The Glass Heart - Marty Holland

Down on his luck Curt Blair is waiting out a rainstorm in a “ritzy hash joint” just outside of Hollywood, USA when he steals a fancy camel hair overcoat then flees intending to sell the coat. It’s how he makes his living these days – ripping off suckers' coats, rifling the pockets for treasures and cash, then selling the ransacked coat. But this time all hell breaks loose and he’s being chased. While hiding from his pursuers he ends up in the backyard of Virginia Block’s home. She mistakes him for the handyman she recently hired from an agency. Curt being the opportunist that he is wisely plays along and learns the job comes with a free room and kitchen privileges. So he accepts the job, gains a cheap salary of $20/week and a place to stay and eat.

Later the same day aspiring actress Lynn York shows up at the boarding house. She is paying $60/month for an upstairs room, but no kitchen privileges for her. Mrs. B is greedy and a miser we soon figure out. Within hours Curt and Lynn are hooking up and doing the dirty deed in the dirty basement where while putting the moves on Lynn Curt is bothered by the irritating sound of a dripping pipe. He vows to fix the leak though that task is not on the insanely long list of arduous work Mrs. Block expects of him.

While dealing with the plumbing problem Curt discovers a gruesome surprise and jumps to conclusions.  A bit of detective work supports his rash theory and he sees dollar signs. He schemes to blackmail his landlady and employer. Soon he finds his paltry salary increased to a cool $1000/week.

And if you haven’t already figured out that the tables will be turned then you don’t know your crime fiction.

Reading The Glass Heart is like travelling back in time to a 1950s movie palace watching a B movie programmer. It’s crammed full of action, double dealing, manipulation, greed, lust and crime. Everyone is out for himself or herself. James M Cain, who penned multiple densely packed novels about two timing lovers and how greed controls their lives admired the book so much he 1. wrote a praiseworthy blurb for the Julian Messner first edition dust cover and 2. wrote a screenplay adaptation that unfortunately was never produced.  Even he recognized the cinematic potential of this hard to resist story.

While it’s not hard to predict that Curt and lovely Lynn will hook up within hours of meeting I doubt many readers will be able to predict the unusual plot twists. Soon a handful of supporting characters descend upon Mrs. Block looking for handouts including Elise, Lynn's future roommate and a member of an evangelical church devoted to enlisting new members and coaxing money out of them to help build their new church.

The story is overloaded with plot and incident. It’s almost like reading two books in one at the same time. There’s almost no time in the action-filled pages to question the often outlandish turn of events. But I did! And frequently. Some of my nagging questions included: Why on earth is Mrs. B such a pushover? Why didn’t she just throw Curt out of her house rather than be bled dry? And why is Lynn so simple minded and easily manipulated? I guess there is no room for common sense in potboiler fiction. The book exists solely to explore crime and base motives (mostly dealing with lust and avarice) but offers no insight into any of the reasons the characters need so desperately what they long for. I wasn’t asking for heightened literary reasons just a few mundane ones.

Late in the book it all turns a bit ridiculous. Elise receives a telegram that her husband was killed in action overseas. She refuses to accept this and in her religious mania keeps praying that hubbie be returned to her. Like a true believers she’s asking for a miracle. One guess as to how that turns out. Because of course every absurd coincidence one can possibly imagine will be crammed into these 192 pages.

Why have one kook when you can have two? Mrs. B is later revealed to be a bit of a loon herself. Lynn spends much of her time eavesdropping throughout the book and hears her landlady talking to herself and singing in a little girl’s high pitched voice. She has conversations with her dead husband, very intimate and revealing conversations. It all leads to a confrontation between the two woman involving a revolver and a golf club that doesn’t end well at all.

Do you think anything will end well in a book of this sort? Think again!

It starts off as noir but some odd detours and intrusive subplots among the minor characters transform the book to a quasi romance. This schizoid state results in a near parody of noir by the time you get to the two climactic moments. Remarkably – almost unbelievably – for something so laden with doom, insanity and murder, both intentional and accidental, it all ends with a cop out finale that includes a wedding and happily ever after honeymoon in New Mexico! I gather that Holland opted for a hearts and flowers finale because she wants the real villain of the piece to be revealed as a vile monster who “deserved” to die. And she seemed to want to make her leads into decent people who were victims themselves. Really strange considering they were crooked and corrupt from the get-go. When the penultimate chapter exposes the villain’s wide ranging schemes of cheating, thievery and mean-spiritedness one wonders if Holland knew a similarly horrible person and this was a revenge piece.

Marty Holland (1919 - 1971)

And yet though I sound like I’m disparaging this book I found it all utterly addictive. The Glass Heart is, I confess, a guilty pleasure. I couldn’t stop reading and had to know where each ludicrous scene would lead and of course how it all would end. It truly is one of the best examples of a genuine B movie on paper. And no wonder – the author Marty Holland was a secretary at Republic Pictures, one of the leading producers of B movie programmers, for many years. She was writing pulp fiction in her spare time, wrote the book that became the classic noir thriller Fallen Angel, and a story treatment for another crime movie classic The File on Thelma Jordan. Typing all those scripts at Republic Pictures taught her well, I guess.

Stark House has reprinted all of Marty Holland’s crime novels over the past year and a half. The Glass Heart is the newest reprint added to that small pile of books. For decades this novel was unavailable to mere mortals like you and me because the few copies for sale were listed by booksellers at unaffordable collector’s prices. It’s wonderful to have Marty Holland’s books all available to the general public in Stark House’s usual handsomely produced editions. For lovers of noir, kooky melodrama and twisty plotting these books are a must have. Highly recommended – even with all the caveats listed above. The Glass Heart is genuine thrill ride that will leave you both gasping in awe and laughing in shock.

Don't Rely on Gemini - Vin Packer

What’s your sign, girl?
Is it compatible to mine?

If your sign matches mine
Think of what we'll have
We'll be making babies together, forever

“What’s Your Sign, Girl?” - Danny Pearson/Tony Sepe

When I first moved to Chicago I religiously checked my own horoscope on my birthday in the Sun-Times because they include a section called “If Your Birthday Is Today…” and below would be a paragraph about what the coming year had in store for me – and the thousands of other people born in the same day, of course. I would cut it out, put it on my fridge, and review it on the day before my birthday. Invariably it was 90% wrong. But I never bothered to think about all those other people who were born on the same day in the sign of Sagittarius. How did the year work out for them?

That’s the premise of Don’t Rely on Gemini (1969), “a suspense and astrological novel” from the wildly inventive Vin Packer, aka M. J. (Marijane) Meaker. I didn’t for a second believe the hype on the paperback's cover promising “the most gripping spellbinder since Rosemary’s Baby.” For some reason throughout the early 1970s anything that remotely had anything to do with occult, supernatural or even New Age topics were tied to either Rosemary’s Baby (1967) or The Exorcist (1971) or both. The astrology element in this book is used merely to study the concept of parallel lives. A savvy and better-read editor would have done well to compare Packer’s novel to the works of Charles Dickens because coincidence and family secrets run rampant in this book. But would a quasi-literary analogy like that sell books? You bet your crystal talisman, it wouldn’t.

So let’s start with this concept of astro-twins living parallel lives. Astro-twins are unrelated people, complete strangers, who were born in the same year on the same date at the same time. Everyone has at least one astro-twin – well, actually everyone has hundreds, perhaps thousands of astro-twins. And that ought to make all you only children feel a lot less lonely, right? You have myriad siblings who are your astro-twins. But in all likelihood you will never meet them or know them. Regardless, they may be living a life similar to your own. That’s at the core of Don’t Rely on Gemini. And yes, the astro-twins we will meet are born under the sign of Gemini. According to all the mumbo jumbo we are forced to read Gemini is apparently one of the least favorable signs of the twelve in the crazy mixed-up world of the Zodiac. Not just unreliable and mercurial in temperament and obsessive about jobs and hobbies and projects, but apt to lose interest in those projects because of that gosh darned unreliable, mercurial personality.

Archie Gamble is the head writer of a TV special featuring the renowned astrologist Anna Muckermann. In order to add legitimacy to the show Mrs. Muckermann wants to talk about astro-twins and have a few on the air to talk about their lives. Mrs. M has documented evidence of several cases of astoundingly parallel lives in astro-twins that she offers up to Gamble, one case dates back to the days of George III. She insists that the TV show will be a huge draw if people are confronted with the truth of two strangers with the same star charts leading similar lives. This she claims will be proof that the rotation of the planets and other celestial activities do indeed rule our lives. When the moon in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars not only will peace guide the planets but the ratings will probably go sky high. Or so Mrs. Muckermann and Archie hope.

Staff members including Archie Gamble himself give out their birthday info and ads are placed in newspapers to lure in prospective volunteer astro-twins. There are several bites. The most fascinating comes from Margaret Dana who volunteers her husband Neal as a match to Gamble’s birthday data. She invites Gamble and his wife Dru to her home to meet her husband and discuss the possibility of appearing on the TV show. Sounds like fun, right? But this is a crime novel. Guess what follows? Worse than Mercury in retrograde, my friends. Being born in the house of Gemini with Saturn rising adds up to a volatile Molotov cocktail of a star chart as we will soon find out.

A fight happens at the Dana household just as the Gambles are about to arrive. In the course of the heated argument someone dies as the result of an accident and then – Ding, dong! It’s Archie and Dru on the front porch ready for dinner. And a dead body at the foot of a staircase inside. A bottle of wine is not going to solve this inconvenience.

But that’s not the worst of it. Neal Dana never knew about the Gambles coming because his wife was being coy in holding back the surprise of the evening. Neal, you see, was hoping that his wife was going out to her Italian lesson so he could have yet another secret tryst with his adorable mistress Penny. While making up a tale about his wife leaving the house and ushering the Gambles off his porch Dru Gamble hears a woman crying in a back room somewhere. She is sure it’s Margaret but she and Archie agree to leave because something certainly is not right and they are clearly not welcome. So the Gambles drive away.

Then… Archie loses control of his car going down the treacherous hill that leads to and from the Dana house. He crashes into a tree. They have to go back to the house and ask for help. Just as Neal Dana is about to bury the body in the backyard!

Don’t Rely on Gemini sounds initially like a lurid tale from the preposterous world of pulp fiction. Noirish to the core everyone seems utterly doomed amid the insanely surreal action and a pile-up of plot contrivances. Meaker, however, is playing with a loaded deck here. Each contrivance and coincidence is carefully calculated to twist the story toward her theme as she dares to play with superstition and fatalism in allowing her characters to surrender to fate rather than make well thought out decisions. She manages to juggle the ostensibly absurd moments with a very deadly combination of characters who are easily manipulated and those who give in to obsessive thoughts. Mrs. M proves to be perhaps the most dangerous person of all. In her zealous beliefs and dire pronouncements she contaminates the Gamble’s marriage and their relationship by planting seeds of doubt and foretelling impending doom if the couple does not follow her advice. Saturn is ruling their lives; failure to heed all the warnings will lead to disaster. The law of astro-twins does not lie!

The real conflict, however, has nothing to do with astrology. It is the Gambles’ perception of reality. They know nothing about Penny and Neal, unlike the reader, and they assume that a car that belongs to Penny is actually Margaret’s, that each time they see the green scarfed woman in the Ford Falcon they think they see Margaret. Dru learns of Margaret’s affair with a young man from a diary and letters she finds through yet another one of the many coincidences Meaker packs into her story. At the same time Archie is trying to decide whether Neal’s parallel life is worth putting on TV Dru is trying to protect Neal Dana from discovering his wife’s affair.

But, of course, we know what Archie and Dru don’t – that Margaret is dead. That Neal is having an affair of his own with Penny. Neal becomes dangerously obsessive about Margaret, his guilt overpowering him. Penny is fearful she is losing her older lover and she’s right. She can never hope to gain back his attention when he’s drowning in such a powerful nostalgia, she cannot compete with the memory of the perfect wife he is creating in his mind. Nothing can tarnish that memory just as no one can bring Margaret back to life. Someone is going to have to pay the price for that horrible accident. But wait…was it an accident? Didn’t Penny push Margaret down the stairs?

Don’t Rely on Gemini is not only an intriguing thematic exploration of the perils in surrendering to fate it’s also a pop culture smorgasbord of late 1960s America. The book is brimming with brand names, musicians, movie stars and authors including mystery writers Margery Allingham and Mary Stewart. Everything from various models of domestic and imported automobiles to Barry Farber, radio talk show host on WOR and WMCA. Even the plus size dresses and a joke about the maternity line of Lane Bryant crop up in the story. Rock and folk music play in the background of certain scenes as much as Archie’s favorite recordings of operatic arias. Neal disappears into his record collection as well in one of the telling moments playing up the parallel life angle. He plays selections from The Pajama Game original cast album or classical piano music from a William Kappell record to conjure up memories of his dead wife. At other times it feels as if the characters are like the intellectuals of Helen McCloy’s sophisticated Manhattan of the 1940s for the novel is also inundated with literary allusions covering Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence and the 17th century poem “The Meditation” by – get ready for another coincidence – the obscure philosopher and theological poet John Norris. I could have written an entire blog post on "Things I Learned" alone there was so much popping up within this story.

This was the last novel Meaker wrote using her "Vin Packer" pen name.  The 1970s found her turning to juvenile novels which apparently were her most successful books.  I have acquired several of the Packer books over the years, but oddly this most recent one (originally purchased for last year's "Friday Fright Night" meme but proved less suited for that Halloween feature) is the first I've read.  I'll be digging out the other Vin Packer books I own and tearing through them throughout the rest of this year. Stay tuned.

NEW STUFF: Untamed Shore - Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Untamed Shore by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Agora/Polis Books
ISBN: 978-1-947996-92-1
284 pp $25.99
Publication date: February 2020

I can never resist marketing hype. Why? I should know better. I really should. But when I learned that one more person was attempting to liven up the classic noir thriller and that writer was primarily known for her revisionist fairy tales and fantasies and mash-ups of science fiction and the traditional romance novel how could I possibly pass it up? Silvia Moreno-Garcia with three bizarre homage novels of fantasy, supernatural and fairy tale motifs to her credit and a handful of anthologies as editor/compiler has published her first crime novel, Untamed Shore (2020). It’s modeled on the old-fashioned James M. Cain style story of a sucker being led down the road of temptation by a greedy devious woman. But in Moreno-Garcia’s revisitation of this very familiar plot she has reversed the roles. The tempter is a gorgeous and very desirable man and the sucker is a young woman.

Viridiana is hired as a translator/typist to a non-Spanish speaking would-be writer. The writer is rich. He’s married. And his wife’s brother is in tow with them as they rent the ultra-modern mansion called The End located at the very tip of Baja peninsula. It’s the brother, Gregory, who latches onto Viridiana. She may be all starry-eyed but the reader knows she is hardly headed for a happily ever after ending. This kind of role reversal while not wholly original provides an imaginative writer with definite possibilities to shake up a tired formula. I’ve read several Cain style crime novels with reversed roles of temptress/patsy. I’ve even read one where the duplicitous schemers are gay men trying to kill a third man for his money. Did Silvia Moreno-Garcia pull it off? Much to my surprise she did.

I was not buying much of the book for its first half. Moreno-Garcia is clearly still very much sticking to the romance novel formula in this her sixth full length novel. To be honest I have not read any of her other books but going purely by the plot summaries I can see that she is in love with love. All of her books feature young women in the lead roles and all of them are entranced by dangerous men. This is the rudimentary ingredient for all romances and especially the Gothic romance novel (two of her most recent novels are heavily influenced by that subgenre). She’s revisiting very well worn territory here. And the romance angle even though it may be ornamented with paragraphs of startling shark imagery and some intriguing lore about shark fishing is overly familiar and hardly eye opening.

Her protagonist saves the book. Viridiana invigorates what might have been just another romance redux book. It's not just her unusual name (her father named her after the lead character in a Luis Buñuel movie he loved) that makes her unique. With her odd job as reluctant tourist guide and interpreter for the 1970s gringos who find her native Baja peninsula Mexican town an exotic attraction Viridiana is the kind of character you want to spend a lot of time with. She has a horrid home life, she’s dumped her dull fiancé and in the process of being willful and independent has alienated both her mother and would-be mother-in-law, not to mention the would-be groom. Viridiana wants desperately to escape her dead end town. Unappreciated, insulted and maligned by nearly everyone in her town, lectured by her mother who constantly reminds her she does not know a good provider is enough to save her its no wonder that Viridiana retreats into solitary fantasy. We know she deserves a better life. And we want that for her – at any cost.

Enter the trio of rich and flashy Americans who bring to life all of her Hollywood fantasies. You see, like her father Viridiana is a movieholic. She can’t help but draw comparisons to Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun as she finds herself drawn into a risky romance with Gregory. All of her references relating to love and sexual attraction are from old movies. She embarrasses herself with her indulgent imagination and finds herself dictating her dreams into a cassette tape recorder her absent father gave her as a substitute for a diary. She knows it’s wrong to dream girlish fantasies, but can’t help herself. And Gregory exploits her Hollywood fantasies with promises of taking her away and setting up a new life in Paris. She wonders aloud in her tape recorded musings if it all is just too good to be true.

You better believe it is.

Soon her employer is found unconscious at the foot of the stairs. They call the police and a doctor. But by the time they arrive at The End, miles away from the town center, he is dead. Convenient accident or murder? Viridiana begins to suspect the worst and sees Gregory and Daisy, his sister, in a wholly new light as the police begin to question them. She even turns snoop and amateur sleuth and uncovers additional mysteries that need explaining. The movie she dreamed of begins to seem more and more like A Place in the Sun. She had forgotten about the death of Shelley Winters in that movie -- an accidental drowning that leads to Montgomery Clift’s being charged with murder. Her movie fantasies become even more terrifying the more she tries to find out exactly who Gregory and Daisy are and why they came to Baja.

At this point the book kicks into high gear shifting in tone and piling on more action, Moreno-Garcia abandons the dreamy introspective narrative that dominated the first half and takes up the motifs and situations of genuine noir and pulp fiction. Con men, gangsters, crooked cops, bribes galore, a convoluted will, a suspicious nephew, ultra bloody violence. We get it all. Viridiana is forced to grow up almost instantly. She recognizes she’s been used and turns the tables on her exploiters.

I’m glad I took the time to stick with this one. It paid off in ways that I didn’t think the writer was capable of. If Moreno-Garcia has not read the typical crime novels to familiarize herself with this genre she at least has watched a lot of movies to get a handle on the right conventions and plot elements. I thought I knew exactly where this was headed but she managed to throw in a few unexpected curve balls and surprised me at least twice. She sure was not afraid of some gory violence and torture either. I usually don’t applaud this in any writer, but after the ostensible false start of the book it was exactly what the novel needed. Without it Viridiana probably never would have changed and realized at least something resembling a Hollywood ending. And, of course, getting the long overdue life that she richly deserved.

The Singing Clock - Virginia Perdue

THE STORY:  In the middle of the night Jacklin Bogart discovers the dead body of her cousin Antoinette and proceeds to cover up the crime. She is certain she knows who is guilty. We watch her remove the weapon from the scene and bury it far away, then she washes blood off her clothes. Lt. Brady arrives on the scene and is too clever to be fooled by Jacklin's charade. He knows she is shielding someone and perhaps trying to incriminate one of her relatives she so hates. Soon we learn that Jacklin is highly suspicious of nearly all her relatives and suspects someone guilty of not only killing her mother but trying to do in her beloved grandfather. When another murder occurs in the home it is clear to Brady that Jacklin's meddling is endangering the lives of the entire Crandall household.

THE CHARACTERS: Jacklin is one of the earliest renditions of the now tired cliche of "the unreliable narrator".  We never really know whether to believe her outrageous claims that someone not only arranged the accidental death of her father, but manged to drive her mother to commit suicide. Or perhaps killed her and made it look like suicide. Despite her beliefs her parents' deaths are not viewed as crimes by anyone,  but only by Jacklin herself. Her hatred of her relatives infects her every interaction. Her desire to avenge her parents' death affects her close relationship with her grandfather who she also believes is being targeted by the same homicidal manic who killed her parents. Everard Crandall, is an irascible old man who seems to be as misanthropic as his granddaughter. But someone still manages to poison him, a botched attempt to kill him that does not go unnoticed by the police or the relentless killer who will try again later in the story.

David, Antoinett'es former fiance, who had an argument with the murder victim the very night she was killed.  It seems that David whose reputation is tainted by his volatile temper had a prime motive and all eyes turn to him as suspect number one.  Was Jacklin protecting him with her monkey business at the scene of the crime?  Further complicating the case is that fact that Jacklin has an obsessive love for her cousin, Ward, who was training to become a doctor in Germany but was forced to return to the US in 1939 when the war broke out. She dreams of marrying him, and longs to be a Crandall so she get get rid of the odious name Bogart and all the hateful things it reminds her of.

The Crandall household is typical of these GAD fictional homes populated with troubled wealthy people all waiting for an ailing relative to die. The eccentric standout is Aunt Mel, Antoinette's mother. She is a religious zealot obsessed with New Age style movements like the one that celebrates The Great Life Force she is currently proselytizing about. In one of the book's highlights she lets loose with a tirade of invective at Everard accusing him of bringing about her daughter's death and cursing him to die.

Everard's housekeeper Mrs. Wollaston, was at one time his lover and they intended to marry, but the family prevented their union in holy matrimony. Mrs. Wollaston, nevertheless moved into the house to stay by the man she loved and care for him.  But is it possible her love is all a sham and she is actually in love with Everard's money?

ATMOSPHERE: The title of the book comes from a musical antique grandfather clock that has a prominent place in the home. Throughout the novel Jacklin hears the clock chiming an hour and a portion of the lyrics of "My Grandfather's Clock" run through her head. The song itself lodges in her mind like an earworm, and each time the clock chimes a new hour she hears another line of lyrics singing to her. Often the phrases ironically comment on the action that just occurred or will foreshadow future incidents in the narrative. Perdue uses this motif to add an eerie menace as the murder investigation unfolds. The rhyme includes the line "But it stopped short, never to run again, when the old man died" and Jacklin is fearful that if the clock stops it's tune or stops its incessant ticking Everard Crandall will in fact drop dead. She is determined to save him and is on constant watch as people continually enter and exit his bedroom where he spends much of his time.

INNOVATIONS: I thought this was going to be a suspenseful inverted crime novel and that Jacklin was guilty from the start on page one when we follow her destroying evidence and covering up the murder. But The Singing Clock (1941) is in fact a legitimate whodunnit, an ingenious blend of psychological suspense and detection. Filled with shifts in tone, surprise revelations, astonishing secrets and some transgressive touches like marijuana addiction and borderline incestuous love, The Singing Clock is one of the most remarkable crime novels to be published by Doubleday's Crime Club and a minor masterpiece from Virginia Perdue, a sorely underappreciated American crime fiction writer. The last chapter of this book is bonechilling and genuinely thrilling with Perdue's final unexpected shocking revelation. All that preceded suddenly shifts, characters are seen in a new blindingly altered light, and the story all makes perfect sense. The last few paragraphs are literally bloodcurdling with a scene reminiscent of the violent movies of Quentin Tarantino and the nightmarish tales of Cornell Woolrich and Robert Bloch. For me the final chapter of The Singing Clock is utterly ingenious and makes this book a breathtaking pioneering novel of misdirection in crime fiction. I was both impressed and astonished, a rare reaction these days.

THINGS I LEARNED:  I remember "My Grandfather's Clock" as a nursery rhyme from my childhood. My younger brother and I had it on a kid's record and we used to listen to it over and over as we did with the many odd songs in our large record collection. But apparently it's actually a folk tune that dates to the post Civil War era. Written and composed by Henry C. Work the song was published in 1876. Work is also the composer of a march that memorialized Sherman's invasion of Savanaah called "Marching Through Georgia."

According to a Wikipedia article Henry C. Work wrote a sequel to the song in which the narrator "laments the fate of the no-longer-functioning grandfather clock – it was sold to a junk dealer, who sold its parts for scrap and its case for kindling."

A lyric line from the song inspired "Ninety Years without Slumbering" in the classic TV series The Twilight Zone. Similar to what Jacklin believes in Perdue's novel in the TV show Ed Wynn stars as a man who fears his life will end when his antique clock stops ticking.

For those unfamiliar with the song "My Grandfather's Clock" you can hear Johnny Cash do his own rendition. It's the only one I can listen to now amid the sea of annoying kid's versions.

QUOTES:  "Don't think you can get out of it so easily! You've gone too far, Everard Crandall.  Your wickedness and cruelty have offended against the Great Life Stream!" Jacklin felt a mad desire to laugh. At the same time there was a prickling along her spine. It was only a part of Aunt Mel's latest religious fad. Nevertheless, it was rather horrible.

"Nobody can call his soul his own. Not so long as [Everard's] alive."

There was an air of vigorous health about [Aunt Sarah], a country air, as if she were made of good rich soil instead of ordinary blood and nerves.

And I can't resist adding this one in our days of mask phobia and pandemic viruses:

...the other man gave a harsh laugh which ended in a fit of coughing. He really had a bad cold, Jacklin thought with distaste. Why didn't they stay at home when they were sick. It wasn't fair to go around snuffling and coughing and infecting other people.

NEW STUFF: Tears Are for Angels - Paul Connolly

Tears Are for Angels by Paul Connolly
A Black Gat Book/Stark House Press
ISBN: 978-1944520922
200 pp. $9.99
Publication date: February 24, 2020

Flashbacks. I like a little time travel in my crime fiction. You get it a lot in mystery fiction, whether it’s a simple telling of a client’s reason for hiring a private eye, or the apparently guilty heir coolly going over his actions the night his wealthy uncle was bashed on the head with a silver plated candlestick. It’s nearly inescapable in the conventional formula of the Q&A style of “Where were you on the night of…?” you get in everything from English manor whodunnits to hard-edged police procedurals to melodramatic courtroom battles. But rarely are flashback techniques used with such stunning effect as in Tears Are for Angels (originally published 1952) the final crime novel Tom Wicker wrote as “Paul Connolly” before he decided to use his own name on his work.

Here's the bare bones story:  The murderous result of a jealous husband’s rage, his insane method of covering up the murder as a suicide, the bizarre self-mutilation done to bolster his claim of self-defense which later leads to amputation and disfigurement, and the subsequent amateur investigation of his wife’s previously unknown friend trying to get at the truth of that violent death.

Wicker uses multiple viewpoints in his detailed flashbacks as both narrative experiment and to create suspense in a story of duplicity, mistrust and hidden desires. There is an element of the unreliable narrator in the storytelling that always leaves the reader questioning which story he should believe. Is anyone telling the truth? Much as we get a tortured confession from Harry London at the outset is he just making it all up? And is Jean, his wife’s supposed good friend from the Big City, to be trusted with her story? Is she too creating a story of her relationship they had as a sympathetic diner customer looking after a lost and needy waitress?

On the surface this novel may seem nothing more than a tawdry tale of revenge, but there is more to this sex and violence tale than a retread of another familiar getting even story. Surprisingly, for a tale that ostensibly seems to be about crime and revenge Tears Are for Angels turns out to be a novel of love and forgiveness, for redemption and rebirth. Wicker has his protagonist come to this eyebrow raising realization:

I had never really loved Lucy [his wife]. What I had thought was love was only conceit, because she had been my property, because I had made her my property.

...now I know what love is, I thought. Now I know. It's what I feel for this woman who lies naked and sleeping beside me. It's something I never knew existed in this world or any other. It's what you feel when you are able to do anything and suffer anything and endure anything and give anything, any time, anywhere, for someone else. Or at least it is for me. That's what love is for me. 

A more lusty and transformative love has rarely been depicted so intensely or unexpectedly as in this compact novel. For all its action oriented scenes, for all the desire captured in passionate and desperate moments this final work as "Paul Connolly" is one of Wicker's most mature works. We still get a shocking climax in which one final plot twist is delivered with a hefty punch, but the ending of what might have been a deeply disturbing noir tale delivers not only redemption for Harry, but for the memory of his dead wife. More importantly, Tears Are for Angels promises a glimmer of light for our two protagonists after a descent into the abyss. This was the book Tom Wicker needed to write in order to pave the way for his later, even richer novels like The Devil Must (1957) which were published under his own name.  here is a minor classic, in my opinion, and one of the few paperback originals that absolutely deserves this new reprint from Black Gat/Stark House.

Highly recommended!  Grab a copy now.

FFB: Murder Comes Back - Harriette Ashbrook

THE STORY: Moira Ballinger, widow of department store millionaire, is found dead in her bedroom shot through the head, apparently self-inflicted. Twenty years earlier her husband supposedly committed suicide in the same manner using the very same monogrammed revolver found in her limp hand. Is it merely a case of eerie déjà vu? Or is it a murder disguised?

CHARACTERS: Initially Murder Comes Back (1940) seems like it will be a run-of-the mill story of greedy relatives clinging tightly to secrets and too easily motivated to kill a vile relative in order to gain their inheritance. Money seems the obvious motive for all those implicated.  But Ashbrook is too clever to resort to tiresome conventions and cliche plot ideas. There are plenty of secrets in the Ballinger household a veritable avalanche of skeletons come tumbling out of multiple closets once Spike Tracy and Inspector Herschman begin questioning the relatives.

The murder investigation gets under way almost immediately with the intrusive presence of Dr. Horatio Pennypacker, a suspicious outspoken family physician who has taken it upon himself to imprison the person he thinks is the obvious murderer. He entrusts the key to a bedroom where he has locked up James Wort, the Ballinger family lawyer. Then Pennypacker enumerates several points about Prentice Ballinger's death and the outrageous coincidences that match up with his wife's recent supposed suicide, the most compelling being that each bedroom was wiped clean of all fingerprints except for those found on the revolver near the hand of each victim. Murder seems a proven fact with that detail in the open. Tracy then adds one more observation to the list of coincidences -- that Dr. Pennypacker was the first person on the scene at each death. That seems to put Pennypacker in his place leaving him quietly seething and shutting his supercilious mouth for the remainder of the chapter.

Tracy will face off with his Irene Adler in this murder case. She is Patsy,  the youngest Ballinger and the only child not even born when her father was killed two decades ago. Patsy seems to be digging through the past and finding bits of evidence that she refuses to share with Tracy.  He curses her in every other chapter calling her all sorts of names but at the same time marveling at her wily intellect and admiring her ability to outwit every policeman sent to keep an eye on her in her lower Manhattan apartment building.

The rest of the family are featured in small vignettes but are almost relegated to the background for the bulk of the novel. Sidney, the older brother, is eager to get an investment partner to renew a promissory note for $100,000 lest his business fall into bankruptcy. His money problems make him a prime suspect. David, the other son,  and his wife Paula live in near squalor thanks to Moira's selfishness. He too needs money and could use the Ballinger millions denied him by his haughty disdainful mother. And then there' s Olivia, affectionately called Ollie by Patsy, who lives in lonely spinsterhood in her isolated third floor apartment in the family mansion. Her only friends seem to be the female servants with whom she frequently goes to the movies. Is she harboring a secret that requires money too? Though the Ballinger sons may not feature prominently and Ollie seems to be present only for window dressing all of them play important parts in the solution of the Ballinger murders.

INNOVATIONS: Ashbrook has constructed a complex plot in which an overlooked crime in the past has led to a swath of violence in the present. Prentice Ballinger’s suicide is clearly a murder as is Moira’s death and both seem to be the work of a single person. But several other murders follow in quick succession, one of them rather shocking. Inspector Herschman and Tracy follow the clues believing that one greedy soul is the culprit. In a brave departure from the conventions of traditional detective fiction Ashbrook has allowed her love of violent murder movies to influence the outcome of her gripping story of violence, blackmail and revenge. There are multiple villains in the piece, few people escape guilt for one reason or another, surprise witnesses appear who don’t know they are witnesses, an intricate cover-up is slowly revealed and a genuine surprise in the final pages of who killed Moira and what happens to that criminal. Ashbrook has broken several time honored rules in Murder Comes Back and I enjoyed it immensely as a subversive murder mystery published well before similarly transgressive crime novels would flood the shelves in the post-WW2 era.

QUOTES: The only kind of big game he’s interested in wears lace step-ins.

I’m the only one who has an ironclad alibi for both cases. […] Twenty years ago when old [Prentice] was popped off, I was in what the poets call the 'primordial darkness of the womb.'

And so Spike told him. All. That was one of Pug’s chief virtues. Telling him All was as safe as pouring it down the kitchen sink.

Her artless, foolish, and malicious chatter had lightened one of the most obscure spots in the case -- the spot between four-thirty and six o’clock on a certain afternoon in the life of the late Moira Ballinger.

A female who figures in a murder investigation, even in a minor capacity, should be a ravishing blonde or a flashing brunette. She should be sinister or of touching innocence. She should be an intriguing vixen or an adorable angel. In the light of these requirements Miss Lillian Gillespie was a bust.

EASY TO FIND?  You can buy an eBook version of Murder Comes Back from an outfit called Black Heath Editions who sell their reissued vintage crime novels via amazon. I've been informed that it is available in the UK, EU and USA as well as India. Good news for a digital edition for a change! Even more exciting news is that Black Heath has remarkably reissued all of Harriette Ashbrook's mystery novels. If you like this one, you can read them all! Luckily for those who prefer original and vintage editions there are still a handful of copies of Murder Comes Back in both hardcover and paperback offered via the usual internet bookselling sites outside of amazon. Only one is priced in the collector’s range. Act now!

TomCat who blogs at Beneath the Stains of Time is reviewing many more of Ashbrook's novels over the next couple of weeks. You can find them all by clicking here.  I'll be reviewing at least one more, The Purple Onion Mystery, the final book in the Spike Tracy series.

FFB: The Little Lie - Jean Potts

When asked where her fiance Chad has gone Dee Morris tells a lie, The Little Lie (1968). A fib really. She says he's gone to California on business. And because Dee has a habit of telling these little lies and truly believing in them, depending on them to construct her own personal reality, to protect her preciously cultivated status in town, that one little lie leads to more lies. A fib becomes a grand deceit and soon Dee finds herself desperately trying to reconstruct the truth without ever being found out. She can't admit to the lie, she is incapable of admitting to mistakes. And that's her fatal flaw. A plane crash leads everyone to believe that Chad has perished along with all the other passengers and Dee admits to it. But what will happen when everyone finds out that Chad is really alive? To what lengths will Dee go to make sure that her version of the truth remains undisturbed and undiscovered? Dee learns that not everything is in her control and that nothing can ever be predicted.

So many great works of literature have been created out of the concept of "the bigger the lie the more it will be believed". The Children's Hour (1934) by Lillian Hellman being one of the earliest and still one of the finest examples of the power of rumor and lies to change the viewpoint of all people those rumors touch while simultaneously bringing to light deeply hidden secrets. Few writers, however, have been challenged by the concept of the dangers of a fib. In an age when we are confronted with lies by people in power on an almost daily basis, by leaders who manufacture their own reality and wholeheartedly believe in that falseness, The Little Lie reminds us of the dangers of trusting too easily and more perceptively the concept of the liar as manipulator and puppeteer. Like our own misguided and narcissistic President, Dee Morris is trapped in a private world of her own creation, utterly self-absorbed, concerned only with her carefully crafted worldview, her status, and her tenuous happiness. Everyone else be damned. Woe to anyone who crosses her.

Even the slightest interference will only add to the snowballing trouble. The elderly schoolteacher Mr. Fly, a well-intentioned interloper who only wants the best for everyone. His habit of eavesdropping (a favorite plot device of Jean Potts) and gossip leads to a deadly confrontation between Dee and her sister-in-law Erna. Mr. Fly appears to be some sort of adult male version of Pollyanna trying to spread happiness wherever he goes, but only succeeds in augmenting trouble and bringing about ruin instead. In dealing with his intrusions Dee only becomes more desperate. Desperation makes her intractable. Her every action is about self-preservation. If people won't stop talking and gossiping then she will have to take matters into her own hands and permanently silence them.

The Little Lie is perhaps Jean Potts' finest contribution to genuine domestic suspense. In Dee Morris Potts has created one of her most unnerving and deeply disturbed characters. The story hits all the right notes, focuses on the lives of women and their husbands (or in the case of Dee, her intended husband) with the perceptive plot gimmick, a seemingly innocuous lie, serving as the catalyst for all that follows. The final pages are fraught with tension, a neatly noirish touch in the revelation of Dee's most creepy secret, which leads to a near operatic mad scene. Like the best of noir we know everything was leading to this explosion, that Dee was doomed when she uttered that little lie. And it's perfectly fitting in the last paragraphs that it is Mr Fly, the foolish interloper, who discovers Dee finally broken, caught in the web of her own creation, surrounded by her final act of violence with nothing left to do but collapse in a pitiful ironic fit of laughter.

FFB: Death Wishes - Philip Loraine

Unpleasant people. Unpleasant situations. You can’t escape them if you’re going to read crime fiction. I’m always amazed when I read a review of a crime novel that states the reviewer did not like the book because the characters were unlikeable, unpleasant, untrustworthy, and in general just UN-anything. Why bother reading crime fiction then? Nice people don’t steal, swindle, beat up, torture or kill other people. There are nothing but unpleasant people in Death Wishes (1983) one of Philip Loraine’s last books published in his lifetime. But just because these people are not nice doesn’t make them not worth your attention. This is one crafty bunch of characters and their two-timing and lying make for some fascinating reading.

Basically what we have here is another story about a group of avaricious relatives fighting for the estate of a wealthy patriarch who had little love for anyone other than himself. Edward Walden has one daughter, an alcoholic ex-wife now dead, and a couple of illegitimate children who will crop up during this twisty story of deceit and betrayal. His mistresses and their offspring as well as his servants are expecting to be the primary legatees when the will is read. Imagine their surprise when they hear that the entire estate is left to Catherine, his estranged daughter who has been living in the United States for over twenty years. The household is in a mild uproar and those who were apparently disinherited insist that there was a new will that cut out Catherine and left them the estate to divide into five equal shares.

Catherine who has traveled southern France to the Walden estate (but conveniently skipped out on Daddy’s funeral) finds herself the target of a couple of dangerous young men, their scheming mothers, and a wily butler out for himself. Who will find the correct will? And will Catherine survive the weekend before it turns up? I’ll say no more. Loraine has constructed a neatly plotted story, deceptively simple on the surface but teeming with background intrigues only hinted at in the first few chapters. But in the masterful, exciting finale those intrigues take center stage. All hell breaks loose with a furor of tempers flying, accusations of attempted murder, and a flurry of bizarre revelations and ugly truths finally exposed.

Short and sweet this week, eh? The only thing I’ll add in closing is that in this fourth to last novel of Loraine’s not only are the characters more base but so is his writing. Casual swearing crops up frequently as well as casual sex. Loraine decided to go whole hog with the unpleasantness. Those easily offended by F bombs in language and in the bedroom ought to look elsewhere for their entertainment. For me, Death Wishes hit the right notes of venal and criminal behavior on the printed page. Guess I was sick of niceness this past week.

FFB: And to My Beloved Husband - Philip Loraine

THE STORY: Not all ugly ducklings will transform into swans. But despite her plain looks and less than warm personality Beatrice Templer manages to win the hand, if not the heart, of her handsome prince. Aspiring novelist Michael Kinman, stunningly gorgeous, described as a "beautiful angel" by too many women, learns of Beatrice's recently inherited millions from a previous marriage of convenience and takes advantage of her besotted attraction to him. Soon they are married, living a life that not too many would describe as happily ever after. Michael has his mistresses and Beatrice has a diary into which she pours out her secret longing. Then one summer evening Beatrice drops dead at during a cocktail party with friends. Her last words are "Mikey, oh, Mikey..." as she looks right into his eyes with that usual cold blank stare. An autopsy reveals she died of an overdose of her combination anxiety reducer and sleeping pill. Could a woman so obviously in love with her beautiful younger husband have killed herself? Inspector Keen begins his investigation doubting that premise and is determined to uncover the dirty truth behind Beatrice's unexpected death.

THE CHARACTERS: And to My Beloved Husband (1950) is the debut novel by a writer who would go on to a prolific and rewarding career as a screenwriter. This first effort already shows his talent for rich characterization and adroit, well-delineated voices in his often acerbic dialogue. The novel opens with a scene between two supporting characters -- friend of the Kinman family Humphrey Orton and the lawyer Alexander Perowne. Orton is sort of a clone of Count Fosco, Wilkie Collins' odious villain. Like Fosco his repellent physique is offset by his wit and charm. He describes himself as both a procurer of and chaperone for Michael's mistresses. We learn almost all we need to know about Michael and Beatrice in this opening chapter, the most telling tidbit being that Orton will be escorting Michael's most recent paramour Helen Langton (the very antithesis of Beatrice) to the weekend party.

When the story moves into the Kinman home we find a divisive household, some utterly devoted to Michael and others duty bound to Beatrice. Constance Snagge is Beatrice's secretary companion, a mousy spinster in her mature years as besotted with her employer as Beatrice is in love with Michael. Michael too has his share of idol worship in the person of Beatrice's stepson Adrian Templer, a handsome painter with an erratic personality given to bursts of anger and resentment if he learns that anyone is talking ill of Michael or treating him poorly. These two also give Inspector Keen a lot of inside information about their adored figures that no other character is privy to.

Detective Inspector Keen is aptly named, as sharp as a knife with an personality edge just as cutting. Unlike many of the policemen who turn up in novels where a household is divided into two camps of slavish devotion and bitter jealousy Keen is not created as a peacekeeper. In fact, he's one of the more devious characters in the cast. More manipulative than Beatrice herself he exploits his role as a policeman during his brutal interrogations with casual insults, personal attacks, and caustic remarks intended to wound egos and weaken the suspect's carefully cultivated facades. He's as relentless as he is indifferent. All that matters to him is that he find a killer. For he is certain in this household of impassioned remarks and fervent emotions that someone has murdered Beatrice.

INNOVATIONS: The novel has an artful structure that alternates between the present and the past. Just after Beatrice's death takes place the following chapter gives us a detailed history of her past from her career in nursing to her caring for her future husband, many years her senior, ultimately leading up to a Mediterranean vacation where she meets Michael. The omniscient narrative voice allows us to know Beatrice in a detached way well suited to her enigmatic personality. Loraine adopts a cheeky tone often tinged with patronizing judgments and snide wit wholly suited to a novel where the characters are mostly putting on fronts or hiding behind an officious veneer created to protect fragile emotions.

Nearly every character is treated to exhaustive backstories highlighted by neat personal touches and unusual details. Loraine's omniscient narrator gets deep inside each character and the brutal honesty of the writing reflects how we are meant to think about each person. His style falls just short of what can become, in less talented hands, the voice of a godlike observer passing judgment on fallible and weak people.

THE AUTHOR: In the author bios on the dust jackets of "Philip Loraine's" early books it was clear the writer was not interested in revealing his real name or letting anyone know much about his life. There have never been any photos on his books and his name was not revealed until much later in his career. Robin Estridge, in fact, had a more successful career in the movies as both a screenwriter of original work and adapter of other writer's novels. His most well known book is perhaps the novel The Day of the Arrow (1964) which he adapted for the screen and became the weird neo-Gothic thriller The Eye of the Devil. Most of his novels were a mix of suspense thrillers and espionage adventures. And to My Beloved Husband is one of his few crime novels that could be classified as a traditional mystery.

Estridge had two other novels adapted for the screen by other writers: The Break in the Circle and Nightmare in Dublin. For his own work in screenwriting he received a BAFTA award for The Young Lovers (aka Chance Meeting, 1954) co-written with playwright and novelist George Tabori and five years later was nominated for a BAFTA for his script North West Frontier, a wartime adventure. His more than fifteen other scripts include Checkpoint, a crime drama (1956); Beware of Children, a comedy (1960); and The Boy Cried Murder (1966), a remake of The Window based on a Cornell Woolrich story. He died in 2002 at his home in Oregon.

EASY TO FIND? Though born in England Estridge eventually settled in the USA. Many of his early Philip Loraine books are easier to find in US editions on this side of the Atlantic. And to My Beloved Husband was published in three different editions available from American publishers. The UK edition was titled White Lie the Dead (1950) and is apparently a genuinely rare book as I could find no copies for sale. There are only two known copies in UK library systems. Luckily, the used book market has a good number of copies in all three US editions, one hardcover and two paperbacks, all of them shown in the post. Happy hunting!

FFB: Heart to Heart - Boileau & Narcejac

THE STORY: One evening a singer and her piano playing lover have an argument with the singer's composer husband ending in the piano player killing the composer. The two lovers cover up the murder by making it appear that the husband died in a car accident. But their trouble is only beginning. Only a few days later the wife receives a package from, she thinks, an unknown admirer. Inside is a record and when it is played she hears the final song her husband composed called "Heart to Heart." In an odd mix of devotion and hatred he asks her to record it while simultaneously accusing her of his murder. If she records the song he promises all will be well, but if she refuses he will send on a letter to the police. Then she learns that her friend, a music publisher & producer, also received a package -- the manuscript of the music along with a set of lyrics. He also wants her to record the song. Will she give in to what appears to be blackmail from beyond the grave?

THE CHARACTERS: Heart to Heart (1959) was originally published in French under the title À Coeur Perdu (To a Lost Heart), a more fitting title encapsulating the themes of obsessive love, jealousy, possession, and retribution. As usual for Boileau and Narcejac, the story is told from a male viewpoint.  Almost exclusively we see all the events through the eyes of Jean Leprat, the pianist lover who mortally wounds Maurice Faugères when he strikes him on the head with a heavy candlestick. I noted only one scene when the story shifts to Eve's viewpoint and Jean is not present. Otherwise, we are lost in Jean's obsessive world. It is almost strictly a two character piece with the story focusing on the aftermath of the crime and Eve and Jean's embroiled love-hate affair. They are typical of the tortured lovers that fascinate these French writers. Jean like Fernand Ravinal, the protagonist of She Who Was No More, is trapped by his emotions and lost in his thoughts. Interestingly, prison imagery is prevalent recalling their masterful thriller The Prisoner (Le Louves) published four years earlier. Jean muses over his desire to be free of the woman without whom he cannot live with lines like this: "To think that I love her so much -- as though I were some kind of animal and she were my mate!" Also like Ravinel Jean finds himself at the mercy of a controlling ghost of whom he remarks: "Eve belonged more to a dead man than to the living one."

Faugères' method of revenge is music. All three know that the song "Heart to Heart" will be an instant hit with its beautiful melody and lyrics describing intense longing. Jean describes the song this way: "It was a love song with a taste of tears, the rather embarrassing pathos of a farewell. But the refrain was virile stirring. It proclaimed the triumph of life." But Eve cannot sing such a song that is clearly her husband's plaintive call to her. The song is indeed recorded, but by Florence, a woman singer who was Eve's rival and who she feels is less talented, hardly an artist. Of course the song becomes a huge hit playing on the radio many times a day. And the two lovers cannot escape the song. Jean hears taxi cab drivers whistling the tune. Eve is annoyed when a elevator boy hums the song. It plays over the speakers in stores. Everywhere they go they hear the song. Jean comes to the horrible realization that Maurice Faugères "was stronger dead than alive."

INNOVATIONS: The police get involved when there are faint hints of foul play at the scene of Maurice's car accident. But it becomes a full blown investigation at the novel's midpoint with an unexpected murder of a supporting character that comes as a shock to the reader. Borel, the lead investigator, has as his primary clue only the sound of a woman's voice. A cab driver reports to the police that he dropped off a woman in the vicinity of the building where the crime took place. The most distinctive feature he can remember was her low and resonant voice, a voice like a radio singer. And so the book becomes not only about music and lyrics and the emotion carried in a powerfully written song but sound of all types. It's a brilliant addition of how sound and voices can become a surreal form of haunting that will eat away at the fragile consciences of our guilty duo.

Further building on the device of the several recordings that the dead Faugères has somehow managed to send to his wife and her lover the writers have Borel conduct an experiment in recording of his own. The policeman tracks down several woman singers and recording artists and asks them to speak the lines spoken to the cab driver and records them on tape. He plays all of the voices for Eve but she catches on quickly. She not only speaks the few sentences into the tape recorder she says, "Why did you not ask them to sing?" And then for the first and only time in the novel Eve sings the song "Heart to Heart." We never get to read the lyrics (a wise choice on the writers part) but we are told this:

She sang the first verse softly, her eyes fixed on Leprat. It was for him that she was singing. For him and for Florence, whom she was crushing with her talent. Florence ceased to exist. The challenge lent unbearable poignancy and sadness to Faugères' words. His song of farewell to Eve was transformed, in this police office, into her farewell to Leprat. Her face gradually became suffused with inexpressible grief, her voice took on inflexions that came from the blood, from the entrails; it was lacerated, agonized, and triumphant.

Sound -- whether it be the spoken voice, the singing voice or music itself -- is the real force of haunting in this story of obsession and possession. There may be the imagined ghost of Faugères reaching out to them but for these people for whom sound is such an important part of their lives, for whom music is an energy more powerful than their love for each other, it is sound that will be their undoing.

Danielle Darrieux (Eve) and Michel Auclair (Jean) in Meurtre en 45 tours (1960)

THE MOVIE: The novel was adapted for the screen as Meurtre en 45 tours in 1960. Freely adapted is more accurate. Extensively changed with most plot elements rearranged, the only features that remain unaltered are the characters' names, their relationships, and the recordings sent to Eve after her husband dies. In this rewritten movie version we never really know who killed Maurice until the rather ridiculous ending. Throughout the movie Eve and Jean suspect each other of causing the car wreck that kills Maurice. Gone is best part of the book -- the ingenious use of sound and music as methods to prey on their guilt. The screenwriters were clearly influenced by the success of Les Diaboliques (1955) and play up the possibility that Maurice may in fact be alive. The movie can be seen online in both French and English. Unfortunately, the English version is dubbed rather than subtitled.

EASY TO FIND? If you read French you are in luck. There are multiple used copies in various editions of À Coeur Perdu, all at cheap prices, from numerous US, UK and European dealers. Nearly all of these French books are paperback reprints. But the 1959 English edition (translation by Daphne Woodward) from Hamish Hamilton is a scarce and highly collectible book. There was only one hardback edition published in English and no paperback reprints that I know of. Currently there are only two copies available for sale: one is offered by an Australian dealer for US$108 and the other from the estimable Mysterious Bookshop in New York City for $125. Both are in fine condition and include the handsome DJ as shown from my copy up at the top of this post.

This is my second favorite suspense novel by Boileau & Narcejac. It stands out as an example of that all too rare work in genre fiction -- an artistic crime novel. They continue to explore their favorite themes of obsessive love and guilty consciences, incorporate the ghost and haunting angle, and the powerful metaphoric use of music and sound makes it all sheer brilliance. Though it all ends in genuine tragedy the book also has very slight touch of the detective novel in the second murder investigation that ought to please the purists. If you are fortunate enough to find a copy I highly recommend this. I'd go so far as to claim that this is superior to their other two well known books made famous by the movies Vertigo and Les Diaboliques, but not quite at the same level as their masterpiece The Prisoner.

FFB: Dead Reckoning - Bruce Hamilton

"Well written, but most unpleasant tale" -- penciled remark by a Previous Owner left in my copy of Dead Reckoning

THE STORY:Tim Kennedy is a successful dentist and happily married to Esther. Until one evening his vivacious, attractive wife goes chasing after her hat on a busy roadway. She is struck by a car and suffers multiple injuries. Her recovery is a painful and disheartening one. She is left horribly disfigured, crippled on one side of her body, and drained of her lust for life. Taking care of Esther becomes a burden to Tim, his love and devotion dwindling, eventually finding himself drawn to the much younger Alma Shepherd. Tim begins to daydream of how easier his life might be without Esther leading to what he thinks is the perfect murder.

THE CHARACTERS:The original title of Dead Reckoning (1937) in England was Middle Class Murder. That title is a good cue to the kinds of people to expect in its realistic rendering of a dentist, his patients and friends. But it is Hamilton's juxtaposition of mundane homelife and a routine workplace against the secret criminal plotting of our anti-hero that make the book more than just a mainstream novel which in the first half it very much resembles. From the very first page we know Tim Kennedy is planning on killing his wife, one of several half-started, then abandoned plots that will come back to haunt him in the final chapters.

The story is told in third person but everything is viewed through Tim's perspective. He at first seems like an amiable man, well respected in his profession and well liked among his small circle of friends and acquaintances. As the story progresses he gradually transforms into a figure of pathetic desperation. Aching for the sex life he once had, longing to be desired, suffering through the worst kind of middle age crisis and coming to the most heinous decision on how to transcend his depression and unhappiness. Remarkably, it is Hamilton's skill in turning our sympathies toward Tim when he becomes the victim of a nasty blackmail plot that make this book a unique British version of a James M. Cain tale of infidelity and murder.

We know poor Esther is doomed from the start and yet she never becomes sentimentalized. Her recovery is painful to read of while her burgeoning friendship with Alma, Tim's object of desire, is an ironic high point of joy in her brief post-accident life. Tim's business partner Adam, who becomes his nemesis in Book Two, is a fine portrait of a little man attempting to live a life of big dreams yet revealing instead nothing but amoral corruption and small-minded greed. The lack of police throughout the story highlights another world of Hamilton's creation fraught with omnipresent danger, paranoia and near lawlessness.

INNOVATIONS: Hamilton's brother Patrick is best known for his playwriting skills, but Dead Reckoning shows the elder Hamilton to have a similar gift for drama played out in skilled dialogue sequences that reveal character. There is a excellent section devoted to a tennis party ostensibly thrown together for Esther's benefit but in reality a way for Tim to get to see Alma. Hamilton uses the tennis party to introduce a few minor characters who will reappear in other functions in the second half of the novel as well as allowing us to see Esther experience the joy of her former self. The dialogue is cleverly rendered with innuendo between Alma and Tim; we know Tim's thoughts as well as his words, but can only guess at Alma's thoughts and feelings based on ambiguous remarks. A later scene where Tim takes Alma on a private tour of his home leads them to a room with a rocking horse. Alma sits down and rocks herself while Tim continues his veiled flirtation with her. It's a remarkable piece of writing that shows the older man pursuing a younger woman while at the same time ridiculing him as we see her acting in such a childlike manner.

The crime novel features take over in Book Two when Tim finds himself the victim of a blackmail scheme. In eerie anticipation of Robin Maugham's well known novel The Servant Tim finds himself at the mercy of his employee who in effect takes complete control of his life, commandeering his finances and forcing Tim into committing more acts of final desperation. This coupled with some bad news about his supposed property inheritance from Esther sends Tim into a continual downward spiral. It's a chilling portion of the novel. One cannot help side with the hapless dentist and hope that he can turn the tables on the avaricious and amoral Adam. There are some violent action set pieces and an eleventh hour scene where we think Tim may have indeed thwarted the plot to reveal him as Esther's killer.

THINGS I LEARNED: In one of the many dentist office scenes (some of them rather fascinating) Tim runs out of a special mouthwash preparation. He calls his assistant, Adam, to make him some more, but there is no reply. Because the patient is in the chair in mid-surgery he is forced to come up with an alternative: "Eventually he telephoned the chemist (whose boy proved to be out) and made do with lysol." Lysol as a mouthwash? I can't believe that. Hamilton must've intended Listerine and got confused. I looked up the history of Lysol products and it was never used as mouthwash. It was, however, used as a vaginal douche. I'll spare you anymore of my findings.

EASY TO FIND? If you speak and read French you're in luck. The most affordable copies are paperback editions in French (Portrait d'un meurtrier) but there are only five that I could find for sale. No good news for the original English language editions. A single copy of the UK title Middle Class Murder is available if you're willing to pay $324 (£250) while only two US editions are for sale priced at $30 (no DJ) and $250 (with DJ). Looks like your local library may be the best bet.

FFB: Something about Midnight - D. B. Olsen

THE STORY: By day she's Ernestine Hollister, dedicated English literature student at Clarendon College, but at night she transforms herself into Ernestine Hall, sultry dance hall girl flirting with every young naïve sailor she can find. Her motives are founded on bitter revenge but she's not talking about her past with anyone. Not even Freddy Nixon who's been trying to get her to notice him for weeks at her regular haunt at the amusement pier. He finally gets up enough nerve to talk to her, she relents out of boredom, and accepts his invitation to visit Mrs. Lacoste, an elderly woman who has been his weekend companion for several weeks now. This strange trio of characters drink, laugh and discuss Mrs. Lacoste's missing grandson who has gone AWOL from the army or is MIA. It's all very ambiguous. Mrs. Lacoste isn't offering any real details, she'd rather drop a few sleeping pills in her beer creating a "goofball cocktail" and get deliriously drunk. Freddy and Ernestine notice the abuse of drugs and alcohol but keep it to themselves. That night Ernestine vanishes along with her sporty convertible Packard. Professor Pennyfeather is asked to find the missing Ernestine by her seriously frightened cousin Rae Caradyne who also happens to be one of his students. Four hours later he finds the missing student at the foot of a cliff. A typewritten note left in her car indicates suicide. Or did something far more sinister happen?

THE CHARACTERS: Something about Midnight (1950) is the fourth mystery novel featuring D. B. Olsen's (aka Dolores Hitchens) inquisitive English professor Mr. Pennyfeather. Hitchens has once again dreamed up a cast of fully human often complicated characters. It's almost a shame that poor Ernestine gets knocked off so early in the book because she is one of the most fascinating young women I've encountered in Hitchens' mystery novels. Intelligent yet petty, Ernestine's sardonic hipster attitude masks a deep-seated anger mixed with sorrow. Only after she's dead do we fully realize what motivated her to adopt the alter ego of Ernestine Hall who teased and exploited the young sailors looking for female companionship at the dance halls. The opening chapter with its strange visit to the home of Mrs. Lacoste is at the heart of the mystery and the numerous violent deaths. Mrs. Lacoste herself is an odd character, but compared to others she seems relatively sane even in her choice to live in an alcoholic stupor.

There's Rae Caradyne, an all too somber, rather humorless college student who first brings Mr. Pennyfeather into the case. She comes off as a near caricature of the ugly duckling, bespectacled loner. But her seriousness rings false to Mr. Pennyfeather. He is sure Miss Caradyne is hiding her real self behind the mask of a dull Plain Jane.

The most colorful of the cast is Ernestine's uncle Stephen Dunne. He too is a loner, but of an entirely different sort. He lives the life of a reclusive artist in a seaside ramshackle house where he collects driftwood and seaweed for his unusual mix of sculpture and painting in the weird landscapes he creates on mesh frameworks. He has a deep love for his niece and cannot accept that she killed herself which is how the police want to deal with her death and thus avoid any type of real investigation. Uncle Stephen waxes poetic with some nicely done monologues in his discussions with Pennyfeather. Hitchens does a fine job with Stephen in reminding us how violence brings out a person's deep philosophical side, how it makes us reflect on the fragility of life, what we value most and how often we never realize that worth until it is taken from us. Stephen Dunne is cantankerous, witty and often profound. He was my favorite of this well-rounded group of intriguing characters.

INNOVATIONS: Of all Hitchen's mid-career books this one seems to mark her transition from the traditional mystery to her darker crime novels that border on genuine noir. The story of Ernestine and her past are reminiscent of the plots that Ross Macdonald revelled in with his corrupt, well-to-do California families. Hitchens' noir touches will be fully realized in her brief series featuring private eye Jim Sader who appeared in Sleep with Slander (1960) and one other novel. That's not to say that this still isn't a intricately constructed and subtly clued detective novel because it is. The academic setting for once is intrinsically intertwined in the story of Ernestine's violent death. Her insightful study of literature and love of poetry manifest themselves in quotes from "The Garden of Proserpine" by Algernon Swinburne which will be of great help in leading Pennyfeather to the truth. Also, a rather Christie-like bit of clueing comes in the letter Freddy Nixon sends to his secretary alerting her to his possible murder. He reports an overheard conversation and quotes some dialogue that appears to be college slang but will turn out to have a completely different meaning.

The novel tends to veer into thriller territory in the final third when Mr. Pennyfeather is abducted and the story shifts into high gear with one action set piece after another. Highlights include a climactic fire in a California forest and an unusual hand-to-hand fight between the middle-aged man and the very surprising villain of the piece. Still with all these action sequences Something about Midnight rightly belongs in the traditional detective novel category.

QUOTES: Dunne looked gloomily out upon the sea. "So damned lonely...as lonely as death itself. Would she have come up here in the middle of the night to jump off into the roaring black surf? I don't think she would have. Not at midnight. There's something about midnight, something gruesome."

There were no lights, and the fog concealed the gleaming radiator until it was too late. The car was there, a juggernaut, and [he] was there, its victim. And Death was there, too, waiting for the not unhandsome fellow who had liked to linger on the beach to pick up girls.

Mr. Pennyfeather turned over and over in his mind the circumstances of the case, the outright, miraculously lucky breaks that had seemed to occur one after the other, making everything seem so smooth, logical and easy; and he was aware, as before, of an uncomfortable hunch that there was a ghastly hitch in it all somewhere, and that under the whole reasonable tightly knit structure of his solution some demon of the perverse was laughing at him.

EASY TO FIND? Looks pretty good, gang. As usual it's the paperback reprint that tends to be available for sale more than any other edition. The book was published in the UK and the US, but US editions are more plentiful on the internet. There are approximately 30 or so copies available all at reasonable prices. Only two copies of the first US edition hardcover (a Doubleday Crime Club book) show up for sale. One with the scarce DJ is $25 and the other without is $20. Both are real bargains, I say. The Pocket Book paperback is your best bet. Sadly, none of Hitchens' books under her D. B. Olsen moniker have been reprinted in modern editions. Someone ought to rectify that soon.