E. X. FERRARS – Alive and Dead. New York: Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1975. Paperback reprint: Bantam, 1982. British edition: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1974. Hardcover reprint: Constable, UK, 1989 (shown). (Note that the author’s usual byline in the UK was Elizabeth Ferrars.)

   The novels of E. X. Ferrars (a pseudonym of Morna Brown, who also writes under the name of Elizabeth Ferrars) are best described as quiet and polite.

   The characters are usually normal middle-class British people — which is not to say they are dull; many are writers or artists or engaged in otherwise unusual professions; the women are independent and strong. But they are people to whom violence seldom happens; and when it does, they are shocked, but willingly take charge and get to the bottom of these unexpected happenings.

   Martha Crayle is a typical Ferrars heroine. Middle-aged and twice divorced, she has struggled to raise two sons while caring for an invalid aunt and running a rooming house. When the aunt dies and leaves her an unexpected legacy, she moves out all her boarders except the reserved and stem Mr. Syme (who has become her confidant and, when crime strikes, a sort of Watson) and takes up volunteer work for the National Guild for the Welfare of Unmarried Mothers.

   It is at their offices that she meets Amanda Hassall, a young pregnant woman who claims she has been deserted by her husband and impregnated by the man she is living with. Amanda does not wish to marry the baby’s father, nor does she want to put the child up for adoption as her parents have suggested. Martha takes the girl home, and a day later takes in another pregnant woman, Sandra Aspinall.

   As Mr. Syme has darkly hinted, Martha should not have given refuge to these total strangers. Before Amanda has spent two nights in the house, a murdered man turns up in a local hotel, and she is reported to have been on the scene.

   Amanda insists the victim is her estranged husband, but her parents — who appeared shortly before the body was discovered — claim the husband died in an airplane crash the year before. In addition to the parents, the boyfriends of both young women arrive, and by the time murder is done twice, Martha thoroughly regrets her involvement and wishes she had listened to Mr. Syme.

   The plot twists and turns (with plenty of surprises) all the way to the very end. Ferrars writes well and creates characters that are sure to enlist her readers’ sympathies. This novel is one of her best.

         ———
   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.

E. X. FERRARS – Murder of a Suicide. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1941. Paperback reprint: Curtis Books, no date. British edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1941, as Death in Botanist’s Bay, as by Elizabeth Ferrars (her standard byline in the UK).

   Edgar Prees, director of the Botanical Gardens In Asslington, is a man of such regular habits that when he is two hours late coming home one evening his daughter becomes quite alarmed. And rightly so, for Prees has, or so It seems, tried to commit suicide by trying to throw himself off a cliff.

   He is stopped, but the next morning, even as he still seems to be thinking about killing himself, he is murdered. Or does he kill himself?

   Officially, Inspector Tingey investigates. Tingey “liked simple virtues and was sympathetic to a few simple vices. He liked to be thought a simple man who believed what people told him.”

   Unofficially, Toby Dyke and his rather odd companion George, of apparently fixed abode but no last name, both of whom had aided in keeping Prees from hurling himself off the cliff, try to help Prees’s daughter, who is a possible suspect.

   Most of the characters, with the possible exception of Prees’s neurotic former secretary, are believable, including Gerald Hyland, an author who achieves a reasonable Income by writing about “sex and religion in the desert” and who is the complete faddist.

   There are wheels within wheels here. A plausible solution is offered at the end, and then it is overridden by an even more plausible solution.

   For reasons that I cannot recall, I had thought that Ferrars was essentially a suspense writer. This, however, is a fair-play mystery.

Bibliographic Data: I believe Bill Deeck’s assertion to be correct. Between 1940 and 1995 E. X. Ferrars wrote over 70 detective and mystery novels or story collections, and my impression is also that those written toward the end of her career were more inclined to be romantic suspense in nature than they were “traditional” detective fiction.

   But in each of the first five books she wrote, her leading character was the same Toby Dyke as in Murder of a Suicide; and I have a strong feeling that in these books, as was common for most detective fiction in the early 1940s, “fair play” deduction was the order of the day.

TOBY DYKE. [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin] —

       Give a Corpse a Bad Name (n.) Hodder 1940. [No US edition.]
       Remove the Bodies (n.) Hodder 1940. [US title: Rehearsals for Murder, Doubleday, 1941.
       Death in Botanist’s Bay (n.) Hodder 1941. [US title: Murder of a Suicide, Doubleday, 1941]
       Don’t Monkey with Murder (n.) Hodder 1942 [US title: The Shape of a Stain, Doubleday, 1942]

       Your Neck in a Noose (n.) Hodder 1942. [US title: Neck in a Noose, Doubleday, 1943]

PETE HAMILL – Dirty Laundry. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1978.

   The first in a planned series of at least three Sam Briscoe adventures, and if this one is any example of the books to follow, it is indeed a welcome addition to the roster of private eye like novels.

   Technically, Briscoe is not a private eye, but instead a freelance journalist. No matter. His actions are very private eye like. He’s a Charlie Parker fan, an ex-art student and a damn mean customer. Dirty Laundry shows its linen right from the start, gets it out quick and the action rolls.

   Briscoe’s ex-girlfriend, Anne Fletcher, calls him greatly in need of his help, but refuses to explain over the telephone for fear of bugs. He agrees to meet her and talk, but his feelings are mixed. He still carries a torch for her but feels like the whole thing should stay finished.

   He need not have worried. She’s killed in a car accident Or is it an accident? .

   Briscoe’s investigation of her death leads him to a very Chandler-like woman named Moya Vargas. (Compare Dolores Gonzales right down to the wide, white part in the middle of her scalp.) From there, it’s involvement with the now classical, fumbling F.B.I. man.

   Of course, Briscoe outwits him at every turn. But what’s the stake so important that the F.B.I. is interested? Could it be Anne’s past interest in Cuban affairs, her involvement in the revolution?

   So Briscoe is off and running, or rather flying, to Mexico. His descriptions of Mexico are so full of vivid detail you can almost smell the city streets. Having never been to Mexico City, I can only guess at how accurate Briscoe (Hamill) is, but it certainly has a realistic feel.

   Actually, at this point there is little detection left. The novel falls more correctly into the suspense category, but there are still very obvious “Chandler” highlights. There’s the body in the bath tub; Briscoe is as given corpses to the descriptions of corpses and the finding of corpses, as Chandler.

   Briscoe immediately surmises, and correctly, that he has been set up to take a murder rap, if for no other reason than to get him off the case. Like any good private eye or private eye type, that’s merely incentive to lock in with the jaws and bulldog it out to the end.

   And what an end! Full of surprises — Hamill twists the tail of the genre a bit. Not so much as to upset a staunch traditionalist, but enough to keep from making it all seem old hat.

   Nice climax. Nice atmosphere. Nice debut.

   Looking forward to more Briscoe adventures. According to the little note in the back of the book, the next Sam Briscoe adventure is scheduled for early in ’79.

Bibliographic Update:   There were two additional Sam Briscoe novels by real-life journalist Pete Hamill, The Dirty Piece (Bantam, pbo, 1979), and The Guns of Heaven (Bantam, pbo, 1983, recently reprinted by Hard Case Crime in August 2006). Alas, there were no others.

MARGARET MILES –

   A Wicked Way to Burn. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, February 1998.
         [plus]
   Too Soon for Flowers. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1999.

    You’re probably like me and when a new author starts a new series with a new character, you miss the first two or three and pick up the fourth one as the first one to read. Not this time. Here are the first two in a sequence of mysteries taking place in colonial Massachusetts, and both are well worth reading. The town is Bracebridge, halfway between Boston and Worcester. Time: the fall of 1763 and the spring of 1764.

    Reading two in succession, rare for me, only builds to the sense of community the author definitely has in mind. Young widow Charlotte Willett does most of the detective work, plain in looks, but her inquisitive mind is far from simple.

    Her next-door neighbor, Richard Longfellow, is the village selectman and of a scientific bent. His sister Diana, whose visits from Boston are not uncommon, is a flirtful sort. Rounding out the list of major players is the enigmatic Captain Montagu, whose “duties and obligations [to the Crown were] not commonly understood.” He also seems to favor Diana.

    The incident that’s at the center of the first book is, by eyewitness account, that of spontaneous human combustion. Mrs. Willett is not so sure, and her instincts are quite correct. In the second novel, a young girl dies while being quarantined after being inoculated for smallpox, a deadly scourge at that time of the nation’s history.

    Oddly, the mystery is better handled in the first book, and matters of historical interest more capably in the second — even at times to making certainly sections too ‘talky’ in regard to current events, and waxing philosophical on matters of relationships between the sexes and the nature of death.

    While the first mystery is an excellent model of fair play detection, Miles allows the dead girl’s secret to be suspected by the reader far too early in the second, and too much coincidence is allowed to stick its nasty nose in.

    But by that time, we’ve also had a long opportunity to grow even more comfortable and at home with the various and sundry folks in colonial Bracebridge, and both books are very nearly equally enjoyable.

   Bibliographic data:

      The Bracebridge series:

    1. A Wicked Way to Burn (1998)
    2. Too Soon For Flowers (1999)
    3. No Rest For the Dove (2000)

    4. A Mischief in the Snow (2001)

    As for the author herself, “Margaret Miles” is too common a name to do much research on. Al Hubin has no information about her, and neither do I. As for the series of four novels, I have not read the 3rd nor the 4th, so I also cannot tell you whether all of the loose ends were tied up before the series ended, presumably caused by the usual insufficient (and falling) sales.

WALTER MOSLEY – Little Scarlet. Little Brown & Co., hardcover; first edition, July 2004. Paperback reprint: Vision, April 2005.

    It is the fall of 1965, a time when the crew of the Gemini 5 was preparing for takeoff, Martin Luther King was alive and preaching, and the soot, ashes, and broken glass of the Watts Riots had yet to settle in Los Angeles. Walter Mosley’s ninth novel to feature Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins is set amidst the racial tensions in the aftermath of the riots that shook Los Angeles and the world for five days.

    In the opening chapter of Little Scarlet, Easy Rawlins is helping one of his tenants pick up the pieces of a torched and looted shoe repair shop. In walks Melvin Suggs, a white LAPD detective, asking Easy to assist the city on a delicate matter. A young black woman has been murdered, possibly by a white man. “If this proves to be true, and if the word “gets out on the street, the embers of the riot could easily reignite.

    In a style setting him squarely in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, Mosley brings the L.A. streets alive with greed, corruption, and jaded hopes. With Little Scarlet, he confronts the complexities of race relations, civil rights, and miscegenation…

    As an added bonus for Mosley fans, Little Scarlet includes a brief cameo appearance of Paris Minton, the Los Angeles bookstore owner of Mosley’s “Fearless Jones” series.

    The one problem I had with the book was Easy’s rationalization of the riots. Sure, he never out-and-out approved of the torching and looting, but he made it clear, repeatedly, that this was a provoked, natural, and understandable response to the White Man’s oppression.

    I don’t buy that argument, and I don’t think Easy Rawlins, a Black man who fought in WWII, would buy it either.

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. Paramount Pictures, 1932. Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Rose Hobart, Holmes Herbert. Based on the story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Director: Rouben Mamoulian.

   Continuing my pre-Halloween October odyssey in Monster Movie watching, then there was the 1932 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, with Fredric March, a film that established the definitive “Hyde look” with simian features and form incongruously decked out in evening clothes and top hat.

   Mamoulian and March, however, somehow make the tortured Jekyll a more interesting figure than the simplistic Hyde, who looks like somebody shaved an ape.

   One other thing: according to IMDB, this story has been filmed more than 20 times, and not once to my knowledge, as Stevenson wrote it: a mystery gradually unfolding to a horrific conclusion.

SHE LOVES ME NOT. Paramount, 1934. Bing Crosby, Miriam Hopkins, Kitty Carlisle, Edward Nugent, Lynne Overman, Warren Hymer, Judith Allen, Vince Barnett, George Barbier. Director: Elliott Nugent. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

    Showgirl Miriam Hopkins witnesses a murder and skips town, taking refuge in a Princeton men’s dorm where she persuades reluctant soon-to-graduate seniors (Crosby & Edward Nugent) to let her hide out.

    She’s tracked down by gangsters, and Crosby’s graduation and his burgeoning relationship with the college president’s daughter (Carlisle) are soon threatened.

    “Love in Bloom” is the most familiar of the tunes in this attractively acted and staged musical. At the time of this movie’s showing, Carlisle had recently appeared at a New York cabaret. Too bad she couldn’t have been persuaded (if she was still able) to fly in for the screening, but she was probably more of a theater than a screen personality.

THOMAS MAHON – The Fandango Involvement. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback original; 1st printing, September 1981.

    Here’s a curious little book, one so far off the beaten path — especially as a mystery, although the evidence indicates that the author may have intended it to be something more than that — that without actually having it in hand, it’s hard to consider its ever being thought publishable.

    Billy Fandango is a dwarf with a lot of curiosity. A fellow employee at the company for which he’s a computer expert seems to live in agonized total isolation and to have aged years beyond his time. Why? Just as this man seems to be coming out of his shell, he commits suicide.

    Or is it? Naturally, Billy and his six-foot girlfriend decide that further investigation is in order.

    As I say, this is an unusual book, and so’s the ending, involving both Vietnam and the arms industry — and isn’t it strange to realize that Vietnam is now very nearly ancient history?

    But the whole affair is still strangely out of kilter. The story line reels and staggers like the proverbial drunken sailor, this way and that, and back again.

    It’s also overwritten by at least half a notch, with some of the worst of the flowery dialogue sounding as if it came straight from the pages of the latest Marvel comic book. It’s the best of its field, I grant you, but by no stretch of the imagination could anyone ever be considered as actually talking that way.

[UPDATE] 11-14-09. A curious little book indeed. What I remember about this book, other than what you’ve just read, is nothing. Zilch. I have no record of having owning this book, much less knowing where my copy would be. There are only six copies offered for sale on ABE. The good news is that if you wanted to buy a copy, you needn’t pay more than three or four dollars, plus shipping.

    It is the only work of fiction Mr. Mahon wrote. His other book is Charged Bodies: People, Power, and Paradox in Silicon Valley (New American Library, 1985). According to Contemporary Authors, he was born in 1944, was an independent film-maker for two or three years before turning to public relations in 1976, eventually starting his own PR agency in 1984.

    And at the moment, no cover image. If I had one, it might jar some memories loose, but so far I haven’t been able to come up with one.

DESMOND CORY – Timelock. Frederick Muller, UK, hardcover, 1967. Walker, US, hc, 1967. US paperback reprints: Award A343S, 1968; Walker, 1984.

   When Johnny Fedora wakes up in a Spanish hospital with no memory of how he got there and registered under the name John Fox there are certain things he knows:

   Johnny Fedora is the creation of British writer Desmond Cory (Shaun McCarthy), an ex-Royal Marine Commando who had an actual license to kill issued by none other than Winston Churchill as part of a group that hunted down war criminals that might escape post war justice in the final days of the war.

   In 1948 he penned the first novel featuring his British “free agent” with Spanish blood who “kills the people who kill other people.”

   Timelock from 1967 is part of a series within a series featuring Johnny’s running battle with the cold-blooded cat-like Russian agent, Feramontov, his personal Moriarity.

   Johnny and Feramontov had previously crossed swords in Undertow and Shockwave, and in Timelock Johnny’s prior successes against the Russian have left Feramontov out of favor with the new boys in Moscow and working for an unknown traitor high up in the Spanish government.

   All Johnny knows is that he remembers something about Cell 11, and nothing at all about Laura, the woman who informs him she is his wife.

   Caught between Spanish intelligence, who is using him as a stalking horse, and Feramontov, who is plotting something to do with the Santa Ana dam that provides much of the power for the country, Johnny fights to regain his memory and to uncover Feramontov’s latest plan.

   With Laura in tow, Johnny tries to piece together the missing weeks in his life, but finds himself distracted by his beautiful new wife and on the run from the Spanish military, controlled by Feramontov’s high-placed Spanish boss.

   Cory was a superior writer of this type of thriller, highly praised by Anthony Boucher (writing about Undertow, “finesse, economy,humor, and full inventive plotting”), and with a dry subversive sense of humor that elevated Johnny above many of his Bondian competitors.

   In this one, the relation between Johnny and Laura adds a Hitchcockian note of romance and humor and the byplay with Feramontov, when he is captured and tortured, make for superior fare. Part of the pleasure of the Fedora books is the sometimes black humor that informs them:

   Fermontov is particularly well drawn, a monster, but one that is both human and still frightening. He is a well rounded character:

   Johnny and Laura escape Feramontov and end up high on the Santa Ana dam pinned down by an army of Spanish soldiers under the orders of the high-placed traitor in the Spanish State Department.

   But Johnny survives, trumps Feramontov again and uncovers the secrets of his memory loss and marriage in a suspenseful, down-to-the-wire last-minute finale, one of Cory’s trademarks in the Fedora books.

   Cory ended the Fedora series when he felt they were becoming too popular (his excuse, not mine) and took up a series of excellent suspense novels and a series of mysteries with amateur John Dobie.

   Among the non-series books Night Hawk, A Bit of a Shunt Up the River, and Bennett are outstanding. Bennett in particular may be a masterpiece.

   His novel Deadfall was a film with Michael Caine and Eric Portmann, about a jewel thief caught up in the psycho-sexual drama of a mysterious older man and younger woman who become his partners. The book is a stunner, the film not so much, though worth seeing.

   There is an attractive site for Cory that shows many of the covers for the series and features a PDF biography of the author and his creations which you can download.

   Cory never received the respect he deserved, nor Johnny the popularity he deserved.

   Some of the early Fedora books are little known here and he is too often mistakenly identified as just another Bond clone, despite the fact that like Jean Bruce’s “OSS 117” Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, he beat 007 into print by six years.

   Johnny Fedora is something a bit different from the spy craze and Cory one of the more literate writers skilled at both suspense and a wry humor. He’s well worth getting to know.

   The Johnny Fedora series is marked by good writing, taut suspense, black humor, and sometimes stunning violence, you won’t be sorry you made the effort to meet him.

Editorial Comment: A complete bibliography for Desmond Cory, under all of his pen names, appeared here on this blog in 2007, around the time his passing in 2001 was made known.

JOHN R. KING – The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls. Forge, hardcover. First Edition: August 2008.

   I was drawn to this one by the idea of having Sherlock Holmes meet up with William Hope Hodgson’s supernatural sleuth Carnacki The Ghost Hunter, albeit in this case, Carnacki isn’t a ghost hunter yet.

   The year is 1890, and Thomas Carnacki has been bumming around Europe. He’s just reached Meiringen, Switzerland and is pretty darn hungry, when he spies a pretty young woman named Anna Schmidt carrying a picnic basket. She’s about to hire a carriage to take her up to the foot of Reichenbach Falls, and Carnacki agrees to drive it for the pleasure of her company and part of her lunch.

   Shortly after their arrival they spot two men fighting at the top of the falls and one of them plummets over. When he lands they fish him out, but he has amnesia. What’s more, the other fellow starts shooting at them, wounding Carnacki as he drives them to safety.

   Soon the three of them will be in a life and death struggle with the man with the gun, a certain Professor Moriarty, while trying to restore the memory of the man they temporarily name Harold Silence — but you all know who he is.

   The story is divided into three parts: The first and third are told in alternating chapters narrated by Carnacki and Silence / Holmes, while the second is taken up by the memoirs of Professor Moriarty.

   The trouble with this book is that, since Carnacki is involved, there is a large supernatural element, and that element isn’t original. Though the ending implies that there will be further Holmes / Carnacki adventures, I probably won’t read them unless I get them much more cheaply than what I paid for this one.

   Perhaps someone should try their hand at having Hercule Poirot meet up with Seabury Quinn’s supernatural sleuth Jules DeGrandin and have them exchange fractured French phrases.

Editorial Comment. In fantasy circles John R. King is better known as J. Robert King, author of 20 or so paperback originals for Forgotten Realms, etc., and a hardcover Arthurian trilogy from Tor.