[Back in 1982] Jove Books was busily reprinting virtually all of Ngaio Marsh’s books, making it possible for the reader to trace her long career from its beginning, with A Man Lay Dead (1934), to her latest in paperback,Photo Finish (1980). [At the time this essay first appeared] one book remained to be published, posthumously: Light Thickens (Little Brown, 1982).
Like her contemporaries, Sayers and Allingham, Marsh used elements of the thriller in her early work. A Man Lay Dead, though a detective story, is also about Bolsheviks, spies, and maidens in distress. It moves at a far crisper pace than later Marsh because there are fewer long passages detailing the interrogation of suspects. If Marsh had a weakness, it was that her hero, Roderick Alleyn, spent too much time asking questions.
More than compensating was her use of unusual murder methods. I can think of few authors as imaginative in how they disposed of victims-to-be. My favorite is the gun-in-the-piano in Overture to Death (1939), but there are other contenders; e.g., the wool-compressing machine in Died in the Wool (1945) and the swinging champagne bottle in Vintage Murder (1937).
Another Marsh strength was what Howard Haycraft dubbed the “Marsh-milieu.” It was a world of artists, theater people, aristocracy, and civilized policemen. Far removed from the usual settings for murder in real life, it was all the better for escape reading because of that.
Especially attractive were such theater novels as Night at the Vulcan (1951) and Killer Dolphin (1966). Not only did she make the people come alive, but she made you feel you were physically inside the theater.
Generally, Marsh’s novels did not change too much from the classic detective type she used in her second, Enter a Murderer (1935). She returned to the thriller once, with excellent results, in Spinsters in Jeopardy (1953). Her attempts to modernize her books, by using the drug scene in When in Rome (1970), the leader of an emerging African nation in Black as He’s Painted (1974), or the Mafia in Photo Finish, were not fully successful. Yet, each of these hooks contained enough traditional Marsh to satisfy her fans.
If I had a gun to my head and had to select only two Marsh books to recommend, I would pick Overture to Death and Death in a White Tie (1938). However, there are almost thirty others which I’ve read, enjoyed, and can recommend. Thankfully most are [still] available.
— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 6, No. 6, Nov-Dec 1982.
THE GREEN MAN. British Lion Film Corp., UK, 1956. Alistair Sim, George Cole, Terry Thomas, Jill Adams, Raymond Huntley. Screenplay: Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder,based on their play “Meet A Body.” Directed by Robert Day and Basil Deardon (the latter uncredited).
You may have Peter Sellers’ undisputed genius, you may have the brilliant Alec Guinness, you may bask in the clipped mustachio twirling urbanity of Terry Thomas, you may teeter on the edge of the brilliant pomposity and erudition of Robert Morley,and you may giggle or guffaw at Norman Wisdom, Eric Sykes, Benny Hill, or the British comic actor of your choice. I’ll take Alistair Sim.
Sim is best known for Scrooge (1951), the classic version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a seasonal favorite, and for the crossdressing genius of the film version of Ronald Searles’ cartoon madness The Bells of St. Trinian’s. Americans may know him best as Jane Wyman’s father in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright or as Inspector Cockerill in Green for Danger, and he was brilliant to the end, his last film being the cult classic The Ruling Class But he did two of the best comedic crime films ever made in that same time frame, Hue and Cry, where he plays a crime novelist who becomes involved with a group of crime fighting street urchins, and the film reviewed here, The Green Man.
Here Sim is Hawkins, who from childhood has a way with explosives, and like any sane person he follows his interest into his mature years and makes a career of his talents — blowing people up. Here the odd dictator, there the miscreant husband — anyone and everyone he is paid to dispose of with his not inconsiderable talents.
Ah! School days. The happiest days of one’s life. I was a carefree innocent lad in those far gone times. Only one thing clouded my youthful spirits: my headmaster. Really, all I did was to put an electric charge in his fountain pen and an explosive charge in his inkpot. I honestly only intended to humiliate him. However, that got rid of him, and also disposed of any doubts I may have had about my true vocation.
His latest victim is a pompous government minister (Raymond Huntley), who is planning a jaunt to the coast for a bit of hanky-panky at an inn called the Green Man, where Hawkins hopes to retire him from his position explosively if only everyone and his dog didn’t show up on his doorstep, including the politician while he is trying to do the deed.
Sim is a master of the slow burn, the sly grin, the quietly murderous and murderously funny frustration, the softly spoken razor sharp phrase, and the look that could kill and in this one he is up to his ears in young lovers (one of whom, comic actor George Cole, has an improvised scene with Sim where he tries to call the police, and Sim tries to stop him, that is worth watching for alone) and innocent bystanders conspiring to keep him from his appointed murderous due.
Sly is the word most often applied to Sim’s performances, and never truer than in this black comedy about a professional assassin having the bad day to end all bad days as he tries to ply his trade. Few actors ever possessed a face that expressed as much as Sim’s, or as brilliantly. He has many of the gifts of a great silent comedian, but those are in addition to his soft funeral director’s voice and flawless delivery with the skill of a surgeon’s scalpel. Find The Green Man and Hue and Cry, they really are the best of British comedy, and the best of Alistair Sim, of which there is nothing better.
MITCHELL WILSON – None So Blind. Simon & Schuster/Inner Sanctum Mystery, hardcover, 1945. Hillman #182, paperback, 1960. Film: RKO, 1947, as The Woman on the Beach.
THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH. RKO, 1947. Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan, Charles Bickford. Based on the book None So Blind by Mitchell Wilson. Director: Jean Renoir.
Ever wonder why some books even get made into movies? The question crossed my mind when I read None So Blind by Mitchell Wilson. It starts out as a moody and intriguing thing about a shell-shocked Naval Officer running a shore patrol station and trying to get his head together, as they say, who gets mixed up with a mysterious lady painter and her blind (or is he?) abusive husband.
The ensuing story flirts with violence like a floozie in a Biker Bar, and it’s a pretty fine read… till the author writes himself into a corner, and their attempts to get out turn pretty sloppy; downright embarrassing, in fact.
The closer I got to the end, the sorrier I felt for these poor schlemiels, as what could have been a nifty tale of murder for love turned to mush before my eyes.
So for some reason, RKO decided to film this in 1947 as Woman on the Beach, and it suffers in the end game, too, but not quite so badly. The way it looks, when Director Jean Renoir saw there was no way to kill the story, he just quit shooting the damthing and went back to France.
Beach ends without resolving the plot or consummating the Murder that looks to be bubbling just off-screen, but along the way there are some wondrous visuals of horses galloping across the gothic seacoast, desperate trysts in derelict shipwrecks, and fine performances from Joan Bennett, Charles Bickford, and especially Robert Ryan as the neurotic sailor.
It’s no masterpiece, but off-beat and intriguing enough to make it worth your time.
THE SPY IN THE GREEN HAT. MGM, 1967. Robert Vaughn , David McCallum, Jack Palance, Janet Leigh, Eduardo Ciannelli, Allen Jenkins, Jack La Rue, Leo G. Carroll, Joan Blondell, LetÃcia Román. First aired on NBC, 10:00 p.m., Friday, November 25 and Friday, December 2, 1966 as episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: “The Concrete Overcoat Affair” (Parts 1 and 2). Director: Joseph Sargent.
Directed by Joseph Sargent, this entry is a campy romp featuring Jack Palance and Janet Leigh as THRUSH villains. Veteran actors Eduardo Ciannelli, Allen Jenkins, and Jack La Rue portray Chicago gangsters who team up with U.N.C.L.E. agents, Napoleon Solo (Vaughn) and Ilya Kuryakin (David McCallum) to thwart THRUSH’s alliance with a former Nazi scientist. Adding to the excitement is the presence of Italian actress, LetÃcia Román who portrays an innocent Italian girl who inadvertently gets caught up in a whirlwind of international intrigue.
As far as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. episodes go, these are fairly average. If it weren’t for Palance and Leigh, they wouldn’t be particularly notable. That said, the movie has enough action, silliness, and homage to make it a light, entertaining, albeit hardly memorable, 1960s spy film, even if the title has almost nothing to do with the movie. Well, except for the fact that a minor character at the very end happens to wear a — wait for it — green hat.
Perhaps because this well-filmed mini-series originated in France and not this country, you can find a lot of false and misleading information about it on the Internet.
Nor is Antigone 34 a newly created task force to fight crime, as some sites say. It’s an ordinary police station in Montpellier, a mid-sized town in southern France on the Mediterranean Sea, but as such it still manages to have its hands full of murders to solve as well as the usual thefts, felonies and misdemeanors that plague every city in every part of the world.
At least one review calls the series nothing more than an American police procedural transported to its French locale. I think if you watched only the first episode you might get that idea. A young female medical student is murdered, then another. The police think at first it was a hazing session gone bad, then a drug deal gone sour (a corpse being dissected in the college is found to have a package of white powder inside him), before coming back to a Castle type twist at the end.
But wait. It’s not the end at all, but only the beginning. A scene that follows suggests that there’s more to the story, and indeed there is. The six episodes constitute one long story line, punctuated by single stories along the way: a missing video game designer, a hit-and-run driver with a fake ID, a robbery at a tuna warehouse, a pizza delivery hit man, and a plastic surgery gone bad.
The setting is often gorgeous, especially along the shore, but on occasion the story also heads off to some inner parts of the city and places where you and I might not care to find ourselves in at night. The series is shot almost continually with handheld cameras, even while listening in on ordinary conversations, then with fast action camera movements while making scene shifts.
Because perhaps the series was filmed in French, even with subtitles I felt I missed sizable chunks of the story. Not enough to cause me worry or pain, you understand, but I do think there were some issues that were left unresolved, perhaps held over for a second series, of which there has been and will be none.
The star attraction, however, as far as I was concerned, was the performance of Anne Le Nen, previously involved in fashion design and a student in the martial arts, particularly when it comes to self-defense for women. She was 41 when this series was made, a brunette with piercing blue eyes, a very athletic build and a beautifully expressive face showing resolve, anger, frustration and confidence in equal proportion. It’s too bad there was no follow up to this series. As I sad, she is the star attraction. All eyes are on her whenever she’s in a scene.
ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Perjured Parrot. Ballantine, 1982. First published in hardcover by William Morrow, 1939. Other paperback reprints include: Pocket #378, 1947. Cardinal C-379, 1959.
The problem, of course, with the Perry Mason stories is that the characters are totally flat and one-dimensional. Gardner’s prose, utilitarian at best, is designed only to tell the story and is best otherwise ignored.
But the stories he tells — I can’t resist ’em. They’re low on action and high in idea content. The plot and red herrings are simply mind-dazzling — if only you could sort them out!
I read one chapter and I’m hooked. I’ve guessed who done it from time to time, but not very often. I read too fast, I think, and Mason’s too smart for me.
Gardner is obsessed with circumstantial evidence, and it helps to keep in mind that his facts are always subject to considerable variation. This time I thought I’d outguessed him, but somehow he managed to zig left just as I was zagging right.
Involved are at least three parrots, hints of police graft and corruption, forged checks, multi-bigamous marriages and questionable divorce decrees, a will and two widows, and a time of death that turns out to be of utmost importance.
Mason also makes an ass out of another pompous witness. You’d think they’d learn.
Rating: B.
— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 6, No. 6, November-December 1982.
Tod Browning was a director who used theatrical illusion in several of his best films, and the rarely seen Miracles for Sale (MGM, 1939), based on Clayton Rawson’s Death from a Top Hat, makes extensive use of magic in a suspenseful melodrama of stage magicians and psychic phenomena.
Robert Young does a competent job as Michael Morgan, a re-named Rawson Merlini, who has unaccountably acquired a folksy father played by Frank Craven in his best Our Town style. (I wonder if MGM didn’t entertain some faint hope that this film might spawn a series with Young/Craven sharing in some of the popularity of the Ellery Queen father-son duo.)
It’s a well-produced film in which Morgan, through damsel-in-distress Judy Barkley (played by Florence Rice), becomes involved in spiritualism and murder, but the spookiness of the premise is undercut by some conventional thirties’ farce.
There is a seance that has some of the style — and chills — of Browning’s better work, and fanciers of such things will be interested to see Gloria Holden (the daughter of the underrated Dracula’s Daughter) in another of her frozen-face roles but with none of the sexual perversity that made her playing in the earlier film more interesting.
Miracles for Sale comes off as a glossy, entertaining swan song for Browning, and it is unfortunate that most people now know his work through Dracula, which is his least characteristic film and far from his best.
You will not find in Miracles for Sale the brilliance of Freaks (with its superb bridal party sequence), but it’s an accomplished bit of directing and should not be relegated to a footnote in a history of his career.
— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 6, No. 6, November-December 1982.
MIRACLES FOR SALE. MGM, 1939. Robert Young, Florence Rice, Frank Craven, Henry Hull, Lee Bowman, Cliff Clark, Astrid Allwyn. Based on the book Death from a Top Hat, by Clayton Rawson. Director: Tod Browning.
THE MAN IN THE BACK SEAT. Independent Artists, UK, 1961. Derren Nesbitt, Keith Faulkner, Carol White. Written by Malcolm Hulke and Eric Paice. Directed by Vernon Sewell.
I really wish I hadn’t read about this in The Encyclopedia of Horror Films because it’s a movie that deserves to be seen fresh, and the Encyclopedia makes no bones about giving away endings. So my recommendation here is that you stop reading this review right now, find a copy of Man in the Back Seat and settle down for a nice hour or so in 60s noir-land.
Yeah, I figured you’d ignore that sage advice, so I’ll go ahead and tell you that the story revolves around a couple of young spivs (British slang for flashy small-time criminals) who let themselves in for a night-long odyssey of greed and desperation when they waylay a bookie and hit him a bit too hard.
What follows could be played for comedy, as everything that could possibly go wrong proceeds to do so. For starters, the victim keeps his money-satchel handcuffed his wrist, and the boys have to cart his inert form around in the car—hence the title of the piece. But the writing and directing keep it tense and downbeat, due mainly to the time they take with the characters. Tony (Derren Nesbitt) is clearly the dominant member of the duo, but he’s just as obviously stupid and immature; just the sort you want in charge.
Frank (Keith Faulkner) is basically decent but easily bossed around, and as things deteriorate you can see him mentally melting down under the pressure, and not helped at all by encounters with his wife (Carol White) who loves him for his good nature but is quickly disenchanted by his weakness as he and Tony throw one lie after another at her.
This could easily have ended up as a rather standard late-noir crime film, but it doesn’t and I refuse to spoil it by telling you why. Just bear in mind that the writers here worked on television’s The Avengers in its mid-60s hey-day, and director Vernon Sewell specialized in creepy ghost flicks (including writing and directing three versions ofHouse of Mystery) and expect the unexpected, as they say.
MYSTERY LINER. Monogram, 1934. Noah Beery, Astrid Allwyn, Edwin Maxwell, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Ralph Lewis, Cornelius Keefe, Zeffie Tilbury, Boothe Howard. Based on the short story “The Ghost of John Holling” (The Saturday Evening Post, 8 March 1924) by Edgar Wallace. Director: William Nigh.
The story was good enough to be reprinted in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (April 1963), but watching this movie based on it is as big a waste of time as watching the city trucks cruise up and down the block on garbage pickup day.
It has something to do with a new scientific discovery that allows ships at sea to be operated by remote control from a staff of laboratory workers on shore. Lots of secret skulkers abound, including someone who looks like the previous captain, who was replaced when he was overcome by madness and was taken to a sanitarium.
Plus secret passages, if I’m not giving too much away, a shot in the dark when the lights go out, another murder, and for comedy relief, a noisy old biddy who takes over the film when nothing else of importance is going on, which seems like half the film, but probably isn’t.
Director William Nigh went on to better if not bigger things, such as the Mr. Wong movies, but Noah Beery’s role of the original captain is so small it could have been played by anyone. Some claim he was in it only for his name on the marquee value. Certainly no one else’s had any, then or now.
L. E. MODESITT, JR. – The Magic of Recluce. Tor, hardcover, May 1991; paperback, May 1992.
I wonder how many created-world heroic fantasies have been written since Tolkien made them respectable? Quintscillions, at least, and most of them aren’t worth reading, and most of the rest aren’t anything special. I thought this one stood out a bit from the large and somnolent herd.
A young lad (15) doesn’t fit in his culture, which is an island nation composed of a mysterious people who adhere fanatically to Order. Our hero finds them boring and is found by them to be an unacceptable influence, and a potential danger to order.
He and some other misfits are given an option: exile, or go out into the wider world on a mission assigned them, to be allowed to return only when it’s completed. He is, of course, more than he seems or knows.
Considered separately, the story’s components don’t sound too original: Order against Chaos, a youthful quest, good magicians and bad. It is, however, a lot better and more different than it sounds. The world is well thought out and constructed, and the characters a good deal more than cardboard.
Modesitt writes well and I found his pacing excellent. Recluce is by far his best book to date, and though there will be at least one more book with this setting, this one stands alone well enough. It plows no startlingly new ground, but if you like fantasy at all it’s well worth your time.
— Reprinted from Fireman, Fireman, Save My Books #2, July 1992.
The Recluce series —
1. The Magic of Recluce (1991)
2. The Towers of Sunset (1992)
3. The Magic Engineer (1994)
4. The Order War (1995)
5. The Death of Chaos (1995)
6. Fall of Angels (1996)
7. The Chaos Balance (1997)
8. The White Order (1998)
9. Colors of Chaos (1999)
10. Magi’i of Cyador (2000)
11. Scion of Cyador (2000)
12. Wellspring of Chaos (2004)
13. Ordermaster (2005)
14. Natural Ordermage (2007)
15. Mage-Guard of Hamor (2008)