HARRY WHITTINGTON – Married to Murder. Joel Palmer #1 (and done). Phantom #503, digest-sized paperback original, 1953. Berkley Diamond D2019, paperback, September 1959. Gryphon Books, softcover, 2005.
From the early 1950s and clear into 1970s, Harry Whittington was one of the most prolific paperback writers around, publishing nearly 200 novels under a host of pen names. What he’s best known for by connoisseurs of such things was a unique combination of noir/hardboiled/sleaze fiction. For all that work, I don’t believe he produced another private eye novel other than this one. (I could easily be wrong about that.)
Joel Palmer, the protagonist in this one, was once a cop but he’d been forced to resign, and when Married to Murder begins, he’s trying to eke out a living as a PI and not doing a very good job of it. Worse, the police are continually hounding him, with obvious malicious intent. So when a old woman with one leg and a crutch to help her get around comes looking for him, he takes her up on the offer she makes, as dubious and offputting as it sounds.
He’s to move in with the woman’s granddaughter, under the pretense of being her husband. His first reaction is a natural one. He laughs. But the granddaughter, who thinks her husband is dead, is in deadly danger, he is told, although exactly why, she refuses to say. At length, confronted with threats of calling his personal nemesis on the police force, he agrees.
Some plastic surgery is involved. That’s a given. But to make the change permanent, he has to agree to put his identification papers on the person currently being stored in a small freezer and dump the body in the East River. After this point in time, Joel Palmer will be dead. Assisting him on this task is the old woman’s maid, a strange enigmatic creature who dresses in tight-fitting black dresses. (Use your imagination here.)
While two of them are on this midnight disposal run, our hero (of sorts) discovers that the man, whom he has been told died of natural causes, was really a victim of cold-blooded murder. By this time, though, it is far too late for him to turn back.
Which all of the above takes up the first 64 pages of a mere 144 page novel, but between you and me, these are 64 pages I will never forget. Once he hits Florida, where the granddaughter lives, and the impersonation begins, the book settles down into a more conventional sort of tale, but conventional in the hands of a writer such as a Harry Whittington was in that regards is still heads and shoulders above almost any other PI writer I can think of.
It’s not a classic, mind you. There are way too many implausibilities built into the plot as it unfolds to say that. I didn’t believe them all myself, even while I was reading it. Safe to say, you’d be better off just fastening your seat belt and going along for the ride.
I was looking forward to great things from The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte but — alas! — found myself bitterly disappointed at a book filled with cardboard characters, a painfully obvious “surprise” killer, and endless pages of talky explication for a climax.
These shortcomings (and many others) stand out all too sharply against a plot of striking intelligence; Julia, a beautiful young art expert, is commissioned to restore a renaissance-era painting of a Duke and Knight playing chess while the Duchess looks on in the background (Perez-Reverte describes this painting so vividly the reader can almost see it in brilliant color and sharp focus) but stops abruptly when x-rays reveal a message hidden under a layer of paint: “Who killed the Knight?”
For the answer, she recruits a small band of friends and friends-of-friends (all, alas, as two-dimensional as Julia herself) to reconstruct the game on the painting and discover who took the Knight by playing it backwards. Which works fine until her friends themselves start getting killed by someone who leaves little notes with chess moves on them.
It’s a dandy idea for a mystery, and I only wish Perez-Reverte had given it a worthy execution. As it was, I saw the Killer come marching down Main Street with a big brass band, but for some reason the author thought he needed twenty-odd pages of “… then I did … but you never suspected I …” to put it across.
Equally bad is his tendency to imply something very very clearly, then go ahead and state the obvious in case we missed it. So we get a couple paragraphs where Julia’s older-woman, sexually predatory (and two-dimensional) employer looks with a proprietary air at young man, extols his sexual prowess, then Perez-Reverte adds, “He was the latest in her long line of lovers.”
Or several lines describing Julia’s ex-lover/former teacher, a cliche’d College Professor who wears tweed jackets with patched elbows, knit ties, and sandy hair graying at the temples, and Perez-Reverte caps his description by saying that “he looked like a stereotype of a professor.” Well du-uh.
Reading this is like sitting at a great feast of words and being tossed the scraps; it insults my intelligence, and I’d take Perez-Reverte to account for it, if I weren’t afraid of him. As it is, I’m going to give him another try, this time with lowered expectations.
— Reprinted from The Hound of Dr. Johnson #7, May 2000.
MANNING COLES -The House at Pluck’s Gutter. Tommy Hambledon #26 (including one collection of short stories). Pyramid X-1782; paperback, first US edition, April 1968. Published earlier in the UK by Hodder and Stoughton, hardcover, 1963.
A pair of binoculars with a concealed piece of microfilm leads Tommy Hambledon and his amateur assistants on a chase from Belgium to Rome and finally back to England. Forgan and Campbell are given brief tours of [every] prison along the way, and Hambleldon himself is arrested at least twice, endures several blows on the head, is thrown overboard in a sack, and then trapped at the top of a radio tower.
The microfilm ends up in the hands of the diplomatically immune Knights of the Reconciliation, who plan to blackmail England for its return.
The humor [of Hambledon’s previous escapades this time] affords only an occasional smile — too close to slapstick? — but the ending, with a film company’s version of the Marines to the rescue, was lunatic genius. In fact, the concluding chapters were much easier to take than all of the initial running around. The author’s use of punctuation was bewildering at times, with lots of exclamation points, but that’s a minor quibble.
Rating: ***½.
— June 1968.
Update: Until the former’s death, hidden behind the Manning Coles byline was a long-running collaboration between two British writers, Adelaide Frances Oke Manning (1891 – 1959) and Cyril Henry Coles (1899 – 1965).
The last two Hambledon books, including this one as the last, were written by Coles and Tom Hammerton. Why this one first appeared only as a paperback original in this country is a mystery.
JAMES CRUMLEY – Bordersnakes. C. W. Sughrue & Milo Milodragovitch #3 (each, not together). Dennis McMillan, hardcover, limited edition, 1996. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1996. Warner, paperback, 1997. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, softcover, 2016.
The man by whose largess I read this thought this was top-notch stuff. This heartened me less than you might think, because he also liked The Mexican Tree Duck, which I thought was about as thoroughgoing a piece of garbage as I read that whole year. But excelsior …
Milodragovitch has come into his middle-age inheritance — just in time to find that a crooked banker has relieved him of most of it. He’s in a frame of mind for revenge and recovery, and heads to Texas to find his old drinking, doping, and PI buddy C. W. Sughrue to help him.
He finds C. W., all right; scarred, married, and hiding out from people who wanted to kill him and almost did. Together they set out on an odyssey across Texas, hunting for the banker and maybe themselves. They find whiskey, dope, and danger everywhere they tum, and there are more turns than they looked for.
The thing that still bothers me about Crumley’ s books is that the people he writes about are adolescent fantasies of the kind of people it would be cool to be: hard-fighting, hard-doping, romantic idiots who are moved only by their addictions. And that Crumley himself seems to admire this, and to think it’s the way a man should be.
Another reason [to be bothered] is that the plot is a maze of wild, unlikely coincidences; plot never was Crumley’s thing. Balanced against all that, and in the end overcoming it, is the fact that the son of a bitch can write. He can tell you a story well enough to drag you along over the rough spots so fast and enjoyably that you barely feel them until later, much like the bruises from an athletic contest. And while the things his people do may not make much sense at times, the people themselves are real while he’s writing about them, and you find yourself cheering their antics as mindlessly as they perform them.
— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #26, July 1996.
Spike Walters drives a cab. He’s waiting on a train. It’s midnight. A frigid winter.
A woman comes out, fancy in a fur coat, hails him thru the hail.
She gives him an address way out in the boonies. But when he gets to the address, she’s gone and a dead man is lying in her place. Shot thru the heart. A bursted vein. She gives love a bad name.
Spike calls the cops. It is laid upon Detective David Carroll to solve the crime.
Carroll calls himself a “psychological” detective. But he’s not, really. He’s just a really good conversationalist. He inspires trust, and people talk to him.
The story proceeds as a pleasant procedural, as Carroll interviews and re-interviews various suspects. Nary a sign of the “scientific methods” of other detectives. Carroll says he doesn’t care what people say to him. He just wants them to speak freely so he can watch them as they speak. The way folks tell their stories, a lie may contain as much as the truth.
Carroll is very likeable, and convinces the Chief of Police to hold off on any 3rd degree methods. So no rough stuff. Just soft shoe conversation with upper crust suspects until they crack as the accumulation of facts and the natural contradictions of false alibis crumble under their own weight.
Speaking of weight, this thing is so light it could fly away with a soft wind. But it’s a pleasant way to fritter the time away.
DOROTHY DUNNETT – Dolly and the Bird of Paradise. Johnson Johnson #6. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1983. A. A. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1984.
Dorothy Dunnett’s “Dolly” series is about spy Johnson Johnson, skipper of the yacht Dolly. Each novel is titled for the “bird” (British slang for woman) who narrates it. The “bird” in this case is Rita Geddes, a punked-out young makeup artist with blue and orange hair who is hired to travel with a client, TV personality Natalie Sheridan. In Madeira, however, Rita is severely beaten and then her friend, Kim-Jim Curtis, another makeup artist, is killed. The nefarious doings seem to involve drugs, but in fact, much, much more is going on.
As must all Dunnett’ s “birds,” Rita becomes professionally involved with Johnson Johnson, who, in addition to being a yachtsman and sort of spy, is a famous portrait painter.
Johnson enlists Rita’s aid in running to ground the drug smugglers, but she really wants to avenge Kim-Jim, for reasons that she withholds from the reader. Though Rita is the narrator, Dunnell (a pseudonym of Dorothy Halliday) skillfully sees to it that she withholds any number of pertinent details-including the fact that she has a serious disability. The real mystery, locked within Rita herself unfolds satisfyingly and amid plenty of action, including piracy on the high seas and a rip-roaring hurricane.
Dunnett, also a noted author of historical fiction, is a very deft, very literate writer; Johnson is a sardonic, quasi-hero who grows on the reader as he grows on the birds on whom he tends to make poor-to-awful first impressions. Other titles in this series include Dolly and the Singing Bird (1982; original 1968 title, The Photogenic Soprano); Dolly and the Cookie Bird (1982; original 1970 title, Murder in the Round); Dolly and the Starry Bird(1982, original 1973 title, Murder in Focus); and Dolly and the Nanny Bird (1982).
MACK REYNOLDS – Computer War. Ace Double H-34; paperback original, December 1967. Previously serialized in Analog SF, June & July 1967. Reprinted as half of Ace Double 11650, paperback, February 1973.
Economic reasons lead the government of Alphaland to go to war with the second planetary power Betastan. Computer predictions are that a two-month conflict will be enough for [an Alphaville] victory, but the Betastani have read Ho Chi Minh (page 62) and retaliate with sabotage, high-level infiltration and other forms of standard guerilla warfare.
The result is predictable. The excuse for a hero is needed only to have everything explained to him; enough of nerdy cloddy flats! The subversive Karlists have good ideas — it might be more interesting to see how they succeed in victory.
SLAVOMIR RAWICZ – The Long Walk. Constable, UK, hardcover, 1956. Lyons Press, hardcover, 1997. Reprinted several times.
THE WAY BACK. Exclusive Films, 2010. Dragos Bucur, Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, Alexandru Potocean, Saoirse Ronan Saoirse, Gustaf Skarsgård, Mark Strong, Jim Sturgess. Written & directed by Peter Weir, from the book by Slavomir Rawicz.
I think it was back in 1998 when I first encountered The Long Walkin a new edition of a book well worth keeping in print, a straightforward true adventure of seven men who, if ghostwriter Ronald Downing can be believed, walked from Siberia to India, across the Gobi Desert and over the Himalayas, to escape a Soviet Labor Camp in World War II.
In 1939, Slavomir Rawicz was a Lieutenant in the Polish Cavalry (Yes, there were still mounted Cavalry charges against Tanks and machine guns then.) Following Poland’s defeat and partition by Russia and Germany, he — along with most other Poles in positions of any authority — was arrested for espionage, tortured and shipped off to Siberia. But Rawicz was a young man with no taste for spending 25 years in a forced labor camp, and he proceeds to tells us how he organized an escape that led to over a year’s walk across some of the most forbidding terrain on earth.
This is quite simply a tale to be treasured. The author describes fatigue, starvation and thirst so vividly you feel them right along with him. And he fills his tale with enough colorful anecdote and terse characterization that by mid-point I felt I really knew these people. Add all this to a story of Homeric struggle and you get something quite special indeed.
One caveat: Skip the co-author’s introduction until you’ve finished the book. It reveals a plot twist the reader really should happen across on his or her own. And enjoy.
One other caveat: The Long Walk may be a work of fiction. There has been considerable doubt raised over the years — some by Rawicz himself — about the veracity of this narrative, including a book-length study, Looking for Mr. Smith. What it comes down to is that there is some evidence that such a trek did take place, but the circumstances of Rawicz’s life seem to preclude his having done it.
All that aside, this is a superior tale of endurance and high adventure, vivid, compelling, and well worth your time.
The movie is even moreso. Peter Weir’s fast-paced, fluid direction takes full advantage of a lavish production budget, dazzling locations, and makes excellent use of capable actors like Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, and a dozen others unknown to me. He also provided them with a script filled with memorable lines and dramatic incident. Drop whatever you’re doing, and catch this one!
THE FULLER BRUSH MAN. Columbia Pictures, 1948. 93 minutes. Red Skelton, Janet Blair, Don McGuire, Adele Jergens, Donald Curtis, Arthur Space, Hillary Brooke, Ross Ford, Trudy Marshall, Nicholas Joy, Selmer Jackson, Jimmy Hunt (the Mean Widdle Kid). Based on The Saturday Evening Post short story “Appointment with Fear” by Roy Huggins (28 September 1946) .
Red, recently fired from the sanitation department, tries his hand at door-to-door salesmanship, without much success. But there is some pain — e. g., the Mean Widdle Kid (one of Skelton’s characters), who gives him a horrible time (ironic, since Red played the Kid on radio). And not only pain — Red manages to get himself designated as the prime suspect in a murder, an impossible crime in which the deadly weapon mysteriously disappears (actually it never appears in the first place — perplexing, huh?).
Before he can finally clear himself, Red and Janet Blair almost get rubbed out in a war surplus warehouse filled with explosives. Congratulations are due the stunt people, who definitely earned their paychecks on this picture.
At one point Red refers to himself as “Philo Jones,” a still-meaningful reference to society sleuth Philo Vance.
Oddly enough, this Red Skelton vehicle got its start as a hard-boiled private eye story in The Saturday Evening Post, but by the time the screenwriters (principally Frank Tashlin) got through with it there was no resemblance to the source material.
For you trivia hounds, the original story featured P. I. Stu(art) Bailey, played on TV a decade later by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., in the 77 Sunset Strip series. At almost the same time as The Fuller Brush Man was being filmed, a more serious movie featuring the Stu Bailey character (I Love Troublewith Franchot Tone in the lead) was also being lensed; it even had a few actors from the Skelton film (Janet Blair, Adele Jergens, Donald Curtis). Coincidence? We don’t think so.
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Related 2013 Mystery*File article about Roy Huggins:
MILTON “MEZZ” MEZZROW & BERNARD WOLFE – Really the Blues. Random House, hardcover, 1946. Reprinted several times since, including Dell D118, paperback, 1953, and Signet, paperback, 1964.
“To all the hipsters, hustlers, and fly cats tipping along The Stroll. (Keep scuffling.) To all the cons in all the houses of many slammers, wrastling with chinches. (Short time, boys.) To all the junkies and lushheads in twobit scratchpads, and the flophouse grads in morgue iceboxes. (R.I.P.) To all the sweettalkers, the gumbeaters, the highjivers, out of the gallion for good and never going to take low again. (You got it made, daddy.)â€
Mezz Mezzrow was a Jewish dude who longed to be a black jazzman. He lived a life that had him in the orbit of Louis Armstrong (he was Armstrong’s marijuana dealer), playing jazz with Sidney Bichet, Bix Beiderbecke and Gene Krupa, he played the clubs of Al Capone and Legs Diamond, he got hooked on heroin, jailed at Riker’s, lived in Harlem married across the miscegenation lines and lived to tell the tale.
At Riker’s, Mezz insisted on being classified as Black because “colored cons were different; almost any colored guy can land in jail, not just the soulless zombies who have already shriveled up and died inside and are just postponing their date with the undertaker’s icebox. Some of the finest, most high-spirited guys of the race landed in jail because of their conditions of life, not because they were rotted and maggot-eaten inside –far away from all this grimy, grating white underworld, up in Harlem where people were real and earthy.”
Jazz, to Mezz, was the soundtrack of Roaring Twenties America: “jazz was only a musical version of the hard-cutting broadsides that two foxy studs named Mencken and Nathan were beginning to shoot at Joe Public in the pages of The American Mercury — a collectively improvised nose-thumbing at all pillars of all communities, one big syncopated Bronx cheer for the righteous squares everywhere. jazz, making itself heard above the rattle of machine guns and the clink of whisky bottles. The sprawling outside world, they found, was raw and bubbling, crude, brutal, unscrubbed behind the ears but jim-jam-jumping with vital spirits; its collar might be grimy and tattered, but it was popping with life and lusty energy, ready for anything and everything, with a gusto you couldn’t down. And jazz, its theme song. These kids went for that unwashed, untidy world, and they made up their minds to learn its unwashed, untidy music –all the decent, respectable citizens who were home in bed having decent, respectable nightmares instead of braying through their horns at the stars –jazz music was, in a way, practically the theme-song of the underworld because, thanks to prohibition, about the only places we could play like we wanted were illegal dives…..turbanned Hindus, ramrod-spined Englishmen balancing monocles, swarthy cattlemen from the Argentine, sugar planters from Batavia, sabre-scarred Prussian officers, bullfighters from Madrid, college kids with crew haircuts from Wilkes-Barre and Des Moines”.
The book has a host of great hardboiled one-liners:
● He had more music in him than Heinz has pickles.
● It takes a long, tall, brown-skin gal to make a preacher lay his Bible down.
● Don’t look for no chitlins before you kill your hawg.
● I was locked up in a cage that would have cramped a canary.
● The poor guy squirmed and wriggled like a jellyfish with the d.t.’s.
● It’™s a hell of a life, said the Queen of Spain, Three minutes’ pleasure and nine months’ pain
● … as winded as Paul Revere’s horse.
● there wasn’t enough room in it for a midget to swing an underfed kitten,
· corny? Sure, the husks are still on it
● Rotgut and remorse trickled through Uncle Sammy’s veins.
● … his face as long as a sigh
· blow my nose and call me Snorty
● … frail as a nail and twice as pale
● That town was sad as a map and twice as flat
● … no bigger than a blink
· the chorus lumbered around like a herd of asthmatic cows.
● … emotional pickpockets
● The days oozed by like a melted movie film, all run together.
● (ode to the dead): Plant you now, dig you later
● If you pried the lid off my skull with a can-opener, you might have spotted some weird eels snaking through the whirlpool I lugged around under my hat.
In the end, after a life drug thru the wringer, jailed, drug addled, left out soggy in the rain, Mezz’s reward was to finally understand jazz and be able to finally play it:
“F]or the very first time in my life, you see, I had fallen all the way into the groove and I was playing real authentic jazz, and it was right, not Chicago, not Dixieland. …Now I was no more afraid. All the rambling years behind suddenly began to make sense, fitted into the picture: the prison days, the miss-meal blues, the hophead oblivion, the jangled nerves, the reefer flights, the underworld meemies. They were all part of my education, had gone into my make-up until I was battered and bruised enough to stumble into the New Orleans idiom and have something to say in it ..We here, and we going to stay put … don’t recognize no eviction notices from the good green earth. Life gets neurotic and bestial when people can’t be at peace with each other, say amen to each other, chime in with each other’s feeling and personality; and if discord is going to rule the world, with each guy at the next guy’s throat, all harmony gone. Why, the only thing for a man to do, if he wants to survive, if he won’t get evil like all the other beasts in the jungle, is to make that harmony inside himself, be at peace with himself, unify his own insides while the snarling world gets pulverized. He carried his own environment around inside him.”
His only dream remains: “I don’t aim to have my fillings and bridgework picked out, to fatten the Bull Durham sack in some junkie’s or lushhead’s pocket. Uh, uh. Just take my body and shove it in one of them blast furnaces, and when I’m melted down good, scrape out the dust and mix it up with some shellac and press it into a record with a King Jazz label on and then take it up to Harlem and give it to some raggedy kid on The Corner who hasn’t got the price of admission to see the stage show at the Apollo or a deuce of blips to buy himself a glass of foam. until he gets tired of it, and then let him throw it away and that’s that. Just do that, and you’ll know I’ll be happy. That’s memorial enough for me.”
—
I dug it. It lags in the middle when Mezz gets addicted to heroin and lands in the clink. But it’s real and the lag was a lag Mezz experienced and was important to his coming out on the other side. If, as Welles says, movies are life with the boring bits cut out,”this one leaves in the boring bits. But without the boring bits (for Kierkegaard tells us that “boredom is the root of all evil”) how are we to understand the motivation towards redemption. Towards some jazzy heaven Mezz Mezzrow bebops towards with every breath and footstep.
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
