FFB: No Questions Asked - Edna Sherry

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

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

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

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

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

FFB: The Silence of the Night - Roger Ormerod

THE STORY: Weary of the world of police work David Mallin is now in security work, his most recent assignment is to guard the artwork – in particular, a Chinese vase from the T’ang dynasty – at an upcoming gala in the home of Hillary Keane, art collector and real estate mogul. But the night before the gala Keane’s home is burglarized, a man is murdered, and the vase is smashed to pieces. Mallin offers to help find out exactly what happened when his girlfriend’s uncle is implicated in the burglary and possibly the murder. Because Mallin was on site at the time of the burglary and was suspiciously knocked out by an unknown assailant the police immediately suspect the security guard of being involved in the crimes. Mallin works furiously to clear Elsa’s uncle and himself of all culpability.

THE CHARACTERS: Dave Mallin is modeled on the American private eye heroes of the 1940s. The entire book is imbued with the conventions of an action-filled pulp thriller. He speaks just like one of the generic wiseguy private eyes from books and movies of a bygone era. Very odd for a British book published in 1974. But he’s inherently likeable as a protagonist and I liked his irreverent treatment of his former police colleagues. He has all the inside dope on how police officers think and operate and this gives him an advantage over them as he resorts to a battle of both wits and methods in figuring out what happened at Killington Towers.

Elsa seems to be present only as a foil for Mallin’s coarse personality. In contrast to her boyfriend Elsa is refined, a wannabe sophisticate, who longs for a better behaved, more gentlemanly man in her life. She’s constantly bickering with Mallin and adding insult to injury flirts with all the well-to-do art collectors. One of these men, Martin Vale, spends a lot of time with Elsa. She accepts his attention mostly to irritate Mallin and because the guy has a Porsche. There is a running gag about her own car that has a faulty starter and a kind of stupid subplot about trying to get it repaired. Her Rover sometimes starts up fine, and at other times fails to start at all. This serves as a gimmick to keep the arguing flowing throughout the story. But what at first I thought was just dumb jokes and filler turns out to be an important plot point. Cars, their engines and whether they run well or not all turn out to be significant to the story and help Mallin defeat the villain in the end.

Speaking of subplots -- in addition to all the talk about art and antiques, specifically ancient Chinese porcelain, there is a parallel story about 17th century playwright manuscripts making this both an art mystery and a bibliomystery. The murder victim is Cameron Frazer, an oddball researcher obsessed with proving that Christopher Marlowe was the true author of Shakespeare’s works. He has managed to infiltrate the Keane household without invitation and holed himself up in the library refusing to leave. All this because in addition to the fine art collection Killington Towers houses a library of rare books and manuscripts. Keane inherited the library from the previous owner. Among those rare manuscripts is a Shakespearean first folio that Frazer was poring over at the time of his death.

T'ang dynasty jar with lid

Even more intriguing is the fact that Frazer is deaf. This presents an intriguing impossible crime of sorts. The police presume that the burglar was startled in his theft of the vase, dropped it, broke the thing, and then murdered the researcher so that he could not identify the burglar. But Mallin maintains that the murder was an inside job and that the killer must have known that Frazer was deaf otherwise he would not have attempted the burglary in the first place. So if it was an inside job why was Frazer, a deaf man, killed? He would not have heard anything, not a door being jimmied or a window being raised, and certainly not the smashing sound of the vase when it broke. It’s all rather mysterious. Mallin wonders which was the intended crime – the murder or the burglary? Was there even any crime at all? Was the burglary faked? Was the murder an accident?

Elsa’s uncle was involved in a shady deal trying to acquire the first folio for one of Keane’s collector friends, Alton Bloome who is visiting from Minnesota. Bloome is also interested in the Marlowe/Shakespeare conspiracy theory and has made manuscripts a hobby of sorts. The police are convinced the murder is the primary crime and that the vase being smashed was an accident as the murderer fled. But Mallin is not so sure it’s as easy to explain away. Elsa insists Mallin get to the truth and prove himself worthy after having failed to do his job of protecting the vase and other artwork.

Then it turns out that there is a copy of the T’ang vase in the possession of Martin Vale, local automobile dealer and the same man Elsa has been hanging around. Mallin begins to wonder if the burglary has something to do with collector jealousy and the murder was not at all the primary crime.

INNOVATIONS: As usual Ormerod fills his story with loads of red herrings among the well placed valid clues. I fell for the most obvious red herring while dismissing all the automobile talk as filler. None of the car talk, however, is filler. You don’t need to know the difference between a Rover (Elsa’s car with the faulty mechanism), an Oxford (Mallin’s car) or a Porsche (Vale’s alluring car) but any reader ought to pay attention to scenes when Dave and Elsa are arguing about whether the starter works or not. I should have known better having just read a book where I skipped over all the talk about photography and missed one of the best clues in that other book.

The smashed vase is of greatest interest to Mallin. He collects all the pieces and has it reconstructed by an art forger/expert he knows. When the vase is reassembled there is a small piece missing. This sets Mallin’s imagination afire. Elsa’s uncle was in the area of the library where Frazer was killed on the night of the murder and burglary. But he claims he did not hear the vase being broken. Mallin uses this as proof of his theory that the vase was broken elsewhere and the pieces were scattered around the floor to make it appear that it was broken. The missing piece is most likely to be found in something that belongs to the burglar/murderer. He believes the vase was stolen. He mentions this to the police referring to the incident as “the crash that wasn’t heard” -- The Silence of the Night, as it were. Alwright, the detective in charge, quips, “Like the dog that didn’t bark?” and laughs at Mallin.

ATMOSPHERE: In keeping with the American private eye influences that permeate The Silence of the Night Ormerod creates a cinematic set piece for his climax. All of the car business leads to a breakdown in both mechanics and Elsa and Dave’s relationship. The two hot headed lovers break up seemingly for good and Elsa storms off to find Vale. Mallin ends up being pursued by one of the bad guys and we get a full blown car chase, shoot out culminating in a explosive wreck as the book’s climax.

Humor is interspersed making the book all the more engaging and readable. I particularly liked the absurd bit of business when Mallin wants all the male suspects to speak in a pretentious American accent in order to figure out who faked a phone call. The scene allows Ormerod to make fun of American gangster movies with one of the more amusing characters doing a near perfect impression of James Cagney snarling out 1940s movie dialogue. The tension is cut in an original way and the entire scene undermines the villainy of the professional criminal who was exploited by the murderer.

Overall, The Silence of the Night is an entertaining and unusual detective novel blending traditional Golden Age plot motifs, American hardboiled narrative style and Ormerod’s original use of contemporary and popular culture in spreading out innovative clues. My only complaints are 1. the villain in this book is rather obvious (if not his motive) 2. the only American character in the story, Alton Bloome, tends to speak in British idioms that no American would ever use. For instance, he says “set that down” rather than “put it down over there”. But this is just nitpicking on my part. I enjoyed meeting Dave Mallin, Elsa and the rest of the regular gang and look forward to reading other books in the Mallin series. There are sixteen books in this series, most of which are available in digital book format from Lume Books as well as fairly affordable used copies from online sellers and used bookstores.

BONUS!  Try to find a copy of the 1993 Black Dagger reprint (pictured at top and the one I own). There is a brief introduction with some biographical info on the author written by our friend Martin Edwards!  He was writing introductions back in the 1990s for the CWA sponsored "Black Dagger" reprint series. This book and five others were selected by CWA members Peter Lovesey, Marian Babson, and Peter Chambers.  If all of them are as unique as this book I'll be looking for more of them.

Dave Mallin Detective Novels
Time to Kill (1974)
The Silence of the Night (1974)
Full Fury (1975)
A Spoonful of Luger (1975)
Sealed With a Loving Kill (1976
The Colour of Fear (1976)
A Glimpse of Death (1976)
Too Late for the Funeral (1977)
This Murder Come to Mind (1977)
A Dip into Murder (1978)
The Weight of Evidence (1978)
The Bright Face of Danger (1979)
Amnesia Trap (1979)
Cart Before the Hearse (1980)
More Dead Than Alive (1980)
One Deathless Hour (1981)

MOONLIGHTERS: Burton Keirstead, The Economist & the R.C.M.P.

What a surprise it was to learn that this excellent detective novel was the work of a young economics professor who was teaching at the University of New Brunswick when it was published. Burton Keirstead (writing as B. S. Keirstead) co-authored his first and only novel with D. Frederick Campbell, who apparently was also working at the university though I was unable to uncover anything about him. The Brownsville Murders (1933) is an engaging and fascinating blend of police procedural, a novel of rural Canadian life, a satire of naive thinking, and an eye-opening account of the RCMP in 1930s Canada. Keirstead seems to draw from American pulp writers and the nascent detective novels just beginning to become popular as million copy bestsellers. Well reviewed in the American press The Brownsville Murders showed promise for the young man who wrote only one other detective fiction work published only in serial format, but would go on to make a name for himself as one of Canada's leading economists of the early 20th century.

The Brownsville Murders is set in the titular Canadian farming village sandwiched between Woodstock and Fredericton in the province of New Brunswick. In the opening pages we meet a young couple engaged to be married who while driving to Fredericton come across a body in the middle of the road. Upon close inspection they see it is a man who has been shot in the head. When they go for help and return to the accident scene the body has disappeared. A search ensues and soon another person is dead. And then another!  Only 35 pages have passed and already we have three bodies, one missing, and two young people terrified to have been caught up in a true murder mystery.

Brian Woodworth, the young man driving the car that night, we soon learn is a law student finishing his studies and employed in the office of Lawyer MacPherson whose first name is never mentioned. Macpherson is our narrator and the unofficial detective of the novel. This is a blend of both amateur and professional detective work. Inspector Eccles of the RCMP will eventually take charge of the investigation aided by MacPherson and Sgt. LaTour. Interestingly, MacPherson notes that the young sergeant is the more capable of the two policemen. He describes LaTour as a man of "sheer native wit and shrewdness and insight." In contrast Eccles is an an impulsive and fanciful thinker who MacPherson believes relies too much on imaginative ideas "full of bad psychology." Eccles is certain that two people were responsible for the three murders and the vanishing of two corpses. He cannot envision that one person could carry out all the activity necessary in killing three people and moving the bodies.

The man found dead in the road is identified after painstaking questioning and turns out to be a local named MacLeod with a reputation as a womanizer. In one of the most intriguing fictional inquests I've ever read the Brownsville murder case reveals a torrid lover's triangle heightened by impassioned jealousies and rampant cruelty. We meet a sadistic Fundamentalist Christian farmer who according to gossip beats his daughter. A feeble minded "half-wit" confesses his love for MacLeod's wife and talks of his passion for late night salmon fishing. Finally, we learn of the life and work of the stranger in town, a writer and illustrator named Stephen Jamieson.

Canadian law allows for a police counsel to question witnesses at a coroner's inquest.  In The Brownsville Murders the police counsel is Mr. Des Barres who is determined to implicate Albert Denton, the "half-wit fisherman" who was seen wandering near the site of the shootings. This eyewitness is Mrs. MacLeod, the object of Albert's obsessive affection and also the wife of the murdered man in the road. As MacPherson watches the inquest unfold from the gallery he is suspicious of every word uttered by Mrs. MacLeod. Is it possible that she is perjuring herself in order to escape suspicion and help Des Barres build his case against Albert?

Poor Brian Woodward is also badgered on the witness stand during the inquest. He is advised by MacPherson to keep his temper under control and not allow himself to be bullied into an outburst. MacPherson is sure that Brian will be manipulated and exploited by the shrewd and controlling police counsel. It's all Brian can do to keep from criticizing Des Barres' methods rather than simply answering his questions. At times he cannot speak, rather he sits seething in the witness stand.

The inquest ends with a circumstantial case built against Albert who has been painted as an obsessive stalker angry with MacLeod and protective of his "love" for Mrs. MacLeod. Albert's father is worried that the police will soon arrest Albert and hires MacPherson as his lawyer. The case becomes one of MacPherson trying to save Albert from trial and determined to help Eccles and LaTour find the true murderer of the three shooting victims.

I was completely enthralled with this novel. It's an impressive debut work and all the moreso because the writing duo managed to fool me.  The James M. Cain-like atmosphere of jealous lovers and volatile extramarital affairs was so convincing and so neatly laid out with multiple suspects I was completely taken in. But all the while Keirstead and Campbell had another angle with clues cleverly planted so off-handedly that I dismissed them entirely as red herrings. Much to my embarrassment (and later delight) these supposed red herrings were the real clues leading to the solution. In fact, one bit of investigation about a shack on one of the farms near the initial murder and roadside accident should have been so obvious to me that I was kicking myself for overlooking it.

Young Burton Keirstead, circa late 1930s.

Burton Seely Keirstead (1907-1973) was born in Woodstock, New Brunswick and was the son of Dr. Wilfrid Currier Keirstead, a pastor for the United Baptist Church and a noted professor himself. Dr. Keirstead taught philosophy and social sciences at University of New Brunswick where his son would eventually study and teach.

Burton would choose economics over religion and philosophy and his studies included a stint as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford where he was involved in the Adelphi Club, the Dialectical Society and the Lotus Club. While at Oxford he often entertained students in a salon in his private rooms. One of the most famous salons he arranged included a talk by fellow student E. M. Forster, famed novelist of A Passage to India, A Room with a View, Howard's End and Maurice.

Over his lengthy career as an academic and economist Keirstead taught at University of New Brunswick, Dalhousie University's Institute of Public Affairs, McGill University and University of Toronto. He was a visiting lecturer at MIT, University of Arizona and The University of West Indies in Jamaica where he studied and eventually published a book on freight rates and the federal shipping service. He published several books on economics throughout his life notably The Economic Effects of the War on the Maritime Provinces of Canada (1944), The Theory of Economic Change (1948), Canada in World Affairs, Vol. VI (1956), and Capital, Interest and Profit (1958).

While The Brownsville Murders is Keirstead's only published detective novel it is not his only contribution to crime fiction. The editor of Maclean's magazine after reading an enthusiastic review of Keirstead's debut mystery novel in a New York newspaper met Keirstead in person to discuss his fiction. Together they came up with a plan to publish Keirstead's second idea for a detective novel as a serial. The first part of Murder in the Police Station appeared in the January 15, 1934 issue. MacPherson, Brian Woodward (now a partner in MacPherson's firm), Inspector Eccles and LaTour all appear in this second work. A nice surprise is that after his success with the Brownsville case LaTour has been promoted to the rank of Inspector in the RCMP. Murder in the Police Station was published in six bi-monthly installments from January through April 1934. The entire serial is available to read at the Maclean's website. I hope to read the whole thing and write a review of that obscure fiction work soon.

FFB: Case of the Cold Coquette (a rerun)

Here's another rerun for you pulled from the back files of Pretty Sinister Books. I read nearly all of the Jonathan Craig police procedurals and wrote them up over a three year period.  The only two not reviewed on this blog are the last two books in the series. Though they were popular posts (one in particular garnering over 1700 hits) I got very few comments on them when I first ran them. This may be in part because -- with the exception of one post -- none of them were featured as part of the Friday's Forgotten Book meme. Enjoy this late summer rerun!

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In the opening pages of Case of the Cold Coquette (1957) Eddie Macklin is shoved into the path of an oncoming subway car. His corpse is a mess, the police have to take him away in pieces. The medical examiner jokes, "I could practically do the autopsy right here without lifting a scalpel." Gallows humor is the only way to survive the mean streets of Lower Manhattan. Selby and Rayder examine the contents of Macklin's clothes and find nearly $500 in cash and receipts from a theater ticket agency and an after hours liquor joint that show Macklin to be a man of expensive tastes. Why then is he wearing cheap off-the-rack clothes and unpolished battered shoes?

The two cops learn that Macklin was leading a double life in two separate homes. One residence is a small room in a cheap tenement on West 24th Street where he talked to no one, never had visitors, and played his guitar and sang folk tunes that annoyed his cranky landlady. His other place is a swank midtown apartment near Columbus Circle that he shared with Marcia Kelpert, the "cold coquette" of the title.

Marcia Kelpert is a high priced call girl who specializes in long term commitments to only very rich clients. She's found her latest wealthy lover in Macklin. She provides Selby and Rayder with their first real leads and through her stories they begin to understand the dual life of Eddie Macklin. She mentions Eddie's hatred of Peggy Taylor, a popular jazz singer with whom he attempted to collaborate on a recording of some folk tunes. Eddie was an expert in the origins of American folk tunes, an amateur guitar player and a fairly good singer. But his partnership with Peggy ended after a nasty fight. This bit of info will lead the cops to Taylor and her agent, the equally shady George Sullivan.

Craig focusses the story on the life of the victim which will become the growing trend in much of crime fiction, especially the police procedural, from the late 1950s to the present. Each interview provides another layer of Macklin's complex life: his multiple addresses, his primary source of income as a bookkeeper, the basically friendless life he led, and his mistrust of nearly everyone. Selby soon realizes that Macklin's source of wealth was related to another of his non-musical interests -- blackmail.

As in The Dead Darling when the story moves to Greenwich Village (the two cops' usual beat) Craig takes advantage of that colorful neighborhood to introduce us to a variety of oddball characters. There is Ace Wimmer, a newspaper seller who fancies himself a secret journalist even to the point of wearing a hat with a fake press card tucked into the band; Mercator, who gets his quirky nickname from his hobby of selling maps of the Village with special locations for secret thrills; Teddy Sheaffer, an ex-vaudeville ventriloquist who haunts the local bars with his dummy plying drinks from tourists and doling out info on Village denizens; and Alice from the Movies, a statuesque prostitute who appeared in some News Reel footage of Times Square that garnered her a lot of attention and provided her with her odd nickname. But one of the strangest characters is Dukey Nardo.

Nardo is a snipe grabber. Provided with a report from the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Selby discovers that Nardo had been examined at Bellevue where it was revealed that Dukey Nardo derived "sexual gratification from obtaining the unsmoked portion of a cigarette - provided it was being smoked by a young and attractive girl - and finishing it himself." He started out by sitting near a smoking girl and switching cigarettes with her in a shared ashtray and moving up to the daring and extremely creepy job of plucking a cigarette right out of the woman's hand or mouth and running off with it to drag on it ecstatically. Snipe grabber. Don't tell me you can't learn something from reading old mystery novels.

Another thing you will learn is of two unusual medical conditions that affect the circulatory system. Knowledge of these medical conditions provides a huge clue to Selby in recognizing the identity of the murderer. I guess if you've gone to medical school or have an extensive knowledge of diseases you might be able to recognize the killer when first introduced, but don't count on it. The identity of the killer came as a complete surprise to me. This is one of Craig's skills in writing these books. You're wrapped up in the unravelling of Macklin's confusing and fascinating life that you lose sight of the hunt for the killer and things just slip right by. These are not just police procedurals, but cleverly constructed and subtly clued detective novels.

MOONLIGHTERS: Dulcie Gray, Actress & Mystery Writer

This is my inaugural post for a new feature on people who wrote mysteries who were primarily known for a completely different profession. We'll be looking at mainstream novelists, academics, performers, journalists, and a music magazine editor. To start us off I chose Dulcie Gray, stage, TV and movie actress, who was married to Michael Denison, also an actor with whom she often appeared.

Gray's first mystery novel, Murder on the Stairs (1957) is a homage to the old dark house thrillers and draws on traditional detective novel motifs like a bitter family at each other's throats and action confined to an old family estate. Unlike the novels which obviously inspired her Gray experiments with narrative techniques.

Divided into three separate sections we get the point of view first from an ostensible victim, Mary Howard, who we soon learn has been leading us on in her first person narrative. Part two changes narration to third person and we see everyone’s reactions to Mrs Howard’s seeming paranoia and learn that several people may want her dead. We also discover her husband died under suspicious circumstances.  In part three we have yet one more change in point of view when  Dr. Bradley takes over the story as an amateur detective with the added unusual twist of two people who take turns presenting their solutions to Mrs Howard’s murder.  Murder on the Stairs reminded me most of the work of Christianna Brand whose mystery novels also tend to be populated with embittered families, display a sardonic wit, and contain -- her trademark -- multiple solutions to the mysteries.

The difference is that Gray aspires to achieve the plotting techniques and sparkling wit of Brand but falls short of the mark. Her dialogue is bitchy and catty reminiscent of the kind of thing that Gray herself must've uttered in many stage melodramas. Her plotting is not as clever and her clueing is weak when it is present. Murder on the Stairs has one intriguing element that made me hope that she was writing a send-up of Murder on the Orient Express. At one point in the second half we discover that three couples (two sets of husband/wife and a duo of female friends) are planning to kill Mrs. Howard. I was hoping that all three couples would pull off each attempt on her life and it would be up to the survivors (and of course the reader) to figure out which murder plan succeeded and who was responsible. However, all hopes were dashed when the murder occurs and it is ineptly pulled off. The cover illustration of the paperback edition I own depicts the crime. The illustration is purposefully misleading but I'll say no more.

I read only one other book -- Epitaph for a Dead Actor (1960), her fourth novel -- but it too suffers from stilted dialogue (especially when the characters express their love for one another) and plot elements better executed in the hands of more accomplished writers. I plodded on through the tiresome opening which focused on Louise Ferrar and her relationships with a TV director (called a producer during this era) and her current paramour. I managed to make it to the murder of a loathsome womanizing actor who is playing the male lead in a vehicle produced and written for Louise to star in. When he is killed the live broadcast is cancelled and his life is revealed in all its lurid detail. We learn he has been married multiple times and fathered a child out of wedlock, as they used to say.  The more the police uncover the more we learn that Robert Strang has exploited women vilely. His big secret which serves as the motive for the crime is something pulled from the pages of  Victorian sensation novels. I won't mention it but you probably can easily guess from that hint.

Only the women characters (apart from boring Louise) held my interest and got me to the end of the book. There is a conspiracy of sorts, a bit of ugly blackmail, and once again some false confessions and therefore alternate solutions to Strang's murder. But in the end there is nothing clever here, all of it so very familiar. The old hat dialogue that seems lifted from a 1940s melodrama is completely inappropriate for a novel written in 1960. Not even the backstage look at how a TV show is put together and rehearsed was enlightening. The setting which has a kind of John Dickson Carr importance in how the architecture and layout make it difficult for people to be seen from certain angles is not handled very well either.

All of the characters (even young Anita Weston, who appears all too briefly yet has perhaps the best written scene in the entire book) seem to be living in an England that died decades before the action takes place. Even the teleplay the actors are rehearsing, called The Schoolmistress, has a hoary plot reminiscent of a script pulled out of a dusty trunk left in someone's attic filled with Edwardian and Victorian memorabilia.

Even when she tries to add some excitement to the book Gray falls into cliche traps. When John Foster, the TV director, turns amateur sleuth the villain in a sort of disguise kidnaps him and locks him in an abandoned warehouse to prevent him from getting too close to the answer. The sequence filled with ludicrous touches just seems stupid in the context of the rest of the book and completely out of character for who the villain turns out to be. Foster spends 48 hours trying to find a way out of his prison and it's all so ridiculously contrived. He can't smash the window and crawl out because Gray invents reasons to prevent that. Instead he accidentally finds a hidden trapdoor that leads to a cellar that then leads to another exit! The whole sequence spread out over three chapters wouldn't pass muster in a boy's adventure book.

One plus for this book: a really cool plan of the murder scene appears on the final page. (see below) Why it wasn't placed at the front of the book eludes me. Thankfully, there's a footnote to draw the reader's attention to its odd placement.

I can imagine that some actors would find their talent in creating and inhabiting characters to be an advantage in writing fiction. After all writing novels and playing a part have very similar artistic skills involved. I think in the case with Gray, she found herself heavily influenced by the dialogue of stage and screen rather than drawing from life.  Her worst fault (clearly stemming from her stage career) is her fondness for lengthy monologues. Everyone talks endlessly and melodramatically. My favorite phrase that occurs in both books I read is when any man gets angry at a policeman and feels personally insulted he exclaims, "Damn your eyes!"  Gray's characters don't behave like real people most of the time and they often sound like they are on a stage entertaining a matinee of blue haired biddies.

Michael Denison & Dulcie Gray, 1951

Dulcie Gray (1915-2011) was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where her father was a judge. She was sent to boarding school in England and returned to Malaysia in 1931. According to one of her autobiographies she ran away from home, managed passage on a cargo ship bound for England and got a job as a governess. In 1938 she gained admittance to Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts where she met her husband, Michael Denison. She had a long career on stage, movies and television. On stage she frequently appeared opposite her husband and she co-starred with him in a few movies.

I watched one of her earliest parts as a housemaid in a mediocre melodrama about a haunted house, A Place of One's Own (1945) starring James Mason, one of the many "Gainsborough melodramas" she appeared in while under contract to that movie studio. I also caught her in a few scenes opposite Denison in perhaps her best known movie, The Franchise Affair (1951) based on Josephine Tey's crime novel. Watching her on screen sort of explains the kinds of books she wrote. She is capable but lacks fire. When called on to perform a character part like the giddy maid she relies on silly stereotypical behaviors. Apparently she was well loved on TV in her late career when she had to play old matrons. She had a recurring role on an UK TV series called Howard's Way in the late 1980s and also turned up in an episode of Partners in Crime, the 1983 adaptation of Christie's Tommy & Tuppence book starring Francesca Annis and James Warwick.

In addition to her over twenty crime novels she wrote a number of ghost and supernatural stories (many of them found in the Pan Book of Horror anthologies), a couple of theater memoirs and a book on butterflies that draws upon her lifelong hobby of lepidoptery and her noteworthy charitable work as a member of the British Butterfly Conservation Society.

Sorry to say that these two mediocre efforts do not bode well for Dulcie Gray as a mystery writer. I won't be reading any of her other eighteen novels. I will say that her publishers had some talented artists working for them and her books certainly look enticing even if they most likely will not live up to the dramatic cover illustrations. If anyone else has read her other books and had a different opinion on her writing I welcome your comments below.

FFB: Ominous Star - Rae Foley

THE STORY: Mary Turner befriends an elderly book collector and antique dealer while working at her new job in an antiquarian bookstore in Manhattan. Out of gratitude for their many delightful evenings together, talks of books and antiques, and platonic friendship Charles Sheridan gives her the deed to a cottage, a place he knows she will appreciate. But she can only accept his gift on one condition -- upon his death she must find a locked box in the attic and destroy its contents. She must never look at or read what's in the documents in this box. A few weeks later someone robs Charles of a few rare antiques. He catches the thief in the act, they exchange words, the thief punches Sheridan in the face, he falls striking his head and later dies. When the police learn that Mary was willed the cottage they suspect she had a hand in the theft and Sheridan's death. Then a mysterious man enters Mary's life and the two of them decide to beat the police at their own investigation and find out the truth behind the theft and how Sheridan died.

THE CHARACTERS: The summary above makes this Ominous Star (1971) sound like a Phyllis Whitney novel, a suspense novel with fanciful elements drawn from Gothic mystery novels of the past. Young female protagonist and elderly erudite gentleman become friends, and he entrusts a secret task to the other. But the whole business with the box and its contents is akin to a MacGuffin in a Hitchcock movie. It merely serves as an object, or in this case a task, that will propel the plot. The real story is about who stole the antiques from Sheridan's home and how and why he died. There is also a subplot involving Miller, Sheridan's butler and confidante, and his deep, dark secret. The novel turns out to be a surprisingly well plotted detective novel along the lines of a police procedural. Nearly three quarters of the story deals with the police investigation. Mary appears only at the start of the book and the last couple of chapters, with the obligatory damsel in distress sequence to serve as a climax.

Hippie hitchhiker, circa 1968
A rich kid in disguise?
(photo © Getty Pictures)

The supporting players were more to my liking than Mary (a rather drab and cookie cutter style heroine one finds in these woman in peril novels). I thought for sure I had pegged Randy, Sheridan's black sheep relative, who spends most of his time in a hippie disguise, as the villain. Had this been a Phyllis Whitney book he most definitely would have turned out to be a handsome rogue. I'll not reveal whether I was right or wrong but I was a bit surprised by the way this book turned out. Especially with the anticlimactic business with the box and its contents.

However, two of the supporting women characters were well worth the trip through these pages. Phoebe Cortlandt ("Oh, that Cortlandt!" everyone says when they finally meet her) is a highlight in this novel. She's a rich kid living in a penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side and despite her well-to-do and entitled roots she is completely counterculture. She dresses like a Mod and fancies herself an artist. She is upset that the "true artists" of New York never get a break in the snobby galleries of the city. In retaliation she has opened her home as a gallery to her friends so they can display their work. She even invites the police to the art exhibit. It's going to be a party, of course. She promises food, drink, lots of interesting people and eye-opening art. Several people the police want to interview in relation to the Sheridan crimes will be present at the party and Petersen instructs Sgt. Carpenter to get some good clothes and make an appearance. The scenes with Phoebe are filled with wry humor and off kilter characters and allow Elinore Denniston (the real name of "Rae Foley") to make some fascinating commentary on the art scene, the hippies and young people of the 1970s.

I also enjoyed a silly sequence when a floozie secretary flirts with Sgt Carpenter at the office of the grandiose and odious Kenneth Wilkinson. She's a very minor character, appears only once and serves no other purpose than as a sexpot comic part. The entire sequence made me laugh out loud. Whether this was Denniston's intent or not didn't matter to me. I thought it was hilarious and very un-PC all at once.

INNOVATIONS: Denniston uses the bohemian and artist scene of the 1970s Manhattan to comment on the pop culture phenomenon of Hippies and the "groovy scene." Some of the best elements in this book are the characters' reactions to meeting people like Phoebe and Randy. Randy's ludicrous disguise is clearly meant as a chance for Denniston to ridicule the ubiquitous hippie look. Randy chooses probably the most cliche look of all: fringe vest, long blond wig, wildly colored shirt, tight pants, and a guitar case with actual guitar inside. This last bit is overkill; a stupid prop that he carries with him everywhere. But I don't recall that he even plays the thing.

QUOTES: Instead of quotes of the author's writing I thought I'd show you how much Dennison was entranced by literature, mostly the work of playwrights. I've read three of her mysteries so far, all of them overloaded with literary allusions. The title of this one comes from John Webster's bloody revenge tragedy The White Devil ("This thy death/Shall make me like a blazing ominous star/Look up and tremble.") Everyone seems to be well read in her fictional worlds. I mean everyone! From the erudite sophisticates of the Upper East Side to the cops, every character in Ominous Star loves to quote famous writers or allude to literary works.

Charles Sheridan: "I'm no philanthropist. I have no use for what Shaw called 'the undeserving poor,' the world-owes-me-a-living type."

and: "I feel like Sir Walter Raleigh. Do you remember his bitter lament after having been forced to attend a garden party? ..." And then he goes on to recite from memory a six line verse in doggerel which I will not reproduce here.

plus: "like Leacock's horseman I ride my hobby off in all directions."

also: "Do you remember Maggie in What Every Woman Knows or has our nudist theater made [James M.] Barrie part of the general discard?"

OK, enough of Charles. The first chapter alone has close to fifteen allusions uttered by him.

Peterson: "As Scott Fitzgerald once remarked, 'Rich people are different.'"

Vincent Young, Sheridan's financial advisor on Kenneth Wilkinson, a fatuous lawyer: "The Falstaff of the legal profession without the wit; a sponge without will."

Phoebe Cathhart: "What is he really up to? Is he threatening to cast you in the role of First Murderer?" (Macbeth allusion referring to one of the two dull-witted killers enlisted to murder the Macduffs.)

THINGS I LEARNED: Yet another allusion but one so arcane I needed to do some research. Lt. Peterson is talking to his sergeant about the suspects and when they get to Miller, the butler and the sergeant's easy target for Sheridan's killer, Peterson says, "Your King Charles's head." Clearly this refers to the execution of Charles I and seems to imply that the sergeant was stuck on one idea. But I needed to know its origin. The phrase stems from a character in David Copperfield, Mr. Dick, who has been trying to write an autobiography on the King and is "regularly defeated by the intrusive image of King Charles' I head" after execution. To speak of "King Charles' head" is basically the same concept as the folk saying "to have a bee in your bonnet." It's a bothersome or obsessive idea that one finds difficult to get rid of.

EDITION: The first batch of the Rae Foley Dell paperback reprints had a uniform look and were illustrated and marketed to look as if the books were romantic suspense or neo-Gothic novels. (See the image above in the QUOTES section.) In many cases with Foley's books this is utterly misleading. The plot summary of Ominous Star makes it seem as if the lead character is Mary Turner, but the bulk of the book is a police investigation with Peterson, the Homicide detective being the focus. If anything this is more like a Helen Reilly or Elizabeth Linington novel than it is part of "romantic suspense" subgenre. The "romance" angle is thrown in as an afterthought taking up less than two chapters towards the end. It seems totally out of place, too and is rather unbelievable.

EASY TO FIND? A handful of copies of Ominous Star in various editions, including one in French translation, are currently offered via the usual used bookseller websites. One handsome US first edition with a nearly pristine dustjacket is offered via eBay at a very affordable price. But the majority are either Ulverscroft large print editions or Dell paperbacks. Happy hunting and reading!

Rae Foley's Non-Series Mystery & Suspense
No Tears for the Dead (1948)
Bones of Contention (1950), US paperback: The Other Woman (1976)
Wake the Sleeping Wolf (1952)
The Man in the Shadow (1953)
Dark Intent (1954)
Suffer a Witch (1965)
Scared to Death (1966)
Wild Night (1966)
Fear of a Stranger (1967)
The Shelton Conspiracy (1967)
Malice Domestic (1968)
Nightmare House (1968)
Girl on a High Wire (1969)
No Hiding Place (1969)
This Woman Wanted (1971)
Ominous Star (1971)
Sleep Without Morning (1972)
The First Mrs. Winston (1972)
Trust a Woman? (1973)
Reckless Lady (1973)
The Brownstone House (1974), UK title: Murder by Bequest (1976)
One O’Clock at the Gotham (1974)
The Barclay Place (1975)
The Dark Hill (1975)
Where Helen Lies (1976)
Put Out the Light (1976)
The Girl Who Had Everything (1977)
The Slippery Step (1977)

FFB: The Silent Murders - Neil Gordon

THE STORY:  Inspector Dewar and Superintendent Bone are faced with the enigma of a series of murders where at each crime scene the body has been tagged with a numbered piece of cardboard. When the book opens victim #3 has been found. All the men are middle-aged, some have been stabbed, most have been shot by an air rifle that scores the bullets in a peculiar way. What can they possibly have in common besides their age, the murder method, and the numbered cardboard tags? When the linking element is found the policemen find themselves in a race against time to identify the potential victims from a brief list and prevent the last of the murders.

THE CHARACTERS: Dewar and Bone are a great team. Bone is the senior official and he enjoys razzing Dewar for being both very young (only 32) and Scottish. He constantly jibes Dewar about his hometown of Dumbartonshire often referring to his junior as "Dumbarton", always in a friendly joshing manner. He is respectful and impressed by Dewar's abstract thinking and his gifted detective's instinct. It is only because of Dewar that they literally uncover another murder while investigating the truth behind the serial murders.  It's one of many clever layers to this intricate plot.

Dewar though the junior member of the team is clearly the lead detective of the novel.  He is driven and dedicated to his job. A single man who eats, sleeps, and breathes police work he is well liked by all his colleagues. And it's largely because of the mutual admiration between Dewar and Bone that this detective novel which relies heavily on methodical police work never lags interest and never suffers from "procedural" monotony which is often the case with this subgenre.  We never have to watch these men fill out paperwork, talk about the bureaucracy that stalls their work, or any of the other less glamorous aspects of police work. They are on the hunt, they mean business, and they most definitely get their man.  In fact they get their man about three times in this wildly, fast-spinning and ever changing pursuit of a relentless killer hiding amongst many criminal types.

INNOVATIONS:  One of the earliest of serial killer novels The Silent Murders (1930) still seems very modern because it uses as the major thrust of the plot the now familiar motif of looking for patterns. But not analyzing the killer's psychological profile, rather looking at the lives of the victims for a connection to warrant such mass murder. Unlike other tales of multiple murder of the Golden Age in which the acts are horrifyingly random and committed by a lunatic The Silent Murders has a murderer with a clear cut, understandable motive unshrouded by psychopathology and free of any baroque hidden meanings. He may be leaving calling cards counting out the murders, but that is the extent of the adornment, so to speak. The police work is entirely focussed on trying to find an underlying connection between all the victims.  It's rather baffling since two deaths occurred in Canada, one of the victims was a tramp, and two were high-powered, prominent British businessmen. The police are forced to dig deep into the past and they hit the jackpot with a business deal in South Africa that took place around 1907, twenty-five years prior to the events of the novel. The case seems almost at an end until their prime suspect flees along with a servant.

The plot shifts to a pursuit for their suspect, but a truly surprising event at about midway through the book causes the entire case to fall apart and Dewar and Bone must start from scratch. When that happens there is a very subtle element of fair play clueing is dropped allowing the reader to figure out the killer's motive for the seemingly unending mass murder. I am proud to say that it dawned on me literally two paragraphs before Inspector Dewar announces it. It's an invigorating moment whether the reader guesses before Dewar or not for it also comes as the recognition that this may in fact be the very first book ever to employ such a novelty plot element in a detective story.  The characters talk about the motive with such alarming horror that it seems totally fresh within the context of the story even if it is now a tiresome cliche in the genre as a whole.

Body Found Stabbed (1932) by John Cameron,
another of Macdonell's pseudonyms

QUOTES: Dewar: "Where does a harmless Methodist tradesman who's never been farther from Reading than Lyme Regis connect with a gang of murdering cutthroats and [diamond brokers] and gunrunners from Jo-burg and Angola and Belgian Congo?"
"Most eloquently put," said Bone, "and quite unanswerable."

The quietness and simplicity of it were terrifying. No one had seen a figure approaching the victims. No one has seen a figure hastening from the scene of the murders. ...each murder committed with ruthless efficiency and each retreat effected without fuss or hurry.  "Like a cat in the night hunting a bird," thought Dewar.

A. G. Macdonell, 1939
(photo © Bassano, Ltd.)

THE AUTHOR: Neil Gordon is one of two pseudonyms used by Archibald Gordon Macdonell when he was writing detective and thriller fiction. Macdonell began his writing career as a journalist, writing mostly theater reviews for London Mercury.  In 1933 his novel England, Their England received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and it is this book for which he is most likely best remembered. Another satirical novel The Autobiography of a Cad (1938) has garnered something of a cult reputation lately. In addition to novels and a handful of plays he wrote at least one book on military history. As "Neil Gordon" he wrote five detective novels; a Buchanesque political thriller called The Factory on the Cliff (1928); and The Bleston Mystery (1928) done in collaboration with Milward Kennedy, one of the founders of the Detection Club. Under the pen name John Cameron he wrote two other detective novels with similar sounding titles: Seven Stabs (1929) and Body Found Stabbed (1932). In 1941 Macdonell died unexpectedly at the age of only 45 in Oxford.

EASY TO FIND? Luckily, yes! (From now on I will only be including this section when the answer is positive.) Many of Macdonell's novels have been reprinted by Fonthill Media, a British indie press known primarily for their line of military, aviation, and maritime non-fiction. Only two of the Neil Gordon detective novels were reprinted and have been released under Macdonell's real name -- The Silent Murders and The Shakespeare Murders. Currently all the Macdonell books are offered at 20% off the original retail price if you buy them from the Fonthill Media website. For anything else you'll have to resort to used bookstores, both online and the few remaining brick and mortar stores out there.

FFB: The Frog Was Yellow - Francis Vivian

Prior to his ten novel series starring Inspector Gordon Knollis Francis Vivian wrote a brief string of books featuring another policeman detective in the lead. The Frog Was Yellow (1940) is the apparently the second, possibly third, appearance of Acting Inspector (formerly Sergeant) Ronald Drew and his wife and sometime collaborator Drusila. (Yes, that makes her Dru Drew. Why on earth did he saddle her with that ridiculous moniker?) In this second outing Drusila, who we are reminded in a few footnotes was something of a skilled ghostbuster in their previous adventure Dark Moon (1939), acts as the first in a trio of narrators in the three separate “books” that make up the novel. Ronnie Drew is our second storyteller in part two and the novel is closed up with the reluctantly recruited third narrator in the voice of Inspector Burton, one of the many supporting policemen characters is this police procedural style detective novel. Though The Frog Was Yellow may have a decidedly strange title and its story may be tinged with a modicum of weirdness, it is nevertheless another stellar example of Vivian’s intricate plotting, fine fair play clueing, and thoroughly original storytelling.

The Drews are newlyweds in this novel and have just purchased a new home. While it is undergoing a heavy-duty renovation and refurbishing they are invited to stay at Black Canons, the home of Drusila’s (I just can’t call her Dru, though Ronnie does so all the time) friend Corry Dane and Corry’s great aunt and uncle Georgina and Henry Dane. The elder Danes are brother and sister, not spouses. Uncle Henry is recently on leave from the Home Office with whom he was an agent in stationed in Germany. Georgie has made a name and nuisance of herself as both an outspoken social activist and interfering busybody. When not protesting the death penalty in vociferous picketing she is handing out birth control literature to people she thinks have too large families. She has her nose in everyone’s business including her brother’s shady past in what was most likely a counterespionage scheme involving the Gestapo. Needless to say Georgie has made many enemies and will come to a bad end.

When Georgie is murdered under bizarre circumstances it is thought that an angry local man named Rawlinson (the recipient of her birth control handouts and her accusatory finger) is most likely responsible for her death. But one day later his body is found dumped down an abandoned well. Ronnie Drew, his wife Drusila, and several policemen join forces in an intensely intricate investigation to discover who killed the two people and why.

Ronnie and Drusila make for engaging couple. I believed them as a married couple, albeit newlyweds. The ways in which Drusila manages to be on the scene and assists in the investigation were all cleverly introduced into the story. There was never a time when I felt she was being a snoop or a know-it-all. Ronnie is only 29 years old and she is 23 yet they have a maturity to them that makes them all the more appealing. No Tommy and Tuppence lighthearted crime solving here. No competition between the two either. Drusila trusts her husband to do his job and she doesn’t give him advice even when she tells him that she knows who the killer is way back on page 122 in this 284 page book.

Every reader likes a good amount of clues in a traditional detective novel. In The Frog Was Yellow there is a veritable avalanche of what readers expect from a Golden Age detective novel, but even I have to admit Vivian was laying it on a bit thick in the Clue Department. Among this plethora of clues are an engraved brooch, a stolen packet of secret documents, a pair of woman’s gloves that appear and disappear too frequently, two separate disguises hidden in unusual places, a black homburg hat, recently oiled hinges on a handicraft shed, splashes of molten metal on the wall of the same shed, and of course the titular frog which turns out to be a lawn ornament with some barely noticeable blood stains. Are any of these red herrings? Not a single one! You may need a tally card to take notes and match up everything in the strangely complex plot.

For much of the book it appears that Lionel Scraptoft, the 29 year-old estate keeper at Black Canons, is the killer. Though he claims to have been knocked unconscious near the scene of one murder nearly every bit of evidence seems to point to him. Ronnie finds himself stepping in and giving expert advice and cautioning Superintendent Thompson to slow down and to apply the evidence to the case rather than fitting the circumstances to Scraptoft who Thompson is convinced is guilty.

What else would you like? Eyewitnesses? There are two. Killers in disguise? Present and accounted for. Bodies moved from the actual scene of the crime to divert suspicion? Check! Perhaps multiple solutions and some rabid accusations from the many suspects? You get them in abundance, too. As much as I have enjoyed multiple solutions in the work of Christianna Brand, who seemed to have cornered the market on them in her small number of detective novels, in The Frog Was Yellow this unusual plot motif may have been Vivian’s greatest handicap.

Vivian has impressively managed to come up with so many solutions to the two crimes and one attempted cover-up that by the penultimate chapter nearly everyone who appears in the novel has been named the guilty party. Each time a solution is presented we get legitimately outlined methods and motives with all the evidence accounted for. It’s an incredible feat of both imagination and intricate plotting. I was duly impressed. And yet…

In the final pages when we are confronted with the real murderer it all ends with something of an anticlimax. Having read of at least five different variations of how Georgie and Rawlinson were killed to be presented with a sixth (or is it seventh?) final and genuine solution diminished the surprise quotient. What should have been eyebrow-raising shock instead elicited a mere “Oh really?” comment from me. But one final lurid touch did effect a gasp from me just before the novel's close.

FFB: Death at the Wheel - Vernon Loder

THE STORY: Two bodies found in cars, both shot dead, within days of one another.  The first is a policeman who has been investigating a sting of jewel robberies. The second corpse is a two bit (or six penny since this is England) fortune teller who calls himself Osiris. The question is - are these two murders or a murder and suicide? Rufus Tate (aka Osiris) seems to be implicated in the jewel robberies and it appears he may have killed the cop and then himself. Arthur Way, the Sulcote chief constable, doubts the verdict at the double coroner's inquest. Too many oddities make the suicide highly unlikely. With the help of a large crew of police, both local and Scotland Yard officials, as well as some surprise ideas from Clare, his fiancee, Arthur uncovers a very strange truth.

THE CHARACTERS: Death at the Wheel (1933) features a large cast led by Arthur Way, a rural chief constable at odds with the more experienced city cops of Scotland Yard.  Arthur, however, sees this unusual set of crimes as an opportunity to shine as the detective he always wanted to be. He has some very ingenious ideas how to approach the crime and is complimented for his contributions.  Scotland Yard should be assisting only at his instruction but that doesn't stop Assistant Commissioner Cance from setting up a rather unethical undercover operation with his ace detective Inspector Brow. When Arthur stumbles upon Brow in the disguise of a fly fisherman on holiday he becomes very angry.

Meanwhile, Clare's stepfather Holroyd Sayce is targeted as the primary suspect as the mastermind of the jewel robberies.  Sayce happens to be in the jewelry business making it all the more likely that he may be involved with a ring of thieves who are all carnival workers who have always been nearby each time a home was burglarized. 

Loder's signature wit is not lacking here. Clare Winkton is definitely a highlight with her brash wit and good sense. Clare is always teasing her stepfather nicknaming him Holly and treating him irreverently. Paradoxically she also seems to be protecting him from the police.She provides Arthur with one of the cleverest ideas when they brainstorm about where Smith, the master crook, might be hiding out.  She also points out to Arthur that a slip of paper that he is convinced is an intricate code is actually nothing more than a series of dates and initials.  The reader knows this as quickly as Clare does. In his attempt to prove himself a great detective Arthur does tend to overthink a lot of the obvious

Also I liked the bit part of Sir Guy Lunt, owner of an amber necklace that was stolen and broken up for its gemstones. Lunt is a foppish hypochondriac with a malingering case of "bronchitic tendencies." He reminded me of the vile Frederick Fairleigh in Collin's The Woman in White who never stepped out of his dressing gown and complained of aches and pains while pawing over his pornographic drawings.  Sir Guy Lunt is just as ludicrous, a perfect satiric creation and one more character in Loder's collection of worthless aristocrats who pop up frequently in his mystery novels.

INNOVATIONS: Too many cooks may spoil the broth, but too many policemen don't spoil this detective novel. There are a slew of policemen that I didn't really think I needed to keep straight. The more that were added to the story the more I kept thinking that this might have been Loder's attempt to imitate Henry Wade.  By the midpoint of the novel I was truly impressed with how different this was form the usual Loder detective novel which is usually brimming with eccentric touches, bizarre murder methods and outlandish incidents.  In a high contrast to his first eight books Death at the Wheel is grounded in real crime, murder committed with guns, dogged police work and career criminals.  It's a genuine police procedural and one of the best of its type by any of his contemporaries.  Loder can stand shoulder to shoulder with Wade, Nigel Morland or Helen Reilly, three of the best practitioners of true police procedurals, meaning detective novels that not only show us how police solve crimes but also explore the culture of police stations and the collegiality of policemen.

Guns & bicycles!  The murder weapon was
manufactured by this company based in St. Etienne.

Loder manages to juggle parallel storylines and we follow Arthur's raw edged, ingenious and experimental style of detection which is in strong contrast to the polished technical police work of the Scotland Yard men and local police.  The book might very well have been called The Case of the Three Shells for the bulk of the novel deals with the bullets, casings and shells of a French made .22 handgun, the murder weapon in both shootings.  Arthur spends a lot of time thinking about three .22 shells, where they were found, the lack of fingerprints on some when they should be present. He creates a variety of involved experiments like  the one with a pair of trousers worn by one of the victims. Arthur tires to discover if a fingerprint on a shell casing could be worn away over time if placed in a tight fitting pocket. He also studies wear patterns in the fabric to determine whether or not a gun could have been habitually carried in a certain pocket in the trousers. This was a fascinating section of the book showing off Loder's masterful plotting techniques and unusual ideas about crime solving.

THINGS I LEARNED:  At the end of Chapter 10 Clare makes this quip in reference to Smith, the burglar the police are hunting: "No one would knowingly put Charles Peace in the post of chief clerk, where jewels were bought and sold."  I had no idea who Charles Peace was and so off I went a-Googling.  I guess I should have known because he turns out to be one of the most notorious criminals in the history of British criminology.  Peace, a talented musician, in the guise of a travelling violin player and bric-a-brac peddler committed multiple burglaries over a three year period. He became wanted for two murders and one attempted murder of a policeman. He was pursued by police, arrested and tried in 1879. In a record breaking 12 minute jury deliberation Peace was found guilty and executed.  Peace has been immortalized in the penny dreadfuls of Victorian fiction, has music hall songs written about him and his life story was filmed at least three times. The most well known movie of his life and crimes may be The Case of Charles Peace (1949) directed by Norman Lee.

Arthur Way utters this odd sentence late in the book: "If he died, he died very suddenly. And like the dead donkeys, which they say no one ever sees, sir, he buried himself rather mysteriously."  I figured this was some sort of British slang so I went looking in various reference books. I'm not sure I got the actual origin, but this fit as close as possible. I was looking for something to do with dead donkeys never being seen. What I found is a "dead donkey" comes from the world of journalism, a phrase that refers to a story that is so trivial it can be killed to make room for more newsworthy story that deserves to be in print. Supposedly the phrase comes from a 1990s UK sit com called Drop the Dead Donkey and many people think it was created by the writers. But obviously since the phrase appears in a book in 1933 it's a lot older than the TV show. If anyone knows more about this odd allusion and phrase, please let me know in the comments.

QUOTES:  One of these mystery story writers would have made something of that, he mused. There would be a masked gang...with headquarters in some riverside dive. Clare would be their languid queen, at one moment in a Paris gown at some elegant hotel, at another clothed in black tights burgling the suite of a duke...

Arthur Way was a man with an active mind, and even the most busy of country Chief Constables finds that the routine of his job does not highly try his faculties. The idea of doing a bit of detective work on his own appealed to the boy which is latent in most of us.

"Good luck to you," said Cance, "but try to use your imagination, Brow! Common sense is a fine thing, but there isn't much of the X-ray about it!"

Clare: "...I could have skipped down to the gun-room, got one of Holly's shotguns and peppered the brute.  I wasn't really afraid."
That was like her.  It had always struck him that she was both cool and courageous.

EASY TO FIND? If you want a real book you're out of luck. It's a rarity.  But the good news for readers who have Kindle devices and live in the UK or Europe is that you can purchase a digital copy of Death at the Wheel from Black Heath Classic Crime.  TomCat has been reading the Nicholas Brady books put out by Black Heath so I guess they're OK. The fact that they don't have their own website makes me think these are pirated digital books and I'm not comfortable helping to promote them. But if this is the only way you can read the book, then go ahead and spend your money on them. They are ridiculously cheap, that's for sure.

It's a solid police procedural, one of Loder's better books filled with creative ideas and invention.  But as such it's very different from the weirdness that was displayed in the more original and bizarre mystery The Shop Window Murders recently reprinted by HarperCollins.

FFB: Three Dead Men - Paul McGuire

Three Dead Men (Brentano's, 1932). US first edition

THE STORY: Prim, restrained, fairly unadventurous Herbert Chuff Horner while vacationing in Brinesey Bay goes sunbathing for the first time. There by the seashore he chances to look up at the cliffs just as a man goes plummeting off a precipice to the rocks below. Mr. Horner is convinced the man did not jump or fall. There was no scream for one thing and the way he fell without flailing his arms or legs is suspicious. Maybe, Mr. Horner tells the police, he was already dead. Several other strange circumstances lead the police to agree with Mr. Horner and he is soon unwillingly enlisted to aid in the investigation which soon uncovers two connected deaths.

THE CHARACTERS: Three Dead Men (1931) begins with an arch, lighthearted, dryly satiric tone as we are introduced to Mr. Horner who we think will be a sort of amateur sleuth and who will outshine the police. But as the novel progresses Horner retreats to the background and Detective-Inspector Cummings of Scotland Yard takes over as lead investigator. Horner does indeed have an innate curiosity and keen observational skills that make him a perfect accidental detective and Cummings takes advantage of those traits. They make a fine duo playing off of each other. The real surprise is that the bulk of the novel is one of the finest examples of a police procedural from the 1930s. Like any contemporary crime novel published these days we are introduced to a battalion of policemen each with his own specialty. There is a fingerprint technician, a tire track expert, the ballistics guy, and even a detective who knows automotive mechanics so well he is brought in to determine exactly how a car's gasoline tank was meticulously emptied so that it would run out of gas at a specific remote spot where one of the victims was then waylaid and murdered. That section was an amazingly modern touch and it felt as if I had time travelled out of 1931 to a techno-thriller of the 21st century.

The suspects are a varied and engaging group consisting of a mix of local yokels, quick witted (for a change) police, and some mysterious hotel guests. Stand outs in the large cast of characters include vile tempered, vulgar and hostile tavern owner Mr. Prump; lovely Miss Temple who seems to be hiding a secret; Covey, a poacher who raises a insanely violent ruckus in order to be deliberately arrested and put in jail; and Dr. Supple who is called upon to perform autopsies and has an odd habit of unexpectedly turning up in the most surprising locations.

McGuire has a talent for replicating a variety of local dialects using a combination of phonetics and unusual grammar peppered with regionalisms and slang. The dialogue is rendered so well I could actually hear distinct accents and voices while reading. Each person in the novel is singularly designed and speaks uniquely in character revealing their personality moreso than what they do.  That's a true writer's gift. McGuire might have been a great talent as a playwright or a screenwriter had he chosen that career path. That this was only McGuire's second novel impressed me even more.

Three Dead Men (Skeffington, 1931) UK edition

INNOVATIONS: I liked the way this novel changed tone and tenor over the course of the story. The wry Wodehouse-like narration that starts us out gives way to a typically puzzling murder mystery, transforms into a fascinating police procedural, then morphs again into a sort of gangster thriller by the time the climax is reached. I have purposely been shying away from vintage fiction this summer. But having immersed myself in a book so thoroughly Golden Age as Three Dead Men I was so pleasantly surprised and fairly rapt from first chapter to the very last page. This book delivers the goods. You definitely get more than you would ever expect from a book with such a boringly pedestrian and unimaginative title. It's overloaded with expert detective novel plotting and ingenious detection with nicely planted clues. There's even a nod to Sherlock Holmes when Cummings and Horner manage to identify an unusual type of tobacco from the remains of a rolled and crushed cigarette. Of course it turns out to be bizarre -- a Brazilian tobacco rolled in a maize leaf! The whole book is filled with wonderful Golden Age details like that. Reading Three Dead Men was like a homecoming for me and renewed my love for the genre that I seem to have a love/hate relationship with these days.

McGuire is daring enough to kill off one of the lead characters at the midway point and considering who that character is it comes as quite a shock. I better not say anymore, but I feel compelled to raise that point because for a 1930s detective novel I was wholly unprepared for the scene. I imagine when this book  was first published readers were gasping aloud. I almost did. I definitely raised my eyebrows when the third dead man turns out to be... Oh! almost went too far there.

QUOTES:  McGuire's writing can often be striking and caught me offguard at the most inopportune moments. There are some typically 1930s sentiments that are inexcusable today (I included one below), but he also displays a knack for lyricism juxtapoised with irony.

"We begin to know something about the mentality of the criminals, Mr. Horner; and you don't fit in. The type is the clever fool, the kind that allows his own cleverness to cloud his vision. If you'll excuse me saying it" --his smile would have pleaded for high treason-- "you're not what I call clever, and you're not, most definitely not, a fool."

"They're fools to kill a policeman. No criminal gets away with that, unless he has the luck of a Chinaman or the help of the Devil."

"They committed murder," said Mr. Horner, and Cummings --who was the model-- could not have said it more impressively, "and they did not remember the noose."

Cummings was genuinely interested; but then he had a patience that was almost like an artist's patience and an artist's curiosity about life as it is variously lived.

A blackbird was singing on an elderberry bush, quite heedless of the cars roaring up and down the road, quite heedless of Mr. Chief Inspector Cummings, quite heedless...of this mortality, of accident and death.

THE AUTHOR: Paul McGuire was born in Peterborough in 1903, educated at Christian Brothers College, Adelaide, and later University of Adelaide. During World War 2, Paul McGuire served with Naval Intelligence, reached the rank of Commander, and was made a CBE in 1951. He had a distinguished career as a diplomat serving as an Australian minister in Italy, Ambassador to Rome, served in the Holy See where he worked with Pope John XXIII and was honored with numerous awards for his services to both Church and state. After his naval service he worked briefly as a journalist for Melbourne Argus which led to fiction writing, literary criticism and an author of history and travel books. His crime fiction began with Murder in the Bostall (1931) and ended with The Spanish Steps, aka Enter Three Witches (1940). He wrote a total of sixteen novels.

EASY TO FIND?  Well...  Oh yeah. You know the drill by now. It's another scarce one, gang.  Only five four! copies offered for sale from online bookselling sites. And with the exception of one copy priced at a steal of $14  they ain't cheap. [...sigh...] Check your local library. I'm guessing if you live in Australia your chances are better than the rest of us.

[UPDATE: That $14 copy is sold as of 12:15 PM, Central Daylight Time. Damn! I wish I could earn a referral commission for all these books I manage to sell for other people once I write about them.]