Every year, Kate Jackson hosts a celebration over at her blog, Cross-Examining Crime, of all the classic mystery titles that have been republished during the year. She invites all her blogging friends to nominate two of their favorite titles for the honorific of Reprint of the Year. It’s a lot of fun, and there are plenty of ways you can be involved: readers do the voting and they can even nominate an extra title to be included on the nominations for the best of the best. 

We have a lot of thanks to bestow on the (mostly smaller) publishing presses who continually make it possible for us to read books that were previously the stuff of legend or available on eBay for a mere $3,000. Thanks to the likes of the British Library, Pushkin Vertigo, Crippen & Landru, Dean Street Press, Wildside Press and many others, rare titles by some of the biggest names (Brand, Carr, Queen) now grace our local bookstore’s shelves again, side by side with first translations of Japanese honkaku crime fiction and the best works by all-but-forgotten authors. 

It was Wildside Press that introduced me to Lange Lewis, and while she only wrote five mystery novels during her long and colorful lifetime, I have already gobbled down the first and the second. And while the third title, Meat for Murder, is definitely in my queue, I had to step out of order for a special occasion. For whatever mysterious reason, it was American Mystery Classics that pounced on the rights to Lewis’ fourth novel, widely considered to be her best, called The Birthday Murder. And while Kate’s Reprint contest is always a reason to celebrate, I am particularly excited to choose this as my second nomination, not only to honor Lewis but as a festive literary candle on my own birthday cake!

That’s right, folks: I’m queuing up with Beethoven and Jane Austen and Catherine of Aragon and Arthur C. Clarke and Margaret Mead to hear you sing, “Happy Birthday to meeee!!!”

Lewis spent her adult life in Southern California, the setting for all five mysteries. But while the first and second novels brilliantly capture the environs of a large university campus (similar to the University of Southern California where the author worked for a time), let us not forget that Los Angeles is more than just a college town – it is Tinseltown! The Birthday Murder is a Hollywood murder mystery, but in keeping with Lewis’ strong writing style and talent for characterization, it never presents the film industry in a campy or over-glamorized way. 

The small cast of this novel consists of people on the make, as producers, authors and performers, as well as the coterie of hangers-on – agents, secretaries, cronies – all hanging onto the ring of opportunity in order to increase their own star-power. At the same time, Lewis gives us the sense of a town that, despite the crazy movie biz, is still just a town where people look for domestic happiness, where the housekeeper crosses the street to borrow coffee from Humphrey Bogart’s cook, where some petty jealousies have nothing to do with the cinematic bottom line. 

There’s always an interesting woman at the center of a Lange Lewis mystery. Here, it’s Victoria Jason, a novelist whose latest success, Ina Hart, has been optioned by a studio for the full Class A treatment. Long divorced after catching her first husband in their shower with a beautiful blonde, she has finally remarried. Her new husband, Albert Hime, is a film producer who wants to make Ina Hart his first A-list picture. The future of this potential power couple looks bright – so it is with great surprise to the Hollywood community when Albert returns from a hard day at work, sits down to dinner with his wife, goes to bed – and never wakes up. He has been poisoned, and he could only have been poisoned that evening at home. 

On the surface, this seems like the simplest case Lewis has fashioned for her Homicide detective, the large, grumbly but sensitive Richard Tuck. The method of murder, even the poison selected, happens to coincide with the climax of Ina Hart. But Tuck has a problem with jumping to obvious conclusions: Victoria seems to have no motive for wanting her husband out of the way, and she also appears way too smart to utilize her own plot device as a murder method. And so Tuck, accompanied as always by his sad-sack confederate, Detective Froody, begins to consider other options. Four people had access to poison Albert, and yet none of them – not Victoria’s adoring housekeeper or her neurotic best friend or her ex-husband who shows up out of the blue or the ingenue who covets the role of Ina Hart and needs Albert to get it – none of these people had a motive for killing the producer or his wife. 

Once again, Lewis’ writing draws you in and shakes you apart. Compared to the first two books, there may be a dearth of suspects here, but the intimacy works just fine. I have a feeling that in Victoria we’re getting a bit of a glimpse of Lange Lewis herself: a professional artist more comfortable with her work than with the people around her. Tuck suspects something – or someone – very disturbing is behind this murder, and as we get to know each of the suspects, it feels like any one of them might have done the deed – except none of them could have! 

And then, as she did in Murder Among Friends, Lewis pulls the rug out from under you, with an solution that is as surprising as it is sad. (She also adds a coda at the very end which resembles a “stuck-in-its-time” moment from Juliet Dies Twice, but that’s 1945 for you!) Honestly, every time I read another book by this woman I get angry that she only wrote five of them. But aren’t we lucky to have them available to us again!

And listen, as you go to Kate’s place to select the Reprint of the Year, don’t forget that a simple vote makes such a lovely birthday present!