Predator

I hope you people have fun with your words. But I don't care if you call yourselves the Red Cross, you owe me forty-five thousand dollars and you'll pay me back whether you like it or not.

—Parker; The Hunter

I’m not entirely sure how to kick off this review. I tend to follow a formula: first introduce the plot; then talk about the book as a whole: setting, characters, the plot’s quality, etc.; and finally sum everything up in a paragraph containing the word “overall” somewhere. But today’s book, The Hunter by Richard Stark (really Donald E. Westlake in disguise) is very different from the kind of book that I usually review—it isn’t really a mystery in the proper sense of the word, unless you’re working in a bookstore. So how to begin? Well, in the blog’s time-honoured tradition, I’ll take the cleverly-lazy way out and let someone else do the talking for me. The following text has been unashamedly stolen from William L. DeAndrea’s Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (an invaluable reference tool for the mystery fan):

“One night in the early 1960s, car trouble forced author [Donald E.] Westlake to walk across the George Washington Bridge between New Jersey and New York on a winter evening. The wind and the cold and the cars zooming by made him feel very alone and very alienated. He began to wonder what sort of person would belong in that sort of environment.

The result was Parker, a professional thief shot and left for dead by his associates and his wife. When he is introduced, at the beginning of The Hunter (1962; British title Point Blank), he’s walking across the George Washington Bridge, planning his revenge.”

Prima Aprilis!

“But how extraordinary! I mean, it’s like finding a cauliflower in your bed, or something perfectly ridiculous like that.”

—Ludovic Travers, The Case of the April Fools

The Case of the April Fools has an interesting premise at its core—an April Fool’s joke has gone horribly, horribly wrong. It’s a very good idea—in fact, Anthony Boucher and Denis Green used it in one of the New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes radio plays, where Dr. Watson is enlisted by friends to play a trick on Holmes where the great detective investigates a fake jewel theft with clues planted that will point to none other than Holmes himself… but then the real jewel disappears!

However, something a little more serious than theft is involved in The Case of the April Fools. Ludovic Travers is invited by the rich Courtney Allard for a get-together at Allard’s country house. Everything goes splendidly, until Charles Crewe, one of Courtney’s guests, is found stabbed to death in his room. Courtney breaks down and says that this was not supposed to happen— Allard was supposed to die a fake death as an April Fool’s prank. Travers sees that Courtney is more or less useless, so he goes to call the police himself… but as he does so, a shot rings out! When Travers returns to the scene of the crime, he finds another corpse: Courtney Allard has apparently blown his brains out, but oddly enough, the gun is nowhere to be found.

Mr. Marlowe Finds God

“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—no, nor woman neither…”

—Hamlet, Act II, scene ii

I’m convinced that the mystery community is in a giant conspiracy to get me to start reading the work of Margaret Millar. The trouble started a few months ago, in a discussion with Jeffrey Marks, who asked me whether I’d read any Millar. I replied that I hadn’t, and she wasn’t particularly high on my list of authors to read, although I had been intending to read something by her husband, “Ross Macdonald”.

A few weeks later, I jubilantly held my copy of William L. DeAndrea’s Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, which had been delayed in the mail. Acting on a sudden whim, I flipped to the M section and looked up Margaret Millar, only to read the following: “Unjustly overshadowed by her husband Kenneth Millar, who attained fame as ROSS MACDONALD, Margaret Millar has produced some of the most varied and provocative mysteries in the history of the genre, with endings often unguessable until the last page.” This intrigued me, but I filed it away in the back of my mind.

Are you a detective?

Macdonald constructed his plots rather than improvise them, thereby merging his novelist’s concern for his themes with the reader’s desire for a good (and fairly clued) mystery. The plot was everything with Macdonald. Beginning with The Galton Case (1959) (…) all Macdonald’s novels have the same plot. A murder in the past traumatizes a child and poisons the present, threatening a relationship and causing more murders. The themes of child’s loss of parent and parent’s loss of child (Macdonald experienced both) are rendered poignantly again and again.

—William DeAndrea, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa

Kenneth Millar, aka Ross Macdonald

When I moved, I started to attend Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate and Vocational School. This is the same high school that Margaret Millar and her husband Kenneth Millar (better known under his pseudonym Ross Macdonald) attended. For what it’s worth, I despised the school, which is full to the brim of bad memories for me. I don’t recall a single enjoyable day I had between those walls, and returning for a single evening to obtain a diploma was one the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I left five minutes after the general reunion got underway.

Perhaps it’s one of the reasons I’ve been interested with the work of Ross Macdonald, a prolific writer of hardboiled mysteries starring private eye Lew Archer. I have no idea how he and his wife enjoyed the high school experience, but I walked through the same corridors as they did for a few years. What really surprises me is how long it’s taken me to read something by Macdonald: I decided to acquaint myself with his work through The Galton Case, which he apparently considered the book in which he broke off from the influence of Raymond Chandler and started writing his own way.

LXXVII. In which the mystery reader gets less than his money's worth.

I recently acquired a copy of William DeAndrea’s Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, which already has become a valuable tool in my blogging activities. When looking up Elliot Paul and his detective, Homer Evans, I came across the following information:

“Like his creator, an American living in Paris, Homer Evans was intended to be a parody of Philo Vance. On that level, the character was a failure. Although far more accomplished than Vance (for instance, Evans had to give up painting as a hobby because all the professional artists of his acquaintance were nearly suicidal with despair), Elliot Paul was incapable of making anyone a tenth as obnoxious as Vance. Where the Homer Evans mysteries succeed is as absurdist, almost surreal farces, populated by likable loonies somehow involved in murder cases that didn’t have to make much sense—they just had to serve as a framework for the craziness.”

Well, there we have it: William DeAndrea has already summed up everything I have to say about Elliot Paul’s Mayhem in B Flat. This is a world so alcohol-soaked it makes Craig Rice’s books seem like the work of a teetotaller. The adjective describing the mad mix-ups that populate this book has yet to be coined. Tarantula fights, kidnappers, gangsters, drunkards, brawls in nightclubs, chorus girls and girls in general (a long line of them) run all over the place in this book, smack in the middle of which is a murder mystery— or at least something that masquerades as one.