I tested positive yesterday again for the Covid virus. I had this sh*t once before, and I thought it was one and done. Not so. So far it’s been only little worse than a bad head cold, and they’re treating me with ordinary OTC medications: ibuprofen, Flonase and some honey-based throat remedy I don’t know how to spell.

   I thought (since I don’t have much else I can do) I’d keep the blog going, but while thinking about what I could be doing, and actually doing it is another. So I’ve decided that the best thing to do is wait it out and start again fresh when it’s run its course.

   And start a New Year all over again! As to what’s happened so far this year, I’d just as soon forget it.

PAUL BOWLES – Let It Come Down. Random House, hardcover, 1952. Signet #1002, paperback, 1953. Reprinted many times since.

   Nelson Dyar is a bored bank teller in the U.S. of A. Waiting for nothing. An acquaintance has apparently established himself in the International Zone (which Burroughs calls ‘Interzone’) of Tangier and invites Dyar to work at his travel agency. Dyar accepts. Nothing else to do.

   The phrase “Let It Come Down” is from MacBeth. One of the characters is scheduled for a hit. He walks by his hit man, saying: ‘Looks like rain’. The hit man says, swinging his sword upon his neck: ‘Let It Come Down’.

   Dyar arrives and his buddy is not all that friendly. In fact, his buddy is just using him as a money laundering mule. British Sterling is strictly controlled in Morocco. And sneaking it in is worth its weight in silver.

   Dyar suspects precisely what is happening, and lets it happen anyway. Let’s himself be seduced by a countess, let’s himself be taken in by a whore. He had nothing going on anyway. So why not?

   And then he finds himself with a shitload of money. And decides, for perhaps the first time in his life, to do something: He steals it.

   He absconds to a hovel in Spain where he waits, smoking more and more hashish, getting more and more stoned, more and more paranoid. And waits. For it to come down.

   Which it does. Inevitably.

         —

   Starts off promising, ends with a meh. I picked this one because I’d just read Peter Rabe’s The Box which got me in the mood for more North African island intrigue. However, as the book goes on, as Dyar gets more and more stoned, as his attentions start to blur and glaze, the book starts to meander too. Like Dyar. Like the camera’s eye. Which is realistic. Just not enjoyable for this reader.

   So the thing is well executed, I guess. I just prefer straight, hardboiled execution. And when the character and narrative start to fall apart, so did my attention.

   I read that a fan once knocked on Bowles’s door excited to visit Tangier, and Bowles, upon opening the door, responded: If you’d read my books, why would you want to visit Tangier? He paints a portrait where everyone and everything is for sale in the International Zone. That there’s nothing too perverted, for a price.

   It’s a place where, if you have no values, you’ll be sucked into intrigue quicker than a duck in a jet engine. But for me, this book was more quack than pâté. And I never liked pâté anyway.

MICHAEL CONNELLY – Trunk Music. Harry Bosch #5, Little Brown, hardcover, 1996. St. Martin’s, paperback, 1998

   Connelly is to me one of the strongest authors to emerge in this decade, and I am a bit surpassed that he hasn’t been nominated for more awards. The Black Echo did win a Best First Edgar, but what I thought was his best, The Concrete Blonde, went almost unnoticed.

   Harry Bosch is back in homicide, after a disciplinary assignment away from trouble and the limelight His first case after he returns is a sleazy filmmaker’ s body in a trunk, one that has all the earmarks of a Mafia hit. The LA Organized Crime boys want no part of it, though, and this makes Harry a little suspicious. He gets even more so when the trail leads to Las Vegas and some mob figures. He follows it there, and finds a troublesome lady from his past, and more suspicions, and a lot more problems than he wanted, needed, or could comfortably deal with-but that’s par for Harry.

   [A line I spotted:] “He smiled glibly.” I’ve always wanted to do that, but never knew how.

   I think this is the first time I’ve given a Connelly book less than a [double star rating], but this was a very ordinary book for Connelly — which means it was above average, and better than most [authors] can  write.  One of the plot elements — his Achilles heel from the first book — wasn’t believable to me, and there wasn’t anything really exceptional about any part of the story.

   It was nevertheless a good book, because Connelly is good enough to be readable even at half speed,  On the whole, though, it was a little disappointing, if only because of the high standard he’s set.

RICHARD ABSHIRE – Dallas Deception. PI Jack Kyle #3. William Morrow, hardcover, 1992. Penguin, paperback, 1993.

   Jack Kyle is one of those oh-so-common PI’s who’s barely squeaking by. He sleeps in his office, for example, and his secretary (named Della) works for the occupants of all the offices on the same floor as his. He’s hired on this case (pro bono) on behalf of a cop friend who’s currently laid up in the hospital. It seems that the daughter of the latter’s very close lady friend has been caught on videotape in some very X-rated activity, and not voluntarily.

   Kyle makes with the rough tough scene, gets the tape, makes sure it is the original (but of course the number of copies can’t be determined for sure, but the frightened Freddy, who orchestrated the scene, tells Kyle that that’s all there is. Maybe, maybe not, but Kyle later finds he has a problem to deal with when he finds Freddy dead, with the very naked daughter in the same room.

   That’s pretty much it. The basic plot line. When spelled out like that, it doesn’t seem like much — not to fill nearly 300 pages of small print in the paperback edition — but I haven’t yet gone into the motive, which verges into very nearly science fiction territory, of the “mad doctor” variety, or at least it was back in the early 1990s, and personally, I didn’t find it very interesting, I have to admit, though, it was certainly different.

   Jack Kyle, who tells the story in good old-fashioned first person, is a likeable lunk of a guy. When he’s actually working on the case, the action scenes are well-described and orchestrated, but the banter between Kyle and his friends and associates often come off as forced and lame. Maybe it was just me, but the best I can do on my H/B scale is a meager 4.7.

   That’s out of 10.
   

      The Jack Kyle series —
1. Dallas Drop (1989)
2. Turnaround Jack (1990)
3. The Dallas Deception (1992)
   

[NOTE]: This is the last of four reviews that went missing during the loss of service undergone by this blog over this past weekend. Unfortunately all of the comments for it have permanently disappeared.

BILL PRONZINI. “Booktaker.” Nameless PI. First appeared in Shosetsu Shincho, 1982, apparently a Japanese collection of four novellas, presumably in English. Also collected in Casefile, St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1983; PaperJacks, Canadian paperback, 1988. Reprinted in Locked Room Puzzles, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini (Academy Chicago, paperback, 1986).

   Nameless is hired in this one by a bookseller friend to investigate the recent thefts of several etchings and old maps, $20,000 worth in 1982 money. (This from the store where Nameless built the bulk of his pulp magazine collection, back when they could still be obtained at reasonable prices.)

   There are only three keys to the room, the owner’s and those of two employees. There are also security devices at all of the ways in and out of the store. It must be an inside job, but which of the store employees is responsible, and the even bigger question is how is he doing it?

   To keep an eye on the situation, Nameless goes undercover in the shop as a new employee, using the name Jim Marlowe. And lo and behold, another rare map disappears, almost literally under Nameless’s eyes and nose.

   It is indeed quite a mystery. Only a chance comment by Nameless’s girl friend Kerry helps lead to the solution to the case, but the culprit is not named until both she and Nameless are nearly run off a dangerous canyon road by another car.

   Wonderful! Without trying to exaggerate too much, this one has everything. Who doesn’t love a bookstore mystery? And a locked room mystery built right into it?
   

[NOTE]: This is the third of four reviews that went missing during the loss of service undergone by this blog over this past weekend. Unfortunately all of the comments for it have permanently disappeared.

PETER RABE – The Box. Gold Medal 632, paperback original, 1956 (cover by Barye Phillips). Stark House Noir Classics, softcover, 2003 (published in a 2-for-1 edition with Journey Into Terror).

   Quinn is a mafia lawyer who screws up. Not quite big enough for the long ride, so he’s given an all expenses paid trip around the globe instead.

   The way it works is this: They knock you out and stick you in a box, about the size of a coffin. They fill it with plenty of food and water and put holes in it for air. Then they nail it shut and stick you on a freighter from NY Harbor to NY Harbor, by way of the world entire.

   Somewhere about halfway thru the voyage, the box top breaks and it starts to smell of human filth. A smell the sailors can’t handle — so they dump the box out at tiny harbor port in Northern Africa.

   Quinn’s got amnesia and doesn’t know what the hell is going on. The locals clean him up and go about trying to get some papers from the consulate on him so they can send him on his merry way.

   But soon enough he gets the lay of the land and his gangland persona kicks in. He decides to take things over in this island town and make his own gangland kingdom by the sea.

   The local corruptor in chief (the mayor) doesn’t take too kindly to this outsider coming in and threatening his take. And so the matter comes to a head: the NY gangster enlists some of the local oppressed Arabs against the African mayor and his cronies. And comes the showdown.

         ————–

   I enjoyed it but it was a bit on the light side in the end. I also didn’t like how hard Rabe tried to push the metaphor of “The Box.” The idea is that humans have “boxes” that they create for themselves. Even with the “benefit” of amnesia, a NY gangster has habits of character created by “The Box” he has caged himself within that will inevitably cause him to become a gangster in whatever environment he finds himself in.

   Not sure I buy it myself. On the other hand, Rabe was a practicing psychologist so he probably knows better than I do. Still, overwrought metaphors are annoying to this boy in the box. I preferred Anatomy of a Killer and Kill the Boss Goodbye.
   

[EDITORIAL NOTE]: This is the second of four reviews that went missing during the loss of service undergone by this blog over this past weekend. Unfortunately all of the comments for it have permanently disappeared.

JACK EARLY – A Creative Kind of Killer. Fortune Fanelli #1. Franklin Watts, hardcover, 1984. Carroll & Graf, paperback, 1995, as by Sandra Scoppettone (the author’s real name).

   Fortune Fanelli, the first-person narrator of A Creative Kind of Killer, is a former cop who inherited money, made a lucky investment, and left the force. He’s now a private investigator, but not exactly the usual kind. He’s a single parent, trying to bring up his two teenage children and work on murder cases at the same time.

   His ex-wife, a soap-opera producer, has no real interest in raising children, so Fortune gets the job. He lives in New York’s SoHo district, and the first murder in the book takes place right in his neighborhood. The killer is “creative,” posing the corpse in the window of a boutique so artfully that Fanelli himself admits he must have passed the body six limes without noticing it.

   His investigation of the case leads him both into the arty crowd and into the more sordid world of runaways and kiddy porn.

   A Creative Kind of Killer is a promising debut. Fanelli is an interesting character, and his relationship with his children makes for a different kind of subplot. The love interest is provided by a young woman who is a dead ringer for Meryl Streep; and Father Paul, the handsome local priest. is a strong character.

   Early is particularly good in his descriptions of SoHo, and Fanelli’s feelings about the changes in his old neighborhood are an effective commentary on one man’s desire to remain involved in his community. The mystery is a good one, too, and the resolution satisfactory. It seems likely that Fanelli will appear in other cases in the near future.

   Early’s second novel, Razzamatazz (1985), is a straight thriller sans Fanelli, however.

         ———
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.
   

[UPDATE]: In spite of Bill’s suggestion that it might happen, a second recorded case for Fortune Fanelli never occurred.
   

[ADDED NOTE]: This is the first of four reviews that went missing during the loss of service undergone by this blog over this past weekend. Unfortunately all of the comments for it have permanently disappeared.

   I say that with my fingers crossed, since I haven’t tested everything, but with only a few casualties, the recent outage crisis for the blog is over. What had to be done was a full restore to the blog going back to before the problem arose. That seems to have done the trick.

   Missing, though, are all of the posts that appeared here after Tuesday of last week. I made backups of those, though, and they will all appear again as soon as I can get to them. The bad news is that any comments that were left for those most recent posts are gone forever.

   This is better news than I was anticipating, though, as one possible outcome for the restore operation was that the posts would all come back, but ALL of the comments left for the blog since its inception would have disappeared. That would have been a loss awfully hard to take.

   So that’s the news for now. I’ll get to work replacing the missing posts as soon as I can.

ED McBAIN – Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear. Matthew Hope #12. Warner, hardcover, 1996; paperback, 1998.

   The [previous] Hope novel, There Was a Little Girl, ended on something of an uncertain note, and I was interested to see where and if McBain would go from there with the series. Though one of the [earlier] books — Mary, Mary — was just about as bad as they come, on the whole I’ve enjoyed [them]. Neat title on this one, too.

   Gladly, the optically-challenged ursine, is a toy invented and patented by Hope’s young lady client. The problem is that her previous employers, a toy designing and making firm, are marketing a very similar toy. She’s suing, and they’re counter-suing, and who knows what the judge will decide?

   That all fades into the background when one of the legal antagonists gets messily murdered, and Hope’s client is charged with the crime. Did Hope, recently emerged from a five-month coma, doesn’t think so, but proving it is another story. Particularly so because the story his client tells keeps changing, and never for the better.

   McBain nearly always writes like the seasoned, best-selling professional he is, and that’s the case here. There is a dab of courtroom (all connected with the patent case), some investigation, a tad of Hope’s personal problems, a little danger, and it’s all mixed into a very readable and enjoyable book.

   Taken separately, none of the elements are anything special, and in the hands of a less accomplished writer, it would have been an average read at best; but McBain is McBain, and that do make a difference.

JOHN DICKSON CARR. “The Third Bullet.” Colonel Marquis #1. Novella. First published as a novel in 1937 under Carr’s “Carter Dickson” pen name (Hodder & Stoughton, UK). A shorter version appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1948 (cut by perhaps 20%). Collected in The Third Bullet and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1954; Harper & Bros., US, hardcover, 1954). Collected in Locked Room Puzzles, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini (Academy Chicago, paperback, 1986).

   This one is a good one, but only if you’re already a fan of locked room mysteries. If you’re not, I don’t think it will go down well enough to convert you. It’s too single-minded as to the plot, with the barest amount of time spent of either the setting or the characters. But for the record, here’s the basic setup and hold on tight. It’s complicated:

   A murder is committed while the police are watching from the outside through a window and while another policeman is knocking on the only inside door leading to a hall inside the house. The windows are sealed tight (but footsteps are found leading from one of the windows). Only one person was in the room, other than the victim. No one else went in nor went out. No one was hiding inside.

   Two guns are found in the room. One was the one the suspect used; the other is found hidden in a vase. However — and this is a big “however” — ballistics show that neither one was used to kill the victim, a judge who had previously sentenced the suspect quite severely (flogging as well as a prison term).

   The investigation begins on page one, and it continues non-stop until the case is solved. Colonel Marquis is clearly a forerunner of Colonel March, one of Carr’s other more well-known detectives. Even if this was his only appearance, which is likely, he’s the sort of fellow who relishes a case such as this one, and almost as much as I do. The basic explanation is both very intricate and very simple, but the latter doesn’t mean I solved it before Colonel Marquis does.

   To my mind, very nicely done.