November 2009


REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:         


TORMENTED

Tormented. Cheviot, 1960. Richard Carlson, Susan Gordon, Lugene Sanders, Juli Reding, Joe Turkel, Lillian Adams. Screenplay: George Worthing Yates. Original story & director: Bert I. Gordon.

The Lift. Arcade Pictures-Netherlands, 1983, as De lift. Huub Stapel, Willeke van Ammelrooy, Josine van Dalsum, Liz Snoyink, Wiske Sterringa. Screenwriter-director: Dick Maas.

   I’m feeling generous, so I will throw in a good word for Bert I. Gordon’s Tormented. Bert was never the most subtle of auteurs, but his blunt handling of supernatural cupidity somehow makes this tawdry re-hash of An American Tragedy (with ghosts) more credible even when Richard Carlson finds himself haunted by what is obviously a department store dummy.

   Somehow the milieu of cheapness and 60s chic surrounding the characters makes the whole thing believable even when the effects are not.

THE LIFT

   Speaking of Cheap, The Lift offers an interesting variation on the movie monster thing, with a tale of a killer-elevator that manages not to be as silly as it sounds.

   The director keeps things tight and suspenseful, and the two leads — playing a repairman and an intrepid girl reporter — put across the concept of working-class folk caught up in a gory mystery pretty ably.

   It’s fun enough, and there’s a dan-dan-dandy climax with the repairman in an elevator shaft, but the concept is a bit confining: it’s hard for an elevator to run amok, after all, so the Lift — like the Mummy back in the ’40s — has to mostly victimize the elderly, unfit and infirm.

   This didn’t bother a young Adonis like me much, but I got to wondering how some of the older, more decrepit members of my reading audience (no names) might react to seeing their ilk objectified as victims.

A Review by
STEVEN STEINBOCK:


JOHN GREEN – Paper Towns. Dutton Juvenile, hardcover, October 2008. Reprint paperback: Speak, September 2009.

JOHN GREEN Paper Towns

    The winner of the 2008 Edgar for Best Young Adult Mystery is less a mystery novel than it is a beautifully drawn coming-of-age story.

    Quentin Jacobsen is a nerd. As long has he can remember, he has had a crush on his next-door neighbor Margo Roth Spiegelman. Then one night toward the end of senior year, Margo appears at his bedroom window enlisting his help on a night of pranks, adventures, and mostly innocent revenge.

    But the following morning Margo has gone missing, and Quentin is determined to track her down and uncover the mystery of her disappearance.

    With ongoing themes and motifs that range from strings to paper to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Quentin discovers the deep bond that connects people, one to another, and the fragility of their perceptions of each other.

JOHN GREEN Paper Towns

    There are hints of crime and mystery throughout the book, beginning in the prologue when as nine-year-olds, Quentin and Margo discover the body of a man, the victim of apparent suicide, propped up against a tree in a neighborhood park. The real mysteries are: Why did Margo disappear and where did she go?

    While set in Orlando, Florida and on an interstate road trip, the real world of Paper Towns is that of high school students. Green’s portrayal of Quentin and his friends is honest and free of cliches. He gives readers a frank look at Quentin’s affection for, and objectification of Margo.

    With its portrayal of teen life, its poetic probing into the soul, and its rich humor make Paper Towns a place worth visiting.

A REVIEW BY MARYELL CLEARY:
   

PATRICIA MOYES – Death on the Agenda. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1962. Holt Rinehart & Winston, US, hc, 1962. Paperback reprint: Owl Books, 1984.

PATRICIA MOYES Death on the Agenda

   Moyes is a dependable writer; her protagonists, Henry and Emmy Tibbett, are solid and capable, though happily not past a little flightiness now and then.

   This time they’re in Geneva for a meeting of the Permanent Central Opium Board. The cast is international; the scene is Switzerland, both its wealth and its natural beauties playing a part in the story.

   One of the interpreters, John Trapp, is found murdered in one of the offices of the subcommittee Henry is chairing, under circumstances which make Henry the obvious choice as murderer.

   Intrigue about the drug traffic and intrigue about love make the motive hard to determine. Opportunity is even worse, for scarcely anyone but Henry could have done it, so it seems.

   The Tibbetts get to know one of the wealthiest couples in Geneva, and Henry has a belated fling with a lovely young staff member of the subcommittee. Once again Henry and Emmy emerge as real and likable people, enmeshed in a plot that’s not their own, and doing their best to get out of it by finding the real murderer.

   Which they do.

– Reprinted from The Poisoned Pen, Vol. 6, No. 4, Fall 1986.



REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:         


THE HOUSTON STORY. Columbia, 1956. Gene Barry, Barbara Hale, Edward Arnold, Paul Richards, Jeanne Cooper, Frank Jenks, John Zaremba, Chris Alcaide, Jack Littlefield, Paul Levitt. William Castle, director; Sam Katzman, producer. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

    I didn’t know that Castle, before he made something of a name with gimmicky horror films, directed some crime films, and if this film is any indication, quite competently.

THE HOUSTON STORY

    Gene Barry is an oil worker who goes to a local crime-boss (Edward Arnold, considerably thinner than in his years as a major supporting player) with a scheme for skimming off oil from the major companies, installing his unwitting brother-in-law Frank Jenks as the token company president.

    Barbara Hale, almost unrecognizable if you mainly know her (as I did) as Perry Mason’s faithful secretary Della Street, is a nightclub singer and gangster’s moll who hooks up with Barry in his meteoric (and brief) rise to the top of the local mob scene.

    Jeanne Cooper is the pre-crime spree girl friend of Barry who finally catches on to his double-dealing ways, and there’s a tense final shoot-out at the roadside cafe where she works and wears her heart on a sleeve for the errant Barry.

    A fast-paced 80 minutes or so that caught Barry in mid-career between his role as the hero in Pal’s War of the Worlds and his successful career as Bat Masterson (a program I never watched).

   Barry showed something of an edge in the brief interview that followed the screening, shortened I would imagine by his almost total lack of recall of much of his career, with the most uncomfortable moment his confused question, “Have we talked about War of the Worlds?,” a subject that had indeed been covered earlier in the interview.

THE HOUSTON STORY

REVIEWED BY GEOFF BRADLEY:         


ELMORE LEONARD – Unknown Man No. 89. Delacorte, hardcover, 1977. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft, including Dell, 1978 (shown).

ELMORE LEONARD Unknown Man No. 9

   I’ve read a couple of Elmore Leonard’s in the distant past and enjoyed them more than enough to want to read a few more.

   However I’ve only just got around to this other one, which is about process server Jack Ryan who is hired to trace a violent criminal by a man who specialises in finding unclaimed stock issues and the unknowing rights holders.

   Offered a goodly sum, Ryan pursues the criminal but his life changes when at an AA meeting he bumps into the criminal’s wife.

   Knowing that he is being pursued on all sides by violent criminals, he must arrange things so that they are clear of all that, preferable with outstanding money to their credit.

   I raced through the first 50 pages but somehow it all slowed down — probably my own fault — for another 50 pages before grabbing my attention and racing through to the end. I shall have to get to some of the other Leonard’s in my TBR pile.

THREE BY EDWARD D. HOCH
by Mike Tooney:


   The late Edward D. Hoch (1930-2008) holds — and probably always will hold — the record for publishing the most mystery short stories. At the time of his death, he’d written — and had published — over 900 of them.

   A writer that prolific would be expected to have a lot of his stories reprinted, and that is the case. Moreover, as a professional short story writer Hoch would be expected to contribute to original themed anthologies, and that is also the case.

   Below are the first three of many examples of his voluminous output that I have unsystematically stumbled across in my reading. Another grouping of three will appear here on this blog soon.

   These stories will date from the ’60s through the early 21st century, with at least one from each decade of his publishing career except the first, the ’50s, a deficiency I hope to correct soon.

EDWARD D. HOCH

1. “I’d Know You Anywhere.” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, October 1963. Reprinted in: Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories to Be Read with the Lights On, Random House, hc, 1973; Dell [Volume One], pb, 1976.

    “I know my military law and I know my moral law. It’s like the overcrowded lifeboat.”
    “I think you just like to kill.”
    “What soldier doesn’t?”
    “Me.”

COMMENTS: Contrell (no first name) and Willy Grove survive a desperate situation fighting the Germans in the Tunisian desert, but Willy betrays a ruthlessness in liking to kill. Eight years later, Contrell encounters Grove again during the Korean War and sees that Willy is just the same.

   In Berlin in the early ’60s their paths cross once more; Contrell can’t help noticing how dangerous it is to have a volatile individual like Grove involved in such a tense international situation. Finally, Contrell and Willy meet for the last time in Washington — the very last time.

NOTES: Not really a mystery, but the buildup to the final explosion is well-laid. And while the ten-page story takes us across three decades, Hoch doesn’t make the mistake of trying to round out his characters too much.

EDWARD D. HOCH

2. “The Leopold Locked Room.” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, October 1971. Reprinted in: Tricks and Treats, edited by Joe Gores & Bill Pronzini, Doubleday Crime Club, hc, 1976.

    “She shot herself with your gun, while it was in your holster, and while you were standing twenty feet away?”

COMMENTS: Captain Leopold has a past, as Lieutenant Fletcher discovers to his surprise: an ex-wife who is unwilling to forgive and forget.

   Leopold’s past violently catches up to him at a wedding when he apparently shoots his ex dead in a completely empty room with absolutely no possibility of anyone else pulling the trigger.

   She dies of a bullet through the heart fired from no more than two inches away, while Leopold is standing almost seven yards from her. Even Leopold’s confidence in himself is shaken, but thanks to Fletcher’s perseverance the “impossible crime” is shown to be altogether possible.

NOTES: This story was adapted for an episode of the TV series McMillan and Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan St. James (“Cop of the Year,” November 1972), but Commissioner McMillan’s capable assistant Sergeant Enright is the one blamed for the murder.

EDWARD D. HOCH

3. “The Golden Nugget Poker Game.” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March 1987. Reprinted in: The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits, edited by Mike Ashley. Carroll & Graf, softcover, 1993.

    Ben sat there feeling like a fool. He’d traveled to the end of the world as the bodyguard for a man who was a faster draw than he was.

COMMENTS: Free-lance gun-for-hire Ben Snow finds himself in the wild and woolly Yukon during the Gold Rush, where men were men and women made the most of it.

   In a frontier town like Dawson, occasional violence is fairly normal; but you wouldn’t expect to come across a criminal conspiracy like the one Ben runs afoul of, a variation of the old badger game — but with bullets.

   When a man dies once too often, Ben’s detective instincts are fully engaged; his client, furthermore, is innocent of murder even when several eyewitnesses — including Ben — see him fire two bullets into the man. Ben’s job is to prove his client didn’t commit murder while not getting himself murdered.

NOTES: As a professional gunslinger, Ben Snow is remarkably ineffectual in this one; but he makes up for it with his detective skills.

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Robert J. Randisi & Bill Pronzini:


LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN – Sugartown. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1984. Paperback reprints: Fawcett Crest, 1986; Ibooks, 2001.

   Since the publication of Motor City Blue in 1980, Estleman and his tough Detroit private eye Amos Walker have been a formidable team, combining to create an average of one high-quality PI novel per year.

   Walker has been called “hard-edged and relentless”; Estleman has been lauded as “having put Detroit on the detective map.” Both encomiums are accurate; and in Sugartown, author and Eye carry on the tradition.

   Walker is hired first by an elderly Polish immigrant to find her grandson, who has been missing for nineteen years: He disappeared following an ugly, tragic incident where his father shot his mother, his sister, and then himself — a scene of carnage that the boy discovered upon returning home from school. Later the old woman also asks Walter to find a family heirloom, a silver cross — a job that leads him directly into a murder case.

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

   Walker’s second client is a Soviet defector and famous author who thinks a Russian spy is out to kill him. After an investigation that takes Walker through the dark underbelly of Detroit, he escapes a trap that almost takes his life and establishes a connection between the two cases.

   Plenty of action and solid writing in the Chandler tradition make Sugartown (which won the PWA Shamus for Best Novel of 1984) the same kind of potent book as its predecessors in the Amos Walker series. The others are Angel Eyes (1981), The Midnight Man (1982), and The Glass Highway (1983).

   The versatile Estleman has also written two novels as completely different from the hard-boiled private eye as it is possible to get: a pair of Sherlock Holmes pastiches pitting the Great Man against two legendary Victorian “monsters,” Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula (1978) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes (1979).

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Robert J. Randisi & Bill Pronzini:


LOREN D. ESTLEMAN – Kill Zone. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1984. Paperback reprint: Fawcett, 1986.

   In Kill Zone, Loren Estleman, who is best known for his rough-and-tumble, Chandleresque private-eye novels, introduces Peter Macklin, “efficiency expert” — a euphemism for hit man.

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

   Macklin is the toughest character — hero or antihero — to arrive in crime fiction since Richard Stark’s Parker; and Estleman’ s prose the hardest-boiled since the days of Paul Cain and Cap Shaw’s Black Mask. Macklin and Estleman, in fact, would probably have been too grimly realistic even for the pioneering Shaw and his magazine.

   A terrorist group takes control of a Lake Erie excursion boat with 800 passengers, rigging it as a floating bomb. They demand the release of three prisoners within ten days. Michael Boniface, the head of the Detroit mob, offers his assistance from his prison cell in return for parole, but it is not until the FBI discovers that one of the passengers on the boat is a cabinet member’s daughter that they take him up on it.

   Boniface’s assistance is in the form of his top “efficiency expert,” Peter Macklin. Macklin tries to concentrate on the business at hand while dealing with an alcoholic wife, the knowledge that someone close to him has betrayed him, and the fact that he is being stalked by a killer working for Charles Maggiore, acting head of the mob, who does not want Boniface to get out of prison.

   Estleman takes an expertise previously displayed in PI and western novels (one of his westerns, Aces and Eights, won the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award for Best Novel of 1982) and in applying it to a different type of novel has once again scored high marks.

   Fans of hard-boiled fiction won’t want to miss it — or subsequent Peter Macklin titles: Kill Zone is the first of at least three.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

    Bibliographic Data: There was a long delay between the first three and the fourth and fifth:

       The Peter Macklin series:

Kill Zone (1984)
Roses Are Dead (1985)
Any Man’s Death (1986)

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

Something Borrowed, Something Black (2002)
Little Black Dress (2005)

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN – Angel Eyes. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1981. Paperback reprints: Pinnacle, 1984; Fawcett Crest, 1987; Ibooks, 2000.

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

   As is the case with all good private eyes, Amos Walker is a man with an unswerving code of honor. When his client, a girl singer with unforgettable eyes, disappears, as she had predicted she would, shaking him from the case is as easy as sneaking a steak from a hungry dog.

   The scene is Detroit, and union politics combine with and merge inevitably into the background of a city in slow decay. To perk things up and to keep the case moving, Estleman is a current master of the well-tuned metaphor. He is also better at mood than he is at plot, and there is enough plot in the second half of the story to choke a full-grown horse.

   The longer the trail becomes, the more it insists on turning incestuously back upon itself. Not surprisingly, there are also plenty of guns to go around.

– From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 6, No. 2, March/April 1982 (slightly revised). This review also appeared earlier in the Hartford Courant.


Editorial Comment: This is the second book in Loren Estleman’s “Amos Walker” series. How many of the PI series being written when he began are still being written today? That’s “enough said” to say it all.

   The Amos Walker series:

Motor City Blue (1980)

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

Angel Eyes (1981)
The Midnight Man (1982)
The Glass Highway (1983)

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

Sugartown (1984)
Every Brilliant Eye (1985)
Lady Yesterday (1987)

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

Downriver (1988)
General Murders: Ten Amos Walker Mysteries (1988)
Silent Thunder (1989)

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

Sweet Women Lie (1990)
Never Street (1996)
The Witchfinder (1998)
The Hours of the Virgin (1999)

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (2000)
Sinister Heights (2002)
Poison Blonde (2003)
Retro (2004)
Nicotine Kiss (2006)

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

American Detective (2007)
The Left-Handed Dollar (2010)

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:         


HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN

House of Frankenstein. Universal Pictures, 1944. Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, John Carradine, Anne Gwynne, Peter Coe, Lionel Atwill, George Zucco, Elena Verdugo. Story by Curt Siodmak. Director: Erle C. Kenton.

House of Dracula. Universal Pictures, 1945. Lon Chaney, John Carradine, Martha O’Driscoll, Lionel Atwill, Onslow Stevens. Director: Erle C. Kenton.

Bride of the Gorilla. Realart Pictures, 1951. Barbara Payton, Lon Chaney, Raymond Burr, Tom Conway, Paul Cavanagh, Gisela Werbisek. Screenwriter and director: Curt Siodmak.

   Following The Body Snatcher (reviewed here ) came House of Frankenstein / Dracula, the sad swan songs of the Monster Movie heyday, offering the Frankenstein monster, Dracula and the Wolfman, with Mad Scientists and Hunchbacks tossed in for good measure.

   These movies are two of my guilty pleasures; I know in my head they’re ridiculous, but it thrills my heart to see all the old cliches — and I mean all of them — treated respectfully one last time.

BRIDE OF THE GORILLA

   As for Bride of the Gorilla, it shows more intelligence than you’d expect to find in a movie called Bride of the Gorilla.

   Written and directed by Curt Siodmak, it offers Raymond Burr as a virile man-about-jungle who kills his mistress’s husband and finds himself the subject of a jungle-movie curse with predictable echoes of The Wolf Man (also written by Siodmak).

   One interesting twist is that Burr gets cursed not because he killed a man, but because he toyed with the affections of a local girl. The other twist is … well, I won’t reveal it except to say that this tatty little quickie repays careful viewing.

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