The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov (Panther, 1958)

A gift from a friend who knows me far too well:

 

A CRIME THAT COULD INFLAME A GALAXY...

A Spaceman--a specialist in robotics--has been murdered.  Lije Baley, a plain-clothesman of his age, combs the huge cave of steel for a lone fanatic, for a murderer--for the solution to an almost perfect crime.

One of the two men on the cover is a robot—I'm not sure, but I think it is the one who is unconscious.  Don't quote me on that, though!

Isaac Asimov was one of the Big Three names of the "golden age" of science fiction (the others were Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein).  Asimov is most famous for inventing the Three (fictional) Laws of Robotics:
  

"A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law."

 In The Caves of Steel he combines a science fiction novel with a detective story, a combination of genres that for some reason seldom works.  And yet it works in this one.  I put it down to the fact Asimov creates an interesting futuristic setting for his story, then makes it integral to that story rather than using it as window-dressing.  His detectives move through an overcrowded urban world where people huddle under domes and hate and fear the outdoors—and robots.  It's an almost film noir-ish setup—except Asimov was far too prissy and logically-minded to indulge in the sort of sex and violence common in most hardboiled fiction!

Need I add that one of the detectives is a robot and the resolution of this mystery lies in the world outside the domes?

I have another copy of this—also a Panther Book—but alas, it was published in the 1970s, and the cover isn't nearly as interesting.

The Case of the Restless Redhead by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pan, 1962)

 

She had a neat figure, plenty of bad luck--and red hair.

They caught her with stolen diamonds--but as she told the story it was a frame-up, and Perry Mason believed her.

Then came news of more serious crime--and Mason found the charge against his client was murder.

It never fails.  No matter what a client initially hires Perry Mason for--to settle a parking fine, to get a divorce--before the end of the book they're up on a charge of murder.

My advice to anyone thinking of consulting Perry Mason?  Don't.

The Case of the Cautious Coquette by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pan, 1958)

 

Perry Mason Suspected!

LAWYER-DETECTIVE Perry Mason begins a search for a hit-and-run motorist.  A police advertisement brings an anonymous letter, and the letter brings him to a blue-eyed blonde.

Mason is delighted--and finds a damaged black sedan that fits the case perfectly.

Next thing on his hands is another damaged car and two equally convincing candidates for the role of guilty party!

Then a corpse crops up--and the man the police start building their case against is Mason!

I've been trying and trying to work out who the man on the cover reminds me of, and my best guess is Richard Attenborough as he appeared in Brighton Rock.  If anyone has any better guesses, please let me know.

As for the book itself--I get the impression that Erle Stanley Gardner had reached the stage where he no longer cared--at least about his Perry Mason stories.  After a nice start, the plot isn't terribly coherent, and when Perry solves the mystery it comes out of left field.   It's almost as if the author suddenly realised he needed to finish the book, so he closed his eyes and stuck a pin into a list of his characters in order to decide which one was the murderer...

The Lady in the Morgue by Jonathan Latimer (Pan, 1959)

Another piece of loot from my Lifeline Bookfair crime spree:

Lively DEATH

PRIVATE EYE, WILLIAM CRANE, juggles with the identity of one dead blonde and sundry live ones, cuts grim mortuary capers over a volcano of violence and reminds us that there's no place--in crime fiction--like Chicago!

"Hardboiled" would be the only word to describe this book.  The plot involves a stolen corpse, competing gangsters and a murdered morgue attendant (you can see the murderer bringing down a cosh on the poor guy's head to the right of the cover.)   Oh yes, and there are sundry Dangerous Dames floating about the story (including a group of taxi dancers in a sleazy dance hall.)

In brief: generic but fun!

Head of a Traveller by Nicholas Blake (Fontana, 1962)

Yet another prize from my Lifeline Bookfair Crime Spree!

 

They found the body in the Thames--the head, weeks later, in a string bag hanging on a tree.

 Short and sweet--and oh, boy, doesn't it make you want to read more!

Mind you, the blurb makes the book appear more hardboiled and gritty than it is.  And if it had been published in America, and started with the discovery of a headless corpse floating in the Hudson or San Francisco Bay, this book probably would be that kind of detective story.  One would expect the hero (either a jaded PI or a world-weary cop) to track the murderer through the mean back streets of the city, encountering various underworld types along the way.   However, Head of a Traveller was written by a British author, and the detective is a gentleman amateur who tracks the murderer to the country estate of a poet!

The Clue of the Forgotten Murder by Erle Stanley Gardner (WDL Books, 1960)

 

The story begins when a cop investigated a man and a woman suspected of a gas station stick-up.  The man turned out to be Frank B. Cathay, prominent banker on a binge.  The girl disappeared.

The story deepened when a private eye was shot on a downtown street, presumably by a gangster.

The story got hot when Charles Morden, a reporter from "The Blade" investigating the case, was murdered.

Immediately Dan Bleeker, publisher of "The Blade", called in Griff, the famous criminologist.  Then the story really boiled!

One of Gardner's more confusing stories.  By the end of the book I was not only unsure who the criminal was, but I was also confused about the nature of his crime!   The detective--I mean criminologist--investigating this tangled mess of a case didn't follow up clues so much as as "play human checkers" with the suspects as pieces.

I'm also confused about the dame on the cover of this edition.  I'm pretty sure she didn't actually appear in the book.

Headed for a Hearse by Jonathan Latimer (Pan, 1960)

More loot from my Lifeline Bookfair crime spree:

 

SIX DAYS

to go before Westland would go to the electric chair for the murder of his wife...

SIX DAYS

for him to sweat in the death cell--with a gangster and a fiend for company...

SIX DAYS

for private investigator William Crane to flirt with death and find the real killer...

Now this is an example of hard-boiled crime fiction.  Originally published in 1935 it is steeped in Depression cynicism, and filled with characters who are corrupt, cowardly and treacherous.   Innocence is vindicated--eventually--but it takes a lot of bribes and a sharp lawyer.  Oh, and some help from gangsters:

    Butch looked forbiddingly at Crane.  "Connors musta told you about us."
    "You bet he did."  Wind whipped the side curtains against the body of the car and whistled across the back seat.  "He said you boys could muscle your way into heaven and come out with a truckload of harps."
    This was a lie but it satisfied Butch.
    "Connors would have been all right," he said, "if he could of left the coppers alone.  It's OK to knock off a hood or so, but you oughta be careful about shootin' coppers.  It makes the judge mad, and sometimes he won't let ya fix the case."

(Page 110)

Out of the Past by Patricia Wentworth (Hodder, 1959)

I went to the Lifeline Bookfair this weekend, where I turned to crime.  Fortunately it was of the paperback kind:

 

A huge ugly old house, hordes of friends and relations--and a young man with information to sell and suppress.

A perfect setting for a murder--and for

MISS SILVER.

With a cover like this you'd certainly expect your detective to be more than a little hard boiled--drinking neat whiskey in his lonely office between romancing dangerous dames and fighting it out with toughs on the waterfront.  Instead the detective in this story is a retired Victorian governess with a fondness for knitting and Lord Tennyson.

Ah well, at least there's blackmail and murder to liven things up!

Double or Quits by Erle Stanley Gardner (Corgi, 1964)

Another book from the Lifeline Bookfair.  This one is a bit battered, but it's still readable:

 

QUIETLY

 it began : with a hunt for a missing secretary and some stolen jewels.

COMPLICATING

the issue : blackmail and murder

FASCINATING
it became : with a rich divorcee and a lonely widow

CLIMAX

was when Donald Lam took a long drink from a bottle of poisoned Scotch.

There's something wrong with the the corpse depicted on the cover.  Oh, he's ghastly enough (who expects a dead body to be decorative?) but his head looks flattened out and distorted somehow, as if it had been run over by the car whose wheel we see in the top of the illustration.  He wasn't, by the way.  The victim in this murder mystery died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Dud cover illustrations aside, there's a little bonus in the back of the book--Corgi was running a crossword competition and offering cash prizes to the winners:

£5--that was quite a lot of money in 1964!

The Murders on Fox Island by Margaret Page Hood (Dell, 1960)

 

They Called Her A Wanton,

the people of Fox Island, but Jeanne Marie was only young and full of high spirits.

Her constant teasing flirtations, with any man and even with his own brother, were meaningless--or so Jeanne Marie's husband told himself.

Until the night he found her lying on her bed in a flimsy nightgown.  Dead.  With his dead brother beside her.

And found himself the chief suspect for a double murder.

 As I read this one I kept wondering whether it was part of a series--the author kept making passing references to the personal life and history of her detective character.  And sure enough, a quick search of Google confirmed my suspicions.  Margaret Page Hood wrote a number of books starring Deputy Sheriff Gil Donan, of Fox Island, Maine.  Evidently Fox Island was one of those quiet little rural communities with a high murder rate.  They're oddly common in detective fiction!

Appointment With Death by Agatha Christie (Pan, 1957)

Another book I bought for its cover!

 

"You do see, don't you, that she's got to be killed?"

These startling words overheard by Hercule Poirot in a Jerusalem hotel, open

APPOINTMENT WITH DEATH

by Agatha Christie

 The speaker is a young American, Raymond Boynton; he is talking to his sister Carol about their stepmother.  Old Mrs. Boynton, it appears, was a prison wardress before her marriage, and her ingrained lust for power and cruelty has gradually driven her family to desperation.  While she lives, there can be no happiness for any of them.  Soon an expedition is arranged to Petra, "the rose-red city"; and there a death occurs.  The problem is taken up by Colonel Carbury in Amman just as Poirot arrives with a letter of introduction to him.  And so the little Belgian detective becomes involved in one of the most extraordinary cases of his career.

Trust me on this: in his entire career, Hercule Poirot has never become involved in an ordinary case.

(The back cover blurb is a strangely unexciting summary of the first half of the book.  And it's in the passive voice too--an expedition "is arranged" and a death "occurs".  No, a death didn't "occur"--this is Agatha Christie.  Someone was murdered!)

The Case of the Backward Mule by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pan, 1957)

I got this one from a bookshop in Tasmania via eBay:

 

Chase in San Francisco's Chinatown

To baffle the lie-detector clamped on his arm, Terry Clane practises the intense concentration he learned in the Orient.  But the sight of a little Chinese figure--an old man riding backward on a mule--sends the indicator-needle leaping; for he'd given it once to Cynthia, his former fiancee and close friend of a man convicted of murder who has escaped.  Says the police examiner: "Either there's something I haven't accurately diagnosed or else ... you murdered Horace Farnsworth."  Then begins a grim game of hide-and-seek through Chinatown.

Erle Stanley Gardner--a prolific mystery writer, best known as the author of 82 (!) Perry Mason books.  None of his works could be described as great literature (not surprisingly, given his output) but they are mostly entertaining light reading.  I find them great reading for the daily commute.

The Case of the Backward Mule is one of the (many) books Gardner managed to write when he was not churning out Perry Mason mysteries.  The book has many "Chinese" elements, as you can see from the cover of this edition and the blurb.   It's interesting to note that Gardner probably drew upon his own experiences in writing this.  As a young lawyer he had many clients (and made some lifelong friends) among California's Chinese community.  Being the writer he was, you can't expect any deep insight into China or the Chinese from this book, nor is it entirely free of cliches, but it is surprisingly sympathetic and lacking in the racism of its era!

Swing, Brother, Swing by Ngaio Marsh (Fontana, 1974)

 

Rivera had advanced in the spotlight.  He seemed rapt; at once tormented and exalted.  He swayed and jerked and ogled, a puppet of his own music.  As the performance rocketed up to its climax, he swayed backwards at a preposterous angle.  Then a screaming dissonance abruptly tore loose from the general din as the spotlight switched to the tympani.  Lord Pastern, wearing his sombrero, had risen.  Advancing to within five feet of Rivera, he pointed his revolver at him and fired...

Oh my!  Hot jazz, aristocrats (common people seldom star in Ngaio Marsh's mysteries where even policemen are pedigreed) and murder all mixed up together.  And bound within one of Fontana's better photo-covers.  I love the dramatic foreshortening of the murder victim, lying there with some kind of spike sticking out of his white dress shirt.  The image just draws you in and makes you want to find out what's going on.

A Tale of Two Murders by Elizabeth Ferrars (Fontana, 1961)

Bought in the same batch of books as Always Say Die.

It entertained Hilda Gazely to speculated about the strange woman who walked the river bank at sunset.  But murder and the facts which came to light afterwards made her ask herself desperately how she could have been so complacently blind to what had been happening around her.  Hilda was unusually impressed by Inspector Crankshaw and told him all she could--then she became uneasy.  She was sure that something she had seen, done or said was utterly wrong.

 The problem with writing about mysteries is you really can't say too much without giving away important plot points.  Suffice it to say that a thoroughly nasty character is murdered, and almost all the suspects have good reason to do away with him.

A Tale of Two Murders also introduces the delightfully cynical, "heard-it-all-before" Inspector Crankshaw:

    Not impatiently, but in a considering tone, as if , as if he were speaking mainly to himself, to clear his own mind, Crankshaw said, "A widower, faithful to the memory of his wife, not many friends, but such as he had, good ones--that's the picture, then."
    She raised her head quickly, grateful that he should have understood, and was shocked to see the irony in his small, sly eyes.

 Oh, and in the end, Crankshaw gets his man.

Footsteps in the Night by Dolores Hitchens (Pocket Books, 1962)

I found this at the Lifeline Bookfair - source of over 50% of my best finds:

 

Sheriff Ferguson found plenty of skeletons in the closet in the new Dellwood houses--who was prim Miss Silvester's midnight visitor?  Why was Mr Holden terrified of his wife?  Where was tight lipped Mr Arthur's grandfather on the night of the murder?  How did the crippled Dronk boy fit into the picture???

And why was everyone so anxious not to talk?????

This was another book I bought for its cover--and I found a tightly plotted, suspense-filled little murder mystery inside.  It kept me guessing who the guilty party was and worrying about the innocent suspects, right until the very end.  That's exactly what I look for in a whodunnit!

One thing about that cover, though.  If the young lady on the cover is meant to be the murder victim  (and that seems the logical inference) then the artist got it wrong.  The victim was meant to be a fifteen-year old girl wearing capri pants.  Maybe that wasn't glamorous enough for the publisher!

Three Act Tragedy by Agatha Christie (Pan, 1964)

I found this at a high school book fair:

"Sir Charles Cartwright, the distinguished actor, was giving a party.  Around him, his guests stood talking and drinking.  The Reverend Stephen Babbington sipped at his cocktail and made a wry face.  The other guests continued to chatter.  Suddenly Mr Babbington clutched at his throat and swayed...

It was the beginning of the drama,

a three-act tragedy

with death in every act"

I bought this one literally for its cover, as I already have a copy of this book (along with all the other Christies.)  The still life on the cover depicts the essentials of the plot: one glass containing poison, and one blackmail note.