and fencing studio of Nikola Miltan (whom Wolfe has met at Marko’s table), has been accused of stealing diamonds from a man’s pocket. Unnerved when she says “Hvala Bogu” (Thank God), Wolfe orders her ejected; “I have skedaddled, physically, once in my life, from one person…a Montenegrin woman…many years ago.”

   Barely an hour later, Wolfe is visited and reminded by a G-man, Stahl, about the Federal statute “requiring persons who are agents in this country of foreign principals to register with the Department of State.” He says that he is not, although as a boy he served as an agent of the Austrian government and in the Montenegrin army, noting that he “starved to death in 1916,” then walked 600 miles to join the A.E.F. when the U.S. entered the war.

   Wolfe states that he has neither communicated with nor provided money to Prince Stefan Donevitch of Zagreb (the nephew of Old Peter, dying in Paris, whom he knew long ago), but has contributed to both the Loyalists in Spain and the League of Yugoslavian Youth.

   Wolfe tells Stahl, “I was born in this country,” flatly contradicting a previous statement that “I wasn’t born here” (Too Many Cooks) and a reference to “my boyhood in Europe” (Some Buried Caesar). He is, in fact, a Montenegrin; Rex Stout’s authorized biographer, John McAleer, attributed this retcon to “violent protests from The American Magazine, supported by [publisher] Farrar & Rinehart,” but “that even in 1939 Wolfe was irked by the FBI’s consuming curiosity about the private business of law-abiding citizens [so he thus] felt under no constraint to tell the truth about himself when interrogated by Stahl.” No, there won’t be a quiz later on, but this stuff will be important as the series progresses.

   In the copy of United Yugoslavia Carla perused while awaiting his descent from the plant rooms, Wolfe finds a 1938 document. It empowers Stefan’s wife, Princess Vladanka, to talk and act in his name “in all financial and political matters and claims pertaining to me and to the Donevitch dynasty, with particular reference to Bosnian forest concessions and to the disposal of certain credits at present in the care of Barrett & De Russy, bankers of New York.” Wolfe sums up the “Balkan mess” thus: “The regent who rules Yugoslavia [then including Montenegro] deviously courts the friendship of certain nations….Prince Stefan…is being used by certain other nations, and…using them for his own ambition.”

   Wolfe mails the document to freelance P.I. Saul Panzer when Carla reappears, claiming that Neya is his vanished and adopted daughter (unseen since she was 3) and producing his signed adoption record, which he pockets, then solicits the details. Hired with Carla via an introduction by Donald Barrett, son of banker John P., Neya denies being seen by fencing student Nat Driscoll returning his suit coat to his locker, and was searched to no avail by Mrs. Jeanne Miltan. Belinda Reade and a dancing client, Ted Gill, refute Neya’s claim that she was then giving an épée lesson to Percy Ludlow, who asserts that she was getting cigarettes from his identical coat, mistaken for Driscoll’s, in an adjoining locker.

   Driscoll appears with lawyer Thompson, who retracts the charge — saying he’d forgotten his secretary took the gems to a jeweler to be set in a bracelet — but Archie advises Neya not to sign the quittance he produces. Chaos erupts as Jeanne is refusing him permission to ask the porter, Arthur, about stubs and ashes (“just curious”) in the room where Neya fenced with Ludlow, found with an épée stuck through his body. Its blunt point does not bear a col de mort (collar of death) stolen from Nikola’s office…which Archie discovers, upon returning home, in his coat pocket, rolled in a woman’s canvas gauntlet; at Wolfe’s to ask Archie about fleeing the crime scene, Cramer learns of three Feds descending on it.

   He lists 10 suspects with no apparent motive; one of them, Rudolph Faber, alibied Neya, last to see Ludlow alive, and comes to ask Wolfe’s interest in her, departing after he fails to retrieve the document while alone in the office. Another suspect, couturière Madame Zorka, calls to say that she saw Neya put something in Archie’s coat and plans to tell the police, so Wolfe tries to bring them together with Cramer, who has Purley fetch Neya as Carla tags along, also revealing Ludlow and Faber to be confidential agents of the British and German governments, respectively. Zorka has skipped, but Neya admits finding the gauntlet in her robe’s pocket and transferring it to Archie’s, because he was there to help.

   The roomies leave with Wolfe’s promise to return both papers to Neya that day, when she hopes her “political errand” will be done. Then Donald arrives, forced by Wolfe—under threat of exposing his designs on Yugoslav property—to let Archie collect Zorka, stashed at his love nest with Belinda, tipsy and déshabillé, but she escapes the brownstone during the night, which is reported to Cramer. Wolfe orders Archie to give Carla the document in Neya’s presence, yet in the flat they find Carla gone and Faber dead, so having gotten it back from Saul, Archie has fellow operative Fred Durkin, who was tailing them, return it to Wolfe, mindful of the thorough frisking the police will give him when they’re called.

   Back home, John P. comes and goes after Wolfe refuses an offer to hire him, and Zorka is pulled in by Cramer, admitting when confronted with evidence located by Saul that she is Pansy Bupp of Ottumwa, Iowa, backed by Donald. After further machinations, we learn that Neya, the incognito Vladanka, killed Ludlow, who knew she was in cahoots with the Barretts in dealing with the Nazis, and Faber, who tried to blackmail her. When she goes after Wolfe with a dagger, he kills her with a beer bottle (shades of Fer-de-Lance); Carla, accompanying her due to dependence on the Donevitch family, is really Wolfe’s adopted daughter, and he intends to help when she announces her decision to remain in America.

   Over My Dead Body was the earliest work in the canon to be adapted for the small screen (at least in the U.S.), as the two-part first-season finale of A&E’s A Nero Wolfe Mystery. “Over My Dead Body” (7/8 & 15/01) was directed by star Timothy Hutton, who played Archie opposite Maury Chaykin’s Wolfe, and served as an executive producer; scenarist Janet Roach, in her only series entry, shared an Oscar nomination with Richard Condon when the latter’s novel Prizzi’s Honor (1982) was filmed by John Huston in 1985. The series boasted handsome period settings, exclusively Stout-based material, and a cast of more than twenty repertory players rotating in the roles of killers, victims, and suspects.

   Here, they embody the killer, Neya (Francie Swift); the victims, Ludlow (James Tolkan) and Faber (Richard Waugh); and suspects Carla (Kari Matchett), Zorka (Debra Monk), Jeanne (Nicky Guadagni), Nat Driscoll (Hrant Alianak), Belinda (Dina Barrington), and Donald (now Duncan; Boyd Banks). Other members include George Plimpton (as John Barrett), Robert Bockstael (Stahl), and David Schurmann (Thompson), with a two-time guest star, Ron Rifkin, as Nikola. The remaining regulars are Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), assistant Purley (R.D. Reid), cook/butler/majordomo Fritz Brenner (Colin Fox), and “the ’teers”: Saul (Conrad Dunn), Orrie Cather (Trent McMullen), and Fred (Fulvio Cecere).

   A collaborator with Alan J. Pakula on such films as Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974), series composer Michael Small gives his score a suitably Balkan feel, heavy on cimbalom and violin. Roach hews closely to Stout while understandably omitting, for example, Archie’s encounter with Arthur (Peter Mensah) — in the novel a literally eye-rolling caricature, decidedly un-P.C. by today’s standards — as he flees the studio. The comic element is played up as Wolfe conceals the gauntlet and col de mort inside a loaf of hollowed-out Italian bread, disguised as a cake with chocolate icing, and then returns them to Archie’s coat to be “discovered” in Cramer’s presence at the end of the first half.

   Curiously, despite the scripted name change, the younger Barrett is playfully referred to as “Donnybonny,” as he is in the novel; Plimpton, who brings a properly patrician air to his father, was the “participatory journalist” whose book Paper Lion (1966), filmed with Alan Alda in 1968, depicts his tryout with the NFL’s Detroit Lions. In an odd directorial choice, separate encounters in Wolfe’s office with Barrett, Cramer, and Zorka are intercut into a montage that throws continuity to the winds. Over My Dead Body was adapted in 2012 on another Italian series, with Francesco Pannofino as Wolfe and Pietro Sermonti as Archie, as were Fer-de-Lance, The Rubber Band, The Red Box, and other books by Stout.

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Booby Trap”

      Editions cited:

   The Rubber Band, The Hand in the Glove, Some Buried Caesar, Over My Dead Body: Bantam (1982, 1983)

   The Red Box, Too Many Cooks, Red Threads: Pyramid (1963, 1964)

      Online sources:

DERMOT MORRAH – The Mummy Case Mystery. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1933. Published first in the UK as The Mummy Case (Faber & Faber, hardcover, 1933). Perennial P884, US, paperback, 1988. Coachwhip Publications, softcover, 2014.

   An inquest convened at Beaumont College, Oxford, quickly decides that the death of Peter Benchley, famous Egyptologist, was due to accidental fire. Two junior fellows have inquiring minds, however, and they begin an unofficial investigation on their own.

   Was the fire deliberately set? Is the body Benchley’s, or his recently acquired mummy? If it’s his, where’s the mummy? On page 136 [of the Perennial edition] they come up with a list of sixteen key questions, then follow it with 40 pages of clever deductions. The good humor is equally fine.

E. C. R. LORAC – Fire in the Thatch. Chief Inspector MacDonald #27. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1946. Mystery House, US, hardcover, 1946. Chief Inspector MacDonald Poisoned Pen Press (British Library Crime Classics), US, softcover, 2018.

   Chief Inspector MacDonald goes to Devon to investigate the apparently accidental death of an ex-Navy man in a fire which his thatched cottage home. The local police and coroner are satisfied as to accident, but the man’s former commanding officer raises questions.

   MacDonald finds good reasons why the fire is not likely to have been accidental, but no motives for murder. The dead man, Nicholas Vaughn, was well-liked by his landlord and neighbors. He was a hard-working man who loved the country and was making a go of farming his small bit of land. He was happy and was looking forward to getting married. Only a Londoner, looking for property to buy in the area, had any grudge against Vaughn, and then only a slight one.

   The careful detective work, a few interesting characters – particularly Ali, the evacuee boy – and the contrast between London and the country make this book worth reading. Lorac has committed a cardinal sin, to my way of thinking, however, in killing off a character just as I was getting to know and like him.