BEN BENSON – The Blonde in Black.   Bantam #1974, paperback reprint; 1st printing, July 1959. Hardcover: M. S. Mill; first edition, February 1958.

   When the subject of police procedurals comes up, and which authors were among the first, Lawrence Treat and his novel V for Victim (1945) is often cited as the first of those in the modern era.

   There were, of course, any number of candidates in the 1930s and even before. The idea of police solving crimes is a natural, after all; private eyes and purely amateur sleuths can’t have all the fun.

   Ben Benson, whose books in softcover I’ve owned for many years (there were 19 of them and this is, alas, only the second one I’ve read) has somehow become neglected as one of the early authors in the field.

   His first book, Alibi at Dusk, came along in 1951, for example, and there were not many other authors who might fit into the category between Treat’s books and his. As a minor quibble, if you were to look closely at The Blonde in Black, you might say that it does not really fit the category — if the category consists of a police department at work upon several unrelated crimes at the same time.

   But if a police procedural can also consist of several members of a police department working as a team, following professional guidelines and conducting a case coolly and intelligently, then The Blonde in Black does indeed qualify, and presumably so do all of Benson’s other books.

   The blonde in question is Junie Jacques, whose image as a sexy singer has been built as a gigantic case of fraud by her record company. She’s in reality a home town girl from Massachusetts who needed the money and agreed mostly against her will to go along with the image the public knows her by.

   And when she tells her record company executive that she’s quitting to get married, to the nephew of the governor, he’s fit to be tied. He’s also very quickly dead, with the D.A.’s office ready to arrest Junie for his death, which she claims to have been only a shooting accident.

   Captain Wade Paris of the Massachusetts State Police is not so sure of Junie’s guilt, and he continues his investigation anyway, regardless of what the ambitious fellow from the D.A.’s office might think.

   In one sense, this is an impossible crime, since Junie’s warning shot against what she thought was an intruder was in the air and toward the figure coming toward her, and as it turns out, the man was shot in the back. But the shot came from her gun, and only one shot was fired.

   A fact which may sound insurmountable, but it’s easily enough solved. (It didn’t take me much time to figure it out, in other words.) Most of the book is taken up, in documentary fashion, with the ins and outs of the music business as it was in the 50s, in what it took to create an image the public would go for; payola to grease the palms of important disk jockey’s; the expectation that girl singers would do whatever it took to get ahead; and so on.

   Benson’s a bit stodgy in the details here, nor does he see a lot to rock-and-roll singing beside the well-planned gyrations on stage, but his policemen, while largely faceless, do know their business. And on the other hand, while the case is a slight one, the other characters involved are real enough to have convinced me.

   Ben Benson died young, in 1959, at the age of only 44, and I don’t know any details. His 19 books were written in a span of less than ten years, the last, The Huntress Is Dead (1960), being published after his death, and was never published in softcover.

   Wade Paris was in ten of his novels; a Massachusetts state trooper named Ralph Lindsey was in another seven. There do not appear to have been any crossovers, but I’d love to be corrected about this. The other two books Ben Benson wrote consisted of one standalone novel and a collection of two novelettes. (Thanks to Roger Ljung, whose comment made an essential correction to this statement.)

[UPDATE] Later the same day.   I have discovered one source online that says this about Benson:

    “[He] was born in Boston and seriously wounded during Army service in WW2. He began writing as therapy…” A complete list of Benson’s novels can also be found on this site.

[UPDATE #2] 07-01-10.   I recently received the following email from Victor Berch, with a cc sent to Al Hubin. The updated information about Benson will appear in the next installment of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV.

Hi Steve:

I became interested in your review of Ben[jamin] Benson’s books and since he was a Boston boy, I decided to check on his vital statistics. I know Contemporary Authors and other sources assign a 1915 birth date to him. However, according to the Massachusetts Vital Records, 1911-1915, there was no Benjamin Benson born in 1915.

What little data that is presented in Contemporary Authors reveals that Benson had enlisted in the US Army in 1943. So, I decided to check out any statistics that might appear in his Army record. Sure enough, his record was available.

It stated that he had enlisted in Boston on Sept. 24, 1943 as a private for the duration of the war (his Army serial number was 31422170, should anyone care to explore his record further). His year of birth was given as 1913, had two years of college education and his civilian occupation was given as a salesman.

Armed with that 1913 birth date, I went back to the Massachusetts Vital Records, 1911-1915. And his record was available. The data revealed that Benjamin Benson II had been born in Boston June 14, 1913, the son of Hyman D., a printer, and Rivka [Rebecca] (Charmonsky) Benson, both immigrants from Russia.

Whatever the family name originally was would have to be obtained from his father’s naturalization papers. His family had only immigrated to the US in 1912.

Best,

Victor

    Or, things that have occurred to me to say, later the same day as the preceding post.

    ● I’ve watched the movie To Catch a Thief one and a half times since David Vineyard reviewed both the book (by David Dodge) back about a month ago. The first time was upstairs on our small 24″ TV, which was OK, but when I started watching it again downstairs on our large screen with the commentary on, the difference was like night and day.

    What a spectacular movie! The colors are magnificent, and the people — well, who could ever outshine Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in a movie together? The fireworks are what everybody remembers, but the first time she turns and gives him a kiss at her hotel room door, that was something else again. The stuff dreams are made of? You’d better believe it.

    ● After reviewing the 1937 movie made of H. Rider Haggard’s novel, King Solomon’s Mines, I soon afterward watched the one that came out in 1950. The later version starred Deborah Kerr, Stewart Granger and Richard Carlson, and was nominated for an Oscar as Best Picture of the Year.

    It didn’t win the big one, but the film did pick up two Oscars anyway, one for Best Cinematography (Color), and one for Best Film Editing. The characters were shuffled around some from both the book and the earlier film, leaving Richard Carlson with not much to do, but the photography, as the small safari made its way further and further into unknown bush country, was once again spectacular, if I may use the word again. The plot is fairly simple, and some people leaving comments on IMDB complain about the slow pace, but that’s only to be expected after Indiana Jones has come and gone.

    ● Looking back over the past month, I see that I’ve read only two books, one a science fiction novel by Alan Dean Foster entitled Quofum. I thought it was a stand-alone, and in a sense it is, but it’s also Book 8 in the author’s “Humanx Commonwealth” series

   And as such, while tremendously inventive in itself — a strange planet is discovered with an unbelievable abundance of strange fauna and flora, plus many incompatible forms of intelligent life within miles of each other — it’s also spinning its wheels in anticipation of the next book to come along — a fact the reader (me) doesn’t realize until the book is over, only to discover the story’s not finished.

    ● The other book I read this June perhaps ought to have its own post, but since I never got around to writing the review, I think this is all the space it’s going to get. After tackling and mostly enjoying One Shot by Lee Child, the first “Jack Reacher” adventure I’ve read, but #9 in the series, I tried another.

   This one was Nothing to Lose, which is #12 out of fifteen Reacher books, so far. The reason it took me all month to read it, or one of them, is that it’s 544 pages long. But another reason is that after a great opening setup — two adjoining towns in Colorado connected by a single highway, one called Hope, the other Despair — most of the 544 are not necessary. I think the technical name for this is “padding.” Lots of repetitious action, in other words, plus the female chief police officer of Hope has personal problems that Reacher of course takes on as his own.

   What I really found amusing — I think that’s the technical term — is that this book has gotten a terrific panning by the reviewers on Amazon. Some 169 reviews, out of 420, have given it only one star. A typical comment goes something like this. Well, to be truthful, it goes exactly like this:

    “I found it impossible to buy into the far-fetched ‘conspiracy theory’ with its pathetic ‘villains’ and was surprised at Child’s foray into political opinion (putting his opinions into Reacher’s mouth — which completely changed Reacher’s character). This was totally out of place, I thought, and awkward at best.”

   Turns out that the main villain is a born-again Christian with delusions of grandeur, and that Child’s foray into political opinion are some statements that come up relating to the war in Iraq.

   In any case, it looks like I’ve just reviewed the book after all.

    ● I think I’ve reviewed here all of the movies I’ve watched in June, except for the last two, which will be posted soon. I shall have to start forcing myself to take some time for reading, else I shall be falling even more behind. Otherwise I have been making my way through various TV shows on DVD in box sets, which I seldom report on here.

   To fill in that particular gap, though, at least in a small way, here are the ones I’m currently watching: Stargate Atlantis, the final season; Vega$, the one with Robert Urich, the first season; The Professionals, a 1970s British series about the fictional adventures of CI5, a high-powered governmental agency that handles security issues inside the country; NCIS, the first season; and Have Gun, Will Travel, also the first season.

    ● Tomorrow marks the 3.5th anniversary of this blog, which I believe has finally found its niche. It’s taken a while, having had no goals in mind to begin with, but the current mix of old and new reviews seems to be working. I don’t think many people celebrate their 3.5th anniversaries, and I probably won’t do anything out of the ordinary, but since it just occurred to me that that’s what it will be, I thought I might mention it.

    Or, call this an attempt to catch up on a few items posted here on the blog or that have come up here and there in recent comments —

    ● Cover images for the jackets of all three mysteries written by Means Davis have been added to the review that Bill Deeck wrote of her Murder Without Weapon. Nominating this novel as an alternative mystery classic is a motion that Bill Pronzini is in full agreement with. (See the comments.)

    ● Al Hubin agrees that Love Insurance, by Earl Derr Biggers, should be downgraded in Crime Fiction IV to having only marginal criminous content. The book was the basis for the first Abbott and Costello movie, One Night in the Tropics, which David Vineyard reviewed here.

    ● And given the discussion that followed David’s review of A Summer in the Twenties, by Peter Dickinson, Al has also accepted the general consensus that it should be included in CFIV. Both this change and the revised status of the Biggers book will appear in the next installment to the online Addenda.

    ● My review of the film The Sword of Lancelot, starring, written and directed by Cornel Wilde, elicited a number of comments about other movies about the ill-fated trio of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot, including Knights of the Round Table, perhaps the most spectacular of them all — the one starring Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner and Mel Ferrer. If you’ve never seen it, or haven’t seen it in a while, it will be shown early tomorrow evening on Turner Classic Movies, between 6 and 8 pm, EDT.

    ● David Vineyard’s review of JFK Is Missing!, by Liz Evans, led to the discovery (generally known but to neither of us) that she also wrote four novels as by Patricia Grey that take place in England during World War II. It is difficult to determine from the short synopses we’ve found on the author’s website, nor are the covers particularly attractive, but it’s possible that those who like Foyle’s War might also find something of interest in this short series of mysteries. (I’ve already ordered two of them for my own edification.)

LIZ EVANS – JFK Is Missing! Orion Books, UK, 1998. Distributed in the US by Trafalgar Square, circa 2002.

   Grace Smith isn’t exactly the most promising private eye you will ever meet. To begin with she works the mean streets of Seatoun, a unprepossessing town on England’s South Coast, and she isn’t the greatest at her job. But as her friend Annie tells her:

   And she even has a client, Henry Summerstone, and all he wants is for her to find someone — save he doesn’t know her name — and he can’t tell Grace what she looks like because he’s blind. But aside from that it’s a perfect case for Grace, a girl named K something that Henry met on the beach during his daily walk with his seeing eye dog:

   Anyway, Henry loaned K a recording of David Copperfield and now she hasn’t shown up for a while, and since she seemed a nice young woman he’s worried. Grace agrees to take the case expecting to find very little.

   What she finds is a young woman named Kristen — Julie-Frances Kreble aka Kristin Keats, who has gone missing. There’s also a teenage girl called Bone who just wants to be loved; a skateboarder called Figgy; a pair of pot bellied Vietnamese pigs that have outlived their cute stage; Bertram who used to be married to Kristen; and Bone’s family: brother Patrick who hates boarding school, father Stephen who is something of a player and up and coming rather nicely in the world in their nice upper middle class home, and mother, Amelia, a social climbing self involved air head.

   And something else — Stephen, Daddy, and Kristen were friends. Close friends.

   And what she begins to suspect — even though there is no body — is that Kristen is dead. Murdered. Stephen Bridgerman, her primary suspect, is on to her:

   A trip to Jersey to visit Kristen’s parents and a missing workman add to the mystery as well as who ran over the skateboarding Figgy, son of one of Amelia’s chums, and a government cover up involving her not so innocent blind client who knows more about the missing Kristen than he’s been saying.

   Which leads to Grace chained up in a wine cellar with a nasty blow to the head and a very full bladder waiting for a very confused but totally ruthless killer to decide what to do with her.

   Before it’s over Grace will end up in the boot of her own car, sloshed with gasoline and with a belly full of vodka being driven to a convenient place for another little murder — her own.

   Grace may get it all wrong but she also solves a murder and brings down a murderer — even if she nearly gets killed along the way — and ends up answering to the RSPCA for a pair of Vietnamese pot bellied pigs …

   JFK is Missing! is exactly what it sets out to be, a solid funny private eye novel with an attractive, if less than brilliant, heroine, a set of quirky characters, a well realized setting, and the kinds of crimes that you see on the nightly news.

   It’s a sprightly series, other entries including Who Killed Marilyn Monroe? and Don’t Mess With Mrs. In-Between. The lines are snappy, the pace fast, the cliff hangers nerve wracking and dripping with irony, and you could easily find Grace Smith one of your favorite sleuths of the modern era. With this single book she has moved well up on my list.

       The Grace Smith series —

1. Who Killed Marilyn Monroe? (1997)
2. JFK Is Missing! (1998)
3. Don’t Mess with Mrs In-Between (2000)
4. Barking! (2001)
5. Sick as a Parrot (2004)

6. Cue the Easter Bunny (2005)

   As Patricia Grey, Liz Evans has also written a series of four books with Detective Chief Inspector Jack Stamford and Sergeant Sarah McNeill taking place during World War II —

1. Junction Cut (1994)
2. Balaclava Row (1994)
3. Good Hope Station (1997)
4. Cutter’s Wharf (1998)

BURTON E. STEVENSON – The House Next Door. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1932. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1932.

   Reviewers, certainly those like me who assay the gold of the past, ought to get hazardous-duty compensation for the dross. Reading this novel could have produced brain rot if the author’s leaden prose had not set up the defense mechanism of allowing me to immediately forget what had just been read.

   Something like eight years passed between Stevenson’s previous mystery effort and this one. I can assure you that he was not perfecting The House Next Door all that time.

   According to the publisher: “In order to aid the reader in choosing a mystery of whose merit he may be certain in advance, the ‘hard-faced editors’ are placing a red badge on those detective stories which they are willing to recommend unreservedly to the most discriminating reader.”

   The red badge on this one is indubitably a fraud, for God knows I am not all that discriminating.

   The only thing that can be said in favor of this novel is the apparent absence of typographical errors. Otherwise, the plot is silly, the characters totally unbelievable, and the characters’ acts and conversation tedious.

   Turning the pages was an ordeal, but I continued to read in the hope that there might be something — anything, even one felicitous phrase — to justify publication. That hope was dashed when page 313 was reached.

   The narrator, a lawyer, judges everyone by physiognomy, even including the first corpse, whose “high, narrow forehead bespoke intelligence, but also a limited and narrow character. There were little peevish lines about the eyes It was a selfish and egotistical face, utterly without attraction.”

   One of the detectives — Godfrey, of the Record, as he is described — says: “‘Of course I suspected [Blank] from the first. For one thing, I didn’t like the way his eyes were spaced.”’

   Anyone unprepossessing or suffering from some slight physical impairment had better not be around these chaps when a crime is committed.

   As for what there is of a plot, Professor Verity wants to change his will, but somebody breaks his neck before he can accomplish that aim. The neighbors are a heathen Hindu and an oily Italian. Look no farther for suspects.

   Oh, there’s another chap that might have done it, but the Professor’s daughter is in love with him and he’s Anglo-Saxon and not obviously disfigured, so he has to be innocent.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   According to Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, Burton E. Stevenson, 1872-1962, wrote thirteen mysteries, one marginally criminous, between 1903 and 1939. The book Bill referred to as preceding this one was The Storm-Center (1924). Jim Godfrey, the sleuth of record in The House Next Door, was in five others, including Stevenson’s first one, The Holladay Case (1903).

   Mike Grost takes a critical look at The Mystery of the Boule Cabinet (1911), one of Stevenson’s earlier books, on his Classic Mystery and Detection website, comparing his work in some ways to that of Mary Roberts Rinehart.

   Many of Stevenson’s books, including the latter, are available online. A complete listing can be found here.

   When he wasn’t writing mystery fiction, Burton Stevenson was quite well-known in other fields, at least locally, in his home town in Ohio. Quoting from this online site:

    “Born in Chillicothe in 1872, Burton Stevenson’s life was devoted to the written word as a prolific author and anthologist, and as a librarian. Following stints as a journalist while a student at Princeton University and then at newspapers in Chillicothe, Stevenson became the librarian of the city’s public library in 1899. He held the post for 58 years.

    “Stevenson then went to Paris as the European director of the Library War Service. After the Armistice in 1918, he established the American Library in Paris and directed it until 1920 and again from 1925-1930. In addition to accomplishments as a librarian, he wrote or compiled more than 50 books….”

LORNA BARRETT – Bookplate Special. Berkley, paperback original; 1st printing, November 2009.

   Tricia Miles, proprietor of the mystery bookstore Haven’t Got a Clue in Stoneham, New Hampshire, is probably the least appealing protagonist of any recent mystery series I’ve been sampling.

   She’s confrontational, irascible, and downright unpleasant, particularly in her dealings with local police and her current boyfriend, Russ, publisher of the local weekly newspaper. The series also includes recipes, which I are generally a turnoff for me, but the bookstore setting brought me back, after I’d read and reported on the second in the series (Bookmarked for Death, reviewed here ) for this follow-up novel.

   Shortly after Tricia tells a lingering house-guest to pack up and move out, the woman is murdered, and Tricia, not one to let the local authorities handle the investigation, is almost immediately very much. involved, withholding vital evidence and, in general, acting without regard for her own safety or for a reasonable outcome for a very thorny investigation.

   The author thanks friends who “pointed out the places” where she tripped up. Frankly, I think she needs a new group of friends who would point out to her that amateur sleuthing doesn’t mean you shouldn’t observe a modicum of common sense.

   However, in spite of her unattractive side, she’s still able to come out of the labyrinth of missteps and bad decisions with two potential boyfriends and only minor collateral damage.

   So what you have is a potentially attractive series, with a strong protagonist who may turn off some readers but please anti-establishment, feminist readers who will be urging Tricia on from the sideline.

       The Booktown Mystery series —

1. Murder Is Binding (2008)

2. Bookmarked For Death (2009)
3. Bookplate Special (2009)
4. Chapter and Hearse (2010)

   Coming in 2011 is A Crafty Killing, the author’s first “Victoria Square Mystery.” Lorna Barrett, the pen name of Lorraine Bartlett, has also written two suspense thrillers as by L. L. Bartlett.

“Diagnosis: Danger.” An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (Season 1, Episode 22). First air date: 1 March 1963. Michael Parks, Charles McGraw, Berkeley Harris, Rupert Crosse, Allen Joseph, Douglas Henderson. Writer: Roland Kibbee. Director: Sydney Pollack.

   A car returning from Mexico heading toward Los Angeles suddenly lurches and a man falls out of the back, unnoticed by the driver. Between the time he becomes airborne and the moment he hits the road’s shoulder, he dies — not from the impact but from the deadly and highly contagious disease of anthrax.

   Dr. Daniel Dana (Michael Parks) works for the County Department of Public Health as an epidemiologist; his boss, Dr. Simon Oliver (Charles McGraw), is a study in paradox — he can’t stand the sight of blood, flinches when someone is in pain, gobbles antacid pills, and prefers to call himself a politician. Nevertheless, these two will have to oversee the search for an unknown number of people who have come into contact with the dead man on the roadside.

   Before the day is over, Dr. Dana will be striving to save the life of a man with a rifle who, in return, will be trying to kill him ….

   Michael Parks (b. 1940), with his brooding attitude and mumbling delivery, was supposed to be the second coming of James Dean. In “Diagnosis: Danger” he has to deal with what has since become known as “technobabble”; half the time he’s incomprehensible — but when he isn’t, he’s quite good.

   He made many appearances in individual episodes of ’60s and ’70s TV series, everything from Ben Casey to Perry Mason. In films he was Adam in The Bible (1966) and Bradley Ford in The Story of Pretty Boy Floyd (1974, TVM), made one Ellery Queen (1976), Murder at the World Series (1977, TVM), Dial M for Murder (1981, TVM), Prime Suspect (1989), The China Lake Murders (1990, TVM), five appearances on Twin Peaks (1990-91), Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2 (2003/4), and even had his own series, Then Came Bronson (27 episodes, 1969-70).

   Douglas Henderson (1919-78), the nosy reporter, was one of those ubiquitous screen faces whose name you never knew, bit-part performers who superbly served as cinematic wallpaper. Criminous credits: Cage of Evil (1960), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Johnny Cool (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), three episodes of The Outer Limits (1963-64), six appearances on Perry Mason, Pendulum (1969), 10 segments of The Wild Wild West (1966-69), Zigzag (1970), four episodes of Mannix, six installments of The F.B.I., and three installments of Mission: Impossible.

    “Diagnosis: Danger” can be viewed on Hulu here.

Editorial Comment:   According to one source on the Internet, “Diagnosis: Danger” was intended as the pilot for a weekly series starring Michael Parks, but the project failed to find a sponsor.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Problem of the Green Capsule. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1939. Published in the UK as The Black Spectacles, Hamish Hamilton, hardcover, 1939. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback, including: Books, Inc., hc, 1944; Pan, UK, pb, 1947; Bantam #101, pb, 1947; Berkley, pb, 1970; Award, pb, 1976; IPL, pb, 1986.

   A series of poisonings of village children by means of doctored chocolates brings in a Scotland Yard detective, Andrew Elliot. While he’s there, it is learned that another murder has taken place: that of Marcus Chesney, a local millionaire whose niece, Marjorie, has been suspected of the earlier poisonings.

   Chesney has died from poisoning! And he was being filmed at the time he was poisoned! Chesney was doing a demonstration of how the doctored chocolates had been substituted for the innocent chocolates in the village shop, testing the perceptions of an audience of three people: Marjorie; Marjorie’s fiance, George Harding; and a neighboring friend, Professor Ingram.

   Chesney’s brother, Doctor Joe Chesney, had had to absent himself from the performance, while Marcus’ employee, Wilbur Emmet, was a participant in the performance, as the mysterious, muffled Mr. Nemo.

   It is “Mr. Nemo” who forced a presumably poisoned capsule down Marcus Chesney’s throat. But Wilbur is found concussed in the yard after the performance. Was Wilbur really Mr. Nemo, or was someone else masquerading as him?

   All three members of the audience seemingly have perfect alibis — they were watching the performance. Dr. Joe was attending a patient. So we have an impossible crime once again, though more in the nature of an alibi problem: how was someone able to get in position to poison Marcus?

   I find this on re-reading still to be a very good detective novel, with an interesting problem, lucidly elucidated at the end. Some may find it short on action, but that’s okay with someone like me, who finds some Carr’s too active.

   Interestingly, the Carr stand-in hero here is a young police inspector. On the whole, this works well. Dr. Fell does not appear until halfway through the book, and a very good police investigation is conducted until then. Then Inspector Elliott meets Dr. Fell, shouts that he loves Marjorie and confesses that he has concealed that he knew before taking the case that Marjorie tried to buy poison.

   Fell (who it turns out is suppressing evidence about Marjorie as well) compliments Elliott on his chivalry. This put me off a bit. It seemed Carr’s romanticism getting the better of good sense. Any policeman behaving that way should have been drummed out of the force.

   And that Elliot could have been “in love” with Marjorie to that extent after seeing her once in Pompeii (Pompeii is for lovers?) seemed absurd to me. But I think I’m the first person ever to complain about this, so I guess it isn’t an issue with most people.

   The characters are solid enough, classic Carr stock. We have the disputatious academic (Professor Ingram); the bluff, hearty fellow who roars a lot (Doctor Joe); the goody two shoes, obsequious male (George Harding — though did Carr really need to give us as black marks that he has “Southern European” looks and went to a “minor” public school, oh dear!); and the beautiful girl who is either an angel or a devil.

   The police are nicely characterized (Major Crow only sounds like Carr once, when he informs Elliott of Marjorie: “For all her sweetly innocent looks, I hear she sometimes uses language that would startle a sergeant-major”).

   There’s a lot of roaring from the male characters that goes on in this book (Dr. Fell even makes a roaring whisper, I don’t know how). I could do without the roaring myself, and I know this got on Barzun’s nerves.

   After reading Doug Greene’s excellent biography of Carr with all the information about his drinking, I can’t help wondering if the drinking bouts kind of influenced Carr’s writing in this regard. After all, drunken people do often roar and shout. Or maybe Carr was just naturally excitable.

   We know he was strongly attracted to the more romantic past. It’s interesting that he was such good friends with the phlegmatic John Street. Of course, both Carr and Street had a fascination with and great talent for murder mechanics.

   Carr often coupled this talent for murder with a Christie-level skill at misdirection, which makes him a truly major figure of the period even if one does like all his stylistic quirks. Barzun and Taylor are far too harshly critical of Carr (and it should be noted they never read many of his best books).

   Nitpicking aside, this seems to me one of Carr’s strongest books. Not flashy, but a fascinating problem. One part of the explanation has a beautiful simplicity, but chances are the reader will miss it until it is revealed!

Editorial Comment:   Curt has recently been re-reading a number of books by John Dickson Carr. This is the fourth in a series of reviews he wrote as a result. The Corpse in the Waxworks was the third, and you can read it here.

BARBARA CLEVERLY – Strange Images of Death. Constable, UK, hardcover, March 2010. Soho Constable, US, hardcover, April 2010.

Genre:   Police procedural. Leading character:   Commander Joe Sandilands, 8th in series. Setting:   France; 1926.

First Sentence:   He studied her sleeping face for the last time.

   Scotland Yard Commander Joe Sandilands is taking Dorcas, his friend’s 14-year-old daughter, to meet her artist father at an old castle in Provence. On the way, she asks Joe to find the mother who abandoned her when she was 2 years old.

   Upon arrival, there is a second mystery to solve. It begins with the destruction of a tomb figure, escalates to the death of a rabbit and culminates in the murder of a beautiful woman. Forced to work with French Commissaire Francis Jacquemin, known for arresting first, then forcing confessions, Joe must ensure he catches the proper killer and prevents any more deaths.

   Characters. It is they who bring a story to life and Cleverly’s characters do not disappoint. They are fully developed with their backgrounds established and their personalities distinct. We not only learn about Joe, for those who’ve not read previous books in the series, but are told of his appearance in an unforced manner.

   A predominant young character can be awkward, but not here. Dorcas, his 14 year old “niece” is someone who holds her own. She is someone I want to see remain part of the series, if not in every book but certainly in the future. There was a character I felt wasn’t as strong an element as I thought might be, but I was okay with that.

   Cleverly is a very visual writer, whether in panorama or in detail. You have a real sense of their surroundings at all times. I appreciate dialogue that has a natural ear and flow with a touch of humor, and she satisfies on all aspects.

   This book’s opening hook is very strong; suspenseful, dramatic and ultimately brutal without the reader having to witness the act. It is also, we soon learn, the first of many excellent twists within the plot, this first so subtle you don’t realize it until later.

   Cleverly skillfully interweaves interesting historical information into the story as well as providing an adept explanation of French and English police ranks and an amazing assessment of Van Gogh’s self portrait.

   These are only a few examples of the deftness with which Ms. Cleverly writes, with none of these causing a break in the flow of the story. Add to that an emotional secondary mystery, and just the right touch of suspense and you have a well thought out and well executed traditional mystery.

   Each year I plan for the release of the newest Sandilands book and order it as soon as it is available. If you’ve not read them, do start at the beginning of the series and set aside uninterrupted time to enjoy each one. I know why they rank so high on my “must read” list; they are excellent.

Rating: Excellent.

      The Detective Joe Sandilands series —

1. The Last Kashmiri Rose (2001)

2. Ragtime In Simla (2002)
3. The Damascened Blade (2003)
4. The Palace Tiger (2004)

5. The Bee’s Kiss (2005)
6. Tug of War (2006)
7. Folly Du Jour (2007)

8. Strange Images of Death (2010)

   Barbara Cleverly has also written three books about aspiring archaeologist Leatitia Talbot, a series that also takes place in the late 1920s and various exotic places around the world.

   Of all the authors who in the years after World War II moved mystery fiction “from the detective story to the crime novel,” perhaps the most influential American woman was Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995).

   Certainly she’s the only one to have received so much critical attention after her death: first Andrew Wilson’s biography in 2003, more recently Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith, which isn’t a conventional biography but more an exploration of Highsmith’s obsession-torn mind and emotions and how they spilled over into novels like Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

   If you think Cornell Woolrich was something of a psychopath and a creep, you don’t know the meaning of those words till you’ve encountered Highsmith.

   Both, of course, were homosexual. I gather from Schenkar’s book that Highsmith, who was born in Texas and came of age in the feverish New York of the World War II years and went through lovers with the fury of a Texas twister, was never terribly comfortable with being a lesbian.

   Woolrich was perhaps the most deeply closeted, self-hating homosexual male author that ever lived. Both wound up worth several million but often acted as if they were penniless. Both lived mainly on booze, cigarettes and coffee, with peanut butter added to the diet in Highsmith’s case.

   Both bequeathed their copyrights and other property to institutions, not human beings. Woolrich left an autobiographical manuscript (Blues of a Lifetime) which is full of obvious fiction; Highsmith left 8000 pages of notebooks which, as Shenkar demonstrates, are also pockmarked with falsifications.

   But there were notable differences too. Just to mention one, Highsmith was fixated on possessions, keeping everything (except any paper trail leading back to the seven years she had spent in her twenties writing scripts for comic books like Spy Smasher and Jap Buster Johnson), while Woolrich kept nothing, not even copies of his novels and stories.

   It’s most unlikely that the two ever met. Woolrich read very little crime fiction but appeared regularly in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties and may have read Highsmith’s EQMM stories.

   We know she read the magazine steadily and, in her book Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, devoted almost a full page to Woolrich’s “Murder After Death” (EQMM, December 1964).

   Why did she single out this rarely reprinted and never collected tale? Perhaps she saw something akin to her own evil protagonists in Georg Mohler, a loser at the game of love who turns to crime for emotional revenge.

   When the wealthy and lovely Delphine rejects him for law student Reed Holcomb and then dies a sudden but natural death, Mohler concocts a laughably dumb plot to sneak into the funeral parlor, inject poison into her body and frame Holcomb for murder.

   Woolrich’s detail work is sloppy and implausible and his climactic twist, like those in several of his earlier stories, comes straight out of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. But the scene where Mohler hides in the funeral home and posthumously poisons his lover’s corpse is a gem of poetic horror.

   If any single element in the tale deserved Highsmith’s attention it was this one. In fact she spent most of the page summarizing the plot, calling it a “quite well-done gimmick story” with “an elaborate but quite entertaining and believable scaffolding….” Go figure.

   It was a gimmick—the two men in Strangers on a Train (1950) agreeing (or did they?) to exchange murders — that first made crime fiction readers (not to mention Alfred Hitchcock) take notice of the not yet 30-year-old Highsmith.

   Later authors including Nicholas Blake and Fredric Brown worked their own variations on the theme. But who remembers its first appearance in the genre?

   Mum’s the Word for Murder (1938) uses very much the same gimmick, although here it involves three murders, not two, and is saved till the solution rather than employed as a springboard.

   The byline on this long-forgotten book was Asa Baker but the author’s real name was Davis Dresser and his best-known pseudonym was Brett Halliday, which he used for the all but endless adventures of Miami PI Michael Shayne, beginning in 1939, a year after Mum’s the Word came out.

   As chance would have it, much of both novels is set in Texas, where both Dresser and Highsmith spent several of their formative years.