VERONICA STALLWOOD – Oxford Exit. Kate Ivory #2. Scribner, US, hardcover, 1995. Np US paperback edition. First published in the UK by Macmillan, 1994.

   Yet another author new to me. Stallwood was born in London and lives in Oxford, where she has worked at the Bodelian and Lincoln College libraries. The first book in this series is Death and the Oxford Box.

   Kate Ivory is a struggling romance novelist who has experience with computers and library cataloguing. She is called on by a friend to help investigate a possible series of thefts from the Oxford University Library System, and after agreeing is plugged into the system as a roving cataloger and consultant.

   Shady doings are afoot, all right, and Kate discovers that a young library assistant who was murdered in the recent past may have stumbled across them also, What seemed to be a relatively safe assignment now takes on a darker hue.

   Were this an American book, I’d call it a cozy, but given how I’ve defined those I think I’d be doing this an injustice. I like Stallwood’s prose, and I like her characters, an dI like the milieu. She tells her story by interleaving chapters told from the viewpoints of Kate and the anonymous murderer, and I thought she made unusually good use of the device.

   Secondary characters were also well done. It’s a type of book that British authors do exceptionally well, and Stallwood does this reputation no harm.

       The Kate Ivory series —

1. Death and the Oxford Box (1993)
2. Oxford Exit (1994)
3. Oxford Mourning (1995)
4. Oxford Fall (1996)
5. Oxford Knot (1998)
6. Oxford Blue (1998)
7. Oxford Shift (1999)
8. Oxford Shadows (2000)
9. Oxford Double (2001)
10. Oxford Proof (2002)
11. Oxford Remains (2004)
12. Oxford Letters (2005)
13. Oxford Menace (2008)
14. Oxford Ransom (2011)

MORAY DALTON – The Body in the Road. Hermann Glide #1. Sampson Low, UK, hardcover, 1931. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1930. Black Cat Detective #8, US, digest-sized paperback, 1944, Dean Street Press, UK, trade paperback, 2019; introduction by Curtis Evans.

   Moray Dalton was the working byline of Katherine Dalton Renoir, the British author of 29 mysteries published between 1924 and 1951. If you live in the US, you can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of her. Only three of her books have ever been published in the country, including this one (but how it happened to be published here a year before the British edition, I have no idea).

   It looks as though, however, if sales do well, that the folks at Dean Street Press are doing their best to be sure readers in this country can easily get their hands on them. Five were published last year and five more will be published in March. This is a totally unexpectedly bonanza for fans of obscure detective fiction from the Golden Age of Detection.

   I caution you, though, on the basis of this, the first of her work I’ve read, that any comparison to the contemporary authors of her time, those who are still well known today, are well in the favor of the latter. Dalton’s approach to both dialogue and storytelling are both rather unfocused and naive.

   The following excerpt comes from page four of the Dean Street edition. Two young women who have just met as musical performers at the same cafe, are talking:

   Vivian is living with n older woman who has acted as her guardian since she was young, and who has kept her under her very strict eye for all that time. It is no wonder she wishes to rebel, and finally she does, and in fact she decides to go into partnership with Linda on setting up a small tea shop together.

   Until, that is, the day they find the titular body in the road, that of a small dog that has been badly injured. They go off in opposite directions to obtain help, but Vivian is never to be seen again. And who is accused but Linda. Luckily for her, the new Lord Harringdon in the area has met her and has taken more than a liking to her.

   The case against Linda is flimsy, to say the least, but the local police are inexplicably set on their case against her. Lord Harringdon also investigates, but in his mind it is the strange doctor with stranger patients and medical staff that gets all of his attention. Finally, about 45 pages from the end, he hires Hermann Glide, a frail-looking private eye in London who resembles (at first appearance) “a monkey on a barrel organ.”

   Glide is not given many pages to do his work, and in fact we see very little of it, but he does his job, and as it turns out in the end, he did it perhaps a little too well. I’ll not say more about that, but it is one of the more interesting thing I can hint at in terms of the detective work that is done.

   Overall then, I’m glad I read this book, and I plan to read more of Moray Dalton’s work. As for you, though, unless you’re really a devout fan of old traditional detective novels, I’d recommend this on to you only if you’ve run out of other (and more solidly constructed) ones to read.

       The Hermann Glide series —

The Body in the Road (1930/31)
The Night of Fear (1931)
Death in the Cup (1932)

U. S. ANDERSEN – Hard and Fast. Steve Lawson #1. Popular Library Eagle Book EB-72, paperback original, 1956.

   This has the distinction of being written entirely in the Present Tense. Which is the only difference between it and a thousand other hard-boiled PI books from the 1950s & 60s.

   But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

   Hard and Fast observes the traditions of the HBPI with scrupulous care: The beautiful client with something to hide; the gangster with a phalanx of ineffectual tough guys; the too-helpful lawyer; the frightened witness who turns up dead after promising to tell all; dubious cops and willing dames…. Plus bloody fights, fragile clues, fast chases and swift seductions, all packed in a hundred and fifty-some pages and wrapped in a gaudy cover, this is by way of being the distilled essence of its genre.

   The story? Well as if anyone cares, wealthy Ann Wertzer hires PI Steve Lawson to dig up divorce dirt on her husband, “Wild Bill” Wertzer, a businessman with some shady connections and dangerous associates. Before they can even discuss the case, Lawson has traded punches with a couple of hired goons and Wertzer has turned up dead in an obviously staged “suicide” with Ann the equally obvious suspect.

   What follows is the standard product, with optional accessories itemized above. But it’s done with the professionalism of a craftsman proud of his work. The metaphors are well-strung:

   The fights are brutal, the pacing sure, and the ending completely unsurprising. This is a writer who knows his stuff and is not ashamed of showing it off.

   Which jolts me a bit. Andersen was the author of a best-selling and very serious book about Positive Thinking, Evolution, and the Law of Attraction, read by luminaries like Elvis Presley and Wayne Dyer, and for him to put his own name on a gaudy paperback like Hard and Fast bespeaks a certain amount of conviction — even courage — that surprised me even when the book itself did not.

THIS WAY PLEASE Paramount, 1937. Charles “Buddy” Rogers, Betty Grable, Ned Sparks, Jim and Marian Jordan, Porter Hall, Lee Bowman, Mary Livingstone. Director: Robert Florey. Shown at Cinevent 21, May 1989.

   Rogers is a popular stage entertainer in This Way Please, pulling them in for he between-the-films shows, and Betty Grable is hired as an usherette, but (wouldn’t you know it?) ends up heading the billing, while alternately cooing and feuding with Rogers.

   Fibber McGee and Molly [Jim and Marian Jordan] are in the big town, vacationing from Wistful Vista, and Ned Sparks is the pop-eyed publicist, trying desperately to provide some bearable comic relief in a film that tried to be unrelievedly comic.

   There is one striking stage number but not much else of interest. Florey’s direction is dreadful, and this drags its way to a predictable conclusion.

   I almost walked on this one.

DAVID ROSENFELT – Dachshund Through the Snow. Andy Carpenter #20. Minotaur Books, hardcover, October 2019.

First Sentence: It has been almost fourteen years since Kristen McNeil’s body was discovered.

   A tag on a Christmas charity wish tree leads attorney Andy Carpenter and his wife Laurie to a young boy wanting his father Noah Traynor to be brought home. The murder, for which Noah has been arrested, was a cold case until his DNA is identified on the victim’s body. In the meantime, K-9 officer Sergeant Corey Douglas is about to retire, but his dog, Simon, still has time left to work. Corey wants Andy to help him get Simon released to retire with him. Andy agrees to represent Simon on the basis of species discrimination.

   How refreshing it is when characters defy stereotype. Laurie, Andy’s wife, is the type of person one aspires to be; kind, generous, compassionate toward people. She is an ex-cop, and very capable of taking care of herself and Andy. Andy, on the other hand, is a lawyer who keeps trying to retire from the law and is passionate about dogs. As a self-described weakling, he depends upon Laurie and the indomitable Marcus to protect him. There are interludes of Andy at home with his family and friends, yet they avoid the over-sentimentality such interaction can bring about.

   Rosenfelt’s courtroom scenes are a pleasure to read. They are well presented and honest, even when the client is decidedly unusual. He creates an excellent analogy by likening a court case to a mountain climb such as Mt. Everest, and through it, introduces the rest of Andy’s quirky and memorable team.

   It is always tragic when someone young dies. It is appreciated when Rosenfelt acknowledges one of the great sorrows of such a death– ‘It also once again highlights the terrible loss that occurred when her best friend died; Kristen might have gone on to bring other people into the world or cure some disease or just do kind things for people that needed kindness.”

   The story includes alternative POVs, but only when needed to move the plot forward by characters other than the protagonist. Rosenfelt creates a plot which seems simple but grows into something more complicated and more dangerous as it progresses. Be aware; despite the cute dog on the cover, this is not a cozy. Rosenfelt does like his body count, but the scenes aren’t particularly gory. He is also very good at the unexpected, and very effective, plot twist, and a fun mention which lightens the situation.

   The dialogue is so well written, the courtroom exchanges come alive. Along with the on-going outside investigation, in which there is a very nice escalation of suspense, plot twist, and an excellent red herring, one feels the anticipation of awaiting the jury’s decision.

   Dachshund Through the Snow is a well-done legal mystery with plenty of twists and suspense. A very nice aftermath hints at the future of the series.

Rating: Very Good.

       The Andy Carpenter series —

1. Open and Shut (2002)
2. First Degree (2003)
3. Bury the Lead (2004)
4. Sudden Death (2005)
5. Dead Center (2006)
6. Play Dead (2007)
7. New Tricks (2009)
8. Dog Tags (2010)
9. One Dog Night (2011)
10. Leader of the Pack (2012)
11. Unleashed (2013)
12. Hounded (2014)
13. Who Let the Dog Out? (2015)
14. Outfoxed (2016)
15. The Twelve Dogs of Christmas (2016)
16. Collared (2017)
17. Rescued (2018)
18. Deck the Hounds (2018)
19. Bark of Night (2019)
20. Dachshund Through the Snow (2019)
21. Muzzled (2020)
22. Silent Bite (2020)

MICHAEL SHAYNE “Spotlight on a Corpse.” NBC, 13 January 1961 (Season 1, Episode 15). 60 minutes. Richard Denning (Michael Shayne), Herbert Rudley (Lt. Will Gentry), Gary Clarke (Dick Hamilton). Neither of the characters Lucy Hamilton or Tim Rourke appear in this episode. Guest Cast: Herbert Marshall, Robert Lansing, Constance Moore, Ruta Lee, Alan Hewitt, Jack Kruschen. Based on characters created by Brett Halliday. Director: Sidney Salkow.

   Found murdered on a movie set is the associate producer-writer who also happens to be a notorious womanizer. Mike Shayne is hired by the producer who wants his own investigation done, but the thing is, his current would-be investor actually likes the idea of all the publicity a killing such as this would produce. A killing in more ways than one?

   I wonder how many viewers at the time found the story line interesting. The money and the problems thereof that are involved in putting a movie together isn’t the sort of thing that people even bother to read about in their daily newspaper, much less in a sit-back-and-relax sixty minute TV show.

   Or is that only me?

   What I found far more watchable was a subplot involving the acting pair of Constance Moore (the elderly female lead) and Herbert Marshall (her former director now relegated to being her dialogue coach), who as a team are completely at odds with the young director (Robert Lansing), who thinks their way of making films are completely outmoded.

   As for Richard Denning, he doesn’t fit my picture of Michael Shayne very much at all. He’s doesn’t have the build for it. He’s too cerebral. He’s too pleasant, and as written, too agreeable. He made a great Mr. North, but as Mike Shayne, the tough Irish detective, he’s a complete lightweight. In my opinion.

      —

PostScript: The credits, I believe, claim this episode was based on a Mike Shayne novel. I don’t recognize the story line, but then again, I haven’t read them all. Anyone?

BASIL COPPER – The Curse of the Fleers. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1977. No US paperback edition. Published previously in the UK by Harwood-Smart, hardcover, 1976. Reprinted by PS Publishing , UK. hardcover, 2012.

   There are mysterious things happening in an old manor house located in a remote corner of Dorsett, and a wounded army officer oon leave is called upon to investigate. The ancestral home of the Fleers comes intact with all the required trappings: decaying towers and battlements, endless passageways, underground catacombs and unexplored caverns, and of course, an ancient curse on the family living within.

   Copper tries hard, casting suspicions far and wide, but he can’t add any life to this tale, many times told. Not my cup of tea. Maybe yours?

   
Bibliographic Update:   Basil Copper was a prolific British author of both crime and supernatural fiction. He is best known for a long series of stories about Solar Pons, a Sherlock Holmes read-alike first created by August Derleth. Unknown to most readers in the US, he also wrote over 50 novels chronicling the adventures of American PI Mike Faraday.

THE CORONER “First Love.” BBC, UK. 60 minutes. 16 November 2015 (Season 1, Episode 1.) Claire Goose as Jane Kennedy, Coroner, Matt Bardock as Davey Higgins, Detective Sergeant, Grace Hogg-Robinson as Beth Kennedy, Jane’s daughter. Director: Ian Barber.

   The story in this first episode is better than average, but as the first episode, it fails badly in introducing the players. A synopsis on IMDb helps:

   “Following the failure of a relationship high-flying solicitor Jane Kennedy returns to the small Devon coastal town of Lighthaven, that she left when she was a teenager. She takes up the position of coroner investigating sudden, violent and suspicious deaths. Jane moves back, with her teenage daughter Beth to live with her mother. In her new role Jane must work alongside Davey Higgins, the boy who once broke her heart, who is now the local Detective Sergeant.”

   There are just the beginning of hints at all this in the episode itself. We don’t get a clear statement as to why Jane Kennedy has moved back to her home town, only that she has, nor what her relationship withe Davey Higgins is and/or was. They are working together, she as the local coroner (and how does it happen she has the job so quickly?), he as a local police office, and (for the most part) comfortably so.

   The mother-daughter relationship, on the other hand, is obviously prickly. There is a lot of that going around. See Dicte, the first episode of which, from 2013, was reviewed here. In fact, the story line is very much the same. Young girl falls for an iffy guy from a faster crowd than her mother wants her to be anywhere near.

   The boy friend in this episode happens to have been the best friend of another young boy who is suspected of committing suicide by jumping off a high stone tower. It is possible, however, that he may have been pushed, and it is up to Jane and Davey to check into it before Jane can prepare her final report.

   In spite of the strong sense of déjà vu on my part, which arose only by the sheer chance of seeing the first episodes of both series so close together, the story itself is well done. This is another series I can see myself spending more time with (streaming now on Britbox.)

RICHARD MASON – The Fever Tree. The World Publishing Co., hardcover, 1962. Signet T2123, paperback, 1963.

   It was a battered paperback with a lurid cover and the first actual novel, not a mystery or science fiction or classic, I ever read on my own, Richard Mason’s The World of Suzy Wong.

   And yes, the lurid cover had a lot to do with my reading it.

   The story of a Chinese dance-hall girl/prostitute child-woman who becomes the obsession of an English artist in Hong Kong (in the movie the artist became an American played by William Holden), it is a much less racy novel than you might expect. Mason was a first class writer with something to say, often about the rocky territory of inter racial romance in the Near and Far East (his 1948 novel The Wind Cannot Read is about a British soldier in WW II who falls for a Japanese translator was also filmed in Technicolor with Dirk Bogarde).

   It was still a bit over the head of a twelve-year-old, but by then I had seen the William Holden movie with the gorgeous Nancy Kwan as Suzy, and was entranced. So entranced that I would actually go to the real club in Hong Kong where Suzy supposedly worked when I was sent there in the seventies, and meet a few girls who claimed (probably not truthfully) to have known her (whether she was real or not, she was real enough to them) and Mason.

   Even Richard Hughes (Dikko Henderson in Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice) wasn’t certain she hadn’t been real, if not quite what Mason made out of her, and Hughes knew China and Japan like the back of his hand, even down to a personal relationship with Mao.

   Suzy Wong had been around a while when I read the Signet paperback, and as a result about a year later, I happened to buy the Signet edition of what proved to be Mason’s last novel, The Fever Tree (I still remember the cover), that didn’t look like the sort of book I usually read at that tender age, but turned out to be pretty much exactly my cuppa, the story of a British traitor assigned to arrange the assassination of the king of Nepal, lay the blame at the feet of India and a young Indian radical inflamed by the British agent provocateur, and drive Nepal in Red Chinese hands.

   That was the plot/McGuffin, what the novel was really about is that of a soul lost man who finds a woman he loves too late to save himself or her, more Graham Greene than Ian Fleming or John Le Carre.

   Major Ronald Birkett is the protagonist, very much the very last of the Raj, the Pukka Sahib type with a clipped little military mustache and a handsome rather horsey English face browned by years in the sun, a writer of travel and adventure fawned over by people he secretly has contempt for and using his background as a cover for his assignments for the Red Chinese.

   As we meet him he is in a former British club turned bar in India feeling superior to everyone while he waits to meet a contact for his next mission.

   Yes, a decade ago, Birkett thought, the only Indians you’d have seen in this place were the waiters in compulsory white gloves to conceal the grey hands. And now the few British who came here fell over themselves to behave like Indians while the Indians behaved more like the British than the British themselves.

   Attractive and dangerous, Birkett is ruthless in his work and with women, at least he always has been until he meets Lakshmi: “The fans twirled like aeroplane propellers under the high vaulted ceiling, fluttering the blue silk sari of the girl along the bar. She had huge dark sad eyes like the eyes in Persian paintings, and a red spot on her forehead to match the red paint on her nails.”

   The “girl with the Persian eyes,” will come to haunt Birkett as his mission leads him from India to Nepal, a brief affair in India with a married woman, turning into something more serious for both of them.

   Fans of James Bond may uncomfortably be reminded of some of 007’s attitudes toward women, the world, and his work considering Birkett works for the other side.

   Whether that was Mason’s intent of not it adds a nice irony to the book. Save for his pose as a tired reminder of the Raj Birkett is a modern man with all the questions that involves.

   The Fever Tree is a suspenseful novel, an excellent portrait of an agent provocateur at work, and a fine spy novel. What destroys Birkett, what makes him into a human and ends his mission while saving the man if not the spy makes the book a fascinating read.

   There is no shortage of action and suspense of the old-fashioned thriller kind either, as Birkett tries to stop the assassination he has set in motion and he and Lakshmi try to flee his failed mission where Lakshmi finds her romance has become all too real and the inevitable tragedy of Birkett’s life takes its final shape.

   Ironically, Birkett finds himself trapped by his own illusion of love as much as the burgeoning conscience it creates.

   The Fever Tree is a first class novel of intrigue and adventure daring to tackle more serious themes. It’s a shame Mason chose to make this his last book. He might well have opened up a new door in a too short career. It builds to a powerful and ironic ending, quite unforgettable, and a reminder what a good writer Mason was, and just how seriously the spy novel could be taken as both novel and entertainment.

HUGH PENTECOST “Jericho and the Nuisance Clue.” Short story. John Jericho #6. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystey Magazine, August 1966. Collected in The Battles of Jericho (Crippen & Landru, 2008).

   Some clarification is needed. This is the sixth of 25 John Jericho stories that Hugh Pentecost wrote for EQMM between 1964 and 1987. It does not include six novels he appeared in between 1965 and 1970, nor several dozen stories he appeared in as a member of the Park Avenue Hunt Club for the pulp magazines, mostly Detective Fiction Weekly, between 1934 and 1944, all under the author’s real name, Judson Philips.

   The two earlier incarnations are not really the same person as the one in this story, but if television can re-invent or re-imagine old series characters every so often, why can’t mystery writers? Nor, for example, do I think that Ellery Queen was the same Ellery Queen in every novel over the years as time went on.

   The more recent John Jericho was a painter/social activist whose eye for detail stood him in good stead when it came time to solve mysteries. He’s described in “Nuisance Clue” as being a giant of a man, about 40, six-feet-six inches tall, weighing 240 pounds, a giant with red hair and red beard.

   Not only does he have an eye for detail, but he also has the knack of being in the right place at the right time. In :this story he’s sitting at a local bar, minding his own business, when a local mobster picks a fight with him, not knowing who he is.

   Why, Jericho can’t help but think, is he trying to establish an alibi? Sure enough. The story’s only ten pages long, and it flies by quickly and smoothy, showing that telling a well-reasoned out detective story doesn’t need 400 pages to do so.