October 2015


This song comes from Judy Collins’ sixth LP, In My Life (1966), the album that served definitive notice that in spite of the cover, she was no longer just a folksinger. I think this is my favorite version of the song.

RICHARD MARSTEN – Vanishing Ladies. Permabooks, paperback original, 1957. Reprinted as by Ed McBain: Signet, US, paperback, 1976; Penguin, UK, paperback, 1982.

   I’ve owned the Permabook edition for a long time, but I’ve never read it, which has been my mistake for going on 50 years now, but I’ve made up for it by (as it happened) reading the British paperback from Penguin. (It’s a long story and a not very interesting one.)

   Once begun, at last, for a while I thought I was reading a small unknown gem. Well, not that unknown, since Ed McBain is a fairly big name as far as mystery fiction writers go, but a gem nonetheless. The ending doesn’t match the beginning, though, but Marsten/McBain (Evan Hunter) gives it his best shot, and he almost — but not quite — makes good on it.

   The story is told by Phil Colby, a cop from the city (presumably New York), who goes with his girl on a vacation the next state over. (I assumed it was New Jersey, but I may have been wrong.) First thing that happens is that he’s pulled over in a speed trap and is taken by a local motorcycle cop to an obviously crooked justice of the peace to pay a fine. He manages to keep his cool, but it’s an effort.

   Then he and his girl find a tourist camp of semi-attached cabins to spend the night. They are engaged, but since this is the 50s, they take separate cabins. He leaves his cabin later, only to come back to find a girl (not his girl) waiting for him. She’s young and pretty and she’s a hooker. And he can’t get rid of her. Fourteen pages of some tough unpersuasive conversation (on his part), he discovers blood seeping through the floor boards from the adjoining cabin.

   The door to the cabin next door is locked, and when Phil looks in the cabin where he left his girl, the cabin is empty. The manager says he (Phil) arrived alone, registered for one, and that another couple in in her cabin. (There is.)

   Eventually, after a lot of excited talk going on, mostly by Phil, they get around to checking out the bloodstains coming from the cabin next to Phil’s. Gone. Unable to have anyone believe him, Phil ends up in jail.

   This is about half way through the book, and I wish I could have told the story so far as well as Marsten-McBain did. He was a master on dialogue that can go on for a page or more with one line sentences going back and forth the way people really do talk, without a lot of he-said’s and he-replied, and you can never get lost as to who is saying what and when as you can easily do with a lot of other authors.

   I think that over half the book is dialogue, if you exclude an every-once-in-a-while six-page digression, such as the one about how life in the city differs from that in the country, the one that comes just before Phil’s friend Tony Mitchell (also a cop from the city) is bitten by a snake in a swamp.

   There is more than one missing lady, and that is the key to the plot that is being pulled on Phil. Unraveling it turns out to be a letdown when all is said and done, but the fun is in the reading, this time at the hand of a writer who really knew how to write.

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:


CHARLES ERIC MAINE – B.E.A.S.T. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1966. Ballantine U6092, US, paperback, April 1967.

   â€œCharles Eric Maine” was just one of the pen names used by David McIlwain, whose books formed the basis of several rather dull SF movies, including Spaceways, The Mind of Mr. Soames and The Electronic Monster. B.E.A.S.T., though, is remarkably readable.

   Mark Harland, the first-person narrator, has a rather shadowy job in a rather shadowy department somewhere in MI5 or thereabouts, and as the story starts he’s ordered to infiltrate a top-secret research facility in the Defense Department and find out what the hell’s going on there.

   I should add that this infiltration is does not involve a great deal of subterfuge; simply a matter of Harland filling in for the facility’s Security Officer for a few weeks, with all documentation supplied by MI5 and a knowing wink from the Security Officer himself as regards one Synove Raynor, the facility’s resident nymphomaniac.

   This particular facility, known as RU8 has to do with genetic warfare—how to wage it, and how to see if someone’s waging it on us—and the facility’s central feature is one of those giant computers beloved of mid-1960s spy-and-sci-fi fiction, running on reel-to reel tapes and occupying several sub-basements, like the one in Alphaville (1965.)

   But while the computer is supposed to be used for genetic research (“If only we could unravel the genetic code of DNA…”) it seems the absent-minded director of the facility, an unprepossessing sort named Howard Gilley, has been using it to run an experiment in applied evolution (Biological Evolutionary Animal Simulation Test) starting with theoretical single-cell organisms and compressing millions of years of development to produce a theoretical creature totally geared toward self-preservation.

   Or is it still theoretical?

   As Harland casually absorbs himself into the family, learns about some of the complex relationships there, and finally gets Dr. Gilley to open up a bit, he finds that the theoretical BEAST that communicates through the computer has been asking Dr. Gilley questions. And making demands.

   Nowadays we just label this Artificial Intelligence and having labeled, dismiss it. But writing fifty years ago, Maine-as-Harland does a fine job of trying to wrap his mind around the notion: If the BEAST exists, where does it reside? In the computer? In the tapes running through it? Or is it just in the mind of Dr. Gilley, who begins to seem more and more unbalanced as Harland gets deeper into the whole thing.

   I can relate to some of this. When you write fiction, something delightful happens every once in a while when one of the characters gets up and does something you weren’t expecting. So when Gilley tells Harland of his feelings when the BEAST started asking questions, I could feel for him, and I think Maine did too. But Harland has to figure out whether Gilley is going crackers or something even more sinister is coming on.

   Oddly, the elements that make those movies so dull impart a bit of gritty and gripping reality to B.E.A.S.T. as Harland deals patiently with the personalities and possibilities involved and wonders how anyone will be able to explain something as complex as this to his higher-ups… or to an MP unlikely to comprehend any concept more sophisticated than a campaign slogan. And it gets stickier still when Harland finds empty Vodka bottles and pornographic pictures hidden away in the abstemious Gilley’s office and begins to suspect their bizarre implications.

   I should add that B.E.A.S.T. proceeds to a fine spot of monster-on-the-loose that fits in perfectly with the Halloween season, and a thoughtful conclusion that will send me seeking out more of Maine’s work.

SELECTED BY JONATHAN LEWIS:


“Zamrock [Zambia-rock] was born in the ’70s in Southern Africa. Merging hard rock, psychedelia and funk, this Zambian genre was influenced by artists as diverse as Black Sabbath, James Brown and The Rolling Stones. WITCH – which stood for “We Intend To Cause Havoc” – was one of the scene’s major bands…”

Lead Vocals: Emmanuel “Jagari” Chanda
Drums: Boyd “Star MacBoyd” Sinkala
Bass Guitar: Gedeon “Giddy King” Mwamulenga
Rhythm Guitar & Vocals: John “Music” Muma
Lead Guitar & Vocals: Chris “Kims” Mbewe
Keyboard: Paul “Jones” Mumba

Reviewed by JONATHAN LEWIS:         


TERROR TRAIN. Twentieth Century Fox, 1980. Ben Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Hart Bochner, David Copperfield (as The Magician). Director: Roger Spottiswoode.

   For the first forty-five minutes or so, Terror Train doesn’t disappoint. True, it’s a derivative slasher film with a plot that’s none too surprising and an urban morality tale about how it’s not always wise to play cruel pranks on people, particularly if your victim is later found out to have homicidal tendencies.

   Terror Train benefits from an above average supporting cast and from a quasi-noir claustrophobic setting in which college air partygoers in elaborate costumes ride an old train that chugs along through the wilderness on a cold, dark night. And then there’s the scream queen – Jamie Lee Curtis – who bellows out at least two absolutely memorable shrieks during the film. Because, you know, there’s a masked killer on board and he’s wearing – at least for a while – a super creepy Groucho Marx mask.

   That said, the last half-hour of the film really veers off track. After the suspenseful wind-up and the background story of who the killer might turn out to be, the film loses its focus and requires such a suspension of disbelief that makes it a lot less thrilling than it could have been. Making matters worse, by the time the whole affair ends, the train’s conductor, portrayed by Western film legend Ben Johnson, looks worn out from a long night’s work. I, for one, enjoyed the beginning of the journey but was disappointed when I arrived at the final destination.

THE BACKWARD REVIEWER
William F. Deeck


CHARLES BARRY – The Mouls House Mystery. Methuen, UK, hardcover, 1926. E. P. Dutton, US, hardcover, 1927. McKinlay, Stone and Mackenzie, US, hardcover, as part of its “Scotland Yard Mystery Library,” no date.

   Superintendent Liddell, of the Cornwall County Police, is on holiday. Kept awake late at night by toothache, he observes through his field glasses an elderly man apparently being throttled by a younger one in the house opposite, known as Mouls House. The Superintendent and another man go to the house as quickly as they can only to find neither the attacker nor the victim. Both have disappeared.

   There is more here than meets at least Liddell’s eye. Scotland Yard is called in, in the form of Chief Detective Inspector Gilmartin (a continuing character in some of Barry’s novels), one of the Big Five, which I had always thought was Four, but I guess the number can change up or down depending on the number of biggies who happen to be around at the time.

   This is purely a police procedural, and probably a good one for its time. There are some sound deductions by Gilmartin and also a fair amount of guessing on his part, which is understandable in the light of circumstances.

   There have recently been complaints about the number of novels these days dealing with drugs, and those who are complaining probably will be surprised to learn that drug smuggling has been going on for quite some time. It has never been a money loser that I know of. But why anyone, as one of the characters in the novel does, wants to smuggle saccharine baffles me. Was it illegal in England at one time? If so, why?

— Reprinted from CADS 20, 1993. Email Geoff Bradley for subscription information.


Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   According to Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, Charles Barry was the pen name of Charles Bryson, (1887-1963) and the author of 22 works of detective fiction, 16 of them cases for Supt. Laurence Gilmartin of Scotland Yard. Some but not all were reprinted in the US.

A FUTURE FORGOTTEN TV SERIES
by Michael Shonk


THE PLAYER. NBC, 2015; Thursdays, 10pm-11pm. Kung Fu Monkey Productions and David Entertainment in association with Sony Pictures Television. Cast: Philip Winchester, Wesley Snipes, Charity Wakefield, Damon Gupton. Created by John Rogers and John Fox. Executive Producers: John Rogers, John Zinman, Patrick Massett, John Davis, and John Fox.

   It is the new fall TV season, and time for new series to be judged. Some new series will join our list of series we watch every week, more new series will be rejected and forgotten. While not the worse of the new series this season (Fox’s Minority Report is the worse) The Player shows all the signs of a doomed series. Rejected by critics and viewers alike, a strange premise ineptly handled, The Player is one to watch soon before it is gone forever.

   The premise of The Player is that there is a secret society of the world’s very rich and powerful that has set up a system where they bet on crime. Created in America around the turn of the 20th Century, the game grew popular with the ruthless rich and powerful of the era. Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage created the first computer to help with the game and Thomas Edison got it to work. The game went global and quickly was out of control and started WWI. To regain control of the game the House was created. The House is run by the Pitboss who sets up the game, the Dealer who monitors the game and offers assistance to the final employee of the House –The Player.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm12VQNIS8

   But this is NBC, a major free network, so it should come as no surprise that a premise open to thought-provoking discussions on the immorality of the bored rich gambling on the outcome of crimes would instead be a mindless fast pace violent implausible immortal action TV series with the inability to avoid any TV cliché ever written.

   The next clip tells us more about the people and their role in the game:

   The Player is Alex Kane, a former special op with a dark past, now living in Las Vegas as the World’s Greatest Security consultant. Philip Winchester (Strike Back) does what he can with his limited range to play this standard issue TV action hero.

   In the type of creative thinking typical for this series Alex’s best friend is Police Detective Cal Brown (Damon Gupton) who worries about his friend and is always the cop in charge when Alex destroys part of the city fighting bad guys. Alex’s love of his life is his ex-wife Virginia Lee (Daisy Betts). They love each other very much and have finally decided to get back together. That night while our hero and ex celebrate in bed bad guys attack and she is killed. But this is modern comic book inspired fiction, so is she really dead?

   Meanwhile at the House is the Pitboss Mr. Johnson played by Wesley Snipes (Blade) in not his best performance. Mr. Johnson is an evil soulless man who believes in blackmail, murder, whatever it takes to serve the House. He also believes in tough love when dealing with The Player.

   The Dealer is the blonde beauty Cassandra King. Charity Wakefield (Mockingbird Lane) has shown she is capable of portraying the series most conflicted character. She is aware of the immorality of the game but in some of TV’s lamest dumb-down dialog tries to convince Alex that they are doing good, saving the victims of crimes enjoyed by the evil rich gamblers.

   The series features more property destruction than a Marvel’s superhero movie, more pointless car chases and stunts than a Bond movie and a believability level that wouldn’t convince a 12 year old. The suspense is weaken by the number of deus ex machina devices used – from an all knowing computer named ADA that Cassandra can use to get Alex out of any jam to Johnson’s ability to call in a get out jail card whenever the cops get too close.

   You can view the pilot episode for free at iTunes. This is just one of many TV series that first episode can be downloaded for free at iTunes.

   The odds are against The Player. While handicapped by a bad time slot it has a strong lead-in (Blacklist). How much of the Blacklist audience it loses will tip you off on its future. Personally, I would bet The Player doesn’t survive to see January.

Reviewed by DAVID VINEYARD:          

   
“The Gladiators.” An episode of Have Gun – Will Travel, 19 March 1960. (Season 3, Episode 27.) Richard Boone. Guest Stars: Paul Cavanaugh, Dolores Donlon and James Coburn as Bill Sledge. Teleplay: Robert C. Dennis. Series created by Herb Maddow and Sam Rolfe. Directed by Alvin Ganzer.

   Have Gun – Will Travel was seldom just an ordinary western, and on occasion barely a western at all, as in this episode which opens in San Francisco at our hero Paladin’s (Richard Boone) rooms in the Carleton Hotel where he is receiving an attractive young lady, Miss Alison Windrom (Dolores Donlon) of New Orleans, with seduction on his mind, as evidenced by the champagne that accompanies her to the room and his lounging jacket.

   Alas for our tarnished knight, Miss Windrom is concerned for poor Daddy back home (veteran actor Paul Cavanaugh), who has accepted a challenge to a duel:

      â€œHe’s a very proud man, Mr. Paladin, he’d rather die than yield.”

      â€œIs that a family trait?”

   It is the nineteen-fifties, and we know the seduction is not going to succeed, but the teleplay and Boone’s delivery of the lines makes no bones about what Paladin has in mind. It isn’t surprising audiences were ready for the much more successful James Bond a few years later. All this unfulfilled seduction and innuendo had to end at some point in a bedroom somewhere.

   Of course once he is hired, Paladin is all business. In that he, and most of the gunslingers in Westerns, very much resemble the work ethic of the private eye of pulp fiction, all business, no matter how attractive the distractions. In many ways Paladin is a private eye as much as a hired gun, though he is seldom cast in the role of detective.

   Over the course of the series we learn little of him other than he is an ex-soldier, fast with a gun, would rather talk than fight when possible, has exquisite tastes acquired if not born to, is possessed of a mordant and quick wit, and is cynical but still a romantic despite his jaundiced eye.

   He would like to be wrong about people and is gratified when he finds one of the few who defy is dark assessment of humanity. He is a man out of his time and place who probably would only really fit in San Francisco of that era or as an Elizabethan privateer. He is very much Chandler’s errant knight ‘good enough for any world,’ but his mean streets are most often dusty trails ending in a showdown.

   Miss Windrom is convinced the other party in the duel, the younger Mr. Beckley (George Neise) will step out if Paladin shows up as a proxy for her father. So Paladin gets dragged into it, protesting all the way, and steps into the looking glass with the Southern aristocrats who would rather die than yield, even if it means over the bodies of innocents.

   Or not so innocents, when Beckley hires his own proxy in the person of gunfighter Bill Sledge (James Coburn) from Texas, a man with a reputation with a gun equal to Paladin. The two men know of each other, and they meet on neutral ground with mutual respect for the other’s skill and professionalism. That paean to professionalism is also a throwback to the classic private eye of Hammett who is redeemed more by that trait than his humanity, the Code of the West is ironically largely the Puritan work ethic.

   Paladin considers the duel nonsense, and so does the dark but charming Sledge. Neither particularly wants to kill anyone, certainly not for two arrogant fools battling over some obscure point of honor, and it seems for a moment like the meeting on the field of honor and blood can be avoided if Paladin and Sledge refuse to fight, but Sledge can’t help but wonder which of them would win, and …

      Sledge: I never done much of this kind of fighting in Texas. Hear tell there’s rules.

      Paladin: You pay much attention to rules?

      Sledge: Never done yet.

   This episode is a tight little psychological game, as Paladin finds himself Alice surrounded by White Rabbits and Mad Hatters obsessed by ‘honor’ and inured to death. He finds the price of honor in this case too high, but no one else does, and as the tight little half hour goes on he inevitably will find himself on that field of honor and blood at dawn.

·       Paladin: “How much blood will you settle for?”

   The episode may surprise some who have a certain view of series drama from the Fifties. It is bitter, cynical, downbeat, dark, and unforgiving. That the conclusion is predetermined and unavoidable from the first makes it all the worse. It has the sharp taste of bitters without the gin, a nasty dose of quinine made palatable by watching two outstanding actors, both gifted at playing villain and complex hero, both with charm and cool to spare (had this episode also included those two other masters of small screen cool, Steve McQueen and Robert Culp, it could have frozen and shattered television tubes) in acutely observed and written roles clearly enjoying themselves.

   Coburn displays the vicious charm that worked equally well as dark hero or psychotic villain and would soon lead him to stardom, and Boone, who has the same qualities on screen, seems to enjoy his scenes with him, recognizing an equal. That, and the sharp observation of a world where honor encompasses wagering on death and wasting lives over obscure points make this episode a standout as Paladin learns the savagery of the “savage land” of the series theme song is nothing compared to that of the civilized world.

   Have Gun – Will Travel was always a well-written series, and thanks to Boone, always well-acted, but this one is a standout, a cynical little gem about the cost of violence and cultures that embrace it.

   It is also rare in that Paladin, the man who holds himself above the rest, is as compelled by his own code of honor as the men he condemns to see it out to the end, and in the final scene he is as disgusted with himself as them. This episode comes close to tragedy since no one in it escapes their hubris or pride whether they live or die.

   In the end, Paladin is a victim of his own honor as much as they are and bloodied by it as surely. His slight rebuff of all that has gone before in the final scene, when he throws a glass of champagne to the ground with a bitter comment and stalks off as the screen fades to black, isn’t satisfying for the character or for the viewer, and perhaps all the darker because we as voyeurs wanted to know which man would prevail as well.

   For a half-hour episode of series television from that time period “The Gladiators” bears a great deal of existential despair, especially for a Western. Even for a series as quirky and adult as Have Gun – Will Travel, this episode is savage and dark.

GAVIN LYALL – Venus with Pistol. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1969. Berkley S1920, US, paperback, December 1970. First published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover,1969. Reprinted many times in the UK in paperback.

   By reading this book, if ever you do, you will learn more about the dirty side of the world of fine art — the buyers, the experts, the hangers-on and wanna-be’s, the forgers, the smugglers — than you ever dreamed existed. This is the first of Gavin Lyall’s thrillers and suspense novels, fifteen in all, that I’ve ever found time to read, and I’m glad I finally did.

   This particular adventure is told by Bert Kemp, a low-key British antique firearms dealer who’s also known in certain circles as being quite adept at moving paintings across European borders without the niceties of paying duties — or even avoiding bans on such activity altogether.

   In Venus with Pistol (also the name of a painting that first in brought into the tale on page 203) he’s recruited by Dona Margarita Umberto, a lady with a lot of money after the death of her husband, but with no means of getting her hands on it, the money having been confiscated by the Nicaraguan government. But the lady has political ambitions, and what the officials in Managua will allow her to do, Bert is told, is to go to Europe and obtain works of art for a gallery for the people of her country. Her spending limit: two and a half million pounds.

   Well, sir. Bert is on board in less time than it takes to say where do I sign up twice, along with one head assistant named Carlos MacGrgeor and two local art experts, one male, one female. From here the entourage makes a grand tour of Europe, running into snags now and then as they go, but with Bert’s quick mind at work, mostly they work out of them — except for the knock on his noggin that costs him memory as to what happened, along with a missing painting, not to mention one murder, quickly covered up.

   What this reads largely like is a series of individual made-for-TV episodes, as they make their way from Paris to Vienna to Venice to Zurich and back to Vienna. But there is a continuing thread to them, as the plot zigs and zags and thickens along the way. Bert is a good man with a quip as well as having a solid knowledge of firearms, about which the reader also will find himself (me) learning perhaps even more about, the ins and outs of which being quite essential to the story, in more ways than one.

   The ending, though, is what brings all of the separate adventures together, as Bert works out some thoughts and deductions together that both he and I should have making all the time. There’s a bit of romance at the end as well, one that was highly anticipated (by me), nor I was disappointed.

The song “I’m Crying” first appeared in the US as a single in 1964 then on the LP The Animals on Tour (MGM, 1965), which I do not believe has ever been released on CD. Eric Burdon was the lead singer for The Animals, a British blues-rock group that was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

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