BENJAMIN APPEL – Brain Guy. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1934. Lion #39, paperback, 1950. Lion Library #151, paperback, 1957. Also published as The Enforcer (Belmont Tower, paperback, 1972). Stark House Press, softcover, 2005 (two-in-one edition with Plunder).

   The first in a trilogy (Brain Guy, The Power-House, and The Dark Stain) about the rise of a mob boss (Bill Trent) from Hell’s Kitchen.

   We start with Bill as a rent collector for a real estate agent. There’s a wink and a nod for the tenants with speakeasies and brothels, but you better not get caught by the cops. If you do, the agent will play dumb, blame it on the collector, and can them on the spot. Which happens to Bill.

   Now Bill is broke in the Depression, like everybody else. But he’s not like everybody else. He’s not gonna beg. He’s not gonna starve. He fancies he’s a Brain Guy. A guy with schemes.

   So he sells his schemes to one of the mobsters he used to collect the rent from. The scheme is this: Bill collected rent from all the stores in the neighborhood: the dress store, the meat store, the cheese store, the speaks. He knows when they’ve got their dough on hand. He knows just when to hit them.

   So that’s how he gets his start. Robbing all the tenants he used to rent collect.

   He hooks up with some muscle, takes a whore for his moll, and kills his way to the top.

   What’s a bit unique about the story is that we see all the self-doubt of Bill Trent. He nearly fails many times. He nearly gives up. He’s just playing by ear and he has no idea what he’s doing. He is fully conscious that all mob bosses are employees at will, their time is grossly indeterminate, and the termination notice is terminal. He’s just a guy filling a role: Brain Guy. And he’ll keep it til he gets knocked off by the next one. And so on.

   The story is nothing new, really. But it’s a well-done, credible, three dimensional picture of how a pretty ordinary guy becomes a monster. Never a monster in his mind. But in his actions. Always just doing what thinks he has to do to survive.

   There’s a nice quote on the cover from the New York Times saying it’s “written with the cold, corroding passion of one who has seen through the heart of human poverty and degradation and had all the softness and sham burned away.” Which seems to me as good a definition as any of hard-boiled prose. What was happening in the Poisonville’s of America during prohibition and the depression produced pockets of desperation. And desperation speaks with concision.

   When death is imminent, you don’t tend to use a lot of pretty adverbs and adjectives. You cut to the chase. Bullshit has a way of disappearing down the mouth of a gun. In Fight Club, there’s a scene where Tyler Durden holds up a convenience store cashier:

   Heidegger talks of ‘being towards death’ — that only the constant thought of mortality keeps us authentic. Keeps us from collapsing into the idiot wind of idle chatter. Adorno says ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. But my favorite formulation of the hard-boiled manner comes from The Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find: “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

   So there you have it. The book feels real. With hard-boiled patter. The better to think with. The better to speak with. The better to be authentic in the life you live.

JOHN GARDNER – The Werewolf Trace. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1977. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1977. Reprint editions include Bantam, US, paperback, 1978,

   What if post-war British intelligence had documentation that seemed to indicate that a recently naturalized citizen was, in fact, a sleeper Nazi agent? That the man in question was quite possibly the son of Joseph Goebbels and was now an heir apparent to the Hitler regime? That’s the basic premise of John Gardner’s The Werewolf Trace, an overall rather disappointing thriller that might have worked far better as a short story than as a full length novel.

   Vincent Cooling works for British intelligence, though he doesn’t much care for his bosses, nor for the “dirty tricks” of spycraft. Although tasked to read through voluminous files that point to the existence of “Werewolf,” a German child soldier now grown up to be a Nazi sleeper agent, he remains deeply skeptical and believes that his superiors are too obsessed with the Nazi past.

   Gardner paints a portrait of a man quite possibly more disturbed by the would-be intrusion into Werewolf’s privacy than by the prospect of an ideological fanatic living in economically depressed 1970s England. It doesn’t make for a compelling, sympathetic protagonist for which one wants to root.

   Enter Werewolf. He’s really a somewhat mild-mannered Scandinavian furniture importer living under the name Joseph Gotterson. He has a devoted wife, Sybil, and a young child, Helen. They live outside of London in a rural area. In a house that is purportedly haunted.

   Yes, you’ve read that right. Gardner chose, for whatever reason, to mesh the spy thriller with supernatural/ghost fiction. I’m all for experimentation in literature, but overall, blending the two here makes The Werewolf Trace lesser than the sum of its parts.

   That said, the writing is clear, concise, and allows for the reader to become fully immersed in the story. It’s just that the story drags on a bit; it really does not have the same degree of tension and excitement found in the comparable The Bormann Testament (1962) written by Jack Higgins or Frederick Forsyth’s excellent The Odessa File (1972), later turned into a movie starring Jon Voight.

FREQUENCY. New Line, 2000. Dennis Quaid, Jim Caviezel, Shawn Doyle, Elizabeth Mitchell, Andre Braugher and Noah Emmerich. Written by Toby Emmerich(?) Directed by Gregory Hoblit.

   This’ll grab ya, even as you feel your credulity strained. And we all know how painful that can be.

   Quaid and Caviezel carry the story very capably between them as a Firefighter who dies in a warehouse fire in 1969, and his now grown-up Policeman-son in 2000. A freak cosmic storm in 1969 and a matching event thirty years later (ouch!) enable them to contact each other when Caviezel comes across his dad’s old HAM radio just in time to warn him of the upcoming warehouse inferno (Owww!)

   But saving Daddy’s life triggers a host of unforeseen consequences involving a serial killer, the murder of their wife/mother, death by cancer, Quaid arrested for murder, and a lot more, all of which have to be fixed and re-fixed by father and son working across time together-yet-apart.

   This is the sort of thing that has to be done fast and gaudy to keep the viewer from switching channels in mid-movie disbelief. It also has to be clearly explained each frame of the way for said viewer to keep up with the constantly changing realities. And it also has to offer clear segues from past to present and back again.

   That’s an order of beanstalk dimensions, but Frequency  mostly succeeds, thanks in hefty part to the skillful editing of David Rosenbloom, who eases things through with graceful and easy-to-grasp transitions. And it’s a good thing we got ’em because the screenplay, though credited solely to Toby Emmerich, shows the work of many hands.

   It’s not that there are loose ends — more like dead ends. Plot developments terminated abruptly, characters who arrive late and leave early, and a ninth-ending come-from-behind plot twist that just hasn’t been prepared for.

   But somehow I found myself forgiving all this for the sake of some really ingenious ideas, and the pace and style with which Frequency  delivers them.

JOHN BIRKETT – The Last Private Eye. Michael Rhineheart #1, Avon, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1988.

   I bought this book because of the title. Unfortunately, Michael Rhineheart is “the best private investigator in Louisville,” which is bad news, as far as I am concerned. Louisville means horses. And horse racing, and doped horses, and rigged odds, and what a bore.

   Nothing here to change my mind. Rhineheart is “cool,” shrugs a lot, and wanders around with his fly open, Even though the bad guys are obvious, their undoing is only due to bad luck and their own bad temperaments. Rhineheart has nothing at all to do with it.

Bibliographic Update: There was a second book in the series, The Queen’s Mare (Avon, 1990), but not a third.

RAWHIDE. “Clash At Broken Bluff.” CBS, 02 November 1965 (Season 8, Episode 8). Clint Eastwood, Paul Brinegar, Steve Raines, L. Q. Jones. Guest Cast: Ron Randell, Nancy Gates, Warren Stevens. Teleplay by Louis Vittes. Directed by Charles Haas. Currently available on YouTube.

   By some sheer coincidence, even on a TV show taking place in the past and the far West such as this one, the primary subject matter is voting rights: who should have the right to vote in an upcoming election, or more importantly, who should not. In this case, the women of Broken Bluff are demanding the same right at the polls as the men in the cattle drive who just happen to be in the county on election day.

   To that end, the town’s more nefarious leaders are premising the cowboys much needed supplies – not to mention free beer – if (and only if) they will vote their way. On the other hand, the leader of the women’s marches is a young widow whose land the cattle must cross while making their way north.

   It is a dilemma, if not an impasse, and it is complicated even further by Rowdy Yates’ attraction to the lady. (It is, of course, a young Clint Eastwood who plays the trail boss, and the lady is very attractive.)

   There’s not a lot more than an hour’s entertainment that’s intended here. The right of women to vote had long been settled in history books, even in 1965. The rest of the tale is what viewers sat down to see, and to that end, there was plenty of other old-fashioned western drama and romance in this episode to say they got their money’s worth.
   

FREDERIK POHL “Servant of the People.” First published in Analog SF, February 1983. Collected in Midas World (St, Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1983) and Platinum Pohl (Tor, hardcover, 2003). Reprinted in The Best Science Fiction of the Year #13, edited by Terry Carr (Baen, paperback, August 1984). Nominated for a Hugo for Best Short Story, 1984.

   Sometime in the near future, standing at a point in time circa 1983, a US Congressman, having served in that role for over twenty terms, begins his campaign for yet another election cycle. Although it is becoming harder, he enjoys campaigning, meeting people, kissing babies, endless meals out at greasy diners, the whole bit.

   To his mind, his greatest achievement is having been instrumental in passing a law allowing robots to vote, even those coming fresh off the assembly line.

   Imagine his loving wife’s consternation, then, when they discover his newest opponent is … a robot itself.

   Given this basic premise, I have a feeling that everyone reading this will have their ow ideas of how the story should take place from here. And I also suspect it won’t be very much different from the one I imagined it would be, which in turn was awfully close to the one that SF Grand Master Frederik Pohl wrote.

   Speaking for myself only, the story Pohl wrote is yards better than anything I might have come up with. While not up there at, say a Hemingway level, Pohl was a master of crisp clear prose with a keen visionary and often sardonic  eye on what the future might bring for this country, if not the entire world.

   The only thing wrong with this tale, from my point of view is the premise. Passing a law in this country that would allow robots to vote? No way, no how.

   This is a theoretical exercise only. A “what if” proposition carried to a logical conclusion, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with that. To my mind, it’s precisely what serious science fiction is/was designed to do.

Rating: B plus
   

PostScript: I read this in Terry Carr’s Best of the Year anthology for 1983, published exactly forty years ago. That’s a nice round number. I will have to wait and see, but at the moment I’m planning to  continue working my way through it and reporting back here as I go. Don’t change that dial!

ALAN DEAN FOSTER – The End of the Matter. Pip & Flinx #4.Del Ray, paperback original; 1st printing, November 1977. Cover art by Darrell Sweet. Multiple later printings.

   In this, the fourth adventure in a long-running series (18 novels and a handful of short stories), the orphaned young man nicknamed Flinx continues his search for his parents – or, well, just his father now; although she is now dead, he has learned who his mother was in the book immediately preceding this one. Pip, by the way, is a minidrag (flying snake) who accompanies him, wrapped around his neck, wherever he goes.

   And since Flinx has his own spaceship (!), he can go wherever a casual hint suggests he go, even with members of a cult of black-clad assassins hard on his trail. Along the way he picks up other companions, some of whom do not survive. One that does is a blue four-eyed, four-armed, four-legged alien who speaks only gibberish in verse.

   There is more at stake than finding Flinx’s father, though. A whole section of the known universe is at risk of being swallowed up by a rogue collapsar, unless Flinx and his friends can avoid his enemies long enough to find the ancient weapon, now lost, that can stop it.

   I don’t think I will spoil anything by telling you that that is exactly what they do, with enough knowledge of theoretical astrophysics on their side, The fun is getting there, in good old-fashioned Edgar Rice Burroughs style, mixed with more than a dash of Edmond Hamilton, in his early “world wrecker” days.

   This is pure out-and-out space opera, in other words, but written in a wholly literate fashion by an author who knows what adventure is all about, when you have the whole universe at your disposal to set your stories in.

   As usual, the three novellas in Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe collection Triple Jeopardy (1952) had all first appeared in The American Magazine: “Home to Roost” (as “Nero Wolfe and the Communist Killer,” January 1952), “The Cop-Killer” (as “The Cop Killer,” February 1951), and “The Squirt and the Monkey” (as “See No Evil,” August 1951).

   In “Home to Roost,” Wolfe investigates the murder of Arthur Rackell, whose aunt, Pauline, states that he “was acting for the FBI when he joined the Communist party,” which Archie’s former G2 colleague Agent Wengert neither confirms nor denies. He immediately alerts Cramer, and Purley tells Archie, “this one has got stingers. Lay off”…so Wolfe takes on the case.

   Pauline is revealed as a secret Communist herself, who believed Arthur’s lie — intended to satisfy her façade of criticism for his leftist behavior — and killed him as an imminent threat. Wolfe calls Communists “enemies of this country,” yet adds here, “I deplore the current tendency to accuse people of pro-communism irresponsibly and unjustly…”

   As Stout’s biographer, John J. McAleer, noted, “By this time McCarthyism had brewed such tensions that even [critic and editor] Anthony Boucher said aloud he wished Wolfe would find another adversary. Boucher’s protest confirmed Rex’s belief that McCarthy helped Communism by making anti-Communism seem reactionary” (as quoted on Wikipedia).

   â€œThe Squirt and the Monkey” is set in the comic-strip milieu with the syndicated Dazzle Dan, created by Harry Koven and drawn by Pete Jordan and Byram Hildebrand. All are suspects — along with Harry’s wife, Marcelle, and agent/manager, Patricia Lowell — when his friend Adrian Getz (aka the Squirt) is killed; the only witness is Adrian’s pet monkey, Rookaloo, found in his cage clutching the murder weapon… Archie’s stolen pistol! Stout, with characteristic insouciance, conflates the names of Henry H. Barber and his successor as Wolfe’s lawyer, Nathaniel Parker, into Henry George Parker, who is asked to bring an action against Koven for $1 million after his lies lead Cramer to suspend Wolfe’s license.

   Carl and Tina Vardas, from Joel Fickler’s Goldenrod Barber Shop, entered this country illegally after escaping a Russian concentration camp, and have since feared detection; it seems to be at hand as plainclothes Det. Jacob Wallen questions the staff about the night before.

   They make a beeline for advice from favored customer Archie (who says he was born in Chillicothe, Ohio), but when he makes a recon, Purley Stebbins tells him Wallen was stabbed there with scissors, so one of them is “The Cop-Killer.” What led him to the shop from a stolen car that killed two women in a hit and run is not known, and all he had with him was that day’s early News, while the fugitives swear they never learned to drive.

   Suspects include barbers Ed Graboff (Archie’s), Jimmie Kirk (Wolfe’s), Philip Toracco, and Tom Yerkes, manicurist Janet Stahl, and Fickler; Archie and Wolfe tell, respectively, Purley and — when his curiosity compels him to stop by — Cramer that the Vardases are in their front room, knowing the truth will be dismissed as a joke.

   After learning that Janet has been hurt, Archie is summoned back, locking them in for their own safety, in spite of Carl’s impulsive attack in an effort to escape. Knocked out under the noses of the police, Janet will talk only to Archie, claiming improbably that Purley struck her, but he thinks she knows something, if unaware of its significance, and the killer sought to silence her.

   Wolfe arrives, ostensibly for a haircut, proposing to Cramer that “we see if we can settle this business” as he sits in the chair with the suspects assembled; he posits that whatever Wallen found in the car was folded in the paper, and is still there somewhere. As it turns out, Wolfe will need a new barber because the incriminating object, a two-week-old Time magazine hidden in plain sight after the murder, bears the shop’s subscription address. In Jimmie’s pocket when the chronic car-thief committed his crime while drunk, it was left behind unnoticed, which sent Waller to the shop, and with the Vardases cleared, Archie suggests calling in a favor from General Carpenter to work out their immigration status.

   A second-season episode of A&E’s A Nero Wolfe Mystery, “Cop Killer” (8/11/02) was the first of two directed by John R. Pepper, and the only entry adapted by Jennifer Salt. The daughter of screenwriter Waldo Salt, an Oscar-winner for Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Coming Home (1978), she had been an actress in the former and in Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1972), and as Eunice Tate on Soap. After an opening montage of frantic activity at the shop, cleverly scored with the overture to Gioachino Rossini’s opera Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville, 1816), we see Wallen (Doug Lennox) arrive, then segue to Tina (Nicky Guadagni) and Carl (Hrant Alianak) petitioning Archie (Timothy Hutton).

   With Fritz (Colin Fox) away from the house, Archie instructs Tina to bring beer — but not open it — if Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) should buzz while he is at the shop, assuring Purley (R.D. Reid) that he is only there for a shave. John Berrie (who succeeded Derek Rogers as cinematographer that season) often tilts his camera off-kilter, which along with quick cuts and high-angle shots produces a vertiginous effect, while the flashbacks are stylized with desaturated colors. In the chair, Archie reflects on Philip (Robbie Rox), who’d lost two sons in the war; Fickler (Ken Kramer), once attacked by his ex-wife; Jimmie (Boyd Banks), whom he accuses of stealing supplies; and race-track debtor Ed (James Tolkan).

   The over-dramatic Janet (Kari Matchett) seeks a show-business career, and Archie wisely writes off her initial story of stabbing Wallen after an attempted rape as, well, flummery. He returns as the Vardases dine with Wolfe, who “must have felt the distant rumblings of human sympathy” due to crimes by “Stalin’s puppets in Yugoslavia,” interpolated by Salt from The Black Mountain (1954). Bill Smitrovich beautifully plays Cramer’s indecision as he is challenged by Wolfe to look in the kitchen, used “to keep the murderers in,” but decides not to risk looking silly; Hitler and Stalin “told barefaced lies to have it taken for the truth, and we tell barefaced truth to have them take it for a lie,” Archie assures them.

   Janet, we learn in the climax, had seen Jimmie with a hot towel and the magazine, which she joked that he had been steaming when he tossed it on the table, prompting his earlier assault on her and a frantic dive in the novella that is foiled by Cramer, Purley, et alia. In the episode, Wolfe orders Jimmie to stop cutting his hair and give him a shave, seemingly playing cat and mouse and goading Jimmie into an abortive attempt to cut his throat. Salt has Archie make his suggestion not privately but at a dinner with the overjoyed Vardases, where we hear Wolfe’s side of the conversation as he commends “two exemplary people, who would make very significant additions to the citizenry of this country” to Carpenter.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Prisoner’s Base

Edition cited: Triple Jeopardy: Bantam (1957)

Online source:

THE DARK CORNER. 20th Century Fox, 1946. Lucille Ball, Mark Stevens, Clifton Webb, William Bendix, Kurt Kreuger, Cathy Downs, Reed Hadley, Constance Collier, Eddie Heywood. Directed by Henry Hathaway. Currently available on YouTube. (See below.)

   PI Brad Galt has a problem. Ge has a past that includes a stretch in a California prison for manslaughter – a crime he was framed for by a former partner, a romeo who specializes in blackmail om th side. They’re both in New York now, the fur about to fly.

   Galt also has a good-looking secretary who believes in him, but who intends to wait for a wedding ring before fooling around. Stevens looks too soft to be believable to be a tough private eye, but Lucille Ball is delectable. She could work in my office any time.

WALT & LEIGH RICHMOND – The Lost Millennium. Ace Double H-19, paperback original; 1st printing, 1967. Published back-to-back with The Road to the Rim, by A. Bertram Chandler (reviewed here). Reprinted as Siva! (Ace, paperback, May 1969.

   Shades of Velikovsky! (And to be sure, there he is, on page 18.) An archaeologist tells an engineer, about to complete construction of a solar tap, the story of how a previous civilization had developed the same technology and destroyed the Earth, or Atalama, of that time. Explained in the course of the story are most of the bases of Judaism, Hinduism, and mythologies from around the world, complete with present-day flying saucers.

   The scientific background would satisfy Analog‘s standards, but its heresy would prohibit its publication even there. There is no story; only a means for presenting a theory. In this form, however, it only makes it harder for serious work to be proposed, if any. A garbled mess. And what are the transposers, first introduced on page 93? Who are the mysterious people returning to Earth? What is going on?

Rating:  *