DENISE HAMILTON – The Last Embrace. Scribner, hardcover/trade paperback, June 2008.

   Lily Kessler worked undercover for the OSS during WWII, along with her lover, Joseph Croggan, who was killed in a freak accident after the war.

   When during a visit to Joseph’s mother, Mrs. Croggan receives a wire that her daughter, a young actress working in Hollywood, has disappeared, Lily reluctantly agrees to try to find out what has happened to her, and finds herself returning to the city where she grew up and to which she had never intended to return.

   Lily moves into the room that Kitty had rented in a boarding house for girls seeking, like her, to break into the movie industry, Then, after the discovery of Kitty’s body in a ravine, Lily begins her own investigation when it seems the police aren’t making much headway in theirs.

   The Los Angeles that Kitty knew, and that Lily rediscovers, is a competitive jungle, with temptations for the Unwary that, in addition to the traditional producer’s couch, include gangsters and other pitfalls for the vulnerable young women who flock to the area. One of Kitty’s friends, and a possible suspect for her death, is Max Vranizan, one of the more interesting characters, who works with Willis O’Brien on special effects, but whose creative talent has a dark side.

   Lily seems to find a soulmate in an LA homicide detective, but his partner seems untrustworthy, a quality that soon makes Lily wary of her friend, Pico, in a world in which she finds herself increasingly alone, as well as the target of violence that puts her life in jeopardy.

   This is a Hollywood noir, with a definite feminine take on its conventions, and Lily is another of those inquisitive female heroines who get themselves into situations where caution seems to be in very short supply.

   There’s a fair amount of supplementary material that convinces me that Hamilton did her homework and that she has a genuine affection for post-war Hollywood, with a feel for the geography that seems genuine.

   I wish I had liked the novel more, but in spite of the threatening situations in which Lily finds herself, there was too much of a romantic haze to make me feel that she was ever in any real danger. The threats were less real than Lily’s need to recover from her past and move on with her life, which she finally does, in true romance novel fashion.

JARKKO SIPILÄ – Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall. Ice Cold Crime, trade paperback, 2009. Originally published in Finland by Gummerus as Seinää Vasten. Translated by Peter Ylitalo Leppa.

   The eighth in the police procedural series centered around Kari Takamäki (a male, not female, Kari), the fictional chief of the Helsinki homicide squad (which also handles other serious crime), this is the first in the series to be published in the United States.

   The main character in this outing is Suhonen/Sukkanen, an undercover cop who virtually lives his job. We learn a bit more about the criminals’ personal lives than we do those of the cops. The various cops and crooks quickly become distinct, individual characters, though the names can be a little difficult to keep straight.

   The members of the Skulls gang are truly frightening; the hapless, small-time loser who gets in way over his head eventually draws our sympathy, but that’s cold, cold comfort.

   This is a whydunit, not a whodunit, with a fast pace that makes up for the rather inelegant translation. It’s worth seeking out for fans of Scandinavian crime fiction or those who like a fairly strict procedural flavor to their fiction.

   This book might be hard to find, but you can try Amazon.com and icecoldcrime.com. I purchased it at a Swedish Institute event, had it inscribed, read it, and now have no idea where I’ve put it. That’s my life these days.

   Commentary on books I’ve covered in the New York Times Book Review.   [Reprinted from The Armchair Detective, Vol. 1, No. 4, July 1968.]

    Previously on this blog:
Part 1 — Charlotte Armstrong through Jonathan Burke.
Part 2 — Victor Canning through Manning Coles.
Part 3 — Stephen Coulter through Thomas B. Dewey.
Part 4 — Charles Drummond through William Garner.
Part 5 — Richard H. Garvin through E. Richard Johnson.

HENRY KANE – Laughter in the Alehouse. Macmillan, hardcover, 1968. Paperback reprint: Penguin, 1978. McGregor, retired policeman, wealthy, a gourmet, erudite, sometimes (when so inclined) private detective, is a fascinating addition to mystery lore, and this his third case, involving a left over Nazi and a beautiful Israeli agent, is a solid, tightly plotted affair.

CARLTON KEITH – A Taste of Sangria. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1968. Paperback reprint: Curtis, n.d. Handwriting expert Jeff Green plays private investigator and comes up with some solid detection in this story of a disappearing (with $200,000) accountant.

PETER KINSLEY – Pimpernel 60. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1968; E. P. Dutton, US, hardcover, 1968. No paperback edition. A good example of what careful plotting and imaginative characterization can do for the novel of intrigue. This one follows a Jesuit priest in an attempt to bring a Russian defector out of Albania.

EMMA LATHEN – A Stitch in Time. Macmillan, hardcover, 1968. Paperback reprints include: Pyramid X-2018, 1969; Pocket, 1975. Pseudonymous Miss Lathen has yet to be unmasked, but she is reportedly two women writers. At any rate her (their) talents are indisputable, and this seventh of Wall Street banker John Putnam Thatcher’s cases is a nice puzzle in an interesting setting, told in witty, beautifully controlled prose.

Editorial Comments: Henry Kane was, of course, far better known as the author of several dozen private eye Peter Chambers mysteries. This is the last of three McGregor books. After 1968 Kane and Peter Chambers moved to Lancer Books, where he appeared in a series of novels that became more and more sexually explicit (that is to say, X-rated).

   Carlton Keith wrote six mysteries, five with series character Jeff Green, of which Sangria is the last. I’ve always meant to read one of them, but so far, I still haven’t.

   Pimpernel 60 is the only novel by Peter Kinsley that has appeared in the US. The other two, both published by Robert Hale, came out in the 1980s.

   It seems strange today that an author could hide her real identities for as long as Emma Lathen did, apparently for as many as seven books. With all of the tools of the Internet available today, I think fans would have uncovered the truth in next to no time. For the record, Emma Lathen was the writing combo of Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart. (You can probably put the pieces together.) They also wrote several mysteries as R. B. Dominic, a fact which as I recall, ace mystery reviewer Jon L. Breen brought to light.

NICHOLAS BLAKE – Malice in Wonderland.

Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1940. Harper & Brothers, US, hc, 1940, as The Summer Camp Mystery. Paperback reprints include: Penguin #592, 1946; Pyramid R-1008, 1964 (later 1971, shown) as Malice with Murder; and Carroll & Graf, 1987, as Murder with Malice.

   Recently published by Carroll & Graf, a publisher which is doing some of the most interesting reprints lately, is Nicholas Blake’s Murder with Malice. This is yet another title for the book which began life in 1940 as Malice in Wonderland (easily its best title) and was reprinted in the United States the same year as The Summer Camp Mystery.

   Oh well, under any title, this is one of the best examples of the late Golden Age of classic puzzles that you’ll find in paperback. Nigel Strangeways is called to investigate strange doings at a holiday camp named Wonderland, where a series of practical jokes — e.g., tennis balls dipped in treacle — by someone who calls himself “The Mad Hatter” have culminated in murder.

   The humor Is sophisticated and the puzzle very difficult to solve. The setting is believable but far enough removed from our usual lives to make perfect escape reading.

Editorial Comment: I wonder if this detective novel holds the record for being published under the most titles. It’s certainly in the running!

DENNIS WHEATLEY – The Devil Rides Out. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1935. Bantam, US, pb, 1967. Many other reprint editions.

Filmed as The Devil’s Bride. Hammer Films, 1968. Released as The Devil Rides Out in the UK. Christopher Lee, Charles Gray, Nike Arrighi, Leon Greene, Patrick Mower, Richard Eddington. Screenplay: Richard Matheson. Directed by Terence Fisher.

   With sales topping sixty million copies (that’s sales, not in print) Dennis Wheatley was one of the best selling writers of the 20th Century. His long list of books vary from mystery, to thriller, to spy novels, to historical adventure, to the occult, to lost worlds, and science fiction.

   His long running series include tales of secret agent Gregory Sallust; Napoleonic era secret agent Roger Brook; Monte Cristo-like Julian Day; and the tales of Duc de Richleau and his team of modern musketeers: American Rex Van Ryn, Englishman Richard Easton and his wife Mary, and Simon Aron, a young wealthy Jewish adventurer.

   The Devil Rides Out is a tale of de Richleau and his friends, and the first of Wheatley’s occult thrillers. It may also be his finest achievement in that genre. Simon Aron has fallen in with the mysterious cult leader known as Mocata, and de Richleau suspects something is wrong. When he confronts Simon, he discovers Mocata has the youth under his hypnotic spell and has drawn the young man into a demonic cult.

   De Richleau recognizes a dangerous enemy in Mocata and summons his friends Rex Van Ryn and Richard Easton to aide in rescuing Simon. Not surprisingly Rex also finds a young woman under Mocata’s rule and sets out to save her after he and de Richleau crash a Black Mass to perform a daring rescue of their friend.

   Now hiding Simon and the unwilling girl at Easton’s country home, they find themselves under siege by Mocata’s occult powers, climaxing in a night long battle of wills between de Richleau and Mocata, with our heroes within a protective pentagram and under attack by Death himself, mounted on a monstrous black stallion, who once summoned never leaves without a victim.

   When Richard and Mary’s daughter is kidnapped by Mocata as a sacrifice to open the very gateway to Hell it is time for a final battle between good and evil.

   I know a good many readers of this blog have little patience with the occult and the supernatural, but despite Wheatley’s sometimes awkward prose and mannerisms he had a real gift for both. (He himself didn’t believe in the supernatural but often wrote about its psychological dangers.)

   Several of his books in the field were classics, among them The Haunting of Toby Jugg, The Ka of Gifford Hillary (something of a tour de force since it is narrated by the hero from a state of suspended animation in his tomb), To the Devil a Daughter, and They Used Dark Forces, a Gregory Sallust WW II spy novel about Nazi attempts to use the occult as a weapon in WW II. Despite these books, he only wrote ten occult thrillers, a small portion of his output.

   Wheatley based Mocata on Alister Crowley, the self styled Satanic mage and Anti-Christ, who was also the basis for Somerset Maugham’s Oliver Haddo in The Magician, and James Bond’s arch enemy Ernst Stavro Blofield. Only a few years later during WW II Wheatley and Fleming would attempt to use Crowley’s occult contacts among the Nazi’s to infiltrate the party hierarchy while they both served in British intelligence.

   Crowley’s real life, mostly spent dodging the law and creditors, was a good deal less dramatic than that of his fictional counterparts. Still, he had a fairly good run as one of the great con men and frauds of the 20th Century, rubbing shoulders with the great and near great from poets like William Butler Yeats and fellow members of the prestigious Golden Dawn, to one of men who built the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos.

   The Devil Rides Out came to the big screen as Hammer Studios The Devil’s Bride with Christopher Lee ideally cast as de Richilieu and Charles Gray as Mocata. (Ironically Gray also played Blofield in the Bond film Diamonds Are Forever.)

   The Richard Matheson screenplay is faithful to the novel and the night long battle with Death mounted on a great black horse a memorable bit of cinematic horror. It’s a first class film, handsome to look at, and played to full effect by a fine cast.

   Despite his best selling status, Wheatley was likely best known in this country for the series of books he did in the 1930’s in the File series (File on Robert Prentice, File on Bolitho Blane), in which he provided the characters and crime and a complete set of clues, from lipstick-stained cigarettes to diagrams of the murder scene for the reader to solve.

   The books had a brief vogue, but ultimately it proved more fun to read about detectives than try to play one — not to mention the tendency to lose the enclosed clues.

   Despite his many flaws as a writer (he once said he never knew a best selling writer who knew the meaning of the word syntax) Wheatley knew how to spin a tale, and like his great literary hero Alexandre Dumas, his books are often highly readable and entertaining once you get into them. A number of his books were filmed, including Forbidden Territory, The Eunuch of Stamboul (as The Spy in White), To the Devil a Daughter, and Uncharted Seas (as The Lost Continent).

   Even absolute howlers like the stand alone Star of Ill Omen, where a British secret agent is kidnapped by Martians in a UFO and foils a Martian/Commie plot to destroy London (and believe me I’m making it sound saner than it reads), have a sort of goofy charm.

   His historical novels about Roger Brook, secret agent to William Pitt, probably received the most critical acclaim. Dark Secret of Josephine, in which Napoleon’s first wife reveals her ties to voodoo in her Hatian homeland, is likely the most successful blend of his chief interests; history, espionage, and the occult.

   But The Devil Rides Out is a first class thriller in the classic form. If you only read one Wheatley novel, this should be the one. The shootout at a Black Mass is worth the price of admission alone, and the siege within the pentagram guaranteed to raise the hackles of the most jaded horror fan. It’s a grand example of the occult thriller at its best.

THE BODY SNATCHER. RKO, 1945. Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Daniell, Edith Atwater, Russell Wade, Rita Corday. Based on the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Screenplay: Philip MacDonald & Val Lewton (as Carlos Keith). Director: Robert Wise.

   Compared to the Fredric March version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, reviewed not so long ago here, RKO treated Stevenson rather more faithfully in The Body Snatcher (1945), one of their string of quality “B”s produced by the redoubtable Val Lewton.

   This was directed by Robert Wise in his pre-bomb period, and allegedly written by Philip MacDonald, though he said someplace that Lewton re-wrote the whole thing under the name Carlos Keith.

   Well, it’s a fine job regardless of whodunit; not a really scary pitchur as much as a brooding one, with characters a bit more complex than you usually find in a monster movie.

   Karloff is at his nastiest in the title role, killing blind women and puppies with scarcely a qualm, yet he’s kind to his horse and positively dotes on the little crippled girl at the center of the story.

   Opposite him is the surgeon forced into using the services of a resurrection man to help the little girl walk again, played by Henry Daniell, as cold and constipated as ever. Daniell was one of those actors (like Laurence Harvey. or Dan Duryea) who never made any claim on audience sympathy, and maybe that’s why I like him so much.

   He does nothing very sinister here, yet his palpable heartlessness puts him instantly in the same camp as the Mad Scientists who typically run amok in this sort of thing.

   And when the running comes, it is indeed amok. Body Snatcher is one of those rare horror films with sense enough to save the scariest part for the climax, and ends with a burst of creepy action followed by a grim coda that leaves us feeling we’ve just seen some sobering lesson — even if we can’t say quite what it was.

SAN ANTONIO ROSE. Universal, 1941. Robert Paige, Eve Arden, Jane Frazee, Lon Chaney, Jr., Shemp Howard, Luis Alberni, Richard Lane, and The Merry Macs (Mary Lou Cook, Joe McMichael, Ted McMichael, Judd McMichael). Director: Charles Lamont. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   Eve Arden and Jane Frazee are out-of-work performers who arrive at a supper club on the night it’s forced to close by a rival who hopes to revive his own dying club with his competition shut down.

   With no place to go (and no money), the two stay on in the abandoned club, and when a band headed by Robert Paige (less than memorable as the somnambulistic non-dead male lead of Son of Dracula) shows up to fulfill an engagement, the girls propose their version of “Let’s put on a show” by reopening the club.

   Chaney and Howard, dim-bulb minions of the rival club owner, are sent in to sabotage the opening. However, their attempts at sabotage are turned into unintentional parts of the floor show by the enterprising new owners and the boys are soon sent flying through a window.

   A bright 63 minute effort with the audience particularly enjoying the smooth singing of the once popular Merry Macs (with surviving relatives in the audience). Chaney and Howard make a fine comedy team and this was a tuneful and entertaining complement to the more ambitious (and no more entertaining) Crosby vehicle seen (and reviewed) just before.

ROBERT KYLE – Blackmail, Inc.

Dell First Edition A155; 1st printing, February 1958. Cover art: Victor Kalin. Second printing: Dell 0577, March 1967.

   If it matters, and inquiring minds always need to know, Robert Kyle was in reality Robert Terrall, and the latter wrote nine books as Kyle, all paperback originals from Dell. Of the nine, five chronicled the adventures of New York City private eye Ben Gates, of which this was the first. The fifth and final one, Ben Gates Is Hot, appeared in 1964.

   Terrall wrote only a bare handful of books under his own name; starting in 1965, he essentially took over as the primary writer of Brett Halliday’s Mike Shayne books, beginning, with Nice Fillies Finish Last. (He’d also written one of the hardcover Shayne’s, Murder In Haste, back in 1961.)

   But Fillies was the first of the Mike Shayne books to be published as a paperback original, again by Dell, and except for reprints like Blackmail, Inc., Ben Gates was dropped, never to be heard from again.

   But as I say, this is the first Ben Gates book, and with it, there’s quite a bit of back story that needs to be filled in for him along the way.

   It seems he’s just lost his license, he’s out of work and he can’t find a job. He’s about to take a security position on some oil field along the Persian Gulf when he decides to take a last-minute offer to work for the publisher of Authentic, “the biggest and the meanest of all the scandal magazines.” The man and the magazines are both leery of lawsuits, and Gates is just the man to give them a hand.

   Roland Van Nuys does not seem to be the kind of man anyone would care to work for, but then again, three grand for one month’s work is not poultry feed. And add the fact that scummy private eye Rupert Weil is same guy who (a) submitted the story Van Nuys is worried about, and who (b) was pretty much the one single guy responsible for getting Gates’s license lost.

   But when a glamorous movie star like Sally Spaine comes along, who thinks Van Nuys is going to be doing a story on her next, and offers Gates $4000 to work for her instead, he turns her down. To me, it doesn’t make sense, but you figure Gates knows what he’s doing. On the other hand, page 23, he says, “Someone was being conned around here, and it could be me.”

   Or, if I may, here’s a longer quote from page 31:

   The writing is sometimes phrased not as smoothly as I might have wished, but mixed in with it are some decent PI-style metaphors and similes. Gates is a dues-paying member of the hard-boiled school, telling his own story, and not much caring if anyone thinks he’s a knight in shining armor or not.

   If the plot becomes somewhat muddled, after a firecracker couple of opening chapters, it’s made up for, and then some, by some closing theatrics that make the long and rather ordinary middle section worth the slog it takes to get through it.

   There are also some subtle and later not-so-subtle homophobic nuances scattered throughout the book; I was going to say they were incidental and not relevant to the solution to the mystery — Rupert Weil is the one who’s murdered, if I didn’t mention it, and I don’t think I did, and Gates is the number one suspect — but on second thought, for what it’s worth, maybe Kyle (Terrall) did mean them be more than incidental.

   For the reprint edition, there’s also a very nice painting of a nearly nude seductress on the front cover, and I’m really really sorry that at the moment, I don’t have a scan of it to show you. It’s by McDermott (no first name given) and she does have her shoes on.

[UPDATE] 11-17-09. I don’t remember details of plots. Never have and I probably never will. I began writing reviews to amuse myself and to help me remember what I read. But when I started writing reviews for other venues, I couldn’t be as specific as to the finer details as I was before.

   Therefore, all I can tell you about the paragraph one before the last is exactly what’s there, nothing more and nothing less.

   As for the last paragraph, I have a copy of the second printing, and I know what box it’s in, but where the box is, I can narrow it down to a three mile radius. I’m as tantalized by what the cover might display as you are, and maybe even more so. (Anyone who can help me out on this, please do!)

   And as for Robert Terrall himself, I reviewed Sand Dollars, one of the mystery thrillers he wrote under his own name, several months ago here on this blog. I also added some additional bibliographic information about him, along with a few additional covers, which are always nice to have when I can find them.

E. X. FERRARS – Frog in the Throat. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1980. US paperback edition: Bantam, 1981. British edition: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1980.

   Virginia Freer, heroine of Frog in the Throat, is staying with craftsmen friends Helen and Andrew Boscott (he’s a furniture restorer, she’s a weaver and tapestry worker) for a much-needed holiday.

On a quiet afternoon, in walks the big mistake of Virginia’s life — Felix Freer, her estranged husband. Felix is one of those charming people who have few scruples and an overwhelming capacity for lying — even when he thinks he’s telling the truth. He is now lying about his reasons for dropping in at the Boscott house, and Virginia wonders why.

   The events of the evening only complicate matters. At a neighbor’s cocktail party, novelist Carleen Fyffe (half of a famous sister team of historical-romance writers) announces her engagement to poet Basil Deering (whom Felix has expressed an interest in meeting).

   Shortly after the Freers and Boscotts return home, Olivia Fyffe arrives, saying she has found her sister on the floor of their den, murdered.

   When they all go to the Fyffe cottage, however, there is no body. Almost everyone thinks Olivia is being dramatic for some reason of her own, or perhaps hysterical. It takes a second body and the discovery of her sister’s corpse to prove otherwise, and a certain amount of detection on Virginia’s part to determine Felix’s connection with the murders.

   The pace of this novel is slow, with good characterization of all participants except the heroine. The plot unfolds in the best tradition of the British country-house mystery, with plenty of suspicion and all ends tied up nicely at the conclusion.

   One wishes, however, that Virginia Freer were as well characterized as her enigmatic and complex husband and hosts. It is a little hard to care what happens to any of them when the viewpoint character is so lacking in substance.

   Ferrars has been writing mysteries for over forty years; many of her tales are set in such locales as Greece, Africa, Mexico, and Australia, as well as in England. Other notable titles include Give the Corpse a Bad Name (1940), Hunt the Tortoise (1950), The Busy Body (1962), The Seven Sleepers (1970), The Cup and the Lip (1976), and Crime and the Crystal (1985).

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   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.

E. X. FERRARS – Alive and Dead. New York: Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1975. Paperback reprint: Bantam, 1982. British edition: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1974. Hardcover reprint: Constable, UK, 1989 (shown). (Note that the author’s usual byline in the UK was Elizabeth Ferrars.)

   The novels of E. X. Ferrars (a pseudonym of Morna Brown, who also writes under the name of Elizabeth Ferrars) are best described as quiet and polite.

   The characters are usually normal middle-class British people — which is not to say they are dull; many are writers or artists or engaged in otherwise unusual professions; the women are independent and strong. But they are people to whom violence seldom happens; and when it does, they are shocked, but willingly take charge and get to the bottom of these unexpected happenings.

   Martha Crayle is a typical Ferrars heroine. Middle-aged and twice divorced, she has struggled to raise two sons while caring for an invalid aunt and running a rooming house. When the aunt dies and leaves her an unexpected legacy, she moves out all her boarders except the reserved and stem Mr. Syme (who has become her confidant and, when crime strikes, a sort of Watson) and takes up volunteer work for the National Guild for the Welfare of Unmarried Mothers.

   It is at their offices that she meets Amanda Hassall, a young pregnant woman who claims she has been deserted by her husband and impregnated by the man she is living with. Amanda does not wish to marry the baby’s father, nor does she want to put the child up for adoption as her parents have suggested. Martha takes the girl home, and a day later takes in another pregnant woman, Sandra Aspinall.

   As Mr. Syme has darkly hinted, Martha should not have given refuge to these total strangers. Before Amanda has spent two nights in the house, a murdered man turns up in a local hotel, and she is reported to have been on the scene.

   Amanda insists the victim is her estranged husband, but her parents — who appeared shortly before the body was discovered — claim the husband died in an airplane crash the year before. In addition to the parents, the boyfriends of both young women arrive, and by the time murder is done twice, Martha thoroughly regrets her involvement and wishes she had listened to Mr. Syme.

   The plot twists and turns (with plenty of surprises) all the way to the very end. Ferrars writes well and creates characters that are sure to enlist her readers’ sympathies. This novel is one of her best.

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   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.