The One-Man Book-Club

"To read of a detective’s daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy."

- Rex Stout.

Until a few years ago, the message board of the John Dickson Carr collector website was not entirely unlike a disreputable alleyway, tugged away in an obscure gas-lit street of Sherlock Holmes' Victorian London, where the fugitive shadows of the city gathered to tell and boost of tales of haunting crimes and murder most foul. However, crime has the tendency to spread and soon we were absorbed by the blogosphere, which provided us with the tools necessary to brainwash the masses indoctrinate your children promote classically-styled mysteries, but it turned the JDC forum into a ghost town – and one thing I do miss, from time to time, are the one-man book-clubs.

A One-Man Book-Club is exactly what its name implies: you read a book and post your thoughts and theories as you go through the story. This resulted in some interesting "reviews," at least I think so, and because I have nothing else at the moment I decided to revisit a few of them.

One month before I began blogging, I read Lenore Glen Offord's The Glass Mask (1944) for one of these One-Man Book-Club threads and the first thing I noted that it was the kind of detective story that American mystery writers reputedly never wrote – set in a remote small-town unaffected by the passage of time and echoes the sleepy, country-side village of Miss Marple's St. Mary Mead. The problem is also one that could have been torn from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel: was an ailing and inoffensive matriarch murdered by her grandson to inherit her property and an opportunity to get married? According to the local gossip machine, he did, but it's impossible to proof as the remains were cremated and there are many other unanswered questions.

Offord's main characters, however, are not stock-in-trade and even ahead of their time. Georgina Wyeth is a single mother of an eight-year-old girl and has relation with her semi-official fiancé, pulp writer Todd McKinnon, but she's not your quintessential dunderheaded heroine entering dark cellars or abandoned houses on her own – and the book has its "Had-I-But-Known" moments. But the biggest triumph of this book is how the solution to the "perfect murder" is handled.

S.S. van Dine's The Dragon Murder Case (1934) was a disaster of a story that I had to abandon midway through, but not before taking a peek at Vance's explanation and discovered not only that I was partially correct but also that I was being to logical. If you’re curious, you have to read the original post where my observations are hidden behind proper spoiler-tags.

Darwin Teilhet was one of the first writers to address the atrocities committed by the nazi's, when Hitler rose to power, and used the detective story as his vehicle. The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934), set against the rise of the Third Reich, opens with the unlikely sight of a talking sparrow, imploring an elderly man to help him, moments before the man himself is shot. A cover-blurb pointed out that the book, atmosphere-wise, suggests the work of another American mystery writer, John Dickson Carr, and I agree. The story has a few nice touches of the macabre, the sparrow that spoke like a human and nazi officials going out of their way to bow to a lone pine-tree, but also a young American hero who's caught between a blitzkrieg of crime and the efficient Schutzmännen of the German police force.

Unfortunately, The Talking Sparrow Murders merges the spy-thriller with elements of the detective story, which left me in two minds, where I wanted more from the plot, but was nonetheless intrigued that it was published years before Hitler began WWII. This makes me want to give less weight to its shortcomings as a mystery. I mean, it's not an historical novel – it was written in 1934, and it turned out to be a glimpse of things yet to come!

My fall as a snobbish, cynical purist began to pick up momentum after reading William DeAndrea’s The HOG Murders (1979), which has a wonderfully conceived plot that connected the past with the present. A serial killer is bumping people off at random in a small town and sends taunting messages to the police, who turn to the famous criminologist Nicolo Benedetti, who I described at the time as a cross between Hercule Poirot and a hand tame Hannibal Lecter, and Ronald Gentry – a private-eye Benedetti personally trained. The plot has an original take on the serial killer story and I was on the right track, before DeAndrea effectively pulled the wool over my eyes.

It's follow-up, The Werewolf Murders (1992), was also subject of discussion in a One-Man Book-Club thread. The book was written and set during the waning years of the Twentieth Century and a French baron has organized the first Olympique Scientifique Internationale, a year-long gathering of the world's most prominent scientists, in preparation of the new and hopefully more enlightened millennium at the ski resort of Mont-st.-Denis. But then an astronomer is murdered and his body is draped across the eternal flame, situated in the town square, another scientist is brutally attacked, and before long, logic and reason begins to dissipate among the scientific community as the rumors of the Werewolf of Mont-st.-Denis begins to leave footprints on their nerves.

When the local authority with the assistance of a detective from the famous Sûreté fails to turn up any leads or even a viable suspect, everyone, once again, turns to that philosopher of crime and human evil, Professor Niccolo Benedetti, who also shows Nero Wolfe how to collect an enormous fee and still come across as the embodiment of generosity and patriotism. 

I was able to grasp the most significant parts of the solution, only missing out on some of the finer details and motive, and missed one very obvious clue.

Well, that’s it for this week’s filler and hope to back soon with a regular review. And beware, I have stocked up on locked room mysteries... again. 

Lights, Camera, Murder!

"Seeing a murder on television can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."

- Alfred Hitchcock.

This place was put up to commemorate the erstwhile stories of the mystery genre, not to dump them in a shallow grave and shuffling some dirt on them to fill-up the hole, but after discussing several duds, one after another, it sure began to feel as if I was conducting a series of makeshift funerals – and understood that for the next review I had to clamber out of that bone-filled pit and scrawl a few celebratory lines on a winner. So I turned to the late William L. DeAndrea, who has yet to disappoint me, and, as expected, found myself in the middle of another praise worthy effort from his hands.

Killed in the Act (1981) has a plot revolving around the preparations and rehearsals for the 50th anniversary show, entitled "Sight, Sound & Celebration," of The Network and their celebratory television extravaganza is jam-packed with their biggest stars from past and present – including the reunion of Ken Shelby and Larry Green (a comedy/magic act not entirely dissimilar to Penn & Teller), Alice Brockway (a former on-air personality currently married to Shelby) and the Hollywood sex-bomb Melanie Marliss.

As the Vice-President of Special Projects, Matt Cobb has little to nothing to do with the hustle and bustle of their jubilee because his job description consists of keeping inconveniences of The Networks back and smothering problems before they are big enough to tarnish the stations reputations. Or at the very least, keep the damage to a minimum. But when someone steals Melanie Marliss' bowling ball (a famous prop from the series that turned her into a star) together with a stack of old kinescopes from the 1950s, the corporate trouble shooter has to get involved and everything gets progressively worse from there.

One of his friends at The Network, Jerry de Loon, got a whack on the head during the theft and seemed to have shrugged it off, but aftertelling his story to Cobb he dies as a result of complications and he was not the first corpse in this case – nor would he be the last. Before the Shelby party arrived in New York, they had to explain to the Los Angeles police department how a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist ended up floating facedown in their pool and this so-called Network Phantom seems to have it in for Shelby & Green.

After the parade of duds I struggled through, it was refreshing to read a novel from a mystery writer who was able to divide his attention between a clever plot and interesting characters as well as topping it off with an exciting climax and surprise twist – which was also more than fairly clued. Heck, it was practically rubbed into the readers face, especially towards the end, but at that point in the story I had stopped being on the alert for the presence of any possible clues because I assumed the story had come to an end by then and only thing left was a proper rundown of the events. Well, he did and more and as a result he put one over me in spite of having solved the case, which made closing this book a lot more satisfying than any of the other books reviewed on here for nearly a month.

I have to keep this review brief (you know that stuff we call time?), but I have to point out that William DeAndrea gave us a glance of how the modern GAD novel would have turned out if it had continued to evolve – instead of being ditched by publishers in favor of gritty crime stories. Everything is there: the narrative voice of the hardboiled genre and the plot construction of the puzzle-orientated detective stories, but the characterization and his style were very up-to-date and that mixture made his stories more than just mere throwbacks – and the fascinating behind-the-scenes look at The Network only makes this series even more interesting.

As I have said before, DeAndrea not only picked up the threads of tradition but also weaved new patterns with them and this is one of his better works.

The Matt Cobb series:

Killed in the Ratings (1978)
Killed in the Act (1981)
Killed with a Passion (1983)
Killed on the Ice (1984)
Killed in Paradise (1988)
Killed on the Rocks (1990)
Killed in Fringe Time (1995)
Killed in the Fog (1996)
Murder – All Kinds (2003) 

Malice Nostalgia

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."

- Sherlock Holmes.

William DeAndrea was a mystery writer endowed with a mental prowess that reflected the physical aptitude of a professional athlete, coupled with an uncanny knack for hoodwinking and bamboozling, which routinely lead him to emerge triumphant from an exercise of wits and ingenuity against a quick-witted reader – especially when he's facing me on the other side of the playing board. On more than one occasion, I was demoted from a bright young armchair detective to a narrow-minded, starving stray cat that veraciously scoured a trail of carefully laid out red herrings. But no more! I finally beat this modern day grandmaster in a fair, one-on-one, battle of wits. 

Don't assume that Killed with a Passion (1983) was a moment of weakness or disorientation, of which I took advantage to deliver a valid thrust with an epee to score an undeserved victory against an otherwise unbeatable opponent, which was not the case, but another example of an efficacious fusion of a fairly-clued, neo-orthodox detective story with the seamier elements of a contemporary thriller.

When we tune in, Matt Cobb, the often troubled Vice President in charge of Special Projects for The Network, a major television broadcaster, whose job description consists of smoothing out the problems that are too insecure for security and too private for Public Relations, has left his office to do some fieldwork – which includes taking a closer look at the booming, but corruption prone, cable TV industry. This also provides our troubleshooter with an opportunity to drop in on some of his college chums and that's when the course of the story takes a dramatic, 360-degree turn.

You'd expect that after a set-up like that, in which exorbitant, underhanded fees are paid for broadcasting licenses, to be hurled head first into an exciting and perilous corporate mystery, steeped in television history and lore, but morphed instead into a very personal and character-driven detective story – in which the impending marriage of one of Cobb's friends provokes a murderer into raising his objection before the ceremony with a crushing blow. The corruption story is downgraded to a sub-plot and our troubleshooter dedicates his natural ability to attract problems, razor-sharp wit and a take-no-guff attitude to pry an old friend from the grubby clutches of a political hungry District Attorney.

Dan Morris was Cobb's roommate in college and during that period he cultivated an infatuation with Debbie Whitten, a spoiled girl with a doting father, who teased and played games with his aching, mournfully howling heart. Morris is an expert martial artist with black belts in both karate and judo knotted around his waist, but it's his unrequited love who has hold him in an iron stranglehold for years. He even refused to roam two potentially interesting career paths to bury himself in a small town, just to be near to her, but when it's announced that Debbie has become the betrothed of a human Ken-doll he finally has had enough – and vows to put a stop to this marriage no matter what.

The local authorities are inclined to believe him and find themselves convinced that he wrestled himself out of her headlock, but only after delivering a lethal blow to the throat that crushed her larynx and ruptured the carotid artery.

The murder of Debbie Whitten provides the reader with nearly everything you expect from a skillfully constructed mystery, from cleverly planted clues to engaging characters, but the plot also neatly shows how emotions can distort an uncomplicated situation and create a ton of complex problems for everyone involved – and I feel like bragging here for having skewered through these problems with relative ease.

There are also a few tight spots for Matt Cobb in this novel, which sprang from the corruption case lingering in the background, when someone sets the Organic Hit Man on him – an expert murderer who kills on the spur of the moment with whatever is handy at the time. A local policeman tells Cobb the story how he clobbered a man to death outside a library with a portfolio of bird paintings his victim had just checked out!

I once noted that William DeAndrea proved that, contrary to popular believe, that tradition and innovation are not entirely incompatible within the convinces of the genre – and even showed that these constituent elements can be just as good, or even better, when they are paired together as when they stand on their own. Killed with a Passion is a fine example of this marriage between tradition and innovation, although, honesty compels me to say that the book doesn't quite reach the same altitudes as The HOG Murders (1979) or Killed on the Rocks (1990), but hey, labeling a detective story as merely excellent instead of absolutely brilliant hardly constitutes as negative criticism, right?

There's just one, very minor, point I want to raise in disfavor of this otherwise excellent story and that is that DeAndrea neglected to explain something that, at first, seems inconsequential but actually contributed to mucking up this case. It's very subtle and easily missed, but if you're observant enough you'll know what I'm referring to. Try and spot if you decide to give this book a shot.

Anyway, in spite of that particle anomaly, I heartily recommend this story – especially to readers who are already devoted fans of this series.

The Matt Cobb series:

Killed in the Ratings (1978)
Killed in the Act (1981)
Killed with a Passion (1983)
Killed on the Ice (1984)
Killed in Paradise (1988)
Killed on the Rocks (1990)
Killed in Fringe Time (1995)
Killed in the Fog (1996)
Murder – All Kinds (2003)

Rated to Kill

"When your Monday has consisted of murder, two sessions with a boss who doesn't like you, a trip to the country, the chase and capture of a fleeing man, a tough softball game, and a tête à tête with a beautiful psycho who more or less announces that at a more convenient time and place for her she intends to have your body, whatever it will do to your life, it tends to bode ill for the rest of the week."

- Matt Cobb (Killed in Fringe Time, 1995)

What can I possibly say about William DeAndrea, as a preface to this review, that I haven't already touched upon in previous blog entries dedicated to his work? Chronologically, he was a crime writer of the modern, post-GAD era, but if you carefully peruse his books and short stories, it won't be too hard to notice the iron-clad links that connect the far past with the here and now – and hopefully the distant future as well. The hardboiled tone of story telling, resonating with the voices of Archie Goodwin and Philip Marlowe, partnered with an orthodox sense of plotting set against the décor of a television network, not only picked up the threads of tradition but also weaves new patterns. 

In the opening of Killed in Fringe Time (1995), Matt Cobb, the Vice-President in charge of Special Projects, who's responsible for handling everything that's too insecure for security and too private for Public Relations, is lulled into running an errand for Richard Bentyne – who recently signed a multi-million dollar contract to battle on The Network's behalf in the trenches of the late-night war against Jay Leno and David Letterman. The prime-time prima donna managed to snare "The Mountain Man," an eccentric billionaire hermit, for his show and wants the troubleshooter to pick him up from the airport – even though it's not part of his job description he indulges their newest acquisition for the sake of the station. But allowing a well-off solitudinarian, who estranged himself from society, to hitch a ride from him to the studio will proof to be the least of his worries.

As you've probably noticed by now, Richard Bentyne is the proverbial victim whose elephantine ego leaves absolutely no room for friends and compensated this with an impressive collection of enemies, but this, strangely enough, didn't turn him into a stock character or plot device. Before stuffing him into body bag, DeAndrea humanizes his character with a personal revelation that came up in a conversation between Bentyne and Cobb – making the murder somewhat less impersonal. Sure, he's as insufferable and asinine as they come, but hardly a Mr. Ratchett or Mary Gregor whose murderers could be cheered on without the risk of spraining your conscience.

Unfortunately, for the new face of late-night television, the murderer wasn't privy when he lay bare the faint traces of a genuine human being in his personality and before tapping the show his acid laced tongue tastes the numbing effect of fatal dose of poison. But what's really cruel is that the murderer doctored his specially prepared dish of chicken wings peppered with snippets of garlic. I personally could live with chomping down an alarming quantity of arsenic, but to have the taste of fried chicken lingering in your mouth before you depart from this world seems to me a faith worse than death.

It's up to Matt Cobb, leading force behind Special Projects, to keep the damage to The Network to a minim, which simply means sniffing out the murderer himself and handing this person over to the police. However, that's easier said than done when your lists of suspects consists of, among other, a delusional old woman, who believes the talk-show host was her long lost son, a producer who's also a live-in ex-girlfriend and a psychotic associate producer who could've crept from the pages of a second-rate, cliché riddled private eye story, nor does it help to be oblivious to the clues that are practically dangled in front of your eyes – which was also the case with this reader.

In my defense, some of the clues required a particular knowledge to perceive them as such, but there's not a legit excuse, other than brain leakage, for missing the main clue, which, retrospectively, was a dead giveaway – and I feel embarrassed for having missed it. So, well played, Mr. DeAndrea. Well played. But I'll get your next time Gadget! I will spot your cutesy, but oh so cleverly hidden, clues and unsnarl your tangled plot before that troubleshooter of yours does – and that's a promise! Well, look at that, it's nearly time for my medication. That means the moment has come to wrap things up here.  

Killed in Fringe Time is a prime-time showcase of the talents scribbled down in the opening paragraph, in which DeAndrea summons the phantasms of a bygone era that seamlessly blends into a contemporary setting. The result is a story that manages to feel both retro and fresh at the same time. It's also a perfectly fair detective story with enough twists, turns and dangerous situations to satisfy a wide arrange of fans within the genre.

It also whetted my appetite for Killed in the Act (1981), but I have to put off that one for just a few more weeks – while I reduce the pile of impossible crime stories by Paul Doherty and Herbert Resnicow. It's a job fraught with temptations, peril and sacrifice, but somebody has to do it!

The Matt Cobb series:

Killed in the Ratings (1978)

Killed in the Act (1981)

Killed with a Passion (1983)

Killed on the Ice (1984)

Killed in Paradise (1988)

Killed on the Rocks (1990)

Killed in Fringe Time (1995)

Killed in the Fog (1996)
Murder – All Kinds (2003)

Rated M for Murder: Viewer Discretion Advised

"Television has brought back murder into the home – where it belongs"

- Alfred Hitchcock.

Yesterday, I had one of those lazy days, whose hours were entirely at my disposal to be wasted as I saw fit, and without any intrusions from other carbon-based life forms or anything of actual importance to do it was inevitable that I ended up pulling William DeAndrea's Killed in the Ratings (1978) from my congested shelves – and the book neatly ties-in with the previous, sloppily scribbled, review I posted only a few days ago.

William DeAndrea's Killed in the Ratings and Herbert Resnicow's The Gold Solution (1983) were both bestowed with a nomination for a prestigious Edgar award in the category of Best First Novel, but it was DeAndrea who walked away clutching the coveted statuette to his chest – and having read these narratives back-to-back it became apparent to me why Resnicow was unable to cash in his nominee in exchange for a bust of the father of the detective story. The Gold Solution is an entertaining and diverting read, showing plenty of zest and imagination, but also displays a still inexperienced writer who was testing the waters of the mystery genre. DeAndrea, on the other hand, seemed thoroughly comfortable within the genre in his debut – even though the plot was still rough around the edges. 

Killed in the Ratings formally introduces the readers to Matt Cobb, a corporate trouble shooter in the employ of a television network and attached to Special Projects, in which he handles everything that's too ticklish for security and too nasty for public relations, but in his first outing he has not yet earned his promotion to vice-president and the full responsibility of their dirt-sheet cover-up division – and as the events unfolded in this book I became, more and more, curious how the heck he survived this case to rise through the ranks of the networks. DeAndrea threw everything at him, from a phony murder rap that looms over his head like the Sword of Damocles to a band of mobsters stalking his every move, and he handled it all!

The trouble begins when Matt Cobb receives an uptight telephone call from a man who implores to rendezvous with him at a dingy, second-rate hotel, to discuss matters that will proof to be ruinous to the network and network television in general or else he will spill his story to the FBI, but it takes the name of his ex-girlfriend to agree to the meeting – and I think even the most unseasoned reader of detective stories can guess what happens next. Upon entering the grubby hotel room, Cobb stumbles over the body of a man, with an uncomfortable looking switch-blade stuck in his back, and is clobbered from behind with an ashtray – leaving him with more than he can explain to the cops when it's their turn to come busting through the door.

Making your protagonist one of the prime-suspects has long since ceased to be a revolutionary plot device, but in the able hands of a gifted artist there still is fun to be have with that ploy and I can envisage DeAndrea smirking as he came up with another disastrous plot twist to drag Cobb even deeper into a catastrophic quagmire. The reason why he wasn't charged on the spot is that he had a reasonably acceptable story to tell them and the fact that the homicide detective in charge is a close friend to his family, but the first antagonist he faces in this story is a Second Grade Detective who sees in him an easy collar to polish up his résumé – and he feels strengthened in his precipitate conclusion after uncovering that the blood-spattered stiff on the floor is the ex-husband who whisked away his ex-girlfriend to make her his wife. Cobb didn't help his case, either, by spending an hour at her apartment after the murder. 

But wait, it gets better! In between several botched attempts on his life, he also has to shake off an unscrupulous agitator and his henchmen who shares the detective's conviction of his guilt and holds him personal responsible for missing out on a big chunk of potential revenue – giving the plot more of a hardboiled edge than the later entries in this series. The story gets really violent at one point and I wonder if DeAndrea hadn't fully made up his mind at this point whether he should lean more to the tough, hard-bitten gumshoes or embrace the orthodox, puzzle-orientated approach, but when it was time to wrap-up all the loose-ends, during a William Powell-type dénouement, he had branded, what would become, in the succeeding years, his trademark on this book – equating hardboiled story telling with a conventional, intricately constructed plot and not afraid to crack a joke at his own expense. One of my favorite scenes in the book comes when Cobb is forced to hitch a ride from two gangsters, at gunpoint, to meet their employer while they exchange cutesy insults and acting very much like stereotypical gumshoe/mobsters – at which Cobb reflects that they must have watched the same movies when growing up.

That's William DeAndrea for you! He was well aware that his types of books didn't really require him to gaze too deeply into the human psyche and find the words needed to describe its dreary scenery, but that instead he could pull his readers into a parallel world where he could thrill, baffle or merely make people laugh – and that is, for the most part, enough for me. But just to show-off that he was better than most of his contemporaries in the field he made a social comment on racism and renounced it in a few, effective sentences when it would've taken most writers a couple of hundred pages. The mob-boss in this book is a Jew with a nasty personality and this elicits a comment from the homicide cop, who's doing his best to pin a murder charge on our trouble shooter, at which Cobb muses that it takes only one bad apple to confirm the stereotype and give people the excuse needed to be racist. Great huh? Cobb repudiates both the behavior of the self-styled Godfather and the attitude of the one-track cop without delving into unresolved childhood trauma's! These books should be required reading for everyone who wants to be a published author of crime books.

There are, however, two minor blotches that mar the overall quality of the book. The first speck is that I anticipated part of the solution because it was alluded to in one of the later stories, Killed on the Rocks (1990), but that's hardly a valid complaint when judging this book. The second problem is that one of the plot threads, concerning a key player, wasn't fairly clued and most of the revelatory information, hinting at part of the motive, was withheld from the reader until the final moment, but it's such a rich and complicated plot that's easy to overlook this single oversight and I'm very lenient when it comes to first efforts at crafting a detective story – so I'm going ahead and give this one full marks!

On a final note, I want to say that the next review here will be one in the series of foreign mysteries. But I haven't decided whether to go with a modern or a classic one. One of these days, these luxury problems will drive me sane again!

Killed in All Kinds of Ways

"Maybe the truth is that Bill was a man who believed that fairy tales came true, and that we can live happily ever after – but his fairy tales were more like fractured ones from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle Show than anything that might have been written by brothers named Grimm. These stories are fairy tales in their way, and at the same time homage to the genre he spent his life immersed in."

- Jane Haddam

Yes, another review of a book that has William DeAndrea's name plastered across the front cover, but this one is special – a posthumous compendium that's an exhibit in miniature scale of his considerable talents as a storyteller and plotter. The first fistful of stories feature Matt Cobb, a specialized trouble shooter for a television network, handling everything that's too ticklish for security and too nasty for public relations, who's job often drags him into high-profile and baffling murder cases connected to the world behind the small screen. The book also includes two Holmesian pastiches, one of them narrated with the voice of the hardboiled detective, and the remaining tales are standalones – one of them the standout story of this collection. Lamentably, he never wrote any short stories that chronicled one of the many cases that were handled by Niccolo Benedetti and Ronald Gentry, and which were alluded to in The Werewolf Murders (1992). 

Murder – All Kinds (2003) opens with a short introduction from his wife, Jane Haddam, who's an accomplished mystery author herself, telling briefly of one of those domestic tragedies that most of us, unfortunately, are all too familiar with from personal experience. But optimistically noted that he produced a lot of work in the final year of his life, and that "it's impossible to tell which were written when he was sick and which when he was well." I found myself agreeing with her, more and more, with each passing story!

Matt Cobb, Special Projects:

Snowy Reception

In this opening story, Matt Cobb is escorted to an airport by two federal government agents to identify a notorious terrorist – who procured a spot on the most wanted list by taking the anchorman of the Evening News hostage and murdering several security guards. The consequences of this on-air killing spree made the fame-seeking terrorist a bit camera shy and upon his escape abroad, he drastically altered his appearance. Cobb identifies him by pointing out the one thing even the best plastic surgeons in the world couldn't alter. This is a fun, but slight, story that reminded me of some of the tales from Detective Conan, in which a single suspect has to be deduced from a suspicious lot of characters.

Killed Top to Bottom

With the sole exception of a sobbing clown, everyone started hugging the concrete floor when an unobserved assailant took aim at the host of a local cable show – a noted professor of linguistics. The smoking gun proves to be as elusive as the shooter and the solution as to how it was obscured is exemplar of DeAndrea's creativity. There's also a hilarious scene, in which Matt Cobb wrestles the half hysterical clown to the ground and is stunned by a security guard, who was under the impression that he had stopped an attempted rape, and this skirmish turns out to contain an important clue!

Killed in Midstream

Justice Quest is a true-crime show that asks its viewers to help them shed some light on unsolved mysteries, but the ratings have been lagging behind that of its competitors and it's given one more shot at reeling in viewers with a high-profile, mind blowing case – and dispatches Matt Cobb and one of the shows executives to the island of an ex-diamond merchant. The merchant and his cat were the only ones who survived a massacre at his store, in which the lives of twenty-seven people were extinguished to safely obtain a pile of precious stones, and whomever was responsible got away with it. But when Matt Cobb and his TV station starts probing the case again, it becomes evident that the police were looking for the mass murderer too far away from home. And the method for hiding diamonds is one of the cleverest I have ever come across in a detective story!

Killed in Good Company

Matt Cobb receives an invitation to partake in a round-table discussion with other famous investigators for a documentary, but the discussions are interrupted by the noisy rattling emanating from the cupboards of skeletons demanding to be let out – with deadly results. Cobb nearly lost his life when he attempted to save a retired private eye from the poisonous fumes that filled his room and the method employed here is both brilliant and original. The story also very much reminded me of Rex Stout's novella "Too Many Detective" (collected in Three for the Chair, 1957) and the gathering of detectives in volume 30 of Detective Conan/Case Closed.

Other Stories:

Hero's Welcome

A short-short Cold War spy story, in which a Soviet agent returns home and there's an expected twist ending. Not a very interesting story, I'm afraid.

Sabotage

This is the standout story I referred to earlier, and I can't tell too much about it without divulging any of its surprises. But it's a story that keeps you guessing until the end which direction the plot is going to take and involves a dedicated psychiatrist, questing for the reason behind the suicide of one of his patients, a promising teenage genius, and its connection with a radical figurehead of the pro-environmental movement – and ties it neatly together with one of the most dreadful tragedies of the modern era. Why can't more modern crime stories be like this?

Friend of Mine

Even in the broadest interpretation used these days, it's impossible to pigeonhole this story as one of crime or detection, however, there is a sense of genuine mystery – but one that's more at home between the crumbling pages of classic tales of horror and adventure. In this modern fable, a soldier, stationed in the artic region, has a brush with Victor Frankenstein's monstrous creation – who has been elevated to Godhood by the locals. It's completely out-of-place in this collection, but nonetheless a very engaging read and a first-rate pastiche of Mary Shelley's immortal horror yarn.

The Adventure of the Cripple Parade (ascribed to Mickey Spillane)

Depending on where you stand, this is either one of the most successful or one of the most disastrous attempts at bonding the European and the American detective story. Here we have the personification of the conventional detective story, who's voice suddenly vibrates with the violent poetry of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane – and vows revenge to whoever beat Watson to a bloody pulp. I guess this is a nod to The Maltese Falcon (1930). Although Sam Spade's motive for finding his partner's assailant wasn't driven by the kind of friendship that Holmes feels for Watson. Anyway, it's a surprisingly amusing story, but not that everyone is going to like.

The Adventure of the Christmas Tree

This is a bona fide attempt at recreating Conan Doyle's magic, in which the forester of a Scottish lord brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson a most singular problem: the Christmas tree he hand picked and marked for his master was spirited away from his private woods, but nevertheless turned up in the ancestral home of his employer! Coincidently, the Lord is entertaining an important German diplomat, while they negotiate the terms of important business deals between their nations, and the tree has an important bearing on these talks. In the end, Holmes and Watson foil a devious conspiracy that might have kicked started WWI prematurely. However, it's not one of the most ingenious Sherlock Holmes stories I have ever read, original or replica, but it's amusing enough and would've made a fun episode with Jeremy Brett.

Prince Charming

A cutesy retelling of the titular fairly tale trope in a contemporary setting with a kidnapping plot woven into the story telling. The story actually managed to utterly fool me, because I was convinced that Prince Charming staged the kidnapping of a young heiress in order to cast himself in the role of her savior and get his hands on all of her fathers money by marrying her – completely forgetting that in fairly tales lovers are supposed to live happily ever after. Oh well...

Murder at the End of the World

This previously unpublished story, set in the 1970s, is basically Orson Welles The War of the Worlds Hoax as perceived by a scribbler of detective stories, in which the military accidentally sends out an erroneous emergency notification to all radio and television stations – entailing that a nuclear strike against the country is imminent. This causes a panic at a small student radio station that leads to a vicious assault on one of them, but what possible motive still stands in the face of a nuclear fall-out? The solution, unfortunately, is uninspired, but that's more than made up by the premise of the story and the surprise of the hidden and understated identity of the detective!  

Altogether, this is a solid collection, comprising of all the short stories William DeAndrea produced during his life time, which is certainly worth acquiring if you're already a fan of his work – or just enjoy kicking back with a bunch of well written stories.

The Ties That Bind

"Nero Wolfe would never start tramping through the woods in twilight"

"No," Benedetti conceded. "He would remain home in comfort reading a book while his assistant went tramping through the woods at twilight. At least you have me here to complain to."

In a previous review, I briefly told the story of how William DeAndrea had softened my pessimistic, anti-modernist attitude towards everything published after the 1940s – and his novels starring Niccolo Benedetti and Ronald Gentry were instrumental in converting me. The HOG Murders (1979) and The Werewolf Murders (1992) are elaborately plotted intrigues, with well-drawn and eccentric characters, that assure the reader that the larger-than-life detectives, from the grand old era, never really strayed that far away from the printed page.

Niccolo Benedetti is a world-renowned professor of criminology, who prefers to be perceived as a philosopher in pursuit of truth behind human evil, and poring over my notes he struck me on his first appearance as a benign and hand-tame Hannibal Lecter – and his character is loaded with eccentricities. To begin with, he's a prodigy artist whose paintings reflect the state of the investigation: at the start of his hunt they are almost hyper-realistic and gradually become more abstract as he closes in on the truth. He also loves to flirt and hates spending money, always fobbing off the bill on someone else, in spite of receiving astronomical fees. There is a delightful scene in The Werewolf Murders, in which he shows how to collect an enormous fee and still come across as the embodiment of generosity and patriotism. Nero Wolfe could learn a thing or two from him!

The Archie Goodwin to his Nero Wolfe is the private investigator Ronald Gentry, who was personally trained by the professor, and the team is rounded out by Ronald's wife, Janet – a psychoanalyst who provides her insight into the human psyche to their investigations. Yeah, this is not exactly like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, to which this series is often compared, but the nucleus of their partnership is essentially the same: Niccolo Benedetti is the brilliant European detective and Ronald Gentry is the smart-mouthed American gumshoe.

The Manx Murders (1994) is their last recorded case and it's very dissimilar to the prior books in this series, in which they were close on the heels of serial killer who either threw an entire town into a frenzy or stalked a sumptuous mountain resort packed with international scientists – and compared with that this is a rather domestic affair that involves a rivalry between elderly twin millionaires.

Clyde Pembroke, a bird-lover, and his twin-brother Henry Pembroke, who breeds Manx's, have been at odds for years, but now their feud seems to prevent the production of an important air filter – and the government implores the eminent criminologist to act as an intermediary between the quarreling brothers. He's not very keen on accepting this assignment, but when all the birds disappear from their private nature preserve he recognizes a glimpse of evil and heads down to their estate, consisting of a lap of ground and two Victorian mansions, Alpha House and Omega House, with his assistants, Ronald and Janet, in tow. Regrettably, the tantalizing semi-impossible situation of the vanishing birds is shoved to the background, and the book needs half a dozen warm-up chapters before it starts picking up steam.

The unfathomable incident of the birds could've been a merely malicious prank, but when a stray cat is brutally killed and basically dumped on their doorstep, everyone becomes aware of the malevolent presence whose ominous shadow looms over the estate – and nobody can ignore this being when one of the twins is kidnapped and a ransom of $1.000.000 is demanded for his safe return. But when the ransom money is delivered, completely according to the given instruction, they are lead back to an abandoned barn where they discover the murdered and still warm remains of the abductee!

Basically, the plot has enough clever bits and pieces to satisfy its readers, however, it's not as intricately constructed as the previous stories and the shallow, almost dried-up, pool of suspects makes it more suited for a short story or novella than a full-length novel. You could easily trim a hundred pages from the book and it would only strengthen the plot, because the main trick of the easily identified murderer, which, admittedly, is very canny and retrospectively somewhat of an impossible crime, just came up short to justify all of its two hundred and some pages.

However, all things considered, The Manx Murders is still a pretty good read, despite some of its shortcomings, and a solid enough effort from an author who was usually in the habit of turning out brilliant stuff – and pass experiences shouldn't take anything away from this book that, alas, doesn't quite reach the heights of its predecessors. But hey, if this is the type of stuff you produce on an off day, then wow, you're something else!

Cobb's Night With a Frozen Fright

"I went to the bar and made a bourbon and soda for myself. Ralph had one too. He looked as exhausted as I felt. I had no idea how guys like Hercule Poirot and Doctor Fell managed it. Yes, I did. By not being real, that’s how they managed it."

- Matt Cobb

If you know me just a little bit, you're probably aware that I look at the post-GAD era as a dry wasteland, barren of any creativity, and it must have come as a mild shock to see my rigidly frozen, anti-modernist stance thawing over the past few months – as I discovered and enjoyed the stories from many different contemporary crime writers. I still think the oasis patches of green and blue are few and far between, but it's gratifying to know they're still out there and escaped being buried under an ever increasing pile of bloated, third-rate mush that the lion's share of publishers like to barf out on their reading audience.

William DeAndrea probably is the one who's responsible for swaying me into reconsidering my standpoint on modern detective stories. This transition from fundamentalist to moderate happened last year, when I read Killed in Paradise (1988), The HOG Murders (1979) and The Werewolf Murders (1992). I had bought them, more or less, on a whim, but was amazed to learn that they possessed all the qualities of the past masters of the genre – it was like being confronted with a living fossil from the Cretaceous Period!

Killed on the Rocks (1990) is another fine example of William DeAndrea adjusting the traditional detective story to a modern surrounding without sacrificing any of it's authenticity – as Matt Cobb solves an seemingly impossible murder at a snowbound mansion. 

Matt Cobb is the quintessential American detective, whose narrative voice echoes the tone of the hardboiled gumshoe, especially Archie Goodwin's spirit reverberates through his lines, but what sets him apart from Archie Goodwin, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe is that he's not a licensed private investigator. Cobb is the Vice President of a TV-station simply known as The Network and he's in charge of Special Projects, which basically means that he's a specialized troubleshooter – and one that's much needed when dealing with the rich and famous. 

His current assignment focuses on overseeing and protecting the negotiations between The Network and the billionaire Gabby Drost, a corporate raider and economic pirate, who wants to buy the television station and the wheeling and dealing is to take place at his mountain mansion – and Matt Cobb is send along after a series of anonymous letters that put question marks to Drost's sanity and that a deal with him will mean certain ruin for The Network.

A slightly eccentric, soon to be departed, billionaire? Check!

An isolated mansion? Check!

Populated with an ill-assorted cast of characters? Check!

A paralyzing snowstorm? Check!

A sort of unofficial detective who just happens to be around whenever bodies start hitting the floor? Check!

The game's afoot? You bet!

On the morning after their first night at the luxurious mountain retreat, they awaken at the sight of their host's body laying outside of the house – squashed on the rocks and there's field of unbroken snow between the unsightly remains and the front door! There's not even a single track of footprints leading up to the macabre composition in red and white!

I've read many different solutions to these kinds of miracle problems, but this one takes the cake for sheer complexity – sporting one of the most contrived answers on how to trod through a blanket of virgin snow without leaving any footprints. Don't get me wrong, I mean this in the best way possible. It's true that impossible crimes are often best explained with a simple, yet brilliant, solution, but sometimes overly elaborate ones can be just as satisfying. However, I have to stroke my own ego here for a moment by saying that my solution would've been a lot easier to execute and still being just as clever as this one.

But the entire plot doesn't just orbit around that single question of how the murderer pulled off this illusion, but is also loaded with enough pressing questions to keep Cobb and the reader occupied until the final chapter – and shows how the traditional detective story benefits from an upgrade when it's done by someone who knows what he's doing. There are a number of queries raised in the story that you won't find in a classic whodunit from the 1930/40s. For example, why did the wife of Drost make a pass at one of the female representatives of The Network, denying it fervently the following day, and how did a TV set transmit image and sound of the dead man, pointing an accusing finger from beyond the grave, when it wasn't hooked up to anything and was only fed power from the electric socket? 
 

DeAndrea proved here that he was a first-rate all-rounder as he skillfully sets-up a story that's both meticulously constructed as well as having it moments of thrilling suspense – and has an eye for developing his regular character in more well-rounded characters, but he never, for even single moment, forgot that he was writing a detective story and not a soap opera. In effect, he was one of the few who showed that tradition and innovation aren't mutually exclusive in this genre. What a terrible loss for us that he died so young! If only we could trade him back for writers such as Dan Brown, Gilbert Adair or any other second-rate reject who couldn't make it as a "serious" writer and decided to fluff up their shallow musings on live with a few crimes and euphorically present it as a literary thriller. 

 William L. DeAndrea  (1952-1996)

 

Matt Cobb series: 

Killed in the Ratings (1978)

Killed in the Act (1981)

Killed With a Passion (1983)

Killed On the Ice (1984)

Killed in Paradise (1988)

Killed On the Rocks (1990)

Killed in Fringe Time (1994)

Killed in the Fog (1996)

Niccolo Benedetti series:

The Hog Murders (1979)

The Werewolf Murders (1992)

The Manx Murders (1994)