Merrilee Moore, the latest star to bewitch millions from the silver screen, is rumoured to be making a movie about Helen of Troy in Greece after years of being kept on a decidedly ungenerous contract by greedy studio heads. Suffice to say, certain people in the industry feel slightly put out at this turn of events, and might wish ill upon Miss Moore before she ever crosses the Atlantic and gets in front of a camera. And so magazine journalist William Deacon accepts a commission to cross the ocean on the Monmatre and keep an eye on Merrilee, to ensure nothing bad befalls her. First problem…is she even aboard the ship?

Look, The Traces of Merrilee (1966) is not a good book, and represents the nadir of Herbert Brean’s novelistic output. I can now confidently say that Brean’s career improves over the first three novels up to masterpiece Hardly a Man is Now Alive, a.k.a. Murder Now and Then (1950) and then slowly declines all the way to this, his final long form published work. Given my reduced blogging this year, I was even tempted not to review this, but the other six Brean novels made it onto The Invisible Event and, as a fan of him when he’s good, I knew I’d be fending off queries about this in the years ahead, so let’s attempt to find something to say and put this thing to bed for good.

The restricted setting of a cruise ship, especially one that doesn’t call at any ports on its journey, is a dream of a location for a classic mystery — Carter Dickson showing us how to do it superbly with Nine — and Death Makes Ten (1940). We all know that a collection of people on holiday, where, as Hercule Poirot pointed out, no-one need account for their presence and so need not necessarily be who they claim, is a wonderful opportunity to mix in some rich character portraits and have fun with a few reversals. So that Brean manages to populate an entire book with people you don’t remember — hell, I still see no reason why Bill Deacon couldn’t be Brean’s earlier protagonist Reynold Frame, and can only assume a change of publishers made it necessary — isn’t a great start.

One guy wears gloves. Another has an odd…eye, or something. There’s a tall Indian man who walks around. Er. Oh, and a suspected industrial spy and an avuncular type who have the same surname. None of these are red herrings, and one of them — thanks to an open-handedness with clewing that borders on the irresponsible, since you’ll only miss the key giveaway if you suffer a cataclysmic concussion mid-novel — is the bad guy and seems to be possessed of a variety of ways to be in the right place at the right time to create much unpleasantness for Merrilee Moore. Except that’s all it is: someone trying to put Merrilee Moore off staying in Europe and making a film. Seriously, no mystery has ever been less mysterious in antagonist or motive. Hell, I’ve read inverted mysteries that have more coyness about who their killer is.

Very little happens, someone dies, Deacon hides the body rather than tell any of the crew, then very little happens, someone else dies and Deacon is taken into the crew’s confidences and something something, long-winded diversion into Extra-Sensory Perception and Merrilee guessing a baseball score. In the middle of this, I put the book down for three days and forgot that I hadn’t finished reading it, so I picked it up again, lost interest inside of five pages, and skipped to the end. Along the way we get a far greater sense of the changing expectations of genre fiction — Deacon hiding, unsuspected, in Merrilee’s closet while the beautiful film star parades around in the nude, say — than anything approaching a detective plot. It’s actually quite staggering how poorly constructed this is, especially given the strong work Brean did earlier in his career.

Every so often it would threaten to spring to life with an arresting aside, but equally it exhibits the very worst indicators of a floundering genre which, it feels, didn’t have the energy to keep up with the cleverness and invention of the Golden Age. Deacon is very much in the 1960’s idiom of hero who can do and know everything from the indicators that a body was strangled before being suspended by the neck to tying a perfect bowline hitch, all while keeping his friends in ignorance and parading around with literally one of the most famous women in the world without anyone raising an eyebrow. He’s not James Bond, but he might as well be. Bean’s writing is pleasingly breezy…

I awoke early and slowly, gradually discovering that I was feeling a little less than well. I had succumbed last night, or, to be exact, about five hours before I woke up, to the various pressures afflicting me. To be more exact, I had worked my way much farther into the cognac. Now, a little after 9 a.m., I was beginning to work my way out of it.

…but the intrigues here offer nothing new and little of interest. Read everything Brean wrote up to and including 1950, but take it from me that he’s very, very inessential thereafter.

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See also

TomCat @ Beneath the Stains of Time: Brean penned a breezy, fast-paced and fairly clued detective that was fun to read, but, except for the mind-reading act, nothing stood out as particular clever or inspired.

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The novels of Herbert Brean

Featuring Reynold Frame:

Standalone:

Featuring William Deacon: