Sally's in the Alley: A Carstairs & Doan Mystery (Rue Morgue Vintage Mystery)

Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Mystery
Review: During the second world war there were a number of mystery writers who specialized in chaotic, fast-moving, screwball, wartime detective stories. The war doesn't always enter into the plot, but there were numerous such books at that time and in my head I sort of group them together based on when they were written. Craig Rice, Dwight V Babcock, Frank Gruber (early in his career), and Norbert Davis were all writers of this "school", which features humor, lots of movement, and multiple lead characters at least one of whom has a rather flexible morality. The books are crowded with characters of widely divergent backgrounds, and often have an underworld or (sometimes) a Hollywood back drop.

I think the best of the lot may be Norbert Davis's "Sally's in the Alley". Davis's novels have the most unusual crime-solving duo I've comea cross. One of them is a dog: Carstairs, a highly moral, intelligent Great Dane who doesn't approve of his master, a detective named Doan, who Carstairs believes indulges his taste for alchohol too much. The plot is as screwball as anything in the genre, and is populated with such characters as a highly patriotic young woman named Harriet Hathaway who'll do almost anything to help the war effort, a mysterious man named "Mr. Blue" who'd rather make lewd suggestions to Harriet than think about the war, a beautiful movie star, her agent, a government-hating prospector named Dust Mouth Haggerty, and a sinister undertaker, among others.

And Davis certainly had an amusing and evocative way with words: "Forenoons in Southern California are wonderful, except when the're not, and in that case there's no use discussing the matter at all. This one was ordinarily wonderful. The sun was shining and soft breezes were slithering, and there were some small, shy, freshly washed clouds distributed where they would do the least good."

At a slim 122 pages, the covers of this book are too close together (to invert an Ambrose Bierce criticism of another book), but that's my only complaint.

By the way, if you like Davis, you're in good company. He was a favorite of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.