Of necessity, I’ll be taking a break from blogging for the next week or so. My doctor and I are working on the problem. With thyroid disorders, it’s awfully tough to keep the dosages right. Lots of hills and valleys, as you’ll know if you’ve been following this blog long enough.

If I owe you an email, and I probably do if you’ve emailed me since the middle of last week or so, I’ll respond directly as soon as I get caught up a little.

Best wishes for the holiday season. I’ll be back when I can.

— Steve

HAL GLATZER – The Last Full Measure.

Perseverance Press; trade paperback original; April 2006.

   Number three in the continuing mystery-solving adventures of itinerant 1940s swing band musician Katy Green turns out to be measurably better than number two, A Fugue in Hell’s Kitchen (2004), in my opinion, but still not nearly as fine as number one, Too Dead to Swing (2002), which is still the best of the three so far.

   The primary setting for Katy’s latest adventure is an ocean liner that is headed for Hawaii in December, 1941.

    “Ah, ha!” you say. Yes, and you’d be right.

   It is indeed one of those novels in which the reader knows exactly what is in store, but for the passengers and crew, all they’re aware of are rumbling war clouds somewhere off in the distance (but getting closer and closer as time goes on). Katy is part of an all-girl group hired to entertain the passengers, and while you might think impending events would be trouble enough, it is not so.

   There is a murder on board, but as it is also one with no real suspects. Once the ship arrives in Hawai’i, there is (strangely) nothing to forestall a side journey by a subgroup of the all-girl orchestra and various other passengers to locate a treasure buried by native Hawai’ians during a failed insurrection against the haoles in control of the islands many years before.

   Of course this recitation of historical events requires a couple of short lectures, but while while they’re necessary, they also slow the action to a temporary crawl.

   Soon enough, however, it is back to the still unsolved murder, committed by one of the dumbest villains in print, magnified by two events having probabilities of say, one in a million each. (Since the events are not likely to be independent, the overall combined probability of the two events both happening is NOT found by multiplying the two individual probabilities together, so perhaps it’s not as bad as it sounds.)

   Other than that, the travelogue and on the on-board camaraderie are nicely done and may be in themselves worth the price of admission. The author certainly knows his music, and it shows.

   Note: A shorter version of this review appeared in Historical Novels Review.

[UPDATE] 04-06-09.   This was, alas, the last of Katy Green’s adventures in print, so far. Author Hal Glatzer is also a playwright as well as a writer and (not surprisingly) a musician. You can visit his website here.

   My first sampling of British author John Laurence, The Fanshawe Court Mystery (Hodder & Stoughton, 1925), quite encourages me. This is a well-paced tale, nicely complex in plotting and properly mystifying.

   Sometime detective story writer John Martin is riding his motorcycle along a rural lane one rain-filled night, headed for home, when flagged down by the beautiful girl he’s worshiped from afar but not yet met. The girl has come through a forest path and urgently asks a ride to the station so she can catch the train to London.

   He helps her, and later learns that a reclusive local resident has been found murdered along that path. Why was he killed, and what roles do the girl and her dragon-aunt play? Supt. Barlow seems not to be making much headway, so Martin and a crime reporter do their own digging, as much to save the girl as anything else. Gradually threads of conspiracy, fraud, murder and revenge emerge.

   Ripe for Development (Cassell, 1936) is one of several novels by John Gloag about Lionel Buckby, and it’s a rather peculiar affair. Buckby has private money and only one passion: old furniture. He’s not very fond of the U.S…

   …and he’s one of the least perceptive protagonists in the genre. He gets mixed up with a crooked New York art importer and a pair of Chicago gangsters and never catches the drift. The results are nearly fatal – but New York’s Insp. Slamble, allied with the Yard at the end, comes to the rescue. The scheme has something to do with furniture bearing Buckby’s authentication being shipped across the Atlantic. Amusing in spots but not impressive.

   Another British author of total obscurity is Josephine Plain, who perpetuated three mysteries featuring Colin Anstruther in the 1930s. One of these is The Secret of the Snows (Butterworth, 1935), set in a Swiss mountain village.

   Detestable chemist Alfred Gitterson married a young and beautiful and fearsomely superficial wife and in due course got himself strangled on a mountainside. Or so it appears at first glance. At second glance circumstances change drastically and it seems physically impossible for only one person to have done the deed.

   Anstruther is providentially vacationing on the spot. He wants no part of the matter, but his old friend, Swiss detective M. Maraud, draws him in – and in any case Colin had suspected one of the principals of murder in an earlier case.

   Various characters are slowly revealed for what they are as Colin and Maraud struggle against an impossibility which gets worse the more they dig. Pleasant and well-written as this is, it neither plays fair nor convinces nor satisfies in resolving the puzzle.

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

LES SAVAGE, JR. – Gambler’s Row.

Leisure, paperback reprint; 1st printing, February 2003. Hardcover edition: Five Star, February 2002.

   Yes, this is a western, and if you’re a mystery fan only, you can go right on to the next review, if you prefer. But over the past few years Five Star has been doing western fans a great big favor in publishing collections of vintage pulp stories like this one, and thanks to Leisure Books as well, many of them are now available in cheaper editions.

   There are three short novels in this one, all previously appearing in the badly flaking pages of Lariat Magazine, circa 1945-48. But where’s the crime connection, you ask? I’m glad you did, since I was coming to that. In “Gambler’s Row,” the title story, a wandering cowpoke named Drifter (well, yes) is hired by the female owner of the Silver Slipper to locate the sole witness to a murder.

   In “Brush Buster” the only crime is cattle rustling, but it does take some detective work on the part of small-scale rancher Nolan Moore to track them down (and win the hand of lush, full-bodied Ivory Lamar). And in “Valley of Secret Guns” one-armed bronc-buster Bob Tulare is suspected by a gang of rustlers and killers of being a private detective, working undercover to bring them to justice. There is, of course, a woman involved as well.

   As you can probably tell, Al Hubin isn’t likely to include this book in the latest edition of his Bibliography of Crime Fiction, nor would I if I were he, to tell you the truth, but like most westerns, it’s not all that far afield. The stories are melodramatic, especially the first one; humorous, especially the last one; romantic, all three of them; and, most importantly, authentic, again all three of them.

   If you read carefully enough, you can learn how to track someone on horseback without being spotted; how to retrieve cattle used to running wild in the mesquite and thick brush along the Mexican border; and how to break killer horses at five dollars a bust.

   There are cowboy terms in this book that I’ve never heard of, and I don’t think Savage made them up. From page 160: “Center-fire rig popping and snapping beneath him, Tulare unhitched his dally … he didn’t have to get too close with forty-five feet of maguey in his hand.”

   Savage also writes great fight scenes, a few that go on for pages. Not great literature, by any means, but for the market for which they were written, these stories are top of the line.

DENISE MINA – Field of Blood. Little, Brown; hardcover, July 2005; Bantam, pb, April 2006.

       — The Dead Hour. Little, Brown; hardcover, July 2006; Back Bay Books, trade pb, February 2008.

       — Slip of the Knife. Little, Brown; hardcover, Februray 2008. First published as The Last Breath (UK, Bantam Press, 2008).

    I thought that Denise Mina’s Garnethill (Carroll & Graf, 1999) marked the debut of a outstanding crime writer. I was less taken with her stand-alone novel Deception (Little, Brown, 2004). But her new series with neophyte reporter Paddy Meehan has, for me, validated the promise of her early work.

    Paddy, a bright young woman obsessed with a negative self-image, establishes a tentative hold on the bottom rung of the journalistic ladder in a small Scottish newspaper in Field of Blood, her first appearance, while in The Dead Hour she has risen to full-time employment on the night shift, hoping to get the story that will gain her the respect of her colleagues, and make her career.

    She lucks into it but with bent cops trying to effect a coverup and both Paddy’s life and career on the line, she follows leads that could prove her suspicions or kill her.

    In Slip of the Knife she’s achieved her journalistic ambition with a position as a newspaper columnist that brings her recognition if not the complete personal satisfaction that is the more elusive goal. When she learns that a close friend and sometime lover has been murdered and that she has inherited his scrubby estate, she finds she has also inherited his troubled history and deadly secrets that now threaten her.

    This still developing series has the drive of the early Rankin Rebus outings, with a potentially self-destructive protagonist who rivals Rebus in her ability to court disaster without falling prey to it. She may not ask for the reader’s attention, but the power of her narrative voice demands it.

   Between 1933 and 1959 John W(omak) Vandercook (1903-1963) penned four mysteries featuring his remarkably unremarkable sleuth Bertram Lynch and his Watson, Yale history professor Robert Deane.

   The books, Murder in Trinidad (1933), Murder in Fiji (1936), Murder in Haiti (1956), and Murder in New Guinea (1959) were all well-written detective tales possessing a sense of adventure sometimes missing in more formal works of mystery fiction.

   And little wonder, as they reflected Vandercook’s life and career as a novelist, biographer (including Black Majesty: The Life of Henri Christophe, King of Haiti, illustrated by noted Edgar Rice Burrough’s illustrator Mahon Blaine), anchorman, and war correspondent.

   You can go to the The Authentic History Center website, and listen to Vandercook’s full December 8, 1941 broadcast on the NBC Red Network of the Pearl Harbor attack. In all, Vandercook wrote more than fourteen volumes of history, biography, and travel including Tom-Tom, Dark Islands, and Caribee Cruise.

   Bertram Lynch, the hero of the series, is a special agent variously of the British and the League of Nations, who is invariably sent in alone on the most dangerous of assignments. In Murder in Trinidad, for example, Lynch has been sent to Trinidad to break the back of the opium smuggling trade. While traveling to his mission on a tramp steamer he draws the attention of Robert Deane, a Yale History professor who is first attracted to Lynch’s ordinariness, but spots something unique about the quiet middle class Englishman:

   Shortly after they land, Deane interrupts an attempt on Lynch’s life by a knife-throwing assassin and witnesses Lynch coolly retrieve the knife and throw it back wounding his assailant — again without ruffling a feather. Now Deane is drawn into the hunt, and when Lynch’s contact is murdered, the mystery deepens.

   Before the game is over, Deane will have indulged in a bit of romance, a murder from the past will have been uncovered, and the two will penetrate a dangerous swamp to uncover the mastermind behind the crimes — the man Lynch has suspected all along, as he shows with a series of deductions worthy of Sherlock Holmes. So ends the first mystery featuring Lynch and Deane.

   Anthony Boucher said: “It’s at once a rousing novel of tropic adventure .. and an unusually tight and satisfying deductive puzzle …”

   In Murder in Fiji, Deane is summoned by his friend Lynch who is now an agent of the Permanent Central Board of the League of Nations. A wave of murders has stuck the Fiji islands. After finding dead flies under the eyes of a corpse, witnessing the bizarre murder of a native chief and discovering the connection between the crimes and the sections of the map marked in lavender, Lynch cracks the case, despite a less than cooperative local Chief Constable who asks:

   Again Deane romances an attractive and lively lady and Lynch plays a sort of unwanted cupid. The dialogue is sprightly, the action intense, and the mystery more than fair. Overall, another excellent entry in the series with local color, geography, and culture playing major roles in the mystery rather than merely acting as a colorful background. The murder of the native chief is a well handled scene done with a nice understated feeling for the macabre.

   Boucher said of this one: “As before, the local color is well handled, and the relationship of detective Bertram Lynch and his narrator, Robert Deane continues to be a sheer delight.”

   Deane and Lynch don’t return again for almost twenty years, but in 1956’s Murder in Haiti, they are back in action. By now Lynch is a sort of private detective, and Deane joins him on the deluxe yacht Vittoria, owned by a financial czar determined to recover millions in stolen pirate booty.

   But when they reach Haiti, it becomes clear the gold isn’t pirate loot, but more recent in origin: stolen Nazi gold. Lynch as usual plays his cards close to his vest, risks Deane’s neck, and encourages the professor to romance an attractive blonde — all in the name of duty.

   The locations are well-drawn and the action well-conceived. Vandercook knew Haiti particularly well, and it shows in his use of the islands unique history and culture as a background.

   Murder in New Guinea is the last of the Lynch and Deane mysteries. This time Lynch and Deane have been summoned by the Governor of New Guinea to find four explorers who have gone missing among the gold rich Murray Range and it’s dangerous Stone Age tribes.

   Of course things are never that simple, and natives and gold prove the least of the duo’s problems, as they uncover something more valuable than gold and worth killing for in the mountains of New Guinea. They thwart an international plot, and we last see the duo as Lynch takes a much deserved nap after their exertions. Whether Vandercook intended that to be the duo’s last teaming we’ll never know. He died in 1963 before any further entries could be written.

   Barzun and Taylor didn’t care much for the series and were hard on this one in Catalogue of Crime, and to be fair, Vandercook makes one major blunder about a key factor in the novel, but it hardly spoils the pleasure over all.

   Likely the average reader isn’t going to be a geologist so it probably doesn’t matter all that much. Conan Doyle once had Watson identify rabbit bones as human, makes major geographical mistakes about Dartmoor, and has the trains running out of Victoria Station in the wrong direction, but no one seem to care.

   For that matter, Dumas has a street in The Three Musketeers named for one of Napoleon’s marshals. In these matters nits should be picked carefully. If minor matters bother you then this one likely will, but if you can overlook them it’s an enjoyable finale to a good series of books.

   There is nothing revolutionary about the Lynch and Deane novels, but they are all well written, fast paced, and interesting. Vandercook is no threat to Agatha Christie in the spinning of cunning plots, but he writes well, and the books are surprisingly readable, with Lynch an unassuming yet satisfying great detective, and Deane is one of the more intelligent, useful, and likable Watsons in the genre.

   Lynch is a believable figure, cool in action despite his ordinary facade and ruthless when need be. He is well-balanced by the sane and intelligent Deane, who for once proves an able assistant, despite Lynch’s Holmes like insistence on keeping him in the dark.

   Murder in Trinidad, the first entry in the series has a colorful history. It was first filmed in 1934 under the same title; it was directed by Louis King with a script by Seton I. Miller. Nigel Bruce (for once neither blathering nor blundering) played Lynch, and Heather Angel and Victor Jory were featured.

   Deane didn’t appear, at least not as Deane. You can read the review from The New York Times here online. William K. Everson also has much to say in praise of the film in The Detective in Film. Bruce’s slovenly ordinary detective is somewhat mindful of the later Columbo with Peter Falk in both his appearance and appeal.

   In 1939 the book was the basis of Mr. Moto on Danger Island, with Peter Lorre subbing for Lynch, Jean Hersholt, and Warren Hymer co-starring, and directed by Herbert Leeds with a script by Peter Milne and story by John Reinhardt and George Brickner. In 1945 the book was again filmed as The Caribbean Mystery, with James Dunn and Sheila Ryan, again minus Lynch and Deane by name.

   The first two Lynch and Deane books were reprinted in hardcover form in the mid-1950s, and two appeared in the US in paperback, and they sold well enough that they aren’t all that rare. They are well worth reading, and if you sometimes would like to get away from the more cozy British country house or village crime without sacrificing the fun of a formal mystery, the books offer thrills, and solid detection.

   Vandercook knew the places he wrote of and his style is clean and painless, all the virtues of a good travel guide to exotic ports, and Lynch and Deane are good company for a little armchair adventuring.

   These aren’t great novels, they won’t change your life or the way you think about the genre, but they deserve to be read and remembered. Among all the mediocre and worse books that fill the genre that’s reason enough to appreciate Lynch and Deane and their creator for their accomplishments.

         Bibliographic data:

Murder in Trinidad. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1933. William Heinemann, UK, hc, 1934. Hardcover reprint: Macmillan Reissue “Murder Revisited” series, 1955. US paperback reprints: Penguin 552, 1944; Collier, 1961. Also appeared as Star Weekly Complete Novel, Toronto, 1 October 1955.

Murder in Fiji. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1936. William Heinemann, UK, hc, 1936. Hardcover reprint: Macmillan “Murder Revisited” series, 1955. Also appeared as Star Weekly Complete Novel, Toronto, 26 May 1956.

Murder in Haiti. Macmillan, A Cock Robin Mystery, hardcover, 1956. Eyre & Spottiswoode, UK, hc, 1956. Paperback reprint: Avon T-278, 1958, as Out for a Killing. Also appeared in Bestseller Mystery Magazine, February 1961.

Murder in New Guinea. Macmillan, A Cock Robin Mystery, hardcover, 1959. W. H. Allen, UK, hc, 1960.

BEVERLY CONNOR – Scattered Graves.

Penguin/Obsidian, paperback original; 1st printing, February 2009.

   I’m not much interested in stories about medical examiners (not even Quincy) or forensic specialists (I’ve never read a book by Patricia Cornwell), nor do I watch Bones or any of the CSI shows on TV. It must be a failure in me, as they seem to be very popular with everyone else.

   In any case, this is the reason that this is the first book by Beverly Connor that I’ve read, it being the sixth book in her “Diana Fallon Forensic Invesigator” series, which followed five books about Linsday Chamberlain, described online as an “anthropologist who specializes in archaeology [and] an expert in forensic analysis of bones.”

   A description of A Rumor of Bones, the first book in the Chamberlain series begins this way: “It’s the bones of missing children that disturb her…” and that tells me all I want to know. I don’t read books that have bones of missing children in them. I’m sure that this is what wiped me out of reading any others in the series, as none of the titles sound remotely familiar:

      Lindsay Chamberlain series:

   1. A Rumor of Bones. Cumberland House, hc, Oct 1996; pb, Mar 2001.

   2. Questionable Remains. Cumberland House, hc, Sept 1997; Worldwide, pb, May 2001.
   3. Dressed to Die. Cumberland House, hc, Sept 1998; pb, Oct 2001.
   4. Skeleton Crew. Cumberland House, hc, Oct 1999; pb, Jan 2002.

   5. Airtight Case. Cumberland House, hc, Oct 2000; pb, Oct 2002.

   But now that I’ve done the research, I take that back. Cumberland House books don’t get much circulation up here in New England, and the reason that the titles don’t look familiar, all but the one from Worldwide (Harlequin), is that I never saw them.

   Luckily enough, when her contract with Cumberland seems to have run out, Beverly Connor was able to adapt and start another series, apparently in much the same subgenre, and maybe even the same same mode. Here’s a list of her Diane Fallon books, both so far and forthcoming:

       Diane Fallon series:

   1. One Grave Too Many. Onyx, pbo, Dec 2003.

   2. Dead Guilty. Onyx, pbo, Sept 2004.
   3. Dead Secret. Onyx, pbo, Dec 2005.
   4. Dead Past. Onyx, pbo, Feb 2007.

   5. Dead Hunt. Obsidian, pbo, Feb 2008.
   6. Scattered Graves. Obsidian, pbo, Feb 2009.
   7. Dust to Dust. Obsidian, pbo, Aug 2009.

   Six books into a series these days, when detectives have personal lives as well as solve crimes, means that there’s a lot of backstory to catch up on, but to Connor’s credit, she made it easy for me, a first time reader. What struck me the most, though, was not the small group of friends, enemies and co-workers around her – some of whom are one and the same – but how “over the top” the story line is.

   After a rather standard opening for a book about a DNA lab, with the local sheriff bringing in a young boy’s find – a stash of bone chips in a newly plowed field – I suddenly sat straight up in my chair in the middle of Chapter Four, as a local policeman with a grudge against Diane tries to push her personally off a cliff.

   She, being an experienced rock climber, manages to escape, while Harve Delamore falls to his death. Perhaps I should mention that Rosewood, where Diane works, in in Georgia, not too far from Atlanta, and you may have to accept that grudges last longer and are worked out differently in the South.

   Including, strangely enough, Diane’s nearly being charged with Delamore’s death. But wait, that’s not all. I won’t reveal anything that you wouldn’t like to know about ahead of time, but Rosewood is one of the most corrupt towns you will ever be in, and that goes all the way to the top. Until someone with a gun tries to do something about it – and that someone may or may not be one of the Good Guys.

   I’d like to say more, but let me release my breath and say Whew, just thinking about it. It’s like one bombshell going off after the other. There is one heck of a complex ending, too, one that all but stalls out in a moral morass of malicious behavior, some intended, some not, as extravagantly excessive as anything that has gone before.

   And please don’t take that as a bad thing. Is the book readable? Once you pick it up, I don’t think you’ll put it down very quickly. It took me two evenings to read its slightly over 350 pages, the best eyeball rate I’ve managed to accomplish in a good long while.

   Uploaded this morning was Part 31 of the ongoing online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. Included are the usual bits of information, including a handful of new authors and titles, but for the most part the new data consists of additional information about books and writers previously included. Series characters and story settings for the former, for example, and birth and death dates for the latter.

   Al says the printed version is 45 pages long — one of the longest installments to the Addenda so far.

   Follow the links and feel free to browse around. If you spot any errors and would like to make corrections, or if you discover you have additional facts to supply, then of course, please do!

CHRISTIANNA BRAND – The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries from Inspector Cockrill’s Casebook.  Crippen & Landru, hardcover & trade paperback, November 2002. Edited by Tony Medawar.

   Christianna Brand’s Inspector Cockrill appeared in almost a score of novels, short stories, and even a play, most of which were published in her lifetime. Crippen & Landru have done us a service in preserving all of the short stories that saw publication — and more.

   From the back cover blurb:

    “Christianna Brand (the pseudonym of Mary Christianna Milne Lewis, 1907-1988) was a supreme mistress of the classic detective story, with twists and turns, and all the clues fairly given to the reader. The wizened, bird-like Inspector Cockrill of the Kent police starred in Green for Danger, one of the greatest detective novels to emerge from World War II, but The Spotted Cat is the first collection of all of the short stories about him. Five of the stories have never previously appeared in a Brand volume, and one of them is published here for the first time. The book also includes a genuine find, a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill.”

         CONTENTS:

Introduction (“In and Out of Darkness”) by Tony Medawar: A well researched article about Brand’s life and progress as a writer.

1. “Inspector Cockrill” (1978) by Christianna Brand: The author writes an amusing but affectionate biographical sketch of her most famous character, patterned closely after her father-in-law, a medical doctor.

    “He [Cockie] is not one for the physical details of an investigation: ‘meanwhile his henchmen pursued their ceaseless activities’ writes his creator, not too sure herself exactly what those would be; and he is content to leave fingerprint powder and magnifying glass to the experts, using their findings in a process of elimination, to get down to the nitty-gritty from there on.

    “He has acute powers of observation, certainly; a considerable understanding of human nature, a total integrity and commitment, much wisdom; and as we know a perhaps overlong experience of the criminal world …. Above all — he has patience.” True, “he will have compassion for the guilty”; nevertheless, “he can be forthright and stern …. There is no false sentiment about Chief Inspector Cockrill, none at all.”

2. “After the Event” (from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, January 1958 as “Rabbit out of Hat”)

   In a famous play by Shakespeare, Othello strangles his (reputedly) faithless wife; back in the 1920s, an actor playing Othello at the time apparently did the same thing in the lady’s dressing room backstage. An unnamed Great Detective reminisces about the case to a group of acquaintances, among them Inspector Cockrill, who predictably pokes holes in the speaker’s handling of the situation, much to the Great Man’s chagrin. And one should always remember, as Cockrill does, that theatrical people have been known to put on an act ….

   Note: Inspector Cockrill, cracking walnuts and irritating the Great Man, is an armchair detective in this story.

3. “Blood Brothers” (from EQMM: September 1965)

   Brotherly love, like all relationships, seems to have its limits. Two siblings, identical twins, have been with the same girl, competing for her affections; but now, it seems, she is pregnant by one of them. The situation is further complicated by several factors: The girl knows that one of the brothers has killed a small boy in a hit-and-run; she is also married to a huge brute doing time in one of HM’s prisons but due soon for release; and one of the siblings harbors enough hatred to let the other take the fall for first-degree murder.

   Inspector Cockrill — who enters in the last third of the story — simply lets things take their natural and inevitable course, as David and Jonathan rapidly degenerate into Cain and Abel … with a twist.

   Note: Instead of being told in the third person, this story is narrated by one of the brothers.

4. “The Hornet’s Nest” (from EQMM: May 1967 as “Twist for Twist”)

   When wealthy Cyrus Caxton — a nasty piece of work, that one — does a Brodie face first into his half-eaten peach, no one of his acquaintance is moved to shed a tear, save his attractive wife. Inspector Cockrill is called in and confronts a fine set of likely suspects; in the end, the Inspector, Ellery Queen-like, has proposed two plausible solutions before pouncing on a third, actual one.

   Elizabeth comments on Cockie’s method: “He’s — he’s sort of teasing us; needling us, trying to make us say something.” Presciently, the Inspector early in his investigation remarks: “There has been a plan here, doctor: no simple matter of a lick of poison scraped out of a fortuitous tin, smeared on to a fortuitous peach-in-liqueur; but a very elaborate, deep-laid, long-thought-out, absolutely sure-fire plan.”

5. “Poison in the Cup” (from EQMM: February 1969)

   CASE HISTORY: Stella Harrison is a small-town doctor’s wife more than a little bored with her lot in life; her husband Richard, a painfully honest individual, seems oblivious to her incipient disaffection — and equally unaware of her secret love for his partner, Frederick Graham. A nurse at the hospital, Ann Kelly, however, makes no secret of her undying love for Stella’s husband… Ann makes a fatal mistake, though, when she decides to stage a bogus suicide attempt in Dr. Harrison’s surgery …. DIAGNOSIS: Murder. PROGNOSIS: Life in prison for a killer who remembers every detail but one ….

   Note: The murderer’s identity is never in doubt; we see the crime committed. The interest lies in how Chief Inspector Cockrill, a la TV’s Columbo, will trip up the perp — because this killer uses the truth as a cover.

6. “The Telephone Call” (from EQMM: January 1973 as “The Last Short Story”)

   The best-laid plans do often go off the tracks, don’t they? A young man short of money conceives an intricate plot to acquire a lot of it in a hurry; his girlfriend half-jokingly suggests it: “You’ll have to murder your rich Aunt Ellen”; and he improves it: “Yes, and let Cousin Peter swing for it; if he did, I’d scoop the lot.”

   And so he carefully begins building two alibis, one for himself and a negative one for the hapless Peter… And it all works beautifully — except for one thing, and you don’t have to be Detective Inspector Cockrill to figure it out.

   Note: The bulk of this story is told in the form of a written confession.

7. “The Kissing Cousin” (from Woman: June 2, 1973)

   Cranky old Aunt Adela has millions, but true to form she is parsimonious and secretive about her wealth; her niece Franca doesn’t really care if she inherits — but there’s someone she knows who is greatly interested in the old lady’s money, someone willing to kill for it. When Aunt Adela is found dead, her house ransacked for a missing will, Chief Inspector Cockrill zeroes in on Franca: “You inherit,” he says. “And you hold the only key to the door.” But the killer already has Franca marked for murder, and knows as well the secret Keeper, the cowardly mastiff, is harboring ….

   Note: It seems Cockie doesn’t really solve this one, and takes no active part in apprehending the murderer; he is a secondary character here.

8. “The Rocking-Chair” (from The Saint Magazine: August 1984)

   Taking a break from a village fete “on a boiling hot afternoon” to have “a little booze-up”, the Duchess of St. Martha’s Island retires to her castle with Miss Maud Trumble, “rich and famous author of dozens of really quite terrible books”, and Chief Inspector Cockrill.

   Seemingly gripped by a feeling of guilt, Miss Trumble, “mildly squiffy,” relates her involvement in the unresolved Case of the Three Dead Ladies: “three women lying dead, spread out like a trefoil clover-leaf, their poor heads forming the centre point…” Cockie and the Duchess both prove able armchair detectives by “solving” this fifteen-year-old case.

    “It was like a detective story, thought the Duchess, where the clues are placed not so much squarely before the reader as slightly obliquely, so that they come out as not quite what in fact they are.” Just so.

9. “The Man on the Roof” (from EQMM: October 1984)

   English village life is normally uneventful, but not today: The much-despised and suicidal Duke of Hawksmere seems at long last to have followed through with his oft-delayed promise to do himself in: “a good, straight-forward suicide,” thinks Chief Inspector Cockrill, “heralded by the gentleman himself….”

   If only it were that simple. The dearly deceased, consistent with the burdensome pattern of his life, has managed to die under most perplexing circumstances that suggest he was murdered; to wit, he seems to have expired in a classic “locked room.”

   Cockie, in frustration, says: “The locked room is the lodge, locked in, as it were in all that untrodden snow. A man dead in the lodge, very recently dead, death instantaneous, from a gun-shot wound at close range. And the mystery is very easy to state and not at all easy to answer. The mystery is — where is the gun? — because it isn’t lying there close to his right hand where it ought to be, and it isn’t anywhere else in the lodge and it isn’t anywhere outside in all the snow.”

   As in “The Hornet’s Nest,” Cockie devises two plausible scenarios — but the actual solution, one not of his devising, comes as an exasperating — and exasperatingly simple — surprise to both him and the unsuspecting reader.

   Note: “The Man on the Roof” can also be found in Thomas Godfrey’s English Country House Murders, 1989.

10. “Alleybi” (“This story, published in this volume for the first time, was probably written in the mid-1950s.”)

   A short-short story (one and a half pages) that should serve as a warning to all investigating officers not to get tunnel vision whenever someone’s alibi is in doubt.

11. “The Spotted Cat: A Play in Three Acts” (“Previously unpublished; written in 1954-1955. Brand considered turning it into a novel but abandoned the idea.”)

   Things aren’t going particularly well for barrister Graham Frere these days: His legal prowess is failing, he’s experiencing problems with alcohol, and he is beginning to think he’s going crazy.

   At first he doesn’t realize that not all of his troubles are of his own making, that people close to him — under his very roof — are subtly pushing him towards madness, or possibly suicide; they have already murdered once, however, so even that option isn’t off the table. The conspirators themselves share a love-hate relationship, as evidenced by one telling the other:

    “We’re bound together for ever now, you and I.”

    “Nothing binds us.”

    “Fear binds us.”

    “It doesn’t bind me.”

    and: “When I look at you — coldly and sanely — I’d as soon put my love and trust in a cobra.”

    Nice people! But the conspiracy falters when the worm turns and murder is prescribed ….

   This play is a mixture of Gaslight and Double Indemnity with just a dash of Patricia Highsmith. Brand spoofs herself in one exchange:

    “London Particular was a book — that woman who wrote Green for Danger.”

    “I know it was. I couldn’t read a word of it.”

   Despite a few typos (e.g., “does” for “dose,” “desert” for “dessert”) and some problematic punctuation, this book can be highly recommended.

MAX COLLINS – The Broker. Berkley, paperback original, 1976. Paperback reprint: Foul Play Press, 1985, as Quarry.

   In the mid-1970s, the multi-talented Max Collins (who also writes as Max Allan Collins) produced a series of four paperback originals about a Vietnam vet turned hired killer, known only as Quarry. The Quarry series has so often been referred to as a Richard Stark pastiche that its own tone and morality are often overlooked.

   In The Broker, the first in the series, we meet Quarry shooting a man in an airport men’s room. Quarry’s assignment is to bring what the man is holding (heroin) back to his employer, an icy sort called the Broker. Quarry complies.

   After complaining that he does not like to deal in drug killings, he reluctantly takes another Broker assignment, this one working with a homosexual killer named Boyd. In the rest of the novel, Collins shows us an abundantly unpleasant world peopled with all sorts of characters, from cuckolded husbands to porno-crazed geezers who look like Gabby Hayes.

   What gives the Quarry books their style is the detached voice of the narrator: Quarry has no compunctions about killing people, because he feels most of them are rather foolish beings anyway. Unlike Stark’s Parker, who is human only when it serves his ends, Quarry is subject to feelings other than anger-melancholy, amusement, contempt-feelings he notes, nonetheless, with the kind of removed observation one would expect from a man in his profession.

   The Broker and the other three novels in the series — The Broker’s Wife (1976), The Dealer (1976), and The Slasher (1977) — are successful for another reason: They depict the waning hippie/flower-power days with a great deal of historical accuracy. The Quarry books are therefore an important part of the crime fiction of the Seventies — a quirky, idiosyncratic look at the Midwest during the Gerald Ford regime.

         ———
   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: The Quarry series [Updated].

   The Broker. Berkley, pbo, 1976; aka Quarry, Foul Play, 1985.

   The Broker’s Wife. Berkley, pbo, 1976; aka Quarry’s List, Foul Play, 1985.

   The Dealer, Berkley, pbo, 1976; aka Quarry’s Deal, Foul Play, 1986.

   The Slasher, Berkley, , pbo, 1977; aka Quarry’s Cut, Foul Play, 1986.

   Primary Target. Foul Play, hardcover, 1987.

   Quarry’s Greatest Hits. Five Star, hc, 2003. Contents:
       ● Primary Target (novel)
       ● “A Matter of Principle” (short story, reprinted from Stalkers, Roc/Penguin, 1992, Ed Gorman, ed., and the basis for a short film included in the DVD boxed set Max Allan Collins Black Box Collection: Shades of Neo-Noir, 2006.)
       ● “Quarry’s Luck” (short story reprinted from Narrow Houses: Blue Motel, Volume 3, Little Brown, UK, 1994, Peter Crowther, ed.)
       ● “Guest Services” (short story reprinted from Murder Is My Business, Signet, 1994, Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins, eds.)

   The Last Quarry. Hard Case Crime, pbo, 2006. Expansion of “A Matter of Principle,” and the basis for the feature length film, The Last Lullaby (2008).

   The First Quarry. Hard Case Crime, pbo, 2008.

   Quarry In The Middle. Hard Case Crime, pbo, 2009. (Forthcoming, November.)