Fri 27 Oct 2023
A 1001 Midnights Review: TODD DOWNING – Vultures in the Sky.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[5] Comments
by Bill Pronzini
TODD DOWNING – Vultures in the Sky. Hugh Rennert #4. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1935. Coachwhip Publications, paperback, 2012. American Mystery Classics, hardcover, 2020.
Hugh Rennert, special investigator for the U.S. Customs Service, is on his way from Laredo, Texas. to Mexico City by train. One of his fellow passengers reports to him a sinister conversation overheard by his wife the night before, in Laredo, in which a threat to “blast the train” was made and there was a cryptic comment about earrings and cuffs and “don’t forget the extra edition.”
While Rennert ponders the meaning of this, the train enters a long tunnel through El Paso de Los Muertos-and when it emerges, he finds one of the other passengers dead in his Pullman chair.
Who was the dead man and why and how was he killed?
And which of the odd group of remaining passengers is responsible? Was it the drunken reporter, the badly sunburned man who hides behind dark glasses, the religious fanatic, the novelty supply salesman, the girl traveling under someone else’s name, or the strange woman who seems totally devoid of emotion and who looks at life with the eyes of a spectator at a play?
Rennert’s job is made all the more difficult by a strike of Pullman employees of the Mexican National Railway, soldiers sent out by the government to keep order, the kidnapping of the three-year-old son of a wealthy Anglo-American family, another murder, and an unscheduled stop deep in the Mexican desert. But matters take their deadliest turn when the Pullman containing Rennert and the suspects is mysteriously uncoupled, stranding them-with the murderer in their midst-in the middle of nowhere.
This is an expertly crafted whodunit, well-written (except for a mildly annoying overuse of commas where there should be periods) and offering a vivid, detailed portrait of Mexico in the mid-l 930s. Although an American (and one-quarter Choctaw), Todd Downing lived in Mexico for many years and his work reflects not only intimate knowledge of the country but a deep love and respect for it and its people. Anyone who likes his mystery plot enlivened by frequent glimpses of another culture both old and new is certain to find Downing’s work enjoyable.
All but one of his nine whodunits are set in Mexico (the one exception has a Texas border background), and all are well worth investigating. Among the best of the other six featuring Hugh Rennert are The Cat Screams ( 1934), which deals with a tide of eerie suicides in the American colony at Taxco; The Case of the Unconquered Sisters (1936), in which Rennert investigates a railway freight wreck and murder at an archeological dig on the edge of a huge sea of lava; and The Last Trumpet (1937), which has a bull fighting background. Downing’s remaining two novels feature Texas sheriff Peter Bounty: Death Under the Moonflower (1938) and The Lazy Lawrence Murders (1941). The latter title, like Vultures in the Sky, deals with murder and mystery aboard a Mexican train.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
October 27th, 2023 at 10:39 pm
Steve,
Any idea what this series rates on your patented hardboiled-o-meter?
October 27th, 2023 at 11:28 pm
That’s a good question. While I own all of the Downing mysteries but one, I shamefully have to admit that I have not read any of them. It is my guess, and a guess only, based on what I’ve read about them, that the books might peak at a “4.” I stand to be corrected, and I hope someone will.
October 27th, 2023 at 11:37 pm
This doesn’t help a whole lot, but from
https://crossexaminingcrime.wordpress.com/2017/04/17/vultures-in-the-sky-1935-by-todd-downing/
“This part interested me as it occurred to me that both Rennert and Talcott are both relatively unemotional people in the face of death, but it is because Rennert has an appropriate avenue for his puzzle solving skills, that his unemotional nature receives less criticism. Not that any reader should want to censure either of them, as like them the reader is glued to observing all the characters after Torner’s death and their reactions toward murder and crisis.”
October 27th, 2023 at 11:41 pm
And from Curtis Evans’s blog http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/06/carrion-death-vultures-in-sky-1935-by.html :
“At times one feels one is reading an Edgar Wallace thriller; yet Downing, though a self-professed admirer of Wallace, manages to keep Vultures tethered to true detection. In this respect Vultures is a great deal like the novels of John Dickson Carr, another writer Downing greatly admired. In other words, Vultures manages, like so many of Carr’s miraculous works, to be both viscerally exciting and ratiocinative, an uncommon feat indeed.
“Perhaps the most obvious authorial influence on Vultures, however, comes from another of the mystery genre’s great writers, Agatha Christie. Downing read Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express the year he began writing Vultures and he immediately praised the Crime Queen’s novel unreservedly.”
October 27th, 2023 at 11:26 pm
I read this one and found it impressive, but it’s not hardboiled particularly, at least I didn’t find it so. It’s been some time, but I recall Rennart as a more or less standard tec of the era albeit with an exotic beat and of course for me the train setting set it apart.
More classic mystery than tough guy. In fact I would not rank it anywhere near tough guy doings though that plot would certainly work in the hardboiled genre.