JOHN CREASEY – A Knife for the Toff. Richard Rollinson #24. Evans, UK, hardcover, 1951. Pyramid R-1097, paperback, 1st US edn, 1964.

   Richard Rollinson, the Toff is on the dance floor with the beautiful Camilla aboard a yacht owned by the ruthless and grossly fat Rumplemeyer who watches malevolently over them, and despite the seeming atmosphere of gaiety time is running out for the Toff as he flirts with his beautiful dancing partner.

   That, of course, is the authentic voice of the gentleman adventurer of the Twenties and Thirties however hardened and changed by the War. But the day of the swashbuckling poetry-spouting hero serenading bobbies in the street and speeding down narrow foggy roads in low slung cars is over. Tough guy Americans, Peter Cheyney, and the War ended all that and James Bond is about to put the boot in it for higher stakes than boodle.

   It is 1951, and the breed has changed a bit, grown a shade tougher, and less concerned with the niceties. We are still two years out from James Bond, but at times it is hard not to wonder that the same things that influenced Ian Fleming’s licensed public executioner might not be haunting the Toff as well. He’s not quite the same man he was before the War.

   The Toff was always the odd man out of the gentleman adventurer school. Not only was he genuinely from money and birth (“A gold spoon,” he tells Camilla when she accuses him of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth). Despite that his knight errantry came with a social conscience, it is hard to imagine Simon Templar or Norman Conquest possessing, and however close he skirts it, he is never a desperado or outlaw, just a bit careless with the workings of the law when they interfere with justice.

   Even in those rare cases where the villain he’s pursuing is a personal one (The Toff Goes to Market, in which Aunt Gloria is poisoned by wartime black marketeers), he’s far less likely to fling himself through plate glass windows with guns blazing or dangle the odd bad guy out windows than the Saint or 1066, and unlike Creasey’s other gentleman hero, the Baron, he would never take revenge on a social order that betrayed him.

   It’s hard to imagine the Saint financing a club for boys in the East End like the Toff.

   All that is about to go out the window with this one though. It is 1951, a new decade, and Rollinson is up against a different kind of bad guy than the usual petty master criminals he’s used to, and the fantastic Rumplemeyer has Rolly trapped on his yacht, the Lucretia, with only minutes to choose between a watery grave and serving a hideous criminal master.

   While Creasey always opens well, it is unusual for him to put the Toff in the thick of it on page one and start ratcheting from that point on.

   What Creasey excels at is the choreography of tension and action. His heroes are not the kind to stand around wondering what course to take. That’s another Bondian tie. They aren’t afraid to kick the card table over when they get a bad hand.

   The Toff does escape, with the help of Camilla, who has fallen for him and reformed based on nothing but a kiss (shades of Pussy Galore, and there is more than one parallel here between Fleming and Creasey with a few bits similar to scenes in Diamonds Are Forever and Goldfinger), with both of them escaping on a lifeboat only to end up stranded at sea for ten days while they fall in love.

   Meanwhile back at the farm the Toff’s man Jolly (like Tonto the brains of the outfit despite his comic relief role), his wealthy disapproving titled Aunt Gloria, East End boxer and pub owner Bill Ebbutt, and Rolly’s rival/friend Grice of the Yard believe him dead, which if nothing else gives us a chance to take a tour of the Toff’s trophy wall (the finest such museum outside the Yard’s Black Museum) replete with a top hat with a bullet hole in it, various knives, poisons, coshes, and a hangman’s rope that was used on one of the more unlucky types the Toff battled

   Rollinson and Camilla are rescued, but when the get back to London, before they can even get off the ship, an attempt is made on their lives and Camilla receives a serious head wound thanks to Rumplemeyer’s man in the UK, the Wizard, who the Toff believes is one Colonel Merlin.

   In almost every book the Toff finds himself at odds with the police, even hunted and forced to work alone, or with his unlikely allies in the East End, to defeat the threat at hand, but here it is with a vengeance. Always before the Toff was a justice figure, but the least bloodthirsty of the type.

   Not here. He’s not defending the idea of justice, this time it is personal and he’s ruthless.

   Granted he doesn’t go around popping off the unwashed with the vigor of the Saint or Norman Conquest, but he leaves a few bodies behind before he uncovers Rumplemeyer’s plot to use an illegally acquired submarine to hold up a shipment of gold bullion at sea (shades of Goldfinger and Assault on a Queen), ending with the Toff aboard a Royal Naval destroyer hunting down Rumplemeyer for a savage finish.

   But that isn’t the end, the end is a bittersweet note with a bit of class conscious reality thrown in the mix, and here is where Creasey and Fleming really part ways, because by the last line the old irrepressible Toff is back, a bit heart sore and sadder but wiser. No year long benders getting out of shape and agonizing over his life choices for the Toff.

   It’s not that he’s made of sterner stuff. Only that he is cut from thinner cardboard, and Fleming’s war was much dirtier than Creasey’s.

   This is my favorite among the Toff novels, actually the second one I read at the easily influenced age of fifteen (the first was The Toff in New York), and part of what sold me was a great Jack Thurston cover with a top-hatted Toff in the upper left corner, cigarette holder in hand, while on the cover the Toff and Camilla stand on the deck of something (hard to say what) as fireworks go off on the deck of a surfaced submarine behind them.

   I’m fairly sure that cover would have sold me any book, whether I had ever heard of Creasey or not (and no, that scene isn’t in the book).

   I reread the book for this review with only a shade less enjoyment than when I first read it. While it has many of Creasey’s problems as a writer it also has all of his virtues, which for me outnumber the former, and today has the added cachet of how much it has in common with some of the Bond’s to come and the changing tone of the Post-War British thriller.

   No, I don’t think Fleming read Creasey, though it is possible, but I do think both men were reflecting something new to popular fiction in that time period that came out of the War each in their own way, and to be perfectly fair, the Toff being on that destroyer doesn’t make any more sense than Bond manning a Bofors gun in South Africa at the end of Diamonds are Forever, but I’m grateful to Creasey and Fleming for not caring and doing it anyway. (*)

(*) And I was grateful when Philip McCutchan’s Commander Esmonde Shaw and James Dark’s Mark Hood finished with similar scenes in their adventures. I like my fictional t’s crossed and i’s dotted, whether it makes sense or not.

   
                           BEST WISHES TO ALL!!

EXPOSED. Republic Pictures, 1947. Adele Mara (Belinda Prentice), Robert Scott, Lorna Gray, Adrian Booth, Robert Armstrong, William Haade, Bob Steele, Harry Shannon. Director: George Blair.

   It’s possible, depending on definitions, that this is the first movie in which a female private eye is the leading character. You may be thinking right away about Torchy Blane and the movies she was in, and I wouldn’t blame you, but she was a newspaper reporter with a good eye for crimes and who committed them, but no, she wasn’t a PI.

   Adele Mara is the PI in this one, a brash young lady named Belinda Prentice, but while she tries hard, she doesn’t have the patter that a good wisecracking PI needs in the movies (blame the writers). Not only that, but the fact that she needs a lovable lunk of an assistant named Iggy (William Haade) to get her out of scrapes is another strike against her.

   Noting that her father is the chief of homicide (played to perfection by Robert Armstrong), we can only agree that as an independent operator, Miss Prentice is pretty much a minor leaguer.

   It doesn’t help that the case she’s hired to work on (that of a father wanting to know why his son is taking so much money out of their firm’s account) is so muddled, even when it turns into a case of murder as so many cases such as this invariably do. Watch this and see if I’m not right. Muddled. And even so, there are too many scenes of people walking from one place to another, as well as automobiles driving in or off somewhere, as if they were a new invention.

   One scene does stand out, though, that of Iggy and Bob Steele’s character (a hood by the name of Chicago) having a smack ’em up, knock ’em down fight that’s well worth the price of admission (free on YouTube).

Q. PATRICK – Death Goes to School. Smith & Haas, hardcover, 1936.  Banner Mysteries #2, digest-sized paperback, April 1945.

   Anthony Boucher once mentioned in a letter to John Dickson Carr that it was the authors using the pseudonyms of Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin, and Jonathan Stagge, who developed a certain gimmick in mystery writing: their books during the 193Os challenge the reader to discover not only who is the murderer but also who is the detective.

   Often, but not always, the narrator is the detective; sometimes the police detective discovers the criminal; occasionally the amateur detective actually, turns out to be the murderer. Even a relatively minor Q. Patrick work like Death Goes to School plays with the reader, and not till the end do we discover who solves the crime.

   The story takes place in an English boarding-school, two of whose students are murdered apparently because their father, an American judge, has passed sentences against some Nazis.  I describe the story as minor because the focus is not always clear and because the surprise ending can be predicted by readers who know Patrick’s tricks.

   But there is much to praise in it, especially the character of St. John Lucas, a schoolboy who (having read Chums and other sensational papers for adolescents) helps unearth evidence. But I like Patrick/Quentin/Stagge so much that even when I can see through their tricks I enjoy their work. Indeed, I am beginning to revel in predicting their gimmicks.

   In short, I recommend Death Goes to School for those who haven’t read enough Patrick to predict the solution, and for those who have reached the point that they positively enjoy outguessing the author.

ROBERT DEANE PHARR – The Book of Numbers. Doubleday, hardcover, 1969. University of Virginia Press, softcover, 2001.

   Dave Greene and Blueboy are Black travelling waiters in the 1930’s, going from resort town to town with the seasons: Saratoga, Hot Springs, wherever the white leisure class goes, you’re sure to find them there. Waiting.

   And since segregation is still a thing, there’s a Black ward in every one of these towns. With Black whore houses, bars and gambling to match so that these travelling waiters can spend every cent they earn. All except for Dave Greene. He’s got bigger plans.

   Dave’s father was a ‘lawyer’: ‘Lawyer Greene’. He wasn’t a real lawyer — never having gone to law school, never having passed the bar. But he knew more about the law than most of his peers, and he knew enough to represent his clients by genuflecting like a bending slave, ‘yessah’-ing and ‘nossah’-ing and bowing to whitey begging forgiveness and promising to do better from now on.

   Dave grew up thinking his dad was an actual lawyer entitled to respect. It was only when he grew older and began to understand that other Black folks in the community viewed ‘Lawyer Greene’ as a pathetic minstrel that Dave began to hate his father and crave actual and deserved respect.

   So rather than spending all his travelling waiter money on prostitution, alcohol and craps, Dave saves up. For something. He’s not quite sure what.

   But then he and Blueboy wind up in Richmond, VA. And they notice something strange. There’s no local numbers racket. All the locals play numbers by sending money to Detroit or Chicago or some other big town. But there’s nowhere local to play.

   The way you play numbers is you pick any number from 000 to 999. And you can bet any amount you want, starting with a penny. And if your number ‘hits’, you win on 600-1 odds. So a penny bet will get you six dollars. And so on.

   Dave has saved up $1000. And he’s sick of playing minstrel to whitey. He’s ready for some respect. So he and Blueboy quit being waiters and start a numbers racket in Richmond’s Black ward.

   They make it big. Really big. And end up millionaires. In cash. But they aren’t really allowed to spend it any way they want. They try to go legit. To invest in a franchise of some kind. Or a dealership. But Blacks aren’t allowed to own a franchise or dealership in nearly every industry of the time.

   And white politicians and law enforcement start expecting bigger and bigger payoffs. And violence in the ward is a thing. A thing you can’t avoid. No matter how big you think you are. Sudden death is never far behind.

   It’s a good novel. Didn’t blow me away. But it’s good. And does an excellent (what do I know?) job of showing you what life was like for local numbers bosses in the segregated south of the 30’s. Pharr’s own biography is similar to that of his protagonists — and his actual experiences surely inform the verisimilitude of the story told. The vernacular of the dialogue is fresh and frequently hilarious, with such lines as: ‘he’s too short to kick a duck’s butt’ and ‘don’t look a gift whore in the mouth.’

   In an interview Pharr says his goal was to be a Black Sinclair Lewis. He was inspired by Babbitt and getting a glimpse inside the upper middle class white home, to see what life was like behind closed doors, doors heretofore forbidden. Now opened wide. Pharr wished to do the same for Black culture. To let you see what Black folks are like when whites aren’t looking.

   The characters are all three-dimensionally drawn, with romance and dreams and heartbreak. While the main characters may be nominally gangsters — they bristle at the accusation. They don’t see themselves that way. They just see themselves as men, and they dream to be treated as such.

   Made into a film of the same name in 1973. . Currently online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQJAanxjgcQ.

DONALD HAMILTON – The Retaliators. Matt Helm #17. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback original, 1976.

   I suppose I could blame it on the movies. This is the latest Matt Helm adventure and the first I’ve ever read. The first impression is favorable, and I really did know Dean Martin wasn’t really right for the part. Helm is a tough government operative, with a  philosophy of life nearly as well defined as Travis McGee’s, They do have different bosses, different loyalties, but they share a common disdain for plastic America.

   This mission begins as Helm finds an extra $20,000 in his bank account, a worn-out idea that still brings the Bureau of Internal Security down on his neck. And the BIS boys continue to hang around his  neck as he heads for Mexico to stop a hit-man named Ernemann from his appointed rounds.

   I have the feeling that if Helm had asked himself or some other right person the right question at the right time, the detailed plot would have collapsed long before the final chapter, but then again his loyalties do not always involve asking questions. Smooth writing with a bit of action never more than a couple of pages away,  more than enough keep the eyeballs tracking.

Rating: B minus.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT – Something Wicked. PI Rush McKenzie #19. Minotaur Books, hardcover, May 2022. Setting: Minnesota.

First Sentence: “Jenness Crawford’s voice trembled with rage.”

   Rushmore McKenzie may have retired from the police force, but when a friend of his wife, Nina, asks for help, McKenzie can’t refuse. Jenness believes someone murdered her grandmother despite a lack of evidence. However, her biggest concern is that her siblings want to sell their 1883 home, hotel and restaurant, struggling since the pandemic, to developers. The Sons of Europa, a group calling for the preservation of white families, wants her to sell so zoning laws might be changed, and no one wants that.

   Housewright can be relied upon for an excellent sense of time and place, and wonderful dialogue. His realistic inclusion of live in the time of COVID is very well done. He deals with the issues of white supremacy, racism, greed, deceptiveness, infidelity, and more while being objective and non-preachy.

   McKenzie, Nina, and the town’s sheriff Deb are the ones who hold the story together and maintain our interest. There is a danger inherent with a plot which centers on a family rivalry; the characters tend to be unpleasant. That was certainly the case here. While Jenness avoided that curse, she was overshadowed by the other characters.

   There were significant weaknesses to the book. Exposition can be interesting but unless it moves the plot forward, it’s filler. Predictability is boring. Highly dramatic points at 50 percent and 75 percent makes one think of Midsomer Murders. An ending that tells, rather than shows, seems lazy. Classifying this story as a “locked-room mystery” is deceptive, and a major loose thread, even when acknowledged in the epilogue, wonders why it was there in the first place. Housewright is usually better than this. It seemed as though his heart just wasn’t into this book.

   Something Wicked relies on the strength of its principal characters and they don’t disappoint. A protagonist with a strong, committed, supportive relationship is such a pleasure. It may not overcome everything but serves as the core for a decent way to spend a day.

Rating: Okay.

MIRIAM ALLEN deFORD – The Theme Is Murder. Abelard Shuman, hardcover, 1967.

   Miriam Allen deFord is best known for her scholarly works on a variety of historical subjects, and for her true-crime studies — the full-length books, The Overbury Affair (for which she was awarded an MWA Edgar in 1961) and Ma Barker (1970), and the collection of short pieces, Murderers Sane and Mad (1965).

   But she was also an accomplished writer of short stories, both mysteries and science fiction (and in some cases a combination of the two); beginning in 1944, she published an aggregate of more than 1O0 until her death in 1975 at the age of eighty-seven.

   The Theme ls Murder is her only criminous collection, and a first-rate gathering it is. There are seventeen stories here, most of which first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; others were originally published in such diverse publications as Shadow Mystery Magazine, the Sixties men’s periodical Dude, and Windsor Quarterly. Most are of the quiet variety, with emphasis on character and unusual backgrounds (an actual homicide case preserved on a cuneiform tablet from 1850 B.C., for instance, in “The Judgment of En-Lil”; or Ancient Rome in “De Crimine”).

   One of her favorite themes is familial strife that builds into violence, as in such stories as ”Beyond the Sea of Death,” “The Oleander’ and “A Death in the Family.”

   Each of these seventeen tales is finely crafted and thought-provoking — a single-volume legacy from a gifted spinner of mysterious webs. Recommended.

———
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.

NANCY BELL – Biggie and the Poisoned Politician. Biggie Weatherford #1, hardcover, St. Martin’s, 1996; paperback, 1997.

   And here we have a first novel by an Austin, Texas lady who is a sorority house-mother at the University of Texas, and who is at work on the next Biggie Weatherford novel.

   Biggie Weatherford is the wealthiest woman in the small East Texas town of Job’s Crossing, and somewhat more than semi-eccentric. When the city fathers decide to put a landfill next to her farm and ancestral graveyard she rises up in righteous wrath, which is further fueled by a strip-mining operation sniffing around the area. But before she can accomplish anything a boarder has his car blown up, a city official is killed, and a mysterious stranger shows up in town.

   Well, they don’t come any cozier than this-pure fluff and a yard wide, but fortunately not very long (200 pages). It’s even got a recipe at the end, for God’s sake. And I actually sort of (*blush*) enjoyed it. It’s narrated by the lead’s 12 year old grandson in a fairly authentic rural Texas voice, which along with the characters was most of its appeal for me. They were painted with a very broad brush, but anyone who’s lived in a small town won’t have trouble recognizing a few of them.

   Bell stumbles once or twice with the voice (a regional first person voice is hard to write for 200 pages, even if you’re raised to speak it) and has a cat doing something a cat wouldn’t do, and the plot is the usual cozy silliness, but if you’re not expecting too much going in, you  might be pleasantly surprised.

   An aside — I’ll be interested to see if she catches any heat from the P.C. crowd for not only portraying a black woman as a maid, but having her have a shiftless husband and be a voodoo woman as well.

      The Biggie Weatherford series —

1. Biggie and the Poisoned Politician (1996)
2. Biggie and the Mangled Mortician (1997)
3. Biggie and the Fricasseed Fat Man (1998)
4. Biggie and the Meddlesome Mailman (1999)
5. Biggie and the Quincy Ghost (2001)
6. Biggie and the Devil Diet (2002)

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER writing as A. A. FAIR – All Grass Isn’t Green. Bertha Cool & Donald Lam #29. William Morrow, hardcover, 1970. Pocket, paperback, April 1971. Reprinted several times.

   There is a small disagreement in the mystery world about the numbering of this book in the series. The one that was theoretically intended to be number two, The Knife Slipped, was rejected by William Morrow, Gardner’s hardcover publisher – on grounds of being too racy – and did not see the light of day until 2016. (Goodreads calls it book #1.5, and I think they have the right of it.)

   What is true is that All Grass Isn’t Green is the final book in the series, and since Gardner is said to have been ill at the time, many reviewers have called it out as being one the weakest. More on that later.

Lam, as the active member of the two-person detective agency (plus a small staff or perhaps only two), is hired by a fairly reticent client to find a man for him. Why, he won’t say. Lam agrees, but with reservations. He quickly learns that the missing man is a freelance writer, that his girl friend has also moved out very suddenly, and that the trail for both leads to Mexico.

   That makes up the first third of the book, and Lam’s investigation, as he tells it, is both fun and very much worth following. The middle third is another story altogether. Once in Mexico, Lam discovers that the missing man was very foolishly putting together a story about the marijuana trade. (Hence the title.) Smuggling, that is, and when one of the gang turns up dead, it is somehow Lam’s client who is arrested for the murder.

   The story meanders around considerably in this section, with lots of uninteresting routine and repeated trips on Lam’s part back and forth across the border. It’s not until the preliminary hearing that the story picks up again, and with a vengeance. Lam cannot act as a lawyer, so he has to hire one for his client, but in the middle of the proceedings, convinces his client to fire the fellow and to act as his own attorney, with Lam whispering to him what questions to ask.

   So the book ends in fine fashion, albeit without the twist in the tale you might expect. The verdict on the book itself is therefore definitely mixed, but I’m glad I finally managed to catch up with this one. As for Bertha Cook, she fries a lot of oysters, but her role is otherwise inconsequentially small. (She never had a large one, or did she?)