DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Maltese Falcon. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1929. Serialized in Black Mask magazine, September 1929 through January 1930. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft, including Pocket #268, July 1944; 8th printing, October 1945, with dust jacket (both shown). Film: Warner Bros., 1931; also released as Dangerous Female. Also: Warner Bros., 1936, as Satan Met a Lady. Also: Warner Bros., 1941.

   The Maltese Falcon is the prototype hard-boiled private-eye novel, the finest ever written. It is also the most famous of all American detective stories, thanks in no small part to John Huston’s definitive 1941 screen version.

   Huston remained remarkably faithful to the novel, using most of Hammett’s original dialogue; and his casting was superb: Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade; Mary Astor as Brigid 0’Shaughnessy; Sydney Greenstreet as Caspar Gutman; Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo; and Elisha Cook, Jr., as the little gunsel, Wilmer.

   (An interesting footnote is that Wamer Brothers originally wanted either Edward G. Robinson or George Raft for the lead role; it was only after both of those actors turned it down that Bogart — Huston’s choice from the first — was selected. The thought of either Robinson or Raft, fine actors though they were, portraying Spade is mind-boggling.)

   Sam Spade is likewise the quintessential tough detective. Other writers have altered his image, refined it; but the fact remains that without Spade, there would have been no Philip Marlowe, no Lew Archer, no uniquely American subgenre of detective fiction that has so captured the imaginations of millions that it has been elevated to the status of myth.

   Spade himself is a mythical figure, of course, owing in part to the fact that he is both enigmatic and misunderstood. Otherwise a Hammett admirer, Somerset Maugham called Spade “a nasty bit of goods … an unscrupulous rogue and heartless crook,” and said that “there is little to choose between him and the criminals he is dealing with.”

   Maugham missed the point completely. Spade is indeed a nasty bit of goods, an unscrupulous rogue and heartless crook — on the surface. That is his public persona, one he wears like a suit of old clothes or the gun he sometimes needs to carry.

   As he says to Brigid at the end of both novel and film, words identical in both: “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be. That kind of reputation might be good business — bringing in high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy.”

   Spade is hardly a saint; but in his own way, and despite his affair with his partner’s wife, about which much has been made, he is an exceedingly moral man.

   Similarly, don’t be too sure The Maltese Falcon is everything it seems to be on the surface. It is hard-boiled, yes. Uncompromising, yes. Grim and brutal and even nasty in places, yes. But in its own way, it, too, is exceedingly moral.

   The plot of Falcon is familiar to nearly every detective story fan and film buff. Briefly, Spade is visited by a woman calling herself Miss Wonderly; she tells him her sister ran away from New York with a man named Floyd Thursby, that the three have a date that night, and that she wants Spade to rescue the sister.

   Enter Miles Archer, Spade’s partner, who says he’ll attend to the job himself. Which he does, but not very well: He gets himself shot to death in a back alley. Also shot that foggy San Francisco night is Floyd Thursby, in front of his hotel.

   Spade tracks down Miss Wonderly (in reality Brigid O’Shaughnessy); she tells him a different story and begs for his help, and he agrees.

   Enter Joel Cairo, who puts a gun on Spade in Spade’s office and first mentions “the black figure of a bird.”

   Enter Caspar Gutman, who eventually explains that the figure is “a glorious golden falcon encrusted from head to foot with the finest jewels,” a gift to Emperor Charles V from the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, crusaders who persuaded the emperor to give them the islands of Malta, Gozo, and Tripoli in 1530.

   While en route to Spain, the falcon was stolen by the pirate Barbarossa, and over the centuries it passed through various private hands, two of those hands being Gutman’ s — almost.

   He has spent seventeen years tracking down the black bird, almost got it in Paris, almost got it in Constantinople: wants it desperately. So do Joel Cairo and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, both of whom were confederates of Gutman’s at one time and both of whom have tried to double-cross him to get it for themselves.

   Another murder and more double-dealing lead to a grand finale in Spade’s flat with all the principals present — including the falcon, which has just arrived via the ship La Paloma from Hong Kong. Or has it? The confrontation between Spade and the murderer of Miles Archer remains one of the most powerful in all of crime fiction.

   The Maltese Falcon is hardly a perfect novel; such is a rara avis indeed, almost as rare as the Maltese falcon itself. Spade’s affair with Iva Archer is never satisfactorily resolved. The character of Rhea Gutman, Gutman’s daughter, seems superfluous. (John Houston thought so, too: He excised her completely from his screen version.)

   Bits and pieces don’t quite hang together or are fused by melodrama. But this is nitpicking, really. In all ways that matter, it is truly a classic work, summed up brilliantly by Houston in the last line of the film, when he had Bogart/Spade say that the Maltese falcon is “the stuff that dreams are made of.”

         ———
   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.

DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Glass Key. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1931. Serialized in Black Mask magazine: “The Glass Key” (March 1930). “The Cyclone Shot” (April 1930), “Dagger Point” (May 1930), “The Shattered Key” (June 1930). Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback, including Pocket #211, pb, 1943 ; Dell 2915, pb, 1966. Film: Paramount, 1935, with George Raft. Also: Paramount, 1942, with Alan Ladd, Brian Donlevy, Veronica Lake.

   Hammett’s fourth novel is set in a nameless city modeled on Baltimore, where he grew up. Like Personville in Red Harvest, the city is controlled by crooked politicians in league with various mobster factions; but in The Glass Key Hammett gives us an insider’s view of the corruption and in fact creates a corrupt political henchman as his protagonist.

   Ned Beaumont — tall, thin, a dandy and a compulsive gambler and tuberculosis victim like Hammett himself — is the best friend and most trusted adviser of Paul Madvig, the lower-class ethnic who controls the city.

   Against Beaumont’s advice, Madvig has made a deal for mutual political support with upper-crust Senator Henry, hoping that the payoff for him will include Henry’s lovely daughter, Janet, with whom he’s infatuated.

   Then Senator Henry’s son is murdered in circumstances that implicate Madvig. As Madvig’s enemies plot to speed the politically wounded leader’s fall from power, Beaumont sets out to clear his friend and patron, limit the damage to his machine, and keep the other side’s crooked candidates from defeating Madvig’s crooked candidates in the upcoming election.

   In the process he endures perhaps the most savage beating in crime fiction, and the equally painful experience of becoming involved himself with Janet Henry, his best friend’s woman.

   The Glass Key is one of Hammett’ s most powerful novels but also one of crime literature’s most frustrating classics. Its third-person narrative voice, like that of The Maltese Falcon, is so objectively realistic and passionlessly impersonal that it seems to draw an impenetrable shield between characters and reader.

   As a result, generations of critics have debated all sorts of factual questions that writers less bold than Hammett would have answered unequivocally.

   Did Ned really intend to sell Madvig out to his rival Shad O’Rory, or is he playing double agent?

   For what earthly reasons did he permit Jeff, O’Rory’ s unforgettable moronic bone-crusher, to beat him almost to death? Is he really in love with Janet Henry or does he have a suppressed homosexual desire for Madvig?

   Reading the novel again and again only fuels these controversies, for Hammett refuses on principle to enter into any of his characters’ thoughts and feelings, and forces us to judge from what they say and do — from inherently misleading and uncertain data. No wonder there’s no consensus about The Glass Key!

   Hammett himself, and such experts as Julian Symons and Frederic Dannay (Ellery Queen), thought it was his best novel; a number of academic literary critics rank it as his worst.

   Hammett’s vision was one of the darkest in the history of crime fiction. He saw the world as an incomprehensible place in which no one can ever really know another, and created the world of The Glass Key to match.

   Whatever the ultimate verdict on its literary status, it’s a compulsively readable, coolly sardonic portrait of an unredeemable nightworld and ambiguous relationships, and stands beside The Maltese Falcon as one of the earliest classics of noir crime fiction.

         ———
   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.

JOHN CREASEY – A Rocket for the Toff. Pyramid R-1085, paperback original; 1st US printing, October 1964. UK editions: Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 1960; Hodder 563, paperback, 1963.

   John Creasey simply wrote too many books for me to claim to be an expert on all of them, including the reprints, both in England and the US. So when the cover of the Pyramid edition of A Rocket for the Toff claims that it”s the first of Creasey’s Toff adventures to be published over here in this country, I haven’t checked it out positively, but I’ve done enough so far that I’m inclined to believe it.

   And to that end, there is a two page introduction by John Creasey in which he explains who The Toff is (Richard Rollinson) and what a toff is (“a man who is stylishly dressed, or who has a smart appearance […] a gent, in fact”).

   I don’t remember where I bought my copy of this book, except that I had just started grad school, so it would have been Ann Arbor, but which of several sales outlets, including drug stores — all of which I remember rather vividly — I cannot say for sure, but what I am sure of is that I appreciated the introduction, as otherwise how would I have known what a toff was?

   But buy the book I did, and now I can say that I have read it. (Whether or not I read this one at the time, I cannot say, but Pyramid published several of these Toff adventures within a period of a few months, and read some of them, I did.)

   This one starts out in fine fashion, full of action, furor and mystery from page one onward, as a young girl hoping to meet her fiance at the London airport, after two years’ absence in the US, is sadly disappointed when he does not arrive. Even more, she’s involved in a serious accident involving a man, his sister, and their dog that results in her being knocked to the ground and knocked out.

   To her rescue comes Dr. Mike Kennedy, who believes her story when the police are polite but somewhat skeptical. He (the doctor) is also somewhat taken by her and personally takes her home. He is also a good friend of the Toff, whom the next day he calls in on the matter.

   And it is a good thing, too, as Kate Lowson — that’s her name — and her apartment, is the subject of several break-in’s and attacks, but for what reason she does not know.

   And as long as the spotlight is on Kate and Dr. Kennedy, the action is focused and direct. But once the basis of the affair is revealed — the “rocket” of the title is nothing more than a new secret brand of automobile with amazing (almost science-fictional) abilities — it seems as though all of the mystery is gone, and the reader-s interest with it. (Speaking for myself, that is.)

   It remains to the Toff and his friend Superintendent Grice of Scotland Yard to clean up from here, but also from this point on, the story no longer seems personal, having lost (in my opinion) all of its immediacy. Lots of derring-do, which as always keeps the pages turning, but all in all, it’s all fairly lackluster, I’m sorry to say.

BORIS AKUNIN – Murder on the Leviathan. Random House, hardcover, April 2004; trade paperback, February 2005. Translated by Andrew Bromfield.

    One of the unexpected benefits of the fall of the former Soviet Union was the career of Russian mystery writer Boris Akunin, with his novels about Erast Fandorin now available in the west.

    Akunin is Grigori Chkhartichvili, a philologist, critic, essayist, and Japanese translator, who took advantage of the new freedom in Russia to create a popular series about 19th Century sleuth Erast Fandorin, a special agent of the Russian Police whose adventures take him from his youth to middle age and from Moscow to exotic adventures around the globe.

    Attractive, smart, and devastating to women, Fandorin is a human and likable hero who combines elements of James Bond, the original Nick Carter, The Wild West, and Ellery Queen in his bright clever adventures.

    The books veer from wild adventure to more or less straight detection, from con men to serial killers, and find Fandorin at various stages in his illustrious career, often caught between clever villains, dangerous beautiful women, and his own devious superiors.

    It’s no surprise Ruth Rendell has called Akunin the Russian Ian Fleming.

    In Murder of the Leviathan Akunin takes a note from Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming. When Lord Littleby and his family are found murdered in their mansion on the Rue de Grenelle in Paris in 1878, the legendary French sleuth “Papa” Gauche finds his only clue to the crime is a key in the shape of a golden whale, a ticket on the luxury steamship the Leviathan leaving Southampton on its maiden voyage to Calcutta.

    Arriving at Southampton and boarding the Leviathan, Papa Gauche finds himself joined by Erast Fandorin, a handsome callow Russian sleuth with a shock of white hair. It’s a reluctant teaming on Gauche’s part, though he admits Fandorin might be useful. He might be even more reluctant if he knew Fandorn was a walking arsenal of hidden weapons, and something of a genius at crime solving.

    Fandorin is a contrast to Papa Gauche, who lives up to his name:

    But the two form a working relationship, and Gauche soon comes to respect Fandorin’s wisdom and intelligence.

    There are ten un-ticketed passengers on the Leviathan, and one of them is the killer: the Japanese doctor, the professor who deals in rare Indian artifacts, a pregnant Swiss woman, a wealthy Englishman who collects Asian antiquities, being among them. And then in true Christie style the passengers on the Leviathan begin to die at the hand of the desperate killer.

    These books feature grand villains, femme fatales, desperate espionage, and action enough for a dozen books. The Fandorin tales are great fun, playful and intelligent, as Alan Furst said, as if Tolstoy had set out to write a murder mystery. Fandorin is a cross between Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, d’Artagnan, and a Dostoevsky hero, brilliant, swashbuckling, and romantically melancholy.

    I’m not sure anyone in the west is writing anything like Akunin’s Fandorin novels, but thankfully we have them, and so far of the eleven books in the series, at least eight have been translated, with five published so far in the US. Akunin has also written a trilogy about Sister Pelagia, all of which are now available in English.

    Get acquainted with him. His books are literate, playful, and page turning reads. You will find nothing quite like him and no one quite like Erast Fandorin in Western literature — more’s the pity.

    It’s not often you find a writer or a hero who can honestly be said to mix elements of dime novels, Ian Fleming, Dostoyevsky, Dumas, and Ellery Queen, but Akunin and Fandorin manage the feat. There is nothing else quite like them on the shelves.

       The Erast Fandorin series. [Note that so far only the first five have been published in the US.]

1. The Winter Queen (2003)
2. The Turkish Gambit (2004)

3. Murder on the Leviathan (2004)
4. The Death of Achilles (2005)
5. Special Assignments (2007)

6. The State Counsellor (2008)
7. The Coronation (2009)
8. The Lover of Death (2009)

       The Sister Pelagia series

1. Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog (2006)

2. Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk (2007)
3. Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (2008)

COUNT THREE AND PRAY. Columbia, 1955. Van Heflin, Joanne Woodward, Phil Carey, Raymond Burr, Allison Hayes, Myron Healey, Nancy Kulp, Jean Willes. Screenwriter: Herb Meadows. Director: George Sherman.

   In all likelihood, this is Joanne Woodward’s least known motion picture. I may be wrong about that, but it is for a fact her first.

   Before doing Count Three and Pray, she’d been on Broadway and she’d been on television, doing episodes of highly regarded series such as The United States Steel Hour, Alcoa Playhouse and Studio One.

   It was on Broadway that she first met a fellow actor named Paul Newman; both were understudies for a run of “Picnic,” where they got along well, or so I’ve read.

   I’ve categorized this movie as a western, but I’m not sure that it is, exactly, even though director George Sherman had directed tons of westerns, starting as far back as 1937. It does take place in the post-War South, that’s definite, but how far west Van Heflin’s rural home town is, the one he returns to, I’m not sure.

   Van Heflin plays Luke Fargo, a veteran of the war and a man with a new goal in life. It seems that he fought for the North, a choice his former neighbors do not take kindly to when he returns. Before he left, he was also something of a hell-raiser. Now his only desire is to become the town’s preacher.

   But the church has been destroyed, and the parsonage next door in bad shape and has been taken over and is lived in by a young orphan girl named Lissy (Miss Woodward), a true tomboy who wants nothing to do with Luke Fargo. As if she has any choice.

   Running the town is a storekeeper named Yancey Huggins (Raymond Burr, in fine villainous form). Allison Hayes (later to become the “50 Foot Woman”) plays the daughter of one of the town’s former aristocrats, and you know how old Southern aristocrats fared after the War. Many of them had to make their lives over, in any way they could.

   (It should be noted that the female star with Van Heflin in the still from the movie is Allison Hayes. It’s been difficult to find any contemporaneous publicity material which includes Joanne Woodward, which illustrates, I believe, how totally unknown she was to moviegoers at the time.)

   As for Van Heflin, he plays weary and perhaps sorely misguided but determined very well, but Joanne Woodward is even better, as she brings an entirely unexpected light to his life – and to this movie as well.

   Even this early in her career her Broadway training is very noticeable. She moves around the set with polished ease, makes it clear what she’s thinking without saying a word, and when she does speak she does so clearly and projects to the last seat in the balcony – and in the meantime, she is a ray of sunshine whenever she is on the screen. It is extremely clear that she would not be doing many more westerns in her movie-making career.

   Two years later, she won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for The Three Faces of Eve (1957).

DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Dain Curse. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1928. Originally published as the following stories from Black Mask magazine: “Black Lives” (November 1928), “The Hollow Temple” (December 1928), “Black Honeymoon” (January 1929), “Black Riddle” (February 1929).   Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and paperback, including Permabook M-4198, 1961 (shown). TV movie [4-episode mini-series]: 1978; with James Coburn as “Hamilton Nash”.

   The Dain Curse is one of two novel-length works featuring the Continental Op. It was originally written for Black Mask as four separate novelettes; taken together, the four interconnected “cases” comprise a kind of criminous family saga in which Hammett all but decimates the “Black Dains” of San Francisco.

   The novel begins with the Op, who has been hired by an insurance company to look into a diamond robbery at the home of Edgar Leggett (real name Dain), finding one of the missing stones:

   Just a few of the more than thirty characters he subsequently encounters: Leggett/Dain, a scientist working at home on a process for coloring diamonds; his daughter, Gabrielle, who feels she has bad blood and is cursed and whose drug addiction is a focal point of the story line; the family’s mulatto maid, Minnie Hershey; Gabrielle’s doctor, Riese; her fiance, Eric Collinson (a puckish Hammett tribute to the pseudonym under which his first Black Mask stories were published); Joseph Haldorn and his wife, Aaronia, who run a religious cult called the Temple of the Holy Grail; writer Owen Fitzstephan; and a couple of other private detectives investigating Leggett/Dain’s shady past.

   The plot has numerous twists and turns, multiple climaxes, and plenty of atmospheric elements (the scenes enacted at the Temple of the Holy Grail, for instance).

   On the whole, however, it is overlong and decidedly melodramatic. As critic John Bartlow Martin wrote in Harper’s Magazine:

    “In this single Hammett novel the detective shot and stabbed one man to death, helped shoot another dead, was himself attacked with dagger, gun, chloroform and bomb, fought off a ghostly manifestation barehanded, wrestled with five women, cured a girl of narcotic addiction — and … was obliged to deal with one seduction, eight murders, a jewel burglary, and a family curse.”

   The Dain Curse is more cleanly plotted and credible than the first Op novel, Red Harvest (1927), in which more than thirty people die, including no fewer than a dozen of the main characters. But its flaws prove that it is the novelette, not the novel, to which the Continental Op was best suited and in which his finest cases are chronicled.

         ———
   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.

CAROLYN WELLS – The Gold Bag. Lippincott, US/UK, hardcover, 1911. Silent film: Edison, 1913, as The Mystery of West Sedgwick. Online text: here.

   The prolific American writer Carolyn Wells was mocked by Bill Pronzini in his entertaining book on “alternative” mystery classics (books so bad they’re good), Gun in Cheek, for having written an instructive tome on the craft of mystery fiction, The Technique of the Mystery Story (1913), and then seemingly failed to follow her good advice when composing her own mystery tales.

   Wells’ second detective novel, The Gold Bag — which actually precedes The Technique of the Mystery Story by two years — illustrates Pronzini’s thesis. It might well have been titled The Leavenworth Case for Dummies.

   Carolyn Wells was first drawn to reading mystery fiction in her mid-thirties when a neighbor lady came calling on Wells and her mother and read to them some of Anna Katharine Green’s latest detective novel, That Affair Next Door (1897) (Wells, by the way, suffered hearing loss as a child and wore a hearing aid throughout her life.)

   Green had published a hugely popular mystery novel, The Leavenworth Case (1878) nearly twenty years earlier, and had settled into a comfortable career as a prolific crime writer.

   Though I personally find it unreadable due to the stilted, melodramatic speech-making of its characters (particularly the two nieces), The Leavenworth Case is considered a seminal work of mystery fiction and is still taught today. Moreover, it does have a solid plot and is fascinating for being an early instance of so many Golden Age mystery tropes: the millionaire murdered in his mansion study/library, the retinue of suspicious servants, the beautiful niece (in this case two), the private secretary, the will.

   Wells clearly was familiar with The Leavenworth Case, because The Gold Bag, her follow-up to her debut detective novel, The Clue (1909), obviously is modeled on Green’s famous tale.

   In The Gold Bag there is a Watsonesque narrator figure, as there is The Leavenworth Case (in this case Burroughs, apparently a private detective — Wells is never clear on realistic detail like this). As in Leavenworth, this figure is called in to be involved in a murder investigation, this one in a wealthy town in New Jersey (probably, one suspects, quite like Wells’ own home town).

   The case involves a millionaire murdered in his study, a retinue of suspicious servants, a beautiful niece, a private secretary and a will. (Sound familiar?) As in Leavenworth, a great deal of time is spent on the coroner’s inquest. As in Leavenworth, the Watsonesque figure becomes enamored with the beautiful niece suspected of the crime. Will true love prevail? What do you think?

   Following Leavenworth by over thirty years, The Gold Bag is written in a sprightlier style and reads much more quickly. Where it falters is in providing an adequate puzzle. Wells’ putative Great Detective, Fleming Stone, appears briefly at the beginning of a 325 page novel, then returns in the last twenty pages to solve this case.

   If this suggests to you problems with the solution, you are right. Most of the novel is devoted to Burroughs’ investigating various trails (including the trail of the gold bag of the title), all leading to different suspects, and all proving false. During virtually the whole novel, Burroughs, when not pining for the niece, is lamenting how the great Fleming Stone is not around to solve the case for him, until you just want to thrash him.

   When Stone does show up he eliminates one suspect on the basis of deductions he had made some days ago about some shoes left out to be cleaned at a hotel, shoes that just happen to turn out to have been the shoes of this suspect!

    “It is very astonishing that you should make those deductions from those shoes, and then come out here and meet the owner of those shoes,” pronounces another character. I’ll say!

   Then Stone pulls the murderer, the only person left not suspected at some point in the novel, out of his hat, and the fool hysterically confesses his/her guilt and commits suicide with one of those convenient poison pellets Golden Age murderers always seem to have handy when the Great Detective points the Dread Accusing Finger at them.

   This leaves one page for the author to pair off Young Love, and all ends happily ever after (except for the murderer, but readers will barely remember him even one page after his exit).

   So, with disappointing detection, no clever murder mechanics, cardboard characters and no interesting descriptive writing, there is not much to recommend this one, except from a sociological standpoint.

   It’s not really bad enough, either, to qualify as one of Pronzini’s alternative classics. Notably lacking here is the rather silly humor and situations found in many of Wells’ later detective novels.

   There is still an air of unreality about the whole enterprise, however. The murdered man was a businessman of some sort, but we never learn anything about his business. A police investigator is briefly mentioned, but he does nothing. Indeed, it seems to be the view in the The Gold Bag that coroners and district attorneys rely exclusively on private investigators to conduct murder cases for them, without any involvement from the police.

   One is left with the impression that Wells had a rather limited acquaintance with what might be termed “real life.” Granted, Golden Age novels often did not stress realism, but Wells’ novels seem to me too far removed from any semblance of it.

   If they were clever Michael Innes-ian parodies of the form that would be one thing, but they don’t seem to be that either. So far they just seem to me mildly silly.

   But, given their apparent popularity, they do show that there was a mystery fiction audience in the United States over the period Wells published mystery novels (1909-1942) that must have been far, far removed in taste from the celebrated hardboiled style.

  Note:   Curt hasreviewed another book by Carolyn Wells on this blog, Feathers Left Around, from 1923.

LUIZ ALFREDO GARCIA-ROZA – The Silence of the Rain.

Picador, trade paperback; 1st printing, July 2003. Hardcover edition: Henry Holt and Co., July 2002.

   This moody sort of detective novel was first published in Brazil and translated from the Portuguese, and I recommend it to you. It starts out in a mildly light-hearted fashion, as a mixup over a wealthy executive’s suicide in a parking garage — someone went off with the gun and the suicide note — leads Inspector Espinosa of Rio de Janeiro’s First Precinct into handling the case as though it were a murder.

   (Not unlike Columbo of TV fame here in this country, we are privy to certain events that Espinosa is not, and even by the end of the case he is still running through endless speculations as to what actually happened.)

   The mood becomes gradually edgier, though, until page 121, which is where the reader is forcibly confronted with the realization that this is no cozy, if not before. Reading mysteries taking place in other countries also makes you realize that the rules are often totally different. Here’s a quote from page 161:

   And from page 238:

   Espinosa is, the dead man’s widow decides, a rare bird, a cultivated policeman. He is attracted to her. She is so wealthy she does not seem to notice. Espinosa is a reader of Dickens and Thomas De Quincey, is afflicted by loneliness and self-doubts, and he is also better than decent as a reader of character.

   Besides an almost other-worldly atmosphere and surroundings, there are enough twists and turns of the plot to keep any detective story buff more than satisfied, even with the aforementioned Colombo-like prologue, with an ending I know I’ve never read before — I couldn’t possibly have forgotten a scene like this, and you won’t either.

   And yes, the telling of tale does switch back and forth between first person and third. Just in case you were wondering.

        The Inspector Espinosa series —

1. The Silence of the Rain (Holt, hc, 2002; Picador, trade pb, 2003)
2. December Heat (Holt, hc, 2003; Picador, trade pb, 2004)
3. Southwesterly Wind (Holt, hc, 2004; Picador, trade pb, 2004)

4. A Window in Copacabana (Holt, hc, 2005; Picador, trade pb, 2006)
5. Pursuit (Holt, hc, 2006)

6. Blackout (Holt, hc, 2008; Picador, trade pb, 2009)
7. Alone in the Crowd (Holt, hc, 2009)

[UPDATE] 09-17-09. My local Borders store stopped carrying these after the first three or four. I hadn’t realized there were more in the series until now. I’ve also searched thoroughly, and there doesn’t seem to have been a softcover edition for #5 — why that should be, I certainly can’t tell you.

    More authors’ entries from Part 34 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. Most of these authors’ names are unfamiliar now, but if you take the time to read through their biographies, brief as they are, you’ll see how well known they were in their day.

BRITTON, KENNETH PHILLIPS. Poet, playwright, writer. Co-author (with Roy Hargrave, 1908- , q.v.) of one mystery play included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV.

HAPGOOD, HUTCHINS. 1869-1944. Born in Chicago. Add: educated at the University of Michigan, at Harvard, and in Berlin and Strasburg. Later a journalist and drama critic for the Chicago Evening Post; noted most as a social critic and an anarchist. Author of one novel included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. See below:

      The Autobiography of a Thief. Duffield & Co., US, hc, 1903; Putnam, UK, 1904. Add setting: New York City. From an online New York Times review: “… a graphic and picturesque account of life in the under world.” [Text online.]

HARDING, JOHN WILLIAM. 1864-? Add biographical information: Born in London, England; educated there and in Paris. Later on editorial staff of New York Times; short story writer and playwright. Author of one novel included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. Note that his full middle name was used on this title:

      A Conjurer of Phantoms. F. Tennyson Neely, US, hc, 1898. [An “elusive supernatural novel,” says one ABE bookseller.]

HARDY, ARTHUR SHERBURNE. 1847-1930. Add biographical information: Born in Andover, Massachusetts and educated in Boston, Switzerland and at West Point; Professor of Civil Engineering, Los Angeles College, and of mathematics at Dartmouth College, 1884-1893. Editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, 1893-95. Consul-General to Persia, 1897-1899; U.S. Minister to Greece, Romania and Serbia, 1899-1901, to Switzerland, 1901-1903, and to Spain, 1903-1905. Among other writings, the author of one detective novel and one story collection included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. Series character: Inspector Joly, who appears in the novel and six of the eleven short stories.

      Diane and Her Friends. Houghton Mifflin, US, hc, 1914, hc. Story collection. Queen’s Quorum title.

      No. 13, Rue du Bon Diable. Houghton Mifflin, US, hc, 1917.

HARGRAVE, ROY. 1908- . Add year of birth & biographical information: born in New York; actor, director and author. Co-author (with Kenneth Phillips Britton, q.v.) of one play included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV.

      Houseparty. French, US, pb, 1930. [3-act play.] Add setting: Massachusetts; Academia (Williams College).

HARRADEN, BEATRICE. 1864-1935. Add biographical information: Born in Hampstead, London; member of several societies for social reform and women’s rights. Author of two novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. This is now the author’s complete entry:

      Out of the Wreck I Rise. T. Nelson & Sons, UK, hc, 1912. Add US edition: Stokes, US, 1912; also add setting: England. Note: The title is a quote from Robert Browning. [Text online.]

      Search Will Find It Out. Mills & Boon, UK, hc, 1928. Setting: England. Note: The title is a quote from Robert Herrick.

HARRISON, EDITH OGDEN. 1862-1955. Add year of birth and biographical information: Born Edith Ogden in New Orleans; in 1887 married Carter Henry Harrison, who served at least five terms as mayor of Chicago. Noted author of juvenile fiction, travel books and autobiographical works, plays and novels; contributor to Chicago Daily News. Author of two tales of the Royal Canadian Mounties listed in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. This is now the author’s complete entry:

      The Lady of the Snows. McClurg, US, hc, 1912. Setting: Canada. Illustrations by J. Allen St. John. Add film: 1915; see synopsis here. [Text online.]

      The Scarlet Riders. Chicago, IL: Seymour, US, hc, 1930. Setting: Saskatchewan, Canada. “Western adventure novel of train robbery and banditry.”

DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Big Knockover. Edited and with an Introduction by Lillian Hellman. Random House, 1966. Paperback reprint: Dell, 1967, in two volumes: The Big Knockover and The Continental Op: More Stories from The Big Knockover. Also: Vintage V829, 1972.

   Samuel Dashiell Hammett was the father of the American “hard-boiled” or realistic school of crime fiction.

   As Raymond Chandler says in his famous essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” Hammett “wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.”

   Hammett’s first published short story, “The Road Home,” appeared in the December 1922 issue of the pioneering pulp magazine Black Mask under the pseudonym Peter Collinson. The first “Continental Op” story was “Arson Plus,” also published as by Collinson, in the October 1, 1923, issue; the October 15 number contained “Crooked Souls,” another Op novelette and Hammett’s first appearance in the magazine under his own name. (“Arson Plus” was not the first fully realized hard-boiled private-eye story; that distinction belongs to “Knights of the Open Palm,” by Carroll John Daly, which predated the Op’s debut by four months, appearing in the June 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask.)

   Two dozen Op stories followed over the ensuing eight years; the series ended with “Death and Company” in the November 1930 issue.

   The Op — fat, fortyish, and the Continental Detective Agency’s toughest and shrewdest investigator — was based on a man named James Wright, assistant superintendent of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Baltimore, for whom Hammett had worked. And his methods, if not his cases, are based on real private-investigative procedures of the period.

   It was in these Op stories that Hammett honed his realistic style and plotting techniques, both of which would reach their zenith in The Maltese Falcon (1929).

   The Big Knockover contains thirteen of the best Op stories, among them such hard-boiled classics as “The Gutting of Couffignal,” about an attempted hoodlum takeover of an island in San Francisco Bay, during which corpses pile up in alarming numbers and a terrific atmosphere of menace and suspense is maintained throughout; “Dead Yellow Women,” which has a San Francisco Chinatown setting and colorfully if unfortunately perpetuates the myth that a rabbit warren of secret passageways exists beneath the streets of that district; “Fly Paper,” in which the Op undertakes “a wandering daughter job,” with startling results; “Corkscrew,” a case that takes the Op to the Arizona desert in an expert blend of the detective story and the western; and “$106,000 Blood Money,” a novella in which the Op sets out to find the gang that robbed the Seaman’s National Bank of several million dollars, and does battle with perhaps his most ruthless antagonist.

   Lillian Hellman’s introduction provides some interesting but manipulated and self-serving material on Hammett and his work.

   This is a cornerstone book for any library of American detective fiction, and an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the origins of the hard-boiled crime story.

   The Continental Op appears in several other collections, most of which were edited by Ellery Queen and published first in digest-size paperbacks by Jonathan Press and then in standard paperbacks by Dell; among these are The Continental Op (1945), The Return of the Continental Op (1945), Hammett Homicides (1946), Dead Yellow Women (1947), Nightmare Town (1948), The Creeping Siamese (1950), and Woman in the Dark (1951).

   The most recent volume of Op stories, The Continental Op, a companion volume to The Big Knockover but edited and introduced by Stephen Marcus instead of Hellman, appeared in 1974.

         ———
   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.

Editorial Comment:  Coming over the four days, spread out at a rate of one a day, will be reviews by Bill Pronzini and Mike Nevins of The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man, all taken from 1001 Midnights.