Too Many Cousins by Douglas G. Browne

Review by Matt B. (buffalosavage)

Six cousins stand to inherit a substantial fortune built by a merchant prince of a grandfather. Then certain of them run into a singularly foul run of bad luck.

One is run down in a road accident.

One is poisoned.

One is drowned.

The fourth, a lucky survivor, is sure that she was pushed into the path of a lorry.

Living to tell her lurid tale, she captures the attention of Mr. Harvey Tuke — Senior Legal Assistant to the Director of Public Prosecutions. On his vacation – of course – he investigates these odd accidents.

Browne is a very clear writer, despite his employment of challenging vocabulary and complex grammar. The plot is seamless and the characters distinct and memorable. Browne captures professional wariness and rivalries so well that I wonder if he was writing from direct experience. The setting is London near the end of WWII so there are curious periodic touches of bombed ruins and saving electricity and gas.

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Somebody Owes Me Money by Donald E. Westlake

Review by Matt B. (buffalosavage)

Chet Conway, a cabbie in the Big Apple, gets a tip on horse race from an appreciative fare who enjoys Chet’s conversation. The horse comes in to the tune of $900.00. At the time the story was set, 1969, that’s about $5,300.00 in our post-modern dollars.

Chet, a gambler, badly needs the cash to pay off markers. But when he goes to collect his winnings, he finds his bookie dead on the floor, his chest looking as if he’d been “hit with anti-aircraft guns.”

Though he hasn’t a clue whodunit, Chet finds himself in the middle of struggles among the cops, two rival gangs of thugs, and the dead bookie’s hottie sister. Abbie’s a card mechanic in Vegas. She has flown in from Las Vegas to avenge her brother’s murder, since she figures her cheating sister-in-law is the perp. Chet and Abbie have slapstick adventures while they avoid the bad guys and get to the bottom of the murder.

Readers looking for a comic-caper stand-alone mystery will be entertained by this novel. Since many chapters end with a cliffhanger, it keeps us readers turning the pages. Westlake is deft with twists and turns and creates interesting characters. He keeps the language simple, so this is extremely easy to read. Westlake is a master of the quip. For instance, Chet ruefully observes that impetuous Abbie has “all the self-preservation instincts of a lemming.” The author is firmly in the tradition of mystery writers poking genial fun at the conventions of mysteries.

I hadn’t read Westlake, whom fans remember fondly for his humor, since I was teenager during the Nixon administration. Clearly, I don’t read in the comic-crime genre much. The reason is that for me comedy, however refreshing witty or farcical or absurd, pales into the merely facetious over the course of a 250-page book. In a mystery, character, setting, plot and suspense have to trump burlesque and high jinks. Still, I liked this return to reading Westlake and will read another of his before another 40 years go by.

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The Instant Enemy by Ross Macdonald

Review by Matt B. (buffalosavage)

Troubled parents call in PI Lew Archer on a runaway daughter case. An additional detail is that the girl and her unstable boyfriend have stolen pop’s shotgun and a few cartridges. Poking around, Archer finds evidence that the weapon has been turned into a sawed-off shotgun. Then a millionaire financier is kidnapped by the young ‘uns. Hey, it’s 1968 in the mystery, so maybe those crazy kids were influenced by the movie Bonnie & Clyde.

The distraught mother of the millionaire offers Archer $100K to get her son back in one piece. As usual, the more interviews Archer conducts, the more tangled the connections among the principals become, which may throw a less than attentive reader. The descriptions are intense and revealing. This, a poor duffer’s stuff:

I could recognize some of the things on sight: a broad-bladed fisherman’s knife to which a few old fish scales were clinging like dry tears, a marriage certificate with deep fold-marks cutting across it, a bundle of letters tied together with a brown shoestring, some rifle bullets and a silver dollar in a net sack, a small miner’s pick, a couple of ancient pipes, an ineffectual-looking rabbit’s foot, some clean folded underwear and socks, a glass ball that filled itself with a miniature snowstorm when you shook it, a peacock feather watching us with its eye, and an eagle’s claw.

Granted, the “dry tears” are over the top, but this gaffe is balanced by the “ineffectual-looking” good luck charm.

All the interview scenes are outstanding, but Macdonald writes brilliantly the interview in which a witness who’s been sitting on something coughs up crucial dope. Macdonald sets an especially rapid pace in this one.

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