FFB: Who Killed the Pie Man? - Phillips Lore

Leo Roi is a lawyer and a private eye at the same time. Oh now let me correct that. He calls himself an investigative attorney which really amounts to a lawyer who likes to spend most of his time playing sleuth prior to taking up a case that might go to court. In his debut novel Who Killed the Pie Man? (1975) Roi is asked to clear the name of a Northwestern University student implicated in the double murder of a professor and female student. Dr. Wren, the professor victim, is well known in his Evanston, Illinois numismatic circle. A rare collection he at one time owned -- ancient gold coins dating back to the days of the Roman Empire -- seems to be the motive for the murders. He also is known for haunting the local bakeries and consuming pies and other pastries in large quantities leading to his nickname of "the Pie Man".

Roi first visits the home of the female student where he interviews her father, a wheelchair bound millionaire with a temptress wife half his age. The young wife later asks Roi to help her find out who has been blackmailing her and her husband. A lot of poolside chats with the temptress lounging in swimwear. Lots of 1970s girl watching and writing to match the mood.

We're in Chandler territory here with a 1970s flavor. Although "Phillips Lore" (pseudonym of novelist Terrence Lore Smith)dedicates this private eye novel to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin the entire plot seems to be a conflated rewrite of both The Big Sleep and The High Window. T. H. Koenig, the disabled millionaire, is an obvious update of General Sternwood of The Big Sleep. Joanna Koenig, the 20-something wife is a stand-in for Carmen Sternwood. Dr. Wren is Big Sleep's Geiger, the murdered bookstore owner who deals in pornography on the side. And the Roman coin collection is the stunt double for the Brasher dubloon of The High Window. It's practically a photocopy of Chandler.

The whole book reeks of 1970s hipster nonsense. Cocktails and coffee seem to be the only beverages these people drink. Alcohol is served at all times of the day and night. Roi is offered a cocktail right after breakfast in one scene. People talk to each other via answering services. Not an answering machine in sight here when they were practically household items by the mid 1970s. Most ridiculous are the numerous paragraphs devoted to clothing descriptions. Roi likes to talk about his eccentric wardrobe and his indulgent pastime of dressing up. Here's a classic example of the asides into the land of his bizarre sartorial choices:

I was no longer the racetrack tout. Now I was, in Miss Jean Brodie's phrase, of the crème da la crème; crushed velvet, midnight-blue, double-breasted tux; powder-blue, ruffle-front shirt; crushed velvet, midnight-blue, large floppy bow tie; as I said I like clothes and I spend too much money on them.

First, what's with the overuse of the hyphen? Second, what adult man in the 1970s wore a powder blue tux and thought he was fashionable? Back in my high school days (when this book was first published) the teenage boys who wore powder blue tuxes to the prom were mocked. Leo Roi also adopts the look of a 19th century dandy and a red leather jacket wearing Huggy Bear wannabe. The whole book is filled with these detailed wardrobe updates. I can only hope that Smith meant these to be tongue in cheek commentary on 1970s fashion trends. What with Leo Roi's clothes horse mentality, the 1970s brand name dropping, his taste in fine dining (beef wellington, Riesling wine - really?) he comes off as an utter poseur of ersatz 1970s sophistication. Maybe this is the point.

There are troubled college football players, a scarred and crippled Viet Nam vet, several intellectual professors demanding that justice be done, a couple of crooked cops. Oh and mobsters turn up too. What was a 1970s crime novel without at least one showing of a Mafia character or drug dealing? Yes, there's some talk of pot smoking, cocaine use and dealing, too.

To be fair Smith does have a flair for writing. When he veers away from his supposed tongue in cheek commentary the story has a more mature viewpoint; his tone is serious, the writing incisive and trenchant. Smith delves into Roi's past and we learn he is the privileged son of Andre Roi, a millionaire whose fortune is traced back to the Prohibition era and the Roi family dynasty in bootleg booze. Roi is understandably ashamed of his past. Ironically, his family history will ultimately reveal how he is connected to the missing Roman gold coins. Smith has a lot to say about wealth and privilege and how both can easily give way to greed and corruption.

Terrence Lore Smith wrote three books with Leo Roi. The third, Murder Behind Closed Doors (1980), is a much better book with an unusual locked room plot. Probably his best known book is The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1971) featuring Webster Daniels, a gentleman thief with a world view very similar to Leo Roi's. It was made into a movie starring Ryan O'Neal and led to a not so successful sequel called The Devil and Webster Daniels. Smith had an unfortunately short writing career and life. He died in a freak auto accident in Colorado in 1988. He was only 46.

Leo Roi Private Eye Novels
Who Killed the Pie Man? (1975)
The Looking Glass Murders (1980)
Murder Behind Closed Doors (1980)

Death Takes an Editor - Nigel Morland

For one reason or another in the world of popular fiction some publishers and agents suggest prolific authors resort to using pseudonyms, especially if they are trying out new characters or writing books that veer away from their usual fare. This was a trend that dates back to the Golden Age and carried on into the 1970s.  I guess there are still a few prolific writers who have multiple identities, as it were (I can think of a few male thriller writers still active under several pen names), but it was more common decades ago. Nigel Morland was one of those prolific writers with a schizoid writing career.

Morland's Palmyra Pym police procedural mysteries were his mainstay and were published in the UK and the US by two top-line publishers.  When he chose to write outside of the series, usually under a pen name, his crime novels often tackled unusually technical and scientific concepts in a mystery novel and I guess he had to shop them around. Surefire sellers with recognizable series characters are easier to accept for a publisher while risky or controversial subject matter may not at all be attractive when it comes to selling books. It wasn't altogether clear to me why Death Takes an Editor (1949) wasn't released by his regular publisher in the UK. It seemed fairly straightforward with its newspaper setting, formulaic cast of characters, and an eccentric consulting detective with a background in abnormal psychology. Why did Morland hand over his book to the obscure and long gone publisher Aldus Publications Ltd.? At the halfway mark the book's content makes a startling turn into a lurid world and the answer to that question was made perfectly clear. In 1949 there weren't too many mystery novels that dealt with sadomasochistic sex so candidly.

At first I thought this was going to be one of Morland's strange forays into scientific detection because the police detective is Chief Inspector Jonathan Lamb. Under the pseudonym John Donavan Morland wrote a handful of complex and engaging detective novels with Johnny Lamb, a policeman with a background in chemistry who solves cases involving poisoning via an air conditioning system (Case of the Rusted Room), poisoning by iodine gas (Case of the Violet Smoke), and odd botanical toxins (Case of the Beckoning Dead). But this Lamb is of a completely different wool and he turns out to be the secondary detective.

The real sleuth in Death Takes an Editor is Professor Steven Malone, "the most brilliant medical jurist of his day." A former forensic professor at the University of Egypt Malone worked all over Europe and at the start of this novel he is employed in a "revolutionary Medico-Legal department...attached to Scotland Yard" where he acts as "part of a police organization without being subordinate to it." Malone, like his creator Nigel Morland, also happens to have an extensive knowledge of abnormal psychology and is well acquainted with some of the more sensational cases of the past as detailed in the numerous criminology textbooks he has devoured over his long career. This arcane information serves as the springboard to the solution of a series of murders all having their roots in possessive and controlling love.

The plot includes a few miracle problems like the vanishing of two men from a locked and guarded newspaper office as well as some odd red herrings like a box of poisoned chocolates and the appearance Bernard Ambrus, the mysterious "astropathologist" -- really nothing more than a glorified astrologist who claimed to treat disease. At first the case seems to focus on the puzzling personality of the murder victim Ernest Shipper. Each character presents a completely different perception of Shipper. At first a scold and office dictator disliked by all his co-workers, then a misunderstood quietly tolerant man, then a thrill-seeker slumming for sex in dive bars.

The more he thought about [Shipper] the more seemingly negative characters of the editor took on a full and amazing life. From being a minus sign in human form he was gradually emerging into the full flower of a thoroughly contradictory personality.

One of Morland's many true crime books

Malone however turns his attention on Jill Bethanny, Ernest Shippers wife who chooses not to use her husband's surname. This book is marketed salaciously on the DJ blurb as if Jill is some sort of femme fatale who weaves a spell over all the men in the story. This is not the case at all. She turns out to be a victim of the perverse sexual predilections of her husband. As Malone uncovers more dirty secrets in the Shippers' lives -- pornography in a secret drawer in Shipper's office, S&M paraphernalia hidden in the bedroom, signs that someone was lashed to a water heater -- the novel descends into a& world that Morland would like us to think is amoral and thoroughly evil.

Malone acts as Morland's voice here and it's hard to dismiss the misogyny that completely overtakes the story. Malone quotes from an ancient criminology book called The Female Criminal, gives examples of outdated Freudian psychology and tries to explain the difference between men and women who become criminals. It's all hogwash. Morland tries to shock his readers with a still misunderstood world of alternative sex practices but it just comes out embarrassing. His views (and the books he quotes from) are dated, chauvinistic and hateful. Additionally, these criminal facts color his moral worldview and for Malone (and presumably Morland) there is no room for forgiveness or redemption or a second chance when it comes to indulging in "perversity".

WARNING! ...SPOILERS A-COMIN'... I'm about to give away the biggest "shock" of the finale. Stop here if you don't want the book ruined. Not that it makes much of a difference, IMO.

Jill, we learn, was not only abused by her husband but as a result of succumbing to his will and participating in his hedonism she is doomed and cursed to a life of irredeemable amorality. She commits murder in order to free herself, but by then as far as Malone is concerned it is too late for her. She has become thoroughly corrupted. In the end he plants the idea in her head that she would be better off dead and she commits suicide. Nice, huh? There's some advanced twentieth century thinking for you!

...END OF SPOILER...

When Death Takes an Editor sticks to police procedure and forensics it makes for an intriguing detective novel. When Morland becomes a moralizing lecturer, however, the book fails disastrously. I'll be sure to avoid any of his other books published by the more obscure houses of the past like Aldus. It's clear to me that the mainline publishers saw some of his books as disguised treatises to espouse his personal beliefs and not as a novel meant to entertain.

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I read this as part of Rich Westwood's "1949 Mystery Novel Challenge" for the month of May. But I so hated this book I decided to wait to write it up until after the challenge was over. I found a much better book -- Death Knocks Three Times by Anthony Gilbert -- to replace this one for that challenge.