JEREMY LANE – Death to Drumbeat. Phoenix Press, hardcover, 1944. Paperback reprint: Black Knight #17, no date stated [1946].

    Whitney Wheat, Lane’s series character, is a psychiatrist who also detects. In this novel his patient, a publisher and we know what they are like, hears drums, apparently portending his own death. Attempting a cure through a means that I didn’t quite understand when it was originally proposed and still don’t when all has ostensibly been cleared up, Wheat takes his patient to the estate of Humber Jacks.

    An authority on Indian Drums, Jacks is a wealthy man with an income of $25,000 a month but who rents out rooms at $1 a night to tourists and makes sure he gets the takings. He also has an ill-assorted household. After Wheat’s and the publisher’s arrival, murder occurs.

    Since my consciousness was recently raised, I make it a point to avoid novels in which the county attorney is gormless or corrupt, and sometimes both. But it was awhile before the county attorney appeared in Lane’s novel, and I continued reading, though I ignored the politician’s failings — alas, such are the absurdities one encounters in fiction — to find out if Lane was going to make sense of anything in the book.

    He doesn’t. Oh, he explains things; of course, that is not the same thing as making sense.

    For those who are interested in such matters, the narrator of the novel, on an intellectual level with the county attorney, has the same name as the author.

Bibliographic Data: The following checklist is taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

LANE, JEREMY. 1893-1963. Note: Dr. Whitney Wheat appears in those titles indicated with an asterisk (*).

    Like a Man (n.) Washburn 1928.
    The Left Hand of God (n.) Washburn 1929.
    * Death to Drumbeat (n.) Phoenix 1944.
    * Kill Him Tonight (n.) Phoenix 1946.

    * Murder Menagerie (n.) Phoenix 1946.

    * Murder Spoils Everything (n.) Phoenix 1949.