DYLAN SCHAFFER – Misdemeanor Man. Bloomsbury, trade paperback original; first printing, June 2004.

   Public defender Gordon Seegerman sticks to defending misdemeanors, sings lead in a Barry Manilow tribute band, and worries about getting early-onset Alzheimer’s like his ex-cop dad.

   An indecent exposure case leads to something bigger, and things get busy and dangerous at the same time that the band is preparing for a gig that “MBM” (Mr. Barry Manilow) himself might attend.

   If this sounds gimmicky, it is. Most of Gordon’s wacky bandmates also work in his office, he lives with his father and grandfather in a wacky old house, and he can’t keep a girl friend because he’s haunted by the possibility of clinical wackiness.

   Countering all the wackiness, the trial procedure is quite realistic, according to my sources. (The author is a criminal-defense attorney.)

   Verdict: gimmicky but enjoyable.

      The Gordon Seegerman “Misdemeanor Man” series:

    1. Misdemeanor Man. 2004.
    2. I Right the Wrongs. 2005.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – Fire, Burn!   Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1957. UK edition: Hamish Hamilton, hc, 1957. Paperback reprints include: Bantam A1847, 1958; Bantam S3638, 2nd printing 1968. Carroll & Graf, 1987.

   Fire, Burn! was the first book by John Dickson Carr that I ever read. To be honest the combination of the atmospheric James Bama cover on the Bantam paperback edition, and the time travel aspect probably attracted me more than Carr’s name or his credentials as one of the greats of the Golden Age of Detection at the time. The plot sounded just enough like one of my favorite films (I’ll Never Forget You reviewed here on this blog by me) that I couldn’t resist.

   I’m grateful to both Bantam and Bama for that. Fire, Burn! opened the door to a lifetime of entertainment.

   The time and place is London in the years after the Second World War. That part is important because in those years London suffered some of the worst and most deadly fogs in modern history. The city was socked in for days, even weeks, by heavy yellow fogs that sent thousands to emergency rooms and no few number to their graves.

   It’s in one of those fogs that Superintendent John Cheviot of Scotland Yard grabs a taxi one bleak night and finds his life turned upside down as he finds himself emerging from the taxi into London of 1829 in the reign of George IV at the end of the Regency period.

   Cheviot, who is obsessed with history, especially of the early days of Scotland Yard, finds himself investigating a mystery, and attempting to use his modern skills while trying not to give himself away with his too ready knowledge of events that have yet to happen. In the meantime he finds himself romantically entangled with an attractive but trouble-prone young lady of somewhat screwball tendencies.

   I’ll grant that Fire, Burn! never really bothers to explain how or why Cheviot ends up in 1829 — other than wishful thinking — and the heroine may rub some readers the wrong way — though her type was common enough in the era the book is set in (Georgette Heyer’s clever heroines were probably rarer), but the mystery involves a typical Carr-ian bit of misdirection that takes advantage of a bit of history the reader may not know.

   Fire, Burn! is not the best of Carr’s historicals (that’s probably The Devil in Velvet), but it is an entertaining one, and for me, it holds pride of place as my introduction both to Carr and to historical mysteries in general.

   What Fire, Burn! has is an attractive hero, a clever mystery, and Carr’s painless immersion in the history and language of the period without a strain or an anachronism to mar the experience.

   And in all fairness, it isn’t as if time travel romances are ever particularly strong on exactly how the hero or heroine manages to make the transit of years. Dating back to George Du Maurier and Peter Ibbetson (1891) the time travel aspect seems most often to just happen. As late as Daphne Du Maurier’s House on the Strand the exact manner of how the hero gets back in time was still pretty questionable.

   Give Carr credit though. While you are reading Fire, Burn! you won’t think to ask the question of how Cheviot makes the transition, and if you think of it later, you can’t really blame Carr. He did his part. The willing suspension of disbelief is up to the reader.

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    It never seems to fail. I go away for two days, and it takes me two days to get myself pointed in the right direction again. Then this light cough that I’ve had for a couple of weeks sees its chance and attacks when I’m not looking, and turns itself into a full-fledged cold. Nothing more than a runny nose, itchy eyes, husky voice and that wonderful achy-all-over feeling. The usual over-the-counter stuff helps — it does exactly what it’s supposed to do — but so far it’s also letting me sleep 10 to 12 hours a day.

    So if you’ve emailed me recently and haven’t gotten a reply, that’s the reason. Right now I’m medicined up fairly well, so maybe I can get some things done tonight. Or maybe I’ll just go watch some DVDs or read a book or two. We’ll see.

    Among the incoming email messages that piled up while I was away included that contained a few more cover images to go with my James Pattinson post, along with a photo of the author, and a cover image that goes with a recent review of a book by James Anderson. These were supplied by British mystery specialist bookseller Jamie Sturgeon, who deserves a round of applause and has gotten one from me so far, but you can join in.

    If you’re interested in the do’s and don’ts of preserving pulp magazines as well as other paper collectibles, Walker Martin suggested that I give you the link to Laurie Powers’ Wild West Blog. He’s right. It’s an excellent piece, full of all kinds of good advice.

    And if you’re interested in traditional (or classic) mysteries, Les Blatt reminds me to tell you that his website is still running and he’d love to have you stop by. What he does, besides the usual postings is a weekly podcast for the books he reviews. Check him out at www.classicmysteries.net. The books he covers are well worth your while.

TOM ADAMS [Artist] – Agatha Christie: The Art of Her Crimes. The Paintings of Tom Adams, with a Commentary by Julian Symons. Everest House, hardcover, 1981.

    Paperback cover art reaches a new high with this deluxe hardcover edition of over ninety Tom Adams paintings, all done for various editions of Agatha Christie’s mysteries, both in this country and in Britain.

    Those expecting numerous repeated portrayals of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, two of Christie’s most well-known detective characters, will come away disappointed, however.

   Adams leans more to the symbolic and to surrealism in his work, and the commentary provided by both himself and by noted mystery critic Julian Symons reveals just how many clues he managed to work into the overall design of each of the covers here.

    Tastes in art being what they are, it is amusing to note that one of the paintings Adams considers one of his best, Symons slides over as nothing out of the ordinary.

    The subject matter of Christie’s works being what it is, it is not surprising that the overall effect is rather a dour one — lots of skulls, bloody instruments, and other paraphernalia of murder.

    Nevertheless, given the double-barreled insights into the works of perhaps the most famous mystery writer of all time, Agatha Christie’s many fans will find this more than a must for browsing.

DICK FRANCIS – Shattered (2000). Michael Joseph Ltd., UK, hardcover, 2000; Putnam, US, hc, 2000. Several reprint editions.

   I’ve had a hiatus in my reading of Dick Francis’s oeuvre, longer than the one he took after this book. (His next book, Under Orders, didn’t appear until 2006.)

   The narrator, Gerard Logan, has a small but select business blowing glass, small pieces that sell to tourists in his Broadway (that’s the Cotswold village, not the New York theatre — or should that be theatre-district) shop, and larger pieces that sell as high priced art.

   Logan is best friends with a jump jockey who dies in a racing accident but has asked someone to pass a video tape to Logan for safe keeping. The video tape, which goes missing, is the McGuffin sought by a group of crooks who assault Logan in trying to locate it. Logan has to find the tape and identify the thugs and in typical Francis-hero fashion does so by putting his own body on the line.

   I’ve enjoyed Francis over the years but this was one of the least enjoyable books. I like to like my heroes — a weakness, I know — but Logan came over to me as arrogant, and plot was straight from a join-the-dots puzzle.

   Read this if you’re a Francis completist, but if you haven’t read him, seek out his earlier books like Blood Sport or Enquiry. Of course I won’t be able to resist Under Orders and the following three (the third was published in September) written with his son.

   (Department of coincidences: In the final scene of the book Logan goes to the apartment of the policewoman girl-friend he has acquired during the course of the book. There he finds the place stocked with memorabilia from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.)

   I’m still trying to figure out why H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1898) works so well. Wells spends 30 pages building up to the obvious, radically shifts focus three times, and doesn’t ring in the nominal hero till it’s too late to care much about him.

   Yet somehow we do. The last few chapters of Kemp besieged in his house by the Invisible Man make for good action and genuine suspense, which is agreeably true of the book as a whole. I just can’t figure out why.

   I mean, there are all these words, paragraphs, pages and chapters where a mysterious stranger turns up hiding his face; there are uncanny noises, things move about, and all the while the astute critic ought to be saying, “Y’know the title of the book is like The Invisible Man … Hell-loool”

   That the reader doesn’t say any such thing — this reader didn’t, anyway — tells me Wells may have been a more gifted story-teller than I realized.

   And yup, he was. I’ve just finished reading The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and it seems H.G. really knew how to spin a yarn.

   From the initial ship-wreck to the resolution on an Island Hell, this is the kind of writing that deserves to be called Crackerjack: piratical captains, mad doctors, chases, fights, monsters… and an undercurrent of thoughtfulness that reads like Jonathan Swift writing for the Pulps.

   It’s nowhere near as scary as the movie they made from it back in the 30s, but it has stayed on my mind since I read it back in grade school, and I’m glad I revisited it.

         —

Editorial Comment: The spooky cover image for The Invisible Man came from a vintage paperback edition published by Pocket in 1957. The one for Dr. Moreau is a book club edition that contains both Wells’ book and Joseph Silva’s novelization of the American-International film that came out in 1977 (with Burt Lancaster, Michael York, Nigel Davenport, Barbara Carrera and Richard Basehart). Joseph Silva is often better known as Ron Goulart.

JOSEPH CONRAD – Victory: An Island Tale. Doubleday Page & Co., 1915. First Edition (shown immediately below). Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft.

    Victory was the first of Conrad’s great works and his first popular success. It is also in many ways a crime novel that might well have come from Dashiell Hammett or out of Black Mask magazine.

   We tend to think of Conrad in terms of serious literature and forget that he wrote adventure stories (Lord Jim, The Arrow of Gold, and Nostromo), spy novels (The Secret Agent) political novels (Under Western Eyes), science fiction (The Inheritors with Ford Madox Ford), historical fiction (Romance again with Ford), and even domestic drama (Chance).

    Victory , set in the islands of the Malay Archipelago is the story of Axel Heyst, a mysterious and solitary Swede (“…Heyst, the wanderer of the Archipelago, had a taste for silence …”) who sets the actions of a tragedy in motion when he saves a young English woman from her predatory employer, the German hotelier Schomberg.

   Heyst retreats to his home on remote Samburan with the girl, and Schomberg’s wrath, is brought to a head by the arrival of the mysterious Mr. Jones, his “secretary,” the violent Martin Ricardo, and Pedro the brutish animal like Portuguese half cast alligator hunter from Columbia.

   It is to these three that Schomberg entrusts his mission of revenge against Heyst and the woman with rumors of the riches the mysterious Heyst is alleged to have hidden on his remote island.

   It’s hard to read the novel today without visions of The Maltese Falcon and Gasper Gutman. Joel, Cairo, and Wilbur. There are hints of something unwholesome and perverse between Jones and Ricardo, and a suggestion of crimes unspoken. “Wickedness for it’s own reward.”

   Jones is virtually the model for the suave educated villains we have seen in a thousand books and films, but with something both decadent and perverse in his genteel shabbiness. Ricardo, his violent nature barely repressed, is another familiar figure.

   When Jones and his team arrive on Samburan the events of the tragedy, the plots of the criminals and the personal drama between Heyst and the woman plunge toward a violent bloodbath (“… there are more dead in this affair — more white people, I mean — than have been killed in many of the battles of the last Achin war.”).

   Victory isn’t a thriller by any means, or a crime novel. It is dense and character driven, and by no means a quick or simple read, but it does present a fascinating portrait of evil and in Heyst and the woman he loves almost noirish prototypes.

   And yet though the fate of Heyst and the woman are tragic, the fact that they find love and finally come together makes the novels title true rather than ironic.

   Ultimately they triumph over both the villains and themselves. Their human triumph over the forces of crime and brutality is a victory.

   The 1940 John Cromwell film of Victory is not available on VHS or DVD, but should be. Frederic March and Betty Field play Heyst and the woman, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Jerome Cowan, and Sig Ruman Jones, Ricardo, and Schomberg. Hardwicke and Cowan are especially chilling. It was also filmed in 1919 and 1930 (as Dangerous Passage).

ALFRED EICHLER – Alfred Eichler. Death of an Ad Man. Abelard-Schuman, hardcover, 1954; paperback reprint: Berkley #105, 1955. British edition: Hammond, hc, 1956, as A Hearse for the Boss.

   It is a rather frantic time at the Malcolm and Reynolds Advertising Agency. Reynolds has retired, and Malcolm has just had what appears to be a heart attack.

   While various officials of the agency are struggling for power in an attempt to replace Malcolm as the agency’s head, someone makes sure that Malcolm won’t be around to protest. A pair of scissors is shoved into his chest while he is in the hospital.

   Kindergarten was never like this advertising agency. Children do have some sense, but precious few employees of this agency have any. The only sensible person is Martin Ames — who appears in several of Eichler’s novels — head of the radio department, which also includes television.

   Even he is erratic. He is at one point firmly convinced that an agency employee is Malcolm’s murderer and a few moments later is brooding because he didn’t stop the murderer from killing the employee.

   Ames has inherited the agency from Malcolm, and he had an opportunity to commit both murders. For this reason, and in a hope to keep the agency from disintegrating, Ames investigates. He spots the killer by discovering a new motive for murder, or what would have been a new motive if it had had anything to do with the murder.

   He also says things like “Holy hatpin!” which I guess is typical advertising talk. And he is one of the few people who have visited a psychiatrist with a “crowded anteroom.” Does this mean a ten-minute hour?

   The novel isn’t well written and the plot isn’t that great, but the insights into advertising agencies may appeal to some.

Bio-Bibliographic data: According to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, Alfred Eichler, 1908-1995, was a advertising copywriter based (it is to be presumed) in New York City, an easy inference, since that’s where he was born.

    He was the author of nine detective novels, many of which seem to reflect the author’s own occupation in the advertising and radio business, especially the first two, Murder in the Radio Department and Death at the Mike.

    Each of these also have as their leading characters Martin Ames and Inspector Carl Knickman, the latter of whom Bill didn’t happen to mention as being the detective of record in Death of an Ad Man, as well as several other cases told to us by Eichler. See below:

EICHLER, ALFRED. 1908-1995.

      Murder in the Radio Department (n.) Gold Label 1943 [Insp. Carl Knickman; Martin Ames]
      Death at the Mike (n.) Lantern Press 1946 [Insp. Carl Knickman; Martin Ames]
      Election by Murder (n.) Lantern Press 1946 [Martin Ames]

      Death of an Ad Man (n.) Abelard-Schuman 1954 [Insp. Carl Knickman; Martin Ames]
      Death of an Artist (n.) Arcadia 1955 [Insp. Carl Knickman; Martin Ames]
      Moment for Murder (n.) Arcadia 1956 [Insp. Carl Knickman]
      Bury in Haste (n.) Arcadia 1957 [Insp. Carl Knickman]
      Pipeline to Death (n.) Hammond 1962 [Martin Ames]

      Murder Off Stage (n.) Hammond 1963.

   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.

RICHARD H. GARVIN & EDMUND G. ADDEO – The FORTEC Conspiracy. Sherbourne, US, hardcover, 1968. Paperback reprint: Signet T3832, 1969. A combination of a science-fictional theme, UFO’s, with the man on a mission suspense story — and it builds toward a shocking and memorable finale.

ROSEMARY GATENBY – Aim to Kill. Morrow, US, hardcover, 1968; Robert Hale, UK, hc, 1969. Paperback reprint: Pyramid X-2094, 1969. Weakened by too leisurely an approach (largely flashback), this second novel describes a small town terrorized by a seemingly random sniper.

FRANK GRUBER – The Gold Gap. Dutton, US, hardcover, 1968; Robert Hale, UK, hc, 1968. Paperback reprint: Pyramid N2558, 1971. Commander Sergeant returns a hero from Viet Nam, and accepts a millionaire’s assignment to investigate his fiance — a job which turns out to have international implications. This is a smooth job, though not so deviously plotted as some.

E. RICHARD JOHNSON – Silver Street. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1968. British title: The Silver Street Killer. Hale, hc, 1969. Paperback reprints: Dell, 1969; IPL, 1988. This is a powerful first novel by an inmate of the Minnesota State Prison, dealing with the seamier side of a large city slum and harshly carved out in the vernacular of its inhabitants. [Series character: Tony Lonto.]

THE DARK HORSE. First National, 1932. Warren William, Bette Davis, Guy Kibbee. Vivienne Osborne, Frank McHugh, Sam Hardy, Berton Churchill, Harry Holman, Charles Sellon, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Robert Warwick, Louise Beavers, Wilfred Lucas Photography by Sol Polito; director: Alfred E. Green. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   Guy Kibbee, the “dark horse” gubernatorial candidate of this political satire, is described by Warren William, his campaign manager, as “so dumb that every time he opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.”

   Bette Davis is William’s secretary (and long-time girlfriend), who plays a nondescript role with her usual intelligence, but it’s Vivienne Osborne, as William’s predatory ex-wife, who steals the female acting honors as she lures Kibbee into a tryst, where in a game of strip poker he’s getting down to essentials as the police and reporters close in on their hideaway, with William flying in at the last minute in an attempt to get to the love nest ahead of them.

   Kibbee is a complete buffoon, completely innocent of anything that passes for intelligence, but he has a weak spot, an eye for a shady lady, and this pre-code film makes no bones about the unseemly nature of his relationship with Osborne.

   William is a human weasel, willing to do anything to promote his candidate, with Davis his conscience who rather belatedly manages to salvage William from the eager hands of the law. Kibbee is elected with William and Davis finally united and leaving the state to its new governor and a corrupt crew of supporters.

   I won’t be so crass as to suggest that this was selected as a less-than-discreet commentary on this year’s political slug-fest [2004], but astute observers will note some similarities with the contemporary scene. Sharp dialogue and frank treatment of the racy relationship of Kibbee and Osborne mark this as a pre-code script, and its quick footed pacing (and on the mark performances) made it a late-night favorite of the convention.