best 100 mysteries of all time

Black Alibi–Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

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Black Alibi— Cornell Woolrich–1942–used

The Leopard Man played on Turner Classic Movies yesterday. It’s a must see, again, film. Atmospheric, and in some parts, downright suspenseful and terrifying, it cannot hold a reader’s breath, the way the original source does, Black Alibi. I’ve proclaimed it before, Cornell Woolrich in all his various nom de plumes is my favorite writer, period. Not just favorite crime writer, but writer, of fiction. Yes, that means I like his work more than Dickens, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Poe, Collins, Steinbeck etc.,  ad nauseum. Is he a finer writer? By most standards, probably not. To mine, yes. Because he delivers life at its most frightening, vulnerable, frantic. Hysteria is never far from breaking out in little pustules–here and there–in one of his novels. Fear is attempted to be kept at bay, yet finds its insidious way back into a character’s life, sometimes as an expected guest, others as a stranger wreaking disaster. Black Alibi is a series of  horrific events in separate stories, all part of the larger novel. It begins with U.S. citizens, Jerry Manning, and Kiki Walker finding small success in the South American city of Ciudad Real. Kiki is a headliner entertainer at a local club, and Jerry, her manager. He thinks up a wild idea for publicity, accent on wild. He convinces Kiki to lead a black jaguar into the club for shock and awe, which in turn shocks the jaguar to escape into the night in the city. Each subsequent chapter follows a young woman as she is stalked as prey by what appears to be the missing jaguar. And it’s within these stories Woolrich’s best work is revealed.

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The Short and Shorter of It–Part 2

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Continuing my exploration of this thick volume full of lovely murders, Bill Pronzini, a superb writer, with a book on my Best 100 Mysteries list, wrote a lyrical love note to the railroad. Pronzini has edited short stories himself, and is the author of the two wonderful Gun In Cheek books about the worst in crime fiction–or best, depending on how you define it. He and his wife, Marcia Muller, are responsible for a huge catalog of  quality work. So I wasn’t surprised to find him within the pages, not once, but several times, alone, or with a writing partner. Sweet Fever  is narrated by an old man who describes he and his grandson’s love of watching the train come through the tunnel at Chigger Mountain.

“The moon was so bright you could see the melons lying in Feride Johnson’s patch over on the left, and the rail tracks had a sleek oiled look coming out of the tunnel mouth and leading off towards the Sabreville yards a mile up the line. On the far side of the tracks, the woods and the run-down shacks that used to be a hobo jungle before the country sheriff closed it off thirty years back had them a silvery cast, like they was all coated in winter frost.”

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Hurricane Reading

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So, as the weather gurus are shouting their dire predictions on TV, the local police are calling each home to warn of impending doom, and my mother is repeating every minute change in the forecast,  my thoughts are on what the hell do I read if the power goes, and there’s no DVD’s of Mannix, or  reruns of Perry Mason to watch? Would I be forced to have a conversation?? I think not. So, scurry around I will to unearth absorbing, fascinating titles, while winds threaten to down every  tree, and rain causes leaves to clog the gutters. Sadly, we left the battery search until there are none in the county, so if I find something readable, I’ll be straining my eyes via candles, the old fashioned way.

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My Ride With Gus–Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

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My Ride With Gus Charles Carillo 1996–available

As soon as my eyes hit the first paragraph of My Ride With Gus, this second time around, I remembered why I loved it so much. Fast paced, hip–90s style–and seriously funny, the original premise of a hapless rather self centered successful architect accidentally killing an unwanted New Year’s Eve club pickup, slowly evolves into a warm, layered, surprising novel, rich in family dynamics and misconceptions that engage the reader long past the initial crime. As a New Yorker, even one who hasn’t lived in the city for a few years, the setting and authentic language of the novel is especially appealing.

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Composition For Four Hands–Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

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Composition  for Four Hands—Hilda Lawrence–1947-OOP

“They wheeled her chair to the big bay window in her bedroom. She’d been fed and bathed. She’d had what they called her forty winks.  They said it was such a beautiful afternoon and wasn’t she lucky to have such a nice window? Then they left her.”

This is the ominous beginning to a story that builds in suspense. Unusual, that it’s not told in the first person, considering the main character is completely paralyzed. I would have probably gone with Nora Manson telling the story from her personal point of view, of her terror in the unknown and the fact that she was being targeted by someone in her own home, someone wanted to kill her.

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The Big Sleep–Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

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The Big Sleep—Dashiell Hammett–1939–in print

I admit, the film is one of my all time favorites. I will watch it each and every time it plays on Turner Classic Movies. Happily, Mr. Turner didn’t colorize this film–or if he did, they don’t bother ruining our viewing pleasure by showing that version. I can enter at the middle, and become glued to the set, or even at the very end, when there’s just a few more moves to be made, and I’ll still opt to watch it rather than some first run program. I love it for the very reason some critics hate it–the convoluted plot. So layered, that even Chandler was hard put to explain whodunit for one of the murders in the book and on screen. I love the actors, naturally–I mean, how could one not love Bogart and Bacall–and wow–the sister to Bacall’s character, Martha Vickers, steals the show–which is why they went back and added more scenes for Bacall to shine in. Character actors galore, and an early Dorothy Malone add up to the perfect mystery film. And lest I forget, the biblio aspect of the story is just the scotch in old man Sternwood’s glass, he can’t drink.

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Laura. Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

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Laura—Vera Caspary–1943 (it ran as a serial in a magazine in 1942 before being published as a novel)–used paperback

I recently read another Vera Caspary title, Bedelia, and the only similarity to Laura is the author. Bedelia is a nice character study of a beguiling black widow, whose latest husband finally catches on. It holds neither the suspense or surprise that Laura does. Since a great deal of the impact of the novel, Laura, is intertwined with the plot–I’ll need to give a general *Spoiler Alert” for the entire article! That’s assuming you are one of the few people who never heard of or saw the classic film starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, nor saw the billion rip-offs on episodic television.

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Partners & Crime Booksellers Closing

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Another independent bookstore is ending its run. Partners & Crime follows many other mystery indies that have closed over the last 20 or so years in New York City. Starting with the two Foul Play bookstores, one in the Village, the other on the Upper East Side in 1994, and over a decade later by the first mystery bookstore established in the US, Murder Ink (it had expanded to two stores before the expansion closed in the late 90s.) Black Orchid, closed a few years ago, and now Partners & Crime. The only specialized mystery bookstore left in the city will be Mysterious Bookshop, which moved downtown after the brownstone it was located in was sold. Partners & Crime was in business for 18 years, not a bad run at all. The reason it was able to stay open as long as it did–the original partners all had day jobs as well as part ownership. The digital world has been taking over, and in some ways this doesn’t seem like a bad thing, to one of the owners. The idea that books will now be on the same playing field as music and movies pleases her. Nonetheless, it is sad for those of us who love wandering through the aisles, perusing titles and authors, making selections from what we physically handle rather than reading inane reviews online and choosing that way. Having a live intelligent person who can point out what they have recently read and liked beats amazon’s ridiculous reviews any day.

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