One of Those Weeks

"But what you see isn't always what's happening."

- Jonathan Creek (The Problem at Gallows Gate, 1998)

After posting the review of Marco Books' De dood van Callista de Vries (The Death of Callista de Vries, 2012), I exchanged emails and swapped opinions with Books on, inter alia, the deviations in clueing and the incorrect solution I came up with while reading the book, which was, nonetheless, endorsed and imprinted with the authors rubber stamp of approval. Of course, the one time I come across scholarly and make a few astute observations, it’s only read by one other person. But, yes, there's a point to this palaver. The conversation gave me an insatiable appetite for another slice of neo-orthodox detective fiction, but the next installment in Books' series is still in the works and thus I turned to one of his contemporaries, Bill Pronzini, whose work is well represented on my bookshelves and to-be-read pile, and the latter had one of his books that embellishes its plot with no less than three impossible scenarios – so it was easy pickings.

Scattershot (1982) follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, Hoodwink (1981), in which The Nameless Detective solves a pair of murders, perpetrated under seemingly impossible circumstances, tied to a group of pulp writers who were all the rage back in the 1940s. He also meets Kerry Wade, who becomes his love interest. You'd think that solving a baffling murder case and getting the girl would turn over a new leaf in the life of this lonely wolf, but Scattershot offers up a picture of one of the worst weeks in his life and only Tsutomu Yamaguchi could’ve claimed to have had a worst week.

The problems opposing Nameless in this novel can be categorized into two kinds: personal problems and professional problems. The personal ones come mainly from the uncertainties of the status of his relationship with Kerry and the interference from her father, who's not a fan that his daughter is seeing an older man with an unsavory, low-paying job. Professionally, the problems may acquire a personal note when an unsatisfied and somewhat unbalanced client starts a media campaign to get his license revoked and take away his livelihood.

I have to note beforehand that the three impossible situations in this book had previous lives as short stories and they were sewn together with bridging material. Just an FYI.

Edna Hornback hires Nameless to shadow her husband, Lewis, and gather evidence of his infidelity and find the money he pilfered from their company, which is a routine job for a private detective. Nameless follows Lewis around like a cat chasing its own tail, but the man actually manages to shake off his own shadow when he vanishes from his locked car, which Nameless was constantly watching from his own car, leaving only a smears of blood on the front seat as a reminder that there was actually someone in the car. Nameless does a good job at figuring out how the stunt was pulled off, but not before his reputation takes a beating it might not recover from when his client decides to file a suit for criminal negligence and riles up the media against him. It's also one of Pronzini's cleverest and most satisfying ploys involving an impossible disappearance (an honorable mention to the (overly?) ingenious "The Arrowmont Prison Riddle," collected in All But Impossible!, 1981, edited by Edward D. Hoch) and I wonder if this plot strand was a conscious nod to John Dickson Carr's (writing as Carter Dickson) She Died a Lady (1943). The solutions have a few points in common and the setting of the crime-scenes (cliff/slope) were also a bit similar.

Anyway, Nameless is advised to stop frequenting his usual spot of trouble, at least, until this blows over and he has another assignment waiting, which consists of tracking down a reckless socialite and serve her with a subpoena. What can possibly go wrong? It's not like she too is going dissipate into thin air, however, he does find her in a locked cabin in the company of her secretary, shot to death, and she seems to have been the only person who could’ve pulled the trigger. This was sort of a short story within a novel, covering two chapters, but it's nonetheless admirable how many clues were crammed into this short intermezzo.

I loved how this book played on theme of the story book detective (read: murder magnate) who always happens to be mooning around when the criminal elements are abound, and this, uhm, talent is at the root of his more pressing problems and it's not something you can turn off like a light switch. Take, for example, the last assignment of his disastrous week: guarding wedding gifts that are locked away in a secured room and he has to plant his ass in front of the door with a pulp magazine. What can possibly go wrong this time? Well, the sound of broken glass and stumbling in the room drags Nameless away from his fictional colleagues, and kicks down the door to discover that a valuable ring has been stolen, however, the broken pieces of glass were found outside – indicating that thief somehow materialized out of nowhere in a locked room and that completely threw me off. I identified the thief before it happened and even spotted the method before the room was locked-up, but I began to second guess my deductions when the theft appeared to be far more complex than I anticipated. Well played, well played.

Scattershot shows Bill Pronzini in one of his unapologetic moods, balancing a cunningly plotted and fairly clued narrative with excellent character development, which, admittedly, was not a big focus of this review, but it was done well enough that I couldn't help feel sorry for that poor gumshoe – and that made the depressing ending perhaps the only downside of this book. A very complex, but satisfying, detective story and one that I recommend unreservedly, but you might want to take a look at Hoodwink first.

On a final, somewhat related, note: Robert van Gulik once made the following challenge, "I think it might be an interesting experiment if one of our modern writers of detective stories would try his hand at composing an ancient Chinese detective story himself." Scattershot is not set in ancient China, but the three separate cases with an overlapping theme definitely follows the structure of an ancient Chinese detective story. Just something my brain pricked upon. 

All the books I reviewd by Bill Pronzini: 

Twospot (1978; with Collin Wilcox)

Hoodwink (1981)
Scattershot (1982)
Casefile (1983)
Double (1984; with Marcia Muller)

Bones (1985)

Shackles (1988)
Carpenter and Quincannon (1998) - an addendum

Nightcrawlers (2005)

Savages (2006) - co-reviewed with Patrick

A Change of Scenery: A Co-Review of "Savages" by Bill Pronzini

“Two minds know more than one.”

During the weeks we refer to as March, Patrick has been commemorating the one-year anniversary of his blog (At the Scene of the Crime) with a series of crossover book reviews and in-depth discussions of authors – which resulted in some stimulating reading material as well as giving me another luxury problem to deal with. Do I persist in pearl diving in the hopes of finding one or two of the genre's lost gems or take a break to finally take a look at Margaret Millar and Donald Westlake? Ah, choices, choices!

Anyway, I was also approached to contribute some ink for a collaboration piece and after a false start we delivered, what I believe, is a well-written and fair review of Bill Pronzini's Savages (2006) – one of the more recent entries in the on-going biography of his "Nameless Detective."

Hopefully, you’ll find the review an interesting one and this blog will return to its beloved Golden Era with the next post.

From the Files of All Souls

“All Souls Law Cooperative works like a medical plan. People who can’t afford the bloated fees many of my colleagues charge buy a membership, its costs based on a scale according to their incomes. The membership gives them access to consul and legal services all the way from small claims to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

- Ted Smalley (“The Last Open File,” from The McCone Files, 1995)

They say that behind every good man stands a strong woman, in which case Bill Pronzini can rest easy knowing that "the founding 'mother' of the contemporary female hardboiled private eye" has his back. Marcia Muller has written 29 novels and published two collections of short stories featuring her female private gumshoe, Sharon McCone, who shares her universe with her husbands "Nameless Detective." I realize that mentioning the fact that Muller took home a Private Eyes Writers of America Live Achievement Award should take priority over noting the fact that they occasionally pooled their series detectives, but I really, really love crossovers. I really do.

Anyway, Marcia Muller made a previous appearance on blog when I reviewed Double (1984), in which "Nameless" bumps into Sharon McCone at a conference for private investigators. It was tremendously fun to watch two universes collide and morph into one world, but I had only explored one of them before and therefore missed that small, but essential, part that prevented me from truly appreciating the novel for what it was. I vowed that I would remedy that omission post-haste, but don't pull a third degree on me to get an answer as to why it took six months before I decided to pick up The McCone Files (1995). You should allow some thing to go unexplained.

I expected Marcia Muller to have a similar style as her husband, as both have identified their work as humanistic detective fiction, which is, of course, their main resemblance, but the McCone stories in this collection have without the presence of "Nameless' an entirely different atmosphere. I'm not sure if I can explain this feeling, but the earliest "Nameless" short stories, which, I think, stand the closest in comparison to the ones collected here, have that classical gritty feel – while these stories seem to be written in full-color. I know, it's a lousy way of explaining it, but perhaps it's the way in which Muller use words to paint an evocative landscape or urban setting. It really gives you the feeling that you're right there with Sharon McCone when she's exploring a valley on horseback, wanders through a surrealistically described building where urns are stored or walks up and down the street of a poor and crime ridden neighborhood.  

But let's take them down from the top:  

The Last Open File

This collection opens with a story of how Sharon McCone, after her previous employer kicked her to the curb, for not taking "direction well" and being "nonresponsive to authority figures," became a staff investigator for All Souls – a legal outfit designed to help the less fortunate in society rather than squeeze a few last bucks out of them. McCone's first assignment consists of tracking down a man who left a young, naïve girl with a stack of unpaid bills and a handful of bounced checks. It's an interesting, open-ended story that will find closure in the final story of this volume. 

Merrill-Go-Round

A mother asks All Souls to help her find her child, a 10-year-old girl named Merril, who went missing after a whirl on a merry-go-round, but she's very reluctant to involve the police and the matter is dropped on Sharon McCone's desk – who grapples with it until she has wrestled the truth from it and as a result may have mended a broken family.

Wild Mustard

Sharon McCone has a favorite restaurant, situated above the ruins of San Francisco's Sutro Baths, that she likes to patronize with regular visits and during each meal she observes an old Japanese woman, wearing a colored headscarf, scouring the slopes for edible herbs. But when the old woman fails to put in an appearance, McCone begins to slowly lose her appetite and starts' digging around the place – and what she uncovered is one of those unfortunate tragedies that usually merits no more than a few lines on page 3.

The Broken Men

The longest story in this collection, at forty and some pages, has Sharon McCone moonlighting as a personal bodyguard for a famous clown-duo, Fitzgerald and Tilby, during their gig at the Diablo Valley Clown Festival, but when one of them splits and leaves a body, garbed in his custom, in his wake it becomes one of those regular working days for McCone. A well-written story that is a lot closer to a traditional mystery than the ones preceding it and also has a nicely imagined, tranquil scene in which McCone explores the region on one of the gentlest (read: slowest) horses in the west. 

Ho-Ling would love and hate this story at the same time! 

Deceptions

McCone haunts the ghosts of the Golden Gate Bridge, where  "some eight hundred-odd lost souls have jumped to their deaths from its decks," hoping to find a vestige of Venessa DiCesare – a young law student who left a suicide note in her car and disappeared. I'm afraid this was, for me, a somewhat forgettable story and the evocative opening was the only thing that stuck to my long-term memory. Well, they can't all be winners.

Cache and Carry (co-written with Bill Pronzini)

It was a nice surprise when I turned over the final page of the previous story and read that this one was co-written with her husband, Bill Pronzini, co-starring his "Nameless Detective," who Sharon affectionately nicknamed Wolf, and the problem he helps her solving is of the impossible variety! The entire story consists of a telephone call between McCone and Nameless, in which she relates to him the facts in the case of a theft of two grand from a locked and secured room at a Neighborhood Check Cashing – and this suggests that the money never left the room but it was stripped-searched without results. So it’s up to "the poor man’s Sir Henry Merrivale" to locate this apparent invisible cubbyhole. Good, short and simple.

Note that McCone has no clue who H.M. is. *shakes head disappointedly*

Deadly Fantasies

Marcia Muller manifests herself in this story as a more traditional plotter and dreams up an ingenious method to administrate poison, in this case, to a young heiress who inherited her fathers multi-million dollar company and came to All Souls because she's afraid that her brother and sister, whose names were conspicuous by their absense in their fathers will, are slowly poisoning her. I, too, suspected that her siblings were feeding her something, such as unfounded suspicions to feed her paranoia and get a court to declare her mentally unsound and usurp the family fortune, but the ending turned out to be quite different – and far more tragic. 

All the Lonely People

A series of burglaries has been tied to a dating service, All the Best People, and McCone has filled out one of their application forms and braves the dating scene – looking for a man with a raccoon mask and a stuffed sack flung over his shoulders. As a crime story, it's not spectacular but a lot is made-up with McCone going on actual dates to probe for a lovelorn housebreaker.

The Place That Time Forgot

Sharon McCone is engaged to track down the estranged granddaughter of an old shopkeeper, Jody Greenglass, whose ramshackle store sneaked away from the march of progress and stands steadfastly in defiance of the rapidly changing world around it. McCone goes through the skeleton-stuffed closet of the Greenglass family and dusts off a lot of old family tragedies, but a catchy and soulful tune leads her to the end of her quarry.

Somewhere in the City

On October 17, 1989, a major earthquake that killed over seventy people and injured thousands struck the San Francisco Bay Area. This is the scene in which Sharon McCone finds herself after her last conversation with an anonymous phone caller, who has been making threatening calls to the Golden Gate Crisis Hotline, but when the city began to shake the last thing she heard, before the connection was broken, was a cry for help. Undoubtedly, the most original and fresh story in this collection.

Final Resting Place

A friend of McCone asks her help in finding out who has been leaving flowers at the San Francisco Memorial Columbarium, where the urn encapsulating her mothers ashes are interred, and what the relation of this person was to her mother – and when she begins to dust-off this problem she naturally uncovers another dreadful secret. The best part of this story was Muller's almost surreal description of the Columbarium where urns are stored under a leaky roof. 

Silent Night

This Christmas tale reminded me of Doyle's "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," but instead of going on a wild goose chase for a fabulous jewel McCone spends her Christmas Eve looking for her missing nephew – and finds out how little she really knew about the boy. Along the way she also meets a few of society's misfits who spend their evening alone and makes for a nice, humanistic story.

Benny's Space

All Souls is engaged on behalf of Mrs. Angeles, a poor and hardworking mother whose social status condemned her to an even poorer neighborhood, who has been bombarded with death threats – after witnessing a local gang leader being shot. The case is referred to their staff investigator, Sharon McCone, and comes to a conclusion that puts the murder in a whole new perspective. This crime story really benefited from the poor, violent neighborhood that functioned as its backdrop. 

The Lost Coast

A local politician and his wife are under siege from a nefarious stalker, who sends dramatically worded death threats and sends floral arrangements suitable for funerals, and Sharon McCone ends up looking into the matter and stumbles over a body before she got hold of the truth – which turns out to be one of the oldest crimes in the book. I wonder if Muller found inspiration for this story in Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin because it strangely felt like one of their cases. Perhaps it was the threatening floral arrangement in combination with the murderer being trapped on an inconsistency in a statement.

File Closed

Sharon McCone's tenure at All Souls has come to an end and opened up an investigation firm of her own, but as she's cleaning out her old office she comes across her first, unclosed file – and decides to give it one last shot to tie-up all the lose ends before opening a new chapter in her life. This is perhaps the best kind of story to end a collection with.

Announcement: The Bughouse Affair (2013) by Pronzini and Muller

"They're coming to take me away, ho, ho, hee, hee, ha, ha

To the funny farm..."

- Napoleon XIV

Pronzini and Muller

Consider this an addendum to the review posted on Sunday, in which I briefly discussed the stories comprising Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998). John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, a former secret service man and a female ex-Pinkerton operative and widow of a Pinkerton detective, who have gone into business together and run a private detective agency during the dwindling years of the nineteenth century, are Bill Pronzini's secondary characters – both of whom sporadically roam the pages of The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

However, in a recent exchange of emails, Bill Pronzini divulged that he and his mystery-writing wife, Marcia Muller, are collaborating on a series of full-length Carpenter and Quincannon novels for Tor/Forge – and the first of them has been delivered to them and will be published in January 2013. The book has been titled The Bughouse Affair and I can reveal that part of the plot will revolve around a locked room/impossible disappearance ploy and that a new recurring character, who fancies himself to be Sherlock Holmes, will contribute to the solution of the story.

At the moment, Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller are firing up their word processors to begin working on the second entry, The Spook Light Affair, which will also contain one or two impossible situations. I, for one, can't wait to dig into these affairs!

In other news:

Marco Books, who penned, IMHO, one of the best crime/mystery novels of 2011, De laatste kans (The Last Chance), submitted another prospective masterpiece to his publisher and additional information is expected to be released in December. Now if only a foreign publisher out there would pick him up and introduce his work to an (English-reading) audience he deserves!  

Curt Evans, a mystery scholar who's actually dispelling misconceptions of the genre instead of nurturing them, in order to feed them to a pet theory, has entered the blogosphere like a comet – and you can follow him along over at The Passing Tramp. This erudite scholar is also the author of the upcoming book Masters of the Humdrum Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920 to 1961, in which he champions the cause of the shamefully neglected and often ill treated humdrum writers.

Back off everyone, they're professionals!

"Detective work, gentleman. That is all I can say."

- John Quincannon

Bill Pronzini has garnered most of his laurels with an ongoing series of novels and short stories, in which he depicts the personal and professional life of a San Francisco based detective and these narratives ought to be viewed as a biography in progress. The Nameless Detective, whose full name has become a public secret at this point, is one of the most well-rounded characters in the genre who single-handedly changed the way I perceived private eye stories – and gave me a whole new perspective on the genre. It therefore pains me to no end that I have to relegate him down the list of favorite characters in favor of Pronzini's secondary detectives, John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, but at heart I will always remain a classicist and these two plucked at the strings of that instrument.

John Quincannon used to be in the employ of the United States Secret Service as a secret agent, which seems an unlikely occupation for a man who cultivates a conspicuous, gray-flecked freebooter's beard, but gave up that government job to go into business with Sabina Carpenter – a widow of a Pinkerton detective. Quincannon would love to expend their joint partnership into a romantic commitment, but Sabina firmly turns down his advances and continues to work with him on a purely professional basis.

Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998) collects nine stories, penned between 1988 and 1998, in which the titular detective duo are confronted with counterfeiters, grifters, body snatchers and even the occasional locked room murder during the waning years of the 19th century and are topped with a western flavor – making them borderline hybrid stories.

No Room at the Inn

Twas the night before Christmas, when a lone San Francisco gumshoe, chilled to the marrow with a frost-coated beard, braves a snowstorm as he cuts a track through a frozen mountain landscape – in hot pursuit of a quarry with a nice Christmas bonus on his head. The one-man manhunt reaches an impasse at the front door of an inn and its occupants seem to have vanished like Ebenezer Scrooge's ill-tempered demeanor after an intervention from three spirits. Quincannon subsequent search of the place turns up a surprise or two and the plot patterns that emerge from his findings are quite pleasing. This is as good as a Christmas story as Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle."

Burgade's Crossing

Quincannon and Carpenter are engaged to not only figure out who has been toying around with the idea of treating Noah Rideout to an early wake and funeral, but also, if possible, to upset this persons plans. It's not a bad or uneventful story, but I had to thumb back to recall its premise and solution. Not a very memorable story, I'm afraid.

The Cloud Cracker

The womanizing Leonide Zacks is a self-professed "Cloud Cracker," whose portable chemical shack and potion-filled rockets can break any dry spell and offers this service to drought-stricken towns in exchange for some of their liquid assets, but the only torrents he creates are those of voices cursing his name after a sunstroke town finds out that they've been conned. Quincannon can earn a paycheck if he exposes and captures the fraudulent rainmaker, but before he's able to complete his assignment the conman has the bad manners to allow himself to get shot inside his locked shack – and the only other person in there profusely professes his innocence. This is a very diverting tale with an original take on the problem of the locked room, but the guilty party walked a very fine tight-rope during the execution of this seeming impossible crime and must have paid-off Murphy's Law not to show up for work that day.

Lady One-Eye

Quincannon and Carpenter are on a joint undercover assignment at McFinn's Palace Saloon and Gaming Parlor, where they attempt to get a grip on the sleight-of-hand methods of a female cardsharp named Lady One-Eye. But a jealousy-driven undercurrent turns this straightforward affair into a complicated murder case when the husband of the one-eyed card shark, Jack O'Diamonds, is shot in the middle of the crowded saloon – without anyone seeing who dispatched the fatal bullet. The solution is a variation on an old ploy, but one that blends perfectly with the time and setting of the story. Overall, this is just a fun detective story populated with colorful and memorable characters. Definitely one of the standouts of this collection!

Coney Game

Long Nick Darrow is a gifted, but rancorous, counterfeiter who was thrown in the clink thanks to the unrelenting efforts of Quincannon – which earned the bearded operative a top-spot on Darrow's list of unfinished business to take care of once he's out. This is more a western than a mystery, really, in which the problem is resolved with cracking knuckles and blazing guns rather than relaying on wit and intellect. Great fun, though!

The Desert Limited

The detective duo of Carpenter and Quincannon board The Desert Limited, in pursuit of an outlaw with a bounty on his head, but as the train races through a sun-blasted wasteland the fugitive manages to shake off his pursues – and seems to have evaporated from a speeding train. The premise of the story and the semi-improbable disappearance are interesting, but the solution is silly and a letdown. However, I have to note here that this story would probably work a lot better if it were translated to a visual medium. A Carpenter and Quincannon television series?

The Horseshoe Nail

Quincannon once again accepts an undercover job, this time at a sawmill, to ensnarl a sneak thief and retrieve the loot, which he assumes will earn him an easy paycheck, but then the larcenist turns up dead in his cabin – with the only door securely barred from the inside. The answer to this locked room problem is delightfully simple, but clasping the responsible party in irons will proof to be close shave for the 19th century gumshoe. A good story, plain and simple.

Medium Rare

Arguably the best story in this collection, in which Quincannon and Carpenter, masquerading as the fictitious Mr. and Mrs. John Quinn, set-out to expose professor Vargas, head of the Unified College of the Attuned Impulses, as a fraudulent medium – who made an art out of financially draining the grieving. The professor puts on a fantastic spook show in his locked and darkened séance room, where tables move on their own accord and luminous faces from the spirit world take a peek at our plain of existence, but then the Grim Reaper puts in an appearance – and Vargas is stabbed while everyone was holding hands and the locked door prevented any outsider from coming in!

I have a sneaking suspicion that this tale was penned as a tribute to John Dickson Carr. The story has an atmospheric setting and a premise that revolves around apparently supernatural occurrences and an impossible stabbing, but there were also a few laugh-out-loud moments – as Carpenter and Quincannon were channeling the spirit of Sir Henry Merrivale when it was their turn to ask the spirits questions! Full marks for this story!

The Highbinders

This is more a thriller than a proper detective story, in which a war between different factions is brooding in China Town after the body of a Tong Leader is snatched and a lawyer is fatally wounded in the street by a bullet. The only clue are the last words of the lawyer, "blue shadow," which constitutes as a dying message, but the main focus for Quincannon is on preventing a a small-scale civil war in the streets and simply surviving this ordeal. Not a bad story at all, but this time the setting was more interesting than the actual plot.

Overall, a strong compendium of period stories, which either had cleverly constructed plots or told an exciting story combined with evocative settings and colorful characters, that left me craving for more – and I wonder if over the past thirteen years enough new stories have appeared to justify a second collection. These stories are too good to leave them uncollected! 

All in a Days Work

"What's in a name, after all?"

- Bill Pronzini

Ever since the inception of this blog, it has chronicled a journey of discovery through the realm of the post-GAD era detective story and during these travels I grew particular fond of the private eye novels penned by Bill Pronzini. It was on this very spot that I critiqued my first, full-length Nameless novel, Hoodwink (1981), but was already formally introduced to both author and character through a number of short stories scattered over numerous anthologies. The first one I read, "The Pulp Connection," was collected in The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000) and whetted my appetite for more, but it wasn't until earlier this year that I began picking up his books – and the only regret I have is that I didn't do it sooner. So reading the short stories collected in Casefile (1983) felt as a return to those unenlightened years.

Chronologically, this collection opens with a smattering of archetypical, noirish private eye stories that were Pronzini's early literary endeavors into the genre, in which Nameless is confronted with the seamier side of life. But after "Private Eye Blues" the stories become gradually more complex as the unnamed gumshoe is confronted with locked rooms, semi-impossible disappearances and even a dying message.

It's a Lousy World

The bereaved widow of an ex-convict, who strayed from the crooked path to walk the straight and narrow, engages the services of Nameless to find out what really happened the night her husband was shot by two patrolling policeman – after apparently holding up a liquor store. Nameless exonerates the dead man by understanding the significance of a paper-wrapped bottle of hard liquor the ex-con was carrying when he was gunned down, and proves that this world sometimes really is just a lousy place.

Death of a Nobody

A street bum relates the story of how one of his chums witnessed a hit-and-run accident and extorted money from the driver he nicknamed Robin Hood, but this person turned Bad King John on him – and savagely beats him to death in a back alley. Nameless takes on the case pro bono. This is neither a puzzle yarn nor a hardboiled narrative, but a tale that is best described as a humanist crime story.

One of Those Cases

This is "an old story, a sordid one, a sad one," in which Nameless is engaged by a woman who suspects her husband of having a fling with another woman, but a surveillance of her husbands late night excursions into the unknown turns up evidence of a far more serious offense than not observing his wedding vowels. Essentially, this is a page from the life of a private investigator that ended on a slightly more exciting note than these types of routine checks usually do.

Sin Island

An elderly, indisposed millionaire hires Nameless to take the first plane to the sultry island of Majorca, a slice of the Spanish Mediterranean, where he's to deliver a suitcase stuffed with dough to his son – who cabled a demand for ready cash. It's a rather simplistic story, but I still quite liked the twist and it's the first entry in this collection that broke with the dark, moody atmosphere of the previous tales. 

Private Eye Blues

Here we have Bill Pronzini's "The Final Problem," in which he prematurely wrote-off his fictional brainchild to devout his career to writing big commercial novels, but came back on that premature decision in Blowback (1977) – and drastically altered the direction and tone of the series.

The Pulp Connection

Lt. Eberhardt calls his friend, Nameless, to the home of Thomas Murray, who garnered fame as the King of the Popular Culture Collectors, to assist him with deciphering a cryptic message left behind by the cultural accumulator after someone poked him with a steel spike – and left the dying man behind the locked door and fastened windows of his pulp room. The dying message is made up of three pulp magazines, Clue, Keyhole Mystery Magazine and Private Detective, but even Nameless, an enthusiastic collector himself, has a hard time making sense out of it. Unfortunately, the solution he comes up with depends too much on unsubstantiated guesswork rather than logical deductions and the locked room trick, clever though it is, is very risky and not a method I would gamble my freedom on. Nevertheless, it's still a very diverting story that shows a writer who has decided to have some fun with the conventions of the genre without apologizing for it.

Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?

Nameless is laboring under the naïve assumption that he's earning an easy fee, when he agrees to fill-in as a temporary night watchman for an importing company. The facility he has to guard already resembles an impenetrable fortress, where he can kick back with a pulp magazine most of the time, but it takes more than locks and shuttered windows to stop the detective curse – and before long he has to find an explanation as to how a body could be introduced into a building that is the equal to a sealed box. The solution to the reversed locked room problem is as simple as it's clever as well as the identity and motive of the murderer. Great title, by the way!

Dead Man's Slough

A minor tale, in which Nameless encounters a ghostly appearance of a red headed man clutching his head on the water and disappears under semi-impossible conditions – and the appearance of the man, corresponds with that of the ghost of a murdered miner. But Nameless doesn't believe in ghosts and searches the islet for answers. It's not really a spectacular story, but it pleasantly reminded me of Scooby-Doo.

Who's Calling

The last two entries in this collection have a combined page count of one hundred and nine pages and can almost be considered novellas. In this case, an attorney wants Nameless to track down an anonymous caller who has been harassing his daughter with lewd phone calls, but soon they transition from vulgar into the threatening – and our unnamed opt stumbles over yet another body. This is fairly clued story, but the problem failed to grab my full, undivided attention and the culprit is too easily identified. Not one of my favorite Pronzini stories, I'm afraid.

Booktaker

This story, on the other hand, has been a personal favorite of mine ever since reading it in a mini-anthology, Locked Room Puzzles (1986), and it's one of the standout stories of this collection – alongside with "Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?". Nameless takes on an undercover assignment at a bookstore where a wraithlike thief has been smuggling valuable maps past a perfect operating security system. The solution is uncomplicated, workable and absolutely brilliant.

Casefile is an excellent collection by any standards, but it will depend on where you stand in the genre on which half of the book you'll enjoy more. For me, it was the second, more puzzle-orientated part of the book, but I can understand if devotes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett find more satisfaction in the first fistful of stories. In any case, it's a perfect introduction to Pronzini's work and recommended to start of with if you aren't familiar with his work yet. 

All the books I have reviewed in this series: 

Twospot (1978)

Hoodwink (1981)

Casefile (1983)

Double (1984)

Bones (1985)

Shackles (1988)

Nightcrawlers (2005)

"If you call one wolf, you invite the pack"

 "It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help."

- Epicurus.

When I critiqued the cooperative effort Twospot (1978), penned by Bill Pronzini and Collin Wilcox, I dropped a hint that the next nameless tale loitering in the queue was another crossover novel, in which Pronzini and his mystery writing wife, Marcia Muller, had pooled their series detectives – and in preparation, I wanted to dig into one of her Sharon McCone stories first. Well, that didn't happen. The problem that upset my initial plan, is that the book that piqued my interest also happens to be one of a handful of her tomes that is not within the immediate grabbing range of my covetous claws. So I decided this book would be my formal introduction to her characters. What else was I suppose to do? Exhibit more patience? 

Double (1984) is set at a luxurious San Diego hotel hosting a convention for professional snoopers, who collect their paychecks in the private sector by keeping adulterous spouses under surveillance and nosing around for missing persons, which seems a likely spot for two ace investigators to bump into one another – as well as cueing the cog-wheels of faith to open another can of bodies. The first of these victim fell from one of the hotel spires, four floors to an ugly mess on the cobblestone strewn soil, witnessed by that anonymous murder magnet who recognizes in the remains the establishments chief of security and former associate of Sharon McCone.

A lamentable suicide or an ill-fated accident is the prevailing opinion of Elaine Picard leaping into oblivion, but subtle undercurrents at the hotel gives a different interpretation of her death – and Nameless and McCone withdraw themselves from the hustle and bustle of the convention to embark on an exhaustive, perilous quest for the truth without the backing of a client or the prospect of a fee!

The story is told in the unmistakable, first person narrative that is the trademark of the private eye genre, but here the perspectives alternate between Nameless and McCone – which is a really nifty recital device when you have two such distinctive characters at your disposal to give the reader a report of the events as they went down. But this also included a drawback for me. I spend half of the book peeking over the shoulder of a character I was already on first name terms with, while the other was a complete stranger to me and this gave me more of a connection with story when Nameless was narrating a chapter – which contained everything I enjoyed about these novels. Pronzini always creates an opportunity to bring up his pulp collection and there were subtle bits of humor here and there (e.g. giving the name of his father-in-law when he invaded an adult book-and-curio shop, although, I would've probably LOL'd hard if he had identified himself as Russ Dancer).

Nonetheless, it was a delight to make my acquaintance with Sharon McCone and loved the nickname she stuck nameless with through out the story, namely Wolf, which was lifted from a newspaper article labeling him as the last of the lone-wolf private eyes – and she's the only one who can call him Wolf and get away with it. Nope. It's not what you think. Their relationship is nothing like that. McCone kindles Nameless paternal instincts rather than his amorous ones and it's just a friendship based relationship grounded in a common, professional interest that also happens to fuel their investigation into the death of Elaine Picard.

Like I noted a couple of paragraphs earlier, McCone and Nameless work, more or less, pro-bono on this case and even take a financial beating by voluntarily probing the wasps' nest that is the hotel and vanquish some minor evils as they attempt to close in on the truth. These quests include tracking down a mother with her son, after they vanished from one of the hotel bungalows, locating a private club which was frequented by security chief months prior to her death and leaving only two additional bodies in their wake – which should've been a lot higher with these two cursed detectives working on the same case. So you have to applaud them for not causing a small-scale holocaust at the convention!

The plot itself wasn't bad, but only the first murder was properly clued (as far as clueing goes in a private eye novel) and the other deaths were an additive of the first murder, but then again, this is not the type of story in which you're suppose to be on the look-out for clues and put down the book to construct a clever theory of your own. You simply have to fulfill the role of silent partner as you tag-along with Nameless and McCone on a very bumpy ride on the road of discovery, and find out how a series of events could've escalated in a murder that ended up wrecking the lives of half-a-dozen people. At heart, this is one of those dark, gritty crime stories but also one of the best of its kinds that I have read. Not quite as ingenious as Hoodwink (1982) or as grabbing as Shackles (1988) though, but close enough to be considered as one of his better stories and one that argued a pretty good case for me to be less picky when it comes to scoring a Sharon McCone novel.

If you told me a few years ago, shortly after pledging my alliance to John Dickson Carr and his devoted followers, that there would be a day when I would be reading and praising abrasive, hardboiled private eye novels, I would've probably chucked a string of garlic at your head while hollering, "The power of Edgar Allan Poe compels you!" 

On a sidenote, I toned down my overblown writingstyle a bit (compare this blog post to the previous one) and I want to know if this is preferable or not.

All the books I have reviewed in this series: 

Twospot (1978)

Hoodwink (1981)

Double (1984)

Bones (1985)

Shackles (1988)

Nightcrawlers (2005)

"Never hate your enemies, it affects your judgement"

"You're new at lawbreaking, I gather, so maybe I should tell you how the game is played. It's actually a combination of musical chairs and blind man's buff."

- Friedman (Twospot, 1978)

Bill Pronzini has a well established reputation for experimenting with innovative ways in which he, as a writer with an aversion to the idea of becoming a series scribbler who continuously regurgitates the same books over and over again, could approach the private eye story and developed a penchant for concocting hybrid-like stories – in which he roams the boundaries of the genre. Hoodwink (1981), for example, is a classic locked room mystery, which pays homage to the ghost of John Dickson Carr, while Shackles (1988) is an exceedingly dark, character-driven thriller exploring the darkest nooks and niches in the psyche of his nameless investigator. 

The collaborative team effort by Bill Pronzini and Collin Wilcox, Twospot (1978), in which their series characters, The Nameless Detective and Lt. Frank Hastings, cooperate with one another on the same murder case, lets itself not as easily asserted as the aforementioned books. In the first place, it's a crossover, which is a sub-category of fiction all by itself, but also a convergence of two distinct branches of crime fiction in which both authors specialized themselves – consequently intertwining the private eye novel with a police procedural.

Twospot comprises of four alternating, novella-length chapters and a epilogue that shifts perspectives from nameless to the police lieutenant, in which they deal with the problems facing them on their own terms – making the book an interesting contrast between the writing styles of Pronzini and Wilcox.

Pronzini kicks off the story by sending his lone wolf op down to the winery of the Cappellani family to report on a background check he run on one of their employees – suspected by one of the sons, Alex Cappellani, to be an opportunistic gold digger who wants to usurp the distinguished distillery by trapping his widowed mother into a marriage. At this early stage in the story, I fully expected him to chance upon the body of one of the men at the winery and the plot turning into an old fashioned, but hardboiled, whodunit with a family business as a backdrop – but the crimes confronting him were limited to merely an attempted murder and a forced, midnight wrestling match in the shrubberies. He's had worse days.

The chapters, narrated by Nameless, are unmistakably Pronzini's – tough and hard-headed when the situation calls for it, but humane when he needs to be and this early incarnation of his personage, that of the solitudinarian investigator, shows how consistent his basic personality has been over the past four decades. Fundamentally, he has remained the same person, however, you only have to glance at the stories that came after this one to see how life continued building on that fundament – turning an einzelgänger into a family guy with a senior partnership in a successful private investigation firm. And his endearing fanboyism concerning his favorite pulp writers also makes him one of the most relatable characters in the genre, because you can connect with him on a basic level as one fan to another and his thoughts on the subject can be eerily recognizable. Heck, he even described a dream, in which he and a bunch of detectives, from the brittle pages of his treasured pulp magazines, joined forces to clean up a gang of Prohibition era rum-runners. Hey! I had dreams like that!

But let us return to the story, as Wilcox has taken over from Pronzini when the subject of Nameless' enquiry turned up dead and a note with an incomprehensible term, "twospot," scrawled across its surface is found near the body – and here the plot takes a definitive turn away from a possible crossbreed between the private eye and a conventional detective story and morphs into a police thriller. Honesty compels me to say that I was less then thrilled with Wilcox's contribution to the book. The narrative voice of his protagonist, Lt. Frank Hastings, also has a hardboiled edge to it, but, somehow, it didn't ring true with me and impressed me as artificial – nor did I find his character particular enthralling. As a matter of fact, I think his subordinate, Canelli, who acts like a walking good-luck-charm to his team and made a significant contribution to resolving the case and preventing more bloodshed, eclipsed his overall appearance. 

Needless to say, a modern police thriller will not entirely adhere to the orthodox rules of fair-play, nonetheless, there were still parts of the solution that were foreshadowed and could be anticipated – but don't expect to find clues that will help you fill in the finer details (e.g. the exact meaning of "twospot"). However, the problem the solution suffers from the most is that parts of it are a bit dated and haven't aged with same grace as a Cappellani vintage wine, but I can't say any more without spilling too much crucial information regarding the solution. 

In conclusion, this is not a prime candidate for a future short-list of favorite entries in this long-running series, which is mainly due to the chapters penned by Collin Wilcox, who simply failed to grab and hold my attention, and the plot was also sub-par. I've seen Pronzini do better than this, even in an out-and-out thriller like Shackles! Still, it's an interesting experiment that has its moments and perhaps I should've read a Lt. Frank Hastings novel before tackling this book (to get the overall and complete experience), which is a lesson I will take to heart before I start chippen away at the crossover novel, Double (1984) – co-written with his mystery writing wife, Marcia Muller. I'm sure there are one or two of her books I can easily obtain, even in these parts. To be continued.

By the way, why does even a somewhat disappointing book usually translate itself into a shoddily written review – even after a number of revisions this is the best I have to offer. I really do suck! Oh well, the next blog post will hopefully be a bit better as I run through the plot of a locked room mystery by an obscure, nearly forgotten mystery writer. 

Update: I received additional information on this book from Bill Pronzini:

"It's a fair review. Twospot was written a long, long ago and I've never much liked it myself. It was supposed to be Threespot -- a three-way collaboration with the third writer being Joe Gores. Gores backed out just as we were about ready to start plotting and writing the book, so Collin Wilcox and I had to rethink and rework it. Neither of us was satisfied with the finished book. The original Threespot story would have made for a much more effective novel."

It's a pity that the triple crossover never came to fruition and killed what could've been an excellent, and unique, crime book within the genre.

All the books I have reviewed in this series:

Twospot (1978)

Hoodwink (1981)

Bones (1985)

Shackles (1988)

Nightcrawlers (2005)