MATT STUART – Edge of the Desert

Lancer 72-117, paperback original, May 1966. 2nd printing, Lancer 73-635, as Lady of Battle Mountain, July 1967; 3rd printing, Lancer 73-833, as Edge of the Desert, April 1969.

   I can find covers of the first and third printings, but not of the second, which itself is very difficult to find. The only two copies which surfaced on a recent Internet search were on Amazon, and nowhere else.

   But please forgive me. Is this a western? You’re asking, and the answer is yes. I’ve never read westerns as often as I have mysteries, but I started reading them in the 1950s – I remember buying a copy of King Colt by Luke Short when I was 14 and thinking it was terrific — and I’ve never quite stopped.

   And whether or not they’re included in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV – Al generally says no unless there’s a leading character who’s actually a detective and involved in solving a case – I have no compunction about reviewing them here. Almost every western has a crime component of some kind, and if they don’t, I probably don’t read them. Rustling, gunfighting, horse thievery, burning out homesteaders, it’s all against the law, and therefore – when written up in book form – crime fiction.

   To tell you the truth, though, and I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, the crime component in this book is rather small. But it’s the book I started while taking a short leave of absence from the rather long mystery novel I was otherwise involved with, finishing it in a couple of evenings’ worth of reading time, and here it is.

   But first, worth a mention, I think, is that the author, Matt Stuart, was also better known (to western readers of the 60s and 70s) as L. P. Holmes (1895-1988), who began by writing for the pulp magazines in 1925. His first book appeared in 1935, but the bulk of his career as a novel writer – about 50 of them in all – came between 1949 and 1975.

   I daren’t try to generalize too much from Edge of the Desert, however, as what kind of writer he was, as I think the book is rather unusual – a western in which a woman plays the leading role, and a woman from the East, at that.

   Sherry Gault never knew her uncle very well, having met him only once when she was very young, but when he died and left her his ranch out West, she thought she owed it too him at least to visit it, even though his lawyer had passed on to her a very generous offer for her new inheritance.

   Not so. The lawyer’s a crook, and so is the powerful cattle baron who made the offer, not to mention the local sheriff, who’s solidly in the pocket of the latter. The foreman of the ranch, who meets her off the train, and the other hands – her newly gained employees – are on her side, however, all but one, and together they eventually prevail.

   A very slim story, with every potentially interesting twist of the plot into other directions never quite followed up on. But in its own way, with a manifest love of the open sky and wide open country apparent at every turn of the page, as Sherry finds herself more and more at home on Clear Creek ranch, it’s difficult to speak more badly of the tale than that. The ending is as homespun and corny as you can very well imagine, or at least that’s what I’d thought too if it hadn’t come straight from the heart.

   I’m guessing, therefore, if I dare, but I’m going to say that the rest of L. P. Holmes’s western fiction is going to be very much in this same traditional vein, if not as solidly romantic as this one.

DORIS MILES DISNEY – Room for Murder

Macfadden 75-448; paperback, 2nd printing, October 1971; 1st printing, Macfadden 60-392, April 1969. First Edition: Doubleday/Crime Club, 1955.

   Explain this to me, if you can. Doris Miles Disney, while very popular in her day – and I’ll get back to that in a minute – and I haven’t checked to see how true this is for her other books, but at least the one I have here in my hand has all but vanished from the Internet marketplace. I find only six copies for sale, including none of the hardcover edition, ranging in price from $16.81, including shipping, to $34.49. The cheapest one, by the way, will be coming from the UK, if you were to order it.

    I don’t know whether it’s low supply or high demand, but what on earth is going on? It’s a good book, but by no stretch of the imagination is it a great one. It’s also very much not typical of books being written today, and that’s something else I’ve have to get back to.

   But in terms of describing Mrs. Disney’s popularity, here’s a list of her books, as taken from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

    Did you spot the book from Putnam in there? I don’t know how or why that happened. It otherwise seems like a long and production relationship with Doubleday, one that lasted for nearly 35 years.

    For some basic biographical data, one online source says briefly of the author:

Doris Miles Disney (22 Dec 1907-9 Mar 1976) insurance employee, social agency publicist.

   For the long version, you can learn more here. (This webpage comes from doing a search in Google books, so you may have to repeat the search.) If you were to have gathered from the locale of many of her stories that she may have been from Connecticut, you would have been correct. She was born in Glastonbury, two towns over from me.

   Of her series characters, Jim O’Neill is a Connecticut county detective; Jeff DiMarco is an insurance investigator; and David Madden is a US postal inspector. From all accounts, Mrs. Disney began her career writing traditional detective stories, but began writing suspense thrillers that grew progressively darker as the years went on. Even so, a dose of comedy could often be found in her mysteries as well.

   Case in point, the book in hand, the only one of the above that I’ve read in, say, 30 years or so, making it the only one I can talk about with more than vague generalities. I won’t say I laughed out loud while reading it, but if intermittent chuckling counts, this is a funny book. There are some noirish qualities to it as well – by which I do not mean to say hard-boiled in any way, shape or form – far from it – but behind the walls of the rooming house where the book is centered there’s a definite sense of uneasiness that never quite goes away.

   Running the rooming house are two spinster sisters named Aggie and Kate, Irish through and through, and who argue and quarrel with each other nearly all day long, or at least whenever they’re in the same room together. Nonetheless, having spent their lives together so far, the reader can tell that they could never live apart. Their niece Teresa has lived with the two women for most of her life and is now of marriageable age, but to her aunts’ ever growing frustration, she shows no signs of finding a suitable man to marry, or wishing to.

   There are other relatives, and of course there are the boarders, some of them long-term and some relatively new, and all have their own particular eccentricities, shall we say. It is one of the more recent roomers who is found dead after coming home after what appears to have been a long night of drinking. Suicide is the verdict of the local (Somerset, Connecticut) police department. Aggie, who reads true crime magazines, is not so sure, and surprisingly enough, ventures out on a long trip from home alone to prove it.

    I have not mentioned Dennis Callahan yet. He is one of the policeman called to the scene of the roomer’s death, and while he is there, he and Teresa immediately catch each other’s eye, much to the two sister’s displeasure. A mere policeman, he is, even though he has a solid Irish name – and there’s a story behind that as well.

   The case itself is complicated, and unfortunately, to my own personal regret, most of the detection takes place offstage. On the other hand, Mrs. Disney doesn’t pull any punches. As cozy and light as the banter in the rooming house is, there is a villain that is as nasty as any you will find in many other much tougher venues. It’s a clever mix that I found both unusual and, well, delightful.

   Ian Covell has continued his attempts to track down some of the more obscure appearances of author Charles Runyon in print, adding to the bibliography established for him a few weeks ago on this blog. With the assistance of Victor Berch and Charles himself, a number of additional stories have been located and/or confirmed.

   These additions won’t be added to the blog version, however. I’ve set up a permanent webpage for the bibliography on the main M*F website, and this will be the “official” version, as complete as it is at the moment, and as it will be whenever any additional corrections are found.

   First, as relayed from Victor Berch to Ian and on to me:

   This information was then sent on to Charles, who replied:

  Hi Steve

   I’ve just found your site — didn’t know about it before, but it’s very interesting. I don’t think my father Frederic Goldsmith ever had as much attention as a writer in real life.

   I incorrectly spelled my grandfather’s name when writing to Al Hubin. He was known as Igee [Goldsmith], but his first name was Isidor (not Isadore). It’s possible I picked up this mistake from IMDB, which has the same mistake.

   Otherwise, I thought you might like to hear this cute story. Although I never knew Igee, I did know Vera Caspary [his second wife] and would visit her whenever I was in New York. We wrote quite a few letters.

   When she died I was sorry not to have anything of hers, so I contacted her executors asking for something, a nice copy of one her books for example (since I knew she had many shelves full of first editions etc.) But I was sent a dull meaningless book club edition of Laura which didn’t even have a dust jacket, as if I’d been just a fan.

   Two months ago, I was clearing out the house of my mother, Barbara, (Frederic Goldsmith’s first wife) after she died, and was browsing through her books. There was very little of interest there, but I did, by chance, pull out a faded hardback, with no cover, to look at it more carefully. It turned out to be one of Vera’s books — Thelma — and inside it had been inscribed “For Barbara and Freddie and Paul – in love – Vera – October 1952,” i.e. just a few months after I was born.

   It made my heart sing.

PS:  There’s quite a lot of information about Vera in her autobiography The Secrets of Grown-ups.

   You probably won’t recognize Rod MacLeish, nephew of poet Archibald MacLeish and noted NPR commentator who died in 2006, as having written a novel that was nominated for an Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America, but as it happens, he did.

   Here’s his complete entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, only slightly expanded:

   MacLEISH, RODERICK (1926-2006 )
      * The Man Who Wasn’t There (n.) Random House, hc, 1976; Fawcett Crest, pb, 1977 [Washington, D.C.]
      * Carnaby Rex (n.) Weidenfeld, UK, 1976; See: The Man Who Wasn’t There (Random House,1976)
      * Crossing at Ivalo (n.) Little Brown, hc, 1990, as by Rod MacLeish. Zebra, pb, 1992.

   In case you may be wondering, it was the latter that caught the eye of the MWA. One online seller describes it thusly: “The principal architect of the Soviet ‘Star Wars’ system is kidnapped and his abductors offer him for sale to the Soviets and Americans. The Russians don’t want anyone to have him and the Americans want to learn all that he knows.”

   His earlier book having crime-related components, The Man Who Wasn’t There, is cryptically described by one seller thusly: “Millionaire film star, claiming to be his twin, reads of his death.” A second synopsis provided by another seller, probably from the back of the book itself, says: “From the quiet elegance of Georgetown to Hollywood and Paris, this novel moves inexorably toward the innermost recesses of a man’s mind. The suspense builds to a terrifying pitch in a climactic scene – a scene no reader will soon forget.”

   Another book, this one with no criminous overtones, is A Time of Fear (Viking Press, 1958), the “story of a small town in the way of development.” Yet another, a science fiction fantasy thriller, is Prince Ombra (Congdon & Weed, hc, 1982; Tor, pb, 1983) in which the title character, “Prince Ombra is the lord of every mortal nightmare. He has appeared in the world a thousand times, and the rememberers have given him a thousand names – Goliath, the murderous Philistine; Mordred, enemy of Camelot. The heroes of legend have offered their lives in confrontation with the evil one. Among them have been David and Arthur, king of the Celts.”

   Or in other words, a book about a boy with magic powers in modern-day New England. During his journalist days, Mr. MacLeish also wrote a non-fiction book, The Sun Stood Still, about the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

   According to an National Public Radio [NPR] tribute to one of their long-time contributors:

LAWRENCE BLOCK – Lucky at Cards

Hard Case Crime; paperback reprint, Feb 2007. First published as The Sex Shuffle, by Sheldon Lord; Beacon B757x, paperback original, 1964.

   Here’s a crackerjack of a crime novel published in 1964 that has been a loosely kept secret, not even appearing in Allen J. Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV until now, which is when the folks at Hard Case Crime have essentially let the entire world know about it. Everyone, that is, but a small handful of diehard collectors who delve into and devour what are called the “sleaze” books in the trade, Beacon being one of the better and more well known providers of the same.

   Not that the “sex scenes” in Beacon’s output are anything near torrid, given today’s standards, and The Sex Shuffle, if anything, is tamer than most. On the other hand, if you believe the quality of the writing in the Beacon books is anything like that of The Sex Shuffle, you’d be fairly well mistaken. They were written quickly for the most part, mostly by men who had one eye on the market and other on their landlord, whenever the rent was due — sometimes with hidden talent but far more often, what you read was what you got.

   Nor do I think searching out Sheldon Lord’s books in general would necessarily be a worthwhile pursuit, unless you are one of those aforementioned diehard collectors, or this book persuades you to become one. An article in Books Are Everything, which I have not seen, is reported to have stated that Block was “the first user of the Sheldon Lord pseudonym, followed by Hal Dresner, followed by Milo Perichitch.” There are also claims that say that Donald Westlake was one of the writers behind Sheldon Lord, but since this statement seems to have been questioned immediately by others, you’d better not rely very much on my saying so.

   In any case, what you have here, whatever its lineage may have been, is a near perfect low-level novel of crime and lust and greed and comeuppance and all of the other noir-related themes you can think of, written so smoothly that its 220 pages can be read in an hour, without once coming up for air.

   Story: a professional cardshark is stuck in a two-bit town while recuperating from his last scrape with — not the law — but with real gamblers in a real game and of course there was a woman at the root of it. Quoting from page 19:

   Thus beginning the book with this pair of introductory lines:

   The town isn’t mentioned, or if it is, I missed it, and even so I’d rather think of it as one of those typical small Midwestern towns of the sixties that was still living in the fifties at the time, with small town businesses and small town businessmen and small town wives…

   Except for one of them. From page 27, and an even longer quote this time. The dentist has invited Bill Maynard to a friendly small town poker game:

   This is one of those moments when the clock simply stops ticking, in other words. Her name is Joyce, and it turns out that she has a sharp eye out for a man who’s (too) good at cards. One thing leads to another, as things like this happen to do, and the husband is in the way. Bill Maynard has a plan, an outrageous plan, and even when you read it for the first time, it sounds outrageous but you go along with it, simply because Bill Maynard knows his plan will work.

   It doesn’t involve murder, not quite, or maybe it does, in a way, and of course it doesn’t work. Not at least, the way that Bill Maynard thinks it will. Did I mention that there is also a “good girl” in this story, a grade school teacher named Barbara who thinks that maybe she wants a bad man? Bill thinks she deserves a house and kids, and says good-bye. She’s not in the plan.

   What is the plan, how is it supposed to work, why doesn’t it work, and what it is with women who are attracted to bad men? Read the book, and you will learn.

   It does go a little over the top — a small misstep once or twice somewhere near the end — but all in all, it is the truth: about bad men (and bad women, for that matter) and life in small towns and a small chunk of our past, all in an hour’s reading. I kid you not.

A. WHATOFF ALLEN – Exit an Admiral

Sampson Low; hardcover. No date stated, but given as 1938 in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.

   And the above seems to be the sum total knowledge of Mr. Allen and his single work of detective fiction, unless you include an Internet obituary of one David Whatoff Allen, BA, 22 May 1997; commoner 1936-39. Aged 79. Perhaps a relative?     [See also the FOLLOWUP below.]

   In terms of other general information about the family, in this country (US) there was (presumably) a family of Whatoffs in Oklahoma, five members of which died between 1987 and 1993. [From Social Security records.] In the UK there is a Whatoff Lodge Farm in (I belive) Leicestershire where camping sites are available.

    Using Google, even though it’s an uncommon name, there are other references to Whatoff to be found, so perhaps if one wanted, the author could be traced, given a little more persistence, ingenuity and luck.

    And you may need the same (persistence, ingenuity and luck) if you were to try to find a copy of this book. I obtained mine on eBay, a winning bid taken purely as a shot in the dark, as I had no idea what kind of crime fiction the book might turn out to be. There are no copies available on the Internet, for example, at the present time. (Right now my book searching website of choice is addall.com. The results on bookfinder.com are organized better, but since ABE took them over, they seem to miss a lot of books that addall finds.)

    But I digress. As a detective novel, Exit an Admiral leaves a certain amount to be desired, but it is also crammed full of clues, derring-do, more clues (a house full of them), mistaken identities, false trails, even more evidence and other clues, and I tell you up front, this was an extreme pleasure to read. (Not to mention the sinister satisfaction that one sometimes feels when one knows one is reading a book that no one else has in over 50 years perhaps — or am I deluding myself with this? — nor perhaps no one else will in another 50 years.)

    I do tell you this. If you do see a copy for sale anywhere, make sure you grab it up immediately. If I can’t persuade you to read it, and I am about to do my best, you can consider this: that I will have persuaded someone else that they desperately want to read it, and they will pay almost anything for the opportunity.

    In Chapter I we meet Ivor Duke, young barrister and a well-known amateur sleuth of the type that England was filled with in 1938. His assistant (major domo), a former boxer named Pug Jordan, is with him in a car, and the story of how they met is told.

    In Chapter II Duke stops along the highway, rather deserted, to come to the aid of young woman standing next to a car with a decidedly flat tyre. She resists his assistance, he allows her to resist, but persists long enough to see a man in the back seat who looks decidedly dead. She holds a revolver on him, and that is when the lights go out, as someone has snuck up on him from behind. (Pug remains asleep in Duke’s car throughout the incident.)

   Next day. In Chapter III Duke is visited by Inspector Jenner at home and is told about the mysterious murder of a retired admiral in his home, the same night and in the (totally coincidentally) same area as Duke’s own strange encounter. Not the same dead man, however, much to Duke’s surprise.

    But two bodies in the same evening and in the same vicinity? Are the cases connected? Apparently not, but we (the reader) know better, and in spite of some doubts along the way, so does Duke.

    Here’s a quote from the beginning of Chapter III, however, describing Duke on the morning after, and before the visit from Inspector Jenner:

   Here’s where you and I may go our separate ways, if I were to tell you that this is my kind of writing and it happens not to be yours. And at least in the early going, the author is making it abundantly clear what sort of approach he plans to take with the story.

   What the paragraph above also makes clear is that this is not Duke’s first brush with strange events occurring at two o’clock in the morning, which is reinforced with some suitably appropriate banter soon thereafter with Jenner about how, when Scotland Yard is baffled, they come along to see Ivor Duke.

    Now this was in 1938, and in 1938, whether true in real life or not, amateur assistants to Scotland Yard in detective fiction were allowed to examine the premises where the dead man’s body was found, picking up clues and other evidence, sometimes revealing what they find to the reader, and sometimes not, carelessly forgetting to do so until such time when a careful exposition is more likely to impress the reader with their various reasonings and conclusions.

   One can easily forgive Mr. Allen for merely going along with the trend. Here’s a quote from page 101 which will describe what Ivor Duke soon finds himself up to his waist in, immediately after interviewing an elderly gent named Huggett, whose horse and buggy were nearly run off the road on the same night as the murder, but by another car altogether:

   There is also a host of strange and mysterious coincidences that are, I confess, exceeding frustrating, coincidences being the primary means of support for many a weaker detective fiction writer, but do not despair, all is explained, as well as the even stranger behavior of the dead man’s daughter on page 112.

    While this is a thoroughly solid detective story, once one gets over some of the shakier parts, it ends in a sudden burst of activity found in only the best thrillers of the day, followed by the revelations suggested above in which all is marvelously and beautifully explained.

    One is also left with the hope of another detective thriller from the pen or typewriter of A. Whatoff Allen, but for whatever reason, alas, such a one was not to be.

FOLLOWUP. I did hear from one fellow twice by email in one evening who told me he was a relative of the author and passed along some interesting pieces of information about him. I’ve not heard back from this fellow, though, and posting this review of Exit an Admiral here on the blog is serving as a reminder to me that perhaps I should try getting in touch again. More, when I learn more, as always.

   Two authors who have passed away not too long ago seem to have escaped notice in the world of mystery fiction, but not to the larger universe we also live in. Both have only one book included in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, who recently came across the deaths of each.

   First is Pat Maloney, Sr., whose entry in CFIV previously looked like this:

      MALONEY, PAT, Sr. (c1926- ); Texas trial lawyer from San Antonio.

         * Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor (Presidio, 1998, hc) [Texas]

   Saying that Mr. Maloney was a trial lawyer is perhaps the understatement of the year, so far. Extracted from his obituary which appeared in the Washington Post for September 21, 2005, is the following:

   To complete his updated entry in CFIV, Mr. Maloney was born August 9, 1924.

   Another author whose death has been recently noted is Arthur Maimane. His entry in CFIV consists of just one title as well:

      MAIMANE, ARTHUR (1932- ); A black South African.

         * Victims (Allison, 1976, hc) [South Africa; 1950s]

   One title, but the overall scheme of things, an important one. Born October 12, 1932, his full name was John Arthur Mogale Maimane. He died in London, June 28, 2005. Taken from his obituary in The Independent (London) is a short description of his early working career:

   His book Victims, winner of the English Academy of South Africa’s Pringle Award for Creative Writing in 1978, was banned in South Africa at the time of its publication but finally appeared there under the title Hate No More, Kwela Books, 2000.

   An online description of the book says of it:

   Another, more detailed obituary appears online here, this one from The Guardian.

RANDALL PARRISH – The Case and the Girl

Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1922. A. L. Burt, hc reprint, n.d. Paul (UK), hc, 1923.

   Captain Matthew West has just been honourably discharged after twice being wounded during World War I. Feeling restless and not yet ready to return to civilian work, while browsing the newspaper at his club he decides to answer a personal ad running thus

   “Wanted: Young man of education and daring for service involving some personal peril. Good pay, and unusual reward if successful. May have to leave city. Purpose disclosed only in personal interview.”

   Instructed to bring his evening clothes — and a good job he has them! — he is soon off to a rendezvous with orphaned heiress Natalie Coolidge. She does not explain what task she requires him to undertake but Captain West agrees to help her even so, and is whirled off to the family mansion, where he is astonished to be introduced to the house party as her fiance. One of the guests is Natalie’s uncle and guardian Percival Coolidge. The two men dislike each other on sight – in fact, Uncle Percy accuses West of being a fortune hunter, the cad.

   Next morning the gallant captain has a private chat with Natalie and learns someone is impersonating her. However, nobody believes her because the responsible party looks so like her she fools even Natalie’s friends, not to mention the servants and bank clerks who know her well.

   Is Natalie telling the truth, mistaken, or demented? Despite doubts at times, West agrees to try to solve the mystery. There are a couple of odd happenings, statements made don’t quite check out, and then a death occurs and West is plunged into an adventure with enough twists and turns to make a scriptwriter swoon. The detective work is partly deductive and partly wearing out shoe leather and when it comes to action, West usually wipes the floor with his opponents, yet in a manner showing he is not a super hero.

   My verdict: Apart from the occasionally annoying fact that Captain West is a bit slow on the uptake at times, this was a rollicking read and keeps the interest to the end. I particularly admired a sequence in which West and Natalie are trapped in…but no, I will not ruin the suspense, although I will say it gave me the creeping heeby jeebies.

      Etext: http://www.gutenberg.org

RANDALL PARRISH (1858-1923) – A Partial Bibliography

● Crime Fiction  (Thanks to Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.)

● Titles available online, including non-mystery fiction:

* Beth Norvell: A Romance of the West

* Bob Hampton of Placer
* The Case and the Girl
* The Devil’s Own: A Romance of the Black Hawk War
* Gordon Craig: Soldier of Fortune
* Keith of the Border
* Love under Fire
* Molly McDonald: A Tale of the Old Frontier
* My Lady of Doubt
* My Lady of the North
* Prisoners of Chance: The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, through His Love for a Lady of France
* The Strange Case of Cavendish
* When Wilderness Was King: A Tale of the Illinois Country

* Wolves of the Sea: Being a Tale of the Colonies from the Manuscript of One Geoffry Carlyle, Seaman, Narrating Certain Strange Adventures Which Befell Him Aboard the Pirate Craft “Namur”

● Shorter fiction:   (Thanks to The FictionMags Index.)

● Three of his novels and stories have been adapted into film:   (Thanks to IMBD.)

   As a followup to an earlier discussion about the movie version of The Big Sleep here on the Mystery*File blog:

   At this rate, it won’t be long before the entire movie is up on YouTube. Thanks to Jeff Pierce, head man at The Rap Sheet, for getting me started in looking.