FFB: Dreamland Lake - Richard Peck

THE STORY: Philip "Flip" Townsend and Brian Bishop, two teen boys guided by a dated book on the history of their hometown Dunthorpe, Illinois set out to find and explore an abandoned amusement park near the shores of Dreamland Lake (1973). To their horror they stumble across a skeleton and they make the local newspapers and receive celebrity status for a few weeks as adventurers. They continue to return to the ruins of the amusement park and discover some sinister artifacts and a weird shrine decorated in swastikas. With a new found tag-along friend Flip and Brian will be forced to confront the fragility of friendship, the stigma of being ostracized and the inevitability of death.

THE CHARACTERS: Flip and Brian are perfectly realized 1970s teen boys. They talk and behave like thirteen year-olds and the adults around them seem just as real. I can speak from authority here because I was thirteen myself in 1973, the year the book was published. The entire story rang true with an astonishing resonance that at times it seemed as if Peck had stolen glimpses from my own life. Everything from their slang, their past times like a very 1970s obsession with old time monster movies on late night TV, the problems with finding a sub for Flip's paper route when other activities take precedence and even their hero worship of a twenty-something athletic and down-to-earth swimming coach -- all of it was spot on. The two boys never once seem older than their years and in fact get a healthy dose of life lessons from Peck's finely rendered adult characters like a teacher trying desperately to instill a respect for modern poetry in her students; Old Man Sanderson, an anal retentive curmudgeon typical of the bullying paper route customer who is out for blood any time Flip deviates from the rules of newspaper delivery; and Old Lady Garrison who I'll talk about in a section below. Not to be left out is the pathetic figure of lonely outcast Elvan Helligrew, a perfectly named misfit who is eager to become Flip and Bri's best friend. Elvan is willing to do anything to impress them. The two boys exploit Elvan for their own ends fooling the boy into thinking he has become "cool" in their eyes. But what happens to the three boys will have dire consequences for all of them and will be the most painful growing experience for Flip and Brian.

INNOVATIONS: Ostensibly a book written solely for a young audience, Dreamland Lake has the remarkable paradox of being a book so fully and truly realized as a microcosm of what is what like to be a kid in the 1970s that it seems almost like a novel of nostalgia. To a kid in 1973 reading this book probably would have seemed almost mundane with its everyday details like Flip's paper route difficulties or the dullness of being forced to compose a modern poem in English class -- called Language Arts in a typically 70s education reform re-labeling. But to an adult reader in the 21st century reading the book now was like the most vivid trip down Memory Lane. Interestingly, as Peck's writing career progressed he would become increasingly drawn to the past and one of his most successful books was an adult memoir he wrote of his own boyhood. In writing a contemporary book about boys growing up in 1970s Illinois, where Peck himself grew up, he had already mastered a kind of reality that few writers -- both those writing for adults and children -- ever really accomplish.

The mature themes of confronting the ugly truth of Life's finality, particularly unexpected death, is a topic that many 1970s children's writers were incorporating into their work. Often the topic of death in kids' books is ever so gently introduced into the story, sometimes cloyingly depicted and discussed. Peck talks openly about death in Dreamland Lake. The scene where the boys are invited to Mrs. Garrison's home and she relates the story of how she lost her son in a horrible milk truck accident is handled matter-of-factly and without a drop of sentimentality. Mrs. Garrison is not the typical wise old woman who pontificates on somber Very Important Subject Matter the way other writers would use a character like her. She's lived a comfortable life, still grieves for her son, and in telling her tale shows the boys that death is ever present. Better to get used to it at a young age, she tells them, rather than have to deal with it unprepared as an adult. You didn't get scenes like this in kid's books during the 30s, 40s, 50s and rarely in the 60s. The 70s were the decade when children's books were finally growing up.

I’m no real expert in what is now known as young adult genre, but I do know that when I was growing up children’s writers were only just beginning to tackle formerly taboo subject matter for children’s books like puberty, divorce, child abuse, date rape, racial inequality, and even -- as in Dreamland Lake -- facing one’s own mortality. Cute books about talking animals, stories inspired by fairy tales or similar tame "kiddy fare" were no longer making up the majority of children’s books. Children increasingly wanted to read about themselves and their very real problems. Gone too were the teen sleuths who chased after crooked real estate agents and avaricious treasure hunters. The teen protagonists were often criminals themselves – shoplifters, bicycle thieves, burglars and gang members. Flip and Brian engage in some less than legal activities themselves.  Richard Peck was definitely a ground breaker along with his fellow 1970s young adult writers Paul Zindel, Judy Blume and S. E. Hinton.

THINGS I LEARNED:  Flip and Brian talk about their days of swim classes at the YMCA where they were required to swim nude. Believe it or not, this was a national rule in the United States. Nude swimming was required of all males who used YMCA public pools from about 1926 to 1962. This was mandated by the American Public Health Association and thousands of high schools and middle schools that gave swimming lessons also enforced the rule of nude swimming for boys which continued well into the mid-1970s. Girls, luckily, were allowed to wear swimsuits in school swimming pools.  I had to find out more so I went a-Googling. As early as the 19th century when swimsuits were made of woolen textiles, fibers would clog the early filtration systems making for added work of cleaning them almost hourly. To alleviate this unnecessary, time consuming labor the rules about nude swimming were instituted. There were also some supposed added benefits that the APHA created in order to justify the lack of swimsuits in public pools. Prior to getting in a YMCA pool all men's bodies were examined for open wounds or indications of infectious disease. The changing social attitudes towards nudity in YMCA pools and the entire history of nude swimming in the US is outlined in a fascinating article you can read here.

Richard Peck as seen
on a DJ from a 1989 book

THE AUTHOR:  Richard Peck was born and raised in Decatur, Illinois. He grew up during the Depression era with a father who owned a Phillips 66 gas station and a mother who instilled him at a very early age a love of reading and books.  He was educated at DePauw University, Exeter University as an undergraduate and Southern Illinois University and Washington University in St. Louis, MO as a graduate student. During the late 1950s he served two years in the US Army stationed in Stuttgart where he worked as a chaplain's assistant.

His first novel for young people was Don't Look and It Won't Hurt (1972) which addresses teen pregnancy and was later adapted as the movie Gas Food Lodging.  He has also covered such formerly taboo topics as stalking and the aftermath of teen sexual assault in Are You in the House Alone? (1976) which was adapted as a TV movie in 1978. This novel won Peck an Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery. At the advice of some junior high school readers who he visited with he began to explore the burgeoning popularity of supernatural themes in his books for children. His first efforts resulted in a series of well received books featuring Blossom Culp, a girl with skills of a medium who acted as an occult detective of sorts. Blossom first appears in The Ghost Belonged to Me (1975) narrated by an older man looking back on his youth in 1904. While the book is reminiscent of a Mark Twain novel, complete with an alternating folksy and sarcastic humor, the TV movie adaptation Child of Glass (part of "The Wonderful World of Disney" anthology series) is decidedly different and updated to be set in the 1970s.

In addition to the Edgar Peck has won the Newberry Medal, a Newberry Honor, the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction and been nominated for the National Book Award. He died May 23, 2018 at his home in New York City following a long illness. He was 84.

EASY TO FIND?  Most of Peck's children's books have remained in print since they were first published, no mean feat for someone so prolific. Dreamland Lake can be found in numerous paperback editions dating from 1975 all the way to 2000. Each edition received multiple printings. His many books continue to be very popular in libraries all over the US and Canada. There should be no problem finding a copy of any of his books. Happy hunting!

FFB: The Evil Wish - Jean Potts

THE STORY: The Knapp sisters are planning to murder their domineering physician father who is hoping to marry his much younger nurse assistant and then disinherit his daughters. Should the doctor's plan come to fruition the two sisters will be forced to leave the only home they have ever known and give up a comfortable life. The very day the murder is to take place, however, Dad and Pam the nurse both perish in a car wreck. The Evil Wish (1962) -- as Jean Potts reminds us in the epigraph that precedes the story -- is most evil to the wisher, some words of wisdom she quotes from the Greek poet Hesiod. Marcia, the elder sister, extends that thought to a troubling, haunting reality when she tells Lucy that their father has tricked them once again. "Cheating us out of what we were primed to do, and so here we are with a leftover murder on our hands." How they deal with this burden of guilt for a crime they never actually committed is told in a unnerving tale of cat and mouse with deceit and betrayal lurking around every corner of their home.

THE CHARACTERS: Marcia and Lucy are compelling portraits of two sisters clearly devoted to one another and yet at odds with each other. They are also described as opposites in both physical attractiveness and psychological make-up. Typically for Potts she describes these women with a huge dollop of irony. Lucy is the radiant beauty of the two but she's also socially awkward, emotionally stunted, and dangerously neurotic. Marcia, on the other hand, is darkly attractive, cynical, outspoken and a bit too protective of her younger sister. Since their youth the two have engaged in a game of eavesdropping that has made them privy to their father's secrets. An architectural anomaly in the basement, situated directly below his doctor's office, has allowed the sisters to listen in on conversations. They have continued to do this into adulthood. Their surreptitious behavior will recur throughout the novel and have dire consequences for both. What they never realize is that other people who live and work in the house have also discovered this ideal place to listen in on conversations while never being seen.

Most interesting about this book is that there does not seem to be a real protagonist the reader can root for while antagonists are plentiful. Lucy and Marcia may be presented as the central characters but neither is truly likeable or sympathetic. In effect they are a duo of anti-heroines similar to the men one finds in a Patricia Highsmith novel. While there may be some elements of pathos about Lucy's fragile mental state one can never truly side with her plight. Marcia comes across as the more wily of the sisters and yet she too will be revealed to be as sinister as the two men the women find themselves at the mercy of over the course of the novel.

Original painting for the ACE G-541 reprint
(Artist uncredited)

The menacing handyman Hansen is as vile a villain as those found in Victorian and Edwardian penny dreadfuls. Just like an old-fashioned stage melodrama baddie Hansen, an embittered employee who never felt appreciated by the Knapps, is someone you want to throw rotten vegetables at and boo and hiss whenever he enters the stage. In Potts' frequent use of unusual animal imagery Hansen is likened to a slovenly bear "rigged out in men's khaki work pants and shirt" who "shambles" his way through the house grunting and mumbling his resentful complaints.

In contrast to Hansen there is C. Gordon ("Call me Chuck. Everybody else does.") Llewellyn, a portrait photographer, interested in Pam the nurse's personal belongings left behind in her office. Chuck is is first described as a "bouncy, phoney guy, trying to seem younger than he was." He's also interested in leasing out Dr. Knapp's office if he can successfully cajole and manipulate the sisters into meeting his demands. But does he have an ulterior motive? When he finds Pam's diary why does he refuse to allow the sisters to read what's written inside? His sporting manner and affable charm mask a darker core and hidden motives. Chuck's presence sets Lucy on edge and sends her easily triggered morbid imagination into a frenzy of paranoid fantasies. Marcia is leery of Chuck, but she treats him with kid gloves.

Lucy's unfortunate obsession with the disposal of an old gas heater is not easily forgotten by Hansen who was entrusted to get rid of it quickly after the two deaths. She alternates between fretting about what Hansen knows and obsessing about where Chuck has hidden Pam's diary.  Either man might be able to expose the failed plot to do in her father. Growing suspicions of foul play surrounding the car accident lead to a battle of wits between the two men and two women as they attempt to outguess and out maneuver one another. And it won't end well for anyone.

The cast is rounded out by two quirky, gossipy neighbors who rent rooms on the second floor of the house. Each woman is a pet owner and they frequently are seen trotting out with their dogs, one of which is dressed in outfits that match its owner. Mrs. Sully and Mrs. Travers (aka "La Traviata" so dubbed for her large physique and grandiose manner) are clearly objects of ridicule, but also exist oddly as the two voices of reason in this household of fear, paranoia and scheming. Ironically, as grotesque and foolish as they are painted the two neighbors appear to be the only characters who see things clearly yet as loudly as they speak no one will pay them any attention.

INNOVATIONS:  Potts' ingenuity lies in the exploration of evil deeds not carried out and the festering remains of criminality that never come to fruition. To say that the novel is merely about the guilty consciences of these two sisters is to undermine its complexity. Take for example, the scene where Marcia executes a caterpillar by whacking it in two with a trowel:

Absently she scuffed some crumbs of dirt over the caterpillar. One of God's creatures. All right; but so were roses, and you had to make a choice. You had to accept the fact that some of God's creatures were no good. The law of rose-preservation, as basic as the law of self preservation.

The ease with which Marcia so callously and brutally severs the bug in two is mentioned repeatedly after this scene.  Potts' has created that resounding image as a reminder of how that evil wish has corrupted Marcia, how strong that desire to carry out violence is not only much easier for her but almost necessary.

QUOTES: "Yeah, but if Lucy planned it... It must do something to you, to plan a thing like that. You know what I mean? It's like you've crossed a line or something, and you can't ever get back to what you were before."

After finding a photo of Dr. Knapp and Pam: "Who's the guy?" Mr. Llewellyn asked, and she could not speak. She did not have to; she had one of those expressive faces, and that was Mr. Llewellyn's business, noticing faces.

Fear. How strange to live with it, get used to it, even thrive on it. It was like a fever running in her, sharpening her perceptions and quickening her to an abnormal animation. How strange, how different from other fears. [...] Instead of the old abject helplessness, she had a feeling of zest, sometimes even of power.

EASY TO FIND? This one looks good. Published in both the UK and the US The Evil Wish was also reprinted in the US twice in two different paperback editions. My search of the most popular bookselling sites turned up a little under 20 copies of the book in various editions. Of all of these versions the most common copies found are in the Ace Books (G-541) paperback, most of them reasonably priced. Happy hunting!

FFB: Go, Lovely Rose - Jean Potts

US paperback edition (Berkley, 1961)

THE STORY: Coreyville is rid of its worst pest. Rose Anthony has fallen down her cellar stairs and suffered a fatal head wound. Rachel Buckmaster travels from Chicago to settle the estate with her nineteen year-old brother Hartley. Both are relieved the horrible housekeeper who was willed the house by their father and had helped raised the two after their mother's death is finally out of their lives. They plan to sell the place and each can be free of her miserable hold over them...and everyone else in town. But when Rose's look-alike sister Mrs. Pierce arrives to get to the bottom of the accident circumstances arise that lead her to believe Rose was murdered. She has Hartley arrested and is determined to see him on trial for murder. Rachel and young Dr. Craig are equally determined to foil Mrs. Pierce's vengeful plans by proving Hartley's innocence. But things do not look good for the boy.

THE CHARACTERS: At first we think that the story will be told primarily from Rachel's viewpoint, but it is Dr. Craig who mostly takes over the narrative. He acts as a sort of amateur detective while the primary murder investigation is in the hands of Sheriff Jeffreys and a police detective known only as Mr. Pigeon. But over the course of the novel we are allowed to know the thoughts of nearly everyone in the book with only Hartley consigned to the background. He spends most of the book in jail while the others do their best to look for the evidence they need to bring to the police and get him out.

Essentially it is the story of two families: the Buckmasters and the Bovards. In Rachel we see the beginnings of the new crime fiction heroine -- outspoken, willful, risk taking and thoroughly independent. Similarly, Beatrix "Bix" Bovard is the kind of teenager who seems more real than those normally depicted in fiction. Bix is a conflicted young woman on the verge of adulthood, incapable of reining in her volatile emotions, mimicking speech and dialogue from the movies, and generally looking for good time whenever possible. Her homelife is messy, her mother has rejected her and she has a difficult love/hate relationship with her father to whom we know she is utterly devoted. She's a breath of fresh air when she's unself-conscious and poignant in quiet moments when Potts allows us to enter her troubled mind burdened with familial conflicts and her presumed role as a loyal daughter.

Penguin UK paperback

Dr. Craig has his own share of troubles and secrets. Rumor and gossip follow in his wake about how he left his bad marriage and where his wife is now. A minor subplot concerns his attraction to Rachel who complicates matters with her suspicion of ulterior motives. Is the physician interested in helping Rachel clear her brother's name only to be physically closer to her?

The most fascinating person in the cast may be Francis Henshaw, dubbed Francie by the townspeople. In his youth Francie was a go-getter, a handsome young man engaged to marry a banker's daughter and voted most likely to succeed at anything by his high school classmates. That marriage was ruined by Rose and her evil machinations when Francie ended up chained to Rose for decades in a loveless marriage. Now long divorced from his "abomination" of a wife he has fallen into a pathetic hermit's existence. Running a second hand furniture shop he retreats into a world of dusty chairs, rusting metalwork and the cobwebs of his past. A candlestick turns out to be the murder weapon and has gone missing from Rose's home. It's mate was taken out of spite by Francie as part of the spoils of their divorce. Now Bix and Rachel are sure that both candlesticks are hidden somewhere in Francie's shop. The climax of the book involves an elaborate hunt for the murder weapon leading to violence and a showdown with Henshaw in the local hospital.

INNOVATIONS: Go Lovely Rose (1954) won Jean Potts the Best First Novel Edgar award for her debut mystery novel. It belongs to the burgeoning domestic suspense subgenre already becoming more prevalent and popular with the work of her contemporaries like Margaret Millar and Charlotte Armstrong, neither of whom had written their best books by 1954 making Potts' novel all the more noticeable in her debut. And its quite a performance for a first novel.

Potts helped forge the way for more women writers who were fascinated with dissecting the underbelly of rural and suburban life, rooting out callousness and seemingly inexplicable malicious behavior from which no good comes. As an examination of a horrible woman's vindictive lifestyle and its effect on not just two families, but an entire town, Go, Lovely Rose is easily one of the most arresting and perceptive crime novels of the 1950s. Potts succeeds in finding the balance between attack and compassion in her critique of the small-minded and malicious Rose and the long lasting wounds she has caused. The murder investigation, as is the case in many of these domestic suspense novels, is both a revelation and healing for all. But the restitution of well-being and equanimity for all families involved always comes at a costly price.

Go, Lovely Rose, US 1st edition (Scribner, 1954)

Potts has a writing style both colloquial and sophisticated with a talent for turning phrases that smack of real truth. With so many damaged people in the cast she is never patronizing or judgmental. Potts examines her characters from all angles often resorting to an omniscient narrative voice. She shines her unflattering spotlight on the most conflicted people like Bix and Rose's ex-husband Francis revealing them at their most vulnerable and truthful selves despite their outwardly deceptive ways. She has a fine ear for the way people talk, especially in her two teenage characters, "Bix" Bovard and Hartley Buckmaster. Bix in particular has the most unique speech pattern, kind of a junior 1950s Mrs. Malaprop, in her mispronunciation of ten dollar (scintillating with an "sk" sound) and a general misuse of words she's only seen in print but never heard.

At the heart of the story's mystery is Althea Bovard's unending grief for the death of her son, Ronnie. His ghost hovers over the Bovard house and his name is never far from his mother's lips. No conversation is free from the mention of some memory or wisp of Ronnie's short, difficult life. Ronnie has died more than 15 years ago when Bix was an infant and he is still Althea's favorite child. Primarily because Ronnie was severely disabled, born with Down syndrome though that genetic disorder is referred by its uglier 1950s terms -- Mongoloid and Mongolism. It is a rare writer of any period, let alone the 1950s, who gives us insight into the turmoil and struggles of a parent raising a child like Ronnie. Althea cannot forgive herself for not allowing him a longer life, for failing to find ways for him to adapt. Her grief is her punishment. Ronnie's death will prove to be the most significant aspect of the book, the key to gleaning everyone's unspoken resentments, and the ultimate answer to understanding why Rose Henshaw was such an odious woman.

QUOTES: The morning after Hartley's arrest Dr. Craig woke up late, realized it was Sunday, and lay for a few minutes contentedly surveying his cluttered little back room and his own large feet which stuck out beyond the end of the studio couch. He had forgotten to pull the shades again, and the winter sunshine lay in lemon-colored wafers on the dusty congoleum rug. Simultaneously the Methodist and Presbyterian church bells began ringing, loud and bossy-sounding, as if they were quarreling over the souls of Coreyville. They had something to quarrel about all right, thought Dr. Craig affably. A real prize package: the soul of a murderer.

The detective's name turned out to be Mr. Pigeon, of all things. And he couldn't have looked less like a detective if he had actually had pink feet and a fantail.

"So you're engaged to Etta Kincaid," Rose had said to him. "How nice. And you work down at the bank, for her father. How nice." Thus, with a flick of Rose's tongue, was love reduced to expediency.

"Oh, he's in it all right. He's up to his neck. As for motive -- well, you never can tell about these eccentric old birds. They get notions. They brood over some little thing, magnify it till it turns into what is, to them, perfectly good grounds for murder. It happens all the time -- people get killed for picking their teeth, or wearing the wrong color necktie."

THINGS I LEARNED: That mention of the congoleum rug in that first quote above was a puzzler for me. I always thought that congoleum was a floor tiling. It actually is an offshoot of a roofing material called Congo (supposedly named for the fact that asphalt used as a saturate in the roofing material came from that African region) created in 1902 by the United Roofing and Manufacturing Co. Here's the lowdown from the Congoleum Corporation's "History & Heritage" web page: "It soon became evident that the three foot wide strips of Congo roofing material could easily be used as floor runners to deaden noise and minimize dust and dirt collection in traffic patterns. It was also more durable than the rubber mats which were being used at the time. To differentiate between the Congo roofing and the flooring material, the flooring was given the name Congoleum." So really they were mats. But by the mid 1920s the company managed to make intricate decorative patterns in the material in order to mimic the look of an area rug. There's also another story about how congoleum and linoleum became cousins when two companies merged and the Congoleum Corporation simplified the costly and laborious manufacturing process for making linoleum. Click here for more on flooring material history and development.

THE AUTHOR: Jean Potts was born and raised in Nebraska. After graduation from Nebraska Wesleyan University she became a journalist for a Nebraska newspaper. Later she moved to New York to continue her journalism career and branching out into fiction for magazines. In 1946 her first story was published in Collier's ("The Other Woman") and she continued writing domestic melodramas for other "slicks" like McCall's, Cosmopolitan and Redbook throughout the 1950s and 1960s. After the great success of her award-winning debut mystery novel Go, Lovely Rose she focused more on crime fiction though she would occasionally write a "woman's story". Her crime fiction consists of a handful of short stories nearly all published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and fourteen novels. According to a Nebraska literary website Go, Lovely Rose had been optioned by a London movie company and her 1963 novel The Evil Wish (an Edgar nominee) was supposed to have been filmed with Barbara Stanwyck and Sir Ralph Richardson. Neither movie was made, nor can I find any confirmation that either piece of information is true. Jean Potts died in New York in 1999.

EASY TO FIND? As far as I know none of Jean Potts' novels have been reprinted. Few of her books turn up for sale in the used book market, but there are a handful of paperback copies of both the US and UK editions of Go, Lovely Rose. The US first edition is truly scarce and finding one with a dust jacket is next to impossible. I found no images online of the original first edition dust jacket proving that copies probably haven't been for sale for a long time. (BUT! thanks to Bill Pronzini I now have a photo of the US 1st edition DJ up there in the Innovations section.) Currently there is exactly one copy with a DJ offered for purchase from a Minnesota dealer but that's an ex-library copy.

Murder in the Closet Nominated for Edgar!

"O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"

I was so excited to read this afternoon that Murder in the Closet: Essays on Queer Clues in Crime Fiction before Stonewall (McFarland, 2016) has been nominated for an Edgar in the category Best Critical/Biographical Work.

Congratulations to Curt Evans who has been long overdue for recognition for his critical writing on the history of detective fiction, its developments and the lives of many under-appreciated and forgotten crime writers. Curt created the concept for Murder in the Closet and recruited over twenty writers from both international academia and the blogosphere. I was one of those contributors and delivered four essays, three of which made it to the final book. The final product is what I consider to be a landmark anthology of critical essays covering the treatment of LGBTQ themes in Golden Age detective fiction as well as discussing the lives of many gay and lesbian mystery writers like Hugh Wheeler & Richard Webb, Beverley Nichols, Patricia Highsmith, Nancy Spain and George Baxt.

I'm so proud to be part of this book and that Murder in the Closet has been recognized by the Mystery Writers of America. A more detailed post about the book, its contents, and its origin appears on our esteemed editor's blog The Passing Tramp.

FFB: Four & Twenty Bloodhounds - MWA Anthology, Anthony Boucher (ed.)

For years the Mystery Writers of America have been putting out an annual anthology usually with a theme of some sort. I'm not sure if this tradition is still being continued, but it certainly was a regular practice for the first ten or fifteen years of their existence. Four & Twenty Bloodhounds (1950) is one of the earliest collections, the third to be precise. From the clever title you might be able to figure out the theme. The book contains twenty-four stories each spotlighting a different series detective. They range from the very familiar (Ellery Queen, Gideon Fell, Hildegarde Withers) to those known only to diehard fans (Johnny Liddell, Merlini, Scott Jordan, Lt. Timothy Trant) to the utterly obscure (Nick Noble, Shadrack Arnold, Mortimer Death). Each story is preceded by some background history on the writer, the detective or both, sometimes some intriguing publication history as well all provided by the genre's first real fan boy, Anthony Boucher who oversaw the collection as editor and mystery maven.

This is one of the most varied and exciting mystery story anthologies I've ever come across. There are traditional detective stories, hardboiled pulp style thrillers, some suspense tales, and even two solve-it-yourself puzzles penned by Clayton Rawson and featuring the Great Merlini. The bulk of the stories were originally published in magazines between 1942-1947 with a few stories taken from short story collections like the Solar Pons tale which was first published in book format. Some date back to the late 1930s and were pulled from pulp magazines like Lawrence Blochman's story, "The Zarapore Beat" about a NYC patrolman assigned as a bodyguard to a visiting Maharajah, pulled from a 1936 issue of Argosy. Only three pieces appear to be originally written for this volume: "Three Strips of Flesh", the only Mary Finney short story, actually just a rewrite of the novel Devil in the Bush (1945); "Girl Overboard" by Q. Patrick is the first appearance of a story that was rewritten to take place in a hotel rather than a ocean liner because (Boucher tells us in his intro) it apparently resembled a true crime case that was fresh in the headlines when Wheeler and Webb sent it off to a magazine publisher, here we get the original shipboard mystery; and "Michael Shayne as I Know Him", the only non-fiction piece in the book, by Brett Halliday who gives us the inside dope on how Shayne came into being.

That last piece by Halliday is merely an elaboration on something that each author was asked to provide for the book. Following each story is a biographical sketch modeled after that registry of the elite, Who's Who. Each author was asked to provide their character's biographical details from birthplace to schooling, professional life to hobbies. Boucher then took that data and wrote up listings as they would appear in a mythical book called The Detective Who's Who. I took a photo of Hildegarde Withers' entry as an illustration (see below) because it's one of the more amusing ones. Look under her hobbies. Dianetics! Who knew the old schoolmarm was a follower of L. Ron Hubbard's cult?

I'm still reading this 400+ page anthology, one or two stories per day, so I can't really give you an overview of the best of the 24 stories. I liked the Solve-It-Yourself puzzles neither of which I figured out. Way too subtle for me, I guess. Four & Twenty Bloodhounds includes several other first appearances, too. Of those I'll highlight the only short story appearance in book format of Rachel Murdock whose debut was in the novel The Cat Saw Murder, the only appearance in a short story of The Mysterious Traveller ("The Big Money" by Robert A. Arthur) who was created for a radio series; and a rare short story --a prizewinner in EQMM no less-- featuring Jeff and Haila Troy ("Two over Par" by Kelley Roos, set at a golf country club), one of the married couple sleuthing teams whose adventures are worth reading. Lots of detectives who I had never heard of turn up in these pages. Among them are Ken Crossen's Mortimer Death, aptly enough a mortician turned amateur sleuth, and Shadrock Arnold, created by pulp fiction writer Verne Chute, one of the three correspondence school detectives in the genre and probably the least known of that trio.

EASY TO FIND? I was surprised to discover that this book was reprinted back in 1985 by Carroll & Graf bringing the total of available editions to at least three. Online booksellers offer multiple copies of all three: US & UK hardcover, and the C&G paperback reprint. It's a book that diehard fans of detective fiction definitely ought to read if not own. The breadth of the stories, the unusual characters, and the rarity of some of the lesser known detectives in short story appearances make this anthology a must have for real devotees of the genre.

FFB: Here's Blood in Your Eye - Manning Long

THE STORY: Louise "Liz" Boykin is an artist's model by choice. She's trying hard to become part of the artist community but lives on the fringes of acceptance. She's getting over the recent break up with her old fiance who dumped her and dealing with her uptight, ultra conservative, new fiance who is not much of an improvement. When she is invited to a swank artists' party at the home of married painters and her current employers, Flora and Whitfield Linton, she feels she is finally part of the in crowd. But when her ex-fiance Melchior Thews turns up violently murdered, circumstances continually point to Liz as the prime suspect. With the help of Gordon Parrott, investigator for the Manhattan DA's office, her name is cleared, but not before she is implicated in at least two more deaths.

THE CHARACTERS Here's Blood in Your Eye (1941) is the first of the Liz Parrott books. Knowing this ahead of time spoils a bit of the final chapter where Liz Boykin discovers she will become Liz Parrott. But not much of a spoiler really. Any reader well versed in detective novels jammed packed with romantic subplots and with a leading character who has left a trail of ex-fiances behind her knows that as soon as Liz meets Gordon she has found her third and final fiance-to-be. With this one reading Liz Parrott has become one of my favorite woman amateur sleuths of the 1940s. She's got a contemporary edge to her and she's got so many conflicts within herself she makes for a unique character. It helps that she's got a tough side to her and a wicked sense of humor in her narration. I could easily see these books made into movies with Barbara Stanwyck in the lead even if Liz is supposed to be more ravishingly beautiful.

The rest of the cast is made up of equally brash and snobbish characters. They all sport the kinds of names that reek of the kind of urbane Manhattan sophisticates that turn up in mysteries set in NYC. In addition to the preposterously named victim we have Husted Breamer, Liz' laughably priggish current fiance; Clare Edmiston and Barry DuBois, an older woman engaged to an investment broker playboy; Grace Leigh a dangerously wronged woman with blackmail on her mind; Leonard Foxe-Macon who first sees Liz when her gun falls out of her purse in front of Melchior's apartment; and Marcella Payne, a wealthy art patron and one of the many ex-lovers of the murder victim. Even the cops have unusual names like Inspector Langmede who is convinced that Liz has a part in Melchior's death and all the violence that follows in its wake.

INNOVATIONS: The narrative voice of Liz Boykin (soon to be Parrott) is loaded with zingers and fine ironic writing that never descends into the jokey wiseacre stuff of this era. I could fill this entire post with great quotes but it's better to discover them within the context of the story. Her edgy voice has a purpose too because she's trying to find her way in life, sorting out what she wants and who she wants and most importantly of all trying to preserve her identity and personality without having to sacrifice her fiercely independent ways. Getting over her previous engagement which is tinged with a personal shame and a terrible incident that still haunts her provides some conflict to the story as Melchior exploits her past, writes it up in a letter and attempts to blackmail Liz and ruin her chances at marriage with Hue Breamer who disapproves of everything from her posing partially nude in a artist's studio to her owning a cat.

The plot, overflowing with letters used for blackmail purposes and a string of ex-fiances and ex-lovers in Melchior Thews' amorous past, is perhaps a bit too complicated for its own good. The large cast of characters, especially several women who appear to be clones of one another, is often a bit hard to keep track of. Nevertheless Long carries off the telling of this complex story with panache and verve. There are plenty of incidents to keep the plot moving, some decent fair play detection, and a handful of clues dropped early on in the story to point the reader to the somewhat surprising killer.

THE AUTHOR: All I could find out about Manning Long comes from a French Wikipedia article. She was born in Virginia, lived in Washington DC, New York and New Jersey and eventually settled on a farm back in Amherst, Virginia. She was married to Peter Williams, a ceramist and sculptor who created the bust of Edgar Allan Poe used for the MWA Edgar awards.

EASY TO FIND? This title is rather scarce, but later titles in the Liz Parrott series are comparatively common. None have been reprinted in contemporary editions nor did I find any eBooks out there. The first couple of books in the series were published in the US, UK, Canada, and France so finding a copy may be easy for an assiduous book hunter. Here's Blood in Your Eye is one of the earliest Harlequin titles dating back to the days when they published all sorts of genre fiction before turning exclusively to romance novels. Manning Long's first mystery novel is Harlequin #10 first published in a 1948 edition with the suitably lurid cover shown above.

Liz Parrott Detective Novels
Here's Blood in Your Eye (1941)
Vicious Circle (1942)
False Alarm (1943)
Bury The Hatchet (1944)
Short Shrift (1945)
Dull Thud (1947)
Savage Breast (1948)

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This is late because I'm in Alaska and it took me an entire day to fix my phone so that it would work way up here. Sprint and roaming call headaches. I needed to download a software update that finally I managed to do when we were in a hotel with decent WiFi. Expect more delays over the next ten days.

FFB: Breathe No More - Marion Randolph

THE STORY: At the start of Breathe No More (1940) N. B. Guardet has summoned friends and family to a weekend celebration during which he plans to make an announcement. There's plenty of French food, an exotic frozen dessert especially ordered from a local caterer, and champagne is flowing. The new air conditioning ordered only two weeks prior is cooling the mansion and keeping the Connecticut summer heat at bay. Until the system fails and everyone feels groggy and N.B. is found dead in his bedroom. Asphyxiation is the cause. He has breathed his last. Unfortunate accident as a result of the new air conditioning? No, my friends. A cleverly engineered and very bizarre murder.

THE CHARACTERS: N. B. Guardet has modeled himself on a very famous person. Let's see if you can tell who. Guardet lives in a palatial estate called Malmaison furnished almost exclusively with early 19th century French antiques. His two daughters are named Josephine and Marie-Louise. And even his short stature of only five feet three inches matches that of his idol. Got it? Yes, those first two initials stand for Napoleon Bonaparte. Like his namesake Guardet rules his family like a military man. Upon his death his two daughters feel released from his tyranny and openly confess their hatred of him. In fact, nearly everyone from the servants to his business associates admits to similar feelings ranging from tolerable dislike to outright enmity. It's left to Jeremy Gaunt, Josephine's publisher friend who is quickly rediscovering a deep attachment to the elder daughter, and Dr. Knowlton to investigate the accident and prove murder was done.

Knowlton is the coroner in Rowdean, CT but he oddly behaves more like a homicide detective. Since the primary reason for the investigation is tied to the inquest, and finding proof of whether or not the strange accident that befell Guardet is actually a murder, his behavior in the context of this novel seems somewhat justified. Still, with the few policemen taking direct orders from a coroner it's a bit unsettling that Dr. Knowlton has so much clout and is the primary representative of the law here. He's sort of a 1940s era Quincy, M.E.

Among the other suspects are the drop dead gorgeous butler William Fish, who is the object of desire of three of the women; an unctuous overweight lawyer; and Guardet's middle-aged fiancee whose money may have been the primary draw for the impending engagement.

True crime inspiration for the deadly means
1st edition (Doubleday Doran, 1937)

INNOVATIONS: The murder method (which I won't discuss in detail) is perhaps the most ingenious part of the book. The same means was used in a very well known mystery by John Dickson Carr published in 1941. Obviously, if I give you the name of Carr's book that will spoil much of the reading if you're not familiar with it. Interestingly, Randolph actually beat the master at his own game by using the method one year earlier. Though it's scientific plausibility as a means of murder is described in detail Randolph seems to have got the idea from a true crime book. In the plot the murderer has found a review copy of a book that Jeremy Gaunt was about to release called The Doctor Looks at Murder. This is a real book published in 1937 and written by M. Edward Marten who was Deputy Chief Medical Examiner in New York. The book turns up in an unlikely place with the stamp of Gaunt's publishing house inside the front cover. Trying to find out who recently visited his office and who might have been the thief forms part of the murder investigation.

Randolph also employs a standard detective novel motif known as the tabulation scene -- basically, the recap which occurs midway through the book. Here it is presented in reverse chronological order and written out, at the suggestion of Dr. Knowlton, as a study of the many coincidences that occurred on the night of Guardet's death. The idea was originally suggested by Gaunt when he talked of the use of too many coincidences in fiction as being "unreal" and that perhaps all of the coincidences they have encountered as sleuths might in fact be part of a deviously engineered plan.

She also employs another of my personal favorites of the many detective novel motifs of the Golden Age which unfortunately must remain unnamed. It's this aspect of the plot that almost qualifies the book for the label of "impossible crime mystery", more than that I cannot say without ruining it all. I will mention for diehard fans that the best practitioners of this motif were two British writers whose best work was in the 1930s: Vernon Loder and Anthony Wynne. Both of these writers, especially the unjustly forgotten and underrated Loder, have been written up in great detail on this blog.

THE BONUS: Like a real good old-fashioned murder mystery there are these very cool floor plans that serve as endpapers.  For some reason on the second floor plan where the name Gaunt should appear there is the name Jones!  Did Randolph originally name her publishing sleuth Jeremy Jones? Later changing his name to Gaunt just prior to publication?  We may never know. In any case it's a pretty egregious error for a top line publisher like Henry Holt.

You can click to enlarge to see both of these plans up close and personal.

THE AUTHOR: Time to reveal the secret identity of the writer. "Marion Randolph" is the alias for Marie Rodell, a prominent literary woman who began her career as an assistant editor at William Morrow eventually landing as mystery fiction director at Duell, Sloan and Pearce, home of Lawrence Treat, H.H. Holmes (Anthony Boucher), Lenore Glen Offord and Dorothy B. Hughes, among many others. The DJ blurb for Breathe No More says of this find of the season: "We discovered [the novel] on the desk of a mystery editor for another New York City publishing enterprise. It turned out that the author-editor was reluctant to publish a self-created story. So Marion Randolph is not the author's real name..." Rodell later left editing to start her own business as a literary agent. She eventually was responsible for publishing Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and in 1958 the first non-fiction work by Martin Luther King, Jr. Notable for crime fiction fans is that she served as secretary for the Mystery Writers of America for a brief stint in the 1940s and wrote a text book on crime fiction, Mystery Fiction: Theory and Technique.  In 1949 she was awarded a Special Edgar from the MWA for her editorship of the "Regional Mystery" series. She said of the statuette that Poe's face reminded her of her first husband John Rodell, a ne'er do well playwright, of whom she rarely spoke and never kindly (Linda Lear, p. 153). More on Rodell can be found in Sarah Weinman's web article "The Women Who Edited Crime Fiction" and in Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature by Linda Lear, which includes intriguing biographical detail on Rodell and her working relationship and friendship with Carson.

As the Henry Holt publicity people have called this book their "find of the season" so will I. Breathe No More is a real detective novel aficionado's mystery. It has it all: a baffling murder with a truly unusual method; cleverly planted clues, not too complex yet not too obvious; all sorts of timetables and alibi breaking business; a pair of sharply defined detectives -- one amateur, one professional; two nicely done love interest subplots that are directly related to the investigation; nifty floor plan endpapers and other illustrations that serve as fair play clues; and a cast of eccentric characters whose dialog and speech also reveals their character. Overall, this debut mystery novel hits all the right notes with resounding music that may have you cheering for more. I know I'll be reading her other books hoping they'll be two more for the Randolph Hit Parade.

Detective Novels by "Marion Randolph"
Breathe No More (1940)
This'll Kill You (1940)
Grim Grow the Lilacs (1941)

FFB: Act of Fear - Michael Collins

Act of Fear (1966) is the first book in a series of private eye novels featuring Dan Fortune, the one-armed detective created by Dennis Lynds under his "Michael Collins" pseudonym. This is the first I've read of Fortune and so I can't speak for the other novels but his origin of how he lost his arm when he was a teenage hooligan and why he's reluctant to tell the truth about it provides a fascinating basis for who Dan Fortune becomes in his adult years. The setting for the most part is 1960s Chelsea in lower west side Manhattan and Lynds paints an eye-opening portrait of that neighborhood long before it was turned into a gentrified haven for well-to-do New Yorkers.

Fortune's client in this story is not the typical client any private eye is used to. He's Pete Vitanza, a young man hooked on fancy sports cars and devoted to his best friend Jo-Jo Olson who has disappeared. Vitanza is worried it might have something to do with some tough guys who were in the neighborhood a few days ago. Pete doesn't have a lot of money but he's willing to pay Fortune and he pleads his case giving some hazy reasons why he's avoiding the police. It's enough to convince Fortune to take the case, albeit begrudgingly. Soon Dan Fortune finds that Jo-Jo's skipping town is tied to the mugging of a cop and the murder of a showgirl. And that Pete has a lot more on his mind than seeming loyalty for a missing friend. The engaging plot takes Fortune to some seedy night clubs sporting names like Monte's Kat Klub and The Blue Cellar, a mechanic's garage, and finally to Flamingo, Florida where he confronts his quarry only to learn he's been followed by some New York heavies.

Dan Fortune is one of the new breed of private eye that started to appear in the late 1950s. He's not an out an out tough guy. He's got a lot of humanity and he genuinely cares about people. The book is filled with his philosophical musings about the effect of crime on a neighborhood, how growing up in tough unsympathetic Chelsea can harden a person. We learn of his own teen age life as a juvenile delinquent, the consequences of his actions, and the loss of his arm that is a constant reminder of his past. Even with all the thuggery and villainy from the bad guys Fortune still takes to the time to understand why they became such rotten apples.

I especially liked this observation:

Maybe under pressure we all revert to what is easy, to what we have rejected in our lives. The way a gentle man will often become the most violent when violence is forced on him. As if the thing rejected has been lurking all the time and waiting for its chance to burst out when our painfully constructed rational defenses are down.

Lynds has said in an interview with Ed Lynskey: "I did not set out to write a detective series, but I decided I wanted to write books that probed into the society we live in. We all must relate to others and how we do that determines the kind of society, country, world and universe we will have." Act of Fear gives you a lot to think about and I'm eager to revisit Dan Fortune and get a few more wise words from this world-weary but wholly likeable private eye with a soul.

For more about Dennis Lynds and his writing career see this website and be sure to visit the Dan Fortune page at Thrilling Detective website for the full list of books and more insight into this great fictional detective.

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This fulfills the "Book written by a writer using a pseudonym" for the Silver Age Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge (space R5). I haven't  forgotten my pledge to fill both cards! I'm just slowing down a bit in my posts.

NEW STUFF: World of Trouble - Ben H Winters

World of Trouble
by Ben H. Winters
Quirk Books
ISBN: 978-1-59474-685-7
316 pp. $14.95
July 15, 2014

Usually I avoid dystopian and apocalyptic fiction. I'm not all that interested in the dark imagination of writers showing human behavior at its most hedonistic and desperate. I live in a chaotic city and I ride public transportation. I get enough of this on a daily basis without the fear of the end of the world literally looming over my head.

Ben H. Winters, however, in his final installment of his "Last Policeman" trilogy has dreamed up a world facing inevitable doom that is plausible in its mix of indulgence and dread. As many readers already know the premise behind this trilogy is Earth's impending collision with asteroid 2011GV1 predicted to strike the planet sometime in October and all of civilization is counting down to that impact date. Over the course of the first two books we have seen towns all across the United States disintegrate in lawlessness and paranoia. But periodically, Winters adds a very human touch in his depiction of this end of the world scenario. Drunks and drug addicts feast on roasted chicken while blaring classic rock until Doomsday.  This is a world where "Bucket List" criminals, fantasists who have always wanted to loot and rape and murder, can now do so without fear of arrest, trial and incarceration.  "Last Call" parties are the trendy way to go out big and those revellers brave enough to take part in one can indulge in one last party cruise before they throw in the towel on Life and allow their cruise director to blow them up at sea. Now there's mass suicide with a twist! Crime and death and traps are omnipresent. And Hank Palace, Winters' last policeman hero, is looking for his sister in this final volume.

In the previous two books Winters was finding both his voice and his way around a new genre.  Though The Last Policeman won an Edgar, and deservedly so for its sheer inventiveness, his work with the structure and tropes of the detective novel were rudimentary and at times very disappointing. In Countdown City, the second book, he abandoned the detective novel format instead opting for an adventure thriller that focussed more on science fiction elements than crime.  Finally, in World of Trouble Winters seems to have found his footing. He treads more assuredly in the land of the detective novel and there are fine touches of retro detection. Palace is forced to resort to the old fashioned methods in this world where the internet has been destroyed and computers and crime labs are useless. He carries with him a magnifying glass and often finds himself examining clues and evidence like the most hackneyed of comic detectives. Yet, in this dystopian world of ravaged shopping malls and citizens armed with high powered rifles a policeman with a magnifying glass is ironically original and inventive.

Ben H. Winters (photo: Quirk Books)

Probably the best parts of the book are when Winters allows Palace long scenes with some of the most endearing yet dangerous supporting characters in the trilogy.  Notable are the young couple living in an RV who befriend Hank Palace and invite him to their daily chicken roast even while pointing automatic rifles at him throughout his visit.  An extended sequence on an Amish farm is the highlight of the book when Hank meets up with Atlee Miller, a man who has stooped to lying and kidnapping to protect his family from the truth of what is in store for the entire planet.
  
The story itself is the age old cherchez la femme plot with Palace trying to locate his sister and his determination to solve one last mysterious murder and learn the identity of the victim. The plot is well done, the detection is genuine and surprisingly fair play, and there are an ample amount of twists and surprises. World of Trouble was well worth the wait and its reassuring to see a young crime writer returning to the fundamentals of the mystery novel and concocting an intriguing and moving novel of raw human emotion. Often in reading these types of trilogies the reader finds as he progresses to the last volume not satisfaction but a let down in an anticlimactic conclusion. Winters has lived up to the promise of his first award winning novel and has delivered a stunning conclusion that mixes the mystery of crime with the mystery of the human heart. As the characters face the inevitable end one of the most powerful images is that of one human reaching out for the hand of another. Winters reminds us that -- Apocalypse or not -- in the end all we really have is one another.

FFB: Miss Fenny (1957) - Charity Blackstock

Two teenage boys skipping out on their English class on the last day of school come across a horrible sight while walking through Braxham Wood -- a skeleton half buried in a pile of leaves and wearing only one woman's shoe. They immediately report their grisly discovery to their teacher Tim Brennan who then calls Sergeant Hawkes and soon the entire village of Braxham Parva is caught up in a murder investigation.  Who was this woman? How long had she been dead? Why had no one reported her missing?

Miss Fenny (1957) was later retitled in its US publication The Woman in the Woods and is better known under that second title. The first title refers to the seemingly imaginary friend of a bedridden crippled boy named Daniel. The two of them become the most important characters in the book. Daniel is a petulant, demanding eight year-old, the only son of Nicole Sherratt who spends much of the book fretting over her son and pining for her dead husband. Brennan has been seeing Nicole for several months now and has developed a bond with Daniel. He tells the boy stories, creates nightly drawings for him, and listens to Daniel's fanciful tales of Miss Fenny, trying to win over Nicole in the process but frustrated repeatedly by her obsessive thoughts of her dead husband.

Little do Brennan and Nicole realize that Miss Fenny is far from imaginary. It doesn't take long for the reader to recognize that Daniel at one time befriended the woman whose skeleton was found in the woods. She was indeed murdered and the identity of her killer does not remain hidden for long. The killer also has daily visits with Daniel and when he keeps hearing the stories of Miss Fenny and the facts that Daniel unwittingly reveals in the conversations he has had with her the killer fears he may be found out. The story then becomes not so much a murder investigation but a suspense tale. As in the story of the boy who cried wolf the reader keeps hoping that the adults will finally see the truth in what Daniel has to say about Miss Fenny. Until they do the entire village is at the mercy of a killer who will not stop at more murder to keep his one crime secret.

Blackstock seems to me to be the missing link in the British school of suspense writing bridging the post-war detective novel with the modern day crime or suspense novel. Prior to her appearance on the mystery scene it was the American women writers like Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, and Usula Curtiss who were pioneering domestic suspense and malice domestic novels. Blackstock brings to mind modern writers like her fellow countrywomen Ruth Rendell and Minette Walters in the use of sardonic humor and the creation of loathsome characters ripe for satiric attacks like the haughty racist Lady Grale, the prattling hypochondriac Miss Brooks, and the vile physician Dr. Heslop more interested in using the contents of his doctor's bag to harm than cure. Among the British women crime writers I can think only of Blackstock's contemporaries Shelley Smith and Joan Fleming who were writing similar tales of menace and murder at the time of the publication of Miss Fenny. What Blackstock does in Miss Fenny, however, is rather remarkable. She has written a story in which not just a violent crime but death itself has an inexorable affect on an entire village. And she does so with the macabre effects of a modern Poe.

Nicole is truly haunted by her husband, almost as if she is in thrall to his ghost. Brennan cannot compete for her love as she is more in love with a memory than anyone alive, including her son. Yet he too finds himself haunted. There is a chilling scene in which Brennan realizes that the skeleton belongs to a woman he held, caressed, and kissed. Linking the corrupted skeleton to a living being and then connecting that to a memory of a tender sexual encounter is something straight out of Poe.

Dr. Heslop, the cruel physician caring for Daniel; Rose, the doctor's simple-minded mistress and office assistant; Matthew Plumtree, an effete writer battling between cowardice and heroism are also key players in the drama and all have had their past encounters with the woman Daniel has come to know as Miss Fenny. When the identity of the skeleton finally comes to light and Daniel's stories are seen to be truth and not fiction it is only a matter of time before the cowards will make bold confrontations and the killer will strike out again.

Anthony Boucher, champion of new crime fiction writers of immense talent, was thoroughly impressed with Blackstock's novel when it first appeared. He noted her "technically faultless" construction, solid characters of "believable complexity" and an "evocative hint of fantasy" in the person of Miss Fenny. But notably as I have mentioned above he writes "...there is a spell of the sharp immediacy of death itself, such as is too rarely cast in our novels of violet crime."  Contemporary writers have since capitalized on this crucial aspect of crime fiction, but it was Charity Blackstock who perhaps was one of the earliest pioneers to recognize the dread power Death has over the living. Her ruminations on this conceit captured in evocative writing and impassioned emotions make Miss Fenny -- or The Woman in the Woods -- a book worthy of your attention.

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Reading Challenge update: Golden Age Bingo card, space O6 - "Book with a Woman in the Title"

FFB: Just an Ordinary Day - Shirley Jackson

The introduction to Just an Ordinary Day (1997) written by two of Shirley Jackson's grown children tells how they received a box of manuscripts, carbon copies and typewritten sheets of unpublished stories as well as the original manuscript for The Haunting of Hill House and character notes for that novel. The two siblings began to think about putting together a volume of their mother's unpublished work.  In doing research they uncovered even more published work that had never been reprinted in book form.

Just An Ordinary Day brings together thirty vignettes and stories that were never published in Jackson's lifetime in the first half of the book. A second section reprints an additional twenty-two stories that originally appeared in a variety of magazines between 1943 and 1968. Though mostly women's magazines bought Jackson's stories I was surprised to see among the list of publications Harper's, Vogue, Gentleman's Quarterly, and Playboy. Three stories were purchased by Fantasy and Science Fiction but I have to say the fantasy content is very slight and none of them would I classify as science fiction by the widest leap of imagination. I can't believe they made it to that revered magazine. Clearly, Jackson was able to appeal to a wide audience even if her themes and topics seemed to be very similar as I moved along from story to story.

I'll admit I did not read this volume cover to cover. I randomly selected stories based on the titles or by the magazine in which the story was originally published. Admittedly this was not a very good way to discover what I wanted to read -- Jackson's darker fiction dealing with crime, the supernatural or domestic suspense tales. I hit gold with only three stories. "Nightmare" tells a story of surreal paranoia when a woman feels she is the subject of a bizarre advertising gimmick that seems to have taken over the city. An eerily evocative supernatural tale of people trapped in a painting ("The Story We Used to Tell") is a brief but chilling example of Jackson's gift for making the flesh creep. "The Possibility of Evil" about an anonymous letter writer was my favorite story of the batch I selected.

While perusing the other stories I learned that the bulk of Jackson's fiction was about suburban life, married couples and troublesome children ("Arch Criminal" and "I.O.U."), the problem with gossip in small towns ("The Very Strange House Next Door"), the malaise of housewifery and the desire to escape ("Maybe It Was the Car"), the dependence on neighbors for help and advice ("When Things Get Dark" and "I.O.U." again) and other similar themes. But in all of them Jackson managed to undercut the mundane and the superficial with an uneasiness and a cruelty that was often disturbing.

One of the most interesting things that Laurence Hyman and Sarah Hyman Stewart have done with this material is to point out the way Jackson liked to recycle plot ideas and even characters from story to story. The most fascinating juxtaposition is of two versions of the same story called "The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith" in one version and "The Mystery of the Murdered Bride" in the other. In the former the story is more fleshed out, more direct with little ambiguity except for perhaps the very last line. In the second, and probably the first version, the story is vague and hazy. It seems unpolished. There's too much left to suggestion and the final sequence is just muddled. Jackson is trying to plant the idea that Mrs. Smith is oblivious that her new husband might be a wife killer with a couple of bodies buried in his past. I think the version called "The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith" is the more successful of the two. Similarly, the entire plot of "Nightmare" was lifted and inserted as a minor incident in "The Omen", one of her stories published in Fantasy and Science Fiction that to my mind is representative of neither genre.

Her darker fiction is not well represented in this hefty volume. There is an ambiguous ghost story that has traces of crime fiction in "The Missing Girl" and "The Friends" is a nasty story of busybody Ellen who decides to put an end to the adulterous affair of her friend Marjorie by commandeering Marjorie's free time. But it is "The Possibility of Evil" where I found Jackson to be at her shining best. Published in the December 18, 1965 issue of The Saturday Evening Post (mistakenly noted as 1968 in this book) we get to know the inner workings of superficially kindly old woman Miss Strangeworth who in her spare time writes poison pen letters to the neighbors she is smiling to on a daily basis. When she has a mishap mailing a batch of those letters and some children help her by hand delivering a letter she dropped Miss Strangeworth gets a bitter taste of her own "good intentions". Deservedly, in 1966 "The Possibility of Evil" won Jackson the Edgar for "Best Short Story". This is the kind of story I've always felt was Jackson's strength. Though she may show traces of the underbelly of apparently peaceful suburban life in her more lighthearted domestic tales it is this kind of portrait of Adela Strangeworth that is her hallmark in American fiction.

FFB: Room to Swing - Ed Lacy

I have a thing about the Edgar Awards. I happen to think a lot of the award winners didn't deserve that little statue of Poe. Only occasionally do I come across a truly worthy Edgar winning mystery novel. Room to Swing (1958) won the Edgar for Best Novel. It's most definitely one of the deserving winners. Not only that - it's a little known, little discussed, hardly reviewed at all, landmark novel in the history of crime fiction by a writer who deserves a lot more attention.

Toussaint Marcus Moore is a private detective hired by Kay Robbens, a TV executive, to shadow the subject of a soon to be aired reality TV show that sounds exactly like a 1950s version of "America's Most Wanted." The man, Robert Thomas, is wanted by Ohio police for a rape and assault of a teenage girl and Kay know he is currently living under an assumed name in Manhattan. Moore is to keep an eye on Thomas and make sure he doesn't leave New York until the show is aired. Then Kay hopes some TV viewer will spot Thomas, notify police, and he'll be arrested thus validating the purpose of the TV show and insuring it has a long run. But Thomas ends up dead, Moore is framed for the murder, and he flees the city. Moore is determined to clear his name, but in order to do that he needs to uncover who killed Thomas and why. He figures it's all linked to the rape case.

His travels take him to Bingston, a small Ohio town on the Kentucky border, where he holes up in a makeshift boarding house owned by one of the few black couples in town. This is good for Moore because as a black man himself with an opinionated, unguarded way of speaking he was nearly run out of town by the bigoted police officers in Bingston. He finds an ally of sorts in Frances Russell who immediately sees through his bad impression of an itinerant jazz musician. She will serve as his captive audience (and later a sometime assistant) as he tells his tale to her in a series of flashbacks.

What's most remarkable about this book is that with all its talk about race relations, its depiction of a complex black man in the 1950s fed up with being called "Boy" by nearly every white man he meets, disgusted with segregated hotels and restaurants and entire portions of cities, and "whites who can sure say the jerkiest things" is that it was written by a white Jewish New Yorker. Leonard Zinberg lived in Harlem all his life. Before creating his private detective (named after two prominent activists in Black history, I might add) Zinberg had always been interested in race relations and leftist politics. As early as 1935 he wrote a story titled "Lynch Him!" a hint at his strong feelings about the treatment of blacks. Later he wrote several stories about boxers, one of them Walk Hard, Talk Loud (1940) is the story of a black boxer and his relationship with a white woman who also happen s to be a Communist activist.

Room to Swing is a fantastic book. Well written, smart without being smart alecky, prescient and insightful in ways that make it seem like you are reading a book written only a few years old rather than decades old. The mystery is a good one if not one that has jaw dropping surprises, but what makes the book noteworthy are the well drawn characters and Zinberg's insights into black/white relations. Touie is one of the best of the earliest of the black private eyes. It's a shame he only appeared in two books.

For more on Ed Lacy I suggest you read Ed Lynskey's well written and very detailed article at Mystery*File. A review of the follow-up book The Moment of Untruth featuring Toussaint Moore in his second and last appearance in an even better constructed mystery than the one here, will be posted tomorrow. Ed Lacy is one writer I'm glad I discovered and whose books I am rapidly acquiring and reading with great interest.