Sax Rohmer's The Green Spider

There was a lot more to Sax Rohmer than the Fu Manchu books. He wrote detective stories many of which had supernatural elements, or at least suggestions of the supernatural. And he wrote some fine gothic horror. Black Dog Books have collected a varied assortment of his early stories in The Green Spider: and Other Forgotten Tales of Mystery and Suspense.

The Green Spider (written in 1904) begins with a college servant named Jamieson discovering what appears to be a horrific murder. Someone has broken into the laboratory of Professor Brayme-Skepley, wrecked everything and murdered the professor. The body however is not there. There is evidence that suggests that the professor was forcibly removed from the premises (either dead or alive) but there is other evidence that suggests that such a thing could not have happened. And there’s the matter of the giant green spider seen by the servant.

The Death of Cyrus Pettigrew involves the sudden death of a man on a train. The only other person in the compartment was Miss Pettigrew, his niece and ward. The doctor who examines the body has no doubt that Cyrus Pettigrew was poisoned but the means by which the poison was administered remains mysterious. This is an impossible crime story, and a pretty good one.

The Mystery of the Marsh Hole dates from 1905 and is a disappointing and contrived story of a disappearance in the marshes.

The Sedgley Abbey Tragedies from 1909 begins with an escape from a lunatic asylum. Soon afterwards a body is found in an abbey moat. The explanation is clear-cut and the case is closed and the drama is over. Except that more bodies turn up in the moat. A good story with some fine twists.

The Mysterious Mummy is an OK very early story (from 1903) about odd happenings in a museum. A mummy is there, and then it isn’t there.

The McVillin (from 1905) concerns a well-born but impoverished Irish officer, Colonel McVillin. In fact he’s now a penniless rogue and adventurer. He finds himself involved in an affair of honour although he has no idea what it is all about. Something about a young lady being forced into a marriage against her will. McVillin will have to fight the duel anyway. A delightfully quirky mix of cynicism, romanticism and mystery. Splendid stuff.

Who Was the Rajah? dates from 1906. A masked ball onboard a steamer ends in piracy on the high seas. A very clever and witty caper story.

The Secret of Holm Peel, published in 1912, takes place on the Isle of Man. There’s a castle that once belonged to the king and a family secret that must be kept. There are secret passageways and phantom dogs. Good fun.

The Dyke Grange Mystery, from 1922, is a puzzle-plot mystery with some exotic touches. Private detective Paul Harley and Inspector Wessex are investigating the murder of a dissipated nobleman. An unusual dagger of Egyptian origin sees to be an important clue. Along with an assortment of cigarette stubs. An entertaining tale.

The Haunting of Low Fennel dates from 1920 and is an unusual and excellent haunted house tale. Major Dale would like to sell Low Fennel, an old house that has been in the family for centuries and has always had an evil reputation. He turns to ghost-hunter Addison for help. I’m not going to risk even the mildest spoiler but this is definitely not a run-of-the-mill haunted house story.

The Blue Monkey was published in 1920. A man is on his way home, on a lonely path through the moors. He is carrying a parcel - a blue porcelain monkey he has just purchased. The man is found dead. He has been strangled. No mystery there, but the only tracks leading from the crime scene seem to belong to a small child. A good solid mystery.

The Zayat Kiss was written in 1912. It’s extremely important since it arks the first appearance of Nayland Smith and Fu Manchu.

The Six Gates of Joyful Wisdom dates from 1915 and is an excerpt from The Return of Fu Manchu.

The Green Spider is a fine collection and is highly recommended.

More of Rohmer’s early short stories can be found in another Black Dog Books volume, The Leopard Couch and Other Stories of the Fantastic and Supernatural, which is also recommended. Also very worth getting hold of is The Dream Detective, a very fine collection of occult detective tales. And there’s some great fiendish occult wickedness in Brood of the Witch-Queen.

Nicholas Freeling’s Love in Amsterdam

The first of Nicholas Freeling’s Van der Valk mysteries, Love in Amsterdam (AKA Death in Amsterdam), was published in 1962. Van der Valk is a Dutch police detective and these mysteries are set in Amsterdam.

It begins with a man named Martin in police custody. A woman named Elsa has been murdered. Martin knew Elsa very well over a long period of time and had obviously been her lover. He was in the vicinity of the murder scene at the time of the killing.

Inspector Van der Valk does not have enough evidence to charge him and is in fact inclined to believe that Martin was not the killer. He does however intend to keep Martin in custody for questioning. He is sure that Martin is lying about something important and he is convinced that that something is the key to solving the case.

Van der Valk makes it clear from the start that he has no interest in nonsense such as taking casts of footprints or looking for cigar ash or lipstick traces on cigarette butts or fingerprints. Van der Valk’s methods are psychological.

He is convinced that the secret to identifying the murderer is to find out why Elsa was killed. It’s the motive that interests Van der Valk. In fact the motive is the sole focus of his investigation. Van der Valk is also not interested in giving Martin the third degree or intimidating him. He believes that if he can get Martin to talk about Elsa and think clearly about the events of the fatal night and the events that led up to it then eventually Martin will want to tell him the truth. Van der Valk does not believe that he will get anything useful out of Martin unless Martin gives the information voluntarily. Van der Valk is prepared to manipulate Martin but he does so openly - he tells Martin exactly what he is doing.

It’s made clear that Van der Valk is not hoping for a confession. He genuinely does not believe Martin is a murderer. Martin is not a murderer but he is the key to catching a murderer.

Van der Valk is a man with a somewhat earthy sense of humour and he is perhaps a bit of a rough diamond but he’s an affable sort of chap and he and Martin get along quite well. Martin is more of a semi-willing collaborator in the investigation than a suspect. The fact that Martin is now happily married to Sophia may be part of the reason he is holding things back but it’s also likely that there are things Martin does not want to admit to himself.

Slowly the complicated and sordid truth about the relationship between Martin and Elsa is brought to life. They had a passionate, obsessive but unhealthy relationship. Elsa was promiscuous and she was manipulative and selfish. Elsa used men. Sex plays a major role in the story since it played a major role in Elsa’s life but for Elsa sex was always a weapon. There’s some kinkiness in this tale but it rings true given what we find out about the people involved.

It has to be said that if you’re hoping for anything resembling a traditional fair-play puzzle-plot mystery you’ll be very disappointed (and the plot most definitely does not play fair). The mystery plot is pretty feeble. But clearly Freeling had no intention of writing a mystery of that type. He doesn’t care about the plot at all. This is a psychological crime novel.

Generally speaking I dislike psychological crime novel. Too many of them try to put the reader inside the mind of a serial killer or a psycho killer of some kind and I have no desire to be put inside the mind of such a person. But Love in Amsterdam is different. Firstly, while there’s a killer there is no serial killer or psycho killer. Secondly and more importantly (and more interestingly) in this book Freeling is trying to put us inside the head of the victim rather than the killer. And since the victim is dead he can’t do that directly. The only way the reader (and Van der Valk) can get inside Elsa’s mind is indirectly, through Martin. This is a genuinely intriguing approach.

Of course we also get to know Martin very well. He’s quite fascinating. He’s not quite a loser but he’s made a lot of mistakes and he has taken an awfully long time to grow up. He has indulged in very self-destructive behaviour. But he’s not a total loser. He’s trying his best.

Elsa isn’t quite a monster, but she’s close. She’s the kind of woman who might not set out to destroy men’s lives but she will do so anyway. She is bad news, but fascinating in the way that Bad Girls always are fascinating.

If there’s a slight weakness here it’s the motive which I felt needed to be fleshed out just a little.

Overall a psychological crime novel with a genuinely interesting approach. Recommended.

Rufus King’s Secret Beyond the Door (Museum Piece No 13)

Rufus King’s crime novel Museum Piece No 13 was published in 1945 and was later retitled Secret Beyond the Door to tie in with Fritz Lang’s movie adaptation.

Rufus King (1893-1966) was an American crime writer whose work belongs to the fair-play puzzle-plot genre that blossomed during the golden age of detective fiction. He is best-known for his excellent Lieutenant Valcour mysteries.

This book begins with Lily arriving at her new husband’s mansion, Blaze Creek, to take up residence. Lily is a 30-year-old widow whose instinct has always been to go with the flow. She isn’t stupid but she is timid. She’s also very rich. Her new husband, Earl Rumney, is quite a bit older. His first wife died a year earlier. He owns a newspaper.

The atmosphere is uncomfortable from the start. Earl’s fifteen-year-old son Aderic is introspective, intellectually precocious and decidedly odd. She does not like Lily.

The women of the household make Lily uneasy. Earl’s rather controlling sister Diana seems to resent her. Leona Drumm certainly resents her. Leona is a columnist and a political zealot and she’s angling for a share in Earl’s newspaper. She had also had hopes of marrying Earl. Miss McQuillan is Earl’s live-in secretary. She has long been in love with Earl.

The most disturbing thing is Earl’s hobby. He collects rooms. Rooms in which something startling or horrific has happened. He buys the houses in which the rooms are located and then recreates them at Blaze Creek. It’s an obsession rather than a hobby. These are mostly rooms in which brutal murders were committed. Earl likes to sit in these rooms and soak up the atmosphere. He likes to show these rooms off to people, except for Room 13 which is kept locked.

Lily becomes more and more concerned. Is her husband crazy? Is this morbid obsession of his dangerous? Dangerous to him, and possibly not just to him? Lily was timid to start with. Now she’s becoming a nervous wreck. She would like to do something to help Earl but she doesn’t know how.

She confides in a psychiatrist. He is quite alarmed.

The presence of a psychiatrist in a story written in the 1940s is always promising. I do love mysteries and thrillers with psychiatric themes.

There’s a definite mystery plot here but this is mostly a suspense novel. It might be more accurate to describe it as a gothic psychological suspense romantic melodrama. It covers all bases. And it uses elements from multiple genres in a very skilful way.

Rufus King was most assuredly not a pulp writer. His style is polished and literary, and often quite witty.

Lily might be mousey but she’s likeable and she’s not a fool. Earl is complicated and enigmatic. His bizarre obsession could have several causes. It might be weird but harmless. It could indicate deep-seated problems. It could have terrifying implications.

This novel is a riff on a famous fairy tale. To avoid spoilers I won’t tell you which one although you’ll almost certainly figure it out pretty quickly.

The plot has a few very neat twists.

The focus is very much on Lily. What matters is not necessarily what is happening but what she thinks is happening, or suspects is happening. Mostly all she has are suspicions but they’re eating her up.

An excellent novel by a writer who doesn’t get enough attention. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed four of Rufus King’s Lieutenant Valcour mysteries, including Murder Masks Miami and his three maritime mysteries (among the very best books in that sub-genre), Murder by Latitude, The Lesser Antilles Case and Murder on the Yacht. I recommend all his books very highly.

I’ve also reviewed Fritz Lang’s excellent and very underrated film adaptation, Secret Beyond the Door… (1948).

Edgar Wallace's The Frightened Lady

The Frightened Lady is a 1933 Edgar Wallace thriller.

Fairly typically the setting is a country house in England. Marks Priory is the estate of the young Lord Lebanon but he is definitely not in charge. He is entirely under the thumb of his mother. He doesn’t like it but every attempt at rebellion on his part has failed. Lady Lebanon is a formidable woman. She has intense family pride. An expert in heraldry, she is obsessed by the family’s history. She is not not just a Lebanon by marriage but by birth as well. She married her cousin. It is a very ancient family.

Young Lord Lebanon has other problems, specifically the rather sinister Dr Amersham. The relationship between his mother and Dr Amersham is obscure but it does appear that the doctor has some kind of hold over her. The servants detest Dr Amersham, probably with good reason.

Chief Inspector Bill Tanner of Scotland Yard becomes involved with this ancient family when the chauffeur is murdered. Tanner was in fact more or less on the scene at the time. He was in the village, Marks Thornton, investigating a case of counterfeiting.

There are all kinds of tensions at Marks Priory. The gamekeeper Tillings suspects his wife of being unfaithful, possibly with the chauffeur. There are two hardboiled American footmen which is very strange. One has to wonder how on earth they came to be in the service of such an old and distinguished family. Lord Lebanon has tried to dismiss them but has been overruled by his mother. Lady Lebanon’s secretary Ilsa Crane is terrified but nobody knows why. Every member of the family and every member of the staff seems anxious, unhappy and secretive.

And more murders will follow.

There are secrets here, possibly from the past. There might also be a question of money, the Lebanon family being extremely rich. There are sexual tensions. There are jealousies. There could be all sorts of motives for murder here.

Tanner is an efficient cop with an impressive record. His two off-siders are perhaps less formidable. Detective Sergeant Ferraby is young but very keen. Tanner regards Detective Sergeant Totty as the worst detective he has ever encountered, with a tendency to indulge in fanciful speculation. Totty is however almost a genius when it comes to spotting physical clues.

Ferraby gets himself personally involved when he takes a shine to Ilsa Crane.

There are plenty of suspects in the sense that there are plenty of people here with things to hide. Coming up with a plausible explanation for the crimes is a challenge even for a man as experienced as Bill Tanner, and he is unable to connect all the pieces of the puzzle until the very end. Despite his experience he has made a couple of false assumptions.

Wallace invites the reader to make false assumptions as well. He plays fair with the reader but like any good detective story writer he uses misdirection quite skilfully. He allows us to mislead ourselves.

The construction of Marks Priory began in 1160. It has been modified and extended and rebuilt several times. You won’t be at all surprised to learn that it is suspected that the house may contain secret passageways - this is an Edgar Wallace thriller after all.

This is closer to being a straightforward country house murder mystery than the more outrageous type of thriller for which Wallace was known, although there are a few outrageous touches and a few familiar Wallace trademarks.

The Frightened Lady is fine entertainment and is recommended.

The novel was filmed in 1940 as The Case of the Frightened Lady.

M. Scott Michel's The Black Key

The Black Key is an obscure 1946 murder mystery which belongs to a bizarre but fascinating sub-genre - the psychiatric murder mystery.

M. Scott Michel (1916-1992) was an American playwright and crime writer. He wrote a handful of mysteries in the late 40s and early 50s. Intriguingly Michel seems to have written at least one other psychiatric mystery.

Alex Cornell is a prominent psychoanalyst who has a disturbing patient show up on his doorstep. A pretty young blonde Englishwoman has no idea of her own name or where she comes from, she has no memory of anything, but she fears she has murdered a woman. She doesn’t remember doing so but she does remember the woman’s murdered body at her feet. Alex is dubious until he sees the body for himself.

Obviously he should turn the young woman over to the police but he doesn’t. He is fascinated by her. He is also fascinated by the opportunity to play amateur detective and to solve the murder by means of psychoanalysis.

He discovers that the girl’s name is Serena. The murdered woman was Marion. Marion was a live-in nurse employed by a rich old guy named Dudley Briggs. The Briggs household also includes Dudley’s niece Pauline, his nephew Richard and Pauline’s friend Serena.

Dudley had intended to marry Marion, which would have put the inheritances of Pauline and Richard in doubt. Richard is an idle drunk who hopes for a political carer. Pauline is a doctor and she has lots of secrets. For starters there’s the mysterious deaths of her parents many years earlier. Her father may have been a madman and it may have been a murder-suicide. There’s also something involving Pauline that happened years ago in London.

There’s another doctor involved with this household. There’s Richard’s fiancée Edna and Edna’s father. There’s also Roff. We don’t know where he fits in. Perhaps he’s Pauline’s lover. And there’s the Cockney blackmailer. 

All of these people seem to have motives for murder. Perhaps Serena had a motive as well. The second murder makes things even more puzzling.

Alex is frantically analysing Serena’s dreams. He is sure they will provide the answers. This is not just a psychiatric mystery, it’s a Freudian psychiatric mystery. We get lots of wacky psychobabble and Freudian psychobabble is even more fun than the regular kind. Alex is excited to find all kinds of symbols in Serena’s dreams. Flowers, coffins, clouds, mysterious bearded men, men with thick glasses, a sinister ugly man. And most of all, the black key. Alex is in Seventh Heaven. He comes up with all kinds of delightfully loopy explanations for these symbols.

Alex does a bit of regular amateur detective stuff as well, with mixed success.

Of course Alex and Serena start to fall in love, so we get even more musing psychobabble about transference.

Of course it is impossible today to take any of this seriously, it all just seems so silly and wacky, but in 1946 people took psychoanalysis very seriously indeed. And it was a very big thing in the arts and entertainment.

I simply adore 1940s mystery novels and movies dealing with psychiatry, like Hitchcock’s 
Spellbound (1945) and Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool (1949).

The Black Key is totally off-the-wall and I won’t pretend that the plot is even slightly believable. The dream clues are just crazy and ludicrously contrived. But if you don’t mind that it doesn’t make sense it is entertaining and it’s highly recommended if only for its oddness.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Robert Moore Williams’ Somebody Wants You Dead in a two-novel paperback edition.

F. Van Wyck Mason’s The Sulu Sea Murders

The Sulu Sea Murders was the seventh of F. Van Wyck Mason’s thirty-one Hugh North spy thrillers. It was published in 1933. While these novels are usually considered to be spy fiction it should be pointed out that many of the early books in this series are as much murder mysteries as spy thrillers, and quite a few are in fact pure murder mysteries. Such is the case with The Sulu Sea Murders. It’s a murder mystery but the exotic setting adds interest.

Hugh North is an officer in the US Army’s intelligence division, G-2, but in the early books he works for the Department of Criminal Investigations. He is essentially a military policeman. He holds the rank of captain (by the time the series ended in 1968 he had been promoted to colonel).

The Sulu Sea Murders opens with the murder of a pearl diver in the Philippines. All that is known of the murderer is that he is a member of the American garrison on the nearby island of Sanga Sanga. Hugh North is sent to Sanga Sanga to investigate.

The American garrison is quartered in Fort Winfield, a very old castle built by the Spanish. It’s a rabbit warren. There are parts of the castle that the Americans have never even attempted to explore - it would to be too easy to become hopelessly lost.

There’s one thing North is pretty sure of - pearls are involved somewhere in this case. It soon becomes obvious that the atmosphere at Fort Winfield is not merely tense, it’s explosive. There are professional jealousies among the officers. The commanding officer, Major Flood, is hated by all.

There are three women each of whom seems to be at the centre of romantic and sexual intrigues. One is Flood’s French-born wife. Theirs is clearly not a happy marriage. Then there’s Captain O’Hare’s wife, universally referred to as Anytime Annie. There’s also Manuela, the beautiful young daughter of the local Spanish grandee. All three women are engaged in flirtations or affairs.

Those pearls also suggest that greed is going to play a part in this tale.

There are countless motives for murder, and there are several murders in quick succession. In two cases the identity of the killer seems obvious but Hugh North is not satisfied. He doesn’t like jumping to obvious conclusions.

Hugh North is very much a scientific detective. Forensic science provides some of the vital clues that will eventually lead to a solution of the case. North doesn’t rely too much on flashes of intuition. He is patient and methodical.

The old Spanish fortress plays a major role in the story. As does a shipwreck. There’s also the curious and colourful profession practised by one of the chief murder suspects before he enlisted in the army. There are conflicted loyalties and there are double-crosses.

The climate becomes almost a character in the story. The stifling heat raises tensions ever higher and there’s a hurricane on the way. The approaching hurricane plays a key role in the plot, adding a crucial time element.

This book is very much in the vein of the puzzle-plot mysteries of the golden age of detective fiction and I think it qualifies as a fair-play mystery. This one has a pleasingly intricate plot that comes together neatly at the end.

I am personally a huge fan of mysteries, thrillers, horror tales and melodramas in tropical settings. You get that feel of overheated passions and the loosening of moral restraints which always leads to entertaining emotional mayhem. It always works for me and it works in this book.

The Sulu Sea Murders is thoroughly enjoyable and is highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several of F. Van Wyck Mason’s other Hugh North novels - The Shanghai Bund Murders, The Fort Terror Murders, The Singapore Exile Murders, The Branded Spy Murders and The Budapest Parade Murders.

I’ve also reviewed his The Castle Island Case which doesn’t feature Hugh North but is a fascinating illustrated murder mystery with photographic clues.

Sidney Herschel Small's Festival of the Dead

The Festival of the Dead is a collection of the early Jimmy Wentworth stories by Sidney Herschel Small (1893-1958), published in pulp magazines in 1931. The stories are set in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Jimmy Wentworth is an American but was brought up in China and speaks fluent Chinese. He works as a clerk for the chief of the Chinatown detail. The murder in the first story is so baffling that the chief decides to give Wentworth his chance. He’ll put him on the detail ostensibly as a beat cop but his real job is to find out things that an ordinary beat cop could not find out. Jimmy’s advantage is that he is fluent in all the Chinese dialects but nobody in Chinatown knows that. He will get to hear things and the inhabitants of Chinatown won’t know that he understands them.

These are typical pulp stories with plenty of action. There’s also an element of paranoia, as the hero is continually pitted against a diabolical criminal mastermind who seems beyond the reach of the police.

In the first story, Festival of the Dead, a popular beat cop on the detail, a grizzled old-timer named Bannion, has been murdered. This is puzzling. Bannion was an honest cop and was popular with the Chinese. He understood little of their culture and never interfered.

The head of the Chinatown detail is desperate enough to take a chance on putting Jimmy into uniform and assigning him to Bannion’s beat. With his knowledge of the language and his understanding of the culture Jimmy might turn up something. And he does. But it’s not the murderer he wants, it’s the man (or men) who planned the murder.

In Crimson Circles another cop is murdered and Jimmy is on the trail of the mysterious arch-criminal Kong Gai. There is a dope selling racket he wants to bust as well. He has a vital clue - crimson circles painted on the leg of a dead man. He sees similar circles painted on other men’s legs. Nobody knows what they mean, but Jimmy is sure they’re the key to a puzzle.

In King Cobra a rich man named Carrington blows his brains out but the puzzling thing about the case is that a piercing scream was heard from his apartment five minutes before the gunshot. Jimmy thinks it’s murder although the other circumstances suggest that that is impossible. Jimmy also suspects Kong Gai’s involvement, and there is a damsel in distress to be rescued - an innocent girl enslaved by drugs. There’s a link between the girl and Carrington.

Death Rock is a tale of rum-running (this being the days of Prohibition). Not the sort of criminal enterprise one would expect Kong Gai to be involved in but the dying words of a sailor point in his direction. The explanation of the sailor’s injuries is clever and devious.

The Bloody Emerald begins with two apparently unconnected incidents - a daring robbery of San Francisco’s most prestigious jewellery store and the discovery by Jimmy Wentworth of the corpse of a pretty Chinese girl. There’s another devious murder method and a very unusual motive for murder. There’s an even more unusual motive for the jewel robbery.

The Horns of the Dragon begins with the outbreak of a tong war. Tong wars are nothing new in Chinatown but this one begins in an odd way and there are some circumstances surrounding it that puzzle Jimmy Wentworth. It turns out that there’s something other than a tong war going on.

These are all quite entertaining stories and they’re nicely atmospheric, and there’s a fine sinister super-villain. This collection is recommended.

The Festival of the Dead is one of the titles in the excellent Argosy Library series from Steeger Books.

The Saint Goes West

The Saint Goes West is a 1942 collection of three Saint novellas by Leslie Charteris. Although he wrote fine novels and short stories I’ve always felt that the novella was the perfect form for Charteris. In this collection he demonstrates his complete mastery of the form.

The three novellas are Arizona, Palm Springs and Hollywood.

Leslie Charteris wrote a huge number of Saint stories from the late 1920s up to the early 1960s. The Saint went through several quite distinct incarnations during this time. For my money the most satisfactory versions of the Saint were the first version and the final version. In his initial incarnation Simon Templar is very young, dashing, reckless, carefree, irresponsible and irrepressible. He’s like an overgrown schoolboy, but a charming schoolboy. His sense of fun is infectious. He’s the leader of a criminal gang but they only steal from other criminals and spend more time fighting crime than committing it. Simon acquires a live-in girlfriend, Patricia Holm, and she is the great love of his life. The original version of the Saint is to be found in books such as The Saint Closes the Case and The Avenging Saint.

In his final incarnation he hasn’t aged much physically (he should be in his sixties in his final adventures but he always apparently remains in his thirties) but he’s grown up. He’s now a loner. He seems quite a bit older. He is wiser, and perhaps just a bit sadder. There’s just the faintest hint of melancholy. He is still recognisably the same man, but he has grown up. He has gained some depth. His thirst for adventure remains unquenched although at times you get the vague feeling that he is not entirely comfortable in the postwar world and the adventures are his way of coping with a duller, greyer, more conformist world. This version of Simon Templar can be seen fully formed in the 1948 story collection Saint Errant.

But in between there were a couple of other versions of the Saint. There is the Saint transplanted to America in the late 30s. And The Saint Goes West gives us another one of these transitional editions of Simon Templar.

Simon has been slightly Americanised (not surprising since Charteris had relocated to America and had become hugely popular there). I don’t think this version of the characters works quite as well as the earlier or later versions. He’s lost some of the over-the-top fun quality of the first version and hasn’t yet acquired the substance of the later Saint. But he’s still the Saint and he’s still entertaining.

On the plus side Charteris was at his peak when it came to plotting, especially in Palm Springs and Hollywood. And he uses the American settings extremely well.

In Arizona Simon Templar gets to do the whole cowboy routine. He’s set things up so that he can persuade a rancher to take him on as a hand. The rancher is involved in a dispute with a neighbour who wants to buy the ranch and is prepared to use underhand means to force a sale. The neighbour claims to want to buy the ranch because of a dispute over water rights.

Simon is willing to do the right thing and help out his new employer.

It seems like a classic western story but we suspect from the start that there’s some deeper reasons for the Saint’s presence in Arizona. Since this is a wartime story we further suspect that the reason has something to do with espionage or some dastardly German plot. We already know that Simon suspects that the rancher’s brother was murdered.

Simon finds time to strike up a bit of a romance with the rancher’s daughter.

It gradually becomes obvious that there’s a lot more at stake than water rights, and that the situation is likely to get very ugly.

This is the least successful of the three stories.

Palm Springs has an interesting history. Charteris wrote a screenplay for the RKO Saint series, called The Saint in Palm Springs. By the time the movie was shot there was nothing left of Charteris’s story. In 1941 Charteris wrote a photo-story (told with text and photos) for Life magazine. The story was called Palm Springs. Everybody, including Charteris himself, loved it. So he decided to use it as the basis for the novella Palm Springs.

A rich dissolute young man named Freddie Pellman hires Simon as a bodyguard. He thinks that a mobster is intending to have him rubbed out. Freddie lives in a palatial rambling house in Palm Springs with his harem. Yes, he has a harem. It comprises a blonde, a brunette and a redhead. It’s not always the same blonde, brunette and redhead but there’s always one of each. And no, they’re not just house guests or personal assistants or anything like that. It’s a real harem. The three girls all share Freddie’s bed (although not all at the same time). At this moment the harem comprises Esther, Ginny and Lissa.

Sure enough somebody does try to kill Freddie (he has a narrow escape). The Saint thinks it was an inside job. Which means the assassin has to be one of the three girls, or one of the three servants in the house. And for various reasons the servants seem unlikely suspects. So it’s probably one of the girls. All three are at least vaguely possible suspects.

They all have alibis, but the alibis are not too solid. And Simon doesn’t put too much stock in alibis. He’s made use of alibis himself and he knows how slippery they can be. The alibis do however play a part in the story.

It’s a fine little plot. There’s a somewhat decadent atmosphere, with a cast of colourful offbeat characters and as so often Charteris gets the tone just right - not too serious, not too whimsical. An excellent story.

In Hollywood Simon is offered a job by movie producer Byron Ufferlitz (he used to be a racketeer and now he’s in a different racket). He is rather taken aback when he finds out that he is being groomed for movie stardom. He isn’t sure he wants to be a a screen idol but working at a film studio has its compensations. Ufferlitz has a charming pretty secretary, Peggy Warden. And for publicity purposes Simon has to pretend to romance starlet April Quest. Since she’s also very pretty Simon decides Hollywood isn’t too bad a place.

There’s plenty of drama at the studio, provided not just by ex-racketeer producers and glamorous starlets but also by a couple of crazy screenwriters named Lazaroff and Kendricks, a director named Jack Groom and pretty-boy star Orlando Flane. All of whom have reasons to resent all the others.

So when murder occurs there’s no shortage of suspects. What really concerns Simon is that the police think he’s a suspect as well. So the Saint has a very strong motivation to find the real culprit.

There are some nicely planted clues and as with Palm Springs there’s plenty of misdirection. Another nicely constructed plot and another fine story with a nifty little ending.

So overall, The Saint Goes West does not offer my favourite version of the Saint but it does offer one good story and two excellent very clever stories and those two stories are good enough to lift this book into the highly recommended rating.

And, happily, this book is in print.

Fredric Brown's The Screaming Mimi

Fredric Brown (1906-1972) was an American writer of science fiction and crime fiction. Although he was a pretty big deal in the crime genre he is a writer whom I’ve overlooked until now. The Screaming Mimi, published in 1949, is one of his earlier crime novels. It was filmed in 1958 and in 1970 it was adapted (apparently “unoffically”) by Dario Argento as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. We’ll get back to Argento later.

The Screaming Mimi has been reprinted by Bruin in a two-novel paperback edition, paired with a slightly later Brown crime novel, The Far Cry.

The Screaming Mimi is the story of a drunken Irish newspaperman named Sweeney. Sweeney is not sure how long he’s been drunk. It could be a few days, it could be a couple of weeks. He doesn’t think he left Chicago during that time but he can’t be sure of anything.

Sweeney witnesses a crime. The crime, an attack on a woman, takes place behind locked glass doors. What the witnesses (including Sweeney) see is the immediate aftermath of a crime rather than the crime itself. A crowd has gathered and the cops have arrived but nobody can get in through those glass doors to help the woman because of the dog. It’s a big dog, a really big dog, and it has no intention of letting anyone in. The cops could of course just shoot the dog but they don’t want to. The woman isn’t dead and while she’s hurt she doesn’t seem to be in immediate danger of death. The dog doesn’t seem to be intending to hurt her. It occurs to the cop on the scene that the dog probably belongs to the woman. If they shoot it she might make a fuss. And the cop likes dogs. He doesn’t want to shoot a dog that is only trying to protect his mistress.

Eventually the cops get in and find that the woman isn’t badly hurt.

This event causes a sensation because in the previous couple of weeks three women have been murdered by a crazed killer who’s been dubbed the Ripper. This woman, a stripper named Yolanda Lang, is the first woman to survive an attack by the Ripper. The newspapers turn the event into a media sensation. Yolanda can’t identify her attacker which makes the story even bigger - a serial killer still on the loose.

The event has a different effect on Sweeney. That’s because Yolanda was nude. Sweeney has never seen such a gorgeous female body. He figures she probably has a nice face as well but he isn’t sure because it wasn’t her face he was looking at.

Sweeney discusses the matter with God. No, not that God. This God is a drunken bum named Godfrey but everyone calls him God. God has a theory. He believes that a man can get anything he wants, anything at all, if he wants it badly enough. He just has to be prepared to pursue the goal with single-minded determination. Sweeney decides to test the theory because for the first time in his life he’s found something he wants badly enough to be prepared to devote himself to achieving it. He wants to sleep with Yolanda Lang. He doesn’t want to marry her, he doesn’t want her to be the mother of his children, he just wants to sleep with her.

Sweeney will have to drag himself out of the gutter to achieve that aim but that part isn’t too difficult. Sweeney isn’t an alcoholic. He’s a moderate social drinker who goes on occasional spectacular benders. He’s even able to get his job back. He’s a reporter.

Now he’s onto the biggest story of his career but Sweeney never loses sight of the fact that solving this crime is merely a mean to an end. The end is to have sex with Yolanda Lang.

Sweeney is a good reporter when he’s sober. And he finds a lead that the cops have overlooked. It’s a naked girl. Not Yolanda Lang, but a different naked girl. This one is a foot high. She’s a nude statuette of a terrified young woman. Her name is Mimi. The company that sells the statuettes has dubbed this particular line the Screaming Mimi. Sweeney has a hunch that Mimi is the key to solving the mystery.

Sweeney has another hunch as well. In fact he has several, but there’s one that obsesses him.

There are several potential suspects. They have alibis, but not rock-solid alibis.

As the author tells us at the start, Sweeney’s story begins with a nude woman. And it ends with a nude woman. Not that nude statuette but an actual nude woman. What’s cute is that while all these nude women add the sort of salacious content that makes crime novels sell they are essential to the plot, and the fact that they’re naked is essential to the plot.

That opening sequence behind the glass doors is a corker. It’s easy to see why it got Argento’s attention. Argento took a fine effective literary scene and turned into one of the best visual set-pieces in cinema history. Aside from that scene Argento’s movie retains some key plot points and scraps others. It’s interesting that the emphasis on the purely sexual nature of Sweeney’s obsession is downplayed in the movie. It’s interesting because the giallo is a sub-genre of the erotic thriller and Sweeney’s obsession with Yolanda’s naked body is ideal erotic thriller material. Overall this is a case of a movie differing somewhat from its source material but both the novel and the movie are masterpieces in their own ways.

Brown’s novel is a fine mystery story with a terrific plot but it’s also very definitely an erotic thriller.

The novel also includes a lot of sly humour. It’s not by any stretch of the imagination a humorous detective story but it has some very witty very amusing moments. Brown’s attitude towards his hero is also interesting. Sweeney is a nice guy and he’s likeable but Brown doesn’t gloss over his character failings. He’s a very human hero.

The Screaming Mimi is a gripping well-constructed crime thriller with a few very nice structural touches. Very highly recommended.

I've also reviewed Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

Theodore Roscoe's Z Is For Zombie

Theodore Roscoe (1906-1992) was an American pulp writer and also a distinguished naval historian. Like most pulp writers he worked in a number of different genres. If you wanted to make a decent living as a pulp writer it was desirable to be able to sell stories to as many different pulp magazines as possible which meant you pretty much had to write in multiple genres. Roscoe wrote excellent adventure tales and dabbled in fantasy and horror and he also wrote murder mysteries. Z Is For Zombie, published in serial form in Argosy in 1937, spans at least three and possibly four different genres. It’s a blend of horror (with voodoo elements of course), adventure in the tropics, spy thriller and murder mystery. And the murder mystery involves an impossible crime.

The setting is Haiti (Roscoe had actually visited Haiti). Dr Jim Ranier is in a waterfront dive in a remote village in Haiti and he’s drunk. That’s not unusual. He spends a lot of time drunk. He had at one time been a very successful surgeon but he lost everything in the stock market crash and now he’s a ship doctor on a tramp steamer and when he’s not drunk he spends his time feeling sorry for himself. He had been married, until his wife broke the news to him that while she was delighted to be married to a rich successful surgeon she had no interest whatsoever in being married to a struggling small town doctor. So Ranier has some valid reasons to feel sorry for himself.

Ranier and a number of passengers from the steamer have gone ashore intending to drive along the coast (getting a look at the real Haiti) before picking up the ship again at Port-au-Prince.

Being drunk he gets into an argument with one of the passengers, a German named Haarman, and he gets slugged and thrown out into the street. He wanders back into the bar and finds himself a quiet corner in which to drink and brood. He notices that Haarman is awfully quiet now. Too quiet. In fact the guy seems dead. He’s not dead, but he’s dying. With a knife wound in the back. But that’s impossible. Nobody could have stabbed him. Someone would have seen it happen. And the knife is nowhere to be found.

Ranier is a drunk but he’s still a doctor and he has to try to save Haarman. There’s a small hospital nearby, run by a Dr Eberhardt. And now the weird fiction elements start to emerge. Dr Eberhardt is nowhere to be found. His laboratory has been wrecked. His nurse (and niece although we later discover she’s not really his niece), a German girl named Laïs Engles, is mystified. She reveals that Dr Eberhardt had been working on some very strange research, something to do with reanimating dead tissue. Maybe even reanimating dead people. And there are all those frogs. Hundreds of them. It’s all a bit strange. Things get even stranger when Haarman dies. It appears that after dying Haarman got up and left.

That’s not the end of the strangeness. Not by a long chalk. Laïs Engles recognises Haarman. The last time she saw him was fourteen years ago and he was dead at the time. Now he’s dead again. Maybe.

Laïs has a very strange story to tell. A story of wartime intrigue and top-secret missions and journeys through the Amazon jungles and shipwreck. The poor girl is clearly mad. But Ranier doesn’t think she is mad. He’s convinced she’s telling the truth. Or at least that she thinks she’s telling the truth. Some of it may actually be true. More worrying is the possibility that all of her story is true.

The book now becomes a crazy journey from graveyard to graveyard, with corpses that apparently not only get up and walk, they undertake cross-country travels.

To add to the fun the locals are convinced that they’re dealing with evil voodoo witch doctors and they know how to deal with people like that - you hunt them down and kill them or you burn them out if they’re hiding. There are also people running around with guns taking pot shots at each other and soon there are more corpses. These ones really are dead. Probably.

The really fun part is that because this is a story from an adventure pulp rather than a detective pulp the reader can’t be entirely sure there’s going to be a rational explanation, and indeed it’s hard to imagine a rational explanation that would make sense.

Roscoe knows what he’s doing. He brings all the crazy plot strands together and gives us a wholly satisfying resolution although naturally I’m not going to give you any hints about that resolution. Whether there’s any actual supernatural element involved is something else I’m not going to tell you. There is however a solid murder mystery plot here.

The impossible crime angle might disappoint those who love amazingly complex impossible crimes but this one at least has the virtue of being totally plausible.

The novel was originally serialised in six parts so at times Roscoe gives us brief recaps of previous events. The novel does not appear to have been edited in any way, which is a very good thing. Once you succumb to the temptation to do a bit of editing the danger is that you’ll start thinking your readers are over-sensitive children and you’ll start editing out all the politically incorrect stuff. Happily Steeger Books have reprinted Z Is For Zombie in all its politically incorrect glory.

You can enjoy this book as an outrageous but well-crafted murder mystery but it’s equally enjoyable as an adventure tale and a horror story. Whichever way you take it it’s superbly written (Roscoe’s prose is an absolute joy) and immensely entertaining. Very highly recommended.

I bought this book after reading the glowing review at Beneath the Stains of Time. There’s another fine review at The Invisible Event.

I’ve reviewed a couple of collections of Rocoe’s short stories - The Emperor of Doom and Blood Ritual. They’re both well worth a look.

William O’Farrell’s Repeat Performance

William O’Farrell’s Repeat Performance was published in 1942.

It is 1942. Barney Page is a successful Broadway actor. At least he was a successful actor. Now he’s a bum. He blames himself for his wife Sheila’s death. And he knows he was responsible for his mistress Fern’s death. He remembers strangling her. He knows the cops will soon be closing in on him. His producer John Friday tells him that maybe he can help him. Barney trusts John Friday. John tells him that what Barney’s life needs is a rewrite job.

Surprisingly Barney gets the chance to do that rewrite job. Because now it’s 1941. None of the things that wrecked his life have happened yet. Barney knows they’re going to happen, but that knowledge might give the chance he needs. Now he’s more like the director of the play that is his life, rather than just an actor in it.

And Barney knows all the mistakes he’s going to make. Every one of them. It should be possible to avoid them. He knows he should not take the movie job he’s been offered because if he goes to Hollywood he’ll meet Fern and he’ll have an affair with her. So he decides that he is definitely not going to Hollywood.

He also knows that it’s important not to sleep with Pete McCord’s wife. That’s a big mistake he made, or rather it’s a big mistake he’s going to make unless he’s careful.

He has to make sure Sheila doesn’t meet Jake. Jake is the writer of the play in which Barney is about to star. If he can prevent them from meeting they won’t sleep together, and Sheila might not die.

Barney knows about other mistakes he’s going to make as well. He has to keep away from the booze.

Of course knowing the dumb things you’re going to do and the disastrous consequences that will follow doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not going to do those dumb things anyway. Barney however is determined to try, and he does try. He tries really hard.

There is a crime but this isn’t really a crime novel in a conventional sense. It is however very definitely noir fiction. It’s a different kind of noir novel, in which the protagonist knows how his own story is going to end. He knows the ending, but he thinks he can change it. He thinks he can write the script for his life as he lives it.

Barney is a nice enough guy. He has never intended to hurt anyone. He likes people. He has no dislike of women. He just doesn’t quite have the strength of character to avoid temptations, especially temptations of the feminine variety. He ends up in bed with women without really knowing how it happened. Barney isn’t particularly driven by lust. It’s more loneliness. He doesn’t have the emotional closeness with Sheila than a man should have with his wife, and it seems to that need for emotional connection that drives him.

Barney qualifies as a noir protagonist. The three women however don’t really fit into the femme fatale category. Sheila isn’t a bad girl, although she drinks too much. It’s not really anyone’s fault that the marriage didn’t work out.

Fern is not the kind of woman who sets out to steal other women’s men, but with Barney it just kind of happened.

Sis isn’t a classic bad girl. She’s promiscuous and Pete should never have married her but she’s not an evil spider woman.

The whole rewriting his life thing raises obvious questions. Is this a science fiction/crime crossover story? Is something supernatural or paranormal happening? Is it a dream or just a distorted memory? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

Repeat Performance was filmed in 1947, which is intriguing. I could think of so many ways that Hollywood could have made a mess of an adaptation, and in my opinion that's exactly what they did. Here's my review of the movie.

Repeat Performance is a bit of an oddity and it’s worth reading for that reason. It’s also a decent noir-tinged romantic melodrama. Highly recommended.

Dolores Hitchens' Strip for Murder

Julia Clara Catherine Maria Dolores Robins Birk Olsen Hitchens (1907-1973) wrote mysteries initially under the name D.B. Olsen. With her second husband Bert Hitchens, who was a railway detective, she wrote five railway mystery thrillers including the excellent End of the Line (1957). She also wrote mysteries under the name Dolores Hitchens, including her 1958 novella (really more a short novel than a novella) Strip for Murder.

Stark House have reprinted Strip for Murder and since it’s only a novella they’ve thrown in a couple of short stories as a bonus.

Strip for Murder begins with a guy named Bellew getting poison-pen letters. He runs a theatrical agency but in fact the entertainers he represents are strippers. Sometimes they get sent on jobs to private parties. Bellew is a quiet little guy who has no carnal interest in the girls he represents. Such things no longer interest him.

He thinks the threatening letters may be linked to an incident that occurred twenty years earlier. He’d sent a girl named Janie Gordon to a lodge party and she’d been raped. Afterwards she committed suicide. Bellew has always felt vaguely guilty although it was an incident that could not have been predicted.

Bellew asks Warne for help. Warne is an insurance investigator with an office across the hall from Bellew’s. Warne does a bit of private detective work. Warne does some checking up on Janie Gordon’s parents. Her father is still alive, he’s very very old and he’s extremely rich. Which is strange because he used to be extremely poor. Warne is convinced that it would be worth finding out where the old boy got all his money.

The old man has a bodyguard, which is also odd. The bodyguard is young, fit, tough and mean. He’s itching for a chance to beat up people like Warne who start nosing around. Warne isn’t too worried. He’s handled punks before. Old dogs tend to know some rather nasty tricks.

What worries Bellew about the letters is that they contain a prediction that what happened to Janie Gordon is about to happen again.

Warne becomes steadily more interested in the case. He also becomes steadily more interested in Bellew’s secretary. He’d never taken much notice of her previously. He hadn’t noticed how attractive she was.

Bellew is worried because he’s about to send another girl to a private party. The party is organised by a club that claims to be a group of patriots but Bellew thinks they’re more interested in naked girls than in saving the country. Bellew isn’t bothered by their hypocrisy. He takes such things for granted in his business. And Candy Carroll knows how to look after herself. Candy has just flown in from Vegas and she’s staying with another stripper, Chickie Anderson.

What happened twenty years earlier doesn’t happen again, not exactly, but something does happen. Now the police are interested. Hard-nosed reporter Fred Robinson is interested as well. He smells a story.

This is not really a hardboiled or a noir story. It’s a straightforward mystery. Warne isn’t your typical tough guy private detective but he’s tough enough. Private detective work is not really his field but he’s a good insurance investigator with an instinct that tells Im when someone is telling him lies. And he figures he’s definitely being lied to.

The plot struck me as being just a little contrived. Hitchens uses a certain method to throw us off the scent and it’s a method about which I have mixed feelings. Is the plot fair-play? I guess it is. The solution works, even with the plot contrivances.

The first of the short stories is If You See This Woman. Junie was brought up in a home for intellectually disabled girls. The girl were taught how to care for babies and were then placed with married couples as cheap live-in nannies. Junie looks after Mr and Mrs Arnold’s year-old baby Petey. One day Junie overhears something which she takes literally, and she then decides that Petey is in danger and that she must save him. If you can accept the slightly far-fetched premise (it’s hard to believe that anyone could take things as literally as Junie does) then it’s an interesting emotionally affecting story which pays off quite nicely.

The second story is Blueprint for Murder. Old Mr Harvod tells his nephew about a murder he committed and the nephew realises he now has a plan for the perfect murder. Quite a clever story.

Strip for Murder isn’t quite a neglected classic of the mystery genre but it’s enjoyable enough, Hitchens writes pretty well and the sleazy background adds interest (although the sleaze quotient is at best moderate). The two short stories are a little offbeat. So this book is worth a look.

F. Van Wyck Mason’s The Shanghai Bund Murders

The Shanghai Bund Murders, published in 1933, is the sixth of F. Van Wyck Mason’s Hugh North spy thrillers.

When Mason wrote the first of his twenty-five Hugh North novels in 1930 spy fiction had been around for quite a while but it was mostly a British affair. The big names of the genre - William Le Queux, E. Phillips OIppenheim, H.C. McNeile (“Sapper”) and John Buchan - were all British. Spies in American fiction were confined to pulp fiction and usually featured in outlandish tales incorporating elements of science fiction or the fantastic, or they were essentially wartime adventure stories. There wasn’t really an American school of true serious spy fiction. Mason was a pioneer.

The next important step in the history of American spy fiction would be the appearance of the first of John P. Marquand’s Mr Moto novels, Your Turn, Mr Moto, in 1936.

Having said all this, Mason’s early Hugh North books are hybrids of a sort - they’re murder mysteries with added espionage elements and espionage backgrounds. As the series progressed the books become more and more true spy stories. And Hugh North is a real spy. A professional spy. He’s a U.S. intelligence officer.

Mason loved exotic settings. In fact it’s hard to think of an exotic locale that North doesn’t visit at some stage during the course of his career.

When reading The Shanghai Bund Murders you have to bear in mind that this was still the Warlord Era in China. Powerful and ruthless warlords had divided the country. Some warlords were ideologically motivated but most were mere opportunists out for power and money. The country was in a constant chaos and wars were continually breaking out.

You also have to remember that this was 1933. The world was not yet divided into rival ideological blocs. In these early Hugh North stories you can’t assume that the Germans or the Japanese will be the bad guys. The bad guys might turn out to be the French. Or the Italians. Or in fact just about any great power.

The Shanghai Bund Murders opens on a British steamer in the Yangtze River. Two warlord armies are fighting it out. Hugh North is in China but at this stage he is not anticipating being involved in any kind of espionage drama or foreign intrigue of any kind.

Two of his fellow passengers attract his attention. One is Sam Steel, an unscrupulous American mercenary in the service of one of the warlords. Steel and North have crossed swords before. The other passenger of interest is Mrs Ruby Braunfeld, a very glamorous Austrian lady. Ruby Braunfeld is a “coaster” - a prostitute plying her trade on the Chinese seaboard. But Ruby Braunfeld is no common prostitute - she is a very high-class very expensive courtesan and she is as charming as she is beautiful. At least four of the men aboard the steamer have already fallen in love with her. She’s obviously going to be worth watching.

And then one of her admirers commits suicide. Only it’s no suicide. The man was murdered. The motive was not robbery. It could be a crime passionnel. Hugh North however knows something about the man that suggests the possibility that espionage or international intrigue could be involved. The murdered man was British and it’s a British steamer but Hugh North also has reason to believe that the interests of the United States could be involved.

North knows that there’s some plot afoot and that it has something to do with the power struggle between three warlords. Various great powers believe that is in their interests for one of the three to come out on top. North has to make sure that whichever warlord wins is going to be one friendly to American interests, and British interests. Britain and the U.S. are colonial rivals but in this case they have decided that they have sufficient interests in common to persuade them to coöperate.

If North is going to foil this nefarious plot he has to find out who is behind it and why. In order to do that he will have to discover who murdered the man on the steamer, so there’s both a murder mystery and a spy thriller plot strand and both plot strands are inextricably linked.

Sam Steel is a suspect, but so is Ruby Braunfeld and so is an enigmatic English tea merchant, and a Chinese gentleman named Chang, and a mysterious Frenchman. And they’re all equally plausible suspects, and there’s no way of knowing what kinds of powerful interest groups could be pulling the strings behind the scenes.

Hugh North is a combination of action hero and clever detective. He uses the standard investigative methods you’d expect from a great detective but he gets involved in lots of rough-and-tumble action as well.

I’ve previously reviewed several other Hugh North spy novels - The Fort Terror Murders, The Singapore Exile Murders, The Budapest Parade Murders and the truly excellent The Branded Spy Murders. I can’t recommend the early Hugh North thrillers too highly - they have a distinctive flavour of their own, Mason uses his exotic settings not just to provide colour but as integral parts of his plots, they’re fast-paced and exciting and they have just a bit more emotional depth than you might expect. He really was a very fine writer.

The Shanghai Bund Murders is intelligent and provocative and it works as both murder mystery and spy novel. It’s also great fun. Highly recommended.

Peter Cheyney's The Urgent Hangman

Peter Cheyney (1896-1951) was an Englishman who had a very successful career writing American-style pulp thrillers, beginning in 1936. Cheyney hadn’t been to America but that didn’t matter. He was familiar with the America of the movies and the pulps and he assumed (correctly) that that was the flavour that readers wanted. He is best remembered for his crime/spy thrillers (such as Dames Don’t Care and Never a Dull Moment) involving FBI agent Lemmy Caution. He also wrote a series of novels dealing with a home-grown pulp creation, private eye Slim Callaghan, set in the seedier sleazier underside of London. The Urgent Hangman, published in 1938, was the first of the Slim Callaghan thrillers.

Slim Callaghan is a private detective and his business is not going well. He has seven-and-sixpence in his pocket and that represents his entire worldly wealth. He owns one pair of shoes and they’re falling apart. He hasn’t eaten all day. And, much more seriously, he has run out of cigarettes.

So his new client arrives just in time (and she arrives very late at night). As a bonus she’s young and gorgeous. Her name is Cynthis Meraulton. She spins him a very unlikely tale. Her very rich stepfather cannot live much longer. His fortune will be divided between Cynthis and the old boy’s five nephews. One of the nephews, Willie, is her husband-to-be. Willie is honest and reliable. His four brothers are penniless losers and probably crooks. Cynthis has been warned that she is in danger and has been advised to consult Slim Callaghan.

On that very night Cynthis’s stepfather is murdered. Cynthis is likely to be a suspect. She did not get on with her stepfather. In fact Slim is sure that she is the murderess. Nonetheless he sets out to prove her with a fake alibi. He later comes to feel that this was a mistake. Not that Slim has any qualms about providing fake alibis - his ethical standards are very very flexible. His reasons for doing so in this case are quite simple. Cynthis is a gorgeous woman.

Of course Cynthis might not be guilty. The four ne’er-do-well Meraulton brothers all had motives for killing the old man as well.

Slim concocts an incredibly elaborate plan to mislead the police. He also blackmails all of the Meraulton brothers and amasses a very tidy sum of money. But what exactly are his intentions? Detective Inspector Gringall isn’t sure. He disapproves of Slim but has a grudging respect for him. Whatever Slim is up to it’s bound to be clever. Not necessarily honest, but clever.

Old man Meraulton had made a new will, leaving everything to Cynthis. That will appears to be the key to the puzzle, and it is, but not in the obvious way.

Slim weaves an intricate web in which not only the various members of the Meraulton family are entangled but also their various mistresses and associates. Detective Inspector Gringall also seems to be caught in the web. Slim has an objective in mind but he is the only one with any idea what that objective might be.

Cheyney’s style is a kind of English hardboiled. It’s very very pulpy but it’s lively and energetic and fun.

Slim is a great character. He’s incredibly devious, he’s ruthless, he has no respect for the law and he may well be no better than a criminal but we can’t help liking him. His total disrespect for all the things that we are supposed to respect is endearing. And he’s a pretty tough guy. He can take a beating and come up smiling.

There’s no shortage of red herrings. Is it fairly clued? Since it’s not a traditional puzzle-plot mystery there’s no reason why the author should play fair but in a way he does. There’s a vital clue that we should spot but Cheyney makes sure that there’s so much going on and that we’re so involved with Slim’s scheming that we probably won’t stop long enough to notice its significance. I don’t think the author can be accused of pulling a solution out of a hat like a conjuror with a rabbit.

The Urgent Hangman has an air of seediness, sleaze, trashiness and cheapness. These are features, not bugs. It’s fine pulpy fun. Highly recommended.

Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (Dive Into Danger)

British diplomat and intelligence agent (and magician) Gordon Philo and his wife Vicky wrote a small number of very underrated mystery thrillers under the pseudonym Charles Forsyte, beginning with Diplomatic Death in 1961. It’s no surprise that several of their books have a diplomatic background, including the excellent Murder with Minarets (published in 1968).

Diving Death (also published as Dive Into Danger) was their second effort, appearing in 1962.

Inspector Richard Left of Special Branch is lazing in the sun in the picturesque little village of Port-St-Pierre in the south of France. Left is having a long-overdue and well-deserved holiday. He runs into Sir Paul Pallett, a very distinguished archaeologist with whom he has a very slight acquaintanceship. Sir Paul casually asks Left if his presence in Port-St-Pierre has anything to do with the Knossos, a luxury yacht currently anchored offshore. The Knossos is owned by a nouveau riche type named Dermot Wilson, a type for whom Sir Paul has nothing but contempt. Wilson is there to conduct underwater archaeology (something else for which Sir Paul has nothing but contempt). He considers Wilson to be a dilettante and a charlatan. Wilson has however attracted some archaeological talent to his expedition - a very able chap named Syce and a youngster named Lockhead.

Sir Paul then springs two surprises on Left. He reveals that he has accepted an invitation to go aboard the Knossos on the following day, and he asks of Left would like to accompany him. Left is, truth be told, growing a little bored with his holiday so he accepts.

On board the Knossos are Wilson, Syce, Lockhead, Wilson’s fiancée Julia Ferrers, his secretary Mary Lawton and a diving master named Marshall. As Left and Sir Paul head towards the yacht in a motor launch Wilson swims out to meet them. Marshall, Lockhead, Julia and Mary are all on a dive, seventy feet down investigating the 2,000-year-old wreck of a Greek trading ship (Syce remains topside as safety man). Wilson then dives down to assist them. Shortly afterwards a body floats to the surface, very dead and with a harpoon through the chest.

Left is well out of his jurisdiction but it will take the French police hours to arrive. Left is very much aware that any delay in beginning a murder investigation could mean that vital evidence will be lost. He assumes (correctly) that the French police will not object if he starts that investigation immediately.

Left will also have to consider two other incidents which could be attempted murders.

Working with a French police detective named Lapointe proves to to be not too unpleasant.

Lapointe comes up with an ingenious solution but Left isn’t happy with it. Left is not the sort of detective who starts theorising as soon as he’s gathered a few facts. He likes to be sure he has all the facts first. The problem he faces here is that when he believes he has all the facts he still can’t come up with a theory that he’s happy with. He starts to think that his facts have to be wrong somewhere, but those facts all seem so clear-cut. He feels that he must have missed something, and that is in fact what has happened.

This is very much a puzzle-plot mystery in the golden age style. The circumstances mean that the murderer must be one of a very very small group of people - it must be someone who was aboard the Knossos. Left has one immediate priority - to establish the time of death. In this case he is able to do almost to the minute. His second priority is the question of alibis. Every one of the suspects appears to have a rock-solid alibi but one of those alibis must be false. The emphasis on timing and alibis, and the skill with which those elements are handled, will bring a warm glow to the heart of any golden age detection fan.

There are plenty of clues including one of the most delightfully outrageous examples I’ve ever encountered.

The underwater setting for the murder is not just interesting and unusual, it’s an essential plot element. Archaeology is also a bit more than just a colourful background to the tale.

There’s also no shortage of possible motives, and this element is also handled extremely well.

I discovered Charles Forsyte through TomCat’s glowing reviews at Beneath the Stains of Time. And Pretty Sinister Books also features a very favourable write-up on this author (or rather authors).

Used copies of the second and fourth Charles Forsyte books, Diving Death and Murder With Minarets, are not too difficult to find. The first and third books, Diplomatic Death and Double Death, are very very rare.

Diving Death compares extremely well to the very best works of the golden age of detective fiction. It really is that good. Very highly recommended.

Robert van Gulik’s The Red Pavilion

The Red Pavilion, published in 1961, is one of Robert van Gulik’s wonderful Judge Dee mysteries. It follows the usual pattern, with Judge Dee investigating three cases at the same time. And this novel includes a locked-room mystery!

Judge Dee had figured in a classic 18th-century Chinese detective novel, Dee Goong An, which van Gulik translated into English as Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. The character of Judge Dee was based on a real 7th century magistrate of the Tang Dynasty. Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee was a major success and van Gulik subsequently wrote a series of modern Judge Dee novels, written partly at least in conformity with the conventions of the 18th-century Chinese detective story.

The Red Pavilion opens with Judge Dee and his faithful reformed-criminal assistant Ma Joong passing through Paradise Island. Paradise Island is an entertainment resort. The entertainment comprises high-stakes gambling and high-class prostitutes. It’s all perfectly legal and while Judge Dee doesn’t personally approve he takes the sensible attitude that prostitution conducted in an orderly manner is overall a benefit to society.

There’s a festival going on and the only accommodation available is the Red Pavilion. It turns out to be most comfortable although the judge is puzzled by the fact that the interior doors haver locks on him. It is explained to him that those who rent the Red Pavilion value their privacy.

The judge encounters a young woman on his verandah. She’s hard to miss. She’s very beautiful and she’s wearing a robe so thin as to be almost transparent. At the moment the robe is wet so it’s entirely transparent and the judge notes that she is wearing nothing whatever underneath the robe. Dee is mildly annoyed until the young woman informs him that she is the current Queen Flower. The Queen Flower is selected from amongst the island’s most celebrated courtesans. It’s not jut an empty honour. It carries great social weight on an island devoted to pleasure. The reigning Queen Flower is not a person one should offend and Dee has great respect for the social conventions. After making sure that Dee has had a really good look at her near-naked body she departs but the judge notices that she seems nervous.

Dee intended to stay just one night on Paradise Island but his old friend Lo, the local magistrate, asks him to take over the investigation of a case of suicide. A young man named Lee, a newly appointed Academician, cut his throat over love for the courtesan Autumn Flower. Autumn Flower turns out to be none other than the Queen Flower Dee has already met. It’s a straightforward case. Young men kill themselves over women all the time. And Autumn Flower is an exceptionally beautiful woman well versed in the art of love so it’s not unreasonable to suppose that she could drive a man to madness and suicide. It all seems very straightforward until Dee makes a horrible discovery in the Red Pavilion. The discovery of this corpse raises serious doubts in Dee’s mind about the supposed suicide of Academician Lee.

Dee is even more concerned to learn that there have in fact been three mysterious deaths in the Red Pavilion. All appeared to be suicides, but Dee now suspects that all three were cases of murder. Dee starts to wonder about a few other things as well, such as the rapid departure of an important local official.

Dee painstakingly constructs fairy satisfactory theories to account for all three deaths, but there’s always at least one clue for which the theories do not account. Those clues simply cannot be accounted for at all. That means that Dee’s theories must be partially, or even completely, wrong.

The three murders are all related in some way but are they directly related? Is there one killer or several? Dee is not sure. And this is a Robert van Gulik Judge Dee mystery, which means it is an attempt to conform party to the conventions of the classic western puzzle-plot mystery and partly to the conventions of Chinese detective stories. The reader cannot be entirely certain that assumptions about the solution based on the conventions of western mysteries will prove to be correct.

There are both physical clues and psychological clues in abundance. Autopsies conducted on two of the victims provide Dee with headaches because they reveal things he expected and things he didn’t expect. The Red Pavilion itself provides some important but deceptive clues.

With van Gulik you also get more than just a mystery. You get some fascinating glimpses into Chinese history, culture and jurisprudence (subjects on which van Gulik was extremely knowledgeable), an occasional aside on the subject of Chinese art (on which van Gulik was an acknowledged authority) and some reflections on love, sex and marriage (and van Gulik wrote an important scholarly work on that subject as well).

In this case you certainly get an intricate plot. There are three locked-room puzzles. Two are childishly simple. The third is much trickier. This book is not really a locked-room mystery in the sense of having a locked-room puzzle as the central element. It does however serve a vital plot purpose. The plotting is quite effective with an ending that probably won’t be at all the sort of ending you’re expecting.

As always Ma Joong provides some entertainment. He falls in love with a courtesan named Silver Fairy but that gets complicated as well. In this novel love and sex make life very complicated. More fun is provided by Crab and Shrimp, two oddly likeable strong-arm men employed by the island’s warden.

This is van Gulik at the top of his game - a good mystery but a novel that offers a bit more than a straightforward mystery. Very highly recommended.

You might also want to check out TomCat’s glowing review at Beneath the Stains of Time.