BRETT HALLIDAY – Last Seen Hitchhiking

Dell 4683; paperback original. 1st printing, August 1974.

   By this date in the career of famed private investigator Mike Shayne, all of his adventures were appearing as paperback originals and (unknown to unwary buyers) were ghost-written by other writers. Brett Halliday — as I’m sure you know, but I’ll mention it anyway — was the pseudonym of Davis Dresser. After 1960 or so Dresser started to contract out the stories to authors such as Robert Terrall (mostly) and Ryerson Johnson (once or twice). What the circumstances were, I don’t know, but in any case Terrall was the man who wrote this one.

   Which makes difficult such judgments as comparisons in style between this and Halliday’s Tickets for Death, reviewed here (by me) not too long ago. Dresser’s books were written in the 40s and 50s, though, and the 60s and 70s were a different era altogether.

   Mike Shayne was still a tough private eye based in Miami, but society itself had changed, and sexual freedom had come to a large sectors of it. The F-word is used with no inhibitions in this book, for example, and that a fairly graphic description of sexual perversions (you might say) is included seems to say that this is not your grandfather’s brand of mystery tale. (Well, maybe yours, but certainly not mine.)

   Shayne is called in by a fellow (female) detective, who needs his help in tracking down a missing (female) grad student, who disappeared while (probably) hitchhiking away from the scene of a crime — the theft of an extremely valuable Central American artifact.

   We (the reader) know that she was indeed the captive of a certain kind of predator — again fairly graphically. We don’t (quite) know her final fate, but that that it’s tied rather intricately with each of the two cases Shayne is working on certainly comes as no surprise, a near no-brainer.

   There is also a rather unique way in which Shayne solves them: by doing a live broadcast from a radio talk show, trying to entice a killer out of hiding as well as the captor of his lady friend — the killer and the captor are perhaps the same person, but we suspect not — plus any witnesses who believe they have anything else of interest to share.

   All in all, this is a solid, suspenseful mystery, unraveled in part by the intelligence, believe it or not, of the detective at work. As a bonus — depending on your point of view, perhaps — hippies, LSD and free sex are elements of this country’s cultural history, and this is definitely a jolt back into time, describing a huge capsule chunk of our past only now getting into schoolbooks. (And some of this never will.)

[UPDATE] 02-25-08. Since the review was already written, and it has been for seven and a half years, I didn’t see any reason for having you wait any longer for it.

   For the best one page coverage of Mike Shayne and all of the venues he’s appeared in, along with the authors who wrote about him, you really ought to go to this portion of Kevin Burton Smith’s “Thrilling Detective” website.

   If that’s not enough, then there’s more: an entire website devoted to the red-headed Irishman. Check it out at http://www.mikeshayne.com/.

    BRETT HALLIDAY – Tickets for Death.

Dell 8885; paperback reprint. 1st printing, new Dell edition, July 1965; cover art by Robert McGinnis. Hardcover first edition: Henry Holt & Co., 1941. Several other paperback editions, including Dell 387 (mapback); cover art by Robert Stanley.

   It’s been a long time since I’ve read a Mike Shayne private eye novel, and I think I’d forgotten how hard-boiled a guy he was. Back in 1941, Shayne was a two-fisted detective in the Dashiell Hammett-Black Mask mode, a bit derivative, maybe, but by no means a fellow to mess around with.

   Take pages 24 and 25, for example — a very early event in this case centered around a sudden influx of counterfeit racetrack tickets. Shayne and his wife have just registered in a hotel, when he’s called down to another room. Something triggers his suspicions, and he goes in ready for action. Within four paragraphs the two hoodlums in the room are slumped on the floor dead. Shayne himself is injured, but “It was only a flesh wound.” Naturally.

   Nor does the wound hamper his range of action for the remainder of the night. And there is a lot of action, and during the midst of it, Shayne runs into a lot of characters that both he and the reader have to keep constant track of:

   There is a pint-sized newspaper editor who seems to delight on rousing up stories. There is the owner of a disreputable night club just outside the city limits. There is a cop who, while not perhaps crooked, is heavily beholden to the criminal elements in town. There is the manager of the race track, and there is a girl who tries to frame Shayne up in the old badger game. There is another girl who knows something and tries to entice Shayne into paying her for what she knows. There is a shyster of a lawyer who is trying (among other activities) is trying to get the inventor of a new camera gimmick to sign the rights over to him.

   And there is Phyllis, who (at the time of this story) is married to Mike Shayne. Having a wife on hand is an interesting twist added to a tale of a hard-drinking private investigator, but (apparently) there are only so many twists that an author can manufacture from the concept — and marriage vows really have to tie a guy down a lot — and Phyllis soon disappeared from Shayne’s long life in fiction.

   What’s remarkable is not so much any of the above, but that out of the tangled morass of a plot (as indicated above) the author Brett Halliday makes a coherent mystery novel out of it. Most (if not all) of the confusion that the tangled non-stop motion and literary sleight-of-hand is eventually unraveled, and neatly so. Good work all around.

[UPDATE.] 02-24-08. I’ve read a few other Mike Shayne novels since Tickets for Death. In fact, the very next book I read (back in the year 2000) was one. Look for my comments about it here sometime within the next couple of days.

   As for Phyllis, I’ve done some investigating on my own, and I have the answer. In Brett Halliday’s own words (well in the words of Davis Dresser, who ought to know), taken from The Great Detectives, by Otto Penzler (Little, Brown, 1978):

    “20th Century Fox bought The Private Practice of Michael Shayne as a movie to star Lloyd Nolan and gave me a contract for a series of movies starring Nolan as Shayne. For this they paid me a certain fee for each picture starring Shayne, promising me an additional sum for each book of mine used in the series.

    “I finally inquired as to the reason from Hollywood and was told it was because Shayne and Phyllis were married and it was against their policy to use a married detective.

    “Faced with this fact of life, I decided to kill off Phyllis to leave Shayne a free man for succeeding movies. This I did between Murder Wears a Mummer’s Mask and Blood on the Black Market (later reprinted in soft cover as Heads You Lose).

[BONUS.] From a website called www.bookscans.com I have found an image of the back cover I will add here at the end. Why have a map of the mystery available, and not use it?

JOHN RHODE – Three Cousins Die

Geoffrey Bles, UK, hardcover, 1959. Dodd Mead & Co., US, hardcover, 1960. [The cover shown is of the latter.]

   The first of the three seems to have killed himself; the second is the victim of a far too hasty knife attack; the last dies in a puzzling sort of automobile accident. Dr. Priestley asks a few pertinent questions of Superintendent Jimmy Waghorn, and although he’s never on the scene himself, he’s easily able to establish the common factor that connects all three events.

   This is surely no-nonsense investigation at its finest. Rhode was indubitably an author at least a quarter century behind his time. Little or no effort is spent on the kinds of trivial matters that commonly pass for characterization or secondary motivation. Slow-moving; and, yes, I knew who did it as soon as Dr. Priestley did.    [C minus ]

   When I wrote this review, it looks as though I was channeling mystery critic Julian Symon and his opinion of the “humdrum” school of detective fiction. From Bloody Murder (1974) he describes what he means:

    “Most of them came late to writing fiction, and few had much talent for it. They had some skill in constructing puzzles, nothing more, and ironically they fulfilled much better than S. S. Van Dine his dictum that the detective story properly belonged in the category of riddles or crossword puzzles. Most of the Humdrums were British, and among the best known of them were Major John Street …”

   The Major Street he was referring to was also John Rhode, author of the Dr. Priestley books, as well as Miles Burton, who related to the world cases solved by Inspector Arnold and Desmond Merrion.

   Three Cousins Die came toward the end of Street’s long writing career, which extended from 1925 to 1961. Only three more Rhode novels came later, and three more Burton’s.

   For whatever reasons – supply? demand? – this particular book is also hard to find. There are seven copies on ABE at the moment, ranging in suggested price (and condition) from $30 to $65.

   I couldn’t tell you whether my opinion today would match the one stated above or not. I seem to remember railing away at some private eye around the same time for having too much characterization; that is, too many details of his home life. What can I tell you? I was much younger then.

LESLIE CHARTERIS – The Last Hero.

International Polygonics Library; paperback reprint, November 1988. Previous editions: Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hc, 1930. Doubleday Doran & Co./The Crime Club, US, hc, 1931. Plus: Ace/Charter, pb, 1982. Also published as: The Saint Closes the Case, Sun Dial, 1941; Fiction Publishing Co., pb, 1967. And as: The Saint and the Last Hero, Avon #544, 1953.

   A fairly complicated publishing history, in other words, and it’s far from complete. But it’s not nearly as complex as the history of The Saint as a character himself. This has generally been considered the second Saint novel, but after reading the Wikipedia entry (under Simon Templar) I am certainly willing to go along with the now accepted chronology: that Meet – the Tiger! was first, and Enter the Saint (consisting of three novellas) was second.

   My own exposure to The Saint was through the stories that appeared in every issue of The Saint Detective Magazine when I was in my teens and shortly beyond. The stories came from every time period and in no order whatsoever, so thinking of how The Saint first came on the scene and developed as a character would have been impossible, even if I’d have seriously considered doing so.

   From reading The Last Hero at this much later date, and matching my thoughts up with several of the online histories of The Saint, it’s clear in retrospect that Charteris was still tinkering with the character, revising and improvising details as he went along, creating as he did a back story that may (or may not) have stayed constant all the way through the remaining books and collections — nearly a hundred in all.

   I’ll not bore you with details, as I’d probably get them wrong, and besides, there’s a book by Burl Barer called The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Film and Television 1928-1992. (MacFarland, 1992, 2003) that if you’re interested, will get them right. I don’t have a copy, and I will have to get one.

   There is also a humongous website devoted only to The Saint that deserves more exploring than I’ve had a chance to do so far.

   You may remember the IPL cover to the left as one that has appeared here before. The cover from Avon edition (below right) features Patricia Holm, the love of Simon’s life, fairly prominently. The third one (above right) is from a set of Saint novels that came out when the Roger Moore TV show was playing in the US.

   I don’t particularly believe that the title The Saint Closes the Case is apt at all, since the villain, a wealthy arms dealer named Dr. Rayt Marius, manages to survive, only to appear in a few more of the Saint’s adventures, along with his patron, the brutally ambitious Crown Prince of some small unnamed European country.

   I said brutally ambitious, and I meant it. In 1930, the clouds of war were beginning to form once again, and it was easy for readers of the day to believe that ruthless profiteers like Marius and the Prince did for a fact exist. Once Simon Templar learns of a mad scientist’s new invention, a veritable death ray machine, he knows that if it were to fall into the wrong hands, or even the right hands, the world would not be likely to survive.

   The solution? Kidnap Professor Vargan, confiscate his plans, persuade him to destroy his weapon – or suffer the consequences. There is no bluff on The Saint’s part. He may have his usual devil-may-care attitude about him, but he’s not joking. He and his small group of comrades in arms are deadly serious.

   This group of friends includes the previously mentioned Patrica Holm, who gets kidpanned in return, to The Saint’s dismay; Roger Conway, new to the business and prone to error; and Norman Kent, the titular hero:

   From the prelude, page 13: “…and it is also the story of one Norman Kent, who was his friend, and how in one moment in that adventure held the fate to two nations, if not of all Europe, in his hands; how he accounted for that stewardship; and how, one quiet summer evening, in a house by the Thames, with no melodrama and no heroics, he fought and died or an idea.”

   From Caroline Whitehead and Geroge McLeod, Knights Errant of the Nineeteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Chapter 5:

   Heady stuff that, then and now, although there are things here about which the reader is not totally aware while the book is in progress. [Nothing essential, but to ease my mind, please forget that you just read it.] After a slow beginning – as the author sorts out his primary character’s affairs, for perhaps the benefit of himself as much as more the reader – this is an adventure nearly without equal. The prose simply sings. On his way to rescue Pat, taken from pages 152-153:

   If you can’t read that without getting the least bit of thrill, please try taking your pulse again.

[UPDATE] 02-23-08:    I thought you might like to see this:

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN – The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association

Forge, paperback; 1st printing, July 2000. [Hardcover first edition: Forge, March 1999.]

   Movies are a large part of everyone’s life today, whether viewed in theaters, seen as videos at home, or the basis of watercooler gossip at work. It comes as a distinct pleasure, therefore, to read about the early days of the pre-Hollywood motion picture industry, back in the days of makeshift sets, mind-melting lighting systems and hand-cranked cameras.

   People did what they had to in order to get those dazzling images up on the screen. In this novel Buck Bensinger’s leading lady Adele Varga is a former Mexican prostitute. She’s also the producer, the secretary, the bookkeeper, and when she needs to, she’s also the company’s publicity director. Buck’s new leading man is an ex-convict, just released from San Quentin.

   In the real world, before he started making movies, D. W. Griffith (to pick just one example) was a cash boy in a dry goods store. Other recognizable names are bumped into now and again, as Buck tries his best to get his latest two-reel epic finished.

   The villain, though? Surprise of surprises, none other than Thomas Alva Edison, dubbed by Buck as “The Lizard of Menlo Park.” Twenty years after coming up with the moving picture process, Edison discovered that there was money to be made from the idea, and he helped form a monopolistic trust (the Motion Pictures Patents Company) whose sole function was to keep anyone else from making movies.

   Driven from the East Coast, the early pioneers in the field were forced westward to California, where they finally made their stand. And where they faced vandalism, kidnappings, wide-scale destruction of movie lots, and worse. (Edison himself may have been unaware of what was transpiring in his name, and the Pinkerton detectives who worked for the Trust were, as they claimed, on the side of the law.)

   People in on the early days of anything are not always aware of their eventual footnoted places in history — they’re there to do a job, with a love for what they’re doing — and it’s left to others to look back later and marvel at their accomplishments. Giving us (the reader) the same perspective in this story is Tom Boston, a would-be writer born Dmitri Pulski, the son of a northern California iceman. Sent by his father to negotiate a sale of eight tons of ice to the Rocky Mountain Picture Association, Tom finds life in the sunny south much more to his liking and never returns to the life of cutting ice in the Sierra Nevadas. What he receives, along with a paycheck, is a ringside seat to the birth of a new industry.

   What happens next is pure fiction, a novel too good to be fiction, and if it didn’t really happen, it should have.

          — August 2000. This review first appeared in The Historical Novels Review. It has been very slightly revised since then.

[UPDATE] 02-22-08. I’ve just checked — I hadn’t before — but this book is not included in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV. I’d have to skim through it again to be sure, but from the review itself, which is all I’m going by, there doesn’t appear to be quite enough crime element in it to qualify for inclusion.

   But the facts about Edison and the tactics of the Pinkertons on behalf of Motion Pictures Patent Company are true enough, and obviously Loren Estleman has a mystery (and western) writer’s approach to telling a rattling good tale.

   Anybody interested in the early days of movie-making ought to enjoy this book. You’ll probably be able to buy it online easily enough, but for some reason, other than my own copy, I’ve never seen another one in a bookstore, new or used.

[ADDED LATER.] This book was written during a particularly fertile period in Estleman’s career. In the four year period from 1997 to 2000, he wrote a total of ten books, all major ones. Since then, he seems to have slowed down to a more normal pace of a book a year. Taken from his wikipedia entry:

ELLERY QUEEN – The Roman Hat Mystery.

Signet P3229; paperback reprint; 1st printing, August 1967. [Hardcover first edition: Frederick A. Stokes, 1929. Shown below, left.]

   First published in 1929, this early Ellery Queen effort really shows its age, unfortunately — it’s difficult to be any more polite than that. It was their first novel, and as an intellectual puzzle, it still has some fizz, but the characters are weak, and the strings they’re manipulated by stand out strongly.

   The death — by poisoning — of a unliked, unlikable lawyer takes place in the middle of the Roman Theatre while a play is going on. The key clue is the dead man’s missing top hat. In the 1920s, all men wore hats — if not top hats, then derbies and fedoras and more — all strange almost unidentifiable objects today. Ellery, aiding his father, Inspector Richard Queen, takes this premise, seemingly small, to its most logical extremes and solves the mystery.

   The Inspector, by the way, dotes on snuff, to another extreme — at least every other page, or so it seems. In terms of populating their story, the writers Queen deliberately modeled their early work on S. S. Van Dine and Philo Vance, or so I’ve been led to believe, and there’s nothing to contradict it here. Fortunately their idea of what makes a good mystery changed and coalesced into something much more solid over the years, along with their audience’s.

   With about two or three chapters to go, there’s a Challenge to the Reader, a favorite Ellery Queenian device, at which time — based on the facts so far — the reader is asked to pinpoint the killer’s identity. I hope I don’t hurt myself, patting myself on the back, but I’ll give myself about 80% on this one.

[UPDATE] 02-21-08. I don’t how often I’ll keep running these old reviews, but on the other hand, if you haven’t read them, they’re new to you.

   At the time, this happened to be the first review I’d written in about eight years. I’d drifted away from reading mysteries for a lot of that time, and even more so I’d lost touch with mystery fandom. This was prior to blogging, but not DorothyL, to put a time perspective on things. I’d been busy with teaching and other matters, but not with collecting, by any means. That has never stopped, not since I was 12 or 13. Some of the books I bought then I still have, but unfortunately not all of them.

   In any case, when I started Mystery*File up as a print zine again, this was the first review of mine that I included. Some readers thought I was fairly rough on Mr. Queen, but others agreed with me. I haven’t made any attempt to rewrite it. While the rust shows, it still reads like my writing. I know what my writing reads like, and I can’t do anything about it.

   For an Ellery Queen novel I liked more, read a more recent review of The Tragedy of X here.

LOUIS L’AMOUR – Off the Mangrove Coast.

Bantam hardcover; First Edition, May 2000. [Paperback reprint: Bantam, May 2001.]

   Louis L’Amour is likely to be one of the three most well-known western writers of all time. I’d place Zane Grey and Max Brand ahead of him, but you could argue with me. Of the nine stories brought together in this latest collection, however, only one takes place in the old West, and it’s perhaps the only one that could safely be considered “historical.”

   There are two boxing stories, one about a private eye, and another about an insurance investigator in a tight spot. None of these, including the western, are worthy of more note than this. A better one is a short little tale about a longshoreman who meets his match at checkers, and a good one is an interesting vignette that takes place in a French café after World War II.

   The two best stories are the title story, about diving for treasure in the South China Sea, and a longer one about hunting for diamonds in the jungles of Borneo, infested with headhunters.

   The time these stories take place is unclear, perhaps in the 1940s, perhaps as early as the 1920s. L’Amour pulpy, rough-hewn writing style is uneven, sometimes full of cliches and worn-out plot devices, sometime lyrical and imbued with a strong sense of what it takes to be a man. But if he hadn’t written these particular works, they’d have never been published again, I regret to say. The old pulp magazines are filled with stories just like these, gone and mostly forgotten, remembered only by a handful of enthusiasts who still collect them.

POSTSCRIPT: As one of those selfsame enthusiasts, I really would have liked to known where these stories first appeared. There is no bibliographical information provided at all.

       — June 2000. This review first appeared in The Historical Novels Review. It may have been very slightly revised since then.

[UPDATE] 02-20-08.    The final tagline explains why the emphasis in the review is on the “historical” content, and not so much on the detective stories that happen to be in the collection.

   The book is included in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, though, and here’s a list of the stories which (for reasons of space) I didn’t include when I first wrote the review. A couple of the magazines where the stories first appeared are given, and I’ll repeat them here:

      The Cross and the Candle
      The Diamond of Jeru
      Fighters Should Be Hungry, Popular Sports Magazine, February 1949
      * It’s Your Move, The Tanager, February 1939
      Off the Mangrove Coast
      The Rounds Don’t Matter
      Secret of Silver Springs
      Time of Terror
      The Unexpected Corpse, G-Men Detective, November 1948

   * This story is not one of those for which CFIV lists the original source. I just came across this one somewhere else myself. My copy of The Louis L’Amour Companion is not handy, I’m sorry to say, and in fact is nowhere to be found. It’s been almost eight years since I wrote this review, so obviously I haven’t been suffering from any unrequited urgency, but if you can fill in the details, I’d certainly appreciate it.

   If I were able to rewrite the review for the blog right now, I’d make sure to identify the stories more clearly with the contents, but I didn’t at the time, and I can’t. All I can tell you about the book is what you’ve already just read. L’Amour is not one of my favorite western writers, but in case it wasn’t entirely clear, I enjoyed this collection.

[UPDATE #2] 02-21-08. Robert Teague of the WesternPulps Yahoo group has supplied me with a couple of story sources:

    “The Rounds Don’t Matter” was first printed in Thrilling Adventures Feb 42

    “Secret of Silver Springs” Range Rider Western Nov 49

   Four more to go, keeping in mind, as others have pointed out, that titles may have been changed, and some of the stories may have appeared for the first time in this (much) later collection.

[UPDATE #3] 03-03-08. Excerpted from a pair of email messages sent me by Juri Nummelin:

Hi Steve,

   I finally pulled out my copy of Weinberg’s L’Amour Companion, and it does seem that the four stories have been previously unpublished. I can’t find them on the checklist Weinberg provides. Well, of course the titles may have been altered. There are short descriptions of the short stories in Weinberg’s book, so if you have synopses of the stories in the book, I can compare them to Weinberg’s.

   I seem to remember that “The Diamond of Jeru” was made into a film in the early 2000’s. Yes, I was right.

   From IMDB: http://akas.imdb.com/title/tt0282441/

   It says that the film is based on L’Amour’s novel, but you can’t really be sure about what Imdb says. It says however that the screen story was written by Beau L’Amour. Maybe this was an unproduced treatment Beau has found in his father’s archives. In that case it would be only sensible and polite to provide that info on a foreword or some such.

   You can add to the info Robert Teague already provided you with: “Secret of Silver Springs,” Range Riders Magazine, as by Jim Mayo, January 1950

   By the way, Robert Sampson has a pretty good article on L’Amour’s detective stories in Weinberg’s book. He makes the stories sound good.

                — Juri

       >>> My reply:

   Thanks, Juri, even if Weinberg’s book didn’t supply a lot more information. When I come across my copy of Off the Mangrove Coast again, I’ll see if I can’t supply the synopses you suggested.

   I was totally unaware that “The Diamond of Jeru” had been made into a movie. It was made for cable (USA Network) and is available on DVD. So far, though, all of the copies I’ve seen offered online have been very expensive, but I’ll keep looking. The movie starred Billy Zane, Paris Jefferson, and Keith Carradine, with Jackson Raine and Khoa Do. According to IMBD, it’s “the story of an American scientist and his wife who hire an ex-pat war veteran to act as a guide on a journey up an unchartered Borneo river in search of diamonds.” Reviewers on IMDB have mixed opinions about the movie, to say the least.

   By the way, there’s one synopsis right there.

   As for L’Amour’s detective stories, I enjoyed the one collection of them that I read quite a bit. On the other hand, once again there was nothing in them that knocked my socks off. I’m sure any reader of the detective pulps could come up with a selection of stories from any other pulp writer equally as good, if not better.

THE STREET WITH NO NAME. 1948, 20th Century Fox. Mark Stevens, Richard Widmark, Lloyd Nolan, Barbara Lawrence, John McIntire, Donald Buka, Joseph Pevney. Directed by William Keighley.

   As a sequel to The House on 92nd Street (Fox, 1945), this film repeats both the semi-documentary style and Lloyd Nolan as FBI agent George Briggs. Immediately after the film’s credit, the following notice appears on the screen:

   To obtain Mr. Hoover’s approval for the film, one supposes, the first fifteen minutes are dreadfully and drearily slow. With loud, stentorian music in the background, the audience is dramatically shown the technical advances and training background that agents of the FBI had at their disposal in their new post-war battle against crime.

   Mark Stevens, perhaps too good-looking for the role, plays undercover agent Gene Cordell as he tries to gain acceptance into the Alec Stiles gang. It is not until Alec Stiles makes an appearance that the movie begins to gain some footing – and you know who plays Stiles don’t you? You’ve seen the credits, if not the movie. Straight from his major debut in his star-making role as Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death, Richard Widmark.

   As the woman-hating, narcissistic and germophobic gang leader Alec Stiles, Widmark tones his portrayal down so that he is only a mere two hairs from lunacy, but they are thick hairs. Lloyd Nolan, whom we think from the beginning is going to be the star, has next to no part at all.

   It is on the streets of “Central City” where the action is, with John McIntire as Cordell’s mentor and backup agent Cy Gordon in the rooming house across the street, getting scruffier and shabbier by the minute, but providing Cordell his only protection.

   Playing nearly as important a role as Widmark is the aforementioned “street,” actually downtown Los Angeles at the time the movie was filmed, crammed with flop houses, pool halls, penny arcades, cheap restaurants, boxing emporiums, and dives of all sorts and kinds. Filmed largely at night, beginning as the bus rolls in with Cordell on it and getting off, it triggers a sense of 1940s big city sleaze as overpowering and as authentic as you can imagine. Deep down inside, you know that this is (was) as real as it gets.

   Noir? Yes, definitely, once the movie’s rid of its documentary trappings. Filmed with a superb sense of black and white, inventive camera angles and taking superb advantage of on-location shooting, this is one of the best views of how the inhabitants of Skid Row managed to exist, if not live, immediately after World War II.

   Surprisingly enough, the members of Styles’s gang still wear coats, ties and hats to most of their functions, including poker games, boxing matches, stick-ups, robberies and murders. There is also only one woman in the movie, Barbara Lawrence as Styles’s wife Judy, a cheap, sarcastic moll (even to Styles) if there ever was one and convincingly so, even if, as an actress, she was only 18 or 19 at the time.

   I think that there was a little too much violence in the ending, in the manufacturing warehouse filled with all sorts of strange-looking machinery, making for all sorts of terrific shots from a cinemaphotographer’s point of view. I don’t have the technical expertise to describe the latter. Take a look at Mike Grost’s website for that. If you’re interested in reading an in-depth analysis of the movie-making (and movie-watching) aspects of The Street with No Name, there is definitely the place to go.

   But, as I began to say, my opinion is that the police were a little too trigger-happy than they should have been. A little? A lot! There is more gunfire in this nifty low budget film noir than I can remember in any of the others I’ve ever seen, but of course there are many I haven’t. Nonetheless, if only the first fifteen minutes could be skipped: you’d have one of the best of them all.

ELIOT PATTISON – Bone Mountain.

St. Martin’s; trade paperback, May 2004. Hardcover: September 2002.

   I don’t know if you’re anything like me, but I’m pretty much intimidated by the sheer bulk of some of the books coming out today. Sometimes, as I’m looking through the stacks of books around here for something to read – and I don’t mean library stacks. I mean stacks – and if a book looks simply too hefty, too weighty, too long – you know what I mean – in terms of what I’m looking for at the time, I usually pass it by and go on to another.

   This happens more and more with fantasy epics, by the way, big thick books in series that go on and on forever, and how does one manage to keep track of the story, all of the characters, all of the various strands of the plot, unless you’re living it everyday, just as the author does, or has to, creating it, breathing it, playing scenes back, every free moment, his or her life taken over by nothing but.

   But I digress. As I was saying, I don’t recall precisely what the occasion was, but reading this particular book was the result of the decision made one day to give one the “big ones” a try. And it’s a big one, all right, over 400 pages of small print in an oversized trade paperback format. It’s also an introduction to a world that’s familiar to only a smattering of westerners: the land of Tibet, overrun and modernized by the Chinese in the world of today, or at least, under their rule, they’re trying their best to adapt.

   Pattison’s first book, The Skull Mantra, won the MWA’s Edgar award for the best first novel of 2000, and it introduced “disgraced ex-Beijing police inspector Shan Tao Yun” to the world of mystery fiction. (I’m quoting from the back cover here.) Bone Mountain is the third of his continuing adventures. Number two was Water Touching Stone, and newly out in hardcover is the fourth, Beautiful Ghosts.

   It took me two weeks to polish this one off, and I enjoyed every minute of it. You may have noticed that I have not mentioned anything about the plot, and the reason is that I’ve been putting it off, feeling myself not able to do justice to it.

   The candidate for the most obvious plot line, of which there are several, is that an idol (banned, of course, by the Chinese) is missing a stolen stone eye, and the band of Tibetans, along with one American cowboy (with diplomatic papers, but still a cowboy), with whom Inspector Shan is traveling has as their goal to replace it in its rightful spot in the Yapchi valley.

   Winslow, the disgraced diplomat, is also on the search for a missing female geologist, part of the oil venture that may soon displace the people of Yapchi valley, which is another essential thread of the tale.

   There are several murders to be solved and deaths to be explained, so that, yes, if you were wondering, this is indeed crime (and adventure) fiction.

   The real villain, however, is Beijing, and the Chinese government, intent on wiping out, destroying, annihilating an entire culture – that of traditional Tibet – and that, in the longer view, is the story that Pattison is telling, one story that’s now four books long.

   There is a sense of timelessness in the world he describes, in the provinces furthest from population centers, and there is along with it a dream-like quality of an ancient civilization that refuses to die in the face of overwhelming and dire adversity. More than once was I reminded of those epic works of fantasy I mentioned earlier, written by authors such as Tolkien and Robert Jordan, among others, but with the essence of reality about it – we do not really know how the story will end – behind the melancholy mask of tragedy.

   Not your usual detective story? Not by half!

ADDITIONAL COMMENT:  Here’s a news release that’s both relevant and of interest, I’m sure, if you’ve read this far…

         For National Release (regional counterparts) May 21, 2004:

   Eliot Pattison, writer of the acclaimed Inspector Shan series, has so upset authorities in China that they are periodically blocking access to his website within China. Pattison joins a long list of human rights activists who have been singled out by Beijing for censorship-but he is believed to be the only writer of fiction to be thus censored. Numerous readers in China report that, like a number of sites criticizing the Chinese government, Pattison’s site is often blocked by the central authorities.

   Pattison’s award-winning mysteries, set mostly in Tibet, incorporate the Chinese gulag for political prisoners and China’s dismantling of minority cultures into their plots. His books have been highly successful in introducing these issues to new audiences–human rights activists state that his novels capture the realities of China’s treatment of ethnic minorities better than most works of nonfiction. His works have been compared to those of Solzhenitsyn, whose books in an earlier generation brought much-needed attention to the Soviet gulag.

   As soon as it was released, Pattison’s first novel The Skull Mantra, became a popular black market item within China as its citizens realized the book explained aspects of their country their government would never speak about. Interest in his books surged after that novel won the prestigious Edgar Award-since then his four novels have been translated into twenty languages and have been adapted to radio drama in Europe. Some editors have suggested that he has created a whole new genre of “campaign thrillers” which construct mysteries around political messages.

   Pattison began traveling to China the month that relations between Washington and Beijing were normalized in 1980. On his many repeat visits he became increasingly appalled at the rigid police control of Tibetan temples and other ethnic centers. “After writing several nonfiction books I wanted to try my hand at writing mysteries,” Pattison explains, “and also very much wanted to tell the world about the struggle Tibetans and other minorities face trying to maintain their cultural identity. Writing this series became the perfect answer.” While angered by China’s blocking of his website, he is not surprised-“the list of websites deemed politically undesirable to Beijing numbers in the hundreds,” he notes. “Censorship is a way of life in China, and will have to be addressed if China is truly going to join the global community. At the end of the day, of course, it just underscores the points I make in my books.”

[UPDATE] 02-19-08.  There’s not always a reason for going back to my files and picking out a review to run here, but this time there is. This one was written almost four years ago, and unless I’m badly mistaken, no one’s seen it but me until now.

   There is now a fifth book in the series, Prayer of the Dragon, out just recently, and on his blog Detectives Without Borders, Peter Rozovsky reviews it and throws out the following question for discussion:

    “All this makes Shan Tao Yun more of an outsider than your average cop who’s impatient with his boss. For one thing, Shan’s outsider status is far more dangerous than that of most crime protagonists.

    “I’ll stop now and let you go read the books yourselves. […] While you’re on your way to the bookshop or library, ponder this question: Of all the outsider crime-fiction protagonists you know, who is the most outside, the most precarious, the most alienated? What makes him or her that way?”

   An interesting question, Peter. My money’s on Inspector Shan, but my knowledge of mysteries taking place all around the world is rather limited, regrettably so. There are some awfully dangerous places a detective can find him- or herself in. I’ll have to wait and see what your readers have to say.

BRUNO FISCHER – The Girl Between.

Gold Medal 1054. Paperback original; 1st printing, 1960.

   Here’s a pulp story that’s designed to tell you what really goes on inside the traditional smoke-filled room of small-time politics. To get onto the best-seller list, you have to aim a little higher, on the congressional level, at the very least, but [the] politics are dirtier, and the politicians even less further removed from racket bosses, in the realm of town and state government.

   Or so says Bruno Fischer, in this story of just such a [local] political boss. The father of his right-hand man, [leading protagonist] Curt Stone was a good guy squeezed out a long time ago. Two members of the opposition end up murdered, and one of their wives would make a handy scapegoat, if only she could be located. Other essential members of the cast are Maryann, the big man’s wife, who still feels the need to play around, and Hank, the throwback to another era, when brawn rather than brains was the more important requirement.

   Erle Stanley Gardner could have written parts of it. With calm, cool uncomplicated prose Fischer lets Stone dig himself in deeper and deeper, until he’s forced to choose sides once again. The reader is expected to pick up on an occasionally subtle plot twist, but you shouldn’t expect Fischer to reveal the killer quite so easily. The ending is pretty corny, and you probably even know what it is by now. Otherwise, I liked it fine. [B minus]

[UPDATE] 02-18-08. I liked to be elusive back when I wrote this, didn’t I? Or do I mean allusive? I added a couple of inserts and corrected one misspelled word, but it didn’t help. I have no idea what the ending is, except that I assume it turned out well, and a little soapy. Or do I mean soupy? No, I don’t think so.

   Here’s a complete list of Bruno Fischer’s work for Gold Medal. The Girl Between was the last book he wrote until The Evil Days in 1974, about which more later. Any of these is going to be worth reading. I guarantee it.

      House of Flesh. Gold Medal 123, 1950.
      The Lady Kills. Gold Medal 148, 1951.

      Fools Walk In. Gold Medal 209, 1951.
      The Fast Buck. Gold Medal 270, November 1952.
      Run for Your Life. Gold Medal 343, October 1953.

      So Wicked My Love. Gold Medal 437, October 1954.
      Knee-Deep in Death. Gold Medal 591, July 1956.
      Murder in the Raw. Gold Medal 694, August 1957.

      The Lustful Ape. Gold Medal 901, July 1959; previously published as by Russell Gray (Lion 38, August 1950)
      Second-Hand Nude. Gold Medal 928, October 1959.
      The Girl Between. Gold Medal 1054, November 1960.

   I’ll set up a link as well, but here below is Fischer’s mini-biography, as Victor Berch, Bill Pronzini and I wrote it in connection with the three books he wrote for Ziff Davis’s line of Fingerprint Mysteries. (In keeping with the covers I’ve already used, however, I’ll use scans of various paperback editions instead of the hardcovers. I hope you don’t mind.)

      The Pigskin Bag, 1946
      More Deaths Than One, 1947 [ PI Ben Helm]
      The Bleeding Scissors, 1948

   Before turning to writing for the pulp magazines in 1936, Bruno Fischer, born in Germany in 1908, held a variety of other jobs after high school: he was a sports reporter, rewrite man and police reporter for a Long Island newspaper, he was a truck driver and chauffeur, and he did book reviews and political columns for New Republic and other similar magazines. (The entire Fischer family emigrated to the US in 1913.)

   Once established in the pulp field, however, Fischer became a full-time writer, producing hundreds of mystery, detective, and weird menace stories for just about every magazine under the sun, using both his own name and the pseudonymous Russell Gray.

   Fischer’s first hardcover mystery novel, So Much Blood, was published by Greystone Press in 1939. His primary series character, medium-boiled private eye Ben Helm, first appeared in The Dead Men Grin (McKay, 1945). Helm, who was married and was perhaps as much a criminologist as he was a PI, ended up in a total of six mystery adventures in hardcover before he was through.

   Fischer left the pulps and hardcover fiction behind in the early 1950s, and much of his reputation among collectors today rests on the large number of original crime novels he began doing then for Gold Medal. After 1969 he gave up writing to assume the positions of executive editor of Macmillan’s Collier Books and education editor of the Arco Publishing Company, both of which he held for over a decade.

   As for Fischer’s books in the Fingerprint series, The Pigskin Bag is a finely crafted suspense novel about a man who finds the eponymous bag in his garage, it having belonged to a man who died in an accident witnessed by his wife. Before he can take the bag to the police, it is stolen and a murdered man left in its place in the garage. Reviews were uniformly excellent. Will Cuppy in the Saturday Review, for example, called it “exciting, fast-moving, with some spine-tingling moments.”

   The Bleeding Scissors is another suspense novel, this one involving a man whose wife suddenly and inexplicably turns up missing, a New York City play called “The Virgin Mistress,” an apparent hit-and-run death, and a villainous private detective (not “Nameless”).

   More Deaths Than One, the middle entry among Fischer’s Ziff-Davis mysteries, is Bill’s own favorite among the three. This one is an unusual detective story told in alternating first-person viewpoints among six principal characters, one of whom is Ben Helm, and another one of whom is the cleverly and fairly concealed murderer of a womanizing artist in a small upstate New York town.

   Fischer was particularly good at drawing believable characters whose actions and motivations are psychologically sound, an ability he demonstrated to good advantage in More Deaths Than One, and equally so in The Evil Days, his final work of crime fiction (Random House, 1974). Failing eyesight regrettably prevented Fischer from doing others, as he had planned. He died in 1992.