Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 787 & 788, March/April 2007

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

Copyright © 2007 by Jon L. Breen

The great days of the post-World War II paperback original are the subject of much recent celebration, including old and new books in the style and format. The most prolific reprinter has been Stark House, which offers at $19.95 each two-novels-to-a-volume trade paperbacks by three writers who flourished in the ’50s and early ’60s and whose career crises in the late ’60s and early ’70s had varying outcomes: Harry Whittington, who made a strong comeback writing historicals as Ashley Carter; Peter Rabe, who became a college psychology professor; and Gil Brewer, who never stopped writing but lost a battle with alcoholism.

Whittington lives up to his reputation as one of the great noir storytellers in both A Night for Screaming [and] Any Woman He Wanted, a 1960 wrongly-accused-fugitive variation and a 1961 honest-cop-in-corrupt-city tale, respectively. A new introduction by David Lawrence Wilson and a re-printed essay by Bill Crider illuminate the prolific Whittington’s career. Rabe’s My Lovely Executioner [and] Agreement to Kill, from 1960 and 1957, show him the finest stylist of the three. Both man-on-the-run variants begin with the protagonist leaving jail, one by reluctant breakout, the other having completed his sentence, both headed for trouble. The first is a gem of pace, plot, and prose, the second much less compelling. A brief recollection by agent Max Gartenberg is joined by George Tuttle and Donald E. Westlake essays that recur from previous Stark House volumes of Rabe’s work. Brewer was a lesser practitioner, but Wild to Possess [and] A Taste for Sin ($19.95), from 1959 and 1961 (the latter much the better), are not the soft-core porn their titles and cover illustration suggest, but rather studies of crime and obsession in the James M. Cain vein, often effective despite clumsy plot machinations and improbabilities. Publisher Gregory Shepard’s new introduction is joined by previously published pieces by Bill Pronzini and Verlaine Brewer.

John Lange’s 1970 Edgar-nominee Grave Descend (Hard Case, $6.99), a Jamaica-based nautical thriller with echoes of James Bond and The Maltese Falcon, offers crisp, fast-paced storytelling. (Though the book and accompanying publicity keep it under wraps, Lange was an early pseudonym of Michael Crichton.)

Meanwhile, the paperback noir tradition lives on, albeit mostly in hard covers.

**** Richard Stark: Ask the Parrot, Mysterious, $23.99. On the run following a bank robbery, career criminal Parker first becomes part of the posse searching for him, then aids a disaffected racetrack employee in a plan to loot the track’s take. Stark (the best-known of Westlake’s pseudonyms) began the Parker series in 1962. After a twenty-year-plus hiatus be-tween 1974 and 1997, the series is stronger than ever. Stark/Westlake is a consummate master of crime fiction who can get a character in a couple of paragraphs better than many authors with a twenty-page dossier and can surmount any challenge, including writing one short chapter from the convincing view-point of a caged parrot.

**** Bill Pronzini: The Crimes of Jordan Wise, Walker, $23.95. To win the heart of a beautiful woman who wants to live on the edge with the finer things, San Francisco accountant Wise engineers a complex embezzlement scheme that allows the couple to escape to a new and carefree life in the Virgin Islands, until complications en-sue. This is an extraordinary piece of pure storytelling, with the noirish mood, pounding narrative impetus, and unsparing character insights of the best 1950s Gold Medal paperbacks.

*** Max Allan Collins: The Last Quarry, Hard Case Crime, $6.99. Quarry, the first professional killer for hire (with the possible exception of some spy types) to front a series of novels, returns in a typically dark, funny, and compulsively readable adventure based in part on two previously published short stories, “A Matter of Principal” and “Guest Services.” Is Quarry so amoral he will carry out his assignment to kill an attractive and well-liked young librarian? Added inducement: a great cover by iconic paperback artist Robert McGinnis.

*** Lawrence Block: Hit Parade, Morrow, $24.95. Another series hit man, John Keller, returns in a darkly comic short story collection disguised as a novel. At least some of these nine droll and sometimes oddly moving stories first appeared in Playboy or original anthologies, including several from Otto Penzler’s sports-themed collections.

*** Peter Corris: Taking Care of Business, Allen & Unwin, $11.95. Australia’s most famous private eye, Cliff Hardy, returns in eleven expertly crafted short cases concerning white-collar crime, seven from Australian periodicals, the rest new to print.

*** Hailey Lind: Shooting Gallery, Signet, $6.99. San Francisco artist Annie Kincaid, granddaughter of an accomplished forger of paintings, fronts one of the best new series in the Janet Evanovich tradition. The plot, beginning with a sculptor hanging from a tree, is just strong enough to support the humor, ranging from wit to slapstick, and the insights on creating, restoring, and authenticating works of art. But the author should watch the character names. The first few chapters give us Annie, Annette, Agnes, and Anthony, and later we meet both Pete and Pedro.

** Sarah Graves: Trap Door, Bantam, $22. The Home Repair is Homicide series features handywoman Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree, whose monumentally dysfunctional family includes an alcoholic son and a deceased ex-husband who haunts her 19th-century Maine house. The back story gets tiresome; the complex plot is totally goofy; and an unresolved paranormal subplot, presumably to be pursued in the next book, is annoying; but humorous style, interesting characters, household hints, and even some fair-play clueing compensate.

** Steve Brewer: Monkey Man, Intrigue, $24. Albuquerque private eye Bubba Mabry, a non-tough guy along the lines of John Lutz’s Nudger or Parnell Hall’s Stanley Hastings, is seated in a cafe with a zoo employee concerned about a higher than normal incidence of animal deaths when a person in a gorilla suit enters and shoots the prospective client to death. The case doesn’t quite live up to its irresistible opening hook, but much of it is very funny.

The title of The Rex Stout Reader (Carroll & Graf, $16.95) suggests a more varied menu than what is delivered: two pre-World War I magazine serials, Her Forbidden Night (1913) and A Prize for Princes (1914), with an introduction by Otto Penzler. Don’t look for Nero Wolfe or Archie Goodwin, but these early works will intrigue mystery historians and the author’s most devoted fans.

One would think Wilkie Collins’s classic 19th-century mystery novels, The Moonstone and The Woman in White, better suited to the elbowroom of a TV miniseries than single two-hour versions. But the DVD pairing of two Masterpiece Theatre presentations in The Wilkie Collins Set (WGBH Boston, $29.95) offers superb productions of both.