LUKE SHORT – Bold Rider. Dell 1st Edition #7, paperback original; 1st printing, 1953. Reprinted several times. Previously serialized as “Gun-Hammered Gold,” in the Daily News, January 17 through March 5, 1938 (according to copyright renewal records) and the Chicago Tribune (January 18 through March 5).

   My review not too long ago of First Claim (1960), also by Luke Short (and which you can find here) was not exactly negative, but neither was it positive, either.

   What I did say was that I was disappointed, mostly because of a well-worn plot (cowboy comes home from the war to reclaim his land, now held by someone else) and the fact that there were no twists in the tale along the way.

   I was not disappointed with Bold Rider, I can tell you that right now. There is plenty of action from start to finish, with definitely more than one thread to the plot, one which you will hard pressed to know which way it will turn next.

   Primarily, though, it’s the story of Poco St. Vrain, a chap who’s on the wrong side of the law, according to the law, and awfully handy with a gun, but he’s also a well-liked young fellow whose word, when he gives it, is as good as gold.

   And gold is the other part of the story. Two representatives of an insuring company are to act as guardians to a final shipment of the stuff from a mine perched at the top of a mountain, accessible only by a treacherous trail up its side, and all but deadly in the winter. But both men are dead, and their identification papers have fallen into the wrong hands.

   Poco poses as one, for nefarious reasons (well, it is gold, after all) and an even more despicable outlaw named Espey Cardowan pretends to be the other. Working independently — neither can call out the other, of course — they must work their way down the mountain again, together and in single file, carrying five hundred pounds of ore between them, and neither trusting the other as far as they can throw them.

   To make this small portion of the story short, Poco ends up in a snow-filled ravine with no way out, but then, out of the blue comes… And this is on page 45, with over 145 left to go.

   Poco makes his way out of this predicament, of course, you should not be surprised to learn, and he promises the daughter of the mine manager that he will retrieve the gold, a promise not easily kept as ruses, double crosses, shootouts, kidnapping, and a deadly runaway train stand in his way, not to mention the fact that Cardowan turns out to be the most vicious outlaw you may ever want to read about – being responsible for the kidnapping alluded to just now, and the runaway train in which all of the other passengers are dead (at his hand) or have been forced to jump.

   There is also the inevitable dance room girl with a heart of gold (there’s that word again), but Steamboat’s not your usual kind of dance room girl. She’s as good with a gun when it becomes necessary as anyone else in this tale, which I am pleased to recommend to you, without a single reservation.

ARNOLD FREDERICKS – The Blue Lights. W. J. Watt & Co., hardcover, 1915. Hardcover reprint: Grosset & Dunlap, no date. Serialized (four parts) in The Cavalier as “The Changing Lights,” January 11 through February 1, 1913.

    Before there was Nick and Nora Charles, or Pam and Jerry North, or even Lord Peter and Harriet Vane, a pair of happily married American sleuths were pursuing mystery across the international scene fighting crime tooth and nail.

    Robert and Grace Duvall were the creation of Frederick Arnold Kummer, a popular mystery writer both under his own name, and as Arnold Fredericks and an early tie to the burgeoning new cinema as both a scenarist and like Arthur B. Reeve, the creator of Craig Kennedy, adapting films to print. He also co wrote musicals with Sigmund Romberg and Victor Herbert — not bad company.

    The Duvalls debuted in the pulps in The Cavalier as “The Honeymoon Detectives,” a series Robert Sampson describes in Yesterday’s Faces, The Solvers (Volume 4) as “prose as bland as unsweetened farina.” There Robert Duvall, private investigator, and Grace Elliott, plucky American girl, met and fell in love. [Note: Follow the link above for a long excerpt from Bob Sampson’s book.]

    Richard, as the series opens, is a “gifted” private detective assigned to the staff of M. Lefevere, Prefect of the Paris Police.

    Despite being such a bright and gifted sleuth, Richard has nothing on Grace, who is front and center for most of their six adventures, finding more ways to get into trouble than Nancy Drew ever imagined. The six books cover a number of changes in the Duvall’s life. As The Blue Lights opens they are retired from crime fighting and living in Maryland on a plantation until Richard’s fame draws him reluctantly back into the world of crime and detection.

    Their adventures are: One Million Francs ( in Cavalier as “The Honeymoon Detectives”), The Ivory Snuff Box (which opens exactly one hour after the first book ends), The Blue Lights (in Cavalier as “The Changing Lights), The Little Fortune, “The Mysterious Goddess,” and Film of Fear (in which Robert aids movie star Ruth Morton).

    [Note: The publication dates for these adventures as they appeared in the pulp magazines can be found here. Unaccountably, “The Mysterious Goddess” has never appeared in book form.]

    In The Blue Lights an American millionaire’s son has been kidnapped in Paris and his agent rushes to the Duvall’s Maryland estate to enlist Robert in the investigation:

    Stapleton is a banker who Duvall has worked for before — a “wealthy banker” as we are told (as opposed to a poor banker one supposes). Duvall reluctantly agrees to take the case. Robert doesn’t want to leave Grace, but she insists: “I think, Robert, that you had better go.”

    And go he does, allowing Fredericks to use his favorite device, the divided storyline, following Robert on one hand and Grace on the other, because no sooner has he departed than he receives an urgent message from his old friend and boss M. Lefevere begging him to come to Paris to take over a difficult case.

    Grace packs and heads for Paris, unaware that she will arrive there alone because Robert as taken a detour to New Jersey on one of his mysterious missions (like many sleuths of the era Robert is prone to omniscience when he isn’t dense as a teak two by four).

    In Paris, Lefevere enlists Grace as his new assistant with typical Gallic resignation:

    If you didn’t see this coming I have some lovely land in New Mexico I’d like to sell you — nice place called the White Sands Missile Testing Range …

    So Grace goes undercover so she will not be recognized as the wife of the brilliant Robert Duvall. Fredericks, true to the nature of the pulps, conveniently fills us in on what Grace is up to:

    On the day following that upon which she arrived in Paris, Grace Duvall sallied forth, determined to find out two things — first, the position occupied by Alphonse Valentin in the affair of the kidnapping; secondly, the identity of the man who had stolen the box of cigarettes from Valentin’s room, and gone with them to the house in the Avenue Kleber. The latter incident seemed trivial enough, at first sight; yet she reasoned that no one would risk arrest on the score of burglary, to steal anything of such trifling value, without an excellent reason.

    Meanwhile (there are a lot of meanwhile’s in this series) Richard arrives in Paris not knowing Grace is already there and finds his work complicated by his old friend and a police agent he doesn’t realize is a disguised Grace:

    Of course rather than simply explain the truth, everyone is as high handed and thick headed as possible without actually provoking the Dorothy Parker reflex (“This book should not be put aside lightly — it should be thrown with great force.”).

    Robert may be “gifted,” but Grace is lucky. At one point she just walks into the kidnapper’s lair and finds the kidnapped child hidden in a plaster casting, then she herself spends a day hiding in a closet from which she luckily overhears all sort of vital information. All I ever heard in a closet was the sound of my clothes being devoured by hungry moths, but then I’m not a plucky sleuth.

    Of course on their separate courses the Duvall’s manage to solve the case, rescue the kidnap victim, and capture the villains after a few close calls:

    Golly!

    But Robert brings it to a satisfying conclusion and explains all the convolutions of the case and how everyone but him was wrong, and M. Lefevere resolves that:

    You can hardly call these fair play detective stories. Indeed they are full of the sort of thing that the Detection Club and Van Dine’s famous rules were designed to correct, and yet despite prose as “bland as unsweetened farina,” and the high-handed hi-jinks of Robert Duvall, the books are fun and a pleasant read.

    And as Robert Sampson points out, Grace Duvall is something refreshing, in that her adventures continue after marriage rather than finding her ensconced in the home like some princess locked away in a tower. For her day she was a breath of fresh air, however musty the plots she was involved in.

    I enjoyed this and some of Fredericks other works (available on line at Manybooks and Google Books) on their own merits. Like most popular fiction of the age they require a bit of forgiveness by modern readers, but they also offer some genuine entertainment and polite well behaved thrills.

    And historically Grace Duvall is the grande dame of all those bright nosy tec wives to come. She might be a bit staid and prim, but she is a true cousin of Nora Charles, Pam North, Halia Troy, Iris Duluth, Phyllis Shayne, Jean Abbott, Arab Blake, Helene Justus, and the whole attractive brood replete with wicked jaws, long elegant legs (hollow in the case of Nora and Pam), golden curls, and unerring taste for murder.

    Though in all fairness after spending an evening with Robert you may well be wishing for one of Nora Charles and Pam North’s stronger martinis… Even as great detectives go, he really is a pain.

    Gifted my …

    Oh, well, see for yourself.

JOSEPH SAMUEL РThe Murdered Clich̩. Quality Press, UK, hardcover, 1947. No US edition.

   If this reviewer has any weaknesses, a charge he would vigorously dispute, revealing too much about a book would be foremost. That, of course, presupposes that he understands the book or pretends, if he thinks he can get away with it, that he understands the book.

   Too much about this one won’t be revealed. In fact, I’m not sure what cliché was murdered.

   Samuel’s dedicating the novel “To the Marx Brothers” ‘ should provide a pointer as to what sort of book it will be. The Marx Brothers, however, were lunatics in a sane world, or perhaps vice versa. Here, all is lunatic.

   Basil Lord Maltravers, who never did anything with reason, being beyond that sort of pettiness, is found dead by his butler, not in the library or billiard room but in the bathroom, seated upon the commode for the most part, his head having been disattached and placed in the tub.

   The butler contends to Lady Maltravers, in her “early plenties,” that it’s murder: “‘Well, I put it to you,’ he began argumentatively, ‘there’s a guy, sat down from his neck down and going to have a bath from his neck up. Now, that’s alright if he’s the kind of man who bathes stood on his head with a chair strapped to his seat. But I think I can say, Ma’am, his Lordship was always free from that kind of bias.'”

   Into Elvers Towers, home of the Maltravers, comes Inspector Crimble, stolid, full of common sense, able to move swiftly despite his weight, to scratch his head in perplexity, to be out in all kinds of weather, to hang on with a “‘bulldop” grip, and for all his apparent simplicity not easily led up the garden path. We have seen his like before — and, I believe, since.

   But Crimble, despite his many accomplishments, needs help to deal with Lord Maltravers’s wife and the weekend guests–the Hon. Percy Fitznoggy, old Lady Dewlap, young Jimmy Coker, Peggy Chumleigh, and old Amos Boustead, all of them certifiably bonkers, including Crimble. The servants aren’t much better.

   Thus, Crimble calls upon Mercure Poitrine, whose waxed mustaches and idiosyncrasies may remind some readers of another Gallic detective. And I didn’t think Poirot could be lampooned! Poitrine solves the case, but–

   Well, you wouldn’t believe the ending even if I were so brave as to reveal it. Full of bad puns, some of them amusing, and utterly strange conversations, this novel will appeal only to a few, say those who like me enjoy the early Max Shulman of Barefoot Boy with Cheek or Ross H. Spencer’s caper novels.

Bibliographic Note: This is the only book by this author to have warranted inclusion in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, unless of course Joseph Samuel is not his real name, and then all bets are off.

EARLENE FOWLER —
    ● Fool’s Puzzle. Berkley Prime Crime, hardcover, May 1994; reprint paperback, January 1995.
    ● Tumbling Blocks. Berkley Prime Crime, hardcover, May 2007; reprint paperback, May 2008.

   Benni Harper’s husband was killed in a car accident some months before the opening of Fool’s Puzzle, the first in this now long-running series, and she’s moved on, serving as curator of a folk-art museum in the town of San Celina, but with an extended family of relations and friends close at hand. The title, like that of all the other titles in the series, refers to a quilting pattern.

   The murder of a potter, who’s been working late at a kiln in the museum, catapults Benni into an unaccustomed role of private investigator, which brings her into conflict with the new sheriff, Gabriel Ortiz, and confirms her character as confrontational and hell bent on putting herself in harm’s way and withholding evidence from the police.

   But then, this seems to be the pattern for strong female protagonists (and what female protagonist isn’t strong?), so you can’t expect anything terribly fresh or ground-breaking in the concept of the central character.

   What makes the series work is the very adept characterization of a fairly large cast, and the sense of grounding in a diverse, changing community as San Celina, formerly largely a ranch and farming community, develops into a more up-scale town, with the museum, ably directed by Benni, at the center of an influx of touristy galleries, restaurants and shops.

   In the thirteenth book in the series, Tumbling Blocks, the museum has landed a prize acquisition, the donation of a painting by a nationally known folk artist, with a presentation gala that’s attracting some major attention from outside the area, and an appearance by the reclusive artist’s great-niece, who is a tireless supporter of his work.

   As if Benni doesn’t have enough to do with overseeing the event, she’s coerced by Constance Sinclair, the museum’s major benefactor, into investigating what appears to be the death by natural causes of Constance’s long-time friend “Pinky” Edmondson, but which Constance believes to be a murder.

   The investigation by Benni takes back seat for much of the book but when it comes to the forefront makes up for its earlier reticent place in the plot by heating up rapidly and dangerously for Benni.

   I don’t know that I’m going to be a tireless pursuer of the other titles, but I enjoyed both of these early and late examples of Fowler’s work.

Bibliographic Note: Number fourteen in the series, State Fair, was published earlier this year. For a complete list and cover images of all fourteen, visit the Fantastic Fiction website page here.

JOSEPH HONE – The Valley of the Fox. St. Martin’s Press, US, hardcover, 1984. Reprint paperback: Collier, US, 1989. First edition: Secker & Warburg, UK, hardcover, 1982.

   Joseph Hone has written some fine espionage novels — The Oxford Gambit, The Sixth Directorate and The Private Sector — so The Valley of the Fox comes as a surprise.

   Peter Marlow, retired spy featured in the earlier Hone books, marries a beautiful but mysterious widow named Laura whose anthropologist husband was killed in Africa. Laura has a daughter named Clare who doctors have pronounced “autistic” but who holds many surprises.

   Marlow’s life is idyllic until a masked man enters his house and kills Laura and attempts to kill Peter. Marlow, finding out he’s being framed fqr his wife’s murder, flees into the surrounding English countryside. There he meets a bizarre woman named Alice who helps him rescue Clare from the nearby hospital and allows Peter and Clare the run of her strange estate.

   The plot continues to twist and turn as Marlow investigates his dead wife’s past and the deadly secrets Clare holds. This is not an espionage novel in the conventional sense but Hone manages to pull off an off-beat novel about a retired spy in an incredible plot.

   Recommended!

   Bibliography [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

HONE, JOSEPH. 1937– .
       The Private Sector (n.) H. Hamilton 1971. Peter Marlow.
       The Sixth Directorate (n.) Secker 1975. Peter Marlow.
       The Paris Trap (n.) Secker 1977

       The Flowers of the Forest (n.) Secker 1980. US title: The Oxford Gambit. Peter Marlow.

       The Valley of the Fox (n.) Secker 1982. Peter Marlow.

MARTHA GRIMES – Jerusalem Inn. Little, Brown & Co., hardcover, 1984. Paperback reprints include: Dell, 1985; Onyx, 2004.

   Superintendent Richard Jury meets a woman in a graveyard. He finds her attractive, makes a dinner date, and when he comes to keep it, she is dead — poisoned.

   His investigation takes him to the Jerusalem Inn, a country pub where snooker is played in the back room. Meanwhile, fate is busy drawing Jury’s amateur detective friend, Melrose Plant (aka the Earl of Caverness) his Aunt Agatha, and their mutual. friend, Vivian Rivington, to the same vicinity for a Christmas house party.

   The guests consist of artists and writers who are taciturn, and dilettantes who definitely aren’t. Nicest of the bunch is young Tommy, ace snooker player, otherwise known as the Marquess of Meares.

   Another murder ensues, and a confusion of motives. Jury moves along to a conclusion, but slowly. This is a contemporary version of the old-fashioned British Christmas house party murder mystery, and as such, it really ought to have a final chapter in which everyone is gathered together and everything is explained. Too many loose ends are left untied for my liking.

      Previously reviewed on this blog:

The Black Cat   (by Ray O’Leary)
The Case Has Altered   (by Steve Lewis)

“Run for Doom.” An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (Season 1, Episode 31). First air date: 17 May 1963. John Gavin, Diana Dors, Scott Brady, Carl Benton Reid, Tom Skerritt. Teleplay: James Bridges, based on the novel Run for Doom (1962) by Henry Kane. Director: Bernard Girard.

   Nickie Carole (Diana Dors) is beautiful and talented. She works as a nightclub singer for Bill Floyd (Scott Brady), whose interest in her is intensely personal; sometimes to get her attention he slaps her around a little, but she seems to enjoy it. Floyd takes her for granted, however, and that will prove to be a fatal error.

   Yes, Nickie is bad news, but that doesn’t stop naive young medico Don Reed (John Gavin) from wanting to marry her. Even after his father (Carl Benton Reid) tells him the findings of a private eye — that Nickie has already beeen married three times to well-to-do men — Don insists on marrying her.

   When his father dies unexpectedly, Don comes into a lot of money; so whenever he waves a diamond sparkler under her nose, Nickie’s big eyes get bigger and Don gets even more attractive.

   But the girl can’t help it; Nickie tries to seduce another man just to make Don jealous and because she’s bored with married life. What results from this fracas is a lifetime blackmail plan for Don unless he can figure out how to rid himself of this troublesome wench.

   And then Floyd re-enters their lives with his own solution to the Nickie Carole dilemma, this time one that involves more than just slapping her around a little…

   Diana Dors (a Brit whose accent is always on the verge of manifesting itself) had a reputation for being merely a sex kitten in the Jayne Mansfield tradition, but here she proves that she can act as well as sing provocatively in a strapless evening gown. There isn’t a false note in her performance; she is the perfect femme fatale — and she gets to perform two song numbers, as well.

   In addition to Psycho (1960), John Gavin was a spy in OSS 117 (1968) and had two TV series, Destry (1964) and Convoy (1965). Hitchcock reportedly was unhappy with Gavin’s performance in Psycho, but he more than makes up for it here, traversing the emotional gamut from funny to morose and from naive to sinister.

   Henry Kane wrote for TV as well as roughly 30 novels and about as many short stories, many of which featured his series character Peter Chambers. As for other media: Martin Kane, Private Eye (6 episodes, 1951-52), Mike Hammer (1 episode, 1958), Kraft Theatre (2 episodes, 1958), the screenplay for Ed McBain’s Cop Hater (1958), Brenner (1 episode, 1959), Johnny Staccato (1 episode, 1959), and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (2 episodes, 1963).

   He even wrote a TV tie-in novel to Peter Gunn (1960), a character some claim may have been “inspired” by Kane’s own Peter Chambers.

   You can see “Run for Doom” on Hulu here. For more on Henry Kane and his series character Peter Chambers, read Steve Lewis’s review of Until You Are Dead, earlier here on this blog.

JONATHAN CREEK. “The Judas Tree.” BBC-TV, 04 April 2010. Alan Davies (Jonathan Creek), Stuart Milligan (Adam Klaus), Sheridan Smith, with Natalie Walter, Paul McGann. Director: David Renwick.

   Earlier this year we have had a one-off “Easter Special” of this long-running series (the first one was in 1997) with the 95-minute (no adverts) “The Judas Tree”.

   When the series first started (back in 1997) it was a breath of fresh air, with impossible crimes — some with supernatural overtones — solved by a charismatic but entirely rational detective.

   In recent years, although the puzzles continue to beguile, the explanations fail to convince. The elaborate plots are still of great interest but the unravelling of them leaves, much to be explained.

   Also, now that we have “specials” rather than series we get longer stories which are padded out by entirely unfunny comedy sequences with magician Adam Klaus, Creek’s employer in his day-job. (At least this time not as preposterously as in the previous Creek, the Christmas 2008 special.)

   Anyway, in this one Creek is called in when Emily Somerton, housekeeper to crime writer Hugo Dore, encounters some strange happenings. Soon there is a violent death and Emily is accused of the crime. The explanation, when it comes, is ingenious all right, but unfortunately full of holes.

   I enjoyed watching it as it went along and the explanation that we got was good, even very good, in parts but the overall feeling was one of disappointment.

   As an interesting aside we saw the dust wrappers of five of Dore’s books and I was obsessive enough to copy them down. Each was subtitled “An Ellison Starberth Mystery” and the titles were:

       The Gilded Unicorn.
       Blind Skeleton Murders.
       The Case of the Whispering Attic.
       The Riddle at Hangman’s Cloister.
       The Four Wax Footmen.

   The first two seem to be a nod to John Dickson Carr (a combination of The Gilded Man and The Unicorn Murders, followed by The Blind Barber and The Skeleton in the Clock possibly) and just maybe the last is also (The Four False Weapons and The Waxworks Murder [UK title], maybe).

   But I have no idea about the other two. Any suggestions would be very welcome.

CARL HIASSEN – Strip Tease. Knopf, hardcover, 1993. Warner, paperback, 1994.   Film: Columbia, 1996, as Striptease (with Demi Moore, Burt Reynolds & Armand Assante).

   Hiassen has been one of those writers whose virtuosity I grant, but whose product simply hasn’t appealed to me. Several people told me that his latest was less off-the-wall than previous ones, so I decided to try it.

   We start with a Florida congressman who every now and then goes a little pussy crazy, if you’ll pardon the indelicacy. This time it takes the form of assaulting a drunk who’s pawing a nude dancer who’s an ex-FBI clerk.

   The dancer is divorced from one of the worst kind of scumbags, who nevertheless got custody of her daughter because of a bible-toting judge. Then there’s a local cop, a Cuban, who gets involved because of a body that turns up in Montana while he’s on vacation.

   Throw in a political fixer, a few sugar growers, and a sleazy lawyer or two, and you have yourself a typical Hiassen cast.

   Well, it was a little straighter than his norm, though I don’t know how much that says. Hiasson’s palette really doesn’t have any muted shades. There aren’t any weedeater prostheses, but there’s a Chinaman bitten on the penile appendage by a long snake.

   Has Florida really taken over the country’s title for most sleaze and slime, or have    the writers really just settled upon it as an easy target? There seems to be an unlimited market for low-down Florida novels, and they all seem to sell.

   While I don’t like them nearly so well as America does, if you’re going to read one Hiassen [this one] is a good choice. He has a real eye for the odd and the underside, and a biting wit. There are actually a few characters in this one that it’s possible to like, though I don’t know that I’d care to live next door to any of them.

   If you like ’em down, dirty, and strange, this is for you.

SELDON TRUSS – Always Ask a Policeman. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1952. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1953.

   What does Goodge’s dreadful lodging house have to do with the pompous Cosmo Almond, soon to be candidate for Member of Parliament? It harbors, if that’s the word I want, the ineffable Miss Dysart, who is in love with Romance, finds invisible bugs on her clothing, and may or may not be threatening Cosmo’s life, such as it is.

   The lodging house also contains Miss Pym — no, not our Miss Pym; this one is a clergyman’s daughter who poses nude at a dubious art studio patronized by Cosmo’s male secretary — an odd medical student who keeps getting picked up by the police to “assist their inquiries,” and the loathsome Goodge himself.

   Since Miss Dysart has appealed to the Yard to find Cosmo, Inspector Gidleigh of Scotland Yard — who talks like John Appleby but without the wit — is keeping an eye on this situation. Mr. Horace of the well-read but not respected Daily Snapshot both helps and hinders the investigation. But what and who are being investigated?

   Certain aspects of the novel will be clear to the experienced mystery reader, but this is still an engrossing investigation. If only all the characters had not spoken as though they had been educated at Oxford…

Bibliographic Data:   Inspector Gidleigh appeared in 24 of the author’s detective novels, published over a period of time ranging from 1936 to 1965. Truss’s full list of mystery fiction appeared between 1928 and 1969, well over 40 years, approximately 45 novels, including three as by George Selmark, but he’s almost assuredly unknown to any but the most serious collector today.