Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 5. Whole No. 777, May 2006

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

Dennis Lynds, who died in 2005 at age eighty, was among the best and most prolific practitioners of detective fiction of the past forty years. What may be his last book is notable for the pleasure of the pulp-style narratives but even more for its snapshots of the writing life and the development of a major talent.

*** Dennis Lynds writing as Michael Collins: Slot-Machine Kelly: The Collected Private Eye Cases of the One-Armed Bandit, Crippen & Landru, $29 hardcover, $19 trade paper. The billing is ironic: Though the Collins byline would become more famous, these 13 stories, dating from the 1960s and all but one from Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, were originally published as by Lynds. The honest and frequently self-critical story notes touch on the abandonment of a Watson narrator, why one of the stories was written too hastily, and Kelly’s gradual evolution into the more serious one-armed shamus of Collins’s novels, Dan Fortune, whose Edgar-winning debut, Act of Fear (1967), was expanded from the last story in the book.

**** P.D. James: The Lighthouse, Knopf, $25.95. This time, the threatened institution (a James specialty) is a private island off Cornwall that has become an R-and-R destination for weary VIPs. A widely hated novelist is murdered, and the isolated setting makes for a typically excellent closed-circle whodunit for Adam Dalgliesh and his team, with an enthralling cast of suspects and clues to the killer broad and fair enough to be interpreted by armchair sleuths more alert than this one.

**** Thomas H. Cook: Red Leaves, Harcourt, $23. Photo-shop proprietor Eric Moore’s seemingly perfect life all starts to unravel when an eight-year-old girl disappears from her home on a night his teenage son had babysat her. This grim study in suspicion, loss, and multigenerational family relationships explodes artificial distinctions between literary and category, character- and plot-driven fiction. As in earlier novels, Cook doesn’t “transcend” the crime-suspense genre but works within it brilliantly, and while firmly based in character, this is also a gem of construction.

*** Stephen King: The Colorado Kid, Hard Case, $5.99. Told mostly in dialogue, between two veterans of a small Maine weekly and the young woman they are training in the journalist’s art, this understandably controversial novel makes for compelling reading: The author has a matchless narrative gift, and the characters are beautifully drawn. It sets a tantalizing mystery puzzle and examines it from all angles with near Queenian thoroughness, and it makes valid points about news media and human nature. But it will help to know two things going in: this is not a detective story but an anti-detective story, and it does not fit the hardboiled fiction noir category in which its publisher specializes. If King had chosen to solve the case, you could even call it a cozy.

*** Walter Mosley: The Wave, Warner, $22.95. What starts like a ghost story — Errol Porter gets late-night phone calls ostensibly from his ten-years-dead father — morphs into a wild science-fiction adventure in which the Los Angeles computer expert turned potter must save a superior alien race from a sinister government agency. There’s plenty of allegory, symbolism, and political commentary, but they don’t get in the way of a fast-moving thriller plot with romantic and criminous interludes.

*** Maddy Hunter: Hula Done It? Pocket, $6.99. Iowa tour leader Emily Andrew takes her senior-citizen charges on a Hawaiian Island cruise, resulting in a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World-style treasure hunt. You may anticipate the solution, but the attraction of this series is the humor — farce, slapstick, and situational — that is somehow sustained over 300 hilarious pages.

*** Mat Coward: Open and Closed, Five Star, $25.95. London cops Don Packham and Frank Mitchell look into the murder of an octogenarian activist during the occupation of a public library threatened with closure. The book offers the author’s customary humor, sociopolitical messages, and nimble manipulation of plot, characters, and language.

*** Ralph E. Vaughan: Sherlock Holmes and the Coils of Time, Gryphon, $16. This hundred-page novella is a richly atmospheric cross-pollination of the Baker Street sleuth’s return to 1890s London, as described in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” and the events of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.

*** Dean Koontz: Velocity, Bantam, $27 hardcover; $7.99 paper-back reprint. In a fresh variation on a familiar situation, the nutty games-playing serial killer’s antagonist is not a cop but a Napa Valley bartender. The wild and tricky plotting, hyped-up suspense, moral ponderings, and unconventional romance demonstrate that over-the-top can be a good thing.

** Dean Koontz: Forever Odd, Bantam, $27. Koontz’s second 2005 book, a sequel to 2004’s Odd Thomas, about the psychic detective and fry cook whose unwelcome ability to see and communicate with the dead includes a relationship with a displaced Elvis Presley, has its moments but is far from its extraordinary predecessor in originality and emotional impact.

** Kent Conwell: The Ying On Triad, Avalon, $21.95. In his fifth case, Austin P.I. Tony Boudreaux has a week to save an innocent man from execution. The publisher’s products, directed mainly to a Middle American library market, usually fly under the reviewer radar. While this one presents a broad target — it’s simplistic in plot and development, old-fashioned in language and attitudes, unoriginal, and lacking a surprise finish — it is smoothly readable and should please its intended audience.

Those whose interest in mystery fiction extends beyond reading — e.g., to attending conventions, subscribing to fanzines, posting to online discussion groups — will love Marvin Lachman’s The Heirs of Anthony Boucher: A History of Mystery Fandom (Poisoned Pen, $16.95), which is enjoyably written, scrupulously accurate, and admirably willing to address controversy.

Elizabeth George’s long novels about Scotland Yard detectives Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers have been distilled into hour-and-a-half TV adaptations with the excellent acting and production values typical of the British imports seen on PBs’s Mystery. The Inspector Lynley Series 3 (WGBH Boston, $39.95 DVD or VHS) draws compact and diverting whodunits from A Traitor to Memory, In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner, and A Cry for Justice, but If Wishes Were Horses overdoes the series’ soap opera elements and has numerous improbabilities leading up to its annoying cliffhanger climax.

Copyright © 2006 Jon L. Breen