A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Day of the Moon - Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey Wallmann

As far as I can tell, DAY OF THE MOON has been published in only two editions, a 1983 British hardback from Robert Hale and a 1993 paperback reprint from Carroll & Graf. (No longer true. It's available in an e-book edition on Amazon.) It’s a dandy little crime thriller, tightly plotted as you’d expect from a couple of old pros like Bill Pronzini and Jeff Wallmann and written in terse, hardboiled prose that’s a joy to read.

Flagg (we’re never told his first name) is a troubleshooter for the mob, here known as the Organization. He’s headquartered in San Francisco. As the book opens, he’s looking for the loot from an armored car robbery which has disappeared following some sort of double-cross that left the planner of the heist dead. That job isn’t the only one Flagg has on his plate, though. He’s also investigating a series of hijackings involving trucks and merchandise owned by the Organization, including some moonshining equipment. That ties in with Flagg’s third assignment, which is to find the bootlegger who’s trying to muscle in on the Organization’s illegal liquor operation in the Pacific Northwest. Not surprisingly, the armored car robbery winds up being connected to Flagg’s other two jobs as well.

Flagg reminds me a lot of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker in his low-key professionalism and also in the fact that the reader winds up rooting for him despite the fact that he’s a criminal. He actually comes across as a private eye of sorts, except his only client is the Organization. He shies away from violence, although he’s plenty tough when he has to be, and prefers to rely on his brain rather than a gun. He needs both, though, to untangle this complicated plot. I’m not aware of any other books or stories featuring Flagg and don’t know if he was intended to be a series character, but he certainly could have been. DAY OF THE MOON is a fine, enjoyable novel. One of the reviews quoted on the cover of the paperback refers to it as a “good, old-fashioned page-turner”, and that’s exactly what it is.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on May 23, 2008. A few days later, on May 26, Bill Pronzini provided more information about the book's background.)

"You're right that Flagg was intended to be a series character. The novel was originally sold to Leisure here, but never published because of a change of regime and policy; Wallmann and I were lucky to sell it to Hale in the U.K. And to have Carroll & Graf do a U.S. mass market edition, all thanks to Ed G. (Ed Gorman)

Incidentally, MOON is composed of three novelettes, two from AHMM, one from MSMM, that we bridged together and revised into the novel format. There's one other Flagg novelette from AHMM that we planned to use as the basis for a second novel and that has never been reprinted or collected."

(And here's the listing of the original Flagg stories from the Fictionmags Index.)

Day of the Moon, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine June 1970, as by William Jeffrey
Murder Is No Man’s Friend, (ss) Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine November 1970, as by William Jeffrey
The Ten Million Dollar Hijack, (nv) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine January 1972, as by William Jeffrey
The Island, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine August 1972, as by William Jeffrey

(I've met both Bill Pronzini and Jeff Wallmann, one time each, on separate occasions. I'm sure some of you know them much better than I do. I found them to be fine fellows and excellent writers. In fact, I need to read more by both of them. In the meantime, I still highly recommend this novel.)

Coming From Stark House: The Action Man/Terror Tournament - Jay Flynn

THE ACTION MAN
Denton Farr has everything he needs, money, and a fine woman. So why plan the perfect, impossible heist? Why do something that would bring the federals and the syndicate howling after him; why try a stunt that could easily get him killed and certainly send him up for the rest of his life? The action. There's something special about the way his body feels, something different about the air it breathes when he has action. That it is unnecessary doesn't matter. It is action. And why the hell does he want to climb that mountain? Because it is there. Yes, this is the heist will provide all the action that Farr will ever need...

TERROR TOURNAMENT
Ex-cop Burl Stannard has been hired as security to protect the take at a 3-day pro-amateur golf tournament. All he has to do is ride shotgun with the money to the bank. But something goes wrong. Three men pull up in a golf cart and crash their car. Shots are exchanged. A fellow ex-cop and one of the thieves are killed. When Stannard comes to, the $400,00 is gone, and no clues in sight, not even the body of the dead criminal. Who could have pulled off such a perfect heist? The more Stannard digs, the more it begins to look like an inside job but everyone involved has an airtight alibi!

I've read several novels by Jay Flynn and enjoyed them, but these two I haven't read, so I'm looking forward to them. And the introduction by Bill Pronzini is great. I can recommend this volume on that basis alone.

Forgotten Books: Bill Pronzini/Marcia Muller Day

For Bill Pronzini/Marcia Muller day, I wanted to write about something a little different, so I wound up reading two novellas written by Pronzini and Jeff Wallmann when they were living in Europe in the early 1970s, writing erotic novels for Liverpool Library Press and house-name novellas for various digest magazines published by Leo Margulies' Renown Publications.

We'll start with Pronzini and Wallmann's only entry in the Mike Shayne series, "Danger—Michael Shayne at Work!", from the April 1972 issue of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. This is a classic mystery set-up: a group of people trapped in an isolated hunting lodge by a hurricane. In this case, the hunting lodge is in the Florida Panhandle, and Mike Shayne has driven up there to deliver a report to his client, a politician who suspects his assistant of being involved in a crooked bid-rigging deal with a construction company. Also on hand are the politician's girlfriend; his ex-wife and her husband; his daughter and her boyfriend; the lodge's caretaker; and the assistant who's mixed up in the corruption and graft. As you'd expect, one of them winds up dead, leaving Shayne trapped with plenty of suspects and an unknown killer who's soon after him, too.

This story has quite a bit going for it. The action takes place in a short period of time, which I always like. The plot is suitably complex, and Pronzini and Wallmann play fair with the clues, so when Shayne finally gathers the suspects and names the killer, everything makes sense. There are some nice hardboiled scenes along the way.

Where it suffers is in the authors' characterization of Mike Shayne. Shayne has been referred to (erroneously, in my opinion) as the generic private eye, and unfortunately that's true in this case. Other than the fact that he has red hair and tugs on his earlobe occasionally when he's thinking, there's little to distinguish Shayne from dozens of other private eyes. With the story not being set in Miami and without a single mention of any of the regular supporting cast, Shayne just doesn't seem like Shayne. It's true that Davis Dresser sometimes took Shayne out of his usual setting, in novels such as MURDER IS MY BUSINESS, STRANGER IN TOWN, and SHE WOKE TO DARKNESS, but more of his personality survived intact. However, as I mentioned this is the only Shayne story Pronzini and Wallmann wrote, so they probably would have done a better job of that had they continued. As it is, "Danger—Michael Shayne at Work!" is an enjoyable if minor yarn.

This issue of MSMM also contains a Pronzini short story, "The Duel", under his Jack Foxx pseudonym. It's a well-written little tale about two men fighting over a woman, with a twist ending that could have gone two different ways. I didn't pick the right one.

The final novella Pronzini and Wallmann wrote for Renown is "The Pawns of Death", originally published in the final issue of CHARLIE CHAN MYSTERY MAGAZINE (August 1974). There's an old saying among long-time mystery fans: Never go to the opera with Ellery Queen. The same warning holds true for going to a chess tournament with Charlie Chan. The Honolulu detective is actually in Paris this time around, to attend the championship matches of an international chess competition. The reigning champion is a very stiff-upper-lip Britisher; the challenger is a brash, arrogant young American. Each man has an entourage of friends and family with him, and there are a lot of reporters on hand as well. Pronzini and Wallmann do a good job of introducing us to all the characters, and if it's pretty obvious that at least one of them will wind up as a murder victim and the rest will be suspects.

Using that set-up, the authors do a good job of spinning an entertaining yarn featuring not one but two locked room murders, a dying message, romantic triangles, a bizarre murder weapon, and a satisfactory solution. Packing all that into 30,000 words isn't easy, but Pronzini and Wallmann pull it off.

Best of all, though, is their portrayal of Charlie Chan. He's probably a little closer to the movie versions of Chan, rather than the character from Earl Derr Biggers' original novels, but he's still smart, funny, and very likable. His friendship with the French police prefect in charge of the case is handled quite well. I read this in an e-book version available on Amazon, and it includes a good introduction by Pronzini that mentions the editor of the magazine cut out some of the typical Chan sayings, but there are plenty left to make the character ring true to what we expect. Typical of most writers, Pronzini doesn't seem to think much of this early effort (I feel the same way about some of my stuff), but I found it to be very entertaining and thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Even though they were always digests, the magazines from Renown Publications were really the last gasps of the pulp era, with their lead novels under house names, backed up by an assortment of novelettes and short stories, many of them by authors who wrote for the actual pulps earlier in their careers. Editors such as Sam Merwin Jr. and Frank Belknap Long also had long associations with the pulps. I don't know if Pronzini and Wallmann feel this way, but I've always been very glad I got the chance to be a part of that.

I didn't want to completely neglect Marcia Muller in this post, so I reread her story "The Time of the Wolves" from the iconic Western anthology WESTERYEAR. This is a tale of two pioneer women trapped in an isolated cabin in Kansas by a blizzard and a pack of hungry wolves, and one of the women may just be going mad . . . It's a great story, full of suspense, and as good as I remembered it from the last time I read it, years ago. I give it a high recommendation, along with the book it's in. WESTERYEAR is one of the all-time best Western anthologies (and it has my all-time favorite Bill Crider story in it). Hard to believe it's been almost thirty years since it was published.

Forgotten Books: The Crimes of Jordan Wise - Bill Pronzini

(This post originally appeared on August 20, 2007)

I’ve been a fan of Bill Pronzini’s work ever since I read his Man From U.N.C.L.E. novella “The Pillars of Salt Affair” in the MFU digest magazine sometime in the late Sixties. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that Pronzini had written that story. It was published under the house-name Robert Hart Davis, a tribute by publisher Leo Margulies to Bob Davis, an early pulp editor with whom Margulies had worked. Anyway, I was a huge U.N.C.L.E. fan and really enjoyed “The Pillars of Salt Affair”; I remember the ending of it to this day. It was a few years, though, before I discovered that Pronzini wrote it.

By that time I was also reading and enjoying his Nameless Detective series, one of the great private eye series of all time. Over the years I’ve fallen behind on reading the Nameless books, but I’ll catch up on them sooner or later. In the meantime, I’ve just read this stand-alone suspense novel by Pronzini, and THE CRIMES OF JORDAN WISE lives up to the high standard of his other work.

In classic noir style, accountant Jordan Wise meets beautiful-but-only-as-good-as-she-has-to-be Annalise Bonner (even Annalise’s name sounds like something out of a Gold Medal novel), and before you know it Jordan has embarked on a daring plan to steal a lot of money in order to win her over. That he succeeds is almost a given, but you also know that the idyllic life Jordan and Annalise make for themselves in the Virgin Islands isn’t going to last. Things Will Go Wrong. And they certainly do.

What makes THE CRIMES OF JORDAN WISE such a fine novel isn’t the plot, which won’t contain many surprises for regular readers of this sort of book, but rather Pronzini’s writing, which is some of the smoothest you’re liable to encounter. Like Lawrence Block, there’s nothing fancy about Pronzini’s words, no verbal pyrotechnics, just good old-fashioned storytelling that draws the reader farther and farther into the story with well-constructed sentences, concise characterization, and occasional bursts of action. THE CRIMES OF JORDAN WISE gets a high recommendation from me.

A Few Words from Bill Pronzini

Last Friday I posted about DAY OF THE MOON, a novel by Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey Wallmann. Here’s some more information about the book, from Bill himself.

You're right that Flagg was intended to be a series character. The novel was originally sold to Leisure here, but never published because of a change of regime and policy; Wallmann and I were lucky to sell it to Hale in the U.K. And to have Carroll & Graf do a U.S. mass market edition, all thanks to Ed G. (Incidentally, MOON is composed of three novelettes, two from AHMM, one from MSMM, that we bridged together and revised into the novel format. There's one other Flagg novelette from AHMM that we planned to use as the basis for a second novel and that has never been reprinted or collected.)

Friday's Forgotten Book: Day of the Moon -- Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey Wallmann

As far as I can tell, DAY OF THE MOON has been published in only two editions, a 1983 British hardback from Robert Hale and a 1993 paperback reprint from Carroll & Graf, making it a perfect candidate for the Friday’s Forgotten Book project. It’s a dandy little crime thriller, tightly plotted as you’d expect from a couple of old pros like Bill Pronzini and Jeff Wallmann and written in terse, hardboiled prose that’s a joy to read.

Flagg (we’re never told his first name) is a troubleshooter for the mob, here known as the Organization. He’s headquartered in San Francisco. As the book opens, he’s looking for the loot from an armored car robbery which has disappeared following some sort of double-cross that left the planner of the heist dead. That job isn’t the only one Flagg has on his plate, though. He’s also investigating a series of hijackings involving trucks and merchandise owned by the Organization, including some moonshining equipment. That ties in with Flagg’s third assignment, which is to find the bootlegger who’s trying to muscle in on the Organization’s illegal liquor operation in the Pacific Northwest. Not surprisingly, the armored car robbery winds up being connected to Flagg’s other two jobs as well.

Flagg reminds me a lot of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker in his low-key professionalism and also in the fact that the reader winds up rooting for him despite the fact that he’s a criminal. He actually comes across as a private eye of sorts, except his only client is the Organization. He shies away from violence, although he’s plenty tough when he has to be, and prefers to rely on his brain rather than a gun. He needs both, though, to untangle this complicated plot. I’m not aware of any other books or stories featuring Flagg and don’t know if he was intended to be a series character, but he certainly could have been. DAY OF THE MOON is a fine, enjoyable novel. One of the reviews quoted on the cover of the paperback refers to it as a “good, old-fashioned page-turner”, and that’s exactly what it is.