1975 BOOKS: Sex, Race & Crime

I know, I know. I'm a day late (and a dollar short as my mother would say. These days I'm several dollars short). But I have to get these written up and knocked off, so to speak. I enjoyed them more than the other 1975 book, each for different reasons. And they were much more exemplary of the year 1975 than that book I refuse to name by that American woman. So very quickly here are the highlights of the two other books I read for the Crimes of the Century meme last month when 1975 was the year of books being saluted and celebrated.

The Topless Tulip Caper by Lawrence Block

This is the last book about Chip Harrison, ostensibly also written by him as they were originally published under his name. But he's just another of Block's alter egos working double time on the wiseguy humor and the sex and crime books he wrote for Gold Medal back in the days of paperback originals. It's also the second detective novel featuring the sleuthing team of Leo Haig and Chip who, as all mystery lovers in the know should know, are knock-offs of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Oops. Should I say this is a homage? No way. Block would call that pompous.

As the title implies there's a strip club involved and a stripper is the first victim. Well, really the 124th victim. "124 murder victims?" I hear you cry. "That's some serial killer at work!" Oh calm down. See, this is also about tropical fish collecting and the lost art of breeding fish in an aquarium. (Does anyone still have home aquariums?) As Wolfe has his obsession with caring for and hybridizing various orchid species so Leo Haig has his tropical fish. And the client in this case has hired Haig to find out who slaughtered her prize collection of Scatophagus tetracanthus (You better believe I looked that one up!) They account for the first one hundred and twenty-three victims of the book. Thankfully, we are spared this aquatic carnage as they are mass murdered by poisoned fish food well before the book even begins. Chip knows that Leo is the man for the job as does Thelma Wolinski, aka Tulip Willing, as she is known when she dances in her undies for the salivating male audience at the Treasure Chest strip club. Thelma, you see, is the leading authority on the "Scatty" and has written a couple of articles on how to successfully breed the species for a few ichthyological trade journals. Remarkably, the bizarre death of her stripper colleague Cherry (curare poisoning delivered mysteriously to her ...uh... left breast) is tied to the liquidation of Thelma's fish.

Leo Haig delivers a rousing final chapter lecture just as all great detectives of the Golden Age should do with all the suspects present in his office. Chip has several sexual escapades with the attractive women in the cast all done tongue in cheek and with some meta-fiction jokes at the expense of the people who were Block's editors at Gold Medal. This is a fun and frothy example of a well done off-the-wall detective novel that hits all the marks for me -- bizarre murders, unusual subject mater, raunchy humor and true wit, as well and some randy sex scenes that, as gratuitous as they are, still managed to make me smile because they were never taken seriously.

Snake by James McClure

At the opposite end of the 1975 detective novel spectrum is this police procedural from South African writer James McClure. As somber as Block's book was lighthearted this crime novel depicts the era of apartheid in all its ugliness and bigotry. The book dares to show policemen working together, black and white, Afrikaners and Bantu, without one trace of the political correctness we are suffering from these days. McClure' s main policemen characters are Lt. Tromp Kramer, a white Afrikaner, and Mickey Zondi, a Zulu. Kramer calls the locals coons, wogs and coolies. Zondi doesn't even blink at the use of these terms. There is also Sgt. Marais, one of the most ultra conservative and nationalist Afrikaners in the police force. He often resorts to the term "kaffir" -- a word that was banned from usage in South Africa as it is the equivalent of nigger in the US. Oddly, the word is borrowed from Islam and literally means a non-believer in Allah. But just as "gook", the Korean pejorative in their own language for white men, was turned into an insult for Korean soldiers during that war I can see how a relatively harmless word from another culture was appropriated by South African white men to insult an entire race.

The white policemen and the black policemen seem to tolerate one another amid all this obvious dislike. Kramer despite his uncensored language is more than tolerant and has a friendship with Zondi that transcends their work relationship. Occasionally the reader is reminded of the reality of apartheid as in the scene when one of the police officers watches an argument between an African teacher hosting his class on a field trip and a nature museum official. The teacher is not allowed to enter a movie theater in the museum because there is a prominent sign marked "Whites Only".

And why a nature museum in this novel? Because, of course, as the title tells us there's a snake in the pages. The murder being investigated is of an exotic dancer who was apparently strangled by the python she used in her act. The death is described in detail and we know that she was visited by a man who she attempted to seduce in a very unorthodox manner -- well, creepy is the right word, I guess -- by letting the snake slither over her naked body as her visitor slowly undressed himself. Then we see that he kills her when the kinky sex gets out of hand. The mystery is not so much about who or how she was killed, but exactly which of the many male suspects is guilty of the murder.

Told parallel with this murder case is the investigation of a series of robbery/shootings in a poor neighborhood known as Peacedale. This had some powerful resonance for me with the rash of urban crime and bank robberies that have beset Chicago for the past ten years. The depiction of the gangster lifestyle of 70s era South Africa doesn't seem very different at all to what continues to plague 21st century cities in the US. The resolution of this portion of the novel has an interesting twist that further comments on the divisiveness of South African culture during the 1970s.

This is the first of McClure's I've ever read though I've known about them for decades. I found his manner of unrestrained violence and straightforwardness in presenting difficult topics refreshingly honest and real. Kramer, Zondi, Marais and all the rest of the policeman and law officers come alive on the page and are uniquely individual. McClure was a crime reporter for many years so he knows the ins and outs of both writing and the police in his native land. But he also manages to reveal a human side to all of his characters in the brief glimpses we get of his characters' personal lives. Even Marais who for the most part seemed to be a huge asshole had a couple of scenes where he was less hateful and more human. There was one touching scene where Kramer's girlfriend after moving to a new home donates her unwanted furniture and clothes to Zondi and his family. It's done without a patronizing manner and reveals character without one word of dialogue being spoken.

I'm looking forward to reading the rest of this short series of crime novels. I own copies of almost all of them and they've been set aside for this month and the coming new year.

All in all, here are two books from 1975 well worth your time. Whether you lean towards wild and crazy or somber and humane each of these books give you aspects of 1970s life that are genuine and not artificial.

Make Out with Murder - Chip Harrison

The dedication page to Make Out With Murder (1974) says: "This is for REX STOUT, whoever he might be." If you're one of those ardent readers who scrutinizes every page of a book this dedication will not only bring a smile to your face but will provide you with a tantalizing hint as to what lies within its pages. For this is not just another book starring and written by Chip Harrison exaggeratedly dubbed "a one man anti-chastity movement" on the cover it is a love letter to the traditional mystery novel.

Why the Stout dedication? And why that crack implying no one knows him? Well it's all due to Leo Haig, an aspiring private detective who has modeled himself on the practice of Nero Wolfe. And he actually believes -- as many people believe of Sherlock Holmes -- that Wolfe is a real person living a reclusive life somewhere in Manhattan where Haig has also set up business. He also believes that Rex Stout is the clever pseudonym chosen another real person, Archie Goodwin who according to Haig is not only Wolfe's right hand man but his most respected biographer. You'll have to read the book to find out Haig's theory about the origin of the Stout pen name. It's insanely funny and almost believable.

But it isn't just Wolfe that Haig admires. He knows and honors all the great detectives of fiction. In fact everything he knows about being a detective he has learned from his extensive collection of murder mysteries that crowd the shelves of his home. Look carefully and you'll also find several fish tanks artfully inserted in the many bookcases in Haig's house. Just like Wolfe has his obsession with orchids Leo Haig is overly devoted to the care of his large collection of rare tropical fish.

But enough about Haig. The book is really about Chip Harrison, who Haig has handpicked to be his own Archie Goodwin.  This third book is more of a first book in that it introduces Leo Haig and refashions Chip as his legman and biographer. It's a legitimate murder mystery serving as Chip's crash course in dealing with the temptations of femmes fatale of all ages and hair color. As if he hadn't already had his fill of women. In the previous two books Chip is a randy young man itching to lose his virginity. Those books are all about sex and bawdy humor not crime and dark motives.

Chip is head over heels in love with doomed Melanie Trelawney who has a morbid fear of dying. Two of Melanie's sisters died violently and suspiciously and she is certain she will succumb to a similar fate. Within days her death wish comes true and Chip is convinced that her death by heroin overdose is a vicious murder. Too many things are fishy. Like how Melanie was found dead on her air mattress bed but was overly cautious with sharp objects being anywhere near the bed let alone on it. Leo and Chip team up and show up the loutish cops who seem more interested in closing the case as another junkie suicide than in finding Melanie's killer.

The real fun reading this book is in revelling in Block's combination of ribald humor and Chip's slang-filled narration expressing a youthful worldview that comes across as utterly authentic. Detective fiction fans will enjoy the seemingly endless references to crime writers and their books. Haig promises his young employee that by drinking deep of murder mysteries he'll gain the knowledge he needs. Chip is impressed when Haig tells that all he knows of philately he picked up from The Scarlet Ruse, a Travis McGee book. Similarly, Sayers' The Nine Tailors taught him about the art of bell ringing. When Chip learns that one of the murder suspects is a numismatist he follows his employer/tutor's advice and reads Chandler's The High Window plus a book by Michael Innes to learn all he can about coin collecting.

Chip does all the legwork, gets beat up, and has a few bedroom interludes but it is Haig who comes up with the dazzling solution. This case of multiple murder will turn out to be more reminiscent of Ross Macdonald than Rex Stout -- a bit of detective fiction trivia Haig cannot help pointing out to Chip. While the killer may be a bit easy to spot as the body count climbs that doesn't mean this isn't worthy of your attention. I had a lot of fun meeting Chip and Leo. And I'm eager to read about them again in their second (sadly last) adventure set partially in a strip club and called The Topless Tulip Caper. Stay tuned for more...

FFB: Three Men Out - Rex Stout

We're saluting Rex Stout today in a web-wide reading of his books for the Friday's Forgotten Book meme hosted by Patti Abbott though most of his books, I think, are hardly forgotten. I chose to continue my reading of the Nero Wolfe canon with Three Men Out (1954). This volume includes three novellas all of which were published under different titles in The American Magazine between September 1952 and December 1953. All of them were subsequently reprinted one or more times in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. As with most of the Nero Wolfe books the US paperbacks were first printed by Bantam and remained in print from the 1950s throughout the 1980s. I liked all of these long short stories for various reasons, but the first one seemed the weakest of the lot.

"Invitation to Murder" was originally published as "Will to Murder". The first title is uttered by Herman Lewent as part of his introductory dialogue. Lewent is both client and victim in the story. As the second (original) title may suggest to a wily Wolfe reader the novella is about a large inheritance, the money and estate that Lewent feels he's been cheated out of. He seeks out Archie and Wolfe to help him find out what happened to his share of his father's estate which was inherited by his sister. She died suspiciously of ptomaine poisoning after eating a plateful of artichoke appetizers at a party and Lewent thinks that someone in her husband's household killed her. Reluctantly, Wolfe takes on the case and Archie is sent to the home of Theodore Huck, the wheelchair bound husband, in a somewhat undercover capacity to smoke out the killer...if in fact there is one. When Lewent dies Archie is tasked with finding a real murderer. He and Wolfe try to prove that Lewent was murdered because of his knowledge of Mrs. Huck's suspicious and conveniently timed death.

The suspect list is small in this story and therefore the sniffing out of the culprit is not at all difficult. Besides the invalid husband who is the most fleshed out of the characters, there is his nephew Paul Thayre, an aspiring composer of "modern music" and Huck's three female employees: a housekeeper, a secretary, and a nurse. None of these women is really s given any full treatment as a character. They're sort of ciphers. Archie of course is attracted to a few of them, notably Mrs. O'Shea, the buxom, hip swinging, widowed housekeeper who he thinks is Huck's secret paramour. But when Lewent's murder by bludgeoning is examined closely there really can be only one possible killer. The only surprise here is how the body was moved from the actual murder site to where Archie literally stumbled over it. Not much of a mystery tale and though Wolfe solves it with his usually aplomb anyone could figure out this one.

A better mystery and better tale is "The Zero Clue" which resembles the work of Ellery Queen. It's no wonder that the story was reprinted four times in EQMM between 1963 and 1976. The Wolfe novella includes a rather puzzling dying clue, a plot device practically invented by the Queen writing team.

This is also one of the few times we learn that Wolfe had a rival in the private detective business, though this detective is of a most unusual sort. Leo Heller is what one might call a probability detective. As an ex-professor of mathematics Heller made a name for himself by using the laws of probability in determining the outcomes of anything from a horse race to a political election. He then turned to becoming a private detective of sorts using his various calculations and formulae in helping people with everything from completing business deals to locating missing persons. Archie says the rumor has it Heller was so successful that he was pulling a six figure income. Heller crossed paths with Wolfe in one case where they had the same client but Wolfe was fired when the client thought he was moving too slowly. Heller then delivered for the client but he used much of the data and info gathered by Wolfe's operatives which led to Wolfe's negative opinion of Heller as a man of ethics in the private detective world.

The dying clue in "The Zero Clue"

Now Heller wants to hire Wolfe to verify his suspicions of a client who may be a criminal. Wolfe is still steamed about the past and his anger is only intensified when Archie tries to get permission to take the case because Wolfe and Theodore are in the midst of dealing with a thrip invasion in the orchid greenhouse. Archie goes to Heller's office anyway and finds him dead with Cramer and other police already investigating. On the desk in Heller's office the police find eight pencils and one eraser arranged to form what appears to be the initials NW. Cramer is convinced that the rivalry between the two got the better of Nero Wolfe and he had Archie take out Heller like a hitman. Wolfe, however, sees through the meaning of the dying clue almost immediately and asks the police to pay close attention to anything involving the number six.

The suspects include all of the prospective clients who were in the waiting room or who had recently paid a visit to Heller's office. Among them are a nurse who wanted Heller to help her uncover the identity of the person who firebombed her hospital; a society dame with a cache of anonymous letters that hint at blackmail; an egotistical inventor with a temper who sought out Heller to provide him with the missing formula to make his latest invention workable; and Karl Busch noted as a man of "NVMS" (no visible means of support) on the police notes Archie spies. Busch seems to be the criminal of the bunch for he wanted Heller's help in winning a horse race. Heller provides him with the name of the horse to bet on but with a name like Zero Busch was too superstitious to accept it as the real winner.

Wolfe listens to all their stories and sees that not only was his first thought about the dying clue wrong, but that Heller's mathematics background is actually the key to the entire case. And armed with some arcane knowledge he gathers from a textbook about the history of mathematics he not only solves Heller's murder but discovers the person who blew up the hospital where Susan Maturo, the nurse, worked. The story is not exactly fair play since it requires that the reader also have that arcane knowledge, but it's nevertheless a superior mystery story with some of the best plotting for a story set in a single room I've read in a long time. This could easily be adapted for the stage and it should be!

The last story of the bunch "This Won't Kill You" is equally good, but because it deals with baseball I tended to waver in and out of it. In fact, I skipped entire pages at the start of the story that described the baseball game that Archie, Wolfe and a visiting chef from Paris are attending. There are some funny moments with Wolfe indignant about the chairs in the stands that obviously will not accommodate his mammoth size. (Wolfe's need to find suitably large furniture to sit in is a running joke in all three stories.) There is all sorts of 1950s name dropping of baseball players that went right over my head, too.

The story is about the drugging of four baseball players on the New York Giants and the murder of a fifth player suspected of drugging them. The large cast of characters includes a showgirl wife who is the object of many a player's roving eyes and who supplies the story with a subplot that goes on a bit too long. The real mystery is so tied up with the game of baseball that for me it didn't mean much. The mystery was well told but sports fans would appreciate it a lot more than someone like me who doesn't give a damn about professional athletics. For me the biggest mystery was the decision of the Viking editors to change the verb in the original title "This Will Kill You" to a negative.

Overall, a good collection with the second and third novellas the best of the trio. But for me "The Zero Clue" is absolutely top notch. It also appears to be the unanimous appraisal for that novella. "The Zero Clue" turns up in the top five (some rank it as #2) of all 39 novellas in numerous "Best of Nero Wolfe" lists all over the internet and in several reference books.

FFB: Three for the Chair - Rex Stout

It's not really right to ever include any of Rex Stout's crime fiction in the Friday's Forgotten Book posts, but here I go anyway. How can anyone call Nero Wolfe forgotten?  I needed to find some books published in 1957 and all I could find were British writers among my shelves. I wanted to devote more time to US writers this year, especially when it came to contributing to Rich Westwood's "Crime of the Century" monthly posts where we write about books published in a specific year. By chance I stumbled across my beat up book club edition of Three for the Chair and was glad to see a copyrighted date of 1957. I'll just gloss over the fact that all three novellas in the book were originally published in magazines in 1955 and 1956 if that's all right with everyone. And now that's all out of the way -- let's move on, class.

I was excited to return to Nero Wolfe after having completely given up on him for over forty years. As luck would have it Three for the Chair seems to be very atypical for Stout, at least from my foggy memories of the novels I've already read. Among the three novellas in this book there are two very well plotted mysteries, one of them including a borderline impossible crime.  I was very surprised and delighted with those stories. As for the third...

My least favorite of the trio was "Immune to Murder".  Because I work in a hospital when I see the word immune I immediately think of viruses, infectious diseases and vaccines. I thought this was going to be a medical mystery of sorts. Here the word immune had nothing to do with medicine or biology. It exemplifies why I wasn't thrilled with Nero Wolfe as a kid since the story is not so much a mystery as it is a tale of the legal issues of diplomatic immunity. It's also about fly fishing and cooking trout.

It's one of two stories in the book where Wolfe and Archie leave Manhattan and his brownstone haven where Wolfe would prefer to be.  The private eye has been invited to a mountain lodge in the Adirondacks to prepare a special gourmet trout dish for a group of visiting diplomats. But just before the dinner is to be served one of the guests is found with his head bashed in and floating face down in the river.  There's not much of a mystery here and the identity of the killer got a sort of "So what?" reaction from me. The real interest in the story is Wolfe's attempt to work around New York laws dealing with the treatment of diplomats and the surprising news that anyone who dares to arrest a diplomat can be charged with a crime himself. There is a very minor mystery of why he chose not to cook any of the fish caught by the man who invited him to prepare the trout in the first place.

Much better is the first story called "Nero Wolfe and the Vanishing Clue" when it was originally published in The American Magazine and given a much simpler title of "A Window for Death" in this triple play book. Bertram Fyfe dies unexpectedly of pneumonia after telling his relatives that he was looking into his father's death. Bert was tried and acquitted for murder several years ago when his father died from negligence. Someone left a bedroom window open during a snowstorm which was a direct cause of his father's death. That the son has now died from pneumonia just as his father did is more than just coincidence. David Fyfe hires Wolfe to look into his brother's suspicious death.  He thinks murder has been done, especially since there's a lot of money that will be inherited and shares in a uranium mining operation in dispute.

The story has a kind of Agatha Christie feel to it with the crime in the past and the family members fighting for their share of the money left to them in the dead man's will.  Similar to "Immune to Murder" there is a recurring theme of a negative clue, so to speak.  Much is made of the two hot water bottles that were found empty in Fyfe's bed the morning he died.  The nurse insists she left them full, but when the body was discovered one of the brothers found that they were both empty and dry. This is the vanishing clue of the magazine published title. This puzzle of the empty hot water bottles is tied to the purchase of some mango flavored ice cream, if you can believe that, making it even more like a Christie story.

Continuing another coincidental pattern in my reading this year the murder method is yet another instance of a bizarre way to kill someone. It tends to crop up in Golden Age novels more often than I would've expected. This instance makes the fifth use of this particular substance as a means to do in someone. Stout's variation is utterly fantastic, hugely risky and probably not very fatal.  But that doesn't detract from an entertainingly told and cleverly thought out criminal problem for Nero Wolfe.

The best of the lot is the final story in the book "Too Many Detectives". It's the second story in which Wolfe is out of his element and the safety of his brownstone on 35th Street. This time he and Archie have traveled to Albany where they and several other private detectives are required to give testimony in a hearing on illegal wiretapping practices among licensed private detective agencies in New York state.  We learn that in 1956 there were 590 licensed PIs in New York, and 423 of them were in New York City.  That's not counting the employees who at the time required no license.

Among the PIs being questioned is Dol Bonner who appeared way back in 1937 in her own novel Hand in Glove and also teamed up with Tecumseh Fox in Bad for Business (1940).  She and her employee Sally Colt keep Archie's wavering eye very busy as he sums them up both as professional colleagues and potential dating material. When Sally shows a taste for alcohol she loses points with him.  I didn't remember that he never drank booze in the novels unless this is something that develops in the later books.

This story is funnier, more involved, has a lively cast of unusual characters, and has the most genuine detective work out of all three stories.  The mystery of a murdered con man who under a variety of aliases hired each of the five detectives to perform some spying and eavesdropping on phone calls is not just confined to who and why he was killed. They must discover his real identity and his motivation for the elaborate trickery employed in the wiretapping jobs. Each of the other detectives seems to have some secret reason for not admitting to being taken in by the con artist. And when the Albany D.A. serves a warrant for Wolfe's arrest the story kicks into high gear.

When I went to The Wolfe Pack website to hunt for illustrations for this post I found a rating sheet for all 39 novellas created by Rex Stout fan Robert Schneider. Interestingly, my assessment of these three stories matched exactly his ratings.  Schneider ranked "Too Many Detectives" the highest with an A-. It comes in at #5 out of all 39 novellas -- in the Top Ten, no less.  "A Window for Death" which he compared to a Ross Macdonald novel (I can see that) earns a B+  and ranks 16/39 while the trout cooking story was ignominiously ranked at #32 getting slapped with a D for "dearth of detection". I'd say D for dull. Unless you like reading about fishing, descriptions of Archie's salivating over the two attractive women, and some arcane tidbits about New York State law the story is pretty lousy as a mystery.

Should you come across a copy -- and there hundreds of copies out there --of this book I'd very much recommend the other two novellas. I had such a fun time with Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin and the rest of the gang this time around that I'll be digging up some more Rex Stout in this book museum of a home.  I'm very much interested in these novellas now as they seem to be quite varied and show Stout's unusual experimenting with plotting and detective fiction gimmickry.

The Case of the Phantom Fingerprints - Ken Crossen

Detective Jason Jones and his tagalong partner Necessary Smith, a private eye, are confronted with the puzzling disappearance of the prime suspect who has left behind incriminating fingerprints on a murder weapon in the first few chapters of The Case of the Phantom Fingerprints (1945). Jones is known for handling unusual cases and he is prompted to deliver a mini lecture on the nature of impossible crimes and why murderers indulge in them. After offering up four different categories that might explain what appears to be an impossible vanishing Jones then goes on to draw analogies to the world of magic and prestidigitation.

“The only way to solve a case like this is to forget that it’s a human drama, in which a human life was lost, and to think of it as a trick—as sleight-of-hand. When we do that, we know that all we have to do is find the one move that is the key to the trick, and the whole thing will fall apart.”

Magicians tend to be drawn to dreaming up impossible crime mystery stories. Clayton Rawson, of course, is the most well known and even his detective The Great Merlini is a magician. Hake Talbot (aka Henning Nelms ) was also a stage magician and one time stage designer for theater. Ken Crossen who used a variety of pseudonyms in his writing and his pal Bruce Elliot were also magicians and members of an elite circle of illusionists and magicians, many of whom were also writers. Crossen has written widely in the genre and used some rather clever gimmicks, though not always done fairly, in creating impossible situations in his mystery stories. While he is not as well known or as talented in whipping up ingenious locked room problems as his colleagues Rawson, Carr and Anthony Boucher (aka H.H. Holmes) who are mentioned in passing in this short novel, Crossen deserves at least an honorable mention for his clever spins on well-used tricks and his obvious love of the genre.

I’ve written about Crossen before in his guise as “Richard Foster”. Both those books also featured impossible crimes and “miracle problems” but were not as engrossing nor as clever as this one. Perhaps Crossen was caught up in the novelty of having his detective be a Tibetan American or maybe he was expending much of his energy on creating the Green Lama pulp magazine stories. In any case both books featuring Chin Kwang Kham were not as interesting as this one featuring a Nero Wolfe clone in the person of gigantic Jason Jones.

Crossen, who has clearly borrowed from the pages of Rex Stout, even shamelessly has one character call Jason Jones “a poor man’s Nero Wolfe”. Jones is a colorful character who like Wolfe and his orchids enjoys tending to his geraniums on a rooftop hothouse. There is a strange section in the book where we learn that he often uses various geranium varieties in cooking like an exotic recipe calling for geraniums as a flavor enhancer in lemon jam.

Oddly, Necessary Smith though he is ostensibly engaged to investigate the murder by drama critic Thornton Rockwood acts as a sidekick and legman to policeman Jones. Smith does some sleuthing and even offers up a theory (which perhaps most readers will come up with pages before he does) that turns out to be utterly wrong. Jones is the real detective here. It’s an odd pairing and I’m sure that no real life police department would look favorably on Jones using a P.I. as his partner. But we’ll let it slide because it’s all done in pulpy fun. It’s a book, after all, and hardly grounded in reality.

Speaking of books Crossen uses a particular mystery novel as one of the biggest clues in this story. It also happens to show one of his weaknesses as a pulp writer –- self-referential jokes. One of the characters is a mystery novel addict and his copy of The Laughing Buddha Murders has gone missing. It turns up in a hotel room briefly and just as quickly disappears. The joke here is that The Laughing Buddha Murders is by a writer named Richard Foster and it happens to be very real. (Anyone curious about the book can briefly read about it in my post on Crossen writing as Foster by clicking here.) For the sake of the story this “version” of The Laughing Buddha Murders has not been officially published even though in real life it was published one year earlier than …Phantom Fingerprints. Both books were put out by the digest publisher Vulcan Publications; Buddha is Vulcan Mystery #3 (1944) and Fingerprints is Vulcan Mystery #5 (1945). Over the course of the novel Smith and Jones try to find out who has read the book and who might have borrowed the advance copy from choreographer and detective story nut Gregor Santos. There is also a brief mention of John Dickson Carr and his ingenious locked room mysteries which turn out to be the preferred reading of both Santos and a ditzy actress named Toni Dorne.

In …Phantom Fingerprints Crossen makes use of a very familiar plot from the annals of Golden Age mysterydom. A group of theatrical professionals are at the mercy of a scheming ruthless blackmailer who happens to be producer Max Black. Many of Block's productions are staffed with big name stars who he has wheedled into working for him lest he reveal their deep, dark secrets. Additionally, Block would demand cash payments for keeping those secrets under cover. No surprise when he’s found stabbed in his home during a big post-theater shindig where not too coincidentally many of his blackmail victims were guests. The weird thing about the crime is that the murderer left his bloody fingerprints on the knife in Block’s chest. The prints match those of Max Thale, a visiting PR man from a Hollywood movie studio. But Thale appears to have dematerialized. He is nowhere inside the house and no footprints can be found outside the snow covered ground to indicate he might have jumped from a window or snuck out some other way. All the entrances and exits were guarded by trustworthy policeman and they swear no one got past them. How did Thale manage his disappearing act? That the book is populated with theater people ought to be a big tipoff.

There are several other murders and found at each scene of the crime a bloody handprint matching the prints of Max Thale. The trick of the fingerprints and how they were created is probably the most original feature of a book filled with familiar characters and situations. We even get a “talking villain” scene that seems to have been created solely to fill up some pages with words. I think anyone who knows even a little about stage magic might spot the telltale clue that can lead to figuring out the fingerprint mystery. The explanation when it comes is glibly related and I doubt it would result in the intended effect, but Crossen gets points for trying. Supposedly, the solution is based on fact and can be found in a book on French criminology though Crossen never mentions the exact title nor the author’s name.

Bouchercon Cleveland - Fri., Oct 5 (part two)

As always at any Bouchercon there are few panels dedicated to mysteries of the past. The entire concept of the convention has evolved over the years to sell new books and promote the authors who wrote them. That's to be expected, but it upsets me that so little space is saved for panels to talk of the authors of the past. If a book is out of print, it can't be sold at the convention. So why bother talking about it seems to be the attitude about the older books. Each year there tends to be a Holmes panel and one other writer whose work remains in print. Last year it was Christie. This year it was Rex Stout.

Back in the spring I made a valiant attempt to organize a ready-made panel that would discuss forgotten books and suggested it to the B-con committee to include this year. It was to be about reissuing forgotten books by neglected authors -- a melding of the past and the present and it would have included some very fascinating anecdotes about what it takes to get a long out of print book back into the hands of modern readers. Suffice it to say with only two bloggers and two writers mostly known for histories and biographical accounts of writers our panel did not make the cut. There was, however, a panel called "Bucket List - The Books You Have to Read Before You Die" moderated by Otto Penzler. More on that in a later post.

I attended the Rex Stout panel called "Wolfe at the Door" even though I'm not the biggest Nero Wolfe fan so I could get a better understanding of what I seem to be missing each time I read one of those books. To date the Stout book I have enjoyed the most is Alphabet Hicks, one of the few stand alone detective novels Stout wrote, and one that has fallen into the limbo of Out-of-Printdom. It's not considered one of his best books at all though I found it to be rather innovative in my review last year.

Moderated by James Lincoln Warren the panel was made up of mystery writers Jane Cleland and Dave Zeltserman; Linda Landrigan, editor at Alfred Hitchock's Mystery Magazine; and a substitute member whose name I never caught in the swift introductions. We were spared from Warren's usual time consuming oral interpretative skills, but had to listen to him dominate the panel with his vainglorious lecturing about his past award winning novella in the Black Orchid Novella Award writing competition sponsored by the Wolfe Pack, a group that celebrates all things Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. I would rather listen to panel members talk and have a moderator ask the questions. Sometimes you get a panel hog who interrupts or talks forever, but when you get a moderator who takes over and talks indulgently about himself it gets dull very fast for me.

Most of the panel was devoted to discussing why they like Stout as a writer, why Archie and Nero Wolfe have become such iconic characters for mystery and crime fiction writers, especially American writers, and of course a usual list of the best Nero Wolfe mysteries. There was a brief discussion by the stand-in panel member (for the life of me I cannot remember his name) who gave some trivia I never knew of Stout's reaction to Edward Arnold as Wolfe (disliked the choice), Lionel Stander as Archie (hate that choice) and how he vowed never to allow any Nero Wolfe books to be adapted for the screen after the botched movie versions of Fer-de-Lance (retitled Meet Nero Wolfe) and The League of Frightened Men.

The most interesting part of the panel was when I learned about the Julius Katz stories by Dave Zeltserman. I have been won over by the Zeltserman as a true original among the contemporary writers when I read The Caretaker of Lorne Field last year.  His Katz stories came about when he wanted to enter the Black Orchid Award contest the mission of which is to revive the craft of writing mystery novellas, a form that Stout seemed to have perfected. He wrote forty of them and they are among the best in the corpus (as the Wolfe Pack like to call Stout's body of work). Zelterserman's homage to Stout's detective is Julius Katz, "Boston's most brilliant, eccentric and possibly laziest detective," who is assisted by an artificial intelligence named Archie that resides in his tie clip and is the narrator of the stories.  I had heard of these before and Patrick of "At the Scene of the Crime" even reviewed the Shamus award winning novella and another short story. To hear the characters described by the author himself along with some of his own personal insights -- he described the duo, for example, as having an almost father/son relationship-- made them all the more enticing. They are available in eBook format, but of course I am not part of that revolution.  So I'm stuck hunting them down in the old EQMM magazines where they first appeared.

Still more on Bouchercon Cleveland is coming...

Estate Sale Bonanza - July 2, 2011

Just for a lark Joe and I went on an estate sale road trip and hit about nine sales in one afternoon.  Most of them were a complete bust as far as books were concerned.  If I was interested in old bedroom furniture, though, it would've been a big success.  Every house I went into had a striking fourposter bed, or a quaint vanity and mirror table, or an impressive armoir.  It wasn't until I went into the last two houses that I found the kind of thing I'm always in search of.

The first house had a nice library of old mystery novels including:

Red Wind by Raymond Chandler - the 1st hardcover printing from Tower Books.  Most people don't realize that this is also considered a first edition and NOT a reprint even though Tower Books is primarily known as a reprint house. 
The High Window by Chandler (Tower books reprint)
The Adventures of Sam Spade by Dashiell Hammett - 1st hardcover from Tower books (but a 2nd printing) Later in the car I discovered this was only a reading copy due damage to the boards and some scribbles on the endpapers.

But for 50 cents a book who really cares. None of them had dust jackets unfortunately

Other mystery books I picked up at that sale were Dead Skip by Joe Gores and Cop Killer (1st US edition with DJ in excellent condition) by Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo.  This is a Martin Beck book that I had yet to find in a a decent US edition. Now I can get rid of the placeholder book club edition I have.

Also in this house I found several books by Antoine de Saint-Exupery but only took Flight to Arras -- a first edition, the one in the best condition, and one that I don't have a copy of nor have I read.  Wind, Sand, and Stars is one of my favorite books of all time.  It's a memoir, but it reads like a novel. His books about being a pilot during wartime are some of the best aviation memoirs.

It was the very last house located in Zion all the way up by the Wisconsin border that we found our genuine treasures. Zion was founded by an eccentric Scottish evangelist, John Alexander Dowie, who named most of the streets after towns, prophets, and other personages found in the Old Testament. On our way to the estate sale house located on Enoch Street we passed streets named Gideon, Galilee, Ezra, Ezekiel, Bethesda, Jericho, and most of them were in alphabetical order. I was very intrigued by that. When we got to the house I found that the "old books," as described in the ad, turned out to be exclusively religious textbooks, hymnals and other related books.  I was disappointed but had I known more about Zion I would have been prepared for something like that.

It seemed that we made a very long drive for absolutely nothing.  Just before we decided to leave the house, however,  I saw on the floor in a corner of the den a pile of The American Magazine.  I noticed on the cover of one issue the name Kelley Roos, an American husband and wife mystery writing team. Suddenly, I remembered that many of Rex Stout's novels and novellas appeared in The American Magazine before being published as books by Farrar & Rinehart and later Viking Press.  I immediately enlisted the help of Joe and we started flipping through the Table of Contents of all of the magazines.

At first I only looked at the magazines from the 1930s hoping I would find an installment from The Rubber Band or Too Many Cooks or any of the early Nero Wolfe novels.  But then we decided to look in the 1950s copies as well since they were in much better condition. Bingo! On the cover of one from 1955 was the brightly lettered ad proclaiming:  A complete NERO WOLFE mystery novel. It turned out to be "The Last Witness" - really a novella not a novel - later published as "The Next Witness" in the book Three Witnesses. We also found an issue with the final installment of The Red Box (illustration from that is pictured at the left).  And there were more surprises in store as we made our way through the entire stack.

After much flipping of pages and dirtying all of our fingers with the dust and grime of a house occupied by four successive generations of one family we found quite a nice pile of forgotten gems of mystery fiction.  Here is the list with a surprising variety of writers and styles.

Octavus Roy Cohen - "The Frame-Up" story featuring detective Jim Hanvey (June 1928)

P. G. Wodehouse - "The Missing Mystery" story (December 1931)
Max Brand - "Masquerade" a mystery novella not a western (June 1936)
Leslie Charteris - "The Saint and the Siren" story (same issue as the Brand novella0
Q. Patrick - "The Jack of Diamonds" novella (November 1936)

Alexandra Brown - "Curtain for an Actress" novella (April 1937)
Rex Stout - last installment of The Red Box (same issue as the Brown novella)

Q. Patrick - "Exit Before Midnight" novella (October 1937)
Kelley Roos - "Deadly Detour" novella (August 1952)
Kelley Roos - "The Case of the Hanging Gardens" novella (July 1954)
Rex Stout -  "The Last Witness" novella (May 1955)

Not a bad haul. The big bonus was that everything in the house was at half price since it was the final day of the sale. We ended up paying $20.50 for the stack of nine magazines. Lots of reading and reviewing to come - especially the Kelley Roos and Q. Patrick stories which I don't think have been published anywhere in book format.

ALPHABET HICKS - Rex Stout

I may be the only mystery reader in the world who hasn't fallen in love with Nero Wolfe.  I've read only three Wolfe books and they didn't do much for me.  I read them in my teens, however, when I was a devoted follower of the fair play British puzzle detective novel.  The only American writers I liked were those whose books were puzzle first, character second.  My friends had to keep pestering me to read Rex Stout.  I did and I just didn't like them.  I stayed away from them for 30 years.

Now I'm dipping into the Stout waters again, slowly and cautiously, like a beginning swimmer afraid that the shallow end of the pool will suddenly drop off into the dangerous deep end and I'll be lost with nothing beneath my feet.  For my re-entry experimental reading I decided to read all the non-series mystery novels by Stout this summer.  And I was surprised that in Alphabet Hicks I found the kind of quirky characters and puzzling plot that I craved when I was so much younger.

Alfred Hicks earns his nickname from his odd business cards. They are printed with his name and only a string of seemingly nonsensical letters forcing everyone he hands a card to ask, "And what's that stand for?"  M.S.O.T.P.B.O.M. = Melancholy Spectator of the Psychic Bellyache of Mankind.  C.F.M.O.B. is translated as Candidate for Mayor of Babylon.  Not Babylon, Long Island.  The Old Testament Babylon.  Hicks is quite the sarcastic cut-up.  He's also a disbarred lawyer who mostly ekes out a living as a taxi driver when he isn't trying to be a private detective.  It's in his role as cabbie that he is recognized by one of his fares, Judith Dundee, who hires him on the spot.

Her husband Dick Dundee, president of a plastics manufacturing company, suspects her of turning traitor and selling corporate secrets to his rival. Mrs. Dundee tells Hicks her paranoid husband has turned against her and is threatening to end their marriage.  At the core of his paranoia is evidence that proves she has been in cahoots with Jimmy Vail, the owner of the competitor plastics firm. Her price for hiring Hicks is too much to resist. He takes on her case and is soon embroiled in a messy murder and a corporate spying plot.

1st US edition: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941

The paperback reissue title of the book (and all subsequent editions of the book, in fact) is The Sound of Murder. It's a perfect title.  Better than the original even, for the crux of the plot is the search for a missing record used in an early eavesdropping machine called a sonotel in the book but it seems no more different than an early phonograph recording device with a hidden microphone to record and a record player for play back. The record contains the evidence the husband claims is incriminating his wife as an industrial spy. Like the illustration on the Dell Mapback cover the record becomes a metaphorical tornado spinning out of control and threatening to destroy the lives of all involved.  The record contains a conversation between a woman and Jimmy Vail.  But just who is the woman? Is it Judith Dundee as her husband claims it is? Or is it the voice of Martha Cooper? She is the murder victim found on the grounds of R.I. Dundee & Co. the very day Hicks trails her from a train station to the plastics firm.  Both have amazingly similar voices.  What Stout does with this highly original idea of two sound-alike characters and the mileage he gets out of that plot gimmick is impressively done. He keeps the story moving adding multiple plot complications that make for a twister of a story.

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BLOG LONGEVITY NOTE:  This marks the 100th post for this blog which is approaching its half year anniversary.  I'm glad it happened to be a post on a book from the Golden Age of detective fiction since that was supposed to be my focus when I started this writing adventure back in late January of this year.  But all in all, I like how this blog has morphed into something all-encompassing in crime fiction (and other related genre fiction). It's almost as if it's trying on different personas just like a child growing up.  Here's to another 100 before December 31!