Fri 20 Nov 2015
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: WENZELL BROWN – The Rum and Coca-Cola Murders.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
William F. Deeck
WENZELL BROWN – The Rum and Coca-Cola Murders. Saint Mystery Library #14 [131], paperback original, 1960.
For reasons unexplained, Prof. Peter Aswell, expert on Maine folkways, is given a grant to study “the history and background” of Calypso. When he arrives in Trinidad with his agent, they find in one of their rooms a dead man who had been masquerading as Aswell. The man had been poisoned by bitter Cassava, part of the Obeah-Trinidadian black magic-death charm.
In between meeting such Calypso Singers as the Lord Deceiver, the Lord Agitator, and the Duke of Manchester, Aswell investigates the first and later deaths.
An interesting introduction by Leslie Charteris on Calypso and the information in Brown’s short novel about that type of music are the only reasons for reading this book.
Bibliographic Notes: Bill failed to mention at the time that the book contains a bonus short story: “Calypsonian,” by Samuel Selvon, a reprint from The Saint Detective Magazine, January 1957. As for Professor Aswell, he was the featured detective in one earlier book, Murder Seeks an Agent, a digest-sized paperback original (Green/Five Star #6, 1945) and reprinted later as Saint Mystery Library #10 [127] (1959).
Also, if anyone is interested, there is a long article online about The Saint Mystery Library, along with a complete bibliography. This one by Wenzell Brown was the last in the series. You can check it out here.
November 20th, 2015 at 2:56 pm
I wish Bill had said more about the deficiencies he found in this book, but since this is probably the only review of it ever written, perhaps it is enough to have him tell us what he did find of interest.
November 20th, 2015 at 8:55 pm
Not knowing much about Wenzell Brown, other than owning some Gold Medal originals he wote but have never read, mostly because they seem to be juvenile delinquent novels, I went searching online and found a website I hadn’t known about before and this page in particular with a lot of information about him:
http://what-when-how.com/pulp-fiction-writers/brown-wenzell-pulp-fiction-writer/
Something I didn’t know is that Brown once won an Edgar in the True Crime category, for a book about executed female killers called They Died in the Chair (1958).
November 20th, 2015 at 10:04 pm
The best of the Saint Mystery Library books was Blochman’s RED STAR OF DARJEELING, his last Inspector Prike novel.
November 20th, 2015 at 11:50 pm
The last of three. The first was the most well known, having been made into an also well-known film:
Bombay Mail (Little Brown, 1934)
Bengal Fire (Dell, 1948)
Red Snow at Darjeeling (Saint Mystery Library, 1960)
I’ve read the first but not the other two. Maybe one day I’ll catch up with all the books I haven’t read yet.
November 21st, 2015 at 8:46 am
BOMBAY MAIL is the only one I’ve read as well, almost 40 years ago now. I liked it a lot, but even though I had RED SNOW AT DARJEELING I never got around to reading it.