CATCH ME A SPY – George Marton and Tibor Méray.

Popular Library; paperback reprint, no date stated, but stated elsewhere to be 1971. Hardcover edition: W. H. Allen, UK, hc, 1971; Harper & Row, US, hc,1969.

   I reviewed the movie based on this book way back in May of last year, then followed it up soon afterward with a short profile of the first of its two authors, George Marton.

   I mentioned then that it took me by surprise that the story was played for fun, so I wasn’t sure if the book was going to be a comedy as well. I played it cautiously as I read, waiting to see what would happen, and – I’ll tell you in a minute.

   Here’s a short recap of the story itself. A young and rather naive English girl named Jennifer, the niece of a famous chemist, is wooed and romanced by a chap named Fenton who sweeps her off her feet and takes her off to a honeymoon in – Bulgaria. Where on their wedding night, before their marriage is consummated, he is whisked off to a Moscow prison.

   Returning eventually – and disconsolately – to London, Jennifer decides on a plan: to find a spy on the other side operating in England whom she can capture and use in a swap to gain her husband back.

   So here is where the humor comes in. I did say that Jennifer is naive, didn’t I? So unsophisticated in the world that she does not even know that Hungary does not have a navy, much less a naval attache. Is there a chance in the world that such a charming young woman – played by Marlène Jobert in the movie – would have a chance in the world at completing such a mission? It is but to laugh, although gently.

   Whereas in the movie the comedy is much more physical, although again (if this makes sense) in a gentle way. The spy that Jennifer does meet – played by Kirk Douglas in the movie – also appears much earlier on in the film, a good choice that, as it gets the major players face to face quite a bit earlier.

   The endings are also not quite the same, but at least they were built on the same basic premise, which of course is one that I cannot reveal. At only 174 pages of medium-sized type, the book is too slender to have even been a major player in the world of fictional spy fiction, mildly complex and no more. A pleasant diversion, that’s all, and no less.

   Plus – and I’m sure it’s a huge bonus in some collectors’ minds – a really spiffy cover by Robert McGinnis, which I imagine you’ve guessed – and admired – already.

   I spent part of this afternoon annotating the following authors’ entries in Part 25 of the online Addenda to Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. Looking over the list after I was done, the only connecting feature these authors have in common is that they are in this blog post, and nothing else at all.

LEITE, GEORGE THURSTON. 1920-1985. Joint pseudonym with Jody Scott, 1923-2007: Scott Thurston, qq.v. Under this pen name the co-author of one crime novel included in the (Revised) Crime Fiction IV. Owner of Daliel’s Bookstore in Berkeley, editor of Circle Magazine, and a long-time publisher.

RICH, A(RTHUR) T. [Show byline thus.] Author of one detective novel included in the (Revised) Crime Fiction IV. See below.
      The Curate Finds the Corpse. Bear Hudson, UK, pb, 1945. Setting: England.

SCOTT, AMANDA. Add as a new author entry. Pseudonym of Lynne Scott-Drennan, 1944- , q.v. Under this pen name, the author of some 40 romance novels, many of them Regencies. The titles below appear to have at least marginal crime content.
      -The Bawdy Bride. Pinnacle, pb, 1996. Setting: England, 1800s. [Who is responsible for the mysterious events at Lord St. Ledgers’s ancestral estate – including the suspicious death of his brother, the duke?]
      -Dangerous Angels. Pinnacle, 1997. Setting: England, 1829. SC: Lady Letitia Deverill, in a non-leading role.

      -Dangerous Lady. Zebra, pb, 1999. Setting: London, 1800s. SC: Lady Letitia Deverill. [Letty discovers a plot to assassinate the Queen Victoria.]

SCOTT, JODY. 1923-2007. Add year of death. Full name: Jody Hugelot Scott Wood. Born Joann Margaret Huguelet. “Mr. Scott came later closely followed by Mr. Wood.” Joint pseudonym with George Thurston Leite: Thurston Scott, qq.v. Under her own name, the author of two sf/fantasy novels, Passing for Human and I, Vampire.

SCOTT, THURSTON. Joint pseudonym of George Thurston Leite & Jody Scott, 1923-2007, qq.v. Correct full name of the latter to Jody Huguelet Scott Wood, q.v., and add year of death. Under this pen name the author of one crime novel included in the (Revised) Crime Fiction IV. See below.
      Cure It with Honey. Harper & Bros., hc, 1951. Setting: California. Also published as: I’ll Get Mine (Popular Library, 1952). [Confirm this later retitling.]
      _I’ll Get Mine. Popular Library, pb, 1952. See: Cure It with Honey (Harper, 1951). “She loved men, money and marijuana.”

SCOTT-DRENNAN, LYNNE. 1944- . Pseudonym: Amanda Scott, q.v. Born and currently living in California, prolific writer of romance fiction, under both her own name and her pen name.

WOOD, JODY HUGUELET SCOTT. See Jody Scott.

WADE MILLER – Killer’s Choice.

Signet 771; paperback reprint. First printing, February 1950. Second printing, Signet 1235, 1955. Fourth printing, 1961. Originally published as Devil on Two Sticks by Farrar, Straus & Co., Inc. Appeared earlier in Famous Detective magazine, November 1949. Trade paperback: Stark House, June 2008 (paired with The Killer, Gold Medal, 1951).

   In case you were wondering, I have no information about the third Signet printing. It may have been a Canadian printing. But between 1961, when the fourth printing appeared, and the forthcoming edition from Stark House, that’s over 45 years that the book was out of print. (At least it’s coming back. There are many, many books that are over 45 years old and will never see print again, and I don’t mean only hardboiled novels like Killer’s Choice.)

   If you’d like to read more about the writing pair of Robert Wade and Bill Miller, then I can send you to no better place than the original Mystery*File website, where you can find an overview of their career, many reviews of their work, a partial bibliography, and an interview with Mr. Wade conducted by Ed Lynskey back in 2004.

   Killer’s Choice (or Devil on Two Sticks, if you prefer) is not one of Wade Miller’s stories of private eye Max Thursday, which I can highly recommend to you, if you are a private eye fan, and even if you’re not. It’s instead a tough, hard-as-nails story of a mobster named Steve Beck, or rather a head mobster’s right hand man, or enforcer, if you will.

   The setting is San Diego, and when word gets to Beck’s boss, a fellow by the name of Pat Garland, that the state Attorney General’s office in Sacramento has a direct line into his operations, it’s Beck’s job to find the insider and plug the leak, and fast. It’s like a detective story in reverse, with a list of suspects from which to pick the Good Guy, not the other way around.

   Complicating matters is that Beck is falling in love with the daughter of one of his possible choices, a lawyer by the name of Everett. Marcy is slim, young and not as sophisticated as she thinks she is, and a far cry from Beck’s usual taste in women. One more problem: Marcy seems to favor one of Beck’s other suspects more than she does him. Jealousy is an ugly monster.

   There is at least one additional surprise in store for the reader, which I won’t even begin to hint at, other than what I’ve just said. Surprisingly, though, and not the surprise I just alluded to, is that there is not a lot of action in this novel of the rackets. A lot of talk – a lot of threats, some subtle, some not – most of it very intelligent, and you have to read every word behind what everyone says, if you know what I mean.

   I was reminded more of Dashiell Hammett more than I was Raymond Chandler while reading Killer’s Choice. Robert Wade mentions both as influences in the Lynskey interview, along with Alfred Hitchcock, and I can see the latter as well. The book would have made a terrific movie back around 1950, and in the right hands, it still would today.

   But I mention Hammett in the following sense. We follow the story’s progress through Steve Beck, although he does not tell the story himself. We know what he says and what we sees, but we do not always know what he’s thinking, and for a hoodlum, he thinks a lot. And it also turns out that he’s not quite as capable as he has always led himself to believe, and it comes as quite a shock when he discovers this – especially to him.

   It’s also, believe it or not, a fair play story of detective novel also, or very nearly so. The clues are there when you look back, but even so, they’re still rather subtle, and it’s no wonder I missed them the first time around. (I kick myself like this rather often, you understand.)

   As I hope I’ve made clear, this is not your usual Mike Hammer kind of yarn, to pick a rather obvious author to use in comparison, but at the time the books of both of them came out, I think Wade Miller’s books did respectably well in the competition, and deservedly so. It’s good to see this one coming out again, there’s no doubt about that.

   Richard Wright (1908-1960) was perhaps the best-known and most written-about black novelist of the 20th century, but as far as I know no one except myself has ever pointed out the debt he owes to Cornell Woolrich. During the late Thirties when Wright was working on his first and finest novel, Native Son (1940), he is known to have been a voracious reader of the pulp mystery magazines like Black Mask to which Woolrich contributed dozens of stories.

   Native Son’s basic storyline of a young man wrongly accused of murder and running headlong through “streets dark with something more than night” was clearly inspired by Woolrich’s powerful suspense thriller “Dusk to Dawn” (Black Mask, December 1937; collected in Nightwebs, 1971).

   During the last months of his life Wright was working on another crime novel, recently published in unfinished form as A Father’s Law, and it seems equally clear that here too he took his point of departure from Woolrich. In “Charlie Won’t Be Home Tonight” (Dime Detective, July 1939; collected in Eyes That Watch You, 1952) a middle-aged cop slowly becomes convinced that the criminal he’s seeking is his son. Woolrich’s cop of course is white. A Father’s Law deals with a middle-aged black cop who also becomes convinced that his son is a criminal.

   If this is simply a double coincidence, it’s one that even Woolrich (who was prone to stretch coincidence to the outer limits) would have rejected. Any student of African-American literature who’s in need of an unexplored topic could do worse than to investigate the Woolrich-Wright interface in depth.

   Silly mistakes in mystery fiction are not confined to nonentities like John B. Ethan, whose fond delusion that Zen Buddha was a person I discussed in my last column. Some of the biggest names have perpetrated howlers no less ridiculous.

   Take, for instance, Margery Allingham. “The Definite Article” (The Strand, October 1937; collected in Mr. Campion and Others, 1950) finds Albert Campion called in by his friend Superintendent Oates when Scotland Yard is asked by the “Federal Police” of the U.S. (by which I presume she means the FBI) to arrest and deport a “society blackmailer” whose extortion drove a young woman in New York to suicide.

   Excuse me? Where’s the Federal crime? Where’s the Federal jurisdiction? Any doubts that Allingham knew nothing about the American legal system should be allayed a little further in the story when Campion asks Oates why the Feds got in touch with Scotland Yard instead of, say, “the Sheriff of Nevada.” Since when do states have sheriffs?

   Richard Fleischer (1916-2006) directed some of the worst big-budget movies ever to issue from Hollywood but started out helming several excellent little specimens of film noir, perhaps the best known being The Narrow Margin (1952) and Violent Saturday (1955).

   His memoir Just Tell Me When to Cry (1993) says very little about most of his noirs but includes a neat anecdote about a similar film he had nothing to do with. In 1946, as a novice at RKO, he sat in on a production meeting with tough-as-nails executive producer Sid Rogell and the well-known theatrical director Harold Clurman, who was helming his first movie. Fleischer doesn’t name the picture but, since Clurman made only one movie in his life, it has to be Deadline at Dawn, loosely based on Cornell Woolrich’s novel of the same name.

   As Fleischer remembered the meeting, the first thing Rogell told Clurman was: “You don’t have forty days to shoot the picture. You’ve got thirty.” Then Rogell picked up the script, noticed that the first scene took place at night and called for rain (in film noir, what else?) and asked Clurman: “Rain? You know how much fucking rain costs?….What do you want rain for?” “For the mood,” Clurman told him. “Fuck the mood. No rain.”

   Rogell was about to order Clurman to cut back on the number of people who appeared in the scene when the director interrupted: “How about dust? Lots of dust blowing everywhere. Can we afford dust?”

   In the finished film the first scene takes place indoors – the confrontation between the blind pianist (Marvin Miller) and his predatory ex (Lola Lane) – and neither rain nor dust appears in the second scene, which is set outdoors but was clearly shot on a soundstage.

   So many people have told me that I absolutely must see Infernal Affairs (2002), the Hong Kong movie which Martin Scorsese remade with Leonardo di Caprio and Matt Damon as The Departed, that I finally did it earlier this month.

   The Asian film tells the same story as its U.S. counterpart – the duel between two moles, one planted in the mob years ago by the PD, the other planted in the PD by the mob – but much more tightly and cynically and without the graphic in-your-face violence that seems to have become a Scorsese trademark.

If    you’ve hesitated because you’re unfamiliar with Asian action films and are afraid you won’t be able to tell the characters apart, I can assure you that this is not a problem. The wispy-mustached police mole in the mob (Tony Leung) could never be confused with the clean-shaven mob mole on the force (Andy Lau), and the only cop whose knows his mole’s identity (Anthony Wong) could no more be mistaken for the only mobster who knows his mole’s identity (Eric Tsang) than could Martin Sheen for Jack Nicholson in Scorsese’s version.

   I do recommend, however, that Infernal Affairs be seen in letterbox. The panned-and-scanned version I got from Netflix eliminates far too much of each image from an intensely visual film – and one that goes far towards proving that noir has become a universal language.

   This is a continuation of a post made a couple of weeks back, based on a couple of discoveries made by Ken Johnson. First of all, here are the previous Addenda entries, repeated as they were given then:

FRITCH, CHARLES E(DWARD). 1927- . Add pseudonym Eric Thomas, q.v. For many years editor of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, beginning in 1979. Under his own name, a science fiction writer and the author of one private eye novel included in the (Revised) Crime Fiction IV.
      _Negative of a Murder. Sydney, Australia: Phantom, pb, 1960. See: Negative of a Nude (Ace 1959).
      Negative of a Nude. Ace, pb, 1959. Australian title: Negative of a Murder (Phantom, 1960). Setting: Los Angeles, CA. Add series character: Hollywood private eye Mark Wonder. Rewritten as Strip for Murder, by Eric Thomas (Kozy, 1960). As described by James Reasoner on his blog: “Mark Wonder […] is hired to recover some blackmail photos.”

THOMAS, ERIC. Add: pseudonym of Charles E. Fritch, 1927- , q.v. Under this pen name, the author of two novels included in the (Revised) Crime Fiction IV; see below:
      Psycho Sinner. Athena, pb, 1961. Add series character: Hollywood private eye Mark Wonder. Says James Reasoner on his blog: “Mark Wonder is hired by beautiful starlet Silvi McClair to find out who’s trying to kill her.”
      Strip for Murder. Kozy Books, pb, 1960. Add setting: Los Angeles, CA. Leading character: private eye Christopher Sly. [Sly is hired by a stripper to recover some photos shed posed for.] According to James Reasoner on his blog, this book is “a very loose rewrite of Negative of a Nude (Ace, 1959), written under the author’s own name.

   After these entries were posted, Ken emailed me with the following information:

    “I have a different book called 7 Deadly Sinners by Christopher Sly, published by Athena Books in 1961, also featuring Sly as the lead character. This book was reprinted a year later by Carousel Books, another porn house, as Fury in Black Lace by Charles Brockden. Here’s the interesting part: Carousel Books were published by Frimac Publications which, it is my understanding, was owned by Charles Fritch and Jack Matcha.”

   We’ll have to leave Frimac Publications to discuss another day — this was certainly news to me — but by pure coincidence, Jack Matcha’s entry was included in the same post as Charles Fritch’s.

   For now, though, the following revised entries will appear in Part 25 of the ongoing online Addenda to Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. Until perhaps Mr. Fritch confirms that he wrote the following books, we’ll reserve the possibility that some plagiarizing may have been going on, as was common in the sleaze-based paperbacks of that era.

SLY, CHRISTOPHER. Possible pseudonym of Charles E. Fritch, 1927- ; other possible pen name: Charles Brockden; qq.v. Confirmed pen name for Mr. Fritch: Eric Thomas, q.v.
      7 Deadly Sinners. Athena, pb, 1961. Setting: Los Angeles CA. Series character: Private eye Christopher Sly. [Sly is hired as a bodyguard to seven beautiful movie starlets.] Note: This book was rewritten as Fury in Black Lace, by Charles Brockden.

BROCKDEN, CHARLES. Possible pseudonym of Charles E. Fritch, 1927- ; other possible pen name: Christopher Sly, qq.v. Confirmed pen name for Mr. Fritch: Eric Thomas, q.v.
      Fury in Black Lace. Carousel, pb, 1962. Setting: Miami Beach FL. Leading character: Private eye Nicholas Gamble. [Gamble is hired as a bodyguard to seven beauty contest contestants.] Note: This book is a rewrite of 7 Deadly Sinners, by Christopher Sly.

KATHERINE HALL PAGE – The Body in the Fjord.

Avon, paperback reprint; 1st printing, November 1998. Hardcover first edition: William Morrow, November 1997.

   False advertising. Although her name is not on the front cover, it’s on the back cover and all over the first couple of blurb pages. This is supposedly a “Faith Fairchild” mystery, and it isn’t.

   Faith Fairchild, for those of you who may not know, is a minister’s wife who lives in Aleford MA (a small fictional village somewhere outside Boston), and she’s solved many a case in her day, but not this one. She appears in a few pages at the beginning, a couple in the middle at the other end of a telephone call, and a few more at the end. That’s all.

   Besides being a sleuth, a wife and a mother, and not necessarily in that order, Faith also has a catering business on the side. Working for her part-time is Pix Miller. What Pix knows about murder cases, she’s learned from Faith, but it hardly seems enough for her to tackle a book’s worth of adventure on her own – and it isn’t, I’m reluctantly sorry to say.

   Pix and her mother Ursula head for Norway in this book – which should hardly come as a surprise, given the title of the book – where they try to track down Kari, the granddaughter of Ursula’s best friend Marit. Kari and Eric, her boy friend, had been working as stewards on a guided tour through the land of the fjords for a group largely consisting of Americans.

   But Eric has been found dead, and Kari is missing. You might think it would be the utmost in audaciousness for two American women to come to a foreign country to do the job of the local police, and for the most part, you would be right. Mitigating this rather shaky basis of the story line is the picturesque quality of the tour they join, asking all kinds of questions as they go. Most of the central part of the book is as much a travelogue as it is a mystery, which is what we primarily signed up for, or at least I did, complete with recipes in the back.

   Possible reasons for Kari’s disappearance: she and Eric may have stumbled upon a stronghold of Nazi survivors or sympathisizers; or a gang of smugglers of Norwegian artifacts; or a cabal of industrial spies in the oil business; or the romance between the two young people may have ended in a lovers’ spat and that is that.

   Or any combination of the above. The police don’t make an appearance until page 167, leaving Pix and her mother the only ones on the scene asking questions and getting into serious trouble, especially Pix. It’s all a case of too much, which is quite a paradox, since it’s also a case of far too little.

   Here’s a list of all the Faith Fairchild books, expanding upon the entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. I’d recommend that you read one or another of this list instead, at least for the first one. If you’ve already read one, you’re probably way ahead of me on this.

LES ROBERTS – The Cleveland Local.

St. Martin’s; paperback reprint, December 1998. Hardcover first edition: St. Martin’s, November 1997. Trade paperback: Gray & Company Publishers, June 2005.

   I’ll begin, not at the beginning, or not really, with a list of all the mystery fiction that Les Roberts has written. This I put together from what I found in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, plus the bibliography that Mr. Roberts provides on his own website:

         The Saxon Series:     [A Los Angeles actor turned private eye.]

• An Infinite Number of Monkeys (St. Martin’s Press, 1987)
• Not Enough Horses (St. Martin’s Press, 1988)
• A Carrot for the Donkey (St. Martin’s Press, 1989)
• Snake Oil (St. Martin’s Press, 1990)
• Seeing the Elephant (St. Martin’s Press, 1992)
• The Lemon Chicken Jones (St. Martin’s Press, 1994)

         The Milan Jacovich Series:      [A private eye of Slovenian heritage based in Cleveland OH.]

• Pepper Pike (St. Martin’s Press, 1988)
• Full Cleveland (St. Martin’s Press, 1989)
• Deep Shaker (St. Martin’s Press, 1991)
• The Cleveland Connection (St. Martin’s Press, 1993)
• The Lake Effect (St. Martin’s Press, 1994)
• The Duke of Cleveland (St. Martin’s Press, 1995)
• Collision Bend (St. Martin’s Press, 1996)
• The Cleveland Local (St. Martin’s Press, 1997)
• A Shoot in Cleveland (St. Martin’s Press, 1998)
• The Best-Kept Secret (St. Martin’s Press, 1999)
• The Indian Sign (St. Martin’s Press, 2000)
• The Dutch (St. Martin’s Press, 2001)
• The Irish Sports Pages (St. Martin’s Press, 2002)

         Stand Alones:

• The Chinese Fire Drill (Five Star, 2001)
• The Scent of Spiced Oranges (Five Star, 2002)

   Here’s the real beginning, the first sentence of The Cleveland Local: “It was a black-and-white-movie morning when I opened my office, looked out the window down the Cuyahoga River, and saw the angry thunderheads hunkered over Lake Erie.”

   And here’s how the man pronounces his name: MY-lan YOCK-o-vitch, which he proudly makes sure the reader knows by page 3. Milan is an ex-football player and pretty much of a blue-collar kind of PI. He knows his way around every section of Cleveland, though, from the ethnic neighborhoods where he grew up to the ritzier parts of downtown and areas where the richer people live.

   In The Cleveland Local he’s hired to tackle a rather cold case, that of the shotgun murder of a young professional lawyer on the Caribbean island of San Carlos ten weeks earlier. Obviously there’s no way the Cleveland cops can get involved, so the case is steered Milan’s way. The dead man’s sister, also an attorney, is picking up the tab.

   What Milan can’t understand is why the dead man’s father, a noted well-to-do labor attorney, wants nothing to do with the investigation, making him wonder if the sister might be right, and that there’s a local connection, not just another botched robbery attempt in a foreign country and international resort area.

   And of course there is. That’s almost not the point. What Roberts is equally interested in, besides the mystery, is to illustrate why and how he loves the city of Cleveland, the ins and outs, the people who run it, mostly behind the scenes, in a fictional paean to the town, with a hint of melancholy for the older days. There’s also some introspective father-son stuff involved as well, without being overly blatant about it, plus a generous hint of a budding romance. (Milan is divorced from his two boys’ mother.)

   Milan’s technique consists of asking good common sense questions, persistence, a tough guy attitude (which at over 40 he can still back up) and persistence. An excellent combination, marred by the fact – and I dislike having to bring it up – by the relative weakness of the mystery. The motive for the murder seems too slight, the method too complicated, and people in retrospect don’t seem to have behaved in appropriate fashion to it.

   Can I say that and still say that I enjoyed the book? I can, and if you didn’t notice, I just did. I should also point out, as many of the reviewers on Amazon also do, that the ending is one that will have readers immediately reaching for the next book in the series, which – thanks to the bibliography above – would have been A Shoot in Cleveland. It looks like a must read to me.

   I’ve not been able to do much posting here on the blog this week, but I hope to get back in the routine again soon. Pushing me in the right direction this morning was Al Hubin, who sent me Part 25 of the online Addenda to his landmark bibliography Crime Fiction IV, and I was able to upload it this afternoon.

   Follow the first link directly to Part 25. The second one will lead you to the main page, which has a little more information about what this long ongoing project is all about.

   There are no major pieces of information in this installment, only a slow but steady accumulation of answers to trivia questions, perhaps: newly identified settings, corrected publication dates, added movies or TV films based on mystery novels, newly discovered series characters, new editions of old books under new names or titles, on and on. Even though the cutoff for titles is the year 2000, additions and corrections like these keep coming in.

   A small percentage of the information, by the way, has been previewed on this blog over the past few weeks. Al sends me the basic data, and eventually I expand and annotate the individual entries. I’ve not yet had a chance to do any of that for Part 25, but it’s on my agenda of things to do over the next few days.

JEAN HAGER – Sew Deadly.

Avon, paperback original. First printing, December 1998.

   At one time Jean Hager had three different mystery series going, but while I’m not 100% sure, there doesn’t seem to have been any books to appear from her in a while. She was born in 1932, so if she happens to be retired from writing, as seems likely, she’s had a very decent career to show for it.

   Ms. Hager wrote romances in the beginning, under both her own name and under several pseudonyms, before edging her way into mystery fiction by writing Gothics (as Amanda McAllister and Sara North) in the late 1970s. Her first true detective novel may have been The Grandfather Medicine in 1989 — but let’s do it the easier way. Here’s a complete list of all the books in each the three series that I mentioned just a minute ago, thanks primarily to Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

   Chief Mitchell Bushyhead: [half-Cherokee and head of the four-man police force in Bushkin, Oklahoma]

      The Grandfather Medicine. St. Martin’s, 1989.
      Nightwalker. St. Martin’s, 1990.
      Ghostland. St. Martin’s, 1992.
      The Fire Carrier. Mysterious Press, 1996.

      Masked Dancers. Mysterious Press, 1998.

   Molly Bearpaw: [a major crimes investigator and advocate for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma]

      Ravenmocker. Mysterious Press, 1992.
      The Redbird’s Cry. Mysterious Press, 1994.
      Seven Black Stones. Mysterious Press, 1995.

      The Spirit Caller. Mysterious Press, 1997.

   Tess Darcy: [owner of the Iris House, a bed-and-breakfast in Victoria Springs, Missouri]

      Blooming Murder. Avon, pb, 1994.
      Dead and Buried. Avon, pb, 1995.
      Death on the Drunkard’s Path. Avon, pb, 1996.
      The Last Noel. Avon, pb, 1997.
      Sew Deadly. Avon, pb, 1998.
      Weigh Dead. Avon, pb, 1999.
      Bride and Doom. Avon, pb, 2000.

   Relative to the Tess Darcy books, there’s a long online interview with Jean Hager about the series at http://bandb.about.com/library/weekly/aa060898.htm.

   Any mystery novel with an amateur female detective, especially one who operates a bed-and-breakfast establishment, is going to be called a “cozy,” no matter that two people are murdered in it, and more or less on stage rather than off, one of them in fairly gruesome fashion. (While sometimes I wonder exactly how cozy “cozies” really are, I’m not going to argue, or least not here.)

   Probably because a B&B can’t have too many murders take place in it and stay in business, the primary setting of Sew Deadly has shifted by this time, the 5th book in the series, to the local seniors’ center, where Tess volunteers during the winter months, with no reservations in sight until March.

   The first victim comes as no surprise. It is a meddlesome little old lady who lives in near poverty and seems to delight in finding various ways of annoying her fellow seniors, even to the extent of a little minor blackmail, just for fun. (The second to die is more of a shocker, as I mentioned above, both as to who the victim is and the manner of death.)

   It does mean that there are plenty of good suspects, including the dead woman’s nephew and his supposed wife, who just happen to be visiting to make sure he’s remembered in her will, for whatever small amount it might be. And because Jean Hager as an author is quite good as describing what might have been totally stereotypical regulars to the senior center, the detective work is for the most part very well done — and in fact the emphasis is on the detective work, and not Tess’s love life, which seems to be moving well enough along so as not to cause anybody any concern.

   Perhaps you noticed that I used the phrase “for the most part.” The killer is fairly obvious to spot, but while there are lots of clues planted along the way, some of them leading to dead ends, of course, the clincher is not discovered until page 202 (of a 210 page book), meaning that Tess knows for sure only a fraction of a moment before the reader does.

   If the reader has been paying attention, that is. The end result is an “almost but not quite” fair play detective story, but in some cases, like this one, the “almost” is almost good enough.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Fan-Dancer’s Horse.

Detective Book Club; hardcover 3-in-1 reprint, July 1947. Hardcover first edition: William Morrow & Co., 1947. Paperback reprints: Pocket 886, 1952 (with many additional printings); Ballantine, October 1992.

   Start out with a serious automobile incident that leaves one car on its side in a ditch. When Perry Mason and his secretary Della Street observe the accident, they (a) get the occupant of the car to safety and (b) check out the trunk to find two very fine ostrich-plume feathers and a pair of white dancing slippers. Ever think of writing a mystery yourself? What sort of story could you come up with from here?

   Probably not one as complicated and far-fetched as this one. Don’t even think of trying to compete with a master in his prime. More than one fan-dancer is involved. There are two, and one is using the name of the other. One has a horse — hence the title — and it seems to have disappeared. It may have been wounded, or it may have a bullet in its saddle, and in any case it’s missing.

   When the husband of the one with the horse, the real Lois Felton, is murdered, a timetable of the people visiting his room that night takes up nearly half a page. Plus of course the fact that one fan-dancer looks a lot like the other, and which one is telling the truth about her story? It also makes for some great courtroom theatrics, and of course isn’t that what you read a Perry Mason novel for? (If you were to tell me that you read a Perry Mason novel for the characters, I would be more than amazed. I would be dumbfounded.)

   It think it all fits together. I was puzzled, though, as to how Perry knew on page 27 that the fan-dancer he saw in the previous chapter was a ringer, and I still am. An explanation never turned up, and I kept waiting for one. And that’s what kept me entirely off-balance the rest of the story, and that’s why I never would have figured out who did it on my own. That’s my excuse, anyhow, and I’m sticking to it!

[UPDATE] 03-08-08. If you’ve been paying attention, you should have been expecting this review, right? Well, here it is. But to maintain a semblance of the unexpected, what you won’t see here is the cover of that Detective Book Club volume for the third time, and you’re welcome.

   If I may, however, let me introduce a plug for those old 3-in-1 one books. If you like to read vintage detective fiction but you’re on a limited budget, then you can still pick them up cheaply on eBay, especially in bulk. They do seem to be disappearing from bookshops. Once up a time you could find at least a shelf full of them in every used book store you went into. No more. Maybe the store owners have gotten tired of clearing the dust off of them, or they’ve gotten confused with multi-book Readers Digest editions, and into the landfill they went.

   As for Erle Stanley Gardner, I’ve probably mentioned this before, but the Perry Mason novels were the first mysteries I cam across, once I was allowed into the grown-up section behind the librarians’ desk, along with a Tommy Hambledon tale or two. Once found, I was hooked. I think I read three Mason’s in the first day, but I’m probably exaggerating there.

   Some 50 years later, I’m afraid I’m seeing the flaws in the Gardner oeuvre. Not in the lack of personal lives for the primary players, but in the logic behind their thinking. I didn’t notice the gaps in the plots then, but I’m beginning to now, more and more, as I attempt to revisit my past.