THOMAS MAHON – The Fandango Involvement. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback original; 1st printing, September 1981.

    Here’s a curious little book, one so far off the beaten path — especially as a mystery, although the evidence indicates that the author may have intended it to be something more than that — that without actually having it in hand, it’s hard to consider its ever being thought publishable.

    Billy Fandango is a dwarf with a lot of curiosity. A fellow employee at the company for which he’s a computer expert seems to live in agonized total isolation and to have aged years beyond his time. Why? Just as this man seems to be coming out of his shell, he commits suicide.

    Or is it? Naturally, Billy and his six-foot girlfriend decide that further investigation is in order.

    As I say, this is an unusual book, and so’s the ending, involving both Vietnam and the arms industry — and isn’t it strange to realize that Vietnam is now very nearly ancient history?

    But the whole affair is still strangely out of kilter. The story line reels and staggers like the proverbial drunken sailor, this way and that, and back again.

    It’s also overwritten by at least half a notch, with some of the worst of the flowery dialogue sounding as if it came straight from the pages of the latest Marvel comic book. It’s the best of its field, I grant you, but by no stretch of the imagination could anyone ever be considered as actually talking that way.

[UPDATE] 11-14-09. A curious little book indeed. What I remember about this book, other than what you’ve just read, is nothing. Zilch. I have no record of having owning this book, much less knowing where my copy would be. There are only six copies offered for sale on ABE. The good news is that if you wanted to buy a copy, you needn’t pay more than three or four dollars, plus shipping.

    It is the only work of fiction Mr. Mahon wrote. His other book is Charged Bodies: People, Power, and Paradox in Silicon Valley (New American Library, 1985). According to Contemporary Authors, he was born in 1944, was an independent film-maker for two or three years before turning to public relations in 1976, eventually starting his own PR agency in 1984.

    And at the moment, no cover image. If I had one, it might jar some memories loose, but so far I haven’t been able to come up with one.

DESMOND CORY – Timelock. Frederick Muller, UK, hardcover, 1967. Walker, US, hc, 1967. US paperback reprints: Award A343S, 1968; Walker, 1984.

   When Johnny Fedora wakes up in a Spanish hospital with no memory of how he got there and registered under the name John Fox there are certain things he knows:

   Johnny Fedora is the creation of British writer Desmond Cory (Shaun McCarthy), an ex-Royal Marine Commando who had an actual license to kill issued by none other than Winston Churchill as part of a group that hunted down war criminals that might escape post war justice in the final days of the war.

   In 1948 he penned the first novel featuring his British “free agent” with Spanish blood who “kills the people who kill other people.”

   Timelock from 1967 is part of a series within a series featuring Johnny’s running battle with the cold-blooded cat-like Russian agent, Feramontov, his personal Moriarity.

   Johnny and Feramontov had previously crossed swords in Undertow and Shockwave, and in Timelock Johnny’s prior successes against the Russian have left Feramontov out of favor with the new boys in Moscow and working for an unknown traitor high up in the Spanish government.

   All Johnny knows is that he remembers something about Cell 11, and nothing at all about Laura, the woman who informs him she is his wife.

   Caught between Spanish intelligence, who is using him as a stalking horse, and Feramontov, who is plotting something to do with the Santa Ana dam that provides much of the power for the country, Johnny fights to regain his memory and to uncover Feramontov’s latest plan.

   With Laura in tow, Johnny tries to piece together the missing weeks in his life, but finds himself distracted by his beautiful new wife and on the run from the Spanish military, controlled by Feramontov’s high-placed Spanish boss.

   Cory was a superior writer of this type of thriller, highly praised by Anthony Boucher (writing about Undertow, “finesse, economy,humor, and full inventive plotting”), and with a dry subversive sense of humor that elevated Johnny above many of his Bondian competitors.

   In this one, the relation between Johnny and Laura adds a Hitchcockian note of romance and humor and the byplay with Feramontov, when he is captured and tortured, make for superior fare. Part of the pleasure of the Fedora books is the sometimes black humor that informs them:

   Fermontov is particularly well drawn, a monster, but one that is both human and still frightening. He is a well rounded character:

   Johnny and Laura escape Feramontov and end up high on the Santa Ana dam pinned down by an army of Spanish soldiers under the orders of the high-placed traitor in the Spanish State Department.

   But Johnny survives, trumps Feramontov again and uncovers the secrets of his memory loss and marriage in a suspenseful, down-to-the-wire last-minute finale, one of Cory’s trademarks in the Fedora books.

   Cory ended the Fedora series when he felt they were becoming too popular (his excuse, not mine) and took up a series of excellent suspense novels and a series of mysteries with amateur John Dobie.

   Among the non-series books Night Hawk, A Bit of a Shunt Up the River, and Bennett are outstanding. Bennett in particular may be a masterpiece.

   His novel Deadfall was a film with Michael Caine and Eric Portmann, about a jewel thief caught up in the psycho-sexual drama of a mysterious older man and younger woman who become his partners. The book is a stunner, the film not so much, though worth seeing.

   There is an attractive site for Cory that shows many of the covers for the series and features a PDF biography of the author and his creations which you can download.

   Cory never received the respect he deserved, nor Johnny the popularity he deserved.

   Some of the early Fedora books are little known here and he is too often mistakenly identified as just another Bond clone, despite the fact that like Jean Bruce’s “OSS 117” Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, he beat 007 into print by six years.

   Johnny Fedora is something a bit different from the spy craze and Cory one of the more literate writers skilled at both suspense and a wry humor. He’s well worth getting to know.

   The Johnny Fedora series is marked by good writing, taut suspense, black humor, and sometimes stunning violence, you won’t be sorry you made the effort to meet him.

Editorial Comment: A complete bibliography for Desmond Cory, under all of his pen names, appeared here on this blog in 2007, around the time his passing in 2001 was made known.

JOHN R. KING – The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls. Forge, hardcover. First Edition: August 2008.

   I was drawn to this one by the idea of having Sherlock Holmes meet up with William Hope Hodgson’s supernatural sleuth Carnacki The Ghost Hunter, albeit in this case, Carnacki isn’t a ghost hunter yet.

   The year is 1890, and Thomas Carnacki has been bumming around Europe. He’s just reached Meiringen, Switzerland and is pretty darn hungry, when he spies a pretty young woman named Anna Schmidt carrying a picnic basket. She’s about to hire a carriage to take her up to the foot of Reichenbach Falls, and Carnacki agrees to drive it for the pleasure of her company and part of her lunch.

   Shortly after their arrival they spot two men fighting at the top of the falls and one of them plummets over. When he lands they fish him out, but he has amnesia. What’s more, the other fellow starts shooting at them, wounding Carnacki as he drives them to safety.

   Soon the three of them will be in a life and death struggle with the man with the gun, a certain Professor Moriarty, while trying to restore the memory of the man they temporarily name Harold Silence — but you all know who he is.

   The story is divided into three parts: The first and third are told in alternating chapters narrated by Carnacki and Silence / Holmes, while the second is taken up by the memoirs of Professor Moriarty.

   The trouble with this book is that, since Carnacki is involved, there is a large supernatural element, and that element isn’t original. Though the ending implies that there will be further Holmes / Carnacki adventures, I probably won’t read them unless I get them much more cheaply than what I paid for this one.

   Perhaps someone should try their hand at having Hercule Poirot meet up with Seabury Quinn’s supernatural sleuth Jules DeGrandin and have them exchange fractured French phrases.

Editorial Comment. In fantasy circles John R. King is better known as J. Robert King, author of 20 or so paperback originals for Forgotten Realms, etc., and a hardcover Arthurian trilogy from Tor.

JEFFREY ASHFORD – A Sense of Loyalty. Walker, US, hardcover, 1984; paperback reprint, 1986. British edition: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1983.

   Jeffrey Ashford is the author of the classic mystery The Burden of Proof, but his latest novel, A Sense of Loyalty, is a long way from that standard.

   The Chairman of the Board of HI Motors announces that an industrial spy is leaking priceless information about HI’s new model. The company hires a private investigator named Inchman to conduct an investigation to find the spy.

   Mike Sterling, head of the PR department, is Inchman’s prime suspect. Sterling tries to clear himself by conducting an investigation of his own, but everything gets muddled by Sterling’s loyalty to his sister’s happiness over the corporate code of ethics.

   I found the pace much too slow and the family crises much too tiresome. There’s a flurry of action at the book’s conclusion, but too few surprises. Go read Ashford’s earlier fiction and forget about this latest piece of fluff.

PAUL DOHERTY – An Evil Spirit Out of the West. Headline, hardcover/trade paperback, August 2003; pb, April 2004.

   Doherty just keeps turning out his historical mysteries, with Evil Spirit the first in a trilogy narrated by Mahu, a commoner who becomes the protector and confidant of Akenaten, the heretical Pharaoh who replaced the traditional religion that honored many gods with a monotheistic system.

   This first novel details the rise and fall of Akenaten, with the the succeeding volumes The Season of the Hyaena and The Year of the Cobra continuing the saga with the beginning of the reign of Tutankhamen and then, the sudden, unexpected return of his father.

   Mahu is the center of this first novel, the intelligent commoner and adviser who seems to be something of a staple in the Egyptian mysteries I’ve read, and he will apparently continue his role with the reign of Tutankamen, although how he will manage to serve two masters in the third volume intrigues me.

   The Spies of Sobeck, the seventh novel in Doherty’s series featuring Amerotke, the Chief Justice of Thebes, was published in April and is available from Amazon. I’ll just note the publication here, since I don’t plan to do a detailed review.

   As long as Doherty keeps writing Egyptian mysteries, I’ll keep on reading them. They’re uniformly well done, and my assessment is that if you like one you’ll want to read all of them. And with that, I rest my case.

DYLAN SCHAFFER – Misdemeanor Man. Bloomsbury, trade paperback original; first printing, June 2004.

   Public defender Gordon Seegerman sticks to defending misdemeanors, sings lead in a Barry Manilow tribute band, and worries about getting early-onset Alzheimer’s like his ex-cop dad.

   An indecent exposure case leads to something bigger, and things get busy and dangerous at the same time that the band is preparing for a gig that “MBM” (Mr. Barry Manilow) himself might attend.

   If this sounds gimmicky, it is. Most of Gordon’s wacky bandmates also work in his office, he lives with his father and grandfather in a wacky old house, and he can’t keep a girl friend because he’s haunted by the possibility of clinical wackiness.

   Countering all the wackiness, the trial procedure is quite realistic, according to my sources. (The author is a criminal-defense attorney.)

   Verdict: gimmicky but enjoyable.

      The Gordon Seegerman “Misdemeanor Man” series:

    1. Misdemeanor Man. 2004.
    2. I Right the Wrongs. 2005.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – Fire, Burn!   Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1957. UK edition: Hamish Hamilton, hc, 1957. Paperback reprints include: Bantam A1847, 1958; Bantam S3638, 2nd printing 1968. Carroll & Graf, 1987.

   Fire, Burn! was the first book by John Dickson Carr that I ever read. To be honest the combination of the atmospheric James Bama cover on the Bantam paperback edition, and the time travel aspect probably attracted me more than Carr’s name or his credentials as one of the greats of the Golden Age of Detection at the time. The plot sounded just enough like one of my favorite films (I’ll Never Forget You reviewed here on this blog by me) that I couldn’t resist.

   I’m grateful to both Bantam and Bama for that. Fire, Burn! opened the door to a lifetime of entertainment.

   The time and place is London in the years after the Second World War. That part is important because in those years London suffered some of the worst and most deadly fogs in modern history. The city was socked in for days, even weeks, by heavy yellow fogs that sent thousands to emergency rooms and no few number to their graves.

   It’s in one of those fogs that Superintendent John Cheviot of Scotland Yard grabs a taxi one bleak night and finds his life turned upside down as he finds himself emerging from the taxi into London of 1829 in the reign of George IV at the end of the Regency period.

   Cheviot, who is obsessed with history, especially of the early days of Scotland Yard, finds himself investigating a mystery, and attempting to use his modern skills while trying not to give himself away with his too ready knowledge of events that have yet to happen. In the meantime he finds himself romantically entangled with an attractive but trouble-prone young lady of somewhat screwball tendencies.

   I’ll grant that Fire, Burn! never really bothers to explain how or why Cheviot ends up in 1829 — other than wishful thinking — and the heroine may rub some readers the wrong way — though her type was common enough in the era the book is set in (Georgette Heyer’s clever heroines were probably rarer), but the mystery involves a typical Carr-ian bit of misdirection that takes advantage of a bit of history the reader may not know.

   Fire, Burn! is not the best of Carr’s historicals (that’s probably The Devil in Velvet), but it is an entertaining one, and for me, it holds pride of place as my introduction both to Carr and to historical mysteries in general.

   What Fire, Burn! has is an attractive hero, a clever mystery, and Carr’s painless immersion in the history and language of the period without a strain or an anachronism to mar the experience.

   And in all fairness, it isn’t as if time travel romances are ever particularly strong on exactly how the hero or heroine manages to make the transit of years. Dating back to George Du Maurier and Peter Ibbetson (1891) the time travel aspect seems most often to just happen. As late as Daphne Du Maurier’s House on the Strand the exact manner of how the hero gets back in time was still pretty questionable.

   Give Carr credit though. While you are reading Fire, Burn! you won’t think to ask the question of how Cheviot makes the transition, and if you think of it later, you can’t really blame Carr. He did his part. The willing suspension of disbelief is up to the reader.

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    It never seems to fail. I go away for two days, and it takes me two days to get myself pointed in the right direction again. Then this light cough that I’ve had for a couple of weeks sees its chance and attacks when I’m not looking, and turns itself into a full-fledged cold. Nothing more than a runny nose, itchy eyes, husky voice and that wonderful achy-all-over feeling. The usual over-the-counter stuff helps — it does exactly what it’s supposed to do — but so far it’s also letting me sleep 10 to 12 hours a day.

    So if you’ve emailed me recently and haven’t gotten a reply, that’s the reason. Right now I’m medicined up fairly well, so maybe I can get some things done tonight. Or maybe I’ll just go watch some DVDs or read a book or two. We’ll see.

    Among the incoming email messages that piled up while I was away included that contained a few more cover images to go with my James Pattinson post, along with a photo of the author, and a cover image that goes with a recent review of a book by James Anderson. These were supplied by British mystery specialist bookseller Jamie Sturgeon, who deserves a round of applause and has gotten one from me so far, but you can join in.

    If you’re interested in the do’s and don’ts of preserving pulp magazines as well as other paper collectibles, Walker Martin suggested that I give you the link to Laurie Powers’ Wild West Blog. He’s right. It’s an excellent piece, full of all kinds of good advice.

    And if you’re interested in traditional (or classic) mysteries, Les Blatt reminds me to tell you that his website is still running and he’d love to have you stop by. What he does, besides the usual postings is a weekly podcast for the books he reviews. Check him out at www.classicmysteries.net. The books he covers are well worth your while.

TOM ADAMS [Artist] – Agatha Christie: The Art of Her Crimes. The Paintings of Tom Adams, with a Commentary by Julian Symons. Everest House, hardcover, 1981.

    Paperback cover art reaches a new high with this deluxe hardcover edition of over ninety Tom Adams paintings, all done for various editions of Agatha Christie’s mysteries, both in this country and in Britain.

    Those expecting numerous repeated portrayals of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, two of Christie’s most well-known detective characters, will come away disappointed, however.

   Adams leans more to the symbolic and to surrealism in his work, and the commentary provided by both himself and by noted mystery critic Julian Symons reveals just how many clues he managed to work into the overall design of each of the covers here.

    Tastes in art being what they are, it is amusing to note that one of the paintings Adams considers one of his best, Symons slides over as nothing out of the ordinary.

    The subject matter of Christie’s works being what it is, it is not surprising that the overall effect is rather a dour one — lots of skulls, bloody instruments, and other paraphernalia of murder.

    Nevertheless, given the double-barreled insights into the works of perhaps the most famous mystery writer of all time, Agatha Christie’s many fans will find this more than a must for browsing.

DICK FRANCIS – Shattered (2000). Michael Joseph Ltd., UK, hardcover, 2000; Putnam, US, hc, 2000. Several reprint editions.

   I’ve had a hiatus in my reading of Dick Francis’s oeuvre, longer than the one he took after this book. (His next book, Under Orders, didn’t appear until 2006.)

   The narrator, Gerard Logan, has a small but select business blowing glass, small pieces that sell to tourists in his Broadway (that’s the Cotswold village, not the New York theatre — or should that be theatre-district) shop, and larger pieces that sell as high priced art.

   Logan is best friends with a jump jockey who dies in a racing accident but has asked someone to pass a video tape to Logan for safe keeping. The video tape, which goes missing, is the McGuffin sought by a group of crooks who assault Logan in trying to locate it. Logan has to find the tape and identify the thugs and in typical Francis-hero fashion does so by putting his own body on the line.

   I’ve enjoyed Francis over the years but this was one of the least enjoyable books. I like to like my heroes — a weakness, I know — but Logan came over to me as arrogant, and plot was straight from a join-the-dots puzzle.

   Read this if you’re a Francis completist, but if you haven’t read him, seek out his earlier books like Blood Sport or Enquiry. Of course I won’t be able to resist Under Orders and the following three (the third was published in September) written with his son.

   (Department of coincidences: In the final scene of the book Logan goes to the apartment of the policewoman girl-friend he has acquired during the course of the book. There he finds the place stocked with memorabilia from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.)