MIKE ROSCOE – One Tear for My Grave.

Crown, hardcover, 1955. Paperback reprints: Signet #1358, November 1956, cover: Robert Maguire; G2432, 1964.

   Mike Roscoe’s tough Kansas City private eye Johnny April appeared in five novels between 1951 and 1958. Although the first four went through various printings and editions, neither Roscoe nor April is much remembered today.

   Both are due for revival and reassessment, as the handful of Johnny April stories are among the best produced in the wave of hard-hitting PI fiction that followed the big splash made by Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer.

   One Tear for my Grave finds April in the presence of millionaire Avery J. Castleman and a corpse. This prologue (“The 23rd Hour”) is followed by a flashback (“The First 22 Hours”) that comprises the bulk of the book.

   The lure of a fat retainer coaxes April out of bed at two in the morning to aid bookie Eddie Norris and his moll, Nicky, who have a corpse on their hands — or, actually, in their back seat. Norris claims innocence — somebody dumped this stiff in his car, says the bookie. From the cops April learns the corpse is a society type named David Matthews.

   Over the coming hours, various bookies — all of them owed money by Matthews — begin to die, and not of natural causes. Among them is Norris. April bumps heads with one particularly nasty bookie named Carbone, who trashes April’s office to convince him to “lay off” this case, which only serves to enrage the detective.

   April then meets with Ginny Castleman, the delicate, sympathy-arousing society girl engaged to the late Matthews; he also meets her mysterious Oriental servant, whose quiet concern for his mistress seems strangely obsessive. While bobbing and weaving between bookies and their thugs, April encounters Carbone’s moll, Lola, and a love/hate relationship blossoms.

   Eventually he finds that Matthews had paid off all the bookies before their deaths; and at the Castleman mansion, April has a final confrontation with Carbone as the convoluted, ultimately tragic mystery unravels. An epilogue (“The 24th Hour”) brings the book full circle.

   What sets such Roscoe mysteries as One Tear for My Grave apart from the crowd of would-be Spillanes is a studiously spare style. The novel is stripped for speed, consisting mostly of crisp dialogue and one- and two-sentence paragraphs.

   Despite this, the language is often vivid and evocative; witness the four opening lines (and four opening paragraphs) of the novel:

         There are two times when a man will lie very still.

         When he is finished making love with a woman.

         When he is finished with life.

         The man on the floor lay still with death.

   Roscoe was two men — Michael Ruso and John Roscoe — who were real private eyes, employed by Hargrave’s Detective Agency in Kansas City.

   The team’s first three books — Death Is a Round Black Ball (1952), Riddle Me This (1953), and Slice of Hell (1954) — are also excellent.

   The last Johnny April novel, The Midnight Eye, did not appear till 1958, half an Ace Double. While some of the poetic touches were still present, this marked a dropping off in quality over the first four, and a near absence of the dialogue/short paragraph approach.

   Perhaps the team had broken up and only one of them recorded this last Johnny April case.

         ———
   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.

MIKE ROSCOE – One Tear for My Grave. Crown, hardcover, 1955. Paperback reprints: Signet #1358, November 1956, cover: Robert Maguire; G2432, 1964.

   Call me a jaded old cynic, but when I saw the name “Mike Roscoe” on the cover of One Tear for My Grave, I somehow doubted that was the appellation his parents bestowed upon him at birth.

   In fact, a little digging in Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers and on the ?net revealed this was a joint pen name for two writers, both allegedly Private Detectives, who spun a half-dozen books in the mid-50s around the exploits of PI Johnny April.

    And they did rather a nice job, ladling out tough, bright, Chandler-esque prose, with a generous hand, lively and entertaining, with vivid action:

   Extravagant description:

   And the improbably-cantilevered women of a young man’s dreams:

   Prose like this can carry a book a long way, and for most of its brief length, Tear is a highly satisfying read, with a new twist wrinkling the end of each chapter, and a fresh corpse approximately twice a page.

   But then there’s the ending, and here I must carp: It’s just plain-damn sloppy. If a crime writer centers his book around Who-killed-so-and-so, that becomes a sort of important issue in the narrative. So when the cops tell our hero that all the major suspects have alibis, we readers should either take that as a given, or get to see the PI break down whatever alibis must needs get broken.

   Not here. I can say without revealing anything important that although the killer is given a clean bill early on, s/he turns out to be the killer with nary a word of explanation.

   It just ain’t fair.

   Fortunately, this unsatisfactory ending comes fairly late in the book, and doesn’t spoil what is for the most part, a lot of good fun. I’ll be looking for more “Mike Roscoe” and I recommend this one to anyone who likes a bright, fast-moving hard-boiled mystery.

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

ROSCOE, MIKE. Pseudonym of John Roscoe & Michael Ruso. SC: PI Johnny April, in all.
      Death Is a Round Black Ball. Crown, hc, 1952. Signet 966, pb, Oct 1952.
      Riddle Me This. Crown, hc, 1952. Signet 1060, pb, Sept 1953.
      Slice of Hell. Crown, hc, 1954. Signet 1216, pb, July 1955.

      One Tear for My Grave. Crown, hc, 1955. Signet 1358, pb, Nov 1956.
      The Midnight Eye. Ace Double D273, pbo, 1958.

THE LAST DETECTIVE. Pilot episode for the British ITV series of the same name; first telecast on 7 February 2003. Peter Davison, Sean Hughes, Rob Spendlove, Emma Amos, with Joanne Frogatt, David Troughton, Rachel Davies. Based on the book Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective by Leslie Thomas. Director: Nick Hurran.

   As far as the literary world is concerned, there are only four books in the “Dangerous Davies” series, but there were 17 episodes of this television series, spread out over four seasons, all part of the box set of DVDs I recently purchased, and I’m glad I did.

   This, the first episode, was adapted into a TV movie once before, a production with the same title as the book, Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective (1981), written and directed by Val Guest and starring Bernard Cribbens as Davies. I’ve not seen it, but it is included in the box set. (A sad note about the earlier movie is that it marked the last screen appearance of Bernard Lee, long-time “M” of the James Bond series.)

   So far as I know, Dangerous Davies never has had a first name, and the reason he is called “Dangerous” is that as a policeman, he isn’t. He’s slow, he’s methodical, the punks in the suburban town outside (or just inside) London don’t mind being arrested by him — he doesn’t resort to violence or racial epithets as the other coppers do — and he’s called the last detective, as he’d be the last one in the station house to be given a case of any significance.

   It’s not really clear how he fell so far in the opinions of his fellow officers or Inspector Aspinall (Rod Spendlove), his superior officer, as there are no flashbacks to tell the viewer (the writers of the TV series may want to hold that back for a while) and of all of the accents of the players involved, it’s those of his fellow policemen which I found the most difficult to translate.

   Davies, as I see I haven’t mentioned it so far, is played by Peter Davison — or should I say underplayed, as he’s certainly the gentlest and most patient of police detectives I have ever seen on TV. (This may be why he gets on the nerves of his fellow officers.) Davison, of course, also played Dr. Who for a while in his long acting career, as well as a shorter stint as Albert Campion, Margery Allingham’s stalwart but enigmatic hero.

   Assigned a nothing job to see whether a known hoodlum is coming back to England from Spain, and if so, why, Davies sidetracks himself onto another case, one that been open and unsolved for 20 years — that of a 17-year-old girl who went missing one night, her body never found.

   Reopening the case means wounding the girl’s family all over again, her mother, her father, and especially the girl’s sister, who came along only after her older sibling disappeared. Joanne Frogatt plays both parts, Josie in the present, and Celia in the past.

   She’s cheeky, sexy and vulnerable at the same time, and as Josie, at point slyly (but almost shyly) makes a play for Davies. It’s a wonderful performance.

   Davies, though, is married, but only barely. Emma Amos plays his wife, exasperated by Davies, unable to live with him, but there’s a sense that she still loves him, and if so, I imagine this is a thread that will play its way out over the course of the series. (They do have a large dog in common.)

   Stand-up comedian Sean Hughes plays Davies’ buddy Mod, who assists him on his cases, very much unofficially, while holding a number of real jobs, including dog-walker and door-to-door interviewer about the sex lives of senior citizens — and not very successfully.

   The ending is bittersweet, as Davies’ approach, low key but effective at the same time, is to persuade the killer to confess. Thus justice is done, but with no fanfare and at the same time embarrassing the department — slipshod and ineffective policework was done at the time — and thus getting himself into a deeper hole on the job.

   Episode Two now awaits me. While I’m not likely to be reporting on more, I am more than ready for the task. Eager, in fact. After a while, watching endless car chases on The Rockford Files eventually become boring, no matter how much you enjoy James Garner as Rockford.

BARBARA ALLAN – Antiques Roadkill. “A Trash ‘n’ Treasures Mystery.” Kensington Books, hardcover, August 2006. Paperback reprint: July 2007.

JANE K. CLELAND – Consigned to Death. St. Martin’s, hardcover, April 2006. Paperback reprint: April 2007.

   I was bored with the pseudonymous Barbara Allan novel, apparently produced by the husband-and-wife team of Max Allan and Barbara Collins. The characters were pasteboard and the plot was so vaporous that even reading the copy on the back jacket didn’t bring any of it back to me. But what do I know?

Consigned to Death, Cleland’s debut for antiques dealer Josie Prescott.

   Cleland has a background in both antiques and rare books, and her New Hampshire coastal setting, with well-drawn characters and an intriguing mystery plot, have me looking forward to a second outing, Deadly Appraisal, previewed in a supplement to Consigned.

    H. J. S. Anderton is hardly an author who is or ever was a household name, but Steve Holland recently posted the results of his research into his life on his Bear Alley blog.

    A British writer, Anderton was responsible for nine crime thrillers that came out in the 1930s. The titles are included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, all published in cheap paperback form, but what Steve has come up with for the first time is his full name, the year he was born, when he died, and most amazingly, some information about his family.

    Anderton’s books are impossibly difficult to find, so I can’t show you a picture of one of his covers. Only a single copy of one of his books is offered for sale on ABE, a reprint copy of his first book, The League of the Yellow Skull.

    Steve mentions this book in the following paragraph, which I’m quoting in full:

    I think he’s referring to Yellow Claws, The Golden Idol, and Shadow of Chu Kong. All nine of Anderton’s books are now on my wish list, but I think I’m going to have to wish awfully hard.

      Bibliography   [taken from Crime Fiction IV] —

ANDERTON, H. J. S.
    The League of the Yellow Skull (n.) Mellifont 1932
    The Quest of the Crimson Idol (n.) Mellifont 1932
    “The Panther” (n.) Mellifont 1933
    The League of Death (n.) Mellifont 1934
    Yellow Claws (n.) Mellifont 1934
    The Golden Idol (n.) Mellifont 1936
    The Dope King (n.) Mellifont 1937
    The King of Crime (n.) Archer Croft 1940
    Shadow of Chu Kong (n.) Popular Fiction 1940

    The connection between noted director Joseph Losey and the movie Hotel Reserve may be slim, but in the comments that follow my recent review of the film, a long discussion about the man and his movies has been taking place, perhaps without your noticing it.

    The movies that have come up for discussion range from Modesty Blaise to Boom!, The Lawless, The Servant and several others. If you’re a fan of his work, or would like to read more about him, follow the link above.

EDGAR WALLACE – The Stretelli Case and Other Mystery Stories. International Fiction Library / World Syndicate, hardcover, 1930.

   Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) was a publishing phenomenon in his day, his name being synonymous with the word “thriller,” a genre some would credit him with inventing.

   Wallace was incredibly prolific; he belongs to that group of logorrheic authors — Erle Stanley Gardner, John Creasey, Charles Dickens, and a few others — who wrote books like their hair was on fire. One would naturally expect a lowering in quality with an increase in quantity (it seems to be a natural law), but we’ll leave that judgment to others who have waded through most, if not all, of Wallace’s output.

   The Stretelli Case seems to be a brief sampling of his work taken from other collections, consisting of eleven short stories loosely classified as “mysteries.” While thriller elements are certainly present in most of them, the stories, with one exception, are indeed mysteries of one sort or another (the exception being “The Know-How”).

   Several stories feature detectives per se; most of them have people under pressure who must decipher baffling situations in order to correct deformations in the social fabric — or just to save their imperiled lives or reputations.

   The dates and places of first publication for these stories are nowhere in the book. (Sources for some are included in Hubin and will be noted here.)

         CONTENTS:

   ● 1. “The Stretelli Case.” [Reprinted in The Thriller #286, 28, July 1934.] Detective-Inspector Mackenzie’s last case provokes in him that “unquenchable antagonism between his sense of duty, his sense of justice, and his grim sense of humor.” Dr. Mona Stretelli of Madrid comes to him, convinced that Margaret, her sister, has been murdered by her husband, Mr. Morstels.

   Margaret, however, had a bad reputation with the authorities, since she “belonged to the bobbed-hair set that had its meeting place in a Soho restaurant. She was known to be an associate of questionable people; there was talk of cocaine traffic in which she played an exciting but unprofitable part,” and so on. Imagine Mackenzie’s surprise, then, when Mona does a complete about face and announces her intention to marry Morstels; and of what significance is it when Mona purchases a paste ring once owned by Marie Antoinette?

   Be prepared for a plot twist near the end.

   ● 2. “The Looker and the Leaper.” Is it always true “that the ultra-clever father has a fool for a son”? Dick Magnus and Steven Martingale, both scions of wealthy business magnates, wooed Thelma — “cold and sweet, independent and helpless, clever and vapid”–and “To everybody’s surprise, she married Dick.”

   Perhaps one could write it off to hormones, those “little X’s in your circulatory system which inflict upon an unsuspecting and innocent baby such calamities as his uncle’s nose, his father’s temper, and Cousin Minnie’s unwholesome craving for Chopin and bobbed hair.”

   By story’s end, we are left with a conundrum: Did the leaper fail to look before the looker made his leap, or was it all just a horrible accident?

   ● 3. “The Man Who Never Lost.” [Town Topics, 27 December 1919; reprinted in The Thriller #290, 25 August 1934.] Aubrey Twyford, The Man Who Could Not Lose, has won over 700,000 pounds in ten years at Monte Carlo’s gambling casinos; but when Bobby Gardner decides to go for broke and try to win enough to marry Madge Brane, will Twyford divulge his unbeatable system and thus guarantee his own loss?

   ● 4. “The Clue of Monday’s Settling.” Five million pounds’ worth of British, French, and Italian notes go missing from a strong-room on a trans-Atlantic ocean liner, and John Antrim and his daughter May face certain financial ruin; also missing are six towels, a fact of consuming interest to Bennett Audain, who “certainly understood the psychology of the criminal mind better than any police officer that ever came from Scotland Yard–an institution which has produced a thousand capable men, but never a genius.”

   For him, a word association test clinches it: If you heard the word “key,” would you think “wind”; and if the word was “Monday,” would you think “unpleasant”?

   ● 5. “Code No. 2.” [The Strand, April 1916.] It’s spy-versus-spy on the eve of World War One: Sir John Grandor, Chief of Intelligence, has his doubts about one of his own people; even though the one he suspects is killed, it still remains for a smart female agent to thwart a plan to transmit the stolen code to the Central Powers.

   (The code-stealing gadget, by the way, is remarkably high-tech and seems straight out of a James Bond movie.)

   ● 6. “The Mediaeval Mind.” [Reprinted in The Thriller #291, 1 September 1934.] Jean D’Orton, half-sister to the D’Orton brothers, is very, very rich and anxious to marry Jack Mortimer; the fact is, however, she doesn’t come into her fortune until she is twenty-five or gets married. In the meantime, her half-brothers have been, shall we say, improvident with her money, and the prospect of Jean’s wedding has dire implications for them: “It means,” says one, “penal servitude for all of us.”

   What to do. Well, how about shanghaiing Jack and forcing Jean to marry an escaped convict; that always works, doesn’t it? The biters get very decisively bit in this one.

   ● 7. “The Know-How.” Storm and stress in the production of a musical play, one in which no one, not even the producer, has any confidence. A Cinderella story for the understudy, but a mystery story this is not.

   ● 8. “Christmas Eve at the China Dog.” The paths of old war buddies intersect when Walter Merrick approaches air taxi pilot Tam M’Tavish, offering him five hundred pounds to help him perform a despicable act vis-a-vis another man’s wife; then comes that fateful evening in Paris at the “Chien de Chine,” and Tam quite unwittingly lays the foundation for a perfect alibi.

   ● 9. “The Undisclosed Client.” [Hearst’s Magazine, July 1926.] Lester Cheyne is a lawyer whose success lies, shall we say, outside the normal channels of the law; putting pressure on wealthy people for their indiscretions is his stock in trade, and everything is humming along nicely until he encounters the Girl in the Brown Coat….

   ● 10. “Red Beard.” [Colliers 24 May 1919.] A spy is murdered in his flat, yet he is clearly overheard telling his assailant that he’s glad his own gun jammed; Brinkhorn and Templey investigate on behalf of the Department.

   By the time they’re finished, Templey will have connected the disparate dots of the spy executed in the Tower of London, a disappearing index card, a ship sinking in the Irish Sea, a colored birth-mark on a child’s leg, bread passed and wine poured with the left hand, and his partner’s resignation from the Department.

   ● 11. “The Man Who Killed Himself.” [The Royal Magazine, February 1920.] For seventeen years Preston Somerville has been blackmailed by a nonentity named Templar; but when the latter drags Somerville’s daughter into the glare of hostile publicity, Preston is moved to desperation, his actions taking him through the valley of the shadow…..

RITA MAE BROWN & SNEAKY PIE BROWN – Catch As Cat Can.

Bantam; paperback reprint, Feb 2003. Hardcover edition: March 2002.

   Yes, Virginia, there really is a Crozet. In Virginia, that is, a small town of about 2000 inhabitants (not including cats), snugly nestled into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Montains. And the home of Mary Minor Haristeen, known to her friends as Harry, the postmistress of Crozet, and the Mom to Mrs. Murphy and Pewter (both cats) and Tee Tucker (a corgi).

   That the Mrs. Murphy mysteries are popular almost goes without saying, as this is the 10th in the series, but on the other hand, I am also positive that there are many many mystery readers who would never never read a mystery that has talking animals in them.

   To each other, that is, not to humans, who are ever a source of humor and resignation to them. Not to mention food.

   From page 3: “‘I’m standing vigil at the food bowl.’ Pewter zipped to the kitchen.” And here’s a typical cat way of expressing herself, from page 35: “Mrs. Murphy strode into the room, sat down on the coffee table, and yelled, ‘Everybody is horrible! Only I am perfect!'” Animals — and I never knew this before — are very blunt observers of the humans around them. Read page 144 and be convinced.

   And Harry’s three companions — Harry once was married, but her ex is still friendly, and wants to be friendlier again, but she is not sure — do their best to assist in solving the mysteries involved in their books, but being unable to communicate with Harry in any useful manner, they are forced, alas, to allow her to muddle along without them.

   In Catch As Cat Can, it takes 80 pages for the first death to occur — before that the only crime that occurs is a case of the stolen hupcaps — and the atmosphere is so low key that even then no one’s aware that murder has actually happened.

   Rita Mae Brown is a well-known writer of Southern fiction, and she has the details of life in small town Crozet delineated perfectly, social structure and all, down to the finest details, but as a mystery writer, she’s a long way from being this generation’s Agatha Christie.

   The investigation carried out by the local sheriff’s office is certainly up to any large city’s standard, but it’s still largely underwhelming and uninspired. There are heaps and heaps of speculation, most of it wrong, and no one asks the right question at the right time. And although there’s a great big huge Wrecker’s Ball of a finale, the solution is both (a) strictly from left field, and (b) simply too easy.

   Harry, the two cats, the corgi, and all of her friends (and ex-husband) are certainly great people to sit down and visit with vicariously, though, and if you find yourself hooked, you’ll probably want to come back again and again.

[UPDATE] 05-17-09.   I wouldn’t mind reading another in the series, but while I’ve had the chance, several times over, so far I haven’t. Others have taken up the slack, though. Since I wrote this review, only six years ago, another seven Mrs. Murphy books have been published.

   The Black Horse Extra website is designed primarily to promote Western fiction, and Westerns published by UK publisher Robert Hale in particular. The latest issue, however, as editor Keith Chapman told me in an email from him earlier this week, has at least one item of considerable interest to mystery fans as well.

   The lead piece, though, is a long profile of western writer Gary Dobbs, aka Jack Martin, whose Tainted Archive blog is always worth a visit. Gary’s also a one man publicity factory for the revival of western fiction in general, making every effort he can to promote the genre and to keep it alive and well — and succeeding, too.

   The direct connection to Mystery*File is further down the page, and at this point, I’m simply going to quote:

   Some of the authors seem to be one side, while others are on the other. The consensus answer, if any is arrived at, appears to be “It all depends,” which although I’m not an author, would have to be the answer I’d give if I were one.

    Of course there’s a lot more to it than that. Since mystery writers face the same dilemma, I think most mystery readers will enjoy the far-ranging discussion that follows. (Follow the link in the first paragraph above.)

HOTEL RESERVE. RKO Radio Pictures-UK, 1944. James Mason, Lucie Mannheim, Julien Mitchell, Herbert Lom, Clare Hamilton, Frederick Valk, Raymond Lovell, Patricia Medina. Based on the novel Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler. Directors: Lance Comfort, Max Greene (Mutz Greenbaum), Victor Hanbury.

    There must be a well-known rule of thumb, something like Murphy’s Law except that I don’t know the name, that when a movie has three directors, it’s not very good. While there are some good moments in Hotel Reserve, it’s no exception to prove the rule.

    I don’t think it was the author’s fault. Back in the 1950s when I first started reading “grown-up” mysteries, Eric Ambler was one of my favorite authors. His spy novels written in the 1940s were wonderfully descriptive and intense, filled with ordinary citizens getting into the most intricate plots — and all the better, finding their way out.

    I’ll have to re-read them sometime. Perhaps they won’t hold up or match my memories, but I think they will. In Hotel Reserve it is a man named Peter Vadassy (James Mason), an intense medical student who’s half-Austrian and half-French and anxiously awaiting his French naturalization papers, who gets into trouble during a short vacation at a French seaside resort, circa 1939.

    It seems that someone accidentally used his camera to take some photographs of a defense installation, and the police, particularly intelligence chief Michel Beghin (Julien Mitchell) are not amused. Although he knows Vadassy to be innocent, he sends him back to the hotel to find the real culprit, under the threat of deportation if he fails.

    The set-up is fine. This had all the signs of a pretty good amateur detective story, but what follows instead is a mish-mash of comedy and inept B-movie clunks on the head and angry confrontations.

    The other vacationers are difficult to keep track of — who’s who and why they’re there — even Vadassy’s would-be girl friend, Mary Skelton (Clare Hamilton).

   That the latter is surprisingly wooden in both attitude and delivery is explained by the fact that this is the only movie she ever made. (It is claimed by several sources that Clare Hamilton was the sister of Maureen O’Hara; at least one person leaving comments on IMDB is not so sure.)

    If you read through the list of the cast that I provided above — I didn’t list them all, as most of them have very small parts — and assuming that you recognize some of the names, you may pick out the true culprit(s) rather easily.

    James Mason, alas, didn’t have that luxury. He does well in the part, frightfully earnest to the end, but he’s undone by an indifferent script, a ludicrous ending, and three directors, none of whom can be compared to, say, a certain Mr Hitchcock, except badly.