E. C. R. LORAC – I Could Murder Her.

Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1951. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, April 1952. Paperback reprint: Popular Library, no date [ca. 1960]. Originally published in the UK by Collins Crime Club, 1951, as Murder of a Martinet.

   Muriel Farrington is a domineering woman who, unfortunately for them, has her entire family living with her in her stately home. She tries, often successfully, to run the lives of her children, her stepchildren, her in-laws, and her husband, and she seems to be despised by all except her husband and one son.

   When she is found dead one morning in her bed, the family doctor, who is old, ill, and hasn’t been very able for years, is unable to attend and bestow a certificate, which he would have done without investigation or thought.

   A younger, more able and perceptive doctor has to be called in, to the shock of whoever the murderer was, and he does not find the death natural.

   A hypodermic puncture in her arm leads him to believe, correctly as it turns out, that someone has injected insulin into the woman. Since she was not suffering from diabetes, death was the inevitable result.

   The characterizations of those in the household are well done, particularly the one of Mrs. Pinks, the charwoman. The motives of each of the family members who may have killed Muriel Farrington are set forth clearly.

   The investigator, Chief Inspector Macdonald of the C.I.D., a continuing character in many of Lorac’s novels, is not very distinct, however. He is quiet, kind, considerate, and an excellent investigator in his own way, but that’s all that is learned about him.

   Perhaps Lorac had delineated Macdonald in his earlier cases. Nonetheless, she could have taken a little more effort here to acquaint new readers with him.

   A fairish-play novel. The murderer was evident to me, and I don’t spot too many. The clues are psychological rather than physical.

CAROLYN WELLS – The Wooden Indian. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, US, 1935.

   A recent replacement of a hot water heater in our basement necessitated the moving of several boxes of books in order in order to make room for the old one to be dragged out and the new one brought in. This brought to the light of day (figuratively speaking) several shelves of other books that I was glad to lay my eyes on again. It had been six or seven years, at least.

   I am talking several hundred books in total — being moved and/or coming to light again — and of these, I picked one to read, not realizing at the time that Bill Pronzini had beaten me to it. One of his reviews from 1001 Midnights is of this same book and was posted here on this blog back in January of this year.

   This is a Fleming Stone mystery, and while Bill called him “colorless and one-dimensional,” I’d say he’s a step or two above that in both categories, but on the other hand, he’s certainly no more than that.

   Dead is a man whose demise is so certain, and at the hand of another, that Bob Barnaby, a friend of Stone’s staying in the same elite area in Connecticut (near the Pequot Club Grounds, a center of the book’s activities), senses it too, and calls him in on the case long before the murder actually happens.

   It seems that David Corbin, a noted stamp collector as well as that of Indian memorabilia, is rather a bully to his wife, in public, at least, and his wife is also one of those beauties who suffers in silence while attracting other men to her like, well, moths to a flame.

   The murder weapon is an arrow, fired from the bow of, well, guess what, a wooden Indian in full regalia in the dead man’s study. There is limited access to the room, but I do not believe that the mystery could really be called one of the locked room variety.

   I’d expected the story to be stodgy and formal, but I was in error in that regard. The banter is generally witty, although of the upper crust type– no dark and dirty streets here — and the tale is heavy on dialogue, so much so that one must stop every once in a while and trace the paragraph back to rediscover who it is that’s talking.

   This is also one of those books in which all of the suspects are gathered together in one room for a final confrontation, whether it’s necessary or not. Stone claims not to have known who the killer was until the very last moment, but an even less than astute reader should know from the questions he’s been asking who it is that he suspects long before then.

   As a detective story, then, The Wooden Indian lands solidly in the “mediocre” category. Enjoyable enough, but distinctly below par. Bill concludes his comments about Carolyn Wells’ detective stories in general by saying, “… the casual reader looking for entertaining, well-written, believable mysteries would do well to look elsewhere.”

   While I’m far from discouraged enough to say I’ll never read another one of her books, I’d have to say that I’m not especially encouraged to do so either — not immediately, at any rate.

TWILIGHT WOMEN. Independent Film Distributors / Lippert, 1952. Originally released in the UK as Women of Twilight. René Ray, Lois Maxwell, Freda Jackson, Vida Hope, Joan Dowling, Laurence Harvey. Screenplay by Anatole de Grunwald, based on a play by Sylvia Rayman. Director: Gordon Parry.

   On the Obscure Movie front, several years ago I encountered an unintentionally bizarre little item called Twilight Women, made in Great Britain back in 1952. The word “twilight” had a specific connotation in sleazy paperbacks of those days, but the Twilight Women of this film all happen to be unwed mothers.

   Hard to believe now, but fifty years ago, Unwed Motherhood was a brand of shame roughly equivalent to a criminal record. In fact, the home for single-parents-to-be in Twilight Women is not unlike a prison at all, with its corrupt warden/landlady, her venal and sub-normal hench-persons, and the assorted tough gals, tramps and frightened innocents stuck in her care.

   Their stories play out with surprising intelligence and compassion, however (the adaptation of Sylvia Raymond’s play being done by Anatole de Grunewald, who was rather good at it) and while the film never tries for explicit social commentary, its depiction of women made victims of society’s moral code leaves little doubt of whom we should root for.

   This is, however, no message picture; it’s far too weird for that. For one thing, the print I saw had an odd blue tint to it, giving it the appearance of a Guy Madden film. For another, there’s a sort of introduction, in which the faces of the ladies morph eerily into one another.

   And strangest of all is the fleeting presence of Laurence Harvey, early in his career, playing some sort of lounge lizard. The sight (and sound) of this patently-hateful actor charming the ladies and belting out love songs in an obviously-dubbed baritone must be seen to be disbelieved.

   Or perhaps you shouldn’t. I still hear him sometimes, in the long dark nights of the soul…

Editorial comment:   We all know who Lois Maxwell is, I’m sure. She’s one of the young mothers in Twilight Women, while René Ray, whose photo you see below, plays another, she being gangster moll Viv Bruce — the gangster being Jerry Nolan, the low-life club singer played by Laurence Harvey, whose role in the film was pointed out so perceptively by Dan. (I am not positive, but I believe it is also René Ray’s photo on the DVD cover above.)

ERIC HEATH – Murder in the Museum. Hillman-Curl Clue Club Mystery, hardcover, 1939. Mystery Novel of the Month, digest-sized paperback, unnumbered, 1940.

   Readers of Bill Pronzini’s book Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek will recall Eric Heath, author of the breathless classic, Murder of a Mystery Writer (1955), wherein the hero, Dr. Wade Anthony, propounds the “motion picture theory of crime solving.” The doctor’s secretary-assistant was one Penny Lake.

   (The latter was previously reviewed here. The book was a rewrite of Heath’s own Death Takes a Dive (1938), the protagonists of which were Copey Clift and Winnie Preston. Forgive the interruption. Please continue reading.)

   There is nothing quite that wonderful in Murder in The Museum, but rest assured, in all other ways it is as alternative as alternative gets. And more fun for it.

    Museum also features that attractive sleuth Cornelius (Copey) Clift Jr., America’s outstanding criminologist; and his bride-to-be, Watson, and narrator of our little adventure, Winnie Preston, who conveniently is also Copey’s secretary.

   As the novel opens they are driving up the coast from San Francisco to Seattle where they are to be married in the home of Copey’s wealthy mother when they stop to visit Copey’s old friend Alexander Cameron, a millionaire obsessed with Egypt, and prone to eccentricities — not the least of which being his sultry and seductive French dancer wife Sidi, but Winnie isn’t worried, “because the average man does not want to marry that sort of woman.”

   And they are hardly settled in before they catch her performing a strange dance nearly nude around an Egyptian sarcophagus that belongs to her husband’s collection. You know how foreigners are.

   Things start popping soon after, when their host is found murdered in the strange triangular shaped museum attached to the house — locked in with no way out in a secret room, unmarked save for a small puncture wound on his jugular vein.

   And we’re off. Pretty soon Copey and Winnie uncover a crystal coffin with a perfectly preserved corpse of a beautiful Egyptian girl, and the suspects grow:

   Cameron’s adult son Dennis with whom he quarreled; Seilimann, his loyal butler; the French wife; Haroud, the curator of the museum; and Mannheim, who believes Cameron cheated him out of an ornate scarab ring found on the dead man’s finger.

   Captain Forquer of the police arrives and of course bows to Copey’s superior knowledge as any good policeman would… But Winnie is concerned:

   Of course Winnie is just being silly, as Copey will prove, despite Cameron’s belief that his wife Sidi and he had been lovers in a previous life. Still, Winnie is a bit prone to melodrama for the wife to be of a criminologist.

   We can only hope, but instead we get a heavy fog — other than the one Winnie seems to be in perpetually.

   And you can’t really blame her when the body in the crystal coffin turns out to be Zuleyka, Cameron’s lost reincarnated love.

   Of course Copey brings it all to a solution after a bit of business on a boat and a storm and a missing body, and Heath pulls off a unique twist — the most likely suspect is guilty.

   Copey, borrowing a note from Philo Vance’s notebook, allows the suspect to commit suicide (“I detest executions…”) and he and Winnie are once again on their way to Seattle.

   It’s a wonder there isn’t another murder.

Editorial Comments:   It is I who added that parenthetical second paragraph to David’s review above. Following the link will give you more information about Murder of a Mystery Writer than you may want to know, along with a complete bibliography for Eric Heath, the author.

   For a complete gallery of the covers of the books in Hillman-Curl’s Clue Club series, you need go no further than this page from Bill Deeck’s Murder at 3 Cents a Day website.

BRENNER. TV series. CBS-TV, 1959-61-64. Ed Binns, James Broderick, with Dick O’Neill, Walter Greaza, Sydney Pollack, Gene Hackman. Executive producer: Herbert Brodkin. Various screenwriters & directors.

   Brenner was one of those overlooked gems of the black-and-white TV era, a half-hour character-driven drama about two New York City cops, Roy Brenner (Edward Binns) a veteran member of The Confidential Squad (aka Internal Affairs), and his son Ernie (James Broderick), a rookie detective.

   The focus was police corruption and the emotional cost of police work, themes explored at greater length and intensity by such later shows as Naked City and Police Story.

   Brenner utilized a low-key approach, though, and it pays off. It doesn’t utilize the city as a character the way Naked City did, but its exteriors capture the time (1959) and place and Manhattan mood just as well.

   A big help is the supporting cast of then mostly unfamiliar New York actors, including Simon Oakland, George Grizzard, Michael Strong, Frank Sutton, Frank Overton and an unbilled Gene Hackman, who pops up several times as a patrolman.

   The recent DVD box set from Timeless Media features 15 of the 25 or 26 episodes produced. (See below.)

   The visual quality on most of the episodes is outstanding. I’d seen a couple of episodes years ago and always hoped I’d get to see more. I was not disappointed.

NOTE: The series was first televised in 1959 (6 June to 19 September) and appeared in re-runs on CBS during the summmers of 1961, 1962, and 1964, with two new episodes appearing in 1961. In the fall of 1964 (17 May to 19 July) a summer season of several new episodes appeared. According to the The Classic TV Archive, the total number of episodes that actually aired is considered to be 25.

TOO LATE FOR TEARS. United Artists, 1949, aka Killer Bait. Lizabeth Scott, Dan Duryea, Arthur Kennedy, Don De Fore, Kristine Miller. Screenwriter: Roy Huggins, based on his book of the same title. Director: Byron Haskin.

   Lizabeth Scott fans, and I know there are many of you, will be happy to know that she pulls out all the stops in Too Late for Tears, as if you probably didn’t already know. I apologize for the cliche in the opening sentence, but it is true.

   As Jane Palmer, she and her husband (Arthur Kennedy) are driving down one those hills surrounding Los Angeles one evening when someone in a car speeding by in the opposite direction tosses a bag into the back seat of their convertible.

   Stunned, the pair manage to shake the car that begins to follow them immediately . Obviously the bag was intended for someone else; the Palmers have somehow been caught in the middle of something they know nothing about.

   One close-up scene will tell you all you want to know about what the rest of the movie has in store. One look at Jane Palmer’s face when she sees the contents of the bag tells the story, all of it. The bag is full of money, stacks and stacks of it. Alan Palmer doesn’t stand a chance. It’s keep the money or lose his wife.

   Not being a strong believer in telling a prospective viewer too much, I won’t, but it’s hard to resist. I’ll do my best not to reveal too much, but to tell you the truth, I can’t think of a noir movie as complicated as this one is.

   Dan Duryea. The money — a payoff of some kind? — that was meant for someone, that someone couldn’t be played better than by Dan Duryea. Can even he resist being caught up in Mrs. Palmer’s plans?

   Don DeFore. He claims to be Alan Palmer’s wartime buddy, Don Blake, but he’s turned up at a strange time. Although friendly enough, even to the point of being somewhat of a sap, he asks too many questions and doesn’t seem to be completely on the up-and-up

   Kristine Miller. Alan Palmer’s sister, Kathy, who finds herself falling for Don Blake, while frantically suspecting Jane Palmer of anything and everything.

   And of course don’t forget Lizabeth Scott as Jane Palmer. She can go from scowling grimness to a smiling luring vamp full of charm in a fraction of an instant. If she sees an opening, she’ll take it in a second.

   If ever a woman could devour a man who stands in her way in less time than it takes to flicker an eyelash, it is she.

   If you’re a fan of film noir, or even if you aren’t but you’re still reading this — if you haven’t seen this movie, by all means, do something about it, and soon.

   I think anyone who’s already seen this movie will tell you exactly the same thing, and for exactly the same reasons. Good direction, a great story, and five well-drawn performances. You can’t go wrong.

   Danny Fuller to Jane Palmer: Don’t ever change, Tiger. I don’t think I’d like you with a heart.

                      

CLYDE B. CLASON – Murder Gone Minoan

Rue Morgue Press; trade paperback, 2003. Original hardcover edition: Doubleday Crime Club, 1939. Hardcover reprint: Sun Dial Press, 1940.

   Checking on www.abebooks.com just a few minutes ago, I found only one copy of the Crime Club edition for sale: Near Fine in a Near Fine jacket. Price: a mere $250.00. Further searching revealed a few other copies on other venues, one being a former library copy with no jacket. Price: a much more reasonable $35.00.

   But if $14.95 is all you want to spend, this handsome trade paperback will do very nicely. This is but one of many classic mystery reprints coming from Tom & Enid Schantz of Rue Morgue Press, and they should be commended for a job well done, and for jobs yet to be done. (At the moment, the only other Clason title they’re published is The Man from Tibet, but perhaps others are on their way. Only sales will tell, I imagine.)

   Only one thing is lacking, before I continue, and that is the original cover art, which as I recall was by Boris Artzybasheff. That gentleman no longer being available (or affordable) a fine piece of work by Rob Pudim was used in his stead. To my eye it’s a bit cluttered, but it Does Catch the Eye.

   Clason’s series detective is an eminent Roman historian named Theocritus Lucius Westborough — Westborough for short — who also has earned a well-deserved reputation as a private investigator on the side. If this book is an example — which from my point of view it has to be, at least for the moment, since if I ever read an earlier book in the series, it was long ago and long forgotten — Westborough’s adventures are copiously filled with well-researched lore of ancient times, interspersed with mini-lectures on the same.

   I’m jumping the gun here, but it’s Westborough’s knowledge of ancient history that helps crack a killer’s alibi — which is not quite fair to the reader not recently tutored in such matters — such as myself, I have to admit — but it’s a sizable step above nabbing a villain who reveals himself because he’s not aware that buildings do not have thirteenth floors, for example.

   Just in passing. There is a deliberate misstatement on my part that is not quite correct in the last sentence of the previous paragraph, but if I were to speak more clearly, I would be revealing more of what Clason had up his sleeve than I should.

   This, the seventh of ten cases Westborough is on record as having solved, takes place on an isolated island off the southern California shore, where first a valuable artifact is stolen — and Westborough called in — and then murder, when a missing butler is later found dead.

   The owner of the island, a rich Greek businessman named Paphlagloss, is fascinated with the ancient Minoan culture, pre-historic Cretans whose civilization arose and fell even before the ancient Greeks, and his mansion is filled with valuable relics, artwork and jewels.

   It is just the right place for skulduggery to be done, and with only a handful of suspects, one of whom is responsible for doing the dugging, it’s a perfect setting for a mystery.

   Another of Clason’s strengths is in his characters and their dialogue. To my ears, the lengthy reports of letters and verbatim interviews of suspects are close to perfect. Other parts of the tale are excellent, while others, contrarily, are pure fuddle-muddle.

   I like the following quote, for some reason, taken from pages 160-161. Paphlagloss’s daughter is having a private conversation with Westborough:

   While it’s great to have this small gem of the Golden Age of Mysteries back again in print, I also have to suggest that it didn’t then, and it doesn’t now, have the staying power of one by a Queen, a Christie, or a John Dickson Carr.

   Even so, and within its limitations, Murder Gone Minoan is a gem in its own right, and no, they don’t write them like this anymore.

[UPDATE] 07-16-09.   Rue Morgue Press has now published four of the ten Clason-Westborough mysteries: Dragon’s Cave, Green Shiver, Murder Gone Minoan, and Poison Jasmine. I don’t know whether the fact that these are also the last four is significant or not. I’d like to think that they’d eventually do all ten.

CLYDE B. CLASON – Blind Drifts. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1937.

   Mild-mannered Professor Theocritus Lucius Westborough, an expert on the Roman emperor Heliogabalus, is an amateur sleuth in the classic mold of the Twenties and Thirties: He solves convoluted puzzles through the time-tested Sherlockian methods of keen observation, a storehouse of esoteric knowledge, and deductive reasoning.

   Westborough — and his creator specializes in locked-room “miracle problems.” Even the best of these offers no challenge to John Dickson Carr, but for the most part they are cleverly constructed and well-clued.

   The one in Blind Drifts offers a particularly neat and satisfying variation on the theme.

   Westborough’s home base is Chicago, but here he travels to Colorado to visit a gold mine in which he has inherited 70,000 shares. Not long after his arrival, he finds himself investigating, first, the disappearance of one of the mine’s directors, and then the murder of its owner, Mrs. Coranlue Edmonds, known far and wide as a “bearcat on wheels” — a murder by shooting that takes place in front of seven witnesses, in a “blind drift” deep inside the Virgin Queen mine, by a seemingly nonexistent gun.

   The plot is twisty and complex, the clues numerous and fairly presented, the motive for Mrs. Edmonds’s murder plausible, and the method likewise. The Colorado setting is well depicted, as are the details of the operation and physical makeup of a large gold mine.

   It is Clason’s attention to such detail, more than anything else, that lifts his work above the average puzzle story of the period; you can’t read a Westborough novel without learning something, and something interesting at that.

   The one drawback to this and the eight other entries in the series is Clason’s sometimes florid, often prolix style. Blind Drifts is the only book of his that would not benefit greatly from the excision of ten or fifteen thousand words, and at that it could stand to lose five or six thousand here and there.

   The most appealing of Westborough’s other cases are The Death Angel (1936), set on a Wisconsin country estate called Rumpelstiltskin, where a murder happens in spite of 1542-to-l odds against it, and a murderer is twice guilty of killing the same man; The Man from Tibet (1939), which features a locked-room murder and contains some fascinating background material on the strange customs and rites of Tibet; and Green Shiver (1941), which has a Los Angeles setting and another “impossible” plot, the solution to which depends on Westborough’ s knowledge of Chinese jade.

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   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.

CLYDE B. CLASON – Poison Jasmine.

Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1940. Trade paperback reprint: Rue Morgue Press, 2008.

   Poison Jasmine involves murder among perfume manufacturers. While other Clason mysteries are set among art collectors, Poison Jasmine has a background of science and technology, instead.

   It is a scientific detective story. The main crimes involve poisoning, and these too are scientific in nature. The science in Poison Jasmine often involves plants; Clason’s knowledge of botany will return in Green Shiver.

   Sleuth Theocritus Lucius Westborough has much information on perfumery in the ancient world. Poison Jasmine is also one of Clason’s books in which Westborough’s career as a classical historian is best integrated into the novel.

   The book’s look at a business as a background for a crime also resembles Rex Stout. As in Stout, we have a group of suspects that work as officers and consultants for a small, successful business. They are upper middle class, educated people of considerable business skill. Stout’s businesses tend to have an intellectual feel, such as a design firm, publishing or broadcasting. Clason’s perfume firm is steeped in cultural traditions of the world of scent production.

   Unlike some other Clason works, Poison Jasmine does not recreate another culture. It does offer a sympathetic, anti-racist account of the Chinese chef, which is in accord with the views expressed in Clason’s other fiction.

   Poison Jasmine has a simple, but effective impossible crime puzzle; in fact, it anticipates ideas John Dickson Carr will use in one of his later novels. The book also shows Clason’s flair for color imagery. Both the flowers, and events of the mystery plot, are described in color terms.

   Agatha Christie in The Big Four (1924) included a section called “The Yellow Jasmine Mystery” (Chapters 9-10). This deals with the same poisonous plant that gives the title to Poison Jasmine.

   Poison Jasmine seems padded. Like many mystery novels, it would have been better as a novella. Most of the meat of both the mystery plot and perfume background are in several sections totaling around seventy pages.

Editorial Comment:   If you’re looking for a copy of this book to read, you will need a lending library that never has discarded a mystery novel in the past 70 years. Either that, or take advantage of Rue Morgue Press’s highly laudable policy of getting hard-to-find vintage mystery fiction back into print. There was only one copy of this book on ABE just now when I looked, and in dust jacket the asking price was in the $300 range.

   For a long overview of Clyde B. Clason’s life and writing career, the Rue Morgue website is also the place to go.

   Coming up soon: Bill Pronzini’s review of Clason’s Blind Drifts (Doubleday, 1937), taken from 1001 Midnights, then my own of Murder Gone Minoan (Doubleday, 1940).

VICTOR CANNING – A Fall from Grace. Wm. Heinemann, UK, hardcover, 1980; Pan, UK, pb, 1982. William Morrow, US, hardcover, 1981; reprint hardcover: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, June 1981.

   Beginning with Polycarp’s Progress in 1935, Victor Canning has written over fifty novels. After World War II, he turned his efforts to espionage fiction, a genre at which he is now acknowledged to be one of the best practitioners.

   Fall from Grace, however, is anything but an international thriller. Halfway through this psychological mystery, Canning’s main character, private investigator James Helder, is asked how a calm, good-hearted man such as himself got into his somewhat unsavory line of work.

Part of Helder’ s explanation is that he feels himself to be “a sort of gray shape living a gray, humdrum life like so many people. So, to escape from all that, I mix in other and more unorthodox people’s lives to add a little crude color to my own.”

   The unorthodox person Helder is trailing here is the totally amoral John Corbin, about whom Helder observes, “The John Corbins of this world felt compelled to make the occasional obligation to the gods of chance. A little not-too-expensive kindness here, a rare good deed to assuage self-disgust, even at times an isolated self-sacrifice to bring them close to the shriving of some sin.”

   That really is all this novel is about, but it is enough. Canning gives us an engrossing, incisive study of the world’s Corbins, the selfish and impulsive people who charm those close to them and sometimes even themselves, predators with engaging smiles and talent for deception.

   This John Corbin lands a job writing the history of the gardens of Illaton Manor, long tended by the family of Corbin’s employer, the bishop of Testerburgh. Included in the job are a cabin, extensive research facilities, and circumstances which make it easy to seduce beautiful coworker Rachel Harrison.

   Corbin takes advantage of all these conveniences, for a while even convincing himself that he genuinely loves Rachel. But an unexpected opportunity for profitable mischief proves that Corbin’s new leaf is only ego-supported self-delusion, a strained hiatus from reality. He enthusiastically reverts to type.

   This is a meticulously written, revealing glimpse into the mind of a man who is the serpent in his own Garden of Eden.

   Especially good among Canning’s early novels are The Chasm (1947) and The House of the Seven Flies (1952). Other noteworthy titles among his later works include Firecrest (1972), The Rainbird Pattern (1973), which was the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s last film, Family Plot, and Birds of a Feather (1985). Also excellent is a collection of four suspense novelettes, Oasis Nine (1958).

         ———
   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] 07-16-09.   Jamie Sturgeon has just pointed out the existence of a website devoted to Victor Canning, including of course a detailed bibliography. It’s at http://www.victorcanning.com/, and it is a work of art, to say the least. In terms of the bibliography, not only are covers of each edition of every book shown, but photos of places mentioned in each of the books are often included as well.