Customer Reviews

The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus (Penguin Crime Fiction)

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If you can find it, this is a very nice edition of Bardin's three key works: THE DEADLY PERCHERON, THE LAST OF PHILLIP BANTER, DEVIL TAKE THE BLUE-TAILED FLY. Almost undescribable, Bardin is really about using popular frameworks of his day to explore areas of identity and character. DEADLY almost starts as something from "If" magazine or something, a lightweight fantasy, but gets very dark very quickly. My favorite of his, BANTER, is the closest thing I know of to Hitchcock on the page.

Bardin is an author that deserves more attention than he's gotten; to my mind he's easily the equal, if not the superior, to Woolrich. Certainly his books feel less slapdash than Woolrich's, more carefully thought out and crafted. Although I think Symons rather overrates it, BLUE TAILED FLY might be the definitive book of it's subgenre, the psychological thriller where one questions one's identity. (This is a theme that goest throughout Bardin's work, the fluidity of identity and the horror of it.)