The GARRETT P.I. Series by GLEN COOK
by Barry Gardner
Down these mean streets not only a man must go, but just about anything else you can think of. Garrett has a deceased representative of a race you never heard of who is slowly but inevitably decaying for a housemate, hires the occasional groll for strong-arm work, isn’t above banging a sexy copper-headed dwarf if the occasion arises, and has for a best friend a vicious half-breed vegetarian elf who makes Parker’s Hawk seem like a pussy.
His cases involve not only gangsters, but vampires, ghosts, and assorted other malevolencies. No, Dorothy, we’re not in Southern California any more, nor West Oz or North Narnia either.
Garrett is around 30, an ex-Marine and veteran of a decades-long war between the Karentine Empire (in whose capital, TunFaire, he lives) and the Venageti. He’s tough and flip, though his wisecracks haven’t the flair of the better of his “realistic” brothers. The retinue at his brownstone equivalent includes an aging servant with a bevy of marriageable but extremely ugly nieces; a large, colorful and profane bird known as the Goddam Parrot (a later addition); and the Dead Man, a yellow and much larger member of an enigmatic race who is quite dead but still kicking. In a manner of speaking.
In general I haven’t been enamored of attempts to meld crime and fantastic fiction. Though Lee Killough and Mike McQuay have both gained some attention in this area, neither have particularly impressed me, the latter in particular. The Garrett books, to be fair and accurate, are more fantasy/adventure than detective stories, though there are mysteries and there is detection.
Glen Cook is a prolific and in my opinion very, very good science-fantasy writer. He has authored a number of trilogies and series, among them the Black Company saga — one of my own all-time favorites — and a group known loosely as the Dread Empire series.
He is one of the most adept of current writers at constructing mythic landscapes, but at the same time retains a focus on the characters who inhabit them; to me, a formidable combination. It’s unlikely that there are many with a liking for science-fantasy who haven’t discovered him, but for those few I have no hesitation in recommending any of his single books and series.
There are seven books in this series to date, the last (and least) just having been released in February. All are paperback originals from Signet/ROC.
Sweet Silver Blues (1987). Garrett’s old war buddy, Denny, leaves his fortune to a lady whom his family doesn’t know, and they want Garrett to find her. Denny was a dwarf, by the way. Sister Rose, a dwarfish mixture of pulchritude and pure greed, would rather have the fortune than the heir. The trail leads to vampires, centaurs, and trouble.
Bitter Gold Hearts (1988). The son of a Stormwarden (a local variety of sorcerous very big shot) is kidnapped, and her deputy hires Garrett to help. The plot involves ogres and assassins, and if that wasn’t enough, the Stormwarden’s nubile daughter doesn’t seem to find Garrett unattractive.
Cold Copper Tears (1988). A woman from Garrett’s past and something almost as dangerous from the Dead Man’s make things interesting around TunFaire. Throw in a teenage girl’s street gang a few holy relics, a nihilistic cult, then stir twice and start counting the bodies.
Old Tin Sorrows (1989). Garrett owes a big favor to an old Sergeant who works for a retired General whom someone is trying to kill. Garrett takes up residence in the General’s mansion, which has a ghost who no one but Garrett can see. Then the dead come back to life, and more people die.
Dread Brass Shadows (1990). Garrett’s favorite redhead gets knifed for no reason, then two others show up who look a lot like her. An intra-species gang war starts among dwarves, and gangsters are after everybody. They all want the mysterious Book of Shadows, and Garrett hasn’t the foggiest.
Red Iron Nights (1991). A serial killer is gutting beautiful young women in TunFaire and removing their blood, raising spectres of cults and black magic. The City’s top cop wants Garrett’s help, and the lady gangster kingpin wants … something.
Deadly Quicksilver Lies (1994). While the Dead Man sleeps, Garrett is hired by a beautiful redhead, once mistress of a now-dead king to find her runaway daughter. Of course, it’s not that simple; it’s really about buried treasure and old debts, and everybody wants a piece of the action and of Garrett.
These aren’t bad books at all. Lightweight, certainly, but decently written, and they furnish a passable way for some of us with a taste for both fantasy and crime fiction to combine our pleasures.
— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #12, March 1994.
[UPDATE] The series has continued since Barry wrote this overview, to wit:
THE SHIP OF MONSTERS. Producciones Sotomayor, Mexico, 1960. Columbia Pictures, US, 1961. Originally released as La Nave de los Monstruos. Eulailio González, Ana Bertha Lepe, Lorena Velázquez, Manuel Alvarado. Directed by Rogelio A. González.
From the land of robot-fighting Aztec Mummies, and monster-battling masked wrestlers, comes their strangest contribution to cinema yet, Ship of Monsters, a UFO, alien monster invasion, Western, singing and dancing cowboy and alien, Mariachi-singing robot and computer console, kid and his robot pal, science fiction adventure.
Let’s just say if it didn’t exist, Mystery Science Theatre 3000 would have had to invent it. There used to be a Science Fiction Western comic book from Charlton, but it was never this weird.
It all starts when Gamma (Ana Bertha Lepe) and Beta (Lorena Velázquez) land on Earth with a ship load of monsters who escape and have to be rounded up with the help of their robot Tor. Unknown to them they are observed by Lauranio (Eulailio González) a singing and dancing, fast on the draw cowboy who no one in the local cantina will listen to about his UFO sighting. Well, he does drink a little, so they can be excused.
So of course Lauranio goes back out and runs into Gamma and Beta, gorgeous flimsily clad redhead and blonde, and agrees to help them round up the escaped monsters, enlisting the young Rupert who soon becomes pals with Tor.
As if that wasn’t enough, Beta becomes jealous of Gamma and Lauranio and turns evil, sending the monsters out to capture or kill Gamma and Rupert. Lauranio then has to seduce Beta, singing and dancing seductively with her in the monster’s cave, while Rupert sneaks on the ship and saves Gamma. It is easily the most awkward dance scene in the history of film with Beta resembling nothing so much as a cheap Burlesque Queen and Lauranio looking more like he is fighting a bull than seducing a beautiful blonde alien.
Beta discovers, as all must, monsters can’t be controlled, leaving Lauranio, Gamma, and Rupert to stop the monsters, and the film comes to a romantic end as Gamma decides to stay on Earth with Lauranio and Rupert while Tor pilots the monsters back home singing a Mariachi duet with a mobile female computer console he has a crush on.
I kid you not.
You can watch it in Spanish on YouTube if you want. In its own insane way it is entertaining, however strange, but you have to wonder at the mind that came up with it and try not to boggle your mind wondering what Roy Rogers and Gene Autry would have done with this one. Compared to it Gene’s Phantom Empire serial is downright tame: none of his robots even hummed.
BANK SHOT. United Artists, 1974. George C. Scott (as Walter Upjohn Ballentine), Joanna Cassidy, Sorrell Booke, G. Wood, Clifton James, Bob Balaban, Bibi Osterwald, Frank McRae, Don Calfa. Based on the novel by Donald E. Westlake. Director: Gower Champion.
The names have been changed to protect … who? In the book the leader of a hapless gang of crooks who try to rob a bank by stealing the whole bank is named John Dortmunder, whose exploits filled the pages of several of Donald Westlake’s comic crime novels, with emphasis on the “comic.”
Why he becomes Walter Upjohn Ballentine in the movie is a mystery to me, one that I’m hoping that someone reading this will come along and explain.
And while you’re at it, tell me why someone thought George C. Scott has any business playing Dortmunder. I just don’t see it, even with the bushiest caterpillar eyebrows you’ve ever seen on a big time movie star.
Let me explain about the bank. It’s only a temporary one — a trailer filled with guards overnight, but just begging to be put on wheels and towed away. The movie was intended to be a comedy, but I found myself very quietly not laughing almost all the way through. I permitted myself a few smiles now and again — Scott is a very good actor, and while I don’t believe he did comedies very often, once in a while the perpetrators of this movie came up with a scene that worked.
See this for the presence of brassy redhead Joanna Cassidy, whose character is financing the deal and who is (unaccountably) madly in lust with Walter Upjohn Ballentine. The rest of the cast, a motley crew at best, I could easily have done without.
JAMAICA RUN. Paramount Pictures, 1953, Ray Milland, Arlene Dahl, Wendell Corey, Patric Knowles, Carroll McComas, Bill Walker, Laura Elliot (Kasey Rogers), Murray Matheson, Clarence Muse, Michael Moore, Robert Warwick, Lester Matthews. Based on the novel A Neat Little Corpse by Max Murray. Director: Lewis R. Foster.
“Great House, piracy, war, slavery, and murder, everything in Comeback Bay has grown out of violence.” — Mrs. Dacey (Carroll McComas)
We are in Gothic country à la Rebecca in this attractive film adaptation of mystery novelist Max Murray’s novel A Neat Little Corpse. Ray Milland is Captain Patrick Fairlie, returning to Comeback Bay in Jamaica on a mission after the war; first, to establish his old business running the islands in his boat, and second, to reclaim his one time wife, Ena Dacey (Arlene Dahl) held captive by the neediness of her sodden mother (Carroll McComas) and brother Todd (Wendell Corey) who drove a younger Fairlie away before the war.
Fairlie soon learns things aren’t any better. Mrs. McComas hates him for threatening to take Ena away, Todd is still arrogant and short tempered, and Human (Bill Walker) the butler and houseman still runs the house and the natives with Obeah powers in one hand and Dacey influence in the other.
A new element though is William Montagu (Patric Knowles) looking to buy the beach front property, and interested in an old legend that the house was sold to another Dacey whose boat went down in a great storm with the evidence. He has found the heirs to that Dacey, Janice and Robert Clayton (Laura Elliot and Michael Moore), and wants Fairlie to dive on the old wreck to look for evidence of the sale.
Things are tense enough before Robert is found at the bottom of the ocean with his skull caved in, murdered.
Montague: One doesn’t lose a brother every day.
Todd: One couldn’t unless one had an awful lot of brothers.
Fairlie finds the chest with the papers, but not before he is nearly murdered by another diver and Janice Clayton nearly suffers a fatal riding accident.
Meanwhile things are getting more complicated with Todd finally coming around as he and Janice seem to fall for each other — or is he merely scheming to keep Great House, and Obeah man Human is casting spells and determined that the Dacey’s will never leave Great House no matter what the cost.
Ena: Human has cast a spell. The rolling calf is loose and someone must die.
Save for some rather unconvincing underwater scenes, and perhaps a too obvious villain (the book was a little better in that regard), there is some decent suspense generated and some good detective work including a well handled hearing where the truth is revealed, thanks to Fairlie’s detective work and help from the local police (Murray Matheson). The ending is nicely ironic and exciting giving the grand old place a proper Gothic send-off, since as someone once put it, Gothic fiction of the modern kind is about women getting a house, and often losing it and getting a man instead.
Though no auteur, Lewis R. Foster (who started as a writer on films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It Happened Tomorrow, and The Farmer’s Daughter) was a capable director whose work in the late forties and fifties include some of my favorite minor A films of the era including Armored Car, The Lucky Stiff, Manhandled, Captain China, and Those Redheads From Seattle before moving primarily to television where he directed numerous series ranging from Four Star Playhouse to Zorro, Tales of Wells Fargo, and Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color along with a few films like Dakota Incident andTonka.
Jamaica Run won’t top anyone’s list, but it is an attractive and involving mystery, well acted, tightly directed, and with more than enough to keep most mystery fans involved.
G. G. FICKLING – This Girl for Hire. Pyramid G274, paperback original, 1957. Reprinted at least four times by Pyramid. Cover art by Harry Schaare.
G. G. Fickling was the pseudonym of the writing team of Forrest E. (“Skip”) Fickling and his wife, Gloria, creators of Honey West, billed on the front cover, the back cover, and even the spine of This Girl for Hire as “the sexiest private eye ever to pull a trigger!” Honey’s sex is made much of in the course of the book: She spends as much time getting into and out of bathing suits as she does working on the case,and her measurements (38-22-36) are cited both on the back cover and in the text.
The case itself, which involves eight deaths before it ends, begins when Honey is hired by a down-and-out actor whose apparent murder leads to the other killings, all of people involved in the television industry. Despite the setting, there is little actual insight into television, unless the actors, producers, and directors really do spend most of their days and nights drinking and carousing.
The book is filled with incident, even including a strip-poker game, but the plot is so confusing that the reader is unlikely to be convinced by its unraveling, which comes about more by accident than by good detective work. Still, there is a certain pre-feminist charm in seeing the hard-boiled Honey at work in a man’s world, despite Lieutenant Mark Storm (his real name) and his attempts to persuade her to leave the brain work to the men.
Pyramid Books occasionally referred to Honey West as “literary history’s first lady private eye,” and undoubtedly the novelty of a female first-person narrator helped sell the series, but James L. Rubel’s Eli Donavan was playing the same part years earlier in Gold Medal’s No Business for a Lady (1950). Still, it was Honey who wasa success, starring in eleven books and a TV series in which she was portrayed by Anne Francis.
The Ficklings produced one other short-lived series for Belmont Books, this one featuring a male private eye named Erik March, in such titles as The Case of the Radioactive Redhead (1963).
BRUNO FISCHER – So Wicked My Love. Gold Medal #437, paperback original; 1st printing, 1954. Reprinted twice. A shorter version appeared in Manhunt, November 1953, under the title “Coney Island Incident.â€
All of this happens in the first twenty pages of the story, and the redhead continues to make life miserable for Ray Whitehead.
She is one of those wonderfully amoral sexpots of paperback-original fiction that are more easily acquired than gotten rid of. Ray does manage to get rid of the $80,000 that he is stuck with (the loot from the robbery), but the girl keeps turning up at the most inopportune times.
Though not as tightly plotted as some of Fischer’s other works (it was expanded from a magazine story), So Wicked My Love is typically fast-paced. The main characters, especially Whitehead, in the role of the innocent man drawn into criminal events, are particularly well done.
Other Fischer paperbacks of interest are Knee-Deep in Death (1956), Murder in the Raw (1957), and Second-Hand Nude (1961).
BRUNO FISCHER – Knee-Deep in Death. Gold Medal #591; paperback original; 1st printing, July 1956. Cover art by Lu Kimmel.
One of the techniques used by the pulp writers of the 30s and 40s — and earlier and later, for that matter — is to start the story moving by tossing in as many strange and unexplained events as you could and let the main protagonist(s) muddle their way through the rest of the book trying to piece together what happened and put the finger on the guilty party.
It is a technique that works only when the explanation fits exactly what happened, and if the author can lead the way into that explanation without cramming it all in in one great infodump in the last three or four pages.
This is what Bruno Fischer, a long-time and very prolific pulp writer himself, does in Knee-Deep in Death, and by golly, he succeeds on both counts. Where he falls down and leaves the reader (me) not completely satisfied is by using a hero-protagonist who’s not very interesting (boring) and while certainly wronged by his wife (rich) who has left him (he insisted that they live on his money, not hers), he comes off as needing to explain things too much (not exactly whiney, but close).
Coming back to the small town where Manhattan-based TV producer Gabe Bishop’s wife Lucy has returned to live with her mother, he finds her chatting up a fellow in a bar and obviously not very happy to see him (Gabe, that is). Gabe socks him, and it turns out that the guy has a gun. Next thing Gabe knows is that he’s on the scene of a killing, that of an old man in field fleeing an unknown assailant with a (another?) gun, Lucy is nearby — could she be involved? — and so is a good-looking redhead whom Gabe knows is female by grasping into her in the dark.
Then Lucy’s car in trapped in the mud, and Gabe has to rescue her — see the cover — and do you know what? I don’t think I’m making this very interesting at all. But it is. Something is going on, and besides trying to make up with his wife. Gabe is determined to find out what.
You will not be surprised to know that he manages to do both. The result is solidly written, not in any sort of prizewinning fashion, and while as often happens the ending is a bit of a letdown, I think (hope) I’ve told you enough to tell you whether you’d enjoy it, too.
RICHARD N. SMITH – Death Be Nimble. Signet, paperback original; 1st printing, February 1967.
Here’s a book I’ve had since just about forever. I may have even purchased it new, but it would have been a long time ago, so I’m not so certain about that. It’s a private eye novel, so I’ve always meant to read it, and when a spare copy came along and I had it hand, I decided that its turn had finally come.
I don’t know, but back in 1967 I might have liked this book, but reading and finishing it these past couple of nights, just before going to sleep, I can find nothing in of interest in it to tell you about, other than of course that it’s a private eye novel.
His name is John Kincaid, and he works in the Boston area. He’s by a anonymous client who send him an invitation (along with $500 in cash) to a fancy party at a Yacht Club. He is, after all, known as the Boston area’s “society detective.” There he meets a good-looking redhead, who mysteriously disappears on him just before the wife of the man hosting the affair is found floating in the harbor. Somehow he also finds a small fortune in jewelry in his pocket. He immediately throws it overboard. Wouldn’t you?
So, OK, the opening is not all that bad. He never meets the person who sent him the invitation, but he’s hired the next day by the husband of the woman who fell or was pushed overboard. Kincaid assumes that what the man really wants him to do is frame his wife’s brother for the killing
After that there follows nothing but a series of dumb PI cliches; to wit: the brother-in-law objects to Kincaid hanging around; a gangster and his goons beat Kincaid up; Kincaid narrowly misses death from some adulterated suntan lotion; the previous mentioned redhead runs hot and cold before declaring her love for him; Kincaid is taken for a ride, but instead opens the car door, jumps out, and turns the table on the previously mentioned goons; and the real killer comes after Kincaid with a gun, but Kincaid turns the table on the killer…
Sorry. Maybe I’ve told you more than you want to know. None of the characters are given any motivation as to why they do anything, and Kincaid himself is nothing more than the person telling the story, without a whit of anything interesting to say about himself.
This was his only adventure to ever have been published. I probably wouldn’t have cared for it back in 1967 either.
WILSON TUCKER – To Keep or Kill. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1947. Lion #21, paperback, 1950; Lion Library LL84, 1956.
Tucker, who is probably better known today for his science fiction, wrote a total of five Charles Horne mysteries for Rinehart back between 1946 and 1951. After that he apparently decided he was better off not trying to write detective fiction, even as a sideline.
Not that he left the field completely, but I think he probably made the right decision.
Horne is a private eye. Most of his work is done for insurance companies. He quite vehemently does not do divorce work. The small metropolis of Boone, Illinois, where he has his office, is a figment of Tucker’s imagination, although there is a Boone County (up near Rockford).
This is the second Horne book. As it begins, he is witness to an explosion. He thinks it’s a practical joke at first, but when it goes off it takes part of a city block and a couple of victims with it. Later, Horne is kidnapped and kept a prisoner in the home of the girl who planted the bomb. She’s a redhead, tall, beautiful, and as loopy as a loon.
She is in love with Horne, she has been stalking him for months, and now that she “owns” him, so to speak, she expects — well, this was written before such explicit intentions could be stated, but those are the kinds of intentions she has. Viewed from today’s more permissive perspective, Horne’s brave resistance to temptation seems both admirable and refreshingly naive.
Tucker’s style in this book is a burbling, slap-happy one, somewhat reminiscent of Fredric Brown in nature. In all, however, it hardly manages to disguise a total apparent lick of respect for logical thought processes. Or let me put it another way: the sort of logic that is used by all concerned would make sense only to the well-confined inmates of a lunatic asylum.
It wouldn’t be hard to enjoy this quirky excuse for a detective story immensely. There is a thin line, it is said, between genius and lunacy. If I’d been able to follow the plot at all, I’d have said this was the work of the former.
As for a letter grade, I’m not too sure of this one at all, but if it means anything to you, what I’m going to do, if I don’t change my mind tomorrow, is give this book a definite (C plus?).
— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 5, No. 3, May/June 1981.
The Charles Horne series —
The Chinese Doll. Rinehart, 1946. Dell Mapback #343, 1949.
To Keep or Kill. Rinehart, 1947. Lion #21, 1950.
The Dove. Rinehart, 1948.
The Stalking Man. Rinehart, 1949. Mercury Mystery #150, no date.
Red Herring. Rinehart, 1951.
FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins
In ELLERY QUEEN: THE ART OF DETECTION I mentioned that the music for the first ten episodes of the ADVENTURES OF ELLERY QUEEN radio series, which debuted in 1939, was composed by the young Bernard Herrmann, and that three excerpts from his scores for the series could be heard on the Web, played on a synthesizer by David Ledsam.
A few weeks ago I discovered that three complete Herrmann scores for the series were uploaded to the Web last summer, more than a year after my book came out. The episodes for which Herrmann’s music can now be heard are “The Fallen Angel,†“Napoleon’s Razor†and “The Impossible Crime,†which aired respectively on July 2, 9 and 16 of 1939.
Each score runs from ten to twelve minutes and is played on a synthesizer by Kevin Dvorak. I’m sure the music would sound more like the Herrmann we know and love if it were played on the instruments for which he wrote it, but it’s a lot better than what we had before, which was nothing. Check all three out via the YouTube videos above.
***
For us old-timers “Gone Girl†is the name of a Lew Archer short story by Ross Macdonald. Now it’s also the name of a first-rate crime-suspense movie, directed by noir specialist David Fincher and written by Gillian Flynn based on her 2012 best-seller of the same name.
Most readers of this column are likely to have seen something about the picture, so I won’t bother to summarize the plot beyond saying that when beautiful Amy Elliott Dunne (Rosamund Pike) disappears from her upscale Missouri home amid signs of violence, the media go into a frenzy and all but crucify her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) as her murderer.
There are several strong females in the film so perhaps I’m not revealing too much when I say that one of them struck me as the film noir woman to end all film noir women, and a manipulator of such epic proportions that she leaves Diedrich Van Horn and all the other Iago figures in the Ellery Queen novels choking on her dust.
***
A few weeks ago, with a bit of time to kill, I decided to tackle REDHEAD (Hurst & Blackett, 1934), the fourth of John Creasey’s 600-odd novels, the second of 28 that deal with Department Z — which in those days of Creasey’s youth was called Z Department — and the earliest I happen to own.
According to the invaluable Hubin bibliography, this item was never published in the U.S., not even back in the early 1970s when Popular Library was putting out original paperback versions of countless Creaseys from the Thirties. My copy is an English softcover (Arrow pb #417, 1971) and indicates that the book was revised for republication, although the revisions must have been done with a very light hand indeed.
Department Z has little to do with the operation, which pits a muscular young Brit named Martin “Windy†Storm and various of his cohorts against an American gangster known as Redhead who’s determined to bring his crime methods into England.
If Creasey took this notion from Edgar Wallace’s 1932 novel WHEN THE GANGS CAME TO LONDON, he moved the center of gravity to the remote Sussex village of Ledsholm and the ancient castle that dominates the area. Much of the book’s second half is taken up by a long long action sequence in which our guys inside Ledsholm Grange are besieged by two separate gangs equipped with revolvers, automatics, machine guns, armored cars, explosives, the whole nine yards of weaponry.
But since all the characters are stick figures, it’s very hard to keep the action straight or care who shoots or socks whom. Every other sentence ends with an exclamation point (“The greatest criminal enterprise in the history of England was reaching its climax!â€), and the king toad makes Lord Voldemort look like a newborn kitten (“Through the hole in the wall he saw the demoniac eyes of Redhead, green, fiendish, glowing with the blood-lust that possessed himâ€).
The writing is almost Avallonean in spots: “‘Be quiet!’ hissed Redhead.†And if Creasey preserved lines like “A bullet winged its message of death across the room, sending the dago staggering backâ€, I can’t help wondering what gems of political incorrectness he tossed out.
Fast forward to his books of only seven or eight years later, like the early Roger West novels (the first five of them collected in INSPECTOR WEST GOES TO WAR, 2011, with intro by me), and you see at a glance how radically Creasey’s writing skills improved over the Thirties.
***
Or did it take that long? I also happen to have a copy of the next Department Z adventure, FIRST CAME A MURDER (Andrew Melrose, 1934; revised edition, Arrow pb #937, 1967). It has all the earmarks of a Thirties thriller but the writing is so much more restrained and stiff-upper-lippish that it’s hard to believe it came from the same pen as REDHEAD just a few months before.
I don’t have copies of any Creaseys earlier than these but, judging from the quotations in William Vivian Butler’s THE DURABLE DESPERADOES (1973), both SEVEN TIMES SEVEN and THE DEATH MISER resemble FIRST CAME A MURDER in this respect. Of course, what I have is the revised version of the latter title, and perhaps Butler was quoting from the revised versions of Creasey’s earlier novels too.
But in that case why does the revised version of REDHEAD sound so different? I can only speculate, and perhaps, in the words of so many Erle Stanley Gardner characters, I’m taking a button and sewing a vest on it. But it strikes me as significant that REDHEAD was originally published by Hurst & Blackett whereas the publisher of all the other early Creaseys was Andrew Melrose.
Creasey once said that SEVEN TIMES SEVEN, the first novel he sold, was the tenth he’d written. Could REDHEAD have been one of the rejected nine? If there’s ever a comprehensive biography of that awesomely prolific author, perhaps we’ll learn the answer.
