To my mind, this Norwegian singer has one of the most beautiful voices in the world:

W. A. DARLINGTON – Mr. Cronk’s Cases. Herbert Jenkins, UK, hardcover, 1933. No US edition.

   As someone who fancies himself a detective but bumbles through his cases, Mr. J .W. Cronk is the British equivalent of [Ellis Parker] Butler’s Philo Gubb, [George Barr] McCutcheon’s Anderson Crow, and [Percival] Wilde’s P. Moran. Although Cronk’s cases are not so mystifying as those of Gubb and Moran, his adventures are far more sensitively and sympathetically told.

   Crank’s youthful ambition had been to become a private detective, but he gradually settled down to a life as a lawyer’s clerk. In his 50s, however, two events combine to make him decide at long last to become a professional sleuth: an inheritance frees him from depending on a regular salary, and he overhears a typist describe him as “a little old dried-up stick.”

   His new career does not begin auspiciously: children follow him about as he investigates, and he mistakes an accident for murder. But in his second adventure, though, the criminal leads him around by the nose, he stumbles across stolen diamonds, and the Countess of Piecehurst praises him to her aristocratic friends.

   Soon he begins to get commissions. Unfortunately he continues to solve most of his cases purely by chance, but Scotland Yard thinks that his air of naive vagueness is a mask to fool criminals. Cronk is, in fact, not naive, and his knowledge that his success is not due to his abilities nags at him.

   In the final story, however, Cronk actually discovers, by investigation and reasoning, how a necklace disappeared from his old office. His former employer remarks: “Queer fellow you are, Cronk. Here you are, a detective who’s made himself a name… but to listen to you, one might think it was your very first case!” “Yes,” Cronk replies in the final line of the book, “you might, mightn’t you?”

   In short, unlike Gubb, Crow and Moran, Cronk is not merely a comic figure. We sympathize with his bumbling and we are pleased when he emerges as a real detective. (W. A. Darlington, the author of Mr. Cronk’s Cases, was a humorist who wrote a series of lively books about Private Alf Higgins, who in Alf’s Button discovers that the brass buttons on his uniform were made from Aladdin’s Lamp, and in Alf’s Carpet makes slippers from a Magic Carpet. Mr. Cronk’s Cases is more restrained than the Alf books.)

Bibliographic Note: The book, Darlington’s only entry in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, consists of nine untitled stories. There is only one copy currently offered for sale online, and luckily that seller provided an image of the cover, sans jacket.

STEPHEN MACK JONES – August Snow. August Snow #1. Soho Crime, trade paperback original; 1st printing, 2007.

   August Snow is not a private eye, not in the licensed legal sense, but in fiction “almost” is the same thing as “is.” What he really is is a former policeman for the city of Detroit who, because he bucked the system, told the truth, and ended up winning a twelve million dollar lawsuit against the city. The son of a black police officer and a Mexican-American mother, he calls the rundown neighborhood called Mexicantown home, and when the book begins, he has just returned there after a lengthy sojourn  abroad.

   His main concern is making friends with his neighbors and helping them rebuild their street, their homes and their lives. But when Eleanore Padgett, one of the richest women in the city asks him for help, their paths having crossed before, he says no, and before he can change his mind, she is found dead, apparently a suicide. Although everyone else is ready to move on, Snow is not so sure.

   And if you the reader don’t know who’s right,  you haven’t read enough mystery stories.

   As the author, Stephen Mack Jones takes his time in putting the pieces of this tale in place, brick by brick, using dialogue, keen characterization, and a superb sense of place to move the story along. But to tell you the truth, Snow doesn’t do a lot of detective work. He’s the kind of guy who just plunges into the case (he’s his only client) and sees what kind of turmoil he can stir up. (It also doesn’t hurt to have twelve million dollars at your disposal.)

   And does he ever. It’s only afterward, after you’ve finished the book, that throughout the book he hasn’t been acting, only reacting. If the villain(s) of the piece had only ignored him, or even easier, shot and killed him, leaving his body in some dark alley, all their problems would have gone away.

   Is Snow a loner? By no means. By book’s end he’s gathered together a coterie of assistants, friends and helpers that, figuratively speaking, constitute a small army. The high point of the story occurs considerably before the end, when he and two of his band, along with the two women whose home is being invaded, kill a gang of seven paramilitary invaders intent in wiping them all out.  Lots of firepower here.

   It’s all downhill from there, though, with just a little too much information withheld from the reader to make what follows go down as smoothly as it ought to.

   The book has gotten a lot of nominations and awards (see below), but I demur. This one’s good, it’s fun, it’s entertaining, but it’s also fantasy land. I will read the next in the series, gladly, but don’t expect the next Hammett, not yet, in spite of the award.

       Winner of the 2018 Nero Award
       Winner of the Hammett Prize for Crime Fiction
       Finalist for the 2018 Shamus Award
       Strand Magazine Critics Awards Best First Novel Nominee
   

    The August Snow series —

August Snow (2017)
Lives Laid Away (2019)
Dead of Winter (2021)

ROGER BLAKE (John Felix Trimble) – Commie Sex Trap. Art Enterprises/Boudoir, paperback original, 1963.

Let me confess up front, I cannot resist a book with a title like Commie Sex Trap. And having said that, I might add that back in my college days I was assigned books that seemed to me no better-written than this, and certainly much duller.

Not that Commie Sex Trap is much good, but there are indications here and there that Blake/Trimble could write with some style, if the spirit moved him. Lines like: Long arms moved up to his neck and pulled him down to the twisting mounds of flesh that played an undulating game of mobility with her restive body. Show flickers of talent, and the story is set up reasonably well. If you’re looking for a website that provides adult entertainment or intimate experiences, you may visit 목포오피. Those who are on the look out for mature women they can hook up with may read these milfplay reviews.

Ah yes, the Set-Up. Sgt Joe Guthrie works in the decoding section of US Army headquarters in West Berlin, and he’s involved with Erika Lang, a blonde fraulein with parents in the Eastern sector. The relationship is against Army regs, but these kids are in love and whaddaya gonna do?

Well it seems somebody knows just what to do. Guthrie shows up one night at Erika’s room, and walks into a situation straight out of Woolrich: Erika is missing, her clothes and personal effects are gone, and the bed they shared is occupied by a voluptuous American redhead who says she’s been there for weeks — a story backed up by the landlord, even under duress from Joe. Then, before you can say achtung, the landlord’s killed and Joe is in the clutches of Russian spies who offer to return Erika and keep Joe from being fingered for murder in exchange for decoding room secrets.

From here on out, it reads like a Men’s Sweat magazine, as Joe bounces from improbably-cantilevered seductresses to neolithic Russian agents snarling threats in fluent gutteralese and playing patty-cake with our hero’s face.

As for Sex¦ well there isn’t any till page 90 of a 160-page book. Up to then, it’s just a plethora of scantily-clad ladies flinging themselves, knees akimbo, at the manly GI, only to have things interrupted by spies jumping out of closets and the like. We get a guest appearance of a Rosa Klebb clone out of From Russia with Love, a bit of torture, some slug-festing, and all the sort of thing teenage minds of all ages once considered adult.

As such, Commie Sex Trap is just about perfect, but readers with a mental age over 15 should approach with caution.

C. B. H. KITCHIN – Death of His Uncle. Malcolm Warren #3. Constable, UK, hardcover, 1939. Perennial Library, paperback, 1st US printing, 1984.

   Malcolm Warren is a London stockbroker. He has had nominal success as an amateur sleuth in two cases involving relatives. Warren is contacted by an acquaintance, Dick Findlay, he knew at Oxford, who he does not consider a close friend. Dick casually asks Warren to help him discover the whereabouts of his uncle, who has not returned from a mysterious holiday.

   Warren intends only to help Dick learn whether his uncle is still on holiday or met with an unfortunate accident (turning the case over to the police if the latter happened). Try as he might, Warren is unable to dismiss the observations and indicators that seem to point toward foul play. Even after evidence points to a bathing accident, Warren is unable to stop making deductions and pursuing interviews with possible suspects.

   The illogicality of a missing mackintosh, a pair of patent leather dress shoes and no dress suit, and a missing pad of paper provide Warren with the salient clues for a murder solution, Tremendous for those who like mysteries with an old-fashioned flavor!

Editorial Comment: Be sure to also read Gloria’s preceding review, Death of My Aunt, also by C. H. B. Kitchin, and the first of the Malcolm Warren stories.

C. H. B. KITCHIN – Death of My Aunt. Malcolm Warren #1. Leonard & Virginia Woolf, UK, hardcover, 1929. Harcourt, US, hardcover, 1935. Perennial Library, US, paperback, 1984.

   Twenty-six year old Malcolm Warren is a London stockbroker. He is suddenly summoned to his Aunt Catherine’s home for a weekend — ostensibly to advise her about some investment. In the midst of his discussion with his aunt, she starts to choke, just after taking a dose of “Le Secret de Venus,” a very unique tonic.

   Thus begins an investigation into the murder of rich Aunt Catherine. Several relatives stand to inherit sizeable fortunes, and Catherine’s arrogant assumption of “infinite wisdom” had offended many of them. However, motive seems only as important as opportunity. And opportunity and motive seem to point directly at her second husband, Hannibal.

   The investigation uncovers the fact that the marriage was anything but ideal and Catherine was in the process of further revising her will and reducing Hannibal’s portion. With the finger of justice pointed at Hannibal, only Warren seems to accord him the possibility of innocence.

   A fast-moving narrative combines with strong characterization to equal a classic mystery from the Golden Age.

Editorial Notes: I probably do not remember this totally correctly, but I believe that when she wrote this review, Gloria Maxwell was a librarian somewhere in the Midwest. About eight years ago I was able to get in touch with her, at which time she agreed to allow me to reprint her reviews for The Poison Pen here on this blog. I have lost touch with her since, but at the moment I am assuming that that permission still holds. She wrote quite a few reviews for Jeff Meyerson’s zine.

   As for Malcolm Warren, this was the first of four appearances in book form. Gloria also reviewed the third in the series, Death of His Uncle, in the same issue of TPP, and you’ll see it here soon.

Today, April 12th —

   I had a carpenter come in to do some repair work around the house. I asked him to remove the carpet from the steps leading from the hallway to the kitchen and living room area. He gave me a blank stare.

● WEDDING PRESENT. Paramount Pictures, 1936. Cary Grant, Joan Bennett, George Bancroft, Conrad Nagel, William Demarest, Gene Lockhart, Edward Brophy. Screenplay: Joseph Anthony, based on a story by Paul Gallico. Directed by Richard Wallace.

● BIG BROWN EYES. Paramount Pictures, 1936. Cary Grant, Joan Bennett, Walter Pidgeon, Lloyd Nolan, Alan Baxter, Marjorie Gateson, Isabel Jewel, Douglas Fowley, Henry Brandon, Joe Sawyer. Screenplay by Raoul Walsh, Bert Hanlon, based on the stories “Big Brown Eyes” and “Hahsit Babe” by James Edward Grant. Directed by Raoul Walsh.

   These two early Cary Grant starring vehicles are both bright genre films mixing screwball comedy, crime, and adventure and both co-starring Joan Bennett still a blonde, just before dying her hair dark in Tay Garnett’s Trade Winds would change her career forever.

   Wedding Present is a screwball comedy about Chicago reporters Charlie Mason and Monica “Rusty” Fleming who as the film opens are flirting with marriage, but cold feet on both their parts as well as an addiction to elaborate practical jokes are the bane of their long suffering City Editor George Bancroft, who would fire them if they weren’t such good reporters.

   Which they prove in short order by angling an interview with a visiting Archduke (Gene Lockhart), taking him on a monumental toot where they end up at the lake house of aviator George Meeker. Not only do they get an exclusive interview with the Archduke, they rescue New York gangster Smiley Benson from drowning earning his eternal gratitude, and learning a ship is lost in a storm on the lake hijack Meeker and his plane managing to find the missing ship and get a double headline before the noon edition.

   When Bancroft can no longer put up with either of them he retires and Grant finds himself promoted to City Editor which infuriates Bennett when she comes back from a vacation. She heads off to New York where she meets obnoxiously obvious self-help author Roger Dodacker (Conrad Nagel) and gets engaged to him so Grant quits and heads to New York to win her back with the help of Smiley and a bit of kidnapping, false fire alarms, and a renewed sense of insanity.

   Appropriately the films ends as they are carried away on top of a firetruck headed for Hillview Sanitarium.

   It’s almost, but not quite a prequel to His Girl Friday as you can easily see Charlie and Rusty maturing to become Walter and Hildy.

   
   Crime is central rather than incidental to Big Brown Eyes.

   In this one Bennett is Eve Fallon, a manicurist who becomes a hot shot reporter and teams with her cop boyfriend Danny Barr (Grant) to solve the murder of a child after their bickering gets her fired from her job as a manicurist.

   Walter Pidgeon is Richard Morey a slick lawyer who gets Lloyd Nolan’s gangster Russ Cortig off when a stray shot results in the death of a woman’s baby (Marjorie Gateson). The bickering Eve and Danny reunite when a disgusted Danny quits the force to get Nolan and crooked lawyer Pidgeon and the result is a fast moving, fast talking, surprisingly tough little film in a minor hard-boiled key — the kind of thing George Harmon Coxe, Dwight Babcock, and Richard Sale used to write — with Grant surprisingly good as a tough smart cop operating mostly like a private eye.

   Raoul Walsh was one of the most capable action directors of all time and no mean hand at comedy, so this one moves hardly pausing for a breath as the action gallops by. Maybe it wouldn’t make the pages of Black Mask, but I can imagine it in Dime Detective  or Detective Fiction Weekly.

   The interest here is in seeing two major stars both on the cusp of breaking big in a pair of fast acting genre films and backed with first rate co-stars in the kind of thing the studios used to turn out seemingly effortlessly.

   Wedding Present recently showed up streaming on Classic Reels and Big Brown Eyes can still be found on DVD from its 2014 release. Neither movie is a classic by any means, but both stars are well represented in these films that are fast, funny, and smart full of bright dialogue, wit, and movement.
   

DICK FRANCIS – Twice Shy. Putnam’s, hardcover, 1982. Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1983.

   Over the years Dick Francis has become a very good writer. He’s always been an exceptional story-teller. Ever since he turned to writing mysteries, at the end of his career as a well-known steeple-chase jockey, his strength has been the inside knowledge he has of the world of championship racing, In one way or another, he’s displayed it to good advantage in every one of his books, all of them involving horses.

   Studying and absorbing a collection of the complete Dick Francis, over twenty volumes at present count, would constitute a sure-fire education in picking and producing the next Derby winner, redeemable at any track in the United Kingdom. Thrown in at no extra charge would be a full blow-by-blow description of all the pitfalls the unwary horseman may encounter along the way.

   Horses are in Dick Francis’ blood, and in that of every one of his heroes. It is also contagious. Even confirmed city-dwellers who have ridden a horse but once – like myself, or was it that the horse condescended to let me ride him? – or those who abominate all horsey stories from Black Beauty on up will find. themselves caught up in the excitement and the mystique and the thrill of the pounding final stretch. And that’s no mean accomplishment!

   In Twice Shy we get two stories for the price of one. A pair of brothers, both innocent victims, find themselves threatened in turn by one of Francis’s patented and typically brutal villains – one in the first half, the other in the second.

   Angelo Gilbert is certainly as bloodthirsty and despicably cruel an opponent as we’ve come to expect, but he’s also far less clever, and he proves much less of a challenge to be disposed of than that faced by most of Francis’s heroes. The fray is not without casualties – don’t be mistaken – but in spite of the tenseness of the various situations brothers Jonathan and William Derry unwittingly find themselves in, neither seems as overly taxed as they might have been.

   At stake is a computerized betting system that, if it really existed, would be worth millions. For the most part, however, keep in mind that gambling is strictly a mugs’ game. William Derry’s book-making friend Taff is a fine example. Gambling is a way of life in which only the good mathematicians survive. As far as a successful system for betting on the horses is concerned, well, if anyone has one, and it works, it’s like the perfect crime – nobody’s telling anybody else about it.

   From off-the-cuff handicapping, to the expertise of modern-day computer technology, Dick Francis’s name under the title of a book still means there’s plenty of excitement in store, from start to finish. This outing’s certainly no exception, but all in all I think Francis was coasting more than he usually does.

Rating: B plus.

   
   Never buy flowers from a monk. Only you can prevent florist friars.