QUICK SHOTS: The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes by Michael Kurland

I'm quite the fan of Micheal Kurland's work and I'm still on a mystery-bent, so the second (and final) Alexander Brass mystery called to me from the bottom shelf where I keep my hardbacks. It's pretty clear by now from this blog that I'm a paperback guy, so I have to REAL interested in a book to even consider reading a hardback. The only hardbacks I've ever really liked where the slightly squatter ones the Mysterious Press used to do. I read a bunch of Stuart Kaminsky's Toby Peters that way from the library. But I digress.

Michael Kurland is mostly known for writing about Sherlock Holmes's nemesis Moriarty in a long running series and for the Greenwich Village Trilogy of hippie-sci-fi. He wrote the middle book The Unicorn Girl and appears as a character throughout the trilogy. Men's Adventure fans might know him from his excellent War Incorporated series of 60s spy novels, some of the best of the era. Kurland's a very good writer, clever, suspenseful, and very witty. He wrote a lot of sci-fi and I'm not much of a reader of that genre, so his gems in the mystery/adventure field are extra special to me. 

The Alexander Brass books started in 1997 and finished in 1998. Brass is a syndicated columnist for a major New York paper in the 30s. He's a man of the people, knows cops, crooks, politicians, actors, actress and busboys and everyone in-between. Naturally being a mystery novel, he gets involved with various murders and blackmail plots and the like, sending out his aid-de-camp Manny DeWitt out to uncover the clues while Brass writes his column. 

It's a set-up that is vaguely reminiscent of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books. Though Brass is, um, more "active" than Wolfe. It's a series that also treads on the same field as the aforementioned Stuart Kaminsky series, where fictional characters interact with real folks (Dorthy Parker and Robert Benchley from the Algonquin Round Table here) though there's less emphasis on it here. Kurland knows the period, the whole thing feels pretty authentic with some mystery in-jokes like Manny hanging out with Black Mask writers and the like. 

The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes is a complicated story about the disappearance of "Two-Headed Mary" a beggar who hangs out in front of theaters and makes friends with all the chorus girls. But is that all she is? There are gangsters, show business types, con-artists, cops, and newspapermen. If you enjoy the old pulp tales of Daffy Dill, "Flashgun" Casey or the Kennedy and McBride stories this is for you. It's got a lot of the same vibe as those reporters-playing-detective-stories. Plus, it twists and turns and lands somewhere pretty satisfactory. 

Kurland's an old pro and this is the work of an old pro. Is it going to change your life? Probably not. Are you going to consistently entertained? Yes, undoubtably. Unfortunately, the series must not have done well. Kurland might have been too late on the 30s/40s nostalgia mystery book for the era, it was kinda a crowded space at the time. So, he only got two books out of Brass and one short story in The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits. What a shame, but luckily, he returned to the time period recently with a WWII spy series called Welker and Saboy. I guess I have to go buy those right now. 

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Leonardo's Law by Warren B. Murphy

I came to Warren Murphy's work not through his most popular co-creation, The Destroyer but through his comic mystery novels about the insurance investigator Trace. I stumbled onto the Trace books because I had been reading Gregory MacDonald's Fletch series and the covers of the Trace books ripped off Fletch's design. Big font with the title, bold colors, littler font with a snippet of dialog from the book. So, I guess ripping something off does indeed work from time to time.

All in all, I eventually came to like Devlin "Trace" Tracy more than I.M. "Fletch" Fletcher, Trace's books are more consistently entertaining. So, Murphy was on my radar. The old Thrilling Detective Website told me that Trace is the same as Digger, a character from a different publisher. I liked those as well. The same website told me the Razoni and Jackson who appeared in a Trace book had their own paperback series. I liked those too. then I was off and running reading, The Destroyer and other books like Grandmaster. I was a Murphy fan and somewhere along the way unbeknownst to me, he wrote Leonardo's Law for the short-lived publisher, Carlyle.

When I discovered the book, I promptly bought it and filed it away on a shelf and sorta forgot about it. When winter fully embraces the Midwest, my mood tends to run toward mystery novels, I don't know why it happens, but it seems to every year. Then I start rooting around for forgotten favorites or new-to-me books. I was considering re-reading a Razoni and Jackson when I saw this one shelved next to it and felt like I won some sort of forgotten prize. I cracked it open. 

On the cover you see it's a "locked door mystery." My mystery tastes tend to run toward the hardboiled stuff, but I've read a few Ellery Queens and John Dickson Carr and the like, but it had been years since I've dipped my toe into that particular pool and the idea of Murphy tackling the usually quaint and gentile genre in a paperback original from the 70s was an interesting prospect. From his writing I get the picture that Murphy was a bit of a curmudgeon, his characters like to complain, his plot like to satirize (even if I don't fully agree with who he was poking fun at) and they have a wonderful cynical edge about them, what would a cynical, grumpy locked-room-mystery look like? 

Lenardo's Law is obviously supposed to the first in a series of mystery novels. Murphy was a series guy, especially at the time, and you generally don't write a detective novel to be a stand-alone. Our hero Leonardo is an impossible man, much like Poirot or Holmes. He's a professor, an un-official police detective, super handsome, super smart and tools around in a '37 Cord. He borders on parody as a character and his opposite the regular Joe cop Lt. Anthony Jezail (also the narrator) is a fairly stock paperback cop, if a little Murphy-fied. Their dynamic is fun, and it does echo Murphy at his best, when he has two disparate characters bitching at each other, but it doesn't quite boil over enough to be Razoni and Jackson or Chiun and Remo. Maybe if the series continued. 

The "locked door mystery" is fairly interesting, an asshole author is murdered in, you guessed it, a locked room and there's enough suspects to give you pause. Murphy plays it fair and if you pay attention, you can kind of figure it out (I knew a certain character played a part but didn't know the why) and the ultimate solution is wonderfully ridiculous (like the best locked door mysteries) where the book sorta faulters is spending too much time with some really unlikeable characters. We have to put up with Jezail's boss who's just despicable and it rides the nerves after a while. Murphy's asshole characters are usually entertaining to hang around, but Chief Semple is just too much. It's a slim book; I would have rather hung out with Leonard himself more throughout instead of frustrating jerks. 

I always find these aborted series books interesting. Obviously, Murphy might have found his groove with the characters by book #2 and we could have a totally different type of Warren Murphy series to enjoy. Also, this isn't for sensitive readers, there's a lot (too much) casual racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. etc. I sorta of skip over that shit and just get on with the book and I think Murphy was trying to use it all in the satire, (he had done it better elsewhere) but it's still a drag to have to read all the time. 

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!