ROBERT MARTIN – She, Me and Murder. Jim Bennett #12. Curtis, paperback original, 1962. Expanded version of the story that appeared in Dime Detective Magazine, November 1948.

   Jim Bennett, who may have been Cleveland’s first fictional private eye, is hired by an elderly man who has befriended a young stage actress, When her current boy friend is killed, there are only three possible suspects.

   As opposed to the prose of an Ed McBain, for example, which scorches and sings, Martin’ is – at first – plain, dowdy, and chaste. The pace picks up, however, when Bennett’s secretary/fiancee is kidnapped, and the triple-switch at the ending is a doozy.

WILLIAM GOLDMAN – Marathon Man. Delacorte, hardcover, 1974. Dell, paperback, 1975. Other reprint editions include: Random House, softcover, 2001.

   William Goldman, the well-known novelist and screenwriter (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), achieved his first major commercial fiction success with Marathon Man. The first half of the novel is some of the finest suspense writing committed to paper during the past three decades. Goldman weaves a complex plot involving a young budding intellectual/historian/student/marathon runner named Babe Levy, a superspy named Scylla, and Nazi war criminals on the loose in New York City. The characterization is excellent, the story line taut and fast-moving, and there are a couple of unexpected twists.

   The last half of the book, however, might have been written by someone else, because the plot and everything else falls apart. The characters suddenly begin to think and act implausibly, there are several bizarre and unbelievable progressions, and the climax on the Jewish-controlled Diamond Exchange along Forty-seventh Street is unsatisfactory and filled with gratuitous and glorified violence.

   Goldman never seems able to make up his mind whether he wants to be funny or deadly serious; the fluctuation works surprisingly well in the first half and not at all in the second. (There is one nicely handled scene in the last half. a chilling interrogation by torture, simple and bloodless, that involves the use of a dental drill. This scene was likewise one of the highlights of the 1975 film of the same title, starring Dustin Hoffman.)

   All in all, a potentially classic novel in the suspense field, weakened and made distasteful through mishandling of its material.

   Goldman’s other suspense novels include No Way to Treat a Lady (1964; originally published as a paperback original under the pseudonym Harry Longbaugh) and Magic (1976).

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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.

FREDERICK NEBEL “Murder à la Carte.” PI Jack Cardigan. First published in Dime Detective Magazine. 15 November 1933. Collected in The Adventures of Cardigan. (Mysterious Press, softcover, 1988), and in The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 2: 1933 (Steeger Properties, softcover, 2012).

   Cardigan’s main source of work comes from the Cosmos Agency, but he’s hired on his own by a baseball pitcher and a good friend in this one. The fellow was picked up in bar by a lady of some disrepute and after a few drinks they head off to her place in a cab. He doesn’t remember much after that, or so he tells Cardigan.

   He also doesn’t remember signing a check for the lady, a sizable one, but he thinks he might have. This presents a problem on two fronts. He’s married,for one,  and for two,  the World Series is coming up. With him pitching that’s almost a sure two wins for his team. Otherwise, they wouldn’t stand much of a chance. One more problem, and it’s a doozy: when Cardigan finds the lady’s apartment, he finds her dead.

   Nebel’s prose has a smooth, crisp flow to it, and the chase for the two guys Cardigan’s client vaguely remembers being in the girl’s room is a good one. Until, that is, there is a development in the tale that takes the case to a quick ending. Maybe, I thought, just a little too quick. It’s a weak transition point, and it’s far from a fatal one. Maybe it was just me, and maybe I should better just keep my mouth shut.

   Overall it’s a good story. Neither Nebel nor Cardigan are remembered today. Neither is up to Hammett or Chandler’s standards, but on the other hand, nobody else is, either.

DOCKS OF NEW ORLEANS. Monogram Pictures, 1948. Roland Winters (Charlie Chan), Virginia Dale, Mantan Moreland, John Gallaudet, Victor Sen Yung. Based on charcaters created by Earl Derr Biggers. Director: Derwin Abrahams.

   A chemical manufacturer hires Charlie Chan to help investigate the trouble he’s gotten into after agreeing to handle a mysterious overseas assignment, then dies under strange circumstances before their appointment the next morning.

   The is some semblance of a locked room mystery here, but I don’t think it occurred to anybody involved. Happy to say, I figured out who the killer was and how he did it, even before Charlie’s number two son starts up rousing rendition of “Chop Chop Boogie.”

IF SCIENCE FICTION. December 1967. Cover art: Douglas Chaffee. Editor: Frederik Pohl. Overall rating: **½.

JAMES WHITE “All Judgment Fled.: Serial, part 1 of 3. See report following my review of the February 1968 issue.

JAY KAY KLEIN “On Conquered Earth.” Another story of unsuspecting aliens being outsmarted by dumb Earthlings. (2)

FRITZ LEIBER “Answering Service.” An old woman who says she is dying of a heart attack needs help. (4)

C. C. MacAPP “When Sea Is Born Again.” Novelette. Life on an alien world, well-pictured, complicated by the forces of an unknown sea and by visitors from space. (3)

TERRY CARR “City of Yesterday.” The control of humans by machines reaches its final stages, (4)

ROBERT E. MARGROFF & ANDREW OFFUTT “Swordsmen of the Stars,” Novelette. A typical story of mercenary swordsmen hired to fight each other to decide quarrels between rulers of worlds. (2)

ROGER DEELEY “The Time Travellers.” Napoleon revisited. (3)

HAL CLEMENT “Ocean on Top.” Serial, part 3 of 3. See report to be posted soon here.

ED McBAIN – Cinderella. Matthew Hope #6. Henry Holt & Co., hardcover, 1986. Mysterious Press, paperback, August 1987.

   Matthew Hope’s sixth adventure, another perverse take-off of a children’s fairy tale. Here Cinderella is a prostitute who meets a crime kingpin at a ball and then vanishes, along with four keys of nearly pure cocaine.

   McBain is master of dialogue – people really do talk this way – and he tells a compelling story. But along the way, I found that I was learning more about the narcotics and prostitution trade than I really wanted to know.

JACK RITCHIE “The Many-Flavored Crime.” Unnamd PI. First published in MD’s Companion, December 1975. Reprinted in Best Detective Stories of the Year—1976, edited by Edward D. Hoch (Dutton, hardcover, 1976).

   Sometimes in writing a review you can do no better that starting off with the first paragraph of the book or story itself:

   
   Not the first instance of the prank – or crime, as Gerald persists in calling it – but the private eye who is called in on it is perhaps is hard up for employment. He doesn’t say. But he is a pretty good detective. He solves the case in only ten pages.

   And that includes finding the killer of the butler in the household, a man who was wearing his master’s smoking jacket, a fact that complicates things. There is a light touch that permeates the whole matter, as you can tell from the Jello connection, but the murder itself is totally serious.

   As for finding a copy of the magazine that first published the story, well, Good Luck with that.

A. E. van VOGT – The House That Stood Still. Greenberg, hardcover, 1950. Detective Book Magazine, Winter 1952. Beacon 298, paperback, September 1960, as The Mating Cry. Paperback Librar 52-873, paperback, November 1965 (cover art by Jack Gaughan). Carroll & Graf, paperback, January 1993.

   Van Vogt tries a clumsy hand at sex in the midst of a looseness in plot, and the result is predictably poor.

   A massive, imperturbable house, dating from the pre-Spanish days of California, gives its inhabitants eternal life. And naturally the inhabitants command economic power enough to maintain the house in their possession through the years. Crisis comes about when nuclear war of Earth threatens them, and the group splits on the question of strategy.

   There is a flavor of Spanish California in this book that is attractive, but the going of the arbitrary plot is jumpy and is not. There is no involvement withe the mixed-up characters, certainly not enough to bother seeing if the story really does fit together or to spend any time understanding a very poor ending.

   It took a long time to read this one.

Rating: *

JOHN GODEY – The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Putnam’s, hardcover, 1973. Dell, paperback, 1974. Berkley, softcover, 2009. Penguin, softcover, 2012. Films: (1) United Artists, 1974. (2) ABC, made-for-TV, 1998. (3) Columbia Pictures/MGM, 2009.

   Grand-scale-caper novels, in which millions of dollars and the lives of scores of hostages are at stake, were the vogue in the 1970s. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is among the best of these, and for two reasons became modest best seller and a reasonably good film with Robert Shaw, Walter Matthau, and Martin Balsam.

   The first reason is that the caper involves the hijacking of a New York City subway car (Pelham 123) full of passengers and the holding of it for a ransom of $ 1 million cash — an audacious sort of crime that has an appeal for people who have never even ridden the New York subways.

   The second reason is in the form of a neat logistical puzzle: On the surface (or rather, under the surface), it would seem impossible for the gang to escape with the loot, being themselves trapped underground with every tunnel exit watched by heavily armed men. So how are they planning to do it?

   The head of the gang is a ruthless lunatic named Ryder who is not above knocking off a hostage or two to make sure the city of New York complies with his demands. Or killing anybody else who might be foolish enough to get in his way. The other three gang members arc a pair of toughs named Steever and Joe Welcome and an embittered ex motorman, Wally Longman, whose technical knowledge of subway operations is at the core of the entire plan.

   The numerous additional characters (the novel is told in constantly shifting multiple viewpoints) include the various hostages, city policemen, subway workers, Transit Authority cops, members of the media and the Federal Reserve Bank, and the mayor himself.

   Godey maintains a high level of suspense throughout, and deftly interweaves plenty of detailed information on the inner workings of the subway system. (Train buffs will find it fascinating; even casually interested readers will be impressed.) His characters arc well delineated, the writing smooth and effective. And the escape plan devised for Ryder and his gang is both simple and extremely clever, utilizing a certain “foolproof” piece of equipment.

   John Godey (Mort Freedgood) began his career writing Crime Club whodunits in the late Forties and early Fifties, among them such titles as The Blue Hour (1948) and This Year’s Death (1953). In the late sixties he produced a pair of early-Westlake comedy/mystery pastiches, A Thrill a Minute with Jack Albany (1967) and Never Put Off Till Tomorrow What You Can Kill Today (1970).

   After the success of Pelham, he devoted himself to the production of other large-scale suspense novels; among these are The Talisman (1976), The Snake (1981), and Fatal Beauty (1984), the last named about a political-extremist kidnapping in Italy with far-reaching implications.

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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.

STUART PALMER – The Penguin Pool Murder. Hildegarde Withers #1. Brentano’s, hardcover, 1931. Bantam, paperback, March 1986. Intl Polygonics Ltd, paperback, 1990, Rue Morgue Press, trade paperback, 2007. Penzler Books, trade paperback, 2023. Film: RKO Radio Pictures, 1932 (Edna May Oliver, James Gleason).

   Miss Hildegarde Withers’s first meets Inspector Piper in this case, and she helps him solve a murder that takes place in the New York Aquarium, not long after the stock market crash of 1929. They also seem to rush off to be married at the end, but do they?

   Definitely an oldie, but also definitely a goodie. One does wonder, however, how Miss Withers is so readily allowed to tag along with Piper, in so many violations of proper police procedure. In that sense, this is pure fantasy, from another era altogether.