July 2019


FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins


   THE VIRGIN KILLS (1932) was Whitfield’s third and final crime novel under his own byline and a sad comedown after his first two. Our narrator, sports columnist Al Connors, is invited to join a party on the yacht of shady gambler Eric Vennell (the “Virgin” of the title) as it makes its way up the Hudson from Manhattan to Poughkeepsie where the annual inter-university boat races are held.

   Accompanying Connors is Mick O’Rourke, a scar-faced Victor McLaglen type, who’s bodyguarded several top gangsters and has been recruited by Connors to perform the same function for Vennell, who claims he’s been threatened by racketeers after his investment firm lost a pile of their money on the stock market. Also on board the Virgin are a movie star, a bitchy female writer, a Lindberghesque aviator and some others.

   Not much happens until the big race, which the odds-on favorite California crew loses to Columbia thanks to its stroke—“the most important of the oarsmen”—collapsing and dying just before his crew’s “shell” reaches the finish line. An autopsy establishes that, either before or during the race, someone with a hypodermic needle had injected the victim under his left shoulder blade with a fatal dose of morphine.

   Not long afterwards, Vennell is found murdered in his cabin aboard the Virgin. The rest of the book is padded with endless speculations by the narrator, a Poughkeepsie cop and a Philo Vance type hired by the dead oarsman’s family. “He’s suave and very cold and superior….He’s the kind you read about in the books whose writers go in for annotations and such stuff.”

   Luckily for us, this character talks just like all the others in the book, making no attempt to ape that insufferable twit created by S. S. Van Dine. Eventually some movie footage of the race, shot from an airplane, comes to light and the murderer obligingly confesses everything. Since every moment of the action takes place on board the yacht, one might easily believe that the novel was originally intended as a stage play, with interpolated film footage at the climax.

   Whitfield is reported to have helped Hammett construct some of his plots, but I find this rumor hard to swallow considering how in THE VIRGIN KILLS he bungled some crucial physical details. At one point the Poughkeepsie cop asks: “Number Seven [the prime suspect among the California oarsmen] is right ahead of the stroke in a shell, isn’t he?” To which the captain of the Virgin replies: “He sure is.” This is confirmed by our Philo Vance stand-in, who tells us that Number Seven “was directly in front of [the morphine victim]—that is, ahead of him.”

   In that case, Number Seven would have had to reach behind him with one hand to puncture the victim, while rowing at full speed with the other. What an athlete! A page or so later Whitfield seems to have realized his blunder when he has the ersatz Vance character state that Number Seven’s “face was to [the victim’s] back….,” but he doesn’t bother to correct the earlier dialogue. We have to give Whitfield some credit for using “human” when he means “person” only a few times, but we must yank it back when he tells us over and over that the oarsman murdered during the race was “morphined.” If a different poison had been used, would we have been told that the poor guy had been arsenicked or strychnined to death?

   Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of THE VIRGIN KILLS is that the California crew’s physician happens to be named Doc Vollmer, which is also the name of the West 35th Street medico who is called in whenever a body turns up on or near the premises of Nero Wolfe. Either Rex Stout read this misfire of a mystery, and remembered, or we are faced with a full-blown Keeler Koinkydink.

***

   In 1933 Raoul and Prudence Whitfield were divorced. Did her long term affair with Hammett have something to do with the breakup? Hardly had the decree become final when Raoul married again, this time into the Vanderbilt family, and more or less retired from the words game. I have a sneaking suspicion that Hammett was tweaking Whitfield’s nose a bit when, early in THE THIN MAN (1934), he had Nick Charles say that he quit the PI game when his wife Nora inherited a fortune.

   Unlike Nick’s marriage, Raoul’s didn’t last long. Emily Whitfield filed for divorce in February 1935 but shot herself to death a few months later in their New Mexico ranch house, a chain of events on which Walter Satterthwait based his novel DEAD HORSE (2007). Thanks to her will, her estranged husband—who, being in California at the time, had a perfect alibi—morphed into a sudden millionaire.

   From then on he lived the high life and drank whiskey as if it were water. Eventually he married a third and much younger woman, a local barmaid who, in 1943, also killed herself. By this time Raoul had run through Emily’s Vanderbilt money and contracted tuberculosis, which took his life in January 1945.

***

   None of Whitfield’s three crime novels under his own name was reprinted in paperback during his lifetime. GREEN ICE appeared in softcover not long after his death (Avon Murder Mystery Monthly #46, 1947, as THE GREEN ICE MURDERS) and reappeared in the 1980s, along with DEATH IN A BOWL and THE VIRGIN KILLS, in the Quill Mysterious Classics series edited by Otto Penzler. Whitfield’s debut novel was also reprinted in hardcover by Gregg Press (1980) and, more recently, by Mysterious Press (2014).

   Between 1930 and 1933 the Knopf firm published three other Whitfield titles (WWI and aviation books apparently aimed at the juvenile market) and the obscure Penn Publishing Company issued another air adventure, but these have never been revived and are near extinct, as are the two crime novels issued by Farrar & Rinehart under the pseudonym of Temple Field (FIVE, 1931, based on the 5-part Black Mask serial published between June and October 1929, and KILLERS’ CARNIVAL, 1932, taken from the 6-part Black Mask serial published between August 1931 and January 1932).

   Of his 300-odd shorter tales the most easily accessible are the cases of the Filipino sleuth Jo Gar, certainly Whitfield’s most important character and probably the first ethnic detective after Charlie Chan. The eighteen genuine short stories about him were collected in JO GAR’s CASEBOOK (Crippen & Landru, 2002) and are also available, along with the two Black Mask serials in which he stars —one in six installments, the other in two—in WEST OF GUAM (Altus Press, 2002, expanded edition 2013).

   Most of Whitfield’s short stories featuring other series characters like Ben Jardinn or no such character at all are available to you only if your shelves are piled high with issues of Black Mask . Prudence Whitfield, the only one of Raoul’s three wives to survive him, prevailed upon Fred Dannay to reprint that six-part Jo Gar serial in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (February-July 1949; originally in Black Mask, February-August 1931, with no installment in the June issue) and also three other tales (May 1948, November 1951, June 1953).

   I suspect it was also due to Prudence that editor Hans Stefan Santesson chose two more Whitfield stories for reprint in The Saint Detective Magazine (March and August 1956) and a third (March 1960) featuring Jo Gar. Not much of a showing when stacked up against the novels and stories of Hammett and Chandler, which have been reprinted on a regular basis for generations, but then Whitfield was never in their league.

   Still, a letter from him or a first edition of one of his scarcer books can command more than $3000 in the collectors’ market. Whether or not they’re worth that much, it can’t be denied that Raoul Whitfield remains of interest today to anyone who wants to understand the formative years of the literature we now call noir.


NOTE: Part One of this two-part profile of Raoul Whitfield can be found here.

   Kieran Kennedy is the lead singer for this song, a live version of the title track of an album this Irish folk rock group released in 1989.

REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD:

SERGEANNE GOLAN РAng̩lique and the Sultan. Angelique #3. US edition published as Ang̩lique in Barbary. Film: A Franco-German-Italian-Tunisian film dorected by Bernard Borderie , released in 1968, with Michelle Mericier & Robert Hossein.

   Our story up to now:

   Angelique. Born Angelique de Sanc de Monteloup, of a family of the minor nobility in Poitou, she first married Comte Jeffrey de Peyrac of Toulouse, Prince of Aquitaine, of the Palace of Gay Learning. Jeffrey, a remarkably brilliant and powerful man, was condemned to the stake by Louis XIV on a trumped-up charge of sorcery, and was supposedly executed in February 1661.

   Reduced to extreme poverty, Angelique became a member of the Paris underworld, the rendezvous of which was the Court of Miracles in the Saint-Denis quarter of Paris. Later, under the name of Madame Morens, she opened a chocolate shop with David Chaillou, whereby she made a great deal of money which she invested shrewdly, becoming extremley rich, and a member of the literary society of Paris.

   Having been in love with her cousin Philippe, Marquis du Plessis-Belliere, since they were both adolescents, she more or less blackmailed him into marrying her, thus gaining a position in the high nobility of France. She became a shrewd adviser and trusted confidante of Louis XIV and his Minister of Finance, Colbert, and one of the leading members of Louis’s brilliant Court at Versailles. The King’s attentions to her involved her in a fierce rivalry with his mistress, Madame de Montespan. Louis XIV was deeply in love with Angelique, but she resisted his advances and fled the Court, thus incurring the King’s grave displeasure …

   This international bestseller of doorstop adventures of the seventeenth century cross between Candide, d’Artagnan, Fanny Hill, Little Orphan Annie, Madame DuBarry, and Little Nell picks up as our heroine learns the king has pardoned her scar faced lover Joffrey, who has promptly escaped. Always true to her husband, in her fashion, Angelique sets out to find him and reunite with him, but as nothing comes easily for her the reader can be assured they will not be reunited easily.

   The series was written by Anne and Serge Golon, signing as Sergeanne Golan after the first book, and was an immediate bestseller in Europe and then here. The thick paperbacks were a common sight on newsstands, though they made little room for anything else in a spin rack. Finding one that didn’t have a bent cover from being shoved in too small a space was rare.

   Fairly tame in terms of actual sex despite all of her affairs, the books offered a rich background of palaces, intrigue, Dickensian poverty, rogues, adventurers, pirates, heroes, villains, swords, duels, escapes and hurried journeys that manage to sweep from France to the Middle East and all the way to the New World while inspiring films and television series (the most recent only a decade or so back). They were bodice rippers before the genre was invented and Angelique, no doubt inspired by Kathleen Winsor’s Amber from Forever Amber, a cottage industry unto herself.

   My first wife being a long blonde green-eyed French dancer named Angelique, I probably have a higher tolerance for these books and films than many of you. Old home week.

   Anyway, our heroine is off to find her dear Joffrey, a journey that leads her to Marseilles and the smuggler ridden coast of Southern France onto Candia, center of the slave trade, then to Algiers and onto Morocco and the harem of the Sultan Mulai Ismael, the Moroccan equivalent of Louis XIV. Along the way she is shipwrecked and rescued by the masked pirate known as Rescator who holds her youngest son by Joffrey Cantor as hostage and gives her to the Grand Eunuch, Osman Faraji, who in turn presents her to his Sultan.

   Points if you have figured out why Rescator is masked and holds Cantor, much less why Angelique is turned over to Osman Faraji.

   She also manages to seduce, emotionally if not physically, the Eunuch, the Sultan, a French Admiral, and the slave Colin Paturuel, who will naturally give his freedom and life for her while out maneuvering and winning over the Sultan’s jealous first wife Daisy-Valina. And have no fear Joffrey will show up as well, to steal a treasure from the Sultan’s kingdom, and pick up the pieces, since Angelique is not the sort to sit around and wait for rescue, all told in rich descriptive prose somewhere between Dumas and Maurice Dekobra (bestselling French author of Madonna of the Sleeping Cars and many others) and equally adept at describing luxury, sensuality, horror, hardship, and emotional trauma.

   Granted these are thick dense books filled with actual historical personages, interwoven with Angelique and her friends and lovers adventures, they are certainly not great literature, and lacking Georgette Heyer’s signature wit, but they are also literate, expansive, and more Dumas than Kathleen Winsor.

   The Michelle Mercier films are big productions and perfect companions to the films with Mercier and Robert Hossein ideally cast as Angelique and Joffrey, though thankfully running times are nothing like reading ones.


MICHAEL ALLEGRETTO – The Dead of Winter. Jake Lomax #3. Scribners, hardcover, 1989. Avon, paperback, 1991.

   In this his third case, PI Jake Lomax is hired to find a barber’s missing daughter. The barber’s also a bookie, and the daughter, a sensitive type, has just found out. A good beginning, and the stakes quickly become even higher. The next day a bomb destroys the barber’s car.

   Allegretto has a smooth, even style of writing, but until the kidnapping plot is revealed, not much out of the ordinary actually happens. I’m ambivalent about the kidnapping plot, too. It’s an interesting twist, but overall the story line is a combination of bad coincidence mixed with poor judgment.

–Reprinted from Mystery*File #15, September 1989 (slightly revised).


      The Jake Lomax series —

Death on the Rocks (1987)
Blood Stone (1988)
Dead of Winter (1989)
Blood Relative (1992)
Grave Doubt (1995)

  RUFUS KING – The Case of the Dowager’s Etchings. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1944. Previously serialized in , Redbook magazine, July-November 1943. Mystery Novel Classic #69, digest-sized paperback, no date stated. Also published as Never Walk Alone: Popular Library #362, paperback, 1951; Wildside Press, softcover, 2005.

   The word “dowager” is not one that you hear very often any more. It has a couple of closely related meanings, the first being “a widow with a title or property derived from her late husband,” while the second, more informally, is “a dignified elderly woman.” Mrs. Carrie Giles of Bridgehaven, the leading protagonist of Etchings, qualifies on both counts.

   Published in 1944, the book is less an effective work of detective fiction than it is an inside look at a certain strata of life back home during war time. In a spurt of impulsive patriotic enthusiasm, almost immediately regretted, Mrs. Giles offers rooms in her small mansion of a home to local wartime factory workers.

   Her staff, all elderly or ephemeral, such as house maid Leila, are not amused, especially once the four successful applicants, three men and a women are introduced as the new boarders. It is obvious to the reader that none of them are exactly who they say they are, but complicating matters immensely is Mrs. Giles’ discovery of a dead body in her front yard the next day.

   Even more significant to the story is that Mrs. Giles’s grandson Kent is returning home briefly home as a war hero, and all indications are, as far as Mrs. Giles is concerned, is that he may have something to do with the body of the dead man.

   Rufus King’s smooth, relaxed way of writing, with not a little humor mixed in, makes this one go down easily. Mrs. Giles does her best to perform the duties of a detective, but it is all too much for her. It is too bad that Kent is either asleep or sedated from an injury he incurs at one point in the book. If he had been able (or willing) to speak frankly, the mystery could have been solved in less than twenty minutes time.

   Be that as it may, this is an enjoyable excursion into the past, a glimpse of what it was like to be living in the US in wartime. I’m sure it’s not possible to know now for sure, but I suspect that Rufus King based Mrs. Carrie Giles on someone he knew — she seemed that real to me.

REBEL IN TOWN. Bel-Air Productions / United Artists, 1956. John Payne, Ruth Roman, J. Carrol Naish, Ben Cooper, John Smith, Ben Johnson, James Griffith. Writer: Danny Arnold. Director: Alfred L. Werker.

   I have a small confession to make. I find myself more and more liking the small budget black and white films of the late 1950s more than I do the large scale Technicolor epics of the same era. There’s often a grittiness, for lack of a better word, to them than the westerns meant for large audiences don’t seem to have.

   Here’s an example. Rebel in Town takes place after the Civil War is over, but not too soon afterward for all of the bitter hatreds and other emotions to have faded away. When a rebel-hater’s young son is killed in a tragic shooting at the hands of a family of former Confederate soldiers on the run, what comes instinctively to mind? Revenge, of course.

   As the young boy’s grieving parents, both John Payne and Ruth Roman make as much of their roles as they possibly can, and J. Carroll Naish as the Bible-quoting patriarch of the outlaw family is equally impressive. Admittedly this is a one-note story, but when it comes time for turning points to occur, neither the scriptwriter nor the director takes the easy way out.


REVIEWED BY BARRY GARDNER:


P. D. JAMES – Original Sin. Adam Dalgleish #9. Alfred A. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1995. Warner, paperback, 1996. First published in the UK by Faber & Faber, hardcover, 1994.

   P. S. James was for many years one of my favorite authors, but has been less so in the last several. I’m tempted to say that her books have dropped off in quality, but perhaps of late she’s simply gone in directions that haven’t been as much to my liking.

   Peverall Press is England’s oldest private publisher, and it’s i a state of turmoil. The two old heads of the firm are gone, one dead, one retired, and the new Director is bringing the firm into the modern age, accompanied by swarms of anguish and rage by those he’s stepped on and discarded.

   Some nasty and harmful pranks have been played, obviously by someone within the firm who has so far eluded detection. One of the discards has suicided on the premises, but this will not be the last death. The next will be murder, and Commander Adam Dalgleish of Scotland Yard will enter the case.

   One tends to forget just how excellent crafter of prose James truly is. At least I had, and now I’m reminded that she has few peers in this regard. The present story could have been told in many fewer words, but that wouldn’t have been a P. D. James story; she is not a minimalist.

   Dalgleish is much less involved in the narrative that he has been in the past, and it’s obvious that he focus has broadened, It’s also obvious that she is less concerned with whodunit, and more so with character, and not just the character of the principals (though of course they are the primary focus) but that of many lesser players as well.

   Some of this was clearly unnecessary to the playing out of the story proper, and how much you approve will be a matter of individual preference. It’s a densely textured book, and one that demands attention, not a “quick read.” For all the depth of characterization, I’m not sure I believed that one player would have behaved at the end as he/she did, but that’s my only cavil. I thought this was fine novel.

— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #18, February-March 1995.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “Night Birds.” Novelette. El Paisano, aka The Roadrunner #1. Argosy Weekly, August 5, 1933. Probably never reprinted.

   This is the first of five recorded adventures of yet another of Erle Stanley Gardner’s series characters he created for the pulp magazines in the 20 and 30s. Known as both El Paisano and the Roadrunner, and yet no other name, he is a man of mystery, flitting across the Mexican border and back with ease, invariably leaving dead villains, gang leaders and various henchmen in his wake.

   What makes him such a formidable foe is that he can see in the dark far better than most men. Whether better able to see unsavory characters with knives waiting for him in the night, or young beautiful women he can then follow across darkened rooms without them knowing, it makes his tales of adventure and narrow escapes all the more interesting.

   Being the first time any of Gardner’s readers had met this new hero, he spends considerable time making his abilities clear, but not to the expense of the story, which consists of a dead man in an alley, pursuit, rescue (in an inadvertent way) by a slip of a girl with her mind focused on a suitcase filled with a fortune in stolen money.

   It all ends well, but only once the young slip of a girl is fully convinced that the Roadrunner is on her side, which she finally does. There’s otherwise not a lot of depth to this tale, but I certainly wouldn’t mind reading another.

AT SWORD’S POINT. RKO Radio Pictures, 1952. Also released as The Sons of the Three Musketeers. Cornel Wilde (D’Artagnan Jr.), Maureen O’Hara (Claire, daughter of Athos), Robert Douglas, Gladys Cooper, June Clayworth, Dan O’Herlihy (Aramis Jr.), Alan Hale Jr. (Porthos Jr.), Nancy Gates. Director: Lewis Allen.

   I don’t wish to insult anyone, but if you can’t tell from the credits above what this movie is all about and 90% of the plot, you may be reading the wrong blog. But not being a person to send anyone packing without a second chance, I’ll talk some about the movie anyway.

   After the death of Cardinal Richelieu, it seems as though the ailing Queen of France is once again in trouble — the evil Duke de Lavalle is making plans to marry the Queen’s daughter Henriette and kill the young Prince, next in line for the throne. She calls for the assistance of The Three Musketeers and D’Artagnan. They have aged, however, and while willing, they each send one of their offspring in their stead.

   Three men and one woman, and she may be the best swordsperson of them all:

           Enemy soldier: I’ll not fight with a lady.

           Claire: I’m no lady when I fight!

   The movie is in Technicolor, and deservedly so. Maureen O’Hara was meant for color movies, and her presence in one must have doubled the box office receipts, at least.

   This one is told with a great sense of fun, and it only bogs down when things start to turn serious, as they do, but only every once in a while, but not too often. There are a lot of swordfights in this movie, and I mean a lot, and I meant it when I said Maureen O’Hara’s is right there, mixing it up with the rest of them, thrusting her sword into the enemy, through and through.

   It all turns out well, you can count on that. I enjoyed this one.


BONUS TRIVIA:   Taken from the IMDb page. Alan Hale Jr. plays the son of Porthos here. His father, Alan Hale, appeared in The Man in the Iron Mask (1939) as an aging Porthos. When that film was remade as The Fifth Musketeer (1979), that role was taken by Alan Hale Jr.. In that same movie the role of an aging D’Artagnan was played by Cornel Wilde, this picture’s son of D’Artagnan. Also here, the elderly Porthos is played by Moroni Olsen, who played that character in his younger days in the film of the original Dumas novel, The Three Musketeers (1935).


REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:         


ALEXANDER KLEIN – The Counterfeit Traitor. Henry Holt & Co., 1958. Permabook M4122, paperback, 1959; Pyramid, paperback, 1967.

    THE COUNTERFEIT TRAITOR. Paramount, 1962. William Holden, Lilli Palmer, Hugh Griffith, Eva Dahlbeck, Carl Raddatz, and Klaus Kinski. Adapted for the screen and directed by George Seaton.

   An interesting effort, both for the story it tells and the way Klein — and later Seaton — tell it. But first a word of Background:

   Some of you may have already heard about World War II. If not, you should Google it and let us know what you think, because it’s been mentioned in these pages before. But to make a long story short (SPOILER ALERT!) Germany lost.

   But when Nazi Germany was at the height of its power, before America entered the war in ’41, generals and statesmen on what would be the Allied Side were already mapping their strategy. And a major element was to cripple the German Oil industry.

   The effectiveness of this approach cannot be overstated: as allied planes bombed refineries over and over, oil supplies dwindled, and Hitler could no longer use his heavy gas-guzzling tanks with the speed and mobility that made the blitzkrieg possible. Troops and artillery that once would have sped along the autobahn had to march or go by rail. Fighter planes that might have stymied the allies at Normandy stayed in Germany, and the pilots of these planes had their training severely reduced to save gas for the actual fighting. In short, when the allies crimped the flow of oil, they pinched off the lifeblood of the German war machine.

   Okay, that’s the background. One element in accomplishing this strategy was to find out where the oil refineries were, how they were camouflaged and defended, and, later on, how badly they were hit. To do this, the allies recruited one Eric Ericson, an American expatriate oil broker who, in the late 30s, married a Swede and adopted neutral Swedish citizenship in order to do business with both sides during the war.

   Working (reluctantly?) for the Allies, Ericson wangled himself into a position to visit German Oil suppliers on a regular basis throughout the early 40s, where he reported his observations back to American Intelligence and even recruited disaffected Germans to assist him. Later, when Germany was no longer selling oil, he cooked up a phony scheme to start a synthetic oil refinery in Sweden that would (a) supposedly supply oil to the Reich, and (b) actually provide an investment opportunity for wealthy Nazis who wanted to move their assets out of a now-losing Fatherland.

   With this as a cover, Ericson actually gained repeated access to Germany’s most highly-classified refinery sites, and reported their locations — and later, the progress of their destruction — to the allies.

   This is a fascinating bit of true-life espionage, and Alexander Klein’s telling is… well, it’s almost up to the challenge. Klein does a nice job of parsing his story out bit by bit, the way Ericson lived it, gradually building the suspense as his hero ventures into Nazi Germany, flirts with discovery, courts the favor of influential Nazis, and more than once heads straight for disaster.

   He also has a nice way of catching the small details of day-to-day life in a war-weary Germany, with off-hand details about the stench of a subway filled with working people whose soap was rationed, the weary air of sexual license, or the prevalence of bad teeth in a land where toothbrushes were a luxury and dentists pressed into service as doctors.

   Unfortunately, Klein’s gift for dialogue is much less compelling; he reconstructs conversations where characters don’t talk so much as they explicate, saying just enough to move the story along across a background of highly unconvincing small talk. As a result, his characters come off as a bit two-dimensional, real people who are never quite real to the reader. Klein himself seems aware of his weaknesses as a writer, though, and thoughtfully avoids these scenes as much as possible to concentrate on a story I found ultimately quite involving.

   When George Seaton adapted this for the movie in 1962, he overcame Klein’s expository problems very neatly indeed. With the aid of William Holden, playing a cynical businessman pressed unwillingly into the Allied Camp, he created a character who may not have been the real-life Ericson, but seems very plausible to the viewer.

   Holden’s voice-over narration replaces the functional dialogue of the book, and Seaton imparts a sense of realism with skillful playing by a talented cast: notably Hugh Griffith as an obdurate “recruiter” for British Intelligence, whose knife-like smile betrays his complete ruthlessness — this in dramatic contrast to Lilli Palmer’s conscience-stricken German informant, with Holden perched uneasily between the two as his own better feelings begin to surface.

   There are few actors who could have managed this as well as Holden and not many writer-directors who could have evoked it more ably than George Seaton, who could get more drama out of a bottle of cough syrup (The Country Girl) than most filmmakers could do with a disaster at sea. He also plays well on our expectations: When Holden volunteers for “one last trip” into Germany, we know things are going to go bad, but instead of seeming clichéd, it builds the suspense and segues into a dandy chase that goes on for some time but never feels protracted.

   Book and movie are well worth your time, and I recommend them both. But I recommend the film more highly.


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