We’re still in the process of going through some of the typos and other small errors that always creep into a project like this, but Part 40 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, is now online. (Follow the links.)

   There are the usual additions: newly discovered series characters and settings for the novels, a few new authors and novels, dates of birth and death added or corrected. A whole gamut of facts and additional information about our favorite hobby: reading and collecting detective and mystery fiction, some of it generated by the reviews and other discussions that have recently taken place on this blog.

   The corrections to Part 40 of the online Addenda will be made in the next couple of days, but one of the highlights of this particular installment deserves a post here on this blog all to itself, the discovery of a female identity to a masculine byline that occurred frequently in the heyday of the hard-boiled detective pulp magazines.

   I’ll let Victor Berch tell you all about it in the very next post.

SIMON BRETT – Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King’s Daughter. Felony & Mayhem, softcover, February 2011. British edition: Constable, hardcover, May 2009.

   The name Simon Brett should be no stranger to anyone on these pages. His Charles Paris series about a bibulous actor is held in the highest esteem by lovers of humorous well written mysteries, and for the past decade he has been penning less humorous but well received British cozies set in Fethering, a small English town out of Miss Marple by way of The Last of the Summer Wine.

   Blotto, Twinks and the Ex King’s Daughter is yet another venue for Mr. Brett, and one that shows a different side both to his humor and English village life. Indeed, his new series lies somewhere in that vague country inhabited by P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster, Dornford Yate’s Berry and Company, some of the more playful Agatha Christie’s, the early Albert Campion, the more extravagant adventures of Michael Innes Sir John Appleby, and Leonard Wibberly’s Duchy of Grand Fenwick.

   The time is somewhere between the two world wars in an England of stately homes, dizzy aristocrats, loyal retainers, dastardly villains, and vintage automobiles.

   The setting is Tawcester Towers, where the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester (the Duke, her son — known as Loofah and Rupert the Dull, descendant of Rupert the Fiend and Black Rupert — having passed on five years earlier) is entertaining the exiled king of Mittleuropa, Sigismund, when her youngest son, the Right Honorable Devereaux Lyminster, known as Blotto (and with good reason) announces he’s found a body in the library, one Captain Schtoltz.

   In very short order Chief Inspector Trumbull and Sergeant Knatchbull arrive, none too impressed by the body or the Duchess and her royal guest, and then to add to the trouble the Princess Ethelinde is kidnapped.

   Well, naturally Blotto can’t allow that kind of thing to happen in Tawcester Towers without doing something, but considering his limited capacity in the brains department, it is just as well his beautiful sister Lady Honoria, known as Twinks, has a first rate mind and nose for murder (“– what a brainbox that girl had”).

   And the chase is on — in vintage open automobiles of course — and with Grimshaw, Blotto’s valet, in tow (a gentleman never travels without his valet) all the way to Mittleuropa, where they stumble on intrigue supplied by nearby Transcarpathia, ruled by King Anatol and Princess Ethlinde’s betrothed, Prince Fritz-Ludwig among others.

   Before you can say Zenda…, Blotto and Twinks (Grimshaw in tow) are on the trail of the murderer in the capital Zling and over the battlements of the Castle Berkenziepenkatzen … assuming you actually can say any of that.

   Of course Blotto will rescue the Princess and nobly renounce said princess in true Rassendyl style (he has to get out of it somehow) while Twinks will hunt down the kidnapper and murderer displaying both brains and spunk, but it is all a near run thing — especially for Blotto, who might have ended up king of Mittleuropa, or in the arms of the dangerously attractive Svetlana Lubachev (“as a femme fatale she did have some standards”). All before Blotto confronts the killer back in England at jolly old Tawcester Towers in Rupert the Antisocial’s billiard room.

   This is a very funny book, inventively, and splendidly, silly, bright, clever, and outrageous. There isn’t a serious bone in its head. I’m not really sure a mere reviewer can convey the exact spirit and voice of the book, but if you want to escape from reality into a world of smiles, chuckles, and undignified guffaws, this is your chance. Wodehousian, yes, but with a few left turns reminiscent of the Marx Brothers or Mel Brooks, and all bundled up as an attractive new series we can only hope to see more of.

   If you want a few laughs you’d be blotto not to read it.

       The Blotto & Twinks series —

1. Blotto, Twinks, and the Ex-King’s Daughter (2009)
2. Blotto, Twinks and the Dead Dowager Duchess (2009)

3. Blotto, Twinks and the Rodents of the Riviera (2011)

SIMON BRETT – Mrs. Pargeter’s Package. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1991. Warner, reprint paperback, 1992. UK edition: Macmillan, hardcover, 1990.

   Mrs. Pargeter, the widow of a master criminal with lots of friends, decides to accompany an old friend, Joyce Dover (is this name in homage to Joyce Porter, author of the Dover books?) herself a recent widow, on a package tour of Corfu in Greece.

   As they go through Customs, she asks Mrs. Pargeter to carry a package for her, and the next day Joyce’s body turns up, an apparent suicide. Mrs. Pargeter is, of course, suspicious. She slept a bit too soundly the night of her friend’s death, and their luggage seems to have been searched.

   Worse, the local police seem entirely too anxious to label the death Suicide and forget about it. But stranger still, the package Mrs. Pargeter was carrying for her friend turns out to be a bottle of Ouzo: So why was Joyce smuggling Greek Wine into Greece?

   Myself, I can’t fathom why Brett is becoming so enamoured of Mrs. Pargeter when Charles Paris is such a much more entertaining character. Mrs. P., despite her friends, is pretty much interchangeable with any number of LOLs, and this case is completely conventional and without a single memorable incident.

SIMON BRETT – A Comedian Dies. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1979. Reprint paperbacks include: Berkley, 1980; Dell, 1986; Warner, 1990. UK edition: Victor Gollancz, hardcover, 1979.

   Making good use of his background in radio and television, and of his interest in the theater, Simon Brett has created one of the most likable characters among recent series sleuths: Charles Paris, a middle-aged and not very successful radio actor whose vices include drink, women, and stumbling into murder cases that he is forced to solve.

   The Paris novels are distinguished by solid plotting, well-drawn entertainment business backgrounds, and a nice interweaving of humor that often borders on spoof.

   One of the first things the reader of A Comedian Dies, which has a modem British vaudeville background, will notice is that there is a gag at the beginning of each chapter. A gag such as:

   Having discovered this, most readers will no doubt be tempted to flip through the book and read all of the gags immediately, like gulping popcorn. You should refrain from doing this, however. Taken one at a time, every dozen pages or so, each will provoke an amused and tolerant groan; taken all at once, they are sort of like listening to a Bob Hope monologue and may therefore cause severe trauma, if not a sudden desire to take up golf or vote Republican.

   On the other hand, the novel itself is worth reading all at once. Paris and his estranged wife, Frances, trying once again to mend their marriage, are attending a vaudeville show at the Winter Gardens in Hunstanton, a small English seacoast town. But the show the star performer, comedian Bill Peaky, puts on is not at all what Paris anticipated: Peaky is electrocuted on stage while clutching his electric guitar and microphone.

   At the inquest, the coroner decides the death was accidental, due to faulty wiring, but Paris has his doubts and starts an investigation of his own. Suspects abound, owing to the fact that Peaky was not a very popular fellow. Paris is something of a bumbler, which only enhances his appeal; and he does get to the bottom of things eventually, in spite of the eighteen gags Brett throws at him along the way.

         ———
   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.

KING OF BURLESQUE. 20th Century Fox, 1936. Warner Baxter, Alice Faye, Jack Oakie, Mona Barrie, Gregory Ratoff, Dixie Dunbar, Herbert Mundin, Thomas “Fat” Waller, Kenny Baker. Screenplay by Gene Markey and Harry Tugend, from Viña Delmar’s unpublished short story “The Day Never Came.” Director: Sidney Lanfield. Shown at Cinecon 46, Hollywood CA, September 2010.

    Last year at Cinevent I saw the 1943 technicolor remake of this Fox musical, Hello Frisco, Hello [reviewed here ], with Alice Faye and Jack Oakie repeating their earlier roles. I didn’t particularly like the remake, and I can now say that I definitely didn’t like the original version.

   Warner Baxter plays a successful director of musicals who falls for a society dame and is convinced by her to “upgrade” his shows. His career and marriage founder, but his former pals, Faye and Oakie, come to his rescue and Faye graduates from best pal to girlfriend/future wife status.

   I found the 1936 version to be a tedious, hackneyed backstage drammer, occasionally brightened by the musical performers, with “Fats” Waller momentarily lifting the movie out of its well-worn rut. Warner Baxter had played the hotshot director one time too many, and his take on the role was funny when it wasn’t intended to be.

Editorial Note:   Of the three chorus girls in that eye-catching image you see above, the one on the right is Jane Wyman.

GEOFFREY HOMES – Build My Gallows High. William Morrow, hardcover, 1946. Paperback reprints include: Jonathan Press J35,digest, no date [1948]; Ace D-185, 1956, published dos-à-dos with The Humming Box, by Harry Whittington; Zebra “Movie Mystery Greats,” 1988.

   From 1936 to 1946, Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring) published a dozen very good mysteries set primarily in the valleys and foothills of north-central California. Build My Gallows High is the last and best of the twelve, and so firmly established Mainwaring in Hollywood (he had been writing B movies since 1942) that he produced no more fiction during the last thirty-two years of his life.

   This novel was filmed, from Mainwaring’s screenplay, as Out of the Past (1947), starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas — one of the half-dozen best noir crime films ever made.

   Both novel and film are powerful studies of one man’s struggle to maintain the hope of his future when his jaded past catches up with him. Red Bailey is a former New York private detective, the kind “who first looked at a client’s supply of thousand-dollar bills, then at his social-and legal-status” before taking on a job; an angle player who made his big mistake when he went to work for a gambler named Whit Sterling.

   The job (told through flashback) was to find Sterling’s ex-mistress, Mumsie McGonigle, who shot and wounded Sterling and then ran off with $56,000 of his money. Red tracked Mumsie to Mexico, met and fell in love with her; and when she claimed she’d only shot Sterling in self-defense, Red stupidly double-crossed the gambler and helped Mumsie cover her tracks from Mexico to California.

   But their relationship wasn’t what Red expected. When his former partner showed up at their country hideaway, murder drove the final wedge between them — and Red realized how badly he’d screwed up his life.

   Determined to put Mumsie and the rest of it behind him, he made his way to a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, opened a gas station, and spent most of his free time fishing. He even met a new woman, one he learned to love more than Mumsie, one he planned to marry. Now, for the first time in his life, he is content.

   But then one day his past shows up in the person of a flashily dressed Greek gunman employed by Guy Parker, a crooked cop Red knew in the old days who now operates a gambling club in Reno. Red accompanies the Greek to see Parker, and finds that Mumsie is now Parker’s live-in girlfriend.

   Parker wants Red to do a detective job for him; if he doesn’t agree, then Parker will tell Whit Sterling where to find him. Red smells a setup of some kind, with himself square in the middle, but what choice does he have except to do as Parker asks? Up to a point, that is …

   This is a taut, hard-edged thriller, powerfully told in a clipped style reminiscent of Hemingway’s, with superb characterization and a hammer-blow climax. Anyone who has seen and admired Out of the Past will find Build My Gallows High every bit as memorable.

         ———
   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.

 

GEOFFREY HOMES – The Man Who Murdered Himself. William Morrow, hardcover, 1936. Avon, no number [#18], paperback, 1942.

   Working for a missing persons outfit specializing in lost heirs is a cutthroat business, at the fringe of legal niceties, requiring a stretch of the truth now and then, with a little money every so often into the right hands.

   So we meet Robin Bailey, ex-newspaperman, on a case of either suicide or murder — death by personal pollution of a local reservoir.

   Crackling dialogue and a twisting, turning plot, but short but effective glimpses of character and existence in the 1930 leave us wanting more in that regard, while Homes concentrates on the story. Bishop himself finds his work increasingly distasteful and begins to wonder why he never before noticed the office secretary.

   The secondary characters, understated, unobtrusive, are even more memorable, exemplified by the sorrow displayed by the victim’s landlady. I believe this to be Homes’ first book. He’s worth looking into as a writer.

   Bibliographic Data:

      The Robin Bishop series —

    The Doctor Died at Dusk (n.) Morrow 1936.
    The Man Who Murdered Himself (n.) Morrow 1936.

    The Man Who Didn’t Exist (n.) Morrow 1937.
    The Man Who Murdered Goliath (n.) Morrow 1938.

    Then There Were Three (n.) Morrow 1938.

   The latter is a crossover novel with the detective duties shared by Homes’ other major series character, PI Humphrey Campbell, who also works for the Morgan Missing Persons Bureau detective agency.

       The Humphrey Campbell series —

    Then There Were Three (n.) Morrow 1938.
    No Hands on the Clock (n.) Morrow 1939.

    Finders Keepers (n.) Morrow 1940.
    Forty Whacks (n.) Morrow 1941.
    Six Silver Handles (n.) Morrow 1944.

   Homes also wrote two novels in which Mexican policeman Jose Manuel Madero was the primary detective:

    The Street of the Crying Woman (n.) Morrow 1942.
    The Hill of the Terrified Monk (n.) Morrow 1943.

and one standalone:

    Build My Gallows High (n.) Morrow, 1946.

   But if anything, either under his own name, Daniel Mainwaring, or as Geoffrey Homes, his list of credits is even longer on IMDB as a screenwriter.

   Previously on this blog:

  Forty Whacks.     [A 1001 Midnights review by Bill Pronzini.]
  Crime by Night, based on Forty Whacks.     [A film review by Steve Lewis.]

FRANTIC. Nouvelles Éditions de Films (NEF), 1958, as “Ascenseur pour l’échafaud.” Aka Elevator to the Gallows. Maurice Ronet, Jeanne Moreau, Georges Poujouly, Yori Bertin, Jean Wall. Based on the novel by Noël Calef (Paris, 1956). Director: Louis Malle.

   Frantic is a typically French Crime Drama, filled with clever turns that kept me guessing right up to the end. Ronet is an ex-war hero, Moreau the wife of his wealthy bastard of a boss, and they’re so magnetic together I kept rooting for them to get away with that pre-doomed plot-hook of the genre, the “perfect murder.”

   To tell anything at all about how their well-planned crime works out would be to spoil a genuinely ingenious piece of work. Indeed, watching it, I thought for a moment that the writer or director (or both) had taken leave of the story to pursue a hodge-podge of irrelevant detail — only to have everything tied together in a finish that left me gasping.

ABOVE SUSPICION: DEADLY INTENT. ITV, UK. January 3, 4 and 5, 2011. Kelly Reilly, Shaun Dingwall, Ciarán Hinds, Celyn Jones, Amanda Lawrence, Stine Stengade, Richard Brake. Screenwriters: Noel Farragher & Lynda La Plante, based on the latter’s novel. Director: Gillies MacKinnon.

   This is the third in a series based on books by Lynda La Plante with Kelly Reilly as Anna Travis, a Detective Constable in the first two, but here for some reason bumped up to an impossibly young-looking Detective Inspector, and Ciarán Hinds as her rather grumpy boss, James Langton, now a Detective Superintendent.

   In fact Langton says that his and Travis’s paths haven’t crossed since the previous case but here they are together again investigating the death of an ex-cop at a scene involving drugs. We know from the start that a high-powered drug dealer has had plastic surgery to change his appearance, but it’s how Travis gets on to the case despite put-downs from her colleagues that take up the bulk of the story (shown in three one hour, less adverts, instalments).

   The whole thing is quite watchable but also quite risible in many respects both for Miss Reilly’s improbable dress sense as she investigates crimes in high heels and revealing tops, and the attraction here expressed, but not to each other, between the two leads.

   Disappointing, too, for this blue-eyed optimist, was the rather downbeat ending. So, in summary, it’s not bad but flawed and not to be taken seriously for a moment.

ROBERT TURNER – The Girl in the Cop’s Pocket. Ace Double D-177; paperback original; 1st printing, 1956. Published Published dos-à-dos with Violence Is Golden, by C. H. Thames (Stephen Marlowe).

   When an old girl friend is accused of killing her wealthy husband with a method from one of his mystery yarns, ex-newspaperman Will Dennison heads back to the old mill town he grew up in. It’s a town on the way down; labor problems have forced the mills to head south. All that remain are the cheap hotels, the ramshackle homes of the unemployed, and cops who don’t care.

   Dennison investigates and finds at the root a blonde who was forced to grow up too fast. (Why is the worst expected of the most beautiful?) The town is gross, but its inhabitants deserve it. So much for nostalgia!

   Only a rather melodramatic finale brings the rating down. In The Girl in the Cop’s Pocket Turner tells a fast-paced tale.

Rating:   C plus.

[UPDATE] 02-19-11. Robert Turner wrote a long list of stories for the detective pulps before they died out and he had to turn to paperbacks to continue writing. He has four novels in the Revised Crime Fiction IV under his own name, including this one, and one story collection.

   As Don Romano he co-authored three of the five books in a Mafia series beginning with Operation Porno (1973), and ghosted two “Shaft” paperback originals under the name of the author who created the character, Ernest Tidyman.

   On another note, I’ve always been fond of mystery novels in which the primary detective is the author of the same. Who was the first? How about the first one in which one of the author’s stories was used as the basis of a crime?