Never Trust a Partner [ss] (2021), another collection from Crippen & Landru, is composed of two complete series by Robert Edward Eckels: 12 stories revolving around art forgery with Lang and Lovell, and five tales of “the world’s greatest adjutant”, Major Henry T. McDonlevy (ret’d).

Editor Brian Skupin — yes, that Brian Skupin — is clear in his admiration for Eckels’s work in his introduction, and I must confess that it’s only because I respect Skupin’s opinions so much that I picked this collection up to begin with, having not heard of Eckels before this. Am I remiss in this regard? The guy evidently wrote and sold a lot of stories, so how has my reading of the genre been so poor as to avoid him entirely until now?

The con is on, let’s see who gets hustled…

Opener ‘The Blue Lady’ (1969) is a strong one, with Lang approaching a collector with an obviously fake painting — not poor quality at all, but the real one recently sold for a lot of money and is hanging on the wall of a most esteemed institution. So why would a man who started collecting art “after [earning] his 20th or 30th million” be interested in meeting?

If this scheme requires a lot of trust on behalf of the mark, there is at least the “cupidity” there to perhaps justify their confidence in Lang’s proposal. Sure, it’s not hard to see where this is going, but the conceit is a nice one, and the tendency to side with the little guy gets this through on charm alone.

There’s plenty of charm early on in ‘A Question of Honor’ (1970), with Lang trying to get past a secretary — “If she was impressed she did a good job of concealing it.” — to see another powerful man, having sold him a painting a few months previously.

The moral principle at work here is a good one, and does much to win over any reader who might feel conflicted about rooting for two obvious charlatans and chancers. A clever way to go about doing the ‘right’ thing by doing a ‘wrong’ thing, this is a neat and winning little concoction.

‘Only Bet on a Sure Thing’ (1971) sees Lang and Lovell trying to execute their usual plan — copy a painting perfectly, then sell it to a mark claiming it’s the real thing — only for the mark being unwilling to play ball. Instead they’re brought in on a scheme of their intended victim’s making and, well, you’ve read stories before so you know how this goes.

Failing to gull a collector into buying one of Lovell’s forgeries, Lang allows himself to be talked into forging the two missing, believed lost, panels of ‘The Waldemeer Triptych’ (1971). That the trust doesn’t exactly flow openly on both sides is clear here (“[W]e traded smiles of equal insincerity.”) but who’s playing who? I like that the two principals do eventually find some sort of mutual ground…

Outside, he said, “That was easier than I expected.”

I looked at him obliquely, then shrugged. “Most things are,” I said, “once you make up your mind to do them.”

…and the culmination of this is pretty neat…though why they only agreed $200,000 is beyond me. Surely a greedy man would want more, and it was in their interest to pay it…

‘Never Trust a Partner’ (1972) sees Lovell approach a dealer who is sorting out the somewhat jumbled estate of an art enthusiast. Since no-one knows what’s in the morass of work the dead woman collected, could not an unexpected find occur that would see both men profit?

For all Eckels’s glibness that coming up with plots was easy, we’re really on very repetitive ground here. This is only the fifth story in the collection, and if you told me I’d read ten or twelve prior to this I’d believe you. Which is not to say it’s bad — Eckels writes well, and there’s an enjoyable slickness to everything — just that the set of tools he has at his disposal is not as varied as it could be.

Skupin names ‘The Kidnaped Painting’ (1972) as among the best of the Lang and Lovell stories, and until the very end I would agree. An insurance assessor has deliberately overvalued a painting and collected the difference from its real value (I didn’t understand this, but that doesn’t matter) only for the painting to be stolen and thus a payout needing to be made — a too-large payout, much to our assessor’s chagrin.

Given that Lang and Lovell have always been about ensuring the guilty suffer, what gets me is, once the con is completed, how they then renege on the second half of the deal and screw over the people they’re involved with — who, sure, are also crooks, but it just so goes against what we’ve seen of our protagonists to date that it leaves a weird taste.

‘Hobson’s Choice’ (1974) mixes the same ingredients we’ve seen previously in a slightly new way, a talent Eckels exploits fully in this corpus. Approaching an auctioneer with the offer of him auctioning a faked painting with a reserve price too high for it to actually sell — something to do with being able to advertise its value elsewhere, which I didn’t get — has Harry Lang finally met his match?

Well, no, he hasn’t, and again the nature of the con here is extremely similar to elsewhere. But the fact that Eckels is able to keep that reveal until the last line and then drop it in so efficiently without tedious explanation is part of what makes these stories so enjoyable despite the limited ingredients in the brew.

‘The Switcheroo’ (1974) starts well — Lang offers a collector the opportunity to acquire a painting he’d previously failed to get legitimately by having Lovell forge it and replace the real one — but then pays off in the same way as it seems dozens of these stories have so far. Maybe I’m reading these stories too close together (I’m spreading them out over several weeks, rathe than tearing through them in a few days) but the plots are becoming pretty hackneyed and need a little more content to continue to engage, I can’t help but feel.

Opening an art gallery? Holding a private viewing for a wealthy client which seems to involve real paintings for a change? When did ‘Lang and Lovell Go Legit’ (1977)?

See this is what I mean: the essential shape of it isn’t exactly baffling, but there’s just a touch more intelligence in the setup that sees the con get pulled off. The principles aren’t new — we can expect by now that anyone causing Lang difficulties is probably in on the thing — but the slightly more convoluted nature of the misdirection shows that Eckels can do this sort of thing with a little more imagination when required.

‘Quit When You’re Ahead’ (1978) is another story identified by Skupin as among the best, and starts out the same way as ‘Hobson’s Choice’: an auction with a too-high reserve price, and money for all involved. It then, pleasingly, goes on to complicate things, with Lang and the auctioneer Daniell agreeing another sale, and this seeding the ground for a far more profitable payday where Lang and Lovell are concerned.

Again, there’s an added complexity here which is welcome for all the familiarity on display. The eventual direction isn’t hard to see through by now, but it’s lovely to see a little more complication added into these stories, and it pays off well here.

Longest of the lot so far, ‘The Canadian Caper’ (1982) sees an associate of L&L having been duped by a businessman who claims to help American companies expand into their neighbour to the north. The extra time spent on setup and payoff here is again welcome, but, once again, the ingredients are very familiar and only the most credulous reader is going to be fooled by any of it.

Fun to reflect, though, on how this sort of scheme can operate in a simpler, less-connected time. Now, the simple expedient of an internet search would resolve solidly 95% of what goes on here, but there really is a palpable enjoyment to be found in watching this sort of old school grift play out in such a setting.

Lang and Lovell’s career comes to a close with ‘The Bellman Portrait’ (1986), in which a mobster who brought the eponymous valuable painting from Lang some six years previously, suddenly insists on the presence of the pair at his home. Someone else, it seems, has found the real painting, and it’s up to Harry to convince their ex-client that his painting in the genuine one, or else there will be, y’know, trouble.

This is another long story, and very enjoyable for the time it takes to raise the stakes and put our pair in genuine peril for perhaps the first time. There’s one element of this that goes unexplained, I feel, but it’s a minor point in a clever double-reversal that ends things on a high.

It seems sensible to pick a top five for Lang and Lovell on their own, so that’d most likely be…

1. ‘A Question of Honor’ (1970)
2. ‘The Bellman Portrait’ (1986)
3. ‘Quit When You’re Ahead’ (1978)
4. ‘Lang and Lovell Go Legit’ (1977)
5. ‘The Kidnaped Painting’ (1972)

Given that the era in which these were written is not my usual period, and that the set of tropes Eckels chooses to work with is so small, there’s a lot of fun to be had in these twelve tales. After the die is cast early on, I have to say that I’m more a fan of the longer stories which (ahem) paint in a little more detail, either in the scheme itself or the world that Lang and Lovell occupy, but there’s still a lot to enjoy here, and nothing close to a bad story in the bunch. Space out the reading of them with lots of other stuff from different corners of the genre, and you’ll find much here to celebrate

Skupin calls ‘Bread Upon the Waters’ (1973) “clearly the best” of the McDonlevy stories, which, considering it’s the first, is a bit of a shame. It finds Thomas James serving time in jail for disturbing the peace before his outstanding fine is paid by McDonlevy on the basis that “my investments generally result in a tidy profit”.

Here, it turns out that James has inhereted some land, and since McDonlevy clearly expects some reimbursement, the two head to Michigan to see about it. From here I’ll say no more, except that it fits in tonally well with the Lang and Lovell corpus, to the extent that you could almost swap out the character names if those two weren’t restricted to the art world. Full credit to Skupin for spotting the potential of putting these two series together, but it’s to be hoped that this second bunch isn’t all downhill from here.

‘Nobody Can Win ’Em All’ (1974) is a good follow-up, with McDonlevy and James evincing interest in a dilapidated warehouse for reasons that elude our narrator beyond the good Major’s “positive genius for making money out of the most unlikely situations”. A damsel in distress and a rigged card game later and the picture seems murkier than ever.

In essence, this is again the same ingredients as the Lang and Lovell stories, but still with the same playful glint in the eye that’s difficult to dislike. Fun watching this play out along the various lines it sets up, and with fewer tales to spare for these characters, maybe the similarity between the schemes won’t pall in quite the same way.

‘The Long Arm of the Law’ (1977) improves on the previous two stories by making it clear that the man who is patently the mark in this setup — a bank manager named Drexler — is crooked himself and so has whatever loss is planned coming to him. From thereon it’s fairly plain sailing. Seems like a lot of effort to manage the con this time around, but when you convert the $15,000 at stake into about $130,000 in today’s terms, well, I guess that’d make it worthwhile.

One of the nice things about these stories is that their greater length adds a degree of complexity, so that you’re never entirely sure where the sting is going to come. Case in point, ‘Sufficient Unto the Day’ (1978) sees McDonlevy and James about to invest in a clearly dodgy land-grab, and required to put up $5,000 in the process…so how on earth are they going to be the ones to prosper?

I like this one because, in the company of practically everything that has come before, it’s so minor. Like, for all the planning and cleverness and grand schemes on display in this entertaining volume, sometimes con men just gotta eat and so any money you’re able to get for free is to be seized with avidity. It reframes what it means for a con to be a success, and I enjoyed that.

“The problem with being rich today…is that there are so few ways to show it,” — thus opines local bigshot Donner in ‘Never Play Another Man’s Game’ (1980). The usual sequence of events then establishes itself: an innocent meeting, some small betting, the Major losing money, and and eventual return to good fortun via some underhand shenanigans. It’s all very enjoyable — if a little mechanical in it’s who-gets-which-card-when dynamics — but I’m glad this was the last story, as it could get tiresome reading too much more of this.

A top five for a series with only five entries? Okay, there’s a sixth one if you bought this from C&L direct, but I didn’t and so these five are all I’ll ever know. And in that case…

1. ‘Sufficient Unto the Day’ (1978)
2. ‘Nobody Can Win ’Em All’ (1974)
3. ‘Bread Upon the Waters’ (1973)
4. ‘The Long Arm of the Law’ (1977)
5. ‘Never Play Another Man’s Game’ (1980)

As with Lang and Lovell, there’s a limited range to what can be done here, but Eckels manages to just about keep it fresh for these five tales…and spread out over the years they were written I imagine it was pleasing to come across one of these every so often — much like encountering an old friend, and falling back into familiar patterns.

Is Eckels a neglected great of this form? Not on this evidence, but he’s very entertaining and I’d definitely read another collection of his if the stories listed in the back of this volume were ever collected together. Sometimes you just want something to be fun, and Eckels is certainly that: on narrow rails, yes, but he rides them so adroitly that you can’t help but be swept along in the ebullience of it all.