Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 112, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 684 & 685, September/October 1998

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

Most readers of popular fiction think of Max Brand, best known by the pseudonym of Frederick Faust (1892–1944), as a writer of Westerns or perhaps as the creator of the long-running medical hero Dr. Kildare. He certainly is not widely thought of as a writer of detective fiction. But as the “About the Author” note of the book reviewed below tells us, “His enormous output, totaling approximately thirty million words or the equivalent of 530 ordinary books, covered nearly every field: crime, fantasy, historical romance, Westerns, science fiction, adventure, animal stories, love, war, and fashionable society, big business and big medicine.” After Faust was killed in action while serving as a World-War-II correspondent, “New books based on magazine serials or unpublished manuscripts continued to appear so that, alive or dead, he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years.” That at least one of the current publishers of his work is a university press suggests Brand was not just a prolific commercial phenomenon but a writer of enduring literary value. Faust didn’t hang up his poet’s gift for language before entering the pulp-magazine door.

*** Max Brand: Seven Faces, University of Nebraska Press, 312 North 14th St., Lincoln, NE 68588-0484; $25. Brand’s odd-couple team of New York detectives, Angus Campbell and Patrick O’Rourke, may be based on traditional Scottish and Irish stereotypes, but they gradually emerge as well-realized characters. Their boss, Inspector Corrigan, says, “Separate they’re not much but, when they’re together, they hate each other so much that they grind one another sharp as razors.” Assigned to protect a frightened millionaire traveling by train from New York to Chicago, they become involved in a complicated whodunit that provides details of the 1935 period — slang, attitudes, modes of communication, appliances, the feel of rail and air transportation — more fascinating than the story. True, the plot, though surprising and fair to the reader, might not stand close scrutiny, but some of the dialogue and descriptive touches are magical. Published as a six-installment serial in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1936 and now appearing for the first time in book form, the novel has been restored to the author’s original text. Though I don’t know what changes the editor made, I suppose some of the literary notes struck in the narrative, fast as they go by, were considered too rich for the pulp reader’s blood.

**** Sharyn McCrumb: The Ballad of Frankie Silver, Dutton, $23.95. While recuperating from wounds suffered at the end of The Rosewood Casket (1996), Sheriff Spencer Arrowood passes the time researching an historic North Carolina case: the 1832 trial of young backwoods wife Frankie Silver for the murder of her husband. In contrast to its detective-fiction precedents (Alan Grant’s investigation of the Richard III case in Josephine Tey’s classic The Daughter of Time [1951] and Chief Inspector Morse’s reexamination of a fictional nineteenth-century Oxford crime in Colin Dexter’s The Wench is Dead [1989]), this novel spends a good deal of time in the historical period, as the local court clerk describes the course of the Silver case with a fine combination of humor, character observation, and telling detail. To justify the novel’s 384-page length, there are also flashbacks to a murder hunt early in Arrowood’s career, its convicted perpetrator soon to be executed after the traditional decades on death row, and a present-day case the sheriff’s subordinates are trying to keep him ignorant of until he has fully recovered. This is another gem in one of the very best contemporary series.

*** John Lutz and David August: Final Seconds, Kensington, $23. Will Harper, who left the N.Y.P.D. bomb squad after losing three fingers in a failed disarming, and Harold Addleman, a former FBI profiler of serial killers, emerge from unhappy forced retirements to outthink a bomber who targets celebrities. Aside from first-rate suspense, the authors provide some subtle satire of media-obsessed America as they depict victims clearly inspired by Tom Clancy and Rush Limbaugh, among others. (August is the pseudonym of David Linzee, whose Death in Connecticut [1977] was one of the best first novels of its decade.)

Admirers of John Mortimer’s aged barrister Horace Rumpole (of the Bailey), a longtime favorite of PBS viewers and EQMM readers, will welcome The Third Rumpole Omnibus (Penguin, $16.95), a trade paperback bargain gathering 19 stories originally published in the collections: Rumpole and the Age of Miracles (1988), Rumpole a la Carte (1990), and Rumpole and the Angel of Death (1995). (The back cover mistakenly advertises Rumpole on Trial, a collection not included here.)

For all the influx of excellent, good, and publishable writers to enter the mystery field in recent years, the Golden Age of the thirties still retains much of its cachet. The novels of Ngaio Marsh, who delighted readers from that decade into the eighties, always have a ready readership. See, for example, two of the best cases for Scotland Yard’s Roderick Alleyn, both reprinted by St. Martin’s at $5.99: Death at the Bar, a fine 1940 puzzle in which a dart game at a seaside pub ends in the murder of a prominent barrister; and Death and the Dancing Footman, a 1941 model of the isolated-house-party whodunit, including a manipulative host and a splendid cast of mutually-hostile guests.

I don’t know if there are any unpublished novels still to come by the late William L. DeAndrea, but he was apparently busy on the short-story front in the months before his death in 1996 at a tragically young forty-four. The Mickey Spillane/Max Allan Collins anthology Private Eyes (Signet, $6.50), reviewed in this space in July, includes “Killed in Good Company,” a novel-in-miniature about network trouble-shooter Matt Cobb, typically well-clued and featuring an inventive murder method; while Once Upon a Crime (Berkley, $21.95), a generous anthology of stories based on Grimm’s Fairy Tales edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, has “Prince Charming,” a tricky romantic puzzle that is not part of a series but might have become one were life fairer.

Readers of this magazine don’t need telling that Michael Gilbert, born in 1912 and still going strong, is one of the best and most versatile writers of crime fiction at both novel and short-story lengths. Now esteemed scholar B.A. Pike has compiled The Short Stories of Michael Gilbert: An Annotated Checklist 1948–1997 (CADS, 9 Vicarage Hill, South Benfleet, Essex SS7 1PA; $7 surface, $8 air). The collectors to whom the 58-page chapbook is directed will want it even more knowing each copy is signed by both Pike and Gilbert.

Serious students of mystery fiction can’t do without the long-awaited second edition of Walter Albert’s Detective and Mystery Fiction: An International Bibliography of Secondary Sources (Brownstone Books/Borgo Press, P.O. Box 2845, San Bernardino, CA 92406-2845; $100 hardcover, $80 paperback). The 5000-plus annotated entries of the 1985 first edition have grown to nearly 7700 — that the 2500-item increase covers a period of only six years, through the cut-off date of 1990, shows how much critical, biographical, historical, and bibliographic material on the genre has exploded in recent years. The scope of coverage and reliability of information are remarkable. Of an impressive list of contributing mystery scholars, John L. Apostolou, Jacques Baudou, Robert E. Briney, and Loris Rambelli, along with editor Albert, have provided new material for both editions.