Barry's Reviews--"THE FLOATING LADY MURDER" (Avon, 2000) by Daniel Stashower

THE FLOATING LADY MURDER (Avon, 2000) by Daniel Stashower
reviewed by Barry Ergang



An episode from the second season of Monk titled "Mr. Monk Goes to Mexico" contains a tantalizing premise for fans of impossible crime stories: a young skydiver plunges to his death, which is witnessed by his friends on the ground. An autopsy subsequently reveals that the fall didn't kill him; he drowned, apparently in mid-air.

The episode's moments that dealt with Adrian Monk's obsessive-compulsive behavior were often hilarious, but as a mystery it was huge let-down for a couple of reasons. It didn't play fair with the viewer, and the solution was basically a "cheat" because it concerned events only Monk knew about.

The Floating Lady Murder, the second in Daniel Stashower’s series featuring Harry Houdini and his brother Dash Hardeen as detectives, employs a similar premise. It doesn't play entirely fair with the reader, but the solution doesn't cheat so it's not likely to disappoint him either.

In 1898, Harry Houdini—except in his own mind—has not yet achieved the fame that would later make him known throughout America and abroad. His brother Dash, the story's narrator, though a somewhat accomplished performer himself, serves primarily as Harry's booking agent. Lately he's been unable to secure jobs for Harry and Harry's wife Bess, Houdini's on-stage assistant. Thus, when he reads that Harry Kellar, "the dean of American magicians," is hiring additional crew members for his troupe, Dash suggests that he, Harry and Bess apply. In his vanity, Harry balks at the notion until Dash and Bess persuade him of the wisdom of it.

They are hired, and soon learn that Kellar is determined to debut his Floating Lady levitation when the touring company returns to New York City from Albany. The illusion was conceived years earlier by Kellar's mentor, The Wizard of Kalliffa (a.k.a. Duncan MacGregor). Levitation was common among magicians, but this one was to be spectacular in that the person levitated would float out over the stage and high above the audience. MacGregor's wife, assisting her husband by taking the role of the Floating Lady, fell to her death from a great height when the illusion failed. In tribute to the MacGregors, Kellar wants to perform the illusion on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mrs. MacGregor's passing. He has only a matter of days to refine it. Working with the Great Man and his stage crew, Harry and Dash devise an effective means of doing so, receiving Kellar's ecstatic gratitude.

The performance has every member of the troupe holding his breath as the beautiful Francesca Moore seemingly levitates high up into the theater's dome, "borne aloft by the hypnotic force of animal magnetism." The audience is enchanted. But then something goes horribly wrong, and Francesca Moore plummets seventy-two feet to her death.

It seems a terrible accident until, during an autopsy, it's learned that Miss Moore's death resulted from drowning, apparently—and impossibly—in mid-air. When one of the stagehands, Jim Collins, is arrested for murder, Harry and Dash are determined to prove his innocence and uncover the real murderer. This they do when Kellar and a rival magician, Servais Le Roy, team up to perform the illusion once again, putting Bess and Harry's lives in peril.

Stashower does an excellent job of bringing the era to life while serving up a well-paced story that's loaded with action, suspense, a great puzzle, and a lot of humor. Dash Hardeen is not a vacuous Watson who marvels at his brother's brilliance. He, in fact, is the brainier of the two. Harry provides the brawn, as well as unchecked egotism that spawns some wonderful comic moments.

Recommended without reservations.

For more on this novel and the Golden Age of Detection follow the link http://tinyurl.com/24dukc


Barry Ergang © 2007
Currently the Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E, winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. For links to material available online, see Barry’s webpages.

Small Caliber Review--"Red Cat"

"Red Cat" is the third novel of the John March series and he finds himself with an unlikely client. This time it is his brother David who comes to him out of sheer desperation. David has been involved in what he thought was a no strings affair but things have turned out not the way he wanted at all. The woman he knows as Wren seems to know everything about him and seems to be stalking him. He wants John to do what he does best—start turning over rocks and find where she crawled out from. John agrees and once again Author Peter Spiegelman crafts another tale that is part crime and part study of the human mind. Another good read that works best if you have read the series in order. Begin with "Black Maps" and follow with the second book known as "Death's Little Helpers." You won't be sorry.

This "Small Caliber Review" previously appeared at in the summer 2007 edition of Mouth Full Of Bullets found at http://mouthfullofbullets.com/ For your ease of ordering I have added the Amazon links for the other two titles which I heartily recommend.






Kevin R. Tipple (c) 2007

Contest News courtesy of Tony Burton

In case you have not read about the contest, I am taking the liberty of posting a message from Tony Burton that he has posted on a couple of the lists.

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If any of you are also short-story writers and would like to take a shot at some nice prizes (including $125 for first place), go by and check out the Homecoming Writing Contest on the Crime and Suspense ezine web site. Even third place gets a $25 Amazon gift certificate!

The deadline for entry, however, is November 15th.

Hurry, hurry, hurry!

http://www.crimeandsuspense.com

Tony BurtonEditor, Crime and Suspense
tburton@crimeandsuspense.com

http://www.crimeandsuspense.com

Reviewing: "The One Minute Assassin" by Troy Cook

The One Minute Assassin: A Novel
By Troy Cook
http://www.troycook.net/
Capital Crimes Press
http://capitalcrimepress.com/
ISBN #978-0-9776276-4-6
September 2007
Large Trade Paperback
287 Pages
List Price $14.95



Good help is hard to find and that is certainly true in this case. Barry and Nails have a very simple task. They are to eliminate one by one the strongest competition in the latest chaotic governor's race in California. It would be nice if they made the deaths look like accidents. And maybe the first one does as people do, on occasion, fall out of windows.

Though they rarely happen to be so lucky as to face plant into their own star on the sidewalk of the Walk of Fame. Still, it could happen.

Things begin to go seriously haywire for Barry and Nails when they target Eleanor, the sister of John Black. John Black, part of a powerful political family and yet has zero interest in politics, an affinity for telling others not only what to do but also how to do it, and an independent streak that rubs many the wrong way including his own mother affectionately named "The Barracuda." Once he was a private investigator and now what he does is a bit shadowy but clearly results oriented. He, along with his Australian by birth partner and mentor, Harry are used to working cases and achieving justice in unconventional ways. The attempted hit on his sister which puts her near death in the hospital just days before Election Day where she probably would win makes it clear to him that he has to deal with the twin bedfellows of crime and politics. Is there any surprise that the Russian Mafia is also involved?

In what could easily be the start of an entertaining new series, author Troy Cook has surpassed his debut novel "47 Rules of Highly Effective Bank Robbers." That novel was a funny twisted read and there remains no doubt why it was highly successful and won numerous awards.

It was good. If you haven't read it—you should. Immediately.

The same is true here in a novel that is completely different and at the same time has so much in common with the first book. Once again, the killers are dysfunction at best. Nails, somewhere around 400 pounds with very bad knees, is an unwitting human guinea pig for a pharmaceutical company and a severe eye twitch when he becomes agitated. All involved soon learn to watch for the eye twitch.

Then, there is Barry, a skinny white man who constantly argues that there should be a union for killers. If they could become unionized they could make sure to get decent pay and benefits.

With these two at work, it is no wonder why John Black constantly wonders what is going on as there really doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to their actions. He would also like to know how Harry can not only change the ring tone on John's cell phone to anything he wants leading to frequent embarrassment, but how he does it?

While not nearly as funny as the first novel, author Troy Cook routinely uses humor as a weapon. A weapon often aimed at politics and politicians and a weapon that always hits its target. Which is much better than a certain rapper in the story who just can't live up to his own myth.

The result is a highly entertaining read that is part mystery, part comedy, and all good from start to finish. It features unique characters, often witty dialogue, and plenty of action that is never slowed down by the numerous observations of the American political system and California politics. The result is a very good read well worth your time.

Kevin R. Tipple © 2007

Barry's Reviews---"Double In Trouble"

DOUBLE IN TROUBLE (Fawcett, 1959) by Richard S. Prather & Stephen Marlowe

reviewed by Barry Ergang

Richard S. Prather's Shell Scott and Stephen Marlowe's Chester Drum were two of the most popular private detectives in Fawcett's Gold Medal line of paperback originals. The writers had an agent in common who suggested that his clients team up their sleuths, and so Double in Trouble was born. (For additional information, see the reminiscence by Stephen Marlowe at Ed Gorman's blog.)

The story begins with Scott in Los Angeles, hired by Alexis Frost to find her missing father. Gideon Frost is scheduled to testify in Washington before the Senate committee chaired by Senator Blair Hartsell, a committee which has been investigating corruption in labor-management relations and which has recently targeted the very corrupt National Brotherhood of Truckers union. Shortly thereafter, one of Scott's best friends and a dues-paying member of the union is murdered.

Later that same day, in Washington, D.C., Drum thwarts the attempted kidnapping of a woman who won't tell him her name. The incident eventually thrusts him into the investigation of the National Brotherhood of Truckers, too—as a special operative for the Hartsell Committee.

Each detective, working his side of the country, learns that the other is involved. Each knows of the other by reputation. But as events unfold, each begins to suspect the other of being in league with the enemy. At the same time Scott's investigation takes him to Washington, Drum's takes him to L.A. Eventually, of course, they meet face to face—or collide, as the book's cover blurb accurately terms it—when their separate but intimately related cases converge for some surprise revelations and the (literal) sock finish.

I first read Double in Trouble when I was in my teens, which means more than forty years ago. I had read nearly all of the Shell Scott novels and short story collections that had by then been published (and continued to read them as new ones appeared), and quite a few of the Chester Drum novels (and have read quite a few more, purchased on e-Bay, in recent adulthood). Liking both in different ways, when I acquired a copy of Double in Trouble, I was filled with what Shell Scott describes in it as a "joyously anticipatory emotion." After I read it, I felt as Scott subsequently did: "My joyously anticipatory emotion was all shot to hell."

Rereading it after all these years, I have a better idea why. Marlowe was a better "pure" writer than Prather, with a stronger sense of character and place. Though his cases were vastly different, usually taking him out of the country, Chester Drum's style and manner were clearly influenced by Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. (I've long wondered if Drum's creator, who was born Milton Lesser and who legally changed his name to Stephen Marlowe, did so specifically because of Chandler's influence.) At the opposite extreme, Prather was a master of comical circumstance and prose style. Shell Scott could be as hardboiled as Mike Hammer—but with a wacky sense of humor and a lighthearted lecherousness that would appeal to most male readers, regardless of how "liberated" they were. Scott's most entertaining cases put him in outlandish situations—see, for example, Strip for Murder and Dance With the Dead.

It's this clash of styles and approaches that weakens Double in Trouble, that militates against Prather more than Marlowe because the storyline doesn't permit the kind of zaniness the reader expects and wants from Prather.

Additionally, because the book alternates chapters told by each detective, it's hard to keep track of the details of the case, who's trying to do what to whom. In spite of this, it's readable and loaded with enough action to fill a year's worth of pulp magazines, so eventually you quit worrying about the details and just rocket along for the ride.

For more on this novel and others created during the Golden Age of Detection follow the link to http://gadetection.pbwiki.com/ where you can search by author and/or title.



Barry Ergang © 2007

Currently the Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E, winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. For links to material available online, see Barry’s webpages.

Barry's Reviews--"THE HOUDINI SPECTER" (Avon, 2001) by Daniel Stashower

THE HOUDINI SPECTER (Avon, 2001) by Daniel Stashower
reviewed by Barry Ergang



According to an inside-cover blurb, Harry Houdini has appeared as a character in a number of crime novels over the years. That may be, but I've only seen him referred to as a magician and escape artist in stories featuring impossible crimes, not as an active character. When I ran across a copy of The Houdini Specter and saw that it dealt with Harry Houdini solving a seemingly impossible crime, I had to read it.

I'm glad I did. It's an entertaining read.

Narrated by Houdini's brother, Dash Hardeen, who is both a magician and Harry's booking agent, the story takes place in New York in 1898. Houdini has yet to attain the success and fame he would in the future, although to hear him tell it, he's famous all over the world. Compared with his ego, Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe, and Sir Henry Merrivale are paragons of humility.

A newspaperman named Biggs, a longtime friend of Dash's, introduces the brothers (whose real last name is Weiss) to his old friend Kenneth Clairmont. Clairmont is the son of the late Jasper Clairmont, the shipping magnate who apparently took his own life by shooting himself in his locked, private study. Kenneth's mother, Augusta Clairmont, has since become enchanted with and by a spiritualist named Lucius Craig, whom she has taken into the family home as her guest, along with Craig's young daughter Lila. Certain that Craig is a charlatan and confidence man out to take advantage of his mother's hospitality and wealth, Kenneth enlists the aid of Harry and Dash to expose him.

At the Clairmont home, in addition to Craig and Mrs. Clairmont, Harry and Dash meet Edgar Grange, the family lawyer; Dr. Wells, Augusta's physician; and Sterling Foster, Mrs. Clairmont's drunken brother. After a sumptuous dinner, the party adjourns to a room Craig has decked out as a "seance chamber." Once everyone is seated around a table, Craig goes into his act, which apparently includes clairvoyance. Harry, unable to restrain himself, proceeds to demonstrate how it's done. Craig indignantly insists that Houdini knows nothing of the spirit world, and Mrs. Clairmont takes his side. Grange and Wells align themselves with Houdini both as disbelievers and as potential suitors for the wealthy widow.

Unruffled and undeterred, Craig plunges on into the seance. To prove the veracity of his spiritualism, he invites Houdini to tie his hands to the arms of the chair in which he is sitting. Harry, master of escapes, trusses him so as to render impossible the chance of Craig's freeing himself. The room goes dark, and eventually everyone seated at the table, their hands and feet touching so as not to break "the spirit circle" necessary to invoke manifestations from the other side, witnesses the frightening spectacle of a green "glowing apparition" brandishing a knife. Is this the ghost of Jasper Clairmont? Both Harry and Dash leap from their seats to grapple with it as Kenneth calls for light. Harry and Dash collide with one another, the lights come on, and Edgar Grange, gasping, "Jasper!" slumps forward in his seat, a knife in his back.

The door to the room was locked before the seance began. It is subsequently determined that the windows were fastened, too. Unless a ghost committed the murder of Edgar Grange, one of the seven remaining people clustered around the table must have done it. But how—since their hands and feet were touching?

Daniel Stashower is to be commended. Harry Houdini is not portrayed as the infallable, dignified detective. His brother Dash is not portrayed as the idolatrous but otherwise inept Watson. (In fact, in this book, at least, Dash does more to arrive at a solution—and a somewhat startling one at that, given its motivation—than does Harry.)

If I have any complaint, it's that the book is not a strictly fair-play whodunit/howdunit by Golden Age standards. Nevertheless, it's such delightful and fast-paced reading that I can highly recommend it. It's the third in a series that includes The Dime Museum Murders and The Floating Lady Murder, both of which I intend to track down.

For more on the Golden Age of Detection http://gadetection.pbwiki.com/

Barry Ergang © 2007

Currently the Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E, winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. For links to material available online, see Barry’s webpages.

A SENIOR NEWS Update

As many of you know, I have the pleasure of writing a book review column for the SENIOR NEWS newspaper distributed across Texas. For those of you who were unable to find a copy or live out of Texas, I thought I would show you want I did last month.

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Touched By Darkness
By Catherine Spangler
Berkley Sensation
ISBN # 978-0-425-21400



Atlantis existed thousands of years ago before being destroyed and sinking into the North Atlantic due to a climatic battle between good and evil. The legacy of Atlantis lives on today envisioned by Richardson, Texas Author Catherine Spangler as the backdrop for her new paranormal romance series.

Simplifying greatly, seven years ago, Kara's Sentinel lover Richard Wayman was killed in a violent confrontation with a Belian. His death left her alone to care for their unborn child, Alex. Haunted by the terror of what happened she moved constantly until she finally stopped running at the small Texas town of Zorro where she resumed her medical practice.

But now, the past is back in the form of a powerful Sentinel, Damien Morgan who is trying to track another Belian killer. Not only will he need Kara's help, he will have to protect her young son as well because as an untrained Sentinel he is broadcasting his presence and is surely going to draw the evil to him. Kara is torn between her desire to run again, the memories of a man she once loved more than anything else, the romantic lure Damien represents, and the danger her young son faces. Gradually, she realizes that this time she has to stand and fight with Damien.

With interesting characters, the occasional plot twist, and plenty of romance this is a very good novel that delivers a strong read within the genre.


East Texas Garden Of Verses
By Carolyn Cochran
WordWright.biz, Inc.
ISBN # 1-932196-88-9




Through entertaining poetry, short slice of life memory stories, family pictures and illustrations by Joe Tomlinson, Author Carolyn Cochran recounts part of her life growing up in East Texas. From the years 1934 to1946 she lived in Tyler, Texas and those memories and experiences are the foundation of the book. This inspiring book of memories came about due to her creative writing efforts at Richland College in Dallas, Texas. The short book at 50 pages takes readers back to the way it was for Carolyn Cochran. Sure to please not only folks who remember the way things were in Texas small towns, it is also sure to please those looking to read about a seemingly simpler time and way of life.

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In the November 2007 edition available now, I went with politics since the topic is on the minds of so many. This month I reviewed "Barbara Jordan: Speaking the Truth with Eloquent Thunder" which was edited edited by Max Sherman and "Texas Political Memorabilia: Buttons, Bumper Stickers and Broadsides" written by Chuck Bailey with Bill Crawford. Hope you find a copy at your local newsstand, grocery store, doctor's waiting room, etc. But, if not, I will post the column next month so you don't miss out totally.

And if you have a suggestion for what I should review for SENIOR NEWS (remember it has to be a Texas based book in setting or author or something that could fit the over fifty demographic) please drop me a note here or at kevin_tipple@att.net


Kevin R. Tipple © 2007

Barry's Reviews--"Dead Famous" (2001) by Ben Elton

Dead Famous (2001) by Ben Elton
reviewed by Barry Ergang




One of the first and most popular of the so-called "reality TV" shows, "Big Brother" should begin its latest season shortly. Whether you've seen it or only read about it, you probably know the premise: a group of people are confined to a house for several months, isolated from the outside world, their every activity and interaction monitored by cameras and microphones twenty-four hours a day. One by one the housemates are evicted by their fellows until only two remain. The evicted housemates vote to determine the winner, who receives half a million dollars. The runner-up comes away with fifty thousand.

Apart from the prospect of emerging with a lot of money, why do the contestants put themselves through this? They may offer a variety of reasons, but the reality is they crave the instant, if dubious, fame being seen on a nationally or internationally broadcast program brings.

Why would a network (CBS, in "Big Brother's" case) broadcast this kind of program? Because there's an audience for it to whom they can transmit advertisements which in turn pay the network's revenues. The programs that make it to the air are of course carefully edited for their "dramatic" value. Fanatical viewers can pay their subscription money to watch everything, including the mundane moments, via Internet feeds.

This is the basis for Ben Elton's clever satirical whodunit Dead Famous. The program is "House Arrest," brought to an English audience by Peeping Tom Productions, the company owned by the calculating Geraldine Hennessey, also known as "Geraldine the Gaoler."

A diverse group of ten men and women, all relatively young and, with one notable exception, fairly attractive, are confined to the "House Arrest" house under the constant surveillance of Peeping Tom. Friendships and enmities quickly develop as the housemates are assigned tasks by Peeping Tom to earn their weekly share of food and drink. Having no television to watch or books to read, the rest of their time is spent in group and individual interaction. Geraldine, ever alert for "good telly," hopes sexual liasons will ensue, and has done her best to provide for them.

Twenty-seven days later, after the first eviction and the arrest—which stands in lieu of an eviction—of another housemate for a past crime, someone (the reader doesn't learn who until two-thirds of the way through the book) is brutally murdered by person unknown. Given all of the cameras and microphones covering every inch of the house, it can't have happened—but it has.

Thus, an "impossible" murder in a "locked house."

Old-school, often splenetic Chief Inspector Stanley Spencer Coleridge and his team are compelled to wade through unedited, unaired videotapes, hoping to find a motive or a clue. The reader is a party to their investigations as well as to what goes on in the house, the editing suite, and in the minds of the book's characters.

Eventually Coleridge discovers the solution to the fairly-clued puzzle and reveals it in grand fashion.

Ben Elton's crisp prose moves the reader swiftly through the story, which includes some good comic moments as well as suspenseful ones. Dead Famous works very well as a detective story and as a satirical take on our modern culture's inexplicable taste for fabricated fame. I recommend the book with the warning that readers who find raw, rampant profanity and graphic sexual depictions offensive will want to avoid it.

Barry Ergang (c) 2007
Currently the Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E, winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. For links to material available online, see Barry’s webpages.

Barry's Reviews: "Elephants in the Distance" (1989) by Daniel Stashower

Elephants in the Distance (1989) by Daniel Stashower
reviewed by Barry Ergang



Published in 1989, this was Daniel Stashower's second mystery novel. Not an entry in his Harry Houdini series, Elephants in the Distance takes place in the present day. Like the Houdini series, however, this one features illusionists and magicians—several, in fact.

The book opens with a third-person prologue in which an aging professional magician, Josef Schneider, is performing at a child's birthday party. For many years he had been a headliner in theaters in Europe and the United States, during the heyday of the great magic acts which included Blackstone, Kellar, and Thurston. Mourning that era's passing, Schneider nevertheless continues to practice his arts on a vastly smaller, less glamorous scale. While blowing up balloons and shaping them into animals for the children, Schneider begins to feel ill. Ultimately he collapses of dies of an apparent heart attack.

Beginning with chapter one, the story is related in the first-person by Paul Galliard, son of the late Thomas Galliard, a magician who died while trying to perform the dangerous "bullet-catch." Paul, a history professor who gave up teaching while in the midst of writing his doctoral dissertation to become a professional magician himself, learned his craft from Schneider—a friend of his father's—who began to mentor him when Paul was eleven. After Schneider dies, Paul inherits his prop case.

One afternoon at a TV studio, where Paul is shooting a commercial for a product called "Stain Begone," he takes a break between takes to have coffee with the woman he's been seeing for several months, Clara Bidwell. Their conversation is interrupted by the appearance of Paul's boss and his young son. To entertain the boy, Paul begins to do some card tricks and to teach him a little about how they're done. The boy really wants Paul to "make a balloon" for him. They walk back to the studio where Paul takes some balloons from Schneider's prop case, blows them up, and begins to shape them into animal forms. A few minutes later he goes into convulsions and collapses, awakening in a hospital.

Recalling that Schneider died while doing exactly what he did, Paul examines the pump in the prop case. It has clearly been tampered with, which means Schneider had to orally inflate the balloons. Paul takes a handful of the balloons to a friend of his from his teaching days who works in a research lab at the college. She subsequently determines that the nozzles of the balloons were coated with a drug called isoproterenol, which is typically used to treat bronchial spasms and which also contains a cardiac stimulant. Paul is now certain that Schneider's death was not from natural causes, and that he himself, being much younger and healthier, was lucky to have suffered only a seizure.

I don't want to give too much more of the story away here, lest I spoil it for potential readers, because it contains quite a few surprises, some of which date back to World War II. Suffice it to say that Paul's investigation leads to further attempts on his life and to a couple of additional corpses before the murderer is unmasked—when Paul, in an exciting climax, undertakes to recreate the bullet-catch trick for a nostalgic TV special.

Elephants in the Distance, a brisk, fairly-clued mystery, should appeal to readers who enjoy the Great Merlini mysteries of Clayton Rawson. Although his plot is less complex than those in Rawson's novels, Stashower's sense of pace is better, his style leavened with dry wit, his hero more believable than Merlini because he's more fallible.

If you can find a copy, this one is well worth your time.

For more on the Golden Age http://gadetection.pbwiki.com/ and for more on this novel see also
http://www.stashower.com/


Barry Ergang © 2007
Currently the Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E, winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. For links to material available online, see Barry’s webpages

My Good News

In addition to my story "Visions of Reality" which is currently available to subscribers of the Crime and Suspense zine at http://crimeandsuspense.com/ I have had a little more recent success. This announcement was posted online yesterday:

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In addition to the winners of Mysterical-E' s Skeletons in the Closet contest, there were Honorable mentions this time around and they are:

FIESTA by Steven Torres
SOUTHERN EXPOSURE by Charles Schaeffer
TWO OF US by Victor Banis
BURNING QUESTIONS by Kevin Tipple

Needless to say I am very pleased and honored by the company I am part of. Shocked and amazed also come to mind. I am told by Editor Joe Demarco that the story will be published in a future edition. Which issue it will appear in I do not know at this time. I will shout it out long and loud once I am told. In the meantime, check it out at http://www.mystericale.com/


Kevin R. Tipple © 2007

Barry's Reviews--"Instruments of Night" (1998) by Thomas H. Cook

Instruments of Night (1998) by Thomas H. Cook
reviewed by Barry Ergang



Novelist Paul Graves is a man literally haunted by his past. The ghosts of one grim and brutal night invade his thoughts daily, summoned or unbidden, and lend their power to his books.

Raised on a small farm in North Carolina, Graves was already an imaginative young man who had taken a liking to writing when his parents were killed in a car accident. Paul was twelve and his sister Gwen was sixteen. The two continued to live on the farm for about a year until the night Gwen was tortured and eventually slain by a sadist named Kessler and his tremulous sidekick Sykes. Forced to witness his sister's agonies, Paul retreated into a long silence.

In the story's present, a forty-five-year-old Graves lives a life of self-imposed relative seclusion in New York City. He's the author of a popular series of novels set in that city at the end of the 19th Century. They feature a detective named Slovak who, much like Sir Denis Nayland Smith chasing after Dr. Fu Manchu, pursues the bloodthirsty Kessler and the slavish Sykes from murder to murder, aging and wearying in the process—much as his creator has aged and wearied and considered self-extinction.

Graves is invited to Riverwood, an estate in the Hudson Valley that remains a family home and also an artists' colony, by wealthy Allison Davies, who grew up there and who has never left. She offers him an odd commission: look into the fifty-year-old murder of her closest friend Faye Harrison, who was killed at the age of sixteen, and write a story about it that will satisfy Faye's dying mother about who killed her daughter. The story needn't be true, only plausible.

Reluctant at first, Graves finally accepts the job and takes up residence at Riverwood, where he's given access to all of the information about Faye's death, including the detailed reports by the investigating police detective, Dennis Portman. He is joined by Eleanor Stern, a playwright, who is quite possibly more intrigued by the project than Graves is.

What might seem like a dry historical probe is rendered dramatic by Graves's vivid imagination. He visualizes the players and the scenes they enact so as to carry the reader into the moments Portman's summaries only sketch. His investigations lead to revelations about Riverwood and its denizens in that long-ago time, and about Graves's own past.

I should add, for Golden Age fans, that although Instruments of Night is very much a psychological thriller, it's also a fairly-clued mystery. The key clue is extremely subtle and easily overlooked.

I discovered Edgar Allan Poe in early adolescence, William Faulkner in my late teens. What struck me about both of their prose styles was the quality of envelopment: you might be sitting in a riotous, crowded stadium during the Super Bowl or the World Series, but if you were reading one of their stories, you'd feel as though you were alone in inky blackness, aswirl in the story's events. Thomas H. Cook—at least in this novel, the first of his I've read—conveys that same envelopment.

So why am I torn about this book?

It's very well-written, Cook's prose often lyrical. The characters are properly fleshed-out, the pacing spot-on, and the suspense carefully built and sustained.

But its tone is unremittingly dark. In short stories like Poe's, where uniformity of tone was a goal, that quality is tolerable. Many of Faulkner's darker novels were occasionally relieved by moments of levity. Not so Instruments of Night. Cook sometimes overdoes Graves's recollections of his own horrors. Thus, compelling as the storyline is, I found it hard to sustain long periods of reading. I can't recall ever having read anything darker: not Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury, or Light in August. Nor Bernard Malamud's The Fixer. Not even Elie Wiesel's Night.

With that caveat in place, I can recommend Instruments of Night as worth your time.

For more on the Golden Age follow the link http://gadetection.pbwiki.com/


Barry Ergang © 2007
Currently the Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E, winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. For links to material available online, see Barry’s webpages

Barry's Reviews---"Oh, Murderer Mine"

OH, MURDERER MINE (1946) by Norbert Davis
reprinted in 2003 by The Rue Morgue Press
reviewed by Barry Ergang



In the course of an arduous trek through Mignon G. Eberhart's Next of Kin, I took a break and tore through this little gem, the third and—alas!—final novel about the unlikely team of Doan and Carstairs (the other two are The Mouse in the Mountain and Sally's in the Alley). Doan is a chubby, pleasant-faced private detective; Carstairs is the regal, haughty Great Dane he won in a crap game and who disapproves of him.

Doan is hired by 54-year-old cosmetics magnate Heloise of Hollywood to bodyguard her husband, 26-year-old meteorologist Eric Trent—a.k.a. "Handsome Lover Boy" in Heloise's magazine ads. Heloise, though still quite attractive herself, is afraid younger women will hit on Eric and wants Doan to supply the necessary discouragement.

Things get going when Melissa Gregory, an anthropology instructor at Breckenbridge University, is incensed by Trent's usurpation of her office, as sanctioned by T. Ballard Bestwyck, the university president. She confronts Trent about it, but her impetrations have no effect. Trent is arrogant and stubborn. Melissa learns he might even be taking over the apartment she maintains on campus.

That night, Melissa returns home after a date with assistant English professor Frank Ames to find an intruder in her apartment. The intruder knocks her out and flees, but not before Melissa has had time to scream. Hearing her, Doan and Carstairs investigate, and in the course of their pursuit, Doan is shot at and barely missed by the assailant. He subsequently discovers Frank Ames's body in a trash can. Ames's throat has been sliced open.

It's only the beginning. More bodies remain to be discovered before Doan wraps things up. I won't to go on—the book is only 128 pages long—except to say that the chapter in which Carstairs runs amuck in Heloise's salon is worth the price of the book. I recommend this one and its predecessors, along with the out-of-print The Adventures of Max Latin from The Mysterious Press (five novelettes originally published in Dime Detective), as wonderful examples of the screwball comedy school of mystery a la Jonathan Latimer and Craig Rice. Forget about realism, thematic explorations, or character depth—although some of Davis's characters are memorably wacky. This is storytelling as pure entertainment. Davis could and did write stories as hardboiled as those of Dashiell Hammett, Frederick Nebel, and Raymond Chandler, but his best work features an off-the-wall comic perspective on the tough detective story. I'm looking forward to the forthcoming Crippen & Landru collection.

For more on Norbert Davis, see http://www.blackmaskmagazine.com/norbertdavis.html

For more information on the Golden Age of Detection and on this book in particular follow the link http://gadetection.pbwiki.com/Oh,+Murderer+Mine

Barry Ergang © 2007

Currently the Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E, winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. For links to material available online, see Barry’s webpages

Barry's Reviews: "Case of the Vanishing Beauty"

Case of the Vanishing Beauty (1950) by Richard S. Prather

reviewed by Barry Ergang

Released in 1950, Case of the Vanishing Beauty was Richard S. Prather's first published novel but the second one he wrote. The first, The Maddern Caper, was subsequently published under the pseudonym David Knight but retitled Pattern for Murder. Still later it was retitled The Scrambled Yeggs and published under Prather's own name. (All of this is explained by Prather in an interview conducted by Linda Pendleton.)

Vanishing Beauty begins when private detective Shell Scott is hired by Georgia Martin to find her missing sister Tracy. She also insists that Scott accompany her to a less-than-respectable L.A. nightclub called El Cuchillo (Spanish for "the knife"), but beyond saying she might need his protection, she won't tell him why.

At El Cuchillo, Scott and Georgia watch the feature act: the knife-throwing Miguel Mercado and his beautiful assistant/target Lina Royale. After Scott has an altercation with Mercado, he meets the club's owner, the equally repellent Maggie Remorse.

When he and Georgia leave the club, they're tailed by someone in another car who's not reluctant about shooting at them. Scott fires back and the shooter takes off. But Georgia has been fatally wounded. She's able to say "I killed...Narda" before she dies.

Determined to see the case through despite—and because—of the loss of his client, but with very little to go on, Scott talks to his friend Captain Phil Samson, head of L.A. Homicide. When he mentions Narda, Samson tells him a man by that name is the head of a religious cult called the Inner World Society of Truth Believers.

Scott returns to El Cuchillo and later tails Miguel Mercado, who practically leads him to the IW's door. It seems pretty clear the cult is somehow involved in the events that led to Georgia Martin's murder and the disappearance of her sister. Consequently, Scott attends a service, pretending to be a philanthropic sort and using the name Francis Joyne. Narda, he discovers, is very much alive.

As events unfold, Scott eventually finds and rescues Tracy, but there are still multiple mysteries to be solved—among them why Georgia was killed and how Narda, the IW, Miguel Mercado, Maggie Remorse, and twin gunmen Peter and Paul Seipel fit into the picture. Solve them Scott does, of course, and in a fairly-clued manner, with plenty of physical action in the process.

I first read Case of the Vanishing Beauty when I was in my teens—more than forty years ago—so apart from recalling that Scott's term of endearment for Lina was "pepper pot," I had no recollection of the story during my rereading. But when I was a teenager, I didn't read the early Scott novels in order of publication—gave no thought to doing so—I read them in whatever order my father or I purchased them or as the whim took me. I mention this only because, remembering certain things about the series even after all these years, Vanishing Beauty has some of the earmarks of an early series novel in the way it establishes scenes, descriptions, and authorial tendencies that will recur in later books. Among the latter is Prather's habit of having first-person narrator Scott tell the reader at some point during his cerebrations that there's something tickling at his unconscious which, if he could only pull it out, would completely elucidate and solve the case at hand. The technique serves the dual purpose of offering a challenge to the reader, letting him know that he now has all the information Scott has and can solve the mystery himself if he can put all the pieces together; and allowing the author to protract the action and suspense so he can build to a "sock finish."

There have been many Shell Scott novels with sock finishes. Case of the Vanishing Beauty is not one of them. Oh, it's satisfying as far as wrapping up the mystery is concerned, but it doesn't have the wild action and comedy Prather became famous for in later works. Nevertheless, it's a long way from the weakest in the series, and stands up as a fast-paced piece of entertainment.


For more on the Golden Age of Detection as well as about this book follow the link
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Barry Ergang © 2007

Currently the Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E, winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. For links to material available online, see Barry’s webpages

Barry's Reviews--"Pattern For Panic"

PATTERN FOR PANIC (Fawcett, 1954) by Richard S. Prather

reviewed by Barry Ergang

Prather's thirteenth novel, and the twelfth in the Shell Scott series, Pattern for Panic was first published in 1954 and "specially revised by the author" in 1961. The latter is the version I just reread for the first time in roughly forty years—a nostalgic revisit to the work of a writer I've long enjoyed, and who passed away on February 16, 2007.

L.A. private eye Shell Scott is summoned to Mexico by his old friend Amador Montalba with the promise of a high-paying job of considerable urgency. The much younger, somewhat round-heeled wife of prominent General Lopez is being blackmailed, the blackmailer having obtained an incriminating film of one of her trysts he's threatened to make known to her husband. General Lopez is well-known in the U.S. as well as Mexico for his anti-Communist efforts.

Not long after Scott arrives, he meets Dr. Jerrold Buffington, his lovely daughter Susan (better known as Buff), and their beautiful friend Monique Durand. Dr. Buffington is in Mexico to address a meeting of the International Legion for Peace.

Buffington is a research scientist seeking an anti-polio vaccine more effective than Salk's, his wife having died from the disease despite three injections of the Salk formula. One of his experiments resulted in a deadly serum which, if it fell into the wrong hands, could become a potent biochemical weapon. A pacifist, Buffington destroyed the serum and all of his notes pertaining to it to prevent anyone from obtaining it.

Scott's pleasant evening of drinks and dinner with Buffington and the ladies is abruptly curtailed when a man unknown to any of them offers to buy Buff a drink. She declines, he persists, and Scott tells him to go away. This doesn't sit well with the man, and he invites Scott outside to settle it. The two get into a brawl, and suddenly the police appear, pummel Scott, and drag him off to jail—but not before he knocks out the front teeth of Captain of Police Emilio who, as you might imagine, is a man who holds a grudge.

Amador, however, prevails on Señora Lopez to bail out Scott. This she does, and Scott soon after begins his quest to recover the incriminating film before General Lopez has a chance to see it. This requires him to gain entry to a fancy whorehouse where the screening will take place, and to snatch the film off the projector in the presence of the general and his associates without being identified.

The mission accomplished, Scott delivers the film to Señora Lopez. He's concerned about the welfare of Dr. Buffington, his daughter, and Monique, but has trouble resisting the allure of the seductive señora. His resistance returns tenfold when General Lopez comes home unexpectedly early.

Matters quickly become more complicated when Scott can't locate either Dr. Buffington or his daughter, and it soon becomes obvious they've been kidnapped by Communists led by the mysterious, rather fabled Culebra. His motive is equally obvious. Dr. Buffington may have destroyed the notes for the unintentional biochemical weapon, but he knows how to reproduce it.

Scott sets out to save them, encountering a multiplicity of surprises, obstacles, and a dose of the nightmare chemical. Along the way, he realizes the situation concerning General Lopez and the one concerning the Buffingtons have converged.

A thriller rather than a whodunit—though Prather has written more than a few of the latter—Pattern for Panic reflects the prevalent anti-Communist attitude common to many a mystery writer of the 1950s (think Mickey Spillane in One Lonely Night). The Communist villains were portrayed as not only cunning, crafty, and conspiratorial, but also as slavering sadists. The pacifistic Dr. Buffington is portrayed as idealistically naïve. Scott, unsurprisingly, is virulent in his hatred for Communism.

It's not a vintage Shell Scott novel on the order of, say, Strip for Murder or Dance With the Dead, but Pattern for Panic contains a few moments of the racy, sometimes wacky, humor the series is famous for, along with a rapid-fire pace and plenty of action. I had completely forgotten the storyline, so my nostalgic visit was akin to reading the book for the first time. Taken on its own terms, it was an entertaining (re)read.

For more on the Golden Age of Detection as well as this novel which features a rather interesting cover, be sure to follow the link http://tinyurl.com/ywch6d

Barry Ergang © 2007

Currently the Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E, winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. For links to material available online, see Barry’s webpages

Barry's Reviews: "Murder in the Hellfire Club"

Murder in the Hellfire Club (1978) by Donald Zochert
reviewed by Barry Ergang



Devoted mystery fans, especially those who treasure locked-room tales, should make every effort to avoid wasting time on this novel.

The time of the story is 1757, and Benjamin Franklin goes to England to conduct some business with the Penn family concerning the colony of Pennsylvania. In London, he's sought out by Francis Dashwood, founder and leader of the Hellfire Club, notorious for its licentious conclaves. John Raleigh, a porter at the Vulture Tavern and a friend of Dashwood's, has been found dead in a locked room. There are no signs of violence on his body, but Franklin suspects he was murdered. Dashwood has received a bizarre poem that he and Franklin regard as a threat to all of the Club's members.

Two more murders occur before Franklin reveals the culprit and the motive behind the crimes.

If you find my synopsis brief and bland, it's because to tell anything more would be to tell the entire story. Because Murder in the Hellfire Club is scarcely more than a short story poorly padded to novel-length—often annoyingly so, at that.

The narrative is written in a deliberately "antiquated" style, no doubt to "evoke the period," and peppered with the author's attempts at aphorisms. He spends more time describing Franklin's trips, by carriage or on foot, through London than he spends on the story itself. Characters—of which there are many—are delineated more by physical descriptions and authorial comments than by their words and actions. Few become figures of blood and bone, and then pallidly. The dialogue is choppy and frequently incoherent. The murder method—if it weren't already revealed on the dust jacket—is one any experienced mystery reader will guess early on, even if s/he doesn't figure out the details of the locked-room and other murderous situations.

As the detective, Franklin does a lot of brooding interspersed with bouts of self-deprivation or gluttony. He does very little actual investigating.

This is the worst mystery I've encountered since I read Mignon G Eberhart's Next of Kin several years ago. It's time to cleanse my peruser's palate by rereading some Richard S Prather.

******************************************************************************
For more about the Golden Age of Detection and on this book in particular, follow the link to: http://gadetection.pbwiki.com/Murder+in+the+Hellfire+Club


Barry Ergang © 2007

Currently the Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E, winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007 Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. For links to material available online, see Barry’s webpages

Review: "Seasmoke: Crime Stories by New England Writers" Edited by Kate Flora, Ruth McCarty, and Susan Oleksiw

Some parts of the country seem to produce anthologies on a regular basis. Florida, for example or Minnesota for another seem to produce if not just one several a year. Texas doesn’t seem to partake in these deals and why I have no idea. The anthology below comes to readers courtesy of writers based in New England but the cold is only part of the story in a few cases.

Seasmoke: Crime Stories by New England Writers
Edited by Kate Flora, Ruth McCarty, and Susan Oleksiw
Level Best Books
http://www.levelbestbooks.com
2006
ISBN 0-97009484-3-X
Large Trade Paperback
263 Pages
$15.00 US

This is the fourth annual anthology released by Level Best Books and this one once again features the annual “Al Blanchard” award winning story. The winner was “Roundhouse Medeiros and the Jade Dragon” by Jim Shannon. The story is a good one as are all of the stories in the anthology. Below are a few of my personal favorites:

“Winter Rental” by Barbara Ross revolves around the idea of a small group of women time sharing a heated bungalow on Nantucket. While their gender may be the same, their places in life and purposes are very different.

Stephen D. Rogers can always be counted on for a good tale told well and “/KS” certainly fits the bill. Transcribing interview tapes of detectives may not be glamorous but the information provided can help.

Planning the harvest is not easy as Frank Cook observes in his story, “Liberty.” But, when it all comes together, the harvest can be bountiful and a beautiful thing.

“Disturbance in the Field” by Roberta Isleib proves that sometimes the cops just know things have been tampered with despite evidence to the contrary.

You just can’t judge things on appearance as S. A. Daynard skillfully points out in “The Good Samaritan.”

In “The Hechicera’s Ace” by John Russo lady luck isn’t all she is advertised to be.

Despite the planning, having a loan go bad simply isn’t acceptable in “Killer De-Termination” by Paula Mello.

Also contained in this strong anthology are stories from Norma Burrows, Catherine Cairns, John Clark, Kate Flora (editor), Judith Green, Janet Halpin, Woody Hanstein, Marilis Hornidge, Ruth M. McCarty (editor), Susan Oleksiw (editor), Carol Perry, Mary E. Stibal, John Urban, Kathleen Valentine and Leslie Wheeler. Each story is a good one and each author created a tale well worth reading.

The stories, in general, often are complex and feature characters living on the fringes that don’t quite fit into society. Coping with physical demons of both the mental and physical variety, the se characters are in a daily struggle to survive. Sometimes the outcomes are considerably more positive than in other cases though each story provides a sort of life lesson to the reader. Seasmoke: Crime Stories by New England Writers is a good anthology that showcases new and well published writers coming from a variety of viewpoints and styles and culminates in a good enjoyable read.


Kevin R. Tipple © 2007

Reviewing: "Heroes Often Fail" by Frank Zafiro

Child kidnap as well as child molestation are themes that, as a reader, I stay away from and very rarely read. While I recognize for a writer they represent a vast emotional goldmine, I’m just not interested in reading such books. I read to be entertained. Not to be reminded of what we often see in our daily news. In this case, I made an exception because Frank Zafiro is one of those authors that one makes exceptions for.

The parental nightmares begin, as the often do, under clear skies and the promise of a new day early in the morning. It is March 15, 1995 as six year old girls Kendra and Amy walk to school like they have before and will walk home that afternoon like they have countless times before. That is until the van comes and slides to a stop next to them. They both freeze as a man leaps out of the van. He grabs Amy and Kendra runs knows the man could get her next. Instead, she gets away. The man in black didn’t get her but as the hunt begins for Amy, Kendra is filled with guilt.

At the River City Police shooting range, Stefan Kopriva is filled with pain as well as guilt. Having barely survived a shootout at the Circle K six months ago, Kopriva remains on light desk duty. Despite being shot three times he survived and now wonders what more he could have done then and when his reputation will return to what it was before the robber known as Scarface rocked River City, Washington. The six months since have been painful. Not only as his body struggles to heal but in the misplaced admiration by some and the misplaced hostility from other members of the small police force who feel he, at best, failed them. Powerful pain medications and a growing romance are the only things keeping him going as he hates the mind numbing routine of desk duty. He wants his old life back and a symbol of that is getting off the restrictions and back on the streets.

He gets it but not the way he wants. As news of the possible kidnapping spreads through the department, it becomes a classic all hands on deck situation with every person pressed into service. Kopriva, as well as the other men and women of the River City police force desperately try to find Amy knowing that as the hours and days pass the idea that it is a simple kidnapping for ransom is more and more unlikely. For little Amy, kidnapping is quickly the least of Amy’s worries.

Much of what happens regarding the child molestation in this well written but disturbing novel happens offstage. As such, scenes and images are created initially with a heavy emphasis on implied actions that are never described to the reader. As such, while not graphic or detailed, the implications and meanings of what is happening to Amy as well as what happens to another child in one of several secondary storylines are very clear and that material may disturb some readers.

With that being said, it should also be noted that this is a very good novel. Building on characters and events from the preceding novel “Under A Raging Moon” author Frank Zafiro has created a substantially more complex police procedural with multi layered characters, a rich setting, and plenty of action. It is clear that from a technical aspect this novel is superior in all aspects to his first novel which was very good in its own right. This novel is a step upwards and it is clear that Frank Zafiro is steadily improving his fictional game.

It is often said and assumed by many that an author’s second book will be weaker than the first. While that often is true, it certainly is not the case here. What is also true is the fact that we have to wait far too long till the fall of 2008 for the third River City novel “Beneath A Weeping Sky.”


Heroes Often Fail: A River City Novel
Frank Zafiro
http://www.frankzafiro.com/
Aisling Press
http://www.aislingpress.com/
2007
ISBN # 978-1-934677-16-2
Large Trade Paperback
260 Pages (Includes 8 Page Author Interview)
$13.95 US

Kevin R. Tipple © 2007

Barry's Reviews---"Next Of Kin"

Next of Kin (1982) by Mignon G. Eberhart
reviewed by Barry Ergang

This is the first novel I've ever read by Eberhart. This is the last novel I will ever read by Eberhart.



Requiring the most sustained act of willpower since that exercised when in my senior year of high school I had to plod through Silas Marner, this is the most exasperating excuse for a mystery novel I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing. I bought it from an e-Bay auction because it contains a locked room problem. About eighty pages into it, I seriously considered not bothering with it. The only reason I didn't was to see how the locked room business was solved.

In terms of reading time that could have been satisfactorily spent elsewhere, it was a mistake.

Mady Smith, the viewpoint character – I'm loath to call her the “heroine” because she's neither heroic nor much of a sleuth – is a young woman of wealth and privilege who has never done much. When former senator Stuart Channing is offered a Cabinet appointment, Mady hopes to be able to get some sort of job with him to fill the void in her life. She's quite enamored of Stuart's younger brother Hill Channing, a physics professor, whom everyone calls Chan and whom she's known for years strictly as a “friend.”

On Valentine's Day, to celebrate the ex-senator's future appointment, his wife Lettie, a childhood friend of Mady's whom Mady originally introduced to Stuart, throws a party at their luxurious New York apartment. Mady and Chan arrive late because of inclement weather, by which time the party is over. They discover that Stuart earlier had locked himself in his study to make some important phone calls and had not emerged. Chan's knocks elicit no responses from his brother. Using a key, he unlocks the door and finds Stuart slumped over his desk, dead from a gunshot to the back. The room is stiflingly hot, the thermostat having been set higher than the senator would have set it. The gun on the study floor is his brother's.

The cast of characters consists of Mady, Chan, Lettie, Mady's stepfather Clarence, Stuart's vanished secretary Nadine Hallowell, a lawyer named Larry Todd, and a couple of police detectives. About halfway through the book Lettie's uncle, who's been living in Australia for years, shows up. On page 195 of a 224-page book we're introduced to Lettie's mother and her mysterious, Middle Eastern second husband. The latter's role is crucial to the story's solution. Bringing him in at the last minute violates one of the basic tenets of good mystery writing.

There is virtually no detection to speak of in this story – and “story” is the apt word because like Silas Marner, this is a short story badly padded to novel-length. Unlike John Dickson Carr, for instance, in Patrick Butler for the Defence, Eberhart generates no great sense of urgency or suspense to keep matters interesting. “Action” consists mainly of people running from one home to another or Mady brooding about Chan, worrying that he's not interested in an amorous relationship with her and that his solicitousness towards his bereaved sister-in-law is motivated more by attraction than from a mutual sense of loss. Characters are defined by their physical features and manners of dress; the dialogue doesn't differentiate them because they all sound alike – including the cops. If you're one of those readers who gets annoyed with Carr's habit of breaking off unfinished sentences, you'll be apoplectic with Eberhart's. Carr did it for dramatic effect and to keep the reader plunging ahead. Eberhart uses the device ad nauseum, doing nothing to advance either the story or the characterizations.

The characters rehash the same information over and over again – endlessly, it seemed to me – as though the author were just trying to fill pages rather than advance the plot. If two people discuss something in one chapter, you can be sure that a few chapters later one of them will tell the same thing to another character.

Both in narrative and dialogue, Eberhart's favorite word is “lovely.” The hardcover edition, published in 1982, sold for $10.50. If you had a nickel for every time she used “lovely,” you could pay for the book, sales tax included, and still have several dollars left to pocket.

By the time I reached the last page, I didn't care who did it – I just wanted it to be over so I could find something good to read. The final revelations aren't as surprising as they're meant to be, and my irritation was intensified by Chan's mention of clues he spotted that told him the murderer's identity in the early chapters. It only reinforced my notion that this story could have been told effectively in a much shorter form.

Oh – that locked room “puzzle”? It's barely touched on or pondered by anyone, police included, and its simple solution is glossed over in Chan's explanation.

Why Eberhart received the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award is the biggest mystery of all.



For more on this review as well as the Golden Age be sure to check out the Golden Age Wiki at
http://gadetection.pbwiki.com/Next+of+Kin


Barry Ergang © 2003, 2007

Barry's Reviews---"Wilders Walk Away"

Wilders Walk Away (1948) by Herbert Brean
reviewed by Barry Ergang




Former newspaper reporter turned freelance photojournalist Reynold Frame travels to the village of Wilders Lane, Vermont to get a story and steps back in time. Figuratively, that is, because Wilders Lane has been restored to its pre-Revolutionary War look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brean's work is long out of print, so those who are curious will have to try e-Bay, Half.com, and ABE.books as I did. I have two other Reynold Frame novels, Hardly A Man Is Now Alive and The Clock Strikes Thirteen, to read, along with a non-Frame police novel that appears to be more thriller than whodunit called Dead Sure (original title Matter of Fact). I'll report accordingly.


For more on this book as well as the Golden Age, follow the link
http://gadetection.pbwiki.com/Wilders-Walk-Away-?doneSave=1 to the Golden Age Wiki.


Barry Ergang © 2003, 2007

Barry's Reviews; " Hardly A Man Is Now Alive"

Hardly A Man Is Now Alive (1952) by Herbert Brean
reviewed by Barry Ergang




On the drive to Concord, Massachusetts, photojournalist Reynold Frame and his fianceé Constance Wilder (whom Frame first met in Wilders Walk Away) want nothing more than to get married and go on their honeymoon. Frame has but one other task to complete while he's there: photograph a visiting professor of American history, Dr. Vann, at one of the sites pertinent to the Revolutionary War for a magazine article.

Frame and Connie are to be married by Concord's "patriarch," 104-year-old John Annandale, who learned first-hand during his boyhood about the battle that began the Revolution from one of the combatants who also lived to a ripe old age.

The couple are supposed to be staying at the home of Connie's aunt and uncle, Kate and Bowler Eliot, who have hired decorators to redo some of the rooms. The one intended for Frame has a newly varnished, still tacky floor, rendering it temporarily uninhabitable. The local Colonial Inn having no vacancies, Kate and Bowler have arranged with their neighbors the Satterthwaites, who often take in roomers, to put Frame up for the next two days.

Upon arriving at the Satterthwaite home, besides meeting Tom and his flirtatious (albeit engaged) daughter Retty, Frame encounters two fellow roomers, a history professor named Humphrey Hobbes and a spiritualist named Maria Carswell. The latter desperately wants to swap rooms with Frame, who has been given the room in which Percy Nightingale, a mortally-wounded British soldier, died during the battle of Concord. Frame, tired from his drive and irritated by Carswell's manner, refuses. He retains his assigned room, goes to bed, and is awakened in the middle of the night by the presence of a lamp burning in his room—a so-called "Betty lamp," the one that burned there on the night of the British officer's death and which was not there when Frame first entered the room. Frame extinguishes the lamp and goes back to sleep. When he awakens in the morning, the lamp is gone.

This is the first of two "ghostly" manifestations he must contend with. The other is the sound of soldiers marching to fife and drum, a sound which chills him until he ultimately manages to explain its source.

Frame learns from Tom Satterthwaite that his room's previous tenant was an academic named J.J. Walmsley from the University of Chicago. A month or so earlier, Walmsley apparently skipped out under seemingly impossible circumstances, sticking Satterthwaite with an unpaid bill of seventy-five dollars. Shortly thereafter, Frame and Connie discover Walmsley's body in the well in back of the Satterthwaite home.

Not too long after, John Annandale, who has gone out with Professor Vann to answer some historical questions, vanishes. Frame, reluctant despite his proclivity for mysteries to get involved in a murder and kidnapping case, is thus compelled to get to the bottom of things and find Annandale so that the latter can perform the marriage ceremony as planned.

I think John Dickson Carr would have liked this book. For all I know, he did like it, because it was published during his lifetime. It combines an historical mystery—which Frame solves—with a modern one. It contains some wonderfully eerie moments. It's fairly clued. It's well-constructed and well-paced.

Although I solved it instinctively rather than deductively, and with relative ease, I strongly recommend it—if you can find a copy, because it's long out-of-print.



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Barry Ergang © 2003, 2007

Barry's Reviews: "The Clock Strikes Thirteen"

The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954) by Herbert Brean
reviewed by Barry Ergang




"When And Then There Were None meets The Satan Bug"--that's the kind of cover blurb this fast-paced whodunit might have received except that, although it post-dates the former, it pre-dates the latter.

Freelance journalist/photographer Reynold Frame, hero of several other Brean titles, gets a middle-of-the-night call from a magazine editor telling him to be ready to board a plane for Maine at 10 a.m. Frame is excited because, although the story is being written by someone else, he hopes the assignment will enable him to prove his photographic skills. He's replacing a photographer of Russian descent who doesn't have the security clearance necessary for the job.

Upon landing in Portland, Maine, Frame is met by Army Major Harry Geddes and driven to the town of Pethwick. From there they board a boat manned by elderly lobsterman Jonas Kilgore, who takes them twenty-four miles offshore to Kilgore Island, a desolate rock in the Atlantic he used to own.

The island is presently owned by Dr. North Wayland, a bacteriologist--and skilled surgeon before a personal tragedy deprived him of the necessary steadiness--who worked for the government at Fort Detrick in Maryland during WWII. Wayland bought the island to continue his researches privately, albeit with governmental security provided by Major Geddes.

Dropped off by Jonas at Kilgore Island, Frame meets Wayland, his research staff, the magazine writer, and Wayland's housekeeper and her peculiar son. After dinner, Wayland takes Frame to visit his laboratory and show him what he'll be photographing. Everyone's curiosity is aroused because the scientist has been secretive about some work he's been doing on his own. They know only that it involves a biological warfare agent.

Leaving Frame in the lab, Wayland goes off to retrieve something he wants to show the photographer. A moment later Frame hears some sort of hubbub. When he investigates, he finds the scientist dead--stabbed--and with broken Petri dishes and bits of agar scattered around his body. Frame alerts the others, and Major Geddes decides he's the prime suspect.

What follows is both detective story and thriller, as Frame tries to determine the identity of the real murderer and the isolated group on the island try to survive in the wake of what might be an outbreak of a deadly biological agent set loose during the murder.

Though it lacks the impossible crimes of Brean's excellent Wilders Walk Away and the eerie atmospheric touches of Hardly A Man Is Now Alive, The Clock Strikes Thirteen is recommended to mystery readers who like their puzzles mixed with action and high-tension suspense.

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Barry Ergang © 2007

Barry's Reviews--"Catspaw Ordeal"

CATSPAW ORDEAL (1950) by Edward Ronns (a.k.a. Edward S. Aarons)
reviewed by Barry Ergang



Edward S. Aarons, best known for his Sam Durell Assignment series of paperback originals, may not have been a great writer by the purest of literary standards, or by the standards set by more prominent mystery and suspense novelists, but he was a first-rate storyteller.

Catspaw Ordeal is among the mystery thrillers he wrote under the pseudonym Edward Ronns. It deals with one Daniel Archer, a man who would seem to have it all, but whose dissatisfaction with the good life in Southwich, Connecticut has led to the possible dissolution of his marriage and reveries about his more adventurous past—reveries which involve old flame Della Chambers and the late Burke Wiley, his shipmate aboard the Martin J. Crump on which Archer served as radioman, who died when the ship was torpedoed.

The novel opens with Archer getting himself drunk in a local watering hole when the bar's owner tells him there's a man who's been asking about him. Archer confronts the man, one Skit Moore, who might be either a private detective hired by Archer's estranged wife Rosalind or some sort of petty hoodlum. A brawl erupts between them which sets the story in motion.

Archer later discovers Moore in his—Archer's—home, bludgeoned to death, and circumstances compel him to help dispose of the body. Among other surprises, figures from his past, including Della Chambers, resurface to complicate matters, as well as his brother-in-law and business partner Stanley Manning, their secretary Louise Camp, the coldly criminous Clem Holloway, and Holloway's daughter Lisbeth. Much like an unwitting hero out of a Hitchcock film, Archer must dodge the police long enough to solve Moore's murder, dodge someone who would murder him, and thwart a criminal scheme with national and international ramifications.

Many years ago I read but no longer have a number of the Sam Durell espionage novels. Like those, Catspaw Ordeal is rapid-fire reading with plenty of action and suspense throughout. Unlike them, it's also a fairly-clued whodunit—though since it's populated with so many unsavory characters, a number of whom get their comeuppances before the final revelation, most experienced readers won't find it difficult to solve even if they do so by pure guesswork. Read strictly as a detective story it will likely prove disappointing. Read as a fast-paced, sometimes noirish adventure story with the bonus of a whodunit aspect, it's very satisfying.

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As always, for more information on the Golden Age of Mystery and on this review (especially a misleading novel cover), follow the link to GA Detection Wiki at http://tinyurl.com/yp3j6r



Barry Ergang © 2007

Currently Reading

My bookmark is deep into "HEROES OFTEN FAIL" by Frank Zafiro. This is the second in his books set in the fictional "River City" and this one deals with child abduction. Not a topic that I normally deal with. I made an exception for Frank Zafiro becuase I have enjoyed his various works before and he is a talented author.

Kevin R. Tipple (c) 2007

Barry's Reviews--"The Case Of The Baker Street Irregulars"

THE CASE OF THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS (1940) by Anthony Boucher
reviewed by Barry Ergang



Mystery lovers who haven't read it will probably find The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars by Anthony Boucher a lot of fun. It combines bizarre situations, action, humor, lively and intelligent prose, and the advancement of several plausible solutions before the actual one is revealed.

Stephen Worth, ex-private detective turned hardboiled mystery novelist and sometime screenwriter under contract to Metropolis Pictures, is supposed to write a screen adaptation of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” which will be produced by F.X. Weinberg. When word of this makes the newspapers, Weinberg starts receiving irate letters from the Baker Street Irregulars. The want the screenplay entrusted to someone who reveres the Canon as they do, not a “rat,” as they refer to Worth, who writes hardboiled fare. For his part, Worth contemptuously dismisses the BSI as a bunch of “deductionists.” The studio's publicity director, Maureen O'Breen, who has no liking for Worth, a heavy-drinking lecher and prankster, suggests that Weinberg simply take him off the film and assign another writer. When Weinberg tries to persuade Worth to work on a different project, Worth balks at the idea and points to a contractual clause that effectively prevents him from being replaced involuntarily. From his position between rock and hard place, Weinberg hits on a solution and sends letters to each of the five Irregulars who have written to him, inviting them to Hollywood at his expense to serve as advisors on the film. When they agree, the studio provides a house for them at 221B Romualdo Drive, complete with a housekeeper named Mrs. Hudson.

To help tout the film, Maureen plans a party for the press. On the afternoon of the party, Maureen, trying to coordinate the preparations at 221B, is besieged by mysterious callers, messages, and telephone calls. Once things are under way, Stephen Worth makes a drunken, belligerent appearance. When he tries to hit one of the Irregulars, his wild swing hits instead one of the guests, Lieutenant Jackson of the police department. Jackson knocks him cold and he and some others carry Worth to a room upstairs to sleep it off. That ends the party. Later on, Maureen goes upstairs and finds a still drunk and abusive Worth standing in the doorway of the room. Moments later she hears a shot, blood blossoms under the hand Worth claps to his heart, and he falls back into the darkened room. When she bends to help him, something strikes the back of her head, rendering her unconscious. One of the Sherlockians carries her downstairs. When she revives and reports what's happened, Lieutenant Jackson goes to investigate.

There's a lot of blood in the room. There are other significant things there, too. There just isn't any corpse. The next day, each of the Irregulars has a peculiar, sometimes frightening adventure. Each adventure has its roots in a Holmes story, and each elicits information about another Irregular which he'd prefer not be revealed. The police and the Sherlockians thus have their hands full trying to unravel codes and ciphers, interpret the meaning of the adventures, and discover the whereabouts of Worth's body and the means by which it was removed from the house. There's a cover blurb from the New York Times Book Review on the paperback edition I have which reads, “Delightful...offers a surprise on nearly every page.”

This brings me to the only complaint I have about the book—the edition. Mine was published by Carroll & Graf. I'm not sure about the number of pages containing surprises, but this particular book must have been proofread by someone whose idea of intellectual activity is dwarf-tossing. Even by C&G standards, which generally seem to be abysmal in the typographical error department, this one qualifies for the Guinness Book of World Records. By all means read the book. Just avoid the Carroll & Graf edition if you have options.

As always, for more information on the Golden Age of Mystery and on this review, follow the link to the GA Detection Wiki at http://tinyurl.com/2c6um9



Barry Ergang © 2003, 2007