“The Ghost Goes East.” CBS. An episode of The Hunter, 24 September 1952, Wednesday 9:30 – 10:00 pm. Cast: Barry Nelson, Nita Talbot, Iggi Wolfington, Tiger Andrews, Henry Lascoe, Hy Anzel, Helen Penwell. Written by Phil Reisman, Jr. Produced by Edward J. Montagne. Directed by Oscar Rudolph.

   The Hunter is another series with a wacky backstory. It is a history that features two networks, two stars, and two different court cases. But before we get to the history, let’s examine the episode.

   And let’s not bury the lead. This episode was awful. The Hunter was a Commie-bashing spy series. Nita Talbot was the single highlight of this episode, while the rest of the cast, including lead Barry Nelson, did a poor job with Phil Reisman’s terrible script that was burdened with weak dialog and a plot full of holes.

   â€œThe Ghost Goes East” opens in the middle of a stakeout by the FBI. Being outdoors, and in a 1950’s TV-Film show, there was no dialog, just the camera to show what was happening. Director Oscar Rudolph told the story well with some dramatically effective camera angles. We watched as the FBI closed in on the Commie spies only to have one of them escape.

   The setting changes to inside some airport, aka typical 50s cheap generic set. Rudolph was never able to overcome the limitations of the cheap interiors sets to come close to the drama of the opening. He also failed to play fair with the two, granted lame, visual clues.

   Our hero’s (Barry Nelson) contact, Jane (Helen Penwell) arrives at the airport. He is watching a mysterious man watch him. He whistles his code sign “Frere Jacques.” While Jane updates our hero, the man disappeared. She tells him the Red spy is still on the loose and has passed his information to a Commie courier named William. While they don’t know what William looks like, they somehow know what plane he will be on as he heads east to pass the information to the Commies in East Berlin.

   The thirty-minute episode lacked the time for any characterization of our unlikable hero. On “The Ghost Goes East” no name was revealed for our Hero until he checked his passport, one for Jack Hunter, and when asked Hunter claimed his job was “exterminator.”

   He boards the plane and meets his fellow passengers, aka suspects. They include the man who had been watching him and a traveling showbiz troupe headed overseas. The troupe is made up of people who barely know each other, but the man-hungry half of a sister act (Nita Talbot) and the troupe’s leader and comic (Iggi Wolfington) happily gossip and do the exposition.

   Of course there is a murder during the flight. The twist at the end might have worked in 1952, but not today. In the final scene, after Hunter has saved America, the group notices Hunter has disappeared. As the dumbfounded characters wonder out loud where Hunter went, we hear him whistling his signature tune “Frere Jacques.”

   This episode is very easy to find on DVD. It appears on Lost Detective Classics from the Vault (Alpha Home Entertainment).

   The series’ backstory began when sponsor R. J. Reynolds wanted a summer replacement series for their CBS series Man Against Crime, a PI series starring Ralph Bellamy. The William Esty Agency handled the creative side of Man Against Crime and had producer Edward J. Montagne and writer Phil Reisman, Jr. do the same for the summer replacement series, The Hunter.

   The series began July 3, 1952, Thursday at 9pm. But Lucky Strike was able to push R. J. Reynolds off that time slot. CBS moved The Hunter to Wednesday at 9:30pm, a time slot held by Embassy’s series The Web. Embassy tried to stop the move and sued CBS for damages. The court refused to stop CBS.

   The Hunter on CBS starred Barry Nelson and 13 episodes were filmed. It was filmed in New York at the financially troubled Pathescope Studios. Ratings were not bad with the show ranked 22nd nationally by American Research Bureau during the week of August 1-7 and seen in 3,480 homes and 50 cities.

   Nielsen, for the two weeks ending 7/26/52, had The Hunter ranked 7th in number of homes reached (3,746), and 6th in percent of TV Homes reached in program station areas. At that time there were 65 markets, 110 stations, and 18,317,528 estimated TV sets in use in the entire United States.

   CBS’s The Hunter was opposite NBC’s Kraft Television Theatre and ABC’s Wrestling from the Marigold in Chicago (a series that also aired Saturday on the DuMont network). At the end of the summer of 1952, CBS let the series go. But that was not the end of the series, and in the summer of 1954 The Hunter returned to the air.

   But before that, in the summer of 1953 R. J. Reynolds decided to film 13 more episodes of The Hunter. Barry Nelson was now starring on My Favorite Husband, so Keith Larsen took over the lead. These episodes were kept “under wraps” with hopes there might be a demand for them in the future.

   Then R. J. Reynolds sold the CBS episodes with Barry Nelson to NBC as a summer replacement series that aired Sunday at 10:30 starting July 11, 1954. NBC then bought the never-shown episodes with Keith Larsen and aired them in the fall starting October 3, 1954. The Keith Larsen episodes would run once and then NBC replaced The Hunter on January 2, 1955, with The Bob Cummings Show (aka Love That Bob).

   In July 1955, Official Films sold the syndication rights for the 26 episode series to sponsor Tafon Distributors, and The Hunter made its syndication debut in 1955. Tafon, a maker of a “miracle” diet tablet, claimed the series would soon be in 250 markets (of the current 285 in the entire country).

   It is doubtful The Hunter ever came close to that number of markets. The series rarely found itself in the top rated programs in any market, and with just 26 episodes to air the series faded away.

   Official Films sued Tafon in September 1957 claiming Tafon owed them $97,169.37. They also claimed that no payments had been made since November 1956, and $100,000 remained to be paid from the original sale price of $234,000.

         SOURCES: (the usual suspects)

Billboard:   Accessible at http://books.google.com

Broadcasting:   http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Broadcasting_Individual_Issues_Guide.htm

TVTango.com

Editorial Comment:   “Rendezvous in Prague,” a second episode of The Hunter is currently available on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F67VJF74itw

    The opening four minutes of a third (no title provided):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doLXwU14_Tw

EDWARD RONNS – Say It with Murder. Graphic #76, paperback original; 1st printing, 1954. Berkley Diamond D2041, paperback, 1960. Reprinted as by Edward S. Aarons: Macfadden, paperback, 1968; Manor, paperback, 1973.

   In case anyone’s not quite sure, Ronns was the pen name, Aarons was his real name. His writing career, as far as mystery novels were concerned, began back in 1938, when he was 22 years old, with a hardcover novel entitled Death in a Lighthouse, published by Phoenix Press. He didn’t use his own name until 1948 and a book called Nightmare, also in hardcover, this time for McKay.

   His career really didn’t start rolling, though, until 1950, and the era of the paperback original. His first book for Gold Medal was again as Ronns and a book entitled Million Dollar Murder. He was especially prolific in the early 1950s, with five books in 1950, two in 1951, three in 1952, four in 1953, and two in 1954, including Say It for Murder. His first Sam Durell novel, Assignment to Disaster, the long-running spy series for which he is best known, came out in 1955.

   I have sometimes wondered if the four books he wrote for Graphic Books between 1953 and 1955 were rejects from Gold Medal, or if he had so many books in him at the time that he had to spread them out over more than one publisher.

   Personally, I don’t believe that Say It for Murder is as good as the books he was writing for Gold Medal at the time, so I have a feeling that Graphic was only a backup market for him. It does have something of a noirish feeling to it, a la Day Keene, Gil Brewer and Charles Williams, with the protagonist, pianist Bill Carmody, getting into one jam after another, either with the police on one side and the guys he’s forced to hang around with on the other.

   But Carmody is essentially a nice guy who only made one mistake, and not a guy who continually tries to cut sharp corners as he makes his way through life, and we have the sense he’s going to work his way out of his troubles – and get the girl – with the only question being how.

   I don’t know. I was going to tell you more about the plot, which begins with Carmody joining up with two other former Korean prisoners of war in getting even with the guy they think turned traitor on them, and the mysterious death of the man’s wealthy wife, but maybe this is all you need to know.

   There’s nothing deep to the story, but there’s certainly something going on in it all the time, and sometimes that’s all you need just before heading off to bed at night.

SISTER CAROL ANNE O’MARIE – A Novena for Murder. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1984. Dell, paperback, 1986. St. Martin’s, paperback, 2005.

   Sister Mary Helen is a sprightly 75, reluctantly retired from the parochial schools to “do research” at Mount St. Francis College for Women. When the head of the history department, Professor Villanueva, is found with his head bashed in, Sister Mary Helen plunges into detection with all of her enthusiastic nature.

   She brings along with her her old friend, Sister Eileen, the college librarian, and a new friend, Sister Anne, the college chaplain. Professor Villanueva was known for his kindly sponsorship of young Portuguese immigrants, several of whom work for the college. However, several others have recently disappeared.

   The professional police detectives, Inspectors Kate Murphy, a Mt. St. Francis alumna, and Dennis Callahan, who takes a paternal interest in Kate’s love life, strongly suspect one of the Portuguese men after they learn that the professor’s kindness was more apparent than real.

   Though they’re at first annoyed by Mary Helen’s intervention, they wind up liking and respecting her. She is a lively addition to the ever-growing group of clerical detectives. The book is laced with humor, the people are interesting, and the San Francisco locale is well depicted.

   Plot is a bit thin on the ground, and the book’s brevity precludes any real depth of character. Maybe Sister O’Marie will go deeper next time. This enjoyable first effort deserves a follow-up.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   There was indeed a follow-up, ten of them, in fact. There might have even been more, but Sister Carol Anne O’Marie died in 2009 at the age of 75. Besides writing mysteries, she also helped run run a shelter for homeless women in Oakland, CA. A tribute to her at the time of her death by Janet Rudolph may be found on the latter’s blog here.

       The Sister Mary Helen series —

1. A Novena For Murder (1984)
2. Advent of Dying (1986)

3. The Missing Madona (1989)
4. Murder in Ordinary Time (1991)
5. Murder Makes a Pilgrimage (1993)

6. Death Goes on Retreat (1995)
7. Death of an Angel (1996)
8. Death Takes Up a Collection (1998)
9. Requiem at the Refuge (2000)

10. The Corporal Works of Murder (2002)
11. Murder at the Monk’s Table (2006)

BOLERO. Paramount Pictures, 1934. George Raft, Carole Lombard, Sally Rand, Frances Drake, William Frawley, Ray Milland. Screenplay: Horace Jackson, based on a story by Carey Wilson & Kubec Glasmon. Director: Wesley Ruggles (and Mitchell Leisen, uncredited).

   Cornell Woolrich once claimed the plot of this film was stolen from an unpublished manuscript of his. Could be, but I doubt it.

   There are a couple of very Woolrichian concepts here (the hero makes a point of maintaining chaste relations with his dancing partners, and — WARNING!!! — at the Climax, he does his big Production Number and collapses dead on the floor… though this idea, which Woolrich used more than once, owes more to “Le Sacre du Printemps” than anything else) but by and large its pretty much the standard rags-to-riches thing beloved of 30s movie-makers, if not -goers.

   Watching it, you can see why, graceful as he was, George Raft never became a big Dancing Star; Raft’s forte as an actor was always Playing it Cool and Impassive, and though this works quite well in the fatalistic Last Ballet, the strained smile on his face is a definite handicap in the earlier “light-hearted” routines.

JAMES R. McCAHERY – Grave Undertaking. Knightsbridge Bestseller Mystery #12, paperback original; 1st printing, 1990.

   This book is bound to be a Collector’s Item, simply because it’s going to be so hard to find. Maybe things were different in your part of the country, but in the central part of Connecticut where I live, it never went on sale, and I know, because I was looking for it. Knightsbridge is a small struggling publisher, and they just didn’t have the oomph to push an author whose first book this is.

   The other question is, is the book worth looking for? I think it is, even though it has some problems, but it has some pluses too, the primary one being its lead detective, Mrs. Lavina London, an ex-radio actress in her 70s who finds that even at her age, one can still have her wits about her. Occasional bits of old radio shows are dropped here and there, but — you may be interested to know — they’re nowhere nearly as profuse and possibly underfoot as the mentioning of old mystery writers and their works are in Carolyn Hart’s books.

   The plot as to do with graveyards, ha ha, as you would probably have already gathered from the title. The first victim is a wealthy funeral home director who hasn’t made as many friends in this world as he thought he had.

   Besides the fact that I learned more about funeral directors, cemetery owners, and florists than I really wanted to — there is more backstabbing possible between funeral directors, cemetery owners, and florists than I ever dreamed there could be — I thought the book itself was rather uneven. It starts well, begins to fade in the middle (as many books do), picks up again to what seems will be a grand finale — and collapses in a final confrontation with the killer that seems to go on forever, although it’s gone on for only 18 pages when the killer says to Lavina: “Well, enough of this chit-chat, Mrs. L. … I don’t want to hang around here too long.”

   I also thought for a while that the author Jim McCahery hadn’t played fair with us, but after some consideration I decided that a reasonable amount of clues were there after all. (I probably wasn’t paying attention.) I’d still have trimmed the novel down some, if I’d had any say, but I also say that if you care for “little old lady” fiction at all, you should make a point of picking this one up, if and when you ever find a copy.

[UPDATE] 05-31-12. Offhand, I don’t know how long Knightsbridge, the publisher of Grave Undertaking, was able to stay around, but I’ll look into it. I don’t think it was more than a couple of years. It was Kensington/Zebra who published Jim’s second book, What Evil Lurks, in 1995.

   The latter was also Lavina London’s second appearance, but if there was to be a third, it didn’t happen. Jim McCahery died in 1995, at the far too young age of 61. Although we met only twice, we were friends by mail and through an outfit called DAPA-Em, which until it recently disbanded, published stapled-together compilations of each members’ fanzines every two months for something like 35 years.

   We’ve gone digital instead. Many former members leave comments on this blog and/or have their own. Or contribute here from pages of old mailings, with Walter Albert, Dan Stumpf, Marv Lachman, Geoff Bradley and Stan Burns as prime examples.

   I possibly exaggerated the scarcity of Grave Undertaking, as there are 24 copies offered for sale on ABE, and considerably more of the second. I hadn’t known until looking just now that the second was published in hardcover before it appeared in paperback. I’m happy to know that.

DEAR DETECTIVE. Made for TV movie. CBS, 28 March 1979. Two hours. Roland Kibbee & Dean Hargrove Production in association with Viacom. Cast: Brenda Vaccaro, Arlen Dean Snyder, Jack Gingas, M. Emmett Walsh, Michael McRae, Jet Yardum, Corinne Conley, Lesley Woods, Ron Silver, John Dennis Johnston. Music by Dick & Dean DeBenedictis. Written and produced by Roland Kibbee & Dean Hargrove. Director: Dean Hargrove.

   Dear Detective is a television cozy. Detective Kate Hudson is brilliant at her job, wonderful as a mother, yet now faces a real challenge – a new boyfriend. Brenda Vaccaro is delightful as the likeable detective.

   The mystery features a serial killer who stabs Councilmen to death while they are standing in the middle of a crowd. The mystery is the most interesting part of the TV-movie, but its overwhelmed by the need to establish all the characters in the three separate worlds of Kate Hudson.

   It’s 1979, and a female detective is not always welcomed, but this is not Prime Suspect. Kate ignores the negative comments, lets the detectives she commands pamper her, accepts she can answer more of the questions on the Commander’s test than her cowardly Captain (M. Emmett Walsh), and is always one step ahead of everyone else.

   The romance and personal sides of the story are too often unbearably cute. Kate and her new boyfriend, College Professor of Greek Literature Richard Weyland (Arlen Dean Snyder) meet when he is riding his Moped and she knocks him down with her car.

   Home life features a daughter in fourth grade at a Catholic school (Jet Yardum), an understanding mother (Lesley Woods), and a wacky aunt (Corinne Conley). Kate has to phone her ex-husband so he could tell his daughter why he won’t be at her birthday party.

   The cozy mystery has no suspects, only a trail of victims with one thing in common until Kate discovers another link. Clues are few and ultimately only lead to where the killer can be found. We learn who done it only when the killer attacks idiot and Kate’s rival, Detective Brock (Michael McRae). Of course, Kate knows there is trouble and arrives to save the day in a stupid-funny car chase that predates OJ.

   A very short clip from one of the one-hour episodes:

   Writers and producers Roland Kibbee and Dean Hargrove (who also directed) are familiar names to NBC Mystery of the Week fans for their work in Madigan (1972), Columbo (1973-75), and McCoy (1975) as well as TV Movies The Big Rip-Off (1975) and Return of the World’s Greatest Detective (1976). Kibbee died in 1984, while Hargrove continued with such series as Matlock and the Hallmark Channel mysteries, Jane Doe, McBride, and Murder 101.

   The show was based on the French film Dear Inspector, aka Dear Detective (1978), starring Annie Girardot and Philippe Noiret and directed by Philippe DeBroca. Oddly, the movie was not mentioned in the credits, instead the closing credits had: “suggested by characters created by Jean Paul Rouland and Claude Oliver” and “based on a story by Philipe DeBroca and Michel Audiard”.

   This TV-Movie was not the entire pilot for the series. Networks have been trying to find better ways to find the next hit series since television networks began. After the success of the mini-series Dallas in April 1978 lead to the hit weekly series, CBS decided to try again with four mini-series pilots, Married: First Year (four episodes), Miss Winslow & Son (six episodes), Time Express (four episodes) and Dear Detective (one TV Movie and three hour-long episode).

   From Broadcasting (April 9, 1979): “We think it’s a good idea to test shows in the spring for possible fall airing.” Mr. Grant (Bud Grant, CBS Vice President of Programming) said, “We may pay more per episode in a limited run, but this way we give the public an opportunity to participate in the show’s development.”

   Despite a weak lead in from Miss Winslow & Son (24 share), this TV Movie had a 32 share, but still fell behind ABC reruns Charlie’s Angels (43 share) and Vegas (37 share) (Broadcasting, April 9, 1979).

   The next week Dear Detective first hour-long episode would drop to a 26 share. (Broadcasting, April 16, 1979). The mini-series pilot finished in the season’s (September 11, 1978 through April 15, 1979) final ratings 44th out of 114 series with a 30 share (tied with Incredible Hulk and Hawaii Five-O) (Broadcasting, June 18, 1979).

   According to TVTango.com, the hour-long episodes were opposite ABC’s first run series Mackenzies of Paradise Cove and NBC’s rerun of Wheels.

   I actually enjoyed Dear Detective, mainly because of Vaccaro and her character. But like most cozy mysteries, there was too much cute romance and character comedy, and not enough mystery in this two-hour movie. I remain curious about the three one-hour episodes and if any of the mysteries were able to overcome the clutter of Kate Hudson’s life.

   While this TV-Movie is available on pre-recorded VHS and in collector-to-collector format, the three one-hour episodes appear to be lost and forgotten.

PATRICK LEE – Deep Sky. Harper, paperback original, January 2012.

   Even though everyone makes up their own, there are certain rules that readers of fiction must live by, and #4 in the spiral notebook that I always carry with me (figuratively speaking) goes something like this:

   Never read the third book in a trilogy without reading the first two first.

   The proof of a rule always comes in disregarding it, as I did this time, and it will be a long time before I do so again.

   Preceding Deep Sky in the author’s “Breach” trilogy are The Breach (December 2009) and Ghost Country (December 2010), and what we have in this, the third book has a a wind-up whizz-bang opening – the roof comes off the top of an ordinary home in the suburbs, a Sparrowhawk missile is fired, destroying the White House and most of its occupants, including the President – followed by an only slightly less dramatic bunker-busting bomb taking out half of the heavily guarded structure containing The Breach, a la Marvel comics – and an ending that veers so far off into sci-fi La-La Land that even the most fervent enthusiast’s eyes will glaze over.

   I know. Mine did.

   The Breach, as long as you are asking, is some sort of super-secret connection between our world – a wormhole, perhaps – and another, located somewhere else in the galaxy or beyond at some point in time in the future, perhaps. No one knows. All they know is that mysterious artifacts keep slipping through, some useful, others having no discernible purpose.

   Whoever ordered the destruction of the White House and the killing of the President is unknown, but the Vice President, hastily sworn in, is definitely on the side of the bad guys. On the other are Travis Chase, head of Tangent, and his lover, Paige Campbell, whose father was one of the founders of Tangent. Both survive the bunker-bomb blast, and with the use of the devices spewed out by the Breach, begin a book-long investigation into the tragedies and who’s behind them, an investigation conducted on the run, with all of the forces of the US Government acting against them, knowingly or not.

   The first half of the book is a lot of fun, even though the standalone reader (me) has to assume a lot about the events that have previously taken place. But when events in the previous books are suddenly needed (pulled out of the air) to make sense of this one, the fun ceases and the rest of the book (with 150 pages to go) is a mish-mash of techno-babble, super-sized futuristic technology and carloads of information dumped on the reader with no room to yell out for help. The air is sucked out of the book.

   That the leading characters are stick figures goes with saying. (Perhaps we were to have learned all we needed to know about them in the first two books.) This is a techno-thriller, after all, not Moby Dick. The author has a a grand imagination. It’s too bad he couldn’t pull it off, not even in the 150 pages that were left to pull it off in.

   This is a Big Scale book — there’s no doubt about that — but when a Big Scale book isn’t given enough space to answer all the questions, nor to fill in the holes in the plot, then it’s no better than a Small Scale book without any questions. (I’m thinking of halves of Ace Doubles from the 1950s and 60s here.)

PostScript:   I classified this as Science Fiction, correctly, I believe, but you’re much more likely to find this book in the section where your local store keeps the Tom Clancy thrillers.

  THE COUNTERFEITERS. Conn Pictures, 1948. John Sutton, Doris Merrick, Hugh Beaumont, Lon Chaney Jr., George O’Hanlon, Robert Kent, Herbert Rawlinson, with Joi Lansing, Scott Brady (as Gerard Gilbert). Producer: Maurice Conn (also original story). Director: Sam Newfield (as Peter Stewart).

   The nominal star of this minor B crime drama is John Sutton, who plays the part of a Scotland Yard policeman who comes to the US hoping to track down the source of a large supply of counterfeit money that’s flooding his country. Sutton had a long career in both the movies and TV, starting in 1936 on through 1961.

   But I’m sure that the name that caught your eye first in the credits was that of Hugh Beaumont, and believe it or not, he’s the bad guy in this one, the head of the gang of crooks the fellow from overseas is after.

   And “Beaver’s Dad” is as tough as they come. If it weren’t for the intervention of his girl friend (Doris Merrick) who’s also a member of his gang, Inspector Jeff MacAllister would be as dead as the proverbial doornail as soon as he walks off his plane.

   Margo Talbot (Merrick) seems to be as tough as Philip Drake (that’s Beaumont), who owns the plates that are producing the phoney moolah, but it’s obvious she’s working another angle. The only question is what that angle might be.

   Lon Chaney Jr and George O’Hanlon are in the movie a good percentage of the time, all in comedy relief, but unlike some comedy relievers, they’re actually funny.

   At seventy minutes, The Counterfeiters is longer than most B-movies were at the time, and with no time wasted, either. The ten extra minutes or so allows time for the plot to breathe, with a couple of good twists to boot. The story is also fairly clued, and in fact it’s relatively easy to catch on to what’s going on, but it would help if you’re paying attention.

   I enjoyed this one, perhaps needless to say.

MAX ALLAN COLLINS – Kill Your Darlings. Walker, hardcover, 1984. Tor, paperback, 1988.

   The first mystery novel set at a Bouchercon, Max Allan Collins’s Kill Your Darlings takes place in Chicago, where Bouchercon was held in 1984, though Collins wrote the book before that event.

   It’s an enormously enjoyable tale, well plotted and with lots of insights into a mystery convention and publishing, though mostly from a writer’s viewpoint. (Fans do not loom large in this book.) The plot device, an unknown Hammett manuscript, is an inspired idea.

   Despite Collins’s disclaimer that the victim, an old-time mystery writer, is a composite, he reminded me of someone in particular. If you ask me at the next Bouchercon, I’ll tell you who. Until then, attend a Bouchercon vicariously with Max as your guide.

Bibliographic Data: The detective who solves the case in Kill Your Darlings is “Mallory,” a former cop who became a mystery writer living in Iowa.

       The Mallory series —

The Baby Blue Rip-Off. Walker, 1983.

No Cure for Death. Walker, 1983.
Kill Your Darlings. Walker, 1984.
A Shroud for Aquarius. Walker, 1985.
Nice Weekend for a Murder. Walker, 1986.

ERIC WRIGHT – Death By Degrees. Charlie Salter #10. Scribner’s, US, hardcover, 1993. Worldwide, US, paperback, 1995. Doubleday, Canada, hardcover, 1993. Bantam Seal, Canada, paperback (shown).

   In Charlie Salter, Wright has created one of the more credible and likable policemen of modern detective fiction. I’m delighted — though somewhat surprised — that the books haven’t been driven off the shelves by the plethora of Big Cop and serial killer books that have appeared of late.

   Charlie’s father has fallen and suffered a head injury, and probably had a stroke as well. Charlie is somewhat surprised to find himself distraught to the point of being unable to function; his relationship with the old man had not been close.

   To take his mind off his troubles, and a report he’s working on that has been eating him alive, he volunteers to investigate a killing at a local non-degree college. At first thought to be a cut-and-dried robbery, its status is now in doubt because of a series of anonymous notes pointing toward involvement of some university personnel.

   In between all night stays at the hospital, Charlie begins to snuffle around in the halls academe, and introduce himself to the intrigues of academic bureaucracy.

   For me, the Salter books have a number of strong points, Charlie and his family — his wife, their two sons, his irascible father and his common-law wife — have all been developed over the course of the series into fully fleshed-out human beings, in whom the reader can be interested, and for whom it is possible to care.

   There is real police work, accomplished without violence or pyrotechnics. And Wright writes well. It’s an excellent series.

Editorial Comment:   I concur, as my review of The Night the Gods Smiled, the first of the Charlie Salter series, should tell you. I won’t repeat it here, but following the review is a complete bibliography of all of Eric Wright’s crime fiction.