CLEVE F. ADAMS “Flowers for Violet.” Violet McDade #6. Novelette. Published in Clues Detective Stories, May 1936. Cover by Norman Saunders. Never reprinted. Included in Hard-Boiled Dames, edited by Bernard Drew (St. Martin’s Press, 1986). See Comment #1.

   With the exception of some tough newspaper women working alongside the likes of Daffy Dill or a female op helping Cardigan, there weren’t a lot of female driven series in the hard-boiled pulps so, like Theodore A. Tinsley’s Carrie Cashin, Violet McDade is a bit different than the usual pulp fare.

   I really don’t know if Violet came before or after Erle Stanley Gardner’s Bertha Cool, but she certainly owes more to Bertha than Rex Stout’s tough smart and attractive Dol Bonner. Violet is fat, rude, and tough as nails, and as “Flowers for Violet” opens she is being rude and pushy in a nice night club called the Green Kitten, where she is trying to dredge up clients for her and her chief operative, Nevada Alvarado, a slim, attractive girl who is getting sore feet dancing with all the stiffs Violet steers toward her.

   When Violet spies Assistant D. A. Stephen Wright in the Green Kitten, she smells trouble. Mike Donelli, who runs the club runs illegal gambling upstairs and has a backer in state Senator Hymes, and D.,A. Alvin Foss is no fan of either. Violet smells trouble and maybe money, and she is seldom wrong about either. Donelli is married to Rose, who does a routine clad “mostly in brilliants”, and Violet chides Mike for staying in the rackets.

   And with that, you know the stage is set for fists and bullets to fly as Violet and Nevada find Rose on their doorstep still clad in “mostly brilliants” and the news Mike Donelli just shot someone and is gunning for Rose and then their apartment gets fire bombed.

   True to the breed, Violet plays fast and loose with the law letting the fire department think she and Nevada (sometimes called Mex — political correctness was not one of Adams’ strengths) are trapped in the rubble while they get a head start on the case as she and Nevada and Violet’s little chauffeur Sweeny go gunning for Mike Donelli with a protesting Rose in tow.

   District Attorney Foss has been shot, and it adds up that Donelli probably did it, but nothing is ever that straight up in these things. A Violet and Nevada bull into the case, things and people prove to be more complicated than they expect, especially when Violet’s favorite cop, Lt. Belarski gets his skull clipped by a bullet and Sweeny ends up in jail.

   The detective work is pretty good, although it is less in the classic tradition than the hard-boiled one where every violent encounter leads to another step toward the truth, which involves high level shenanigans, political corruption and ambition, and not so honest fall guys.

   The Violet McDade stories are fun, a bit out of the screwball school as Adams’ Rex McBride stories also were: violent, fast moving, and reminiscent of what many of us started reading hard-boiled pulp fiction for in the first place.

   Adams was in the second rank of the classic hard-boiled school, and that isn’t a shot at his often entertaining tales, just a recognition that he perhaps didn’t work as hard at originality as he might have, and for all his word savagery, he just missed the first rank. That “elephant in the aquarium” is no “tarantula on a piece of angel food cake.”

   But second rank in that particular school wasn’t a bit shabby, and if you are looking for a fat lady to sing this particular aria, you could do worse than to accompany Adams and Violet McDade.

      The Violet McDade series —

Page Violet McDade! (nv) Clues Detective Stories Jan 1935
Shrinking Violet (nv) Clues Detective Stories Jul 1935
Mexican Bargain (ss) Clues Detective Stories Aug 1935
Framing the Picture (nv) Clues Detective Stories Nov 1935
Vision of Violet (nv) Clues Detective Stories Feb 1936
Flowers for Violet (nv) Clues Detective Stories May 1936
The Voice (nv) Clues Detective Stories Sep 1936
Compromising Violet (nv) Clues Detective Stories Oct 1936
Important Money (nv) Clues Detective Stories Dec 1936
Violet to Orchid (nv) Clues Detective Stories Feb 1937
Murder City (nv) Clues Detective Stories Apr 1937
The Black Door (ss) Clues Detective Stories Sep 1937
Bloody Bullets (nv) Clues Detective Stories Nov 1937

JAMES T. DOYLE – Deadly Resurrection. Dan Cronyn #1. Walker & Co., hardcover, 1987. No paperback edition.

   Why is it, I wonder, that there are so few PIs working the Washington DC area? Besides Dan Cronyn, the hero of this book and his first adventure, I can think of only two or three others. The nation’s capital would seem to be fertile ground for a whole slew of cases for PIs to be swallowed up into.

   Cronyn, whose roots include an ex-radical past, is in trouble from the first line on, when he finds the body of the man blackmailing his female client. A better than average detective story follows, and luckily (though not perhaps for him) Cronyn is the best possible person to solve it.

Bibliographic Note:   James T. Doyle wrote one other mystery, that being Epitaph for a Loser (Walker, 1988), but alas, Dan Cronyn did not appear in it.

  LESTER del REY, Editor – Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Second Annual Edition. E. P. Dutton, hardcover. 1973. Ace, paperback, December 1975.

   #7. ROBERT L. DAVIS “Teratohippus.” Novelette. First appeared in Worlds of If, November-December 1972. Never reprinted elsewhere.

   If you looked to see who the author of this story was and couldn’t recognize his name, all is forgiven. No one else reading this review will have either — you can bet on that. This was the only SF story that Davis ever had published. The only other story that comes close was “Once Upon a Were-wolf,” which appeared in the November 1969 issue of an obscure horror magazine entitled Coven 13.

   A teratohippus is a gigantic slug-like creature the size of a football field which by means of several external layers of armored exo-skeleton is the only creature that can survive the now frigid climate of the once totally temperate planet of Betul.

   Not much is known about the creatures, but for some as yet unlearned reason they seem to take long migratory treks across some of the most inhospitable expanses of the planet. and of course when a skimmer filled with members of a scientific exploration from Earth is forced to come down in such an area, they do not know how lucky they are that a teratohippus is making such a journey nearby.

   Perhaps I am revealing more than I should, but I will tell you anyway. What they do is to find a refuge in a cavity inside the creature. What’s more, they discover they can change the direction the teratohippus is going from working inside it. This causes a huge dilemma, of course. Saving their lives will come at the expense of the creature’s, not to mention its soon to be born offspring.

   I can’t tell you that I believe all of the alien biology that’s involved, but that’s only the superficial trappings of a good, solidly-told story that happened to catch Lester de Rey’s eye, if no one else’s at the time. And now mine as well, even at this late date.

          —

Previously from the del Rey anthology: R. A. LAFFERTY “Eurema’s Dam.”

SIMON HAWKE – The Dracula Caper. Timewars #8. Ace, paperback original, 1988.

   Monsters (werewolves and vampires) created genetically in the future begin turning up in Victorian England. Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells join with the time-traveling Time Commandos to eradicate the plague.

   The novel is prefaced by several pages of a Time Wars Chronology which I read with about as much interest as I read the potted summaries of fiction in standard literary histories.

   This will probably interest the science fiction fan more than the mystery fan, but the crossover fan (like me) may not find this well enough written to engage either side of his dual personality. Maybe if I had read the eight earlier volumes I would have appreciated this more, but dropping in on it, well along in the series, I found it something of a bore.

   Maybe it’s time to re-read Don Sturdy or Bomba the Jungle Boy.

       The Time Wars series –

The Ivanhoe Gambit (1984)
The Timekeeper Conspiracy (1984)
The Pimpernel Plot (1984)
The Zenda Vendetta (1985)
The Nautilus Sanction (1985)
The Khyber Connection (1986)
The Argonaut Affair (1987)
The Dracula Caper (1988)
The Lilliput Legion (1989)
The Hellfire Rebellion (1990)
The Cleopatra Crisis (1990)
The Six-Gun Solution (1991)

EDITORIAL NOTE:   From Wikipedia: “TimeWars is a series of twelve science fiction paperback books created and written by author Simon Hawke beginning in 1984. The story involves the adventures of an organization tasked with protecting history from being changed by time travelers. In the world of the series, many people and events considered fictional are historical, and vice versa; the action of each book in the series weaves in and out of the events of a famous work of literature. For example, in the first book in the series, time travelers contesting the fate of Richard I of England become caught up in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.”

NGAIO MARSH – Enter a Murderer. Inspector Roderick Alleyn #2. Geoffrey Bles, UK, hardcover, 1935. Pocket Books #113, US, paperback, 1941. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and paperback.

   The second Roderick Alleyn detective novel, and the first of many subsequent Ngaio Marsh mysteries to take place in the world of the London theatre. I don’t know the history of such things, so I’m only suggesting this, but could this be the first detective novel in which the victim is killed on stage in front of a live audience by a gun which is supposed to have fake bullets — but doesn’t?

   If not, it has to be one of the first. And in the audience is none other than Inspector Alleyn himself, along with his friend Nigel Bathgate, a journalist whom he met in the first book in the series, A Man Lay Dead (1934). Bathgate has not only provided the tickets, but he stays close to Alleyn throughout the book as an unofficial Watson — until, that is, his friendship with the suspects makes him something of a liability, from Alleyn’s point of view.

   And there are a lot of suspects, and where each of them were when there was an opportunity to switch the bullets is obviously a prime factor in the investigation that follows.

   This early in Alleyn’s career, I don’t believe that Marsh had a very good handle on his character yet. I grant you that in large part we see him through Bathgate’s eyes, but the latter often seems genuinely surprised by some of Alleyn’s reactions to events, both major and minor, as they happen throughout the investigation. And in all honesty I was taken aback myself, just a bit, at a scene in which it seems he has fallen unduly under the spell of the play’s leading lady — and she still a suspect.

   And here’s a curiosity. On page 86 of the Berkley paperback reprint I happened to I read this time, after Alleyn has questioned most of the people on and behind the stage when the shooting took place, he asks one of them to wait a little longer in the wardrobe room. Nothing is heard of the latter from that point on until the inquest takes place several days later, and then never again.

   All in all, in spite of the lapse above, Enter a Murderer remains highly readable, but it’s also nowhere nearly as sharp or knock-your-socks-off clever at the game of fair play detection as Agatha Christie was, back in the mid-30s when the book was written. Of course, no one else was either, then or now.

   Hal Blaine, who died last Monday, was the drummer for the group of Hollywood session musician informally known as The Wrecking Crew. The musicians themselves were largely anonymous, but no one listening to pop music in the 1960s and early 70s could have missed the songs they played on. Watch this and see if I’m not right:

THE MAN BEHIND THE GUN. Warner Brothers, 1953. Randolph Scott, Patrice Wymore, Dick Wesson, Philip Carey, Lina Romay, Roy Roberts, Morris Ankrum, Katharine Warren, Alan Hale Jr., Douglas Fowley, Robert Cabal. Screenplay: John Twist, based on a story by Robert Buckner. Director: Felix Feist.

   An unusual sort of western, one that place in the burgeoning small town of Los Angeles, circa 1850 or so. The town is a lot more elaborately laid out than most western towns that sit in the middle of a prairie for no great reason to be there. References to Santa Monica to the west, the La Brea tar pits, and the importance of water to the growing community all are intended to add to the historical authenticity, as are references to whether California should enter the Union as a slave state or not, along with the presence of a young bandit named Joaquin Murietta.

   The plot is too complicated to go into (I didn’t understand it) but boiled down to as small a nutshell as I can manage, Randolph Scott (Major Ransome Callicut) comes to town undercover disguised as a schoolteacher (the latter being the result of some quick thinking on his part) to root out a gang of secessionists who also want to control the area’s water supply.

   There are several other major threads to the plot, however, including killings, desperate ruses and several lengthy scenes of singing and dancing in the local saloon, not to mention some ineffectual efforts in the way of comedy by Dick Wesson and Alan Hale Jr.

   There too many twisted threads in this movie’s tale, in other words, taking place mostly in cramped indoor sets. This is made all the more noticeable when at last the director takes the movie outside, for a big shoot-em-up finale. Scott is stiffer than usual in this one, looking far too old (55) for young Patrice Wymore (26), the real new schoolmarm in town. (I forgot to mention the rolling on the floor catfight the latter has with songstress Lina Romay, who also has eyes on Scott).

  DONALD WOLLHEIM, Editor, with Arthur W. Saha – The 1989 Annual World’s Best SF. Daw #783, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1989. Cover art by Jim Burns.

#4. GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER “Schrödinger’s Kitten.” Novelette. First published in Omni, September 1988. Published in a single volume by Pulphouse Publishing, hardcover/paperback, February 1992. First collected in Budayeen Nights, Golden Gryphon Press, hardcover, September 2003. Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette of the Year.

   The story begins with a young twelve-year-old girl waiting in an alley at festival time in the Budayeen quarter of the same unnamed Middle-Eastern city where several other works by George Alec Effinger take place. Her purpose: to kill the boy she knows will rape her.

   She does not know the boy, who he is, or anything about him. She knows what will happen only through the visions she has been having, many times over. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he does not. Sometimes she dies, sometime she lives. When she lives, sometimes she dies alone, after a bitter life of prostitution, sometimes she is rescued.

   And these visions alternate in the telling of the story with futures in which she become a noted nuclear physicist, working alongside the likes of Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, in the era of Einstein, Max Born and Max Planck as they feverishly try to find the mathematics that correctly describe quantum physics.

   It’s quite a mixture. Jehan also has a hand in keeping the Nazis from succeeding in their experiments with the atom bomb. As it turns out, as experienced SFnal readers will quickly deduce, these not exactly visions that Jehan is having while she waits for her would-be rapist in the alley. I think most such readers will catch on very quickly, even before Effinger reveals their secrets, that these are glimpses of parallel worlds. Worlds that are created at every single fraction of a second, and have been since the beginning of time, branching out with the each of the billions of possibilities, continuing on now and the future.

   This is heady stuff, well told. It is no wonder the story won both a Hugo and a Nebula. It was well deserved.

       —

Previously from the Wollheim anthology:   JOHN SHIRLEY “Shaman.”

DONALD WESTLAKE writing as RICHARD STARK – Lemons Never Lie. Alan Grofield [solo] #4. World, hardcover, 1971. Countryman Press, softcover, 1990. Hard Case Crime #22, paperback, July 2006.

   I welcome being corrected if I’m wrong, but I believe that this is the last of four solo adventures of summer stock theatre owner-cum-heist man Alan Grofield. The other books that Richard Stark wrote that he appeared in he played second fiddle to the author’s other primary character, a really hard-boiled fellow by the name of Parker, whom you very well may have heard of before.

   And in Lemons Never Lie, we see that Grofield isn’t averse to a little violence himself, if (but only if) the situation calls for it. The only reason he pulls jobs, almost always in conjunction with others, is to finance his summer theatre, located somewhere in the middle of Indiana, which means of course that it needs a lot of outside financing.

   This one begins with Grofield arriving at the Las Vegas airport, trying a slot machine in the terminal after deplaning — and winning. Three lemons. He naturally takes this as a bad sign, and so right he is.

   He turns down the job he’s offered there, but the guy whose plan it is — a guy named Myers — does not take rejection kindly, and the two knock heads together for the entire rest of the book. It’s not much fun for Grofield, and in the end Myers ends up extremely badly, but it certainly is a lot of fun for the reader.

   Donald Westlake’s way of producing smooth, relaxed prose is on full display here. He was indeed a master of words. The plot doesn’t run all that deep, but I don’t know what kind of on-the-ground research Westlake ever did for the Stark books, but he sure makes it sound as though he’d been taken along on a few heists himself. He’ll probably convince you, too.

DONALD WESTLAKE – Kahawa. Viking, hardcover, 1982. Tor, paperback, 1984. Mysterious Press, hardcover reprint, 1995; paperback, 1996.

   This was originally published in the early 80s, as I’m sure most of you knew but I didn’t. Evidently it sank without a trace then, and now Mysterious is re-publishing it with a new introduction by Westlake.

   Lew Brady, a good, old-fashioned soldier-of-fortune, is stranded in Alaska, reduced to teaching truckers how to fend off union strong-arms. He’s only partly assuaged by the fact that he’s with his lover, a bush pilot.

   Then comes a call from an old mercenary friend who wants him to come to Africa and help steal a train. That’s right, a train. It belongs to Idi Amin, the Uganda strongman, and it’s full of some very pricey coffee. Brandy and his lady pilot hie themselves to the Dark Continent, where they find good and bad guys of all races, and enough excitement to banish boredom forever.

   There are few if any who do caper novels better than Westlake. All the old pro’s skills are in evidence here, if not in quite as polished form as they are today. He created a fascinating cat of characters, with the real-life portrait of Idi Amin hovering chillingly over them all.

   Uganda was a bad, bad place to be in those days, and Westlake brings it to life for you. It’s a thick book, 496 pages, and therein lay my only cavil — it’s hard to maintain the level of intensity a caper novel requires for that length, and I thought that Westlake occasionally failed to do so.

   But it’s still a decent book, by one of the best. If no one made a movie of this, they missed a damned good bet.