ELLIOT PAUL MYSTERIES

Elliot Paul believes that mystery and detective novels are too often mechanical and dry, following well-worn patterns and lacking a legitimate degree of humor, love interest, and just plain good story telling. Several elements combine in this story to assure Mr. Paul of a highly satisfied audience. First of all, there is the gay Paris setting and a group of sparkling characters who would be likeable whether or not they were involved in a most exciting plot. There is Homer Evans, who alone should make this book a rival to The Thin Man, and whose varied talents include both the ability for quick thinking in emergencies and a personality which ambassadors, taxi drivers, and beautiful girls find equally irresistible. Then there is the young lady from Montana, whose shapely hand can be effective with a revolver in the best tradition of the Old West. There is also Hjalmar Jansen, a giant Norwegian artist, equally ready for fight or frolic. Sergeant Frémont, of the Paris Police, is a hero in spite of himself. Most people will recall that a Mickey Finn is a favorite concoction of bartenders the world over, useful in shanghai-ing sailors, and equally useful for putting jealous wives to sleep while husbands play. The Mickey Finn in this story appears prominently in the first murder, but later on death comes in a variety of ways to a number of people.

Homer Evans has a wacky group of friends who lead you all over Paris, up and down the Seine, through cafés filled with celebrities, taxidermist shops, subway stations, the musty dens of Egyptologists and the wards of a fantastic madhouse.

There is violence aplenty and corpses are in the most unexpected places. The New York Herald Tribune Books says, “This, as you might guess, is the funniest mystery on tap—that is, the funniest by far, for all other comic thrillers seem pale and wan beside Mr. Paul’s robustious works.”

You can’t fail to get plenty of gusty guffaws and spine-tickling chills as you join lovely Miriam Leonard, hard-drinking Norwegian-American painter Hjalmar Jansen, former member of the Tsar’s army Lvov Kvek, Chief of Detectives Frémont of the Paris Police, and the medical examiner, Dr. Hyacinthe Toudoux, to help Homer Evans solve this mystery that starts with the theft of a famous Watteau painting from the Louvre.

"Homer Evans is back. You remember Homer. The ever-calm, William Powell-ish sleuth of The Mysterious Mickey Finn, and Hugger Mugger in the Louvre Homer and his incomparable girl friend, Miriam, the gun-totin’, sharp-shooting gal from Montana. You’ll find them at work and play again in Elliot Paul’s Mayhem in B-Flat which has to do with the theft of a priceless Guarnerius violin, a huge dog, rival gangs, murders, tarantulas, dancing girls and loving ladies.

"Elliot Paul gives you plenty of laughs—and a bumper crop of homicide in this story that takes you from concert hall to cabaret to brothel, at racehorse speed. Even Homer has a hard time keeping up.

"Author Paul is a sly one. His quips are as fast as Miriam’s lightning draw; his innuendos as innocent as a strip-teaser. If you’re looking for deep-dyed detective problems, Mayhem in B-Flat is not for you. But if you want a hilarious evening, spend it with Homer, Miriam and the gang. You won’t regret it." (Literary Guidepost, 1940)

The fourth in the series of Homer Evans mystery adventures takes the reader for the ride of his life all the way from Paris to the badlands of Montana. In the wide open spaces where the last survivors of be Blackfeet and Shoshone Indians still keep their tribal ways in the lower stretches of the Yellowstone, where sheepherders and cattlemen fight to the death on the lone prairie, where behind every clump of sagebrush a dead-eye marksman lurks, there go all the veterans of the bloody campaigns in The Mysterious Mickey Finn, Hugger-Mugger in the Louvre and Mayhem in B-Flat.

Guided by Rain-No-More, the Blackfeet son of a chief, directed by the ever-resourceful Homer Evans and trigger-quick Miriam Leonard, and supported by Hugo Weiss the financier, Hjalmar Jansen, the scourge of the studios, Frémont of the Paris police, Anton Diluvio the virtuoso, and all the tried and true shock troops of the previous books, they travel by ship and special train to the frontier battleground. They arrive just in time to participate in the first skirmishes between the cattlemen's forces and the sheepherders' mercenaries recruited among the Great Lakes palefaces, all of them trained braves who had had their baptism of tommy-gun fire in Chicago's gangland wars. The casualties among cowboys, Indians, trigger men, sheep and cattle are appalling. But Homer Evans, by a stroke of tactical genius, turns defeat into victory and forever puts an end to lawlessness in the badlands.

The early Homer Evans mysteries were frolicsome satires, but they didn't stay that way. As author Elliot Paul grew older, his mysteries also matured. I'll Hate Myself in the Morning is a transitional novella, bridging the pre- and post-War writings. The amateur and reluctant detective, Homer Evans, is more pensive than usual, and finds himself investigating the murder of an innocuous little man who only wanted a friend. The fiendish murder takes place on a train traveling through the West, but sorting out the suspects becomes more difficult when they don't all stay put.

Murder on the Left Bank finds Homer back in post-War Paris, where he helps an American family investigate the death of a soldier friend of their son, who died in the War, along with the mysterious circumstances of a strange oral declaration before the son died. Author Elliot Paul recognized the problematic nature of the "super-detective" he created in Homer Evans, but brilliantly sends up his own character by giving us a second detective, the Boston-Irish Finke Maguire, for whom nothing is easy, but proving an able partner for the cerebral and sophisticated Evans. Syndicated reviewer Dorothy Hughes noted of Murder on the Left Bank: "frolic and crime among Americans in Paris with Paul again proving that the intellectual and the zany can mate as happily today as in Sterne's time." (J.P.H. of This & That was less impressed: "If there are screwier whodunits than Elliot Paul periodically turns out, our eyes never have encountered them. And he keeps turning them out. The latest, Murder on the Left Bank, is just as nerve-wracking as its predecessors.") But, those who enjoyed the early Homer Evans mysteries should find the later mysteries just as fun and more detailed in their puzzle creation.

In The Black Gardenia, Homer helps Finke Maguire set up shop in California, leading to a Hollywood mystery. Movie stars, mobsters, and millionaires round out the cast, and multiple murders make up the mystery to solve.

From one NY newspaper review: "The story revolves around the ambition of the Black Gardenia, a beautiful Mexican swimmer, to become a movie star. This ambition innocently sets off a train of intrigue which results in the killings and many times as much suspicion of one and another.

"Elliot Paul’s latest adventure of Homer Evans may not be so famous as his Murder on the Left Bank, but it is high above the average mystery and it is a pleasure to read it."

Elliot Paul, author of The Black and the Red and twenty-seven other books, was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on February 11, 1891. His boyhood was spent in the bosom of his conservative New England family, but an unappeasable wanderlust carried him all over the world. He joined his older brother as a timekeeper and surveyor on an irrigation project in Idaho and Wyoming, and after several jobs in construction camps in the Northwest, he enlisted in the AEF. He decided to remain in France after the Armistice. Off and on he lived on the rue de la Huchette, that street so lovingly celebrated in The Last Time I Saw Paris, for eighteen years. With Eugene Jolas he founded Transition, the startling avant-garde magazine of the Parisian expatriates. In 1931 Elliot Paul went to live in Santa Eulalia, Ibizia, in the Balearic Islands. The story of an idyllic life wantonly destroyed was told in The Life and Death of a Spanish Town.

The outbreak of World War II brought the novelist back to New York, where he scored an immediate success with his first detective story, The Mysterious Mickey Finn. There followed eight accounts, including The Black and the Red, of the prodigious exploits of his debonair detective, Homer Evans.

Now living in California, Elliot Paul makes frequent incursions into the neighboring state of Nevada, to try his fortune in Las Vegas.

(Elliot Paul died in 1958.)

Trust Homer Evans, that epicurean among detectives, to chose Las Vegas, Nevada, as the newest field for his unorthodox investigations into murder and assorted skullduggeries. In the American capital of sky-high gambling and lavish entertainment, of explosions—temperamental and nuclear—of gangsters and atomic scientists, the imperturbable sleuth unravels a mystery that is a sinister as it is wildly fanciful.

The touch of madness in Elliot Paul’s method adds to his extravaganzas of crime the fillip of satire and the zest of his own riotous imagination. As capricious and unpredictable as the roll of the dice or the fall of the roulette ball, The Black and the Red pays off at fabulous odds. The reader is the winner!

This is the last of the Homer Evans mysteries, published just a couple of years before Elliot Paul's death. It brings back favorite characters and much of the frivolity of the early works.

Homer Evans and Finke Maguire, private detectives, are in Boston enjoying an evening with friends, when conversation turns to the methods of detective work. A bet is made—to win, a man must be tailed. But a light-hearted wager turns to mystery with a disappearance, then murder. What, and who, is working behind the scenes? Throw in a love triangle, shady South American financial dealings, and a bag full of snakes, and you’ve got another free-for-all adventure that requires the erudite Homer Evans to untangle a strange puzzle.

“Some highly improper Bostonians weave a tangled web of deception, wild goose chase and assorted criminous pursuits ranging the Hub from axle to rim, with Homer Evans, Finke Maguire and secretary Kay Cougar well in the lead of all the excitement.”

“Elliot Paul brews another of his lethal literary cocktails in ‘Waylaid in Boston’ . . . The sophisticated sleuth Homer Evans and his lieutenant Finke Maguire again encounter murder, this time in the very capital of propriety. Characters, outlandish; plot, sheer humorous lunacy.” (Ralph Morrissey, 1953)