MARK O’NEILL – To Catch a Spy. Poisoned Pen Press, softcover, 2025.

   We open on the Riviera, John Robie, the Cat, is pursuing a man who just fired at him across the roof of the Hotel Carlton:

   One year has passed and once again John Robie, le Chat, the famed jewel thief and Resistance hero is back on a roof pursuing a fugitive, this time for his aristocratic friend Paul Du Pre who Robie had asked to help him reconnect with Francine “Francie” Stevens, the American heiress who had helped him clear his name of a series of crimes on the Riviera and then mysteriously left as their romance heated up.

   As a favor John agreed to break into a room in the Hotel Carlton and check on a man, and now the man has fired at him and fled across the roof falling to his death.

   To make manners worse the policeman called in is Le Pic, the officer who thought a year earlier he finally had a noose around the neck of the infamous Cat only to be humiliated when Robie broke a criminal ring of jewel thieves copying Robie’s pre war exploits.

   Le Pic would like to arrest Robie, but De Pre is not only wealthy and an aristocrat, he is also tied to counter-intelligence and the man who just fell to his death may be an enemy agent.

   To Catch a Spy is the Estate Approved sequel to the novel To Catch a Thief by David Dodge and the film by Alfred Hitchcock with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.

   The film is a classic and hardly needs to be mentioned, but the novel it is based upon needs a bit more introduction. Author David Dodge was a noted travel writer who brought a fresh perspective to his works with his photographic skills and because he traveled his post war haunts with his wife and family in tow.

   In addition to his travel books he was a mystery writer of some note, writing the hard-boiled CPA series about Ira Whitney (Death and Taxes), tales of American Private Eye and relic hunter Al Colby in Central America (Plunder in the Sun), tough Secret Service agent John Lincoln (Hooligan), and stand-alone thrillers like La Carambola and his most famous work, To Catch a Thief.

   I first bonded with my then writing partner Nicholas Boving, a fellow Seven League Booter, over our mutual appreciation of Dodge, who has not had the respect he deserves, though Plunder was reprinted by Hard Case Crime along with one last posthumous novel,, and To Catch a Thief has been reprinted numerous times since it first came out

   Dodge’s tongue’n-cheek approach to crime, adventure, and travel mixed with his easy gift for characterization and plot coming from it made him a perfect companion for travel and relaxing escapist reading, so it was with some trepidation I approached a sequel to his most famous work no matter how much it deserved one.

   Happily Mark O’Neill pulls it off, picking up one year after the events in the original, and like the original, plunging our hero into action and danger on page one. This time Robie must use his old skills to negotiate the treacherous world of spies, but also his troubled relationship with Francie Stevens, the American heiress who got cold feet and abandoned him a year earlier.

   Now Francie is returning to the Riviera with a fashion show and Alex, a new fiance, and before he can hope to reconnect with her Robie has to deal with the fact she is almost certainly a part of the spy ring he has found himself committed to breaking before they kill him.

   Relying on old allies and avoiding old enemies like Le Pic, Robie must uncover the leaders of the spy ring and hopefully clear Francie, if she is innocent, while on the run and unsure why Francie has turned on him.

   The good news is the book is a perfect balance between Dodge’s novel and the fairly faithful adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock, screen writer John Michael Hayes and his team. For a first novel the writing is assured, pleasantly straight forward, and aware of the big shoes it is filling without being self conscious about it.

   Chances are if you love the movie or the book this will be a satisfying chance to spend time with the characters in a new adventure.

   The book isn’t perfect. It is a bit long at 345 pages, probably to be expected in today’s publishing world, and I don’t agree with every editorial choice made, but it is also remarkable in that it finds a balance between the novel and film (close as they are, there are major differences) without shorting either.

   “The public knows him as a burglar, but let me tell you, John Robie is one of a kind…” So were David Dodge and Alfred Hitchcock, and neither should be disappointed by this tribute to their accomplishments. Like the originals To Catch a Spy is froth and fun, and has just enough of an edge and just enough twists and turns to be perfect escapist reading with a mix of glamour, humor, romance, suspense, and thrills.

   It’s champagne, and pink champagne at that, a Brut, a dessert wine and not a vintage, but it tickles the nose and lightly intoxicates, and it makes a pleasant escape from grim reality and cozy domesticity.

JOHN GARDNER – The Garden of Weapons. Herbie Kruger #2 [See Comment #1.] Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1980 McGraw-Hill, US, hardcover, 1981.

   John Gardner is one of the most versatile British writers in the espionage genre. He gained early recognition for his Boysie Oakes series — The Liquidators (1946), Amber Nine (1966 ), and five others — which he created in the hope they would be an “amusing counter-irritant to the excesses” of James Bond; these were written in the black-humor style characteristic of the Sixties.

   In the Seventies, Gardner scored additional critical and sales triumphs with a much different type of series — one featuring Sherlock Holmes’s archenemy, Professor Moriarity, in The Return of Moriarity (1974) and The Revenge of Moriarity (1975). And in the Eighties, Gardner returned to the frantic world of Bondian spies — literally when he began a series of new 007 adventures.

   But Gardner’s best book to date is not one featuring a series character; it is the realistic espionage thriller The Garden of Weapons, which begins when a KGB defector walks into the British Consulate in West Berlin and demands to speak with Big Herbie Kruger, a legendary figure in intelligence circles.

   Kruger’s interrogation of the defector reveals that the greatest of Kruger’s intelligence coups — a group of six informants known as the Telegraph Boys — has been penetrated by a Soviet spy. Kruger decides to go undercover and eliminate the double agent himself, without the knowledge or consent of British Intelligence.

   Posing as an American tourist, Kruger enters East Berlin to carry out his deadly self-appointed mission. But the task is hardly a simple one: and Gardner’s plot is full of Byzantine twists and turns involving the East Germans, the KGB, and British Intelligence. Any reader who enjoys espionage fiction will find The Garden of Weapons a small masterpiece of its type.

   Another non-series Gardner thriller in the same vein is The Werewolf Trace (1977), which has been called “a compulsively readable thriller with delicately handled paranormal undertones and a bitter ending.”

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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.
   

      The Herbie Kruger series —

1. The Nostradamus Traitor (1979)
2. The Garden of Weapons (1980)
3. The Quiet Dogs (1982)
4. Maestro (1993)
5. Confessor (1995)

HENRY KANE – Death Is the Last Lover. Peter Chambers #10. Avon T-291; paperback original; 1st printing, 1959. Signet D2851, paperback, 1966.

   Until the end of his career, PI Peter Chambers was very much a traditional sort of one. In this case he helps a wealthy playboy out of a spot he has created for himself, keeping a secret hideaway under an assumed name and frequenting a dance club named Nirvana.

   Chambers also meets a lovely vision called Sophia Sierra, but even while going ga-ga over her, his mind stays on the case. The rhythm of Kane’s writing often hammers and sings like poetry, and I think his reputation should be higher than it is.

ELLERY QUEEN – The House of Brass. Ellery Queen #32. [Said to have been plotted by Frederick Dannay and written by Avram Davidson. (See Comments #2 and #4.)] New American Library, hardcover, 1968. Signet, paperback, 1971. Several reprint editions followed.

   Ellery returns from an overseas vacation at the beginning of the last chapter, in which the case’s solution finally comes out, thanks to Ellery’s deductions. I might say that Ellery makes it too easy, without substantial indications pointing to the identity of the missing heir, but the mystery, artificiality and all, makes up for it.

   Before that, in the beginning, Inspector Queen and Jessie, his recent bride, receive a strange note inviting them to the ancestral home of the Brass family, The old man, the lone survivor, has brought prospective heirs-to-be together in one spot, before completing his will, with what he says is a legacy of $6,000,000. Once the will is made, you know he hasn’t long to live. Who is the murderer, and where is the money?

   Ellery’s father asks the assistance of several old cronies, like the Inspector, all required to retire from the force because of age, But the Inspector doesn’t fare very well.  He does discover the dream of gold is actually one of mere brass, but an alibi keeps the case from being closed.

   Now maybe Ellery, having read many mysteries, realizes that the missing heir has to be a clue, as should any devotee of the genre. But is this any way to solve a mystery?

Rating: ****

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece. Perry Mason #8. Morrow, hardcover, 1936. Pocket, paperback, 1944. Reprinted many times.

   Perry Mason is approached by a “peculiar” client-Edna Hammer, who seeks help for her uncle, Peter Kent. Kent has a bad habit of sleepwalking, and when he does, he heads for the carving knives and curls up in bed with one. Edna is afraid Uncle Peter will kill someone, and she wants Mason to prevent this.

   Kent has other troubles: a wife who instituted divorce proceedings on account of the sleepwalking but now wants to reconcile; a fiancee whom he wishes to marry but can’t unless the divorce goes through; a complicated business arrangement with a “cracked-brained inventor”; a hypochondriac half brother; and a woman tailing him in a green Packard roadster.

   Mason spends a night at the Kent home, and by the next morning there is a bloodstained knife under Peter Kent’s pillow, a corpse in the guest room, and a client in very hot water.

   The writing in this early novel is taut and lean — reflective of Gardner’s hard-boiled work for such pulp magazines as Black Mask. The dialogue is terse and packs a good impact, and there arc none of the long-winded conversations and introspections that characterize the later Perry Masons. A first-rate example of Gardner’s work in the Thirties and early Forties.

   Some other notable titles in the series are The Case of the Black-Eyed Blond (1944), The Case of the Lazy Lover (1947), The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister (1953), and The Case of the Daring Decoy ( 1957). After the late Fifties, the novels seem to lose something, possibly as a result of Gardner’s work on the Perry Mason TV series. Mason is less flamboyant, and the plots are not as intricate or well tied off as in the earlier novels.

   Gardner created other series characters, writing under both his own name and the pseudonym A. A. Fair. The best of these under the Gardner name are small-town prosecutor Doug Selby (The D.A. Calls It Murder, 1937; The D.A. Cooks a Goose, 1942), whose role as a hero is a reverse of Hamilton Burger’s; and Gramps Wiggins (The Case of the Turning Tide, 1941; The Case of the Smoking Chimney, 1943), an iconoclastic old prospector whose experiences reflect Gardner’s childhood travels with his mining-engineer father.

   In addition to his novels, Gardner wrote hundreds_of mystery and western stories under various names for such magazines as Argosy, Black Mask, Sunset, West, and Outdoor Stories.

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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.

BLOOD WORK. Warner Bros., 2002. Clint Eastwood, Jeff Daniels, Anjelica Huston, Wanda De Jesus. Based on the novel by Michael Connelly. Directed by Clint Eastwood.

   Clint Eastwood directs, and stars in, Blood Work, a rather captivating police procedural from the aughts. Based on the book by Michael Connelly, the film features Eastwood as a retired FBI agent who returns to work under highly unusual conditions. After suffering a heart attack a couple years ago while chasing the Code Killer, Terry McCaleb (Eastwood) is recovering from a heart transplant and living a slow-paced life on his boat in the Long Beach harbor.

   All that changes when Graciella Rivers (Wanda De Jesus) comes to him with a request: find the person who murdered her sister, Gloria. McCaleb is perplexed. Why him? He’s retired. Only when he’s told that he is the recipient of Rivers’ heart does he decide to take the case.

   He’s retired, of course. So all of this police work on his part is unofficial and puts him at loggerheads with the LAPD and with his physician (Anjelica Huston), who thinks he’s putting his life at risk. Still, McCaleb is determined to see this through to the very end. It’s only when he begins to dig deeper that he realizes that the Code Killer, his long time nemesis, may be back and playing a deadly game with him.

   Because McCaleb doesn’t drive, he has to rely upon his neighbor, Jasper “Buddy” Noone (Jeff Daniels) to ferry him around town while he conducts his unofficial investigation. The chemistry between these two leads is solid, with Daniels really leaning into the role of a boat bum with too much time on his hands.

   Aside from being a police procedural, Blood Work is very much a character study of a man at the end of his career who realizes that he has a lot of unfinished business to tend to. There’s a whole subplot about McCaleb’s guilt and belief that he is undeserving of the heart he has been gifted and his sorrow that there is a kid on a heart transplant waiting list, but it never adds up to very much.

   As it turns out, however, the heart transplant itself becomes the key to unlocking not only Gloria’s murder, but the dark machinations of the Code Killer. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this one, even if it was slow in the beginning. The direction is lean and to the point, something for which Eastwood is known.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.” Novella. First published in Unknown Worlds, October 1942. Collected in The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (Gnome Press, hardcover, 1959). Reprinted in 6 x H (Pyramid G642, paperback original, 1961), among others.

   Jonathan Hoag hires the husband-and-wife team of Randall & Craig, Confidential Investigation to solve the mystery of the dirty fingernails. The nails are his. Under them is a dried brownish blood-like substance. The doctor who analyzes it throws him out of his office, and Hoag discovers that he does not know what he does all day.

   The solution, as he sees it, is to have himself shadowed.

   But this is no mere detective story, but a powerful fantasy that creates doubts as to the reality of the world around us. Unfortunately is might have been a better story as a mystery, except that the explanation dies have to transcend the limits of everyday detection.

   Still, it is too easy to throw away the beginning for the less restrictive.

Rating: ****

It’s been one heck of a week, starting with

Tuesday, eye doctor.

Wednesday, lawyer.

Thursday, accountant.

Friday, foot doctor.

All regularly scheduled appointments. No emergencies. But…

I’m too old for this. But…

I survived.

Back to work tomorrow.

ROBERT J. BOWMAN – The House of Blue Lights. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1987. No paperback edition.

   It took me a while to decide what Cassandra Thorpe’s occupation is at the beginning of this book. She is not a private investigator, but rather an investigator for the public defender’s office. (A public investigator?) City: San Francisco.

   More specifically: the unappetizing skid row district south of Market. Her clients: winos, derelicts, and a crazy man who writes notebooks full of code in colors and ends up dead. It’s a busy kind of story, and not a very comfortable one. Maybe it was just me.

BILLIE HOLIDAY – Lady Sings the Blues [with William Dufty]. Doubleday, hardcover, 1956. Reprint editions include: Popular Library, paperback, 1958. Lancer, paperback, 1969. Avon, paperback, 1976. Harlem Moon, softcover, as Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition, 2006.

   An ‘as told to’ autobiography. Legitimacy in question, but if you ask me, based on nothing but instinct, it’s pretty legit.

   Why? Because it makes her look bad. And it’s not very well written. And it makes you depressed just reading it. It’s not ups and downs. It’s mostly just downs.

   And certain tidbits, no one is making this shit up. For example: one of her earliest memories is of her great grandmother, who she loved. Who would regale her with stories from the days of slavery. Where she had 16 kids by the Irish master, and was set up in a little shack behind his home. Great grandma was never supposed to lie down, so she slept in a chair. She’d die if she ever lay down. And little Eleanora (she picked up the name ‘Billie’ later, for her screen girl crush, silent starlet Billie Dove), would wash her great grandma down with washcloths, and was the only one who paid any attention to her.

   So the little four year old bathes grandma one time and grandma begs: oh dear child, please lay down some blankets, I’m so tired, and snuggle up with me and I’ll tell you a story. So she does and wakes a few hours later, middle of the night, and great grandma is ice cold, rigor mortis has set in, and she’s holding the child with a death grip. The child screams and they have to call the fire department to break great grandmas arm to set her free. And she’s beaten for having let great grandma lie down, and was told she killed her.

   Yeah. And it doesn’t get much brighter. Hounded for addiction to opioids, imprisoned, raped aged 10; sent up for seducing the 40 year old man who raped her. Her life sucked.

   There were some good times, sure. And she has nice stories of Orson Welles and Bob Hope and Clark Gable and Artie Shaw standing up for her, standing up against racism.

   But overall it’s just a depressing pit of despair. And she’s frankly not that likable as she sinks. She takes no responsibility for her addiction, the black hole of her constant poverty, no matter how much she makes, her relationships with one abusive scoundrel after the next. And you can see she’s drowning. And it’s too late. But she still can’t see it in this book completed three years before her death. She still has a bit of hope that you know is doomed. And that voice, that fading beauty, the tremor in her reaching vibrato. She sings straight from her breaking heart. And you can feel it. But to no avail. You’d like to help but it’s just too late.

   It’s easy to remember. But so hard to forget.

   Forget it. It’ll just make you sad.