H. BEDFORD-JONES – Fang Tung, Magician. Detroit, MI: Beb Books, 2007.

   This oriental thriller by a prolific and popular pulp writer was originally published in the All-Story Weekly issue for 2 August 1919. Brian Earl Brown, the entrepreneurial chap behind Beb Books, specializes in cheap reprints (the text, in stapled wraps) that he was selling at the table opposite mine at Pulpcon last year.

   This entertaining novelette, about a Chinese messianic magician who wants to chase all foreigners out of the country, in its often careless style betrays the pressure under which pulp writers worked, but the writer’s imagination carried this reader over the rough spots.

   Bedford-Jones was no Sax Rohmer, but he’s working somewhat in the same vein, and the combination of a charismatic villain, a pure and feisty heroine, and an adventuresome journalist is a winning one here. And the $5 price was just right for this minor adventure thriller.

NICHOLAS BLAKE – Thou Shell of Death.

Berkley F1002; paperback reprint, 1964. Hardcover first edition: Collins Crime Club (UK), 1936. US hardcover first edition: Harper & Brothers, 1936, as Shell of Death. [Reprinted in The Nicholas Blake Treasury (Volume 1), Nelson Doubleday, 1964, containing: Thou Shell of Death; The Beast Must Die; and The Corpse in the Snowman.] Other US paperbacks: Penguin, US, 1944, as Shell of Death; Perennial, US, 1977, as Thou Shell of Death.

   Even though they have the same author — Nicholas Blake — what a night and day difference there is between this book and the previous one by him, reported on here. This is the second mystery Blake wrote — the first was A Question of Proof — and it’s the second appearance of Nigel Strangeways as well.

   The conventions of the Golden Age of Detection are very much evident in this earlier book — complete with anonymous threatening letters, a call for assistance from the recipient, an aging but still engaging ex-flying hero of the previous war, a house party at Christmas time with all of the possible suspects in attendance.

   And then death strikes. Is it suicide? Only one set of footprints are found in the snow leading to the small hut where Fergus O’Brien’s body is found.

   Or is it murder? Strangeways’ deductions soon answer the question in positive fashion, solving as he does the “locked room” aspect of the case in quick order. By that I mean by page 72, out of a total of 192. (Paperbacks were thin and the print was small, back in 1964.)

   But I digress. More mysterious doings occur, all of them complicating the mystery even more, rather than clearing them up at all. It is all rather fascinating and interesting and static until (a) Nigel takes a quick trip to Ireland to uncover some facts about the past, and (b) he returns to Dower House only to find himself falling in love with one of the possible suspects, regretting greatly that his prior hypotheses made her one of the primary ones, in the eyes of Scotland Yard.

   As a detective, Nigel himself seems to be only an amateur, in the finest sense of the word. He is called upon in this instance due to the fact that his uncle, Sir John Strangeways, is an Assistant-Commissioner of Police. This allows the dilettantish Nigel to conduct his investigations with the full cooperation of the authorities, if not their down-right awe and admiration.

   I’m not sure that dilettante is precisely the right word. From the Internet comes the following definition: a dabbler: an amateur who engages in an activity without serious intentions and who pretends to have knowledge. Nigel Strangeways is serious all right, and he puts the pieces of the puzzle in excellent fashion.

   If the early Ellery Queen took after Philo Vance, then I believe that Nigel Strangeways follows in the same footsteps as that very same Ellery Queen, whether directly or in parallel — I have no way of knowing whether Cecil Day-Lewis ever read any of the Queenian adventures or not, but they’re cut from the same cloth, no doubt about it.

   As for the case in hand, inspired by a 17th century work by a playwright not previously known to me, Cyril Tourneur, who published The Revenger’s Tragedy in 1607. [NOTE: See Al Guthrie’s comment.] The title of Blake’s work, Thou Shell of Death, comes from a direct quote, which I dare not repeat, for fear of, um, forsooth, revealing too much.

   It takes Nigel the entire last chapter, eighteen pages (small print), to untangle all of the twisted threads of the plot, remarking once on a remarkable (well, yes) coincidence that made the killer’s plan succeed the way that it did, not mentioning the much huger one that initiated the entire sequence of events in the first place.

   That, plus the entire sheer unlikelihood of anyone plotting such a strikingly complex, ingenious, and therefore inept scheme in the second place — well, that’s simply the joy of author trying to outwit reader that makes the reading — and the challenge — all the more pleasurable.

   Blake’s own career, as seen by the earlier post on this blog, eventually went in other directions, as did Ellery Queen’s in tandem. But which kind of story was better, and which are they better known for today? You tell me.

—

ALIAS NICK BEAL. Paramount, 1949. Ray Milland, Thomas Mitchell, Audrey Totter. Screenwriter: Jonathan Latimer, based on a story by Mindret Lord. Director: John Farrow.

   First of all, you may as well go watch this short clip from the movie at YouTube right now, as long as you come back. It’s the first time the viewer gets to see Nick Beal on the screen, played to superb perfection by the ultra-urbane (and more than slightly creepy, in a subtle but obvious, just-under-your-skin sort of way) by Ray Milland, an actor who throughout his career could apparently play both hero and villain with equal ease.

   Meeting him at this rundown waterfront bar is Joseph Foster (Thomas Mitchell), an ambitious but reform-minded District Attorney who doesn’t know it yet, but who has eyes on the governor’s office. Mitchell played rumpled and generally honest guys like this by hardly getting out of bed.

   I’m going to tell you something now that I didn’t know when I started to watch the movie (or was able to conveniently forget), so if you don’t want to know, stop reading now. For some reason this movie is not readily available on video or DVD, but every write-up about it — and there are quite a few of them — talks about it freely, so I think that maybe I won’t be revealing anything too crucial by continuing.

   Still with me? As the story goes, or at least this one does, if Nick Beal is not the Devil, he has strong connections to him.

   If this first scene doesn’t come out and say so, each time he’s on the screen again, he simply knows too much or can do too much and pretty soon he’s got Foster in the palm of his hand, urging him on as only the Devil could do: “Think of all the good you could do if you were the governor,” he says, the unspoken context and agreement being: no matter how you get there or who you have to consort with to do so.

   Is this noir? If you’ve seen the film clip, how could you say no? Is this a crime film? No, not unless a few cheap gangsters, blackmail (on the part of Nick Beal), graft and corruption on a strictly state and city level makes a movie a crime film, and then, of course, it is.

   What this is movie really is a fantasy film, not a soft fluffy one, but one with some sharp corners and awfully hard edges. And with the atmosphere of seduction and crime always in the background — did I mention Audrey Totter yet? If I haven’t, I will. And with, as I began to say, seduction and crime the absolute focal point of this morality tale of ambition and greed, the movie is as noirishly dark as anyone could wish for.

   Until the ending that is, and if noir means unhappy endings, than this isn’t noir. Unless noir means learning about the darkness that exists in everyone’s heart, and even when he’s bested once or twice, a third time out of three is good enough for the likes of Mr. Beal.

   Audrey Totter plays Donna Allen, a woman who has traversed far too many bars in her young lifetime — presumably as well a lady of ill-repute — but here I am going into things the movie dares not quite come out and say. But recruited by Mr. Beal with promises to her of the finer things in life, she goes to work for Mr. Foster, and upon Beal’s request, soon has him in the palm of her hand, ready to leave his wife and do things with her that 48-year-old men have no right thinking about doing with anyone other than their wives.

   None of which we see, and which probably didn’t happen, but might have, and about we can easily surmise what Thomas Mitchell’s character would have like to have happened if it didn’t.

   In this film, though, we see another side of Audrey Totter, the actress. Quite often in the films she’s in — see Tension, in which she plays the two-timing wife of druggist Richard Basehart as a prime example — her characters are always tough and totally in contempt of the men whose emotions she plays with.

   In Alias Mr. Beal, we also see that she can play a character of a less hard-boiled nature, and she’s a marvel to watch as she gradually begins to realize, to her dismay, just whom she has fallen in league with.

   A lot of the attraction for many films that are hard to find copies of is that, well simply, that they’re hard to find. Their reputation is enhanced, in other words, by their unavailability. That’s somewhat the case here. I’d heard many good things about this movie, without knowing most of the details, that when I finally got to see the film, its immediate impact was less than I’d anticipated.

   No matter. A score card rating of 80% isn’t at all bad, at least in my book, especially since it’s an 80% based on already enhanced expectations.

[UPDATE] 06-17-08.   Not being very happy that I hadn’t provided a better photo of Thomas Mitchell, I went looking for one, and here’s what I came up with. Rather nice, in my opinion:

   The Private Eye novel, I’m thankful, is still with us though recent events show that type of detective might eventually become our latest folk heroine. First, we had the female op who stole the show from Inspector Dalgleish in P.D. James’ An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), relegating him to a bit part. I still believe Mrs. James is missing a good bet for another series character.

   Charity Bay, Arthur Kaplan’s detective in A Killing for Charity (1976) started as secretary to a San Francisco detective and, after learning the job, moved to New York where she charges an inflationary $300 a day, plus expenses, for her services. Kaplan has his titular detective display her very good figure to advantage. Charity begins the book by having intercourse with a man to set him up for an arrest. Later, Kaplan gets her into one of those clothes-torn, figure-exposed situations that pulp illustrators thrived on.

   In Marcia B. Muller’s Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977), female private detective Sharon McCone remains in San Francisco where she does investigative work for a store-front legal cooperative. McCone develops a relationship with art-loving Lt. Greg Marcus, S.F.P.D. Except for the possibility of romance, they get along together as the Marlowes et al have traditionally gotten along with the official police.

   The book, except for one good scene authentically describing the Seal Rock area, ends in a blaze of … coincidence. Kaplan and Muller have proven that the only limitations on the success of female private detectives in the future will be the artistic limits of their creators.

    Books reviewed or discussed in this installment:

P. D. JAMES – An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Faber, UK, hardcover, 1972. Scribner, US, hc, 1973. Many paperback reprints in both countries. Film: Boyd, 1981 (scw: Elizabeth MacKay, Brian Scobie, Christopher Petit; dir: Petit). Four episode TV-series (ITV-PBS), 1997-1999, one installment of which was based on this book.    NOTE: Besides the TV series, Cordelia Gray made one additional appearance in book form, a solo case recorded in The Skull Beneath the Skin (Faber, UK, 1982).

ARTHUR KAPLAN – A Killing for Charity. Coward-McCann, hardcover, 1976; Berkley, pb, 1977.    NOTE: This was the only appearance of Charity Bay.

MARCIA MULLER – Edwin of the Iron Shoes. David McKay, hardcover, 1977. Penguin, US, pb, 1978. Several other US paperback editions. Women’s Press, UK, pb, 1993.    NOTE: This was Sharon McCone’s debut entry. She has since appeared in 25 novels and nearly as many short stories.

NICHOLAS BLAKE – The Private Wound.

Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1968. US hardcover: Harper & Row, 1968. US paperbacks: Dell, 1970 (first cover shown); Perennial, 1981. Many British paperback editions, including Pan, 1971. Australian pb: J. M. Dent, 1987 (second cover shown).

    “Nicholas Blake” is an author that I’ve neglected over the years (among many), and I’m trying, with a modicum of success, to catch up with some of them. I put the author’s name in quotes, since Blake was in real life the well-known Anglo-Irish poet Cecil Day-Lewis, but as Blake, his primary sleuthing character was a fellow named Nigel Strangeways, who appeared in 16 of his 20 detective novels.

   Since The Private Wound is one of the four that Strangeways is not in, I’ll refrain from saying more about the gentleman for now — it will wait until I read one that he is in — except to say that one source on the Internet mentions that primary model for Mr Strangeways was Day-Lewis’s contemporary writer and poet, W.H. Auden.

   Day-Lewis was born in Ireland, and presumably had roots there all his life, which goes a long way in explaining the often poetic view of Ireland in the late 1930s there is to be found in The Private Wound. What one does not expect (or at least I did not) was the sensuality, the down-right earthiness, of the brief affair in which writer Dominic Eyre, visiting Ireland from England, finds himself enmeshed with Harry, short for Harriet, the wife of Eyre’s host, Flurry Leeson. (Flurry is short for Florence, “not an uncommon Christian name for men in Ireland.”)

   Here, with your permission, is a short introductory quote, from the very first page:

   Blake died in 1972, and The Private Wound was the last detective novel he wrote. His first was A Question of Proof, which appeared in 1935, which is why I think of him as a Golden Age writer. But a paragraph such as the one above could have appeared in very few novels written in the 1930s, or so I’m conditioned to believe. If I’m in error, I don’t mind, please let me know.

   I’m weak on Irish history — but not as much as I was before I read this book. I knew that there was always a fierce hostility between the Irish and the English — and as Eyre soon discovers, Flurry was part of it. What I did not know was that certain factions in pre-war Ireland were seriously considering negotiations with Germany; uprisings in Ireland would seriously divert England’s attention to their west, rather than keeping their eye on what the Nazis were doing. And a conflict between Germany and England would leave the Northern counties open for takeover.

   I may not have that exactly right. The book that Blake wrote is not a history book, per se, but Dominic Eyre finds himself in the thick of things, of that there is no doubt: suspected both of being a spy and by all of the neighboring countryside of cuckolding his landlord. ((As note of technical accuracy, it is Flurry’s younger brother Kevin who owns the cottage where Eyre is staying.))

   In the sentence before last, the latter is true, but the former is not, and thus the story is made. It makes for a formidable tale of detection as well — I will not tell you who the victim is, and who becomes Eyre’s partner in solving the crime — and I confess that I did not know who the killer was until two pages before All Is Revealed. And I should have. Known, that is, and much earlier. All in all, nicely done, in a sad and beautifully haunting sort of way.

   The same Internet source suggests that The Private Wound is considered the most autobiographical of the author’s works in the mystery genre. That may or may not be true — I have no way of knowing otherwise — but it does help explain the strange framing device. That the tale begins with “Dominic Eyre” describing the events that happened to him thirty years before is not so unusual — it was the closing short epilogue which was, when first read, the puzzler.

   The title comes from The Two Gentlemen from Verona: “The private wound is deepest.”

[UPDATE] 06-14-08.    I’ll be posting a review one of Blake’s detective novels with Nigel Strangeways in it sometime soon, perhaps not tomorrow, but by Monday at the latest.

   While doing some additional research on Peter Driscoll, the author of Pangolin, a spy thriller I reviewed here only a day or so ago, I discovered the sad news of his death, a fact not known to Al Hubin and the Revised Crime Fiction IV before now.

   The Wikipedia entry for Driscoll is not very large. It’s only one sentence long, followed by a list of the books he wrote:

   Taken from an interview with Mr Driscoll and appearing in his entry in Contemporary Authors, he had this to say about his early career:

   Here below is a checklist of all of Peter Driscoll’s crime fiction, expanded upon from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

DRISCOLL, PETER (John). 1942-2005.

      * The White Lie Assignment (n.) Macdonald, UK. hc, 1971. Lippincott, US, 1975. [Albania] “Michael Mannis, a freelance photographer, knew how the Albanian Secret Police dealt with spies. So it took a great deal of money to tempt him into accepting a mission to cross the Albanian frontier and photograph the Chinese missile sites there. He certainly earned it hte hard way when he discovered that his contact was a fugitive double agent with Russian killers waiting for him at the end of the run.”

      * The Wilby Conspiracy (n.) Macdonald, UK, hc, 1973. Lippincott, US, hc, 1972. [South Africa] Film: Optimus, 1975 (scw: Rod Amateau, Harold Nebenzal; dir: Ralph Nelson; starring: Sidney Poitier, Michael Caine). “A white mining engineer plunged into an underground world of intrigue and violence. A beautiful, sensual woman whom he must trust. A black fugitive whom he must save. And hanging in the balance, the fate of a vast, vicious struggle between a clandestine revolutionary organization and a diabolically efficient secret police amid the ugly slums and breathtaking wilderness of present-day Africa.”

      * In Connection with Kilshaw (n.) Macdonald, UK, hc, 1974. Lippincott, US, hc, 1974. [Ireland]

      * The Barboza Credentials (n.) Macdonald, UK, hc, 1976. Lippincott, US, hc, 1976. [Mozambique] “British-born Joe Hickey is charged with finding a mercenary killer in Africa’s dark heart. But time is running out for this ex-cop turned Rhodesian sanctions-buster, and the life he has to save – as the seconds tick relentlessly by – is his own.”

      * Pangolin (n.) Macdonald, UK, hc, 1979. Lippincott, US, hc, 1979. [Hong Kong]

      * -Heritage (n.) Granada, UK, hc, 1982. Doubleday, US, hc, 1982. [Algeria; 1945-62]

      * Spearhead (n.) Bantam, UK, hc, 1988. Little-Brown, US, hc, 1989. [South Africa] “The story of the terror and strife of a South Africa in deep racial conflict. Major Patrick Marriner, a retired British paratrooper and Falklands veteran, is recruited by the Black Nationalist leader Kumalo’s exiled comrades to do the seemingly impossible — free Kumalo before the National Intelligence Service can rid themselves of international humiliation.”

       Secrets of State (n.) Bantam, UK, hc, 1991

       Spoils of War (n.) Bantam, UK, hc, 1994 [Kuwait]

JULIAN SYMONS – Bogue’s Fortune.

Perennial Library; paperback reprint, 1980. Harper & Brothers, US, hc, 1957. Other US paperback editions under this title: Dolphin, 1961; Carroll & Graf, 1988, 1993. First published in the UK as The Paper Chase: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1956. Paperback reprints under this title: Fontana, UK, 1958, 1966; Corgi, UK, 1970; Beagle, US, 1971.

   This is the book I began reading immediately after I finished The India-Rubber Men, by Edgar Wallace, and reviewed here not too long ago. It is also the book that I contrasted the Wallace book to in the comments that followed, saying:

   I confess that I got sidetracked in reading Bogue’s Fortune – since the time I started the book and now, my wife and I have been watching the entire 13-episode season of Eli Stone on DVD, not crime-related but we both think it’s a fabulous show. But I finished the book in one last gulp last night, closing the pages around 2 a.m., and now here I am and ready to report.

   Don’t expect a long analysis of all of Symons’ work, however, or any, for that matter. This is the first one I can recall ever having read, but no matter if it’s typical of his crime fiction – and I suspect not – it will not be my last.

   He was in thriller mode when he wrote this one – which is what brought up the comparison with Edgar Wallace in the first place – and I’m sticking with my original impression. It’s witty and clever, and filled with engaging people, as I said earlier.

   The story – at least he’s getting to it, you say, and I am – begins with a chap named Charles Applegate about to embark on a new career, that of instructor at Bramley, an ultra-progressive school for delinquent children somewhere outside of London. He has an ulterior motive, as he is no teacher, only a detective story writer looking to place his next mystery in such an establishment.

   After some hugger-mugger on the train down, his first night at the school is marred by the discovery of his also newly-arrived colleague dead in the victim’s own bed in the room next door. Murder it is, committed with the knife that Applegate took from one of the students around meal time the evening before.

   This all in the first 50 pages, and by page 72 he is having the following conversation with Hedda Pont, the young matron of the school and the niece of the director. She is as equally progressive as the school, which of course part of her charm to Applegate:

   Not surprisingly, perhaps, it is Hedda who has a better head on her shoulders for detecting than does Applegate, and perhaps even more physically active in the case that follows as well. One begins to think that Symons is being a bit satirical here, and once started thinking in this direction, one cannot begin to stop. Nor should one, and the way the ending plays out will only reinforce that thought.

   I do not think that Symons was thinking so much of Wallace when he write this, however, and while I am also not so very familiar with John Buchan, the latter’s name is invoked on page 135, in the following conversation that closes Chapter 16:

   Don’t get the wrong idea from the first sentence in that last selection. Hedda’s previous sentence had been, “A girl just can’t be ardent all the time. Will you turn out the light? Good night.”

   While both the beginning and end of this thriller adventure, combined with a little bit of detection, meet my prior expectations and then some, the middle sags a little, beginning with a 20 page exposition of the facts of the matter by one of the participants on the adversarial side, or at least his version of them, and no, it is not really known for a while whose side he is on, besides his own, and the jury may safely disregard this entire remark – or at least the second half of it.

   The overall rating, then, if I were to give one, still averages out to much better than average. Much. (And if you were to ask, I would have to say that the US title is the better one. By far.)

PETER DRISCOLL – Pangolin.

Detective Book Club; hardcover reprint (3-in-1 edition), May 1979. Macdonald & Jane, UK, hc, 1979; Granada/Panther, UK, pb, 1980; Corgi, UK, pb, 1989. J. B. Lippincott, US, hc, 1979; Popular Library, US, pb, date not stated.

   It’s wrong to generalize, I know, so generally speaking, I never do. But I still think that the English write espionage thrillers better than anyone else. And while this particular novel written by British author Peter Driscoll never won any awards, it certainly offers many more high points than low.

   Driscoll is probably best known for his book, The Wilby Conspiracy (Macdonald, 1973), and basis for the movie of the same name, but back in the 70s and 80s, he wrote a number of others, all presumably spy thrillers as well. (As a measure of a small comeback, ending a six-year hiatus in 1988, three more books were added to his total.)

   This one takes place in Hong Kong, back in the post-Viet Nam era, but before the British gave up control to the Chinese. A group of would-be adventurers down on their luck plan a kidnapping that will net them ten million dollars, if they can pull it off. The victim, they know — and this is what makes him so valuable — is the undercover head of American CIA operations in the Far East.

   What they do not know is that the man, whose wife has been sleeping with one of the kidnappers, is in the midst of a delicate espionage operation involving the head of the Chinese missile program. Moro rebels in the Philippines are involved, as well as a typhoon, the Hong Kong police, the British foreign office, and of course the CIA.

   It’s obvious that Driscoll must have spent some time in Hong Kong, and some of the greatest pleasures he supplies are the sights, sounds and smells of that city as it was 20 years ago. There are double-crosses galore, as well as massive (and painful) errors of judgment, great detective work, and did I mention double-dealing?

   Not an award-winner, as I stated above — it’s just a little too predictable for that — but it still packs a pretty good punch, providing the reader several full evenings’ worth of intrigue of the sit-back fasten-the-seatbelts-on-your-armchair kind of novel.

[UPDATE] 06-14-08.    The full list of Forgotten Books submitted for this past Friday can be found on Patti Abbott’s blog, where the idea first began.

   And I have discovered some bad news. While doing some research on Peter Driscoll the author, I learned that he died in 2005, a fact not known to Al Hubin and the Revised Crime Fiction IV until now. Look for a separate posting later today on this blog for a short tribute to him.

BOB GARLAND – Derfflinger

Manor Books 17181; paperback original. First printing, 1978. Trade paperback reprint: Writer’s Showcase Press, 2000.

   The Manor edition of this title is a very scarce book. As I type this, there is only one copy online on ABE. Manor books never did get distributed very widely, and when (or where) they did, the authors generally never had any “name appeal,” or not at least on the ones that were paperback originals. Usually an author wrote one or maybe two books for them and nobody else, and nobody ever heard from them (the authors) again.

   Which is why it surprised the something out of me to learn that Bob Garland, now a retired business executive, has written a total of four other book-length adventures of Humboldt Prior, computer manufacturing executive for Intercontinental Data Processing, of New York, NY. The order in which the adventures occur and in which the books were published is a little confusing, and I will try to elucidate as best I can.

   The only one published at the time it was written, I think, is the one at hand. As stated above, the book was reprinted as a trade paperback by Writer’s Showcase Press, in October 2000, and as such it is denoted as a Second Edition. (I do not know if the book has been revised for this edition, but there is the possibility, as there is a good chance Manor chopped it up and did a quick “make it fit” procedure on it, even before WordPerfect came along and made it easy.) It is interesting to note, however, that this 2000 edition is described as the “Second Humboldt Prior Mystery.”

   The other books in the series are the following, in order as published. All are trade paperbacks:

R.I.P. 37E: The Third Humboldt Prior Mystery Writer’s Showcase Press, October 2000.

Slaying the Red Slayer: The First Humboldt Prior Adventure. Writers Club Press; 2nd edition, April 2001. [If there was ever a First Edition, I do not know about it.]

The Elephant Mask: The Fourth Humboldt Prior Mystery. iUniverse, January 2004.

Tradedown: The Fifth Humboldt Prior Mystery. iUniverse, December 2005.

   The only one of these last four which I have is a copy of the third adventure, R.I.P. 37E. I have not read it, but from a quick peek inside, the story appears to have taken place in 1979, so there is the possibility that it was written back then, around that time, but it was never published until Garland retired from his day job.

   I’m really reaching now, but on Amazon.com, there is a short description of the last two books that tells us that Prior is “now … aging” (Elephant Mask) and is “now 60 years old” (Tradedown). Which really makes me feel old, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. It could be that these last two books were written recently, and not earlier.

   But where Slaying the Red Slayer fits in as nominally the “first” book in the series, I do not know.

   In any case, Derfflinger certainly reads like a debut appearance, as in it an amateurish but enthusiastic Humboldt Prior agrees to help the widow of a friend in England who had been doing some investigation on his own into a ship salvaging operation conducted at the end of World War II. He was killed in an auto accident, but as Humboldt takes over the investigation, he too becomes the target of some very narrow scrapes.

   The reason the book reads like the first in a series is that Humboldt seems to be awfully new and/or naive in matters which he seems to be in over his head about. Almost, I hasten to add, because he is quite competent at what he normally does, in a global business sense, and he doesn’t mind admitting it.

   With a billion dollar operation behind him (Intercontinental Data), Humboldt gets around fairly easily and comfortably – to Scotland and then to Germany before heading back to England – on the company’s private Jet Star, with various nefarious villains on his tail most of the way.

   Not only is Humboldt amateurish but enthusiastic, but so is the story. It’s enjoyable enough, but until the end, which contains a surprise or two, there’s no meat to the tale at all, nor does it quite connect on many levels. On the other hand, enthusiasm is sometimes all it takes, and even though this may surprise you, given my comments so far, I discovered when I was finished that I really wouldn’t mind reading any of the four follow-up adventures at all.

   And so perhaps I will.

POSTSCRIPT.   If you would like to know something more about the primary focus of the travail that Humboldt encounters, you could do no worse than to look the word Derfflinger up on Google, say. It’s just a suggestion.

[UPDATE] 06-12-08.   To no one’s surprise, I am assuming, including my own, I have not yet read or obtained any of the other books in the series. There is still only one copy of the Manor edition of Derfflinger offered on ABE, and in fact it may be the very same book. I also do not know any more about the publishing history of the Bob Garland’s work than is stated here.

      The first paragraph below is good news recently received from Bill Contento:

    The online edition of THE CRIME FIGHTERS, by W.O.G. Lofts and Derek Adley, has been updated, now listing fictional detectives “Abbott, Detective” through “Hyer, Henry ‘Hank’.”

   Say the authors Derek Adley (1927-1991) and Bill Lofts (1923-1997) in their introduction:

   The information was never published in the authors’ lifetime. Says Al Hubin as part of his editorial introduction, “The text appears to have been written mostly in the 1960s and so does not cover detectives introduced later.”

   The only version of The Crime Fighters still in existence is apparently the photocopy of the original manuscript in the hands of Al Hubin, who’s working with Bill, Steve Holland and others to put the data online.