Best Vintage Mystery Reprint 2022, part two

 The nomination process continues across the vintage mystery blogosphere this weekend.  Others have theirs posted.  I was away the entire day yesterday, up in Milwaukee to see their version of A Christmas Carol, a delightful adaptation with some stagecraft wizardry I'd never seen before, that was partly inspired by the British Christmas pantomime tradition (the artistic director of Milwaukee Repertory, Mark Clements, is originally is from the UK). Anyway, here I am a day late with my second offering for this year's award for the Best Reprint of the Year or the ROY as it has become known among the  mystery novel cognoscenti.

Once again I've picked a book I've already reviewed in previous years.

No Questions Asked by Edna Sherry

Seems it takes a long time for my tastes in books to appear in new editions.  Stark House Press has managed to snag rights to a rare Edna Sherry book that has never seen a reprint since it first appeared back in 1949. The new edition includes the requisite introduction by our own Curt Evans and gives great detail into Sherry's interesting life, both personal and professional.  He traces her writing roots back to her pulp fiction days and mentions her partnering with two male writers (as I did oh so cursorily in one of my Sherry posts) while also offering up fascinating biographical tidbits.

I first read and reviewed the book back in September 2021. Here are a few paragraphs from what I wrote:

Sherry’s novel is a brilliant mixture of multiple subgenres, a well-oiled machine of suspense and complex conflicted characters. Steve [Lake, the cop protagonist] is enraged with jealousy on one page then overcome with guilt on the next. His snarky and mean spirited lieutenant, a bully of a rival back at the station house, is an opportunistic cop eager for the captain’s desk at the start of the book then morphs into one of Steve’s allies by the end. Vicki [Steve's wife] is torn between telling her husband the truth and continuing with her weakening deceit. The novel is also an intriguing study of the tacit policemen’s code of honor and what cops will do for one another when one of their own is implicated in behavior that could ruin his career and life. In that regard this book is more timely than ever and might be cause for debate among those highly critical of such unwritten and questionable ethics.

No Questions Asked would have made an excellent film or TV episode. Brimming with cinematic details, excellent characters, and the requisite twisty plot peppered with unexpected moments this is a second novel that shows a real pro at work. Some enterprising Hollywood type ought to get a hold of this still resonant and suspenseful novel and could make it as memorable as Sherry's debut novel Sudden Fear that in its cinematic adaptation garnered four Academy Award nominations.

The novel mixes traditional detective novel structure and plotting with espionage and inverted detective novel narrative. We get a mistrustful wife, jealous cop, rival cop looking to shame his colleague and take his place as captain, a Red Scare subplot with a dash of spy stuff, and because this is an Edna Sherry novel some colorful scenes at the horse racetrack. I enjoyed this book quite a bit for its intriguing mix of subgenres and the action oriented story.  I'm glad Stark House brought it back from the limbo of Out-of-Printdom and hope it gains a wide audience. Edna Sherry deserves to be known for all her work not just her debut, Sudden Fear, an excellent crime novel in its own right.

FFB: No Questions Asked - Edna Sherry

Police procedural gives way to domestic melodrama then morphs into a full blown cat-and-mouse thriller in No Questions Asked (1949), Edna Sherry’s sophomore novel in name only. No “wise fool” at all Sherry shows the hand of a master in her second crime novel by expertly plotting two simultaneous storylines that converge in a thrilling climax putting two rival cops practically at each other’s throats.

Steve Lake is a veteran cop, now captain of a homicide squad in Manhattan. As the story opens he is in charge of a murder investigation that smacks of Russian spies and stolen documents a triple combination that is sure to threaten “The American Way.” As if that wasn’t enough on his plate Steve is beginning to question his young wife’s fidelity when he catches her in multiple lies about how she has been spending her afternoons. Early on we get pitch perfect sampling of urban cop detection when in showing how Steve’s inherent mistrustfulness is infiltrating his home life Sherry has the cop trap his wife with easily proven misstatements about what happened at the horse track she claimed to have visited. Sherry must have loved horse racing for this is the first of three crime novels to feature that pastime so popular throughout the late 1940s and into the 1960s. So upset is Steve with Vicki’s obvious and flimsy lies that he begins to follow his wife to find out what she’s doing when she claims to have taken a train to Belmont betting on horses that don’t even exist. When he sees Vicki in the company of a Slevna, a well-known concert pianist and the man who has been tutoring her musician brother, Steve is enraged. Not so much angry that his 22 year-old wife is cheating on him, but furious that she’s doing it with a man old enough to be her father.

Mistrust leads to paranoia which in turn gives way to wild imaginings based on this one eyewitness account of Vicki seen with Slevna. Soon Steve Lake finds himself contemplating a violent revenge. But as with most revenge plots in well written crime novels -- and this one surely is -- the spontaneous plan, ostensibly foolproof in Steve’s crazed mind, backfires spectacularly. As the law of crime fiction irony would have it Steve is also faced with the outrageous coincidence that Slevna is involved in the murder and subsequent corporate espionage his team is investigating.  More than that basis for an intricately constructed and intriguing plot ought not to be revealed.

Sherry’s novel is a brilliant mixture of multiple subgenres, a well-oiled machine of suspense and complex conflicted characters. Steve is enraged with jealousy on one page then overcome with guilt on the next. His snarky and mean spirited lieutenant, a bully of a rival back at the station house, is an opportunistic cop eager for the captain’s desk at the start of the book then morphs into one of Steve’s allies by the end. Vicki is torn between telling her husband the truth and continuing with her weakening deceit. The novel is also an intriguing study of the tacit policemen’s code of honor and what cops will do for one another when one of their own is implicated in behavior that could ruin his career and life. In that regard this book is more timely than ever and might be cause for debate among those highly critical of such unwritten and questionable ethics.

No Questions Asked would have made an excellent film or TV episode. Brimming with cinematic details, excellent characters, and the requisite twisty plot peppered with unexpected moments this is a second novel that shows a real pro at work. Some enterprising Hollywood type ought to get a hold of this still resonant and suspenseful novel and could make it as memorable as Sherry's debut novel Sudden Fear that in its cinematic adaptation garnered four Academy Award nominations. With only two books under her belt Sherry's reputation as a solid crime novelist was firmly cemented in the annals of crime fiction history. She proved to be a contender with later novels Tears for Jessie Hewitt (reprinted by Stark House Press just this year), Backfire and Girl Missing, the last of these three being one of the most widely praised of her later novels.

FFB: Girl Missing - Edna Sherry

THE STORY: Carlton “Carlo” Ives is the epitome of a ne’er-do-well playboy. He’d rather spend money at the race tracks, fancy restaurants and hotspot bars. He’s never had a real job in his life. Now he owes $14,000 to hardnosed bookie and OTB kingpin Nick Archer. Last ditch attempt to reconcile with his wealthy father who had offered his son employment and a chance to redeem himself proves futile. When approached by Archer with an offer he can’t refuse Carlo finds himself agreeing to act as Archer’s racetrack agent. After signing a contract that will award Carlo 10% of all jobs undertaken and 40% of “special projects” Carlo learns he has been hoodwinked into taking part in a kidnapping scheme.

THE CHARACTERS: Girl Missing (1962) implies an abduction or kidnapping, but for a while it almost seems as if our unlikable but stunningly gorgeous (of course) young couple will turn out to be the criminals not the victims. Maybe not robbing banks with machine guns, but causing trouble and wrecking lives all the same. They are definitely bad news when they get together. Veronica Sheldon confesses to Carlo that she is “short on morals” and she’s a rebellious thrillseeker. She agrees to go out with Carlo, a profligate of the worst sort in the eyes of her parents and hoity-toity sister Libby, just to piss off her family. Carlo secretly pursues Ronny in a petty form of jealous revenge for the way her sister openly snubbed and insulted him. Carlo has already been presented to us as an anti-hero but one that the reader is not exactly rooting for. When Carlo is recruited unwittingly into Nick Archer’s kidnap scheme Ronny Sheldon is the first person he thinks of as the best target for a quick and easy payoff. Ironically, Carlo’s entry level criminal act will be a transformative one for both he and his intended victim.

Sherry gives us lots of background in an economically told story. We learn of Carlo’s love/hate relationship with his father and the reasons he feels entitled to a life of luxury, his short lived relationship with Libby Sheldon, and his resentment and anger towards everyone who he believes gave him a raw deal leads to a crescendo of petty revenge.

Likewise, we get a capsule life history of Nick Archer (born Archezzo) from his indoctrination as a teen into the world of betting as a debt collector and gofer to running several off-track betting parlors and becoming a figure of intimidation in the horseracing world. Sherry tells of his devotion to his family, how he and his deaf mute sister were orphaned at an early age and how Nick took care of them both afterward. We also get a brief tale of how Nick met his right hand man Harry, a Korean War veteran, who saved Nick from an attack by couple of juvenile delinquents who tried to mug the betting parlor impresario. Harry turns out to be loyal but with a bitter ingrained streak of sadism leftover from his war days that makes it all too easy for him to be groomed into Nick’s hitman permanently taking care of crooked employees who cross the boss.

Nick is being pursued by federal agents for tax evasion in a subplot that will have significance in the final chapter. Nick’s wants to escape trial for what all gangsters usually go to prison for. With Harry’s help he dreams up a kidnap plot and will use the ransom to help fund an escape plan that will get them to Mexico and then Switzerland. They exploit Carlo Ives’ $14,000 debt coming due in less than two days and figure they can allow him to be their patsy. Archer secures Carlo’s involvement with cleverly thought out frame-ups. Basically he extorts Carlo to carry out the kidnapping out of fear of being accused of other worse crimes, crimes that never actually took place but for which enough proof will be concocted to make them seem not only possible but plausible and with Carlo at the center of them all.

The kidnapping takes place exactly as planned but when Carlo discovers he is also to become one of the victims he begins to see the error of his ways. At this point there is a major shift in the action and an almost sudden transformation in Carlo’s character. Carlo is determined to turn the tables on his captors, rescue both he and Ronny, and turn the real kidnappers over to the police. The final chapters are rife with action sequences that seem perfectly engineered for the movie screen and Sherry inserts more than a couple of neat surprises for both Carlo and the reader before the final page is reached.

INNOVATIONS: Sherry does a neat job of making a thoroughly detestable character like Carlo Ives into someone the reader wants to win and in the end will admire. Even if it seems as if he has an all too easy epiphany and metamorphosis from spendthrift playboy into daring hero willing to risk his life for his girl, Sherry manages to make it fairly convincing. But Carlo doesn’t get off scot free. Ronny will have the last word; she’s far from forgiving when she discovers the truth.

Oddly, Nick seems to be the most sympathetic of the bunch. Having read Tears for Jessie Hewitt a few months ago I’m intrigued by the way Sherry skillfully creates these seemingly villainous men who still have a smidgen of humanity in them for either their family or a loved one. In Nick’s case it is his devotion to his sister that redeems him and keeps us from seeing him as utterly bad. Though Anna is present throughout the entire crime (Nick and Harry use her farmhouse as the kidnap hideout) it is always clear that she will never be implicated in any way. Nick always has in mind her safety first. Several arguments take place when the murderous Harry wants to eliminate all witnesses, but Nick is adamant that Anna is not to be harmed . She is after all incapable of speaking which reluctantly Harry sees as an excuse to leave her alone. Ultimately, Anna’s inability to hear or speak save her life.

THINGS I LEARNED: This is the second novel of Sherry’s I’ve read that involves horse racing and gambling. This time I learned all about the world of off-track betting and the unusual methods in which money is collected. Early in the story, during a section explaining how Nick became such a “star” in the eyes of his gambling parlor mentor Frankie, we watch as Nick in his teen years acted as a spy who helped ferret out a couple of crooked employees stealing from Frankie.

QUOTES: The taxi driver, looking at [Carlo & Ronny] in the rear mirror, summed them up with admiration touched by envy: As good-lookin’ as anything in the movies. An’ prolly rolling. Some people have all the luck. But luck has a way of running out.

Carlo: “We’ll give the classy joints a miss so you won’t be spotted.”
Ronny: “Oh skizzy. Take me to a real low dive.”

The place was crowded with young married couples in the middle-income bracket from all over town who liked good food and enjoyed dancing. But to Ronny’s artless, enraptured eyes, they were all branded with delicious sin. She sprinkled her comments with carefully memorized beatnik phrases. The couples were, of course, “shacked up,” the band was “far out,” Carlo was a “cat” she could “relate to.”

FFB: Tears for Jessie Hewitt - Edna Sherry

UK edition (Hodder & Stoughton, 1958)

THE STORY: Con artist and thief Victor Clyde (aka Francis Edwards) sees in Jessie Hewitt an easy mark.  He spots her in a two bit Hollywood cafeteria frequented by movie extras and she is crying over a letter she received. He turns on the charm and within minutes learns her father is dying, she is out of a job and down to her last couple of dollars. Vic is trying to flee California after his latest job which left a man dead from a mortal wound administered by the butt of Vic's pistol. So he wheels and deals and cajoles and flatters Jessie. He convinces her to leave the state with him and he'll take her to visit her dying father. Along the way they get married! But who exactly is conning who here? And will the police catch up with Vic and stop his crime spree by the time he ends up on the East Coast?

THE CHARACTERS: Despite the title Tears for Jessie Hewitt (1958) is really about Vic Clyde and his life as a professional burglar. He has a very specific M.O. He scopes out marks while at racetracks and casinos. He pegs the big winners, follows them to their home and then makes a study of their habits. The next big win at a racetrack Vic makes sure he is in the mark's house in his unusual get-up of industrial coveralls and --absurdly-- a clown Halloween mask. He threatens them with a gun then knocks them out if they refuse to hand over the money.  This has worked swell for him until one of his older marks suffered a severe head wound from being coshed with the gun butt. He later dies in a hospital and that makes Vic guilty of a felony -- murder during the commission of a robbery.

In Jessie he finds his escape and also a possible victim anticipating that she will inherit her father's money from a successful hardware business along with his house and farmland. But when Jessie discovers Vic's burglar outfit and his gun she starts asking a lot of questions. She remembers the news stories of the Band-Aid Burglar too, a name the reporters and police gave to Vic when it was discovered that he used Band-Aids to cover his fingertips rather than wearing gloves which he found made his burglary activity too clumsy. To her amazement Vic confesses everything. Oddly, this draws them closer. Jessie loves him for his honesty and is surprised that she admires him for robbing only from people who win their money from gambling. Both of them rationalize that Vic is not taking anything from his marks that is rightly theirs. Vic is an immense egotist, vain in the extreme and he gets off on her devotion. Plus he needs her home as his haven. He inveigles Jessie into joining him on a racetrack caper. And she loves the excitement. One caper leads to another and soon they are married partners in crime. But the police are hot on Vic's trail for the murder of the man in California. He still sticks to his M.O. in his new digs and this bad decision coupled with the accidental loss of one of his Band-Aids at the scene of a crime will be his undoing.

Jessie has a troubled past that will color and shape everything she does. She tells Vic of that her father was an abusive and sadistic man and still suffers from the aftermath of that abuse. Living in a small town like Cawfrey didn't help matters either where ideal gossip is the mainstay. She couldn't hide her bruises or scars and everyone in town knew that her homelife must have been hell. She sees in Vic her redeemer. His charm, his honesty, his apparent love for her are a godsend and she'll do anything to protect him. This will be her undoing as well. The title is a huge hint that a happy life is not in Jessie's future.

US Paperback (Dell #1004, 1959)
with a very poor alternate title
[But that McGiniss cover sold a lot of books, I'm sure]

Lt. Lance Wiley is Vic's adversary in the novel. His fellow cops like to call him "Wily Wiley" for he has an unusual method to crime solving. He can think like a criminal and he playacts by imagining himself to be his targeted suspect. "Let's jump into Benson's skin for minute," he'll suggest to his sergeant and soon he's launching into a recreation "entering his mind, registering what he would do or not do in any given circumstances." Wiley uses this technique to determine how Vic behaves and thinks while committing his thefts. One thing Wiley is certain of: Vic is not as smart as he thinks he is and that Vic's immense ego is his greatest weakness.

Vic chose as one of his racetrack marks a famous popular composer who is the first victim who isn't threatened by his gun. A struggle takes place in the composer's apartment when Vic tries to rob him of a $10,000 racetrack prize, Vic is struck in the face and his pulls the trigger on his gun. It's his first deliberate murder. The composer's death makes it two murders on his future rap sheet. And the city will be out for blood. Killing a nationally known celebrity with a huge TV following was Vic's biggest mistake.

When Lance Wiley is asked to take part in a televised memorial for the composer he uses the opportunity to talk about the suspect who he assures the public will soon be apprehended. He knows this because the criminal they are tracking is stupid,using that very word. When Vic, ever the vain man eager to hear what the police think of him, hears Wiley call him stupid he transforms from charming con men into raging beast. He plans to strike back at the cop and show him just how clever he really is. That's when Tears for Jessie Hewitt takes a decidedly strange detour morphing into a novel of personal revenge combined with a cat and mouse game between Lt. Wiley and Vic. There won't be many winners in this game.

INNOVATIONS: It was a refreshing change to read a crime novel in which a policeman has a well adjusted and happy life. No abusive alcoholics recovering from a lifetime of unhappy marriages on display here. Lance has a loving wife Meg with a lively sense of humor, and a precocious yet endearing 8 year-old son named Sandy.  Sandy's obsession with spelling complicated words is introduced in an interesting prologue and will come into play later in the book to help his father solve a mystery.

The novel is modeled on inverted detective novels since we know exactly how the crimes are committed and we follow the criminal's point of view for most of the narrative. However the book is not without a smattering of genuine detective work. Sherry's use of the Band-Aid clue is probably the most inventive retro clue in the story recalling similar odd yet innovative clues found in the best detective novels of Golden Age.

US 1st edition (Dodd Mead, 1958)

QUOTES:   Just so I don't ignore the title character (who comes into her own in the final third of the novel), here are key moments that reveal the tragic figure of Jessie Hewitt.

"Yes, I'm sorry for him, Vic. A thing like this could haunt a kid -- darken his whole childhood -- I know what it's like to shiver with fear --and be too little to fight back."

...she was still the "crazy mixed-up kid" who had to be controlled and managed and guided carefully wherever he decided to lead.

Her gratitude, plus her physical feeling for him, was a combination guaranteed to muddle a far cooler head than hers. She was like a hot-rodder without brakes, hurtling downhill.

...in the afternoons they went to the races and he was totally unprepared for the comic resultant development: Jessie became a violent horse fan. The crowds, the high stepping thoroughbreds, the colorful jockey silks, and the recurring climax at the finish of each race intoxicated her.

Rachel still offered as a
shade as late as 1962

THINGS I LEARNED: In addition to wearing Band-Aids on his fingers while carrying out his robberies Vic chooses to make them less noticeable by covering them up with cosmetics. He choose a foundation cream with a rachel color, a term that puzzled me. I fell down a cosmetic rabbit hole in the internet as I learned trivia after trivia about the origins of this shade of make-up. First, for centuries face powder and foundations were made only in three colors; blanche, naturelle, and rachel which are likened to modern day white, pink and cream. Then, rachel (a cream color) apparently gets its name from the 19th century French actress, Élisa Rachel Félix. As I learned from a blog called Cosmetics & Skin: "Rachel was known for her beauty, her clear diction and unexaggerated style of acting making her well suited for a stage with brighter light. Talented and beautiful, she was ideally placed to make the most of the new environment. It is understandable then, that her name might be associated with a beauty product. She was an actress, a beauty, and known throughout Europe." Visit the blog and you too can get a lesson in the history of make-up, French theater, and the marketing of face powders over the decades.

When Vic visits the racetrack for the first time Sherry takes the time to explain the process of parimutuel betting, a system in which bets of a particular type are placed together in a pool and payoff odds are calculated by sharing the pool among all winning bets. The fascinating history of the system (also originating from France) can be learned by visiting the betting site Twin Spires.

THE AUTHOR: Edna Solomon Sherry (1885-1967) graduated from Hunter College on Staten Island in 1906 and taught literature there for a while before becoming a full time novelist. She had an interesting early writing career that most people know little about. In the late 1920s she began writing fiction in collaboration with Charles K. Harris. Two of their stories with criminous content were published in pulp magazines in 1927 and 1928.

Serendipitously I also uncovered two novels she wrote with Milton Gropper. Is No One Innocent? (1930), a police procedural mystery, is a novelization of a play she wrote with Gropper titled Inspector Kennedy (1929).  Grounds for Indecency (1931), their second book, published by lowbrow Macaulay sounds like a typical sexploitation novel that was a specialty of that publisher. From the jacket copy:

"Nita... brings the treasure of her beauty and puts it in the scales against her father's debt. One man intervenes not only to save her father but to save her from her own self-sacrifice. But she comes to his apartment against his will to make her payment...."

Sherry's first solo crime novel, and arguably her best known work, Sudden Fear (1948) was adapted into the 1952 movie starring Joan Crawford, Jack Palance, and the ever fabulous Gloria Grahame. One of the better movies of the last wave of true noir cinema that came out in the 1950s it was nominated for four Academy Awards but won none of them.

In 1909 Edna married Ernest Sherry, a dentist, who was her husband until his death. Tears for Jessie Hewitt is dedicated "To Ernie, with love."