As far as the individual entries in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV are concerned, it’s easy to forget that there a life behind each and every one of them. There’s always much more than the listing can ever say, taken in isolation by itself. Here’s an example. The entry for Muriel Davidson looks like this:

   Two books which fall into the category of crime fiction, plus a third that’s only marginally so. The year of her birth, and the year of her death. You’d read this, glance at it for up to, say, several seconds, and then you’d go on to the next one, whichever the next one might be.

   Unless you were looking for her entry with a specific reason in mind, and until you happened to want more and decided to Google her name. There is another Muriel Davidson who has something to do with the Canadian census, and you’ll going to have to screen her out. Then you come to an entry that looks promising, you click on it, and that’s when you discover, quoting the following news item in the New York Times:

    A followup story appeared the next day:

   To say that this was unexpected would be an understatement of some magnitude, and that’s putting it mildly.

   Now the reason I was looking up Mrs. Davidson was that I was doing some research on a made-for-TV movie entitled The Wednesday Woman, which was supposedly based on her novel The Thursday Woman, included in CFIV and mentioned in the first Times article above. I kept looking, hardly expecting to discover anything else of significance. That a mystery writer was murdered herself was unusual enough. That there was a second chorus coming would never have occurred to me. (You may remember the incident yourself, though, especially if you were living on the West Coast at the time.)

   It turns out that the made-for-TV movie, The Wednesday Woman, (CBS; Wed., May 24, 2000, 9 p.m.) if I am understanding the course of events correctly, was not exactly based on Mrs. Davidson’s book, but on her life, which in turn imitated the book that she had written earlier, The Thursday Woman. The movie was fiction based on a real-life sequence of events, which tragically mirrored the earlier work of fiction.

    I don’t suppose I’m making myself as clear as I should be. I realize this because it took me a while myself to put the chain of events into some sort of order. The website that seems to tell the story best is this one, but allow me to quote the essential passages, and then if you’re so inclined, you should certainly go read the rest of the story for yourself.

   First, however, a quote from the book itself:

   And now the chain of events that I mentioned:

(1A) In addition to TV scripts, celebrity profiles and other magazine articles and books, the real Davidson wrote a novel titled The Thursday Woman, about an addictive woman who has an affair with a dangerous fruitcake.

(1B) Besides writing for a magazine, the movie Muriel (played by Meredith Baxter) writes a novel with a similar plot titled The Wednesday Woman.

(2A) The real Muriel was murdered by Robert Thom, an alcoholic whom she met at a hospital where she counseled alcoholics once a week. A police report called the two “quite close.” A county probation officer said that just prior to her murder she had tried to sever her sporadic sexual relationship with Thom, who pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and was given a sentence of 17 years to life.

(2B) In the movie, Muriel is a recovering alcoholic, as is her psychotic lover (Peter Coyote) who tries to kill her after she wants to end their relationship.

(3A) and (3B) The kicker that comes next, is that the real life Muriel is murdered. In the movie, she is not, to widespread critical disapproval. If you are portraying real events as closely as this movie does, they said, how can you get away with changing the ending, even if it’s one that leaves the viewer pleased and satisfied that everything in the end, um, ended well?

   You’ll have to answer that one yourself. I can’t give you any advice. I’m still marveling over the sheer audacity of real life to imitate fiction so closely in the first place, in this one single secluded entry in CFIV.

      —

UPDATE [01-30-07] From a brief email sent by Victor Berch:

   The California Death Index gives MD’s birth date as March 21, 1923; born in St. Paul, Minnesota. This seems to be verified in the 1930 US Census taken on April 8, 1930, where her age is given as 7 years old. Her maiden name was Friedland, so her entry should read:

      DAVIDSON, MURIEL (FRIEDLAND) 1923-1983.

   This post began as an UPDATE to be found at the end of the previous one, but as I kept writing, it became long enough, I thought, and substantiative enough, to survive on its own. And so, on its own two feet, here it is:

   Taken from an email message from Al Hubin this morning: “Looks good. The only connection you haven’t made is that Murder in Mayfair was reportedly the basis for the movie “Hour of Decision” (Tempean, 1957).”

   >> No, I didn’t catch that, and I’m certainly happy to know about it. When I checked how many copies of Murder in Mayfair were offered for sale yesterday on the Internet, the answer was none. Zippo. If someone were interested in knowing what the book’s story line was, all I could offer right now in reply are the comments of a single viewer on IMDB, which I’ll add below. And, yes, I know that the movie may be NOTHING like the book, but here goes something better than nothing, at least:

    To which I add, ah yes, Hazel Court. I remember her from a short-lived TV series called Dick and the Duchess (CBS, 1957-58). It was an American series filmed in England and was mostly a comedy, but with criminous overtones.

   Hazel Court’s co-star was Patrick O’Neal, who played Dick Starrett, an American insurance claims investigator based in London and married to an Englishwoman, the “duchess” of the title. That is to say, his wife Jane, whose efforts to help her husband invariably ended in disaster.

   I may be the only person I know who remembers this series, but even though I was only 15 or 16 years old at the time, I think that I was slightly in love with Hazel Court. Yes, she was too old for me, but at that age what possible difference could a few years make, and a distance of only a few thousand miles away … ?

    Thus began a lifelong love of British crime fiction. And yes, I do digress.

   Even though Allen J. Hubin’s work on Crime Fiction IV is nominally closed, he is still accumulating Addenda for his massive bibliography, as I’ve mentioned before, and actively so at that. The Internet is a massive tool to have at your disposal, especially Google, as everyone reading this must surely know — an enormously valuable implement for scooping up data and facts that simply wasn’t available when most of the work on the book was being done.

   In Al’s case (and mine as well, if truth be told) he can now type in the name of an author whose vital statistics are scanty or non-existent (birth date, year of death, some biographical details) and/or the title of one of their books, and see what shows up.

   Sometimes you get nothing at all, and sometimes – if the name is too common – you get too much. It’s impossible, for example, to sort through all of the Bill Joneses of the world.

   Sometimes, however, you hit upon a nugget or two, or even more. Case in point. At the present time, or not until a couple of days ago, nothing was known about:

   On the web now, though, is a site belonging to Paul K. Lyons which includes, among other things, pages of information for over 500 diarists. Besides writing a small amount of fiction, Paul has been a diarist himself since 1974, and he is in the process of making the entries available online.

   In January 1981 he happened to be reading a book called Murder in Mayfair (see above) and wrote about it in his diary. One line, and Google picked it up: “In the British Library I’ve been reading Murder in Mayfair written by my father, Frederic Goldsmith.”

   Al spotted this, immediately emailed Paul and received this reply:

      [UPDATE: In a later email to me, Paul added the following:

   And there’s the connection with Vera Caspary. Here’s one of that lady’s entries in CFIV:

   Emphasis mine. And here’s Isadore Goldsmith’s full entry in www.imdb.com:

   One of the movies that caught my eye was The Scarf, which Isadore Goldsmith both produced and wrote the story it was based on. Was there some connection also to the book of the same title written by Robert Bloch (of Psycho fame)? No, not so. The co-author of the story, according to IMDB, was Edwin Rolfe, who has a single entry in CFIV himself:

   And The Scarf, by Robert Bloch (Dial, 1947) seems to have never been made into a movie at all.

   As for Vera Caspary, she has many entries in CFIV (which I won’t repeat here), even more as a screenwriter in IMDB, and there is a full biography for her here.

   She’ll certainly best be known as the author of Laura, however, and (more than likely) for the movie more than for the book.

   But which of her stories did Frederick Goldsmith use to construct his novel Murder in Mayfair? At the moment I do not know, but if and when I do, you can be sure you will read about it here.

   Born Pearl Elizabeth Dobbins on May 14, 1926, Liz Renay died January 22, 2007, at the age of 80 in Las Vegas, Nevada, of cardiopulmonary arrest.

   Quoting liberally from her biography at www.imdb.com, it is clear that there is no immediate connection between Ms. Renay and crime fiction:

   However, and a big one at that, Ms. Renay did appear in a few films that do warrant mention here, the first being an obscure classic of late 1950s film noir, Date with Death, 1959, starring Gerald Mohr.

   A semi-anonymous reviewer on IMDB says great things about the movie, from which I have excerpted the following:

   Go here for the rest of Mr. Renay’s onscreen credits, which appear largely to be schlocky B-movies or (far) less, but which also include a part on the television series Adam-12, and a role as a stripper in Peeper (1975), based on Keith Laumer’s novel Deadfall, later titled Fat Chance, in which Michael Caine plays a London PI in LA by the name of Leslie C. Tucker. Natalie Wood plays the femme fatale.

   Here are the first few lines of the obituary article in yesterday’s New York Times for Daniel Stern:

   I’ll get back to the coverage of Mr. Stern’s overall career in a minute, but among his other accomplishments, there’s one that makes him stand out from every other cellist who played with Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, and that’s the fact that he also has an entry [one book] in Allen J. Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV:

   A blurb from the book itself says: “In The Suicide Academy Daniel Stern has taken a communal dream of our increasingly ordered times and turned it into a nightmare. Part spy story, part existential parable, this coldly brilliant novel makes for an unforgettable reading experience.”

   About the book, the New York Times also goes on to say, and I quote:

   From the descriptions so far – I haven’t read it, or I’d tell you more from a personal point of view – it appears to be a step beyond your usual book of crime and detection, if not two or three. To confirm this, here are some excerpts from a longer review, this one from Time magazine for September 20, 1968. It begins this way:

   and it concludes:

   Other accomplishments of Mr. Stern deserve a mention. Even though they’re outside the realm of crime fiction, they include:

● He was born on Jan. 18, 1928, and grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in the Bronx.

● He played the cello with Charlie Parker and the Indianapolis Symphony.

● He was a vice president at Warner Brothers Studios, CBS and the McCann-Erickson advertising firm.

● After nine novels, many of them well reviewed, Mr. Stern found his métier in the short story.

● At the time of his death, he was Cullen Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Houston.

● For Warner, he promoted the movie “Woodstock” with the line, “Nobody who was there will ever be the same. Be there.”

   As promised in the update at the end of the previous post, here are the appearances of Lt. Columbo in print. Some of these are becoming difficult to find, even with the assistance of the Internet to help track them down. I wish I were able to show you covers of all of them, but it would be rather crowded if I did, or if I could. Some I don’t have copies of myself.

LT. COLUMBO in book form –

* RICHARD LEVINSON & WILLIAM LINK:

* ALFRED LAWRENCE:

* HENRY CLEMENT:

* LEE HAYS:

* BILL MAGEE & CARL SCHENCK:

* WILLIAM HARRINGTON:

   Acknowledgments go as almost always to Allen J. Hubin, Crime Fiction IV, as the primary source for most of this data.

   I’ll also take this an opportunity to thank Mark Murphy one more time for pointing out where I could go on the web to keep finding more information about Lt. Columbo. In his most recent email to me, he added: “A guy named Mark Dawidziak wrote a book, The Columbo Phile, some years ago. It was quite authoritative. I’ve also found this link to an interview with him…”

   He’s right. There are commercials in this on-the-air interview, but you can skip them, and it’s very much worth listening to.

   To sum things up, I hope, without too many more updates, Columbo as a character has been around long enough, and he’s been popular enough, that there’s plenty of information out there on him, either in print or on the Internet. In these last couple of blog entries, I don’t imagine that I’ve added anything that’s really new about him, but hopefully I’ve presented what I’ve discovered in a straight-forward and useful fashion. I’ve also ironed out some of the contradictions popped up as I went along, and tried to set the record straight on a few statements I found that were either incomplete or simply not so.

   Or to put it another way, I certainly learned a lot.

   Here is but another of the alleys that researching can take you, if you are not wary, and even if you are. While looking up The Dow Hour of Great Mysteries — see the previous post — I found a short piece from the NY Times that suggested that Prescription: Murder, the first appearance of Lt. Colombo, the rumpled police detective made so famous by Peter Falk, made its first appearance on the Dow Hour.

   Not so, and I have Mark Murphy to thank for pointing me to a website that has the right stuff, or in other words, the correct information. Of course you can go there to read it for yourself, and in fact you should. I recommend it. But since I had it wrong in my previous post, it behooves me (I always wanted to say that) to at least set up the correct timetable of the events relating to Lt. Columbo in this one.

May 29, 1960. A drama anthology called The Chevy Mystery Show began on NBC. Hosted by Walter Slezak, new scripts were dramatized every Sunday. There were no recurring characters or actors.

July 31, 1960. “Enough Rope,” was that evening’s presentation, an original story written by William Link and Richard Levinson, introducing to the world a police lieutenant named Columbo, played by a veteran character player named Bert Freed, who received “second-to-last billing in the opening credits.” He is not even included in the IMDB listings for that episode.

1962. “Prescription: Murder” the stage play opened, with veteran movie and stage actor Thomas Mitchell playing Lieutenant Columbo. This was Mitchell’s last role: “He died while the show was touring the United States and Canada, before it reached its Broadway premiere.”
   It is not clear whether the play ever reached Broadway. Some sources I’ve seen so far say yes, others say no.

1968. Filmed in 1967, “Prescription: Murder” appeared as a made-for-TV movie, with Peter Falk in the starring role. It was intended to be a one-shot appearance for the character, but fate (and the character’s popularity) had a way of changing things.

March 1, 1971. The pilot for the Columbo TV series was aired: “Ransom for a Dead Man.”

September 15, 1971. Columbo began its regular TV slot as a rotating part of the NBC Mystery Movie, with the first episode entitled “Murder by the Book.” When that overall umbrella series ended, Colombo continued to appear in a series of made-for-TV movies on a irregular basis. “Columbo Likes the Nightlife” was telecast in 2003, a stretch of some 35 years since Columbo began his run back in 1968.

   Peter Falk is now 80 years old. No one could possibly fill his shoes (or raincoat), so this may mark the end of Lt. Columbo on the small screen.

UPDATE [01-26-07] It’s later the same day, and I see that I’ve forgotten to list the books in which Lt. Columbo has appeared over the years, mostly as novelizations of various screenplays, I believe, although I could be wrong on that. It’s late, though, and I think it will wait for another day. (Tomorrow, I hope.)

   If you’ve done any researching into matters bibliographical, you know how it goes. You’re looking up one thing, you find another. In the case at hand, I was trying to pin down some information on a performance of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White on TV in the early 1960s. I found it without too much trouble, but in the process I discovered that it happened to be an episode of a series that not only do I not ever remember seeing, I don’t even remember reading about it: The Dow Hour of Great Mysteries.

   It was on, as it turns out, while I was off in college in a town so small that there we could get only one channel, and even though the local station was an NBC affiliate, I don’t remember taking very many study breaks to watch television. Except for Johnny Carson late at night, I do admit, thinking back upon it, every once in a while.

   More investigating was in order. There’s nothing on the series in my only handy in-print resource, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, 1946-Present, 3rd Edition, by Tim Brooks & Earle Marsh.

   So it was off to the computer and www.imdb.com, and lo, there it is. Here’s a list of the titles of the stories that IMDB says were adapted:

The Dow Hour of Great Mysteries. A series of seven television specials hosted by John Welch.

Season 1, Episode 1: The Bat [Mary Roberts Rinehart]
Original Air Date: 31 March 1960

Season 1, Episode 2: The Burning Court [John Dickson Carr]
Original Air Date: 24 April 1960

Season 1, Episode 3: The Woman in White [Wilkie Collins]
Original Air Date: 23 May 1960

Season 1, Episode 4: The Dachet Diamonds [Richard Marsh]
Original Air Date: 20 September 1960

Season 1, Episode 5: The Inn of the Flying Dragon [Sheridan Le Fanu]
Original Air Date: 18 October 1960

Season 1, Episode 7: The Great Impersonation [E. Philips Oppenheim]
Original Air Date: 15 November 1960

   But continuing on and doing some Googling around, I came up with the following, a short piece from the NY Times. Where does this fit in?

PLOT DESCRIPTION for Columbo [TV series]

and this, also from a Time magazine TV column:

   It doesn’t make sense for me to try to put anything more together if a episode log has already been done. If someone’s already done one, please let me know about it. My attention has been gotten.

[UPDATE 01-25-07] To answer my own question, yes, according to the BFI website, “The Cat and the Canary” is a Dow program and correctly should be number five in the series, contrary to IMDB, with “The Inn of the Flying Dragon” number six.

   Of course, to return to the theme I began at the beginning of this blog entry, while checking out the Dow series, I came across yet another series called Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries (1973-74), which is also not found in B&M, but is included on IMBD. What network it was on, or whether it was syndicated, I know nothing more.

   I never saw this one, either. Whatever you can tell me about it would once again be appreciated.

[UPDATE: 01-26-07] Mark Murphy sent me an email which addresses two issues. The first one deals with the genesis of the Lt. Columbo character — as hard as it may be to believe, the piece quoted above from the New York Times has gotten several of its facts wrong. Mark has led me to enough information about the origins of the character that I’ve decided to make a separate post out it. Look for it soon.

Mark also goes on to say, and I’m quoting here:

   Thank you, Mark. Yes, I remember when that “family hour” ruling came along, prompted by the FCC. It was early in 1975. Not only did it provide for the “family hour” between 7 pm and 8, but the network heads adopted a self-declared “family viewing” hour in the first hour of network evening prime-time (8:00-9:00 P.M., Eastern time). Quick to complain was Norman Lear producer of the popular but still controversial comedy, All in the Family. Follow the link to learn more about it.

[UPDATE 01-27-07] Taken from a followup email from Mark M. —

   That’s because those fellows have minds of their own. But all seriousness aside, it beginning to look as though someone (maybe even me) should do some annotations for the Orson Welles series. Who wrote the original stories, and who the cast members were for each episode, that sort of thing.

   Yes, it’s probably all on IMDB, but you have to work to find it. Which is also probably why I won’t get to it right away, either.

   Most of the online sites that will be running obituaries of E(verette) HOWARD HUNT (Jr.) this week will concentrate on one thing and one thing only, and that is his involvement in the Watergate matter, a true focal point in this nation’s history. You say Watergate, and to everyone in the US who was more than eight years old at the time, what memories it brings.

   It was from Bill Crider’s blog that I learned the news of Mr. Hunt’s death (and Bill learned it from someone else), and the link he provides from Yahoo! News begins this way:

   I’ll leave it to others to talk about the real life stuff. What I’ll do is see how many of the 80 books I can list, but counting only those from the spy-tale genre. Which, I hasten to add, were made all the more real by Mr. Hunt’s real-life background in matters of spying and inside-the-Beltway intrigue and adventure.

Source: Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.

As by E. HOWARD HUNT. Many of these are reprints of books published first under one of his several pseudonyms:

   I have been meaning to track down a copy of that last appearance (in 1999) of swinging CPA-sleuth Steve Bentley, but so far I haven’t. I’ve often wondered how the gap of 37 years in Bentley’s life was filled in. Most of the Steve Bentley adventures were written as by Robert Dietrich. See below. Jack Novak is described in at least one book as a “rogue DEA agent.”

As by HOWARD HUNT:

* Maelstrom (n.) Farrar 1948 [Mexico]
* -Bimini Run (n.) Farrar 1949 [Ship]
* Dark Encounter (n.) Signet 1950; See: Maelstrom (Farrar 1948).
* The Violent Ones (n.) Gold Medal 1950 [Paris]
* The Judas Hour (n.) Gold Medal 1951 [Prague]
* Whisper Her Name (n.) Gold Medal 1952 [Cuba]
* Lovers Are Losers (n.) Gold Medal 1953 [Los Angeles, CA]
* Cruel Is the Night (n.) Berkley 1955; See: Maelstrom (Farrar 1948).
* Little Miss Murder (n.) Phantom 1956
* The Berlin Ending (n.) Putnam 1973 [Neil Thorpe]
* The Hargrave Deception (n.) Stein 1980
* The Gaza Intercept (n.) Stein 1981 [Middle East]
* Cozumel (n.) Stein 1985 [Jack Novak; Caribbean]
* The Kremlin Conspiracy (n.) Stein 1985 [Neil Thorpe; Moscow]
* Guadalajara (n.) Scarborough 1986 [Jack Novak; Mexico]
* Mazatlan (n.) Stein 1986 [Jack Novak; Mexico]
* Murder in State (n.) St. Martin’s 1990 [Washington, D.C.]
* Body Count (n.) St. Martin’s 1992
* Chinese Red (n.) St. Martin’s 1992
* Ixtapa (n.) Fine 1994 [Jack Novak; Mexico]
* Islamorada (n.) Fine 1995 [Jack Novak; Florida]
* The Paris Edge (n.) St. Martin’s 1995 [Paris]

   The hyphen before a title means that it contains only marginal crime content. The first Jack Novak books appeared in hardcover in this slight variation in the byline.

As by GORDON DAVIS:

   No series characters as by Davis, but from the locales, matched up with the titles, along with the fact that they were all published by Gold Medal, paperback home of the tough noirish crime novel, you can make a pretty good guess as to what kind of stories were going on.

As by ROBERT DIETRICH:

   More about Steve Bentley in a minute.

As by JOHN BAXTER:

* -A Gift for Gomala (n.) Lippincott 1962 [Washington, D.C.]

   A book I have not seen. Note the hyphen (see above).

As by P. S. DONOGHUE:

   I’ve not seen copies of these books, published in hardcover, but spy thrillers both, I am sure it is safe to say.

As by DAVID ST. JOHN:

From Time magazine, June 11, 1973

   I promised to say more about Steve Bentley, and I’ll close with this. Here’s my review of End of a Stripper, written sometime in the fall of 2004:

  ROBERT DIETRICH – End of a Stripper.

Dell First Edition #A197; paperback original, June 1960.

   As all longtime fans who lived through the Watergate era know full well, Robert Dietrich was in reality burglar/criminal mastermind E. Howard Hunt, a gentleman who would probably have been far better off had he remained only a paperback writer. But even without knowing his full biography, I assume that Mr. Hunt always considered writing mysteries to be only a sideline – always preferring to live them instead, when he could, I’m sure.

   NOTE: For what it’s worth, from the rear jacket flap of Stranger in Town, his second [non-mystery] novel, we learn that HH earlier had several contributions published in The New Yorker and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Writing.

   As “Robert Dietrich,” Hunt’s primary character was his two-fisted, hard-drinking CPA detective, Steve Bentley, a former agent for the Treasury, but whose nose for trouble led him into the exact same situations as any two-fisted, hard-drinking private eye would find himself in.

   For the record, here’s a list of all of the Steve Bentley books … [list omitted, as I’ve already just covered the same ground]

   In any case, that makes a gap of 37 years between appearances of a series character, which if it isn’t a record, it puts Steve Bentley right up there in the top five, I’m sure. (I have some notes on this, somewhere, if only I could find them.)

   But back to End of a Stripper, the third in the series, and the first of a subset of three that appeared in three successive months. (The old pulp authors used to do that, but a streak like this is relatively uncommon among the ranks of paperback writers. Can you come up with any others?)

   Relying on the old maxim that “sex sells,” the books starts out in a distinctive manner in, you guessed it, a Washington DC strip club, where Steve Bentley is treating an old out-of-town CPA buddy to a night on the town. As they are about to leave (a) Bentley leaves a tenner on the table without waiting for the change, and (b) the lovely Haitian dancer Linda Lee takes her turn at the stage. They stay.

   After the performance, which Bentley duly appreciates, but before the lights go back on, he spies a man being hustled out of the night club, but not before the gentleman drops something into Bentley’s pocket. Thus begins the adventure, an event that could happen only to the hero of a paperback novel, and never to someone such as you or I.

   The object in Bentley’s pocket is a camera, and the gentleman being hustled out, later found dead is a sleazy private detective named Mousey Morris. After being bumped around by two thugs desiring the camera, Bentley is in the case for good, as if Linda Lee’s charms were not enough.

   Steve Bentley, of course, is a private eye in all but name only, paperback style, with just a couple of differences. His client is himself, for one thing, and secondly, he has a good relationship with a friend on the police force, Detective Lieutenant Kellaway of the Homicide Division.

   He also has a close lady friend, Mary Beth Stuart, to whom he acts as an utter cad in this book, although he does not even seem to realize it, so struck by the charms of the aforesaid Linda Lee is he. One wonders if the relationship with Mary Beth carries over to future books in the series. For her sake, I hope not.

   Back in 1960, one’s manhood was also highly correlated with the amount of hi-fi stereo equipment one had back in one’s bachelor pad. More than several times Bentley whips out his trusty Ampex and puts on the latest Percy Faith and/or Ray Anthony recordings, either to relax by, or to induce a corresponding sense of relaxation within the current lady friend he is entertaining.

   This, you understand, is part of the charm of old paperback novels. A time-machine into the past, history à la Playboy magazine and never in schoolbooks, then or now. The mystery is suitably complicated and certainly succeeds on its own merits. It’s the surrounding – let’s say ambiance – that’s also very revealing. A couple of quotes, the first from page 57, as Bentley describes the area around the Chanteclair club:

   Later on, on page 135, Bentley has just confronted a clerk behind the counter at a liquor store, where he’d stopped to make a phone call. The clerk had made a leering comment about a teen-aged girl who’d tried to pick Steve up:

   No, sir. You don’t find this stuff in textbooks. That’s for sure.

UPDATE [01-24-07] Bill Crider has done yeoman’s work in putting together a slideshow of even more of the covers of Howard Hunt’s paperbacks. Not unexpectedly, most of them feature women, in various stages of dress or (mostly) undress. Don’t miss the chance to see as many of the covers as you will here, all in one spot!

UPDATE [01-25-07] Mystery writer Mark Coggins, author of a series of novels featuring jazz bass-playing private eye August Riordan, mentions this post on his blog, for which I thank him. He also goes on to quote an interesting letter from Raymond Chandler to Mr. Hunt, responding to the latter’s complaint that Chandler was plagiarizing himself in using his early pulp stories as construction material for his later novels. Fascinating stuff, and you should go read it.

From Barbara Seranella’s webpage today comes some very sad news:

From the “About Barbara” page of the same website:

      Her first novel.

Bibliography:

Quoting from the Booklist [starred] review of An Acceptable Death:

The book description for Deadman’s Switch, as taken from the Amazon website: