TIME TO KILL. 20th Century Fox, 1942. Lloyd Nolan, Heather Angel, Doris Merrick, Ralph Byrd, Richard Lane, Sheila Bromley, Morris Ankrum, Ethel Griffies. Screenplay by Clarence Upson Young based upon Raymond Chandler’s The High Window and Brett Halliday’s character, Michael Shayne. Director: Herbert I. Leeds. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

    Fox would remake The High Window as The Brasher Doubloon, with George Montgomery as Philip Marlowe, but although I must confess I have not seen that film or read the novel, I can’t imagine a more entertaining version — albeit performed at express train speed — than the sixty-one minute treatment in Time to Kill. Nor can I imagine a more effective and sympathetic protagonist than the always entertaining Shayne as incarnated by Lloyd Nolan.

    The plot is something of a mess, with enough characters and red herrings for two, maybe even three short films. For the life of me, I couldn’t give you a coherent summary of the film, but I can assure you that I wasn’t bored for a minute. It ends rather abruptly, but Nolan never msses a beat as he exits from the series, most appropriately in a taxi with his latest flame. Mike, we still miss you.

CELIA FREMLIN – The Hours Before Dawn. Victor Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1958. J. B. Lippincott, US hardcover, 1958. Reprint US paperbacks: Dell D422, 1961; Dell 3770, Great Mystery Library, 1966.

   Celia Fremlin has the unusual ability to take a perfectly normal, if not mundane, situation and create an atmosphere of sheer terror. The Hours Before Dawn, which won an Edgar for Best Novel of its year, introduces us to Louise Henderson, a sleep-starved young housewife with a fretful new infant that is causing complaints from both her family and neighbors.

   The only person who doesn’t complain is Miss Vera Brandon, the boarder the Hendersons have recently taken in. In fact, Miss Brandon is so self-effacing and quiet that at times the Hendersons don’t even know she is in the house.

   Soon the boarder’s actions begin to arouse Louise’s suspicions, and she finds herself doing all sorts of things she has never done before — attempting to search the woman’s room, contacting total strangers for information about her, and finally taking the baby for a nocturnal stroll in his pram, only to fall asleep and lose him in a park.

   The author skillfully weaves truly frightening events into Louise’s daily routine of meals, housecleaning, and childcare, and her superb characterization has the reader thoroughly on Louise’s side — and just as terrified as she is — by the time the story reaches its surprising conclusion.

   Other Fremlin titles of note: Uncle Paul (1960), Prisoner’s Base (1967), The Spider-Orchid (1978), With No Crying (1981).

         ———
   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.

CELIA FREMLIN, R.I.P. It was Martin Edwards who first made known the news of mystery writer Celia Fremlin’s passing, announcing it on his blog three days ago.

    She died this past summer in a nursing home in Bournemouth, on June 16th, with very few in the world of mystery fandom knowing about her passing until now.

    Besides Martin’s appreciative tribute to her work, plus a long array of followup comments, a longer obituary by Rebecca Tope can be found online here. She says in part, in one poignant paragraph:

    “Her personal life was, in fact, full of tragedy. From the death of her mother when she was seventeen, she went on to lose three children and two husbands, before going blind and slowly sinking into a twilight world that lasted for several years. Her books are light and humorous at first glance, but just below the surface is an acknowledgment of the truly terrible things that can happen to a person. Her style is distinctive and the books immensely enjoyable.”

   BIBLIOGRAPHY: Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

FREMLIN, CELIA. Pseudonym of Celia Margaret Goller, 1914-2009. UK publishers only, except for one case of a US retitling:
      The Hours Before Dawn (n.) Gollancz 1958.

      Uncle Paul (n.) Gollancz 1959.
      Seven Lean Years (n.) Gollancz 1961. US title: Wait for the Wedding, Lippincott 1961.
      The Trouble Makers (n.) Gollancz 1963.
      The Jealous One (n.) Gollancz 1965.

      Prisoner’s Base (n.) Gollancz 1967.
      Possession (n.) Gollancz 1969.
      Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark (co) Gollancz 1970.
      Appointment with Yesterday (n.) Gollancz 1972. No US edition.

      By Horror Haunted (co) Gollancz 1974. No US edition.

      The Long Shadow (n.) Gollancz 1975.
      The Spider-Orchid (n.) Gollancz 1977.

      With No Crying (n.) Gollancz 1980.

      The Parasite Person (n.) Gollancz 1982.
      A Lovely Day to Die, and other stories (co) Gollancz 1984.
      Listening in the Dusk (n.) Gollancz 1990.
      Dangerous Thoughts (n.) Gollancz 1991.
       Echoing Stones (n.) Severn 1993.
      King of the World (n.) Severn 1994.

RIO CONCHOS. 20th Century-Fox, 1964. Richard Boone, Stuart Whitman, Tony Franciosa, Jim Brown, Wende Wagner, Edmond O’Brien. Based on the novel Guns of Rio Conchos (Gold Medal, 1958) by Clair Huffaker (also co-screenwriter). Director: Gordon Douglas.

   If you were trying to track down several wagons full of stolen Army rifles, and you were the colonel of the fort in charge, who would you send on a mission to find them, using as bait another wagon filled with barrels of gunpowder?

   Surely not a surly ex-Confederate officer named Lassiter (Richard Boone) and a womanizing half-breed Mexican rogue with flashing eyes and surreally white teeth and otherwise about to be hanged (Tony Franciosa)?

   Along with, of course, Captain Haven (Stuart Whitman), the officer who was responsible for the rifles being stolen in the first place, and a black cavalry sergeant (Jim Brown), and you have a team made in heaven.

   Or not.

   Along the way, meeting both bandits and Apaches in approximately equal number the band of four, they add a fifth member to their number, a beautiful Indian woman (Wende Wagner) who at least is brunette and not blonde.

   After several days of assorted misadventures, they at last meet the man who has the guns, Colonel Theron ‘Gray Fox’ Pardee (Edmond O’Brien), Lassiter’s former commanding officer, who intends to use his newly gotten arms to help the South rise again.

   I have heard the phrase “chewing the scenery” many times before, but I don’t think I ever I knew what it meant until seeing Edmond O’Brien in action in this movie, not that it’s exactly what the part calls for.

   Richard Boone as a hero (Paladin, say) has always rated an “A Plus” in my book, but if anything, he is always better as a villain, or in this case a man consumed with hatred toward the Apaches, who killed his wife and child well over a year ago.

   Boone is a master of not-so-veiled sarcasm and an inner rage that threatens to boil over at any instant. (He is at his utter hard-boiled best villainy, by the way, in a spy film called The Kremlin Letter, 1970, an absolute must see, even if it is mostly incomprehensible in its complexity.)

   This was Jim Brown’s debut film, and he is allowed to say perhaps fifteen words during the whole movie. That does not mean that his presence goes unnoticed, nor does that of Wende Wagner, later well-known for playing Miss Case on The Green Hornet TV series. (She has several lines of dialogue in Rio Conchos, but not one in English. I would someday like to know what language — Apache? — she does speak.)

   And why no one has put the The Green Hornet TV series out on DVD is a question for which I have no answer. But I digress.

   Rio Conchos is a movie that is entertaining all the way through, and while it reaches no heights of glory, if you are a western movie fan, it is well worth your undivided attention.

   And if you do watch this moving picture all the way through, there is an added bonus.

   You get to make up your own ending.

   It ends a bit abruptly, it does.

 GEORGE CHILDERNESS – Murder in False Face.

Phoenix Press, hardcover, 1943. Hangman’s House Mystery #3, digest-sized paperback, “condensed slightly,” 1946. News Stand Library #125, pb; 1950.

   Chet Phelps, assistant to Mr. Kent, first name undisclosed but publisher of twenty-odd newspapers, has some unusual duties. Preventing his boss from starving himself in the name of economy is foremost, but he also does some “stenography, reporting, killing of snakes (Denver), subornation of perjury (Milwaukee) and grave robbery in a southern city.”

   After an evening of gambling and drinking, Phelps wakes up the next morning in bed with a young lady whose father had sued Kent for libel. Worse, Phelps discovers that during the night, a total blank to him, he married the young lady, her father had been murdered, probably strangled but also shot twice and horribly mutilated, after which the murderer had painted a false face on what was left of the corpse’s real face.

   As usual, there are lots of suspects, all of whom seem to have been busy getting in each other’s way at the scene of the crime. Phelps investigates, when he isn’t busy getting sloshed. However, it is Kent, who has an odd fascination for waxing his nails, who discovers the murderer.

   Nothing special here, though it has its amusing moments. Childerness wrote one more mystery, Too Many Murderers (Phoenix Press; 1944); maybe he got better.

JON L. BREEN – The Gathering Place. Walker, hardcover, 1984; paperback, September 1986.

   I’m on record as having serious reservations about occult and horror fiction, feeling most works in those genres are “copouts” in which the authors do not play by the “rules” of reality.

   Jon L. Breen’s The Gathering Place contains one unexplainable element, the ability of its heroine, Rachel Hennings, to, without practice, imitate the signatures of famous authors like ErIe Stanley Gardner. The plot device of automatic writing doesn’t help what is otherwise a classic detective story, but it doesn’t hurt it enough to keep me from recommending thls book.

   The setting is a famous old bookstore, on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, recently inherited by Hennings from her uncle. There is real murder to go with the supernatural, and soon Rachel is acting as detective, with some help from a psychology professor, a reporter, and a Los Angeles Police detective.

   Hennings is a, strong enough character that she probably doesn’t need that many extra detectives. The mystery is crisply told and satisfactorily resolved, by strictly logical means. A real bonus is the atmosphere of an old-fashioned book store as seen through the eyes of an author who obviously loves old books.

   Bibliographic Data. [Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

HENNINGS, RACHEL
      The Gathering Place. Walker, hc, 1984.
      A Piece of the Auction. EQMM, July 1986. [Short story.]
      Starstruck. Murder in Los Angeles, Adams Round Table, Morrow, 1987. [novelette]
      Touch of the Past. Walker, hc, 1988.

      Rachel and the Bookstore Cat. Danger in D.C., ed. Martin H. Greenberg & Ed Gorman, Donald I. Fine, 1993. [short story]

CRAIG RICE – Trial by Fury. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1941. Paperback reprints include: Pocket 237, 1st printing, October 1943. Dell D187, Great Mystery Library #2, 1957. International Polygonics, 1991.

    When Jake and Helene Justus escape the hot summer in Chicago, they find themselves in the Jackson County Court House in Jackson, Wisconsin, just in time to witness the murder of ex-Senator Joseph Peveley (“It can’t be murder, that’s the second murder in thirty-two years.”), and naturally Jake being Jake, he ticks off the less than brilliant local lawman and finds himself jailed as a material witness. “It’s none of my business, and I don’t know that I care very much, but who might have wanted to murder your ex-Senator?”

    So the leggy blonde Helene does what any sensible wife would do. She sends to Chicago for that rumpled, red haired, bibulous Don Quixote of the law, the one and only John J. Malone, defender of the weak, savior of the downtrodden, and patron of more bars than the Bar Association can shake a stick at, who arrives by bus, hot bothered, and as usual brilliant.

    In fact, before he even gets Jake and the local prosecutor (who has been arrested by the same lawman) out of jail, he finds the murder weapon and shows how the crime was committed.

    Now all he wants to do is get himself out of Jackson and back to noisy, hot Chicago: “Here they are living in the age of innocence, and in Chicago were living in the age of consent.”

    But then when he goes to cash a check and they blow the bank out from under him, it delays his departure.

    But he isn’t, though someone else is, and as the doctor remarks the city has about four murders every thirty-two years. “There’s two more coming.”

    So reluctantly Malone finds himself delving into the case, and being Malone he naturally does it between drinks, with a little help from a local who seems to be under the impression Hoover is still in office and Prohibition is still in effect:

    And before long, there is yet another murder, one which is preceded by Malone jumping in a river to save a damsel in distress; a body found buried under a concrete slab in a most respectable basement; a less than respectable young lady is killed; and Jake ends up running from a lynch mob with Malone and a slightly inebriated bloodhound named Hercules on his trail, with a bottle of Dollar Gin their only clue.

    Of course Malone solves it, if only after polishing off the Dollar Gin and the local madhouse burns down while he and Hercules send a lynch mob packing.

    Trial by Fury may well be Rice best novel in the Malone opus. It is funny, involving, fast moving, the detective work is genuine, and the humor never flags or falls flat.

    The characters belong to that bucolic Hollywood version of an America that never existed, but Rice and Malone both know that under that facade of 4th of July picnics and Sunday morning services there are motives and actions enough for murder most foul.

    Jake is his usual less than bright self, and Helene surely the most beautiful wife a lucky fool could have. Malone sulks, pouts, drinks, smokes his cigars, looks rumpled, and proves brilliant and in this one even falls in love — albeit with an unlikely soul mate — Hercules, a giant half Bloodhound, half Great Dane, who is possessed of a courageous soul and a detective’s unwillingness to ever give up the scent.

    And in all honesty, I don’t think I can top that. Find this one and read it. It is the screwball school personified, a first class piece of detective work, a drop dead funny novel, and Malone and Hercules are one of the great romances in literature. Unless you are a cat person, or have a heart of stone.

   Some odds and ends this time, almost of them dealing with small typographical errors that have been spotted and corrected in Part 34 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.

COBB, (GEOFFREY) BELTON. 1892-1971. Son of Thomas Cobb, 1835-1932, q.v. Sales director for Longman’s publishers and a regular contributor to Punch and other magazines. His detective novels invariably involved one or more of three series characters: Inspector Cheviot Burmann (41 titles), Bryan Armitage (21 titles) and Superintendent Manning (6 titles), with some overlap. A small handful of stand-alone novels are also included in his entry in the Revised Crime Fiction IV.

DEHAN, RICHARD. Pseudonym of Clothilde (Inez Augusta Mary) Graves, 1863-1932, q.v. Under this pen name, the author of two story collections included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV; some of the stories are criminous.

FORSYTE, CHARLES. Joint pseudonym of Gordon Charles George Philo, 1920-2009, and his wife Mavis Ella (Galsworthy) Philo, 1920-1986, qq.v. Under this pen name, the author of four crime and/or espionage novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, three of them cases for Inspector Richard Left. Of special note is the following book, also in his CFIV entry:
      The Decoding of Edwin Drood. Gollancz, UK, hc, 1980; Scribner, US, hc, 1980. Discussion of previous attempts to complete the novel by Charles Dickens, 1812-1870, with a new ending by this author.

GRAVES, CLOTILDE (INEZ AUGUSTA MARY). 1863-1932. Add name in full (first named sometimes spelled Clothilde). Pseudonym: Richard Dehan, q.v. Born in Cork; actress, journalist, illustrator, poet and playwright. Under her own name, the author of one title included with a dash in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. See below. Other work, according to one source includes “humorous novels and stories of witchcraft and pagan religions.”
      -Dragon’s Teeth. Dalziel Brothers, UK, hc, 1891. Add setting: China. [A tale of daring adventure, hardship and love in China during a native uprising.]

HAMILTON, [LORD] FREDERIC (SPENSER). 1856-1928. Add biographical information: Was in Diplomatic Service, serving in Berlin, Petrograd, Lisbon and Buenos Aires. Member of Parliament; editor of Pall Mall Magazine. (Some sources say that he introduced the sport of skiing to Canada in 1887.) The author of one standalone novel in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, plus seven story collections involving series character Mr. P. J. Davenant. One of these is shown below (Nash, 1915). According to Lofts & Adley, Philip John Davenant was “a public school boy [whose] adventures took place while he was still a pupil at Tonbridge School […] In addition to an amazing bent to criminology [he had] a wonderful knowledge of the German language.”
      -Lady Eleanor, Private Simmonds, and Others. Hurst, UK, hc, 1919. Correct setting: Ireland.

HARDY, IZA DUFFUS. Ca.1852-1922. The author of “a large output of novels of a romantic cast. She set some of them in exotic places, and also wrote travel books and contributed stories and other pieces to periodicals.” To the thirteen titles previously listed in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, add the one below.
      Friend and Lover. Hurst, UK, hc, 1880; Harper, US, hc, 1880. Setting: England.

MACKENZIE, JOAN (NOBLE). Correct spelling of last name (from MacKenzie) and add middle name. Add: Born in Dumfries, Scotland, 1905. Included in her entry in the Revised Crime Fiction IV are five titles published between 1935 and 1951, four of them indicated as having only marginal crime content.

PHILO, GORDON CHARLES GEORGE. 1920-2009. Add year of death and biographical information: British diplomat stationed in Hanoi, Kuala Lampur, Ankara, Istanbul and London; long-time member of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. In literary circles, an expert on both Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. Joint pseudonym with his wife Mavis Ellen Galsworthy Philo, 1920-1986: Charles Forsyte, q.v.

PHILO, MAVIS ELLEN (GALSWORTHY). 1920-1986. Add both dates and full name. Joint pseudonym with husband Gordon Charles George Philo, 1920-2009: Charles Forsyte, q.v.

SCOTT, EVELYN. 1893-1963. Pseudonym: Ernest Souza, q.v. Born in Clarksville, Tennessee; name at birth: Elsie Dunn. She changed her name to Evelyn Scott in 1913 when she began living with Frederick Creighton Wellman, an already married dean at Tulane University. After the mid-20s, she married British writer John Metcalfe. A celebrated novelist, playwright and poet of her day.

SOUZA, ERNEST. Pseudonym of Evelyn Scott, 1893-1963, q.v. Under this pen name, the author of one adventure thriller included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. See below:
      Blue Rum. Cape & Smith, US, hc, 1930; Jonathan Cape, UK, hc, 1930. Setting: Portugal, Brazil (add the latter).

A GENTLEMAN OF PARIS. Paramount Famous Lasky Corp., 1927. Adolphe Menjou, Shirley O’Hara, Arlette Marchal, Ivy Harris, Nicholas Soussanin. Screenplay by Chandler Sprague from the story “Bellamy the Magnificent” by Roy Horniman; titles by Herman Mankiewicz; photography by Hal Rosson. Director: Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

   The cinematography by the noted Hal Rosson was compromised by the dark print that made some of the intertitles difficult to read.

   This was also to be a problem with at least two other films, one of which was so severely damaged that the last reel was almost unwatchable. (More on this later.)

   Adolphe Menjou is the dapper Marquis de Marignan whose complicated love life is managed with great skill by the apparently unflappable Joseph Talineau (Nicholas Soussanin), his butler and general manager of his household.

   The arrival of the Marquis’ fiancee, Yvonne Dufour, taxes even Joseph’s talents, but all seems to be under control until Joseph learns that his wife (their marriage seems to be one largely of convenience from her point of view) is one of his employer’s conquests.

   Stunned by the discovery, Joseph decides to destroy the Marquis by engineering a card game that appears to demonstrate that the Marquis is a cheat, a crime worse, in the eyes of society, than cheating with a friend’s wife. What begins as a frothy comedy of manners turns so dark that the only recourse for a gentleman is to take his own life.

   The sudden reversal that undermines Joseph’s plan and restores comedic balance may satisfy some conventional sense of wanting a restoration of the “natural” order but it throws the film off balance.

   Tragedy threatens and the momentary crossing of the boundary that separates comedy and tragedy in classical French theater may prove disconcerting to more than one spectator, especially since the resolution seems so hollow.

   The director had worked with Chaplin on A Woman of Paris in which Menjou plays a similar role as a gentleman about town, his stock in trade as an actor in the silent era, and this film, even viewed in a dark print, is an effective exercise in style.

   D’Abbadie d’Arast’s Hollywood career was apparently damaged by his reputation for being difficult and going over budget (reminding one of von Stroheim). He ended his career in 1933 with the direction of Topaze, which boasts fine performances by a cast headed by John Barrymore and Myrna Loy, closing his career with a film that played to his strengths as a director.

VIKRAM CHANDRA – Sacred Games. HarperCollins, hardcover; first edition, January 2007. Trade paperback: Harper Perennial; 1st printing, December 2007.

    At 900 plus pages a good many readers may pass this one by, which is a pity, because it is a remarkable thriller that also manages to be an epic of Mumbai (Bombay) and through it, modern India at the birth of the 21st century. Written by Vikram Chanda, who divides his time between Harvard and Mumbai, it has the advantage of a writer comfortable and capable in English and at home in the streets of his homeland.

    The hero of Sacred Games is Sartaj Singh, an Inspector with the Mumbai police, who is at war with Ganesh Gaitonde, the nation’s most wanted criminal and head of G Company, a sort of Indian Mafia with fingers in every pie. Their conflict will take the men across a wide spectrum of life in Mumbai.

A Sikh, known by his colleagues and the people of Mumbai’s streets as the ‘silky Sikh,’ Sartaj is divorced, over forty, and watching his career downspin, but he is determined to bring down Ganesh, who, despite his success as a criminal, is facing demons of his own, his very success isolating him from human contact.

    As the novel develops, equal parts Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris, The Godfather, police procedural, and Bollywood movie, Chandra reveals more and more of both Sartaj and Ganesh, while his portrait of the swirling exotic and poverty-stricken city evolves in the background.

    “History has a shape …the universe has a design … For every insect, there is a predator. For every flower, there is a function. Some scientists still look at all this beauty, but insist it is result of natural selection, of chance and nothing else. They are blind. They are afraid. Pull back from the chance, look at it with the right vision, and chaos reveals its patterns.”

    Finding those patterns is the way Sartaj will locate and find Ganesh, and by the time the two men confront each other, Chandra has given us a full portrait of life in Mumbai: its people, its poverty, its beauty, and its flaws. Sartaj and Ganesh themselves are fully revealed, and their inevitable conflict becomes a clash as epic as Ahab and the white whale.

    The novel is a love letter to Mumbai, but one written with an eye to its realities. Structured like an old fashioned triple-decker, its scope is focused by the conflict of these two men, a battle worthy of Holmes and Moriarity, or Jean Valjean and Javert, but cast in the form of a thriller, although one of which it can be said, as it was of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, all life is in it. All the life of Mumbai anyway.

    In Sartaj, we have a hero as complex as Maigret and as human, and in Ganesh an antagonist as complex and troubled as Michael Corleone, who finds the only man who can understand him or forgive him is the man sworn to destroy him. Like all great protagonist/antagonist pairs, the two men both compliment and contradict each other. Their battle is an epic one that sweeps in its wake all of the city they inhabit. Only one of the two can emerge from the battle: the one best equipped to grow within himself and face his own reality.

    Sacred Games may not be for every reader, but if you ever want more from a thriller, good writing, ambitious narrative expertly controlled, and pure old fashioned storytelling, this is the book for you. That is also a first class thriller is a tribute to Chandra’s skills (and the extensive vocabulary of Indian words and slang at the end of the book).

    As India’s role in the world grows more important we can look forward to getting a glimpse of Indian popular literature, and with this more serious book we will have some familiarity with the subject. In recent years Indian crime has figured as a background in John Irving’s Son of the Circus, and David Gregory Roberts Shantaram, both a far cry from the charm and gentle wit of H.R.F. Keating’s Inspector Ghote.

    Read this one. It is a major work, and yet it reads like a thriller, a portrait of a world alien to most of us and at the same time utterly familiar and real. Despite its length and depth, you won’t want to put this one down. It is the kind of book you can move inside of and inhabit. And unlike most thrillers you won’t want this one to end.

    But don’t get a hernia reading it. It is really a hefty tome, though surprisingly, one that doesn’t read that way. Epic and compelling aren’t always words you can use together, but both fit Vikram Chanda’s Sacred Games.

RICHARD S. WHEELER – Flint’s Truth.

Forge, hardcover; 1st printing, May 1998. Paperback reprint: October 2000.

   The first of itinerant newspaper printer Sam Flint’s adventures in the Old West was recorded in Flint’s Gift. This is the second; the third, forthcoming, is Flint’s Honor. And if this book is any measure, all three are worth tracking down and reading.

   Moving from settlement to settlement with a printing press, several cases of movable type, newsprint and ink is not a task or career for the faint-hearted, nor is setting up shop in a town such as Oro Blanco, where the powers-that-be prefer that certain secrets stay hidden.

   As Sam says on page 63: “You’d be amazed the amount of news that people don’t wish to see in print.” At stake is a fortune in land and gold.

   This is a morality tale written in the guise of a western novel, with most of the characters taking stock parts. In fuller roles, though, besides Sam himself, are the philosophical Mexican priest who befriends him, and Libby, the skinny 13-year-old girl who becomes his right-hand aide. Each in their own way becomes a key to the tale, which is brutally honest and takes an ironic twist or two before a form of justice prevails.

   Here’s a solid, picturesque glimpse into a unique time and place, one that rings a resonant chord of truth and right, and even better — as you can expect of all of Wheeler’s work — here’s a book that’s completely and compulsively readable.