TWO TICKETS TO BROADWAY. RKO Radio Pictures, 1951. Tony Martin, Janet Leigh, Gloria De Haven, Ann Miller, Bob Crosby. Barbara Lawrence. Screenwriters: Sid Silvers & Hal Kanter, based on a story by Sammy Cahn. Director: James V. Kern.

   A young girl from Pelican Falls is given a rousing send-off by her home town she she goes off to fame on Broadway. Of course it doesn’t work out that way, not at first, but I wasn’t worried. I just knew that she and her friends would end up on [Bob] Crosby’s TV show.

   Lots of singing and dancing and variety acts, much like the old Ed Sullivan program when I was a kid. I found [back then] I could do without the variety acts, and I’ve just learned I still can. Today, though, I can use the old-fashioned fast-forward button on the VCR.

   Rex Stout took a wartime hiatus from writing Nero Wolfe novels after Where There’s a Will (1940), abridged as “Sisters in Trouble” for The American Magazine (May 1940), which started publishing the novellas with “Bitter End” (November 1940). Introducing the posthumous collection Death Times Three (1985), biographer John McAleer explains that the publisher refused to run an abridgement of Stout’s Techumseh Fox novel Bad for Business (1940), but paid him double to convert it into the Wolfe novella. Where There’s a Will—adapted in 1969 for the Italian TV series—gives Inspector Cramer his first name, Fergus, and has Wolfe leave home on business for a case involving the Secretary of State.

   The first Wolfe collection, Black Orchids (1942), pairs the title novella with “Cordially Invited to Meet Death,” abridged as—respectively—“Death Wears an Orchid” (August 1941) and “Invitation to Murder” (April 1942). The former introduces millionaire, fellow gourmet, and future ally Lewis Hewitt, whose Long Island greenhouse produced the three titular plants, demanded in payment by an envious Wolfe for sparing him embarrassment while investigating a murder. In the latter, he sends eight of those flowers to the funeral of Bess Huddleston, who was murdered with a deliberate infection of tetanus after hiring Wolfe to stop the anonymous poison-pen letters threatening her party-planning business.

   Not Quite Dead Enough (1944) also paired the eponymous work (abridged; December 1942) with another first published in The American Magazine, “Booby Trap” (August 1944). Both take place during Archie’s World War II service as Major Goodwin of U.S. Army Intelligence; in the former, he must goad Wolfe—who has been “in training” with chef Fritz Brenner, walking by the river and dieting, to kill Germans, as he did in 1918—to return to work. The returning Lily Rowan is briefly a suspect, and Cramer reveals that Lily’s late father “was one of my best friends. He got me on the force, and he got me out of a couple of tight holes in the old days when he was on the inside at [Tammany] Hall.”

   Also invoked, Captain Albert Cross and Archie’s superiors, Colonel Harold Ryder and General Mortimer Fife, all figure in “Booby Trap.” An anonymous letter to John Bell Shattuck links Cross’s fatal plunge from New York’s Bascombe Hotel with the betrayal of “secrets of various industrial processes,” entrusted to the Army, to “those who intend to engage in post-war competition of the industries involved,” which the congressman’s committee is authorized to investigate. After Wolfe says Cross, tracing stolen “samples” of brand-new H14 grenades, was murdered, Ryder is blown apart by an H14 he’d given Archie as a souvenir for his work on the case, which was returned at Wolfe’s insistence.

   Securing Fife’s grudging permission to see General Carpenter in Washington, Ryder had his suitcase already packed, and when sent by Wolfe to remove its remains surreptitiously from the site, Archie finds it gone. Deducing that it was taken by his secretary, Sergeant Dorothy Bruce, Archie is surprised to see Lieutenant Kenneth Lawson, Jr. in the WAC’s apartment when he fetches it and her, and even more so when — en route to Wolfe’s — she offers him $10,000 for it. Claiming that was a test of his loyalty, she is revealed to be the source of the anonymous letter and others; after a private talk with her, Wolfe tells Archie only that the grenade was inside the suitcase, which was booby-trapped to murder Ryder.

   Setting his own “booby trap” with props in his office, Wolfe arranges for Archie to watch from concealment as, sequentially, Lawson, Colonel Tinkham, Fife, Shattuck, and Bruce are each left alone there; none does anything clearly incriminating, but with Bruce’s help, Shattuck is exposed.

   Working undercover for Carpenter with Lawson, she sent 30 letters to smoke out the traitors, and Ryder was silenced when—shocked by Cross’s murder and his son’s death in combat—he decided to fess up to Carpenter. Wolfe has Archie drive to Van Cortlandt Park, where he gives Shattuck, whose political career is ruined, the chance to commit suicide with another H14, which Carpenter had provided for the “booby trap.”

   Bizarrely, “Gambit” (4/3/81)—an episode of NBC’s Nero Wolfe series starring William Conrad, with Lee Horsley as Archie—took its title from Stout’s 1962 novel, but credits “Booby Trap” as its source. The only entry scripted by Stephen Kandel, later a prolific writer-producer on MacGyver, it was directed by the show’s most frequent contributor, George McCowan; its executive producers, Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, created Charlie’s Angels and shared an Oscar nomination as co-writers of the Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces (1957). Fritz (George Voskovec), orchid-meister Theodore Horstmann (Robert Coote), Saul Panzer (George Wyner), and Cramer (Allan Miller) were regulars.

   Best known as reporter Carl Kolchak in the 1972 TV-movie and ensuing series The Night Stalker, Darren McGavin guest-stars as John Alan Bredeman, first seen in comic mode as a faux service tech, hiding a surveillance system in the brownstone. Patti Davis, daughter of recently inaugurated President Ronald Reagan, plays magazine reporter Dana Groves, seeking an interview with Wolfe, against which he refuses to break a long-standing rule. Kandel rewrites Wolfe’s wartime role as “Butterfly,” commander of an intelligence unit, three members of which died when betrayed by Bredeman—code-named “Filligree”—who specialized in demolition, and now plans to kill Wolfe, having served 20 years for it.

   After asking Cramer to check on Bredeman, Archie risks bringing Dana to Wolfe, but as he is dressing them down, Bredeman gloats via the intercom that he has cut off the phone, and provides a “demonstration” by blowing up the stove, injuring Fritz. Asserting that he was innocent, he has rigged the whole house and planted a bomb on the elevator, defused by Archie with Wolfe’s guidance. As Dana exults in a juicy story, the staff disables three cameras, so Bredeman threatens death unless they gather in the entry hall, in view of the fourth; intending to slip out through a plant-room window, Archie sends her down, but in the stairwell, Dana—Bredeman’s daughter and accomplice—calls him on a walkie-talkie.

   Tipped off, he fires at Archie with a rifle (his aim spoiled by Wolfe tossing a pot through another window), belying his assurance to her that he means no harm to innocents; Fritz and Theodore cut off the power, gas, water, and intercom as Wolfe and Archie seek other explosives. Bredeman sneaks in to face his foe, trying to extract a confession for framing him, yet Wolfe, displaying unusual physicality, disarms him and tells Dana he’d deduced her imposture. In her presence, he confronts Bredeman with the truth: he was absent on the unit’s fatal mission, having alerted the enemy to their route, and over the years, guilt had twisted his mind, but attempting to flee, he falls victim to one of his own booby traps.

   Kandel’s “Gambit”—the last alleged adaptation on Conrad’s series—has little to do with “Booby Trap,” let alone Stout’s Gambit, used in 1971 and 2012 on the Italian series with Tino Buazzelli and Francesco Pannofino, respectively. Sally Blount hires Wolfe to clear her father of a murder charge after he served hot chocolate to Paul Jerin, poisoned while playing 12 simultaneous blindfold games at the eponymous chess club. The murder was a gambit, “an opening in which a player gives up a pawn or a piece to gain an advantage. The [murderer] had no animus for Jerin [who] was merely a pawn. The target was your father,” and Archie gets the proof on tape via a hidden mike in John Piotti’s restaurant.

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: The Silent Speaker

   Editions cited

Where There’s a Will: Avon (1941)
Death Times Three: Bantam (1985)
Black Orchids, Not Quite Dead Enough: Jove (1979)
Gambit in Seven Complete Nero Wolf Novels: Avenel (1983)

   Online source [link mislabeled as “Before I Die”]

ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION May 1967. Editor: John W. Campbell. Cover art: Kelly Freas. Overall rating: ***

RICHARD GREY SIPES “Of Terrans Bearing Gifts.” Novelette. Quite predictable Analog story of warlike planet defeated by traders from Earth, bringing psionic inventions, especially so since the story begins with the ending. Adequate but annoying. (2)

CHRISTOPHER ANVIL “Experts in the Field.” Another Analog type – bringing in an outsider to solve a problem. This time, that of a culture without a spoken language. (3)

BOB SHAW “Burden of Proof.” Slow glass (*) has another possible use: evidence in a court of law. Excellent idea; good development here. (4)

MIKE HODOUS “Dead End.” Earthmen trick a planet of centaurs into accepting a false FTL drive, Too much scientific terminology thrown around. (2)

HARRY HARRISON “The Time-Machined Saga.” Serial; part 3 of 3. See review of complete novel soon.

(*) From an online website: “Slow glass was an amusing scientific toy. Light traveled through it so slowly that, looking through a pane of it, you might see what had happened five minutes ago on the other side — or five years.”

SOFTLY, SOFTLY: TASK FORCE. “Blind Alley.” BBC, UK, December 3 1975 (Series 7, Episode 15). Frank Windsor, Norman Bowler, David Lloyd Meredith Guests: Ralph Michael, Michael Culver. Teleplay: Elwyn Jones (Format Creator). Director: Gilchrist Calder.  Streaming online here.

    This series that ran from 1969 to1976 was a police procedural that spun off from the famed Z Cars (from 1962 to 1978 and featuring Brian Blessed in a key role as a PC for several seasons) and its own spin-off Softly, Softly (1966-1969) moving the action from Wyvern possibly around Bristol to Thamesford and the city of Kingly where former Chief Inspector Charlie Barlow (Stratford Johns) is promoted to Superintendent and his top Inspector John Watts (Frank Windsor) to Chief Inspector forming a new special department designed to respond quickly to crimes in the area.

    There were a number of series regulars over the series run but only a few that appeared in most episodes, with Windsor’s John Watt appearing in the most episodes and replacing Johns as Superintendent when he moved on to another series in Barlow at Large in 1971.

    Other regulars over the course of the series were Norman Bowler as Harry Hawkins (who appeared in Softly, Softly from 1966 to 1968) rising from CID Sergeant to Chief Inspector over the series run 1969-1976), the more or less romantic lead; David Lloyd Meredith as Bob Evans (1969-1976) who rises from uniformed Sergeant to Inspector over the series run, a wry Welshman with a nose for crime; PC eventually Sergeant Snow (Terence Rigby 1969-1976) who begins the series as a K9 handler and is eventually promoted to Evans old job; and, Walter Gotell (also Softly, Softly and From Russia With Love, The Guns of Navarone, The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only) as Chief Constable Cullen (1969-1975) their superior, canny political figure as much as policeman.

    There was also a short Softly, Softly, Strike Force series in 1984.

    Unlike Z Cars and Softly, Softly which had many episodes erased by the BBC, all the episodes but one of Task Force are available on YouTube at various sites. Seasons run from thirteen to fifteen episodes and most are self contained although personal struggles and histories carry over from episode to episode and season to season though the series tends to focus on the main characters at work and not at home with only Barlow, Watts, and Hawkins domestic lives explored much.

    Along the line of a British 87th Precinct the series deals realistically with crime and police and there is no guarantee in any episode that the police will triumph and the criminals be caught. Many episodes portray the criminals as human beings caught between their chosen way of life and the police who offer them little room to maneuver. The police aren’t always happy with their own tactics and constraints and are torn between distrust and a natural desire to catch the bad guys and often old relationships with them over the years.

    As often as not the final solution is left in the air or the villains to be caught on another day in other circumstances. Like real police work the cases are messy, plans go awry, and innocents caught out by both police and criminals.

    The format for the series was created by Elwyn Jones with many episodes written by novelist Alan Prior and at least one by none other than novelist Kingsley Amis.

    Frank Windsor’s John Watt is the conscience of the series, a much less high handed and brutal man than Barlow who is portrayed as fairly ruthless and more feared than loved by his men. The camaraderie between higher ranking officers often portrayed in American police series is less noticeable here, the emphasis on discipline and rank however human the officers are. These are human beings, not stereotypes and cartoon figures. This isn’t Dragnet, nor is it car chases and gunfights though there is action in many episodes. Police are vulnerable, fallible, and prone to human mistakes and sometimes butt heads with each other.

    In “Blind Alley” Justice Ballantyre (Ralph Michaels), a notable and often strict judge has bought a weekend home in the area and the Task Force is bending over backward to protect him on his weekends when PC Lincoln (Peter Clough 1975-76) of the Mounted Patrol notices someone has been spying on the judge. While the judge is out of town his home is broken into and leaflets are posted on his window and door while the intruder burns FDR into his lawn, a reference to a radical group Ballantyre sentenced to prison, Free The Daventry Resisters.

    Meanwhile Sgt. Evans is about to officially receive promotion to Inspector, a secret no one on the force seems able to keep.

    When the break-in happens a reporter from London (Michael Culver) shows up claiming he knows the man, a well known radical member of the Daventry Registers, who is willing to surrender to the police, but Watts and Hawkins suspect the man is wanting publicity and they are wary to give it to him, with good reason it seems when the Judge returns and reveals a secret that changes everything.

    Things take a more radical change when they snub the confessor who makes an unexpected attack on the judge turning a celebration into a dark finale for the season.

    Strong writing, flawed protagonists, solid plots, and a jaundiced view of crime and police marked the series. Certainly weighted in favor of the police point of view the series still managed to present criminals as human beings developing more of a social conscience as time went on over its eight year run. Over the years the series dealt with many serious issues and did so sensitively as well as doing the usual mix of seventies subjects like terrorism and hijacking.

    Even if your tastes don’t run to police procedurals the quality of the acting and the writing on this series was exceptionally high. For beginners, I’d dip into a few of the later episodes after the series had its feet and if I liked it — and I did, very much — go back to the beginning. I don’t know about the original Softly, Softly, but a few episodes of Z Cars are on YouTube.

MAXWELL GRANT – The Wealth Seeker. Jove, paperback, 1978. First published in The Shadow Magazine, 15 January 1934.

   A wealthy philanthropist’s home is raided twice by criminals, and each time the gangsters are defeated, their leader being killed before being questioned. Since the man’s donations have always been anonymous, who has revealed his identity to the underworld?

   There are only three suspects, and of course the obvious one is far too obvious. Walter Gibson, who wrote almost all of The Shadow stories, was terrible as a writer, but he was a dandy magician. He fooled me again, even though I was watching.

DAY KEENE – If the Coffin Fits. Tom Doyle #1. Graphic #43, paperback original, 1952. Never reprinted.

   The first appearance of Tom Doyle, a PI with his own agency based in Chicago, and as far as I or anyone knows,, his only appearance in print. Day Keene was an extremely prolific paperback writer in the medium to hard-boiled vein, but he never went in for continuing characters. The only one I’m aware of is a fellow named Johnny Aloha, based in – can you guess? – and who showed up in a couple of book-length adventures back in 1959-60.

   Not that Chicago plays any part in this one. An long-time war buddy hires him to come out west to Central City, a town in a never mentioned state where, as it turns out, a certain but quite unknown Mr. Big has taken over, and with the lid off, almost anything goes. Anything crooked, that is. Gambling, prostitution, the works. Doyle’s specific job is, however, to find evidence to free a young lad sentenced to die in four days for a murder he didn’t commit.

   No, this is not the freshest plot in world of private eye fiction, but Keene was good enough writer to take the premise and run with it, with Doyle taking the brunt of it. Keene is best in this one in small scenes only, though, which are crisp and to the point. When needed on stage, individual characters come alive with a vengeance. Afterward they tend to fade away into the background again. The story is told in bits and pieces, some verging on brilliant, but somehow it never manages to come together into a satisfying whole.

   Which means, speaking specifically, while discovering the identity of the mysterious Mr. Big is the point of all the pain and miscellaneous agony Tom Doyle goes through, when the ending finally comes, it does so as a small unexpectedly minor climax. It needs more, and it’s not there.

   Overall, a prime example of Almost but Not Quite.

SAN QUENTIN. RKO Radio Pictures, 1946. Lawrence Tierney, Barton MacLane, Marian Carr, Harry Shannon, Carol Forman, Tony Barrett, Raymond Burr. Directed by Gordon Douglas.

   An out-and-out plea for prison reform, done in pseudo-documentary style, turns out to be a pretty good gangster movie. Lawrence Tierney plays an ex-con, former head of the Inmates Welfare League, who takes it personally when Barton MacLane makes a daring escape.

   And MacLane is a killer, no doubt about it. In his gang are Tony Barrett, one of my all0time favorite radio actors, and Raymond Burr, another voice from radio. (He also made it big on TV.) The acting is a little stiff at times, but the action is fast and furious.

ROBERT KYLE – Kill Now, Pay Later. Ben Gates #3. Dell First Edition B178, paperback original; 1st printing, December 1960. Reprinted as by Robert Terrall (Hard Case Crime, paperback, 2007). Cover art for each by Robert McGinnis.

   This one starts off with Ben Gates hard at work doing a job not often brought up in the world of PI fiction: namely watching over the wedding gifts at a very fancy affair in the outskirts of New York City. The affair is so upscale that Ben has hired an assistant to keep watch on the outside while he’s stuck in the house on the inside.

   It’s a good thing he did, too, as things do not go smoothly. First an inebriated bridesmaid comes into the room where he is standing guard, and the first thing she does is put on a very expensive diamond bracelet and refuse to take it off. It’s a touchy situation, and before Ben is sure he (and his assistant) have it under control, he finds himself falling asleep.

   The coffee he drank to keep himself awake was drugged.

   When he wakes up the next morning, he learns that a burglar had been at work in the house during the night. The bride’s mother, having surprised the intruder in her room, has died of a heart attack, and his assistant had shot and killed the thief.

   Everything’s fine, otherwise, except for Ben’s reputation, and to remedy that, he takes himself on as a client. What follows is a rollicking romp of a case, with lots of lovely ladies to distract Ben from following up on the clues he finds (basically how did the thief, a city fellow, know that the picking would be so good at this particular time and place?). The lovely ladies all have the way of wearing clothing (or not) as to best attract Ben’s attention, and maybe a male reader’s, too.

   Shades of Richard Prather’s Shell Scott stories – straight out of the same Author’s Handbook. No maybe about it.

   A plot line involving a case of possible arson, badger games, naughty photos, blackmail and the like builds up at length to the bursting point. At which time All Hell Breaks Loose.

   Who’d have thought a simple case of watching wedding gifts would turn out to be so complicated? And fun!
   

      The Ben Gates series —

Blackmail, Inc. Dell 1958.
Model for Murder. Dell 1959.
Kill Now, Pay Later. Dell 1960.
Some Like It Cool. Dell 1962.
Ben Gates Is Hot. Dell 1964.
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JOHN D. MacDONALD – Pale Gray for Guilt. Travis McGee #9, Gold Medal d1893, paperback original, 1968. Lippincott, hardcover, 1971. Reprinted many times.

   A friend of Travis McGee has a small business that was blocking a big land deal, and the squeeze was put on. Things went a little too far, and the friend was dead. McGee suspected murder and sought revenge for himself and for the widow and kids.

   Hit them where it hurts – in this case, the wallet.

   After staging a form of the pigeon drop and some crafty manipulations on Wall Street, McGee and friends are a little richer, the shrewd businessman perhaps wiser, and the murderer, XXXXXX with a feeling for power, is disposed of XXXXXX.

   Future historians need not look further than books like this for the true story of civilization in 1968. MacDonald’s views on the automobile, funeral directors and hippies are pointed but accurately reflect the tolerance and frustration of all but the indifferent.

   MacDonald is not a mathematician, however, nor his editors – the division of the spoils on page 160 [of the Gold Medal paperback] is short by $100,000 – hardly insignificant. He also has the problem that too many characters talk alike, with elusive meaning, justifiable in that the story is told in first person; maybe McGee really talks that way. Tremendous depth.

Rating: ****½

COUNTERSPY. “The Case of the Blackmailed Hijacker.” ABC, 09 August 1949. Don McLoughlin (David Harding), Mandel Kramer (Peters).  Available on many sites online, including this one.

   Counterspy was a totally fictitious anti-espionage agency whose case files began on the radio in 1942, telling tales about the Nazis and how their efforts in setting up spy operations here in the US were always thwarted. After the war ended, the series continued, up through 1957, but the enemies of this country became more general.

   In this episode from 1949, for example, truckers driving through the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania with payloads of dynamite and other explosives are being held up and robbed. The bounty is then shipped off and sold to rebels in post-war hotspots around the world, threatening world security.

   As it turns out, the title of this episode is incorrect. When one driver escapes being kill in one such hijacking, he is at first willing to testify against one of the thugs he could identify, but when the rest of gang threaten to reveal his past life as a convict, and worse, threaten his wife, he finds that his memory of the incident is not as sharp as he thought it was.

   It’s a fairly straightforward thriller of a mystery, in other words, but it’s also one with a very effective final scene taking place in the quiet of the night when the men of Counterspy move carefully in on the truck that has been blown to bits.. Who was caught in the explosion – the good guy, or the bad ones? Pictures in the mind can be a lot more effective than those seen acted out on the screen of a black and white TV set.

   Each of the two stars, Don McLoughlin and Mandel Kramer, went on to have long careers in TV soap operas. Both had very effective voices for radio, though, and I suspect the many listeners thought Counterspy was a real honest-to-goodness organization acting on the behalf of Americans everywhere.