ANTHONY BERKELEY – The Poisoned Chocolates Case. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1929. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1929. Paperback reprints include Pocket #814, US, 1951; Dell/Scene of the Crime #8, US, 1983.

   Anthony Berkeley (a pseudonym for A.B. Cox, who also wrote as Francis Iles) had an excellent ability to characterize, as is demonstrated in this novel in which the members of London’s Crime Club — a carefully chosen group of armchair detectives — match wits to solve the murder of Mrs. Graham Bendix. Mrs. Bendix died after eating poisoned chocolates that were apparently intended for Sir Eustace Pennefather, dissolute member of the aristocracy whom many had reason to kill.

   The police have found no solution to the problem of who sent the chocolates to Sir Eustace (who seems to have innocently passed them on to Mrs. Bendix), and Roger Sheringham, somewhat pompous founder of the Crime Club, has volunteered the assistance of his learned members. Although Detective Inspector Farrar of Scotland Yard appears to think this an idle amusement, nonetheless he agrees to brief the club on the case.

   The members — each characterized in all his or her eccentricities — agree to present their solutions on different nights. And it is no surprise when suspicion falls on one of their number. As theories and evidence pile up, the facts of the case unfold, and the cumulative work of the members — each of whom has his own particular sphere of knowledge, each of whom is certain of the correctness of his solution — leads to the logical but surprising conclusion.

   This is a talky novel, with little action or movement. But it should appeal to those who like the combination of good characterization and armchair detection.

   Other novels featuring the learned Roger Sheringham include The Layton Court Mystery (1929), The Second Shot (1931), Jumping Jenny (1933), and Panic Party (1934).

         ———
   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.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Careless Cupid. William Morrow, hardcover, 1968. Pocket, paperback, November 1969. Ballantine, paperback, 1989.

   Both author Erle Stanley Gardner and character Perry Mason are in fine form in this relatively late entry in the series. (Gardner died in 1970, but as I recall, there were several books written but as yet unpublished at the time of his passing.) It’s a slim book, only 181 pages in the Pocket edition, but there’s still plenty of space for all of the usual ingredients, including a trial in which Hamilton Burger is left dumbfounded (again) and Perry’s client is cleared (again!).

   This time around his client is a widow who would like to marry the man at whose home her husband unfortunately died of food poisoning, or so the death certificate says. There are members of the man’s family, however, who think their chances of receiving their full inheritance if the marriage goes through, and their suggestion that something was fishy about the death is starting to attract the attention of the authorities.

   One way Perry goes about protecting his client in this book is to have her undergo a lie detector test, which gives author Gardner a large opportunity to expound on what a polygraph can or cannot do, and why defense attorneys should use them more often. It helps, though, if the client is innocent. This one reads very quickly.

Subtitled: “The Dave Brubeck Quartet Plays Cole Porter.” I thought I knew all of Brubeck’s early LP’s, but I just came across this one for the first time. It’s available on CD only as a Japanese import.

COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE. American International Pictures, 1970. Alternative title: The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire. Robert Quarry (Count Yorga), Roger Perry, Michael Murphy, Michael Macready, Donna Anders, Judy Lang. Narrator: George Macready. Screenwriter-Director: Bob Kelljan.

   We first meet Count Yorga as he is conducting a seance attended by six couples in modern day (1970s) Los Angeles, as they try to contact the deceased mother of one of the young women in the party. Several of those attending do think it is a party, making jokes and general fun of the proceedings. They shouldn’t have.

   After the seance, one of the couples takes the Count, a recent arrival from Bulgaria, home to what looks like a veritable castle somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. They have trouble leaving and have to stay the night stranded on the castle grounds in their Volkswagen bus, unknowingly allowing a strange visitor enter while they are sleeping.

   Matters progress very well from these, at least from Count Yorga’s perspective. The others investigate, even to the extent of calling in a doctor who is an expert in blood disorders. It slowly dawns on them who (or what) they are dealing with. A direct confrontation is in order, and and from the viewer’s perspective, it proves most amusing as well as chilling.

   And this is the effect of the entire movie, which when it started out was intended to be a soft-core pornography film, a few hints of which still remain. This may be one of the first vampire films to take place in a modern day setting, and in spite of its low budget, it manages to take good advantage of that fact very well. The ending, by the way, is one well worth waiting for.

JOANNE DOBSON – The Maltese Manuscript. Poisoned Pen Press, hardcover, 2003; softcover, 2006. ibooks, mass market paperback, May 2004.

   I haven’t been reading the recent crop of cozy mysteries very much any more. They’ve become too soft and fluffy for me. Too much giddy character interplay, too much emphasis on hobbies, quilting or cooking, and worst of all, too little puzzle or mystery. They’re meant for female readers who can’t get enough of them, not for men who want hardboiled PI stories or old folks like me who want real detective work and/or surprise twists in their tales. So I pass them by, and have been for quite a while.

   With exceptions. While this one may not be recent, it is a cozy by nature, being one of a series of mystery adventures had by a Women’s Studies professor at a small elite college in a fictionalized version of the Amherst MA area. What it does have is a gimmick encapsulated in the title that caught my immediate attention anyway, as it may have already snagged yours as well.

   Part of the detective fiction holdings at Enfield College is the original manuscript of The Maltese Falcon, annotated and corrected in Hammett’s own hand. Valuable? I’d say so, if it existed. (Does it?) But when it disappears during a crime fiction conference at the school, the dean wants the incident hushed up. Who’d donate to any library that has such poor security in place?

   Karen Pelletier is the professor referred to in paragraph two, and with the assistance of mystery writer Sunnye Hardcastle, creator of he extremely popular PI Kit Danger books, plunges right into solving both the theft of the manuscript and more, the mysterious death of a nighttime intruder in the underground stacks of the school’s library.

   Complicating matters is that Karen’s boy friend is Lt. Charlie Pietrowski of the local police force, who doesn’t want her butting in, and a PI named Dennis O’Hanlon whom Karen meets up with again at a high school reunion, and coincidence be damned, he has just been hired by the dean to worr undercover while investigating the theft. That Karen is attracted to him causes some problems, wouldn’t you know?

   After some slow going in the first 80 or pages, the book takes off at last, as the investigation finally begins. There is a lot of witty and wry commentary on the academic approach to deconstructing mystery fiction along the way, and a book thief’s storage houses for the thousands and thousands of the valuable first edition mystery hardcovers he’s stolen from libraries all across the country would be a sight to behold, if it ever existed.

   A minor work, when all’s said and done, but it’s still fun while it lasts. And as a final postscript, let me add that the quoted portions of Sunnye Hardcastle’s novels are patently (and joyously) awful.

      The Karen Pelletier series —

1. Quieter Than Sleep (1997)
2. The Northbury Papers (1998)
3. The Raven and the Nightingale (1999)
4. Cold and Pure and Very Dead (2000)
5. The Maltese Manuscript (2003)
6. Death Without Tenure (2010)

From this American blues, soul and jazz singer’s 1968 LP, Her Point of View.

  EDWARD GORMAN – Rough Cut. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1985. Ballantine, paperback, August 1986.

   The late Ed Gorman was such a towering figure in the world of mystery fiction, it came as a surprise when I realized that this, his first novel, was published only 30 years ago. If you’d have asked me, I’d have said that I’d known his name much, much longer than that. As a writer and editor and (for example) the first publisher of Mystery Scene, among other accomplishments, many of them behind the scenes, he was a man who will be missed.

   And he was a writer with a distinctive edge, from the very first book. Most sources list Rough Cut as the first in his series of PI Jack Dwyer novels, but it is not so. There is a PI in this book, but it is a poor shnook named Harold Stokes, a nebbish kind of guy whose loyalty to a client is slimmer than a two dollar bill, viewed sideways.

   No, the protagonist in Rough Cut is the head of an ad agency in the greater Chicago area named Michael Ketchum, whose partner is found stabbed in his own home. Gorman, being an adman himself before switching careers relatively late in life, obviously wrote his first book based on a world he knew full well.

   Investigating on his own, and lying to the police about an alibi that isn’t so, Ketchum finds that his office had been filled with more than the usual small spats and petty hatreds: apparently everybody has been sleeping with everyone else, for example. Even the accountant’s secretary-mistress was cheating on him with someone else.

   Or in other words, there is a dark-tinged noir feeling to Ketchum’s self-imposed attempt to identify the killer, hopefully not his company’s most affluent client, before the police do. It is incumbent on him to do so to protect the firm, to save the jobs of so many people, not to mention the support he has to provide to his two kids and to a father with Alzheimer’s. The weight of the world is on his shoulders, and in quiet desperation, he knows it.

   This is a no-frills tale that’s tersely told, and is all the more effective for it — only 150 pages long in the paperback edition. A very good start, in my opinion, to a long and productive career — but not long enough.

R. C. WOODTHORPE – Rope for a Convict. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1940. First published in the UK by Nicholson, hardcover, 1939.

   Willie Hopper, movie director, has come to Dartmoor and movie star Daisy Nightingale’s cottage to begin filming a movie based on an escape from Dartmoor Prison. At the same time, an actual prisoner has escaped from Dartmoor. Nightingale’s young son, Malcolm, aids the escape, as does another person, thought the latter’s motives are not as disinterested as Malcolm’s. Then murder occurs, and the escaped prisoner is accused of it as well as the theft of a Shakespeare First Folio signed by Ben Jonson.

   No detection here, coincidences abound and perplex, and more could have been done from the movie angle. But the characters are interesting and often amusing — the curate definitely should have been given a greater role — and Woodthorpe is a first class stylist. Pleasant reading.

Bibliographic Notes:   R(alph) C(arter) Woodthorpe was the author of eight British crime novels; four of them were reprinted in the US by Doubleday. Two of the books feature a character named Nicholas Slade; Matilda Perks appears in another two. At the moment, away from Ellen Nehr’s complete compendium of the Crime Club novels, I know nothing about either of the two.

EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS. Columbia Pictures, 1956. Hugh Marlowe, Joan Taylor, Donald Curtis, Morris Ankrum. Screen story by Curt Siodmak, based on the book Flying Saucers from Outer Space, by Major Donald E. Keyhoe. Director: Fred F. Sears.

   What would humanity do if UFOs waged war on Earth? Would a scientist invent a means of stopping those rascally aliens and then allow the U.S. military to utilize that technology? If you think that’s the most likely scenario, then Earth vs. the Flying Saucers will offer few surprises.

   The plot follows rocket scientist Dr. Russell A. Marvin (Hugh Marlowe) and his new bride Carol (Joan Taylor) as they contend with an imminent alien invasion. Complicating matters is the fact that Carol’s father, Brig. Gen. John Hanley (Morris Ankrum), has been kidnapped by the interstellar humanoids and turned into a zombie! This leads Dr. Marvin to take the lead in discovering a way of repelling the forthcoming alien invasion. Upon learning how the UFOs operate, Marvin creates a sonic weapon that proves useful to the U.S. Army as they wage war on alien vessels attempting to conquer Washington.

   If you think the plot sounds mildly intriguing – and I admit writing it made me realize how much potential the film had – you should realize that this particular science fiction movie is rather flat, both in terms of style and substance.

   Indeed, if Earth vs. the Flying Saucers has an auteur, it is most certainly special effects guru Ray Harryhausen. Responsible for the film’s stellar stop-motion animation, Harryhausen’s skill in unleashing movie magic is evident throughout what is otherwise a rather dull, plodding 1950s science fiction feature.

   Neither the direction nor the acting, save the welcome presence of character actor Morris Ankrum, is particularly memorable; in fact, much of it is truly forgettable. All of which serves to make Harryhausen’s contribution to the movie even more valuable, for without it, there’d honestly be no compelling reason to seek out this one out.