BEN BENSON – Beware the Pale Horse. Captain Wade Paris #2. Mill, hardcover, 1951. Unicorn Mystery Book Club, hardcover, 4-in-1 edition. Bantam #1070, paperback, 1953. Wildside Press, softcover, 2018.

   Competent, well clued and thought out police procedural starring State Detective Wade Paris. Paris’s difficulties stem not only from trying to find out who killed both a police colleague and oriental art collector, Charles Endicott, but also from the political pressures that are put upon him to wrap things up quickly and successfully.

   This political angle is brought in most convincingly and the investigation itself is logical and systematic. The clues are spread with care and cunning and the main one I should have spotted deceived me

   Short on humour but otherwise I can find nothing to complain of in this very professional job. A pity (from my point of view) as it’s the first I’ve read of half a dozen Benson’s I own, and I was looking for an excuse to make a small reduction in the overcrowding on my shelves. Now I’ll be looking for even more Bensons!

DAVID McDANIEL – The Man from U.N.C.L.E. #13: The Rainbow Affair. Ace G-670, paperback original, 1967.

   Some books are great. They are works of art, original, inventive, they speak to the reader as both entertainment and art. Some are tragic, some comic, some make you think, some make you shiver.

   And once in a while, maybe most of the time, a book is just a workhorse, a perfectly predictable escape from the world for an hour or so. Most movie and television tie-ins and novelizations fall into that perfectly respectable category.

   Created by Sam Rolfe and Ian Fleming over drinks in a New York hotel room, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. television series ran four seasons from 1964 to 1968. It starred Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo (name taken from a minor villain in Fleming’s Goldfinger) and David McCallum as Russian Ilya Kuryakin, both working under donnish Alexander Waverly (Leo G, Carroll post Topper) for an international crime fighting group with secret headquarters in New York entered through Del Floria’s tailor shop, the United Network Command for Law Enforcement.

   And if you happened to substitute the word Nations for Network in your head it wouldn’t terribly upset Fleming, Rolfe, or producer Norman Fell however much they might deny it.

   The two agents were most often pitted against THRUSH (which doesn’t seem to stand for anything) a conspiracy of spies, saboteurs, assassins, and monomaniacs all at each other’s throats and weekly scheming to behave horridly. Think Fleming’s S.P.E.C.T.R.E. without the founding genius of Ernst Stavro Blofied or a slightly more competent CHAOS.

   Most episodes followed the format of an ordinary citizen being recruited by Waverly to assist Solo and Kuryakin in foiling THRUSH, meaning at least two name guest stars in every episode, and when the series hit that meant some fairly recognizable faces and names passed through each week on NBC, including William Shatner (in an episode with Leonard Nimoy as a bad guy), Robert Culp, George Sanders, Victor Borge, Jack Palance, Joan Collins, and many others.

   For a while stars vied to appear on the series as they would on Batman a season or so later. A few episodes of the series were even fixed up and released as theatrical movies.

   The first season was in black and white, and by far the truest to the original idea, the next three seasons were in color and grew increasingly playful though the final season did try to reverse the trend.

   Designed to cash in on the James Bond craze and with a nod to Doc Savage (which started reprints that same year) from the pulps, the series created a craze of its own, with more merchandise than even the most devoted fan could collect without a warehouse, and a brief golden age of Television spy series that reached its high point with Sheldon Leonard’s I Spy (also on NBC) and Mission Impossible over on CBS, not to forget Get Smart.

   Magazines, coloring books, lunch boxes, toy guns, play sets, your own U.N.C.L.E. brief case,comic books, a spin off series The Girl From … with Stephanie Powers as April Dancer (her name another Fleming contribution) and Noel Harrison as Mark Slade, replete with its own magazine, books, comics etc.  There was also a two year run of a digest with a monthly novel written by Robert Hart Davis who was mostly Dennis Lynds, but sometimes John Jakes and Bill Pronzini, and twenty three original tie-in novels from Ace Books by the like of Michael Avallone, Harry Whittington, and others followed.

   Among those Ace books, with due deference to everyone who wrote them, there is little doubt that the best of the series (certainly the most, seven of the twenty three and an unpublished twenty fourth meant to close out the book and television series) were penned by David McDaniel, who came as close as any writer can to capturing the unique quality of a different media. As Carl Barks was the Good Duck Artist on Dell Comics Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge titles, McDaniel was the good U.N.C.L.E. writer, or at least the better one.

   Even for McDaniel though The Rainbow Affair, number thirteen in the series, is something special.

   After a brief nod to McDaniel’s original contribution to the series, charming THRUSH operative William Baldwin, the only continuing villain in the books, we get down to brass tacks with Solo and Kuryakin none to happy that rather than international intrigue they are being sent to England to deal with a crook called Johnnie Rainbow who operates a highly successful non-violent criminal organization and so successfully Scotland Yard claims he is just a myth.

   But he is a myth THRUSH is interested in, and they can ill afford to let THRUSH recruit such a competent criminal and his organization.

   So, grousing all the way (McDaniel caught the by play between Vaughn and McCallum better than any of the other series writers) the two agents are off to the jolly old UK, but not before a THRUSH agent in London visits a rival of Rainbow’s to do a little recruiting on their own, an elderly Chinese gentleman.

   Behind this desk sat a tall, thin Chinese, wearing robes of silk which shimmered in the candlelight. His face was unlined, but his eyes were old with ancient wisdom, and seemed oddly veiled, like those of a drowsing cat. Above an imposing brow, he wore a black skullcap with a single coral bead which indicated the rank of Mandarin. A marmoset perched on his shoulder, occasionally nuzzling his ear.

   Huh?

   Shades of August Derleth’s Solar Pons’ Mr. King, I presume? But in fairness this elderly Chinese has gotten around in other people’s books before.

   Then Solo and Kuryakin arrive in London for their appointment at Scotland Yard.

   Wait just a minute here. Claude, the Rollison file, a handsome West? What is this, a meeting of the Thriller Magazine fan club?

   Scotland Yard isn’t much help, but it does give them a lead and they promptly get captured by the Chinese gentleman from earlier, but they are soon rescued by a dapper, handsome MI5 operative in a bowler hat, expensive clothes, and carrying a lethal umbrella who soon introduces them to his willowy beautiful amateur partner a certain lethal lady.

   He even reminds them Mr. Waverly was a colleague in the War working for a certain Department Zed, or as John Creasey would have it Department Z.

   At this point Solo quips he hopes the Double O guy is out of the country.

   It doesn’t end there either. Following leads the two split up, Ilya ending up stumbling on a heist and finding himself outnumbered four to one before a handsome chap appears out of nowhere, dispatches two bad guys with his twin throwing knives and offers Ilya a ride in his Hirondel.

   No halos are seen, but they are certainly implied.

   Meanwhile a local U.N.C.L.E. operative, the beautiful Joey, arrives on a motorcycle to help out Solo in the suburbs and introduces him to her maiden Aunt Jane of the steel trap mind and her paradoxical guest Father John. Seems Aunt Jane and Father John take a proprietary interest in crime and they can introduce Solo to the oldest member of their little group, a beekeeper in Sussex well over one hundred years old named William Escott…

   Somehow the plot does sort itself out. Solo and Kuryakin meet and are charmed by Johnnie Rainbow who ends up a reluctant ally when THRUSH decides if they can’t have him they don’t want him as a rival, not to mention the deadly explosive ulsenite he has created to aid in his heists, they want to get their grubby thrushy hands on.

   As might be expected things end explosively.

   The ancient Chinese turns THRUSH down for the moment (“an old Chinese with a brow like Shakespeare, a face like Satan, and eyes of the true tiger green, lay dreaming.”), Rainbow’s organization is in shambles and Rainbow presumably dead in his destroyed castle after saving Solo and Kuryakin, but at a dinner at Joey’s cottage with Aunt Jane they get a message…

   The message read simply,

   You can almost hear the pulsing beat of Jerry Goldsmith’s theme music.

   As I said, literature it ain’t. It is pure pulp rot gut, but the distilled kind not the bathtub variety and intoxicating enough despite any guilty hangovers for enjoying it this much.

   But damn if it wasn’t fun and capturing much of the feel of the best of the television series, tongue in cheek without head up another body cavity. For a fairly late entry in a series of novels based on a television series The Rainbow Affair proves to have ambitions far above its station delving into what today we call Metafiction feet first and with surprising charm.

   Writers like Richard Jaccoma, Philip Jose Farmer, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, and Kim Newman may be more literary and inventive, but McDaniel pulls it off almost effortlessly and was there pretty early in the game.

         Back then in January 1968. I said:

WILLIAM R. COX “They’ll Kill Me!” Novelette. Tom Kincaid has a murderous competition in his attempt to make a movie about gambling. Low grade Hollywood all the way. (0)

         Now:

   My opinion hasn’t changed one iota, and I’m not sure why this one simply doesn’t work. It may been that there are too many characters – at least a dozen – that the reader has to recognize and assimilate in too short a time, and none of them are more than stock players in a standard let’s-make-a-Hollywood movie type of yarn (with gangsters thrown in as opposition).

   As a matter of fact, though, Tom Kincaid, the leading character, did turn up later in three novel length books written by Cox for Signet as paperback originals between 1958 and 1962. By profession Kincaid is a gambler, but in this story he’s trying his luck as a novice movie producer and director. (He was in fifteen pulp stories in all, all for Dime Mystery in the 1940s.)    (0)

WILLIAM L. DeANDREA – Killed on the Ice. Matt Cobb #4.  Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1984.  Mysterious Press, paperback, 1987.

   William L. De Andrea’s career started off with a bang when his first book, Killed in the Ratings, introducing sleuth Matt Cobb, won an MWA Edgar for Best First Novel of 1978. The very next year, his second book, The Hog Murders, won the Edgar for Best Paperback. Since then, his career has continued to blossom, with a couple of historical mysteries, a thriller, and three more Matt Cobb books.

   Matt is an engaging chap who works as a troubleshooter for a TV network; he’s gentle with women (who don’t always return the courtesy) and a good friend to his constant companion, Spot, the attack-trained Samoyed. If DeAndrea’s fans are fond of Matt, they positively adore Spot, the most appealing little scene-stealer since Asta.

   In Killed on the Ice, Dr. Paul Dinkover, “perhaps the most renowned American psychiatrist alive,” is found sprawled on the ice of a Manhattan skating rink, his stomach thoroughly ventilated with a hunting knife. The ice rink is the one where Matt’s network is filming a special on Olympic skater Wendy Ichimi. Wendy has a motive, and also a good start on capturing Matt’s ever-vulnerable heart.

   When she begins to look like a potential victim herself, he has more than a professional interest in finding the murderer. Along the way, he encounters (as usual) Detective Lieutenant Cornelius Martin, Jr., the black cop from Matt’s old neighborhood, and an intriguing new character — the Frying Nun, an assistant D.A. who left the convent for law school. Also offering a good dying message, interesting murder method, and a clever ruse during the climactic fight, Killed on the Ice is up to DeAndrea’s usual high standard.

   Matt Cobb’s other amateur investigations include Killed in the Act (l981) and Killed with a Passion (1983).

———
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.
   

      The complete Matt Cobb series —

Killed in the Ratings. Harcourt 1978.
Killed in the Act. Doubleday 1981.
Killed with a Passion. Doubleday 1983.
Killed on the Ice. Doubleday 1984.
Killed in Paradise. Mysterious Press 1988.
Killed on the Rocks. Mysterious Press 1990.
Killed in Fringe Time. Simon 1995.
Killed in the Fog. Simon 1996.

KENNETH MILLAR – The Three Roads. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1948. Also published as by Ross Macdonald: Bantam, paperback, 1960. Many other reprint editions exist. Film: As Double Negative (Quadrant, 1980).

   Lieutenant Bret Taylor returns from WWII, but his memory is shot to pieces. He is physically unscathed; he doesn’t have a traumatic brain injury. But for some reason he can’t remember a damn thing.

   The psychiatrists feel like it’s some kind of guilt complex. His carrier was sunk at Pearl Harbor, and he feels responsible for the ship and the men that were lost. His mother apparently died when he was four years old, and he blames himself for it. And when he came back home from the war, he walked into his house only to find his young wife murdered: assailant unknown.

   He leaves the VA psychiatric facility against physician advice to track down the murderer. He feels that if only he can solve his wife’s murder, his memories will come back to him, and he can finally live again. But be careful what you wish for.

   It’s a pretty good idea for a story. But the book really freaking sucks. It’s got to be one of the worst novels I’ve ever read. I hated it.

   Why, you ask?

   First of all, the thing is terribly overwritten. He even has a character make a denigrating comment about Hemingway’s style — so it’s clear that the verbosity is actually on purpose. He even has the temerity to wink at the reader at one point behind a character’s back saying: “He didn’t know what irony was, but it was irony he was enjoying.” What the hell? You don’t need to be an English lit PhD like Millar to enjoy irony. You don’t even have to know the word. If the character was enjoying the irony he was enjoying the irony. I can die of arsenic even if I don’t know the word arsenic. But let’s all have a little laugh at the expense of the uneducated here folks.

   Secondly, the thing is completely devoted to Freud. Seriously. The title comes from the book’s epigram, and has nothing to do with the story other than some implied Oedipus complex that Bret Taylor is allegedly working through: “For now am I discovered vile, and of the vile. O ye three roads, and thou concealed dell, and oaken copse, and narrow outlet of three ways, which drank my own blood….”–SOPHOCLES, Oedipus Tyrannus. If I were smart I would have stopped there. But hey. Who said I was smart?

   Here’s an example of the horribly overwritten Freudian tripe you’ll be force fed should you choose to treat yourself to this crap:

   “‘I have sometimes thought that we of the Viennese school have paid too little attention to problems of moral guilt. Freud himself was a child of his century. He never quite outgrew the physiological laboratory and its atmosphere of materialistic determinism. It is curious, is it not, that the subtlest introspectionist since Augustine should have under-valued the moral and religious life and seen the human mind in terms of blind forces working in Newtonian space?’ ‘You’re talking like a Jungian,’ she said.”

   The above quote reminded me of a bit from Woody Allen’s Love and Death:

   â€œDon’t you know that murder carries with it a moral imperative that transcends any notion of inherent universal free will?”

   â€œThat is incredibly jejune.”

   â€œJejune?! You have the temerity to say that I’m talking to you out of jejunosity? I am one of the most june people in all of the Russias.”

   It’s enough to make you wish Mike Hammer would show up and start punching people in the nose.

   Lastly, the ending is tremendously unsatisfying. The final chapter is entitled “Doomsday” and is over 100 pages. But Doomsday is an vast overstatement. No justice is served, and everyone is left feeling decidedly mediocre — especially the reader.

LESLIE CHARTERIS “The Angel’s Eye.” Short story. Simon Templar aka “The Saint.” First published in The Saint Detective Magazine, June/July 1953; reprinted in the September 1963 issue. First collected in The Saint in Europe, (Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 1954). TV episode: The Saint, 11 November 1966. (Season 5, Episode 7), with Roger Moore.

   While making various stops along the way in a vacation trip across Europe, Simon Templar, as he always does, comes across a strange request for help, this time in Amsterdam. An employee of a diamond merchant tells the Saint he brought an expensive diamond known as The Angel’s Eye into the office of a well-known diamond cutter to be recut. When he returned later, he was told they did not have the diamond, that it was never brought in, the receipt was forged, and they’d never seen him before.

   The Saint has a certain kind of radar for this sort of thing:

   
   Could you stop reading at this point? I think not.

   If in any dreams I may have ever had of writing mystery fiction and producing passages such as this, I’d pinch myself immediately and wake up.

         Back then in January 1968. I said:

TALMAGE POWELL “The Dark, Unfriendly Tide.” Published in Dime Mystery Magazine, May 1945. A man tries to dispose of a girl’s body in the bayou, but the elements betray him. Overly melodramatic. (3)

         Now:

   A man tries to dispose of an ex-girl friend’s body in a Louisiana bayou, but fate is against him, badly. Very atmospheric and readable, but there’s nothing here that couldn’t be foretold from the first paragraph on. (2)

B[asil] G[odfrey] QUIN – The Death Box. Hon. James Clarkson-Parry #1. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1929. Associated Newspapers, UK, hardcover reprint, date? Greenberg, US, hardcover, 1932.

   When Charles Harvey sees Clarkson-Perry, a man’s man and his former wartime commander, at a golf tournament in the morning, he hardly expects to be hired on as his assistant after dinner that evening in the latter’s home. His “Watson,” in other words, as Clarkson-Perry is now an elite private investigator. The comparison is apt. Both men are bachelors, and in the case that follows, Clarkson-Perry has plenty of opportunity to display his ability at deductive reasoning in pure Holmesian fashion.

   It’s quite a case, too. Their client has overheard a group of hooded men meeting in an isolated building on his property, with a mysterious box apparently their primary reason for their having been called together in such a strange ceremony. When one of the men tries to make off with the box, their client ends up with it, but when they go to see it, they find their client dead, and the box missing.

   Complicating matters is a matter of diamonds that are also not in the safe that was opened, and (whew) they discover that the client’s secretary is actually a notorious jewel thief. This not the only surprise in store for them in the case, as far as twists and turns in the plot, including other false identities and mysterious intruders in the night.

   It’s quite a package, indeed, the plot outwardly consisting of out-and-out thriller material, but in essence, a well-constructed detective story, with a rather unexpected killer brought to justice at the end, done in by reconstructing various conflicting facts along the way and the working out of a detailed timetable of events.

   I’d happily read another in the series, but this is the only one that’s at all easy to find. One of the others below can be found offered for sale online, but only in the $150 range. The other two apparently no longer exist.
   

         The James Clarkson-Parry series —

The Death Box. Hutchinson 1929.
The Murder Rehearsal. Hutchinson 1931.
Mistigris. Hutchinson 1932.
The Phantom Murderer. Hutchinson 1932.

DANIEL WOODRELL – Give Us a Kiss. Henry Holt, hardcover, 1996. Pocket, paperback, 1998. Little Brown & Company, softcover, 2012.

   Woodrell is on my list of under-appreciated modern crime writers. His three books featuring the Shade family of Louisiana – the first two (Muscle for the Wing and Under the Bright Lights) focus on René, a cop in the bayou town of Bruno, and the last (The Ones You Do) on his scapegrace wandering father – are all outstanding examples of dark, down-and-dirty regional fiction. He has changed his setting here from the Louisiana bayou to the Missouri Ozarks, and this one is billed as “A Country Noir.”

   Doyle Redmond is from an Ozark clan that always been about half mean, and the other half outlaws. He’s bred true in a lot of ways, but he’s also made a writer out of himself, and been living out in California with a would-be poet wife. She takes up with a real poet, though, so he steals her car and loads up his favorite books – he never did get more than half housebroke, you see – and heads back to Missouri to see his folks in Kansas City.

   They talk him into going back down to the Ozarks to hunt for his older brother, Smoke, who’s sort of wanted by the law. He finds him, and one thing leads to another, and before you know it, he’s involved in a dope-growing deal and lusting after his brother’s woman’s young daughter, But then the fun begins.

   This is probably the best novel I’ve read this year. What I’ve written above gives you no idea of the flavor of the book, but there’s no way I could without quoting large chunks of it. There isn’t any sort of mystery or detective story, and I guess “country noir” isn’t too far from the mark. The voices … well, unique is an awfully big word, but it’s certainly a distinctive one, and one you’ll savor and won’t soon forget.

   Woodrell’s people are hard people, and they’re real people, though you’ve probably never known any of them. This isn’t genre fiction, but it’s damned good fiction, maybe award quality. Read it.

MACK REYNOLDS – After Some Tomorrow. Belmont, paperback original, 1967.

   Two people, Michael Grant and Anne Enesco, are among those a strange foundation has given scholarships to Earl University on the condition they study para-psychology, Their psionic powers attract the attention of another foundation , which is interested in their ability to foresee the future for political gain.

   The sociopolitical systems of the world are about to fall, and knowledge of the prevailing forms of government could be of immense value. Hallucinogenic drugs play a part also and aid them in sending their original benefactor back to his own time.

   The major part of the book deals with their enforced study of political science, which gives Reynolds his usual chance for lecture. In addition, the story of narcotics and their relation to human culture is told. There is an underling story, however, and while it is not as thrilling as the cover would imply, it reads fairly well.

   Naturally, no clue can be given as to the social system that will eventually emerge from the welfare state that Reynolds quite pessimistically sees for the US, and the book ends without resolution on that level. The love interest proceeds beneath the lines, revealed mainly when Grant forbids Anna to wear a transparent blouse. A not too favorable view of Johnson’s role in Vietnam is given on page 67.

Rating: ***½