ARTURO PEREZ-REVERTE – Queen of the South. First US edition: Putnam, hardcover, June 2004; trade paperback: Plume, May 2005.

   So opens Arturo P?rez-Reverte’s Queen of the South, “the corrido to Teresa Mendoza,” the most accessible novel by the Spanish author of bestselling intellectual thrillers like The Club Dumas and The Seville Communion. This epic tale is the story of Teresa, who goes from the girlfriend of drug smuggling pilot Guero Davila in Culiacan, Mexico to the drug queen of the Costa del Sol in Spain in twelve busy years.

   Queen of the South is P?rez-Reverte’s paean to his favorite writer Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, and indeed the classic plays a major role in both the novel and Teresa’s life. She is the modern Edmund Dantes, who is reborn as a mysterious figure of mystery and revenge.

   But first she has to survive, and that is no easy job in the violent drug haunted world of the drug runners and narcocorridos who sing about them. Pursued by a pair of hitmen, Teresa flees for her life, and in due time she finds herself in Morocco working as a whore.

   There she falls for another handsome drug runner, this one using fast cigarette boats to smuggle drugs into Spain. When they are captured, Teresa ends up in prison. And there she meets the tough smart lesbian Patti, who befriends her and gives her a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo to read.

   For Teresa, the novel is a revelation, and an inspiration. Perez-Reverte is reminding us that books are powerful and matter. When Teresa emerges from prison with Patti, she puts her plans into motion, and soon she is controlling the drug traffic along the entire Costa del Sol, the Spanish Riviera.

   She spares the life of one of the Mexican hitmen sent to kill her, and wins a friend and ally, her right hand man. She outwits the law and outmaneuvers her competition, becoming a legend.

   And in due time she returns to Culiacan for her stunning revenge.

   The novel is told in part as P?rez-Reverte’s investigation into Teresa’s life, alternating with third person accounts of her adventures. The style is clean and poetic in the Chandler mode, if the story itself is the stuff of Harold Robbins’ The Adventurers.

   Combining the swashbuckling of Dumas, the seriousness of Graham Greene, the style of Chandler, and the glamour of Sidney Sheldon or Harold Robbins, Queen of the South is as satisfying as the best pulp in the Godfather style, and yet it is a serious and well written novel as well.

   P?rez-Reverte made his debut with The Flanders Panel, and since has cemented his place as one of the best writers of the intellectual thriller, with one stunning book after another — The Club Dumas, The Seville Communion, The Fencing Master, The Nautical Chart, Painter of Battles, and the series of historical swashbucklers about Captain Alariste, a 16th century Spanish swordsman and mercenary that have swept Europe and are currently being prepared to reach the big screen.

   P?rez-Reverte obviously has fallen a little in love with Teresa, and you may well yourself. It is a stunning read, exciting, smart, compellingly readable, and poetic, in its own way a narcocorrido and a commentary on the society that makes heroes of violent drug smugglers whose violence spills over into the innocent streets.

   Queen of the South itself is a sort of song of Teresa Mendoza, a portrait of a remarkable woman who spends twelve years and builds an empire only to risk it all it avenge the man she once loved.

Note:   There always have been intellectual thrillers, but since the stunning success of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the genre has become an important addenda to the thriller genre.

   Arturo P?rez-Reverte is one of several Spanish writers who found new freedom in the era following the end of Generalismo Franco’s reign and lifted Spanish popular literature to bestselling status. Of those writers, P?rez-Reverte is the best, both serious and playful, compulsively readable, and a man with something to say.

MANDA SCOTT – The Crystal Skull. Delacorte Press, hardcover, April 2008. Paperback reprint: Bantam Books, February 2009. UK edition: Transworld, January 2008.

   According to Mayan lore, the world will end on 21/12/2012. The only salvation for humanity lies in the activation of 12 crystal skulls entrusted to the protection of a network of keepers.

   Stella Cody O’Connor, a descendant of Cedric Owens, the keeper of the ninth skull, who was murdered in 1599 after hiding the skull from the dark forces who would destroy it, with the help of her husband, Kit, retrieves the skull from a cave in which it has been buried.

   This is, however, only the beginning of her task, and the novel traces, with mounting tension, Owens’ odyssey in the past and Stella’s present-day struggle to protect the sacred skull.

   Owens’ odyssey takes him to the New World, where the powers of the Skull are revealed to him. The Skull is no inanimate object, the mute subject of the quest. Its keeper bonds with it, and it is that spiritual and emotional bond that is, perhaps, the most distinctive quality of this intelligent thriller, giving it an unusual and moving resonance.

         Bibliographic data [expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin] —

SCOTT, MANDA (Catriona).

      The Dr. Kellen Stewart series —

   Hen’s Teeth. Women’s Press, UK, pb, 1996; Bantam, US, 1999.

   Night Mares. Headline Press, UK, hc, 1998; Bantam, 1999.
   Stronger Than Death. Headline, UK, hc, 1999; Bantam, 2000.

Note: The series is set in Glasgow, Scotland, and environs. Dr. Stewart is a doctor, a therapist and a lesbian, and in various ways she’s personally involved with each of the cases of murder she works on.

       Crime/mystery novels —

   No Good Deed. Headline, UK, 2001; Bantam, US, 2002. [Nominated for an Edgar, 2003.]

   The Crystal Skull. Transworld, UK, 2008; Delacorte, US, 2008.

    More authors’ entries from Part 34 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. I’m still working in the H’s, with a couple of small dividends at the top and bottom:

GIBBS, HENRY CHARLES HAMILTON. 1870-1942. Name at birth of Cosmo Hamilton, q.v.

HAINES, DONAL HAMILTON. 1886-1951. Add biographical information: Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan; educated at the University of Michigan, where he also later taught journalism and freelance writing. Contributor to many magazines, including Everybody’s Magazine, The Popular Magazine, and The American Boy. Besides writing a number of boys’ sports and adventure books, the author of one mystery novel included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. See below:

      Shadow on the Campus. Farrar & Rinehart, hc, 1942. Setting: Michigan; Academia. Intended for younger readers.

HALL, GEOFFREY HOLIDAY. 1913-1981. Confirm both dates. Born in Santa Cruz, NM. The author of two mystery novels listed in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. See below. This is the author’s complete entry.

      The End Is Known. Simon & Schuster, hc, 1949; Heinemann, UK, hc, 1950. Setting: New York City; Montana. Add the latter; also add film: Cineritmo, 1993, as La Fine e Nota (scw: Cristina Comencini, Suso Cecchi d’Amico; dir: Comencini). [A review of the book can be found here on this blog.]

      The Watcher at the Door. Simon & Schuster, hc, 1954. Setting: Vienna.

HAMILTON, CATHERINE J(ANE). 1841-1935. Add as a new author. Born in Somerset, England, of Irish parents. Lived in Ireland for more than thirty years from 1859; author of short stories, verse and serials, contributing to Weekly Irish Times and Ireland’s Own, among other periodicals.

      The Flynns of Flynnville, as by C. J. Hamilton. Ward, 1879. Setting: Ireland. Novel based on “the murder of a bank-manager by a constabulary officer called Montgomery.” [Online text.]

      -True to the Core: A Romance of ’98. White, 1884. [Two volumes.] Setting: Dublin. “The story of the love of a Kerry peasant girl for the ill-fated John Sheares.”

HAMILTON, COSMO. 1870-1942. Name at birth: Henry Charles Hamilton Gibbs, 1870-1942, q.v. Born in England; his working byline was based on his mother’s maiden name. Correct name and year of birth; add biographical information: Settled in the US by the 1920s; novelist and playwright, authoring many London musicals and Broadway plays. One novel and four story collections are included in his entry in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. Not all of the short fiction is criminous. Add the book of four plays below. Also of special note is the one novel, also cited below:

      Four Plays. Hutchinson, UK, 1925; Little, US, 1924. Plays, with the one criminous so indicated below with a *. Note: “The New Poor” was also published separately as: Who Are They? French, 1929.
            The Mother Woman
            * The New Poor
            Scandal
            The Silver Fox

      -The Princess of New York. Hutchinson, UK, hc, 1911; Brentano’s, US, hc, 1911. Silent film: Famous Players, 1921 (scw: Margaret Turnbull; dir: Donald Crisp). [The daughter of an American steel magnate heads for Europe but is waylaid on the liner by a pair of confidence tricksters.] Note: Although working behind the scenes, the 22 year old Alfred Hitchcock developed his cinematic vernacular by compiling the title cards for this film. (From the IMDB link just preceding.)

      Who Are They? See Four Plays.

HANKINS, ARTHUR P(RESTON). 1880-1932. Pseudonym: Emart Kinsburn, q.v. Born in Sac City, Iowa. Add biographical information: Under his own name, besides writing several western and adventure novels, the author of two crime-related titles included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. His shorter work appeared in many pulp magazines such as Detective Story Magazine, Western Story Magazine and Argosy All-Story Weekly.

KINSBURN, EMART. Pseudonym of Arthur P(reston) Hankins, 1880-1932, q.v. Under this pen name, the author of several western novels as well as two crime thrillers included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. See below:
      Tong Men and a Million. Chelsea House, hc, 1927. Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown: “Soft-footed Chinese gunmen stealing forth at night to shoot down the victims whom their tong has marked for destruction!”

      The Wizard’s Spyglass. Chelsea House, hc, 1926.

PAT FRIEDER – Signature Murder.   Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1998.

   I’ve not found out much about the author. This is the first in a set of two mystery novels to feature a semi-disbarred lawyer named Matty Donahue. The second she wrote is Privileged Communications (Bantam, pbo, June 2000), and other than that, I’ve found nothing else online that’s solid enough to say about her for sure.

   Inside the back cover of Signature Murder, though, is the following information: Like her series character Matty, Pat Frieder is a lawyer, and she lives in Albuquerque, NM. Matty lives in Sante Fe, however, and is unmarried. Her creator is also much more successful in her career, having once served as New Mexico’s Attorney General for Criminal Appeals.

   While Matty, on the other hand, is barely survinving, doing essentially grunt work for a prestigious law firm that gives her a dinky office she can barely turn around in – she’s essentially a charity case, having at one time lost her license because of her involvement in a situation very much like the one that’s at the center of this book.

   An eccentric elderly woman has been killed — mutilated in fact, with her hand cut off — and it may be Matty’s fault, since the handyman suspected of the deed had served time for a similar crime — hence the title — and it was Matty who brought him into the household.

   So, strictly against the wishes of the two partners of the firm she’s working for, she decides to solve the case on her own – and one of the trails leads straight back to one of those very same partners.

   There’s also an illegal immigrant from the Middle East who’s been romancing the dead woman’s maid, forgers of Native American artifacts, victims of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (to which Native Americans are very susceptible), a witness who’s disappeared, the grandson of a good friend of the dead woman who may inherit some money (not from the dead woman) if he’s still alive and not on drugs, a well-meaning but mostly inept public defender, and Matty’s former therapist, whose assistance is welcome but whose intentions regarding Matty could easily now be considered unethical.

   And I probably missed something. The first half to two-thirds of the book makes for very easy reading, but there’s simply too much in it (nearly 300 pages of small print) for it all to fit comfortably together, not to mention one question I have – and an important one – that never gets answered. The case does get solved, however, with the help of lots of clues, including a good many false ones, causing Matty a good deal of wear and tear before she’s finished.

   So it’s a good thing she’s a survivor, with at least one more adventure in her life that a book could be written about. Would I read it, if it were easily on hand? Yes, even with my complaints, Matty’s problems can easily become addictive, or so I’ve found out.

RUTH RENDELL – A Sleeping Life. Doubleday, hardcover, 1978. UK hardcover: Hutchinson, 1978. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft.

   Chief Inspector Wexford’s approach to a murder is often based on intuition as well as fact, but this time around, working on the death of a middle-aged woman with no trace of background, he seems to run into stone walls no matter which way he heads.

   Adding to his frustration is a domestic crisis at home as well, provoked by his daughter’s evangelical conversion to Women’s Lib.

   Rendell obviously intends for the ending to come as quite a surprise, but unfortunately the secret’s too big to keep very well. The observant reader will eventually find that all the clues are pointing in one direction only.

   Even so, the workmanship of this well-constructed mystery is exactly readers have come to expect from one of the best authors writing in the field today. There’s no way anyone’s going to be disappointed with this one.

[UPDATE] 09-10-09.   In spite of the good review I gave this book, it’s been a long time since I read anything by Ruth Rendell. I always enjoyed her Wexford books, but her standalones, mostly psychological crime novels, not so much.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – Panic in Box C. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1966; H. Hamilton, UK, hc, 1966. Paperback reprints include: Berkley X1587, 1968; Carroll & Graf, 1987.

   Atmosphere is always a strong element in any John Dickson Carr novel, and that is true of Panic in Box C, one of the last of his Gideon Fell series, recently reprinted by Carroll and Graf in paperback.

   By the time he wrote this book, Carr was long settled in the United States, the place of his birth, and increasingly he was finding reasons for Fell to travel and detect here. This time Fell is on a lecture tour, but he detours to attend a performance of Romeo and Juliet in Westchester County.

   Not only is there the obligatory murder and elements of impossible crime, but there is also effective use of the theatre, both its physical settings, and its lore, to add to an unusually good detective story. Fell remains one of my favorite detectives, a wonderfully eccentric Chestertonian type whose bluster artfully conceals his marvelous brain.

   His solution in Panic in Box C is one of the best and most witty in a long career of brilliant explanations by Carr.

NIGHT LIFE OF THE GODS. Universal, 1935. Alan Mowbray, Florine McKinney, Peggy Shannon, Richard Carle, Theresa Maxwell Conover, Phillips Smalley , Wesley Barry. Based on the novel by Thorne Smith. Director: Lowell Sherman.

   Speaking of the Obscure and Bizarre, I had the good fortune to run across a tape of Night Life of the Gods, a long-lost comedy based on a book by Thorne Smith, from a studio that was never much good at comedy.

   Despite the typical Universal clumsiness — or maybe because of it — Night Life captures the flavor of Smith’s unique style quite nicely. The plot (something about a scientist who can turn people into statues and statues into people) lurches forward in typical Smith fashion towards nowhere in particular as our hero-scientist (Alan Mowbray) contends with insipid relatives, a loving secretary, a host of soliloquizing drop-ins and amorous women, all of whom, in typical Smith-fashion, seem to be pursuing plots in books of their own.

   The result is hardly Great Comedy (Thorne Smith was always more whimsical than humorous), but it’s an effective translation of Smith’s peculiar ethos from page to film.

   As for the actor playing the lead — in a flattering wig with his chins taped up — Alan Mowbray was always one of my favorite Unknowns. He generally played pompous, rather dull Englishmen (no one who sees him in THE KING AND I will ever remember him), and if you recall him at all, it’s probably as the Shakespearean ham in a couple of John Ford Westerns, but he was by all accounts a witty and charming man off-screen — he was one of the loyal coterie of friends who looked after John Barrymore in his later years — and his film career included highlights like the rakehell Cpt. Crawley in Becky Sharp, a bizarre Butler in the Topper films, The Devil once and George Washington twice.

   Commentary on books I’ve covered in the New York Times Book Review.   [Reprinted from The Armchair Detective, Vol. 1, No. 4, July 1968.]

    Previously on this blog:
Part 1 — Charlotte Armstrong through Jonathan Burke.

VICTOR CANNING – The Python Project. William Morrow, hardcover, 1968, $4.95. (UK hardcover edition: William Heinemann, 1967.) A canny old pro turns out a bewilderingly effective combination of a medium-boiled British private investigator tale and the spy story. [Series character: Rex Carver.]

LESLIE CHARTERIS – The Saint Returns. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1968, $3.95. (UK hardcover edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1969.) Two novelettes taken from the British TV series revive the zest of early Saint adventures. Read these tales for nostalgic pleasure.

JON CLEARY – Season of Doubt. William Morrow, hardcover, $4.95. (UK hardcover edition: Collins, 1968; paperback reprint: Popular Library 75-1296, 1970.) A new twist to the spy story involves the dilemma of a career diplomat, posted to an incendiary and largely unfriendly country and assigned the impossible task of maintaining perfect neutrality and clinical detachment. Paul Tancred, undersecretary in the American embassy in Beirut, pays the price of involvement and friendship. Read this one.

MANNING COLES – The House at Pluck’s Gutter. Pyramid X-1782, paperback, 1968, $.60. (UK hardcover edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1963.) Fanciers of Tommy Hambledon, circa 1940, will be disappointed in this one. It contains some amusing scenes and ingredients, but the Coles’ light, sure touch is absent.

Editorial Comment. The paperback edition of this last book is relatively hard to find. While I have a copy, I don’t have access to it, which leaves me without a cover image to show you, so far. To perhaps explain Al’s disappointment in this book as well as mine at the time, it’s now known that it was written by the twosome of Cyril Henry Coles & Tom Hammerton, rather than the original pairing of Coles & A. F. O. Manning.

THE 27th DAY. Columbia, 1957. Gene Barry, Valerie French, George Voskovec, Prof. Klaus Bechner, Arnold Moss, Stefan Schnabel. Based on the novel by John Mantley, who also wrote the screenplay. Director: William Asher.

   The novel this black-and-white sci-fi movie was based on was also one of the first selections I purchased when I joined up with the Science Fiction Book Club, and when I was 14, which I was at the time, I thought it was one of the best I’d ever read.

   Nor have I ever forgotten it in all of the years since, though what I have just now discovered is that I never watched the movie, even though for all of those very same years, I thought I had!

   I think what happened is that I created my own movie out of the images the book created in my head, and that’s what I remembered all this time. Two minutes into the movie and I knew I’d never seen it before.

   And this is true even though I have a feeling that the movie follows the book very closely. It’s just that it’s different than the one I’ve been remembering all along. It’s very strange (and humbling) to realize that your memories can be invalid and unsubstantial — and yet seemingly so solid! — as this

   The premise? Well, to begin with and right from the start, mankind is in trouble. An alien from another universe kidnaps five representative members of mankind and gives them the sole means of deciding whether humanity lives or dies: (1) A Russian solider. (2) A young English woman. (3) A European scientist. (4) A Chinese peasant girl. And (5) a Los Angeles newspaper reporter.

   Each is given a weapon that can destroy all human life on the planet Earth. If they can keep the leaders of the world from using any one of them in the next 27 days, we’ll be given a reprieve and they’ll quietly go away.

   The primary protagonists are (2) and (5), played by Valerie French and Gene Barry respectively, whose characters immediately go into hiding together.

   But do the aliens play fair? No. They also immediately take over the TV sets around the world and name the five people who have been given the weapons. Instant paranoia and panic naturally run rampant.

   This is a pretty good example of what science fiction looked like in the movies during the cold war 1950s, with the added bonus of there being no ugly mutated monsters, only ourselves as our own worst enemy.

   Which is fitting, as the ending is this movie’s own worst enemy. It seems as though the aliens had the power all along, a rather miraculous one, one that can — well, that would be telling.

   I suppose the movie-makers’ intentions were good, and it fits in perfectly with the cold-war fantasies of the 1950s, but all in all, it makes for a pretty lame movie. Awkward and ham-handed are other words that come to mind — all in the interest of making us feel good about ourselves, disregarding the truth of the matter that in this film (a) the aliens did it, and (b) in the real world, there are no aliens.

   As for the book, I’m awfully curious and I’m very much tempted, but I don’t think I’ll read it again. The memories I have of it might be better off if left alone. Just maybe.

CAMERON JUDD – The Quest of Brady Kenton.   St. Martin’s, paperback original; 1st printing, January 2001.

   A clue from an ongoing serial in a dime novel series is enough to convince famed western reporter Brady Kenton that his wife, whom he always believed had died in a railroad accident years ago, somehow survived, and she may even still be alive.

   Alex Gunnison, the son of Kenton’s publisher, is the man assigned to keep him on schedule and out of trouble, which is a full-time job on its own, even before a young woman claiming to be Kenton’s daughter appears. More? On her trail in turn is a former Texas Ranger and now, quite remarkably, one of the world’s first private eyes.

   Intentionally or not, this novel reads like a dime novel itself, with lots of dialogue and action and precise, pinpoint characterizations of the varied westerners whose paths cross those of Kenton and Gunnison. Lots of humor, too, with a dark side that never manages to stay hidden. This particular phase of the chase ends in a wild-and-wooly shootout, but in true pulp fashion, there’s a strong hint of more adventures yet to come.

[UPDATE] 09-09-09.  Or were there? Further adventures, that is — in the plural. There was at least one more, Kenton’s Challenge (St. Martin’s, November 2001), but whether or not that concluded Kenton’s hunt for his missing wife, I do not know.

   I seem to recall that these two books came out around the time that the western lines at several paperback companies were canceled, with a few ongoing series left hanging. I don’t know if that happened here or not. If anyone can say, please email me or leave a comment below.