CRAIG RICE – Trial by Fury. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1941. Paperback reprints include: Pocket 237, 1st printing, October 1943. Dell D187, Great Mystery Library #2, 1957. International Polygonics, 1991.

    When Jake and Helene Justus escape the hot summer in Chicago, they find themselves in the Jackson County Court House in Jackson, Wisconsin, just in time to witness the murder of ex-Senator Joseph Peveley (“It can’t be murder, that’s the second murder in thirty-two years.”), and naturally Jake being Jake, he ticks off the less than brilliant local lawman and finds himself jailed as a material witness. “It’s none of my business, and I don’t know that I care very much, but who might have wanted to murder your ex-Senator?”

    So the leggy blonde Helene does what any sensible wife would do. She sends to Chicago for that rumpled, red haired, bibulous Don Quixote of the law, the one and only John J. Malone, defender of the weak, savior of the downtrodden, and patron of more bars than the Bar Association can shake a stick at, who arrives by bus, hot bothered, and as usual brilliant.

    In fact, before he even gets Jake and the local prosecutor (who has been arrested by the same lawman) out of jail, he finds the murder weapon and shows how the crime was committed.

    Now all he wants to do is get himself out of Jackson and back to noisy, hot Chicago: “Here they are living in the age of innocence, and in Chicago were living in the age of consent.”

    But then when he goes to cash a check and they blow the bank out from under him, it delays his departure.

    But he isn’t, though someone else is, and as the doctor remarks the city has about four murders every thirty-two years. “There’s two more coming.”

    So reluctantly Malone finds himself delving into the case, and being Malone he naturally does it between drinks, with a little help from a local who seems to be under the impression Hoover is still in office and Prohibition is still in effect:

    And before long, there is yet another murder, one which is preceded by Malone jumping in a river to save a damsel in distress; a body found buried under a concrete slab in a most respectable basement; a less than respectable young lady is killed; and Jake ends up running from a lynch mob with Malone and a slightly inebriated bloodhound named Hercules on his trail, with a bottle of Dollar Gin their only clue.

    Of course Malone solves it, if only after polishing off the Dollar Gin and the local madhouse burns down while he and Hercules send a lynch mob packing.

    Trial by Fury may well be Rice best novel in the Malone opus. It is funny, involving, fast moving, the detective work is genuine, and the humor never flags or falls flat.

    The characters belong to that bucolic Hollywood version of an America that never existed, but Rice and Malone both know that under that facade of 4th of July picnics and Sunday morning services there are motives and actions enough for murder most foul.

    Jake is his usual less than bright self, and Helene surely the most beautiful wife a lucky fool could have. Malone sulks, pouts, drinks, smokes his cigars, looks rumpled, and proves brilliant and in this one even falls in love — albeit with an unlikely soul mate — Hercules, a giant half Bloodhound, half Great Dane, who is possessed of a courageous soul and a detective’s unwillingness to ever give up the scent.

    And in all honesty, I don’t think I can top that. Find this one and read it. It is the screwball school personified, a first class piece of detective work, a drop dead funny novel, and Malone and Hercules are one of the great romances in literature. Unless you are a cat person, or have a heart of stone.

   Some odds and ends this time, almost of them dealing with small typographical errors that have been spotted and corrected in Part 34 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.

COBB, (GEOFFREY) BELTON. 1892-1971. Son of Thomas Cobb, 1835-1932, q.v. Sales director for Longman’s publishers and a regular contributor to Punch and other magazines. His detective novels invariably involved one or more of three series characters: Inspector Cheviot Burmann (41 titles), Bryan Armitage (21 titles) and Superintendent Manning (6 titles), with some overlap. A small handful of stand-alone novels are also included in his entry in the Revised Crime Fiction IV.

DEHAN, RICHARD. Pseudonym of Clothilde (Inez Augusta Mary) Graves, 1863-1932, q.v. Under this pen name, the author of two story collections included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV; some of the stories are criminous.

FORSYTE, CHARLES. Joint pseudonym of Gordon Charles George Philo, 1920-2009, and his wife Mavis Ella (Galsworthy) Philo, 1920-1986, qq.v. Under this pen name, the author of four crime and/or espionage novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, three of them cases for Inspector Richard Left. Of special note is the following book, also in his CFIV entry:
      The Decoding of Edwin Drood. Gollancz, UK, hc, 1980; Scribner, US, hc, 1980. Discussion of previous attempts to complete the novel by Charles Dickens, 1812-1870, with a new ending by this author.

GRAVES, CLOTILDE (INEZ AUGUSTA MARY). 1863-1932. Add name in full (first named sometimes spelled Clothilde). Pseudonym: Richard Dehan, q.v. Born in Cork; actress, journalist, illustrator, poet and playwright. Under her own name, the author of one title included with a dash in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. See below. Other work, according to one source includes “humorous novels and stories of witchcraft and pagan religions.”
      -Dragon’s Teeth. Dalziel Brothers, UK, hc, 1891. Add setting: China. [A tale of daring adventure, hardship and love in China during a native uprising.]

HAMILTON, [LORD] FREDERIC (SPENSER). 1856-1928. Add biographical information: Was in Diplomatic Service, serving in Berlin, Petrograd, Lisbon and Buenos Aires. Member of Parliament; editor of Pall Mall Magazine. (Some sources say that he introduced the sport of skiing to Canada in 1887.) The author of one standalone novel in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, plus seven story collections involving series character Mr. P. J. Davenant. One of these is shown below (Nash, 1915). According to Lofts & Adley, Philip John Davenant was “a public school boy [whose] adventures took place while he was still a pupil at Tonbridge School […] In addition to an amazing bent to criminology [he had] a wonderful knowledge of the German language.”
      -Lady Eleanor, Private Simmonds, and Others. Hurst, UK, hc, 1919. Correct setting: Ireland.

HARDY, IZA DUFFUS. Ca.1852-1922. The author of “a large output of novels of a romantic cast. She set some of them in exotic places, and also wrote travel books and contributed stories and other pieces to periodicals.” To the thirteen titles previously listed in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, add the one below.
      Friend and Lover. Hurst, UK, hc, 1880; Harper, US, hc, 1880. Setting: England.

MACKENZIE, JOAN (NOBLE). Correct spelling of last name (from MacKenzie) and add middle name. Add: Born in Dumfries, Scotland, 1905. Included in her entry in the Revised Crime Fiction IV are five titles published between 1935 and 1951, four of them indicated as having only marginal crime content.

PHILO, GORDON CHARLES GEORGE. 1920-2009. Add year of death and biographical information: British diplomat stationed in Hanoi, Kuala Lampur, Ankara, Istanbul and London; long-time member of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. In literary circles, an expert on both Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. Joint pseudonym with his wife Mavis Ellen Galsworthy Philo, 1920-1986: Charles Forsyte, q.v.

PHILO, MAVIS ELLEN (GALSWORTHY). 1920-1986. Add both dates and full name. Joint pseudonym with husband Gordon Charles George Philo, 1920-2009: Charles Forsyte, q.v.

SCOTT, EVELYN. 1893-1963. Pseudonym: Ernest Souza, q.v. Born in Clarksville, Tennessee; name at birth: Elsie Dunn. She changed her name to Evelyn Scott in 1913 when she began living with Frederick Creighton Wellman, an already married dean at Tulane University. After the mid-20s, she married British writer John Metcalfe. A celebrated novelist, playwright and poet of her day.

SOUZA, ERNEST. Pseudonym of Evelyn Scott, 1893-1963, q.v. Under this pen name, the author of one adventure thriller included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. See below:
      Blue Rum. Cape & Smith, US, hc, 1930; Jonathan Cape, UK, hc, 1930. Setting: Portugal, Brazil (add the latter).

A GENTLEMAN OF PARIS. Paramount Famous Lasky Corp., 1927. Adolphe Menjou, Shirley O’Hara, Arlette Marchal, Ivy Harris, Nicholas Soussanin. Screenplay by Chandler Sprague from the story “Bellamy the Magnificent” by Roy Horniman; titles by Herman Mankiewicz; photography by Hal Rosson. Director: Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

   The cinematography by the noted Hal Rosson was compromised by the dark print that made some of the intertitles difficult to read.

   This was also to be a problem with at least two other films, one of which was so severely damaged that the last reel was almost unwatchable. (More on this later.)

   Adolphe Menjou is the dapper Marquis de Marignan whose complicated love life is managed with great skill by the apparently unflappable Joseph Talineau (Nicholas Soussanin), his butler and general manager of his household.

   The arrival of the Marquis’ fiancee, Yvonne Dufour, taxes even Joseph’s talents, but all seems to be under control until Joseph learns that his wife (their marriage seems to be one largely of convenience from her point of view) is one of his employer’s conquests.

   Stunned by the discovery, Joseph decides to destroy the Marquis by engineering a card game that appears to demonstrate that the Marquis is a cheat, a crime worse, in the eyes of society, than cheating with a friend’s wife. What begins as a frothy comedy of manners turns so dark that the only recourse for a gentleman is to take his own life.

   The sudden reversal that undermines Joseph’s plan and restores comedic balance may satisfy some conventional sense of wanting a restoration of the “natural” order but it throws the film off balance.

   Tragedy threatens and the momentary crossing of the boundary that separates comedy and tragedy in classical French theater may prove disconcerting to more than one spectator, especially since the resolution seems so hollow.

   The director had worked with Chaplin on A Woman of Paris in which Menjou plays a similar role as a gentleman about town, his stock in trade as an actor in the silent era, and this film, even viewed in a dark print, is an effective exercise in style.

   D’Abbadie d’Arast’s Hollywood career was apparently damaged by his reputation for being difficult and going over budget (reminding one of von Stroheim). He ended his career in 1933 with the direction of Topaze, which boasts fine performances by a cast headed by John Barrymore and Myrna Loy, closing his career with a film that played to his strengths as a director.

VIKRAM CHANDRA – Sacred Games. HarperCollins, hardcover; first edition, January 2007. Trade paperback: Harper Perennial; 1st printing, December 2007.

    At 900 plus pages a good many readers may pass this one by, which is a pity, because it is a remarkable thriller that also manages to be an epic of Mumbai (Bombay) and through it, modern India at the birth of the 21st century. Written by Vikram Chanda, who divides his time between Harvard and Mumbai, it has the advantage of a writer comfortable and capable in English and at home in the streets of his homeland.

    The hero of Sacred Games is Sartaj Singh, an Inspector with the Mumbai police, who is at war with Ganesh Gaitonde, the nation’s most wanted criminal and head of G Company, a sort of Indian Mafia with fingers in every pie. Their conflict will take the men across a wide spectrum of life in Mumbai.

A Sikh, known by his colleagues and the people of Mumbai’s streets as the ‘silky Sikh,’ Sartaj is divorced, over forty, and watching his career downspin, but he is determined to bring down Ganesh, who, despite his success as a criminal, is facing demons of his own, his very success isolating him from human contact.

    As the novel develops, equal parts Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris, The Godfather, police procedural, and Bollywood movie, Chandra reveals more and more of both Sartaj and Ganesh, while his portrait of the swirling exotic and poverty-stricken city evolves in the background.

    “History has a shape …the universe has a design … For every insect, there is a predator. For every flower, there is a function. Some scientists still look at all this beauty, but insist it is result of natural selection, of chance and nothing else. They are blind. They are afraid. Pull back from the chance, look at it with the right vision, and chaos reveals its patterns.”

    Finding those patterns is the way Sartaj will locate and find Ganesh, and by the time the two men confront each other, Chandra has given us a full portrait of life in Mumbai: its people, its poverty, its beauty, and its flaws. Sartaj and Ganesh themselves are fully revealed, and their inevitable conflict becomes a clash as epic as Ahab and the white whale.

    The novel is a love letter to Mumbai, but one written with an eye to its realities. Structured like an old fashioned triple-decker, its scope is focused by the conflict of these two men, a battle worthy of Holmes and Moriarity, or Jean Valjean and Javert, but cast in the form of a thriller, although one of which it can be said, as it was of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, all life is in it. All the life of Mumbai anyway.

    In Sartaj, we have a hero as complex as Maigret and as human, and in Ganesh an antagonist as complex and troubled as Michael Corleone, who finds the only man who can understand him or forgive him is the man sworn to destroy him. Like all great protagonist/antagonist pairs, the two men both compliment and contradict each other. Their battle is an epic one that sweeps in its wake all of the city they inhabit. Only one of the two can emerge from the battle: the one best equipped to grow within himself and face his own reality.

    Sacred Games may not be for every reader, but if you ever want more from a thriller, good writing, ambitious narrative expertly controlled, and pure old fashioned storytelling, this is the book for you. That is also a first class thriller is a tribute to Chandra’s skills (and the extensive vocabulary of Indian words and slang at the end of the book).

    As India’s role in the world grows more important we can look forward to getting a glimpse of Indian popular literature, and with this more serious book we will have some familiarity with the subject. In recent years Indian crime has figured as a background in John Irving’s Son of the Circus, and David Gregory Roberts Shantaram, both a far cry from the charm and gentle wit of H.R.F. Keating’s Inspector Ghote.

    Read this one. It is a major work, and yet it reads like a thriller, a portrait of a world alien to most of us and at the same time utterly familiar and real. Despite its length and depth, you won’t want to put this one down. It is the kind of book you can move inside of and inhabit. And unlike most thrillers you won’t want this one to end.

    But don’t get a hernia reading it. It is really a hefty tome, though surprisingly, one that doesn’t read that way. Epic and compelling aren’t always words you can use together, but both fit Vikram Chanda’s Sacred Games.

RICHARD S. WHEELER – Flint’s Truth.

Forge, hardcover; 1st printing, May 1998. Paperback reprint: October 2000.

   The first of itinerant newspaper printer Sam Flint’s adventures in the Old West was recorded in Flint’s Gift. This is the second; the third, forthcoming, is Flint’s Honor. And if this book is any measure, all three are worth tracking down and reading.

   Moving from settlement to settlement with a printing press, several cases of movable type, newsprint and ink is not a task or career for the faint-hearted, nor is setting up shop in a town such as Oro Blanco, where the powers-that-be prefer that certain secrets stay hidden.

   As Sam says on page 63: “You’d be amazed the amount of news that people don’t wish to see in print.” At stake is a fortune in land and gold.

   This is a morality tale written in the guise of a western novel, with most of the characters taking stock parts. In fuller roles, though, besides Sam himself, are the philosophical Mexican priest who befriends him, and Libby, the skinny 13-year-old girl who becomes his right-hand aide. Each in their own way becomes a key to the tale, which is brutally honest and takes an ironic twist or two before a form of justice prevails.

   Here’s a solid, picturesque glimpse into a unique time and place, one that rings a resonant chord of truth and right, and even better — as you can expect of all of Wheeler’s work — here’s a book that’s completely and compulsively readable.

EDDIE MULLER – Shadow Boxer.   Scribner, hardcover; 1st printing, January 2003.

   There’s only one thing wrong with this throwback to the 1940s era of sports-based pulp fiction. Well, make it two. While Billy Nichols, who tells the story, is a crack San Francisco sportswriter nicknamed Mr. Boxing, there is not much in this book about either boxers or the fight game.

   What it’s really about is the continuation of the murder case begun in Muller’s first novel, The Distance. It may be that the man Nichols brought to justice in the early book is not entirely guilty. The dead woman was the wife of boxer Hack Escalante — and not so incidentally, she was the also the one Nichols was having a secret affair with.

   It’s a complicated tale, and if this is a new trend in detective fiction, it ought to stop right now. Without having read the first book, it’s impossible to know exactly who is who, and why or why not, and to whom. As detective fiction, it’s spinach, and I hate spinach.

   As a writer of historical fiction, Muller has San Francisco and its seedy (and not-so-seedy) environs down cold. As a writer of hard-boiled pulp fiction, Muller certainly gives you your full money’s worth. Or even double, considering Nichols’ single paragraph longer-than-one-page rant on pages 152-153. Boiled down, it’s a long improvised version, with several choruses, of the old adage, “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”

   This impromptu interjection is a work of noirish perfection, verging on Raymond Chandler territory, but the story that surrounds it is only better than average. What’s missing is an essential if not absolutely vital ingredient, a self-contained coherency. It’s too bad. It could have been a contender.

[UPDATE] 08-31-09.   I’ve always meant to, but so far I haven’t done the obvious thing and start over by reading the two books about Billy Nichols in the right order. But I haven’t — in fact, I’ve yet to read the first one — and my review is based on the fact that Shadow Boxer is the only one I have.

   Wondering, though, why this book never came out in paperback, and why there was never another book in the Billy Nichols series, I found out why on Eddie Muller’s website, in which he says, in part:

THE MUMMY’S TOMB. Universal, 1942. Lon Chaney Jr., Dick Foran, John Hubbard, Elyse Knox, George Zucco. Director: Harold Young.

THE MUMMY’S GHOST.. Universal, 1944. Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Robert Lowery, Ramsay Ames, Barton MacLane, George Zucco. Director: Reginald Le Borg.

THE MUMMY’S CURSE.. Universal, 1944. Lon Chaney Jr., Peter Coe, Virginia Christine, Kay Harding, Dennis Moore. Director: Leslie Goodwins.

   The Mummy (1932; reviewed by Steve way back here) is one of the great romantic films, and The Mummy’s Hand (1940) is a snappy little programmer, but the three Mummy films with Lon Chaney Jr. are the plodding, proletarian work-horses of the Monster Movie.

   Slow-moving, badly-cast and sloppily-written, they have always struck me as examples of what a day-to-day Grind a Monster’s life must be. Kharis stumbles along playing out his curse with no joy, no sign of satisfaction, preying on the Old and Slow-Moving like he was stamping out Widgets on an assembly line, which is a very apt description of the way these films were produced.

   Ben Pivar, the producer responsible for the series, was by some accounts a man of legendary Bad Taste, a filmmaker whose idea of Art was a story that could incorporate as much stock footage and as few sets as possible.

   Indeed, his Mummy movies seem to be made up mostly of clips from earlier films, like youngsters devouring their parents.

   Yet the Kharis films taken as a whole, convey a theme of surprising perversity: alone among Movie Monsters, Kharis fulfills his destiny. He destroys the defilers of Ananka’s tomb and twice reclaims his reincarnated Princess.

   Yet, like the hero of a David Goodis novel, he never succeeds on his own terms. Each film ends with him joylessly sinking back into the grimy milieu from whence he came at the start, no wiser, no happier, and no longer loved.

   Which is a pretty odd message to come from a low-brow producer like Pivar. Just a pity the films themselves are so damn boring.

MICHAEL INNES – Death by Water.

Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1968. Paperback reprints include: Berkley, 1969; Perennial, 1991. UK title: Appleby at Allington: Victor Gollancz, hc, 1968.

   Michael Innes, from whom I have come to expect great things, did not enchant me with a recent non-series mystery, Money from Holme. But Sir John Appleby returns in the present book, and the Innes magic is still operating.

   Sir John seems to have retired to the country from Scotland Yard, and should be (as he recalls) “engaged in moving decently from bedtime to bedtime, from lunch to dinner.” One of these dinners is as a guest of Owain Allington, who has put some recently obtained wealth to the task of reacquiring the ancestral mansion.

   The evening sees the discovery of the first of a series of bodies, all apparently accidentally deceased. Appleby, against his own inclinations and contrary to his own reasoning, finds himself drawn into the affair and smelling an unpleasant odor therein, and after a false start or two tracks the problem to its solution.

   Death by Water is peopled with some wonderful comic characters, and others not so comic. Innes clearly enjoys playing with words, and fortunately his enjoyment is richly shared by the reader.

   Do try Death by Water — it’s a pleasure.

THE DARKENING TRAIL. Mutual Film Corp. 1915. William S. Hart, Enid Markey, George Fisher, Nona Thomas, Louise Glaum. William S. Hart, director; Thomas H. Ince, producer; written by C. Gardner Sullivan. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

    William S. Hart, in his third feature film, plays Yukon Ed, hopelessly in love with Ruby McGraw (Enid Markey), owner of the local saloon, who has refused his offer of marriage dozens of times.

    When Jack Sturgess (George Fisher), fleeing from his father’s wrath after he has wronged and abandoned a woman he refuses to marry, arrives in the small Alaskan town, Ruby, seeing in him the knight in shining armor she’s been waiting for, takes up with him.

    Yukon Ed, willing to give the newcomer a chance, but ever watchful for any wrong done to Ruby, is there when Ruby, gravely ill, is waiting for the doctor who will never come because Jack, after promising to bring him, detours for a dalliance with a dancehall girl.

    The intertitle “Requiem of the Rain” announces the grim conclusion and captures the dark poetry of this striking film.

LIONEL DAVIDSON – The Rose of Tibet. Victor Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1962; Penguin, UK, pb, 1964. Harper, US, hardcover, 1962. Reprint US paperback editions include: Avon, 1965; Perennial, 1982; St. Martin’s, 1996.

   In a recent posting (The Spy Who Parodied, Part 3) I reviewed Agent 8 3/4 based on the novel Night of Wenceslas by Lionel Davidson.

   Davidson, a British thriller writer, wrote only a handful of critically acclaimed novels, mostly in the spy story tradition. Among them were some of the best spy/adventure novels of the 20th century, and among those the outstanding work is The Rose of Tibet.

   Davidson himself is a character in The Rose of Tibet, appearing in the framing sequence as he tries to put together the story of Charles Houston (pronounced ?Uston), a British journalist who traveled to remote Tibet at the time of the Chinese incursion there in the years after WW II. It is Houston’s story Davidson tells, and quite a story it proves to be.

   It is difficult to discuss this book without mentioning other writers, Try to imagine James Hilton’s Lost Horizon written with the canny political eye of Eric Ambler, or H. Rider Haggard as re-imagined by Ian Fleming, perhaps a Harold Lamb novel written by Graham Greene (incidentally I mention Fleming and Greene with good reasons, both were admirers of Davidson and highly praised this book, as did Daphne du Maurier who asked in print if he was not the new Rider Haggard), John LeCarre in collaboration with Charles Crichton and T. E. B. Clarke, who penned many of the classic Ealing comedies.

    The Rose of Tibet is all of that. It is a grand adventure, by turns very funny, very sexy, erotic, exotic, angry, honest , and above all compelling. Charles Houston, the most unlikely of heroes, proves to be the only hope of a remote Tibetan nation, one of those lost civilizations that writers like Hilton, Haggard, Burroughs, and others used to dot all over the wild places of the planet.

   Davidson gives us a highly believable one, but no less enticing or exotic for that. The early scenes in this savage and exotic Eden, a sort of sensual paradise, are among the best such scenes you will encounter in fiction. It is strange yet familiar, exotic, erotic, yet completely believable. It is a splendidly evocative world.

   Houston arrives in this remote, gentle, strangely savage, and doomed place on the eve of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and as the PRC presses forward, a reluctant Houston finds himself chosen for the most delicate and dangerous mission of his life — to smuggle out a small boy and a young woman from this small Shangri La. The boy, a living god and the hope of the small nation, and the girl the repository of all that is erotic and beautiful, the rose of Tibet.

   Their journey, accompanied by a small mountain pony, across the roof of the world one step ahead of the PRC, is the bulk of the book’s narrative. Treachery, his unworldly companions, the narrow roads and deadly mountain paths, murderous and unpredictable weather, a deadly encounter with an Asian brown bear, and the ultimate fate of Houston’s mission make up the rest of the novel, which ends with a delightful twist I won’t even begin to suggest after one of the most harrowing journeys in literature.

   Literate and yet capable of spinning a tale with the best, Davidson’s works are a treasure trove for readers willing to delve into them. Night of Wenceslas, The Menorah Men (aka The Long Way to Shiloh) about a Raiders of the Ark kind of quest for the True Menorah.

   And then there’s The Sun Chemist, Making Good Again, The Chelsea Murders, Kolymsky Heights, Smith’s Gazelle (a young adult novel), Under Plum Lake, and three more young adult novels as by David Line are among some of the best and most delightful books of the era.

   Not a very great output for a period from about 1962 to 1998, but each and every one of them is a gem of great beauty.

   Davidson deserves to be read, and almost certainly once you have read him you will reread him.

   Among these gems The Rose of Tibet stands out. It is a perfect book of its kind, and I don’t really think you are likely to forget it once you have read it. Unlike many thrillers, it is one you will return to and enjoy time after time.

   The Rose of Tibet belongs on that very small shelf of favorites that are equal in your heart as in your head, a curious mix of epic adventure, international intrigue, wild romance, Ealing comedy, and satiric commentary.

   It is all that and more — little wonder Ian Fleming, Daphne Du Maurier, and Graham Greene fell under its powerful spell. I can honestly say that over the years everyone I have introduced the book to has ended up adding it to their list of favorite books of all time. It is certainly one of mine.

   And don’t worry, I couldn’t possibly oversell it. It really is that good.