I confess that I used to be sniffy about readers who dug whodunits just because it was set in a city or region that they knew. I mean, I like recognizing streets and landscapes, but for whodunnits it’s not the setting but the story and the characters. Lew Archer doesn’t have to be in L.A. for Ross Macdonald to have him go through lots of satisfying and universal twists and turns.

I’ve seen the light, I’m not condescending anymore. I really liked the Western New York touches in this novel; he even mentions now defunct Mohawk Airlines, a regional carrier back in the day. The other nostalgic point is that this is set in the long gone Sixties, before transportation pattern changed and oil and gas got expensive, when places like Jamestown and Olean could hold their own economically.

Lawrence Block says,

I was living in Tonawanda, a suburb of Buffalo, when I began the book, and I went to Toronto, Canada, and Olean, New York, to research the scenes I set there. Year later a professor at Olean’s St. Bonaventure University booked me for a talk and reading. The book was a hot ticket in Olean, let me tell you, if nowhere else in the known universe. 

He’s selling the book short. The 1965 novel, re-printed by Hard Case Crime in 2011, rocks as a caper novel. Two veteran con-artists and one greenhorn line up an Olean, New York real estate wheeler dealer on a phony “land in Canada” deal. Block gives the feeling that he has insider knowledge of con artistry. The swindler’s assumptions and concerns are narrated persuasively. Just so, because the narration is an interior monologue of a veteran con man.

The characterization of the Olean moneybags mark and the novice con artist are both excellent. The mark is so shrewd that the con artists play on his shrewdness. Illustrating W.C. Fields’ aphorism, “You can’t cheat an honest man,” they use the larceny in the heart of the mark against him.

This is #7 of 19 mysteries featuring one-armed, Polish-Lithuanian PI Dan Fortune (Fortunowski) of New York City. Dan is asked by an old friend, an Armenian-American belly dancer, for assistance. Her husband wants to renew a lease with a huge corporation but he can’t find anyone in the company to handle the routine paperwork. Dan agrees to intervene in the runaround and find the elusive executive who theoretically handles that procedure. While on the hunt, Dan runs around Manhattan, the industrial wastelands of New Jersey, and pristine spots of SoCal like Ventura. Four murders occur, some for understandable reasons, some senselessly hinging on bad luck.

Dan ends up interacting with bosses and employees of International Metals and Refining Corporation (IMG). One of their lines is the manufacture of pure titanium. Collins had a degree in chemistry and was a technical/writer editor for chem-e journals. So, the technical side of the story feels real. I like credentials in an author

The mystery will feel real to readers of certain age, who were young adults forty years ago. Old-fashioned ideas pop up, such as the irresistible urge all women feel to have babies and the implacable will to power, property, and success in all men. As ecologically-minded as Ross Macdonald, Collins holds up Jersey as an environmental nightmare that was devastated by amoral corporations. The execs of big business smugly feel themselves beyond the reach of the law. But, middle-aged men, vulnerable to the rhetoric of assertive self-empowerment of the era, wonder about the impossibility of balancing real freedom with homey security, cozy benefits with clear and exciting risks. Like a Simenon character at the end of his tether, a 40-ish research scientist bemoans his fate: “When there’s nothing left to dream, you’re dead.  A blue death, oxygen-starved.  My life is over.”

The plot is ingenious, the characters persuasive, the tone matter-of-fact, the nostalgia disarming. Dan is an absolutist and idealist, looking for a perfect world in which human beings can run as free as dogs. IMR robotoids are all moral relativists. Well-worth reading, if only as an artifact of a bygone era.

Madeline Fraser, with her silver voice and charming manner, became a radio favorite in late 1940s Manhattan. On air one early April day, however, her guests toasted each other with a glass of Hi-Spot, “the soft drink you dream of.” Then, suddenly to everybody’s shock and horror, one of the guests gagged and keeled over dead. The smell of bitter almonds said “cyanide” to the doctors. And “murder” to Lt. Cramer of the Homicide Bureau.

But for a week the cops have gotten nowhere.

Private eye Nero Wolfe, whose curiosity in the case was piqued by the papers, decides to take the case. The more compelling reason, his assistant Archie Goodwin points out in his witty narration, lies in the grim necessity of paying Wolfe’s tax bill of $20,000 (in today’s money, about $197K) to the IRS.

While Wolfe tricks the Police Department into doing most of the legwork, he sends Archie out on assignments related to both the business side and detecting side of the agency. The slow progress of the case tries Archie’s patience. So he needles Wolfe in his subtle way.

“I have to talk with that girl. Go and bring her.” 
I had known it was coming. “Conscious?” I asked casually. 
“I said with her, not to her. She must be able to talk. You could revive her after you get her here. I should have sent you in the first place, knowing how you are with young women.” 
“Thank you very much. She’s not a young woman, she’s a minor. She wears socks.” 
“Archie.” 
“Yes, sir.” 
“Get her.” 

The young woman turns out to be a quintessential bobby-soxer, dazzled by celebrity and tossing out slang that the word-loving Stout obviously enjoys parodying. “Mellow greetings, yookie dookie!” All of the characters, in fact, are well drawn.

To my mind, the post-WWII Wolfe novels are among the best, neither too long nor too convoluted or far-fetched. Unlike the first half-dozen or so Wolfe novels, there are no slow spots. Mystery critics Barzun and Taylor selected this one as one of four best Wolfe novels.

Lathen’s smart stylish mysteries take aim at large institutions. She lampooned our diplomats in the State Department in Murder Against the Grain, racists on Wall Street in Death Shall Overcome, the auto industry in Murder Makes the Wheels Go Round, university professors and top administrators in Come to Dust. In this one, her target is the medical system, suburban hospitals, and the pharmaceutical industry. Sure, the book is dated – people smoke in hospitals, unreal – but commentary on why medications cost so much frickin’ money and how that presents a financial burden on working class people still rings true after all these years.

In this novel, shady medical practices are revealed during a law suit. The patient died on the operating table but the suit questions whether the cause of death was a bullet by his own hand or the seven hemostats left inside him after the round’s removal. Her portrait of the doctors, nurses, and staff circling the wagons to protect their jobs and the reputation of the hospital sears with serio-comic denunciation of cover-ups. So much for the Hippocratic oath in the aftermath of the murder of egocentric surgeon (is that redundant?).

This was this seventh of John Putnam Thatcher’s cases. Lathen’s construction of a puzzle is better in this outing than usual. There is a large number of suspects so the perp is not obvious. The best point is the interesting setting and witty prose.