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! 

Remembering Appie Baantjer II: A Spate of Crimes

"We only die if we're forgotten about. As long as someone, even one reader, remembers us... we're immortal."

- Taro Suzuki (Kamen Tantei, vol. 4.)

On August 29, 2010 Albert ("Appie") Cornelis Baantjer passed away after a brief, but exhaustive, duel with the specter of death and as a commemoration of the first anniversary of his passing, I announced the intension to post a review on that date – with an open invitation attached to it to clog the live feeds of the blogosphere that day with book critiques. Only two of my confreres officially gave the heads-up that they will be participating in this little tribute, but I hope they aren't the only ones who will be submitting book reports. Yes, I'm mindful of the fact that I posted this a day before the actual date, but there's a particle chance that I won't be able log-on to the web tomorrow and I'd rather be a few hours too soon than a day too late with this tribute – and isn't that thought more important than a number on a calendar? Oh, and before you read this review, it's advisable to take a look at the previous post first.

The Corpse Adrift

The book I plucked randomly from my overpopulated shelves for this testimonial is Het lijk op drift (The Corpse Adrift, 1998). It's a novel from the later period, in which the plots habitually kow-tow submissively to the tyrannical reign of a thriving formula, however, what was done with this particular story attests my assertion that even the formulaic books are not entirely without interest.

The opening chapter is unusually busy, in which a grumpy DeKok and Vledder wrestle themselves free from the warm embrace of their blankets and head for a malodorous alley where two policemen found the body of a man with a blood smeared shirt, but before arriving at the scene of the crime the victim rose up and walked away – leaving two rookie cops flabbergasted. Back at the precinct, the detective duo is confronted with a man, one Gerard van Nederveld, who reports his widowed mother missing and a message from the water police informing them that they've dragged up a dead woman from the murky waters of the IJ (pronounced as AY) who had a note among her possessions with DeKok's name scribbled across the surface. 

Needless to say, these spate of crimes are interlinked with eachother and the victim is swiftly identified as Alida van Nederveld-De Ruijter, the widowed mother of four grown children reported missing by her eldest son, but the family turns out to be as dysfunctional as your typical, 1920s aristocratic inbred family – rive by a mutual dislike for one another. The source of this animosity was probably the family's father, an indiscriminate collector who pumped nearly all of their money in his hobby and was not averse to employ unsavory underworld characters to acquire a particular item that caught his fancy, and was also dragged from the IJ a year previously. At first, his death was filed away as an unfortunate accident, but the autopsy on the remains of his wife turned up a couple of broken cartilage rings indicating death by strangulation – and suddenly DeKok and Vledder are burdened with what appears to be a double homicide.

Even though the plot somewhat stagnated after this opportune set-up, there's still more than enough pleasure derived from Baantjer's storytelling and the characters that inhabit this story. The fractured shards that was once the Van Nederveld family showed that he was still interested in characterization at this point and it's always fun when he brings members of the Amsterdam penose into a story. The inevitable dénouement was all right, but lacked finesse and suffered a bit from a too obvious a murderer. Nevertheless, the motivation for no less than three murders and the emotional aftermath made for a satisfying conclusion as DeKok relates the entire history behind these crimes.

While The Corpse Adrift is not Baantjer at his finest, I think it has merits and it was fun to tag-along with DeKok and Vledder again for the first time in over three years. As I said before, it was Baantjer who lit the furnace in which my undying love for the detective story has roared ever since and have always felt very much indebted to him.

And for that, I salute Appie Baantjer with a last bow: 

 

Partners in Stitches

"I am an old-fashioned villain."

"Old-fashioned villains are always killed in the end."
- Casino for Sale (1938)

Death is no laughing matter, especially when it manifests itself in the guise of a callous murderer, but the mystery genre has a long and storied history of making a laughing stock out of the homicidal tendencies of the scythe wielding death-dealer – goaded by the ghouls who relish these abdominal stories. And yes, we're all guilty of this one. After all, who can honestly say they read Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) with a straight face or were not reduced to soft chuckles after strangling a laugh while flipping through the pages of Kelley Roos' The Frightened Stiff (1942)?  

Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon, co-conspirators in a series of comical mysteries and historical farces, were two of the malefactors responsible for turning the cloaked embodiment of death into a figure of fun. These literary equivalents of Bonnie and Clyde openly confessed that they intended to keep Londoners laughing during the Blitz and schemed their risible narratives while cremating cigarettes, draining cups of tea and emitting frequent shrieks of laughter – which is why I always refer to them as partners in stitches. Well, if Bill Pronzini is ever going to compile a Gun-in-Cheek sequel, dedicated to awful puns and cringing witticism from hack reviewers like myself, I have secured a spot in it with that one!

Their first collaborative achievement as a criminal enterprise came with the publication of A Bullet in the Ballet (1937), in which Inspector Adam Quill and the members of Vladimir Stroganoff's absurd and uproarious ballet company made their first on-stage appearance – as they tangoed with an assassin who insists on killing performers dancing the role of Petrouchka during shows with hundreds in attendance as potential eye-witnesses. The jocular story telling gelled perfectly with a well-constructed plot, but it was the impresario Stroganoff who usurped the spotlights. A genuinely droll character who gave actes de présence in numerous of their satirical mysteries as well as non-criminal comedies.

Casino for Sale (1938) opens with the beleaguered Stroganoff being bamboozled into purchasing a small, dilapidated casino within the vicinity of a recently erected, modish casino and on top of that his newly acquired gambling den turns out to be cesspool of crime. Blackmailers and confidence tricksters have a run of the place, but the indefatigably impresario takes on the competition by inveigling the discerning public into the run-down gaming house with his world famous and celebrated ballet company. But nothing runs smoothly and when Pavlo Citrolo, an eminent ballet critic who moonlights as a blackmailer, refused to give a good notice the promoter recognizes that the situation calls for swift and immediate action by doing what everyone in his position would've done – spiking the critics drink with a sleeping draught and rushing-off to write a laudatory review in his name after safely locking the snoring blackguard up in his own office.

So problem solved? Casino Stroganoff receives a commendatory notice from a highly regarded patron of the stage and the decrepit casino becomes a success after all. Well, not quite.

When he returned to unlock his office, a speech prepared to logically account for his groggy state and the locked environment, in which Pavlo Citrolo found himself when he woke up from the drug-induced stupor, he finds the strangled remains of the man in what can only be described as a sleuth's nightmare. There was a noose dangling from the ceiling and a gun near the body; there was a bullet hole in the wall and an untouched glass of milk next to a bottle labeled poison; a half-smoked cigar on the mantel piece and the safe door was swung wide open – and guess who the local Inspector Clouseau incarcerated for the murder after his first inspection of the crime-scene? Exactly! Luckily, for Stroganoff, he had the blind foresight to dispatch an invitation to Adam Quill, now retired from the force and making a living as a private enquiry agent, to waste his vacation at the casino – which now has turned into a busman's holiday.

Casino for Sale is a rollicking cavalcade of crime, in which the bantering characters and effervescent dialogue decide on who has the brightest sparkle by holding a repartee duel – making this is a fast-paced and breezy story. Unfortunately, as a detective story, the plot missed a beat or two by trivializing the circumstances in which the murder was discovered. The clue filled murder room was fairly quickly accounted for as one of Stroganoff's artistic fits (hoping to obscure the murder as a suicide and abscond any personal responsibility for drugging him) and the banality of the locked room trick was unsatisfactory to say the least. Admittedly, the latter advanced the plot and provided a few chuckles, but I think littering the place with a dozen spare keys would've worked just as well and been less of a disappointment.  

Nevertheless, these cosmetic anomalies take very little away from the overall quality of the book as it remains a very amusing romp and Adam Quill is a pleasantly assiduous detective – diligently picking up clues, interrogating witnesses and pursuing suspects. It's just that I feel that this could've been a minor classic if Quill also had to explain away the murderous instruments and intriguing clues, one after another, before uncovering the culprit's identity – akin to Carter Dickson's Death in Five Boxes (1938).

If you'd compare this book to a casino slot machine, it only missed one of the symbols needed to complete the winning combination that would've hit the jackpot. Oh well, at least playing the game was plenty of fun.

Bibliography of the Adam Quill and Vladimir Stroganoff series: 

A Bullet in the Ballet (1937)

Casino for Sale a.k.a. Murder a la Stroganoff (1938)

Envoy on Excursion (1940)

Six Curtains for Stroganova a.k.a. Six Curtains for Natasha (1945; non-mystery)

Stroganov and Company (1980; a short story collection)

Leverage: First Impressions

"Sometimes bad guys make the best good guys."

Last week, I posted a brief synopsis of the BBC series Hustle, in which a team of conmen take on the undesirable elements of society who abuse their wealth and power – and separate these unquenchable Scrooges from a considerable amount of dough. Overall, it's a superb series with fun characters, cleverly constructed, multi-layered plots and a brisk tong-in-cheek style. So when I read there was an American counterpart to this series, entitled Leverage, I perked up and immediately placed an order for the first season box-set. The first disc just stopped spinning and it left me with mixed feelings. 

We provide... leverage

First of all, the series has the same unpretentious, facetious tone (even when there's a darker, more serious edge to a story) and the characters are every bit as much fun as their European brethrens. The main objective of this series evidently lies in filling up nearly an hour with unadulterated amusement, however, it misses the cleverness and labrythine plotting of Hustle.  

But let us begin with lining up the suspects and identifying them: Timothy Hutton assumes the role of the crew's mastermind, Nathan "Nate" Ford, who was an insurance fraud investigator until his employer refused to cough up the cash needed to provide his son with life saving medical treatment – resulting in the kids untimely passing. The aftermath of this domestic tragedy is that Nate not only lost his son, but also his wife and career until a man hires him to lead a crack-team of criminals to do a job that would cost the insurance company who allowed his son to die a lot of money. But when they're double-crossed they band together instead of dissolving and take down their first mark as a team.

The other members of this band of criminals include the reputable grifster, who occasionally nicks valuable paintings and artifacts, Sophie Devereaux; the martial arts, fire-arms and retrieval expert Eliot Spencer; the cat burglar Parker and last, but not least, computer expert and master hacker Alec Hardison. They pool their unique talents and knowledge to provide leverage to those who've been wronged, harassed and bullied by influential individuals and domineering corporations by leveling the playing field for them – and this often includes retrieving what was taken from them or get what their targets morally owe their clients.

This is where the fact that you're watching an American series smacks you in the face. The marks are bigger, richer and wield more power and therefore the stakes and risks are a lot higher – resulting in more action based story lines and less of the Machiavellian scheming I was expecting to find in the only peer Hustle has. The plotting can be downright lazy at time! When they're faced with a hurdle, Alec simply strokes his keyboard and it's solved (because everything is online); where as the other crew work their fingers to the bone when on a long-con and their fixer never solved the really difficult tasks with such ease. Heck, in one of the episodes he was unable to bypass a seemingly perfect security system and they had to cook-up a clever plan to work around it – creating an impossible theft in the process. 

Admittedly, the last two episodes I watched, The Miracle Job and The Bank Shot Job, showed definite improvement over the first three episodes. The first one has them fabricating two miracles, making a statue of St. Nicholas cry and disappear before a full congregation, in order to save a church and the second came closest to matching their overseas counterparts – when Nate and Sophie land smack in the middle of a hostage situation during one of their cons at a small-town bank. Yeah, putting your main characters in a hostage situation is not a very innovative plot idea, but you can churn out something decent if you know how to spin it and that was definitely the case here. And the fact that this is as much a crime fantasy, which refuses to take itself too seriously, as the other series also helped making this plot work and everyone can cheer when the villain-of-the-week received his comeuppance.

Plot-wise, Leverage is just a cut below Hustle, but not any less enjoyable and I'm already foolishly keeping my fingers crossed for a continental crossover project, in which the crews of Nate Ford and Michael Stone chase the same mark. But not something as a trivial as looting a casino or bank. No, no, no! This has to be something on the same scale as Maurice Leblanc's epic 813 (1910).

Oh, one can but dream...

The Con is On

"The con: an invisible crime build on the premise of finding someone who wants something for nothing, and then giving them nothing for something."

Recently, I've been re-watching a bunch of episodes from the first three seasons of Hustle, in which a troupe of professional confidence tricksters play the long con on credulous and avaricious marks – who expect to get something for nothing, but end up getting nothing for something.

Would these faces lie to you?

After a so-so season earlier this year, these episodes helped jog my memory as to how the stories roped me into watching this show in the first place. The convoluted plotting, facetious characters and tongue-in-cheek approach was the antidote needed after trudging through a batch, of then, recent Poirot and Miss Marple adaptations – which were very bleak, tone-wise, and suggested P.D. James rather than Agatha Christie. Needless to say, the ambitious plotting and light-hearted nature of these deft capers invigorated my downtrodden spirit.

The contemporary Robin Hood, who leads this modern-day band of merry men, is the infamous, all-round confidence trickster Michael "Mickey Bricks" Stone, who is best described as a cross-breed between the charming gentleman rogue and the brilliant amateur detective. He has a labyrinthine mind that is capable of devising the most intricate schemes with the outward appearance of seemingly random, unrelated events and very few are able to outthink or even second-guess him. This talent is not only employed to separate a mark from his money, but also to help them escape from tight situations.

This craft for deceiving was discovered and cultivated by his mentor, Albert Stroller, a semi-retired, legendary conmen from the US (played brilliantly by Robert Vaughn) who acts as the crew's roper by enmeshing potential marks in one of their traps – and my favorite character in the series. A cunning old fox if there ever was one! Ash "Three Socks" Morgan's main job is that of the teams fixer by turning Mickey's elaborate schemes into workable plans, but he's also a talented grifter in his own right and I love the episodes in which he impersonates a Dutchman. It's so bad it's good!

Mickey, Albert and Ash are the core members of this criminal enterprise, but in the first four seasons their business partners were Danny Blue and Stacie Monroe. The former is an ex-short con artist turned long con rookie and apprentice of Mickey, in spite of regularly challenging his leadership, while the latter is a beautiful, all-round-grifster and potential love interest to both Mickey and Danny. They were replaced in the fifth season by the brother-and-sister team of Sean and Emma Kennedy.

Regardless of their status as professional criminals, this gang isn't made up of hardened thugs who support their millionaire lifestyle with narcotics or running a protection racket, but by skinning fat cats who are a public nuisance or a holy terror to their immediate surroundings. In the episode The Hustler's News of Today, they take down a tabloid paper after one of their targets, a friend of Stacie's, attempted suicide due to false accusations of embezzling funds, while in Missions they face-off with a bend copper who wants to cut-in on their profits.

However, not every episode is modeled on this pattern and the crew often has to deal with authority figures, who want to use their unlawful expertise to further their own cause, and the best example can be found in Law and Corruption – in which an over ambitious cop plants a suitcase full of cocaine on Mickey and blackmails him into capturing a famous gentleman thief for him. A similar situation arises in Cops and Robbers when a head of security, an ex-cop who once beat Albert Stroller at his own game, strong-arms them into entrapping a bank-burglar who has been targeting branch offices and his employers are not amused. 

And then there are the Ocean's Eleven knock-offs, in which they meticulous plan daring heists and impossible escapes. Big Daddy Calling has them visiting grifters heaven, Las Vegas, where they plan to loot the publicly displayed, $5 million jackpot of the Big Daddy Fruit Machine. There's just one tiny problem: it's situated in a tightly secured casino run by a ruthless mob boss, but then again, this is the same team who successfully burgled The Tower of London in Eye of the Beholder! 

In New Recruits and Tiger Troubles, they try their hands at the locked room illusion as they made a painting disappear from a gallery protected with a perfect security system and spirited a diamond encrusted statue from a sealed bank vault – but I've seen these tricks before, although, they were cleverly executed here.

If you haven't got the idea already, these stories are a delicious, crafty criminal fantasies that purposely stretch probability, occasionally knocking down the fourth wall and refuses to apologize for giving viewers like me 60-minutes of unadulterated entertainment – and I highly recommend this comical capers to everyone bored with the current crop of crime shows. Just bear through the introductory pilot episode. It's necessary to establish the characters.

Finally, checkout my review of Freeman's The Stoneware Monkey (1939), which, for some reason, failed to pop-up on numerous blog feeds.