The Black-Eyed Blonde, by Benjamin Black

9780805098143
Henry Holt, 2014
290 pp

hardcover

also available as an audiobook from Macmillan -- if you'd like to hear an excerpt, just click the blue Streampad bar below. 

"I said it before, and I know I'll have to say it again: women are nothing but trouble."

Benjamin Black, aka John Banville, is the author of the excellent series of crime novels set in 1950s Dublin -- in The Black-Eyed Blonde,  he stays in the 1950s but moves to Raymond Chandler's mean streets of Los Angeles.  He also brings back PI Philip Marlowe for another knightly adventure.  After just last week or so having finished and fallen in love with all seven of the original Marlowe novels,  I was frankly skeptical that anyone could pull off a new Marlowe story, but as it turns out, I didn't have to worry.

One Tuesday afternoon, Marlowe is in his office at Hollywood and Cahuenga when in walks Mrs. Clare Cavendish, the "black-eyed blonde" of the title, and heiress to the Langrishe perfume fortune.  Marlowe notes the eyes right away: "A blonde with black eyes -- that's  not a combination you get very often." As she lights her Sobranie Black Russian ("what else?") in its ebony holder, she gets down to business. It seems that two months earlier, her ex-lover Nico Peterson disappeared and now she wants him found.  She hasn't gone to the cops since Nico was "rather shy of the police," leaving Marlowe to ask her if he had things to hide. Her answer "Haven't we all, Mr. Marlowe," turns out to be a major understatement -- as Marlowe soon realizes, there's definitely much more going on than the blonde with the black eyes is willing to tell.  It also isn't long until he's in it up to his neck, from a dead man who's now walking the streets of San Francisco and couple of psychopathic hit men from south of the border to the uber wealthy who hide their secrets in their grand mansions and gated clubs. And all the while he wonders if maybe it isn't some kind of set up. 

The author definitely has a firm hold on the essence of what it is that constitutes Marlowe. The description of our PI hero as a "shop-soiled Galahad"  in The High Window remains the same here -- Black's Marlowe continues to protect his clients and keep their secrets at all costs, which in this book turn out to be more personal than he'll realize.  He's still the same outwardly tough, hard-drinking Marlowe, with no illusions about human nature, especially when it comes to the rich and powerful. He's still the ultimate loner going back to an empty house with nothing but a chess board for company.  There's no question but that in building his own brand of Philip Marlowe Benjamin Black has been very successful.  The same is true for the rest of the book, with Black's own version of the famous Chandler similes and metaphors, well done, but not overdone.  I must say that I missed the depth of Chandler's Los Angeles in this novel -- Chandler was so in tune with the city that his descriptions of LA were one big reason I loved these books. While I think that Black has got the city's late-1950s feel down, no way does his Los Angeles come close to the one in Chandler's originals. On the other hand, perhaps that isn't a fair comment -- Black hasn't set out to become Raymond Chandler, and I think he made a good decision there -- it seems to me that by keeping true to the main character while not trying to pastichize (is that a word?) Chandler in general, it allows the author to make it more his own work.   If you've read  Benjamin Black's work,  you'll definitely recognize little bits of his own style in this novel. I marked one line that made me laugh, thinking "this is so Benjamin Black,"  where Marlowe's gone off to a joint called The Bull and Bear, and he notes  “I can’t decide which are worse, bars that pretend to be Irish, with their plastic shamrocks and shillelaghs, or Cockneyfied joints like the Bull. I could describe it, but I haven’t the heart.”

Overall, I totally enjoyed losing myself in this novel. You don't have to have already read Chandler to enjoy the twisty plot, the characters (especially Marlowe), and the late 50s feel, but it would be helpful.  Definitely a book I'd recommend to Chandler fans, to fans of older crime fiction, and especially to readers of Benjamin Black's work.  I'm in awe of how good this author is every time I finish one of his books.

And now, just a little note which might, for readers who are familiar with Chandler's novels, constitute a major SPOILER ALERT (if you don't want the spoiler, quit reading right now):

The back-cover blurb by Stephen King really pissed me off because it totally gave me the direction that the book was going before I even opened it.  I seriously don't know how he could do that or how the PsTB at Henry Holt could have let this happen -- by the time the big reveal came along, I already knew how things were going to play out -- I mean some of us have already read all of the Chandler novels. That's just wrong.

Playback, by Raymond Chandler

0394757661
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1988
originally published 1958
163 pp

paperback

Raymond Chandler's death in 1959 marked the end of  one of the best PI series ever written. Playback is the last of the fully-original Marlowe novels, although later Robert Parker used Chandler's notes to finish his unwritten Poodle Springs.  After now having finished the original seven, I'm going to skip Poodle Springs for the time being; truth is I'm sort of ambivalent about picking it up because the originals are so good.

In Playback,  the action begins when Marlowe is roused from a deep sleep by a phone call.  On the other end of the line is an attorney, who is calling on behalf of an unnamed client. He wants Marlowe to find a woman named Eleanor King.  All he has to do is to be there when the 8:00 Super Chief pulls into Union Station, identify the woman, follow her until she checks in somewhere and then report back.  He'll make a hefty sum of money for what should be an easy-as-pie job. Marlowe, who always likes to know the score, has no idea who he's actually working for but takes the job anyway.  After tootling around in Union Station for awhile watching the woman, he follows her to the coastal town of Esmeralda, a very wealthy town near San Diego.  Like any good PI, he rents a room next to hers, and listens via stethoscope to his quarry and a man who's with her who seems to be talking blackmail.  He's technically done his job, but he can't pry himself away from the case because he's not sure if this woman is bad news or if she's being set up somehow and needs his protection.

Playback is a novel that is one long conundrum -- every time Marlowe figures something out, it leads to another mystery, and  getting down to the basic truth of matters takes the reader right up to the end. Of course, this wouldn't be Chandler if he didn't remark on society, and setting his novel in the town of Esmeralda (read La Jolla)  makes it easy.  As he untangles his way through the knotty enigmas of the case, he becomes aware of the social and economic discrepancies of this community.  The rich and powerful are respected in this town, and there's very little room among their set for the the tasteless, the classless and the poor.  Marlowe also spends time with an elderly gentleman who clues him in on aging and how this segment of society is often ignored just because they're old. 

This book might not be Chandler's finest work, but the fact that there's a mystery that keeps you guessing may be a big draw for those interested only  in the crime aspect.  But really, what makes this and all of the other Marlowe novels work is his humanity, his ongoing compassion and his determination to get to the truth despite the costs to himself, all while protecting his clients.  In Playback, these very traits are juxtaposed against another PI, who is rough around the edges, shows no class or discernment, and is there to make his money despite what his client is asking him to do. 

I can most highly recommend the entire set of Marlowe novels -- as an oeuvre, they constitute some of the best writing in the history of crime fiction while  remaining intelligent, sophisticated, and consistent.   The plots are convoluted and tangled, there is definitely a formula attached to the works as a whole, and sometimes it's like you need to keep scorecards on who's involved with whom, etc, etc. However, if you read these books simply  for their plots, you're really missing the best part -- and that is most certainly Philip Marlowe, created by the genius who was Raymond Chandler.

The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler

9780394757674
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1988
originally published 1949
250 pp

paperback
#5 in the Philip Marlowe series

I can't get enough of Raymond Chandler -- or more precisely, I can't get enough of Philip Marlowe. Eventually I'll make my way back to modern crime, but I have three more Marlowe novels (and one by David Goodis) to finish first. I'll be revisiting Marlowe á la Benjamin Black here shortly as well, when I get to his The Black-Eyed Blonde.  In this original series though, Marlowe as a person fascinates me, as does Chandler's look at Los Angeles of the time.  With The Little Sister, the plot is once again overly convoluted and overly complex, but Chandler is in rare form here, having Marlowe spill his guts about the city, his job, the people and even the state of California.

Marlowe is back in #615 Cahuenga "stalking the bluebottle fly" that's been buzzing around him for a while, when in walks Orfamay Quest, of whom Marlowe notes "nobody ever looked less like Lady Macbeth." * She's not Marlowe's usual fare -- no make up, and rimless glasses that "gave her that librarian's look." Hailing from the small town of Manhattan, Kansas, Orfamay wants Marlowe to find her brother Orrin. He came to Bay City a year earlier, and the last Orfamay and her mother heard from him was several months earlier.  Now they're worried about him.  Marlowe starts his search for Orrin at his last known address, and once again, our hero finds himself heading down the usual tangential road into a case that puts him smack into the glitz, glitter, and moral ugliness of Hollywood, a killer with a penchant for icepicks, corrupt cops, good cops who bemoan the kind of crooks the city draws, drugs and blackmail. It also leaves Marlowe feeling very, very low.

Once again, Chandler's descriptions of Los Angeles are at peak form, both positive and negative. Chapter Thirteen of this book finds Marlowe reflecting on the case, Hollywood, the city and himself, with Marlowe at his most melancholy state of all of the novels so far. For example,

"All I know is that something isn't what it seems and the old tired but always reliable hunch tells me that if the hand is played the way it is dealt the wrong person is going to lose the pot. Is that my business? Well, what is my business? Do I know? Did I ever know? Let's not go into that. You're not human tonight, Marlowe. Maybe I never was or ever will be. Maybe I'm an ectoplasm with a private license. Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong things happens and never the right."

Later on:

"Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver's shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunchbox. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six times to six millionaires and so blasé and  decadent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture mover in a sweaty undershirt."

By 1949, the publication date for The Little Sister,  in real life Chandler wasn't all that keen on Hollywood.  There's a wonderful piece written by him from The Atlantic in 1945, where he lets his readers know exactly what he thinks of working in the movie business. 

While the plot is once again complex enough to keep a file on who's who, how they're connected, etc. etc., I just love the sardonic cynicism of Marlowe. I also found myself for the first time in the series feeling sorry for the guy.   I cannot speak highly enough of these novels -- they are some of the most literary crime novels ever written.


 *After finishing the novel, it's very clear why he chose this particular description. 

Traveling back through time: Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler

9780394758275
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992
originally published in 1940
292 pp

paperback

"Such murderers are very dangerous. They have to be removed -- sometimes with blackjacks." 

After reading two of his novels now, I'm beginning to like Raymond Chandler much more for his writing than for his plots.  For anyone who thinks crime fiction has no place in the literary world, the Marlowe novels might make you change your mind.  Chandler's an amazing writer when it comes to social commentary,  the similes, metaphors and the sharp, electric prose he's famous for,  and of course, his superb depiction of the city of angels of the 1940s that is so lifelike you almost feel that you're along with him for the ride. The novels are also a way for Chandler to examine American society of the time.

After a case to locate a missing husband fizzles, Marlowe is watching a "big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck" staring at a building on Central Avenue. On this "not the quietest dressed street in the world," the big man is wearing a particularly gaudy outfit, looking "about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food."  The man, whose name turns out to be Moose Malloy, recently released from prison, goes into the building, a "second floor dine and dice emporium called Florian's." Marlowe, curious after watching someone else get thrown out of the building, follows and goes into the building, where Malloy makes him go into the place with him. Malloy is  trying to find his girlfriend Velma, who used to be a singer at the place years earlier -- now the place has changed hands along with clientele. After shooting the manager of the place, Malloy takes off leaving Marlowe to deal with a lazy cop named McNulty who needs "a little credit" in the department -- he wants Marlowe to "take a gander around for this dame." Marlowe's interested and notes that

"Nothing made it my business except curiosity. But strictly speaking, I hadn't any business in a month. Even a no-charge job was a change."

Yet, it isn't long until he does get a paying job, from a guy by the name of Lindsay Marriott, who supposedly picked his name out of a phone book needing a bodyguard.  Things go terribly wrong when Marriott is murdered, leaving Marlowe to get the bottom of who killed him and why. His quest to find Velma and to find out who offed Marriott takes him on a meandering trail through the city, leading him to an alcoholic woman with a very nosey neighbor, a fake swami, a older millionaire and his much younger  wife, some very corrupt cops, blackmail, theft, and an offshore gambling operation run by a man whose power and money can buy a city mayor.  

While I am not much of an analyst when it comes to reading -- a) there are a huge number of analyses of Chandler and his writing all over the place and b) I'm just not good at it so don't pretend to be -- one thing I particularly noticed in my reading was Chandler's use of the color red. To me, where ever Chandler focused on mentioning red, some kind of danger -- emotional or physical -- was nearby.  Velma, Malloy's old sweetheart, was a redhead. Anne Riordan, daughter of an ex-police chief and an ally of Marlowe's in this book, is also a redhead.  He likes her enough to keep some of the worst details from her and finds himself thinking about how her apartment would be a "nice room to wear slippers in."  He watches a red neon light flashing in the hotel room where he stays just before getting on the water taxi to go out to the gambling boat.  He meets ex-cop and boat driver Red Noorgan, with "hair the shade of red that glints with gold," who has "Violet eyes. Almost purple. Eyes like a girl, a lovely girl," with skin Marlowe describes as "soft as silk" and a voice that was "soft, dreamy, so delicate for a big man that it was startling. It made me think of another soft-voiced big man I had strangely liked."  There are likely more instances, but I found the use of red quite interesting here.

The mystery plots that eventually tie together are a little clunky, but I loved this novel and I wish I had read these books long before now.  The writing alone is worth working through the convoluted  plotlines, but most of all  I love the character of Marlowe. As I found in The Big Sleep, he's a knight of sorts in a city where knights don't really have a place -- and I really like that about him.  FYI -- this book was written in the 1940s so you're going to encounter some pretty ugly racial slurs and racist attitudes as you read. That sort of stuff is a bit shocking, but considering the times, not so unusual for back then.

definitely recommended -- now on to the third Marlowe novel.

The next to the last original Marlowe novel: The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler

9780394757681
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992
originally published 1953
379 pp

paperback

The Long Goodbye just might be my favorite Marlowe book yet. Loved The Big Sleep and The Little Sister, but this one trumps both of them.  When I started reading this series, it was because I wanted to read Benjamin Black's new book The Black-Eyed Blonde (which I  got yesterday!),  another Marlowe novel, and I wanted to see  how his Marlowe stacks up to Chandler's, but I'd never read any Chandler.  Since The Big Sleep, however, I've been reading these old books because I genuinely have come to love them.  Life is not all about new and contemporary -- especially considering that Chandler has been an influence on many authors on down the crime-writing line.  This book is the longest and most intense of all of them so far, and though it continues Chandler's run of overly-complicated and tangled plots, it's in this book where the author seems to have most fully expressed different facets of his real life, from alcoholism to publishing. 

Marlowe first meets Terry Lennox  outside of a club called The Dancers, when the parking lot attendant can't shut the door of the Silver Wraith because Lennox is totally plastered and his foot is hanging out of the car. The woman with him, who turns out to be his wife, leaves him behind, claiming to be late for an engagement. Marlowe takes pity on him and takes him to his house, gives him a coffee, and takes Lennox back to his own apartment.  He makes an impression on Marlowe, and as he notes, "there was something about the guy that got me."  It wasn't just Lennox's scarred face, either. He also saw no reason why he'd ever see the guy again, so he didn't ask a lot of questions.  Later, he'll come to regret it:

 "He would have told me the story of his life if I had asked him. But I never even asked him how he got his face smashed. If I had and he told me, it just possibly might have saved a couple of lives. Just possibly, no more."

As it turns out, however, this random meeting with this man with the scarred face will take Marlowe down some of the darkest paths throughout  Los Angeles  -- leading him to crooked and corrupt cops, jail time, the world of the rich, famous and most powerful people,  doctors who peddle narcotics to their patients, beautiful women, and, of course, murder.  While you might say, well, this sounds a lot like every other Chandler novel, trust me -- it's not. But to say more would spoil everything.

After reading and reporting on the five previous Marlowe novels, there's very little left for me to say about my favorite PI except for the fact that here his penchant for doing the right thing will turn into one of the most severe and personal  betrayals of his career.  However, it's really what Chandler says in and around Marlowe's work that I found most intriguing.  He is no stranger to social criticism in these books, but here it's like he's also inserting much more of his personal life into the story.   Everyone knows that Chandler was himself an alcoholic, and in this novel, alcoholism plays an extremely large and important role, with two alcoholic characters.  One of them, the novelist Roger Wade, who admires F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the best drunken writer since Coleridge, who took dope," writes mass-appeal, popular historical books and is so drunk much of the time that he can't finish his latest one. Once he refers to himself as "a literary pimp."  Through Wade, Chandler seems to be evoking his own emotional and other struggles with alcoholism as well as the whole writing biz.  There is a most telling scene where Marlowe reads something "really wild" Wade wants him to get rid of before Mrs. Wade sees it (203-206), where Wade describes his ambivalence about drinking and writing. I must say, while I love all of the Marlowe novels, this one probably is Chandler at his ultimate finest. 

I'm so loving this series, and I loved this book.  The Long Goodbye appeals to my need for edge, for in-depth character study and my constant search for intelligently-written crime fiction. These books are, as I've said a number of times, some of the best literary works in the crime genre.  If you have not yet made the acquaintance of Philip Marlowe, it's something you need to do and soon.

The Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler

9780394758251
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992
originally published 1943
266 pp

paperback

Cutting right to the chase, the fourth novel in Chandler's Marlowe series begins with a missing wife.  Degrace Kingsley, a businessman in the perfume business, hires Marlowe to find his wife Crystal. Although they'd been "washed up for years," Kingsley needs Marlowe to find her to make sure she hasn't "got mixed up with the police" -- he'd lose his job due to the scandal. He'd received a  telegram saying that she was on her way to Mexico to get a divorce and marry another man named Chris Lavery, but then two weeks later, he got a call about his wife's unclaimed car being left at a hotel in San Bernardino.  The last time he knew Crystal's actual whereabouts was a month earlier, when she was staying at their cabin up at at Little Fawn Lake at Puma Point.  Marlowe starts his investigation by calling on Lavery, then  leaves the city for the lake. There, he introduces himself to Kingsley's alcoholic caretaker, Bill Chess, who is about as unhappy as they come -- it seems that his wife Muriel has also disappeared, in fact, on the very day that Mrs. Kingsley was supposed to have come to LA for a party.   Marlowe, who thinks Bill is a "fundamentally good egg," even though he can become violent very quickly, asks Chess to walk with him to the lake. While watching a fat fish named "Granpa" swish around in the water,  Chess sees something else there, which turns out to be Muriel's dead body.   Not a believer in coincidence, Marlowe decides that he needs to look into both cases, and finds a lot more than anyone would have expected.

Things in Los Angeles have changed a bit since the time of The High Window. Chandler makes a number of references to the war starting with the very first sentence of the novel,  as a sidewalk in front of Kingsley's office building, made of "black and white rubber blocks" is being dismantled to go the government. Later, he notes that  armed sentries are standing guard at the dam at Puma (read Big Bear)  Lake, "at each end and one in the middle."  Marlowe runs into a woman who walked to her destination to save her tires for the government. Men are waiting to hear about their enlistment. At the same time, some things have remained the same: crooked cops, murder, blackmail,  illegal gambling and drugs are still in action in the city.   There's another big difference in this book that sets it apart as well -- a good deal of action takes place away from LA, up in the mountains where life is much slower, where deer walk unimpeded, and where people are actually nice and rudeness is conspicuous and not appreciated.

 The Lady in the Lake is quite intriguing, and although isn't my favorite of the Marlowe novels so far, Chandler is still very much on top of his game here. The same wisecracks and witty turns of phrase are still in play. Marlowe continues to try to hold on to his own moral compass while having to resort to less than ethical means to find the bad guys.  And while there is a  basic formula shared by all of these novels -- Marlowe being hired, Marlowe bumping into peripheral cases that somehow tie to his own investigations and get him into some sort of trouble -- each book is different in its own way. Normally when crime novels get formulaic I get bored.  For some reason, that's just not the case with these books -- between Chandler's writing, his focus not just on Marlowe but the other characters as well, and the way he describes Marlowe's Los Angeles, I can't get enough. 

The Blank Wall, by Elisabeth Sanxay-Holding: A yes in my book.

9781903155325
Persephone Books, 2009
originally published 1947
231 pp

paperback

"The walls of her home were falling down; there was no refuge." -- 75

It's not surprising that a number of regular crime fiction readers have never heard of Elisabeth Sanxay-Holding (1889-1955), but it's certainly a shame.  According to the Publisher's Note in this book, in 1950 Raymond Chandler wrote to his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton asking if "anybody in England" published her work, noting that

"For my money she's the top suspense writer of them all."

He went on to recommend three of her books: Net of Cobwebs (1945),  The Innocent Mrs. Duff (1946) and this one, The Blank Wall.   The publisher's note also states that although a number of her books were published in the UK in the 1950s,

"Elisabeth Sanxay Holding vanished on this side of the Atlantic and all-but vanished on the other."

In 1959, Alfred Hitchcock reprinted the complete The Blank Wall in his anthology called My Favourites in Suspense, and a reviewer at the time described Holding as an "astonishing artist" and called upon "reprint publishers" to take notice, but sadly, no one did.  As late as 1981 Maxim Jakubowski writing in The Guardian also said that for publishers, perhaps "the time has come to take up Raymond Chandler's challenge" and to "resurrect the exemplary books" by this author, but  no one did.  Holding is another sadly-neglected author, but now that I've read two of her crime novels, trust me, the home library will be hosting many, many more.

I consider myself lucky to have found this novel, because it's so nicely done I couldn't stop reading it once I'd picked it up.  It reminded me so much of the work of Patricia Highsmith, but Highsmith's first novel, Strangers on a Train, didn't come out until 1950.  The Blank Wall is a book where there are crimes, cover-ups and consequences, but like so very many of Highsmith's books, the focus here is much more on character rather than simply crime.  In that sense, it's not what I'd call a typical suspense/crime novel, so anyone who may be considering it might want to make note of that fact. In other words, the plot is not nearly as important as what's happening around it.

from Early Bird books

Lucia Holley is a mother of two, keeping the  home fires burning while her husband Tom is away, "somewhere in the Pacific,"  doing his duty during World War II.  Her father lives with the family, and she's got a gem of a housekeeper named Sibyl to help her out.  Lucia writes Tom "very dull letters" every evening, letters meant to provide her husband with "a picture of a life placid and sunny as a little mountain lake." And in fact, life had been pretty dull at the Holley home, up until the time seventeen year-old daughter Bee began seeing a much older man named Ted Darby.  Lucia knows he's no good for Bee, and even made a trip to nearby New York City to confront him, but her visit had been "utterly useless," and ultimately harmful, since Ted immediately turned around and told Bee about it, setting up a confrontation between mother and daughter. Lucia, for whom there is nothing she wouldn't do "to stop this thing" makes several threats (cutting off Bee's allowance, for example), but inside she feels as though all of this was her fault -- that she'd made "several mistakes with Bee, even when she was a little girl."

 Lucia's father (Mr. Harper) echoes her concern about Ted Darby, and matters come to a head one evening when Darby shows up at the boathouse.  As Lucia is writing Tom and considering how "badly" she'd done with Bee, Harper reveals that he'd gone to the boathouse and "dealt with" Darby, pushing into the water and sending him off with a "flea in his ear."  The next morning, Lucia wakes up "extra early," and decides to take out the rowboat and go for a swim, "to think of some new and better way to talk to Bee."  As she steps into the rowboat, she looks into the nearby motorboat and discovers Darby's body -- "fallen, on a spare anchor, half upended on the seat, and it had pierced his throat."  Her first thought : "Father did that."

"Of course it means the police, she thought. Then Father will have to know that he did this. They'll find out why Ted came here, and Bee will be dragged into it. And I shan't be able to keep it from Tom. Not possibly. It'll be in the tabloids."

Deciding that she must do anything "to save us all," she decides to hide the body.  But Darby's death  is only the tip of the iceberg:  it's not long until she finds herself targeted for blackmail by a crook who has gotten hold of letters from Bee to Ted, leading to a sequence of events that will reveal exactly how far and to what costs this woman will go to protect her family.

So that's the plot in a nutshell -- suspenseful, definitely, and also twisty along the way to the end, but as I said before, there is much more than merely plot to this book, and Lucia is at the center of it all.  Lucia is a passive, highly-insecure woman  and with Tom away, her "little world," as Lucia puts it, consists solely of her children and her father, for whom she will do anything. Her life since childhood has been relatively uneventful; she married young  at eighteen, directly out of her parents' house, then had her first child. Up until Tom went away for the war, she's rarely had to cope with things by herself, and her life is rather humdrum and dull. She depends heavily on Sybil, who often covers up Lucia's absent-mindedness and sloppy housecleaning; Sybil makes the best deals at the markets to get the most out of their ration coupons, and keeps things on track within the home. But as things begin to threaten Lucia's "little world," Holding does a brilliant job here in slowly bringing out a Lucia who somehow manages to go deep within herself to find the strength she needs to protect it; she also makes us privy to Lucia's thoughts in which she comes to terms with how she really feels about herself and her life.

As Sanxay-Holding lets us into to Lucia's head, we also get a glimpse into how women with domestic responsibilities  like Lucia  are viewed outside of the home. As just one example, while in New York City,  Lucia decides to take out a loan from a company that advertised it would "lend money on a note," with  "no delay" and "no red tape." With no income of her own, the promises don't hold true for her. Thinking about her frustration while in a cab, she notes

"If one of those reporters stopped me in the street and asked me what I thought about Russia, or something like that, he'd put me down as Mrs. Lucia Holley, Housewife.

Why is it 'housewife'? What would I call myself if we lived in a hotel? Nobody ever puts down just 'wife' or even just 'mother.' If you haven't got a job, and you don't keep house, then you aren't anything, apparently."  

There's a lot  happening here outside of plot, as this book takes a look at (among other things) motherhood, family expectations, the true meaning of friendship, race, class, and domestic disruption on the home front due to the war.  At the same time, the focus on the criminal aspects here are very well done, and the suspense ratchets constantly through the novel.  It is so very well done on both inner and outer fronts, and I was so impressed with it that I couldn't put it down. It is highly intelligent and as I said earlier, I feel fortunate in having discovered it completely by chance.  I can seriously and highly recommend this novel to readers of vintage crime, and to readers who enjoy crime fiction written by women.  I promise - it's a story that will not be forgotten.

*****

I'll be back with an update on the film based on this book,  "The Reckless Moment" (1949)  after I've watched it. There was another adaptation, "The Deep End" (2001), but I'm going to pass on that one.

Traveling back through time: The High Window, by Raymond Chandler

9780394758268
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992
originally published 1942
265 pp

paperback

"Phil Marlowe...The shop-soiled Galahad."


At book three in this series it's getting harder to come up with new things to say about Chandler's Marlowe novels.  They are, in a word, excellent.  Whether you read them for the writing, the often-cumbersome plots or the unforgettable characters, especially that of Philip Marlowe, considering that they were written around 70 years ago, the high quality of these books has remained steady so far.

Two women, one troubled and one simply trouble, are at the heart of Marlowe's adventures this time around.   Unlike his other novels, in this case, trouble doesn't come in a gorgeous package, but  one with "a lot of face and chin," who sucks down port as a self-remedy for her asthmatic condition.   She is Elizabeth Bright Murdock, a "warhorse" mother of a "damn fool of a son," who married a torch singer against mommy's wishes.  She wants Marlowe to find a missing rare and valuable coin known as the Brasher Doubloon, and if possible,  to pin the theft of the coin on her now-absent daughter-in-law. What should be an easy case becomes complicated by a down-at-heel ex-cop playing at being a  PI, a number of dead bodies, Marlowe's insistence on protecting his client (even though he hates her) and a case of blackmail that reveals more than even Marlowe bargained for in this case.

Aside from Chandler's witty metaphors,  zippy prose and his take on the sprawl that is Los Angeles (which I am absolutely fascinated by, probably more than anything else in these books) what I am beginning to appreciate more about these novels is in the way Chandler explores people.  Getting to the whodunit and most especially the why is really a vehicle for exploring individual psyches, especially  Marlowe's.   He becomes much more of a damsel-in-distress rescuer in this book, and continues his moral duty of keeping his client shielded from any possible fallout, even though it might mean that he soils his integrity in the bargain.   He continues to hold onto his principled self -- his twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses is all he wants -- he can't be bought off, despite the expectations of clients and crooks alike.  He works hard to get not only to the truth, but also to the heart of  just what it is about people that makes them tick.  But it's not just Marlowe -- pretty much anyone who takes any role in Marlowe's investigations gets even the tiniest bit  of psychological air time from his or her creator.  It's these individual stories when combined that showcase the people who exist in Marlowe's city; his interactions with these people who help to define who Marlowe is. And isn't.   

The High Window didn't feel as clunky or convoluted plotwise -- I am having so much fun with these novels and this one did not disappoint. 

A James Ellroy Double Feature: Brown's Requiem and Clandestine

 

9780593312209

Vintage, 2021

originally published 1981

321 pp

paperback 

(read earlier)

I hadn't really intended to read more of Ellroy at the moment, but back around mid-August I read his My Dark Places and there he was, back in my head and under my skin again. The only way to exorcise his presence was to read more Ellroy, and I decided to start with his earliest work.  Brown's Requiem is his first novel, followed by Clandestine, and I read both.   

 In the introduction to this edition of Brown's Requiem, Ellroy notes from the outset that he was "determined to write an autobiographical epic second to none," but he also realized that his life was "essentially an inward journey that would not lend itself all that well to fiction," which, based on his life as described in My Dark Places,  is probably true.  His response:

 "I then ladled a big load of violent intrigue into my already simmering, tres personal plot -- and the result is the novel you are about to read."

This book is much more a PI novel than anything else he wrote (at least of the books I've read), a fact he makes known in his introduction where he says that this book is "heavily beholden" to  Raymond Chandler.  He also notes that he owes Chandler a "two-fold debt" -- for getting him going and showing him "that imitating him was a dead-end street on GenreHack Boulevard." The Chandler influence shows.   Fritz Brown is an ex-cop, now private investigator whose main source of income as the novel opens is repossessing cars.  The PI business is slow; before making money from the "repo racket" he'd handled "a few cases," but now his office is more like his reading room; the business much more a tax front than an active concern.   Enter Freddy "Fat Dog" Baker, a caddy with a pocket full of bills, who comes to Brown with concerns about his sister.  It seems that 28 year-old Jane has been staying with an older "rich guy," who evidently wants Jane to have nothing to do with her brother.  There's "no sex stuff" going on -- "it ain't like that," but Fat Dog feels that the man is "not right somehow," and that he is "using my sister for something."  He wants Brown to tail the guy, to see what he's into because "he's fucking her around somehow," and Fat Dog wants to know what's going on.  Brown likes the idea of a "surveillance job," one he can work around the repo schedule, so he agrees.   On his first sight of the older man, Sol Kupferman, Brown recognizes him, and his mind goes back to the Club Utopia,"a sleazy neighborhood cocktail lounge"  that had been firebombed in 1968, causing the deaths of six people.  Three culprits were caught, owned up to what they'd done, but had named a "fourth man" as the mastermind, a story that  the cops never believed.  While on the force, Brown hadn't been involved with that case (he was a rookie at the time), but he had been to the Club Utopia with his patrol buddies before it had gone up in flames, and had seen Sol Kupferman there at the time.  As the face of his investigation begins to change,  his finds his own past becoming inextricably intertwined with the case at hand.  

While my description doesn't do this novel the justice it deserves (and of course, there are plots, subplots and characters that I haven't gone into because of time), it's easy to see the first inklings of what to expect in Ellroy's future writings, especially Ellroy's penchant for writing novels that are dark with a capital D.    In Brown's Requiem the prose is more tame, less zippy than in his LA Quartet, but given that it's his first novel, you can see still detect faint strains of the originality of yet to come.  It's interesting to go back and reread Ellroy from the start, especially knowing that  the first book of his excellent LA Quartet  would be published only six years later.    Recommended for those so inclined, mainly people who've enjoyed Ellroy's books and know what to expect. 

Avon, 1999
originally published 1982
paperback, 328 pp

With  Clandestine Ellroy gets more personal, more autobiographical than in Brown's Requiem, tackling his mother's 1958 murder, albeit in fictional form.  It's so very easy to spot, of course, having read this novel after reading Ellroy's My Dark Places, but he also admits to it in a 1996 interview with Laura Miller at Salon where he says that Clandestine was a "chronologically-altered, greatly fictionalized account" of her murder.  Unlike real life though, in Clandestine he also "solved the case."  My Dark Places also allowed for recognizing a fictional young James Ellroy in this book who under a different name, makes an appearance here as well.  

In 1951 Fred Underhill is a young policeman working Wilshire Patrol. When not on the job, he "played a lot of golf and sought out the company of lonely women for one-night stands."   On the job, after roll call one morning, he and his partner were out warning the owner of a small butcher shop/market about a two-man stickup team hitting small markets and a liquor store, and while there they was called to the horrific scene of Underhill's  first murder, a woman identified as Leona Jensen.  Not too much after that, his partner is killed, and later Underhill was sent to the "tragic sinkhole" of the Seventy-seventh Street Division, Watts.   News of a second murder reaches him, that of Maggie Cadwallader, a woman with whom he'd once had a one-night stand after meeting her in a bar called The Silver Star.  It strikes him as more than coincidence that he'd found a matchbook from the Silver Star at the scene of Leona Jensen's death; as he noted, "it was slight, but enough."  Eventually he tracks down the man he believes might be the perpetrator, and thinking about his case, his suspect, his revenge, his collar, his "glory and gravy train," reports his findings to his Captain, only to be slapped down as a "supremely arrogant young man," for whom justice is certainly not a motivation.  Rather than being suspended from duty, however, the Captain sets up a meeting with a certain Lieutenant Dudley Smith, who will be in charge of deciding "the course of this investigation."   And here is where the story actually begins, in my opinion, as Underhill's ambition gets the better of him, making decisions for which the outcome will bring serious repercussions both personally and professionally.    It isn't until he sees the story of the "dead nurse" that he realizes he may have a shot at justice for the dead, as well as for his own personal redemption.

In Clandestine, Ellroy introduces a number of characters (and themes as well) that will reappear in later work, most notably Dudley Smith, a truly bad guy even here, with more than enough hints of what will happen to anyone who crosses him.  This certainly book is more future Ellroy than its predecessor, reading very much like a prequel to the LA Quartet; it would be a great place to start for anyone who's considering Ellroy's work.  Beware: it's good, but it  ain't pretty.  

Traveling back through time: The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler

9780394758282
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992
originally published in 1939
231 pp


paperback

"Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights." 

While I'm patiently waiting for my next installment of crime novels from the UK, I decided to peruse my shelves for something I haven't read yet and came up with this book.   The Big Sleep is Chandler's first Philip Marlowe novel and if the first book of this series is any indicator, I'm going to have a lovely time over the next few weeks with the rest.  As I often say, just because a book was written decades earlier doesn't mean it's not still good. 


Marlowe is a $25 dollar-a-day plus-expenses private eye living and working in the Los Angeles area.  He once worked for the DA as an investigator, but according to Marlowe, they fired him for insubordination, something on which  he tests "very high." He's been to college, lives in a small apartment, furnished with very little except "a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that,"  things that "took the place of a family."  He keeps rye in his coat pocket along with his gun and has a decent enough relationship with the DA's office even though he no longer works there.

the poster for the 1946 movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

The Big Sleep begins as Marlowe arrives at the Sternwood home, summoned there by the family patriarch, the General.  They meet in the Sternwood's steamy greenhouse, where the old man, confined to a wheelchair, reveals the reason for Marlowe's visit. It seems that Sternwood's younger daughter Carmen has racked up some debts and now they're being called in. It's blackmail, but the General doesn't want to go to the police. He wants Marlowe to take care of things.  While they're talking, the General brings up the disappearance of his son-in-law Rusty Regan, former bootlegger and formerly of the IRA, once married to older daughter Vivian, and now missing. He doesn't ask Marlowe to find Regan, but as it turns out, Regan is never far from anyone's mind in this  novel. The trail to the blackmailer begins at a store owned by Arthur Geiger, Rare Books and De Luxe Editions, where it doesn't take long for Marlowe to figure out exactly what sort of books Geiger has to offer.  Parked outside the Geiger home later that night, Marlowe hears shots and then the sound of someone running, so he breaks in and discovers Geiger dead on the floor and a drug-addled Carmen Sternwood buck naked after having had photos taken of her.  Add to this scenario a car that had done an end run over the Lido Pier and pulled out of the water by police the next day, and we're off on a true, hardboiled adventure that doesn't let up until the last page.

Marlowe is an interesting character. He can be tough as nails, not afraid to use violence when necessary, and women make him "sick" --  in fact, he says he's unmarried because he doesn't like policemen's wives. At the same time, there's a philosopher in this man, who is a keen observer of and comprehends even the smallest nuances of  human nature. Irony leads him to come up with similes that are so cool you can really picture them in the mind's eye -- for example this one:

"The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings."

From the outset you get the impression that Marlowe's going to be some kind of knight-like character, coming to the rescue of damsels in distress:

"Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree an didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying."

 He's very much into protecting his clients and doesn't give in to the whole money/corruption scene like a lot of the cops who offer protection for a cost. He's a bit of an idealist who can't be bought. When he's not always totally honest with the police, it's all about protecting his client.  However, it's like sometimes he understands there are some women who don't want to be rescued no matter how hard he tries, and that no matter what, he  realizes that the only way he can keep certain things from the General is to  become a "part of the nastiness" he's fallen into.

The Big Sleep, if you haven't read it, may seem a bit old-fashioned and misogynist -- lots of bad treatment of women, plenty of homophobia etc., but remember that this was written at a different time when those things were pretty much the status quo.  If you can get past the negatives, the novel is superb -- one of those books where when it's over, you can't wait to pick up the next in the series. It's the character of Marlowe that makes this book so good, and then, of course, there's Chandler's incredible writing talent that created him and brought the streets, foothills and people of  Los Angeles so vividly to life like a photograph of the past.  I'm going straight onto the next one from here -- that's how much I loved this book.  Definitely recommended, although it's probably not for every crime fiction reader.  Now I'm going to go put my DVD starring Bogart and Bacall in my blu-ray player, make some popcorn and push play.

The Mouthless Dead, by Anthony Quinn

 

"It was a mask -- one that he wore so determinedly it became his other self." 

9780349146928

Abacus/Little, Brown Book Group, 2025

274 pp

hardcover 

(read in April) 

I don't remember how I happened upon this book, but I was hooked from the moment I read the blurb and knew I had to have it.  For one thing, it turns out to be a novel based on the brutal murder of Mrs. Julia Wallace that happened back in 1931, and I love historical crime, both fact and fiction.  The other thing that piqued my interest is that I had never heard of this case before, so while I was waiting for my book to arrive from the UK I spent quite a bit of time doing some research.  It was a case which Raymond Chandler regarded as "unbeatable. It will always be unbeatable" and about which he  also said that it was an "impossible murder because Wallace couldn't have done it and neither could anyone else."   So now I'm hooked and my book isn't even here yet.  By the time it actually arrived I was already primed, ready to dive in, and I was not disappointed.  

This post will be shorter than usual, because I don't really want to say too much  about what actually happens in this book  -- to tell too much is to completely ruin things, and I don't want to be responsible for that. 

  The murder of Julia Wallace took place at her Liverpool home one night while her husband William had gone to call on a potential client.  William worked for Prudential Insurance, and one night while at his chess club, he had received a message about a phone call from a Mr. Qualtrough, who had asked Wallace to meet him at his home.  The address was also left on the message, and William made his way from his home to the meeting.  He left his house and caught a tram to the area, but never actually got to the Qualtrough home -- it seems that the address was incorrect, and he spent quite a bit of time asking for help from a policeman and other people in the area, none of whom had heard of a Mr. Qualtrough.   Frustrated, he made his way home, only to find his wife dead.  There was no apparent motive, and yet despite what seems to have been an unshakeable alibi with witnesses and the assurances from neighbors that the Wallaces were quiet people who were not inclined to argue, the lead detective zoomed in on Wallace as the prime suspect.  He was arrested for the murder and sent to trial, where he was found guilty and sentenced to hang.  Not too long after the verdict however, the court of criminal appeals overturned the conviction and Wallace was set free, with the murder left unsolved.   By the way, none of this is spoiler material -- just a very brief outline of the actual case. 

The Mouthless Dead  begins some fifteen years later, and one of the former members of the Wallace investigation team, a now-retired Detective Inspector Key who had served as a Liverpool policeman for "nigh on thirty years,"  is on board an ocean liner sailing from England to New York.  He is in the process of putting together a memoir about his career, which would have been "quite unexceptional," except for the one case "that was, in its time, wildly notorious, and had become in the years since the material of legend."  He makes the acquaintance of two fellow passengers, Lydia Tarrant, "somewhat plain" and traveling with her mother, but interested in his stories, and Teddy Absolom, a younger man in his twenties, for whom "film had been his obsession since boyhood." Teddy hopes to look for work in the industry in New York, or maybe even Hollywood, where he's interested in writing and directing.  Lydia reveals to Teddy that Key is writing about the Wallace case in his memoir,  and Teddy admits to having been "obsessed with it as a schoolboy."  Teddy believes that "the hand of fate" must be at work here, because the case would make a great movie with "the lot" -- "a brutal killing, a police force baffled, a man condemned to hang."  Never mind that  there was "no ending"  -- according to Teddy, it wouldn't be a documentary, but a drama based on a real-life story, much like Hitchcock did with his movie "Rope."  And thus it begins, with Key holding Teddy and Lydia spellbound with his continuing story.   Key is only too happy to oblige helping Teddy, unable to resist showing off his insider knowledge.   

Julia and William Wallace, from The Julia Wallace Murder Foundation

 In the Acknowledgments section of the book, the author notes that he "owes this book to a conversation" he'd had that had "triggered" a childhood memory. He remembered his parents talking about it once,  likely because  his family had lived very close to Menlove Gardens, where Wallace was supposed to go to meet the mysterious Mr. Qualtrough.   As he says, "the story came out like a revenant from the darkness of forgetting, and I knew I had to retell it."   The author's done a great job here, bringing in the historical record of the Wallace case complete with police work and materials from the trials,  solidly landing the reader back in 1930s Liverpool.  However, the real genius at work here is that the retelling is offered to us via the fictional Key's perspective, suffusing the narrative with an unexpected intensity, so much so that I could not put this book down.  

The Mouthless Dead is both a gripping, engrossing tale and a keenly observed study of character, one that I can recommend very highly to readers who enjoy historical crime fiction or well-written, intelligent crime novels.  It's also a book I won't soon forget.  

Elisabeth Sanxay Holding x 2: Widow's Mite and Who's Afraid?

9781944520342
Stark House Press, 2018
263 pp

paperback

As always, I have to begin by thanking the lovely people at Stark House Press for my copy of this book.  The work of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding is not very well known among today's crime/mystery readers, but Stark House has made a great effort to get her work out there, publishing a whopping sixteen of her mystery novels (of which I plan to buy the eleven I don't have) in volumes consisting of two novels each. 

It is genuinely a shame that this author's work has been left to fade into obscurity.  She was championed by the great Raymond Chandler who said, as we learn from The Guardian,  that for his money, "she's the top suspense writer of them all," and that "Her characters are wonderful."   Writing in the introduction to this book, Gregory Shepard notes that Holding is

"the precursor to the entire women's psychological suspense genre, and authors like Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell owe her a very large debt of gratitude."  

And indeed, we do.  I was looking over Amazon reviews of some of Holding's novels, and there was one that complained that Holding should "show, not tell," which sort of threw me for a loop for a minute, since evidently the reader didn't read carefully or just plain missed the point.  Holding shows plenty, but it's what goes on in the minds of her characters that holds the most importance in her stories -- as the intro says, it's the "psychological underpinnings" that "form the basis of the mystery."  I easily figured that out on my own while reading, since I didn't read this book's introduction until I'd turned the last page.  And without getting too deep into either, both novels in this volume center on the old adage of "oh what a tangled web we weave ..." with  the respective main characters hedging about telling the truth about what they know about the crimes.   They each have their own motivations for doing so and their lies send them down a rather slippery slope, but again, while they know that (quoting the introduction again) that " 'There ought to be simply a right thing to do, or a wrong thing,' ..." Holding knows human nature well enough that she also realizes that "this is never the case, that it's never that simple."

from Pop Sensation

In Widow's Mite (originally published 1953),  single mom/widow Tilly MacDonald is at the home of her cousin Sibyl Fleming with her young son Robert.  Sibyl is high strung, she isn't the nicest of people, and Tilly is dreading the thought of being alone with her, especially after Sibyl knocks back a few drinks when she would

"either cry, about the ingratitude, the treachery, the intrigues against her, or she would become arrogant and domineering."

 On the particular day that begins this novel, Sibyl decides she needs a nap, and despite Tilly's warning to the contrary, also decides that she needs to have one of her pills to help her sleep.  There's one left, so Tilly hands it over and Sibyl falls asleep pretty much right away.  Tilly's surprised that it took so little time for the pill to work, but she goes out to be with her son Robert before the arrival of other guests at the house.  But later, in the middle of the party, when someone goes to check on Sibyl who hasn't come downstairs yet, they discover that Sibyl's not asleep, but dead.  When the police arrive, and  Tilly learns that Sibyl's death came about as a result of cyanide poisoning, she's in a quandary -- if she reveals that it was she who gave Sibyl that last pill, the police might believe she had killed her, and then who would be left to take care of her little boy?  It doesn't help that other weirdness is going on all around her, done by someone intent on putting the blame on her shoulders.  And of course, there's much much more in this novel that touches on other issues, with parenting high on the list.

from Pop Sensation

This old cover of Who's Afraid (1940) says without words exactly what's going on this book, expressing what I thought the main character was going through during the course of this story.  Never mind that once again we find ourselves with a woman who has information relevant to a murder and doesn't speak up; in this book, deception is the rule of the game.  Miss Susie Alban,
age twenty-one, hasn't had much luck in finding a job; that all changes when she responds to an advertisement for a "Young lady, with unquestionable social and cultural background."  She is found by her prospective employer, Mr. Chiswick, to be "exactly the type he had had in mind" for the job, which was to sell his correspondence course, which "offered to the Women of America a system for developing the individual charm that lies dormant in each of you."  Gateways is the name of program, and the job requires Susie to travel to different cities and sell the program to the more prominent women of the area.   On her first outing, she is on the train to South Fairfield where she meets four different men who show her attention; she is convinced to change hotel plans and instead stay at a local boarding house.  All seems well, right up until the moment when the group leaves the train, when we read this:

"I'll have to get rid of this girl, one of the four men in the car was thinking."

And oh, did I ever perk up here.  Note -- there's no name, no description except for "one of the four men in the car," so we have our first mystery. Who is speaking, and why does he feel a need to "get rid of this girl?"  But wait, there's more.  The first appointment scheduled for Susie is at the home of a Mrs. Person, who along with her husband Mr. Person, doesn't seem too put out to see her, that is, right up until she mentions the name of her employer, Mr. Chiswick.  At that moment, Mr. Person screams at her to get out, threatening to kill Mr. Chiswick before he slams the door. Walking home in the dark, Susie meets up with one of the men she'd met earlier on the train but only after she stumbles upon a body lying near the trees on the side of the road, whom, it turns out, is the same Mr. Person that had so rudely thrown her out.  While the landlord of Susie's boarding house gets pinned for the crime, Susie holds information that she decides against giving to the police, and makes her way to the next town on her schedule, where once again her prospective client goes crazy with the mention of Mr. Chiswick, and once again she meets up with the men she'd met on the train.  But which of them is the killer? Why is he following her?  Why will she not believe that she is in some sort of danger even though she is told more than once?  And what's up with the mysterious Mr. Chiswick?   The answers to these questions will absolutely not be divulged until the very end.

Who's Afraid? is my favorite of the two, although both seriously and most intensely held me until the last pages.  I'll admit that in the cases of both women, I found myself almost yelling at the pages because I was so completely frustrated at times, thinking "why don't you just listen?" or "just tell and get it over with."  But Sanxay Holding's not going to let us off so easily here and that's the key to reading her work -- it's all about what's in our characters' heads and all about how their decisions take them nearly to the point of no return, usually at some sort of personal peril or some sort of consequence to the people in their immediate orbit.   Quite honestly, I love her books so far -- they may seem somewhat tame in comparison of those of Highsmith or Rendell, but then again, it's very easy to see how she laid the foundations for their work with her own. And now that Stark House Press has made her books once more available, serious crime readers are fortunate to have easy access to them.  This woman's legacy and her books deserve much more than to remain  sadly forgotten and unread.

Highly recommended.