Nostalgic tales that must have seemed gauzy even in their first bloom.
In this follow-up to Long Live the Dead (2000), prolific pulp survivor Cave, still active at 92, collects 11 stories he wrote between 1936 and 1940 for Detective Fiction Weekly. Though the types on display range from detection (a police detective examines the circumstances that made his old flame a widow in “Trail of the Torch”) to morality play (a little pickpocket finds true love in “Murder at Hand”) to good old-fashioned action (a counterfeiter just released from prison is framed for more of the same in “Queer Street”), a few ingredients are remarkably consistent. Whether they’re lawmen or numbers runners, Cave’s heroes are invariably ordinary guys whose biggest dreams are surviving the Depression (“I couldn’t die this way. . . . I had a good job now and a future,” thinks the hero of “Beards Grow Slowly” as he’s about to suffer his old gang’s revenge) and winning their women. And the women themselves, in a reversal of the Hammett-Chandler formula, are well worth winning, however guilty they may seem. The combination of male simplicity and female innocence gives Cave’s stories a sweetness and hopefulness strangely at odds with such menacing titles as “A Picture of Guilt,” “Easy to Kill,” and “Deadline.” But although he can make the pages fly, Cave’s refusal to come to closer grips with the realities of injustice and evil, which always remain the province of dark forces out there, keep him from the front rank.
Nostalgic tales that must have seemed gauzy even in their first bloom.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2003
ISBN: 1-885941-80-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Crippen & Landru
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
A murder is committed in a stalled transcontinental train in the Balkans, and every passenger has a watertight alibi. But Hercule Poirot finds a way.
**Note: This classic Agatha Christie mystery was originally published in England as Murder on the Orient Express, but in the United States as Murder in the Calais Coach. Kirkus reviewed the book in 1934 under the original US title, but we changed the title in our database to the now recognizable title Murder on the Orient Express. This is the only name now known for the book. The reason the US publisher, Dodd Mead, did not use the UK title in 1934 was to avoid confusion with the 1932 Graham Greene novel, Orient Express.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1934
ISBN: 978-0062073495
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1934
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.
In Archie Goodwin's 15th adventure since the death of his creator, Rex Stout, his gossipy Aunt Edna Wainwright lures him from 34th Street to his carefully unnamed hometown in Ohio to investigate the death of a well-hated bank president.
Tom Blankenship, the local police chief, thinks there’s no case since Logan Mulgrew shot himself. But Archie’s mother, Marjorie Goodwin, and Aunt Edna know lots of people with reason to have killed him. Mulgrew drove rival banker Charles Purcell out of business, forcing Purcell to get work as an auto mechanic, and foreclosed on dairy farmer Harold Mapes’ spread. Lester Newman is convinced that Mulgrew murdered his ailing wife, Lester’s sister, so that he could romance her nurse, Carrie Yeager. And Donna Newman, Lester’s granddaughter, might have had an eye on her great-uncle’s substantial estate. Nor is Archie limited to mulling over his relatives’ gossip, for Trumpet reporter Verna Kay Padgett, whose apartment window was shot out the night her column raised questions about the alleged suicide, is perfectly willing to publish a floridly actionable summary of the leading suspects that delights her editor, shocks Archie, and infuriates everyone else. The one person missing is Archie’s boss, Nero Wolfe (Death of an Art Collector, 2019, etc.), and fans will breathe a sigh of relief when he appears at Marjorie’s door, debriefs Archie, notices a telltale clue, prepares dinner for everyone, sleeps on his discovery, and arranges a meeting of all parties in Marjorie’s living room in which he names the killer.
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5988-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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