THOMAS H. COOK – Mortal Memory. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1993. Bantam, paperback, 1994.

   Cook’s three novels of Frank Clemons, first an Atlanta cop, then a New York investigator, are about as dark and grim a trio as you’re likely to find. I’ve only read one other book of his and it was of the same shade, so I didn’t come to this one expecting a lot of chuckles. Which was just as well, because there weren’t any.

   This is the story of a man whose father murdered his brother, sister, and mother when he was nine. He has buried most of the memories of his childhood, but not so deep they can’t be disinterred, and that is what happens when a lady comes to town to interview him for a book she is writing about family Killers. As he brings the past into the light, its shadows darken the present, and we move along with him to a conclusion that seems at once both inevitable and unforeseen.

   Cook’s prose reminds me at times of David Lindsey in its slow pace and somber tone. When done well — as they each do it — the combination can result in powerful and evocative storytelling. The protagonist is drawn clearly in some ways, and in others we understand him no better in the end than he does himself. The same is true of his parents and siblings. There are questions left unanswered — but then there are those at the end of everything, aren’t there?

   The constant shifts between past and present were potentially distracting but well handled. I thought that the character of the writer was either too enigmatic or not faceless enough; as presented, she was vaguely unsatisfying. That is a relatively minor cavil though, and if you like this book well enough to read it through, you won’t be unaffected by it. Cook remains one of the masters of the dark side.

ZELDA POPKIN – Death Wears a White Gardenia. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1938. Red Arrow Books #5, digest-sized paperback. 1939. Dell #13, paperback, 1943.

   Mary Carner, department-store detective, appeared in five books, of which this is the first. At least in this novel, the store is Jeremiah Blankfort and Company in New York City, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an appearance by the Governor’s wife.

   Also adding to the festivities is the discovery of a corpse that turns out to have been Andrew McAndrew, credit manager of Blankfort’s and a chap, it would appear, given to blackmailing married customers who charge items for their girl friends. He also had his own girl friends, one of whom is carrying his child.

   The suspects are limited to those who were working in the store the previous evening before the anniversary celebration, but that is nonetheless a rather large number. McAndrew’s fed-up wife and brother-in-law and a junky but talented shoplifter add to the total.

   Mary Carner is convinced that the murder was committed by an employee of Blankfort’s. That part of the investigation is stymied since the store’s owner will not allow the employees to be questioned until the sale day is over. This is, after all, still in the depths of the Depression, and the department store’s finances are rather rocky.

   Better than Spencer Dean’s department-store mysteries, but not much better. One hopes that Popkin improved in her later novels.

       The Mary Carner (Whittaker) series —

Death Wears a White Gardenia. Lippincott, 1938.
Murder in the Mist. Lippincott, 1940.

Time Off for Murder. Lippincott, 1940.
Dead Man’s Gift. Lippincott, 1941.

No Crime for a Lady. Lippincott, 1942.

   Zelda Popkn wrote two other works of crime fiction, So Much Blood (Lippincott, 1944), and A Death of Innocence (Lippincott, 1971) which was the basis of a TV movie of the same title. (CBS, 1971 with Shelley Winters and Arthur Kennedy).

   For more on the author herself, here’s a link to her Wikipedia page.

STEPHEN SOLOMITA – A Good Day to Die. Otto Penzler, hardcover, 1993. No paperback edition.

   Solomita has switched publishers, and given us a new lead after five novels featuring the maverick cop Stanley Moodrow. Roland Means is, like Moodrow, an NYC cop. Means is half Native American, and known as “Mean Mr. Means.” An eighteen year veteran, he has been exiled to Ballistics for his past sins, which are legion.

   He is offered a chance to get back on the street by assisting a black Captain, Vanessa Bouton, in her search for a serial killer known as “Mr. Thong” for reasons too indelicate to detail in this family journal. The NYPD is going crazy trying to catch him, but Bouton has her own ideas, and has gotten permission to form a two-person task force to try them out.

   At the beginning of the book, we see a blind Asian woman abducted by a man and a woman who are obviously psychotic. Can, the reviewer asked breathlessly, these cases be connected?

   This reads like vintage Solomita: hard, fast, and mean. There’s a tinge of Andrew Vachss here, too, due to Means’ background as an abused child, and much talk of many serial killers being similarly abused. The viewpoints alternate between Means and the blind captive, and the story moves along nicely.

   It’s action-adventure, well written and with enough characterization to keep it from being pure escapism; but barely enough, and not all of it struck me as believable. We’ll probably see more of Means and Bouton, though.

[UPDATE] 01-19-15.   There were three more books in Solomita’s Stanley Moodrow series, but Barry guessed incorrectly in his final paragraph. For whatever reason, there was never a second Means and Bouton novel. The remainder of Solomita’s output, continuing through 2014 with The Striver, appears to have been standalones.

LAURENCE SHAMES – Florida Straits. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1992. Dell, reprint paperback, 1993.

   Have you noticed how much good ink down-and-dirty novels set in Florida get? Ever wonder why? The easy answer is that lots of good writers are writing about it, but I rarely enjoy these books as much as others seem to, so I don’t like that one. I like the conspiracy theory better. Shames’ book, by the way, got rave reviews.

   Joey Goldman is the bastard son of a bigtime Mafia chief in NYC, and the half brother of the heir apparent, both of whom ignore him. He decides to start over in Florida, so he and his girl friend Sandra head for Key West and the pot of gold. It proves, elusive, though, and he has been reduced to taking a legit job when he finds himself caught between a gang boss and his bigshot half-brother, the latter having stolen 3 mil worth of emeralds from the former.

   What this story is, is the story of a Young Man Finding Himself. Klutz becomes Competent. Shames writes well, and has the wiseguy dialect down pat. The plot is believable, as is the slightly tacky atmosphere of Key West. Well and good, except he wants me to like Joey Goldman, and I don’t.

   Goldman is a junior-grade hood from a long line of hoods, and having him develop a few virtues doesn’t change that. He talks blithely of becoming a super-pimp (among other things) and doesn’t see anything wrong with it. Though he eventually decides not to be a wiseguy, it isn’t because he repents the way of life, he just realizes he isn’t equipped for it.

   With the exception of his girl (and even she is perfectly willing to live with and off criminal efforts), these are a bunch of jerks who prey on decent people. I don’t like people like that, and I don’t like people who want me to like them. OK?

   
Editorial Comment:   This was the author’s first work of crime fiction, and the first of nine books in what is known as his “Key West” series, the most recent being Shot on Location, 2013. From one website it can be learned that:

    “In prior careers, Laurence has been a NYC cab driver, lounge singer, furniture mover, lifeguard, dishwasher, gym teacher and shoe salesman. Following these failed careers, he moved to writing on a full-time basis in 1976. Since then, he has made four different New York Times Bestseller lists, all writing under different pen names (and none of which were his own).”

WILLIAM G. TAPPLY – The Snake Eater. Brady Coyne #12. Otto Penzler Books, hardcover, 1993. Minotaur Books, softcover, 2000, as one of three novels in Snake Eater/Seventh Enemy/Close to the Bone: A Brady Coyne Omnibus.

   I’ve enjoyed Tapply’s stories of Boston lawyer Brady Coyne over the years. Evidently others have, too, judging from the series’ longevity and Otto Penzler snapping Tapply up for his new press. Though Coyne is a lawyer, it should be noted for those new to the series that these are not “lawyer” books, and that he really functions more as a private detective.

   The book opens with a man whom we do not know being stabbed to death in a NYC subway. Then we shift to our hero Brady as he receives a call from his old friend in the Justice Department, Charlie McDivitt, asking him to defend a Viet Nam vet who has been busted for growing marijuana in his back yard.

   It develops that the vet is a victim of Agent Orange poisoning and needs the evil weed to alleviate his symptoms. Coyne prepares for a tough case, but the charges are dropped unexpectedly, and no one is willing to say why. Then the vet is brutally murdered, and no one seems terribly interested in finding out why, or by whom — except, of course, Coyne.

   Tapply does his usual job of smooth storytelling, and Coyne is his usual engaging self. There is a bit of middle-aged soul searching on his part as one of his relationships goes awry, which serves to deepen the characterization a bit.

   The eventual resolution of the plot in its broad outline (if not all details) was discernible early on, as perhaps it was meant to be. It was not terribly credible to me, and the identity of the killer still less so. Tapply remains one of the better in the field in terms of readable prose, but I found this to be a distinctly minor effort. I wasn’t sorry I read it, but I wish there had been more there. He can do, and has done, better.

Editorial Comments:   William G. Tapply was last mentioned on this blog back in 2009, at the time of his death. Included in that post was a complete bibliography for him. The Snake Eater was the 12th Brady Coyne novel out of 24, not counting three crossover outings with J. W. Jackson and Tapply’s fellow author and good friend Philip R Craig.

   It has been over two years since one of Barry Gardner’s reviews has graced the pages of this blog. Other than the fact that some of the reviews I have access to cannot be scanned but must be re-typed from scratch, there has been no big reason for this.

   For those of you who may not familiar with Barry Gardner, let me repeat my introduction to the first of his reviews to appear here:

   I never met Barry myself. He lived in Texas, I lived in Connecticut. He attended mystery conventions, I seldom did nor have I since. But we were in DAPA-Em together, and we enjoyed each other’s reviews there, and swapped mailing comments there. We were friends, albeit through the mail and through each other’s zines only.

   Barry worked for the Dallas Fire Department until his retirement in 1989, but he didn’t discover mystery fandom for another two years or so. Ah, Sweet Mysteries was the name of the zine that he produced for the apa, each of them running 20 pages or more. Besides his own zine, his reviews began popping up in all of the major, well-known mystery fanzines of the day: The Armchair Detective, CADS, Deadly Pleasures and many others. You name it, he was there.

   Not only was he prolific, but he always managed to put his finger on what made each novel he reviewed work, or (in such cases) why it didn’t. Instinctively and incisively, he seemed to know detective and mystery fiction inside out. He had a critical eye, but he invariably used it softly while cutting immediately to the essence of a story.

   Barry died in 1996 — suddenly, without any warning. George Easter, who still publishes Deadly Pleasures, almost immediately set up the Barry Awards in his name, to honor the Best in Detective and Mystery Fiction on a yearly basis. See George’s website for more information.

   I’m pleased more than I can say that Barry’s wife Ellen has granted me permission to reprint Barry’s reviews from Ah, Sweet Mysteries on this blog. Thank you, Ellen, very much.

WILLIAM H. FIELDING – Take Me As I Am. Gold Medal #272, paperback original; 1st printing, November 1952.

   One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2015 is to read (or re-read) as many of my collection of old Gold Medal paperbacks as I can, primarily if not solely the crime and mystery ones. GM also printed westerns and general fiction, often with noirish themes and overtones, but I’ll concentrate on the crime novels that made their reputation, then (back in the 1950s) as well as now as the best source of true noir fiction on the planet.

   And obviously I’ll be reporting back here as I go. I think it will be one of my first-of-2015 promises to myself that I’ll keep.

   And Take Me As I Am is as tough and noirish as they come, and I’ll get to the story line in just a minute. But first I’d like to point out that William H. Fielding was the pen-name for Darwin L. Teilhet, who under his own name and often in collaboration with his wife Hildegarde wrote (among others) a series of Golden Age of Detection mysteries featuring a character called Baron von Kaz.

   I don’t know very much about their early books, but Doug Greene has this to say about them, in part: “…fair play detective novels of the 1930’s, sometimes with impossible crimes (The Ticking Terror Murders, Death Flies High, Murder In the Air) and generally with a Liberal social attitude — The Talking Sparrow Murders is strongly anti-Nazi at a time when too many people thought of the Nazis as merely German nationalists. Also noteworthy are four novels featuring the Baron Von Kaz.”

   Teilhet then turned to spy thrillers in the 1940s, and when the Gold Medal paperback revolution came along in the early 1950s, he apparently saw an opportunity there too and jumped on board. The other Fielding books in Hubin is The Unpossessed (GM #202, 1951), which I hope to get to sooner, if I can, rather than later. Not in Hubin is Beautiful Humbug (GM #430, 1954), which is about a notorious female swindler. It takes place in 1860s San Francisco, with one source describing it as historical fiction, but I have a feeling that it is true crime instead.

   Take Me As I Am starts out slowly, with a strong sense of déjà vu, one of those books that if you’ve read widely in the field of early noir fiction, you’re sure you’ve read before. Alma, a young blonde girl in her early 20s, is the getaway driver for a gang of mobsters in an armored car robbery that goes bad. Suddenly she finds herself on her own, driving a car with a suitcase in the back full of money, $100,000 worth, in fact.

   In desperation, looking for a way to drive through the roadblocks that have been set up in the area, she picks up a young hitchhiker named Bill Owens, four years younger than she and making his way to Sacramento for a job that he hopes is waiting for him there.

   It doesn’t happen immediately, but there is an attraction between the two that begins to grow. Standing between them, though, although he doesn’t know it, is the money. Alma is torn between the two: young Bill, whose wholesome naiveté is so appealing, or the $100,000 in cash.

   There are also plenty of twists ahead. I somehow lost track along the way, but there is more than a double-cross on the part of someone involved. It is instead a triple-cross and (gangsters being what they are) perhaps one beyond that. It takes a lot of coincidences to occur for all of the pieces together, but as in the best of Cornell Woolrich, Fielding makes us believe them at the time.

   Picking up momentum as it goes, the last 30 pages of Take Me As I Am can be read in one 15 minute gulp. The ending will please any fan of noir fiction, I guarantee it.

UMBERTO ECO – The Prague Cemetery. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, US, hardcover, November 2011. First published: October 2010. Translated by Richard Dixon.

   â€œIf I have become French, it is only because I couldn’t bear being Italian.”

   I warn you this is not an easy book and when you know its subject, many of you may choose not to read it. If you appreciate literate, witty, and brilliant writing though, you should. It is one of the best books I’ve read in years once I recognized where Eco was going. That he pulls off the tightwire act that this book is will be reason enough to read it.

   The quote above is the voice of the narrator of Umberto Eco’s novel The Prague Cemetery, Captain Simone Simoini, the grandson of the actual historical figure Captain Simonini. Simone is our narrator, or one of them, and a worse human being is hard to imagine. Racist, jingoist, police spy, terrorist (19th Century style), propagandist, plagiarist …. keep that last in mind, because that last little skill will define Simone Simonini as one of the worst men whoever lived.

   The Prague Cemetery sweeps across 19th Century Europe from the revolutionary period of the late 1840‘s (1848 the key year) to 1895 with the turn of the century in view. Through it we follow Simone into every back corner, byway, narrow alley, and cordite-smelling conspiracy of that conspiratorial age, with a small army of historical figures such as his grandfather, Garibaldi, Leo Taxil, Serge Nilus, an alienist he insists on calling Froide who convinces him to reveal his story…

   Some of those names may not be familiar, but they would be if you knew the history of conspiracy in that era. All the while he is shadowed and haunted by the mysterious young Jesuit priest Abbe Dalla Picola, who shares the narration of the story and the author’s prejudices including his hatred and fear of women.

   It is a world of violence and lies. Italian freedom fighters allegedly strangle priests with their own intestines, the Freemasons plot against everyone and the Jesuits plot against them (“Jesuits are Mason’s dressed like women”), French anarchists plant bombs and celebrate blasphemous Black Mass while the turbulent history of Italian unification, the Paris Commune, and the Dreyfuss affair play their role.

   All through this the paranoid, backstabbing Simone wiggles like a serpent his sting along a trail of lies, half truths, and sheer hatred of everyone and every thing. He is a maestro of invective, hatred, vitriol , and paranoia and everything is clouded by the secret services of myriad European countries all conspiring and coming to believe their own lies.

   Eco, a leading semiotician, philosopher, and medievalist among other things, burst on the best seller scene with The Name of the Rose and has visited often since. His books are always literate and often informed by his considerable sense of humor. That wit and humor are the saving grace of this book.

   This is a very funny book — black humor, but funny. At some point the narrator’s invective takes on an almost Marxian (Groucho, not Karl) air as he lies, cheats, spies, betrays, murders, and schemes his way through a conspiratorial whirl that makes modern talk radio sound tame. The book would be surreal at times if it wasn’t all unfortunately based on facts.

   And at the heart of this novel is one of the greatest lies ever fostered on humanity, one that is still believed by prejudiced fools all over the world today, appropriately a scene plagiarized from socialist feuillitonist Eugene Sue’s massive Mysteries of the People (Sue is identified as the narrator’s favorite writer.)

   In Sue’s novel the scene describes a meeting in a cemetery of Jesuit conspirators (Sue distrusted and loathed the Jesuits) in the hands of our plagiarist narrator the cemetery is the one in Prague and the conspiracy nothing less than The Protocols of Zion, and it is not a chapter in a novel, but presented as an actual event witnessed by the author (Serge Nilus who first published the Protocols claimed to have been given them by a friend who witnessed the event, the basis for Eco to spin his tale).

   Simone Simonini for the purposes of this book is no one less than the author of one of the most influential lies ever told, one with an almost direct link to one of the greatest crimes ever committed. A more unlikely protagonist is hard to imagine, but he and his story compel you to turn the page.

   Eco brings this world to life with almost magical skill, exploring all those dark byways of the soul with what one review in the Chicago Tribune rightly called “voluptuous abandon.” It is a cautionary tale for our world of undigested news, rumor, and innuendo, a reminder that information age or not the world has always embraced the great lie with the same zeal it does today. That Eco at times manages to also thrill, horrify, and be laugh out loud funny while revealing those lies is a wonder in itself.

   â€œA German produces on the average twice the feces of a Frenchman.”

   â€œWith Germans, as with women, one never gets to the point.”

   â€œNo one is as rude as a French innkeeper.”

   â€œThe Frenchman doesn’t know what he wants, he only knows he doesn’t want what he has.”

   â€œThe Italian is an untrustworthy, lying, contemptible traitor, himself more at ease with dagger than a sword, better with poison than medicine, a slippery bargainer, consistent only with changing sides in the wind…”

   I should point out Eco is Italian.

   On the Masons: “They are like the Jesuits only more confused.”

   â€œI hate women, what little I know of them.”

   On the brasseries of Paris and their patrons: “They are inverts looking for perverts of either sex…”

   â€œCivilization will never reach perfection until the last stone of the last church has fallen …”

   Priests: “They are idle and belong to a class as dangerous as thieves and vagrants …”

   â€œI would say religion is also the cocaine of the people…”

   â€œWe do not know whether animal spirit and genital fluid are the same thing …”

   â€œSomeone said that women are just a substitute for the solitary vice, only you need more imagination.”

   That all literally from Chapter 1.

   As Eco points out in a brief afterward, Simone is a collection of different people, a convenience for the writer, and as he concludes, “still among us.” There is also a mystery or two and a revelation that may catch you completely off guard that Simone never quite manages to put together. At times you can almost hear the real author of the Protocols chuckling as he spins his murderous lies, even to himself.

   This is a powerful work for all the smiles at its excess. It is impossible to read without the images we are all familiar with of where The Protocols lead, not alone, but with its words scribbled in venom and blood. That this novel can be read as entertainment and at the same time a serious statement about hate and lies is one of the reasons to admire and praise Eco’s talents.

   As an added bonus the books is filled with illustrations from the age though not as colorful as those from Eco’s earlier novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Lorna.

   I warn you, this is not for everyone, and I understand why anyone might choose not to read it (it is also nearly 500 pages of small type), but if you do, if you take it as it was written, why it was written, what it has to say to us now and about us then I think you too will find it a remarkable novel despite the difficult subject and the protagonist.

   It’s a very funny book about what may be the bloodiest lie ever told, a deadly serious study in paranoia and hateful speech that will have you smiling, and a fascinating journey through the very heart of the conspiratorial urge in man.

W. T. BALLARD – Murder Las Vegas Style. Tower, paperback original, 1967. Belmont, paperback, 1970.

   After the demise of the pulps in the early 19508, W. T. Ballard found a career as a prolific creator of paperback original novels, both mysteries and westerns. His mysteries appeared under his own name, as well as the names Neil MacNeil and P. D. Ballard, and he even wrote at least one novel in the Nick Carter series. Many of Ballard’s novels were set in Las Vegas, including three in a series featuring Detective Lieutenant Max Hunter.

   Murder Las Vegas Style is a private eye novel featuring Mark Foran, who finds himself involved in what at first appears to be a murder/suicide. The question of an inheritance is involved, depending on which of the victims died first, and as Foran digs into the case, though he seems to be making little progress, there are three serious attempts on his life, along with two more murders.

   The characters include hoods, beautiful women, millionaires, and cops,all of whom are convincingly sketched. The plotting is as convoluted as one could wish, although matters appear simple on the surface. Surprisingly, Ballard avoids the casinos for the most part and instead does an admirable job of giving a fine picture of the “other side” of Las Vegas, the desert.

   For more of Ballard’s LasVegas, see his “straight” novel, Chance Elson (1958), and the books in the Hunter series, including Pretty Miss Murder (1961).

         ———
   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:   Previously reviewed on this blog was Ballard’s Say Yes to Murder.

ROBERT GILLESPIE – The Crossword Mystery. Raven House, paperback original, 1980.

   As I understand it, the first four Raven House titles (this is #3) were sent out as advance samples to at least some, if not all, of the subscribers to Harlequin’s line of romance titles. I don’t know if the story is true, but if it is, I wonder what those women thought of this book. As the title indicates, it’s purely a puzzle story, but the language used is often surprisingly crude and foul — of the four letter variety.

   There’s also one pretty good sex scene, and one fairly brutal, which is not so good. This does not count the murder of Mary Cross, Rocky Caputo’s predecessor as the crossword editor of the New York Herald-Courier. Means of death: starvation in a locked room, complicated by cirrhosis of the liver.

   The puzzle itself — a message in cryptograms, only later as a crossword — is major league, but as we all know, cleverness alone does not a novel make. Gillespie shows promise, but he needs more seasoning. Overall, I’d say Triple A ball in the minors, at best, and if you can’t stand crossword puzzles at all, you can probably skip this one.

Rating:   C

[UPDATE] 12-26-14.   This appears to have been Rocky Caputo’s only recorded brush with murder. It was the author’s first book. Hubin records seven additional titles to his credit, five of them with a series character named Ralph Simmons, a retired advertising director of the same newspaper that Caputo worked for.

   It would have been clear — or at least clearer — to readers of this review back in 1981 that Raven House was an attempt by Harlequin Books to create a line of paperback mysteries. The imprint didn’t last long, and sometime I’d like to take a longer look into what kinds of mysteries they published and some of the highlights of the series. There is not room in this small footnote to do so now, however. For now, it may suffice to give you this link to this New York Times article that appeared soon after Raven House began.

CYRIL HARE – Tenant for Death. Faber & Faber, UK, hardcover, 1937. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1937. Softcover editions include: Dover, 1981; Perennial Library, 1982.

   Even better [than Francis Beeding’s Death Walks in Eastrepps, reviewed here ] is Cyril Hare’s first mystery, Tenant for Death. Hare generates the kind of intellectual excitement that used to be present in so many mysteries. The facts are presented to the reader and, if the puzzle is not as complex as Ellery Queen in his heyday, there is still much for the reader who wishes to compete with the detective.

   Hare’s sleuth is Inspector Mallett who, after appearing in Hare’s first three books, began playing second fiddle to the author’s later detective, Francis Pettigrew. Mallett is a detective we can respect and identify with. I can visualize a subdued Leo McKern (of Rumpole fame) playing him on the screen.

   There is humor in Tenant for Death, and it is reasonably subtle. Hare has a good ear for language and introduces (and demolishes) a few pompous individuals. There is not a great deal of description, and that is good because too much tends to slow a mystery down. There is just enough for the reader to supply his own imagination and set his own scenes.