MARK GATISS – The Vesuvius Club: A Bit of Fluff. Simon & Schuster, UK, hardcover, November 2004; Scribner’s; US, trade pb, October 2005.

   So speaks Lucifer Box (“I have a horror of artichokes.”), Edwardian portraitist, and His Majesty’s most daring — and decadent — secret agent, spy, and when the need arises, assassin, the hero of Mark Gatiss’s novel of mystery, conspiracy, dirty doings, and — of course a threat to the future of the Western world and particularly the waning sun of the British Empire post Victoria.

   Box, who lives at Number 9 Downing Street (because somebody has to), has been assigned to find the missing agent Jocelyn Utterson Poop aided by his hench-woman and nude model Delilah, who has just helped him dispose of his late luncheon guest Everard Supple, a treasonous diplomat:

   The decidedly bi-sexual Box is dispatched by his chief (Joshua Reynolds, a dwarf who gives out his assignments from a bathroom, “Three foot something in his stocking feet and ever so jolly.”) to a case involving the beautiful Miss Bella Pok, his boy assistant handsome Charlie Jackson, and the grizzled vulcanologist Emmanuel Quibble, as well as poisoned centipedes, foggy London chases, kidnapped scientists, and a plot to set off Mount Vesuvius by a Neapolitan secret criminal society.

   It’s a wild chase, equal parts Oscar Wilde, Fu Manchu, H.P. Lovecraft,. Monty Python, The Avengers, James Bond, and Austin Powers. The tale is spun by Gatiss, an award winning star and co-creator of the British comedy, The League of Gentlemen and sometime writer for Doctor Who, in a perfectly toned voice that sparkles with witty epigrams and playful adventure.

   Of course you may find Lucifer Box a bit of a scoundrel, but his raffish adventures among the seedier side of the Edwardian demimonde are outlandishly entertaining and addictive.

   There is even a twist in the tale of near poetic justice for our hero. Which of course he escapes — you can’t very well succumb in the first book in a series. Simply bad taste, that.

   And you’ll be smiling too, though perhaps not as dashed devilishly. A tasty and charming bit of fluff, exactly the thing for a cold winter’s night.

       The Lucifer Box series —

    1. The Vesuvius Club (2004)
    2. The Devil in Amber (2006)
    3. Black Butterfly (2008)

R. AUSTIN FREEMAN – The Stoneware Monkey.

Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 1938. Dodd Mead & Co, hardcover, 1939. Paperback reprints: Popular Library #11, 1943. Dover, with The Penrose Mystery, 1973.

   There wasn’t anything in my unread pile that got me excited, so I decided to reread something I haven’t read in probably 30 plus years. This was paired with Freeman’s The Penrose Mystery by Dover and sold in an oversized paperback for the grand price of $4, according to a sticker on the front.

   The first two-thirds is narrated by young Doctor James Oldfield, a former student of Dr. Thorndyke, covering for a vacationing doctor in the village of Newingstead. Returning from a house call, Oldfield hears a police whistle, and, going to investigate, he comes across the body of a mortally injured policeman and is soon joined by another policeman and a diamond merchant named Kempster who has just been robbed.

   The dying policeman had been hit over the head with his own nightstick, which has the left thumbprint of the killer who escaped by stealing Oldfield’s bike.

   A few months later, Dr Oldfield has bought the practice of a deceased doctor in Marylebone, London and is called in when a pottery maker named Peter Gannet is suffering from stomach troubles. When he can’t discover the cause of Gannet’s illness, he seeks the help of his old teacher, Dr. Thorndyke, who diagnoses arsenic poisoning.

   Suspicion falls on Gannet’s associate, Frederic Boles, who shares a studio with Gannet and who makes, in Oldfield’s opinion, some ugly jewelry. Gannet recovers after a brief stay in the hospital, invites Oldfield to drop by the studio and even teaches him about pottery making.

   After witnessing a pretty nasty blowup between Gannet and Boles, Oldfield stops going around to the studio until Mrs. Gannet calls upon him. She has just returned from a two week vacation and her husband has disappeared. She has been afraid, however, to go into the studio and asks Oldfield to do so.

   He soon realizes that someone has recently used the kiln and then discovers a small bone that he recognizes as human. Since Mr. Boles has disappeared around the same time as Gannet, it looks like murder. And when the police discover a left thumb print that matches the one of the dead policeman’s nightstick on a piece of Boles’ jewelry, they are more than eager to get hold of him.

   The last third of the novel is narrated by Thorndyke’s associate Dr. Jervis, and covers Thorndyke’s investigation of the crime and how he comes up with the solution.

   Well, you can’t call Freeman a colorful writer, though he manages to make the two narrations sufficiently different so they seem to be by two different persons.

   He also takes some amusing pot-shots at what was then Modern Art. The plot twists won’t come as much of a surprise to readers who have read a lot of classic detective stories, but it was an enjoyable re-read. The title, by the way, refers to an ugly piece of sculpture that plays a big part in the solution.

LISA LUTZ – The Spellman Files. Simon & Schuster, hardcover; First Edition: March 2007. Trade paperback: February 2008. Mass market pb: Pocket, January 2009.

   This darkly humorous series debut is told in the first person from the point of view of Isabel Spellman, a P.I. in her family’s San Francisco firm.

   The organization of this book is a post-modern revelation. Ostensibly it’s a series of reports in the case file that Isabel produces as she’s trying to track down her missing 14-year-old sister Rae, who is already skilled in certain investigative techniques.

   In the process, a cold case from her parents’ archives also comes into play. There are sections and subdivisions, rather than traditional chapters. The text utilizes footnotes, varying type fonts, and passages of script-like dialogue.

   This organized chaos accurately maps Isabel’s character — as an investigator, she’s trained to record everything, and she does so obsessively, in part because she’s a bit of a basket case. A fantastic academic challenge would be to try to outline the various chunks of the novel; I may yet try to do this.

   Have I mentioned this book is very funny? Although the 14-year-old has disappeared, no kidnap is involved. In the end, it’s not a traditional crime novel at all; it’s a portrait of a very quirky family, as seen by its most messed-up member.

       The Spellman series —

    1. The Spellman Files (2007)
    2. Curse of the Spellmans (2008)
    3. Revenge of the Spellmans (2009)

    4. The Spellmans Strike Again (March 2010)

DEAR MURDERER. General Films, UK, 1947; Universal, US, 1948. Eric Portman, Greta Gynt, Dennis Price, Jack Warner, Maxwell Reed, Hazel Court, Jane Hylton. Director: Arthur Crabtree.

   By one of those fruity coincidences that happen only in real life, I followed up Othello [with my comments posted here] with two movies about cuckolds driven to murder.

   The first of these, Dear Murderer, offers Eric Portman as a clever but self-deluded husband out to win back his wife’s affections by murdering her seducer — and getting the victim to help him plan the crrime.

   What follows is a twisty-turny cat-and-mouse game between the killer, his victim, his wife and the police, done with wit and sophistication in the vein of Dial M for Murder, which it pre-dated by five years.

   To say any more about the story would give away secrets, but I should mention that the writing, playing and direction are all first-rate.

   Based on a play by St John Legh Clowes, who adapted No Orchids for Miss Blandish for the screen, and scandalized England in the process, Murderer moves along beautifully, with a twist in the story every ten minutes or so, but it’s the acting that really gets attention: Eric Portman and Dennis Price play killer and victim as if they’d just stepped out of an Oscar Wilde comedy, with civilized manners that border on savagery.

   Maxwell Reed and Hazel Court offer a nice counterpoint as innocent lovers caught up in all this, and the real standout is Greta Gynt as a disputed-wife-cum-femme-fatale.

   Writer Clowes and actress Gynt take a standard noir figure and create a portrait, not so much evil as sinfully self-indulgent: delightfully annoyed at a plot that interrupts her own pleasure, and rather fetchingly flattered by the notion that her husband would kill for her.

   A compelling turn in a film I recommend highly.

ROBERT GREER – The Devil’s Hatband. Frog Books, trade paperback, September 2004. Originally published by Mysterious Press, hardcover: March 1996; paperback: March 1997.

   CJ Floyd, a Denver African-American bail bondsman, is also a bounty hunter who goes after bondskippers, but the job he takes on in this first of a series is something quite different, the search for the missing daughter of a black federal judge.

   According to two men to who show up in CJ’s office, Brenda Mathison had joined the Grand River Tribe, a splinter group of what the two men call a “loony” environmental organization, PlanetFirst, then disappeared with a document that belonged to the men’s employer, Carson Technologies, a veterinary research organization.

   Something seems fishy to CJ, but with a sizable bonus promised if she’s found and the document returned within 30 days, he’s willing to take on the job.

   When CJ heads into the back country where Brenda was last known to be living, he finds that somebody else has already found her, a sheriff who’s discovered her body.

   As CJ continues his investigation of what has become an even more sensitive case, he learns that the Grand River Tribe is planning to destroy the Western cattle industry, and the connection with on Technologies involves a deadly virus that can wipe out not only a good portion of the cattle industry but untold numbers of people as well.

   This tense techno-thriller shifts back and forth between the search for the murderer or murderers of Brenda and an attempt to thwart the terrorist attack, CJ’s business in Denver, his ties to the black community, his uneasy alliance with the other bail bondsmen, and a threat posed by a local gangleader who has it in for him.

   CJ is also a collector, most notably of vintage license plates (hence, I suppose, the introduction by bookman and mystery writer Dunning for the Frog edition), and the narrative pace moves at times with gut-wrenching speed, then slows down for a more leisurely take on aspects of CJ’s life that have no direct connection with the Mathison case.

   CJ Floyd is one of the best-drawn and most interesting fictional characters I’ve come across recently, one that I hope to spend more time with in the future.

       The CJ Floyd series —

1. The Devil’s Hatband (1996)
2. The Devil’s Red Nickel (1997)

3. The Devil’s Backbone (1998)
4. Resurrecting Langston Blue (2005)

5. The Fourth Perspective (2006)
6. The Mongoose Deception (2007)

7. Blackbird, Farewell (2008)

R. D. [RODNEY] WINGFIELD – Frost at Christmas. PaperJacks, Canada, paperback original, 1984; 2nd printing, 1987. Constable, UK, hardcover, 1989. Bantam, US, pb, 1995.

   For a lover of detective stories I have to admit that I haven’t kept up with present day (or, at any rate, fairly recent) authors. This is not a plan, but a function of a slow reading rate and other things demanding attention.

   I have confessed several times to a close friend about not reading Wingfield, and he has always told me that I should. Of course I have watched and enjoyed all the episodes of the TV series but was aware that that series was not favoured by the author himself.

   I actually bought this paperback edition for 10 cents at Haslam’s bookstore in St Petersburg, Florida, on a visit in the early 1990s and finally I’ve read it.

   When the smoothly efficient Inspector Allen is taken ill, Frost has to take on the search for a missing 8-year-old girl, and his investigation keeps blundering into other cases, including a 32-year-old case of the murder of a bank worker and a missing £20.000.

   The story is told is short pithy passages and often from the viewpoint of Detective Constable Clive Barnard, the Chief Constable’s nephew who had been assigned to Denton C.I.D. for his first appointment and was accompanying Frost in his investigations.

   I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the book for a while and the first 100 pages shot by. After that, familiarity maybe set in for a while, but I still happily turned the pages, though without quite the same eagerness, until the end, 184 pages later. Still, overall it was an enjoyable read, and I will look out for a cheap copy of the second in the series, A Touch of Frost.

      The Detective Inspector Jack Edward Frost series —

    Frost at Christmas (1984)
    A Touch of Frost (1987)
    Night Frost (1992)
    Hard Frost (1995)
    Winter Frost (1999)
    A Killing Frost (2008)

   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.

CHARLES DRUMMOND – Death at the Furlong Post. Walker, US, hardcover, 1968. Victor Gollancz, UK, hc, 1967. A couple of the most unstereotyped policemen (English) in mystery fiction are featured in this most promising of first novels. [Series character: One of the two policemen is Sergeant Bob Reed.]

FIELDEN FARRINGTON – A Little Game. Walker, US, hardcover, 1968. Popular Library, pb, 1969. Macmillan, UK, hc, 1968. TV movie: Universal, 1971 (Diane Baker, Ed Nelson, Howard Duff). A brooding, irresistibly suspenseful tale of black, ruthless malevolence peering out of the eyes of a 13 year old boy. [The first of two crime novels by this author.]

LUCILLE FLETCHER -The Girl in Cabin B54. Random House, US, hardcover, 1968. Dell, pb, 1969. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hc, 1969. A whale of a chiller about a transatlantic passenger whose extrasensory abilities reveal far too much about a previous occupant of her cabin.

NICHOLAS FREELING – Strike Out Where Not Applicable. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1968. Ballantine, pb, 1969; Penguin, pb, 1975. Victor Gollancz, UK, hc, 1967. Few but Freeling have the ability to turn a novel consisting largely of conversation into a fascinating reading experience. Here Inspector Van der Valk tackles a bludgeoning death in the small Dutch town of Lisse to which he’s been transferred.

WILLIAM GARNER – The Deep, Deep Freeze. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1968. Berkley, pb, 1969. Collins Crime Club, UK, hc, 1968. An absorbing and sure-handed blending of a host of diverse elements into a very satisfying novel of intrigue. [Series character: Michael Jagger.]

DICK LOCHTE – Sleeping Dog. Arbor House, hardcover, 1985. Paperback reprints: Warner, 1986; Poisoned Pen Press, trade pb, 2001.

   Dick Lochte’s Sleeping Dog, recently reprinted by Warner, features Serendipity Dahlquist and Leo G. Bloodworth, “a spunky little miss and case-hardened private shamus.”

   Serendipity is only fourteen, a 1980’s version of Holden Caulfield. When she and Leo find a corpse, she is blase, not queasy, saying, “I’ve seen dead people before, tons of ’em. On TV.”

   This unlikely team works together in a wild, fast-moving mystery about such unlikely subjects as dog-fighting and television. The Southern California scene, used so often in the past, has seldom been better portrayed, with an especially devastating picture of the ocean town, Playa del Rey.

   Equally good is Lochte’s picture of Bloodworth’s car: “It had dark tinted windows, the better to hide behind. Its back seat was covered with jackets, sweaters, strange hats, brown paper bags, squashed into balls, Big Mac wrappers, greasy fried chicken boxes, and empty beer cans. It was the car of a dedicated, working gumshoe.”

[UPDATE] 10-19-09.   Sleeping Dog won the Nero Wolfe Award and was nominated for an Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony Award when it came out in 1985. The only other novel-length appearance of this delightfully mismatched pair of detectives was Laughing Dog (Arbor House, 1988).

WILL MITCHELL – The Goldfish Murders. Gold Medal #188, paperback original; 1st printing, 1950. Red Seal, UK, pb, 1958.

   Somewhere along about chapter three of this Gold Medal original a character inquires about a sexy showgirl who has been found dead with a goldfish between her ‘lung worts.’ By then you should be well aware you are in the realm of Dan Turner Hollywood Detective more than Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer.

   The hero is NYPD Homicide sleuth Christopher Lash, the son of a legendary police officer with a penchant for quoting his old man. Chris has a tough case on his hands in a series of murders that mix Broadway and the funeral business and involves a series of corpses with that signature goldfish.

   Truth be told, Chris spends almost as much time romancing the screwball showgirl Penny as he does investigating the murder. Penny is the type who has a small dog named Cuspidor, and this is type of book where attractive young women have small dogs with names like Cuspidor who like to chew on visiting detectives’ pants cuffs.

   This one is less Mickey Spillane than Robert Leslie Bellem, but in a forgiving mood it adds up to some fun.

   A few samplings from the book will tell you more than any recitation of the plot ever could.

   If you have been wondering where the spicy pulps went to die, now you know. Still in its own way this is fun along the lines of Carter Brown, Bellem, or even some B movie mysteries. At least you get the impression Mitchell meant for it to be almost as funny as it is, and some points have to be given to any writer who gets away with comparing female anatomy to pouter pigeons.

   This seems to be Mitchell’s only book. But then one like this per career is all you really need.

   Should there be a third volume of Bill Pronzini’s paean to alternative classics Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, this one really has to be in consideration. They don’t get much more alternative than this.

NORA BARRY – Sherbourne’s Folly. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1978. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition. No paperback edition. No UK edition.

   The illness of an older sister calls a woman and her adopted daughter back to England from the American suburb where they now live. Once returned, as outsiders to the very much ingrown group of relatives and friends they’d left behind, they’re gradually become more and more aware that something sinister and evil is eating away beneath the strained welcome that greets them.

   In spite of the obvious Gothic trimmings, the accent on time, memory and the nostalgia for a vanished childhood makes this a refreshing change of pace from the hard-boiled violence, for example, of a tale told by a tough private eye. It’s a must as well for lovers of treasure hunts, mazes, and yes, even mansions with secret passages.

[UPDATE] 10-18-09. I read this review just moments ago for the first time in over 30 years, and from what I can tell, I enjoyed the book. I have to confess, however, that the comments above are all I remember about it. This also was the only mystery novel that Nora Barry wrote, either under that name or her real name, Diane Cleaver.

   Using Google — and how did we ever live without it? — I’ve found an online obituary for her here. Turns out that she was a well-known literary agent for most of her life, and that she was born in Birmingham, England, becoming a United States citizen in 1976.

   Which perhaps makes the book semi-biographical in nature, but that’s not a limb that I should be crawling out on, I’m sure. It sounds like a delightful story, though. If I could easily find my copy, I’d love to read it again.