GWEN BRISTOW & BRUCE MANNING – The Invisible Host.   Mystery League, hardcover, 1930. Play: The Ninth Guest, by Owen Davis (on Broadway Aug-Oct 1930). Film: Columbia, 1934, as The Ninth Guest (with Genevieve Tobin & Donald Cook; director: Roy William Neill). Paperback reprint: Popular Library, 1975, as The Ninth Guest.

   A small group of people are gathered together in a lonely location by a host none of them knows. Soon they start to die one by one, and come to the horrifying revelation that one of their number is both their host and the killer. A successful book that became a successful play and was the basis of a film and written by a best-selling female writer…

   But it’s not Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (And Then There Were None). In fact it was published nine years earlier, the first novel by Gwen Bristow (Jubilee Trail, Calico Palace) and screenwriter husband Bruce Manning (Meet Nero Wolfe, The Lone Wolf Returns, One Hundred Men and a Girl, Rage of Paris, Jubilee Trail — see above — and many more).

   The Invisible Host opens as the ‘guests’ receive a telegram from a mysterious ‘host’ —

   True he’s no U. N. Owen, but he makes his point, and his guests arrive at Bienville Penthouse for their assignation with fate:

    Margaret Chisholm, who dislikes her position as grand dame of New Orleans society being challenged; Dr. Murray Chambers Reid, the president of a local university who has just pulled off a coup by forcing a left-leaning colleague out; Jason Osgood, wealthy founder of the Osgood Foundation; Peter Daly, a playwright celebrating his first play on Broadway; Sylvia Inglesby, a glamorous and beautiful lawyer; Tim Salmon, a pugnacious tough politician; Henry Abbot, that left leaning professor; and Jean Trent, the diaphanous movie star back home in New Orleans for the holidays.

   So they gather at Bienville Penthouse in the recently completed Beinville Building where their host informs them anonymously:

   And soon enough the ‘playful unicorn’ is teasing the edges of murder as the guests begin to die one by one.

   So the game is on and the ‘guests’ begin to die one by one as their host strikes again and again…

   Tensions rise between the suspects:

   Mrs. Chisholm dies in the best manner — of chagrin, a neat trick for any killer. Tim Slamon falls to a deadly (and the most unlikely I’ve ever encountered in long years of reading these) trap based on a personal habit. Sylvia Inglesby loses control and commits virtual suicide throwing herself at an electrified door. Jason Osgood, the ruthless millionaire falls victim to his own ruthlessness. Dr. Reid dies of trying to psychoanalyze the killer who is just one step too clever for him.

   And then there were three.

   And of course the killer is mad as a hatter:

   No, it’s not the Joker, though his methods and psychology aren’t far off. The Joker’s motivations make more sense than this killer’s.

   The Invisible Host is by no means a good book, Bill Pronzini wisely chose it as an alternative classic, but it is fun in the way only a true alternative classic can be, and a good illustration of how heavy-handed a good idea can be handled by less deft hands than a master like Agatha Christie. On its own terms it is a good deal of fun.

   I have to admit I enjoyed it, but then I’m somewhat inured to bad books. You may have to find your own standard of tolerance for this sort of thing.

   Bristow and Manning wrote two more mystery novels, The Gutenberg Murders (1931) and The Mardi Gras Murders (1932). I have no idea if they are anywhere near as divinely alternative as this one. Gwen Bristow went on to write two popular historical novels, The Jubilee Trail and Calico Palace, the former adapted into a glossy color film from Republic with Vera Ralston, Joan Leslie, Forest Tucker, and Pat O’Brien (and screenplay by hubby Bruce Manning).

   The Invisible Host was not the basis for the 1939 film The Man They Could Not Hang, though it uses the same basic set up of the ‘host’ gathering his victims in his house and eliminating them one by one.

   Beware, some sources confuse this with the earlier Karloff film The Walking Dead, which does use the idea of the victims each dying more or less of his own flaws and foibles, but nothing else similar to the film. The idea of the victims gathered at a lonely location goes back at least to The Cat and the Canary, so neither the book nor the film is wholly new territory.

   The book was reprinted in a later paperback edition as The Ninth Guest. The Mystery League edition has an added bonus of sample chapters from books by Edgar Wallace, George Goodchild, Miles Burton, and alternative king Sydney Horler.

   And as our hero and heroine escape the deadly trap and the killer bites into the cap of a pen filled with prussic acid…

   Leaving Death, that playful unicorn housewife, to tidy up after himself I suppose. Serves him right too, that motley clown of the Quarter.

Editorial Comment:   If anyone is interested, the New York Times reviewed the movie version of the book, and you can find it online here.

WILLIAM G. TAPPLY – Follow the Sharks. Charles Scribners Sons, hardcover, 1985. Reprint paperbacks: Ballantine, 1986, 1992.

Genre:   Licensed investigator. Leading character:   Attorney Brady Coyne, 3rd in series. Setting:   Boston.

First Sentence:   Sylvie Szabo normally speaks with the careful diction and precise grammar of one whose English is a second language, but when she’s a little sleepy or drunk or wants to tease, her speech tends to betray her Slavic origins.

   At the bequest of a friend, attorney Brady Coyne becomes the agent for young baseball pitcher Eddie Donogan. Although his career starts with great promise, over time his pitching falls apart.

   Eddie not only quits baseball, but walks away from his wife and their young son, E. J. Now, twelve years later, Brady receives a call that E. J. has been kidnapped and the family wants his help.

   You don’t need to be a fan of baseball to like this book, even though it does include one of the most loving and reverential descriptions of the game I’ve ever read.

   But it’s that level of description of all aspects that makes Tapply such a pleasure to read. He pays such wonderful attention to the details in providing time, place and atmosphere: “The sky along the horizon was turning from black to purple…”

   With that, you know exactly the point in the day to which he is referring. Tapply brings the same life to his characters. Brady is one of my favorite protagonists as he is a true “good guy,” which is so refreshing. He doesn’t automatically go to bed with the attractive woman, he plays by the rules while protecting his clients, he likes classical music and classic jazz and misses his children.

   Even with the secondary characters, there is not only the physical description, but that sense of who they are. As with other books I’ve read recently, it is interesting to read a book set within the past 25 years and to realize how much has changed within that short period of time in terms of technology and social behavior.

   Even so, the story did not feel dated to me at all, as plot is very well constructed. Although, the events take place over a period of time, there is still plenty of action and suspense with a very effective first-person voice.

   The thing to which I keep coming back is that Tapply makes it feel real. He passed away in 2009, and I personally should hate to see his work overlooked or forgotten. I am greatly enjoying reading his series in order, and I highly recommend this book.

Rating: Very Good.

Editorial Comment:   A short obituary for Mr. Tapply was posted here on this blog last August. It includes a full bibliography with many cover images. I met him once, and we exchanged emails a few times. He was one of the good guys in mystery fiction, and I echo LJ’s hope that his work won’t be forgotten too soon.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL – The Big Bow Mystery. Rand McNally, US, hardcover, 1895. Previously published by Henry, UK, hardcover, 1892. Reprinted in many anthologies of vintage detective fiction, both hardcover and soft.

   Film (with partial sound): FBO, 1928, as The Perfect Crime (with Clive Brook & Irene Rich; director: Bert Glennon). Also: RKO, 1934, as The Crime Doctor (with Otto Kruger & Karen Morley; director: John Robertson). Also: Warner Bros., 1946, as The Verdict (with Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre & Joan Lorring; director: Don Siegel).

   British novelist and playwright Israel Zangwill made only one excursion into the mystery field, at the age of twenty-seven, when he was invited by the London Star to write a “more original piece of fiction” for them. The result, which ran serially in the newspaper during 1891, was certainly original — the first locked-room mystery novella.

   There had been locked-room mysteries before, in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, but both had involved elementary trickery with windows and the reader had no real opportunity to solve the puzzle. The Big Bow Mystery, written partly as a parody of detective stories, is a classic whodunit that still reads quite well today.

   Whether or not retired police inspector Grodman can really qualify as a Classic Sleuth may be open to question, but from the moment he is summoned by Mrs. Drabdumb to break down the locked door of Arthur Constant’s bedroom, it is clear we are witnessing the birth of a classic mystery situation.

   John Dickson Carr once observed that Israel Zangwill invented a fictional device that has since been used in many forms, “on a ship, in a ruined house, in a conservatory, in an attic, and even in the open air.” But Zangwill’s first version still remains one of the best, and rightly established him as the father of the locked-room mystery.

   Scores of later mystery writers were intrigued by the plot possibilities suggested by Zangwill’s work, and went on to create endless variations on the locked room and the impossible crime.

   Running just over 30,000 words in length, about half as long as the average mystery novel today, The Big Bow Mystery has rarely been published as a separate volume in this century. It appears in Zangwill’s 1903 collection The Grey Wig. More recently it was included in Hans Stefan Santesson’s 1968 anthology The Locked Room Reader (Random House) and David Willis McCullough’s 1984 anthology Great Detectives (Pantheon).

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Note:   The Big Bow Mystery was previously reviewed on this blog by Mary Reed. In his comments following my review of The Big Clock, David Vineyard pointed out that “The idea of the hero hunting himself […] all dates back to Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery […] a pioneering locked room classic that touches on the theme.”

JOHN DICKSON CARR – He Who Whispers. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1946. Hamish Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1946. Reprinted several times, in both hardcover and soft.

   Sometimes you go back and reread an old classic that really impressed you first time out and find the magic is gone. Fortunately, that didn’t happen with He Who Whispers.

   Carr’s eerie tale about the mysterious murder on top the ruined tower in prewar France that haunts a group of people in present-day, postwar England is considered by many fans today to be his single best work. I wouldn’t put it quite at the very top, but it’s certainly in the top ten.

    As Doug Greene has pointed out, it effectively combines supernatural elements of his earlier work with the male-female emotional and sexual tension of his forties works. The tale is both thrilling and moving, with some greater character interest than usual.

   Indeed, the character interest is arguably the strongest element of the book. I would think many readers could deduce the identity of the culprit of the book’s crimes (hey, I did), though the mechanism of the tower murder and its motive may well prove elusive. They are quite cleverly clued.

   Character interest is so strong here, I felt like the presence of Dr. Fell was not really needed, though he is pretty restrained here. Still, he takes me a bit out of the story.

   Other than that, there’s hard to find much to criticize. A grand work. The opening of the book, where the visiting Professor Rigaud tells the tale of the murder on the tower, and the closing section, which tales place in an evocatively portrayed blitzed London, in particular are spectacular set pieces.

Editorial Comments:   This is the first of several reviews Curt has sent me following his recent (re)reading of the works of John Dickson Carr and Carter Dickson. Doug Greene, whom he mentions in this review, is the author of John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles, generally considered to be the definite biography of Mr Carr.

EVE ZAREMBA – A Reason to Kill. PaperJacks, Canada, paperback original, 1978. Second Story Press, Canada, trade paperback, 1989.

   Even Zaremba’s first mystery surely represents one of the more unusual experiments with the female hard-boiled private eye. First of all, her heroine, Helen Keremos, is a Canadian. Second, she is a lesbian.

   But if the locale of Zaremba’s mystery is obvious, the sexual identification of her sleuth is not. Since Zaremba refrains from chronicling the amorous adventures of her detective, it is only her empathy with male gay characters and occasional name-calling by disgruntled straight men that give her sexual identity away.

   Keremos, who operates out of a second-floor walk-up in Vancouver’s Chinatown, is called in by an academic to trace his missing son, last seen in Toronto. With the help of a researcher friend named Alex, Keremos checks out the young man’s past as well as his friends and family — all suspects.

   These include his sculptor mother and her drunken lover; a boyhood friend and his masculinity-obsessed father; and an appealing bisexual hood on the edge of Toronto’s entertainment biz. Keremos concludes that Martin Milwell’s disappearance is somehow linked to his recent acknowledgment of his homosexuality, but she must still discover the how and why of his disappearance.

   The plot, which seems to be building to an obvious solution, has several twists to deliver before its unusual conclusion — one that turns the classic reenactment of the crime into an exercise in collective decision-making.

   Keremos’s cross-Canada trek tells us much about the country and its people as well.

   Tough, a navy veteran with plenty of street smarts, Keremos is nonetheless a sympathetic figure. When she takes on two thugs (after a few too many drinks), we may question the realism in the portrayal, but Keremos’ s macho antics are mild compared to most of her male fictional counterparts.

   The politics of Zaremba’ s novel, sexual and otherwise, is clearly recognizable as part of the Seventies. For her portrayal of a believable PI, hardboiled and female, Zaremba should be recognized as an early entry in a mystery trend of the Eighties — and very probably beyond.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Editorial Comment:   As suggested in my comments following the preceding post, Helen Keremos may be the very first lesbian PI, at least as published by a major publisher (although semi-obscure one). It has been reprinted once, but apparently there’s never been a US edition. (PaperJacks books were generally distributed in this country, however.)

The Helen Keremos series —

     1. A Reason to Kill (1972)
     2. Work for a Million (1988)

     3. Beyond Hope (1988)
     4. Uneasy Lies (1990)
     5. The Butterfly Effect (1994)

     6. White Noise (1997)

DAVID GALLOWAY – Lamaar Ransom–Private Eye. Riverrun Press, Dallas, hardcover, 1979; published simultaneously by John Calder, London, hardcover, 1979 .

   For a change, something unusual in private eyes. Lamaar Ransom is hard boiled, a frequent daytime drinker with booze in the filing cabinet, extremely interested in females, especially those who have overdeveloped chests, and given to wise cracks at most unseemly times. Ransom’s secretary is crazy about males.

   What then, you may ask, is unusual about Ransom? Well, Ransom is a female. Her secretary is Lavender Trevelyan, black, male, gay, and a transvestite. When Ransom wants to borrow some sexy clothes for a disguise, she gets them from Trevelyan.

   The director of the Fairfield Academy, dedicated to the training of actresses and models, hires Ransom to find Yvette LaFlamme, no less, who has mysteriously disappeared. The reason Ransom is chosen is because she has tact. Ransom insults her potential client throughout the job interview, forcing one to wonder whether the director knows what tact is.

   Perhaps not, since no graduate of the academy has ever been hired as an actress or a model.

   Ransom does find the missing LaFlamme, part of her in one suitcase and part of her in another. This leads to additional unpleasantness, even involving Ransom’s lover, a not-very-bright young lady whom Ransom strangely puts in harm’s way by having her enroll at the academy.

   A professional’s professional, Ransom, having dyed her hair black — she’s a blonde — in order to impersonate her girlfriend, part Mexican, in a possibly intimate situation, also dyes her pubic hair. It is unlikely that Holmes, Kleek, or Carter, those masters of disguise, were ever that thorough.

   The time period of the novel is World War II, and the setting is Hollywood. The ending is deus ex machina, but tolerable.

   Aside from wishing that the author had learned how to spell “discreet” and “all right” and had not used “game plan” long before its time, the only anachronism I noticed, my enjoyment of this novel — and whether it is a parody of the private-eye novel I won’t hazard a guess — was considerable.

   The cross-talk between Ransom and Trevelyan is alone worth the price of the book. Which, since it has been recently remaindered at $1.98, makes it an even greater bargain.

Editorial Comments:   Since Bill wrote this some 22 years ago, you shouldn’t think that you can find a copy very easily at your local remainder outlet, wherever that may be. It is not too difficult to find online, however, and I just purchased a copy myself.

   You should not be surprised to know that this is the only book by David Galloway in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV. It has “one shot” written all over it, but then again I’ve been surprised and been wrong the other way, several times over.

   The book — and here I was surprised — was reviewed by Newgate Callendar in the New York Times, and favorably, too. The link works for me, but it may require your registering at the Times website if you haven’t already done so.

   Was Lamaar Ransom the first lesbian private eye? Kevin Burton Smith, on his Thrilling Detective website, says no, it was Eve Zaremba’s Helen Keremos, who preceded her by a year.

IDIOT’S DELIGHT. MGM, 1939. Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Edward Arnold, Charles Coburn, Joseph Schildkraut, Burgess Meredith, Laura Hope Crews, Harry Van’s “Les Blondes”: Virginia Grey, Virginia Dale, Paula Stone, Bernadene Hayes, Joan Marsh, Lorraine Krueger. Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, based on his own Pulitzer Prize winning play. Director: Clarence Brown.

   Not only was Robert Sherwood hired to write the screenplay, but he expanded on it by creating a long prelude to the play itself.

   Some back story for both of the two stars is filled in, detailing their first encounter as vaudevillians Harry Van and Irene Fellara, whose paths cross and meet again some 20 years later, just as rumors of war are rumbling across Europe.

   Clark Gable plays Harry Van, of course, and Norma Shearer is Irene. He’s a stooge for a phoney mind-reader when first they meet, and she’s an acrobat who hangs by her teeth in the act before them. They spend one wonderful night together (but not a bed) before their trains take them in opposite directions in the morning.

   The next time they meet (and of course they do) is in a snowbound lodge somewhere in the Alps.

   Unable to cross the border from one country to the next because of international tensions, a large number of passengers from a wide assortment of countries are also stranded.

   Harry is now the manager and lead dancer for a troupe of female dancers (Les Blondes). She’s the mistress (we presume) of an important European munitions mogul. She’s also now a blonde and claims to be a refugee Russian countess. His jaw drops.

   In fine overdramatized fashion Irene goes into much detail about her former life:

   There is a lot of comedy in this film, and in fact it is quite remarkable – I wouldn’t have known it until reading about it later on IMDB – that this is the only time Clark Gable did a song and dance routine in a movie: “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

   He does it well – but then again everything Clark Gable did in a movie he did well. He was, as far as I am concerned, the quintessential Hollywood actor, with a presence before the cameras that was second to absolutely nobody else.

   The movie is itself is a time capsule trapped in amber, as Idiot’s Delight is, and you have to watch this movie as if you were in the theater in 1939. It is in itself a plea for peace, not war; laying the blame for the incipient hostilities on munitions manufacturers, unfortunately, not the plans of national glory of Hitler and others. Hitler himself is not mentioned, I do not believe.

   So there is a lot of anxiety hidden behind the long-delayed romance and the songs and quick and easy patter of Harry Van.

   Lives are about to be disrupted for many and for good. A honeymooning couple are emblems of loves that are (most likely) going to be torn apart.

   Many of the people who have left comments seem to feel that the film is outdated, which it is, and corny, which it is and is not, both at the same time. The movie is entertaining, no doubt about it, but watching it in the present day there is a sense of unease or disconnect between its several components, and all I can do is tell you about it. More than this, I haven’t defined it further, no more than I have.

   There are two endings for this film. One is a happier one, shown in the US. The other, shown in Europe, which is the one I’ve just watched, ends on a bright note, but one wrapped up in a solid container of reality.

NOTE: Credit for the dialogue quoted goes to the IMDB website, from which I copied and pasted.

 TELL IT TO THE MARINES. MGM, 1926. Lon Chaney, William Haines, Eleanor Boardman, Eddie Gribbon, Carmel Myers, Warner Oland. Director: George Hill. Shown at Cinesation 1993, Saginaw MI.

   This was a big hit for Chaney, and as in While the City Sleeps (MGM, 1928) it showcases Chaney in a non-horror role. Chaney is a tough sergeant, charged with the unenviable task of whipping unwilling recruit William Haines into shape before the unit ships out.

   In both the 1926 and 1928 films, Chaney’s girl is won away by the younger man (criminal he’s trying to reform, recruit he’s trying to save), which allows Chaney to reveal the heart under the crusty exterior.

   Superb entertainment, and, according to the notes, was just behind the studio’s Flesh and the Devil! at the box-office. Warner Oland has a small non-speaking role as a Chinese warlord, a role he was playing as early as 1920.

   A character-driven detective novel is one in which the plot develops entirely from the people who inhabit it, protagonists and secondary characters both — their psychological makeup, strengths, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, etc. The plot is not created first and the characters inserted to fit the prearranged storyline.

   Whodunit, howdunit, detection are all less important than what happens to the people themselves; the impact on them of the crime(s) in which they’re involved; how they and/or the world they live in are altered by these crimes and by other external events, some within their control, some beyond it.

   In a character-driven series, the protagonists and those close to them have personal as well as professional lives. And they do not remain the same from book to book; they evolve, change, make mistakes, better their lives, screw up their lives, love, marry, grieve, suffer, rejoice, you name it, the same as everybody else.

   A plot-driven detective novel is just the opposite. Characters are subordinate to plot; the mystery, the gathering and interpretation of clues, the solving of the puzzle are of primary focus and importance. If the detectives have personal lives, they’re generally mentioned only in passing and treated as irrelevent.

   This is not to suggest that this type is inferior to the character-driven variety; far from it. I’m a great admirer of the Golden Age writers — Carr (particularly), Queen, Christie, Stout — but their books mostly fall into the plot-first category.

   The puzzle, the game is everything. Sir Henry Merrivale, Dr. Fell, EQ, Poirot, Nero Wolfe are all superb and memorable creations, but each remains essentially the same from first book to last. There is no evolution, no significant change. The crimes they solve have no real effect on them, or in other than a superficial fashion on the people good and bad whom they encounter.

   One reads their adventures mainly for the cleverness of the gimmicks and the brilliance of the deductions (and in the cases of Wolfe and Archie for the witty byplay, and of H-M for the broad and farcical humor). With the exception of Wolfe and Archie, we never really get to know any of them all that well; and even with that inimitable pair, there are no significant changes in their lives or their relationship with each other.

   The private eye fiction of Hammett and Chandler is likewise plot-driven (remember Chandler’s oft-quoted remark that when he was stuck for something to happen, he brought in a man with a gun?). The mystery is dominant. As memorable as Sam Spade and the Continental Op and Philip Marlowe are, they’re larger-than-life heroes who remain pretty much the same over the course of their careers.

   This is true even in The Long Goodbye, which many consider to be Chandler’s magnum opus (I don’t, but that’s another story); Marlowe’s complex relationship with Terry Lennox and its results, while a powerful motivating force, has no lasting or altering effect on Marlowe’s life.

   Ross Macdonald’s novels, on the other hand, are character-driven to the extent that the convoluted storylines devolve directly from the actions past and present of the large casts of characters; but Lew Archer is merely an “I” camera recording events. His life and career remain unaltered by the crimes he solves or any other influences. We hardly know him; he hardly seems real.

   Contemporary private eye fiction tends to be primarily character-driven, in the sense that I used the term above. The cases undertaken by Thomas B. Dewey’s Mac, for instance, evolve from the complexities and eccentricities of the individuals he encounters; crime and violence have a profound effect on him as well as on those individuals, in subtle as well as obvious ways.

   The same is true of Hitchens’ Long Beach private eye Jim Sader in Sleep with Slander, a book I’ve called “the best traditional male private eye novel written by a woman.” And of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder. And of Marcia’s Sharon McCone (see Wolf in the Shadows, her Shamus-nominated Vanishing Point). And of my “Nameless” series (Shackles, Mourners). All, for better or worse, character-driven and character-oriented. Which is why our readers continue to read us.

Editorial Comment:   This essay by Bill is a repost. It first appeared here on this blog on 07 Aug 2007. It has belatedly dawned on me that it fits right in with the ongoing discussion that’s developed here on this blog about author Jane Haddam’s comments on hers about a review of one of her books I wrote and posted on mine about a year ago.

   Whew! If this sounds complicated, it is, but if you go here and follow the links and read the comments, some 24 of them at the moment, all will be explained.

[UPDATE] About 15 minutes later.   Synchronicity strikes again. I took a few minutes out to see what the the other crime-fiction bloggers have been talking about today, only to discover Ed Gorman reporting on a movie version of Boobytrap in the works, a suspense-filled standalone novel by Mr. Pronzini.

   Congratulations, Bill! (And what took them so long?)

[UPDATE #2] 30 May 2010.   It was either late last night or my mind suffered a small brain glitch. I really did know better. Here’s Bill’s email to me, received earlier today:

    “Thanks for the posted congrats on the Boobytrap film deal. The irony is that it’s a Nameless novel and the first thing the Informant Media people did was to dump him and the rest of the series characters; their only interest was in the basic story, which they’ve also revamped from the novel version.

    “Okay with me; I still retain all film rights to Nameless, not that there’s any likelihood he’ll ever appear on a big or little screen. But I suspect that I’m not going to like the film version much. Action films loaded with special effects, explosions, blood and gore leave me cold. But maybe it’ll surprise me.”

BILL PRONZINI – Snowbound. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1974. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, UK, hc, 1975. Reprint editions: Fawcett Crest, pb, 1975; Futura, UK, pb, 1975; Carroll & Graf, pb, 1994; Stark House Press, trade pb, 2007 (combined with Games).

   This was the first of many books by Bill Pronzini that I have read, and one whose story and execution has stayed with me for many years. It is almost a model of how to do a closed world suspense novel (i.e. a suspense novel set in a single confined location such as Joseph Hayes Desperate Hours or W.L. Heath’s Violent Saturday) and a perfect blend of action, suspense, and character development.

   Hidden Valley is a small isolated mountain town where nothing much happens. This is the story of one week, from December 17th to December 23rd when a snow storm cuts them off from the rest of the world, and the town is enveloped in terror.

   Likely anyone who has ever been on a ski trip in the Western States has seen this little scene, passed through or visited this little town. It is typical of Pronzini that in so few words he sketches in this familiar setting and yet subtly paints a slightly ominous note — the “dark winter-afternoon sky” and the “vaguely fraudulent” look of the village foreshadow what is to come without any hint of manipulating the reader or forcing his vision.

   Zachary Cain, is a newcomer to Hidden Valley. He lives in an A-frame cabin and while friendly enough is something of a mystery. All anyone really knows is he may come from San Francisco and receives a monthly check.

   In Sacramento a heist is going down — a big cash-and-carry giant department store is being hit by three men: Brodie, the wheel man, capable and intelligent; Loxner, big and slow witted, not the man they wanted for the job; and, Kubion, the brains, the planner. But the best laid plans as the saying goes … the whole thing goes wrong.

   Meanwhile in the valley individuals private lives unknowingly move toward unexpected crisis as their lives are about to spiral out of control.

   If you have ever read a suspense novel you know where this is going. Pronzini makes no bones about that as he sets the action up with a kind of grim inevitability that like Hidden Valley is both unreal and achingly true to life. The mark of a great suspense novelist is that ability to let you see what he is doing and at the same time keep you turning the page as the inevitable happens. Pronzini is a master and shows it here.

   Like one of those John D. MacDonald novels where a series of disparate people are drawn together toward a moment of violence and crisis Snowbound has an inevitability about it like watching a car wreck happening and not being able to do anything about it. You want to shout out, to warn someone, but no one is listening. No one can hear you, or would listen if they could…

   I won’t give away much plot detail. The crooks reach Hidden Valley and a slide closes the only road out of town. Kubion begins to plot how to get out and to take advantage of the situation by effectively holding up the entire valley, aware that they are sitting ducks when the road opens and the police begin to pour in. Meanwhile local tensions grow and the reader begins to sense that pressure like a pot about to boil over. Something has to give…

   And give it does in a sudden display of violence, and as the fear and helplessness of the villagers and the brutality and desperation of the criminals dovetail together it becomes increasingly certain that the outsider Zachary Cain is the only man equipped to restore order with his own brand of chaotic violence and his own need for redemption.

   Cain, it turns out has something to prove to himself, something to atone for, and maybe if he can save the people of this small village from these three brutal men he can save his own soul.

   Along the way Pronzini draws a number of well-etched characters among the villagers with an almost cinematic eye and a few deft strokes of the pen — just enough that their fates matter to us, but not so much that their stories get in the way of the building tension and suspense. That’s a fine line to walk, and it is a tribute to his skill at writing this sort of book that he makes it look effortless.

   The action is orchestrated like an Alistair MacLean novel, and the suspense rapidly reaches the unbearable level as Kubion goes increasingly blood simple in his desperation and Cain’s growing personal involvement raises the emotional stakes for him.

   It is difficult to review a book like this without giving away too much. Let me just say the payoff is both viscerally and emotionally satisfying in the way only the best suspense novels ever manage to be.

   The writing, as always with Pronzini’s books, is simple but evocative. Little bits of action or lines that stick in the mind: Kubion rocking in the armored car after the hold-up goes wrong repeating the same words over and over in “a savage litany”; Matt Hughes, a local whose passions will inadvertently set off the violence who suffers from an “almost boyish recklessness”; the people of the village gathered in the local church, “balanced precariously on the edge of panic”; and a dying man as “the black red mist grows and twists through his mind like a helix”.

   Parallel with his private eye novels about Nameless (among them some fine examples of the suspense novel within the hard boiled framework), his westerns, anthologies and criticism, Pronzini has continued to write outstanding suspense novels, alone and with Barry Malzberg and others. His skills at this form of story are considerable and have continued to grow, but this one is very close to a blueprint for how this should be done.

   And I mean this as the highest of compliments, when you turn the last page you will swear you have seen the movie. That’s something only the best suspense novels achieve.