MICHAEL CONNELLY – Trunk Music. Harry Bosch #5, Little Brown, hardcover, 1996. St. Martin’s, paperback, 1998

   Connelly is to me one of the strongest authors to emerge in this decade, and I am a bit surpassed that he hasn’t been nominated for more awards. The Black Echo did win a Best First Edgar, but what I thought was his best, The Concrete Blonde, went almost unnoticed.

   Harry Bosch is back in homicide, after a disciplinary assignment away from trouble and the limelight His first case after he returns is a sleazy filmmaker’ s body in a trunk, one that has all the earmarks of a Mafia hit. The LA Organized Crime boys want no part of it, though, and this makes Harry a little suspicious. He gets even more so when the trail leads to Las Vegas and some mob figures. He follows it there, and finds a troublesome lady from his past, and more suspicions, and a lot more problems than he wanted, needed, or could comfortably deal with-but that’s par for Harry.

   [A line I spotted:] “He smiled glibly.” I’ve always wanted to do that, but never knew how.

   I think this is the first time I’ve given a Connelly book less than a [double star rating], but this was a very ordinary book for Connelly — which means it was above average, and better than most [authors] can  write.  One of the plot elements — his Achilles heel from the first book — wasn’t believable to me, and there wasn’t anything really exceptional about any part of the story.

   It was nevertheless a good book, because Connelly is good enough to be readable even at half speed,  On the whole, though, it was a little disappointing, if only because of the high standard he’s set.

RICHARD ABSHIRE – Dallas Deception. PI Jack Kyle #3. William Morrow, hardcover, 1992. Penguin, paperback, 1993.

   Jack Kyle is one of those oh-so-common PI’s who’s barely squeaking by. He sleeps in his office, for example, and his secretary (named Della) works for the occupants of all the offices on the same floor as his. He’s hired on this case (pro bono) on behalf of a cop friend who’s currently laid up in the hospital. It seems that the daughter of the latter’s very close lady friend has been caught on videotape in some very X-rated activity, and not voluntarily.

   Kyle makes with the rough tough scene, gets the tape, makes sure it is the original (but of course the number of copies can’t be determined for sure, but the frightened Freddy, who orchestrated the scene, tells Kyle that that’s all there is. Maybe, maybe not, but Kyle later finds he has a problem to deal with when he finds Freddy dead, with the very naked daughter in the same room.

   That’s pretty much it. The basic plot line. When spelled out like that, it doesn’t seem like much — not to fill nearly 300 pages of small print in the paperback edition — but I haven’t yet gone into the motive, which verges into very nearly science fiction territory, of the “mad doctor” variety, or at least it was back in the early 1990s, and personally, I didn’t find it very interesting, I have to admit, though, it was certainly different.

   Jack Kyle, who tells the story in good old-fashioned first person, is a likeable lunk of a guy. When he’s actually working on the case, the action scenes are well-described and orchestrated, but the banter between Kyle and his friends and associates often come off as forced and lame. Maybe it was just me, but the best I can do on my H/B scale is a meager 4.7.

   That’s out of 10.
   

      The Jack Kyle series —
1. Dallas Drop (1989)
2. Turnaround Jack (1990)
3. The Dallas Deception (1992)
   

[NOTE]: This is the last of four reviews that went missing during the loss of service undergone by this blog over this past weekend. Unfortunately all of the comments for it have permanently disappeared.

BILL PRONZINI. “Booktaker.” Nameless PI. First appeared in Shosetsu Shincho, 1982, apparently a Japanese collection of four novellas, presumably in English. Also collected in Casefile, St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1983; PaperJacks, Canadian paperback, 1988. Reprinted in Locked Room Puzzles, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini (Academy Chicago, paperback, 1986).

   Nameless is hired in this one by a bookseller friend to investigate the recent thefts of several etchings and old maps, $20,000 worth in 1982 money. (This from the store where Nameless built the bulk of his pulp magazine collection, back when they could still be obtained at reasonable prices.)

   There are only three keys to the room, the owner’s and those of two employees. There are also security devices at all of the ways in and out of the store. It must be an inside job, but which of the store employees is responsible, and the even bigger question is how is he doing it?

   To keep an eye on the situation, Nameless goes undercover in the shop as a new employee, using the name Jim Marlowe. And lo and behold, another rare map disappears, almost literally under Nameless’s eyes and nose.

   It is indeed quite a mystery. Only a chance comment by Nameless’s girl friend Kerry helps lead to the solution to the case, but the culprit is not named until both she and Nameless are nearly run off a dangerous canyon road by another car.

   Wonderful! Without trying to exaggerate too much, this one has everything. Who doesn’t love a bookstore mystery? And a locked room mystery built right into it?
   

[NOTE]: This is the third of four reviews that went missing during the loss of service undergone by this blog over this past weekend. Unfortunately all of the comments for it have permanently disappeared.

PETER RABE – The Box. Gold Medal 632, paperback original, 1956 (cover by Barye Phillips). Stark House Noir Classics, softcover, 2003 (published in a 2-for-1 edition with Journey Into Terror).

   Quinn is a mafia lawyer who screws up. Not quite big enough for the long ride, so he’s given an all expenses paid trip around the globe instead.

   The way it works is this: They knock you out and stick you in a box, about the size of a coffin. They fill it with plenty of food and water and put holes in it for air. Then they nail it shut and stick you on a freighter from NY Harbor to NY Harbor, by way of the world entire.

   Somewhere about halfway thru the voyage, the box top breaks and it starts to smell of human filth. A smell the sailors can’t handle — so they dump the box out at tiny harbor port in Northern Africa.

   Quinn’s got amnesia and doesn’t know what the hell is going on. The locals clean him up and go about trying to get some papers from the consulate on him so they can send him on his merry way.

   But soon enough he gets the lay of the land and his gangland persona kicks in. He decides to take things over in this island town and make his own gangland kingdom by the sea.

   The local corruptor in chief (the mayor) doesn’t take too kindly to this outsider coming in and threatening his take. And so the matter comes to a head: the NY gangster enlists some of the local oppressed Arabs against the African mayor and his cronies. And comes the showdown.

         ————–

   I enjoyed it but it was a bit on the light side in the end. I also didn’t like how hard Rabe tried to push the metaphor of “The Box.” The idea is that humans have “boxes” that they create for themselves. Even with the “benefit” of amnesia, a NY gangster has habits of character created by “The Box” he has caged himself within that will inevitably cause him to become a gangster in whatever environment he finds himself in.

   Not sure I buy it myself. On the other hand, Rabe was a practicing psychologist so he probably knows better than I do. Still, overwrought metaphors are annoying to this boy in the box. I preferred Anatomy of a Killer and Kill the Boss Goodbye.
   

[EDITORIAL NOTE]: This is the second of four reviews that went missing during the loss of service undergone by this blog over this past weekend. Unfortunately all of the comments for it have permanently disappeared.

JACK EARLY – A Creative Kind of Killer. Fortune Fanelli #1. Franklin Watts, hardcover, 1984. Carroll & Graf, paperback, 1995, as by Sandra Scoppettone (the author’s real name).

   Fortune Fanelli, the first-person narrator of A Creative Kind of Killer, is a former cop who inherited money, made a lucky investment, and left the force. He’s now a private investigator, but not exactly the usual kind. He’s a single parent, trying to bring up his two teenage children and work on murder cases at the same time.

   His ex-wife, a soap-opera producer, has no real interest in raising children, so Fortune gets the job. He lives in New York’s SoHo district, and the first murder in the book takes place right in his neighborhood. The killer is “creative,” posing the corpse in the window of a boutique so artfully that Fanelli himself admits he must have passed the body six limes without noticing it.

   His investigation of the case leads him both into the arty crowd and into the more sordid world of runaways and kiddy porn.

   A Creative Kind of Killer is a promising debut. Fanelli is an interesting character, and his relationship with his children makes for a different kind of subplot. The love interest is provided by a young woman who is a dead ringer for Meryl Streep; and Father Paul, the handsome local priest. is a strong character.

   Early is particularly good in his descriptions of SoHo, and Fanelli’s feelings about the changes in his old neighborhood are an effective commentary on one man’s desire to remain involved in his community. The mystery is a good one, too, and the resolution satisfactory. It seems likely that Fanelli will appear in other cases in the near future.

   Early’s second novel, Razzamatazz (1985), is a straight thriller sans Fanelli, however.

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

[UPDATE]: In spite of Bill’s suggestion that it might happen, a second recorded case for Fortune Fanelli never occurred.
   

[ADDED NOTE]: This is the first of four reviews that went missing during the loss of service undergone by this blog over this past weekend. Unfortunately all of the comments for it have permanently disappeared.

   I say that with my fingers crossed, since I haven’t tested everything, but with only a few casualties, the recent outage crisis for the blog is over. What had to be done was a full restore to the blog going back to before the problem arose. That seems to have done the trick.

   Missing, though, are all of the posts that appeared here after Tuesday of last week. I made backups of those, though, and they will all appear again as soon as I can get to them. The bad news is that any comments that were left for those most recent posts are gone forever.

   This is better news than I was anticipating, though, as one possible outcome for the restore operation was that the posts would all come back, but ALL of the comments left for the blog since its inception would have disappeared. That would have been a loss awfully hard to take.

   So that’s the news for now. I’ll get to work replacing the missing posts as soon as I can.

ED McBAIN – Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear. Matthew Hope #12. Warner, hardcover, 1996; paperback, 1998.

   The [previous] Hope novel, There Was a Little Girl, ended on something of an uncertain note, and I was interested to see where and if McBain would go from there with the series. Though one of the [earlier] books — Mary, Mary — was just about as bad as they come, on the whole I’ve enjoyed [them]. Neat title on this one, too.

   Gladly, the optically-challenged ursine, is a toy invented and patented by Hope’s young lady client. The problem is that her previous employers, a toy designing and making firm, are marketing a very similar toy. She’s suing, and they’re counter-suing, and who knows what the judge will decide?

   That all fades into the background when one of the legal antagonists gets messily murdered, and Hope’s client is charged with the crime. Did Hope, recently emerged from a five-month coma, doesn’t think so, but proving it is another story. Particularly so because the story his client tells keeps changing, and never for the better.

   McBain nearly always writes like the seasoned, best-selling professional he is, and that’s the case here. There is a dab of courtroom (all connected with the patent case), some investigation, a tad of Hope’s personal problems, a little danger, and it’s all mixed into a very readable and enjoyable book.

   Taken separately, none of the elements are anything special, and in the hands of a less accomplished writer, it would have been an average read at best; but McBain is McBain, and that do make a difference.

JOHN DICKSON CARR. “The Third Bullet.” Colonel Marquis #1. Novella. First published as a novel in 1937 under Carr’s “Carter Dickson” pen name (Hodder & Stoughton, UK). A shorter version appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1948 (cut by perhaps 20%). Collected in The Third Bullet and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1954; Harper & Bros., US, hardcover, 1954). Collected in Locked Room Puzzles, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini (Academy Chicago, paperback, 1986).

   This one is a good one, but only if you’re already a fan of locked room mysteries. If you’re not, I don’t think it will go down well enough to convert you. It’s too single-minded as to the plot, with the barest amount of time spent of either the setting or the characters. But for the record, here’s the basic setup and hold on tight. It’s complicated:

   A murder is committed while the police are watching from the outside through a window and while another policeman is knocking on the only inside door leading to a hall inside the house. The windows are sealed tight (but footsteps are found leading from one of the windows). Only one person was in the room, other than the victim. No one else went in nor went out. No one was hiding inside.

   Two guns are found in the room. One was the one the suspect used; the other is found hidden in a vase. However — and this is a big “however” — ballistics show that neither one was used to kill the victim, a judge who had previously sentenced the suspect quite severely (flogging as well as a prison term).

   The investigation begins on page one, and it continues non-stop until the case is solved. Colonel Marquis is clearly a forerunner of Colonel March, one of Carr’s other more well-known detectives. Even if this was his only appearance, which is likely, he’s the sort of fellow who relishes a case such as this one, and almost as much as I do. The basic explanation is both very intricate and very simple, but the latter doesn’t mean I solved it before Colonel Marquis does.

   To my mind, very nicely done.

MICHAEL Z. LEWIN – The Way We Die Now. Albert Samson #2. Putnam, hardcover, 1973. Perennial Library, paperback, 1984. Mysterious Press, paperback, 1991.

   Albert Sampson, PI. A bit nebbish. Late 30s. Sleeps in his office in Indianapolis. Barely making it.

   A mother calls on behalf of her daughter. A whiny, overbearing one at that. And looking for the cheapest sleuth in town. They found him.

   Daughter’s husband Ralph just killed a guy. He’s in jail, facing manslaughter charges.

   What happened is this: Ralph was as a security guard with Easby Guards. The company requires their employees to carry double barreled shotguns. It’s an image thing, really. But they are loaded for bear.

   Ralph’s a Vietnam vet that got discharged after he lost his gourd in battle. He can’t find work and the only work he’s not willing to do is anything involving a gun. So of course this security job is perfect! Well, what happens is that Easby Guards has been seeking out PTSD discharged vets to hire. They’e framing it as philanthropy. But is there something more sinister happening?

   Ralph is convinced to give the job a try. But the first night on the job, one of the tenants in the building Ralph’s assigned to tells him he’s scared a guy is gonna try to kill him tonight. Please protect me he pleads.

   Later that eve, a menacing looking man knocks on the tenant’s door. The tenant opens it, screams to shoot when the man reaches for something under his coat. And Ralph does. His aim is true. The man dies, instantly.

   The cops show. And the tenant says: I don’t know what happened. Ralph just went crazy and shot this guy for no reason. I never told Ralph to shoot. I never told Ralph I was scared of the guy, or that I’d been threatened.

   Given Ralph’s psychiatric history, the cops figure the tenant’s story is probably right: Ralph just went bananas, shooting the stranger for no reason. Just like he did in Vietnam. Manslaughter.

   Sampson takes the case on. But you wonder why. According to Ralph’s lawyer, it’s manslaughter now, and it’s still manslaughter if he proves he was told to kill the guy. So why bother?

   The REAL reason should be this: ‘Defense of others’ is a defense to liability for an alleged crime that is in defense of a person other than oneself. It refers to a person’s right to use reasonable force to protect a third party from another person who threatens to use force on the third party. [See, for example, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defense_of_others.]

   Unfortunately, this doesn’t occur to Ralph’s lawyer or to Samson. What pisses me off a bit is when I’m a better lawyer that the lawyer in the book.

         —

   The book was okay. I like Albert Samson. And that itself is something. It’s tricky trying to write a contemporary detective novel while avoiding pastiche. Although we are precisely at this moment as far from this Samson novel as this Samson novel was from the Continental OP (50 years, to be exact). There is in fact some similarity between Albert Samson, Jacob Asch, David Brandstetter, Harry Moseby from Night Moves, Moses Wine, Harry Stoner, Jim Rockford, Travis McGee, Lebowski, Doc Sportello, John Marshall Tanner, and Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe.

   Such that it may be fair to say that there’s a second archetypal detective. There’s the Philip Marlowe/Sam Spade classic PI’s of the 30s and 40s. Smoke and whiskey. Black and white. Knights errant in a world gone noir. And then there’s the laconic seventies dude detectives. As likely to be smoking a joint as drinking a beer. Wasting away again in Margaritaville.

   The problem with the book is that, like its detective, it lacks ambition. There’s a heavy book inside it with some weighty stuff to explore and possible vindication of his client. Yet Samson settles for mediocrity. Like Lebowski says, forget it dude. Let’s go bowling.

HARRY WHITTINGTON – Married to Murder. Joel Palmer #1 (and done). Phantom #503, digest-sized paperback original, 1953. Berkley Diamond D2019, paperback, September 1959. Gryphon Books, softcover, 2005.

   From the early 1950s and clear into 1970s, Harry Whittington was one of the most prolific paperback writers around, publishing nearly 200 novels under a host of pen names. What he’s best known for by connoisseurs of such things was a unique combination of noir/hardboiled/sleaze fiction. For all that work, I don’t believe he produced another private eye novel other than this one. (I could easily be wrong about that.)

   Joel Palmer, the protagonist in this one, was once a cop but he’d been forced to resign, and when Married to Murder begins, he’s trying to eke out a living as a PI and not doing a very good job of it. Worse, the police are continually hounding him, with obvious malicious intent. So when a old woman with one leg and a crutch to help her get around comes looking for him, he takes her up on the offer she makes, as dubious and offputting as it sounds.

   He’s to move in with the woman’s granddaughter, under the pretense of being her husband. His first reaction is a natural one. He laughs. But the granddaughter, who thinks her husband is dead, is in deadly danger, he is told, although exactly why, she refuses to say. At length, confronted with threats of calling his personal nemesis on the police force, he agrees.

   Some plastic surgery is involved. That’s a given. But to make the change permanent, he has to agree to put his identification papers on the person currently being stored in a small freezer and dump the body in the East River. After this point in time, Joel Palmer will be dead. Assisting him on this task is the old woman’s maid, a strange enigmatic creature who dresses in tight-fitting black dresses. (Use your imagination here.)

   While two of them are on this midnight disposal run, our hero (of sorts) discovers that the man, whom he has been told died of natural causes, was really a victim of cold-blooded murder. By this time, though, it is far too late for him to turn back.

   Which all of the above takes up the first 64 pages of a mere 144 page novel, but between you and me, these are 64 pages I will never forget. Once he hits Florida, where the granddaughter lives, and the impersonation begins, the book settles down into a more conventional sort of tale, but conventional in the hands of a writer such as a Harry Whittington was in that regards is still heads and shoulders above almost any other PI writer I can think of.

   It’s not a classic, mind you. There are way too many implausibilities built into the plot as it unfolds to say that. I didn’t believe them all myself, even while I was reading it. Safe to say, you’d be better off just fastening your seat belt and going along for the ride.

H/B rating: 8.9