Forgotten Book - The Wife of the Red-Haired Man

I wrote recently about Bill S. Ballinger's excellent The Tooth and the Nail, which appears in a new volume published by Stark House Press. In the same edition is another of Ballinger's novels from the 1950s, The Wife of the Red-Haired Man. This too is told in Ballinger's trademark  narrative style, with one storyline presented in the first person, another in the third.

The similarities end there. The Wife of the Red-Haired Man isn't an ingenious puzzle, but a book in the old tradition of the story about the hunter and the hunted. Here the emphasis is on presentation of character and on the relentless building of suspense. It's fair to say that Ballinger masters these skills just as he did the skill of bamboozling the reader in the earlier book.

The hunted are a couple, a man called Rohan and a woman called Mercedes Turner. Rohan is an escaped convict and Mercedes is devoted to him, although at the start of the story she has inconveniently (and rather strangely, I thought) married a rich hoodlum. Murder is committed, and the pair go on the run.

The hunter is a police officer who is assigned to the case and follows them with a relentlessness worthy of the cop in The Fugitive. The meticulous care with which he investigates every lead is progressive. And right at the end of the book there is a revelation about him which is very well done and puts what we have read in a slightly different light. Another good novel by Ballinger and it's pleasing to see it back in print.

Forgotten Book - The Tooth and the Nail

Among the independent presses doing good work on both sides of Atlantic in terms of reviving excellent crime novels of the past, I'd like to highlight the work of Stark House Press. Typically, they issue  two books in the same volume, and they have in recent times brought back novels by the talented Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and Dolores Hitchens.

I've now read Bill S. Ballinger's The Tooth and the Nail, which appears, along with The Wife of the Red-Haired Man, in a new volume with an interesting introduction by Nicholas Litchfield. It's due out in April. I've not read Ballinger previously, and I hadn't realised how good he is. On the evidence of this book, he was a gifted crime writer, who had something in common with Fredric Brown. Like Brown, he was interested in narrative technique, and the cunning with which he tells this particular tale is impressive.

The book opens with a short, tantalising prologue. When one reaches the end of the book, one may be tempted to quibble about the prologue, and I'm not sure it was really necessary. But it certainly provokes interest in the main narrative. Actually, in this novel there are two stories going on, told in alternate chapters, one told in the first person, one in the third. We can be sure that they are linked, but how they fit together is unclear for a long time.

One story involves a magician, Lew, and the other is a courtroom drama. Someone is on trial for murder, but we don't know the identity of the person in the dock and the identity of the victim seems rather puzzling too. I shouldn't really say much more than that. Stark House have done us a favour by bringing it back into print. I really enjoyed this book and I look forward to reading more of Ballinger's work.