STUART KAMINSKY – Death of a Russian Priest. Porfiry Rostnikov #8. Fawcett, hardcover, 1992. Ballantine, paperback, 1993.

   Kaminsky is another author with whom I have an ambivalent relationship. I very much like his books featuring Porfiry Rostnikov and Abe Lieberman, and thoroughly dislike those with Toby Peters. I was a little apprehensive as to what effect the breakup of the USSR would have on his Russian series, but he seems not to have broken stride.

   The latest book takes place after the abortive coup against Gorbachev, with Boris Yeltsin in uneasy power. The government agency for which Rostnikov works has been given more power, but bureaucratic enemies still exist on every side, very much including the revamped KGB.

   Against this background, Rostnikov and his merry band — Emil Karpo, Sasha Tkach, and a new member, Elena Timofeyeva — are working through two unconnected cases. Rostnikov and Karpo are dispatched to the village of Arkush to deal with the murder of an outspoken and charismatic priest, while Tkach and Elena try to trace the missing daughter of a Syrian diplomat. The missing girl’s lover, a Jew, is murdered just as the book begins.

   I have no real idea, of course, as to how accurate Kaminsky has been over the course of the series in depicting the lives and milieu of his Russian characters. They have felt real; and certainly the present book in its picture of everyday life does not contradict what one has read in Time, or seen on network television. If Rostnikov and company are not real, they are Russia’s loss, not ours.

   Kaminsky is an entertaining writer, and the Russia he depicts is a fascinating one. I recommend the entire series, perhaps the first few a trifle more.

PETER LOVESEY – Waxwork. Pantheon, US, hardcover, 1978. Pebguin, US, paperback, 1980. First published in the UK by Macmillan, hardcover, 1978. Adapted for TV: (1) Episode 4, Season 1 of Screenplay, 19 August 1979. (2) Episode 1, season 1 of Cribb, 13 April 1980.

   Mystery fiction written before the turn of the century is doubtless an acquired taste, one that I’ve never developed. Yet with smooth and consummate ease Lovesey continues to show that not only can detective stories be successfully set in the days of Queen Victoria, but he also blends the details of this long-ago era into an essential part of the crime and its solution.

   In this, his latest, all Britain eagerly awaits the salacious details as a beautiful woman is accused of poisoning a blackmailer and is committed for trial at Old Bailey. Sergeant Cribb‘s task is to close out the investigation — some details remain that could yet contradict the lady’s guilty plea.

   From a technical sense, this had to be one of the most difficult tales to tell of any in recent months, and as the jiggery-pokery at length slides effortlessly into place, one can only sit back and applaud with admiration.

Rating:  A.

Bibliographic Note:   This was the eighth and last recorded case to be solved by Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray, a pair of London-based policemen.

SECRET OF THE INCAS. Paramount Pictures, 1954. Charlton Heston, Robert Young, Nicole Maurey, Thomas Mitchell, Glenda Farrell, Michael Pate, Yma Sumac. Director: Jerry Hopper.

   Before there was Indiana Jones, there was Charlton Heston in Secret of the Incas. A lackluster action movie filmed on location in Peru, the movie features Heston in khaki pants, a leather jacket, and a fedora. He portrays scheming smart aleck Harry Steele, a would-be adventurer and treasure seeker unhappily giving wealthy Americans tours of Cusco, Peru. Even more than women, Harry has one thing on his mind. Money.

   All that begins to change when Romanian exile, Elena Antonescu (Nicole Maurey) arrives in town, the communist authorities hot on her trail. When he and Elana steal a private plane and head to Machu Picchu to steal an Incan treasure (his plan, not hers), it feels as if you’re about to take part in a great adventure and a character’s radical moral transformation.

   Except you’re not.

   Truth be told, Secrets of the Incas is, with a few exceptions, an epic bore. The on-location photography, including some truly breathtaking mountain vistas, is wasted on a lackluster script and strikingly unoriginal direction.

   Heston, who was more than capable of portraying men with villainous streaks, does his best with what he was given. His character, thought by many to be the basis for Indiana Jones, hardly has Indy’s rapscallion charm. Harry Steele isn’t a particularly interesting character; indeed, when he finally realizes that there’s other things in life other than money, it’s with the type of bitterness Heston was so capable of emoting. But truthfully it’s difficult to care all that much: another day, another modernist epiphany.

   All of which leaves the viewer with the question: if it weren’t for Indiana Jones, would anyone anywhere care about Harry Steele?

STUART KAMINSKY – Murder on the Yellow Brick Road. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1977. Penguin, paperback, 1979.

    “Someone had murdered a Munchkin.” So begins the latest case of Toby Peters, last seen helping Errol Flynn out of a nasty blackmail scheme. This time it’s a frightened Judy Garland who demands that MGM allow our lowly Hollywood private eye to handle the affair.

    Name-dropping is again as much of a nuisance as it is of nostalgia value, but rather amusing is the assistance of a rather famous mystery writer who happens to be in Hollywood at the time. More importantly, by the time he’s cracked the case, this time the raffish Toby Peters has begun to become a little more real himself, in a way equivalent to catching a glimpse of an actual person hidden behind the glitter and glamor visible up front on the silver screen.

    Next up, the Marx Brothers.

Rating:   B minus.

Bibliographic Notes:   This was the second of twenty-four Toby Peters novels published between 1977 and 2004, a very nice run by anyone’s standards. For a complete list, along with the books in four other series Kaminsky wrote, plus two standalones, go here.

JOHN FLAGG – The Persian Cat. Gold Medal #103, paperback original, 1950. Stark House Press, paperback, August 2015.

   When I went to bookscans.com to find the cover image you see to the right, I discovered that this low number Gold Medal paperback is actually the first crime, detective or espionage novel that that company ever published. I’m not sure if that means anything more than something of historical interest, and then only to diehard collectors, but it is, I think, worth pointing out.

   â€œJohn Flagg,” a pen name of John Gearon, wrote eight novels for Gold Medal, five of them with a character named Hart Muldoon, a former OSS agent whose past-World War II adventures took him all over the globe. I’ve not read any of them, but if Persian Cat is an example, I probably should do something about that.

   The protagonist in Cat is not Muldoon, but a gent cut from the same cloth, another ex-OSS agent named Gil Denby who as the story begins is at extremely loose ends in Paris. The year is not stated, but it could be either 1949 or 50 as easily as not. He’s hired by a member of the former French Resistance to track down and bring to justice a woman who betrayed her husband and two others to the Vichy government during the war.

   She’s in Tehran now, the companion of fabulously wealthy dealer in oil wells and other money-making commodities. Delby’s job, to bring her out of Iran and — under some pretext or another — to Algeria where she can be tried and summarily executed.

   All is not what it seems, of course. It never is in the best of spy and espionage novels. There are enough sudden deaths, mix-ups and double-crosses to satisfy any aficionado’s tastes, and naturally Delby begins to wonder if Mrs. Claire Fayne not the traitor she is known to be.

   Flagg seems to know his way around Tehran, circa 1950, and he is able to translate what he knows into very descriptive prose. In his hands, the city he talks about has a certain surreal feel to it, giving the central part of the story more than a little uncertainty as to the direction it will take next.

   Which is a good thing. For identification purposes, Delby is given a small artifact, a seven inch Persian cat, to be used whenever needed. As it turns out (spoiler) it really isn’t used for anything but to give the story a little coherence, which it really doesn’t need. The real Persian cat of this story is rather Mrs. Fayne, who is illustrated to near perfection on the front cover.

BRENNER. “False Witness.” CBS; 6 June 1959. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Edward Binns, James Broderick. Guest Cast: Frank Overton, Kay Medford, Alan Ansara, Michael Conrad, with Dana Elcar (uncredited). Written by Loring Mandel. Director: Gerald Mayer.

   The series as a whole was reviewed here on this blog by Ted Fitzgerald almost seven years ago soon after a box set of DVDs was released. Now that I’ve watched the first episode, I’m impressed enough to want to see more.

   Ted described it as “character-driven drama about two New York City cops, Roy Brenner (Edward Binns) a veteran member of The Confidential Squad (aka Internal Affairs), and his son Ernie (James Broderick), a rookie detective,” details that for one reason or another weren’t completely nailed down in this first episode.

   This one’s about a hack assistant D.A. who wants Ernie to embellish, shall we say, his testimony against a man accused of splashing a container of lye in his wife’s eyes. No one saw the crime itself. The man says the lye was hers (in more ways than one) and she spilled it on herself.

   The D.A. guy puts all kinds of pressure on Ernie, but in the end he (spoiler) does the right thing. According to Wikipedia, the series was “filmed live,” by people who knew something about telecasting live TV. This particular episode begins with some interesting long tracking shots, and facial closeups are used to very good advantage. Skilled people were at work here.

   As for the guest cast, Kay Medford has the acting ability to make her quirky character, the victim of the attack, even more interesting than the lines she has to say, and Alan Ansara, as the cellmate of the accused assailant, sounds very much like Robin Williams to me in his exaggerated way of trying to say whatever he thinks he needs to that will earn him rewards from the police and D.A.’s office.

   What I found unusual, and the problem I alluded to above, is that there was no effort to “introduce” the characters. We do not even know who the younger Brenner is until he’s spoken to by name about ten minutes into the program. The father, Edward Binns, does not appear until there’s only two minutes to go. As he is sitting there in the courtroom awaiting the trial to begin as someone we have net seen before, the young Brenner sits next to him and calls him Dad. Presumably he has bigger roles in future episodes.

Recorded in 1999 and after a contentious split-up, contained in the album Got You on My Mind compiled by Galison alone in 2003:

THE MAD MAGICIAN. Columbia Pictures, 1954. Vincent Price, Mary Murphy, Eva Gabor, John Emery, Donald Randolph, Lenita Lane, Patrick O’Neal, Jay Novello. Story & screenplay: Crane Wilbur. Director: John Brahm.

   If stealing ideas and pieces and pieces of various scenes from other movies were a crime, The Mad Magician would seriously be on the verge of being sent up for a ten-year stretch. Crane Wilbur, who wrote the story and screenplay also did the screenplay for House of Wax, which came out the year before, but for Warner Brothers, and probably not so coincidentally also starred Vincent Price in the leading role.

   Both films were also in 3-D, though this one is in black-and-white, while House of Wax was in color. In both films the theme is that of revenge. In both cases it is Vincent Price’s character who is wronged, but getting even is where the fun comes in, at least for the viewer, if not his victims.

   Director John Brahm, among other films, did both The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945), two films which take place in roughly the same time period as this one, or the turn of the last century, and one scene in The Mad Magician, in which Price’s character rents a room as part of the plot he is perpetrating, is more than strongly reminiscent of a similar scene in The Lodger.

   As the fledgling magician Gallico the Great, Price’s character is taken advantage of twofold, first by the owner of his contract that says that all the tricks Price creates belong to him, then by a rival magician, The Great Rinaldi, who then appropriates them to use in his own act.

   The new science of fingerprints has a great deal to do with solving the case (murder), which is investigated by Lt. Bruce (Patrick O’Neal), the boy friend of Karen Lee (Mary Murphy), Gallico’s very comely assistant, along with the mystery writer wife of the couple who own the house in which Gallico rented the room.

   It’s a complicated story, and maybe it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but where this movie goes off in another direction from the others I’ve mentioned, is its arch sense of humor and fun behind the mayhem. I wish they’d showed the audience how the “Lady and Buzzsaw” trick in real time, though. The “Crematorium” is just as deadly, one assumes, but if they’d wanted to have made a sequel, à la all those Freddy movies, I really think they could have.

A MAN ALONE. Republic Pictures, 1955. Ray Milland, Mary Murphy, Ward Bond, Raymond Burr, Arthur Space, Lee Van Cleef, Alan Hale Jr. Director: Ray Milland.

   What begins as a remarkably bleak and gritty Western noir eventually undergoes a remarkable metamorphosis and transforms into a rather standard melodrama – a Eugene O’Neill family drama in the American Southwest, as it were.

   And it’s a darn shame, for A Man Alone, a movie both starring and directed by Ray Milland, certainly had the potential to be a much more offbeat, rough around the edges, Western than it turns out to be. This is especially true given that Ward Bond, Raymond Burr, and Lee Van Cleef all portray men engaged in a criminal enterprise that is suffocating a small Arizona town.

   The movie begins as bleak as can be, with scant dialogue and the sound of desert winds. Gunfighter Wes Steele (Milland) is literally a man alone in the hot, dusty Arizona desert.

   After stumbling upon the site of a brutal stagecoach massacre, he makes his way to Mesa where he first engages in a shootout with the local deputy and then holes up in the town bank.

   It’s there that he learns that a man named Stanley who runs the Bank of Mesa (Burr) and his henchman, Clanton (Van Cleef) were behind the massacre. In noir fashion, however, it is Steele who is blamed for the crime, leading him to seek refuge in the home of Nadine Corrigan (Mary Murphy).

   Problem is: Nadine’s dad (Bond) is not just overprotective. He’s also the local sheriff and a corrupt one at that. He has his reasons, of course. (Don’t they all?)

   But this promising setup ultimately doesn’t pay off. What could have ended up as Western noir classic instead turns into instead standard Hollywood fare, complete with a relatively upbeat ending.

   Wes Steele may be a gunfighter (Spoiler Alert), but he ends up defeating the bad guys and getting the girl. Perhaps had he ended up as an elegiac, tragic figure like Gregory Peck’s world-weary gunslinger, Jimmy Ringo, in Henry King’s The Gunfighter (1950), A Man Alone would be more widely known film than it is.

   Run Westy Run was a Minneapolis-based post-punk guitar band that was very popular in Minnesota in the late 1980s, but they remained practically unknown in the rest of the country. Their third and final album Green Cat Island was released by Twin/Tone Records in 1990.