Anna Katharine Green’s milestone American detective novel, The Leavenworth Case (1878), was reprinted last year in an attractive new edition as part of the Penguin Classics series, which now puts the tale in the company of such distinguished nineteenth-century works with detection and sensation elements as Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1853), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868).

    “Some critics disparage [Green’s] characters’ occasional florid speeches” in The Leavenworth Case, admits Michael Sims in his Introduction to the new edition of the tale. Nevertheless Sims contends that while “now and then [Green’s] storytelling [in The Leavenworth Case] is as leisurely as you would expect from a nineteenth-century novel,” the author “keeps the dialogue lively and mostly convincing.”

   I would have to dispute Sims’ contention. Except in the effective portrayal of the archetypal “nosey spinster” character, Amelia Butterworth (who appears in three later Green mystery novels), lively and convincing dialogue did not flow easily from the pen of Anna Katharine Green. Indeed, during the numerous high stress situations in Leavenworth, the dialogue, which is never memorable, becomes positively purple (and therefore false), as the character prate like bad stage actors in fifth-rate melodramas:

   Put simply (as she herself too infrequently put things), Anna Katharine Green was not a scintillating writer. To get to the puzzle plots in her tales, one must wade through shoals of prose that ranges from the merely tedious to the truly tiresome. Even forty years after Leavenworth, as the Twenties roared just around the corner (and with it the Golden Age of detective fiction), Green, in The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow (1917) continued to write unattractively and unpersuasively:

   and:

   And Green’s characters still have a pronounced tendency to orate, rather than speak naturally, as real-world human beings:

   I found Arrow too dully written to bear with over its great length (despite some excellent “multimedia” floor plans that are like something out of one of S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance murder cases), yet I wondered about Michael Sims’ implication that the leaden prolixity of Green’s writing simply reflected her literary age. For my part, I certainly had not remembered Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins being unable to sketch appealing, believable characters.

   So for purpose of this review I decided to read three fairly short “sensationalist” works by three Victoran authors: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “The Mystery at Fernwood”(1862), Wilkie Collins’ “Who Killed Zebedee?” (1881) and Benjamin Leopold Farjeon’s Devlin the Barber (1888).

   In each case I found that, while, the works offered nothing in the way of the more complex detection found in the tales of Anna Katharine Green, nevertheless they each contrastingly offered believable characters and emotionally compelling situations and as a result were vastly more enjoyable to read.

    “The Mystery at Fernwood” and “Who Killed Zebedee?” are long short stories (about forty and twenty-five pages, respectively; the latter is also known, more prosaically, as Mr. Policeman and the Cook).

   In “Fernwood” Mary Braddon effectively mines the Gothic tradition that had been first struck in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and that perhaps produced it richest early lode of ore with Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). In many of Braddon’s verbose triple-decker sensation novels, appealing mystery elements are too much submerged in love stories (see, for example, Wyllard’s Weird, 1885), but that is not so with the lean and spare Fernwood.

   In this tale, a young woman finds not only mystery but grave menace when she visits Fernwood, the decaying Yorkshire country estate of her fiancee. “No, Isabel, I do not consider that Lady Adela seconded her son’s invitation at all warmly,” fatefully announces the heroine’s aunt in the first line of the story.

   Academics might strain hard with this tale to find deep meaning about the position of women in Victorian England, but I do not see it myself. However, “Fernwood” is a rattlingly suspenseful tale (even if you pierce the veil of the mystery quickly, as you probably will) and a fine example of the grand and hallowed Gothic tradition that has extended right up to this day in such mystery genre works as Barbara Vine’s The Minotaur (2005).

   Wilkie Collins’ “Who Killed Zebedee?” at first seems, with its title and its setting (a lodging house full of eccentric characters), to have popped straight out of the Golden Age of the detective novel (1920-1939), rather than the Victorian era. A frantic cook bursts into a police station, armed with a doleful tale of murder at the lodging house in which she is employed. The victim is one John Zebedee, who was stabbed to death in his bed.

   Suspicion immediately falls on Zebedee’s wife, a somnambulist. People fearing a repetition of another Wilkie Collins tale will be pleased to see other suspects emerge among the company of lodgers, most obviously the dandified Mr. Deluc. Desirous of helping the law is the nosy elderly spinster Miss Mybus, yet another interesting early incarnation of a character type most strongly associated today with Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.

   The attention to police procedure and the thumbnail character sketches in “Zebedee” are quite good, making one wish that the tale had been expanded into a full-length novel. As it stands,”Zebedee” is a disappointment as a tale of detection, with the solution coming essentially fortuitously.

   To be blunt, “Zebedee” is more luckstone than Moonstone. Collins is more interested here in exploring character, however, and he does this very well, even providing a surprisingly ambivalent ending in the modern fashion.

   The only novel among these three works is Devlin the Barber, a striking admixture of mystery and horror elements authored by the prolific novelist Benjamin Farjeon (father of the beloved children’s book writer Eleanor Farjeon).

   Luridly advertised on London billboards with an illustration of a young woman bloodily stabbed by a seeming maniac, the book appeared the same year as the Jack the Ripper serial killings horrified England (what are considered to be the genuine Ripper murders took place in 1888 between the dates of August 31 and November 9; Farjeon’s work appeared in serial and book form later that year). Devlin the Barber seems quite obviously to draw not only on the Ripper killings but the gruesome legend of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber.

   Devlin the Barber was called a “disagreeable but certainly ingenious tale” when it first appeared and since then has customarily been deemed the best of Farjeon’s many fictional works (only a few of which were sensationalist). Three years before the appearance of Devlin, Farjeon had written Great Porter Square (1885), the first of several praised mystery novels. The man clearly had a talent for crime writing, even though Devlin surely to an extent has to be seen as an opportunistic effort (if an inspired one).

   Despite its clear linkage with Jack the Ripper, Devlin opens with only one slaying, that of a nice, middle class young woman who for some reason was keeping a secret late-night rendezvous. After she is found fatally stabbed, it is learned that her twin sister (twins were quite popular in crime books before the Golden Age) has disappeared.

   The young ladies’ wealthy uncle, lately returned from Australia, for no particularly compelling reason offers the narrator of the tale, an out-of-work, middle-class friend of the family, a grand sum to solve the case (naturally he has no faith in the police).

   The narrator soon finds that the murdered woman had a gentleman friend, but he seems like a winning young man (he is even wealthy and has a responsible guardian). The most striking event occurs, however, when the narrator is called upon for help by his former nursemaid, Mrs. Lemon (could this have been the mother of Hercule Poirot’s future secretary — I certainly hope so). It seems Mrs. Lemon has a very odd lodger indeed, a barber named Mr. Devlin….

   Mrs. Lemon’s tale of her frightening lodger, which takes up over a fourth of the book (fifty of the Arno Press edition’s 190 pages), is a tour de force of horror narration. It is almost a disappointment when we come back to the mystery investigation. But now we have a new investigator of the heinous murder: Mr. Devlin himself! If you thought this novel was going to take the same turn of events as Marie Belloc Lowndes’ famous Ripper tale, The Lodger (1913), think again.

   More could be said about this fascinating novel, but I will leave the reader to seek out the book for him/herself. I will simply add that, in contrast with The Leavenworth Case, the narrative throughout Devlin the Barber (published ten years later) is smooth and idiomatic, a reader’s delight. Even the cry of the murdered woman’s beloved is not nearly so melodramatic as the contrived speeches you find in Leavenworth:

   The long narrative of Mrs. Lemon is especially fine. Like the better-known Braddon and Collins, Farjeon was an effective spinner of tales.

   Anyone wanting a good murder story from the Victorian era is advised to seek out these works by Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Benjamin Farjeon. They may be old, but they still speak to us today. During the last decade “The Mystery at Fernwood” and “Who Killed Zebedee?” have been reprinted in attractive editions by Hesperus Press, an admirable publisher of shorter literary classics. (The former has also been collected several times, including in Victorian Tales of Terror, edited by Hugh Lamb, as shown.)

   Devlin the Barber, however, stands in need today of a modern scholarly edition (the 1978 Arno Press reprint edition itself is now a rare and valuable collector’s item). Perhaps Penguin Classics will heed the call.

JOHN CROZIER – Murder in Public. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1934. Houghton Mifflin, hc, 1935.

   Falcon — more familiarly known to his intimates as Onanta (Swooping Falcon), son of Nibowaka (The Wise), Chief of the Sinawaa — is a North American Indian of the Delaware tribe, apparently the Canadian branch.

   Acquainted with Sherlock Holmes, Falcon emulates to some extent the Master in his own investigations. And to prove he hasn’t lost touch with his roots, Falcon has his headquarters in London.

   When a pearl necklace is stolen, amid a rash of jewelry thefts, from an American actress starring in London play, Falcon is called in. He is soon called off, but then the actress is shot dead during a performance by another actor, maybe deliberately, maybe not.

   Working with Scotland Yard and Miss Mitt, his office assistant who is as American as the author can make her, Falcon breaks up a gang of dope dealers, who were seemingly as nasty in England in the 1930s as they are here today but much more cunning.

   The information about Holmes may be of interest to Sherlockians; the rare American Indian character may be of interest to. others. Otherwise, there’s not much here.

Editorial Comments:   Bill Deeck, I am sure, was unaware of it, or he’d have mentioned it, but “John Crozier” was the pen name of the noted actor Alexander Knox, who over the years, as it turns out, was the author of a small number of mystery and adventure novels as well.

   There was one other “Falcon” mystery under the Crozier byline, that being Kidnapped Again (Hutchinson, 1935; no US edition).

   I haven’t read Murder in Public, but I found Bill’s review very illuminating, as the character named Falcon in this book is very similar to a character named Eagels in an earlier book by one Ian Alexander (another of Knox’s pen names) called The Disappearance of Archibald Forsyth (Hitchinson, 1933).

   As far as it is known, this latter book was Eagels’ only appearance. He was, however, also a London-based PI, a full-blooded North American Indian (Iroquois), had a female secretary/assistant who was most decidedly American, and someone who had met Sherlock Holmes and who based his investigative techniques on the latter’s. Here’s a brief quote, with Eagels thinking over the case as it has developed so far:

   For more, you’ll find (by following the link) my review of the Alexander book on the primary Mystery*File website.

   I believe that Eagels, long before Tony Hillerman’s detectives came along, was the first fictional Native American detective. I think the fact that both he and Falcon had supposedly met Sherlock Holmes in person is also quite remarkable.

PETE HAMILL – Dirty Laundry. Bantam, paperback original, 1978.

   Sam Briscoe, 200 pounds of Irish Jew, is not a private eye, but a newspaper reporter — very nearly the next best thing, as I’ve implied before — presently free-lancing, but once a top columnist for a New York paper. (Hamill makes no secret of the fact that he regards this series as an integral part of his imaginary autobiography.)

   A one-time girl friend calls on Sam for help, but on her way to him she’s smashed up while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. The night is cold, and Sam has no idea that the killer’s trail will soon be leading him into sunny Mexico, and involve him deeply in the affairs of some renegade revolutionaries from Cuba.

   And thereby all the ingredients of the traditional hard-boiled paperback novel are here — crime, passion, greed, lust, and revenge; the fire isn’t. And yet, if your taste runs toward the fulfillment of adolescent male fantasies, I think you’ll like it just fine.

Rating:   C plus.

[UPDATE] 03-15-11.   I had the impression back in 1979, that Sam Briscoe was going to hang around as a character a lot longer than he did, which was only two three books.

   Of course with a line like the one below, excerpted from an online biography, you can understand that the writing of PBO mysteries was not going to be a career-changer for him:

    “He [Pete Hamill] has been a columnist for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and New York Newsday, the Village Voice, New York magazine and Esquire. He has served as editor-in-chief of both the Post and the Daily News.

   And as they say, there is more, much more. The Sam Briscoe books are not mentioned.

   From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

PETE(r) HAMILL. 1935- .
      Dirty Laundry (n.) Bantam 1978 [Sam Briscoe]
      The Deadly Piece (n.) Bantam 1979 [Sam Briscoe]

      The Guns of Heaven (n.) Bantam 1983. [the third Sam Briscoe adventure; see comments]

SEABURY QUINN – Alien Flesh. Oswald Train; hardcover, 1977. Introduction by E. Hoffman Price; illustrations by Stephen Fabian. Expanded from the short story “Lynne Foster Is Dead!”, Weird Tales, November 1938.

   There is a type of book that can only be called a peculiar classic; not a work of great literature, and yet both memorable and remarkable. Inevitably such books are faintly redolent of the decadent, faintly touched with the strange; Huysman’s La Bas and Against the Grain are such books, so were the works of E. H. Visiak and William Beckford, so Mari Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan, and James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen. Everything William Morris wrote falls under this umbrella and most of Lord Dunsany.

   And so does Seabury Quinn’s Alien Flesh.

   Seabury Quinn reigned supreme in the old pulp Weird Tales. The popularity of his tales of psychic sleuth Jules de Grandin and his Watson, Dr. Trowbridge, far surpassed the popularity of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch or any of the other legendary names associated with the magazine. He even produced one genuine classic, the haunting Christmas story Roads (the legendary Arkham House edition illustrated by science fiction master Virgil Finlay is one of the most attractive books ever printed by a small press)..

   Alien Flesh is a novel, written after Weird Tales glory days, in 1950 not long before the series of strokes that ended Quinn’s fiction writing career. He lived until 1969, but no longer churned out tales of vampires, werewolves, cults, and covens, and only one book like Alien Flesh. Not that there could be more than one book like Alien Flesh.

   Hugh Arundel, Egyptologist, attending a new Egyptian exhibit at a New York museum is introduced to the fabulous Madame Foulik Bey, Ismet.

   And something draws Arundel to her, something in her strange manner, and stranger eyes, something he can’t quite put a finger on.

   In short order his life revolves around her. She becomes the axis all aspect of his thoughts turn on. And at every turn a new mystery, her nature possessing, “as many facets as a diamond.”

   And yet despite her obvious feeling for him she holds him at bay.

   Finally he pushes her and she relents and tells him her story,

   Lynne Foster was a boyhood friend. They had gone to school together, dated together, both been fascinated with Egypt. Lynne Foster had disappeared in Cairo, possibly murdered.

   And then she relates her — Lynne Foster’s — tale.

   I did warn you this was a peculiar classic.

   Lynne Foster in Egypt fell afoul of ancient sorcery, and in his western arrogance was punished. He was transformed, from the strong and tough minded young man to …

   As you might imagine this could go wrong very quickly, and it is a testament to the old pulp master’s skills that it does not. He finds a fine balance between horror, humor, whimsy, unabashed Arabian nights, the erotic — suggested but never spelled out — and sensuality — the book drips with that — as he spins out the tale of the fortunes of Lynne Foster, now Ismet a simple harem girl.

   Again, I said this was a peculiar book and it is difficult to convey to any reader how well Quinn handles this difficult theme without slipping into either soft porn or outright comedy. The book recounts Ismet’s adventures, her first touches of romance in her new body, her battle with the mind of Lynne Foster and the emotions of the woman Ismet, and her rise to riches and power using Lynne Foster’s masculine mind and Ismet Foulik’s feminine charms.

   I’m not sure I buy the sweepingly romantic ending, but Quinn more than prepares you for it, and after all, Hollywood used to churn out this kind of fantasy with regularity — though usually in the form of Thorne Smith comedy such as Turnabout or I Married A Witch.

   Here it is deadly serious, but handled so deftly that the giggles that could easily turn to guffaws and destroy the entire mood are held at bay (at least while you are caught in Quinn’s spell, I can’t answer for later) and the reader manages to stay with Quinn thanks to his sheer story telling skills.

   Once he gets you on his side he keeps you there, and plays deftly with both the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief and also the key to any storyteller’s success, the readers desire to see what happens next. Quinn knew how to spin a tale and keep the pages turning, and here those skills serve him well. This isn’t the sort of book that can survive much in the way of the reader stopping to meditate on the story.

   When this was reissued in 1977 by Oswald Train it came with an appreciative forward by Quinn’s friend and former pulp master E. Hoffman Price, a beautiful color cover by illustrator Stephen Fabian, and a full accompaniment of full page black and white illustrations also by Fabian. It’s a lovely little book and a perfect tribute to this most peculiar of peculiar classics.

   I know many of you reading this description of the book, are going to say there is no way it could work in the form Quinn gives it, and no doubt it would not for many readers, but Alien Flesh, given half of a chance earns it’s place on that shelf of peculiar classics, and earns Quinn this much from me — I can’t think of another writer who could have pulled it off with half the charm, skill, and old fashioned pulp romanticizing.

   If nothing else you turn each page just to see if he avoids the obvious traps — which he always does — and you reach the end glad to give him his choice of endings thankful for the memorable trip.

   And one more peculiar classic finds its way onto the shelves.

“Bed of Roses.” An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (Season 2, Episode 29). First air date: 22 May 1964. Patrick O’Neal, Kathie Browne, Torin Thatcher, George Lindsey, Alice Backes, Alice Frost, Bill Walker, Paulene Myers, Robert Reiner, Ethel Griffies.

   George Maxwell (Patrick O’Neal) has it all: a comfortable, undemanding, high-paying position in his father-in-law’s business (Torin Thatcher), a nice home, and a beautiful airhead trophy wife, Mavis (Kathie Browne).

   But that still isn’t enough for George. He also has a mistress — or rather, HAD a mistress. George wakes up one hungover evening to find her dead — and he’s not sure if he’s responsible.

   Let’s face it: George is ill-equipped to handle this situation. Not only does he accidentally open himself to blackmail from a snoopy cab driver and a personal secretary, but he also shows how inattentive he is as a husband.

   George, you see, is about to have an epiphany regarding his wife, one that will leave him slack-jawed with surprise and swollen with admiration. Among other revelations, he will learn that when his wife offers somebody one of her delicious sugar-molasses cookies, they would be well-advised to turn it down….

   Patrick O’Neal (1927-1994) specialized in shifty, unlikable, yet somehow elegant characters, such as the killer in the Columbo episode “Blueprint for Murder” (1972).

   Beautiful Kathie Browne (1930-2003) had “range” as an actor. She could be good with doe-eyed innocence; she could also be bad with those same doe-eyes. Watch her in the Star Trek episode “Wink of an Eye” to see what I mean.

   Torin Thatcher (1905-1981) often played screen villains; he rarely had a chance to be a good guy like his character in the Star Trek episode “The Return of the Archons.”

   George Lindsey (born 1935) is most often remembered as Goober on The Andy Griffith Show. Before he got that gig, though, he had a chance to play more complex and sinister characters in two other Hitchcock shows: “The Jar” and “The Return of Verge Likens.”

    Watch “Bed of Roses” online at Hulu.com here.

QUATERMASS II: ENEMY FROM SPACE. Hammer Films, 1957. Brian Donlevy, John Longden, Sidney James, Bryan Forbes, William Franklyn, Vera Day. Originally serialized by BBC-TV, Oct-Nov 1955, in 6 30min segments. Story & screenplay: Nigel Kneale & Val Guest. Director: Val Guest.

   Yet another surprisingly effective British Thriller that builds quietly to a really gripping finish. Brian Donlevy plays the eponymous Doctor Quatermass, who stumbles onto a top-secret Government Project that turns out to be a front for Alien Invasion.

   I was struck by the writers’ ability to come up with really alien-looking aliens and an eerily off-the-wall kind of Invasion. Director Val Guest does a good job of starting out Slow and Realistic (The top-secret Government Complex is actually an Oil Refinery — and looks it.) then working up to a Big Finish that’s all the more impressive for looking so out-of-place in such a modest film.

   In terms of Writing and Playing, Quatermass 2 is uniformly intelligent; the characters talk and act like ordinary folks, and Brian Donlevy is surprisingly effective as the gruff, ill-mannered, unlikely hero of the piece.

   I’ve always been puzzled, though, by the fact that they chose him to star in the Quatermass films, despite the popularity of the British Actor who played him on Radio. One assumes that they must have had an eye on the American Market, but Good Lord: BRIAN DONLEVY?!?!

   That’s not enough Star Power to light up a Marquee! Truly, the minds of Film Producers are inscrutable to us Mortal Men.

NICHOLAS BLAKE – There’s Trouble Brewing. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1937. Harper & Brothers, US, hc, 1937. Paperback reprints include: Popular Library #30, 1944; Perennial, 1982.

   This is the third of the 16 Nigel Strangeways mysteries and earliest of the four that have lurked unread upon my shelves for the last 20 years or more.

   Blake, of course, is a pseudonym for the poet Cecil Day Lewis. And the Strangeways novels are the product of a poet and scholar whose purpose in writing mysteries was to make some extra money to support his growing family. While he’s giving a bit of a tweak to the genre as it existed in Britain at the time, he stays within its boundaries.

   In fact, the traditional elements are quite rigid. The story unfolds chronologically, each chapter designated with a number, date and time. For example, the eighth chapter is “VIII. July 19, 8.20–11.30 A.M.” Each chapter has an epigraph; these are drawn from a variety of sources, from Shakespeare to a 19th century temperance ballad.

   The sleuth, Nigel Strangeways, is a classic upper-class amateur. In this case, he is summoned to the village of Maiden Astbury by an Oxford classmate’s wife, ostensibly to address the local literary society on the topic of his “delightful little book on the Caroline poets.” He ends up investigating a gruesome murder in a brewery, foreshadowed by the similar disposal of the brewery owner’s dog, subject of the book’s opening:

   The educated, slightly tongue-in-cheek tone is maintained throughout. While gently amusing, it distances the reader from the story and characters.

   Plot and structure are similarly flawed; more than one significant character is offstage for all or most of the book, existing only through other characters’ eyes and according to the physical traces left behind. The total effect is of a puzzle with missing pieces, viewed from afar.

      Previously reviewed on this blog:

Murder with Malice   [by Marv Lachman]
Thou Shell of Death   [by Steve Lewis]
The Private Wound   [by Steve Lewis]

CALCULATED RISK. Bry/McLeod, UK, 1963. William Lucas, John Rutland, Dilys Watling, Warren Mitchell, Shay Gorman, Terence Cooper, David Brierly. Screenplay: Edwin Richfield. Director: Norman Harrison.

   As you may have noticed already, except for Dilys Watling, who plays the young factory worker who undresses at night in a second story apartment overlooking the bombed-out lot where a gang of safecrackers are digging their way under ground into the bank building next door, everyone else in this movie is male.

   Even so, Miss Watling’s part is almost a cameo role, almost but not quite, and as caper movies go, even though very few people will have seen it, this one’s a good one.

   It begins with a gent named Kip (John Rutland) getting out of prison and being picked up in a car by his brother-in-law Steve (William Lucas). Kip is a crook, but not a very good one. He’s been in and out of jail most of his life. He even missed his wife’s funeral while he was in this last time.

   But now that he’s out, he has a plan and to pull it off, he needs some help. He’s been told about an undisturbed underground WWII air raid shelter that’s only two walls away from a bank vault, and inside the vault is a fortune in cash. Even though Kip is considered something of a Jonah on the job, it isn’t difficult for Steve to come up with a small crew of others to add their talents in.

   All things considered, it’s a good plan, and it’s one that might actually work, but plans and the carrying out of them are hardly ever the very same thing. Small things can be adjusted for – Kip’s heart problems, for one, but I won’t tell you about the big one, but if you read the first paragraph above again, maybe you can figure it out on your own.

   The script is tight, the vivid black-and-white photography perfect for the tale that’s told, and even though none of the actors are known in this country – and maybe not even in England – they all fit their characters well, and what more could you want?

   Perhaps a little longer running time — it’s only 72 minutes long — but with anything longer you run the risk that the tension is going to be as big a fizzle as the… Or does it?

DOROTHY GARDINER – The Trans-Atlantic Ghost. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1933.

   The detective in what was Mrs. Gardiner’s first mystery novel has a well-chosen name, I think you’ll agree, but the fact is that while Mr. Watson indeed did work for 20 years for the New York Police Department, he was for all that time a minor clerk, a statistician. (Though, of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that!)

   The locked room murder he’s called upon to solve in this book is in California, however, where he finds himself as part of an around-the-world cruise he’s about to embark on, as he heads back home to his native England for good.

   The locked room is in an English castle that’s been transported across the ocean and rebuilt in the hills of California by a wealthy millionaire; there is some talk of ghosts, and some obnoxious louts who call themselves policemen, led by the appropriately named Captain Bulnose; and lots of suspects.

   What makes this book so disappointing is difficult to describe without giving the entire solution away, and you may as well have your own chance at it. Allow me to suggest, however, that it’s the obvious one, and one that at one point Watson is solemnly assured could not be the explanation.

   Of course we shouldn’t assume that everyone knows the truth, or speaks it, but some tiny spark of imagination is to be expected as well, isn’t it?

   There are some nicely humorous scenes to be pleased with, such as when the string on Watson’s pajamas gives way at one crucial point, and to be honest, this was no real chore to read, but as a mystery, it’s (sadly) rather a silly one.

Rating: C minus.

[UPDATE] 03-12-11.   A scarce book, with only a single copy of the US edition listed on ABE, and my copy has no jacket, thus no image above.

   I don’t know much about the author, but according to one website: “Dorothy Gardiner was born in Naples, Italy. She grew up in Boulder, Colorado. In 1917, she graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in History. During the Second World War she was in charge of all the files and records for the North-Atlantic Area office of the American Red Cross.”

   From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, a list of her mystery fiction:

GARDINER, DOROTHY. 1894-1979.
      The Transatlantic Ghost (n.) Doubleday 1933 [Mr. Watson]
      A Drink for Mr. Cherry (n.) Doubleday 1934 [Mr. Watson]
      Beer for Psyche (n.) Doubleday 1946
      What Crime Is It? (n.) Doubleday 1956 [Sheriff Moss Magill]
      The Seventh Mourner (n.) Doubleday 1958 [Sheriff Moss Magill]

       Lion in Wait (n.) Doubleday 1963 [Sheriff Moss Magill]

   She also edited For Love or Money: The 1957 Anthology of the Mystery Writers of America (Doubleday Crime Club, 1957).

         Steve:

   I just found your email inviting my comment on Ralph Dennis.

   Deadman’s Game [reviewed here ] was to be the first in a series, and Dennis did write a second novel which was never published. It was one of several unpublished novels Ralph’s sister kindly let me read.

   To drop back a bit, I met Ralph Dennis one time when he was working at Oxford Books II in the Peachtree Battle Shopping Center in Atlanta. I recognized him from a picture the Atlanta Constitution ran some years before.

   While we chatted about writing, he noticed among the stack of used books I was holding a few of the Parker novels by Westlake. You know, he said, I created a character a lot tougher than Parker. At the time I had not read Deadman’s Game, but I expressed great interest.

   The story he briefly told was a common one in publishing. His editor who championed the character left the publisher and “orphaned” the series. The editor newly assigned to Dennis loathed the character and the violence. He rejected the novel and that was that.

   I wish now I had gone back there and befriended Ralph and shared a beer at the Stein Club or one of his favorite bars George’s on North Highland Street. I read his obit in the Atlanta Constitution in the mid-1980s. Then I wrote about him a couple of times and since I’ve heard from several old friends of his.

   Finally, I tracked down Ralph’s sister and learned much more of his story. I knew he had a BA and a master’s degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill but I didn’t know he had another master’s from the Yale School of Drama and was on his way to a PhD when he had a serious falling out with adviser and dropped out.

   His sister said he was not very open to editorial comments from his agent or editors. That hurt him.

   She was very interested in getting him back into print and we had several conversations about it.

   She let me read several of his unpublished novels. Some were ambitious, mainstream novels. Others had criminal/suspense elements but were longer and more ambitious. More like a Stuart Woods.

   And there was the shorter novel labeled simply Kane. It featured a breakneck pace and the violence level was higher than most anything around in the 1970s. I thought republishing Deadman’s Game together with the second novel would make an excellent book, a fine reading experience. The second really completed the first. I could see why no publisher coming along later would be interested in this second novel as a stand-alone.

   Point Blank press agreed and even drew up a contract. But then Ralph’s sister died. Her children still wanted to move forward but her lawyer said there were technical problems having to do with the rights to unpublished manuscripts. We emailed back and forth for several years. I think he retained a Georgia lawyer to reopen Ralph’s estate. Eventually, I knew nothing was going to happen, and so far, that’s correct.

   A shame.

         Richard Moore