Ex-newsman’s fun mystery novels re-released

Bill Knight column for 2-3, 4 or 5, 2020

If still waters run deep, the late Bob Liter’s quiet, pensive demeanor smoking a pipe while editing stories for the Peoria daily newspaper for decades hid a mind swirling with adventure, violence, fun and sex.

Liter, who lived in downstate Illinois’ Tazewell County, died in 2008 after leaving the newsroom and writing several novels, from “Rainy-Day Lover” and “Murder Inherited” to seven racy titles written pseudonymously as “Cyn Castle,” and especially five books in his “Nick Bancroft Mystery Series.”

Now, his daughter, Martie Liter Ogborn, has started re-releasing the potboilers with an eye to continuing the series herself.

The first two, “August is Murder” and “Murder by the Book,” were released last month at a book-launch party at a Central Illinois recreation center and bowling alley.

That was fitting since Liter was a competitive bowler – as well as an avid golfer and gardener, and a fan of the Bears and Cubs. Plus, Bancroft’s fictional escapades occasionally mirror the region, from its geography and culture to yet another losing season for the Cubs (only slightly dating the books).

Although murder mysteries, Liter’s Bancroft books are less in the style of masters such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and more like Robert Parker (the Spenser series) and Tony Hillerman (the Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn books).

Where Chandler and other hard-boiled authors – also including Joe Lansdale and even Kinky Friedman – specialized in using creative and often amusing metaphors and similes, Liter stressed stories, much like other best-selling writers adept at plots, such as Lee Childs or Michael Connelly.

But like a couple of other area newspaper colleagues who also penned novels (Jerry Klein’s “fathersday” and Gerry Whalen’s “Tamara,” written under the pen name Ann Sullivan), Liter could turn a phrase while sticking to the direct, subject-verb-object style that propels readers from ledes to wrap-ups, darting from fact to fact.

Of course, Liter’s Bancroft books are fiction, but they reverberate with realism.

Narrating the first effort to kill him in “August is Murder,” Bancroft observes, “Ghost-like human figures emerged from the darkness and stood in small groups. Flames flared, died down, and flared again. Faces, some I recognized, appeared and vanished, only to appear again. The third floor collapsed into the second and, finally, the debris settled, with sparks flying, onto the remains of the first floor. Nothing was left except burning wood, ashes and smoke.”

In “Murder by the Book,” Liter writes, “The streets, with the dim streetlights, seemed dark until we got to the store and stood across from it. Now the darkness disappeared. I imagined eyes, police eyes, watching our every move.”

A U.S. Navy veteran who served in both World War II and the Korean War, Liter made Bancroft a reporter, and in “Murder by the Book,” the protagonist is drawn into a case where a woman is found dead at a stadium, a sex-etiquette book in her lap. The victim’s father wants Bancroft to find the killer, but the newsman is distracted by a torrid love affair with a receptionist and questionable interactions with another woman, detective Faustine Smith.

Various double reverses ensue, with Liter’s skillful storytelling making the yarn riveting and rewarding

“August is Murder” has the plucky hero endure that attempted assassination-by-arson, a vicious beating, an attack by dogs, and gunfire, all in service to his client, a rather lewd nudist. It’s as action-packed as Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan books (without all the military minutiae, obviously) and as filled with both local color and universal appeal as Carl Hiassen’s gems.

There’s more to come, says Ogborn, who plans to release the next three Bancroft novels – “And the Band Played On,” “Death Sting,” and “Point of Murder” – within the next six months.

“Murder by the Book” (122 pages) and “August is Murder” (138 pages) are both published by Digital Parchment Press.