BILL CRIDER – Winning Can Be Murder. Dan Rhodes #8. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1996. Worldwide, paperback, 2000.

   This is my favorite of Bill’s series, and it’s a sin and a shame that no one is doing them in paperback now. Other people try to do small town Southwestern cop novels and some do pretty good, but nobody does them as well as Bill.

   Do you know what small-town Texas tragedy is? It’s having an assistant coach murdered just when the local high school football team is about to make the playoffs for the first time in ages. Do you know what pressure is? It’s what Sheriff Dan Rhodes feels from every citizen of the surrounding territory above the age of five (and a few below it) to solve this crime and get it out of the way so folks can get back to worrying about really important matters-like a football game.

   I don’t have any first-hand experience with small-town high school football these days, so I can’t say whether Bill nailed it present-day or not; I can say that it it was that way when I experienced it, and I could smell the dust and hear the cheers again when I read his descriptions.

   Aside from Bill’s always smooth and easy-to-read prose, that’s what l enjoy most about the books — the feeling that these are real people in real places, acting the way people in those places act. Well, up to a point, anyway.

   The Rhodes books will never b5e huge sellers, because they aren’t  grim and bloody enough to attract the body-count crowd, nor on the other hand a female lead who can tumble “engagingly” into peril, save the police from their incompetence, and give you a to-die-for recipe in the process.

   They are nevertheless thoroughly entertaining and very readable, and it’s a damned shame more people don’t know about them.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Exploits of the Patent Leather Kid.  Crippen & Landru Publishers, 2010. Edited and introduced by Bill Pronzini. 13 stories.

   When most people hear the name Erle Stanley Gardner, they immediately think of his most famous character creation, Perry Mason, but he was also an incredibly prolific pulp fiction writer. One of the characters Gardner created for the pulps was The Patent Leather Kid, an unoriginal amalgamation of Zorro, Raffles the Gentleman Thief, and The Scarlet Pimpernel.

   Gardner’s principal contribution to this style of hero — the effete, indolent society fop he pretends to be while his alter ego tirelessly fights criminals and the official authorities when necessary — was to infuse his stories with the hardboiled sensibilities of Depression Era America. Even so, Gardner never let his Patent Leather Kid’s exploits veer into sadism: The Kid was always on the side of right, and the reader knew it.

   Thanks to Doug Greene at Crippen & Landru for bringing back The Patent Leather Kid and other pulp heroes from their undeserved oblivion.

      The stories:          [All originally published in Detective Fiction Weekly.]

(1) “The Kid Stacks a Deck” (1932): A local criminal gang really has it in for The Patent Leather Kid and sets up an ambush. The Kid, meanwhile, sets out to prove that robbing a jewelry store equipped with the most up-to-date alarm systems isn’t, as the store’s owner boasts, “impossible” after all.

(2) “The Kid Passes the Sugar” (1932): Someone’s gunning for The Kid but kills the wrong person. The Kid sets a trap with a shiny platinum watch as bait and an abused wife as a means of bringing the killer to justice.

(3) “The Kid Wins a Wager” (1932): The Patent Leather Kid sets out to help a woman in trouble with her boss, only to come up against another burglar who’s quite capable of framing The Kid for his own crimes. If he’s clever enough, The Kid might be able to escape the frame — and collect a large bet in the bargain.

(4) “The Kid Throws a Stone” (1932): Somebody’s running around pretending to be The Patent Leather Kid, pulling off robberies in fancy Chryslers and making no effort to be subtle about it. The Kid must lay a trap for his doppelganger that, if successful, will not only clear him with the police but also aid a distressed damsel he’s never met.

(5) “The Kid Makes a Bid” (1933): After several attempts at robbing a jewelry store, a thief apparently succeeds, taking some stones and cash with him and leaving two of the store’s assistants hog-tied with ropes and handcuffs. The Kid’s suspicions are aroused by the way the crime was committed, and he performs a rough “experiment” on an unscrupulous businessman, thereby thwarting two crimes simultaneously.

(6) “The Kid Muscles In” (1933): A doctor is murdered, and the prime suspect — a young man in love with the victim’s niece — can’t explain away his presence at the crime scene or his fingerprints on the murder weapon. It falls to The Patent Leather Kid to exonerate the falsely-accused in the way he knows best, breaking and entering with intent to catch the real bad guys.

(7) “The Kid Takes a Cut” (1933): An ex-con gets the blame for a jewel robbery he didn’t commit. His alibi — that a woman gave him the stones as a reward for a good deed — is, let’s be frank, flimsy at best. Only the ex-con’s wife can corroborate his story, but the police won’t believe a word of it. The Kid must contrive an elaborate scheme involving matching train schedules to prove the man innocent, for otherwise the real thieves will soon be on their merry way.

(8) “The Kid Beats the Gun” (1933):  A famous — and vastly overrated — criminologist fingers the butler of a rich couple as the one who stole valuable jewels from them. The butler finally confesses, not to the theft, but simply to following orders. The Patent Leather Kid must intervene to prevent a miscarriage of justice and experiences the triple satisfaction of exposing a fraud, deflating an egomaniac’s pomposity, and seeing an innocent man cleared.

(9) “The Kid Covers a Kill” (1933): The man often referred to as The King of the Underworld operates almost entirely with impunity, unhindered by the police. To him, the lives of his victims don’t mean very much. But when he brutally murders the sister of one of his underlings, The Patent Leather Kid gets involved — and for The King of the Underworld, that’s a very unhealthy development.

(10) “The Kid Clears a Crook” (1934): A small businessman with a criminal record tries to go straight but runs afoul of organized crime; they get him framed for a jewelry theft — enough of an injustice to attract The Kid’s indignant notice. Before it’s all over, The Kid will have fenced some hot ice, dodged numerous submachine gun bullets, and tickled a butler.

(11) “The Kid Clips a Coupon” (1934): A wealthy elderly woman has been murdered — by a tramp, according to the police — but The Kid doesn’t think so. The whole thing smacks of an inside job — a case of discovered embezzlement — and The Kid must be proactive to head off another murder, even if it means kidnapping someone himself.

(12) “The Kid Cooks a Goose” (1934): The underworld and the police have a common nemesis — and common cause to rid themselves of him — namely The Patent Leather Kid. The cops have let it be known — through unofficial channels, sub rosa, you understand — that if the criminal class terminates The Kid, they’re willing to cut the crooks some slack. When The Kid receives news of this ad hoc arrangement to bump him off, it’s without joyful enthusiasm. His characteristic response is to devise an impromptu plan that will not only clear him of a murder frame, neutralize several underworld kingpins, and save a woman’s life, but also give a guinea pig his big chance to be a crime buster.

(13) “The Kid Steals a Star” (1934): During the course of a robbery at a jewelry store, a policeman is killed and the night watchman gets the blame. It gets worse for him when he foolishly tries to skip town; actually, he’s been perfectly framed by the clever boss of a criminal gang. In order to clear the watchman and catch the crime boss in the act of swindling a jeweler, The Kid, with the able assistance of his bodyguard and an admiring telephone operator, must concoct a three-act “play” starring gangsters, gemstones, guns, and — if everything goes according to plan — a happy ending.

         Random notes:

   Unlike Sherlock Holmes, The Kid does see it as his duty to correct the deficiencies of the official police. — All of the members of the gentlemen’s club are stereotypes. — Gardner always uses the word “conservative” with negative connotations. — These stories aren’t mysteries in the traditional sense: The fun is watching The Kid improvising his way out of tight situations. — There’s a lot of 1930s gangster slang. — The reader shouldn’t try to read more than one story at a time: Gardner was clearly writing to a formula. Read one every few days to avoid tedium.

   For even more about The Patent Leather Kid, see Monte Herridge’s Mystery*File article here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=13823.

ELLERY QUEEN – What’s in the Dark? Capt. Tim Corrigan #6. Popular Library, paperback original; 1st printing, 1968. Dale Books, paperback, 1978. Zebra, paperback, 1985.

   Captain Tim Corrigan is assigned to a murder case on the night of New York City’s “Great Blackout.” The suspects are all trapped on the 21st floor with the body while Corrigan’s investigation goes on. And of course the blackout helps provide the means for establishing the killer’s guilt.

   The psychology of crumbling inhibitions is emphasized, but Corrigan and his detective pal Chuck Baer still have too great a tendency to climb into bed with their suspects. That and an early emphasis on Miss Graves’ mammae make this novel [considerably] different from EQ’s more conventional mysteries.

   [It’s] strictly enjoyable, though, and the reader has a fair chance to grab the essential clue on page 45. I shall look for more. [Books in the series, that is, not clues. per se.]

Rating: ***½

UPDATE: Reading this old review tonight for the first time in 55 years, it does not appear that back when wrote it I knew that the book was not written by “Ellery Queen.” It was ghost-written instead by Richard Deming, who as it turns out was the actual author of four of the overall six Tim Corrigan novels.

BOURBON STREET BEAT. “A Taste of Ashes.” ABC, 05 October 1959 (Season 1, Episode 1). Richard Long (Rex Randolph), Andrew Duggan (Cal Calhoun), Arlene Howell (Melody Lee Mercer), Van Williams (Kenny Madison). Guest Cast: Joanna Moore, Fredd Wayne, Karl Weber, Isobel Elsom, Jean Byron, Jean Allison. Based on the novel by Howard Browne. Director: Leslie H. Martinson. Currently streaming online here.

   When you’re a private detective and your partner is murdered, you’re obliged to do something about it. Especially when the local cop tells you it’s suicide and you know it’s not. Such is the case that Rex Randolph (Richard Long) finds himself on, taking over from the one that his partner, a chap named Jelkens, was working on.

   Randolph’s office is in New Orleans (not Chicago, as in the book), but most of the action takes place in Pelican Point, a town run by a wealthy matriarch who doesn’t want certain information made public. Blackmail is a nasty business, but the head cop doesn’t want Randolph or any of his assistance anywhere around. An older man on the force, tired of working under younger fellows, is a lot of more sympathetic, and I hope I don’t spoil anything for anybody by telling you that this older guy is named Cal Calhoun (Andrew Duggan), who by episode’s end is Randolph’s new partner.

   There is a noirish vibe in this episode – well, why not, being set in New Orleans and close environs as it is – that’s less present in contemporary stablemate Surfside 6, say, or even 77 Sunset Strip. at least this time around.

   The book is still better, though, a well-recognized masterpiece in the hardboiled/PI/noirish vein. (For Bill Pronzini’s 1001 Midnights review of the book, go here.)

PAMELA FRANKAU – Colonel Blessington. [Completed by Diana Raymond.] Bodley Head, UK, hardcover, 1968. Delacorte, US, hardcover, 1969. Dell 1378, US, paperback, 1970.

   
   And well he might. Harvey Blessington is many things to many people. To most he is a war hero, the brave Colonel Blessington, to Anthony Price he is the man who ought to replace the candidate for Parliment they both support, to actress Anita Gilroy he is object of her first love, and to her father Matthew, he is his ex-commando comrade in arms and the object of an obsessive memory a nightmare running “like a dark river underground, until he also becomes the object of fear and a mystery that remains unsolved.”

   Like quicksilver Harvey Blessington seems always changing shape, sometimes a shadow, sometimes bright as the sun, sometimes dark and strangely threatening. At the heart of Harvey Blessington is a mystery, one just beyond belief, at once revealing and impossible to believe.

   One worth men’s lives to keep hidden.

   Colonel Blessington was the final novel by British novelist Pamela Frankau, and her first suspense novel venturing into the kind of duality and uncertainty of a Graham Greene or Patrica Highsmith. Frankau grew ill and died while writing the book and her friend novelist Diana Raymond finished the book from her extensive notebooks. While the novel was recognized in its time and critically praised in both Britain and here, her death perhaps overshadowed the novel which isn’t half as well known as it once was.

   Frankau was the daughter of British literary gadabout Gilbert Frankau, who abandoned her and her mother when she was small. She went on to become a famed and critically praised novelist on her own, her some sixteen novels such as A Wreath for the Enemy, Over the Mountain, and Clothes of a King’s Son, among her better known works.

   As Matthew Gilroy finds himself hunted and hunter going to ground to uncover the enigma of Blessington, the tension ratchets up and the need to solve the mystery of Harvey Blessington a matter of life and death.

   
   Blessington is something of a tour-de-force, pulling off a twist worthy of Agatha Christie. It’s one of those books that cleverly lays the groundwork for its key revelation so you can look back and see each clue and misdirection, yet has a solution so shocking that you won’t guess it ahead of time, Blessington’s ultimate flaw “…to take people’s lives and spoil them — a love of power. A common love brought to extremes —”

   I first read Colonel Blessington when it came out back in 1968. It still holds up today, its final revelation still as stunning and chilling as it was then, its quiet shocks coming with a chill to the bone and a recognition of our own prejudices and blindness when we fail to see the obvious right in front of us and recognize the duplicitous Blessingtons in our own lives.

O. G. BENSON – Cain’s Woman. PI Max Raven #1. Dell First Edition A200, paperback original; 1st printing, 1960. Perennial Library, paperback, 1985, as Cain’s Wife.

   So I figured there’s gotta be something biblical with the Cain’s Woman thing, right? From what I can tell by googling, it looks like the biblical Cain married his twin sister. If you google ‘Cain’s Wife’, the first thing that comes up is a Wikipedia (yes, know—Wikipedia isn’t reliable; at the same time, I’m not in the mood to do serious research at on this and the results confirm my confirmation bias) entry that says:

   “According to the Book of Jubilees, Awan (also Avan or Aven, from Hebrew אָוֶן aven “vice”, “iniquity”, “potency”) was the wife and sister of Cain and the daughter of Adam and Eve.”

   So, there’s that.

   Mrs. Cain doesn’t disappoint. Vice, iniquity, potency? She’s got ’em.

   And she comes to call on our lonely detective in his lonely beat down office, wanting his help.

   The detective is Max Raven. And he’s everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be, to coin a phrase. Except for the well-dressed part.

   Mrs. Cain says she’s being blackmailed as a result of some naughty candid pictures her ex-fiancé took of her. Mr. Cain is very old and very rich and proper. And it wouldn’t do at all for him to see these photos. Would Raven please please please fetch them for her.

   And he does.

   But things aren’t what they appear to be, and Mrs. Cain is both far more and far less than she appears. She plays Raven like a fiddle, and gives him fits, til he’s fit to be tied, like sudden death. And like sudden death, it comes. Suddenly.

   The book is quite good, Raven is likable, Mrs. Cain is femme-fatale-able. Til the end, which is far too fallible for a femme fatale to be.

   That is to say, O.G. Benson plays nary a note wrong. Until the end. When his femme-fatale does something that no femme-fatale can do, nor has ever done. It’s a fatale flaw. It takes a tale that was just a step away from being as good or better than Charles Williams’s Touch of Death and ruins it. At the very last second. Like gluing a hallmark card onto Munch’s The Scream. I screamed.

   Or what’s worse. I didn’t.

   A more favorable review here: https://vinpulp.blogspot.com/2008/02/cains-woman-by-o-g-benson.html

LES ROBERTS – Collision Bend. Milan Jacovich #7. St. Martin’s. hardcover, 1996. No paperback edition.

   You know by now that I think Les Roberts is one of the better and certainly one of the more underrated PI writers around today.  It appears that he’s decided to let his Saxon series languish and concentrate on Cleveland PI Milan Jacovich, and that suits me just fine. Les gives really good Cleveland.

   Milan Jacovich encounters that hoariest of PI cliches, a visit from an old love, one from whom the parting was painful and the wound slow to close. A television journalist at the station where she works has been murdered, and the man for whom she left Jacovich is under suspicion. Even worse, he was having an affair with the dead woman.

   But she wants Milan to prove him innocent, and she knows that the moral code that drove them apart will make him do everything in his power to help the man — if he takes the case. He knows he shouldn’t, but he does; and even before the last shot is fired he realizes that his first inclination was the right one.

   You’d think reviewing a book you like by an author you like is about as easy as it gets for a reviewer, wouldn’t you? Well, maybe not. When it’s an author you’ve reviewed many times before, there’s a tendency to run out of new things to say, or any fresh ways to say them, and that’s  where I am with Les Roberts.

   He still writes immensely readable prose; still makes of the City of Cleveland a colorful and likable character in itself; still writes about a strong, capable, but intensely human and fallible human being in Milan Jacovich; and is still as good at characterization as anyone around.

   But you’ve already heard all that from me, right? So why don’t I just reiterate that the man writes really good books, and that this is one of them? Okay. Done.

WARWICK DOWNING – The Player. Joe Reddman #1. Saturday Review Press, hardcover, 1974. No paperback edition.

   ‘The Player” is Denver private investigator Joe Reddman. He was given his Cheyenne name, Nataq, nha-ewo-tsimtisi,” by Bluetree Woman, the Indian who raised him. It means “Man Who Plays Garne” — and Reddman plays his particular game very well.

   In this first recorded case, Reddman is hired by a man named Aaron Cane to clear his nephew, a rookie cop named Denny McLoughlen, of a murder charge. At the same time, he takes on another job — to look into a two-year-old, $450,000 bank robbery involving an armored car that was decked out as a stagecoach. He soon discovers the two cases are connected, but before he can uncover exactly how and why, Denny McLoughlen is murdered. That, plus his growing involvement with Denny’s girlfriend, complicates his efforts, and more murder and mayhem lead up to an action-packed climax.

   Downing’s grasp of Denver’s history recalls a rough-and-tumble past that is coated with only a thin veneer of elegance. and the Rocky Mountain scenery is used to exceptionally good effect. Joe Reddman is an interesting character, a man of great integrity, and it is a shame that he has appeared as the main character in only one other novel — intriguingly titled The Gambler, the Minstrel, and the Dance Hall Queen (1976), in which an old legend from the mining camps on the south slope of Pike’s Peak seems to be repeating itself in present times. He also has a cameo appearance in The Mountains West of Town (1975), which features lawyer Nathan Tree.

   These three novels comprise Downing’s entire contribution to crime fiction. One hopes that others will be forthcoming.

         ———
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.
   

Bibliographic Update: There were no further adventures of Joe Reddman, but Warwick Downing did publish six later novels which appear to be genre work, either westerns or mystery/suspense titles.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the One-Eyed Witness. Perry Mason #36. William Morrow, hardcover, 1950. Pocket #1041, paperback, 1954/5?. Other later reprint editions, both hardcover and paperback.

The Rap Sheet blog recently posted the following:

   “• Speaking of Mason, a video games and sports Web site called JStationX has posted a piece about the 1960 Perry Mason episode “The Case of the Violent Village.” It’s pretty bland, overall, but mentions that Mason “made appearances in other novels written [by] Erle Stanley Gardner, such as the Cool and Lam series.” What? Thanks to an extraordinary bit of luck, I own all 30 of the Bertha Cool/Donald Lam detective novels. And though I haven’t worked my way through every single one of those yet, nowhere have I come across a cameo appearance by Los Angeles’ best-known fictional defense attorney. Can anyone tell me in which book Mason figures, if he does?”

http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2023/10/bullet-points-info-dump-edition.html/a>

   Intrepid googler that I am, I found more specificity regarding the alleged Cool/Lam/Mason crossover in the same site. Mainly:

   â€œThere have been crossover novels featuring Perry Mason and other prominent detective characters, such as  The Case of the One-Eyed Witness  with Donald Lam and Bertha Cool.”

https://jstationx.com/perry-mason-the-case-of-the-renegade-refugee/

   Thus spurred, I immediately galloped and gulped the cited book, eagerly awaiting the appearance of Cool & Lam in this Perry Mason book.

   Spoiler Alert: They aren’t in it.

   But, since I read it, I might as well put down my thoughts on it.

   It starts out with Perry and Della having a swanky meal at a night club. They are interrupted by a frantic call on the club phone begging for help, referencing an envelope, followed by a shriek and a hangup. On cue, the envelope is delivered. The envelope contains $500 and asks Perry to contact a man living at a specified address and to show him a newspaper cutting referencing a blackmail.

   Mason, struck by the authenticity of the shriek, and decides to take the case — even though he has no idea who his client is.

   He and Della show up at the man’s house, the man acts kind of shady, denies any knowledge, and they leave. A couple of hours later, his house burns to the ground, the crusty smoking remains of his burnt corpse found within.

   Mason continues his sleuthing, clams to the cops, and gets in deep when his trail leads to another murder. It’s a bit surprising how far out on a limb Mason puts himself for a client he doesn’t know, who has signed no retainer, and who (when he finally finds her) denies that she retained him.

   The sleuthing part is fairly hard-boiled and very little courtroom stuff shows up til the end. The action is swift and violent, and ESG could write the trunk off an elephant, he’s so smooth. He could sell a set of luggage to the Brooklyn Bridge.

   Anywho, unfortunately the thing completely falls apart at the end. Like the man says, if you can’t convince ’em, confuse ’em. And Perry & ESG certainly do their damndest to confuse you into thinking there’s a there there. But there ain’t. It doesn’t come together, and the whole thing falls apart in an apocalypse of word salad.

DANIEL BOYD – Aesop’s Travels: A Crackerjack Tale of the Old West. Montag Press, trade paperback, July 2023.

   Let me say right here at the start that in your eyes, you may not consider this an unbiased review. I know the author personally, and if you stop by this blog even only every so often, so do you. Under his own name, he goes by Dan Stumpf, and his book and movie reviews that are posted here are even better than mine, if that were at all possible, not to mention all of the most cogent comments he leaves on posts of others here.

   But since I believe that this is the book I most enjoyed reading all year, I thought I’d at least tell you some more about it, and you can make your own decision from there.

   It is a western, of the traditional variety, but I cannot give you another author to whose work you might compare it to. It is very nearly unique in many ways, and hopefully what I say here will explain further. It takes place in the 1880s, perhaps, in Dakota Territory, and the small town of Greenfield, where Beefy Beaumont, the narrator of the tale, now owns the Queen of Egypt saloon.

   And as the story opens, a good friend of his, Charlie Greenfield, a gambler who holds down a table in the saloon nearly every night of the week, is in jail and is destined to be hanged by the end of the week. There is more to the story than that, but it comes out only gradually and you’re be better off reading it on your own anyway.

   I hope I will not spoil things too much by saying the hanging does not happen, and when it doesn’t, Part Two of the book takes off from there. What I do need to tell you is something about Little Aesop, the young waif Beefy finds hunkered down in the saloon when he takes over. Little Aesop, by the way, is the new name Beefy gives him (from Billy Boogers, as I recall, based on the snot that continually flows from his nose, and whom Beefy teaches how to clean himself up.)

   Little Aesop, being only one step up from being the village idiot, so to speak, also needs to learn how to handle life, and to that end, Beefy tells him stories every evening from Aesop’s Fables.

   Now I admit that this may not seem like much to base a 300 page novel on, but it is the starting point that you may be wondering about as to the what and wherefore of the title, at least, and Part Two of the tale is a rip-roaring tale of retribution and revenge. You will read the last two chapters in perhaps thirty seconds or less.

   Participating in this second-half journey are: the Bartender, the Old Scout, the Outlaw, and Gambler, and of course, Little Aesop. They do not all come back alive, but while you, the reader, have no idea all along where the story is headed, it does come to an end in due course to the spot where it was headed all along.

   Daniel Boyd has a voice all his own, consistently humorous and folksy and real. If you like westerns which go off the beaten path as much as I do, then I think you’ll enjoy this one as much as I did.