****

​Lem's evocation of the eerie, the odd, and the mysterious highlights this novel of an English police inspector investigating a strange case of corpses seemingly coming back to life. The mystery itself is less important here than the theories advanced to explain it, which together create a world in which perception becomes its own reality. The terrific ending includes a particularly creepy scene set in the English countryside. At night. In deep fog.

****

Introverted academic swears ​to get even when an alcoholic neighbor runs over his beloved cat.  Psychological crime novel with complex characters (these are recognizable people with real problems), a genre defying plot (the mystery here isn't in the crime but in the way it will all play out), and loads of perceptive humor (most of which goes unappreciated by the melancholy main character).  Regrettably, the ending isn't as inventive as the rest of the novel, but the rest  -- full of intelligence, wit, and charm -- is a pure delight.  Vin Packer is one of several pen names used by Marijane Meaker.  Public Service Note:  If you have the Prologue Books paperback edition, do not read the grabber on the opening page:  it gives away a major plot point.

**

​The third and final volume in Collins' thematic trilogy of comics controversies:  who really owned Superman, the Al Capp/Hal Fisher fued, and now this, Dr. Fredric Wertham's 1950's crusade against comic books that ultimately resulted in the creation of the self-censoring Comics Code Authority.  A roman à clef, the book turns Dr. Wertham into Werner Frederick, Bill Gaines into Bob Price, Mad magazine into Craze, and so on.  And it's all about what happens when one of the players in this comic imbroglio gets murdered.  It's a lightly written, occasionally amusing mystery aimed at undiscriminating fans of comic book history, people who won't mind that the heroes (Jack and Maggie Starr) may inhabit the 1950s but think and behave like people from our own 20-teens, nor that Collins takes the path of least resistance (and highest personal resonance) by casting Wertham as evil, misguided, and foolish for daring to question the suitability of some comic stories and artwork for young readers.  Takes its title from Wertham's own book, unintentionally preserving its warning to the unwary.

****

Sophisticated romantic mystery narrated by three different characters, each of whom is dealing with the murder of a young woman in their own way.  One of them, a police detective, has to figure out who is lying, and why -- while meanwhile unraveling a bizarre love quadrangle.  Beautifully constructed, introspective and moody, with only enough nuts and bolts detective work to keep things moving.  Not hardboiled, but fully on par with with other noir greats from the likes of Hammett, Chandler, and Cain.  First published in 1942 as a serial in Collier's, where it ran under the Cain-inspired (yet awful) title Ring Twice for Laura.  Made into a film in 1944, starring Gene Tierney.

****

Superior mystery, winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, introduces the character of Irwin Maurice Fletcher.  Here, he's a hot-shot reporter working undercover to expose drug operations on a California beach when a rich industrialist makes him an offer he can't refuse:  he'll pay Fletch fifty thousand dollars to kill him.  Macdonald relies predominately on dialogue without adornment (James M. Cain-style) to reveal both the mystery and Fletch himself, who is funny, sarcastic, clever, and oddly romantic (a clear precursor to Nelson De Mille's John Corey).  Not the "master of disguise" played so well by Chevy Chase in the movie adaptation, Fletch here is just as amusing as an accomplished manipulator of social intercourse, playing off people's expectations to get them to open up to a complete stranger.  A fast and thoroughly entertaining read.  Followed by Confess, Fletch.

***

Sherlock Holmes adventure -- the eleventh in the series starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson -- sees the detective on the trail of a sadistic woman killer ("the worst since Jack the Ripper") who carries away a forefinger from each of his victims.  If the final solution is understandably rather prosaic, it's a lot of fun getting there, as we follow Holmes and Watson to the Mesmer Club and a woman (Hillary Brooke, presumably in green) who practices hypnosis.  Atmospheric, sometimes even eerie, and with that wonderful Rathbone/Bruce interplay.  Also with Henry Daniell as Professor Moriarty.  Black and white.

****

A man becomes obsessed with the strange, suicidal woman he is asked by her husband to keep an eye on, a woman who may be the reincarnation of an ancestor who herself committed suicide years before.  Clever and atmospheric French mystery, with obvious supernatural overtones, heavily weighted toward the psychological aspect of the case:  the man -- lonely, insecure, and desperate -- latches onto the woman as his one shot at happiness.  The authors effectively capture the man's contradictory and often self-defeating state of mind while providing some startling twists along the way.  The basis for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and also published under that title, though the original title is more apt.

****

Hammett's first novel, featuring the Continental Op, a detective with the San Francisco-based Continental Detective Agency. Called to the town of Personville, the Op finds his client murdered and the town, known locally as Poisonville, in the grip of rampant crime and corruption. He decides to clean it up, by pitting the various factions against each other. A labyrinthine plot and a body count that quickly rises to obscene proportion pull the reader into a nightmare world of murder and mayhem that even the Op finds difficult to resist. Hammet is "so hardboiled," Dorothy Parker wrote in The New Yorker, "you could roll him on the White House lawn.” Red Harvest is Exhibit #1. Based on four linked stories from 1927 and 1928, originally published in Black Mask.