DOROTHY DUNNETT – Dolly and the Bird of Paradise. Johnson Johnson #6. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1983. A. A. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1984.

   Dorothy Dunnett’s “Dolly” series is about spy Johnson Johnson, skipper of the yacht Dolly. Each novel is titled for the “bird” (British slang for woman) who narrates it. The “bird” in this case is Rita Geddes, a punked-out young makeup artist with blue and orange hair who is hired to travel with a client, TV personality Natalie Sheridan. In Madeira, however, Rita is severely beaten and then her friend, Kim-Jim Curtis, another makeup artist, is killed. The nefarious doings seem to involve drugs, but in fact, much, much more is going on.

   As must all Dunnett’ s “birds,” Rita becomes professionally involved with Johnson Johnson, who, in addition to being a yachtsman and sort of spy, is a famous portrait painter.

   Johnson enlists Rita’s aid in running to ground the drug smugglers, but she really wants to avenge Kim-Jim, for reasons that she withholds from the reader. Though Rita is the narrator, Dunnell (a pseudonym of Dorothy Halliday) skillfully sees to it that she withholds any number of pertinent details-including the fact that she has a serious disability. The real mystery, locked within Rita herself unfolds satisfyingly and amid plenty of action, including piracy on the high seas and a rip-roaring hurricane.

   Dunnett, also a noted author of historical fiction, is a very deft, very literate writer; Johnson is a sardonic, quasi-hero who grows on the reader as he grows on the birds on whom he tends to make poor-to-awful first impressions. Other titles in this series include Dolly and the Singing Bird (1982; original 1968 title, The Photogenic Soprano); Dolly and the Cookie Bird (1982; original 1970 title, Murder in the Round); Dolly and the Starry Bird (1982, original 1973 title, Murder in Focus); and Dolly and the Nanny Bird (1982).

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

Bibliographic Update: Omitted from the list above of other books in the series are Dolly and the Doctor Bird (1971) and Moroccan Traffic (1991).

MACK REYNOLDS – Computer War. Ace Double H-34; paperback original, December 1967. Previously serialized in Analog SF, June & July 1967. Reprinted as half of Ace Double 11650, paperback, February 1973.

   Economic reasons lead the government of Alphaland to go to war with the second planetary power Betastan. Computer predictions are that a two-month conflict will be enough for [an Alphaville] victory, but the Betastani have read Ho Chi Minh (page 62) and retaliate with sabotage, high-level infiltration and other forms of standard guerilla warfare.

   The result is predictable. The excuse for a hero is needed only to have everything explained to him; enough of nerdy cloddy flats! The subversive Karlists have good ideas — it might be more interesting to see how they succeed in victory.

Rating: *½

SLAVOMIR RAWICZ – The Long Walk. Constable, UK, hardcover, 1956. Lyons Press, hardcover, 1997. Reprinted several times.

THE WAY BACK. Exclusive Films, 2010. Dragos Bucur, Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, Alexandru Potocean, Saoirse Ronan Saoirse, Gustaf Skarsgård, Mark Strong, Jim Sturgess. Written & directed by Peter Weir, from the book by Slavomir Rawicz.

   I think it was back in 1998 when I first encountered The Long Walk in a new edition of a book well worth keeping in print, a straightforward true adventure of seven men who, if ghostwriter Ronald Downing can be believed, walked from Siberia to India, across the Gobi Desert and over the Himalayas, to escape a Soviet Labor Camp in World War II.

   In 1939, Slavomir Rawicz was a Lieutenant in the Polish Cavalry (Yes, there were still mounted Cavalry charges against Tanks and machine guns then.) Following Poland’s defeat and partition by Russia and Germany, he — along with most other Poles in positions of any authority — was arrested for espionage, tortured and shipped off to Siberia. But Rawicz was a young man with no taste for spending 25 years in a forced labor camp, and he proceeds to tells us how he organized an escape that led to over a year’s walk across some of the most forbidding terrain on earth.

   This is quite simply a tale to be treasured. The author describes fatigue, starvation and thirst so vividly you feel them right along with him. And he fills his tale with enough colorful anecdote and terse characterization that by mid-point I felt I really knew these people. Add all this to a story of Homeric struggle and you get something quite special indeed.

   One caveat: Skip the co-author’s introduction until you’ve finished the book. It reveals a plot twist the reader really should happen across on his or her own. And enjoy.

   One other caveat: The Long Walk may be a work of fiction. There has been considerable doubt raised over the years — some by Rawicz himself — about the veracity of this narrative, including a book-length study, Looking for Mr. Smith. What it comes down to is that there is some evidence that such a trek did take place, but the circumstances of Rawicz’s life seem to preclude his having done it.

   All that aside, this is a superior tale of endurance and high adventure, vivid, compelling, and well worth your time.

   The movie is even moreso. Peter Weir’s fast-paced, fluid direction takes full advantage of a lavish production budget, dazzling locations, and makes excellent use of capable actors like Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, and a dozen others unknown to me. He also provided them with a script filled with memorable lines and dramatic incident. Drop whatever you’re doing, and catch this one!

THE FULLER BRUSH MAN. Columbia Pictures, 1948. 93 minutes. Red Skelton, Janet Blair, Don McGuire, Adele Jergens, Donald Curtis, Arthur Space, Hillary Brooke, Ross Ford, Trudy Marshall, Nicholas Joy, Selmer Jackson, Jimmy Hunt (the Mean Widdle Kid). Based on The Saturday Evening Post short story “Appointment with Fear” by Roy Huggins (28 September 1946) .

   Red, recently fired from the sanitation department, tries his hand at door-to-door salesmanship, without much success. But there is some pain — e. g., the Mean Widdle Kid (one of Skelton’s characters), who gives him a horrible time (ironic, since Red played the Kid on radio). And not only pain — Red manages to get himself designated as the prime suspect in a murder, an impossible crime in which the deadly weapon mysteriously disappears (actually it never appears in the first place — perplexing, huh?).

   Before he can finally clear himself, Red and Janet Blair almost get rubbed out in a war surplus warehouse filled with explosives. Congratulations are due the stunt people, who definitely earned their paychecks on this picture.

   At one point Red refers to himself as “Philo Jones,” a still-meaningful reference to society sleuth Philo Vance.

   Oddly enough, this Red Skelton vehicle got its start as a hard-boiled private eye story in The Saturday Evening Post, but by the time the screenwriters (principally Frank Tashlin) got through with it there was no resemblance to the source material.

   For you trivia hounds, the original story featured P. I. Stu(art) Bailey, played on TV a decade later by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., in the 77 Sunset Strip series. At almost the same time as The Fuller Brush Man was being filmed, a more serious movie featuring the Stu Bailey character (I Love Trouble with Franchot Tone in the lead) was also being lensed; it even had a few actors from the Skelton film (Janet Blair, Adele Jergens, Donald Curtis). Coincidence? We don’t think so.

         ===============

Related 2013 Mystery*File article about Roy Huggins:

      https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=20980

MILTON “MEZZ” MEZZROW & BERNARD WOLFE – Really the Blues. Random House, hardcover, 1946. Reprinted several times since, including Dell D118, paperback, 1953, and Signet, paperback, 1964.

   â€œTo all the hipsters, hustlers, and fly cats tipping along The Stroll. (Keep scuffling.) To all the cons in all the houses of many slammers, wrastling with chinches. (Short time, boys.) To all the junkies and lushheads in twobit scratchpads, and the flophouse grads in morgue iceboxes. (R.I.P.) To all the sweettalkers, the gumbeaters, the highjivers, out of the gallion for good and never going to take low again. (You got it made, daddy.)”

   Mezz Mezzrow was a Jewish dude who longed to be a black jazzman. He lived a life that had him in the orbit of Louis Armstrong (he was Armstrong’s marijuana dealer), playing jazz with Sidney Bichet, Bix Beiderbecke and Gene Krupa, he played the clubs of Al Capone and Legs Diamond, he got hooked on heroin, jailed at Riker’s, lived in Harlem married across the miscegenation lines and lived to tell the tale.

   He was convinced to partner up with a writer to get the story down, “talking to me about writers I never heard of, Andre Gide, B. Traven, Céline, Henry Miller and guys like that, and reading parts of their books to me. He says, ‘Mezz, you’ve got a story to tell just like those writers did, and it deserves to get down on paper. watching the screwy kaleidoscope of American life jiggle and squirm over your head. Not very many people have gotten a good look at their country from that bottom-of-the-pit angle before, seen the slimy underside of the rock. It’s a chunk of Americana, as they say, and it should get written. It’s a real American success story, upside down: Horatio Alger standing on his head. It’s the odyssey of an individualist, through a land where the population is manufactured by the system of interchangeable parts. It’s the saga of a guy who wanted to make friends, in a jungle where everybody was too busy making money and dodging his own shadow. If I’d known I was being significant, instead of just hungry and beat, I sure would have changed my ways. This is the book. If it got in your mouth, don’t fault me. Like I said, it’s a story that happened in the U.S. of A.’

   At Riker’s, Mezz insisted on being classified as Black because “colored cons were different; almost any colored guy can land in jail, not just the soulless zombies who have already shriveled up and died inside and are just postponing their date with the undertaker’s icebox. Some of the finest, most high-spirited guys of the race landed in jail because of their conditions of life, not because they were rotted and maggot-eaten inside –far away from all this grimy, grating white underworld, up in Harlem where people were real and earthy.”

   Jazz, to Mezz, was the soundtrack of Roaring Twenties America: “jazz was only a musical version of the hard-cutting broadsides that two foxy studs named Mencken and Nathan were beginning to shoot at Joe Public in the pages of The American Mercury — a collectively improvised nose-thumbing at all pillars of all communities, one big syncopated Bronx cheer for the righteous squares everywhere. jazz, making itself heard above the rattle of machine guns and the clink of whisky bottles. The sprawling outside world, they found, was raw and bubbling, crude, brutal, unscrubbed behind the ears but jim-jam-jumping with vital spirits; its collar might be grimy and tattered, but it was popping with life and lusty energy, ready for anything and everything, with a gusto you couldn’t down. And jazz, its theme song. These kids went for that unwashed, untidy world, and they made up their minds to learn its unwashed, untidy music –all the decent, respectable citizens who were home in bed having decent, respectable nightmares instead of braying through their horns at the stars –jazz music was, in a way, practically the theme-song of the underworld because, thanks to prohibition, about the only places we could play like we wanted were illegal dives…..turbanned Hindus, ramrod-spined Englishmen balancing monocles, swarthy cattlemen from the Argentine, sugar planters from Batavia, sabre-scarred Prussian officers, bullfighters from Madrid, college kids with crew haircuts from Wilkes-Barre and Des Moines”.

    The book has a host of great hardboiled one-liners:

          ● He had more music in him than Heinz has pickles.

         ● It takes a long, tall, brown-skin gal to make a preacher lay his Bible down.

         ● Don’t look for no chitlins before you kill your hawg.

   In Rex Stout’s If Death Ever Slept (1957), Archie is posing as secretary “Alan Green” to learn if millionaire Otis Jarrell’s daughter-in-law, Susan, is stealing business secrets and cheating on his son, only to find predecessor James Eber with a bullet in the head. Wolfe tells Archie to “be guided by your intelligence and experience,” later expressed — e.g., in Gambit (1962) — as using his “intelligence guided by experience.” He hires Dol Bonner and Sally Colt, whom he met in “Too Many Detectives” (1956), to reinforce Archie and the ’teers; they find the .38 that killed two men in Susan’s locker at Clarinda Day’s, “an establishment…where women could get almost anything done that occurred to them…”

   As its title suggests, the next collection, And Four to Go (1958), is unique in containing a quartet of novellas, including “Christmas Party,” which debuted as “The Christmas-Party Murder” in the final issue of Collier’s (January 4, 1957). Two appeared in Look: “Easter Parade” (as “The Easter Parade Murder,” April 16, 1957) and “Fourth of July Picnic” (as “The Labor Union Murder,” July 9, 1957). Published there for the first time, “Murder Is No Joke” was subsequently rewritten and expanded into “Frame-Up for Murder,” which was serialized in three issues of The Saturday Evening Post (June 21-July 5, 1958), and finally appeared in book form in the posthumous collection Death Times Three (1985).

   In “Easter,” Wolfe has Archie hire a thief, Tabby, to snatch the spray of Millard Bynoe’s unique, flamingo-pink Vanda from his wife’s shoulder…just as she collapses, shot with a strychnine-filled needle at the titular event. With typical insouciance regarding character continuity, Bob Skinner is yet again the D.A. despite apparently becoming Commisioner, replaced by Ed Bowen, in Prisoner’s Base (1952); an A.D.A. Doyle also appears, but as Stout used the surname repeatedly, it is unclear if this one has any specific antecedent. In “Fourth of July,” Wolfe reluctantly agrees to deliver a speech for the Independence Day picnic of the United Restaurant Workers of America at Culp’s Meadows on Long Island.

   He is persuaded by Felix Martin, the maitre d’ at Rusterman’s, which he has supervised since Marko Vukcic died; Paul Rago, the Churchill’s sauce chef; food and wine importer H.L. Griffin; and the URWA president and director of organization, respectively, James Korby and Philip Holt. Waiting on deck, Wolfe finds Holt stabbed to death, alerting only Archie, but while he is speaking, Korby’s daughter, Flora, screams upon discovering the body. We learn that after two weeks of college, Archie “came to New York and got a job guarding a pier, shot and killed two men and was fired, was recommended to Nero Wolfe for a chore he wanted done, did it, was offered a full-time job…took it [and] still have it.”

   In “Joke,” Bianca Voss is hit with a marble paperweight and strangled with a scarf while on the phone with Wolfe, whom Flora Gallant has asked to end a pernicious influence on her brother, star couturier Alec. Or so it seems until Sarah Yare, a customer of his who’d infatuated Archie with her performance in the play Thumb a Ride, is found an apparent suicide, so Wolfe deduces that she’d acted a part to conceal, perhaps unknowingly, the fact that Voss was already dead. With 31 additional pages, “Frame-Up” turns Flora from a frump into a subject of Archie’s admiration; innocently devised to protect the interests of Alec (a hero of the French Resistance), Flora’s charade was hijacked by the killer of Bianca and Sarah.

   In “Christmas,” Archie refuses to drive Wolfe to Lewis Hewitt’s on Long Island to meet British hybridizer Thompson, citing a prior engagement — a party at the office of interior decorator Kurt Bottweil, for whom they recovered some stolen tapestries—and showing a license to wed sales representative Margot Dickey. Also present are “angel” Mrs. Perry Porter (Edith) Jerome; her playboy son, Leo; fellow employees receptionist Cherry Quon, business manager Alfred Kiernan, and “pet wizard” Emil Hatch; and Santa…tending bar. In mid-toast, Bottweil succumbs to cyanide in his Pernod, and Archie realizes that Santa has vanished in the tumult, leaving behind his mask and costume in the private elevator.

   The license was, of course, “for the birds,” a ploy requested by Margot, merely a frequent dancing partner, to make Kurt — who tore it up — stop stalling and marry her, warding off a bid by Cherry. Wolfe took seriously enough the threat of either losing Archie or having the brownstone invaded by a female to forego Thompson and observe the “happy couple” incognito, making him by default a fugitive from justice and the primary suspect. Unlike the police, he knows that the bottle in Kurt’s desk was unadulterated before Wolfe put the costume on but, unwilling to explain to Cramer the reasons for his presence there, asserts he must crack the case before the Santa-hunt inevitably leads the law to West 35th Street.

   Arriving uninvited, Cherry reveals knowledge that Wolfe was Santa, but says she has not yet told the police, fearing they’d be diverted from the real culprit, allegedly Margot; she wants “evidence” (i.e., a frame-up), because everyone knew Emil had potassium cyanide in his workshop, and agrees to give Wolfe time to assemble the facts. After making some arrangements with Saul, typically keeping Archie in the dark, he convenes the suspects in his office, where Emil offers motives: Edith and Al were jealous of a Kurt/Cherry union, and Leo did not want his inheritance drained. With Purley in tow, Cramer shows up and tries to arrest Saul, but Wolfe puts him in his place, and is ready to identify the murderer.

   Offering an edited version of the truth, with Santa a vagabond who couldn’t have known about the poison, Wolfe explains that he had Saul send each suspect a note in which “St. Nick” professes to have seen what they did, offering to meet at Grand Central. Emil and both Jeromes took theirs to the police, as did Al, who agreed to attend the rendezvous and signal them, but Margot showed up without having done so. Guilty after all, she had lied about Kurt agreeing to marry her, to deflect suspicion from herself; Wolfe tells Cherry in private after the arrest that her objective was achieved, even if not by the method she had suggested — leaving her with no reason to muddy the waters by identifying the true Santa.

   â€œChristmas Party” (7/1/01) and the previous first-season entry of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, “Door to Death” (6/4/01)  — both directed by Holly Dale and adapted by Sharon Elizabeth Doyle — were linked for international broadcast and DVD as the faux telefilm Wolfe Goes Out. Margot (Francie Swift) cuts in on Lily Rowan (Kari Matchett) and Archie (Timothy Hutton) at the Flamingo Club to discuss her proposal; we flash forward to Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) broaching the invitation from Hewitt, which here includes his former employee, Andy Krasicki. Like Lily, Theodore’s sometime substitute is not seen in the novella, nor does he appear on screen, but is obviously invoked to connect this with “Door to Death.”

   Doyle has Wolfe dismiss Christmas as “an excuse for wretched excess, aptly symbolized by an elephantine elf who delivers gifts to the whole world in one night,” and order Fritz (Colin Fox) to remove his Santa hat. M.J. Kang, in her only series appearance as Cherry, and Jody Racicot — previously seen in “Prisoner’s Base” (5/13 & 20/01)—as Leo join rep players David Schurmann (playing Al), Richard Waugh (Emil), Nicky Guadagni (Edith), and Robert Bockstael (Kurt). Wolfe’s indirect method of revealing “Santa’s” identity is retained, sending Archie to his room ostensibly to fetch his copy of Herbert Block’s Here and Now , found with the white gloves Wolfe himself purchased to complete the costume.

   Stout makes much of Cherry’s “Oriental inscrutability,” unsurprisingly eliminated for the 21st-century audience, although Kang is dressed and coiffed to emphasize the character’s ethnicity; in the novella, Margot states, “her father was half Chinese and half Indian—not American Indian — and her mother was Dutch.” The assembly in the office arrives in two contingents, with the Jeromes, Cherry, and Emil later joined by Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), Purley (R.D. Reid), and those picked up at the rendezvous: Saul (Conrad Dunn), Margot, and Al. Saul’s other errand had been to confirm that Kurt’s wastebasket was not emptied before Archie searched it, belying Margot’s claim that he tossed in the license-fragments.

         — Copyright © 2024 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Champagne for One

Editions cited —

         If Death Ever Slept in Seven Complete Nero Wolfe Novels: Avenel (1983)

         And Four to Go, Death Times Three: Bantam (1974, 1985)

Online source —

ANALOG SF.  June 1967. Editor: John W. Campbell. Cover art: John Schoenherr. Overall rating: **

HARRY HARRISON “The Men from P.I.G.” Novelette. Porcine Interstellar Guard, that is. Nothing more than the title suggests: rather poor Analog-type adventures on a colonial planet. (2)

CHRISTOPHER ANVIL “Compound Interest.” About 12 pages summarizing “Experts in the Field” (Analog, May 1967; reviewed here) plus [four more with] a new ending. (1)

JOHN T. PHILLIFENT “Aim for the Heel.” Novelette. Not SF. The “Man from CODE” this time, able to avenge the deaths of thousands by acting strictly within the law. (3)

E. G. VON WALD “Something Important.” The aliens’ message for help is ignored because of previously garbled transmissions. (2)

MACK REYNOLDS “Computer War.” Serial, part 2 of 2. See review to follow shortly.

LAWRENCE A. PERKINS “Bite.” An unpopular doctor is infected with rabies. (2)

THE THIRD KEY. J. Arthur Rank / Ealing Studios, UK, 1956. Original title: The Long Arm. J ack Hawkins, John Stratton, Dorothy Alison, Michael Brooke, Sam Kydd, Glyn Houston. Director: Charles Frend.

   A business in Westminster is burgled, and when the police arrive they are greeted by a nightwatchman. The safe has been opened with a key and its contents stolen. The following day, however, it emerges that the nightwatchman was actually the thief in disguise, and the real nightwatchman is in hospital with a burst appendix. Superintendent Tom Halliday (Jack Hawkins) and his new Detective Sergeant Ward (John Stratton) begin their hunt for the fraud.

   With the help of his boss and friend Chief Superintendent Jim Malcolm (Geoffrey Keen), Halliday discovers that there have been more than a dozen safe-breaking jobs all across Britain, with each involving the same make of safe.

   With no suspects at the manufacturer, the case seems to have reached a dead end, until the thief strikes again and an innocent bystander is killed with the getaway car. The vehicle is later found in a scrapyard, inside of which lies a newspaper that leads Halliday and Ward all the way to Snowdonia, North Wales, and a Mr Gilson, a deceased former employee of the safe manufacturer.

   The pair discover that there are twenty-eight identical safes in London. The most lucrative haul will come from one that is located at the Royal Festival Hall, where a trap is duly set for the thief…

   This mid-fifties police procedural plays like an ever so slightly grittier episode of Dixon of Dock Green, with always-reliable Jack Hawkins, famous at the time for playing resolute men of sturdy, sensible authority, as the investigating officer. An almost documentary style keeps this part of the realist school of detective drama, with only occasional moments of gentle humour, mostly between Halliday and his new sidekick, who, in a running gag that’s more of a leisurely stroll, is forever interested in getting off work to see his girlfriend.

   The cast is made up of dependable stalwarts of the era, with the likes of Geoffrey Keen (so often excellent in these sort of roles, who sometimes got the chance himself of playing the main detective in lower-budgeted B-films), Sydney Tafler (a big favourite of mine, here playing a character named ‘Creasey’, presumably because of big-name crime writer of the time John Creasey), and Ralph Truman.

   Ian Bannen also appears as the victim of the hit and run, to whom Halliday somewhat insensitively questions while on his death bed, and would go on to play the lead role in the amiable Scottish farce Waking Ned over forty years later.

   A bunch of other actors with walk-on roles, such as Stafford Johns, would go on to appear as police officers again in the rather more grim Z Cars and Softly, Softly, a dramatic direction which would lead to The Sweeney and everything else that makes The Third Key now seem antiquated and, despite its efforts at realism, a little unsophisticated.

   That’s probably ungenerous, as middle-class police investigating mostly non-violent crimes is no less realistic than cockney, blue-collar police chasing rapists, but it nonetheless feels more genteel when you have Hawkins’ wife fussing about him being late for tea.

   She is, by the way, one of only three women to be given any meaningful role, out of five who appear in the whole film, while most of the cast are middle-class, middle-aged men, with the only ones left over being a street-seller hawking his wares, and Nicholas Parsons as a beat constable.

   In fact, thanks to a scene in which Halliday’s son has a birthday party, and another in which a young urchin played by Frazer Hines (of ‘60s Doctor Who and evergreen rural soap Emmerdale) offers a significant lead, there are several more prepubescent boys in the film than women.

   Much of which you have to accept with a picture of this vintage, not least as these glimpses into a bygone era are often so interesting, with the location work in particular standing out. The narrative itself may seem a little ho-hum, with the only action being an exciting finale in which Hawkins grips recklessly to the bonnet of an escaping car (the idea of handcuffing the villain not having occurred to the experienced detective).

   The film isn’t long, and more focused and markedly less grim than its spiritual successor Gideon’s Day a couple of years later, in which Hawkins plays another Scotland Yard man struggling to juggle serious police work with his home life and family. The main difference there is that he has a teenage daughter instead of a young son, and his wife is rather less worried about him.

Rating: ***

SUSAN DUNLAP – An Equal Opportunity Death. Vejay Haskell #1. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1984. Dell, paperback, 1994.

   Veronica (“Vejay”) Haskell is something of a maverick, even for today’s new breed of woman: She has fled a picture-perfect marriage, a well-paying executive position, and all the comforts of life in San Francisco for a cold little house and an arduous job as a Pacific Gas & Electric Company meter reader in the Russian River area of northern California.

   The rainy season takes its toll on Vejay, and she takes an illegal sick day; but instead of staying home, she goes to friend Frank Goulet’s bar, quarrels with him, and when Frank turns up murdered, she finds herself the prime suspect.

   Vejay quickly decides that local sheriff Wescott isn’t going to look far for the killer; and she wonders about a number of things, including the call that Frank Goulet received at his bar while she was there — a call that prompted him to cancel the date they’d just made and thus provoked their quarrel.

   Carefully (at first) she sets out to question friends and residents in the area: the warm and hospitable Fortmiglic clan; Paul and Patsy Fernandez, former hippies who now own a canoe-rental business; Madge Oombs, one of the local antique dealers; Skip Bolio, a realtor; and Ned Jacobs, ranger at the nearby state park. As Yejay probes deeper, she finds herself the target of hostility, not only from the law but from these former friends and neighbors.

   Vejay is forthright and refreshing, and her observations on the other denizens of the area bring them fully alive in all their peculiarities. Dunlap has a fine touch for setting, and you’ll probably want to read this one curled up in front of a warm fire, since the descriptions of the biting cold and wetness of the Russian River area during flood season will chill you.

   A second Vejay Haskell novel, The Bohemian Connection, was published in 1985; in this one, she investigates strange goings-on that center on the Bohemian Club’s famous summer encampment at their Russian River grove. Dunlap is also the author of two novels about Berkeley policewoman Jill Smith — As a Favor (1984) and Karma (1984 ) — which skillfully capture the flavor of that offbeat and iconoclastic university town.

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   
          —–

Bibliographic Update: A third and final book in the series was The Last Annual Slugfest (1986), and adding to the total in the Jill Smith series were eight more, making ten in all. The last one, Cop Out, appeared in 1997. Susan Dunlap also wrote four adventures of female PI Kiernan O’Shaughnessy, seven books featuring stuntwoman Darcy Lott, one standalone mystery, and three collections of short stories.

ERSKINE CALDWELL – Poor Fool. Rariora Press, hardcover, 1930 (limited edition of 1000 copies; illustrations by Alexander Couard). Novel Selections #52, digest paperback, 1953. Louisiana State University Press, softcover, 1994.

   Before Caldwell learned to weave the absurd humor of the dispossessed into the rural noirs of Tobacco Road and God’s Litt;e Acre, he wrote a couple of diabolically dark grotesques: The Bastard and Poor Fool.

   Poor Fool is the story of washed-up boxer Blondy Niles. We first find Blondy lying in a gutter, picked up by a prostitute named Louise, who wants to save him and make him her very own. Louise became a prostitute because she was so god-damned lonely. It seemed like a way around it. Plus you got paid. Mostly.

   Salty Banks is a boxing promoter. He’s got a contender, Knockout Harris. He figures he can make a quick bundle letting a hasbeen like Blondy knock out Knockout, then schedule a second match where Knockout wins. He promises Blondy $10,000 he never intends to pay.

   Blondy takes the deal, and it goes down like the Titanic.

   Meanwhile, Louise gets murdered and Blondy ends up working at an abortion motel, 15 women at a time on the 3rd floor, hacked by a hack, one or two women dying a day, their bodies sold for $5.00 a piece by the greedy landlady and ‘nurse’, Mrs. Boxx.

   Mrs. Boxx has a castrated husband who carries a pouch with three marbles in it where his manhood used to be. Mr. Boxx spends his days in visitation with the dead. His ex-wife is in the cemetery:

   “I’ve got a private way of getting down there where she is. You know, there are a lot of them down there, men and women. They have a good time too. They have dug out a big room down there and connected up all the coffins with halls. They sleep in the coffins and then walk around visiting each other and meeting in a big room to talk and sing. They have dances sometimes too. They have a good time down there, you can bet your boots! You know, the men and women down there carry on just like they do up here….Oh, I had a good time. A damn good time. I went to see my wife and she took me in her coffin and we stayed there an hour or so. Say, you know, I bought my wife a fine coffin. I didn’t think so much about it when I got it, but yesterday when I saw it I was real proud of myself for getting her such a nice and fancy one. It’s all padded and lined with soft white silk cloth and fixed up nice. She’s crazy about it, too. And say, you should see the men down there…they are the funniest looking people you ever saw. All of them wear coats with no backs to them and a lot of them have pants with only the top part.”

   Mrs. Boxx decides to castrate Blondy too, to make him nice and docile. Blondy’s having none of it, and is rescued by the Boxxes’ daughter Dorothy. They run away together.

   Blondy decides it’s time to get paid his $10 grand by Salty. He hears thru the grapevine that it was Salty who murdered Blondy’s girl Louise because she was wise to Salty’s ways. So Blondy decides it’s curtains for Salty, and gets himself a gun.

   And then the showdown.

         ——

   Both this novel and The Bastard (as well as Bodies Are Dust by PJ Wolfson) are the blackest of noirs, nary a sliver of light shines thru. No redemption, and pretty much no dramatic arc. Just quick descent from bad to worse. From worse to worst.

   It’s not really any fun. On the other hand, one has to appreciate the artistic integrity of a work whose very darkness damns it to instant obscurity. Aborted to the darkness from whence it came.