GIRL WITHOUT A ROOM. Paramount, 1933. Charles Farrell, Charles Ruggles, Marguerite Churchill, Gregory Ratoff, Walter Woolf, Grace Bradley, Leonid Snegoff, Mischa Auer, Leonid Kinsky. Director: Ralph Murphy. Shown at Cinevent 21, May 1989.

   Farrell arrives on a scholarship in Paris, France from Paris, Tennessee, to paint and rents a room at a boardinghouse filled with eccentric bohemian artists and expatriate Russians (including the Trotsky, Walksky, Gallopsky/Sitsky crew).

   There is the far-out Bohemian playgirl “Nada” (Churchill), who is pursued by an alcoholic rich American but who falls for Farrell; and Vergil Crook (Chares Ruggles), master of the revelries, and surrogate mentor for the babe-in-the-wood Farrell.

   This is a funny, charming, delightful send-up of the 30s avant-garde French art scene. For me, this was the sleeper of the convention. Director Ralph Murphy is credited with over 40 films and some later work in television. Of the movies, only The Men in Half Moon Street (1945) seems somewhat familiar, but as my big-city friends will tell you, living in the boondocks has severely restricted my film education.

The local college radio station was playing country music this afternoon, and this was one of them. It’s gotten stuck in my head, and I can’t get it out, so I thought I’d pass it along to you:

   This month’s column is like the two roads that diverged in a yellow wood. On the first road is a signpost with the initials EQ. On the second, the one less traveled by, there’s another signpost, this one initialed HSK. Any guesses?

   In recent years—no, make that recent decades—it seems that I’ve either written or edited or had some connection with the vast majority of books having to do with Ellery Queen, the single exception being BLOOD RELATIONS (Perfect Crime Books, 2012), Joseph Goodrich’s excellent selection from the often acrimonious correspondence between Frederic Dannay (1905-1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905-1971), the first cousins who used the name Ellery Queen as both their joint byline and their series detective.

   Now we have a second exception: Laird R. Blackwell’s FREDERIC DANNAY, ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE AND THE ART OF THE DETECTIVE SHORT STORY (McFarland, 2019), a title so unwieldy it won’t all fit on the book’s spine, which omits THE ART OF. Blackwell’s aim is to encompass in just 218 pages “the true impact of Ellery Queen on the detective-crime short-story genre.” By Ellery Queen of course he means Fred Dannay, the scholarly-bibliophilic-editorial half of the Queen partnership, who as founding editor of EQMM labored feverishly, beginning at the magazine’s birth late in 1941 and ending not long before his death, both to revive the best short stories of the distant and recent past and to encourage the creation of equally fine stories in the present and future.

   Blackwell knows the 40-odd Dannay years of EQMM backward and forward and writes insightfully of the milestone authors and stories that Fred had a hand in developing or preserving. We traverse the entire range of the genre from Poe through Conan Doyle and Chesterton to then newcomers like Stanley Ellin and Edward D. Hoch (who wound up having more than 500 stories published in the magazine) to a few like Jon L. Breen and Josh Pachter and myself who began appearing in EQMM when we were young and Fred was well along in his editorial career and who carry on today like old warhorses continuing, perhaps more gently, to smite the earth.

   If I had had a hand in Blackwell’s book I would have nudged him to include the birth and death years of the dozens of authors he covers, giving readers a more vivid sense of the scope and flow of detective-crime fiction in its short form. But I would have fought like a T. rex for the removal of the superabundant typos which pockmark almost every page.

   For the benefit of anyone who might think superabundant too strong a word, let’s pick one author totally at random, like the winner of a megabucks lottery, and take a look at what Blackwell has to say about that person. Who won the lottery? Yikes! I did. You’ll find the entry on me at pp. 129-130.

   First off, he spells my first name wrong, Frances, the female way, not Francis, the pope’s way, and that of every other man whose name I’ve ever seen written down. Next, he omits my middle initial, as he does with virtually every other author with an initial in his or her byline. Also he gets the titles of two of my early stories wrong. Then he lists as a non-series story one of my earliest EQMM contributions, in fact the first Fred Dannay bought from me, which is not a story at all but a poem (if you want to call it that) in the manner of that great poet (if you want to call him that) Ogden Nash.

   Among the other stand-alone stories he credits me with is one (“Black Spider” from the August 1979 EQMM) which features Loren Mensing, also the protagonist of four of my novels and a pile of other EQMM tales. All these flubs in exactly 14 lines of print!

   But it’s not as if I’m treated worse than other EQMM contributors. When it comes to having my name misspelled, I stand beside “Jacque” Futrelle (19), “Irving” Cobb (21), “Cornel” Woolrich (22, 90), John “Colliers” (23), Philip “Macdonald” (76), Damon “Runyan” (113), “George” Simenon (128, 189, 216), Ross “MacDonald” (167), and—almost forgot!—that old standby Edgar “Allen” Poe (152).

   When it comes to missing middle initials I’m also in excellent company, along with Jon Breen (30, 115, 180), Pearl Buck (101), Charles Child (151), Mignon Eberhart (21), Robert Fish (103, 121, 181) and Edward Hoch (36, 104, 159), just to mention those whose last names begin with the letters A through H. Middle-initialed luminaries like John D. MacDonald and Robert B. Parker would no doubt have endured the same fate had Blackwell mentioned them.

   Several authors with three-name bylines, including Dorothy Davis (102, 119) and Earl Biggers (54, 191), get their middle names chopped off. And a number of contributors besides yours truly get story titles messed up, as witness James Yaffe’s “Mr. Kirashubi’s Ashes” (139), Thomas Flanagan’s “The Cold Winds of Adeste” (124, 209), and Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Blue Carbunkle” (45) which will lift every Sherlockian’s eyebrows to the heavens.

   More than one protagonist of a stand-alone story, like Kachoudas (or, as Blackwell calls him, Kouchadas) in Simenon’s prize-winning “Blessed Are the Meek,” is listed as a series character. Even book titles mentioned in passing are mangled; notice, for example, Blackwell’s version of the Bill Pronzini-Marcia Muller nonfiction anthology 101 MIDNIGHTS, which dumps a whopping 900 witching hours down the memory hole.

   A number of significant dates are also off, for example the death of Ed Hoch, which occurred in 2008 not 2018. (If only Ed had enjoyed the extra ten years of life with which Blackwell gifts him!)

   But now comes the weird part. Those 14 scrambled lines about me are followed by three paragraphs of text which demonstrate that Blackwell is both knowledgeable and insightful about the stories I wrote for EQMM back in the Seventies and early Eighties when Fred Dannay was still alive and editing. This strange dichotomy, that the material in coherent sentences is of a much higher order than what is found in the lists, persists throughout Blackwell’s 218 pages.

   It’s almost as if he had completed the part of the book that consists of sentences and then turned the list-making function over to an ignoramus. The sentences contain very few factual flubs (the main one I caught being that Erle Stanley Gardner’s scam-artist character Lester Leith is identified on page 71 as a criminal lawyer) and plenty of keen observations. All the gaffes I’ve highlighted don’t seriously detract from what Blackwell has accomplished here. If you can turn a blind eye to everything but the good parts, you can learn much from this book.

   Now let’s move away from serious stuff and spend a few minutes with the great wackadoodle of detective-crime fiction.

   In the late 1950s the Chicago branch of Mystery Writers of America was a small and sleepy organization, among whose members was our revered filbert Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967). Even though no American publisher had bought a book from him since 1948 and his English publisher had dropped him five years later, Keeler kept up his membership—mainly because it gave him access to just about the only social life he had—and kept hoping his luck would change.

   His closest friend among the members was W.T. Brannon (1906-1981), an eyepoppingly prolific author of true-crime pieces for magazines. The members he seemed to envy most deeply were Richard Himmel (1920-2000) and Milton K. Ozaki (1913-1989), who had managed to hitch rides on that gravy train of 1950s popular fiction, the original paperback novel.

   Keeler was no more equipped to write for that market than is a toad to perform a Louis Vierne organ symphony, but every so often he’d make a half-hearted stab in that direction. THE AFFAIR OF THE BOTTLED DEUCE (Ramble House, 2009).seems to have started out as one of those stabs.

   This 65,000-word novel, completed on August 15, 1958, was immediately followed by THE STRAW HAT MURDERS, which I discussed in this column a few months ago, and THE CASE OF THE TRANSPARENT NUDE, which I may take up later this year. What makes all three rarae aves in the Keeler Kanon is that they might pass in a pea-soup fog for the kinds of softcover originals about tough cops tackling crime in the big city’s mean streets that were being published regularly by Gold Medal, Ace, Avon, Dell, Pyramid and countless other houses of the time.

   Pull down Fender Tucker’s A TO IZZARD: A HARRY STEPHEN KEELER COMPANION (Ramble House, 2002), turn to the collection of opening paragraphs from Harry’s novels in the bibliography at the end of this matchless tome, and compare the first lines of BOTTLED DEUCE with those of every other novel he wrote during the year or so before and after. See the difference?

   One might almost believe Harry thought that if he aped the pb-original manner for a few pages, some editor would send him a contract and advance without bothering to read further! It didn’t work, of course. BOTTLED DEUCE was published nowhere—not in the U.S., not in England, not even in Spain where a number of his Fifties novels had been appearing as originals—until the Ramble House edition which came out early in 2005.

   Among the paperback thriller specialists of the Eisenhower years were some first-rate talents: David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Day Keene, Harry Whittington, John D. MacDonald, Jonathan Craig and Ed McBain, just to name seven. If what you want is not what these guys offered but the unreconstructed nut that was our Harry, fear not. BOTTLED DEUCE begins as he introduces us to his versions of pb-original Homicide cops: Louis TenEyck Ousley, skinny and wart-faced and called Lousy Lou by all and sundry—a nice role for Dan Duryea if by some miracle the movie rights in this then unpublished and by sane standards unpublishable book had been sold back in the Fifties!—and Homer “Butterball” Tomaroy, who resembles a human dumpling and would have been a perfect part for Lou Costello.

   Then Harry quickly forgets what he started out to accomplish and the train of plot switches onto the tracks we know and love. Lythgoe Crockett, a naive and paranoid young man living in a dump in Chicago’s Little Italy while trying to write the Great American Novel—his costume while in the throes of composition being bathing trunks and grass slippers!—apparently shot himself in the head in his apartment, all of whose doors and windows are locked from the inside, shortly after receiving a package containing a deuce of diamonds in a bottle. What could have motived and motivated such an act?

   Then when Lousy Lou discovers that the gun dangling from Crockett’s nerveless hand is made of wax, the question morphs into: Why would anyone commit murder in such a cockamamie way, and how could both murderer and weapon have vanished from Crockett’s sealed apartment? In time the answers seem to emerge, and Rilla Kenshaw, girl magician, finds herself in jail and indicted for the crime by sadistic State’s Attorney Herman Kober, her only hope being the lone-wolf investigation of Lousy Lou, with sympathetic nods from Assistant State’s Attorney Chalfont Nortell.

   Eventually Harry allows himself to vent some pet peeves, notably the sex-obsessed nature of current best-sellers like PHAETON PLACE and—talk about biting the hand he hoped would feed him!—of the novels published as 25-cent paperback originals. The case climaxes with a reconstruction of events in Crockett’s apartment, presided over by Lousy Lou but dominated by Sheridan Overturf, a bottom-rung magazine publisher whose like Harry had dealt with and worked for in his salad days as an editor.

   If you’re familiar with the milestones of detective fiction, you won’t long wonder why in the late chapters Harry introduces—in his own inimitable way, by having other characters talk about him!—one Jamrock James, a.k.a. Old Sherlock Holmes the II’d. Any Sherlockian who gives the matter some thorght should be able to anticipate the ultimate gimmick in this book, although the trappings are a million times zanier than Conan Doyle’s.

   BOTTLED DEUCE isn’t in the same league with the Keeler Klassics of the Eisenhower era like THE STREET OF A THOUSAND EYES and THE RIDDLE OF THE WOODEN PARRAKEET, but it’s wackily satisfying in its own terms and all true Harryphiles huzzahed loudly when it finally became available. So might you if you care—or should I say dare?—to check it out.

    —

Editor’s Note:   Thanks to graphic designer-artist Gavin L. O’Keefe for providing me with both front and back cover images for the Keeler book, done most stylistically in the 1940s Dell mapback mode.

L. C. TYLER – The Herring Seller’s Apprentice. Ethelred & Elsie #1. Pan Macmillan, UK, trade paperbark, 2007. Felony & Mayhem, US, trade paperback, April 2009.

   I reviewed The Herring in the Library, #3 in series, back in November. I liked it so much that I did something I don’t always manage to do. I found a copy of Ethelred and Elise’s first appearance and read it as well.

   From the earlier review, let me borrow the first paragraph and get the introductions out of the way first:

   Since The Herring Seller’s Apprentice is the true introduction to the characters, they haev’t settled into their roles as solidly as they were in Book #3. In fact, I’m not at all sure that Tyler was completely firm himself as to where future stories were going to go. (There are now eight of them.)

   Also what makes Book #1 rather different than the later one is that it’s Ethelred’s former wife who’s gone missing and is shortly thereafter declared dead. Although the police are suspicious of him, he has a solid alibi: he was in France at the time of the murder. He conducts his own investigate independently from the police, but Elsie thinks he’s acting strangely about it and begins her own.

   Hence the title. As a mystery writer Ethelred is the Herring Seller. Elsie is his Apprentice. When she takes over the narration, the font changes, a fact which is both helpful and unusual enough, perhaps, that she even points out the fact to the reader, a protocol not often found in other works of mystery fiction, old or new.

   A quote on the cover calls the book “A classic detective novel.” Well, yes and no. It follows the format of he traditional mystery story, but it pushes its boundaries every inch of the way. This is a statement that includes the ending, which concludes but yet does not end. I will have to read Book #2 in the series, Ten Little Herrings (2009) to see where Tyler takes his characters from here.

   This is a book you have to read carefully. I believe that every word that’s spoken was truthfully stated, including my own, and yet Tyler manages to have at least one big surprise up his sleeve. It’s also not as laugh-out-loud funny as Book #3 is, but the humor is there. That Ethelred is so closely involved may explain this one is a notch more serious in tone.

   That’s all for now. On to Book #2!

   The Jazz Networks was a group of ever changing personnel, but always headed by the late Roy Hargrove. This song is included on an album released in 1993 entitled Beauty and the Beast. All of the tracks on it are the group’s versions of songs taken from various Walt Disney movies.

Roy Hargrove, trumpet; Antonio Hart, alto, soprano sax; Yutaka Shiina, piano; Tomo Shima, bass; Masa Osaka, drums.

10 RILLINGTON PLACE. Columbia Pictures, UK/US, 1971. Richard Attenborough, Judy Geeson, John Hurt, Pat Heywood, Isobel Black. Director: Richard Fleischer.

   For a serial killer movie, Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place is rather subdued. There’s comparatively little screen-time violence and there is almost no blood or gore. What there is, however, is psychological violence of the worst kind.

   Richard Attenborough gives a chilling performance as psycho-sexual deviant John Christie, a real-life criminal responsible for the strangulation murders of numerous women in late 1940s and early 1950s. He’s an everyman, struggling to survive in post-war London, and operates under the radar. Nobody, except perhaps his long-suffering wife, seems to suspect that there might be anything amiss in the building that Christie lets out for renters.

   Enter a working-class married couple with a young infant daughter. Timothy Evans (John Hurt) and his wife, Beryl (Judy Geeson) are just trying to make ends meet. He drinks. She stays home. They fight. But overall, it’s a decent marriage. Until Christie decides that he is going to make Beryl his next victim. In a dastardly act of manipulation, Christie finds a most shocking way to get Beryl alone and vulnerable, before proceeding to strangle her to death.

   What comes next is even more unnerving. Realizing that Evans is a simple illiterate with few friends, Christie manipulates him into leaving town, telling him that Beryl died accidentally. Evans, doe-eyed and unaware of the evil enveloping him, complies and seals his fate. Eventually, he is arrested for the murder of his wife and is hanged by the authorities for it.

   Attenborough disappears entirely into the role. His Christie is less salacious than Anthony Hopkins’ scenery-chewing (pun intended) Hannibal Lecter, but perhaps even more vicious. Apparently, Attenborough took the role of Christie in significant part because of the film’s implicit anti-death penalty stance. Evans, after all, was truly an innocent man, a victim of both Christie and a judicial system unable to look past his social origins and lack of intelligence.

   As you might have suspected, 10 Rillington Place is an undoubtedly bleak film, largely bereft of daylight, either in the literal or metaphorical sense. Everyone lives in a fog of despair and depression. This was, after all, the age of austerity. Britain was trying to get back on its feet after the Second World War and the subsequent loss of empire.

   There was massive social dislocation in postwar London, with many persons left without families, spouses, or social support systems. Christie, the film implies, seems to have taken advantage of the weak, the lonely, and the trusting in the worst possible way. Fortunately, he eventually did get caught and face justice. But not before shocking many middle-class Britons with his horrendous crimes.

   Fleischer is a talented director who worked in many genres over a long career in Hollywood. Some may consider him an auteur. Others, most certainly would not and feel that he was skilled journeymen, who adapted with the times and reinvented himself as his career required. Whatever the case, his direction here is steady and immersive. He certainly gets the most out of his actors. This is particularly true for Attenborough and Hurt, whose professionalism lends the film its necessary gravitas. Indeed, there’s nothing particularly exploitative here.

   On the contrary, it’s perhaps too antiseptic, distant even, at times. A movie happy to show you what happened, without trying to overly capitalize on your emotional response. In fact, there’s not much – if any – music or overly intrusive ambient noise in the film. What we have instead is a quiet, claustrophobic world manipulated by a sociopath who learned how to lie and to manipulate his way into far too many lives.

   The film is able to make you feel this intellectually, even more than emotionally. It’s a different kind of serial killer film. One that persons who usually don’t like that particular subgenre of crime film might find worth a look.

(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Autumn 2019/Winter 2020. Issue #52. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 36 pages (including covers). Cover image: The 12.30 from Croydon.

   With many Golden Age (GAD) writers nowadays seeing reprints for the first time after years of neglect, Arthur Vidro’s Old-Time Detection (OTD) is more timely than ever, an invaluable resource for neophyte and experienced readers alike. The insights and information contained in any given issue of OTD make it a worthwhile reservoir from which Golden Age enthusiasts may drink with pleasure.

         

~ “From the Editor” by Arthur Vidro:

   Vidro echoes the sentiments of many devotees of classic detective fiction: “. . . every time a publisher [such as Penzler Publishers] reprints a novel of an old-time author, or (as Crippen & Landru does) collects into a book for the first time the short stories of an old-time author, it is cause to rejoice.”

~ “Looking Backward” by Charles Shibuk and “A Sidebar by Arthur Vidro” (2 pages):

   Shibuk discusses the comments supplied by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor for A Book of Prefaces to Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction, 1900-1950: “The collaborators have endowed these highly literate prefaces with all the wisdom of their many years of reading experience. Their pithy remarks are always interesting, enlightening, and a good example of their critical expertise and mandarin tastes.” Arthur Vidro helpfully appends a complete list of those “Fifty Classics.”

~ “Christie Corner” by Dr. John Curran (2 pages):

   The world’s foremost expert on Dame Agatha summarizes recent developments in Old Blighty, with comments of the newest collection of Christie stories, The Last Séance: Tales of the Supernatural, many of them coming from The Hound of Death (1933); TV adaptations of Christie’s works, some more successful (i.e., being true to the originals) than others; and two festivals honoring She Who Had a Talent to Deceive.

~ “Give Me That Old-Time Detection Film Music” by Marvin Lachman (3 pages):

   Lachman highlights the musical scores of classic detective/mystery/crime movies from the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and a little beyond, many of which are very memorable, even haunting, such as the ones in The Letter and Double Indemnity (both by Max Steiner); Laura (David Raksin); The Big Sleep (Steiner again); Spellbound, The Naked City, and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Miklos Rozsa in all three cases); Sunset Boulevard (Franz Waxman); and Murder on the Orient Express from 1974 (Richard Rodney Bennett).

~ Mega-Review: Mycroft and Sherlock (2018) by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar & Anna Waterhouse; reviewed by Michael Dirda (2 pages):

   A former basketball superstar (with an acknowledged writing partner) has another go at modifying the Sherlockian mythos in this sequel to Mycroft Holmes (2015). The story introduces a character many readers may have heard of, an “intense young man” who is “arrogant, stubborn, argumentative, and almost bloodthirsty in his taste for newspaper accounts of the latest crimes and atrocities.” Dirda concedes that “it moves along briskly, and the reader’s interest never flags,” but it does have its flaws.

~ “Spotlight on Freeman Wills Crofts” by Charles Shibuk (4 pages):

   For mystery fans Crofts needs no introduction, being a pioneer of the police procedural subgenre starting with The Cask (1920, published the same year as Agatha Christie’s first book), a novel which received high praise from Anthony Boucher: “Possibly the most completely competent first novel in the history of crime, it is the definitive novel of alibis, timetables — and all the absorbing hairsplitting of detection . . .” With some exceptions, Crofts’s later works adhered pretty much to the same pattern, especially after he introduced his most famous detective, Inspector French.

~ “35 Years Ago: Mystery Reviews” by Jon L. Breen (3 pages):

Deadly Reunion (1975; 1982 in the U.S.) by Jan Ekström:

   Unlike other Scandinavian writers who have achieved fame in the Anglophonic world, Ekström takes a less common approach to crime fiction, being “solidly in the tradition of the Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s, with an enthusiasm for locked room and impossible crime situations that has marked him as the Swedish John Dickson Carr”—high praise indeed.

Ice by Ed McBain:

   Starting in the mid-fifties, Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels chronicled the ups and downs of a “family” of police officers, focusing on the group’s various adventures and misadventures in crime solving, and Ice is no different: “Police procedurals come in two types: the single-case type and the modular type. In the latter, truer to life but harder for a writer to bring off successfully, several unconnected cases are involved. McBain has experimented with both types but usually concentrates on one investigation, as he does in Ice.”

~ Fiction: “Murder in the Hills” by T. S. Stribling (The Saint Detective Magazine, February 1956), a Henry Poggioli short story (12 pages):

   Poggioli and his “Watson” walk straight into an old-fashioned Southern feud when they’re persuaded to investigate a possible murder; mercurial Mercutio could bitterly wish Romeo “A plague a’ both your houses,” but Poggioli takes a different approach.

~ Book Reviews:

That Day the Rabbi Left Town (1996) by Harry Kemelman; reviewed by Ruth Ordivar:

   Kemelman’s last book about Rabbi Small seems more noteworthy for its depiction of the inner world of education than its central mystery.

Murder Fantastical (1967) by Patricia Moyes; reviewed by Kathleen Riley:

   It’s hard to go wrong with a writer who “gives you warm and fuzzy British in a skillfully written package — and an engaging series character to boot,” namely Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett.

Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective (1934) by Agatha Christie; reviewed by Rita Hurvord:

   Unlike Christie’s better-known professional heavesdropper Hercule Poirot, Parker Pyne, whose specialty is being a professional helper-outer, “does not proclaim himself a sleuth, because he isn’t one. But he does some sleuthing nonetheless.”

~ The Non-Fiction World of Ed Hoch — Biography: John D. MacDonald by Edward D. Hoch:

   Hoch didn’t just write detective fiction, he wrote about it and the authors who produce it, in this case John D. MacDonald, most remembered for his Travis McGee series.

~ Royal Archives: “Dannay-Stribling, Part Five” by Arthur Vidro:

   Examining the correspondence between Fred Dannay, editor of EQMM, and other authors, in this case, T. S. Stribling, best known as the creator of the Poggioli series.

~ “Random Thoughts on Writing the Paperback Revolution” by Charles Shibuk:

   “In conclusion I think that about one-fourth of the review copies I receive are absolute junk, half of them are—shall we say—uninteresting, and the remainder are of some interest even if they don’t qualify for review.”

~ The Readers Write:

   “Issue #51 was top-notch, with illuminating contributions by the veteran mavens of detective literature . . .”

~ Puzzle Page:

   If you know your Poirot backwards and forwards, then this issue’s puzzle will be a snap.

       Subscription information:

– Published three times a year: spring, summer, and autumn.

– Sample copy: $6.00 in U.S.; $10.00 anywhere else.

– One-year U.S.: $18.00 ($15.00 for Mensans).

– One-year overseas: $40.00 (or 25 pounds sterling or 30 euros).

– Payment: Checks payable to Arthur Vidro, or cash from any nation, or U.S. postage stamps or PayPal.

       Mailing address:

Arthur Vidro, editor
Old-Time Detection
2 Ellery Street
Claremont, New Hampshire 03743

       Web address:

vidro@myfairpoint.net.

ROBERT TWOHY “McKevitt–100 Proof.” Short story. Albin McKevitt 1. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1968. Probably never reprinted.

   Thus begins this tale, an absolute gem of a throwback to the pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s, in which detective heroes could be as drunk as a hoot owl and still be able to solve the cases they somehow stumble into.

   Albin McKevitt is not a PI, but he might as well be. Instead, however, he’s a reporter with a nose for news, and in the room, besides the members of the local police force, are one man and two women. And a dead man, a bullet hole squarely in the middle of his forehead.

   They claim it was a matter of self-defense, one of the women having shot and killed her husband, with the other woman there as a bona fide witness. McKeviit asks a few questions, wanders around, then called his editor, telling him, to the astonishment of the good lieutenant, it’s murder all right. Premeditated murder.

   Besides its obvious comic overtones, this is also a bona fide detective story. One could only wish that there had been many more adventures of Albin McKevitt that Robert Twohy could have told us about, but alas, this is a one and done.

   As an author of detective mysteries and short stories, Robert Twohy wrote almost 80 of them between 1957 and 1994, all for either Ellery Queen’s or Alfred Hitchcock’s magazines. Someone named Jim Quark was in four of the; otherwise all of his other work were standalones like this one.

MARY (THERESA ELEANOR) HIGGINS CLARK, author of some 50 plus crime and suspense novels died yesterday, January 31, 2020, at the age of 92. Her sales, in the millions of copies, must rank her as being among the greatest of any recent or current writer in the field.

   Theatrical films have been made of the following novels: A Stranger Is Watching (1982), Where Are the Children? (1986), Lucky Day (2002) , and All Around the Town (2002), and dozens more have been adapted into made-for-TV films.

   The following bibliography has been taken from the Fantastic Fiction website:

      The Alvirah and Willy series —

   [A lottery winner and her husband use their winnings to solve crimes.]

1. Weep No More, My Lady (1987)

2. The Lottery Winner (1994)
3. All Through The Night (1998)
4. Deck the Halls (2000) (with Carol Higgins Clark)
5. The Christmas Thief (2004) (with Carol Higgins Clark)
6. Santa Cruise (2006) (with Carol Higgins Clark)
7. Dashing Through the Snow (2008) (with Carol Higgins Clark)
8. I’ll Walk Alone (2011)
9. The Lost Years (2012)
10. As Time Goes By (2016)
11. All By Myself Alone (2017)

      The Regan Reilly series (with Carol Higgins Clark)

   [Regan Reilly is a private investigator based in Los Angeles.]

Deck the Halls (2000)

The Christmas Collection (2006)
Santa Cruise (2006)
Dashing Through the Snow (2008)

      The “Under Suspicion” series —

   [Laurie Moran is a producer on the television series ‘Under Suspicion’, a documentary program which investigates unsolved cold cases.]

1. I’ve Got You Under My Skin (2014)

2. The Cinderella Murder (2013) (with Alafair Burke)
3. All Dressed in White (2015) (with Alafair Burke)
4. The Sleeping Beauty Killer (2016) (with Alafair Burke)
5. Every Breath you Take (2017) (with Alafair Burke)
6. You Don’t Own Me (2018) (with Alafair Burke)

       Other Novels —

Aspire to the Heavens (1960) aka Mount Vernon Love Story (non-criminous)
Where Are the Children? (1975)

A Stranger Is Watching (1978)
The Cradle Will Fall (1980)
A Cry in the Night (1982)
Stillwatch (1984)
While My Pretty One Sleeps (1989)
Loves Music, Loves to Dance (1991)
All Around the Town (1992)
I’ll Be Seeing You (1993)
Remember Me (1994)
Pretend You Don’t See Her (1995)
Let Me Call You Sweetheart (1995)
Silent Night (1995)
Moonlight Becomes You (1996)
You Belong to Me (1998)
We’ll Meet Again (1998)
Before I Say Good-Bye (2000)
On the Street Where You Live (2000)
He Sees You When You’re Sleeping (2001) (with Carol Higgins Clark)
Daddy’s Little Girl (2002)
The Second Time Around (2003)
Nighttime Is My Time (2004)
No Place Like Home (2005)
Two Little Girls in Blue (2006)
I Heard That Song Before (2007)
Where Are You Now? (2008)
Just Take My Heart (2009)
The Shadow of Your Smile (2010)
Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (2013)
Inherit the Dead (2013) (with C J Box, Lee Child, John Connolly, Charlaine Harris, Jonathan Santlofer and Lisa Unger)
The Melody Lingers on (2015)
I’ve Got My Eyes on You (2018)
Kiss the Girls and Make Them Cry (2019)

   Seven issues of Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine were published sporadically between 1996 and 2000.

ANNE PERRY – A Christmas Gathering. Novella. Lady Vespasia & Victor Narraway. Christmas series #17. Ballantine, hardcover, November 2019. Setting: England-early 1900s

First Sentence: It was not the Christmas Vespasia had planned.

   Vespasia and Narraway had hoped for a quiet Christmas at home. Instead, they are obligated to attend the country estate gathering of Max and Lady Amelia Cavendish. More than a holiday celebration for Narraway, former head of Special Branch, he is there to uncover a traitor.

   Perry does an excellent job of introducing one to the characters, as well as providing background on Vespasia’s history and relationship with Narraway.

   Perry’s observations often cause one to pause— “But this visit was duty, and he learned long ago that no happiness was untarnished for long if you had shirked duty in order to take it.” A nicely done recounting of Narraway’s history reveals the significance of this visit. Most authors would be inclined to depict Narraway as a classic strong male. Perry skillfully avoids that trope and gives us a man with faults and insecurities, and we like him all the more for it.

   The relationship between the two principal characters is an interesting one, and Perry captures the nuances of it perfectly. The sharpness repartee between Vespasia and Amelia is perfect and reflects Perry’s skill with dialogue. She also captures the audacity of status; how those who are “higher” believe it gives them privileges simply because of their rank.

   One can’t help but love Vespasia as she begins to conduct her own investigation and demands that Victor let her help, and for snapping at him when he dismisses her idea— “But with a woman, it is not the words, it is the message that matters.” For those readers who have followed Perry’s series for years, this Vespasia seems much sharper in tone. It is rather gratifying.

    A Christmas Gathering is a good addition to the series of novellas. It’s always nice to see her normally secondary characters move into the limelight. The story has a subtle building of tension and while the suspense is well done, it is truly the characters who bring make this book work

Rating:   Good.