GEORGE BAGBY – Dirty Pool. Inspector Schmidt #34. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1966. Curtis, paperback, date?
The transit strike New York City recently suffered through brings forth a mystery, initially so tense that it isn’t even noticed that the victim has no name!
Trapped in in the rain in the midst of ignoring traffic, a girl is placed in a commandeered automobile by a sympathetic policeman. To say it was against the wishes of the driver is an understatement – a fourth man in the car has just been fatally stabbed, and now the killers have both a corpse and a witness to worry about.
Her escape brings her in contact with bumbling Bagby, and nothing can convince her that he is not one of the gang. Even Inspector Schmidt loses her confidence with his friendship with Bagby, adding to her problems.
The tale as told is a bit contradictory with respect to the girl’s cool behavior in the car and her later hysterical fears – but can it be justified as being “just like a woman”? Accept the basic premise, and you will have a lot lively reading ahead of you.
ROBERT DUNDEE – Pandora’s Box. PI Johnny Lamb. Signet S1980, paperback original. 1st printing, January 1962.
PI Johnny Lamb’s client, a former call girl, has a box containing something valuable, and something also very dangerous, both to her and to anyone in her vicinity. (This Lamb’s only recorded case.)
This is one roller coaster of a ride. The action never stops, and if you don’t ask questions, most of it even makes sense. There is even a semi-surprise or two at the end, one of which I am convinced I saw coming.
MICHAEL GILBERT – Game Without Rules. Calder & Behrens. Hodder and Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1968. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1967. Carroll & Graf, US, paperback, 1988.
“The Road to Damascus,” the first of the eleven stories in this collection. begins: “Everyone in Lamperdown knew that Mr. Behrens, who lived with his aunt at the Old Rectory and kept bees, and Mr. Calder, who lived in a cottage on the hilltop outside the viJlage and was the owner of a deerhound called Rasselas, were the closest of close friends.
They knew, too, that there was something out of the ordinary about both of them. Both had a habit of “disappearing.” What the villagers don’t know is that Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens are professional counterintelligence agents attached to the External Branch of the Joint Services Standing Intelligence Committee — a pair of very quiet and very deadly spies working at a job in which, as Mr. Calder has said, “there is neither right nor wrong. Only expediency.”
No one is better at expedient action than Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens. In “The Road to Damascus,” they utilize the twin discoveries of a World War IT hidey-hole containing the skeleton of a murdered man and the fact that a former army colonel has been selling secrets to the Russians to fashion a trap that at once explains the mystery and eliminates the spy. In “The Headmaster,” it is guile and keen observation that allows them to unmask and dispose of a senior Russian agent.
Most of these cleverly plotted stories are set in England; “Heilige Nacht,” however, takes place in Germany, and “Cross-Over” the most exciting of the entries-features a lengthy trek through both Germany and France.
Gilbert’s style is wry, restrained, penetrating, and ironic. Reading one of these stories is like sipping a very dry martini, and the cumulative effect of two or three is also much the same — you begin to feel highly stimulated. However, there is a good deal of casual killing here, much of it done very coolly and professionally by Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens (Rasselas, too, on occasion).
The atmosphere is amoral, to say the least. (In “On Slay Down,” for instance, a soldier who thinks he has accidentally killed a woman — who, in truth, was a turncoat shot down by Mr. Calder, buries the body to cover up the killing, and is rewarded by recruitment into the External Branch because he is just the sort of quick-witted fellow they want.)
The result of this is also cumulative and also like guzzling dry martinis: two or three may stimulate you, but eleven in a row tend to leave you rather ossified. There is a hangover effect, too. You don’t mind having hoisted (buried) a few with Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens, but you’re not so sure you’d like to go spy-killing with them on a regular basis.
Those of you who have stronger constitutions will want to consult the second collection featuring these two dignified liquidators, Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens (1982).
WE’RE RICH AGAIN. RKO Radio Pictures, 1934. Edna May Oliver, Billie Burke, Marian Nixon, Reginald Denny, Joan Marsh, Buster Crabbe. Director: William A. Seiter.
On the eve of her cousin’s wedding to a millionaire, a young girl from Texas shows up and completely disrupts the proceedings. She acts naive, but she easily has her own way – nor does she fail to see the process sever at her ‘rich’ relatives’ door.
Marian Nixon is billed third, but as the unsophisticated country cousin, she is easily the star of this Depression-era comedy. At the time it was released, it must have been a riot. Watching it now, over fifty years later, I still found plenty to smile at.
THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION. December 1967. Cover artist: Jack Gaughan. Editor: Edward L. Ferman. Overall rating: ***½.
DAVID REDD “Sundown.” Novelette. The confrontation between man and creatures of fantasy; creatures not of love, but of hate, yet capable of understanding, and of pity. (5)
LARRY EISENBERG “The Saga of DMM.” Emmett Duckworth. The discovery of a new chemical stimulant. (4)
STUART & JENNIFER PALMER “Brain Wave,” Novelette. Telepathic contact with another galaxy – anticlimactic, like a long bad joke. (3)
ALGIS BUDRYS “Carberus.” Not Sf, or even fantasy, but four long puns. (3)
DEAN R. KOONTZ “To Behold the Sun.” Adventure and trauma upon an expedition to the sun. (3)
GAHAN WILSON “The Power of the Mandarin.” A series character not unlike Fun Manchu comes to life and to have power over the author (and editor). (4)
LEONARD TUSHNET “The Chalmlins.” The guardian angels of some Jewish Polish-Americans, who need them. (3)
J. G. BALLARD “The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D.” Vermilion Sands. Three, no, four men who sculpt clouds, and the insane woman whose portrait they create. Haunting. (4)
JOAN HESS – Strangled Prose. Claire Malloy #1. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1986. Ballantine, paperback: 1st printing thus, February 1987.
A reception for an author of romantic novels at Claire Malloy’s bookstore is destroyed when it is discovered that several characters in the lady’s latest epic have very close counterparts in real life. At the end of the gathering, the lady is dead. Lt. Rosen helps investigate.
The book is a lot of fun, perhaps too much so. The witty repartee us all but endless. Everyone is a master of it, and it (eventually) is overwhelming, In spite of the barbs, Claire and Rosen are attracted to each other, Big surprise.
THE MYSTERIOUS RIDER. Paramount Pictures, 1938. Released to TV stations in 1950 as Mark of the Avenger. Douglass Dumbrille, Sidney Toler, Russell Hayden, Monte Blue. Based on characters created by Zane Grey. Produced by Harry Sherman. Directed by Lesley Selander.
The Mysterious Rider is yet another of those dumb-title movies that no one ever heard of and that someone seems to be writing about all the time. It has a mildly interesting mystery angle to it, and there’s a fascinating story behind its making, but if you’re looking for hard-core Mystery and have little patience with B-westerns, you might as well skip the rest of this and move on. I won’t mind a bit.
Still here? Okay, the story centers around one of the hoariest cliches of the Western, the Good Bad Guy, in this case, a notorious Road Agent who, years before, fled his ranch and family and turned to crime after killing his partner under rather dubious circumstances.
As the story picks up, he is returning Ulysses-like, to the old homestead . where he is no longer recognized, only to find his family usurped and his daughter besieged by unworthy suitors.
How he takes a job as a menial on the land he once owned and manages to restore his legacy to his kinfolk, sort out a few ornery cattle rustlers and related owlhoots, and manage to stay out of the local pokey constitutes the basis of this sincere if meager narrative.
By the time they made this, Producer and Director Sherman and Selander were already old hands a the Minimalist Western. Sherman in particular had launched the incredibly durable Hopalong Cassidy series and was in the middle of a string of oaters starring George Bancroft, who ten years earlier had starred in Von Sternberg’s Underworld and the next year could be found high on the credits of John Ford’s Stagecoach.
As I say, Bancroft was all set to star in this Mysterious Riderthing; Sherman had hired a writer with a good eraser to re-fit an old script, he’d cast the film, lined up the stuntmen, rented Gower Gulch for a few days and auditioned the horses when Bancroft struck for more money.
Well, Harry Sherman had a soft spot for has-beens (as witness his resurrection of William Boyd) but e must have decided he’d be damned if he was going to raise George Bancroft’s salary, because he told George to go ahead and walk which left him (Sherman) in the unenviable position of having to find — and damquickly — an actor who looked like George Bancroft’s stuntman.
The actor he settled on was Douglas Dumbrille, the stuffed-shirt foil for comedians from the Marx Brothers to the Bowery Boys, red herring in no less than three of the Charlie Chan films, and oily villain of countless low-budget sagebrush sagas.
Movie fans with good memories ay recall him putting bamboo shoots under Gary Cooper’s fingernails in Lives of a Bengal Lancer.
It proved to be inspired casting. Dumbrille has enough villainy in his demeanor to suggest a career of misdemeanor. Watching him, one gets the feeling that this guy might actually once have been a Road gent. And his type-cast stuffiness translates here to an oddly moving shabby dignity as he tends the kennels or wanders like a taciturn King Lear across his erstwhile kingdom.
To be sure, the script is nowhere near intelligent enough to support all this, most of the acting could be charitably described as Pedestrian (particularly Sydney “Charlie Chan” Toler as a Comical Side-kick) and the Mysterious Rider himself visibly drops about twenty pounds whenever he pulls on his mask and the stunt-man takes over, but director Lesley Selander had talent enough to capitalize on Dumbrille’s surprisingly off-beat charm and inject his own easy-going economical grace into the proceedings.
The result is distinctly one-of-a-kind and definitely worth a look.
— Reprinted from A Shropshire Sleuth #35.
NOTE: For more, much more from the pen (?) of Dan Stumpf, check out his own blog, filled with great fun and merriment at https://danielboydauthor.com/blog
Following my review of Accused of Murder, Richard Ness left the following question as a comment there:
I have a bit of a mystery regarding Accused of Murder. A few years ago I bought a 16mm scope print of it, but it is in black and white. I believe it was not uncommon to make black and white prints of color films for television broadcast in the days before color TV became the norm, but no TV station would have run a scope print. So what would these prints have been made for and where would they have been shown?
By the way, seeing it in black and white gives it a bit more of a noir feeling, but I still would not consider it film noir.
Questions such as this are way beyond what I know about the making and production of movies, which is close to zero. In fact, I suspect the people who could answer this inquiry are no longer with us. If anyone today knows, however, I suspect they could be reading this now. You, perhaps?
LAWRENCE FISHER – Death by the Day. Berkley G520; paperback original; 1st printing, April 1961.
Bellboy Nick Paulson, a punk with big dreams, cuts himself in when he discovers that three new arrivals at the hotel (two men and a woman) have plans to snatch $75,000 in local jewels.
A paperback original, totally obscure. Pure pulp. Very little plot. Sometimes Paulson noses around for pages, doing nothing but feeling sorry for himself. He’s probably got that right. No one else would.
TIM AKERS “A Murder of Knights.” Published in Sword and Planet, edited by Christopher Ruocchio (Baen Books, trade paperback, 2021).
As the story begins, two men are on a quest, one they apparently have been ordered to be upon. We gradually learn what they must do. We never do quite learn who ordered them, but since the thrust of the tale does not depend on that, it does not matter. At some short length, they arrive at an isolated village where the mayor’s daughter has been abducted by a broodmother (think of something comparable to a monstrous spider-like creature, but worse).
The question of the quest, and the tasks they are bound to do are now apparent.
It is never quite clear on what world they are in. It may be Earth, it may not. It most probably isn’t. Technology seems to have previously existed on the planet. It does not now. Life is primitive in the world they are. The weapons they have are little better than swords, but magic also plays a part in their attack on the monster they must kill — or be killed by.
There is, of course, little that is new in this tale. Many of us have read this short adventure many times, and for some of us, for a long time. Tim Akers, the author, tells it well. Here’s a short example:
“… length of the blade, turning the blunt edge sharp, awakening the weapon’s divine power. I stared at it in horror, my mind frozen in place. I barely lifted my sword in time to block the slice that would have cut me in half if it had landed. The force of the blow shoved me off my feet. The sound of godsteel striking godsteel shrieked across the chamber. I hit the ground and slid.”
You might think Mr. Akers is a young fellow, as I did when starting this tale, but he is 53 and has written several novels and short stories, perhaps all in a similar vein, but none of which have I noticed before. From the ending, I thought a sequel could easily have followed, but so far, such an event has not occurred.
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
