Mon 28 Apr 2025
Diary Review: IVAN T. ROSS – Old Students Never Die.
Posted by Steve under Diary Reviews[3] Comments
IVAN T. ROSS – Old Students Never Die. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1962. Detective Book Club, hardcover, 3-in-1 edition.
School teacher Ben Gordon accepts a weekend vacation at a former student’s country hideaway. The student is Jackie Meadows, now a successful comedian, and one who is now negotiating for his own TV show, which explains the additional presence of the many typical show business types on hand.
The unexpected return of one of Jackie’s old girl friends upsets things, and leads top her death. The change in Jackie since high school days leads Ben to accuse him of the murder. Admission, attempted suicide, death.
So far, so good, but the story still has 20 pages to go. Obviously a twist in the tale is yet to come, but for some reason, it is not as satisfactory as it should have been.
Analogies drawn to high school days are uniformly fine. And they would naturally lead one to conclude that Ivan T. Ross has done a considerable amount pf high school teaching.
But Jackie Meadow’s jokes are really not very funny.
Rating: ***½
April 28th, 2025 at 8:54 pm
Ivan T. Ross was the pen name of Robert Rossner (1932-1999), who wrote five mystery novels under this name between 1960 and 1964. Ben Gordon, the protagonist in the one, appeared in four of the books.
For more information about the author, he has a Wikipedia page in France. Here’s the link to the translation of that page:
https://fr-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Robert_Rossner?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc
Among other things, it confirms the fact that Rossner was indeed a teacher in real life.
He also has a page on IMDb, but it’s brief and contains only a little more than Wikipedia does:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0744470/?ref_=fn_all_nme_3
May 2nd, 2025 at 11:39 pm
There may be no harder task than trying to write a comic who is actually funny, no few accomplished writers have failed miserably at it.
May 3rd, 2025 at 12:54 am
A thought I’d never managed to put together on my own, but how true it is.