Forgotten Book - Purloining Tiny

John Franklin Bardin was an American author whose brief career would have been deeply obscure had it not been for the advocacy of Julian Symons. Symons praised Bardin's first three novels in Bloody Murder, and in the mid-Seventies facilitated their being reprinted as a Penguin omnibus volume, which I devoured as soon as I could lay my hands on it. I shared Symons' enthusiasm for Bardin's work. The three books are very interesting examples of psychological suspense writing in the aftermath of the Second World War - pre-dating Patricia Highsmith, among many others.

The attention that the omnibus gained seems to have galvanised Bardin to resume his writing career in earnest, and he published another crime novel in 1978, with the characteristically odd title of Purloining Tiny. However, it wasn't a success, and copies are hard to find. It's only in relatively recent times that I've had the chance to read it.

The book has attracted one or two enthusiastic admirers over the years, and Dorothy Salisbury Davis said that it was "bizarre, wicked and wonderful". It also bears, on the back cover, a rather carefully worded blurb from Stanley Ellin, who described it as "certainly one of the strangest mystery tales I have ever read." As he says, the story focuses on "the perverse and shadowy wish-fulfillments of its astonishing characters". These are, it has to be said, not exactly words of undiluted praise.

I think Ellin got it right. It's a very odd book, about a glamorous young woman, a famous contortionist no less, who is kidnapped and held captive in an apartment by her long-lost father. At the time, I suspect it was seen as a cutting-edge example of a crime novel involving kinky sex. As with the earlier Bardin books, but to an even greater extent, incestuous desires play an important part in the story. For me, it simply didn't work. Really, it reads like an over-the-top pastiche of those early, intriguing novels. A major disappointment, I'm sorry to say.

Forgotten Book - Murder Can Be Fun

Happy new year! For all those of you who read this blog, may I send warm wishes that 2019 will be a happy and healthy year for you.

A new year is a time to look forward, and I'll be doing just that before long. But today's Friday, and it wouldn't be Friday without looking back at a Forgotten Book, would it? So I've picked a novel which has a title which seems appropriate. Not because murder in real life is fun - absolutely the contrary. But detective stories about the ultimate crime are hugely enjoyable, whether or not they also take a look at the more serious side of life.

I first came across Fredric Brown's crime fiction a long time ago, when Zomba Books, guided by the super-knowledgeable Maxim Jakubowski, published a terrific omnibus of four of his mysteries, including The Screaming Mimi. I was very impressed, and equally taken with a few short stories of his that I came across. Since then, it has been hard to find Brown's other books in the UK, but I chanced upon a copy of Murder Can Be Fun in Skoob Books in London, and snapped it up sharpish.

This novel was his third published book, and in fact it's an expansion of an earlier short story, which perhaps explains why the plot does not seem quite as taut as those in his very best books. Nevertheless, it's an appealing story with a splendid premise. Bill Tracy, a former journalist who has become a radio soap opera writer, comes up with an idea for a crime series called "Murder Can Be Fun". But the joke appears to be on him when life begins to imitate art, and someone starts committing murders which are evidently based on his plots.

This is a neat variation of a hook that has been used by a good many crime writers to produce novels of various types - examples include Roger East's Murder Rehearsal and John Franklin Bardin's The Last of Philip Banter, as well as the much more recent Disclaimer by Renee Knight. Of course, it's one thing to set up a baffling scenario, and quite another to resolve it satisfactorily. Brown does a pretty good, though not outstanding job of explaining how Tracy's plots came to be used.

Really, this is the work of a novelist who was still learning his trade, but several elements of the story are typically Brownian - the science fiction references, the heavy drinking (which can become a bit tedious), dreams, and Alice in Wonderland references. There's a "least likely person" solution which is passable rather than brilliant, but the lively prose often glints with humour. Not Brown's best book by a long chalk, but neatly crafted entertainment all the same.

Sebastien Japrisot - and Advertising

The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, by Sebastien Japrisot, and translated by Helen Weaver, has languished in my to-be-read pile for a very long time indeed. I’m not quite sure why this is so, since I enjoyed his far-fetched but gripping thriller Trap for Cinderella some years back. Perhaps the cumbersome title put me off. Now I’ve finally read it, I must say I enjoyed it a good deal, with just a few reservations.

Dany is a blonde, beautiful and myopic woman of 26, who borrows her boss’s Thunderbird car on impulse and sets off for the sea. But a series of mystifying events disrupt her journey – people she meets tell her that she made the same trip the day before, when in fact she was in Paris. She is attacked, and left injured, and then discovers a body in the boot of the car. What on earth is going on?

This vivid premise really is terrific, and reminiscent of the work of Boileau and Narcejac, though Japrisot probably has more pretensions as a “literary” writer. The snag, inevitably, is that the unravelling of the truth is rather cumbersome. Japrisot, like a number of his contempories (Catherine Arley and Herbert Montheilet spring to mind) sometimes struggled for a credible resolution to the dazzling puzzles that he created. All the same, this book didn’t deserve to wait as long as it did to be read.

Dany and her boss work in advertising, and so for a time did Japrisot (his pen-name was an anagram of Jean-Baptiste Rossi, his real name). Advertising and PR has supplied a good many crime writers not only with settings but also with business experience. Dorothy L. Sayers, Julian Symons, David Williams, John Franklin Bardin, Leighton Gage, Elmore Leonard, David Goodis and Alan Furst are examples, and I’m sure there are plenty of others. I’m not sure if anyone has ever written about the connection between working in advertising and crime fiction; perhaps it’s a subject worthy of further exploration.

Forgotten Book - The Last of Philip Banter

I can never resist a book with a truly intriguing premise, and The Last of Philip Banter boasts one of the best, making it a worthy entrant in Patti Abbot's catalogue of Forgotten Books. It is one of three novels of psychological suspense which John Franklin Bardin wrote between 1946 and 1948, and although they did not attract too much attention at the time, the advocacy of that great critic Julian Symons ensured that they reached a wider readership over the years.

Symons seems to have managed to persuade Penguin Books to put together The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus (to which he contributed an introduction) in 1976. I was a student at the time and this was one of the few books, other than pricey legal textbooks, that I bought, rather than borrowed from a library. I definitely was not disappointed. The Deadly Percheron and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly are, perhaps, more admired than The Last of Philip Banter, but nevertheless it is the less celebrated book for which I have an especially soft spot.

Philip Banter is an advertising man with marriage trouble and a drink problem. He finds a typed manuscript on his office desk, apparently typed by himself, which confuses past and future. It describes what is going to happen as though it had happened already. Then the ‘predictions’ start to come true….

It’s a gripping concept, and a fluently written novel. In later years, Bardin (1916-1981) wrote a few more crime novels under pseudonyms, but they didn’t compare in intensity to the three early books. But I share Symons’ admiration for his work.

Forgotten Book - Murder Rehearsal

Now for a really obscure entry to Patti Abbott's series of Friday's Forgotten Books. My contribution this week is a review of Roger East's Murder Rehearsal:

‘Who in the world?’ demanded a reviewer in ‘The Manchester Evening News’ three quarters of a century ago, ‘is Mr Roger East? It is my deliberate and considered judgment that he seems likely to become one of the small band of really first-class detective-story writers.’

Bluntly speaking, this prediction, like so many of its sort, proved to be well wide of the mark. After an initial flurry in the 30s, East produced little notable work in the remainder of his crime writing career and the last time attention was paid to him was on the reissuing in the mid 80s of the splendidly entitled Twenty Five Sanitary Inspectors. This was when Collins produced its very welcome ‘Disappearing Detectives’ set of hardback reprints, with introductions by H.R.F. Keating. The disappearing detective in question was Superintendent Simmonds, who made his debut in Murder Rehearsal, the novel which prompted such lavish praise from the Mancunian critic.

This book caught my eye because of its terrific premise. A likeable young crime writer, Colin Knowles, has an admiring secretary, Louie, who notices a series of links between a book Colin has been working on and three apparently unconnected recent deaths. Before starting to read, I wondered if there might be any similarity between this novel and John Franklin Bardin’s later, excellent book The Last of Philip Banter: the answer proved negative.

In truth, the best features of East’s novel are that first attention-grabbing idea and the final twist, which offers a rather pleasing and unexpected revelation after I had feared that the story would fade into anti-climax. In between, there is a good deal that is far-fetched. That said, East is a readable writer with a light touch. I was definitely entertained, but overall, this book (while not deserving obscurity) does not compare with the superior work of, say, Anthony Berkeley or Philip Macdonald. The characters are lightly sketched, but Simmonds is an agreeable fellow and it is no surprise that East brought him back for further adventures.