LOUIS TRIMBLE – The Surfside Caper. Ace Double D-505, paperback original; 1st printing, 1961. Published back-to-back with In a Vanishing Room, by Robert Colby (reviewed here ).

   To be absolutely honest, Larry Flynn is not a private eye. He’s really a trouble-shooter for a worldwide hotel chain, which ordinarily would be close enough. I may be stretching the point, though, since in this case, he’s working on his own time. Does it matter, though? He talks, thinks and acts like a PI, and that’s all that really counts.

   As it turned out, The Surfside Caper was the only book he ever appeared in. Starting as far back as 1941 with a book from Phoenix Press, Trimble wrote perhaps two dozen crime and detective novels, most of them along the same lines as this one, and in those books he made use of only one series character, an insurance investigator named Martin Zane (Cargo for the Styx, Ace, 1959, and The Dead and the Deadly, Ace, 1963). After 1963 he turned to writing science fiction and westerns only.

   This one begins with Flynn being nearly run off the road and down a steep hillside while on his way to the Surfside Lodge, somewhere along the California coast. It’s the other car, however, that goes off the road, and the driver is badly injured. Flynn goes to get help, and before he knows it, he’s accused of two murders and up to his eyeballs in a plot that he knows nothing about.

   The owner of the luxury resort he was headed for is the widow of a good friend of Flynn’s, now deceased, and when she asked him for his help, he came running. Now she acts as though he’s working for someone else, and what’s more, there are plenty of others involved who that someone else might be.

   Trimble keeps the story going by stirring up the plot and the players in it by slight of hand only, keeping Flynn pretty much in the dark most of the way. Lots of secrets and misunderstandings, in other words, with hints of perverse activities that don’t particularly add much to the overall mix.

   To sum it up briefly, competent, but not particularly recommended.

EDWARD D. HOCH – The Thefts of Nick Velvet. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1978. A limited edition of 250 copies was also published in slipcase, numbered and signed by the author, adding the story “The Theft of the Persian Slipper.”

   The best of Edward D. Hoch’s short stories are divided more or less equally among five outstanding series characters: Police Captain Leopold, whose cases are generally of the procedural variety; Rand, the retired spy, who is an expert at solving difficult codes and ciphers; Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a New England country doctor who solves “impossible” rural mysteries in the 1920s and 1930s; Simon Ark, a shadowy figure who claims to be a 2000 year-old Coptic priest and whose detections are tinged with elements of the occult; and Nick Velvet (born Velvetta, but he dropped the last two letters because the name sounded too much like a popular cheese), a master thief with a peculiar code of honor — he will risk his life and freedom to steal any object, no matter how impossible the challenge, so long as the item has no monetary value.

   This quirk alone makes Nick Velvet unique among crime-fiction protagonists, and also makes for some highly unusual, even bizarre, challenges to his professional expertise. “The Theft of the Clouded Tiger,” for instance, in which he is hired (he works by assignment only) to swipe a tiger from a zoo, Or “The Theft of the Silver Lake Serpent,” in which a hotel owner pays him to steal a sea serpent out of a small Canadian lake.

   Or “The Theft from the Empty Room,” in which Nick is evidently hired to steal nothing at all. Some of Nick’s adventures turn into fair-play whodunits in which he is forced to play detective; in others, it is the baffling motives behind the odd things he is asked to purloin that keep the reader guessing; and in still others it is the question “How in the world can Nick possibly accomplish that theft?”

   No matter what type of story it happens to be, it is certain to be wonderfully inventive and entertaining. Hoch’s mastery of the criminous short story is evident in every one of the thirteen entries in this collection.

   Nick Velvet shares one other collection (with Rand, the retired spy): The Spy and the Thief (1971), which has seven stories featuring each character. Simon Ark appears in three collections: The Judges of Hades and City of Brass, both published in 1971, and The Quests of Simon Ark (1985). Also published in 1985 was the first Captain Leopold collection, Leopold’s Way, which contains nineteen stories and a useful checklist.

         ———
   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.

MARGARET MILLAR – Wall of Eyes. Random House, hardcover, 1943. Reprinted in Thrilling Mystery Novel, pulp magazine, November, 1945. Dell #110, paperback, mapback edition, 1946; Lancer 72-994, paperback, 1966; Avon, paperback, 1974; International Polygonics, paperback, 1986.

   I found this to be a strange and very interesting book. Half of it concerns the members of a very wealthy family, and one that’s also totally dysfunctional. A key to the problem is the youngest daughter, who lost her sight two years before in an automobile accident, but now who angrily demands attention almost constantly. Worse, even though she is blind, she is haunted by a wall of eyes staring at her, filled with hate.

   The other half concerns a cheap night club, its bouncer and several of its dancing girls. How the two halves meet is part of the mystery — and provides most of its solution.

   It is Inspector Sands of the Toronto police who’s called upon to investigate the murder of Kelsey Heath, the woman who’s blind, and by the time the case is over, he very nearly plays God too. Millar is well-known for her black humor, and it’s quite apparent in this book. It’s an extremely good detective story, but it’s also one that’s distinctly sour and cynical as well.

Bibliographic Notes:   Inspector Sands appeared in two of Margaret Millar’s other novels, those being The Devil Loves Me (Doubleday, 1942) and The Iron Gates (Random House, 1945). Her other series character, Dr. Paul Prye, also appears in the first of the two.

LINDA GRANT – A Woman’s Place. Catherine Sayler #4. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1994. Ivy, paperback, 1995.

   This is Grant’s first book since 1991, and I was beginning to be afraid she’d left the field. I thought that she along with Kijewski was one of the most promising newcomers to the female private eye group.

   Catherine and her partner Jesse aren’t your typical private eyes. They specialize in corporate security with a focus on computers, and here they are hired by a software firm to investigate sexual harassment in the form of pranks and computer mail. The firm has just been taken over a smaller one, and the male employees of the acquired firm seem to be having a difficult time adjusting to the larger firm’s corporate culture.

   Catherine and Jesse both go undercover and begin to work on the problem from separate angles. They discover that there is indeed a large problem, and no shortage of potential suspects. Catherine herself becomes a target of harassment, and then there is a murder.

   I believe this is Grant’s best book to date. It;s a book a man could have written nearly so effectively, and a powerful statement about not only sexual harassment in the workplace, but of the difficulties our legal systems have in dealing with the problems of sexual abuse in general.

   I continue to regard Sayler as one of the better characaterized protagonists in the field, as are her niece Molly, her atypical PI lover Peter, and her cop ex-husband Dan. Grant is a very good prose stylist, telling her story cleanly and without flamboyance. She manages to be intense about her subject without being hysterical, and holds her heroine’s Ramba-esque antics to a minimum. Excellent writer, interesting characters, good book.

      The Catherine Sayler series —

Random Access Murder (1988).

Blind Trust (1990).
Love Nor Money (1991).

A Woman’s Place (1994).
Lethal Genes (1996).
Vampire Bytes (1998).

JAMES HADLEY CHASE – Twelve Chinks and a Woman. Jarrolds, UK, hardcover, 1940. Howell Soskin, US, hardcover, 1941. Avon Monthly Novel #7, US, digest-sized paperback, 1948; Avon #485, US, paperback, 1948. Reprinted as Twelve Chinamen and a Woman, Novel Library #37, US, paperback, revised & edited, 1950. Also published as The Doll’s Bad News, Panther, UK, paperback, 1970.

   In the Gasps from the Past Department, I re-read Twelve Chinamen and a Woman by James Hadley Chase, the “specially revised and edited” Novel Library version of Twelve Chinks and a Woman which I read under its original title as a college freshman, back in the gaudy 60s.

   It should go without saying that this is hardly Great Literature or even reasonably competent writing. Chase’s grasp of American argot is a tenuous toehold at best — people keeping using “should” for “would” and “shall” for “will” — and his idea of Plot is to keep killing off characters until whoever’s left must be guilty, and he develops the story by having hoods burst in shooting every few pages.

   His scenes of Hot Passion are more laughable than lubricious, with passages like:

   On the other hand, I have to credit Chase with the kind of loopy genius it takes to keep a story moving at white-hot speed for 157 pages, and he can put across a scene of violence rather well, when his writing doesn’t get in the way.

   In all, Twelve Chinamen is rather memorable, in its fashion (otherwise, I wouldn’t have revisited it, I guess) and while I wouldn’t put it on my resume, it made for a few nice hours of Guilty Pleasure.

THE TREASURE OF PANCHO VILLA. RKO Radio Pictures, 1955. Rory Calhoun, Shelley Winters, Gilbert Roland, Joseph Calleia. Director: George Sherman.

   When is a Spaghetti Western not a Spaghetti Western? When it’s a RKO color feature starring Rory Calhoun and Gilbert Roland. Filmed on location in Mexico, The Treasure of Pancho Villa is a structurally uneven, albeit thoroughly entertaining adventure film that predates not only the Italian Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s, but also Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and the ultra-violent Spaghetti and Paella (Spanish) Westerns of the 1970s. The common theme running through all of these genres and subgenres, at least when pertaining to stories set around the time of the Mexican Revolution, is the tension between idealists and mercenaries.

   Such is the case in The Treasure of Pancho Villa. Calhoun portrays Tom Bryan, a somewhat unpleasant, rakish American mercenary working for revolutionaries in the Mexican Civil War. He’s a coldhearted sort, mainly interested in money. And he means business in more ways than one. He carries with him a Lewis machine gun that calls “La Cucaracha” and employs it numerous times throughout the story in order to mow down Mexican troops.

   This violence – death at the hands of mechanized warfare – was a hallmark of many of the Mexican Revolution themed Euro-Westerns produced in the 1970s. In many ways, it represents Bryan’s personality perfectly. For him, killing Mexican troops is just a job and “La Cucaracha” is just useful tool at his disposal.

   In direct contrast to Tom Bryan, Colonel Juan Castro (Gilbert Roland) is an idealist. He’s fighting for his ideals and believes strongly in Pancho Villa. He’s not on the take, can’t be bought or bribed, and is willing to use violence when necessary. He, however, seems not to get too much of a thrill out of it and certainly doesn’t strut around with a Lewis machine gun like his “ugly American” counterpart.

   For a time, the two men find themselves on the same side, both fighting for Pancho Villa. Together, they rob a train carrying gold and begin the process of transporting the loot across rugged terrain in order to deliver it personally to Pancho Village. But when the Mexican revolutionary leader fails to show up, things fall apart between the two men, leading to a series of twists and turns that eventually has them joined together again against a common foe. As I mentioned, it’s a plot that would be followed time and again in Spaghetti Westerns that were set during the Mexican Revolution.

   Spaghetti Westerns, for the most part, didn’t often have unnecessary romantic subplots that only served to distract from the action at hand. Unfortunately, that is not the case in The Treasure of Pancho Villa with the introduction of the character of Ruth Harris (Shelley Winters), an American schoolteacher living in Mexico who has fallen in love with the revolution’s ideals. Bryan’s romantic feelings for her never seem real, nor despite what he says at the end of the film, is it believable that Juan Castro could have seen himself with her.

   That said, The Treasure of Pancho Villa was a surprisingly enjoyable action adventure film. Gilbert Roland was perfectly cast as Juan Castro and [spoiler alert], despite the fact that his character doesn’t end up surviving the onslaught of the Mexican Army, the story told in the movie is about his impact on Bryan’s worldview. For it’s only through his encounter with a man who believed in something more than money, in something greater than enriching himself, that Bryan learns what honor and loyalty are.

ERIC AMBLER – The Siege of the Villa Lipp. Random House, US, hardcover, 1977. Ballantine, US, paperback, 1978. First published in the UK as Send No More Roses: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, hardcover, 1977; Fontana-Collins, UK, paperback, 1979.

   Eric Ambler is something of a rarity among writers in that his inimitable style neither withered nor grew stale over the years. Late in his career he still turned out superb thrillers like Doctor Frigo or Levanter, as fresh and imaginative as his early work. That isn’t to say his work was always equally brilliant, but over his long career I find nothing severely wanting. Mid-level Ambler, or in collaboration as Charles Rodda, is still well worth reading.

   The Siege of the Villa Lipp is well above mid-level in anyone’s estimation, and takes head on a theme that Ambler developed over the course of his career, that of the Able Criminal, a shadowy figure with a hand in most crimes yet who is unknown to police, not even as a person of interest; a super-criminal more able and better concealed than any Carl Peterson, Dr. Fu Manchu, or Ernst Stavro Blofield.

   The figure of the Able Criminal first appears in fledgling form in the mysterious Dimitrios in Coffin for Dimitrios. Across the years others have borrowed him, most notably Orson Welles in Mr. Arkadin and John Le Carré in The Night Manager.

   He is a figure that dates to the beginning of the genre, think of Poe’s “The Man in the Crowd,” the least likely of unlikely suspects, the spider at the center of the web. John Buchan exploited him in several thrillers in various guises including The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Power House, The Three Hostages, and The Man From the Norlands. Hitchcock uses him as well. Auric Goldfinger, Mr. Big, Doctor No, and Emile Largo in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels are all examples of the form. He makes fleeting appearances in other books by Ambler, in the forefront of A Kind of Anger, but it is not until this book that he takes center stage, in far more subtle form than most of his co-conspirators.

   In the real world he is modeled on men such as Otto Skorzeny, Aristotle Onassis, Sir Basil Zarahoff, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan.

   The narrator of The Siege of the Villa Lipp is Paul Firman, himself an Able Criminal.

   Or is he? According to Firman, he is only a not quite innocent caught between a team of academics who think they have uncovered his secret and have gathered at his remote Italian villa to blackmail him into an in-depth interview, and the real Able Criminal, the dangerous Mr. X Firman has partnered with for most of his career, a shadowy figure manipulating in the background.

   While not as funny as the adventures of Arthur Abdel Simpson in Ambler’s The Light of Day (Topkapi) and Dirty Story, Lipp is as droll as an Ealing comedy (albeit a dark and at times violent one), and as easy to cast. It’s hard not to see James Mason or Alec Guinness as Firman, Peter Sellers, in makeup of course, as Professor Krom, the academic who sees in Firman the final proof of his disputed theory, and so on down the line from Krom’s unctuous assistants to Firman’s staff, the ever-wily Yves, and Firman’s beautiful and brilliant mistress Melanie.

   The siege of the title proves no metaphor for Firman, his guests, and his allies, find themselves literally under siege from the mysterious X when he learns of Krom’s investigations — under siege and under the gun from within, and from without. Watching Firman scheme, wrangle, and ultimately triumph proves great fun as well as revealing of the Able Criminal at work.

   Siege offers, aside from first class thrills, a glimpse at the dangerous world of high finance, several well drawn character studies — not the least its protagonist — fine suspense, a clever detective story, and several startling revelations, especially those Firman discovers about himself, some far more revealing than he would like.

   Is he the Able Criminal of Krom’s theory, or a semi-innocent caught between dangerous forces is the question Ambler asks, and as fits the subject no two characters in the book offer the same answer. Krom, who is presented with a mix of humor and admiration, has one answer, and Firman himself another. Is Firman the spider or the fly, or, unwittingly perhaps, both?

   The Siege of the Villa Lipp is Ambler’s penultimate novel, but shows no sign of weariness or the kind of neutral writing too often associated with writers near the end of their career. There is still about it the same sense of a glimpse into a twilight world we only suspect, the same fascination with characters on the edge of the civilized society we think we live in, and the same gift for explaining the convoluted and complex ways of finance, crime, and espionage at the highest and lowest levels with perfect reportorial skills. The Old Master proves again why he was an Old Master of the form.

   I’m only sad I can’t read all his books again for the first time.

MERLE CONSTINER – Guns at Q Cross. Ace Double M-118, paperback original; 1st printing, 1965. Published back-to-back with The Toughest Town in the Territory, by Tom West. Reprinted as Ace Double 81861, the cover of which is the one shown.

   Back in the 1940s, Merle Constiner was primarily known for the detective stories he wrote for Black Mask, Dime Detective and several other top notch pulp magazines of the day. He did write one detective novel, Hearse of a Different Color (Phoenix, 1952), but by 1957 he seems to have writing only western novels, many if not all of them for Ace in the “double” format, still very much collectible today.

   The hero of Guns at Q Cross is a hard-boiled rancher from Texas named Stiles Gilmore, who has preceded a herd of his cattle to a ranch in southern Idaho, where he has a buyer waiting for him. What he doesn’t expect is that on the same day that he arrives, an owlhoot who is lying in wait for him shoots to kill.

   Stiles is caught without a gun, so he’s lucky the fellow misses. But when Stiles soon sees the man again, he is ready. He pulls out his gun and kills him! The reason this comes as a surprise (note the exclamation point) is that even though the wild west was supposed to wild and woolly, this certainly seems woollier than most works of western fiction.

   It seems that there is a severe amount of rustling going on in the territory, and while Stiles is worried that his herd is at risk, it is not so. It’s just that Stiles’s presence is a catalyst for stirring up things involving the dirty work the gang is really up to.

   There is a bit of detective work that goes on in the rest of this very short novel (only 109 pages), as Stiles tries to figure out just what it is that he’s walked into, and who’s behind it, but unfortunately while Constiner brings his characters to life in fine fashion, the story itself is just not all that interesting.

JOSEPH LOUIS – Madelaine. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1987.

   Billed as an “Evan Paris Mystery,” here’s a prime example of how detective work can be used as a means for personal therapy. Paris was once an investigator of sorts, but then became a best-author and was even nominated for an Oscar as a screenwriter.

   When his wife was kidnapped and murdered, however, his life went into a downward spiral and into a complete funk for over a year. Until, that is, he’s asked to find the father of a little old lady’s three-year-old granddaughter. Trudy’s mother Madelaine was also a murder victim, and it’s the mall similarity between the two cases that brings Evan Paris back to life again.

   Tracking down Madelaine’s past is like chasing down a ghost, however, a veritable will-o’-the-wisp. Lew Archer was never haunted as greatly as this by his own memories. But as in Ross Macdonald’s work, this is a case that depends a great deal on untangling the myriad threads in more than one family’s lives, and unraveling the secrets that most of them would prefer to keep concealed.

   This is a powerfully emotional book, there’s no denying it, but as a mystery, I think most readers will put the pieces together just a little faster than Evan Paris does.

Bibliographic Update: This book was nominated for the Shamus Award for Best Original Private Eye Paperback by the Private Eye Writers of America, and for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel by the Crime Writers of Canada in 1988. A second and final book in the series was The Trouble with Stephanie (Bantam, 1988).

   Prior to this series, the author published five books under his own name, Joseph Mark Glazner, about a character named Billy Nevers (Warner, paperback originals, between 1979 and 1981). The New York Times described Nevers as “a wheeler‐dealer in the world of finance, the creation of Joseph Mark Glazner, a Toronto public relations man.”

ELLERY QUEEN – The Siamese Twin Mystery. Ellery Queen #7. Frederick A. Stokes, hardcover, 1933. Pocket #109, paperback, 1941. Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and paperback.

   Ellery Queen’s seventh novel, and, in my opinion, by far the weakest to this point in his career. Ellery and his father, Inspector Richard, are returning from a vacation in Canada. Ellery takes a short cut, and the two find themselves cut off by a raging (is there any other kind?) forest fire.

   The only refuge is the top of Arrow Mountain, where they come to the home of Dr. John Xavier, an eminent and retired surgeon, who has with him members of his family and other characters who act in the prescribed guilty manner before there is anything really to be guilty about.

   As the fire races toward the mountaintop, Dr Xavier is murdered while playing solitaire and is found clutching half of a playing card in his hand — the six of spades. Later, another character is murdered, and in his hand is half of the knave of diamonds. Ellery’s interpretation of these clues are, in the first instance, weak and in the second rather tortuous, but it’s fun watching him at work.

   This is the first Queen novel that does not have the usual “challenge to the reader.” Queen explains this in The Chinese Orange Mystery, without naming the novel missing the challenge, as merely an oversight, but since Ellery himself does not know who did it until the very end of The Siamese Twin Mystery — and the murderer is revealed through psychological trickery rather than ratiocination — any challenge to the reader would have been ludicrous.

   Some oddities in the novel: the forest fire knocks out the telephone line, but the electricity supply never falters. Even while the house itself is burning, the light bulb in the basement, though “feeble,” continues working. There is never any mention of a generator on the premises, nor is it likely, with the house at the top of a mountain very difficult of access, that the electrical wires would be underground.

   The Queens put the deck of cards from Xavier’s solitaire game in the house’s safe, but Ellery keeps the actual evidence, the six of spades, and describes the safe as a “sort of baited trap.” Yet when the murderer seems to try to get into the safe, both Ellery and his father are surprised.

   Why would the murderer, they wonder, try to get the evidence from the safe when the safe didn’t contain the evidence? It does not occur to them that perhaps they had neglected to tell the murderer the safe did not contain the evidence. Besides, the murderer’s attempt is an essential device to keep the plot going, not to help the reader solve the crime.

   Also, when the fire reaches the house and sets it afire, Ellery has all the characters go to the basement. Maybe this is the safest place to be when a two-story house is burning down above you and the ceiling of the basement, since we are not told otherwise, is wood, but it does seem a strange refuge.

   Is The Siamese Twin Mystery worth reading despite its problems? Any Queen is worth reading, however weak it might be.