BOB GARLAND – Derfflinger

Manor Books 17181; paperback original. First printing, 1978. Trade paperback reprint: Writer’s Showcase Press, 2000.

   The Manor edition of this title is a very scarce book. As I type this, there is only one copy online on ABE. Manor books never did get distributed very widely, and when (or where) they did, the authors generally never had any “name appeal,” or not at least on the ones that were paperback originals. Usually an author wrote one or maybe two books for them and nobody else, and nobody ever heard from them (the authors) again.

   Which is why it surprised the something out of me to learn that Bob Garland, now a retired business executive, has written a total of four other book-length adventures of Humboldt Prior, computer manufacturing executive for Intercontinental Data Processing, of New York, NY. The order in which the adventures occur and in which the books were published is a little confusing, and I will try to elucidate as best I can.

   The only one published at the time it was written, I think, is the one at hand. As stated above, the book was reprinted as a trade paperback by Writer’s Showcase Press, in October 2000, and as such it is denoted as a Second Edition. (I do not know if the book has been revised for this edition, but there is the possibility, as there is a good chance Manor chopped it up and did a quick “make it fit” procedure on it, even before WordPerfect came along and made it easy.) It is interesting to note, however, that this 2000 edition is described as the “Second Humboldt Prior Mystery.”

   The other books in the series are the following, in order as published. All are trade paperbacks:

R.I.P. 37E: The Third Humboldt Prior Mystery Writer’s Showcase Press, October 2000.

Slaying the Red Slayer: The First Humboldt Prior Adventure. Writers Club Press; 2nd edition, April 2001. [If there was ever a First Edition, I do not know about it.]

The Elephant Mask: The Fourth Humboldt Prior Mystery. iUniverse, January 2004.

Tradedown: The Fifth Humboldt Prior Mystery. iUniverse, December 2005.

   The only one of these last four which I have is a copy of the third adventure, R.I.P. 37E. I have not read it, but from a quick peek inside, the story appears to have taken place in 1979, so there is the possibility that it was written back then, around that time, but it was never published until Garland retired from his day job.

   I’m really reaching now, but on Amazon.com, there is a short description of the last two books that tells us that Prior is “now … aging” (Elephant Mask) and is “now 60 years old” (Tradedown). Which really makes me feel old, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. It could be that these last two books were written recently, and not earlier.

   But where Slaying the Red Slayer fits in as nominally the “first” book in the series, I do not know.

   In any case, Derfflinger certainly reads like a debut appearance, as in it an amateurish but enthusiastic Humboldt Prior agrees to help the widow of a friend in England who had been doing some investigation on his own into a ship salvaging operation conducted at the end of World War II. He was killed in an auto accident, but as Humboldt takes over the investigation, he too becomes the target of some very narrow scrapes.

   The reason the book reads like the first in a series is that Humboldt seems to be awfully new and/or naive in matters which he seems to be in over his head about. Almost, I hasten to add, because he is quite competent at what he normally does, in a global business sense, and he doesn’t mind admitting it.

   With a billion dollar operation behind him (Intercontinental Data), Humboldt gets around fairly easily and comfortably – to Scotland and then to Germany before heading back to England – on the company’s private Jet Star, with various nefarious villains on his tail most of the way.

   Not only is Humboldt amateurish but enthusiastic, but so is the story. It’s enjoyable enough, but until the end, which contains a surprise or two, there’s no meat to the tale at all, nor does it quite connect on many levels. On the other hand, enthusiasm is sometimes all it takes, and even though this may surprise you, given my comments so far, I discovered when I was finished that I really wouldn’t mind reading any of the four follow-up adventures at all.

   And so perhaps I will.

POSTSCRIPT.   If you would like to know something more about the primary focus of the travail that Humboldt encounters, you could do no worse than to look the word Derfflinger up on Google, say. It’s just a suggestion.

[UPDATE] 06-12-08.   To no one’s surprise, I am assuming, including my own, I have not yet read or obtained any of the other books in the series. There is still only one copy of the Manor edition of Derfflinger offered on ABE, and in fact it may be the very same book. I also do not know any more about the publishing history of the Bob Garland’s work than is stated here.