Wed 15 Feb 2017
A 1001 Midnights Review: LAWRENCE G. BLOCHMAN – Diagnosis: Homicide.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[15] Comments
by Bill Pronzini
LAWRENCE G. BLOCHMAN – Diagnosis: Homicide. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1950. Pocket Book #793, paperback, 1951. Television: CBS, 1960, nine-episode summer replacement series, with Patrick O’Neal (Dr. Coffee), Phyllis Newman (Doris Hudson), Cal Bellini (Dr. Mookerji), Chester Morris (Max Ritter).
Although most of his work is (regrettably) long out of print and he is little known among modern readers, Lawrence G. Blochman was an innovative and popular writer for more than four decades. His early novels and short stories had foreign settings, primarily India, where he spent several years in the 1920s as a newspaperman.
Bombay Mail (1934), his first and probably most accomplished novel, is set on board an Indian train; features one of his many series characters, Inspector Leonidas Prike of the British CID; and is one of the best of that intriguing subgenre, the railway mystery. Two other Prike novels, Bengal Fire (1937) and Red Snow at Darjeeling (1938), are also good, as is Blow-Down (1939), a non-series suspense/adventure novel set in a sleepy Central American banana port.
Blochman’s most notable creations, however, are his numerous short stories (for such magazines as Collier’s and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine) and one novel featuring Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee, pathologist of the Pasteur Hospital in mythical Northbank, New York. Coffee was the first pathologist detective in crime fiction, the forefather of TV’s Quincy, and his cases have a uniform sense of realism as a result of Blochman’s interest and research in forensic medicine. Diagnosis: Homicide, the first of two Dr. Coffee collections, is of sufficient import that Ellery Queen included it as the lO6th and final entry on his Queen’s Quorum list of most important volumes of detective short stories.
The eight novelettes in this book are what might be called “forensic procedurals.” Coffee’s chief criminological weapons, as Ellery Queen has pointed out, are modern (circa 1950) laboratory procedures in pathology, chemistry, serology, microscopy, and toxicology.
With these — and the help of his assistant, Dr. Motilal Mookerji, on scholarship from Calcutta Medical College, and police lieutenant Max Ritter — the good doctor solves such baffling cases as the death of a woman after an apparently simple appendectomy (“But the Patient Died”); the strange case of a woman who hears a baby crying in the night, even though there is no baby in her house (“The Phantom Cry-Baby”); and the murder of a doctor to cover up one of the oddest rackets in medical (and criminous) history (“Brood of Evil”).
The second Dr. Coffee collection, Clues for Dr. Coffee (1964), is likewise excellent and worth seeking out. Somewhat less successful is the only novel featuring the pathologist and his sidekicks, Recipe for Homicide (1952); Coffee’s talents, as Blochman himself seems to have realized, are better suited to the short-story form.
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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.
February 15th, 2017 at 4:09 pm
I’ve seen Blochman books but never been tempted to pick one up. You changed my mind.
February 15th, 2017 at 8:36 pm
Steve – There’s also more about Blochman’s magazine fiction (with links) here:
http://carrdickson.blogspot.com/2016/06/deliberately-cleverly-and-diabolically.html
February 15th, 2017 at 8:55 pm
Thanks for the link, Mike. That’s a great post.
February 15th, 2017 at 8:49 pm
And as Steve will recall from years ago Blochman’s novella DEATH IN SANSCRIT was the basis for one of the best B films ever made, QUIET PLEASE, MURDER!
February 15th, 2017 at 10:58 pm
This movie has come up for discussion a couple of times, David, and from what I said in the most recent conversation (some six ears ago) the novella QUIET PLEASE was based on was “Death Walks in Marble Halls,†a short novel that first appeared in The American Magazine, September 1942:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1089
“Death in Sanskrit” is what IMDb said then and still says now. AFI agrees with us.
The movie is a good one, though. No doubt about it.
February 15th, 2017 at 8:58 pm
Episode One of the TV series can be found online here:
https://archive.org/details/DiagnosisUnknownTheCaseOfTheRadiantWine
I don’t know why this obscure short-run series has stuck in my mind all this years (from 1960), but it has.
February 16th, 2017 at 1:32 am
From what I can find this TV episode is the only one surviving. I enjoyed the episode mostly for the characters and their interaction. It gave me the same feel as Perry Mason – the mystery was there but it was the characters and their friendship that keep me returning to Mason and has had me looking for more of this series.
February 16th, 2017 at 2:04 am
You’re absolutely right, Michael. It really does a Perry Mason feel to it, That has to be a big reason why it’s been stuck in my memory for as long as it has.. Watching this old program, I didn’t remember the story at all — and since it’s the first episode, I must have seen it — but the characters, I most certainly did.
February 16th, 2017 at 1:35 am
Oh, I forgot to mention. I knew this was an old classic review when it referred to QUINCY. Today would have used CSI as QUINCY is nearly forgotten (except by us 70s TV fans).
February 16th, 2017 at 2:30 am
Responding to nobody’s call:
Diagnosis: Homicide was how the TV series was announced to the waiting world by CBS early in 1960.
The title change came about a few weeks before the first airing (reasons: unknown).
D:U was the summer replacement for Garry Moore’s weekly variety show. Bob Banner, Moore’s producer, packaged the series for his company as part of an overall deal with CBS.
Much of the preshow publicity centered on the fact that Diagnosis would be videotaped in New York rather than filmed in Hollywood. This was one of the last gasps of major prime time TV production in NYC.
On Garry Moore’s season closer, Patrick O’Neal turned up, in character, for a brief gag appearance with Moore.
Additionally, Diagnosis was promoted quite extensively on the network’s air, in all day parts; The spots showed all the stars (including Chester Morris,who was starring on Broadway at the time and was arguably the best-known actor in the cast), telling the camera what a terrific show this was going to be.
Garry Moore had one of CBS’s better rated shows at that time; as I recall, Diagnosis:Unknown held on to a respectable share of that audience, particularly for a summer show. The reviews were mainly favorable, and the conventional wisdom was that it would get its own time slot, by midseason at least.
… except that it didn’t happen.
Reasons: Unknown.
February 16th, 2017 at 3:57 pm
Mike, I must have been aware of all the hoopla CBS created to promote the series, but I’d certainly forgotten about it until you reminded me. Thanks!
I wish the series had continued, but ever since, I thought I was the only one who remembered it. It’s good to know that I’m not.
February 16th, 2017 at 4:32 am
The ratings were very good for Diagnosis:Unknown. The first episode The Case of the Radiant Wine finished the highest rating show of the night with a 49.7 share. It was then preempted for three weeks – one for Democrats political convention, once for something unknown by me, and once for the Republican convention.
When it returned ratings apparently were good. At least twice the show was the highest rated show on Tuesday night TV.
CATV claims the name was changed because DIAGNOSIS HOMICIDE sounded too violent. This was a time where the networks were worried about violence and the pressure from Congress. It might explain why the series was not renewed.
February 16th, 2017 at 3:52 pm
All those preemptions helps explain why there were only nine episodes shown. The usual run for summer series was 12 or 13, as I recall.
February 16th, 2017 at 10:11 pm
Steve,
From the best I can tell “Marble Halls” and “Sanscrit” are the same novella. Dell published it as “Marble ” Halls” in its 10 cent line, but it may have originally appeared as “Sanskrit.”
February 17th, 2017 at 12:18 am
Concerning QUIET PLEASE MURDER and DEATH WALKS MARBLE HALLS, a couple years ago while at the Windy City Pulp convention, I bought the original cover painting to the Dell 10 cent edition of DEATH WALKS MARBLE HALLS. As part of the deal I got a copy of the Dell paperback and also a copy of the NEW YORKER where the cover painting also had appeared.
Someone recently asked me why I bought the painting which shows a woman screaming in a library. I guess I just like cover art showing women screaming amidst thousands of books!
I can identify with such a reaction…