Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 110, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 673 & 674, September/October 1997

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

© 1997 by Jon L. Breen

Crime and mystery fiction have an almost infinite number of sub-categories — some (espionage, underworld, private eye, formal detection, modern gothic) go in and out of fashion but are always around in some form. Others flourish for a time and disappear almost entirely. Take, for example, male romantic suspense. In the forties and fifties, in slick and pulp magazines, in hard and paper covers, were stories as sentimentally romantic as any Harlequin Intrigue but written from a masculine perspective. Octavus Roy Cohen practiced the form with titles like A Bullet for My Love, Love Can Be Dangerous, Love Has No Alibi, and Romance in the First Degree. Another practitioner, as seen in the first book publication of a 1944 novel from the pulp Mammoth Detective, was the popular fiction chameleon Howard Browne, writing for the first time as John Evans, the byline of the first three of Browne’s very Chandleresque Paul Pine novels.

*** Howard Browne: Murder Wears a Halo, Gryphon Publications, P.O. Box 209, Brooklyn, NY 11228-0209; $20 trade paperback, $40 signed limited. Chicago pulp writer Don Hearn falls in love with beautiful, enigmatic writing buff Loa Santley, their involvement leading to a pair of murder trials and the single recorded case of Browne’s Perry Mason homage Endicott (End) Overend. (The same publisher’s Gryphon Double Novel series offers a back-to-back reprinting of two enjoyable Browne novelettes that combine mystery and science fiction: Twelve Times Zero/Carbon-Copy Killer[$10], from 1952 and 1943 respectively.)

**** Ed Gorman: Black River Falls, Leisure, $4.99. A sharply observed middle-American background, a painfully recognizable view of adolescent rites of passage, a dark but not completely pessimistic slant on family relationships, a Woolrichian incursion of crime and terror into recognizable everyday life, a rapidly paced narrative full of unexpected but fully believable twists and turns — these are some of the features of Gorman country, to which this novel’s visit is one of the best.

**** Jonathan Kellerman: The Web, Bantam, $24.95. In his eleventh appearance, psychologist Alex Delaware assists Detective Milo Sturgis in the complicated case of Dr. Hope Devane, a murdered professor and bestselling pop-psych author. Kellerman’s L.A. background and large cast of characters are, as usual, well-drawn, including that signature feature of the best whodunits: an interesting murderer.

**** William L. DeAndrea: Fatal Elixir, Walker, $22.95. The author, who died last year at the tragically young age of 44, is at his best in what may prove to be his last novel: the second western mystery about paralyzed lawman-turned-newspaperman Lobo Blacke and his dime-novel biographer Quinn Booker. The mystery is both surprisingly resolved and clued with scrupulous fairness, the telling bright and humorous. The title refers to the tainted product sold by a traveling medicine show.

*** H.R.F. Keating: Asking Questions, St. Martin’s, $20.95. Inspector Ghote returns in a typically thoughtful and deceptive narrative centered on scientific ethics. (Is the Indian dialect getting quirkier itself in recent volume-smolumes, or is it my imagination only?)

*** H.R.F. Keating: In Kensington Gardens Once..., Crippen & Landru, P.O. Box 9315, Norfolk, VA 23505-9315; $12 trade paperback, $35 signed limited. These ten short stories, three of them previously unpublished, all are set in Kensington Gardens. Keating is nearly as good a miniaturist as he is a novelist, and Gwen Mandley’s drawings add to the appeal.

*** Aaron Elkins: Twenty Blue Devils, Mysterious, $27.95. The ninth novel about Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver is well up to snuff, with an interesting background of Tahiti and coffee growing and a larger than usual role for FBI sidekick John Lau.

Two original anthologies are directed at the cozy fan. Murder, They Wrote (Boulevard, $6.99), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Elizabeth Foxwell, is ostensibly fronted by TV’s Jessica Fletcher, who appears in one of the stories, collaborating with Charlaine Harris’s librarian-detective Aurora Teagarden in “Deeply Dead,” which has an interesting murderer and motive but (in common with too many of today’s traditional whodunits) lacks clues and real detection. The same pluses and minuses apply to Nancy Pickard’s “The Potluck Supper Murders,” featuring the late Virginia Rich’s Eugenia Potter. Jean Hager’s locked-room puzzle “A Deadly Attraction” is one of the few real puzzle stories in the book. Some stories offer variations on well-known works — the first name of the female lead in Jane Dentinger’s theatre tale “The Last of Laura Dane” is surely no coincidence, and Kate Kingsbury’s “A Nice Cup of Tea” may remind you of The Whales of August. Among the better stories are straight crime tales by Janet Laurence and Sally Gunning.

Though uncredited on the book, the same team of editors produced Malice Domestic 6 (Pocket, $5.99), introduced by Anne Perry. Though my own contribution (and a splendid job it is!)may bias me, I found this a somewhat stronger collection, with two satirical gems: Peter Lovesey and Edward Marston’s parodic tribute to definitively awful mystery writer James Corbett and his devoted fan William F. Deeck; and Simon Brett’s tale of a bestselling author of cat mysteries determined to kill off her fictional feline’s real-life model. Other highlights: a very clever nursing-home poisoning mystery about Catherine Aird’s C. D. Sloan; Lindsey Davis’s Greek historical on the murder of Pythagoras; a family holiday murder by Betty Nathan; and a tale for fans of the bibliomystery by Peter Robinson.

Among the reprints are two 1945 classics from Carroll & Graf: Joel Townsley Rogers’s offbeat The Red Right Hand ($4.95), with an informative new introduction by Edward D. Hoch, and one of the best locked room novels by John Dickson Carr (writing as Carter Dickson), The Curse of the Bronze Lamp ($4.95).

Fans of Mike W. Barr’s classic detection comic book The Maze Agency will be glad to know it’s found a new home: Caliber Comics. Barr advises the black-and-white book “will be available through comic specialty shops only, but interested parties can contact Caliber directly at 888/22-COMIC.”