One of the especially lovely things about having a blog is when someone discovers an old post and restarts a conversation from, like, eight years ago. It was a key reason I opted for blogging ahead of other online options, since everyone reads books at their own rate and should be able to discuss them when they’re ready (I, for instance, am months and years away from reading a book that you, dear reader, already absolutely love). So when a representative of Digital Parchment Services cropped up on an old post to let me know that reprints of the wonderfully witty Kelley Roos novels and novellas were in the works, well, I was delighted, to put it mildly.

By my understanding, Ghost of a Chance (1947) is the sixth of eight novels to feature Jeff and Haila Troy, a thirty-something couple who stumble into danger in their first few books and seem to have acquired a reputation as sleuths by now. Things get off to a pacy start here, with Jeff receiving a phone call from one Frank Lorimer, who insists that a woman is going to be murdered and that only the Troys can help him avert this. Intrigued, they agree to meet Lorimer at a bar of his choosing, only for a mini-quest to unfurl with the unmet Lorimer repeatedly sending the Troys notes in which he claims he’s being observed and will meet them somewhere new. And then, at the termination of this odyssey, the Troys are present when a man is pushed under a train…a man they have good reason to believe is Frank Lorimer.

So, is a woman’s life at stake? And, if so, how can they possibly identify and warn her in a city of eight million people?

Part of the difficulty in narrowing down the lady’s identity is that, as the Troys follow the slender thread of Lorimer’s gin-soaked existence, they only really encounter people who don’t believe what they’re being told: “[Frank] was prone to imagine the most incredible, outlandish and macabre fantasies,” they’re told at one point, with even the women they encounter completely certain that there’s nothing about them worth killing. And yet Jeff and Haila push on, trading some of their trademark quips (“That’s a hell of a thing to say about your mother.”), evincing some clever thinking (the brooch, say), with the wonderfully tense situations they find themselves in painted quite beautifully.

The headlights would pick us out as easily as if we were a vaudeville duo on an empty stage.

The plot is arguably a little thin (‘Are you the woman? No? Do you know who could be?’ — rinse, repeat) but Roos keeps you pinballing around New York, and some savvy reasoning would appear to have solved the problem by the halfway stage…with a second half very much committed to finding the woman and keeping her safe, and a raft of wonderful complications making that harder and harder to do.

Now I’ve read more Craig Rice, I see a lot of similarities between her and the couple who wrote as Roos. The humour is just on the right side of distasteful, pushing at the boundary expertly (a hotel in New York is “fashionable” because it has “[o]odles of suicides”), and reinforcing the humanity of these people with simple asides about how lonely it suddenly feels in a house that is supposed to be deserted, or the sheer panic of pushing ahead into the darkness of an unknown room. The byplay is clearly loving underneath the sass (c.f. the line about the letter and the comb), and the plot, for all its slenderness, rockets along like the best of Rice’s endeavours.

A few nice touches compel this above something written by less gifted authors, such as the page and a half where Jeff vanishes in impossible circumstances — very clever — or the taxi driver who won’t get involved in the intrigue because he’s recently married. Roos has an ability to chill you in the middle of a moment of lightness that few if any authors have matched (c.f. the meeting of the woman on a train), and if the ending here is a little serendipitous…well, there are still some good developments to get you there, and the pages kept flying by very readily indeed.

All told, it’s a joy to make the acquaintance of the Troys again, and I’m very eager to dig deeper into the Roos catalogue. Many people will enjoy, too, the inclusion of the Dell Murder Map in this edition, as well as the list of characters at the start of the book. Good work, Digital Parchment Services — sign me up for many more!

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It should be noted that between the writing and publication of this review the various Digital Parchment Services reissues of the Roos books have disappeared from Amazon. I know that the company is getting increasingly twitchy about publishing work by dead authors, perhaps with an eye on copyright claims — I remember John Pugmire having a torrid time with some of the later Locked Room International books — and it’s hoped that whatever difficulty there is gets sorted out soon.

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See also

Bev @ My Reader’s Block: Good banter for entertainment and the couple do make a nice detecting team. Roos generally sprinkles clues liberally throughout their books, thought this particular outing ranges a little more on the thriller side with all the chasing about town. It also stretches one’s belief a bit that just about everyone they meet seems to be in this giant conspiracy to murder one woman. Still, it is great fun and the book is worth price of admission for the section where Haila devises a disguise in order to confuse the baddie who is trailing her and then turns the tables and follows him in her new persona.

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Kelley Roos on The Invisible Event