YOUNG BUFFALO BILL. Republic, 1940. Roy Rogers, George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, Pauline Moore, Hugh Sothern, Trevor Bardette, Steve Pendleton, Wade Boteler. Director: Joseph Kane.

THE KID RIDES AGAIN. PRC, 1943. Buster Crabbe, Al “Fuzzy” St. John, Iris Meredith, I. Stanford Jolley, Glenn Strange, Charles King.

   Here are a couple of B-westerns that play fast and loose with history, and if you can’t trust B-westerns, who can you trust? In the first of these two films, Roy Rogers plays Buffalo Bill Cody as a young scout who comes to the aid of an aged Spanish don with a ranch outside of Sante Fe. A crooked surveyor is trying to cheat him out of his land.

   In the second, Buster Crabbe adds another entry to a long list of movies in which he played Billy the Kid. In this particular alternative universe, Billy is a misunderstood gunfighter who’s really good if people would only leave him alone. This time around he helps a bank owner withstand a run on his bank after thieves have robbed it.

   In both cases there are young girls involved who catch both heroes’ eyes. Pauline Moore plays the Don Regas’s granddaughter to whom Roy is immediately attracted; and Iris Meredith is Joan Ainsley, the daughter of the banker in The Kid Rides Again.

   Another point of similarity between the two movies is that both Bill Cody and William Bonney have goofy sidekicks. Roy has Gabby Hayes, who resents (often) being called an old goat and is called Gabby for good reason; and Buster Crabbe has Fuzzy St. John, the skinny old galoot prone to scratching his addled head and sidesplitting pratfalls. (Well, I thought they were funny.)

   Neither plot line needs an in-depth analysis. The production values in Roy�s movie are the greater ones, but if you’re not a fan of singing cowboys, you already know to avoid his films. Roy’s probably also a better actor (earnest and young) than Buster Crabbe, but the Billy the Kid movie has something that Bill Cody doesn’t, and that’s Iris Meredith.

   What a beautiful woman! I’m comparatively new to the world of the serials of the 1930s and 40s, so I’ve not seen her in her most famous roles, those being The Spider’s Web (1938), Overland with Kit Carson (1939) and The Green Archer (1940), not to mention dozens of westerns like this one, which as it turns out, was also her last.

   Looking down the list of movies she was in (on IMDB), she deserved better roles than she ever received. If she had a major part in an “A” film, I don’t see it.

   I’ve found two photos to show you, but neither one comes from The Kid Rides Again. The first one (above) shows how she looked as Nita Van Sloan in the pulp hero serial, The Spider’s Web. In the second one (seen to the right), she’s standing between Charles Starrett and Bob Nolan in Spoilers of the Range, Columbia, 1939.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE – The Ax.

Mysterious Press, hardcover, June 1997; paperback: May 1998.

   The national din on downsizing, corporate America’s wholesale decimation of jobs and workers in pursuit of higher profits and bigger returns to investors, rang loud during the early months of the 1996 Presidential campaign then receded to the level of white noise, in the background, acknowledged but barely noticed. But it didn’t recede as a day-to-day issue for the many American workers who lost their livelihoods and their assumptions about work and identity. And it certainly didn’t recede for Burke Devore, the narrator on Donald Westlake’s new novel, The Ax.

   You’ve seen someone like Burke somewhere, bagging your groceries or working the floor at Macy’s. He’s the middle-aged middle manager who bought fully into the fiction that corporate loyalty entitled one to a lifetime job. A good soldier, Burke. Not necessarily the best or brightest, but steady; a good organizer and a facile problem solver, a liberal arts grad who worked his way up from sales to production for a Connecticut paper manufacturer. A man secure in his career and his life until his employer merged with a Canadian conglomerate and sent all the high-paying jobs over the border and all the high-paid workers to the breadline.

   The Ax opens two years into Burke’s enforced vacation. His exile, if you will. Though he’s kept quiet and to himself, Burke has not accepted the situation with grace; he wants his job back, his job and nothing else will do. An article in a trade journal points him to a job that’s a carbon copy of his old one at another paper mill within a reasonable commuting distance.

   The only problem is the man who’s already in the job. In his mind, Burke toys with the idea of doing away with the interloper until a deflating reality comes to the fore: Even if the current occupant met a sudden demise, someone else would get the job; someone younger, someone with more education; someone who interviews better. Despair evolves into inspiration and Burke’s problem-solving skills come into play as he devises a plan to learn who his most likely competition would be and to them do away with them…

   It’s clear that Donald Westlake doesn’t want The Ax to be taken as a comic novel. What he does here is to take reality, stretch it the least little bit and add the slightest of kinks. He taps into the fear of poverty and the career man’s unspoken terror that his professional life’s been for naught, that the wrong choice was made a long time ago and can never be rectified.

   In real life, a Burke Devore would be gunned down by police after staging a bloodbath at corporate headquarters, or more likely, would slaughter his family then add himself to the package. But in Westlake’s ghostly, disquieting suburbia, murder becomes an exercise in resume writing, a self-described “learning curve” which Burke Devore masters with each killing. And the killings become a rite of passage through which Burke realizes the strengths and skills he possesses even though he lacks the job through which he’s defined his entire adult existence.

   Westlake’s great accomplishment is to get inside Burke’s clever, troubled and bland mind, to make both his madness and his justification credible and yet also show his complete isolation from the world around him. He eschews stylistic flourishes, making Burke’s narrative voice simple, clear and disturbing.

   There’s an element of Hitchcock, the mischievous Hitchcock, at work here as well. The subtle humor of unexpected complications and the absurdity of a man blandly talking about taking human life. And the reader being taken in by it all. How will Burke explain and pay for that fender damaged when he ran over a victim and will it be fixed in time to go after victim number four? What’s that cop doing knocking on the door? Will anyone observe the murder in the parking lot?

   The primary question for the reader nearing the end of the book, though, is what trick or twist will the author pull out to end things? Will there be a fillip, a catharsis, a mordant twist of fate? Will Burke Devore’s quest end in madness, blood or success?

   The last chapter is ironic and troubling. But the book’s chief irony is what Burke Devore becomes by its finish. His claim of sympathy and sorrow for his victims doesn’t stop him from slaughtering them and profiting from their demises. His passionate survival rationale echoes the corporate downsizers who have ended thousands of careers and not a few lives in pursuit of their goals.

   The Burke Devore who once blandly assumed lifetime loyalty from corporate America has bought into a new creed: Me first. Win at any cost. The end justifies the means. The one loud laugh in this sorrowful book comes at the bottom line: Burke Devore, corporate downsizing’s ultimate victim, becomes its star-spangled poster boy.

SUSANNAH SHANE – Diamonds in the Dumplings.

Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1946.

   According to Hubin’s Bibliography of Crime Fiction, Harriette Cora Ashbrook wrote seven “Spike” Tracy mysteries between 1931 and 1941, all as H. Ashbrook. Then from 1941 to her death in 1946 she wrote six more detective novels, all of these as by Susannah Shane. In at least four of these the sleuthing was done by amateur man-about-town named Christopher Saxe.

   Neither Ashbrook nor Shane seems to be mentioned in the Penzler-Steinbrunner Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, and the one reference to Susannah Shane in Catalogue of Crime (Barzun and Taylor) leads the reader only to an entry for R. C. Ashby, who, although feminine, is another writer altogether.

   Diamonds in the Dumplings was, as it happened, Saxe’s last case. It begins in a wealthy Connecticut home with the accidental discovery that a valuable jewel, the famous Burma Star, has been stolen and an almost identical replica substituted. Saxe is brought into the case by means of a badly hung-over crime reporter friend, and by an ever-curious eye for the unusual.

   As a writer, Ashbrook-Shane takes full advantage of the fact that an amateur detective is not required to follow hard-and-fast police procedure, but after a slow start she allows complications to enter in at a breakneck pace. Chance is permitted to play dirtier tricks than usual on the frailties of human nature, but as it is eventually learned, the three separate plot threads had been neatly intertwined all along.

   Some quite plausible detective work (seen and appreciated more in looking back upon it) undoes an entanglement that at one time seemed to be confused beyond all redemption. At least in the guise of Susannah Shane, the mystery authoress who wrote this particular work seems unfairly forgotten — if in fact she was ever well known.

[UPDATE] 01-04-09.   I’ll leave for another day a listing of the H. Ashbrook-Spike Tracy titles. For now, perhaps it will suffice to supply a list of the books she did as Susannah Shane.

   I don’t think I’ve read any of them since my review of Diamond in the Dumplings. Re-reading what I had to say then, that could be a serious omission on my part, as this seems to be the kind of book I’m inordinately fond of.

   Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

SHANE, SUSANNAH. Pseudonym of H. Ashbrook, 1898-1946.

      Lady in Lilac (n.) Dodd 1941 [New York City, NY]

      Lady in Danger (n.) Dodd 1942 [Christopher Saxe; Long Island, NY]
      Lady in a Million (n.) Dodd 1943 [Christopher Saxe; New York City, NY]
      Lady in a Wedding Dress (n.) Dodd 1943

      The Baby in the Ash Can (n.) Dodd 1944 [Christopher Saxe; New Jersey]

      Diamonds in the Dumplings (n.) Doubleday 1946 [Christopher Saxe; Connecticut]

ELIZABETH PETERS – Guardian of the Horizon.

William Morrow, hardcover, March 2004. Reprint paperback: HarperCollins, March 2005.

   In this sequel to The Last Camel Died at Noon, the Emersons, with son Ramses and adopted daughter Nephret, return to the Camel’s lost city, now under the rule of a despot, with the rightful ruler in exile.

   The resourceful Amelia, hotheaded Emerson, courageous but immature Ramses, and the beautiful Nephret are the catalysts in this somewhat stately but entertaining archaeological mystery.

   The characters may be fabricated out of synthetic materials, but their essential decency and resolute genius at improvisation (especially on the part of Amelia) keep the leaky narrative afloat in the midst of the familiar, manufactured perils.

ELIZABETH PETERS – Tomb of the Golden Bird.

William Morrow, hardcover, March 2006. Reprint paperback: Harper, March 2007.

   Amelia’s Egyptologist husband Emerson is stewing over being shut out of the excavation of King Tut’s tomb by Howard Carter and his party.

   He and his family and friends are somewhat diverted by the unexpected (and not welcome) arrival of Emerson’s brother Sethos, involved in some secret government work that puts the family at peril for most of the novel.

   This is a lackluster effort, mainly for diehard Peters’ fans, with all the really interesting stuff (the work on inventorying the fabulous objects in the royal tomb) largely taking place offstage.

   I owe my discovery of Donald Westlake to three separate coincidences that happened within a few weeks years ago – another reason why I don’t believe in coincidences. First, I found a beaten-up copy of Slayground, a relentless Parker novel, a hardboiled novel unlike any other I had read before.

   Second, I found a copy of The Hot Rock, which informed me that there was a P.G. Wodehouse in crime fiction and that his name was Donald Westlake. The third one was a used volume by one Tucker Coe, the novel A Jade in Aries, which I found both magnetic and devoid of Chandler-Hammett-Macdonald schtick.

   It didn’t take me long to find out that all three authors were one and the same, which surprised me and made me wonder for a moment if this were not an industrial operation. If so, it was the highest quality operation the literary-industrial complex had ever produced.

   Later, as I started catching up with the Dortmunder and Parker series, the latter not always easy to find, and with the new books that Westlake kept publishing with amazing consistency and regularity, I started connecting the styles and to see the literary carpentry that made Westlake’s books both absorbing and enduring.

   Pick up any Westlake book and you can be assured it’s re-readable, just like Wodehouse, Chandler and Ring Lardner are re-readable. I started to realize that this genre writer (I should say “multi-genre” writer) was on a par with the greatest authors in crime fiction. I then tried to fill all the gaps in my Westlake collection, which is close to complete –- and not a single book has failed to be reread!

   Who can forget Westlake? From Parker’s long-running series, likely the best hardboiled series ever published, to his late realist noir masterpieces The Ax and The Hook, from Levine (too little remembered) to Mitch Tobin, to his excursions into science fiction and various hybrid experiments?

   Who can forget the adventures of The Busy Body, a masterpiece that combines real adventure with dry humor running through it but never breaking the spell?

   Taken as a whole, the work of Donald Westlake is second to none in the annals of crime fiction. His breadth is unmatched, his style rings true regardless of setting, and his sense of humor and demonstrated intimate knowledge of human nature is a gift that future generations of readers will rediscover once and again.

   We have lost a contemporary classic of American literature.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE – Levine.

Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1984. Paperback reprint: Tor, 1985. No UK edition.

   In the late Fifties and early Sixties, Westlake was a frequent contributor to the digest-size mystery magazines. Included among his output were five novelettes — four published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine between 1959 and 1962 and one in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in 1965 — about Abraham Levine, a detective with Brooklyn’s Forty-Third Precinct.

   Levine is no ordinary cop; he is fifty-three years old and lives on the edge of his emotions, constantly worrying about his aged heart, constantly taking his pulse; a man who is “so tensely aware of his own inevitable death that he wound up hating people who took the idea of death frivolously,” as Westlake writes in his introduction to this collection of the five early Levine stories plus one brand-new novelette.

   Each of Levine’s cases ties in with his relationship with death, “his virtual romance with death,” for “death fascinated Levine, it summoned him and yet repelled him.”

    “The Best-Friend Murder” involves him in a complicated psychological case of murder and suicide whose principals are both young, healthy males.

    In “‘Come Back, Come Back … ’” it is Levine versus a man on a ledge, a man who wants to take his own life.

    In “The Feel of the Trigger,” perhaps the best of the four AHMM novelettes, it is Levine versus Levine when he is forced into a kill-or-be-killed showdown with a teenage murderer.

    “The Sound of Murder” takes Levine “farther down the same road, and when I finished it,” Westlake says, “I wondered if I hadn’t gone too far … made him someone no longer relevant to his theme.”

    Not so. He brought Levine back for one more appearance, albeit three years later, in “Death of a Bum” — a story that was rejected by AHMM and other markets because it has no resolution, because it has instead one of the most painfully emotional endings of any story in the genre. It was and is the ultimate Levine story; Westlake knew it and retired the character.

    Until 1984, that is, when the idea for this collection was broached to him. The early stories weren’t sufficient to make a complete book; he would have to write a sixth Levine novelette for that purpose.

   On the one hand, it is fortunate he agreed to do so, for now the early stories have been made available in book form. On the other hand, it is unfortunate that Westlake chose to write “After I’m Gone.”

    Not because it is a bad story; it isn’t — it is Westlake at his most facile, with an up-to-the-minute plot involving high-tech gangsters and a perfectly fitting and proper resolution, both of the story and of the miniseries.

    No, the problem is that the intense feeling that makes the early works so poignant — the very core of the Levine series — is missing here. There is a detachment, a truncation of emotional content — as if Westlake, after twenty long years, has lost touch with the essence of his character.

   That one slick, somewhat superficial (and therefore frivolous) story keeps this collection from being what it should be: a wholly suitable monument to a man named Abraham Levine, a man who hated people who take the idea of death frivolously.

         ———
   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.

HUGH WHEELER (PATRICK QUENTIN) – The Crippled Muse.

Rupert Hart-Davis, UK, hardcover, 1951. Rinehart & Co., US, hc, 1952.

   The Crippled Muse was something of a departure for Hugh Wheeler (1912-1987) then half of the writing team that wrote the Patrick Quentin detective novels featuring Peter and Iris Duluth, and the Dr. Westlake books written as if by “Jonathan Stagge.” Both series were, ha ha, petering out when Wheeler published this novel, the only one he published under his real name.

   The story takes place during a few spring days in a decadent, postwar Capri, the resort island in the Gulf of Naples, and is told from the point of view of a young American academic new to international travel and the ways of the jet set.

   The novel is a sort of cross between a social satire like Norman Douglas’ notorious 1917 roman a clef about Capri (South Wind), and a regular Peter Duluth novel. This one could easily have been retrofitted for the Duluths and called Puzzle for Poets.

   Our hero Horace Beddoes is on sabbatical from a provincial US college in order to write the biography of an acclaimed US modernist poet. Merape Sloane has been living in seclusion in the Villa Lorliz on Capri for thirty years and will see no one, not even the most famous of fans — Aldous Huxley, Auden and even T S Eliot have all come to get at her door, and she has sent them sternly away.

   And yet Horace is hoping and praying for an interview in order to complete his book. Wheeler’s great accomplishment here is the creation of Merape Sloane, so convincing as an American legend that even the snatches of her poetry quoted in passing have the authentic ring of modernism.

   She is part H.D., apparently, part Mina Loy, part Edith Sitwell, part Emily Dickinson, part Martha Graham even, and embodies the weirder and most melodramatic parts of each one’s life. And yet why has she written almost nothing since an accident crippled her thirty years ago? And what was the exact nature of that accident?

   Trying to get closer to Merape Sloane means Beddoes must penetrate through many layers of the demi-monde surrounding the recluse.

   Those of you familiar with the 1970 Harold Prince film Something for Everyone (screenplay by Hugh Wheeler) will recognize some of the antecedents for that witty and sardonic script here, in its unsavory yet scintillating Europeans, its continual contrast between the local color of the indigenous peasants and the riffraff of the aristocracy.

   When hardboiled, heavy-drinking Mike McDermott, a rival to Horace both in biography and in love, meets with a sudden, violent death, the game becomes more dangerous, and Horace comes under suspicion of having bumped his rival off.

   Wheeler invokes Capri in a flurry of impressionistic gestures:  “…this island of wild humps and sudden plunges, this sharp, pinnacled fantasy of rock, grey as a dove’s breast, and below, always dizzily below, the Mediterranean, flashing with the blueness of all the butterfly-wings in Brazil.”

   Merape Sloane’s life proves itself an ironic allegory for the nature of poetry itself, and her strange progress from a Cold Comfort Farm-like life of abject rural poverty, to being the venerated object of a cult of aesthetes, bisexuals and millionaires, has the ring of something really thought out, really felt.

   As a mystery novel, The Crippled Muse is fairly clued, but Wheeler is so skillful that the last forty or fifty pages produce one amazing revelation after another.

         _____

   Happy new year everyone! My new year’s wish is still to get my paws on a copy of the elusive Danger Next Door by Q. Patrick (1952). Any leads tragically appreciated!

WHY ME? 1990. Christopher Lambert, Kim Greist, Christopher Lloyd, J.T.Walsh, Michael J. Pollard, Lawrence Tierney. Based on the novel by Donald E. Westlake, who also co-wrote the screenplay. Director: Gene Quintano.

   Some changes were made. The locale was changed from New York City to Los Angeles (budgetary, I’m sure) . The name of famed hapless burglar John Dortmunder was changed, too. To Gus Cardinale. You figure that one out. (I don’t think the book had a question mark, either.)

   Other than that, some of the remaining story is still the same. Dortmunder/Cardinale robs a jewelry store and manages to get away with the fabulous Byzantine Fire, a ruby that has just been hijacked by Armenian nationalists while on its way back to Turkey.

   And on his trail (and his friend Bruno and Bruno’s daughter, who is also Gus’s girl friend) are the CIA, the Turkish government, the Armenians, and the entire L.A. underworld, tired of their endless hassle by the L.A.P.D.

   The book was better. By the movie’s end, it was very difficult to keep track of who was who, what they were doing and why they were doing it. Mostly it’s played for laughs, and mostly it comes off silly and not nearly as funny as the book.

   Also note the presence of Lawrence Tierney in the credits. If it weren’t for the closing cast notes, I never would have recognized him. He’s gained sane weight and lost some hair. He probably doesn’t make too many movies any more, but he looks like he’s still a pretty tough guy.

[UPDATE] 01-03-09. First of all, I was correct in saying that while the title of the movie has a question mark at the end, there is no such device in the title of the book. See the cover image to the right. I will also so inform Al Hubin.

   At this much later date, I can’t say that I remember much about the movie I reviewed over 17 years ago, but right now my opinion is that any movie with Christopher Lloyd in it as a star is going to be sillier than the actual script, however it reads.

   I’ve not found very much in the way of images taken from the film itself, only the two posters above, but there is a trailer for it that I’ve found online.

   Follow the link, and I think you might agree with me as to silly the movie might be.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE – The Hot Rock.

Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1970. UK edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971. Paperback reprints include: Pocket, 1971; Mysterious Press, 1987. Film: TCF, 1972; released in Britain as How to Steal a Diamond in Four Uneasy Lessons (scw: William Goldman; dir: Peter Yates).

   Donald Westlake tells the story that he had an idea for a Parker novel (Parker is the grim, ruthless heistman featured in a series of very hard-boiled books published under Westlake’s pseudonym Richard Stark) in which Parker had to keep stealing the same object again and again.

   It just wouldn’t work as a Parker novel — the idea was inherently too funny — so Westlake created the Dortmunder gang and launched a series of very successful comic caper novels with this book.

   The African nation of Talabwo wants to obtain custody of the massive Balaborno emerald, currently in the hands of a rival country and on display in a museum exhibit. Their U.N. ambassador contracts with an odd assemblage of heistmen, led by master planner John Dortmunder, for the theft and delivery of the stone.

   Dortmunder, Kelp, Chetwick, Greenwood, and Murch pull off a very slick job, almost, but Greenwood gets nabbed by the cops, and he was the one holding the emerald.

   So they have to bust Greenwood out of jail, which they do, only to learn that he hid it in a police-station holding cell. So they have to break into the cop shop, which they do, only to learn that the stone isn’t there anymore, which necessitates yet another, even more elaborate caper, and so it goes….

   Westlake doesn’t depend on blatant farce to generate laughs; his approach to the comic caper is rather subtle. Initially, the setup isn’t very different from what one might fmd in a straight Parker novel, but the crooks are just a bit odd, and the caper just a tad outlandish. As things proceed, the gang’s exceptional bad luck escalates and the situation gets quite out of hand, becomes increasingly ludicrous, and increasingly funny.

   The Hot Rock was made into a very successful film, which, atypically, follows the book rather closely (though the casting of Robert Redford as Dortmunder is pretty far off the mark). The movie, alas, did omit the wildest caper in the book, the kidnapping of Greenwood’s lawyer from a sanatorium using a locomotive.

   Two other Dortmunder books have made it to the screen, both badly botched: Bank Shot (1972), in which the gang steals an entire bank on wheels; and Jimmy the Kid (1974), wherein Dortmunder and company use a (nonexistent) Richard Stark Parker novel as the blueprint for a kidnapping, with predictably disastrous results.

   The most recent entry in the series, Why Me (1983), is also one of the best and funniest. This one involves Dortmunder and his gang with a Turkish national treasure stolen by a band of Greeks; and with the FBI, the New York City Police Department, and no less than three terrorist groups from three different countries.

         ———
   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.

MICHAEL DIBDIN – Blood Rain.

Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition]; hardcover reprint (*). First edition: Faber & Faber, UK, hardcover, 1999; trade ppbk, 1999 (*); paperback, April 2000. Pantheon, US, hc, March 2000 (*); Vintage, trade pb, May 2001. (* = shown, in this order)

   One question to which I’ve never been able to come up with a definitive answer is how long did the Detective Book Club last? What was the last selection?

   There must have been subscribers all the way through to the end, but I’ve never been able to find one of them who’d be willing to say with any authority that here’s the one that was the last.

   (I’d also like to obtain more of the selection booklets sent to members over the years. I have a few, but it’s nearly a hopeless cause, since of things ephemeral, I can thing of very few things more so, except serviettes at McDonalds.)

   In the last few years of their existence, though, the DBC put volumes numbers on the spine. The one for this book, for example, is D655, which is the highest I’ve ever had in my possession. The other two books in the same volume are copyright 2000, which puts this awfully close to the end, whenever it was.

   And for the record, if you can’t make them out on the cover shown, the other two books are The Hard Detective, by H. R. F. Keating, and Manifesto for the Dead, by Domenic Stansberry.

   As for Blood Rain, it’s a book in Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series, about which you can read more in an obituary for the author which I posted here on the blog early in 2007.

   Zen is a Venetian-born police detective whose successive posts have sent him on a guided tour of Italy today. Other observers have suggested reading the books in order, which is a good idea, as in each of them, the situations he finds himself in are as much about him personally as they are about the crimes he is forced to confront.

   Unfortunately I did not take this advice. To tell you the truth, I didn’t take the time to see what advice these other observers had already given, so I plunged right in. And it took me a while to sort out why he has been relegated to Sicily in this book, and why he seems to have a daughter he never knew about and who really isn’t his daughter according to DNA data.

   And to tell you the truth again, I never did completely sort any of either of the above. It’s that kind of book. Very well written, very literary, and very vague on details that depend on either previous books or exactly who is doing what to who in the midst of a Mafia war that seems to have broken out in Sicily at about the same time as Zen’s arrival.

   Zen’s new daughter Carla is in the middle of it, as she is there too, working on installing a new computer system for the police, and so is Corinna Nunziatella, an anti-Mafia judge who has taken a liking to Carla.

   Basically, this is what it is. There are Mafia families against Mafia families in this book, some on the way up, others on the way down. Some are up-to-date regarding new technologies and new sources of income, and some are old-fashioned and designed to stay in the backwaters of the new commerce.

   Dibdin’s prose is witty, clever, introspective and descriptive. His is the type of novel that literary critics go head over heels for, as it typifies the term, “transcending the genre.” Those of us who are old-fashioned and are relegated to the junk heap of wishing to read about old-fashioned detection in our detective fiction may not be as enthusiastic about the story itself as those previously mentioned literary critics have been.

   Please don’t get me wrong. I meant what I said when I referred to Dibdin’s prose as witty and clever. Unfortunately Zen, in this book at least, is a leading character who reacts to events, instead of being pro-active in tackling them head-on, which makes all the difference in the world. Not that he’s any kind of slouch about what he does, but his forte is thinking, when he has a well-defined need to, and not so much doing. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

   And oh, yes, before I go. I understand there was quite a reactive uproar about the ending of this book when it first came out. It’s far enough along in time now, after the fact, to say that the cliffhanger of an ending seems to have worked out in Zen’s favor, but nobody knew that at the time, not until the next book came out, Medusa, four years later, in 2003.