STANTON FORBES – If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1970.

   During Mime Day at Shenley College, a small eastern school, students from the Classical Cinema Department all decide to dress up as Laurel and Hardy for their annual high jinks. One pair of actors takes the opportunity to murder the president of a nearby electronics corporation, Sacheville, Inc., and newly hired PR director Larry Evans is implicated in the crime. In order to save his bacon, Evans undertakes an investigation of his own, pokes around among a bunch of rather quirky (to say the least) suspects, and eventually unmasks the culprits.

   This is a fine idea for a mystery, but the execution is poor. Forbes’s style is a cross between eccentric and sophomoric; so is her humor. Some might find this sort of thing clever and amusing, but this reviewer isn’t one of them. (The best thing about the book, in fact, is its wraparound dust jacket depicting thirteen sad-faced Laurels against an orange background — one of the niftiest jackets on any contemporary crime novel.)

   Forbes is the author of numerous other novels, among them the likewise fancifully titled Go to Thy Death Bed (1968), The Name’s Death, Remember Me? (1969), and The Sad, Sudden Death of My Fair Lady (1971). She has also written numerous mysteries under the pseudonyms Tobias Wells  and Forbes Rydell (collaborations with Helen B. Rydell).

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   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.