also heading your way in February: Go Lovely Rose/The Evil Wish, by Jean Potts

9781944520656
Stark House Press, 2019
303 pp

paperback (my many, many thanks to Stark House for my copy)

When I opened the envelope and saw this book, my first thought was "who the hell is Jean Potts?"  while my second thought was "Cool! Another woman writer I've never heard of!" Rather than relegate it to the this-can-wait-a-while stack, I threw it into the suitcase to take with me on my second trip west last week.

As to my first reaction, Jean Potts was born in 1910 in Saint Paul Nebraska, and after graduating from Nebraska Wesleyan University, she went on to work for The Phonograph newspaper in her home town before moving to New York.  Her first crime novel, Go Lovely Rose, published in 1954, won her an Edgar Award; she would go on to write thirteen more crime novels before her death in 1999, the last of which, My Brother's Killer, was written in 1975.  She also wrote

"several short stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Magazine and Women's Day to name a few." 

But who she is as a writer is much more interesting, and it didn't take me long to discover what makes these books work so very well for me personally.   In her New York Times Obituary,   Edward D. Hoch (former president of the Mystery Writers of America)  notes that perhaps her "strongest suit" was her characterizations, and I have to say that this is what I discovered in these books.   What hit me right away and continued to stay with me is how very flawed her characters are, and how they remain in many cases so locked inside of their own heads that for some of them, there is little chance of escape.   After finishing this two-in-one volume, I then turned to the introduction written by  J.F. Norris where he says it so much more eloquently, noting that in Potts' stories,  "Thoughts imprison her characters," to which I said out loud, "Yes, that's it. Spot on."

 As someone who normally reads less for plot than for what an author has to say about the human psyche and human nature in general,  I always have an inner eye open to how (or if)  an author incorporates an exploration into (quoting Norris again),  the "dark recesses of human imagination and its powerful hold."  Potts is deadly serious in this arena, and it begins to show not even five minutes into her first novel, Go Lovely Rose.   Neither of these books are in any shape or form what I'd call traditional whodunit or mystery stories -- in both, I think it is safe and accurate to say that Potts' genius as a writer is revealed via the slow unfolding of these  dark edges that reside within the minds of her characters. Along with a very keen, often delectable sense of irony in her writing, it's certainly enough to make me want to read more of her work. 

original edition cover, 1954. From Amazon

 Because I can't even begin to convey the psychological depths at work in either of these stories, I'll just offer a bit of basic appetite-whetting plot here with no spoilers. 

 Go Lovely Rose begins with the death of Mrs. Rose Henshaw,

"Fifty-six years of age ... For nineteen years housekeeper in the home of the late Dr. G.F. Buckmaster..."

who had fallen down the steps to the basement of the Buckmaster home in Coreyville and had broken her neck.  Rachel Buckmaster, who had left the family home for Chicago, returns home to sell the house so that her younger brother Hartley (19) can pay for college with his share; she's also disturbed after speaking to her brother and to a neighbor who tells her that Mrs. Henshaw's death was an accident, but that "people were talking."  There aren't many people in Coreyville who would actually mourn the loss of the Buckmaster's long-term housekeeper; she was an "evil" woman, even according to her ex-husband, and Rachel realizes that Hartley is  "free now, with Mrs. Henshaw dead."  Things may have worked out just fine for all had it not been for the appearance of Mrs. Henshaw's sister Mrs. Pierce, who insists that Rose was murdered and raises such a stink that Hartley is arrested.  Rachel and the local physician Dr. Craig, along with Hartley's girlfriend Bix Bovard and her father, newspaper editor Hugh Bovard, join together to prove Hartley is innocent, which isn't going to be easy for several reasons.  Trust me, this is not just another murder mystery. 

 1963 original cover, from Biblio

Moving from small midwest townville to New York City for The Evil Wish (1963),   Potts brings us the story of  two sisters who since childhood have grown up eavesdropping on their domineering father from the basement, and continuing the tradition into adulthood, one day discover that their dad has plans that would basically disinherit them in favor of his current girlfriend.  If Lucy and Marcia Knapp don't like it, he says, they can lump it.   The thought of losing their home is devastating, and Lucy can't stand the idea of being "abandoned" by her sister.  Even worse, they discover that they "don't matter to him" and that "he simply doesn't care."  They are savvy enough, however, to know that they have to keep the lid on the fact that they know what's about to happen; they are also irate enough to  decide to kill him.   Fate steps in however, when a car crash does the job, and while their problem has seemingly disappeared, they are left with the "evil wish" of his death, which as the epigraph by Hesiod reveals, is "most evil to the wisher."   As the blurb for this book asks, "what are they to do with their murder scheme and the residual guilt...," but really, reading this book as a story about a case of guilty consciences doesn't at all do it justice, because it's much, much more.   To her credit, Potts provides a hell of an answer to the question with ratcheting tension doled out in increments along the way toward some pretty horrific consequences. 


It is a true pity (she says once more in a familiar lament) that the work of Jean Potts is not more well known. She would be very much enjoyed by readers who enjoy the work of her contemporary Margaret Millar, who also wrote some psychologically-oriented novels, so hopefully the word will get out.  She may never become a household name, but she is definitely a writer whose work deserves the attention of not only serious aficionados of crime fiction of yesteryear,  but also of readers like myself on the lookout for relatively unknown women writers of the genre.     My thanks to J.F.  Norris for his insight into this writer in his introduction, and especially to the lovely people at Stark House for sending me a copy of this book.  I'm just blown away.

The Blue Room, by Georges Simenon

9780141399041
Penguin, 2015
originally published as La chambre bleue, 1964
Translated by Linda Coverdale
156 pp

paperback

"How could he have guessed that this scene was something he would relive ten times, twenty times and more -- and every time in a different frame of mind, from a different angle...?"

A hot sunny day in August, a hotel room, and two people have just finished making love, "bodies still flushed with sensation and minds slightly dazed."  Caught up in his own sort of post-sex floatiness, haze, afterglow -- whatever you want to call it -- Tony Falcone is dabbing at the blood on his lip where his lover/mistress over the past eleven months, Andrée Despierre has bitten him, barely listening to her and quietly responding as she asks him a series of questions, words that to him "hardly mattered," since for him, "They were talking for the pleasure of it, as one does after making love..."  and

"Right now, nothing seemed important to him -- he felt good, in tune with the universe."

Still in this frame of mind, where "only the present mattered,"  halfheartedly listening to Andrée, she asks him if he could really spend the rest of his life with her, and he, in a non-thinking sort of way answers "Sure..."  But his happiness is interrupted when looking out the window overlooking the Place de Gare in the town of Triant, he sees something that causes him to grab his clothes, run out of the room and head to his car -- Andrée's husband Nicolas, who is heading right for the hotel.  It may seem that Tony's managed to escape, but in reality, he's already trapped in a nightmare. He just doesn't know it yet. 

However, we know that something has happened just three pages in as Tony describes a "psychiatrist appointed by the examining magistrate" asking him questions about that day, and "studying his reactions."  It's that series of questions, the conversation between Andrée and Tony that he is asked to remember, but why we don't exactly know.  It is that scene which he will be called upon to "relive ten, twenty times and more -- ... every time in a different frame of mind and from a different angle." And indeed, the conversation crops up several times throughout this story, and as we begin to learn what has happened that puts Tony in front of an examining magistrate, it takes on more meaning each time.

But Tony, who is married to a wife he loves and has a young child, struggles to make everyone understand about his affair with Andrée and the blue room, where for him,

"nothing was real. Or rather, its reality was of a different nature, incomprehensible anywhere else." 

Outside of that space they'd never been a couple; as he says, "they were an 'us' only in a bed" there.  For him, their lovemaking was intoxicating; both shared "an animal pleasure" he'd never known with any other woman.  She is, to Tony, the fulfillment of his sexual desire and passion.  But more importantly, as things progress, we hear from Tony that no one can really understand the present without an understanding of the past.  As he says,

"They thought, all these people in Poitiers, policemen, magistrates, doctors, even that unnerving lady psychologist, that they were going to establish the truth, when they knew nothing about the Despierres, the Formiers, and so many others who were important in their own ways."

As in most of his work, Simenon launches us quickly into the past, which ties directly to the present while the principals try to get to the truth.  But we are quick to learn that truth here isn't exactly absolute -- although Tony tries to be as honest and candid as possible, past and present circumstances are "True and false, like all the rest of it."   But the author does something more here, taking us beyond the past and present into the future, and does it so skillfully that it just becomes part of the flow even as he makes the shifts.

 With Simenon's gift for detail, his focus on human nature and his characters, his ability to produce a sort of claustrophobic atmosphere that only becomes more confining as time goes on, and his excellent economy of prose where every word, every phrase is carefully measured and never wasted, The Blue Room  offers an intense study of a man who unwittingly creates his own hell and becomes trapped, with no possibility of escape;  as he is continuously questioned, he is also forced to face his own role and his own responsibility for what has happened.

The length of this book might fool you into thinking that you can buzz through it in a day, but don't do it.  There is so much going on here and it needs to be given your utmost attention because everything, and I do mean everything in this story matters.  I did about 40 pages per day just to absorb it all, and even after a second read, I'm sure there's much more that I could get out of it.  It is, quite frankly, genius writing, but then again, most of Simenon's books are.

Beyond highly recommended, especially for readers who want a challenge and who want to take the time to get underneath what seems to be a fairly cut-and-dried story. Trust me -- it is anything but.

The Syndicate, by Clarence Cooper, Jr.

9781948596046
Molotov Editions, 2018
originally published 1960
140 pp

paperback: my many, many thanks to  Dominic Stansberry at Molotov Editions for my copy of this book.


"It was no use trying to get around the facts: something was wrong with me. And whatever it was was scary as hell..."


June 15th, three days from now, the small press Molotov editions will be releasing The Syndicate, by Clarence Cooper.  It's highly likely that regular readers of crime fiction have never heard of Clarence Cooper, who wrote this book in 1960 under the pseudonym of Robert Chestnut.  He had written another book prior to this one, which, as the back cover blurb reveals, "was a literary sensation."  The Syndicate, however, was seen as "too raw,"  a negative that would have been "possibly damaging" to Cooper's writing career, hence the name change.

 Clarence Cooper has also been neglected among scholars of African-American crime fiction,  because even in a quick survey of four different reference books I have that pertain to the topic,  Cooper's name turns up in only one.  And even there, in Justin Gifford's  excellent Pimping Fictions: African-American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing, Cooper is acknowledged only as one of a "number of black crime fiction authors who were contemporaries of Chester Himes," who have "remained off the radar of most literary and cultural scholars" (180).   That is a shame, really, since if The Syndicate is an example of what came out of this author's head, he should be much better known than he is, by readers and especially by scholars in this field.

Definitely not for the faint of heart, The Syndicate is beyond raw, reaching down into the grittiest depths of darkness as it pulls us into the mind of an extremely troubled and damaged man, Andy Sorrell.  He's been called on by his boss to take care of three men who have double crossed "the Syndicate," an organized-crime group out of New York.   Andy will be paid ten grand for his work, once he finds these crooks who had  made off with half a million dollars "rightfully" belonging to the Syndicate after a "bank job" in New Jersey.  He is then supposed to recover the money and return it to his boss.  After making his way to the coastal town of Hollisworth,

"... a solid little city, with the exception that it belongs to the syndicate, lock, stock, and barrel"

complete with crooked cops, Sorrell begins his quest at his contact's club where he literally beats the information out of a stripper,  Tina, who knows the whereabouts of one of the men he's looking for and won't talk.   Afterwards, he has a moment of regret for hurting her, but he has to focus on his targets.

His anger at Tina actually has very little to do with his anger over her not talking, but stems from the death of his pregnant girlfriend, Carolyn.  As Sorrell reveals, it was Tina

 "so closely resembling Carolyn, that's what got me. She had not right to look just like her, or to say those things like Carolyn might have said! No right!"

Sorrell is constantly haunted by Carolyn.  Early on in the story he hears her talking to him, her voice coming from the sea, telling him that he's "horrid and brutal and a murderer."  She also tells him that when he kills, he's killing "more than one person."  As she puts it,

"You're trying to kill that thing within you."

Exactly what "that thing" inside of Sorrell is is fleshed out more as the story goes along, but it's evident early on that Carolyn's death two years earlier has wounded him to the core and it has played havoc with his mind. 

The Syndicate is a twisty, brutally dark novel.   It is one of those stories where it's difficult to know who is telling the truth or who is trustworthy, since betrayals abound.  Although it's laced with violence that is hard to read at times, the plotting, the pacing and the story are all solid -- not a misstep anywhere.  Yet, aside from the plot it's what's happening within that is utterly fascinating.  We find ourselves inside the mind of a brutal killer, who knows that there's something wrong with him, and that whatever it is,

"it was getting closer and closer to me, ever since two years ago and Carolyn."

I think it's this mix of Sorrell's battles with his own inner demons and the external forces that for reasons I won't spill here want to keep him from finishing the job he's been sent to do that makes this book unique in a big way.  It's definitely not just another dime-a-dozen, enforcer-goes-looking-for-who-screwed-the-mob sort of novel -- it's the author's simultaneous attention to what's going on inside of Sorrell that elevates this book to an entirely different level.

I'll be honest here -- The Syndicate is not an easy book to read because of some of things that happen between its covers;  there were times when I had to put the novel down for a while because of incidents of brutality against women that crop up a couple of times.  However, looking at it from the point of view that there is something in Sorrell's psychological makeup that causes these things to happen makes it a bit more easy to deal with on an emotional level.

This lost crime classic that is about to reappear shortly is well worth the attention of any crime fiction reader that enjoys dark, deep, and gritty -- the back cover likens him to Jim Thompson so that pretty much tells you what you need to know regarding what you might be getting into here.

One final note:  there is an excellent article about Clarence Cooper Jr. at The Guardian , where author Tony O'Neill notes that with some of his books coming back into print, "Clarence Cooper Jr., ignored and reviled in his own lifetime, is gradually being recognised as the great American novelist he is."  Let's hope that's the case, and let's also hope that there will be more of his books made available in the near future.  I hadn't even finished this book before I went and bought his The Farm. and my hat is off to Molotov Editions for bringing this novel back into print and rescuing it from its current state of "pulp oblivion." 

a downright delicious double dose of Dard, from Pushkin Vertigo: Crush and Bird in a Cage

9781782271987
Pushkin Vertigo, 2016
originally published as Les scélérates, 1959
translated by Daniel Seton
156 pp

paperback

"I sincerely believe you have pulled off the perfect crime." --  Bird in a Cage  

The good people at Pushkin Vertigo tell me in a short section at the back of this novel that this book is one of Frédéric Dard's " 'novels of the night', -- a run of stand-alone, dark psychological thrillers written by Dard in his prime, and considered by many to be his best work."  It's good, all right, as is his Bird in a Cage, both of them read over the course of one night while I was once again wide awake.

 What I find interesting about both books is that somewhere toward the beginning of each, the main characters say or think little things that sort of grate on the mental ear, cluing me into the notion that there may just be something very off with these people who are telling us their stories. It's nothing big, there's really nothing anyone can put his or her finger on at the moment,  but that little mental niggle picked up on by my inner radar has come back to me in both books at some later point, leading to the "aha - I knew it!" moment in my head.

Let's start with Crush, which has a bizarre but good ending that in hindsight I should have seen but actually never saw coming.  The "I" here is 17 year-old Louise Lacroix, living at home in Léopoldville, in a neighborhood that's "all stunted little houses, lined up any old how on a plain surrounded by chimney stacks spewing out great clouds of smoke..."  She lives with mom and her "mum's man" Arthur (having never known her dad)  in a rented "ramshackle, barely furnished house" that hasn't seen repairs in years,  even though the "walls are crumbling like nobody's business." She's also always hated the town, because she saw it as "artificial and sad."   Louise has a job in a local factory, but we soon discover that she needs a change, starting with her route home from work each evening. 

Changing her way home takes her through the center of town, where "you can feel the money round there," where she discovered the home of the Roolands, a couple known locally as "the Yanks"  existing "on a sort of desert island all its own... where the natives seemed to live bloody well..."  Returning home late one evening, she gets into it with Arthur, and runs to the Roolands' where she offers her services as a maid. Eventually Jess and Thelma agree and Louise convinces them that it would be better if she lived in.  While Thelma drinks away her day while listening to music, Jess works at NATO, and soon enough Louise is happy in her new situation.  One incident drives her home, but the American couple provides enough financial incentive to Louise's mother to bring Louise back. It isn't long though until tragedy strikes, and suddenly we're left wondering exactly what the truth is behind the events that follow.  Dard does such a good job here that as I said, I should have seen what was coming and absolutely did not.  Once I'd finished, though, I was in awe of just how well the author had set things up, and I didn't mind at all that I'd been so cleverly manipulated. Au contraire - I actually appreciated it.

Moving onto the next book, Bird in a Cage, another of Dard's romans nuits, I was a bit worried at first that I was reading something along the lines of Cornell Woolrich's Phantom Lady, because in many ways Bird in a Cage begins with just that sort of feel.  As things turned out though, I was entirely wrong.  

9781782271994
Pushkin Vertigo, 2016
originally published as Le Monte-Charge, 1961
translated by David Bellos
123 pp
paperback

It's Christmas Eve, and Albert has come back home to Paris and to his mother's apartment after being away for six years. Mom has died, and he has returned to an empty, but still unchanged place.  After laying back in his old bed for a while, thinking he'd give anything to see his mom "just for a second, standing behind the door," and to hear her asking him if he was awake, his sorrow takes over and he needs to get out.  Off into the night, into his old quartier he wanders, after having stopped in a shop to buy a Christmas decoration, a "silver cardboard birdcage sprinkled with glitter dust" with a blue and yellow velvet bird inside on a perch. Next stop is Chiclet's, a "big restaurant" where as a child he'd stop and look through its windows "at the opulent part of humanity holding court inside."

 It's there that he runs into a woman who reminds him of a woman from his past named Anna, but this woman has a small child with her, and Albert suddenly feels the tragedy of the "shared loneliness" of the two.  After a short stint at a movie theater, Albert walks the woman (still nameless at this point) home; she invites him up for a drink and some impulse drives him to hang the birdcage on the woman's Christmas tree.  The little girl is put to bed, after which the woman reveals that she would really like to go out for a while, and they talk about her marriage which is extremely unhappy.  Returning her to her home, Albert realizes that they're not alone -- there's now a coat hanging on a hook that belongs to the woman's husband, who is lying on the sofa dead as a doornail. Albert quickly tries to remove traces of himself from the apartment, cleaning up fingerprints, etc., but when he goes to get the birdcage, he discovers that it is no longer hanging on the tree.  It's at this juncture where the story really takes off, as Albert is forced to make a confession to this woman, who promptly throws him out after telling him she'd get in touch with the police about her husband's death.   But he just can't leave, so he waits, hiding outside and watching as things get weirder and weirder before he steps in once more and gets the surprise of his life. 

When I finished this novel, to say I was blown away is to very much understate how I felt about it.  Frankly, I thought it was just genius. I think my insomnia may have been caused by a) first the tension that kept ratcheting up throughout the story and b) just laying there thinking about the book and  about just how cleverly Dard  put things together here. It's like I was expecting one thing and then out of nowhere, it became an entirely different ball game altogether, where everything changed completely.   

Passing on this book because it was written in 1961 would be a shame -- it's absolutely perfect for vintage crime readers, for readers who enjoy French crime, and for readers who are looking for something different in their crime fiction. My advice is to run, do not walk,  and pick up a copy ASAP. This one I just loved.  Absolutely.    

diving back into Highsmith's brain with This Sweet Sickness

0393323676
W.W. Norton, 2002
originally published 1960
282 pp

paperback

"The Situation. It was all part of the one Situation, after all."

The more Highsmith I read, the more reluctant I become to label her work as crime fiction. The problem in trying to categorize her work is that she's a writer who doesn't pigeonhole easily, so I have just quit trying.  But since there's murder involved here, as in most of the books I've read (with the exception of her The Price of Salt), this seems like the appropriate place to talk about her work.

This Sweet Sickness is Highsmith's seventh book and somewhere around page 90 I had to put it down for a day because of the knots forming in my gut. Somehow I just knew that this story was going to end very badly and well, I wasn't wrong.  This book unnerved me to the max and reaffirmed my belief that it is dangerous indeed to stay in this woman's brain (or that of her main character here) for any length of time.

David Kelsey is an intelligent, successful chemist who lives in a small town in New York.  He has a room in a boardinghouse there during the week; over his weekends he goes to a lovely home he owns, which he'd bought under the name of William Neumeister, "who had never failed at anything, at least nothing important... "  His fellow residents at Mrs. McCartney's boardinghouse know nothing about either Neumeister nor Kelsey's home -- when asked where he goes every weekend, he tells them he is visiting his mother at a nursing home. What no one knows is that David's mother is dead and has been for a while.  It seems that David goes home each weekend looking for letters from the only woman he's ever loved, Annabelle.  He's also fixed the place up in a style he knows Annabelle will love. But David absolutely refuses to accept or to deal with "The Situation," which

 "was the way it was and had been for nearly two years...like a rock, say a five-pound rock, that he carried around in his chest day and night."

David's "situation" is that two years earlier, Annabelle had married Gerald Delaney.  That doesn't seem to bother David, though -- in his mind, he had "won Annabelle," who, in Neumeister's house, "lived with him here, he imagined," "her presence in every room."  Everything he does is for Annabelle, and his obsession with her grows as he pursues his dream of having her as his wife.

first US edition cover from Wikipedia

The US first edition cover speaks volumes about what's inside this novel, but once again I turn to
Andrew Wilson, Highsmith's biographer who reveals that Kelsey is a sort of "Nietzschean hero," which should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who's read Highsmith. He also reveals that Highsmith herself "conducted an imaginary love affair," and notes Highsmith's diary as recording that "without her" (the woman about whom she fantasized), "it would have been a different book."

Quite frankly, This Sweet Sickness is one of the most disturbing novels in Highsmith's lineup to this point, and reader beware -- there is absolutely nothing uplifting or redeeming to be found here, which normally doesn't bother me, but with Highsmith I've found that reading her work has to be done in small doses.  I'm totally not surprised that Hitchcock bought the television rights to this book, which eventually became an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour called "Annabel"   (season one) starring Dean Stockwell.  Maddeningly, I can't find a copy to buy anywhere, nor can I find anything but a VHS copy of the movie based on this book (1977) starring Gérard Depardieu, "Dites-lui que je l'aime."

Enter at your own risk, but then again, that's true of every Highsmith novel. Her books definitely get an NFE (not for everyone) rating from me -- but I can't help myself.  I love her. 

in the spirit of the season -- Hallowe'en Party, by Agatha Christie

My edition of this book is the blue leatherette hardcover, the whole set of which  my very understanding and indulging spouse discovered in a consignment shop and bought for me some years back. But this cover is much more interesting than my plain one, and way more interesting than the original:

Having recently watched the excellent dramatization of this book on DVD (with David Suchet, of course, as Poirot and Zoe Wanamaker the absolutely perfect Ariadne Oliver), I figured I'd give Christie's Hallowe'en Party a go in book form.  After finishing it late yesterday afternoon, I found myself agreeing with a contemporary reviewer from the Toronto Daily Star who wrote that "Poirot seems weary and so does the book."  It was a bit disappointing in that I'm used to actually seeing Poirot's little gray cells at work, and here, while he does solve the mystery, it's just not the same as the older Poirot novels -- he does indeed seem incredibly tired. Poirot's less than lackluster self combined with several missed character opportunities made this book not as fun to read as I'd hoped.

The plot itself is an incredibly good one.  The wealthy Mrs. Rowena Drake, who has her fingers in every social, civic and church-related pie in her village, throws a Halloween party at her home for the "eleven-plus" group of kids.  Ariadne Oliver happens to be in the neighborhood, staying with her friend Mrs. Butler, and they both attend the party.  Mrs. Oliver is famous, of course, and one young girl (Joyce) tries to impress by telling her about the time she saw a murder happen.  Of course, she says, she didn't realize that it was a murder that she was seeing at the time, but now she realizes the truth of it.  Joyce, who has a penchant for story telling and making things up, is pooh-poohed by everyone at the party -- no one believes her and they make fun of her for making up something so outrageous.  But someone must have believed her, because when the party ends, Joyce is discovered head down in a tub filled with water meant for apple bobbing.  Poirot is visited the next day by a very shaken Ariadne Oliver, who tells him what happened. He latches on to Joyce's tale of murder, leading him to go to the scene of the crime.

Zoe Wanamaker (Ariadne Oliver) and David Suchet (Poirot) in "Halloween Party"

While the plot is good, I think Christie missed the boat on this one -- it most certainly isn't the best of Poirot and it isn't the best in terms of clues for the amateur armchair detective to follow. I just don't feel like she utilized those skills in this book that made her such an enduring mystery writer.    When it comes down to the who and the why, things seemed rather shaky and I found myself saying things like "but what about..?" more than once.  I hate plot holes, no matter who the writer is, and there are definitely a couple or three sinkhole-sized ones here.

So the long and short of it is great plot potential, but not so hot in the execution.  I suppose even Agatha Christie can have an off day, and it definitely shows in this one.

Chalk Line Books: The Secret Squad, by David Goodis

Chalk Line Books, 2014
kindle edition
 originally published in 1961 as The Night Squad

my copy from the publisher (thanks!)

"It's like a shell-game ... You pick up the wrong shell, you're done. And the odds are always two-to-one against you. At least two-to-one, that is.  In this case it's more like fifty-to-one. But that's the gamble you gotta take. There just ain't no other way to play this deal." 

Good crime for me is all about edge, and David Goodis has rewarded me many times over in just this one book. Having never read anything by this author before, after reading this one,  I'll be collecting his other novels for my permanent collection.  

Set in a run-down neighborhood in Philadelphia known as "the Swamp," the story follows former cop Corey Bradford as he becomes caught between a sleazy but respected businessman named Walter Grogan and the head of Philly's Night Squad, Detective Sergeant McDermott.  Bradford, whose dad was a cop,  lost his place in the force for shaking down locals for a few extra bucks & taking bribes. Now near broke, prone to double shots of gin and divorced, he happens to be in a local bar called The Hangout when some thugs try to take Grogan out.  Bradford saves Grogan from being killed, and impressed, Grogan tells Bradford he'll give him fifteen grand to find out who's after him.  Bradford takes the job, but it isn't long afterward that he's contacted by Sergeant McDermott of the Night Squad, a small group of cops who were often referred to as "barbarians," "butchers," and "gangsters."  McDermott wants Bradford to join the squad and try to dig up any evidence pointing to Grogan as a criminal, putting Bradford into a moral corner -- if he works for Grogan, there's all that money; if he does the job for the Night Squad, it's bye-bye cash and any promise of escaping the Swamp, where for most people, with the exception of a down-at-heel, gentlemanly drunk named Carp, he's persona non grata. 

 

"They gave him back his badge -- and sent him down into the brutal throbbing heart of the slums."

 The people in this novel are all damaged in some way or another, and the action takes place in a neighborhood that's run down with little chance of escape for the people who live there. They're set apart and almost isolated from the rest of the city due to the neighborhood's geography --- the Swamp is bordered by an area of muddy water that can suck a man down.  The name of this place is appropriate -- very few of the inhabitants have a lot of hope of getting out, and this comes out brilliantly in the author's development of  his characters.  And, as in any good edgy crime novel, there's no pat or contrived happy resolution for any of these people.

This is a story that I genuinely liked -- the action, even if it's in Bradford's interior monologues, is dark and stays that way.  The Swamp is so well rendered here that by the time you finish the novel, you're well acquainted with every shabby rooming house and every dark alley in the neighborhood, as well as the inner miseries of the people living in it.  I definitely want to read more of this author. 

Definitely not for people who like happy endings or cutesy/cozy mysteries, this book ranks high on the noir scale.   I highly recommend it.  

A word about this edition of the e-book: it's very readable, uncut, and has a few line drawings scattered throughout the text.  Very well done. 

The Expendable Man, by Dorothy B. Hughes

9781590174951
NYRB Classics, 2012
originally published 1963
245 pp


My favorite fiction is the edgy, gritty kind where some poor guy, for some reason or another,  gets drawn into a hopelessly screwed-up situation and finds that it just keeps getting worse, despite everything he does to try to escape.   These kinds of stories start off innocuously enough, but within just a very short time my tension starts to build, joined by a restlessness and a quickly-growing sensitivity to the fear and paranoia emanating from  the hapless character. When that level of unease stays with me the entire time I've got the book in my hands,  I'm positively elated.  This feeling is precisely what I look for when I pick up a crime novel, and this is exactly what I got in Dorothy B. Hughes' The Expendable Man.  What happens in this novel is nothing less than one man's nightmare played out over the course of a few days of his life; between the lines Hughes pens her own insights into issues pertinent to the time & place of this novel's setting.

Dr. Hugh Densmore is an intern at UCLA, and he's left the city to be with his family for his sister's upcoming wedding in Phoenix.   In his mother's borrowed car, he's making his way through the desert highway and notices a hitchhiker along the side of the road. Normally, he "knew better" than to stop for hitchhikers, but this time it's different -- leaving the young, teenaged  girl at the side of the road just wasn't something his conscience isn't going to  allow him to do:

"He had sisters a young as this. It chilled him to think what might happen if one them were abandoned on the lonesome highway, the type of man with whom, in desperation, she might accept a lift."

Although his growing uneasiness on the drive leads him to make plans to leave her at the border before crossing the state line into Arizona,  that idea backfires and he takes her on into Phoenix. He drops her off at the bus station and she's gone.  But the day after she makes a surprise visit to his hotel room,  he hears an announcement on the radio about an unidentified girl.  Grabbing the newspaper, he discovers that the body of a young girl has been found in a nearby Scottsdale canal.  He quickly discards any idea of helping the police identify her,  but later an anonymous tip sends the cops directly to him -- as a suspect.  He hides the situation from his family and tells the police the bare outlines of his story,  but he's just certain that they're going to pin the girl's murder on him.  They delay an arrest, but growing ever more paranoid that it's going to happen at any moment,  he spills everything to Ellen, a family friend in town for the wedding. Densmore now has no choice but to try to prove his innocence.  He has to show that he played no part in the girl's murder before they take lock him away for good:  "because of circumstance," he has been tagged as the "sacrificial goat,"  and he knows it.  But time is ticking and no one but Ellen believes him. 

A  taut, thoroughly convincing and highly atmospheric novel, The Expendable Man is a classic "wrongly-accused-man" story with a bit of a twist that adds an extra layer of reader tension when it dawns on you exactly what's going on.  Hughes is superb at plotting and pace; her descriptions of the Arizona desert are spot on.  For example, in describing a ride through the desert night, she writes:

"The moon was high and white; each fence post, each clump of cactus was as distinctly outlined as by the sun. The mountains were moon-gray against the deep night sky. A dog barked from a distant house, the only reminder that they were not on a distant planet."

The atmosphere she creates with phrases like these also reflect Densmore's own isolation throughout the story.  Her characters and dialogue are all believable as well, but beyond the normal components of this kind of fiction,  Hughes also incorporates people from different walks of life into her story, all the while  scrutinizing American attitudes regarding race, socio-economic status and crime in the early 1960s.

The Expendable Man is among the best books I've read all year, and I can't recommend it enough.  Sure, the wrongly-accused-man thing has been done before and for many modern readers used to the gimmicky serial killer type reads that top the charts today,  it might come across as a little tame or outdated.  But this book goes well beyond just another novel of crime fiction, spilling into the realm where empathy takes over:  the reader remains trapped in Densmore's nightmare just as much as he is, up until the final sentence. That's how much power Hughes has over her audience.  And I loved every second of it.

The Pale Horse, by Agatha Christie

0007151659
HarperCollins, 2008
originally published by Dodd, Mead in 1962

"Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human."

And Agatha Christie should know, since she spent her illustrious career writing stories about the evil that men (and women) do.  In this later book, there is no Poirot, there is no Marple, no Tommy or Tuppence, but there is still a decent mystery at the core of this tale.

A priest takes a confession from a dying woman in a boarding house, and walks out of there wondering exactly how much of what he's just heard is true and how much is to the delirium brought on by high fever.  He also knows that he must write down a list of names the woman has given him before he forgets them.  He does this at a small cafe (with terrible coffee) then puts the strip of paper in his shoe, due to a torn pocket lining in his cassock. On his way home, he is most cruelly murdered.  The only clue the police have is the list of names and a witness statement from someone who says he saw the murderer on the night in question.

Mark Easterbrook, who is working on a book about the Moguls, finds himself involved rather peripherally at first, then after a few mysterious coincidences is drawn fully into the case. His part of the story begins in a Chelsea coffeehouse with a fight between two women and then a chance meeting with a friend of his, a forensics specialist who has given up private research to make a living; and then it moves on to a mysterious inn known as The Pale Horse, which is run by a trio of Macbeth witch-like women who run the place.  His narrative parallels and then joins that of the police until a cruel murdering maniac is brought to justice.  And the person who provides him with the missing link -- that oh so critical bit of information that is needed to piece it all together -- is none other than Ariadne Oliver, friend to Hercule Poirot, often-scatterbrained mystery writer and probably Agatha Christie's tongue-in-cheek fictional alter ego.

 The reader clearly gets a feel for place and time here --  you can just imagine the coffee houses of Chelsea in the 1960s complete with their "cool" clientele: the "teddy boys;" the young girls who wear birdsnest-type hairdos and sweaters even though it's warm inside, and the young of both sexes who seem rather "dirty" in their overall appearance.  Many of the characters are well imagined and developed, and the plotline is better than just okay. The best compliment I can give for this book is that I did NOT guess the identity of the killer. At one point I thought I had it figured out -- the who and the how, but I was dead wrong, which is always a good thing. There were also a few nice red herrings for the reader to become temporarily sidetracked.  And while The Pale Horse may not one of the better examples of Christie's work,  it is still quite good, and it will keep you entertained trying to figure out the who and the how of the crimes. It's a bit different than any of the other Christie novels in terms of a few members of the dramatis personae involved, and the end came a bit too quickly, but if you're a fan, you'll definitely want to read it.

Third Girl, by Agatha Christie

0002318075

HarperCollins, 2002

originally published 1966

Hercule Poirot is now in his 35th adventure; after this one, he has only three more contemporary appearances -- in Hallow'een Party, Elephants Can Remember, and Curtain.

Third Girl is set smack in the mid-sixties.  It's a time when men are wearing such clothes as  "elaborate velvet waistcoat[s], skin-tight pants," and wearing their hair long in "rich curls of chestnut," while women were wearing

the clothes of their generation: black high leather boots, white open-work stockings of doubtful cleanliness, a skimpy skirt and a long and sloppy pullover of heavy wool.

The Beatles proclaim in 1966 that they're more popular than Jesus. The younger generation is experimenting with drugs and getting high. Girls aren't staying at home much after leaving school, going off to the cities to find jobs and live in apartments, often doubling up or adding a "third" girl to help with the rent.  It is just such a "third girl," Norma Restarick, who early one morning finds herself with Hercule Poirot, to tell him that she might have committed a murder, but then proclaims Poirot too old, and disappears. He's obviously intrigued, and finds out the girl's identity only when Ariadne Oliver, the mystery novelist, begins discussing a party she'd been to earlier where she'd met this young woman. From that point, the two begin investigating Norma's past and present, trying to discover if she's unbalanced, or if there's someone that might mean her harm. Poirot looks for patterns & death, and Ariadne tries methods that her detective, Sven Hjerson, might use in her popular mystery books.

As usual, there are plenty of suspects and red herrings throughout the novel, and this time Christie puts a secret up her sleeve that she doesn't reveal until the end -- a bit of duplicity on her part which wasn't really fair, but worked.  I thought the final solution was well done and although the clues were there all along, I still managed to be surprised by the ending,  which a) I felt was quite satisfying and b) I should have figured out after the breadcrumb trail of clues Christie left behind. And while the story may seem a bit muddled from time to time, it's still well worth the read. 

Poirot, without a doubt, is one of my favorite detectives ever, with his fastidious mannerisms and personality.  Even toward the end of his career his little grey cells are as busy and sharp as ever; Miss Lemon,  the secretary par excellence,  makes an appearance, always a step ahead of Poirot, and then there's Ariadne Oliver, a rather unique character, often living off of her intuition or using her mystery novelist skills to offer help in Poirot's investigation.  While she does provide some comic relief and comes off as a bit of a bumbler from time to time, she actually manages to also provide a few valuable clues to Poirot from time to time. 

At first I was a bit unsure as to whether or not I would enjoy this novel, but it ended up being a treat. This must be one that either I read eons ago and have totally forgotten, or that somehow I managed to miss until now. I can recommend it, definitely, BUT ... if you're looking for the recently televised Third Girl, you'll find that there's quite a difference between page and screen.

fiction from England

A Caribbean Mystery, by Agatha Christie

0007120915
HarperCollins
2002
Originally published 1964
224 pp.

"Like to see the picture of a murderer?"

Major Palgrave was the man with a million stories, and everyone vacationing at the lovely Golden Palm Hotel on the Caribbean island of St. Honoré tried to avoid him like the plague. Once he got started, he never stopped. His latest victim, so to speak, was Jane Marple, who had come to the Golden Palm to recuperate after a serious bout of pneumonia. Knitting bag in hand, Miss Marple was sitting, half listening and making polite replies once in a while, until Major Palgrave started speaking about her favorite topic: murder.  He begins to tell her a rather unusual story about a man who got away with murder more than once, and when Palgrave asks her if she wanted to see a picture of a murderer, the knitting stops and she's all eyes and ears.  But after he fishes through his wallet for the photo, he suddenly stops and changes the subject rather abruptly and rather loudly. Taken aback, Miss Marple looks up to see why and sees several people nearby.  Although curious, she goes right back to her knitting. The next day, when one of the maids finds Major Palgrave dead in his room, apparently from natural causes, Miss Marple can't help but wonder if all is as it seems.  When she creates a clever story to retrieve the photograph Palgrave was about to show her, it's gone, and now she's interested.

Miss Marple is the perfect detective. When people look at her they see "all knitting wool and tittle-tattle," and she becomes more or less invisible that way, easily dismissed by most of the players. But one man, wealthy businessman Jason Rafiel, sees right through her. And since Jane is not in St. Mary Mead at the moment, with no help from the likes of Sir Henry Clithering, it is Rafiel to whom she turns in hopes of preventing more death.

 A Caribbean Mystery is lighter in tone than some of her other Marple mysteries, slowly paced and there are spots where my interest definitely flagged.  The mystery plotline was good, although a bit predictable. The ocean, the sand, the palms and the steel band music definitely brought the Caribbean to mind while reading, since I've been there a number of times.   And although this isn't one of my favorites in the Marple series, I couldn't help but enjoy watching her brain at work.

My advice to potential Christie readers: put this one somewhere in the middle of your reading schedule and start with some of the other Marple stories.  

as an aside:
This book has been adapted for television twice:
1) with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple
2) with Helen Hayes as Miss Marple

fiction from England

The Master Key, by Masako Togawa

014007645X

King Penguin, 1985

Original Japanese Title: Oi Naru Genei, 1962

translated by Simon Grove

An oldie but still a goodie, The Master Key begins with a highly-publicized architectural experiment: engineers are about to move an entire five-story building to make way for widening an existing road. The engineers have assured the women who live there that they can remain in their apartments for the move, and that they won't notice a thing.  They've even convinced the inhabitants of the building that they should all fill a glass with water and watch it ... they won't even see a ripple.  And as the story opens, that is what many of the women are doing. Then -- three flashbacks: an accident involving a man wearing women's clothing, the burial of a child's body in the building's basement, and the tale of the kidnapping of the young son of an American army officer stationed in Japan. 

The K Apartments for Ladies is not only a residence, but is also the world which these women occupy.  It is a place where, according to one woman,  a person can imagine that

 old women pass their days in silence still gazing at the broken fragments of the dreams of their youth, every now and then letting fall a sigh that echoes down the corridor, until they combine on the stairway and roll down to the cavernous hallway, raising one long moan...

Ironically, the original purpose of the building was to serve as a place where "Japanese women could emancipate themselves," where single young ladies could live alone.  Fifty years earlier, when the building was constructed, that was almost unheard of, and people would often look at it with "envious curiosity."  However, now the residents are growing old, living with the "bright days of their pasts," now passing their time largely in a lonely existence of solitude and withdrawal. Rather than being free, women are now stuck there, with nowhere else to go, keeping parts of their past lives away from the prying eyes of others.  And in the face of a changing outside world, many live there in order to continue old traditions.  Now, with the theft of the building's master key,  the safety of their world has been violated.  Someone has access to things the residents would rather keep buried. In the midst of this world of secrets and solitude, there is one person who has no qualms about prying into the proverbial skeletons in the closets.  The looming threat of deadly gossip would be, in some cases, too much to bear. Along with the moving of the building, the theft of the master key threatens to bring about that "one chance in a hundred" of the collapse of the world which these women inhabit, by making public the things they have kept hidden for a good portion of their lives.

The question of who took the key and why is only part of this story. Secrets upon secrets are revealed as the author delves into the lives of  a few of these women to produce a novel that starts out on a high note of tension and stays that way up until the very end. But The Master Key is not only a mystery novel; it also offers a psychological portrait of aging women dealing with their pasts and the loneliness of their present situations.

The story is told from several different points of view so the novel may be a bit confusing at times. The characters and their hidden lives are what drive this book, but I found myself having to go back a few times to remember who was who and pick up the threads of their individual narratives.  While that was a bit distracting, the sleight-of-hand twist at the end made it all worthwhile, as did the sense of place that came alive in the very atmosphere of this stifling and gloomy apartment world in which these ladies live.  And although it was written in 1962 and may seem a bit dated, the suspenseful tone that starts at the beginning does not let up until the end.

fiction from Japan

Shattered, by Richard Neely

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

1991 (reissue)

0679734988

originally published as 

The Plastic Nightmare

1969

Shattered is a work of noir fiction that begins when Dan Marriott awakes in a hospital. His wife, Judith, is by his side, and he learns that he and Judith had been in a catastrophic car accident.  Judith was thrown clear, but Dan wasn't so lucky. Most of the bones in his body were broken, his face was totally disfigured, and worse yet, he has no memory of who he is. After a series of plastic surgeries, he is ready to leave the hospital and to try to piece together his life. Judith takes him home and begins filling him in on their past life together, but little things Dan finds and remarks people make cause him to realize that something is just not right -- and after a few very strange occurrences, he finds it even more imperative to get to the truth. To say more would wreck the story.

Let's just say that this isn't the best piece of noir I've ever read, nor is it the worst. The plot is a good one, and I never guessed the ending (definitely a nice twist) but everything seems to happen so quickly. There's not a lot of time to really get into the characters, and while the story keeps you reading, it would have been better if it had been a bit more in depth.  However, I liked it well enough to pick up another book by this author -- The Walter Syndrome, highly recommended by several Neely fans.

I'd recommend it to readers of noir fiction.

sidebar: the movie based on this book is on IFC Friday night (4/16) 8:45 pm.  From all accounts it's not so hot, but I plan on watching it anyway.