NEW STUFF: Who Is Maud Dixon? - Alexandra Andrews

Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews
Little, Brown & Co.
ISBN: 978-0316500319
336 pp. $28
Publication date: March 2, 2021

I imagine many people have often said “I wish I had his/her life” at a low point when feelings of envy and jealousy often get the better of us. Count yourself lucky if you’ve been perfectly satisfied with your life in comparison to anyone else, especially someone much more successful in a career or wealthier or more attractive or anything that most people perceive as being the hallmark of what leads to happiness. The rest of us have been there. Dreaming of a life better than the one we have, hoping for the one we know we deserve. 

Florence Darrow, the protagonist of Who Is Maud Dixon? (2021), is such a person. With dreams of being a successful writer but not quite brave enough to take the plunge she has consigned herself to working as a lower echelon assistant editor at a high profile publishing house and is surrounded by people who she perceives as better than her – more informed, more sophisticated, more intelligent and hence more successful. Everything she experiences passes through a filter of her inexperience, her Floridian background cursing her and leaving her in the wake of faster moving, hipper co-workers speeding through the fast lane of a Manhattan lifestyle she had only dreamed of back in Port Orange in her teen years. She just can’t keep up. Each day reveals she knows little, lives a shallow too safe life, while her co-workers manage to see all, know all and take everything they want with ease.

Florence is going to try her hand at taking what she wants no matter what. She has no idea what awaits her.

Through a series of embarrassing choices that recall some of the worst revenge stories of the early months of the #MeToo rage Florence loses her job only to land at the feet of her idol – the mysterious Maud Dixon, bestselling novelist whose pseudonym has never been penetrated. Now Florence is employed by the real Maud Dixon -- Helen Wilcox -- and she is in awe of the woman behind the pen name. As unfettered and opinionated as anyone Florence has worked with Helen is sort of an unimaginable caricature of the independent woman. She lives her life large and damns anyone who settles for less: “Middle categories are for middling people” she tells Florence after denouncing the male species with this glib diatribe: “Men are blunt objects. There’s no nuance there.” Within weeks on the job ostensibly a mere transcription gig, turning manuscript into digital pages, Florence finds herself completely trusted by Helen. She is astonished as she is given access to not only the handwritten pages of Helen’s upcoming novel but her bank and email accounts. Even more unexpected Florence is asked to pretend to be Helen on occasion when her employer can’t be bothered to answer business emails, like the never-ending barrage of demands from her literary agent who wants to see the first chapters of the new book. It’s only the beginning of a shift in identity and a thirst to become a successful writer at any cost.

Who is Maud Dixon? has rightfully been compared to Patricia Highsmith though it discards Highsmith’s penchant for primarily male dominated storylines for an nearly all-female cast. Still, the comparison couldn’t be more apt. It’s one of the few contemporary suspense novels I’ve read that is all deserving of a Highsmith analogy. In Helen Wilcox Alexandra Andrews has created a character as ruthless and intimidating as Ripley, as charming as Bruno, as deadly as any of her antagonists driven to murder and steal in order to get what they want. Florence’s hero worshiping personality and her love/hate relationship with her mother Vera recalls the dreamy fantasist Carol who practically wishes her female lover into existence. And the shapeshifting, personality trading practices of Tom Ripley ironically wear rather well on Florence when a near fatal car wreck and mistaken identity allows her to fully immerse herself as Helen in what was previously only role playing.

What follows this quirk of fate is a highly suspenseful novel fraught with tension and devilishly constructed incidents in which Florence must outwit everyone who believes she is Helen and that the Florence is dead. Will she get away with it all? Or is this identity switch something not at all accidental but a sinister plot manufactured to doom Florence/Helen to a life that turns out to be not at all what she thought it would be. In taking on Helen’s identity Florence realizes too late that she must also embrace everything from Helen’s past life – the life of “Maud Dixon” – which slowly reveals itself to be not at all a work of fiction, but terribly and nightmarishly real.

Alexandra Andrews
(photo: Andrew De Francesco)

This is but one of a handful of new books I read this year that surpassed all the hype. And if I have one caveat it is that Andrews allows her characters to get the better of her. There is one scene that smacks of turgid B movie melodrama overloaded with the clichés of a psychotic killer on the rampage. The scene I'm thinking of has no place in a book that was so subtle and devious in its layering of manipulation, exploitation and identity theft. But I’ll excuse it all because I hear this is going to be a movie soon. That scene is going to make for some terrific scenery chewing and some nasty hand to hand combat (with a couple of household cleaning items deployed as weapons) for the two actresses who are lucky enough to be cast in the leading roles.

Who Is Maud Dixon? is highly recommended for those who think intelligent, original, and suspenseful crime thrillers are not being written anymore. It’s simultaneously literate, topical and filled with plot machinations of the kind that diehard crime fiction devotees crave. Patricia Highsmith would be have been proud to see her name invoked to sell this notable and deftly handled debut novel. And I think she might have conceded that after so many pretenders to the throne of Highsmithian suspense Alexandra Andrews is her legitimate heir.

P.S. I read this book last month and I wrote this review just after Thanksgiving despite it only being posted today. Coincidentally, I just learned that I'm not the only one who thinks this is worthwhile reading. Sarah Weinman, the regular crime fiction reviewer for The New York Times these days, selected Andrews' debut crime novel as one of the "Best Mystery Novels of 2021." Can I pick 'em or what?

FFB: False Witness - Helen Nielsen

Publishing executive Markham Grant has been sent to Norway to secure the rights to the memoir of renowned resistance fighter Tor Holberg.  While riding a funicular up to a well known tourist spot in Bergen he witnesses a woman being strangled in the train that is descending on the opposite side of the tracks. But when he and a fellow tourist, Ruth Atkins, investigate no body is found. The woman seems to have vanished.  This bit of amateur sleuthing makes them late catching their cruise ship and it leaves without them.  Luckily, a local named Sundequist they met on board the cruise ship comes to their rescue and gives them temporary lodging at the nearby home of his friend Dr. Bjornsen. That evening Grant and Ruth meet Sundequist's artist niece and Grant is astonished.  She is the woman he saw strangled on the funicular!

In the new reprint of False Witness (1959) from Stark House Press Curt Evans rightly brings up Agatha Christie's classic Miss Marple detective novel The 4:50 from Paddington (aka What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!) with its similar eyewitness account of a strangling in a train on parallel tracks and the subsequent disappearing body. But Nielsen is not so much interested in the mystery of who the woman is and why she looks like Sigrid...or is it the other way around? This story is no real murder mystery.  Rather, it is a clever amalgam of psychological mystery and suspense thriller. False Witness owes less to detective novels of the Golden Age (something Nielsen indeed knows a thing or two about), but more to Alfred Hitchcock and his favorite trope of the pursuit thriller spiced up with espionage. The novel is rife with Hitchcockian details like a Macguffin (Tor Holberg's memoir), doppelgängers, dual identities, and even some questionable supernatural elements with a dash of hypnotism thrown in for good measure.  I would also mention that this novel is a cousin to The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon, coincidentally also published in 1959, while also hearkening back to Sax Rohmer's early Fu Manchu novels of the 1910s.  For what lies at the heart of False Witness is an intriguing idea about mind control that seems decades ahead of itself.

False Witness is also highly unusual for Nielsen, known for her gritty realism, because it dares to address the occult and extrasensory perception.  Clairvoyance and déjà vu permeate this quasi-supernatural thriller.  Grant has more visions while staying at the Bjornsen’s home.  Viewing a painting of a ruined church for the first time oddly brings back a rush of memories.  Wearing the borrowed clothes of Sigrid's dead husband makes Grant feel like someone other than himself.  The more time he spends with Sigrid the more his visions and sense of déjà vu rapidly increase. Nielsen does an effective job of making it seem like Grant is losing control of his mental faculties and that something eerie is happening to him and the people he interacts with.  But you can rest assured that there is something altogether more sinister at work here.  While the motives may appear diabolical, the villains at the heart of the devilry are entirely mortal.

In exploring alternate realities and other worldly dimensions Nielsen seems to have become more self-conscious of her writing. The dialogue is teeming with a kind of Wildean epigrammatic speech with snippets like "Someday is nothing but a delayed now" and "The heart remains loyal; the mind forgets."  An abundance of this kind of talk can ruin the serious mood with unintended hokey humor, but Nielsen shows restraint and manages to make it seem natural.  I particularly admired her prowess in creating an unusually speedy intimacy between the leads. Sigrid makes a fire, takes Markham Grant's wet shoes and clothes from him. While he warms himself she gives him her husband's robe and slippers. They look at her paintings and talk about their lives. Soon Sigrid finds herself divulging her hidden life to Grant almost instantly. It's as if she creates a new Carl, her dead husband, in the person of Grant and uses him as her confessor. The intimacy flows naturally and allows for some nice poetic touches.

The novel does not turn into a sentimental romance thankfully.  Cary Bryan, the “freeloading American” as Ruth calls him, intrudes.  Bryan has been making a living as a cheap guide for English speaking tourists ignorant of Norwegian language and customs.  And he keeps appearing in the most unlikely settings leading Grant to believe he is being followed. Bryan is often wearing a dirty raincoat that reminds Grant of the raincoat the strangler was wearing.  And wasn't the man on the train a redhead too?  Or is Grant misremembering that?  Bryan takes on a sinister aspect and Grant suspects that what he saw was a vision of an event yet to take place, that he was somehow in touch with the future. He is determined to prove Bryan to be the strangler and prevent him from killing Sigrid.  If only he could get everyone else to believe him.

Eventually Grant meets up with his publishing colleague, Nate Talmadge, who secured the rights to Holberg's memoir and wants Grant to get the contract signed. Talmdage seems to be Grant's only ally and friend. When a real murder takes place the two men will discover the reason for Grant's visions and the truth of what took place in the train.

QUOTES:  

"Very few people ever find love -- genuine love. Perhaps that's because they expect too much from something or someone outside themselves.  They feel lonely and unfinished and go looking for someone else who is lonely and unfinished, and you know what happens if they succeed, don't you?  Two miserable people go stumbling though life, lonely and unfinished together."

"Marriage is very much like the funicular. In order to fulfill its purpose, both trains must be perfectly balanced on the same cable. One can't pull more weight than the other; one can't run ahead of the other; one can't dominate the other." 

"[The portrait] was supposed to be [of Carl]; but I can't seem to get the face right. I can't  -- this is ridiculous, but I can't remember."

Discretion moves more rapidly than a police car with a screaming siren. 

"A man in your profession must have the gift of imagery. [...] A gift of imagery. With this -- with thought alone -- we can reshape the world."

"It's guided thought that conquers; not the guided missile."

"Murders are done every day. A man goes mad and slaughters his children; a nation goes mad and invades a neighboring nation. What's the difference? It's all weird; it's all madness. Someone has just found a new approach to murder..."

NEW EDITION:  Stark House Press has reprinted False Witness in tandem with Sing Me a Murder also by Helen Nielsen.  This twofer volume goes on sale in mid-November 2021.  Sing Me a Murder, a superior crime novel equally worthy of its new edition, was reviewed on this blog several years ago. Those interested in knowing what that other Helen Nielsen book is about can read the post here

FFB: No Questions Asked - Edna Sherry

Police procedural gives way to domestic melodrama then morphs into a full blown cat-and-mouse thriller in No Questions Asked (1949), Edna Sherry’s sophomore novel in name only. No “wise fool” at all Sherry shows the hand of a master in her second crime novel by expertly plotting two simultaneous storylines that converge in a thrilling climax putting two rival cops practically at each other’s throats.

Steve Lake is a veteran cop, now captain of a homicide squad in Manhattan. As the story opens he is in charge of a murder investigation that smacks of Russian spies and stolen documents a triple combination that is sure to threaten “The American Way.” As if that wasn’t enough on his plate Steve is beginning to question his young wife’s fidelity when he catches her in multiple lies about how she has been spending her afternoons. Early on we get pitch perfect sampling of urban cop detection when in showing how Steve’s inherent mistrustfulness is infiltrating his home life Sherry has the cop trap his wife with easily proven misstatements about what happened at the horse track she claimed to have visited. Sherry must have loved horse racing for this is the first of three crime novels to feature that pastime so popular throughout the late 1940s and into the 1960s. So upset is Steve with Vicki’s obvious and flimsy lies that he begins to follow his wife to find out what she’s doing when she claims to have taken a train to Belmont betting on horses that don’t even exist. When he sees Vicki in the company of a Slevna, a well-known concert pianist and the man who has been tutoring her musician brother, Steve is enraged. Not so much angry that his 22 year-old wife is cheating on him, but furious that she’s doing it with a man old enough to be her father.

Mistrust leads to paranoia which in turn gives way to wild imaginings based on this one eyewitness account of Vicki seen with Slevna. Soon Steve Lake finds himself contemplating a violent revenge. But as with most revenge plots in well written crime novels -- and this one surely is -- the spontaneous plan, ostensibly foolproof in Steve’s crazed mind, backfires spectacularly. As the law of crime fiction irony would have it Steve is also faced with the outrageous coincidence that Slevna is involved in the murder and subsequent corporate espionage his team is investigating.  More than that basis for an intricately constructed and intriguing plot ought not to be revealed.

Sherry’s novel is a brilliant mixture of multiple subgenres, a well-oiled machine of suspense and complex conflicted characters. Steve is enraged with jealousy on one page then overcome with guilt on the next. His snarky and mean spirited lieutenant, a bully of a rival back at the station house, is an opportunistic cop eager for the captain’s desk at the start of the book then morphs into one of Steve’s allies by the end. Vicki is torn between telling her husband the truth and continuing with her weakening deceit. The novel is also an intriguing study of the tacit policemen’s code of honor and what cops will do for one another when one of their own is implicated in behavior that could ruin his career and life. In that regard this book is more timely than ever and might be cause for debate among those highly critical of such unwritten and questionable ethics.

No Questions Asked would have made an excellent film or TV episode. Brimming with cinematic details, excellent characters, and the requisite twisty plot peppered with unexpected moments this is a second novel that shows a real pro at work. Some enterprising Hollywood type ought to get a hold of this still resonant and suspenseful novel and could make it as memorable as Sherry's debut novel Sudden Fear that in its cinematic adaptation garnered four Academy Award nominations. With only two books under her belt Sherry's reputation as a solid crime novelist was firmly cemented in the annals of crime fiction history. She proved to be a contender with later novels Tears for Jessie Hewitt (reprinted by Stark House Press just this year), Backfire and Girl Missing, the last of these three being one of the most widely praised of her later novels.

IN BRIEF: I Did Not Kill Osborne - Victor Bridges

This is the year I’ve been reading books by several writers who I’ve known about for a long time and have been dancing around the periphery of my interest level. One of these writers is Victor Bridges (1878-1972) who was born George de Freyne in Bristol. Bridges worked in a bank and as an actor prior to becoming a full time writer.  Eventually he settled in Essex where most of his books are set. After getting several stories published in magazines Bridges turned to novels and averaged one published book a year from 1912 to 1961. Recently, many of his books started appearing for sale online by the dozens. He suddenly became of great interest to me especially when I learned that his career had lasted almost five decades. Surely there must be something to his work for his career to have lasted so long.

I should know better. Being prolific does not necessarily equate with quality or innovation. Bridges mostly reminds me of his equally prolific, bestselling contemporary J. S. Fletcher. Both writers churned out standard thrillers jam packed with action (albeit predictable action).  Here we have popular fiction that appealed to an audience of undiscerning readers who liked all their entertainment to be ripping yarns, easily identifiable and familiar.

Bridges' most enticing title for me seemed to be I Did Not Kill Osborne (1934) so I started with that one.  Ironically, this is an invented title slapped on the book by American publishers. In the UK the book was published as Three Blind Mice (1933), unimaginative and off putting for its nursery rhyme allusion, but aptly symbolic of the three lead characters who get caught up in a dastardly plot oblivious to the danger until it's too late. Despite the difference in titles the premise was intriguing – Nichols Trench, professional sculptor, is on trial for the murder of Jack Osborne, an acquaintance who stole a steel manufacturing formula that would revolutionize construction and engineering. In the opening chapter Nicholas is waiting to hear the jury’s verdict while his defense attorney assures him that he will be acquitted. Of course he is and Nicholas then turns his attention to trying to find out who killed the industrial thief.

Nicholas is aided by #2 mouse Molly O'Brien. She has attended every day of the trial and her presence was not unnoticed by Nicholas’ wandering eye. Molly is the daughter of the formula's inventor and gives us the requisite background on how Osborne became associated with her father back in New Orleans and how he managed to get the formula and return to England. The third of the “three blind mice” is Nicholas’ best friend Sir Jerrold Mordaunt (or plain ol' Jerry to his pals), wealthy heir to a baronetcy, whose money allows the three to finance their impending adventures.  Jerry has a devoted butler at his beck and call and a faithful dog, George, that accompanies the group. Nicholas and Molly set up their sleuthing base at Jerry’s vast estate and together the three hatch a plot to recover the formula and capture Osborne’s real killer. A group of professional criminals are hot on Nicholas’ trail and they kidnap Molly which sets in motion a series of high paced pulp magazine style incidents which don’t let up until the final pages. Any hope of the book being a true detective novel just fizzles out.

It's all fast paced, easy to read, hardly taxing on the brain, yet all too familiar. Many of Bridges’ first books were adapted for the silent screen and he himself had written several plays prior to this novel. No doubt influenced by silent movies and penny dreadful melodrama I Did Not Kill Osborne is so much like hundreds of other books you’ll be overcome with déjà vu long before you reach the halfway mark. “Haven’t I read this before?” you may ask yourself several times. Nicholas saves the girl, punches out several villains, earns several bruises and injuries before the last page. Molly is stoic and brave during her abduction ordeal. Jerry is dashing and charming and witty, like all best friends, ever ready with cash or his trusty butler to help at the last minute. Oh and there's Jimmy, the 12 year-old boy who idolizes Nicholas as an artistic mentor (the boy shows him drawings and wants Nicholas to help teach him how to be a great artist). Jimmy is recruited to help navigate a small boat that takes our intrepid group to Essex where the climax of the book takes place complete with terrifying death trap and an explosion that nearly does in everyone. The villains are dirty, lumbering, stupid and easily defeated except when Bridges needs to delay the finale.  The leader of the crooks turns out to be a Bolshevik spy, a classic cliche of the egocentric villain who talks too much and never sees what's behind him until it bashes him in the face.  Yes, he too is conveniently stupid when Bridges needs him to be.  It all works out well (did you think otherwise?) with a happy ending for our heroes and deserved arrest for the villains.

Oh! Almost forgot. We do find out who really killed Osborne. But there was no detective work involved at all. By the end of the book with Nicholas having nearly died three times and Molly's being abducted, beaten and nearly blown up herself does it even matter who killed Osborne?  The revelation is done in a confession by the killer's widow. Huge anticlimax.

In a word, passable. Very attractive dust jacket on the US edition up there at the top of this post. That's probably the only reason to seek out a copy.

FFB: Nothing Is the Number When You Die - Joan Fleming

THE STORY:  What seems to be a simple job of finding a university student who took an extended leave turns into an adventure worthy of a private eye movie. Nuri Iskirlak finds himself interrogating college girls, landladies and aging aristocrats. With each visit he learns more of the student's intriguing life outside of Oxford. Nuri is pursued by the sinister Arnika, uncovers the tawdry life of a promiscuous co-ed and her trail of pregnancies and boyfriends, and stumbles upon the location of a missing cache of pure heroin.

THE CHARACTERS: Nuri bey was previously encountered in Fleming's CWA Award winning thriller When I Grow Rich (1962) and his adventures in Nothing Is the Number When You Die (1965) make up an almost direct sequel. Unfortunately, the finale of the previous book is spoiled more than once in the telling of this novel so it is best to read the books in order saving this one for last. Fleming models the book on an old-fashioned 40s noir film with Nuri acting as a private eye albeit without the handsome retainer to entice him to carry out the work. As a friend of the family he is asked to track down the son of Torgüt Yenish, whose wife Tamara Nuri knew as a teenager. Complicating matters is the fact that Nuri has been in love with Tamara his entire life, and regrets not having the courage to have confessed his love to her decades ago. The Yenish boy, Jason, is a student at Oxford where is has just up and vanished from his classes. Rumor has it that he has taken up with a bad girl who is leading him down a path of temptation and self-destruction. Nuri agrees to travel to England and find the boy, convince him to return to his studies and to contact his family. The job will prove not to be as simple as he thinks. For that night Yenish is shot in the head in his study. Now it seems as if his son's disappearance is connected to some criminal enterprise.

Among the many people Nuri questions his most intelligent and insightful helpers are women.  From the curious and overly friendly co-ed to the ancient woman who is secretly providing a haven for Jason Nuri finds that Western women are wiser, more compassionate and more resourceful than any of the men he meets in Oxford and its environs. There are comic characters among the women like Lady Mercia Mossop forever tending to her gardens and doing her best to keep her rambunctious dog Fido from intimidating Nuri with affectionate pouncing.  I also liked the scenes with Maisie, the garrulous good-natured aunt of Jason's girlfriend who acts as Nuri's chauffeur for a while. The standouts in the novel are Jason's girlfriend Hannah who reluctantly becomes Nuri's best confederate while the most unlikely and bravest of the lot turns out to be Yenish's widow Tamara who ultimately finds that she most resort to crime in order to save the reputation of her husband before the police discover his own secret criminal past. Tamara also has the most interesting hobby of astrology combined with astronomy. She has a private retreat with a high powered telescope that is her own observatory which will provide her with a brief moment of unusual clarity towards the climax of the novel.

Surprisingly, the crux of the plot will center around not Jason but his equally lost lover Ronda. She is lost in spirit, a directionless young lady who thinks her only worth is in offering herself to any man who will pay attention to her.  She has been pregnant too often,  had too many abortions and now has become Jason's project. He suffers from the Good Samaritan complex and is convinced he can save Ronda.  Nuri bey, on the other hand feels that Ronda is more than trouble -- she is a disaster waiting to happen.  His thoughts about Ronda, however, go unheeded and will serve as a dire prophecy for future horrific events.

INNOVATIONS: Fleming does a fine job conveying the culture shock that Nuri bey faces when he is meets England's Swinging '60s full on. This "fish out of water" kind of story can make for farcical humor, but Fleming chooses to introduce humorous elements in a sly manner. As the story is primarily told from Nuri's viewpoint we get his outsider's opinion of scandalous fashions, wild hair styles and outspoken young women that are all too much for a conservative middle-aged man of Islam. Her satirical descriptions of modern college girls are always done with her customary tongue-in-cheek humor, never appearing to be disguised social critiques.

QUOTES: "Have pity on yourself, man, do not behave like an adolescent schoolboy, nurturing a rattlesnake which will surely grow up and kill you."

"...he doesn't kill for the sake of killing, as you would say. He would kill in desperation and will kill but he's not..."
"Trigger-happy?
"No. I would say he is not a person but a figure of acquisition, he lives to acquire."

After witnessing Nuri Bey become uncharacteristically violent to Arnika, the antagonistic and sinister Turk hot on his trail, two railway officials are described: The two officials looked at each other; knowing, as they did, that the travelling public consisted largely of lunatics and raving maniacs, they exchanged sardonic smiles.

A few girls walked up or down but they were of such terrifying aspect that Nuri bey did not dare ask anything of them. Some wore black stockings and had skirts many inches above their knees so that Nuri bey felt they must have lost their skirts. Some wore their hair piled as high as XVIII Century wigs, others had their hair hanging on their shoulders and some wore it over their faces in a kind of yashmak but more concealing and these Nuri bey too to be more ladylike and shy ones. All looked at him but their eyes strayed away with no more interest than if they had alighted upon a hat rack.

The longer I live, Nuri bey mused, the more I find I have to learn and he looked back at the land where the sun goes down, as they used to do in his country in the old days, and marvelled.

THE AUTHOR:  I've written about Joan Fleming many a time on this blog.  Astonishingly, I just learned that this is really the only mystery blog where her work is paid any attention or discussed in detail. There is a single hidden Joan Fleming page containing several book reviews (very old and unsecure so it often so doesn't show up in internet searches) with many reviews of her books by someone who discovered her work, but apparently never really followed through with his plan of reviewing all her novels. The only other places I uncovered posts on Joan Fleming are two brief posts:  one at Mysteries in Paradise and the other -- not too surprisingly-- at Mystery*File.  She's one of my favorite writers. Not one book has ever left me wanting or disappointed. For several years now I have been contemplating setting up a tribute website for her work. As Anthony Boucher so astutely observed in one of his Fleming reviews: "...no two of her novels resemble each other in anything save artistry."  I agree wholeheartedly; reading Joan Fleming is like coming to meet a favorite writer for the first time over and over.

EASY TO FIND?  Why yes it is! What wonderful Christmas news, right? Tune in tomorrow to find out just how easy. And for those who like their vintage mysteries authentically vintage there are hundreds of copies of both US and UK hardcover and paperback editions. Five pages worth of copies turned up in my simple search. Happy Hunting and Happier Reading!

FFB: Tears for Jessie Hewitt - Edna Sherry

UK edition (Hodder & Stoughton, 1958)

THE STORY: Con artist and thief Victor Clyde (aka Francis Edwards) sees in Jessie Hewitt an easy mark.  He spots her in a two bit Hollywood cafeteria frequented by movie extras and she is crying over a letter she received. He turns on the charm and within minutes learns her father is dying, she is out of a job and down to her last couple of dollars. Vic is trying to flee California after his latest job which left a man dead from a mortal wound administered by the butt of Vic's pistol. So he wheels and deals and cajoles and flatters Jessie. He convinces her to leave the state with him and he'll take her to visit her dying father. Along the way they get married! But who exactly is conning who here? And will the police catch up with Vic and stop his crime spree by the time he ends up on the East Coast?

THE CHARACTERS: Despite the title Tears for Jessie Hewitt (1958) is really about Vic Clyde and his life as a professional burglar. He has a very specific M.O. He scopes out marks while at racetracks and casinos. He pegs the big winners, follows them to their home and then makes a study of their habits. The next big win at a racetrack Vic makes sure he is in the mark's house in his unusual get-up of industrial coveralls and --absurdly-- a clown Halloween mask. He threatens them with a gun then knocks them out if they refuse to hand over the money.  This has worked swell for him until one of his older marks suffered a severe head wound from being coshed with the gun butt. He later dies in a hospital and that makes Vic guilty of a felony -- murder during the commission of a robbery.

In Jessie he finds his escape and also a possible victim anticipating that she will inherit her father's money from a successful hardware business along with his house and farmland. But when Jessie discovers Vic's burglar outfit and his gun she starts asking a lot of questions. She remembers the news stories of the Band-Aid Burglar too, a name the reporters and police gave to Vic when it was discovered that he used Band-Aids to cover his fingertips rather than wearing gloves which he found made his burglary activity too clumsy. To her amazement Vic confesses everything. Oddly, this draws them closer. Jessie loves him for his honesty and is surprised that she admires him for robbing only from people who win their money from gambling. Both of them rationalize that Vic is not taking anything from his marks that is rightly theirs. Vic is an immense egotist, vain in the extreme and he gets off on her devotion. Plus he needs her home as his haven. He inveigles Jessie into joining him on a racetrack caper. And she loves the excitement. One caper leads to another and soon they are married partners in crime. But the police are hot on Vic's trail for the murder of the man in California. He still sticks to his M.O. in his new digs and this bad decision coupled with the accidental loss of one of his Band-Aids at the scene of a crime will be his undoing.

Jessie has a troubled past that will color and shape everything she does. She tells Vic of that her father was an abusive and sadistic man and still suffers from the aftermath of that abuse. Living in a small town like Cawfrey didn't help matters either where ideal gossip is the mainstay. She couldn't hide her bruises or scars and everyone in town knew that her homelife must have been hell. She sees in Vic her redeemer. His charm, his honesty, his apparent love for her are a godsend and she'll do anything to protect him. This will be her undoing as well. The title is a huge hint that a happy life is not in Jessie's future.

US Paperback (Dell #1004, 1959)
with a very poor alternate title
[But that McGiniss cover sold a lot of books, I'm sure]

Lt. Lance Wiley is Vic's adversary in the novel. His fellow cops like to call him "Wily Wiley" for he has an unusual method to crime solving. He can think like a criminal and he playacts by imagining himself to be his targeted suspect. "Let's jump into Benson's skin for minute," he'll suggest to his sergeant and soon he's launching into a recreation "entering his mind, registering what he would do or not do in any given circumstances." Wiley uses this technique to determine how Vic behaves and thinks while committing his thefts. One thing Wiley is certain of: Vic is not as smart as he thinks he is and that Vic's immense ego is his greatest weakness.

Vic chose as one of his racetrack marks a famous popular composer who is the first victim who isn't threatened by his gun. A struggle takes place in the composer's apartment when Vic tries to rob him of a $10,000 racetrack prize, Vic is struck in the face and his pulls the trigger on his gun. It's his first deliberate murder. The composer's death makes it two murders on his future rap sheet. And the city will be out for blood. Killing a nationally known celebrity with a huge TV following was Vic's biggest mistake.

When Lance Wiley is asked to take part in a televised memorial for the composer he uses the opportunity to talk about the suspect who he assures the public will soon be apprehended. He knows this because the criminal they are tracking is stupid,using that very word. When Vic, ever the vain man eager to hear what the police think of him, hears Wiley call him stupid he transforms from charming con men into raging beast. He plans to strike back at the cop and show him just how clever he really is. That's when Tears for Jessie Hewitt takes a decidedly strange detour morphing into a novel of personal revenge combined with a cat and mouse game between Lt. Wiley and Vic. There won't be many winners in this game.

INNOVATIONS: It was a refreshing change to read a crime novel in which a policeman has a well adjusted and happy life. No abusive alcoholics recovering from a lifetime of unhappy marriages on display here. Lance has a loving wife Meg with a lively sense of humor, and a precocious yet endearing 8 year-old son named Sandy.  Sandy's obsession with spelling complicated words is introduced in an interesting prologue and will come into play later in the book to help his father solve a mystery.

The novel is modeled on inverted detective novels since we know exactly how the crimes are committed and we follow the criminal's point of view for most of the narrative. However the book is not without a smattering of genuine detective work. Sherry's use of the Band-Aid clue is probably the most inventive retro clue in the story recalling similar odd yet innovative clues found in the best detective novels of Golden Age.

US 1st edition (Dodd Mead, 1958)

QUOTES:   Just so I don't ignore the title character (who comes into her own in the final third of the novel), here are key moments that reveal the tragic figure of Jessie Hewitt.

"Yes, I'm sorry for him, Vic. A thing like this could haunt a kid -- darken his whole childhood -- I know what it's like to shiver with fear --and be too little to fight back."

...she was still the "crazy mixed-up kid" who had to be controlled and managed and guided carefully wherever he decided to lead.

Her gratitude, plus her physical feeling for him, was a combination guaranteed to muddle a far cooler head than hers. She was like a hot-rodder without brakes, hurtling downhill.

...in the afternoons they went to the races and he was totally unprepared for the comic resultant development: Jessie became a violent horse fan. The crowds, the high stepping thoroughbreds, the colorful jockey silks, and the recurring climax at the finish of each race intoxicated her.

Rachel still offered as a
shade as late as 1962

THINGS I LEARNED: In addition to wearing Band-Aids on his fingers while carrying out his robberies Vic chooses to make them less noticeable by covering them up with cosmetics. He choose a foundation cream with a rachel color, a term that puzzled me. I fell down a cosmetic rabbit hole in the internet as I learned trivia after trivia about the origins of this shade of make-up. First, for centuries face powder and foundations were made only in three colors; blanche, naturelle, and rachel which are likened to modern day white, pink and cream. Then, rachel (a cream color) apparently gets its name from the 19th century French actress, Élisa Rachel Félix. As I learned from a blog called Cosmetics & Skin: "Rachel was known for her beauty, her clear diction and unexaggerated style of acting making her well suited for a stage with brighter light. Talented and beautiful, she was ideally placed to make the most of the new environment. It is understandable then, that her name might be associated with a beauty product. She was an actress, a beauty, and known throughout Europe." Visit the blog and you too can get a lesson in the history of make-up, French theater, and the marketing of face powders over the decades.

When Vic visits the racetrack for the first time Sherry takes the time to explain the process of parimutuel betting, a system in which bets of a particular type are placed together in a pool and payoff odds are calculated by sharing the pool among all winning bets. The fascinating history of the system (also originating from France) can be learned by visiting the betting site Twin Spires.

THE AUTHOR: Edna Solomon Sherry (1885-1967) graduated from Hunter College on Staten Island in 1906 and taught literature there for a while before becoming a full time novelist. She had an interesting early writing career that most people know little about. In the late 1920s she began writing fiction in collaboration with Charles K. Harris. Two of their stories with criminous content were published in pulp magazines in 1927 and 1928.

Serendipitously I also uncovered two novels she wrote with Milton Gropper. Is No One Innocent? (1930), a police procedural mystery, is a novelization of a play she wrote with Gropper titled Inspector Kennedy (1929).  Grounds for Indecency (1931), their second book, published by lowbrow Macaulay sounds like a typical sexploitation novel that was a specialty of that publisher. From the jacket copy:

"Nita... brings the treasure of her beauty and puts it in the scales against her father's debt. One man intervenes not only to save her father but to save her from her own self-sacrifice. But she comes to his apartment against his will to make her payment...."

Sherry's first solo crime novel, and arguably her best known work, Sudden Fear (1948) was adapted into the 1952 movie starring Joan Crawford, Jack Palance, and the ever fabulous Gloria Grahame. One of the better movies of the last wave of true noir cinema that came out in the 1950s it was nominated for four Academy Awards but won none of them.

In 1909 Edna married Ernest Sherry, a dentist, who was her husband until his death. Tears for Jessie Hewitt is dedicated "To Ernie, with love."

FFB: The Evil Wish - Jean Potts

THE STORY: The Knapp sisters are planning to murder their domineering physician father who is hoping to marry his much younger nurse assistant and then disinherit his daughters. Should the doctor's plan come to fruition the two sisters will be forced to leave the only home they have ever known and give up a comfortable life. The very day the murder is to take place, however, Dad and Pam the nurse both perish in a car wreck. The Evil Wish (1962) -- as Jean Potts reminds us in the epigraph that precedes the story -- is most evil to the wisher, some words of wisdom she quotes from the Greek poet Hesiod. Marcia, the elder sister, extends that thought to a troubling, haunting reality when she tells Lucy that their father has tricked them once again. "Cheating us out of what we were primed to do, and so here we are with a leftover murder on our hands." How they deal with this burden of guilt for a crime they never actually committed is told in a unnerving tale of cat and mouse with deceit and betrayal lurking around every corner of their home.

THE CHARACTERS: Marcia and Lucy are compelling portraits of two sisters clearly devoted to one another and yet at odds with each other. They are also described as opposites in both physical attractiveness and psychological make-up. Typically for Potts she describes these women with a huge dollop of irony. Lucy is the radiant beauty of the two but she's also socially awkward, emotionally stunted, and dangerously neurotic. Marcia, on the other hand, is darkly attractive, cynical, outspoken and a bit too protective of her younger sister. Since their youth the two have engaged in a game of eavesdropping that has made them privy to their father's secrets. An architectural anomaly in the basement, situated directly below his doctor's office, has allowed the sisters to listen in on conversations. They have continued to do this into adulthood. Their surreptitious behavior will recur throughout the novel and have dire consequences for both. What they never realize is that other people who live and work in the house have also discovered this ideal place to listen in on conversations while never being seen.

Most interesting about this book is that there does not seem to be a real protagonist the reader can root for while antagonists are plentiful. Lucy and Marcia may be presented as the central characters but neither is truly likeable or sympathetic. In effect they are a duo of anti-heroines similar to the men one finds in a Patricia Highsmith novel. While there may be some elements of pathos about Lucy's fragile mental state one can never truly side with her plight. Marcia comes across as the more wily of the sisters and yet she too will be revealed to be as sinister as the two men the women find themselves at the mercy of over the course of the novel.

Original painting for the ACE G-541 reprint
(Artist uncredited)

The menacing handyman Hansen is as vile a villain as those found in Victorian and Edwardian penny dreadfuls. Just like an old-fashioned stage melodrama baddie Hansen, an embittered employee who never felt appreciated by the Knapps, is someone you want to throw rotten vegetables at and boo and hiss whenever he enters the stage. In Potts' frequent use of unusual animal imagery Hansen is likened to a slovenly bear "rigged out in men's khaki work pants and shirt" who "shambles" his way through the house grunting and mumbling his resentful complaints.

In contrast to Hansen there is C. Gordon ("Call me Chuck. Everybody else does.") Llewellyn, a portrait photographer, interested in Pam the nurse's personal belongings left behind in her office. Chuck is is first described as a "bouncy, phoney guy, trying to seem younger than he was." He's also interested in leasing out Dr. Knapp's office if he can successfully cajole and manipulate the sisters into meeting his demands. But does he have an ulterior motive? When he finds Pam's diary why does he refuse to allow the sisters to read what's written inside? His sporting manner and affable charm mask a darker core and hidden motives. Chuck's presence sets Lucy on edge and sends her easily triggered morbid imagination into a frenzy of paranoid fantasies. Marcia is leery of Chuck, but she treats him with kid gloves.

Lucy's unfortunate obsession with the disposal of an old gas heater is not easily forgotten by Hansen who was entrusted to get rid of it quickly after the two deaths. She alternates between fretting about what Hansen knows and obsessing about where Chuck has hidden Pam's diary.  Either man might be able to expose the failed plot to do in her father. Growing suspicions of foul play surrounding the car accident lead to a battle of wits between the two men and two women as they attempt to outguess and out maneuver one another. And it won't end well for anyone.

The cast is rounded out by two quirky, gossipy neighbors who rent rooms on the second floor of the house. Each woman is a pet owner and they frequently are seen trotting out with their dogs, one of which is dressed in outfits that match its owner. Mrs. Sully and Mrs. Travers (aka "La Traviata" so dubbed for her large physique and grandiose manner) are clearly objects of ridicule, but also exist oddly as the two voices of reason in this household of fear, paranoia and scheming. Ironically, as grotesque and foolish as they are painted the two neighbors appear to be the only characters who see things clearly yet as loudly as they speak no one will pay them any attention.

INNOVATIONS:  Potts' ingenuity lies in the exploration of evil deeds not carried out and the festering remains of criminality that never come to fruition. To say that the novel is merely about the guilty consciences of these two sisters is to undermine its complexity. Take for example, the scene where Marcia executes a caterpillar by whacking it in two with a trowel:

Absently she scuffed some crumbs of dirt over the caterpillar. One of God's creatures. All right; but so were roses, and you had to make a choice. You had to accept the fact that some of God's creatures were no good. The law of rose-preservation, as basic as the law of self preservation.

The ease with which Marcia so callously and brutally severs the bug in two is mentioned repeatedly after this scene.  Potts' has created that resounding image as a reminder of how that evil wish has corrupted Marcia, how strong that desire to carry out violence is not only much easier for her but almost necessary.

QUOTES: "Yeah, but if Lucy planned it... It must do something to you, to plan a thing like that. You know what I mean? It's like you've crossed a line or something, and you can't ever get back to what you were before."

After finding a photo of Dr. Knapp and Pam: "Who's the guy?" Mr. Llewellyn asked, and she could not speak. She did not have to; she had one of those expressive faces, and that was Mr. Llewellyn's business, noticing faces.

Fear. How strange to live with it, get used to it, even thrive on it. It was like a fever running in her, sharpening her perceptions and quickening her to an abnormal animation. How strange, how different from other fears. [...] Instead of the old abject helplessness, she had a feeling of zest, sometimes even of power.

EASY TO FIND? This one looks good. Published in both the UK and the US The Evil Wish was also reprinted in the US twice in two different paperback editions. My search of the most popular bookselling sites turned up a little under 20 copies of the book in various editions. Of all of these versions the most common copies found are in the Ace Books (G-541) paperback, most of them reasonably priced. Happy hunting!

FFB: Dead Reckoning - Bruce Hamilton

"Well written, but most unpleasant tale" -- penciled remark by a Previous Owner left in my copy of Dead Reckoning

THE STORY:Tim Kennedy is a successful dentist and happily married to Esther. Until one evening his vivacious, attractive wife goes chasing after her hat on a busy roadway. She is struck by a car and suffers multiple injuries. Her recovery is a painful and disheartening one. She is left horribly disfigured, crippled on one side of her body, and drained of her lust for life. Taking care of Esther becomes a burden to Tim, his love and devotion dwindling, eventually finding himself drawn to the much younger Alma Shepherd. Tim begins to daydream of how easier his life might be without Esther leading to what he thinks is the perfect murder.

THE CHARACTERS:The original title of Dead Reckoning (1937) in England was Middle Class Murder. That title is a good cue to the kinds of people to expect in its realistic rendering of a dentist, his patients and friends. But it is Hamilton's juxtaposition of mundane homelife and a routine workplace against the secret criminal plotting of our anti-hero that make the book more than just a mainstream novel which in the first half it very much resembles. From the very first page we know Tim Kennedy is planning on killing his wife, one of several half-started, then abandoned plots that will come back to haunt him in the final chapters.

The story is told in third person but everything is viewed through Tim's perspective. He at first seems like an amiable man, well respected in his profession and well liked among his small circle of friends and acquaintances. As the story progresses he gradually transforms into a figure of pathetic desperation. Aching for the sex life he once had, longing to be desired, suffering through the worst kind of middle age crisis and coming to the most heinous decision on how to transcend his depression and unhappiness. Remarkably, it is Hamilton's skill in turning our sympathies toward Tim when he becomes the victim of a nasty blackmail plot that make this book a unique British version of a James M. Cain tale of infidelity and murder.

We know poor Esther is doomed from the start and yet she never becomes sentimentalized. Her recovery is painful to read of while her burgeoning friendship with Alma, Tim's object of desire, is an ironic high point of joy in her brief post-accident life. Tim's business partner Adam, who becomes his nemesis in Book Two, is a fine portrait of a little man attempting to live a life of big dreams yet revealing instead nothing but amoral corruption and small-minded greed. The lack of police throughout the story highlights another world of Hamilton's creation fraught with omnipresent danger, paranoia and near lawlessness.

INNOVATIONS: Hamilton's brother Patrick is best known for his playwriting skills, but Dead Reckoning shows the elder Hamilton to have a similar gift for drama played out in skilled dialogue sequences that reveal character. There is a excellent section devoted to a tennis party ostensibly thrown together for Esther's benefit but in reality a way for Tim to get to see Alma. Hamilton uses the tennis party to introduce a few minor characters who will reappear in other functions in the second half of the novel as well as allowing us to see Esther experience the joy of her former self. The dialogue is cleverly rendered with innuendo between Alma and Tim; we know Tim's thoughts as well as his words, but can only guess at Alma's thoughts and feelings based on ambiguous remarks. A later scene where Tim takes Alma on a private tour of his home leads them to a room with a rocking horse. Alma sits down and rocks herself while Tim continues his veiled flirtation with her. It's a remarkable piece of writing that shows the older man pursuing a younger woman while at the same time ridiculing him as we see her acting in such a childlike manner.

The crime novel features take over in Book Two when Tim finds himself the victim of a blackmail scheme. In eerie anticipation of Robin Maugham's well known novel The Servant Tim finds himself at the mercy of his employee who in effect takes complete control of his life, commandeering his finances and forcing Tim into committing more acts of final desperation. This coupled with some bad news about his supposed property inheritance from Esther sends Tim into a continual downward spiral. It's a chilling portion of the novel. One cannot help side with the hapless dentist and hope that he can turn the tables on the avaricious and amoral Adam. There are some violent action set pieces and an eleventh hour scene where we think Tim may have indeed thwarted the plot to reveal him as Esther's killer.

THINGS I LEARNED: In one of the many dentist office scenes (some of them rather fascinating) Tim runs out of a special mouthwash preparation. He calls his assistant, Adam, to make him some more, but there is no reply. Because the patient is in the chair in mid-surgery he is forced to come up with an alternative: "Eventually he telephoned the chemist (whose boy proved to be out) and made do with lysol." Lysol as a mouthwash? I can't believe that. Hamilton must've intended Listerine and got confused. I looked up the history of Lysol products and it was never used as mouthwash. It was, however, used as a vaginal douche. I'll spare you anymore of my findings.

EASY TO FIND? If you speak and read French you're in luck. The most affordable copies are paperback editions in French (Portrait d'un meurtrier) but there are only five that I could find for sale. No good news for the original English language editions. A single copy of the UK title Middle Class Murder is available if you're willing to pay $324 (£250) while only two US editions are for sale priced at $30 (no DJ) and $250 (with DJ). Looks like your local library may be the best bet.

NEW STUFF: Cat Out of Hell - Lynne Truss

While browsing in a Barnes & Noble bookstore (one of three left in the entire city of Chicago) I came across Cat Out of Hell (2014) by Lynne Truss. The blurb on the book was enticing enough for me to make an impulsive purchase and I started it that very day. I didn't stop until I was finished. I can tell you that never happens with me reading a new book any more. What made it such an "un-put-downable" read? It's 100% original, 100% unpredictable, and 100% just plain fun.

On the dedication page Truss has this public notice: "To Gemma, who loves proper horror, with apologies". I don't know who Gemma is, a relative or friend of Lynne Truss, but she's a girl (or woman) after my own heart. I love proper horror, too. And this is the real thing. Plus, it's funny! Why Truss finds it necessary to tack on an apology I don't really know. Maybe because the book is about a talking cat? A couple of them, in fact.

Roger is a cat who has literally lived nine lives. He has suffered eight torturous deaths at the hands of his surrogate father -- a wiser, older, somewhat sinister and utterly intimidating black cat who goes by the moniker "the Captain." There is a mystery about The Captain and Roger isn't telling his present owner, a middling actor who makes a living touring in a production of that British farce chestnut See How They Run! The first part of the story -- the bizarre life of Roger and his owner Will Caton-Pines, the actor -- is told through a series of documents and emails sent to Alec Charlesworth a retired librarian who is getting over his wife's recent death. It's all a bit hard to swallow for Alec. Is the story a hoax? Much of it is told in the form of a bad screenplay. And why has Alec been sent these documents about a talking cat who seems to have been responsible for the deaths of several humans? Alec has several mysteries to solve. But all will be explained as this exceptional, brightly funny, and often bloodcurdlingly gory black comedy makes its way to the inevitable battle of good vs. evil in the final pages.

When a book is this good I cannot begin to summarize the plot. I don't want to. The thrill of this kind of popular fiction so well done, so imaginatively thought out, and suspensefully told is in the actual reading. Cats have always been a source of sinister inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe to Sax Rohmer to Stephen King. The movies also are filled with tales of villainous or murderous cats with Cat People, The Uncanny, and Eye of the Cat some excellent examples that come immediately to mind. Even heroic cats have been depicted trying to thwart evil human deeds as in the nasty revenge story Shadow of the Cat with a screenplay by George Baxt. But here is a horror story in which a cat is an anti-hero, a sort of feline Tom Ripley. You can't help but like this rather unlikeable, potentially murderous ball of fur. For much of this short and briskly told novel there is a Highsmithian air of ambiguity about the proceedings. Are the villains the cats or the humans? Is it all a coincidence that Roger's previous owners have all died in a series of bizarre accidents? How do Roger and the Captain figure into Alec's life? The denouement is completely unexpected and reminded me of Dennis Wheatley, Sax Rohmer, Aleister Crowley and a dash of H. P. Lovecraft all rolled into one weird hodgepodge in the insane blood-soaked finale.

For a thoroughly original spin on familiar horror themes, an ingeniously thought out feline conspiracy theory about the purpose of cats in the world, and a well plotted multiple murder mystery Cat Out of Hell gets high marks from me. I feel like reading it all over again. Rush out and get a copy right now!

FFB: The Hammersmith Maggot - William Mole

UK 1st edition (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955)
Illustration by collectible DJ artist Biro

THE STORY: Alistair Casson Duker (Casson to his friends) is a wine merchant, gourmand, and a self-confessed collector of "human oddities." He watches, observes and investigates when his sixth sense alerts him to people whose behavior suggests that they "live beyond the law." His success with the Witch of Bath case and the journal article he published based on his experience has lent him a reputation for a very different kind of amateur detective work. At the opening of The Hammersmith Maggot (1955) he has set his eyes on a fellow club member Lockyer whose drinking has increased, whose normally unruffled, polite manner is becoming self-involved and worrisome. Duker is sure that something is wrong. So he takes the man home and through a combination of subtle conversation aided by Lockyer's alcoholic loosened inhibition gets Lockyer to admit that he is being blackmailed. But the blackmail scheme is for a wholly fabricated story. Yet so insidiously constructed and damaging to his reputation that Lockyer cannot prove it false. He has succumbed to the blackmailer's demand but as with all blackmail the fear that this "maggot" will strike again with another false accusation has practically ruined him. The story he threatens Lockyer with is that he is a pedophile.

THE CHARACTERS: Duker is a fine creation. A vigilante of the soul, a man driven to root out injustices that would otherwise never be noticed by the law. He marvels at the perversity of a man who would imagine he could extort money from people by telling them complete lies spun from a few threads of credibility based on the truth of the person's private life. How did he know of Lockyer's involvement in charity that benefits misfit teenage boys, that Lockyer spends his free time teaching young men how to sail on his yacht? How did he know Lockyer had enough money to pay without drawing attention to a sudden large withdrawal of cash? Duker starts to paint a portrait of this parasite of a criminal -- a petty man, one privy to his target's banking history and personal life, and -- through a series of coincidences and dogged detective work -- that the blackmailer is a collector of unusual objets d'art. This last bit of information provides Duker an idea for a clever trap in order to expose the blackmailer.

Duker has a policeman friend from whom he manages to extract information that supports his theory of the blackmail scheme. There are others who have been victimized and all of them have been forced to pay for fear of the lies being exposed to their loved ones or employers.

UK 1st paperback (Beacon Books, 1957)

The rest of the cast is made up of the blackmailer's victims all of whom have been threatened with exposure for false accusations similarly constructed so that no proof can be presented to clear the victim's name and yet enough truth exists to make the lie very plausible. Marital infidelity, lax business practices are just two of the other threats of exposure that result in the victims paying out large sums of cash to the "maggot" that Duker knows under his real name of Perry. The novel becomes a game of cat-and-mouse as he forces Perry out of hiding, catching him out of one of his many assumed identities, and by revealing himself and playing to his weaknesses. Duker plans to make the man pay for his crimes by making him feel exactly like his victims. But this game does not come without terrible unplanned consequences. When Duker realizes that he is responsible for the death of one of his witnesses he is even more determined to bring about Perry's undoing.

It is interesting that the author's wife, Elizabeth Hely, only a few years later would try her hand at a crime novel that in essence explores exactly what Mole did here. Duker is a vigilante for unknown victims just as Mark was a seeker of justice for his raped and murdered wife in I'll Be Judge I'll Be Jury. Both husband and wife writers seem to have an uncanny skill in dreaming up stories which uncover the darkest and most hidden of motivations. While Hely's book is perhaps the more unnerving of the two The Hammersmith Maggot certainly is one of the most original twists of the tale of a blackmailer and the kind of Dorian Gray world of a small-minded vengeful man who allows his dreams of unbridled vanity and thirst for power over others to turn him into a monster.

QUOTES: "When would the English learn that a pleasant face and an aptitude for sport were not automatic guarantees of honesty?"

"You say that Fenton's threat was fit only for a cheap novelette. So it was. But there is a part of everybody's mind which yearns to believe in cheap novelettes, in music under the moon, in handsome heroes, in masked intrigue and love triumphant. It is trash and it is untrue, and that is why people believe it."

"Some men collect postage stamps. Some spend their holidays hunting for rare flowers in Continental woods. Some, like your husband, stalk stags. I collect human beings who live along the fringes of illegality. And I collect them Mrs Gordonstoun, because it is then that their behaviour is least inhibited and most human."

"He could just imagine Perry in, for example, [his club], moving like a prim and voracious lamprey between the pillars and the pictures."

"When you were faced by the abyss over which the human mind hung poised, then you got vertigo. You got the height sickness that urged you to throw yourself over and end the intolerable strain of clinging to your balance. And you got nausea, too, when you saw the things which moved with rustling, unclean wings in the depths."

"To blackmail, and in the end to kill, for snobbery was a repulsive comment on the human mind. To do those things for silver candlesticks he could comprehend. But to kill for a handshake was ludicrous, ten-dimensional, a music hall joke."

William Younger as seen on the
rear of the Beacon paperback

THE AUTHOR: William Younger was Dennis Wheatley's step-son from his wife's first marriage. Under the pen name "William Mole" he wrote several thrillers and crime novels, three of which feature Alistair Casson Duker. The Hammersmith Maggot was the first. Under the title Small Venom (as it was published in the US) it became part of Jacques Barzun & Wendell Taylor's series of reprints called "50 Classics of Crime Fiction 1950-1975". Oddly, Younger first started writing poetry and his first book was Inconstant Conqueror (1938), a collection of his poems illustrated by his sister Diana. This was followed by two more books of verse in 1944 and 1946. Much later in life he also collaborated with his novelist wife on a handful of travel books and one book on their great love in life -- wine.

EASY TO FIND? Your chances are pretty damn good for this one, gang. There are about 50 copies right now for sale, mostly in affordable paperback editions. Pick a title, any title. There are three titles the book was published under!  I've shown three editions on this post:  the original UK hardcover, the first UK paperback, and the US paperback published under the title Shadow of a Killer. The only two not shown are the original US hardcover called Small Venom (Dodd Mead, 1956) and its later 1980 reprint in Barzun & Taylor's series. The 1980 reprints were created specifically for sale to libraries, come in dull green unadorned boards with no DJs, and aren't worth using as illustrations. I had no luck in finding a Dodd Mead edition for sale with the DJ.

William Mole's Crime & Detective Novels
(Only the last three feature Casson Duker in the lead role)

Trample an Empire (1952)
The Lobster Guerillas (1953)
The Hammersmith Maggot (1955)
 -- US title: Small Venom
 -- in paperback: Shadow of a Killer
Goodbye Is Not Worthwhile (1956)
Skin Trap (1957) -- US title: You Pay for Pity

FFB: Do Not Disturb - Helen McCloy

Edith Talbot has fled Paris and her ex-husband to return to New York for a well deserved break. She takes up residence in the Hotel Majestic where she begrudgingly is given the only room available. It turns out to be next door to Room 1404 from which horrible crying can be heard – the crying and sobbing of what she believes to be an adult male. She is tempted to knock on the door but notices the "Do Not Disturb" sign on door and decides to honor the request.

The next day she mentions the incident to the desk clerk who reveals that the room she is staying in was reserved by the man in Room 1404. He is Dr. Melchior, a psychiatrist, traveling with his son who is suffering from a painful ailment. Melchior wanted to reserve the room adjacent (where Edith is staying) but not use it so that no one would be bothered by his son's frequent crying and moaning. The desk clerk reluctantly gave the room to Edith because she was insistent on staying in the hotel. Edith thinks the doctor's reasoning is odd but returns to her room.

The second night she hears a piercing scream and rushes to the room next door to find out exactly what is going on. This time she ignores the "Do Not Disturb" sign and knocks until she gets an answer. The man who opens the door identifies himself as Captain Gorgas of the New York Police. After Edith's persistent questioning he tells her they are interrogating a suspect in a crime and she should return to her room and forget anything she may have heard. It's none of her business. He closes the door in her face leaving her puzzled as to where Dr. Melchior and his son might be since they are the ones who should be in the room.

Edith leaves to visit a friend the next day and when she returns that night she discovers a dead body in her room. The man resembles one of the men she had seen when Gorgas opened the door to Room 1404. And she does what any character in a suspense novel would do – she flees the hotel in search of help.

But by doing so she inadvertently sets herself up as the accused. Soon her photograph is in all the newspapers as a woman wanted for questioning in the man's murder. Everywhere she turns she thinks someone is part of a plot to capture her and turn her into the police. She spends the entire book trying to find somewhere that is safe, someone who she can trust, who will believe her story and help her find who really killed the man in her hotel room.

This is not a detective novel, though there are elements of crime solving. Dr. Basil Willing, McCloy's usual series detective, is nowhere in sight. This is a pure cat-and-mouse pursuit thriller. But Do Not Disturb (1943) is not as fast paced as it could be due to McCloy's usual fondness for didactic passages in both the dialog and the prose. While there tends to be far too much intellectualizing on Edith's part, and lots of talk about the psychology of criminal behavior, there is also some fascinating background on life in WW2 era America – both urban and rural viewpoints. Gas rationing and its impact on traffic, air raid patrols, blackouts in buildings of fifteen stories or taller all play an important part in the story as Edith flees the city, with the police hot on her heels, to head for Pennsylvania to seek refuge with her former high school friend.

There is a very odd scene where she is helped by an overly friendly couple in the Pennsylvania hills. After escaping from a bus full of inquisitive passengers one of whom recognizes her from her infamous newspaper photo and sends out the alarm she trudges through the woods, comes across a house. Comforted by a German Shepherd and a black cat that greet her and practically invite her inside she enters the unlocked home just like Goldilocks in need of food and shelter. Inside, the unnamed man and woman treat her like their own child, feed her, chit chat with her about their life, then leave her to watch over the house while they head out for a church function. Edith is rightly suspicious of their behavior but after more rationalizing and intellectualizing decides they mean well. As it turns out she is not as safe as she thought when they leave the house. It is one of many scenes that McCloy creates to lull the reader into a false sense of Edith's safety only to let loose with a barrage of unexpected violence.

I was reminded of so many Hitchcock films like The Wrong Man, and especially The 39 Steps, while reading McCloy's book. It is relentless in its themes of pursuit and the wrongly accused. It even employs Hitchcock's favorite plot gimmick of "find the MacGuffin" as so many of the villains believe that Edith is in possession of that "something special" yet she hasn't a clue what it is.

The book shifts into a quasi-spy thriller when Edith is abducted (for the third time!) and returned to New York where she encounters more suspicious police and a lawyer named Charles Henderson who is adamant that Edith has that "something special" in her possession and demands its return. Strangely, her ex-husband Lucien will turn up in the course of the twisty plot and prove to be her most trustworthy ally. Or is he really at the core of it all? Typical of these kinds of suspense thrillers the element of paranoia, Edith's constant weighing of who is trustworthy or not, takes over. Though we see the action only through Edith's eyes it is just as difficult for the reader to determine who are the good guys and who are the baddies.