The Case of the Borrowed Brunette by Erle Stanley Gardner

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

The 28th Perry Mason novel was published in 1946. Shortages of housing and consumer products suggest a post-WWII setting as does the tough road of women trying to make it in a man’s world. For instance, Helen Reedley is trying to get out of a marriage in which her husband holds the economic whip hand besides being a domineering oaf. Also, working girl Eva Martell, to make a few bucks and get noticed in Hollywood, accepts a job in which she has to impersonate another woman. Worried that she may be placed in vulnerable legal position, she and her chaperone Adelle Winters consult crack attorney Perry Mason.

The usual inevitabilities arise. A dodgy gambler turned blackmailer is found with a bullet betwixt his eyes. The cops want to pin the killing on Eva and Adelle just because they have an eyewitness report that Adelle put her gun – the murder gun – in a garbage pail. The DA’s hatchet man is out to cut Mason down to size on legal technicalities and secure the flamboyant lawyer’s disbarment. The outcome hinges on a determination of when the crime was in fact committed, not when it seems to have been committed.

But Gardner departs from the norm aplenty. Unexpectedly, familiar characters such as Della Street, Lt. Tragg, and DA Ham Burger don’t play big roles. But there are many more suspects than the usual three or four, all of whom have cool retro names: Orville L. Reedley, Cora Felton, Daphne Gridley, Carlotta Tipton, and Arthur Clovis. Mason and his PI Paul Drake have extensive and complicated conversations exonerating the persons of interest.

Despite a lot of talking, this novel is one of the more exciting and riveting outings purely on the basis of rational thinking. I mean, enthralling given the reader accepts the initial premise of the impersonation, which, to my mind, often does not come off as convincing in whodunnits.

High Tide by P. M. Hubbard

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This 1971 suspense novel was the writer’s tenth novel so it reads like the work of a confident, experienced writer that knows exactly how he wants to tell the story.

Peter Curtis is our first-person narrator. A cultured guy but not an intellectual, Peter hints that he is big and strong enough to be a commando but never dared take the training because he feared with violent skills coupled with his temper he’d be a danger to himself and others. He can usually keep his temper in “dingy kennel” of his mind but when provoked he’s not beyond killing. In fact, the novel opens upon his release from the Big House where he was sentenced to four years for accidentally killing a guy with his bare hands.

The provocation? The vic ran over Curtis’ Labrador.

Curtis does not face the money problems we assume an ex-con would have. So with the dream of buying a sailing boat to cruise the west coast of the Sceptered Isle for a couple of months, he’s driving in the south of England by night and sleeping by day in cheap hotels.

The plot twists when Curtis meets a henchman of the man he killed over the Labby. Then Curtis gets the feeling he is being followed. After adventures with a mysterious girl, Curtis ends up on a Cornish coastal town. Near a hiply designed but deserted farmhouse, he also meets the personification of “still waters run deep” in the form of the wife of a local novelist who writes nautical stories like Patrick O’Brian.

Hubbard also published poetry so he has a keen ear for sounds and a keen eye for details. He effectively evokes the dreary town of Leremouth, with its relentless tides and hazardous quicksand. As a Great Lakes guy, I can recommend this novel as a fine example of the nautical mystery, as enjoyable as Down among the Dead Men by Patricia Moyes, The Sailcloth Shroud by Charles Williams or the immortal The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers.

The Widow’s Cruise by Nicholas Blake

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Set on a ship’s cruise to the Greek islands, this 1959 mystery stars series PI Nigel Strangeways and his live-in GF Clare Massinger, a sculptress like Judith Appleby. They witness an odd situation involving a classics mistress recovering from a breakdown; her rich flashy widowed sister; a loosely educated classicist who is a popularizer and thus a scourge to the scholarly classicist; a flighty selfish school-girl who used to be taught by classicist; her twin brother; a sleazy busybody Brit; a know-all little girl, and a macho-man Greek tour guide who speaks American English.

The set-up is a bit long but things move faster with the disappearance and death of a merry widow’s ugly-duckling sister the classicist and another grisly killing. Aside from the grisliness, another challenging piece of the book is the 17-year-old schoolgirl wanting “experience” from the popularizer who is twice her age. Such bold aspects do not a cozy make. This outing is not as scary as The Corpse in the Snowman or The Beast Must Die; more on the level of The Dreadful Hollow or the first one A Question of Proof.

Nicholas Blake was the penname of Cecil Day-Lewis, classics professor and the Poet Laureate of the UK from 1968 until his death in 1972. Obviously, the vocabulary is literate, carefully chosen, and engaging for us world-weary readers that expect the prose in mysteries to be flat and workmanlike at best. Blake/Day-Lewis creates convincing characters, all with attitudes and motivations that are consistent, plausible and sometimes unsettling. He is especially acute depicting children and youths, probably because he was a teacher for a time. The background scenes of the cruise on the Med are well-done, so this appeals to readers who are a little tired of the country houses of the usual golden-age mystery. Strangeways takes it all the way to the twisted and surprising ending.

Hide and Seek by Wilke Collins

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

First published in 1854, this is an early suspense novel of the writer of the still read The Woman in White and The Moonstone. In Hide and Seek, a deaf and mute girl is rescued from exploitation under the big top. To minimize the risk of carnies kidnapping her back, her adopted father hides her origins under the cover of a modest middle-class family life. But her security and a family secret are threatened by a surly figure from the past, seeking the truth of the girl’s circus origins and bent on revenge.

Always clever and inventive, Collins also shows a kind tender side as he introduces us readers to the quiet life of a unsuccessful artist who has endearingly opted for a career of painting portraits of family members, dogs, and horses of crude manufacturers in order to provide comforts for his bedridden wife. This lovely couple has adopted the afflicted young girl. The murky origins of the girl are revealed as the surly stranger gets on her trail.

Of course, the probability of thrilling events happening in this world is quite low, but one always trusts Collins to carry our interest through admittedly long-winded sections or coincidences that in another writer (Dickens in Oliver Twist, say) would make us jaded readers snort in indignation. At only 29 years of age, in only his third novel, Collins got a handle on what he was doing as a writer.

Unusually for a novelist of that time, Collins sets up a person with a disability as a main character, drawing on John Kitto’s deafness memoir The Lost Senses. Moreover, the character is happy, able to establish relationships with others, helpful to an invalid in the house and ambitious for a career of her own. She is never an object of pity, though she does star in some sorrowful scenes. What helps, of course, is that she is a beautiful as a Pre-Raphelite Madonna.

The other remarkable point in this novel is Collins’ comic sense. Collins could see humor in situations such as the drunken son sneaking back into his father’s house or the incompetent artist boring his audience with contradictory explications of the symbolism in his clichéd paintings. I’m probably overstating this, but I find Collins’ humor much easier to take than Dickens’ facetiousness.

The Case of the Daring Decoy by Erle Stanley Gardner

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

It is 1957. Oil Man Jerry Conway is embroiled in a proxy fight with an ex-employee Gifford Farrell. We know Farrell must be a cad because he has a debonair manner and a pencil-thin moustache. Jerry stumbles into a trap involving a room in a threadbare hotel, a beautiful woman dressed in not much more than a mudpack. Hubba – as they used to say – hubba.

Rosalind – she of mudpack fame – coughs up a recently fired .38 to Conway before he hustles the heck out of there. Jerry high-tails it out of there. Driving away, he discovers one bullet has been fired from the .38 caliber revolver. Feeling legally vulnerable, he calls super-lawyer Perry Mason’s answering service.

Later in the same hotel room Perry and his PI Paul Drake discover the body of an un-mudpacked woman with a bullet in her chest, fired – of course – by the same gun. Mason phones Homicide and confuses the desk clerk with questions just for good measure. The obnoxious SGT Holcomb stomps his way in, suspiciously asking questions that assume Mason is guilty of something. Mason criticizes him for asking questions when he should be securing the murder scene. It’s a nice contrast to the usual unfailingly polite Mason on TV.

Is the frame-up of Jerry perfectamundo? With frank and inhuman glee, will DA Hamilton Burger hang a rap of accessory to murder on Perry?

As always, Gardner indulges his penchant for giving characters odd names. We get Norton Barclay Calvert, Dr. Reeves Garfield, Evangeline Farrell, and the melodious Myrtle Lamar. Another distinguishing point is that Della Street appears in only a couple of scenes – sad for us Della fans – but the one with a chivalrous Perry is a humdinger.

Dead Men Don’t Ski by Patricia Moyes

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

In the first Inspector Henry Tibbett mystery published in 1959, Henry and his wife Emmy take a vacation at a ski resort in the Italian Alps near the Austrian border. It’s in fact a working vacation because his superiors in Scotland Yard have asked Henry to be on the lookout for drug smugglers.

As in the second novel starring Tibbet, Down among the Dead Men, a seemingly accidental death has already occurred before the novel actually gets started. That is, one of the ski instructors ended up in a crevasse because of too much risk-taking.

But another hotel guest, detested by about everybody who had contact with him, is discovered shot dead on the ski lift. Henry joins a local copper and greenhorn Inspector Spezzi to investigate the murder.

Moyes likes to set her mysteries in different locations, such as Geneva (Death on the Agenda) and a London movie set (Falling Star). Like a cozy writer usually does , she employs stock characters: the bright young thing, the good guy with the dodgy past, the Lord Peter type, the mysterious woman, the emotional foreigner, the dumb colonel, the hideous Hun, etc. Henry and Emmy are reassuringly normal – no existential angst on them and Henry’s preternatural intuition (his “nose”) isn’t weird.

Moyes also has a Simenonian sense of the closed community, such as the locals versus the tourists and the local commercial fishers versus the weekend boaters (again Down among the Dead Men). Finally, though I’m not astute when it comes to puzzles, she unfolds the incidents smoothly with only a couple of too obvious techniques “to make ‘em wait,” as Wilkie Collins urged. This one, unexpectedly, did not have draggy spots although it goes almost 300 pages, long for a mystery in my book.

All in all, a strong effort for a first novel and well worth reading.