The Siskiyou Two-Step

215 pages. Octavo (8 1/2" x 5 3/4") bound in original publisher's quarter grey cloth with silver lettering to spine over beige boards in original pictorial wrappers. First edition. More farfetched and cutesy than previous outings for Washington/Oregon narratorshamus John Denson (Decoys, 30 For a Harry), this strained caper begins when Denson stumbles on a woman's dead body while fishing in the North Umpqua River. The corpse is quickly identified as that of Kathryn Marsden, daughter of a Shakespearean scholar. But why, then, doesn't the body have the buttocks-birthmark of the real Kathryn? And why have the Marsden parents disappeared? Could it have to do with a manuscript of a lost Shakespeare play, supposedly proving that the Bard was really (as Prof. Marsden believes) Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford? It could indeed. So Denson is soon chasing around California--examining the buttocks of two other possible real Kathryns (one of whom is an exotic dancer), matching wits with the (late) Prof. Marsden's nemesis: Sir Giles Twigg-Pitchart, anti-de Vere Shakespearean scholar and ruthless intelligence officer. And eventually, after locating the manuscript, Denson sets up a scare for selling it to Sir Giles--with negotiations, scuffles, and skulduggery on board a moving train. Despite flickers of Hoyt's hard-boiled talent here and there: a silly, even a bit smutty comedown for the Denson series, with the zany flair that works in Hoyt's spy-fantasies (The Manna Enzyme, Trotsky's Run) not adapting at all well to the shamus genre. Condition: Jacket spine head lightly rubbed with small chip at hinge else a near fine copy in like jacket.