Now Available: The Man in the Moon: A Markham, P.I. Novella – James Reasoner

 e-books, James Reasoner, MSMM, mystery fiction, new releases  Comments Off
Jun 162013
 
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Back in the prehistoric days of my career, I wrote several stories about a private detective named Markham. "The Man in the Moon" is a 10,000 word novella that appeared in the April 1980 issue of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, and it's been out of print ever since. The Kindle version of it has just gone live on Amazon, appropriately enough for Father's Day since two fathers figure prominently in the plot. A Nook version is in the works as well. If you've read and enjoyed my Cody stories, you should like the Markham yarns as well. The other stories in the series will be available in the relatively near future.

Blood on Blood – Frank Zafiro and Jim Wilsky

 Frank Zafiro, Jim Wilsky, mystery fiction  Comments Off
Jun 102013
 
Mick and Jerzy Sawyer are half-brothers in Chicago, but there's no brotherly love between these two. Jerzy is a career criminal, Mick is a disgraced former cop who went to prison because he took the fall for other cops. The two of them basically hate each other . . . but they're forced to work together when their dying convict father puts them on the trail of a stolen necklace and earrings worth millions of dollars. More complications ensue when Jerzy finds himself in the middle of a gang war and both brothers (wouldn't you know it?) fall for the same beautiful blonde.

BLOOD ON BLOOD is the first novel collaboration by Frank Zafiro and Jim Wilsky. Zafiro has written other crime novels and short stories and Wilsky has authored quite a few short stories. They've joined forces here to produce an excellent hardboiled crime thriller. The narration switches back and forth between Mick and Jerzy, and also between past and present tense, and while those are both techniques I often don't care for, Zafiro and Wilsky make them work very well.

They've also written a sequel to this novel, QUEEN OF DIAMONDS, that's out already, and I plan to read it as well, but I recommend you start with BLOOD ON BLOOD. If you enjoy fast-paced, gritty crime fiction, I think you'll like it a lot.

Forgotten Books: The Case of the Sunbather’s Diary – Erle Stanley Gardner

 Erle Stanley Gardner, Forgotten Books, mystery fiction  Comments Off
May 242013
 

This post originally appeared in slightly different form on July 20, 2007.

This Perry Mason novel was originally published in 1955, an era during which Gardner’s work was still consistently good, although as far as I’m concerned his best books were published during the Thirties and Forties. The edition pictured is the first paperback, from February 1958. I have no idea why there was a three-year gap between the William Morrow hardback and the Cardinal paperback.

As for the story itself, it starts off in a typically intriguing Gardner fashion: Perry Mason receives a phone call at his office from a young woman who wants to hire him. It seems that she lives in a trailer, the small kind that can be pulled behind a car, and while she was out sunbathing -- nude, of course -- somebody stole the car and trailer, literally driving off with her home. She wants to hire Mason to bring her some clothes and find out who stole the trailer.

Well, you know there has to be a lot more to it than that in an Erle Stanley Gardner book, and of course, there is. It turns out the young woman is the daughter of a man who is serving time in prison for masterminding an armored car robbery, and wouldn’t you know it, the nearly four hundred thousand dollars in loot that was stolen in that robbery has never been found. The daughter is convinced that her father is really innocent and wants Mason to prove it. Meanwhile, various factions are equally convinced that the daughter really knows where the money is hidden. Sure enough, once Perry Mason gets involved in the case, it’s only a matter of hours before there’s a murder, and Mason’s client is arrested and charged with the crime.

I thought I was doing a pretty good job of keeping up with the plot in this one, something I often have a hard time doing in a Gardner novel. I spotted some clues, recognized some misdirection, and was convinced that I had the solution figured out. Then, with only a few pages left in the book, Gardner throws in a perfectly logical twist that I never saw coming at all. I wound up being about half-right in what I figured, and for a Perry Mason novel, that’s not bad, I suppose.

This book is also interesting because of the trailer angle. Gardner was known for going off to the desert and staying for weeks at a time in a trailer, so he puts his knowledge of such things to good use here, throwing in a few nuggets of information about how such trailers are set up and what they’re worth.
The Mitchell Hooks cover on the paperback edition is okay, but if ever a book was crying out for a McGinnis cover, you’d think that one with a title like THE CASE OF THE SUN BATHER’S DIARY would be it.

UPDATE: And sure enough, there was a later edition with a McGinnis cover, which you can see below.


Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: 5 Detective Novels, Fall 1950

 mystery fiction, pulps  Comments Off
May 192013
 

5 DETECTIVE NOVELS was a mostly reprint magazine from the Thrilling Group that ran for 17 issues during the late Forties and early Fifties. This issue has a nice cover and a good line-up of authors. The five novellas, all reprints from POPULAR DETECTIVE and THRILLING MYSTERY, are by T.T. Flynn (one of my favorite authors), Paul Ernst, Joseph J. Millard (Ernst and Millard were top-notch pulpsters), John Hawkins (don't know anything about him), and Frank Johnson, a Standard Publications house-name who was often Norman Daniels but there's really no telling who wrote this one. Backing up the novellas are two apparently original short stories by Arthur J. Burks and Amelia Reynolds Long, best known as one of the first female science fiction writers before she turned to mystery fiction. I probably would have read this one if I'd come across it.

Forgotten Books: Hawke – Ted Bell

 Forgotten Books, mystery fiction, Ted Bell  Comments Off
May 102013
 

This post originally appeared in slightly different form on August 18, 2007.

Recently I got the urge to read a long book, which is rare for me, and at nearly 600 pages in the Pocket Books Premium edition, Ted Bell’s debut thriller HAWKE certainly fits the bill. When I was younger and had more time to read, I plowed through many a doorstopper novel without really thinking about it. The summer between eighth and ninth grades I read all three books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy back-to-back-to-back, something I’d never attempt today. DOCTOR ZHIVAGO? GONE WITH THE WIND? No problem.

But to get back to HAWKE, I thought, well, I’ll try it, and if I don’t like it, or if it’s taking too long to read, I’ll just stop. I liked it right away, though, and had no trouble sticking with it to the end. It’s just the sort of over-the-top, swashbuckling, action-adventure/espionage novel that I enjoy. Lord Alexander Hawke is a handsome, debonair playboy/billionaire businessman/freelance secret agent who takes on dangerous assignments for the American and British governments. A lot of the reviews compare him to James Bond, but to me he seems like more of a tribute to Derek Flint and Amos Burke (for those of you with long memories), with just a touch of Austin Powers but not nearly as silly. This book involves a military coup in Cuba that replaces Fidel Castro, a giant Russian stealth submarine, and biological warfare.

But that’s not all, to quote the late-night TV pitchmen. In addition to the secret agent stuff, you also get a storyline involving murder, revenge, and hidden pirate treasure. If that’s not enough, there’s also plenty of Clancy-ish technobabble about weapons, good and evil mercenaries, some big battles, and a climactic swordfight (well, a machete fight, but that’s close) that’s a dandy. You can tell that Bell had a lot of fun writing this book, and I had a lot of fun reading it. I was interested in Bell’s work because I read his story in the THRILLER anthology and thought it was one of the best ones in that book. He didn’t disappoint me with HAWKE.

Is the book too long? Yeah, probably. But the padding isn’t too blatant and for the most part the pace clips right along. A while back I read a thriller by another big-name writer that had a pretty good plot, but all the way through it I kept thinking “Nick Carter could’ve handled this problem in a third as many pages -- or less!” That didn’t happen with HAWKE. There are three more books, so far, starring Alex Hawke, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be reading all of them.

One reason I’m sort of interested in books like this right now is that I recently finished writing a big international thriller (a ghost job) with lots of short chapters, a big cast, and several interconnected storylines. It’s an appealing format, although I wouldn’t want a steady diet of it as either a writer or a reader. If I can ever find the time I might try to write one of my own, one of these days.

UPDATE: I read the second book in this series and liked it, too, but I never got around to the others, and even though I have all of them, I think, I don't know when or if I'll get around to reading them since my attention span is so lousy these days I often have trouble reading short novels, let alone behemoths like the ones Bell writes. As for the connection with my writing, I'm still ghosting the occasional big thriller (working on one now, as a matter of fact, and have a couple more lined up) but still haven't done anything like that under my name. Like reading the rest of Ted Bell's books, I don't know when or if I'll get around to it.

Forgotten Books: Markham – Lawrence Block

 Forgotten Books, Lawrence Block, mystery fiction, TV tie-ins  Comments Off
Apr 192013
 
This post originally appeared in slightly different form on April 20, 2007. My apologies for all the reruns. I just haven't had much time to read lately.


This is a book I’ve had on my shelves for many years, and I’ve finally gotten around to reading it. It’s a tie-in novel, based on a short-lived series that ran on NBC in 1959 and 1960, starring Ray Milland as New York-based private eye Roy Markham. Now, if Ray Milland isn’t exactly your idea of a hardboiled private eye, well, I feel pretty much the same way. Maybe a lot of other people did, too, and that’s why the series didn’t last long. This novel didn’t come out until 1961, after the TV series was over. I guess Belmont had it in inventory already and decided to go ahead and throw it out there. Lawrence Block wasn’t a big name at the time, so that wasn’t the reason (as it probably was a few years ago when this novel was reissued under the title YOU COULD CALL IT MURDER, with no mention of the TV series or its original Belmont edition).

As for the book itself, it’s pretty standard PI stuff. As a favor to a friend, Markham takes on a wandering daughter job. The girl has disappeared from the fancy private university she attends in New Hampshire. Markham starts investigating and then gets roped into what seems to be a completely different case – but you know the jobs will wind up being connected, and sure enough they are. There’s a lot of small-town college scenes, some late Fifties/early Sixties hipster stuff, a suicide that might be murder, some other deaths that are definitely murder, blackmail, gangsters, and lots of drinking and smoking. Everybody in this book spends a lot of time taking out cigarettes, lighting up cigarettes, putting out cigarettes, etc. Markham gets hit on the head and knocked out. Eventually he untangles everything and exposes the killer, of course.

Not surprisingly, despite the generic plot Block’s use of language is excellent, as always. Even though this book came early in his career, he could already put sentences together in a consistently interesting and entertaining fashion. I didn’t really see anything in this book that was a precursor for, say, the Matt Scudder books. (There is a minor character named Keller, however.) It’s worth reading, although it’s not on the same level as his other early books that have been reissued by Hard Case Crime.

Forgotten Books: The Black Angel – Cornell Woolrich

 Cornell Woolrich, Forgotten Books, mystery fiction  Comments Off
Apr 052013
 
This post originally appeared in slightly different form on November 10, 2007.

THE BLACK ANGEL is part of Cornell Woolrich's famous “Black” series. They all have the world “Black” in the title, beginning with THE BRIDE WORE BLACK, but other than that they’re not connected.

THE BLACK ANGEL is narrated by Alberta Murray, a young woman whose husband Kirk always calls her Angel Face. Alberta thinks everything in her life is going along just fine (always a warning sign) until she suddenly discovers that her husband is having an affair. Worse yet, he’s planning to leave her and run off with the other woman. Alberta goes to the woman’s apartment to confront her, and yep, you guessed it, her husband’s mistress is dead, smothered with a pillow. Worse still, the cops arrest Kirk and charge him with the murder. In short order, he’s convicted and sentenced to death, and Alberta has less than three months until her husband’s execution to find the real killer and clear his name. Luckily, she just happens to have an address book she picked up in the murdered woman’s apartment, and a match book with the letter M engraved on it, pointing to the real killer. All she has to do is investigate everybody in the address book whose last name starts with M to find out who really killed her husband’s mistress and save him from the electric chair.

Yes, this book has its share of the coincidences and far-fetched plot developments that Woolrich’s work is famous for, but it also generates a considerable amount of suspense as Alberta searches for the murderer. Its structure is rather episodic, as she investigates each of the suspects in turn and the plot gets more and more complicated. Woolrich springs a nice reverse at the end that you’ll probably see coming. I did, but I enjoyed it anyway. And the final scene of the story has a sting of its own.

You could spend all day pointing out the flaws in Woolrich’s plotting, and his writing can be breathless and melodramatic at times. But nobody is better at using the emotions of his characters to capture the readers and sweep them along in a story. He’s also one of the best at utilizing the backdrop of seedy hotels and sleazy nightclubs and making that setting almost as much a character in his stories and novels as his human protagonists are. THE BLACK ANGEL is especially strong in that area. It’s a fine novel, and highly recommended by me. (I love that cover from '68 Ace edition, too.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ten Detective Aces, June 1935

 mystery fiction, pulps  Comments Off
Mar 312013
 

Nice early cover by Rafael DeSoto on this issue of TEN DETECTIVE ACES, which includes stories by Frederick C. Davis (a Moon Man yarn), Paul Chadwick (creator of Secret Agent X), T.W. Ford, W.T. Ballard, Emile C. Tepperman, and Joe Archibald. TEN DETECTIVE ACES was a pretty good pulp, from everything I've seen about it.

The Drifter Detective – Garnett Elliott

 Garnett Elliott, mystery fiction  Comments Off
Mar 202013
 

The Cash Laramie Universe expands with the introduction of Cash's grandson, private detective Jack Laramie, in an excellent novelette written by Garnett Elliott, "The Drifter Detective". Jack doesn't have your usual big-city office complete with bottle of booze in the desk drawer. No, he's more of a door-to-door detective, as one character in the story refers to him, driving around rural Texas in the early 1950s pulling an empty horse trailer where he sleeps when he doesn't have any place else.

It's a great set-up for a hardboiled private eye series, and Elliott provides the twisty plot (involving a wealthy oilman suspected of smuggling whiskey to the Indian reservations in Oklahoma), the beautiful babes, and the gritty action that the genre demands. He also does a very fine job of capturing the time and place, and I'm someone who knows whereof he speaks since I spent a lot of time around West Central Texas in the early Sixties, and I promise you, things hadn't changed much in the intervening decade.

Basically, "The Drifter Detective" is just a hell of a lot of fun. The cover even looks like it could have come off a Fifties paperback spinner rack. I want more Jack Laramie stories, and I'm ready for 'em right now. Highly recommended.

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