At eighteen, Ed Hunter is older than Huck and a good deal more worldly. When his father is beaten to death, the apparent victim of a random mugging, he wants answers but knows he‘s out of his depth when it comes to getting them. He therefore enlists the help of his father’s brother Ambrose, a carnival barker savvy in the ways of the mean streets. In teaming up with Uncle Am to solve what they eventually determine is a deliberate murder rather than an impersonal mugging, Ed undertakes his own Huck-like voyages of discovery through the streets of Chicago and thus performs his rite of passage.

The characters, with perhaps one or two exceptions, are neither all good nor all bad. Most exhibit morally gray behaviors and attitudes. The story itself is as “naturalistic” as any I’ve ever read in the genre, a superb example of the kind Raymond Chandler alluded to when he wrote about Dashiell Hammett (and by extension other good pulp writers) giving “murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.” Anthony Boucher called it “a singularly effective job of portraying people as they are and murder as it is — a solidly compelling story.” But while it contains its share of dark moments and situations, and has a strong sense of place, Brown’s style — though eminently readable — is relatively pedestrian, lacks the brooding lyricism that infuses, for instance, a David Goodis novel.

The Fabulous Clipjoint has been marginalized as a minor classic for many years. Recently, an article by Dick Adler argued for the elevation of its stature. Read it for yourself to decide if Fredric Brown merits being ranked with Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, and Jim Thompson.

©2009 Barry Ergang

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Visit his website: http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/ Some of his work is available at Amazon and at Smashwords.

As Richard Stark, probably his best-known pseudonym, he produced a very successful series of ultra-hardboiled novels, several of which were filmed—see The Thrilling Detective website for more information. The books starred Parker, a professional thief: “Once or twice a year, Parker was in on an institutional robbery…It wasn’t out of humanity that he limited himself to organizations, it was just that organizations had more money than individuals….

“Parker wasn’t a single-o. He always worked with a pickup group gathered for that single specific job. Every man was a specialist, and Parker’s specialties were two; planning and violence. Other men were specialists in opening safes or scaling walls or making up blueprints from nothing more than observation, but Parker was a specialist at planning an operation so it run smoothly, and at stopping any outsider who might be thinking of lousing things up.”

The premise of The Jugger, the sixth book in a series which does not necessarily have to be read in order, is fairly simple. Joe Sheer is a jugger, a safecracker, living in the small town of Sagamore, Nebraska under the name Joseph Shardin. Now retired, he sometimes acts as an intermediary between Parker and others in his particular line of work. He writes to Parker who, when not pulling heists, lives in Miami under the name Charles Willis, an identity he has painstakingly constructed over a period of years. Sheer’s first letter indicates that he’s in some kind of trouble, that he’ll handle it, but that Parker shouldn’t try to contact him until the matter is settled. A month later a second letter arrives, this one asking for Parker’s help. Parker packs a bag and, as Charles Willis, goes to Sagamore. He does so not out of loyalty or friendship toward Sheer—there is nothing noble about him; he does so for the sake of self-preservation. “Joe Sheer could crucify Parker, he could nail him to the wall with a hundred nails…He knew him by his old face…He knew Parker’s cover name, he knew twenty or twenty-five jobs Parker had been connected with, he knew enough about Parker to skin him alive.”

Simple premise, right? All Parker has to do is find out what kind of jam Sheer is in and either help him out of it or kill him to protect himself. But not long after he arrives in Sagamore, things quickly become complicated. Sheer is dead, but nobody will level with Parker about how he died. A man named Tiftus, who “claimed to be a lock man” whom “Parker had never worked with…because he was too unreliable” shows up at Parker’s hotel room, wanting to partner to find something valuable he’s certain Sheer had hidden somewhere.

Parker goes to Sheer’s house to look around for himself and is knocked unconscious by someone wearing a burlap bag for a mask. Not long afterward, Tiftus is found dead—in Parker’s hotel room. Now Parker must deal with the corrupt Captain Younger, local head of the police department, and the honest, earnest state police investigator Regan—while trying to tie up loose ends, absolve himself of a connection to Tiftus’s murder, find the actual killer, and ditch an unwanted new associate.

To say anything more would be to spoil the excitement in this taut short novel. The Jugger is as hardboiled as anything Mickey Spillane ever wrote, but without the posturing. Parker is cold, efficient, and ruthless, the complete anti-hero. He lets nothing and no one stand in his way when he’s trying to accomplish something. Even readers who think they’re inured to fictional criminal activities might be surprised by  some of Parker’s. Although he’s repellent to anyone with moral sensibilities, he’s so intriguing that readers who go for noir fiction will want to follow his adventures, a testament to Westlake’s authorial skill.

As the quoted passages demonstrate, the author doesn’t waste words, doesn’t indulge in the kind of verbal pyrotechnics that can dilute and obstruct a narrative. Thus, the story’s relentless pace infuses it with a raw power. The no-nonsense style reflects Parker’s no-nonsense approach. A further testament to the author’s skill is his ability to portray breathing, individualized characters—this despite the fact that the reader is given background information only about Parker and Captain Younger.

The Jugger will not appeal to readers who only like stories about heroes with noble codes of honor and conduct, nor will it appeal to readers who dislike onstage violence. Fans of rapid-fire hardboiled fiction will greatly enjoy and possibly even love it. To them I highly recommend it.

]]> https://www.flashbangmysteries.com/the-jugger-1965-by-richard-stark/feed/ 0 https://www.flashbangmysteries.com/review-the-great-merlini-the-complete-stories-of-the-magician-detective-1979-by-clayton-rawson/ https://www.flashbangmysteries.com/review-the-great-merlini-the-complete-stories-of-the-magician-detective-1979-by-clayton-rawson/#comments Sat, 16 Apr 2016 21:17:25 +0000 https://www.flashbangmysteries.com/?p=625 Continue reading Review: THE GREAT MERLINI: THE COMPLETE STORIES OF THE MAGICIAN DETECTIVE (1979) by Clayton Rawson →]]> As I have acknowledged in an essay and in other book reviews, I’m a sucker for impossible crime stories. When, years back, International Polygonics, Ltd. reissued the four novels by Clayton Rawson that starred The Great Merlini, crime-solving magician, I snapped them up. Although I felt the first one, Death From a Top Hat, piled on a few too many seemingly impossible situations, as though the author were afraid he’d never write and sell another book and had to demonstrate his entire repertoire of cleverness in this one, I read—and enjoyed even more—its three successors. I also read and liked three Merlini short stories in anthologies I acquired that were focused on locked-room mysteries. When I discovered that The Mysterious Press had reissued The Great Merlini, which collects all twelve of Rawson’s short stories about him, I snatched up the Kindle edition. The stories are as follows.

Zelda the Snake Charmer has been strangled in her room—a room on the eighth floor whose “only window is locked on the inside.” There’s only one way in and out, and that’s been under observation by a group of other circus performers who are shooting craps in the corridor outside. A frustrated Inspector Gavigan and Sergeant Brady aren’t lacking for suspects when they relate the events to Merlini, who solves the case when he picks up on “The Clue of the Tattooed Man.”

“Everybody,” Gavigan growled, “tried to get in. And you want me to believe nobody ever went out—that Lasko’s murderer vanished into thin air like a soap bubble.” The exasperated inspector is once again faced with a seemingly impossible murder and a group of four suspects when the body of theatrical producer Jorge Lasko is found in a room with a French window locked from the inside. Private detective Dan Foyle arrived on the premises just before the two shots were fired, ran to the room, but saw nobody leave. Actress Dorothy Dawn was out on the sundeck and swears nobody exited the room via the window. Merlini seizes on “The Clue of the Broken Legs” to solve the case.

 In “The Clue of the Missing Motive,” Merlini tells Gavigan and Lieutenant Malloy, when they show up at his home: “A man gets killed at dusk last evening just across the street in the park—a hundred feet or so from my front door. Scores of people there, as usual, and one man actually saw the victim as he fell. Yet no one saw the murderer or heard the shot. I’m a magician. So I suspected you might suspect me.” The real suspects, however, live next door, and all have motives for wanting one another dead. But what’s the motive for killing the man from Oklahoma who actually died? Merlini, of course, figures it out as soon as the policemen provide him with the necessary details.

In one of the longer, more atmospheric, and much better-developed stories in the book, which I first read years ago in the anthology edited by Edward D. Hoch titled All But Impossible!, Merlini’s journalist friend Ross Harte visits the magician before cabbing to Andrew Drake’s mansion to interview Drake for a magazine article. A man of wide-ranging interests who says, “Put in enough money and you can accomplish anything,” Drake’s latest obsession is extrasensory perception and psychokinesis: “Unleash the power of the human mind and solve all our problems.” When he arrives, Harte meets a clearly agitated Dr. Garrett, Drake’s physician, on the doorstep. The two are admitted by Drake’s daughter Elinor, who tells them her father is in his study. Dr. Garrett tries the door, then pounds on it and begs Drake to open it. When that proves futile, he and Harte break it down. The scene inside is a bizarre one, not only because of Drake’s dead body, but also in part because of the unconscious psychic medium Rosa Rhys, who is clad in a skimpy bathing suit despite it being a bitterly cold January day. Gavigan and Merlini are summoned, and Merlini must determine whether this locked-room murder was committed by a human or someone “From Another World.”

Anthologized in Death Locked In, edited by Douglas G. Greene and Robert C.S. Adey, where I first read it, “Off the Face of the Earth” begins with the saturnine Gavigan telling Merlini and Ross Harte about the mysterious disappearance of chorus girl Helen Hope. At a Park Avenue party she met Bela Zyyzk, who claims to be a visitor from Antares and a mind-reader. In front of witnesses, Zyyzk told Helen Hope she’d vanish off the face of the earth in three days—and she did. The D.A. requested of Judge Keeler that Zyyzk be held as a material witness, and Keeler granted the request. Then Zyyzk prophesied that Keeler, too, would vanish into the “Outer Darkness.” Keeler is of special interest to the police because he’s known to be on the take from the Castelli mob, and has been under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Learning that the judge has been to the safety deposit vault in his bank, has emerged carrying a suitcase, and has gone to Grand Central Station, Gavigan orders a subordinate to keep an eye on him and to “grab him the minute he tries to go through a gate.” When Gavigan, Merlini and Harte get to the station themselves, they learn that a dazed Lieutenant Malloy and Sergeant Hicks had indeed been constantly watching Keeler. They had taken up positions opposite one another on either side of a line of phone booths. They saw Keeler go into one. When they looked in the booth a few minutes later, it was empty, Keeler apparently having vanished into thin air. It requires a magician like Merlini to explain this conundrum.

“Merlini and the Lie Detector” is a lightweight, negligible story that is neither fairly-clued nor one containing an impossible crime. Merlini must determine which of two suspects murdered Carl Todd. His method of doing so relies on a convenient oversight by the culprit, one that if avoided would have conceivably prevented arrest.

When Gavigan introduces Merlini to George Hurley, the chief of the Customs Service, the latter tells the magician: “I want to know how you would go about making nearly half a million dollars disappear.” The suspected thief is another magician, a skilled card manipulator named Pierre Aldo. The authorities can only hold him for twenty-four hours, and thorough searches of his clothing and premises have turned up nothing. Merlini is on—and up against—the clock in “Merlini and the Vanished Diamonds.”

Another relatively brief story in which Gavigan and another official, in this case F.B.I. agent Fred Ryan, present the magician with an impossible situation, “Merlini and the Sound Effects Murder” deals with the death of sound effects engineer Jerome Kirk. Having spent quite a number of years in the retail audio business, I question a crucial aspect of the story’s solution. I haven’t the technical expertise to say it’s definitively possible or impossible, but if the former, I’m not sure it’s so easily accomplished. To elaborate further would require a spoiler.

“Nothing Is Impossible” reads the sign behind the counter in Merlini’s Magic Shop, where the magician-cum-sleuth sells (and creates, when necessary) items for professional magicians to use in their acts. It is also the title of the next story in this collection, and another one I originally read in an anthology: The Locked Room Reader, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson. This one concerns retired aviation pioneer Albert North, who has handed the reigns of his company to his son-in-law, Charles Kane. Needing a hobby to keep himself busy and engaged, North became fascinated by the idea of extra-terrestrial beings visiting Earth in flying saucers, and has since become “an unoffical clearing house for saucer information,” as Ross Harte explains to Merlini. When North is found shot to death in his study, which is locked from the inside, and Charles Kane is found unconscious and naked—his “shirt was inside the coat, neatly buttoned,  the Countess Mara tie still in place, still tied in a neat Windsor knot.” His underwear is inside the top clothes and his socks are inside his shoes. “Kane says his clothes were removed while he was unconscious,” Merlini tells Homicide’s Lieutenant Doran. “They would appear to have passed through his body in the process.” The appearance of what are apparently alien hieroglyphics burned into the plaster wall, and the absence of the gun that killed North, add to the puzzling circumstances, as do the four-inch-long, three-toed footprints in the dust atop some filing cabinets. Merlini has to figure out if E.T. committed murder and then beamed up to the mother ship, or whether a human culprit killed North, then miraculously vanished from a locked room. He also has to explain some of the aforementioned bizarre discoveries.

In “Miracles—All in the Day’s Work,” Merlini must accompany an insistent Lieutenant Doran, acting on the orders of Inspector Gavigan, to the Chancellor Building. Why the urgency? “What we got is a murderer who just vanished into thin air —sixty-four stories up.” Three witnesses, one of whom is Inspector Gavigan, in the reception area of the Hi-Fly Rod & Reel Company, hear Courtney answer the phone in his office a while after a man in a Panama hat went in to see him. But after his secretary rings him several times and he doesn’t answer, she opens the door and finds him slumped over his desk with a knife in his back. There is no sign of the man in the Panama hat, and he couldn’t have gotten out the window even if he were a kind of human fly because the building has no ledges.

Lester Lee is a well-known Broadway gossip columnist. He’s also  a blackmailer. When he’s shot to death, George J. Boyle isn’t sorry, but he is enraged. Boyle is the producer of the show “Magic and Music,” and one of its stars, Inez Latour, has been hauled in for questioning by the police just prior to opening night. Another star is The Great Merlini. Boyle knows of his connections to the police and insists that Merlini become involved and get Inez Latour back in time for opening night. The magician, using his connections to the Homicide Department, discovers that much of the evidence is photographic and demonstrates that what you see is not always what’s reality in “Merlini and the Photographic Clues.”

The collection ends with another story narrated in the first-person by Ross Harte. The action occurs at Pancakes Unlimited, where Harte is having dinner with his friend Hammett Wilde, a private investigator. Wilde is keeping an eye on Carl Hassleblad, the producer of an underground film that unexpectedly became a hit, at the request of Hassleblad’s wife. The producer is dining with an actress who goes by the name Anna Love, and a writer named Larry Allen. Both are demanding more money for an upcoming film, and Hassleblad is balking at the idea when he suddenly bolts for the men’s room. Wilde follows him, then returns abruptly a moment later to enter a phone booth and call for an ambulance and squad car. Hassleblad has been poisoned. Who could have done it, and how? The restaurant isn’t far from Merlini’s home, and Wilde says he has “a hunch that a magician may come in handy.” It goes without saying that he does, and ultimately solves “The World’s Smallest Locked Room.”

I said at the outset that I’m extremely fond of impossible crime stories. Unfortunately, other than the three I’ve read previously in anthologies, I find the stories in this collection to be largely disappointing. Several of the shorter ones are reminiscent of the old Minute- and Five-Minute Mysteries—i.e., intellectual exercises of a supremely mechanical nature that have little or no interest in engaging the reader via other elements of storytelling. Clayton Rawson was a friend of impossible crime master John Dickson Carr, who has often been criticized for superficial characterizations. Compared with Rawson, he’s Dostoyevsky. Rawson’s style is plain and straightforward, but lacks the color, vigor, and atmosphere that, to my mind, tales of “miracle” crimes deserve.

As mentioned earlier, I read the Kindle edition. Although it wants some better editing, its typos and punctuation errors are relatively few. Its most glaring error, however, is the illustration of a three-toed footprint that belongs in “Nothing is Impossible” but appears in “Merlini and the Photographic Clues.”

All things considered, I can only recommend The Great Merlini to mystery fans for whom puzzle is pre-eminent, who are not especially interested in character and atmosphere, and who are completists with regard to specific authors or types of stories. Other readers need to look elsewhere.

© Barry Ergang 2013

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s own impossible crime novelette, “The Play of Light and Shadow,” is available at Amazon and Smashwords.

Spring forward several chapters and a few years later to the story’s present, the mid-1930s. Actor and playwright Nigel Manson has a hit on his hands with the play he’s written and co-stars in with Nathalie Marvel, a comedy titled The Invisible Man, inspired by his past visit to Stapleford and, in particular, by a visit to Trerice Manor where he heard the story of the village’s invisible killer. Nigel surprises his wife Helen with the news that he has purchased and renovated Trerice Manor, and that they will be spending a couple of weeks there. Joining them the first weekend, he tells her, are Nathalie Marvel and Frank Holloway, the man who promoted Nathalie to stardom.

When the invisible murderer strikes yet again, claiming another victim in front of several witnesses, chief constable Superintendent Weston requests help from an old friend, the head of  Scotland Yard, who in turn assigns Inspector Archibald Hurst to investigate the crime. “He had a knack—all his colleagues were unanimous on this point—for being stuck with all the most complex cases.” Hurst calls upon his friend Dr. Alan Twist, criminologist, who “often lent a hand in the investigations,” to accompany him to Stapleford.

The solutions to a couple of the murders struck me as a bit of a stretch, although they weren’t entirely implausible.

Thanks to John Pugmire’s translations, I’ve now read four of Paul Halter’s exceptional novels—two starring Alan Twist, two starring Owen Burns—and a collection of his short stories. I am certain the great John Dickson Carr, were he alive and thus able to read Halter, would not only admire him but also conceivably envy him for his inventiveness in concocting and solving seemingly impossible crimes. Halter’s oeuvre is invariably compared to Carr’s, and this is as it should be because Halter has readily admitted in interviews that impossible crime stories are his favorite kinds of detective stories and that Carr was his inspiration.

But there are significant differences between the two. Carr’s prose was richer—lusher, if you will—undoubtedly a product of the era in which he was raised, and influenced by the stories he read growing up. Halter’s narrative style is much leaner, and he has a fondness for using dialogue as much as possible to advance the story. Although Halter succeeds in creating an eerie or sinister atmosphere when one is called for, he’s no match for Carr, who was probably as good at atmospherics as anyone who has ever written. Carr has sometimes been criticized for weak characterization, but in that aspect he is definitely superior to Halter. The latter’s characters often have traits or interests that are vital to the story, but otherwise they are rendered in the sketchiest manner imaginable. Halter is more  purely concerned with the puzzle elements in his work than any other mystery writer I can think of, and some of the puzzles he devises are very original.

My criticisms of Halter’s weaker qualities are not intended to dissuade readers. I have enjoyed every one of the novels and stories of his I’ve read, and I look forward to reading more of them if Mr. Pugmire continues to translate them. His work is eminently worth the time of any fan of Golden Age-style impossible crime stories, and should in fact be considered essential reading. And with that, The Demon of Dartmoor is strongly recommended.

For much, much more about Paul Halter and his work, see http://at-scene-of-crime.blogspot.com/p/paul-halter.html and http://www.mysteryfile.com/Halter/Locked_Rooms.html

The village is named after its oldest family, the Wilders, whose history is pocked with inexplicable, seemingly impossible disappearances starting with Jonathan’s in 1775 and extending forward to the novel’s mid-20th Century present. The vanishings have given rise to a chant known to everyone in Wilders Lane and surrounding areas:

“Other people die of mumps
Or general decay,
Of fevers, chills, or other ills,
But Wilders walk away.”

In search of lodging, Frame goes to the restored home of the lovely Constance Wilder, her sister Ellen, and their Aunt Mary. As he arrives, Ellen emerges from the house carrying a suitcase. She’s been invited to visit another aunt. Frame gallantly lugs the heavy suitcase to the bus stop for her, then returns to the house where he strikes an agreement with Constance to rent a room for a week.

Later that night, there are suspicions that Ellen has “walked away.” Her mysterious vanishment is of brief duration, however, because Reynold Frame finds her murdered body in a freshly dug grave. This in turn leads to the discovery of Constance and Ellen’s father’s body, also clearly the victim of a murderer. A year or so earlier, at his office, Fred Wilder walked into a storeroom under observation from outside–and disappeared.

A day or two later, at the Wilder home, Aunt Mary leaves Frame and Constance at the dining table, goes into the kitchen to fetch dessert, and vanishes.

Smitten with Constance and possessed of the reporter’s inextinguishable curiosity, Frame is inexorably drawn into the investigation. As the situation deepens, he manages to solve the “walkaways” of the past as well as those of the present, and ultimately identifies the present-day murderer.

Although I employed more intuition and guesswork than deduction a la Frame, I found it relatively easy to identify the murderer. In spite of that, I enjoyed the book a great deal thanks to Brean’s unerring pace and construction.

Brean was undoubtedly influenced by John Dickson Carr, as his sense of history and penchant for the “impossible situation” attest. His writing style is much leaner and his atmospheric effects more understated than JDC’s, but he can be quite engrossing nonetheless. For a little while I thought I’d found in Wilders Walk Away a companion to The Three Coffins and Rim of the Pit for ultimate greatness. That degree of feeling didn’t sustain itself, but I can still recommend Wilders enthusiastically. It’s even better than Brean’s The Traces of Brillhart.

Brean’s work is long out of print, so those who are curious will have to try Amazon.com, e-Bay, Half.com, and ABE.books as I did. The search will reward readers with a very clever and entertaining mystery novel.

© 2003 Barry Ergang

Barry Ergang’s impossible crime mystery novelette, “The Play of Light and Shadow,” is available at Smashwords and Amazon.

It’s only June, but Vinnie the bartender shows Balzic that he’s got locally grown tomatoes, and that they were given to him by one Jimmy Romanelli who, as it turns out, is married to a woman Balzic knew when they were kids. Balzic was in his teens and Mary Frances Fiori was a child. Their fathers were both coal miners who often got together to discuss union and other business. Fiori was a widower, so Mario Balzic kept an eye on his young daughter while he and the elder Balzic talked. After his father died, Mario lost contact with Fiori, and is astonished to learn from Vinnie that the man is still alive: “…And he’s a bull. Still works his garden every day, still walks five, six miles every day, cuts his own firewood, cooks, cleans house, takes care of himself.”

Balzic recognizes Jimmy Romanelli’s name, remembering that a State Bureau of Drug Enforcement investigator once mentioned him as a person of interest. Vinnie doesn’t believe it, telling Balzic that Romanelli’s the kind of guy who always has to be right, who’s a good guy when things are going his way, but who blames everyone but himself if things take a turn for the worse. And that they have because when the local mine shut down, he and many others were suddenly out of work. Others found jobs of different sorts or moved to other mining regions of the country. Romanelli did nothing but collect unemployment checks, and now those have run out.

Balzic’s conversation with Vinnie is interrupted several times by phone calls from Mary Frances Romanelli. She’s hysterical because Jimmy hasn’t been home in more than twenty-four hours. Vinnie forces an unwilling Balzic to talk to her, but his own efforts to calm her are as ineffectual as Vinnie’s were. When he finally returns to City Hall, he learns that she has been calling there repeatedly and berating whoever answers for not finding her missing husband. Balzic decides it’s time to pay her a visit and talk to her in person.

I can’t really say anything more about the story without giving everything away because the basic storyline is pretty thin. Despite being billed as “A Mario Balzic Detective Novel,” this is not at all a conventional detective story. In fact, most experienced mystery readers will figure out what happened and who is responsible long before Balzic does. The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes is more than anything a novel of character, the author delineating and differentiating his cast of blue collar Americans through a heavy use of dialogue.

Balzic, through whose third-person point-of-view events are filtered, is a generally likeable character—intelligent, intuitive, tough, stubborn, humorous, sensitive, and at times irascible. If I have one complaint about him, it’s that a couple of times he uses the N-word. This is the fifth book in the series, but the first I’ve ever read, so I can’t determine whether he’s actually a racist, whether epithets of this sort are just part of the culture of Rocksburg, or if he’s trying to persuade certain interlocutors that he’s “one of them.”

As I said earlier, the story itself is not a complex, convoluted one, and for some readers will prove to be thoroughly predictable. Despite that, and because of strong characterizations achieved primarily through a masterly use of dialogue, The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes should appeal to the men and women who like fast compelling reads.

© 2011 Barry Ergang

A Derringer Award-winner, Barry Ergang’s fiction, poetry and non-fiction has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of his work is available at Smashwords and Amazon. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.

The year is 1936, and Raymond Chandler and his wife Cissy are living in the Los Angeles area. Chandler continues to learn and hone his writing craft by turning out stories for Black Mask, the magazine that has also been a home to stories by his friends Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner.

When Chandler answers a phone call from a homicide lieutenant requesting that Cissy come to the morgue to identify a body, he asks who the dead man is and learns it’s Julian Pascal, Cissy’s former husband. His body was found in a Chinese cemetery, and his death appears to have been a ritual suicide. A stunned Chandler tells the detective that he’ll come to the morgue, that he and Julian were friends. Once he confirms the dead man’s identity, Chandler dreads having to tell Cissy. When he breaks the news to her, she vehemently insists that Julian would never kill himself and urges Chandler to look into the matter to find out what really happened.

A mysterious woman in a white limousine appears at Julian’s funeral, a woman later identified as Carmilla Blastok, a now-retired actress whose claim to fame is a series of films that began with The Blood Countess, in which she portrayed a vampire, “a kind of female Lugosi,” as Hammett describes her. She retired after David DuPlaine, the director of all her hit films, was shot to death, ostensibly by a burglar he caught in the act of robbing his house. When Chandler meets with her, he learns she barely knew Julian Pascal, though the latter composed the scores for a couple of her films. She attended his funeral, she tells him, because she hoped to see her much younger sister Elina there. She suspects that Elina once had an inappropriate relationship with Julian.

Elina, who had had a brief acting career herself, has been estranged from Carmilla for three years, having taken up with an abusive former stage actor named Merv Enright. Carmilla begs Chandler to find her sister, just so she can know if the girl is alive and well. When he reminds her that he’s a writer, not a detective, she offers to pay him a thousand dollars, money he can sorely use. Thinking that Elina might be able to enlighten him about Julian and thereby enable him to definitively resolve the question of Julian’s death, he accepts.

And so, enlisting when necessary the assistance of his friends Hammett and Gardner, Chandler’s adventure at “playing detective” begins, plunging him into some situations more appropriate to his fictional sleuths than to a middle-aged former oil company executive turned pulp writer. One of those situations is reminiscent of a similar one in his novel Farewell, My Lovely, as William F. Nolan no doubt playfully intended readers to believe Chandler used his “real life” experience as the basis for Philip Marlowe’s fictional one several years later.

As entertaining a whodunit as The Marble Orchard is, the detective-story portion feels like one of novelette length, the rest a lot of filler. Thus the reader is given scenes involving real-life personalities including William Randolph Hearst, Orson Welles, and Shirley Temple, among others–scenes that do nothing to advance the plot but which serve to fix the story in a particular place and era. The reader is given historical information about a number of locales within the greater Los Angeles area. And there is a secondary story thread involving an African-American man and woman that is clearly meant to depict the racial attitudes of the period but which is wholly irrelevant to the principal plotline. Fortunately, Nolan is a skillful writer with a smart sense of pace, so the filler is equally entertaining and doesn’t disrupt the flow.

Since I first discovered him when I was in my early teens, Raymond Chandler has always been one of my literary heroes. (The Long Goodbye is my all-time-favorite novel.) So enamored of his style was I that, back then, when writing a story, I’d often ask myself, “How would Chandler handle this scene, or this section of narrative, or this exchange of dialogue?” Ultimately I realized that developing my own style and voice, for better or worse, was preferable to imitating another’s. Playing Robert Louis Stevenson’s “sedulous ape” will only get you so far; eventually you have to (and should want to) come into your own. To truly write like someone else requires one to be someone else.

Chandler has had plenty of imitators. I personally think his style was among the most influential of the 20th Century and might very well still be one. Whether they intended to imitate him some of those writers might dispute, but the influence is indisputably there. Three who carried it off well were Howard Browne writing as John Evans (incidentally the name of one of Chandler’s pre-Marlowe pulp-magazine detectives) in his Paul Pine mysteries; Roy Huggins in The Double Take; and Keith Laumer in his purposed homage, Deadfall.

As a former editor of a couple of mystery magazines, one of my biggest pet peeves was the story submission that deliberately tried to imitate Chandler’s–or anyone else’s–distinctive style. Unless the author was writing an obvious spoof or one-time tribute, he or she was virtually guaranteed a rejection. I wanted to publish stories in the authors’ own unique styles.

To his credit–and he touches on the matter in an afterword–Nolan, save for maybe three similes, does not write like Chandler writing a Philip Marlowe novel. That’s because Nolan is not writing a Marlowe novel; he’s writing what is intended as a report from Raymond Chandler about events in which he personally played a role.

All things considered, then, The Marble Orchard is a good, if unexceptional, detective story embedded in a lot of entertaining and informative filler, and populated with a variety of colorful characters.

*****

Postscript: In real life, Chandler and Hammett met exactly once, at a dinner for Black Mask writers. In his biography of Chandler, Tom Hiney writes that Gardner and Chandler were friends, but outside of some correspondence they exchanged, I’ve never read anything that indicates they actually spent time in each other’s presence.

© 2012 Barry Ergang

A Derringer Award-winner, Barry Ergang’s fiction, poetry and non-fiction has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of his work is available at Smashwords and Amazon. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.

The job gives Harvey a lot of time to read, and his favorite genre is the detective story–specifically, the hardboiled private eye story. He’s also fond of catching reruns of old private eye series on the TV Land channel. Among his favorite detectives, literary and televised, are Travis McGee, Shell Scott, Elvis Cole, Spenser, Joe Mannix, Magnum, and Dan Tana from “Vega$.” His fantasy is to be a private eye and have a life as fraught with excitement as theirs are.

Fantasy becomes reality when Bel Vista resident Cyril Parkus hires Harvey to trail his beautiful wife Lauren and report to him about her activities. It doesn’t take long to discover that Lauren is being blackmailed, though Harvey doesn’t know the blackmailer’s name or what he has on her. His pursuit of the man earns Harvey a severe beating, but it doesn’t dissuade him from eventually learning the man’s identity. When he reports what he’s discovered to Cyril Parkus, Parkus says he’ll take it from here. This doesn’t sit well with Harvey because, to his way of thinking, the case has just gotten under way, and his literary and television idols wouldn’t quit at this point in a case. Thus, thinking he can help both his erstwhile client and his wife, he once again trails Lauren. When she drives to a freeway overpass, gets out of her car, climbs onto the railing, looks directly back at Harvey, and then dives into the traffic below, Harvey can only stare back in shock and horror.

Beset with guilt, despite realizing with the rational part of his mind that he’s done nothing to feel guilty about, and again because his fictional heroes wouldn’t leave a case unresolved, Harvey is determined to uncover the secret that drove Lauren to her death and, if he can, bring her blackmailer to justice. His quest takes him to Seattle and other areas of Washington state, where he encounters murder, a variety of quirky characters, and some stunning revelations.

I’ve read and enjoyed a number of the novels Lee Goldberg has written based on the TV series “Monk,” so I know he’s adept at writing humor. There is a good deal of that in Harvey Mapes’s first-person narrative, one full of self-deprecating remarks and wry perspective on his particular world. What I initially thought I was getting in Watch Me Die was a fluffy screwball comedy about a private eye wannabe who’d blunder his way through a “case” populated by idiosyncratic characters and wacky events. What I got was far different: a love story (yes, it is that, too) that becomes very dark, violent, and sometimes flat-out nasty; that is as much about Harvey’s maturation and insights into himself and others as it is about solving a mystery. Goldberg skillfully manages the delicate transition from levity to gravity as Harvey probes–and sometimes occasions–events.

This well-paced page-turner is not a cozy, so readers who dislike raw language, sexual situations, and onstage violence will want to avoid it. Those who can handle those elements will be rewarded with a story that amuses, surprises, and lingers in the mind long after it ends.

It’s available in both trade paperback and Kindle editions.

© 2012 Barry Ergang

A Derringer Award-winner, Barry Ergang’s fiction, poetry and non-fiction has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of his work is available at Smashwords and Amazon. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.

Nora’s pursuit of the truth pits her against certain townspeople she thought were her friends; introduces her to strangers who become unlikely allies (readers won’t soon forget Dugger); exposes her subtle conflicts with family members and a not-so-subtle one with her mother-in-law; puts her and others in mortal danger and, literally and symbolically, pits her against the treacherous snow that blankets the region, both concealing and revealing frigid current and decades-old brutal realities and concomitant attitudes.

The trepidations and mysteries in this suspenseful gem will have readers turning pages late into the night to find out what happens next, not least because many a chapter closes with a cliffhanger. Jenny Milchman has crafted an excellent debut novel studded with turns of phrase that add vividity without distracting from the headlong narrative thrust.

The novel is not without what some readers will perceive as flaws. There are unanswered questions about key events, some loose ends are left dangling, and the fates of some of the characters, major and minor, go unexplained. These didn’t bother me personally; not every issue in life has a definitive resolution, and not every question gets answered. I can highly recommend Cover of Snow to fans of high-tension suspense fiction, and in fact recommended it to a number of friends even before I’d finished reading it. I’m looking forward to Jenny Milchman’s next novel.

© 2014 Barry Ergang

Some of Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s work can be found at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.

Because of his stature and enduring popularity, Wolfe inevitably became the subject of parodies, pastiches, and homages. After Rex Stout died, Robert Goldsborough received permission to continue the series and wrote seven new novels. Lawrence Block paid tribute to Stout in some of his Chip Harrison novels and short stories. What I didn’t know until just recently, after I had a look at The Wolfe Pack website, is how many others have written Wolfe-like stories and novels.

The most recent member of this club is Dave Zeltserman, whose 21^st Century high-tech approach to Wolfean detection began with the novelette “Julius Katz,” which was published in the September/October 2009 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and subsequently won the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and the Derringer Award for best novelette from the Short Mystery Fiction Society. He followed that with the short story “Archie’s Been Framed” in the September/October 2010 issue of EQMM. The story later took first place in the Ellery Queen’s Readers Choice Awards. And now Zeltserman has brought out the first full-length Julius Katz novel, the e-book Julius Katz and Archie.

Apart from each having the first name of a Roman emperor and an animalistic surname, apart from the fact that both are inherently lazy and only inclined to work when they need money to support lifestyles that include expensive passions, Nero Wolfe and Julius Katz have any number of other similarities. But they also have many striking differences. I considered enumerating both here, then rejected the idea on the grounds that readers familiar with Wolfe should have the pleasure of making the discoveries on their own. (I‘ll even refrain from giving in to the urge to shout “O pioneer, Zeltserman!” with regard to the naming of a particular character and leave readers of this review to figure out to whom and what I refer.) There is, however, one similarity it’s imperative to mention.

Archie.

Nero Wolfe’s cases are narrated by his general factotum, the redoubtable Archie Goodwin, and Julius Katz has Archie Smith. Archie Goodwin is a licensed private detective in his own right, operates as Wolfe’s principal legman, and handles secretarial and accounting chores. Archie Smith is…well, that is, he’s…–Oh, hell! Archie Smith is as unique a narrator as any you’ll find in all of detective fiction, and possibly any other kind of fiction, and that’s all I’ll say on the matter lest I spoil the surprise.

Julius Katz and Archie opens with mystery writer Kenneth J. Kingston trying to hire Julius for ten thousand dollars “for no more than four hours work.” A former bestseller whose sales have been declining over his last several releases, he has a list of six people who, he claims, want to kill him. He also has a new book coming out, which he explains is being treated with extreme secrecy until it‘s actually released. When Julius accuses Kingston of wanting to engage him strictly for the sake of publicity, Kingston replies: “Bingo! That’s why you’re the world-class genius detective. So all I want from you is to spend an hour, two hours at the most, interrogating them as a group. Make it look real. They’ll all think it is. I’ll have a TV crew present. Then in two weeks, after the buzz and media attention has been building, bring everyone back for another round of questioning. This time when you’re done, act as if you’re stumped, and I’ll jump in and name the guilty party. It will be a brilliant piece of publicity that will get the public hot for my book.”

Julius initially turns down Kingston’s offer, which the writer then raises to twenty-five-thousand dollars. When Kingston subsequently shows up on his doorstep with a bottle of a ’78 Montrachet and the reluctant willingness to pay him the money, too, Julius the wine connoisseur can’t refuse.

Thus, the following afternoon, the six people on Kingston’s list are invited to, and show up at, the office in Julius’s Boston townhouse. They are Kingston’s wife, his agent, his editor, his former writing partner, a book critic, and a private detective on whom Kingston’s fictional hero is based. Kingston is supposed to arrive half an hour after the others do, but he doesn’t. It’s subsequently discovered that he was shot to death in his home hours earlier.

Despite Archie’s prodding and pestering, Julius wants no part of the murder investigation. But after a poker game where he outmaneuvers a card cheat hired by shadowy arch-enemy Desmond Grushnier, and then tangles with the cheat and a couple of other thugs, someone takes several shots at him outside his townhouse. Angry, and certain that the shooter is one of the six people Kingston suspected, Julius promises an irate homicide detective that he will expose the murderer by midnight. Experienced mystery readers will probably have no difficulty in identifying the culprit, but that doesn’t matter because the fun is in the ride.

I have but a minor nit to pick with Julius Katz and Archie, and that is Archie’s tendency to harp repetitively and at length on certain aspects of Julius’s behavior. Fortunately, Dave Zeltserman’s easy, breezy prose style compensates so it doesn’t become too tedious. Otherwise, this is a nicely-paced, fairly-clued whodunit from a skilled writer best known to date for some very hardboiled and noir novels and short stories who is clearly having fun with, and versatile enough to pull off, the formal detective story.

At the beginning of this review I suggested that readers unfamiliar with Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels should read some to appreciate what Zeltserman has done with his own creation. I stand by that, but I hasten to assure readers that they needn’t know the Wolfe corpus to enjoy the Julius Katz stories. Julius Katz and Archie can stand on its own as an entertaining and very contemporary detective novel.

© 2011 Barry Ergang

A Derringer Award-winner, Barry Ergang’s fiction, poetry and non-fiction has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of his work is available at Smashwords and Amazon. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.