WINIFRED PECK – The Warrielaw Jewel. Faber & Faber, UK, hardcover, 1933. E. P. Dutton, US, hardcover, 1933.

   In 1933, Catholic priest and writer Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, one of the talented Knox siblings, children of Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, former Anglican Bishop of Manchester, published Body in the Silo, a detective novel.

   This is not really news. Father Knox, best known in the mystery genre today for having formulated an influential set of “rules” for the writing of detective fiction, had before 1933 already published three well-received detective novels and been admitted as an original member of the Detection Club in 1930.

   There was a five year lag between The Footsteps at the Lock (1928) and The Body in the Silo (1933), but, still, the appearance of the latter could not exactly be called a surprise.

   But another Knox sibling also published a detective novel in 1933: one of Ronald Knox’s sisters, (Lady) Winifred (Knox) Peck. Entitled The Warrielaw Jewel, this mystery tale by Peck, a once successful though today mostly forgotten mainstream novelist, received quite favorable reviews and holds up well today.

   Three years ago, the excellent Persephone Books reprinted Peck’s House-Bound, a mainstream novel with a World War Two period setting, with an introduction by her (and Ronald Knox’s) famous niece, the late novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. The Warrielaw Jewel deserves reprinting as well.

   Jewel is notable as an early example of a Golden Age mystery that, in its shifting of emphasis from pure puzzle to the study of character and setting, helped mark the gradual shift from detective story to crime novel which Julian Symons famously celebrated in his history of the mystery genre, Bloody Murder .

   A tale of Victorian/Edwardian familial dysfunction, Jewel rather resembles Margery Allingham’s Police at the Funeral (1931) and More Work for the Undertaker (1948), as well as S.S. Van Dine’s The Greene Murder Case (1928).

   While the puzzle certainly is not as intricate as Van Dine’s in the latter novel, the writing is excellent, in my view on a level with that of Allingham and her Crime Queen contemporaries Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. (There also is some similarity to American Mary Roberts Rinehart’s mystery novel The Album, published the same year, though thankfully The Warrielaw Jewel is without all Rinehart’s Had-I-But-Known digressions.)

   As one pleased reviewer noted of Peck’s mystery novel, “the writing, atmosphere, and characterization” made the story “something quite distinct.”

   The Warrielaw Jewel actually is set in the Edwardian era, 1909 specifically ( “that period, so far away from modern youth, when King Edward VII lived, and skirts were long and motors few, and the term Victorian was not yet a reproach”).

   The narrator, Betty Morrison, wife of the lawyer for the eccentric, decaying gentry family of Warrielaws, tells the tale from the vantage point of the early 1930s, looking back over those shocking events in the vicinity of Edinburgh, Scotland, including the death of elderly family head Jessica Warrielaw and the trial of her favored nephew for murder.

   Involved in the affair is a family heirloom, a so-called fairy-jewel, said to have been given to the Warrielaw family centuries ago by a glittering enchanted lady carried off and married by a dark and brooding laird ancestor. A curse is said to have been laid upon the jewel. Certainly dreadful happenings, whatever the cause, overtake the family in the present day.

   There is investigation and detection, performed by an retired policeman friend of Betty Morrison’s husband; yet it is Betty herself who provides the final, crucial piece of evidence. The mystery itself is engrossing, though the best elements of the tale are found in the characters — particularly the various odd Warrielaws and their remaining retainers –and the Edwardian Scottish atmosphere.

   I hope that one day Winifred Peck’s The Warrielaw Jewel is republished and honored as a member of the company of better-written, literate mysteries of the period, for it certainly deserves to be so designated.

   When one reviewer declared The Warrielaw Jewel “in a class by itself” and added that “it looks as if [Mrs. Peck] were going to bear [Father Knox] at his own special game,” he was not, in my view, exaggerating.

Bio-Bibliographic Data:   Winifred Peck, 1882-1962, was born and educated in Oxford and lived in Edinburgh, according to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. His bibliography includes only one other mystery novel that she wrote, the provocatively titled Arrest the Bishop? (Faber, 1949).

   While copies of the latter may be found offered for sale online (although with asking prices of $50 and up), none of The Warrielaw Jewel were seen, even with a US edition.

DICK CLUSTER – Return to Sender. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1988. Reprint paperback: Penguin, 1990.

   Dick Cluster, a Bostonian newcomer to our field, offers Return to Sender. Alex Glauberman, 40, repairs foreign cars in Boston. He’s divorced with one child who lives with her remarried mother.

   Alex’s current bedmate is a professor, on sabbatical in London. He’s going through chemotherapy for recently diagnosed cancer, and his life and thinking and physical condition are much influenced by this.

   One day, while he is waiting in line at a post office, an elderly man asks him to mail a package to his daughter in Berlin. Alex does so. Later, after Alex sees him being escorted away by a pair of strongarm types, the man returns to ask Alex, for $2500, to go to Germany and retrieve the package.

   Alex had thought to visit London anyway, and agrees. But this proves a most deadly assignment. Sender, with its fresh and intriguing plot and central character, is well worth your attention.

Bibliographic Data:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin]

CLUSTER, DICK.   1947- .     Alex Glauberman in all:

        Return to Sender. Dutton, 1988.
        Repulse Monkey. Dutton, 1989.
        Obligations of the Bone. St. Martin’s, 1992.

Editorial Comment:   I thought the contrast between the two covers is very interesting. As usual for mystery novels of this era, the one on the hardcover is about as stark and minimal as you can get. The cover of the paperback is far more colorful, although perhaps hard to make out what’s really pictured, unless you can look at it closely, but at least (to me) it has something to it that also says Pick Me Up At Least and Look Inside.

   There’s no need to think I’m disparaging Dutton, who published the hardcover. Artists cost money, and I suspect 90% of the sales of this mystery, by a first-time writer, went to libraries sight unseen, and another 9% went to the author’s friends. (A small laugh, hopefully at no one’s expense.)

   By the way, you can’t make it out, but the quote on the paperback is by Tony Hillerman: “Gripping… raises the Mystery into the realm of Literature.”

WILLIAM G. TAPPLY – Dark Tiger. St. Martin’s, hardcover, September 2009. No softcover edition scheduled.

Genre:   Unlicensed investigator. Leading character: Stoney Calhoun; 3rd in series. Setting:   Maine.

First Sentence:   Stonewall Jackson Calhoun was sweeping the floor around the display of chest waders and hip boots when the bell dinged over the door, signaling that somebody had come into Kate’s Bait, Tackle, and Woolly Buggers shop.

    Stoney Calhoun has a lot of military-type skills but no memory of how he came by them. But The Man in the Suit checks periodically checks on him to see whether any memories have returns.

    Now the Man needs his help and Stoney can’t refuse. An operative and a young woman were found dead in a car, each with a gunshot wound. What’s interesting is they were both dead before they were shot.

    Stoney, half-owner in a fishing shop and an expert guide, is to go to an exclusive fishing lodge in Northwestern Maine to learn how they died and what the operative was investigating.

    I’ve always liked Tapply’s characters. Stoney is moral, principled, somewhat curious about his past, which he was told he doesn’t remember due to having been struck by lightning, but content to live his life from here forward.

    He is in love with Kate, his business partner, but understands women are different from men and is undemanding. He has skills he doesn’t remember learning and is more curious than surprised when he discovers a new one. Kate’s husband is in long-term care with MS, knows and approves of Kate and Stoney being occasional lovers. And then there’s Ralph, Stoney’s Brittany spaniel, as human as any character except when Stoney talks to him, Ralph doesn’t answer back.

    Tapply’s voice is very Downeast, almost folksy without being patronizing, yet comfortable. Whether Stoney remembers it or not, Tapply let you know he has seen a lot of life… “All creatures had repertoires of survival… All creatures except humans, he thought. Humans just killed each other.”

   You know from the descriptions that Tapply had a great love of Maine and of fishing — he wrote several books on fishing. Those descriptions remind me why I love and miss that part of the country.

    This is not a high-octane, shoot-em-up book. The book is much more character, than plot, driven but has its elements of suspense. Dark Tiger is the last Stoney Calhoun book and was written while Mr. Tapply was suffering from leukemia, from which he died in July 2009.

    I shall miss Stoney, Kate and Ralph, along with Mr. Tapply’s Brady Coyne books, but he is an author whose work I am glad to have read and do recommend.

Rating:   Good Plus.

The Stoney Calhoun series —

       1. Bitch Creek (2004)
       2. Gray Ghost (2007)

       3. Dark Tiger (2009)

Editorial Comment:   For this blog’s tribute to William Tapply at the time of his death, go here.

THE RISE AND FALL OF LEGS DIAMOND.   Warner Brothers, 1960. Ray Danton, Karen Steele, Elaine Stewart, Jesse White, Simon Oakland, Robert Lowery, Judson Pratt, Warren Oates, Frank DeKova, Diane (Dyan) Cannon. Director: Budd Boetticher.   Novelization by Otis H. Gaylord, Bantam A2079, 1960.

   Rise and Fall is Budd Boetticher’s version of Richard III, with a preening megalomaniac rising to power by a combination of scheming and brutality, only to find that he has reached a rather precarious perch.

   Beyond that, there’s nothing much good you can say about the film: the plotting is flat and unsurprising, the action scenes few and rather pallid (particularly from a director like Boetticher, who crafted memorable action in The Tall T and Ride Lonesome) and the photography by Lucien Ballard is surprisingly flat, making the Warners back lot look like nothing more than a Warners back lot.

   Legs has one compelling virtue though, and that’s the performance of Ray Danton in the title role, perfectly realized by actor and director. Even when the film itself is plodding and predictable, Danton’s sharply-dressed, sexually magnetic hood keeps our attention.

   Boetticher’s westerns were always more concerned with the macho bad guys than the nominal heroes, just as his bullfighting movies focused more on the gaudy matadors than the charging bulls, and Legs Diamond carries this on with a hero/villain to whom Image is everything.

   It’s a memorable bit of acting/directing, and I just wish there were a better movie to go around it.

CHAD HANNA. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Henry Fonda, Dorothy Lamour, Linda Darnell, Guy Kibbee, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Fred Shepely, Roscoe Ates, Olin Howland. Screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel by Walter D. Edmonds. Director: Henry King. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

   This handsome Technicolor production, screened in a stunning print, and based on a popular novel by Walter D. Edmonds, also author of Drums Along the Mohawk, recounts the saga of a small, one-ring circus setting up in rural communities in upper New York state in the mid-19th century.

   Chad Hanna (Henry Fonda), after helping an escaping slave evade capture, runs away with the circus, accompanied by Caroline Tridd (Linda Darnell), daughter of an abusive slave tracker. The family circus, run by Guy Kibbee and Jane Darwell, with its star attraction equestrienne Albany Yates (Dorothy Lamour), is competing with a larger circus that will stop at nothing to eliminate its competition.

   This rivalry provides much of the drama of the film, with the romantic triangle formed by Fonda, Darnell, and Lamour, a potent attraction for the movie-goers of the time. And it might be added that the trio is as attractive and charismatic 70 years later.

   However, it’s the affectionate portrayal of the inner workings of the small traveling circus, now a historical curiosity, that is responsible for much of the appeal of this episodic film. Henry King’s skill at these rural dramas dates back to the silent classic Tol’able David (1922), with a notable sound film, State Fair (1933), starring Will Rogers, attesting to his continuing command of the medium.

   I will add that my enjoyment of the film was enhanced by some personal history. My father’s brother ran away from home and joined Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus, where he appeared as a clown for some 20 years and, like Chad, married an equestrienne.

   When I knew him decades later, his marriage had failed, and he was a rather dour middle-aged man. At the time, I didn’t know of his background, and one of my regrets is that I didn’t and missed the opportunity of hearing from him first-hand his stories of his days with the circus.

CORTLAND FITZSIMMONS & JOHN MULHOLLAND – The Girl in the Cage. Frederick A Stokes, hardcover, 1939; Grosset & Dunlap, reprint hardcover, no date.

   Once again, Cortland Fitzsimmons has taken a sure-fire idea — “the first mystery based on the psychology and deception of the magician’s art” — and turned it into a dud. Referring to the prose style of the ineffable James Corbett, whom it has been claimed I try to emulate, Bill Pronzini has said reading it is “like watching grass grow.”

   Well, reading Fitzsimmons is like watching grease congeal. Furthermore, his narrator; a Roman Catholic priest nearing seventy, could be a twenty-year-old college student the way the author portrays him. The other characters are more like tissue paper than cardboard.

   Putting on a magic show between films at a theater, Peter King enlists the assistance of a frightened and unprepossessing — she’s not the latter, of course, but you already guessed that –young lady, who then volunteers before King’s stooge can do so to disappear from a cage.

   Only later is it discovered that the man sitting in front of her has had a dagger plunged into his neck. Four or five corpses later — tedium caused me to lose count — King spots the multiple murderer through his knowledge of magic.

   Daniel Stashower, author of two books featuring magicians, The Ectoplasmic Man and Elephants in the Distance, tells me that Mulholland, a master magician himself, wrote a nonfiction work on magic that was quite readable. Which leads me to deduce that he had no role in this novel other than the magic, none of which, true to his code, he explains.

Bibliographic Data: This collaboration with Fitzsimmons is the only entry for John Mulholland in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV. As Bill Deeck pointed out, he was quite well known in the world of magic and magicians. You can find his MagicPedia page here.

   I don’t know how well known Cortland Fitzsimmons (1893-1949) was as a mystery writer, but there are 17 titles to his credit in CFIV between 1930 to 1943. His most famous mystery might be Death on the Diamond (Stokes, 1934), which was also made into a rather bizarre film starring Robert Young as a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals. (Apparently his teammates keep getting bumped off, one by one.)

RUTH RENDELL – A Demon in My View. Doubleday, hardcover, 1977. Paperback reprints include: Bantam, 1979; Black Lizard/Vintage, 2000. First published in the UK: Hutchinson, 1976. Arrow, UK, pb, 1980 (shown).  Film: First City, 1992, with Anthony Perkins, Uwe Bohm, & Sophie Ward. Screenplay & director: Petra Haffter.

   The upstairs boarder at 142 Trinity Road is a quiet prissy man with a secret, a plastic mannequin in the cellar. When the compulsion becomes too great, the mannequin dies. Routine is disturbed, however, when a new roomer moves in, into the flat with a view of the cellar door.

   It’s like watching a house of cards cave in, one card at a time. Precisely, methodically Arthur Johnson’s crisis is developed into a private catastrophe, one that spreads its evil as it grows.

   Rendell is truly the fine writer people have been telling me she is. From a first chapter that seems to have only short story possibilities she fills a novel filled with convincing characters whose lives interwearve with fascinating accuracy.

   As a result the ending may seem at first unsuitably melodramatic. But at the next instant the realization comes that it has just snapped into place like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, or the jaws of a gigantic self-made trap.

   Don’t put off reading Rendell as long as I have.

[UPDATE] 10-24-10.   This could easily be the earliest of my reviews that I’ve posted on this blog. It was written over 33 years ago, or nearly half a lifetime, and in all honesty, I can’t say that my writing style has changed any.

   Do I remember the book? I can’t say that I do, even though I gave it an “A Plus” at the time. I also can’t say that I’ve followed my own advice and have read much of Ruth Rendell’s work since that time. If I have, I’m sure that most of what I’ve read has been from her Inspector Wexford series.

   When I could not find a copy of the cover of the Doubleday edition to show you, I thought the British paperback that I did find was both the most colorful and pictorially representative the story inside.

   I did not know there a film made of this movie until 20 minutes ago. Re-reading my review again, why am I not surprised to learn that Tony Perkins was chosen to play the leading role?

PETER GUNN. Pilot: “The Kill.” NBC-TV, 22 September 1958. Craig Stevens, Lola Albright, Hershel Bernardi, Hope Emerson. Guests: Gavin McLeod, Jack Weston. Written & directed by Blake Edwards. [The series: 1958-1960, NBC; 1960-1961, ABC.]

GUNN. Paramount Pictures, 1967. Craig Stevens, Laura Devon, Ed Asner, Sherry Jackson, Albert Paulson, M.T. Marshall, Helen Traubel, J. Pat O’Malley, Regis Toomey. Screenplay by Blake Edwards & William Peter Blatty. Directed by Blake Edwards.

PETER GUNN. TV-movie/pilot, ABC, 22 September 1958. Peter Strauss, Barbara Williams, Peter Jurasik, Pearl Bailey, Charles Cioffi, Jennifer Edwards. Written & directed by Blake Edwards.

   Some ideas are just too good for one telling. Roy Huggins novella “Appointment with Fear,” a Stuart Bailey private eye tale, was the basis for the films The Good Humor Man and “State Secret,” the pilot for 77 Sunset Strip (and at least two episodes), and the pilot for City of Angels. So Blake Edwards, with variations, used “The Kill,” the pilot for Peter Gunn, as the basis for the 1967 feature film and the 1989 refit with Peter Strauss.

   The basic story, as outlined in “The Kill,” is that an aging gangster is killed by two assassins dressed as cops in a phony cop car. Peter Gunn owed the old time mobster his life and won’t leave his death alone.

   An ambitious gangster (Gavin McLeod — called Fallon here, Fusco in the movie) wants to take over and blows up Mother’s, the jazz bar run by Hope Emerson where Peter Gunn’s chanteuse girlfriend Edie sings, as an example of how his extortion racket will work. Gunn figures it out, puts pressure on Fallon’s top man (Jack Weston) and sets him up as a target for the two phony cops.

It wasn’t as if borrowing was new to Blake Edwards. He began his career creating singing detective Richard Diamond for Dick Powell on radio, then moved into screenplays and television. He updated Richard Diamond as a smooth non-singing private eye played by David Janssen for television, then he also wrote and directed a pilot with Brian Keith for a Mike Hammer series.

   Peter Gunn was very much a cross between the cool hip buttoned down and laid back Richard Diamond and the tough violent jazz themed world of Mike Hammer.

   Peter Gunn, for the uninitiated, is a private eye in a riverfront town that is never named but always seems a bit wet and foggy. He operates out of Mother’s, a smoky bar where his girl friend Edie is the singer, and he stands at the bar and exchanges hip humor with the owner, Mother. His chief ally on the police force is Lt. Jacobi, a human, dogged, world weary policeman.

   Peter is aided by a small army of informers and snitches, all colorful, eccentric, and prone to theatrics. The closest literary equivalent to Peter Gunn was likely Henry Kane’s Peter Chambers who has a similar jazzy offbeat quality — and ironically (or not), Kane wrote the only novelization of the television series.

   To add to the cool dialogue, complex plots, and moody noirish look the series was blessed with perhaps the most recognizable theme in television history, Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme.

   What the Monty Norman/James Bond theme is to spy fiction, the Gunn theme is to crime. It is simply unforgettable (little wonder, in addition to Mancini, at the time his orchestra included legendary John Williams.) Even people who never heard of Peter Gunn know that iconic theme.

   One more element came into play: perfect casting. If there was a better choice than Craig Stevens to play Peter Gunn I can’t imagine him. Stevens was a minor B-actor whose biggest role was probably that of a shell shocked soldier in Since You Went Away and by the time of Peter Gunn had fallen to appearing in films like The Preying Mantis and Abbot and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

   Just before Peter Gunn he had an outstanding role as a cool gun man in Budd Boetticher’s Buchanan Rides Alone, which may well have led to his being cast as Gunn. For whatever reason, he took the part and ran with it. The result was like seeing Mike Hammer played by Cary Grant. It is simply one of the most iconic roles in television history, on a level with Lucy and Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason.

   Craig Stevens is Peter Gunn. Much of the character and mood established with nothing more than a raised eyebrow or a his cat like walk. Craig Stevens is Peter Gunn the way Sean Connery was James Bond or Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes.

   For American audiences, Peter Gunn and Stevens were the transition from Mike Hammer to James Bond.

   The rest of the cast included Lola Albright as the sexy somewhat melancholy Edie who knows her man is only her man in a limited way:

   Hershel Bernardi was cast as Lt. Jacobi the world weary cop and veteran Hope Emerson was Mother, an imposing presence even on the small screen. Veteran character actors like J. Pat O’Malley and Regis Toomey were semi regulars as colorful informers.

   The series ran only three seasons on NBC and then ABC. When it went off the air it found new life in syndication, and in 1967 Edwards decided to try again as a feature film. Stevens was back, but Lola Albright was replaced by Laura Devon as a rather wan Edie. Ed Asner was good as a tougher version of Jacobi and Helen Traubel played Mother. O’Malley and Toomey again appeared as informers.

   The plot was expanded from “The Kill” with some fine variations — at least one borrowed from Mickey Spillane’s Vengeance is Mine. Albert Paulson was “Fusco,” the Fallon character from the pilot, M. T. Marshall had a standout role as Daisy Jane, a madam who ran a floating whorehouse, and Sherry Jackson appeared as a beautiful and mysterious kook who shows up naked in Gunn’s bed.

   The world had changed in six years though Gunn hadn’t, and the whole thing is faintly anachronistic, but it is done with such style that hardly matters. It’s a superior effort all around, with at least three outstanding set pieces, including a shoot out in a mirrored bedroom, a confrontation on a racket ball court (taken in part from “The Kill”), and the finale, a bloody brawl that may well be one of the most violent scenes filmed to that time.

   Craig Stevens commands the big screen as he did the small one, but the time for Gunn was gone and though it did well, the critics weren’t kind and Gunn disappeared again. Stevens had several other series that ran varying lengths of time — Man of the World, Mr. Broadway, The Invisible Man, did a pilot for a “Thin Man” series, Nick and Nora (notoriously bad), and probably had his last big role in Edward’s S.O.B.

   By 1989 Blake Edwards had moved onto bigger things, but he trotted out Peter Gunn yet again with a new actor in the role, Peter Strauss, then still fresh off his star-making role in Rich Man, Poor Man.

   Again a gangster has been killed and a gang war threatens. Peter Gunn caught in the middle has to find the killers and stop the bloodshed.

   As a private eye film this is not bad, but as Peter Gunn it just isn’t right.

   Strauss makes his first appearance in a dinner jacket with a white silk scarf and looks like Michael J. Fox wearing his father’s suit. Edie has almost nothing to do and is largely replaced by a scatterbrained secretary (in the original series Mother’s was Pete’s office) who has far too much screen time. Peter Jurasik plays Jacobi as a petulant and cynical typical cop. Pearl Bailey has little to do as Mother.

   Frankly it’s all tired and hackneyed. Not bad, but not Peter Gunn, not by a long sight. Peter Gunn in a turtle neck just didn’t fit somehow. That said, the film has it’s moments, with a nice variation on the shootout from The Big Sleep at the end. One nice touch, Lt. Jacobi acquires a first name — Hershel.

   Strauss might have been good as a private eye. Just not Peter Gunn. As made for television private eye films go, this isn’t bad. If you had never seen Craig Stevens and the original you might even have been impressed.

   But it’s Diet Coke, not the Real Thing.

      The plot varies even more from “The Kill” than Gunn did, but there are enough similarities you won’t have any trouble recognizing where the idea came from. Charles Cioffi is the gangster this time.

   In the years since Peter Gunn projects have come and gone. John Woo had one at one point. It would be nice if by some miracle everything came together and we got one more great Peter Gunn, but it seems unlikely. Gunn is very much of its time, an attitude, an actor, and a handful of people he interacted with, and very much one of the best themes ever written, bar none.

      Not that we will be, but perhaps, just this once, we should be grateful for what we have.

VAL McDERMID – Beneath the Bleeding. HarperCollins, UK, hardcover, August 2007. Harper, first US edition; trade paperback, September 2009.

   This is the fifth of now six novels in the Val McDermid’s Tony Hill series. Dr. Hill, a clinical psychologist who works as a profiler for the Bradfield police, is sidelined for much of the novel after being severely wounded by an inmate in the Bradford Moor Secure Hospital. He had escaped from his “secure” cell and rampaged through the halls with an axe.

   The action then shifts to an investigation by DCI Carol Jordan of the murder of Bradford’s star midfielder, with Tony serving as a consultant and, as he slowly recovers, beginning to slip out of the hospital to interview suspects.

   The investigation leads to the discovery of related murders, all of them committed with the use of exotic poisons, while, unbeknownst to the police or to Tony, a local resident appears to be preparing to launch a major terrorist attack on Bradford’s stadium during a game.

   The novel may appear to be cluttered, but it’s superbly managed by McDermid, and makes one wish that she would put aside some of her stand-alone novels, which I’ve found overwritten and increasingly long-winded, for more of this still vital series. It seems to engage her considerable talents more richly than anything else she’s done recently.

The Tony Hill / Carol Jordan series:

      1. The Mermaids Singing (1995)
      2. The Wire In The Blood (1997)

      3. The Last Temptation (2002)
      4. The Torment of Others (2004)
      5. Beneath the Bleeding (2007)
      6. Fever of the Bone (2009)

   The cases of Tony Hill and Carol Hill have also been dramatized over the course of six seasons (31 episodes) of Wire in the Blood (UK-ITV, 2002-2008). Robson Green played Dr. Tony Hill, while DCI Carol Jordan was portrayed by Hermione Norris. (Perhaps someone can explain why the latter appeared in only 14 of the episodes shown.)

   All six series appear to have been released on DVD in the US.

    A list of favourite thrillers; for which my only criteria has been personal enjoyment. With gritted teeth I have limited some authors to one title when I could easily have named more, and I have resisted the urge to add in hundreds of titles which fall more easily into the ‘crime’ or ‘mystery’ (or even horror or western) genres.

    This list was inspired by David Vineyard’s survey of thrillers, but is in no way in competition with it.

    If it introduces a new author or title to anyone and they get the same pleasure from reading them that I did, then my work here is done.