FRANK GRUBER – The Buffalo Box. PI Simon Lash #2, Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1941. Bantam #50, paperback, 1946.

   Gruber created three other major series characters (four. actually): book salesman Johnny Fletcher and his pal Sam Cragg, heroes of The French Key and The Hungry Dog (1941), The Mighty Blockhead (1942), The Scarlet Feather (1948), and ten other adventures; private eye Otis Beagle, who stars in a trio of undistinguished mysteries: and Pl Simon Lash, who likewise appears in three novels, The Buffalo Box being the second and best of them.

   Lash is Gruber’s most memorable sleuth. A bibliophile as well as a private detective, he teams with his friend and bodyguard Eddie Slocum to solve mysteries with at least some bookish element. Here, Lash is hired by an old prospector who has come riding his burro down Hollywood Boulevard and claims to be Lansford Hastings, author of The Emigrant’s Route to Oregon and California, an extremely rare personal account of the famous Donner Party tragedy.

   The prospector wants Lash to find the owner of a redwood box carved in an intricate buffalo design by a wealthy member of the Donner Party named Isaac Ekert, who died in that snowbound Sierra Nevada pass in 1846. All of which is fine, except that Lash, being an astute detective, smells a rat: He happens to know that the real Lansford Hastings died in 1870.

   Curiosity prods Lash into undertaking an investigation, and his interest is piqued even furthcr when he finds a legitimate descendant of Hastings, Elizabeth Dunlap, trying to peddle a copy of The Emigrant’s Route in Oscar Eisenschiml’s secondhand bookshop. Murder complicates matters even more. Lash’s investigation intensifies, leading him all over the L.A. area, to Emigrant Gap in the High Sierra, to the mountain town of Placerville. and finally back to Hollywood and both a killer and the secret of the buffalo box.

   Gruber’s knowledge of books and of pioneer history, and his breakneck pacing and outlandish cast of characters, make this an enjoyable book. The same is true of the other two Lash/Slocum novels— Simon Lash, Private Detective ( 1941), in which a rare Mormon pamphlet called The Latter Day Saints’ Emigrants’ Guide plays an important role; and Murder ’97. (1948), in which sinister doings revolve around a copy of an 1897 children’s book by Horatio Alger called Ralph Raymond’s Heir.

   ;Frank Gruber’s mysteries, despite their shortcomings, were quite popular in the Forties and early Fifties. as were his many western novels. Several of both types were filmed, some from his own screenplays. He also wrote the scripts for more than twenty other Hollywood B movies, among them The Mask of Dimitrios and the last of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films, Dressed to Kill (1946); and some 200 teleplays.

   Late in his life and career, he returned to the writing of novels, nearly all of them non-series suspense stories with exotic locales. The best of these are probably Twenty Plus Two (1961), which was made into a film with David Janssen; Bridge of Sand (1963); and The Etruscan Bull (1969). These novels have more depth and show more craft than his earlier series mysteries, yet none of them has the appeal of the Simon Lash books, or the Oliver Quade stories, or even of the flawed Johnny Fletcher/Sam Cragg titles.

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   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.

CHARLIE JANE ANDERS “Palm Strike’s Last Case.” Novelet. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2014. Reprinted in The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera, edited by David Afsharirad (Baen Books, June 1915).

   I don’t read much of what’s offered by current publishers in the way of science fiction or fantasy, practically none all. But Charlie Jane Anders is a new author, or least she counts as such to me. She’s been writing SF and (I think) fantasy for 20 years already, and has been nominated (and won) a ton of awards, including both the Hugo and Nebula over that same time period.

   It was the title that caught my eye with this one. Palm Strike is the alter ego of Luc Deverux, a food agriculturist on Earth, a man who wears  a mask and costume to fight a war of revenge against a mobster called the Dark Shard, blaming the latter for the death of his son. He has done so well in this regard he has been persuaded that he needs another frontier as a continued fight in a  new battleground.

   But he arrives on his new planetary home later than  he expected,  having failed to revive from his sleeping capsule perhaps 20 years too late. The colonists there are on the verge of being wiped out. Their crops have been failing more and more every year. Barely nothing will grow. After he finally has been woken, he is hailed as a hero. He doesn’t think so, but he is willing to take on the challenge, using the guise of his secret identity in a final thrust against   disastrous failure.

   Anders is a excellent writer.  She tells this particular story clearly and using many short asides for an added punch when needed. I’m not so sure all of the loose ends are tied up, but I decided at the end to make a pact with myself not go into details. So I won’t. Safe to say this one doesn’t have quite the status of her award-winning stories I mentioned earlier, but it’s still a very very good one..

GEORGE BAGBY – Murder Calling “50”. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942.

   History books are fine, but they don’t tell the whole story. The same pieces of personal history may occur for millions of people everyday, events that affect their lives many times over, but if they make the history books (and almost none of them do), they’re squeezed into a short footnote (at best a small paragraph or two), so children a generation or so later hardly have a chance to know anything about it.

   Personal diaries and mystery stories, that’s the only way some important things will ever remembered. A case in point: this book (of course) about the air raid drills and blackouts that took place in New York City (and probably all up and down the East Coast; California was looking another direction).

   If you didn’t live through them, who remembers anything about them today? Even the title this book no longer has any significance to anyone any more. Air raid wardens and civil defense personnel had to spread the word when a drill (or actual attack) was coming, and they did it by phone and by code, each one called required to spread the word to three or four others. “50” is the code for “man your posts”. “52” is the code for “all clear”.

   Who knows this today? Who remembers the routine of blackout curtains, heading for designated apartments in a building until the all clear was sounded, or even buckets of sand placed on every floor?

   Or who would know, from a chapter in a history book, how uncertain and confusing the times were in those days? Even with CNN on the job today, rumors and speculation ran rampant during the Persian Gulf War. What must it have been like without?

   And of course, all this makes an ideal background for a murder mystery, one that takes place in Bagby’s building while his friend Inspector Schmidt (he of the always aching feet) is visiting. There is a dead man, of course; his wealthy patron; a young couple in love but not quite sure of each other; a Russian princess (and faithful milkman); a playgirl and a Broadway sharpster. All involved in a mass of stairs in the dark, dog leashes, strange noises, family jewels, elevator boys and the above-mentioned buckets of sand (handy for showing footprints in bathrooms, if nothing else).

   You probably know from this if this is the type of book for you, but if you like George Bagby / Aaron Marc Stein’s work (as I do), I should also tell you that I didn’t find it one of his better ones. For technical reasons, that is. The question not answered concerning the bombshell Schmitty reveals on p.257 is “When did he know, and how did he find out?” (I suspect it was the mysterious one-sided phone conversation he had on p.213, but I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.)

   There were a couple of other questions left unanswered at story’s end. I won’t go into any of these — they’re relatively minor, and they have no particular effect on events, and then only before the murder, not afterward. It would have taken Bagby a couple of extra pages, perhaps, to fill us in, and  I realize that I’m a little late in saying that I wish he had.

ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE – January 1968. Overall rating: ***½.

JOE GORES “File #2: Stakeout on Page Street.” (Dan Kearney Associates) Involving a delinquent car,, narcotics, and racial prejudice in Hashbury. (4)

EDGAR WALLACE “The Father Christmas Job.” (Felix Jenks) First published in The Grand Magazine, January 1923, as “The Buoy That Did Not Light.” Ship’s steward sees behind on-board activities. (1)

STUART CLOATE “The Second Nail.” First published in 1966. An African witch doctor’s magic soothes a broken love affair. Quiet sophisticated evil. (5)

STEPHEN DENTINGER “First Offense.” A bank robbery fails to come off. Young bored kids with big ideas. [Dentiger is a pen name for Edward D. Hoch.] (3)

MICHAEL HARRISON “The Murder in the Rue Royale.” [C. Auguste Dupin] “Unpublished” Dupin pastiche, perhaps the first locked room murder. A complicated business.. (3)

EVE CHRISTMAS “The Burning of a Witch.” First story, Poorly told story of the mistress of a Nazi prison camp commander. (1)

MEL D. AMES”The Promise of His Coming.” First story. Infidelity revenged, Somehow too clever, (1)

ELLERY QUEEN “With the Compliments of Comus.” (Ellery Queen.) Novelette. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine , December 1948, as “The Dauphin’s Doll. A doll mysteriously disappears from a department store display at Christmas time. Of course the story’s ending must destroy the illusion. (4)

HUGH PENTECOST “No Witnesses on the Waterfront.” First published in Argosy, March 1960, as “The Ghost of Champagne Charlie.” Longshoremen on the waterfront stick together, this time on the side of the law. (5)

ALICE SCANLAN REACH “Father Crumlish Celebrates Christmas.” Father Crunlish saves a falsely accused man at Christmas time, Entertaining, but short on detection. (2)

JULIAN SYMONS “A Pearl Among Women.” (Francis Quarles.) First published in The Evening Standard, January 26, 1953. Quarles solves an uninteresting puzzle of stolen necklace without moving from his chair. (2)

LAEL J. LITTKE “A Feline Felony,” A mystery-fantasy of Jerome, who looked like a cat. (4)

JAMES YAFFEE “Mom Remembers,” Short novel. Mom Makes a parallel between the unhappy life of a Puerto Rican family in the streets of New York City today and the story of a Jewish family, and Mon’s own mother, in the lower East Side 45 years ago. Length gives added depth to both stories, depth which overcomes a slight weakness in the detection. Mom is a lovely person. (4)

FRANK GRUBER – Brass Knuckles. Sherbourne, gardcover, 1966.

   Frank Gruber’s first novel, The French Key (1940), so moved critic William Lyon Phelps that he rhapsodized: “[It] is the best of 8,000 murder stories I have read.” One wonders (a) what sort of godawful mysteries Phelps had been reading all his life; and (b) if he was senile at the time he made this statement.

   The fact is, while The French Key may be an entertaining novel. it falls woefully short of being a masterpiece. Like all of Gruber’s novels, its prose shows the author’s pulp-magazine origins, the plot has some dubious motivation and other weak elements, and the whole thing suffers (as opposed to the works of many of Gruber’ s counterparts) from underwriting — scenes chopped off short of their potential, either through haste or lack of ability.

   Still and all, Gruber had a pulpster’s knack for telling a lightning-fast story, and for creating oddball characters and integrating them into unusual backgrounds; for those reasons his work remains readable today. This is especially true of his short stories: his short fiction shows much more facility than his novels, as the ten novelettes in Brass Knuckles testify.

   All ten of these stories feature Oliver Quade, the “Human Encyclopedia,” hawker of the 1200-page Compendium of Human Knowledge (every page of which he has memorized) and accomplished amateur sleuth. The Quade adventures began in Thrilling Detective in 1936; the following year Gruber moved the series to Black Mask, where all hut one of the entries in Brass Knuckles were first published.

<    Quade is an amusing character, as is his sidekick, Charlie Boston (a name Gruber borrowed for use as a pseudonym on a 1941 novel, The Silver Jackass ). He and Charlie travel around the country looking for likely places to set up their spiel and getting into trouble as a result of their choices. In “Ask Me Another,” their appearance at the Great Chicago Auditorium Poultry Show has them up to their ears in murder, mayhem, and chickens.

   Other creatures plague them as well-canines in “Dog Show Murder,” bangtails in “Oliver Quade at the Races,” and fighting cocks in “Death at the Main.” In “State Fair Murder,” it is the midway at the Minnesota State Fair and Confederate colonel William Clarke Quantrill that combine to land our heroes in hot water.

   These stories are lightweight and pulpy, but pleasant diversions nonetheless — and representative examples of the state of the art in such magazines as Black Mask in the late Thirties and early Forties.

  Despite factual errors and distortions, a thirty-nine-page introductory essay by Gruber entitled “The Life and Times of the Pulp Story” (which he later expanded into his 1967 memoir The Pulp Jungle) is compulsive reading and makes Brass Knuckles particularly commendable to anyone interested in the pulp era.

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   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.

IF SCIENCE FICTION. January 1968. Editor: Frederik Pohl. Cover art: John Pederson, Jr. Overall rating: **½.

JOHN RANKINE “The Peacemakers.” Novelette. [Rankine is a pen name of Douglas R. Mason.} The responsibilities of peace entail sabotage and violence to help an IGO agent escape from the planet Garamss. With all the subsequent rationalizations, and a beginning that doesn’t mean anything. Uninteresting and confusing. (1)

BASIL WELLS “From Distant Earth.” True love, unreturned, on an invisible planet, (3)

R. V. HUMPHREY The Taste of Money.” First story. Novelette. Comic story, funnier than Retief, of the flavorful Tastybushes of Gloomer. Real biological SF in addition. ($)

PHYLLIS GOTTLIEB “Rogue;s Gambit.” Novelette. What happens when an ugly man marries disfigured woman and takes her to an isolated spacelight [?], to later learn she can be cured. Psychologically interesting, (3)

FRED SABERHAGEN “Starsong,” Berserker story based on Orpheus’s trip to the underworld. (4)

JAMES WHITE “All Judgement Fled.” Serial; part 2 of 3. See report following my review of the February (1968) issue.

ROGER ZELAZNY “He That Moves.” An advanced race that can regenerate humanity discovers a a man who refuses, Who is he? (3)

   It started out normally, in perfectly innocent fashion, but after I’d packed up the I’d books sold on eBay since the day before and was heading to the post office, I noticed that a warning light on my car’s dashboard was on. Something wrong with a tire? That hadn’t happened in a while. I jumped out and looked at all four tires. Sure enough, one was not just soft, but flat.

   I went in to call AAA, and having done so – they told me that it would be an hour before help came along – I went back out and heard the radio playing. I hadn’t turned it off before getting out. I got in and reached for my ignition key, The thick, stubby end wasn’t there,  Gone. It had exploded apart, leaving only the thin metal part in the ignition. I tried puling it out, but was a total no-go. Eve with pliers, it wouldn’t budge.

   So, two more phone calls, One to Goodyear to replace the tire, and then to a local locksmith. I have an appointment with the former for Tuesday – why so long, I don’t know – and the locksmith came around one o’clock today.

   But what’s going on? What’s the connection between a flat tire and an ignition key with its head blown off? Same time and place.  I don’t see it, but there you go. It happened.  Any explanations?

MAXWELL GRANT – The Eyes of the Shadow. Bantam H4056, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1969. Reprint of the original novel that appeared in The Shadow Detective Magazine, April/June 1931.

   #2 in series. Harry Vincent and Claude Fellows are back on the scene again, helping Bruce Duncan fulfill the conditions in his uncle’s will, rewarding friends of a Russian nobleman. These friends are being methodically eliminated, however, and the Shadow’s assistance is needed to nab the criminals responsible.

   As in a comic strip, dialogue is used to explain too much of the action, with many machinations of the plot designed only for the reader’s benefit and revelation, Better writing than last time (reported on here), but this is not as interesting a story.

   Lamont Cranston appears for the first time. The use of television, as a new invention, is also worth pointing out.

Rating: **

MARTHA GRIMES – The Man with a Load of Mischief. Richard Jury #1. Little, Brown, hardcover, 1981. Dell, paperback, 1990. Many other later reprint editions.

   An English village called Long Piddleton, an earl who prefers to be called Mr. Plant, his slightly dolly aunt (an American by birth who hasn’t assimilated the British point of view even after thirty years), assorted villagers, pubs with ancient names and modem nicknames, and Inspector Richard Jury of Scotland Yard — all of these combine with an admixture of gruesome murders and eccentric antics in The Man with a load of Mischief .

   Jury, along with his hypochondriac sergeant, arrives to investigate two unidentified murdered men whose bodies were found on consecutive nights at different Long Pid pubs. Melrose Plant, who teaches a course a year in French romantic poetry and who has given up his title, assists Jury in the investigation, but is impeded by his aunt (who has countered Plant’s renunciation by assuming the title “Lady Audrey”).

   Among the suspects when yet another murder is discovered near yet another pub are a variety of Long Pid’s inhabitants, who have moved there for reasons that require several chapters to explain. The combination of Jury’s painstaking police work and Plant’s background know ledge of local skeletons helps identify the victims and finally provides the killer’s motives and identity.

   Jury is a warm and clever man, and the friendship that develops between him and Plant is just the beginning of a relationship that carries over into future novels, among them The Anodyne Necklace (1982), The Dirty Duck (1984), and Help the Poor Smuggler (1985).

   Grimes, an American professor of English, has perfectly captured the atmosphere of the small English village, as well as created indelible and endearing characters.

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   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.

D. C. BROD – Error in Judgment. PI Quint McCauley #2. Walker, hardcover, 1990. Diamond, paperback; 1st printing thus, September 1991.

   [The asking price for the later edition as posted above is $4.50.] As you’ve probably noticed, paperbacks are making quantum jumps in terms of prices. I’m not sure where the upper limit is, in terms of public resistance to bigger and bigger chunks of available spending money, but so far nothing seems to be keeping the cost of reading material from jumping onward and upward, from one month to the next, or so it seems. (Compare the price of this book with the one that went before, from the same publisher. [Murder at Teatime, by Stefanie Metteson, $3,95, published March 1991.] Compare it with the price of paperbacks at the time you’re reading this, several months from now.)

   But as for the question, “Is this book worth $4.50?,” I’d hesitate a little, but I’m going to say yes. I enjoyed it (and enjoyed it more than I thought I was going to, after the first couple of chapters). It’s a good-sized book, 258 pages of smallish print, and if you enjoy PI stories, I think you’ll be getting your money’s worth.

   On the other hand, a general rule of thumb is that you should be careful of PI books written by authors with initials for a first name. The “D” stands for Deborah, and by and large, women still don’t write hard-boiled PI novels. (But neither did Rex Stout. All I’m saying is be careful.)

   Brod’s detective hero is Quint McCauley, a struggling private investigator  new to the small town of Foxport, somewhere outside of Chicago. He’s already made the mistake of crossing one of the town’s leading legal lights, and jobs are getting hard to come by. The one that he has now, on a contingency basis, is that of trying to determine whether or not a judge’s death was really a suicide. A clause in an insurance policy means a difference of a million dollars, payable to the widow.

   The judge, by the way, was under indictment in an bribery case, but Quint still wonders why the case was closed so quickly by the police department. (He is also on the outs with the chief of police, you might be interested in knowing, ever since he tried to pick up the man’s wife in a bar some time earlier.)

   Quint does have the advantage over the police, as far as the case is concerned, in that he was the one to have discovered the body. He was also the one who found (and went off with) the pictures he found stashed away in a filing cabinet. He shouldn’t have, and that’s where the title comes from.

   It’s a complex case, in other words. The difficulty I found with it, in the early going, is that the writing is talky and flat, and McCauley, who tells the story, sounds whiney and apologetic, almost to the point of exasperation. Points of the story where he should be angry, he says he’s angry, but he doesn’t seem angry and he doesn’t act angry. (Maybe he’s more cold-blooded than I thought he was.)

   If you’ve decided to read it, though, bear with it, and you’ll eventually find the plot has enough twists, major and minor, to make it worth the effort. This is a mixed review, in other words.

      The Quint McCauley series —

1. Murder in Store (1989)
2. Error in Judgement (1990)
3. Masquerade in Blue (1991); apa Framed in Blue
4. Brothers in Blood (1990)
5. Paid in Full (2000)