TED WHITE – Android Avenger. Ace Double M-123, paperback original; 1st printing, 1965. Published back-to-back with The Altar of Asconel, by John Brunner.

   This was author-editor Ted White’s first solo novel — his first being a collaboration with Terry Carr entitled Invasion from 2500 (Monarch, 1965) under the byline of Norman Edwards. It’s by no means a major stand-out effort, far from it, but what it does have is momentum, and plenty of it.

   It begins in Manhattan in the year 2017 (!) as an ordinary citizen named Bob Tanner does his regular civic duty (every fourteen months, on the average) of taking part in an Execution, a government sponsored event in which those deemed insane and a threat to society are strapped down and electrocuted by in front of 1000 citizens who push the buttons that do the deed.

   The US has become a country of Compulsory Sanity, in other words. As every SF fan knows, however, there are pockets of resistance, or there will be. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

   As Bob Tanner leaves the Arena, his responsibility done, he slips on the sliding walkways in the city, causing an open fracture in his leg. What the medics discover, to their amazement, is that instead of bones, Tanner has a metal skeleton, and that his body has a non-human ability to heal itself in hours and minutes instead of weeks and days.

   Naturally Bob Tanner is scared out of his wits. (I would be, too.) But even more frightening to him, once he escapes and is on the run, is that he has a new-found ability to kill people he meets, even those he believes are friendly, beautiful women included, with a laser-like ray that emanates from his mouth.

   Bob Tanner, it seems, is a killing machine, built by one man but under the control of another, and he is caught in between. The story is padded with some scenarios built by one side or another and that play out in his mind — I am not too clear about this — but as these are some of more interesting portions of this rather short book (113 pages), it’s padding that adds significantly to the overall ongoing thrust of the story.

   Which ends on a high note, as good stories should, but there is definitely room for the question to be asked, “What comes next?” A question that may be answered in the sequel, The Spawn of the Death Machine (Paperback Library, 1968). Perhaps it will be as fun as this one to read.

   
KYRIL BONFIGLIOLI – Don’t Point That Thing At Me. Charlie Mortdecai #1. Weidenfield & Nicolson, UK, hardcover, 1972. Published in the US by Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1973, as Mortdecai’s Endgame. Later published in the US under the British title by International Polygonics, paperback, 1990. Reprinted several times in various editions. Film: Mortdecai (2015), with Johnny Depp.

   For the many who may have spent sleepless nights wondering what sort of novel P.G. Wodehouse might have produced had he tried his hand at a depraved, unwholesome, im- or amoral tale — that is to say, a novel wholly about aunts of the vilest antecedents — Don’t Point That Thing At Me will give you a good idea what the master might have written.

   Describing the Hon. Charlie Mortdecai, sometime art dealer, is a difficult task, but there can be no doubt that he is one of the great antiheroes of the literature. Perhaps if you were to remove most of his good points from Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy — including his sexual drive, if that’s a good point — and make Frank McAuliffe’s Augustus Mandrell a coward and a sybarite, and then merge the two characters, you might have Mortdecai, or then again you might not.

   In this, Mortdecai’s first recorded adventure, he and his thug Jock, a sort of reverse Jeeves whose surname Mortdecai doesn’t recall but thinks it is probably Jock’s mother’s, have in their possession Goya’s “Duquesa de Wellington” and a scheme to smuggle it from England to the United States. The scheme involves a bit of blackmail, which gives rise to all sorts of nasty goings-on, or going-ons , if you prefer.

   Everyone, with the exception of a few minor characters, is thoroughly despicable, with Mortdecai and Jock having a few redeeming virtues, if one could only think of them. Mortdecai himself says that he has, like the Woosters, a code, but he doesn’t tell us what it is.

   Much mayhem, some torture, and as little sex as is possible — Mortdecai seems to lead a celibate life, although he is capable of indulging with a female, reluctantly — are contained herein, as well as some Lovejoyian asides on art. Torture, of course, isn’t funny, but somehow it produces laughs in Bonfiglioli’s hands.

   (This novel won the John Creasey Memorial Award in 1974.)

      The Charlie Mortdecai series —

         by Kyril Bonfiglioli:

Don’t Point That Thing at Me (1972)
Something Nasty in the Woodshed (1976)
After You with the Pistol (1979)

         by Kyril Bonfiglioli & Craig Brown:

The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery (1996)

TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY. TriStar Pictures, 1991. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong. Director and co-screenwriter: James Cameron.

   OK, I agree, The special effects are everything everyone has said they were. But I didn’t see the first film, and I still don’t have much of an idea of what the story is about. (Two killer cyborg robots come from the future, one to protect a young boy, Linda Hamilton’s son, the other to destroy him.)

   There’s lots of shooting for the juvenile gun-freaks in the crowd, but since both Schwartzennegger and his nemesis are essentially indestructible, most of the shooting pretty pointless. If you like to see trucks smashing into everything in sight, and buildings being blown up, and people being shot, stabbed, dismembered and thrown away, this is certainly the movie for you.

[UPDATE.]   Within the past year I’ve seen the first movie of the series, and while I now understand the story, I don’t think I’d change anything else in what I said about this second one.

KYLE HOLLINGSHEAD – Ransome’s Move. Ace Double 38500, paperback original; 1st printing, 1971. Published back-to-back with Jemez Brand, by L. L. Foreman (reviewed here ).

   I know nothing about Kyle Hollingshead, the author of this Ace Double western novel, other than the fact that he wrote six other westerns, all for Ace (list below), and that itinerant gambler slash con-man Santee Ransome is in at least two more of them.

   He comes to Roaring Springs for a good reason, though. An old friend of his, Howard Giles, is in jail for killing the wife of the man who runs the town, Patrick Clancy. He’s been tried and convicted. The case against is open and shut, but Ransome does not believe it.

   As he soon discovers, though, there are far more threads to the story than this, with several dozen characters clogging up only 120 pages of story, most of them coming on stage only once or twice before disappearing again. Given major short shrift is the mystery of the sheriff’s missing son (his wife just happens to be a old flame of Ransome’s).

   Taking up much of the story is a charade being perpetrated on the teller of Clancy’s bank while Clancy is away. Word gets around that the old white-haired man who has come to town in a fancy private coach and large retinue is none other than Cornelius Vanderbilt. Tis not so. I wasn’t taken in, nor do I think I was meant to be.

   It’s all in fun, but I think it would have helped if the book has been half the size longer, just to fit all of the story into it.

      KYLE HOLLINGSHEAD – Bibliography:

Echo of a Texas Rifle (Ace Double, 1967)
The Franklin Raid / Ransome’s Debt (Ace Double, 1970)
Ransome’s Move (Ace Double, 1971)
Ransome’s Army (Ace,, 1974)
The Man on the Blood Bay (Ace, 1977)
Across the Border (ace, 1978)

ELIZABETH DALY – The House Without the Door. Henry Gamadge #4. Holt Rinehart & Winston, hardcover, 1942. Superior M653, paperback, 1945. Bantam, paperback; 1st printing, October 1984. Felony & Mayhem, trade paperback, 2006.

   “For a lady who didn’t start writing mysteries until she was in her early 60s, Elizabeth Daly was one of the more prolific author in the 1940s, publishing sixteen adventures of Henry Gamadge, the leading character in each of her books, during the twelve year period beginning in 1940 and ending in 1951.”

   This was the first paragraph of my review of The Book of the Lion (1948), and there’s no reason not to use it again. Henry Gamadge was both a forgery and rare book expert living in some comfort in New York City, but more importantly to detective fiction readers, he also dabbled in solving mysteries.

   Authors sometimes have to go through some contorted maneuvers to get their amateur detectives involved in criminal cases, but not so in The House Without a Door. He’s hired from the start to assist a woman who’s already been acquitted of killing her husband. She’s now living under an assumed name, avoiding publicity and the notoriety that comes from having been the subject of too many newspaper headlines.

   The problem: she’s been getting crank letters in the mail stating that the killer of her husband is still at large. More than that, she’s been the victim of several attacks on her life. Gamadge is asked to find out who’s responsible.

   The setting is that of upper middle class society in wartime Manhattan and environs, semi-sophisticated to the extent of being overly formal if not stodgy. It comes very much as a surprise when it is revealed that Gamadge is only 35. He acts like a man in his 60s. As a detective, he keeps most of his thoughts very much to himself, especially those relevant to the case he’s working on.

   The reader should not feel insulted by not being let in on Gamadge’s thoughts. None of his retinue of assistants, which also very much include his wife Clara, have any idea what he has in mind whenever they do whatever he asks of them to do. This is of necessity, of course. If we knew what he was thinking all along, we’d know who the real killer is as soon as he does, which is very early on.

   Which he explains to everyone’s satisfaction, including this reader’s, at the end, which is where solutions to detective stories ought to be.

MacKINLAY KANTOR – Wicked Water. Random House, hardcover, 1948. Unicorn Mystery Book Club, hardcover, 4-in-1 edition, 1949. Bantam #809, paperback, 1950; 2nd printing, #1238, 1954.

   Another tip-off from the redoubtable Bill Crider.

   Okay, for starters I assume everyone here has read Shane or seen the movie and you all remember Jack Palance as the saturnine gunman, Wilson. Well, Wicked Water is what Shane would have been if it were called Wilson.

   Buster Crowe makes his entrance in the classic fashion, riding into the tiny hamlet of Pearl City on a dusty afternoon, and he shows his nature by beating a kid in the first few pages, then cowing the boy’s dad with a display of deadly marksmanship. In short order he’s hired by the local big ranchers to scare away the “nesters” and the murders start.

   Kantor takes a simple tale, does it in prose that’s expressive but never showy, and rings in some colorful characters to move it along, notably Mattie MacLaird, a saloon-singer-turned-schoolmarm, and Marshal “Speedy” Rochelle, a laid-back lawman who ambles in at the half-way point to set things to rights — another neat reversal on Shane.

   Mostly though this is about Buster Crow, the hired killer, and his murderous progress through the environs of Pearl City, and it’s here where Kantor really shines, fleshing out the character without letting up on the pace, and he lets the interaction among the characters bring things to a conclusion that actually got me a little misty.

   Definitely one for fans of Westerns or just plain good writing.

KEITH LAUMER “Ballots and Bandits.” First published in If, September-October 1970. Collected in Retief of the CDT (Doubleday, hardcover, 1971; Pocket, paperback, July 1978).

   After reading and reporting back on a novel by Keith Laumer called Catastrophe Planet a while back, I realized that I hadn’t read any of the series of stories he wrote about an intergalactic diplomatic troubleshooter named Retief in quite a while. I enjoyed them immensely back in the 60s and early 70s, but as time went on, I started to forget how good they were.

   Shame on me. I read this one a couple of days ago, and I found it as funny as I remember all of Retief’s adventures for the CDT were. Retief is “fighter” spelled backwards, or so I’m told (well, it’s close), and what the initials CDT stand for is Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne. The stories themselves are wicked, satirical jabs at diplomatic missions around the world, and the US in particular, based on Laumer’s previous career in the foreign service.

   The only difference being that instead of traveling around the world, Retief’s job takes him to all kinds of alien planets all over the galaxy. What’s the same is the dunderheadedness of all ambassadors and their ilk — all Retief’s superiors, but none of them, not one, can maneuver their way through an interworld diplomatic crisis if their lives depend on it. And often they do.

   In “Ballots and Bandits” Retief and entourage (well, technically speaking, he’s part of the entourage) are on the planet Oberon where the enemy Groaci have recently been sent packing, and the various races on the planet are about to have independent elections for the first time.

   Two problems: Ambassador Clawhammer thinks the Terrans should have their say in the matter, and worse, the various races on Oberon have mistakenly taken the idea of election battles and political war chests far more literally as the people of other worlds do. The question is, which is better, being pushed around by local hoodlums, of being exploited from afar?

   Retief is the kind of guy that cuts through diplomatic double talk with total impatience, and as a mere Second Secretary solves the problem as a man who thinks with his head instead of using it as only a place to rest his hat. And in the process this time around he teaches the Oberonians the Rituals of “Whistle-stopping, Baby-kisisng, Fence-sitting, and Mid-slinging, plus a considerable amount of Viewing-with-Alarm.”

   Great stuff. I’ve only scratched the surface of what made me laugh out loud with this one, and more than once.

L. L. FOREMAN – Jemez Brand. Ace Double 38500, paperback original, 1971. A “fix-up” novel comprised of two novellas from Western Story Magazine, the first being “Jemez Brand” from the 10 December 1941 issue, the second “Six-Gun Sermon,” from 05 September 1942. Published back-to-back with Ransome’s Move, by Kyle Hollingshead.

   The hero of this pair of western tales is Preacher Devlin, who appeared in several dozen pulp magazine stories in the 30s and 40s, beginning with Western Aces in December 1934 before moving over to Western Story in 1939. The last of his adventures appeared in the issue for June 1949.

   Something I do not know is whether this is the only appearance in book form of Preacher Devlin or not. He’s basically an outlaw, with posses invariably on his trail. I do not believe that he ever was a minister of any denomination, but he may have been at one time. As the book begins, he is described as wearing a long black coat with a black hat with flat brim and crown. He is also very good with his guns, with the reputation that goes along with such a man in the Old West. He is not averse to coming out ahead in monetary fashion as he travels, but only if he has earned it.

   For example, when he comes across a dead man, murdered in some strange fashion at the beginning of the first story, with money still in the man’s pockets, he does not take it. The body is only the beginning of a strange affair that involves a hunt for a city of gold, complete with a tribe of local Indians who may be descendants from the Ucaylis originally from Peru — or even Lost Atlantis.

   Add in a young ethnologist searching for traces of his missing father, a young girl with the face of a cat — a mask made of gold — and a band of vicious mercenaries led by an ex-Confederate colonel named Trist. It’s quite a wild story, but unfortunately — and not surprisingly — after a great start, it tails off in rather perfunctory fashion, at least in comparison to the earlier part of the tale.

   Even better is Part II of this cobbled-up novel, and thanks to Walker Martin for helping me identify this second tale, after narrowing the possibilities down by the use of Phil Stephenson-Payne’s online Western Fiction Index.

   Unlike the story in Part I, this one starts out in bang and gets even better as it goes along. It begins with a traveling minister and his daughter finding Devlin in sorry straits after being bushwhacked and left for dead. They then bring him into a town most inappropriately called Rainbow, where all hell breaks loose. It seems that the rough and very wild gold-mining town is under the control of outlaws, in spite of the best effort of the local lawman. Even more, Devlin has a price on his head, and not only is a posse after him, but hordes of bounty hunters from all over the West.

   One highlight of this second story is when Reverend Topcliff tries to start up a church service in Rainbow, not realizing that the bad element in the area are only joshing him along in anticipation of the fun they are going to have with him. It is up to Preacher Devlin to end the chaos that follows, as he makes good use of not only a sermon but both of his six-guns.

   A very enjoyable pair of stories. I think more of Preacher Devlin’s western tales should be in print. I hope someone is listening.

S. T. HAYMON – A Beautiful Death. Ben Jurnet #7. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1994. No US paperback edition. First published in the UK: Constable, hardcover, 1993.

   The “S”in S. T. stands for Sylvia, if you didn’t know. This prima facie remarkable lady is now 76, and pulished the first Jurnet book when she was 62.

   DI Ben Jurnet is so weary that he can’t quite wake up when his lover tries to tell him she’s taking his car because hers won’t start. He never sees her again, because the car explodes when she starts it. Incapacitated by grief for a time, he finally begins to look in the past and present for answers.

   Official inquiries focus on the IRA, who are quick to claim responsibility, and indeed Jurnet travels to Ireland after a guest of Irish neighbors vanishes. But there are enemies from his own past to consider, too, including a petty crook who blames Jurnet for his brother’s crippling, and an ex-political figure who blames him for his wife’s death. Too, he must cope with how the tragedy has affected his impending conversion to Judaism.

   This is a powerfully written book. Jurnet’s grief at the loss of his lover is almost overwhelming in its intensity, and the novel is as much of his coming to terms with it as it is a detective story. Haymon has much to say about violence, and guilt, and blame, and the ways people cope with them.

   Her characterizations are strong, the saturnine Jurnet and his superior in particular, and her prose is clear and illuminating. I think it’s time that this lady is recognized for what she is: one of the better serious crime novelists practicing today. If you aren’t familiar with her, you owe it to yourself to become so.

[UPDATE.] Unfortunately there was to be only one additional book in Haymon’s Ben Jurnet series. Death of a Hero was published in 1996, one year after her death in 1995.

JONATHAN LATIMER – The Lady in the Morgue. Bill Crane #3. Doubleday Doran / Crime Club, hardcover, 1936. Pocket Books #246, paperback, 1943 [several printings]. Dell, paperback, 1957 [Great Mystery Library]. International Polygonics, paperback, 1988. Contained in Triple Detective, pulp magazine, Winter 1952 [probably abridged]. Film: Universal, 1938, with Preston Foster (Bill Crane), Patricia Ellis, Frank Jenks (Doc Williams), Tom Jackson, Bill (Gordon) Elliott. Director: Otis Garrett.

   After the staggering amount of every kind of liquor consumed by PI Bill Crane and his two associates in this book, in every combination of proportion thereof, it’s a wonder that by the time the case is over, anyone is left standing at all.

   It’s a wild, woolly, and definitely risque affair, with the unidentified nude body of a beautiful young woman being stolen from the morgue late at night right from under Crane’s watchful eye. Various factions of gangsters and one very rich family either want the body back, don’t want anyone else to have it, or simply want to know if it’s that of a wandering daughter. Crane is left right in the middle.

   There is actually some detective work going on here, in between bouts at a taxi dance hall, another mausoleum, various mobsters’ hangouts and so on, but with all the lowbrow humor (including some really nifty puns), it might be hard to notice.

   Did I care? No.