The review below by way of Barry Ergang originally ran 4 years ago. Make sure you check out the full list over on Todd's blog after you read Barry’s work below.
KINDLY DIG YOUR GRAVE and Other Wicked Stories (1977) by
Stanley Ellin
Reviewed by Barry
Ergang
The late, great Stanley Ellin was a painstaking craftsman,
as Ellery Queen (Frederick Dannay) details in his introduction to Kindly Dig Your Grave and Other Wicked
Stories. The results justified the pains he took, as demonstrated by the
fact that his first published story, “The Specialty of the House,” is
acknowledged as a classic of its kind. (Those who haven’t read it may have seen
the televised versions on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Alfred Hitchcock
Hour,” the former version having a shorter running time but being truer to the
original story. As of this writing, both versions are available on YouTube.) Ellin
won two Edgar awards for other short stories and one for a novel. The (mostly)
character-driven stories in the collection under consideration here bolster his
well-deserved reputation.
In "Kindly Dig Your Grave," the reader meets Madame
Lagrue, a Parisian art dealer who specializes in bad paintings that sell
especially well to the American market hungry for work "by great French
artists at reasonable prices." She has found an effective method of
dealing with hungry artists to whom she can pay a pittance for their canvases,
which she then sells for a 500- to 1000-percent profit. One of her hapless
suppliers is a painter named O'Toole. When a tough-minded young Algerian woman
who goes by the alias Fatima becomes enamored
of him, she quickly realizes how Madame Lagrue is taking advantage and sets out
to rectify the situation in this comical biter-bit tale.
Dispirited in spite of being exonerated of graft charges and
told he can return to duty though not even his father is sure he's innocent,
Noah Freeman takes a trip to Rome,
Italy to try to
decide whether or not to go back to work as a New York City police detective. He finds
himself drawn to an attractive but distant, cynical young woman, Rosanna, who
works at the pensione he's staying
in. When he learns that her father was killed by partisans twenty years earlier
during WWII because they were sure he had betrayed them to the Germans,
resulting in the deaths of three members of the Resistance, and that the stigma
attaches to her and her brother to this day, Noah sets out to get to the bottom
of "The Crime of Ezechiele Coen." I correctly guessed the outcome of
this story quite early into it. Nevertheless, it lost none of its power or
poignancy.
In "Death of an Old-Fashioned Girl,"
Elizabeth Ann Moore is anything but. She's quite the drama queen, portraying
herself as naïve and ingenuous: "During her brief lifetime she must have
ingested enough romantic literature and technicolored movies to addle a much
larger brain than hers, and in the end she came to believe that human beings
actually behaved the way the heroine of a melodrama would." She's actually
quite manipulative, which is how she managed to entice artist Paul Zachary to
divorce his wife Nicole and marry her. When she ends up knifed to death, the
police aren't lacking for suspects. They include the narrator, another artist,
and his wife; Sidney and Elinor Goldsmith, art gallery owners and the folks who
discovered Zachary and helped him achieve success; and Zachary himself. How the
narrator and Zachary became friends, and how theirs and the others' lives
converged and Elizabeth Ann died make for an absorbing story with a neat and
fitting irony at its end.
When Max
de Marechal, editor of a magazine for wine connoisseurs, tells the wine
merchant Drummond he's writing an article about the greatest vintages various
experts have sampled and asks for an interview, they get into a small debate
over specific vintages and whether there could ever be any consensus among a
group of experts. De Marechal maintains there is one he's never tasted but
which has acquired a legendary status among authorities: Nuits Saint-Oen 1929.
Because it was produced in such a small quantity, he's certain that a single
bottle no longer exists. Drummond tells him he has "The Last Bottle in the
World" in his company's cellars. He has not been tempted to open it
because it's so old the wine might be bad. De Marechal asks if he'll sell it,
and Drummond says no. Ultimately, de Marechal introduces him to millionaire
Kyros Kassoulas and his wife, and he becomes involved in a tense domestic drama
in which the wine plays a pivotal role.
In
another story set in Paris,
"Coin of the Realm," Millie gets on her husband Walt's case for
dressing like a tourist. Walt rather proudly proclaims that that is what he is,
and accompanies his tastefully-attired wife to a flea market. While Millie
haggles with a furniture seller, Walt, ostensibly looking for coins for his
business partner's collection at the partner's request, goes to see another
seller, Piron, for a much more sinister reason.
While
Broderick and Yates, both slightly inebriated, wait on Broderick's boat,
Chappie and Del
set out in a dinghy toward the Miami
Beach shoreline. Del stays on the dinghy while Chappie swims
to the Royal Oceanic Hotel to fulfill a grisly task. When they return to the
boat they demand "The Payoff," the nature of which readers will never
guess.
There
are any number of things Albert doesn't like—about himself and about others.
His first name, for instance. He resents his mother naming him for a figure on
a pipe tobacco can. He doesn't like women, but in his therapy session with Dr.
Schwimmer, he discusses his recurrent dreams about a "Girl, Doctor.
Maiden, if you will. Not a woman" with whom, for the first time in his
fifty years, he has fallen in love. In "The Other Side of the Wall," told
almost entirely in dialogue, Dr. Schwimmer employs a radical approach to help
Albert achieve catharsis and surprises the reader in the process.
A change of pace in tone and approach from the
stories that precede it, "The Corruption of Officer Avakadian"
displays Ellin's skills at writing humorously. First-person narrator Avakadian,
a young, uncompromisingly by-the-book
police officer, has been partnered with the soon-to-retire Schultz, a jaded cop
who is not above a bribe or a free meal. When they are dispatched to the home
of Dr. Cyrus Cahoon and his wife in a wealthy neighborhood, they learn from
Mrs. Cahoon that her husband has been kidnapped. The victim happens to be
present and confirms the story, which becomes more and more bizarre as its
details are revealed.
Script doctor Mel Gordon can’t resist the lure of a
poorly-written script, and Alexander File, tight-fisted producer of low-budget schlock movies, knows it. Because he’s
been successful working in television, Gordon no longer needs to work for File,
as he had done for a number of years earlier in his career. But when File sends
him the script for Emperor of Lust,
Gordon agrees to fly to Rome
to improve it and help with the production. Apart from making movies as cheaply
as possible, File’s primary interest is in “dewy and nubile maidens, unripe
lovelies all the more enticing to him because they were unripe. He loved them,
did File, with a mouth-watering, hard-breathing, popeyed love.” Once filming
begins, it’s not long before tension sets in and conflicts develop between File
and Gordon, and between File and his director, his cameraman, and a young man
hired to create props in the novella “The Twelfth Statue.” And then one evening
File “walked out the door of his office and vanished from the face of the earth
as utterly and completely as if the devil had snatched him down to hell by the
heels.” Readers who think they see the ending coming will only see part of it,
so they can look forward to at least one additional surprise.
The author’s elegant, flexible writing style and sense of
place, combined with storylines that are far from run-of-the-mill and populated
with colorful characters, make this collection a wonderful read. I can highly
recommend it to those who appreciate the kind of literary craftsmanship whose ultimate
result is pure artistry.
Barry Ergang © 2012, 2016
Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s most recent
e-book offerings—at both Smashwords and Amazon—are the fantasy for children “The Boy Who Ate Rainbows” and “The Vole Eater,” a
parody of science fiction grand master Mike Resnick’s
The Soul Eater.
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