Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

The Jury BOX by Jon L. Breen

In his great 1970 debut, A Clubbable Woman, recently reprinted with a new introduction (Felony & Mayhem, $14.95), Reginald Hill introduced the Mid-Yorkshire police team of Andy Dalziel (crude old-school boss) and Peter Pascoe (posh university-educated newcomer). Over the decades since, the series has proved one of the most durable, varied, and consistently outstanding in the procedural genre. The British title of the latest volume, The Death of Dalziel, was subtly changed for its American edition. Only reading the book will tell you which title is more appropriate.

**** Reginald Hill: Death Comes for the Fat Man, HarperCollins, $24.95. Dalziel is gravely injured in an explosion engineered by an antiterrorist vigilante group which may have a mole in the Central Antiterrorism Unit. Pascoe, investigating on his own, to the dismay of the spooks, finds himself taking on the abrasive personality traits of his stricken mentor. The literate prose (keep a dictionary handy), keen character insights, and devious plotting, plus the suspense over the fate of Fat Andy, mark this an excellent addition to the saga.

*** Michael Connelly: The Overlook, Little, Brown, $21.99. The reductive turf wars between local police and national anti-terrorism units get an American treatment in Los Angeles cop Harry Bosch’s latest case, an expanded version of a New York Times Magazine serial with an admirably clued puzzle plot.

*** Jennifer Lee Carrell: Interred With Their Bones, Dutton, $25.95. Kate Stanley is directing a production of Hamlet at London’s new Old Globe when a theatre fire and the death of her academic mentor send her on a perilous scholarly treasure hunt with multiple stops in the U.S.A., Britain, and Spain. Elements include a lost Shakespeare play, murders in-spired by events in the Bard’s works, and much pondering of who really wrote those plays. This Edgar-worthy first novel follows the formula of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, but is infinitely better written. A thorough and quite necessary concluding author’s note separates fact from the fiction.

*** Richard Bachman: Blaze, foreword by Stephen King, Scribner, $25. King revives his Bachman pseudonym for one (last?) encore in a tragicomic crook story, written in the 1970s in acknowledged homage to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and published only now in revised form. Mentally impaired giant Blaze attempts to carry out the kidnapping for ransom of a baby, helped by the ghost (or the memory) of his deceased mentor and protector George. Another proof of King’s incomparable storytelling gift, the novel is accompanied by an equally powerful short story, “Memory.”

*** W. R. Burnett: Dr. Socrates, O’Bryan House, $14.95. In a small Midwestern town, a troubled young doctor reluctantly becomes physician of choice for a gang of robbers headed by Red Bastian, a character inspired by John Dillinger. This expertly written and suspenseful Depression-era short novel by the author of Little Caesar appeared as a Collier’s magazine serial in 1935 and was filmed the same year, but has never before been published in book form.

*** Jeffrey Miller: Murder on the Rebound, ECW, $19.95 Canada, $16.95 U.S. When a controversial law professor is accused of the poisoning murder of his re-search assistant, Ontario Court of AppealJustice Ted Mariner defends, first in an unlikely but highly entertaining preliminary hearing in the Toronto law school’s moot court room, then in a full-scale trial on revised charges. Neither the rather goofy plot nor the cat narrator, known as Amicus Curiae, whose graceful comic style owes an acknowledged debt to Rumpole of the Bailey, should discourage courtroom buffs from this third in a law-steeped series.

** John Mortimer: Rumpole Misbehaves, Viking, $23.95. The Old Bailey’s immortal junior barrister defends a Timson youth charged with violating an Anti-Social Behavior Order, his crime chasing his football into the wrong street, and a client accused of murder who is very anxious to be defended by a QC (in polite language, Queen’s Counsel; in Rumpole-speak, Queer Customer). Like other recent short novels in this series, mild fun for regular readers, but newcomers should seek out the early story collections (or TV shows) first.

** Dave Zeltserman: Bad Thoughts, Five Star, $25.95. Once a year, on the anniversary of his mother’s brutal murder, Cambridge, Massachusetts cop Bill Shannon suffers nightmares and mysterious week-long blackouts. The reader is gripped immediately and held to the end, though the main surprise, revealed a little past the halfway point, both slows the impetus and challenges credibility. Violence and torture are over the top for some tastes, and the central premise may be too much to swallow, but solid prose, dialogue, and construction mark a writer worth watching.

** Ruth E. Weissberger, M.D.: The Cure for Remembering, Melville House, $22.95. In a short first novel set in 1991 New York, internist Dr. Nora Sternberg discovers that her elderly aunt, a former nurse who died suddenly after apparently successful surgery, was only one of several retired medical personnel to suffer the same fate. The plot, resolved by an institutionalized-relative-ex-machina, is thin, but the easy, humorous style and warts-and-all insider’s view of the medical business give hope for future cases.

** Claudia Bishop: The Case of the Tough-Talking Turkey, Berkley, $6.99. Upstate New York veterinarian and retired academic Austin McKenzie investigates the murder of a much-hated local turkey farmer. If not quite up to the standard of his first case, the droll first-person narration and outsized characters continue to please.

No longtime reader of this magazine will seriously dispute that Michael Gilbert was arguably “one of the greatest crime fiction writers of the twentieth century,” as averred by Tom and Enid Schantz in introducing his 1947 first novel Close Quarters (Rue Morgue, $14.95). Introducing his 1952 whodunit set in a World War II prisoner of war camp, The Danger Within (British title Death in Captivity; $14.95); the Schantzes recount Gilbert’s experiences as a POW in Italy. A lighter Rue Morgue offering is the 1942 satire The Widening Stain ($14.95), a limerick-strewn academic mystery by Cornell University literature scholar Morris Bishop, writing as W. Bolingbroke Johnson. Rob Pudim’s Thurber-inspired cover is an added inducement.

Other reprints include a pairing of two excellent pure suspense novels by Bill Pronzini, Snowbound [and] Games (Stark House, $14.95), first published in 1974 and 1976 respectively, with appropriately appreciative introductory remarks by Marcia Muller and Bob Randisi; and Lawrence Block’s last Evan Tanner novel, the sleepless agent’s 1998 comeback Tanner on Ice (Harper, $7.99), joining the earlier novels with an entertaining afterword on the history of the series.

© 2008 by Jon L. Breen