Classic Mysteries

Black Orchids 2019 , plus a Nero and a BONA

The Wolfe Pack, the society of fans of Rex Stout's mysteries featuring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, held their 42nd annual Black Orchid Weekend this past weekend. One highlight of the event was the presentation of the Nero Award at the banquet, presented each year to the Best American Mystery. This year's winner was Walter Mosley for Down the River Unto the Sea. 

It's the second Nero Award for Walter Mosley, who also received the award in 2004 for Fear Itself. He accepted the award from Stephannie Culbertson, the Chair of the Nero Award Committee.

Also at the banquet, the Black Orchid Novella Award - known generally as the BONA - went to author Ted Burge for his novella, "The Red Taxi."

The award is presented jointly by The Wolfe Pack and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. It is designed to encourage writers to create a new and hitherto unpublished mystery story at novella length, the length and format which Rex Stout so often used for his shorter stories. Among other honors, the winning novella will be published next summer in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

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The keynote speaker at the banquet was Dr. Amanda Belarmino, who has spent some time with the Wolfe Pack and summarized her findings for us in "The Roaming Wolfe Pack: Seeking Our Favorite Detective Outside the Brownstone."

In addition to the awards and speeches, there were the usual extras - quizzes, toasts to the principal characters in the Nero Wolfe books, song parodies, the presence and participation of Rex Stout's daughter...it's quite an event. Next year's banquet will be on December 5, 2020. Why not join us in New York City next time?

"The Allingham Minibus"

As an author, Margery Allingham has long been considered one of the "Crime Queens" of the British Golden Age of Detection. Her novels, most featuring amateur sleuth Albert Campion, are still read and enjoyed by fans. She was also a prolific writer of short stories, some of which were collected into anthologies both before and after her death. One of those collections, first published in 1973 as The Allingham Minibus (also known as Mr. Campion's Lucky Day and Other Stories), has just been re-released in an e-book edition from Agora Books, and the publisher provided me with an advance proof copy for this review. The Allingham Minibus is the subject of my audio review this week on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you are welcome to listen to the complete review by clicking here.

Fans of Albert Campion should be aware that he is featured in only three of the eighteen stories in this collection. On the other hand, this edition of The Allingham Minibus includes a tribute to Allingham written by Agatha Christie shortly after Allingham's death in 1966, a lovely tribute by one classic mystery writer to another. However, one of the reasons I find Allingham’s stories so appealing is that they are not solely dependent on Campion's presence to succeed. The author was quite versatile, and her flexibility of approach, of subject and of style serves us well in these collections.

The three stories with Campion include two that are so brief as to be really vignettes. The third story, called “The Man With the Sack,” is longer and has more of the gentle humor which may be found in Allingham’s best works, as Mr. Campion gently but firmly, ruins a carefully planned robbery. The other stories in the book range from brief and often eerie tales of mystery to an interesting story called “A Quarter of a Million,” which is really novella length. That one is more of a thriller, with a kidnapping, a theft, and a murder to be solved.

There are also several short stories that cross over to supernatural themes. There are a couple of stories dealing with revenge from beyond the grave; there’s a confrontation with the Devil, and there are others which are less frightening and more moving, but all are written with Allingham’s masterful style as she evokes the people and places that make her stories come alive. There are a few stories that are along the lines of classic puzzle-plot crime fiction, although not all deal with murder. And there are a few which defy being placed easily in stylistic pigeonholes. If you’re looking for a way to spend more time with Margery Allingham’s writings, you’re very likely to enjoy The Allingham Minibus. 

"The Christmas Card Crime" and Other Stories

Among the many fine volumes of traditional mysteries being brought back into circulation through the British Library Crime Classics series, you will find several first-rate collections of short stories, most by Golden Age authors with a sprinkling of both older and younger tales. It's a pleasure to add their latest anthology to this group. In The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories, editor and mystery historian Martin Edwards has selected, and provided introductions for, a group of eleven short mysteries for our reading pleasure. It is being published at the beginning of October as one of the British Library Crime Classics from Sourcebooks and the Poisoned Pen Press, which sent me an advance reader's copy for this review. The book is the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast.

The stories were originally published between 1909 and 1965, and all of them are set in (or at least around) the winter holidays. The authors include some very familiar names, including Carter Dickson, Ronald Knox, John Bingham, John Bude and Julian Symons. Among the seasonal stories you'll find here:

• An unpleasant old man is murdered – but do the police have the right man?
• A train breaks down in a snowstorm, and an abduction and a murder soon follow in a frantic hunt for half of a Christmas card.
• A woman tells a tale of impossible murder and revenge from beyond the grave.
• A mysterious stranger knocks at the door of a remote cottage on a dark and stormy night, with an escaped murderer lurking nearby.
• A man comes up with a plan to get rid of the person who has been blackmailing him – but it may not be as easy as he thinks.

Eleven stories in all, some by authors whose names you’ll recognize, others from classic writers whose fame has faded with time. For a complete list of the stories - and the authors - please listen to the podcast by clicking here - it's not very long and contains fuller descriptions of the collected stories and more information about each of the authors. 

From the Vault: "The Dead Witness"

This week's visit to the Classic Mysteries vault yields a collection of stories that goes back to the earliest days of the "modern" detective story. It's called The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories, edited by Michael Sims, and it delivers exactly what it promises in that title: a collection of very early short stories, written as the English-language crime/mystery story was first being developed, back even beyond those first detective stories written by Edgar Allan Poe. The book appears to be available now primarily as an e-book, but there seem to be a fair number of second-hand copies available, and it also appears to be available as an audiobook. It's worth getting, and I hope my original audio review, written some eight years ago, will persuade you to find a copy. Here's the transcript of my original review, slightly edited as usual:

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Here’s an interesting collection of mysteries for you. You’ll find:

• A short mystery published four years before Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” – generally considered to be the first real modern detective story;
• Another story, from 1866, written and set in Australia – the first to be written by a woman author;
• A short story by Willkie Collins that predates his two famous novels, The Woman in White and The Moonstone;
• Classic stories of detection and mystery from Emile Gaboriau, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, Melville Davisson Post and many others;
• As well as mysteries by Dickens, Twain, Alexandre Dumas and Bret Harte – authors you might not have thought about as mystery writers.

They’re all part of an elegant  collection called The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Detective Stories, edited by Michael Sims.

Given the overwhelming popularity today of mysteries – all sorts of mysteries, in a wide range of genres – it’s hard to believe that the detective story is really less than 200 years old. But it is – and some of the earliest stories still amuse, entertain and entrance readers today, just as they did in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Take the stories you’ll find in a new collection called The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Detective Stories. The editor, Michael Sims, is the veteran anthologist behind a number of excellent collections of early detective fiction. He’s chosen a group of top-notch stories. They’re interesting for their historical place within the mystery genre – but most of them also qualify as highly entertaining reads.

The book is arranged more-or-less in chronological order, beginning with a story by William E. Burton called “The Secret Cell.” It was published in 1837 – four years before Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” – and it has never been reprinted since it first appeared. It deals with the mysterious disappearance of a young heiress and her rescue from a villainous plot. There’s very little deduction involved, but there is a detective who disguises himself in order to track down the villains.

Of course, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is here as well. And the anthology goes on to include quite a number of interesting and thoroughly readable stories. The title story, “The Dead Witness,” for example, from 1866, was written by an Australian named Mary Fortune – and it is said to be the first detective story written by a woman.

One of my favorites was a story by Willkie Collins, the author of “The Moonstone,” called “The Diary of Ann Rodway.” Telling the story through the pages of a young woman’s diary would prove to be a useful and often-repeated technique for Collins. It’s an excellent little story, with a plucky heroine who unravels clues to unmask a killer and see justice served.

Sherlock Holmes is represented here by the chapters in “A Study in Scarlet” in which Holmes shows off his deductive skills for Watson. Chesterton’s Father Brown is represented by “The Hammer of God,” one of the most-frequently-anthologized stories about the little priest.

There are 22 stories in all. Some are by authors who don’t usually come to mind as mystery writers – Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, for example. Others are about detective characters who have largely faded from memory, although their stories are still very much worth reading – Max Carrados, Uncle Abner, Dorcas Dene, Loveday Brooke. Each story has a brief introduction by Michael Sims, who also contributed a lively and informative introduction which provides further context for these stories, their authors and their detectives.

The Dead Witness is a fine companion for a stormy night, when there may be fog and ice and snow all about, and your imagination can almost hear the sound of horse-drawn hansoms rattling through the street outside, beckoning you into a world of gaslight, damsels in distress, evil villains and clever detectives. I highly recommend it.

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You can listen to the complete audio review by clicking here.

Next: The Man in Lower Ten, by Mary Roberts Rinehart.

From the Vault: "A Study in Scarlet"

I suspect that most of the readers who visit my blog will have no difficulty remembering the mystery book that introduced you to - and hooked you on - reading mysteries. In my case, it was Sherlock Holmes, and the very first of Conan Doyle's books about Holmes, the novel A Study in Scarlet. I had just turned ten years old when a friend of the family gave me a copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes - all four novels and fifty-six short stories. My parents were just beginning what was going to be a birthday trip for me, on which I was driven all around the United States (on what was then the existing system of mostly rural roads before the Interstate highway system was established). Sherlock accompanied me. I returned home several weeks later, back from "seeing America" - having, in fact, seen remarkably little of America, because I had spent most of my supposed sightseeing time in the back seat of the car with those Holmes stories. I've never lost my fondness for Holmes in the original format - and, as I'm very much overdue for another reading of the Holmes books, I offer you from the vault my audio review of A Study in Scarlet, which I ran the better part of a decade ago on the Classic Mysteries podcast. As always, it has been slightly edited. But come, the game's afoot:

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A medical man – a combat veteran – is seeking a roommate in Victorian London. A mutual friend introduces him to a most unusual man, whose trade is (for the moment) something of a mystery. He is…well, in his own words now…"I am a consulting detective. Here in London we have lots of government detectives and lots of private ones. When these fellows are at fault, they come to me and I manage to put them on the right scent.”

Does any of that sound familiar? It should. The British medical man is Dr. John Watson. And his new friend and soon-to-be roommate is named Sherlock Holmes. They meet in the early chapters of what would become one of the most influential mysteries of all time – the novel called, A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle.

I think it is fair to say that no more influential fictional detective than Sherlock Homes has ever existed. 132 years after A Study in Scarlet first appeared in a magazine – Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887 – Holmes as a character and as an influence on the whole realm of detective fiction continues to astound us. He is the subject of new movies, new television adaptations, new literary pastiches and parodies – some authorized by the Conan Doyle estate, some less so.

All that influence really comes from an incredibly small literary output – Doyle wrote only four novels and 56 short stories about Holmes. And it all began with the first novel, A Study in Scarlet.

The story begins in London with that first meeting between Holmes and the man who would narrate most of his stories, Dr. John Watson, M.D. Watson, recently invalided out of the British army after receiving war wounds in Afghanistan, is looking for someone to share rooms, as a way of cutting costs. He is introduced to Holmes, a man of mystery to his few friends. In fact, it is not until they are already rooming together that Watson will have a chance to find out what it is, exactly, that Holmes does – and how he uses logic and reasoning to solve seeming inexplicable puzzles.

It is that ability to use logic rather than intuition or guesswork, to observe things that others do not observe, such as splashes of mud or cigar ashes, that gives Holmes his strengths.

And those powers are put to the test when two London police detectives, Lestrade and Gregson, come to Holmes seeking help in solving a lurid and seemingly impossible murder case. It involves the discovery of a man’s body – without wounds – in an empty house. Someone has scrawled the letters r-a-c-h-e in blood upon the wall of the room. What is the significance of that writing? The London detectives have their own ideas – ideas which Holmes finds amusing at best – but it will be Holmes who uses logic to solve both that murder and a second, clearly related killing.

The killer is caught and arrested little more than halfway through the book. At that point, the reader is taken back to events in the American west many years earlier. This kind of split narrative was used in many novels of the period, giving the author the freedom to tell some of what we now call the “backstory” of the novel and explain the motivation behind the events we have witnessed.

Eventually, as the characters move through time, we are brought up to date and Dr. Watson’s narrative resumes – providing another perspective on the events which have taken place. It also gives Holmes a chance to explain to Watson the logical steps by which the murderer was uncovered and the crime explained.

A Study in Scarlet was followed by another novel, The Sign of Four, and then by the first 23 short stories. At the end of that, you may recall, Doyle attempted to kill off his now fantastically successful creation – Doyle thought that Holmes was getting in way of the author’s efforts to write “serious” fiction. Very little of Doyle’s “serious” fiction holds up very well today – nor is it much read. Doyle was forced to bring Holmes back – and Holmes continues to be immensely and intensely popular.

As I said earlier, Holmes was and is absolutely central to detective fiction (even among authors who sneer at him). Whether you come to Holmes through the original books, such as A Study in Scarlet, or through the newest television or movie versions, Les Klinger's brilliantly annotated edition of the complete Holmes books, or through brilliant pastiches such as Laurie R. King’s justifiably popular series about Holmes and Mary Russell, you cannot get away from Holmes. Nor, come to think of it, should you get away.

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You can listen to the original audio review by clicking here. I should also note that there are (on Amazon alone) more than a thousand versions of this book listed, with prices generally quite reasonable (including a couple that are at least nominally free). Your favorite book dealer should have no trouble accommodating your Sherlockian tastes.

Next: Dead Witness, A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories, edited by Michael Sims.

From the Vault: "And Four to Go"

My timing is a little off, due to those couple of weeks around the end of June when I shut my mind down for a vacation. As a result, I now realize, I should have come back from my latest trip to the Classic Mysteries vault with a recommendation that you read - or re-read - a quartet of Rex Stout's novellas about Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, originally published in magazines, then collected and re-published in 1958 as And Four to Go. The reason for my remorse is that three of the four stories in this collection take place on or around holidays (including the Fourth of July), so they would have been more timely around the beginning of this month. They're still an enjoyable read, however. Here's a text of the audio review I wrote for the Classic Mysteries podcast several years ago. As usual, it has been edited somewhat (mostly to remove some outdated information):

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Wouldn’t it be fun to go to a party with somebody like Nero Wolfe’s assistant, Archie Goodwin? Well, based on reading Rex Stout’s novels and novellas about Wolfe and Archie, I’d have to say…probably not. It might be fun, but it could also be dangerous; Archie has an unfortunate way of being on hand when bad things happen to people. Consider what happens in “Christmas Party” – just one of four novellas in the collection And Four to Go, by Rex Stout.

I thought it would be fun to look at some mysteries which take advantage of the holiday seasons as a background for their mayhem. I think that Rex Stout’s novella “Christmas Party" is a good place to start. It is, I think, the only time Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin got caught up in a Christmas crime. “Christmas Party” is one of four novellas collected into the book And Four to Go, and it’s a great deal of fun.

Or is it? Not so much, perhaps, for some of Archie’s friends. He’s invited to a Christmas Party at the office of one of Wolfe’s recent clients…only to find himself on hand when someone is murdered at the party. The police have a great suspect, though – the mysterious man dressed up as Santa Claus who was bartending for the party. Santa disappeared in the commotion around the murder.

So far, so good – but Archie and Wolfe will soon find themselves caught up in the mystery, and Wolfe will have to solve the case himself as quickly as possible to clear his own name.

I don’t want to tell you more, but if you’re looking for some seasonal cheer to get you into the Christmas spirit later this year, “Christmas Party” is certainly a good way to ease into it.

As a bonus, of course, there are the other three novellas in this very good assortment, two of which also use other holidays for their background.

There’s "Easter Parade," for example, where Wolfe’s love of orchids overpowers his common sense. The result is that he sends Archie off to the Easter Parade along New York’s Fifth Avenue for some shady dealings which are supposed to get him a very rare orchid blossom. What he gets for his pains, however, is involvement in another murder which happens right in front of Archie at the parade.

The third case is called "Fourth of July Picnic," and it takes Wolfe out of the 35^th street brownstone and onto New York’s Long Island, where he intends to make a speech to an organization of restaurant workers. So, once again, Archie Goodwin is on hand –and this time with his boss - at the picnic when one of the leaders of the organization is murdered. Wolfe and Archie immediately run afoul of the Long Island authorities, and Wolfe finds himself forced once again to find and deliver the killer before the police make his life totally miserable.

The final novella in this collection is called "Murder Is No Joke," and it is the only one that is NOT set at a holiday period. A would-be client comes to Wolfe’s office asking for help getting rid of a troublesome co-worker – but while the client, Wolfe and Archie are on the phone with that co-worker, they hear what sounds like the co-worker being murdered. But Wolfe is far from satisfied with what he heard – and his investigation will turn up a ruthless killer.

That last story, by the way, has an interesting history. "Murder is No Joke" is one of the few stories that Rex Stout decided to revise after submitting it for publication. He enlarged and expanded the story and published it as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post magazine, under the new title “Frame Up For Murder.” That version of the story eventually wound up in a collection called Death Times Three, published after Stout’s death – so both the original “Murder Is No Joke” and the revised version, “Frame Up for Murder” are available in published versions for comparison.

And Four To Go is a good collection of shorter mysteries. As I have said many times before, I am very fond of the Nero Wolfe novellas; the shorter form forced Stout to be more economical in terms of providing characters and events and there’s no sense of the padding you might find in some of the longer works. Treat yourself to these novellas of three holidays plus a spare in And Four to Go.

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You can listen to the original audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast by clicking here.

Next: A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle.

"The Return of Mr. Campion"

Margery Allingham is generally considered to be one of the "Crime Queens" whose mysteries helped to define what we now consider to have been the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Her amateur detective, Albert Campion, after beginning life as a minor character in her first book, The Crime at Black Dudley, quickly became the star performer in Allingham's later fiction. He appears in more than a dozen novels and a fair number of short stories. Collections of those short stories were released both during the author's lifetime and after her death. The last of those collections, The Return of Mr. Campion, was released in 1989. That collection has now been re-published by Agora Books, and it is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, which you can hear by clicking here. The publisher has made a copy available to me for this review. 

There are 13 stories in this collection – the new edition from Agora Books also includes another story, called “Tall Story,” which originally appeared in a different collection. Albert Campion appears in roughly half of the stories. The others are an eclectic group of tales, generally written when Allingham was quite young. They are all fairly interesting reads, although not all would qualify as mysteries. There are a couple of supernatural stories, one of which may prove offensive to some modern readers because of its racial overtones. There’s a romance or two as well. Curiously for a crime fiction book, there are no murders involved, although a couple of the Campion stories do deal quite well with espionage and blackmail. It should also be said that a couple of the stories in which Mr. Campion DOES appear are really anecdotes rather than stories, written (in earlier years) by Margery Allingham as an introduction to her detective. There are even cameo appearances from Campion's valet, assistant and general factotum, Magersfontein Lugg, as well as from two of Mr. Campion’s closest associates among the police, Stanislaus Oates and Charlie Luke.

On the whole, readers interested in learning more about Mr. Campion and also interested in seeing some very early writing by his creator, Margery Allingham, are likely to enjoy The Return of Mr. Campion.

"Bodies from the Library"

As the song from My Fair Lady asks, "Wouldn't it be Loverly?" Here's an example much closer to home, among visitors to the Classic Mysteries blog and podcast: wouldn't it be "loverly" to discover not one, not five, not ten, but sixteen stories, never, or very rarely, published but forgotten stories by sixteen of the finest writers of that Golden Age of Detective Fiction? Virtually new, largely unseen and certainly unread stories by the likes of Nicholas Blake, Georgette Heyer, Freeman Wills Crofts, Leo Bruce and even Agatha Christie? That's what I can offer you today on the Classic Mysteries podcast as we discuss the amazing anthology called Bodies from the Library: Lost tales of mystery and suspense by Agatha Christie and other Masters of the Golden Age. The book, ably selected and introduced by Tony Medawar, was released last summer, and I owe you all an apology for not bringing it to your attention before this. It is the subject of today's audio review on the podcast, and you can listen to the complete review, which includes brief summaries of all sixteen stories, by clicking here.

Crime fiction historian Tony Medawar managed to discover these sixteen stories written by so many of the finest writers of that Golden Age, and I suspect that many of my visitors here will recognize some of the authors' names, beginning with the ones I mentioned above, but going on to other master writers, male and female. You'll find stories here by Anthony Berkeley, Chrisianna Brand, Arthur Upfield, and A. A. Milne - the list goes on. For each of the stories, Medawar gives us a few brief introductory paragraphs about the author and about the story - for these stories, as I said earlier, will almost certainly be unknown to most people. They're usually stories that had been written very early in the author's career, perhaps published once in a newspaper or magazine, but never before collected into an anthology. Most are very good examples of the kind of fiction produced by these Golden Age authors - the kind of stories that I suspect most of my listeners enjoy as much as I do.

I would also note that there will be a second volume of forgotten gems rediscovered by Tony Medawar that will be published in mid-July as Bodies from the Library 2. I promise I'll try to report on it in a more timely manner. In the meantime, enjoy these sixteen stories!

From the Vault: "The Exploits of the Patent Leather Kid"

Mention the name of Erle Stanley Gardner to most mystery fans (at least those of us old enough to remember him), and you'll get nods of recognition for the author who created Perry Mason. But over the course of a long and quite prolific career, Gardner also created several other series characters on both sides of the law. One of the memorable crooks he created was a character known as the Patent Leather Kid, who appeared in a number of short stories about his escapades. The Kid lived in a world where both evil gangsters and even more evil crooked cops fought it out, the innocent were often framed, and the Kid generally got involved on the side of the little guy. No wonder everybody wanted to kill him.The short stories that make up his escapades were collected in 2010 into one of Crippen & Landru's "Lost Classics" series, edited by another talented mystery author, Bill Pronzini. I wrote an audio review of The Exploits of the Patent Leather Kid for the Classic Mysteries podcast. Here's a transcript of what I said at the time, slightly edited as usual:

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There are a few things you need to know about The Kid. First of all, there’s the fact that the big-time, Depression-era bootleggers and gangsters who control parts of his city hate him – and want to kill him. Then, there’s another fact: the cops also hate him – and want to kill him. But the newspapers love him (because he’s good copy) – and so do a lot of the everyday people whose lives he touches. Oh, and there’s his costume – his disguise, if you will. That consists of black patent leather shoes. And black patent leather gloves. And a black patent leather mask. That’s how he got his name: the Patent Leather Kid. And you can read all about him in a collection called The Exploits of the Patent Leather Kid, by Erle Stanley Gardner.

Erle Stanley Gardner has achieved a sort of immortality for himself in crossword puzzles – whose hard-pressed constructors were delighted to find a very useful and unusual four-letter name, spelled e-r-l-e, to fit awkward spaces in their puzzles. But he is far better known among mystery readers as the creator of defense attorney Perry Mason, a crusading champion for the little guy, the fall guy, the guy who was always being wrongfully accused of murder and other crimes.

Gardner created other characters and series too, of course. And before Perry Mason (and for a while afterwards, too) he did a lot of short story writing for the pulps, those marvelous cheap magazines that specialized in more-or-less hard-boiled mystery stories.

One of the characters he created was The Patent Leather Kid, and his thirteen short stories about The Kid have now been collected into a thoroughly enjoyable anthology edited by mystery writer Bill Pronzini and published by Crippen & Landru. The Kid’s exploits originally appeared in the pulp magazine Detective Fiction Weekly between 1932 and 1934. As a reference point, the first Perry Mason novel was published in 1933. It was a time when the United States began transitioning out of the Prohibition Era, and organized crime had become a major problem for law enforcement in many cities. Shootouts between the criminals and the cops were the stuff of pulp fiction, to be sure, and Gardner was no exception.

His character, the Patent Leather Kid, inserted himself into the war between criminals and cops – and became a target for both sides. The Kid is fighting for social justice, just as Perry Mason and other Gardner characters did. The crooks want to kill him – and so do the often-corrupt police, who apparently don’t mind framing an innocent person and ignoring the crimes of well-connected gangsters.

Gardner quite clearly churned out these stories to put bread on the table, and the Patent Leather Kid stories very definitely follow a predictable, if entertaining formula. As a general rule, it works this way:

The story opens in an exclusive, upper-class club. One member of the club, Dan Seller, an apparently shiftless and idle – but extremely wealthy – man, gets into conversation with another club member, Police Inspector Phil Brame. Brame apparently is somewhat corrupt, more than willing to frame some poor and hard-working bystander for the crimes of better-connected gangsters. Brame tells Seller and his other friends about some crime – usually one where he’s already made an arrest of someone who quite clearly, at least to the reader, is innocent.

Seller usually goads Brame into accepting a bet – that the Patent Leather Kid will get involved in the case. Brame hates the kid – wants him killed, in fact, and quite openly brags that the cops are going to make it a point to get rid of The Kid, whose exploits in clearing the wrongfully accused have turned the cops into laughing stocks.

What Brame never guesses is that the indolent Dan Seller is, in fact, the Patent Leather Kid. After more-or-less forcing Brame to accept a bet, Seller usually walks out of the club. He then, through the use of assorted intermediate hideouts and ruses – think Superman and his telephone booths – turns himself into The Kid.

Working alone or, in later stories, with his bodyguard, Bill Brakey, The Kid then comes up with some kind of ingenious ruse. The outcome of that plot is to expose the real villain of the piece. And, more often than not, The Kid also manages to manipulate the cops into a shoot-out with the gangsters.

The Kid then transforms himself back into Dan Seller and returns to his club, where he collects on his bet with Inspector Brame. The inspector, smarting because he has once again been exposed as having tried to railroad some poor bystander into paying for someone else’s crime, rants against the interference of the Patent Leather Kid, and swears that next time they’ll catch him. Seller just smiles…and pockets the bet.

That’s pretty much the way all of the exploits work. But if it’s a formula, then Gardner is pretty nimble at ringing the changes on it, so that the stories don’t feel repetitive. We care about the people The Kid is helping. If The Kid robs somebody, it’s usually a crooked jeweler, or fence, or corrupt cop, or gangster, and he usually gives most of the money or jewelry to the real victims of the crooks. Then we join in laughing at Brame and the other corrupt cops and politicians, and we join in The Kid’s triumphs over the cold-blooded and ruthless crooks he fights in each story.

The Exploits of the Patent Leather Kid, by Erle Stanley Gardner, is a fairly new release in Crippen & Landru’s “Lost Classics” series. Mystery writer Bill Pronzini edited the collection and has added a critical introduction which is nearly as much fun as the stories. It’s a fine collection and deserves a place on your shelves.

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You can listen to the full version of the audio review by clicking here.

Next: Night of the Jabberwock, by Fredric Brown.

"Beware of the Trains"

Sorry to be a bit late in posting this one today, but I've spent the past couple of days celebrating (1) my wife's birthday and (2) Mothers Day. So perhaps it's fitting that I offer a present to you as well - or sixteen presents, even better. They're the sixteen short stories contained in Beware of the Trains, by Edmund Crispin, one of my favorite authors, and fourteen of the sixteen stories feature Oxford University Professor Gervase Fen, often aiding his (not always very bright) friend, Inspector Humbleby. It's the book that is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast.

Rather than duplicate effort, if you'd like more information about the sixteen stories in  Beware of the Trains, please listen to the complete podcast review, which will give you brief descriptions of each story. Things should be back to what passes for normal here later in the week. If you've never read Crispin, this is a fine way to meet him.