FIRST BOOKS: Somebody's Walking over My Grave - Robert Arthur

I may be cheating calling this a First Book, but it most definitely is this writer's only crime novel written for an adult audience. So it's a qualified First of sorts. And yes, it's the very same Robert Arthur who gave us The Three Investigators and many anthologies attributed to Alfred Hitchcock filled with stories intended for younger readers. I had to visit the tribute website for Arthur to verify this book was written by the same man I knew from that boy sleuth series of books I devoured when I was a pre-teen. There I also learned that it's actually a revised and expanded version of an earlier novella written for Mercury Magazine (more on that later.) 

Somebody's Walking over my Grave (1961), a much better title than the original, is influenced by and descended from the long line of fictional American private eyes.  Max London, our detective protagonist, supplements his income as a private investigator with work as a photographer and journalist.  At the start of the book Max is helping his brother with a story on the death of his brother's girlfriend. Pete London is convinced that she was murdered by a notorious gangster Tony Reiner who will end up having a large role in the case L Max will soon be handed.  The story of Max, Pete and the death of Millicent, Pete's fiancee, serves an extraneous subplot that will ultimately reveal a secret that Max is hiding.

When the novel opens we find Max taking photographs of model Selma Carle lying on the beach completely nude as the ocean waves "curl up to lick daintily at her naked body." Her risque poses are meant to duplicate the sad death of Millicent who drowned when she supposedly fell off Tony Reiner's yacht.  Max and Pete think she was thrown over.  Selma seems like an extraneous character, too, but she'll turn up later in the story in a surprising link to the multiple crimes that are committed throughout.  She's the character who utters the line which gives the book its title when she feels an unnatural chill on the sunny beach where Max is photographing her.  She mentions the superstition of somebody walking over your grave when you get a chill as something her mother used to tell her.  It's a not only an apt title it's an eerie foreshadowing of Selma's fate.

The main plot involves Max trying to buy back some IOUs for Jonothan Grigsby, a wealthy businessman and innovative inventor in the world of television sets. Grigsby has invented "a lens that will change any black-and-white television broadcast into color at the receiver."  Patricia Parson, Grigsby's business partner,  attempts to explain it all to Max but he tells her to skip it. I was glad he did that because the television invention is another subplot element that, in the end, also has nothing to do with the real story either.  And the few sentences Patricia starts to rattle off sound like science fiction than anything resembling real physics.

Dally with a Deadly Doll by John Mill
is the other book you get in the Ace Double
with Arthur's revised novel

 

 

It's those IOUs left behind by Grigsby's first wife Larraine that the story is all about. Larraine was considerably younger than Rigsby (what else is new?) and addicted to life in the fast lane. She spent most of her brief life drinking, driving fast, gambling and spending time with men other than her husband. One night after a hedonistic night of roulette, poker and booze she drove off the road, crashed her car and died in a blazing car wreck. Now Grigsby needs to clean up the mess she left behind and pay off her debts

Max wheels and deals with gambling hustler Marshall Dunn to buy back the IOUs at a bargain basement price.  Dunn wants an outrageous $50,000 (more than the total debt) but Grigsby is certain Dunn will accept only a portion of that.  He knows that Dunn is desperate for money because he too owes someone.  And it turns out to be none other than Tony Reiner.

Shortly after Max gets Dunn to accept the discounted pay-off  Dunn turns up dead.  Max is found at the scene of the crime unconscious and his gun prove to be the murder weapon used to kill Marshall Dunn. It appears to be one of those messy frame-ups private eyes are always falling victim to.  Max then has to work his tail off trying to prove he was set up and find out who killed Dunn and made off with the money he was carrying to buy back the IOUs.

For the most part Somebody's Walking over My Grave is typical of private eye novels of this era.  Plenty of violence, fistfights galore, Max survives several conks on the head, women are put in peril, he beds a couple of them and we get one dirty joke about an erection from one of his sex partners. This made me laugh out loud but at the same time seemed more like something you'd find in a 1970s book and not one from 1961...or even 1956. (Yes, it's in the original version. I had to check.)

As a detective novel it works well and there are even some clever and innovative clues like one involving cigarettes that are stamped with someone's name. Max first thinks the letters left behind on the butt of the used cigarette are s-o-n perhaps indicating Patricia Parson was at the scene of Dunn's murder.  But when he finds a box full of new cigarettes with the same personalized stamp and can examine the full name he finds that he was mistaken in what he thought the letters were. It was a rather nifty clue based on typography that is just like the kind of arcane, barely noticeable thing the Golden Age writers loved to employ in their detective novels.

In the final chapter Arthur decides to use the old gather the suspects and lecture to them scene once again hearkening back to the Golden Age.  The denouement, typically long winded in explaining all the details of the several murders, comes with exactly the sort of shocking pronouncement you'd find in Carr, Christie, Queen or Brand.  I had guessed two aspects of the solution but had not realized that both those aspects were intertwined.  Max talks about a dead giveaway clue that should have tipped him off much earlier and might have prevented one of the deaths.  And when he describes that one clue I practically slapped myself on the forehead for missing it.  It's so obvious that it would never have made the twist in the final chapter a surprise at all.

FIRST VERSION: Robert Arthur's first adult crime novel originally appeared under the title Epitaph for a Virgin in Mercury Mystery Magazine (Sept. 1956) as the lead story.  You can see Selma on the front cover illustration over there on the left. Though she is lying on the beach at the start of the book she's been decently clothed in a swimsuit or negligee in the photo and not scandalously naked.  Took me a while to locate a cheap copy of this magazine.  Several ignorant and greedy sellers are asking ludicrous amounts for reading copies of this digest sized magazine that contains nothing of any real value other than this oddity by Robert Arthur.  I didn't read this version from start to finish, but rather flipped through the pages and I found nothing about Pete or Millicent. Apparently the original ending was slightly altered in Somebody's Walking Over My Grave but I didn't do a strict comparison of the two books. Later tonight I'll look it over and revise this section if I find anything drastically different.

THE AUTHOR:  While perusing the pages of the Robert Arthur page on a website that celebrates The Three Investigators I discovered that Arthur was also a veteran writer of  for the pulp magazines which I don't think I knew at all.  Maybe I saw the name on the cover of a pulp years ago but probably thought it was some other Robert Arthur. Now I know it was the very same man. Robert Arthur (1909-1969) wrote over 100 stories using his own name and dozens more using a variety of pseudonyms that include Andrew Benedict, A. A. Fleming, Robert Forbes, Jay Norman and Pauline C. Smith. His work regularly appeared in nearly every pulp magazine that specialized in crime stories.  From 1933 though 1948 Arthur was published in Clues, Dime Mystery, Baffling Detective, Thrilling Detective, Double Detective, Popular Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly. I even found his name on the cover of an issue of the seminal Black Mask. Throughout the  1950s and 1960s his stories appeared in three top selling mystery magazines that sported the names of Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock and Mike Shayne in their titles. His work as a radio script writer won him an Edgar award and he would go on to helm the editorial staff at Mysterious Traveler Magazine based on the radio program he worked on from 1942 to 1953. His radio work led to some script writing for TV shows including Thriller and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  Television and his Hitchcock association culminated in his work as editor for some of the first Alfred Hitchcock short story anthologies (for which he wrote introductions in the style of the Master of Suspense) and the creation of the series featuring the boy sleuths known as The Three Investigators.

More on Robert Arthur can be found on his daughter's tribute website here and various author pages on The Three Investigators fan site.

FFB: The Man Whose Dreams Came True - Julian Symons

Confession #87: I am not a fan of Julian Symons. Years ago when I was a teenager my treasured copy of Murder Ink introduced me to hundreds of mystery writers I was eager to sample. In that seminal anthology and history of crime fiction I learned of Julian Symons’ unique suspense novel The 31st of February. This was the first Symons “mystery” I read and only because of Dilys Winn’s rave calling it one of the best books with an unforgettable surprise ending. Well, it bored me more than my algebra class. I was only 15 so maybe the gravitas of a man being mentally tortured and hounded by someone who knows he killed his wife was beyond my experience. But shouldn’t the telling at least engage any reader? I’ve also read The Three Pipe Problem (too arch in its humor for my teenage mind), The Kentish Manor Murders (sequel to the previous book, snobby and pompous and tiresome), and The Blackheath Poisonings of which I remember nothing. I’ve tried a handful of others over the past couple of years and never finished them. Why on earth then did I specifically reserve two little read Julian Symons books from the Chicago Public Library?

Confession #88: it was for a silly idea I had. Review a slew of books with titles that begin The Man Who… Symons wrote three of them, one right after the other back in the 1960s. I read one excellent book by Dolores Hitchens (The Man Who Cried All the Way Home) and posted that a few days ago. Now here’s the second in my series of “Man Who…” reviews. And was I ever surprised! This book may single-handedly have changed my mind about Julian Symons.

The Man Whose Dreams Came True (1968) is an inverted detective novel with an anti-hero in the Patricia Highsmith mode. We know from the very first chapter that Anthony Scott-Williams is a cad. He dreams of a life in Venice, Italy while working as a researcher and secretary for an old General who is compiling a memoir that grows ever longer and may probably never see publication. Tony has several different identities. He willfully steals from his employer to supplement his gambling addiction, manipulates his friends and associates, lies and cheats to get what he wants and does it all with good humor and charm. Tony is bound to get mixed up with the wrong people as he continues to exploit the women and men he meets in his life of leisure. His girlfriend turns out to be a con artist but does he learn his lesson with her? No, he tries again with an older woman and his life turns upside down.

At first there is admiration for Tony’s hutzpah and a longing to see him taken down a notch. We briefly watch Tony in action trying to exploit a young woman he thinks is a rich heiress but when it all backfires he is more than a little angry. But when he next plies his charm on another wealthy woman, Genevieve Foster, he surprises himself by falling in love with her. Mrs. Foster has a plan, however, that includes a crime Tony has never dreamed of committing. This time he thinks his life will finally change for the better and he’s willing to anything for Jenny -- including murder her husband.

Like his own creation Symons seems to be playing the reader and exploiting his emotions with twists and layers of irony. First the novelist presents us with a likeable cad, then reveals him as a foolish and rash young man with an anger problem, and then ultimately as a victim of someone much more malicious and self-serving than himself. The shifts are all done with astonishing skill.

The one aspect that is unsurprising is that Tony has had a rather miserable life. We learn about his drunken father who beat him as a child, his ineffectual mother whose love was not enough to protect him from abuse, and his eventual descent into a life of crime. Free from maudlin sentimentality this history is told as cold and distant as an idealistically unbiased journalist. And yet the narrative elicits an affinity for the young man and a hope for a better future. The reader may join Tony in desiring a happily ever after ending no matter what he has to do in order to achieve his dreams.

When the tables are turned and Tony becomes a victim of an obvious frame-up, carried out in a heartlessly malicious manner, it only strengthens the reader’s desire for positive change in Tony’s life. He finds himself on trial for the murder of a man he never met. No amount of explaining to either the police or his wise team of public defender lawyers can muster much sympathy, even when he is forced to confess that he was conspiring to kill someone entirely different than the person he is charged with murdering! All the while the reader knows Tony is telling the truth and is eager for his lawyers to find the evidence that will prove Tony’s innocence. We find ourself rooting for this thoroughly unscrupulous and selfish man who was going to kill but never fulfilled his plans.

A bit past the halfway mark a private detective enters the story. He has been hired by a mysterious benefactor who has Tony’s best interests at heart. Dimmock works for Second to None Agency has been put on this case because the owner Clarence Newhouse trusts his most reliable and senior agent to do the kind of determined work he well known for. While other agents at Second to None may be fiddling with expense accounts and wasting time in pubs drinking away last week’s paycheck Dimmock is always on the case. As Symons describes him: “If Dimmock was asked to find a missing woman last seen in Birmingham he would go on doggedly looking until he found her or was called off the trail.”

The scenes with Dimmock are filled with a humanity and quiet dignity. The man is suffering from a cold while performing his job, the result of spending too much time chasing after witnesses during wet and rainy weather while dressed inappropriately. Sneezing and wiping his nose at nearly every home he visits Dimmock displays a skill in saying the right things to ward off anger and bring out the best in the witnesses who were guarded when questioned by police. With a down-to earth nature, an unapologetic manner, and despite his aggravating cold, Dimmock gets the various people on the list of witnesses for the prosecution to admit to facts that the police were not offered. He turns up crucial observations and perceptions that led him to finding damning physical evidence of Mrs. Foster’s guilt. Dimmock is the real hero of the novel and was my favorite character.

In the end for all its humanity, for all the shifts in sympathy we have for Tony, and even with the surprise of a nifty detective novel in miniature in the chapters that feature Dimmock The Man Whose Dreams Came True proves to be a darkly ironic piece of noir fiction. Can there really be a happily-ever-after for Tony? With a vicious attack on his character, with his ultimate admission of plotting to kill someone completely different than the victim of the murder trial, with that brazen and brave confession as his only defense can Tony receive redemption? He should be on the road to reform and ought to be rewarded with something other than the much desired acquittal. Perhaps a cruel Fate will intrude as happened when he met Mrs. Foster. The fourth section of the novel is titled “How the Dreams Came True” and in it Symons delivers a nasty punch to the gut. Despite all his dreams, despite all his good fortune after the trial, we get a finale that perhaps was the only possible ending for Tony.

QUOTES: “Tony understood that if there had been no threats it was a good thing for him, it meant that he had no reason to worry about the money. This meant also that it didn’t always pay to bring out the truth. Would it be right to say that truth was one thing and justice another?”

“Newton’s hand fell like an accolade on Dimmock’s shoulder as he said that they would need him also in court. That was an exciting prospect, but Dimmock afterward thought of the hour he had spent in those chambers, rather than the session in court, as the crowning point of his career. He had the prescription made up. And although it had no effect upon his cold he treasured the piece of paper to the end of his life.”

FIRST BOOKS: The Dead Take No Bows - Richard Burke

The Dead Takes No Bows (1941) gives us the origin of Quinny Hite, a former cop turned opportunistic private eye, two splendid plans – one of the scene of the crimes, the other of a gizmo used to carry out the quasi-impossible crime – and a preposterous story of revenge among theater people who seem to have lost their grip on reality.

In his former life as a cop Hite was honest and decent. One day he raids an illegal dice game, arrests all present ignorant of the fact that one of the gamblers is the District Attorney’s brother-in-law. Newspapers sensationalize the arrest making sure to note the arrest of the D.A.’s relative and as a result the lawyer loses his bid for re-election. In retaliation the D.A. has the Police Commissioner fire Hite. This kind of topical political pettiness gave me the impression that I was in for an intriguing satirical mystery novel. Unfortunately, Richard Burke seems to have been more fascinated with the novelty and fantasy of detective fiction because the plot resembles something that Harry Stephen Keeler might have dreamed up. It's a weird story of oddball performers lost in a limbo of nostalgia, obsessing on their faded glory and past achievements, and dominated by the stereotypical high voltage emotions and passions that are supposedly inherent in theater people.

The book opens with Joan, Quinny Hite’s fiancée, waiting patiently for her man to show up for their wedding to be held downtown at City Hall. She is dressed to go and he is late as usual. Just as Quinny shows up offering apologies murder intrudes. A hotel maid screams from the apartment above them and Hite rushes to the scene.

He discovers two veteran vaudeville actors shot in the head -- Louis Lothrop, comedian and theatrical producer, and Desiree La Fond, his one-time lover. Both murder victims are dressed in 18th century costumes from The Girl from Dieppe, an 30 year old musical revue set in the French Revolution era. An unusual reunion of the 1908 show’s cast had recently taken place, one at which every wore their costumes that was apparently held every year on the anniversary of the show’s opening night. There are odd clues throughout the hotel suite that serves as Lothrop’s extravagant home. Bullet wounds suggest two separate guns – a pistol and a rifle. A walking stick or wand of some type wrapped in a silk cloth is found on a mantelpiece near the dead bodies. A dog costume is found in a clothes closet. After the police arrive and Lothrop’s much younger wife Phyllis shows up unexpectedly with Lothrop’s former partner, David Earle, Hite is taken aside and secretly hired by Phyllis to find the murderer. She doesn’t like the way she and Earle were being questioned by police and she promises Hite that both she and Earle are innocent and have alibis. Hite jumps at the easy $500 retainer and the promise of more to follow when he solves the case.

Of course by this time he has completely forgotten about poor Joan and the wedding is indefinitely postponed. Joan is miffed but not very angry. It’s typical of Quinny apparently. Nice guy, huh?

The plot involves digging into the history of The Girl from Dieppe, the performers’ past lives, and the messy relationships that grew out of their involvement in the production. Forget about typical lover’s triangles and hotheaded romantic tiffs and spats. This company was infected by a lover’s tetrahedron. Nearly everyone was jealous of each other and romantic desires overlapped in quadruplets. Some turned to drink, some turned to drugs to comfort them when they were rejected and couldn’t get their object of desire.

Hite focusses on the raging jealousy between Carlo Ralph and Lothrop. Carlo Ralph was a stage magician and Desiree was his assistant and partner in the act. Lothrop stole Desiree away from Ralph. When Ralph’s magician career started to fail without his attractive female partner Lothrop cast him in The Girl from Dieppe giving him the thankless role of a pantomime dog. The costume found in the closet was the one Ralph wore in the show. Hite is certain Ralph is the killer. But when he learns that Ralph was presumed dead during WW1, that he never returned home and was listed as MIA Quinny is forced to look elsewhere for the murderer. Further investigation turns up more dirty secrets and forlorn love.

When Emily the maid is found dead in her apartment surrounded by candles in a what appears to be a mockery of a shrine Hite is baffled. A letter suggests she confessed to the murders and committed suicide. But why all the candles? Is the suicide faked? Maybe Emily saw something she shouldn’t have the night she found the two bodies in Lothrop’s suite.

The fantastical elements of The Dead Take No Bows threaten to turn the book into a self-parody. Burke seems to have modeled his first detective novel on a mixture of private eye action of pulp magazines and the nonsense found in Philo Vance mystery novels. The gimmick here is a murderer who tried to baffle police by using two weapons. And Hite obsesses on the theory that the guns were fired simultaneously. Why would that matter at all? It turns out that the killer created an elaborate bit of machinery using a strange contraption found in the Lothrop home in order to do just that. But I wondered why anyone would bother with it. It seemed an utter waste of time, something dreamed up for sheer theatricality and to puzzle the police, something that would only happen in a detective novel. If the killer was present in the room with the two people and he had a gun he could simply shoot both with one gun and leave.

Dare I mention that the hotel suite has special entrances that allow for anyone to enter the theater next door unseen? Lothrop owned the theater and had a bridge built at the uppermost floor connecting to his hotel suite so he didn’t have to leave his hotel and take the extra five minutes to enter the theater through its front door. Another piece of odd business that exists only to make the story strange and weird. And, of course, allow the killer to gain entrance to the crime scenes repeatedly without being seen.  If that wasn't enough two other secret doors and entrances are discovered that connect the Lothrop suite to other places within the hotel and the theater. It’s like Burke took the worst gimmicks from Carolyn Wells and the absurd “impossibilities” in the poorer S.S. Van Dine novels (remember the pencil under the massively heavy sarcophagus in The Scarab Mystery Case?) and threw them all into his story with no regard for common sense. In the end Hite solves he case, gets his money from Phyllis, and marries Joan. But the finale is as ludicrous as the manner in which the murders were committed.

Burke can prove to be engaging and insightful as in the scene between Quinny Hite and Dorothy Earle, David Earle’s actress daughter who shares with the detective her observations about the sad lives of her father’s friends. She comments on the tragedy of turning your back on the present and disappearing into the past. Her frequent startlingly poetic statements (“Poor Uncle Lou… he was just sifting ashes.”) are so poignant they seem to belong to another book altogether and not this off-the-wall, Keeleresque murder mystery. For that reason I’m interested in reading the other few Quinny Hite novels I’ve acquired over the years.

Inspector Pierson (William Demarest, left) and Mike Shayne
(Lloyd Nolan) confer over the dead body of Desiree La Fond
(played by a mannequin)

Intriguingly, The Dead Take No Bows was sold to the Hollywood and turned into a vehicle for Lloyd Nolan in the Mike Shayne private eye series. That’s rather remarkable for a first time novelist, I think. Even moreso for having been turned into a movie so quickly after the book was published. Most of the Mike Shayne movies, oddly, used different books other than the original Brett Halliday stories and substituted Shayne in the role of private eye. So in Dressed to Kill (1941), the renamed movie version of Burke’s book, Quinny Hite is gone, but Joan is still there trying marry Nolan as Shayne.

I found the movie uploaded to YouTube and watched it a few nights ago. I was flabbergasted to learn that the plot was almost 100% true to Burke’s kooky novel. The only noticeable changes were that Phyllis, Lothrop’s second wife, was transformed into a society matron; Dorothy was relegated to one dumb scene in a taxi and robbed of her poignant monologue; one minor character became a potential second murderer in the slightly rewritten finale; and the original method for killing the two actors was dispensed with and a similar idea was substituted, one more plausible and possible but still rather ludicrous when you examine it closely.

There are a handful of fairly affordable copies of The Dead Take No Bows out thee for sale, including some with the rare DJ. But instead I recommend you look up the movie and watch it. It’s so faithful to the story it’s almost like reading the book. One warning in advance: Be prepared for Manton Moreland and Ben Carter doing some awful scaredy-cat Black man "humor" in one of the few wholly original, but insulting, scenes in the movie.

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)

FFB: The Mystery of the Creeping Man - Frances Shelley Wees

THE STORY: Professor Edgar Murchison has vanished, but his family is not too concerned. His wife has not reported him missing and seems none too worried. But she becomes unusually alarmed when her tenant Tuck Forrester currently renting the Murchison home while school is out of session for the summer returns a smoking pipe she found in the house. Apparently Murchison was never without his pipe. Why was it left behind if he went off on an unannounced trip? Suspicions are further raised when a body turns up in the professor's clothes and a mysterious shadowy creeping figure is seen lurking in the forest near the Murchison home.

THE CHARACTERS: The Mystery of the Creeping Man (1931) is the second appearance of husband and wife sleuthing team Michael and "Tuck" Forrester. Commissioner Davies who worked with them in The Maestro Murders (1930, Wees' debut mystery novel) has them take up residence in the Murchison home for the summer break. He expects them to dig into the local gossip and see if they can ferret out any info on what happened to Prof. Murchison. They do more than the policeman ever could have imagined when they uncover missing diamonds, a mystery man roaming the woods, bizarre experiments in a university research lab, an unhinged scientist, and a killer with a taste for both human and animal victims.

I did enjoy this book ...up to a point. The characters are a lively bunch. Tuck and Michael are easy to like, they have some nifty banter and a couple of very well handled scenes theatrically presented. Tuck acts like Jane Marple at a garden party she engineers purely to draw information out of the easily baited gossips in town. Some of the supporting characters were spot on, especially Alix Lissey, a snobbish and elitist spinster, whose outsider status allows for some ironically perspicacious observations that will be her undoing.

But it was the outrageously complex and surreal plot that kept my interest...that is until it derailed in the final chapters.

INNOVATIONS: Part of the detective work involves solving an unusual code in jigsaw puzzle format. The code made up of several pieces of paper with strange symbols eventually point to a stonework pattern on a sundial in the backyard of the Murchison property. And the amateur sleuths find a valuable prize embedded in the edging of that lawn ornament. The code is rather elaborate and something that only characters in a detective novel would dream up in order to hide a valuable item. It requires a miraculous imagination in order to piece together, literally in this case, the code. Proves that Wees' characters are a bit too smart for their own good. The whole thing was lost on my tired brain even taking into consideration that an academic with lofty intellect invented the arcane code.

I could only smile ruefully when I reached the section that dealt with the intricacies of a bridge game. I immediately thought of our dear, late friend Noah, his affinity for the card game and his love/hate relationship with cameo appearances of the game in detective novels. Even while remembering Noah with a smile on my face I confess that I mostly skipped over everything in those seven pages overloaded with bidding, passing, and trick-taking because all the rules of bridge remain an utter mystery to me no matter how much a writer tries to make them appear understandable. Wees didn't try here, she assumed her readers were expert players.

As the book progresses the complex plot gets ever more bizarre. Murderous attacks increase -- some successful, some failed -- until the story transforms into a ludicrous horror movie complete with a mad scientist, secret underground passages and a lab of gruesome surprises hidden in the forest. Wees had no idea how to end her story. What with a bigamous subplot and machinations of two of the primary characters, a boy sleuth investigating the poisoning of his pet dog, and Mrs. Devoe's guilt-ridden conscience, the mystery gets ever more convoluted and teeters on the brink of absurdity.

Sadly, the denouement is littered with threads left hanging and mysteries hazily explained, if explained at all. When Michael keeps saying things like "I don't know how he did that...but he did" you want to reach through the pages and throttle him. One of the murder weapons is an unnamed poison that can kill a dog and cat instantly yet shows no real signs of toxic compounds under scrutiny and laboratory analysis. A touch of pulpy science fiction? More like pure laziness, my friends.

Wees got better in time, but this sophomore effort surely shows that she tried to do it all in one book but just wasn't up to the task as a novice.

THINGS I LEARNED: Before I completely gave up on the bridge section I came across this sentence, "Tell 'em we follow the Rockefeller convention..." and I had to find out what that meant. It's a joke used to describe a phony "convention", an oft used bidding pattern pre-arranged between partners. According to the American Contract Bridge League website: "With only 15 words allowed during an auction and just 13 cards in each suit, bridge players have invented dozens of special bids, called conventions, to describe their strength and hand patterns." Apparently back in the 1930s many of those "conventions" were named after millionaires, hence the joke about the wealthy American family.

THE AUTHOR: Though born in the United States Frances Shelley Wees (1902-1982) grew up in Saskatoon, lived and worked in Ontario province, and finally settled in British Columbia on Denman Island. Many of her books are set in Canada. According to a talk she gave in 1948 at Regina Women's Canadian Club at the Kitchener Hotel she became a professional writer by accident. Her husband found a manuscript of a novel she wrote, read it, and thought it worth publishing so he typed it up and sent it to New York. The book was indeed published and sold over 50,000 copies. Her life as a novelist was off to a great beginning.

Prior to writing full time she had been a primary school teacher, the Canadian director of the speaking engagement syndicate known as Chautauqua, and lastly worked in public relations for a Toronto firm. She was married for over fifty years to Wilfred Rusk Wees, who taught psychology at the Camrose Normal School and was executive vice-president of Gage Publishing Ltd.

Wees wrote 22 books, a mixture of romance, detective, and suspense novels for adults and a handful of juvenile mystery books. Ten of those novels can definitely be classed as crime or detective novels for adults. Most of her crime novels remain out of print and are only available through libraries or the used book market. However, her 1956 suspense novel The Keys of My Prison was recently reprinted by Canadian publisher Véhicule Press. Brian Busby, the series editor for their Ricochet Noir crime fiction imprint, wrote a rave review about the novel on his blog The Dusty Bookcase and helped bring the book (and Wees) out of the shadows of obscurity. That later book is worth your time, her early mysteries like The Mystery of the Creeping Man perhaps not so.

FFB: The Sutton Place Murders - Robert George Dean

THE STORY: Murder and mayhem in the financial world of 1930s Manhattan. Insurance investigator Paul Andrew Thompson (he goes by Pat, the first initials of his name) is hired to prove a suspicious death is suicide so his firm can avoid paying out the $250,000 policy. But when another suicide occurs Thompson is certain that a killer is disguising his work, what the newspapers will soon dub The Sutton Place Murders (1936).

THE CHARACTERS: While the story seems dominated by men (police, lawyers, the district attorney and several business associates of Harry Mitchell, the drowned man the insurance company believes killed himself) the real interesting characters are the women. Susan Barton, is Thompson's girlfriend who as a reporter has access to the "morgue" and archives of her employer. She is enlisted to help dig up dirt in the past lives of several female suspects. Susan has several theories about how the crimes were committed. The scenes with she and Pat are probably the best in the book.

Whenever Pat is interacting with a woman character like sly and evasive Alice Woods or vamping Laura Hess the book becomes much more interesting. Even the eccentric widow Louise Mitchell and a seemingly insignificant maid like Madeline Hine are better delineated with intriguing quirks than the many cookie cutter male characters we have encountered over and over in crime and detective fiction of this era. As the story progresses it becomes clear that the women are the ones the police should be paying attention to. Plots and schemes are uncovered and a deadly game of blackmail seems to be at the root of all the mysterious deaths.

INNOVATIONS: Dean likes to emulate the hardboiled style by laying it on heavy with banter and wisecracking dialogue. "Pat" Thompson could have been a great long-running series character. It's a shame that he appears only in three books. The scenes with Pat and Susan are the liveliest parts of the book and sound similar to the repartee you hear in movies like The Thin Man series and other urban and urbane crime films featuring husband/wife or male/female detective pairs.

The detection in the book is surprisingly well done. One of the better examples involves the typewritten suicide note purportedly left by Laura Hess Pat does some inventive thinking which leads him to believe the suicide was staged and the note clearly not typed by the victim. He also wants to know if Harry Mitchell's death was a suicide then where was his note? Clues related to clothing play a big part in the plot too. Susan offers up some ideas that most of the men would never think of and is convinced that one of the suspects, Louise Mitchell, is a man-hater if not a lesbian as some of the men later surmise.

The talk of lesbianism in the book is done rather frankly and colloquially for a 1930s book. When Susan remarks that Louise Mitchell has no man in her life Pat quips, "You mean she's a Les?" Later eyewitnesses report seeing someone dressed in men's evening clothes having visited Louise in secret. Everyone thinks it's a man, but Susan is certain it was woman in disguise. Many of the men start making bad jokes about lesbians thereafter (see "Things I Learned" section below).

QUOTES: (After waking up with a hangover Pat says to himself:) So this is what comes of trying to drink a woman under the table. Just a sacrifice on the altar of insurance!

The Frenchman was tall and thin like an adagio dancer; his complexion pale, almost sallow; and his face was the type that would be termed handsome by some women for whom life had begun at forty.

Pat: That means you do really adore me, under that scant veneer.
Susan: As one strip of veneer to another, let me repeat for your dull powers of comprehension; I hate you. Vindictively, I might add.

Pat: I'm giving you the chance to a flaunt your deductive powers.
Susan: Mmmm, I see. This is the page where they put the notice: 'Dear Reader, you have been given all the dope; now, it's up to you.' Well you can go to hell Mr. Sporting Opportunity Thompson!

THINGS I LEARNED: Cholly Knick is mentioned in passing. In the context I figured he was a writer. My assiduous Googling revealed the name to a shortened form of Cholly Knickerbocker, the house name for a gossip column created by reporter John W. Keller who started his career with the New York Recorder in the late 19th century. When he left that paper in 1902 to join Hearst’s New York American, later the New York Journal-American, he took the pseudonym and his column with him. One of the more notable Cholly Knickerbockers was Igor Cassini who in the 1940s co-wrote with longtime columnist Liz Smith. For the full history of Cholly Knickerbocker click here.

On page 130 District Attorney Hoffman alludes to a line of poetry from Kipling in an attempt to make a quip about lesbians. He says that “the colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady” (from Kipling’s “The Ladies” ) are lesbians under their skin making the statement when the murder case involves a woman who dresses as a man in order to meet another woman in secret. The actual line is “sisters under their skins” and was never intended by Kipling to imply sexual attraction between two women. Identifying the Kipling quote led me to a fascinating article by grammar maven and lexicon expert William Safire who wrote an essay about the prevalence of misquoting popular writing. Rosie O’Grady, gilding the lily (see Shakespeare’s King John where it is actually “to paint a lily”) and “into the breach” (rather than the actual “unto”) from Henry V were all cited as the three of the most often incorrectly quoted phrases.

The last Tony Hunter novel
UK edition (Boardman, 1954) 

THE AUTHOR:  Robert George Dean (1904-1989) worked as a journalist and drove an ambulance during the war years. In addition to a short three book series featuring "Pat" Thompson and Susan Barton he created Tony Hunter, a private eye who works for the Schmidt Agency. Hunter appeared in ten books between 1938 and 1953. Using the pseudonym "George Griswold" he wrote four espionage/adventure novels with the mysterious Mr. Goode.  I thought maybe one of his books might have been turned into a movie or that he wrote at least one movie script because he's so good at that snappy dialogue you hear in 30s and 40s crime movies. Sadly, his name does not turn up in the Imdb.com listings so the chances of Pat and Susan or Tony turning up on screen are fairly slim.

Pat Thompson & Susan Barton Trilogy of Mysteries 
The Sutton Place Murders (1936)
What Gentleman Strangles a Lady? (1936)
Three Lights Went Out (1937)

IN BRIEF: The 3-13 Murders - Thomas Black

It isn't often that I am so entranced by another person's review that I find I have to read the book immediately. When I came across a post on an author I was hardly familiar with on TomCat's blog Beneath the Stains of Time I found myself unable to resist temptation. It was really one single sentence that made up my mind:  "The 3-13 Murders is one of the finest and cleverest hardboiled detective novels ever written, which I recommend, unreservedly, to all."

Clever? Yes. One of the finest? No, I don't agree.

The  most notable aspect that makes the book stand out is an unusual murder which TomCat has likened to the use of intricate gizmos and gadgets you'll find in the works of John Rhode.  And I have to tell you that any astute reader will pick up on the two vital clues mentioned none too subtly within the narrative. One of those clues is mentioned three separate times making it rather obvious. Paying close attention to the oddities observed by our private eye hero can easily lead the reader to figuring out how that murder was achieved. At least I did. I know what was created in the room where the murder was committed, but not exactly how the murder was pulled off.  Is this enough to make a book one of the finest, the part that sent TomCat into a rapturous rave?  In my estimation, no.  But then I look at the book as a whole and not simply for the ingenious murders, a surprise identity of the murderer, and other puzzle pieces.

The setting is also unusual for a private eye novel. Black lays the action in the fictional urban milieu of Chancellor City which must be in the Midwest somewhere, close to Wichita mentioned a couple of times. Over the course of the novel Al Delaney, the private eye protagonist, gives us details of his taxi jaunts mentioning specific street names. A close look at street maps of Missouri and Kansas cities reveal a match up with Kansas City, Kansas. Black was born and raised in Kansas. Makes sense that he would want to model his books on his home state.

One other noteworthy feature is Black's use of unusual gangster slang that I've never encountered in any other writer's vocabulary of the underworld.  Taxis are referred to as "Yellows", women in prostitution rings as "whitebirds" (I guess a signifier of white slavery), "percentage girl" is a prostitute who works for a pimp or in a brothel. The title itself reveals a very odd slang term for two types of illegal drugs that I think Black simply made up. He tells us what "3-13" means late in the book and it's a tip-off to another coded remark mentioned earlier that I managed to figure out. At least those other words seemed closer to real slang terms.

This novel turns out to be something of a diatribe against the vices that rule career criminals and make them rich. More than anything The 3-13 Murders recalled to my mind less of Black's hardboiled colleagues and more of Sax Rohmer's Dope. Frankly, had I known that this book was all about gangsters, drugs and prostitutes I think I would've just skipped it.  My least favorite topic in ANY crime novel is drug dealing.

Black is majorly influenced by pulp magazine writers of the era and probably private eye movies since his work comes so late in the heyday of private detective mania. His dialogue reminds me of the type of wisecracking stuff you hear spouted by B movie characters of the 1940s rather than the characters in the books of the demigods of the hardboiled genre like Hammett and Chandler. Many of the characters are very familiar and come across as stereotypes like the vixen client who turns on the sex appeal to manipulate our hero; the motherly landlady; the repellent brothel madame; the faithful secretary; possibly corrupt leader of a weird religious cult (a la The Dain Curse) and a slew of immoral would-be sophisticates. There's even a pretty boy sadistic hitman (a favorite un-PC fictional type) who I thought would turn out to be gay but who surprisingly has a wife.

The plot is well done if mired in the past. A portion of the book makes utterly no sense -- the retention of an incriminating letter that leads to one of the murders. Black's reasoning for the character who keeps hold of the letter is very weak (it involves blackmail). He turns the letter over to a neighbor for safe keeping and of course she is then killed in a horrific manner. All of this seemed not to mesh with the rest of the book which is all about venal and greedy people who act on impulse.

Black is a clever writer, I will admit. He does a good job of planting clues. But at this stage in my life I've read so much crime fiction in all of its subgenres that I can't give this too much attention. A well plotted (if overly complex) book with one ingenious murder method doesn't merit being called "one of the finest and cleverest hardboiled detective novels ever written."  There are many more better examples with better realized characters, more maturely thought out motivations, and less -- dare I say it -- contrived storytelling.

But in keeping with my "give 'em a second chance" nature I did buy a copy of Black's The Pinball Murders to see if perhaps he truly was consistently good at dreaming up weird murders and intricate plots or if this book was just a fluke. Stay tuned...

Death of a Doll - Hilda Lawrence

Death of a Doll, 1st edition DJ
Simon & Schuster, 1947

Hilda Lawrence was not a prolific mystery writer. However, in her small output of only five books, she gave us a fascinating type of crime novel that included detection and psychological suspense, some of the earliest cases of genre blending in the post-WW2 era. Her first novel Blood upon the Snow (1944) introduced a private eye who nearly met his match with two elderly spinsters, Beulah Pond and Bessy Petty, sort of a 1940s version of the Snoop Sisters minus the mystery writing angle. Mark East, the private detective, would return two more times accompanied in each book by Beulah and Bessy.  Death of a Doll (1947) is the third and last case for this highly unusual sleuthing trio and it may be their most complex and intriguing crime solving case of the the lot.

Right off the bat this a very different Mark East mystery because it is set in the heart of Manhattan. The previous two books took place in isolated rural communities far away from the hustle and bustle of city life. Lawrence has a knack for finding the darkness no matter where she sets her books. Like the previous two mysteries in the trilogy of detective novels Death of a Doll is fraught with tension, long hidden secrets and one of the most sinister murderers to spring from the macabre imagination of its writer. Lawrence delves into the dangerous side of female friendships, the petty jealousies that can turn from mean spiritedness to treacherous revenge to murderous rage.

The mystery itself centers on Hope House, a women's boarding house and its mix of working class women residents and its all female staff.  Ruth Miller, is the newest resident, a shop girl employed at the somewhat ritzy department store Blackman's. Two girls who work in Blackman's storeroom currently live at Hope House and let Ruth know of a recent vacancy. She is excited to be moving in and shares this excitement with one of her favorite customers, Roberta Sutton (newly married, fresh out of the previous book A Time to Die). This conversation will come back to haunt Roberta when days later she hears of some very sad news. Ruth died shortly after moving in from a fatal fall out of her apartment window.

Prior to the accident Lawrence lets us know that Ruth has been carrying with her a terrible secret. One she was sure that she would never have to confront. But on her first day all her buried fears, her angst about this secret and her life prior to New York City, come rushing back in a flood of memories when she sees and hears something.  She actually tries to flee and escape confronting this past but she is dragged back by Monica Brady, one of the two women in charge of Hope House, who senses something strange in Ruth's behavior. She wants to help the girl but also has some suspicions and wants to get at the truth.

No one can prevent what happens. Lawrence allows us to see Ruth meet up with her past and we know that she never suffered an accidental fall that more and more the police want to rule as a suicide. Roberta Sutton is sure of Ruth's death was neither accident nor suicide based solely on the conversation she had with Ruth. Seeing her giddy excitement, knowing that she was ready for change and improvement in her life Roberta is convinced that Ruth would never take her own life. She asks her friend Mark East to look into Ruth's death and prove her right. With the help of his two old lady assistants and in cooperation with Inspector Foy of the NYPD  Mark digs into Ruth's past and discovers a killer like no other he's met before.

What Lawrence does so well here is shake up the conventions of the private eye urban world with an offbeat and decidedly female perspective of her two spinster detectives who tackle the big city environment with gusto. Beulah is tough, nearly humorless and shrewd. Bessy is flighty, garrulous, overly imaginative and has tendency to dip into the sherry bottle too often. Both are formidable each in her own way. Beulah manages to instill a bit of terror in the residents of Hope House when she goes undercover as Ruth's disabled aunt (she fakes a limp) and starts asking a lot of prying questions.  In addition to exploiting their age and appearance they are imaginatively resourceful. They manage to find a dry cleaner and an eye doctor by thinking exactly like Ruth and knowing how she would choose those services based on her character of a small town girl just getting used to a big city.

The detective work tends to be a mixture of the kind of psychological probing of the victim's life you find in most mystery fiction (more prevalent in post-WW2 private eye fiction), and the oddball clue finding of the traditional mystery already seeming quaintly old-fashioned by 1947. Ruth's death took place during a costume party in which all the residents were dressed in identical rag doll costumes. A music box is used as a murder weapon. One of the residents is blind, her childlike inquisitive nature adds an eerie chill when she appears on the scene. Then there are taxi chases and insensitive grilling sessions that are stock in trade of private eye novels. The balance between the two seemingly disparate types of mystery blend well and are almost indistinguishable from each other. It's as if Lawrence has invented her own subgenre, and one that seems a delightful paradox for mystery writing -- the cozy urban murder mystery.

Even more challenging, perhaps Lawrence's strongest quality as a novelist, is that nothing is ever really spelled out. Her writing and narrative structure is done in such a way that much of what is key to the story must be gleaned from the storytelling itself. Ruth's secret is presented to the reader piecemeal but with well planted clues.  A phone call made early in the book and a passing reference to a number written down comes back to provide a major clue for the detective trio.  Nothing that seems an inconsequential detail is put there without a reason. With a large cast of women characters resorting to the pronoun "she" often adds a level of confusion and mystery. Just who is she talking about among all the women? But it is all done for conscious effect.

 The plotting here is strong, there is an abundance of detective work from two different schools, and the characters are never boring. The two old women do provide for an ample amount of humor but never at the expense of the mystery plot. It all works splendidly together culminating in a finale tinged with disturbing tragedy and not a little unexpected sadness.

Agora Books 2019 new edition cover

Death of a Doll has been released in a new edition (paperback and digital) from the fine folks at Agora Books, a UK based outfit doing excellent work in reissuing classic crime novels. Many of you are familiar with the Richard Hull editions that have been coming out for the past two years. Here is their first American mystery writer added to their catalogue. Hilda Lawrence is not only an excellent addition to the Agora Books line, but a writer who has been long overdue for new look, new editions and a new audience. Anyone interested in the history of the genre, in a true original who invigorated the mystery world with unusual genre blending techniques would be well advised to check out Death of a Doll.

*  *  *

Death of a Doll by Hilda Lawrence
Agora Books
£9.99 Paperback
£3.99 Digital (UK buyers only)
ISBN: 9781913099237

FFB: The Deaths of Lora Karen - Roman McDougald

THE STORY: Philip Cabot, private investigator, has been asked to the home of Charles and Lora Karen at the behest of the wife. She believes that someone is trying to kill her, but is being stubbornly secretive about it all. She promises to reveal everything to Cabot at the dinner party that will take place in the book's first chapter. But before she has a chance to talk about anything the killer strikes -- and with abandon. Lora Karen is poisoned, a maid is strangled, and Dr. Morley, who is called to try and save Mrs. Karen, is bashed on the head. Someone also seems to be hiding somewhere on the Karen estate -- someone who seems to be able to change shape from a large and powerful monstrous size according to the terrified maid to someone who wears shoes the size of a child's like the pair found mysteriously placed in a guest's bathroom. Cabot unravels all the mysteries and uncovers a group of criminals in the Karen household, including the murderer who devised The Deaths of Lora Karen (1944).

THE CHARACTERS: Cabot seems to be modeled on Philip Marlowe but which private eye of the 1940s wasn't? Unlike Marlowe, however, Cabot doesn't go it alone down those mean streets. He has a medium-sized agency in New York with not only a faithful and attractive secretary (Lib Terry), but at least five named operatives who are assigned the footwork to help with the Karen case. It's rare in crime fiction of this Golden Age to come across a private detective who actually runs a real agency with a full staff. Nero Wolfe is probably the best known of this type, but I also know of Carney Wilde created by Bart Spicer who also had a agency that grew in size and reputation over the course of the series. Still, most fictional private eyes go it solo or have only one partner.

In a nod to the Van Dine and Queen books there is also Jefferson Boynton, the Manhattan D.A. who can't resist rushing to the latest murder scene and getting his hands dirty in the police investigation. His wife (who is also Cabot's sister) is always complaining how Boynton is never home, always thinking of the next great case that he can add to his prosecution successes, always speeding away to be first on the scene of a grisly murder. She knows that her husband treats murder as a career stepping stone, and talks of how he hopes the next murder will be sensational enough in the news and can be used as political leverage when elections hit the calendar. We get more of Boynton and Cabot as detective than we do of Captain Kroll and his squad of o policemen. That Boynton is also Cabot's brother-in-law makes for an interesting dynamic with argumentative fireworks enlivening the investigation as the case gets more complicated.

Similar to Chandler novels the Karen family is wealthy and chockful of secrets and deception. Charles Karen is a boxing promoter who married into his first wife's well-to-do family. Lora Karen was his daughter's governess during that first marriage. The house party also sports Maurice Bode, a drop dead gorgeous portrait painter described as looking more like an artist's model than a painter; his girlfriend Avis Searcy, seductive and enigmatic; Felicie Karen, a teen-aged vamp typical of the hardboiled genre; Lora's money grubbing parasite of a cousin Barry Duret; and Roger Niehl, a waspish lawyer who deals with the Karens' legal and financial business. No wealthy household is without its loyal servants either. Jaffre is the butler willing to protect his employer at great risk and Josephine is Lora's easily terrified maid convinced a monster invaded the home and nearly strangled her to death.

Dr. Paul Morley shows up when a doctor is needed to try and save Lora after she is poisoned. The maid thinks Morley is Lora's physician, but it turns out he is her psychoanalyst who gave up his practice as a G.P. when he discovered being a disciple of Freud was more lucrative. When Lora dies Morley is one of the key figures who helps unravel the superstitious, highly imaginative woman's troubled life weeding out her fantasies from the truth. He is instrumental in aiding Cabot uncover the identity of a blackmailing fiend who may have turned killer.

Cabot not only needs to figure out who was threatening and blackmailing Lora Karen, but who eventually succeeded in her poisoning her, who broke into the house attempting to steal her jewelry, who left the tiny shoes in Avis' bathroom, who attacked Josephine and Dr. Morley. Before the case is finally disentangled and all the culprits are un discovered there will be two more violent attacks and one gruesome murder.

INNOVATIONS: Some of you may have heard of or read the new sensation mystery novel The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, a weird fantasy/sci-fi/detective/horror novel mishmash that I don't think much of unlike the rest of the world.  Unlike that book the deaths of the victim here are not fantastically repeated over and over.  In fact the title McDougald invented is more of a metaphor for the attempts made on Lora Karen's life and the other attempts made on the lives of others who knew Lora. Death seemed to haunt this woman, both in the present and the past. Of all these "deaths" it is the demise of the first Mrs. Karen that will figure prominently in the solution of the various mysteries.

McDougald has a good feel for Gothic atmosphere. The opening of the book is notably creepy with a pervading aura of paranoid delusions. Lora is presented as a wildly imaginative woman, ever fearful, and yet canny of her relatives and their underhanded motives. The night of Lora's poisoning is filled with violence and eerie events. Josephine seems to have been infected by her mistress' imagination and rants about the shape and form of her attacker. Evidence of an escape via a vine-covered trellis by a bedroom window with balcony shows that someone descended, but no large "monster" could have done so without tearing the vines from the trellis. No heavy footprints are found on the damp ground either. McDougald does a fine job of creating genuine mystery, adding an element of fantastic horror into the novel. When Cabot starts following leads about the possibility of a dwarf or midget being the criminal the novel enters the realm of the grotesque. Poe would have been proud of those sections.

The most striking and inventive part of the book for me was the number of crimes and the nontraditional aspect of multiple criminals. Gritty hardboiled private eye fiction tends to veer away from the formulae of the traditional detective story in which the finale unveils only one culprit responsible for all the crimes. Realism plays a big part is this subgenre and it shouldn't be too shocking to a reader to discover that the blackmailer and the murderer are not the same person. The sheer number of villains unmasked in this book, nevertheless, was indeed a surprise. Four separate endings follow in quick succession, almost as if each incident was being treated as a short story and then all of them were linked to form a novel.

QUOTES: There was a ghost of a smile on Mrs. Karen's own face [in the photo] as he came nearer, and the vision of that set and lifeless pleasantness was as subtly disturbing to the senses as though the photographer in some strange way had anticipated the embalmer.

"Don't tell me he skipped out! Incredible!" roared Boynton. "How could he have disappeared under the very eyes of your men?"
"You'll have to ask them," [said Captain Kroll]. "All I can say is that I ought to have had better sense than to send three Irishmen to a funeral."

THE AUTHOR: Roman Miller McDougald (1905-1960) wrote six crime novels, three of which feature his private investigator Philip Cabot. According to a living relative who left a comment at the Mystery*File blog, McDougald was known as Miller by his friends and family. He also apparently worked in Hollywood from information I found in a brief newspaper article I dug up on the internet. An attempt to confirm this at imdb.com was fruitless; there is no listing under either name in that database. Perhaps none of the movies or TV shows he worked on gave him credit in the final production. I was unable to find anything else about him.

Philip Cabot Private Eye Novels
The Deaths of Lora Karen (1944)
The Whistling Legs (1945)
The Blushing Monkey (1953)