WILL THOMAS – Lethal Pursuit. Cyrus Baker & Thomas Llewellyn #11. Minotaur Books, hardcover, November 2019; trade paperback, December 2020. Setting: England, 1892.

First Sentence: The express from Dover was still coming to a stop when Hillary Drummond leapt onto the platform.

   A man is found murdered on a train newly arrived at Charing Cross Station. In his shoe is the key to a railway locker containing a satchel. It is 1892; the threat of war is in the air. Enquiry agents Barker and Llewelyn are tasked by the Prime Minister to deliver the satchel to Calais as it contains a document, an unnamed first century gospel. With the satchel sought by secret societies, political groups, and the German government, Llewelyn is perplexed by Barker’s delay in fulfilling their assignment considering it places them under repeated attack.

   Rarely are prologues necessary. However, Thomas’ prologue captures and captivates one immediately with suspense, danger, intrigue, and yes, death. With the receipt of an old brass key, stamped with the letter “Q,” the characters go— “Down the rabbit hole.” One cannot help but smile at their destination, and Llewellyn’s admiration of what he sees there is understandable.

   Thomas’ voice is enviable. Even during a serious scene, he makes one smile with the simplest line even when in a serious situation. It is only a part of what makes reading him such a pleasure. His dialogue is a pleasure to read— “The things you know, Thomas!” “Yes, well, the more I know, the more I know how little I know.”

   Characters are Thomas’ strength. It is nice to have a series with characters who have developed over time. Still, for those who have not read the previous books, one won’t feel lost as Thomas provides well-presented introductions to the characters. Llewelyn’s wife, Rebecca, deals with the conflict of being shunned by her family for being married to a gentile. Their marriage and commitment adds a nice touch and humanness to the story— “There was still something strange about being separated from Rebecca for more than a few hours. It was like slow asphyxiation.” A scene between Llewelyn and his father-in-law is particularly well done.

   Thomas conveys mood well, in this case, it is that of a man adrift. A significant change is made in the roles and responsibilities of Barker, Llewelyn, and others ensure a shift in future books.

   The backdrop of Victorian England makes the plot particularly effective. The drums of war are beating in the distance, the underlying anti-Semitism, and the inclusion of an Evangelical preacher from the United States advocating eugenics. There is action and suspense, but also serious subjects which require consideration.

Lethal Pursuit maintains one’s interest from the beginning to an ending that is clever in so many ways, including the ultimate question— “Why do evil men prosper?” This is more than an average historical mystery. Thomas is an author to add to one’s list.

Rating: Very Good.
   

      The Barker & Llewelyn series —

1. Some Danger Involved (2004)
2. To Kingdom Come (2005)
3. The Limehouse Text (2006)
4. The Hellfire Conspiracy (2007)
5. The Black Hand (2008)
6. Fatal Enquiry (2014)
7. Anatomy of Evil (2015)
8. Hell Bay (2016)
9. Old Scores (2017)
10. Blood Is Blood (2018)
11. Lethal Pursuit (2019)
12. Dance with Death (2021)

      Novella —

An Awkward Way to Die (2017)

ROSS THOMAS – The Mordida Man. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1981. Berkley, paperback, 1983. Mysterious Press, paperback, 1994.

   A terrorist with connections with Libya is kidnapped. The Libyans think the CIA was responsible, and so they take the Presidet’s brother as a hostage. They lop off his ear and send it to the President, who calls in the Mordida Man.

   Who is Chubb Dunjee, an ex-congressman who who received his nickname in Mexico fo his ability to make a bribe count. He still has a reputation for setting events in motion.

   Complications ensue. Thomas provides some very oblique tangents to what otherwise wold be a very direct story, and he has it all formly under control until the final minutes, when suddenly the plot seems to fall apart beneath his feet.

   Don’t try to analyze Chubb’s final plan. It’s too elaborate to have been improvised on the spot, which is his specialty. It obviously wasn’t created on the spot, and yet there appears to have been no way he could have known what to expect ahead of time. Plots as intricately wound as this one need airtight support. This one doesn’t.

   There’s a lot to like in what comes before. Thomas is unarguably a witty and clever writer. Somehow, though, this time I seem to have left all my ardor in my other pants.

THOMAS W. BLACKBURN – Short Grass. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1947. Bantam #207, paperback, 1948; #1164, paperback 1953. Other editions include Dell, paperback, 1973.

SHORT GRASS. Allied Artists, 1950. Rod Cameron, Johnny Mack Brown, Cathy Downs, Morris Ankrum, Alan Hale Jr. Raymond Walburn, Harry Woods, Stanley Andrews, Riley Hill, Jeff York, Tristam Coffin and Lee Tung Foo. Screenplay by Thomas W. Blackburn. Directed by Lesley Selander.

   An excellent book turned into a superior B Western.

   I started watching Short Grass last month and was immediately struck by something rare in B Westerns: Depth. Early on, wandering gunfighter Steve Lewellen (Rod Cameron) gets dry-gulched by Myron Healey, who is in the employ of big rancher Hal Fenton (Morris Ankrum.) He survives (Healey doesn’t) and is nursed back to health by small rancher Pete Lynch (Stanley Andrews) and his daughter Sharon (Cathy Downs — whom you may remember in the title role of My Darling Clementine.)

   The whole episode serves as a plot device to put Rod on the side of the small ranchers, but the film takes a few minutes to tell us a bit about Myron Healey’s character, and how he comes up against Rod Cameron. The two even have a bit of edgy interaction before getting on with the story, and I wondered why a B-Western would take such pains with a throwaway character like Healey’s. Then I saw that the screenplay was by the author of the book, who would naturally try to get as much of his story on screen as he could.

   Then I started wondering about the book itself. So I dug out a copy to compare and contrast with the film, and it was a revelation.

   Don’t get me wrong. Short Grass is not a great novel. But it’s a damn fine one, and it made a superior B Western. But where was I?

   Oh Yeah: In the book, Steve Lewellen uses his prowess to keep Pete Lynch from being crowded off his range. But when he kills Fenton’s hot-head brother he realizes the odds are too great, and if he stays it will bring worse trouble. So he advises his friend to sell out and rides away from the woman he has grown to love.

   That’s book one of a two hundred page novel. Book two finds Lassiter three years later, farming on the outskirts of a small town called Brokenbow, which threatens to become a wide-open town since the railroad arrived and drew in the cattle drives—headed by Fenton.

   And this is where Blackburn turns a standard western into something a bit better, sketching out vivid portraits of the townsfolk: a town-taming sheriff, a Swede farmer, crusty old doctor, shopkeeper… and even a Chinese Cook. They all come to life here and join in the action, of which there is plenty.

   Ah yes, the action. You couldn’t ask for anything better. In one scene Lewellen takes on four opponents and Blackburn makes it read real, not like some pulp-book superman. And he wraps things up with a running gun battle through the streets: Townsfolk vs drovers, and never lets the reader lose track of who’s where and what hit whom—a neat trick, and he does it well.

           ***

   When Allied Artists made this into a movie they were still sloughing off the Monogram persona, like a caterpillar turning hopefully moth-ward, and they fashioned Short Grass firmly in the B+ mode, with sturdy sets, good stunting, lots of extras, and names familiar to Western fans.

   Blackburn cut out the unnecessary characters, put the bit parts in deep focus (as in the opening cited above) and changed what needed changing; in the book, the virile, town-taming sheriff is fooling around with the wife of the Newspaper Editor. In the movie he’s tough, paunchy Johnny Mack Brown, loving her pure & chaste from afar.

   Allied Artists picked Lesley Selander to direct, and no one could have made a better job of it. Selander was a dab hand with action, and he visualizes Blackburn’s fights and shoot-outs just as he wrote them. But more than this, Selander — who brought Hopalong Casssidy and The Lone Ranger to the scree — had a feel for the mythic qualities of the men and their story. When, after many minutes of furious battle, the battered gunman and the wounded lawman lock arms and march across the street into a saloon full of bad guys, it carries all the feeling of a similar moment in Ride the High Country. Peckinpah did it better, but Selander did it first.

   You can enjoy Short Grass equally as book or movie, but I recommend you try both. And before I wrap this up, I should add that Tom W Blackburn was also a songwriter of sorts with one solid gold record to his credit.

   Can you name it?

THOMAS BUNN – Closet Bones. John Thomas Ross #1. (***) G. P. Putnam’s Sons. hardcover 1977. No paperback edition.

   The copy on the dust jacket mentions Sam Spade in referring to private detective John Thomas Ross, but the resemblance is closer to Dashiell Hammett’s other detective, the nameless Continental Op. Ross is paunchy, losing his hair and not getting any younger, but yet not easily waylaid by temptation.

   He’s called on to find a missing playboy, patron of an upstate New York hippie community, who disappears shortly after a sudden marriage. The plot is complicated, the writing is competent and quietly unobtrusive, and all the way through there is a curious lack of intensity or involvement, as if we have read it all before.

   We have.

(***) Most sources call this the first in a series of three books featuring Jack Bodine, another of Thomas Bunn’s private eye creations, but I have one online source that agrees with me, that the PI in this book is indeed John Thomas Ross, his only recorded case. Bunn wrote only the three books. Follow the link to Bodine’s Thrilling Detective webpage.

THOMAS CHASTAIN – Vital Statistics. J. T. Spanner #2. Times Books, hardcover, 1977. No paperback edition.

   Relatively few private eye novels appear any moe, and those that do often seem to have their existence pend soley on minor variations from the standard format. This one’s told in present tense, for example, but one soon learns to ignore that. The only other distinguishable feature is that J. T. Spanner’s office help consists of his two ex-wives, with both of whom he maintains most cordial relations.

   The case itself concerns a missing stewardess and the mutilated body of an unidentified young woman. Are they the same? The underlying background and mood are provided by the living entity called New York City, the provider as well of a myriad interesting facts and figures.

   Although nothing new really develops, it is a smooth and convincing effort, the only jarring moment coming with a distastefully violent means of forcing a final confession.

Bibliographic Notes: Spanner’s earlier case was entitled Spanner (Mason/Charter, 1977). There was not a third. Among his other crime novels, Chastain wrote five books about Max Kauffman, a Deputy Chief Inspector of the N.Y.P.D, including an appearance in the first Spanner book, and two additional cases for Perry Mason, written after the passing of Erle Stanley Gardner.

THOMAS WALSH “Murder Twist.” Short story. First published in Ace-High Detective, August 1936. Probably never reprinted.

   I haven’t taken the time to check this theory out, but it’s my sense of things that most Edgar winners for Best First Novel come from nowhere, so to speak, or in other words are brand new to the mystery field. Not so in the case of Thomas Walsh, whose novel Nightmare in Manhattan (Little Brown, 1950) was indeed a winner, but he’d been writing short mystery fiction since 1933, when a story titled “Double Check” appeared in the July issue of Black Mask magazine.

   Walsh gradually graduated to the slicks, magazines such as Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, many of them later being reprinted in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Almost all of these, if not out-and-out police procedurals, were cases solved by policemen largely working alone but in their ordinary tours of duty.

   Such a one is “Mystery Twist,” in which a cop named Gannet — his only appearance, I believe — tackles what appears to be a straightforward suicide, that of a woman whose grieving husband claims she jumped out of a window on the 20th floor of an apartment building.

   Gannet is the kind of cop who doesn’t like to take anything for granted, however, but it takes some psychological prodding on the part of his immediate superior, Inspector Powell, to make sure he follows up on his instincts in cases such as this.

   As the title of the story suggests, there is a twist in tale, and I’m going to pat myself on the back by telling you that I figured it out as quickly as Gannet did. But if the story’s well told, and this one definitely is, then the facts should point to the conclusion all along the way, shouldn’t they?

THOMAS PERRY – Vanishing Act. Jane Whitefield #1. Random House, hardcover, 1995. Ballantine, paperback, 1996.

   The Butcher’s Boy is one of my favorite books, with Metzger’s Dog not far behind. I’m always glad to see a new one by Perry.

   Jane Whitefield is a young woman who is part Seneca by blood, all by heritage. She lives in upstate New York, and is a guide. Not the kind of guide you may be thinking of, though; she guides people who need to be lost, people who have other people looking for them. Jane puts them on the road to not being found, and teaches them how to walk it.

   And then one day a man named John Felker shows up at her door. He says he’s an ex-cop, that he’s been framed, and that there’s a contract out on him. There are people after him, all right, as Jane finds as they set out on the road to anonymity, but he’s not exactly what he seems. A different road lies ahead, with a different destination.

   Two things you can depend on with Perry: he’ll have a strong, somewhat off-beat central character, or characters, and he’ll tell a hell of a good story. Jane Whitefield is one of his more memorable leads, and the story is a fast-moving thriller that will drag you right along.

   There’s a good deal of Native American lore and history interspersed in the third person narrative, about the verisimilitude of which I have no idea at all, but which certainly enhances the story and fits in well with it. Perry seldom writes the same book twice, but he always writes a good one, and this one is very good.

  THOMAS B. DEWEY – The Brave, Bad Girls. Mac #5. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1956. Permabooks M-3089, paperback, 1957. Carroll & Graf, paperback, 1985.

   If you like detective work along with your hard-boiled PI fiction, this may be the book for you. But as a all-out recommendation, this statement comes with a bit of a caveat. The plot is extremely complicated, and the fact that Mac, the only name that he goes by, doesn’t tell the reader everything he notices or is thinking, doesn’t help any.

   The women in the case: (1) his client, Sherry, a young girl who is going out with a married musician against her father’s wishes; (2) Miss Colby, the principal of the school where one of her staff, Lorraine, is a teacher and whose past life is being looked into and she, Miss Colby, doesn’t like it; (3) Lorraine herself, who is married to but separated from the musician that Sherry is seeing; (4) Trudy, her young precocious daughter; (5) Esther, Lorraine’s sister, who has generally been in charge of bringing up Trudy; and (6) Georgiana, also a PI, who agrees to give Sherry shelter after Mac finds her with a dead man on her hands.

   As I say, complicated. The best part of the book, though, is the extreme interrogation that Mac undergoes at the hands of the police which extends from page 150 to 190. That Mac stays faithful to his clients and his principles is an understatement.

   There were 16 “Mac” novels in all, published between 1947 and 1970. I’ve enjoyed all of them that I’ve read, including this one. After reading this one, though, I realize that I haven’t read nearly enough of them.

THOMAS POLSKY – Curtains for the Copper. “Scoop” Griddle #3. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1941. Handi-Books #5, paperback, 1942. Dell #29, mapback edition, no date stated [1944]; Dell #700, paperback, 1953.

   While Polsky wrote one additional non-series book in 1952, Curtains for the Copper is the last of three cases that ace newspaper reporter L. F. “Scoop” Griddle worked on shortly before World War II. The cop who dies is a rookie on the beat, shot and killed during a raid on a gambling house.

   There are lots of suspects on the scene, including a good-looking girl and a police chief with a IQ of 62. In fact it is only the sorry excuse for police work that makes the final scene possible. Nothing more than a good imitation of George Harmon Coxe, only the latter did it better.

       The L. F. “Scoop” Griddle series —

Curtains for the Editor. Dutton 1939
Curtains for the Judge. Dutton 1939
Curtains for the Copper. Dutton 1941

ROSS THOMAS – Ah, Treachery! Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1994; paperback, November 1995.

   Ross Thomas is one of my desert island authors, and I think one of the finest crime writers of this century, I always look forward to a new book from him, even though I think the quality of his putput has fallen markedly in the last few years.

   Edd “Twodees” Partain was an Army Major once, but now he’s a clerk selling guns in Montana. His past catches up with him in the person of a Colonel who appears to tell him that a story is about to break that will dredge up things best forgotten, and he’s fired from his job.

   He gets in touch with an old friend in Washington DC, and through him is hired by a big0time fundraiser to find some stolen money. Then his past and present begin to circle each other warily, rattling a whole closetful of skeletons in the process.

   I don’t think that Ross Thomas can write a book I won’t like; at least he hasn’t yet. Running on autopilot he is still a better and more interesting writer than 90% of those plying the trade today. Unfortunately for those of us who cherish his classics — The Seersucker Whipsaw, The Fools in Town Are on Our Side, Chinaman’s Chance, etc. — autopilot seems all too close to the mark.

   There is still the smooth, patented convoluted plot, and the usual group of slightly off-center. usually amoral characters, but… The books are slimmer than they used to be, and what’s missing is the depth of characterization that was once the strongest part of his novels. The characters here are enjoyable, but I doubt that you’ll find them memorable, and in Thomas’s prime they always were.

   I enjoyed it, but I mourn for the Thomas of old. “Snif!”