A Sad Song Singing by Thomas B. Dewey

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Among such knowledgeable readers as the people who read this blog, confusion will inevitably arise due to the similarity of the names Thomas B. Dewey and Thomas E. Dewey. Thomas B. wrote mysteries starring the one-named PI Mac. Pictured left, Thomas E. was a New York Republican about whose facial hair Herbert Hoover observed, “”A man couldn’t wear a mustache like that without having it affect his mind.”

Thomas B. Dewey wrote about 16 Mac novels from 1947 to 1970. A Sad Song Singing was written in 1963, about half-way through the life of the series. Mac’s stomping ground is Chicago. One theme in Dewey’s books is lost youth, so in this one features a seventeen-year-old girl who has been driven out of her country town by gossip to the big bad city. Her guitar-strumming folk song-singing boyfriend has left her with a locked suitcase, telling her not to open it and that he’ll be back for it. But three thugs are after the suitcase and will stop at nothing to get it. The girl hires Mac with money she made waitressing in a coffee house. As in the music-related mystery Blues for the Prince by Bart Spicer, this novel has cool period details about the folk music, beatnik, and hootenanny scene of the late Fifties.

There are also hints of the generation gap that was to receive so much attention in the middle Sixties. Mac is in his mid-thirties. As quiet, sensitive, and compassionate as Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, Mac thinks, “I had no way to read what was in her mind.” This is a common enough response to teenager females but especially ones who learned at home from an early age never ever to disclose anything that was going on in their heads.

I thought the prose was subdued, if well-crafted and eminently readable. The thugs lack names, which implies that they are relentless forces that we can’t help fearing. From Elkhart, Indiana and having lived all over the Midwest, Dewey effectively evokes the country towns outside Chicago and Gary. This novel was good enough to put me on the look-out for others in the Mac series or his other PI hero, Pete Schofield who solved cases with his red-headed bombshell of a wife Jeannie (which I pronounce “genie”).

In 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction, critic and mystery writer Bill Pronzini hailed A Sad Song Singing as “one of the ten best private-eye novels ever written” and praised the book for its “emotional depth and impact.” In 2007 Pronzini told an interviewer, “My favorite character is Thomas B. Dewey’s private detective Mac, who is hard when he should be but still human and sometimes vulnerable. I tried to create the same kind of mixture with Nameless.”

The Case of the Screaming Woman by Earle Stanley Gardner

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Super-lawyer Perry Mason acquires a client because the client’s wife doesn’t believe for a minute her husband’s tale about picking up a stranded woman in the middle of the night and dropping her off at the Beauty Rest Motel after registering as husband and wife. She asks Perry Mason to cross-examine the hubby in order to prove his tale is full of holes.

The husband is a sales manager and trainer who has excessive confidence in his ability to overcome sales resistance and make people believe anything he wants them to. During the interrogation, Mason finds the client is so up to his keister in suspicious circumstances that his lame story won’t whitewash.

Soon enough the relentless tentacles of the police tighten and Mason finds himself in legal quicksand. Though he protests in legal mires he prefers to be, even his loyal confidential secretary Della Street wonders aloud if he can avoid being disbarred.

Follow Mason as he blazes a trail to uncover black market adoptions, abused narcotics and blackmail until he plays one last gambit in the climactic court-room scene.

Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Consulting detective Nero Wolfe must leave his beloved brownstone in New York City in order to deliver the keynote address at a meeting of master chefs. One of masters has a sausage recipe that Nero has been seeking for decades so this allure tempts him to the Kanawha Spa resort in Marlin County, West Virginia. A wicked chef who steals recipes, jobs and wives ends up the murder victim, presenting us with a virtual locked room mystery. Nero investigates .

One stand out scene is when Nero speaks to a group of black cooks and waiters. To persuade them to open up, he delivers Stout’s enlightened (for the late 1930s) views on social justice. He is so effective that he persuades a college student to speak up and tell what he witnessed in the murder room – a white man in blackface due to burnt cork.

This was the fifth novel in the series. To my mind, it shows that after the first 3, which were very long in the golden age tradition, Stout was starting to tighten up his plotting. His sentences are still lengthy, with copious phrases and clauses. Stout did like hard words too, such as “coquine” instead of “naughty” or “sassy.” Taking Nero out of the brownstone, of course, lends itself to ‘fish out of water’ situations.

Highly recommended despite the time-bound attitudes.

The Case of the Sun Bather’s Diary by Erle Stanley Gardner

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

A girl’s father has been wrongfully convicted of a bank heist and penned in San Quentin. The loot was never recovered. Assuming the girl knows where it’s stashed and is tapping the haul, the insurance company PI’s and LA cops take turns keeping the girl under surveillance. She knows she is being watched but that does not stop her from nude sun bathing in remote SoCal spots where she has parked her fancy trailer.

We hard-core Perry Mason fans simply sigh. We are used to opening chapters that feature “opaque raincoats” (TCO Glamorous Ghost) and “swimming nymphs” (TCO Negligent Nymph) and hitchhiking girls who “looked childish in her innocence, a platinum blonde with a poker face, wide blue eyes, thin, flawless skin and a good figure (TCO Vagabond Virgin).”

But this odd Perry Mason story provides plenty of departures from the scantily-clad norm. For one, at 230 pages, it is unusually long, with all the chapters a bit over 10 pages. Gardner stretches things out with longish passages about the routine steps in tracking down a perp, the minutiae of transporting cash in armored cars, and puzzling activity that leads to Nowheresville, contributing to neither the plot nor character development (not that Gardner was an adept in that department). Finally, in an odd preliminary hearing scene, Mason himself has to take the stand and get grilled by DA Hamilton Burger, who very kindly reminds him of his right not to incriminate himself.

If you are a hard-core Perry, Della, and Paul fan like I know I am, you’ll like this one despite the rather inane plot. If you are new, you should read, say, The Case of the Counterfeit Eye.

The Sailcloth Shroud by Charles Williams

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Charles Williams (1909 – 1975) is known for writing taut suspense stories, a few such as Dead Calm and Aground with a nautical theme. On the water is out of my comfort zone. Though I grew up in a Great Lakes state, I’m no sailor. So, I read passages like, “There’s a formula for calculating the absolute maximum speed of a displacement hull, regardless of the type or amount of power applied. It’s a function of the trochoidal wave system set up by the boat and is 1.34 times the square root of the waterline length.” And I think, “Okay, I’ll trust you on that.”

But like Patrick O’Brian in the Aubrey-Maturin stories, Williams makes the techno-babble go down easy with his concise, readable style and imaginative story-telling. Despite his Texas origins, he can make his tall tales stay on the plausible side of incredible. In this one, a sailboat captain hires two strangers in Panama to help him pilot a 40-foot ketch back to the US where he can sell it. One of the men dies of a heart attack and must be buried at sea. And just a few days after they land in Texas, the other hire is beaten to death.

Suddenly the captain is subject to unwelcome attention by the cops and FBI and to brutal questioning by hardened criminals. Three flashbacks provide narrative interest. Williams fires off jokes just when the gettin’ can’t get much worse for our hero. He has an excellent touch with down-home metaphors and similes. Like this when our hero manages to run away after “enhanced interrogation techniques”: “My torso felt as if had been emptied and then stuffed with broken glass or eggshells. Every breath was agony, and I ran awkwardly, with a feeling that I had been cut in two and the upper half of my body was merely riding, none too well balanced, on the lower.”

Fine as cream gravy, now that’s talkin’ Texan. I can’t say this one reaches the outstanding standard set by the hard as nails A Touch of Death, because it lacks a femme fatale like the devilish Madelon. Also, the vision of the Spanish moss settings of the Deep South are suggestive but not quite as evocative in this outing. But anybody who likes a rockin’ crime novel or stories of average guys suddenly thrust into hellish circumstances will enjoy this one.