ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE – The Hound of the Baskervilles. George Newnes Ltd., UK. hardcover, March 1902. McClure Philips & Co, US, hardcover, 1902. Originally serialized in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902. Reprinted numerous times. Adapted to radio, TV and the movies even more countless times.

   Unlike the first two Sherlock Holmes novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles is successful in every way, a book that would be a classic even without the buttressing of the Holmes short stories. The legend of a gigantic hound that stalks the members of the Baskerville family on the moor near their ancestral home forms the background for the only Holmes novel to tell a complete story without recourse to a lengthy flashback following the solution.

   The book opens with Holmes’s deductions about Dr. James Mortimer, drawn from a walking stick he had left the night before. Mortimer himself soon returns, and tells Holmes and Watson of the legend concerning the Baskerville family. Sir Charles Baskerville has been killed recently, apparently by the gigantic hound of the legend.

   Holmes and Watson begin their investigation, with Holmes disappearing for a time to live in disguise on the moor itself. An escaped convict named Selden is in the area, as are a band of Gypsies. Sir Henry Baskerville seems destined to be the next victim, but the convict is killed instead, apparently by mistake. In the end Holmes and Watson face the hound themselves, and find a logical solution to the baffling case.

   The Hound of the Baskervilles represents one of the few occasions in the Holmes canon when Doyle uses seemingly supernatural events to heighten the atmosphere of mystery. It is also more of a whodunit than most Holmes stories, with the sort of shifting suspicion that readers came to expect from later writers.

   The book can be criticized (and has been. by John Fowles and others) for its marked shortage of pure detection. But it has its clues and its red herrings-and best of all, it has Holmes and Watson, in a story that shows Doyle at the peak of his powers. Neither he nor Holmes would ever be quite so good afterward.

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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.
   

   For your amusement and edification. (Well, mine, anyway.)

WILFUL AND PREMEDITATED—Freeman Wills Crofts—Dodd, Mead ($2). Poison is the weapon; the motive, gain. The author first shows the victim’s death, then the murderer’s modus operandi. Inspector French is brought forward on the trail. In the ensuing hunt the reader feels himself the quarry. Explanation of detection follows, with Inspector French being raised in rank once again.

BOMBAY MAIL—Lawrence G. Blochman —Little, Brown ($2). Death and fast action take place on the crack Trans-Indian Express. First victim is the Governor of Bengal, second the Maharaja of Zunjore. Inspector Prike, sorting suspects, encounters rubies, secretaries, cobras, priests, spies. Village scenes of India, butterflies, toxicologist and acrobat flit past before the inspector brings conclusion to a crime that beat the book to the Screen.

THE VENNER CRIME—John Rhode— Dodd, Mead ($2). The insatiably curious Dr. Priestley correlates a “death from natural causes,” an “ordinary disappearance” and a bill for electricity into a solution for one of the Yard’s unsolved cases.

THE MANUSCRIPT MURDER—George Limnelius—Crime Club ($2). A lifelong association of four men culminates in the murder of the most despised among them. Reading a detective story with these men as characters brings forth the killer.

THE SECOND BULLET—Lee Thayer— Sears ($2). Peter Clancy, with his incomparable “gentleman’s man” Wiggar, falls into a first-class murder case when they stop for gasoline at the mansion in the New Jersey hills. Concealment of his identity and the dexterity of Wiggar enable Clancy to mingle with the neighbors, to make friends with a half-crazy animal trainer, to see justice done.

MR. DEATH—Carlton Wallace—Crime Club ($2). The extortioner’s slogan is “pay or die,” and so successful is he that Superintendent Bendilow of the Yard leaves job and pension, even simulates death to catch him.

MURDER OF A MISSING MAN—Arthur M. Chase—Dodd, Mead ($2). With a carload of near-witnesses, including a New York detective, it takes a sharp-eyed little spinster to ferret out both the identity and the murderer of the corpse in the end compartment. The voluble Mr. Goldstein helps.

THE DEATH WISH—Elisabeth Sanxay Holding—Dodd, Mead ($2). Long Island society, his neighbors and his rich wife are too much for poor, ponderous Delancey. Had it not been for the calm young guest next door, he might have been convicted of two murders.

TWO O’CLOCK COURAGE—Gelett Burgess—Bobbs-Merrill ($2).

MURDER COULD NOT KILL—Gregory Baxter—Macaulay ($2).

MURDER RUNS IN THE FAMILY—Hulbert Footner—Harper ($2).

   And how many of these have you read? (How many would you care to?)

ALLEYN MYSTERIES “Artists in Crime.” BBC1, 23 December 1990 (pilot episode). Simon Williams (Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn), Belinda Lang (Agatha Troy), William Simons (Inspector Fox), Ursula Howells (Lady Alleyn). Based on the novel by Ngaio Marsh. Director: Silvio Narizzano.

   There was a three year gap between this one-shot pilot and the series that eventually developed from it. In the meantime, actor Simon Williams became unavailable, and his role as Inspector Alleyn was taken by Patrick Malahide, while Simons and Lang continued in two seasons of eight additional TV films of Ngaio Marsh’s mysteries.

   I can’t comment on the latter actor in the part (not yet, that is), but I had a difficulty time at first with Simon Williams in the role. Not because he wasn’t more than acceptable. The problem was that while I’ve read about half of the Alleyn mysteries, I had only a general idea of what he looked like. The same is true about his wife-to-be, Agatha Troy, and his second-in-command “Br’er” Fox.

   This is the story in which Alleyn first meets Agatha Troy, and in the film at least, he is smitten immediately. The problem he faces is that she is intimately involved in the mystery, and she in fact is for some time an actual suspect. She is the artist overseeing a group of paying clients trying to learn to paint and living together in the same large home if not mansion. Dead is a sexy model, and in strange fashion, impaled by a knife sticking upward from the bed where she has been posing.

   She, as it turns out, and not surprisingly, is also a blackmailer. This means that Agatha Troy, whom Alleyn’s mother looks favorably upon, is hardly the only suspect. The film is beautifully filmed, a period piece set in the late 40s, but I found it difficult to keep in mind who the other suspects were, and what their involvement might be. Remembering the book only vaguely, I believe the killer’s identity was the same, but they changed the motive.

   Overall, almost more a very tentative romance than a detective story, but as we know Alleyn and Agatha Troy did eventually marry. Oh, one more thing. In this TV version, at one point Alleyn goes into a deep silent mood, and his mother explains he’s been that way since the war. Never happened in the books, nor (so I’ve been told) in any of the TV episodes that followed.

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. George Newnes Ltd., UK, 14 October 1892. Harper Brothers, US, hardcover, 15 October 1892. Stories previously published in twelve consecutive monthly issues of The Strand Magazine from July 1891 to June 1892. Collection reprinted numerous times. Stories adapted to radio, TV and the movies even more countless times.

   The most famous book of short detective stories, and one of the best, remains this collection of the first twelve short stories about Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal sleuth Sherlock Holmes. It is doubtful that the two earlier novels about Holmes would be remembered as more than curiosities today had it not been for the short stories that followed.

   Judged strictly as a writer of detective stories, Doyle rarely played fair with the reader: In many of the stories, key facts are withheld and we have no opportunity to match Holmes’s brilliant feats of deduction. But it is not the plots so much as the characters of Holmes and Dr. Watson that have kept the stories alive for nearly a century. Doyle hit upon the perfect way to popularize the formula with which Poe and others had experimented, and his detective remains justly popular.

   As many readers, both children and adults, have discovered to their pleasure, the stories in this first collection fully justify the book’s enduring popularity. All twelve are worthy of note, beginning with “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the least typical story in the Holmes canon. In it we meet Irene Adler and accompany Holmes on a delicate mission.

   It was the second story in the book, “The Red-Headed League,” that really set the tone for those that followed. Here we have the client calling upon Holmes, the brilliant deductions by Holmes regarding the man’s background, the statement of the problem, the investigation by Holmes, and the solution. It was a pattern that rarely varied but almost always entertained the reader.

   In “The Red-Headed League,” a critical and popular favorite among the Holmes stories, a man is hired because of his red hair to copy articles from the encyclopedia every day in a small office. Holmes discovers the real motive for this odd undertaking.

   The crime in “The Five Orange Pips” has its roots in the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, and “The Man with the Twisted Lip” takes us inside a London opium den, showing Holmes as a master of disguise. “The Blue Carbuncle,” one of literature’s great Christmas stories, is about a missing jewel. “The Speckled Band,” about a woman frightened to death in a locked room, is a story almost everyone knows. and is probably the most popular Sherlock Holmes tale of all. “The Copper Beeches” is about a young woman hired to carry out an odd set of instructions at a country home.

   Also in the volume are “A Case of Identity,” “The Bascombe Valley Mystery,” “The Engineer’s Thumb,” “The Noble Bachelor,” and “The Beryl Coronet” all typical of the cases from Holmes’ s most rewarding period.

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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.
   

   I stand to be corrected on this, but this upcoming TV series, scheduled to appear on AMC+ sometime next year, takes place in early 1960s France, where PI Ssm Spade has recently retired. Until now, that is, when he’s called upon to tackle another case of murder and maybe more. I can’t tell more than that from the trailer below, but it does star Clive Owen as Sam Spade, so there is that.

ELLIOTT CHAZE – Wettermark. Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1969. No paperback edition.

   Cliff Wettermark is a reporter at shitty small town Mississippi paper.

   His life sucks. He can’t pay his bills. It’s just doldrums. Day after day of mediocrity and the slow bleed of failure.

   Then something happens. A guy robs the town bank.

   He just drives right up to the drive thru, hands the teller a note that says: ‘Gimme all your money. Rifles are trained at your head. Don’t hesitate. Give me all of the bills in your till immediately or you will be dead two seconds after I honk my horn.’ And she does. Hands him $10,000.

   It was that easy.

   Wettermark can’t let it go. He dreams about it.

   In a dream, he speaks with the robber:

   “The sunglasses were the blackest kind of black and very large, bulging like grasshopper eyes. The robber’s voice seemed to come from behind the glass, his mouth not moving at all. He had asked Wettermark how long it had been since Wettermark lived a really good day or night. Wettermark said he couldn’t remember but it was probably on furlough from Fort Benning in War II. The robber said was the trouble with everybody. They kept hoping for a string of good years; but while they were waiting, they didn’t live one good day and many didn’t have even a single fine hour. The robber said people were tricked by the lure of longevity, yet there was no crueler death than that of extreme old age and a hundred years would mean nothing if the span was composed of thousands of rotten, meaningless days. The robber invited Wettermark to examine the fabric of the past year and then state one clear reason for not taking the risk of robbing a bank. It was all a matter of logic. A man needed money in quantity. A glimpse of the green was not enough. The money was in the bank. It was not much of a gamble if the life you were living was drab.”

   Wettermark puts the dream aside, and continues his dull, boring life.

   He starts drinking again. And he’s assigned to a Senator’s press conference at the local college. He’s not paying much attention. Then the senator says, about the Vietnam war: “I believe some excellent reporting is being done over there; but at times the Pentagon paints too rosy a picture of the supply situation. That, of course, is all a part of the war, you don’t know your own side.”

   Wettermark, drunk, and drunk sick of the mendaciousness of it all, “was surprised to hear himself saying: ‘Why the hell shouldn’t you knock it if your side does something wrong?'”

   “The senator smiled at him, the tawny face as pleasant and relaxed as before. ‘Are there any more questions?'”

   “‘I asked you a question,’ said Wettermark.”

   “The TV reporter who looked like a Pekingese, whom Wettermark had not seen since the bank robbery, dropped his pencil. While he was bent over the side of his chair, he hit Wettermark on the leg and hissed: ‘This is a live interview, you creep.'”

   “Wettermark said to the senator who held onto the smile: ‘Tell me, sir, tell me in living color, if you would want to pile on the pressure if it was your ass over there in the jungle?'”

   “The TV reporter made a slashing gesture at the camera-man behind him and Wettermark arose from his seat, bowed to the assembly, a kind of half-bow. He hoped that his smile was faint and mocking. His head hurt and he knew he was going to be sick.”

   Wettermark is immediately fired. And now he really is screwed. His wife leaves him, he can’t pay his bills, he’s got no career prospects but one: Bank robber.

   So he plots. And he plots. And he does it.

   The first half of the book is a straight tale of the boring life of a small town police reporter. A tale that Chaze knew personally and well.

   The second half is a caper novel. Pulled off by someone with the skills of a Dortmunder. But it’s no joke from here on out.

   It’s real and it’s frightening and it’s…..well I don’t wanna tell you how it ends. But anyone who has read Black Wings Has My Angel knows that Chaze knows how to plot and write vividly of violence and of crime gone awry.

   In its own way, once the caper starts the novel is fully the equal of Black Wings. Which is saying a lot. Because Black Wings may be the best caper novel of all. But while Black Wings is dirty and swampy and belongs on a shelf with Whittington and Charles Williams and Jim Thompson — this one reads like the book of a completely different writer.

   The book credibly sounds like the voice of a near-do-well reporter who decides to rob a bank. Which is what it is. He’s educated. He’s cynical. He’s dissatisfied. And he’s incompetent and nervous. Just like you and me. Or me, at least.

   It’s a really good book that deserves to be in print.

   Another review here: https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=286

I’m going to be taking a few days off from posting on this blog. A lot of personal matters that need to be taken care of are to blame. I can’t tell you for sure when I’ll be back, but I’ll keep you posted when I know a lot more, especially if I have to be away longer than I think I’ll be now. I’ll be back when I can!

BILL CRIDER – Winning Can Be Murder. Dan Rhodes #8. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1996. Worldwide, paperback, 2000.

   This is my favorite of Bill’s series, and it’s a sin and a shame that no one is doing them in paperback now. Other people try to do small town Southwestern cop novels and some do pretty good, but nobody does them as well as Bill.

   Do you know what small-town Texas tragedy is? It’s having an assistant coach murdered just when the local high school football team is about to make the playoffs for the first time in ages. Do you know what pressure is? It’s what Sheriff Dan Rhodes feels from every citizen of the surrounding territory above the age of five (and a few below it) to solve this crime and get it out of the way so folks can get back to worrying about really important matters-like a football game.

   I don’t have any first-hand experience with small-town high school football these days, so I can’t say whether Bill nailed it present-day or not; I can say that it it was that way when I experienced it, and I could smell the dust and hear the cheers again when I read his descriptions.

   Aside from Bill’s always smooth and easy-to-read prose, that’s what l enjoy most about the books — the feeling that these are real people in real places, acting the way people in those places act. Well, up to a point, anyway.

   The Rhodes books will never b5e huge sellers, because they aren’t  grim and bloody enough to attract the body-count crowd, nor on the other hand a female lead who can tumble “engagingly” into peril, save the police from their incompetence, and give you a to-die-for recipe in the process.

   They are nevertheless thoroughly entertaining and very readable, and it’s a damned shame more people don’t know about them.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Exploits of the Patent Leather Kid.  Crippen & Landru Publishers, 2010. Edited and introduced by Bill Pronzini. 13 stories.

   When most people hear the name Erle Stanley Gardner, they immediately think of his most famous character creation, Perry Mason, but he was also an incredibly prolific pulp fiction writer. One of the characters Gardner created for the pulps was The Patent Leather Kid, an unoriginal amalgamation of Zorro, Raffles the Gentleman Thief, and The Scarlet Pimpernel.

   Gardner’s principal contribution to this style of hero — the effete, indolent society fop he pretends to be while his alter ego tirelessly fights criminals and the official authorities when necessary — was to infuse his stories with the hardboiled sensibilities of Depression Era America. Even so, Gardner never let his Patent Leather Kid’s exploits veer into sadism: The Kid was always on the side of right, and the reader knew it.

   Thanks to Doug Greene at Crippen & Landru for bringing back The Patent Leather Kid and other pulp heroes from their undeserved oblivion.

      The stories:          [All originally published in Detective Fiction Weekly.]

(1) “The Kid Stacks a Deck” (1932): A local criminal gang really has it in for The Patent Leather Kid and sets up an ambush. The Kid, meanwhile, sets out to prove that robbing a jewelry store equipped with the most up-to-date alarm systems isn’t, as the store’s owner boasts, “impossible” after all.

(2) “The Kid Passes the Sugar” (1932): Someone’s gunning for The Kid but kills the wrong person. The Kid sets a trap with a shiny platinum watch as bait and an abused wife as a means of bringing the killer to justice.

(3) “The Kid Wins a Wager” (1932): The Patent Leather Kid sets out to help a woman in trouble with her boss, only to come up against another burglar who’s quite capable of framing The Kid for his own crimes. If he’s clever enough, The Kid might be able to escape the frame — and collect a large bet in the bargain.

(4) “The Kid Throws a Stone” (1932): Somebody’s running around pretending to be The Patent Leather Kid, pulling off robberies in fancy Chryslers and making no effort to be subtle about it. The Kid must lay a trap for his doppelganger that, if successful, will not only clear him with the police but also aid a distressed damsel he’s never met.

(5) “The Kid Makes a Bid” (1933): After several attempts at robbing a jewelry store, a thief apparently succeeds, taking some stones and cash with him and leaving two of the store’s assistants hog-tied with ropes and handcuffs. The Kid’s suspicions are aroused by the way the crime was committed, and he performs a rough “experiment” on an unscrupulous businessman, thereby thwarting two crimes simultaneously.

(6) “The Kid Muscles In” (1933): A doctor is murdered, and the prime suspect — a young man in love with the victim’s niece — can’t explain away his presence at the crime scene or his fingerprints on the murder weapon. It falls to The Patent Leather Kid to exonerate the falsely-accused in the way he knows best, breaking and entering with intent to catch the real bad guys.

(7) “The Kid Takes a Cut” (1933): An ex-con gets the blame for a jewel robbery he didn’t commit. His alibi — that a woman gave him the stones as a reward for a good deed — is, let’s be frank, flimsy at best. Only the ex-con’s wife can corroborate his story, but the police won’t believe a word of it. The Kid must contrive an elaborate scheme involving matching train schedules to prove the man innocent, for otherwise the real thieves will soon be on their merry way.

(8) “The Kid Beats the Gun” (1933):  A famous — and vastly overrated — criminologist fingers the butler of a rich couple as the one who stole valuable jewels from them. The butler finally confesses, not to the theft, but simply to following orders. The Patent Leather Kid must intervene to prevent a miscarriage of justice and experiences the triple satisfaction of exposing a fraud, deflating an egomaniac’s pomposity, and seeing an innocent man cleared.

(9) “The Kid Covers a Kill” (1933): The man often referred to as The King of the Underworld operates almost entirely with impunity, unhindered by the police. To him, the lives of his victims don’t mean very much. But when he brutally murders the sister of one of his underlings, The Patent Leather Kid gets involved — and for The King of the Underworld, that’s a very unhealthy development.

(10) “The Kid Clears a Crook” (1934): A small businessman with a criminal record tries to go straight but runs afoul of organized crime; they get him framed for a jewelry theft — enough of an injustice to attract The Kid’s indignant notice. Before it’s all over, The Kid will have fenced some hot ice, dodged numerous submachine gun bullets, and tickled a butler.

(11) “The Kid Clips a Coupon” (1934): A wealthy elderly woman has been murdered — by a tramp, according to the police — but The Kid doesn’t think so. The whole thing smacks of an inside job — a case of discovered embezzlement — and The Kid must be proactive to head off another murder, even if it means kidnapping someone himself.

(12) “The Kid Cooks a Goose” (1934): The underworld and the police have a common nemesis — and common cause to rid themselves of him — namely The Patent Leather Kid. The cops have let it be known — through unofficial channels, sub rosa, you understand — that if the criminal class terminates The Kid, they’re willing to cut the crooks some slack. When The Kid receives news of this ad hoc arrangement to bump him off, it’s without joyful enthusiasm. His characteristic response is to devise an impromptu plan that will not only clear him of a murder frame, neutralize several underworld kingpins, and save a woman’s life, but also give a guinea pig his big chance to be a crime buster.

(13) “The Kid Steals a Star” (1934): During the course of a robbery at a jewelry store, a policeman is killed and the night watchman gets the blame. It gets worse for him when he foolishly tries to skip town; actually, he’s been perfectly framed by the clever boss of a criminal gang. In order to clear the watchman and catch the crime boss in the act of swindling a jeweler, The Kid, with the able assistance of his bodyguard and an admiring telephone operator, must concoct a three-act “play” starring gangsters, gemstones, guns, and — if everything goes according to plan — a happy ending.

         Random notes:

   Unlike Sherlock Holmes, The Kid does see it as his duty to correct the deficiencies of the official police. — All of the members of the gentlemen’s club are stereotypes. — Gardner always uses the word “conservative” with negative connotations. — These stories aren’t mysteries in the traditional sense: The fun is watching The Kid improvising his way out of tight situations. — There’s a lot of 1930s gangster slang. — The reader shouldn’t try to read more than one story at a time: Gardner was clearly writing to a formula. Read one every few days to avoid tedium.

   For even more about The Patent Leather Kid, see Monte Herridge’s Mystery*File article here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=13823.

ELLERY QUEEN – What’s in the Dark? Capt. Tim Corrigan #6. Popular Library, paperback original; 1st printing, 1968. Dale Books, paperback, 1978. Zebra, paperback, 1985.

   Captain Tim Corrigan is assigned to a murder case on the night of New York City’s “Great Blackout.” The suspects are all trapped on the 21st floor with the body while Corrigan’s investigation goes on. And of course the blackout helps provide the means for establishing the killer’s guilt.

   The psychology of crumbling inhibitions is emphasized, but Corrigan and his detective pal Chuck Baer still have too great a tendency to climb into bed with their suspects. That and an early emphasis on Miss Graves’ mammae make this novel [considerably] different from EQ’s more conventional mysteries.

   [It’s] strictly enjoyable, though, and the reader has a fair chance to grab the essential clue on page 45. I shall look for more. [Books in the series, that is, not clues. per se.]

Rating: ***½

UPDATE: Reading this old review tonight for the first time in 55 years, it does not appear that back when wrote it I knew that the book was not written by “Ellery Queen.” It was ghost-written instead by Richard Deming, who as it turns out was the actual author of four of the overall six Tim Corrigan novels.