J. B. PRIESTLEY – The Old Dark House. Harper, hardcover, 1928. Published in the UK as Benighted (Heinemann, hardcover, 1927). Films: Universal, 1932; Hammer, 1963.

   It’s been a season for reading some Old Chestnuts, the first of which was J.B. Priestley’s The Old Dark House,  which turned out to be a neatly – perhaps too neatly — constructed variation on the … well, on the Old Dark House theme, with a group of disparate travelers stuck on a dark and stormy night in a remote mansion inhabited by an equally disparate household of lunatics, criminals and potential killers.

   This was hoary stuff even in the 20s, and Priestley’s stated intent was to use the shuddery conventions as a showcase for his talents with Character and Dialogue, which he does — a little too clearly. One is sometimes reminded a bit forcefully that these are all supposed to be Honest-To-Gawd Characters, and their lines intended to be Highly Dramatic and Very Important.

   Still, as a writer J.B. was no slouch, and The Old Dark House does offer its share of clever talk and sho’ ’nuff thrills; indeed, the Chills are cunningly crafted to appear in ascending order, with effective foreshadowing and a resolution that is entirely too pat, but handled rather well.

   There is a very fine scene late in the book, with the surviving characters, exhausted by their Night of Horrors but too wrought-up to sleep, slumped exhausted in musty armchairs, trying to find some meaning in all this as they prepare to face a gray and uncompromising dawn. And if the preceding pages aren’t all up to that level of writing, well, at least they aren’t a chore to get through.

   
KERRY GREENWOOD – The Lady with the Gun Asks the Questions. Phryne Fisher, short story collection. Poisoned Pen Press, hardcover, 2022. Setting: Australia, 1920s.

Opening: Dear Reader, Thank you very much for buying this book (and if you haven’t bought it yet, please do so — I have cats to feed…)

   Only Kerry Greenwood could make an “Apologia” as interesting and delightful to read as the actual stories. Not only do I recommend readers start with that, but also not skip “On Phryne Fisher” which is the author’s introduction. From there, one jumps into the wonderful world of 17 absolutely wonderful short stories. There is also a very helpful Glossary at the end.

   As per usual, one always has favorite stories:

   “Hotel Splendide,” a case of a missing husband and a missing hotel room, starts one off with the perfect amount of information as to Phryne’s background, her style, her ability to take charge, and her enviable sangfroid.

   “The Body in the Library” pairs Phryne and DI Jack Robinson and a not-so-pious reverend.

   “Death Shall be Dead” includes DI Jack Robinson and a dog. How can one resist that?

         and

   “The Bells of St. Paul’s” begins with a tea at the Windsor that leaves one salivating, and a message in the bells.

   One wishes a few of the stories were novellas and a couple would make wonderful full-length novels.

   The book is probably more for fans of Phryne than those new to her. There’s not a lot of introduction to the secondary characters. The settings and the time at which the story occurs also jumps around a bit. Even so, for new readers, this is an excellent way to experience Phryne and her world, and for those who already love Phryne, there is still the overwhelming desire to be her when one grows up.

   The Lady with the Gun Asks the Questions is a treat. Some of the stories were previously published, some have been reworked slightly, and four are brand new. They are piquant, thoroughly entertaining, and not overly complicated. One may read one, a few, or all of them at a sitting as reading them may have the effect of potato chips; one just isn’t enough.

Rating: VG Plus.

RICHARD LOCKRIDGE – Dead Run. Inspector Heimrich.  Lippincott, hardcover, 1976. No paperback edition.

   It’s late December, and an ice storm hits New York’s suburban Putnam County. Ah, that brings back memories of slick roads, downed power lines and stranded travelers.  A lawyer friend of Inspector Heimrich is killed by a car in a parking lot, and a witness to the murder is the girl Heimrich’s stepson brought home as an unexpected surprise for the holidays.

   Quite comfortable reading, a pleasure to relax with old friends capable of coping with disrupted routine.

Rating: A minus

ROSS THOMAS – Chinaman’s Chance. Arthur Case Wu & Quincy Durrant #1. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1978. Avon, paperback, 1979. Mysterious Press, paperback, 1988.

   A few years ago some dude named Malcolm Jones (who I’ve never heard of) shared his top ten list of crime novels. All the ones I’d already read were great, lending the list some credibility. The ones I hadn’t have been great too. Chinaman’s Chance made the grade. So I was impelled to try it out.

   A ramshackle ramble by the seat of its pants, the story is an entertainment. A wonderful entertainment. And of perhaps all the novels I’ve ever read, it deserves that moniker. It strives to be nothing other than entertainment. And it succeeds. Wonderfully and wonderfully vacuous.

   There are so many plot threads that it will be hard to relay them in linear, straightforward fashion. God knows that Thomas didn’t try to do it. And yet it is the multiple perspectives and slowly eked out details that makes the damn thing so tantalizing, anticipated and delicious.

   I’ve read that Woody Allen only gives his actors their own lines to remember and they have no idea how the whole script fits together. That’s the feeling you get from the characters here. No one has the whole picture. Everyone has just a little piece. And the story reveals itself like a picture puzzle put together, piece by piece, before your eyes. But this picture puzzle you bought came in a blank cardboard box. So you have no idea ahead of time how the thing is supposed to look.

   In fact I’d be surprised if Thomas knew ahead of time how it all was going to fit together. If he did, and outlined it all ahead of writing it, then he’s a freaking genius. If not, then he’s really really lucky. Because all of the pieces in this 5000 piece puzzle fit. Even though it seems like he’s manufacturing the puzzle pieces right before your very eyes.

   But hey. I’ll have a try at linear summary.

   Artie Wu and Quincy Durant are soldiers of fortune. Back when the Vietnam war was petering out, there was money to be made. An associate of theirs at the US Embassy, Reginald Simms, was given orders to burn the 12 million in U.S. currency on hand. He burned 10 million of it.

   The other two mil? Simms and his college roommate, a major mafia figure, ‘buy’ the political machinery of the small broken down coastal town of Pelican Bay in Southern California.

   The dream? To build a red-light district version of Epcot Center: “[S]in without sorrow and thrills without danger…. You can go from Paris to Berlin…. to Singapore to Hong Kong to Marseilles to London’s Limehouse to San Francisco to New Orleans to New York to wherever you have ever dreamed of going. It will all be within this four block square area, and whatever you have dreamed of finding in those places you will find here — carefully sterilized for safe consumption…. People don’t want the real thing… because the real thing has bad breath, and sweaty armpits, and sometimes steals your wallet and makes you hurt when you pee. What people want is vice and sin that look the way they look in the movies — and that’s exactly what we intend to give them.”

   So what’s wrong with it? Well maybe nothing in principle. But the devil’s in the details. And whether the end justifies the means.

   Part of the means involved screwing over Artie Wu and Quincy Durant back in Vietnam. Including getting Durant’s fiancé murdered by the Viet Cong.

   And part of cleaning out the old Pelican Bay political machinery involves killing a Congressman opposed to graft. And the Congressman’s wife. And the Congressman’s mistress.

   So that’s basically the story. It’s about Artie Wu and Quincy Durant seeking vengeance and a cool $2 million coming up against the mob.

   It’s supremely entertaining. And another thing that surprised me is how Tarantinoesque the thing is. And it predates Tarantino by more than a decade. So the phrase shouldn’t be Tarantinoesque. Tarantino is being RossThomaseque. It’s all there: the combination of brutal violence and slapstick comedy.

   There are a number of great scenes so it’s hard to pick one to illustrate the point. But my favorite involves a couple of hitmen who’ve taken their target in a Winnebago, intending to throw him off a cliff near Pepperdine University. They lecture the murderee on having made bad career choices. Then they are distracted as it dawns on them that Pepperdine’s campus appears in The Six Million Dollar Man! The murderee leverages their distraction by grabbing a can of gasoline and setting them on fire while the Winnebago flies off a cliff.

   So yeah. It’s like that. And if it sounds like your bag, give it a read. It’s a great movie to watch in the theater of your mind. Grab the popcorn.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Crooked Hinge. Dr. Gideon Fell #8. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1938. Popular Library #19, paperback, 1944. Reprinted many times.

   What the Farnleighs are waiting for, though they don’t yet know it, is foul murder, a hint of the supernatural, Satanic cults, possible robot killers (in 1938), and a killer whose lack of genius almost overwhelms the brilliance and eccentricity of Dr. Gideon Fell’s efforts to unravel the mystery.

   But pause a moment to admire the literary skill in this little scene at the start of Chapter Two of The Crooked Hinge, a classic Carr mystery. It not only established Farnleigh Close, which is both the setting and the McGuffin that seemingly sets the action in motion but it sets a mood. Chimney’s are “thin and close,” the woods are called Hanging Chart and shadowed ominously, the “silver of age and grace” lays over a room. A clock ticks at the beginning of the paragraph and is brought in again at the end, establishing a tension. Something is coming. Something sinister though nothing concrete has been said to tell us that.

   Carr does this effortlessly, his use of metaphor and simile as sharp as Chandler, though applied to a different end.

   Even the title, The Crooked Hinge, suggests something sinister about a house, something not quite right about it or the people in it.

   The setting is Kent, where John Farnleigh (“The old-time Farnleighs were an unpleasant lot…”), a survivor of the Titanic lives with his wife in Farnleigh Close, but another claimant has shown up claiming to be the real John Farnleigh and an inquest is scheduled to establish the truth. Carr tries out his own solution to the famous Tichborne Claimant case.

   Then the first Farnleigh is murdered by the pool, his throat slashed in front of three witnesses, and none of them saw anyone do it and the police can’t find the weapon.

   Is it the automaton modeled on Maezel’s Chess Player that reaches out to touch a maid and nearly frightens her to death, and who stole the thumbograph, a device for taking fingerprints, not to mention the suggestion of a cult of Satanists. DCI Elliot (…”youngish, raw-boned, sandy-haired, and serious-minded. He liked argument, and he liked subtleties…”) investigates and calls on Dr. Fell to sort out the sinister goings on, as he points out:

   A ranking of the top ten impossible crime mysteries of all time placed this one number four. It is Fell and Carr at their considerable best. It is dedicated to Dorothy L. Sayers.

   Just why the wrong man was murdered becomes as important as how. Fell cannot quite lay hands on why the murderer struck and why he has not struck again: “This murder is human, my lad. I’m not, you understand, praising the murderer for this sporting restraint and good manners in refraining from killing people. But, my God, Elliot, the people who have gone in danger from the first! Betty Harbottle might have been killed. A certain lady we know of might have been killed. For a certain man’s safety I’ve had apprehensions from the start. And not one of ’em has been touched. Is it vanity? Or what?”

   In finding the solution Fell even calls on S. S. Van Dine and Philo Vance’s favorite work, Criminal Investigations: a Practical Textbook by Hans Gross (The Bishop Murder Case) to explain the esoteric but quite real murder weapon (and true to Carr he has laid the groundwork for the killer’s expertise with the weapon) and in a real twist reveal the killer twice in a single chapter.

   The Crooked Hinge is Carr and Fell at their best. The mystery sparkles with hints of something unhealthy and outside the realm of the possible, with Fell at his eccentric, high handed, and deceptive finest, and full of well-realized characters just the right side of cardboard, neither overwhelming the story nor mere cut-outs to be moved on the board.

   This is a model for the genre, especially that special corner of impossible crime and hints of something sinister and beyond that John Dickson Carr made his own.

JAMES LEE BURKE – Cadillac Jukebox. Dave Robicheaux #9. Hyperion, hardcover, 1996; paperback, 1997. Reprinted in several editions and printings since.

   Burke is one of the mainstays now, one of those writers who if you haven’t read him you’re either not a real fan of crime fiction, or you like it only on the lighter side. Every generation of crime writers has a few upon whom posterity bestows the tag of “significant,” and I think he’s one of those.

   A former Klansman and forever white trash refugee from the piney woods has finally been imprisoned for the decades-old murder of a black civil rights leader. He swears he is innocent, but no one believes him-except maybe New Iberia cop Dave Robicheaux. A politician who wrote a book about the crime is. about to be elected governor, a film company wants to make a documentary proving the man’s innocence, and a New Orleans hit man accuses Robicheaux of taking a bribe to ignore Crown’s case. Robicheaux had an affair long ago with the politician’s wife, and that just may be the final bit of heat that makes the pot boil over.

   There is no question in my mind that Burke is one of the best pure prose stylists ever to grace our field. The man can, to coin a phrase, write like an angel, and in the alcoholic and angst-ridden Robicheaux h has created one of the genre’s enduring characters. His books are dark, lyrical, and yes, occasionally overwrought, and maybe even sometimes confusing.

   I’ve never read one of his books I didn’t enjoy while reading it, and enjoy a lot; I have finished a few  with some lingering dissatisfaction, particularly those in which indulges his penchant for the supernatural.

   Jukebox possesses all Burke’s virtues, and lacks, thank goodness, any ghosts — though he couldn’t resist a little mysticism. Thus I rate it highly, as it deserves, but I’m left with a lingering uneasiness that Burke has said nothing new in his last few books, nor said it in any new ways. And however unfair it may be, sometimes sameness, however fine a sameness, may begin to pall.

THE KENNEL MURDER CASE. Warner Brothers, 1933. William Powell (as Philo Vance), Mary Astor, Eugene Pallette. Ralph Morgan. Robert McWade. Robert Barrat. Based on the novel by S. S. Van Dine. Director: Michael Curtiz. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime (and perhaps elsewhere).

   When a man who is intensely disliked by both his family and friends, it is not big surprise when soon into the movie he’s found dead in his study. What is a surprise is that an examination of his body reveals that not only was he shot, but he was also slugged and then stabbed. At first it is assumed that he committed suicide, especially when his study door has been locked from the inside and the only way to get in (or out) is by breaking the door down.

   Once suicide has been ruled out, the there two questions: who did it (and there are lots of suspects) and how? The latter is answered quickly enough. Philo Vance, who seems to have an in with the D..A. and free rein on the case, [PLOT ALERT] uses a needle and a short length of thread to demonstrate. [END OF PLOT ALERT]

   A dog is eventually used to identify the killer, but even before that, the title of the film is totally justified by it opening scenes, taking place at a championship dog show where all the players seem to have a stake in the action.

   From all accounts, this is a fairly good adaptation of the original Philo Vance novel, and just maybe, too good. It’s not easy getting all the primary plot points of a 300 page book into a movie with only 80 minutes running time, but director Michael Curtiz moves even the draggy bits along at a fast pace. It also does not hurt that all of the players are more than competent in their roles, starting at the top with William Powell who was made to play smoothly urbane roles like this.

MICHAEL ARLEN – Hell! Said the Duchess: A Bedtime Story. Heineman, UK, hardcover, 1934. Doubleday Doran & Co., US, hardcover, 1934. Valancourt Books, softcover, 2013. [NOTE: Horror writer Karl Edward Wagner included Hell! Said the Duchess on his list of “The Thirteen Best Supernatural Horror Novels” in the May 1983 issue of The Twilight Zone Magazine.]

   A slim volume, a real curiosity, and a highly enjoyable read.

   Michael Arlen is best remembered (if at all) for his best-selling The Green Hat  (1924) which is pretty much forgotten these days. And is there anything so terribly forgotten as the best-sellers of another generation?

   Not for me. I read The Green Hat  (not to be confused with The Green Hornet) and while researching it for a review, I came across mention of this later work. Well, there’s something inside me that will not pass up anything with a title like Hell! Said the Duchess, so I ran down a copy, and discovered a neglected gem.

   Plot-wise, this starts out as a rather obvious Murder Mystery: a series of gruesome crimes, dubbed the “Jill the Ripper” murders is terrorizing London in the 1880s, and evidence points unmistakably to a woman who must be innocent — the eponymous Duchess, who is known far and wide ass the very soul of sweetness and light. Police are puzzled, friends are frantic, and confusion is rife.

   All this is carried along with a light, humorous prose that reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, as in:

   
   Or:

   
   The bantering tone fooled me into thinking I had the mystery figured out, only to find that there was no mystery here. Only a terrible truth that surprised & shocked me – if you can imagine being shocked by a work of fiction.

   Arlen shifts gears in the last chapter and the ending is a shattering surprise. I can say no more except that I urge you to try it and see if you agree.

JOHN JAKES – When the Star Kings Die. Dragonard #1. Ace G-656, paperback original, 1967. Cover by Jack Gaughan. Second printing, 1978.

   When Max Dragonard, ex-Regulator, is broken out of prison by his old commander, he is assigned to investigate the revolutionary organization called Heart Flag. The Lords of the Exchange, rulers of II Galaxy and previously immortal, are dying, and no one seems to know why. Dragonard is captured by the High Commander of the Regulators and betrays his friend.

   At the command of Lord Mishubi II, he is sentenced to die. Escape to the Heart Flag movement reveals to him the secret of immortality which has been kept from the ordinary people of the galaxy.

   Quite better than expected, the story improves as it continues. One can hardly help but think of the old Planet Stories tradition, but it would seem that there is more complexity and development in this novel than the usual stereotyped space-adventure.

   Dragonard’s own mental defect, correction of which was denied him, helps persuade him of the Lords’ treachery, a nice touch. The girl he loves is killed under bitter circumstances, but there is another who is waiting for his love. And Jeremy’s dream of life for all must be destroyed, but only temporarily, to free the galaxy from one man’s control.

Rating: ***½

         The Dragonard series –

1 When the Star Kings Die (1967)
2 The Planet Wizard (1969)
3 Tonight We Steal the Stars (1969)

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Bigamous Spouse.  Perry Mason #65. Morrow, hardcover, 1961. Pocket, paperback, 1963. Many later printings and editions exist.

   Here is one of the smoothest Masons of ESG’s last years, with a beautifully mounted plot, tremendous pace and a variety of sharp comments on everything from sales technique and modern marriage to police lawlessness and the· undertaking business.

   Mason’s client is a gorgeous book saleswoman who has accidentally discovered that her best friend’s husband is a bigamist — and that he’s ready to kill her to keep his secret. When the bigamist is murdered instead, all hell breaks loose.

   There are a few tiny plot flaws, and the solution is rabbit-out-of-a-hat, but still and all it’s a gorgeous entertainment reminiscent of Gardner’s prime.