FRIENDS OF MR. SWEENEY. Warner Brothers, 1934. Charlie Ruggles, Ann Dvorak, Eugene Pallette, Robert Barrat, Berton Churchill, Dorothy Burgess, Dorothy Tree, Harry Tyler. Based on a novel by Elmer Davis. Director: Edward Ludwig.

   Charlie Ruggles is the true star of this one, even though Friends of Mr. Sweeney was recently shown as part of a day-long salute on TCM to Ann Dvorak (pronounced with a silent D). As an editorial writer, over the years, he’s become hidebound and downtrodden, and totally subservient to his boss at the weekly magazine where he plies his trade, even to the point where he’s resigned to composing a favorable piece on a politician he knows is crooked.

   As his trusty assistant, Ann Dvorak can only look on sadly, and with unrequited fondness (which she obvious wishes could be more). Enter Eugene Pallette, Charlie’s old buddy at college, where they were on the football team together, and a couple of more high-spirited and fun-loving buddies you would be hard-pressed to find.

   Maybe you can take it from here. First a badly interrupted dinner date with his secretary, then out on the town as a foursome, posing as a friend of a fictitious Mr. Sweeney to enter one of the poshiest casinos in town, where all hilarity breaks out, then back to office while the building is being robbed (all part of the story line).

   The fussy Charlie Ruggles I always find amusing, especially in situations where he finds himself enjoying becoming a wildcat again. I often need only a small dose of Eugene Pallette to get me through the week, however, and unfortunately this is more than a small dose. (No offense intended.)

   Ann Dvorak, only 22 when this movie was made, was destined to have a career consisting only small parts or larger roles in minor movies like this one, but like this one, her beauty and engaging personality wins me over every time. (One scene is which she is wearing nothing but lingerie is rather revealing for a movie made with the Code in effect.)

Note:   You can see what I mean by that last parenthetical statement — as well as everything else I’ve said — by checking out the original trailer that’s available on the TCM website.

MATTHEW FARRER – Crossfire. Black Library /Games Workshop Ltd., paperback original; 1st US printing, July 2003. A book in the “Warhammer 40,000” series.

   I confess that I haven’t read any of the other Warhammer books, but the series consists of a long list of novels taking place in a universe set far in a future ruled by the Emperor’s Imperial Guard, the “ever-vigilant Inquisition” and the “tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus.” Lots of bloody warfare, I gather, with “no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.”

   Maybe it’s a video game, too, or a role-playing game, or maybe I have it all wrong. In any case, if you haven’t already skipped this review and gone on to the next one, the small incident on an isolated planetary system that this novel is about has both a crime, or a series of crimes, and an active detective whose career seems to be only beginning. Really. Stay with me, and I’ll tell you what I mean.

   What caught my eye first was the cover. A punkish young lady with reddish, short cropped hair, dressed mostly in shiny black – either leather or metal, or a combination thereof – holding a light saber of some sort in one hand and a huge pistol-looking affair in the other.

   Her name is Shira Calpurnia, and she is the newly arrived Arbites officer on the planet Hydraphur. From the first sentence on, we know, hey Jenny, we’re not in Kansas any more, when she meets Genator-Magos Cynez Sanja, of the Order Biologis:

   An attempt to assassinate Shira is made soon thereafter, and hunting down the miscreants responsible takes the remainder of the book, which consists of 320 pages of very small print, and baroque prose nearly always as dense as the short extract above.

   Or as below, taken from page 51:

   Words fail me. I could not write like that in a million years.

   I’ll skip all of the action, all of interesting if not fascinating, all of it filled with a sense of wonder that I haven’t felt as strongly as this since I was about 12 years old. Not that I understood it all. Maybe you have to be, um, 12 years old. But the ending I understood, and you will, too:

   She may not look the part, but Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and all of other virtuous gumshoes who have toiled and labored in the mean streets the world over have a worthy descendant in Shira Calpurnia, destined (I believe) to continue on with other adventures.

UPDATE [June 2006].   I was correct. Shira Calpurnia has indeed appeared in a follow-up entry, and a third one that will be showing up soon looks extremely interesting:

   Legacy. Black Library, pb, US, August 2004. Shira takes more of a background role in this one, more of a novel of political intrigue than a mystery novel (from what I can deduce from a rather meagre description).

   Blind. Black Library, pb, US, July 2006. A telepath is killed with no weapon found nearby. Said to be a locked room mystery. It sounds like a must-have to me.

[UPDATE #2] 08-16-11.   These three are all there are in the series, so far. Enforcer, released in 2010, is an omnibus collection of all three.
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“The Case of the Bogus Books.” An episode of Perry Mason (Season 6, Episode 1). First air date: 27 September 1962. Cast: Raymond Burr, Barbara Hale, William Hopper, William Talman, Ray Collins, Wesley Lau, Phyllis Love (the accused), Adam West, John Abbott, H. M. Wynant, Joby Baker, Allison Hayes, Woodrow Parfrey, Maurice Manson, Tenen Holtz, Kenneth MacDonald (the judge), Michael Fox (not to be confused with Michael J. Fox). Writer: Jonathan Latimer. Director: Arthur Marks.

   Locked-room puzzles rarely turn up on TV, and the Perry Mason series of 271 episodes had very few. In this case, however, a bookshop owner, Joseph Kraft [Maurice Manson], is found dead in a sealed basement room, with a lamp still burning and the radio still on but the gas heater off, and a handful of dead flies on the window sill.

   Perry’s client, Ellen Corby [Phyllis Love] had been fired earlier by the dead man after a rare book went missing. Although she was sure the book was marked at $8, Kraft claimed that it was valued at $7000.

   The death, however, looks like suicide, and the police initially view it as such. But Perry Mason suspects murder. Unfortunately, every circumstantial clue will point to his client — as they always do.

   The locked-room problem, which isn’t the main focus of this episode, is partially cleared up in about ten minutes. I say “partially” because Mason will later perform a courtroom demonstration with flies that will change everyone’s mind, not about the CAUSE of death but the TIME of death, thereby exonerating his client and a multitude of likely suspects and narrowing it down, employing the classic Golden Age Detection trope of the TIME TABLE, to just one person — the murderer.

   This one had a fine cast of TV’s best character actors from the ’50s and ’60s: handsome Adam West (Batman); reliable H. M. Wynant; beautiful but evil Allison Hayes (Attack of the 50-Foot Woman); ubiquitous Maurice Manson; intellectual John Abbott; shifty Woodrow Parfrey (whom my wife calls “Woodrow the Weasel”); and durable Kenneth MacDonald as the judge, in one of his 32 appearances as the magistrate in the Perry Mason series.

Note:   The rare book at the heart of this story is a first edition of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne, published in nine different volumes from 1759 to 1767. If you’d like to know what the rare books’ prices mentioned in this episode would be in today’s dollars, multiply them by 10 or 11 times.

   I couldn’t locate “The Case of the Bogus Books” online. Perhaps someone else will have better luck.

THE HOUR: Episode One. BBC 2 Production. Six part series, 19 July through 23 August 2011. Created and Written by Abi Morgan. Directed by Coky Giedraye. Produced by Ruth Kenley-Letts. Cast: Ben Whishaw as Freddie Lyon, Romola Garai as Bel Rowley, Dominic West as Hector Madden, Vanessa Kirby as Ruth Elias, Anna Chancellor as Lix Storm.

   Available on BBCA starting August 17, 2011, as part of the hour-long block called “Dramaville,” hosted by Idris Elba (Luther). The Hour is also available for download at the usual places. Episode one is available now, for free.

   It is June 1956. The government has a tight stranglehold on the press, but it is the time of the Cold War and events are about to explode.

   A frustrated Freddie Lyons works in the BBC newsreel division where his desire to do “real” news is constantly suppressed. He has a habit of making everyone uncomfortable with his obnoxious behavior, as well as his ability to find news that makes those in power very nervous.

   There are plans to develop a new BBC TV news magazine called “The Hour.” Freddie feels betrayed when the position he wanted of Producer goes to his best friend Bel. He is shocked, after all she is just a woman.

   Despite the constant sniping and meanness between Freddie and Bel, she fights to get the jerk a job with the new news magazine. Of course, as with any such relationship, everyone but Freddie and Bel realize the two are meant for each other.

   As the development of “The Hour” continues and we meet each of the characters, a childhood friend of Freddie’s contacts him. Ruth tells Freddie there is more to the death of a college Professor, who was her secret lover. She warns him about “Them,” that England is no longer a “democracy,” and how she would be killed if “they” knew she had talked to a powerless employee of the BBC.

   The production values, the costumes, music, lighting, sets and locations, are of the high quality one has come to expect from British television. The direction was serviceable, but nothing could have saved this episode from the script, a script that was predictable and drowning in cliches.

   The cast tried their best to overcome their one dimensional characters:

   Freddie, the he is so brilliant we can not survive without him hero. Bel, the woman determined to succeed in a man’s world and fears any personal commitment so she sleeps with married men. Hector, the handsome married anchorman who is attracted to Bel. Liz Storm, the veteran reporter who drinks too much and is there to share old stories and wise advice. The interchangeable white men in power.

   The script dooms any possible attempt to make the story interesting. The pace is slow to build suspense, but there is little suspense because we have no reason to care about any of these characters. The script is full of twists and clues that creak with age and overuse, such as the camera intercutting between Ruth dancing with her fiance and the killing of her lover, the references to crossword puzzles, and the ending of this episode that will surprise no one.

   Add annoying bits such as Freddie calling Bel, “Miss Moneypenny” and the heavy handed handling of the era’s sexism and racism, and any hope for future episodes is nearly crushed.

      

   Recently, I was walking through my house trying to find a set of magazines on the bookshelves. I wasn’t having too much luck because I must have double stacked another set of magazines in front of them. Then I started wondering, how did I get to the point that I have so many books and magazines that I can’t find them? It’s not as if I have them hidden in boxes or storage units, they are mostly on bookshelves, though I do see some stacks on the floors.

   I started collecting magazines in 1956 and I still have the very first one that I bought off the newsstand: the February 1956 issue of Galaxy. I keep intending to frame it and hang it on the wall. So I’ve been at it now for 55 years and I guess that is how I now have so many magazines that I cannot find some of them. Each year I pick up more or start collecting another title that I’ve been thinking about reading. It all adds up as the years march on.

   When I bought the Galaxy I was hooked for life on science fiction. I was 13 and my allowance was $1.50 each week. Doesn’t sound like much but that’s $6.00 a month which enabled me to buy all the SF digests and paperbacks. I also had a job on Saturdays which paid me another $1.50 per week, cleaning a barbershop (sweeping floors, dusting bottles, cleaning the mirrors).

   Since the SF digests only cost 25 cents I was within my budget. But then in the summer of 1956 I discovered Manhunt and all of a sudden I had a cash flow problem. Manhunt had a lot of hardboiled crime competition from such titles as Pursuit, Hunted, Two Fisted, Offbeat, etc.

   This was the age of the digest revolution and the newsstands were full of the small fiction magazines. If you try and find the digests nowadays, you will realize we are at the end of the digest era and perhaps entering the days of the electronic magazine or e-book.

   As a lover of the physical books and magazines, this makes me very unhappy. The e-book looks pretty sorry next to the beautiful artifacts that I have been collecting for so many years. The feel of the physical book, the dust jacket, the smell of the pulp paper or digest, might soon disappear and be replaced by the humming of a electronic gadget.

   No e-book could have ever made me fall in love like I did when I saw my first Galaxy or Manhunt. We all know about the attractions of the SF covers but the Manhunt covers struck a deep sexual chord within my body. The brassy blondes, the shameless hussies, the girls about to be beaten, or something worse.

   Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough money to buy SF and crime digests, so after reading a few Manhunt’s, I had to reluctantly stop buying them. Fast forward about 20 years and now I have a job with more money to spend on collecting. But I also have the usual things like a wife, kids, mortgage, etc.

   Somehow I managed to squeeze out enough to put together a complete set of Manhunt, all 114 issues. By the way, the magazine is well known as just about the best of the hardboiled crime digests, lasting from 1953 to 1967, so this fact makes collecting the title a prime objective.

   For about 25 years I read many of the stories by Ed McBain, William Campbell Gault, Richard Prather, Ross Macdonald, etc. But then around the year 2000, I started to get annoyed by the amount of hours I was spending each day working at my job. I figured if I took early retirement, I could read and watch film noir movies all day long! I must have been wasting 10 hours a day working.

   So in order to make all this happen, I did some downsizing and made the mistake of selling my set of Manhunt’s. To make matters even worse, I sold it for only $500, which included the 12 very rare large sized issues.

   Now I began to question my sanity and judgment as a serious collector. I missed the magazine terribly and spend many years whining and complaining about my stupid decision to sell.

   A few years ago at Pulpcon I stumbled across an art dealer who had two of the 1956 original cover paintings used on Manhunt. I immediately bought both and hung them in my living room, despite the nervous complaints from my wife about the scenes showing women being strangled.

   The copies of the magazine came along with the paintings and I rapidly reread both, meanwhile muttering under my breath about mentally defective collectors who sell favorite magazines.

   So for over 10 years, I felt this regret eating away at me until finally this year at the Windy City pulp convention, my desire to rebuild the set burst forth. In a mere two hours, I had gone through 140 dealer’s tables like a buzzsaw and found 39 issues of Manhunt, or about 1/3 of the run.

   The price averaged about $11 or $12 each, some higher, some lower. Now, you would think that this would make me feel relieved and happy. No, not at all. I wanted the complete set of 114 issues. 39 issues were not enough, a mere drop in the bucket.

   Another blog that I follow, hosted by a collector like Steve Lewis who also loves books and magazines, was having to downsize his collection because he was selling his house. Normally he would never consider selling what he also thought was the greatest hardboiled crime digest.

   I made a good offer and he quickly accepted. Also included were the Manhunt companion digests such as Verdict, Murder, Menace, and Mantrap. He also threw in several Giant Manhunt’s, which rebound leftover issues, and the British version titled, Bloodhound.

   The condition was nice, especially the 12 large sized issues which are so rare. One problem was how to smuggle three large boxes into the house without my wife detecting the arrival of over 100 more magazines. The house is already sinking under the weight of thousands of books and magazines(I won’t even go into the subject of the thousands of DVDs).

   When the mailman delivered the boxes I quickly put them into the trunk of my car, giggling insanely at my clever actions. Then I slowly introduced them into the house and no one noticed because I’m always walking around with stacks of books or magazines.

   So ends another successful Adventure in Collecting. Welcome home Manhunt!

NIGHT OF THE QUARTER MOON. MGM, 1959. Also released as Flesh and Flame. Julie London, John Drew Barrymore, Anna Kashfi, Dean Jones, Agnes Moorehead, Nat “King” Cole, James Edwards, Cathy Crosby. Paperback adaption by Franklin Coen (Bantam, 1959). Producer: Albert Zugsmith. Director: Hugo Haas.

   If nobody has ever written a full-length analysis of Hugo Haas’s directorial output, then someone should. He’s known, of course, by a small cult of followers and true believers for such films (lurid dramas) as Pickup (1951), The Girl on the Bridge (1951), Strange Fascination (1952), One Girl’s Confession (1952) and Bait (1954), all variations on a theme.

   That theme being that of middle-aged men or older (often played by Haas himself) being lured into relationships (sexual, of course) with blonde tramps (well-built, of course, and usually played by Cleo Moore), with deadly results.

   This, you may be sure, is the stuff that cults are made of, but even with limited budgets, the films (in my humble opinion) were made with some thought behind them, down to earth, and generally better than better critics than I have considered them to be.

   What could Haas have done with a major studio (MGM) and major money behind him? Well, first of all (deep breath here) Night of the Quarter Moon is not a major disaster, and while it has its faults – quite a few, in fact – there’s enough story line here to provide more than one PhD candidate with a considerable amount of material for more than one dissertation.

   When John Drew Barrymore (a former Korean Conflict prisoner-of war) meets Julie London in Mexico, he doesn’t care that she’s one quarter black (Portuguese-Angolan), but his rich mother (the imperious Agnes Moorehead) back in San Francisco does, when she finds out.

   And equally so do his neighbors, who fear their property values are going to plummet, and who don’t fail to let the newly married couple know about it after they move in.

   Mama, in fact, takes the case to court to get the marriage annulled, while keeping her son under sedation and incommunicado, her contention being that he wasn’t told of his bride’s unfortunate background before the wedding.

   Which leads inexorably to the most overblown (and provocative) portion of the film, an ending that by sheer audacity surely made audiences gasp at the time, and is still very effective now: Julie London’s character must strip in court to show her tan lines, or lack of them.

   Well, OK, but in the context of the movie, it makes sense.

   Julie London, who resembles nothing more than a less full-blown Jane Russell, but not much less, does very well as lady in the case, determined not to let her husband get away from her, and for the right reasons; and John Drew Barrymore, confused by his arrest and subsequent sedation, more than holds his own.

   They make a good couple, mixed-race or not, and if nothing else, the movie might be remembered as a solid romance movie, even without strictly exploitative and over-the-top theatrics Hugo Haas uses to describe the situation they find themselves in, to put it mildly.

FREDRIC BROWN – Night of the Jabberwock. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1950. Paperback editions include: Bantam #990, April 1952; Morrow-Quill, 1984. British edition: T. V. Boardman, hc, 1951.

Based on two pulp stories: “The Gibbering Night” (Detective Tales, July 1944) and “The Jabberwock Murders” (Thrilling Mystery, Summer 1944).

   I recently took a couple days to re-read the greatest book ever written in the English Language, Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock, which can’t be beat in terms of structure, action, characterization, or much of anything else for that matter.

   The tale is of a night in the life of “Doc” Stoeger, middle-aged editor of a small-town weekly newspaper — the kind of publication now put out by a syndicate if it exists at all, in a town that nowadays has become a suburb or a fiefdom of Wal-Mart.

   But back in 1950, the small town and its paper were vibrant, charming bits of Americana, just like Brown’s novel, which starts off with Doc putting his sleepy little paper to bed, sadly looking at the front-page news of a church rummage sale and wishing he could somehow just once break a major story.

   What follows is a night of wonderland-style adventures and reverses, as a mysterious visitor initiates him into The Vorpal Blades, a select club devoted to serious study of Lewis Carroll, major stories fly into his lap like scattered playing cards, he becomes a small-town hero, a hunted fugitive, kidnap victim and kidnapper himself.

   All this is tossed off with the deceptively easy style only Fredric Brown could do so well. And speaking of Tossed Off, someone should go through this book with a calculator and see how much Doc drinks during the course of an evening; every chapter is punctuated by him having two or three drinks, then sobering up, then drinking again, drinking more, sobering… at some point it gets a bit ridiculous, but somehow the humor only adds to the charm of this witty and elegant adventure through a looking-glass.

   By the way, this sent me back to re-reading Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, books I hadn’t seen since childhood. And I have to say their charm was sadly lost on me.

   There’s some excellent doggerel there, perhaps up to the level of Edward Lear, but in their hurry to get from one scene to another, the stories never seem to get anyplace; colorful characters never do anything interesting, and conversations all consist merely of people contradicting Alice.

   Or am I missing something?

THE SMILING GHOST. Warner Brothers, 1941. Wayne Morris, Brenda Marshall, Alexis Smith, Alan Hale, Lee Patrick, David Bruce, Helen Westley, Willie Best. Screenplay by Kenneth Garnet and Stuart Palmer, based on a story by Stuart Palmer. Director: Lewis Seiler.

   I saw this spooky comic mystery on its initial release, when I was still in short pants, and for years the image of the Ghost, glowing eerily in the dark, haunted my dreams. A recent screening by Turner didn’t, perhaps, chill me in the way the original release did, but it’s still an engaging Old House mystery, with the requisite dose of sliding panels and screams in the night.

   When out-of-work Alexander “Lucky” Dowling (Wayne Morris), besieged by debt collectors, is hired to play the role of the fiancé of heiress Elinor Bentley (Alexis Smith) for a month, he accepts the job without realizing previous suitors have been severely injured in a suspicious car crash and poisoned by the bite of a venomous snake.

   Accompanied by his valet Clarence (Willie Best), Lucky moves into the Bentley house (it’s a bit too small to be called a mansion) where very quickly an attempt is made on his life and he realizes the job is a potentially lethal one.

   Lucky is slower on the uptake than Clarence but he quickly buys into the fiction that Elinor truly loves him, a fiction that is eventually dispelled by the more clear-headed perspective of reporter Lil Barstow (Brenda Marshall), but not before his devotion is put to the ultimate test, which could be either marriage to the predatory Elinor or murder at the hands of the Ghost.

   The household is crowded with members of the Bentley clan, headed by matriarch Helen Westley, with Charles Hulton giving an indelible portrait of a professor whose hobby is not only collecting shrunken heads but actually producing them in his laboratory. Alan Hale bumbles around as a general factotum and security detail, and Lee Patrick sizes up the situation with her usual wry humor.

   Willie Best, in these supposedly enlightened times, gives probably the most controversial performance, with the most offensive (and, dare I say it, funniest) moment taking place when he conceals himself in a coal bin in the basement.

   This is probably not quite in the league of Paramount’s Old House classics, The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers, but it kept breaking me up and occasionally produced a hint of the chills that captivated me at a long-ago Saturday matinee. And noting the name of a noted concoctor of comic mysteries as a co-author of the script, I suspect that he’s responsible for the more delightful comic notes in the screenplay.

HILARY BURLEIGH – Murder at Maison Manche. Hurst & Blackett Ltd., UK, hardcover; date not stated but known to be 1948.

   Another one-shot detective novel from an all-but-unknown author today, but not a book, in my opinion, that’s nearly as successful as David Burnham’s Last Act in Bermuda [reviewed here ]. To begin with, to set the scene, so to speak, let me quote from early on in the affair, from page 13:

   So all right, then. Both of the ingredients for a successful Golden Age Mystery are present, as touched upon in my comments on the Burnham book. Essential ingredient number one: A house (or even better, a manor) full of glitzy people, or an exclusive business establishment of some sort, or some other meeting place of the rich and famous.

   Essential setting ingredient number two: When Gleba, Mache’s most beautiful mannequin (model) is found murdered immediately after a showing of a wedding dress (page 18) there has been only limited access to the salon and the dressing rooms behind. Only the people on the premises can be presumed to have been the killer.

   One difference between this book and the Burnham’s is how early on the victim’s death occurs. Here it seems almost too soon, only eighteen pages in, and there has been no time to know anything about the girl, except that she wears clothes well. Thus there has been no time for the reader to react properly and have any feeling about such minor matters such as rationale, reason and motive.

   In Murder at Maison Manche, matters like these are left to be revealed only gradually, but the major one (as far as I will reveal it to you) is that the wedding dress Gleba had been wearing just before she was killed was that of a woman in the audience with whose fiancé she (Gleba) recently had had an affair.

   The detective from Scotland Yard who is quickly called to scene is Chief Inspector Tellit. He is described in detail on page 74 as a thick-set man dressed in well-cut and utterly uninspired clothes, ugly hands, far from good-looking but with an often kindly look in his deep blue eyes. In general, however, “he was considered a hard man” as far as crime and criminals are concerned.

   This is far from his first brush with a mysterious death, you may also be interested in knowing, since on page 48, his assistant, Det. Sgt. Fry feels “content that he was once again with Tellit on a murder case.”

   Tellit is a man for keeping track of details, gathering together scraps of information and putting them together like pieces of a jigsaw, as we are told on page 101. Every so often the author (in the guise of Inspector Tellit) feels the need for a recap and a provisional summing up, a device that seems worn-out today, but it is one which this reader, at least, almost always finds welcome.

   If this is not as gripping a detective yarn as David Burnham’s one was, it is for two reasons, the first being the huge amount of coincidence that is involved to put all of the actors on the scene at precisely the right moment, with the right means (a mysterious snake venom manufactured only in one lab in South America), the right motive and the right opportunity.

   Secondly the pacing is oddly off. In particular, the book also seems to “end” at page 180, with 27 more pages to go, and another character, previously relegated to the background is needed to emerge to set up the “real” solution. One more coincidence, and usually for a suspension of disbelief, all that an author is usually allowed is one, or no more than two.

   The right ingredients are present, in other words, but they get themselves muddled up a bit at the hands of an author whom I will call an amateur – without knowing anything else about her – in the finest sense of the word.

KATE ROSS – Cut to the Quick. Viking, hardcover, 1993. Penguin, paperback, 1994.

Genre:   Historical mystery. Leading character:  Julian Kestrel (1st in series). Setting:   England/Regency era, 1824.

First Sentence:   Mark Craddock paced slowly, deliberately, back and forth behind the desk in his study.

   After Regency dandy and detective Julian Kestral rescues young Hugh Fontclair from embarrassment at a gambling hall, he is, in turn, asked to serve as best man for Hugh’s forced marriage to Maud Craddock.

    Kestral, along with his man Dipper, travels to the Fontclair country home for a weekend with both families. The last thing he expected was to find the body of an unknown murdered woman in his bed or having to provide Dipper innocent of the act.

    For those of us who love period mysteries, Ross is one of the best. She captures the period with exquisite detail from dress, manners, speech. Her characters are wonderfully drawn portraying all levels of society.

    Kestrel is the character at center stage. He is the personification of the Regency dandy, exhibiting droll cynicism and detachment. Upon meeting Hugh’s young sisters, he comments:   “I rather like making friends with women before they’re old enough to be dangerous.”

    However, under the veneer is a consideration for others, an admiration for goodness, awareness of people’s natures and a determination for justice. Although there are quite a number of characters in the story, each is so well drawn as never become confused.

    The plot is very strong. It’s not a locked-room mystery as the key is on the hall table. It is very much a case of who is the victim, how did she get there and what was her relationship to the people in the house. It’s a step-by-step investigation with plenty of twists and turns along the way. Best of all, I certainly did not predict the killer.

    While sadly, Kate Ross only published four books before her death in 1998, this, as are all of her books, is very well worth reading, and reading again.

Rating:   Very Good Plus.

    The Julian Kestrel series —

Cut to the Quick (1993)
A Broken Vessel (1994)

Whom the Gods Love (1995)
The Devil in Music (1997)