THE BACKWARD REVIEWER
William F. Deeck


JOHN M. ESHLEMAN – The Long Window. Ives Washburn, hardcover, 1953. Mercury Mystery #206, digest paperback, n.d. [1955], as Death of a Cheat.

JAMES M. ESHLEMAN

     ●   The Long Chase. Ives Washburn, hardcover, 1954. Mercury Mystery #201, n.d. [1954], digest paperback, two-page introduction by Anthony Boucher, as The Deadly Chase.

   When Lucy Storm is found strangled in her bedroom after a party in The Long Window, Police Lieutenant Larry Koharik of an anonymous city next to Berkeley, Calif., directs the investigation. Since the partygoers have alibis, the obvious suspects are the husband, who may have killed her because of jealousy, and the black houseboy, who apparently was angry with her for disrupting his plans to return to school.

   Despite the fact that Koharik once dated Lucy and knows at least one of the suspects, he continues as head of the investigation. Don’t policemen ever recuse themselves when there might be a conflict of interest, or is that fit only for judges and potential jurors and some lawyers?

   While not a great deal is learned about Koharik of a personal nature — quite often in first-person narration these details aren’t provided — it is revealed that he is thirty-three years old and married to a woman who loves, and thus puts up with, him.

   Though the investigation is a bit unorthodox, with Koharik socializing with the people who partied at Lucy Storm’s house, it is a good one. Oh, there’s at least one hole in the explanation, the murderer oddly is quite bloodthirsty and then reluctant to kill, and a suspect hides where he and Koharik had been just a few days before.

   But none of that is noticed in the reading, for the author carries all before him with splendid prose, solid suspects, and an attractive protagonist. In addition, not that anything extra was needed, there’s a great bit about lie detectors when all the suspects — but you should read it for yourselves.

JAMES M. ESHLEMAN

   In The Long Chase, Koharik and his wife are at a society party, meet the rich and noble Senor Diego Castillo, furnish him with a ride, and watch him be shot for the third and fatal time. Then Koharik discovers that Castillo was neither rich nor noble and had a fair number of enemies.

   Let me step aside here for a moment and quote a master reviewer, Anthony Boucher, from his introduction to this novel:

    Koharik is clearly destined for a niche of his own among the very few sympathetic and believable cops of tough-realistic fiction. And he has a worthy case to work on in this book — a case that involves criminal factors (gambling, pandering) that might happen anywhere, and social factors that could happen only in the American West, from the peculiarly Californian meaning of being a daughter of the Dons to the unique practices (as sincerely devout as they seem anti-social) of schismatic Mormons exiled from Utah as heretics. It’s a case that builds, like good Hammett, out of quiet personal tension into violent overt action, culminating in an outburst of wholesale carnage which is as underplayed and as effective as anything in that line since Red Harvest.

   Boucher goes on to hope that there would be more cases for Lieutenant Koharik. Unfortunately, there were no others. Thus we will be vouchsafed no additional observations from Koharik such as the following:

   Talking to the chief is something that sends goose pimples up and down his back. I think the reason he’s a captain is because the chief knows it and likes it that way. There are never any arguments from that kind of captain if you’re a chief. The reason I’m a lieutenant is because that kind of captain needs somebody around who can do the work that he can’t.

   For reasons only a publisher would understand — I sure don’t — Mercury Publications chose to publish Eshleman’s second novel featuring Lieutenant Koharik before it published the first one.

— From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 13, No. 4, Fall 1992.