An Invitation....

People who read this blog and use Facebook might be interested in "Golden Age Detection" a Facebook group started by Jeffrey Marks for fans of traditional mystery (discussions also are known spill over into other areas of crime fiction).  It is a closed group, but if you "friend request" me on the Facebook page I started I can place you in the group. We would love to have you join.

Later this week, by the way, I will be posting reviews of Ruth Rendell's Simisola and Crippen & Landru's latest Edward D. Hoch Dr. Sam Hawthorne short story collection, Nothing Is Impossible. And there should also be the last part of of my consideration of Lucy Worsley's take on Golden Age detective fiction.

I am also expecting to get a series of interviews about crime fiction with some interesting people rolling soon!

Worsleying around with the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Part Three: The Lower Orders and Our Social Betters

It has taken me a while to get around to this, but here is Part Three of my look at Lucy Worsley's genre survey A Very British Murder.  See here for Part One and Part Two.

After a short chapter of about 2000 words on the Detection Club (this is acceptable, though you will learn much more about the Detection Club from Doug Greene's observations on it in his biography of John Dickson Carr, my CADS booklet Was Corinne's Murder Clued? The Detection Club and Fair Play and Peter Lovesey's essay on the Detection Club, forthcoming in Mysteries Unlocked), Worsley in Chapter 23, "Snobbery with Violence," adopts the old Julian Symons-Colin Watson take on Golden Age English detective novels, castigating the books for their "attitude that servants are not really human" (the chapter title is the same as the title of Colin Watson's book on the subject).

Worsley cites as evidence for this assertion Margery Allingham's Albert Campion and his manservant Magersfontein Lugg.  Do Allingham readers agree that the memorably-portrayed Lugg comes off as "not really human"?  And what about Dorothy L. Sayers' Bunter?  He may not be human, but, if so, it's because he's super-human, not subhuman!

Not really human? Lugg and Campion

Worsley also cites a character in Sayers' The Nine Tailors (a Mrs. Gates), who says of a chauffeur, "I believe him to be a perfectly truthful man, as such people go."  Worsley doesn't mention that immediately after this comment the person Mrs. Gates is talking to mentally refers to her as "this old cat." Worsley may have missed this, but Mrs. Gates and her retrograde social attitudes (and, yes, they were retrograde attitudes, even among Sayers' readership, in the 1930s) are being satirically portrayed by Sayers.  This is not evidence for Worsley's claim, but rather evidence against it.*

*(Here is a character's description of Mrs. Gates from earlier in the novel: "But I'll tell you who would have noticed anything, and that's Mrs. Gates--our housekeeper, you know....She's a perfect ghoul...She's quite nice, really, but she ought to live in a Victorian novel....")

Of course Worsley, like Symons and Watson before her, is right that there are plenty of objectionable classist attitudes about servants legitimately attributable to authors of Golden Age mysteries, but the argument can be overdrawn.  In fairness to the Golden Age mystery, there was more nuance on this matter than often is admitted.

Worsley goes on to pronounce that "in the Golden Age, too, the detective was usually of a specific social class, much more elevated than it had been in the days of Inspectors Field and Whicher, when detection was considered dirty work....Agatha Christie cleverly allowed Hercule Poirot to sidestep the issue of class by making him Belgian and therefore, notoriously, hard to categorize.  But a great many of his colleagues sprung from the ranks of the aristocracy."

Predictably, Worsley then goes on to offer as evidence of the "great many" Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion and Roderick Alleyn.  Once again only resort to the Crime Queens is made. But what about the resolutely bourgeois Inspector French (Freeman Wills Crofts), Superintendent Wilson (GDH and Margaret Cole) and Inspector Macdonald (ECR Lorac)?

These are three examples, just the number Worsley offers, but additional ones could be offered (and have been on this blog).  It's simply not true that the readership of Golden Age mysteries could not abide a smart middle class policeman as a series sleuth.

a middle class copper

Part Four will consider Worsley's explanation for the "fall" of the Golden Age detective novel.

Nosing It out in Northumberland: Vera, Season One (2011)

Recently I reviewed at this blog Ann Cleeves' new Vera Stanhope detective novel, Harbour Street (2014).  I liked the characters of DCI Stanhope and her subordinate DS Joe Ashworth and the evocatively portrayed north England setting, so decided to give season one of the popular television series, starring Brenda Blethyn as Vera and David Leon as Joe, a try, despite some qualms I have about Cleeves' plotting in Harbour Street. I am happy to say I liked the series and will be getting season two, though again I have some qualms about the plotting.

In my view the strongest of the four episodes in season one was the fourth episode, Little Lazarus, the only one not based on a Cleeves novel. This was an extremely good television crime film. The other three all had good points as well, but were not on par with the superlative Little Lazarus. I'll talk about each one in order.

"Hidden Depths"

Vera cogitates

Vera and her team investigate two seemingly related murders, that of a teenage boy and a young woman schoolteacher.  In both cases the corpse, garroted, was found in water, strewn with flowers. Vera focuses her sights on a group of four male ornithologists.

This was a very solid opening for the series.  As in all the episodes of season one, the score and the photography are superb. The wide open, bleakly beautiful spaces immediately reminded me of Wallander.

Also striking was the centrality to the plot of mental aberration and sexual psychosis.  It is no surprise to me that Ann Cleeves is a great fan of Nordic crime fiction in general. The influence is quite evident in all three season one episodes based on her novels.

Arguably the suspects were not as well fleshed out as the could have been, but there are a lot of interesting plot wrinkles and the final revelation of the identity of the killer allows an important thematic point to be made, one that relates to the personality of the title character. Additionally, I thought there were some memorable insights into the state of families in modern England (I also noticed this in the novel Harbour Street).

"Telling Tales"

Joe questions

In this episode Vera discovers that a recently deceased woman may have been wrongly convicted for the murder of an adolescent girl.  There soon follows another murder, which Vera believes is related to this earlier case.

I found this episode the least satisfying of the season.  Again psychosis and sexual misdeeds are brought to the fore, and I found it hard to square behavior with character, as it is presented to us. Additionally, I was left in confusion about aspects of an assault made late in the story, and Vera reaches the solution by pure (and unlikely) happenstance. Blah!

"The Crow Trap"

one of the many sad souls Vera encounters in the course of her investigations

A woman who co-owns land desired by a quarrying company is murdered.  It turns out that this woman was a suspect in a previous case, concerning the disappearance of a child. Another murder follows.

Yet again psychosis plays a great role and the whole thing seems rather far-fetched in the final analysis, but I did admire the plot construction and found the whole thing quite engrossing.

In all three of these episodes Vera's personality is nicely developed, along with her relationship with Joe. One is inevitably reminded, I think, of Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis. Like Morse, Vera is a loner who doesn't take good care of herself and can be difficult to work with, though she can have great empathy for the sorry souls she runs across in her cases.  Like Lewis, the young family man Joe is more placid and helps anchor his boss to the social world.  They make a nice team.  Both Blethyn, a twice Oscar-nominated actress, and Leon perform extremely well in these roles.

Other members of the team are non-entities, with the exception of Holly Lawson and Kenny Lockhart, and even they are not given too much of interest to work with.  Paul Ritter's pathologist Billy Cartwright, on the other hand, offers some memorably mordant moments.

Finally we come to the season one finale:

"Little Lazarus" (story by Paul Rutman)

Vera is judged

In this one, a young boy survives a brutal attack in which his mother is killed.  Investigating into the mother's past, Vera finds a maze of mystery, some of which seems to implicate people in high places.

I found this a tremendously engrossing episode, with good characterization and an interesting, intricate plot that thankfully for once did not depend on anyone being absolutely stark ravers.  The ending I found quite poignant, because we have been made to care for the people involved, including two interesting modern couples.

Vera's relationship with the boy is nicely developed and we are left with a cliffhanger about Vera's health--as if we didn't have reason enough already to come back for season two!

True Confessions? The Diary (1952), by William Ard

Another helping of hard-boiled this week, with William Ard's The Diary (1952).  Ard has been lucky to get some vocal enthusiasts, Dennis Miller, who has a blog about the author, and genre critic Francis Nevins, who has written an introduction to some reprints of Ard crime novels by Fender Tucker's Ramble House.

a young-looking William Ard
striking a cool pose
(courtesy Dennis Miller
williamard.wordpress.com) 

The Diary, the second of William Ard's Timothy Dane detective novels, has not been reprinted by Ramble House, though Ard's first and third, The Perfect Frame (1951) and .38 (1953), have been, in a twofer volume titled Perfect .38.

In his introduction to Perfect .38, Nevins distinguishes Ard's writing from what he calls the "sadism-snigger-and-sleaze" school of Mickey Spillane, arguing that Ard

carried on in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, in which the private eye stands for personal and political decency, legitimate violence abounds but sadism is eschewed, sex is not a savage perversion but a restoration of oneself and a friendly caring for another.

Without getting extensively into the matter of Nevins' characterization of Spillane, who remains popular to this day, I will say that Nevins highlights some of the qualities about The Diary I found appealing.

One deal breaker for me with Spillane has always been the enjoyment his "hero," Mike Hammer, takes in killing people. It's not just that Hammer is willing to take the law into his own hands, vigilante-style, it's that in doing so he is so palpably satisfying his own personal blood lust.

Timothy Dane, on the other hand, is a different sort of hard-boiled detective, at least from my reading of The Diary. For starters, just take that name, "Timothy."  I'm not an expert in hard-boiled monikers, but there's something boyish and non-macho about the name Timothy Dane (just compare it with Mike Hammer).

And check out the striking cover illustration of the Popular Library edition of The Diary. This illustration depicts Dane, not with Diane Rebow, the brattish eighteen-year-old millionaire's daughter and author of the novel's titular diary, but rather with a young prostitute who appears in one short scene in the book, trying to pick him up.

The whole scene is extraneous to the plot, yet it has lingered in my memory:

She was young and thin and very sad looking.  Her skirts were hiked to knee level and she wore a transparent blouse and a black brassiere but not because it was hot. She asked me for a cigarette.  I handed her one from the pack and lit it.  She cupped my hand in both of hers.
"Thanks," she said.
"Yeah."
"Nice night out."
"Yeah."
"You live in New York?"
"Yeah."
"You wanna get laid?"
"Nope."
"Sure you do."
"Nope."
"What's the matter--you queer?"
"I'm broke."
The girl shrugged her shoulders.  "Who isn't?"

Dane's face looks unusually softened and sensitive for a man on a hard-boiled paperback from this era (and despite her attempted airs the "girl" on the cover looks just that--a girl). Dane isn't swaggering or brandishing his gun; instead he's pensively holding out a packet of cigarettes.

Don't get me wrong, Dane does his share of tough stuff in this book, including killing a guy, but he doesn't seem to get enjoyment out of it and he expressly rejects the notion of playing God.  He is a decent man.

a much different encounter

The Diary opens very much in Chandler-Hammett tradition, with Dane getting hired to straighten out  a mess a millionaire's daughter has gotten herself into.  Diane Rebow's diary has been stolen and her father, in the midst of planning a political career, is anxious to get it back. It seems there's some steamy stuff in it, though the father insists it all must just be teenage imagination, fueled by Hollywood films and romance novels.

Soon Dane is enmeshed in a messy affair of multiple murders, drugs and civic corruption at the highest levels.

This is a good hard-boiled mystery, even shorter than most for the period and never lapsing into the tedium of endless fisticuffs.

To be sure, there is quite a lot of incident (including a good share of what Nevins deems "legitimate violence").

However, our hero, with perhaps implausible good fortune, survives a final scrape with death and at the end explains everything to the characters assembled at the millionaire's house, just like he's Hercule Poirot or something. It's masterfully done.

Dane even finds time for some romance with Eileen Kay, the personal assistant of political boss Jim Steele (yes, the very same name as Dana Chamber's hard-boiled sleuth, discussed here last week). Kay is a good character, sexy (natch), smart and independent, although Ard does have her fall prey to a couple "comic" misunderstandings that don't do her keen brain justice (Nevins justly refers to this as "elements of Hollywood sex comedy").

After she and Dane have survived a quite traumatic night, she offers herself to Dane--who has recently been sapped, shot in the shoulder and injected with codeine--and is quite miffed when he has the temerity to fall asleep on her (okay, she didn't know about the codeine, but she was around for the sapping and shooting parts and might have surmised that he might not be up to another job, so to speak, that night).

I know in hard-boiled mythology the hero is supposed to be able to manage head bashings and bullet wounds without too much more than batting an eye (let alone having to resort to hospitalization), but that he's also expected the very same night to make a woman out of the heroine is a bit much!

Be that as it may, I found The Diary a great read and will be returning again to the work of William Ard, an author who died much too young in 1960 at the age of 37.

Royal Rendell and the Great Gladys

Ruth Rendell, who turned 84 a couple months ago, is still scribbling away, five decades after the publication of her first novel, with a new book, The Girl Next Door, scheduled for publication later this year.  Rendell fans will know that she writes three types of crime novels.  Under her own name she produces traditional police detective novels and psychological suspense thrillers, while under the pseudonym Barbara Vine she writes denser, multi-layered mysteries more in the Victorian style (if fully modern in subject matter).

Ruth Rendell

In my view, the Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford series that Rendell launched fifty years ago, with From Doon with Death (1964), is one of the finest bodies of series detective fiction produced in the last half-century. Of the dozen Chief inspector Wexford novels published between 1964 and 1983, there is only one real comparative "dud," I think: the sophomore effort A New Lease of Death (1967).

While the Rendell Wexfords from this period, like Rendell's sister Crime Queen P. D. James' earlier Adam Dalgleish novels, offer clever, fairly clued puzzle plots, I think they are more forward looking than James' books. Though a policeman and not an "eccentric amateur" sleuth, James' Dalgleish seems more a throwback to the Golden Age Great Detective, being a sophisticated yet isolated loner (a poet no less).

On the other hand, Rendell's Wexford, with his wife and daughters and his sidekick subordinate, Mike Burden, seems to have helped set the mold for numerous crime fiction series about provincial English policeman (and, more recently, policewomen).  Often people say they prefer the "psychological" Rendells or the Vines, but I think the Wexfords should receive their due too.

Beginning in 1985 with An Unkindess of Ravens, Rendell began writing longer Wexfords (all her Rendells got longer at this time, like the books in her Vine series, which was launched in 1986; this has been, of course, a general trend in crime fiction over the last three decades). Between 1985 and 2013 Rendell has published another dozen Wexfords, which are more of a mixed bag in my view.  The puzzle plotting tends to be more diffuse, while there is greater emphasis on social issues (feminism, racism, environmentalism, child molestation, spousal abuse, female circumcision).

I was going to review Ravens here this week, but to be frank I found this novel the worst Wexford I have read.  To me the writing was flat and the characters uninteresting (the women, for example, seemed caricatures, either stereotypical doormat housewives or stereotypical strident feminists, which really surprised me, coming from this writer). I can't help feeling that at this time her creative interest was really drifting over to the psychological Rendells and the debut Vine (The Killing Doll, 1984, The Tree of Hands, 1984, Live Flesh, 1986, A Dark Adapted Eye, 1986). Coming right in the middle of that "Big Four," Ravens seems particularly unmemorable.

I decided to go back and look at the novel Simisola (1994), arguably, I think, the best of the later Rendell Wexfords.  This has the overt political dimension Rendell now likes in her Wexfords, plus strong writing and characters and a more focused plot.  It's also longer in the modern style (I'm guessing about 120,000 words), so I am not quite ready for the full review!  But I hope to have more soon.

Gladys Mitchell

Meanwhile, I wanted to alert readers of this blog to the fact that a lot of new Gladys Mitchell titles are available, in both the US and UK (check out Amazon and Amazon.co.uk).  I am planning a post on Gladys Mitchell later this month.  I think she was a genuine Golden Age Crime Queen, on the level of Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Marsh, but have never actually blogged about her here to date.

As in the case of my "humdrum" favorite, John Street, many of Gladys Mitchell's books are extremely rare--she never really caught on with US print publishers--and expensive, which has put them out of the reach of most readers.  Now she is accessible again, with a wide range of works.  Good news indeed!

A Country House Mystery, Shaken and Stirred: Some Day I'll Kill You (1939), by Dana Chambers

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
Chambers was no Chandler
but he is still worth reading

2014 has been heralded as the 75th anniversary of a hard-boiled crime fiction milestone: Raymond Chandler's first mystery novel, The Big Sleep, which was published way back in 1939.

1939 also saw the publication of another first hard-boiled novel by a middle-aged American writer: Some Day I'll Kill You, by Dana Chambers, whose real name was the something less than hard-boiled Albert Leffingwell.

Kevin Burton Smith has expressed the view that a man with such a name as Albert Leffingwell must be English, but this is not in fact the case.

Albert Fear Leffingwell (1895-1946) was the eldest son of two doctors: Albert Tracy Leffingwell (1845-1916), a prominent social reformer, and Elizabeth Fear Leffingwell (1864-1938), a pioneering woman gynecologist.

Albert Fear Leffingwell wrote admiringly about his parents in a short book dedicated to the memory of his brother, the ornithologist Dana Jackson Leffingwell (1901-1930), who died of pneumonia before he reached the age of thirty:

Albert Leffingwell's book on "American Meat" shook Chicago long before racketeers were invented; his studies of the causes of illegitimacy in Great Britain were quoted in Parliament (once his intervention purely as an interested authority changed the whole course of English justice and saved a young mother from the gallows); his work in restriction of both human and animal vivisection probably achieved more than that of any other one person in the solution of that once-burning problem.

Elizabeth Fear--the young physician whom he married in 1892--was one of the first women in America to take a medical degree and to study in the great German clinics--at a time when the mere idea of Woman as anything but housewife and nursemaid excited either derision or alarm.  

The daughter of Obediah Barnes Fear, an English Wesleyan Methodist who in 1850 migrated with his parents, wife and children to Pittson, a Pennsylvania coal mining town, Elizabeth Fear Leffingwell in addition to maintaining a successful medical practice home schooled her three sons at the sprawling Leffingwell abode on Cayuga Lake, at Aurora, New York, which the Leffingwells acquired in 1896, the year after their eldest son was born.  Constructed in 1826 in the federal style and later remodeled according to the Italianate and Queen Anne fashions, the house, which still stands, is said to be the first brick building in Aurora.

Wanting her boys to experience Europe, Elizabeth took them on a tour of Bavaria and Italy the the spring of 1912 (this was right around the time of the Titanic disaster).

Dana Jackson Leffingwell received a doctorate from Cornell, while Albert Fear Leffingwell graduated from Harvard, in 1917.

The future hard-boiled writer early on showed literary inclinations, publishing a book of poetry, Castles in Spain, while still at Harvard.

In 1925, he co-founded the advertising agency Olmstead, Perrin and Leffingwell, which four years later was absorbed by McCann (today the massive global advertising network McCann Erickson).

the Leffingwell House at Aurora, New York

Leffingwell did not publish his first crime novel until 1939, when he was 43 years old (this was also, incidentally, the year immediately following his mother's death).   

Some Day I'll Kill You would be followed by twelve additional crime novels.  All totaled, there appeared, between 1939 and 1947, ten books written under the pseudonym Dana Chambers, two under the pseudonym Giles Jackson and one under the author's own name. Probably Leffingwell derived his most notable pseudonym from a Harvard dormitory building, completed shortly after he was born, called, yes, Dana Chambers, that is now home to the offices of the Medieval Academy of America.

Leffingwell was praised in his day by no less than Anthony Boucher and Bill Pronzini has told me that he owns all the Leffingwell novels and has enjoyed his work.

In his Saturday Review notice on Some Day I'll Kill You (which appeared just one week after his notice on The Big Sleep), "Judge Lynch" praised Dana Chambers for having "lavishly overlaid" his "antiquated plot nucleus" with "rapid fire talk, brisk and bloody action, piquantly pulchritudinous females, and fervent drinking," rendering the verdict "Lusty" on the novel.

This is a good summation.

Chambers' basic mystery plot  design in Some Day I'll Kill You definitely could come right out of an English country house detective novel.  It is even set primarily at a house party in a country house, located near Old Lyme, Connecticut.

Several generations of Leffingwell ancestors hailed from this area.  Albert Fear Leffingwell's great-great-great-great grandfather Thomas Leffingwell (1649-1723) started an inn at nearby Norwich, Connecticut in 1701 (it is a house museum today).

the Leffingwell Inn at Norwich, Connecticut

Yet despite the novel's country house setting and the references to Sherlock Holmes we also have, as Judge Lynch indicated, booze, beatings, shootings, sexual byplay, beautiful women (four, to be precise) and criminal brutes, all presented to us in cool first-person narration by Jim Steele, surely the toughest radio script writer ever.

I enjoyed it all immensely.

So here's the dope on the plot.   Beautiful Lisa Ridgman calls on old beau Jim Steele, a writer of radio thrillers, to help her out of a jam.  It seems someone is trying to put the squeeze on Lisa, claiming in anonymous letters knowledge that she murdered her first husband, Norman Barclay. This person will keep quiet for major hush money.

Lisa had a nervous breakdown not long after the death of Barclay in a mysterious fire on his yacht.  She has since wed her psychiatrist, Mike Ridgman.

For Jim's part, after a madly passionate fling with Lisa (when she was in between husbands), he did a stint in the Spanish Civil War, fighting on behalf of the Republicans with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (had Leffingwell lived beyond 1946 to chronicle further adventures of his series sleuth into the Cold War, Jim's Spanish Civil War service might have made Jim a suspicious character to the American government).

life at the Ridgman country house doubtless is vastly
different from life at this Methodist church, built in 1805
 in Timsbury, England, where Albert Fear Leffignwell's
maternal grandparents and great grandparents worshiped

When Jim shows up with Lisa at the Ridgman house party near Old Lyme, he encounters:

• Mike Ridgman, Lisa's psychiatrist husband ("He wasn't my idea of a psychiatrist," says Jim, "he looked like a man who had captained the Princeton eleven in '05, say, and spent three decades since playing polo at Westbury.")
• Tommy and Marian Weston, a wealthy sportsman and his beautiful ex-actress wife
• Henry Allen, the Barclay family lawyer
• Mrs. Barclay, Norman's mother
• Marie Ridgman, Mike's nymphet half-sister
• Parker, the shifty English butler

Marian Weston dies that very night, from being fatally bludgeoned while taking a nap--i.e., passed out after too many highballs--on a porch swing.

Was someone after Marian, or could Marian have been mistaken for Lisa? Jim inclines to the latter supposition and he sets out to solve the mystery and save Lisa--even if she is, most inconveniently, married to another man.

There is a lot of action in this book.  Our hero actually kills a bad guy, strangling him in Mike Hammer fashion (in his defense, however, it was, well, defense).

He also beats up a bad guy, shoots another bad guy in the face, kneecaps yet another bad guy and he gives serious thought to slugging an obnoxious cop.

Moreover, he gets sapped once by a bad guy and knocked out in a car crash. And not only does he never need to visit a hospital, he claims the second crack on the head actually jogged his brain, allowing him to reach the solution of the mystery.

If all this is not exciting enough for you, there's also a second murder (a shooting this time), a kidnapping and a massive explosion on the grounds of the Ridgman mansion (in his crime fiction Leffingwell had a great fondness for explosions).

Yet there's also some good byplay and nice little character studies to go along with all the mayhem.

Here's Steele talking to the soon-to-be late Marian Weston:

La Weston said: "But how is it you [Jim and Mike Ridgman] haven't met before?"
I said: "Oh, we don't move in the same circles.  Dr. Ridgman cures the idle rich.  I distract the idle poor."
"Sociologist?"
"No, radio scripts.  I write half-hour thrillers.  Sell toothpaste."

There's some nice sardonic description from Steele too:

Parker's great white ham-like face was beaded with perspiration as though he had been running.  His features were clustered too close together in the middle of it, and I had a sudden irrelevant thought that he looked like Herbert Hoover.

There's quite a measure of sexual frankness in the book.  Lisa tells Jim that her first husband, Norman Barclay, was a degenerate who sexually assaulted her that fateful night of the boat fire:

"Norman was--he was--oh, skip it.  He was a Krafft-Ebing case.  I was unconscious and he--"

Undercover Work?
Jim and Louise

There are some first class scenes between Jim and the manager of Lyme hotel, "an aged Downeaster with steel-bowed spectacles and a face like a dried prune." He's a great little comic Yankee "character."

That's the old man's granddaughter, the luscious blonde Louise, in the great cover illustration to the Popular Library edition of the novel.

Louise provides Steele information on the shady roadhouse owner Maclay, as well as something of a third point on a love triangle.

Late in the novel Lisa gets jealous about Louise:
"What was all the blonde stuff?"
"One of my assistants. Undercover girl for Dr. Steele."
"I imagine she's quite good under covers."

Lisa is an interesting character in this book.  She's smart and sexy and it's refreshing here, compared with so many traditional mysteries, to see a love interest who has been around the block several times, so to speak, and makes no apologies about it, nor is expected to.

How does it all get resolved?  Does Jim crack the case? And, just as important, what happens with Jim and Lisa?

You will want to read on to find out.  I certainly did.

Some other hard-boiled pieces at the Passing Tramp:

Murder with Pictures (1935), George Harmon Coxe
The Gentle Hangman (1950), James M. Fox
The Barbarous Coast (1956), by Ross Macdonald
The Ferguson Affair (1960), by Ross Macdonald
Detections and Tribulations: Dashiell Hammett and Bill Pronzini
Ray and Jimmy: Correspondence between Raymond Chandler and James M. Fox

Woman Trouble: A Gaze at Da Blurbs, Hard-Boiled Edition

This week I plan to review a hard-boiled mystery bluntly titled Some Day I'll Kill You. The book was first published in 1939 and later by Popular Library in 1953.

The 1953 Popular Library edition included the following advertisement for other "Bestselling Popular Library Mysteries."

I think that the descriptions, short and direct, bring home the hard-boiled world:

Shakedown by Ben Kerr
Blackmail, a sizzling blonde--and murder. 
(more on "Ben Kerr" coming soon)

Don't Crowd Me by Evan Hunter
The story of a woman who tempted one man too many.

Don't Get Caught by M. E. Chaber
Some women have everything--but a conscience.

M. E. Chaber
was one of the many pseudonyms of
Kendall Foster Crossen (1910-1981),
creator of the pulp hero Green Lama

Naked and Alone by Michael Lawrence
She played with fire and got burned.

Double Cross by Mike Moran
Velma's goal was every man in town.

Blondes Die Young by Bill Peters
Dames, derelicts, dope--and death.

All the Way Down by M. E. Chaber
His mission was dangerous--hers was amorous.

Kiss Me Hard by Tom Brandt
He was on the run--she was on the make.

Booze, babes, cigs and couches--looks like they all get a lot of action! If anyone out there has read any of these books, I would love to hear about it.

And I know the stunning ladies on the covers naturally get most of the attention, but surely we would be remiss if we neglected to commend the gentlemen for color matching their blue ties and blue socks.  Dames notice these things.