LOUISE PENNY – A Rule Against Murder. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, January 2009; reprint paperback: September 2009. Published in the UK and Canada as The Murder Stone.

    In the fourth of Penny’s fine Canadian crime series, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his wife Reine-Marie are spending their wedding anniversary at the palatial Manoir Bellechasse lodge, within driving distance of Three Pines, the idyllic isolated town where the three earlier titles were set.

    The lodge is also the site of an annual reunion of the Morrow/Finney family, a dysfunctional group that harbors resentments and hatreds that go back decades. At first a bystander to the family’s in-fighting, Gamache becomes a major factor in their internal drama when the oldest daughter is crushed to dead by the newly installed statue of her father, a bizarre crime that borders on the impossible.

    The novel is littered with red herrings and other misdirection ploys that culminate in a hairbreadth encounter on the roof of the lodge that threatens the innocent as well as the guilty.

    The strong suit of this series is the portrayal of Gamache and of the setting, which, as in the Three Pines novels, is as significant a factor as the characters. In 1957, I spent a summer working at a lodge in Glacier Park, in a setting that rivaled that of the novel for its natural beauty. Manoir Bellechasse is extraordinarily well run, with a stuff that functions almost like the mechanism of a fine watch, a characteristic also of the lodge where I worked.

    I will add that there were undercurrents of hostility in the Glacier staff, but nothing that reached the level of venom that festers throughout Penny’s novel.

      Previously on this blog:

Still Life   (reviewed by Walter Albert)
A Fatal Grace   (reviewed by Tina Karelson)

ESCAPE. 20th Century Fox, UK, 1947. Rex Harrison, Peggy Cummins, William Hartnell, Norman Wooland, Jill Esmond, Betty Ann Davies. Based on a play by John Galsworthy. Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

   I don’t know about you – and there’s absolutely no reason I should – but when I think of Rex Harrison, I think of My Fair Lady. I’ve seen him in other films, I know, and so have you, I’m sure, but to me, Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins was such a defining role, it dwarfs anything else he ever did in comparison.

   There are scenes in Escape, however, in which Mr. Harrison is nearly 180 degrees the polar opposite of the impeccably dressed Henry Higgins, and which (perhaps) I will remember for an equally long time.

   Playing an escaped prisoner named Matt Denant, his headlong flight across the rough rural English countryside means watching him splash his way through numerous small rivers and streams, snatching food up from wherever and whenever he can, and ending up thoroughly covered with as much dirt and mud as you can possibly imagine.

   Convicted of manslaughter – having accidentally caused the death of an overly officious bobby accusing a young woman in a public park of being a prostitute (this aspect of the film portrayed discreetly – it is up to audience to come to their own conclusion that that is what she is), Matt Denant is (was) a well-to-do former fighter pilot in World War II. That he was unjustly imprisoned he is utterly convinced — and so, for that matter, is the audience, foursquare and solidly.

   And audiences ought to be trusted. They recognize and know the rigid, inflexible hand of justice when they see it. But one man fleeing a pack of bloodhounds on his trail needs assistance. Denant cannot do it alone, and coming to his aid (somewhat mystifyingly, even to herself) is a young socialite girl named Dora Winton (Peggy Cummins), who is engaged to be married, but who also sees in Denant a fox at the fox’s end of a fox hunt.

   William Hartnell, later of Dr. Who fame, plays the plodding Inspector Harris, intelligently and fairly but also unwaveringly, in the solid English tradition.

   Escape is most definitely belongs to the film noir category, one that’s nicely done, British style, but also one that’s slightly undone by the uplifting scene that takes place in the church that becomes a temporary place of refuge for Denant toward the end of the film.

   I happen not to think that the finale is as upliftingly optimistic as the audience is led to believe – and perhaps the audience at the time was wise to this as well – but also perhaps I am wrong. I like happy endings as much as next fellow. Even relatively happy ones.

EARL DERR BIGGERS – The Chinese Parrot. Paperback reprint: Pocket #168, 1942. Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and soft. Silent film: Jewel, 1927; Charlie Chan: Sojin. Sound film: TCF, 1934, as Charlie Chan’s Courage; Charlie Chan: Warner Oland.

   All right let’s get the racist thing out of the way right now. The Chan books are not racist. (The books! I’m talking about, the books!) They are, in fact, ANTI-racist and anyone who reads The Chinese Parrot will clearly see that Biggers has no tolerance for the bigoted treatment of Chinese and the stereotyped depictions of pidgin speaking characters in fiction. Let me give you two examples:

    1. When confronted by the ignorance of Captain Bliss, a police officer who wants to charge Chan (in his disguise as Ah Kim, a servant) with a stabbing murder, Chan quickly turns the interrogation around and asks the Captain to produce a motive, fingerprints and the murder weapon, in fact any real evidence, before even thinking about continuing his bullying questions.

    2. In one of their many secret meetings Bob Eden asks Chan to deliver a message to Madden, Ah Kim’s boss. Knowing that he will have to use his comic servant pidgin speech Chan replies: “With your kind permission, I will alter that message slightly, losing the word very. In memory of old times, there remains little I would not do […] , but by the bones of my honorable ancestors I will not say ‘velly.’ ”

   OK? Enough said. Let’s move on, class.

   If Dell’s mapback series had started up much earlier than 1943 or so the editors might have chosen Earl Derr Biggers’ books as some of the first mysteries to release in paperback. The inside blurb page for The Chinese Parrot, the second Charlie Chan novel, might read something like this:

    What this book is about…

   A $300,000 string of pearls, a parrot that speaks Chinese, a murder without a corpse, a missing antique Colt .45 revolver, an abandoned trolley car with a mysterious occupant, several buried cans, a ghost town in the hills.

   This is a vastly entertaining, tightly plotted, and well written book. Instead of Hawaii, the action moves to the mainland. It opens in San Francisco then moves on to a Southern California desert town called El Dorado. Biggers has created some very American characters here and his gift for snappy dialogue makes the book all the more enjoyable.

   Chan has a much larger role here and as mentioned above is undercover in the role of a Chinese “boy of all work” called Ah Kim who cooks, tends to fireplaces and even acts as chauffeur. He teams up with the son of a jeweler, Bob Eden, to uncover some obvious criminal doings at the home of P. J. Madden, a millionaire intent on buying the valuable pearl necklace.

   The most baffling of the events is an apparent murder without a body. Tony, the African gray parrot of the title, is quite a mimic and in addition to spouting forth Chinese phrases he also squawks out, “Help! Help! Murder! Put down that gun!” Chan is convinced the bird was a witness to a murder.

   Discovery of a missing antique gun with two chambers empty, and an attempt to hide a bullet hole in a wall by covering it with a painting, both support the theory of a murder having taken place in Madden’s home. But just who was killed and where did the body go?

   Chan may have two white men as his aides in detection in this book, but it is he alone who will unmask the killer in a great finale where we see “his eyes blaze in anger” while covering the villains of the piece with two guns, one in each hand.. Truly, here is an excellent book not only in the series, but in all of early American detective fiction.

   Even more striking is that this particular book seems to have been written only a few years ago. There is no sign of that quaint style that often makes a 1920s book unbearable to me. With the exception of only a few topical references tied to the period (the mention of United Cigar Stores, radio as a form of “miracle technology,” a scene where movie actors start dancing the Charleston like maniacs on speed, for example) the story seems to be occurring in the not too distant past rather than the late 1920s.

   There is a movie location scout who talks about the motion picture industry as if it were now and not part of the silent era. There is a real estate agent trying his darndest to sell building lots in a developmental desert community called Date City. He spends his time tending to a feebly spurting fountain outside the gates hoping to lure “easy marks, uh rather, good prospects” into believing they’ll have a lovely new home and a rich life in what is now nothing but barren wasteland.

   And there is Biggers’ masterful handling of lively dialogue only occasionally peppered with period slang that makes this a thoroughly engaging and surprisingly modern read for something written 85 years ago.

   I read The House without a Key, the very first Chan book, last year and was also struck but its modern feel and its compassionate treatment of minority characters. I am now determined to read the remaining four books in the series.

   I’ve repeatedly found the Charlie Chan books in my book hunting and buying binges and have owned at least one copy of each title over time. Because I found them to be great sellers in the past I began buying them with the express purpose of making a little cash by reselling them on-line.

   Now with relatively affordable reprint editions from Academy Chicago at $14.95 a pop (with nifty period style cover art) I guess no one will want the older editions unless they come with the rare dust jackets. I’m glad to hang on to the four old Charlie Chan Grosset & Dunlap reprints and the one battered first edition I own of The House without a Key. I’m a new Chan fan for life and I’ll treasure the copies I was lucky enough to find.

           SIDE NOTE:

   For a fascinating read, find a copy of the recently published non-fiction work Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective & His Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang.

   It’s a combination of a biography, critical essay, and sociological study of the Asian American in popular fiction and movies. Primarily a biography of Chang Apana — a Honolulu policeman who served as the inspiration for Charlie Chan — the book also gives insights into the life of Biggers, all of the Chan books and many of the Chan movies.

   The similarities to Chan in the early books and Apana’s real life prior to his being a police officer are uncanny considering that Biggers had only heard mention of Apana and had never met or talked to him until 1930 or so.

       Previously on this blog —

The Keeper of the Keys (reviewed by Marv Lachman).

Castle in the Desert (a film review by Dan Stumpf).

ACROSS THE BRIDGE. J. Arthur Rank, UK, 1957. Rod Steiger, David Knight, Marla Landi, Noel Willman, Bernard Lee, Bill Nagy, “Dolores.” Based on a story by Graham Greene. Director: Ken Annakin.

   I do not believe I have ever seen a movie in which Rod Steiger had an important if not starring role that I did not find fascinating in one way or another, and that fascination has almost always meant considerable enjoyment.

   I cannot tell you why I had never heard of this movie until last month, nor do I remember who pointed it out to me then, but I owe that person or website a huge, great big thank you. I was fascinated with Mr. Steiger’s performance all the way through, and I enjoyed every minute of it tremendously.

   Steiger plays a German financier named Carl Schaffner in Across the Bridge, an arrogant fellow (as arrogant as having lots of money, mostly questionably gained, will allow, if not cause) who gets into trouble with Scotland Yard while he’s in Manhattan scheming away at his next plan.

   Trouble that’s serious enough that he makes his way headlong out of the country by train – no passenger lists, you see – but not fast enough for the news of his escape to make the newspapers while he’s still riding the rails.

   Thinking fast, he drugs a fellow passenger who looks like him, a gentleman traveling with Mexican papers, which he steals after dropping him off the end of the train. Fate has fickle fingers. The man who identity Schaffner has assumed is even more wanted than he is – an assassin with 100,000 pesos on his head, dead or alive.

   Ending up – after considerable travail, which I will restrain myself from going into – in a small town in northern Mexico, Schaffner finds himself with an unfriendly police chief watching his every move; a man from Scotland Yard breathing down his neck (but unable to touch him as long as he does not cross the bridge back to the US); no friends; and a dwindling supply of money. He is a victim of his own making, a desperate man trapped by his own avarice and greed.

   What Across the Bridge is, in my not-so-humble opinion, is a true noir film, as noir as noir can get. In this case, and I invite you to see this for yourself, the ultimate irony is that the worse his problems become, the more we (the audience) begin to empathize with him, with the plot taking some very surprising (if not bizarre) twists and turns (plus a good old-fashioned handful of healthy coincidence as well) along the way.

   There is one note I have to add, and it’s an important one. I said he had no friends in the paragraph above. I was incorrect in saying that, quite wrong.

   You cannot watch this movie and ignore the role played by mongrel dog (part cocker spaniel?) who belonged to the man whose identity he stole. A dog who steals nearly every scene she’s in. Remarkably, and totally in spite of himself, Schaffner does has one friend, one with the saddest eyes you will ever see.

   I don’t know whether Dolores was a method actor or not, but it is one of the characteristics of Steiger’s performances that he is known for. During the making of this film this put him at odds, so we are told, with Bernard Lee, for example, who plays Schaffner’s not totally ethical adversary from Scotland Yard, but the technique gives Steiger an edge up in every film I’ve seen him in. Across the Bridge, a movie that’s unfairly all but unknown today, is no exception.

CRIS HAMMOND – Speed Walker Private Eye. Pinnacle, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1984. A collection of the United Features comic strip, “Speed Walker Private Eye,” from May 2 through November 25, 1983.

   On May 2, 1983, a different kind of PI joined the comics page, “Speed Walker Private Eye.” Speed may not have been as smooth as Rip Kirby (King Features, 1946-1999) or as tough as Mike Hammer (Phoenix Features, 1953-1954), but he was funnier.

   The comic strip features three main characters: Speed Walker, a bumbling loser who solves mysteries no one else could; Sally Gelata, his secretary, a single woman with an attitude; and Lt. Lou Arches, the overweight idiot homicide detective and Speed’s friend.

   The art has a nice cartoony style with enough detail to help establish the theme, but the strip lacked action, rarely giving readers more than a picture of characters talking.

   The writing had its moments. But to try to tell a murder mystery with three months of daily gags, each needing to advance the story and have a punchline was more than anyone could expect.

   This book collection features “Speed Walker Private Eye” at its best. It contains two murder mysteries:

    In “The Simpson Case,” E.R. Lowman finds his partner dead with the victim’s wife holding the gun, just as Lowman had found his first partner thirty years earlier.

   Sample gag (June 3,1983): Speed is questioning psychiatrist Rinn as they sit on her office sofa:

   In “Chinese Cooking Class Murder,” Speed falls for a cooking classmate who is poisoned by Speed’s won ton.

   Sample gag (September 10,1983): Speed is sitting at his office desk as Lt. Lou Arches consoles him.

    “Speed Walker Private Eye” would end August 26,1984. There is a second book collection of this strip, Speed Walker Private Eye – Totally Fearless!! (…Within Reason),” published again by Pinnacle as a paperback original, December 1984.

    This second selection of strips features the search for the missing pearls stolen by Merle Searles and a run for President of the United States by a new character, Butch the sea gull.

   Samples of “Speed Walker” are available to view at cartoonist Cris Hammond website: http://www.crishammond.com/Pages/strips.html.

   Thanks to fellow member of google group rec.arts.comics.strips Charles Brubaker for providing the start and end dates for “Speed Walker Private Eye.”

SIMON R. GREEN – The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny. Ace, hardcover, January 2010. Reprint paperback: December 2010.

Genre:   Paranormal/Mystery. Leading character:   John Taylor; 10th in series. Setting:   Nightside/Contemporary London.

First Sentence:   This is the Nightside.

    Things are changing in Nightside, a hidden inner city section of London where elements of fantasy, science fiction and the supernatural merge and collide — a place “where dreams come true and nightmares come alive.”

    An elf — never trust an elf — hires PI John Taylor as an escort across Nightside. Then Larry Oblivion, the Dead Detective, asks to help him find his brother who disappeared during the Lilith War. But the biggest concern is Walker, who runs Nightside on behalf of the Authorities. He wants to retire and have PI John Taylor assume his position.

    A book with a compelling opening is a joy, and Green writes great openings. I am always staggered by imagination and his ability to make the unreal seem real, unpleasant as that sometimes is.

    This book blends humans — sometimes loosely defined as such — monsters and mythical characters, such as Puck; but not Shakespeare’s Puck. To balance the graphic nature of the tale, Green employs a delightful humor and includes references to contemporary culture and the occasional nod to Shakespeare. In fact, the book itself has a rather Shakespearean feel to it.

   The books in this series are not pure fantasy books; there is some real substance and insightful observations and truth tucked in amongst the action, including a rather sad but honest observation on drugs. When John asks Walker whether the power ever goes to his head, Walker responds “…There isn’t one of them that really likes or even respect me. It’s the position, and the power that comes with it.”

    Isn’t that true for most people who are famous or powerful— people agree with them and laugh at their jokes not because of who they are but because of the power they hold.

    At one point, Taylor talks about the value of the less important… “Is their pain any less? Their deaths any less final”…leading me to think of Shylock’s speech about the Jews “…If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?…”

    Green is an excellent writer and this is clearly a transitional book. I cannot help but look forward to my next visit to the Nightside.

Rating:   Very Good.

HARLEY JANE KOZAK – A Date You Can’t Refuse. Broadway, trade paperback original, March 2009.

   At one time a greeting card designer, Wollie Shelley currently makes her living as a professional dater. But along with this switch in career paths, she has somehow managed to find herself mixed up in several cases of murder as well.

   In this, the fourth and final book in the series, Wollie finds herself working for a media training firm, teaching American social conventions to Eastern Europeans — in essence, dating them. It turns out her reality shows were huge hits in Belarus and vicinity, so she’s a bit of a celebrity to the clientele.

   She also happens to be informing to the FBI, because they think something is up with the vaguely cultish company — maybe arms dealing. However, the FBI isn’t very forthcoming, and her FBI agent boyfriend is involved in his own undercover investigation.

   Anyway, it turns out more than one thing is up. As usual in this series, there are a lot of ingredients in the soup, including murder, DVD piracy, bad mobile phone reception and a sidewalk chalk art competition. Wollie realizes her predecessor at the media training firm was murdered. When that young woman’s boyfriend is also killed, Wollie gets serious about investigating and lands in real danger.

   Anyone who hasn’t read the previous books might find the subplots related to Wollie’s brother, uncle and friends a bit unclear, but that won’t spoil the book. And I won’t spoil the ending to the series, one of my favorites, except to say that it seems like a happy one.

The Wollie Shelley mystery series —

       1. Dating Dead Men (2004)

       2. Dating Is Murder (2005)
       3. Dead Ex (2007)
       4. A Date You Can’t Refuse (2009)

   I recently unearthed an Ellery Queen mystery, or more precisely a mystery about EQ, which will not be solved easily if at all. The September 2002 issue of Radiogram, a magazine for fans of old-time radio, includes “In the Studio with Ellery Queen,” a brief memoir by Fred Essex, who was a producer-director for the Ruthrauff & Ryan advertising agency in the early 1940s when one of the programs the agency brought to the air every week was The Adventures of Ellery Queen.

   At this time Ellery’s creators, the cousins Fred Dannay and Manny Lee, were working out of an office in mid-Manhattan but asked the agency not to disturb them while they were in the throes of creation. “[T]he boys in the mail room who would deliver two mimeographed copies of the finished script each week were instructed not to enter the office…but to throw the fat envelope through the transom above the door.”

   At the time in question, Essex recalled, “Carleton Young played Ellery….” We know that Young took over that role in January 1942, when the series returned to the air after a 15-month hiatus, and kept it until August or September 1943 when he was replaced by Sydney Smith. Essex occasionally directed an EQ episode, and in his memoir described a segment where the murder “was committed in a radio studio that was supposedly rehearsing a crime program.”

   Essex recalled that the guest armchair detective that evening was radio comedian Fred Allen, and that he failed to solve the mystery. What’s wrong with this picture? Simply that The Sound of Detection, my book on the Queen series, lists no episode during Young’s tenure where Ellery solved a crime in a radio studio and no episode at any time where Fred Allen was the armchair sleuth!

   Either Essex misremembered radically or there’s still some information on the Ellery of the airwaves that hasn’t been unearthed. I hope to live long enough to find out which.

   Anyone in the market for another EQ mystery? As most mysteryphiles know, roughly between 1960 and 1966 Manny Lee was suffering from some sort of writer’s block and unable to collaborate with Fred Dannay as he’d been doing so successfully since 1929.

   Ellery Queen novels and shorter adventures continued to appear during those years, with other authors expanding Fred’s lengthy synopses as Manny had always done in the past. We know who took over Manny’s function on the novels of that period but not on the short stories and not on the single Queen novelet from those years.

   â€œThe Death of Don Juan” (Argosy, May 1962; collected in Queens Full, 1965) is set in Wrightsville and deals with the attempt of the town’s amateur theatrical company to stage a creaky old turn-of-the-century melodrama.

   Could this be a clue to the identity of Fred’s collaborator on the tale? In his graduate student days Anthony Boucher had worked in the Little Theater movement, and on his first date with the woman he later married the couple went to a creaky old-time melodrama.

   This is hardly conclusive evidence but, if I may borrow a Poirotism, it gives one furiously to think. Between 1945 and 1948 Boucher had taken over Fred’s function of providing plots for Manny to transform into finished scripts for the EQ radio series. Might he also have performed Manny’s function a dozen or more years later?

   The first publisher of the hardcover Ellery Queen novels and anthologies was the Frederick A. Stokes company, with whom Fred and Manny stayed from their debut in 1929 until 1941. A few months before Pearl Harbor they moved to Little, Brown and stayed there through 1955.

   After a few years with Simon & Schuster (1956-1958) they moved to Random House and the aegis of legendary editor Lee Wright (1902-1986), who among other coups had purchased Anthony Boucher’s first detective novel and the first “Black” suspense novels by Cornell Woolrich.

   What was behind their earlier moves from one publisher to another remains unknown, but when I interviewed Wright more than thirty years ago she explained why Queen left Random House. The year was 1965, a time when Manny was suffering from writer’s block and Fred called most of the shots for the two of them.

   He left Random, Wright told me, ”literally because Bennett Cerf didn’t invite him to lunch. His feelings were hurt….I said: ‘Fred, Bennett isn’t your editor. I am. You’re sort of insulting me. My attention isn’t enough for you, it has to be the head of the house, is what you’re saying.’”

   Fred tended to be hypersensitive to any hint that mystery writers were second-class literary citizens, while Manny over the years had come to hate the genre and his own role in it, to the point that he described himself to one of his daughters as a “literary prostitute.”

   That he and Fred could have disagreed about this and everything else and still have collaborated successfully for so long is nothing short of a miracle.

   When I was ten years old, for no particular reason I began squirreling away the weekly issues of TV Guide as my parents threw them on the trash pile with the week’s newspapers. The result is that today my bookshelves are weighed down by a week-by-week history of television from the early Fifties till the end of 2000, a goldmine of information unavailable elsewhere.

   One such nugget is buried in the listings for Thursday, June 14, 1956. One of the top Thursday night programs broadcast that season was the 60-minute live dramatic anthology series Climax!

   That particular evening’s offering was “To Scream at Midnight,” in which a wealthy young woman breaks down and is placed in a sanitarium after being thrown over by her lover. Her psychiatrist becomes suspicious when the man reappears and claims he wants to marry her.

   Heading the cast were Diana Lynn (Hilde Fraser), Dewey Martin (Emmett Shore), Karen Sharpe (Peggy Walsh), and Richard Jaeckel (Hordan). John Frankenheimer directed from a teleplay by John McGreevey which, according to TV Guide, was based on something by Highsmith.

   But what? I can recall no novel or story by her from 1956 or earlier (or later either) that remotely resembles this plot summary, but I am no authority on Highsmith. Joan Schenkar, author of the Edgar-nominated The Talented Miss Highsmith (2009), has read every word her subject ever wrote, including hundreds of thousands of words in her diaries.

   When I sent her a photocopy of the relevant TV Guide page, she too couldn’t connect the description with any Highsmith novel or story.

   That makes three mysteries about mysteries in one column, all of them probably unsolvable. If any readers have suggestions I’d love to see them.

   Breaking News! My chance encounter last Thanksgiving with that website devoted to William Ard has borne fruit. Ramble House, a small publisher with which every reader of this column should be acquainted, has arranged with Ard’s daughter to reprint a number of her father’s novels of the Fifties, probably in the two-to-a-volume format pioneered by Ace Books back when Ard was turning out four or more paperback originals a year. More details when I have them.

MARRIED?   Jans Productions, 1926. Owen Moore, Constance Bennett, Evangeline Russell, Julia Hurley, Nick Thompson. Director: George Terwilliger. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   The complicated plot of this romantic action film brings together Eastern socialite Marcia Livingston (Constance Bennett) and Dennis Shawn (Owen Moore), the rugged foreman of her lumber holdings, in a “temporary” marriage arranged by elderly, aristocratic Mme du Pont (Julia Hurley), owner of an adjoining property.

   The marriage is intended to unite the two holdings and thwart the machinations of an unscrupulous corporation intent on gaining control of both properties. The unlikely couple turns out to be a good match but only after some hairbreadth escapes from situations that any fan of silent chapter plays will appreciate. The most innovative is a reversal of the heroine and an electric saw routine, here threatening the hero with death by buzzsaw.

   A wildly improbable adventure film that was wildly entertaining.

● JOE GORES – Dead Skip. Random House, hardcover, 1972. Reprint paperbacks include: Ballantine, 1974; Mysterious Press, 1992.

   While holding down a variety of jobs, one of them a stint as a San Francisco private investigator, Joe Gores published numerous (and generally hard-boiled) short stories in the 1950s and 1960s. One of these, “Sweet Vengeance” (Manhunt, July 1964) became the basis for his first novel, the violent suspense thriller A Time of Predators (1969).

   Dead Skip is the first of three novels in the DKA File series (which also includes a dozen or so short stories) — a series Ellery Queen called “authentic as a fist in your face.”

   DKA stands for Daniel Kearny Associates, a San Francisco investigative firm modeled on the real agency for which Gores once worked. (It was Anthony Boucher who first suggested Gores utilize his PI background as the basis for a fictional series.)

   DKA operates out of an old Victorian that used to be a specialty whorehouse, and specializes in the repossessing of cars whose owners have defaulted on loans from banks and automobile dealers.

   Kearny, the boss, is tough, uncompromising, but fair; his operatives, each of whom plays an important role in some if not all of the novels and stories, include Larry Ballard (the nominal lead protagonist), Bart Heslip, Patrick Michael O’Bannon, Giselle Marc, and office manager Kathy Onoda.

   Dead Skip begins quietly enough, with Bart Heslip (who happens to be black) repossessing a car in San Francisco’s Richmond district and returning it to the DKA offices, where he files his report. But when he leaves he is struck down by an unknown assailant — and the following morning the other members of DKA are confronted with the news that Bart is in a coma in a hospital intensive-care unit, the apparent victim of an accident in a repo’d Jaguar.

   Bart’s girlfriend, Corinne Jones, refuses to believe in the “accident” and convinces Ballard that Bart was the victim of violence. In spite of Kearny, who seems more concerned about the cost of the wrecked Jag than about Bart’s welfare (thus causing tension in the ranks), Ballard embarks on a search for Bart’s assailant and an explanation for the attack.

   Starting with the files on Bart’s recent repo jobs, he follows a twisting trail that takes him all over San Francisco and to the East Bay; involves him with a number of unusual characters, one of them a rock musician with a group calling itself Assault and Battery; and ends in a macabre confrontation that endangers not only Ballard’s life but that of Giselle Marc, in a house high above the former haven of the flower children, the Haight-Ashbury.

   The motivation for the attack on Bart is hardly new to crime fiction, and some of the villain’s other actions are likewise questionably motivated, but these minor flaws shouldn’t spoil anyone’s enjoyment of what is otherwise an excellent private-eye procedural. It is, in fact, strong stuff — realistic, powerful, “a traditional American crime novel, out of Black Mask, Hammett and Chandler” (New York Times).

   Even better are the other two novels in the series — Final Notice (1973) and Gone, No Forwarding (1978).

● JOE GORES – Hammett. Putnam’s, hardcover, 1975. Reprint paperbacks include: Ballantine, 1976; Perennial Library, 1982.

   Gores is a lifelong aficionado and student of the works of Dashiell Hammett, and Hammett’s influence is clearly evident in Gores’s own fiction. Hammett is his personal monument to the man he believes was the greatest of all crime writers — part thriller, part fictionalized history, part biography set in the San Francisco of 1928, “a corrupt city, owned by its politicians, its cops, its district attorney. A city where anything is for sale.”

   When an old friend from his Pinkerton days, Vic Atkinson, is murdered after Hammett refuses to help him, the former op-turned-Black Mask writer once again finds himself in the role of detective and man hunter.

   But as the dust-jacket blurb says, “During his search through the teeming alleys of Chinatown, through the cathouses and speakeasies and gambling hells of the city, Hammett discovers that the years of writing have dulled his hunter’s instincts, have made him fear death — and that failure to resharpen his long-unused skills as a private detective could end… his life.”

   The blurb goes on to say, “[Gores’] dialogue crackles and sparks with the wry, tough humor of the twenties. His characters are thinly disguised portraits of the men and women who shook and shaped this most fascinating of American cities. His plot, drawn from actual events in San Francisco’s corrupt political past, casts harsh light on a stark and bloody era.”

All of which is true enough, at least up to a point. Hammett is considered by some to be Gores’ best book, and in many ways it is. But it also has its share of flaws, among them some overly melodramatic scenes and a disinclination on Gores’ part to even mention Hammett’s left-wing politics.

   All things considered, it is certainly a good novel — one that should be read by anyone interested in Hammett, San Francisco circa 1928, and/or fast-action mysteries of the Black Mask school — but it is not the great novel it has occasionally been called.

   The 1982 film version produced by Francis Ford Coppola, on the other hand, is pure claptrap. Frederick Forrest is fine as Hammett, and the script by Ross Thomas is faithful to the novel, but the direction (Wim Wenders) is so arty and stylized that all the grittiness and power is lost. Some of the scenes, in fact, are so bad they’re almost painful to watch.

   Gores’ other non-series novels, A Time of Predators (which received an Edgar for Best First Novel of 1969) and Interface (1974), are also excellent.

   The latter is one of the toughest, most brutal novels published since the days of Black Mask — so hard boiled that some readers, women especially, find it upsetting. But its power is undeniable; and its surprise ending is both plausible and certain to come as a shock to most readers.

         ———
   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.

JOE GORES, R.I.P.   Posted earlier today on Yahoo’s Rara-Avis group was an announcement by publisher Vince Emery of Joe Gores’ death. Quoting briefly:

    “Sad news: Joe Gores, one of my favorite authors — and favorite people — passed away Monday, in a hospital in Marin County.

    “Joe was a three-time Edgar Award winner, past president of the Mystery Writers of America, and author of my favorite hard-boiled mystery series set in San Francisco, the Daniel Kearny & Associates series, which was based on Joe’s own experiences as a detective and repo man. He was working on a new DKA novel when he died.”

    Mr. Gores’ most recent novel was, of course, Spade & Archer (Knopf, 2009), a prequel to The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. Quite coincidentally (this is Steve talking) I am halfway through it now, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.