Pierce’s Picks

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.



Shaft’s Revenge, by David F. Walker (Dynamite Entertainment). The last year has been a red-letter time for fans of Ernest Tidyman’s 1970s New York City private eye, John Shaft. November brought the publication of Steve Aldous’ The World of Shaft, a comprehensive study of the character as he’s appeared in various media. And David F. Walker, who in late 2014 began delivering a new series of Shaft comic books (more recently collected as Shaft Volume 1: A Complicated Man), has now debuted a second series of adventures for that “cat who won’t cop out,” Shaft: Imitation of Life. Walker is also offering Shaft’s Revenge, the first new Shaft novel brought to market since Tidyman’s The Last Shaft in 1975. I haven’t yet received a copy of this 288-page work, but Walker—in an interview with Comic Vine—explains that its story “takes place shortly after Shaft’s Big Score [1972], which was the third book by Tidyman,” and that it finds the gumshoe being “hired by Knocks Persons, the godfather of Harlem, who appeared in the first novel [Shaft, 1970]. Knocks knows he is about to be killed, and he basically hires Shaft to find his killer. As he works the case, Shaft is caught up in the middle of a conflict between corrupt cops and the killer of Knocks.” Walker adds that this book gave him the chance to “explore some of what makes Shaft tick, including aspects of his youth. We learn stuff about Shaft in this book that has never been revealed before, stuff that even he didn’t know about, which serves as something of a second mystery within the story.”

Another familiar face turns up in The Sign of Fear (Simon & Schuster UK), Robert Ryan’s fourth outing for Sherlock Holmes’ aging but faithful companion, Doctor (or, more recently, Major) John H. Watson, following last year’s A Study in Murder. It’s now 1917, and London is under assault by German bombers, a barrage that seriously unnerves the local citizenry. Watson, already grieving after the loss of one friend, is struck again by news that another warfront ally has been lost during a torpedo attack on the English Channel. Then his concert-going comrade, Sir Gilbert Hastings, is snatched, along with four others, and a ransom demand follows, telling of the ghastly events destined to take place if those demands are not satisfied. Anxious for help, Watson accepts it from a most unlikely source: ruthless German spy Miss Pillbody, aka the “She Wolf.” Although their aims are ultimately different, their investigative efforts prove fruitful, exposing a dastardly, high-level plot. Ryan’s portrayal of Watson as compassionate, intelligent, and surprisingly brave for an old gent is most satisfying, and his careful suspense-building makes this series well worth the reading time.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks: “Dead Man’s Land”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Dead Man’s Land, by Robert Ryan (Simon & Schuster UK):
This novel was published in Great Britain at the beginning of the month; but as I live way out here in Seattle, and there’s no U.S. edition of Dead Man’s Land (in fact, author Robert Ryan doesn’t seem to have been published much in the States at all), I only recently received a copy of the book and found the chance to read it.

I am very glad I did.

As Ryan explains in a short essay for Crime Time, Dead Man’s Land was not originally his idea. His publisher was shopping around for “a work of fiction featuring a ‘detective in the trenches of World War I,’” and Ryan came up with a splendid solution: Why not send Dr. John H. Watson, of Sherlock Holmes fame, to the front lines in France, where he’d find himself involved in a homicide investigation? Of course, Watson would’ve been fairly old in 1914, when the action here takes place (in his early 60s, by most estimates). That, however, proved to be a surmountable problem. In Dead Man’s Land, we find Watson--who, after all, was a battlefield surgeon before becoming the chronicler of a crime-solver’s escapades--in Flanders Fields as a major with the Royal Army Medical Corps, and “an expert in the new techniques of blood transfusion.”

He becomes grudgingly accustomed to the quotidian deaths of thousands of soldiers, the persistent bomb barrages, the pressures that weigh heavily upon physicians and nurses under such circumstances, and the appalling atmosphere of the trenches (“black tar from lamp wicks, the constant cigarettes, not to mention the tang of rat piss and the sour smell of unwashed clothes”). Yet, when a sergeant suddenly perishes of an elusive ailment that turns his skin blue and his hands into claws, the horrific routines of war are upset. Blame is cast initially upon Watson’s blood transfusions; but when other, similar deaths are discovered, the old man’s sublimated sleuthing sensitivities are aroused, and his pursuit of a murderer with old grudges to exercise draws him into a deadly confrontation that must finally be settled in the worst possible place: the bleak no-man’s-land between the opposing armies.

Ryan’s portrayal of battlefield conditions is thorough and captivating, his cast of suspects sufficiently well drawn to have fooled me, and his capturing of Holmes’ associate faithful enough to have won the backing of Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate. The author has left himself room to write a sequel. I hope he will do just that.