GEORGE HARMON COXE – Murder for Two.

Dell #276; mapback edition; no date stated, but circa 1949. Hardcover edition: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.

   Another Boston mystery, this one featuring “Flashgun” Casey, ace photographer for the Express, but one of another style and another era. While Death of a Harvard Freshman [reviewed earlier here] was wordy and cerebral, this novel by George Harmon Coxe is terse and prone to violent action. Casey is as good with his fists as with his wits.

   As you might have known without my saying so, had I mentioned earlier that this novel was originally published as a Black Mask serial. Its original title in the pulps? “Blood on the Lens.” [A three-part serial, beginning January 1943.]

   And as far as titles go, Murder for Two is the more appropriate, even though it’s rather meager and bland in comparison. The first death is that of crusading columnist Rosiland Taylor. Apparently someone objected to a story she was working on. The second death is that of a former secretary who held some incriminating evidence against the target of that story.

   The case is all so straightforward that it comes as quite a pleasant (though not unexpected) surprise to learn that Coxe has more of a mystery in mind than that, so if you pick this one up and give it a try, don’t take it too lightly as a work of detective fiction. Keep reading. (The question is more of how Coxe is going to pull off what he does, not whether.) The key here is that there is a very nifty alibi involved, one so nifty, as a matter of fact, that no one is even aware it is an alibi.

   Or in other words, there is a lot of action going on in this book, so take this as a warning. Coxe’s meticulous plotting can easily blindside you and catch you as flat-footed as I was. (A humbling admission to make, but there you are.)

   He also catches a rare male camaraderie between Casey and police lieutenant Logan of Homicide — one that can suddenly flare into mutual irritation and tired sarcasm but then, with common sense and good humor, just as quickly right itself back into place again.

STEPHEN KING – The Colorado Kid.

Hard Case Crime. Paperback original; first printing, October 2005.

   Let me be the first to state that the authorial specter hovering over Stephen King’s latest is none other than George V. Higgins.

   Maybe it’s being from New England, but starting with the long monologue about why the Boston Globe reporter’s money is being slipped to the waitress, and in a clandestine fashion, and then recognizing that the book is one long alternating monologue among two aging Maine newspapermen attempting to instruct their young intern on the nature of mystery and the mystery of life, well, this is the sort of thing Higgins did in many of his books.

   And this slim volume succeeds as lecture, meditation and tall tale. Its brevity works in its favor. Any longer and it would get caught up in itself.

   Basically, this is the story of two old codgers enticing a young would-be reporter with the sort of sour wisdom old time newshounds expel with the ease and frequency they break wind: Kid, there are some things for which there are no answers, some mysteries that will never be solved.

   Want closure? Write fiction. This book is a creative gamble for King and a marketing gamble for Hard Case, and I applaud them both for trying.

   It’s not Hard Case’s usual type of book (except for the cover) although, when all is said and done, it’s very much an old fashioned paperback original in its brevity and smooth, swift, readability.

GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL. Paramount, 1957. Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming, Jo Van Fleet, John Ireland, Lyle Bettger, Frank Faylen, Earl Holliman. Vocals: Frankie Laine. Screenwriter: Leon Uris; director: John Sturges.

   As a technicolor movie running just over two hours in length, this was a true western epic at the time it was released, and if it isn’t considered one now, it isn’t the fault of either of the two leading stars.

   Burt Lancaster plays Wyatt Earp, straight and narrow to the core, and Kirk Douglas is in fine boisterous mettle as Doc Holliday, dying of TB and therefore unafraid of any man with a gun, and (as they say) untameable by any woman (Jo Van Fleet, as the much-abused Kate Fisher). And here lies an early cinematic revelation, perhaps, that a western hero’s deeds need not always be heroic.

   But the events of the O. K. Corral are what everyone who watches this movie is going to be waiting for. Don’t expect either historical accuracy or intelligence on part of the Clantons and their gang, including Johnny Ringo (the always menacing John Ireland). Along the way we get a bit of romance between Wyatt and a gambler lady named Laura Denbow (the beautiful redheaded Rhonda Fleming) but I noticed no particular sparks flying.

   No sir or ma’am, Kirk Douglas is the star of this show, tagging along as he does with Wyatt as the latter takes his lawmaking abilities from town to town, and a rough craggy friendship, even respect, gradually develops. And that’s the story as far as I was concerned. Friendships, even craggy ones, are never to be shunned. (Getting up from a sick bed to face the Clantons with me, as does Doc, that’s a bonus I wouldn’t ask of anyone.)

BILL S. BALLINGER – Not I, Said the Vixen

Gold Medal k1529; paperback original, 1965.

   Ballinger had a long career as a mystery writer as well as working for television and the movies, but for some strange reason, this is the first book of his I’ve read. So, whether this one is any way typical or non-typical of his fiction, I couldn’t tell you.

   His one-time protagonist in this largely courtroom affair is Cyrus March, perhaps the best defense attorney in the country. But unlike Perry Mason, say, March also has a drinking problem. And somewhat unlike Perry Mason, his client admits to pulling the trigger in the fatal shooting of a wealthy female socialite.

   Like so many of Perry Mason’s clients, Cyrus March’s is a beautiful woman, perhaps even narcissistic, and her story is that the victim was an unknown intruder in her apartment. March’s problems with the bottle began with the death of his wife, and unlike Perry Mason, he soon declares his love for person he’s defending.

   The dialogue is sometimes stilted, and the action often stagy, but every once in a while Ballinger mixes in a brilliant turn of phrase that makes you remember why you’d rather be reading instead of watching the tube. He also alternates chapters between first and third person, an unusual format that doesn’t quite click, even though you know why he’s using it.

   Lesbianism is a key ingredient of what makes the courtroom drama go — it’s seemingly kept at arm’s length at first, but the nuances become less and less subtle as the story works its way out.

   Rather a minor effort overall, but if you ever find a copy to read, I think it’ll keep you interested all the way through. It did me, and sometimes that’s all you need.

[UPDATE] 12-05-08.   Out of curiosity, I checked again to see if Cyrus March showed up in any of Ballinger’s other mystery fiction, but I’ve found nothing to suggest that he did. Ballinger did have a series character named Joaquin Hawks, who was in five paperback originals put out by Signet in the two year period 1965-66.

   As a Native American detective, tribal affiliation unknown, Hawks is mentioned in my list of N.A. sleuths on the primary M*F website, but I’ve not read any of his adventures. Another website says that he “is a case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency. His normal beat is Southeast Asia.”

   If you follow that last link, you’ll find a lot more information about him. For the record, here’s a list of all five of the Joaquin Hawks books, expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

             HAWKS, JOAQUIN:
      The Spy in the Jungle (n.) Signet D2674, pbo, May 1965 [Viet Nam]
      The Chinese Mask (n.) Signet D2715, pbo, June 1965 [China]
      The Spy in Bangkok (n.) Signet D2820, pbo, Dec 1965 [Thailand]

      The Spy at Angkor Wat (n.) Signet D2899, pbo, May 1966 [Cambodia]
      The Spy in the Java Sea (n.) Signet D2981, pbo, Sept 1966 [Far East]

UNKNOWN VALLEY. Columbia, 1933; Lambert Hillyer, direction and screenplay; Charles “Buck” Jones, Cecilia Parker, Wade Boteler, Frank McGlynn, Ward Bond, Arthur Wanzer, Alf James, Brett Black, Frank Ellis, Gaylord Pendleton and “Silver.” Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   An unusual western. Buck, in search of his missing father, after crossing a desert to a range of mountains where his father appears to have been heading, stumbles on a community of religious extremists.

   Buck discovers that their leaders, Ward Bond and Wade Boteler, have been mining for gold with the help of Buck’s missing father, now their prisoner, and plan to escape shortly with their loot.

   The religious sect is not really identified, but they are (with the exception of their treacherous leaders) peaceful folk, who want only to maintain their way of life without interference from outsiders.

   Buck was my favorite cowboy hero when I was a kid, and I think I had good taste. An intelligent film that has enough thrills and suspense to keep an audience enthralled.

FREDRICK D. HUEBNER – The Joshua Sequence.

Fawcett Gold Medal; paperback original. First printing, November 1986.

   [Rather than make any changes, I’m going to leave this review pretty much as it was written, back in early January 1987. You’ll see why in a moment. Keep reading.]

   I guess I’m getting old. It’s not so much that I’ll be 45 years old tomorrow, because I really don’t think that’s what I’m feeling. It’s more that for the past few semesters I’ve gotten the feeling that for the students in my classes, the Vietnam War is something they’ve only read about, in history books, and not from newspapers.

   And here in The Joshua Sequence we have a mystery novel with the root causes based in the early 70s, with the various underground movements, the bombings, the thoughts (carried over from the 60s) that protests could change the world. The longer Seattle lawyer Matt Riordan searches for the killer of former student activist Stephen Turner, now a computer programmer, the more sure he becomes that the reason is connected with Turner’s days with the Weathermen and the Northwest Nine.

   Ancient history. Has it been 15 years ago, already? In the passage of time, most of Turner’s co-conspirators have gone establishment, in one form or another, depending on how you define the term, but there is a secret from those earlier days that one of them does not want revealed. And therein lies the mystery.

   Drugs, and a government cover-up, are also involved. Lacking sufficient muscle, Riordon has to call in a private eye friend from Montana. He also gets too closely involved with his client, the dead man’s sister. You can probably write the rest from here.

   Huebner is also a lawyer, so here in his first novel, he is writing largely what he knows, but every so often I thought his ear for dialogue was off. It may look good in print, but as opposed to the recently reviewed Death of a Harvard Freshman, I don’t think this is the way people really talk. There are an awful lot of typos, too.

   Or maybe I’m just getting cranky in my old age?

[UPDATE] 12-05-08.  No further personal comment is necessary from me, I don’t believe. My copy of the book is packed up and stored away where I can’t get to it, so I don’t have a cover image to show you. Next best thing, though: a cover shot of one of his other Matt Riordan books, then a scan of his most recent book. And why not a complete bibliography for him also, expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

HUEBNER, FREDRICK D. 1955- .     MR = Matthew Riordan.
      * The Joshua Sequence. Gold Medal, pbo, 1986, MR
      * The Black Rose. Gold Medal, pbo, 1987. MR
      * Judgment by Fire. Gold Medal, pbo, 1988. MR
      * Picture Postcard. Columbine, hc, 1990; Gold Medal, ppbk, 1991. MR

      * Methods of Execution. Simon & Schuster, hc, 1994; Gold Medal, ppbk, May 1995. MR
      * Shades of Justice. Simon & Schuster, hc, 2001; Signet, ppbk, Jan 2003.

JUDSON PHILIPS – The Laughter Trap. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1964. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition], December 1964. Paperback reprint: Pinnacle P154N, January 1973.

   Although his work as Hugh Pentecost is better known, Judson Philips has published some excellent novels of suspense and detection under his own name, and created one notable series character — Peter Styles, a national columnist for Newsview magazine who specializes in human-interest stories.

   The Laughter Trap is the first of many novels featuring Styles and dramatizes the tragic events that irrevocably altered the shape of his life and career.

   While on their way home from the Darlbrook Lodge in the Green Mountains of Vermont, Styles and his elderly father, Herbert, a successful but alcoholic advertising executive, are forced off the road by two thrill killers. Herbert Styles dies in the fiery wreck; Peter is thrown free, but sustains a serious injury that forces doctors to amputate his right leg halfway between the ankle and the knee.

   He recovers with the help of a former lover, Liz Connors, whose husband is a doctor specializing in prosthetic devices. His new artificial leg allows him to move around with only the slightest limp, and once he has recovered, he devotes his life to an ongoing search for the men who cost him his father and his leg. His only clue is the “hideous high giggling laugh” he heard before the crash.

   All of this is told in flashback and through conversations with others as Styles returns a year later to Darlbrook Lodge. He has wired for private accommodations, but ends up sharing a room with the lodge’s publicity man, Jim Tranter, through whose eyes we view the rest of the story.

   Styles’s first evening at the lodge is without unusual incident — until he awakens Tranter in the middle of the night, claiming he has again heard the hideous laughter. In the morning, a much more disturbing event is revealed: Two young women staying in one of the cabins — Jane Pritchard and Martha Towers have been brutally stabbed to death. Jane Pritchard’s father appears on the scene, accompanied by his other daughter, Laura, and offers a reward for the apprehension of the slayer.

   Styles interests himself in the investigation, believing the killings and the laughter he heard have a connection. By the time he solves the grisly double homicide, the usually peaceful atmosphere of the mountain lodge has been disrupted by yet another killing, an attempted murder, a melee in the bar, and dangerous undercurrents of hatred and suspicion. But while Styles finds satisfaction in the resolution of the case, he finds only frustration in his search for the driver of the car who took his father’s life.

   Styles continues his quest in such other novels as The Twisted People (1965), Nightmare at Dawn (1970), Walk a Crooked Mile (1975), and Why Murder (1979).

   Of the other series characters created by Philips under his own name, the most interesting are Carole Trevor of the Old Town Detective Agency and her ex-husband, wealthy man-about-town Maxwell Blythe, who appear in two early mysteries: The Death Syndicate (1938) and Death Delivers a Postcard (1939).

         ———

   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.

VICTORIA SILVER – Death of a Harvard Freshman.

Bantam; paperback original; 1st printing, April, 1984.

   Dialogue is an important component of mystery fiction — the most devious plots are often undone by speech patterns that border on either the most stilted or the most incomprehensible, but I am convinced that Harvard freshmen really do talk like the characters in this book. Central Connecticut State (where once I taught) is not Harvard, by any means of comparison, but it is not Outer Slobovia, either, and I think I’m a reasonable person to judge.

   (Mostly I talked to students about courses, grades, and whatever it is that actuaries actually do, and not about personal things like life, sex and whatever else it was that consumed the thinking time of college students back in the mid-1980s, but I still think I’m a reasonable person to judge. Or I was then.)

   Sort of surprisingly enough, this is very much a classical detective story, rather uncommon today, with a limited number of suspects (the fellow members of Lauren Adler’s freshman seminar on the Russian Revolution), a great amount of misdirection in the matter of solving the murder of black student activist Russell Bernard — or rather suspicion directed equally in all directions — and clues derived solely from large amounts of conversation, pieced together from differing accounts of each suspect’s activities and personalities, with very little physical action involved.

   This is also very much an amateur investigation. The police do what they do offstage, and only one faculty member has a major speaking role. Besides the murder — as in the case of Rasputin, perhaps to destroy Russell’s political influence — and its solution, this is also a novel in which each of the characters are seeking their own identity — whether Jewish, black, gay, southern aristocrat, preppie, or L.A. modern.

   I’ll say it again. The characters are real. This is one book I wouldn’t mind reading again, and there are few mysteries I would ever say that about.

Note: Silver’s second mystery, Death of a Radcliffe Roommate (Bantam, 1986), has been published already, and it also features Lauren Adler. Without expanded its borders beyond that of the campus community, this would seem to be a very limited series of books. But as long as I’m nowhere in the vicinity of a school where Lauren’s nearby, I’m really pleased that we haven’t yet seen the last of this fascinating young lady.

[UPDATE] 12-04-08.   Most of the revisions were made to reflect that I’m no longer teaching, so what I know about current students’ speech patterns is rather problematical. What I was comparing, though, were students in the 1980s and they way they talked and the way the students talked in Victoria Silver’s book, which also took place in the 1980s.

   “Victoria Silver,” by the way, is not the author’s real name, and as far as I know, it is not known who the real author was. I suspect that many of the characters in her books were based on people she actually knew. (Googling for more information on her, most of the web pages that came to view were about, you guessed it, Victoria silver.)

   And as I also suspected in the last paragraph of my review, at least between the lines, these were the only two cases of murder in which Lauren Adler ever found herself involved.

GIFT OF GAB. Universal, 1934; Karl Freund, director; Edmund Lowe, Gloria Stuart, Ruth Etting, Gene Austin, Alice White, Victor Moore, Ethel Waters, Chester Morris, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Phil Baker, Gus Arnheim and his orchestra. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   Don’t let the cast list get your hopes up. This is an anthology film, and the most interesting cast members make very brief appearances, so brief in some instances that when several of us talked about the film later we couldn’t agree on which actors actually appeared in the film and in what capacity.

   Edmund Lowe is a street huckster who worms his way into radio and up the corporate ladder to become, albeit briefly, an airwaves star. This may have been heavily edited. The story line doesn’t really hang together and some of the guest stars should have fired their agents for letting them get involved in such a lame enterprise.

W. R. PHILBRICK – Slow Dancer. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1984.

   Mystery fiction has seen more women detectives hang out their shingles in the last five years than in its entire history. Naturally, most of these characters are written by women, fueled by a personal understanding of the modem woman’s changing role. W. R. Philbrick is one of the few men who can write a modem female detective and make us believe her.

   Connie Kale has no one to rely upon but herself. Her dad’s still alive, but a massive stroke has taken his speech and his mobility. A golf pro for thirty years, he can only remind Connie that she’s not the Women’s Golf Champion of the World, a title for which he prepared her since childhood.

   Her first year on the circuit cracked her nerve — something about being a very small fish in a very big pond — and she’s returned to her small New England hometown to start a new career as a private investigator.

   Her clients value her knowledge of the community and her graceful sense of discretion. She cleans up the messes in their lives with no one the wiser — no small talent in a small town.

   In Slow Dancer, though, it looks like she might not pull it off. Mandy O’Hare has gotten herself killed in a sleazy motel room after one of those dives into decadence only the rich can afford. Mandy’s daddy and grampa have always bought her out of trouble before, but this time all they can manage is to keep the sordid details hushed up. Daddy, you see, is running for governor, about to realize grampa’s greatest and last ambition for him. This is grampa’s last gasp, and Mandy’s death, allegedly at the hands of a local male stripper, is not going to stop him.

   This family of aristocrats is being eaten away from within, and grampa wants to know who is rotten and who is not. Connie’s father was the old man’s golf pro, and Connie is practically a member of the family herself. (She and Mandy used to play on the estate together when baby girls.) Old man O’Hare figures if anybody can find out what’s going on and keep her mouth shut about it, Connie can.

   Connie, however, has her doubts. Mandy was a brat, and the family is already tainted by suicide, infidelity, and insanity. Besides, murder is hard to cover up anyway, no matter who you are.

   It’s a Pandora’s box, and by the time Connie lets all the contents out, this great and powerful family is exposed for the cesspool it is, and Connie barely escapes with her life.

   Philbrick writes exceptionally well; his prose sparkles. And he writes Connie well, although women readers might wish to see more of her softer edges than Philbrick shows.

   Philbrick’s other novels are [non-mystery] Shooting Star (1982) and Shadow Kills (1985). The latter will be of particular interest to mystery buffs, as its hero is a mystery writer who is confined to a wheelchair.

         ———

   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.