FFB: The Blue Horse of Taxco - Kathleen Moore Knight

Troy Bannister has flown to Taxco from her safe New York job at Frobisher’s where she is the jewelry buyer. She is to judge a contest of silver designs and the winner will be set up in a private studio to make a line of custom made jewelry for her employer. The contest was her idea and the winner unbeknownst to her employer has already been chosen. He is Jerome Blake, her old flame whom she has tracked down to Taxco. She is sure that when he is chosen the winner and given the $5000 prize money plus the opportunity to work in his own studio back in New York that she will finally have a chance to win him back and marry him. But when she learns of a local silversmith who is regarded as the best of the contest’s entrants she sees her deceitful plan start to crumble. She must see exactly what this talented artist, an immigrant Polish man named Casimir Lazlo, can create and if is indeed a superior craftsman find a away to eliminate him from the competition.

Someone does that job for Troy. Shortly after she has met Lazlo and seen his exquisite workmanship on an intricately stamped necklace, he is murdered. Troy’s guilty conscience and unethical ways get the better of her. Imagining the worst and thinking that she might actually be thought the killer she stages the scene of the bloody murder to look like a suicide. She flees Lazlo’s studio but not before impulsively stealing the copper plate that made the beautiful design in the silver necklace. All of this occurs in the first two chapters. This is our protagonist? Knight seems to be writing a Patricia Highsmith novel with a love mad female version of Tom Ripley, a woman who cares for no one really but herself.

Bracelet designed by Taxco silversmith
Hector Aguilar (circa 1940s)

Soon word is out that Casimir has committed and suicide yet no one can believe it. The other artists who have entered the contest recognize that their chances are now greatly increased for winning the coveted prize money and the job as jewelry designer in New York. But someone suggests that Casimir was murdered in order to achieve that advantage. When they also discover that Troy had visited Lazlo prior to the judging day they are in a furor and begin to think that the contest was rigged from the start. Troy has few friends among the artists including Jerome, living under the alias of Joe Blank, who is quick to uncover most of Troy’s deceit and her involvement in Lazlo’s death. Eventually it is Jerome/Joe, with the aid of Lazlo's daughter, who will take over as the lead character and solve not only Lazlo's murder but another murder of a local Mexican artist who was secretly entering a creation of his own in the contest.

The tone and language of The Blue Horse of Taxco (1947) is completely different than the Elisha Macomber (her best known series detective) novels in Knight’s early writing period. It’s darker, not at all lighthearted, and fueled with the illogical passions of impulsive desires not unlike the novels of pulp and noir writers. She is finding a way to tell a story of crime without resorting to old-fashioned thriller tropes and set pieces that seem lifted from cliffhanger serials. Gone are the quaint clues and girl sleuthing sequences found in her early books. Knight’s focus now is on character as opposed to multi-layered puzzling plots which is not to say that she has completely abandoned the puzzle. There is still the mystery of the pieces of the figurine of the title that will feature in the plot. But overall the story arises out of the characters’ behavior and thinking and their relationships not an artificial manipulation of events created only to bamboozle the reader.

(The above is a slightly edited portion from a longer essay on Kathleen Moore Knight I wrote for issue #68 of Geoff Bradley's fine journal Crime and Detective Stories (CADS). The issue will be coming out in a few months.)

Moment of Untruth - Ed Lacy

Touie Moore returns in a sequel of sorts to Room to Swing. Seven years have passed since his debut and he is now married to Fran who he met at the boarding house in Bingsten, Ohio. As the story opens Touie learns his wife is pregnant, but he's not as excited as she is. In fact he's not at all happy about it though he doesn't reveal this to Fran. Shortly after getting the news of his impending fatherhood he calls Ted Bailey, his former private detective partner, to plead for a side job. He's already thinking he'll need additional income when Fran has to quit her job to take care of the baby.

Hoping for nothing more complicated than a guard job on the weekend he soon learns that Ted 's private detective agency is now an "industrial investigating" firm and that Kay Robbens, the PR TV executive from Room to Swing, is Ted's partner in the firm. As it happens they need an agent to take on a job in Mexico. The primary stockholder in a chemical company that Kay is wooing for her PR firm demands Ted's agency send down a private eye immediately. After some cajoling Kay and Ted get Touie to agree to take on the job. Touie sees it as an opportunity to escape his responsibility to his pregnant wife and a chance to distract himself from the major life changing event that he faces.

When Touie arrives in Mexico he learns that the "old bag" Kay was telling him about, Grace Lupe-Varon, is actually a very young and outspoken university professor. She wants Touie to prove that he husband was murdered. She is sure that a prominent matador is behind the death. Her investigative journalist husband had uncovered something about the bullfighter's career and was threatening to expose him. When the husband died of a snake bite she was convinced it had to be a murder. Snake bite? Where did the snake come from, Touie asks? From my collection she tells him. Mrs. Lupe-Varon it turns out is a herpetologist and she has a veritable menagerie of reptiles in her home for her extensive research on snake venom and their medicinal properties.


UK edition: T.V. Boardman (1965)

Complicating matters is the presence of Frank Smith, a mysterious American tourist who befriends Touie based solely on the fact that they are two black men in a foreign country. Smith claims to be a writer, Touie is suspicious. Nevertheless, the two strike up a friendship as often is the case when people of similar background met up by chance in a foreign country. Smith introduces Touie to the world of bullfighting allowing him to see firsthand the artistry of matador superstar "El Indio." But when Smith seems to be following Touie in his investigation of the Lupe-Varon murder the plot takes a sinister turn. Is Smith also a private detective interested in the death of the professor's husband? There is more to Smith than meets the eye as Touie will soon learn from the Mexican police.

Moment of Untruth (1964) as the title may suggest is a mystery about bullfighting. The moment of truth as bullfighting aficionados may know is the point at which the matador makes his kill. The title is one of the biggest clues to the ultimate mystery surrounding the murder of Grace's husband. There are plenty of scenes in the bullfighting arena, lots of background on the art of being a matador and specifically the unusual habits and rituals of "El Indio."

The mystery is much better constructed than Room to Swing and the exotic background makes for a gripping, fascinating read. Though Lacy apparently disliked the idea of a series character he does a fine job of incorporating Touie's life as husband and father-to-be into the detective story plot. And there is plenty of detection and action in this private eye novel. His final adventure in Mexico will force him to make decisions about what he really wants out of his life. That decision will fully explain why he never appeared in another book or story.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Ed Lacy's death. Coincidentally, there happens to be a rise in interest about him just as I have been posting reviews on his work. You can read a tribute to Lacy in Tablet, a Jewish online magazine. Click here for the article.