VICTOR CANNING – The Python Project. The Companion Book Club, UK, hardcover reprint, 1968. Originally published by William Heinemann, UK, hardcover, 1967. Also: William Morrow, US, hardcover, 1968. Paperback reprints include: Pan, UK, 1969; Charter, US, date?

   I picked up this British book club edition at a library book sale last year because it looked like good, mindless, vintage fun. And it is — though too witty and well crafted to be called mindless.

   London P.I. Rex Carver is the first-person narrator. He’s vaguely connected to British intelligence, but not at all happy about their attempts to insinuate themselves into his life, which they do while he’s working on his latest assignment: finding a python bracelet for a rich, seductive, young widow.

   His client claims her brother stole the bracelet and some money. Of course the situation is more complicated than it first appears, as evidenced by Rex being frequently bashed over the head and required to travel to places like Tripoli.

   Life is tough in swinging ’60s London, especially when your partner/secretary is on vacation.

   More on Canning and his books can be found at: http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/canning/

Editorial Comment:   You also need go no farther than this blog for coverage of many of Canning’s books, most recently David Vineyard’s review/essay of two of his novels, which you can find here.

NOREEN AYRES – The World the Color of Salt. “Smokey” Brandon #1. Avon, paperback reprint, 1993. First published by William Morrow, hardcover, 1992.

   I bought this as much for the cover as anything — a blue and green composition that blends a mermaid-like naked body into a coastline. Strikingly attractive, and different. The title is from a poem by Richard Hugo, who wrote a mystery before his death.

   Smokey Brandon is a forensic Specialist for the Orange County Sheriff/Coroner’s office. She’s been a stripper, and she’s been a cop, and she’s about half tough. Her troubles start when a 20 year old kid she knew casually is killed in the robbery of a stop and go store. Though she’s developed a protective shield to go with her job, this one gets to her.

   She’s sort of in love with a married co-worker, and her best friend takes up with a guy with a record who was briefly a suspect in the killing. Things go from bad to worse on all fronts, and she finds herself hunting her friend while she continues to search for answers to the killing.

   Ayres is an award-winning poet, and this is her first mystery novel. It’s a good one, and I don’t know how I missed it in 1992. Ayres gives Brandon a glib, hard voice entirely in keeping with her character, and she is one of the best realized new characters, male of female, that I’ve come across in a while in hardboiled fiction.

   And this is hardboiled, make no mistake about that. The story is told in first person, and very effectively. Ayres has an eye for the California landscape and its denizens, and if the details of the forensic trade aren’t accurate, they’re done well enough to fool me.

   The only fault I found was an occasional jerkiness as the story shifted from reflection to action, and that wasn’t often. Ayres is good.

The Smokey Brandon series —

      A World the Color of Salt. Morrow, 1992.
      Carcass Trade. Morrow, 1994.

      The Juan Doe Murders. Five Star, 2000.

Editorial Comments:   Once again I’m pleased to say that here online I can show you the cover that Barry was referring to, one he wasn’t able to in his printed zine. I think it lives up to his description of it, don’t you?

   As for the book itself, based on Barry’s review, it’s a shame that there’s been only three books in the series, the third of which was news to me. For whatever reason, the series didn’t catch on. Or perhaps Noreen Ayres herself had other options available to her.

   From her website: “Noreen Ayres has published novels, short stories, and poetry, and has had three teleplays produced, winning several awards for writing. Her varied career includes positions as a technical writer/editor and publications manager for major engineering, petroleum, and aerospace companies. Holding a Masters degree in English and post-grad certifications in business, she has taught composition, creative writing, business, and science.”

MIDNIGHT MYSTERY. 1930. Betty Compson, Lowell Sherman, Raymond Hatton, Hugh Trevor, June Clyde. Director: George B. Seitz.

   It was a dark and stormy night … on a rock-bound island off the coast of Cuba. [FOOTNOTE] A mansion, full of guests, laughter and merriment, and suddenly … a shot rings out.

   A rush to the wall at the edge of the cliff … and a body is seen being washed out to sea. A confession … despair … hatred … and (would you believe?) murder.

   The fiancee of the accused man, with whom she has been quarreling, is also a writer of mystery novels (“dime novels,” he sneers), and in this movie she proves her worth as a detective. While we (the viewer) know who the killer is, it is nice, on occasion, one such as this, to be able to follow the deductions along with the sleuth of the story.

   And a stagey sort of story it is (not surprisingly, being adapted directly from a play, one called Hawk Island), with the acting ranging from barely adequate to abysmal. By today’s standards, I hasten to add.

   The only player I recognized was Raymond Hatton, but after seeing him as a cowboy sidekick in countless other movies of a type other than this, I’m not sure I would have recognized him, what with suit jacket, vest and tie, if his name hadn’t appeared early on in the credits.

[FOOTNOTE]   There is some confusion about this, as this week’s TV Guide says it was off the coast of Maine, which seems more likely, but I checked the beginning of the movie again, and no, it says Cuba, right there in the opening scene.

[UPDATE] 10-26-10.   I should still have the video tape I made of this movie, and I certainly hope so, since I’ve not been able to find one on DVD. Presumably I taped it from either TCM or American Movie Classics, so there is no doubt that it does still exist somewhere.

    Betty Compson, pictured above, made a lot of silent films, and I mean a lot, but she survived the switch to talkies and was still making movies through the late 1940s, albeit of the “B” variety, a la Hard Boiled Mahoney (1947), which I watched a month or so ago during an all-day Bowery Boys marathon.

WINIFRED PECK – The Warrielaw Jewel. Faber & Faber, UK, hardcover, 1933. E. P. Dutton, US, hardcover, 1933.

   In 1933, Catholic priest and writer Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, one of the talented Knox siblings, children of Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, former Anglican Bishop of Manchester, published Body in the Silo, a detective novel.

   This is not really news. Father Knox, best known in the mystery genre today for having formulated an influential set of “rules” for the writing of detective fiction, had before 1933 already published three well-received detective novels and been admitted as an original member of the Detection Club in 1930.

   There was a five year lag between The Footsteps at the Lock (1928) and The Body in the Silo (1933), but, still, the appearance of the latter could not exactly be called a surprise.

   But another Knox sibling also published a detective novel in 1933: one of Ronald Knox’s sisters, (Lady) Winifred (Knox) Peck. Entitled The Warrielaw Jewel, this mystery tale by Peck, a once successful though today mostly forgotten mainstream novelist, received quite favorable reviews and holds up well today.

   Three years ago, the excellent Persephone Books reprinted Peck’s House-Bound, a mainstream novel with a World War Two period setting, with an introduction by her (and Ronald Knox’s) famous niece, the late novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. The Warrielaw Jewel deserves reprinting as well.

   Jewel is notable as an early example of a Golden Age mystery that, in its shifting of emphasis from pure puzzle to the study of character and setting, helped mark the gradual shift from detective story to crime novel which Julian Symons famously celebrated in his history of the mystery genre, Bloody Murder .

   A tale of Victorian/Edwardian familial dysfunction, Jewel rather resembles Margery Allingham’s Police at the Funeral (1931) and More Work for the Undertaker (1948), as well as S.S. Van Dine’s The Greene Murder Case (1928).

   While the puzzle certainly is not as intricate as Van Dine’s in the latter novel, the writing is excellent, in my view on a level with that of Allingham and her Crime Queen contemporaries Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. (There also is some similarity to American Mary Roberts Rinehart’s mystery novel The Album, published the same year, though thankfully The Warrielaw Jewel is without all Rinehart’s Had-I-But-Known digressions.)

   As one pleased reviewer noted of Peck’s mystery novel, “the writing, atmosphere, and characterization” made the story “something quite distinct.”

   The Warrielaw Jewel actually is set in the Edwardian era, 1909 specifically ( “that period, so far away from modern youth, when King Edward VII lived, and skirts were long and motors few, and the term Victorian was not yet a reproach”).

   The narrator, Betty Morrison, wife of the lawyer for the eccentric, decaying gentry family of Warrielaws, tells the tale from the vantage point of the early 1930s, looking back over those shocking events in the vicinity of Edinburgh, Scotland, including the death of elderly family head Jessica Warrielaw and the trial of her favored nephew for murder.

   Involved in the affair is a family heirloom, a so-called fairy-jewel, said to have been given to the Warrielaw family centuries ago by a glittering enchanted lady carried off and married by a dark and brooding laird ancestor. A curse is said to have been laid upon the jewel. Certainly dreadful happenings, whatever the cause, overtake the family in the present day.

   There is investigation and detection, performed by an retired policeman friend of Betty Morrison’s husband; yet it is Betty herself who provides the final, crucial piece of evidence. The mystery itself is engrossing, though the best elements of the tale are found in the characters — particularly the various odd Warrielaws and their remaining retainers –and the Edwardian Scottish atmosphere.

   I hope that one day Winifred Peck’s The Warrielaw Jewel is republished and honored as a member of the company of better-written, literate mysteries of the period, for it certainly deserves to be so designated.

   When one reviewer declared The Warrielaw Jewel “in a class by itself” and added that “it looks as if [Mrs. Peck] were going to bear [Father Knox] at his own special game,” he was not, in my view, exaggerating.

Bio-Bibliographic Data:   Winifred Peck, 1882-1962, was born and educated in Oxford and lived in Edinburgh, according to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. His bibliography includes only one other mystery novel that she wrote, the provocatively titled Arrest the Bishop? (Faber, 1949).

   While copies of the latter may be found offered for sale online (although with asking prices of $50 and up), none of The Warrielaw Jewel were seen, even with a US edition.

DICK CLUSTER – Return to Sender. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1988. Reprint paperback: Penguin, 1990.

   Dick Cluster, a Bostonian newcomer to our field, offers Return to Sender. Alex Glauberman, 40, repairs foreign cars in Boston. He’s divorced with one child who lives with her remarried mother.

   Alex’s current bedmate is a professor, on sabbatical in London. He’s going through chemotherapy for recently diagnosed cancer, and his life and thinking and physical condition are much influenced by this.

   One day, while he is waiting in line at a post office, an elderly man asks him to mail a package to his daughter in Berlin. Alex does so. Later, after Alex sees him being escorted away by a pair of strongarm types, the man returns to ask Alex, for $2500, to go to Germany and retrieve the package.

   Alex had thought to visit London anyway, and agrees. But this proves a most deadly assignment. Sender, with its fresh and intriguing plot and central character, is well worth your attention.

Bibliographic Data:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin]

CLUSTER, DICK.   1947- .     Alex Glauberman in all:

        Return to Sender. Dutton, 1988.
        Repulse Monkey. Dutton, 1989.
        Obligations of the Bone. St. Martin’s, 1992.

Editorial Comment:   I thought the contrast between the two covers is very interesting. As usual for mystery novels of this era, the one on the hardcover is about as stark and minimal as you can get. The cover of the paperback is far more colorful, although perhaps hard to make out what’s really pictured, unless you can look at it closely, but at least (to me) it has something to it that also says Pick Me Up At Least and Look Inside.

   There’s no need to think I’m disparaging Dutton, who published the hardcover. Artists cost money, and I suspect 90% of the sales of this mystery, by a first-time writer, went to libraries sight unseen, and another 9% went to the author’s friends. (A small laugh, hopefully at no one’s expense.)

   By the way, you can’t make it out, but the quote on the paperback is by Tony Hillerman: “Gripping… raises the Mystery into the realm of Literature.”

WILLIAM G. TAPPLY – Dark Tiger. St. Martin’s, hardcover, September 2009. No softcover edition scheduled.

Genre:   Unlicensed investigator. Leading character: Stoney Calhoun; 3rd in series. Setting:   Maine.

First Sentence:   Stonewall Jackson Calhoun was sweeping the floor around the display of chest waders and hip boots when the bell dinged over the door, signaling that somebody had come into Kate’s Bait, Tackle, and Woolly Buggers shop.

    Stoney Calhoun has a lot of military-type skills but no memory of how he came by them. But The Man in the Suit checks periodically checks on him to see whether any memories have returns.

    Now the Man needs his help and Stoney can’t refuse. An operative and a young woman were found dead in a car, each with a gunshot wound. What’s interesting is they were both dead before they were shot.

    Stoney, half-owner in a fishing shop and an expert guide, is to go to an exclusive fishing lodge in Northwestern Maine to learn how they died and what the operative was investigating.

    I’ve always liked Tapply’s characters. Stoney is moral, principled, somewhat curious about his past, which he was told he doesn’t remember due to having been struck by lightning, but content to live his life from here forward.

    He is in love with Kate, his business partner, but understands women are different from men and is undemanding. He has skills he doesn’t remember learning and is more curious than surprised when he discovers a new one. Kate’s husband is in long-term care with MS, knows and approves of Kate and Stoney being occasional lovers. And then there’s Ralph, Stoney’s Brittany spaniel, as human as any character except when Stoney talks to him, Ralph doesn’t answer back.

    Tapply’s voice is very Downeast, almost folksy without being patronizing, yet comfortable. Whether Stoney remembers it or not, Tapply let you know he has seen a lot of life… “All creatures had repertoires of survival… All creatures except humans, he thought. Humans just killed each other.”

   You know from the descriptions that Tapply had a great love of Maine and of fishing — he wrote several books on fishing. Those descriptions remind me why I love and miss that part of the country.

    This is not a high-octane, shoot-em-up book. The book is much more character, than plot, driven but has its elements of suspense. Dark Tiger is the last Stoney Calhoun book and was written while Mr. Tapply was suffering from leukemia, from which he died in July 2009.

    I shall miss Stoney, Kate and Ralph, along with Mr. Tapply’s Brady Coyne books, but he is an author whose work I am glad to have read and do recommend.

Rating:   Good Plus.

The Stoney Calhoun series —

       1. Bitch Creek (2004)
       2. Gray Ghost (2007)

       3. Dark Tiger (2009)

Editorial Comment:   For this blog’s tribute to William Tapply at the time of his death, go here.

THE RISE AND FALL OF LEGS DIAMOND.   Warner Brothers, 1960. Ray Danton, Karen Steele, Elaine Stewart, Jesse White, Simon Oakland, Robert Lowery, Judson Pratt, Warren Oates, Frank DeKova, Diane (Dyan) Cannon. Director: Budd Boetticher.   Novelization by Otis H. Gaylord, Bantam A2079, 1960.

   Rise and Fall is Budd Boetticher’s version of Richard III, with a preening megalomaniac rising to power by a combination of scheming and brutality, only to find that he has reached a rather precarious perch.

   Beyond that, there’s nothing much good you can say about the film: the plotting is flat and unsurprising, the action scenes few and rather pallid (particularly from a director like Boetticher, who crafted memorable action in The Tall T and Ride Lonesome) and the photography by Lucien Ballard is surprisingly flat, making the Warners back lot look like nothing more than a Warners back lot.

   Legs has one compelling virtue though, and that’s the performance of Ray Danton in the title role, perfectly realized by actor and director. Even when the film itself is plodding and predictable, Danton’s sharply-dressed, sexually magnetic hood keeps our attention.

   Boetticher’s westerns were always more concerned with the macho bad guys than the nominal heroes, just as his bullfighting movies focused more on the gaudy matadors than the charging bulls, and Legs Diamond carries this on with a hero/villain to whom Image is everything.

   It’s a memorable bit of acting/directing, and I just wish there were a better movie to go around it.

CHAD HANNA. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Henry Fonda, Dorothy Lamour, Linda Darnell, Guy Kibbee, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Fred Shepely, Roscoe Ates, Olin Howland. Screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel by Walter D. Edmonds. Director: Henry King. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

   This handsome Technicolor production, screened in a stunning print, and based on a popular novel by Walter D. Edmonds, also author of Drums Along the Mohawk, recounts the saga of a small, one-ring circus setting up in rural communities in upper New York state in the mid-19th century.

   Chad Hanna (Henry Fonda), after helping an escaping slave evade capture, runs away with the circus, accompanied by Caroline Tridd (Linda Darnell), daughter of an abusive slave tracker. The family circus, run by Guy Kibbee and Jane Darwell, with its star attraction equestrienne Albany Yates (Dorothy Lamour), is competing with a larger circus that will stop at nothing to eliminate its competition.

   This rivalry provides much of the drama of the film, with the romantic triangle formed by Fonda, Darnell, and Lamour, a potent attraction for the movie-goers of the time. And it might be added that the trio is as attractive and charismatic 70 years later.

   However, it’s the affectionate portrayal of the inner workings of the small traveling circus, now a historical curiosity, that is responsible for much of the appeal of this episodic film. Henry King’s skill at these rural dramas dates back to the silent classic Tol’able David (1922), with a notable sound film, State Fair (1933), starring Will Rogers, attesting to his continuing command of the medium.

   I will add that my enjoyment of the film was enhanced by some personal history. My father’s brother ran away from home and joined Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus, where he appeared as a clown for some 20 years and, like Chad, married an equestrienne.

   When I knew him decades later, his marriage had failed, and he was a rather dour middle-aged man. At the time, I didn’t know of his background, and one of my regrets is that I didn’t and missed the opportunity of hearing from him first-hand his stories of his days with the circus.

CORTLAND FITZSIMMONS & JOHN MULHOLLAND – The Girl in the Cage. Frederick A Stokes, hardcover, 1939; Grosset & Dunlap, reprint hardcover, no date.

   Once again, Cortland Fitzsimmons has taken a sure-fire idea — “the first mystery based on the psychology and deception of the magician’s art” — and turned it into a dud. Referring to the prose style of the ineffable James Corbett, whom it has been claimed I try to emulate, Bill Pronzini has said reading it is “like watching grass grow.”

   Well, reading Fitzsimmons is like watching grease congeal. Furthermore, his narrator; a Roman Catholic priest nearing seventy, could be a twenty-year-old college student the way the author portrays him. The other characters are more like tissue paper than cardboard.

   Putting on a magic show between films at a theater, Peter King enlists the assistance of a frightened and unprepossessing — she’s not the latter, of course, but you already guessed that –young lady, who then volunteers before King’s stooge can do so to disappear from a cage.

   Only later is it discovered that the man sitting in front of her has had a dagger plunged into his neck. Four or five corpses later — tedium caused me to lose count — King spots the multiple murderer through his knowledge of magic.

   Daniel Stashower, author of two books featuring magicians, The Ectoplasmic Man and Elephants in the Distance, tells me that Mulholland, a master magician himself, wrote a nonfiction work on magic that was quite readable. Which leads me to deduce that he had no role in this novel other than the magic, none of which, true to his code, he explains.

Bibliographic Data: This collaboration with Fitzsimmons is the only entry for John Mulholland in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV. As Bill Deeck pointed out, he was quite well known in the world of magic and magicians. You can find his MagicPedia page here.

   I don’t know how well known Cortland Fitzsimmons (1893-1949) was as a mystery writer, but there are 17 titles to his credit in CFIV between 1930 to 1943. His most famous mystery might be Death on the Diamond (Stokes, 1934), which was also made into a rather bizarre film starring Robert Young as a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals. (Apparently his teammates keep getting bumped off, one by one.)

RUTH RENDELL – A Demon in My View. Doubleday, hardcover, 1977. Paperback reprints include: Bantam, 1979; Black Lizard/Vintage, 2000. First published in the UK: Hutchinson, 1976. Arrow, UK, pb, 1980 (shown).  Film: First City, 1992, with Anthony Perkins, Uwe Bohm, & Sophie Ward. Screenplay & director: Petra Haffter.

   The upstairs boarder at 142 Trinity Road is a quiet prissy man with a secret, a plastic mannequin in the cellar. When the compulsion becomes too great, the mannequin dies. Routine is disturbed, however, when a new roomer moves in, into the flat with a view of the cellar door.

   It’s like watching a house of cards cave in, one card at a time. Precisely, methodically Arthur Johnson’s crisis is developed into a private catastrophe, one that spreads its evil as it grows.

   Rendell is truly the fine writer people have been telling me she is. From a first chapter that seems to have only short story possibilities she fills a novel filled with convincing characters whose lives interwearve with fascinating accuracy.

   As a result the ending may seem at first unsuitably melodramatic. But at the next instant the realization comes that it has just snapped into place like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, or the jaws of a gigantic self-made trap.

   Don’t put off reading Rendell as long as I have.

[UPDATE] 10-24-10.   This could easily be the earliest of my reviews that I’ve posted on this blog. It was written over 33 years ago, or nearly half a lifetime, and in all honesty, I can’t say that my writing style has changed any.

   Do I remember the book? I can’t say that I do, even though I gave it an “A Plus” at the time. I also can’t say that I’ve followed my own advice and have read much of Ruth Rendell’s work since that time. If I have, I’m sure that most of what I’ve read has been from her Inspector Wexford series.

   When I could not find a copy of the cover of the Doubleday edition to show you, I thought the British paperback that I did find was both the most colorful and pictorially representative the story inside.

   I did not know there a film made of this movie until 20 minutes ago. Re-reading my review again, why am I not surprised to learn that Tony Perkins was chosen to play the leading role?