Customer Reviews

The Adventures of Lucius Leffing

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

I discovered Joseph Payne Brennan in my misspent youth, when you could buy mass market paperback anthologies of his stories for a few bucks. Now, they are out of print and considered collectors' items, and thus extremely expensive.

This book is therefore a relatively affordable way to sample his work. It's priced reasonably for a hardcover. It's also autographed by the author and the artist - a nice surprise. (Mr. Brennan passed away in January 1990, so he must have signed these shortly before he died.)

Brennan's stories are the sort you used to find in the old pulp magazines. They are fine examples, though. Most of the stories in this book have a supernatural element, though not all do. Lucius Leffing is a sort of Sherlock Holmes character, with Brennan himself as Watson. Only rather than finding a rational explanation, as Holmes usually did, Leffing's cases tend to find ghosts and other supernatural causes at the heart of the mystery.

I enjoyed the illustrations as well; you don't see books with illustrations much any more.

An eminently readable, clean and lean book with compact, straight-forward stories involving likable protagonists and all the usual antagonists: this is how I would like to sum up my feelings for this particular book. The "star attraction" or the "USP" of the book is the writing style of Joseph Payne Brennan, and for people like me who get to read his stories for the first time, it becomes easily evident as to why Stephen King had praised his work.

All the stories in this collection 'star'-s Lucius Leffing, the Victoriana-loving & Sarsaparilla-drinking detective who, with the assistance of his friend Brennan, solves those mysteries which have something of bizzare & weird attached to themselves (sounds familiar? Yessssss.... he is another of those occult detectives highly in demand during the 1970-s when fanzines were vanishing and even the old masters of 'Weird Tales' were being forced to become formulaic, but despite all the trappings Lucius Leffing is actually an old-fashioned gentleman who has great sympathy for his clients, and even greater courage while facing the adversaries. All the adventures listed here are not occult-related, and unfortunately, those involving the human agencies are quite flat with the ending becoming visible long-before Mr. Leffing has explained the things. Such stories are (which I would advise to rush through): -

* The Vanning Case;
* Copycat Killer;
* Murder In The Parks;
* The Butcher Knife Murder;
* Motive For Murder;
* The Delivery;

One story, despite being rather humane in nature, has an interseting Hitchcockian feeling to it is "Observations on Lorimer Street", which fittingly ends the volume. But the best part (apart from the excellent printing of the book, thich and very good paper, a few atmospheric drawings, and the signatures of the author and the artist) which elevates the book to its well-deserved 5-star status, is its actual horror stories where Lucius Leffing acts as the fighter of evil, namely: -

1) The Nursing Home Horror;
2) The Swamp Horror;
3) Death on 91;
4) Wanderson's Waste;
5) The Haunting at Juniper Hill;
6) The Spruce Valley Monster.

Like almost everything else written by Joseph Payne Brennan, this book is also bound to go out-of-print once its 1989 print-run gets exhausted. Before that happens, don't deprive yourself from reading some extremely readable & entertaining stories, and get hold of this book ASAP!