Not long ago I felt the urge to read another novel by that king of the humdrums, John Rhode (1884-1964) and, from the specimens on my shelves, chose THE CLAVERTON AFFAIR (1933). Judging by Rhode’s foremost admirers, it was an excellent choice. “A fine example of good early Priestley,” say Barzun & Taylor in A CATALOGUE OF CRIME. “The puzzle is sound, the atmosphere menacing in a splendidly gloomy way, and the treatment of spiritualistic seances above reproach….[This is] a book to hang onto.” I found it somewhat less impressive.

   As in almost every one of the Rhode novels, the protagonist is curmudgeonly Dr. Priestley, whose rarely seen first name is Lancelot and who is not a doctor, at least not a physician. Paying a visit to his old friend Sir John Claverton, Priestley discovers newly ensconced on the premises Sir John’s estranged sister, who’s a psychic medium, and her daughter, who is nursing him through some gastric problems.

   His physician Dr. Oldland, soon to become a regular character in the series, tells Priestley in confidence that the cause of Sir John’s most serious attack was arsenic. A few days later Sir John dies. Priestley naturally enough suspects another dose of arsenic but medical tests rule out that poison conclusively. Sir John had recently changed his will, replacing what had been a simple testament with an exceedingly strange one. After two seances, the second rigged by Priestley, our sleuth solves the puzzle and the murderer obligingly confesses the whole plot.

   For the most part THE CLAVERTON AFFAIR is on a par with the dozens of other Rhodes. One aspect that makes it unusual is that there are only three suspects, hardly enough for a book that runs more than 270 pages. Another is that the soporific prose is marred by some grammatical lapses of the sort one rarely encounters in the humdrums. “I should like, if possible, to see this Doctor Oldland, whom you say was attending Sir John.” “But that wasn’t the worse.”

   What surprised me more than the moments of bad grammar was some unusual dialogue. Here speaking to Priestley is a man who left his wife for a wealthy younger woman. “I honestly believe that an impartial deity would count her [i.e. the wife’s] petty suffering a very small thing to put against our surpassing happiness.”

   And here is a married woman who had an affair and a child with another man while her husband was overseas in World War I. “…I’m proud of every moment that we spent together. I wouldn’t give up a single one of my memories to save myself from eternal damnation….To me, he was the most wonderful lover that ever lived!” Sentiments like these are rare to say the least in a detective novel more than 80 years old. Is it possible that a stodgy Brit like Rhode was host to an inner swinger?

   There is no Rhode biography and it’s hard to believe that someone who wrote so many books actually had a life, but apparently he did. One of his closest friends among crime novelists was John Dickson Carr, who said of Rhode that he “once boasted of being the Detection Club’s heaviest member, always excepting G.K. Chesterton. I have watched him polish off ten pints of beer before lunch, and more than that after dinner.” I gather from the Web that for many years he lived with a woman whom he married only after his first wife’s death. Swinger indeed!

   In a letter from decades ago, novelist and playwright Ira Levin (1929-2007) described Rhode to me as “still my favorite narcotic and traveling companion.” For me he doesn’t fit well in that slot. Why? Because you can’t read Rhode without keeping your mind engaged to a certain extent. At bedtime and on the road I prefer Peter Cheyney (1896-1951), at least when he’s writing about that rootin’ tootin’ two-gun shootin’ G-man Lemmy Caution.

   Cheyney was blessed with the un-British gift of chutzpah: knowing nothing about the U.S. or the American language, he cranked out a whole series of novels with an allegedly Yank narrator who not only writes in first person but in present tense in what his creator fondly imagined to be the manner of Damon Runyon. I’ve found that the best way to read a Lemmy Caution exploit is to start with the first couple of chapters and then skip around, on the prowl for the Cheyneyisms with which the books are strewn.

   Recently I pulled down my tattered copy of the second Cautionary tale, POISON IVY (1937), which seems never to have been published on this side of the pond. With superhuman restraint I’ll limit myself to quoting seven splendiferous sentences.

      â€œIt sounds to me like a pipe dream from a police nose.”

      â€œToo many guys have had to use hair restorer over goin’ out and meeting a whole lot of grief before it got there.”

      â€œI reckon that they think I’m the cat’s lingerie.”

      â€œLemmy Caution without a Luger under his arm is about as much use as a lump of pickled pork to a rabbi.”

      â€œHe is a big guy with a derby hat an’ he is smilin’ and lookin’ as happy as a sandboy.”

      â€œIf you start anything I reckon I’m goin’ to fill you so full of holes that you’ll think you was a nutmeg grater.”

      â€œWell, sweetheart, if you’re a lady then I’m the King of Siam gettin’ himself elected President of Cuba in a snowstorm.”

   Take that, Raul Castro! And the next time you meet a sandboy, toss him a lump of pickled pork.

   I quoted John Dickson Carr a few pages ago so it’s only fair that I close this column with him too. THE THIRD BULLET is of an unusual length that Carr had never attempted before or since, much shorter than any of his novels but considerably longer than, say, most of the Nero Wolfe novelets.

   It was first published under his Carter Dickson byline in 1937, the same year as Cheyney’s POISON IVY, in a short-lived series of Hodder & Stoughton paperback originals advertised as “new at ninepence.” The only other title in the series likely to be familiar to mystery fans was Margery Allingham’s THE CASE OF THE LATE PIG.

   The detective in Allingham’s contribution was the well-established Albert Campion but Carr’s sleuth was a newcomer, Colonel Marquis, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and something of a rough sketch for the better known Colonel March of Dickson’s later Department of Queer Complaints stories.

   A retired judge is found shot to death in the pavilion behind his Hampstead house. The room is locked — how could it be anything else in a Carr story? — and its only other occupant is a man whom a few years earlier the judge had sentenced to be flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails and who’s found carrying a pistol with one shot fired. He claims that the shot from his pistol had missed and that a third person had fired the fatal bullet with a second gun, which is discovered in the room. There’s a bullet hole in the judge and another, from a different weapon, in one wall of the pavilion.

   But medical evidence establishes that the fatal bullet was fired from yet a third weapon, which is nowhere to be found. Colonel Marquis solves the puzzle neatly, although I doubt that one reader in a million could anticipate his solution and it’s hard to imagine anyone except a Carr character devising a scheme like the one at the center of this story.

   The tale never appeared in the U.S. until after World War II, when Fred Dannay published a heavily edited version in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for January 1948 — edited, I should add, with Carr’s approval. “[D]on’t you think you had better do a lot of cutting?” he wrote Fred. “I remember being uncomfortably verbose in those days.”

   By that time Carr had apparently lost all copies of the Hodder & Stoughton version, which means that Fred must have edited from a carbon of the typescript. It was the Dannay condensation that was used when the tale appeared as the lead item in the Carr collection THE THIRD BULLET AND OTHER STORIES (Harper, 1954) and in all subsequent reprints until Douglas G. Greene included the full original version in FELL AND FOUL PLAY (International Polygonics, 1991).

   Anthony Boucher in the New York Times Book Review (May 30, 1954) described the condensed version as “a somewhat conventional but admirably detailed and intricate locked-room puzzle, ranking as good Grade B Carr.” Barzun & Taylor in A CATALOGUE OF CRIME said: “It is ingenious but told without vim.” By that I assume they meant that it lacks the Poesque atmospheric touches that distinguish so many of Carr’s early novels, as indeed it does, although there’s a tad more atmosphere in the uncut version that only became available after these comments were written.

   THE THIRD BULLET may not be in the same league with Carr classics like THE THREE COFFINS (1935) or THE CROOKED HINGE (1938), but it’s a smooth specimen of the kind of story that will still be linked with JDC when our great-grandkids are reading him on their wristwatch computers as they rocket their way to other galaxies.

BAD BLOOD. Made for TV, UK, 1981. Southern Pictures / Kerridge Odeon, New Zealand, 1982. Jack Thompson, Carol Burns, Denis Lill, Donna Akersten, Martyn Sanderson, Kelly Johnson, Bruce Allpress. Based upon the book Manhunt: The Story of Stanley Graham, by H. A. Willis (Whitcoulls, 1979). Director: Mike Newell.

    Bad Blood opens with a telling scene that, in retrospect, tells the viewer a lot about how the story is going to unfold. In a small New Zealand farming community, the community men aim their rifles and fire at targets. The Second World War is on and the local, God-fearing, upstanding townsfolk are preparing to do their part (if called upon) to fight alongside Britain and against the Germans.

   Notably absent from the rather giddy group of would-be soldiers is Stan Graham, a local oddball who, along with his wife and kids, live on a small homestead in town. From the get go, the viewer learns two things: rifles are going to play significant roles in the narrative and that Graham is an outsider.

   Not surprisingly, guns and outsiders do not go well together, at least they don’t in director Mike Newell’s cinematic exploration of the life and times of real life New Zealand mass murderer Stan Graham (1900-1941).

   Portrayed with a combination of pathos and unbridled rage by Australian leading man Jack Thompson, Graham is an antisocial sort, a man consumed by bitterness whose devotion to his firearms leads to a catastrophic confrontation with local law enforcement. This triggers a large-scale manhunt in which Graham is finally captured. But not before killing more men who he blames for his failing farm.

   It’s a story that is once particular to a certain time and place in Depression-era western New Zealand and also easily transferable to any rural farming community that divides people into insiders and outsiders. Graham, as depicted in the film, is a paranoid man, so completely consumed by hate that it’s difficult to identify with him.

   And yet, we also get the sense that Graham’s financial failures and isolation are also due in part to a rather rigid community, one so caught up in the ways of propriety that they can’t stand the presence of the rude, uncouth Graham family in their presence. The real life Graham was surely a mass murderer and a villain, a man responsible for taking many lives, but the Graham portrayed on screen is a bit more nuanced. He’s something approaching an anti-hero, but not quite.

   He’s almost an anarchic figure whose refusal to conform leads to unspeakable tragedy for a close-knit community. Still at the end of the day, Graham is responsible for his own actions. After watching Bad Blood, it struck me just how subtle the director’s approach was. Without any sensationalism or over-moralizing, this New Zealand classic tells a “rural noir” story and lets the viewer wrestle with the uncomfortable implications.

PAUL CAIN – Seven Slayers. Saint Enterprises, paperback original, 1946. Avon #268, paperback, 1950. Vintage/Black Lizard, paperback, 1987, 1994.

   And Pulp is a many-splendored thing as witness the stories by Paul Cain (aka screenwriter Peter Ruric) first collected in paperback in 1946 as Seven Slayers. The prose is never more than functional, the characters no deeper than the thickness of a page, but these things move faster than a speeding bullet, impelled by a ruthless logic that goes from Problem to Solution with fast action and not much fuss about what it all means.

   Where Chandler’s five murderers seem driven by ethics, sentiment or an innate decency, Cain’s seven slayers are motivated mostly by greed, and sustained by nothing more than their own expertise. The result lacks the satisfying depth of Chandler’s prose, but it sure makes for satisfying stories.

       Contents:

Black. Black Mask, May 1932
Murder in Blue. Black Mask, June 1933, as “Murder Done in Blue”
One, Two, Three. Black Mask, May 1933
Parlor Trick. Black Mask, July 1932
Pigeon Blood. Black Mask, November 1933
Pineapple. Black Mask, March 1936
Red 71. Black Mask, December 1932

L. L. FOREMAN – Last Stand Mesa. Ace Double 47200, paperback original, 1969, bound with Mad Morgan’s Horde, by Philip Ketchum. Reprinted as a solo volume: Ace 47201, no date stated (cover shown).

   At a spare 126 pages, this western novel still has enough fast-paced action and staying power to keep a reader going through an entire cross-country airplane flight, even interrupted every so often by short naps and offers of pretzels and soft drinks, with time left over for an even meatier private eye novel from the 50s as well. Or so it proved for me.

   Even though the book opens with Mike McLean on the run from a sheriff’s posse on the way to Mexico, he’s portrayed sympathetically enough that we instinctively know he’s not a ruthless outlaw of any shape or form, just a guy who’s down on his luck and who made a mistake. And so he proves to be.

   After McLean saves an elderly gent, a tinhorn gambler named Timothy Sean Mario O’Burrifergus — or Ould Burro for short — from imminent death from a gang of disgruntled former acquaintances, the two down-on-their-luck fugitives join forces and take a detour from their foray into Mexico. They settle down instead in what turns out to be the middle side of an incipient range war, caught between two ranchers, one also the leader of a gang of outlaws, but each of whom wants to control the entire valley.

   There is a girl, of course, a roundup and a stampede, a fancy dance night interrupted before it’s over by hatred and gunfire, a fake wedding and a deadly ambush with a story-shaking outcome — all I say, in a mere 126 pages. A book with almost everything but a major twist or two in the plot, only minor ones. Just enough staying power to keep a reader reading, but alas, none whatsoever afterward.

RAYMOND CHANDLER – Five Murderers. Avon Murder Mystery Monthly #19, digest-sized paperback, 1944; New Avon Library #63, paperback, 1944.

   A brightly packaged confection of early stories by Raymond Chandler, including his first, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” (1933) and his first first-person narration, “Goldfish” (1936).

   Well, they read just like early efforts of a major mystery stylist: the prose is highly-patterned and a bit gaudy, the action scenes plentiful and effective, and the characters sometimes try to behave like something other than figures on a pulp cover.

   The only consistent problem is with the stories themselves, which are mostly over-plotted. Chandler sets up a case (usually missing jewels) then side characters come on and make cryptic comments, bodies turn up, heads are sapped, new actors walk on and off, secrets get shared, lies lied, and (in Chandler’s own words) two men come through the door with guns in their hands.

   This is a lot of to-do for a sixty-page story, and after about 55 pages of it, everything gets sorted out with a wild shoot-’em-up that leaves the bad guys conveniently dead and the good guys still up and about to close the case.

   Pretty awful stuff, really. The wonder is that Chandler’s gifts for sharp characterization and telling prose make it all so pleasant to swallow — and I mean, these are almost compellingly readable. Now and again he slips up — in “Blackmailers” a young starlet opines “They look as if they only existed alter dark, like ghouls. The people are dissipated without grace, sinful without irony.” and it’s all too dearly the author talking, not the character — but in the main these pulp tales are catchy little gems and well worth looking at.

Bibliographic Notes:   None of the five stories feature Philip Marlowe; all first appeared in Black Mask magazine. The other three stories are “Guns at Cyrano’s” (1936), “Nevada Gas” (1935) and “Spanish Blood” (1935).

DAN J. MARLOWE – Operation Counterpunch. Fawcett Gold Medal P3454, paperback original; 1st printing, February 1976.

   This 12th and last of Dan Marlowe’s Earl Drake “Man without a Face” series was a disappointment, starting with the front cover, where Drake appears misshapen and starting to become, dare I say it, paunchy. I also don’t care for books which finish up the action in a previous one, and this one takes some care to tidy up some loose ends from not one but two earlier ones, neither of which have I read.

   To wit: At the end of Operation Deathmaker, book #11, Hazel, Drake’s girl friend and constant companion, was hurt and in the hospital. This one starts with Drake breaking her out before she’s able to answer too many questions, using one of the most embarrassingly juvenile ways of accomplishing this that I can imagine.

   Also: the story in Operation Hammerlock, book #9, had Drake and Hazel ripping off a fabulously rich Mexican gangster. Now he wants revenge, and he doesn’t much care who gets in his way to get it.

   How Drake manages to find Don Luis Morales first and finish him off with all of his henchman is all that this story is about. Drake goes through the motions of changing his face and rest of his appearance every so often, but there’s really no reason to. No undercover espionage assignment this time around, no sneaky plot devices, no interesting characters, just a series that for whatever reason needed to be wound down, including in hindsight, a happy ending at least in sight for the pair.

   It’s a readable book, all right, don’t get me wrong, but it’s still mostly an empty and non-satisfying one.

ALICE & CLAUDE ASKEW “Aylmer Vance and the Vampire.” First published in The Weekly Tale-Teller, UK, July 1914. Collected in Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer (Wordsworth, UK) as “The Vampire.” Anthologized several times over the years, including The Vampire Archives: The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published, edited by Otto Penzler. Available online here.

   Psychic detective Aylmer Vance was the brainchild of husband and wife writer duo Alice and Claude Askew, English authors who were tragically killed when a German submarine sank the ship they were traveling on in 1917. Like his more well known and esteemed counterpart, one Sherlock Holmes, Vance also had an assistant/sidekick who recounted his cases in narrative form. Enter Dexter, Vance’s “Watson,” who acts as “recorder of his strange adventures.”

   In “Aylmer Vance and the Vampire,” the reader learns of a most unusual case investigated by Vance and Dexter, one that involves a vampire and a witch’s curse and unravels less like a mystery and more like a Gothic supernatural tale. Although it’s not a particularly compelling work of detective fiction, the story does contain all of the major tropes of the then emerging modern vampire story.

   There are references to an ancient race, an exotic Continental locale, and the tension between ancient superstitions and modern rational thought and skepticism. There is also a castle, which serves as the locale for strange happenings, one which the narrator Dexter described as a “gloomy edifice” with “the great stone walls, the long corridors, gloomy and cold even on the brightest and warmest of days …”

   All told, “Aylmer and the Vampire” is a solidly constructed vampire story and one that deserves more recognition. While reading it, I couldn’t help but picture Peter Cushing portraying Aylmer Vance in my mind’s eye. That surely counts for something. Recommended.

FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS – Fatal Venture. Hodder & Stughton, UK, hardcover, 1939; Dodd Mead, US, hardcover 1939, as Tragedy in the Hollow. Popular Library #18, US, paperback, under the latter title, 1944.

   Perhaps another dubious entry here. Charles Bristow has a good idea: Buy a salvageable ship and set it up to cruise around the British Isles, visiting hard-to-reach attractions, at a price the average person can afford. As the scheme is developed, however, the ship is turned into a floating casino and priced accordingly.

   Although the ship is registered in France, the British Government is embarrassed by this flouting of their gambling proscription. Inspector French is asked to take a holiday on the.ship with his wife, Em, in the hope he will spot some irregularity and be able to halt the gambling. No irregularities occur, unfortunately, but there is a murder.

   Some criticize Crofts’s novels as being dull, a view with which I do not agree. Oh, sure, the prose is mostly pedestrian and occasionally the detailed confirmation or breaking of alibis can be a bit tedious, but on the whole, Crofts manages to hold at least my attention. Try this one, or one of his many others; you may agree.

Folk singer Patrick Sky’s first album, self-titled, was released in 1965: