DOROTHY BOWERS – The Bells of Old Bailey. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1947. Originally published in the UK: Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 1947, as The Bells at Old Bailey.

   While it would at first appear that my bias against detective-story characters who do not report information to the police ought to be shaken by the main event in this novel, later incidents validate my opinion.

   Miss Tidy, the proprietress of Minerva Hatshop, Beauty Parlor and Teashop, receives two poison-pen letters following a series of unlikely suicides in Ravenchurch, where her establishments are located, and Long Greeting, where she lives.

   Taking the letters to the police, Miss Tidy argues that the suicides were well-executed murders. Dubiety on the suicides greets her efforts, and there’s no small suspicion that Miss Tidy wrote the letters herself. But then —

   To go on would reveal information that some readers would rather not know as they begin the novel. Suffice it to say that Bowers has written a charming novel about an English village, with all that that implies — to wit, blackmail and murder — and including an antiquarian bookseller, a detective-story writer, and a mainstream novelist for the biblio enthusiasts.

   Also there is fair play for the most part. Bowers is another author I am adding to my long list of writers whose books are sought after.

Bibliographic Notes:   Dorothy Bowers wrote four crime novels before The Bells of Old Bailey, all featuring Chief Inspector Dan Pardoe. All were first published in the US by Doubleday Crime Club. They are difficult to find as first editions; if anyone might be looking for copies to read, all four have been reprinted by Rue Morgue Press.

    Postscript to Poison. Hodder 1938.
    Shadows Before. Hodder 1939.
    Deed Without a Name. Hodder 1940
    Fear for Miss Betony. Hodder 1941. US title: Fear and Miss Betony.

DEBORAH CROMBIE – A Finer End. Bantam, hardcover, May 2001; paperback, May 2002.

Genre:   Police procedural. Leading characters:  DI’s Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James; 7th in series. Setting:   England.

First Sentence:   The shadows crept into Jack Montfort’s small office, filling the corners with a comfortable dimness.

   DI’s Duncan Kincaid and Gemma Jones travel to Glastonbury, Scotland after a call from Duncan’s architect cousin, Jack Montfort. It appears that Jack may be a conduit via automatic writing for a medieval monk who wants Jack to find a missing relic.

   Duncan is not the only one who knows about Jack’s unasked for link to the past. Anglican priest and Jack’s lover, Winnie; Nick, a handsome, young bookstore clerk; Faith, the very pregnant, psychically-sensitive runaway; Garnet, the reclusive, new-age potter, and Simon, a Church-scholar with his own secrets, all join with Jack to uncover what is happening. An attempted murder and an actual murder blend the paranormal with police procedure.

    Crombie certainly knows how to capture your attention and draw you straight into the story. From the very first page, Crombie creates a delicious sense of menace and foreboding; a sense of something supernatural at work. This is wonderfully offset of the everyday, very real concerns in Gemma’s and Duncan’s lives and their ever-evolving relationship.

   We are well introduced to the cast of characters, learning who they are and how they interconnect. They were rather fascinating and unusual for a mystery. Certainly, they all had pasts and elements of those pasts they wanted to keep from being revealed. However, it was refreshing that there wasn’t an obvious villain in the group. That made the final resolution even more effective when it was revealed.

   The history was fascinating and well imparted, from the furnishing in one character’s home to information on the Abbey. Crombie’s descriptions are wonderful. She is an author who paints with words and, in this case, sent me straight to the internet looking for more information.

   I particularly loved the role music played in the story including Gemma’s reaction to music and the conveyance of when music touches your soul, as well as learning that the word “enchantment’ is derived from the work chant as it was believe music was the strongest magic.

   On the other side, I did feel there were some dubious bits of information concerned religion, old and new, and pottery. There were also a couple significant coincidences and a few threads left hanging. I enjoyed the paranormal element but might have found it more interesting to have a non-paranormal resolution.

   In summary, we have a story a bit heavy on the paranormal but a captivating plot, lots of viable suspects and excellent plot twists. All in all, it worked for me.

Rating:  Good Plus.

       Previously on this blog:

A Share in Death. (Reviewed by Steve Lewis.)

WHO IS KILLING THE GREAT CHEFS OF EUROPE? Lorimar (now Warner Brothers), 1978. Cast: Jacqueline Bisset as Natasha O’Brien, George Segal as Robby Ross, Robert Morley as Maximillian Vandeveer. Screenplay by Peter Stone, based on the novel Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe by Ivan and Nan Lyons. Director: Ted Kotcheff.

   In Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? the world’s finest dessert chef Natasha O’Brien finds herself between a killer out to rid Europe of its greatest chefs and her ex-husband who wants her back.

   Award-winning writer Peter Stone took the funny mystery by Ivan and Nat Lyons and gave it the style of Stone’s earlier romance suspense films such as Charade. Shot on location with some of Europe’s best actors, Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? remains an excellent example of the sophisticated adult romantic comedies that today exists only in our memories and DVDs.

   The film begins with Maximillian Vandeveer, played to perfection by Robert Morley. Max is a food critic, publisher of a famous gourmet magazine and addicted to the best foods, and he is dying for those sins. Max is told he will die soon if he does not lose weight, but he responds he doesn’t want to live without his favorite meals.

   Max has arranged for two famous chefs to cook a dinner for the Queen. One of the chefs is Swiss Louie Kohler, the greatest chef in England, and the other is Natasha. Arriving in London, Natasha is kidnapped. She has no idea who or why anyone would kidnap her, but she is more annoyed by the delay than scared by the danger. The beautiful Jacqueline Bisset is delightful as Natasha, a confident pampered woman still hurting from her ex-husband’s affair and, more importantly, him letting the other woman use her kitchen.

   Natasha’s ex and millionaire fast food king Robby Ross, played a little over the top by George Segal, has kidnapped Natasha to ask her to be the Master Chef for his new fast food omelette chain called H. Dumpty. She turns him down.

   Kohler and Natasha prepare the meal for the Queen. The meal is a great success as is Louie’s attempt to seduce Natasha. In the morning she finds him dead, baked in an oven in the style of his famous baked pigeon dish. The police suspect Natasha until Robby blunders into the role of chief suspect.

   Max sends Natasha to Venice to interview the greatest chef in Italy. There he explains, hands on, why Italian men pinch women, appropriately enough his specialty is lobster. Robby unexpectedly arrives. He is still searching for a famous chef to front H. Dumpty. Again, it is Natasha’s fate to find the murdered chef’s body, drowned in his lobster tank.

   Robby realizes if the great chefs of England and Italy have been murdered, the greatest chef in France may be next. He contacts six of the greatest chefs in France, sets up a meeting, and invites Natasha to come with him. In a scene of blocking genius, when Robby and Natasha arrive the chefs are all sitting so each could not see any of the others. Each chef is convinced that only he could be the greatest chef of France. They all agree that a French chef should have been killed first.

   As the tension and mystery intensifies, so does the romance between Robby and Natasha, much to the displeasure of Max.

   With the death of the French chef, Natasha realizes how the victims were selected and that she is next on the menu. But when Max tells Natasha that the killer has confessed, all relax. Max sends Natasha to do a cooking show called “The Movable Feast”. On the show Natasha will show how to cook the dessert she made for the Queen, a bombe.

   While the mystery would not challenge Ellery Queen, there are clues, suspects, and a killer that satisfies the detective in us. It is not only who the killer is, but who the next victim will be that maintains the story suspense.

   What makes this film so special is its wonderful intelligent adult humor. Metaphors using food abound. The conflict between Robby and Max over Natasha, each loving and needing her in different ways, give a new twist to the romantic triangle. As any good comedy mystery, after the real killer confesses, there is a nice epilogue giving the characters closure. The final scene of Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? will leave you smiling and humming the delightful Henry Mancini’s theme music as the credits roll.

THE WHIP HAND. RKO Radio Pictures, 1951. Carla Balenda, Elliott Reid, Edgar Barrier, Raymond Burr, Otto Waldis, Michael Steele, Lurene Tuttle, Peter Brocco. Director: William Cameron Menzies.

   Amid the general anonymity of reds-under-the beds cold-war movies, The Whip Hand comes as a pleasant surprise: a quirky, paranoid little film from a master of the form, William Cameron Menzies, whose Invaders from Mars (1953) set the standard for quirky paranoia.

   Actually Whip wasn’t supposed to be about the Red Menace; it started its weird little life as a movie about finding Hitler holed up in mid-west USA. But when Howard Hughes, then the head of RKO saw it, he said Hitler was last year’s boogie man and they should change the story to something about a Commie plot. Hence this pleasant trifle about sinister Russians infiltrating a small town to do experiments in mass murder.

   Given this bifurcated birth, one would expect The Whip Hand to turn out as some godawful mess along the lines of They Saved Hitler’s Brain, but actually it’s a pretty neat job, thanks mainly to the visual intensity imparted to it by Director Menzies, a stylist also responsible for the look of films like Things to Come, Thief of Bagdad and The Black Book.

   Menzies at his best has a way of exaggerating the look of ordinary things to evoke a slightly off-kilter feel, a sense that familiar things are somehow alien.

   Thus the typical small town into which vacationing reporter Elliott Reid stumbles seems filled from the outset with subtle menace, and the people he encounters always seem to be hiding something just off-screen.

   It all culminates in a nifty chase, a mad doctor’s lab, and a rattle of G-Man machine guns, but before we get there we’re treated to Raymond Burr at his nasty best.

   Playing a second-string bad guy, Burr offers a patently fake folksy air and a booming hearty laugh at the feeblest of jokes that’s somehow more chilling than anything his boss-heavies put out here. It’s just one more reason to enjoy a movie that should be better known.

D. C. BROD – Error in Judgment. Diamond, paperback reprint, September 1991. Hardcover edition: Walker, July 1990.

   As you’ve probably noticed, paperbacks are making quantum jumps in terms of prices. I’m not sure where the upper limit is, in terms of public resistance to bigger and bigger chunks of available spending money, but so far nothing seems to be keeping the cost of reading material from jumping onward and upward, from one month to the next, or so it seems.

   (Compare the price of this book, $4.50, with the one by Stefanie Matteson that I reviewed just prior to this one, $3.95, from the same publisher. Compare it with the price of paperbacks at the time you’re reading this, several months from now.)

   But as for the question, “Is this book worth $4.50?,” I’d hesitate a little, but I’m going to say yes. I enjoyed it (and enjoyed it more than I thought I was going to, after the first couple of chapters). It’s a good-sized book, 258 pages of smallish print, and if you enjoy PI stories, I think you’ll be getting your money’s worth.

   On the other hand, a general rule of thumb is that you may want to be careful of PI books written by authors with initials for a first name. The “D” stands for Deborah, and by and large, women still don’t write hardboiled PI novels. (But neither did Rex Stout. All I’m saying is be wary.)

   Brod’s detective hero is Quint McCauley, a struggling PI new to the small town of Foxport, somewhere outside of Chicago. He’s already made the mistake of crossing one of the town’s leading legal lights, and jobs are getting hard to come by.

   One that he has in this case, accepted on a contingency basis, is that of trying to determine whether or not a judge’s death was really a suicide. A clause in an insurance policy means a difference of a million dollars, payable to the widow.

   The judge, by the way, was under indictment in an bribery case, but Quint still wonders why the case was closed so quickly by the police department. (He is also on the outs with the chief of police, you might be interested in knowing, ever since he tried to pick up the man’s wife in a bar some time earlier.)

   Quint does have the advantage over the police, as far as the case is concerned, in that he was the one who found the body. He was also the one who found (and went off with) the pictures he found stashed away in a filing cabinet. He shouldn’t have, and that’s where the title comes from.

   It’s a complex case, in other words. The difficulty I found with it, in the early going, is that the writing is talky and flat, and McCauley, who tells the story, sounds whiney and apologetic, almost to the point of exasperation.

   Points of the story where he should be angry, he says he’s angry, but he doesn’t seem angry and he doesn’t act angry. (Maybe he’s more cold-blooded than I thought he was.)

   If you decide to read it, though, bear with it, and you’ll eventually find the plot has enough twists, major and minor, to make it worth the effort. This is a mixed review, in other words, but in balance, it should read more positive than negative.

Rating:   B Minus.

       The Quint McCauley series —

1. Murder in Store. Walker, 1989.

2. Error in Judgment. Walker, 1990.
3. Masquerade in Blue. Walker, 1991. Reprinted as Framed in Blue, Diamond, 1993.

4. Brothers in Blood. Walker, 1993.
5. Paid in Full. Five Star, 2000.

[UPDATE] 09-25-11.   Here it is, some twenty years later, not just a few months, and while prices of mass market paperbacks seem to have stabilized in the past year or so, it’s at a level that’s essentially double it was in 1991.

   The bigger problem, as far as I see it, is the total lack of diversity that exists in the way of detective fiction published today in MMP. Many publishers no longer have lines of genre fiction, and of those that do, almost all of it is of the “cozy” variety, with protagonists more interested in their hobbies (quilting, teddy bears) or small shops (antiques, herbs) than they are in solving murder cases, mostly incidental.

   In my opinion, ebooks will soon force MMP publishing into oblivion, a sad day as far as I’m concerned, but as other people have also pointed out, I’ll still have plenty to read.

MAX BRAND – The Outlaw Redeemer. Leisure, paperback, March 2004. Hardcover edition: Five Star, 2000.

   One way or another, most traditional westerns have elements of crime fiction built into their plot structure, and naturally I wouldn’t have brought it up if both of the short novels contained in the case at hand, The Outlaw Redeemer, weren’t such prime examples, but in markedly different ways.

   In “The Last Irving,” which takes place in the more recent Old West (Irvington is wired for electricity, for example, and the characters drive proudly around in flivvers) the heir to the no longer existent Irving fortune, a city yokel by the name of Archibald, returns from the East to revenge himself on the two crooks who conned his Uncle Ned out of his total financial worth.

   This is the standard tall tale of a (perceived) dumb sap who (it is anticipated) comes out on top by the simple expedient of setting his two opponents one against the other.

   While there is more anticipation than there is follow-through, I can’t imagine anyone not finding the ending at least mildly satisfying. The title story which follows, however, “The Outlaw Redeemer,” comes with some real surprises, most of them quite unexpectedly so, and this is the one that’s by far the more enjoyable of the two.

   The opening is nothing less than Biblical in nature, with lots of “begat”s that trace the lineage of the tale’s two primary antagonists: (a) the pure in heart John Tipton, who becomes a Texas Ranger and whose constant quarry is (b) the brutish and devilish criminally-minded Hubert Dunleven, nicknamed either Shorty or Bunch, “both of which were derived from his physical peculiarities.”

   Their efforts as directed against each other are the stuff from which legends are made. Can a western ever be called utterly charming? Dunleven is that rarest of beings, an outlaw with a silver tongue. Take for example, this speech he makes to the beautiful Nell — and, oh, yes, there is indeed a girl, and of course she comes between them.

   Consider the eloquence to be found on page 118, after Dunleven has requested that Nell make breakfast for him, a request she cannot refuse:

   Nell is not, however, emphasis not, your usual western heroine. As are the two male protagonists of the tale, she also is flawed, and I confess – I admit it – I did not know, with several chapters remaining to go, which way the story was going to come out.

   That is it a happy ending, you may rest assured. You may also be assured that you will not know in which way it will end happily, but it will.

PostScript:   Both of the these stories first appeared in the pulp magazine, Western Story Magazine. “The Last Irving” appeared as “Not the Fastest Horse,” as by John Frederick in the November 7, 1925, issue; and “The Outlaw Redeemer” appeared as “The Man He Couldn’t Get,” as by George Owen Baxter in the February 27, 1926, issue.

   In a subtly strange but substantial way, I like the original titles better.

[UPDATE] 09-25-11.   Your mileage may vary, but although it doesn’t compare to the covers of the western paperbacks of the 1940s and 50s, I much like the cover of the Leisure book over that of the totally generic photo on the hardcover edition.

   And speaking of Leisure books, most mystery-oriented blogs have concerned themselves with the loss of the Hard Case Crime paperbacks when Dorchester went under, and rightly so. But I also miss the box of four western paperbacks that came by mail from them every month, with at least two of them almost always reprints from the pulps.

LA BANDERA. Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC), France, 1935. Released in the US (1939) as Escape from Yesterday. Annabella, Jean Gabin, Robert Le Vigan, Raymond Aimos, Pierre Renoir, Gaston Modot, Margo Lion. Based on a novel by Pierre Dumarchais under the name of Pierre MacOrlan. Director: Julien Duvivier.

   There was a day last month that TCM showed Jean Gabin movies for 24 hours straight, and I taped about 16 hours’ worth. As I make my way through watching them, my comments will show up here. This is the first.

   I’ve not seen enough French films of this era for me to say anything clever or even intelligent about them in that regard. I’ll have to also refrain from saying anything about other films that Jean Gabin made, unfortunately, except to say that this one was early in his career, with both La grande illusion and Pépé le Moko not coming along until 1937, the two films that really cranked his career into high gear.

   He’s a man on the run in this one, having killed a man in France and finding himself broke in Spain in the very next scene. The Spanish Foreign Legion is his only option. He signs up, trying (as many men did) to forget his past and not to think (too much) about his future.

   He makes some friends, a couple of enemies, including one (he believes) is on his trail for the murder he committed. He also meets a Moroccan girl (Annabella), a dancer in what can only be called a dive, for where else is there for a legionnaire to go, away from the barracks and the day to day drudgery of a soldier’s life?

   The first half is slow going, with the quick transitions between scenes making it a bit of a challenge to follow the story, but once Gabin finds himself in one spot, somewhere in the African desert with all-but-invisible Arab enemies, the story settles down as well. To a tale of honor, of course, and manhood, and life in general as well as in particular.

   I will not tell you if the movie ends tragically or not, but either way, it is one of those films that could easily do so. But there are other reasons to watch this movie, other than the story. The film-making techniques, and what the director added to this film visually, for example, catch the eye and intrigue the mind more often as not, making this movie one I will probably watch again, perhaps even soon, for that very reason.

      YouTube clips:

(1) A man is killed.

(2) Gabin and Annabella meet for the first time.

(3) The finale.

AMANDA CROSS – The Question of Max. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1976. Paperback reprints include: Avon, 1977; Ballantine, May 1984.

   My first experience with a Kate Fansler novel, of which there were 14, with The Question of Max being the fifth. My first reaction (favorable) is that if you like very literary and very quotable (and early feminist) detective fiction, in terms of both the writing and the subject matter, you will like Amanda Cross, or at the least you will like this book.

   If, however, your greater pleasure is in terms of solid plotting and following the detective on the case, watching and identifying with her (him) as she goes, why then, we’re on slipperier ground. I was going to explain my unhappiness in greater detail, but after going into the same at great length, I’ve scrapped everything I intended to say and have decided to give you an abbreviated (and less invasive) version instead.

   When Max Reston, a literary figure of some small renown, comes calling on Kate at her country refuge in the Berkshires, it is to invite her to drive him to the estate of Cecily Hutchins up in Maine. Max is Cecily’s literary executor, and prowlers have been seen in the vicinity of the manor house where she lived alone after her husband’s death.

   Does Max have an ulterior motive? Kate isn’t sure, but she decides to take the request at face value, and takes Max to Maine, where among other things, they find the body of a dead girl in the rocks along the shore not far from Cecily’s home. More amazingly, Kate recognizes the girl as one of her grad students.

   Which is where the problem in the plotting first arises. Kate, a university professor of literature, makes a mistake on page 47 that sends her on a false trail for the next 150 pages, a mistake that I don’t think she should have made. I was in academia myself for a good many years, and speaking for myself, I just don’t see it.

   It’s a leisurely told tale, and for much of the book it is not even known whether or not a murder has occurred. You may assume there was, as I did, but when it comes down to it, I still rather resent being sent down a path (or a hairpin turn of the plot, metaphorically speaking) as creaky and shaky as this one is.

ROGUES’ REGIMENT. Universal International, 1948. Dick Powell, Märta Torén, Vincent Price, Stephen McNally, Edgar Barrier, Henry Rowland, Carol Thurston, James Millican, Richard Loo, Philip Ahn. Director: Robert Florey.

   Search and Destroy, the most recent movie I happen to have reviewed on this blog, appeared some four years after the end of the Viet Nam war. Most of Rogues’ Regiment, on the other hand, takes place in Viet Nam (aka French Indo-China) at the beginning of the conflict, as it originally took place.

   The premise is that one of the would-be defendants at the Nuremburg Trials, one Martin Bruener, had made his escape from Germany and was never found. As his photograph had never been taken, except for one in which only the back of his head can be seen, no one even knows what he looks like.

   The trail, though meager and cold, leads one man, Whit Corbett (Dick Powell), to Indo-China, where the French and the Foreign Legion are desperately fighting to keep control there. So desperate are they that they are accepting former WW2 soldiers from all over the world — including Germany — as new recruits. Hence the title of the film, Rogues’ Regiment.

   Powell goes so far as to sign up for a tour of duty with the Legion, and although we do not know this right away, so does his quarry (Stephen McNally). Aiding the latter is Vincent Price, a German posing as a Dutch importer of antiques (and guns for the Vietnamese revolutionaries).

   Aiding Powell, though, is a French operative (Märta Torén) posing as a nightclub singer, and the latter are more than a match for the former. Quite predictably Powell falls for Miss Torén, who also gets to sing a song or two. Powell does not.

   The movie is enjoyable enough — there is no major skimping on the cast or the production values — but the biggest problem I had with the film is that it makes everything involved with catching ex-Nazis all too easy. Nearly a one-man job, in fact, if the one man happened to be Dick Powell.

STEFANIE MATTESON – Murder at Teatime. Diamond, paperback original, March 1991.

   This second installment of the adventures of noted actress and movie star Charlotte Graham takes place in Maine, where a world-famous professor and expert on herbal remedies is poisoned by one of the products found growing in his own garden.

   The motive may have been his stout opposition to the proposed economic development of the island where he’s living (golf course, hotel and condos), or it may have been connected to his valuable collection of herbal incunabula (books printed before 1500), discovered soon after his death to be missing.

   Charlotte Graham is deliberately modeled on the old-fashioned Katharine Hepburn type of movie star, independent, only occasionally regretting that she has put her career over love and marriage. She is, however, in love with the world and nearly everything in it.

   Although at first Charlotte finds herself nervous in a place that “didn’t have sidewalks,” she is soon won over by the raw beauty of Maine and its inhabitants. And where else in the country would she be asked by the harried chief of police to aid him in his investigation, simply because of her past exploits in the field?

   It has to be a chore for a mystery writer, book after book, to get his/her amateur detective involved in what should really only be police investigations. In a way it’s refreshing to see Matteson make no bones about it, and get Charlotte Graham right to work!

   This is but one example of how this case maintains itself as a direct descendant of the mysteries of the Golden Age of Detection. As another, there are only a few major suspects on the relatively isolated island. Their alibis have to be checked out individually, their motives examined in both direct and casual conversation, and in the end they are all gathered together in a final confrontation, during which the murderer bolts and pursuit must follow.

   A love of books and the lore of book collecting are also important ingredients of this novel, along with the herbs and the pitfalls of life in academia. If I thought Mattes0n’s first book, Murder at the Spa slowed down too often to nearly a halt by the intrusion of as much about the spa business as I wanted to know, she certainly makes up for it with this one, which has almost everything I’m looking for in a detective novel.

   Almost, but not quite. I did have a little bit of trouble with the ending, and with a

I’m going to tell you about it here. [Don’t read farther without having read the book first, if you’re going to.]

   The problem, as I see it, is that the evidence that eventually traps the killer is found carelessly left lying in a book as a bookmark. I don’t know about you, but if I’d ever murdered anybody, I’d be a little bit more careful about incriminating myself than this.

   (Of course, I’d be the kind of killer who keeps returning to the scene of the crime over and over again, looking and looking for anything at all that I’d missed!)

Rating:   B.

       The Charlotte Graham series —

1. Murder at the Spa (1990)

2. Murder at Teatime (1991)
3. Murder on the Cliff (1991)
4. Murder on the Silk Road (1992)

5. Murder at the Falls (1993)
6. Murder on High (1994)

7. Murder Among the Angels (1996)
8. Murder Under the Palms (1997)