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JACK HIGGINS writing as JAMES GRAHAM - The Khufra Run  Berkley; paperback reprint; February, 1985. British hardcover edition: Macmillan, 1972. US hardcover edition: Doubleday & Co, 1973. Other paperback editions: Fawcett Crest, 1976; Pocket Books, 1990; Berkley, 2002. Copies of the first US hardcover editions of this book are a little pricey – in the $50 to $100 range – but if a paperback will do, this shouldn’t a very difficult book to find. Here’s what’s interesting, though. In 1985, the book was 213 pages long and sold for $2.95, while in 2002 (the edition that’s still in print) it’s 287 pages long, and if you buy it new, it will set you back $7.99. Well, I found it interesting, and you wonder how they do that. (Yes, I know. Bigger margins. In more ways than one.) Another thing that’s interesting, and you are probably aware of this too, but of the two authors’ names on the cover, neither one is the real guy. Jack Higgins, still writing today, was born in 1929 as Harry Patterson, and his first several books were published that way. The other names he also went under are: Martin Fallon, Hugh Marlowe & Henry Patterson From an “unofficial” Jack Higgins website on the net I discovered the following chronological list. I also didn’t count them, but the website says he’s responsible for 63 books and one short story. I also didn’t note the original author’s by-line on the books below, but by this time, most of them have been reprinted as by Jack Higgins, the name that’s the most well-known.
 If I were
really ambitious, I would check my statement that all of these have
eventually been republished as by Jack Higgins, even if he had to
revise them to do so. Those that haven’t, if any, would therefore
have to be the ones he’s least happy with, looking back at them today.No matter. It was The Eagle Has Landed, the 1975 thriller about a German attempt to infiltrate England in World War II and capture Winston Churchill, that made Higgins a multi-millionaire. The Khufra Run isn’t in that league, by any means, but it’s great entertainment, and if done with a decent B-level budget, it would make a really decent B-grade action movie. Here’s the opening paragraph: It was late evening when they brought the
coffin down to the lower quay in Cartagena’s outer harbour. There
were no family mourners as far as I could see, just four men from the
undertakers in the hearse, a customs officer in a Land-Rover bringing
up the rear.
Here are the last two paragraphs from Chapter One: I paused on the brow of the road close to
an old ruined mill, a well-known landmark, and got out to admire the
view. I reached for a cigarette and somewhere close at hand, a
woman screamed, high-pitched and full of terror.
A second later, a naked girl ran out of the darkness into the headlights of the jeep. It is the girl who is the key figure in the rest of the story, even though (as you may have guessed) Jack Nelson’s flight from Cartagena to Ibiza (an island off the Spanish coast) had an ulterior motive. Jack Nelson, who tells the story, is an island-hopping pilot and small time smuggler. The naked girl is Claire Bouvier, or as it happens, Sister Claire, of the Little Sisters of Pity, on leave from a convent near Grenoble, and as it eventually transpires, she has a proposition for Jack. Somewhere in the Khufra Marshes, off the Algerian coast, is a fortune in silver, and Claire, one of the most naive and single-minded women you will ever meet, in fiction or not, needs Jack and his friend Turk to help her find it. On page 20, she tells Jack that “you are a good man in spite of yourself.” Jack is not so sure, nor is the reader, except for the reader who knows exactly how predictable such adventurers (and their adventures) are.  It’s still a rattling good story, though, whatever that means, even if Jack is rather careless about the bad guys on their trail, and yes, there are. If I didn’t mention them, you should have known better. Once they start making their picturesque way through the marshes, a narrative suddenly goes into overdrive, and if you can put the book down after page 138, you are a better man (or woman) than I. The ending is even better. I like the idea of Audrey Hepburn in the role of Claire, while any tall, slim, grizzled tough guy actor could be Jack. But Audrey Hepburn. She may have been a little slim for the part, but other than that, nothing but net. Reference: The Unofficial Jack Higgins Home Page, at www.scintilla.utwente.nl/users/gert/higgins/ PostScript: The Jack Higgins short story mentioned in passing up above is “The Morgan Score,” 1995. It first appeared in Great Irish Tales of Horror, ed. Peter Haining, Souvenir Press, along with stories from such heavyweight authors as J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Sax Rohmer, Brian Moore, Bram Stoker, M. P. Shiel and others. That is good company, to be sure.
January
2005
FOOTNOTE:
This latest title appeared after the review was written.
HUGH
McLEAVE - Second Time Around
Walker; paperback reprint, 1984. Hardcover editions: Robert Hale (UK), 1981; Walker (US), 1981. Unless there’s some duplication of titles between the US and over in England, Hugh McLeave, a new author to me, wrote a total of thirteen spy thrillers for a wide variety of publishers between 1964 and 1987. According to Crime Fiction IV (but see below), four of them feature as their leading protagonist, free-wheeling psychologist Dr. Gregor Maclean, who, as a leading character in Second Time Around, takes on what is very nearly a secondary role. On the other hand, a psychologist is exactly who is needed at the center of this Cold War tale about a reputable London publisher who on occasion checks into various clinics with no memory of who he is or why he is having such terrible dreams. Maclean becomes doubly interested when his acquaintance Dr. Armitage, who was treating him, gets run down by an automobile after confiding his concerns to Maclean, although in the stark, documentary-like style of writing that McLeave employs, Maclean seems to exhibit no great anguish over Armitage’s death – only the delight of tackling the puzzle it seems to supply. Here’s a longish quote from pages 32-33 to illustrate. Deidre is Maclean’s long-suffering live-in assistant:  Had he followed Deidre’s advice he would
have handed over the whole case to Scotland Yard; she considered his
idea of investigating the case himself as mad and dangerous.
Then, he always had this tussle with her; she sometimes felt inclined
to view psychiatry as a painless exercise in straightening out mental
kinks with homely advice and would have filled his working ours with
nice, harmless neurotics, from compulsive handwashers and cake-eaters
to to cat-and-bird phobias; Deidre had another criterion, sizing up if
these patients could keep them in high-rent Harley Street; he, on the
other hand, would have been involved with schizophrenics and
paranoiacs, the acute depressive cases and hopeless alcoholics, seeing
some bit of himself in all of them; most of them would touch him for
money rather than expect to pay for his help. So, over the years,
he and Deidre had established a sort of symbiosis; she allowed him a
percentage of problem people with the sort of mental disorders that had
brought him into psychiatry in the first place, while he treated her
affluent neurotics.
“Macushla, just look at him as a patient,” he pleaded. The case – and yes, he certainly does decide to get involved – takes Maclean, Deidre, the man’s daughter, and a male friend of the daughter, not to mention at least one other – on a hastily arranged trip to Germany, both East and West, on the trail of the man whose memory is either coming back, and if so, from where, or he is cracking up completely and probably responsible for the deaths of several prostitutes who reminded him of – whom? This is also very like science fiction, mixed in with a goodly amount of bitter cold war philosophy, but based wholly on fiction, very likely not. And no, this is a book which is very little like anything I have ever read before. It is clear more quickly to the reader what the underlying circumstances are (which I am being so careful not to tell you about) than they are to Maclean. This may be an error, perhaps, on the author’s part, because the tale starts to plod a little, about two-thirds of the way through. While after reading this book I still prefer Ross Thomas and Manning Coles, two writers who otherwise have little in common – or do they? – I have to admit that, one, McLeave still has a small surprise or two up his sleeve, and, two, this very well may be one of the saddest love stories ever written. Is that enough for a recommendation? Either way, it will have to do.  PostScript: I have done some googling on the author, and I have made a few unexpected finds. Categorized as “published works” but available now only as downloaded ebooks from www.fictionwise.com, and not included as any of the thirteen tales mentioned above, are the novels, White Pawn on Red Square, which has to do with the (attempted) theft of Lenin’s body; and The Bent Pyramid, about an Egyptologist and some ancient jewelry. (Where and when these books were previously published, I have not yet been able to determine.) McLeave’s works of non-fiction include The Last Pharaoh, about the life of King Farouk; a history of the Foreign Legion titled The Damned Die Hard; A Man and His Mountain, a biography of the painter, Paul Cézanne; A Moment of Truth, a historical novel based on the life of Zola; and a history of art thievery titled Rogues in the Gallery. A list of nineteen “unpublished works,” mostly fiction but including his autobiography, can be found at www.hugh-mcleave.com. These are also available for downloading. For a gentleman born in 1923, Hugh McLeave is finding the computer age much to his liking. Bibliographic followup: In Crime Fiction IV, Al Hubin wonders if The Icarus Threat (UK) and The Life and Death of Liam Faulds (US) are one and the same. From the book descriptions, they are not. Gregor Maclean is in The Sword and the Scales, not so stated in CF IV. He is also in at least three of of the unpublished novels mentioned above: The Twa Corbies, Who Pray Together Slay Together, and Not All Rivers Reach the Sea. Spies and/or secret agents Paul Brodie and Shane Kingslake (female) appear in A Borderline Case, Double Exposure, The Icarus Threat, and Under the Icefall (all published). A surgeon named Murdo Cameron appears in both A Question of Negligence (published; Maclean also appears) and Sacred Flame (unpublished). January
2005
 RICHARD RAYNER - The Devil’s Wind HarperCollins; hardcover. First Edition: February 2005. If there were no such word as “coincidence” or “serendipity,” it would have to be invented. The day before I received this book in the mail to read, I happened to be looking up science fiction writer Charles Eric Maine, for some reason or another, no longer remembered – the reason, not the author, although in all likelihood there are not many who remember Maine, either. But I digress. As it happens, Maine, who died in 1981 and whose real name was David McIlwaine, also wrote a handful of mysteries (all scarce, and none published in the US) under the name of – you guessed? – Richard Rayner. Hmm. The Richard Rayner who wrote The Devil’s Wind was born in England, but now lives in Los Angeles, and as in the case of a certain other author (named Chandler, although born in Chicago), it may take someone on the other side of the Atlantic to come to this country to tell us, and show us, what we’re really like. Or what we were in the past, as this book does; back in 1956, the time of HUAC; the atom bomb tests in Nevada and the concomitant growth of Las Vegas; Jimmy Hoffa; inherent racism; and jazz. All essential ingredients of a top-notch noirish thriller (filmed in glorious black-and-white?) based on identities: hidden identities, newly created identities; and revenge: subtle and not-so-subtle, and bullets to match. And jazz. On pages 193-194, wealthy up-and-coming architect – about to become the new Senator for the state of Nevada – Maurice Valentine (not the name he was born under) is listening to the only record a young black musician ever made: I didn’t know what to expect. In the
war, like everyone else, I’d danced to Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and
Count Basie; I’d lain on my bunk, smoking, dreaming, while Bing Crosby
or Billie Holliday or Frank Sinatra sang on the radio. I
understood, in a general way, tthat after a war a revolution had
occurred in jazz, that the swing of the music had turned itself inside
out, with bop, bebop, hard bop. I knew, even, of a further
development – West Coast jazz, cool jazz. Especially liking the
sound of those concepts, I’d sped to a Hollywood music store and bought
myself a couple of Art Pepper records. The guy had style.
He wore fine duds, was handsome, white. He played each solo like
it was a seduction. That, I could relate to. And of course
jazz bands were always playing in the Vegas show rooms. I was no
ignoramus on the subject, in other words; nor was I an expert.
But nothing had quite prepared me for what I was about to hear.
It was a quintet: the piano came in first, with bass, drums, and trumpet following behind, and I knew at once this wasn’t the hard stuff; the Dizzy Gillespie kind of jazz; nor was it California cool, man. The tune was a standard, “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and when Wardell Lane entered with his first solo I swear it was like being washed in the purest, freshest water I’d ever known. That horn floated with a sweet clarity that cleansed my blood and eased my bones. Okay, I was exhausted, drugged with fatigue. But I don’t want to underplay the feeling of the moment. The whole room glowed, and Konstantin stood there with a huge grin. “You see now? You understand?” he said. “Listen. He’s almost on the edge, as if he were in danger of falling over.” But somehow Wardell never did. The woman. Mallory Walker is a rich man’s daughter and a would-be architect, a field which in the 1950s in which there were very few openings for women. Valentine is married but eminently capable of being seduced, and he finds himself captivated. From page 8: My first impressions were of a cool
hand and a firm, bony handshake. A slender figure in blue linen
and flat heels. A lean face with hair cropped short and bleached
blond, almost silvery in color. Full lips, nose slightly
upturned. An impression of impudence, of life. Her eyes
were a pale gray-green, and powerful, of startling clarity; she looked
at me as if she knew my every secret.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said, as simply as that. Her voice was clear and clipped, with no identifiable accent. She is a force, a whirlwind, someone who knew her well says on page 256. Clever and proud and ruthless and beautiful, Maurice says earlier on page 40. There is also the hot wind that blows across the Nevada desert. The natural wind. There is also the unnatural wind that arises after the flash and colossal boom of the mushroom clouds that can be seen from the top floor of Las Vegas hotels, the wind that causes disasters in more ways than one. I also have to tell you about one of the notes I wrote to myself while reading and absorbing everything that was happening as quickly as I could. I suddenly sat up and told myself, less than half way through, and I quote, “I have absolutely no idea where this book is going.” Is that adequate as a one-line review? I’d like to think so. I do think so. It’s quite a ride. PostScript: One of this author’s previous novels also qualifies as crime fiction: Murder Book, Houghton Mifflin, 1997. It’s been optioned as a film by actor John Malkovich. If they were to make a movie of The Devil’s Wind, as written, I’d go to see it in a minute, black-and-white or not. January
2005
Note: A
shorter version
of this review appeared in Historical Novels Review.
EDWARD S. AARONS - Girl on the Run Gold Medal R2142; paperback reprint, 1969. Originally published as a paperback original: Gold Medal, 1954.  As an author, Aarons
began his career writing for the pulp magazines and for second-tier
hardcover outfits, like Phoenix Press (Death
in a Lighthouse and Murder
Money, both 1938), and after the war, for David McKay, beginning
in 1947. All of his early novels – and his work for the pulps –
were written as by Edward Ronns. His first novel published under
his real name, Aarons, came out in 1948 (Nightmare, David McKay). As
he began writing for the paperbacks in the early 1950s, he gradually
switched over, and most of his work began to appear as by Aarons.Including of course the “Assignment” series, featuring the intrepid Cajun CIA operative Sam Durell. The first of these was Assignment to Disaster (Gold Medal, 1955), so Girl on the Run, being published a year earlier, might almost be considered a dry run for the series, without being a series novel itself, with no other books coming between. The hero, Harry Bannock, a structural engineer between jobs and at loose ends in France before heading back to the states, does not happen to work for any espionage organization, however. He’s just a guy, who because of a girl, Lorette O’Bae, whom he earlier loved and lost to a friendly rival, finds himself at her service, and very quickly thereafter, involved way over his head in non-stop action and nail-biting adventure. What the bad guys are after – and this includes his not-now-so-friendly former rival – is either (a) an enormously valuable medieval treasure, or (b) a secret, hidden lode of uranium, either of which will have a great influence on France’s political role in the postwar world. Honed by working in the pulps, one imagines, Aarons’ prose is clear, clipped, crisp and clean. From page 19: Bannock looked at Lorette then. He
felt the urgency of Cobb’s words and knew that Cobb was speaking the
truth about their limited time for decision. The girl’s eyes met
his in a silent appeal. She looked small and trim, the red
leather belt emphasizing her tiny waist and the flare of her softly
curved hips. Looking at her, he knew that everything was
unimportant beside the fact that he was in love with her. An
intense desire for her came over him, and he looked at Cobb and the
huge young man in the doorway and still he saw Lorette and the soft
lines of her breasts and the way her chin lifted just a bit then.
She was very beautiful. Suddenly he knew that going home to New
York was a trifling matter. There was nothing for him in New
York, after his years of absence. He had been on his way there
from force of habit, because there was nowhere else to go. He had
been living in all the far corners of the earth until now because he
had been looking for something he hadn’t wanted to admit to himself,
and now, when he looked at Lorette, he knew what that something was and
he didn’t want to lose it.
From pages 33-34: He tried to tell himself then that nobody
would hurt Lorette as long as her kidnapers didn’t learn what they
wanted to know. He knew he was lying to himself. The
thought of her being in the hands of reckless men made him tremble, and
the sweat stood out all over him. He got up off the cot and
smashed at the steel door with his hands and yelled at the top of his
voice. The cell was dark, and there were no lights in it.
He kept smashing at the door and yelling and presently a dim bulb went
on the corridor and he heard quick footsteps. It was the guard.
Here’s an action scene, from page 53. When [the two men] suddenly jumped, Bannock kneed one and
punched at the other’s face and then lowered his head and tried
to ram between them to get off the aqueduct. The stocky man
tripped him, and before he could rise again the other kicked at him,
and Bannock rolled sideways in pain exploding all through him.
The stones under his body slanted sharply and he shouted and felt
himself slide toward the open end of the bridge. The sound of his
voice was lost in the quick roar of the whirlpool below. For an
instant he glimpsed the wide, staring eyes of the two men. For
another instant he tried to cling to the edge of the slippery
stones. His legs dangled in empty space. His fingers clawed
for a grip. The stocky man grunted and stamped his heel on
Bannock’s hand, and Bannock suddenly let go and fell through space
toward the swift sucking current of the stream below.
On page 93, he becomes philosophical: He thought: I remember a day in Maine in
the spring, when I went fishing instead of going to school, and the sun
was warm like this sun and the earth felt like this earth. I was
twelve years old and Aunt Martha was already dying and I didn’t know
it. If I went back there now and picked up a handful of earth, it
might, by the chemistry of nature, be a handful of Aunt Martha, because
we all belong to the earth and the earth is our final
destination. The earth is our home. I’ve been in many
strange corners of the world and never knew this before. And yet,
because of the accident of birth and the familiarities of childhood,
you can’t call this place or that place your home, but only one
particular place, and for me that is a place far away from
here. But if I went there, I still wouldn’t be home, because
there is this emptiness I always felt and which I filled with of
Lorette O’Bae. So this plot of earth or that one isn’t enough.
He thought: The sun that warms me now also warms Lorette. Somewhere nearby, perhaps within walking distance, she is asleep or just awakening in a bed she thinks is safe; but it isn’t safe, and I want to be with her and guard her and, if she will let me, to love her. And when I am with her again, then this or that earth will make no difference at all because it will be all one and the same. And if anyone tries to stop me from finding her and being with her, no matter who it is, including this thief sitting beside me, then I will send him to join and become part of this soil here. I never wanted to kill anyone and I still don’t want to kill anyone, because it’s an awful thing to take another’s life since there is nothing more important to a man than to continue in the casement of his body that holds his brain and his soul, if he has a soul. When the body is killed and the man is dead, then his identity is gone, and he no longer thinks or feels or observes or enjoys or suffers, and in a small way the earth itself is robbed by his death. There is much to this story that would also be considered hard-boiled, and I would recommend at least the first 75% of the book to you, including the parts I quoted from. It is also true that the tale seems to get away from Aarons, out of control and misfiring at just precisely the wrong time and the wrong place. Beat up and left for dead at one point, for example, but with the use of not a single bullet, Bannock is not dead. He lives, he recovers and he prevails. We knew he would, but all in all, I think (just maybe) it could have been made a teensy bit more of a challenge for him. Not that Bannock – if you were to ask him, given all that he goes through – would agree! February 2005
CAROLE B.
SHMURAK
- DeadmistressSterlingHouse; trade paperback; 2004. Carole and I both taught at Central Connecticut State University for I won’t say how many years, but as far as I can remember, we’ve met only once, and then only briefly, at a talk that author Ron Goulart gave about mystery fiction at the local Newington library. She was in the Department of Education, and I taught math (still do, twice a week), so our paths seem to have never crossed. (But given the committees we each served on over the years, they may have, and we never knew it.) While still teaching, Carole’s writing career began with a series of young adult books in collaboration with Tom Ratliff (as Carroll Thomas), all of them historical fiction and following the adventures of a 16-year-old girl named Matty Trescott living in Connecticut around the time of the Civil War. One of the books, Ring Out Wild Bells, was nominated for an Agatha (the Malice Domestic award) for Best Young Adult Mystery. In this book, and without the use of modern forensics, Matty helps nab a killer while beginning her study of medicine at New England Female Medical College in Boston. Assisting her is her cousin Neely, who is at Mount Holyoke Seminary (not yet college) studying science.  Deadmistress
is Carole’s first work of adult detective fiction, and it’s a good
one. (No mystery novel that starts out with a map in the front
can ever be bad, and I noticed that the Math and English building is
called Lewis Hall. Hmm.)I’m starting off ahead of myself. The map is that of the campus of the Wintonbury Academy for Girls, and the headmistress is the one who has been killed. (No surprise there.) Sabena Lazlo was popular with almost no one, which makes for a lengthy roster of suspects, and what prompts Susan Lombardi, a former instructor there, to add her talents to the investigation, is that the list of suspects includes the large number of friends she left behind when she went to work at Metropolitan University. There is a continual twinkle in the author’s prose, as she allows Susan to tell the story herself. Both the author and Susan know the ins and outs of academic life, including never-ending battles over turf, although Susan, as yet untenured at Metropolitan, is still taken by surprise by how seriously some of the skirmishes are fought. (I’ve been caught unprepared like this, and caught in the middle, once or twice myself.) As for detective work, Susan’s only self-taught, and even though she’s learning on the job, she quickly discovers that she’s also pretty good at it. Even her work-at-home husband, Michael Buckler, inevitably nicknamed Swash, finds himself interested (and carried along) in her activities. Even so, as good as she is, she soon finds that she needs some professional assistance. In this case it’s from an older student, Mark Goldin, who at one time had a short career as a PI for a Hartford insurance company. The end result is a nice compact sort of detective novel, only 184 pages long, and for the most part, it goes down very smoothly. It’s well-written, and there are no typos at all, as far as I noticed, which is generally not the case with smaller publishers (and even with the larger conglomerates). But while there are a lot of suspects involved, there is not the level of complexity in the detective end of things that I would have liked to have seen. There is one clue that will point to the culprit immediately, if you should happen to think about it. On the other hand – and this is important – the author takes good care that you don’t. Think about it, that is. Misdirection is everything, and Carole Shmurak has it. What I found unrealistic, and therefore somewhat off-putting, is the final confrontation scene with the killer, as Susan gets some of the school’s students too directly involved, and how the police would let a show like this go forward, I couldn’t say. Also surprising me a little bit – well, hey, it surprised me a lot – was a bit of edginess that comes up in the relationship between some of the main characters, although one of them doesn’t know it, and that person had certainly better not find out ... ? February 2005
Update (10/05): Death by Committee, the second Susan Lombardi mystery, has been completed and is scheduled for publication sometime in 2006. I also have recently done an interview with Carole, which you can read by going here. HUGH McLEAVE - Vodka on Ice Pyramid T2387; paperback reprint, Feb 1971; hardcover edition: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969.  I hope you will forgive me, but I’m going to start where the previous review of one of McLeave’s spy thrillers left off, and that’s with a bit of a bibliographic muddle. Most of the sellers of the hardcover edition of this book on ABE mention that the copies they have are the first US editions, but what no one seems to know is what title of the British edition was, nor have I been able to match it up with any of the other titles in his list of works. Mr. McLeave’s website is of no assistance, either, as only the Harcourt edition is mentioned, with no hint of an earlier one. Maybe, until I find the time to ask him to be sure, maybe there wasn’t one. Also incorrect is the setting Al Hubin has for the book in Crime Fiction IV. He gives it as England, and while it’s close, it’s no cigar. It begins in Bulgaria, as Bob McIlhenney, a well-regarded academic in the field of high-energy physics, flies in for a conference to give a paper. His high-flying non-academic conduct, however, which also includes a highly sensationalized taste for vodka – the good stuff extremely difficult to come by in Cold War Bulgaria – immediately attracts the attention of the Russian overseers of the country. Enter “Karen Schultz.” No reader of any number of spy novels, large or small, will believe that that is her real name, or that she could in any way on her own be attracted to this unruly American. McIlhenney does not believe it either, but he is certainly not about to toss any good fortune away that fate may have brought him, and who knows? Sometimes truth can be stranger than fiction. In any case, they soon find themselves working out a plan so that they can stay together. Are there ulterior motives in mind? First stop, Athens, then Paris, with McIlhenney’s plans succeeding on one level, but on another, getting them into more and more trouble as they go. It’s a good story, and if you were to track, say, “light-heartedness” on a chart all the way through both this one and the earlier book of McLeave’s that I read, the lowest point for Vodka on Ice would top the highest point on whatever scale you’re using for Second Time Around, in terms of making a head-to-head comparison. Which is neither good nor bad, I hasten to add, but it is an observation worth making. What is not so good, and I’m not saying that it’s bad, is that whenever there is a point at which the action is about to change, or when you sense that one of McIlhenney’s various charades is going to take a tumble... Well, let’s put it this way, I had several ideas about where the book was going, and the book went unobligingly off in its own steadfast direction and on its own terms. I can’t say that McLeave’s tale is unimaginative, because it’s not, but whenever I end a book thinking my imagination might have had the better of it, well, as I say, that’s what’s not so good. And, if you were looking for a tale with a lot of action, those James Bond fans who may be among you, references to From Russia, with Love on the front cover notwithstanding, this is not the one. For all of its aforementioned lightheartedness, the book is still rather formal and reserved, at least in comparison to Mr. Bond’s books, or at the very least in terms of how I remember them. Note: The cover shown is that of the hardcover edition. PostScript: I was thinking about this book a few weeks after writing the review above, and it occurred to me that the way that books like this differ from most of the thrillers written today, is that in books like this, it’s not the whole world that’s at stake. Books like this center on people, not massive world-destroying armaments. Keep in mind, however, that I don’t read most of the thrillers written today, so I may be completely wrong about this. At this stage it’s only a hypothesis, without enough sample data to support it or not, but at least it’s something to think about. February 2005
JILL
TATTERSALL - Chanters ChaseFawcett Crest; paperback reprint; (February 1979). Hardcover edition: William Morrow & Co., 1978. You cannot always tell a book by its cover. Take a good look. And pull your eyeballs back in. Whatever it is that you are thinking, that is not the kind of book this is. You also cannot always tell a book by the genre that even the publisher thinks it’s in. This one is billed on the cover – you’re going to have to look hard – no, not there, but up over there – as a “superb new romantic thriller.” And that’s the kind of book that Jill Tattersall was known for writing – see the list of titles below – but once again that’s not the kind of book this is. There’s a small amount of romance, it is true, and here and there a thrilling moment, but a romantic thriller? No.  So what kind of book is
this? You may ask. It’s a detective novel, believe it or
not, and I will eventually get around to telling you how, and in what
way. But would it have sold if it had been marketed as a
detective novel? You may ask. And the answer is no, but
except for the fact that there is no castle in the moonlight with a
light in the window on a rugged moor in the background – that didn’t
come out exactly right, but you know what I mean – this could have been
sold as a gothic, and that’s the section of the newsstand where
you would have found it, but no, it’s not a gothic either. It’s a
detective novel.The year is never stated, but it appears to be Regency England, but the setting is not London. It’s a purely rustic or bucolic affair, with a small village atmosphere, even though most of the participants are high born, but not all. It’s also difficult, from the first three chapters, to pinpoint whom the leading characters are going to be, but as it turns out, it is not Mr. Aylmer Montague, whose nature turns out to be far worse than it first appears, nor is it Miss Alice Pargeter, who fancies that she is in love with him. On page 13 is the first appearance of a Miss Rede, a Miss Miranda Rede, who flits in and out of the story with the briefest of whispers, but long enough to suggest to Alice – and this is only a hint – that perhaps she has designs on Aylmer herself. But Aylmer, as it happens, is possessed of a cruel nature, and his way of life, his debts, and his debtors, are what leads to his death, the heir to his baronetcy being his cousin Nathan, who spies Miranda while bathing in a pond – see the cover – and ... Miranda’s grandmother is a sybil, which if you refer to Webster, means she is a prophetess, a hag, and from the context of the story – could it be? – a witch, and Nathan in a drugged, subdued state, unexpectedly finds himself married to Miranda. (Much of the early part of the book reads like an adult fairy tale, and so does much of the rest.) A marriage is all well and good, but what Nathan is also suspected of is the murder of his cousin – that is, it is to say, if the cousin were not disposed of by means of witchcraft. Which notion is not taken too seriously, until later, see below, and what this becomes, in truth, is an extremely early version of one of those English country house murders which were so popular in the 1930s. The inquest, in which forensic analysis takes a large part of the discussion – might it have been foxglove, who could have obtained it, and what forms of vomiting, et cetera, might it have produced? There is, as in the aforementioned English country house murder sort of mystery, an ensuing whirlwind of bewildering secrets and motives and family – keeping all of the names straight becomes somewhat of a challenge – and the death of the old woman by strangulation after the local townsfolk have marched on her home – picture pitchforks and burning torches – only adds to the mystery. Eventually a list of suspects is provided, and by page 241, Nathan confronts the several of those remaining: “There are really only four suspects in this matter, and three of us are here tonight. Shall we cast votes upon it?” Each writes a different name, but the case is closing in on the culprit, as the novel has only just over ten pages to go, which is still time enough to cast suspicion on at least one or another wrong party. What do you think? You do find detective stories often when you least expect them. This one is not a classic perhaps, but a classic of its kind, yes. Perhaps the only one of its kind. And that is a nice cover to go with it, isn’t it? Bibliography: JILL TATTERSALL, 1931 - . The English publisher on each book is listed first, but some of her books seem to have been first published in the US. The mystery here is why, after a long run of being published in hardcover in both this country and in England, did no further novels of crime fiction appear after 1980? A Summer’s Cloud. Collins, 1965. No US edition. Very scarce. (Only one copy is listed on ABE, and it’s a British paperback in fair condition. There may also be no demand for the book. The asking price is a very modest $1.97. A closer look indicates a notation in the description that says Sold.) Enchanter’s Castle. Collins, 1966. No US edition. Scarce. The Midnight Oak. Collins, 1967. No US edition. Scarce. Lyonesse Abbey. Collins, 1968. Morrow, 1968. Fawcett Crest, pb, 1969. A Time at Tarragon. Collins, 1969. No US edition. Scarce. Lady Ingram’s Retreat. Collins, 1970. Published as Lady Ingram’s Room: Morrow 1971. Fawcett Crest, pb, 1972. Midsummer Masque. Collins, 1972. Morrow, 1972. Fawcett Crest, pb, 1973. The Wild Hunt. Hodder & Stoughton, 1974. Morrow, 1974. Fawcett Crest, pb, 1975. The Witches of All Saints. Hodder & Stoughton, 1975. Morrow, 1975. Fawcett Crest, pb, Feb 1976. The Shadows of Castle Fosse. Hodder & Stoughton, 1976. Morrow, 1976. Fawcett Crest, pb, 1977. Chanters Chase. Hodder & Stoughton, 1978. Morrow, 1978. Fawcett Crest, pb, Feb 1979. Dark at Noon. Hodder & Stoughton, 1979. Morrow, 1979. Fawcett Crest, pb, Dec 1979 Damnation Reef. Hodder & Stoughton, 1980. Morrow, 1979. Fawcett Crest, pb, Dec 1980. Part of the answer to the question asked above may come from a further visit to the information you can find on the Internet. Damnation Reef takes place in the Caribbean, and note the titles of the works of non-fiction that turn up, although with very few copies being offered for sale. Columbus: The Great Adventure : His Life, His Times, and His Voyages. Crown, hardcover, 1991. Haunted Greathouses of the Caribbean. Island Legends, slim trade paperback, 1993. Legends of Beef Island. Paramount, softcover, 1996. [British Virgin Islands] One can easily believe that these last three books are by the same Jill Tattersall. March
2005
MICHAEL
PEARCE - The Point in the Market: A Mamur Zapt MysteryPoisoned Pen Press; hardcover; April 2005.  From the list of books found inside the front cover, you might conclude that this is the 12th mystery adventure of Captain Owen, the Mamur Zapt, the British head of the Sultan’s Secret Police in pre-World War I Egypt. But the count is off, and I’m not sure why. If you check the bibliography I’ve created at the end of this review, the number of books in the series certainly seems to be 15. No matter how many there are, this is the first for me, and that’s my error. Your error, too, if you’ve missed them as well, and you have a fondness for historical mysteries with a flair for the foreign and exotic. The British in effect controlled Egypt at that time, but until the war activities began, their power was veiled, careful to pretend that they were there as advisors to the government only. Now that an attack from Turkey seems imminent, the declaration of a British Protectorate and the subsequent ousting of the hereditary ruler called the Khedive have changed all of that. Owen’s case, in this adventure, is slow to come together, but eventually the body found in the Camel Market on page one is learned to be that of an Egyptian who occasionally reported as an agent to the Mamur Zapt. Whether his death was due to his ties to the British or not is part of the puzzle that Owen must solve. In the meantime, he has other problems. The Australians are in town to help fight the war, and they are loud and uncouth, and some Egyptians, starting to chafe under the more overt British rule, are beginning to take offense. Owen’s new wife is Egyptian, and she has begun to find herself cut off from both worlds. Not only that, Owen finds he must deal with a phenomenon totally new to Egypt, a burgeoning feminist movement that neither he nor the male portion of the population of Cairo is nearly ready to deal with. Pearce’s quiet humor and insight go a long way in disguising the fact that there’s no solid center to the story, and sometimes it is difficult to keep some unfamiliar names and places straight. In fact, if the mystery is all you would be interested in reading about, you could easily find yourself disappointed. But the sights and sounds of a country which seems to be on the verge of greatness again are vividly (if not lovingly) depicted, and they feel instinctively correct. And this is what makes this book such a delight to read, along with the people in it, who are drawn with charm, wit and care. The world they live in they find is changing, and they are often perplexed by it. Amusing, perhaps, to us, but of the utmost significance to them. It appears that I have an entire series of books to track down and read, plus more of some others: Bibliography Michael Pearce has two other series of books, the first featuring Dmitri Cameron, an ambitious young lawyer in the provincial 1890s Russian town of Kursk. Dimitri and the Milk Drinkers. Collins, 1997. Dimitri and the One-Legged Lady. Collins, 1999. Both of these are very difficult to find in this country, there being no US editions of either. More recently, another one is: A Dead Man in Trieste. Constable & Robinson, 2004. Carroll & Graf, 2004. Sandor Seymour of the Special Branch is sent to Trieste, 1906, on the behalf of the British Foreign Service. A Dead Man in Istanbul. Constable & Robinson, 2005. Carroll & Graf, September 2005. Sandor Seymour in the middle of trouble again. One non-mystery is The Dragoman’s Story. Severn House, 2000. Described as a comedy of manners involving foreign travel in the mid-Victorian period. But the books in the Mamur Zapt series are below. By my count, there’s now fifteen. The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet. Collins, 1988. Doubleday, 1990. Poisoned Pen Press, trade paperback, 2001. The Mamur Zapt and the Night of the Dog. Collins 1989. Doubleday, 1991. Poisoned Pen Press, trade paperback, 2002, as The Night of the Dog. The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey-Vous. Collins, 1990. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1992; paperback, 1993. Poisoned Pen Press, trade paperback, 2002, as The Donkey-Vous. Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind. Collins, 1991. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1993; paperback edition, 1994. Poisoned Pen Press, 2003, as The Men Behind. The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in the Nile. Collins, 1992. Mysterious Press, 1994. Poisoned Pen Press, trade paperback, 2003, as The Girl in the Nile. The Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt. Collins, 1992. Mysterious Press, 1995. Poisoned Pen Press, trade paperback, 2003, as The Spoils of Egypt. The Mamur Zapt and the Camel of Destruction. Collins, 1993. Poisoned Pen Press, hardcover, 2002, as The Camel of Destruction; trade paperback, 2003. The Snake-Catcher’s Daughter. Collins, 1994. Poisoned Pen Press, hardcover, 2003; trade paperback, 2003; trade paperback, April 2005. The Mingrelian Conspiracy. Collins, 1995. Poisoned Pen Press, 2003. The Fig Tree Murder. Collins, 1997. Poisoned Pen Press, 2003. The Last Cut. Collins, 1998. Poisoned Pen Press, 2004. Death of an Effendi. Collins, 1999. Poisoned Pen Press, 2004. A Cold Touch of Ice. Collins, 2000. Poisoned Pen Press, 2004. The Face in the Cemetery. HarperCollins, 2001. Poisoned Pen Press, 2004. The Point in the Market. Poisoned Pen Press, 2005. March 2005
Note: A shorter version of this review appeared in Historical Novels Review.
WILLIAM HEFFERNAN - A Time Gone By Akashic Books; trade paperback; 1st pbbk printing, April 2005. Hardcover edition: Simon & Schuster, 2003. As a journalist, investigative reporter and editor, along with many other honors, William Heffernan was nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize. As a crime fiction writer, it’s not clear how many times he was nominated for the MWA’s Edgar, but he won it once, for Tarnished Blue (1995) as the Best Paperback Original. He’s also not an author I’ve read before. Looking through the list of 16 books he’s written, it’s not difficult to see why. Most of his books are either gangster (Mafia) fiction or hard-edged police procedurals (his Paul Devlin series), neither of which category seem to fall into my hands for bedtime reading. In recent years Heffernan has decided to expand his range, including making use of his extensive journalistic background. Alternating with books in his Devlin series have come Cityside (1999) a look into the more unsavory aspects of big city tabloidism, and Beulah Hill (2001), taking place in 1933 Vermont, with a murder of a white boy by a suspected black causing a severe setback to racial relations in the community. A Time Gone By is Heffernan’s most recent book, and it’s very much of a tour de force. Switching the time frame of a murder mystery back and forth between 1945 and 1975, and making it seem the easiest thing in the world, never clashing gears once, is a challenge I suspect not many authors would be up to. When a crooked judge is murdered in his home in 1945, Jake Dowling was only a rookie cop, and not even his more experienced partner could continue fighting forever when they quickly discover that a political fix is in. Thirty years later Jake, who for the most part tells his own story, finally has the clout and, after the death of his wife, the will to see if the case can be closed at last. There is a definite noir-ish feel to the scenes taking place in 1945, and of course, there is a woman involved, and even though Jake is married, with a child on the way, he falls deeply in lust (if not love) with the judge’s new widow, a former hatcheck girl who has made good. In 1975, Jake knows that the wrong man went to the electric chair. Even though the man had clearly committed other murders, Jake knows that he died for one he didn’t do, but who did? Thus develops the tantalizing interplay between past and present, with an enigmatic puzzle that roots itself into the mind of the reader as well, and refuses to become dislodged. While the transitions always take place smoothly, meshing into place in near perfection, I think the naive Jake of 1945, led around by the young widow by something other than his brain, is better developed than the Jake of 1975. As a chief of detectives for the NYPD, he still seems too callow for the job. How, one wonders, was he able to make all of the advancements he did to come out on top like this? It’s a subtle thing, and maybe it was only me. As for the mystery itself, it’s a winner, with – as the veteran mystery reader will suspect with increasing anticipation all the way through – well, you couldn’t have a detective story written as well as this without having a switch or two, and/or a substantial surprise or three, before it’s done, could you? I daren’t say more. If you’re fond of 1940s noir with a slight but appreciable touch of sexual infidelity, you’ll have to read this one for yourself. BIBLIOGRAPHY * = Paul Devlin series. Devlin is a detective with the New York City police department. Some descriptions of the books make it seem as though he reports directly to the mayor. Broderick. Crown Publishers, hc. 1980. No paperback edition. Caging the Raven. Wyndham Publications, hc. 1981. No paperback edition. The Corsican. Simon & Schuster, hc. 1983. Paperback reprints: Dutton (Onyx?), Aug 1987; Signet, March 1993. Acts of Contrition. New American Library, hc, 1986. Paperback reprint: Onyx, Aug 1987. Ritual. New American Library, hc, 1989. Paperback reprint: Signet, 1993. * Blood Rose. E. P. Dutton, hc, 1991. Paperback reprint: Signet, Dec 1993. Corsican Honor. E. P. Dutton, hc, 1992. Paperback reprint: Signet, Mar 1993. * Scarred. Signet, pb, Dec 1993. Reprinted: Onyx, Apr 1995. * Tarnished Blue. Onyx, pb, Apr 1995. Winner of 1996 Edgar award for Best Paperback Original Novel. * Winter’s Gold. Onyx, pb, Jan 1997. The Dinosaur Club. William Morrow, hc, 1997. Paperback reprint: Pocket Books, Dec 1998. Cityside. William Morrow, hc, 1999. Trade paperback: Akashic Books, Sept 2003. * Red Angel. William Morrow, hc, 2000. Reprint paperback: Avon, Dec 2001. Beulah Hill. Simon & Schuster, hc, 2001. Trade paperback: Akashic Books, Apr 2003. * Unholy Order. William Morrow, hc, 2002. Reprint paperback: Avon, Dec 2002. A Time Gone By. Simon & Schuster, hc, 2003. Trade paperback: Akashic Books, Apr 2005. March 2005
Note: A shorter version of this review appeared in Historical Novels Review. JUDITH SKILLINGS - Dangerous Curves Avon, paperback original, March 2005. Synchronicity strikes again. If I only knew what the deep underlying significance of the coincidence meant, I’d be a wealthy man. There is another mystery novel that came out in exactly the same month as this book, and it has exactly the same title. The gods of the cosmos must be chuckling deeply in their underground grottos, or up their sleeves. Or something. Is there a stock on Nasdaq that we all should be buying? Or should that be NASCAR that we should be looking into? The other author is Pamela Britton, and while this one by Judith Skillings just happened to come first, I will read and report back on Britton’s book very shortly. But before I get to either one, it has occurred to me to investigate. Just how many other books are there with the same title? Here are a few more, working backward through the mysteries, then a few others: DANGEROUS CURVES - Jacey Ford, 2004. DANGEROUS CURVES - Kristina Wright, Silhouette Intimate Moments, 1999. DANGEROUS CURVES - Bart Banarto, 1951. DANGEROUS CURVES - Peter Cheyney, 1939. DANGEROUS CURVES AHEAD - Pat Ballard, 2004 (a collection of romance stories about Rubenesque heroines) DANGEROUS CURVES: THE ART OF THE GUITAR (sorry, I’m getting rather far afield here, and I shall stop) The book by Kristina Wright should be in Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, by the way, and it isn’t. Peter Cheyney is a hugely prolific British crime fiction author of the 1930s and 1940s, whose work I confess I’ve never read, but which I have always imagined that I will. There never was a real Bart Banarto, a house pseudonym used by a British paperback publisher in the 1950s by the name of Edwin Self. Other titles include Dames Play Dumb, Rackets and Dames, Doublecross Dame, Dangerous Wanton, and Lament for a Blonde, among others. We can only imagine what we are missing.  But obviously I digress. Judith Skillings, whose second mystery this book is, is the co-owner and operator of a motorcar restoration shop, along with her husband, in eastern Pennsylvania, and is involved with several other racecar-related activities. Which makes the occupation of her heroine, who appeared earlier in a book called Dead End, not all that surprising. Rebecca Moore, once a top-notch investigative reporter, is now the owner and operator of a classic car restoration shop in suburban Washington DC. That may sound like a snide remark, and it isn’t meant it to be. I know very little about restoring antique cars, and what I learned about it from this book is fascinating. What’s not so intriguing, from a reader’s point of view, is that... Put it this way. If you haven’t read Ms. Skillings’ previous book, you may as well assume you have, once you’ve gone more than a few chapters into this one. The events that took place in the previous book prior to this one are hashed and rehashed, and several times over. Even by page 113 we are not done. There is even more of the backstory we need to be reminded of, and in even more detail. A more experienced writer may have made this more palatable, but Skillings doesn’t yet seem to be at that stage of her career. The death of a young exotic dancer, whose body is found in an antique Bentley parked on a flatbed trailer outside an upscale strip club, makes for a fine opening. But more than who was responsible, is why someone would want to put her there, or how she could get there on her own after being stabbed, going down two floors, across a parking lot, up onto the flatbed and into the car? Or why the car was not locked. Too many questions, too few answered. The strip club does make an ideal place for Rebecca to go to work undercover, but there is also more promise here than there is follow-through. (I do regret saying this.) There is a writing technique that doesn’t generally appeal to me, and it’s one that Skillings tends to use far too often. (Which is to say, at least one time too many.) This is the one in which chapters end on a “cliff-hanger” of sorts, then the scene shifts, and later and only later does the reader find out what happened the chapter or so before. Not only that, but when the follow-through is eventually revealed, but only through the conversation of two people, of whom perhaps one or neither were actually involved themselves, it’s an irksome itch that becomes halfway annoying. But maybe that’s just me. There’s another problem. Besides some very unorthodox police work that is conducted in general, to put it mildly, on page 325 Rebecca muses to herself that on this case she herself hadn’t been much of a detective: “She hadn’t been clever enough to find out who was pulling the strings... She hadn’t been perceptive enough to notice him hiding in the shadows of the dining room.” If you’re going to read a detective mystery that’s over 330 pages long, you really need a stronger leading character than this, one who’s more active in solving the mystery than this, as interesting as her primary (non-sleuthing) occupation may be. Take all of the funky friends and employees she has, throw in the sort-of half-on half-off romance she has with two of them, add the mystery that’s beginning to develop about her parentage, wrap them all up, and no matter how you try to factor it all in, it’s all still background. As a matter of course, most of the issues raised along these lines have not been resolved by book’s end, and this is a good thing. There’s a quite a bit that’s clearly has to hashed out some more next time around, and it’s obvious that a good many readers are going to be coming back for more. But with the detective work itself is as essentially non-consequential as it is in Dangerous Curves, that’s not what it is, unfortunately, that they’ll be looking for. March
2005
KATHARINE HILL - Dear Dead Mother-in-Law E. P. Dutton, hardcover; First Edition, 1944. FOOTNOTE.  This is the first half of
a two-part series on
Katharine Hill’s complete works of mystery fiction. Part two,
covering her second novel, Case for
Equity, also involving her series character detective, Lorna
Donahue, will be reported on shortly.In Crime Fiction IV, Al Hubin provides us with no information on Katharine Hill, neither birth nor death date. She seems to have written the two books and vanished. But not quite, or at least not completely. The copyrights on both books were renewed in the early 1970s, so she was still alive then. I also have tracked down the name of a sister, and the sister’s daughter, but – all three have common names, and the hunt has bogged down. If I obtain more information, you can be sure I will let you know about it, and as soon as possible. Lorna Donahue is a widow who lives in Connecticut, the town of Ridgemont, to be precise. Even though fictitious as far as Connecticut is concerned, it’s obviously a wealthy sort of town in the semi-rural Wilton-Weston-Ridgefield suburban part of the state. Or at least in 1943 or so, it would have been quite rural, and with a gasoline shortage a large problem of the day, walking was a common alternative to driving. Only gradually do we learn about Lorna’s prior life: several husbands, on the stage, the newspaper game and now the real estate business, for which she has a partner, thankfully, for it allows her both (a) to be snooping into homes while people are gone and (b) to have someone to run the business while she is busily doing the aforementioned snooping. These last two observations are my own. Found dead at a bridge party is a recent bride’s outspoken mother, emphasis on outspoken, and it is her husband (of the recent bride) who is accused of killing his mother-in-law. And clapped immediately into jail, with no provision for bail, and so he sits, as the daughter (and his wife) moves in with Lorna. Who of course does not believe for a moment that he did it. Much more likely is the snooty woman (my observation) whom the dead woman, not long before she died, accused of cheating at cards on the continent, in partnership with a younger man everyone assumes she was cheating on her husband with (now deceased). Or it could have a tramp. Britain never had a monopoly of tramps to be murder suspects. Without my being able to come up with a better word, the sleuthing that is done is charming, as long as you can ignore the fact that the police department on the job is not on the job, because if they were, Lorna would have hardly a role to play. The small town atmosphere is evoked through many small details, describable only by someone who lived through that small era in time, unreproducible by someone would attempt to write a story taking place in such a setting today. The humor is sneaky but not all subtle. From a brief passage, as Lorna takes in her new guest (Pamela, the daughter), page 39: Mrs. Donahue fitted out her pathetic house
guest with a pair of her own pyjamas, flowered in green on purple and
they were her quietest pair, which would contained three Pamelas, and a
toothbrush in cellophane which she had on hand for emergencies.
Later on, Lorna is trying to envision what kind of defense that Walter (the son-in-law) might be able to raise. From page 166: The inference was therefore inescapable
that the person who killed Ada Mullins by swinging a bottle over her
head had left the scene, carrying the bottle with him. The
disappearance of the bottle proved, ipso facto, the disappearance of
the killer – and that the man who had not disappeared, who had remained
innocently and jovially preparing doubtless mild cocktails for the most
prominent and respected of Ridgemont’s ladies, was not the murderer, in
spite of the circumstances deemed so damning by the prosecution, that
he was a married man whose mother-in-law was not a pauper, and that he
had not been on th best of terms with her every moment of his married
life. Could every member of the jury assent that there had never
been a breeze at breakfast – a time when few of us are at our best –
between him and his mother-in-law?
You have probably decided long before now whether or not this is book you feel urged to seek out and purchase on the Internet, and I don’t blame you at all. The detective work is successful, however, no matter how improbable (and perhaps even naive) its basis in reality may be. Gritty hard-boiled fiction it’s not, but please don’t get me wrong. Following the clues and solving the mystery – that’s the edge that makes this old-fashioned suburban cozy work for me. April 2005
SHANNON DRAKE
- WickedFOOTNOTE:
I’ve done some investigating, and my copy of the
book is not a First Edition after all, even though it is so stated on
the reverse of the title page. On the title page itself the
publisher is given as: Books Inc., Distributed by E. P. Dutton &
Co., Inc., 1944, New York.
I inquired of bookseller Nelson Freck of Second Story Books in Washington DC, and his reply was that his copy did not mention Books, Inc., at all. Even though mine appears to be the same as the Dutton edition, except for the information on the title page, it must have been printed as part of a special arrangement between Books, Inc., and Dutton, using the same plates to publish both editions. HQN (Harlequin), paperback original, 2005. Shannon Drake is one of the pen names of Heather Graham Pozzessere, who has written even more under her own name or as Heather Graham, with (it is said) over 100 books and stories to her credit. Those by Shannon Drake seem largely to be historical romances, some with a bit of crime or mystery component to them, like this one, her most recent. Four them are vampire novels, which is a “hot” category for romances these days, although I confess that I have no understanding why. (Anne Rice may have started this particular craze, but here comes the point where you will have to tell me more, rather than the other way around.) As either Heather Graham or herself, Pozzessere’s list of books seems to be the same mixed bag, but with perhaps a larger percentage of them being crime and/or mystery-related, including a book called Haunted (Mira, 2003), the first in a projected series of cases that Darcy Tremayne, a psychic ghost hunter, is hired to look into.  I say “projected” since, as of the date I am writing this, a second installment of the series has yet to appear. If I hear more about a second adventure being published, I will let you know. In the meantime, how about a murder mystery taking place in Victorian England, complete with Egyptian artifacts and mummies, cobras (asps), loads of them, a wounded war hero who wears a ugly mask crafted in the form of a beast to hide his injuries, and the daughter of a prostitute who has earned her way into a position of significance in the Egyptology department of the British Museum? (I almost forgot that this last sentence was a question.) There are a number of suspects in the deaths of the parents of the current Earl of Carlyle, and although he has all but withdrawn from the world and allowed the grounds of his castle to become as overgrown as a jungle, he is keenly intent on bringing the killer to justice. Camille Montgomery is first a pawn in his plans for vengeance, but she very quickly comes to mean much more to him. I will supply no further details along this direction, but in terms of what transpires in many other historical romances, what takes place in this one is, frankly, rather mild and tame. As a work of semi-gothic fiction, this is one of those affairs in which everyone acts suspiciously – and therefore irrationally – but there are a couple of fairly neat twists in the plot before the book is at length concluded, almost 400 pages worth. The rest is sheer melodrama, with several questions left answered (why didn’t he or she do this or that much earlier, and so on) and told in prose and dialogue that resembles that of the Victorian era quite often, if not all of the time. I happen to like stories based on Egypt and Victorian explorations and excavations like this, but my recommendation for you is that you should read this one only if you really, really like them too. And then if you’d rather read the latest Amelia Peabody book instead, then by all means, you should. April 2005 PATRICIA HARWIN - Slaying Is Such Sweet Sorrow Pocket; paperback original; first printing, March 2005. This one caught me by surprise. You don’t know how seldom it is, unless you’ve been paying awfully good attention, that when I pick up a second book in a series to read, I’ve actually read the first one. Nor, looking back to my review of the first Catherine Penny mystery, Arson and Old Lace (Pocket, Feb 2004), did I expect this one to be published so soon. To jog your memory, here are the last couple of sentences in the review of that earlier book I did: “And Catherine Penny, prone as she is to rash and impulsive behavior, is a bit of fascination in herself. It’s too bad that we'll have to wait until Fall of 2005 for a return visit, scheduled to be told in Slaying Is Such Sweet Sorrow.” [NOTE: The review itself is not yet online.]  A quick recap is in
order. Catherine Penny, in her 60s and newly (and abruptly)
divorced, has moved to England to be near her daughter, who was
actually closer to her father. On her own, and in her own home, a
cottage in a small town not too far from Oxford, she helped unravel a
mystery soon after arriving.In this followup case, matters cut closer to home. It is her son-in-law who is accused of killing the newly appointed head of his academic department at the University, a man intensely disliked by all – but Peter, to his misfortune, had really thought the job was his. Complicating matters, at least for Catherine, who tells her own story, is the arrival of her former husband Quin, accompanied by the “bimbo” for whom he had left Catherine. I expressed some displeasure at the amount of non-essential background in a book by Judith Skillings a short while back. Here is, I think, a counter-example to the proposition that it can’t be done. Which is to say the feat of combining the personal background of the detective with his or her friends within the main context of a mystery novel, which is, of course, the work that detectives have to do. There is also the knack of working the details of a previous book unobtrusively into the current one. Although she’s also a new author, Patricia Harwin, whose day job is a librarian, seems to have it. Another plus, at least for me, is the large amount of academic talk and continual references to aged British dramatists, which may provide a large yawn from Hammett enthusiasts, but to each our own. There are, it seems, two major stories here. One is Catherine’s prickly relationship to Quin, which is uncomfortable even to the person who is only reading about it. And the other is Catherine’s awkward determination to get Peter out of jail, which she does of course, but as in Harwin’s previous book, with too many pages to go, and in terms of naming the real killer, the long-time mystery reader is there way ahead of her. Which of course signifies only one thing, or at least (once again) it did for me. It may be that when a mystery is well-written, with characters well-developed from the get-go, that the murderer identifies himself (or herself) almost as soon as he (or she) arrives on the scene, and that is the case here. Or could be it that Harwin is almost too careful in setting the scene, and overplays her hand? The nabbing of the culprit also suffers from the same over-planning, allowing the reader to follow along and see exactly (a) where the personalties of those involved lead directly the result and (b) where chance rather than pure detection comes in. I submit to you that (a) is good and that (b) is not so good, but – perhaps? – it is unavoidable. Quite possibly I am overanalyzing this. Where Harwin succeeds, and Skillings did not, is in making the two halves of the story (the mystery vis-à-vis the characters) parallel each other, merge where they need to, and then allowing them to mesh into a satisfactory whole. What she aims to do, she does well, and once again, I’m looking forward to the next one. April 2005.
CARLETON CARPENTER - Deadhead Curtis, paperback original; 1974. Paperback reprint: Black Walnut, 1985.  If you were to do a search for Mr. Carpenter on the Internet, you’d find more in the movie and entertainment databases than you will regarding his writing career, which consisted of only a small handful of paperback originals. There’ll be a list of them soon, in case you’re interested, including two new discoveries (both relatively minor) not included in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV. Before concentrating on the books, though, perhaps it suffices to say that Carleton Carpenter was a both a composer and an actor, in both the movies, on television and in Broadway musicals. One of the top musical hits of 1951 was “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” sung by Debbie Reynolds and Carleton Carpenter (from the film TWO WEEKS IN LOVE). His career in the movies and on TV is summed up neatly at imdb.com. I did find a reference on a New York Times website that says, and I quote: “Carleton Carpenter was better known in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s as a best-selling mystery novelist; one of his more popular books, Deadhead, was adapted into a short-lived Broadway musical.” Without deliberately trying to be negative, I imagine that the best-selling part of that quote is an exaggeration, New York Times or not, but a Broadway play based on a paperback original? What do you think, if it is true, wouldn’t that be a first? (I should point out, however, that all of the other references to Deadhead being on Broadway seem to have been swiped from the NYT website. Additional confirmation is needed.) Here’s a list of Mr. Carpenter’s mystery fiction. As previously mentioned all of these are paperback originals. * = Chester Long mysteries. ** = billed as a Jasper Wild mystery. Games Murderers Play. Curtis 07271, 1973; Black Walnut, 1985. Cat Got Your Tongue? Curtis 07272, 1973; Black Walnut, 1985. * Only Her Hairdresser Knew... Curtis 07299, 1973; Black Walnut, 1985. Pinecastle. Curtis 09187, 1973, as by Ivy Manchester; Black Walnut, as Stumped, as by Carleton Carpenter. * Deadhead. Curtis 09263, 1974; Black Walnut, 1985. ** Sleight of Hand. Popular Library 00661, 1975; Black Walnut, as Sleight of Deadly Hand. The Peabody Experience. Black Walnut, 1985. Short story: “Second Banana.” Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1976.  Information
that is not in
the currently unrevised Crime
Fiction IV is in boldface. Little is known about Black
Walnut Books, but they seem to have been in business only to print Mr.
Carpenter’s books. Whether Jasper Wild appeared in any of the earlier books or was intended to be another continuing character is also unknown. It would also be interesting to learn whether the AHMM short story has either Chester Long or Jasper Wild as characters, leading or incidental. Someone with access to that issue will have to let us know. Pinecastle (aka Stumped) was marketed and sold by Curtis as a gothic romance, but a quick scan through my copy indicates that the people who are in it all have a very strong theatrical background, which is not surprising. Chester Long is a hairdresser (straight). Jasper Wild’s occupation: unknown. Someone who has a copy of Sleight of Hand will have to let us know. If by chance he’s a magician as well as a detective, that would be worth knowing. There is a quote on page 34 of Deadhead, which was Chester Long’s second brush with murder, that is interesting. Chester is telling the story: I’ve forgotten which wag said it first. That thing about how everybody has two professions – his own and show business. When Chester is offered a position on the side as the head of the hairdresser crew for a musical bound for Broadway, he jumps at it. For the rest of the book he’s a fascinated observer behind the scenes, giving the reader an equally vicarious (and authentic) look at a world largely foreign to us mere mortals. Even so, as Chester admits on page 81: In my heart I knew I was nothing more than a voyeur who was being overpaid for the opportunity to peep. The going is as light and breezy as this for over 100 pages, chatty and gossipy in trunk loads. The murder of the show’s bizarrely flamboyant producer does not occur until page 104, which gives Chester this follow-up opportunity to show his flair as a sleuth. (Not that there’s any inkling of a previous criminous adventure. Until I checked out the bibliography, I was working under the impression that this was Chester’s first encounter with detective work.) With the entire company on the road and snowed in as a mammoth snowstorm hits Boston, the effect is that of an isolated country house, which means, of course, besides clues and motives, means and opportunities galore. And until the end, when things seem to fall apart, plotwise, there would be much in the reading to recommend. While Carleton Carpenter is a story teller’s story teller, he unaccountably allows Chester’s previously mentioned flair as a sleuth to fizzle out well before the finale, all of his theories disappearing into smoke. On page 189, after the killer has been nabbed, and the case is being rehashed, Chester says: This has been hindsight babbling on. I was just as surprised as anyone else. What’s worse is if that the scene that’s described on page 190 as happening really did happen, it happened offstage, or if not, I did not remember it, nor could I find it when I went back to look. My feeling is that the book was edited, and badly, and a chunk is missing. There was one other sudden jump in locale on page 157, which was disconcerting at the time, but the lapse was not nearly as critical as this one, occurring as it does during the summing up. (To see if the later edition fixed up anything, I checked out the Black Walnut reprint of the novel, but it’s purely a photocopy, or else they used the same printing plates. The two editions are exactly the same.) In any case, all I can offer for a recommendation is hemi-semi-demi-positive one. The book is worth reading for the show business element – that part is simply Grade A all the way – but as a mystery, while it has its moments, the answer, if that’s what you’re asking, is, reluctantly, no. The cast and choreography are excellent, but the book itself? Good, but not up to par. It needs some work. April 2005
KATHARINE HILL - Case for Equity E.P. Dutton, hardcover; First Edition, 1945. Digest paperback reprint: Mystery Novel Classic #74, as The Case of the Absent Corpse, 1946. This is the second half of a two-part series on Katharine Hill’s complete works of mystery fiction. Dear Dead Mother-in-Law (Dutton, 1944), Lorna Donahue’s first foray into fighting crime, was reported on not too long along, and here is her second. As of yet, no additional information has been discovered about the author, but not all of the available resources have been exhausted, so there is still hope. The two books take place in consecutive summers, but if Katharine Hill had another summer (and another mystery to be solved) in mind, it (or they) unfortunately never materialized. Once again the red-headed suburban Connecticut widow, married four times, gets on the wrong side of the local law, in the guise of Chief of Police Starkey, first by parking in an illegal spot in front of the post office, then by calling him out to a isolated home in the country where she’s found a body – but when he gets there, there is no body to be found. The owner of the house is an actor, one with a role in a local play, and when he doesn’t show up later for work, it is, of course, a “Case for Equity.” But is the dead body, the one that disappeared, his? Lorna does not know, and so she goes to work, determined to show Sharkey what’s what. From page 20, as she finds the house empty the next day:  And what a glorious opportunity for an
amateur detective – to have the scene of the crime all to herself
without any interfering officers of the law shouldering about,
collecting and removing clues to be numbered exhibits later;
obliterating all the subtle indications that might tell much to a
perceptive woman, in their eagerness not to overlook the smallest
material evidence – the dropped button, the cigar or cigarette ash, the
bullet embedded in the woodwork!
Later on, from page 33: Surely no professional detective had ever
had such a difficult task as this self-assumed one of hers. With
the corpse just briefly glimpsed once, and not available for
examination, without knowledge of the nature of the wound or the weapon
used – her horrified mind had merely registered that there was a lot of
blood about – with no fingerprints or other regulation aids, this
mystery must be solved, if at all, by psychological methods, by
intuition rather than by deduction – perhaps by nothing more scientific
than that leap across probabilities to the truth which is known as a
hunch.
As even the most seasoned mystery reader knows, without my reminding him or her, it is also awfully difficult to solve a murder when one does not even know who the dead man is. And to Lorna’s credit, her efforts are ... not awful. There are pieces of manuscript salvaged from a fire, and a letter from the missing man (who may be the dead man) which may or may not be forgery. There are also intricate time-tables describing the whereabouts of all of the interested parties, a poker chip left fortuitously under an table, and more. In similar fashion to her previous mystery, Mrs. Donahue takes the missing man’s widow(?) under her wing, and simply moves in with her to facilitate her investigation. There is much of interest to the inveterate mystery buff here, and a very clever plot to be uncovered, so why it just doesn’t work is also a mystery. Part of the reason, though, may be because of the extremely narrow group of people who take an active role this time around. Even the old-fashioned kind of mysteries that invariably take place in isolated English country house mansions have more active suspects and/or active players than Case for Equity does. It’s a closed set, and after a while, even in the wide-open Connecticut countryside, the reading starts to feel cramped. (In Dear Dead Mother-in-Law the town of Ridgemont seemed filled with people. Not so now. It could almost be a ghost town.) While this book has all of the right elements, in other words, they’re not spread around thickly enough and/or they’re simply not laid out properly, without the tight Christie-like control over events. It’s another case of almost, but not quite, and with no intention of being unkind at all, that could also be easily said of Katharine Hill’s writing career. Other the other hand, you should not get me wrong. Read her if you get the chance. Neither of her works of detective fiction deserves obscurity either. April 2005
 PAMELA BRITTON -
Dangerous CurvesHQN (Harlequin). Paperback original, 2005. This is the second half of a two-part series on books titled Dangerous Curves published in the same month, March 2005, and of the two, the first one, a couple of books back, has considerably more to offer. Not that this one doesn’t try hard. Up front, of course, it is what it is – a novel of contemporary romance. It’s also set up to appeal to mystery fans – one of the leading characters is Cece Blackwell, a top-notch undercover agent for the FBI – as well as to NASCAR fans – she’s assigned to investigate a raceway accident which may not be so accidental. To her surprise (you will see why in a minute) it was race team owner Blaine Saunders who specifically askedfor her presence on the case. Cece and Blaine grew up together, you see, and they have had a past of sorts together, but it is not one that Cece looks backward upon with pleasure. In other words, she had a crush on him in high school and he humiliated her. Since you know already where this part of the story is going– or if not, read pages 129, 206 and 237– but since this is a mystery journal, or it was the last time I looked, let’s consider the mystery portion of the proceedings. I submit to you that a female FBI agent who worked her way through school waitressing at Bimbo’s may not have a lot of credibility, but you may be more credulous than I. I also submit to you that the backstabbing and infighting that is carried on between various agents and their superiors is mildly off-putting, although you may find it mildly interesting. Unfortunately, I must also submit to you that given the fact that the culprit has been named and is in custody (if not dead) on page 319, and that there are 362 pages in the book, that this shows where the author’s real priorities are, and it has nothing to do with racing. The NASCAR aspect is only a convenient and peripheral backdrop. If you’re an auto racing fan, in other words, I’m sure you can do better. April 2005
IAN ALEXANDER - The Disappearance of Archibald Forsyth Hutchinson & Co., British hardcover, no date [1933] A quick recap seems to be in order. Back in Mystery*File 46, one of the items in Al Hubin’s “Addenda to Crime Fiction IV” columns revealed that Ian Alexander was a previously unknown pen name of Alexander Knox. In the very same issue, and totally unconnected with the Hubin entry, Charlie Shibuk mentioned Alexander Knox as one of the actors who appeared in Andre DeToth’s film NONE SHALL ESCAPE. This very remarkable coincidence went unnoticed by me, but naturally Charlie spotted it right away. He added the following information, which appeared in the letter column of M*F 47: “Knox was born in Canada in 1907 and appeared on stage and screen in England and America. He portrayed the title role in WILSON (1944).” I then added the following:  After taking a
look at Alexander
Knox’s career, I see that Charlie neglected to point out that he was
nominated for an Oscar for his role in WILSON. Concentrating
otherwise only on his literary output, I found the following statement
on the web: “In 1971, Knox would become the proud author of
five adventure novels based on the Canadian wilderness of the 19th
century.” Two of them can be found in Hubin, Crime Fiction IV: The Enemy I Kill (London: Macmillan, 1972, hc) U.S. title: Totem Dream. Viking, 1973. Raider’s Moon (London: Macmillan, 1975, hc) St. Martin’s, 1976. Two of the others seem to be: The Kidnapped Surgeon (London: Macmillan, 1977, hc) St. Martin’s, 1977. Night of the White Bear (London: Macmillan, 1971, hc) Viking, 1971; Toronto [Canada]: Macmillan, 1971. A fifth title could not be found. The alternate titles for one of them may have caused some confusion. FOOTNOTE (1) As Leonard Blackledge, Knox wrote one crime novel entitled Behind the Evidence (Hutchinson, 1935), and as John Crozier, he wrote two others: Murder in Public (Hutchinson, 1934) and Kidnapped Again (Hutchinson, 1935) Both of these featured a character called “Falcon,” who presumably was not THE Falcon of movie and radio fame, and created in book form by Drexel Drake in 1936. (Or was it Michael Arlen, in a 1940 short story |
