BLOCHMAN Death in Marble Halls

QUIET PLEASE: MURDER.   20th Century-Fox, 1942. George Sanders, Gail Patrick, Richard Denning, Lynne Roberts, Sidney Blackmer, Kurt Katch, Byron Foulger. Screenplay: John Larkin, based on the story “Death Walks in Marble Halls,” by Lawrence G. Blochman. Director: John Larkin.

   According to IMDB, the Blochman story that this 1940s crime and mystery film wass based on was one titled “Death From the Sanskrit,” but other than IMDB, neither David Vineyard nor I have found a reference to a Blochman tale anywhere else by that name.

   We may be wrong about this, but we’re sure (say 99.99%) that Quiet Please: Murder was adapted instead (and loosely so) from “Death Walks in Marble Halls,” a short novel that first appeared in The American Magazine, September 1942. It appeared later in EQMM as “Murder Walks in Marble Halls,” and was reprinted under its original title in 1951 as #19 in Dell’s short-lived series of slim-sized 10-Cent paperbacks.

   Says David, who may be the only person to have both watched the movie and read the book:

    In Death Walks in Marble Halls, Phil Manning is the PR man for a major public library and plunged into a mystery when a trustee of the library is murdered, and shortly after a woman who was a witness dies too. The chief suspect is a crackpot called an “erudite screwball,” and the only clue a scrap of paper in what appears to be Sanskrit.

BLOCHMAN Death in Marble Halls

    The plot turns on a musical score that may or may not be original. Kilkenny is a local cop on the case, and Dr. Rosenkohl the medical examiner. The main similarity is they are all trapped in the library with a murderer while the police investigate, but in the novella it is the real police and the forgery business is mere plagiarism.

    As always with Blochman, it’s a well written mystery and moves rapidly, and while there isn’t a lot of it in the film you can see bits and pieces of it there. Some of the names from the novella are used in the film, and some of the details of library operation.

BLOCHMAN Death in Marble Halls

   Me again, Steve. I’ve watched only the movie, and what follows is the basic outline of the plot. As you’ll see, other than the basic library setting, there isn’t a lot in common, as David says. The forger in the film who isn’t in the book, as he mentions, is Jim Fleg (an oilier than usual George Sanders), who’s stolen a rare copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from a downtown library and who’s planning, with the able assistance of femme fatale Myra Blandy (Gail Patrick), to make multiple copies and sell them to equally unscrupulous collectors as a continuing source of income.

BLOCHMAN Death in Marble Halls

   Unfortunately Myra makes the mistake of selling one of the forged copies to a Nazi agent (Sidney Blackmer), who wants his money back. At which point enters PI Hal McByrne, a lanky womanizer played by Richard Denning, causing Myra (the femme fatale he falls for) to realize she can kill two birds (at least) with one stone.

   At which point the rest of movie moves to the aforementioned library, where several murders do occur, as the title of the film suggests (I confess I lost track of how many), along with many well-constructed chases of one character by another between the stacks of books, plus a very timely blackout monitored by a comically excitable librarian cum war raid warden played to perfection by Byron Foulger, a name long-time old movie fans will certainly remember.

BLOCHMAN Death in Marble Halls

   Either the movie was actually filmed in a library — and believe it or not the Dewey Decimal System, carefully explained earlier on, is part of the plot — or the producers of this film raided the shelves of several nearby furniture stores. (The library is said to have two miles’ worth of books, but naturally we do not get to see them all.)

   The plot is a complicated one. You have to pay attention every minute of the way. (My usual technique of watching the movie a second time did not help, and in fact I only found myself confused in other ways.) In terms of production values, they’re probably only par for the course in terms of black and white mystery movies made in 1942, but the film itself is surely an entertaining one.

PostScript:   Mike Grost reviews the novella, not the movie, on his Classic Mystery and Detection website. He says of it, in part, and I quote:

BLOCHMAN Death in Marble Halls

    It is set at the New York Public Library, and is one of the few Blochman stories in which the floor plan and architecture of the setting plays a crucial role: one can follow the movements of the characters all over the Library, and the architectural orientation gives pleasure in the way typical of Golden Age mysteries. […]

    The characters in the story do not merely stand around and expound on their intellectual specialty. Each has a job, and each is busy producing something as part of it. This beehive of work is integrated into the mystery plot. Both the Library and the knowledge work are part out the main productive output of New York City, its work as an industrial center of the mind. […]

    The unfolding patterns of this tale make it a very satisfying reading experience. Blochman weaves them out of several different “colors”: the personal relationships of the characters, their professions; their physical positions in the library architecture; and their relationship to the murder plot.

BLOCHMAN Death in Marble Halls