Showing posts with label Bill Pronzini. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Pronzini. Show all posts
Sunday, May 24, 2026
Bitter Tea and Mystery: Signing up for 20 Books of Summer 2026
Bitter Tea and Mystery: Signing up for 20 Books of Summer 2026: This is my eleventh year of participating in the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge. The event was originally hosted by Cathy at 746Books ...
Wednesday, April 01, 2026
Friday, November 21, 2025
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Bitter Tea and Mystery: Short Story Wednesday: "A Man With a Fortune" by Peter Lovesey
Bitter Tea and Mystery: Short Story Wednesday: "A Man With a Fortune" by ...: Peter Lovesey died on April 10, 2025, at the age of 88. He was a British author who published historical and contemporary mystery novels, f...
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Gravetapping: Review: "To Florida" by Robert Sampson
Gravetapping: Review: "To Florida" by Robert Sampson: “To Florida” by Robert Sampson from Hard-Boiled ed. by Bill Pronzini & Jack Adrian Oxford, 1997 Ro...
Wednesday, January 08, 2025
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Jerry's House of Everything: SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: ATTACK OF THE BANDITO HORDE
Jerry's House of Everything: SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: ATTACK OF THE BANDITO HORDE: "Attack of the Bandito Horde" by "Romer Zane Grey" (house name used this time by Bill Pronzini & Jeffrey N. Wallman;...
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Bitter Tea and Mystery: Short Story Wednesday: Deadly Anniversaries
Bitter Tea and Mystery: Short Story Wednesday: Deadly Anniversaries: Three years ago I purchased Deadly Anniversaries , edited by Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller, so that I could read "Chin Yong-Yun Set...
Wednesday, August 07, 2024
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Monday, October 16, 2023
Beneath the Stains of Time: Bughouse Chess: "The Pawns of Death" (1974) by Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey Wallmann
Beneath the Stains of Time: Bughouse Chess: "The Pawns of Death" (1974) by Bil...: Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey Wallmann's "The Pawns of Death" originally appeared in the August, 1974, issue of the short-lived, ...
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
Friday, August 11, 2023
Beneath the Stains of Time: The Paradise Affair (2021) by Bill Pronzini
Beneath the Stains of Time: The Paradise Affair (2021) by Bill Pronzini: In 2005, Bill Pronzini revived his two historical gumshoes, John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, who sold their professional detective ser...
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
Jerry's House of Everything: SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: THE SCREWIEST JOB IN THE WORLD
Jerry's House of Everything: SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: THE SCREWIEST JOB IN THE W...: "The Screwiest Job in the World" by Bill Pronzini (first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction , September 196...
Friday, August 12, 2022
FFB Review: The Bughouse Affair by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini Reviewed by Barry Ergang
The year is 1894, the city is San Francisco, and Sabina Carpenter and John Quincannon, owners and operators of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, have been partnered for over three years. “When they had met by chance in Silver City, Idaho, he had been an operative of the United States Secret Service investigating a counterfeiting operation, and she had been a Pink Rose, one of the select handful of women employed as investigators by the Pinkerton International Detective Agency, at the time working undercover to expose a pyramid swindle involving mining company stock. Circumstances had led them to join forces to mutually satisfactory conclusions, and resulted in an alliance that had prompted Quincannon” to suggest the business partnership—an equal one—to which Sabina agreed.
In the case
under consideration, Sabina has just been hired by the owner of the Haight
Street Chutes Amusement Park to find and stop the activities of a pickpocket
who has been plaguing the site’s customers. Quincannon, meanwhile, has been
hired by the Great Western Insurance Company to find and stop the activities of
a burglar who has already robbed the homes of three “prominent citizens,” all
of whom are policy-holders. The company suspects that at least three other such
citizens are targets.
When the
detectives manage to identify the objects of their separate pursuits as
pickpocket Clara Wilds and burglar “Dodger” Brown, they wonder if their cases
have somehow converged because Clara and Dodger are known to be—or to have
been—a romantic pairing. But then Sabina finds Clara dead, murdered, and Dodger
immediately becomes a prime suspect.
Complicating the
detectives’ lives, Quincannon’s in particular, is an Englishman who claims to
be Sherlock Holmes. Ambrose Bierce has already surmised in his newspaper column
that the man is an impostor because it is well known that Holmes died three
years earlier in a plummet from a Swiss waterfall. Whether Holmes or not, he
insinuates himself into Quincannon’s investigation, which becomes much more
than the pursuit of Dodger Brown. It evolves into the investigation of an
impossible crime when an attorney, Andrew Costain, requests a meeting with
Quincannon at his home. The latter observes someone breaking into the home: “Up
and over the railing there, briefly silhouetted: the same small figure dressed
in dark cap and clothing. Across to the door, and at work there for just a few
seconds. The door opened, closed again behind the burglar.” When Quincannon and
Holmes, the Englishman having watched the house from a different direction,
enter, they find Andrew Costain dead—both stabbed and shot—in a study whose
doors and windows are locked from the inside. The two of them had previously
taken precautions to effectively seal the house against exit or entry, yet
their quarry managed to evade capture and vanish.
As Holmes, or
pseudo-Holmes, sums up the conundrum to Quincannon: “…You are adept at solving
seemingly impossible crimes. How then did the pannyman manage a double escape?
Why was Andrew Costain shot as well as stabbed? Why was the pistol left in the
locked study and the bloody stiletto taken away? And why was the study door
bolted in the first place? A pretty puzzle, eh, Quincannon? One to challenge
the deductive skills of even the cleverest sleuth.”
Count this
reader as one who easily nailed down the identity of the murderer upon spotting
a particular clue, but who did not come close to solving the locked room/sealed
house aspects of the puzzle. The first in a series about the Carpenter/Quincannon
partnership, this well-paced novel melds an enticing puzzle plot with humor,
picturesque characters, and colorful descriptions, based on the authors’
research, of the San Francisco of the 1900s.
Marcia Muller
and Bill Pronzini are Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award-winners.
The only other married couple to achieve that distinction was Margaret Millar
and Ross Macdonald. As much as I recommend The Bughouse Affair, the meaning of
whose title will become evident not long after one gets into the book, the
authors’ reputations, separate and combined, recommend it far more.
Barry Ergang ©2016,
2022
Among his other works, Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s locked-room novelette, The Play of Light and Shadow, can be found in e-book formats at Smashwords.com and Amazon.com
Friday, June 24, 2022
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