THE DANGER ZONE

Eleven pulp reprints resurrect detective heroes coeval with the first decade of Perry Mason.

Though best known for his legal sleuth, Gardner (1889–1970) created detectives as regularly as some attorneys post billable hours. The second-string relics of the 1930s here range from freelance diplomat Major Copely Brane to loose-cannon investigator Pete Wennick to Snowy Shane, a shamus who gets the cops to do his heavy lifting. Like most of Gardner’s hardboiled heroes, they reflect his enduring fascination with the equivocal figure who can bring justice to a lawless world because he’s not burdened by undue respect for the law himself. Yet it’s clear why they all remained also-rans. Once he brings them to life with a vivid phrase of two, Gardner has no interest in developing them further. And their plots, for all their relentless velocity—Gardner always built for speed—are mostly routine. The two best are “Time for Murder,” in which a bored socialite turned amateur thief gets more thrills than he bargained for, and “Barney Killigen,” whose raffish attorney has as many tricks up his sleeve as Perry Mason.

“Flight into Disaster,” a 1952 yarn, seems included to prove that Gardner (Honest Money, 1991, etc.) never developed as a writer; his gifts for lightning-fast movement and antiestablishment insouciance were there from the beginning, and he rode them hard till the very end.