(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Autumn 2020/Winter 2021. Issue #55. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 36 pages (including covers). Cover image: The Radfords’ Who Killed Dick Whittington?

   As is his usual wont, in this latest edition of Old-Time Detection Arthur Vidro has once again delivered a valuable compendium of information about classic detective fiction, resurrecting long-forgotten pieces as well as showcasing up-to-date commentary about the genre.

   When, in 1951, Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen (the editor) got together to compile a list of what they considered to be a “Definitive Library of Detective-Crime-Mystery Fiction,” they probably had no idea that their compilation (commonly called the “Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones”) would still be worth consulting seventy years later. One of their choices for the list is Clayton Rawson’s locked room classic Death from a Top Hat (1938), which receives Les Blatt’s scrutiny. Another “cornerstone” is Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1928), which Michael Dirda, in contrast to the usual consensus opinion, does not regard as “the first modern espionage novel.”

   Two now largely forgotten detective fiction novelists worth spotlighting are the married writing team of E. and M. A. Radford; they receive their due attention in Nigel Moss’s essay, which sadly notes that despite a long writing career “the U.S. market eluded them.” Moss also highlights the play, that rare theatrical bird, an honest-to-goodness whodunnit, derived from the Radfords’ sixth novel, Who Killed Dick Whittington? (1947).

   While he was still living, impossible crime expert Edward D. Hoch turned his attention to Agatha Christie’s short fiction and found most of it praiseworthy: “If the short stories often are not the equal of the best of her novels, they still sparkle on occasion with her vitality and ingenuity, reminding us anew of the pleasure of a well-crafted tale.”

   Dr. John Curran, the world’s foremost expert on all things Christie, has nice things to say about Mark Aldridge’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World, in his opinion a “must-have book for the shelves of all fans of the little Belgian and his gifted creator.” Curran also includes little-known facts about Agatha, only a few of which yours truly was aware.

   Continuing with the Christie theme is a talk by Leslie Budewitz aptly entitled “The Continued Influence of Agatha Christie”; “she was,” says Budewitz, “first and foremost a tremendous storyteller.”

   Then come a couple of apposite reviews, both by Jay Strafford: Sophie Hannah’s The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020), starring Hercule Poirot; and Andrew Wilson’s I Saw Him Die (2020), the fourth in a series of novels making the most of that Queenian fictional trope of featuring a detective fiction writer as, well, an amateur detective.

   The center piece of this issue of OTD, both figuratively and literally, is Stuart Palmer’s entertaining story “Fingerprints Don’t Lie” (1947), in which Hildegarde Withers, sans Inspector Piper, solves a knotty murder in Las Vegas.

   Continuing with Charles Shibuk’s series of paperback reprints from the ’70s (at the time a noteworthy and welcome trend for classic mystery buffs), he highlights works by Nicholas Blake (Mystery*File here), Charity Blackstock (Mystery*File here), John Dickson Carr (of course!; Mystery*File here ), Agatha Christie (also of course!; Mystery*File here), Raymond Chandler (ditto; Mystery*File here), Henry Kane (Mystery*File here), Patricia Moyes (Mystery*File here), Ellery Queen (Mystery*File here), Dorothy L. Sayers (Mystery*File here), Julian Symons (Mystery*File here), Josephine Tey (Mystery*File here), and editor Francis M. Nevins’s (Mystery*File here) nonfictional The Mystery Writer’s Art, “obviously the logical successor to Howard Haycraft’s The Art of the Mystery Story (1946) . . .”

   Several pages of contemporary reviews of (mostly) classic mysteries follow: Jon L. Breen about Robert Barnard’s School for Murder (1983/4) and Evan Hunter’s “factional” Lizzie (1984); Harv Tudorri about Ed Hoch’s Challenge the Impossible (2018); Ruth Ordivar about Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Angry Mourner (1951); and two reviews from Arthur Vidro about Barbara D’Amato’s The Hands of Healing Murder (1980) and John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night (1965): “with maturer re-reading, I am dazzled . . .”

   The issue wraps up with letters from the readers and a befitting puzzle about Agatha Christie.

   All in all, Issue 55 is definitely worth adding to your collection.

   If you’d like to subscribe to Old-Time Detection:

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X MARKS THE SPOT. Republic Pictures, 1942. Damian O’Flynn as PI Eddie Delaney, Helen Parrish, Dick Purcell, Jack La Rue, Neil Hamilton, Robert Homans, Anne Jeffreys, Dick Wessel. Co-screenwriter: Stuart Palmer. Director: George Sherman. The movie can currently be seen online here.

   Just two days before he’s off to help fight the war, the father of PI Eddie Delaney is killed while on duty as an on-the-beat policeman. Grieving, Delany is given a chance to do something about it when he’s hired by a man to look into a case of trucks being hijacked while loaded with tires. Rubber being at a premium in the early days of the war, this is no trivial matter.

   And besides working on the case, Delany senses a connection between it and his father’s death. His dad, he thinks, stumbled across something he shouldn’t have, and it cost him his life.

   That’s about the extent of the plot, but the 52 minutes of running time is filled to the brim. Besides at least three deaths (I may have lost count), a budding romance between Delaney and Linda Ward (Helen Parrish) as one of the girls working at the headquarters of a citywide telephone jukebox system, and of course she helps him out with the case he’s on.

   As a detective story, the screenwriters had a tough job keeping the killer’s identity a secret, with all of the suspects being killed off, one by one. By the time the last reel is shown, there are no suspects left.

   The cast consists of players who have no name recognition today, and they may not have even back then. I sometimes wonder if they might not even be recognized by people such as ourselves who watch movies such as this one and go look them up on IMDb as soon as the movie is over.

   Centralized telephone jukebox systems have come up for discussion on this blog before, that so happening as part of my review of Swing Hostess (1944), starring Martha Tilton, and the comments following. Here’s the link:      Click here.

   More details on such an operation and better photos from X Marks the Spot can be found here:      Click here.

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

ONE FRIGHTENED NIGHT. Mascot, 1935. Charley Grapewin, Mary Carlisle, Arthur Hohl, Wally Ford, Lucian Littlefield, Regis Toomey, Hedda Hopper. Screenplay by Wellyn Totman, based on a story by Stuart Palmer. Director: Christy Cabanne.

   I don’t want to wax too passionate about the virtues of One Frightened Night, a cheap old-dark-house thing from a studio that died of penury, filled with bad dialogue, tired acting, and no pace whatsoever. And yet…

   Night starts off with imaginative title credits, worthy of Sam Bass (B-movie makers knew the value of wrapping even the direst offerings in fancy wrap) and proceeds to ring in some changes on the standard formula. Charles Grapewin (Uncle Henry in Wizard of Oz) stars as Jasper Whyte, a reclusive millionaire who kicks things off by announcing plans to distribute his wealth, Lear-like, before his death, to his greedy relatives gathered for the occasion in his creepy mansion on a dark/stormy etc. But there’s a hitch: he tells everyone they wouldn’t get any of it if he had only been able to find his long-lost grand-daughter.

   This is normally the sort of set-up that would put him dead on the library carpet late in the first reel, but writer Stuart Palmer throws things about a bit: just before Midnight (when the bequests were to be made) Jasper’s lawyer shows up with the missing heiress. Then “The Great Luvalle” a creaky vaudeville magician played by Wallace Ford, arrives with another woman claiming to be the missing grand-daughter. In short order one of them turns up dead, and Jasper, who started off the film looking like the most-likely victim is thrust into the role of amateur detective.

   I’d like to say the film lives up to this charming premise, but the fact is, it just sort of plods along, with tired dialogue, annoying complications, and humor that could set comedy back fifty years. On the other hand, Grapewin delights in playing a lead, Wallace Ford is suitably brassy as the obvious charlatan, and together they inject enough energy into things to make One Frightened Night worth sitting through. To me, anyway.

(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Summer 2019. Issue #51. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 36 pages (including covers). Cover image: Whodunit? Houdini?

   ONCE AGAIN Arthur Vidro has brought forth a publication worth your attention, with a satisfying variety of articles about Golden Age of Detection (GAD) authors and their works, some from yesteryear and some contemporary. In case you haven’t noticed it, the GAD “renaissance” continues apace, and every issue of Old-Time Detection (OTD) serves as a fine compendium of information for both the experienced GADer (yes, it’s now a word) and the newcomer to this era of the “mystery” genre.

   If you’re a Edward D. Hoch fan like us, you’ll appreciate a new series in OTD, “The Non-Fiction World of Ed Hoch,” featuring “a run of reprint pieces penned by” the latter-day master of the impossible crime short story, compiled by Dan Magnuson, Charles Shibuk, and Marvin Lachman. Hoch’s knowledge of the “mystery” field was practically unbounded, and what he had to say about it is always worth your notice.

   Between the two World Wars the “mystery” story underwent a sea change from genteel drawing room bafflers to the hardboiled outlook, signaling the “death” of the formal whodunit as it was then known—or so people have been told. Jon L. Breen begs to differ; in “Whodunit? We’ll Never Tell but the Mystery Novel Is Alive and Well” he gives us just the facts, ma’am.

   J. Randolph Cox focuses the Author Spotlight on Craig Rice (Georgiana Ann Randolph), known to most readers for her wild and woolly mysteries featuring lawyer John J. Malone, saloon owner Jake Justus, and Justus’s wealthy and beautiful wife Helene. Rice took the relatively understated screwball social dynamics of Hammett’s The Thin Man and pushed them to the limit: “In a genre in which death can be a game of men walking down mean streets unafraid to meet their doom,” writes Cox, “she wrote of men whose fearlessness came from a bottle—from several bottles, in fact—and made it seem comical.” However, “The drinking which she made amusing in print was not amusing in her own life.”

   Thanks to a veritable explosion of paperback reprints of classic detective and mystery stories in the 1960s and ’70s, as well as the works of newer authors, the world of GAD-style fiction was kept from total extinction in the face of the hardboiled onslaught, as Charles Shibuk told us in his Armchair Detective reviews of the period.

   Among the writers who enjoyed this attention from the publishers: Margery Allingham (“I’m convinced that Allingham’s best shorts are of greater value than her novels”), Eric Ambler (“The decline of this writer’s skills during the 1960s has been sad to contemplate . . .”), Nicholas Blake (“Here is another writer whose recent efforts are best left unmentioned, with one notable exception . . .”), John Dickson Carr (“This author’s best work was published between 1935 and 1938 . . .”), Agatha Christie (“If you have not read it, do not on any account miss Cards on the Table“), S. H. Courtier (“. . . obviously the logical successor to the late Arthur W. Upfield”), Amanda Cross (“. . . has only produced three novels in seven years . . .”), Andrew Garve (“. . . prolific and usually reliable . . .”), Frank Gruber, Ngaio Marsh (“Like fine wine, this author improves with age”), Stuart Palmer (“. . . his work was highly competent and always entertaining”), Ellery Queen (“. . . The Spanish Cape Mystery, which represents the last chapter in Queen’s first and best period”), Julian Symons (“Recent work has shown an attempt to return to form . . .”), Josephine Tey (“. . . I don’t think this is ultimately the stuff of which detective stories are really made”), and Raoul Whitfield (“. . . here is a rare opportunity to examine the work of an unjustly forgotten contemporary of Dashiell Hammett”).

   Next, Marvin Lachman offers an affectionate memento of Lianne Carlin who, as a fanzine editor-publisher, was one of the major forces responsible for nurturing mystery fandom and keeping interest in the genre alive and well.

   Dr. John Curran covers the world of Agatha Christie as no one else can: a seldom-seen and different play version of Towards Zero from 1945 (“The plot of both stage versions is, essentially, the same as the novel, as twisty a plot as any that Christie every devised”); Tony Medawar’s impending Murder She Said; The Agatha Christie Festival (“. . . in keeping with the last few years, is disappointing”); and Christie Mystery Day (“. . . no one knows what to expect until it begins”).

   In “Zero Nero . . . Well, Almost”, George H. Madison offers a good summary of the finer points of Rex Stout’s popular series (46 books!) but ruefully explains why “our Nero will not be revived on screen this generation.”

   As we mentioned earlier, a new feature of OTD reprises “feature articles and introductions written by Edward D. Hoch,” the first one being his preamble to the Index to Crime and Mystery Anthologies from 1990. “Here is a book,” says Hoch, “to make an addict out of any reader of short fiction.”

   Amnon Kabatchnik’s summary article about Maurice Leblanc’s Arsene Lupin promises to tell us about “Lupin on Stage, the Screen, and Television,” and delivers nicely. It’s ironic that Leblanc, however, fell into the same trap that the creator of Sherlock Holmes did: “After the unexpected blockbuster popularity of Lupin, he found, as Conan Doyle had before him, that the public wanted him to produce stories and novels only about his most famous character and nothing else.”

   The fiction offering in this issue is William Brittain’s “The Last Word” (EQMM, June 1968), with the author using the “James Knox” alias to signal that it won’t be one of his popular Mr. Strang adventures.

   One of the best anthologies from the ’70s is Whodunit? Houdini? Thirteen Tales of Magic, Murder, Mystery (1976), which, despite its title, is not a collection of fantasy stories but mystery and detective adventures by Clayton Rawson, Rudyard Kipling, John Collier, Carter Dickson, Manuel Peyrou, Frederick Irving Anderson, Rafael Sabatini, William Irish, Walter B. Gibson, Ben Hecht, Stanley Ellin, and Erle Stanley Gardner, seasoned authors who knew how to write engrossing fiction.

   Perceptive as always, in “Allure of Classic Whodunits” Michael Dirda tells us about the “distinct sense of well-being and contentment” he feels at what modern critics would regard as a defect, the artificiality that has become a “welcome attraction in many vintage who-and-howdunits,” stories which “deliberately leave out the messiness of real life, of real emotions, thus allowing the reader to mentally just amble along, mildly intrigued, feeling comfortable and even, yes, cozy,” putting the reader “a long way from deranged fantatics armed with semiautomatic weapons,” and, thus, engaging the mind rather the emotions, which is where the detective story had its beginnings (thanks, Edgar).

   To wrap up this issue there are letters to the editor and a puzzle page that isn’t as easy as some. If you don’t already have a subscription to Old-Time Detection, here’s how to get one: It’s published three times a year: spring, summer, and autumn. A sample copy is $6.00 in the U.S. and $10.00 anywhere else. A one-year subscription in the U.S. is $18.00 ($15.00 for Mensans) and overseas is $40.00 (or 25 pounds sterling or 30 euros). You can pay by check; make it payable to Arthur Vidro; or you can use cash from any nation, or U.S. postage stamps, or PayPal. The mailing address: Arthur Vidro, editor, Old-Time Detection, 2 Ellery Street, Claremont, New Hampshire 03743. Arthur’s Web address is vidro@myfairpoint.net.

MRS. O’MALLEY AND MR. MALONE. MGM, 1950. Marjorie Main, James Whitmore, Ann Dvorak, Phyllis Kirk, Fred Clark, Dorothy Malone, Willard Waterman, Don Porter. Based on the story “Once Upon A Train, or The Loco Motive” by Craig Rice & Stuart Palmer. Director: Norman Taurog.

   Somehow in the translation from printed page to film, Hildegarde Withers becomes Hattie O’Malley, a widow from Montana who wins $50,000 in a radio contest and heads to New York City to collect. Halfway there, Chicago to collect, her path crosses that of attorney J. J. Malone.

   The rest of the movie takes place on the train, on the trail of a paroled embezzler. While James Whitmore plays the disreputable Malone to perfection, Marjorie Main simply tones down her Ma Kettle character a notch or two. It’s not much of a mystery, but funny? You bet!

THE SMILING GHOST. Warner Brothers, 1941. Wayne Morris, Brenda Marshall, Alexis Smith, Willie Best, Alan Hale, David Bruce. Written by Kenneth Gamet and Stuart Palmer. Directed by Lewis Seiler.

   A recent review here of Secret of the Blue Room (1933) got me wondering: Universal used this story again in 1938 (The Missing Guest) and 1944 (Murder in the Blue Room). So how did it turn up at Warners in 1941?

   In all fairness, Ghost takes a wholly different comic approach to the story and introduces characters not found in any blue room — some of them rather well-realized — but when we get to the series of murdered fiancés and the eventual solution, we are on very familiar ground indeed.

   Wayne Morris starts the film as an impecunious engineer looking for any sort of job, who hires on to be engaged to Alexis Smith for a month, unaware that each of her previous fiancés has met a horrible fate. By the time he’s wised up by reporter Brenda Marshall he has narrowly escaped murder at the hands of the eponymous ghoul .

   Okay, never mind the improbability of this guy getting a scientific degree and having two intelligent women fall in love with him. They do it for the sake of the plot, so let’s just get on with the skulking shadows, eyes peering through secret passages, brushes with death and all the rest of it.

   The proceedings are enlivened considerably by subsidiary characters like Charles Halton as an eccentric uncle who collects shrunken heads, and especially by Alan Hale as a detective posing none-too-convincingly as a butler. Lewis Seiler directs without distinction but he keeps things moving, and the rest of the cast are the usual Warners reliables, with everyone pitching in to keep things going efficiently and forgettably.

   But I still can’t figure out how writers Gamet and Palmer passed this off as their own…..

Editorial Comment:   Walter Albert has also reviewed this film for this blog, nearly six years ago. Check it out here.

FLETCHER FLORA – Skuldoggery. Belmont B50-738, paperback original, 1967.

   A talented writer whose work received regrettably little attention during his lifetime, Fletcher Flora was one of the best producers of criminous short stories in the 1950s and 1960s. His range was remarkable: everything from hard-boiled tales for such magazines as Manhunt to police procedurals, to straightforward whodunits,to light whimsey, to literary stories that transcended the genre.

   As a novelist however, Flora was less successful. His books are extremely well written, with engaging characters and strong suspense; but they are all short on plot, tending to be slices of life or collections of incidents rather than fully realized novels. Skuldoggery falls into that category, but everything
else about it is so good that it ranks as Flora’s best novel — though probably his least known, owing to the fact that it was published by a small paperback house and poorly distributed. (The fact that a front-line publisher failed to recognize its merits is beyond comprehension.)

   When Grandfather Hunter dies, he leaves an estate of $10 million, which his greedy family — Uncle Homer, Aunt Madge; Junior; Flo; and Flo’s twins, Hester and Lester –expects to inherit. Ah, but no; grandfather’s will instead gives the dough to Senorita Fogarty, who happens to be a Chihuahua of questionable breeding, for her exclusive use throughout her lifetime and the lifetimes of her pup’s pups ad infinitum.

   Of course there is a proviso that should Senorita Fogarty and all her subsequent pups expire, the inheritance then passes on to the family. And of course what the novel is all about are the humbling attempts of Uncle Homer, Aunt Madge, Junior, Flo, and Flo`s twins to dispose of Senorita Fogarty, and the determined efforts of grandfather’s faithful servants, the Crumps, to thwart them.

   This sort of farce is not unfamiliar, but it is nonetheless beautifully conceived and written with considerable drollery and wit. Anyone willing to spend the time and effort tracking down a copy will not be disappointed.

   Most of Flora’s other novels were also paperback originals; among the more notable of these are The Hot Shot (1956) and Leave Her to Hell (1958), both of which are in the tough vein. He also published three hardcovers, Killing Cousins (1960), another delightfully murderous farce, which won the Macmillan Cock Robin Award; The Irrepressible Peccadillo (1962); and Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (1969), which he was commissioned to finish when Stuart Palmer died, and which he completed shortly before his own untimely death [in 1968].

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

FORTY NAUGHTY GIRLS. RKO Radio Pictures, 1937. James Gleason, Zasu Pitts, Marjorie Lord, George Shelley, Joan Woodbury, Frank M. Thomas, Tom Kennedy, Edward Marr. Based on the story “The Riddle of the Forty Naughty Girls” by Stuart Palmer in Mystery, July 1934. Director: Edward F. Cline.

   I know some of you may like Tom Kennedy’s lowbrow comedy performances, especially as dumb cops in movies like this and the Torchy Blaine serie, among dozens of others, if not more, and so do I, in small doses. But in Forty Naughty Girls, reportedly a Hildegarde Withers and Inspector Piper detective mystery, he should get third billing, he has so many lines, rather than way down the list of credits where you will actually find him.

   The murder of a press agent for a Broadway musical who’s a man with too many ladies takes place during one of the performances of said play, with the solution coming just as the play is over for the evening. No thanks to Inspector Piper’s deductive techniques, however. His approach is to accuse someone of the crime only to discover (Miss Withers does a lot of whispering in his ear) that he’s way off base and his case just doesn’t hold up.

   Miss Withers, on the other hand, does a lot of sniffing around on her own — literally, as she is on the scent of a perfume she smells on the dead man’s clothing. She also finds herself in the prop room under the stage, to much would-be hilarity, but not from me, and of course, with Tom Kennedy’s character around to pull the wrong lever, she finds herself on stage during a dance number, much to her surprise, but lose her aplomb, does she? In a word, no.

   This is the last movie of six adventures of Miss Withers recorded on film, and the second of two with Miss Pitts, she of the fluttering hands and the quavering voice. She was also in the preceding one, The Plot Thickens, reviewed here. Compared to this one, the preceding one was not bad. This one? Abysmal.

   Thanks to my office (where I keep my computer) being closed down for the holidays, followed by the frightful weather, followed by some health issues, I expected that my February column, if any, would be culled from those old book notes I wrote for my eyes only back in the Sixties and Seventies.

   Surprise! Thanks to Joseph Goodrich, editor of that priceless selection from the letters between Fred Dannay and Manny Lee published in 2012 as BLOOD RELATIONS, I am now in possession of all the material from their correspondence that for space or other reasons Joe didn’t include in his book. There are gems in that material, which over the next several columns I’ll dole out here.

   In a letter dated March 31, 1950 and not included or excerpted in BLOOD RELATIONS, Fred tells Manny that for years he’s been trying to interest various movie studios in subsidizing Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s annual story contests, arguing that an investment of as little as $10,000 would lead to an “increase in submitted stories,” “interest by bigger names,” and — always a high priority with Fred considering his background in the advertising biz — publicity.

   Approached by Fred, MGM executives told him that “they have invested millions of dollars in literary contests, but never got a single desirable piece of property out of it….now they wouldn’t contribute $10, let alone $10,000.”

   Not long after that exchange, MGM bought the movie rights to a second-prize winner in the latest year’s EQMM contest, “Once Upon a Train” by Craig Rice and Stuart Palmer, in which the authors’ respective series detectives John J. Malone and Hildegarde Withers teamed up to solve a railroad mystery.

   Since the story wasn’t published until the October 1950 issue, MGM must have bought it from manuscript. (Those who have learned from Queen to read with extreme care may think Fred might have misdated his letter and actually wrote it in 1951, but this possibility is ruled out by his later statement to Manny that the story “has not yet appeared in EQMM….”).

   Fred queried the suits at MGM and was told that they had only bought the story because they “‘had a spot for the use of two characters like Withers and Malone,’ a spinsterish schoolteacher and a dipso lawyer.” Later Fred learned that MGM’s original plan was to use the story as a vehicle for Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride, who had scored a big hit as Ma and Pa Kettle in THE EGG AND I (Universal, 1947).

   By the time the movie had been released, one actor and one character had been axed from the initial conception: Marjorie Main still starred but as Harriet “Hattie” O’Malley, not Miss Withers, and John J. Malone was still the leading male character but was played by James Whitmore. For anyone who wants to waste an hour watching this turkey, its title is MRS. O’MALLEY AND MR. MALONE (MGM, 1950).

   In the same letter to Manny, Fred reports that MGM has also spent $5,000 buying movie rights to John Dickson Carr’s short story “The Gentleman from Paris” (EQMM, April 1950). This move baffled Fred as much as MGM’s purchase of rights to the Rice-Palmer story.

   As everyone knows who has read Carr’s excellent tale, which is set in 1840s New York, the climactic revelation is that the main character is none other than Edgar Allan Poe. “[S]urely MGM does not intend to keep the identity of the detective a secret….”

   Fred couldn’t figure out what the studio had in mind but any interested reader can find out by watching THE MAN WITH A CLOAK (MGM, 1951), a not-half-bad historical crime thriller starring a mustached Joseph Cotten as the Poe character (who calls himself Dupin) and Barbara Stanwyck and Leslie Caron as the female leads.

   With a bit of space left over, I return to fields I plowed almost fifty years ago with comments on first novels by authors writing under their own names. Let’s begin with a writer whom I knew slightly and once, near the end of his life, lunched with at his lovely retirement home in Sedona, Arizona, armed with an assortment of first editions of his books, some of which he said were in better condition than his own, all of which he signed for me.

   Richard S. Prather (1921-2007) was one of the first superstars of the paperback original, turning out a torrent of books for Fawcett Gold Medal in the Fifties and early Sixties which millions of readers gobbled down like Thanksgiving turkeys. I didn’t read them in order but, when I got to his first Shell Scott caper, CASE OF THE VANISHING BEAUTY (Fawcett Gold Medal pb #127, 1950) I had to concede that most of its plot and characters were lifted bodily from Chandler’s THE BIG SLEEP and FAREWELL, MY LOVELY with a few perfunctory variations.

   One of a millionaire’s two spoiled daughters engages Scott to locate her missing sister and the trail leads LA’s coolest PI to the usual sinister nightclub, phony religious cult, dope smuggling, flying bullets, you name it. Prather had the gifts of pace and raw storytelling talent from the get-go but what distinguishes this otherwise routine programmer is Scott’s narration — bemused, self-mocking, gorgeously funny, and so wildly individual that he’s never been successfully imitated. He was, as we cruciverbalists say, a oner.

   Bridge grandmaster Don Von Elsner (1909-1997) threw his hat, or perhaps I should say his lei, into the mystery ring with THOSE WHO PREY TOGETHER SLAY TOGETHER (Signet pb #S1943, 1961). Troubleshooter Colonel David Danning is hired by the board of directors of a packaging empire to protect its subsidiaries from a status-hungry gangster turned corporate raider.

   The trail leads from a Chicago boardroom to Honolulu’s most lavish hotels and encompasses some superb stock-market shenanigans and a couple of murders which Danning must solve while on the run from both mobsters and cops.

   At the climax all the characters unmotivatedly congregate for a Danning solution which is almost pure guesswork, but the pace is swift and the tooth-and-claw power struggles among tycoons seem to ring true.

   SILVER STREET (Harper & Row, 1968) introduced the mystery world to E. Richard Johnson (1938-1997), a convict serving a life term at Minnesota’s Stillwater State Prison. It’s a short and unadorned tale of the mean streets in a nameless city where a modern Jack the Ripper is slicing up the local pimps for no discernible reason.

   Streetwise homicide dick Tony Lonto’s hunt for the killer inevitably leads him to the discovery that his own girlfriend is a nympho and a whore. (Wouldn’t a streetwise cop have discovered this sooner?)

   Superficially the book is tough as nails but it’s drenched with cloying romanticism beneath the surface. Nevertheless it won an Edgar for best first novel, an award which was duly presented to Johnson in the prison visitors’ room.

   He wrote four more Lonto books and several other novels before being released in 1991 but by then his writing career was washed up and he died a few years later. So does crime pay or doesn’t it?

THE SMILING GHOST. Warner Brothers, 1941. Wayne Morris, Brenda Marshall, Alexis Smith, Alan Hale, Lee Patrick, David Bruce, Helen Westley, Willie Best. Screenplay by Kenneth Garnet and Stuart Palmer, based on a story by Stuart Palmer. Director: Lewis Seiler.

   I saw this spooky comic mystery on its initial release, when I was still in short pants, and for years the image of the Ghost, glowing eerily in the dark, haunted my dreams. A recent screening by Turner didn’t, perhaps, chill me in the way the original release did, but it’s still an engaging Old House mystery, with the requisite dose of sliding panels and screams in the night.

   When out-of-work Alexander “Lucky” Dowling (Wayne Morris), besieged by debt collectors, is hired to play the role of the fiancé of heiress Elinor Bentley (Alexis Smith) for a month, he accepts the job without realizing previous suitors have been severely injured in a suspicious car crash and poisoned by the bite of a venomous snake.

   Accompanied by his valet Clarence (Willie Best), Lucky moves into the Bentley house (it’s a bit too small to be called a mansion) where very quickly an attempt is made on his life and he realizes the job is a potentially lethal one.

   Lucky is slower on the uptake than Clarence but he quickly buys into the fiction that Elinor truly loves him, a fiction that is eventually dispelled by the more clear-headed perspective of reporter Lil Barstow (Brenda Marshall), but not before his devotion is put to the ultimate test, which could be either marriage to the predatory Elinor or murder at the hands of the Ghost.

   The household is crowded with members of the Bentley clan, headed by matriarch Helen Westley, with Charles Hulton giving an indelible portrait of a professor whose hobby is not only collecting shrunken heads but actually producing them in his laboratory. Alan Hale bumbles around as a general factotum and security detail, and Lee Patrick sizes up the situation with her usual wry humor.

   Willie Best, in these supposedly enlightened times, gives probably the most controversial performance, with the most offensive (and, dare I say it, funniest) moment taking place when he conceals himself in a coal bin in the basement.

   This is probably not quite in the league of Paramount’s Old House classics, The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers, but it kept breaking me up and occasionally produced a hint of the chills that captivated me at a long-ago Saturday matinee. And noting the name of a noted concoctor of comic mysteries as a co-author of the script, I suspect that he’s responsible for the more delightful comic notes in the screenplay.