JILL PATON WALSH – The Wyndham Case. Imogen Quy #1. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1993; trade paperback, 2003. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1993.

   Jill Paton Walsh, who died in 2020, was first best known as the author of a long list of children’s book. She rose to fame in “our” field for being chosen to complete one of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels, left unfinished at the time of her death (Thrones, Dominations, 1998), followed by three more Wimsey novels written on her own.

   Alongside these she wrote the four books in her Imogen Quy series, of which this is the first. Imogen is a young nurse at St. Agatha’s College, Cambridge University —  an interesting way to write detective mysteries involving college professors and deans in action, up close and personal, but yet from the outside, without having a major stake in the game.

   The “Wyndham Case” is actually (as a play on words) the spectacular shelving unit in a special, separately endowed scholarly library at St. Agatha’s, complete with arcane requirements for its care and financial upkeep . Found dead there one morning is a student who, because of his meager means, is suspected by many of being there for nefarious reasons. Thievery,

   A close male friend of Imogen is a police officer, which is always a good way to get a layperson involved in a murder case. Imogen is, in fact, invited by him to do just that when the students in the dead boy’s life stonewall the police.

   Walsh has to have been a good choice to continue to Peter Wimsey series. Her prose is clear, precise, witty, and just fusty enough to qualify. (I haven’t read any of them.) Imogen Quy (rhymes with “why”) is quiet but both perky and intelligent enough to be able spend a lot of enjoyable time with – perhaps too much so, as the fully absorbed reader (me) can easily find him- or herself so caught up in her personal life as to let the clues in the case slip  on by Me again).

   Do not lose yourself in the game, therefore,  and miss sight of the goal. Read and remember all the details as the case goes on. They will all be there (mostly).

   I enjoyed this one.
   

       The Imogen Quy series —

The Wyndham Case (1993)
A Piece of Justice (1995)
Debts of Dishonour (2006)
The Bad Quarto (2007)

ANDRE NORTON – Year of the Unicorn. Witch World series. Ace F-357, paperback original, 1965. Cover and interior art by Jack Gaughan. Reprinted many times. Collected in The Gates to Witch World (Tor, hardcover, 2001).

   Gillan’s story begins in an abbey, where she has spent the last eight years. She is of unknown origin, having been captured from the Hounds of Alizon by a lord of High Halleck as he fought to free his homeland. Her past is of importance, however, for she has the ability of true-sight, to see the thing behind the thing.

   As she tells her story, of her marriage to a Were-Rider as part of the Great Bargain, of the evil magic which produces two Gillans, and of her desperate struggle to reach the false one before she fades to the world of her dreams, this ability grows more controllable and both aids her and brings about the troubles she faces.

   Evidently she has blood of the witches of Estcarp, stories of whom have been previously told but not read; still, this book stands well enough on its own. This is an interesting world, where magic can be performed by some and swordsmanship is a necessary art. But, as fantasy, there is too much a feeling that the author has too much power at her command, especially at the end as Gillan and Herrel fight for their lives.

   The book begins slowly, difficult reading, but as the story becomes clearer so does interest rise. Then long chapters drag on without dialogue as she struggles her way alone to the land of the Were-Riders. On the other hand, many scenes are quite effective, and the quality of the archaic, picturesque language Norton uses adds a great deal to the tale.

Rating: ****

FREDERICK C. DAVIS – The Deadly Miss Ashley. Schyler Cole & Luke Speare #1. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1950. Pocket #804, paperback, 1951.

   I read and collect Davis’s books mostly because he was an extremely prolific writer for the detective pulp magazines, but if you were to pin me down I couldn’t tell you anything significant that he wrote for them. Maybe the Operator #5 pulp-hero stories?

   Here the detective Agency is Scyler Cole’s, but the switch os that he plays Watson to his own legman, Luke Speare, who appears to have all the brains and energy. The problem is to discover which of the many women inn the case is the accomplice awaiting an embezzler’s return from prison, the loot still hidden.

   The deductions get tedious and self-contradictory, the plot contrived and essentially unreal, but the clues are fair and the killer is deadly. The case hinges to large extent on an undecipherable method of shorthand, invented and taught by a lady in Baltimore – a touch of insanity indeed.

Rating: C

      The Schyler Cole & Luke Speare series —

The Deadly Miss Ashley. Doubleday 1950.
Lilies in Her Garden Grew. Doubleday 1951.
Tread Lightly, Angel. Doubleday 1952.
Drag the Dark. Doubleday 1953.
Another Morgue Heard From. Doubleday 1954.
Night Drop. Doubleday 1955

BASIL COPPER – The Curse of the Fleers. Harwood-Smart, UK, hardcover, 1976. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1977.  PS Publishing, UK, hardcover, 2012 (restoring the text of the author’s original manuscript).

   A well done Gothic melodrama for the season.

   Though Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca was as unblushing a gothic tale as was ever written, replete with the Rochester like Maxim de Winter and the faintest blush of the supernatural in the person of the title character and her mad housekeeper, the result of that novel and films success was that the Gothic novel took a tack into largely the women’s market, in books written almost exclusively by women and for women.

   Defined as a woman gets house genre, the model followed Du Maurier and Bronte’s Jane Eyre slavishly. A woman, always young and somewhat inexperienced, usually a governess, comes to a strange household usually finding an eccentric family haunted by the past, an attractive but distant, cold, and cruel male and a more charming, but not always trustworthy type.

   Not every book in the genre followed that model exactly, and I am not in the least condemning those that did. Mary Stewart. Norah Lofts, Phyllis Whitney, Dorothy Eden, Victoria Holt, and others working in the genre are some of the best writers of their era, but the true Gothic spirit got a bit lost in the mix.

   Oh, there were books that did fit the original definition, Dorothy MacArdle’s The Univited, Francis Beeding’s The House of Doctor Edwards, Jesse Douglas Keruish’s The Undying Monster, Russell Kirk’s The Old Dark House of Fear, William Sloane’s Edge of Running Water and To Walk Alone, Tom Tryon’s Harvest Home, and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House fit the “Gothick” tradition like a glove. And so did Basil Copper’s The Curse of the Fleers, and it might have been recognized as such if it hadn’t been butchered by its first publisher to the point the author turned his back on it.

   Now a restored edition brings the book back into its full Gothic glory replete with Copper’s extensive notes on writing the book appended to the ending.

   Captain Guy Hammond is a forty something veteran of the wars in Afghanistan facing the end of his military career as he recovers from a leg wound in London.

   
   Hammond, a bit like Dr. Watson, is a man with little family and no direction in life until he gets an urgent letter from former Lt. Cedric Fleer begging him to come to their estate Fleer in Dorset. “I cannot go into details but, for friendship’s sake. I should be grateful for your help and advice. This business becomes blacker with every passing day and I fear for my father’s sanity.”

   
   What red blooded Victorian male could resist that? But as Hammond gets closer to Fleer a sense of foreboding overtakes him. And with good reason. Beneath its battlements, Fleer is a vast uninviting place, however welcoming Sir John, Cedric’s father, and his attractive younger sister Prudence, and beautiful Claire Anstey. The countryside is cold and damp and the nearest neighbor Sir Jeffrey Darnley sullen and threatening.

   Basil Copper was a popular British writer who made his mark in the latter day Lovecraftian movement and followed August Derelith in writing the popular Solar Pons stories. His novels include the Lovecraftian The Great White Space, the Victorian Gothic detective story Necroscope, and the horror novel House of the Wolf. In addition he had some success with his L.A. based private eye series about P.I. Mike Faraday (even though he never visited Los Angeles), and wrote the Lee Falk Phantom paperback original novels for Avon. He was nominated for a Locus Award for best Fantasy novel and his story “Camera Obscura” was adapted for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

   One flaw built into the Gothic is that with all the build up too often the payoff is a disappointment. All that portent and heavy breathing, those sideways looks, the sudden breeze and cold, the faint noise that can’t be explained, shadows, and things barely perceived can add up to nothing much and disappear with a little light and a fresh breeze off the sea in lesser hands, or descend into overdone melodrama and sturm un drang. Many a perfectly good Gothic falls apart as the cobwebs get blown too conveniently away and the reader is left with a resounding, “so what?”.

   John Dickson Carr borrowed the trappings heavily in his detective novels, usually avoiding the pitfalls and often exceeding expectations, while writers like Helen McCloy (Through a Glass Darkly and Mister Splitfoot), Hake Talbot (Rim of the Pit), and William Lindsey Gresham (Nightmare Alley) teased the edges of the genre. Wilson Tucker’s Warlock even managed to work the spy novel into the mix, but the classic gothic take was usually eschewed for something else, the detective story, the horror novel, or science fiction.

   Not Copper, and not Fleers. The elements ratchet up nicely without boiling over, the tension gathering, the mystery deepening, and the ending well choreographed replete with logical explanation, a death trap worthy of Dick Tracy, and of course the inevitable treasure of the Fleers. Elements of the detective novel and horror may play at the edges, Hammond does some good detective work, but they are not the main thrust of the tale.

   That is pure Gothic. This would be silliness in a fair play detective story. In a true Gothic it is par for the course.

   Originality isn’t really what we are looking for in these kinds of entertainment. It’s the comfort of the familiar played out with intelligence and an eye to teasing our expectations while never disappointing them, here with the Creeping Man seen haunting the battlements and a giant gorilla in a private zoo as well as bodies hanging strangled in closets as Hammond investigates and begins to uncover very real motives for murder and the methods of committing them it all builds to what Copper himself called a Grand Guignol finale.

   And this time the guy gets the house and the girl and a career.

   About time too.

GLENN M. BARNS – Murder Is a Gamble. Jonathan Marks #1. Phoenix Press, hardcover, 1952. Bestseller Mystery B162, digest paperback, 1954?

   Jonny Marks of the Watson Agency is hired as a bodyguard for a slightly phoney but still likable Colonel Smallwood, who turns out to be a small-time card sharp and con-man with one last important deal in the works. Marks does save him from a beating by some mobsters om a nightclub but not from a “suicide” on a sealed-off floor of his hotel.

   A perfectly ordinary tale on which every other character is a ninny; otherwise no major offenses. The “locked room” mystery is nothing to startle, but it works neatly enough to be noted. Barns might have made something more out of this [had he given more editorial assistance than I am sure Phoenix Press was willing or able to provide].

Rating: C

Bibliographic Update: This was the first of eight mystery novels written by Glenn Barns. There was a second case recorded for PI Jonathan Marks, that being Murder Is Insane (Lippincott, 1956).

CHARLES WILLEFORD – Cockfighter. Chicago Paperback House, paperback, 1962. Crown, hardcover (slightly revised), 1972. Avon, paperback, movie tie-in, 1974. Black Lizard, paperback, 1987.

   If you’re still looking for the great American novel, this could be it.

   George Washington wrote a letter to General Lafayette saying: “It will be worth coming back to the United States, if only to be present at an election and a cocking main at which is displayed a spirit of anarchy and confusion, which no countryman of yours can understand.” One may want to remember this point, which we may be in danger of forgetting.

   Frank Mansfield is a cockfighter. He’s 32 and single. Cockfighting is his life. And his life’s goal is to win the Cockfighter of the Year award. He’s taken a vow of silence and will not speak again until and unless he wins the award.

   The story is of the single-minded purpose and commitment of a man alone in the world but for the signal pursuit that he himself has freely chosen and the cockfighting community in which he thrives.

   It’s a story of honesty, brutality and commitment. There are four things we can learn from a rooster: To fight, to get up early, to eat with your family, and to protect your spouse when she gets into trouble. Frank Mansfield has no spouse or family. But two out of four ain’t bad.

   The honesty of the sport is impeccable as a peck of pecking peckers. A cock couldn’t throw a fight even if it knew how.

   I’d last read this book in the mid-90’s and considered it a favorite. But sometimes it’s good to see if my assessments of yore hold true. And as old Heraclitius pointed out ‘you can’t step in the same river twice’ because you’ve changed and so has the river.

   Well, if I loved the book before I love it even more now. This book is as good as it gets. It’s about cockfighting, sure. But more than that it’s about life, about commitment to something, never mind what the hell it is. And fighting for it with everything you’ve got, risking everything. Like Camus said, “A reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.”

         —-

   In 1974 was made into a movie starring Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, and Charles Willeford. Directed by Monte Hellman (who also made the terrific Two-Lane Blacktop starring Dennis Wilson and James Taylor).

            https://tubitv.com/movies/466939/cockfighter

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Spurious Spinster. Perry Mason #64. William Morrow, hardcover, 1961. Pocket #4515, paperback, 1963. Reprinted many times since.

   This was one of Anthony Boucher’s favorite late Masons, but I found little to praise in it except for Gardner’s never-failing story-telling pace and drive.

   The plot has to do with corporation intrigue over a non-productive mine, a shoebox full of dubious cash, the impersonation of the company’s irascible female owner and, as if you hadn’t guessed, a murder.

   But all the story elements remain chaotic and incredible by the fadeout, and even the courtroom sequence is weak, with Mason given little chance to shine. Gardner must have dictated this adventure on an off day.

ANTHONY PRICE – Other Paths to Glory.  Dr. David Audley #5. Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1974. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1975. Mysterious Press, US, paperback, 1987

   When Anthony Price is on form he really. does write a.very good novel of espionage and intrigue – and in this one he’s quite definitely on form. The particularly intriguing puzzle he poses is why should anyone in 1974 want to kill off those few remaining people with expert knowledge about a little known first War battle waged in 1916.

   One of the intended victims is young military historian Paul Mitchell, but by sheer luck he survives,·and is at once recruited to find the reasons by Dr. David Audley, that devious agent for the Defence Ministry. The action (and the intrigue) rattle along at a good old pace, and the solution is quite feasible. A book I found myself stealing time to read.

S. A. DUNPHY – Bring Her Home. Boyle and Keneally #1. Bookouture. softcover, 2021. Setting: Contemporary Ireland.

First Sentence: I left his body where I knew it would be found, nestled gently in the tidal mud of the Thames in the shadow of the Tate Modern in Southwark.

   A man known only by the Celtic rune Uruz murders the former professional and personal partner of criminal behaviorist Jessie Boyle and is now stalking her. After retiring from London’s Metropolitan Police, Jessie returns home to Ireland. Her friend, Dawn Wilson, newly appointed Police Commissioner of Ireland, calls in an old debt.

   Penelope (Penny) O’Dwyerhe, the daughter of Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister) is gone. The kidnapper threatens to kill her unless the police find her first. They have twelve days. Serial killer Frederick Morgan, imprisoned for life, claims he has the information needed to save Penny, but Jessie is the only one with whom he will negotiate. As Boyle and her team investigate, they learn there is much more to Penny than first thought, and that she is not the only woman who has gone missing.

   There are a lot of threads and characters in this story. There is much to really like, and Dunphy’s voice galvanizes the reader to continue reading. But there are several things which, upon reflection, cause one to pause.

   The book, in some ways, feels introductory, a prologue to the upcoming series while clearly being a story in and of itself. One is introduced to every character, including the secondary ones, with each given a separate chapter detailing their background. As opposed to interfering with the story, the characters are brought to life with even the bad guys given full dimensionality and shades of gray. However, one may wonder at the necessity of this and how many of these characters will reappear in the future.

   The principal police characters: Jessie Boyle, Detective Seamus Keneally, genealogist and IT tech Terri Kehoe, and Dawn Wilson are an interesting, diverse team, each with strengths and weaknesses. They contrast and complement each other and are characters one wants to know. When at risk, the tension is palpable as one doesn’t want any harm to come to them.

   The story includes quite a bit of ancient folklore and references to Celtic artifacts. While germane to the plot, this slows the pace and can lead to confusion with the number of characters who spiral off the person who fashions himself after the folklore character of Uruz. One already knows he will be back.

   Bring Her Home is an exciting read with great characters, occasional good humor, and powerful suspense. The book would have benefited from stronger editing. Even with a satisfactory ending, once one thinks about it, it causes curiosity about the fate of several characters. Book two awaits. It will be interesting to see how things progress.

Rating: Good.

ICEBERG SLIM – Mama Black Widow. Holloway House, paperback, 1969, as by Robert Beck. Also published as by Iceberg Slim: Holloway House, UK, hardcover, 1992, and Holloway House, US, paperback, 1996, as well as several later printings. (Anything published by Holloway House has a complicated printing history; corrections gratefully accepted.)

   The nightmare life story of Otis Tilson, a Black drag queen born on a Mississippi plantation in the 20’s, living until the end of the 60’s in the Chicago ghettos.

   In the intro, Iceberg Slim claims that the book is a transcript of a 1969 tape recording of the flamboyant drag queen Otis Tilson (Tillie). Now normally I don’t care if something is ‘true’ or ‘fiction’ as long as it’s good. And, to me, the difference between non-fiction and fiction is blurrier than we’d like to admit. But whatever. The only reason I bring it up is that if it is a work of fiction, one really can question what the point of it is. Oscar Wilde says: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.” So what to make of something both unadmirable and useless?

   On the other hand, if it’s just a life story, you might say, ‘it is what it is’. I disagree. One’s life is capable of interpretation just like anything else. Schopenhauer says somewhere that the main difference between the ‘great lives’ we read about in books and the boring lives we live are that we experience our lives in mediocre ways. That were we to experience our lives with great exuberance, verve, desire and will, our lives too would be of magnificent import. And in our life stories magnificent import we’d impart. Cf the films Birdman, Toto le héros, Kiss of the Spider Woman, or even The Secret Life of Walter Mitty or Harvey to see the ways that a crappy life can be redeemed with a bit of imagination.

   Anywho. This one is unredeemable.

   Otis’s father Frank makes his living as a cotton sharecropper and part-time preacher. His father ‘saves’ and marries the beautiful Sedelia, seducing her with the words of Jesus Christ, stealing her away from the brothel life in which she lived with her older cousin Bunny. The father is a strong, proud man, muscular and moral.

   Sedelia’s beguiled by tales of indoor plumbing in the jewel bedazzled city of Chicago from cousin Bunny, who has moved there to strut her wares. Sedelia begs and begs then threatens and begs some more til her husband agrees to cash out the farm for $37, leaving the only life he’d ever known, and they move to Chicago.

   In Chicago it’s just one disaster after the other. It’s the depression and Frank can’t find work. The trade unions are all whites-only. Praying to Christ for work to support his family, Frank fails. Sedelia starts sleeping with the rich preacher of the local church who drives a Cadillac and showers her with furs. Sedilia flaunts her infidelity in her husband’s face, driving him to drink, diabetes and death.

   Meanwhile Otis, at age 9, is molested by a church deacon who promises him that any of his wishes will come true if only he brings tears of joy to his ‘magic wand’. Otis says: “Really? Can your magic wand give my father a job and make my parents stop fighting?” “Absolutely!” exclaims the deacon. But let’s keep it a secret just us two.

   Otis’s sister Carol falls in love with a white chubby baker. But Sedelia has promised Carol to the local numbers shark in exchange for corned beef, jewels and hard cold cash. So when Mama Black Widow (i.e. Sedelia) finds out that 17 year old Carol is planning to elope with the baker and bear his child, Sedelia kicks her in the belly til she miscarries, cuts out the fetus with a razor blade, and throws it in the garbage can. Carol keeps crying ‘why’d you kill my baby’, gets up in the night to retrieve it from the trash, and bleeds to death in the bed clutching her dead fetus to her breast.

   It only gets worse from there. Carol’s twin sister Bertha turns to whoring and is immolated by a john, and Frank Jr. avenges her death by killing Bertha’s white pimp, getting sentenced to life without parole.

   Otis is only attracted to men. He dresses in drag, and he is quite beautiful. He picks men up at bars, and gets sodomized and beaten. Over and over again.

         (SPOILER ALERT)

   Then he kills himself.

   Then End.

   Good lord. Surely one of the bleakest books of all time. And as the title shows, he blames it all on his mother: The Black Widow.

   Avoid at all costs unless you’re into self-flagellation. In which case: highly recommended. Also recommended anyone who believes that things couldn’t possibly get any worse.