AUGUST DERLETH “The China Cottage.” Solar Pons. Short story. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1965. First collected in The The Casebook of Solar Pons (Mycroft & Moran, hardcover, 1965), as “The Adventure of the China Cottage.” Reprinted in Alfred Hitchcock’s Games Killers Play (Dell, paperback, 1968.

   I wonder if this story marked the first appearance of Solar Pons’ brother Bancroft, a man of some size and weight and who worked, not surprisingly, for the British Foreign Office. Dead in a locked room is an eccentric breaker of codes and ciphers, found slumped over the latest set of papers he was working on.

   But as it turns out, Pons quickly deduces that the papers and the secrets that may have been in them were not the reason for his murder, and the problem of the locked room is disposed of almost as quickly. If it was indeed murder, the killer simply walked out of the room, closing the door behind him. Or her.

   No, the puzzle, as Pons finally works it out, and I hope I’m not giving too much away, has to do with the china cottage of the title, an ordinary incense burner in the shape of … a cottage. It is imagined, by me at least, that at one time these were quite popular in England.

   As a consulting detective whose cases you may decide to follow when you’ve read the entire Holmes canon several times over, Solar Pons certainly has his fans, even today, but I’ve always found his tales to be a mixed bag. This one’s better than many, but in my opinion, no way near the best of them. I found the shift in focus from a case in Bancroft’s purview to a much more domestic one disconcerting, but your opinion may vary.

LINDA GREENLAW – Fisherman’s Bend. Jane Bunker #2. Hyperion, hardcover, 2008. St. Martin’s, paperback, April 2019.

   There is some backstory left over from book one in this series, in which Jane Bunker dealt with a case of murder back in Miami, but in this followup adventure, she’s picked up stakes and is now living in Maine, which seems to be a more natural habitat for her.

   She’s working full time as a marine investigator and on the side she’s nabbed a position as assistant deputy sheriff of the county she’s moved to. And once in a while the two hats seem to overlap, as it does in this book. After checking into some vandalism at the lab a pair of marine scientists are doing a oceanographic survey, she finds a empty lobster boat running in circles, the owner totally missing.

   The missing man’s son had just died of a drug overdose, and drug dealers are Jane’s sworn enemies. Do you believe in coincidence? Neither does Jane.

   Jane is 40ish, unattached but not unattractive, and she doesn’t back down for anyone or anything. While about 3000 miles apart from Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, the tone of the story Jane tells is very much the same. I only wish I could tell you the mystery is as good as those that Kinsey worked on, but I can’t. Too may loose ends are wrapped up very quickly at the end, as if suddenly not very important any more.

   I did like the setting of coastal Maine and the presence of so any well-drawn people who live there. Authentic? Yes. I’d say so.

      The Jane Bunker series —

Slipknot. June 2007
Fisherman’s Bend. July 2008
Shiver Hitch. June 2017
Bimini Twist. July 2018

DONALD HAMILTON – The Steel Mirror. Rinehart & Co., 1948. Paperback reprints include: Dell #473, 1950; Gold Medal d1617, 1966.

FIVE STEPS TO DANGER. Henry S. Kesler Productions/Unoted Artists, 1957. Ruth Roman, Sterling Hayden, Werner Kemperer, Jeanne Cooper and Karl Lindt. Written & directed by Henry S. Kesler, from the novel by Donald Hamilton.

   A tightly-written post-war mystery with the times reflected in small details and a plot that kept surprising me right to the end.

   Even without the surprises, this would be a fun piece of nostalgia, but Steel Mirror hooks the reader quickly with John Emmett, vacationing everyman, whose car breaks down somewhere west of nowhere. He gets a ride from Anne Nicholson, an attractive, well-dressed young woman in a new car, driving across the country, and congratulates himself on his good fortune.

   Until he stows his gear in the trunk and sees no luggage….

   Hamilton builds nicely from this. Our hero and the young lady without luggage are being followed… by what turns out to be her Doctor and a nurse. It seems Anne worked with the French Resistance in WWII, got captured and tortured by the Gestapo – and may have betrayed her husband and friends; she can’t remember, and she’s driving across country to meet the one man who can tell her.

   And oh yes: the good Doctor adds that she’s subject to mental breakdowns, has tried to kill herself, doesn’t trust him (the Doc) and it would be a big help to everyone if Emmett would stay with her and check in when she gets where she’s going.

   Okay at this point the savvy reader has spotted the Bad Guy, and as the pages turn will guess the truth about the one man we’re after. This is because Donald Hamilton has let us spot and let us guess; this plot has more twists than a box of candy canes — near-arrest by a county sheriff, a visit from the FBI, and a helpful passer-by packing heat—and it soon occurs to Emmett and that savvy reader I mentioned that there are a lot of people who don’t want Anne to get where she’s going.

   Eventually the journey reaches that point where all thrillers must inevitably arrive — Anne & Emmett on the run from a Murder charge, posing as husband & wife till they can get to the one man who can clear the whole thing up for them — whereupon it simply takes another turn and then another, all predicated on the people acting like grown-ups and not like characters in a paperback. Even when the chips are down and guns drawn there’s none of the “Very clever, Mr. Bond!” stuff, just everyone playing their cards close to the vest and me trying to figure out who’s got the Joker.

   But what I shall remember from The Steel Mirror is an underlying theme of characters trying to define themselves. Emmett spent the War in a vital civilian job and he’s always wondered if he did it from convenience or cowardice. Anne is trying to find out if she’s a heroine or a traitor. And The Steel Mirror resolves both issues by letting the characters grow and understand each other.

   Nice job, that.

   I only started reading Donald Hamilton in the last few years. I was always put off by the Matt Helm thing, but he did some decent stuff. Like the novel basis of The Big Country and The Violent Men, and in between those two fine Westerns, Henry S. Kesler made a modest little film from this.

   Kesler is hardly a name to conjure with, but he worked on some memorable films (5 Graves to Cairo, In a Lonely Place, Lured …) and Five Steps to Danger is competently done. Even quite good at times. Stars Ruth Roman and Sterling Hayden play well off each other, and the bad guys (Werner Klemperer and Richard Gaines) strike just the right note of stuffy disdain: not so much evil as arrogant, and it works well here. If you ever met a doctor too interested in himself to listen to you, then you know Klemperer’s character. And Richard Gaines (the Insurance Executive in Double Indemnity) as a duplicitous dean is so politely unhelpful as to seem maddeningly sinister.

   That’s director Kesler. Writer Kesler simplifies and updates Hamilton’s book. Maybe too much so. No more Gestapo. Now Anne has (or had) a brother in East Germany working against the communists who died trying to get valuable information to a German Rocket Scientist, now working for the U.S., who was an old friend of the family before the war, and it’s up to Anne to complete the mission.

   Rocket Science. I wonder how long it took to think that one up? Kesler treats it more seriously than it deserves, and maybe I’m being too hard on him. If I hadn’t read the book first, I might have thought more highly of this. But I remembered the human element in the book, and I missed it in the movie.

M. E. CHABER – The Splintered Man. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1955. Perma Book M-3080, paperback, 1957. Paperback Library 63-308, paperback, 1970.

   Kendall Foster Crossen published more than twenty novels as M. E. Chaber. All but one of these featured Milo March as the first-person narrator and protagonist. At times March functioned in his usual capacity as an insurance investigator, but he often had occasion to work for the State Department or the CIA.

   There is a certain similarity in many of March’s adventures, but Crossen is a writer who perfected his craft, and the Chaber books are fast, smooth, funny in spots, and always entertaining. The Splintered Man stands out among them because long before the Beatles were singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Crossen introduced lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) as a major [;pt device in an espionage story.

   Milo March is called back into the army and sent into East Berlin to find Herman Gruss, the head of the counterespionage police in West Berlin, who is believed to have defected to the East. Getting into East Berlin is not too hard for March in those days before the wall. Getting out is something else again, especially when March is caught and given a hefty dose of LSD by a doctor who is experimenting with the drug at a large Russian hospital.

   The description of the drug’s effects on March, while perhaps not clinically accurate by today’s standards, is nevertheless convincingly carried off. It is not revealing too much to say that March;s inevitable escape from the hospital is accomplished by a little fudging of scientific facts, but the result us still satisfactory.

   The cover of the first paperback edition of The Splintered Man (Perma Books, 1957), is a collector’s dream. March, in his undershorts, cowers in the background while held by two men in uniform. In the foreground are two large red hands, one holding a test tube, the other holding a sizable red hypodermic needle. (In the story, March’s dose of LSD is administered in a glass of water.)

   Milo March’s other adventures include The Gallows Garden (1958), Softly in the Night (1963), The Flaming Man (1969), and Born to Be Hanged (1973). Crossen also published numerous mystery novels under his own name and such pseudonyms at Christopher Monig, Clay Richards, and Richard Foster.

     ———
   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.

   Alas, I’ve been jammed up with too many things to do to be able to post Walker’s annual PulpFest report here on this blog in any timely fashion. We’ve asked Sai Shankar whether he’d be willing to post it on his Pulp Flakes blog, and he’s most graciously agreed. More than that, he’s done a masterful job.

   Here’s the link. Enjoy!

THINK FAST, MR. MOTO. 20th Century Fox, 1937. Peter Lorre, Virginia Field, Thomas Beck, Sig Rumann. Based on the novel by John P. Marquand. Director: Norman Foster. Shown at Cinevent 27, Columbus OH, 1995.

   The first of the Moto series, several of which I have on tape but have never watched. I will have to remedy that, since this was a charming 70 minutes, with Lorre in fine form.

   Odd to see Sig Rumann as a villain. I remember him best as the manic impresario in A night at the Opera.

MY LIFE IS MURDER. TV series produced by Network 10, Melbourne, Australia. One-hour episodes, starting 17 July 2019. Cast: Lucy Lawless as Alexa Crowe; Bernard Curry as Detective-Inspector Kieran Hussey; Ebony Vagulans as Madison Feliciano; Alex Andreas as George Strathopoulos, the owner of Baristas Café; Dilruk Jayasinha as Dr. Suresh; and Todd River & Elliot Loney as Captain Thunderbolt, Alexa’s pet cat. Producer: Elisa Argenzio; Lucy Lawless, executive producer.

   The cleverest thing about this new detective series is how they integrate the show’s title card into the location shots of photogenic Melbourne; it goes without saying that the most attractive thing about it is Lucy Lawless, formerly a long-haired brunette warrior princess turned short-coiffed blonde; but the least appealing part of the show is the tired plots, too many of which have been done to death.

   Only the backgrounds, the everyday world inhabited by the characters in front of which the series takes place, have anything new about them. And “cozy” is the word here, with the violence content barely moving the meter — but at least the cat doesn’t try to solve the crimes.

   The first episode of ten, “The Boyfriend Experience,” has a young woman dying from a great fall being investigated by Alexa, an ex-cop, at the request of D-I Kieran, who thinks a male prostitute is responsible; the trouble is, the closer she gets to this guy the less she thinks he might be the killer.

   The second show, “The Locked Room,” has an executive being murdered in a locked hotel room. To solve that conundrum Alexa must first establish a motive, but her prime suspects all alibi each other. The locked-room gimmick is far from ingenious, but we’re thinking it just might work.

   Episode three, “Lividity in Lycra,” has Alexa giving up jogging temporarily and taking up endurance bike riding because the victim, while cycling up a mountain, has died of dual traumas in what looks like a heart attack followed by cracking his skull in falling to the pavement; Alexa’s pretty sure she knows who did it, but the problem is determining how, with GPS coming to the rescue.

   The fourth show, “Can’t Stand the Heat,” has Alexa going under cover as a student in a cooking school looking for who might have murdered an aspiring chef.

   In this one, Alexa loses a lot more blood just trying to prepare food than from any bad guys that she’s encountered so far (her bandages, at least, match her outfits). The head chef is hardly a help, being a female version of that “Hell’s Kitchen” guy, complete with high-pressure demeanor and multiple f-bombs.

   One more thing. The character of Ebony Vagulans, Alexa’s Internet cyber-whizkid, undergoes a radical and unexplained attitude change going from the first two episodes, where Alexa could barely get her to do anything, to begging for Alexa’s next assignment — but, with those thick, rapid-fire Aussie accents, maybe we missed something.

FREDERICK NEBEL “Wolves of the Wild.” Novelette. First published in Ace-High Novels, April 1932, Collected in Forbidden River (Black Dog Books, trade paperback, 2014).

   In this tale of the frozen North an old prospector named Shorty finagles the son of a good friend, wasting his life away as gambler in a Yukon saloon, into hitting the trail with him on his next expedition. He needs toughening up, Shorty thinks.

   There’s only one problem. Shorty has come into town with a pouch full of gold, and when others see gold as rich as this, they start thinking that there will be more of it at the other end of Shorty’s trail. They is a girl, too, and even though this is all the story there is, Nebel fills over 40 pages to tell it. Luckily he’s a good enough story teller that you don’t really notice how thin the tale is until 20 minutes later, when you’ve finished it.

   The second story in this same collection, which I’ll stick with for a little while longer, is “A Gambler Passes,” which first appeared in the January 1930 issue of Five Novels Monthly. The latter was an all-purpose magazine, usually with one mystery story, a western, a sports story, and a couple of adventure tales or maybe a romance. Since “A Gambler Passes” is less than 50 pages long in book form, you can easily realize that calling the stories “novels” is really only a case of exaggerated salesmanship.

   That the leading character in “Gambler” is, guess what, s gambler, should come as no surprise. That his name is Jack Cardigan is a bit startling, but only if you know that Jack Cardigan was also the name of his long-running private eye character later on in Dime Detective. In his long, informative introduction to this collection, publisher and editor Tom Roberts seems to suggest that the two are one and the same. They certainly could be, and it’s fun to think so, but without more evidence, I’m inclined to write it off as an author doubling up the use of a name that caught his fancy.

   I could be very wrong about that, and the more I think about it, the more likely I think I may be.

   In this story, the gambler Jack Cardigan is accused of killing the son of the man who has the small mining town of Lodestar. That it was an accident that occurred while the dead man was foisting his attentions too fiercely on the girl Cardigan loves makes no difference to the kangaroo court that is convened, and once convicted, Cardigan has to flee.

   And thus follows a lot of traipsing around in the snow-covered wilderness. One gets the feeling of how bitterly cold the weather that far north can be, but after a while one also begins to wonder how easily the main protagonists run across each other while fighting off blizzards and general fatigue. Still, a good story with a satisfying ending.

   Nebel takes a different approach in “Forbidden River,” reprinted from the June 1930 issue of Five-Novels Monthly. The primary protagonist is a lawyer from Chicago who is making a trip to the North country as part of a hunting vacation with a friend who has a lodge there.

   The trip is by train, and on the train the one other passenger is a young girl who appears to be of French heritage. When his back is turned she pulls the emergency cord, the train stops, and she jumps off. Going to the end of the train, he falls off as the train starts up to look for her, and he’s off and running in an adventure he never in his life dreamed of.

   I’ll not venture further into the plot, but all kinds of factions come into play, including murder and two Mounties, making it a detective story of sorts as well as a tale that once started is difficult to put down.

   There are two more stories in this collection: “The Roaring Horde” (Five-Novels Monthly, April 1932) and “Gold” (North•West Stories, May 1931). I confess that I’ve not read either, I’m sorry to say, but I’m sure I will sometime soon. Nebel was a good writer, and these frostbitten yarns make for perfect reading in these hot and muggy days of mid-August.

MICHAEL CRAVEN – The Detective & the Chinese High-Fin. John Darvelle #2. Harper, trade paperback; 1st printing, 2016.

   I read and reviewed The Detective & the Pipe Girl, the first adventure of LA PI John Darvelle here, way back in March 2015. It was a long review, and if it wasn’t completely a rave review, it was as close to being one as it could get without actually being one.

   This one’s almost as good, and there’s no good reason why it’s taken as long as it has for me to get around to reading it. After a short prologue of sorts, in which Darv finds a old woman’s missing ring. he gets down to real business when a friend of sorts on the police force refers a client to him. A married couple, actually, one whose son was shot and killed in their driveway, and the cops have made no headway on the case.

   The son, unfortunately, was the kind of guy that no one has any use for, once they get to know him, so there’s no shortage of suspects. The problem is that all of them have ironclad alibis, so Darvelle goes fishing on the edge of things, which means checking out a tropical fish business that the dead man had at one time invested in. (Hence the title.)

   Darvelle tells his own story, which means we get his opinions on almost everything, including his own personal philosophy of life. I don’t mean to say that this is a bad thing, but after a while the middle of the book seems to sag a little.

   But around the two-thirds mark, the action picks up again in a most satisfactory way, and as it turns out everything that has come before also comes back into play. At the end of the book Darvelle in fact is given quite a moral dilemma to work his way through. I think he makes the right decision; and if you read the book for yourself, you can see if you agree or not.

   To this date, there has not been a third book in the series. I’d like to think there will be, but it’s quite possible that, for many possible reasons, there won’t. But if that’s the case, then at least we have the two in hand, and that can’t be taken away from us.

KERRY GREENWOOD – Murder on the Ballarat Train. Phryne Fisher #3. Poisoned Pen Press, US, October 2006). Trade paperback, September 2011. Originally published in Australia, 1991. TV adaptation: Season 1, Episode 2 of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, 02 Mar 2012. Essie Davis (Phryne Fisher), Nathan Page, Ashleigh Cummings.

   This is a not untypical introduction to the remarkable Honorable Miss Phryne (rhymes with Briny) Fisher, modern liberated woman par excellence, 1920’S style: beautiful (she resembles Louise Brooks down to the hair do), smart, a crack shot, expert at self defense, incredibly rich, and a private detective to boot. If you crossed Miss Marple with Honey West and Emma Peel you wouldn’t be far off the attractive Miss Fisher.

   If you don’t know the series (currently running on Netflix, and on Acorn a modern descendant of Miss Fisher is now in her first season) you may well have seen the attractive covers for the books and decided it was yet another cozy series, this one set in Australia in the twenties, but Miss Fisher is anything but cozy.

   With an eye (and more) for an attractive young man, absolute certainty in her chosen crusade, spirit, and brains, this is no blushing shy violet crocheting and quilting while solving crimes with her cats. With her secretary and friend Dot, her two adopted daughters, her two-fisted butler Mr. Butler, her snobbish often appalled Aunt, and her two Union organizer muscle men and operatives Bert and Cec (pronounced “Cease” as in Cecil), Miss Fisher has taken on everything from Union disputes to Antisemitism, sex traffic, organized child molestation, serial killers, bank robbery, murder at the circus, and theatrical murders while romancing pilots, a handsome Chinese silk merchant, and any variety of men and flirting outrageously with the frustrated Inspector Jack Robinson, Miss Fisher triumphs, and on her own terms.

   Here Phryne discovers she and Dot, on the way to a county fair in Ballarat, have been drugged along with the rest of the passengers. After stopping the train and helping administer aid to the others she discovers one young woman was more deeply drugged and her mother, Mrs. Henderson, a difficult woman at best, is missing from the train.

   A brief backtrack reveals Mrs. Henderson, hanging from a water tower, and quite obviously murdered.

   There is no lack of suspects on the train and off, including a harried father and his young son who received mysterious tickets to the fair, the daughter’s Pre Med student fiance Mrs. Henderson disapproved of, and his handsome student friend who might well be counting on his good friend marrying money to cover his gambling debts.

   Then too, just about anyone who ever knew Mrs. Henderson might have murdered her. She was that type of woman.

   There is also a witness, a runaway girl on the train who isn’t talking, and who becomes the chief focus of Miss Fisher’s interest and eventually one of her two adopted daughters.

   Don’t get me wrong, Kerry Greenwood is not Agatha Christie. Most of the mysteries rely more on Miss Fisher’s and companies charm and the well developed social and historical milieu than brilliant mystery plots. They aren’t bad mysteries, but sad to say they won’t exactly tax your mystery solving skills either, though there are well placed and intelligent clues and something very close to fair play.

   What the books are is fun, light, playful, sexy, smart, fast moving, crisply written, and hard to lay down until you have finished. Miss Fisher manages to seem to coexist in a world where you might stumble across Peter Wimsey or Albert Campion and in much the same sophisticated style. If not in a class as a puzzler with Sayers or Allingham, she certainly writes well, and Phryne Fisher is a welcome addition to the great detective class.

   And it is more than a little fun to watch her tweak the nose of stilted 1920’s Australian social mores and attitudes, whether in print or beautifully played by Essie Davis in the popular series. She may navigate the mean streets in a Hispano-Suzia, but she does so in style.