WILLIAM GORE – There’s Death In The Churchyard. George G. Harrap, UK, hardcover,1934. No US publication.

   Pondersby Jonson becomes ill in the church at Sutton Eacham. When helped out of the church after the services by his host, Captain Stoyner, squire of the village, Jonson expires, but not before accusing his host of having murdered him.

   Stoyner and Jonson had had a fierce argument the night before; Stoyner possessed the poison used to commit the murder; Jonson, a financial ‘shark’ from the city, was trying to do down the good captain; Stoyner was the only one who could have administered the poison if what he says about the poison is true.

   It seems like an open-and-shut case. The villagers are all convinced that the squire did it, although their opinion is that the murder was certainly justifiable. Stoyner puts up no defence at the coroner’s hearing, his opinion being that if the jurors don’t want to believe a chap with his breeding, background, and record, so much the worse for them. They don’t justify his faith.

   During the trial itself, he will not allow himself to be defended by a barrister. If it costs £2000 for an obviously, or so he claims, innocent man to be found not guilty, then there really isn’t any justice.

   Luckily, this rather headstrong and proud man has a few believers and supporters. The vicar, married to Stoyner’s sister-in-law, finally spots, during one of his tedious sermons, how and why the murder was committed.

   This is a well-plotted, well-written, and amusing novel, with an unusually true-to-life private detective. It also has one of the few acceptable children in the genre, which makes it worth reading on that count alone.

          Bibliography:

WILLIAM GORE: pseudonym of Jan Gordon, 1882-1944.

   There’s Death in the Churchyard. Harrap, UK, 1934.
   Death in the Wheelbarrow. Harrap, UK, 1935; Mystery House, US, 1940 as by Jan Gordon. [Insp. Ernest Penk]
   Murder Most Artistic. Harrap, UK, 1937; published in the US by Doubleday, 1938. [Insp. Ernest Penk]

From this roots-rock guitarist’s 2011 CD, Eleven Eleven. Besides working solo and in collaboration with his brother Phil, Dave Alvin has also played in the bands X and The Knitters.

   It’s hard to imagine two writers with less in common than Graham Greene and Erle Stanley Gardner, but we know that Greene was an enthusiastic reader of the Perry Mason novels, and in one of my columns several years ago I quoted from a letter about Mason which Greene sent to fellow Gardnerian Evelyn Waugh. Recently I discovered that Mason even figures in one of Greene’s novels. The Honorary Consul (1973) is set in northern Argentina and among its principal characters are Dr. Eduardo Plarr, a physician in sympathy with the revolutionary movement in that country, and León Rivas, a former priest turned guerrilla leader. On page 36 of the novel we find the following:

   Is that really how Mason comes across in Spanish, as lawyer to the Left and friend to those who have no friend? Quien sabe?

   Maybe readers of Gardner in Spanish translation confuse Mason’s fierce loyalty to clients with something ideological. The murderee in The Case of the Screaming Woman (1957) is a doctor who ran an illegal service connecting wealthy women desperate for a child and girls about to give birth out of wedlock.

   Mason discovers that the doctor kept a secret notebook that can prove large numbers of children are illegitimate and adopted. Out of Mason’s sight, the woman who stole the book from the dead man’s office gives it to Della Street, who later asks Mason whether it’s ethical for her to have it.

   Mason: “Hell, no!… That notebook is stolen property, Della. If I take it into my possession, I become an accessory after the fact. [But] I haven’t the faintest intention of letting that property get to the police.”

   Della: “And if I should have that book, where would it leave you professionally?

   Mason: “Behind the eight ball if I knew you had it.”

   Then he says: “Ethics are rules of conduct that are made to preserve the dignity and the integrity of the profession. I’m inclined to conform to the spirit of the rules of ethics rather than the letter.”

   Della: “But what about the courts?”

   Mason: “They’ll conform to the letter rather than the spirit. If the police ever find out that [the notebook] came under my control, [Hamilton Burger the DA will] throw the Penal Code at me.”

   Della: “And then what will you do?”

   Mason: “Then I’ll truthfully say that I don’t know where the book is… I’m not going to throw heaven knows how many children to the wolves….”

   Della: “And you’re willing to risk your reputation and your liberty to keep that from happening?”

   Mason: “You’re darned right I am. I’m a lawyer….”

   Anti-establishment passages of this sort were to come to a screeching halt once Mason in the form of Raymond Burr became a star of prime time TV but they may help to explain how in Spanish he might have been mistaken for a revolutionary with a law degree.

   Screaming Woman happened to be published between two of the finest Mason novels of Gardner’s middle period, The Case of the Lucky Loser and The Case of the Foot-Loose Doll, and is certainly not in the same league with those gems.

   At least two key characters never come onstage even for a moment, the more important of the pair isn’t even mentioned until very late in the day, and the dying message clue is one of the feeblest I’ve ever encountered. But it moves like a bullet train and remains well worth reading almost 60 years ago.

   By a coincidence worthy of Harry Stephen Keeler, Gardner’s is one of two novels I’ve read recently in which crucial characters are kept offstage. The other is Georges Simenon’s Félicie est là, which was written in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of France, first published in French two years later and still under the occupation, and translated into English as Maigret and the Toy Village (1979).

   After a one-legged old man is shot to death in the bedroom of his house in a small residential development being built in the countryside, Maigret visits the scene and is driven to distraction by the dead man’s impossible housekeeper. Here, unlike in Screaming Woman, it’s the murderer himself whom we never get to see or hear, and in fact his name isn’t even mentioned until page 116 of the 139-page American version.

   Does it matter? I’m not sure. When someone as nutty as Keeler throws in characters who are no more than names, we couldn’t care less, especially when they have names like Hoot Ivanjack, Hamerson Hogg and the three Threebrothers brothers. When someone like Gardner does it, there’s a problem. Simenon seems to me to fall somewhere between these extremes.

   Having read a fair number of the novels Simenon wrote during the war, I’ve concluded that he entered into a “contract with France” to say nothing about the Nazi occupation and backdate everything to the Thirties without explicitly saying so — at least not often. We find one exception to this rule in the first paragraph of Toy Village:

   This tells us pretty clearly that the events he’s describing took place years earlier. Simenon’s relation to the two German occupations he experienced, the first in Belgium during his adolescence, the second in France at a time when he’d become one of the best-known European novelists, is explored in depth by biographers like Pierre Assouline and Patrick Marnham.

JACK O’CONNELL – Box Nine. Lenore Thomas #1. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1992; paperback, 1993.

   I started this with more anticipation than usual, and less certainty. It’s had a great deal of publicity, much more than a first novel usually gets, and though the reviews have been mostly favorable, still I really didn’t have a good sense of what to expect, other than something extremely hardboiled. And that, at least, I got.

   Lenore Thomas is a policewoman, an undercover narcotics agent. Her twin brother, Ike, is a postman. They live together in a duplex in a mythical city [Quinsigamond] somewhere (I assume) in Massachusetts. The book turns around the introduction of a new designer-drug with strange and ultimately lethal properties.

   Reviewers and would-be critics are lost without comparisons, and are prone to grab at unlikely ones when obvious and apt ones are not readily at hand. I’m going to avoid that trap, but possibly at the cost of leaving you as unsure of what Box Nine is all about as I was. There are, though, a few things I can tell you.

   The book presents a bleak, grim view of urban life, and of those urban denizens that it depicts. The story is told in the present tense and from shifting view-points; Lenore’s, Ike’s, a drug lord’s, another police woman’s, Ike’s supervisor at the Post Office, and they are all strange people. Lenore is arguably the strangest: a speed freak, heavy metal devotee, in love with her guns if she is in love with anything and overall one of the more different protagonists in recent memory. The prose serves the story well. The plot? Secondary, at best; what you have are people dancing in and out of a semi-apocalyptic vision.

   Do I recommend it? Lord, no. If you don’t like hardboiled fiction, you shouldn’t touch it with a pair of tongs. Even if you do, I have no idea whether you’d be glad you read it or not — and notice my avoidance of the terms “like” and “enjoy,” which seem inappropriate. Am I glad I did? No, I don’t believe I am. But it was different; I’ll give it that much.

       The Quinsigamond series —

1. Box Nine (1992)
2. Wireless (1993)
3. The Skin Palace (1996)
4. Word Made Flesh (1998)

Appropriate for the Halloween season. (It’s never too early.)

DIE, MONSTER, DIE! American International, 1965. Boris Karloff, Nick Adams, Freda Jackson, Suzan Farmer, Terence de Marney, Patrick Magee. Screenplay: Jerry Sohl, based on the story “The Colour Out of Space” by H. P. Lovecraft. Director: Daniel Haller.

   An admirable attempt to adapt to film what might have been Lovecraft’s closest attempt to wrote science fiction. Admirable, since there’s much to like, especially in the first half, but doomed to failure when they tried to make a monster movie out of it, rather the a study of the not very beneficial effects a radioactive object landing from space has on all the surrounding terrain.

   For some reason the movie was filmed in England, and so naturally they moved the story there as well, rather than (I believe) somewhere in austere New England. At least they called the nearby village Arkham. Nick Adams plays the boy friend of Susan Witley (Suzann Farmer), whom he met in college back in the states. Boris Karloff plays her father, intimidating even in a wheelchair, and orders young Stephen Reinhart off the premises.

   He refuses, of course, but even stepping off the train, he knows that not all is well with the Witley family. All of the village fold shun him immediately they know his destination. Susan’s mother is not well, the one servant is on his last legs, and old Nahum Witley has secrets he will not tell, including what caused the large pit just down the drive from the manor house, and the totally blighted area around it.

   The first half of the movie is extremely well done, beautifully photographed and the old mansion filled with all the accouterments an old family mansion should have. With hints galore, of course, that there are secrets here that man, perhaps, is not meant to know.

   So of course when the secrets are so slight, and the telling so indifferently done, the second half can hardly live up the billing. If some of the details of the the history of the house and those who have lived in it had been set out more precisely, it would have helped. But the even the title of film promises a monster, and when all we get is a few momentary chills and a display of what happens in the end to old Nahum Witley, shaggy eyebrows and all, there isn’t anything left to do but wish that a stronger hand had been on the controls.

WILLIAM SAMBROT “Island of Fear.” Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, 18 January 1958. Reprinted in Island of Fear and Other Science Fiction Stories (Pocket, paperback, May 1963).

   William Sambrot (1920-2007) wrote and published over 50 science fiction stories. Many of them first appeared in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, not the most traditional market for speculative fiction, but the place where he found a home. He also wrote for such publications as Playboy and Blue Book Magazine. Fourteen of his short stories were reprinted in Island of Fear and Other Science Fiction Stories.

   The short story “Island of Fear,” is a suspenseful yarn about a man obsessed with a wall built on a Greek isle. He wants – no, he needs to know who built this wall and why. This is especially so given the fact that on the other side of this wall there appears to be a beautiful sculpture, one that has escaped the attention of the art books.

   As a tale that is both atmospheric and suspenseful, “Island of Fear” isn’t so much a science fiction story as it is a horror story. It’s actually a pretty good read, yet because it’s a rather short, I’d be giving away too much if I tried to tell you too much more about the plot. Let’s just say the Greek setting is what propels the story forward, with rising tension, toward a horrific climax.

   So as I ask you as readers of speculative fiction: have you ever read Sambrot’s work? Do you remember it when his fiction was first published in The Saturday Evening Post? Do you have a favorite story of his? If so, leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

ROBERT BLOCH – There Is a Serpent in Eden. Zebra, paperback original, 1979. Reprinted by Zebra as The Cunning, paperback, 1981.

   This finds the author of Psycho in John D. MacDonald territory, and not very happy about it.

   â€œEden” is a retirement community in California, but it reads a lot like MacDonald’s Florida: plenty of sun, money, and drama in the lives of the aging residents, a half-dozen of whom are unknowingly heading for a crisis that will redefine their lives, much in the manner of All These Condemned — or for that matter, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

   Bloch sets up the characters and their hang-ups with color and economy: Warren, contemplating suicide; Joe, trying to look like his neighbors and keep his background a secret; Lulu and Homer, just off the farm and uncomfortable in a suburban environment… and each of them, in his or her own way, dealing with old age. We get the sagging nympho, the restless retired cop, the dying man, and the old woman suffering from dementia — and we get Mick, the nasty young caterer planning to rob all these geezers at gunpoint.

   Mick’s enterprise pushes Serpent close to caper-novel territory, but mostly Bloch stays with the suicidal Warren as he looks about him and finds no reason to live. Which gives the author plenty of time to ruminate on society in the late 1970s and wonder where it all went wrong.

   Now I’ll grant you, the late 1970s were hardly the high point of western civilization (that was the late 1960s!) but Warren (or the author) seem unduly harsh to me.

   When this was published, Robert Bloch was in his early 60s, which I like to think of now as the beginnings of approaching pre-middle-age. Seriously though, it’s a time when some folks reflect on days gone by and on their own mortality. But coming from Bloch, the philosophizing is laced with puns and word-play, and the effect is like Travis McGee doing stand-up.

   Somehow the story gets so wrapped up in itself that it’s not until page 218 that anybody gets a knife in the chest — totally unlike Bloch to string the reader along like that, and that’s my only problem with Serpent; when I pick up a Robert Bloch book, I expect some gruesome mystery, a few chills and maybe a ghoul or two. What I get here is Drama. Well done — the robbery and its unraveling is particularly tense and exciting, when we finally get to it — but not the bloody, lurid thing I was looking forward to.

ROBERT COLBY – Secret of the Second Door. Gold Medal #855, paperback original; 1st printing, February 1959. Wildside Press, softcover, 2002. Prologue Books, softcover, 2013. TV Adapation: An episode of Hawaiian Eye, 9 December 1959 (season 1, episode 10; same title).

   Of the seventeen paperback originals Robert Colby wrote under his own name in the 50s, 60s and and early 70s, five were published by Gold Medal, five by Monarch, four by Ace, two from Avon, and one from Pyramid. (He also paired up to write one of the Nick Carter books done by Award in 1972.) Given my opinion of the quality of books from these publishers, to me this suggests that his career was more a case of wide variability rather than versatility.

   It’s the first by Colby that I’ve read from any publisher, though, so I know that until I read more, a statement such as the one above should be taken with a grain of salt, maybe even two.

   As for the book at hand, however, I was moderately disappointed. It starts out just fine. A guy running an apartment complex in Florida gets an anonymous clipping in the mail, telling him that the husband of his ex-flame in New York City has just died, under rather unusual circumstances.

   Does he go running off to see her? He’s carrying a torch that he can barely lift over his head. You bet he does. It turns out that before he died in an automobile accident the dead man had come home from he said was a poker game with a suitcase filled with exactly $200,000 which is now missing.

   It doesn’t sound like the winnings at a poker game, the former girlfriend says. Between seeing the lady again and the promise of a share of the loot to boot, Neil Shepherd agrees to help her.

   So far, so good, but the book goes off in its own direction, as Shepherd has his mind filled with thoughts of the money than he does the lady, which is why he showed up in Manhattan in the first place. And of course the real owners of the $200,000 want their say in the matter, not to mention the lady friend, who has secrets of her own.

   But instead of a bunch of clever guys, they turn out to be no more than gang of stupid, vicious thugs, and a whole lot of stupid, vicious things happen in the second half of the book, which is otherwise pretty much a letdown. Worse, several key points of the plot creak worse than any badly oiled door you ever heard, including on the radio.

   Well, maybe more than moderately disappointing.

   I’m not exactly sure how the title fits in. It may be figurative, that Shepherd is given a second chance with the lady friend. But as that aspect of the story doesn’t pan out the way I thought it would, there are a couple of real-life doors that figure into the tale, briefly but significantly, one more than the other.

A. E. MARTIN – The Outsiders. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1945. Detective Book Club, hardcover reprint, 3-in-1 edition. Mercury Mystery #116, digest-sized paperback, no date stated. First published in Australia by Consolidated, hardcover, 1944, as The Common People. Film: Hammer, 1955, as The Glass Cage; released in the US as The Glass Tomb.

   This is the first of, I believe, two Pel Pelham novels. Pelham is a “spruiker”, or barker, for various sideshow attractions. In this novel, he is working with Henri Sapolio, the World’s Champion Faster, who is going to attempt to break his record of not eating for 65 straight days.

   A young lady is murdered in the apartment house where Sapolio lives. As she is being murdered, Pelham and some of his friends, including an armless woman, a midget, a tattooed lady — well, really stenciled — and a Chinese giant, are partying at Sapolio’s the day before he is to begin his record fast.

   The murdered woman is a former aerialist in the circus whose father gave Pelham his first job. She also may or may not be mixed up in blackmail, particularly of a special friend of Pelham’s who grew up with him in an orphanage.

   Pelham has to get the fasting show started, deal with a cop who loathes “freaks,” and figure out who the killer is in an excellent novel that is also a very good mystery.

Bibliographic Notes:   In something of a footnote, Bill added that the book takes place in Australia, probably Sydney, not England, as Al Hubin had it in error at the time. The second Pel Pelham novel that Bill referred to is The Bridal Bed Murders (Simon & Schuster, 1953).