CARTER BROWN – The Strawberry-Blonde Jungle. Belmont Tower, paperback original, 1979.

   Carter Brown’s back, and he’s got Danny Boyd with him. Brown was a mainstay at Signet for years — sales of over 50,000,000, so says the cover, and not a bad track record at all — before being dropped several years ago.

   His kind of story being hard to sink, he’s resurfaced in recent months at Belmont Tower, but with some of the sleazier aspects of his later days at Signet still very much in evidence — if not more.

   As for Danny Boyd, he’s moved from Manhattan to Santo Bahia, California, but he’s still a private eye. In his own words, he’s about the ripest bastard he knows, with a penchant for a leer and saying his mind.

   This latest case involves a widow’s hunt for some leftover syndicate money, and a reasonable number of complications develop, but it’s your meat only depending on how deeply your craving for bosomy babes and bawdy broads runs in your daily dose of detective fiction.

   This is a family magazine, as I’ve remarked before, so I don’t believe I’d better explain the title.

Bibliographic Note:   The final Carter Brown novel from Signet may have been The Dream Merchant, which came out in June 1976. When Belmont Tower picked up the franchise in 1979, they published six or so that year, with Donovan’s Delight and The Spanking Girls appearing first, followed by The Strawberry-Blonde Jungle.

N. A. TEMPLE-ELLIS – The Man Who Was There. E. P. Dutton, US, hardcover, 1930. First published in the UK: Metheun, hardcover, 1930.

   In order to hasten his recovery from influenza, Montrose Arbuthnot, criminologist, has taken his faithful but not too bright companion, Sir Edmund King, to the Isle of Wight. One day as they are preparing to golf, the housekeeper from a nearby bungalow informs them that her master had been shot and killed.

   They find the corpse, an empty safe, a young man on the veranda reading Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and Arbuthnot’s card on the floor of the dining room. The corpse’s missing pince-nez is of concern to Arbuthnot, but even more puzzling to him is the hat that cannot be found when the alleged murderer drives off a cliff. “Murderers always wear hats,” Arbuthnot contends.

   Amusing and action-filled, with a complex crime and somewhat fair play. Arbuthnot and King are interesting characters, though one does wonder how they manage to tolerate each other’s faults, if indeed Arbuthnot can be said to have faults.

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

TEMPLE-ELLIS, N. A. Pseudonym of N. A. Holdaway, 1894-?

* The Inconsistent Villains (n.) Methuen 1929; Dutton, 1929. [Montrose Arbuthnot]
* The Cauldron Bubbles (n.) Methuen 1930
* The Man Who Was There (n.) Methuen 1930; Dutton, 1930. [Montrose Arbuthnot]
* Quest (n.) Methuen 1931 [Montrose Arbuthnot]
* Six Lines (n.) Hodder 1932
* The Case in Hand (n.) Hodder 1933
* The Hollow Land (n.) Hodder 1934

* Three Went In (n.) Hodder 1934 [Insp. Wren]
* Dead in No Time (n.) Hodder 1935 [Montrose Arbuthnot; Insp. Wren] US title: Murder in the Ruins, Dial, 1936
* Death of a Decent Fellow (n.) Hodder 1941 [Insp. Wren]

Note:   Temple-Ellis’s first book, The Inconsistent Villains, was the winner of the publisher’s Detective Story Competition of the year, beating Josephine Tey’s classic The Man in the Queue.

RICHARD FORREST – The Wizard of Death. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1977. Pocket, paperback, 1978.

   Connecticut residents will get a kick out of this inside view of state gubernatorial politics. When the nominee Randolph Llewyn is assassinated at a political rally, it appears that writer Lyon Wentworth’s wife is the next target. Bea Wentworth is a state senator and has a great deal of influence over who the next nominee will be.

   The Chamber of Commerce is not likely to be pleased with some of ground covered during the course of the investigation, including the hangouts of several motorcycle clubs lobbying against the helmet bill and the sleazier side Hartford’s massage parlors.

   The whole business is pretty unlikely, and one fears that it’s also quite superficial. But it reads quickly, and it is fun at times to indulge your fantasies.

      The Bea & Lyon Wentworth series —

A Child’s Garden of Death (n.) Bobbs 1975.
The Wizard of Death (n.) Bobbs 1977.
Death Through the Looking Glass (n.) Bobbs 1978.
Death in the Willows (n.) Holt 1979.
The Death at Yew Corner (n.) Holt 1980.
Death Under the Lilacs (n.) St. Martin’s 1985.
Death on the Mississippi (n.) St. Martin’s 1989.
The Pied Piper of Death (n.) St. Martin’s 1997.

JASPER FFORDE – One of Our Thursdays Is Missing. Hodder Library, UK, hardcover, February 2011. Viking, UK, hc, March 2011.

   Jasper Fforde is among the top writers in “cross-genre anarchy.” A prime example of the genre is One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, a book with a blend of every genre in the library except pornography and non-fiction.

   The Thursday Next series we read does not exist in the Nextian Universe where the alternative reality of RealWorld and the world of the written word in BookWorld are located. The Nextian version of the Thursday Next books is the home of Written Thursday and read by the people of RealWorld.

   RealWorld Thursday has the unique ability to travel between RealWorld and BookWorld. There has been more than one Written Thursday, the current one is dealing with self-esteem issues trying to live up to the racy Written Thursday she replaced and her idol RealWorld Thursday.

   This is the sixth book in the Thursday Next series and features a major change in protagonist. It is told from the point of view of Written Thursday as RealWorld Thursday is missing. Written Thursday’s narration does more than just tell the story, through her we discover what it feels like to be unread, almost remaindered.

   We experience the frustration of losing one’s own identity in the middle of a conversation because the “ghostwriter” has stopped using “she says” or “he said” until none of the characters know who said what. We learn the difference between reality and fiction, but from fiction’s point of view.

   The story begins on the big day when BookWorld changes from the Giant Library into a geographic world. Meanwhile, the possibility of Civil War between Racy Novel and Women’s Fiction is growing more likely.

   The Thursday Next books, located in fantasy, are suffering from such a serious drop in readers the actors playing the characters are worried about their future, and blaming Written Thursday for the lack of readers. But soon Written Thursday is faced with even more serious problems.

   Jurisfiction, BookWorld’s police, asks Written Thursday to solve the mystery of an unknown book that had mysteriously exploded over BookWorld. When Written Thursday finds evidence of sabotage, she finds herself dangerously in the middle of a deadly conspiracy that could destroy BookWorld.

   There is much in this story to please the mystery reader. Why was the book destroyed? What was its title, and who was its author? Who do the secret police Men In Plaid really serve? Why is someone trying to start a war between Racy Novel and Women’s Fiction? What role does RealWorld evil corporation Goliath play in the conspiracy and why? And where is the RealWorld Thursday Next?

   The humor has much to offer readers of all genres. For mystery fans, Written Thursday describes a scene in the land of Thriller:

   While I recommend you read the Thursday Next series in order, it is possible to enjoy this book by itself. Each book in the series has a satisfying ending but leaves enough plot threads open to set up the next book.

   For example, here we learn why, in First Among Sequels, RealWorld Thursday was the only one who could see her second daughter, Jenny. In One of Our Thursdays Are Missing, we are left with unanswered questions about Goliath’s current evil plan in the RealWorld.

   Answers to those questions will most likely be revealed in TN7. However, the mysteries of the BookWorld conspiracy are solved at the end, as is what happened to RealWorld Thursday.

   The Thursday Next series continues to satisfy fans of quality satire, mystery, and any other genre.

      The Thursday Next series —

1. The Eyre Affair (2001)

2. Lost in a Good Book (2002)
3. The Well of Lost Plots (2003)
4. Something Rotten (2004)
5. First Among Sequels (2007)
6. One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (2011)

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER – Bryant & May Off the Rails: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery. Bantam, hardcover, September 2010; trade paperback, September 2011. Originally published in the UK: Doubleday, hardcover, June 2010.

Genre:   Police procedural. Leading characters:  Arthur Bryant & John May; 8th in series. Setting:   England.

First Sentence:   With regard to your apprehension of the hired assassin operating in the King’s Cross area, this so-called “King’s Cross Executioner” chap, thank you for acting so quickly on the matter, although it’s a pity he subsequently managed to give you the slip.

   A killer known as Mr. Fox has been captured by Detectives Arthur Bryant and John May, but escaped, murdering one of their colleagues in the process. A body has been discovered in a station of London’s Underground. Was Mr. Fox the killer or does the Peculiar Crimes Unit have another killer on their hands?

   Okay, I’ll start right out by admitting I love Bryant and May. In them, Fowler ha created two of the most appealing characters being written today. And it is truly Fowler’s excellent writing and voice which brings them, and the story, to life.

   I have always appreciated books which include a cast of characters. Fowler found a particularly clever way of incorporating his cast of principal characters into the story as a staff roster. In this book, he provides a description of Bryant which truly does give “some measure of the man,” and I love his Bryant’s habit of reciting dictionary definitions.

   Bryant and May, while being the central characters, are not alone but supported by a host of secondary characters each given distinct backgrounds, characteristics and contributions to the story. With each book, we learn more of each character’s background and personalities. But beyond the central characters, it is a rare author who can make one feel an element of sympathy for a series killer, but Fowler manages so to do.

   There is wonderful humor balanced by touching poignancy. There is a balance of historical information — the London Underground system — with very contemporary references — the use of a flash mob as a distraction. It is the inclusion of small details about which one normally doesn’t think; such as the inclusion as to why escalators are always breaking down and the comparison between actors and serial killers, which I appreciate.

   This is a book where one should have read the previous books in the series. That is no great burden, however, as all the Bryant and May stories are so well done and delightful to read. I should hate to see this series end so, please, give them a try, spread the word and enjoy Bryant and May. Off the Rails is another excellent addition to the series.

Rating:   Excellent.

     The Bryant & May series —

1. Full Dark House (2003)
2. The Water Room (2004)

3. Seventy-Seven Clocks (2005)
4. Ten Second Staircase (2006)
5. White Corridor (2007)
6. The Victoria Vanishes (2008)

7. Bryant and May on the Loose (2009)
8. Off the Rails (2010)
9. The Memory of Blood (2011)

THE MOLLYCODDLE. Fairbanks-United Artists, 1920. Douglas Fairbanks, Ruth Renick, Wallace Beery. Director: Victor Fleming. Shown at Cinecon 44, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2008.

   The films that Fairbanks made before the success of Robin Hood propelled him into the big-budget historical epics for which he is now remembered may not be as visually sumptuous as his later work, but they are every bit as entertaining.

   In this, his third United Artists release, Fairbanks plays Richard Marshall V, the descendant of a line of risk-takers and adventurers, who is the “Mollycoddle” of the title, a term coined by Theodore Roosevelt to characterize a spoiled, frivolous young man.

   Attracted to a young woman in Monte Carlo, he insinuates himself into her group, a party formed by villainous diamond smuggler Henry Van Holkar (Wallace Beery) that is shortly to set off as a cover for an Arizona tour where Van Holkar will pick up another supply of diamonds for delivery to Amsterdam.

   The Arizona excursion proves to be the making of Richard, who performs spectacular stunts that prefigure the Fairbanks roles shortly to follow. The most spectacular stunt, in which Marshall leaps from a cliff to a tree, was filmed with a double because of injuries Fairbanks sustained in an earlier stunt.

   The doubling is seamlessly shot, with the dastardly villain foiled and the intrepid hero and fair maiden reunited. All of the early Fairbanks films are wonderfully entertaining; ten of them, including The Moddycoddle, I am delighted to say, are included in a reecnt DVD set from Flicker Alley.

Editorial Note: In that set referred to by Walter are: His Picture in the Papers / The Mystery of the Leaping Fish / Flirting With Fate / The Matrimaniac / Wild and Woolly / Reaching for the Moon / When the Clouds Roll By / The Mollycoddle / The Mark of Zorro / The Nut.

ROBERT C. S. ADEY & DOUGLAS G. GREENE, Editors – Death Locked In. International Polygonics Ltd, softcover, 1987. Hardcover reprint: Barnes & Noble, 1994.

   Death Locked In is a generous collection of twenty-four stories covering 553 pages. Its editors, Robert C. S. Adey and Douglas G. Greene, are two of the world’s leading experts on the locked room mystery. Lest those who are not devotees of the classical puzzle be put off, I will point out that this book contains great variety, though all stories have one common denominator: a locked room.

   From the pulps are stories by Fredric Brown and Cornell Woolrich. There is a science-fiction mystery by Anthony Boucher. Ngaio Marsh, quite appropriately, uses a theatrical setting. Even Bill Pronzini’s nameless private eye solves one. Early locked-room stories by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, L. Frank Baum of Oz fame, Nick Carter, and Wilkie Collins are included.

   Finally, we have the best practitioners of this wonderful sub-genre: John Dickson Carr, Edward D. Hoch, and Ellery Queen with a reprint of one of his famous radio mysteries. Each story in the book has a learned introduction, telling interesting information about the author and putting the story into historical perspective.

OUT OF THE PAST. RKO, 1947. Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming, Richard Webb, Steve Brodie, Virginia Huston, Paul Valentine. Screenplay by Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring) based on his novel Build My Gallows High. Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca. Director: Jacques Tourneur.

   I recently took time out to revisit the ultimate film noir, Out of the Past, (RKO, 1947) and the book it was based on, Build My Gallows High (Morrow, 1946) by Geoffrey Homes.

   I wasted an awful lot of my precious youth reading other books by Homes, thinking on the strength of Gallows that he must be pretty good. ’Tain’t so. In fact, Homes’ book, which suffers from over-complication and a surfeit of stock characters, is perceptibly inferior to the screenplay he adapted from it.

   The film’s plot is still dense and impenetrable, but the characters are more developed and streamlined, the action is well-calculated and surprisingly stark, and though the nature of the story is quite leisurely, momentum never flags, probably thanks to director Jacques Tourneur, who learned early on in his career how to get things moving, and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, who fills the screen with some truly striking imagery.

   Interestingly, though the book Build My Gallows High is written in the third person, the movie Out of the Past is very much a first-person thing; Robert Mitchum narrates most of the first half as he recounts the story of why he has to go to Tahoe and pay a call on gang-boss Kirk Douglas. It seems years ago

         (WARNING! PLOT DETAILS AHEAD!!)

Mitchum was hired to find Douglas’ runaway mistress Kathy (Jane Greer) but ended up running off with her and living happily ever etc. until she framed him for murder and ran out on him.

   Well, we’ve all had relationships like that, and all this is told voice-over by Mitchum till he arrives at Tahoe and finds Kathy there, once again sharing Douglas’ bed.

   That, as I say, is the first half. Having brought us up to date,

          (WARNING! Continued.)

the movie gets Mitchum embroiled in a blackmail scheme and involved with a second femme fatale, this one named Meta and played by Rhonda Fleming as a less-classy version of Kathy.

   For this second half of the film, there is no more voice-over, but Tourneur and Musuraca increasingly photograph Mitchum from behind or in silhouette, and they employ more subjective shots, showing events from his point of view, visually forcing us to identify with the character, though he’s no longer narrating.

   And then there’s a moment no one talks about: having been betrayed by Meta, Mitchum makes his way back to her apartment and hides there to wait for her return. The door opens and Kathy comes in, goes to the phone and identifies herself as Meta.

   Now logically, there’s no reason for her character to even be in that part of the country, but dramatically, it makes such perfect poetic sense for the two femme fatales to merge into each other that most reviewers don’t even notice.

   Mention should also be made — and here it is — of an actor named Paul Valentine [above, on the right] who plays Douglas’s sinister gofer. Smooth, balletic, and lethal, displaying an easy-going manner that never seems less than deadly, it’s an outstanding performance that should have led to bigger things. But alas, did not.

ALICE CAMPBELL – Desire to Kill. Farrar & Rinehart, US, hardcover, 1934. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1934.

   In his interesting and influential but often rather one-sided analysis of English detective novels and thrillers between the wars, Snobbery with Violence: English Crime Stories and Their Audience (1971), Colin Watson portrays the Golden Age English mystery as quite straight-laced, sexually speaking, with blushing crime fiction writers of the day able to bring themselves to refer only “obliquely” to “coital encounters.”

    “The political tone [of the between-the-wars English mystery novel] was conservative save in a handful of instances,” pronounces Watson. “As for morals, it would be difficult to point to any other single branch of popular entertainment that conformed more strictly to current notions of decency. […] An almost Victorian reticence continued to be observed in crime fiction for decades after treatment of unsavory topics had come to be accepted, within limits, as a legitimate feature of the straight novel.”

   Colin Watson likely never read Alice Campbell’s 1934 crime novel Desire to Kill.

   Admittedly, the novel is set in France (specifically Paris), where many English readers no doubt could more easily accept the presence of moral decadence in human life. Still, the plot itself quite strikingly involves elements (drugs, homosexuality, prostitution and sexual voyeurism) that would be right at home in the unbuttoned and unzipped modern mystery.

   Alice Campbell (1887-?) herself was an American, though, like John Dickson Carr, she is associated with the English school of mystery. Originally she came from Atlanta, Georgia, where she was part of the socially prominent Ormond family. (Ormond was her maiden name.)

   Campbell moved to New York City at the age of nineteen and became a socialist and women’s suffragist (this according the blurb on a 1939 Penguin paperback — evidently Penguin did not deem it necessary to shield potential readers from knowledge of this author’s less than conservative background). She moved to Paris before World War One, married the American-born artist and writer James Lawrence Campbell and had a son in 1914. By the 1930s (possibly sooner), the family had left France for England, where Campbell continued writing crime fiction until 1950 (the year The Corpse Had Red Hair appeared).

   Campbell’s first mystery novel was Juggernaut, a highly-praised tale of the murderous machinations of a villainous doctor. (The story was adapted into a film starring Boris Karloff in 1936.) Throughout the rest of the pre-WW2 period, most of her crime tales were set in France.

   Desire to Kill is one of the French novels. Like many of Campbell’s crime stories, it is really more a tale of suspense, though there is some detection in the form of attempts by a couple amateur investigators to pin the crime on the true villain. Dorothy L. Sayers praised the novel “for the soundness of the charactersation and the lively vigor of the writing,” which she thought helped to lift the narrative out of “sheer melodrama.”

   And melodramatic the tale is! The opening sequence, which concerns the events at socialite heiress Dorinda Quarles’ bohemian drug party, is well-conveyed. Sybaritic “Dodo” Quarles imbibes deeply and frequently at the well of moneyed decadence:

   Dodo’s latest wicked pash is the cult-like new religion of the Bannister Mowbray, obviously a charlatan and a degenerate, at least in the eyes of the respectable:

   Bannister Mowbray’s current “henchman and slave” is Ronald Cleeves, the handsome son and heir of Lord Conisbrooke. The author compares him, in a suggestive image, to a “pure Greek temple…invaded by a band of satyrs.”

   Later on Campbell’s amateur detective, the brash, American-born freelance journalist Tommy Rostetter, visits the two men at Ronald’s Parisian abode and finds them “wearing dressing-gowns” and sitting “close together, in earnest discussion over bowls of café au lait.”

   Other characters in the novel — all guests as Dodo’s party — include:

   Peter Hummock, originally of South Bend, Indiana. “Ranked as the most pestiferous social nuisance in Paris,” Hummock nominally deals in antiques and designs tea-gowns “for middle-western compatriots” but spends most of his time “in a tireless dash from one gay function to another, impervious to snubs, detailing scandal.”

   Mrs. Cope-Villiers, “familiarly known as Dick…a reputed addict to cocaine.”

   â€œThe glum and taciturn Australian poetess, Maud Daventry.” A neighbor of Tommy’s (based on Gertrude Stein?), she first is mentioned in Campbell’s earlier Tommy Rostetter mystery, The Click of the Gate (1932). Tommy has “nothing against her, little alluring as was her soggy complexion, mannish dinner-jacket, and untidy mop of hair invariably flecked with cigarette-ash.”

   Announcing that Dodo’s party guests have consumed a powerful hallucinogenic drug, Bannister Mowbray promises them the thrill of intense dreams:

   During the period when all the guests at Dodo’s party are ostensibly in drug-induced stupors, Dodo is stabbed to death—a rather Manson-like culmination of events!

   Apparently someone indeed had cherished an ordinarily forbidden desire, a desire to kill; and its accomplishment in those dark hours was not at all illusory.

   When a woman he believes to be innocent is implicated in Dodo’s murder, Tommy investigates to discover what truly happened at this decadent affair. He finds that the dead Dodo is not missed:

   Despite encountering indifference and resistance, Tommy perseveres in his investigation and eventually discovers an amazing answer to his problem. Proving it, however, proves a perilous endeavor indeed for him.

   Much of the later part of the novel involves goings-on at a house of prostitution where, for a price, the madam allows those voyeurs who like to look but not touch access to strategically placed peepholes, so that they may watch the house’s illicit couples coupling.

   Though Campbell never directly describes sexual acts, reticent she is not in Desire to Kill. In terms of subject matter the novel certainly offers something outside the beaten Golden Age track — and the mystery is not at all a fizzle either. It is herewith recommended as an antidote to conventional genre wisdom and for its sheer entertainment value.

CAMPBELL, ALICE (Ormond). 1887-1976?

    — The bibliography above was taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.

   The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran an article yesterday morning on the appearance of K. C. Constantine at the Mystery Lovers of American 16th annual Festival of Mystery, where he signed copies of Pittsburgh Noir, featuring short stories by Pittsburgh authors, and his previously published novels (the most recent of which was published ten years ago).

   He confirmed his actual name, already available on the internet. He’s 76 years old, a native of McKees Rocks, and currently living in Greensburg PA. On the subject of why he maintained his privacy for many years, replied that he “wished he could remember,” but finally decided that “it was ridiculous to keep up [the] charade.” The article, with an accompanying photo, can be found at http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11123/1143638-44.stm