Friday's "Forgotten" Books: The Ethnic Detectives

The Ethnic Detectives, edited by Martin Greenberg and Bill Pronzini (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1985) is an anthology of seventeen stories whose sleuths are members of minority groups and whose cultural experiences often play a primary role in a crime or in crime-solving. Obviously, the editors had to determine how exactly to define "ethnic" for inclusion in this book. In the introduction, they say that such a distinction isn't all that simple and point out how in one sense, even Edgar Allan Poe's C. August Dupin qualifies. The principal definition is that the sleuth is a member of a minority group within a dominant culture, and whose mannerisms, world view, and approach reflect upon his or her background.

The reasons for writing such a character are many and varied, but as Greenberg and Pronzini point out, "These are particularly interesting characters because their adventures frequently concern problems of identity, of the search for one's roots, and of reconciling different heritages — problems that are the stuff of emotion and high drama." And, as the editors ultimately conclude, "Vive le roman policier! Vive la difference!"

This particular group of stories were chosen to represent different ethnic groups, without duplication. Thus, we have one each of the Chinese detective (Judge Dee by Robert van Gulik); one of a couple of different Native American tribal detectives (David Return by Manly Wade Wellman and also Tony Hillerman, mentioned below); the Czechoslovakian detective (Dr. Jan Czissar by Eric Ambler); the Filipino detective (Jo Gar by Raoul Whitfield) and so forth. Most of these authors will be new to the majority of crime fiction readers, with only a handful well-known, such as Georges Simenon (Inspector Maigret), Tony Hillerman (Jim Chee), and Marcia Muller (Elena Oliverez).

Reading the book is something akin to eating at an international food fair, with little tastings that may satisfy, but leave you wanting more. The most effective stories are those from the authors who have lived the longest with their characters, primarily Hillerman and his Navajo Corporal, Jim Chee, and for the most intense banquet of all, a novella-length story from Ed McBain featuring the various multi-cultural detectives of his 87th Precinct series the author featured in dozens of novels and stories.

The Ethnic Detectives is a fascinating look at the various ways writers slip into worlds not their own and try to create fiction that conveys the spirit of people who live there. Like most such efforts, some of these attempts are successful, others a little less so. But it's an easy way to travel around the world vicariously and be pleasantly entertained at the same time.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Death on Remand

John Michael Evelyn (1916-1992) was born in Britain and privately educated before going to Oxford University. He was called to the Bar in 1939, but immediately joined the Army where he served during WWII until 1946, attaining the rank of Major. From there, he did go on to a career in law with the Department of Public Prosecutions, serving for some thirty years.

Adopting the pseudonym of Michael Underwood, he published his first mystery novel, Murder on Trial in 1954, which introduced one of his main protagonists, Inspector Simon Manton. The Inspector was featured in a dozen novels that stretched into the 1960s and included Lawful Pursuit, The Case Against Phillip Quest and The Crime of Colin Wise.

Underwood also supported his fellow crime authors as chairman of the Crime Writers Association in 1964-65 and was elected a member of the Detection Club in 1959. This was during the presidency of Dame Agatha Christie, who had agreed to take the position as a successor to Dorothy L. Sayers, but only on the condition she didn't have to speak at public meetings. Michael Underwood essentially served in her stead for that purpose during Christie's tenure.

Underwood frequently drew on his legal expertise in his plots, as you might imagine, although as in the case of novels like Death on Remand, the courtroom scenes are kept to a minimum and more in a Perry Mason style—with the investigation happening during the bulk of the book until the suspect is apprehended, followed by the final courtroom finale, sometimes with a twist.

Death on Remand starts off with the attempted car bombing of a small-time crook, Julian Prentice, who has just been released from prison for a car theft. The investigation falls upon the desk of Detective-Inspector Playford of the Wenley Borough Police C.I.D., who is as perplexed as other people in the community that Prentice had been defended by the father of the young woman whose car was stolen, the man known as "The Shady Solicitor," Augustus Jason. When the chief suspect in the bombing, Prentice's former boss, also meets with violence and Prentice himself disappears from the hospital, Playford is more than happy to let Scotland Yard step in, led by the efforts of Detective Superintendent Manton. Manton faces seemingly fool-proof alibis for everyone connected to the victims as well as general antagonism from the locals, but in his own quietly plodding, tenacious way, he manages to uncover the truth.

The central gist of the plot probably had more of an impact back in 1956 than it does now. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that cultural mores and accepted standards have changed quite a bit in 54 years, although the basic human vices of lust, pride and greed probably haven't changed much in millennia. Criminal investigation methods have changed a bit since 1956, but in the book as is the case today, it's good old-fashioned legwork and evidence collection that saves the day As Inspector Manton observes after the suspect has been arrested, "Tactics play as important a part in forensic contests and their menoeuvres as in military battles."

Like most third-person omniscient narratives that hop back and forth between characters, it's a little difficult to develop characters fully. In this particular case, there really aren't any truly sympathetic characters to root for other than the detectives, but as legal/police procedurals go, Death on Remand is a fairly quick read and a pleasant enough way to spend a hour or two.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: The Saint in Europe

Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin (1907-1993), better known as Leslie Charteris, was born in Singapore and half-Chinese, half-English, which would later come to haunt him when he was excluded from permanent residency in the U.S. due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law prohibiting immigration for anyone with "50 percent or greater" Oriental blood. Eventually, after his success in literature and in Hollywood, an act of Congress personally granted him and his daughter the right of permanent residence in the United States.

It's probably safe to say that Charteris is one of the more colorful crime fiction authors in the genre. Before his literary success, he worked variously on a freighter, as a bartender, prospecting for gold, fishing for pearls, working in a tin mine and on a rubber plantation, touring England with a carnival, and driving a bus. He also rode on the Hindenburg on its successful maiden voyage.

His success lies almost entirely upon his famous literary creation, Simon Templar, known as "The Saint," featured in over 50 novels, novellas and short-story collections, as well as several TV and movie incarnations, and a long-running comic strip.

As to the genesis for the character, Charteris once said,

"Who knows where an idea comes from? The Saint was just originally a character who came to life in my head not so long after I started writing, but he was not the first character I thought of. He was, as a matter of fact, the fifth...I looked back over the characters I had created so far and picked the Saint, liked him the best, and decided to go on with him."

The books and stories never disclose Simon Templar's origins, other than the the possibility he started his career as a criminal. He was suave, mysterious, a daredevil, a gentleman thief or, as often called, a "modern day Robin Hood." In the earlier novels he was more violent than in later outings, such as the various short stories.

The Saint in Europe collection was first published in 1953, the 29th book to feature the character, and it marked not only a resumption of the book series after a five-year hiatus, but the 25th anniversary of the the Templar series. All seven stories in the collection were used as plots for episodes of the 1962-69 TV series, The Saint, starring Roger Moore (later James Bond).

The theme that ties all these stories together, if you can call it that, is the Saint traveling to different parts of Europe where he has runs into trouble of one kind or another. Or as Templar says, he "seldom went anywhere with the intention of getting into trouble. But trouble had that disastrous propensity for getting into him."

The first story is set in Paris and titled "The Covetous Headsman," in which the body of a young, honest, hardworking Parisian shipping clerk is found murdered and decapitated. Templar steps in to help when a web of money and betrayal dating back to the resistance during WWII threatens to make the naive sister of the victim the murderer's next target.

"The Rhine Maiden" is probably the best of the lot, hearkening back to the Templar of the earlier novels, where he was "judge and executioner." Templar gets drawn into the plight of a pitiable man and his daughter traveling with him on a train who have been swindled by the man's boss, also a passenger on the same train. The man, his daughter, and the boss remind Templar that

"the Saint has been something of a crook sometimes, even if that didn't hurt anybody but specimens like you. And since I reformed I've become rather sophisticated. Maybe it's a pity. Once loses sight of some simple elementary things that were very good."

The stories have some of the same flair as in the novels, with Templar's wit and imperturbability shining through. They're a good introduction to the character and Charteris style, and a pleasant enough way to while away an hour or so (it's a fairly short book). Meanwhile, fans of The Saint depictions on the small screen can rejoice with the news announced late last year that Paramount has plans to reboot the series with Rege-Jean Page starring in the title role.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: The Spoilt Kill

Mary Theresa Coolican Kelly (1927-2017) was born in London but ended up a Scotland gal. She received an M.A. degree from University of Edinburgh in 1951, married Dennis Charles Kelly in 1950, and became a teacher. Her first mystery series featured Inspector Brett Nightingale of Scotland, starting with A Cold Coming in 1956. But after only three entries in that series, she switched to a series with freelance detective, Hedley Nicholson, as protagonist, with the first installment, The Spoilt Kill, earning the Gold Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers Association in 1961. She was also a member of the Detection Club and served as secretary..

Apparently, starting on a new literary track worked well for her, because after only two books in the Hedley Nicholson series, she switched to standalone novels, the first three (beginning with March to the Gallows) all nominated for the Gold Dagger in 1964, 1966 and 1969. She also tried her hand at a short story in 1971, "Judgment," chosen for inclusion in 1984's anthology The Best Crime Stories published by Hamlyn, putting in her the same company as Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Unfortunately, in 1974 she stopped writing for good.

In The Spoilt Kill, P.I. Nicholson is hired to discover who is copying new pottery designs from the Shentall Pottery Company of Stoke-on-Trent and selling them to foreign competitors. It seems fairly straightforward until a body is found in a closed "kill" (local dialect for "kiln") filled with liquid clay. Nicholson soon finds himself falling for the chief suspect in both crimes, talented designer Corina Wakefield, the only employee not native to the area—who also has a drinking problem and a failed marriage that turns out to be relevant to the case..

Kelly structures the plot to start off with the discovery of the body in the first section ("What Happened"), just one chapter, in essence a prologue, then doubles back to a prequel of events ("What Happened Before") in the middle section, before returning to the denouement in part three's "What Happened After." The author does a nice job of immersing the reader into the atmospheric setting of the industrial area in the Midlands and of the pottery world, with passages such as the following:

"...A row of bottle kilns blocking the gap between blackened brick buildings, and beyond them a factory chimney and the peak of a slag heap, wraiths even in the middle distance. There was no far distance, only a grey blankness of cleaned smoke mixed with the drizzle that seeped from low-lying clouds."

Kelly had a foot in the very end of the Golden Age of detective fiction, and was a somewhat rare example of a female British writer penning a professional male private eye at the time. As such, Spoilt Kill has the feel of a hybrid cozy/traditional mystery blended with the P.I. form. Some may quibble that Kelly doesn't quite nail the male first-person POV all the time, and the ending a tad telescoped, but the characters are well drawn and engaging, and the true mystery Kelly portrays is the psychological puzzle underlying human relationships.

Friday's "Forgotten Books: Death of an Old Girl

Elizabeth Wharton Lemarchand (1906-2000) was born in Barnstaple, England, and spent most of her life as a headmistress. When she was forced to retire early due to an illness, she turned her hand to short stories, with some success. By this time, she was in her 60s, but long a fan of the Golden Age authors of detective fiction, she decided to give novels a try herself, creating the investigative team of  Superintendent Tom Pollard  and Sergeant Gregory Toye.

The author once remarked that "I employ only settings of which I have some personal knowledge," which is why it was a no-brainer for her first novel in 1967, Death of an Old Girl, to be set at a boarding school for girls. She may have taken some inspiration, too, from one her Golden Age idols, Agatha Christie, who had penned her own boarding-school mystery, Cat Among the Pigeons, a few years earlier in 1959.

In this inaugural Pollard and Toye story, the detective pair are called in to investigate when an "old girl" (alumna) of the Meldon School for Girls is found murdered in a puppet theater at the end of the annual Old Girls' Reunion weekend. The old girl in question, Beatrice Baynes, had criticized the new administration, the new teaching staff and the new curriculum, but that hardly appears motive for murder. But soon the suspects begin piling up, headed by the victim's lazy nephew George and timid god-daughter Madge who both stand to inherit a tidy sum of money, as well as the school's cast of characters, including the headmistress, art teacher and groundskeeper. As Pollard meticulously pieces together every second of the victim's last moments alive, he begins to learn he's going to have to identify the killer first in order to uncover the motive, with a little help from Pollard's perceptive wife, Jane.

As with most third-person omniscient narratives, Lemarchand's characters aren't fully fleshed out, but it's not surprising there is a great deal of attention to setting; the author once wrote an essay for City and Shore: the Function of Setting in the British Mystery, in which she said

"I wonder why my books are so WHERE dominated...I think the most likely explanation is that I first came to detective fiction in the Golden Age of the 20s and 30s and have ever since been under the spell of the master craftsmen of the period such as Dorothy L Sayers and Freeman Wills Croft. It was their vivid portrayal of the settings in which their impeccable plots unfolded that made the whodunits of this time to absorbing to me. The action was intimately associated with and conditioned by the milieu in which it took place, and this gave it conviction."

Fans of today's faster-paced crime fiction novels may find this book a bit tedious and difficult to wade into, with a heavy emphasis on timetables and a lot of static discussions, but if you stick with it, it's an entertaining nod to the Golden Age complete with the stereotypical small English village, a closed set of characters, rules of fair play and a who-dunnit puzzle. FYI, the BBC Afternoon Plays (1984 - 2002) dramatized Death of an Old Girl, if you ever happen to run across it, although it's probably as hard to find as Lemarchand's book are these days, mostly out of print.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Death of a Busybody

In her 67 years, California author Elizabeth Linington (1921-1988) wrote some 82 crime fiction novels, published between 1955 and 1990, under her own name as well as the pen names Anne Blaisdell, Lesley Egan, Egan O'Neill, and Dell Shannon. She started out writing radio and stage dramas in the 1940s, switched to historical novels and finally to mysteries in 1960, winning three Edgar Award nominations almost back to back, in 1960, 1962, and 1963.

Perhaps it was due to her own family's 19th-century Irish immigrant background that many of her protagonists had strong ethnic identities, including an Italian rose-fancier, Glendale police Detective Vic Varallo; New England Sergeant Andrew Clock of the LADP and his sidekick, the Jewish lawyer and amateur detective Jesse Falkenstein, who quotes the Talmud; and Sergeant Ivor Maddox, a Welsh bachelor assigned to Hollywood's Wilcox Avenue station.

Her most successful creation was written under her Dell Shannon name, the dapper Mexican-American LAPD Lieutenant Luis Mendoza, who first appeared in Case Pending, as well as one of her other Edgar-nominated works, Knave of Hearts. Sometimes called the "Queen of the Procedurals," Lininger/Shannon among the first women to write in the police procedural genre, as well as one of the first to feature a Latino police officer.

Some critics have pointed out that Linington/Shannon's earliest works were her best, with more attention to detail and craft, but as she started cranking out as many as four books a year, the quality began to suffer, throwing in more cliches and pot-boiler touches. George N. Dove, author of such nonfiction books as The Reader and the Detective Story, pointed out that Linington/Shannon eventually settled down into a formula characterized by a remarkable number of storylines representing the number of cases on which her police officers like Mendoaza are employed (as many as 24 in Spring of Violence), with one main case surrounded by the other unrelated ones in various stages of investigation.

Mendoza is a single detective, just shy of middle age, when he makes his first appearance in Case Pending, but his character is developed throughout the thirty-eight books published over twenty-seven years. He has an inexplicable attraction to women, since he's not unusually handsome, and often finds their attention to be a personal and professional nuisance. He grew up poor and became a gambler to survive before he ultimately joined the police and was surprised by inherited wealth from his miser grandfather. He has a fondness for racy cars, high-stakes poker, and his Abyssinian cat, Bast, eventually settling down to marry Alison Weir in the early novels (Shannon wasn't shy about killing off characters, so suffice it to say, the cast of characters surrounding him tends to change).

In Death of a Busybody (first published in 1963, but reissued as a Mystery Guild selection by Doubleday in 1988), Margaret Chadwick is the snoop in question, a serious flaw for someone who had money and a pedigree. When she turns up dead, no one seems to care, something Mendoza begins to understand more clearly as he realizes the extent of the damage this one women did—pitting husbands against wives, children against parents, and sewing seeds of jealousy, suspicion and hatred like other people sew tulips and daffodils. But when a second body turns up, killed on the same night in the same way, things get a little murkier. Unlike her later "formulaic" novels, Busybody focuses on one case only, and even has Mendoza pull the main players together at the end for the "reveal," deciding he "wants to handle it the way they do in the detective novels."

Shannon may have been called the "Queen of the Proceedurals" and compared to masters such as Ed McBain and John Creasey, but by her own admission, she based her knowledge of police routine and law not on direct experience but on the basic texts used by police departments themselves and took plots from detective magazines. By today's standards, that makes for a more genteel investigation, but she manages some interesting character development and snappy dialogue. It's interesting to see her multi-layered handling of racial, gender and sexual prejudices and roles, themes that are just as prevalent and volatile today as they were back when she was writing this, some sixty years ago in 1962-63.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: The Habit of Fear

Dorothy Salisbury Davis (1916-2014) was born in Chicago and raised as a Roman Catholic but left the church when she married her husband, actor Harry Davis. Now considered one of the Grand Dames of crime fiction, she didn't start out as a writer, working first in advertising and as a librarian, publishing her first novel in 1949 with the encouragement of her husband. Her 20 novels and numerous short stories went on to receive seven Edgar Award nominations, and her novel Broken Vows was also made into a 1987 TV movie starring Tommy Lee Jones.

She had a clear influence on the crime fiction community, serving as Mystery Writers of America grandmaster in 1985 and on the initial steering committee for the formation of Sisters in Crime (along with Charlotte MacLeod, Kate Mattes, Betty Francis, Sara Paretsky, Nancy Pickard and Susan Dunlap). She was Guest of Honor at Malice Domestic VI, quoting Hilaire Belloc, that "It will not matter if my sins are scarlet, if only my books are read."  
          
By her own account, Davis felt she was an "odd fit" in crime fiction, unhappy with her perceived inability to create a memorable series character and uncomfortable with violence and murder. But she was very happy creating villains, and often commented that villains are much more fun to write about than heroes. Her themes trended more toward psychology than out-and-out detection, and religious tensions are often found in her work, not surprising considering her own background.

That religious undercurrent can be found in The Habit of Fear, the fourth and last in her series featuring Julie Hayes, a former actress and fortuneteller-turned New York City tabloid reporter, but the religious theme is only a small part of the deftly-knit threads of the plot that begin with her husband Jeff telling her he wants a divorce. Angry and hurt, she storms out of their apartment where she's tricked into a nightmare scenario of rape and sodomy by two mysterious men. Although she's reluctant to help the police, preferring to try and put as much emotional distance between her and the events as possible, she's drawn into the case, as well as a search for the Irish father she never knew, a journey that eventually takes her to the land of her beloved Yeats.

But her troubles only follow her, as a strange "Gray Man" seems to be stalking her, there's an appearance by her two attackers who escaped New York on bail, and she finds herself in the middle of tensions involving the Irish Republican Army and a splinter group. Underlying it all is a NYC gangster who watches over Julie as a protective, yet violent, avenging guardian angel. The plot threads ultimately do tie together into a hopeful but bittersweet conclusion.

Salisbury once contributed the chapter "Background and Atmosphere" to the Writer's Digest Mystery Writer's Handbook in 1975, and she is certainly adept with creating atmosphere in The Habit of Fear, first in the seedy side streets, police precincts and courts of New York and then in the bucolic but war-torn landscapes of Dublin, Wicklow, Ballina and Sligo:

Julie climbed the narrow street to where the village came to an abrupt end at a gate to the ruins. The wind gusted fiercely. The river became rapids alongside the ruins and rushed noisily down the hillside. Looking down, she could see boats at anchor, heaving in the heavy waters. Beyond the inlet was the Atlantic, blue and white-capped and dappled with dark patches where the clouds threw their shadows. As she went on, she could see the coast road with an occasional cottage and bits of color where the stacked turf was tucked around with plastic tarps.

Her characterizations are also rich and multi-layered, with no character completely evil or saintly. In an interview with Don Swaim on the CBS Radio studio show "Wired for Books," she talked about this novel and how she created the character of Julie Hayes during a period when the author herself was in therapy. She made Hayes a defender of street people due to Davis's own walking through city areas frequented by prostitutes, where she said she was accepted as "this little old lady with white hair in a raincoat," talking to various people from all walks of life.

Friday's Forgotten Books: The Yellow Turban

Charlotte Jay was the pen name of Australian mystery author Geraldine Halls (1919-1996). Her marriage to Albert Halls of UNESCO enabled her to travel the world to exotic locations like Pakistan, Japan, Thailand, England, Lebanon, India, Papua New Guinea, and the Trobriand Islands, many of which she used in her books. Jay penned nine standalone crime fiction novels (as well as other works under her married name), and although largely forgotten today, she was in fact the very first winner of the Mystery Writers' Association of America's Edgar Award of the for Best Novel of the Year, Beat Not the Bones, in 1954. Another of her books, The Fugitive Eye, was adapted for television in 1961 as an episode starring Charlton Heston of the also largely-forgotten TV series Alcoa Premiere, hosted by Fred Astaire with music by John Williams.

Jay was something of a late bloomer as a writer, working as a shorthand typist in Australia and England and then as a court stenographer in New Guinea, before turning her hand to novels. Her first was published in 1951, when Jay was in her early 30s. She wrote crime novels until around 1970, when she switched to writing romantic suspense and mainstream novels, for reasons which aren't very clear.

Jay uses a first-person male narrative for The Yellow Turban, something not all that common for women authors when the book was written in 1955. The central character is William Brooke, a vagabond Englishman who is lulled by a high fee (only a third of which is paid in advance) to find and retrieve an old friend, Roy Finlay, from Karachi and bring him back to England. Brooke's instructions include cryptic warnings about "secrecy" and "trouble," which Brooke largely ignores as he checks in at a seedy hotel and starts to work.

When Brooke tries to find Finlay, who has disappeared, he begins to realize his missing friend's job wasn't exactly what Brooke had thought, while every step of his investigation is dogged by a sinister man in a yellow turban. Misgivings and confusion turn to outright terror when he climbs into bed one night and finds a blood-drenched corpse. He ends up on the run from the police, who think he's the murderer, and shadowy men who want to kill him for reasons unknown to Brooke, in a journey that takes him to the Kurat mountains and into the heart of Pakistan.

The 1950s Pakistani settings of The Yellow Turban are particularly relevant to current events of our day, and it's fascinating to catch a glimpse of the country's culture that Jay would surely have witnessed first-hand on her own travels. No doubt, some of the villages and cultures have changed little during the intervening half-century. There are hints of the Pakistani people, of various faiths, political views, classes and backgrounds, that Jay manages to convey through her descriptive writing:

On a kong seat covered by red plastic, a thin, dirty young man, wearing baggy white trousers and a buttoned-up gray coat, lay curled up with his eyes closed and his naked toes twiching like a dreaming dog.

Conversation in Pakistan, I was to learn, was frequently only a means of self-expression. The idea of communication between man and man gets lost somehow.

I suppose you can get used to bribing people. Maybe you get an exaggerated idea in your had that money will corupt anyone, and maybe, after you've lived in the East ong enough, it will. Customs are like diseaases, you can breathe them in from the air, soak them through your skin. 

And still the great crowd merged on, a white boiling mass speckled with black dots like grains of dust blown onto a bowl of foam. The flagellants moved on and a group of drummers approached, heralding a tower made from green and crimson tinsel paper. It stopped directly in front of us, the crowd formed a circle around it and a group of ragged little boys danced forward, each with a knife in his hand.

This landscape was disordered, certainly, but without force or intension, like a disordered room when clothes are left lying around. The objects on it appeared to have some prescribed place to stand or go, some sense of prupose and direction, and had just dropped in their tracks out of lassitude of frustration before they took up their positions.

Ultimately, the plot and setting of The Yellow Turban end up merging age-old themes of man's war with himself and others into the insanity mankind has created with 20th (and 21st) century technological evils. The novel's denouement near a crumbling monastery proves to be a fitting symbol for the crumbling worlds of William Brooke, Roy Finlay, and the people of Pakistan in the 1950s.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Dover One

Joyce Porter (1924-1990) started down a literary path with a degree in English at London University before she veered off and served in the Women’s Royal Air Force as an officer (including confidential work in intelligence), from 1949-63 in the UK and Germany. Somewhere along the line, she developed not only an interest in writing novels, but a sharp sense of humor and the absurd that she wove into protagonists featured in all three of her series—whether it's Edmund "Eddie" Brown, a secret agent who's as much a threat to the British intelligence service as he is to the bad guys, or the Honorable Constance Ethel Morrison Burke, a bit of a bungler who possesses a below-average IQ.

But the most popular of her creations is Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover, who quite possibly has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He's described as having a six-two frame draped in "seventeen and a quarter stone (242 pounds) of flabby flesh"; unhygienic (the only man in the Metropolitan Police Service with underarm dandruff); and "with a moustache of the type that the late Adolph Hitler did so much to depopularize." He's also mean, occasionally violent, but mostly lazy, having been promoted through the ranks as much by colleagues who wanted to get rid of him as any particular investigative skills, relying on luck and the work of others to solve cases.

Dover is aided by his aide and polar opposite, the young, well-dressed, kind, sympathetic, charming and intelligent up-and-coming Sergeant Edward MacGregor. The patient MacGregor does most of the work for which Dover gets the credit, one reason he keeps trying to be transferred away from his boss—to no avail, thanks to the Assistant Commissioner who believes in a "baptism of fire and salvation through suffering" for the younger detectives.

The first literary outing for Dover and MacGregor was the appropriately-named Dover One, published in 1964. To get him out of the building, Scotland Yard sends Inspector Dover to investigate the disappearance of a promiscuous young housemaid in the small remote town of Creedshire. Once there, Dover and MacGregor find affairs, illegitimate children, homosexuality, drug abuse and seemingly every one of the Seven Deadly Sins, as well as a cast of over-the-top characters who all have motives to kill the housemaid. The problem is—there's no body and this particular body is a rather large young woman who'd be hard to hide. Did she just run off? or is it a case of kidnapping or suicide? Dover doesn't particularly care, he just wants to find a restaurant in town that has a decent meal. Or take a nap.

In Dover One, as well as all the Dover novels, Porter creates an uncultured and slightly titillating world but tempers it via pitch-black humor. Her supporting characters are often repulsively racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and definitely not politically correct, but this is part of her own satirical dig at elitism and classism in the UK of the 1960s. She also doesn't shy away from other touchy subjects, including castration, cannibalism, and terrorism.

Neither does she skimp on plotting, which lead Anthony Boucher to note in a 1965 New York Times review, that Porter's first two novels (Dover One and Dover Two) were "plotted with the technique of a virtuoso.'' Publishers Weekly added that the author "plants clues in the best British whodunit tradition, simultaneously honoring the genre's conventions even as she sends it up." Best-selling author Martha Grimes (the Richard Jury series) once said that Porter was one of the few series she really liked, with Porter perhaps the only writer who has consciously influenced her.

The BBC adapted one of the Dover novels for an episode of the TV series Detective in 1968, and Paul Mendelson and David Neville adapted five books from the Dover collection by Joyce Porter into radio plays for BBC Radio 4, with Kenneth Cranham as Chief Inspector Dover and Stuart McQuarrie as Sergeant MacGregor. (None of these was based on Dover One, but taken from the other 14 Dover novels and 11 Dover short stories.)

If you're in the mood for serious detective fiction, then Dover won't be your cup of tea, but if you like dark humor and satire, then settle down with "Scotland Yard's least-wanted man," some strong British ale, and maybe some tea biscuits. Lots of tea biscuits.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Death Watch

Author Cynthia Harrod-Eagles is a British writer born in 1948 in the Shepherd's Bush area of London. While studying English, history and philosophy at the University College of London in 1972, she wrote her first novel which won the UK's Young Writers Award. She toiled away in the business world as her day job, but continued writing on the side which finally paid off in 1979 with what has become her best-selling series about the Morland Dynasty. She's written over 60 novels in three different genres since then.

She turned to crime fiction in 1991 with Orchestrated Death, the first in her series featuring Detective Inspector Bill Slider, which has grown into 12 novels thus far, with the 13th due out in 2011. Slider is middle-class, middle-aged and, according to his partner Jim Atherton, menopausal, or as reviewer Bill Ott said, "Slider is a beleaguered Everyman, immersed in the dailiness of life." Atherton, on the other hand, is out of place in the Met because he's a gourmand, fancy dresser and womanizer. The give-and-take between the two men is one of the elements that anchors the series.

On the subject of how she came up with the idea for Slider, the author says

"When I originally embarked on ORCHESTRATED DEATH, the first of the Bill Slider books...I had no thought then of having it published. With no preconceived notions of how to write a detective novel, I started with a corpse; and, in order not to make it too easy, I made it a totally naked corpse in a completely empty flat – a clue-free zone! I didn’t have to invent a detective - Bill Slider walked into my head the first day, complete in every respect. Don’t ask me where he came from: he’s not like anyone I know, at least not consciously; but from the first moment I knew everything about him – how he looked, where he lived, where he’d been to school, what he liked and disliked. So Bill and I started investigating our first case. I had no more idea than he did who the corpse was, let alone who had murdered her or why, so we had to work it out as we went along –  not the recommended method for writing a mystery..."

But Harrod-Eagles was apparently a quick-study, thanks to a lot of research spending time with police detectives, reading police in-house magazines, doing legal and forensic studies, as well as reading newspaper reports of real crimes. The result has been a series worthy enough that she's been likened to John Harvey and Ian Rankin.

The second book in the series, Death Watch from 1992, follows Slider and Atherton when they respond to an arson at the Master Baker Motor Lodge and that led to the death of a loudmouthed lothario salesman, Dick Neal, who leaves behind a bitter wife and a bevy of mistresses. Despite the fact that the victim had ligature marks around his neck and trusses on his genitals, Slider's superiors are hoping it's just a suicide, due to budget constraints—but then Slider uncovers a possible link between the death and what is happening to the members of the "Red Watch" who manned the Shaftesbury Street Fire Station in the 1970's.

As Slider digs deeper into the case, he at first loathes then envies the dead man his adulterous life, finding parallels between the victim and Slider's own extramarital affair with a concert violinist. When Slider notes the victim "Seems to me to have been a a sad, pathetic creature," it's as much an indictment of his own situation as it is Neal's. But lest one get the impression that Harrod-Eagles' books are more in the noir vein, she also peppers her writing with wit, a bevy of puns and intelligent dialogue, as well as effective pacing and clever plot twists.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: The Rising of the Moon

Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell (1901–1983) taught English, Spanish, history and games in various schools in and around London and was a lifelong student herself, interested in poetry, archaeology, medieval architecture, Freud, and witchcraft (thanks to the influence of her friend, author Helen Simpson), and she was also a member of the British Olympic Association. She penned sixty-six detective novels under her own name, published between 1929 and a posthumous book in 1984, all featuring Mrs. Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley. She also wrote another series of detective stories under the pseudonym Malcolm Torrie (with architect Timothy Herring), as well as historical and children's books. 
 
One of the earliest members of the British Detection Club, along with Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, Mitchell is often compared to the other two Grande Dames and included on lists of the brightest lights of the Golden Age of detective fiction. But with 76 books to her credit, critics like to point out that quantity didn't always mean quality in her novels, something the author addressed in an interview published in the Armchair Detective in 1976:  "I know I have written some bad books, but I thought they were all right when I wrote them. I can't bear to look at some of them now...The books I dislike most are Printer's Error and Brazen Tongue—a horrible book." That may be, but her beloved protagonist Mrs. Bradley still stands as one the most unusual and memorable in detective fiction.

The thrice-married Mrs. Bradley is a medical practitioner, psychiatrist, criminologist and consultant to the Home Office. She herself is an author, including A Small Handbook of Psychoanalysis and articles in psychological journals, specializing in the psychology of crime. In the nonfiction book Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, Michele Slung wrote that Mrs. Bradley's "detecting methods combine hoco-pocus and Freud, seasoned with sarcasm and the patience of a predator toying with its intended victim." Mrs. Bradley is variously described by other characters in the books as being "dry without being shrivelled, and bird-like without being pretty," "a hag-like pterodactyl," and "Mrs. Crocodile." She is an accomplished player at bridge, pool, snooker, darts and throwing knives, and a dead shot with an airgun.

Although Mitchell always denied she included much blood and violence in her stories, there's plenty of poisoning to be found (such as deadly nightshade grafted onto to a tomato plant) with horrific side effects, lots of throat-cutting, and one victim was even minced into sausages and hung from hooks. The main premise of 1945's Rising of the Moon, one of Mitchell's personal favorite books, involves a a Ripper-like killer wreaking havoc on the streets of the small village Brentford by mutilating young women and slitting their throats when the moon is full.

Reminiscent of the precocious narrator of Alan Bradley's Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie over sixty years before that book's publication, Rising of the Moon is told through the eyes of 13-year-old Simon Innes, who teams up with his 11-year-old brother Keith, becoming junior Hardy Boys trying to solve the bloody crimes. Their task becomes even more urgent when they spy the potential murder weapon at a local junk shop run by their friend—an eccentric old lady who has a "rag and bone man" as a lodger—then realize the knife may belong to their older brother/guardian and worry he'll be accused of murder.

In that same Armchair Detective interview referenced above, Mitchell remarked Rising of the Moon recalled much of her own Brentford childhood, she being Simon in that story and her "adorable brother Reginald" the model for Keith. That may be one reason Mitchell doesn't patronize her young protagonists, painting them as curious, clever and witty in their matter-of-fact observations, such as "All detective work is sneaking. That's why only gentlemen and cads can do it," or Simon's solemn thought after one almost-disastrous attempt at sleuthing:

In this innocent belief, our progress back to the high street was robbed of much of its terror. The moon was now flooding the sky. Her image reflected in the water was no longer a thing of murky terror, for we were vain-glorious; we were heroes. We had been under fire. We had been suspected of being murderers. We had filled some female heart with excessive terror. We felt we had been blooded, and were men.

In Mrs. Bradley they find a sympathetic ear and are immediately put at ease by her confidence in them, as she becomes their greatest ally and supporter. She in turn offers up little insights into life as part of their education, as in "These bestial realities must sometimes be faced...Life is inclined to be sordid. Our friends are not always what they seem." Mrs. Bradley's role in Rising of the Moon is important, although she actually only appears half-way through the book, with the heart of the story carried by the winsome Simon.

The book is at turns darkly tongue-in-cheek, eccentric, warm and ultimately charming. Though the plotting is a bit muddled and disjointed at times, if you're willing to put that aside, the endearing narration and almost dreamy setting pull you in and make you feel a little like you've become immersed in a surrealistic painting. That may be why Christopher Fowler said in the Independent that Mitchell's works are "more interesting than Christie's, if more problematic."

Radio adaptations for the BBC were made of two of her books with Mary Wimbush starring as Mrs Bradley, and five of Mitchell's novels were loosely adapted for the 1990s television series The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries featuring Diana Rigg (Rising of the Moon was one, although the plot barely resembles the novel). One critic groused that the latter turned Mrs. Bradley into a glamorous Miss Marple, but it may have helped rekindle some interest in the author.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Shroud of Canvas

Isobel Mary Lambot (1926-2001) was from a family of readers in Birmingham, England, but she didn't turn to writing until 1960. She served first in the Women's Royal Air Force then as a teacher before marrying in 1959 a Belgian engineer whose work took him to Third World countries. That was the launching point for Lambot's travels around the world, experiences that would later turn up in her writing—including her Russian-exile Commissaire Orloff who appeared in two novels and was inspired from a period spent in France. In fact, Lambot's very first crime novel was written in Jamaica, and although never published, it connected her with her literary agent.

In all, she published some 20 crime novels, including police procedurals, political thrillers and standalone detective stories based in such locations as Ceylon and the Congo, translated into German, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish under the Lambot name or the pseudonyms Daniel Ingham and Mary Turner. She also had a nonfiction book, How to Write Crime Novels, published in 1992, taught creative writing, lectured to writers' groups and presented "Whodunit" evenings.

She was definitely of her time and the social mores of the day, once saying, "My aim is to entertain, not to preach, but certain moral values underlie my work all the same. I prefer old-fashioned virtues, such as Crime Does Not Pay, while obviously in real life it does! I don't like the permissive society, and make sure my heroines get decently married at the end. If any of my characters leap into bed with each other, it is essential to the plot, and they usually regret it." But she also understood the writing process well, adding that "People write because they want to. It is an inner compulsion. Crime writers write to entertain, to give a little relaxation in a world of stress. It is very hard work." 

Sadly, late in life as a widow she had rapid onset of Alzheimer's disease and after being moved to a nursing home, left one day and was last seen walking into the countryside. As a family member noted, the author's final mystery was like her novels, as a massive search operation was set up with police and volunteers until her body was found against a tree in Yeld Wood. But she probably would have appreciated the funeral—allegedly, as the hearse drove from the Church in Kington to the Crematorium in Hereford, a lone buzzard flew over the coffin and screeched.

Her novels, such as the 1967 Shroud of Canvas, use a plain straightforward style to good effect, weaving character sketches and interpersonal relationships to help build suspense. The main POV protagonist in "Canvas"  is Rosalind, a young widow with a daughter, who had cut all ties with her family during her first disastrous marriage and has recently married a man she's only known for six months, Geoffrey Lennard, founder of a plastics company.

When Rosalind receives a telephone call from Geoffrey's former fiancée whom Rosalind knew nothing about, it sets in motion a series of mysteries and deaths beginning with the murder of the ex-fiancée in the Lennard garden. As evidence and suspicion begins to mount against Geoffrey, Rosalind's newfound happiness is in jeopardy even as she unwaveringly believes in the innocence of her husband. With the help of a surprising ally, Detective Sergeant Barry Thornley, and his boss, Superintendent Longton, Rosaline pursues the truth, dodging the whispers and doubts from the local community admid a backdrop of industrial espionage and power struggles.

And yet...Rosalind does wonder, as this excerpt indicates, although it also shows Lambot's effective sparse style and how she creates conflict:

There was a nightmare sense of repetition. Was she doomed to sit at the breakfast table each morning waiting for an explanation that never came?...She had wandered round the silent house all evening, waiting for the sound of Geoffrey's car, wishing one moment that Sally was not away for the night, glad at another that she was not there to witness her mother's anxiety.

One in desperation, she had phoned the office but there was no reply. Not that it meant anything. Geoffrey could have told the switchboard not to leave him connected with an outside line, so that he could get on with his work in peace...

But the previous evening he had gone to meet Anne...

Shroud of Canvas may date from the late 60s, but it follows true British Golden Age tradition, filled with skillfully placed clues and red herrings alike and ending with a closed circle of suspects gathered together to hear the revelation of the murderer's identity. And of course, in the end, Crime Does Not Pay.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: A Night at the Cemetery

A doctor by trade, although better known for his classic plays like The Seagull and Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov actually began his literary career writing stories, many of which were in the psychological suspense vein. They were published in a wide variety of periodicals and literary publications, many under the pseudonym of Antosha Chekhonte and mostly written to pay the bills to help put him through medical school. It's not a big a leap as many would suspect—Chekhov worked for a time with police assisting with autopsies in criminal investigations.

Peter Sekirin, who works at the Center for Russian Studies at the University of Toronto, collected 42 of these stories and compiled them into "A Night in the Cemetery," published in 2008. As Otto Penzler pointed out for the New York Sun, these are not mystery stories as may think of them, containing "A lot of drunken behavior, frequently resulting in forgetfulness, which leads to a kind of 'mystery,' as in: What happened? There are occasional policemen, and they invariably leap to erroneous conclusions. Apparent crimes have other, frequently humorous, explanations. Terrors brought on by seemingly supernatural occurrences derive from comical misunderstandings."

Present throughout the collection, even among these early works, are Chekhov's penetrating psychological insight and microscopic views into the absurdity of human nature. His characters here, as in his mature works, are more often than not passive, weak and irrational, although they yearn to make things better or find ways to justify their existence.

In "The Swedish Match," which pokes fun at deductive reasoning, a pair of bumbling detectives find their suspect list growing as they investigate a bizarre murder case after finding "evidence" that the victim was strangled and carried out the window, then later stabbed in the garden to finish him off. The trail leads to the police superintendent's young wife, although not everything is at it seems; in the comically macabre tale, "A Night of Horror," a man finds a pink-glazed coffin in his apartment. His distress only increases as he runs to one friend and then another to find more coffins appearing in apartments.

Other offerings include "A Crime: A Double Murder Case," which is short, but interesting as an early example of noir;  "Thieves," a simple-minded doctor's assistant falls among a temptress and robbers which leads to a personal meltdown as "He realized that it was only due to his lack of opportunity that he had not become a thief or a cheat."; and "The Drama at the Hunt," one of the longest stories in the collection, which revolves around three men who love the same woman, ultimately leading to betrayal, humiliation and murder.

As with all translations, I find it frustrating not to be multilingual so I can read them in the original language (I once tried to teach myself Cyrillic, with less-than-stellar results), wondering about all the subtleties and authorial voice I'm missing. These stories generally show signs of a young writer coming into his own, but even a young Chekhov in translation creates characters who will stay with you.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - Blood Lines

Ruth Rendell (1930-2015) is an author who needs very little introduction, having created the popular Chief Inspector Reginald "Reg" Wexford series under her own name and many other books under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, as well as having been nominated numerous times for Dagger and Edgar Awards. But the very first Edgar she ever won was in 1975 for a short story, "The Fallen Curtain" from a book by the same name (she won another short-story Edgar in 1984). Following that success, she had nine short story collections published, the latest a compilation in 2008.

One of her collections, Blood Lines, dates from 1995 and includes ten shorter stories and one novella. Most of the stories are familiar Rendell territory including the villages of Kingsmarkham and Stowerton, which are the stomping grounds of Chief Inspector Wexford and his assistant Mike Burden. The duo is featured in the initial story. "Blood Lines" which finds Wexford and Burden solving a bludgeoning death that Wexford doggedly pursues despite the fact everyone else thinks it's a mere robbery gone bad. In the end, they piece together a picture of infidelity, spousal abuse, and betrayal.

"Lizzie's Lover" takes a new and literal twist on a Browning poem that comes to life; "Burning End" explores the difficult relationships between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law and what it takes to push someone over the edge; the accidental discovery of a poisonous mushroom in a garden leads to a game of culinary Russian Roulette by a mad man in a supermarket, in "Shreds and Shivers"; "Clothes" is the only story not to deal with death but rather peers inside an unusual obsession that drives a woman to emotional collapse.

The longest story, the novella, "The Strawberry Tree," was one of seventeen televised feature-length adaptations of Rendell's work which aired on ITV in the UK and on some PBS stations between 1987 and 2000, under the title Ruth Rendell Mysteries, which Acorn Media later released in a DVD boxed set. It was apparently intended as a sketch for a Barbara Vine novel, a foreboding and atmospheric tale of lost innocence embedded in a lonely young woman's deep desire for love and friendship on the island of Majorca.

Rendell (and alter ego Vine) is known for her exploration of the darker human impulses forged out of society’s moral codes. Passion, jealousy, anxiety, guilt, shame, rage are the colors she uses to paint psychological portraits as she allows the reader to delve into the minds of her characters. If you haven't read a Rendell novel (and you should!), stories such as these make for a fine introduction.

Friday's Forgotten Books - Emily Dickinson is Dead

Author Jane Langton (1922-2018) didn't come to mystery novels in any traditional sort of way. She studied astronomy at Wellesley College and the University of Michigan and received graduate degrees in art history at the University of Michigan and Radcliffe College. But turn to writing, she did, in 1962, penning YA novels (her book The Fledgling is a Newbery Honor book) and 18 adult mysteries which won her Bouchercon's 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award.

All of her mysteries focus on the same two protagonists, Homer Kelly, a distinguished Thoreau scholar and ex-lieutenant detective for Middlesex County, and his wife Mary. As the author herself said, "Mary is the sensible one, but I confess I like Homer's rhapsodic flights of fancy." Most of the settings are in the author's own state of Massachusetts, although she's also sent them to more exotic places like Florence, Oxford and Venice.

Langton also illustrates many of her novels with her own drawings, explaining it this way:

One of the greatest pleasures has been illustrating my adult books with drawings of the real places where my fictional events happen. I've loved setting up my folding stool in Harvard Square, or standing on my own back porch trying to get down on paper the look of the pants and shirts on the laundry line, or leaning against cars in Florence with sketchbook in hand to draw some architectural wonder. Conditions have not always been salubrious, as when my feet were submerged while I sketched the house of Tintoretto in Venice during the season of high water.

Her 1984 Homer Kelly novel, Emily Dickinson is Dead was nominated for an Edgar Award and received a Nero Award that year. It was inspired, no doubt, by the author's own interest in Dickinson, having written a text about the poet for the collection Acts of Light. The action in Langton's novel takes place at a symposium celebrating the 100th anniversary of the death of poet Emily Dickinson, where one attendee disappears and another is found murdered in the poet's former bedroom.

Langton's trademarks are all here in the novel, her memorable and descriptive settings, eccentric characters, a sly humor that pokes fun at the pompous academics and Amherst townsfolk alike. As the New York Times Book Review added, "Miss Langton is a sensitive and even elegant writer, one who deals with literate, intelligent people..." 

Homer Kelly is more of a peripheral figure in this particular novel, but he sums up the essence of his philosophy—and probably that of the author—and the book quite nicely:

Homer Kelly, too, was enchanted with the afternoon. It wasn't the justice of the women's cause that had diverted him; it was the everlasting melodrama of human souls in conflict. It was the handfuls of gritty sand that were forever being sprinkled into the machinery of daily life, grinding the ill-fitting cogs against each other, warping the sprockets, jamming the mismatched teeth. It was always so fascinating, the way people went right on being so outrageously themselves, and therefore so eternally interesting.

Although not so much a mystery as a wry study of human hubris and self-delusion, the book's character studies, snippets of poetry, Langton's illustrations, and even some details about the workings of dams and reservoirs, make Emily Dickinson is Dead is an entertaining read.

Forgotten Books Friday - The Long Shadow

Celia Fremlin (1914-2009) was born in Kingsbury, England, the daughter of a doctor and the sister of nuclear physicist John H. Fremlin. She studied classics at Somerville College, Oxford, but after her mother died in 1931, she was expected to look after her father. Instead of being content to just stay at home, she took jobs in domestic service, which was unusual for a middle-class woman at that time. She said it was to "observe the peculiarities of the class structure of our society," and those experiences later found their way into her later writing.

Much later, in her sixties, she began to take long walks at night by herself  all over the back streets of London, partly for research and partly to prove a point. Her conclusion was that to make the dark streets lose their terror, "We don’t need more policemen on the beat. We need more grandmothers." Those experiences were compiled into a TV program about challenging people’s fears of urban streets at night and many observations also wound up in her books.

Her life may have seemed like domestic bliss on the surface, but it was filled with its share of tragedy that would be at home in any crime novel:  Not only did she lose her mother at age 17, but her youngest daughter committed suicide, as did Fremlin's husband, rather than live a disabled life after a heart attack. She also outlived her second husband and her other two children, and went slowly blind in her later years, spending her last days in a nursing home, which was a bit ironic, considering she became an advocate for euthanasia late in life. 

Fremlin's first mystery novel was The Hours Before Dawn from 1958 which won the Edgar Award for Best Novel and established her style of mystery/horror set mostly around the lives of married women in the 1950s. Some feel that The Long Shadow was an equally fine work, and H.R.F. Keating even included it in his 1987 listing of the 100 best crime and mystery books. It's the story of the Imogen Barnicott, third wife of a celebrated, cruel and egocentric professor, who, despite her unhappy marriage, had never plotted her husband's murder—yet after his supposedly accidental death, she receives a mysterious phone call accusing her of that very thing. Add to that strange happenings like new messages left lying around in his handwriting, work on an unfinished manuscript of his that continues to be written, and shadowy figures seen in the house, and Imogen not only begins to doubt her husband is dead at all, she begins to believe she just might take his place.

Celia Fremlin used to say that she wrote the sort of book she wanted to read, in which a mysterious threat hangs over someone and escalates chapter by chapter; or as, H.R.F. Keating recalled her saying, "to put a plot that is exciting or terrifying against a background that is domestic, very ordinary, humdrum." She used this to great effect in The Long Shadow and others, slowly building an atmosphere of suspense and terror out of the excruciatingly mundane, using the contrasts as a literary canvas like Dali and his surrealistic art.

Her character observations managed to be cutting and yet have a touch of dark humor, as well, as this passage from Imogen's experience at a party a well-wishing friend had encouraged her to attend:

Worst of all, perhaps, was the apparently unending procession of people who, incredibly, still hadn't heard, and had to be clobbered with the news in the first moment of meeting. Had to have the smiles slashed from their faces, the cheery words of greeting rammed back down their gullets as if by a gratuitous blow across the mouth. There they would be, waving from across the road, calling "Hi!" from their garden gates, phoning by chance from Los Angeles, from Aberdeen, from Beckenham...One and all to have their friendly overtures slammed into silence, their kindly voices choked with shock. One after another, day after day, over and over again: sometimes Imogen felt like the Black Death stalking the earth, destroying everything in her path.

Fremlin's books are filled with astute perceptions that no doubt bear the imprint of her first-hand research into human behavior, as Imogen's stepson Robin advises her about taking on boarders:

I'd choose Depressions rather than Anxiety States...From the point of view of a landlady, Depressions are good because they lie in bed until midday and don't eat breakfast. Whereas Anxiety States want grapefruit—All Bran—the lot."

In addition to her 20 novels and nonfiction books, the last dating from 1994, she wrote short stories, poetry and articles and was a member of the Crime Writers Association for many years. The Long Shadow, The Hours Before Dawn, and her other fiction certainly deserves a closer look.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: The Man Who Didn't Fly

Scottish author Margot Bennett was born in 1912 and worked first first as a copywriter in the UK and Australia and then as a nurse during the Spanish Civil War before turning to writing. Her output in crime fiction was relatively small, yet successful: The Man Who Didn't Fly was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger and was runner-up to Charlotte Armstrong's A Dram of Poison for Best Novel at the Edgars in 1956, and she won the Gold Dagger two years later in 1958 with Someone from the Past. She was also chosen to contribute a short story to the second CWA anthology, Choice Of Weapons, edited by Michael Gilbert.

But thereafter, a bit of mystery regarding Bennett herself began. She essentially stopped writing crime fiction, something discussed by Martin Edwards both on his blog and in the foreword he wrote for the Black Dagger Crime Series edition of The Man Who Didn't Fly. Bennett only wrote for television for awhile—including the early 60s UK adaptation of the Maigret novels by Simenon—with the exception of two non-mystery books (one of which had the intriguing title The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Atomic Radiation), before abandoning writing altogether in 1966. She died in 1980 at the age of 68.

In The Man Who Didn't Fly, four men are scheduled to take an ill-fated chartered flight to Dublin that crashes into the Irish Channel. Although the bodies can't be recovered, it becomes evident that only three men were on board the plane, yet all four are reported as missing. Inspector Lewis and Sergeant Young have their work count out for them trying to coax clues out of unreliable witnesses including the Wade family, Charles and his daughters Hester and Prudence.

The lives of the Wades intersected with all four of the missing men: Harry Walters, a desperate poet, who was in love with Hester Wade; Joseph Ferguson, a businessman who wife was more interested in Harry; Morgan Price, a nervous guest of the Wades; and Maurice Reid, something of a family friend. Slowly but surely, Lewis and Young piece together the details of the days leading up to the flight, finally uncovering the name of the missing man. But that just sets up a new problem: what happened to him and why?

Bennett's artful plotting was enough to capture the attention of the producers of NBC's Kraft Television Theater who created an episode in 1958 based on The Man Who Didn't Fly starring then 27-year-old William Shatner, Jonathan Harris (Dr. Smith of Lost in Space) and Walter Brooke (guest star in just about all TV series in the 60s, 70s, and 80s). The book was also chosen by Julian Symons as part of his 1958 "100 Best Crime Stories" for the London Sunday Times.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: The Edgar Winners

In honor of the Edgar Awards announced this week, I thought I'd highlight The Edgar Winners anthology published in 1980 and edited by Bill Pronzini. There are two dozen short stories included from writers who were awarded an "Edgar" for excellence by the Mystery Writers of America between 1948 and 1978.

As Pronzini states in his introduction, this anthology is

"The first anthology to bring together in one volume only those stories that have received the coveted Edgar as the Best Mystery Short Story of its year....These twenty-four stories include some of the finest mystery fiction to be published in the past four decades. Moreover, they represent the widest possible variety of types, themes, styles and authors—testimony to the fact that the mystery story, contrary to what certain critics would have us believe, is by no means a limited and hidebound genre."

A little history is in order, too, as the first two years of the Edgar Award for the short story were given for bodies of work; the third went to Ellery Queen's Mytery Magazine; and the next four were given to one-volume single-author collections. The current policy of honoring a single story didn't begin until 1954, and thus, Pronzini chose representative stories from the pre-1954 categories to be included here.

The stories are printed chronologically, from 1947's "The Adventure of the Mad Tea Party," by Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manford Bennington Lee), up through "The Cloud Beneath the Eave" by Barbara Owens, the winner from 1978. Other names are indeed a "Who's Who" of giants in crime fiction, short or long forms, including William Irish (a/k/a Cornell Woolrich), Lawrence G. Blochman, Philip MacDonald, Roadl Dahl, Stanley Ellin, Edward D. Hoch, Joe Gores, and Robert L. Fish. On the other hand, it's interesting to see how many of the winning stories were penned by authors who, for whatever reason, never went on to widespread name recognition, like William O'Farrell, Warner Law, and Margery Finn Brown.

The themes and styles Pronzini alluded to above range from detective stories to psychological suspense, police procedurals, character studies, morality plays, social commentaries, and "gently nostalgic glimpses of the past, even what might be termed an avant-garde literary exercise." If you're looking for a book that provides an overview of the best writing in a variety of short mystery fiction sub-genres, then this is a good place to start.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Voice Out of Darkness

Ursula Reilly Curtiss (1923-1984) came into the world with fairly impressive crime-fiction genes. Her mother, Helen Reilly, her sister, Mary McMullen, and her brother, James Kieran, all wrote mysteries. Curtis didn't start out that way, working first as a columnist for the Fairfield, Connecticut News in 1942, at age 19, followed by a stint as a fashion copy writer. She began writing mystery/suspense novels, full-time at that, when she married John Curtiss in 1947 (the marriage no doubt helping her financial circumstances enough to give her that opportunity). Her first book, Voice Out of Darkness, won the Red Badge Award for the best new mystery of 1948.

Rather than penning police procedurals like her mother, Curtiss focused on the type of story where an innocent bystander gets pulled reluctantly into becoming an amateur sleuth — against a backdrop of seeming domestic calm, with layers of evil hiding behind family secrets and familiar faces. Her protagonists were usually female, except for works like 1951's The Noonday Devil where the main character is a man who learns his brother's death as a Japanese POW was carefully planned by a fellow prisoner.

Voice Out of Darkness falls into the female-protagonist camp, where we find that thirteen years prior to the events of the book, Katy Meredith lost her foster-sister, Monica, in a skating accident. Although Katy tried to save Monica, Monica's last words were "Katy pushed me." Katy thought she'd escaped both her home town and the horrors of Monica's death by moving to New York, until she starts receiving threatening notes in the mail. At first she wonders if someone else near the ice that day overheard Monica's words and is trying to blackmail her, but when Katy returns to her childhood home, she finds evidence of a calculating killer whose sights are now set on her.

Curtiss has moments of crisp observations in her writing, such as the following character study:

She was disconcerted, in the midst of her apologies for lateness, by Lieutenant Hooper's mild and wren-like appearance; he looked, she thought, like a portrait of a suburban traveller. Rubbers. Plaid woollen muffler, an air of having been assembled, eyed critically, and finally dismissed on the 8:32 by a bustling, dutiful wife. Except for his eyes: shrewd, steady, impartial as jewellers' scales.

or this excerpt about Fenwick, Connecticut, Katy's home town:

[It] had its replicas all over the New England coast. It lay sheltered in a tumble of windy hills, its architecture a blend of pure old Colonial and the raw new bones of housing developments. Its chief prosperity came from the summer visitors who came to splash and play in its wide blue crescent of Sound and laugh delightedly at its ancient moviehouse. Its chief crop was gossip, sown and grown with zest...

Curtiss' strengths are in her characterizations, setting and pacing, the novel being a quick read, which helps make the slight thinness and predictability of the plot (at least by 21st-century eyes looking backward), not much of a distraction. Curtiss later had two of her books, made into movies, I Saw What You Did from 1965, based on Curtiss' novel Out of the Dark, starring Joan Crawford, and 1969's What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?, based on the author's novel The Forbidden Garden, featuring Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon. Curtiss also wrote the screenplays for a couple of television episodes of Detective and Climax Mystery Theater.