Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, No. 5. Whole No. 855, November 2012

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

The five novels of Derek Raymond’s Factory series (Melville House, $14.95 each) represent a landmark in British detective fiction. Downbeat, violent, sometimes depressing or even revolting in their uncompromising exploration of urban crime and morbid psychology, they are made palatable by superb prose style, very dark humor, and the uncompromising morality of their unnamed narrator, a lone-wolf London detective sergeant. They are both searing social documents and genuine if unconventional detective stories. In the first of them, He Died With His Eyes Open (1984), introduced by James Sallis, the sergeant becomes obsessed with a beating murder no one else seems to care about and the voluminous audiotapes the victim left behind. Unusual as it is, it follows a comparatively standard mystery structure, but the last, Dead Man Upright (1993), previously unpublished in the U.S., eschews by-the-numbers suspense for an anticlimactic arrest and a case study of the serial killer’s twisted mentality that fills up nearly the last third of the book. Others are The Devil’s Home on Leave (1985), How the Dead Live (1986), introduced by Will Self, and I Was Dora Suarez (1990).

Philip Wylie was one of the most versatile and (with his coinage of “momism”) controversial popular writers of the twentieth century. Surinam Turtle, Richard A. Lupoff’s Ramble House imprint, has revived two curiosities from early in his career. The real rarity is Blondy’s Boy Friend ($18), a romantic mystery redolent of the roaring ’20s, originally published in book form in 1930 as by Leatrice Homesley. The titular blonde turns detective initially to try to clear of murder her doctor boy-friend, who has offered the following sage advice: “Don’t bother your pretty head. Women weren’t cut out for detective work.” Plot and romance are equally preposterous, but it’s interesting as a period piece, and the nuttily ingenious whodunit surprise somewhat anticipates a famous detective novel. (Save Lupoff’s introduction for the end, if you don’t want to know which one.) The 1935 satire The Smiling Corpse ($18), written with Bernard A. Bergman, is notable for a cast of real people, including former Pinkerton man Dashiell Hammett and amateur sleuths S.S. Van Dine, Sax Rohmer, and G.K. Chesterton. J. Randolph Cox’s introduction describes his efforts to pin down the true authorship of a novel originally published anonymously.

The death in 2011 of Enid Schantz, proprietor with husband Tom of the Rue Morgue Press, was a great loss to the mystery world. But Rue Morgue continues its policy of reprinting outstanding English and American detective stories from the 1930s and after. Latter-day classicist Patricia Moyes joins the list with her 1959 debut Dead Men Don’t Ski ($14.95), introduced by Katherine Hall Page, first of 19 novels about Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett and wife Emmy. Anthony Boucher praised the early work of P.D. James by averring that she was almost as good as Patricia Moyes. At the same price are accounts of impossible or inexplicable crimes by three stars of the Golden Age of Detection, American branch: Carter Dickson’s (John Dickson Carr’s) The Peacock Feather Murders (1937), about the outrageous Sir Henry Merrivale; Stuart Palmer’s second novel about schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers, Murder on Wheels (1932); and Clyde B. Clason’s The Purple Parrot (1937), one of the better cases for classical historian Theocritus Lucius Westborough.

Also recommended to impossible-crime fanciers are Daniel Stashower’s The Dime Museum Murders (1999) and The Floating Lady Murder (2000) (Titan, $9.95 each), which offer a colorful view of late 1890s show biz and Harry Houdini, an admiring quoter of Sherlock Holmes, as likeable if egotistical comic sleuth. But is fellow illusionist Dash Hardeen, his brother and Watson, the real detective? The puzzle plots, with a locked room in the first and an illusion-gone-wrong in the second, are well managed with clues and surprises.

Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Maud Silver, an elderly and constantly knitting spinster sleuth, is quite different from the superficially similar Miss Marple: she’s a P.I. rather than an amateur, and her 1928 debut Grey Mask (Open Road e-book, $9.99) calls to mind Edgar Wallace and P.G. Wodehouse more than Agatha Christie. But with its nice writing, rocky romance, and sinister masked villain, it’s loads of fun.

Perfect .38 (Ramble House, $30 hardcover, $18 trade paper) comprises two of William Ard’s novels about New York shamus Timothy Dane. His first-person debut The Perfect Frame (1951) takes the familiar P.I. jumps with flair, but the third-person .38 (1952), in which Dane the conflicted romantic meets his mirror image in a new- style white-collar mobster, is a vast improvement, with characters better drawn and the story arc more original. As Francis M. Nevins’s introduction suggests, Ard began by imitating Spillane but his heart wasn’t in it.

Richard Deming’s four enjoyable novels about one-legged World War II-vet P.I. Manville Moon — The Gallows in My Garden (1952), Tweak the Devil’s Nose (1953), Whistle Past the Graveyard (1954, reprinted as Give the Girl a Gun), and Juvenile Delinquent (1958), the latter previously published in book form only in Great Britain — are all available as e-books (Prologue Books, $3.99 each). Moon, who operates in an unnamed Midwestern city, has some associates (long-term girlfriend, annoying comic sidekick, irascible police contact) that seem made for radio. Deming believed in fair-play clues as well as hardboiled set-pieces. The first and best seems to be following the plot of a classic detective novel but may surprise you.

Ennis Willie’s Sand’s War (Ramble House, $32 hardcover, $18 trade paper) has two wildly plotted, energetically writ-ten 1963 cases for the mobster-turned-sleuth known only as Sand.

Haven for the Damned, set in a castle that serves as a hotel for fugitives, is unsatisfactory as a locked-room mystery but cleverly constructed. Fantastic as it is, it looks like gritty realism next to the Spillane-inspired Scarlet Goddess, concerning that old P.I. staple, the sinister religious cult, and a serial rapist-killer who resembles a Sasquatch.

Also recommended: Douglas C. Jones’s beautifully written 1979 novel Winding Stair (New American Library, $15), a superlative historical-Western-courtroom-mystery hybrid; the 1941 title novel in William G. Bogart’s Hell on Friday: The Johnny Saxon Trilogy (Altus Press, $34.95, e-book $4.99), introduced by Will Murray, far from classic but notable for its background of the cutthroat pulp magazine business; Georges Simenon’s World War II romance The Train (Melville House, $14), translated by Robert Baldick, first published in French in 1961 and in English in 1964, intensely suspenseful, subtle and acute in characterization, with a powerful surprise conclusion; and John Gardner’s Victorian gangster epic The Return of Moriarty (Pegasus, $25), introduced by Otto Penzler, one of the earliest (1974) and one of the finest book-length examples of Sherlockian spin-off and revisionist history, though Holmes himself is only an offstage presence.

Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913; original U.S. title The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu) and The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1916; original British title The Devil Doctor), both short story collections disguised as novels, have been reprinted in handsome trade paperbacks (Titan, $9.95 each), with other Fu-Manchu volumes to come. If Leslie Klinger’s excellent afterword to the first volume is correct that the evil doctor’s exploits, enormously entertaining but undeniably racist, attract more contemporary readers than Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan, created as a corrective to racism, what a sad irony.

Copyright © 2012 by Jon L. Breen