Here is a rundown of this fabulous quartet from Elizabeth Linington, aka Dell Shannon, Lesley Egan, and Anne Blaisedell:


GREENMASK

“He wished, if the lunatics like Greenmask had to come along, they’d kill off just the unlikable people who wouldn’t be missed.”

A wonderful read from one of the greatest crime writers of the twentieth century. Unlike her Luis Mendoza series (written as Dell Shannon) and the Vic Varallo series (written as Lesley Egan), I had only vague recollections of Elizabeth Linington’s Ivor Maddox series (written also as Anne Blaisedell). It would gradually become the Ivor Maddox and Susan Carstairs series — which astute readers can feel coming even in this first entry. Maddox can’t quite understand why it is so easy to be around policewoman Carstairs. Perhaps it’s her affability, or good police work. Or perhaps it’s her seeming obliviousness to him, whereas, almost to his chagrin, women seem to be universally attracted to him, though he doesn’t find any reason for it.

“Maddox felt slightly cheered up to see her, for no reason. Good old Carstairs. The reliable Carstairs, looking at him with her grave dark eyes.”

I’m not certain why I didn’t remember this series as well, because it’s fabulous! Very much set in the 1960s, and later the seventies and eighties, there still exists — outside of some deliciously politically incorrect stuff in the denouement — an almost classic mystery vibe to it. This is in no small part due to the life and characteristics Linington gave her series protagonist, and this particular plot. Linington was a mystery lover herself, quite knowledgable about the genre, and by making Maddox a mystery book collector as well as a smart copper, and then weaving in a narrative which allowed that aspect of his life to blur with the crime, she kicked off this series in grand mystery fashion.

Ivor Maddox has Welsh blood, and has just been promoted to Sergeant. He is also moving for the first time. As the series begins, Maddox is trying to settle in both at the little house he’s chosen because it had space to put up his book shelves, and the Wilcox station in Hollywood. Thirty-one-year-old Maddox is dark-haired, single, a book-hound, drives a scarlet-red Frazer Nash sport’s car, and considers himself rather ordinary looking at 5’9’’. He continues to be astounded that every attractive female he comes across, eventually makes a play for him.

Though you can feel the sixties when reading this today, the Hollywood element is somewhat muted, as if Linington wanted to show that whether it was Glendale (Vic Varallo series), Los Angeles (Luis Mendoza series), or Hollywood (Ivor Maddox series), crime was crime, and cops were cops. Settings may have varied in her series, but motives and passion and avarice were universal, and quite realistic.

Maddox is buried in boxes of books he’s attempting to organize onto his newly erected book shelves, when D’Arcy and Céaser Rodriguez pull him away to Walt’s Malt Shop. A man lay bludgeoned, and left at the crime scene is a county guide, a green ribbon, and this note:

“This is number one! Greenmask.”

While Rodriguez is delighted to have a real challenge for a change, Maddox is less enamored of having a nut job running around killing people randomly, like in one of his old mystery books. As the bodies begin to pile up — and they do — something about the case keeps nagging at Maddox. It isn’t until he’s unpacking his books that he realizes the killer is recreating a very famous mystery novel.

If you’re up on this great author, you might have guessed which book it is from the description of the killing, but you’ll never guess how much fun it creates when Maddox brings the book into the station and informs the others what’s going on. Rodriguez, who has never been a reader, much less a mystery reader, gets so hooked on Maddox's books that it’s hard for him to focus on the case at hand. We also finally meet Susan Carstairs for the first time, and there’s a glimmer of what lies ahead for Maddox in the series.

There are plenty of interesting suspects, but the trick is figuring out just which of the victims was the “important” one. The only thing which seems a forgone conclusion to Maddox, is Rodriguez getting hooked on John Dickson Carr. Book lovers will delight in this one, as will those who enjoy mystery puzzles blended with police procedural. D’Arcy’s real name is revealed to Carstairs by Maddox, and there is a fine ending. Maddox’s explanation of how and why the Greenmask killer came to be, when all is revealed, and how another was persuaded to help him or her, will surely ruffle the feathers of the modern-day, uber-sensitive PC crowd. This first book in the Ivor Maddox series is delicious fun for mystery lovers, however!


NO EVIL ANGEL

In Elizabeth Linington’s second outing for Ivor Maddox and Susan Carstairs, the thin, dark, average looking book collector who drives a red Frazer Nash sports car and works out of the Wilcox station in Hollywood has more crimes to solve. Policewoman Carstairs is asked to help when Maddox needs to speak to a woman about her missing thirteen-year-old daughter. She will have a bigger role in this one than the terrific inaugural entry in the series, Greenmask, about which Anthony Boucher wrote: “A very considerable detective novel…a mystery reader’s mystery and a beauty.”

The lovely Carstairs, ever the professional, is appalled that the girl has been missing for a week, yet the mother has only now seen fit to report her as missing. No sooner does the search get rolling, however, than Maddox has a homicide on his hands. Patrolmen Finch and Gomez have discovered Steve Wray dead in his parked car. There is also a missing mother in Philadelphia, a safe job gone bad, a liquor store robbery with another killing, and finally a young boy beaten to death. Some will be related cases, others will not, in this easy to take and involving police procedural.

Carstairs has some nice moments in this one, as she searches for Jewel, who may or may not have run off deliberately with someone. It is the search for the “someone” that nearly jams her up until Maddox is able to bail her out of a tough spot with some delinquent youths. Maddox is a bit more hands on in this one than the first entry, as Linington shows he’s a cop first, a book lover second. Most of the allusions to books in this one belong to Rodriguez, who is now working his way through Carr. D’Arcy is around of course, and everyone lends a hand in this swiftly moving police procedural/mystery with well defined characters and an excellent plot.

More shootings, a lot of legwork, and some rumination on a system that in some cases is too lenient and flawed to prevent history from repeating itself, follow as this very good and almost breezy police procedural rushes toward a surprising and satisfying conclusion.


DATE WITH DEATH

“Maddox looked at Rodriguez. It was, indeed, so much neater between the book covers: the problem posed, the problem neatly solved. People in real life somewhat different. Often, somewhat dirtier: often, somewhat messier: often, you wondered just exactly how far Homo sapiens had progressed from the cave with the bones scattered round the fire and Neanderthal squatted grunting over his kill. You wondered.”


The third book in the Ivor Maddox series is a breezy police procedural richly layered with insight into people. Maddox has settled into the Hollywood Wilcox station at this point, and found a home. César Rodriguez is still hooked on mystery books, thanks to Maddox, and does as much reading as he does detecting in this one. D’Arcy is still prone to fall in love with every pretty woman he meets on a case, and the wonderful Susan Carstairs is still single, but you can sense something will happen soon between her and Maddox.

It’s early November at the Wilcox station in Hollywood as this one opens, and two very different cases pop up. The first is more amusing than menacing: a pink pig painted with blue polka dots has been set loose in the city. It was a lot of trouble for someone to go to, but the “why” becomes clearer as more pranks occur; each prank designed to make the people being pranked realize their shortcomings. But who in the world could know each of the “victims” so intimately?

The second case is anything but amusing. A young man named Ronald Morgenstern and his bride-to-be Ruth Evans are gunned down in her driveway after returning home from the movies. Ronald was by all accounts a good egg, attending a lesser college on the cheap. Ruthie comes from a family with money, but she’s also a good egg, working as a social worker despite her family’s position in the community. Who was the target, Ronald or Ruthie, or was it both? Ruthie’s address book gives Maddox a long list of suspects. But every time Maddox and his pals think they have someone who looks good for the killings, it washes out.

Linington makes it incredibly entertaining to be in the shoes of Maddox and the police as they attack every new lead. We’re reminded in this one just how great a writer and storyteller Linington was in Date with Death. As she did so well, Linington weaves humor and pathos into the procedural, and sometimes tragedy. On one occasion Maddox is confronted with the heartbreaking situation of a teenage girl living with a terrible secret:

“Maddox found the kitchen: everything needed painting, everything was very old, enamel chipped off the ancient stove and refrigerator, but everything was very clean. Trying to keep a home together for the younger kids, that girl; she was doing a job of it maybe. And that drunken old bum — And because, probably, she was under age, no way to kick him out and still get the supplemental relief checks to keep the family together. The rules sometimes didn’t allow for individual circumstance.”

Linington always gave the reader more than a mystery, more than just an entertaining police procedural, but a look at people and psychology and the tiny things in the lives of people which mean so much. Cops were real people with real lives, hopes and dreams and silliness just like everyone else. And in this one, we learn — not for the first time in one of Linington’s novels — just how cops doing a tough and dirty, all-too-often thankless job, feel about the do-gooders, who don’t have a clue about what really goes on out there. In a section of chapter five too lengthy to quote, Linington captures the older, run-down section of 1960s Los Angeles County as strikingly and stunningly as Raymond Chandler captured postwar Los Angeles. Not only was she more prolific than her contemporary, Ed McBain, but she had more literary chops. She uses her deft ear to write dialog fitting a girl of the above-mentioned age enduring a terrible situation, until it finally spills out in fits and spurts, and tears.

While Maddox and the boys are chasing their tails on the prankster case and the double homicide, Carstairs goes undercover in a hotel being used as a cathouse. Linington shows there are racial tensions in mid-’60s Los Angeles, and not just between blacks and whites — a book shop owner hated Ronald because he was Jewish as much as he hated a couple of his black friends. Yet no one who had a motive for killing either Ronnie or Ruthie appears to have the means and opportunity. A bank robbery with casualties, and a few other cases pop up, and Maddox begins to wonder if the double-homicide will have to go in the unsolved file. But a casual remark by someone will finally lead him down a sad, lonely road to the killer. The ending to one case will be sad, the other, more humorous, because life goes on, whether we want it to or not in this terrific read from a writer at the top of her game.


SOMETHING WRONG

“He thought of the principal saying, ‘Right back to Sodom and Gomorrah.’ Once in a while Maddox the pessimist took a long look at the average crowd along any street in the city, and the thought crossed his mind, Are they worth saving?” — Something Wrong


A lot is going on at the Wilcox station in Hollywood in the fourth entry in this magnificent series, Something Wrong. A supermarket heist gone bad and deadly compete with the apparent suicide of a young girl jilted by her beau, a service station robbery, the random shooting of an elderly man from the window of a car, and a missing baby. A few other crimes pop up as well, including a shoplifting ring comprised of young girls, who may not be acting on their own. Ivor and the men try to get to the bottom of each case, especially the missing baby, because it won’t be long before the Feds take over. A hard woman named Janet Henry has a creepy, almost unnatural attachment to her vicious dobermans, and Maddox fears for the worst. And then there is Carol Ann Fisher, who was only fifteen and pregnant. How did she get the Quinidine? Was it cold blooded murder, or simple tragedy?

The solution to one crime is very dark — occult dark. It is made all the more powerful for the reader because of the adept way Linington frames it; suggesting what happened in such nuanced tones that she didn’t need to go into blood and gore detail. Linington knew that what the mind could imagine was far more horrific and disturbing than had she described the act in more graphic detail. It is an important lesson to other writers that blood and gore and graphically described violence is not only unnecessary, but a shortcut for writers either not skilled enough in their craft, or industrious enough in their work ethic, to paint with suggestion and make the act all the more powerful for it’s very lack of gratuitous and graphic violence.

By the time you’ve finished this quartet, you’ll wonder why Barbara “Elizabeth” Linington (aka Dell Shannon, Lesley Egan, and Anne Blaisedell) has not had the same renaissance as other mystery writers of the past, many of whom were neither as prolific, nor as talented, much less as successful. Series featuring Luis Mendoza, Vic Varallo, and Ivor Maddox and Sue Carstairs were acclaimed by critics and gobbled up by the reading public, keeping her at the top of mystery bestseller charts for three decades. She had genuine chops, and was a favorite of mystery book clubs. Her crime and police procedurals were not only groundbreaking in helping shape the genre, but terrifically entertaining reads. Something Wrong was in fact touted as the finest police procedural of 1967 by none other than Anthony Boucher, a name familiar to any mystery and crime lover worth his or her salt. The only conclusion one can draw is she suffers from that same unspoken stigma which dogs Spillane (and other writers of her ilk) to this day, because it certainly isn’t the writing… ( )