GWEN BRISTOW & BRUCE MANNING – The Invisible Host.   Mystery League, hardcover, 1930. Play: The Ninth Guest, by Owen Davis (on Broadway Aug-Oct 1930). Film: Columbia, 1934, as The Ninth Guest (with Genevieve Tobin & Donald Cook; director: Roy William Neill). Paperback reprint: Popular Library, 1975, as The Ninth Guest.

   Two of the earliest and most popular writers for the highly successful Mystery League were the husband-and-wife team of Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning, both one-time reporters on rival newspapers in New Orleans.

   This first work is sheer melodrama at its best (if such is possible) as a cast of eight guests is invited by telegram to attend a penthouse surprise party in New Orleans; each guest is led to believe the party is in his/her honor. The only problem is that none of them are permitted to leave and death awaits each in turn, as their host explains to them over the radio.

   Any comparison with Dame Christie’s And Then There Were None stops here. There is a definite undercurrent of hostility between various members of the ill-fated gathering, and suspicion runs high as to who is actually behind the macabre dinner.

   The host challenges them to his life-or-death game over radio station WITS, promising himself as a final victim if he fails to kill them all, each of whose secrets and idiosyncrasies he seems to know so thoroughly.

   Against the prerequisite background of thunderstorm and candlelight with all avenues of escape blocked and eight coffins awaiting them on the patio, the guests fall one by one by various pre-arranged death devices, including poison, electricity, needles and (Pen readers take note) a final death by a poisoned pen.

   The host cleverly counts on his guests’ known habits to plan and even predict their various deaths.

   While necessarily shy on characterization, and requiring a more-than-normal amount of suspension of disbelief on the reader’s part, it would be unfair not to admit to some good surprises and a good overall job of construction on the part of the authors.

   You may recall having seen the 1934 Columbia film on television which was made from the play version, both of which were entitled The Ninth Guest — and there was one, by the way, but you’ll have to read the book if you want to find out who it was.

Note:   David Vineyard reviewed this book a few posts back. Follow the link to find it. In the same issue of Poisoned Pen, Jim also reviewed Bristow and Manning’s The Gutenberg Murders, another Mystery League adventure. Look for it posted on this blog sometime soon.

Editorial Comment:   Jim McCahery died in 1995 at the age of 61, far too young. He lived in New Jersey and was an avid reader and collector of mystery fiction. He was also the author of two crime-solving cases of Lavina London, a retired radio star and amateur detective, books that were both published in the 1990s.

     I met Jim in person once or twice as a fellow member of DAPA-Em, and he was a close friend of Jeff Meyerson, who published The Poisoned Pen, and who has given me permission to reprint not only this, but other reviews that Jim wrote for him over the years.

DAN J. MARLOWE – The Vengeance Man. Fawcett Gold Medal d1645, paperback original, 1966. Reprint paperbacks: Black Lizard, 1988; Stark House Press, 2007.

   Like his masterpiece The Name of the Game is Death, Dan J. Marlowe’s novel The Vengeance Man revolves around a small, insular community filled with intersecting characters and multiple hidden agendas. In fact, the book’s hard-boiled lead, Jim Wilson, makes a point of constantly calling out just how small his backwoods town is, and at certain key moments, turns the claustrophobia of the small town experience to his advantage.

   At first Marlowe paints Jim Wilson in broad strokes, portraying him as a typical criminal leading man — low on patience, tough as nails and borderline sociopathic. But as the novel progresses, the novel works to fill in details, giving us a much more personal take on Wilson’s personality. Details emerge on everything from a youth filled with abandonment and abuse to Wilson’s strange passive aggressive relationships with women.

   By about hundred pages in, you feel that first-person voice creeping under your skin. You can almost smell Wilson’s rage at a town that he feels betrayed him. And while you’re seeing the world through his revenge-tinted eyes, you can’t help but have a slight fear of whatever his next move might be. The result is something similar to the first-person work of Jim Thompson in novels like Hell of a Woman and The Nothing Man. A frightening insight into the killer mind the none-the-less manages to humanize at the same time. The effect can be chilling.

   The book opens with Wilson murdering both his cheating wife and her lover in a flea bag motel. After a carefully orchestrated, if somewhat unrealistic scheme sets him free, he unleashes a campaign of terror on the town — with the end goal of setting himself up as the most feared and powerful man in the community. A title he aims to usurp from his political string-pulling father-in-law, Judge Tom Harrington.

   As the story moves forward, we ping-pong between dueling political forces: politicians, bankers, and worst of all, banker’s wives. Of course, we know it’s going to end badly for Wilson. But trying to anticipate when the rug will get pulled, and who will do the pulling is something Marlowe has refined to a pretty fine science.

   Throughout the book Marlowe keeps the plot moving at a fast clip with the occasional detour for the sake of color and atmosphere. But there’s nothing even remotely indulgent. As for the quality of the writing, it recalls Gold Medal books at the top of their game: clean, simple and hard boiled.

   If there’s a fault to the book it’s the weak characterizations outside of Jim Wilson and his Femme Fatal counterpart. Tom Harrington, for example is built up throughout the first half of the novel as possibly the most dangerous man the south has ever seen. Yet by the time we finally meet him it seems as though Marlowe was unsure how to bring this to life. In the end we’re left unsure exactly what kind of threat he really posed.

   The same can be said of other characters throughout the book — from Wilson’s best friend, to his friend-with-benefits. The argument could probably be made that keeping these characters so peripheral helps establish an atmosphere where shocking revelations are truly shocking. But when you don’t have a preconceived notion about a character, surprising the reader with new information doesn’t end up being much of a surprise.

   Still, this is a small flaw and it shouldn’t dissuade you from reading one of Dan J. Marlowe’s best books outside of the Earl Drake series.

   I’ve been a baseball fan since 1952. Not too coincidentally I’ve also been a Detroit Tigers fan since 1952 — I grew up in a small town in Michigan. The team was awful, but I was ten years old and that didn’t matter to me. Whenever they won, I remember running up to my dad when he came home from work — they played baseball in the daytime then — and telling him, “The Tigers won! The Tigers won!”

   I wasn’t very athletic when I was ten. Later on I could play fairly well. But the game of baseball — any sport — has a way of humbling you whenever you think you’re good or even really good. What I discovered, though, back in 1952 were record books. All kinds of numbers for every player on every team and I think I memorized every one of them for the previous year and from then on until Major League Baseball expanded and there were too many teams that were simply too far away and if Detroit didn’t play them, then the numbers started not to mean so much.

   There was a fellow on that 1952 team, a team that was in last place all season long, named Virgil Trucks, and even though he had a win-loss record of something like 5 and 22 that season, he pitched two no-hitters. I remember listening to both of them on the radio (no TV back then) but maybe that’s memory speaking, and I only think I listened to them. Maybe one, maybe neither, but I remember listening, and to me that’s all that matters.

   Earlier tonight, or really late yesterday, while I was lazing around trying to figure out is rewarded play legit on my phone, I was watching as a pitcher for Detroit named Armando Galarraga was almost a hero, and I think he is, since he pitched a perfect game (not a single opposing batter reaching base for any reason) in which he got 28 outs, one over the legal limit of 27.

   He knows he pitched a perfect game, the whole world does — the parts of the world where baseball has any meaning to the people that live there. But in the record books he threw a one-hitter. The very last man he faced in what would have been perfection, 27 batters up, 27 batters down, was called safe by the umpire, a fellow whose life-long career has been umpiring, a fellow nobody ever heard of until now, a fellow named Jim Joyce.

   And Jim Joyce missed it. He called the batter safe at first base, but he was out. All of the replays showed it, and Armando Galarraga had to face one more batter. He could have lost control, lost his temper, but he didn’t. He stayed cool, got the next batter out and won the game. In the long run, in baseball terms, that’s the goal. To win the game.

   When he saw the replay after the game, Jim Joyce was distraught. He knew he blew it. He apologized profusely, but the game was over. It was too late. It was in the record books.

   When that last batter came up, Jim Joyce knew the situation. He’s a baseball fan himself, he has to be. He called the play at first base the way he saw it. He could have taken the easy way out and called the batter out. No one would have blamed him, even if the replay had shown the batter safe. He didn’t shade the truth. He was honest, and he called it the way he saw it. He’s a man of integrity. An honest man.

   An honest man who apologized when he discovered he was wrong. A man who probably won’t sleep well again for a long time, but what he did was the job he was paid to do.

   When he shows up for work tomorrow, and I hope he can, as he’s in for an ordeal of media coverage that you won’t believe, but whenever he does, the fans in the stadium ought to give him a standing ovation. I know they won’t but if I were there, I’d give him a standing ovation of one person. Me.

ELEAZAR LIPSKY – The Kiss of Death. Penguin #642, US, paperback original, 1947. Reprinted as The Hoodlum: Lion #161, paperback, 1953. Also reprinted by Dell (D396) under its original title, 1961.

    ● Film: Twentieth Century-Fox, 1947 (with Victor Mature, Brian Donlevy, Coleen Gray & Richard Widmark; screenwriters: Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer; director: Henry Hathaway).

    ● Film: Twentieth Century-Fox, 1958, as The Fiend Who Walked the West (with Robert Evans, Hugh O’Brian, Linda Cristal and Stephen McNally; screenwriters: Harry Brown and Philip Yordan; director: Gordon Douglas).

   Following the two Errol Flynn books [reviewed here ], I moved on then to a sub-sub-genre known to cineastes as “Re-makes of Old Victor Mature Movies” starting with Kiss of Death (Fox, 1947) which was reincarnated as The Fiend Who Walked the West (Fox, 1958).

   Kiss of Death comes from a 1947 novel of the same name by Eleazar Lipsky, a former prosecutor who turned to writing and did rather well at it. It’s a taut, unglamorous tale about a professional crook betrayed by his own kind, struggling to keep to his personal code of ethics.

   Tightly told, and peopled with characters who seem quite ordinary and very real in Lipsky’s muted but evocative prose, it reads very real at times. There’s even an interesting bit where two of the characters go to a movie that sounds a lot like The Blue Dahlia (Paramount, 1946). Mosty, though, it’s quiet, gritty and very effective.

   Filmed the same year at Fox, the movie benefits from vigorous direction by Henry Hathaway, evocative photography on New York locations, and convincing performances all around, including the much-maligned Victor Mature, who projects his greasy machismo with effortless ease against some showy co-stars.

   A nice job, particularly since he’s up against Richard Widmark’s star-making debut as a sadistic killer who gets all the best scenes. One of Widmark’s bits has become a movie icon (as you see here) but I was more impressed by a simple scene where the snarling killer is seen through a gap in a curtain, approaching the camera: the nearer he gets, the less we see of his face, till all that’s left is the snarl — like a baleful Cheshire cat from some malevolent Wonderland, ready to devour something. One of the scariest bits I’ve seen outside the monster movies.

   Kiss of Death was so successful they re-made it as The Fiend Who Walked the West in 1958, with Hugh O’Brien taking the Victor Mature role, and doing rather well with it.

   O’Brien’s stoic acting somehow lends itself to a character trying to keep his emotions in check as he plays cat-and-mouse with a sadistic killer, and things are helped along considerably by punchy direction from Gordon Douglas, who could do anything with a straight face.

   Here he provides some explosive action and solid, western-style suspense, despite a somewhat jarring effect from time to time when the soundtrack erupts into back-ground music borrowed from The Day the Earth Stood Still. He also gets to use his action trademark, a violent shoot-out with one fighter returning fire while visibly getting hit. Fun stuff.

Editorial Comment:   Dan didn’t mention it, so I didn’t include it in the info above, but the book was made into a film a third time, also by Twentieth Century-Fox, in 1995. This most recent version starred David Caruso, Samuel L. Jackson, Nicolas Cage & Helen Hunt. I wish I could tell you more about it, but somehow I missed this one, and this is all I know.

CHARLES TODD – The Red Door. Wm Morrow & Co., hardcover, December 2009; trade paperback, January 2010.

Genre:   Historical mystery/police procedural. Leading character:   Insp. Ian Rutledge, 12th in series. Setting:   England–Golden Age/1920.

First Sentence:   She stood in front of the cheval glass, the long mirror the Peter had given her on their second anniversary, and considered herself.

   Inspector Ian Rutledge has two cases. First is the disappearance of Walter Teller. Rutledge finds the behavior of the missing man’s family decidedly odd. The second case is of a violent robber who attacked Rutledge and who murders his next victim. Rutledge is pressured to solve both cases, especially as deaths mount in both.

   This is another instance of an author making the mistake of assuming readers have read the previous books and, thus not providing sufficient character identification or development, particularly of the secondary characters.

   Ian and less so, Hamish, are well-enough accounted for. (Hamish is the voice in Ian’s head of Hamish MacLeod, the corporal whom Ian shot for desertion during the war.) However, there are two characters with similar names, and background is only somewhat provided for one, but not the other.

   I am happy to say, the Teller family fares better in this regard, although there are so many of them a Cast of Characters would have been very helpful. This negative element is balanced by the positive pertaining to sense of time and place.

   Todd is very good at creating atmosphere, taking us to post WWI England. For historical accuracy, I rank Todd in the same category as Anne Perry, and that’s high praise, indeed. The dialogue is very well done and reflects the period as well.

   The other skill is in plot. Some may wonder at the need for the second story line. On thinking about it, however, it worked well at provided another element of doubt regarding the primary story.

   It was also realistic in that most officers would handle more than one case at a time and it, again, displayed Bowles dislike of Rutledge. Even with the slight negative of character development, the book worked and Todd remains very high on my “must read” list.

Rating: Good Plus.

Editorial Comment: It is hard to believe that there are already 12 books in this series, but given that the first one, A Test of Wills, came out in 1996, or 14 years ago (!), it is surprising that I am so surprised. The Todds (Charles & Caroline) have also written two books in another series they’ve just begun, this one with Bess Crawford, a nurse working in England during World War I.

Previously reviewed on this blog:

       A False Mirror (by Steve Lewis)

GWEN BRISTOW & BRUCE MANNING – The Invisible Host.   Mystery League, hardcover, 1930. Play: The Ninth Guest, by Owen Davis (on Broadway Aug-Oct 1930). Film: Columbia, 1934, as The Ninth Guest (with Genevieve Tobin & Donald Cook; director: Roy William Neill). Paperback reprint: Popular Library, 1975, as The Ninth Guest.

   A small group of people are gathered together in a lonely location by a host none of them knows. Soon they start to die one by one, and come to the horrifying revelation that one of their number is both their host and the killer. A successful book that became a successful play and was the basis of a film and written by a best-selling female writer…

   But it’s not Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (And Then There Were None). In fact it was published nine years earlier, the first novel by Gwen Bristow (Jubilee Trail, Calico Palace) and screenwriter husband Bruce Manning (Meet Nero Wolfe, The Lone Wolf Returns, One Hundred Men and a Girl, Rage of Paris, Jubilee Trail — see above — and many more).

   The Invisible Host opens as the ‘guests’ receive a telegram from a mysterious ‘host’ —

   True he’s no U. N. Owen, but he makes his point, and his guests arrive at Bienville Penthouse for their assignation with fate:

    Margaret Chisholm, who dislikes her position as grand dame of New Orleans society being challenged; Dr. Murray Chambers Reid, the president of a local university who has just pulled off a coup by forcing a left-leaning colleague out; Jason Osgood, wealthy founder of the Osgood Foundation; Peter Daly, a playwright celebrating his first play on Broadway; Sylvia Inglesby, a glamorous and beautiful lawyer; Tim Salmon, a pugnacious tough politician; Henry Abbot, that left leaning professor; and Jean Trent, the diaphanous movie star back home in New Orleans for the holidays.

   So they gather at Bienville Penthouse in the recently completed Beinville Building where their host informs them anonymously:

   And soon enough the ‘playful unicorn’ is teasing the edges of murder as the guests begin to die one by one.

   So the game is on and the ‘guests’ begin to die one by one as their host strikes again and again…

   Tensions rise between the suspects:

   Mrs. Chisholm dies in the best manner — of chagrin, a neat trick for any killer. Tim Slamon falls to a deadly (and the most unlikely I’ve ever encountered in long years of reading these) trap based on a personal habit. Sylvia Inglesby loses control and commits virtual suicide throwing herself at an electrified door. Jason Osgood, the ruthless millionaire falls victim to his own ruthlessness. Dr. Reid dies of trying to psychoanalyze the killer who is just one step too clever for him.

   And then there were three.

   And of course the killer is mad as a hatter:

   No, it’s not the Joker, though his methods and psychology aren’t far off. The Joker’s motivations make more sense than this killer’s.

   The Invisible Host is by no means a good book, Bill Pronzini wisely chose it as an alternative classic, but it is fun in the way only a true alternative classic can be, and a good illustration of how heavy-handed a good idea can be handled by less deft hands than a master like Agatha Christie. On its own terms it is a good deal of fun.

   I have to admit I enjoyed it, but then I’m somewhat inured to bad books. You may have to find your own standard of tolerance for this sort of thing.

   Bristow and Manning wrote two more mystery novels, The Gutenberg Murders (1931) and The Mardi Gras Murders (1932). I have no idea if they are anywhere near as divinely alternative as this one. Gwen Bristow went on to write two popular historical novels, The Jubilee Trail and Calico Palace, the former adapted into a glossy color film from Republic with Vera Ralston, Joan Leslie, Forest Tucker, and Pat O’Brien (and screenplay by hubby Bruce Manning).

   The Invisible Host was not the basis for the 1939 film The Man They Could Not Hang, though it uses the same basic set up of the ‘host’ gathering his victims in his house and eliminating them one by one.

   Beware, some sources confuse this with the earlier Karloff film The Walking Dead, which does use the idea of the victims each dying more or less of his own flaws and foibles, but nothing else similar to the film. The idea of the victims gathered at a lonely location goes back at least to The Cat and the Canary, so neither the book nor the film is wholly new territory.

   The book was reprinted in a later paperback edition as The Ninth Guest. The Mystery League edition has an added bonus of sample chapters from books by Edgar Wallace, George Goodchild, Miles Burton, and alternative king Sydney Horler.

   And as our hero and heroine escape the deadly trap and the killer bites into the cap of a pen filled with prussic acid…

   Leaving Death, that playful unicorn housewife, to tidy up after himself I suppose. Serves him right too, that motley clown of the Quarter.

Editorial Comment:   If anyone is interested, the New York Times reviewed the movie version of the book, and you can find it online here.

WILLIAM G. TAPPLY – Follow the Sharks. Charles Scribners Sons, hardcover, 1985. Reprint paperbacks: Ballantine, 1986, 1992.

Genre:   Licensed investigator. Leading character:   Attorney Brady Coyne, 3rd in series. Setting:   Boston.

First Sentence:   Sylvie Szabo normally speaks with the careful diction and precise grammar of one whose English is a second language, but when she’s a little sleepy or drunk or wants to tease, her speech tends to betray her Slavic origins.

   At the bequest of a friend, attorney Brady Coyne becomes the agent for young baseball pitcher Eddie Donogan. Although his career starts with great promise, over time his pitching falls apart.

   Eddie not only quits baseball, but walks away from his wife and their young son, E. J. Now, twelve years later, Brady receives a call that E. J. has been kidnapped and the family wants his help.

   You don’t need to be a fan of baseball to like this book, even though it does include one of the most loving and reverential descriptions of the game I’ve ever read.

   But it’s that level of description of all aspects that makes Tapply such a pleasure to read. He pays such wonderful attention to the details in providing time, place and atmosphere: “The sky along the horizon was turning from black to purple…”

   With that, you know exactly the point in the day to which he is referring. Tapply brings the same life to his characters. Brady is one of my favorite protagonists as he is a true “good guy,” which is so refreshing. He doesn’t automatically go to bed with the attractive woman, he plays by the rules while protecting his clients, he likes classical music and classic jazz and misses his children.

   Even with the secondary characters, there is not only the physical description, but that sense of who they are. As with other books I’ve read recently, it is interesting to read a book set within the past 25 years and to realize how much has changed within that short period of time in terms of technology and social behavior.

   Even so, the story did not feel dated to me at all, as plot is very well constructed. Although, the events take place over a period of time, there is still plenty of action and suspense with a very effective first-person voice.

   The thing to which I keep coming back is that Tapply makes it feel real. He passed away in 2009, and I personally should hate to see his work overlooked or forgotten. I am greatly enjoying reading his series in order, and I highly recommend this book.

Rating: Very Good.

Editorial Comment:   A short obituary for Mr. Tapply was posted here on this blog last August. It includes a full bibliography with many cover images. I met him once, and we exchanged emails a few times. He was one of the good guys in mystery fiction, and I echo LJ’s hope that his work won’t be forgotten too soon.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL – The Big Bow Mystery. Rand McNally, US, hardcover, 1895. Previously published by Henry, UK, hardcover, 1892. Reprinted in many anthologies of vintage detective fiction, both hardcover and soft.

   Film (with partial sound): FBO, 1928, as The Perfect Crime (with Clive Brook & Irene Rich; director: Bert Glennon). Also: RKO, 1934, as The Crime Doctor (with Otto Kruger & Karen Morley; director: John Robertson). Also: Warner Bros., 1946, as The Verdict (with Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre & Joan Lorring; director: Don Siegel).

   British novelist and playwright Israel Zangwill made only one excursion into the mystery field, at the age of twenty-seven, when he was invited by the London Star to write a “more original piece of fiction” for them. The result, which ran serially in the newspaper during 1891, was certainly original — the first locked-room mystery novella.

   There had been locked-room mysteries before, in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, but both had involved elementary trickery with windows and the reader had no real opportunity to solve the puzzle. The Big Bow Mystery, written partly as a parody of detective stories, is a classic whodunit that still reads quite well today.

   Whether or not retired police inspector Grodman can really qualify as a Classic Sleuth may be open to question, but from the moment he is summoned by Mrs. Drabdumb to break down the locked door of Arthur Constant’s bedroom, it is clear we are witnessing the birth of a classic mystery situation.

   John Dickson Carr once observed that Israel Zangwill invented a fictional device that has since been used in many forms, “on a ship, in a ruined house, in a conservatory, in an attic, and even in the open air.” But Zangwill’s first version still remains one of the best, and rightly established him as the father of the locked-room mystery.

   Scores of later mystery writers were intrigued by the plot possibilities suggested by Zangwill’s work, and went on to create endless variations on the locked room and the impossible crime.

   Running just over 30,000 words in length, about half as long as the average mystery novel today, The Big Bow Mystery has rarely been published as a separate volume in this century. It appears in Zangwill’s 1903 collection The Grey Wig. More recently it was included in Hans Stefan Santesson’s 1968 anthology The Locked Room Reader (Random House) and David Willis McCullough’s 1984 anthology Great Detectives (Pantheon).

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Note:   The Big Bow Mystery was previously reviewed on this blog by Mary Reed. In his comments following my review of The Big Clock, David Vineyard pointed out that “The idea of the hero hunting himself […] all dates back to Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery […] a pioneering locked room classic that touches on the theme.”

JOHN DICKSON CARR – He Who Whispers. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1946. Hamish Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1946. Reprinted several times, in both hardcover and soft.

   Sometimes you go back and reread an old classic that really impressed you first time out and find the magic is gone. Fortunately, that didn’t happen with He Who Whispers.

   Carr’s eerie tale about the mysterious murder on top the ruined tower in prewar France that haunts a group of people in present-day, postwar England is considered by many fans today to be his single best work. I wouldn’t put it quite at the very top, but it’s certainly in the top ten.

    As Doug Greene has pointed out, it effectively combines supernatural elements of his earlier work with the male-female emotional and sexual tension of his forties works. The tale is both thrilling and moving, with some greater character interest than usual.

   Indeed, the character interest is arguably the strongest element of the book. I would think many readers could deduce the identity of the culprit of the book’s crimes (hey, I did), though the mechanism of the tower murder and its motive may well prove elusive. They are quite cleverly clued.

   Character interest is so strong here, I felt like the presence of Dr. Fell was not really needed, though he is pretty restrained here. Still, he takes me a bit out of the story.

   Other than that, there’s hard to find much to criticize. A grand work. The opening of the book, where the visiting Professor Rigaud tells the tale of the murder on the tower, and the closing section, which tales place in an evocatively portrayed blitzed London, in particular are spectacular set pieces.

Editorial Comments:   This is the first of several reviews Curt has sent me following his recent (re)reading of the works of John Dickson Carr and Carter Dickson. Doug Greene, whom he mentions in this review, is the author of John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles, generally considered to be the definite biography of Mr Carr.

EVE ZAREMBA – A Reason to Kill. PaperJacks, Canada, paperback original, 1978. Second Story Press, Canada, trade paperback, 1989.

   Even Zaremba’s first mystery surely represents one of the more unusual experiments with the female hard-boiled private eye. First of all, her heroine, Helen Keremos, is a Canadian. Second, she is a lesbian.

   But if the locale of Zaremba’s mystery is obvious, the sexual identification of her sleuth is not. Since Zaremba refrains from chronicling the amorous adventures of her detective, it is only her empathy with male gay characters and occasional name-calling by disgruntled straight men that give her sexual identity away.

   Keremos, who operates out of a second-floor walk-up in Vancouver’s Chinatown, is called in by an academic to trace his missing son, last seen in Toronto. With the help of a researcher friend named Alex, Keremos checks out the young man’s past as well as his friends and family — all suspects.

   These include his sculptor mother and her drunken lover; a boyhood friend and his masculinity-obsessed father; and an appealing bisexual hood on the edge of Toronto’s entertainment biz. Keremos concludes that Martin Milwell’s disappearance is somehow linked to his recent acknowledgment of his homosexuality, but she must still discover the how and why of his disappearance.

   The plot, which seems to be building to an obvious solution, has several twists to deliver before its unusual conclusion — one that turns the classic reenactment of the crime into an exercise in collective decision-making.

   Keremos’s cross-Canada trek tells us much about the country and its people as well.

   Tough, a navy veteran with plenty of street smarts, Keremos is nonetheless a sympathetic figure. When she takes on two thugs (after a few too many drinks), we may question the realism in the portrayal, but Keremos’ s macho antics are mild compared to most of her male fictional counterparts.

   The politics of Zaremba’ s novel, sexual and otherwise, is clearly recognizable as part of the Seventies. For her portrayal of a believable PI, hardboiled and female, Zaremba should be recognized as an early entry in a mystery trend of the Eighties — and very probably beyond.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Editorial Comment:   As suggested in my comments following the preceding post, Helen Keremos may be the very first lesbian PI, at least as published by a major publisher (although semi-obscure one). It has been reprinted once, but apparently there’s never been a US edition. (PaperJacks books were generally distributed in this country, however.)

The Helen Keremos series —

     1. A Reason to Kill (1972)
     2. Work for a Million (1988)

     3. Beyond Hope (1988)
     4. Uneasy Lies (1990)
     5. The Butterfly Effect (1994)

     6. White Noise (1997)