MAX MURRAY – The Right Honourable Corpse.

Farrar Straus & Young, US, hardcover, 1951, as The Right Honorable Corpse. Hardcover reprint: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, 4-in-1 edition, April 1951. US paperback reprint: Collier, 1965, as The Right Honorable Corpse. British hardcover: Michael Joseph, 1952. British paperback reprint: Penguin #1203, 1957.

   Back when he was actively writing, which was up right up to his untimely death in 1956, Max Murray was never one of the big names in the field of mystery fiction. Even though he had a respectable string of detective novels in a ten year stretch between 1947 and 1957, he may not even have been in the second or third tier of big names, in spite of the fact that many of his books were reprinted in this country by Dell in paperback and either the Detective Book Club or the Unicorn Mystery Book Club in hardcover.

   The problem may have been that he never used a series detective. I’ve thought this of several mystery writers before, but I don’t believe I’ve ever quite come out and said it. I think it takes a steady focal point, a recurring detective character that the readers can feel comfortable with before they’ll take the author to heart as well.

   With obvious exceptions, of course. But authors like Andrew Garve and E. X. Ferrars, to take two rather disparate examples, were extremely prolific and presumably very popular in their day, are all but totally forgotten now. Ferrars did have a few recurring characters, but if you can name one without going and looking up her bibliography, you are the winner of today’s trivia contest, and truth be said, when Garve wrote as either Roger Bax or Paul Somers, he did have a couple of series characters. You’re this year’s trivia champion if you can name either.

   And I’m straying from the review of the book in hand, without making a very solid case for my conjecture, I’m afraid, but perhaps I’ll return to it some day.

   Here below is Murray’s entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, along with a few facts about him, most of which I didn’t know, until I looked him up earlier today:

MURRAY, MAX(well). 1901-1956. Born in Australia; newspaper reporter in that country, the U.S., and England; scriptwriter and editor for BBC during WWII; married to author Maysie Greig.

      The Voice of the Corpse (Joseph, 1948, hc) [England] Farrar, 1947.

      The King and the Corpse (Joseph, 1949, hc) [France] Farrar, 1948.
      The Queen and the Corpse (Farrar, 1949, hc) [Ship] See: No Duty on a Corpse (Joseph 1950).
      The Neat Little Corpse (Joseph, 1951, hc) [Jamaica] Farrar, 1950. Film: Paramount, 1953, as Jamaica Run (scw & dir: Lewis R. Foster).

      The Right Honourable Corpse (Joseph, 1952, hc) [Australia] Farrar, 1951.
      The Doctor and the Corpse (Joseph, 1953, hc) [Singapore; Ship] Farrar, 1952.
      Good Luck to the Corpse (Joseph, 1953, hc) [France; Academia] Farrar, 1951.

      The Sunshine Corpse (Joseph, 1954, hc) [Florida]
      Royal Bed for a Corpse (Joseph, 1955, hc) [England] Washburn, 1955.
      Breakfast with a Corpse (Joseph, 1956, hc) [Nice, France] U.S. title: A Corpse for Breakfast. Washburn, 1957.
      Twilight at Dawn (Joseph, 1957, hc) [Australia]
      Wait for the Corpse (Joseph, 1957, hc) [England] Washburn, 1957.

   All of his books were published in the UK, but when they were published in the US, strangely enough they were often published here first. And as befitting his background as a world news correspondent for the BBC, his books take place all over the world, with only two of them in Australia, where he was born. (And as it turns out, where he died, while back on a visit.)

   The Right Honourable Corpse is one of the two, as it so happens, and from the description of (a) the closely knit circle of politicians, bureaucrats and diplomats in the small and isolated capital city of Canberra, and (b) life in the beautiful but desolate Australian out-of-doors, you’d think he’d lived there all his life. And, truth be guessed at, perhaps in his own mind, perhaps he did.

   Dead, but mourned only on the surface, is Rupert Flower, the powerful Minister for Internal Resources, poisoned to death during a piano concert going on in his home. Vain and vindictive — a dangerous combination — he was a man whose untimely passing was foreseen by many.

   Martin Gilbert, the pianist, turns out to be the central character, and I for one would have liked it immensely if he’d ever made a return appearance, which sad to say he did not. It turns out that he is a spy — a domestic one. He works undercover for the new Commonwealth Security Service, and it is not a job that he likes, and his extreme distaste only grows as the case goes on.

   Bitter, sarcastic and outwardly enigmatic in tone and behavior, Martin discovers that friendship with the people he is observing does not go hand-in-hand with reporting those observations on to his superior, Sir David Reynolds. Nor is falling in love consistent with the role he is playing, another problem being that one of the possible suspects is also his best friend and in love with the same girl.

   The plot is quite largely secondary to the players, but it’s a good one. At the end, it’s also fairly clear why Martin Gilbert was never brought back for an encore. As a character himself, he gave all he was capable of in this one. I don’t think he had another murder case to be solved in him. He is used up, worn out, but never thrown away. No sir or ma’am. Tears seldom come to my eyes at the end of detective stories, but I’m not unwilling to say they did this time.

[UPDATE.] 10-28-08. Taken from a couple of emails sent by Jamie Sturgeon:

   Enjoyed your piece on Max Murray, a quick e-mail to point out correct title Wait for a Corpse. There’s a note on Crimefictioniv.com (Part 7) to say Twilight at Dawn was rewritten by his widow Maysie Greig (it says wife but should be widow) and published as Doctor Ted’s Clinic. It is possible that Twilight at Dawn is not criminous or only marginally at best.

   Also: In the entry for Maysie Greig in ADB (Australian Dictionary of Biography) Max Murray’s middle name is Alexander and year of birth as 1900. No separate entry for Max Murray.

TONY HILLERMAN – Dance Hall of the Dead. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1973. Paperback: Avon, 1975. Many reprint editions, both hardcover and soft.

   Tony Hillerman is a master storyteller, the kind who can spin you a yarn that will keep you on the edge of your chair replete with ghosts, evil spirits, sinister happenings, legends, and all the other ingredients that make up the culture of a people.

   The people he writes of are the Navajo and Zuni Indians of the American Southwest. His books are full of Indian lore. (Hillerman himself went to an Indian boarding school for eight years, and knows the culture as few Anglos do.)

   Set against the vast and often desolate expanse of the great reservations near Four Corners (where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado abut one another), they re-create the loneliness of the high mesas.

   If life is hard for those who live there, it is also hard for Hillerman’s heroes – tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn and, in more recent books, Jim Chee. There are no instant backup systems on the mesas, no quick computerized information resources, indeed few methods of communication.

   Alone, the protagonists must rely on their own intelligence, good judgment, and instincts that have been passed down in a society almost as old as the ancient land where it sprang up.

   Dance Hall of the Dead (which won the MWA Edgar for Best Novel of 1973) opens, as a number of Hillerman’s books do, with a scene from the life of a resident of the reservation, in this case a Zuni.

   And immediately we are confronted with one of the numerous contrasts between modern and an ancient culture that are a trademark of Hillerman’s work: “Shulawitsi, the Little Fire God, member of the Council of the Gods and Deputy to the Sun, had taped his track shoes to his feet.”

   The Little Fire God is a young Zuni man in training not for a track meet but for a religious ceremony. As he rests, thinking of many things that disturb him (but not allowing himself to become angry because at this time in the Zuni religious calendar, anger is not permitted), a strange figure appears from behind a boulder….

   Now that we have been drawn into the Indian consciousness, the scene switches to Zuni tribal-police headquarters where Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is being briefed on a jurisdictional problem. The Little Fire God, in ordinary life Ernesto Cata, and his Navajo friend, George Bowlegs, are missing, and there are indications that one of them has been knifed. While Cata’s disappearance is in Zuni jurisdiction, Leaphorn is asked to find Bowlegs.

   Cata is presumed dead, and the police suspect Bowlegs is his killer. But there are also rumors that a kachina – a Zuni ancestor spirit – got Cata and frightened Bowlegs. When Cata’s body is found, Leaphorn’s search intensifies; and as he crosses the rugged reservation, fact becomes mixed with legend, and Leaphorn, an outsider to the Zuni culture, must sort out the reality of the situation.

   Dance Hall of the Dead is a fascinating study in the conflicts between two Indian cultures, as well as a fine mystery, the scenes and characters of which will haunt you for a long time after you reach its conclusion.

         ———
   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.

TONY HILLERMAN, R.I.P. The much loved author of the Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee mysteries died October 26 of pulmonary failure. He was 83. See the The Rap Sheet online for more details and many remembrances.

   Previously on this blog:

PART I. THE NOVELS.

PART II. THE STORY COLLECTIONS.

Part III. LETTERS, A CARD AND A MEETING.

   Boucher wrote Woolrich for the first time in the late spring of 1944, requesting permission to reprint a story in his anthology Great American Detective Stories (World, 1945). Replying on June 5, Woolrich recommended that Boucher use the 1938 “Endicott’s Girl,” which he called “my favorite among all the stories I’ve ever written.”

   Boucher didn’t care for that one, as he explained in a July 19 letter to World editor William Targ: “It has in extreme measure the frequent Woolrich flaw – a fine emotional story which ends with loose ends all over the place and nothing really explained.”

   Instead Boucher opted for “Finger of Doom” (1940), which he retitled “I Won’t Take a Minute.” The new title was retained when the story was included in The Ten Faces of Cornell Woolrich (1965). “Endicott’s Girl” remained uncollected until I put it in Night and Fear (2004).

   On July 20, one day after his letter to Targ, Boucher wrote Woolrich again: “In the past month or two I’ve read over 30 [of your] pulp stories. And even from such a dose as that I still feel no indigestion; which means, I take it, that you are (as I have suspected all along) the goods. Keep ’em coming!”

   Woolrich’s reply, dated July 23, solved a puzzle for me. I had long suspected that his “The Penny-a-Worder” (1958; first collected in Nightwebs, 1971), which is about a pulp writer who has to hack out a story overnight to go with an already completed front cover illustration, was based on personal experience.

   After finding the July 23 letter among Boucher’s papers at the Lilly Library I knew it for a fact. In it Woolrich mentioned that he particularly remembers his story “Guns, Gentlemen” (1937; collected as “The Lamp of Memory” in Beyond the Night, 1959) “because I wrote it to match up with the cover of the magazine, which they sent me.” This doesn’t mean, of course, that he wrote the story in a single night!

   On a file card dating from 1950 or early 1951, when he was co-editing The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Boucher set down his reaction to the idea of reprinting Woolrich’s novella “Jane Brown’s Body” (1938). “This brilliantly macabre concept spoiled for me by 2 things: a.) My pet irritation of writing exclusively in present tense; b.) A pulp plot so formulaly obvious that each step can be accurately forecast. Inept, for Woolrich, but because of his name let’s include.”

   It was reprinted in the magazine’s October 1951 issue and collected in The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich (1981).

   Boucher finally met Woolrich while on a visit to New York in April 1965. He died without writing about the encounter but his widow, Phyllis White, was present and described it for me before her own death:

    “[W]e were in a restaurant with some MWA members after a private viewing of a film…. Clayton Rawson [then managing editor of EQMM] told us that before going home he was going to drop in on Cornell Woolrich, who was convalescing from surgery, and he suggested that we come along.

    “Of course Tony was thrilled at the prospect. We went to the hotel room where Woolrich was temporarily quartered. One eye had been operated on and he was to go back after an interval for an operation on the other. [Saint Mystery Magazine editor] Hans Santesson was there trying to look after him. He was supposed to go easy on drinking so he was sticking to wine. Santesson kept suggesting pleasantly but ineffectively that he slow down.

    “The room had until recently been used for storage of furniture. It was in good enough condition except for lacerated wallpaper. Woolrich complained that the hotel staff was sneering and laughing at him behind his back. Rawson asked Woolrich whether he had anything lying around that would be suitable for reprint in EQMM.

    “Woolrich rummaged around and turned up something. There was a bit of comic pantomime in which Rawson started to look at the story and then tried to hide it from rival editor Santesson peering over his shoulder.

    “The only dramatic incident of the evening was missed by Rawson, who had to leave to catch his train. The door opened suddenly and a crowing man burst in with a girl and a bottle. The hotel had mistakenly sent him to that room and he was indignant on finding us there…

    “The intruder withdrew, leaving Woolrich convinced that this was another part of the conspiracy against him. Eventually we left but it wasn’t easy. Woolrich thought that people who went away, no matter how long they had stayed, were leaving because they didn’t like him. Tony was delighted that he had finally met Woolrich, and at the same time thought that it wouldn’t do his own nerves any good to see too much of him… ”

   He needn’t have worried. They never met again. Boucher died of lung cancer on April 29, 1968, at the unbearably early age of 56; Woolrich of a stroke on September 25, a little more than two months before his 65th birthday. Just a few months apart. Forty years ago this year. May they rest in peace.

RICHARD HALEY – Thoroughfare of Stones.

Headline, UK, paperback reprint, 1996. First hardcover edition: Headline, UK, 1995. No US edition.

   You may be more widely versed in British mystery writers who’ve never been published in the US than I am – and for whatever reason, there are a good many of them – but I have a feeling that Richard Haley may be as new a name to you as it was to me when I picked this book up to read.

   Here’s what the blurb inside the front cover says about the author:

   As for John Goss, he’s a private detective based in a town called Beckford, which confused me a little, as according to the Google map I have, Beckford and Bradford are quite a distance apart. No matter. Even though Thoroughfare of Stones has its flaws, it shows that Richard Haley should have started writing PI novels long before he did. (I grant you that living a life before taking up writing can often give you something to write about, and that may well be the case here. It should also be noted that Haley wrote three non-mystery novels before turning to PI fiction.)

   Before continuing further, though, here’s a list of all the John Goss novels, taken from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

      Thoroughfare of Stones (Headline, 1995)
      When Beggars Die (Headline, 1996)
      Written in Water (Hale, 1999)

      Fear of Violence (Hale, 2000)

   Haley has another PI character named Frank Crane, who so far has appeared in the following novels, not in CFIV, all having come out post-2000:

      The Murderer’s Son (Hale, 2006)
      Dead Dream Girl (Hale, 2007)
      Blood and Money (Hale, 2008)

   The only one of these I own is the one in hand, and let’s get to it, shall I? Goss is a PI more or less by default, having been turned down by the police force for health reasons. In Thoroughfare he’s hired by a wife who is wondering where her husband is wandering. He’s a a wealthy executive for large chemical firm’s local branch, and Goss has no problem asking (and getting) a thousand a week plus expenses.

   There is no other woman, though, as Goss soon discovers, but along the way I learned what the British idiom “getting his leg over” means. You can look it up. I won’t tell you. What he does learn is something worse in one sense, although Mrs. Rainger doesn’t seem to agree, but the local police force do. Or would if Goss would tell them, but he hesitates, and for a while all seems lost, as the “enemy” is quite capable of being as ruthless as any other gang of villains when cornered and at bay.

   I should also mention Fernande, a girl Goss meets and gets to know very well. She is almost-but-not-quite beautiful, sexy, flighty, mercurial, a liar, a consummate actress, and Goss simply can not resist her. In terms of the case he is working on, Fernande works in Rainger’s office, but otherwise she is not involved with any of his other activities. Nonetheless she is important both to Goss and (as they soon discover) to the predicament he puts them in …

   … the resolution to which takes up the last 150 pages of a novel containing just over 400 pages. I’ll wager that if you’re like me, they won’t take you much more than an hour to read, the pages will be turning so fast. This is a thriller novel, not a detective puzzle, make no mistake about it.

   Looking back once you’ve finished, you’ll realize that the opposition was just a little too efficient and deadly to make such foolish mistakes as they eventually did, but if they hadn’t – as we all well know – Goss and Fernande would never have survived past page 300.

   Lest you get me wrong, no PI novel containing more than 400 pages could be readable if the characters were not top notch and ably created, and in Thoroughfare of Stones, they are. It takes more than all-out action to make a believer out of me.

   When Ron Goulart came to Gary Lovisi’s paperback show this past Sunday, it was as a guest, and he had with him copies of Cheap Thrills and Good Girl Art available for sale and signing. See my previous post, and in particular Walker Martin’s comment in which he describes each of them more fully. He also praises them both very highly, a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with.

   I asked Ron if he still had copies, and he says no, but they’re both easily available from Amazon and other Internet dealers as well as the publisher, hermespress.com.

   He does have copies of books in his “Groucho Marx, Detective” series, though, which he’ll gladly sell you for $20 each and pictorially autograph in his inimitable style (my words). You can email him if you’re interested, or just to say hello. (Click on the link.)

   None of the Groucho books ever came out in paperback, which is a criminal offense in itself. The only editions were hardcovers from St. Martin’s Press. Here’s a complete list. (You’ll have to ask him which ones he has.)

      Groucho Marx, Master Detective (1998)
      Elementary, My Dear Groucho (1999)
      Groucho Marx, Private Eye (1999)
      Groucho Marx and the Broadway Murders (2001)
      Groucho Marx, Secret Agent (2002)
      Groucho Marx, King of the Jungle (2005)

From my copy:

   Previously on this blog:  PART I. THE NOVELS.

PART II. THE STORY COLLECTIONS.

   The first collection of Woolrich’s shorter work was I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1943, as by William Irish), which includes at least three supreme classics: the title story (1938) plus “Three O’Clock” (1938) and “Nightmare” (1941, as “And So to Death”).

   Boucher inexplicably didn’t review the book but late in December he listed it as the year’s best volume of crime fiction at less than novel length. It was also the only such collection published that year, but clearly Boucher didn’t include it among 1943’s best by default, since a few months later (28 May 1944) he called it one of the 13 finest books of short crime fiction published since 1920.

   The follow-up volume After-Dinner Story (1944, as by William Irish) brought together six tales of which at least four — the title story (1938), “The Night Reveals” (1936), “Marihuana” (1941) and “Rear Window” (1942, as “It Had To Be Murder”) — are among Woolrich’s most powerful. Boucher found one or two of the half dozen (apparently the ones I didn’t name) “a bit too patly ironic” but called the others “first-rate specimens of that master of the suspense and terror of the commonplace.” (26 November 1944)

   If I Should Die Before I Wake (1945, as by William Irish) was a digest-sized original paperback collection of six tales of which three are pure gems: the title story (1937), “A Death Is Caused” (1943, as “Mind Over Murder”), and “Two Murders, One Crime” (1942, as “Three Kills for One”).

   Boucher, perhaps the only critic broad-minded enough to notice softcover originals, described the 25-cent volume as “various in quality but containing at least two of the finest Woolrich-Irish opuses — which is about as fine as terror-suspense comes currently.” (1 July 1945) When the collection was reissued as a paperback of conventional dimensions a year and a half later, Boucher said that “to watch the Old Master of suspense technique at work is worth anybody’s two bits.” (19 January 1947).

   Next came The Dancing Detective (1946, as by William Irish), which contained eight stories, four of them top-drawer noir: the title story (1938, as “Dime a Dance”), “Two Fellows in a Furnished Room” (1941, as “He Looked Like Murder”), “The Light in the Window” (1946) and “Silent As the Grave” (1945). Boucher praised the book to the skies: “Nightmares of a…masochistically pleasant nature await the reader who recognizes in [Woolrich] the great living master of what the psalmist calls “the noonday devil” — the infinite terror of prosaic everyday detail.” (14 July 1946)

   The last Woolrich collection Boucher reviewed for the Chronicle was Borrowed Crime (1946, as by William Irish), another digest-sized paperback original costing a quarter then and worth a mint today. This one brought together four short novels, two of them dispensable, the other pair — “Detective William Brown” (1938) and “Chance” (1942, as “Dormant Account”) — displaying Woolrich at his most powerful. Boucher’s review was terse but just: “The excellence of the Woolrich-Irish pulp novelettes is now so widely recognized that the mere announcement of this latest collected volume should send you scurrying to a newsstand.” (9 March 1947).

   Six more Woolrich collections, all as by William Irish, were published over the next six years. The first two came out when Boucher was off the Chronicle and not yet on the Times, but he praised both in his “Speaking of Crime” column for EQMM:

   Dead Man Blues (1947) brought together seven tales including the classics “Guillotine” (1939, as “Men Must Die”) and “Fire Escape” (1947, as “The Boy Cried Murder”). Boucher called the collected stories “a compelling group….” (February 1949)

   The Blue Ribbon (1949) gathered eight more tales of which by far the finest was the nonstop action thriller “Subway” (1936, as “You Pays Your Nickel”). Boucher described the octad as “a mixed lot ranging from the supernatural to pure sentimental emotionalism. But the five crime stories included bear the authentic Woolrich/Irish stamp so unmistakably that no seeker of suspense can afford to overlook the volume.” (August 1949)

   He was no longer reviewing for EQMM when the next Woolrich collection was published. Somebody on the Phone (1950) was reviewed in the Times but not by Boucher. The subsequent paperback-original collections Six Nights of Mystery (1950) and Bluebeard’s Seventh Wife (1952) were reviewed by no one.

   But Boucher made it a point to discuss what turned out to be the final collection under the Irish byline. Eyes That Watch You (1952) included seven stories. Its three longer tales — the title story (1939, as “The Case of the Talking Eyes”) plus “Charlie Won’t Be Home Tonight” (1939) and “All at Once, No Alice” (1940) — Boucher praised as “richly representing [Woolrich’s] best work.” The other four, which were much shorter, he dismissed as “minor gimmick stories which any hack could have written” but he advised readers to “overlook them, settle down to the longer stories and revel in the skill of the foremost master of the breathtaking this-could-happen-to-me impact.” (24 August 1952)

   All subsequent Woolrich collections were published under his own name. Nightmare (1956), a volume of six tales including two classics previously collected in I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes, gave the critic a chance to sum up his ambivalence about the author:

    “By sober critical standards there is just about everything wrong with much of Woolrich’s work. This collection of six stories illustrates most of the flaws: the ‘explanation’ that is harder to believe than the original ‘impossibility,’ the banal and over-obvious twist of ‘irony,’ the casual disregard of fact or probability –the Los Angeles Police Department so understaffed that only a single investigator of low rank can be spared to handle the murder of a film star! However, critical sobriety is out of the question so long as this master of terror-in-the-commonplace exerts his spell. It is an oddly chosen collection, representing neither the best nor the least familiar of Woolrich … but it is characteristic, and I do not envy the hard-headed reader who can resist its compulsive black magic.” (2 September 1956).

   Of the six tales printed in the sequel collection Violence (1958), I would rank three with Woolrich’s best: “Don’t Wait Up for Me Tonight” (1937, as “Goodbye, New York”), “Guillotine” (1939; previously collected in Dead Man Blues, 1947), and “Murder, Obliquely” (a heavily revised version of “Death Escapes the Eye,” 1947). “Guillotine” was the only one of the six that in Boucher’s view “ranks with the best of Woolrich’s unforgettable pulp classics.” But all six, he said, “display, if to a lesser extent, [Woolrich’s] mastery of detail in creating tension and terror out of the commonplace.” (10 August 1958).

   About a month later Woolrich’s Hotel Room came out. The setting is Room 923 of New York’s Hotel St. Anselm and the story of the building’s birth, adolescence, maturity, old age and death is told through the stories of the people who checked into that room at various points in time between 1896 and the late Fifties. The book wasn’t reviewed in the Times at all but Boucher devoted a few lines to it in his monthly column for EQMM, calling it “less a novel than a collection of episodes, many with the impact of [Woolrich’s] crime shorts.” (November 1958) A most generous comment considering that only one episode in the book was even remotely criminous!

   The next Woolrich collection was the paperback original Beyond the Night (1959), which Boucher covered in the Times at much greater length:

    “Recent Woolrich collections have, I suspect, been selected by the author himself; they seem to consist largely of those stories best loved by their creator because no one else appreciates them. Beyond the Night contains six stories, mostly supernatural, including [in “My Lips Destroy” (1939, as “Vampire’s Honeymoon”] the most tedious arrangement of cliches on the vampire theme ever assembled. There are glints of the old Woolrich magic, especially in a 1935 tale of voodoo [“Music from the Dark,” better known as “Papa Benjamin”] and a 1959 picture of gang callousness [“The Number’s Up”], but there are so many much better Woolrich stories which have yet to appear in book form.” (4 October 1959)

   The following year saw the publication of Woolrich’s last paperback original, The Doom Stone (1960). Boucher described it superbly as “heaven help us, about the diamond stolen from the eye of a Hindu idol in 1757 and the curse it brings on successive owners in Paris during the Terror, in New Orleans under the carpetbag regime and in Tokyo just before Pearl Harbor. Few authors would dare make a straight-faced offer of such triple-distilled corn, but devout Woolrichians (like me) may find it surprisingly potable if hardly intoxicating.” (8 May 1960)

   By then Woolrich was dying by inches and writing very little. Boucher had no occasion to discuss him again until five years later when the final collections of Woolrich’s lifetime appeared roughly three months apart.

   Of The Ten Faces of Cornell Woolrich he said: “Much though I admire the work of [Woolrich], I can see little excuse for [this collection]. Eight of the ten stories have appeared in book form before, six of them in earlier gatherings of Mr. Woolrich’s tales. (One indeed is making its third appearance in a Woolrich collection.) The stories, to be sure, range from good to excellent, but this can hardly claim to be a new $3.95 book.” (2 May 1965).

   The Dark Side of Love Boucher described as bringing together “several of [Woolrich’s] lesser recent short stories along with others which seem, for good reasons, not to have appeared in magazines. It’s a collection that stresses this veteran’s weaknesses rather than his virtues, but at least only one of its eight stories has been published in an earlier Woolrich volume. Only the previously unpublished “Too Nice a Day to Die” seems to me to rank with Woolrich’s best.” (25 July 1965)

   Coming soon:

PART III: LETTERS, A CARD AND A MEETING.

  WILLIAM P. McGIVERN – Night Extra.

Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1957. Paperback reprints: Pocket 1193, January 1958; Pyramid V3795, 1975; Berkley 11190, 1988.

   A big city reporter (which McGivern was at one time) investigates the murder of a woman whose body was found in the house of a reform mayoral candidate. It soon becomes clear that the entrenched political machine has engineered a frame-up and appears likely to succeed in destroying a feared political opponent.

   The novel is set in an unnamed East Coast city that suffers from pervasive corruption. Anyone who fights against the corruption places their job, if not their life, in jeopardy. Crusading reporter Sam Terrell spends much of the story trying to convince witnesses to come forward and tell what they know. He also must navigate through the city’s numerous layers of civic, political and bureaucratic corruption in order to find allies who might advance his investigation.

   One of the themes that McGivern explores is how ingrained and insidious corruption can become if left unchecked and unchallenged. Many of the enablers of corruption believe themselves to be good people and only realize their complicity after Terrell points it out to them.

   Will enough citizens stand up to the machine and do the right thing? Will Terrell succeed in his quest to save the reform-minded politician? Pick up a copy of this book from an Internet bookseller or at your local used bookstore. Sadly, few if any of this once respected mid-twentieth century crime writer’s books are in print today.

         Bibliographic data [Taken from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin] —

McGIVERN, WILLIAM P(eter). 1922-1982; pseudonym: Bill Peters.

But Death Runs Faster (n.) Dodd 1948

Heaven Ran Last (n.) Dodd 1949
Very Cold for May (n.) Dodd 1950
Shield for Murder (n.) Dodd 1951
The Crooked Frame (n.) Dodd 1952
The Big Heat (n.) Dodd 1953
Margin of Terror (n.) Dodd 1953
Rogue Cop (n.) Dodd 1954

The Darkest Hour (n.) Dodd 1955
The Seven File (n.) Dodd 1956
Night Extra (n.) Dodd 1957
Odds Against Tomorrow (n.) Dodd 1957
Savage Streets (n.) Dodd 1959
Seven Lies South (n.) Dodd 1960
Killer on the Turnpike (co) Pocket Books 1961
The Road to the Snail (n.) Dodd 1961
A Choice of Assassins (n.) Dodd 1963
The Caper of the Golden Bulls (n.) Dodd 1966
Lie Down, I Want to Talk to You (n.) Dodd 1967

Caprifoil (n.) Dodd 1972
Reprisal (n.) Dodd 1973
Night of the Juggler (n.) Putnam 1975

-The Seeing [with Maureen McGivern] (n.) Tower 1980
Summitt (n.) Arbor 1982
A Matter of Honor (n.) Arbor 1984

PETERS, BILL. Pseudonym of William P. McGivern.

KATHLEEN MOORE KNIGHT – Port of Seven Strangers.

Detective Book Club; hardcover reprint [3-in-1 edition], November 1945. First edition: Doubleday/Crime Club, 1945. Paperback: Armed Services Edition 1123. Reprinted in Two Complete Detective Books, No. 41, November 1946.

   This one was disappointing. In a span of 25 years, beginning in 1935 and ending in 1960, Knight wrote 30 to 35 mysteries, most under her own name, but there were a handful that appeared under her alternate byline of Alan Amos as well. The ones I remember most featured Elisha Macomber, a rustic Cape Cod selectman who did a lot of crime-solving on the side. It’s been a while, so the details escape me, but I always enjoyed them.

   Not so this one. The ingredients are all there, and it starts out in fine fashion: an all-but-deserted tourist hotel in Vera Cruz during the stormy season, partly filled with an assorted group of vacationers, plus a foursome of stranded wartime American fliers, an invalid old man unable to leave, and a young European woman named Lorel (or perhaps Elise) whose beauty draws men like moths to the proverbial flame. (*)

   The first murder happens right away, but it’s hushed up almost right away. Two are more difficult to manage: a second body is found in the room of Gail Warren from Boston, who until then had been happily sharing an almost-at-first-sight mutual attraction with Lieutenant January (one of the aforementioned fliers). The local constabulary, a stout, dark man named Sanchez, seems convinced of the lady’s guilt, which of course we (the reader) know to be complete nonsense.

   All the right stuff. Everything’s in place. Sit back and enjoy … but the plot needs some tinkering with. As it is, it just doesn’t work. Gail has the feeling that the murder was committed in the room next door (she heard a strange sound while finding her wrap). No one wonders (too much) why the body is in her room.

   Later, after she is pushed down some dark empty steps, events become even more impossible to follow: why was she abandoned with two people she does not even know, where is her aunt who has been traveling with her, who was it who killed Lorenzo (who turns out to be a parrot), and when Lorel is murdered in turn, it appears to be the last anyone thinks of her.

   It might have all been untangled, but no. Knight has a twist or two up her sleeve, and one of them just doesn’t gibe with how the events were said to have happened in Chapter One. There would be a clever way to have worked around this, one that someone named Christie could pulled off easily, but Knight seems to have missed the mark on this altogether.

   As I say, a disappointment, but given the chance to read another of her books, do you know what? I’d still grab it.

(*) Yes, I know. Clichés are supposed to be avoided like the plague.

GRIF STOCKLEY – Probable Cause.

Ivy, paperback reprint; 1st printing, December 1993. Hardcover edition: Simon & Schuster, October 1992.

   According to the information provided inside the back cover of Probable Cause, the second of his two recorded adventures, Grif Stockley was (in 1993) “an attorney for Central Arkansas Legal Services, which was funded by the federal government to provide representation to indigents in civil cases.”

   As an author, his series character is Gideon Page, a middle-aged attorney whose first case after striking out on his own is highly is highly charged with racial overtones. And undertones, too, for that matter. His client is a black psychologist who’s accused of killing a retarded girl he was administering electric shock therapy to with a cattle prod. Why is the case so difficult? The man was having an affair with the wealthy girl’s mother, who is white.

   Large portions of this novel are taken up with detective work, but for the most part what this is an intimate, inside look at how the justice system actually works, with lots of snapshot character studies of the people who either try to make it work, or (in some cases) try to make it work on their behalf.

   Page’s life with his precocious and sensitive high school daughter (Rosa, her mother, is dead) and his platonic love affair with Rainey, a social worker at a local state hospital, are essential parts of the story, more than background matter, although not part of the case itself.

   This is the legal equivalent of a multi-faceted and well-diversified police procedural, in other words, as Page divides his time among his other clients, colleagues and adversaries, told by someone who’s been there. One suspects with some amount of surety that some of Stockley’s own clients, colleagues and adversaries may find more than a little similarities between themselves and some of the people populating this book.

   There’s very little spelled out in black and white, pun intended, including the ending, nor as to what might happen next in Gideon Page’s life. I for one will be looking eagerly for more in the local used book stores. Unaccountably, this is the only one of his adventures that I own.

   Thanks to Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here are the others:

STOCKLEY, GRIF. 1944- .
      Expert Testimony. Summit Books, 1991.

      Probable Cause. Simon & Schuster, 1992.
      Religious Conviction. Simon & Schuster, 1993.
      Illegal Motion. Simon & Schuster, 1995.
      Blind Justice. Simon & Schuster, 1997.

   And if you’re interested, here’s a link for more information on Grif Stockley himself.

   Back from Michigan, that is, where a wonderful time was had by all, as expected, and back from Gary Lovisi’s paperback show in New York City yesterday. Attendance was up slightly and a lot of money seemed to be changing hands, but of course the even greater attraction was seeing and talking to many, many friends I’ve known for a long time.

   I hope none of them will feel slighted if I mention only one of them, writer and pulp historian Ron Goulart, author most recently of Cheap Thrills, a profusely illustrated history of the pulp magazines, and Good Girl Art, also profusely illustrated, and even more so. I recommend both to you very highly.

   Recent health problems kept Ron from this year’s Windy City pulp and paperback show, where he was to have been this year’s co-guest of honor. We’ve known each other for well over 30 years, and it was good to see him again.

   Lots of people asked me about the recent absence of posts on this blog. I’m still not sure in what direction I (and it) will be going next, but until I find out, I have a large backlog of reviews that need to be uploaded, and I think you’ll see one here sometime in the next few minutes.