The Case of the Wandering Redhead by Leigh Brackett, 1951

I’d never read Leigh Brackett until now and I’m glad I finally did. I found her short story The Case of the Wandering Redhead in the pages of New Detective Magazine, February 1951, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

This is the introduction to the story.

“Here is the most ruthless man you’ve ever met—a filler whom death could not soften nor bullets stop—yet whose relentless fists battered to their last futile gesture that softest thing a man ever finds—the heart of a woman in love. It is with a definite sense of accomplishment that we welcome Miss Brackett to these pages—which many of you will find unforgettable!”

The “ruthless man” is Marty James, a territorial gangster who lives by guns and fists, and the narrator of the story. He is wildly in love with Sheila Burke, a stunning redhead he wants to marry even if she detests the very thought of it. She refuses him point blank, just the way he’d shoot his adversaries. Sheila has good reason for not wanting to have anything to do with him.

“Can I get it through your head? I hate you, Marty. I hate everything you stand for. All I want out of life is decency and peace and maybe a little happiness. You can’t give me any of them.”

But Marty has no plans to leave her alone. In fact, he is trying to force her to marry him, when his sidekick calls him away on urgent business only to betray him to a rival gangster eyeing his turf. Marty fights and shoots his way out of captivity and returns to Sheila, with a rib wound and two bullet holes in his thigh.
 
Six flights, with thin snow beginning to fall, thinking of Sheila’s voice saying, There’s blood on you, Marty. You’re not in my world.

I thought, All right. That’s the way it is, Sheila. That’s the way we’ll play it. I was colder than the snow, and numb.

The Case of the Wandering Redhead is a cracker of a story. The two main characters, Marty and Sheila, are drawn well. In the words of the gangster, human enough to go crazy over a girl. Brackett’s narrative style is clean, almost poetic and visually striking, as if the story is playing out on screen. Consider this passage.

I looked at her. She was beautiful. She was like something the wind might cut out of a snowbank, with the red fire of her hair on top. Her eyes met mine, and there was an awful coldness in them, like I’d killed the spark inside her.

The short story is a fine example of the hard-boiled crime fiction of the Golden Age, although I have plenty left to read from the genre.

Recommended.

Memory Man by David Baldacci, 2015

Amos Decker is Memory Man.

The bearded and massively-built protagonist—a former homicide detective-turned-private investigator-turned-police consultant—has a rare gift: he remembers everything and forgets nothing. Events, experiences, people, faces, names, objects, shapes, numbers, dates, time, hour, minutes, seconds…the result of a violent collision on the football field when he was twenty-two years old.

The accident ruins Decker's professional football career but leaves him with a super autobiographical memory, the ability to recall just about everything that has happened in his life. 

If you are a student and about to take a Math or History test, you would want what Decker has.

Decker puts his extraordinary perceptive faculties and deductive reasoning to good use: he joins the Burlington Police Department where he and his partner and friend, Detective Mary Lancaster, make a formidable team in crime investigation.

One evening, Decker returns home from work to find his wife, little girl and brother-in-law murdered; his wife and daughter genitally mutilated. The shocking tragedy sends his life into a tailspin. He leaves home, gives up his job, and lives off the streets, basically not caring what happens to him. Eventually, Decker establishes a semblance of life by working as a reclusive private investigator, taking up inconsequential cases, probably just to stay alive. Meanwhile, the case remains unsolved.

More than a year later, the sudden appearance of a strange man, Sebastian Leopold, who walks up to the police and confesses to the murders, in spite of a watertight alibi, and a calculated mass shooting at the local high school around the same time jolts Decker back to reality. His former boss, Captain Miller, persuades him to be a part of the investigation into the shootout. Decker agrees in the hope that he can also find out who killed his family.

Decker joins his former partner, Lancaster, in the school library—the war room—with the FBI for company. But he works largely alone, much to the annoyance of Lancaster and special FBI agent Sam Bogart, bringing them in only after he has successfully pursued a lead.

What he uncovers over the next few days leaves him stunned—the person (or persons) who wiped out his family was also responsible for killing the targeted students and staff at the school. His remarkable mental abilities initially fail to throw up faces or names of people he might have wronged in the past and who might want to get back at him through his family.

As more people, including a female FBI agent, turn up dead, Decker makes another chilling discovery—he is going to be the final victim.

Amos Decker is one of the most unusual characters I have read in crime fiction. The tragedy has left him bereft of emotion but not without empathy. His brilliant mind makes him unique in a way that it makes everyone around him—his partner Mary Lancaster, special agent Bogart, with whom he has a strained relationship in the beginning, and opportunistic reporter-turned-amateur sleuth Alexandra Jamison—almost redundant. He finds most of the clues and assembles the missing pieces. It comes to a point, later on in the book, where the three wait for a cue from Decker and do exactly as he deduces.

As a reader, I couldn't help question their purpose in the narrative. I also felt it was one of two weak spots in what was otherwise a novel filled with suspense and speculation, though not enough to keep me on tenterhooks. The other was the motive behind all the murders, which wasn't as convincing as I'd have liked it to be.

Still, Memory Man is a well-crafted thriller with an unusual storyline and an intriguing hero. The novel's strength lies in its singular focus on the Goliath-like character who sweeps the crime novel from start to end, both as a grieving family man and as a razor-sharp homicide detective. I will be keen to read more on Amos Decker in the five-book series.

The Rome Express by Arthur Griffiths, 1907

I offer this review for Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase as well as my self-imposed challenge to read 1850-1950 vintage books in five categories this year. This is the first of five books in mystery-detective which supersedes spy-espionage for now.

The Rome Express, the direttissimo, or most direct, was approaching Paris one morning in March, when it became known to the occupants of the sleeping-car that there was something amiss, very much amiss, in the car.

The Rome Express by English author Arthur Griffiths has some of the ingredients of Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. A man is brutally murdered on an express train, half-a-dozen people of different nationalities are suspects, and the detective investigating the crime seems like Hercule Poirot’s twin. Except for one thing: Griffiths wrote his novel 27 years before Christie wrote hers. Did Christie borrow the idea from Griffiths? We'll never know.

Unlike Poirot who investigates Ratchett’s murder on the Orient Express, M. Floçon, the Chef de la Surêté, or Chief of the Detective Service of the French police, investigates the mysterious death of Francis A. Quadling, a disreputable banker on the run from Rome, after the express train reaches Lyons station in Paris.

Floçon wastes no time in questioning the seven suspects—the beautiful Contessa Sabine di Castagneto, an Englishwoman by birth, and her attractive maid Hortense Petitpré, a Frenchwoman; the upright and indignant General Sir Charles Collingham, an officer in the British army, and his brother Reverend Silas Collingham, a rector in Norfolk county; Natale Ripaldi, a police detective from Rome; and two unknown Frenchmen.

The other passengers in the adjoining cars are allowed to go on the ground that they’d no access to the one in which the murder took place.

© www.christies.com

In his interrogations Floçon gets a lot of help from M. Beaumont le Hardi, the instructing judge who does as much of the questioning, and a commissary of police, who is at best a mute spectator. Two first inspectors, Galipaud and Block, bungle their way through the field work.

Floçon somewhat resembles Poirot in attire and appearance but not in attitude. I liked Arthur Griffiths’ description of M. Floçon. It says:

“He lived just round the corner in the Rue des Arcs, and had not far to go to the Prefecture. But even now, soon after daylight, he was correctly dressed, as became a responsible ministerial officer. He wore a tight frock coat and an immaculate white tie; under his arm he carried the regulation portfolio, or lawyer's bag, stuffed full of reports, dispositions, and documents dealing with cases in hand. He was altogether a very precise and natty little personage, quiet and unpretending in demeanour, with a mild, thoughtful face in which two small ferrety eyes blinked and twinkled behind gold-rimmed glasses. But when things went wrong, when he had to deal with fools, or when scent was keen, or the enemy near, he would become as fierce and eager as any terrier.”

A lithograph in colours, 1900,
by R. De Ochoa

The French detective is overzealous in his frantic effort to nail the murderer, to the extent that he accuses nearly all the seven people of committing the crime. A mere word or two from someone is enough for the Chief of the Detective Service to zoom in on a suspect, as he does in the case of the countess, her maid, the general, and the Roman officer, often with hilarious results. His accusations swing from one suspect to another like a pendulum.

In the end General Collingham, who is smitten by Contessa Castagneto, saves the day, and much embarrassment, for Floçon, as he perceives a trail of blackmail involving the Italian detective Ripaldi and correctly reasons that the murdered man is not Quadling, the banker.

Final word
The British like poking fun at the French and Arthur Griffith does in ample measure in his delightful novel which is laced with French and Italian exclamations. He has portrayed the French police as a bunch of nitwits who can’t do their job right. For instance, when the general learns that the countess has been arrested, he blurts out, “I don't believe it! Not from these chaps, a pack of idiots, always on the wrong tack! I don't believe a word, not if they swear.”

The Rome Express lacks the suspense and seriousness of Murder on the Orient Express but makes up with a dose of unintended humour through the antics of Floçon and his investigation. Except for the French detective, the other characters are quite ordinary. In short, a nice and light read.

The book is not to be confused with the 1932 film Rome Express by Walter Forde and starring Esther Ralston and Conrad Veidt. The story, by Clifford Grey, an English songwriter, actor, and Olympic medalist, takes place on the train and revolves around a valuable painting that is stolen.

About the author
Arthur Griffiths (1838-1908) was an inspector of prisons and author who has published over 50 books. He is believed to have descended from a long line of military men and served as a Second Lieutenant during the Crimean War in mid-19th century. His books include both fiction and non-fiction, notably The Passenger from Calais, Mysteries of Police and Crime: A General Survey of Wrongdoing and Its Pursuit, The Mediterranean: It’s Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins, The Thin Red Line, Life of Napoleon, Victorian Murders: Mysteries of Police and Crime, In Old French Prisons, and In Spanish Prisons: The Inquisition at Home and Abroad, Prisons Past and Present, among many others.