Thin Air - Howard Browne

THE STORY: Ad exec, Ames Coryell, returns from a vacation in Maine with his wife Leona and 3 year-old daughter Phoebe.  While Ames unloads the luggage from the car Leona quickly exits the car and enters the house.  When Ames goes in with his daughter and the suitcases he can't find his wife. Her handbag is on the table in the dining room but no sign of his wife.  He panics.  Runs through the neighborhood and cannot find her.  When he calls his neighbor Sally Fremont to ask if maybe Leona made a quick visit at their home Sally is perplexed. It's 2 AM in the morning! Why would Leona stop by? "Where is Mark?" Ames asks inquiring about Sally's husband. She tells him Mark is still awake in his office working on his latest architect's project. "Will you check? Maybe Leona is there."  Sally does so and is shocked when she discovers that Mark too is gone. Did the two run off together? If not, have they vanished into Thin Air (1954)?

THE CHARACTERS:  This is primarily Ames' story and he acts as first person narrator. Once his wife disappears he reveals himself to be a willful and temperamental man. He makes an immediate enemy of Lt. John Box assigned to look into the claim that Leona Coryell has disappeared. Box makes no pretense that he suspects Ames has something to do with her disappearance which of course infuriates Ames. The two do not get off to a good start and it only worsens as the book progresses. Fed up with a detective who won't listen and has already accused him of murder Ames is determined to solve the mystery of his missing wife on his own.

Then Mark is found unconscious not far from his home and taken to a hospital where he lapses into a coma. He has been struck on the back of the head with the ubiquitous blunt object. Now Box thinks that Ames is acting out some revenge plot having picked up on hints that Ames imagined that Mark has perhaps had a secret affair with Leona and that they were running off together. Box is sure that Ames found Mark and attacked him. He warns Ames that if the coma worsens and Mark eventually dies he will be after Ames Coryell for a definite murder.

French paperback edition
(Editions Ditis, 1957)

Coryell then dismisses the police altogether and comes up with an ingenious plan. He enlists his entire advertising firm to turn his wife's disappearance into a regional campaign. Everyone from the art department head to every agent writing copy will work on the project. Ames even involves the agency's market research team who work at a completely different company to help in their elaborate campaign.  They will create a public interest in Ames' missing wife. TV ads, magazine ads, radio spots--the whole shebang.  Leona's face will be everywhere and she will be on everyone's mind just like the many products that the advertising firm sells. Create the need and the public will respond with purchase power.  Or in this case with possible eyewitness accounts and other information. The ultimate aim is to turn the public into a collective of amateur detectives. Soon the police and the ad agency are deluged with phone calls offering  tips and witness stories.

Some of the tips pay off and Ames soon finds himself paying a visit to a blond woman staying in a fleabag hotel. And that's when the story begins to get complicated and a bit fantastical. Best leave it there. Unexpected twists and unbelievable coincidences compound leading to a shocking murder and the somewhat outlandish reason for Leona's disappearance.

INNOVATIONS:  The idea of using an ad agency to solve a crime is wholly original. Many of the sequences where the men from Palmer & Verrick, Market Researchers offer their expertise to Ames show a truly clever way to introduce detection into the story. Market researchers, as head agent Uhlman, tells Ames are little more than compilers of statistics. They have at their hands multiple references and databases (mostly in book form in this decade) to help locate anyone and any company. As an example: when Ames shows Uhlman and his men a photograph of Marty Dry wearing tee shirt, jeans and house slippers standing in front of  car parked near an apartment building and another building with the letters ERY visible at the edge of the photo Ames is sure than the photo was taken in front of his home. Who would be dressed like that anywhere else? Remember it's 1954 and slippers were only worn in the home not in public like they are now in this age of "slovenly chic" fashion choices. They also notice the numbers 773 on the building with the letters ERY.  Uhlman offers up a variety of businesses those letters might be: grocery, stationery, bakery, millinery, etc.  After looking up addresses in Manhattan where those numbers occur in the street address he then brilliantly eliminates all neighborhoods where those businesses could not be next to an apartment building using his vast knowledge of sociodemographics.  Then Uhlman and a crew of eight other men use phone directories, split up the alphabet, and within only a few minutes they have pegged a few possible addresses where Marty Dry lives and when Ames drives to the first and most likely address he is astonished that the photo matches the location exactly. Very impressive detective work, I'd say. Completely believable, too, given how market research firms work.  

Some more innovative detective work is performed by Ame's daughter who is only 3 years old. When she asked her mother "Do you like me, Mommy?" while they were driving home from a brief stop in Connecticut Phoebe tells her father that her mother said the wrong thing. It's a game that she plays with her parents. She asks the question and they always says No. And then Phoebe asks "Why not?" and they reply "Because I love you." When the woman said yes to the question "Do you like me?" Phoebe knew it wasn’t her mother sitting next to her. This surprising news leads Ames to the most startling discovery in the book and the beginning of his action-filled search for the whereabouts of his wife.

THE AUTHOR:  Howard Browne (1907-1999) worked at several advertising agencies as well as being the editor of two notable genre fiction magazines according to the DJ blurb on the back of my copy of Thin Air.  Further research revealed to me that those magazines were Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures. Not only was he editor of those magazines Browne contributed his own fantasy, adventure and science fiction stories under both his own name and a variety of pseudonyms.  He is probably best known for the crime novels he wrote under his pseudonym John Evans. As Evans he created the private eye Paul Pine who appeared in a series of four novels set in Oak Park, Illinois and Chicago.  In 1001 Midnights Bill Pronzini called Paul Pine "one of the best of the plethora of tough guy heroes" from the post-WW2 era. He goes on:  "Although the Pine novels are solidly in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, they have a complexity and character all their own and are too well crafted to be mere imitations."  Browne also wrote for television and the movies. Thin Air was adapted several times for television. The first of several TV versions was the sixth episode in the second season of Climax! with Robert Sterling as Ames and Pat O'Brien as the policeman. Later adaptations of the missing person motif would appear in numerous crime dramas including episodes of The Rockford Files and Simon & Simon.  In addition to numerous TV scripts from series in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly westerns and crime dramas, Browne wrote the screenplays for three gangster movies: Portrait of a Mobster (1961), The St. Valentine's Massacre (1966) and Capone (1975) with Ben Gazzara in the title role.

QUOTES:  If I don't get [my wife] you're going to be up to your tie clasp in police. 

He looked slightly less dangerous than the Bobbsey Twins. 

When a girl's that close to a guy it would only seem reasonable that she'd have his phone number or his address... Maybe in a little black book. Girls who live alone in cheap hotels along shoddy back streets have books like that. ...At best this was a lonely world. 

I was making enough racket to alert half the county. This was what came from preferring football and girls to a membership in the Boy Scouts.

Looking into his eye was like looking at the falling blade of a guillotine

I was up to my hatband in doubt.

There was no warning, no advance whisper of sound. Only the world blowing up in a sudden sea of white flare laced with agony, and I was falling through it in slow motion toward the edge of blackness.

It was time for the organ music and please omit flowers.

EASY TO FIND? Multiple editions are offered for sale on line, a mix of paperback reprints and the original Simon & Schuster hardcover. The first paperback (Dell 894, 1955) is the most common edition for sale. A later 1984 reprint from Carrol & Graf also turns up often from online dealers.  The first edition will of course cost you more with prices ranging from $75 (dampstained book with a VG- DJ) to $450 for a fine copy in DJ that is also signed by Howard Browne. Happy hunting!

Now Seek My Bones - S. H. Courtier

THE STORY:  A monster crocodile. A private zoo of venomous snakes. An 18th century ship that disappeared. A lost treasure. And the return of an ancient cult of Crocodile Men. Sounds less like a mystery novel and more like a lost screenplay for another Indiana Jones sequel (though Indy definitely would not be happy about the snakes). These are the bizarre elements that feature in the plot of Now Seek My Bones (1957) which is more of an adventure thriller than it is a detective novel. This macabre crime novel ventures into horror territory frequently when an Australian obsessed with his ancestors from Revolutionary era France is found dead in his swimming pool that borders a marshland and draws water from its natural source. He was apparently attacked and killed by a giant crocodile that got through a sabotaged mesh fence designed to prevent entry of fish and other aquatic life. The horrible death is called a grisly accident and dismissed. When the novel opens the family is preparing for the man's funeral. "Digger" Haig, one of Courtier's clever often arrogant series policeman characters, suspects murder and makes his way surreptitiously to the McGorrie ranch to get to the bottom of the skulduggery.

THE CHARACTERS: The ostensible protagonist and something of an aide to Haig is Jeff Galloway, affectionately known as Galley by most of the women in the story. A reporter and friend of the slain Rann McGorrie, Galley is disturbed because he learned of Rann McGorrie's death from an obituary. No one from the family informed him of the death and so he heads to Port Crosby to attend the funeral. When he arrives we meet the members of the small funeral party, mostly relatives of McGorrie.

Kit McGorrie - Rann's daughter who at first seems to be a naive and flighty young girl. But no one is truly what they appear to be in this novel.

Aunt Hilary - Rann's sister, the imperious substitute matriarch of the clan. She insists that her brother died in a bizarre accident. That there is no killer at large...until the ranch is invaded by the strange men wearing crocodile masks who have modeled themselves after a cult of dream-timing indigenous people of decades past.

Norman McGorrie - Rann's nephew. From the outset it seems Norman is nothing but bad news and many readers will peg him as the villain. Sullen, quick tempered, resentful and violent. Hardly anything likeable about Norman. Don't be so quick to judge. Courtier does a fine job of misleading everyone in this mystery novel.

Marion Steele - a mystery woman of sorts. Passed off as a close friend of Kit's but Digger Haig knows who she really is. Galley (and the reader) will also learn her true identity and why she showed up at the McGorrie home after Rann's death. Her interest in 18th century France may have a lot to do with her presence at the ranch.

Hooker Trull - business associate of Rann.  Of all the characters Hooker is a kind of cipher for much of the book.  He seems only to be present as an attraction for the women in the story.  His role is made clearer in the in the final chapters.

Gosh Laffey - The most authentically Australian character of the lot. Immensely likeable, teeming wiht eccentricity, and harboring lots of secrets he is eager to share with Galley. Gosh is the owner of the private reptile zoo a self-styled herpetologist though not a professional one by any means. He has over 150 snakes in a zoo he keeps ont he south end of the property. The collection of snakes consists of both venomous and harmless native Australian species. The star serpent, so to speak, being David, a carpet python (a constricting snake and non-venomous) he often wears around his neck.  The snakes are not just unusual decor for the novel. Their presence will be exploited in a terrifying action sequence that is better left as a surprise.

Once Digger Haig reveals himself in an intriguing scene the cast will grow to include some indigenous peoples among them King Jimmy of the Crocodile Tribe, also known by his native name Koolakuk, who provides much of the history of the crocodile men, where they came form, their purpose and what they are up to now. Also we meet a tracker named Sammy who is the only one of a group of local men who takes his role as a policeman aide seriously. His work in determining how many men invaded the ranch after studying footprints in the dirt and examining broken branches is some of the most helpful native detective work to Haig. 

INNOVATIONS: From McGorrie's fascination with his French ancestors to the story of the crocodile men it's difficult to know where to start in pointing out the originality and innovation. Courtier's strength as a mystery novelist will always be his talent for uncovering some of the uncommon, often just plain weird, aspects of Australian culture and history. Whether it's in his love of the native animal life peculiar to the continent or the mysterious ways of indigenous people and their arcane mores each Courtier crime novel will offer up some fascinating tidbit. Now Seek My Bones, only his fourth mystery novel, offers more than a tidbit, it's a veritable cornucopia of trivia, history and secrets of the natural world. The story gives a crash course in native snakes of Australia, instructs on the difference between the harmless snakes and the deadly ones. The most deadly of all is the taipan. One nasty specimen makes its home in Goff's zoo and it will feature in a terrifying scene late in the book.

The climax of the book occurs when a book on Australian 18th century shipwrecks is found and a story of a missing ship and its mysterious cargo (oh yes it's all related to 18th century France) is related to Haig and Galley by the equally mysterious Marion Steele. She also reveals an unusual rhyming code that Rann McGorrie composed that when solved will lead the trio to a highly unusual hidden treasure. From this point on the book kicks into high adventure mode with many cinematic action sequences. Some enterprising filmmaker ought to grab a hold of this book and turn it into a movie. It's ripe for a 21st century movie-going public with an insatiable appetite for action movies. Underwater cavern exploration and shipwrecks and monster crocodiles?  Can't you hear the money rolling in like the crashing surf?

Somehow Courtier manages to weave in the shipwreck to McGorrie's obsession with his French ancestors and also wrapping up the reason that the crocodile cult was revived in the utterly unexpected finale that takes place in a sort of submerged cavern accessible only at low tide. Nothing is predictable in this thoroughly bizarre, often chillingly macabre, adventure-cum-mystery novel.  Yes, there is also an unveiling of the truly surprising murderer, but that comes almost as an anticlimax amid all the rest of the over-the-top adventure sequences consisting of underwater hunts, nighttime seiges, captures, rescues, and mayhem galore.

EASY TO FIND? Not at all. You may have luck if you live in Australia. I'm sure the libraries have loads of Courtier's books. My copy purchased just last year was the first one I'd seen since I started looking for all of his exceptionally good mystery novels -- most of them extremely hard to find -- back in 2014 or so. Good luck in locating another copy!