FRANCES COWEN – The Shadow of Polperro.

Ace, paperback; 1st US publication, 1973. First UK publication: Robert Hale, hardcover, 1969.

   Here’s a prime example of an authentic gothic romance novel. When this particular example of the genre recently surfaced in a box of books I was rummaging through, I just couldn’t resist.

   It has all of the right ingredients, starting, of course, with the cover: A close-up of a young wide-eyed girl standing behind a iron gate next to a tall piece of statuary; in the gloomy background, a hulk of a mansion or castle, with the full moon partially hidden behind the bare branches of a convenient tree.

   The castle is Polperro, located on the southern coast of Cornwall. Supposedly it dates back to the days of King Arthur, Camelot and the traitor Mordred. It was built by the latter as a fortress. In near decay now, and known by the nearby townsfolk to be haunted, it is the single item in Esther Roden’s inheritance from her father.

   Not knowing how to dispose of it, she deems herself lucky to find a film director who wishes to rent it as a location site for his latest effort, a remaking of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.

   Lots of hints follow of dire things to come, a few unexplainable accidents occur, and there’s an abundance of spooky atmosphere, but except for one dead body found strictly offstage … nothing really happens.

   There are some close calls, but just when you think the story is at last leading you somewhere, it doesn’t, and then it boldfacedly ignores even the possibility that it was leading you somewhere.

   You’ll also think I’m crazy, but the book is as compulsively readable as a bag full of popcorn. It’s not the detective work, which is as flimsy and as transparent as a wisp of mist, the killers’ identities obvious within pages.

   The author’s strong points are her characters, surprisingly enough, both major and minor. You may not notice it while she’s doing it, but she sketches and fills them in with ease, making what’s difficult for some writers seem almost effortless instead.

PostScript:   One character who befriends the heroine in this tale is an older lady named Agnes Macintosh, whose psychic powers warn Esther of the castle’s malevolence. She doesn’t have a big role, but later on it’s revealed that she also has connections with Scotland Yard. Interesting, but not worth mentioning until I discovered that she also appears in Frances Cowen’s Village of Fear, another gothic published by Ace. Al Hubin doesn’t list her as a series character in Crime Fiction III, so I just passed the Big News on to him

[UPDATE] 01-09-09.   I suspect that Agnes Macintosh may appear in some other of Frances Cowen’s books, but these are the only two identified so far.

   Cowen is the author of 30 novels in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, all perhaps in much the same vein as The Shadow of Polperro. Four other novels by her are marginally included in CFIV. These were written as by Eleanor Hyde and are historical novels taking place in the 1500s with some criminous elements. She also seems to have written many books for children, mostly for girls.

   All of her books for adults came out first in the UK in hardcover. Seven were published in US by Ace as paperback originals. Some of the other titles are The Curse of the Clodaghs (1973), The Gentle Obsession (1968), The Haunting of Helen Farley (1976), and The Hounds of Carvello (1970).

RICHARD STARK – The Hunter.

Pocket Books, paperback original, 1962. British title: Point Blank. Coronet, ppbk, 1967. Reprint editions include: Gold Medal, pb, ca.1967; and Berkley, pb, 1973, both as Point Blank; Avon, pb, 1984; Univ. of Chicago Press, trade pb, 2008. Film: MGM, 1967, as Point Blank (scw: Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse, Rafe Newhouse; dir: John Boorman). Film: Paramount, 1999, as Payback (scw: Brian Helgeland, Terry Hayes; dir: Helgeland).

   Although one of the most influential series of the Sixties and Seventies, the Parker novels have never really been a huge popular success in the United States. They have shuttled from one publisher to another, while gaining critical acclaim and cult status, selling handsomely in foreign editions, and generating six motion pictures — the income from which no doubt justified the effort put into the books by an author who is finally coming to be viewed as one of the major figures of the twentieth-century mystery.

   The impact Parker has had on the tough crime novel can be gauged by a sub-genre Stark has virtually invented: the so-called crook book. Prior to Stark, only Robin Hood thieves like Raffles or the Saint had taken center stage in series fiction; and W. R. Burnett — in whose path Stark most clearly treads — did not write series fiction about his amoral antiheroes.

   Parker’s recorded adventures begin in The Hunter (sometimes republished as Point Blank, the title of the stylish 1967 John Boorman-directed movie version with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson).

   Betrayed and left for dead on a heist by his wife, Lynn, and his friend Mal Resnick, Parker returns with a single-minded mission: to get the $45,000 due him. He first contacts his remorseful wife (who describes herself as a “Judas ewe”) and, without really intending to, intimidates her into suicide. When he finally corners Resnick, now employed by the mob, he finds Resnick has turned the money over to his “Outfit” bosses.

   With a sense of logic unique to him, Parker forces Mal to tell him the names and whereabouts of the various mob bosses, then strangles him and sets about getting his money back from the mob. What begins as a personal vendetta — which Parker cloaks in the practical consideration of getting his money back (it is characteristic of him to bury his emotions, his humanity turns into a darkly humorous tale of one man battling an organization.

   Parker is a self-sufficient, single-minded loner out of an earlier, wilder America; the soft, big-business boys don’t stand a chance against him.

   Richard Stark’s prose is as straightforward and matter-of-fact effective as Parker himself. His narrative structure, here and in the other Parker novels, is not so straightforward: Working in the third person, it is Stark’s method to follow the initial Parker-point-of-view section of the book with a section that shifts to Parker’s antagonist’s point of view (or, in later novels, the points of view of various characters, including antagonists), and then, finally, shift back to Parker’s viewpoint.

   Events are often seen more than once, from varying perspectives, moving back and forth in time, creating a sense of inevitability where Parker’s Frankenstein-monster forward momentum is concerned.

   The Parker series is one of the most evenly written in crime fiction; the sixteen novels are consistently well done and readable. If forced, one might point out Plunder Squad (1972) as a somewhat perfunctory Parker, and Deadly Edge (1971) as a particularly fine example.

   Offbeat entries include The Jugger (1965), in which Parker plays detective: and Slayground (1971), a set piece in which Parker hides from and does battle with mob interlopers in an amusement park.

   Parker has inspired two spin-offs: Grofield by Stark, and Dortmunder by Westlake. Actor Alan Grofield, whose first appearance was in the Parker novel The Score (1964), has appeared in four novels of his own: The Damsel (1967), The Dame (1969), The Blackbird (1969), and Lemons Never Lie (1971).

   The first three resemble slightly straighter versions of Westlake’s famed comic crime novels and, in their foreign locales, prefigure his massive Kahawa (1982). Grofield seems a slightly different character in his solo novels, struggling to perform the role of protagonist and not sidekick; but the two personas converge in the Parker-like Lemons Never Lie.

    Butcher’s Moon is a sequel to both the Parker entry, Slayground, and the Grofield entry, The Blackbird, which share nearly the same first chapters (detailing a botched armored-car job). The Dortmunder books are deadpan comedy versions of Parker capers: The first, The Hot Rock (1970), is a specific reworking of The Black Ice Score, and Grofield has a leading role.

   Later, in Jimmy the Kid (1974), Dortmunder’s gang read and follow as a blueprint a nonexistent Parker novel entitled Child Heist; this nicely counterpoints the differences between the cute absurd world of Westlake/Dortmunder and the grim absurd one of Stark/Parker.

         ———
   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.

NORTHWEST TRAIL. Action Pictures/Lippert, 1945. Bob Steele, Joan Woodbury, John Litel, John Hamilton, Raymond Hatton, Madge Bellamy, George Meeker. Cinecolor. Based on a story James Oliver Curwood. Director: Derwin Abrahams.

   As a word of caution first, several online websites that discuss this movie suggest that the connection to James Olive Curwood was totally imaginary. The DVD was also sold to me in a box set of western films, but since the setting is contemporary Canada (circa 1945), with both automobiles and airplanes not only visible but part of the plot, I’m going to call it an action adventure movie instead.

   Bob Steele, of course, was indeed a long-time B-western movie star, but in Northwest Trail he plays a Royal Canadian Mountain Policeman instead. It was toward the end of Steele’s career as far as leading roles was concerned, but the career continued on to 1973 in secondary roles. He’s probably most famous for his role as Trooper Duffy in TV’s F-Troop, but not to me, as the series, a comedy taking place in the Old West, never appealed to me.

   Playing opposite him in Northwest Trail is Joan Woodbury as Kate Owens, the daughter of a man to whom she’s bringing $20,000 in cash to help him meet his payroll far up in the Canadian wilderness. Their first encounter does not go well, which means of course they will eventually find themselves falling in love with each other.

   But I’m getting ahead of myself. The movie begins with mounted officer Matt O’Brien (Bob Steele) coming across the young lady as she’s sleeping in the middle of nowhere in a car with a carburetor that’s being balky at the high altitude. The young lady is greatly amused. The officer is stolid and inwardly grimacing as he tries to help her:

    “Say, tell me, is this ‘always gets his man’ stuff true, or just a lot of movie hokum?” she asks. “That happens to be the motto of the service,” he replies stiffly. “Oh, how noble. Well, where’s your man, or didn’t you get him yet?” Zing, zing, zing. See for yourself. It’s a scene that’s well worth the price of admission.

   My apologies for the smallness of Joan Woodward’s photo (and it’s not even from this movie) and the blurry image of the scene to the right. (Bob Steele’s being ordered back to his RCMP base by John Litel after he’s successfully reunited the lady with her father, played by Neil Hamilton of Superman fame.)

   I haven’t the skills to improve this second image. Maybe it can’t be done.

   But getting back to the story, it’s full of action, beginning with a robbery after O’Brien is assigned the task of escorting the young lady on the final stage of her journey, on horseback, since cars are no longer up to the task.

   Not all of the action makes a lot of sense, but there is plenty of shooting, chasing, and sneaking up on, plus an abundance of other suspicious activity.

   I referred earlier to Tim McCoy’s rather stiff way of riding in the saddle. You could hardly ask for more animation in a rider than Bob Steele, elbows flying, his horse fairly leaping along.

   Remarkably enough, Joan Woodbury is also an excellent rider, and overall, with sparks continually flying, she brings far more life to the story than the rather dour Mr. Steele does.

   What her character sees in him is another matter altogether, especially when all is said and done. That includes an ending I didn’t believe even as I was watching it – the solution being built out of the sheerest of gossamer fabric – and the clinch that occurs afterward seems as unlikely as the proverbial snowball.

ARTHUR MORRISON – Chronicles of Martin Hewitt.

D. Appleton & Co., US, hardcover, 1896; Ward Lock & Co., UK, hardcover, 1895 (shown).

   Arthur Morrison’s Martiin Hewitt was for the decade 1895-1905 probably the foremost rival of Sherlock Holmes. Not much of one, though, for he completely lacked the distinguishing personality of the Master and his creator the skill to make his deductions seem other than lucky guesses.

    Some of his adventures, however have plots as delightfully flamboyant as Holmes’. Notable of the six short stories — each the length of a Nero Wolfe novella — included in Chronicles are “The Case of Laker, Absconded,” in which the crooks carefully arrange their robbery of a bank messenger to make it seem that he has defaulted; and “The Case of the Missing Hand,” in which a gypsy almost frames, unintentionally, two brothers for killing their suicide step-father by stealing the corpse’s hand to make a Hand of Glory — a thief’s talisman.

   The telling of these tales is, however, almost as pedestrian as Hewitt’s personality.

      Additional bibliographic data:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

ARTHUR MORRISON – Chronicles of Martin Hewitt

      The Case of Laker, Absconded · nv The Windsor Magazine May, 1895
      The Case of the Lost Foreigner · nv The Windsor Magazine Jun, 1895
      The Case of the Missing Hand · ss The Windsor Magazine Apr, 1895
      The Holford Will Case · ss The Windsor Magazine Mar, 1895
      The Ivy Cottage Mystery · nv The Windsor Magazine Jan, 1895 (shown)
      The Nicobar Bullion Case · nv The Windsor Magazine Feb, 1895

ROBERT KENNETH JONES – The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s.

NAL Plume, trade paperback, 1978. Hardcover edition: FAX Collector’s Editions, West Linn OR, 1975. Reprint hardcover/softcover: Wildside Press, 2007.

   In 1940, when I began reading everything I could lay my eyes on, there were countless pulps at my local newsstand. There was even, in the neighborhood in the South Bronx in which I grew up, a store that sold used pulps at three for a dime. Aware of the prices being asked for pulps now, I deeply regret not having invested-or at least kept those I had. Had I but known.

   Robert Kenneth Jones’ The Shudder Pulps is designed for those of us who, for literary and-or monetary reasons, are nostalgic for the pulpa era. It is not designed as a complete history, but rather as an informal survey of the horror-weird menace type of pulp that was so popular in the 1930’s.

   The stories of which Jones writes fell somewhere in between fantasy-science fiction on one hand and detective-mystery fiction on the other. While most of his discussion concerns magazines like Weird Tales, Horror Stories, and Terror Tales, some of the detective pulps like Dime Detective come in for attention as well. In an easy-going, anecdotal style, Jones describes the contents of some of the magazines, the publishing taboos, and gives us an idea of the economics of writing at the time.

   Though many of the pulp writers of the thirties are no longer alive, Jones interviewed several of those available, e.g., Baynard Kendrick and Wyatt Blassingame, and has captured their reminiscences for posterity.

   No book about the pulps would be complete without some discussion of the illustrations, especially the gory, funny, sexy covers. Jones has included more than seventy illustrations, mostly covers. Unfortunately, they are reduced in size and are in black and white, so that some of the original appeal of the covers is missing. Still, in words and pictures Robert Kenneth Jones has done an admirable job of recreating a time for which we rightly feel nostalgic.

DAN BROWN – Deception Point.

Pocket, paperback reprint; 1st printing, December 2002. Hardcover edition: Atria, November 2001.

   There are more than 550 pages in this recent techno-thriller with strong political overtones, and unless I lost track of time, it all takes place in just over or under 24 hours. And in most of the action is Rachel Sexton, who works for NASA and who’s on the outs with her U.S. Senator father, who’s making a strong run for the Presidency, based on an even stronger anti-NASA platform.

   But something’s afoot in the Arctic. NASA has made an earth-shaking discovery of some sort, and so far they’ve been keeping it under wraps. To convince Rachel to commit to his side, her boss whisks her off to the Milne Ice Shelf before making a world-wide television announcement that will completely change the course of the campaign.

   Not all is what it seems, and Dan Brown continually managed to keep me off guard most of the way through. (One thing I did know is that when on page 65, it is revealed that Rachel is petrified of open water, that it’s one hundred percent guaranteed that she will be later challenged in this regard, and probably more than once. And she is.)

   Brown knows his technology, or if he doesn’t, he certainly convinced me that he does. And the scary thing is, you start to wonder, if the government has this much power and this much control of almost everything, what possible say does a common citizen have to alter the way the country is run, to influence the decisions that are made?

   To say that the book is compulsively readable is an understatement. The thrusts and counter-thrusts, by each of the parties involved, both political and physical, never cease, and deciding who exactly is on whose team is like grasping images in smoke.

   The ending can’t possibly survive the accumulated firepower of all that goes before, and it doesn’t, but in terms of a pyrotechnic display, it’s one heck of a show while it lasts.

[UPDATE] 01-07-09.  In case you were wondering, this is still the only book by Dan Brown that I’ve read. The review was written several months before his next book came out (March 2003).

   Iris Meredith has been a favorite of mine for nearly 40 years now. She’s not the greatest actress in the world — although she wasn’t exactly given challenging roles or directorial guidance in Westerns and serials — but her beautiful face and distinctive voice still exert a vaguely hypnotic influence on male viewers, as Steve is now learning.

   Unfortunately, like so many who toiled in “B” movies, she didn’t get the breaks she deserved. As a Columbia contract player, she worked long hours on cheap pictures and was forever being promised better opportunities that never seemed to materialize.

   Iris lost both parents before she started working in Hollywood (while still a teenager) and supported a younger brother. She retired from the screen in 1943 after getting married; I think that Buster Crabbe Western was her last film.

   In the late 60s or early 70s she developed a particularly virulent form of cancer that necessitated the removal of half her jaw and part of her tongue, disfiguring that once-beautiful face. She showed unusual grace and courage, in my view, by accepting an invitation to appear at a 1975 convention of Western movie fans in Nashville. Fortunately, her old fans — by now middle-aged men and women — showered her with affection during the convention, and she was moved to tears when an audience of several hundred gave her a standing ovation at the closing-night banquet.

   Although she found speaking difficult — the loss of part of her tongue made it hard for her to articulate many words — Iris graciously granted me an interview. She recalled with fondness her stint as Charles Starrett’s regular leading lady (they made 20 Westerns together) and her appearance as Nita Van Sloan in The Spider’s Web.

   Curiously, when I mentioned her third and final serial, 1940’s The Green Archer, Iris said, “I don’t like to discuss that film. Please don’t ask me about it.” I hastily changed the subject, but I’ve always wondered what happened on that set to make the shooting of Green Archer such an unpleasant memory for her.

RICHARD & FRANCES LOCKRIDGE – Murder Within Murder.

Pocket Books, reprint paperback; 1st printing, July 1982. Hardcover edition: J. B. Lippincott, 1946. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition], February 1946. Other paperback reprints: Dell 229 [mapback], 1948; Pyramid, October 1965. Trade paperback: Perennial, July 1994.

   Based on information obtained from Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction III, this is the 10th of the multi-entertaining series of Mr. & Mrs. North detective novels. There were 26 in all, appearing between 1940 and 1963. When his wife Frances died, Richard Lockridge continued writing for quite a while, but that’s when the curtain fell for the Norths, whose last appearance was Murder by the Book in 1963.

   I’m only guessing, but it always seemed to me that the character of Pamela North, the lady with the charmingly and disconcertingly chaotic thought processes, died when Frances did. She was either Pam’s creator or inspiration, or more than likely both, and when she left us, Mr. and Mrs. North went with her.

   And while I’m digressing, one thing more. Here’s something’s that always puzzled me. The North books were immensely popular, or so it’s my impression, but they never seemed to be very successful in paperback. Compared with the way the Perry Mason books sold, for example, the adventures of the Norths were left in the dust.

   Even though there was a long-running radio series chronicling their adventures, and later a TV series, many of the books were never published in softcover. If it weren’t for the Dollar Mystery Guild, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to read each and every one when they came out, and I doubt that I was the only one.

   Pressed to describe Pamela North to someone who’s never read one of her excursion in murder and detection, I’d have to say Gracie Allen without the brashness. Assuming that that someone knows who Gracie Allen is. The books themselves are light-hearted without being out-and-out funny. Here’s a quote, from page 143. Lt. Bill Weigand is speaking to Sgt. Mullins, who always thinks the cases in which the Norths get involved become screwy:

   The first victim is a middle-aged lady, very righteous in manner, who is doing research on a book of several notorious true crimes for North Books, Inc., and the list of suspects is a long one. She controls the purse strings of her late brother’s estate, and she does not approve of either the behavior of her niece and nephew or their habitual need for money.

   While a member of the faculty of a small college in Indiana, she disapproved of a fellow teacher’s conduct with a female student, and she said so, loudly. And as she was doing the research on the book on unsolved murders, it’s also possible that she uncovered some facts from the past that greatly displeased someone she perhaps shouldn’t have confronted. Hence the title.

   This is my kind of detective novel. All kinds of theories, possibilities, and configurations of other possibilities. The good stuff.

   Delicious coincidences also abound, which may turn some people off, but I didn’t mind them at all. Wiegand is a very good policeman, even if he lets the Norths hang around a little too much, and his interview with several suspects in Chapter 8 is a small masterpiece.

   Money — or safety — is the root of all murder. I’m paraphrasing from page 68, but it’s true. In retrospect, the solution to the murders is rather obvious. What the Lockridges were able to do more often than not, and they did it again here, is a magician’s trick, to keep what the eyes of the readers are seeing from actually reaching their brains. It’s either that, or I’m awfully thick-headed.

[COMMENT] 01-07-09. When I suggested Gracie Allen as being the ideal person to play Pam North, I think I had completely forgotten the movie in which she actually did
play Pam North. Either that, or I thought my comment “without the brashness” would cover whatever deficiencies in that regard that she might have.

   I might have to watch the movie again, but right now, unh-unh, no I don’t think so. After recently watching some of the early 50s TV shows with Barbara Britton, I’m now not so high on Gracie in the part now when I first wrote this review.

   Regarding the Norths in paperback, I was struck by the fact that this particular book came out quite a few times in paperback, and maybe you caught that, too. I’ll stick to my assertion that overall the North books did comparatively poorly in paperback, and one of these days I’ll do the research I need to back my statement up.

MR. AND MRS. NORTH. MGM, 1942. Gracie Allen, William Post Jr., Paul Kelly, Virginia Grey, Tom Conway, Millard Mitchell, Keye Luke, Jerone Cowan. Based on the stories by Frances & Richard Lockridge. Director: Robert B. Sinclair.

   For starters, you could refer back to my review of The Patient in Room 18 – you know, my comments about Hollywood and detective mysteries. Gracie Allen gets a solo lead billing in Mr. and Mrs. North, and you know what that means. Disaster, in a word.

   As Pamela North, unlike the stories, she is a chattering nitwit, charming but still a nitwit. George Burns at least had the strength of personality that made it seem reasonable that he could survive living with her for more than a week. William Post, Jr., whom I don’t know — I can’t think of another movie that he was in — is, in contrast, rather bland and ineffectual in the role of Jerry, her greatly put-upon husband.

   What the movie’s about is a good question, and it may even be relevant. After both Pam and Jerry have been out of their apartment for a day — he on a business trip, she to visit her mother (or so she says) — they return home to find a corpse in their closet. (They open the door, and out he falls, on his face.)

   They don’t know the man, at least at first, but then it seems that the paths of the dead man and several of the Norths’ closest friends seem to have been intricately tangled. It takes a while to untangle all of the relationships, none of which (unfortunately) are very interesting.

   That Jerry North is, at several points of time, the number one suspect, means that his close relationship with Lt. Weigand has not yet developed, but by movie’s end, you can see that it’s in the works. This is mostly a comedy picture, though, and if you’re not a fan of Gracie’s, you can easily pass it by.

[UPDATE] 01-07-09.  A few comments, in no particular order. First of all, nothing that I’ve ever read suggests that this movie was based on any one of the Lockridges’ books, only that it was based on their characters.

   Looking back over this review, I see that I made a big assumption. That the people reading it actually knew who George Burns and Gracie Allen were.

   Maybe it was true in 1991, but even if it was, it has to be even less true now. If you’re more than 10 years younger than I am, follow this link for more information.

   As for William Post, Jr., the all-but-known chap who played Jerry North in this movie, thanks to IMDB, I can now tell you more, but not a lot, since there isn’t a lot to tell.

   Of interest to mystery fans, he appeared in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943), Experiment Perilous (1944), The House on 92nd Street (1945), and Call Northside 777 (1948), but I can’t say that I remember putting a name to his face in any of them.

   It wasn’t until TV came along that there was any other attempt to bring the Mr. and Mrs. North to the screen again. Richard Denning and Barbara Britton played the couple for two seasons, starting in 1952, and they were quite good at it.

TUCKER COE – Don’t Lie to Me.   Random House, hardcover, 1972. Paperback reprint: Charter. Hardcover reprint: Five Star, 2001. UK edition: Victor Gollancz, hc, 1974.

    “Tucker Coe” is one of several pseudonyms used by Donald E. Westlake. And Mitchell Tobin, the narrator of Don’t Lie to Me and of four other novels published under the Coe name, is in many ways Westlake’s most fascinating creation.

   Tobin is an ex-New York City cop who was thrown off the force in disgrace when his partner was shot down while covering for him: Tobin at the time was in bed with a woman named Linda Campbell, another man’s wife.

   Unable to reconcile his guilt, Tobin has withdrawn to the point where little matters in his life except the high wall he is building in the back yard of his Queens home — a continuing project that symbolizes his self-imposed prison and isolation.

   His forgiving wife Kate and his teen-age son are unable to penetrate those internal walls; no one can, it seems. Occasionally, however, someone from his past or his present manages to persuade him to do this or that “simple” job, thus creating circumstances which force Tobin to utilize his detective’s training.

   The combined result of these cases, as critic Francis M. Nevins has noted, is that Tobin “builds up a store of therapeutic experiences from which he slowly comes to realize that he is not unique in his isolation and guilt, and slowly begins to accept himself and return to the real world.”

   Don’t Lie to Me is the last of the five Tobin novels, the final stage of his mental rehabilitation. He has been given a private investigator’s license and is working as a night watchman in Manhattan’s Museum of American Graphic Art, and before long Linda Campbell, his former lover, about whom he has ambivalent feelings, reappears in his life.

   Tobin then discovers the naked body of an unidentified murder victim in one of the museum rooms. Further complications include pressure from hostile cops and from a group of small-time hoodlums with a grudge against Tobin.

   Against his will, he is forced to pursue his own investigation into the murder, and eventually to reconcile his feelings toward Linda Campbell — and toward himself. The ending is violent, powerful, ironic, and appropriate.

   The other four Tobin novels are Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death (1966), Murder Among Children (1968), Wax Apple (1970), and A Jade in Aries (1971).

   It is tempting to say that more Tobin novels would have been welcome, but this is not really the case. Westlake said everything there is to say about Mitch Tobin in these five books, what amounts to a perfect quintology; any additional novels would have seem contrived to capitalize on an established series character.

         ———
   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.