FFB: By Death Possessed – Roger Ormerod

Photographer Tony Hines inherits a painting from his grandmother and takes to it to be appraised by experts on the Antiques Road Show (yes, the TV show). Dr. Margaret Dennis tells him that he has a rare painting by British ex-pat Frederick Ashe. Rare because only six of his paintings are known to exist and are held in a few museums in Europe and in private collections. Tony disbelieves her. He was always told that it was the work of his grandmother. Margaret says she knows Ashe’s brushwork and she points out the distinctive overlaid FA initials in the corner of the painting as his unique signature. “No, you’re looking at that the wrong way,” Tony tells Dr. Dennis. The initials actually read AF which stands for Angelina Foote, the name of his grandmother. Margaret assures him that he is the mistaken one. There is no doubt in her mind that the painting is by Frederick Ashe. She urges Tony to take the artwork home and insure it for £20,000. So begins Tony Hines’ unwanted adventure into the world of manic art collectors, art theft, and con artistry.

A quick visit to Grandma Angelina for background and the final word on the real artist behind the painting reveals a secret relationship and the discovery of Tony’s true heritage. His grandmother was in an arranged and loveless marriage but prior to the actual wedding had an affair with Ashe when she lived in Paris. She returned to England engaged to marry the man she did not love and pregnant with Ashe’s child. Tony's father was that child making Ashe Tony's grandfather.

She tells Tony that Ashe recognized in her a talent for painting that he fostered. As a joke she learned to paint exactly like Ashe and had so much fun that they made a ritual of their art creations. They would literally stand beside one another and paint the same scene or person, but each with a slightly different viewpoint, at a slightly different angle. It was almost impossible to tell the two paintings apart from each other as they both painted in the same style, used the same brushstrokes, shading and even shared the same palette of paint. They also signed their works using the same overlaid initials of F and A. That was Frederick’s idea – a monogram that would work for both of them on paintings that each of them had created.

Shortly after this remarkable life history Tony’s grandmother dies unexpectedly but not before he has uncovered 81 paintings in the attic. But who painted them? There is a story about the other set of paintings that involved Angelina’s enraged husband who in a fit of jealousy destroyed all the art work by Ashe and his wife – all but one painting that Angelina managed to rescue from a huge bonfire her husband lit in their backyard. It is this painting that Tony had appraised. His grandmother cannot remember exactly which ones were burned and which managed to survive. She is sure that Ashe’s were all destroyed. Only one other person may know the truth -- Angelina’s lifelong companion and servant Grace with several secrets of her own.

Together Margaret and Tony do some complicated detective work trying to figure out who painted the 81  paintings stored in the attic. They track down a British collector of rare art work with the wonderfully evocative name of Renfrewe Coombes, who claims to own two of Ashe’s paintings. Coombes is like a modern day Count Fosco in both his physical appearance and his sinister persona.  As disreputable as Wilkie Collins' archetypal Victorian villain Coombes surrounds himself with thugs and bodyguards and a secret treasure trove of rare art work. Tony at one point dwells on Coombes as a formidable adversary:  

 "I realize now that I must have been in a state of euphoria, brought about by the sheer magnitude of Coombe's villainy. To a person like me, he was so far from anyone I had ever before met I was quite unable to contemplate him as a serious obstacle. I was nervous, but strangely confident.  I was over simplifying."

Will Coombes be able to help Tony and Margaret or is he after the Ashe paintings to complete his own collection?

I may have given too much info about the set-up for this novel but all of that happens in only the first three chapters!  By Death Possessed (1988) may seem like pure suspense, but it is a definitely murder mystery with some surprising twists which I have learned to expect from the inventive and devious mind of Roger Ormerod.  I enjoyed this book quite a lot.  Some readers may feel there is an avalanche of double crossing in the finale and that some of the wrapping up is too pat and convenient. Despite that I'm all for a writer who will fully enter the world he has created. Ormerod is not afraid to wallow in the Machiavellian betrayals of these people who will do anything to own one of kind art.

This is quite a good example of the art caper subgenre and a nifty addition to the many crime novels featuring an Average Joe caught up in a world of con artists and criminals who uses his own knowledge (photography, to be specific ) to outwit them at their own game. Ormerod was a photographer himself and we get abundant detail on how Tony's photo lab operates. It's not just the author showing off, it's all for a purpose. Pay attention to the sections on photography and you may see what Tony is up to.  I missed it all and it was right in front of me.

Recommended for both Ormerod fans and those who enjoy mystery novels about art forgery and rare paintings.  By Death Possessed, like many of Ormerod's books is now available as a digital book (Kindle format) from Lume Books and -- luckily! -- is available for purchase in both the US and the UK.

FFB: At the Sign of the Clove & Hoof - Zoë Johnson

THE STORY: The Clove and Hoof is the hot spot in Larcombe for a pint of bitter, a good story and some laughs. It's also the focal point of a bizarre series of murders for the only connection the victims have seems to be that they all frequented the local pub. Strange pranks, a spate of anonymous letters all painted in blue watercolor, and a decapitated head found floating in the stream near Starehole Gap all lead to the police uncovering unusual criminality dating back 20 years.

THE CHARACTERS: The story of At the Sign of the Clove and Hoof (1937) is memorable for its offbeat sense of humor and the colorful characters who inhabit the village of Larcombe. This is a world of kooks, oddballs and eccentrics galore. Only an oddball would create anonymous letters with a child’s watercolor paint kit, right? And what kind of person would think that playing pranks by leaving a fish in someone’s bed, placing a ticking metronome outside a bedroom door or using a airgun to blast pepper shot at windows would be viewed as terrorism and result in hysteria? A nut job for sure, right? At first the novel seems to be no more than a Wodehousian satire of folksy villagers with a smattering of farcical scenes but the pranks and the oddness turn sinister and deadly as the story progresses.

Two policemen of decidedly differing approaches to crime solving head up the professional side of the investigation. We begin by meeting the officious Inspector Percy Blutton aided by local cops Jack Marsden and P.C. Jipps. Blutton questions the various habitués of the Clove and Hoof with vigorous impatience and makes up his mind fairly quickly who killed Vicar Ernest Pratt, the first victim of the mad killer, who was found shot in the head at the base of a cliff not far from his car. Footprints indicating a hobnail boot and a pegleg are found around the vehicle suggesting that Captain John Thomas Ridd, the only one legged man in the village, was near the car wreck recently. But Ridd has a solid alibi having been on his boat returning home to Larcombe the night Pratt was killed. Blutton disbelieves him and hounds Ridd for the rest of the novel. That is, until Ridd suddenly vanishes without a trace.

Our other policeman is Det. Sgt. Plumper from Scotland Yard. Considerably younger than Blutton he has a more subtle style of interrogation allowing the men of the village and the few women (nearly all of whom are servants) to chatter away and gossip while he nonchalantly inserts pertinent questions to catch them off guard and almost always getting a quick and truthful answer. Blutton finds this tactic strange and pointless but is ironically envious that it works for Plumper as often as it does. Plumper also exhibits impatience with the locals but manages to get the truth quicker than Blutton. Unfortunately, Plumper’s ego gets in the way and he allows himself to be hoodwinked by a clever ruse in the highly interesting final chapter.

Of the various suspects we have Bert Yeo, the pub owner who seems the most reticent of the lot; Sebastian Hannabus, aging antiquarian and jack-of-all-trades who counts among his various professions taxidermist, antique dealer, and barber; Lionel Gedling, ancient recluse who lives in the crumbling mansion known as Old Barton who is the victim of the various odd pranks; his mysterious manservant Costigan a man with a closed lip and a secret he’s hiding; Jeremy Scoutey, the local grocer, and his daughter Alice who is one of the several people in town who owns one of the paint sets that might be the source of the anonymous letters; Rosa, the barmaid with a fickle heart; and the star of the book Christian Peascod, dilettante of the arts and amateur detective.

Peascod is the best thing about At the Sign of the Clove and Hoof. He dominates the action whenever he appears with his larger than life personality, his arch humor and grandiose manner of speaking. Fancying himself both a poet and painter but good at neither he is also well versed in detective fiction having read the works of “Bailey, Doyle, Van Dine, Roger East, Freeman, Wills, and Croft and the Misses Sayers and Christie.” I love that bit Freeman, Wills and Croft. A real in-joke for hardcore devotees of mystery novels. I take it that Freeman is R. Austin Freeman and Wills refers to the now ultra obscure Cecil M. Wills whose books are as scarce as Johnson’s are now.

Plumper listens to Peascod’s fascinating ideas about how and why the various crimes were committed -- all of it inspired by his favorite writers. Much to the would-be poet’s delight the Scotland Yard officer allows him to continue his investigations as a sort of unofficial deputy. But all the time Plumper has Peascod in mind as suspect number one. It was Peascod’s metronome found at Gedling’s home. Peascod was present at Starehole Gap the day the head came floating up out of the water. That Peascod is also fond of watercolor as his preferred medium for his laughable artwork is also a huge mark against him.

By the time the police have sorted the red herrings from the facts, discarded all the surreal nonsense obfuscating the murderer’s motive, six people will have died, Plumper and Jack Marsden will be attacked and nearly killed, and Christian Peascod will have a last laugh on the police who scoffed at his ideas.

INNOVATIONS: Though there is a protracted denouement which consists mostly of a cliché of traditional detective fiction I am beginning to detest – the villain who performs a monologue of his life while outlining the reasons for his actions—ultimately the book ends with some stunning surprises. Johnson has dared to flout the tacit and written rules of detective fiction and come up with a solution that defies all those conventions. I loved it and it made me grin in admiration. This finale reminded me how rare it is to encounter an unconventional rule breaker who thumbs his or her nose at the supposed rules and how much I mentally applaud them when they do show up.

THINGS I LEARNED: Johnson loves language and words and sprinkles her novel with unusual vocabulary. The adjective corybantic cropped up to describe the men in the pub when they get rowdy and it led me to find out its origin. It comes from Corybant, the name given to a priest who worshipped Cybele in ancient times. Their ecstatic celebrations to the goddess included fervent dancing that came to be described as corybantic.

QUOTES: Starehole Gap was beauty spot. Not a commercial and official Beauty Spot with Tea Rooms run by languid, rapacious genteelwomen and with Period Car Parks for char-a-bancs. No; it was just a pretty, unnoticed place, the private property of Lionel Gedling and part of his small estate on Larcombe Head. The Gap itself was a steep little glade sloping down to the sea, whose chief attractions were a delicate waterfall and a deep green pool. People said that had Lionel Gedling not been so thick-skulled and simple and crazy, he could have made money out of it simply by changing its name to the Faery Grotto, hanging lanterns in the trees and opening it to the holiday public at a shilling or more per head.

Christian was only too pleased to go. He had already got the first two couplets of Ode to the Bloodiness of Man, and he knew he would forget them if he tarried much longer.

“Our man’s certainly a colorful humorist,” [Plumper said.] “Like Peascod, he’s read his detective novels. The Clue of the Wooden Leg. The Clue of the Headless Body. The Clue of the Painted Letter, and now the Clue of the Bloody Handkerchief. Rich – very rich. Too rich.”

But Plumper was scowling. He was angry and he was worried because he had a strong feeling now that he was up against a maniac of some sort; one who was treating crime as a game, taking fantastic risks because he was too crazy to care about personal danger, playing mysterious tricks because it amused him to do so, acting from inconsistently abnormal motives. The whole business was too theatrical, too Grand Guignol.

“Merciful heaven! The man asks has it anything to do with this business?” Peascod was almost prancing with excitement. “This [letter] has come straight from the murderer, don’t you realize that? Hot from his bloody hand. Don’t just stand there dithering, man. Don’t you realize you hold the key to everything? All unwitting, you’ve stumbled on the villain’s secret! Quick, quick what is it you’ve seen, heard, felt, smelled, dreamed?”

THE AUTHOR: Finding biographical information about Zoë Johnson was next to impossible. Other than the very few listings for this book, one of two that were for sale in the past six months, I found nothing online about her. With such a dearth of info I was convinced that Zoë Johnson is a pseudonym for some well-known mystery writer. The book itself – with its primarily male cast of characters, a hard-edged satirical sense of humor, knowledge about the life of a fisherman, and the emphasis on men gathering in a local pub for camaraderie and entertainment – seemed to be the work of a man rather than a woman. But this could be a combination of sheer bias and utter ignorance. I thought of other writers published by Gregory Bles who shared the same sense of offbeat humor and dreamed up similar bizarre plots like Reginald Davis, John Haslette Vahey under his “Henrietta Clandon” guise and John V. Turner writing as “Nicholas Brady.” I guess only copyright information on Johnson’s two books published with Bles would reveal the truth, that and the actual contracts. William Collins & Company (creator of the Collins Crime Club imprint) purchased the publishing house of Gregory Bles in 1953 and most likely still holds the copyright for Johnson’s novels. My feeble attempts at uncovering the copyright info turned up nothing. Then after a few days of compulsive searching of the multiple online updates at Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV I found this:

JOHNSON, ZOË (GREY?). 1913(?)-1992(?). (Adding somewhat more likely
middle/maiden name and dates for the author of two 1930s novels in CFIV.)

Good heavens, I thought. She’s a real person! If I had the patience to carry on with this data digging I might be able to verify her birth date and death date with records from Ancestry.com or some other similar genealogy website. But I really can’t spend any more time trying to figure out who she is or where she lived. I’m hoping someone who has some knowledge about Zoë Johnson will read this post and leave a comment below. It’s a real shame she only wrote two books and that the other one, Mourning After (1938), is so rare that no copies are offered for sale at all. This is yet another book I’d love to reprint in a heartbeat.

FFB: Golden Guilt – Francis Gerard

THE STORY: Sir John Meredith is off on another adventure involving kidnapping, revenge and another bizarre cult that hints at supernatural origins. In the prologue of Golden Guilt (1938) two men and one girl are “anointed” and banished to the Place of Fire “never to return until such a time as [they] have restored that which is lost and have avenged the sacrilege.” This outlandish thriller with a smidgen of a detective novel plot is populated with Aztec descendants, Russian gangsters, Mexican terrorists, a gang sporting tattoos of Three Clasped Hands, and a group of zealots from a lost kingdom in search of the legendary Golden Fleece.

THE CHARACTERS: Meredith does his best to prevent the kidnapping of Lord Allingham’s son Bobby with the help of his wife Juanita, Sgt Beef (who is remarkably related to Leo Bruce’s Sgt Beef!), Bradford and Col. Merryweather-Winter. Along the way two characters from previous books turn up, Sir Hector MacAllister and Clifford Craigworth, and assist our heroes in the complicated plot.

Add this title to the ever growing list of mystery novels and thrillers with a burial vault break-in. (I swear I need to do a post on this topic soon). After a funeral the Allingham family vault is discovered broken into and smashed coffins littering the interior of the chamber. Evidence points to the M.O. of “Soup” Smith, a notorious safecracker and burglar who preferred dynamite over picking locks to gain entry. Smith was recently released from prison and the search is on to track him down.

Some of the supporting characters were my favorite people in the heavily populated story and Gerard enjoys taking advantage of their eccentricity to indulge in his ever-present ribald and vulgar sense of humor. Lord Marshington, for example, is an aristocrat obsessed with growing roses. Meredith apologizes for interrupting him while in his garden and Sgt Beef is appalled when he hears his lordship mention he was planning on putting muck into Dorothy Perkins bed. Beef thinks the worst of this “supposed gentleman” who would throw horse manure into a woman’s bed chamber. The scene turns into an Abbot and Costello routine of wordplay and misunderstanding thankfully lasting only a few lines. But even in its brevity it made me laugh out loud.

INNOVATIONS: Like Secret Sceptre Gerard peppers his story with frequent allusions to Golden Age detective fiction writing and characters which supports my theory that these books are meant to be a send-up of the entire genre. See the QUOTES section for some of the better references.

This was my second favorite of the weirder entries in Francis Gerard’s series featuring Meredith, a British Foreign Office agent turned policeman. Brimming with action and eccentric characters Golden Guilt is another is Gerard’s near parodies of the ultra-heroic adventure thriller which originated with H. Rider Haggard and his books about Alan Quatermain and Leo Vincey then carried into the often self-parodying adventures of pulp magazine heroes. As for the capture and reveal of the villains of the piece all is not as obvious as it first appears. Gerard does a fine job of misdirecting the reader into believing that one character is the brains of the kidnapping then performs a nifty reversal in the final pages. In doing so he simultaneously supplies the requisite twist to the crime plot making this more than satisfying as a detective cum adventure novel.

THINGS I LEARNED: One of the women characters is wearing a “…really complicated, though apparently severe black Hartnell dress.” Ignorance of early 20th century designers led me to look up Norman Bishop Hartnell (1901-1979). Probably much better known in the UK than in the US Hartnell was a fashion designer who did most of his work for the Royal Family. He was given the honor of Royal Warrant as Dressmaker to the Queen Mother in 1940 and the same for Elizabeth II in 1957.

QUOTES: “We found everybody’s finger-prints there…!” He snorted “You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, with all this damn silly rubbishy detective-fiction stuff that’s written nowadays that everybody, down to a three-year-old, would know not to handle a thing like that.”

“I’m not really trying to behave like a detective in a book, but you know the more I read detective fiction the more I realize that the detective heroes are quite right to behave as they do and keep their mouths shut until the denouement. After all, nobody likes to look a fool…”

“And you’re equally certain that there’s no pointer anywhere?” suggested Meredith. “No nice bloody thumb-marks left on a clean piece of white paint, for instance? No scented or monogrammed handkerchiefs dropped outside the window? No uneven footprints clearly indicating the presence of a red-haired French sailor off a Dutch boat with a bad limp in his right foot, and no butts of cigarettes of a tobacco only smoked by members of the Egyptian Embassy”? . . . No, I suppose not.” John sighed. “I always think those fellows in fiction have the easier job of the two.”

There had always been an amicable feeling of rivalry between Matthew Beef and his more famous cousin Sergeant William Beef, who has so signally put the amateur detectives in their place in the case which had made his name, and which had been chronicled by Mr. Leo Bruce under the heading The Case for Three Detectives. Moreover, Beef, who rather fancied himself at darts, could never quite beat his cousin William […] who was apt to be a little superior with Matthew over his recent successes.

“A stone jar which contains vitriol contains an evil thing, but the jar isn’t responsible for its contents. Madness is an evil, there’s no getting away from that; but does that necessarily make the madman, the vessel housing this horrible ill-balance, an evil thing?”

EASY TO FIND? Much to my surprise I found several very affordable used copies of Golden Guilt. There are couple of the Thriller Book Club edition (some with dust jackets) as well as the Cherry Tree paperback offered for sale from various online sellers. But be warned – the later Cherry Tree paperback reprints tend to be considerably abridged from the original text. Even more remarkable I also found six copies of the US first edition and two of the UK edition (later printings each) all of them were under $20. One of the UK edition comes with a DJ in better condition that the one I picture here. The remaining of the hardcover copies (with and without DJs) range in prices from $30 for the UK ed in DJ to $100 for a US first edition in “about fine” condition with a “very good or better” dust jacket. As far as I know none of the Francis Gerard books have been reprinted since the 1950s. Happy hunting and reading!

IN BRIEF: I Did Not Kill Osborne - Victor Bridges

This is the year I’ve been reading books by several writers who I’ve known about for a long time and have been dancing around the periphery of my interest level. One of these writers is Victor Bridges (1878-1972) who was born George de Freyne in Bristol. Bridges worked in a bank and as an actor prior to becoming a full time writer.  Eventually he settled in Essex where most of his books are set. After getting several stories published in magazines Bridges turned to novels and averaged one published book a year from 1912 to 1961. Recently, many of his books started appearing for sale online by the dozens. He suddenly became of great interest to me especially when I learned that his career had lasted almost five decades. Surely there must be something to his work for his career to have lasted so long.

I should know better. Being prolific does not necessarily equate with quality or innovation. Bridges mostly reminds me of his equally prolific, bestselling contemporary J. S. Fletcher. Both writers churned out standard thrillers jam packed with action (albeit predictable action).  Here we have popular fiction that appealed to an audience of undiscerning readers who liked all their entertainment to be ripping yarns, easily identifiable and familiar.

Bridges' most enticing title for me seemed to be I Did Not Kill Osborne (1934) so I started with that one.  Ironically, this is an invented title slapped on the book by American publishers. In the UK the book was published as Three Blind Mice (1933), unimaginative and off putting for its nursery rhyme allusion, but aptly symbolic of the three lead characters who get caught up in a dastardly plot oblivious to the danger until it's too late. Despite the difference in titles the premise was intriguing – Nichols Trench, professional sculptor, is on trial for the murder of Jack Osborne, an acquaintance who stole a steel manufacturing formula that would revolutionize construction and engineering. In the opening chapter Nicholas is waiting to hear the jury’s verdict while his defense attorney assures him that he will be acquitted. Of course he is and Nicholas then turns his attention to trying to find out who killed the industrial thief.

Nicholas is aided by #2 mouse Molly O'Brien. She has attended every day of the trial and her presence was not unnoticed by Nicholas’ wandering eye. Molly is the daughter of the formula's inventor and gives us the requisite background on how Osborne became associated with her father back in New Orleans and how he managed to get the formula and return to England. The third of the “three blind mice” is Nicholas’ best friend Sir Jerrold Mordaunt (or plain ol' Jerry to his pals), wealthy heir to a baronetcy, whose money allows the three to finance their impending adventures.  Jerry has a devoted butler at his beck and call and a faithful dog, George, that accompanies the group. Nicholas and Molly set up their sleuthing base at Jerry’s vast estate and together the three hatch a plot to recover the formula and capture Osborne’s real killer. A group of professional criminals are hot on Nicholas’ trail and they kidnap Molly which sets in motion a series of high paced pulp magazine style incidents which don’t let up until the final pages. Any hope of the book being a true detective novel just fizzles out.

It's all fast paced, easy to read, hardly taxing on the brain, yet all too familiar. Many of Bridges’ first books were adapted for the silent screen and he himself had written several plays prior to this novel. No doubt influenced by silent movies and penny dreadful melodrama I Did Not Kill Osborne is so much like hundreds of other books you’ll be overcome with déjà vu long before you reach the halfway mark. “Haven’t I read this before?” you may ask yourself several times. Nicholas saves the girl, punches out several villains, earns several bruises and injuries before the last page. Molly is stoic and brave during her abduction ordeal. Jerry is dashing and charming and witty, like all best friends, ever ready with cash or his trusty butler to help at the last minute. Oh and there's Jimmy, the 12 year-old boy who idolizes Nicholas as an artistic mentor (the boy shows him drawings and wants Nicholas to help teach him how to be a great artist). Jimmy is recruited to help navigate a small boat that takes our intrepid group to Essex where the climax of the book takes place complete with terrifying death trap and an explosion that nearly does in everyone. The villains are dirty, lumbering, stupid and easily defeated except when Bridges needs to delay the finale.  The leader of the crooks turns out to be a Bolshevik spy, a classic cliche of the egocentric villain who talks too much and never sees what's behind him until it bashes him in the face.  Yes, he too is conveniently stupid when Bridges needs him to be.  It all works out well (did you think otherwise?) with a happy ending for our heroes and deserved arrest for the villains.

Oh! Almost forgot. We do find out who really killed Osborne. But there was no detective work involved at all. By the end of the book with Nicholas having nearly died three times and Molly's being abducted, beaten and nearly blown up herself does it even matter who killed Osborne?  The revelation is done in a confession by the killer's widow. Huge anticlimax.

In a word, passable. Very attractive dust jacket on the US edition up there at the top of this post. That's probably the only reason to seek out a copy.

FFB: Girl Missing - Edna Sherry

THE STORY: Carlton “Carlo” Ives is the epitome of a ne’er-do-well playboy. He’d rather spend money at the race tracks, fancy restaurants and hotspot bars. He’s never had a real job in his life. Now he owes $14,000 to hardnosed bookie and OTB kingpin Nick Archer. Last ditch attempt to reconcile with his wealthy father who had offered his son employment and a chance to redeem himself proves futile. When approached by Archer with an offer he can’t refuse Carlo finds himself agreeing to act as Archer’s racetrack agent. After signing a contract that will award Carlo 10% of all jobs undertaken and 40% of “special projects” Carlo learns he has been hoodwinked into taking part in a kidnapping scheme.

THE CHARACTERS: Girl Missing (1962) implies an abduction or kidnapping, but for a while it almost seems as if our unlikable but stunningly gorgeous (of course) young couple will turn out to be the criminals not the victims. Maybe not robbing banks with machine guns, but causing trouble and wrecking lives all the same. They are definitely bad news when they get together. Veronica Sheldon confesses to Carlo that she is “short on morals” and she’s a rebellious thrillseeker. She agrees to go out with Carlo, a profligate of the worst sort in the eyes of her parents and hoity-toity sister Libby, just to piss off her family. Carlo secretly pursues Ronny in a petty form of jealous revenge for the way her sister openly snubbed and insulted him. Carlo has already been presented to us as an anti-hero but one that the reader is not exactly rooting for. When Carlo is recruited unwittingly into Nick Archer’s kidnap scheme Ronny Sheldon is the first person he thinks of as the best target for a quick and easy payoff. Ironically, Carlo’s entry level criminal act will be a transformative one for both he and his intended victim.

Sherry gives us lots of background in an economically told story. We learn of Carlo’s love/hate relationship with his father and the reasons he feels entitled to a life of luxury, his short lived relationship with Libby Sheldon, and his resentment and anger towards everyone who he believes gave him a raw deal leads to a crescendo of petty revenge.

Likewise, we get a capsule life history of Nick Archer (born Archezzo) from his indoctrination as a teen into the world of betting as a debt collector and gofer to running several off-track betting parlors and becoming a figure of intimidation in the horseracing world. Sherry tells of his devotion to his family, how he and his deaf mute sister were orphaned at an early age and how Nick took care of them both afterward. We also get a brief tale of how Nick met his right hand man Harry, a Korean War veteran, who saved Nick from an attack by couple of juvenile delinquents who tried to mug the betting parlor impresario. Harry turns out to be loyal but with a bitter ingrained streak of sadism leftover from his war days that makes it all too easy for him to be groomed into Nick’s hitman permanently taking care of crooked employees who cross the boss.

Nick is being pursued by federal agents for tax evasion in a subplot that will have significance in the final chapter. Nick’s wants to escape trial for what all gangsters usually go to prison for. With Harry’s help he dreams up a kidnap plot and will use the ransom to help fund an escape plan that will get them to Mexico and then Switzerland. They exploit Carlo Ives’ $14,000 debt coming due in less than two days and figure they can allow him to be their patsy. Archer secures Carlo’s involvement with cleverly thought out frame-ups. Basically he extorts Carlo to carry out the kidnapping out of fear of being accused of other worse crimes, crimes that never actually took place but for which enough proof will be concocted to make them seem not only possible but plausible and with Carlo at the center of them all.

The kidnapping takes place exactly as planned but when Carlo discovers he is also to become one of the victims he begins to see the error of his ways. At this point there is a major shift in the action and an almost sudden transformation in Carlo’s character. Carlo is determined to turn the tables on his captors, rescue both he and Ronny, and turn the real kidnappers over to the police. The final chapters are rife with action sequences that seem perfectly engineered for the movie screen and Sherry inserts more than a couple of neat surprises for both Carlo and the reader before the final page is reached.

INNOVATIONS: Sherry does a neat job of making a thoroughly detestable character like Carlo Ives into someone the reader wants to win and in the end will admire. Even if it seems as if he has an all too easy epiphany and metamorphosis from spendthrift playboy into daring hero willing to risk his life for his girl, Sherry manages to make it fairly convincing. But Carlo doesn’t get off scot free. Ronny will have the last word; she’s far from forgiving when she discovers the truth.

Oddly, Nick seems to be the most sympathetic of the bunch. Having read Tears for Jessie Hewitt a few months ago I’m intrigued by the way Sherry skillfully creates these seemingly villainous men who still have a smidgen of humanity in them for either their family or a loved one. In Nick’s case it is his devotion to his sister that redeems him and keeps us from seeing him as utterly bad. Though Anna is present throughout the entire crime (Nick and Harry use her farmhouse as the kidnap hideout) it is always clear that she will never be implicated in any way. Nick always has in mind her safety first. Several arguments take place when the murderous Harry wants to eliminate all witnesses, but Nick is adamant that Anna is not to be harmed . She is after all incapable of speaking which reluctantly Harry sees as an excuse to leave her alone. Ultimately, Anna’s inability to hear or speak save her life.

THINGS I LEARNED: This is the second novel of Sherry’s I’ve read that involves horse racing and gambling. This time I learned all about the world of off-track betting and how the unusual methods in which money is collected. Early in the story, during a section explaining how Nick became such a “star” in the eyes of his gambling parlor mentor Frankie, we watch as Nick in his teen years acted as a spy who helped ferret out a couple of crooked employees who were stealing from Frankie.

QUOTES: The taxi driver, looking at [Carlo & Ronny] in the rear mirror, summed them up with admiration touched by envy: As good-lookin’ as anything in the movies. An’ prolly rolling. Some people have all the luck. But luck has a way of running out.

Carlo: “We’ll give the classy joints a miss so you won’t be spotted.”
Ronny: “Oh skizzy. Take me to a real low dive.”

The place was crowded with young married couples in the middle-income bracket from all over town who liked good food and enjoyed dancing. But to Ronny’s artless, enraptured eyes, they were all branded with delicious sin. She sprinkled her comments with carefully memorized beatnik phrases. The couples were, of course, “shacked up,” the band was “far out,” Carlo was a “cat” she could “relate to.”

The Pub Crawler - Maurice Procter

US 1st edition (Harper & Bros., 1957)

For some reason I have been reading a slew of the books that were reprinted as part of Garland Press' Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction series. There were two sets of these books totaling one hundred examples of what in the estimation of Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor (authors of the seminal detective fiction annotated bibliography A Catalog of Crime) are superlative examples of the genre.  Most of the time, especially those in the first set which includes books published between 1900-1950, I have been very pleased with the choices.  But lately I've been sampling some from the second set spanning 1950 - 1975 and I have to admit great disappointment.  Yesterday I posted an essay on the uneven but entertaining novel The Body in the Beck included in this second set of fifty "classics". Today I regret I have found one that is simply mediocre.

The Pub Crawler (1956) is a perfect example of a police procedural that fails to excite. Though the central conceit of an undercover policeman should provide the reader with ample opportunity for suspense and detection Maurie Procter instead delivers a plodding story that mixes soap opera melodrama with a fairly routine police investigation. Sam Gilmour, owner of the Starving Rascal, is murdered for his rare coin collection and Bill Knight is the rookie policeman chosen by his superiors to be a "pub crawler", apparently police slang for an undercover cop who haunts bars trying to elicit information from the regular customers. Knight's original task was to gather information on illegal gambling but Gilmour's murder offers his superiors the chance to put him on double duty as a "police spy" a term Knight finds more accurate to describe his unwelcome assignment.

US 1st paperback (Berkeley, 1958)

Soon Knight finds himself set up in a boarding house owned by Mrs. Byles and sitting at the dinner table holding conversations with his landlady and her three children, Gunnar, Rosemary and Junie, in an attempt to get to the bottom of Gilmour's murder. Gunnar is soon implicated as the prime suspect. Junie, only eighteen years old and the youngest of Mrs Byles' children, starts to show an amorous interest in the rugged Knight. When another female suspect, Gilmour's adopted daughter Gay, begins to show signs of jealousy Knight's job is hampered by their rivalry and competing attentions. Unfortunately, soap opera elements threaten to overtake the crime plot at this stage.

But there are the thug characters named McGeen and Frost to keep Knight busy as well. Gunnar is mixed up with these two bookies who may or may not also be involved in the murder of the pub owner. When an attempt is made by McGeen to sell a gold ingot bar to a local junk dealer the police are alerted and the case comes to a startlingly rapid close.

For me there wasn't enough detection in this story to keep interest in the crime plot. The subplot of the women vying for Bill Knight's attention and the repeated beating scenes of the gangster characters kept intruding and distracting me. When Knight is alone and focused on the gathering of evidence -- even if it is a bit unorthodox -- the book approaches true excitement. But these scenes are few and far between. Only when Mrs. Byles is onstage in the soap opera sections does the story hold real interest. Procter's creation of a complex and non-stereotypical working class mother who knows too well that her children are not angels and whose contempt for respectable people fuels her hatred of the upper class kept me reading to the final page. Mrs. Byles was the most complex and unexpected character in a book otherwise filled with rather cardboard, familiar types of 1950s cops-and-robbers melodrama.

The book is far from a classic for any era. I'm dumbfounded how it merits being called one of the fifty best books in a twenty-five year period of crime fiction publishing.

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Reading Challenge update:  N2 on the Golden Age Bingo Card - "Book with a Place in the Title"

The Ghost Knows His Greengages - R. B. Saxe

Great sufferin’ antimacassars!

Sammy Creed here. Me and the Ghost (or John Dobbs as his parents supposedly named him though by all the signs and portents I do believe he made it up) get mixed up in some pretty tight scrapes. We go way back. Back in the trenches to be specific. And that is when he got his nickname, the one by which I prefer to call him. Yeah, he has that spooky way of sneaking into a room appearing out of nowhere just like a blamed ghost. Comes in handy when we are facing up to all sorts of crooks and gorillas with plug ugly pans and uglier demeanors. Not to mention perfectly horrible taste in sartorial splendor. Man, these guys need several lessons in how to dress. They could take a cue from the Ghost or even me myself as we are two people who know good threads when we see ‘em.

OK, I can’t keep on with this. But you probably have guessed that Sammy and the Ghost are the two leads in today’s forgotten vintage crime novel The Ghost Knows His Greengages (1940) by the equally forgotten R.B. Saxe. It’s an obvious homage to Damon Runyon but with a Canadian ex-solider doing the narrating instead of one of Runyon’s Broadway guys. But you’d never know he wasn’t American by the way he talks. Here’s one Canadian in love with the sound of gangster lingo and very American slang of the World War 2 era.

The book is set in England and the writer is British. As much as he knows way too much about Runyonesque patois he lets his English background let slip more often than he ought to. Like when Sammy calls the trunk of a car "the boot" or describes getting duded up in formal wear “fancy dress.” I don’t think a Canadian would use those very specific British terms if he was the kind of talker Sammy is.

And it’s that lingo that is the main attraction of Saxe’s book. The story leaves a lot to be desired. It’s Guys and Dolls transported to merry old London with a sharp contrast between Sammy’s borrowed American speech and the Ghost’s British tough guy act. It’s as if we had Lemmy Caution, Peter Cheney’s brutal private eye, teamed up with Harry the Horse or any number of Runyon’s second string characters.

The story? A simple revenge scheme. The Ghost and Sammy nearly run over a confused old man who walks into the path of the Ghost’s Italian sports car (a Boscalozzi, if you must know, but I think it’s completely made up). They rescue the gent, take him home, and discover the reason for his dazed stroll into traffic is because his bank account has been cleaned out by notorious stock market fleecer Joe “the Baker” Schreiner. The Ghost is determined to get back every last shilling of the old man’s money and help himself to a little extra if he can. Thereafter follows a lot of fisticuffs, broken noses and bruised muscles and egos as the two good guys go after the thugs and goons who make up Joe the Baker’s army of bad guys. Along the way the Ghost tokes on the occasional reefer to relax and get his wheels spinning in his fast paced brain while Sammy knocks back whiskey shots and trade quips with Mulligan their Chinese manservant. Oh yes, he’s got a real Chinese name but Sammy can never remember it so he just calls him Mulligan to simplify the matter.

I tried to overlook the abundance of racial slurs in this one but the constant references to “big schnozzles” of Jewish characters and dubbing the only black gangster in the book a “dinge” was a little too much for me. Most of the time I can forgive some of this “period charm” but this book seemed to be narrated by an ancestor of Archie Bunker. Runyon never did this kind of thing even for laughs and I wonder why Saxe thought he had to throw it in. It ain’t funny at all.

What I chose to concentrate on instead was Saxe’s wicked imagination and flair for turning out insane metaphors in Sammy's peculiar idiom. Here’s a sampling of the best that made me laugh out loud.

Last book in the Ghost & Sammy Credd series

"Maybe one of these days I’ll manage to get a line on [the Ghost], but up to the present I’m no more able to understand him than I could figger out the Theory of Relativity broadcast in Eskimo from Bugville, PA by a Jewish sword swallower in a straight jacket."

"…I realise that although all our duds come from exactly the same establishment we are as alike as one pea in a pod and the back wheel of a motorcycle."

"…where I come from they’re so tough the bed-bugs carry pneumatic drills."

"…but let me tell you here and now that to argue with the Ghost is about as effective as bombarding the Woolworth Building with doughnuts."

"My knowledge of English place names is about as much as could be engraved on the head of a pin by a one-armed Kansas barber using a fourteen pound hammer and a cold chisel."

"The Dud is very well behaved until I start to try to take off his pants and then he suddenly springs into action and commences fighting like a man-eating octopus who is suffering from a sharp attack of green apple colic."

The above, by the way, is not a sexual assault. Sammy says pants but he means trousers. That's the way we North Americans talk you know. The Dud (yes, it’s Dud and not Dude) is drunk and Sammy is trying to get him in bed so he can sleep. This is what the Canadian has to say about the proper way to treat pants:

“It is my opinion that for a guy to go to sleep with his pants on is not only very uncivilised, but is also not giving the pants a square deal into the bargain; it being a known fact that a pair of pants that have been slept in never succeed in occupying the same place in their owner’s affections as before, for no matter if they are pressed a million times there always seems to be a sort of stigma attached to them, if you know what I mean.”

See? I told you these guys are in love with their clothes. Lots of clothes talk in this book. Maybe a bit too much.

R.B. Saxe turns out to be a fake moniker. As fake as John Dobbs, no doubt. He was born Francis Dickson into a family of entertainers. His father was a music hall performer, his brother was an actor who made a living in pantomimes. Is it any wonder that Francis eventually found himself a musician writing songs and playing in a number of jazz bands? In addition to three comic crime novels he also wrote comic strips based on historical figures like “Deep Sea Doctor” about Wilfred Grenfell, a Victorian physician who served as a medical missionary to Canadian fishermen. For more info about this writer who’s almost as interesting as his wacky crime fighting duo see this intriguing post at Bear Alley Books.

The Ghost and Sammy appeared in four books. This was their debut. It was a breezy read and a fun visit, but I’ll not be seeking out the other books in the series. All of them, of course, are very hard to find. And only the first one was published in both hardcover and paperback editions. Probably because it was the best effort of the lot.

The Ghost and Sammy Creed series
The Ghost Knows His Greengages (1940)
The Ghost Does a Richard III (1943)
The Ghost Pulls the Jackpot (1945)
What Can You Lose? (1947)

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Count this as book #6 on my Golden Age "Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge" Bingo Card. This book satisfies the space G1 (“A Book with a Color in the Title”)."

FFB: Desert Town - Ramona Stewart

Based solely on the plot blurb on the rear cover of the Pocket Books edition any reader would think that Desert Town (1946) by Ramona Stewart is an early sleaze novel about a trampy, rebellious daughter and her domineering mother. "You little slut," her mother said. is the bold headline intended to grab the attention of a prospective reader. As usual the publisher is teasing and misleading by appealing to a taste for melodrama and raunchy language. A thorough reading of the book itself reveals so much more than vulgarity and a mother and daughter at odds with one another. Desert Town is a very strange exploration of love in all its forms and the pursuit of one’s desires. But not specifically sexual desire.

At the heart of the novel is one of the oddest love triangles in pulp fiction. Paula Haller – Eddie Benedict—Johnny Ryan. And it’s not the men vying for the woman as one would think in one of these triangles. Instead we find Johnny and Paula competing for the affection of Eddie. Yet there isn’t a hint of homoerotic lust between the two men. Theirs is a very intense devotion that defies brotherly male bonding with obedience and need taking the place of sexual attraction. While Paula is drawn to Eddie’s strong personality, his toughness, his brooding good looks Johnny wants Eddie because he needs him to achieve his status in the world of racketeers. But for the bulk of the book Johnny is depicted as a jealous lover constantly trying to get rid of Paula. He threatens her as would a woman who feels she is losing her man to a younger, sexier rival. He belittles her in front of Eddie similar to a women who is slighted.

Incredibly strange to read these exchanges coming from the mouth of a man who intimidates Paula with his eyes "the shade of redwood bark," his "animal warmth" she feels when she shakes his hand upon first meeting him and how he seems to demand of her "recognition of his slow moving, powerful aliveness." Stewart has a quirky way with her prose. She can be spot on in a descriptive passage about the desert landscape then like a beginner driver shifting gears too quickly she slips up and allows her tendency towards purple prose to sputter across the page with awkward word choices and indulgent metaphors. It's slightly forgivable for a first time novelist and the weirdness of these odd slips in writing adds another level of the surreal to an already strange story of attraction and repulsion among the three main characters.

The rivalry between Paula and Johnny is further complicated by the fact that Paula is a dead ringer for Eddie’s recently deceased wife Angela. There’s an element of Rebecca in the way Paula uses this similarity to her advantage and it’s all the more creepy when you recall she is a seventeen year-old not yet graduated from high school and Eddie is at least ten years older, perhaps even older, though his age is never stated outright. Fritzi is always reminding her daughter of the inappropriateness of the relationship as well as warning Paula that Eddie is just plain no good.

The mixed signals are intentional on Stewart’s part. She develops the kind of misdirection found in a detective novel by allowing the reader to view Johnny Ryan only through Paula's eyes. This allows Stewart a narrative coup de grace delivered by Johnny Ryan like a boxer's knockout blow in the penultimate chapter.  His revelation crushes both Paula and Eddie as it was intended and he comes out like a champion.

Stewart’s other strength is in her creation of the supporting players who surround the trio and the frustrated scheming Fritzi. There is Lena Raines, the wife of the town undertaker, who trades in a promising career in biochemistry at a local university for a life of domesticity only to discover she has trapped herself in a marriage as barren as the desert town she thought would be a blissful escape. She turns to alcohol and racing her husband's car recklessly in a sort of dance with death. But she's always rescued and prevented from hurting herself or anyone by policeman Luke Sheldon to whom she is attracted and secretly desires. Sheldon turns out to be the savior figure of the book and the only decent and ethical cop in Chuckawalla.

The other policemen are Pat Johnson and Tom Hansen, another male duo in a near co-dependent relationship that borders on the perverse. Hansen is a former rodeo champion who had to give up his chosen life due to permanent injuries sustained while bronco busting. We learn he is a sadistic thug and Johnson, his only real friend, tolerates and sometimes encourages Hansen’s hobby of doling out regular beatings to the jail’s prisoners. At a poker game where the two cops are joined by Doc Waley and Jim Raines (Lena’s husband) the men discuss the death of a drunk who died in the jail. All know (as does the reader) that Hansen beat the drunk to death. But the conversation circumvents that reality and they spend the night dismissing the poor old drunk who died an accidental death. The casual nature of the talk perfectly captures how inured the town has become to violence and corruption. How they are willing to allow murder to go unpunished in order to preserve and maintain their twisted status quo. Even Fritzi Haller's assortment of brothels and her casino The Purple Sage are allowed to flourish in Chuckawalla thanks largely to her frequent bribing of the police while all other officials conveniently look the other way.

In addition to exploring the dark side of male friendships Desert Town is also a coming of age tale for Paula Haller. She wades through this crooked, deviant world trying to find a path to happiness and womanhood. Paula constantly complains of being treated as a child and wants to grow up quickly. She finds herself testing her limits, pursuing dream men and dream jobs, falling in and out of love as quickly as the desert winds change and the rainstorms come and go. And she encounters dangers and perils as she comes to see how her mother has changed and how the hedonistic businesses she runs are far from fun diversions and that the men she deals with are far from gentlemen.

Ramona Stewart, age 25, as she appears
on the rear DJ cover of the 1st ed.

Stewart's story originally appeared as a serial in Collier's magazine and was purchased by Hollywood prior to its being published in book form. The movie adaptation was retitled Desert Fury and came out in 1947, the same year the book was released. The movie stars Lizabeth Scott and Mary Astor as Paula and Fritzi; John Hodiak and Wendell Corey as Eddie and Johnny; and Burt Lancaster as an amalgam of the good Luke Sheldon and the evil Tom Hansen with good winning out over evil in the blending of the characters (even if he did end up with the bad cop's name). Amazingly, Robert Rossen who adapted the story retained nearly 80% of Ramona Stewart's original dialogue and scenes -- a testament to her dramatic skill.

Finally, here is some good news: Desert Town is the sophomore offering from Raven's Head Press. The book is in the final stages of production and will be offered for sale, if luck is on our side, by the end of this month. The new edition will include a killer cover design and a foreword by me on the unusual writing career of Ramona Stewart. She began with stories for the "slicks" and ended up writing occult thrillers of which The Possession of Joel Delaney, made into a very disturbing movie with Shirley MacLaine and Perry King, is her most well known. An announcement will be posted here when our edition of Desert Town is officially released. Stay tuned!

IN BRIEF: Free Ride - James M Fox

Leo Maxwell, an ex-boxer, is being transported via train to Phoenix where he will be tried for manslaughter.  Two cops, Jerry Long and Chuck Conley, are in charge of his safety.  En route they learn that Maxwell managed to win over $20,000 on a long shot bet at a horse racetrack.  Even before the train leaves the station an attempt is made on Maxwell's life.  Sgt. Long handles the three goons with the usual pulp fiction style fistfight.  Turns out they are members of a Sicilian syndicate.  Long and Conley try to get Maxwell to confess the racetrack winnings were a gang related con game. Maxwell refuses to cooperate. Everyone on board seems to know that Long and Conley are cops.  Maxwell in handcuffs seems to be the give away.  As the train continues its journey from New Orleans through several Texas towns onto Arizona more attempts are made on Maxwells' life.

Like the best of the paperback originals that specialize in crime we get the usual ingredients for a quick read. Fistfights and action galore. Lots of James Hadley Chase style ersatz American dialog meaning it's littered with wiseacre period slang that no real person ever used. A myriad of suspicious characters make trouble for the two cops.

Among those characters are:

Homer Finch -- a salesman on his way to a cosmetic convention.  He spends much of his telling stupid jokes and playing pranks with novelty gag items.

Thomas Carpenter -- older gent way too interested in the police business and a bit too interested in other passengers like...

Gloria Starr -- burlesque stripper, con woman who gets Carpenter to pay for her meal in the dining car when she "forgets" her purse

Carol Wallace -- claims to be Maxwell's girlfriend. Attempts to bribe Long with sexual favors in order to free Maxwell. 

Long sends orders to headquarters to run criminal background checks on all these passengers and a few more. He suspects that one or more may be involved in a plot to either free Maxwell and get him off the train or to kill him before the train arrives in Phoenix.  It turns out he's right, but just who is involved is rather hard to figure out. And there are indeed a few surprises before this action tale comes to its violent finale with plenty of fists and bullets flying.

IN BRIEF: So Young, So Wicked – Jonathan Craig

When Steve Garrity comes home one night to find a paper match bent into the front door frame of his apartment he knows it's not a good sign. Vince Licardi has been there again. And when Vince shows up Steve knows he has to give up his regular gig as a piano player in a local night club and do another favor for the syndicate. The favor always means someone has to die.

This time it's Leda , a fifteen year old girl living in a upstate New York suburb. Just why Leda has to do die is never explained to Steve. All that is stressed is her death must appear to be accidental and needs to happen fast. It's one of Steve's most difficult jobs for the gangsters he has become enslaved to. Years ago he beat a man to death and in order to escape prison and eventual execution in the electric chair he agreed to a Faustian pact of sorts. He would have to kill someone for the mob and continue to accept hit man jobs whenever called upon in exchange for his life and protection.

Craig provides the usual well drawn cast of supporting players. Small town gossips provide Steve with all the info he needs on Leda without having to probe too deeply.  Offering up all the dirt on the town and Leda's life are a slovenly misanthropic hotel owner, the ineffectual and nosey bellhop Ollie, and a friendly bartender. A former NYC cop, now chief of police of the small town, serves as the shrewd detective who begins to suspect Steve may not be what he pretends to be.

So Young, So Wicked travels down the dark noir road. There is no detection or real justice as in the books detailing the cases of cops Pete Selby and Stan Rayder of the 6th Precinct. Instead we get plenty of steamy sex and scheming. Steve gets in way over his head when he foolishly decides to use Leda's aunt, Nancy Wilson, as a way to get to know his intended victim. Posing as a man interested in opening a music store in the space that formerly housed Nancy's financially disastrous gift shop, Steve decides to pursue her romantically. The phony relationship gets out of hand, Nancy falls madly for Steve, and Leda then uses the two against each other in order to outwit Steve at his own game. Some readers may find the portrait of Leda, a nasty little Lolita with a case of the Bad Seed syndrome, a bit repellent by the end which is as bleak as most real noir should be.

Interestingly, So Young, So Wicked must've been a big seller for Gold Medal  It's one of Craig's books that received two Gold Medal printings.  The one pictured up top (#954) is the second edition with a picture of a mature and teasing teen age Leda as she is described in the book. The first printing (#669) at right makes Leda look like a magazine model in her 30s. Neither of the cover artists chose to dress Leda in her drum majorette outfit that she sports in an incriminating photo, an integral part of the plot. How much of a fetishist's dream is a teenager in a drum majorette outfit? How could Gold Medal have missed that opportunity? Maybe someday there will be a reissue with Leda shown the way Craig intended her to be depicted.

FFB: Frank L. Packard - The Underworld & Exotic Crime

Today is Friday's Forgotten Books Salute to Canada.  Our guest host for this Black Friday is the ever resourceful Todd Mason. The links for today's other posts are at his blog Sweet Feedom.  Check them out for other (I'm sure) more recent and contemporary writers from Canada.  I had to go with one of the most neglected Canadian writers of crime fiction from the past century.

Although Frank L Packard was born and raised in Montreal, attended McGill University, and worked for years for the Canadian Pacific Railway as a civil engineer he tended to write about the dirty underworld of New York crime or exotic adventure tales set in the South Pacific and Asia like those found in Shanghai Jim (1928). Rarely do you find anything about his books on the internet and so I dove right into his books of which I had amassed quite a few.

Packard's first novels dealt with the redemption of the criminal world.  The Miracle Man (1914) tells of the Patriarch, a healer who has a run in with some con men and the surprise healing of a cripple boy that transforms the lives of the crooks trying to fleece the town. The book was adapted into a stage play and later was a high grossing silent film with Lon Chaney in the role of a contortionist who stuns the town by crawling up the aisle in extreme pain and then after receiving the Patriarch's healing touch unfolds his twisted limbs and walks away apparently cured. Similarly, in The Sin That Was His (1917) a crook falsely accused of a murder disguises himself as a priest in order to escape the police, but in living out his second disguised life undergoes a spiritual and moral change.

Probably his best known character is Jimmie Dale, aka "the Gray Seal," one of many in a long line of gentleman thief characters. Jimmie Dale also shows signs of the hero pulp characters with his secret hideaway, masked costume, calling cards stamped with the figure of a seal. I saw a lot of similarities to Herman Landon's Gray Phantom who is also a devil-may-care playboy who enjoys masquerading as a crime fighter and both use multiple identities. The Gray Phantom stories appeared serially in the pulps as did the Jimmie Dale stories but Packard's character came long before making his debut in 1914 while Landon's Gray Phantom appeared in 1920. While Packard may have borrowed from Raffles, Arsene Lupin, and other similar characters of the late Edwardian period in creating his own version of the gentleman thief who fights crime there can be no doubt that in Jimmie Dale we see the origin of the hero pulp characters culminating in The Shadow, The Spider, and even Batman. For an excellent overview of Jimmie Dale see this article by David Vineyard at Mystery*File.

One of the most interesting of the Gray Seal books is Jimmie Dale and the Blue Envelope Murder. Herbert Carruthers, the newspaper editor who knows nothing of Dale's secret identity, delivers to Jimmie Dale the news that the Gray Seal is dead. 

A good example of Packard's exotic adventure novel is The Locked Book which begins aboard a merchant vessel sailing through the Malay Archipelago. After surviving an attack by savage pirates led by a white man wearing a crimson sash, Kenneth Wayne vows revenge on those who killed his father, Old Man Wayne, the skipper of the Waratan. Kenneth makes his way to a hotel run by the mysterious M. Fouché and passes himself off as a mining prospector. He succeeds in getting a local guide, a boat and heads off in search of the pirates pretending all the while to be a man looking for gold. Instead he comes across a shrine where an ancient book is being guarded as if it were a god. It's even given a name that sounds like a deity: Itu Konchi-Kan Kitab, which apparently merely means "the book that is locked." The book bound in an ornate stamped dragon that is swallowing its tongue is said to hold the key to a buried treasure of the Rajah Kana-ee-aa. But a native frightened by Kenneth's desecration of the shrine takes the book out of his hands before he can open it and flees in the jungle. Kenneth's vengeance takes a back seat to his interest in the book and the story becomes a mix of chase and intrigue as he attempts to recover the book and discover if it holds the secret to the treasure.

Part of the fun of reading this adventure tale is that the book itself is a replica of the locked book in the story. Shown above is the Copp, Clark Company 1st Canadian edition with the ornate gilt embossed dragon grasping his tail in his mouth. When the book is closed it gives the impression that it too is locked like the book guarded by the natives.

Whether he is writing about gangsters and their molls, crooked antiquarians seeking rare books with hidden secrets, sailors and merchant seamen battling marauding pirates in the South Seas, or Jimmie Dale and crew in the New York underworld, Frank L. Packard was instrumental in the development of crime fiction that shied away from amateur sleuths and focused on the darker and dirtier world that would explode into the violent writing of hard-boiled writers like Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett.

IN BRIEF: The Snake of Luvercy - Maurice Renard

Mme de Prasse and her son Lionel are intent on luring young Gilberta Laval (Mme de Prasse’s niece) away from Jean Mareuil, her intended fiancée. The countess and her son want Gilberta’s fortune, inherited from Mme de Prasse’s dead sister, for themselves and are hoping to marry Gilberta to Lionel. So the scheming de Prasse family enlists the aid of a crooked former butler to follow Mareuil. They soon discover that Mareuil is leading a double life – by night he becomes Charlot the Snake, a ruffian of the Parisian underworld with a girlfriend who does a snake charming routine for café patrons.

There is much discussion about the current ideas (circa late 1920s) about multiple personality and memory throughout most of the book. The de Prasses think that Charlot was somehow involved in the bizarre death of Mme de Prasse’s sister, Jeanne Laval (Gilberta’s mother) who was bitten by a deadly South American viper, a rare specimen captured by M. Laval who was a sometime explorer and naturalist. The twisting plot then alternates between the scheming countess and her son doing their best to expose Jean as a criminal and Jean’s desperate attempt to prove Gilberta’s mother was murdered by one of the de Prasse family members.

The Snake of Luvercy (1930, English transl.) is an excellent, fast paced thriller with a surprise ending and interesting use of snake imagery throughout. Typical of his French crime writing contemporaries Renard relies heavily on duplicity, disguise and misdirection about the true identities of many of the characters. The story also contains a murder in a locked bathroom with a bizarre solution involving a baroque murder means (typical for Renard) relying on a fiendishly designed mechanical device.

Maurice Renard, science fiction & thriller author

Although Maurice Renard wrote one of the most terrifying crime thrillers of the early 20th century, The Hands of Orlac (which was filmed four times), he is perhaps best known as a science fiction writer. He even invented his own genre that he dubbed "Scientific Marvel Fiction." Only a few of his works were published in English during his lifetime.

In the last five years, however, there has been a renewed interest in his work. Several new English translations by Brian Stableford have been released by Black Coat Press. They have published five of Renard's science fiction books only one of which had been previously published in an expurgated, badly translated version in the 1920s. That book was published in the US as New Bodies for Old  The new Black Coat Press edition restores its original French title of Doctor Lerne.