JULIAN MacLAREN-ROSS – Of Love and Hunger. Allan Wingate, UK. 1947. Reprinted a number of times.

   Fanshawe’s about 30, jaded, in 30’s London between the wars. And broke. Trying to sell vacuum cleaners door to door. Unsuccessfully.

   “The new bloke’s name was Roper. Soon as I set eyes on him I knew he’d never make a salesman. He was about twenty-four and not very tall, and he’d a pink face with a long pointed nose and blond hair slicked straight back with the pink puckered skin of a scar running up into the roots of it. The scar looked odd on him somehow: he didn’t seem the kind of chap who’d have a scar like that. You’d never think he’d been to sea. That’s how he got the scar: a lascar with a bottle in Marseille.

         …

   “Sukie was his wife. She’d a job in the cash-desk at Morecombe’s, dress shop down by the Arcade. Sultry-looking piece. Spanish type. Black hair, dark eyes, lot of lipstick on. Hell of a temper, you could see. We’d never actually met, but I didn’t like the look of her at all.”

   Roper decides to quit and go back to sea. Look after my wife for me while I’m away, he says. See that she doesn’t get lonely.

   Fanshawe does. And so it begins. A torrid affair, but not for long. And Roper returns.

   And without further ado, Hitler invades Poland, and Fanshawe goes to war.

   The end.

   A tightly written, slangy slice of hardscrabble life in 30’s London. I dug it.

WILLIAM L. SHIRER – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 17 October 1960. TV adaptation: ABC, 1968, consisting of a one-hour episode aired each night over three nights.

   I’m anticipating here.

   See August is the end of Summer, and that got me to thinking of September. Which is the month before October. (Check your calendars.) Which is the month I spend reading scary books and watching old monster movies.

   And that got me thinking about an Autumn a few years back, when I led into it….

         (Cue harp.)

   …by reading William L. Shirer’s classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich ,  a real mega-book when it first came out – I remember it was serialized in Life, there were TV shows, bubble-gum cards, tie-in comics, etc. – and it’s easy to see why: More’n fifteen hundred pages and scarcely a clunker in the bunch. Well, I admit to skimming over some of the background on Hitler’s grandparents, but by and mostly this is a compulsive page-turner, even if the title gives away the ending.

   What’s Halloween-scariest, though, is the first third, describing Hitler’s rise to power: how he subtly smeared his rivals with racist tactics, arranged to have opposing parties disenfranchised, convinced Parliament to give up its oversight powers, and the people to abridge their civil liberties in the name of National Security; filled the media with scare stories about threats from Poland and Czechoslovakia… one either sees the parallels or never will, but what impressed me is that you and I read about these antics and say, “I don’t wanna do that stuff if Hitler did it,” but apparently some people read this and say, “Hot dang! That’s slicker’n a toad in a out-house! I gotta try that….

   I guess Real Life gets scary too.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Fan Dancer’s Horse. William Morrow, hardcover, 1947. Pocket 886, paperback, 1952. Several later reprint editions.

   In 1933, when Erle Stanley Gardner took his publisher’s advice that the hero of his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, might make a good series character, he did not know what lay in store for him-or for Perry Mason. Since then, the Los Angeles lawyer; his secretary, Della Street; and private investigator Paul Drake have become household names. And with the first airing of the immensely popular Perry Mason television series in  1957 they became household images as well, in the form of Raymond Burr. Barbara Hale, and William Hopper.

   While not particularly well written or characterized, the Mason books have convoluted plots and punchy dialogue, which in the courtroom takes on the form of verbal sparring. The books are also very much alike, and perhaps this is the basis for their wide appeal. Readers know that in each one an innocent (in the legal sense) will become involved in a murder; odious Lieutenant Tragg will investigate and arrest; snide District Attorney Hamilton Burger will prosecute; and Perry Mason will vindicate his client in a dramatic courtroom revelation of the true killer.

   It is these courtroom scenes that make the novels stand out from other mystery fiction. Gardner, a lawyer himself, was able to simplify courtroom procedure so even the least astute reader could understand it, while at the same time packing the scene with dramatic impact. Even those who are normally bored with legal matters can enjoy watching Perry Mason devil the D.A. in the interests of justice, and many a lawyer practicing today will admit he got his first taste of the profession through Mason’s legal pyrotechnics.

   The Case of the Fan Dancer’s Horse begins with a hit-and-run automobile accident in California’s Imperial Valley. Two cars glance off one another; Perry Mason and Della Street rush to aid the one that overturns in the ditch, and find an old Mexican woman whose car trunk contains the plumed wardrobe of a fan dancer. The woman is presumably taken away to the hospital by a passing motorist, but the accident is never reported. Mason, who has taken the fans and dancing shoes into custody, places an ad in the paper offering their return. The reply is not what he expected: The fan dancer docs indeed want her property returned, but it is a horse, not a wardrobe, that she is missing.

   Dancer Lois Fenton — alias Cherie Chi-Chi — is appearing in an old western town called Palomino, and Mason and Street travel there to meet with her. They return the fan-dancing paraphernalia and receive a description of the missing horse, but soon it becomes apparent that the woman they spoke with is not the real Lois Fenton. The real fan dancer — who has a complicated history — is as missing as her horse.

   Approached by a young man who is in love with Miss Fenton, Mason accepts a retainer to act in her behalf, and earns it when a wealthy rancher is found murdered in an L.A. hotel room, a bloody imprint that could have been made by an ostrich feather on the wall. Lois Fenton was seen leaving the scene and quickly becomes the chief suspect.

   In spite of obvious holes in logic — why, for instance, would Mason take on a client when he has seen no more of her than her ostrich plumes? — the story moves ahead at a breakneck pace. And when the real Lois Fenton finally turns up and the legal battle lines are drawn, Mason is in fine form.

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   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.

WALTER TEVIS – The Man Who Fell to Earth. Gold Medal k1276, paperback original, February 1963. Cover art by Diane Dillon and Leo Dillon. Reprinted several times, including: Avon, paperback, 1976 (slightly updated); Bantam, paperback, 1981. Film: British Lion Film Corporation, UK, 1976; Cinema 5, US, 1976 (starring David Bowie). TV Movie: ABC, 1987. Plus two TV Mini-series.

   An alien, an Anthean, comes to Earth. They’ve run out of resources on Anthea.

   The Antheans had just enough fuel to send one of them to Earth.

   He’s long, tall and gangly, with bird like bones, but with prosthetics looks human enough to pass. He’s learned English from intercepted television broadcasts.

   He has a bagful of diamonds which he pawns til he raises a decent stake.

   He buys a suit of clothes, passage to nyc, rooms at a luxury hotel, and visits the best patent lawyer money can buy. He shows the lawyer formulas for more efficient oil processing, digital photography, digital recording technology, and offers 10% of the profits if the lawyer will take care of the patents and hire the infrastructure to start World Enterprises Corporation. The lawyer salivates.

   Before you know it, the Anthean is a multimillionaire. An Elon Musk-like titan of technology.

   His next project is a huge spacecraft whose secret purpose is to travel to Anthea to bring the rest of his race to Earth. To take over. To rule the earth in a wise dictatorship. To save Earth from the destructiveness of man.

   But the CIA discovers him and his plans. He’s arrested. Officially, the change is being a suspected non-us citizen without proper immigration papers. But he’s forged perfect proof of citizenship and has all the right papers. He’s too famous to kill, and the administration doesn’t dare tell the public he’s an actual alien. It’s an election year, and they’d be laughed out of office. Other big business moguls and the press are hounding the government on this warrantless arrest of a titan of industry. So he’s released.

   But his plans are ruined. There is no way the US government will allow the incomplete spaceship to be finished. And if the Antheans arrived they’d be arrested or killed.

   The Anthean realizes he’ll never see his people again, his wife and family. They’ll be unable to forestall man’s foretold fate of self destruction.

   He discovers the pleasures of gin. He soaks his loneliness. And decides, what the hell is all this for? Who cares? Better to drink my way to oblivion.

   An affecting and strangely believable meditation on loneliness.

BANK ALARM. Grand National Pictures, 1937. Conrad Nagel, Eleanor Hunt, Vince Barnett, Wheeler Oakman, Nat Carr. Directed by Louis J. Gasnier.

   Bank Alarm is a perfectly average crime film. Although considerably dated, it nevertheless tells a somewhat compelling story about a federal agent’s quest to uproot a bank robbing outfit in 1930s Los Angeles. G-Man Alan O’Connor (Conrad Nagel), with his girlfriend/assistant Bobbie Reynolds (Eleanor Hunt), begins his investigation when a lower ranking member of the criminal outfit is killed in prison.

   Little does O’Connor know that his sleuthing will eventually lead to his sister’s new boyfriend, screenwriter Jerry Turner (Frank Milan). Turner has been working in cahoots with local crime boss, nightclub owner Joe Karlotti (Wheeler Oakman).

   There’s nothing particularly special about this film. With a running time of around an hour, it doesn’t waste the viewer’s time with extraneous material. That said, there’s not much here to overly recommend. If you watch it, you probably won’t love it and you probably won’t hate it. It is what it is. Just a largely forgotten B-movie that most people, I suspect, have never heard of, let along seen.

LOOK WHO’S LAUGHING. RKO Radio Pictures, 1941. Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, Fibber McGee & Molly, Lucille Ball, Harold Peary. Director: Allan Dwan.

   Edgar and Charlie make an unscheduled landing in Wistful Vista, the home of Fibber McGee and Molly. Lucille Ball is Edgar’s secretary, and to make things complicated, she is secretly in love with him.

   The rest of the story has to do with land for a proposed airplane factory in Wistful Vista, but the main attraction of the story is seeing so many famous radio characters in the flesh – including Fibber’s long-time nemesis, Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve.

JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper. Travis McGee #10. Gold Medal T2023; paperback original, 1st printing, 1968. Cover artist: Ron Lesser. Reprinted many times.

   It takes about 60 pages of slow going, through a very familiar story of a woman dying of the Big C, before the story begins. But before it’s done, the dirty inside secrets of another pretty-on-the-outside Florida town are exposed by the actions of the ever adventuresome Travis McGee.

   The lady’s request that McGee stop her daughter’s suicide attempts brings him to Fort Courtney, and he stays when the nurse who picks him up in a bar is murdered. It isn’t suicide he still has to stop, but a carefully planned murder, by a man who can’t believe anything will stand in his way.

   McGee is a bit too late, and the daughter becomes the first girl in a plain brown wrapper. The second is more obvious, and yet more subtle.

   Emphasis, or detail, is added to McGee’s sexual appetite. What indeed does make man an man, and a woman a woman? And any resplendence to an abortive scene from The Graduate is purely intentional.

Rating: ****½

DOROTHY GARDINER – The Seventh Mourner. Sheriff Moss Magill #2. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1958. Popular Library, paperback, 1964.

   Sheriff Moss Magill of Notlaw, Colorado, functions best in his beloved mountains and is reluctant to leave them. However, when local resident Harriet Farquhar Orchard dies, she makes it a condition of her will that he deliver her ashes to her home in Rowanmuir, Scotland. Moss is convinced to go only when he learns that Harriet also wanted him to investigate her sister, Lizzy, who has been released by a Scottish court with the verdict “not proven” on a charge of murder.

   Wearing his customary whipcord pants, boots, and black-and-yellow striped shirt with his silver badge pinned to it, Moss evokes many stares during the trip, especially on the train from Edinburgh to Rowanrnuir, which, coincidentally, all of the mourners have taken that same August morning.

   The assorted group is all staying at the hotel where Lizzy works as a maid. During a day trip to Glasgow, Moss hears bagpipes for the first time and, in an enchantment born of ethnic memory, falls in love with Scotland.

   When one of the party is pushed under a truck that same day, he puts his investigative talents to use and works with the local authorities both to discover the murderer and to fulfill Harriet’s last request.

   This is an unusual idea, for a mystery, with excellent background and an appealing main character. Other amusing Magill adventures are Lion in Wait ( 1963), in which a toothless circus lion is accused of murder; and What Crime Is This (1956), in which Moss uses a hula-dancer statue with a clock embedded in her stomach to help clear up a murder.

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   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.

   Live from The Howard Stern Show in 2023:

   A correspondent known to me as Gunnar asks the following question. Perhaps those of you who have read more early detection fiction than I can tell us more:

    “Tony Baer’s recent review of A. A. Milne’s Red House Mystery (1922) got me thinking of the origins and early history of the country house mystery. I suppose you can trace its early prototypes back to Wilkie Collins, but later Sherlock is mainly metropolitan – and while Baskervilles, Valley of Fear and some of the short stories do feature country houses or castles, they’re not really country house mysteries in the true sense (with a closed circle of suspects and all that).

    “The first proper instance I can think of is The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) followed perhaps by Trent’s Last Case (1913) and then of course Styles (1920). Are there other early examples that predate Christie’s debut?”