MAY MACKINTOSH – Balloon Girl.

Popular Library; paperback reprint; no date stated. US hardcover edition: St. Martin’s, 1977. Previous UK hardcover edition: Collins, 1976, as Roman Adventure.

   If you seek a book that has all but dropped out of sight, you need not look very much further than this one. There is only one copy of the paperback listed on ABE, and five copies of the hardcover, and for the completists among you who may be wondering, there is a single copy of the British hardcover.

    One might also wonder, or at least I am, why the British title Roman Adventure was changed for the US edition. The UK title is fairly bland, I grant you, but why did they think that Balloon Girl was a better one? That it would sell more books? It doesn’t seem that way to me, but I never was a marketing major. (Since I prefer the US title myself, it’s only a rhetorical question.)

   Under either title, I’m going to call this a novel of “gentle romantic suspense” and wait for all of the hard-boiled detective fans who are still reading this to step off the bus, if they haven’t already, before getting down to details.

    To wit: this is one of those books which never quite manages to get down to details — any questions that plain flat out need to be asked are never quite asked. They’re left somewhere off in the distance, clouds on the horizon, to be dealt with later. This is a book for someone with the flair of a master procrastinator for putting off unpleasant things in life until tomorrow.

   Take Kati Nickleby, for example, for indeed she is the primary and main character in the tale. Kati works for the restoration department at the European and American Museum in London, and when she awakes on the morning that dawns in Chapter One, she spots her flatmate Ann, her immediate supervisor at the museum, driving off in the street below with a strange man, taking all of her clothes and possessions with her.

   Later that morning it is discovered that a valuable Van Gogh is missing. While there is no proof, the conclusion is obvious. Or is it? On page 29 Ann returns, blissfully unaware that the police have been looking for her. End of Chapter Two.

   In Chapter Three, Kati is in Italy, ready for her pre-arranged stay with Signor Turo, for whom she is to work in his private gallery. What had happened to Ann is a question that Kati ponders but does not know the answer to, and life in sunny Italy begins to shoo away the clouds that had formed back in England.

   Until, shockingly, Ann appears again in a villa Kati is visiting in Tuscany. Ann is the niece of the owner, one Conte Pietro di Tiepolo, and not too coincidentally, of a chain of antique shops, each called “The Balloon Girl.”

   And also not too coincidentally, Kati’s one assured friend, Dr. Sam Frame, a Canadian museum director who also happens to have been on the scene in London when the Van Gogh disappeared and now also in Italy, suspects that forged paintings have surfaced through The Balloon Girl shops.

   Ah, sorry. This is getting (a) too complicated, while at the same time (b) I am oversimplifying things. I will skip further details, as I am sure you have gotten the picture by now.

   There is an abundance of atmosphere, with long passages in which little happens except sudden chills in the warm Italian sun — hinting ever so slightly that some insidious evil is at work — and then of a sudden, evil is at work.

   Shots ring out in an open square. Kati is attacked while touring the Tomb of St. Cecelia. Someone wants her dead. Someone else — or it is the same person? — intends to use her to take a fall. For whom or for what, it is not quite known, but nonetheless suspicion is steered by the spadeful in her direction.

   Please don’t get me wrong. There are flashes of brilliance in the plotting, just enough to keep the reader wondering, and just often enough to keep the previously mentioned reader from putting the book down for good. When the tale begins to falter, crumble and fall apart, my advice is to stay with it, as no, it never quite does.

      Bibliographic data:

   Here’s a complete list of the other mystery fiction that May Mackintosh wrote, expanded from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, with an able assist from abebooks.com:

Appointment in Andalusia. Collins, UK, hc, 1972. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1972.
      Dell, pb, 1973.

      Pan 23817, pb, UK, 1974.

A King and Two Queens. Collins, UK, hc, 1973. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1973, as Assignment in Andorra.

      Pan 24325, pb, UK, n.d., as Assignment in Andorra.

The Sicilian Affair. Collins, UK, hc, 1974. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1974.
      Dell, pb, 1978, as Dark Paradise.

The Double Dealers. Collins, UK, hc, 1975.
      Delacorte, hc, 1975, as Highland Fling.
      Dell, pb, 1978, as Highland Fling.

Roman Adventure. Collins, UK, hc,1976.
      St. Martin’s, hc, 1977, as Balloon Girl.
      Pop. Library 04384, pb, n.d., as Balloon Girl.

   And as by REGINA ROSS:

Falls the Shadow. Arthur Barker, hc, UK, 1974. [British Intelligence agent Charles Forsyth]
      Delacorte, hc, 1974.
      Futura/Troubadour, pb, UK, 1977.
      Dell, pb, n.d.

The Devil Dances for Gold. Macdonald & Janes, hc, UK, 1976.
      Futura / Troubadour, UK, pb, 1977.

      Ballantine, pb, 1977.

The Face of Danger. Avon, pb, 1982.

   There are no birth or death dates for May Mackintosh in Crime Fiction IV, but what Al does provide is the only biographical information I have discovered so far: She was born in Scotland and later lived in Spain. I do not know who series characters Laurie Grant and Stewart Noble are (nothing on Google), but I plan on finding out, eventually. Some day…!

[UPDATE] 01-17-09.   I don’t know why I wrote such a long review of this book, but I did. I thought just now of cutting it, but in the end I decided not to. I did do some rearranging, though, to put the bibliographic data at the end, not the beginning.

   Since writing the review, I haven’t found anything more about May Mackintosh myself, but Al Hubin has. From Part 9 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, here are the years she was born and when she died: 1922-1998.

NORMAN KELLEY – Black Heat.

Avon, paperback reprint; 1st printing, 2002. First Edition: Cool Grove, trade ppbk, 1997. Reprint hardcover: Amistad Press (HarperCollins), 2001.

   I need some help here. If you can think of another series detective novel as focused on black power politics as this one is, let me know. Black Heat is the first appearance of former Brooklyn-based prosecutor turned private eye Nina Halligan, who is both female and black.

   (The second is The Big Mango (Akashic Books, 2000), and I’m glad to know that there is a second one, because after over 300 pages of small print and letting it all out in the first one, I thought perhaps Kelley had left himself with nothing more to say.)

   Nina is hired to find the daughter of the widow of an assassinated black leader of the 1970s, Sister Ronnie, a former movie star, who has been in a mental institution for the last two decades, unable to withstand the pressures on her as a grief-stricken black Madonna.

   In the meantime the legacy of Dr. Malik Martin, her husband, has been fractured and split between two opposing groups of black power activists, one ultra-conservative, anti-rap and anti-feminism, the other more progressive, but each with guns, firepower and the motivation for wiping the other from the face of the nation.

   The pace of the first three-quarters of the book is slowed by the huge amount of expository dumps needed to fill in the background, and a list of characters is badly needed to keep them all straight.

    Even worse, the continuity is severely marred — if you’re trying to read this a detective mystery — by ever-changing statements of who admitted to what, and when.

   Nina Halligan, who tells her own story, is a tough person to identify with, with a mercurial temperament and obsessed with finding the killers of her murdered husband and two children.

   Not that she has much time to spare for the latter, as all her energy is diverted to the ever-growing case at hand. Streetwise and violent, and nearly out of control by the end, this is not a story to which you can cuddle up and relax with.

   Perhaps unique in the world of detective fiction, with lots of jagged edges, this won’t be a book for everyone, but the strong images it invokes are designed to stay with you for a while — and ignoring any of its flaws — I guarantee you that they will.

[UPDATE] 01-17-09. Taken from an online biography: “Norman Kelley is an independent journalist [and] author [who] has written for L A Weekly, The Village Voice, The Nation, [and] Newsday [among others].

    “He is also the author of the ‘noir soul’/ mystery series that features ‘Nina Halligan’ in Black Heat (Amistad), The Big Mango (Akashic Books), and A Phat Death (2003).

    “Norman Kelley was also a contributing writer to Brooklyn Noir (Akashic Books, 2004) and DC Noir (Akashic Books, 2006). […] He edited and contributed to R&B (Rhythm and Business): The Political Economy of Black Music (Akashic Books, 2005).”

CAROLYN WELLS – The Wooden Indian. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1935.

   During the first four decades of this century, Carolyn Wells wrote more than eighty mystery novels — most of them to a strict (and decidedly outmoded) formula she herself devised.

   She has been called, with some justification, an expert at the construction of the formal mystery, and she has also been credited with popularizing the locked-room/impossible-crime type of story, of which she wrote more than a score.

   Her other claim to fame is that she was the author of the genre’s first nonfiction work, a combination of how-to and historical overview called The Technique of the Mystery Story (1913). Unfortunately, that book is far more readable today than her novels, which are riddled with stilted prose, weak characterization, and flaws in logic and common sense.

   The Wooden Indian, one of her later titles, is a good example. It features her most popular series sleuth, Fleming Stone, a type she describes in The Technique of the Mystery Story as a “transcendent detective” — that is, a detective larger than life, omniscient, a creature of fiction rather than fact.

   And indeed, Fleming Stone is as fictitious as they come: colorless and one-dimensional, a virtual cipher whose activities are somewhat less interesting to watch than an ant making its way across a sheet of blank paper. The same is true of most of her other characters. None of them come alive; and if you can’t care about a novel’s characters, how can you care about its plot?

   The plot in this instance is a dilly. An obnoxious collector of Indian artifacts, David Corbin, keeps a huge wooden Indian, a Pequot chief named Opodyldoc, in a room full of relics at his home in “a tiny village in Connecticut which rejoiced in the name of Greentree.”

   One of the accouterments of this wooden Indian is a bow and arrow, fitted and ready to fire. And fire it does, of course, killing Corbin in what would seem to be an accident (or the fulfillment of an old Pequot curse against the Corbin family), since he was alone in the room at the time and there was no way anyone could have gotten in or out.

   Several guests are on hand at the time, one of them Fleming Stone. Stone sorts out the various motives and clues, determines that Corbin was murdered, identifies the culprit, and explains the mystery — an explanation that is not only silly (as were many of Wells’s solutions) but implausible, perhaps even as impossible as the crime itself was purported to be.

   Fleming Stone is featured in such other titles as The Clue (1909), The Mystery of the Sycamore (1921), and The Tapestry Room Murder (1929).

   Wells also created several other series detectives — Pennington (“Penny”) Wise, Kenneth Carlisle, Alan Ford, Lorimer Lane — all of whom are as “transcendent” as Fleming Stone.

   Her novels are important from a historical point of view, certainly; but the casual reader looking for entertaining, well-written, believable mysteries would do well to look elsewhere.

         ———
   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.

THE NUMBER 23. New Line Cinema, 2007. Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen, Logan Lerman, Danny Huston, Lynn Collins. Screenwriter: Fernley Phillips. Director: Joel Schumacher.

   What this is, when you get down to it, with the dirt ground in deep beneath your fingernails, is a movie about obsessive numerology:

   You get the idea? There’s more:

    “Parents each contribute 23 chromosomes to their kids; the Earth’s axis is off by 23.5 degrees (and 5 = 2 + 3); the Mayans predicted the apocalypse on December 23, 2012 (20 + 1 + 2 = 23).”

   And still more:

   You see what I mean?

   Who’s Walter?, you ask. He’s Walter Sparrow, the obsessive, semi-nerdy protagonist of The Number 23, an animal control specialist, happily married (Virginia Madsen), with one well-adjusted son (Logan Lerman). Things are fine until his birthday (see above). A loose dog named Ned (see above) keeps Walter from meeting his wife on time. Loitering in a bookstore, she comes across a hand-produced book titled The Number 23, by Topsy Kretts, and she buys it for Walter as a gift.

   That’s when things go bad. Very bad. Walter begins to identify more and more with the protagonist in the book, a homicide detective named Fingerling. Noirish nightmares follow. A entire world filled with doppelgängers. A world filled with noir symbolism: rainy streets, saxophones playing in the background, beautiful suicidal blondes, knives, blood, death. A world of paranoia. Who do you trust? Are the dreams real?

   Many reviewers seem to have thought that since Jim Carrey is the star of The Number 23, that the movie is a comedy. They are wrong. Since they, the reviewers, didn’t laugh, except to ridicule, they decided that this is a black comedy. They are wrong.

   This is, believe it or not, a straightforward detective movie, and it is up to Walter Sparrow to determine, first of all, who died, and when, and then, finally, who did it. The story doesn’t get there in straight-forward fashion, though, and I admit it’s easy to lose track of what’s happening. (Some people who’ve left comments on IMBD were so totally confused after 20 minutes that they simply stopped watching. Why they want others to know this, I do not know.)

   This movie is a visual treat for the eyes, if you don’t mind skrunge, if you don’t mind madness occurring right in front of you, if you go with the movie instead of fighting it.

   I do wish, though, that the makers of this movie had chosen another ending. This one’s flat. It took a lot of work to build up to a suitable climax, but this one isn’t it.

   The mystery’s solved, the culprit’s named, but the sudden swoosh of air out of your lungs is less a release of tension than one of disappointment.

   Not that the ending isn’t the one the movie was pointing to all along. It’s not that. It’s that it could have – should have – been more. Not happier, not sadder, just one with a little more edge to it. That’s all I’d ask. (I’ve read that the DVD contains an alternative ending, but so far I’ve not been able to confirm that.)

      ______

    Please note: ● Friday’s the 6th day of the week, January’s the first month of the year, and this is the 16th. 6 + 1 + 16 = 23. ● If you were to copy this review into WordPerfect, the images would each appear as three words: The Number 23. There are 23 paragraphs in this review. ● There are 828 words: [2 + 3] + [8 + 2 + 8] = 23.

KENN DAVIS & JOHN STANLEY – The Dark Side.

Avon, paperback original; 1st printing, December 1976.

   As the cover so proudly proclaims, “Faster than Sherlock Holmes. Higher than Superfly. Handsomer than Inspector Poirot. It’s CARVER BASCOMBE and his first adventure.”

   Blurb writers sometimes lie, but this time it’s only a slight exaggeration. Even according to the authors on page 30, Bascombe is a combination of Superfly, Shaft and Virgil Tibbs, all rolled into one.

   It’s remarkable, though, isn’t it, what a difference of 15 years makes. Superfly is totally forgotten, Shaft nearly so, and if it weren’t for the TV series, Virgil Tibbs might very well be also.

   Bascombe is black and a PI, as you might have gathered, and Kenn Davis (by himself) is still writing about his adventures. I’ve read only a couple of them, but until I read The Dark Side I don’t think I realized how closely his cases are connected with the world of the arts.

   I’d have to look into it some more to be sure, but this one, at least, concerns a famous artist whose high-priced works seem to keep on selling, year after year, even though the experts see nothing to them. It also concerns a small teen-aged boy who thinks he’s found a way to make his family financially independent, but who ends up dead instead.

   By the way, I think (as was the case in the case of both Superfly and Shaft) that this book was originally written with an eye toward the movies. It never worked out, but the flair toward to the cinematic, in terms of both descriptive place-settings and the scenes of intense action, simply can’t be mistaken.

   And there is a great deal of violence involved. Even the title this one refers in passing to the great contrast that’s deliberately invoked between the gore of the action and the daintier world of the arts, as previously mentioned.

   Bascombe has white girl friend in this one, and she (Gwen Norris) is an unknowing cause of friction between Carver and a black cop named Ludlow. I don’t know if either one or both happen to appear in later adventures, but never mind. Even if Carver Bascombe has never became world famous in the meantime, he and his associated cast of characters certainly had a slam-bang opening case on their hands in this one.

[UPDATE] 01-16-09.   A long article on Kenn Davis appeared earlier here on the blog, and it includes a complete listing of all his books and a lot more about his life. I was right in surmising that The Dark Side was written with the movies in mind, and I was also correct in saying that Bascombe’s cases all had connection with the world of the arts.

   I did not remember that The Dark Side was nominated for an Edgar in 1976 as Best Paperback Original, until I went back myself to read that earlier piece on Kenn Davis. It’s always nice to know when your judgment is validated like that.

HONEYMOON ACADEMY. 1990. Kim Cattrall, Robert Hays, Leigh Taylor-Young, Jonathan Banks, Christopher Lee, Doris Roberts, Gordon Jump. Director: Gene Quintano.

   What do you do when you want to do Romancing the Stone and Kathleen Turner runs too high for your budget? Kim Cattrall is as exact a look-alike as you can get, without quite the same underlying seductiveness. A little too wholesome. I guess for underlying seductiveness you pay extra.

   Robert Hays is the man she marries. Unknown to him, his new bride is actually a member of a super secret government agency, a courier service of the State Department, so to speak.

   They do all kinds of deliveries: blackmail, ransom, that kind of thing. They meet, she quits, and on their honeymoon she is asked to perform one last, small task.

   We’ve read or seen that before, haven’t we? In this case: a small matter of counterfeit plates. There are a few funny scenes, but most of them border on the silly.

   But then, I laugh at almost anything.

[UPDATE] 01-15-09. Speaking of Kim Cattrall, as I was at the beginning of this review, I suppose some of you saw her in that HBO series she was recently in. I haven’t had the opportunity, I regret to say. What I have found, though, is a trailer for Honeymoon Academy, which you can access for yourself by following this link.

   After watching these small snapshots and snippets of the film, I still think she looks like Kathleen Turner. And I also think my review covers everything else you’ll see in these previews. Certainly nothing less.

ELAINE VIETS – Murder with Reservations.

New American Library, hardcover, May 2007; paperback reprint: Signet, May 2008. “A Dead-End Job Mystery.”

   Things really heat up in this latest Helen Hawthorne novel. The menial job worker’s ex-husband has tracked her to Florida, and she’s working at the Full Moon Hotel where Rhonda, one of her co-workers, is found dead in a dumpster.

   The subsequent publicity and increasing proximity of her ex-husband leaving Helen uncertain about which way to run.

   I’ve heard that Viets had a stroke in March ’07, but later information suggests that she’s recovering. I wish her well and look forward to the continuation of this funny, suspenseful series.

LYN HAMILTON – The Chinese Alchemist.

Berkley Prime Crime, hardcover, April 2007; paperback reprint: January 2008.

   To fulfill a promise to a friend, Hamilton’s Toronto antiques dealer sleuth Lara McClintoch travels to China to buy at auction a Tang Dynasty silver box, one of three that will complete a rare and very valuable set. The visit results in theft, murder and the usual exotic perils for indefatigable traveler Lara.

   Unfortunately, the plot bogs down in a protracted resolution that has more tell than show. This is not one of her more successful outings, with her research and fascination with historical background failing to blend seamlessly into the narrative.

[EDITORIAL UPDATE.]   The next book in Elaine Viets’ well-liked “Dead-End Job” series came out last year in May, right on schedule: Clubbed to Death (NAL, hardcover). In this adventure Helen Hawthorne becomes a “customer care” clerk at the snobbish Superior Club in Golden Palms, Florida.

   In all likelihood the book was finished before Viets had the stroke that Walter mentioned. Even better news, then, is that in June 2008, according to this online article, she was well enough to be doing a signing tour for the book.

   An interview with Elaine Viets which was conducted by Pamela James back in February 2005 for the print version of Mystery*File also appears here on the primary M*F website.

   Harold R. Daniels was nominated for an Edgar in 1955 for his first novel, In His Blood. His other five novels feature the excellence of his first: interesting plots and situations, solid characterizations, and a sense of realism few crime novels achieve.

   In His Blood (Dell, 1955) is the story of Milton Raskob, a worker at Hammersmith Chemical, a loner. Then something happens to change his dull, meaningless life:

   Raskob is seized by the urge to kill, and he does. After following a school girl after a movie, he uses his knife to butcher her. The buildup to the scene is powerful and realistic.

   Lieutenant Ed Tanager of Homicide is given the case. Tanager has personal problems: his daughter is hospitalized with suspected polio; Tanager’s wife is an emotional zombie as a result.

   Raskob endures various humiliations, and after each he feels the urge to use his knife. He almost murders a little black girl, but she gets away. Later, he butchers a small boy in the park. Finally, the fever takes over and he slits the throat of a newborn baby in its crib.

   The investigation is believable, realistic, and professional as Tanager and his men hunt for the killer. The reader feels the frustration of the lack of clues; but he also feels for Raskob as a man driven beyond his limits.

   In His Blood isn’t a perfect book. Daniel’s writing style has its weaknesses, and the dialogue wanders into cliches too frequently. But In His Blood is a superb study of a modern day Ripper.

   Daniels’ second book, The Girl in 304 (Dell, 1956), begins with the body of a young woman found in the woods: stripped and stabbed to death. For a moment I thought Daniels was going to tell the same story as In His Blood, only this time from the perspective of a Georgia sheriff, Ed Masters.

   But this time we aren’t dealing with a psychopath: there’s motive and deception involved here. The plotting is tight and the characters are more fully developed than those of In His Blood.

   I liked The Girl in 304 because Masters must first learn the secrets of the dead woman before he can find the killer, and in that process we discover truths about Masters and ourselves.

   With The Accused (Dell, 1958), Daniels attempts something new. The format is radically different: sections of testimony introduce the narrative. The evidence presented in the trial is expanded and amplified by the chapter that follows it.

   Alvin Morlock is a simple man teaching at a small college. He is unexceptional. He lives a lonely, studious life. But he meets Louise Palaggi, a tramp, and in a moment of supreme foolishness marries her. From that moment he is doomed.

   But Daniels is subtle enough to make Morelock’s fate a tragic event by increments. Although two people are destroyed in this book, the crime is one of being punished for stupidity and pride rather than the usual premeditation. The Accused displays Daniels’ growth in writing skill and characterizations.

   With his next book, Daniels gets even better. John D. MacDonald said, “Harold Daniels’ The Snatch belongs among the modern classics of crime and punishment.” The Snatch (Dell, 1958) involves three men desperate enough to kidnap the grandchild of a Mafia godfather, but men who lack the toughness and professionalism to get away with it.

   Mollison is a grifter who’s come to the end of his road. He’s working for a used car company and is caught trying to work a con on the company. Mollison needs money to avoid a prison sentence.

   Mollison knows Morgan, a bank teller who wants to live as well as the wealthy side of the Morgan family lives. Morgan needs money.

   Mollison also knows Patsy, a handyman of low intelligence who admires Mollison’s phony style. Mollison tricks him into a part in the scheme.

   The snatch comes off fine, but it’s the aftermath with murder and the psychological disintegration which produces the book’s finely crafted conclusion. The characters create their own doom in their own special ways.

   The Snatch is Daniels’ best balanced book, reflecting narrative control and tight plotting.

   For the Asking (Fawcett, 1962) features a character very much like Milton Raskob, the psychopath from In His Blood. Lawrence Merrick is a high school English teacher. He’s pushing forty. He has no close friends. He’s an indifferent teacher whose students consider him boring and stupid. The administration correctly labels him as a time-server.

   But when Merrick assists at a school dance, he’s presented an opportunity to exercise the power and control he craves. While searching the school grounds for necking couples. Merrick stumbles on two students about to make love: Don Scott is the teen-aged son of the town’s doctor, while the girl, Jean Cole, is from the poor side of town.

   Merrick uses his discovery of their activity to blackmail Scott for money and Jean Cole for sex. Slowly, Merrick’s power over these two young people begins the chain of events that’ll destroy them all. When Jean Cole becomes pregnant, Merrick’s mind bursts into a frenzy of hatred and murder.

   For the Asking is a solid book. Its theme of dominance and submission painfully illustrates the ironies of youth and age.

   With House on Greenapple Road (Random House, 1966; Dell, 1969) Daniels brings all of his experience and craftsmanship together. It is simply a stunning book, excellent in all respects.

   A neighbor calls the police. Detective Dan Nalon comes out to the house on Greenapple Road. Here’s how Daniels describes the community it’s a part of, Fruit Hill Farms:

   That is good writing, capturing the tedium and futility of suburban developments with cute names.

   When Nalon reaches his destination he finds a kitchen covered with blood: seven pints of it. The press converge like barracuda, calling it ‘The Red Kitchen Murder.’ However, police can’t find the body. Marian Ord, the missing woman, becomes the object of a multi-state search.

   But Nalon does a search of his own, and, like a time machine, uncovers Marian Ord’s strange, torrid past. Daniels exposes it carefully, skillfully, in a series of flashbacks. The ski instructor, the preacher, the lifeguard, the motorcycle fan, the salesman, the bookie. The path of Marian Ord’s life is like a minefield.

   Nalon follows the case to the surprising conclusion and the result is perhaps Daniels’ best book. I highly recommend House on Greenapple Road and the rest of Daniels’ novels. He’s a fine writer and his books will give you hours of suspense and enjoyment.

VINCENT STARRETT – The Case Book of Jimmie Lavender. Gold Label, hardcover, 1944. Hardcover reprint: Bookfinger, 1973.

   Comprising about a fourth of the published cases of Jimmie Lavender, the only sleuth in mystery fiction named for a major-league baseball player, these twelve tales from the Twenties and Thirties are representative examples of the now mostly forgotten detective short stories of Vincent Starrett, better known today as the biographer of Lavender’ s inspiration, Sherlock Holmes.

   By modern standards, none is of the first rank, but most are well-plotted puzzles cast in the classic mold, with a nice blend of cerebral deduction and physical action, and even fifty years and more later they have their attractions.

   Several of the victims in the ten episodes concerned with murder are dispatched in picturesque ways and in a variety of interesting settings. Among the latter: a nightclub, a cruise ship, a golf course, a hospital, a university campus not far from the grounds of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and even an airplane cockpit.

   In one of the tales, a house “vanishes”; in another, the scene of the crime itself disappears; in a third — a locked-room homicide — the case is solved twenty years before it occurs. And every so often the proceedings are enlivened with some typical Chicago-style gunplay.

   Though not as fully realized or memorably limned as some of his more celebrated Golden Age contemporaries, Lavender himself is an engaging protagonist, warm and whimsical throughout, though perhaps a bit too omniscient at times. He is aided in his investigations by his equally likable companion and chronicler, “Gilly” Gilruth, a refreshingly able Watson.

   Taken in small doses, their adventures are still fun to read, both for their own sake and as pleasantly nostalgic reminders of a more innocent era in the history of the crime-fiction genre.

   Starrett also published a number of mystery novels, none of which is particularly distinguished. Three of these feature a detective with the unlikely name of Walter Ghost: Murder on “B” Deck (1929), Dead Man Inside (1931), and The End of Mr. Garment (1932).

   Starrett’s best novel, however, is probably Murder in Peking (1946), which has a nicely evoked Chinese background. Other of Starrett’s criminous short stories can be found in Coffins for Two (1924) and The Blue Door (1930); two of the stories in the later volume feature Jimmie Lavender.

         ———
   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.

CHARLES G. BOOTH – Murder at High Tide.

William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1930. UK edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930.

   This story of a domestic tyrant who’s found murdered in his library has a lot of what attracted me to mysteries in the first place.

   Even so, while fun to read, an honest appraisal would have to rank it only a notch or so above the Hardy Boys. And as in a vintage Charlie Chan movie, the dead man’s mansion is full of suspects at each other’s throats, with wild accusations and amazing discoveries coming at every moment.

   The hero is a young antiques dealer, in his own words, an ass with women. (No further comment.) The detective is Anatole Flique, a comically suave French policeman, although the murder does take place on an island just off the California coast. In his own words, he’s the cleverest on the Paris Surete. He’s also greatly given to twirling his mustaches and busily polishing the top of his head, all the while contemplating life’s little mysteries.

   There are tons of false evidence, most of it leading to dead ends, but I think that the killer, in spite of his or her alibi, should be spotted at once. The style is not John Dickson Carr’s, but it is his kind of story. If there’s no locked room, it’s only because then there wouldn’t have been quite so much fun with alibi-breaking, which in Murder at High Tide is the name of this particular game.

[UPDATE] 01-14-09.  One of the revisions I made was to add the name of the French detective who worked on this case. Obviously I had no idea that he appeared in more than one book, but he did. From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s his complete dossier:

FLIQUE, ANATOLE [Charles G. Booth]
       o Murder at High Tide (n.) Morrow 1930 [California]
       o The Cat and the Clock (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Los Angeles, CA]
       o Kings Die Hard (n.) Hammond 1949 [California; 1929]

   This last book never had a US edition. It came out in 1949, the same year that the author died. According to Wikipedia, Charles G. Booth was “a British-born writer who settled in America and wrote several classic Hollywood stories, including The General Died at Dawn (1936) and Sundown (1941). He won an Academy Award for Best Story for The House on 92nd Street in 1945. […] He also penned the source story for Paul Mazursky’s 1988 film Moon Over Parador.”

   I’d never realized until now that Booth was originally from England. Besides the fiction he wrote in novel form, I know his name from many stories he wrote for Black Mask, the quintessential hard-boiled American detective pulp magazine.

   In fact, he has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the three authors whose stories were deleted from the paperback edition of The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (Simon & Schuster, 1946), edited by Joseph T. Shaw. This is a great reason why you should own the hardcover edition, not just the one reprinted by Pocket (1952).