LAWRENCE BLOCK – Tanner’s Tiger. Evan Tanner #5. Gold Medal D1940, paperback original; 1st printing, 1968. Reprinted in paperback by Jove (1985) and Harper (2007). Subterranean, hardcover reprint, 2001.

   The gimmick in Lawrence Block’s Tanner stories is actually twofold: (1) that a piece of shrapnel in his brain during the Korean War has not allowed him to get a moment’s sleep ever since, and (2) he somehow is given assignments by someone in the CIA who he doesn’t know and who doesn’t know that Tanner doesn’t work for him. (If I have any details of either (1) or (2) wrong, you can easily let me know.)

   In Tanner’s Tiger he’s handed the task of checking out the Cuban pavilion at the ’67 Montreal Expo; something wrong is going on there, but no one knows what. Refused entry at the border, however, Tanner and his young ward (semi-adopted daughter) Minna (putative queen of Lithuania) have to sneak across from Buffalo.

   And to complete his assignment he must join up with several members of the local chapter of the MNQ (Le Mouvement national des Québécoises et Québécois), who besides coming to Tanner’s aid, are planning to assassinate Queen Elizabeth while she also attends the Expo. (Tanner is a champion of all sort of Lost Causes.)

   Which is were the “tiger” of the tale comes in. Not only is Arlette a fervent member of the cause, but she also has a lusty outlook on both love and life. Throw in the mysterious disappearance of Minna while she and Tanner are visiting the Cuban pavilion, followed soon after by the discovery of a small fortune of smuggled heroin, and you have quite a multi-fold predicament for Tanner.

   Which he decides to handle as only one problem at a time, and he does, but unfortunately only in a most perfunctory way. Getting Tanner into trouble turns out to be a lot more fun than getting him out of it. But of course with author Lawrence Block at the helm, the books is filled from top to bottom with enough witty observations and laugh-out-loud scenes of pure comedy to make this an entertaining romp from beginning to end.

   For example, from page 105, a mysterious man has just swapped a small attaché case he had for a bag of belongings that Arlette and Tanner had been carrying:

   In the case that the man left them are several packages of white powder. Three kilos’ worth. You may or may not find this funny, but I did. This particular adventure for Evan Tanner may be too uneven to be the best of the series, but if you don’t take it all that seriously, I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

       The Evan Tanner series —

The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep (1966)
The Canceled Czech (1966)

Tanner’s Twelve Swingers (1967)
The Scoreless Thai (a.k.a. Two for Tanner) (1968)
Tanner’s Tiger (1968)
Here Comes a Hero (1968) (a.k.a. Tanner’s Virgin)
Me Tanner, You Jane (1970)
Tanner on Ice (1998)

LAWRENCE BLOCK – When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. Matt Scudder #6. Arbor House, hardcover, 1986. Charter, paperback, 1986. Jove, paperback, 1990.

   I have just finished reading When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, in which Matt Scudder remembers a couple of ten-year-old cases that he worked on during his drinking days. I finished this in a rush of adrenalin produced by the excitement a perfect ending always produces in me.

   The reflective, wry meditation on life lived and life changing (but perhaps, not all that much) is an appropriate ending for a novel of reflection on decade-old events. This inevitable conclusion (but inevitable only to a writer of Block’s gifts) is an example of perfect pitch in structure and tone.

   It also reminds me of a moment in a recent episode of Inspector Morse (“Cherubims and Seraphims”) in which Morse’s niece, still caught up in the ecstasy of a drug-induced “perfect moment,” comments that life can never be again like that moment. She is short to kill herself, precipitating a search by Morse for answers to a death that has no answers.

   I don’t think that Block necessarily had any sense that he had created something he could never achieve again. He’s continued to write, with great success, and probably never greater than in his Matt Scudder series, although this novel seemed to have a resonance that I don’t remember in any of the others. Let’s just say that my imperfect pitch, which certainly varies from one minute to the next, was at that moment in time in perfect tune with Block’s pitch.

   However, I don’t feel that this is an experience I won’t have again, although the correspondent for it may be a musical composition, a film, a meal, a moment in a personal relationship. I come down from the highs, but the fall isn’t that intense, and the sense of loss isn’t that devastating. Oh, no. Not at all.

   Also, if the ending to this particular Block novel seemed especially satisfying, it’s not profoundly apart from my usual reaction to Block’s work. My experience with mystery fiction is very limited these days, but Block has established in the Scudder series a consistently recognizable style that distinguishes it and him.

LEE LEIGHTON (WAYNE D. OVERHOLSER) – Law Man. Ballentine, hardcover (H51) & paperback (#51), 1953. Ballantine U1040, paperback 1964. Axe, paperback, 1977. Ace/Charter, paperback, 1985. Jove, paperback, 1988. Winner of the first Western Writer’s Assocation Spur Award for Best Novel.

STAR IN THE DUST. Universal, 1956. John Agar, Mamie Van Doren, Richard Boone, Colleen Gray, Leif Erickson, Randy Stuart, Paul Fix, Harry Morgan, Kermit Maynard and Clint Eastwood. Screenplay by Oscar Brodney, from the novel by Lee Leighton. Produced by the redoubtable Albert Zugsmith. Directed by Charles Haas.

   A taut film from a slack novel.

   Leighton/Overholser’s book deals with twenty-four hours in the life of middle-aged Marshal Bill Worden: the last day in the life of convicted killer Ed Lake, scheduled to hang next morning. It also deals with a wide cast of characters, including:

   Worden’s daughter Ellen, who is engaged to marry

   George Ballard, who owns the biggest ranch in the valley and the local bank — and is therefore ipso facto a bad guy.

   Nan Hogan, Ballard’s ex-mistress, now married to

   Lew Hogan, a stubborn rancher who feels duty-bound to keep Lake from hanging

   Rigdon, a fire-and-brimstone preacher who feels duty-bound to hang Lake himself

   Mike MacNamara, Worden’s Deputy

   Orval Jones, janitor and would-be deputy

   Jeannie Mason, a fallen woman because of Ed Lake

plus assorted farmers, ranchers, cowhands, townsfolk and attendants to the court.

   Leighton does a skillful job of setting all these folks at odds with each other: the ranchers out to save Lake, Ballard anxious to see that Lake doesn’t incriminate him, farmers egged on to lynching by Rigdon, Lake with his own plans for the future – and thankfully Leighton takes care to remind the reader who everyone is from time to time. He also works things to a convincing resolution, one that seems to grow from the characters themselves.

   The problem is that Leighton tends to tell us how they feel—repeatedly and at length — when he should just show us — and when things should be getting tense, they just get wordy. Worthy concept, weak execution.

   Oscar Brodney’s script for Star in the Dust tightens things up considerably. For one thing, it starts at dawn on the day Lake (here named “Sam Hall”) is scheduled to die at sunset. And since this is a film, the internal monologues of the book get replaced by a few lines of dialogue.

   That’s not all that gets replaced. Preacher Rigdon of the book is here a power-mad schoolteacher (I think I had him for English 101 in College) and middle-aged Marshal Bill Worden is now youngish Bill Jordan (John Agar) engaged to marry Ballard’s sister (Mamie Van Doren.)

   Best of all, nasty Ed Lake in the book is now Sam Hall, played with savage sensitivity by Richard Boone, a year before Have Gun, Will Travel and in those days a character actor to be reckoned with. I suspect Brodney knew he was writing for Boone, and wrote the part to fit him. His Sam Hall is educated, self-aware, and dangerous to know, a character at once sympathetic and frightening.

   With Boone as the lynch pin, Star in the Dust could have stopped right there, but producer Albert Zugsmith fills the movie with fine actors in choice parts. Leif Erickson radiates bluff duplicity as the scheming bad guy, slimy Robert Osterloh projects petty tyranny as the schoolmaster, while Paul Fix and James Gleason do a fine double-act as Agar’s deputy and the wanna-be janitor.

   Star in the DustEven better, Colleen Gray and Randy Stuart play off each other perfectly as the women who loved well but unwisely. Stuart in particular carries a moving rueful aspect as Erickson’s cast-off mistress, now married to Henry Morgan, as the loyal-but-not-bright Lew Hogan (Years later, Stuart also played Morgan’s wife in the 1960s Dragnet teleseries.)

   Best of all, Star in the Dust moves in a way the novel never did, filling eighty minutes with action under the fast-paced direction of Charles Haas.

   And by the way, in his one scene, a skinny young contract player named Clint Eastwood is what is usually and charitably termed adequate.

LILIAN JACKSON BRAUN – The Cat Who Went Underground. Jim Qwilleran #9. Putnam, hardcover, 1989. Jove, paperback, September 1989.

   I like cats all right, and I’ve even discovered I can put up with them in detective stories. This is the first of the adventures of semi-retired Jim Qwilleran and his two Siamese pets (Koko and Yum Yum) I’ve read, and while I’m not sure I’m totally converted, it was amusing.

   Braun’s style is a combination of breathless exclamation points with a rural folksiness of a northern Michigan sort that also manages not to be condescending. I do wish, however, that she’d allowed more than the last 40 pages for the detective work to take place.

   To wit. While there are lots of hints concerning some sort of mysterious activity that is taking place, sometimes through the astrology columns in the newspaper, sometimes through a fortune-teller friend, Qwilleran does not find the body of the first known murder victim (under the floor of his cabin on the lake) until page 161.

   Until then, what we’re given is a more-or-less hilarious account of the vicissitudes of a city man trying to cope with life in the “wild” — toilets that don’t flush, water heaters that don’t heat, coons in the chimney, and so on. (I guess I’ll probably stay where I am.)

Bibliographic Notes:   The first three books in Braun’s “Cat” series were published between 1966 and 1968. There was then a gap of 18 years before the fourth one came out, when the author was 75, and something strange happened. It became an overnight success and sold a ton of copies.

   So successful that there were 25 more, with the last one, The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers, appearing in 2007, when Braun was 94. She died in 2011 at the grand old age of 98.

STEVE MARTINI – Undue Influence. Paul Madriani #3. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1994. Jove, paperback, 1995. TV Movie: CBS, 1996, with Brian Dennehy as Paul Madriani.

   Martini is one of the biggies now, if not quite as hot as Grisham and Turow, at least in the same league. He’s a lawyer himself, and has been a defense attorney in both civil and criminal cases. Though this billed as a psychological thriller, it’s not that — it’s a courtroom/Big Lawyer book, which I like/don’t like.

   Paul Madriani promised his dead wife that he would watch out for her younger sister, and he’s going to get a chance very soon. He’s watching her fight a particularly nasty child custody battle with her politician ex-husband when a bad situation gets worse. Her ex’s new wife is found murdered, and she and Paul’s sister-in-law have had bitter and public battles.

   Then hard evidence is found linking her with the killing, and she is charged. Paul has no choice but to represent her, though she is uncooperative, and the case against her strong. Things are, of course, not what they seem, but what are they really? Better, or worse?

   There are two or three action scenes in this 450-pager that allow a semi-accurate use of the word “thriller,” I guess, but basically it’s a courtroom novel and a good one. Martini knows how to maintain suspense and interest, and if most of the characterizations tend toward the surface and/or one-dimensional, they’re still more than adequate to the story.

   It’s written to be a best-seller, but of its kind and with all that implies, it’s a decent book. It almost got a full two [stars] but a final plot twist and burst of violence that I thought unnecessary brought it down. He should have left well enough alone, dammit.

Bibliographic Note:   Through 2017 there are now 15 novels and one novella in the Paul Madriani series.

   
CAROL O’CONNELL – Mallory’s Oracle. Kathleen Mallory #1. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1994. Jove, paperback, 1995.

   O’Connell is a painter turned novelist, and this is her first. Putnam thinks it’s going to be a good one. They paid a lot of money for it, and it’s already been published in England and sold to several other countries.

   Kathleen Mallory was a street kid and she was taken in at the age of 12 by a NYPD cop and his wife. Now she’s a Sergeant in the same department, and her father in all the real sense of the word has been murdered at the same time as the latest victim is killed by a serial killer who preys on old women.

   The Department places her on compassionate leave, but compassion is not a word she understands very well. She’s beautiful, a crack shot and a computer whiz, and underneath a thin veneer is a tough and nearly as amoral as the child she used to be. Mercy is another word that has little relevance to her as she begins tracking her prey.

   O’Connell may be this year’s Minette Walters, and this could easily be an Edgar winner for either First or Best Novel. Yes, I thought it was that good. It’s a powerfully written book, and often beautifully so. An Example: “She lay still in the body and quiet.”

   And watch for the passage about the insane pigeon — surely none of the more unlikely subjects upon which to base a memorable paragraph, but there it was. The third person narrative is mostly from Mallory’s viewpoint, though there are several illuminating shifts.

   The plot is convoluted, with maybe one or two too many threads to the skein, but the book’s strengths lie in O’Connell’s prose and the vivid characterizations of Mallory and a number of others. It isn’t a perfect book, but it’s a very, very strong one, and I think the field has another star here, folks.

      The Kathleen Mallory series —

1. Mallory’s Oracle (1994)
       — 1995 Anthony Award — First Novel (Nominee)
       — 1995 Dilys Award — Mystery Novel (Nominee)
       — 1995 Edgar Allan Poe Award — First Novel (Nominee)
2. The Man Who Lied to Women (1995) aka The Man Who Cast Two Shadows
3. Killing Critics (1995)
4. Flight of the Stone Angel (1997) aka Stone Angel
5. Shell Game (1999)
6. Crime School (2002)
7. The Jury Must Die (2003) aka Dead Famous
8. Winter House (2004)
9. Find Me (2006) aka Shark Music
10. The Chalk Girl (2012)
11. It Happens in the Dark (2012)
12. Blind Sight (2016)

LAWRENCE BLOCK – Eight Million Ways to Die. Arbor House, hardcover, 1982. Paperback reprints include: Jove, 1983; Avon, 1991. Film:, 1985, with Jeff Bridges as Matt Scudder (also partly based on A Stab in the Dark).

   Ex-New York policeman Matthew Scudder is not a formally licensed private investigator; he says you could call what he does “hustling for a buck…. I do favors for friends.” As this novel opens, he is about to take on a favor for a friend of a friend, Kim Dakkinen, a call girl who wants to get out of the business. Kim is afraid to tell her pimp she is leaving, and Scudder’s job is to act as go-between.

   The job goes altogether too easily. The pimp is an unusual man named Chance, with a secret hideaway in Brooklyn (to which he has admitted no one, although he later takes Scudder there) and an easygoing manner that convinces Scudder he will let Kim go. When she is brutally murdered, Scudder, an alcoholic who has been attending AA for less than two weeks, begins to drink, suffers a blackout, and wakes up in the hospital.

   After his release, he is contacted by Chance, who insists he did not kill Kim — or have her killed — and asks that Scudder find out who did. Scudder’s quest takes him into the apartments of call girls and through the bars of Manhattan and Harlem. He periodically stops in at AA meetings- just listening, refusing to speak when his turn comes.

   Teetering on the edge of drunkenness, he crosses and recrosses the city in which there are 8 million ways to die — many of them cataloged from Scudder’s obsessive reading of the newspapers — in search of a killer with a motive that is almost impossible to discern.

   This novel was nominated for a Mystery Writers of America Edgar and won the Private Eye Writer sof America Shamus Award for Best Hardcover Private Eye Novel of 1982. It is grim and powerful and, along with the other Scudder novels — In the Midst of Death (1976), Sins of the Fathers (1977), Time to Murder and Create (1977), and A Stab in the Dark (1981) — contains some of Block’s finest writing to date.

         ———
   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.

MARY McMULLEN – A Country Kind of Death. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1975. Jove, paperback reprint, April 1988.

   I have a small prejudice against small children appearing in mystery novels. They’re either pests or small nuisances, or they’re victims. While children as victims is something we should read about — ignoring the .problem doesn’t make it go away — it’s not something I want to read about, if you see what I mean. Children (ideally) should be innocent and charming, and innocent and charming is not exactly what detective fiction is about.

   For a while, I thought we might have an exception to this loose and sloppy rule. Kit is seven, her father writes mysteries for a living, and on page 3, Kit is described as having “read Philip’s most recent book, in manuscript, and had guessed by page 60 who the murderer was, which at the time had nettled her father considerably.”

   But as good as that line is, the rest of Mary McMullen’s book shows that there is as much malice alive and well in the sweet-smelling country lanes as there is in the stench of any city’s streets. One could coin the phrase “Malice Domestic,” to describe this book, and it would fit perfectly.

   Most of the life in the Keane household is a normal, everyday muddle, but when Kit’s mother Mag leaves for a short vacation, bringing her sister, Aunt Therese, in to keep things running while she’s gone, the muddle becomes nasty.

   Don’t misunderstand. Therese is an innocent bystander. And it’s the neighbor lady, Mrs. Mint, who dies, drowned in the fishpond, and either Kit knows too much, or (could it be?) she’s the one who nudged her in.

   This is not a detective story. Not really. There is a crime, a serious one, or maybe there isn’t one at all. She could have just fallen, you see. But don’t take the kindly prose of Mary McMullen too lightly. There’s viciousness hiding in the organdy, the wild geraniums, and the crisp-smelling sheets, and her characters are not always very nice…

ADAM HALL – Quiller. Jove, paperback; 1st US paperback printing, December 1985. First published in the UK as Northlight by W. H. Allen, hardcover, 1985 (shown).

   After reading Michael Shonk’s recent review of the Quiller novel The Tango Briefing, along with the episode of the TV series based on it, I thought I’d give one of the books a try myself. I’m glad I did.

   It’s only a guess, but I assume the name change made by the US paperback publisher was an attempt to get a bit more name recognition out there where a would-be buyer could see it. Even in the UK all of the titles after Northlight began with Quiller as the first word. I do not know why the first US publication of the book was in paperback. The Quiller Memorandum came out as movie in 1965, so interest in the series by hardcover publishers may have diminished greatly in the 20 year meantime.

   Northlight, as you may be wondering, is the name of the mission that Quiller is given in the book. An American atomic sub has been attacked and destroyed by a trigger-happy Russian naval officer, acting on his own initiative. The problem is that a peace conference between the US and Russia is about to convene in Vienna. What Quiller is asked to do, with the British government acting as a middleman, is go underground behind the Iron Curtain and retrieve the double agent up above the Arctic Circle who has a tape recording detailing the incident in detail.

   All is not what it seems, however, and not unexpectedly Quiller is often left on his own and unaware of all of the intrigue going on at levels far over his head. He has to be wary of everyone he meets, including a cell of operatives who seem to be an extremely interested third party in the operation.

   This is a tough, suspenseful book from beginning to end, even at a length of over 350 pages. Quiller tells his own story, so it is hard to pinpoint who he is exactly, but he is basically world-weary and dedicated, suspicious of everybody and everything at every turn. tough-minded and resourceful, terse and not very good at James Bondian repartee. I assume so, at least, for he does not even try. There is very little humor in the story he tells, making George Segal, somewhat offbeat as an actor, seem to me to be an unusual choice to portray him in the movie, which I have net seen in over 50 years.

   The book does not make for very relaxing reading, which is exactly as it should be, with cliffhangers at the end of almost every chapter. I had a good time with it.

CATHERINE DAIN – Sing a Song of Death. Jove, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1993.

   This is the second of seven recorded cases of Reno-based private eye Freddie O’Neal, all published as paperback originals between 1992 and 1997. This is back in the day when female mystery writers who wrote for the paperback trade did not have to write cozies, with series characters ranging from fudge makers to herbal shop owners to mediums with crystal balls and other assorted outré accoutrements.

   That Catherine Dain (in real life author Judith Garwood) wrote a series of PI novels instead does not make them — or rather, at least this one — more than Sue Grafton-lite, however. Freddie, who is tall and definitely shies away from romantic relationships, works as a bodyguard to a Lake Tahoe lounge singer in this one, but the case is cluttered with too many friends, family members and possible suspects when the singer is found dead anyway — few of whom are particular likable.

   It’s only when Freddie survives an attack on her life that the story picks up any speed, only to be done in by an ending that could best be described as mediocre, with the only interesting character other than Freddie murdered on a set of courthouse steps, his death apparently going unchallenged.