Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 1. Whole No. 785, January 2007

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

Looking for holiday gift suggestions? Consider first Ed McBain’s landmark retrospective Learning to Kill (Harcourt/Penzler, $25). Of the 25 stories, first published in Manhunt and other magazines between 1952 and 1957, over half have previously been collected, but the introduction, story notes, and afterword the author provided before his death in 2005 are full of autobiographical and professional insights into the 87th Precinct’s creator, one of the greatest twentieth-century crime writers.

**** Edward D. Hoch: More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, Crippen & Landru, $43 signed limited hardcover, $18 trade paper. Fifteen locked rooms and miracle problems, all from EQMM, cover November 1978 to December 1983 in publication date and Fall 1927 to December 1931 (the Christmas tale “The Problem of Santa’s Lighthouse”) in the New England small-town doctor’s chronology. Only the greatest names in Golden Age detection have been as ingenious in fair-play puzzle-spinning as Hoch, and even they were not as prolific.

**** Robert Barnard: Dying Flames, Scribner, $24. In a typically literate and enthralling entry from another EQMM favorite, novelist Graham Broadbent is visited at his hotel by a teenage girl claiming to be his daughter and becomes involved in the complicated mendacities of a former girlfriend. Like most of Barnard’s work, the novel refuses to develop along predictable lines. Much is written about plot-driven versus character-driven novels, but in the best mysteries (like this one), the elements are blended too well for the reader to tell who’s driving.

*** Bernard Knight: The Elixir of Death, Simon & Schuster UK/Trafalgar Square, $24.95. Twelfth-century English coroner Sir John de Wolfe, known as Crowner John, investigates a mysterious shipwreck and the beheading of a Norman knight in a novel notable for readable style, historical detail, well-drawn characters, and relevance to present-day events. Knight rivals medievalist colleague Michael Jecks in the provision of scholarly extras: opening and closing notes, maps, and glossary.

*** Harlan Coben: Promise Me, Dutton, $26.95. Returning after a six-year absence, sports and show-biz agent and wisecracking do-gooder Myron Bolitor looks for a missing teenage girl to whom he had made an ill-advised promise of help. Coben keeps the pages flying with a complex plot and a masterful final surprise, while addressing serious societal issues, but some of the comic-book supporting characters belong in another book.

*** Pamela Branch: Murder Every Monday, Rue Morgue, $14.95. In the American debut of a 1954 British novel, the wrongly acquitted murderers of the Asterisk Club train others in their art at a remote Dorset manor house. The droll black comedy, complete with slapstick climax, could have made a ‘50s movie vehicle for Alec Guinness. (Rue Morgue also offers Branch’s other three mysteries, all but one new to American print.)

*** Dean Koontz: The Husband, Bantam, $27. Why would anyone kidnap the wife of a landscape gardener, who is obviously unable to raise the $2,000,000 ransom demanded? Some readers may question the decision to dispel most of the mystery before the halfway point and depend on pure suspense to carry the load, but the wild plotting, vivid action, and storytelling gusto will keep most hanging on till the end.

*** Ken Bruen: Calibre, St. Martin’s/Minotaur, $12.95. London cop Brant, an Ed McBain fan who hopes to follow the equally objectionable Fat Ollie Weeks into a literary career, is up against a good-manners-crusading serial killer who admires Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. Fast-reading fun, if far from the author’s best.

*** Katherine John: The Corpse’s Tale, Accent/Dufour, $6.95. A mentally retarded man wrongfully convicted of the hat-chet murder of a local beauty returns to his Welsh village to a less than warm welcome, while police detective Trevor Joseph investigates the reopened case. The novella inaugurates the Quick Reads series “aimed at emergent readers and adult literacy learners,” but many outside that category will appreciate its solid storytelling.

*** Edward Wright: Red Sky Lament, Orion/Trafalgar Square, $29.95. In late-1940s Hollywood, former cowboy star turned unlicensed private eye John Ray Horn tries to find out who fingered an Academy Award-winning screenwriter as a Communist. The whodunit plot will keep readers guessing, and the pre-blacklist mood in the film industry is conveyed with a painful sense of reality. Woody Guthrie makes a memorable guest appearance.

** Paul Goldstein: Errors and Omissions, Doubleday, $24.95. This first novel also considers the Hollywood blacklist, though set in the present. Why won’t the aged portrait photographer who wrote the screenplay for a classic mid-century film noir sign over his rights to the studio that has turned it into a moneymaking movie franchise? The legal and historical details carry much more interest than the thriller and soap opera elements. Intellectual property lawyer Michael Seeley is a familiar fictional figure: an alcoholic with a failed marriage but flawless ethics and untarnished idealism.

Two more of Vin Packer’s remarkable novels, Whisper His Sin [and] The Evil Friendship (Stark House, $19.95), from 1954 and 1958 respectively, have been reprinted in a single volume with new introductions identifying their bases in true crime cases and my essay on Packer’s work from the 1989 collection Murder Off the Rack. The second fictionalizes the case of New Zealand teenagers Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, convicted of the 1954 bludgeoning murder of Parker’s mother. Hulme later emerged as bestselling mystery novelist Anne Perry.

Also in a handsome new trade-paperback edition is another minor classic of psychological suspense, Theodore Sturgeon’s 1961 documentary-style case study of a modern vampire, Some of Your Blood (Millipede Press, $12), with a new introduction by Steve Rasnic Tem and a related Sturgeon short story, “Bright Segment.”

Two early works of Cornell Woolrich are available in new editions, both introduced by biographer Francis M. Nevins. Manhattan Love Song (Pegasus, $13.95) is the haunting 1932 book that bridged the author’s F. Scott Fitzgerald and dark suspense periods. Even more obscure is the non-criminous autobiographical novel A Young Man’s Heart (Ramble House, $18), not reprinted since its unheralded 1930 debut.

Jim French Productions, prolific purveyors of old-time radio, have introduced another new 1920s character: Freddie Darnborough, British gentleman detective in the Wimsey/Campion mode created by John Hall, best-known for his Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Mr. Darnborough Investigates (CD, $10.95) features two cases, the second, longer, and better of which, “The Curse of Ozymandias,” is a new variation on the old Pharaoh’s Curse ploy featuring some Agatha Christie-like misdirection. The cast (headed by David Natale as Freddie and Gary Schwartz as his valet and assistant Cecil) and the production values are first-rate, as are Hall’s scripts.

Copyright © Jon L. Breen