There are musical performances so unique as to be one of a kind. Take this one, for example:

GSO = Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.

DENNIS WHEATLEY – The Haunting of Toby Jugg. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1948. Bantam, US, paperback, 1972. Several paperback editions have been published. TV film: BBC Four, UK, as The Haunted Airman, with Robert Pattinson as Toby Jugg.

   I wuz had.

   I mean there I was, all alone in the Big city and looking for some Halloween reading. I’d heard of Dennis Wheatley, and the cover of the Arrow paperback suckered me in good & proper. Then too, the story seemed pretty good at first, if a little long at 352 pages. So I settled myself in for a chilling tale of things Satanic, little suspecting….

   Haunting is one of those books written as a series of journal entries, here by the eponymous Toby Jugg, an RAF flyer (this is set in 1943) recovering from war wounds that left him unable to walk. He’s also the heir to several million pounds and an industrial empire, due to inherit when he turns twenty-one in a few weeks, and he’s convalescing in one of the family castles, far from the madding bombs – and contact with society—under the watchful eye of Helmuth, a trusted family friend.

   And oh yes: as the story opens there’s a giant spider outside his window trying to get in.

   Wheatley sets this up capably, with Toby giving updates on the spider’s appearances and the reactions of Helmuth and the staff specially hired to look after him. We very quickly come to suspect he’s being gaslighted, and I won’t be giving anything away to say that he is—but there’s more to it than that. Something implacably evil has plans for Toby that go well beyond giant spiders at the window.

   With all that going for it, >Haunting coulda been a contender. Only it ain’t.

   The chief problem is Wheatley’s repetitive plotting. Time and again Toby comes up with a plan to thwart his persecutors, gets things rolling, comes close to success but… but we still have all those pages to fill so his efforts get frustrated with metronomic regularity. Once or twice I could have handled this, but after the fourth or fifth failure, and 200+ pages to go, I began to wonder if someone was trying to drive both of us mad.

   Another thing: Maybe it sounds inconsistent to accept giant spiders and Satanic curses, then gripe about the story being unrealistic, but when Toby masters the art of Hypnotism and bends the unwilling and unsuspecting to his will just by eye contact, I felt like Wheatley must be kidding us. And when he forcibly hypnotizes someone by wrestling them to the ground and holding their eyes open, I devoutly wished he were kidding. Only he ain’t.

   There’s also a strong current of Anti-Semitism here. “Anti-Semitism” is a term that gets entirely too much play these days, but Wheatley’s story posits that Jews, having killed Christ, will think small potatoes of serving Satan, turning Communist, bringing down the Government, and ushering in a Satanocracy. There’s even a racial slur, when Toby observes that a character with a tinge of Jewish blood can’t properly wear the clothes of an English Squire. Readers of vintage fiction like this should be prepared to overlook the attitudes of a different time, particularly toward minorities, but this taxed my tolerance for intolerance.

   But I hung on to the end, buoyed, I must admit, by Wheatley’s gift for tension. And as the odds stacked up against Toby, and he worked even harder to plot an escape, I became emotionally invested in just how he would do it.

   Came the dawn, and I realized what a fool I had been. Betrayed again by a smooth line and my own weakness, I finally got to the dramatic climax and found it the most blatantly stage-managed bit of deus ex machina claptrap I have ever read. I — literally, and without exaggeration — flung it across the room and regretted the squander of my precious youth on such drivel.

   Steve, should I tell them about it? I’ll let you decide. We can either end it here with me waving readers away from this thing, or insert a SPOILER ALERT! And go on. In either case, they have been warned!

   Surrounded by Satanists and menaced by a spider the size of a St Bernard, Toby Prays to God for help. And God answers. Suddenly Toby can walk again. And he has some mystical power that disintegrates the Spider. The Satanists are momentarily cowed by this display of Holy capabilities, but they rally to a counter-attack, driven on by their own greed and fear of demonic retribution. And just at that moment, another inmate who has been tunneling out in secret, hits the lake on the estate, and water gushes in, drowning the godless and sparing our hero.

   For this I came three hundred and fifty pages??

DONALD ZOCHERT – Another Weeping Woman. Nick Caine #1. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, hardcover, 1980. No paperback edition.

   It took longer than it should have, but it finally came t me. What the first few chapters of this book read like is what the old radio program Pat Novak, for Hire sounded like. Maybe you remember it. Jack Webb played the title role, a tough, world-weary man-for-all-jobs kind of guy who keeps finding himself in a peck of trouble, mostly of the murder variety.

   The narrator of this tale is named Nick Caine, a man whose background is never completely revealed, but that’s the sort of person he is, and that’s the kind of tough, taciturn story he stumbles into.

   As you read it, you’ll find it mellowing somewhat, into the laid-back, weather-beaten and melancholy mode thathas recently epitomized Rocky Mountain mystery fiction. The scene flickers incessantly back an forth between Denver and the wilderness country of Montana, save for one brief interlude taking place in one of the all-white fortresses that find themselves surrounded by the no-man’s land of urban Chicago.

   It all begins with a dead girl, a girl shot before a grizzly got to her, a girl dead before the bullet reached her brain. Nick Caine picks up the search for her killer, and all he finds are memories, a mother’s heartbreaks, and a continuing sequence of death by violence. Caine has been drifting for a year or more before being persuaded into taking the case. He has been out of action for too long, and his reflexes are slow.

   And at times the story feels as though it is drifting as well. The ending is overdone, as if intent on stifling itself on a morass of bad melodrama. But before the, well, the better hard-boiled detective novel is built on nuances and subtle shades of meaning, not wholly on fast-paced action, and so if that’s the sort of literature that catches your attention, most of what goes before should be exactly what you’re looking for.

UPDATE:   There was only one more Nick Caine novel, that being The Man of Glass (Holt. 1982). Donald Zochert also wrote one earlier work of crime fiction, Murder in the Hellfire Club (Holt, 1978), a historical mystery taking place in London into the mid-1700s.

A track from saxophonist Roxy Coss’s 2019 album Quintet:

RUSSELL THORNDYKE – The Amazing Quest of Doctor Syn. Doctor Syn #5. Rich & Cowan, UK, hardcover, 1938. Arrow, UK, paperback, 1964. Black Curtain Press, US, paperback, 2013.

   Still sends a shiver down the spine on a cold wet night, doesn’t it? Russell Thorndyke was a contemporary of John Buchan, and like him an admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, and his tales of the honorable pirate Captain Clegg, who with his band of men sought protection on Romney Marsh where the Captain, in the guise of meek and kindly 18th Century vicar Doctor Christopher Syn, supervises the going market in smuggling along England’s wild Western coastline, have been around for decades even fairly recently on BBC radio.

   The British have always liked their gentlemen heroes with a bit of larceny in their heart, from Robin Hood to Raffles and the Saint. Doctor Syn is in that same cool-headed, roguish, ruthless, and charming company. Captain Clegg never murdered, but he did execute, as does his second incarnation.

   Doctor Syn had a lively career for a quiet vicar. He featured in seven popular novels by Thorndyke, then in Dr. Syn (1936), a feature film starring George Arliss (to whom this book is dedicated) as both he and his ragged and tattered alter ego, the Scarecrow, on his steed Gehenna). That was followed by radio adaptations of the books, a revival by Hammer (Night Creatures, 1962), films with Peter Cushing (as the Rev. Dr. Blyss) in the role of the Scarecrow, and most famously on television on The Wonderful World of Disney, played by Patrick McGoohan, where Doctor Syn protected his flock from the vicious excise man and the British Navy’s Press gangs while making a good profit on smuggled French brandy and foiling the wreckers who preyed on unsuspecting seamen in The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh.

   The Amazing Quest of Doctor Syn is the fifth novel in the seven novel series, and as seen above, opens with a typically atmospheric introduction to the Scarecrow and his men, informing us “For years he had terrorized the level lands reclaimed from the sea, which stretch from Sandgate to Sussex border.” With agents as far away as London the good Doctor has an impressive spy service protecting him from every possible avenue.

   Of course nothing is perfect, as the good Doctor is about to find out.

   Only two men know the Scarecrow’s secret, Jimmy Bone the Highwayman who sometimes rides in the Doctor’s place so he can be in two places at once, and the rat-like but stalwart Mipps, sexton of the Doctor’s Dymchurch-under-the-Wall parish, where he also rides as the Scarecrow’s second-in-command, Hellspite, so the Scarecrow’s secrets are safe, but there are other threats to a man with the Doctor’s history.

   A mysterious Welshman has arrived in Dymchurch with a message for Doctor Syn. The Doctor and the Welshman are the last survivors of a Tontine (that favorite device of Victorian melodrama), joint inheritors of a vast fortune, but nothing is ever that simple in the good vicar’s world. The Welshman has been sent by his landlord in Wales, Tarroc Dolgenny (“He has made his name in North Wales, and I may add he will make it even bigger in hell.”), a smuggler who plans to murder Doctor Syn, see the fortune paid to the Welshman, and then kill him for the money by marrying the pretty niece who would inherit the fortune, then once the money is in his hands murder the girl as well.

   But Tarroc Dolgenny “A dangerous man.” hasn’t counted on crossing swords with the infamous Captain Clegg, much less the spectre of the Marshes, so Doctor Syn is off to Wales to pit himself against a villain of the first order, informing the Welsh lawyer Jones, “I might be dangerous too. In fact, I rather think I shall be if I ever meet this man.”

   First off, a bit of business at home takes precedent, rescuing Jimmy Bone from the gallows and dealing out a bit of justice to a cruel and corrupt lawman, but then the Vicar of Dmychurch is off and the adventure proper is on where Dolgenny proves a greater threat than expected, even suspecting the truth about Syn and the Scarecrow.

   The virtues of the books are that they move quickly full of incident, and that Thorndyke has a fine hand for adventure, history, and atmosphere. No less a contemporary and admirer of adventure tales and historical fiction than John Buchan praised his exciting novels, which in addition have the virtue of coming in at under two hundred pages.

   With Dolgenny a much more dangerous adversary than he thought, Doctor Syn is on his toes, outwitting the murderous brute, who would seem to have the upper hand, and bringing him to bay with quick wits and a quicker sword.

   So out of the night and sea mists of the Marsh company, the Scarecrow will ride again on his firey horse, evading the excise man, terrorizing the ignorant, tormenting the rich, and seeing to it that the people of England can enjoy a good Spanish wine or French brandy without that silly taxation business. Not everyone can be the Scarlet Pimpernel and save people from the Terror, and after all, Sir Percy must have appreciated a nice excise-free cognac after rescuing all those noble Frenchmen and had the Scarecrow to thank for that.

ANDREW KLAVAN – True Crime. Crown, hardcover. 1995. Dell, paperback, 1997. Warner, paperback, 1999. Film: Warner Brothers, 1999, with Clint Eastwood as Steve Everett and Isaiah Washington as Frank Beechum. Directed by Clint Eastwood.

   Klavan wrote the John Wells series as Keith Peterson — a dark group, also about a reporter, and a very good one. I’m not too familiar with his work under his own name, though I thought her previous novel, Corruption, was very good.

   Frank Beachum will die within less than 24 hours. He’s to be executed for the murder of a young pregnant woman, and there’s no hope of mercy or reprieve. Steve Everett is a reporter, a good one though not a very good man. A quirk of fate sends him to do a last-minute interview with the condemned man, and he leaves the prison shaken, convinced of his innocence.

   And so begins the frantic hours, as he searches for some way, any way, to avert what he now believes to be a terrible injustice. And unlikely champion, and a near hopeless quest.

   The thing about this book is that it works. Oh, after you’ve finished it and thought about it a while, you may think there were a couple of plot elements that really don’t stand close scrutiny, and maybe one or two characters who didn’t ring quite true.

   Maybe, and maybe you won’t. But if you do, it will certainly be afterward, because while you’re reading, the story will drag you along by the scruff of your neck. The suspense and air of impending doom are unrelenting, and the temptation to turn to the end and see what it will be is almost overpowering. And you won’t know until you get there. Trust me.

   Particulars? Klavan is a hell of a good writer,and the book is liberally laced with telling phrases, as “…drinking bourbon with a fine chaser of melancholy.” And if the letter Beachum writes to his daughter as awaits execution doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, I worry about you.

   The books is filled with sharply drawn characters, too, some etched in detail, some merely outlines, but all somehow real. You will remember Steve Everett,Frank Beachum, and Warden Luther Plunkitt, as a minimum, long after you put the book down. This goes on the 199 shelf alongside Cook’s Breakheart Hill, and I hope I’m lucky enough to read something else as good this year. But I won’t count on it.

Editorial Update:   Klavan received an Anthony Awards nomination in 1996 for True Crime in the Best Novel category.[

EDWARD M. LERNER “Time Out.” Novella. First published in Analog SF, January-February 2013. Collected in revised and retitled form as the title story of A Time Foreclosed (FoxAcre Press, trade paperback, June 2013). Included in The Time Travel Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Stories, edited by John Gregory Betancourt (Wildside Press, ebook, 2013).

   As it so happens, I might not have posted this review here if not for one fact, and I couldn’t help but tell you about it. This is the first story I’ve read on my new Kindle. Well, it’s not exactly new, being as it is a hand-me-up from my daughter who’s gotten herself a newer, more up to date model. We had some problems getting it registered to me, but once logged in, I’ve managed to get around well enough to chalk up a Number One.

   And the only thing better than a locked room mystery would have been a time-travel science fiction story, which obviously this is, and it’s a good one. When an out-of-work bank official, now an ex-convict due to one flaw — being too trusting — gets a job as a handyman to a not quite a mad scientist (he himself says he’s only peeved), he has no idea what it is that he’s getting into.

   As our hero gains more and more of his new boss’s confidence, he’s allowed to know more or more about what he’s helping to build. Two guesses, and the second one doesn’t count. In some detail, small incremental steps at a time, they’re building a means to change the world for the better.

   If, of course, they don’t wipe out their world’s entire timeline in the process. The time paradoxes they encounter had my head spinning, such as getting the money to finance their project by being sent financial tips from the future. Until, that is, some of tips turn out to be wrong.

   You can tell that Lerner really had to work hard to make sure this story as coherent as it is, and I still don’t think he did. On the other had, nobody could. The whole tale is impossible to have happened. Unless, of course, it already has. Who would know?

THE ADVENTURES OF ROCKY JORDAN “The Man from Cairo.” CBS, 01 January 1950. Cast: Jack Moyles as Rocky Jordan, Jay Novello as Captain Sam Sabaaya of the Cairo police. Guest cast (uncredited): Parley Baer. Sponsor: Del Monte Foods.

   When I started collecting radio shows on reel-to-reel tape, back in the early 70s, there were only a haphazard scattering of shows available, with very little in the way of documentation available for the anything you gladly picked up here and there from other traders and collectors.

   Things change. For many year I had only one show from this series (1948-50, 1951), plus two fifteen minutes episodes from its predecessor A Man Named Jordan (1945-47), which took place in Istanbul, rather than Cairo, the setting of the later series. Today almost all of the second run are available online, at the click of a mouse. Check out, for example the links here at archive.org.

   Whether Istanbul or Cairo, either setting was to listeners here in the US as exotic a place as they’d ever hope to be, and the producers of the show made sure the stories they told took full advantage of it. There also was no mistaking the resemblance to the movie Casablance: all of Rocky Jordan’s adventures were always based in and around the Cafe Tambourine, always the center of nefarious business.

   The writers of “The Man from Cairo” had a bit of extra fun with this one. The hapless tourist who happened to stop by Jordan’s cafe is not from Cairo, Egypt, but from Cairo, Illinois. A taker of home movies, he has enjoyed his stay, but he has one complaint: nothing exciting has happened. And of course as soon as says that, action begins, but he’s never on the scene when it does. Does he believe Rocky when he’s told that his life may be in danger? In a word, No.

   As the man from Cairo, Parley Baer is not credited in the role, but no one who’s listened to a lot of OTR, including his role as Chester Proudfoot in the long-running Gunsmoke on radio will mistake his most talented voice. A lot could be told in only 30 minutes on the radio, and this particular episode is no exception. Follow the link above to hear it for yourself.

MICHAEL GILBERT – The Killing of Katie Steelstock. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1980. Penguin, US, paperback, 1981. Published previously in the UK as Death of a Favourite Girl (Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 1980).

   As a kind of bonus, we get two stories in one. Katie’s death is the obvious reason for the rather dry murder investigation that follows. What we also get, and what fans of legal manipulations and maneuverings like myself will find of much greater interest, is an inside look at how the defense for the accused goes about making plans for the ensuing trial.

   Part of their strategy has little to do with the case itself, consisting instead of weighing and working on the personal stranegths and idiosyncrasies of the man from Scotland Yard placed in charge of the investigation.

   Katie herself was a TV star. After her death, and then only, we discover the two sides of her. For the most part, the village folk of Hannington saw her as their fair-headed girl. In London they knew her as an ambitious conniver with little she was unwilling to do to maintain her drive to the top.

   That this is a mystery novel with some emphasis on character should be abundantly clear. Even so, the ending is one that may come as something of a surprise. A goodly number of loose ends are left undone, and unmitigated coincidence looms large in the overall scheme of things.

   This month I deal with the second and third of Lawrence Block’s novels about unlicensed PI Matt Scudder, but where I should begin presents a quandary because the print and Web sources I’ve consulted disagree as to which book is which. Apparently the one Block wrote right after THE SINS OF THE FATHERS was published a few months after the third book in the series. Decisions, decisions. I choose to cover them in the order in which they were written.

   The source of the title TIME TO MURDER AND CREATE (Dell #8701, paperback original, 1977) is a line from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which makes it the only one of the first three Scudders with a title not derived from a religious text. But it’s also the only one of the trio which is introduced by a motto, and this comes from a religious source.

   The version Block uses is too long to quote here, but it comes from the Talmud, specifically from the tractate SANHEDRIN, 4:5. A more succinct version of the first half of the passage — “Who kills one man kills the whole world” — -is found in a diary Cornell Woolrich left behind after his death. The second half of the quotation is also Talmudic — “Who saves one life saves the whole world” or, as it’s given in SCHINDLER’S LIST, “He who saves the life of one man saves the entire world” — but no one in Block’s novel brings up that line which, as we’ll see, is supremely relevant.

   If we know that this third Scudder novel in order of publication was the second in order of writing, its connections with THE SINS OF THE FATHERS stand out. Scudder of course still tithes, and visits churches when he needs to think, and keeps a Lives of the Saints book in his hotel room, although this time he doesn’t tell us any stories from it. Looking forward to the novel that in fact was published before this one, we find briefly mentioned a special prosecutor looking into police corruption, a subject that would be (was?) central in the third Scudder, which appeared on newsstands before the second.

   As usual in the novels from the time where Block’s protagonist is a practicing alcoholic, we begin in a bar. Scudder is approached by a small-time information peddler known as the Spinner who has come into big money thanks to blackmailing several wealthy people with dark pasts but has also become afraid that one of his marks is out to kill him.

   For a $320 fee (the price of the elegant suit the blackmailer is wearing) Scudder agrees to hold the envelope containing Spinner’s evidence against his victims and, if his client is indeed rubbed out, to open the envelope and identify and punish the murderer without exposing the victims who had meekly submitted to extortion. About two months later the Spinner is found dead in the East River with his skull crushed.

   Scudder opens the envelope, finds out who his suspects are and what they did, and comes into each of their lives, claiming to be carrying on Spinner’s blackmail, hoping that one of them will try to kill him as Spinner was killed. Unlike THE SINS OF THE FATHERS, the situation this time is filled with suspense and menace and violence that are integral to the plot.

   In due course Scudder identifies the person responsible for Spinner’s murder but again exacts his own form of punishment rather than turning the person over to the law. Perhaps he would have accomplished nothing if he had gone to the police since, as Block specifically mentions, the morally responsible party had done no more than what Henry II did when, at the height of his feud with Thomas à Becket, he is said to have cried out: “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” (The line doesn’t come from T.S. Eliot’s 1932 play MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL, in which Henry doesn’t even appear as a character, but it is found in Jean Anouilh’s 1959 play BECKET which was the basis of the 1964 movie of the same name starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole.)

   What compounds the irony is that Scudder himself earlier in the novel has done something similar, inadvertently driving an innocent suspect to suicide by demanding more blackmail money. “His finger had pulled the trigger, but I’d put the gun in his hand by playing my game a little too well.”

   Scudder also killed a hit man — in self-defense, in a vividly described mano a mano — but in the final chapter, admittedly employing guesswork, he shows another of the innocent suspects that his killing the man probably saved two other lives. Now we see the relevance of the part of the Talmudic passage Block did not quote. Could he have thought that bringing it up would have made the book too morally ambivalent? “Who takes a life saves two whole worlds” doesn’t sound terribly Talmudic.

   The part of the Talmud passage Block does quote carries forward the theme in THE SINS OF THE FATHERS that the worst deed of all is murder.

   But there is a difference between murder and other crimes, and the world is a worse place for the murderers it allows to walk unpunished.

   IN THE MIDST OF DEATH (Dell #4037, paperback, 1976) has no introductory motto but resembles THE SINS OF THE FATHERS in that the source of its title is religious, specifically a line from the burial service of the Book of Common Prayer: “In the midst of life we are in death.”

   In the body of this novel, however. there are very few religious allusions. Scudder becomes involved when a plainclothes cop unaccountably decides to turn Serpico and reveal everything he knows about corruption in the NYPD to the special prosecutor who was mentioned casually in TIME TO MURDER AND CREATE. Then a high-priced hooker comes forward and publicly accuses the cop of having extorted $100 a week from her for a long time. Soon after Scudder enters the case on the cop’s side, the hooker is found murdered in the whistleblower’s secret apartment in Greenwich Village, with the police determined to pin the crime on the traitor who was exposing their dirty secrets.

   This time there’s no onstage violence, and Scudder stays pretty much within the law except for a brief scene where, after having sex with his client’s wife, he breaks into the secret apartment and spends the night sleeping in the cop’s pajamas.

   As in THE SINS OF THE FATHERS, Scudder is asked about his drinking, and his answer this time is more ambivalent.

   But in this novel we get to see Scudder too drunk to function, and at the end he at least is thinking about cutting back on the booze. But his view of murder remains, shall we say, Talmudic.

   And his view of human nature is as bleak as ever.

   That’s not Scudder speaking but it surely represents his thinking.

   TIME TO MURDER AND CREATE, my favorite among the first three Scudders, was nominated for an Edgar award as best paperback mystery of the year. In light of that fact plus Block’s towering reputation today, it’s hard to believe that the three did not sell well. But they didn’t, and Scudder lay dormant until early in the presidency of Ronald Reagan, when Block resurrected him in two more novels, this time for a hardcover publisher (Arbor House), after which he again let his character lapse. The fourth and fifth Scudders will be covered next month.