I'm pretty sure I've read this issue of ARGOSY, but it was at least twenty years ago, probably longer, and I don't recall anything about it except the nice Rudolph Belarski cover and that I really enjoyed Frank Richardson Pierce's timber novella. Pierce was just about the best at that kind of yarn. Also in this issue are stories by Jim Kjelgaard, Carl Rathjen, Alexander Key, and Robert W. Cochran, plus serial installments by Robert Carse, Johnston McCulley, and Jonathan Stagge (actually the same guys who wrote mysteries under the pseudonyms Patrick Quentin and Q. Patrick, at least part of the time; who wrote what under those names is pretty complicated). ARGOSY always had great covers and great writers. If it just weren't for all those blasted serials . . .
I don't care much for falling covers. They give me the creeps. But I'll admit, this one by Rudolph Belarski is pretty effective. And there's an excellent group of writers in this issue of MYSTERY BOOK MAGAZINE, too: Fredric Brown, Patrick Quentin, Helen Reilly, Norman A. Daniels, Robert C. Dennis, and house-name Robert Wallace, who, if I had to guess, in this instance was probably Daniels, as well.
Years ago I read quite a few novels by Patrick Quentin (a pseudonym used by several different combinations of writers, but most often Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler) featuring producer Peter Duluth and his movie star wife Iris. I remember these as being witty and sophisticated and generally enjoyable, a little along the lines of the Pam and Jerry North books by Richard and Frances Lockridge, but not as good.
I never read PUZZLE FOR FIENDS until now, though. It’s a Peter Duluth novel, too – sort of. I say that because for most of the book, Peter has amnesia and doesn’t know who he is.
Ah, the old amnesia plot! Well, it wasn’t quite as old in 1946, when this book was first published. After a brief opening in which Peter sends Iris off to Japan for a post-war USO tour, he wakes up in a mansion populated by three beautiful but vaguely sinister women who claim to be his mother, his wife, and his sister, as well as a vaguely sinister doctor who’s there because Peter has been in a car wreck and has a broken arm and leg. Only he’s not Peter anymore (although the reader knows he really is). Everybody claims he’s somebody named Gordon Friend, whose father died recently under mysterious circumstances.
I like a book where nothing is what it seems and the plot has twist after twist. That’s the case here, especially in the second half, which winds up playing like something from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. The first half is mostly set-up and pretty slow, but I can forgive that if there’s a good payoff, as there is here. PUZZLE FOR FIENDS is more of a psychological thriller than an actual mystery, although Peter does wind up solving several murders. It’s worth reading, and in fact I’d recommend just about anything under the Patrick Quentin pseudonym. (Webb and Wheeler also wrote as Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge, but I don’t believe I’ve ever read any of the books published under those names.)
