SIMON TROY [THURMAN WARRINER] – Cease Upon the Midnight. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1965. Previously published in the UK: Gollancz, hardcover, 1964.
The coroner’s jury, sitting on the death of Dr. Bewlay from an overdose of sleeping tablets, leaves open whether it was accidental or intentional. Inspector Smith, too, has not made a decision. Did Bewlay’s fiancee, or his ne’er-do-well actor brother Raymond, or both give him an overdose, and how could it have been done? Certainly Bewlay was not a man likely to kill himself.
Acting on the invitation of Robert Neil, who runs an advanced girls’ school on the island of Grenezy, where both the fiancee and Raymond have gone, though separately, Smith travels to the island, discovers much about the participants, and nearly doesn’t make it back.
While the murderer is known early and may be surmised even earlier, the interest here is in Smith — whose superintendent can’t decide whether he is Machiavellian, naive, or dim — and his investigation, which is first class. The bright but still dumb heroine — “There was no risk,” she contends, “you came just in time” — has a tendency to fall in and out of love with considerable dispatch, and the villain is just a bit too villainous.
These flaws, if flaws they are, weren’t noticed during the reading, only in the reflection afterwards.
— From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 13, No. 1, Winter 1991.
PETER RABE – The Out Is Death. Gold Medal #657, paperback original, 1957. Black Lizard, softcover, 1988.
On a positive note, I recently finished The Out Is Death by Peter Rabe, and am once more impressed by the talent of one of the less-remembered two-bit novelists of the 50s.
Those who sing the praise of Thompson, Goodis et al., should take a look at this tough, sentimental tale of a broken-down safe-cracker and the friend who tries to save him from a sadistic hood coercing him out of retirement.
The action is fast, the plot tight, but it’s Rabe’s feel for the characters, even the minor ones, that lifts this out of the ordinary. Try it.
RICHARD MARR – The Smith Slayer. Big Ben #4, UK, paperback, August 1940. First published: Gardner, UK, 1939, under the pseudonym “Burmar.”
Occasionally I read a book which is utterly preposterous but great fun. The Smith Slayer is such a book. This is a multiple-murder detective novel, which begins with a newspaper advertisement: “God help all whom it may concern: The Smith Slayer commences his campaign.”
Soon people with the surname “Smith” begin to he murdered in the face of the rather incompetent efforts of Scotland Yard to protect them. Still, it’s hard to blame the police force when even a doctor blithely attributes a death to “probably one.of those little known Eastern drugs.”
The book is filled with marvelous assumptions: “Now, if you wanted to hire an assassin where would you go?” “Chicago, I suppose.”
After a series of thriller-like episodes, the book concludes as the Smith Slayer reveals himself and his ridiculous motivation. You won’t believe much of the story, but I’m not sure that you’re supposed to.
— Reprinted from The Poisoned Pen, Vol. 6, No. 2, Winter 1984/85.
Bibliographic Note: Richard Marr has one other entry in Hubin’s Revised Crime Fiction IV, that being Death at Salterton Court (Everybody’s, UK, paperback, 1945).
KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE. Sarlui / Diamant, 1988. Grant Cramer, Suzanne Snyder, John Allen Nelson, John Vernon, Michael Siegel, Peter Licassi, Royal Dano. Screenplay: Charles Chiodo, Edward Chiodo (uncredited), Stephen Chiodo. Director: Stephen Chiodo.
Killer Klowns from Outer Space is not a classic — yet. It may well be in a few years, though, since it’s certainly done in the Classic Vein.
A bunch of aliens land in their spaceship and proceed to pillage a small town, taking the locals unaware until a few brave young people get the Authorities on their side and put the blighters to rout. There’s even a nod to the 70s in the person of a redneck Cop who hates College Kids.
The gimmick here is that the aliens look and act like big, ugly clowns; they shoot people with Popcorn Guns, track them down with balloon-sculpture dogs, mummify them in cotton candy and get around in a spaceship that looks like a circus tent. The concept plays much more effectively than I would have thought, thanks to some really imaginative special effects and nice timing.
There’s one really suspenseful scene where a clown is trying to lure a cute little girl outside, smiling and crooking a finger at her, and holding an oversize wooden mallet behind his back. Sounds dumber than dogs, I know, but trust me, it works.
— Reprinted from A Shropshire Sleuth #48, January 1991.
LAURIE R. KING – The Moor. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1998; Bantam, paperback, 1999.
In her fourth Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes novel, King brings the couple to the scene of one of Holmes’ most celebrated cases, Baskerville Hall. An American adventurer has bought the Baskerville property but, surprisingly, is on the verge of selling it and moving on.
Russell and Holmes, who are visiting Sabine Baring-Gould, an old friend of Holmes, find the situation at Baskerville Hall somewhat troubling, but their principal concern is to find the killer responsible for two murders and track down the source of reported sightings of a ghostly carriage accompanied by the legendary Hound.
Much of the novel deals with Russell’s growing affection for the Moor, and the portrayal of the region and its inhabitants is the principal strength of the novel. The resolution of the various plot lines is accomplished in a few action-packed pages, which I suspect I will not long remember. The wanderings of Russell about the often desolate but still beautiful Moor really have more drama than the Baskerville goings-on and make me want to revisit Conan Doyle’s novel to see if his descriptions of the Moor are as evocative and powerful as King’s.
I found this to be the most engrossing Russell adventure since The Beekeeper’s Assistant, with the portrayal of the noted author and antiquarian Baring-Gould more telling than the rather bland characterization of Holmes.
DANTE. NBC, Monday 9:30-10pm, October 13, 1960 through April 10, 1961; 26 episodes. Four Star Productions. Created by Blake Edwards. Produced by Michael Meshekoff. Associate Producer: Harold Jack Bloom. Cast: Howard Duff as Willie Dante, Alan Mowbray as Stewart Styles, Tom D’Andrea as Biff. Recurring Cast: James Nolan as Inspector Loper.
The character Willie Dante began as a recurring character on the anthology TV series FOUR STAR PLAYHOUSE (CBS). Dick Powell played the gambler Dante who owned the restaurant Dante’s Inferno with a hidden backroom for illegal gambling. With the help of his friend, ex-safe cracker and bartender Monte (Herb Vigran), and (in some episodes) a former British millionaire with a gambling habit and now waiter Jackson (Alan Mowbray), Dante would help someone and be rewarded with the cops, usually lead by Lt. Waldo (Regis Toomey), closing down the gambling backroom at the end of the episode.
I found Powell’s version disappointing, the writing stale, and the acting not strong enough for me to like any of the bad boy characters. Most if not all can be seen on youtube or available on cheap DVDs. Here is an episode with an unexpected cameo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbhKM6Kydhc
Four years after Powell’s last Dante, Four Star and NBC decided to air a weekly series featuring Howard Duff as William Dante. Currently various episodes are available from the collector’s market and youtube. While this is the second episode to air, it appears to be the pilot:
(Part One)
(Part Two)
Things were different. Willie Dante moved to San Francisco with hopes of a new start running a new Dante’s Inferno. This time there would be no backroom for gambling. Dante lived in the office that overlooked the inside of the popular nightclub. He had decided to go straight and was dragging two of his best friends with him.
Dante’s sidekicks, former thief and now reluctant bartender Biff, and Dante’s Inferno’s Maitre d’ and ex-conman Stewart Styles helped run the club while Dante was out dealing with that week’s threat to the club or him, and they were there for backup whenever Willie needed help.
Every week Willie would find himself caught in the middle of two or more opposing forces, usually the cops and bad guys. No one believed Willie was going straight, both the good guys and bad guys suspected him to be up to something.
When a fortuneteller tells a woman her husband will be killed by Willie Dante, Dante finds himself caught in the middle of a mess he didn’t create. For the cops it is a simple case, if anything happens to the husband or Dante they will arrest the survivor.
Women played an important role in Willie Dante’s life. It was the un-PC time of 1960 and women usually played one of two basic roles, the rich beautiful woman eager to be seduced by willing but business first Willie or ex-girlfriends turned femme fatale. There was an occasional variation such as a mobster’s girlfriend willing to do anything for Dante except reveal the name of her boyfriend who was after Willie. There was even one episode when a suspected bad girl turned into an undercover cop.
In the episode below, the role of the girlfriend of the week lacked the patience and forgiveness of most, and the female author of a best selling book about a gangster the public believes is Willie Dante gives Willie more problems than any femme fatale ever could.
Created by Blake Edwards, it is no surprise DANTE had a similar look and style of PETER GUNN and MR LUCKY. The dialog was clever and the banter quick and witty. The stories plots were creative and hold up well. In one episode, bank robbers frame Dante by breaking into the Dante’s Inferno safe and switching the stolen money for Dante’s legally gained cash. Plot devices often had a surprise twist such as a blackmailer using homing pigeons.
In the episode below, an enemy from the past wants Dante dead. Before he retires to the Orient he leaves Willie a $50,000 trust to begin the upcoming Monday. But should Willie not be alive on Monday the beneficiary of the trust would be a hitman desperate for money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbA0BUffifc
The main writer was Harold Jack Bloom (HEC RAMSEY). He and the other writers succeed where the writers (including Blake Edwards) of Powell’s version failed. The writing was fresh, clever, and the humor rose above the old vaudeville jokes about coffee that burdened the FOUR STAR PLAYHOUSE episodes.
But it was Howard Duff who made Willie Dante the lovable rogue. Duff was perfect as Dante. Much as he did in radio’s ADVENTURES OF SAM SPADE, Duff was believable in all aspects of the character, his humor, the romance, and the hardboiled style.
The guest cast featured such talent as Joanna Barnes, Dick Foran, Ruta Lee, Joan Marshall, Charles McGraw, Pat Medina, Edward Platt, Marion Ross, William Schallert, Joan Tabor, Nita Talbot, and (to the left) Lori Nelson.
The series never had a chance as NBC placed it opposite of CBS’s ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW and ABC’s ADVENTURES IN PARADISE. The first episode got a 13.5 rating versus ANDY GRIFFITH 26.6 and ADVENTURES IN PARADISE 21.3. The NBC program before DANTE was BOB HOPE that for that first week had a 31.9 rating. Losing over half the audience of the show before it and finishing last in its time period made it obvious the odds were against DANTE from the beginning.
DANTE with Howard Duff was a superior half hour mystery that remains entertaining today. It is a shame more people didn’t watch it when it first aired and there is not an official DVD available for viewers to discover it today.
Western writer Doyle Trent has been covered before on this blog, the occasion being the announcement of a checklist I was working on for him. The announcement is here. The illustrated checklist is here. As a result of his seeing one or the other, I was contacted by an old friend of Trent, who offered to write up some of his memories of him, and I gladly took him up on it. “No by-line or attribution necessary,” he said. I just wanted to share this anonymously.”
In 1962, Doyle Trent walked into the Tucson Police Department, a newly-hired reporter for the Arizona Daily Star, the town’s morning paper.
Then in his late 30’s, he was older than the typical “cub†reporter, as some old newspapermen labeled such creatures. He stood about 6-feet, of medium build, with sandy, close-cropped (but thinning) hair. His face was smooth and permanently tanned. From mid-forehead to his hairline was a band of white skin, the permanent trademark of a face long in the sun, partially shielded by a hat.
In contrast to reporters’ “newsroom-grunge†collection of barely-ironed shirts, rumpled slacks and scuffed shoes, Doyle’s taste ran to tailored Western pants, leather belt with a simple silver buckle, a complementing colored shirt (tie-less) with snap-type pocket flaps and shined cowboy boots. But no cowboy hat. And he ambled, rather than walked.
Initially working the “day cops beatâ€, Doyle was a quiet presence in that noisy, smelly environment. He shared the large, wooden “press desk†with the afternoon paper’s cops reporter, consigned to the corner of a large, windowless room which housed police dispatchers. From that vantage point, they observed the endless parade of cops and prisoners.
Soft-spoken and polite, even with the ever-prickly cops of all ranks, Doyle was a good writer who favored two-fingered typing on one of two battered Underwood typewriters at the press desk. He was thorough, always asking the reporter’s basic “Five-W’s†but always managing to get just a bit more. In one highway accident, an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer had overturned, killing the driver. The truck carried several tons of steel; it was in Doyle’s lead sentence. His rival missed that little detail and had to deal with an unhappy city editor who explained the relevance of a law of physics involving mass and momentum.
Doyle didn’t talk a lot; personal details were sparse. He never said where he was from, offering only that he had been a cowboy and had served in the Army. Knowing a cowboy’s career was limited, he said he used the G.I. Bill to earn a college journalism degree. He spoke with a slow, soft drawl and, at times, with difficulty. A lifetime of little or no dental care caused him pain, not that he ever really complained. It just added to his taciturn demeanor.
— These recollections came from another reporter who worked “cops†with Doyle a half-century ago. Decades later, that former reporter stumbled by chance on Doyle’s literary career and he observed that, “Given the list of book titles to his credit, it was obvious that his background as a working cowboy, his journalism experience and a vivid imagination combined to make him a successful Western novelist. In a world of cowboy-writer wannabes, Doyle Trent is the real McCoy.â€
HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION. Made for TV. Universal/NBC-TV; telecast 07 Jan 1967. Robert Wagner, Jill St. John, Peter Lawford, Lola Albright, Walter Pidgeon, Michael Ansara. Teleplay: Gene R. Kearney; director: William Hale.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation is a splashy, colorful and cheerfully cheesy made-for-TV exercise in adolescent paranoia that landed right on the cusp of my teenage years. As such, it will always keep a place in my heart, if not on any 10 Best list.
Assuming that you weren’t a high school prom queen or captain of the football team, perhaps you can relate to the feeling. I know I could. Which is where Vacation takes its cue and proceeds to run the table with it. Faced with Lawford/Albright’s constant belittling — and flummoxed by the ease with which they do it — Wagner decides on a puerile revenge; he begins gathering evidence of what he thinks are Lawford’s criminal activities.
What follows borders on a teenage dream, as our hero skulks nimbly about, snapping a photo here, jotting down a detail there, keeping one step ahead of his quarry and jotting it all down in a notebook labeled “How I Spent my Summer Vacation.†Even better, as the fantasy proceeds to its climax, writer Gene Kearney (whose talents seem confined to the small screen for his whole career) keeps spinning it further and further out, in true dream-fashion as we get shifting realities, dark plots, mysterious fortress hide-outs and the whole thing related in flashback to a super-villain (Walter Pidgeon) who seems unsettlingly fatherly — the perfect touch for a tale of adolescent angst —leading to a conclusion that… well to say any more would spoil it.
Don’t take this Vacation expecting artistry, but if you have any feeling for that turbulent rebel mood of the 60s you may find this one a lot of fun.
Editorial Comment: This film has been reviewed once before on this blog, the earlier occasion by David L. Vineyard. (Follow the link.)
