Bøger af Elliot Paul

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Author's Account Of His Boyhood In A New England Town At The Turn Of The Century.

This is a new release of the original 1948 edition.

A French chef receives a mysterious job offer, and asks Homer Evans for help. Homer and gang end up in Las Vegas, as they try to stop a murderous rampage. This last Homer Evans mystery ends with one last frolic and a bang . . .

Another humorous Homer Evans mystery: Leverett Bengay, popular man about town, is bet he can't tail a stranger for 24 hours, but the casual bet turns into an adventure with disappearances, exotic criminals, and murder. Evans must untangle a puzzle that careens through the streets of Boston.

"'The Black Gardenia' is quite a book. Elliot Paul undoubtedly had a wonderful time writing it, and in addition to the usual mystery has made it a vehicle for a lot of good English and a lot of interesting information about mysterious Javanese plants, customs, and poisons. "And, we might as well say right now, you as a reader will be [thoroughly] mixed up as to who dunit until very near the last page. "Suffice it to say that three persons die of very perplexing causes before the suave Homer Evans, detective extraordinary, and his partner, Finke Maguire, are able to bring the murderer to justice. In the meantime, you mix into a lot of Hollywood life, including the Brown Derby, Mike Romanoff, famous chefs and bartenders and assorted movie moguls, millionaires and morons. "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." (Syracuse, NY, Post Standard, 1952)

The early Homer Evans mysteries were light-hearted frolics with crazy antics and cartoonish characters. One reviewer noted that The Mysterious Mickey Finn "has the delirious irresponsibility of a Wodehouse plot" (Charles Poore, New York Times), and another stated, "I astonished and delighted myself by reading it. . . . [it] is like no mystery story I know. It may not please the orthodox mystery fans; it is, in its way a satire on orthodox mysteries. . . . I have seldom read a book which gave me so intensely the impression that the author had a grand good time writing it. The hilarity is infectious" (Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune). After World War Two, author Elliot Paul continued writing the series, but there is a distinct change of tone. The humor (and satire) is still there, but the cartoonish frivolity has been replaced with a more serious attempt at creating a mystery for readers to enjoy. Readers of the earlier novels will welcome the return of many characters from earlier books, of course. This volume includes the novella, I'll Hate Myself in the Morning, along with the full-length mystery, Murder on the Left Bank. I'll Hate Myself in the Morning is a transitional piece, bridging the pre- and post-War writings. The amateur and reluctant detective, Homer Evans, is more pensive than usual, but 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.

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.

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)

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. "Fantastically amusing and thrilling . . . completely cockeyed and hugely entertaining." Jack Ketch, New York Herald Tribune

When a famous art-loving millionaire disappeared from a Bohemian party in the artist quarters of Montparnasse, a number of colorful Parisians began to devote themselves to suspicious actions of one kind or another. Homer Evans, irresponsible playboy artist and Bohemian, combines his talents for quick thinking and kiss-stealing in a wild chase for the murderers through the streets of Paris. Following hot behind is Miriam Leonard, a belle from Montana whose shapely hand is quite as effective with the revolver as with a loving caress! And then there is Hjalmar Jansen, strapping Norwegian artist friend of Homer's, ever ready to gird his loins for any kind of lusty brawl so long as there are women and wine in plenty. Bloodletting and love-making are liberally combined with infectious humor in an altogether irresponsible manner, and readers of The Mysterious Mickey Finn will find in these pages a witty story sprinkled in the classical manner with the proper number of bodies, some beautifully alive and kicking. ". . . I astonished and delighted myself by reading it. . . . The Mysterious Mickey Finn is like no mystery story I know. It may not please the orthodox mystery fans; it is, in its way a satire on orthodox mysteries. . . . I have seldom read a book which gave me so intensely the impression that the author had a grand good time writing it. The hilarity is infectious."-Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune "Read it for the witty, sophisticated, tongue-in-the-cheek fluency of Mr. Paul, for the wicked innuendos, for the fiction-coated satirical barbs at men, morals and artists. It's grand."-Hartford Times

In A Ghost Town on the Yellowstone, Mr. Paul reaches back to the year 1907 and to his youthful adventures on a project of the United States Reclamation Service in Montana. With him you start on one of the oddest stagecoach rides in history -- a ride in which no matter how the passengers change at various stops their number is always thirteen, a circumstance to make the driver consult his whisky jug more frequently than usual. The hapless coach -- jinxed to the whiffletrees -- overturns, dumps its passengers into the sagebrush and thus precipitates the founding of the town of Trembles. Thanks to Mr. Paul's keen observation (vitamin enriched and thoroughly irradiated) you meet the first citizens of Trembles -- a saloonkeeper, two Chinese, a scissorbill, and a woman somewhat less ancient than the profession she follows. Thenceforth you participate in some of the most astonishing, humorous, and touching events ever to take place in that part of the Wild West.

It has the delicious irresponsibility of a Wodehouse plot. . . . It's one of the funniest books we've read in a long time. It contains a great deal of shrewd satire.--The New York TimesMultimillionaire and philanthropist Hugo Weiss is known in every capital of the Western world as a munificent patron of the arts. When Weiss suddenly vanishes while on a visit to Paris, his disappearance sets the stage for this uncommonly witty and urbane mystery. Homer Evans, an intrepid American detective, turns his keen intellect and remarkable intuition toward solving the puzzle of the financier's disappearance. Assisted by his sharpshooting girlfriend, a cowgirl from the American West, Evans plunges into a maelstrom of kidnapping, art forgery, tax evasion, murder, and a plot to restore the French monarchy. Set against the backdrop of bohemian Montparnasse, the story hurtles along at a breathless pace and in a tone of relentless good cheer, despite the rising body count. The first installment in a popular series that parodies the famous Philo Vance stories of S. S. Van Dine, this novel offers sophisticated humor amid a madcap romp as well as a challenging mystery. Dover (2015) republication of the edition originally published by Modern Age Books, New York, 1939.See every Dover book in print atwww.doverpublications.com