LAINE FISHER – Fare Prey. Ace Double D-387; 1st printing, 1959. Published back to back with The Bikini Bombshell, by Bob McKnight. Cutting Edge Books, softcover, as by James Howard writing as Laine Fisher.

   It starts out in fine fashion. Mike Gavin, deliberately down on his luck, finds a dead man in the stall next to his in the men’s room of LA’s Union Station, Needing a coat, he finds several thousand dollars and a ticket to Denver in the pocket. And more.

   The dead man, he discovers, was a hit man, on his way to work. Who killed him, who was his intended victim, and who are he two women busting out of their clothes for Gavin? It’s formula fiction, and it almost works, but not if you ask the right questions.

CORNELL WOOLRICH “Soda Fountain.” Appeared in The Saint Mystery Magazine,” March 1960. Reprinted from Liberty, October 11, 1930, as “Soda-Fountain Saga.”

   John Spanish is a soda jerk, a description of a job which may not exist anymore, and if it does, it’s a job not nearly as common as it used to be. (I am not as up on things like this as I used to be, either.) He is uncommonly good at this job, or at least he thinks he is, and it’s quite apparent that he really does have an effect on all of the high school girls who come swarming in when school lets out.

   All but one of them, and perhaps she is not really a schoolgirl. She never comes in with books, and she treats Spanish with undisguised non-interest. He tries his best, but, no, the lady is not interested, Then for a couple of days in a row, she meets a man at the counter. A man she knows well, Spanish catches on to that right away. In sort of futile gesture, but he cannot help himself, he fixes the girl’s companion a special drink. A doozy, you might say.

   The next day, the girl comes in, with a suitcase. “What did you do to my husband?” she demands. He gulps, figuratively if not physically.

   And just where is this story going, the reader wonders. I’ll stop here and say no more but only remind you that this is a crime story. A minor one, true, and while it was written early in Woolrich’s career, and somewhat amateurishly phrased now and again, with an ending that needed just a little more punch to it, it has a modicum of a cuteness while not being totally fluff either.

   And while I’m not absolutely positive, and there’s no information provided as a blurb in reprint version I read, but this appears to be Cornell Woolrich’s very first crime story. Not his first published story – there were about a dozen stories he had wrote before this one, appearing in magazines such as College Humor and the like – but I’m sure happy I came across it late last night, for all of the reasons mentioned above.

WILLIAM HJORTSBERG – Falling Angel. PI Harry Angel #1. Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, hardcover, 1978. Fawcett, paperback, 1982. Warner Books, paperback, 1986. St. Martin’s, paperback, 1996. Film: Released as Angel Heart (Tri-Star, 1987) with Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro, Lisa Bonet).

   It’s the late 1950’s, NYC. A wealthy, corrupt seeming, seamy yet seemly man, Louis Cipher, hires a private dick, Harry Angel, to find a missing person. That missing person is Johnny Favorite, a dime store Sinatra who got big suddenly in the thirties, between the wars.

   Harry Angel is your typical middle aged, hardboiled, drinking smoking detective, who prefers headbutts to subtle inquiry.

   He attacks headlong on the trail, a hefty retainer under his belt.

   Turns out Favorite was catatonic after the war, put in a home, then disappeared. His face was blown to smithereens, with reconstruction to make him presentable, if unrecognizable.

   But every time Angel gets a lead, the lead ends up with a load of lead. The trail gets bloodier and bloodier until Angel finally cracks the case.

   Imagine his surprise.

   Loads of weird satanic rituals abound, as Johnny Favorite seems to have descended into that voodoo that he do so well.

   I liked it. But having seen the ill-aging (and aren’t they all) Alan Parker film in the 80’s, I knew the twist, which kind of messed the impact up for me. It’s the kind of book that if you could avoid the film, first time you read it, would probably blow your socks off. But only the first time. And then afterwards you can appreciate it for what it was and will never be again for you, like a one nite stand you were happy you got away with. You’re slightly embarrassed for getting taken, you smirk at the wit, you envy the idea and the millions of bucks it earned Hjortsberg. Then you salute him and move on to something else.

         —

NOTE: A second book in the series, entitled Angel’s Inferno, was published in 2020.

WILLIAM P. McGIVERN – The Caper of the Golden Bulls. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1966. Pocket, paperback, 1967. Film: Embassy Pictures, 1967, with Stephen Boyd, Yvette Mimieux, Giovanna Ralli, Walter Slezak. Screenplay by Edward Waters and David Moessinger. Directed by Russell Rouse.

   
   For retired bank robber and cracksman Peter Churchman — aka the Black Dove to Scotland Yard, Interpol, and the Suretè — living in splendid retirement in Spain in contentment with his lazy almost lackadaisical lifestyle as a well to do expatriate is paradise enough. It is the comfortable reward for an intelligent and carefully managed life of crime ended before the inevitable happened.

   Neither greedy nor foolish, Peter settled for just enough. He has always settled for just enough, and that is about to prove a problem because life requires more commitment than just enough.

   He might have known that pipers have to be paid eventually, and his piper is about to present the bill in the form of caper Churchman wants no part of: Grace, a beautiful married woman he won’t commit to, and blackmail that leaves him no choice in a violent and deadly game.

   Every year the running of the bulls is held in Pamplona in Northern Spain. The ritual attracts crowds of American and European pleasure and thrill seekers made a sort of literary wine soaked pilgrimage by Ernest Hemingway’s lost generation novel The Sun Also Rises (aka Fiesta) during which drunken revelers either run the streets of Pamplona in front of the wild bulls ending in the ring where they play at amateur matadors before the real bull fights begin or drink and watch the fools get mauled.

   For the week of the fiesta Pamplona’s population balloons, tourists get run down by the bulls and overcharged by the residents and the locals take in a good portion of their yearly income. Along the way is a genuine outpouring of faith and tradition for the religious holiday the week marks.

   The running of the bulls coincides with a religious procession through the streets of the city displaying valuable religious art and brought to the small city for the Festival of San Fermin, the whole reason for the running of the bulls in the first place.

   Part of the Fiesta is the statue of the Virgin and her diadem of jewels on display during the procession to the church, including treasures from all over Spain and Catholic Europe including the Golden bulls of Avignon sent by the Pope himself. A prize all briefly held in a bank vault in Pamplona.

   Which is why the Black Dove’s old partners in crime François Morel and Peter’s former mistress Angela have shown up with evidence that ties Peter to an old crime and with plans to crack the vault of the bank in Pamplona where the treasure will be kept.

   And if things weren’t bad enough Peter’s married mistress Grace is pregnant, by her husband, and pressuring Peter to make things permanent and his good friend Antonio chief of the local policia is too nosy for anyone’s good.

   Something has to give, and it may just be the Black Dove is well on its way to having its wings clipped before he can survive Morel and Angela and their crew, much less the police and Grace.

   William P. McGivern hardly needs introduction. Best known for his tough suspense and crime novels like The Big Heat, Rogue Cop, and The Odds Against Tomorrow (all also classic films) he also wrote international intrigue, and in his early career had been a staple of the Science Fiction pulps. Late in his career he even wrote a mainstream bestseller or two. Caper is a quick book to read, around 60,000 words, 175 slender pages in paperback, but packs a tremendous amount of story and character development, as well as details about the intricacy of cracking a bank vault, much less outwitting blackmailers with murderous intent.

   As should be expected with McGivern, the suspense is taut, the pace fast, the people involving, and the climax satisfying, all anyone can ask of a caper novel.

   It was a natural to be developed for the big screen with Stephen Boyd well cast as Peter, Yvette Mimieux as Grace (who plays a bigger role ultimately than Peter can expect), and Walter Slezak as Antonio the local police chief. It’s not a great film, but it does manage to capture the characters, adults in emotion and action for once, and the suspense of the novel as well as the color and confusion of the crowded streets of the Festival of San Fermin.

   The book on the other hand is a small gem, a delightful caper novel that manages to be both tough and honest about crime and criminals and give the reader a charming likable if not entirely morally upright protagonist, somewhere between one of Eric Ambler’s able criminals and a more realistic modern Raffles.

   One of the great pleasures of the book is just how much McGivern sketches in with a few deft strokes without turning the plot into a travelogue or padding it out with overwritten asides. It is more picaresque than hard-boiled, more To Catch a Thief than Richard Stark’s Parker, an appetizer and not a meal, but sometimes you are in the mood for a well chosen nosh and not a seven course feast.

   This one should both whet and satisfy your appetite.

ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. December 1967. Overall rating: ***

JON L. BREEN “The Austin Murder Case.” A parody-pastiche of Philo Vance, who uncovers a murderer at a masquerade party, Hilarious footnotes. (5)

JACOB HAY “The Name of the Game,” A Russian school for spies sends a couple to pose as Americans. Expected ending, but with a haunting sense of unreality, (4)

JOHN DICKSON CARR “The Man Who Saw the Invisible.” Colonel March. First published in The Strand Magazine, April 1938, as “The New Invisible Man” by Carter Dickson. An impossible situation revealed as a magician’s trick. (3)

ANTHONY GILBERT “The Intruders.” After terror, a twist makes everything OK for the old lady, but happily? The terror is real. (4)

CHARLOTTE ARMSTRONG “More Than One Kind of Luck.” A would-be killer finds that he makes his own bad luck. (2)

G. C. EDMUNDSON “A Question of Translation.” It would help the reader to have knowledge of both Spanish and Italian. (3)

EDWARD D. HOCH “The Spy Who Didn’t Exist.” An obscure piece of knowledge helps Rand decipher a calendar code. (3)

AGATHA CHRISTIE “The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb.” Hercule Poirot. First published in The Sketch, September 26, 1923. Belief in the supernatural is a powerful force, one Poirot must face, But why does he fake being poisoned? (2)

JOHN HOLT “Number One.” First story. A “practical” joke on a paroled con backfires into murder. (5)

PHYLLIS BENTLEY  “Miss Phipps Goes to the Hairdresser.” If the wig wasn’t obvious, I don’t know what was. A waste. (1)

URSULA CURTISS “Change of Climate.” An elaborate buildup is ruined by an editor’s note which explains the whole story. Climate as a murder weapon. (3)

JOE GORES “File #1: The Mayfield Case.” Daniel Kearny Associates. Telling it as it isi n the private eye game: repossessing  cars. (2)

WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – Death in Donegal Bay. PI Brock (the Rock) Callahan #10. Walker & Co., hardcover, 1984. Charter, paperback, 1987.

   William Campbell Gault sold his first short story to a pulp magazine in 1936; nearly half a century later, he is still writing fiction of the same high quality that has marked his long and prolific career. He has published more than 300 short stories and novelettes — mystery, fantasy, science fiction, sports — and some sixty novels, half of which are mystery/suspense and half of which are juvenile sports books.

   Gault’s most enduring fictional creation is ex-L.A. Rams football player turned private eye Brock Callahan, hero of eleven novels thus far. The first in the series, Ring Around Rosa, was published in 1955; six others followed it over the next eight years. Gault abandoned detective fiction in 1963 to concentrate on the more lucrative juvenile market, and did not return to a life of fictional crime until the early 1980s, when the juvenile vein had been played out. Callahan was given a new life as well, in a pair of paperback originals published by the short-lived Raven House; one of these, The Cana Diversion, was the recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award for the Best Paperback Original of 1982.

   Death in Donegal Bay is Gault’s first hardcover mystery in more than twenty years, an even better novel than Cana Diversion and as good as the best of the early Callahans, Day of the Ram (1956), The Convertible Hearse (1957), and County Kill (1962). Callahan, thanks to a substantial inheritance, is now married to his longtime girlfriend, Jan, an interior decorator, and semi-retired in the beach community of San Valdesto (Santa Barbara, where Gault himself lives).

   But he’s bored and has kept a hand in the detective business by grooming a protege, young Corey Raleigh. When Corey is hired for a surveillance job by con man named Alan Arthur Baker, Callahan worries that the kid has gotten in over his head and therefore sets out to do some snooping on his own. Among the people he encounters in the swanky former artists· colony of Donegal Bay are a conniving real-estate salesman, a couple of kids who run a bait shop, an ex-pug bar owner, a secretive former maid, a beautiful woman with a shady past, and an eccentric millionaire who lives in a medieval castle complete with moat and drawbridge.

   The murder of a vagrant opens up a Pandora’s box of blackmail, narcotics, infidelity, and more homicide before Callahan, with Corey’s help, untangles it all and arrives at the solution.

   Rich in incident, written with wry humor and sharp observation, peopled with believable characters, this is William Campbell Gault at his best.

         ———
   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.

EDWARD D. HOCH “The Spy Who Knew Too Much.” Jeffrey Rand #19. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1971, Reprinted in Adam (Australia; March 1973).

   According to the blurb introducing this story in EQMM, Rand is a “code and cipher specialist, detective by necessity, and now troubleshooter-at large,” assigned as he is to a case with roots beginning back in the days at the end of World War II. For reasons of crucial wartime significance, a plane containing a German general and the head of the French resistance was shot down while heading for Berlin, with both men reported killed.

   This involves a bit of hand-waving on the author’s part, or at least it was for me, as I didn’t quite understand. But no matter. The sentence above is all the reader really needs to know.

   Returning to the present day, a Major Gregory Subic, now living in Toronto, is planning to write a book of his memoirs, and it is rumored to reveal the truth about the affair above. If  secrets are revealed, it would be bombshell of a revelation in world affairs, even twenty-five years later.

   Rand is sent to learn more, and if possible make sure the details are not revealed. When Subic’s literary agent is found dead with the manuscript missing, the case becomes one of murder as well.

   As is usual in the Rand stories, codes and ciphers are involved, and I’m happy to report that I caught on to the one in this one almost immediately.

   Not that I got any farther than that with it – but I should have. Mr. Hoch is as clear and precise as he always was in any of the tales of mystery and deduction he wrote, and he outsmarted me once again, even though I thought I was reading as clearly and concisely as I could.

   I love it when that happens.

NEW DETECTIVE MAGAZINE, May 1944. Cover art by Gloria Stoll. Overall rating: *½.

BRUNO FISCHER “Fatally Yours.” Novelette. A draft board official, accused of selling deferments, is also framed for the murders of those who might have found out, Could only have been written in those days of all-out mobilization, except for those fighting to stay out. (3)

F. ORLIN TREMAINE “The Dagger from Singapore,” Novelette. The love of a sailor with a memory for crime is interrupted by murder. Action, but little else. (1)

FREDERICK C. DAVIS “Death Marks the Spot.” Novel. After six years, an arsonist turned murderer is caught, allowing a falsely convicted gunsmith to work for the war effort, Hard to swallow at times, and overly dramatic. (1)

J. F. HUTTON “Three Days to Howl.” In the time remaining before his induction, Steve Warren helps keep an important new weapon out of enemy hands. (2)

JAMES McCREIGH “No End to Murder.” A train station robbery is thwarted while a cop stops in the restroom. (2)

SUSPENSE “Fire Burn, and Cauldron Bubble.” CBS Radio, April 6, 1943. Number 36 of 945 episodes. Writer: John Dickson Carr.

   One of the favorite programs of  old time radio fans is most certainly the famous Suspense series, which was also probably one or the longest running as well, It was on CBS radio more or less continuously from July 17, 1942, until the final episode, broadcast on September 30, 1962. For most of the early years, up until 1948, the man· who was both producer and director was William Spier, who certainly did his best to live up to the program’s motto of always withholding the final solution “until the last possible moment.”

   During the first two or three years’ run, many of the scripts were written by none other than John Dickson Carr, doubtlessly the most famous practitioner of the Locked Room Mystery, with more than 70 published novels to his credit. Most of them contain some form of impossible puzzle challenge to the reader, and if I’m a fair sample, most of his millions of readers usually failed the test.

   My own personal favorite or the Carr/Suspense collaborations was first heard on April 6, 1943, and is entitled “Fire Burn, and Cauldron Bubble”, The star was. (then) famous movie actor Paul Lukas, who played a professional magician responsible for the special effects in putting on a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (e.g. Banquo’s ghost) in London’s famed Drury Lane Theatre.

   During the first act a former actress is killed in a theater box guarded by two loyal servants, in full view of 3000 unsuspecting people. No shot from a silenced revolver from  across the theater, no dagger thrown from a neighboring box. She died of a stab wound through the right eye, and there’s no sign of the weapon anywhere.

   Some clues; She’s too vain to wear glasses. The box underneath was paid tor, but it  remained unoccupied. And a man sneaked in and out of an aisle seat on the ground floor during the performance ·

   Besides the drama of the crime and its solution, what makes this particular program most memorable to me, at least, is that in the background the play is going on at the same time: the screeching of the witches and the loud, rumbling claps of thunder, always at the  most appropriate moment.

   Unfortunately, there is one question that just might remain in your mind even after the murderer’s identity is discovered. Why on earth was such a far-fetched method of killing the lady required? Don’t ask.

JONATHAN GASH – Firefly Gadroon. Lovejoy #6. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1984. Penguin, US, paperback, 1985. Published previously by Collins, UK, 1982.

   Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy series is one you will either adore or viscerally dislike.

   Lovejoy is immersed in the world he loves — that of antiques, legitimate or fake. (His own run heavily to the latter.) For Lovejoy, antiques are everything — well, nearly everything. His secondary passion is women. Readers who share Lovejoy’s first fascination will be rewarded with descriptions of, for example, hammering a reverse silver gadroon (oval fluting) or identifying Shibayama knife handles.

   In auction scenes, Gash takes his fans into the English village world of off-the-wall bids, “miffs,” “nerks,” “groats,” those who “pong” or “do a beano,” and the “cackhanded,” “narked,” or “sussed.”

   Lovejoy is charming and not above bending the law or the truth in the pursuit of a true antique. The romantic escapades and amours of this sprightly rogue are a delight. But for readers with no interest in or prior knowledge of antiques, the unexplained trade slang and the unabating discussion of old treasures can be overwhelming and tedious.

    Firefly Gadroon is the sixth in the series. Lovejoy’s trouble begins — as it often does — when he spots a luscious woman with beautiful legs at an auction. The object of his admiration “frogs” (gets) a small Japanese box he’s had his eye on, and not only will she not sell it to him, she doesn’t even appear to know its value.

   Why, then, does she insist on keeping it? That question leads Lovejoy into encounters with killers, police, international smugglers, and, of course, still more beautiful women. Lovejoy is at his roguish best in this adventure, and the background is as colorful as ever.

   The first Lovejoy novel, The Judas Pair (1977), involves a hunt for a lost pair of sinister dueling pistols. In The Vatican Rip (1982), the dealer undertakes the tricky task of stealing a Chippendale table from the Vatican. And in Pear\hanger (1985), Lovejoy tries his hand at locating a missing person — and ends up suspected of murder.

         ———
   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.