PAUL DOIRON “Backtrack.” Short story. Charley Stevens. Minotaur Books, ebook, June 2019. [See also Comment #3.]

First Sentence: There were four doctors staying at the hunting camp.

   Game warden Charley Stevens is called to the winter hunting camp in Maine where four doctors from Massachusetts are staying. However, one of them is missing. It’s up to Charley to find the missing man.

   The first thing to know is that this story does not feature game warden Mike Bowditch, but focuses on Charley Stevens, who had been Mike’s mentor. The story is also told, very effectively, in retrospect.

   A well-done short story truly is a work of art. Such is the case here. With a nicely done twist, Doiron takes the reader from suspense to something unexpected and poses an excellent question while dealing with the subject of regret.

   The thing with a short story is that one can’t say too much for fear of including a spoiler. What one can say is how much this story may make one think and question what one would do in the same situation. It may also make one want to read much more of Doiron’s work. The good news is that there is an impressive backlist.

   “Backtrack” is a perfect title for this excellent e-short. It really does take great skill to write a story this short which is this impactful.

Rating: Excellent.

Singer songwriter Sean Della Croce is being interviewed on WWUH, a local college radio station, right now:

“The Evil Eye of Count Ducrie!” Appeared as the first story in KEN SHANNON #1. Quality Comics, October 1951. Bi-monthly. Art unsigned but generally known to be by Reed Crandall. [Story by Joe Millard. See comment #1.]

   Hardboiled (and somewhat lantern-jawed) private eye Ken Shannon’s first appearance was not in this, the first issue of his own comic, but rather in issue 103 of Police Comics (December 1950). That’s when both Plastic Man and The Spirit were dropped, and a new lineup of non-superhero crime-stoppers were introduced. Evidently he was popular enough there that the folks at Quality gave him his own title, all the while continuing on in Police Comics.

   His assistant (and quite possibly a very close girl friend) was the fiery red-haired Dee Dee Dawson, and as “The Evil Eye of Count Ducrie!” the first story in this issue begins, she and Shannon stop a young girl from jumping off a bridge. It seems as though she believes her life is cursed. All of her recent boyfriends have died in strange and unusual ways.

   Taking the true blame, however, is her current suitor, the much older and quite evil-looking Count Ducrie, who threatens Shannon with death when he tries to interfere, and he very nearly succeeds. If this sounds screwy, that’s because it is,and yet, in spite of anything I expected, this is a fair play mystery, or at least it makes a good effort to try to be.

   Two more Shannon stories, “The Playful Pickpocket” and “The Carrier Pigeon Case!,” appear later in this issue. Both are seven pages long, as compared to ten for the lead story. All three of the Shannon stories are filled with action and fisticuffs, but they’re surprisingly heavy on dialogue as well. You do have to read them!

   Sandwiched in between the first and second Shannon story is a five page untitled adventure of Angles O’Day, another private eye whose cases were decidedly on the humorous side. His stories, all backups in Shannon’s comic books, were drawn by Jack Cole, creator of Plastic Man of superhero fame, and who later became quite well known as a cartoonist for Playboy magazine.

CLARK HOWARD “Blues in the Kabul Night.” Novelette. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine September/October 2007. Not known to have been reprinted or collected anywhere.

   Over the course of his writing career, Clark Howard may have written over 200 short stories, not all of them criminous in nature, plus a couple dozen crime novels and collections. This does not include an unspecified number of works of true crime the editor of EQMM mentions in her introduction to this tale.

   Howard hardly ever used a character more than once, and “Blues in the Kabul Night” is no exception. When mercenary for hire Morgan Tenny smuggles himself into war-ravaged Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, it is for a specific reason. His twin brother is in a high security prison there and scheduled for execution soon, unless Morgan can do something about it.

   Which he thinks he can. Not only does he have a plan, but he also has a local contact. And even more, he has a million dollars in cash to help pave the way. Complicating matters, though, since of course plans like this never run smoothly, is a news reporter, a local Afghani girl who has ambitions of her own: to be the next Christiane Amanpour, and when she gets wind of Morgan’s plans, she doesn’t let go.

   Not only does Clark Howard notch up the suspense extremely well — this is essentially a heist novel in miniature — but the sights of sounds (and smells) of Kabul today (or to be precise, twelve years ago, but have things changed all that much?) are vividly brought to life. A polished gem of a story, and very very well done.

GOLIATH “Of Mice and Men.” Amazon Prime, streaming. 14 October 2016 (Season 1, episode 1). Billy Bob Thornton, William Hurt, Maria Bello, Nina Arianda and a large additional ensemble cast. Creators: David E. Kelley & Jonathan Shapiro. Director: Lawrence Trilling.

   One of the unexpected benefits of obtaining my first Kindle and finding out how to use it was accidentally signing up for Amazon Prime. Since the first 30 days are free, I decided why not and started looking around to see what TV series might be available.

   I don’t know why I happened to pick this one, but I’ve just watched the first episode on my large screen computer monitor (I have an even large TV screen, but it’s a smart TV, and it’s way smarter than I am), and all in all it was a good choice. Good enough that I’m planning on finishing up the story, another seven episodes. I reserve the right to bail out, though, if the story line goes off in directions too funky for me to stay with it.

   Which, on the basis of one episode, I don’t think it will. There’s nothing basically new in what I’ve seen already. A burned out lawyer named Billy McBride (Billy Bob Thornton), and I mean down and out, is reduced to piddling jobs that he couldn’t care less about, but when he’s offered one that might give him a chance to get back at his old firm, he jumps at it.

   A death at sea has been chalked up to suicide — by a man blowing up both himself and the boat he’s borrowed in an explosive fireball of flame — may be the key to his revenge. The man’s wife has already settled with the insurance company, but his sister. now two years later, still thinks there’s something that needs explaining.

   Complicating matters is that Billy’s ex-wife is high in the hierarchy at the law firm involved, the same law firm that still has his name on the door. There are several other characters involved, including, in no particular order, Billy’s daughter; a lady co-partner in the lawsuit he initiates who is basically a real agent in the Valley; and a legal assistant who is basically a hooker who owes Billy Bob a favor; and so on.

   Enough threads, in other words, to keep the story going for the full season, and then some, but here are a couple of things that annoyed me. The prologue is poorly done. That there were two boats, not just one, out on the water when the explosion happened was not at all clear — one that blew up, the other with two witnesses.

   And while I’m no expert on what it is that women see in men, and while perhaps some women may succumb quickly to the attractive features of whoever Billy Bob Thornton may play, I found the possibility that Billy and his new client hop into bed together, no more than ten minutes of their first meeting, rather far-fetched.

   Otherwise, at this point of my viewing status, all is OK. The first episode ends with Billy is a local jail, imprisoned on trumped-up charges of some totally bogus driving protocol. That this happens on the first day he is to be in court does not seem to be coincidental. But from here, as they say, to be continued.

There are musical performances so unique as to be one of a kind. Take this one, for example:

GSO = Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.

DENNIS WHEATLEY – The Haunting of Toby Jugg. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1948. Bantam, US, paperback, 1972. Several paperback editions have been published. TV film: BBC Four, UK, as The Haunted Airman, with Robert Pattinson as Toby Jugg.

   I wuz had.

   I mean there I was, all alone in the Big city and looking for some Halloween reading. I’d heard of Dennis Wheatley, and the cover of the Arrow paperback suckered me in good & proper. Then too, the story seemed pretty good at first, if a little long at 352 pages. So I settled myself in for a chilling tale of things Satanic, little suspecting….

   Haunting is one of those books written as a series of journal entries, here by the eponymous Toby Jugg, an RAF flyer (this is set in 1943) recovering from war wounds that left him unable to walk. He’s also the heir to several million pounds and an industrial empire, due to inherit when he turns twenty-one in a few weeks, and he’s convalescing in one of the family castles, far from the madding bombs – and contact with society—under the watchful eye of Helmuth, a trusted family friend.

   And oh yes: as the story opens there’s a giant spider outside his window trying to get in.

   Wheatley sets this up capably, with Toby giving updates on the spider’s appearances and the reactions of Helmuth and the staff specially hired to look after him. We very quickly come to suspect he’s being gaslighted, and I won’t be giving anything away to say that he is—but there’s more to it than that. Something implacably evil has plans for Toby that go well beyond giant spiders at the window.

   With all that going for it, >Haunting coulda been a contender. Only it ain’t.

   The chief problem is Wheatley’s repetitive plotting. Time and again Toby comes up with a plan to thwart his persecutors, gets things rolling, comes close to success but… but we still have all those pages to fill so his efforts get frustrated with metronomic regularity. Once or twice I could have handled this, but after the fourth or fifth failure, and 200+ pages to go, I began to wonder if someone was trying to drive both of us mad.

   Another thing: Maybe it sounds inconsistent to accept giant spiders and Satanic curses, then gripe about the story being unrealistic, but when Toby masters the art of Hypnotism and bends the unwilling and unsuspecting to his will just by eye contact, I felt like Wheatley must be kidding us. And when he forcibly hypnotizes someone by wrestling them to the ground and holding their eyes open, I devoutly wished he were kidding. Only he ain’t.

   There’s also a strong current of Anti-Semitism here. “Anti-Semitism” is a term that gets entirely too much play these days, but Wheatley’s story posits that Jews, having killed Christ, will think small potatoes of serving Satan, turning Communist, bringing down the Government, and ushering in a Satanocracy. There’s even a racial slur, when Toby observes that a character with a tinge of Jewish blood can’t properly wear the clothes of an English Squire. Readers of vintage fiction like this should be prepared to overlook the attitudes of a different time, particularly toward minorities, but this taxed my tolerance for intolerance.

   But I hung on to the end, buoyed, I must admit, by Wheatley’s gift for tension. And as the odds stacked up against Toby, and he worked even harder to plot an escape, I became emotionally invested in just how he would do it.

   Came the dawn, and I realized what a fool I had been. Betrayed again by a smooth line and my own weakness, I finally got to the dramatic climax and found it the most blatantly stage-managed bit of deus ex machina claptrap I have ever read. I — literally, and without exaggeration — flung it across the room and regretted the squander of my precious youth on such drivel.

   Steve, should I tell them about it? I’ll let you decide. We can either end it here with me waving readers away from this thing, or insert a SPOILER ALERT! And go on. In either case, they have been warned!

   Surrounded by Satanists and menaced by a spider the size of a St Bernard, Toby Prays to God for help. And God answers. Suddenly Toby can walk again. And he has some mystical power that disintegrates the Spider. The Satanists are momentarily cowed by this display of Holy capabilities, but they rally to a counter-attack, driven on by their own greed and fear of demonic retribution. And just at that moment, another inmate who has been tunneling out in secret, hits the lake on the estate, and water gushes in, drowning the godless and sparing our hero.

   For this I came three hundred and fifty pages??

DONALD ZOCHERT – Another Weeping Woman. Nick Caine #1. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, hardcover, 1980. No paperback edition.

   It took longer than it should have, but it finally came t me. What the first few chapters of this book read like is what the old radio program Pat Novak, for Hire sounded like. Maybe you remember it. Jack Webb played the title role, a tough, world-weary man-for-all-jobs kind of guy who keeps finding himself in a peck of trouble, mostly of the murder variety.

   The narrator of this tale is named Nick Caine, a man whose background is never completely revealed, but that’s the sort of person he is, and that’s the kind of tough, taciturn story he stumbles into.

   As you read it, you’ll find it mellowing somewhat, into the laid-back, weather-beaten and melancholy mode thathas recently epitomized Rocky Mountain mystery fiction. The scene flickers incessantly back an forth between Denver and the wilderness country of Montana, save for one brief interlude taking place in one of the all-white fortresses that find themselves surrounded by the no-man’s land of urban Chicago.

   It all begins with a dead girl, a girl shot before a grizzly got to her, a girl dead before the bullet reached her brain. Nick Caine picks up the search for her killer, and all he finds are memories, a mother’s heartbreaks, and a continuing sequence of death by violence. Caine has been drifting for a year or more before being persuaded into taking the case. He has been out of action for too long, and his reflexes are slow.

   And at times the story feels as though it is drifting as well. The ending is overdone, as if intent on stifling itself on a morass of bad melodrama. But before the, well, the better hard-boiled detective novel is built on nuances and subtle shades of meaning, not wholly on fast-paced action, and so if that’s the sort of literature that catches your attention, most of what goes before should be exactly what you’re looking for.

UPDATE:   There was only one more Nick Caine novel, that being The Man of Glass (Holt. 1982). Donald Zochert also wrote one earlier work of crime fiction, Murder in the Hellfire Club (Holt, 1978), a historical mystery taking place in London into the mid-1700s.

A track from saxophonist Roxy Coss’s 2019 album Quintet:

RUSSELL THORNDYKE – The Amazing Quest of Doctor Syn. Doctor Syn #5. Rich & Cowan, UK, hardcover, 1938. Arrow, UK, paperback, 1964. Black Curtain Press, US, paperback, 2013.

   Still sends a shiver down the spine on a cold wet night, doesn’t it? Russell Thorndyke was a contemporary of John Buchan, and like him an admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, and his tales of the honorable pirate Captain Clegg, who with his band of men sought protection on Romney Marsh where the Captain, in the guise of meek and kindly 18th Century vicar Doctor Christopher Syn, supervises the going market in smuggling along England’s wild Western coastline, have been around for decades even fairly recently on BBC radio.

   The British have always liked their gentlemen heroes with a bit of larceny in their heart, from Robin Hood to Raffles and the Saint. Doctor Syn is in that same cool-headed, roguish, ruthless, and charming company. Captain Clegg never murdered, but he did execute, as does his second incarnation.

   Doctor Syn had a lively career for a quiet vicar. He featured in seven popular novels by Thorndyke, then in Dr. Syn (1936), a feature film starring George Arliss (to whom this book is dedicated) as both he and his ragged and tattered alter ego, the Scarecrow, on his steed Gehenna). That was followed by radio adaptations of the books, a revival by Hammer (Night Creatures, 1962), films with Peter Cushing (as the Rev. Dr. Blyss) in the role of the Scarecrow, and most famously on television on The Wonderful World of Disney, played by Patrick McGoohan, where Doctor Syn protected his flock from the vicious excise man and the British Navy’s Press gangs while making a good profit on smuggled French brandy and foiling the wreckers who preyed on unsuspecting seamen in The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh.

   The Amazing Quest of Doctor Syn is the fifth novel in the seven novel series, and as seen above, opens with a typically atmospheric introduction to the Scarecrow and his men, informing us “For years he had terrorized the level lands reclaimed from the sea, which stretch from Sandgate to Sussex border.” With agents as far away as London the good Doctor has an impressive spy service protecting him from every possible avenue.

   Of course nothing is perfect, as the good Doctor is about to find out.

   Only two men know the Scarecrow’s secret, Jimmy Bone the Highwayman who sometimes rides in the Doctor’s place so he can be in two places at once, and the rat-like but stalwart Mipps, sexton of the Doctor’s Dymchurch-under-the-Wall parish, where he also rides as the Scarecrow’s second-in-command, Hellspite, so the Scarecrow’s secrets are safe, but there are other threats to a man with the Doctor’s history.

   A mysterious Welshman has arrived in Dymchurch with a message for Doctor Syn. The Doctor and the Welshman are the last survivors of a Tontine (that favorite device of Victorian melodrama), joint inheritors of a vast fortune, but nothing is ever that simple in the good vicar’s world. The Welshman has been sent by his landlord in Wales, Tarroc Dolgenny (“He has made his name in North Wales, and I may add he will make it even bigger in hell.”), a smuggler who plans to murder Doctor Syn, see the fortune paid to the Welshman, and then kill him for the money by marrying the pretty niece who would inherit the fortune, then once the money is in his hands murder the girl as well.

   But Tarroc Dolgenny “A dangerous man.” hasn’t counted on crossing swords with the infamous Captain Clegg, much less the spectre of the Marshes, so Doctor Syn is off to Wales to pit himself against a villain of the first order, informing the Welsh lawyer Jones, “I might be dangerous too. In fact, I rather think I shall be if I ever meet this man.”

   First off, a bit of business at home takes precedent, rescuing Jimmy Bone from the gallows and dealing out a bit of justice to a cruel and corrupt lawman, but then the Vicar of Dmychurch is off and the adventure proper is on where Dolgenny proves a greater threat than expected, even suspecting the truth about Syn and the Scarecrow.

   The virtues of the books are that they move quickly full of incident, and that Thorndyke has a fine hand for adventure, history, and atmosphere. No less a contemporary and admirer of adventure tales and historical fiction than John Buchan praised his exciting novels, which in addition have the virtue of coming in at under two hundred pages.

   With Dolgenny a much more dangerous adversary than he thought, Doctor Syn is on his toes, outwitting the murderous brute, who would seem to have the upper hand, and bringing him to bay with quick wits and a quicker sword.

   So out of the night and sea mists of the Marsh company, the Scarecrow will ride again on his firey horse, evading the excise man, terrorizing the ignorant, tormenting the rich, and seeing to it that the people of England can enjoy a good Spanish wine or French brandy without that silly taxation business. Not everyone can be the Scarlet Pimpernel and save people from the Terror, and after all, Sir Percy must have appreciated a nice excise-free cognac after rescuing all those noble Frenchmen and had the Scarecrow to thank for that.