Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, No. 5. Whole No. 819, November 2009

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

With due respect to the New York majors, the publishers whose offerings I anticipate most eagerly are located in Norfolk, Virginia (Crippen & Landru), Lyons, Colorado (Rue Morgue), Vancleave, Mississippi (Ramble House), and Eureka, California (Stark House). Latest from the latter is a threesome by paperback master Harry Whittington, To Find Cora/Like Mink for Murder/Body and Passion ($17.95), novels obscurely published in 1963, 1957, and 1952, respectively. The middle title, published in France as T’asdes Visions! and revised for the American sleaze market as Passion Hangover (Corinth, 1965; as by J.X. Williams), was molded into its current desleazed state by editor David Laurence Wilson. Noir elements are familiar (ex-con trying to go straight, naive nice girl and avaricious femme fatale, pressure to do one final job), but emotionally heightened narrative, quick pace, and surprising twists demonstrate how good even lesser Whittington could be. Wilson’s account of tracking down Whittington’s pseudonymous work is an enthralling nonfictional detective story.

**** Ed Gorman: The Midnight Room, Leisure, $7.99. In a small Midwestern city, widely admired Dr. Peter Olson loses more than his money in a home-invasion burglary: two DVDs reveal Olson’s secret life as rapist and killer of young women. Police seeking a third missing girl include detectives Michael Scanlon, his dissolute brother Steve, and Kim Pierce, who is currently dating the charming Dr. Olson. The novel is expertly written, rich in pointed social commentary, and brilliantly plotted — you’ll do well to guess any of the twists, including some visceral shocks. But as usual with Gorman, the key element is the deeply realized and painfully real characters, including an especially memorable villain — and not the one you think.

**** Hallie Ephron: Never Tell a Lie, Morrow, $24.99. Pregnant Ivy Rose’s happy life in suburban Massachusetts is threatened when another expectant mother, an acquaintance from high school days, turns up at her yard sale, is taken inside by Ivy’s husband David for a tour of the house, and disappears. Ephron’s first solo mystery, with the intricate structure of a Mary Higgins Clark novel and a more flavorful style, is a suspenseful and well-wrought example of the am-I-married-to-a-murderer subgenre that dates back at least as far as Francis Iles’s 1932 classic Before the Fact.

*** Dean Koontz: Relentless, Bantam, $27. Bestselling novelist Cullen Greenwich, menaced (not just in print) by an evil book critic, goes on the run with plucky wife, genius six-year-old son, and mysteriously gifted dog. Is this suspense, horror, satire, conspiracy thriller, science fiction, fantasy, spiritual allegory? Try all of the above. Over every top and off every wall, combining the sunniest of humor with the darkest and bloodiest of events, Koontz is sui gen-eris: no one else could have written this.

*** Lee Goldberg: Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop, Obsidian, $22.95. Obsessive compulsive Adrian Monk, laid off from his consultancy job with the San Francisco police, joins a P.I. firm. As in the TV series created by Andy Breckman, sharp character comedy combines with ingenious and fairly clued puzzle-spinning. The main problem concerns the arrest of Captain Stottlemeyer for murder; two of the secondary mysteries (“Mr. Monk and the Old Lesson” and “Mr. Monk and the Godfather”) could stand alone as short stories. Don’t miss Lt. Disher’s hilariously nonsensical variation on Sherlock Holmes’s “eliminate the impossible” dictum.

*** Anthony Boucher and Denis Green: The Casebook of Gregory Hood, Crippen & Landru, $29 hardcover, $20 trade paperback. The Holmes radio scripters also wrote its 1946 summer replacement, introducing San Francisco importer and gentleman sleuth Hood. Fourteen lively scripts, rich in detail of the period and locale and often including allusions to real-life Bay Area personalities, feature Boucher’s fair-play puzzle plotting. Joe R. Christopher’s introduction, notes, and episode checklist are models of thorough scholarship.

*** Parnell Hall: Dead Man’s Puzzle, Minotaur, $24.95. Like both Monk and Hood, Puzzle Lady Cora Felton inhabits a world where details are realistic, but the big picture is pleasantly fanciful. Three crosswords by Manny Nosowsky and a sudoku by Will Shortz are keys to the plot, and even if the cute-dialogue-as-page-filler gets a bit tiresome, the almost Queenian solution is ingenious.

** Denis Johnson: Nobody Move, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $23. Gambler Jimmy Luntz, on the run from loan sharks in Bakersfield, California, joins forces with Anita Desilvera, framed for embezzlement by her prosecutor husband and a corrupt judge. An exercise in sex and violence, flashy but lacking sympathetic characters or an engaging plot, merits grudging respect for crisp prose and punchy, darkly comic dialogue. Jacket-flap comparisons to Hammett and Chandler are way off the mark. (Also on CD, read by Will Patton [Macmillan Audio, $24.95]).

** John Shannon: Palos Verdes Blue, Pegasus, $25. The title refers to both an endangered California coastal butterfly species and the habitat-conscious missing teenager sought by unofficial private eye Jack Liffey. The much-praised Shannon writes well and has a good eye for Southern California social strata, but he represents much that is wrong with contemporary crime fiction: excessive back story, self-indulgent literary references, smugly pretentious dialogue, weak plot, and soap opera contrivances. Liffey’s sentimental determination to keep alive an animal in severe pain from cancer made me doubt his moral compass.

** Matthew Glass: Ultimatum, Atlantic Monthly, $24. This international relations thriller, totally undistinguished for prose, dialogue, and characterization, offers an involving story and plenty of wonky policy debate as the newly elected President (the year is 2032) tries to figure out how to reach an agreement with China and save the world from galloping climate change.

Finally, four juvenile novels, all directed at readers twelve and up:

*** Rachel Wright: You’ve Got Blackmail, Putnam, $16.99. Fourteen-year-old Lozzie Cracknell’s slangy and comical first-person narrative is distinctively British but also unmistakably contemporary teen, so the few unfamiliar terms shouldn’t discourage young American readers. School bullies, separated parents, and a blackmailing scheme that may involve Lozzie’s novelist English teacher figure in a fast-moving, highly enjoyable tale that is also a genuine detective story.

*** Brent Hartinger: Project Sweet Life, HarperTeen, $16.99. Tacoma 15-year-old Dave and his two best friends, ordered by their fathers to get summer jobs, explore ways to make the requisite cash without working, including solving a series of bank robberies and seeking a treasure hidden in the city’s underground tunnels. Some young readers will have fun shooting holes in this episodic comic novel’s preposterous plot, but expert telling and healthily moral message disarm criticism. One plot element, the history of Tacoma’s treatment of its Chinese population, is expanded upon in a concluding author’s note.

** Jennifer Sturman: And Then Every-thing Unraveled, Scholastic/Point, $16.99 16-year-old Delia Truesdale, sent from her Palo Alto home to Manhattan and the management of two aunts, refuses to believe her socially conscious mother was lost at sea. The first-person humor and romantic subplot may charm the target readership, but the mystery fizzles: psychic and off-stage detection are cop-outs, and the incomplete ending requires waiting for a sequel.

** Robert B. Parker: Chasing the Bear, Philomel, $14.99. How did Boston private eye Spenser’s western upbringing by a widowed father and two maternal uncles turn him into the literate and principled macho man we know so well? While young readers will enjoy the suspenseful river pursuit, it’s hard to imagine them relating to the framing device: present-day commentary on the action via the sleuth’s customary arch dialogue with Susan Silverman.

Copyright © 2009 by Jon L. Breen