Dance into the Fire

When the United States entered the Second World War, Detroit converted its automobile factories into an “arsenal of democracy”. Car manufacture was put on hold and instead, workers produced tanks, aircraft, and other machines which helped the Allies win the war. All sorts of people had to come together and collaborate in a spirit of patriotism. But racial tensions were high and eventually resulted in rioting.

And in Loren D. Estleman’s novel Jitterbug, a psychotic killer is taking the whole patriotism thing a bit too far. A maniac is on the loose, murdering people left and right. Specifically, he targets hoarders, convinced that every dead hoarder means a soldier’s life is saved on the war front. All those gas and food rations can go to the fine American troops instead of the greedy hands of citizens back home too old and/or infirm to fight. He even leaves a calling card, the message “Kilroy was here”, and it’s up to police lieutenant Maximilian Zagreb to hunt the killer down. But there’s no shortage of suspects in a metropolis like Detroit, and Zagreb is racing against time as Kilroy’s violence escalates…

Der Fuehrer's Face

Seeing how my last review was about a book set in 1945 Nuremburg, it seems appropriate to go just a bit further back in time today. The year is 1934, and today’s book, The Talking Sparrow Murders by Darwin Teilhet, was just published. Across the Atlantic ocean, a man named Hitler has just seized power in Germany, and at this point the worst being thought of him was that he was just another crackpot dictator. But Teilhet disagreed – he saw what Nazism was doing to a country that he loved, and he didn’t like it. And his book is a vicious denouncement of all that Nazism stood for.

This is fascinating to see in a 1934 novel. Nowadays, it’s easy to use the wisdom of hindsight and say “Well, people really should’ve known better.” But here we have someone denouncing Hitler and all he stood for long before WWII and the revelation of the widespread Nazi atrocities. Not only that, this is being done in a detective novel, a form often ridiculed by critics as mere “crossword puzzles in prose”. And while there is a puzzle to solve in The Talking Sparrow Murders, the Nazis are constantly hovering in the background, threatening to turn this into a tragedy.

Rough Justice

Living in 2013, when we think about World War II we can often forget about the smaller things. Of course the widespread Nazi atrocities are well-known, but it seems that many people assume that once Germany surrendered, the European war was over in one night. It’s not true, as J. Sydney Jones reminds us in his new book Ruin Value. Many Germans resented the Allied conquerors, and there were even some bands of Nazi holdouts. Jones sets his story in Nuremburg, shortly before the infamous Nuremburg trials began. The city itself lies in ruins, and it is about to become the stage for arguably the most important trial in the history of mankind.

That is, unless a mysterious serial killer gets his way… Because someone has been targeting Allied troops, slitting their throats and leaving cryptic coded messages behind. And if this killer gets his way, the murders will upstage the events at Nuremburg. Luckily the Allies have an ace in the hole: Captain Nathan Morgan, an ex-cop who went into intelligence during the war. Now he has to return to police work, and he’s paired with an unlikely partner: a German cop accused of collaborating with Nazi war criminals.

One Hell of a Mess

I don’t know what it is about me reading books involving the devil’s footprints of late. But that’s precisely what we get in Arthur Upfield’s The Devil’s Steps—at one point, it seems that Satan himself walked across a patch of grass, killing the grass there and leaving the imprint of enormous feet. And indeed, this is the cleverest situation of the book, and rather quickly explained. The rest of the book is a rather unsuccessful attempt to combine a mystery and a spy thriller of sorts.

Please be warned: I read an audiobook edition, and the narrator was good… but I have no idea how most of these names are spelled. So I won’t risk it. I’ll be avoiding names throughout this review. Anyhow, The Devil’s Steps opens with the murder of a German man down in an Australian guest home. Luckily, Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is there to conduct the investigation? Although it’s not really a stroke of luck—it turns out the murder victim was a very highly placed official during the Third Reich and left the country with important state secrets that ‘Bony’ must recover before they fall into the wrong hands!

Evil Lies in Wait

Arlena Stuart Marshall is a beautiful woman, and she flares up passionate emotions wherever she goes. Men adore her, or at the very least, admire her beauty. Women despise her. It’s not the most harmonious atmosphere she brings with her to the Jolly Roger Hotel, where the great Hercule Poirot is coincidentally staying. She seems to have her sight set on young Patrick Redfern, recently married to Christine, and this relationship is tearing apart the young marriage.

Someone at last decides to stop Arlena for good, by strangling her at Pixy Cove. Hercule Poirot is asked by the local police to help out with the investigation. And thus, he begins to question everyone. There’s no shortage of suspects, he soon discovers: there’s Arlena’s husband Kenneth and his daughter Linda; there’s the dressmaker Rosamund Darnley, something of a childhood sweetheart of Kenneth Marshall’s; Patrick and Christine Redfern, whose marriage was being threatened; Revered Stephen Lane, a religious fanatic convinced Arlena was the incarnation of evil… and there’s plenty more where that came from!

One Hell of a Time

It is wintertime, and the bus struggles to stay on the road in the Québec countryside. The driver finally decides to stop the bus and walks out to fix the snow chains… never to return to the bus. The passengers become anxious and after half an hour decide to look for the driver. They follow footprints to an eerie house, where they are first greeted by gunfire and afterwards, have the door opened for them by Miss Rudd, a woman who is quite cheerfully insane.

Miss Rudd lives in the house with her nurse, Floraine, who is not at all happy to have the bus passengers in the house. She denies seeing the bus driver and claims that nobody has come to the house. She seems quite anxious to get everyone out of the house… but she promptly changes her mind when they all offer to pay for the night’s stay.

It was a dark and stormy night...

Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet were American authors who sometimes worked together but sometimes worked separately. I really can’t say much more about them. Teilhet is known among Golden Age enthusiasts as the author of The Talking Sparrow Murders (which I’ve yet to read). Although written in 1934, it had a strong and unrepentant anti-Nazi stance, at a time when the Nazis’ rise to power didn’t seem like an extraordinary issue. After all, Germany had been so unstable it seemed like Hitler was just the latest in a long string of leaders.

But when 1940 rolled along, times obviously changed— in September of 1939, Hitler precipitated World War II by invading Poland, and before you knew it, all of Europe was engaged in warfare. And it was in 1940 that Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet released The Broken Face Murders, being the fourth adventure of the Baron Franz von Kaz, a comic detective in the tradition of John Dickson Carr’s Sir Henry Merrivale.

He's been mostly dead all day...

Following Black Orchids, Not Quite Dead Enough is the second of the Nero Wolfe books that is not a novel. Again, Rex Stout gathers two almost entirely unrelated novellas and sticks them into one book; but this time, he feels comfortable enough with the form. In Black Orchids, Archie Goodwin writes brief prefaces to the stories and an afterword, which seem like an apologetic note trying to explain to readers what he is trying to do. There is no such thing going on in Not Quite Dead Enough.

The novella form seems to have brought out the best of Rex Stout. The plotting is tighter and more fast-paced, and the stories themselves are far more interesting. Some Wolfe novels would have worked so much better in this form, particularly (of those I’ve read) Fer-de-Lance, Too Many Clients, and Where There’s a Will. Each of these books is fun to read, but I’ll be darned if I remember much about the plots of those I haven’t read recently.

Dead Men Tell No Tales

I’ve recently been hired at the university library as a general shelver, and as a result, I now spend 13 hours a week at the library. I haunt the place to death anyhow, but the difference is I now get paid for it. To my delight, I discovered that the job wasn’t particularly formal—more casual—and I learned that if I felt so inclined, I could listen to audiobooks during my shift. I didn’t need to be prompted twice, and as a result, I listened to Rex Stout’s Where There’s a Will, finishing it in practically one day.

Noel Hawthorne was a very, very rich man, and when he died in a hunting accident, his family was consoled in the knowledge that they could comfort themselves with Noel’s money. What a shock, then, when they discover that Noel’s sisters (April, May, and June) get nothing but fruit— a peach, an apple, and a pear! Noel then left his wife a mere half million, and after some other legacies, the rest of the estate, about seven million or so, is left to his mistress, Naomi Karn.

The Adventure of the Petrified Prankster

The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan served as my introduction to the work of author Stuart Palmer, and more specifically, his series of novels starring schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers. The plot concerns the death of Saul Stafford, half of the screenwriting team of Stafford and Dobie. The duo is well known as the biggest pair of pranksters in Hollywood, and it seems that someone decided enough was enough: Saul Stafford was found in his office with his neck broken. The policeman summoned is all too willing to accept that it was an unfortunate accident.

Luckily, who should move into the office next door that very afternoon but Miss Hildegarde Withers? Originally having planned to spend her vacation in Europe, Miss Withers decided she’d much rather see Hollywood after Europe, in Palmer’s words, exploded. (The book was first published in 1941.) Just her luck, a man named Harry Wagman sees her, recognizes her as a detective, and offers to get her a job as a technical consultant on an upcoming film about Lizzie Borden. Miss Withers spoke to Stafford before the man met his maker, and realized that the man was frightened to death: she blames herself for his death and determines to track his killer down.