NGAIO MARSH – Enter a Murderer. Inspector Roderick Alleyn #2. Geoffrey Bles, UK, hardcover, 1935. Pocket Books #113, US, paperback, 1941. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and paperback.

   The second Roderick Alleyn detective novel, and the first of many subsequent Ngaio Marsh mysteries to take place in the world of the London theatre. I don’t know the history of such things, so I’m only suggesting this, but could this be the first detective novel in which the victim is killed on stage in front of a live audience by a gun which is supposed to have fake bullets — but doesn’t?

   If not, it has to be one of the first. And in the audience is none other than Inspector Alleyn himself, along with his friend Nigel Bathgate, a journalist whom he met in the first book in the series, A Man Lay Dead (1934). Bathgate has not only provided the tickets, but he stays close to Alleyn throughout the book as an unofficial Watson — until, that is, his friendship with the suspects makes him something of a liability, from Alleyn’s point of view.

   And there are a lot of suspects, and where each of them were when there was an opportunity to switch the bullets is obviously a prime factor in the investigation that follows.

   This early in Alleyn’s career, I don’t believe that Marsh had a very good handle on his character yet. I grant you that in large part we see him through Bathgate’s eyes, but the latter often seems genuinely surprised by some of Alleyn’s reactions to events, both major and minor, as they happen throughout the investigation. And in all honesty I was taken aback myself, just a bit, at a scene in which it seems he has fallen unduly under the spell of the play’s leading lady — and she still a suspect.

   And here’s a curiosity. On page 86 of the Berkley paperback reprint I happened to I read this time, after Alleyn has questioned most of the people on and behind the stage when the shooting took place, he asks one of them to wait a little longer in the wardrobe room. Nothing is heard of the latter from that point on until the inquest takes place several days later, and then never again.

   All in all, in spite of the lapse above, Enter a Murderer remains highly readable, but it’s also nowhere nearly as sharp or knock-your-socks-off clever at the game of fair play detection as Agatha Christie was, back in the mid-30s when the book was written. Of course, no one else was either, then or now.

   Hal Blaine, who died last Monday, was the drummer for the group of Hollywood session musician informally known as The Wrecking Crew. The musicians themselves were largely anonymous, but no one listening to pop music in the 1960s and early 70s could have missed the songs they played on. Watch this and see if I’m not right:

THE MAN BEHIND THE GUN. Warner Brothers, 1953. Randolph Scott, Patrice Wymore, Dick Wesson, Philip Carey, Lina Romay, Roy Roberts, Morris Ankrum, Katharine Warren, Alan Hale Jr., Douglas Fowley, Robert Cabal. Screenplay: John Twist, based on a story by Robert Buckner. Director: Felix Feist.

   An unusual sort of western, one that place in the burgeoning small town of Los Angeles, circa 1850 or so. The town is a lot more elaborately laid out than most western towns that sit in the middle of a prairie for no great reason to be there. References to Santa Monica to the west, the La Brea tar pits, and the importance of water to the growing community all are intended to add to the historical authenticity, as are references to whether California should enter the Union as a slave state or not, along with the presence of a young bandit named Joaquin Murietta.

   The plot is too complicated to go into (I didn’t understand it) but boiled down to as small a nutshell as I can manage, Randolph Scott (Major Ransome Callicut) comes to town undercover disguised as a schoolteacher (the latter being the result of some quick thinking on his part) to root out a gang of secessionists who also want to control the area’s water supply.

   There are several other major threads to the plot, however, including killings, desperate ruses and several lengthy scenes of singing and dancing in the local saloon, not to mention some ineffectual efforts in the way of comedy by Dick Wesson and Alan Hale Jr.

   There too many twisted threads in this movie’s tale, in other words, taking place mostly in cramped indoor sets. This is made all the more noticeable when at last the director takes the movie outside, for a big shoot-em-up finale. Scott is stiffer than usual in this one, looking far too old (55) for young Patrice Wymore (26), the real new schoolmarm in town. (I forgot to mention the rolling on the floor catfight the latter has with songstress Lina Romay, who also has eyes on Scott).

  DONALD WOLLHEIM, Editor, with Arthur W. Saha – The 1989 Annual World’s Best SF. Daw #783, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1989. Cover art by Jim Burns.

#4. GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER “Schrödinger’s Kitten.” Novelette. First published in Omni, September 1988. Published in a single volume by Pulphouse Publishing, hardcover/paperback, February 1992. First collected in Budayeen Nights, Golden Gryphon Press, hardcover, September 2003. Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette of the Year.

   The story begins with a young twelve-year-old girl waiting in an alley at festival time in the Budayeen quarter of the same unnamed Middle-Eastern city where several other works by George Alec Effinger take place. Her purpose: to kill the boy she knows will rape her.

   She does not know the boy, who he is, or anything about him. She knows what will happen only through the visions she has been having, many times over. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he does not. Sometimes she dies, sometime she lives. When she lives, sometimes she dies alone, after a bitter life of prostitution, sometimes she is rescued.

   And these visions alternate in the telling of the story with futures in which she become a noted nuclear physicist, working alongside the likes of Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, in the era of Einstein, Max Born and Max Planck as they feverishly try to find the mathematics that correctly describe quantum physics.

   It’s quite a mixture. Jehan also has a hand in keeping the Nazis from succeeding in their experiments with the atom bomb. As it turns out, as experienced SFnal readers will quickly deduce, these not exactly visions that Jehan is having while she waits for her would-be rapist in the alley. I think most such readers will catch on very quickly, even before Effinger reveals their secrets, that these are glimpses of parallel worlds. Worlds that are created at every single fraction of a second, and have been since the beginning of time, branching out with the each of the billions of possibilities, continuing on now and the future.

   This is heady stuff, well told. It is no wonder the story won both a Hugo and a Nebula. It was well deserved.

       —

Previously from the Wollheim anthology:   JOHN SHIRLEY “Shaman.”

DONALD WESTLAKE writing as RICHARD STARK – Lemons Never Lie. Alan Grofield [solo] #4. World, hardcover, 1971. Countryman Press, softcover, 1990. Hard Case Crime #22, paperback, July 2006.

   I welcome being corrected if I’m wrong, but I believe that this is the last of four solo adventures of summer stock theatre owner-cum-heist man Alan Grofield. The other books that Richard Stark wrote that he appeared in he played second fiddle to the author’s other primary character, a really hard-boiled fellow by the name of Parker, whom you very well may have heard of before.

   And in Lemons Never Lie, we see that Grofield isn’t averse to a little violence himself, if (but only if) the situation calls for it. The only reason he pulls jobs, almost always in conjunction with others, is to finance his summer theatre, located somewhere in the middle of Indiana, which means of course that it needs a lot of outside financing.

   This one begins with Grofield arriving at the Las Vegas airport, trying a slot machine in the terminal after deplaning — and winning. Three lemons. He naturally takes this as a bad sign, and so right he is.

   He turns down the job he’s offered there, but the guy whose plan it is — a guy named Myers — does not take rejection kindly, and the two knock heads together for the entire rest of the book. It’s not much fun for Grofield, and in the end Myers ends up extremely badly, but it certainly is a lot of fun for the reader.

   Donald Westlake’s way of producing smooth, relaxed prose is on full display here. He was indeed a master of words. The plot doesn’t run all that deep, but I don’t know what kind of on-the-ground research Westlake ever did for the Stark books, but he sure makes it sound as though he’d been taken along on a few heists himself. He’ll probably convince you, too.

DONALD WESTLAKE – Kahawa. Viking, hardcover, 1982. Tor, paperback, 1984. Mysterious Press, hardcover reprint, 1995; paperback, 1996.

   This was originally published in the early 80s, as I’m sure most of you knew but I didn’t. Evidently it sank without a trace then, and now Mysterious is re-publishing it with a new introduction by Westlake.

   Lew Brady, a good, old-fashioned soldier-of-fortune, is stranded in Alaska, reduced to teaching truckers how to fend off union strong-arms. He’s only partly assuaged by the fact that he’s with his lover, a bush pilot.

   Then comes a call from an old mercenary friend who wants him to come to Africa and help steal a train. That’s right, a train. It belongs to Idi Amin, the Uganda strongman, and it’s full of some very pricey coffee. Brandy and his lady pilot hie themselves to the Dark Continent, where they find good and bad guys of all races, and enough excitement to banish boredom forever.

   There are few if any who do caper novels better than Westlake. All the old pro’s skills are in evidence here, if not in quite as polished form as they are today. He created a fascinating cat of characters, with the real-life portrait of Idi Amin hovering chillingly over them all.

   Uganda was a bad, bad place to be in those days, and Westlake brings it to life for you. It’s a thick book, 496 pages, and therein lay my only cavil — it’s hard to maintain the level of intensity a caper novel requires for that length, and I thought that Westlake occasionally failed to do so.

   But it’s still a decent book, by one of the best. If no one made a movie of this, they missed a damned good bet.

SECRET SERVICE OF THE AIR. Warner Brothers, 1939. Brass Bancroft #1. Ronald Reagan, John Litel, Ila Rhodes, James Stephenson, Eddie Foy Jr., Rosella Towne. Director: Noel M. Smith.

   I really can’t imagine that anyone who went to see this movie in 1939 could have possibly come away from it saying to his wife or her husband, as the case may be, that that guy’s got what it takes to be President someday! But what they definitely would have gotten was a good look at an amiable, good-looking actor with a lot of personal appeal if not necessarily a wide range of acting ability.

   Although only a small budget affair from Warners, the movie itself did so well that three more in a follow-up series were made. I’ve listed two women in the cast, but you can forget about them, even though one of them plays Brass’s fiancée, showing up only at the beginning and once again right at the end.

   In between this is a guys’ story only, one dealing with a tough gang of hoodlums actively smuggling people across the border by plane into California. (How tough are they? Watch this movie and you’ll find out.)

   As for Brass Bancroft, he’s a pilot recruited by the secret Service to go undercover and find out who he Big Boss is. To this end he is framed on a counterfeiting rap and sentenced to a term in prison. Our star of course does this standing on his head. Figuratively speaking, of course. And in spite of his longtime sidekick’s attempt to help (Eddie Foy, Jr.), he’s pretty good at catching bad guys, too.

   Don’t expect too much from this one, as it doesn’t have a lot to give, but you may find this one as much fun to watch as I did.

RENEGADE TRAIL. Paramount, 1939. William Boyd, Russell Hayden, George Hayes, Charlotte Wynters, Russell Hopton, Roy Barcroft, John Merton, Bob Kortman, and Sonny Bupp. Screenplay by John Rathmell & Harrison Jacobs, based on characters created by Clarence E. Mulford. Directed by Lesley Selander.

   A landmark Western… of sorts.

   Even if it were no better than routine, Renegade Trail would be remembered by B-Western buffs for the last appearance in a Hoppy film by George Hayes, who had established himself as trusty-dusty side-kick Windy Halliday in George Sherman’s Hopalong Cassidy series since Bar 20 Rides Again in 1935.

   In the intervening four years, Hayes had worked his garrulous old-timer schtick into a smooth routine, replete with tall tales, amusing double-takes and toothless muttering asides. Small wonder then, that Hayes hit producer Sherman up for a substantial raise. Or that Sherman, running a successful but not hugely profitable enterprise, had Windy Halliday written out off the Bar 20 ranch, into a comfortable sinecure as a town marshal and out of the series.

   George Hayes moved to Republic, playing basically the same character, but since “Windy” was owned by Paramount, he changed the name to “Gabby,” and it stuck. Gabby Hayes. Thus are legends born.

   Getting back to the movie itself, Trail is a bit lacking in action, the plot needlessly complicated, but vigorously directed by Lesley Selander, and has a moment that would have been at home in an Anthony Mann movie:

   Hoppy’s pal Lucky, lying wounded in the back of a chuck wagon, trying to get his gun out as a bad guy walks from long-shot to medium range and murders the driver. The only problem is that Mann would have done it in a single shot, where Selander breaks it into 3 or 4 — which makes the difference between a great director and a talented one.

   But I said this was a landmark Western and it is. Renegade Trail is the only Western I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen plenty) where the bad guy (Roy Barcroft) actually makes his entrance kicking a dog – an act which seems to have gone down in B-movie folklore. And it ties into a delicious ending, so I’ll insert here a SPOILER ALERT!

   Toward the end, the outlaw gang has the good guys pinned down, but Hoppy slips behind their lines, sneaks up close to Roy Barcroft and says. “Tell your men to drop their guns!” which he does and they do. Then in the post-game wrap-up, there’s a conversation I’ll paraphrase as:

   “Nice work, Hoppy. But how’d you know he’d give up?”

   And Hoppy replies, “No man that’d kick a dog would stand up to a fair fight!”

   They just don’t make ’em like that anymore.

A song from Desert Rose ((Sugar Hill, 1984), a solo LP from one of the founding member of The Byrds:

  LESTER del REY, Editor – Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Second Annual Edition. E. P. Dutton, hardcover. 1973. Ace, paperback, December 1975.

   #6. R. A. LAFFERTY “Eurema’s Dam.” Short story. First published in New Dimensions II, edited by Robert Silverberg (Doubleday, hardcover, 1972). First collected in Golden Gate and Other Stories (Corroboree, hardcover, 1982). Co-winner of the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

   While he had written some short fiction before then, Lafferty is best known to me for his first three novels, which came out in 1968, almost all at the same: Past Master, Space Chantey, and The Reefs of Earth, and his exuberant and truly one-of-a-kind way of telling a tale.

   While his stories were nominated several times for various major awards, “Eurema’s Dam” was the only one to win one of the major ones. To me, at this much later date, the story is a mere trifle, but when it was first published, it garnered considerable acclaim from SF critics and fans alike.

   This is the life story of a unique individual named Albert, and let’s let Lafferty tell you what you need to know about him, starting from the very beginning of the story:

   How dumb was he? He was so dumb about arithmetic that he was forced to invent a pocket calculator. He could not tell his right hand from his left without noting the direction of whirlpools and which side a cow is milked on. He even invented a machine that would help him not be afraid of girls.

   When he had a hunch that he would never be good at hunches, he fabricated a machine to help him with that, and he called it Hunchy. Of all the machines and other devices he invented, and there many of them, all of them built on logic, this is the one that he discovers he needs the most.

   It may be that science fiction fans in 1972 could see a lot of themselves in Albert. If so, I can certainly understand that. There is one thing that is for certain. Only R. A. Lafferty could have written this story, and I’m glad he won a Hugo for it.

          —

Previously from the del Rey anthology: FREDERIK POHL & C. M. KORNBLUTH “The Meeting.”