Friday's Book You Have to Read: The Siamese Twin Mystery -- Ellery Queen

Ellery Queen is probably my favorite of the so-called Golden Age of Detection authors. I’ve read most of the books that were actually written by Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, the cousins who were the creators of the Queen pseudonym and the Ellery Queen character, as well as some of the later, ghosted books. I’ve never read a bad one among the Dannay/Lee books, and I’ve liked all the ghosted ones I’ve read, too.

But my favorite Ellery Queen novel is THE SIAMESE TWIN MYSTERY, so that’s the book I’ve chosen to write about this week in another installment of The Books You Have to Read. I enjoyed the Queen books for their elaborately constructed puzzle plots and for the characters of Ellery and his father, Inspector Richard Queen. THE SIAMESE TWIN MYSTERY, originally published in 1933 but readily available in paperback reprints from the Sixties and Seventies, adds some elements that aren’t all that common in the other Queen novels. It’s a little more bizarre than most, with a plot that includes a scientist who may or may not be mad and an isolated mountain lodge for a setting rather than Manhattan or Hollywood or even the small town of Wrightsville, the locations of most of the other Queen novels. Mainly, though, what THE SIAMESE TWIN MYSTERY succeeds in doing like no other Queen novel I’ve read is creating an almost unbearable feeling of suspense that really had me flipping the pages when I first read it about forty years ago. Dannay and Lee don’t let up on that suspense, either, until the very last line of the book, which I’ve never forgotten even after all this time. I really don’t know how the plot holds up now, since I haven’t reread it in a long time, but I do know I enjoyed the heck out of this book.

Since it is rather atypical, THE SIAMESE TWIN MYSTERY might not be the best place to start if you’ve never read an Ellery Queen novel . . . but if you’ve never met Ellery and his dad, you really ought to.

Mind Games -- Merline Lovelace

It’s been a while since I’ve read a book from the Nocturne line, Silhouette’s series of paranormal romantic suspense novels. Merline Lovelace’s MIND GAMES is a very entertaining novel, although to be honest it’s not all that paranormal, reading more like an espionage/action/adventure yarn. Taylor Chase is an Air Force captain sent in undercover to rescue a scientist who’s being held captive on a tropical island belonging to a reclusive, sinister billionaire, and helping her out is an old boyfriend of hers, a professor who specializes in psychic research. I knew from previous books of hers I’ve read that Lovelace is a really good storyteller with the ability to create likable characters and keep a story moving along at a fast clip. She certainly does that here. I raced right through MIND GAMES and had a good time doing it. It’s romantic, it’s suspenseful, and Stuff Blows Up Real Good, always a plus.

Avalon -- Francis Stevens

Avalon is a family name in this long-forgotten pulp novel, not a place. Originally serialized in ARGOSY in September and October of 1919, it takes place on a group of isolated islands off the coast of South Carolina. In pre-Revolutionary times, these islands were granted by the King of England to the Avalon family, who still rule them as a sort of feudal fiefdom despite the presence of a few modern items such as automobiles, gasoline launches, and wireless communication with the mainland.

The current master of Five Isles is Florence “Flurry” Avalon, who is a rugged male despite his feminine name. Avalon is seldom in residence there since he also runs a coffee plantation in South America, but his sister and younger brother live in Cliff House, the ancestral family residence which serves as this novel’s version of The Old Dark House . . . because that’s the kind of story this is, filled with secret passages, villainous Spaniards, shipwrecked survivors, mobs of torch-bearing villagers, unexpected shots in the night, and love at first sight between Avalon and one of the passengers from the wrecked schooner who show up at Cliff House.

The author of AVALON is Francis Stevens (the pseudonym of Gertrude Bennett), who also wrote some early weird thrillers such as THE LABYRINTH and THE CITADEL OF FEAR. I’ve read THE LABYRINTH and thought it was okay up to a point. AVALON lacks as many weird elements, but its plot holds together better and overall I enjoyed it quite a bit. Yes, it’s melodramatic, and its style is so old-fashioned that it might be off-putting to most modern readers. But if you can put yourself in the right frame of mind, the story moves along at a good clip and some of the writing holds up well. It’s due to appear in a reprint edition later this year from Beb Books, and if you enjoy early pulp thrillers, you might want to give it a try.

The Condemned

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you may remember that I thought THE MARINE, starring John Cena, was a pretty good rassler-turned-action-hero movie. Now we’ve watched THE CONDEMNED, starring Stone Cold Steve Austin (although he’s billed now as just plain Steve Austin, probably a good move on his part), another WWE superstar.

Austin plays Jack Conrad, an American locked up on Death Row in a South American prison. A sleazy millionaire rounds up violent convicts from all over the world, takes them to a remote South Pacific island, and turns them loose so they can run around and kill each other, with freedom going to the sole survivor. Outwit, outlast, outplay, indeed. And of course the millionaire plans to broadcast the whole thing live on the Internet to an audience that will equal the size of the one for the Super Bowl.

With a long-in-the-tooth set-up like that, a movie needs a smart, witty script, some unexpected plot twists, or preferably both to be very good. THE CONDEMNED doesn’t really have either of those things, so I didn’t think it was anywhere near as good as THE MARINE. What it has going for it are Austin’s impressive physical presence, some nice photography, and a decent supporting performance from the dependably offbeat Rick Hoffman. It’s certainly watchable, but you’ll know everything that’s going to happen in the movie long before it gets there.

Zero Cool -- John Lange

I remember seeing the original editions of this book and others by John Lange, who was really Michael Crichton, but even though they seem like the sort of book I would have read back in the Sixties and Seventies, somehow I never got around to them. Now with Hard Case Crime bringing some of the John Lange titles back into print, I get a chance to read them without having to hunt up those pricey original editions.

ZERO COOL is more of a thriller than a mystery, although its protagonist, radiologist Peter Ross, has plenty of mystifying things to figure out during the course of the book. He’s in Spain where he’s supposed to present a paper at a medical convention, when he gets involved with a beautiful young Englishwoman, assorted Spanish and Italian and Arab villains, an American who wears buckskins like a frontiersman, and a corpse that goes missing after Ross is kidnapped and forced to perform an unorthodox surgical procedure on it. Everything is fast and breezy and a little over-the-top from the get-go, and the book becomes more bizarre as it goes along. I should have loved it.

But from all the good reviews I’ve read, I seem to be the only person who didn’t care much for this book. It’s not bad, mind you. I found it to be sort of entertaining, but I didn’t care much for the hero and despite the fast pace of the prose itself I thought the plot took ’way too long to develop. The first half of the book is a bit repetitious with the various gangs of hoodlums taking turns kidnapping and/or threatening Ross. The second half, where things actually start to move the story forward, is better. But Ross is still a dumb and not very sympathetic hero.

I enjoyed ZERO COOL enough so that I’ll certainly read Hard Case’s other John Lange reprint, GRAVE DESCEND, which I also have. I hope I like it better.

The Book You Have to Read: Seven Faces -- Max Brand

This week I’m participating in Patti Abbott’s The Books You Have to Read blog project, and the book I’ve chosen to write about is Max Brand’s SEVEN FACES. Most of you who are familiar with Max Brand’s work know him as a Western writer, but Brand, whose real name was Frederick Faust, was also a prolific mystery author. During the Thirties his work appeared regularly in the pulp magazine DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, among others, and DFW was where SEVEN FACES originally appeared as a serial in October and November of 1936.

The protagonists of this novel are a couple of New York City cops, Angus Campbell and Patrick O’Rourke, who make a formidable team despite the fact that they can’t stand each other. When a wealthy man named John Cobb appeals to the police department because he’s been receiving threats on his life, Campbell and O’Rourke are assigned to the case. Cobb has to go to Chicago on business, and the two detectives also have to travel to Chicago to present some evidence in a court case, so their superior decides they should take the train with Cobb and guard him from whoever wants to kill him.

Unfortunately, Cobb disappears on the way to Chicago, and Campbell and O’Rourke have to split up in their attempts to track him down and find out what happened to him. From there the story is a fast-paced yarn featuring torture, murder, greed, and evil coming back from the past to haunt the present. Sure, the characters are a little stereotypical – Campbell is a dour Scotsman, O’Rourke a fat, cigar-smoking, heavy-drinking Irishman – but the plot has some clever twists and Faust keeps things perking so nicely that the reader is drawn along effortlessly by the story.

I picked this book mostly because I enjoyed it, but also because while it’s obscure, it’s not that hard to lay your hands on a copy. It’s been reprinted twice in the past ten years, first by the University of Nebraska Press in their series of Max Brand reissues, and then in large print by Chivers/G.K. Hall. Faust wrote at least one more novel featuring Campbell and O’Rourke, MURDER ME!, and I intend to track it down and read it, too.

(By the way, hearty congratulations to Patti and Megan for their well-deserved awards!)

Fantastic Four: Books of Doom -- Ed Brubaker

Like it was yesterday, I remember walking into Tompkins’ Drugstore in the summer of 1964 and plunking down a quarter and a penny for a copy of FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #2. (Just don’t ask me what I actually did yesterday, because I might not remember that.) I was a big fan of Marvel Comics in general and the Fantastic Four in particular, and had been ever since a couple of my girl cousins gave me a stack of comics they didn’t want the previous Christmas.

FF ANNUAL #2 opened with a story called “The Origin of Doctor Doom”. Doom had appeared several times already in the FF’s regular title and was already the dominant villain in the Marvel universe. In twelve pages, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby filled in his back-story, giving him a layer of humanity he had lacked previously without making him any less evil or dangerous. It was a fine story featuring gypsies and witchcraft and super-science and a mysterious monastery in Tibet, along with cameo appearances by the college-age Reed Richards and Ben Grimm, the future Mr. Fantastic and The Thing. Practically every panel was etched into my eleven-year-old brain, and Lord help me, they still are.

FANTASTIC FOUR: BOOKS OF DOOM, a trade paperback reprint of a recent mini-series, takes the information from that 44-year-old origin story (and a few later stories) and expands it into a large-scale retelling of how the young gypsy Victor von Doom wound up becoming the arch-villain Doctor Doom. The script by Ed Brubaker is well-written but doesn’t add much to the story, although he does throw in a fairly nice twist ending. The art by Pablo Raimondi is pretty good and his layouts are easier to follow than those of some modern comics artists, and it doesn’t appear to have any manga influence, always a plus for reactionary curmudgeons such as myself. The reprint is maybe a little misleading in its title, since the only members of the Fantastic Four to appear are Reed and Ben, making the same sort of cameos they did in the original origin story. Overall, I enjoyed revisiting this yarn, and I’m glad that Brubaker didn’t try to update it very much. BOOKS OF DOOM is worth reading if you’re a Fantastic Four fan.