JAMES ROLLINS – Ice Hunt. William Morrow, hardcover, July 2003. Reprint paperback: Avon, June 2004.

   Another of Rollins’ high-tech adventure thrillers, this time pitting Russian and American scientists and para-military teams against one another at the site of an abandoned polar cap laboratory where the results of horrific experiments, buried but not quite dead, have waited 70 years for the chance to feed again.

   The fate of mankind rests on the outcome of the bloody struggle and I’m sure that you won’t think that I’m giving away anything if I tell you that mankind survives. After all, Rollins doesn’t want to wipe out everything that could keep his Tom Swiftian imagination from achieving more fictional successes.

    Publisher’s Weekly is quoted as saying that “Rollins’s characters [are] fully drawn” in this “first-class roller-coaster.” Well, maybe fully but not deeply felt or imagined. As usual, the most compelling characterization is that of an animal (this time, a wolf), not surprising if you keep in mind that Rollins has a veterinary practice in Sacramento, California.

   In case it wasn’t apparent from my lack-luster review, I ended my flirtation with Rollins’ work with this book.

BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE. Columbia Pictures, 1958. Randolph Scott, Craig Stevens, Barry Kelley, Tol Avery, Peter Whitney. Based on the novel The Name’s Buchanan by Jonas Ward. Directed by Budd Boetticher.

    Synopsis: Riding home through the border town of Agry, Tom Buchanan gets caught up in a feud between the lawless Agry brothers and a family of Mexicans.

   Buchanan Rides Alone is a key film in the group of films Budd Boettticher did with Randolph Scott in the late 1950’s and is something of a comment on society as a whole. There’s nothing new about the newcomer riding into town and ending up cleaning the place up, but Buchanan goes about it in a singularly tough minded manner.

   The characters played by Scott in these films are good men who have been driven by circumstance to become hard, and while they carefully guard a nugget of their humanity beneath that tough exterior they can be ruthlessly violent and even brutal when it’s warranted.

   Because Buchanan Rides Alone is the first of a series of books and the character a sort of drifter, there is less backstory than usual in a Boetticher film. Buchanan would seem to be just another drifting cowboy looking for work — until someone pushes him the wrong way.

   At that point it becomes clear just how far the Scott hero will go to restore what he considers his personal honor. In some ways his Buchanan has some relationship to John D. MacDonald’s later Travis McGee character, particularly in The Green Ripper. Once he has unleashed the man beneath the surface someone is going to pay in blood before he resumes his easy going facade.

   That’s true of most western (and other) heroes but Scott and Boetticher together so refined and perfected the Scott persona in their movies together that they develop a sort of cinematic shorthand, a gesture, a look, a single word, that says more than pages of expository dialogue and background in other films.

   In some ways Scott’s take on the iconic western loner is the dominant one in the western imagination, however important the Gary Cooper, John Wayne, or even Clint Eastwood model. Likely the truest moment in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles is when the townfolk remove their hats reverently at the mere mention of Randolph Scott’s name.

   Barry Kelly is the corrupt town boss and Craig Stevens (just before Peter Gunn) a smooth gunfighter. There is nothing unusual in the plot, but the writing and direction are as superior as would be expected in a Boetticher film, and while the plot may be tried and true, the approach to character makes this one notable.

   The surprising thing about the Boetticher films is that while they are set against the wide open spaces of the west, they are closely focused character studies of men under stress, particularly the Scott hero, who reveals depths of feeling and humanity with little more than a pained look or by holding himself a little apart from everyone else in the film.

   I imagined the Buchanan of Jonas Ward’s series of books as someone along the line as Gary Cooper, but Scott at this time was at the height of his appeal, and his take on Buchanan combined a gentle charm that could turn to steel with a glint of his narrow eyes.

   And it isn’t as if there weren’t close bonds between Scott and Cooper. Scott got his start in Hollywood as Coooper’s dialogue coach for The Virginian and replaced Cooper in the popular Zane Gray series of films. By the time he made the series of films with Boetticher his version of the western hero was almost as iconic as Cooper’s, though it has only been in recent years he’s gotten real credit as an actor in them.

   At first glance Buchanan Rides Alone only seems to be a superior product of the heyday of the adult western, but there is more to the Scott character and to Boetticher’s direction than there may seem to be on the surface.

   In the confines of a fairly common western story Boetticher is commenting on both contemporary American society, and also saying something about the idealized American character. Scott’s hero in these films is the man who does the right thing even when it’s messy and society might prefer that he look the other way. Once he is unleashed he will have a reckoning, whatever the price.

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.]   A complete list of the “Buchanan” books by Jonas Ward can be found following my review of Buchanan’s Black Sheep, a much later entry in the series. David originally left this movie review as a comment following that earlier post. I’ve revised it slightly for its appearance here.

   On mystery writer’s Rafe McGregor’s blog today is a post called “The Speckled Band: The Worst Sherlock Holmes Story?”

   I imagine that everyone over a certain age has read the story, and (I hope) many under that certain age. In order to discuss the story, though, certain elements of the plot have to be mentioned, so [WARNING: PLOT ALERT AHEAD].

   I’d read this or a similar list of errors before, but here are at least some of them:

      1. Snakes don’t have ears, so they cannot hear a low whistle.
      2. Snakes can’t climb ropes.
      3. Snakes can’t survive in an airtight safe.
      4. There’s no such thing as an Indian swamp adder.
      5. No snake poison could have killed a huge man like Grimesby Roylott instantly.

   Rafe asks how detrimental these erroneous pieces of the plot are to the enjoyment of the story, to which some people have already replied. To me, the answer is “not very.” Holmes as a character is well beyond belief anyway, a wish fulfillment superhero in many ways — isn’t he? think about it — that quibbling over “small points” like the above is like asking how come Superman is so vulnerable to Kryptonite.

   You might ask me tomorrow, though. I might have my science pants on by then, and I could easily have changed my mind.

   I can tell you this, though. The story scared the heck out of me when I read it as a kid, which was probably when I was around eight years old. And was I relieved to know, whenever it was, that snakes can’t climb ropes? You bet.

   In the latest installment of his reviews of detective novels from the Golden Age of British Mystery Fiction, Al Hubin began his review of The Strelson Castle Mystery by saying “[author] Hal Pink’s obscurity in this country is total.”

   Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, however, the obscurity that Al referred to, while true at the time he wrote the review, has lifted considerably. I added some information as an editorial update, and indefatigable UK researcher and archivist Steve Holland has taken the ball and run with it.

   Please check out his Bear Alley blog for a long biographical post about Hal Pink, which incorporates all that’s known about him now, which is quite a bit, including a couple of photos, one of which I’ve borrowed and you see here.

   This will take a bit of an explanation, so bear with me.

   Around the turn of last century, a relatively well-known mystery writer named Lawrence L. Lynch had quite a few books published. Some of them were reprinted later as by Emma Murdoch Van Deventer, and as John Herrington says, “At some time someone was able to match Lynch to Van Deventer [as to being the real name of the author], the connection being lost in the mists of time.”

   The only problem is, no one has been able to find a real person having Van Deventer’s name, including John, and he’s been looking. He says, in part, “There are a few Emma Van Deventers on Ancestry.com, but Murdoch does not feature as part of any of these names.”

   I’ll reprint all of Lynch’s entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, just for completeness, but the actual request is, if you know or can come up with any information about either Lawrence L. Lynch or Emma Murdoch Vandeventer, please leave a comment or drop me a line.

LYNCH, LAWRENCE L.  Pseudonym of Emma Murdoch Van Deventer.   [Note: There seem to be no books that appeared under the latter’s name only.]   Except for two which apparently were never published in the US, these are the US titles only. All but one were reprinted in the UK by Ward Lock, including those as by Van Deventer, indicated by EMVD.

      Shadowed by Three (n.) Donnelly 1879 [Neil Bathurst; Frank Ferrars]
      The Diamond Coterie (n.) Connelley 1884 [Neil Bathurst]
      Madeline Payne, the Detective’s Daughter (n.) Loyd 1884 [Madeline Payne]    EMVD
      Dangerous Ground; or, The Rival Detectives (n.) Loyd 1885 [Van Vernet]
      Out of a Labyrinth (n.) Loyd 1885 [Neil Bathurst]
      A Mountain Mystery; or, The Outlaws of the Rockies (n.) Loyd 1886 [Van Vernet; U.S. West]
      The Lost Witness; or, The Mystery of Leah Paget (n.) Laird 1890 [New York City, NY]
      Moina; or, Against the Mighty (n.) Laird 1891 [Madeline Payne]

      A Slender Clue; or, The Mystery of Mardi Gras (n.) Laird 1891    EMVD

      A Dead Man’s Step (n.) Rand McNally 1893    EMVD
      Against Odds (n.) Rand McNally 1894 [Carl Masters; Chicago, IL]    EMVD

      No Proof (n.) Rand McNally 1895 [Chicago, IL]    EMVD

      The Last Stroke (n.) Laird 1896 [Frank Ferrars; Illinois]
      The Unseen Hand (n.) Laird 1898    EMVD
      High Stakes (n.) Laird 1899
      Under Fate’s Wheel (n.) Laird 1901    EMVD
      The Woman Who Dared (n.) Laird 1902
      The Danger Line (n.) Ward 1903 [New York City, NY]
      A Woman’s Tragedy; or, The Detective’s Task (n.) Ward 1904 [Carl Masters; Wyoming]
      The Doverfields’ Diamonds (n.) Laird 1906    EMVD
      Man and Master (n.) Laird 1908 [Carl Masters]
      A Sealed Verdict (n.) Long 1910 [Chicago, IL] No UK edition.
      A Blind Lead (n.) Laird 1912    EMVD

   Notes: Titles with links can be found as etexts online. [See the comments for a list of five more.]

MARK DENNING – Beyond the Prize. Jove V4473, paperback original; 1st printing, 1978.

   This is the third book of a series featuring John Marshall, the one-armed secret agent (not to be confused with Dan Fortune, the one-armed private eye).

   This time Marshall is after an AWOL colleague in Ireland, where he tangles with the IRA, the KGB, and just about everyone else.

   There’s plenty of action, plus a plot twist or two that you don’t really expect in such an action-oriented story, and Marshall has an enjoyable toughness. There aren’t too many books of just this kind being written today, and if you liked James Bond, give it a try.

   Bibliographic data:     [Taken from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

DENNING, MARK. Pseudonym of John Stevenson, ?-1994.     JM = John Marshall.
      Shades of Gray. Pyramid, pbo, 1976.    JM

      Die Fast, Die Happy. Pyramid, pbo, 1976.    JM

      Beyond the Prize. Jove, pbo, 1978.    JM
      The Swiss Abduction. Leisure, pbo, 1981.    JM

      The Golden Lure. Tower, pbo, 1981.    JM

      Din of Inequity. St. Martin’s, hc, 1984.
      Ransom. Pocket Books, pbo, 1990.

KATHLEEN WADE – Crime at Gargoyles. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover. No date stated [1947].

   The current, updated entry for Kathleen Wade in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, looks like this:

   WADE, KATHLEEN (Nesta Knight). 1903 -1986. SC: Detective Inspector (Hamilton) Drake, in at least those marked HD.

      Death at Aranshore (Gifford, 1942, hc)
      Death on ?Calamity” (Gifford, 1945, hc) [England; Ship]
      Crime at Gargoyles (Hutchinson, 1947, hc) [England] HD
      A Cloak for Malice (Hutchinson, 1949, hc) [England]
      The Dark Moment (Hutchinson, 1951, hc) [England] HD

      Act of Violence (Hutchinson, 1954, hc)

   Note that some of this information appears only in the online Addenda, which adds some facts uncovered by British mystery bookseller and researcher Jamie Sturgeon. He also notes that “she lived with the [noted] sculptor and writer Eric Benfield (if you do a Google search you will find a little bit about both of them).”

   The link will lead you to one such page; more than likely there are several others. It was also Jamie who discovered that Inspector Drake appeared in at least two of the books, Crime at Gargoyles being one of them.

   Drake doesn’t enter in until well after halfway through, however. Until then the story focuses solely on John Shirley, home from the Far East as a war correspondent on sick leave — a “recent breakdown.”

   Which helps explain, perhaps, why he does what he does when he moves a body he finds in his guest lodgings at Max Tarn’s manor house, a former monastery called Gargoyles. He was shattered at first by meeting his ex-fiancee at the dinner party the night before, but matters are made worse when the dead man turns out to be the fellow she chose as a husband instead, Tarn?s stepson.

   Strangely enough, when he dumps the body in a small nearby stream — although he realizes how neat a frame it is — he’s thinking as much of the old man who’s been taking care of the guest lodge, a fellow named Beal, who also had good reason to hate the dead man. But good intentions often lead to bad consequences, and of course that is what they do here.

   It isn’t until another victim is found, one presumed to be suicide, but Shirley thinks not, that he decides to call on his good friend Inspector Drake, eventually confessing all. By that time, the case has evolved into as much a thriller novel as a detective story.

   One possible definition of a thriller novel: one that you pick up at midnight to read and at 2:30 you discover you haven?t put it down yet.

   Of course when you do finish it, perhaps not the same evening, you may often look back and see how inconsequential it all was, as is the case here, but not while you are reading it, not at all.

JAMES CRUMLEY – The Last Good Kiss.  Random House, hardcover, 1978.  Reprint paperback: Pocket, 1981.  Vintage Books, trade ppbk, 1988.

   Since the death of Ross Macdonald and on the basis of just three novels, James Crumley has become the foremost living writer of private-eye fiction. Carrying on the Macdonald tradition in which the PI is no longer macho but a man sensitive to human needs, torn by inner pain, and slow to use force, Crumley has moved the genre into the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era.

   His principal setting is not the big city as in Hammett and Chandler nor the affluent suburbs as in Macdonald, but the wilderness and bleak magnificence of western Montana. His prevailing mood is a wacked out empathy with dopers, dropouts, losers, and loonies, the human wreckage of the institutionalized butchery we call the “real world.” Nobility resides in the land, in wild animals, and in a handful of outcasts — psychotic Viet vets; Indians, hippies; rumdums; and love-seekers — who can’t cope with life.

   Crumley’s detective characters have one foot in either camp. Milodragovitch, the protagonist of The Wrong Case (1975) and Dancing Bear (1983), is a cocaine addict and boozer, the child of two suicides, a compulsive womanizer like his wealthy Hemingwayesque father; a man literally marking time until he will turn fifty-two and inherit the family fortune, which his pioneer ancestors legally stole from the Indians.

   Sughrue from The Last Good Kiss has a background as a Nam war criminal and an army spy on domestic dissidents and he’s drinking himself to death by inches. Yet these are two of the purest figures in the history of detective fiction, and the most reverent toward the earth and its creatures.

   Crumley has minimal interest in plot and even less in explanations, but he’s so uncannily skillful with character, language, relationship, and incident that he can afford to throw structure overboard. His books are an accumulation of small, crazy encounters, full of confusion and muddle, disorder and despair, graphic violence and sweetly casual sex, coke snorting and alcohol guzzling, mountain snowscapes and roadside bars.

   When he does have to plot, he tends to borrow from Raymond Chandler. In The Wrong Case, Milodragovitch becomes obsessed by a young woman from Iowa who hires him to find her missing brother, a situation clearly taken from Chandler’s Little Sister (1949).

   The Last Good Kiss, perhaps the best of Crumley’s novels, traps Sughrue among the tormented members of the family of a hugely successful writer, somewhat as Philip Marlowe was trapped in Chandler’s masterpiece, The Long Goodbye (1954).

   In Dancing Bear, which pits Milodragovitch against a multinational corporation dumping toxic waste into the groundwater, the detective interviews a rich old client in a plant-filled solarium just like Marlowe in the first chapter of Chandler’s Big Sleep (1939).

   None of these borrowings matter in the least, for Chandler’s tribute to Dashiell Hammett is no less true of Crumley: He writes scenes so that they seem never to have been written before. What one remembers from The Last Good Kiss is the alcoholic bulldog and the emotionally flayed women and the loneliness and guilt.

   What is most lasting in Dancing Bear is the moment when Milodragovitch finds a time bomb in his car on a wilderness road and tosses it out at the last second into a stream and weeps for the exploded fish that died for him, and dozens of other moments just as powerful.

         ———
   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.

   Bibliographic data [updated]:

MILO MILODRAGOVITCH   [James Crumley]

      The Wrong Case. Random House, 1975.
      Dancing Bear. Random House, 1983.
      Border Snakes. Dennis McMillan, 1996. Note: Crumley’s other PI character, C. W. Sughrue, also appears in this book.

      The Final Country. Mysterious Press, 2002.

JAMES CRUMLEY – The Last Good Kiss. Random House, hardcover, 1978. Reprint paperback: Pocket, 1981. Vintage Books, trade ppbk, 1988.

   Most private eyes work out of huge metropolitan cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Through the years a handful of others have based their somewhat seedier operations in midwestern population centers such as Chicago, Cleveland and Indianapolis.

   On television this season there is an example of how a Las Vegas detective goes about his business, but you’d have to admit that the glamor and glitter of that particular show is far from typical of mainstream America, and so it remains far more reminiscent of that old stand-by of the pulp magazines, the Hollywood private eye story.

   C. W. Sughrue’s home is Montana, however, and his outlook on life and happiness, or the pursuit thereof, is correspondingly closer to a segment of American demographics long ignored by other authors, obsessed with the bizarre vagaries of life in southern California, for example.

   Rocky Mountain jade. Sughrue is often dirty and unshaven, and a good deal of the time he’s drunk, or close to it, but never obnoxiously so. He’s as much a combination of hippie and redneck as either variety of humanity could ever recognize as possible. He mixes affably with both, and yet he has the same moral obligation to himself that all the great private detectives of literature have had to have hidden inside.

   The story, as it strips his character carefully away in layers, is so intensely revealing that for him to become yet another series creation would be close to pointless.

   As muddled — or even more so — as any in real life, the story begins with a hunt for a famous bar-hopping poet and novelist who takes him on a binge through several states before he’s found, but before he can return home Sughrue is sidetracked into chasing down a runaway girl, lost and not found in the pornographic environs of San Francisco ten years earlier.

   Lives are muddled as well, and revelations are painfully hard to come by. The tale that Crumley has to tell builds slowly and easily into a climax that explodes with all the emotional thrill of a gut-satisfying revenge about to be released.

   Crumley is not the new Hammett. He’s closer to Chandler, if names must be dropped, but in several ways he’s the equal of both, their peer. In fact, he’s that rarity, an authentic rough-hewn original, and they don’t happen along very often.

[UPDATE] 04-14-09.   Some comments from me, thirty years later. I have not re-read the book at any time between then and now.

(1) Here’s the first line of the book, still one of the more memorable ones of hard-boiled crime fiction, in my opinion:

    “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

(2) I do not know what TV show I was referring to in the second paragraph. I could look it up, but if you know without resorting to a reference book, leave a comment. I have no prizes to offer to the first one to come up with the correct answer, I’m sorry to say.

(3) It is difficult, sometimes, for a reviewer to say exactly why he or she likes a book. It is far more easy to say why you don’t. Reading this review for the first time in the same 30 years, I’m disappointed (but not surprised) that I wasn’t more clear as to what I read that produced this rave review. (In the MYSTERY FANcier version, but not the one in the Courant, you might like to know that I included a rating: A Plus.)

(4) Somewhere in the middle I suggested that it would be difficult for Crumley to continue using C. W. Sughrue as a series character. As we know now, there were other books, but as I recall none of them knocked my socks off as much as this one. I’ll add a complete list below. (It did take 15 years for Crumley to write about Sughrue again.)

(5) At the end of the review, I compared Crumley to both Hammett and Chandler, saying he was their equal. In the long run, while the author and his books are both cult favorites, I don’t think his career was anywhere near as successful (or known today) as I thought it might. Am I wrong about this?

C. W. SUGHRUE.   [James Crumley]

       * The Last Good Kiss. Random House, 1978.
       * The Mexican Tree Duck. Mysterious Press, 1993.

       * Border Snakes. Mysterious Press, 1996. Note: Crumley’s other PI character, Milo Milodragovitch, also appears in this book.
       * The Right Madness. Viking, 2005.

   Hal Pink’s obscurity in this country is total. None of his thirteen books from 1932 to 1941 was published here, and I think Pink escapes notice in every commentary on the genre known to man or beast.

   So at least I wasn’t over-expectant in approaching The Strelson Castle Mystery (Hutchinson, 1939), but it turned out to be a cheerful, fast and gratifying read. No detective story, this; it’s a thriller, with bad guys and good guys clearly identified at the outset.

   The good guys are a trio of bachelors, vacationing in Europe’s vest-pocket kingdom of Zovania. The bad guys are trying to grab control of a mysterious fortune, apparently hidden somewhere in Zovania’s titular castle, which has just been inherited by beautiful British opera star Coralie Mayne.

   The fun begins at the Zovanian border, and then it’s pell mell action all the way, in two batches – since the chief villain, vanquished once, brews another rotten scheme and surfaces again in his sewer.

   Burford Delannoy wrote a number of volumes of crime fiction around the turn of the century, some of which are collections of detective short stories and vanishingly scarce. Denzil’s Device (Everett, 1904) is one of his novels and, for all its antiquity and stylistic peculiarity, it surprised me with its effectiveness, especially in the portrayal of odious villainy.

   The peculiarity lies in a pronounced tendency toward subjectless sentences (the subject of the previous sentence applies but is left unstated); this is compensated for by a wryly humorous turn of phrase. And while the basic outcome is fairly well assured from the outset, some uncertainty and suspense about details develops.

   Denzil is wealthy and evil. He lusts after the daughter of a judge, but she rejects him for an actor. Denzil’s device is a scheme to acquire the girl (willingly or not) and revenge himself upon the actor. For his purposes he makes use of a murderous lowlife and an embittered mimic; for his downfall the careful attentions of Detective Doyle and colleagues must be praised.

   My only reading of the works of Annie Haynes involves The Blue Diamond (Lane, 1925), which I found effective — surprisingly effective, even, in creating complexity and mystification and in arousing my interest.

   We meet the wealthy and titled Hargreaves, whose estate lies near Lockford in Devonshire, and who own the titular gem. A beautiful young woman, afraid and bereft of her memory, is found one night on the estate. The Hargreaves allow the woman to make the manor her home until her memory returns, or until her family can be traced.

   She soon wins the hearts of most of the household, especially that of Sir Arthur, the impressionable male head of the line who is just reaching his majority. No trace of the woman’s earlier existence can be found; her memory does not return. She stays on, and Sir Arthur’s swoon deepens.

   Not everyone, however, finds her credible, and the disappearance without trace (apparently through locked doors) of a nurse brought in to aid her recovery casts a pall on the manor. And brings in the police…

   NOTE: Go here for the previous installment of this column.

[EDITORIAL UPDATE] 04-13-09. There are few authors so obscure that no one recognizes their name. In spite of the fact that not a single one of Hal Pink’s fourteen mysteries is offered for sale online right now — I just looked — Bill Pronzini had this to say when this set of reviews first appeared:

    “One minor point in re Hal Pink: It’s true that none of Pink’s novels was published here in book form, but he was published in the U.S. A handful of his short stories appeared in such magazines as Mystery (The Illustrated Detective Magazine) and Street & Smith Detective Story in the early 30s. Pretty good stories, too.”

    Steve again: There’s nothing like a comment like that to prompt a checklist. I’ve come up with three stories from US magazines, but if someone more knowledgeable than I knew more about the British pulps than I do, I would expect the list to be a whole lot longer.

         The Blond Raffles, Mystery, February 1934.
         Bat Island, Mystery, March 1934.
         The Fires of Moloch, Detective Story Magazine, September 1939.

   Some time later, I heard from Christine Craghill, a relative of Mr. Pink’s whom I corresponded with for a while. I’ve lost contact with her, so I haven’t asked, but I hope she doesn’t mind my reprinting some of the information she found out about him. I’ve left out a good deal, but this is the essential data:

    “Hal’s real name was Harry Leigh Pink (Leigh being his middle name, given in respect of his step grandfather Edmund Leigh) and he was born in 1906 on the Wirral Peninsular in Cheshire, England. He was the son of my grandfather’s brother Frederick Pink and his wife Ethel. So I was right with my first hunch about him, he was my father’s cousin and therefore my second cousin. […] He died in Bakersfield [California] in 1973.”

   In her first email to me, Christine thought that Hal Pink’s name was really Percy Pink, which is the information that’s given in Part 31 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. This she corrected in a later email, having discovered that Hal and Percy were actually brothers.

   One last note: Hal Pink’s The Test Match Mystery (1941) is mentioned very briefly by Marv Lachman in an article he wrote called “A Yank Looks at Cricket and the Mystery Story.” Worth a look, I think, if you haven’t seen it before.