THOMAS B. DEWEY – Death and Taxes. Mac #14. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1967. Berkley, paperback, May 1968.

   This one starts out the way a good old-fashioned PI story should – no, I’ll take that back. Any good PI story should start with a good-looking blonde entering the PI’s office as a would-be client. But consider this as the next best thing:

   
   Given that Marco Paul having been an old-fashioned Chicago gangster for most of his life, and this is an old-fashioned hit straight out of Black Mask Magazine, you might even decide that this is a better first sentence than the worn-out Gorgeous Blonde Client Gambit.

   And as it turns out, Marco Paul is/was on the verge of becoming Mac’s client. What Paul wanted Mac to do is make sure that his daughter gets the million dollars in cash he has stashed away for her, tax-free.

   So far, Mac has said he’d think about it. Does he know where the million dollars is? No. They hadn’t gotten around to that. Do other parties (both friends — some closer than others — and family) think he knows where the million dollars is? Yes, and they become actively involved in finding out where it is.

   At one point along the way Mac is severely tortured and beaten. Does he recover in the very next scene and carry on as usual, as a certain detective named Joe Mannix always did after being conked on the head? No. Definitely not. This is real life that Mac is living through, and real life often hurts.

   I mentioned Black Mask a short distance upstairs. This reads – or at least the first half does – like a finely tuned Black Mask story, a little more literate and a little more polished, perhaps,  and it is a lot of fun to read. Unfortunately when it comes time to pull all of the plot threads together, Death and Taxes becomes a lot more standard type of PI tale, with lots of guns blazing away and a lengthy explanation of who did what to whom and when.

   I going to call it a mixed bag, then, and let you decide, once you take me up on this proposition, to read this for yourself and tell me which half you preferred.

SIMON JAY – Death of Skin Diver. Collins, hardcover, 1964. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1964.

   The author’s first book and he only wrote one more. Set in New Zealand, it opens with the accidental drowning of a skin diver – or at least it appears to be accidental until absent-minded detective, Dr/ Peter Much, a practicing pathologist, notices one or two inconsistencies and follows them up.

   More violence and death follow, and Much is nearly killed himself. There is mysterious sea chase (and endpaper map to illustrate it), and the unusual crime of gin running (yes, that’s right, gin not gun) is at the bottom of it all.

   By no means a classic, but nonetheless well worth searching out for Dr. Much and his haphazard detection.

Bibliographic Update: Simon Jay’s second and only other mystery novel was Sleepers Can Kill (Collins, 1968). Unfortunately, there is no indication in Hubin that Dr. Much made a second appearance in it.

J. D. KIRK – A Litter of Bones. DCI Jack Logan #1. Zertex Crime, hardcover, October 2020. Setting: Scotland.

First Sentence: The total collapse of Duncan Reid’s life began with a gate in the arse-end of nowhere.

   The past comes back to haunt DCI Jack Logan. A boy has disappeared, and the case has all the characteristics of “Mister Whisper,” a serial child-killer Logan put away ten years ago. When another child goes missing, Jack is sent to lead the investigation. Did Jack have the wrong man all those years ago? Is this a copycat. Either way, Jack needs to do everything possible to rescue the boy.

   It takes very little time to recognize the quality of Kirk’s writing and his skill for dialogue. He provides a well-done introduction to Logan’s team and their personalities. Sinead and DC Hamza Khaled are particularly well utilized in their roles.

   One appreciates the hints of humour with their very Scottish flair— “But in a minute, I’m going to hear a cry for help from within this house, giving me no choice but to break this door down and investigate.” …Sinead hesitated, then nodded. …He watched as Sinead leaned past him, turned the handle, and pushed the door open. “It’s the Highlands,” she told him. “We don’t always lock our doors.” What a good example of Logan being out of his element while showing his fallibility.

   Kirk establishes an excellent sense of place, whether it be a small, mid-terrace house, or the open area. Yet it is the excellence of conveying the fear and frustration of the family which are particularly compelling. His ability to escalate suspense is palpable, cementing the plot as being a ripping page turner filled with wicked twists. Be aware that there are scenes related to animal torture, and others not for the faint of stomach.

   A Litter of Bones is a straight-through, non-stop read filled with great characters, action, suspense, emotional impact, twists and just enough humor for balance. There are no portents, just a wicked good story that keeps on turning the pages. It is dark, and there are scenes unpleasant to read, yet the positive qualities outweigh the negative and compel one to read the next book.

Rating: Excellent.

RAYMOND CHANDLER – Farewell, My Lovely. Philip Marlowe #2, Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1940. Reprinted many times.

MURDER, MY SWEET. RKO, 1944.  Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley, Otto Kruger, Mike Mazurki and Miles Mander. Screenplay by John Paxton, from the novel Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler. Directed by Edward Dmytryk.

   I like to get back to Raymond Chandler once a year or so, and late last year it was Farewell, My Lovely (1940) a fun read enlivened by Chandler’s polished prose and feel for violence. This is the one with Marlowe getting knocked around by Moose Malloy — a character who seems to have inspired the Incredible Hulk — then waking up in a sanitarium for more sadistic fun. Add some engagingly corrupt cops, stolen whoosis and the inevitable near-fatale femme and you get a book that set the standard for a whole generation of tough mysteries.

   I have to say there’s about twenty-five wasted pages — something about Marlowe trying to get on a gambling ship that takes an awfully long time to reach a plot point he could have covered by a phone call, but by and mainly, Lovely still seems fresh and surprisingly un-clichéd nearly seventy years on.

   This was filmed in 1942 as The Falcon Takes Over, with George Sanders’ debonair sleuth replacing Marlowe, and under its original title in 1975, with Chandler’s archetypal detective played by Robert Mitchum, himself something of an archetype by then. But the definitive version came out in 1944 under the title Murder, My Sweet.

   Murder, My Sweet ushered in film noir, and no wonder; it’s a dazzling visual thing, brightly scripted and intelligently played, the kind of movie that sets a style and inspires imitation. Director Edward Dmytryk fills the screen with monster-movie imagery — hard shadows, cobwebs, lurking things coming out of the night — and plays it off beautifully against a hard-edged, take-no-sh*t attitude. Dick Powell’s Marlowe sometimes seems petulant when he ought to look tough, but for a trend-setting film, there are remarkably few false notes played here.

   Speaking of notes though, the ending of Murder, My Sweet echoes another horror-influenced film released months earlier, The Pearl of Death (Universal, 1944) one of Roy William Neill’s superior “B” Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone. Both movies end with an unarmed detective cornered in a room with Miles Mander and a hulking brute enraged by… well, you get the idea.

   I only wonder what actor Miles Mander must have thought, finding himself playing out the same scene at different studios just months, or maybe weeks, apart.

WILLIAM D. BLANKENSHIP – The Programmed Man. Walker, hardcover, 1973. Manor Books, paperback, 1975.

Credit where it is due, that opening draws a clear picture I’m betting every one who reads this review can instantly see. Who hasn’t been in one of those bright clean and relentlessly dingy type offices at some point? Kudos to Blankenship for nailing the experience.

I’ll let the hardboiled sleuth introduce himself, “My name is Michael Saxon. Saxon Security Systems. I’m in the business of industrial security, Franklin, and I’ve been hired by the InterComp Corporation to look into the use you’re making of that computer terminal back there.”

There, that saves some time. Nothing like jumping in with both feet. The Franklin is one Adam Franklin, six foot five of trouble who hisses ‘like a German Gestapo officer’ and in short order cleans the floor with our hero and takes off.

Michael Saxon is an ex cop, and while far from the first industrial detective may be the first to specialize in computer crime in this 1973 novel published by Walker in hardcover and Manor books in 1975 (nice cover on the Manor paperback edition). Of course computers had been around for a while, and were common in Fifties science fiction movies and police procedurals and by the end of the decade even showing up in comedy (Desk Set and The Man From the Diner’s Club), but unless an abacus features in one of Robert Van Gulik’s Judge Dee translations, I’m not sure when the first computer shows up in written mystery fiction, much less the first computer sleuth.

A sort of computer/robot features in John Dickson Carr’s The Crooked Hinge, but turns out to be something else, and by the mid to late sixties computers were pretty common in SF and James Bond era spy novels. I have seen it claimed the first computer bug appears in one of James Mayo’s Charles Hood novels, Let Sleeping Girls Lie (and it’s an actual bug, a cockroach that screws up the works for the bad guys thanks to Hood), and features in Len Deighton’s The Billion Dollar Brain. I’m just not sure where the first one showed up in straight mystery fiction, or if this has some minor historical significance as the first book to deal with hacking and computer sleuthing.

I don’t want to oversell this on that point. It is pretty much a standard, relatively hardboiled private eye novel right down to the sexist tropes. Saxon is not programmer (for that he calls on a Japanese/American friend, another computer clich’ that may be new here), but a fairly well connected private eye type with an eye for attractive women, a penchant for violence, and more gun play than most real private eyes see unless they served in combat.

Here we have him considering the women in the case in the typical voice of the times:

Structurally and in terms of action there is nothing unique here you wouldn’t find in a standard Johnny Liddell adventure or any private eye episode on episodic television (the first season of Mannix certainly beats this guy to the boat on the computer tie-in, though not the hacking thing or how ubiquitous computer terminals became in small businesses allowing for hacking. I want to say computers figure in episodes of The Rogues and Checkmate too, but I’m not certain).

Of course nothing is as simple as it starts out in any private eye novel and it turns out something more important than a few stray files belonging to InterComp are missing, a revolutionary business model system has been stolen and must be recovered. It’s a fairly good mystery plot really.

This is a quick enough read, well written, just not terribly original save in the subject matter, but it and Saxon pass the likability threshold despite his sexism. I know most of what is in this regarding computers was old hat to us who read SF, but my question was how new was it to mystery fiction in 1973, a good decade before the ubiquitous home PC would sit on desks in dorms and home offices.

Blankenship wrote several novels including Yukon Gold, and Brotherly Love, which was a 1985 made for television movie with Judd Hirsch. Among his other works are Tiger Ten, The Levenworth Irregulars, The Time of the Wolf, Mark Twain and the Hanging Judge, and The Helix File (which sounds as if it might be another Saxon novel, and with its 1970 date maybe the first). I confess I recognize the name, but never read anything else by him, something rectified with this one.

Hopefully someone will know if this one has a bit of historical import or was just hooking onto an already moving train. It would be interesting if it proved to be the first novel about computer hacking. If not, it’s not a bad read, though a bit dated in some of its attitudes for more modern readers.

BILL CRIDER “See What the Boys in the Locked Room Will Have.” First published in Partners in Crime, edited by Elaine Raco Chase (Signet, paperback, 1994). Not known to have been collected or reprinted.

   The gimmick of the Partners in Crime anthology is not a difficult one to figure out, just from the title. It’s a collection of original mystery stories in which two detectives pair up to solve various cases together. In large part,  these are detectives created by the same author, some created especially for this anthology. In one instance, though, two authors bring their respective characters together to solve the case (Margaret Maron and Susan Dunlap).

   In “See What the Boys in the Locked Room Will Have,” Bill Crider created a brand new pair of protagonists, collaborative mystery writers Bo Wagner and Janice Langtry. He plots, she writes, he types. It’s an uneasy relationship, in more ways than one, but it seems to work. So well that when a strange death occurs in the same town where they live, the police call them in asking for help.

   A man both Bo and Janice knew well has been shot and kills in his study. There is no gun to be found, but with the room under observation when the shots are heard, there is no one who could have committed the crime.

   It’s a good mystery, with lots of clues, and even though it’s a rather short tale, the deductions come fast and furious. Bo’s recreation of the crime takes up more of the space, but it’s his partner in crime writing who manages to put  the facts together correctly, to his chagrin. As the author of this fully engaging story, Crider has to do a fast bit of handwaving, perhaps, to make it all work, but I was satisfied, and so should you, if you’re ever able to get yours hands on a copy.
   

Bibliographic Note: Bo Wagner and Janice Langtry appeared together in two later stories:

   “The Case of the Headless Man,” Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1997.

   “At the Hop,” with Judy Crider,   Till Death Do Us Part, edited by Jill M.Morgan and Martin H.  Greenberg, Berkley, paperback, 1999. Nominated for the Anthony Award for Best Mystery Short Story of 1999.

GEORGES SIMENON – The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By. Routledge, UK, hardcover, 1942. Reynal & Hitchcock, US, hardcover, 1946. Translation of “L’Homme Qui Regardait Passer les Trains.” Paris, 1938. Film: Stoss, 1952; released in the U.S. as Paris Express (starring Claude Rains and Märta Torén; screenwriter & director: Harold French).

   Kees Popinga is an ordinary guy. He’s general manager for a shipping company. It’s an ordinary job. He’s got an ordinary wife. Couple of ordinary adolescent kids. But he spends his money with class. The best stove. The best of umbrellas. Measured suits. Excellent cigars. The finest of bicycles. A very nice middle class home. The best on the block.

   And he’s respected by his peers. He’s in the chess club. He’s quite a bit better than most at it.

   And, really, everything could have gone on like this forever.

   But by chance enters a bar and sees the owner of his shipping company, an extremely respectable chap, 60-ish, drunk off his ass.

   The boss confesses that tonight he’s about to fake his own suicide — as he’s laundered scads of money thru the company, has cashed it out, and the firm’ll be bankrupt this time tomorrow. He’ll be ‘dead’ but really disappeared with a new name, a new life. Destination unnamed.

   The boss lectures Kees on the stupidity of the common man. About how all of society is just a bunch of crap. And the common man is just a tool. A tool for the wise guys to use like pawns to do all the dirty work so that the wise guys can live the good life. As an example of ‘the high life’ he regales Kees with tales of conquests, not the least of which is his ‘kept woman’ in Copenhagen — Pamela. A local dancing legend for her lascivious beauty. Kees drools at the thought.

   Kees thinks to himself: The Boss thinks he’s the wise guy. But I’ve been wise my whole life too. I always knew my bourgeois life was a bunch of bullshit. I never really liked my wife. I never really liked my house, my kids, my job. I always new it was a bunch of crap. But I never gave myself the liberty to drift. I’ve been faithful. I’ve been a ‘respectable citizen’. But why?

   No longer content to watch the trains go by, he jumps the next for Copenhagen to pay a call on Pamela. The luscious, promiscuous Pamela.

   Arriving at her rooms, she opens the door. Do I know you, she asks? Kees immediately propositions her. This rotund, middle aged pinhead. He gets straight to the point. Pamela chuckles. What’s so funny, he asks. And she laughs again, this time louder. It’s not funny, he says. Stop laughing. And now she’s hysterical. She cannot stop laughing at this horny toad.

   So he strangles her.

   That’s what happens when you laugh at Kees Popinga. He is not a man to be trifled with. Humiliated. Who was this whore to ridicule him!

   And now. A train for Paris.

   The authorities have traced Kees Popinga as far as Paris. But they know not where. Now it’s a game of hide and seek. And his chance to prove he’s smarter than the stupid police inspector.

   He is insulted by how he’s portrayed in the papers. They claim he is insane. His wife even says he’s lost his mind! If only they knew. He’s not crazy. He’s always been this way. Only by the greatest secreted repressions has he played the stupid part of the ‘good citizen’ all these years. He’s not crazy. He’s simply finally being completely honest. Completely free.

   It’s a good portrayal of how a ‘respectable citizen’ can have a psychotic turn. And interesting that the criminal sees himself as completely sane—while in fact he is losing his grip. But of course the crazy person thinks they’re sane. That’s why they’re crazy!

   I personally enjoy Simenon’s romans durs (hard novels) to his Maigret’s. The prose isn’t necessarily that different. But the romans durs are Simenon channeling Jim Thompson. Think The Killer Inside Me with mid-century French manners. With the overlay of WWII and fascism hanging its noir quilt over all of the proceedings.

   Made into a 1952 film starring Claude Rains as Kees Popinga:

POUL ANDERSON – Murder Bound. Trygve Yamamura #3. Macmillan, hardcover, 1962.

   Authors better known for other sorts of writing have occasionally produced good detective novels. Tales by A. A.Milne, C. P. Snow, Antonia Fraser, Isaac Asimov and William F. Buckley (well kind of) come immediately to mind.

   Poul Anderson, the accomplished science fiction and fantasy author, tried his hand at three detective novels between 1959 and 1962. It’s not surprising that the strongest sections of his third mystery, Murder Bound, contain some fantasy elements, especially the scenes connecting Norse sea-legends with modern mystery.

   The book opens with Conrad Lauring returning to America aboard the liner Valborg and listening to tales of Draugs, the ghosts of men drowned st sea. A sailor named Benrud then unaccountably starts a fight and disappears overboard. When Lauring reaches San Francisco, his life is threatened by apparent manifestations of a faceless Draug (Benrud’s ghost), dripping seaweed and all.

   Though Anderson gives some fine atmospheric descriptions of San Francisco, he remainder of Murder Bound is a letdown.· For one thing, it’s difficult to take seriously the investigations of someone named Trygve Yamamura. I’m not kidding; that’s really’ is the name of Anderaon’s private eye. He’s half-Norwegian,. half-Hawaiian, a judo expert who collects Samurai swords.

   Maybe if Anderson had made Yamamura’s Aryan Hawaiianism part of the story, the detective would be acceptable; but in fact; he’s just a normal P,I., and one who seems a bit slow on the uptake. Second, not only is the identity of the Draug  obvious, but the solution assumes an amazing amount of incompetence from a former Gestapo agent.

   There are enough good sections in Murder  Bound to justify spending a few hours with it, but it is not really worthy of an author who could produce such-splendid fantasy novels as A Midsummer’s Tempest and Three Hearts and Three Lions.

The Trygve Yamamura series —

   Poul Anderson: (novels)

Perish by the Sword.  Macmillan 1959.
Murder in Black Letter. Macmillan 1960.
Murder Bound. Macmillan 1962.

   Poul Anderson: (short stories)

Pythagorean Romaji. The Saint Mystery Magazine, December 1959
Stab in the Back. The Saint Mystery Magazine, March 1960
The Gentle Way.  The Saint Mystery Magazine, August 1960,

   Karen & Poul Anderson: (short story)

Dead Phone. The Saint Mystery Magazine, December 1964

A. A. FAIR – Bats Fly At Dusk. Bertha Cool & Donald Lam #6. William Morrow, hardcover, 1942. Reprinted many times, including Dell D348, paperback, April 1960; cover art by Bob McGinnis.

   I mention this particular paperback edition because it has my signature written inside on the back of the front cover, suggesting that I bought the book new at the time it was published. I assume I read it back then, but since it’s now over 60 years later, you will understand when I say I remembered nothing from any previous reading.

   This book also has some significance in a totally different way. At the end of my recent review of All Grass Isn’t Green, I asked somewhat rhetorically whether Bertha Cool ever had any cases she had to tackle on her own. It turns out that the answer was yes, as David Vineyard quickly replied in a comment, and this is one of perhaps two in which Donald Lam is off fighting the war, having recently signed up to join the Navy.

   This doesn’t mean he doesn’t take part in the case. When Bertha finds herself over her head in solving it, she fires off telegrams to her new partner in the firm, and he replies with several cogent suggestions, of course by means of collect messages throughout the second half of the book.

   The cases begins innocuously enough. Bertha is hired by a blind man who “witnessed” a traffic accident to a girl who had befriended him while selling pencils on the street. He does not know her name and would like to know if she’s OK.

   From here things get … complicated, as complicated as an Erle Stanley Gardner/A. A, Fair story ever gets, and that is very. I don’t think Bertha Cool was strong enough as a character to carry a whole novel on her own, but as a puzzle story, the tale itself is certainly top of the line. There are plenty of clues to be scrutinized carefully, and if put together properly, the discerning reader may (!) be able to piece it all together. (That particular statement does not apply to me.)

   Even the title is a clue.

   But as for Bertha Cool as a solo leading character, I fear she’s too one-dimensional as a living being (her sole motive is her love for money) to be that interesting for as long a time as a full-length novel. Read this one for the puzzle only. It’s a good one.

JACK LISTON – Man Bait. Dell First Edition B-158, 1960. Cover art by Robert Maguire.

   Not to be confused with the 1952 Hammer film I reviewed here earlier. This is the goods.

   Bill Madden starts out the book as a sailor on extended shore leave in New York City. Extended because he contracted a nasty social disease that got complicated by a nastier dose of bad penicillin. A couple chapters later he’s close to recovered and at loose ends, so he hooks up with Marcia, a bar waitress who provides him with companionship and convenient sex.

   As Bill waits for an “all-clear” report from his doctor so he can go back to sea, his relationship with Marcia evolves from convenient to committed, marred considerably by her insecurity and his immaturity, a nasty concoction that leads Marcia to take petty revenge when Bill gets spectacularly unfaithful to her.

   I’ll warn potential readers from the outset that this relationship business takes up three-fourths of Man Bait. But I’ll add that author Liston (more on him later) makes it a compelling thing, with hints of danger like movement in the shadows, never quite clear or explicit, but out there.

   And when the action comes, Liston handles it quite nicely thank you, with bursts of terse conflict and inventive bits of business. And with some surprising and very effective moments as characters we’ve seen amiably chatting just a few pages ago suddenly show a whole ’nother side of themselves.

   According to the Paperback Warrior website, “Jack Liston“ was a pseudonym employed by writer Ralph Maloney — a Harvard man, author of “highbrow” novels (whatever those are) and classy stories printed in the slicks — for Man Bait, his one and only paperback original. I assume that he used some influence with publishers to land at the top of the pulp-paper heap at Dell, but looking at that eye-catching cover, I’m glad if he did.