LB's Rambles

"The Exploits of the Patent Leather Kid"

Erle Stanley Gardner was a remarkably prolific mystery writer. He created Perry Mason, to be sure, as well as a variety of other series characters. Among them was a character called the Patent Leather Kid, who appears in just 13 stories written in the early 1930s. Those stories have been collected as "The Exploits of the Patent Leather Kid," edited by Bill Pronzini. The book is the subject of this week's Classic Mysteries podcast review, which can be heard by clicking here.

The Patent Leather Kid is an elegant crook, who disguises himself in a patent leather mask, gloves and shoes. He is the sworn enemy of both the corrupt big-city police force and the Prohibition-era gangsters and bootleggers who infest the city. The stories all follow the same basic line: the Kid hears about an injustice, usually involving the police making some innocent fall-guy take the blame for a crime he or she didn't commit. The Kid comes up with a complex and ingenious plot which results in the fall-guy being cleared (often enriched by the proceeds of the Kid's latest robbery or burglary), the real bad guys being killed or incarcerated, and the Kid's primary enemy, Inspector Brame of the police, being further infuriated by the Kid's bold schemes.

It's another entry in publisher Crippen & Landru's "Lost Classics" series, and the collection is a great deal of fun to read.

"Charlie Chan Carries On"

On this week's Classic Mysteries podcast, you'll find a review of "Charlie Chan Carries On," by Earl Derr Biggers. You can listen to the full review by clicking here.

First appearing in 1932, "Charlie Chan Carries On" was the fifth of Biggers's six novels about the Chinese-American detective. Charlie is called upon to take over a murder investigation when one of his friends, a Scotland Yard man, is shot and seriously wounded. It's one of the best entries in this series. If you know Charlie Chan only from the 1930s and 1940s movies, you really should meet the real character, who is much more intelligent and far less stereotyped.

"A Night of Errors"

The book reviewed this week on our "Classic Mysteries" podcast is the funny and very eccentric "A Night of Errors," by Michael Innes. First published in 1948, it features John Appleby, shortly after his early retirement as a Scotland Yard detective. He is called in to solve the bizarre murder of the titular head of the Dromio family, an eccentric (to the point of insanity) English family. The plot is wonderfully complex, with murders, fires and other oddities, all of which must be resolved before the night is over.

The book also features the marvelously odd character of Swindle, the family butler, who grunts and snorts his way through the novel, terrorizing the family he serves. He is one of the most marvelously comic English country house butlers in fiction, and he plays a key role in the ultimate solution of the problems of this very peculiar night.

You can listen to the full podcast review by clicking here. You'll find more information at www.classicmysteries.net.

"Death With Blue Ribbon"

While I continue to enjoy my end-of-August-stay-off-the-Internet break, let me point out that over at Classic Mysteries, this week's podcast features a review of "Death With Blue Ribbon," by Leo Bruce. You can listen to the full review by clicking here.

"Death With Blue Ribbon" is set in the world of so-called "haute cuisine," and does some skewering of food pretensions. Carolus Deene, a former commando turned schoolteacher, takes on a group that has set up a "protection racket" among British restaurant owners. It's quite simple: pay up - or someone could get very sick by eating your restaurant's food.

It's nasty enough as a blackmail racket; it's even nastier when a particularly unpleasant restaurant critic is murdered. Deene eventually sets out to destroy the racket - at a fairly significant risk to his own life.

Academy Chicago Publishers have brought back a lot of the Leo Bruce books, so they are readily available. Here's another author and detective you ought to try.

"Death in the Fifth Position"

Early in his literary career, Gore Vidal managed to alienate the all-important literary critic of the New York Times. Vidal found himself banned from the pages of the Times. One of his friends suggested that he might be wise to write some potboiler mysteries under a different name - which he did, using the pseudonym "Edgar Box."

Those mysteries have now been republished, and the first of them, "Death in the Fifth Position," from 1952, is the subject of this week's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the full review here.

Vidal claims that he "worked very hard at being a mystery writer, somewhat heavily reliant upon Agatha Christie." The result was three novels featuring Public Relations executive Peter Sargeant. In "Death in the Fifth Position," Sargeant is hired to do publicity work for a Russian ballet troupe that is visiting New York City. He's hardly begun work when one of the company's ballerinas is murdered - a wire is cut, causing her to fall to her death on stage in what balletomanes would call a perfect fifth position.

There are more deaths, to be sure, and a fair amount of surprisingly graphic (for 1952) sex, before Sargeant is able to help the police solve the case. It's a fun read and shows a side of Vidal that readers may not have suspected.

"A Late Phoenix"

Catherine Aird's fourth mystery to feature the work of Detective-Inspector C. D. Sloan, "A Late Phoenix," is the subject of today's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the full review here.

In this 1970 novel, Sloan is faced with the problem of how to solve a murder that happened nearly thirty years earlier, during the German bombing runs on England during World War II. Workman excavating a bomb site in the town of Berebury discover the skeleton of a young woman - but a bullet lodged in the skeleton makes it clear that this was a case of murder. Yet, according to the records, nobody was ever reported missing at the time. So Sloan must try to identify the victim and then try to solve her murder. As he will discover, somebody in town wants to make very sure that the murder - and murderer - is never uncovered.

It's a delightful novel, written with Aird's usual dry humor. C. D. Sloan is an eminently likeable character, and he's really worth knowing. If you haven't met him yet, this might be a good introduction.

"At the Villa Rose"

What was the truth behind the terrible events that took place one night at a lonely French villa? All that we really know is that the rich and elderly French woman who lived at the villa has been murdered, her house has been ransacked - and all the evidence points at the involvement of her young companion, Celie. But is that possible? Or is Celie very much a victim?

Those are the questions raised in "At The Villa Rose," by A. E. W. Mason, first published in 1910, and one of the earliest detective novels. Mason's detective, Inspector Hanaud of the French Surete, was a popular rival in his day to Sherlock Holmes. In this book, it is Hanaud and only Hanaud who is able to analyze the evidence and follow it to its correct conclusion - while the reader most likely will have been led astray by the constant misinterpretation of the narrator, one Mr. Ricardo.

"At the Villa Rose" is the subject of this week's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review by clicking here. For a novel now over a century old, it holds up remarkably well.

"The Plague Court Murders"

Murder inside a locked and bolted room, practically under the eyes of the police. Inside the room, only the victim - and the peculiar knife which was used. No sign of the murderer. Could it have been a malevolent ghost?

That's the central question in John Dickson Carr's "The Plague Court Murders," written in 1934 using the pseudonym "Carter Dickson." It's the topic of today's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, which you can listen to by clicking here. The book introduced another of Carr's series detectives, the irascible Sir Henry Merrivale, known as "H.M." to his associates and his readers. There's a lot of slapstick comedy in some of the later books starring H.M., but not in "The Plague Court Murders." Instead, we are given some marvelous and frightening atmospherics, for it appears that only a ghost could have committed the murder in the locked room.

But this is a John Dickson Carr book, and the reader can be assured that H.M. doesn't believe in ghosts - at least not the kind that go around murdering people. And so the reader will be given some well-disguised clues about what's really happening here - and the reader's path will take some dizzying twists before the solution is ultimately revealed.

It's all great fun, nicely written and plotted, and definitely worth adding to your library.

"If Death Ever Slept"

This week's Classic Mysteries podcast review subject is Rex Stout's 1957 Nero Wolfe mystery, "If Death Ever Slept." You can listen to the full podcast review here.

Archie Goodwin is more on display here than Nero Wolfe, whose armchair detection role consists of even more armchair than usual. Archie finds himself dispatched to a multi-millionaire's mansion, to find out whether the rich man's daughter-in-law is the "snake" her father-in-law says she is. There's also a little matter of industrial espionage going on, and all that is before the murders begin. For once, Wolfe finds himself relying far more than usual on Inspector Cramer for clues, something that makes neither of them very comfortable.

Archie is his usual wisecracking self and there are some interesting and enjoyable characters introduced here before Wolfe gets everyone together for one of his patented office confrontation scenes. As usual, it's good fun and worth the read.

"The First Detective"

This week, on the Classic Mysteries podcast, we're offering something a little different: a review of a non-fiction book. Actually, make that a mostly non-fiction book, because the subject of this biography has inspired a number of dubious stories about him, both in his own memoirs and those of former associates and/or enemies.

The book is "The First Detective: The Life and Revolutionary Times of Vidocq, Criminal, Spy and Private Eye," by James Morton. Vidocq is an amazing character, born in France near the end of the eighteenth century. He started life as a thief, a possible murderer and forger, an escape artist. But he became a police spy and rose through the police ranks to the top before quitting and forming what the author, James Morton, says was the first private detective agency.

His character inspired authors such as Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Herman Melville and Edgar Allen Poe to use him as a basis for characters in their novels. You can find a full review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, which you can listen to by clicking here. He was truly an amazing individual, and the book, packed full of wonderful anecdotes, is thoroughly entertaining. It has just been published in the U.S. by the Overlook Press, which provided a copy for this review.