Steve Hockensmith, The Double-A Western Detective Agency: A Holmes on the Range Mystery

Steve Hockensmith, The Double-A Western Detective Agency: A Holmes on the Range Mystery
© 2018 Steve Hockensmith
ISBI 978-1-7905-516161


Steve Hockensmith’s The Homes on the Range series just might be my favorite on-going mystery series.  I think the continuing characters, especially Otto (Big Red) Amlingmeyer) and his brother Gustav (Old Red), are becoming favorites.  The narrative voice (Otto’s) is sharp (and sometimes discursive), funny, and altogether engaging.  And this entry (the 6th novel in the series) is just excellent.


The boys have, they (well, Gustav; Otto might retain some lingering doubts) hope, left behind their days as cowhands, and their more recent association with the Santa Fe Railroad police division, to become partners in the AA Western Detective Agency (headquarters in Ogden, Utah) with ex-Colonel C. Kermit Crowe and his adopted daughter Diana.  After six months of looking for, and not finding, clients, they have a case!  Clayton Haney, owner of a cattle ranch in the New Mexico Territory, has hired the agency to help solve a rustling problem.  And so Big Red, Old Red, and Diana are off, by train and coach.


When they arrive at the town of DeBarge, they notice, almost immediately, something very strange about the town—the businesses on one side of the (only) street are duplicated by stores with apparently identical products directly across the street.  A fact that will soon be explained.  The explanation comes when, while Otto and Gustav and Diana are talking with the town Marshal, Alfred Hinkle, he receives an urgent summons to break up a fracas at the DeBarge General Store (F. Martinez, Proprietor—just across the street from DeBarge Mercantile and Sundries (M. Baker Proprietor).  The AA crew tags along, and the Marshal rapidly buts an end(if only temporarily) to the hostilities.  And it transpires that the men causing the troubles are in the employ of Clayton Haney.

Things become more complex very quickly, the Marshal is found and Haney gets jettisoned as a client, the Sweeny clan (putative rustlers) become the new clients.  

And a pair of mysterious strangers—a Mescalero Apache and a hard-to-classify (Otto can’t get a good look at him—appear, and seem to be trying to run the Amlingmeyers out of the territory.  Yet another mysterious stranger, a Mr. Burr—who admits to being roving gambler—shows up.  


So the situation is complex, and made more difficulty by ethnic antagonisms.  But Gustav, applying the methods of (of course) Sherlock Holmes, moves steadily, albeit not directly, and with setbacks, to the solution.


Hockensmith has created an engaging cast of characters, all with strong and well-defined personalities.  The dialogue is sharp, the settings add a great deal to the story.  All in all, this is a highly successful mystery.  I look forward to the next entry in the series, which, with luck and if we’re all good girls and boys, will arrive with a shorter hiatus.

Rex Stout, Too Many Women

Rex Stout, Two Many Women
© 1947 Rex Stout
Random House
eISBN 978-0-3077-6808-7


I’ve read Too Many Women too many times, but for me most of Stout’s “Nero Wolfe” books are almost endlessly re-readable.  Despite its very apparent faults (from a contemporary perspective), it remains, after 70+ years, readable and entertaining. 


The plot is fairly straightforward.  An executive at Naylor-Kerr, Inc. (an engineering supply company, although that is actually all but irrelevant), Mr. Kerr Naylor (the son of one of the founders, and named after the other), responds to an internal questionnaire about employee turnover,  His explanation for the termination of Waldo Moore is one word:  Murdered.  Moore died at the end of the prior year, his body found on a deserted side street in Manhattan, run over by a car.  Wolfe is hired (with his assistant, Archie Goodwin, doing most of the work) to substantiate calling his death murder, or to disprove it.  The firm’s president (Jasper Pine) is married to Naylor’s sister (Cecily), who is the largest shareholder in the company.  (Naylor, who inherited 25% of the company’s stock, has retained voting control of it, but transferred ownership to a small number of long-time, now mostly retired, employees.)


Following Pine’s suggestion that Archie pose as a personnel expert, Wolfe takes the case and Archie does the legwork.  He discovers more than he might have hoped for, beginning with an extremely large number of young, apparently all attractive, women, their workspace being a single large open-plan room in which…well, let me let Archie describe it:

One good glance and I liked the job,  The girls.  All right there, all being paid to stay right there, and me being paid to move freely about and converse with anyone whomsoever…Probably after I had been there a couple of years I would find that close-ups revealed inferior individual specimens, Grade B or lower in age, contours, skin quality, voice, or level of intellect. But from where I stood at nine-fifty-two Wednesday morning it was enough to take your breath away.  At least a half a thousand of them, and the general and overwhelming impression was of—clean, young, friendly, spirited, beautiful, and ready.  It was an ocean of opportunity.

I think you can see how this aspect of the book would raise questions among today’s readers (and in fact I always find this part of the narrative somewhat off-putting, along with the depictions of the women employed there who have fairly important roles in the book).  The spell is broken when Kerr Naylor, having come up alongside Archie, says. “I doubt very much if there’s a virgin in the room.”  Which is another aspect of the book that does not play well with readers today.


(As an aside, I have always had a little difficulty with an open-plan work space filled with desks and filing cabinets and seating 500 or so clerical workers.  I rather think this is based on the famous Frank Lloyd Wright-designed S. Cc Johnson workspace, constructed in 1936-39, and one of the first, and still one of the most famous open-plan workspaces in America.  But I also think that such a space would have been highly unlikely in a 1930s vintage Manhattan high-rise.  My calculations suggest that to provide space for 500 clerical workers would require something like 40 square feet per workstation, plus something around half again as much space for filing cabinets and access and ceiling supports, or 30,000 sq.ft. of space—an open space some 300’x100’, which seems unlikely for a high rise at the time,

Archie begins the task of interrogating the staff (not limited to the clerical staff), and things are going nowhere.  Although Archie’s dealings with the clerical staff are related clearly, if discreetly.  Unfortunately, the results are underwhelming.  And Kerr Naylor decides to tell Archie that he actually knows who killed Wilmot Moore, but, as he has no evidence, he can say no more.  This little revelation, when reported to Pine, the corporate president, has repercussions, and Naylor tells Archie, before witnesses, that he never said he knew who killed Moore.  And, following another death and some stratagems by Wolfe, which put another employee at risk, we get a successful conclusion.


I’ll admit there’s a lot of sexism here, and the Pine household is a strange one.  (In common with a number of the other Wolfe stories, some of the sexual behavior of some of the characters would have been, well, unusual for the time.  Too Many Clients is a notable example of what I’m referring to.)  But if you can come at the book without letting that aspect of it dominate, it’s an interesting case, a generally well-plotted story.  Although I think the ending is a bit of a cop-out.

Where Is the Building that houses Naylor-Kerr, Inc., in the Nero Wolfe novel Too Many Women (by Rex Stout)

I'm re-re-re-re-re-re-re-reading Two Many Women, and very early on Archie comments that Naylor-Kerr has its offices in the general vicinity of Wall Street, and the executive offices are on the 36th floor.  So that's probably at least a 500-foot-tall building.  I've never done this before, but I was curious.  Here is a list (taken from a list of the 100 tallest buildings in Manhattan I found on the web, of all the buildings in Manhattan, 500+ feet tall, constructed before 1950:

The Empire State Building, 102 floors, 1250 feet, 34th Street and  and 5th Avenue.  Not near Wall Street.

The Chrysler Building, 1930, 77 floors, 1046 feet (counting the spire), 42nd and Lexington.  Not near Wall Street.

70 Pine Street, 1932, 66 floors, 952 feed, obviously at 70 Pine St.; about 2 blocks from Wall Street.

The Bank of Manhattan Trust Building*, 70 floors, 927 feet, 725 5th Ave,; not near Wall Street,

The RCA Building.**  1933, 70 floors, 850 feet, 1250 Avenue of the Americas.  Not near Wall Street.

The Woolworth Building.  1913, 57 floors, 792 feet.  223 Broadway, about a half mile north of Wall Street.

The City Bank-FarmersTrust Building.***  1931, 57 floors, 741 feet.  Basically on Wall Street.

500 Fifth Avenue.  1931, 60 floors, 709 feet.  Nowhere near Wall Street.

Met Life Insurance Tower.  1909, 50 floors, 700 feet.  Just off Times Square.

Lincoln Building.  1930 56-72 W. 42nd St.  Midtown.

1 Wall Street.  1931, 50 floors, 658 feet.  Definitely near Wall Street.

Chanin Building.  1930, 56 floors, 649 feet.  122 E. 42nd.  At Grand Central.

570 Lexington.  1931, 50 floors, 640 feet.  Midtown.

Mercantile Building.  1929, 48 floors, 629 feet.  10 E. 40th.  Midtown.

New York Life Building.  1928, 40 floors, 615 feet.  200 Park Ave.  Midtown.

So we have 70 Pine, The City Bank-Farmers Trust Building, 1 Wall Street as possibilities.  Given that the president of Maylor-Kerr was Jasper Pine, I'd bet on 70 Pine...

*Now the Trump Building,

**Now the GE Building

***Now 20 Exchange Place

Mark Pryor, The Book Artist

Mark Pryor, The Book Artist
© 2019 Mary Pryor
Seventh Street Books
ISBN 978-1-6388-488-5

The main character in this series is Hugo Marston, the head of security at the US Embassy in Paris, although most of what transpires in the books (of which this is the 8^th) is not related to his official position.  I

n this entry, the Ambassador has asked (i.e., ordered) him to attend the opening of a sculpture exhibit at the Dali Gallery in Montmartre, as a sort of chaperone for the artist, Alia Alsafar.  He’s reluctant, but his reluctance diminishes when he learns that her sculpture is made from books—Marston is a book freak; the fact that the ambassador refers to her as strikingly beautiful doesn’t hurt. 

And the woman who has been his companion for a while now, Claudia (whose last name I can’t find) is training for a marathon, and her run takes her past the Dali that evening—and she collapses and is taken to a hospital in an ambulance..  At about the same time, someone kills Alsafar.  The police inspector in charge of the investigation soon arrests Claudia—her DNA has been found on Alsafar’s body, and Claudia claims never to have met her.  Hugo, or course, butts into the investigation.

Meanwhile, a murder (Rick Hofer), who has recently been released from prison, is out to get Hugo and his good friend (and CIA spook) Tom Green.  Tom is in Amsterdam, on Hofer’s trail, and Hugo is, of course, torn between his desire to clear Claudia and Tom’s likely confrontation with Hofer.


I suppose it’s not really a spoiler to say that Hugo clears Claudia and helps Tom take care of the Hofer issue.


I’ve been a fan of this series since I read the first one (The Bookseller, 2012, but I’m less enthusiastic about this one.  Having Marston deal with the threat to Claudia’s freedom and the risk that Tom is taking in going after Hofer was probably necessary to get the book out to book-length, but it seemed to me to fragment things a bit too much.  And, in both threads, the climaxes were not particularly satisfying.  The interrogation—handled by Hugo, with the cop mostly just sitting in—seemed perfunctory and the murderer’s confession seemed mostly a matter of needing to wrap things up.  And the final confrontation with Hofer also felt almost perfunctory.


The Book Artist was, for me, just good enough to have warranted my time, but not good enough to keep me from putting it down after reading for a while.  I’ll continue to buy Pryor’s books, but I also hope things pick up in the next installment.

Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders

Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders
© 2017 Stormbreaker Productions Ltd.
Harper Perennial
ISBN 978-0-06-2623-4


This is a real tour de force, but it’s also remarkably difficult to write a review without including something that might be a spoiler.  So I’m not going to try to do any sort of plot recapitulation—you’ll have to read it for yourself.  I will say that the story has more twists and turns than a Grand Prix auto racing course.  I will also say, because it quickly becomes obvious, that one aspect of the book owes a lot to Agatha Christie.


Horowitz has created a sterling cast of characters, providing them with interesting, and relevant, back stories ((including insights into their characters and their work lives and their personal lives).  He has also created settings, from small-town England to London, that both support and deepen his narrative.  The investigations are handled nicely, and the denouement flows neatly out of what has gone before.  And, for those of you who like this sort of thing (I do), he provides us with some clever, sometimes initially hidden, wordplay.


I have read, and enjoyed, three of his other books (The House of Silk, Moriarty, and The Word Is Murder); this is a step above them.  And there are three more (The Sentence is Death, Trigger Mortis, and Forever and a Day) that I’m about to make sure I have.  I encourage you to do the same.

James R. Benn, A Blind Goddess

James R. Benn, A Blind Goddess
© 2013 James R. Benn
Soho Press, Inc.
eISBN 978-1-61695-193-1


I seem somehow to be falling behind.  This is, in my opinion, one of the finest mystery/historical fiction series going, and I’m up only to book 8 (there are 5 more in print and another due in a month or so).  And this is one of the best entries in the series, which has become a epic, accurate depiction of some of the events that shaped World War II.


Billy Benn, whose family is related by marriage to Dwight Eisenhower, has spent his time in World War II as a special investigator for Ike.  He finds himself in the village of Newbury in the southeast of England, in March 1944.  One of the British intelligence gurus whom Billy has had much contact, Major Cosgrove, wants Billy to look into the murder of Stuart Neville, and tasks Billy with seeing to it that the murder is treated as a simple murder.  Which, of course, convinces Billy that there is something else going on, especially as the home in which Neville was living is owned by a German refugee family.  


He also has had a call for help a call for help from a friend from his teenage years, Eugene (Tree) Jackson.  Tree is a sergeant in a battalion of tank destroyers; also from Boston, Tree is black (as is the battalion, except for, of course, the officers)..  And his gunner, Abraham (nicknamed Angry) Smith in imprisoned, facing a court-martial, on a charge of murder, the victim being a local constable.  Tree, who is certain Angry is innocent, is hoping Billy can look into it.  Billy, who has 5 days’ leave, is hoping to spend them with Diane Seaton, the woman he loves.  


Diane (who is in the Special Operations Executive) plans to meet Billy.  But first she has an appointment with a high-ranking official in the Foreign Office, to try to persuade him that England, and the Allies in general, need to do something about the German extermination camps.


If that’s not a complicated enough situation, a young girl, a refugee from the Channel Islands, has disappeared from the group home/school in which she has been relocated.


The continuing characters—Billy, Diane, Kaz (a Polish noble and officer in the Polish army—which is now in exile), and Big Mike (a Detroit cop now in the army)—a group who would only have found each other in the dislocations of war, are all finely characterized.  And the characters specific to this book—the local police, a man who operates a sweets shop, the office staff of a Building Society (where Neville worked), and other—provide depth to the narrative.  And the depiction of village life during wartime seems absolutely perfect.


And Benn’s account of the treatment of black soldiers in the midst of this war is both historically accurate and a fairly damning portrayal both of the U.S. military in the 1940s and of the wider society.  One interesting side note comes from Benn’s afterword, in which he describes his research, and provided me with the first positive thing (other than his strategic and tactical strengths as a general) I have ever read about George Patton.  As it happened, the first black armored unit to see battle during the war was assigned to Patton, whose welcome to them included this:  “I don’t care what color you are, so long as you go up there and kill those Kraut sonsabitches…”  And they did.



In case you were wondering, the title derives from this poem, which is also on the opening page of the book.

That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we blacks are wise:
Her bandage hide two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.

Langston Hughes, “Justice”
from The Panther and the Lash

Brett Halliday, Dividend on Death

Brett Halliday, Dividend on Death: A Mike Shayne Mystery
© 1939 Estate of Brett Halliday
eISBN 978-1-5040-1273-7


A recent blog post by Robert Lopresti (“Today in Mystery History”, https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2019/07/today-in-mystery-history-july-31.html) reminded me that I had never read any of the Mike Shayne books (of which there are about 50; the first 20 or so were written by David Dresser; the others were work-for-hire by a number of authors).  My failure to have read any of the Mike Shayne books was not an aesthetic decision; I have read books by Mickey Spillane (Mike Hammer; only 1, I, the Jury) and Richard Prather (Shell Scott), among others.  Not quite sure how I missed Halliday.  The Mysterious has begun to reissue the books, so I bought this one, the inaugural effort, as an ebook, to see what, if anything, I’d been missing.


The short answer is “Not much.”  In Dividend on Death, a young woman named Phyllis Brighton hires Shayne to prevent her from killing her mother.  (She seems to be a little unbalanced.)  He takes the job, and that evening arrives at the Brighton home, on Biscayne Bay in Miami.  The cast of characters includes Rufus Brighton, rich, reclusive, and very ill; his wife (Phyllis’s mother; his assistant; 2 doctors; 2 nurses; a housekeeper; and a thuggish chauffeur.  Phyllis is in bed, presumably asleep, but definitely not talking.  Shayne excuses himself to speak with her and finds her wearing a blood-stained nightgown and in possession of a bloody knife.  He cleans things up and leaves.

From there the plot gets complicated, involving a renowned art critic and a potentially valuable painting, among other things.  Shayne gets threatened by the cops, shot, and beaten.  He also gets through 2 or 3 bottles of brandy in the space of 2 days.  One of the doctors, we find out, is a whole lot off-kilter; the chauffer has a record; and the nurses have things other than nursing in mind.  Shane reveals all and walks away with about $25,000 about $350,000 at today’s price level) from 3 or 4 clients.


Actually, I’m making it sound more interesting that it is.  Either the booze or the injuries would be enough to keep Shayne from functioning well, and the plots (and sub-plots) are not particularly plausible.  I will excuse myself from reading any of the subsequent adventures.