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. 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, 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.

This is a 'screwball' mystery at its finest (and admittedly, isn't for everyone).

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 . . . and his incomparable girl friend, Miriam, the gun-totin’, sharp-shooting gal from Montana. You’ll find them at work and play again in 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 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 previous books. Guided by Rain-No-More, the Blackfeet son of a chief, they travel 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 turns defeat into victory and forever puts an end to lawlessness in the badlands.

The early Homer Evans mysteries were zany frolics, but they didn't stay that way. I'll Hate Myself in the Morning is a transitional novella. Homer Evans, more pensive than usual, investigates 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 suspects becomes difficult when they don't stay put. Murder on the Left Bank finds Homer back in post-War Paris, investigating the death of a soldier. Paul recognized the problematic nature of the "super-detective" he created in the cerebral and sophisticated 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. Those who enjoyed the early Homer Evans mysteries should find the later mysteries just as fun and perhaps more intriguing.

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."

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.

“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)

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.