Wed 14 Jan 2009
TMF Review: CHARLES G. BOOTH – Murder at High Tide.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Crime Fiction IV , Pulp Fiction , Reviews[2] Comments
CHARLES G. BOOTH – Murder at High Tide.
William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1930. UK edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930.
This story of a domestic tyrant who’s found murdered in his library has a lot of what attracted me to mysteries in the first place.
Even so, while fun to read, an honest appraisal would have to rank it only a notch or so above the Hardy Boys. And as in a vintage Charlie Chan movie, the dead man’s mansion is full of suspects at each other’s throats, with wild accusations and amazing discoveries coming at every moment.
The hero is a young antiques dealer, in his own words, an ass with women. (No further comment.) The detective is Anatole Flique, a comically suave French policeman, although the murder does take place on an island just off the California coast. In his own words, he’s the cleverest on the Paris Surete. He’s also greatly given to twirling his mustaches and busily polishing the top of his head, all the while contemplating life’s little mysteries.
There are tons of false evidence, most of it leading to dead ends, but I think that the killer, in spite of his or her alibi, should be spotted at once. The style is not John Dickson Carr’s, but it is his kind of story. If there’s no locked room, it’s only because then there wouldn’t have been quite so much fun with alibi-breaking, which in Murder at High Tide is the name of this particular game.
[UPDATE] 01-14-09. One of the revisions I made was to add the name of the French detective who worked on this case. Obviously I had no idea that he appeared in more than one book, but he did. From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s his complete dossier:
FLIQUE, ANATOLE [Charles G. Booth]
o Murder at High Tide (n.) Morrow 1930 [California]
o The Cat and the Clock (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Los Angeles, CA]
o Kings Die Hard (n.) Hammond 1949 [California; 1929]
This last book never had a US edition. It came out in 1949, the same year that the author died. According to Wikipedia, Charles G. Booth was “a British-born writer who settled in America and wrote several classic Hollywood stories, including The General Died at Dawn (1936) and Sundown (1941). He won an Academy Award for Best Story for The House on 92nd Street in 1945. […] He also penned the source story for Paul Mazursky’s 1988 film Moon Over Parador.”
I’d never realized until now that Booth was originally from England. Besides the fiction he wrote in novel form, I know his name from many stories he wrote for Black Mask, the quintessential hard-boiled American detective pulp magazine.
In fact, he has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the three authors whose stories were deleted from the paperback edition of The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (Simon & Schuster, 1946), edited by Joseph T. Shaw. This is a great reason why you should own the hardcover edition, not just the one reprinted by Pocket (1952).
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Booth was a fairly active Black Mask contributor, and his best known work aside from The General Died at Dawn (which wasn’t published here until after the Lewis Milestone film — with a Clifford Odets screenplay)was Mr. Angel Comes Aboard, which became an early noir minor classic Johnny Angel with George Raft and Claire Trevor. Marvin Miller (The Millionaire) has a nice bit in what I suppose could be called the Raymond Burr/Laird Cregar role.
The General Died at Dawn is well worth catching, it’s a stikingly filmed melodrama with a first class cast that includes Gary Cooper, Madleine Carroll, Akim Tamiroff and some of Hollywood’s best character actors in outstanding roles, including Porter Hall as Carroll’s sniveling con man father, William Frawley as a drunken arms dealer, Duddley Digges a canny Chinese patriot, and novelist John O’Hara as a journalist. The ending may be a little ridiculous, but it is brilliantly pulled off by all, with Tamiroff’s warlord one of the great movie villains of the cinema. Milestone’s sets and scene setting are excellent, and though this is an adventure film it has many elements of a hard boiled detective story with Cooper’s character not far from a P.I.and Carroll a femme fatale he can’t quite trust. The whole thing has a noirish feel to it, and a nice cynical and modern take on heroics and human nature.
April 7th, 2021 at 7:40 pm
Maritime mayhem: a crony of mine (the same joe who collects Erle Stanley Gardner) highly recommends author William Charles to me, because he knows I have a longstanding yen for seafaring settings. Apparently William Charles writes nothing but salty, pellagic-themed mysteries. ‘Scorpion Reef’ for example. I’ve done a keyword search to detect if William Charles has ever been reviewed on MysteryFile and I can’t turn up a single item. I know this fine website doesn’t take listener – requests but I just wish to go on record, inquiring what experienced mystery fans think of William Charles?