JAMES CORBETT – Murder While You Wait. Herbert Jenkins, UK, hardcover, 1937.

   Readers — oh, all right, one to be exact, and she was pixilated — have insisted that I at least occasionally remind them of the works of James Corbett, that unfortunately neglected genius of the thriller. Since this is the final issue of TMF and thus vociferous complaints from others cannot be published, I will courageously risk it.

   If you are unacquainted with his works, the first thing to be said about Corbett is that when the familiar disclaimer is printed– “All the characters in this novel are purely imaginary and have no relation whatsoever to any person, living or dead” –he is one of the very few authors telling the literal truth. Or one certainly hopes he is.

   In this novel, Reginald Harcourt, M.P. for West Singleton, has been shot down in front of his residence after receiving a threat from “Murder While You Wait,” or M.W.Y.W. Seth Mannering, a rich barrister who had talked with Harcourt the night before his death and scoffed at the death threat, hires Malcolm Egerton, distinguished criminologist, to investigate the case.

   It is a complicated one, for twenty-six other people are apparently also in danger. Harcourt and the others had testified in the Broxton Financial Scandal. Some of the group begin receiving notices of their imminent death, and die they do. One is stabbed to death in a taxi, while another is murdered by machine-gun.

   When one of the threatened men commits suicide, Egerton explains it this way: “He was bluffing in Daly’s Cafe, and he left a note to that effect!” (The emphasis is Corbett’s.) Since you are all experienced and perceptive readers, you will understand that without my having to explain it.

   One person is threatened by M.W.Y.W. and is surrounded by Egerton, Mannering, the heroine, and a Scotland Yard detective. He dies anyhow at precisely the time predicted after having a nip of brandy. Mystery buffs will immediately suspect one of those four individuals. But if they do they will have forgotten that this is a James Corbett novel; the man actually died of a heart attack, a pure, if that’s the word I want, coincidence.

   Several times it is pointed out by the investigators that if they knew the name of the killer, they would have a better chance to catch him. As his many admiring readers are aware, Corbett never spares the logic.

   When another stabbing death occurs, Egerton keenly orders an X-ray. That, he is sure, will reveal that the same knife was used in the two murders. Unfortunately, the reader is never vouchsafed the results of this forensic miracle.

   Near the end of the novel, Egerton reveals the reason for his superb investigative ability: “I always get into contact with the unseen, with the mystic forces of the universe, then, after a long period of waiting, there comes a light in the picture.”

   Some readers, unused to Corbett’s characters, might wonder why he didn’t get in touch with the unseen earlier to solve the case; others might wonder why he isn’t doing it even as he speaks. Actually, since he is a Corbett character, he never does it.

   Or maybe he did and he doesn’t reveal it. He catches the murderer by identifying the five distinct clicks from a call-box when the killer picks up the receiver. Since the murderer hadn’t at that point given Egerton’s number, perhaps mystic forces did after all put a light in the picture.

Editorial Comment:   Bill Deeck was a great champion of Corbett’s work, as you can readily discern from this review. You can also find a full page of quotes online that Bill accumulated from several of Corbett’s mysteries: http://www.mysterynet.com/books/testimony/genius/.

   Here are but two of my favorites from that page:

    “It was a morning gown of blue silk, one that stressed her grace of figure and matched her complexion.”

    “Pritchard sat up like a full-blown geranium.”

   Most of Corbett’s work was never published in the US, and unfortunately many of them are very hard to find. For example, there is at the moment but one copy of Murder While You Wait up for sale online, priced in the $70-75 range, depending on the venue. Perhaps a bargain at half that price! (Follow the link for a complete bibliography.)

GAIL BOWEN – Verdict in Blood. McClelland & Stewart, hardcover, Canada/US, 1998. Detective Book Club, hardcover, 3-in-1 edition; no date. TV movie: Shaftesbury Films, Canada, 2002; with Wendy Crewson as Joanne Kilbourn.

   [The original version of this review began with an attempt to straighten out the bibliography of Gail Bowen’s mystery fiction. As a Canadian author and largely distributed by a Canadian publisher, her books have appeared in this country on a very sporadic basis. They may not be difficult to obtain, but they are not found without a deliberate search for them. The list at the end of this review is complete, I believe, but does not contain specific publisher details.]

   […] In any case, it’s easy to see that you ever find one of Gail Bowen’s mysteries and want to read another one, they’re not going to turn up in local bookstores all that quickly. Mystery specialty shops will have them, and almost no one else.

   They seem to have gotten good reviews, and I liked this one very much. St. Martin’s published either two or three and then seems to have dropped the series. Why? Here’s my guess. They’re too Canadian. We’re too provincial down here.

   Here’s an example. A sizable subplot of Verdict in Blood concerns the problems faced by Canada’s aboriginal Indians in a society which at best ignores them — not a hot topic in the United States, by any means.

   On the other hand, it’s something Joanne Kilbourne is confronted with every day. Besides being a busy mother, an incipient grandmother and a professor of political science at the local university in Regina, the current man in her life is Alex Kequahtooway, whose nephew Eli is having severe problems adjusting to the death of his single parent mother. And this is starting to have consequences with her relationship to Alex.

   More. Joanne’s house guest, the elegant 83-year-old Hilda McCourt, was one of the last people to see her friend, Judge Justine Blackwell, alive. Known as Madame Justice Blackheart for most of her career on the bench, in the last year of her life she seemed to have taken a complete U-turn in her view of herself, becoming a champion of those she deemed she had treated unfairly. She’s now a murder victim, perhaps at the hands of one of the ex-convicts she recently befriended.

   It’s a complicated story, and there’s lots more to tell you, but this is as far as I’d better go with the basic outline or I’ll keep you here forever. My impression, though, and this is a distinct one, is that these are adults we’re dealing with, even Taylor, Joanne’s six-year-old adopted daughter, who’s very precocious and instinctively caring. Even with setbacks, Joanne’s progressive views of how to deal with the world are an essential part of the story, if not the mystery.

   Joanne tells the story herself, in first person, and when she misses some warning signals that something is amiss in her relationship with someone else, one person in particular, the reader does also, making him or her (or what the heck, me) feel the letdown that follows as painfully as she does. It’s an understated but certainly effective way to tell a story, and it’s one that hadn’t occurred to me before.

   The ending seemed rushed just a little, compared with the generally slow and even pace before then, but that’s a small quibble, and everybody should do it once in a while. I read this almost as fast as I did the Gil Brewer book [reviewed here ], even though they are miles apart stylistically — and almost every other way you might want to compare them — and maybe even faster. Enjoyable? Yes.

       The Joanne Kilbourn series —

● Deadly Appearances [1990]

● Murder at the Mendel (US title: Love and Murder) [1991]
● The Wandering Soul Murders [1992]
● A Colder Kind of Death [1994]

● A Killing Spring [1996]
● Verdict in Blood [1998]
Burying Ariel [2000]
The Glass Coffin [2002]
The Last Good Day [2004]

The Endless Knot [2006]
The Brutal Heart [2008]
The Nesting Dolls [2010]
Kaleidoscope [2012]

[UPDATE] 08-07-12.   The novels marked with an ● have been adapted into made-for-Canadian-TV movies. I’ve ordered a copy of Verdict in Blood on DVD, but it is yet to arrive. I shall have to see how easy the other five are to obtain.

ANNE PERRY – Dorchester Terrace. Ballantine, hardcover, April 2012.

Genre:   Historical Mystery/Professional Investigator. Police Procedural. Leading character:  Lt. Thomas Pitt; 27th in series. Setting:   England, 1896.

First Sentence:   It was mid-February and growing dark outside.

   Just as the series has continued, so have the lives of the characters. That is only one reason those of us who love this series are loyal to it; these are characters in whom we have become invested.

   After the events of the previous book, Treason at Lisson Grove, we find Thomas Pitt now as head of Special Branch. Unfortunately, neither Pitt nor others are certain he’s capable of handling his new role. Ms. Perry wonderfully helps us understand the complexity, both socially and with regard to experience, of the new position Pitt now holds.

   Victor Narrraway has been moved out of Special Branch into the House of Lords yet misses his old role. Great-Aunt Vespasa, one of my favorite characters, providing insight and wisdom, is Ms. Perry’s vehicle for ruminations on the mental and physical pain of being elderly. Charlotte, Thomas’ wife, is ever loyal and supportive. Stoker, a fairly new character and Pitt’s second, is someone about whom we know little except for a delightful revelation toward the book’s end.

   Ms. Perry’s attention to period detail is astonishing. Additionally, the book is an amazing history lesson on Austro-Hungary and the tensions which led up to WWI. Make no mistake; however, this is not your old, dry, boring history course. Far from it. It is fascinating and well incorporated into the plot.

   Dorchester Terrace contains good tension and suspense with a very good twist which catches both the reader, and the protagonist, unawares. Well done, Ms. Perry!

Rating: Very Good.

From The Satan Sleuth #2: The Werewolf Walks Tonight by MICHAEL AVALLONE.   Warner Paperback Library, paperback original, December 1974.

   … a wet suit, the dark, rubberized costume particular to scuba divers, frogmen, and anyone engaged in the pursuit of aquamarine adventure.   (Page 39)

   Philip St. George had not come to Fletcherville unprepared and half cocked.    (Page 43)

   … the cheap gold lettering on the cover which proclaimed it as the New Testament, St. James Version.    (Page 45)

   Besides being Fletcherville’ s only and most successful banker …    (Page 48)

   There was devils walking in the world, all right.    (Page 55)

   Dean Williams’s Good Book, the St. James version …   (Page 78)

   It was in all the ancient papers, the only known weapon against a lycanthrophobe–    (Page 80)

   There was no saliva in her mouth for she had yet to have any water. Her tongue was a dead lizard in her gullet.   (Pages 83-84)

   Dawson was bound to put two and two together and get a positive four. If he got five, well, forget that, too.    (Page 97)

   No one who saw him could not help feeling sorry for the stranger…   (Page 103)

   On his feet, dark canvas sneakers loomed, the track model.    (Page 107)

   His face was expressionless, his mind perfectly and unwaveringly resolute. He had licked up the scent of the Fletcherville Demon at last. Once and for all. Forever. The moment was electrifyingly tense. There was a high, sharp keen to the atmosphere, as if the rhythms of the spheres of the universe were blending in a moment of truth.    (Page 119)

   Nausea climbed upward from her stomach, joined the horror in her brain, fusing electrically, exploding once more in a final burst of stupefying terror.    (Page 127)

   When the thing snarled, a snarl compounded of rage and pain, and dropped back, releasing its savage hold on his own shoulders, the sound was something joyful to Philip St. George. Like a bugle sounding a cavalry charge or the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. Not even the mammoth grizzly bear of the North can stand up to a frontal assault on his small testicles.    (Page 140)

THE KILLING. United Artists, 1956. Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen, Ted DeCorsia, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Joe Sawyer, James Edwards, Timothy Carey, Kola Kwariani, Jay Adler. Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, with dialogue by Jim Thompson, based on the novel Clean Break by Lionel White. Director: Stanley Kubrick.

   Stanley Kubrick has been one of the most admired and respected film directors for at least twenty years, with a record that few contemporary filmmakers can match.

   His first major critical breakthrough was the striking anti-war film, The Paths of Glory (1957), which can be honorably compared to Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1931) and Jean Renoir’s Grande lllusion (1937), but his acceptance by both critics and audiences probably dates from 1963 and his savagely funny Dr. Strangelove. or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

   This success was comfirmed with one of the most innovative and influential films of the period, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a success that has not been matched for the critics or the public by any of the three films he has directed since then: A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), or The Shining (1980).

   Indeed the massive failure of Barry Lyndon to find an audience in this country and the critical disapproval that greeted his filming of Stephen King’s book, The Shining have appeared to provoke a reassessment of his work by many critics that can probably be best summed up by the observation that there may be less in his films than meets the eye.

   Barry Lyndon was generally thought to be a beautiful but vapid film with an eccentric casting of Ryan O’Neal as the ambitious, doomed Barry, a performance that, according to a similar critical opinion, was perhaps equaled in its inappropriateness by Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

   I don’t intend to devote this column to a defense of Kubrick’s recent films — although I will say that I think Barry Lyndon is one of the most underrated films of the past decade — but rather to turn to his third feature-length film, The Killing (1956).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQXokRldBUo

   The Killing is a black-and-white film (does anyone remember that black-and-white used to be the preferred medium for films?) based on Lionel White’s caper novel, Clean Break, with a script by Kubrick and additional dialogue by writer Jim Thompson.

   After a series of short documentaries growing out of his work as a photographer for Look magazine, Kubrick filmed a claustrophobic war drama (Fear and Desire, 1953), of which there seem to be no prints for public viewing, and Killer’s Kiss (1955), a melodrama of a “girl … kidnapped by the sadistic owner of a dance hall and rescued … by a gallant young boxer.”

   However, The Killing seems to be the earliest film that Kubrick is willing to acknowledge as his own, and, coming at the end of the great period of films noir which preceded Hollywood’s capitulation to the seductions of color, it is one of the best of the post-war “B” films and, in its bold dislocation of chronology, a film that, at moments, has some of the freshness and excitement of the New Wave French films of the late fifties and early sixties.

   The French renaissance was in large part due to the influence of the post-war American “B” films that were a revelation to the directors, and The Killing is clearly, in its conventions and style, related to the work of other American directors of the period.

   The Killing is the story of a meticulously planned impossible robbery: of the office of a race-track whose security is thought to be unassailable.

   While The Killing is a well-crafted caper film that might appear to be limited in conception and execution (a usual criticism of genre films), the boldness of the planning and accomplishing of the robbery are not unlike the risks that Kubrick has taken in film after film: the slave whose vagabond army challenges the legions of Rome (Spartacus); the filming of Nabokov’s perverse and witty Lolita, whose subject was hardly the kind to be approved by the Legion of Decency or the United Mothers of America; the unsettling blend of beauty and violence in A Clockwork Orange and The Shining; the anarchistic comedy of Dr. Strangelove and the Olympian, epic canvas of Barry Lyndon; and, of course, the imaginative rehabilitation of the science-fiction film in 2001.

   All of these films, so stylistically diverse and so difficult for an auteur-oriented criticism to assimilate, are so many challenges to the established and the conventional. They may be thought to be self-fulfilling fantasies, but there is a common thread running through these films from the earliest to the most recent in the impossible attempted and failed.

   But with all of his attraction to the difficult and the resistant, Kubrick’s intelligence is not seduced by these visions. There is a lucidity in his recognition of the traps the great projects pose that is reflected in an ironic detachment that seems to enclose his films, even at their most outrageous and troubling, in a harmoniously balanced form. His comedy sense works against comic release; his sense of the horrific almost seems to be devoid of terror and fear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r69KohzTYfg&feature=related

   The conspirators are led by Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay, a petty crook whose name is an all to accurate gauge of his prospects. His unimposing gang — Jay C. Flippen, Joe Sawyer, Ted de Corsia, Elisha Cook, Jr. — is perfectly cast from among the character actors who worked in films where their perfect control of an essential character could do much to salvage a film starring Hollywood’s latest vapidly empty romantic team.

   There is not a single flaw in the casting — although the film itself is not without weaknesses — and the most surprising pairing of Elisha Cook, Jr., and Marie Windsor. Cook is a race-track employee whose dream of making it seem to have gone down the same chute as his marriage. Windsor is a posing, mocking bitch who deceives her husband with a small-time hood (Vince Edwards) and betrays the details of the plan her deluded husband reveals to her in an ill-considered moment.

   Windsor is herself deceived by Edwards, a betrayal she is as aware of, at times, as Cook is of her true feelings for him. But the husband and wife are also wedded to their dreams and the flaw in the concept of the robbery is not in the plan but in human nature and, more distressingly, a bored and vengeful deity, Chance, that a dozen times in the film works against the project and its participants.

   Lovers of a tight narrative in which there are no embarrassing moments of slack will not be happy with The Killing, where Kubrick is not afraid to linger over a sentimental scene (involving Flippen’s sick wife) that is ironically countered, by a Cook-Windsor confrontation; to introduce an overly friendly parking-lot attendant to interfere with one of the carefully timed “events,” or a traffic jam to delay Hayden’s return with the money; and, finally, to use a fat lady and a small, pampered dog to expose Hayden in the final moments of the film when he might be close to escaping with the money.

   These gimmicks don’t always work: the parking-lot attendant is played by black actor James Edwards, whose speedy warming-up to a white mobster (they are both cripples) is unconvincing in the climate of the fifties; and the woman and, dog are too obviously planted and the reversal too clearly telegraphed to the audience.

   But it might also be argued that these less-than-convincing details are a perfect demonstration of Kubrick’s belief in an almost diabolically conscious fate that takes its pleasure in blatantly countering the human actors’ futile attempts to work out their own destiny. And the most striking shot in the film looks like a still photograph of the conspirators lying dead in a confused jumble, sprawled near the hoods who came to take the money from them.

   At the center of the film is the performance of Sterling Hayden, an earnest, unpretentious master of the game who can bring off the robbery but not carry off the spoils. Hayden does make a killing, but there is also the brutal slaughter, and it is difficult not to see the climax of the film in the room where the bloodied, wounded Elisha Cook, along with the audience, stares in horror at the tangled bodies, rather than in the impersonal, busy air terminal where Hayden’s final moves are checkmated.

   The final shot is brilliant: as Hayden turns to the doors leading to the terminal, he sees two security men approaching. They frame the words THE END superimposed on the shot and they are the final punctuation for the film as surely as they punctuate Hayden’s collapse. In these final minutes we first seem him from the rear, his body sagging, almost without life, and when he turns to the camera and his captors he turns accepting the defeat that has crushed him.

   There is one technique in particular that sets this film apart from other caper films I have seen. Our pleasure in this kind of film is usually in the planning of the caper and in our close attendance upon its execution and the aftermath. We expect to follow the timed and coordinated execution as if we were ourselves participants.

   Kubrick, in an unsettling and exciting denial of those expectations, films the robbery from different points of view, backing up in time to show the different strategies which lead to the robbery. Kubrick has shrugged off any credit for this technique, saying that it was this narrative shifting that had interested him in White’s novel. The technique may be adapted, but that does not lessen its cinematic effectiveness.

   The Killing is a film with so many fine things that only a few can be noted: the performance by Kola Kwariani as Maurice, a bald, bullet-headed chess player who stages a row to distract the police from Hayden’s moves; Coleen Gray’s small but important role as Hayden’s girl friend who is only on screen in the beginning and at the end but who is a perfect frame as her fears, expressed in her first scene, are realized at the conclusion; the marvelous use of interiors, in particular Hayden’s apartment which seems to be a series of interconnecting rooms that in spite of their perfect articulation are only vaguely defined and have something of the inevitability of a labyrinth; the bar at the racetrack that opens out toward the track like a stage on which some of the most important scenes of the film are played; and the frantic speed of the horses with their anonymous riders, always viewed from a distance, their movements described by an announcer with some of that detachment that seems so characteristic of Kubrick.

   Whatever faults The Killers may have, it is, after thirty years, and a generation’s experiences with Kubrick’s films, an exciting and rich work. The Killers, drawing from the past and revelatory of Kubrick’s future, should not be consigned to fragmented late-night showings on TV and to filmographies. Kubrick remains a challenging and demanding filmmaker, and we should, perhaps, study the earlier movies in his game before we try to judge too quickly the newer ones.

   The golden oldie I picked to reread last month was The Bowstring Murders (1933), the only John Dickson Carr novel ever published under the byline Carr Dickson. I wouldn’t rank it among Carr’s top ten or even the top thirty but thought it was on the whole satisfactory, taking place almost entirely in an eerie 15th-century Suffolk castle full of the Poe-like atmosphere that the young Carr loved to generate.

   Is it truly golden? According to Doug Greene’s biography The Man Who Explained Miracles (1995), Carr wrote Bowstring in New York “at white-hot speed” after his English wife Clarice discovered she was pregnant and also in order to finance a long visit to England for the family.

   Greene calls the novel “badly flawed .. John Gaunt [the criminologist who solves the murders] is sharply drawn, but the plot…is unconvincing.” He correctly describes the explanation of the seemingly impossible murder of Lord Rayle as “a creative variation of the solution in [Carr’s first novel] It Walks by Night…”

   He was surprised by “how many mistakes Carr makes about England” but the ones he cites strike me as trivial: the servants “all speak a strange sort of Cockney” and after Lord Rayle’s murder the Bowstring footman fails to address the dead man’s son and successor to the title as “Your Lordship.”

   Greene also mentions “some sloppy lines” in the book but quotes only one, from Chapter 12: “With one gloved hand, he dived behind the body.” Does that sentence rise to the lofty heights of an Avalloneism? Personally, I don’t think so.

   What bothered me most about the plot (am I giving away too much here?) is that, in order for the crucial gimmick to work, a cowled “white-wool monk’s robe” of the sort which the “more than half-cracked” Lord Rayle wore while wandering around Bowstring must be concealed by the murderer in an ordinary briefcase.

   S. T. Joshi in John Dickson Carr: A Critical Study (1990), is no fonder of The Bowstring Murders than Doug Greene. He calls the novel a “confused and shoddily written work” and both the book and its protagonist “spectacular failures.” (Greene, as we’ve seen, disagrees with Joshi about John Gaunt.)

   Joshi’s main complaint is that “the solution depends vitally upon our knowing the exact plan of the house, which is not provided.” Obviously there was no such plan in whatever edition Joshi read, and there’s none in the only edition I have (Berkley pb #G-214, 1959).

   But there are several references to the local inspector making a drawing of Bowstring Castle, and I have a hunch that the sketch does appear in the original hardcover edition. If someone reading this column can tell me whether I’m right or wrong, please speak up.

   If anyone decides to read the novel on the strength of this discussion, they should first go here and download the detailed diagram of the castle that Wyatt James, 1944-2006 (known to Internet mystery fandom as Grobius Shortling) kindly prepared for Carr fans who don’t have a copy of that first edition. And, if my hunch is wrong, even for those who do.

   In my mailbox recently was a book that was sent from Japan but has an English as well as a Japanese title: The Misadventures of Ellery Queen. This 400-page anthology, edited by Yusan Iiki and published by Ronsosha Ltd. Of Tokyo, brings together a huge assortment of parodies and pastiches of the immortal EQ, written by such authors as Jon Breen, Ed Hoch, James Holding, Josh Pachter, Clayton Rawson and, if I may be so immodest as to say it, me. (Anyone remember “Open Letter to Survivors”?)

   The most recent story in the volume, and probably the finest Queen pastiche ever written, is “The Book Case” (EQMM, May 2007) by Dale Andrews and Kurt Sercu, in which Ellery at age 100 proves that his body may be feeble but his mind is sharp as ever.

   Years ago Josh Pachter put together an anthology, also called The Misadventures of Ellery Queen, but could never find a publisher for it. The appearance of this new volume, coupled with the failure of Pachter’s book to find a home, provides an excellent demonstration of how tall Queen still stands in Japan and how deeply he’s sunk into oblivion almost everywhere else.

   Thinking about the role of genetics in mystery fiction, we at once conjure up the DNA testing scenes in countless TV forensic series. But the subject has also figured in the Golden Age of the whodunit. In the 60-minute radio drama “The Missing Child” (The Adventures of Ellery Queen, CBS, November 26, 1939).

   Ellery’s solution hinges on his assertion that it’s impossible for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child. That was a common belief at the time, and was also crucial to the solution in an Agatha Christie story of the same decade (“The House at Shiraz,” collected in Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective, 1934).

   But it’s flatly not true, as Fred Dannay and Manny Lee must have discovered sometime in the ten or eleven years following broadcast of the drama. How do I know? Because the fact of its falsity is central to one of the later EQ short stories, “The Witch of Times Square” (This Week, November 5, 1950; collected in QBI: Queen’s Bureau of Investigation, 1955).

   Genetics mistake and all, the original script is included in that indispensable collection of Queen radio plays The Adventure of the Murdered Moths (Crippen & Landru, 2005).

   In a column posted back in 2006 I waxed nostalgic for a paragraph or two about Boston Blackie (1951-53, 58 episodes), starring Kent Taylor in perhaps the earliest and certainly one of the finest action-detective TV series, most episodes featuring one or more elaborate chase-and-fight sequences shot on Los Angeles streets and locations.

   Eighteen of the 26 segments that made up the first season were directed by Paul Landres (1912-2001), whose action scenes, brought to life by master stuntmen Troy Melton and Bill Catching, were of eye-popping visual quality, especially considering that each episode was shot in two or at most three days.

   Until recently it’s been next to impossible to find decent VHS or DVD copies of Blackie segments, all of which have long been in the public domain. Which is why I was delighted to discover recently that at least twenty episodes are now accessible on YouTube — and that many of them were digitally restored last year.

   I especially recommend the earliest segments like “Phone Booth Murder” (#2), “Blind Beggar Murder” (#5), “The Cop Killer” (#6), and “Scar Hand” (#11), all directed by Paul, whom I met when he was in his mid-eighties and who was the subject of a book of mine that came out about a year before he died.

   Paul would have been 100 this month, and to celebrate his centenary I’ve prepared a DVD tribute that will be presented at the Mid Atlantic Nostalgia Convention in Hunt Valley, Maryland on August 11.

   In one of the tapes I made with Paul he vividly described an accident that took place while he was shooting the climax of “Phone Booth Murder.” His description is now preserved on my DVD, accompanied by the climactic sequence itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ6voB6ADfE

   If any readers of this column check out this episode and are interested in what went wrong and how Paul responded to the crisis, I’ll include his comments in my September column.

   Not every fictional character has been blessed with a TV series. Many famous characters such as PHILO VANCE, NICK CARTER, and THE SHADOW have tried with only a failed pilot or two left behind. Iconic private eye SAM SPADE has never had a TV series due to politics and TV writers finding it cheaper to steal than pay for the real thing.

   The following are my top five choices of fictional characters I would adapt for a TV series. Feel free to add your own or make fun of mine in the comments (points awarded to anyone who has read any of all five (seven) characters’ books). While I focused on mystery novels, any characters from any genre of fiction and any format besides novels may be selected.

CYRIL “MAC” MCCORKLE & MICHAEL PADILLO. Created by Ross Thomas. Appeared in novels Cold War Swap (1966), Cast a Yellow Shadow (1967), The Backup Men (1971), and Twilight At Mac’s Place (1990).

   One of television’s programming quests is to find a successful light drama series featuring the team of an average person (for the viewers to identify with) and a top secret agent. McCorkle and his partner and feared ex-spy Padillo run Mac’s Place, a bar located in Washington D.C. and a favorite spot for political intrigue and power brokers.

ELDON LARKIN. Created by Vince Kohler. Appeared in novels, Rainy North Woods (1990), Rising Dog (1992), Banjo Boy (1994), and Raven’s Widows (1997).

   Eldon is an average guy, a lovable loser with a talent for finding and solving murders. He is a reporter for the South Coast Sun that covers a small community in rainy coastal Oregon. Take the loony locale of a Carl Hiaasen, the off-beat characters of an Elmore Leonard, and the fun dialog of an Gregory Mcdonald and you have a slight idea of the late Vince Kohler’s unique talent.

HAP COLLINS & LEONARD PINE. Created by Joe R. Lansdale. Appeared in novels Savage Season (1990), Mucho Magic (1994), Two-Bear Mambo (1995), Bad Chili (1997), Rumble Tumble (1998), Veil’s Visit (1999), Captains Outrageous (2001), Vanilla Ride (2009), and Devil Red (2011), as well as novella “Hyenas (2011). (http://www.joerlansdale.com)

   Imagine what cable networks FX, HBO, or Showtime would do with these two characters. I can’t better describe them than Kevin Burton Smith did at his website Thrilling Detective. (https://www.thrillingdetective.com/hap.html)

CAPE WEATHERS. Created by Tim Maleeny. Appeared in Stealing the Dragon (2007), Beating the Babushka (2007), and Greasing the Pinata (2009). (http://www.timmaleeny.com)

   Former reporter now San Francisco PI, Cape is from the Robert Parker’s Spenser school of PIs, but lighter with less realism. His companions include Sally, an assassin raised from childhood by the Chinese Triads, a computer genius who is called Sloth for good reason and Sloth’s close friend Linda, a reporter whose hair has a life of its own.

INSPECTOR FRANCIS XAVIER FLYNN. Created by Gregory Mcdonald. Appeared in Confess, Fletch (1976), Flynn (1977), Buck Passes Flynn (1981), Flynn’s In (1984), and Flynn’s World (2003). (http://www.gregorymcdonald.com)

   While Fletch gets all the attention it is another Mcdonald’s character, Flynn that is best suited for a weekly TV series. Flynn’s secret past full of intrigue offers a nice series arc, while the weekly episodes featuring the eccentric and brilliant Boston homicide cop, following in the tradition of endless beloved TV detectives, using unconventional methods to solve crimes. Add his “perfect” family and his abused assistant Grover and you have a nice basis for a network weekly series.

GIL BREWER – The Red Scarf. Crest 310; paperback reprint, July 1959; cover art by Robert McGinnis. Hardcover: Mystery House, 1958. First published in Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine, November 1955 (probably abridged).

   Gil Brewer was a prolific paperback writer in the 50s, 60s and 70s, as well as the author of many stories in Manhunt, Trapped, Guilty, Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine and other magazines in the same time period, including some western pulps. Only two of his books ever came out in hardcover, and this is one of them. (The other was The Angry Dream, also by Mystery House in 1957; reprinted in paperback by Zenith Books in 1958 as The Girl from Hateville.)

   In its Crest edition, The Red Scarf is only 128 pages long, and even though the print is small, it can easily be read in less than a couple of hours. In fact, there are times when — I challenge you on this — your eyes will be going as fast as they can and whole paragraphs will be swallowed up in gulps — the pace is that intense.

   There were many paperbacks novels in the 50s in which the male lead falls completely under the spell of a tempting woman and/or a briefcase full of money, and that’s exactly what this book is all about. Roy Nichols is the guy who needs the money for his failing Florida motel. Vivian is the girl who’s registered there with a bag full of mob money, tied up with a lucky red scarf. Bess is Roy’s wife, anxious to help, but with Roy not talking and Vivian holed up in cabin number six, she doesn’t know what to think.

   Vivian’s partner in crime, thought dead, isn’t. Nor is the mob about to chalk off the missing money as operating expenses, and Gant, the local police detective, can’t figure out why Roy seems to be making up answers as he goes along.

   Those are the ingredients. I’m sure you’re thinking you could put a pretty good story together and take over from here, and you probably could. Brewer does an ace-high job of it, though, and you can relax. You don’t have to.

   I think the following excerpt, taken from pages 66-67, sums things up very nicely:

   You might quibble about some of the more unlikely aspects of the story afterwards, but I’m willing to wager that you’ll never think of them while you’re still turning the pages. For the price of a mere quarter (at the time, not today) you most assuredly got your money’s worth.

SECRET AGENT OF JAPAN. 20th Century Fox, 1943. Preston Foster, Lynn Bari, Noel Madison, Victor Sen Yung, Janis Carter, Steve Geray, Kurt Katch, Addison Richards. Screenwriter: John Larkin. Director: Irving Pichel.

   Secret Agent of Japan was the third and final pairing of its two leading stars, Preston Foster and Lynn Bari, the others being Chasing Danger (1939) and News Is Made at Night (1939). This one’s not nearly as good, but there may be a reason for it, and a historical one, at that.

   I’m told, from what I read, that this movie went into production the day after Pearl Harbor, and it was the first film to be released that included the attack as part of the story line. I’m also told that the critics were not particularly fond of the film, quite the contrary, but audiences flocked to it in droves.

   Its official release date was April 3, 1942. Hardly enough time to get a story written and filmed, one that makes a lot of sense, you might think, and true enough, this one doesn’t.

   Preston Foster plays an expatriate American (Roy Bonnell) running a bar called the Dixie Bar in Shanghai as the drums of the oncoming war fills the minds of the citizens there, of every nationality, and there are many. Bonnell thinks he knows his way around the city and has an understanding with the Japanese living there, but the latter are growing confident (and menacing) about something.

   Enter Lynn Bari as a spy for the British, on the trail of some valuable jade she says, but with various mail drops, secret codes, and a mysterious death or two, it seems as though her cover story is not long to last, nor does it. (Poor Janis Carter, as Bari’s companion in the spying business. Her part is too short to make much of an impression, much less to warrant a listing so high up in the credits, but to her credit, she does and she is.)

   The tale gets a twist or two from there along the way, with the various parts never coming together as a whole, but the audience in 1942 knew what was going on well enough, I’m sure, and the ending of course, is a happy one. The movie doesn’t stand up well today, but the people involved with it weren’t making it for viewers some 70 years later. They were making it for another audience altogether.

        #14. HANIGAN & IRVING, by Roger Torrey.

   The Hanigan & Irving stories by Roger Torrey were a short series of eleven stories published in Detective Fiction Weekly from 1937 to 1941. There are two main characters in the series and a number of supporting ones. The main characters are private detective Michael “Mickey” Hanigan and his assistant – Irving Koslowski the taxi driver.

   Hanigan is a former cop, probably a detective, before he opened up his agency. “Hanigan had ethics, though of a peculiar sort and often discounted by the police department.” (Suicide Story) Irving usually drives a decrepit old taxi and takes Hanigan wherever he needs to go and also assists when needed. Irving’s last name was Borowski in “The Meter Says Murder” but changes to Koslowski later in the series. (see “Murder Tips the Scales” from 1940)

   Supporting characters include Nancy Evans, Hanigan’s girl friend, always ready to try to convince Hanigan to take the day off and relax. But Hanigan usually resists the temptation, insisting that he needs to be in his office in case someone needs him. She tried to help him in the first story in the series, but wound up making a mess of matters, so she refrains from helping him after that unless he asks her.

   Various police detectives are also supporting characters in the stories, but they are different in each story.

   Irving is introduced in the first story in the series, “Case for a Killer” (DFW, September 17, 1937), and is of assistance to Hanigan in the story. Hanigan just picks his taxi at random, and does not identify Irving by name in his first scene. In a later scene, after Hanigan repeatedly calls him Jack, Irving corrects him and tells him his name.

   He also tells Hanigan: “You’re the kind of a guy I like; one that makes up his mind.” Before the two go to a Greek bar, Hanigan tells Irving: “To this Greek spot, and you’re to go in with me. If there’s any dough in this, I’ll see you’re taken care of. If not, you got a steady customer at least.” So it was by sheer accident that the two met up and Irving became hired by Hanigan for future jobs.

   In another story (The Meter Says Murder) Hanigan defends his hiring of Irving: “Now about Irving. The guy ain’t making any money hacking and all I’ve got to pay him is enough for him to get along. And the cab’s handy and he’s a handy boy.” Later Hanigan seems to regret his hiring of Irving, for it was said about him: “Irving Kowalski, who drove a taxi part time and who drove Hanigan to desperation practically the remainder of the time. . .” (Suicide Story)

   Irving’s description was given in “Suicide Story”: “Irving wasn’t tall but he was built like a Shetland pony. Stocky. There’d been several times when he hadn’t ducked in the right direction and these errors in judgment had given him a slightly lumpy appearance. One ear had been torn and this hung at a slight angle, and the gold teeth he’d chosen to replace originals knocked out by knuckles, shone at Hanigan out of the murk.”

   In the first story in the series, “Case for a Killer”, the story is longer than later stories. It is described as a short novel, and the other stories in the series are novelettes. Hanigan is hired to bodyguard Nick Poulas and his young daughter for four days until they sail on a ship for overseas.

   Unfortunately, an assassin breaks into the hotel room while Poulas is giving his story to Hanigan and shoots Poulas with a shotgun. Hanigan takes this hard, and promptly shots the assassin while he is trying to escape. He hides the daughter from the police and goes out on an investigation. Poulas had a valuable briefcase that is missing, so Hanigan searches for that too.

   There is a big conflict between the police and Hanigan and Irving on one side, and two group of crooks on the other. Irving did a good job helping, and the police captain said about him: “Well, he’s a bearcat.” Hanigan replied: “He’s my boy. He’s going to work for me.” So that incident tied up the connection between Hanigan and Irving.

   In the second story, “The Meter Says Murder”, Hanigan is in trouble over a murder. He had had an argument with a newspaper journalist, whom he threatened. The journalist shows up dead the next day in Irving’s taxicab, and both Hanigan and Irving wind up down at the police station trying to explain the situation to one of the Homicide detectives. Hanigan then sets out to investigate the case and clear his name.

   â€œYou Only Hang Once” starts off with Hanigan being called upon to bail Irving out of jail. Irving has a number of charges against him, which he says he is not guilty of committing. The person putting the charges against Irving winds up murdered the next day, and Hanigan gets involved when an heir to a hefty sum is accused of the crime.

   Irving is attacked and both stabbed and slugged, and Hanigan is also attacked when he finds a seriously injured Irving in his taxi. It doesn’t take long for Hanigan to clear up the cases, which are all connected, once he gets a bit of cooperation from friends in the police department.

   â€œA Hunch for Hanigan” finds Hanigan searching for and finding a missing heiress. The case becomes complicated when the heiress is mysteriously killed in an automobile accident with a train. Both the police (in the person of Detective-Lieutenant Simpson) and Hanigan find the accident suspicious.

   The woman’s husband, who happens to be the number one suspect in the death, asks Hanigan to investigate the crime and find the murderer. In this story, Hanigan works well with Detective-Lieutenant Simpson.

   â€œSuicide Story” starts off quickly, with a woman entering Hanigan’s detective agency office and attempting to shoot him. He disarms her and has her tell him why she shot at him. Her boyfriend committed suicide, she said, because Hanigan was investigating his firm.

   Hanigan promises to look into the matter and goes to the seedy hotel where the man had been staying. What he finds convinces him that it is murder, not suicide, and he decides to check further into the case.

   In “Country Kill” Hanigan is called to the country for a case by a landowner who is being sniped by an unseen rifleman. The shooter doesn’t seem to want to hit anyone, just cause a nuisance. His client is an unpopular person in the neighborhood, making matters more difficult.

   The case becomes more complicated when not only is a murder committed, but also three city gunmen decide to come to the area supposedly for fishing on the local lake. Hanigan calls Irving to come down to help him, and leave his taxi behind. Irving doesn’t like being separated from his taxi.

   â€œA Bodyguard for Beano” starts off with Hanigan being hired to bodyguard the rich owner’s prize pedigreed English bulldog, and then moves on the real motive for the hiring. Joseph T. Collins, the dog owner, has really hired Hanigan to bodyguard him. He is in fear of his life from his other three partners in his business firm.

   One attempt on his life took place on the first day Hanigan arrived at Collins’ house and before Collins told him why he was there.

   â€œNo Money Payoff” starts with Irving bringing in a tipster to Hanigan’s office. The tipster claims he knows about a jewelry theft worth ninety thousand dollars that the insurance company would pay to know about. Hanigan, with a hangover from the night before, doesn’t believe him and throws the guy out.

   Irving is convinced the guy is telling the truth, and follows him, only to run into the middle of the kidnapping of the tipster by two crooks. Irving is shot, and winds up in the hospital. He tells Hanigan the story, and Hanigan finds out there actually was a jewelry heist that the tipster could know about. Then he is interested in tracking down the tipster and finding the jewels in order to get the insurance company fee.

   This is probably the most violent of the stories in the series. Five men are killed (one a policeman) and two are seriously hurt. Only Hanigan’s good detective instincts and experience keep him safe from harm.

   In “Murder Tips the Scales” Hanigan and Irving become involved in a plot to kill some ex-politicians. The first politician asks for Hanigan’s help but is killed before Hanigan can do anything or find out any more information than a threatening note stating that three will be killed.

   As usual, Irving convoys Hanigan around in his taxi, but he does get in on some of the action. Irving chases a suspect in a scene, but somewhat ineptly. He buys another taxi, but it keeps breaking down and stranding Hanigan and Irving. The murderer turns out to be the least likely suspect.

   Police Detective-Lieutenant George Woods was ready to give Hanigan a hard time about virtually anything to do with his current cases. Woods often thought that Hanigan knew some facts about his current criminal case. And Woods was right; Hanigan just didn’t want to tell Woods anything because he was working on the case. Hanigan was in it for the money.

   â€œFrame for a Killer” opens with Hanigan and Irving unknowingly being framed for a jewelry robbery and murder in the same building that Hanigan’s new was located in. Most of the story consists of Hanigan and Irving trying to get out of the frame and get the right criminals.

   First Hanigan has to escape from two policemen who have arrested both him and Irving for the crimes. A shootout with the criminals finalizes the case. Then Hanigan has to explain matters to the police, who don’t look too kindly on Hanigan for assaulting their detectives.

   This is an above average series, with some good stories. There is an element of humor in the stories, often contributed by Irving’s actions. Irving is actually of some assistance in Hanigan’s cases, even with the humorous situations.

   This series deserves to be reprinted. The stories are fairly long, so eleven stories might fill a book.

       The Hanigan & Irving series, by Roger Torrey:

Case for a Killer     July 17, 1937
The Meter Says Murder     December 11, 1937
You Only Hang Once     April 23, 1938
Labor Trouble     September 17, 1938
A Hunch for Hanigan     November 12, 1938
Suicide Story     April 15, 1939
Country Kill     May 27, 1939
A Bodyguard for Beano     August 26, 1939
No Money Payoff     December 16, 1939
Murder Tips the Scales     February 24, 1940
Frame for a Killer     November 1, 1941

    Previously in this series:

1. SHAMUS MAGUIRE, by Stanley Day.
2. HAPPY McGONIGLE, by Paul Allenby.
3. ARTY BEELE, by Ruth & Alexander Wilson.
4. COLIN HAIG, by H. Bedford-Jones.
5. SECRET AGENT GEORGE DEVRITE, by Tom Curry.
6. BATTLE McKIM, by Edward Parrish Ware.
7. TUG NORTON by Edward Parrish Ware.
8. CANDID JONES by Richard Sale.
9. THE PATENT LEATHER KID, by Erle Stanley Gardner.
10. OSCAR VAN DUYVEN & PIERRE LEMASSE, by Robert Brennan.
11. INSPECTOR FRAYNE, by Harold de Polo.
12. INDIAN JOHN SEATTLE, by Charles Alexander.
13. HUGO OAKES, LAWYER-DETECTIVE, by J. Lane Linklater.