Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 817 & 818, September/October 2009

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

While quite a few police officers have written mystery fiction, real-life private eyes turned authors are somewhat rarer. The most famous, of course, was Dashiell Hammett, who drew on his experiences as a Pinkerton operative for many of his 1920s pulp stories and later novels. Allan Pinkerton’s own 19th-century books were ghost-written and ostensibly nonfiction. Some contemporary fiction-writing P.I.s include Jerry Kennealy, Parnell Hall, and the first two writers considered in our round-up of historical mysteries.

**** Joe Gores: Spade & Archer, Knopf, $24. It was inevitable someone would do a prequel to Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, so be glad it’s Gores, the best possible candidate for the job. He is a master of Hammett’s purely objective narrative style, and even if you don’t automatically picture Humphrey Bogart as San Francisco private eye Sam Spade, you will by the top of page 8. The episodic novel describes connected cases from 1921, 1925, and 1928, provides the back story for Spade’s relationship with his short-lived partner, not to mention his partner’s wife, and ends with Brigid o’shaughnessy in the outer office and Sam telling Effie Perine, “Shoo her in.” A masterful job of plotting, writing, and extrapolation.

*** Dick Stodghill: The Case Files of Crimestopper Jack Eddy, volume 2, JLT-Charatan, $15.95. Jack Eddy, who runs the Akron office of a large detective agency much like Pinkerton’s, is enough of a publicity hound to use newspaper crime reporter Bram Geary as a sometimes reluctant Watson. Sports historian and World War II combat memoirist Stodghill has done both their jobs in his time, and brings a wealth of bittersweet Depression-era detail to these eight stories, all from AHMM between 1994 and 2008. His special technique is to take a dramatic situation (using colorful titles like “Nightmare on North Hill,” “The Phantom of Johnnycake Lock,” and “Panic on Portage Path”) and undercut it with a dose of mundane reality. Cultural references from 1937 and ’38 (how many remember Kenny Baker, the Hupmobile, Lifebuoy, Don Budge, and Ernie Pyle?) are liberally provided by one who was there.

**** Margaret Lawrence: Roanoke, Delacorte, $24. The Edgar-nominated author whose Hannah Trevor series established her as one of the best American historical practitioners here turns to espionage and adventure in Elizabethan England and colonial America of the late 1500s. Gabriel North, who foiled one of several assassination attempts on the queen by supporters of her sister Mary, Queen of Scots, travels to the New World, where he falls in love with a Native American queen and becomes a puzzle piece in an enduring mystery: What happened to the vanished English settlers on Roanoke Island? Lawrence provides a possible solution plus a valuable author’s note separating fact from fiction.

*** Jason Goodwin: The Bellini Card, Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $25.00. In 1840 Istanbul, the new young sultan expresses to his on-call detective, the eunuch Yashim, his wish to acquire a portrait of ancestor Mehmet the Conqueror by the great Bellini which is rumored to have turned up in Venice. While Yashim’s friend Palewski, ambassador from a currently nonexistent Poland, does not narrate the case, Yashim employs him as Watson in a familiar way, dispatching him in his place to the city of canals, gondolas, and a series of murders. The historical detail and eloquent prose suggest why the first novel in the series, The Janissary Tree (2006), won an Edgar for best novel.

*** Michael Jecks: The King of Thieves, Headline/Trafalgar, $24.95. In 1325, Sir Baldwin de Furnshill and Simon Puttock are sent to France as guards for King Edward II’s son, a precocious (by present-day standards) pre-teen, charged with saving his father the embarrassment of paying homage to France’s King Charles IV. This is a typical entry in a reliable series: complicated, well-populated, written with cross-cutting gusto, and accompanied by scholarly extras: glossary, cast list, author’s note, and map.

*** P. C. Doherty: A Haunt of Murder, Minotaur, $24.95. As Chaucer’s pilgrims continue toward Canterbury, they pause in an eerie Kentish copse to hear the Clerk of Oxford’s tale, both whodunit and ghost story, beginning on May Day 1381 and centered on Ravenscroft Castle, site of the haunted Midnight Tower. The sixth in this inventive series is most unusual, effectively written, and appropriately creepy. (Doherty’s characters continue to murmur and hiss a lot.)

** Alice Duncan: Angel’s Flight, Five Star, $25.99. In 1926 — the news of Rudolph Valentino’s death pinpoints the year — Mercy Allcutt, unworldly but ambitious secretary to Los Angeles private eye Ernie Templeton, launches her own investigation into a pair of phony spiritualists while avoiding her proper Bostonian mother, in town for the apparent purpose of making her daughters’ lives miserable. Slang, attitudes, and manners are appropriate to the period, but the pad-ding and repetition are excessive even by present-day standards. Humor is the saving grace.

** L. Ron Hubbard: Cargo of Coffins, Galaxy, $9.99. This novella by the pulp master is not technically a historical, since it was contemporary when published in a 1937 issue of Argosy. Lars Marlin, recently escaped from Devil’s Island, encounters the man who framed him for smuggling, the charming and devious Paco Corvino, now playing steward to a party of rich twits on a luxury yacht. When the yacht’s captain is murdered, Lars takes the job, while wondering what Paco is up to and how he can get his revenge. Not Hubbard’s best — the surprise twist is lifted from O. Henry — but typically lively, vividly written, and action-packed.

(Like other titles in this series, it’s available at the same price in either an illustrated book version or a fully-cast audio reading.)

Fans of Golden Age-style detection and radio drama will want to seek out the second volume of Hilary Caine Mysteries (Jim French Productions, $12.95), two new cases, one a clever locked room puzzle, for M. J. Elliott’s 1930s British amateur detective. The following will test your tolerance for a character some may find more irritating than charming: complaining about the inconsistencies in King Kong, Hilary wonders how Edgar Wallace could have his name connected to it. Reminded that Edgar Wallace is dead, she remarks, “He’s certainly kept that quiet.”

Copyright © 2009 Jon L. Breen